The violence of nuclear catastrophe is fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, when caused by nuclear weapons, it is highly visible and often spectacular. As is the case with exposure to a large dose of radiation, the consequence of this violence can be instantaneous, too. On the other hand, odourless and invisible, radiation is beyond direct human perception. Furthermore, the deadly effect of radiation often manifests itself gradually over many years or even decades. This paradox of nuclear violence on human lives and the environment, which is simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, poses a particular challenge to film and other types of visual media. In this article, I examine how Japanese cinema has long been struggling with the complex and contradictory relationship between the nuclear question and visual culture. Many Japanese filmmakers, including well-known auteurs like Kurosawa Akira and those who specialize in popular genre movies such as tokusatsu eiga (‘special effects movies’), have tried to overcome the challenge of representing the invisibility of nuclear violence and radioactive contamination of the environment. I discuss how popular Japanese cinema has experimented with various formal and stylistic means to make the invisibility of nuclear violence perceptible or imaginable.

Abstract This article is a formal analysis of the poetics of Li Shaohong’s Stolen Life (2005). It analyses issues of mise-en-scène from the perspective of composition, camera movement and choreography of characters within the frame. Taking in equal measure from David Bordwell’s classic work on mise-en-scène and Adrian Martin’s recent espousal of social mise-en-scène, I shall be arguing that Li’s work presents rich social description but also provides an account of agency and transcendence. My analysis of Stolen Life acknowledges Li Shaohong’s deployment of familiar tropes from popular storytelling, while giving emphasis to the distinct variations that she provides throughout the film.

Abstract As a term of description, ‘Asianization’ characterizes the impact of aesthetic and narrative influences from Asian cinemas on co-produced or American films since the late twentieth century. The ‘flexible citizenship’ of filmmakers and aesthetic traditions stemming from East Asian cinemas are seen to have transformed the global action cinema, in particular. Analyses of the orientalism of self/other relations inscribed in Asianized western films permeate reception, in spite of the problematic nature of the paradigms of Orient and orientalism. This article problematizes Asianization by referring to the Asian masquerades in Hollywood cinema in the pre-Second World War era, and the orientalism and ‘East meets West’ mythos that underpins a number of these films. The main case study, Lost Horizon, a blockbuster produced by Columbia Pictures in 1937 and directed by the Italian American filmmaker, Frank Capra, is a prototype imagining of ‘Asia’. It is a simulacra instilled through the trappings of costume, set, acted masquerade and elliptic narrative geographies, and facilitated by the racial proscriptions of the Motion Picture Association of America (Hays) Code of the era. The aesthetic discourse is marked, I argue, by duality whereby Asia is presented as both threat and paradise, a duality that resonates, if disparately, in the aesthetics of contemporary and twentieth-century Asianized films.

Abstract The Battle of Ono was supposed to be King Hu’s American feature debut. But after more than two decades of devoted efforts to develop and finance this ambitious project, King Hu suddenly passed away before principal photography could begin. Now, more than twenty years since his death, there exists no in-depth documentations nor comprehensive studies of the great Chinese director’s unfulfilled Hollywood experience. To patch a long void in our knowledge of King Hu’s late-career activities and struggles in Hollywood, this article chronicles the development of The Battle of Ono and King Hu’s dauntless navigations through the American film industry, and examines the significant challenges and incidents King Hu had faced in his pioneering yet futile efforts to conquer Hollywood.

Abstract Hollywood’s long-standing practice of leukocentrism is condemned as a false and outdated adherence to an aspect of commercial determinism whereby whitewashing a film is held to ensure its profitability, universality, popularity and social meaningfulness, especially when it involves Asian and Asian American characters. Criticism of this practice came to a head in what became known as ‘Alohagate’, which started with the miscasting of Emma Stone in Aloha (2015) and continued with Doctor Strange (2016), Birth of the Dragon (2016) and plans for the live action version of Disney’s animated Mulan (2020 forthcoming). Asian American filmmakers protested via their #WhiteWashedOut Twitter campaign and drew attention to the targeting of Asians for racist jokes at the 2016 Oscars. The Hollywood response is one of innocent ignorance, which only highlights rather than dispels the deep-rootedness of leukocentrism. These individuals are identified as hūpō haole, Hawaiian for ‘clueless Caucasian/foreigner’, who are granted an opportunity to become enlightened by abandoning their leukocentric bias.

Abstract As one of the most critically celebrated and analysed Malaysian auteurs, Yasmin Ahmad (1959−2009) addressed the complicated postcolonial politics of Malaysia’s multiculturalism in her six feature films. This article examines the relationship between her cinematic imagination of Malaysian multiculturalism and her frequent inter-Asian pop culture referencing. These references initiate on-screen crosscultural dialogues that upend ethnic, gender and class stereotypes. Aestheticizing experiences of partial intelligibility, Yasmin’s audio-visual integration of multilingualism reanimates historical creolization as unanticipated intimacies suppressed by Malaysia’s postcolonial multiculturalism. Questioning popular interpretations of her characters’ relationships as ‘interracial’, this reanimation of creolization does not celebrate the coalescence of an overarching Malaysian or Asian identity (or cinema), but rather proposes more affectionate modes of re-conceptualizing crosscultural relations and initiating neighbourly dialogue.

Abstract The social, political and cultural complexity of post-war Hong Kong (1945–1997) produced a highly fragmented, unsystematic, and historically transient mode of critical debate on the cinema. One film scholar, however, Lam Nin-tung (林年同 Lin Niangtong, 1944–1990), tried to systematize the debate and proposed a thoughtprovoking idea: jing you [geng jau 鏡游] or mirroring-drifting. In this article, I argue that Lam’s theory is best understood as an attempt to re-examine the relationship between the subject and the object in cinematic perception, a project motivated by a subjectival crisis embedded within the social, cultural and political complexity of the historical period.

Abstract

Abstract Hou Hsiao-hsien, Richard I. Suchenski (ed.) (2014) New York and Vienna: Columbia University Press and Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 269 pp., ISBN: 9783901644580, p/bk, £22.50

Abstract We live in transitional times, in which the weight of global power is markedly shifting towards Asia. In this context the meaning of the category ‘Asian’ is thoroughly in flux, negotiated and contested across multiple dimensions. In this light, is it possible, or even desirable, to speak about post-Asia? If so, what could it mean? Or is such talk perhaps premature? In this article, I consider three ways of thinking about the notion of post-Asia: the temporal, the spatial and the epistemological. In all these instances, we can observe that a genuinely post-Asian perspective has not yet emerged.