Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches

Genre in Asian Film and Television

This page intentionally left blank

Genre in Asian Film and Television New Approaches Edited by

Felicia Chan Angelina Karpovich Xin Zhang

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich and Xin Zhang 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27217–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Genre in Asian film and television : new approaches / edited by Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich, Xin Zhang. p. cm. Includes index. Summary: “Genre in Asian Film and Television takes a dynamic approach to the study of Asian screen media previously under-represented in academic writing. It combines historical overviews of developments within national contexts with detailed case studies on the use of generic conventions and genre hybridity in contemporary films and television programmes”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978–0–230–27217–0 (hardback) 1. Motion pictures—Asia. 2. Documentary films—Asia. 3. Television programs—Asia. I. Chan, Felicia. II. Karpovich, Angelina, 1979– III. Zhang, Xin, 1975– PN1993.5.A75G46 2011 791.43'6095—dc22 2011001635 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

List of Contributors

viii

List of Figures

xi

Introduction Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich

1

Part I Non-Fiction Genres 1

Live or Dead? Televised Theatre and its Audiences in Bali Mark Hobart

2

Law through a Hybrid Genre in Solomon’s Choice: A Case Study of a Reflection on Law Education through Television in Korea Ji Yun Park

3

4

Eyes of the Other: The Role of Chinese Women through the Lens of Documentary Films Cecilia J. Pang Almost Propaganda But Not Quite: Identity, Modernity and the Construction of ‘The Native’ in Gift of Life and Viva Tonal Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao

13

33

45

61

Part II Reconsidering Mainstream Genres 5

Between Mainstream and Alternative: Dialect Drama in China 79 Xin Zhang

6

Everything Masala? Genres in Tamil Cinema Michael Christopher

101

7

Defreezing Notions of the Indian Mythological T. Vishnu Vardhan

115

8

The Hindi Horror Film: Notes on the Realism of a Marginal Genre Valentina Vitali

v

130

vi Contents

9 From Genre Flick to Art Film: Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Pistol Opera Temenuga Trifonova

149

Part III Genre and Cross-Cultural Representation 10 (In)Action Film: Genre and Identity in Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle Angelina Karpovich

165

11 The Golden Glow of the Alps: Capitalism, Globalization and Anime’s Dreams of Europe Cobus van Staden

178

12 The Other and the Neighbour: Negotiating Representations of ‘Asia’ in Bengali Films Madhuja Mukherjee

194

13 Genre as Cultural Whimsy: Taking to the Road in The Bird People in China and Cold Fever Felicia Chan

210

14 East Asian Pop Culture Chua Beng Huat

222

Index

246

Acknowledgments We thank Christabel Scaife, Felicity Plester and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for their editorial support, Chua Beng Huat and Mark Hobart for their generosity, and Adrian Vickers and I. Nyoman Darma Putra for permission to reproduce Mark Hobart’s chapter, which previously appeared in an extended form as: Hobart, M. (2000) ‘Live or Dead? How Dialogic is Theatre in Bali?’, in A. Vickers and I.N. Darma Putra (eds), To Change Bali. Essays in Honour of I Gusti Ngurah Bagus. Denpasar: Bali Post.

vii

List of Contributors Felicia Chan is RCUK Fellow in Film, Media and Transnational Cultures at the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) and the Centre for Screen Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie in issues of cultural translation, intertextuality and modernity in film, literature and other cultural texts. She has published in Critical Studies in Television, EnterText, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Refractory, Scope and Chinese Films in Focus II (Chris Berry (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Michael Christopher studied for his MA in Film and History of South Asia in Berlin. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on violence in Tamil cinema. He expects to publish his book on Mani Ratnam, a critically acclaimed Tamil Indian film director, in the near future. Chua Beng Huat is currently Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His publications in the field of cultural studies in Asia include Life is Not Complete Without Shopping, as editor, Elections as Popular Culture in Asia and as co-editor, East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader. He is also founding co-executive editor of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. Mark Hobart is Professor of Critical Media and Cultural Studies at the Centre for Media and Film Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. One of his current projects as a critical anthropologist is in the changes in contemporary mass media in Indonesia. In particular, he is interested in the role of television, radio, print and the Internet in framing public discourse – how Indonesians imagine themselves and others in different media. Angelina Karpovich is an anthropologist and filmmaker who is currently Lecturer in Multimedia and Broadcasting Technology at Brunel University. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on media audiences, media technologies and the relationship between the moving image and modernity. She is the associate editor of Intensities, the journal of cult media. Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures viii

List of Contributors ix

at National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests include comparative poetics, contemporary literary and cultural theories, cultural policy, and modern Taiwan literature and film. He has published in the American Journal of Semiotics, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, Concentric as well as in the collected volumes China and Postmodernism (2000); Postmodernism in Asia: Its Conditions and Problems (2003); Telltale Images: Visions of Lust/Caution from Eileen Chang and Ang Lee (2010); Imaging Taiwan (2010); and La Chine et l’Autre: médiations culturelles entre la Chine et l’Occident à l’époque moderne (2011). Madhuja Mukherjee teaches in the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she is Joint Coordinator of the Media Lab. She has received several national and international research fellowships and is currently researching ‘Glass Negatives and Publicity Material of Popular Cinemas (1950s–1960s)’. She has presented papers and published articles on Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan, Indian studios and P.C. Barua, New Indian cinemas, gender, media, sound cultures and film music. She has edited the volume Ray at Work: . . . (2005) and written the book New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (2009). Cecilia J. Pang is Associate Professor and Head of Performance in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a documentary filmmaker whose work has dealt with such issues as immigrant Peking opera artists, women scientists and motherhood, domestic violence and consumer rights. A Fulbright research scholar in Hong Kong (2010), she is currently working on a film about Cantonese opera education. Ji Yun Park teaches legal English to French law students at the University of Paris 8 and is a holder of a DEA (pre-doctorate degree) in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle). She is a member of the ‘Image of Justice’ network and is a doctoral student at the University of Paris 8, under the supervision of Barbara Villez, where her area of research is image and justice. Temenuga Trifonova is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film at York University, Toronto. She is the author of The Image in French Philosophy (2007) and European Film Theory (2008). Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Cineaste, CineAction, QJFV, Substance, Scope, Film and Philosophy, European Journal of American Culture, Film-Philosophy, CTheory, Postmodern Culture, Kinema, Senses of Cinema and several edited collections.

x

List of Contributors

Cobus van Staden graduated in 2008 with a PhD from the University of Nagoya on the subject of the international circulation of anime, focusing on how shared experiences under capitalism aid our enjoyment of foreign culture. He has worked as a television journalist and finished his first feature film in 2007. His academic work has been published in Iconics and Tagen Bunka. He is currently working in Johannesburg as an investigative journalist, directing a series of documentaries for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. T. Vishnu Vardhan is a doctoral student at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India. His doctoral thesis is on the subject of Telugu mythologicals. He was an Independent Fellow at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, and was actively associated with the Educational Initiatives Programme of CSCS, Bangalore, India. He has also taught courses on film at graduate and postgraduate levels and received a National Award from the Government of India for coproducing a radio feature. He is currently also engaged as a Consultant for the Arts and Culture Programme of Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, India. Valentina Vitali teaches film history and theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (2008) and co-editor, with Paul Willemen, of Theorising National Cinema (2006). Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including boundary2, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Kinema, Framework, Women: A Cultural Review and Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (2005). Xin Zhang worked as a television news producer in Chongqing, China, before completing a PhD on local and national Chinese television at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

List of Figures 3.1

Still from Yang Ban Xi (2005)

52

5.1

Still from The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City (1995)

88

Still from The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City (1995)

95

5.2

xi

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich

The study of genre in film and television has always had two histories: first, in the history of production, in which genres become effective means by which audience preferences may be identified, shaped and catered to; and, secondly, in the academic study of genres as textual devices capable of conveying meaning. The industrial-capitalist nature of both film and television offers the study of genre, a system of classification derived from literary criticism, with considerable potential for reading. On the one hand, it could be said that production creates genres and scholars study them; on the other hand, the discourse of genre that the scholarship produces can inform audiences, provoke debate and generate ideas, thus stimulating subsequent production. The question ‘What is genre?’ has been asked many times over by such film and television studies luminaries as Steve Neale, Rick Altman, Graeme Turner and Thomas Schatz (for scope and range, see various anthologies: Grant 1995; Creeber 2001). Our contribution to the debate with this volume is not so much to offer yet another variation on the question as to explore how genre operates, and is mobilized, in specific cultural and historical contexts. So, rather than attempting to unpack the ontological question, the volume as a whole addresses the epistemological: how and why does genre continue to be important in the way we structure how we think about film and television? Such an approach consciously sidesteps the idealist bent in genre studies and its potential pitfalls, that is, the intellectual aspiration to theorize what a ‘pure’ genre might be, frequently to come to the conclusion that pure genres exist only in the realm of fantasy and that all films are hybrids to different degrees. In his seminal article ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’ (1984), Rick Altman addresses the problem of the ontological question as a problem within the discipline, rather 1

2

Genre in Asian Film and Television

than of the films themselves. Yet the semantics and syntax of genres are what allow certain meanings to be read into the text. Genres, Steve Neale argues, consist of ‘specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema’ and ‘help render films, and the elements within them, intelligible and therefore explicable. They offer a way of working out the significance of what is happening on the screen: why particular events and actions are taking place, why the characters are dressed the way they are, why they look, speak and behave they way they do, and so on’ (1995: 160). Genres, according to Thomas Schatz, operate as pattern and cultural ritual (1995: 93), whose familiarity is built up over time with the accumulation of a vast body of knowledge (1995: 98). Our point of entry into the debate looks at how knowledge of genre operates – both familiar and unfamiliar genres alike – and is mobilized in different film and televisual texts under different historical, political and cultural conditions, which may in turn offer new perspectives on ontological debates. This volume frames the epistemological question around the broad context of Asia. Is there a need for yet another book on the moving image in Asia? The simple answer is ‘yes’; as the questions posed by the contributors to this volume indicate, there is much scope for new research. If the ontology of genre is impossible to unpack, so is that of ‘Asia’; however, like ‘genre’, dismissing the term ‘Asia’ for being a fiction sheds no light on why it continues to operate as a signifier of difference, most often against that other fictional formation ‘the West’. Asia has a complex history; indeed, it is constructed out of myriad histories (Takeuchi 2005), to which a modest volume can never hope to do adequate justice. Yet, what ‘Asia’ offers as a discursive formation is the starting point of a conversation. East Asian screen media, and cinema in particular, of Greater China (comprising the People’s Republic, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Japan and South Korea have experienced a boom in English-language academic publishing in the past two decades, the bulk of which focuses on national cinemas, historiographies and authorship. The screen media of South Asia, primarily from Bollywood, has also received much attention; in contrast, other regional centres of production, notably those in the south of India, in Bangladesh and Pakistan, are still relatively under-considered. Similarly, while Southeast Asian cinema has come to relatively recent attention at international film festivals – Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s winning of the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes signals a new peak – it has had a longer history of production that has roots in and ties with other larger regional centres of production like Hong Kong. The screen media of

Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich 3

Western Asia (more usually identified as the ‘Middle East’) and Central Asia (in particular, the ex-Soviet republics) are rarely considered ‘Asian’ at all, yet in the case of the latter, the process of reconciling the legacy of their Soviet heritage and defining their geopolitical and cultural relationship to the rest of Asia is still very much underway. Central Asian media cultures still tend to be discussed in a post-Soviet, rather than an Asian, context. If it is indeed a fact that Asia’s polyglot cultures enact more differences than commonalities, what then is the benefit of addressing such a range within a single volume of essays? One of the factors which distinguishes significant parts of Asia from much of the world is the direct impact of national politics and policies on cultural production, in particular on film and television – many broadcasters and film production companies are state-run or state-controlled. Even in countries where there is no direct link between the government and cultural producers, debates about the social role of the popular arts form a prominent part of national discourses and are implicit in some of the cultural output. Several contributors to the volume highlight these issues, for example, in the chapters on televised theatre in Indonesia (Hobart, Chapter 1), entertainment programmes in South Korea (Park, Chapter 2) and mainland China (Zhang, Chapter 5), historical documentary in Taiwan (Liao, Chapter 4) and film production across India (Christopher, Chapter 6; Vardhan, Chapter 7; Vitali, Chapter 8; and Mukherjee, Chapter 12). It is not so much that they have these themes in common that make these products ‘Asian’, but that a majority of the region shares enough common histories (colonialism, the Cold War and the uneven lurch towards modernization, to name a few) for one case to illuminate another. A number of chapters in this volume engage with these histories, several of which are concerned with the themes of representing the self within the local, yet all the while in relation to an other: be it representing local culture to the local audience by neighbouring producers within an ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse nation (Hobart); a national culture by local and foreign producers (Pang, Chapter 3); national discourses on the representations of national history on screen (Liao); an exotic Europe in Asia and its reception in a culture where ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ are equally foreign (van Staden, Chapter 11); a nation as neighbour as well as ‘other’ (Mukherjee); or foreignness through the eyes of equally foreign protagonists (Chan, Chapter 13). Significantly, several chapters are based on empirical research which directly engages with both producers (Zhang, Vardhan and van Staden) and audiences (Hobart, Park and Chua, Chapter 14) of media content across Asia.

4

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The other common history that runs through these territories and has impacted the region’s screen media industries in ways distinct from their European and American counterparts is the rise of the VCD (video CD) format, which has enabled the flow of film and national television content cheaply across the region, resulting in an explosion of popular fandom across Asia of an intensity unparalleled elsewhere (Chua). The VCD format, unhindered by region coding, has had a far greater impact across Asia and its wider diasporic communities than the DVD, particularly in developing economies where VCDs are commonly used for both officially-licensed and pirated media content. VCDs utilize digital technology to encode data onto a regular compact disc and the overall image quality is comparable to VHS video. Even licensed VCDs offer considerably poorer video and audio quality compared with DVDs, as well as less storage space, leaving no room for enhancements or extra content. Nevertheless, VCDs are considerably cheaper to produce and thus to purchase: an officially-licensed VCD release may cost no more than half the price of the equivalent content on DVD. Asian audiences are also widely known not to place a premium on image quality, pointing to a significantly different culture of spectatorship and consumption from the developed West (Davis 2003). The way in which genre operates in television is also markedly different from the way in which it operates in film. The study of genre in film is largely preoccupied with the narrative and narrative structure, while the study of genre in television is preoccupied with format, that is, differences in forms of television such as newsreels, drama series, documentaries, quiz shows, reality TV and so on (Open University 2003). At the same time, television studies scholars would argue that television as a medium bears significant differences from film for film genre theories not to apply, at least not without modifications (Mittell 2001). Television communicates in a different way: the first difference is the immediacy of the medium and its entry into the spectator’s domestic space; the second is the implicit possibility of participation which television offers to its spectators through the inclusion of ‘ordinary’ people on game shows, talk shows and reality television, and, more recently, the ability to vote on certain outcomes by telephone. Two chapters in this volume engage with this aspect of television as an immediate representation of ‘reality’, which has led to the emergence of new hybrid genres: in South Korea, the re-creation of a criminal court on screen that mixes reality, drama and education (Park), and in China, dialect programming that combines drama, comedy and current affairs, and focuses on local issues and the use of non-professional actors (Zhang).

Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich 5

While the region’s media production, distribution and reception practices are distinct and noteworthy in their own right, the relatively recent meteoric rise in dominance by East Asian economies has led to commensurate international – ‘Western’ – critical attention on its cultural products. However, while the corpus is growing, English-language publications on Asian screen media have tended to follow two paths: pop-culture books directed at fans of particular genres (most notably, books dedicated to Japanese anime and Hong Kong action cinema) and scholarly monographs focused on national cinemas. In the latter, a small number of genres have received the lion’s share of academic attention: some of these are genres which have become firmly associated with regional centres of film production, as in the case of the Bollywood musical or the Hong Kong action film; in other cases, scholars have addressed Asian renditions of genres already popular elsewhere in the world, for example, Asian melodramas or horror films. One of the key aims of this volume is to reach beyond existing representations of Asian screen media by exploring lesser known case studies and increasing their visibility. If genre can be mobilized as a discursive formation to organize ideas and debates about film and television, so can the concept of ‘Asia’, if we remain vigilant and open to the fact of its contestedness. The essays in this volume were selected for breadth as much as depth and examine the notions of ‘Asia’ and ‘genre’ through various case studies of crossnational and cross-cultural production, representation and reception. The volume is divided into three parts: the first on non-fiction genres, the second on reconsidering mainstream genres and the third on genre and cross-cultural representation. Part I consists of chapters by Mark Hobart, Ji Yun Park, Cecilia J. Pang and Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao, all of which address the complexities of national cultural discourses across East and Southeast Asia. The chapters by Hobart and Park focus on popular national television programmes in Indonesia and South Korea respectively; both of these chapters offer contextualized insights into national television cultures. Hobart’s provocative analysis of live performances of traditional plays which had gained popularity on Indonesian television explores the idea that these plays rely on audience involvement, which is actively encouraged by the actors through many topical references. The audience becomes a key part of the performance and of the overall experience of the plays, creating a performer-audience dynamic that is obviously entirely absent from the televised versions. Despite the fictional narratives of the plays, the tangibility and responsiveness of the actors result in a comparatively

6

Genre in Asian Film and Television

more ‘real’ experience for the audience than similar narratives on television. Hobart’s emphasis on the audience as one of the constituent parts of the performance and his examination of the differences between the ‘live’ and the recorded plays point to significant gaps in current Western academic discourse applied to non-Western media, a concern that threads through many of the essays in this volume. Park’s case study of a widely popular emergent hybrid reality television genre – the courtroom re-creation – initially appears to share superficial similarities with low-budget US formats (now sold internationally) in which a ‘real’ judge presides over arguments between members of the public, but Park argues that the South Korean case is different, since the programme implicitly operates on the key principles of Public Service Television: to inform, educate and entertain. Officially billed as ‘edutainment’, the programme uses the generic codes of drama to build up suspense, while at the same time serving an educational function for the viewers. In the meantime, the chapters by Pang and Liao, which focus on documentary representations of China and Taiwan, consider the tensions between the politics of national representation and the cross-cultural reception of non-fiction film. Pang’s work on Chinese documentary films highlights a genre which, in terms of critical and scholarly attention, has been completely overshadowed by fiction films (a situation paralleled by the relative paucity of attention paid to documentary cinema around the world). She offers four examples focusing on the experiences of women in mainland China, and compares and contrasts the representations of China produced by Chinese documentary-makers with their European and American counterparts. Liao’s chapter looks at two popular Taiwanese documentaries in the context of wider cultural debates about nationalism, nationhood and national identity. The chapter is notable not only for its critical examination of the role of the documentary film genre in the public discourse about the nation, but also for the exploration of the reasons behind the relative ‘boom’ in documentary production in contemporary Taiwan, which contrasts with a parallel steady decline in domestic fiction film production. In Part II, Xin Zhang, Michael Christopher, T. Vishnu Vardhan, Valentina Vitali and Temenuga Trifonova reconsider more mainstream film and television genres, their examples of which all originate from the three countries most frequently featured in academic writing on Asian visual media: mainland China, India and Japan. Zhang examines the production and reception contexts of some of mainland China’s most popular and populist contemporary fiction TV series through an emerging local entertainment genre on Chinese television called ‘dia-

Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich 7

lect television’. She focuses in particular on the institutional context of local television in Chongqing and maps out both the production and distribution processes involved in producing local vernacular television programmes within the context of a wider Chinese state cultural policy. Christopher’s chapter offers both a historical and a critical overview of the cinema of Tamil Nadu, one of the regional cinemas of South India, which has developed, since the 1930s, distinct styles of its own, separate from the more familiar Hindi-language Bollywood films. Christopher argues that traditional notions of genre are not entirely applicable to the films of Tamil Nadu, which simultaneously draw upon the narrative and aesthetic conventions of multiple genres and which incorporate influences from other cinematic cultures in Asia, including not only those from across India but also those from China and Hong Kong. Vardhan also addresses South Asian cinema, though focusing on the Telugu-language cinema of Andhra Pradesh as one of the main production centres for the cinematic adaptations of Indian mythological narratives. Vardhan traces the history of the mythological film as a popular, and indeed populist, genre, from the beginnings of Indian cinema in 1913 until the decline of the genre in the 1980s, using the genre as a case study to examine various claims about the national and regional cultural significance of popular media. Vitali examines films which belong to the genre of horror. She refers to the Hindi horror films as ‘marginal’, but sees their very marginality as a significant response to the particular sociopolitical context of the period in which they were produced. Genres – their conventions and their iconographies – shift over time, sometimes in response to other aesthetic or technological influences and sometimes in response to social factors. The ‘marginal’ Hindi horror films of the 1980s, Vitali argues, combine some of the mythological elements found in other Indian films with wider concerns about the disruptive impacts of modernity. Trifonova’s chapter continues with the exploration of genres traditionally considered to be ‘lowbrow’ by focusing on the Japanese ‘B’ action films of Seijun Suzuki, tracing their histories of production and reception, and arguing that their highly stylized and ‘theatrical’ use of cinematic codes transcends the conventions typically associated with Japanese action cinema, allowing them to be situated equally within the realms of the arthouse and the avant garde. In Part III, chapters by Angelina Karpovich, Cobus van Staden, Madhuja Mukherjee, Felicia Chan and Chua Beng Huat investigate cross-cultural representations within popular genres in Asian film and television. Here, the notions of genre and of Asia are approached as

8

Genre in Asian Film and Television

categories which resist rigid classification and instead emerge as complex and shifting formations within contemporary global cultural discourses. Karpovich explores genre fluidity, indeed, genre indeterminacy, through a focus on what would nominally be considered an action film, Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle, a film produced in Kazakhstan on the brink of the fall of the Soviet Union. Karpovich’s chapter seeks to situate The Needle within an Asian, rather than a Soviet, cinematic context by viewing it as offering perhaps the first cinematic representation of the Koryo Saram, that is, the Korean ethnic minority within the Soviet Union. She also raises linguistic, historical and geopolitical questions about the impact that the external context can have on a production, and the extent to which an awareness of that context can affect the viewer’s experience. Van Staden compares the reception of the Japanese anime adaptation of Heidi in Japan and in South Africa, and the impact that the Japanese TV series had on apartheid South Africa’s visions of an exotic and faraway Europe. While it is common to find analyses of the West’s exoticized representations of its various ‘others’ or of Western audiences’ responses to non-Western media, van Staden’s chapter presents an all-too-rare and fascinating example of the reverse direction in global cultural flows. Mukherjee’s contribution takes us back to South Asia as she teases out the discourses of nationhood, combined with historical tensions, in Bengali cinema’s representations of ‘other’ Asians, such as the Chinese, Japanese and Burmese. She plots an intricate trajectory between the notions of the ‘self’, ‘neighbour’ and ‘other’, as they intersect with various demographic and linguistic contexts within the Indian subcontinent. Chan’s chapter explores the theme of cross-cultural representation through the analyses of two road movies featuring Japanese characters abroad, for whom the cross-cultural encounter is enacted via generic conventions: the first is Takashi Miike’s The Bird People in China, a Japanese film set in China, and the second is Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever which, though not ostensibly an ‘Asian’ film as such, centres on the experiences of a Japanese protagonist in Iceland. By way of a concluding chapter, these ideas are extended by Chua, beyond screen media, to the entirety of a region’s popular culture. While Chua’s work focuses on East Asia, the questions his chapter puts forward, of cultural production across and beyond rigid national boundaries, roundly sum up the ways in which the compound operations of trans- and intra-Asian discourses are mirrored by equally acute and compelling approaches to cinematic and televisual genres.

Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich 9

References Altman, R. (1984) ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’, Cinema Journal, 23(3), 6–18. Creeber, G. (2001) The Television Genre Book. London: BFI. Davis, D.W. (2003) ‘Compact Generation: VCD Markets in Asia’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23(2), 165–76. Grant, B.K. (1995) Film Genre Reader II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Mittell, J. (2001) ‘A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory’, Cinema Journal, 40(3), 3–24. Neale, S. (1995) ‘Questions of Genre’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 159–83. Open University (2003) Television Genres, AA310 Film and Television History. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Schatz, T. (1995) ‘The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 91–101. Takeuchi, Y. (2005) What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. New York: Columbia University Press.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Non-Fiction Genres

This page intentionally left blank

1 Live or Dead? Televised Theatre and its Audiences in Bali Mark Hobart

Balinese actors often say they much prefer performing before live audiences than in recording studios. In this chapter I shall examine some of the differences discernible in the same plays as acted in front of Balinese village audiences and as broadcast on Indonesian state television. Balinese theatre involves not just the ad-libbed exchanges between the actors, but also a – less obvious – overlapping dialogue between actors and audience. In a different and little remarked-upon way, the audience also performs. Acting to camera, with or without a tame studio audience, therefore transforms the occasion. In this instance, ‘mediatizing’ is a more complex issue than just the effect of television recording and broadcasting on theatre. For a start, it invites us to consider what is involved in dialogic models of social action and in communication itself. An inquiry into what happens with theatre once performances start to be reproduced in different ways raises wider questions. For a start, from the moment that people become familiar with reading stories in newspapers, books or as cartoons, with hearing them on the radio or seeing them on television, the idea of theatre itself is transformed. The possibility is born of discriminating nostalgically between authentic, ‘live’ performances and their mechanical or electronic reproduction. In fact, however, it is the contrast itself which creates the conditions of possibility of a privileged, essential, original form, against which divergent versions may be compared. Once theatre is reproduced electronically, live performance itself changes, because it is always framed against what it is not.1 1

Although Balinese actors and audiences would on occasion speak of a performance being dead (mati) or, more rarely, alive (urip), there are qualitative differences with the English distinction, in which ‘live’ is privileged. Mati suggests flat, 13

14

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Theatre in Bali is a vast topic. Not only are there many differing, changing and new genres, but until recently there were innumerable, local, part-time clubs of actors and dancers, besides the better known professional troupes. My concern, however, is with one aspect of theatre in Bali, that is, as a set of changing practices, and how televising this theatre affects performing and viewing as practices. The impact of television on theatre can be judged by the fact that, on the best estimate, over 80 per cent of theatre troupes in Bali disappeared during the 1980s, as audiences were bent on watching only the best, once they knew what it was like. With theatre becoming a mainstay of local television peak-hour scheduling, I found myself caught up in frequent conversations between actors, whether as performers or viewers, who used to complain about the rigidity of the medium. As a central part of my work has been recording broadcast Balinese theatre, a way of testing and fleshing out the actors’ appreciations was to commission performances of the plays previously recorded from television.2 We chose the occasion of local temple festivals in Tengahpadang, because that is when the Balinese themselves put on theatre plays. By the time it came to record the temple performances, we had the problem of how to decide which examples to request from the large range of possibilities in the archive. Again, the obvious way was to involve local aficionados of theatre and ask which plays they had enjoyed the most and which they also considered to be good examples of their respective genres. The choice of plays excerpted below is partly theirs. Primarily for reasons of cost, we restricted ourselves to the two most popular and commonly performed genres. The first, Derama Gong (hereafter simply Derama), sprang up in the late 1960s, not coincidentally after the abortive coup d’état in 1965. The plots are sometimes adaptations of written stories from the Pañji cycle, but more often they are fictive creations. Sometimes, they are notionally set in the Javanese kingdoms of Kuripan, Daha and so on of the Pañji stories, sometimes pedestrian, indifferent – that the performance did not come off. Urip, as I have encountered it, refers to those special moments, especially when a particular actor is what we would call ‘inspired’ and which the Balinese call mataksu. The ‘live’ or ‘dead’ dichotomy in the title is therefore my distinction, not one I have heard Balinese make. 2 The camerawoman for the live performances was Dr Felicia Hughes-Freeland, who had extensive experience in ethnographic film and who collaborated on the television project during its first three years (see Hughes-Freeland 1992).

Mark Hobart 15

not. Although the period in which they are set is pre-colonial Java or Bali, they are ‘modern’ in the sense that the characters draw upon new fashions, such as the hero and heroine holding hands, and introduce contemporary themes and interests. Derama is in spoken Balinese; song and dance are fairly incidental. By contrast, Arja is of far longer standing. Spies and de Zoete described it in Dance and Drama in Bali as corresponding ‘most nearly to our idea of opera, or rather of musical comedy . . . sentimental situations are developed as nowhere else on the Balinese stage [prior, that is, to Derama]. There is something of the comedy of manners in its construction’ (1938: 196–7, my parentheses). Depending on fashion, some male roles, especially refined ones, are played by women, while some of the coarser female roles may be played by men. The plots of Arja are drawn from a wide range of literary sources, the Mahabharata, Javanese romances, Chinese tales of passion and others. The aristocratic figures sing, part of the time at least, in verse of different meters, pupuh, partly in kawi (a literary register of Balinese and Javanese), partly in high Balinese, and are paraphrased by their servants or ministers. For a time during the 1970s and 1980s, Arja lost out in popularity to Derama. By about 1990, however, Arja, which retained a certain classic integrity, had come back into vogue. Audiences had grown bored with Derama, which had become increasingly derivative. With hindsight, Derama looks increasingly like an ideological form peculiarly suited to the New Order regime,3 like Sendratari (on which see Hough 1992). Based on invented stories in a never-never land, where the good win through and the bad get their just deserts, Derama bears little relationship to any contemporary social, political or economic realm of lived experience.4 3 The New Order (Orde Baru) regime was what President Suharto called his ascent to power in 1966, after ousting his predecessor, Sukarno, whom Suharto considered part of the ‘Old Order’ (Orde Lama). 4 The absence of genres which address the problems of ordinary people in contemporary Indonesia is a striking feature of Balinese theatre. This has not always been for lack of trying. The few attempts I know of to mount plays with social realistic themes were met with severe warnings by the authorities. A review of the television project’s holdings shows that local television has been more experimental. Before the events in May 1998, marking the end of the New Order when Suharto was forced to resign after more than 30 years in office, these too remained conservative, not least for fear of censorship. This does not mean that theatre is incapable of social criticism and commentary. On the contrary, the Balinese are skilled at developing analogy and extrapolating contemporary implications. However, this gives a decided advantage to the well-crafted plots of the more classic genres (see Hobart 1991).

16

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The Derama in question was first serialized on Balinese television between March and April and the Arja between June and July 1991. The Derama troupe was one of the best known on the island, Bhara Budaya, and the Arja actors were from the state radio company Radio Republik Indonesia. The live performances were filmed as part of the television project in August 1992 during temple festivals in Tengahpadang. Both live and televised performances lasted some seven hours. The dialogue was extemporized in both, as was some of the singing in the live Arja. The bare outlines of the plots were set, but the order of scenes changed somewhat, especially in Derama, partly because there were slight differences in the cast for the live version and this encouraged them to play to the actors’ strengths and preferences. I am not concerned here with the structure of the plots, but with the relationships between the various parties involved in the occasion as a whole. If they found a play was interesting, my Balinese colleagues would tend to talk about it, sometimes for days afterwards. I subsequently spoke at length with several of the actors, but my translation and analysis of the performances also relied heavily on the commentaries provided by a number of villagers from Tengahpadang who were enthusiastic and often knowledgeable theatregoers. As I have outlined who these were elsewhere (e.g., Hobart 1999a), I shall mention only the immediately relevant figures with whom I worked as a group, the setting in which Balinese most often talk over theatre. Three were themselves actors. The oldest was a well-known Arja teacher and dancer, then in his early nineties. The ex-village head previously mentioned also happened to be a skilled player of ministers and servants in Derama. There was also a wealthy farmer and devotee of shadow theatre; a very clever, but poor, flower-seller; and a tenant farmer who knew a great deal about theatre, but who assumed a guise of naïve stupidity in company. His granddaughter, who was training as an actress-dancer at the Academy of Performing Arts (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) in Denpasar, also took part. Various other friends and relatives who had watched the plays would drop in and out of the discussions.

Warming up the audience A favourite theme among actors, and a corollary of interactive theatre, is the difficulties of getting the play started in the first place. Even if you are experienced and have danced in a place many times before, you do not know who comprises the audience that night, what mood they are in or what they will respond well to.

Mark Hobart 17

In Derama, it is commonly servants, either male or female, playing comic roles whose job it is to warm up the audience.5 So let us have a look at how the same pair of male servants worked a television audience to a local live show. The play was about Gusti Ayu Ratih (the title of the play), the sheltered and beautiful daughter of a minister to the court of Daha to whom the heir to the throne becomes attracted. He seduces and impregnates her but, enchanted by a princess from another kingdom (who lusts after him), he abandons her. Ayu Ratih goes mad and runs wild in the forest before a wise hermit realizes the nature of the problem and sets her and the prince to rights. The opening half-hour or so has virtually nothing to do with the plot other than setting the scene.

The televised version Two close servants of the prince, Gangsar and Gingsir, entered and began talking about the state of affairs in the kingdom of Daha (a section known as Angucap-ucap). The scene was set and the audience knew where they were narratively. The servants then tried out various routines to establish what would make this particular audience laugh. They began in a low-key fashion with two jokes about there being many food-sellers around the theatre, which depended simply on saying the same thing but in different formulations. This provided the springboard for their first routine. They moved to listing the kinds of cakes on sale in the stalls around the open theatre stage, thus laying the foundations of a patter which would lead them to a popular Javanese song on television via a pun on a kind of cake, Ketuk Lèndri, which is close to the title of a song, Getuk Lèndri. In the course of this, an interesting exchange took place: Gingsir: Bullet cakes. (Jaja batun bedil) Gangsar: What? Gingsir: Bullet cakes have been just been going like wild fire. Gangsar: Where’s that? Gingsir: (Delivering the punchline.) In Kuwait and in Iraq, bullets have been selling well! Gangsar: You’ve only seen the image (on the television screen) and you’re saying they sell well. Huh! 5

In Arja, the task falls again to a servant, the demanding female role of Condong. The word for her male counterpart, Panasar, nicely suggests what is involved. The root is dasar, basis, foundation: it is the anchor role.

18

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The two servants were working up to introducing a song. The problem was how to do so seemingly smoothly and naturally, without having to fall back on some kind of the callow line like ‘Now I shall sing’. The song made spectators laugh, not because of the words, which were Javanese and they did not know, but at Gingsir’s dancing to a Javanese pop song and movements in the style of Jogèd Bungbung, a genre in which a female dancer invites and dances flirtatiously serially with male members of the audience. In the middle Gingsir wove idiosyncratic noises into the song – Kaing! Kaing! – which is the Balinese verbalization of a dog barking (Woof! Woof!). Gangsar told him to shut up – Cèk! Cèk! – the rebuke used to silence a dog. They switched to a take-off of the sort of pop group that performs Getuk Lèndri. Gingsir swung his arms and hands out to his sides ever more wildly in a take-off of disco dancing, until he finally grabbed Gangsar (who looked suitably mortified) by the genitals. At several points, what the spectators are to make of what happens is not clearly determined. For instance, is the goosing of Gangsar just clowning around, an ‘accident’ of Gingsir’s exuberant performance? Or, in the context of a Javanese song, is it a rude comment on the loose, and ambivalent, sexuality which the Balinese stereotypically attribute to the Javanese? Is Gingsir’s barking dog in the middle of the song merely an incongruity which will make the audience laugh? Or are there potential resonances about the fact that dogs are known to be haram (forbidden) to Muslims, which most Javanese are? To what extent is the song about broadening Balinese horizons or about domesticating, or making fun of, Javanese popular culture, which the Balinese, who are mostly Hindu, sometimes fear is becoming dominant in Indonesia? The range of interpretive possibilities at many points in the play is left open, as is the possibility of not bothering to think too much and just to enjoy what goes on. If interpretive closure of the text hinges in some way on the original intention of the playwright, then it is often impossible in practice to know what this might be and how we would decide upon it (Hirsch 1967). In what sense then is it useful even to try to determine verifiable and unambiguous intentionality (as Ricoeur 1976 insists is possible) in these quick-silver, ad-libbed, unrepeatable exchanges which depend so much upon the moment? The response in media studies to the problems of interpretation has been to shift the emphasis from closure of the text to the audience and its ‘preferred reading’. This still leaves awkward questions, because the audience is as problematically an idealized entity as is the text. How do you determine exactly who, or what, the audience is (Ang 1991), let alone what they

Mark Hobart 19

are thinking? In what sense and under what circumstances is it useful to talk of audiences ‘reading’? How, and on what authority, do you extrapolate unitary, coherent preferences from this? And what underwrites the equivalence of what spectators experience or think and academic ‘readings’ of these? In answer to the last two questions, I prefer to give significantly greater weight than most media scholars and even anthropologists do to what the performers, local experts and lay people had to say as part of the analysis. So, what did members of the audience make of this scene? Rather than working towards a clear reading or interpretation, the commentators treated the scene as providing an occasion for talking about a whole range of issues, from how well the cast acted compared to other performances they had watched recently or remembered vividly, to discussing which bits they enjoyed, found funny, sad or moving, to expatiating upon cryptic sections of dialogue or remarks the actors made, while those who had themselves been actors tended to frame their remarks with comments on technique, timing and so on.6 Even my apparently straightforward description above of the scene relies on extrapolating from the criss-crossing opinions, judgements, misapprehensions and arguments, resolved or otherwise, between the commentators. The idea that you could uncritically impose hermeneutic practices honed upon the credo of the eternal unchanging text to elicit a hidden and transcendental truth (exemplified by the Bible) on such labile, occasional, immediate and unrepeatable performances would be farcical, were it not still the normal academic way of proceeding. At suitable junctures I asked the group of commentators direct questions. Did they find the exchange funny? Not particularly. Gangsar and Gingsir were often much better, but they had to be careful what they said in front of the television cameras. More importantly, the audience (from Tohpati, near Denpasar) were ‘raw’ (matah). Why then did the television audience laugh? Because they were taken by surprise by the unexpectedly topical reference. Did anyone have an idea why they used that particular song? The group often performs live shows around Bali apart from their televised appearances, so they have begun to run out of fresh 6

I have argued elsewhere (1999b) that, in theatre, the Balinese elaborate rather than translate. Both intention and preferred reading models presuppose some version of the copy, or correspondence, theory, the task of interpretation being a more accurate, valid or full representation of something. Theory and practice are then both bent to the demand of this perfectable repetition (Rorty 1980; cf. Deleuze 1994). My concern, by contrast, is to focus on the intellectual practices by which people engage in commentary and criticism.

20

Genre in Asian Film and Television

jokes and have chosen a song which they know is likely to appeal to the young, while the older spectators enjoyed watching the send-up of the song. The overriding aim in any event is to make the audience like them, to appreciate their performance and want to pay to see them again. A remark by Gangsar neatly exposes the fatuity of interpretive analysis, which does not fully take into account the presuppositions of the actors and spectators. Why, I asked, in the middle of the exchange about cakes did Gangsar suddenly cut in, breaking the flow, to remind Gingsir that he didn’t know what had actually happened in the Gulf War, he only saw the lawat, image, impression, shadow? Without an appreciation of Balinese epistemological ideas about the relationship and consequent practices of discriminating between verifiable perceptions and appearances, the reprimand makes little sense and appears just another example of the irrationality or superfluity of the native mind. However, it is only if you reverse normal procedure and review the analytical presuppositions using those of the object of study that the shock occurs. The Balinese comedians, delightfully, find support in Baudrillard’s infamous work, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a neat and parallel critique of Euro-American habits of conflating what they see on television with reality.7

The live version The play took place in front of the Pura Dalem Kauh in Tengahpadang during the temple festival there. The seating for several hundred was packed out and there was a further large crowd floating between the play, temple, stalls and gambling groups. 7

The Balinese distinguish carefully between the reliability of different kinds of ways of knowing about something (Hobart 1985; Matilal 1986). Some scholars have apparently used Baudrillard’s book to argue that he is committed to idealism or relativism or both (e.g., Sokal and Bricmont 1998). This requires such a naïve realist reading that it would seem more likely to be a postmodernist ploy to discredit their opponents, were it not for the fact that postmodernism is effectively an imaginary. The process of imagining itself is a fine example of the displacement, fracture of desire, fragmentation of identity and failure of representation conventionally attributed to postmodernism by self-confessed experts. Those who champion or deride this empty category are hard-pressed to name anyone who will admit to being a postmodernist, as opposed to being labelled as such by their admirers or detractors. As far as I know, the only person who claims to be postmodernist is Gayatri Spivak, which rather makes the point. The acclaimed arch-priest of postmodernism, Baudrillard, quite reasonably says he does not know what it would be were it to exist (see Baudrillard 1993).

Mark Hobart 21

The play started conventionally, with a deep voice through the microphone offering an apology, pangaksama, for any mistakes or faults on the part of the actors, a request to Divinity that the audience enjoy the performance and to bring prama santi, peace of mind. The same servants, Gangsar and Gingsir, were the first on stage. There happened to be two people of the same names in the village. So the servants started by joking about how I Gingsir (who worked for the Bintang beer company in Denpasar) had to get permission to come home for the festival. They then made a play of confusing the fact that I Gingsir and I Gangsar in Tengahpadang are in-laws with their own relationship. They proceeded to show an equal fluency with the names of the stall-owners round the stage. The aim was to surprise and please the audience by showing that they are au fait with the local scene.8 After this preamble, Gangsar and Gingsir started complaining that they were poor servants, who just got leftovers (lungsuran) to eat and one chequered (polèng) sarong each to wear. How much better the audience was turned out than they! Obviously, the audience appreciated what is fitting according to Hindu religion and were dressed suitably for a temple festival. While comic characters often comment on what is appropriate, dress and current affairs, I found this rather heavy-handed, although the commentators seemed less worried about it. It sounded like a sermon by Gramscian organic intellectuals on state religious policy as refracted through local government. Gingsir protested that he was ashamed (kimud) to go to court in old clothes. But how was he to get new ones? He had no money. They despaired, until they suddenly came up with the idea that they could get money if one of them pretended to be dead. Ni Wayan Suci (a stallkeeper) would give Rp. 1,000 (then about US $0.50) when she heard her relative, I Gangsar, was dead (a further play on local knowledge). With some splendid mathematics, they worked out that if they could manage to persuade two people to give Rp. 1,000 each, they would have two million Rupiah and be rich! After some persuasion, Gangsar agreed to mimic being dead. Gingsir whipped out a length of white cloth and put it over Gangsar, who promptly leapt up and ran in fear offstage 8

On a small matter of ethnography, Clifford Geertz argued that the Balinese ‘anonymize’ personal identity by ensuring that the personal names of adults are never used in public and are not even known to most people (1973). If Geertz were correct, then the joke would have fallen flat, which it did not. Nor does it square with quite mature adults’ names being bellowed across the stage to a mixed audience of 500 people or more.

22

Genre in Asian Film and Television

(because witches would think he really was a corpse and come and eat him). Gingsir had to go off and entice him back.9 No sooner had the white cloth been put over him again than Gangsar had to get up to have a very public pee in the shrubbery which made up the back of the set. The two then sat down for a moment and gloated over what they could buy with all the money they would get. They would buy a car! Gangsar lay down again and promptly got an enormous erection. Gingsir asked him ‘what dead person stands up like that?’ and detumesced Gangsar hard with his foot, to a bar from the orchestra. Gingsir then threw himself into a wild fit of mourning, lifting his sarong to expose a vast pair of red underpants (not the sort of thing you do in a televised performance) and hurled himself about the stage howling in grief. Gangsar ran off again in fear and had to be dragged back by Gingsir, who explained that he, Gingsir, had to cry realistically if they were to get people to believe them and so pay up. Now the Balinese are noted for their restraint in mourning.10 So, once again, how the audience is to take this exchange is left open. There is no final interpretation. It could be a commentary on, or a caricature of, the difficulties – at times impossibility – of ordinary people so rigorously repressing their feelings. It could be a play on what the actors have seen on television and so frames Balinese practice. Even if it is a play for laughs by inverting ‘normal’ behaviour, we are in the realm of a potentially complex commentary. By this stage, it should be evident that the task of theatre is not simply to attempt to represent the normal or ideological, but at the least to encompass quite different points of view, a double- or multiple-voiced commentary. It is a singular form of commentary, because the commentators do not set themselves above what they comment on. On the contrary, they exemplify and embody it. 9

Once again, it is central to much of Geertz’s view of Bali that public life is a sort of stage, in which being embarrassed (lek) is really ‘stage-fright’, a fear that one will not perform adequately. Yet there is little sense here that Gingsir suffers from stage fright at the idea of appearing at court in rags. Geertz’s analysis, if anything, draws attention away from considering the range and circumstances of publicly recognized emotion. Rather more to the point, Gangsar’s pretended fear at playing dead has echoes. The play is taking place, after all, next to the graveyard and a temple closely associated with witchcraft. Live corpses (bangké matah) are used in Calon Arang plays, where there is a very real danger, as happened in Tengahpadang some years after, of several people dying very shortly afterwards. 10 My thanks are due to Linda Connor, who has worked on representations of death in Bali over many years and drew my attention to how sharply this scene departed from conventionally appropriate behaviour.

Mark Hobart 23

In other words, we are dealing with the coexistence of different points of view, even epistemologies, where the actors, who are at once their own authors, refuse to allow themselves that ‘surplus of vision’ which so distinguishes the authoritative author. The complex author of the play, the actors with the help of the audience, has no superior point of view, nor do they predetermine, except in the minimal terms set by the plot, how the role shall develop. Gingsir said that that costs money. The prince asked if he had any, to which Gingsir said no. The prince told Gingsir he had better go and try to raise the necessary sum, to which Gingsir retorted that Gangsar was his (the prince’s) servant and that he should therefore contribute (this could be taken as a reference to how often people renege on their social obligations these days). The prince pulled out Rp. 3,000, which Gangsar threw down on the ground in pique, asking what could he do with just Rp. 3,000? Precisely how much money the prince handed over sets up the next scene when the two servants quarrel about dividing up their spoils.

Some local comments The evening after the play, I invited a group of people round and asked them what they thought of it. The flower-seller said that he liked the version in Tengahpadang much better than the televised version (which I had showed them on video some weeks before). The farmer said that he did not really like either, because he did not like Derama on principle, but confessed that the live performance had made him laugh, while the broadcast had not. The old actor disagreed sharply with them, although he did admit that the jokes were far funnier in the live version. He specified in detail the differences and his reasons for preferring the televised version: the dancing was better, their expressions (semita) were more developed, their movements (ambek-ambekan) were more appropriate to dance and they followed the plot, with the correct stages of its introduction. These are Panglembar, the introductory dance which establishes the space for subsequent performance; Angucap-ucap, describing the state of affairs; Mapaitungan, deliberation, when servants talk over things before attending their masters; Ngalèmèkin, when the elder of the two servants gives (moral) advice to the younger; and Panangkilan, when they go to the court. The ex-headman arbitrated. Because he was a professional, the old actor – and only he – realized all the faults. The scene of playing dead was very clever because it hit several targets at the same time.

24

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The development of the jokes was much better in the live performance because the audience helped the actors much more than the theatre audience in the televised version, who were stiff and unresponsive.

Setting a trap on stage By this point, it should be evident that a full comparison of two versions of the play would require a book in itself. The same would be required for the performances of Keris Pusaka Sakti (roughly The Magical Heirloom Sword). Instead, I would like, using a scene from the live version of Keris Pusaka Sakti, to develop the point about the openness, what Bakhtin called ‘the unfinalizability’, of dialogic interaction. The scene is significant for what Euro-American theatre people and scholars might call ‘breaking frame’. The image presupposes that the structure of the plot and the actors’ lines are sharply demarcated from the actors’ and audience’s lives. In other words, what we are pleased to call ‘the dialogue’ of the play is all too often effectively a fractured monologue, which would be threatened by the possibility of non-mock interaction (in the same way that most academics dislike students interrupting to ask questions when they are in the full loquacious flow of a lecture). The scene takes place at the court of Jenggala, where a meeting (paruman) is in process between the Queen, played by a famous Arja actress, Ni Rèbu, and her two servants, the Panasar and Wijil, and her Chief Minister, who is however marginal to the following exchange. From what transpired, it looks as if the actors playing the Panasar and Wijil must have plotted beforehand to try to embarrass Ni Rèbu on stage. It is probably not coincidental that this happened while we were recording with several well-known local actors, including the old actor and the ex-headman, in the front of the audience. It is also fitting that the exchange occurred during a scene set in Jenggala, the kingdom of the Mad, where the otherwise unsayable is uttered publicly.11 It began innocently enough. Wijil started singing and begging the Queen’s pardon. She, not realizing what was afoot, told him not to abase himself too much, just to say what he wanted. He sang that he wanted to ask for something – a gold ring. Up till now he had only worn 11

It is important to remember that both plays were performed at the height of the New Order repression of free speech, when theatre became a privileged, if potentially dangerous, occasion to articulate, albeit indirectly, otherwise unairable views. However, the present exchange has a different purpose.

Mark Hobart 25

silver and he would like to try gold. She asked him angrily if he had any idea how much gold is a gram. He replied: Wijil: My Lady. I thought you were going around selling gold! Queen: (Suddenly realizing what all this preamble has been leading to) Useless creature! What a gob you’ve got on you! Without understanding the associations and context, it might at first sight appear odd that Ni Rèbu reacted by looking discomfited (congah). As the commentators explained to me later, her face indicated fleetingly that the remark had got through to her. To understand the significance of Wijil’s statement requires some prior knowledge, not least about the actors themselves. By way of background, the exchange relied upon the knowledge that Ni Rèbu, who was old and had never married, was widely believed to have taken an oath that she would remain unmarried in return for the gift of becoming a superb actress.12 When Wijil began to sing, it marked a break from the previous theme of the dialogue. Was it merely a development of the plot or something else? Rather obviously, scripted theatre effectively excludes such possibilities, which keep Balinese actors on their toes at the best of times. To begin with, it was not clear why he was apologizing: it could have been a development of the plot (remember the narrative is almost entirely ad-libbed – much of the play is built up on such off-the-cuff digressions). Wijil referred to wanting to have a gold ring. He had never tried something like that. When Ni Rèbu asked him how much he thought gold was worth, she stepped into the trap. She indicated how high a price gold commanded, but it could as well have been something else that she had of great value to offer, on which she put an exorbitant price. Wijil’s reference to a gold ring, which of course has a hole in it, pointed to the possibility that its referent was the fact that she valued her virginity or her freedom from marriage (the words the commentators used was ambiguous here) as others do gold – in other words, very highly. That she grasped something was afoot was clear from her reply, followed by her kicking him. As far as I – and the Balinese I have spoken to – know, there is no fixed or generally known association of rings with women’s genitalia. It relies upon a context internal to the performance in question. 12

The same was said of a fellow actress, which may tell us something about the constraints on able women in what remains in some ways a pretty patriarchal society.

26

Genre in Asian Film and Television

She then turned to her other servant, the Panasar, who leapt up, kicking his legs out behind him, snapping to attention and replying in Dutch. She told him off and then asked him to sing (everyone knows he has a lovely voice). But he had to smile and not show his teeth at the same time – an impossibility. She had started to exact her revenge. He too was useless, she said, and he would be reborn as a toad hopping about under banana palms looking for food. The Panasar made as if to pull himself together and started to sing. The audience was expecting it to be ‘Singgih Ratu Sri Bupati – my Noble Queen’. Instead he sang ‘Singgih Ratu Sri . . . Rèbuwati’, her real name, Rèbu, with the common suffix ‘–wati’ for a woman. The Queen promptly punched him on the chin and he made as if to stagger off, shaking his head like a boxer who has received a hard punch from his opponent. Boxing at the time was one of the favourite programmes on television. A complicated mixture of shock, merriment, sympathy and perhaps more was elicited when the victims were on the receiving end of hard blows, which were then often mimicked by the viewers. The Panasar immediately retorted. The exchange hinges on a pun on sarap, which is both ‘brain’ and ‘leapt upon by’. The exchange assumes the first sense until the punchline. This time the Panasar manoeuvred her into setting herself up, while Wijil was now telling him to lay off: Panasar: Ooh! My brain. [Or ‘I’ve been leapt upon’.] Queen: You’d be better off dead anyway. Panasar: Ow! My brain. Wijil: Leave off. Queen: What brain? [‘Leapt upon by what?’] Panasar: Leapt upon by a tiger (a remark aimed at Ni Rèbu’s character as just demonstrated ). I have no ground to think that the unfolding sequence had been worked out beforehand. Being a good actor in Bali is knowing how to proceed in an open-ended dialogue. Everyone greatly appreciated the evening. They agreed that it had a life which the televised version, performed in a recording studio with no audience, had not. The old actor was unstinting. The performers were excellent, he said, because they made the audience laugh constantly and they had no idea what was coming next (neither, for that matter, did most of the cast, it seemed). Ni Rèbu in particular was a seasoned (wayah) performer, which came out in the way she turned the ambush back on her fellow actors. The commentators all much appreciated how ‘dry’ (tuh) she was, a term used in the first instance because she did not burst out in a sweat, as a lesser actress would have. More generally,

Mark Hobart 27

though, the term is used of a hardened professional who avoids showing any feeling of discomfiture or embarrassment on being trapped, taunted or caught out onstage. The ambush was not a private joke among the actors. The point was precisely to try and catch Ni Rèbu out in public. In other words, not only had the actors immediately to catch an oblique reference (selling gold) and follow the twists and turns of the exchange; in order for the ploy to work, so did a significant proportion of the audience. Tengahpadang is known in Balinese thespian circles as producing, on the whole, sophisticated audiences who are adept at spotting obscure sexual innuendo. However, what works is specific to a given audience and the actors had gently tested the waters earlier in the evening. Imagine the sensitivity to nuance, associative possibility and the familiarity with the use of a range of speech genres required of at least a part of an audience. The contrast with the stereotypical American or European ‘couch potato’, gawping mindlessly at the television set, could not be starker. Yet audiences are not natural entities but, as this last exchange should make clear, are the continually changing outcome of particular viewing practices. The kinds of practice required to produce the more sophisticated members of a Balinese Arja audience differ sharply from those which supposedly bring about the ‘dumbing down’ required of television audiences in the current capitalist era. That said, the vision of a global settee full of viewers made idiotic by the vast machinery of media imperialism and endless bad Hollywood films is very much an elite representation which itself requires critical examination. The argument is nostalgic. It yearns for a time when it was not thus or looks to a utopia when the masses will be emancipated, whether they like it or not. I hope it should be equally clear that the play is not a production which is finalized before its performance, even though the minimal parameters of the plot have, of course, to be set in order for there to be a play at all. There seems to be no comparable requirement to suspend disbelief as in European theatre. The interpretive version, of course, is the leap of faith into the hermeneutic circle. From my interviews with spectators, there seemed to be no frame to break in the ambush on Ni Rèbu. Each performance, especially ones before live local audiences, is unfinalizable and unrepeatable, as the ambush indicates. The whole event hinges upon different sets of relationships working well simultaneously, notably those between audience and actors, and between the actors themselves. Actors continually stressed to me that unless they feed each other phrases, lines, puns and possibilities for others to develop a scene (saling enyuhin), everything falls flat. Balinese theatre depends crucially on others to make it happen.

28

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Live or dead? At the time of filming the plays, the contrasts between television and live local audiences were probably greater than they are now. Local audiences increasingly expect plays to be as-seen-on-TV and actors to replicate favourite routines. Casts become more adept at coping without audiences and so on. Certain broad differences remain discernible in the two plays discussed. There is greater restraint and formality in the style of dancing and the structure of scenes and speech is more thought through for televised performances. There are also far fewer attempts to improvise whole sections, although the dialogue is still extemporized. The jokes are more restrained. The actors do not set out to surprise the audience or one another as they might do in live performances. Most people agree that actors on television are aken (serious) and feel sarat (weighed down) by the occasion. Partly, of course, this is because of the draconian censorship imposed by the New Order regime (a topic still in need of research) which takes the edge off the social criticism expected of theatre.13 However, the actors themselves stress that they suffer the constraints of broadcasting to a large, heterogeneous and unknown audience. 13

As a famous actor put it, because newspapers, schools, universities and the other social institutions (of what is often dubbed ‘civil society’) that are involved in shaping public attitudes are under such tight government control, it is left to actors to be the effective social commentators and critics. Such comment and criticism on television is potentially risky. This is not to say that it is not done, but it is usually indirect: one speech, two objects (raos asiki tetujon kakalih). It is up to the audience as active participants to reflect on what is said. They must decide for themselves whether there is more to what takes place than appears at first and what, using the clues provided, they wish to make of it. In the project’s archives, one of the finest plays is of the actor in question excoriating corruption in government and its effects, in the course of a Sendratari around the plot from the Mahabharata, where the Pandawa are condemned by their enemies, the Korawa, to exile in the forest. The actions in the play of the leading Korawa provided the basis for a neat analogy. Significantly, this play was televised from the annual provincial Arts Festival and was performed before a large audience. Once again, the audience seems crucial. Obviously, though, actors have a far freer rein to engage in criticism before a live audience when they are not being recorded. Johannes Fabian has made the point that such socially critical theatre is quite common and that, when academics capture such live moments of intellectual guerilla warfare, as it were, in writing, they may imperil the people they work with (1991). Academic study in such situations is never comfortable or neutral, but part of the broader argument and so raises inevitable dilemmas.

Mark Hobart 29

When actors complain of performances on television being dead (the word they often used was literally ‘dead’, mati), they are pointing to the absence of dialogue with the audience. To the actors, the television studio makes their performances closer to a monologue.14 In such a dialogic world, we start to see how Europeans and Americans fetishize texts and presume the naturalness of producer-centred models. A Balinese theatre play is the product of a complex agent comprising most notably the organizers of the occasion, the managers and actors of the troupe, and the audience. One attractive feature of television is that it makes the denial of the complexity of agency easy by reducing production to creators and stars, and audiences to responses and ratings.15 The fact that the audiences are relatively silent compared to the actors does not mean that they are not agents. We confuse activity with agency at our peril. There are many kinds of quiet, including reflection, judgement and waiting. Balinese actors know only too well they have to convince and seduce each new audience.

Some implications The scenes discussed make little sense until they are treated as an engagement with the circumstances and the context of that particular performance. In other words, you cannot extract the essence of a performance from the contingent circumstances of the occasion. That is what Bakhtin called ‘theoretism’, insisting on understanding events in terms of rules or structures and failing to appreciate how particular, open and unfinished they are. ‘We cannot break out into the world of events from within the theoretical world. One must start with the act itself, and not with its theoretical transcription’ (Bakhtin 1984: 91). A related argument has been advanced by Mark Poster, who criticized transmission models of communication for reifying and fetishizing information at the expense of appreciating mediation as involving 14

Balinese actors for the most part still adopt a markedly theatrical style on television in such genres as sitcoms and domestic dramas. The reasons deserve study. Lack of experience in the structured informality and intimacy of television as well as lack of training in television acting may be important. 15 On the notion of complex agents, see Collingwood 1942; Hobart 1990b; Inden 1990. The image of agents as being complex helps to counter the Euro-American obsession with condensing agency into a hero figure, the author, playwright, film or stage star. The result is to deny how complicated and open the practices of production themselves are.

30

Genre in Asian Film and Television

different kinds of social practice, which necessarily constitute knowledge, language and its subjects or objects differently (1990).16 Television itself, he argued, belonged to a broadcast model of communication, a media age which is increasingly superseded by a new age of interactive media (Poster 1995). This requires us to radically rethink our presuppositions about communication, its subjects and objects. Poster takes interactivity to be a function of new technologies. As the scene outlined above shows, presumably it has always been around, but has been sidelined by the dominant epistemological fashion.

Conclusion What can a study of Balinese theatre contribute to the issue of performance and mediatization more generally? Perhaps all theatre and television consists of different degrees and kinds of dialogic performances, be these among actors; between scriptwriters, actors and producers; between actors and audiences; between the producers (however conceived) and their targets; among viewers themselves; between one performance and its predecessors and successors; and between ways of imagining the world. Scholars tend to focus on dialogue and to ignore the other ideas in Bakhtin’s constellation. In one sense, Balinese theatre exemplifies a significant degree of polyphony insofar as the actors develop their characters as beings in their own right and do not just go through the motions of patching together bits and pieces from past performances. The singular nature of extemporized multi-authored theatre in Bali invites us to reconsider and develop the notion of polyphony to see where it leads. 16

For example: the mode of signification of the classical capitalist period was the representational sign. The social world was constituted in the figure of ‘realism’ through signs whose stable referents were material objects. The medium of exchange that held together signifier and signified was reason. The communicative act that best exemplified the representational sign was reading the written word. The stability and linearity of the written word help to constitute the subject of reason, a confident, coherent subject who spoke the language of realism through signs whose highest ideal was the discourse of natural science. (Poster 1990: 61)

Poster develops an explicitly Baudrillardian argument, which undermines the solidity and self-evident referentiality of much academic writing. No wonder so many scholars have their knives out for Baudrillard. However, Poster does not fully take on board the implications of the Baudrillardian critique, which would require a more fundamental ontological revolution than he has yet acknowledged.

Mark Hobart 31

The miracle of academe is how this dazzling richness, diversity, unexpectedness gets cut down into a drab and tedious monologue. Texts, media, form versus content, meaning and codes are the familiar language by which academics extrapolate from the way the world is (Goodman 1972) and hypostatize it, by inventing a tame, convenient, portable, studiable and almost wholly imaginary object. Up to now, we have been able to get away with the illusion that this was accepted, proper – indeed, hallowed – intellectual practice. That it failed to engage with how the Balinese set about performing, enjoying and criticizing their theatre was their problem, not ours. The excuse that once such events might have been difficult to record, still less present, is now visible worn to the bare thread it always was now that multimedia formats are no longer nerds’ wet dreams. By contrast, I am suggesting that we consider not just unrecorded theatre performances, but all the occasions on which they are reproduced and enjoyed, as congeries of practices. Such a dialogic analysis cannot be achieved by theoretical introspection or speculation, but requires new kinds of engagement with Balinese theatre and its audiences. The study of mediatization would be the inquiry into all the new kinds of practice, which electronic media have brought about, not least the authenticating of unrecorded performances. It is not television which has killed off ‘live’ performance so much as the activities of experts.

References Ang, I. (1991) Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, C. Emerson (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. (1984–5) ‘Towards a Philosophy of the Act’ (‘K filosofii postupka’), in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki, A Yearbook of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, G.S. Morson and C. Emerson (trans.). Moscow: Nauka. Baudrillard, J. (1993) ‘I Don’t Belong to the Club, To the Seraglio’, in M. Gane (ed.), Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. London: Routledge. ——. (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, P. Patton (trans.). Sydney: Power Publications. Becker, A.L. (1979) ‘Text-building, Epistemology and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre’, in A.L. Becker and A.A. Yengoyan (eds), The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Collingwood, R.G. (1942) The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, P. Patton (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Fabian, J. (1991) ‘Dilemmas of Critical Anthropology’, in L. Nencel and P. Pels (eds), Constructing Knowledge: Authority and Critique in Social Science. London: Sage. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

32

Genre in Asian Film and Television

——. (1991) ‘An Interview with Clifford Geertz’, Current Anthropology, 32(5), 603–13. Goodman, N. (1972) Problems and Projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Hirsch, E. (1967) Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hobart, M. (1982) ‘Is Interpretation Incompatible with Knowledge? The Problem of Whether the Javanese Shadow Play Has Meaning’, in The Interpretive Study of Java. Second Bielefeld Colloquium on South East Asia, University of Bielefeld, May. Available at http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/7134/1/Is_interpretation_ incompatible_with_knowledge.pdf, date accessed 29 October 2010. ——. (1985) ‘Anthropos through the Looking-Glass: Or How to Teach the Balinese to Bark’, in J. Overing (ed.), Reason and Morality, ASA Monographs in Social Anthropology 24. London: Tavistock, pp. 104–34. ——. (1990a) ‘Who Do You Think You Are? The Authorized Balinese’, in R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press and Washington: Smithsonian Institute, pp. 303–38. ——. (1990b) ‘The Patience of Plants: A Note on Agency in Bali’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 24(2), 90–135. ——. (1991) ‘Criticizing Genres: Bakhtin and Bali’, in P. Baxter and R. Fardon (eds), Voice, Genre, Text – Anthropological Essays in Africa and Beyond. Manchester: Bulletin of the John Ryland Library, University of Manchester, 73(3), 195–216. ——. (1999a) ‘The End of the World News: Articulating Television in Bali’, in L. Connor and R. Rubinstein (eds), Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ——. (1999b) ‘As They Like It: Overinterpretation and Hyporeality in Bali’, in R. Dilley (ed), Interpretation and Context. Oxford: Berghahn. Hough, B. (1992) Contemporary Balinese Dance Spectacles as National Ritual, Monash Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Working Paper 74. Hughes-Freeland, F. (1992) ‘Representation by the Other: Indonesian Cultural Documentation’, in P. Crawford and D. Turton (eds), Film as Ethnography. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Inden, R. (1990) Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell. Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Poster, M. (1990) The Mode of Information. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——. (1995) The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ricoeur, P. (1976) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1998) Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosopher’s Abuse of Science. London: Profile. Spies, W. and de Zoete, B. (1938) Dance and Drama in Bali, reprinted 2002. Hong Kong: Periplus.

2 Law through a Hybrid Genre in Solomon’s Choice: A Case Study of a Reflection on Law Education through Television in Korea Ji Yun Park

The three public Korean television stations (KBS, MBC and SBS) categorize their programmes into ‘news’, ‘drama’,1 ‘entertainment’,2 ‘education/ general culture’ or ‘information/current issues’3 and ‘sports’. However, a considerable number of programmes raise questions as to what genre they might belong to, as many of them mix two or three genres: ‘drama’ with ‘entertainment’, ‘entertainment’ with ‘education/information’, and even ‘drama’ with ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’. Sometimes, the official objective of the programme – be it informing, entertaining or educating – is intermingled with the form of the programme to the extent that it can 1 ‘Drama’ in Korean television corresponds roughly to ‘soap opera’ in American television. They are named and categorized in various ways, which reflects the pervasive presence of the drama genre in Korean television. They are named, for example, according to the day (or the time of the day) in which they are aired: ‘Monday, Tuesday drama’, ‘Wednesday, Thursday drama’, ‘Weekend drama’ and ‘Morning drama’. They are also named according to their duration: dramas lasting for months or even years are called ‘long-run dramas’, those composed of approximately 20 episodes are known as ‘mini-series’ and one-off episodes are known as as ‘single-chapter series’. 2 Programmes classified as ‘entertainment’ are specifically designed to entertain the public and one of the visible criteria with which one can identify them in contrast to ‘information/education programmes’ is the programmes’ use of drama actors, comedians, singers and sometimes emcees (the generic term designating stars of all of these categories is ‘entertainer’), who are largely known to the general Korean public. They come from programmes as varied as talk shows, quiz shows, music shows, stand-up comedy shows, other comedy shows, entertainment news, etc. 3 This category includes various sorts of programmes whose aim is basically to provide information and knowledge. They are produced in various forms: shows with emcees and a public audience, documentaries, etc.

33

34

Genre in Asian Film and Television

generate some confusion as to its intention. Programmes of a ‘hybrid’ genre are abundant in Korean television and constitute one of its specificities. They are products of a creative exploitation of the properties and characteristics of television: its extremely codified nature, the conventions of which can be changed and reinvented infinitely. This strategy of mixing genres is exploited to the full in programmes categorized as ‘education’. Some programmes explicitly and specifically intend to educate audiences in one professional domain in particular while utilizing the form of entertainment. They exploit conventions traditionally used in entertainment programmes, such as the use of celebrities as emcees and participants, quizzes and games, a humorous atmosphere, colourful settings and music. However, the form of these programmes is not completely identifiable as that of the ‘entertainment’ genre. Traditional entertainment programmes on Korean television are clearly identifiable as game shows, quiz shows, music shows, etc. But in the abovementioned ‘hybrid’ programmes, the intention seems to be to borrow not only from programmes traditionally categorized as ‘entertainment’ but also from a genre with entertaining properties, like drama, and to combine them creatively. These programmes are officially classified as ‘entertainment’. However, they are also sometimes referred to as ‘edutainment’ in Korean television and call for an examination of the pedagogical implications (whether intended by the producers or not) of the hybrid form through which educational content is provided. In this chapter, I choose to examine one ‘edutainment’ programme dealing with the law, Solomon’s Choice/Solomon euh sun taek (SBS, 2002–present) for the following reasons. First, the programme presents a considerable challenge of dealing with an area of expertise with which the majority of Koreans are extremely unfamiliar and are even reticent towards. Producing a law-related programme addressing the general public, let alone educating the public in law, is in and of itself a challenging initiative in the Korean context. Traditionally, because of the belligerent and authoritarian image that Koreans have of the law, they prioritize compromise and reconciliation over a legal resolution. Moreover, due to the fact that a foreign (continental) legal system was introduced in Korea by Japan for the purpose of controlling Koreans during the period of colonization, the law is perceived as a system of oppression, which aggravates Koreans’ feeling of distance towards it (Kim 2006: 261).4 It is clear that the Korean government’s 4

All Korean language sources and citations have been translated into English by the author.

Ji Yun Park 35

efforts to democratize the country are at odds with the citizens’ awareness of law (Ministry of Justice 2005). For example, law education in schools is provided on an extremely limited scale (Ministry of Justice 2006). Considering these historical and cultural contexts, television programmes with (even potential) educational implications in law find themselves in a strategic position of providing Korean audiences with access to legal knowledge. Secondly, despite the public’s unfamiliarity with the law, Solomon’s Choice is consistently extremely popular, which necessarily leads us to question the form in which it deals with the law. And, thirdly, the form in which Solomon’s Choice has been representing the law is indeed heterogeneous and innovative even for Korean television, which tends to constantly create new forms of entertainment programmes: legal issues are presented in forms as diverse as dramas, quizzes, experts’ participation, panels of entertainers acting as a jury,5 etc. Even though Solomon’s Choice is not officially classified as an ‘educational’ programme, it is worth examining from a pedagogical point of view with a focus on (possible or potential) educational implications of the hybrid genre. This exercise requires a clarification of my definition of what ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ means, which I would like to do in the light of Caleb Gattegno’s theory of learning. Gattegno, an Egyptian mathematician and educator, said that each person is a ‘learning system’ and mobilizes it (knowledge, experience, skills, sensitivities, etc.) to meet the unknown. Because a learning process consists of constantly negotiating the compatibility of one’s learning system with the unknown material(s), learning is really about getting in touch with oneself. In order for a potential learner to mobilize their learning systems to assimilate unfamiliar material, their curiosity, interest and sense of challenge need to be aroused and, most of all, their learning systems need to be ‘available’, that is, in a relaxed and anxiety-free condition (Gattegno 1976: 10). An entertaining and playful atmosphere disposes television viewers to relax, and conventionalized techniques of entertainment programmes such as quizzes take advantage of the public’s curiosity and sense of challenge. By making efficient use of entertaining factors and codes, I believe Solomon’s Choice facilitates the audience’s entry into a highly professional subject matter. In other words, playfulness allows them to spend minimum effort and energy to access an otherwise difficult area of knowledge. In light of the challenge that designing a 5

There has been no jury system in the Korean judiciary traditionally. On 1 June 2007, the Korean Parliament passed a law on citizens’ participation in criminal proceedings, which came into force on 1 January 2008.

36

Genre in Asian Film and Television

law-related programme in the current Korean context represents and of Gattegno’s theory of learning, I propose the following questions to be considered in the examination of Solomon’s Choice: 1. Does Solomon’s Choice provide opportunities for the public to acquire legal knowledge, a legal approach to problems and an ability to reflect on the law in connection with other areas of knowledge? 2. What strategies, techniques and codes does the programme use to meet its educational objectives? Are there specificities of the hybrid genre itself that contribute to satisfying these objectives? 3. What are the pedagogical effects and limits of the programme in terms of law education? Before the analysis, I would like to clarify that it is not my objective to define the extent to which the pedagogical vision was pre-planned by the producers of the programme. Some devices and strategies are obviously designed with a clear intention to deliver legal knowledge to the public, but I do not believe that I can measure the extent to which the producers were aware of the pedagogical impacts and limits of each device they staged. My interest in this exercise lies in investigating the pedagogical implications of the hybrid form of Solomon’s Choice. Solomon’s Choice is categorized as an entertainment programme aimed at presenting legal conflicts that anybody can experience in everyday life from legal points of view. Since 2002, the programme has been an object of the public’s enduring attention and interest. It has an extremely solid structure. The same structure is repeated three times on three cases and can be articulated in two major parts: the presentation of the case and of the quiz in video, and discussion among the jury followed by the lawyers’ (or the prosecutors’) explanations of the ‘answer’ to the quiz. In the first part of the programme, after a brief introduction of the new members of the jury, the emcee immediately presents the first case. If the case is a criminal one, the video begins with the written title ‘Into the (Criminal) Case’, which is also narrated in voiceover. This announcement brings to the viewer’s attention the difference between a penal law case and a civil law case. The case is often given a humorous or an intertextual title, such as an allusion to the title of a well-known song or to traditional sayings or proverbs, which helps the audience to retain the story.6 As the video is screened, the characters’ lines that 6

Upon being asked what the case was about, the viewers I observed and interviewed often found the answer by referring to the title they had remembered.

Ji Yun Park 37

are essential to the understanding of the case are subtitled in the lower part of the screen, to help the audience focus on the facts to consider in the analysis of the case. The case is presented in a sufficiently realistic and complex manner for the audience to make hypotheses and raise questions about the case and its legal implications. At the end of the video, a voiceover summarizes the main facts of the story and finally announces the quiz in an ‘A or B?’ form; for example, ‘Is a contract drafted by a husband, who committed adultery, under his wife’s promise to forgive him and where he recognizes his wrongdoing valid as evidence of the husband’s adultery?’ (the text of the narration is also presented as written text). In the second part, the emcee takes over the role of the narrator and reiterates the quiz, addressing the jury. The jurors give their opinions with respect to the quiz and their arguments supporting their opinions. They also debate among themselves. Some jurors reason by common sense or with moral criteria and express their position in an emotional tone (for example, they simulate an expression of rage in reaction to a case dramatizing an unfair situation), while others adopt a more ‘serious’ attitude by confronting common sense (or a moral point of view) with a legal approach to the case. The jurors take their final decisions, each one of which is depicted with a sign indicating their choice (option ‘A’ in blue and option ‘B’ in red) that is placed in front of each jury member and that stands up at the emcee’s signal inviting the jury to reveal their decisions. The emcee then draws everyone’s attention to the panel of lawyers and to the announcement of their decisions. Their decisions are presented in the same way as the jury’s. After showing the jury’s diverse reactions to the lawyers’ ‘choices’, the camera zooms in on each of the lawyers who explains the case, presents the arguments sustaining their decisions, and provides other relevant and useful legal information. The first pedagogical quality of Solomon’s Choice lies in the fact that the programme creates an atmosphere that facilitates the public’s entry to the subject. Three major elements of the programme contribute to rendering it inviting to the public. Firstly, the overall colour and tone of the show is entertaining and comic. Flashing lights, glitter, a colourful stage, the presence of a studio audience, music and applause all create the type of setting already familiar to Korean audiences as being a style used in many entertainment programmes. Entertainers, most of the time known as being humorous and familiar to the public, often use humour to express their opinions as members of the jury. Secondly, ‘ordinariness’ is also one of the characteristics that encourage easy access to the show: the function of the jury is to impersonate ordinary citizens at

38

Genre in Asian Film and Television

the site of the discussion. The fact that no ‘big stars’ are invited as jurors disposes the public to concentrate their attention on the subject matter rather than on, for example, the fashion style of a member of the jury. ‘Unknown’ actors7 play the roles in the reconstruction dramas, inviting the audience to identify with the characters. Whereas the process of identification facilitates the viewer’s involvement in the situations and issues proposed in the story, it also runs the risk of channelling the spectators’ energy to the performer as an individual. In fact, the unknown actors who play in the reconstructions of the cases in Solomon’s Choice are carriers of social values (Fiske 1991: 175) rather than individuals. The entertaining mood and a sense of ordinariness put the audiences in an a priori condition of relaxation that predisposes them to concentrate on the legal cases and the quiz being proposed. Thirdly, the law is dealt with in its pragmatic dimension. The legal cases involve problems that ordinary people could encounter in their everyday lives, which easily draws the audience’s interest (Fiske 1991: 67), for example, the legal responsibility of home-shopping companies for a deficient delivery of goods or the legal implications of adultery and divorce. In fact, these are cases experienced by some citizens: the selection of the themes and the reconstruction of the stories are processed on the basis of personal experience that audiences of the programme report to the production team (Yun 2007: 17). The practical aspect of the cases treated in the programme stimulates the public’s curiosity and interest to read the legal knowledge and issues of the programme ‘in a way that makes them relevant to the rest of their lives’ (Fiske 1991: 77). As such, the use of entertaining devices makes a highly professional and technical subject accessible to the public and constitutes the key pedagogical strategy and efficiency of Solomon’s Choice. This strategy is elaborated in the most concentrated and efficient manner in the presentation and use of the panel of lawyers. Their presence is not deprived of a comic touch: sometimes, they use relevant humorous and popular sayings and avoid technical explanations so as to keep the mood light; once, the lawyers even took part in a reconstruction drama. These devices depict the lawyers in a familiar light. When I interviewed regular viewers of this programme,8 they said they felt the lawyers to be ‘like us’, that is, ordinary people with some professional knowledge.

7 Actors whose names are unknown to the public are known in Korea as ‘actors who perform in reconstruction dramas’. 8 The data is drawn from a small-scale study I conducted during the summer of 2006: I watched one episode of Solomon’s Choice with a group of six people whose ages ranged from 25 to 55, after which I held a question-and-answer session.

Ji Yun Park 39

In other words, this strategy succeeded in building a kind of ‘complicity’ between the audience and the lawyers, and in establishing ‘the viewer’s consent’ to the lawyers’ role as their eye on the legal world (Fiske 1991: 57). This is actually one of the remarkable pedagogical contributions of Solomon’s Choice, considering the pejorative, distant and reticent images that the majority of Koreans have of lawyers. At the same time, the producer of the programme clearly played to the positive image of lawyers – as smart, stable and serious – as well. The image of the four lawyers meets the commonly shared one and thereby gains the public’s credibility and interest in what they have to say as professionals. This well-proportioned combination of entertainment and ‘seriousness’ is compounded in the character of the emcee of Solomon’s Choice: he is one of the legendary and familiar emcees of Korean variety shows, whose image is well balanced between ‘seriousness’ and ‘lightness’. Once the entry of the public into the programme and subject is facilitated, several strategies and techniques are deployed to articulate the audience’s process of acquisition. Among them, the most efficient techniques used throughout the programme are quiz and repetition, as well as their combination. The quiz exploits what John Fiske calls television’s ‘nowness’ that ‘disguises the fact that the programme is pre-recorded, so as to give the viewers the pleasures of engaging with the uncertainty, of anticipating, and then experiencing its resolution’ (Fiske 1991: 97). In fact, the programme adopts what he calls a ‘hermeneutic code’, the formula of which goes as follows: ‘thematization, proposal of the enigma, formulation of the enigma, request for an answer, snare, equivocation, jamming, suspended answer, partial answer and disclosure’ (Silverman, cited in Fiske 1991: 143). This code organizes the narrative structure of the programme – it controls the flow of information and enigmas, and defers the moment of closure or disclosure of the ‘truth’ – and thereby constantly motivates the audience’s desire to access the resolution (Fiske 1991: 143). Thus, by adopting the form of a quiz, Solomon’s Choice invites the viewer to ‘play a game by voluntarily accepting the rules of the text in order to participate in the practice that those rules make possible and pleasurable’ (Fiske 1991: 230). Direct interpellation (Fiske 1991: 53), used repeatedly throughout the programme, constantly maintains the audience in the position of the addressee. Indeed, to borrow Fiske’s terms, the audience’s presence has its visual counterpart in the way that television personalities (the emcee and the jury) look at the camera and address it directly (Fiske 1991: 53). In the case of Solomon’s Choice, the public’s presence has its auditory counterpart as well, in the voiceover which announces the quizzes. The programme also maintains the public’s interest by providing tools in a repetitive form, which helps the

40

Genre in Asian Film and Television

viewers to retain useful information in their process of reasoning. Legal expressions and relevant facts are presented during the reconstructed dramas and are taken up again afterwards by the emcee, by the jurors in their debates and finally by the lawyers. The pedagogical effects of repetition on the acquisition of legal knowledge and legal ways of reasoning are even greater for regular watchers of this programme. In my case (and it was also the case for some viewers I watched the programme with and interviewed), since similar themes are often dealt with in a recurrent structure, the speed at which I acquired legal information increased week after week. Being used to the formula and spirit of the programme, I came to wonder what legal problematic the story would imply right from the opening of the video. The sample of audiences I observed often expressed their opinions and the process of their reasoning, compared their ideas with the jury’s, used the information provided in the programme and mobilized similar cases they had experienced directly or indirectly in real life or in movies. They expressed pleasure when their opinions matched the lawyers’ unanimous ‘answer’. Fiske evaluates these moments as ‘self-rating’ ones, that is, producing a sort of ‘“self-esteem” that the education system denied them’ (Fiske 1991: 274). This phenomenon is relevant with respect to Koreans’ general perception of law as a domain reserved for high-ranking students who would later be associated with an ‘elite class’. The feeling of self-esteem experienced during the programme bears an enormous pedagogical potential in the sense that it helps the public verify that they can handle, as ‘ordinary’ people, the knowledge of those associated with social power, and thereby encourages them to approach the law in its pragmatic dimension. When their answers were wrong, the sample of viewers questioned their responses, trying to find out what was missing in their reasoning; when the lawyers’ opinions were divided, they attempted to organize and weigh the different arguments proposed in the show. The viewers also produced a comparative analysis of the cases with similar ones they had seen in American legal movies or series. For example, a regular viewer of Solomon’s Choice and of American legal series noticed that whereas adultery was discussed in terms of its validity as a cause for divorce in Solomon’s Choice, she had never seen an extra-marital affair as a cause for action in an American legal series. The form of the quiz also encourages members of the audience to discuss ideas with each other, allowing them to negotiate the validity of their individual thoughts with the commonly shared ‘dynamics of meaning-making’ emerging from professional issues (Fiske 1991: 79).

Ji Yun Park 41

The use of quiz and repetition makes this programme pedagogically efficient, as it treats its audience as already ‘equipped with competencies to make meanings and motivated by the pleasure to want to participate in the process’ (Fiske 1991: 95) and takes advantage of these competencies to develop their skill in legal reasoning. The whole process is developed in an entertaining manner and is rendered as an easy and pleasurable approach to the law. However, Solomon’s Choice has two regrettable limits from a pedagogical perspective, which are related to the fact that it is, essentially, a programme specifically designed for educational purposes: the non-contextualized presentation of legal knowledge and information, and a restrictive exploitation of the audience’s autonomy. In some cases, the four lawyers’ opinions are divided, with the intention of providing the public with different interpretations of each case (this intention of the programme is made explicit in its title – ‘choice’). My hypothesis is that the clash of interpretations proposed by this convention would have two polysemic and enriching effects. First, the audience would be encouraged to realize that the law is a tool that is subject to the agent who selects relevant laws in order to support the interpretation that they think to be the most pertinent. Secondly, the public’s legal sensibility would be sharpened by acquiring the habit of reading a legal problem from alternative angles. Most of the audiences I observed, however, manifested confusion about the fact that one case can have different ‘answers’. Some of the viewers expressed their irritation: ‘I wish they had given one definite answer.’ It was interesting to see that in response to my question about the outcome9 of a case on which the lawyers’ opinions were split, some viewers looked puzzled, asked each other what the ‘conclusion’ was and finally said that the ‘conclusion was not given’. The terms they used – ‘conclusion’ and ‘(final) answer’ – showed that they were associating the lawyers’ opinions with a kind of final verdict or ultimate answer to the case. It was as if the image of a judge pronouncing the final verdict overlapped with the image of the panel. These reactions reveal the viewers’ uncontextualized perception of the law: for them, the law delivers the absolute, final and indisputable answer, independent of the world in which it evolves. The essential reason for these viewers’ confusion is to be found in a social convention associated with the educational orientation of the 9

My question was formulated as neutrally as possible: ‘So, what was the outcome of the case?’ or ‘So, what happened in the third case?’. I avoided terms such as ‘decision’, ‘answer’, ‘opinion’, ‘verdict’ and ‘final’ so as not to influence the addressees in their answers.

42

Genre in Asian Film and Television

programme. Conventions are ‘the structural elements of genre that are shared between producers and audiences and they are social as well as ideological’ (Fiske 1991: 110). The structure of Solomon’s Choice is indeed tainted with an understanding of education with which Koreans are familiar, which unfortunately features some pedagogical fallacies. The moment when the ‘answer’ is given by the panel of lawyers is indeed realized in a manner highly coded for the Korean television public as ‘the moment of truth’: a musical performance connoting suspense before the revelation of a truth, a low voiceover narrating ‘Solomon’s choice’ in a declarative tone, the camera gradually moving from above towards the panel, etc. All of these techniques render the moment of the lawyers’ decisions excessively solemn. The combination of these techniques has the effect of simulating the suspense that precedes the moment of a verdict in court. Of course, this is not about reproducing a moment of suspense before the final verdict as they are experienced in a real court. This is about reproducing a ‘socially convincing sense’ (Fiske 1991: 21) of this moment, that is, using the cultural and technical codes that the audience deciphers as codes of a ‘moment of suspense before the final verdict’ which they have acquired in their experience of such representations in movies and television dramas. It is possible that it is the association of the image of a judge and the final verdict that conditioned the viewers to expect the answer to the case. If this is so, despite its pedagogical effect of challenging audiences, this mise en scène limits the audience’s awareness of the complex and dynamic nature of the law in a given context. If they were offered a discussion of the cases as they are integrated in an actual legal proceeding, this confusion might not have occurred. In dramas, law is depicted through legal proceedings – the filing of lawsuits, consultations of lawyers, preparation of hearings, process of trials, the outcome, appeals, etc. – and it is obvious that attorneys have different interpretations of laws and take opposing positions. The Korean audiences know this and are automatically involved in the world of law, which functions without a model answer. Yet, the generic conventions of Solomon’s Choice are such that the programme cannot stage law as it affects situations and people in a ‘real’ legal context, that is, in its complex dynamics and multiple interpretations. The mise en scène of the panel is efficient in that it provides useful legal information as well as their sources and establishes a credible and familiar image of the lawyers as legal professionals. This mise en scène, however, cannot provide an insight to the work of lawyers in a ‘real’ professional context with all of its tensions and contradictions. Contradictions are suggested in the lawyers’ divided opinions,

Ji Yun Park 43

but they are shown in a one-dimensional manner. In this programme, the lawyers are in a system where they have the possibility and are invited to speak out from their professional convictions: the chances are that the opinions and interpretations they propose are the ones they would adopt in similar circumstances. But with this staging, the public cannot have access to situations where professional convictions and personal circumstances enter into conflict, and the process that lawyers undergo to sustain their professional status, including the systematic legal implications a personal dilemma could have on professional lives. The extremely codified convention, composition and techniques used in Solomon’s Choice ultimately reveal the pedagogical limit of the educational spirit of the programme: the one that focuses on the teaching and materials rather than on developing the learner’s autonomy to explore the subject matter in its complexities and dynamism. The programme does not seem to consider the fact that even though the viewers may share more or less the same cultural codes and references, each one is a unique learning system that cannot be controlled with one pre-designed programme. One viewer I observed indeed felt interrupted in her own process of reasoning: she complained that the programme was edited in a way that did not leave enough time for her to think over a case before being given the panel’s opinion(s). To borrow Fiske’s term, Solomon’s Choice does not leave enough ‘open’ (Fiske 1991: 84) spaces for a wide variety of audiences to make meaning out of the texts at their own pace and in connection with their own individual and social sensibilities and experience. The self-sufficient coherence of the programme with a linear progression does not invite the viewers to look for contradictions underlying the functioning of the justice system. The editing, motivated with a rather rigid and unilateral spirit of education, does not leave enough space for the audience who should be the main participants and agents of the programme. The presence of an emcee, a specificity of the genre of the show, might also explain the homogenizing character of this programme. As the emcee ‘embodies the unity of the programme’, so audiences ‘in identifying with [him] are interpellated as unified subjects repressing any discomforting contradictions in the sense that [they] make of the programme’ (Fiske 1991: 55) and of the mechanisms of the legal world. The characteristics of the genre tend to discipline and control the audience (Fiske 1991: 59) with a unilateral pattern of legal instruction, which limits the possibilities for audiences to explore the law, the legal world and legal actors in their multi-dimensionalities. Despite these limits, the hybrid use of different properties, codes and conventions of

44

Genre in Asian Film and Television

entertainment and drama in order to deal with a highly professional area with which general audiences are unfamiliar is educational. It is precisely this spirit of facilitating the entry to law by using the Korean public’s familiarity with the codes of the entertainment genre that constitutes one of the most remarkable qualities of this programme. It has contributed to modifying the pejorative images of prosecutor and lawyer that the majority of Koreans have held: from distant, elitist and difficult-toapproach to familiar and ordinary; from ‘they, different from us’ to ‘like us’. This works because the properties of the entertainment and drama genres allow the programme to make the most of the positive images – professional, smart, intellectual – and to use entertaining and comic devices to erase the pejorative images. I believe that this strategy is appropriate for the stage at which Koreans’ consciousness of law is today, given that the pejorative attitude towards legal professionals had formed one of the more – if not the most – important obstacles to the familiarization of Korean citizens with the law. In this sense, the programme functions as an ‘originator of change’ (Fiske 1991: 45). The edutainment genre lends itself well to these objectives because Koreans are familiar with its conventions and therefore it facilitates learning with little effort.

References Allen, R.C. (ed.) (1992) Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Fiske, J. (1991) Television Culture. London: Routledge. Gattegno, C. (1972) Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools. New York: Educational Solutions. ——. (1976) The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign Languages. New York: Educational Solutions. Kang, T.-Y. and Yun, T.-J. (2002) A History of TV Entertainment Programmes in Korea. Seoul: Hanul. Kim, J.-J. (2004) A Study of the Use of Television by Korean Television Audiences and its Effects. Seoul: Communication Books. Kim, J. (2006) Korean Legal Culture: Understanding, Structure and Change. Kyunggi do: Nanam edition. Ministry of Justice (2005) Korean Citizens’ Awareness of Law, in the Perspective of Promoting Law Education. Seoul: Ministry of Justice. ——. (2006) Perspectives of Improvement of Law-Related Education in Korea. Seoul: Commission of Research on Law-Related Education. Yun, Y.-W. (2007) ‘Law! An Invitation to Everyday Life’, Law is My Friend, 1, 18–19.

3 Eyes of the Other: The Role of Chinese Women through the Lens of Documentary Films Cecilia J. Pang

The American filmmaker Micha X. Peled (2007) shares the following comment in an interview: ‘we tend to find China very mysterious and difficult to understand because their culture is so different from ours but they’re becoming a major world power and for that reason I think we should all try to understand them better’. Documentary film has always been a favourite visual medium for foreign filmmakers to explore the inscrutable China, but despite their impassioned objective voices, highly subjective modes and an insatiable curiosity, their work is mostly comprised of ‘cliché images’ and ‘cliché topics’ (Yuen 2005), and ‘show little of the experience of individual Chinese or the filmmakers’ own responses to China’ (Fitzpatrick 1983). On the other hand, documentary filmmaking in China is beginning to wake from its dormant state during this post-socialist era and, as filmmaker Hu Jie proclaims, ‘there is a massive resource for documentary film in China . . . await[ing] us to discover [it]’ (Rui 2005). Paul Pickowicz (Pickowicz and Zhang 2006), however, notices a trend among the emerging Chinese filmmakers to adopt an Occidentalist stance ‘to make movies about China that one imagines foreign viewers . . . would like to see’ such as ‘politically dissident films (even politically suicidal films) that boldly confront the party and directly challenge party/state domination of Chinese life’. At the same time, since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of ‘underground’ films made in the popular cinéma vérité style that record the quotidian lives of ordinary people and give Western audiences, as Ernest Larsen (1998) observes, ‘a chance to see afresh, as if for the first time, how this experience is played out in individual lives’. In these films that ‘explore the “self” and rapidly evolving notions of self-identity’, Pickowicz (Pickowicz and Zhang 2006) asserts that the protagonists seem ‘hollow’ and ‘utterly uninformed’ and ‘have 45

46

Genre in Asian Film and Television

few or no political or social ideas. Their lives are not embedded in any social context, and we learn little or nothing about the society in which they live . . . And China seems to have no history’. However, I argue that, regardless of how clichéd the images may be, some real/authentic aspects of Chinese life bleed through the screen and, regardless of how personal the stories may be, the social/political context of China always seeps through. Using Robert Burns’s dialectic of self-perception and the perception of others – O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us! (‘To a Louse’, 1785) – as a departing point, I look at four documentaries, two made by Chinese videographers: Though I Am Gone (Hu Jie, 2006) and Out of Phoenix Bridge (Li Hong, 1997), and two made by non-native filmmakers: Yang Ban Xi (Yang Ting Yuen, the Netherlands, 2005) and China Blue (Micha X. Peled, USA, 2005) as comparative cases in cultural studies. These films exemplify the different documentary types Bill Nichols categorizes in his seminal book Introduction to Documentary (2001): observational (China Blue), participatory (Out of Phoenix Bridge), reflexive (Though I Am Gone) and performative (Yang Ban Xi). None of these is constructed purely in one mode; rather, each presents a mélange of modes. Following John Grierson’s credo (1966) that documentary film is ‘the creative interpretation of actuality’, I analyse the purpose and content (the creative interpretation) of these films, appraise their aesthetics, determine the filmmakers’ intent and examine the choices the filmmakers made in verbal/visual images to tell their stories, in order to assess how these films reflect the rapidly changing role of women in China (the actuality) and what conclusions they draw concerning Chairman Mao’s proclamation that ‘women hold up half the sky’. Have Chinese women regressed, as Western journalists tend to believe, or are they on their march forward into the future, as the Chinese authorities profess?

Re(m)embering vs. re(w)riting history To ‘remember history’ is the raison d’être Hu Jie made Though I Am Gone, a small, quiet film that depicts the gruesome murder of Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a Beijing middle school and historically the first victim (with millions to follow) of the Cultural Revolution. Without any fanfare and without any re-enactment or constructed scenes, Hu tells the grisly story with a startling simplicity, using primarily the direct cinéma vérité mode of communication, a black and white aesthetic, and silence throughout (save for the revolutionary zest of the playing of

Cecilia J. Pang 47

Bian’s favourite song at the end). Hu’s approach appears to adhere to the Aristotelian dictum that spectacle is the least important element in tragedy and to the Greek convention in which death or violence usually takes place offstage and is reported by a messenger character. In Though I Am Gone, the grisly story of how Bian was brutally bullied for weeks, then beaten to death with nail-spiked wooden sticks by her teenaged female Red Guard students is told to us mostly by Wang Qingyao, Bian’s 85-year-old husband, with a self-contained quietude, leaving the horrific and repugnant images to our imagination, and provoking a cathartic experience in the viewer. To remember history is also the goal of Wang Qingyao, who wants the story of his wife’s tragedy to be remembered and to be preserved in the Cultural Revolution Museum. As a scientist, Wang remembers by documenting the circumstances and collecting evidence. He not only saved his wife’s bloodstained underclothing, but on the day after her death, he went out and bought a camera, and used it to photograph the dead body. He wants to ‘record history’ and feels that it is his ‘duty’. Despite his efforts and his proclamation that this is not a personal tragedy, he is more than likely to be ‘left alone with his memories. The authorities have turned down his request to have a memorial plaque installed in the schoolyard’ (Lorenz 2007). The true protagonist in the film and in history is, however, the tragic heroine, Bian Zhongyun, whose voice we do not hear, whose face we see only through old photographs and whose naked body is revealed as a cadaver, yet she embodies one of communist China’s most remarkable achievements: the education of millions of women. Bian is not only a teacher and vice-principal, but is also the party leader of this middle school, in addition to being a mother and a wife. In short, she is holding up her half of the sky by juggling education, marriage, parenthood, work and politics. In another moment, Wang describes how on the day of the murder, Bian shook hands with him before leaving for work, something she had never done before, a parting gesture that is forever engraved in his mind. This simple gesture of intimacy can be seen as a sociological signifier that women do receive the same political, economic, social and family rights as men, and that gender equality reflects not only the success of communism but also how far Chinese women have progressed from the time of having to walk three paces behind men. In a remarkable parallel, the antagonists (the student murderers) in Though I Am Gone also illustrate the rapidly changing status of women in China – specifically, their political empowerment – though the

48

Genre in Asian Film and Television

underlying message implies that absolute power does corrupt, especially in the hands of a group of young teenagers. From the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese youth (both boys and girls) were an important force relied on by Mao to combat his opponents in the Communist Party. Intoxicated by the party ideology and empowered, almost overnight, by their Great Helmsman, these high school students, now called the Red Guards, believed they could take over the world (or, at the very least, the country), to the extent of committing senseless mass murders. Their deadly mob hysteria brings to mind Euripides’s The Bacchae, wherein the frenzied Maenads, under the spell of Dionysus, tear apart the limbs of King Pentheus. In keeping with the official ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ position of denial on the Cultural Revolution, every one of these former Red Guards, with the exception of one woman who speaks anonymously about the ideological insanity that came over them, has remained silent. We do not know who they are and what they look like, except for celebratory photographs of various generic groups of smiling, innocent Red Guard girls waving their Red Books in revelry, against the graphic background narration of Bian’s attackers wielding their lethal clubs in hysteria. All we know is that, according to Wang, this ‘was essentially a Royal school’, where some of the students were ‘daughters, nieces or granddaughters of members of the Politburo’, many of whom are still living and revered today. Their silence and anonymity by no means suggests a loss of power. In fact, it is speculated that they are the ones who wielded their influence to ban Though I Am Gone and pull the plug on the festival where it was to be shown. With its focus on one personal story, told almost entirely by one person, shot, produced, directed and edited entirely by Hu Jie himself, Though I Am Gone will be remembered as an unusually intimate historical documentary rather than as an attempt to document the sprawling history of the Cultural Revolution or to understand the progress of Chinese women. The film will also be remembered for its unprecedented distribution venue, which intensifies its close, tight, personal intimacy: it is currently available only on YouTube in ten separate segments and is most likely to be screened by one person at a time on a personal computer. In Hu Jie’s defence, this is not an intentional distribution strategy for the digital age, though it may turn out to be one; rather, it is a reaction to the fact that the Chinese government cancelled the Multi Culture Visual Festival in Yunnan, where Hu planned to premiere Though I Am Gone. ‘If politicians deny their own history’, Hu states, ‘we simple Chinese should remember. We must continue to make

Cecilia J. Pang 49

many films about the Cultural Revolution and its massacres’ (quoted in Rui 2005). Nevertheless, Hu Jie’s impassioned call to memory is not likely to be answered by his fellow artists, welcomed by his native audiences, supported by the Chinese authorities or even buoyed up by the West. Hong Kong-born Dutch filmmaker Yan-Ting Yuen (2005) strongly objects to such sentimentality: ‘so many documentaries that cover the Cultural Revolution as main or side topics display the horrors of the revolution. These are facts that are undeniable and cannot be ignored or taken lightly . . . However . . . Not everything was as bad as the Western media usually emphasizes, a tendency that irritates many Chinese’. Her film Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works focuses instead on the ‘cultural’ aspect of the Cultural Revolution, the model revolutionary opera (Yang Ban Xi), a specific art form created for the people and the only entertainment permitted on stage and on screen (film and television) throughout all of China during that tumultuous period. In opting for the entertaining over the enlightening, the cheerful over the dreary, the artistic over the political, Yuen is not, however, advocating denial or forgetfulness, but is campaigning for a postmodern look at history through selective memory. She believes that we can (and should) choose what to remember and what to forget from history, and if given the choice, why not go for the ‘cheerful, happy, colourful and the campy’? Her optimism brings to mind the musical The Man of La Mancha, where the Spanish Inquisition serves but as a historical backdrop to the romantic whimsical quest of Don Quixote, who sings brazenly ‘I know who I am and who I may be if I choose’. Relying on the Hollywood musical as inspiration, Yuen (2005) proclaims in her press statement that ‘history can be rewritten, especially in terms of song and dance’, a sentiment not-so-secretly embraced by the Chinese authorities, who granted her a permit to shoot openly in China. References to the Hollywood film musical are ever-present in Yang Ban Xi, with its constant intercutting of songs and dance, the interjection of choreography into verité, the interpolation of fact and fiction and, above all, the sensational, scrumptious spectacle. Its aesthetic focus, like that of a Chinese puzzle box, remains always on the ‘performativity’ – of the Cultural Revolution, of the Model Opera works themselves (the costumes, make-up, scenery, choreography, etc.) and even of documentary filmmaking – always with a nod to the musical theatre. In the film, the main subjects are introduced to us in still frames as they pose on a sound stage with artificial snow falling or a changing backdrop. These poses are natural and appropriate for the

50

Genre in Asian Film and Television

ballerina Xue Qing Hua and opera actor Tong Xian Ling since they are akin to the convention of lianshan (a freezing moment) seen in both the traditional Beijing and the revolutionary operas. In contrast, the scriptwriter and composer appear quite awkward in the artifice, though all succeed in conveying an ironic and humorous effect much like the close-up tableau at the end of a Hollywood musical number. The entire performative (i.e., non-realistic) attribute owes its debt to Bertolt Brecht and his alienation effect of ‘conscious awareness of audience’, which is in turn inspired by the performance of the celebratory Beijing opera actor Mei Lanfang. This convention spawned the birth of the model works, which helped perpetuate the eternal debate in documentary film about fact and fiction. Stylistically, Yang Ban Xi cannot be considered as a straightforward documentary. It mixes direct cinema, traditional interviews, archive newsreels, film footage, musical conventions and remixes, the use of a fictional narrator, hired actors and dancers, and even a rock and roll sequence. Historically, the use of hybrid genres seems an appropriate choice as it is in keeping with the Western-influenced Model Opera tradition that integrates Beijing opera with ballet, and traditional Chinese with Western orchestral music; however, more than likely, the fusion of styles is credited, once again, to the film/theatre musical structure which comprises spoken words, music, song and dance. As in a musical, where success is measured by whether the audience will be swayed by the seductive powers of the music and go out of the theatre singing the songs, Yuen (2005) hopes that her audience, after seeing Yang Ban Xi, will ‘have “actually” experienced the revolutionary zest of that time, that it was and still is so easy to be seduced by propaganda’. This is problematic, because one cannot talk about propaganda without mentioning the ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ intended to be spread. The Model Operas all share a similar obligatory political context, revolutionary theme and communist ideology. Chinese American writer Anchee Min (1994) writes: ‘The operas were taught on radio and in school, and were promoted by the neighbourhood organizations. For ten years. The same operas. I listened to the operas when I ate, walked and slept. I grew up with the operas. They became my cells.’ Art and politics may appear to make strange bedfellows, but they remain conjoined twins in any discussion of the Model Opera works, for ‘To love or not to love the operas was a serious political attitude. It meant to be or not to be a revolutionary’ (Min 1994). But it is difficult for today’s young performers who ‘were not even born’ during the Cultural Revolution to find empathy with these characters with political and

Cecilia J. Pang 51

historical bents, except to reproduce step-perfect choreography. The ballet master in Yang Ban Xi chides the dancers in a rehearsal of a recent remake of the model work Red Detachment of Women: ‘I don’t see any emotions in you lot, no feeling. The battlefield is over there.’ By ignoring the political agenda and disregarding the textual ideology, Yuen seems to argue ‘that the past isn’t exactly past in China, at least when it comes to its cultural production’, that indeed history can be rewritten (Dargis 2006). As the scriptwriter Jin Yong Qin maintains in Yang Ban Xi, ‘Art should enter a world of fantasy so that the pain inside us is no longer felt and is not real’. But if a documentary filmmaker always focuses on fictionalization (the creative interpretation), what is his or her actuality? Bearing in mind that in a musical, music, dance and spectacle are of paramount importance, and the text is subordinate to the visuality, i.e., what is said is not as important as what is being seen, we can best glean director Yuen’s position on an aspect of reality such as the changing role of women by comparing the textual to the sub-textual, and the verbal to the visual semiotics. Textually, each woman in Yang Ban Xi constructs her identity in relation only to her lover, as a ‘wife’ much like the Confucian woman. The first statement of Jiang Qing, spoken as Chairman Mao’s wife, used here as a fictionalized narrator, is ‘My name is Jiang Qing. I’m Mao’s lover. I’m his dog. I’m obedient’. Xue Qinghua, the ballerina who achieved immeasurable fame with her participation in the Model Opera Red Detachment of Women, when asked for her final assessment of the Cultural Revolution, concludes demurely that ‘it was good because I found a good husband who adores me’. Zhang Nanyuan, the opera actress, abandoned her career in its prime because her husband was blacklisted as belonging to a feudal faction: ‘My husband belonged to that family and I did as well.’ In contrast, ‘others’ construct these women by a sexualizing gaze through the fictionalized screens of the Model Opera works. The artist and fan Xu Yi Hui recalls his most vivid memory of the opera films as the legs of the women ‘because the women wore very little you can see their legs . . . our first sexual feelings were aroused by Yang Ban Xi, from revolution we discovered something real’. Chen Ping, husband of Xu Qinhua, remembers being infatuated with his wife’s on-screen persona (image/fiction) before falling in love with the real person (fact/reality). Such linguistics seem to reflect a throwback view of how Yuen sees Chinese women as reverting back to traditional Confucian days when

52

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Figure 3.1 Still from Yang Ban Xi (2005)

women played a subordinate role to men, but an examination of the visual/non-verbal signifiers indicate otherwise. The non-verbal cues in two images – one real and one fake – of Jiang Qing, for instance, reflect and represent the undeniable achievements of Chinese women in both the political and cultural arenas. In the newsreel, dressed in the gender-erasing Mao uniform, standing behind bars, Jiang still exhibits stereotypically ‘masculine’ qualities – aggression, brazenness and tremendous defiance – as she claims to be the only comrade who stood by the Great Helmsman for 30 years – side by side, as an equal and not as a subservient canine. In another image, shrouded in a silhouette seated on a sound stage to disguise the use of an actor, Jiang appears like the Empress Dowager who rules behind the veil. Historically, Jiang was the uncredited producer behind the scenes who was responsible for the creation and development of the Model Operas. Like the Hollywood mogul who has the power to decide who will be the star of tomorrow, she was instrumental in creating the female role of Chang Bao and inserting it into the originally all-male cast Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

Cecilia J. Pang 53

In fact, all the female heroes in the Model Opera works are better known for their courage, their valour, their fearlessness – stereotypically masculine qualities – than for their beauty. In every image of the archival film footage seen in Yang Ban Xi, whether of groups of women soldiers or of solo heroines, the women characters are standing tall, with glistening smiles and brave gestures, demonstrating all the masculine characteristics of leadership and comradeship as they fight alongside the men. To see these strong, independent Chinese ballerinas leaping into the air with their rifles, dancing en pointe with their grenades, does seem to suggest that Chinese women have made incredible strides in their social advancement.

Domestic vs. global exploitation Rural to urban migration of young women in China has become a huge social phenomenon and is the subject of both Li Hong’s Out of Phoenix Bridge and Micha X. Peled’s China Blue. Known as the dagonmei (working sisters), these young women exhibit a dramatic shift from the traditional norms of female migrants that even urban dweller filmmaker Li Hong (1997) finds it difficult to fathom: ‘As an urban dweller, I had had many pre-conceived notions about these girls from the countryside. What I discovered, however, left me speechless. Out of Phoenix Bridge is indeed a record of this speechless process.’ Out of Phoenix Bridge begins by following the lives of four young women (Jialing, Ah Feng, Xiao Wang and Xiazi) who come from the Anhui countryside to Beijing and work as domestics, but eventually focuses only on the story of Xiazi, while the rest remain on the periphery. According to Ernest Larsen (1998): ‘That spatial displacement produces spiritual displacement is a notion which structures many narratives of migrations.’ To strengthen the dislocation, Li chooses to have most of the film take place in the traditional hutong (the ancient part of Beijing) where the women reside, instead of showing shots of a sprawling and super-modern Beijing. The cramped living quarters are so small that ‘when one takes a bath, someone must guard the door and everyone must stay in the bed’, and Li admits that ‘even she did not realize such kind of places exist in Beijing’. The young women’s confined and restricted living quarters inevitably helps reinforce the pervasive ‘suffocation, fear, and stagnation’ (Larsen 1998) that stalks them, though this is more of a psychological rather

54

Genre in Asian Film and Television

than spiritual displacement. Some of their fears, such as ‘not wanting to come home late because of thugs’ and ‘losing a woman’s reputation’, are universal female concerns; others, such as the ‘fear of not having a permit’ or ‘fear of the police’, are real socially and culturally specific dreads for these female migrants, who are required by law to carry an identity card (shenfen zheng), a temporary residence permit (zanzhu zheng), a medical certificate, a ‘registration card for the temporary employment of emigrants’ (waichu renyuan liudong jiuye dengji ka) and, for women of childbearing age, a ‘marriage and childbearing permit’ (hunyu zheng) (Gaetano and Jacka 2004). The opening sequence in Out of Phoenix Bridge effectively captures the overlapping of their fears, as the women ramble in dialects about how there had been an intruder the night before but no one was courageous enough to open the door, because they did not have the right kind of residential permit and thus might seem like ‘drifters’, and because they are concerned about losing their reputations. But, aesthetically speaking, the sequence is too long and laden, and begs for expert editing. Filmmaker Li Hong takes on a precarious participatory role after she moves in with the women so as to elicit true candour, trust and confidence, but her cinéma vérité approach raises questions about a filmmaker’s boundaries of negotiation. As Reynaud (2003) argues: ‘The purest form of vérité is that the opacity, the unknowability of the Other is almost sacred, and that the distance between subject and object has to be respected, yet taken in stride instead of becoming the topic of the film. The filmmaker’s desire to “understand” is at best naïve, at worst manipulative or imperialist.’ Even though Li is not seen in the film, she is the narrator, which makes it her story as much as that of her subjects, and she constantly injects herself into conversations with a reflexive but subjective and biased attitude. Throughout the film, she expresses an astounded curiosity as to the reactions and attitudes of these young rural women, who in turn are curious and puzzled about these ‘others’, the urbanites of whom the filmmaker is a part. Even Xiazi’s mother, a typical rural woman who has never left Phoenix Bridge, expresses a fascination with the difference between the rural and the urban when she asks Li Hong whether city girls live at home with their parents, because in the country girls are not even allowed to be born at home, but must be born in a cowshed. The close relationship built between the filmmaker and her subjects inevitably creates a web of boundaries that further complicates the dialectic between self-perception and perception of others. At the end, Li ‘developed a sense of guilt’ and felt that she had exploited her sub-

Cecilia J. Pang 55

jects, that she was a traitor they trusted with her prodding and probing, watching and listening. She ‘admitted that her documentary functioned very much like a city dweller’s looting (lueduo) of migrant rural workers’ (Zhang 2004: 127), even though the young women clearly gave her carte blanche to record their lives. On the other hand, although the women do not talk about being exploited by their employers, they hint at the cruel treatment of their landlady, who charges them for every piece of coal. For her part, the landlady does not see herself as an exploiter and believes in her housing rights as she confides to a fellow urbanite, the filmmaker and on camera the problems she encounters with these unruly rural tenants (‘one of them [was] shitting in the pond’). In the official catalogue of the Yamagata Film Festival, Li (1997) writes: ‘Before they had come to Beijing, in their hometown, they were daughters belonging to their parents; when they go back to Phoenix Bridge, they would be wives belonging to their husbands.’ This statement, supported by verbal and visual images, indicates that she perceives her subjects as adhering to Confucian morals, which stipulate the subordination of women in society. But Xiazi’s migration to the city is precisely an attempt to escape from the determining influence of tradition in the hope of making a new identity. In spite of the tremendous pressure put on her to get married, she insists on her right to choose whom she wants to fall in love with, to the extent of attempting suicide to defy her parents’ wishes. She is not opposed to the idea of an arranged marriage as long as she has the right of refusal. Her greatest fear is to follow in her mother’s footsteps: ‘I’ll kill myself if I would marry like Ma.’ Xiazi’s mother is perhaps the most resilient and misunderstood female character in the film. While her husband works in a hair salon, she labours long hours outside in the fields, even though there is not much hope that she would ever leave Phoenix Bridge. Away from her entrenched tradition (past), she continues to have big dreams and confides that if given the opportunity, she would not have gotten remarried, because ‘the single life is so much freer’. According to Li Hong, a picture of Tiananmen Square is the women’s only memento that they have been to Beijing, but this is not entirely true: whatever happens to them, these women cannot erase the experience. Li (1997) concludes in her Director’s statement that ‘those days might be the freest time of their lives . . . It was only in Beijing that they could have a slice of dream, dreaming of changing their fate’. Even though Xiazi laments that ‘I don’t know what my future will be, I do not have a future here [home] and I do not have a future in Beijing

56

Genre in Asian Film and Television

and I don’t know what to do’, she knows she has the freedom to be who she wants if she chooses to and, in the end, she chooses individualism, as the closing caption reveals: ‘the next day she returns to Beijing’. What cannot be erased is the journey of life, the empowerment by knowledge. Micha X. Peled’s China Blue follows a similar structure as Out of Phoenix Bridge by spotlighting the stories of a few girls who migrate from the rural countryside to work in the factories in Shaxi, southern China. Exploitation in China Blue, however, transcends personal dynamics (director-subject, landlady-tenant) to attain a multi-layered and multifaceted global perspective, yet, ironically, none of the exploiters see themselves as users of the disadvantaged, but rather as do-gooders. To appropriate authenticity, Peled’s Associate Producer (and interpreter) went to live with the migrants in the factory’s dormitory before shooting, though not to build trust or extract intimacy as Li Hong did, but in order to get ‘to know a number of the workers’ and then later to send Peled emails with ‘capsule profiles of the people and that’s how we started’ (Peled 2007). This kind of ‘underhanded’ yet harmless exploitation extended even further in Peled’s interaction with the factory owner, Mr Lam, who provided Peled with complete access to every part of the factory. To appease Mr Lam, Peled (2007) reveals in an interview with blogger Sara Schieron: ‘I cut a five-minute sales promo for the factory out of the footage we’d shot. It had smiling workers and me in voice over saying: “We always deliver on time.” I gave it to him as a gift and he’s been very happy with that.’ While Schieron finds this approach ‘subversive’, Peled (2007) explains: ‘In his universe of Chinese factories, Mr Lam has nothing to hide.’ Compared to the many other factories in Shaxi, where as many as 50 workers have to share one room and one bathroom, Lam’s factory is relatively new and has better working conditions. In addition, Peled (2007) persuasively told Mr Lam that ‘the film was about him; that I was interested in making a film about the first generation of Chinese entrepreneurs who are transforming China into a free market economy and creating jobs’. Indeed, Mr Lam, with his rags-to-riches success story, is the embodiment of Chinese modernization, rising from a collective farm worker to a police chief to a factory owner, and whose social climb is reflected in the change of his mode of transportation, from a bicycle to ‘I now drive a small car’, a Mercedes Benz. Lam believes his work ethic is the backbone of his success. He says that ‘We Chinese people are the hardest working people in the world’. So, to him, his rules of management – expectations that his workers

Cecilia J. Pang 57

work a minimum 10-hour day on a regular basis, with overtime often extended beyond 20 hours or more, docking the labourers’ pay for their meals, extracting fines for ‘giggling’, laying off female workers who are pregnant or keeping new employees’ first month’s salary as security – are not strategies of exploitation, but common working conditions in China. More importantly, it is simply beyond his control and power to step outside the prescribed box to challenge the established culture; in Shaxi alone, there are 70 denim factories all fighting for the same orders from international wholesalers. As Dennis Harvey notes (2005), ‘the real profits are made, and kept, in first-world countries’, which poses a stark contrast to the Third-World internal exploitation in Out of Phoenix Bridge. There is a dialectic of ignorance and curiosity about the ‘Other’ in China Blue. Mr Lam says that ‘foreigners have very poor understanding of who we are, as if we still live in totalitarian times and are in Marco Polo times’. Jasmine, the 17-year-old thread cutter, is so curious about who will wear the jeans that she fantasizes about writing a letter to the owner to describe who she is – which reflects a desire to be known by the Other. She does not know of anyone who is that ‘big, fat, and tall’. The supersized blue jeans represent not only the widening gulf between East and West, First and Third Worlds, but also the monumental gap in their profit margins. Jasmine is content to make about 6 cents (US) an hour, while Mr Lam is pleased to make a 20-cent profit on every pair of jeans, and the supplier is laughing about his hard bargain of getting $4.00 for every pair of jeans that he in turn will sell for a huge profit, between $25 and $250. Peled (2007) says: ‘It’s a food chain not unlike The Jungle – and it’s created by the people at the top: the international retailers. They drive the whole system. They go to factory owners and say “we want you to provide us with this product at this price, and if you can’t do it at this price and at this speed, we are simply going to go somewhere else”.’ In spite of the overarching theme of globalization, Peled (2007) considers himself more of a storyteller than a journalist, whose interest is in ‘finding the human stories that illustrate some of the implications of globalization, and telling those stories in a way that everyone can relate to so they can see how it’s impacting their own lives’. Through the stories of the teenaged workers, we not only get a glimpse into their rarely revealed rural home lives but also glean some slight understanding of their struggles in the new urbanized work environments, and develop a perspective on their coming of age as a new generation of modern Chinese women.

58

Genre in Asian Film and Television

One of the significances of the rural-urban migration is that it raises questions about the traditional practice that inadvertently promotes gender preference, as vestiges of the Confucian concept of the superiority of the male remain deeply engrained within the Chinese psyche and active in rural life. In China Blue, Orchid, the zipper, not only gives up schooling so that her brother can attend college, she also has to save money to support his education. But by moving to work in the city, she gains tremendous economic power and freedom, including the freedom to choose who she wants to date. Even though her father seems ambivalent about her choice, she is determined in her decision. And, as the closing credits reveal, in the end, Orchid did get married, have a child and go to work in the same factory as her husband, a far cry from the times of arranged marriages. Resistance to patriarchal oppression is also manifest in the strike talk among the workers. After working for over 20 hours one day and for three months without pay, the normally ‘docile and obedient’ female workers (to use the words of Mr Lam) reach a breaking point and boldly stand united to demand their wages. Seeing the young 17-year-old neverbeen-away-from-home Jasmine’s growing interest in the force of labour unions or witnessing the usually unassuming seamstress Li Ping who, at a mere 14, has the courage to question authority does seem to reflect a courageous quietism in this younger generation of Chinese women. The women in the films discussed above demonstrate a remarkable individualism and exert tremendous independence; clearly, they too hope the audience (others) could see ‘how courageous we are, how strong we really are, and how much we love life, too’ (Rui 2005). Underneath the compound contextuality of the personal stories, there is a resilient but celebratory spirit of social optimism pertaining to the advancement of women in China that all the filmmakers seem to share, some more noticeably than others. Together, the four films encompass ‘the multiple directionality’ which Yingjin Zhang (2007) deems necessary for comparative film studies: China Blue looks outward with its theme of globalization; Out of Phoenix Bridge examines inwards its cultural traditions; Though I Am Gone reflects backward at history and memory; and Yang Ban Xi scrutinizes sideways with its cross-medial practices – each extending beyond its direction and overlapping with the other through different forms of creative expression. Though their styles and methodologies differ, the filmmakers all share a common conviction and a social optimism that help to narrow the fissure between self-perception and the perception of others with

Cecilia J. Pang 59

respect to a truth at once literal, emotional and universal. Yes, Chinese women have indeed come a long way from submitting to the Confucian tenets of the three obediences and four virtues to staying true to their new-found self-definitions, amid the tens of thousands of negotiations in today’s contradictory China. For they know, when tomorrow comes, when the generation emerging from the state’s one-child policy grows up and women become much sought-after, Chinese women may well be holding up three-quarters, and not just half, of the sky.

References Dargis, M. (2006) ‘Review of Yang Ban Xi (Netherlands)’, New York Times, 29 March. Fitzpatrick, M. (1983) ‘China Images Abroad: The Representation of China in Western Documentary Films’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 9, 87–98. Gaetano, A.M. and Jacka, T. (2004) On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press. Grierson, J. (1966) Grierson on Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (2005) ‘Review of China Blue’, Variety, 13 October. Larsen, E. (1998) ‘Video vérité from Beijing’, Art in America, 86 (September), 53–6. Li, H. (1997) ‘Asian Currents: Out of Phoenix Bridge’, Catalogue of Yamagata International Film Festival. Available at: www.yidff.jp/97/cat051/97c059-e.html, date accessed 1 November 2010. Lorenz, A. (2007) ‘The Chinese Cultural Revolution: Remembering Mao’s Victims’, Spiegel Online International, 15 April. Available at: www.spiegel.de/ international/world/0,1518,483023,00.html, date accessed 1 November 2010. Min, A. (1994) Red Azalea. New York: Pantheon Books. Peled, M.X. (2007) Interview by Sara Schieron. Alterati, 3 April. Available at: www.alterati.com/blog/2007/04/china-blue-interview-with-micha-peled, date accessed 1 November 2010. Pickowicz, P.G. and Zhang, Y. (eds) (2006) From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Reynaud, B. (2003) ‘Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary’, Senses of Cinema, 28 (September). Available at: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/ chinas_new_documentary.html, date accessed 1 November 2010. Rui, S. (2005) ‘To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks about His Documentaries’, Senses of Cinema, 35 (April–June). Available at: http://archive.sensesofcinema. com/contents/05/35/hu_jie_documentaries.html, date accessed 1 November 2010. Yuen, Y.-T. (2005) ‘Statement by the Director’, in Press Kit of Yang Ban Xi. Available at: www.shadowdistribution.com/yangbanxi/downloads/ybxpresskit. pdf, date accessed 1 November 2010.

60

Genre in Asian Film and Television

——. (2006) ‘Q&A Session with Filmmaker Yan-Ting Yuen of Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works’ Film Forum Podcasts (29 March). Available at: www.filmforum.org/ podcast/mp3/YangBanXiMar292006.mp3, date accessed 1 November 2010. Zhang, Y. (2004) ‘Styles, Subjects, and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Independent Documentary’, New Cinemas, 2(3), 119–35. ——. (2007) ‘Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Interdisciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1(1), 27–40.

4 Almost Propaganda But Not Quite: Identity, Modernity and the Construction of ‘The Native’ in Gift of Life and Viva Tonal Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao Documenting the Native? Since the late 1990s, there has been a peculiar boom of documentary films (what I call the ‘New Documentary Movement’) in Taiwan, amidst the general decline of feature film production.1 The boom carries such momentum that, in order to take advantage of it, a biennial international festival of documentary films was created in 1998, complete with various prizes. The cause of this boom is a subject still waiting to be thoroughly explored, though given that the New Documentary Movement, which began in 1988,2 closely followed the unfolding of the Nativization Movement (bentuhua yundong) in Taiwan in the mid-1980s – a movement that sought to distinguish Taiwanese culture from the mainland Chinese – a facile explanation would be to ascribe this odd phenomenon to the rise of the so-called ‘native consciousness’ during this period, an explanation this chapter seeks to unpack. A comparison with Taiwan’s New Cinema Movement, which began in 1982 with The Story of Time (Jiao 1990: 21), would reveal a picture more complex than such simple interpretations allow. The New Cinema Movement, which began only about six years earlier than the New Documentary Movement, represented more a 1 By decline, I do not mean a decline in quality, which has actually continued to surpass itself and win international renown since the late 1980s, but the gradual collapse of the film industry. Taiwan’s film industry reached its peak in 1988, producing 157 feature films that year, and then started a downward slide until it reached a relatively steady low of between 10 and 30 films a year since the mid-1990s (see Lu 2003). 2 It is usually argued that Children of the Moon, which came out in 1988, marked the beginning of the rise of the documentary film in Taiwan (Wen 2006).

61

62

Genre in Asian Film and Television

continuation of the Nativist Movement (xiangtu wenxue yudong) which unfolded in the earlier 1970s than being the harbinger of the Nativization Movement.3 Informed by a mixture of Chinese nationalism and socialism but reorienting the government’s unrealistic focus on the Chinese mainland, the Nativist Movement was the first post-war social movement that challenged the legitimacy of the authoritarian rule by KMT (Kuomintang or the Nationalist Party), the party that retreated from China to Taiwan after its defeat by the Chinese Communists, focusing criticism on its pro-Western and pro-capitalist orientations. In the end, however, as I have observed elsewhere, it ironically metamorphosed into its own opposite, the Nativization Movement, which did an about-face, adopting an anti-Chinese (Taiwanese nationalist) and pro-Western outlook. Unlike the Nativist Movement, which attacked the KMT for serving as the lackey of Western capitalism and selling out the Chinese nation, the Nativization Movement argued that the ‘alien’ and ‘unmodernizable’ ‘Chinese’ regime of the KMT had messed up the inherently beneficial capitalism and polluted the purity of ‘native’ Taiwanese culture (Liao 2000: 179–80). In the Asian context, Taiwanese nationalism seems an odd phenomenon, an exception that defies the recent decolonizing or postcolonial trend. Whereas other Asian nationalisms generally seem to define themselves against former colonial masters, Taiwanese nationalism construes colonial subjugation as the beginning of the nation.4 Having developed from a struggle between the Taiwanese local and the Chinese 3

Because of their closeness in time and the similarity in part of their subject matter, the New Cinema Movement was sometimes referred to as the ‘Nativist’ cinema. But critics tend to disagree about this labelling on the grounds that the films produced by directors subsumed under this rubric were not predominantly about rural life, even though they had largely turned towards a realist mode of presentation (see Luo 1990: 285). However, I see the connection not in content but in spirit. In other words, the New Cinema Movement was related to the Nativist Movement in terms of the decentralizing/localizing tendency that they both manifested in the way they approached the idea of culture. 4 Granted that, as Fanon has perspicaciously observed, the national bourgeoisie tends to be Janus-faced: nationalistic in front of its own population and yet subservient towards the metropolitan centre with its all-powerful modernity (1990: 120–6), Taiwanese nationalism’s single-minded adoration for (colonial) modernity nevertheless stands out as an exception, though one that is understandable in view of its perception of China as backward and threatening. For an emphatic approval of Taiwanese nationalism’s longing for modernity, see, for instance, Hsiau (2000).

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 63

pan-national due to a discriminatory policy towards the former by the (Northern-)China-centred KMT in the early years of the post-war period, Taiwanese nationalism is bent on revenging the pan-nationals, now re-termed ‘the Chinese’. Because Taiwanese local culture was treated as less Chinese (for this read ‘less cultured’) than the culture which mainlanders brought to Taiwan, the nationalist revenge enlisted the aid of modernity to counter this belief.5 In other words, it is the level of modernity, according to the nationalist, that distinguishes Taiwan and China and has created the urge on the part of (some) Taiwanese to want to secede from that dark and devouring mother that is China. To the extent that being less Chinese actually means ‘not quite modern or urban’ for the arrogant early KMT government, the clash between official Chinese nationalism and dissenting Taiwanese nationalism formally beginning in the 1980s was actually a competition between two different modernities: Chinese Shanghai (with which the KMT believed it was equipped and which was itself semi-colonial) or Japanese colonial; or, more precisely, a contention over the ‘ownership’ of ‘true’ modernity (Liao 2004). Like Chinese nationalism, Taiwanese nationalism also prides itself on being ‘more modern than thou’, but it pushes this worship of modernity further, 5 We need to go back in history a bit to account for the rise of Taiwanese nationalism. First, in Taiwan, what Frantz Fanon calls ‘the national bourgeoisie’ – that is, the colonial subjects that had most successfully climbed the social ladder during the colonial period – was not able to take over from the departing Japanese because administration over Taiwan was delivered to the Chinese government. Moreover, the national bourgeoisie pretty much lost all relevancy in post-war Taiwan, partly because they were educated in Japanese and were not able to operate in Mandarin Chinese with ease, and partly because many of them had been persecuted in the post-war years. Secondly, the relatively successful Japanese indoctrination of the post-occupation generation of the gentry class about the inferiority of Chinese culture came into intense conflict with the KMT’s unsympathetic, condescending and sometimes discriminatory treatment of the local people. Other factors included: the continuing anti-Japanese propaganda by the KMT, which the local people sometimes felt to be directed towards them, the traditional antagonism between the north and south of China, and the anti-communist phobia indoctrinated by the KMT that inadvertently paved the way for stigmatizing ‘China’ as a whole. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that the KMT back then was irremediably corrupt and completely demoralized during the civil war. When the KMT began to administer Taiwan in 1945, the Taiwanese soon became disillusioned after the initial euphoria over the return to the ‘motherland’, and from that disillusionment erupted the 228 Uprising of 1947 in which many Taiwanese were killed.

64

Genre in Asian Film and Television

to the point of unabashedly embracing colonial modernity as the beginning of the nation. However, that desire has always been couched in a vocabulary of ‘native-ness’, as a thin veil to symbolically cover up that worship of ‘colonial modernity’ and as an easy rallying point of ‘us (natives) against them (aliens)’. The problem is, in so doing, ‘the native’ (or the Taiwanese ‘national’) became overlapped with colonial modernity. And it is precisely the distance between the vocabulary and the reality of the Nativization Movement that measures how far it has emptied itself of the ‘nativeness’ to which its predecessor, the Nativist Movement, had been more faithful. ‘The native’ is now exploited as an allegory at best and as a red herring at worst, but never as itself (Liao 1996). The situation is further complicated by the fact that it was also around the time of the rise of Taiwanese nationalism that postmodern trends were transmitted into Taiwan (Liao 2000: 180–3). Though the postmodern trends in general seem to have represented an alternative route throughout Asia to the nationalist ideological hegemony, which is more or less premised on an anti-colonial outlook, the Taiwanese situation is unique in the sense that the Taiwanese postmodern is curiously connected to the decolonizing project, taken up by the Nativist Movement in the 1970s but remaining uncompleted,6 whereas Taiwanese nationalism, as mentioned above, is deeply caught up in a nostalgia for the colonial. The two strands maintained a relatively unbalanced dialogue on the discursive level (though not necessarily on the everyday life level, because Taiwanese nationalism has a following of at most 19 per cent of the population),7 with the postmodern strand more or less on the defensive and the two having little crossover until recently, when, after eight years of nationalist rule, their corruption and 6

For one thing, as the KMT needed Japanese military know-how in fighting the communists, it cooperated closely with the post-war Japanese government. In terms of local political support, it relied mainly on those in the pro-Japanese camp of the national bourgeoisie, not only because these people were used to cooperating with the ruling class but also because many of those in the anti-Japanese camp continued to express dissent in post-war politics and were persecuted. The KMT’s project of decolonization therefore remained official and revengeful, and did not really address key issues that buttressed colonial domination. If anything, the early KMT may have reinforced it with its authoritarian rule. 7 For reliable statistics, see the poll conducted by the nationalist government’s Mainland Affairs Council (2007). According to this most recent poll, the proindependence ratio is 19.1 per cent, including those who favour immediate independence (7.3 per cent) and those who would like to maintain the status quo until the time is ripe for declaring independence (11.8 per cent).

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 65

ineptitude proved that ethnic politics did bring Taiwan the nationalist rose garden it had promised.8 In addition to literary production, which has always been the first to be involved in disputes over identity, the split between the Nativist ideology and the Nativizationist ideology later turned into an opposition between postmodernism and nationalism. This split has affected feature-film production, which has since the 1990s diverged into two different directions: into the postmodern/multiculturalist and the nationalist (Liao 1999), not least because the cinema is ‘an essential part of a process of defining nations’ (Williams 2002: 4). In contrast, the New Documentary Movement appears to have negotiated with both trends and cannot simply be understood as a positive response to nationalism, let alone its filmic manifestation. While post-1990 documentary films seem to have invested a tremendous amount of energy in exploring lesser known ‘native’ aspects of Taiwan, including memories of political oppression under early KMT rule,9 they span the whole spectrum from the nationalist/nativizationist/reterritorializing end to the postmodern/nativist/deterritorializing end. In general, however, there are more works in between than at either extreme. If anything, there has definitely been a trend towards moving away from the allegorizing tendency of the nationalist narrative to a more down-to-earth, localized level, delving into ‘the native’ in all its multiplicities.

Whence the New Documentary Movement? Up until the final years of rule by martial law under the KMT, i.e., the 1980s, the majority of documentaries were made in connection with government projects and more or less served government propaganda purposes, but all along there had been works since the 1960s that tried to grope their way beyond constraints imposed by the government (Li 2003). Beginning with the mid-1980s, especially after the highly creative director Yii-Feng Wu founded the Quanjing Studio in 1988, Taiwanese documentaries accelerated their pace in wrestling away from 8

A rare exception of a crossover is A City of Sadness/Beiqing chengshi (Taiwan, 1989), a film about the 228 Uprising by the renowned director Hou Xiaoxian (Hou Hsiao-hsien), who, though not a nationalist, was the first director to make a film on this subject, and one that has been considered sacred by the nationalists. For a preliminary examination of this dialogue, see Liao (2000). 9 Blood Stained Youth (1998) by Juzhen Xiao was the first documentary about the victims of the anti-communist political persecution in the 1950s.

66

Genre in Asian Film and Television

their long-subordinated status as propaganda or semi-propaganda and emerged as a powerful medium for knowledge production as well as for social critique. The Children of the Moon (also known as Moon Children, Yii-Feng Wu, Taiwan, 1990), a film depicting the struggles of albinos in Taiwanese society, formally opened up a new era of documentary, which reached its first peak in the late 1990s with young Taiwanese documentary directors winning recognition in many renowned film festivals.10 The filmmakers’ turn towards documentaries became obvious towards the end of the period of rule by martial law, when government restrictions on cultural productions that reflected social truth had considerably eased up. Government relaxation, coupled with a combination of other conducive factors, such as the decline in feature film making, the availability of mobile and more advanced cameras, the founding of the Public Television Service and the drastic increase in the number of cable TV stations, helped catapult the documentary into a semi-renaissance. On the other hand, curiosity about the sociocultural diversity of Taiwan also helped broaden the reception of this genre. Since the mid-1980s, Taiwanese documentary film has gone through the whole gamut of documentary styles, from the earlier presentation of national events, through ethnographical observation, reportage documentary, political investigation and social intervention to the most recent self-conscious documentary that reflects on the nature of documentary itself (Wang 2004: 7; Li 2000: 541–42), and has tremendously broadened its scope and horizons. Despite the fact that in the last couple of years some documentaries were able to attract a larger audience, with a few of them actually making it to regular movie theatres, none were as lucky as the two films chosen for discussion in this article – Viva Tonal, or Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai (hereafter referred to as Dancing) (Wei-ssu Chien and Chen-ti Kuo, Taiwan, 2003) and Gift of Life/Shengming (hereafter referred to as Life) (Yii-Feng Wu, Taiwan, 2003) – because there was an additional reason for their popularity. The showing of these two films coincided with the re-election of the nationalist President Shuibian Chen in 2004 10

For instance, in 1998 alone, Shuyi Chen’s Can’t Come Down the Mountain won the million-dollar first prize at the Taipei Film Festival; Yaodong Wu’s Swimming on the Highway won the first prize for the Asian New Talents category at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Japan; and Lizhou Yang’s I Love 080 won the best film award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland. For a brief description of the rise of Taiwan’s documentary, see Wen (2006).

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 67

and made them easy targets of cooptation.11 While the nationalist government did not lose any time in trying to take advantage of them for propaganda purposes, the directors themselves also seemed willing to play along in different ways and to different degrees. With the generous sponsorship and moral support the nationalist government poured into these films and the overblown fanfare provided by the nationalist media,12 the two not only had impressive box office takings, with that of Life surpassing all other local feature films shown in the same year (Wen 2006), but somehow helped create the false impression that the documentary boom was directly indebted to nationalism (Kuo 2005). While these two films indeed flirted with the seduction of political propaganda by somehow or other catering to political correctness, it is nevertheless encouraging to see that even they showed signs of not being able to or even not wanting to contain the multi-faceted truths of history and society within the nationalist framework. What I am interested in exploring is precisely the distance between what the nationalist government perceived in these two films and the reality of them by identifying what Jacques Lacan describes as ‘anamorphic stains’, that is, places in the films that reveal their ‘constitutive antagonism’ and therefore would somehow upset the projects of coopting them completely as propaganda (Zizek 1991). I argue that these repressed shadows or voices in fact represent either the difficulties these totalizing nationalist projects have encountered or, better still, the incipient move on the part of some nationalists to take a more deconstructive or multiculturalist approach towards nation and nationalism. In the following discussion, we look at how these convoluted issues of identity, nativism and modernity intersect in interesting but contrasting 11

Both Dancing and Life were released in 2004 after the re-election of Shuibian Chen. The opening date of Dancing (on Mother’s Day) was especially close to the inauguration of the President on 20 May 2004. 12 Dancing was initiated and mainly funded by the nationalist-controlled PTS (Public TV Station) and partially subsidized by the Taipei city government, then controlled by the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, the ruling nationalist party). Both Dancing and Life enjoyed successful box office performances, partly because all levels of government encouraged their staff to view it. In addition to promotional moves on the part of many important political figures, including the president and the former president as well as other celebrities, the premier Xikun You and the former president, as well as other pro-government entrepreneurs, actually bought up whole shows of Dancing for their friends and staff (see Anon. 2005). In the case of Life, the central government actually encouraged staff to watch the film during work hours.

68

Genre in Asian Film and Television

ways in these two films, which point to current transformations and future possibilities for Taiwanese nationalism.

From Dancing to oblivion Dancing claimed to be an attempt to reconstruct memories of the colonial period in a way that would enable us to unlearn the ‘wrong’ ideas we had been inculcated with by the KMT government about that period. It was revealed in the film that, imbued by the national spirit of contemporary Japan, which was at the time eagerly modernizing, Taiwan was undergoing dramatic modernizing changes under colonial rule. These changes included not only infrastructural improvements, such as the North-South railway, but cultural advancement as well.13 And yet, while there is indeed mention that progressive ideas such as woman’s rights and socialist ideas also took root in the native soil at this time, the film focuses more on popular entertainment such as film, social dancing and popular music, and particularly on the last category. Although the filmmakers claimed to reconstruct a ‘realistic’ picture of the 1930s by supplying lesser known facts and interviewing people who lived through that period, the ambiance of the film, carefully orchestrated by putting a major emphasis on the apparently thriving popular culture and deliberately foregrounding the ‘positive’ facts, adumbrates a picture of the colonial times that is ‘somewhat overly sunny’ (Hu 2005). This overly sunny feeling was reinforced not only by the narrator’s words and tone, which convey the sense of a time full of progress and hope, but by the other major perspective, which, presented mainly by an old woman, Ai’ai, who was one of the two earliest pop singers in Taiwan and presumably representative of liberalized women in the 1930s, portrayed life under colonial rule to be made up of nothing but listening to music, drinking coffee and taking romantic strolls with one’s beloved. But the film is presumably also about the life of an important but by now little-known writer-lyric composer, Junyu Chen. Chen spent eight years (from the age of 15 to 23) of his youth in China during the tumultuous times of the May Fourth Movement and Vernacular Literature 13

In fact, the Qing dynasty’s first governor of Taiwan, Mingchuan Liu, already started a large-scale modernization project in Taiwan, including building the part of the north-south railway between Jilong and Xinzhu. The Japanese extended it further south for their own military and economic purposes, as in most cases of colonial infrastructural expansion in Taiwan. Furthermore, initially, that expansion was actually based on Mingchuan Liu’s blueprint.

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 69

Movement (the mid-1910s to 1920s) and grew into a progressive young man by the time he left China. After he returned to Taiwan, he participated in the launch of the local Vernacular Literature Movement and was involved in many progressive projects, including publishing a literary magazine together with other left-leaning intellectuals. Most importantly, he was the first Taiwanese lyric composer who composed many poetic as well as witty lyrics for early Taiwanese popular songs, including the film title’s namesake ‘Dancing Age’, which the directors appropriated as a metaphor for the ‘vibrant’ Taiwanese society of the 1930s. At the same time, Chen was constantly made to represent the other aspect of modernity. He is described by the ageing singer Ai’ai as not only short and ugly but also having no sense of style and fashion because he had always had long hair and wore ‘Taiwanese clothes’; according to Ai’ai, no wonder that he could not win the heart of this other singer, Chunchun. Being from a lower class background and joining a traditional Taiwanese opera troupe before having finished elementary school, Chunchun in Ai’ai’s description was wayward, hottempered and by implication unable to climb the social ladder as she had wished to, unlike Ai’ai herself, who always had a good grasp of the Western middle-class code of behaviour. To put it simply, Junyu Chen was denigrated as not having caught up with the times (meaning not having jumped on the bandwagon of colonial modernity) and therefore in Lacanian terms not having it – the phallus. Hence Ai’ai’s definitive comment: ‘How could any woman be interested in him? Not even an uneducated one!’ But in fact, having long hair and wearing Taiwanese clothes both had progressive significance. Long hair was a sign of left-wing radicalism at that time. Even in the film itself, there is a clear clue as to why this was so. At one point (after Chen was ridiculed retroactively by Ai’ai), the narrator mentions a Japanese popular song back then entitled ‘Tokyo March’, which contains the line ‘The long-haired Marxist youth longing for a red romance’. In addition, wearing Taiwanese dress (for this read Chinese dress) was certainly a nationalist/nativist defiance against the colonial rule rather than an indication of a lack of a sense of style and fashion. Why then was Junyu Chen so caricaturized by Ai’ai, especially in view of the fact that the narrator is Chen’s niece? Chen may have been considered part of the progressive forces that were reshaping Taiwan, as the narrator shows up in person after Ai-ai’s caricature of Chen to offer a more positive image of him. But, given that the narrator’s upbeat tone in describing how Taiwan was opening up under the ‘modernizing’

70

Genre in Asian Film and Television

influences of Japan correlates well with Ai’ai’s sunny description of everyday life in colonial times, the narrator’s odd (in the sense of disagreeing with the general alignment of the film with colonial modernity) corrective to Ai’ai’s caricature of Chen seems a rather feeble attempt, one that could easily be considered a biased view from a close relative. The problem with the incoherence comes from the inability on the part of both Ai’ai’s group and the director/narrator to recognize the difference between artistic modernity and bourgeois modernity on the one hand, and left-wing modernity and bourgeois modernity on the other. In most Third World societies, this confusion occurred because of the transmission of the different kinds of modernity to these societies at about the same time. Not only was there no clear distinction between artistic modernity and bourgeois modernity, but few people were aware that Marxism was also ‘modern’. Obviously, it was because Ai’ai and her colleagues look at Chen’s radicalism through the filter of bourgeois modernity that it is construed as pre-modern and ‘backward’. No less so does the perspective of the film (Liao forthcoming). Therefore, the root of the problem is the fetishization of (bourgeois) modernity mentioned earlier, which led to an almost unconditional glorification of Japanese colonial rule. As a result, the film’s self-proclaimed attempt to salvage Chen was not able to compete with the true subject of the film – the (failure of) becoming modern in Taiwan – and Chen was consigned back to oblivion again. For, having spent his formative years in China and becoming Sinophile and left-leaning, Chen had identified with the wrong culture and thereby missed the encounter with true modernity. The real Chen, then, has now been reduced to a mere allegory: the personal consequence of this wrong choice – that he not only failed to win the heart of Chunchun but ended up being unmarried and living a sadly uneventful life of teaching Mandarin – symbolizes Taiwan’s sad fate of having been de-orbited from modernity and falling back into Chinese hands. Parallel to the allegorization of Chen’s life is the ambivalent treatment of the crucial role of Chinese influences in the development of cultural modernity in Taiwan in that period. Though appearing in the film in larger numbers either in the form of footage or through being mentioned by name, the Chinese films from Shanghai that promoted women’s rights and/or helped initiate Taiwanese popular music, the key cultural phenomenon in the film, were rarely identified as being from China. Most audiences would leave the film without having even registered these important historical relations. One possible explanation for this is that the filmmakers are too familiar with this part of

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 71

history to see the need to provide the audience adequate information thereof. But, in fact, the history of cultural exchange between Taipei and Shanghai has long been forgotten because of the early KMT’s general neglect as well as suppression of the history of Taiwan. Therefore, it is more likely that, along with the denigration of Junyu Chen and Chunchun, this resulted from a desire to conform to political correctness (Wang 2004: 11–12) – that Taiwan was delivered from China, the Dark Continent, thanks to Japanese colonization, which modernized Taiwan. There is no way, then, that China could provide any guidance to Taiwan in terms of helping with modernization. As a result, whether they were from the north, as embodied in Junyu Chen, or from the south, as transmitted by Shanghai films, progressive influences from China have no choice but to be eclipsed by the whirlwind of social dancing of high society, which is misrecognized as the modernity and which is, as I have argued elsewhere, in turn misrecognized as the substance of Taiwanese identity (Liao 2001b).

The meaning of Life is incomplete Even though reflections on the fetishization of modernity are rare among the sympathizers of Taiwanese nationalism because it is considered its soul, Life seems to come close to doing this by examining the impact of natural disasters on human existence. Life traces the posttrauma rehabilitation of four groups of victims of the 21 September 1999 earthquake, during which hundreds of people were killed and many more were dislocated. By documenting the rehabilitation process of these victims, the film was supposed partly to help them return to normal life and partly to bring the extended impact of the trauma to the attention of the audience, thereby eliciting their reflections on the ‘meaning of life’. The quake was the largest ever in the history of Taiwan and the impact left deep imprints on many people that would haunt them for a prolonged period of time. Such an occasion could easily be used to create national allegories, especially when the victims were mostly rural people, the stereotypical ‘natives’. On the other hand, this is also a rare opportunity to reflect on human existence, especially on how modernity has blinded us to Nature’s ways. For we all tend to think that Nature, being unpredictable, creates disasters, Nature in fact is just ‘natural’, whereas we live in artificially constructed worlds that make us take things for granted. To be able to see through the constructedness and the artificiality of human society based on a pretentious bourgeois

72

Genre in Asian Film and Television

rationality, one fruitful approach is to conduct a Benjaminian allegorical reading because only by turning an object into fragments, an establishment into a ruin, can truth be most radically revealed (Gilloch 2002). The post-quake ruins automatically present themselves as congenial for a Benjaminian reflection. The director Yii-Feng Wu seems to have done just that, though not thoroughly enough. He proceeded with the reflection in two threads: one on his father’s being paralysed and demoralized by a stroke, and the other on the four groups of victims. With regard to his father, the reflection is quite straightforward, basically serving as an explanatory parallel to the other thread. Seeing his father in a prolonged state of torpor after the stroke, the director/narrator wonders what has happened to the energetic and jovial father he had known so well? The old man had no doubt been knocked down by the inscrutable human contingency: why did the stroke happen and why him? But the reason one is mystified by human contingency is because one is deeply mired in the myth of ‘health’, which makes one believe that being healthy should be a constant state and illnesses are accidents, abnormalities that disrupt a normal life. The truth is, the film suggests, albeit very indirectly, that ‘health’ is a fiction that human rationality created by covering up the ‘natural’ course of bodily deterioration and with it the inevitability of health problems, which are part of this course. And, by implication, to fully appreciate the meaning of life, as the title of this film suggests, one has to see through the fiction of health. Following the other thread, the examination is far less rigorous and the result somewhat dubious. Wu followed the four groups of victims for a year or so to record how they rehabilitated themselves. But he was all the time very intrusive, sometimes even admonishing the subjects in a highly concerned and occasionally agitated tone as if it had been his own business – that he himself had been going through the same thing. This seems odd, as this is not typical of the documentary format, until one apprehends the sub-plot of his correspondence with someone named Wang Jiaxun, who does not show up in the film. Wu’s correspondence with Wang Jiaxun, apparently an old friend, threads through the whole film until it suddenly stops near the end of the film. In the correspondence, he discusses his plan for the film with Wang and when Wang stops responding, he wonders if the latter disagrees with the modifications he has made to his plan. However, at the very end of the film, when all is well that seems to end well, Wu reveals that the correspondence had been an imagined one – Wang Jiaxun, his best friend, had already died in 1987, that is, nearly 17 years previously,

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 73

in a fire. The revelation ends the film on an unexpected and yet highly tense note, one that not only makes us understand why the director took the whole thing so personally, but also sums up cathartically the gist of the film: the helplessness of human beings facing contingencies. However, this ingenious device seems to have more to it than simply serving as a tear-jerker. For Wang is a mainlander; as someone born before the 1960s, Wang had both a first name and an accent that clearly suggest his mainlander background.14 As the forerunner of the New Documentary Movement and a very sophisticated director, it is unlikely that Wu would have added this invisible character in the way he is portrayed in the film just because his best friend happened to be a mainlander and therefore he simply chose to present him realistically. The importance of Wang’s cultural background seems to be further hinted at when juxtaposed with that of the victims. Corresponding to Wang’s identity being a mainlander is the Hakka background of two of the four groups of victims, Hakka being another minority group in Taiwan.15 Strangely, despite the fact that he seems to have attached some importance to the aspect of identity, the director is very understated about this. First of all, for Taiwanese viewers under the age of 40, it would be difficult to tell that Wang is a mainlander just from his name and accent. In the case of the Hakka identity of the two groups, the clues are vague at best. In one case (where there is only one victim), we only hear Hakka spoken from a distance by her relatives; in the other (where there are two sisters) only one sentence, which was spoken quickly to one of them, could be recognized as being Hakka, and then only by people who know Hakka well and listen attentively.16 Wu’s possible intention of executing a Benjaminian allegorical reading could also find corroboration in the subalternity of three out of 14

Wu was born in 1960 and so must have been Wang. In those days, most names having jia (family) as the first word of the first name were common among second-generation mainlanders. In addition, Wang’s accent was undoubtedly a mainlander accent back in those days and forms a sharp contrast with Yii-Feng Wu’s Taiwanese accent. 15 One description of the ethnic composition of Taiwan is that there are four major groups: 69 per cent Holo (more precisely southern Hokkien), 14 per cent Hakka, 13 per cent mainlanders and 4 per cent aborigines. A more appropriate description would be to consider Taiwan as composed of 13 groups, with the aborigines further divided into 10 sub-groups, so that the distinctness of aborigines would not be watered down. 16 The two sisters are probably Holo-ized Hakka, who could understand Hakka but did not speak it. The one sentence was spoken by an elderly female neighbour of one of the sisters.

74

Genre in Asian Film and Television

the four groups of victims. They were all lower class people hit hard by the quake. Thus, one would expect Wu to eventually dwell on the constructed order imposed by bourgeois modernity on Taiwanese society, especially that of the myth of the nation, where lower classes and minorities are necessarily marginalized. But the film stops short of doing this and makes one wonder why, given that Wu has done well with the thread depicting his father. In the end, we are left with a difficult choice: is that intrusiveness found throughout the film that I mentioned earlier only a symptom of Wu’s own attempt to exorcise the ghost from himself, the human contingency that had bothered him for years after his best friend had died? Or was Wang, as well as most of the victims, intentionally made to speak from the margins in order to subvert the boundary of the nation like the Lacanian symptom, and from there the bourgeois myth of an essentially meaningful human existence? If, rather than being a work that is inordinately permeated with existentialist sentimentalism, as LiHsin Kuo (2005) has argued is the case, the attempt to make one realize that the lack of coherence in our existence is in fact the core of that same existence – in order to turn the impossibility of a homogenized society into the vitality of that same society – remains an incomplete project in this film.

Re-membering the nation In trying to represent the native (history), both films run into excess that cannot be easily assimilated. While the first film tries to minimize the excess to fit the native into the nationalist framework, the second film to some extent attempts to make use of it. Dancing, then, is a typical national allegory which, though being hailed by the nationalists, was not able to completely cover over ‘China’ as the ghost or symptom that peeps through the cracks of the nationalist façade. Life, on the other hand, appears more like an anti-national allegory in which the director seems to want to take advantage of the post-trauma fragments of Taiwanese society as a subject for a Benjaminian allegorical reading. Nevertheless, it failed, because the director did this only half-heartedly, and therefore the film remains in the confines of personal memory instead of advancing beyond to a philosophical high ground where human existence can be radically reflected upon. The problem with both films is the inability to cope with the Lacanian symptom, which is actually the truth of their nationalist belief.

Hsien-Hao Sebastian Liao 75

Therefore, how memories are treated is crucial in these two films. In the first film, remembrance relies on a specific interest group – the nationalists – and thus has been customized to present a coherent, politically correct relevance catering to them. On the other hand, remembrance in the second film vacillates between the existential and the allegorical (in the Benjaminian sense). Its possible attempt at a Benjaminian reading seems to imply a desire to redefine the nation, but its ultimate failure to attain the allegorical indicates the director’s indecisiveness as to how eventually to adjust its relationship to nationalism. Nevertheless, even though nationalist goals remain seductive for both films, they have somehow revealed the limitations of nationalism, thereby pointing, albeit hesitantly, towards the sea change that hopefully might take place in the near future.

References Anon. (2005) ‘Cong “gewu zhongguo” he “tiaowu shidai” de piaofang shengli tanqi [From the Box Office Hit of Burning Dreams and Viva Tonal, Dancing]’. Taiwan dianying wang [Taiwan Cinema]. Available at: www.taiwancinema.com/ ct.asp?xItem=52438&ctNode=332, date accessed 30 July 2010. Benjamin, J. (1998) Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, W. (1985) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. J. Osbourne (trans.). London: Verso. Fanon, F. (1990) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Penguin. Gilloch, G. (2002). Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hsiau, A.-C. (2000) Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge. Hu, B. (2005) ‘Musical Verite’, Asia Pacific Arts, UCLA Asia Institute, 12 May. Available at: www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=24161, date accessed 1 November 2010. Jiao, X. (1990) The New Cinema of Taiwan. Taipei: Shibao. Kuo, L.-H. (2005) ‘Sentimentalism and De-politicization: Some Problems of Documentary Culture in Contemporary Taiwan’, Documentary Box #25, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Available at: www.yidff. jp/docbox/25/box25-2-e.html, date accessed 1 November 2010. Li, D. (2000) ‘Taiwan jilupian yu wenhua bianqian [Taiwanese Documentary and Cultural Change]’, in D. Li and Z. Zhang (eds), Jilu Taiwan: Taiwan jilupian yanjiu shumu yu wenxian xuanji [Documenting Taiwan: Selections of Bibliography and Documents Concerning the Development of Taiwanese Documentary], vol. 2. Taipei: National Film Archives, pp. 517–42. Liao, H.-H. (1996) ‘Lisan yu jujiao zhijian: bashi niandai de houxiandaishi yu bentushi [Between the Centrifugal and the Centripetal: Postmodern Poetry and Nativizationist Poetry of the Eighties]’, Taiwan xiandaishi shilun. Taipei: Wenxun, pp. 437–50.

76

Genre in Asian Film and Television

——. (1999) ‘Enemy as Father, Father as Enemy: Nationalism, Narrative and Manhood in Doo-san and Xi-meng-ren-sheng’. Paper presented at the Chinese Modern and Contemporary Popular Culture Conference, Beijing University, PRC. ——. (2000) ‘Becoming Cyborgian: Postmodernism and Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan’, in A. Dirlik and X. Zhang (eds), Postmodernism and China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–202. ——. (2001a) ‘Jekyll Is and Hyde Isn’t: Negotiating the Nationalization of Identity in The Mystery Garden and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”’, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 5(1), 65–92. ——. (2001b) ‘Shanghai xiandaixing yu Taiwan zhutixing [Shanghai Modernity and Taiwanese Cultural Sovereignty]’, China Times, 16 September. ——. (2004) ‘Xiandaixing chongbai yu rentong misi [Worship of Modernity and Myth of Identity]’, in S. Yang (ed.), Miandui gong yu yi: jiangou yige hongguan, kuanrong yu fenxiang de shehui [Vis-à-vis Justice and Duty: Constructing an Allinclusive, Tolerant, and Sharing Society]. Taipei: Shibao, pp. 148–53. ——. (Forthcoming) ‘Xieyan guangtian bieyou tian: wenxue xiandaixing zai taiwan [Looking Awry at the Sky: Literary Modernity in Taiwan]’, in J. Huang and H. Wang (eds), Diguo Bianyuan: Taiwan xiandaixing de kaocha [Margins of Empire: Investigations of Modernity in Taiwan]. Taipei: Qunxue. Lu, F. (2003) ‘Cong shuzi kan Taiwan dianying wushinian [Fifty Years of Taiwan Cinema Seen Through Statistics]’, Taiwan dianying ciliaoku [The Database of Taiwan Cinema]. Available at: http://cinema.nccu.edu.tw/cinemaV2/squareinfo.htm?MID=13, date accessed 1 November 2010. Luo, J. (1990) ‘Taiwan Xindianying de qishi [The Lesson of the New Cinema Movement]’, in X. Jiao (ed.), The New Cinema of Taiwan. Taipei: Shibao, pp. 283–90. Mainland Affairs Council (2007) ‘Minyi diaocha (minguo 96 nian 12 yue 21 ri~12 yue 23 ri) ‘minzhong dui dangqian lian’an guanxi zhi kanfa’ jieguo zhaiyao [Summary of the Opinion Poll (21–23 December) on “Opinions on the Present Cross-Straits Relations”]’. Available at: www.mac.gov.tw, date accessed 30 July 2007. Wang, P. (2004) ‘Zhenghe guonei jilupian zhi ‘fuzhu, tuiguang ji baocun’ baogaoshu [Report on How to Coordinate the Support, Promotion and Preservation of Documentaries]’, Guojia dianying ciliaoguan [National Film Archives]. Available at: http://info.gio.gov.tw/public/Attachment/44916303571.doc, date accessed 1 November 2010. Wen, T. (2006) ‘Cong jilupian kanjian Taiwan shengmingli [Seeing Taiwan’s Vitality in Its Documentaries]’, China Times, 17 September. Williams, A. (2002) Film and Nationalism. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Zizek, S. (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. ——. (1992) Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York and London: Routledge.

Part II Reconsidering Mainstream Genres

This page intentionally left blank

5 Between Mainstream and Alternative: Dialect Drama in China Xin Zhang

From the moment television broadcasting started in China in the late 1950s, Biaozhun Putonghua (Standard General Speech, commonly known as Mandarin Chinese) was used as the main official broadcasting language.1 State policy repeatedly emphasized that standard speech should be used in broadcasting (SARFT 2005, 2009). Even now, the state broadcasting administrative authorities impose strict censorship and control on language use in television production. For example, all broadcasters have to go though strict Mandarin proficiency tests before they can appear on screen (SARFT 2004b). However, in the past two decades, programmes in various regional dialects have emerged on Chinese television and are growing in popularity. In particular, dialect drama2 has become a recognized and popular genre on Chinese TV. Chongqing TV’s Silly Colonel/Sha’er shizhang (1993), The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City/Shangcheng bangbang jun (1995), Neighbours/Jiefang lingju (2000, 2008), CCTV’s Northeast dialect dramas Liu laogen (2002) and Ma dashuai (2004), Sichuan TV’s 1 Cantonese is an exception. Even before 1949, radio stations in Guangzhou broadcast programmes in this dialect. Because of the large Cantonese-speaking population, Cantonese has been an officially approved broadcast language from the 1950s onwards, mainly within the province of Guangdong, where the language is spoken. Apart from Cantonese, the southern Hakka, Min and Teochew (Chaozhou) dialects are also official broadcast languages used in radio and a small proportion of TV programmes. They are mainly used for broadcasting to the Chinese diaspora who live outside of mainland China. 2 ‘Drama’ here is not to be understood as a term describing a particular genre, but as a general term for all TV fiction. In China, all fiction productions on TV are referred to as dianshi ju, literally ‘television drama’.

79

80

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The New Stories of Governor Wang/Wang Baozhang Houzhuan (2008), Shanghai TV’s long-running sitcom Old Uncle/Lao niangjiu (1995–2007) and Yunnan TV’s Dongsi Street Xisi Alley/Dongsi jie xisi xiang (2007) are but a few examples. In order to offset and slow down this trend, the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has repeatedly issued new regulations and warnings to restrict the use of dialect in television drama production, most recently in 2005 and 2009. However, the genre of dialect drama is commercially very successful and is still gathering momentum, so the local broadcasters and producers are trying various ways to bypass the censorship. Jason Mittell argues that to study media genres is ‘to understand how genres work within specific instances and how they fit into larger systems of cultural power’ (2001: 16). In particular, he points out that any study of genres has to pay attention to the particular attributes of the medium and the production environment. It is therefore vital to position the research in specific historical, cultural and political conditions. In China, the emergence and development of dialect drama as a known genre has reflected the complexities and various power struggles within the Chinese media scene. This chapter examines the role of dialect drama in China in recent times, focusing on a case study of Chongqing TV, one of the major players in China as far as dialect programming is concerned. It will be argued that the development of dialect television in China does not so much spin out from a cultural struggle, but rather from a competitive economic response by local television producers to the more powerful central/national media. Dialect programming in China has certain generic attributes: typically a rough and comical style, low production values (relative to programming in Mandarin) and a focus on local issues rather than ‘grand narratives’. The use of dialect is officially frowned upon but is very popular with audiences, so local media producers have to navigate the terrain with great skill. In order to maintain the profitable dialect programming, local stations try their best to keep the content in line with the zu xuanlü (mainstream theme) propaganda policy. For this reason, it could be argued that the subversive, and culturally emancipatory, potential of dialect programming remains minimal at best. The development of dialect programming on the one hand reflects the complexity of Chinese media structures and their operations. On the other hand, it also demonstrates the progress of Chinese television from centralized uniformity towards a de facto acknowledgement of localized diversity.

Xin Zhang 81

Research into Chinese television genres has to take into account the general background of control and financing, as well as the historical development and particular structural features of the Chinese television system; and this is where the following analysis will begin.

The control and financing of Chinese television From the end of the 1970s onwards, the Chinese government could no longer afford to finance the further development of broadcasting media infrastructure. In order to meet the growing public demand for media, it had to introduce a more market-oriented, self-funding structure for the television industry (Qian 2002: 65). From 1979, Chinese television started to broadcast advertisements in order to make a profit. In the 1990s, government subsidies declined further, while the television sector became more and more reliant on advertising income and sales of commercial programmes. From the late 1990s onwards, government policy accepted and actively encouraged multiple channels of finance for the broadcasting industry, such as programme sales, product placements, advertising and private sponsorship (Zhao 1998: 54). Currently, TV stations only receive a symbolic amount of funds from the government (Zhang 2006). From the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, China went through major social and political changes. Redl and Simons argue that under the changing political and economic situation during the reform period, the Chinese broadcasting sector has evolved into a media model with ‘Chinese characteristics’, which they describe as ‘one channel, two systems’ (2002: 18). The television stations are both state-owned non-profit organizations (shiye danwei, non-profit work unit) under government administration and enterprises (qiye danwei) that seek commercial profit. Parallel to the economic developments within Chinese society, important socioideological changes also took place, in that orthodox communism, which had already been weakened by the damage done by the Cultural Revolution, completely collapsed after the 1989 Tiananmen incident. To fill the vacuum, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had to establish patriotic nationalism as the main official ideology, aided by a form of neo-Confucianism based on fighting so-called moral or spiritual pollution (Zhao 1998). Under these new circumstances, ‘Chinese television media has assumed new ideological roles in the post-1989 period – namely, reasserting both nationalism and traditional Chinese morality’ (Zhao and Guo 2005: 530). In addition, Chinese television was also saddled with the task of promoting a ‘Chinese style’ market

82

Genre in Asian Film and Television

economy. Many television programmes on the Chinese screen reflect a mixture of these new ideological themes (Zhao and Guo 2005: 533). Since the late 1990s, the pattern of government intervention in the television sector gradually changed, from a rigid system of control to a more ‘arm’s-length’ approach, with the aim of giving the television sector the flexibility needed in order to make its contribution to economic growth (Redl and Simons 2002). Today, the control of content is more relaxed and the means of propaganda delivery have become more diverse. News programmes have started to report negative news (fumian xinwen), daring to be critical of certain party government officials involved in misconduct and corruption (Li 2002). As for entertainment programmes, the standards of control are even more relaxed, as long as television producers do not go against central government policies or violate certain moral guidelines. Li (2002) argues that when the television stations were forced to become market players, they also became more concerned about the ratings and popularity of their programming. The programmes from the mid-1990s onwards offer a much wider choice of content than used to be the case in the 1970s and 1980s. Although government policies have recently given more freedom to television stations in terms of both content and administration, the government still maintains ownership of the television system and sets the propaganda agenda. Compared to earlier years, the control is more structured and is carried out more through written rules and regulations than through direct intervention. There are no media laws in China; instead, the government regularly issues sets of regulations, administrative directories and standards for managing the television sector and its infrastructure. Speeches and written comments by senior CCP officials are also used to shape the development of Chinese television (Chin 2003: 18). These regulations contain strict guidelines on censorship procedures for all programming. For example, the 2004 version of the SARFT ‘Regulation on Producing and Managing Radio and Television Programmes’ contains specific clauses regarding TV drama production, confirming that all productions still have to be planned years ahead and that the treatment or script will need to go through thorough approval procedures to obtain a production licence. Only projects with such a licence are allowed to proceed to production, distribution and broadcast (SARFT 2004a). It is clear then that the Chinese party government has no intention of completely abandoning the old style of unified and centralized control, and that, despite recent changes, is still firmly in charge of the ideological direction of the Chinese television industry.

Xin Zhang 83

The structural development of the Chinese broadcasting system The Chinese television sector went through several stages of structural changes. Before 1983, Chinese television operated on a two-level system: central and provincial. At the central level, there was the national station Beijing TV (later China Central Television [CCTV]) and at provincial level, there were several local stations operating. In 1983, in order to speed up the expansion of TV coverage throughout the country, the government announced the policy of ‘Running Television at Four Levels’. This policy gave permission to the different levels of local government to establish their own TV and radio broadcasting stations catering for local public requirements (Guo 1991). The first of these four levels is the central national (or state) television station CCTV. The second level consists of the provincial level broadcasters, including the TV stations of the provinces, municipalities reporting directly to the central government (zhi xia shi) and ethnic autonomous regions. The third level is made up of the cities, and the fourth is the counties (towns). These four levels of broadcasting institutions are all answerable to the corresponding levels of administration. However, the non-central stations are not dependent branches of the central station. Their points of reference are local. Policy control is exercised through the party propaganda departments at the different administrative levels (de Burgh 2001: 148). In 1996, the central government started a new round of structural reforms of the broadcasting sector (Lu 2002). This so-called ‘threestation merger’ (san tai he yi) reform had the aim of reducing the number of broadcasting organizations by merging the radio, television and cable networks into one broadcasting company. Administration and management were to be joined together, under the unified supervision of the local broadcasting bureau, and the central government officially abolished the ‘Running Television at Four Levels’ system (Lu and Xia 2001). In 2002, the SARFT announced the so-called ‘media industrialization’ policies. According to these, the broadcasting structure would change back to the two-level (central and provincial) administrative system. The city and county level radio and television stations (apart from those in certain central and big cities), as well as the cable networks, would be required to switch to only relaying channels or broadcasting programmes supplied to them by the central and provincial stations. Each province as a unit should merge all the provincial broadcasting stations to set up a single broadcasting company (Lu 2002).

84

Genre in Asian Film and Television

This restructuring has dramatically reduced the number of broadcasting outlets in China and has created more integrated media companies. The reform has restored the two-level broadcasting system, which helps the government regain more centralized control of the local broadcasting sectors, especially at a grassroots level. These changes notwithstanding, the Chinese broadcasting system maintains a central-local hierarchy. At the same time, the two different levels are in fact independent of each other. CCTV answers to the Central Propaganda Department and the SARFT, while the local television networks are answerable to the local propaganda departments and the local broadcasting bureaux. Since Chinese television stations hardly receive any government financing, all the stations have to self-finance through advertising, programme sales and other business ventures. CCTV and the local stations are direct competitors for ratings and advertising income, and local stations are also in competition with each other.

Chongqing Television and dialect programming in Chongqing3 Chongqing is situated in the southwest of China on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and was traditionally part of the Eastern Sichuan Province. In June 1997, Chongqing officially became an individual province-level municipality under the direct administration of the central government (zhi xi shi) (Hutchings 2001: 77). With a population of 28.39 million, Chongqing is the most populated province-level municipality in China (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2009). Chongqing Television started broadcasting in 1970. At the beginning, it mainly relayed programmes from CCTV and Sichuan Province Television. From 1981 onwards, the station started producing its own programmes (Chongqing TV 1998: 1). At this point, Chongqing TV station was a city-level station. In 1997, the upgrade of Chongqing city to a province-level municipality4 meant that the previous city-level broadcasting stations were also qualified to upgrade to province-level

3

All primary documents and interviews used in this chapter were collected, conducted and translated by the author between 2003 and 2009. All rights and resposibilities rest with the author. 4 The National People’s Congress decided this on 14 March 1997 and Chongqing officially became a province-level municipality on 28 June 1997 (Mackerras 2001: 64, 246).

Xin Zhang 85

stations. In October 1998, Chongqing Television started to transmit its main channel via satellite. From 2002 to 2004, it heeded the call of the government’s ‘media industrialization policy’ to reform and merge the management and finance of all the radio, cable TV, terrestrial channels and smaller stations in the region. This reform created a new multichannel television network – the ‘Chongqing Television Broadcasting Group’5 (chongshi guangbo dianshi jituan). By 2007, the main channel of Chongqing TV was included in most cable networks in China and reached a potential audience of 600 million. In 2010, Chongqing TV broadcast on 11 analogue channels (including satellite, terrestrial and cable) as well as six digital channels. It is now one of the largest local level broadcasters in China. The commonly recognized origin of Chongqing/Sichuan dialect drama was the black-and-white film Military Recruitment/Zhua zhuangding, a black comedy produced in 1963 (Tian 2009). This film featured a story set in a small village in Sichuan during the Second World War. It was adapted from a successful stage play and was entirely performed in the Sichuan dialect. However, in the following years, due to the state policy of limiting the broadcasting language to Mandarin Chinese, dialect seldom appeared on Chinese television outside of filmed stage performances. In 1982, Chongqing Television produced its first single-episode dialect drama Everyone is Different/Ren yu ren butong. Even after that, the development of the genre of dialect drama proceeded more or less by happenstance. In 1988, Chongqing TV collaborated with the Sichuan opera house in Chongqing and produced the six-episode dialect drama series Lin’s Rice Dumplings/Lin Tangyuan (1988) which was adapted from a successful Sichuan dialect stage play. The series enjoyed great success with its audiences and won several provincial and national prizes. In the 1990s, following this first success, dialect drama production at Chongqing Television took off in earnest. They produced drama series such as The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City/Shancheng bangbang jun (1995), The Legend of Tang Feichang/Tang Feichang chuanqi (1996) and period drama series such as The Silly Colonel Trilogy/Sha’er shizhang sanbuqü (1993) and The Legendary Mr An Shimin/Qiren An Shimin (2000). 5

On 18 November 2004, Chongqing People’s Radio Broadcasting Station also merged with Chongqing Television; the Chongqing Media Group was officially announced on this date. See Chongqing Media Group: ‘An Introduction to Chongqing Media Group’, available at www.cbg.cn/group/2009-01/22/index. html, date accessed 2 November 2010.

86

Genre in Asian Film and Television

They also produced sitcoms such as Walking Up Hills and Climbing Up Stairs/Papo shangkan (1999), Stories of Mr Able/Ke Deping waizhuan (2000), Neighbours/Jiefang lingju (2000, 2009) and Spicy Hot Enemies/Mala yuanjia (2005–9), as well as the weekly short drama programme Tales of the Foggy City/Wudu yehua (since 1994). Apart from dialect drama, other dialect programming also experienced a boom at Chongqing TV. For example, there are currently the dialect talk shows City Talk Show/Long men zhen (since 1998) and The Hot & Spicy Life Show/Shenghuo malatan (since 2002), there is the weekly dialect documentary programme Bayu Families/Bayu renjia (since 1994) and there is the music programme The Wrong Songs Show/Waige hengxin (2008), which features music videos of popular music, with lyrics rewritten in the Chongqing dialect. Dialect programming is very popular among audiences in the Chongqing area. In terms of ratings, dialect programmes fare better than the productions of Chongqing TV in Mandarin. For example, the first Silly Colonel series was so successful that Chongqing TV went on to produce two sequels. Liu Deyi, the writer and leading actor of the series, became a famous local celebrity. Dialect programmes such as Tales of the Foggy City and The Hot & Spicy Life Show are among the longest running programmes on Chongqing TV and continue to enjoy high ratings. In 2004, Chongqing TV produced 14 episodes of regular dialect programmes per week, which it broadcast daily at prime time (18:30–21:00) on three separate channels: the Satellite Channel, CQTV-1 (its film and drama channel) and CQTV-6 (its lifestyle channel). It also has a channel almost entirely dedicated to dialect programming (CQTV-7), which broadcasts 12 hours daily. Altogether, regular dialect programming amounts to 15 hours per day, with an occasional extra slot for popular dialect drama series (Zhang 2006: 211). In 2003, Chongqing TV even had plans to set up a dialect drama production centre and start a digital channel solely dedicated to dialect broadcasting. However, these plans had to be reconsidered after the SARFT confirmed its desire to slow the development of dialect programming and cut the number of dialect programmes in its ‘Document No. 560’ of 2005. Unfazed by this setback, Chongqing TV simply rebranded the dialect channel as a ‘Comedy Channel’ and in effect still uses it to mainly broadcast locally produced dialect programming. Chongqing dialect drama (sometimes with Mandarin subtitles) is also being sold to other television channels around China. For Chongqing TV, dialect programming has become one of the main pillars of its business model (Zhang 2006: 211).

Xin Zhang 87

Dialect drama: generic traits When examining the totality of dialect drama at Chongqing TV, certain generic attributes can be seen to emerge. First of all, almost all dialect dramas are comedies. The plots of dialect dramas at Chongqing TV are mostly humorous and the dialogues draw heavily on the idiosyncrasies of colloquial speech. The dialogues often imitate the local theatrical comedy genres of xie ju and Sichuan opera, using proverbs (xie hou yu), slang and idioms to make the audience laugh and feel sympathetic towards the characters. In popular dramas such as The Silly Colonel and The Bamboo Stick Army, the star characters are identified with specific catchphrases. Memorable funny lines and catchphrases from the dramas often find their way into everyday language. In the dramas of Chongqing TV, dialect is employed for its assumed ‘raw and comical’ quality and its entertainment value, rather than to make any grand cultural or ideological statement (Cui and Yang 2009). In terms of content, all of the dramas retain a close connection to the local region; the stories are mainly sourced locally. The 1980s and 1990s can be seen as a phase of experimentation with the nascent genre. The productions of this period were largely based on real-life stories and legendary local historical characters. Lin’s Rice Dumplings (1988) and The Legend of Tang Feichang (1996) both told the stories of successful local family enterprises. The Silly Colonel (1993) was about the adventures of a local gangster turned ‘Colonel’ and his ragtag ‘army’ during the Second World War period. In the drama, he transforms his troops into unlikely war heroes in the anti-Japanese war. This series is one of the most recognizable dialect dramas of Chongqing TV and is still regularly broadcast today, nearly two decades after its production. Later on, dialect drama productions started to be more creative, increasingly relying on contemporary topics as well. Nonetheless, characters and narratives are still closely related to local life. A typical example of this is the dialect drama The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City (1995). Chongqing is set on hilly terrain and is known throughout China as the ‘Mountain City’ (shan cheng). Because of this, a peculiar caste of workers exists in Chongqing – the bangbang jun (bamboo sticks troop). These labourers, with their ‘carrying poles’, earn their money as couriers, helping out as removal men or delivering goods. Everyday life and business in Chongqing could not function without the bangbang jun. They are a group of hard-working, low-income workers who come to the city from the countryside. The programme is a 15-episode, one-off drama with professional actors. It features light-hearted dialogue and shows the

88

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Figure 5.1 Still from The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City (1995)

love-hate relationships between the bangbang jun and their urban customers. The programme was such a success that since its first broadcast in 1995, it has been repeated on Chongqing TV numerous times. The titles of dialect programmes often reflect a close link with local life. For example, several drama series feature the expression ma la (hot and spicy) in their title, because Chongqing cuisine is famous for its strong, spicy flavours. The term has almost achieved the status of a brand; audiences associate it with a self-mocking, satirical quality and the use of quick-witted, ‘rustic’ local language. Dialect dramas typically revolve around the lives of the lower and working classes. For example, the main characters in both Lin’s Rice Dumplings and The Legend of Tang Feichang work their way up from very poor beginnings. Neighbours is set in a neighbourhood in xia bancheng (the lower half of town), a deprived area of Chongqing inhabited mainly by poorer families. The central characters in this programme are an unemployed man, a local shopkeeper and their not-so-well-off neighbours. The plotlines revolve around everyday problems, such as how to catch the person smearing graffiti on all the electric poles, how to stop the rumours about a neighbour’s love affair and so on. Stories of Mr Able/ Ke Deping waizhuan (2000) features a man who has lost his job, but goes to the local neighbourhood committee office (ju wei hui) every day to

Xin Zhang 89

help out other people who are in trouble. This includes looking for people’s lost property, lecturing children on not littering in public, counselling a fighting couple and looking after a baby found in the street. The reason for the prevalence of lower- and working-class stories is twofold: first, as a local station, Chongqing TV lacks the resources and budgets needed to create the image of the elite and affluent. Secondly, the producers at Chongqing TV identify the poorer social groups as the main potential audiences for dialect drama and assume that they are most interested in issues that concern their daily lives. An audience research report conducted by Chongqing TV shows that the main audience for dialect programmes are average residents of Chongqing with a relatively low income and education level. The report also mentions that the target audience appreciate dialect programming chiefly for its ‘down-to-earth’ quality (Zhang 2006: 210). Compared to the Mandarin language dramas occupying the majority of Chinese TV’s airtime, it is also typical for dialect dramas to feature rather low production values – this is especially the case with more recent productions dealing with contemporary subjects. Many of the shows are shot ‘on location’, with only basic lighting and generic camerawork. The recording can also be quite raw; dialogue is often dubbed in postproduction, not least because getting clean sound in a Chinese inner city environment is almost impossible. The editing typically follows a pattern of ‘stock establishing shots of Chongqing, then cut to medium shots of people talking’. Expensive crane or tracking shots are used only rarely. Acting resources are also limited: a small number of former theatre actors and comedians repeatedly appear on the various dramas at Chongqing TV in different roles. Sometimes dialect dramas use untrained amateurs and sometimes even the crew themselves have a go as actors. The two main actors in the successful sitcom Spicy Enemies used to be a technician and an editing assistant. Luo, the producer of Spicy Enemies, argues that dialect drama, which is meant to appeal to ‘local’ audiences, does not need to be technically polished and does not even need professional actors ‘as long as they tell a good story close to everyday life’: Dialect drama played by non-professionals is a programme style unique to Chongqing TV. Our programmes use very cheap sets and amateur actors. However, the seemingly unpolished style and lowcost looks represent the authenticity of our programme. The stories and characters all have an ironic twist, and are based on real life and real people. (Interview: Luo)

90

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Reservations about dialect programming Some Chongqing TV employees who were interviewed did not think much of the dialect programmes produced by their station and questioned their cultural value in particular. Pu, the deputy head for international affairs, said: ‘The dialect programmes do not have much artistic or cultural value, but they enjoy a very large audience’ (interview: Pu). Wei, an internal audience and ratings researcher, thought that dialect programming was not well received by educated audiences and argued that the producers of these programmes deliberately made them low in production values so as to better feed what they saw as the expectations of local audiences: I think dialect programmes at Chongqing are in a very tricky situation at the moment. On the one hand, they achieve high ratings, and have a good deal of influence on the audience, both good and bad. However, despite high ratings, some members of the audience, especially the ones with higher levels of education, have many reservations about the low cultural standards and bad production values of these programmes. The senior management also think that these programmes are of low value, and will never become the kind of influential brand-name programmes they wish to produce . . . Sometimes I think the low production quality of these programmes arises from a misunderstanding by the producers, who deliberately make them look cheap and rough, because they believe the audience expect this style for such programmes. (Interview: Wei) Han, a senior news producer, pointed out that in his view, dialect programmes undermined the overarching requirement of promoting unity and the use of standard language. He also identified a potential conflict between the aim of ‘educating the audience’ and the impulse of merely serving their pre-existing ‘low taste’: I believe that in a modern society communication is very important. Even though people tend to use dialect in daily life, I think that a public information platform such as our television station should use the standard language to communicate, such as standard Mandarin or English. At the moment there is a lot of disagreement over the role of dialect programming in Chongqing TV, however, people on either side of the argument are not completely disinterested. For example, presenters and newsreaders feel that dialect programmes are sidelining

Xin Zhang 91

the standard broadcasting language, Mandarin. Some producers of arts and education programmes think that dialect programmes are purely low-level entertainment and don’t serve to improve the education level and taste of audiences. Some people argue that although these programmes attract airtime buyers, the commercials they can be paired with would mostly be for unglamorous commodities rather than prestigious brand-name products. (Interview: Han) Similar criticisms were also voiced by some media commentators and scholars in China. Some of them see local dialect as inherently ‘low level’ and of interest only to people who are poorly educated and who have vulgar tastes. For example, Shao and Pan (2004), media scholars at the journalism school of Zhejiang University, argue that the development of dialect television is a backward step from the aim of building a modern, internationally respectable national culture. One could jump to the conclusion that criticism of dialect programming by the Chinese government and the Chinese intelligentsia stems mainly from a fear that the use of non-standard language may lead to greater cultural independence and confidence of local culture, and may come to threaten the ideology of national unity. However, from the interviews conducted, it seems that the issues which concerned the respondents the most were rather different. Dialect was seen as posing a threat to ‘high culture’ and the interviewees saw its use as being at odds with their professional integrity. The condemnation of dialect mainly seems to be the result of a paternalistic (if well-meaning) desire to ‘improve the people’. To a lesser extent, the issue seems to be one of national pride and a perceived loss of face. Such concerns also seem to be the driving force behind the state policy of trying to suppress the use of dialect. Cai and Yu (2004) argue that dialect programmes have two advantages over the often more polished programmes in Mandarin they compete with. The first is their ‘localness’ and the second is their ‘humorousness’. The use of locally sourced stories and local language give a sense of down-to-earth realism. At the same time, this realism seems diametrically opposed to anything that is modern, fashionable or sophisticated. It is therefore to be expected that some label dialect programmes as backward and in bad taste. Take Bamboo Army for example: although people admire the hard-working and honest attitude of the labourers, they would not accept them as a symbol of a modern lifestyle. To have a group of desperately poor manual labourers as an essential part of the urban setting is rather disconcerting for some people’s civic pride. Their presence does not square easily with the image Chongqing has of itself as a modern city.

92

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Because the people involved in making dialect programmes are aware of these criticisms, they tend to be very defensive about their productions, even though some admit that economic considerations are often more on their mind than cultural ones. Ma, the producer and director of the weekly dialect programme Tales of the Foggy City, defends his own programme and blames some of his rivals for the generally bad quality of dialect productions: More and more television stations in China have realized the value of dialect programmes. They are very close to real life, very authentic. Many people criticize the dialect programmes as tasteless, but in fairness we cannot blame dialect for this. There are some bad programmes at Chongqing TV which have damaged the reputation of dialect programmes, but this does not mean that the whole idea of dialect programmes should be discarded. On the contrary, Chongqing TV should really put its efforts into studying why my programme is always so successful. (Interview: Ma) The producer of the popular daily dialect sketch show The Hot & Spicy Life Show, one of the programmes criticized most by Ma for damaging the reputation of dialect programmes, defends his position: Firstly, I don’t think dialect programmes are necessarily programmes in bad taste. Secondly, I don’t think our programme is in bad taste . . . The success of our programmes is proved by their very high audience ratings, as well as their commercial income. For example, our programmes are all filmed on actual locations, and this has worked very well in attracting product placements from property development companies. The programme is sold to Sichuan province and will soon be published on DVD. We have a very small budget and manage to make a profit ten times higher. I don’t think a million RMB production with high production values could match this result. (Interview: Luo)

A competitive local product Despite all the criticism and debates surrounding dialect programmes, the decision makers in senior management display a pragmatic attitude towards producing them. Qin, who is in charge of public relations and marketing at Chongqing TV, also stresses the value of dialect dramas for a local television station like his: ‘Within Chongqing TV, dialect

Xin Zhang 93

programmes have the strongest “local flavour”. This is a unique selling point for Chongqing TV. The programmes use local stories, actors and locations, and do so in the local language’ (interview: Qin). Zuo, a channel controller and deputy director of Chongqing TV, emphasizes the strong market value of dialect programming: Dialect programmes are our key products at the moment. They are also very controversial. However, we think we are at a crucial stage that our station has to go through. Our programmes have many problems and we can’t please all audiences at all levels. We have set up a comedy channel and are broadcasting a large number of dialect programmes to meet the needs of the local audiences . . . At the moment dialect programmes are doing very well in Chongqing – they have a good market. We need to tap into this potential in order to face the stiff competition in the current television market. (Interview: Zuo) Yu, a director who has experience in directing and writing for government-funded dialect films and drama series, shares this view: I create programmes according to the budget I have, and I think the dialect sitcom is a cost-effective format for a local television station like Chongqing TV. As a local station we can’t compete with the strong position of CCTV head-on, because our capital expenditure and artistic and technical standards are no match for theirs. Instead of engaging directly with CCTV in the marketplace, we have decided to take an alternative route. In fact, CCTV can’t really hope to cater for the whole market. Local culture is an area they can never take over. In a sense this is a kind of local barrier for them, so a local station like ours should make the best of this chance and occupy this section of the market. When I choose to make dialect programmes, my concern is mainly from a market, rather than a cultural point of view. (Interview: Yu) Jing, another channel controller at Chongqing TV, puts it even more bluntly and regards dialect programming as a last resort for Chongqing TV. He argues that apart from dialect programming, there aren’t many other options: To be honest, we don’t have a lot of choice other than producing dialect programmes. Normally people can only sell what they have. Chongqing is a poor area lacking strong economic development and

94

Genre in Asian Film and Television

therefore Chongqing TV is a poor television station. Therefore, we can only afford to produce local dialect programmes which are comparatively cheap to make. (Interview: Jing) Managers and producers of Chongqing TV are aware of the competitive value of dialect dramas: They usually get high ratings both in Chongqing and in other southwestern Chinese provinces surrounding Chongqing. This is made possible by the fact that the dialect in these areas is very similar . . . The experience at Chongqing TV has shown that dialect drama and programmes can achieve high audience ratings, which also means high commercial income. In addition, the production costs for dialect programmes are very low, which means they are very profitable. (Interview: Qin) In order to maximize the value of this viable local product, producers in Chongqing are pragmatic and flexible. Sometimes they broadcast dialect versions on local channels, but re-dub them into Mandarin or add subtitles when they are sold to other provinces.

Bypassing censorship In order to hold on to this successful product and keep their market share, the local station finds ways to bypass the dialect censorship. As pointed out before, because the state policy officially discouraged dialect programming, the station renamed their dialect channel to the ‘Comedy Channel’. They have also invented a new sub-genre for drama called lan mu ju (programme drama). Dramatic elements are integrated into a topical daily or weekly programme, as this programme format does not have to go through the central licensing process. Chongqing TV’s most successful daily programme, The Hot & Spicy Life Show, is an example of this approach. Each episode consists of two parts: the first is held in a studio talk-show format and features a discussion of a recent ‘hot topic’. This is followed by a short singleepisode drama, playing out a situation or a story related to the topic. The weekly programme Tales of the Foggy City also takes a similar format, containing a 45-minute single-episode drama adapted from popular stories. Both of these are long-running programmes and came up against the dialect ban.

Xin Zhang 95

However, the most effective way for Chongqing TV to keep its dialect drama is to fall into line with the central propaganda department. Although dialect drama is ‘unconventional’, because dialect is generally discouraged or even forbidden from appearing in the broadcast media, dialect dramas do not step very far over the line otherwise. Not least because of its popularity, dialect drama has been recognized as an effective tool of propaganda; this may in fact be the reason that the central government is prepared to accept the transgression of its rules on dialect use in the media. The contents and morals of dialect dramas are generally very much in sync with the ideological requirements of the Central Propaganda Department. For example, Lin’s Rice Dumplings was set in the 1980s and promoted the mainstream theme of economic reform. The main characters of The Silly Colonel used to be gangsters, but later become war heroes fighting the Japanese invasion. This drama therefore promoted the ideology of nationalism and patriotism prevalent both in the 1990s and today. The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City won national propaganda awards. Singing the praises of traditional values such as honesty, loyalty and hard work, the content and theme of the programme were seen

Figure 5.2 Still from The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City (1995)

96

Genre in Asian Film and Television

to ideally fulfil the zhu xuanlü (mainstream melody)6 endorsed by the Central Propaganda Department. In this case, the use of dialect was said to have actually strengthened those mainstream values. The awards made the senior management of Chongqing TV realize that the most important requirement for propaganda is to attract audiences. Huang, a senior manager in charge of propaganda planning, sees dialect dramas and other dialect programmes as a cost-effective form of programming, which both pleases audiences and satisfies the propaganda requirements of the government: The dialect programmes on Chongqing TV have very high audience ratings. The ratings for our comedy channel, which mainly broadcasts dialect programmes, have kept rising ever since we launched it. This kind of programme has a very important role to play because the audiences see their daily life and worries reflected in them and therefore identify with them. They provide a platform for their feelings and concerns, and also allow them to escape into fantasies. At the same time they fulfil the new party propaganda guidelines called ‘being close in three respects’ [san tie jin] – close to reality, close to life, close to the masses. We see this not only as ideological talk, but also as really reflecting the needs of the audience. (Interview: Huang) The producers of dialect programmes are now actively trying to find ways to tick boxes on the ideological checklist. The producers admit that they try to avoid controversial issues when planning their scripts: We mostly try to make programmes with an upbeat and good moral message. When we need to cover something negative or critical, we try not to make it too controversial. If there is a plotline in which someone is corrupted or bribed, we will make this character work in a factory instead of a government department. Also, the bad guy is always a manager instead of a party secretary. The wrongdoings they commit are always small – nothing serious. (Interview: Yin) 6

‘This expression came into usage in 1987 and displaced the term Socialist Realism in describing works that reflected normative behaviour and values. During the early 1980s mainstream melody dramas were didactic narratives as the blueprint for reform and opening was conflated with the realities of a progressively materialistic society. Later in the same decade the focus turned to problems of unequal income distribution, corruption, inflation and social unrest. By the mid-1990s, the mainstream melody formula had reverted from revelations of social injustice towards the more secular concerns of living in an increasingly competitive and less egalitarian society’ (Keane 2005: 3).

Xin Zhang 97

In other words, if a programme is ideologically sound and effective for propaganda, it can even get away with using dialect.

Conclusion From humble beginnings, Chinese dialect drama has developed into an independent genre and an interesting social phenomenon that is worthy of closer examination. Apart from the use of dialect, the genre is associated with a number of other typical traits, such as an affinity to comedy and a quality of ‘raw authenticity’. Although this chapter has mainly focused on dialect productions at Chongqing TV, the generic characteristics of dialect drama seem to be very similar in the productions of other provincial TV stations. The content and style of drama production in other countries is often discussed from a cultural or even author-centred viewpoint. However, drama production in China has developed out of a different kind of environment. It could be argued that the development of the genre of dialect drama has its roots not in any intended cultural or even emancipatory agenda, but more in the economic and strategic consideration of local-level television companies having to navigate a delicate balance between centrally imposed propaganda duties and economic constraints. In China, all drama production which declares itself as such has to be approved and licensed long before actual production takes place, so drama production is not entirely independent of central propaganda control. At the same time, because of the self-funding arrangements imposed on television stations and the central-local broadcasting structure of China, the television stations (CCTV and the provincial stations) are also all market competitors with each other. The competition is skewed in favour of CCTV, which has access to much greater resources and is also favoured politically. For local-level stations, operating with limited budgets and resources, dialect drama has become an increasingly attractive niche, which allows them to get relatively high returns from modest investments, as well as securing them a market share not likely to be threatened by CCTV. The genre draws on local historical, cultural and linguistic resources available free of charge and yet is also highly popular with local audiences. In other words, the boom of dialect drama in China is primarily due to economic and structural reasons, and not because local television stations set out to preserve and strengthen local language and culture – although this might indeed be an uncalled-for side-effect.

98

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The central government still seems to see the rise of dialect programming as problematic, mainly because it directly contravenes the ideal of promoting standard speech in the media. Various SARFT documents have been issued to try to redress the balance (SARFT 2005, 2009). However, local dialect productions are finding creative ways to avoid the ban, not least by making sure that the programmes strictly adhere to the mainstream ideologies laid out by the Central Propaganda Department in all other respects. From interviews with high-ranking television officials, one gets the impression that the use of dialect is frowned upon not so much because of fears that too great a sense of cultural self-confidence might lead to a fragmentation of central political influence, but because dialect is seen as somehow shameful and culturally inferior. Compared to the elaborate, high-production-value dramas produced by CCTV, locally produced dialect dramas tend not to deal with the ‘grand narrative’ themes of nationalism, patriotism and traditional moral values directly. Nevertheless, the ideological bases are covered by local productions too, albeit in a less conspicuous and more down-to-earth manner. This fact, combined with the great popularity of such programmes, has led to a situation where the central government is prepared to turn a blind eye in some respects in order to reap the propaganda benefits dialect programming has to offer. On the surface, dialect productions may seem to provide a platform from which to challenge the state media policy, but in reality they tend to be rather safe and conventional. Finally, because of the vast diversity of Chinese culture, a blanket ban on using dialect in television production does not seem feasible at this point. It looks as though dialect programming will not disappear from Chinese screens anytime soon.

References Cai, S.W. and Wang, S.P. (2005) ‘Guanyu fangyan jiemu de “yifang zhiyan” [A Discussion of Dialect Programming]’, The People’s Daily, 2 November. Available at: http://media.people.com.cn/GB/22100/54430/54431/3822811. html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Cai, M. and Yu, X. (2004) ‘Quanqiuhua, difanghua yujing zhong de xinan fangyan dianshiju [The Southwestern Dialect Serials in the Context of Globalization and Localization]’, Journal of Xinjiang University (Social Science Edition), 4. Available at: http://media.people.com.cn/GB/22114/49893/49899/ caiming.doc, date accessed 2 November 2010. Chin, Y.C. (2003) ‘China’s Regulatory Policies on Transnational Television Drama Flow’, Media Development, March edition, pp. 17–22. Chongqing TV. (1998) A Collection of Documents of Chongqing TV: 1996–1997. Chongqing TV Administrative Office.

Xin Zhang 99 Cui, C.Z. and Yang, Y.C. (2009) ‘Tan fangyan zai woguo dianshi jiemu yuelehua jinzheng zhong de yingyun [A Discussion on the Use of Dialect in Improving the Entertainment Quality of Television Programmes in China]’, China Academic Journal, 23 July. Available at: http://www.51qikan.com/yslw/7055. html, date accessed 2 November 2010. De Burgh, H. (2001) ‘The Beliefs and Practices of Chinese Regional Television Journalists’, PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University. Edgerton, G.R. and Rose, B.G. (eds). (2005) Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Guo, Z.Z. (1991) A History of Chinese Television. Beijing: Chinese People’s University Press. Hutchings, G. (2001) Modern China: A Companion to a Rising Power. London: Penguin. Keane, M. (2005) ‘Television Drama in China: Remaking the Market’, Media International Australia (Culture and Policy), 115, 82–93. Li, X.P. (2002) ‘“Focus” (Jiaodian Fangtan) and the Changes in the Chinese Television Industry’, Journal of Contemporary China, 11(30), 17–34. Lu, Y. and Xia, N. (2001) ‘WTO bei jin xia zhong guo guang bo dian shi ye de shi chang cong zu: te zheng yu mao dun — yi sheng ji guang dian ji tuan wei li [Reforming the Chinese Broadcasting Market under the Background of WTO: Conflict and Challenges, the Case of Provincial Broadcasting Networks]’, MediaChina.net. Available at: www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=1667, date accessed 20 March 2004. Lu, Y.N. (2002) ‘Mai xiang ji tuan hua fa zhan de zhong guo da lu guang dian guan li zhi du [The Development of Broadcasting Industrialization Regulations in Mainland China]’, Taiwan: National Policy Foundation. Available at: http://www.npf.org.tw/publication/ec/091/ec-r-091-017.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Mackerras, C. (2001) The New Cambridge Handbook of Contemporary China. Cambridge University Press. Mittell, J. (2001) ‘A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory’, Cinema Journal, 40(3), 3–24. National Bureau of Statistics of China (2009) ‘National Statistics of China 2008’. 26 February. Available at: www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/ndtjgb/qgndtjgb/t20090226_ 402540710.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Qian, W. (2002) Politics, Market and Media: Research into the Development of Chinese Television Regulations. Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Publishing House. Redl, A. and Simons, R. (2002) ‘Chinese Media – One Channel, Two Systems’, in S.H. Donald, M. Keane and H. Yin (eds), Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 18–27. SARFT (2004a) Order No. 34: ‘Guangbo dianshi jiemu zhizuo jingying guanli guiding [Regulation on Producing and Managing Radio and Television Programmes]’. Available at: www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2004/08/20/20070924095834880560. html, date accessed 2 November 2010 ——. (2004b) ‘Guangbo dianshi xuyao gaosuzhi de jiemu zhuchiren [Radio and Television Need More High Quality Presenters and Broadcasters]’. Available at: www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2004/10/24/20070910165506770004.html, date accessed 2 November 2010 ——. (2005) SARFT document no. 560: ‘Guangdian zongju guanyu jinyibu chongshen dianshiju shiyong guifan yuyan de tongzhi [Announcement to

100

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Reiterate that TV Drama Production Should Employ Standard Language]’. Available at: www.sarft.gov.cn/articles/2009/07/20/20090720160439310156. html, date accessed 2 November 2010. ——. (2009) ‘Guangdian zongju bangongting guanyu yange kongzhi dianshiju shiyong fangyan de tongzhi [Announcement for Strengthening the Control of Dialect Use in TV Drama Production]’. Available at: www.sarft.gov.cn/ articles/2009/07/20/20090720160439310156.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Shao, P. R. and Pan, X. H. (2004) ‘Fangyan yanshuo de shehui chengben [The Social Cost for Dialect Speech in Media]’, China Journalism Review. Available at: http://cjr.zjol.com.cn/05cjr/system/2005/02/04/004265213.shtml, date accessed 2 November 2010. Tian, Y.G. (2009) Lishi xingtai he wenhua biaozheng: chuan yu fangyan yingshiju yanjiu [Historical Characteristics and Cultural Conformation: Researching Sichuan and Chongqing Dialect Film and Television Drama]. Beijing: Communication University of China Press. Yin, H. (2002) ‘Meaning, Production, Consumption: The History and Reality of Television Drama in China’, in S.H. Donald, M. Keane and H. Yin (eds), Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 28–39. Zhang, X. (2006) ‘Chinese Television: The Local, The National and The International. A Case Study of Southwest China’s Chongqing Television’, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. ——. (2010) ‘Chinese Television: The Concept of “Local” in a Local Context’, in J. Kim (ed.), Reading Asian Television: Crossing Borders and Breaking Boundaries. London: I.B. Tauris. Zhao, Y.Z. (1998) Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zhao, Y.Z. and Guo, Z.Z. (2005) ‘Television in China: History, Political Economy, and Ideology’, in J. Wasko (ed.), A Companion to Television. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 521–39. Zhong, Y. (2005) ‘Yingshiju liuxing shuo fangyan [Dialect is Popular with Film and Television]’, The Peoples’ Daily. 27 October. Available at: http://theory. people.com.cn/GB/49157/49165/3804740.html, date accessed 10 May 2009.

6 Everything Masala? Genres in Tamil Cinema Michael Christopher

At first sight, all Indian cinemas seems to follow the same aesthetic principles: excessively long movies, song-and-dance scenes and starstudded casts. Most call this phenomenon ‘Bollywood’ and assume all Indian film industries fall under this common name. However, the term ‘Bollywood’ covers only the Hindi-speaking film companies from Mumbai (Bombay). India is a multi-lingual nation: while Hindi is the most significant language in the North, the Dravidian language family is of particular importance in the South. Thus, the role of the HindiBollywood cinema is not crucial in the southern regions of Tamil Nadu (Tamil), Andhra Pradesh (Telugu), Kerala (Malayalam) or Karnataka (Kannada). Significantly, these regional cinemas of the South produce more than half of India’s total output of films.1 And even if these moving pictures share some aspects of style in common with Hindi blockbusters from the North, it should be noted that South Indian cinema differs from Bollywood. Let us have a close look at the cinema of Tamil Nadu. Tamil-language cinema was born in the 1930s, with the introduction of film sound, and subsequently developed its own style distinct from its bigger brother in the North. The studios are based in Kodambakkam (hence the film industry there is often called ‘Kollywood’), a suburb of Chennai (formerly Madras), producing popular films to entertain spectators in South India. In this cinema, there is no special audience as in genre cinema. Men, women and children, the whole family, all together, 1 Film releases in India according to languages (2000–3): total number of films 3,688, Hindi 913, Tamil 682, Telugu 671, Kannada 391, Malayalam 387, Bengali 187, others 457. Source: Central Board of Film Certification.

101

102

Genre in Asian Film and Television

come to the cinema halls and pay for their tickets, sometimes not only once, but twice or even more in the following weeks. Such multiple viewings are one of Indian cinema’s main formulae for success (Christopher 2006: 22). Genre discourse in Tamil cinema is less common and the prevalent focus of research is on cultural, political or social phenomena, such as film stars (see Hardgrave 2008; Pandian 1992; Dickey 1993; Baskaran 1996; Srinivas and Kaali 1998). In fact, most genre theory is based on Hollywood productions, though there have been several attempts to classify Indian cinema according to local generic patterns. Even if there is no broad genre discourse, different genre categories are frequently addressed in film advertisements and viewer expectations. This is a crucial point in the understanding of film genre. According to Barry Keith Grant ([1986] 2003: 127), genre criticism should not merely discuss the differences and similarities of films, but also should analyse the audience’s experiences and the viewer’s ‘contract’ with the film. Steve Neale states that genres are more than bodies of work or groups of films: ‘they consist also . . . of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process’ ([1990] 2003: 160). In spite of the lack of genre discourse, a system of genre categories actually exists in Tamil Nadu and it is possible to examine genres in Kollywood. The viewers’ engagement with the films operates through categorizations like film stars, themes, songs and genre patterns. The formulaic clues set expectations about context and entertainment, and help the viewers to decide whether they should watch and enjoy a film. This chapter will trace the path of genres in Tamil cinema between international and indigenous conventions, and will analyse the films Thambi (Seeman, India, 2006) and Chandramukhi (Vasu, India, 2005) in order to demonstrate the special character of genres in Tamil cinema. But first we will have a look at the historical development of film in Tamil Nadu.

Kollywood and its political impact Sometimes, Kollywood is called ‘the little sister of Bollywood’, but this term is deficient. Of course, there is a long common history of dramatic narratives in South Asia. The Na¯tya S´a¯stra of Bharatamuni is the source of performance in the whole of India, and most drama, music performance and later film can be said to have their roots in this

Michael Christopher 103

two-thousand-year-old book.2 The chapter Dasarupavidhana (prescription of ten types of drama) describes ten different styles of ancient drama and differentiates them by narration and structure (Anon. 2000: 2–5). Here we can see an early attempt to classify dramatic plays, although today this classification no longer plays a distinctive role. Furthermore, different influences are having an effect on Indian cinema, like folk art or the international development of film language. During the silent film era, 73 movies were shot in the studios of Madras. Next to indigenous films, many British and American productions were screened in the cinema halls. Here, Tamil audiences came into contact with the early American genres. In addition to the screening, non-cinematic entertainment like group dances and boxing matches were also presented to the audience (Baskaran 1996: 1–12). With the emergence of sound in film, Tamil cinema became more successful, because local audiences suddenly faced a language barrier between the local tongue and English or Hindi productions. One hallmark of Tamil cinema is its connection to politics. Since independence, the links between film and politics are very close. The meetings of the leading regional party DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Dravidian Progress League) were accompanied by dramatic performances and dance shows, in which the aims of the party were shown. C.N. Annadurai, the first leader of the DMK, was an acclaimed writer. Outside of this context, in the early years of sound cinema, DMK members were engaged as film scriptwriters and dialogue developers. The links between politics and film were thus born, even though obvious political messages cannot be clearly verified in these pictures (Baskaran 1996: 31). M. Karunanidhi was elected six times as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, but before that he had become famous as a screenplay writer for the film studios of Madras. Most of all, both the political and the film histories of Tamil Nadu are dominated by M.G. Ramachandran, who was elected as Chief Minister in 1977. Before he entered politics, he was able to create a godlike image in the movies, where he played brave fighters for the subaltern like in the popular movie Aayirathil Oruvan (India, 1965). The impact of his fiction characters dominates public opinion, and even today his popularity is immense, due to his cinematic legacy The Na¯tya S´a¯stra of Bharatamuni is an ancient Sanskrit book about drama theory. It is believed that the book was written approximately 2,000 years ago by Bharata. It describes the rules of plays, music, dance and stage design.

2

104

Genre in Asian Film and Television

(Dickey 2008). In much research on Tamil cinema, there is a tradition of devotional interpretation, which understands the Tamil film star as a message/god, which thus gives rise to psychological and political/ sociological analyses, which are still common in the research of Tamil cinema (Prasad 2004: 100–12), where aesthetics and style are of lesser interest.

An approach to genre in South India Rosie Thomas was one of the first Western scholars to analyse Indian popular films.3 While the Parallel Cinema of Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt has received much attention, the blockbuster movies have been neglected because of their strange conventions in style and narration. As such, Thomas argues that ‘Hollywood genre classification is quite inappropriate to Hindi cinema’ ([1985] 2006: 284). She develops five genre patterns: social, family-social, devotional, stunt and multi-starrer. Two years later, she describes seven distinctly Indian genres which had been established since the 1930s and therewith she sets a common categorization most theorists now orientate themselves towards: social, mythologicals, devotionals, historicals, stunt, costume and fantasy (Thomas 1987: 304). In the 1960s, the specific bounds of genre types began to vanish and the distinction between genres was beginning to break. During this decade, Thomas observes a dominant role of the social genre in which aspects of all earlier genres are integrated (1987: 304). Madhava Prasad substantiates this statement by explaining that in colonial times, ‘there was a weak but noticeable tendency to generic differentiation’ (1998: 46), which began to weaken after independence. Today, a clear diversification of film genre cannot be detected. Thus, most theorists have their own system to classify movies, and critics and film distributors try to use ready-made schemes to guide the spectators. Rajinder Kumar Dudrah characterizes six distinct genres, mostly based on Thomas’s system. He also states that ‘these must not be consigned as rigid generic definitions as Bollywood films often display layers of intertextuality and cross-fertilisation of different genres within films’ (Dudrah 2006: 180). Dudrah’s statement is crucial in understanding Indian cinema, Bollywood as well as Tamil, Telugu or Karnataka cinemas. The terms ‘Bollywood’ or ‘masala-movies’ (Gokulsing and Dissanayake 1998: 29), the latter of which refers to the popular spice mixture garam masala, are unhelpful in describing all Indian cinema. In Dudrah’s 3

Next to Eric Barnouw, who published a book about Indian cinema in 1963.

Michael Christopher 105

opinion, masala is a genre in itself, characterized by all-action and formulaic plots (Dudrah 2006: 178). In his collection of essays on Asian cinema, Dimitris Eleftheriotis (2006: 72–9) summarizes the genre discussion in India. He distinguishes the impossibility of defining pure genre in Indian cinema because of the arbitrary way in which genre categories are conceived, and furthermore he highlights the problem of hybridity which can be found in nearly every Indian film. The description of genre seems to be difficult, in particular if we look at non-Western cinema. Therefore, it would be unhelpful to transfer Hollywood’s genre patterns directly on to South Asian films. Pradeep Sebastian (2002) notices regional aspects and local traditions of genres in India. He lists contemporary mythologicals in Andhra Pradesh, off-beat dramas and Malayalam soft porn flicks in Kerala, whodunnits in Karnataka, the intellectual urban cinema of Bengal and the ‘rags-to-riches’ stories of underdogs in Tamil cinema. This is a blatant itemization, but Sebastian’s list is remarkable, because he focuses on intra-Indian differences. As Bollywood orients itself towards an international market and looks towards going global, it is losing its connection to the rural. This should be noted, because the biggest trading markets in India are still the B- and C-circuits in smaller cities. Bollywood is changing itself into an international product and is getting a more Western and urban face, partly through quasi-Western genre conventions. In contrast, Tamil cinema is changing much more slowly: the rural character of plots and styles is still surviving.4

Tamil cinema: how it looks, how it is While the genre discourse about Bollywood is ongoing, in Tamil cinema genre definitions are imprecise. Elisabeth Lequeret states in the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma that genre has disappeared with the decline of mythologicals in Tamil Nadu, and today every film assembles itself from all genres in a condensed form and should be called a ‘masala’ film (Lequeret 2001: 24–5). But this reduction to masala cinema is too simple. The boundaries between genres are still not defined. Furthermore, to cite Buscombe, ‘Genre is not a mere collection of dead images waiting for a director to animate it, but a tradition with a life of its own’ ([1970] 2003: 24). Thus, we can observe that it would be impossible to construct an incontrovertible generic pattern and it would be wrong to attempt to construct an exact body of genre with some listable items 4

Nowadays, film distributors also look towards markets in the Tamil diaspora in Southeast Asia (Ramachandran and Kajendra 2002: 21).

106

Genre in Asian Film and Television

(see Gledhill 1985: 64; Bordwell 1989: 147; Schweinitz 1994: 107–16). Genre is not stable: it begins to develop its formulae as conventions are set. And it should be noted that even most contemporary American genres are hybrids (see Neale 2000: 248–50). In Tamil cinema, there is still another difficulty: beyond all genres, Kollywood still relies on a star system. Celebrities like Rajnikanth, Madhavan and Kamalhassan, and before them M.G. Ramachandran and Shivaji Ganesan, have an enormous influence on the screens of Southern India. Sarah Dickey’s exciting research on film star fan clubs in Tamil Nadu gives us an impression of the importance of film stars in south India (see Dickey 1993), in which the superstar dominates the film, the promotion and the expectations of filmgoers. Therefore, it is important to have a close look at the actors, because the role of the film star is important for the creation of the film’s public presence (Ellis 1991: 301–2; Dasgupta 2005). The knowledge about the image of the star delivers an intertextual dimension to the content and gives the spectator an insight into the fictional world. Here we can see that the presentation of the film star bears on the function of genre. Ravi Srinivas and Sundar Kaali (1998) provide one of the rare descriptions of Tamil genres. They analyse the popular genre of neo-nativism5 in Tamil cinema in sociological terms. According to them, the characters in the movies are not individuals, but rather are representations of collective identities that mirror the social/caste structure in the state. Therein, the sub-plot of comedy operates on a meta-level and effects ‘a radical reordering of the dominant narrational and discursive modes’ (Srinivas and Kaali 1998: 227). Two genres are not only mixed together – in fact, they cooperate and become homogeneous. Tamil cinema is mostly a mélange of genres. The question is: how can genre be capable in its hybridity? Next to stardom, it is important to look at the main narrative, through which we are able to approach a genre typology. Often the narrative changes after the intermission and the film moves, for example, from melodrama to thriller, and sometimes there are several narrative strands, such as when the main plot is action-driven and the sub-plot features a love story. Three different modes of a genealogy of genre can be made: international/non-indigenous genre categories (e.g., martial arts), indigenous 5

A genre located in the rural areas, which reflects the distinction between the urban and the rural worlds. Often, an outsider like a teacher or a military man comes to a community and the order of the village gets mixed up. It is an evolution of the former nativism genre (see Kaali 2000).

Michael Christopher 107

genres (e.g., mythologicals, DMK-films,6 nativism and neo-nativism) and assimilated genres (e.g., melodrama, comedy, socials). Every Tamil film gets a touch of indigenous flavour, and assimilated genres are redefined and developed out of Tamil Nadu’s own cultural heritage. Here lies the reason for confusion about the purity of genre categories. And here we have to follow Rosie Thomas in order to understand Tamil cinema.

Pure genre or hybridity: Thambi Next to song-and-dance, martial arts sequences or just brute fighting scenes are very popular in South Indian cinema. Srinivas describes the genre of martial arts only in the Telugu cinema of Andhra Pradesh (Srinivas 2003: 51–2), but his perception can be transferred to Tamil films. There is a long tradition of martial arts in South India like Kalaripayattu in Kerala and the three common Tamil styles Kuttuvarisai, Varmakkalai and the stick fighting Silambam; in addition, martial arts cinema from Hong Kong is very popular in South India (Srivivas 2003). In the title sequence of Thambi, we can follow martial arts practices of the main character Thambi Velu Thondaiman (Madhavan) who is training his body, his breathing and his technique. The scene is filmed in blue light and is reduced to the body movements. The visual and aesthetic connections to the Eastern martial arts genre are quite evident, but some allusions to Indian heritage are also apparent. Thambi, starring the superstar Madhavan, was one of the most popular Tamil movies of 2006. As a nearly supernatural hero, he is reminiscent of Shiva, the important Indian deity. He fights to reinstate human values in a violent and corrupt society. The connections between politics and crime are close, and the power is in the hands of a Mafia-like organized political caste. Three different narrative strands are pulled together: violence, love and revenge. The main plot follows Thambi’s fight against the lawless world. Two of his main opponents are working together: the nameless party leader and the villain Sankhira Pandian (Biju Menon). Because Thambi is disturbing their business, they are trying to kill him. While our hero is hunting for some of Pandian’s thugs, he heckles the classical dance performance of Archana (Pooja). Here, the second strand is opened: the romance between the rough Thambi and the sensitive Archana. Both narrative strands are loosely connected together until Archana is detected as the Achilles’ heel of the supernatural hero. 6

Films which are connected to the ideology of the DMK party, often based on the scripts of M. Karunanidhi (Pandian 2000: 65–6).

108

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The third strand began in the prologue when Thambi was beaten nearly to death. A flashback, in a sepia-like green light, introduces the audience to the film. This scene has no connection to the narrative until this strand is resumed later in the movie. But here we can see the main motivation of anger, and a dark apprehension of the expected destiny of our star. This early in the narrative, the audience does not know that this prologue sequence is set in the past. Furthermore, it seems that this shall be the doom of our hero, because in the following scenes Thambi is fit for action and full of power. The answer to this prologue is given in the second part of the film. While Thambi is speaking at a graduation ceremony of his former college, a young college boy insults him and calls him rowdy. Thambi enlightens the audience and tells them about his family history and the lucky times of his college studies. When he was younger, Thambi witnessed a murder and accused the Pandian’s brother of the crime, and the villains took revenge by slaughtering Thambi’s whole family. At this point, the prologue resumed and the knocked-out body of Thambi was thrown into a waste dump, but he regained his strength and fought back against the villains. Here the audience gets an insight into the reasons behind Thambi’s actions. The first song-and-dance sequence ‘Ennama Devi’ shows us the world through Thambi’s eyes, where injustice prevails and even small boys are greedy for cigarettes. The solutions to all problems are presented as love for the goddess and the beauty of the rural (and intact) Tamil countryside. Picturesque images of a colourful procession, workers dancing at salt evaporation ponds, and children playing in the mud – this sequence is a visible contrast to the urban violence previously shown. One important statement in the lyrics of this song is ‘the world is upside down’ and the cure shall be the Tamil culture. To fulfil the ideals of this vision, evil has to be chased away. The second short song-and-dance scene of the film shows us Thambi’s martial art practice again, this time outdoors and shot backlit against the sunset. Here the film lets us know that we have to strengthen our body to face the evil. In Thambi, we can detect the elements of martial arts films like the fight to reinstall the moral order when the state has failed, many physical actions, heroic gestures, supernatural abilities, the tragic element of the hero’s own past and some element of qui (love or emotion) (Teo 2000). Depending on the point of view, we can detect some conventions of pure genre in Thambi (martial arts), even if there are three narrative strands in which miscellaneous genres like romantic, family-social and comedy are also detectable. Six song-and-dance sequences are also

Michael Christopher 109

integrated into the movie, but Thambi is no musical, because dance routines are standard in Indian cinema. The influence of Hong Kong cinema is also traceable, but Thambi is very much a Tamil film, using the genre typologies of martial arts. The few comedic episodes with Thambi’s close friend (played by the famous Tamil comedian Vadivelu), the romance with Archana, the importance of family and the songand-dance routines are ‘typically’ Indian. Fight scenes are also very popular in most Tamil films. As shown, many characteristics of martial arts films are detectable too. Thus, Thambi can be said to be ultimately a modern and urban film with many allusions to the popular Asian martial arts genre.

Masala or genre: Chandramukhi Chandramukhi is in some ways a more classical movie than Thambi. Set in a rural environment, it is also an ensemble film in which the interpersonal relationships between the characters are one of the main attractions. This film is a re-remake of the same director’s Kannada movie Aaptamitra (P. Vasu, India, 2004), which in turn is based on the Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu (Fazil, India, 1993). All three films were great successes in South India and had superstars in the leading roles like Rajnikanth in the Tamil version. It is common in Indian cinema to copy and remake successful films of adjoining regions instead of dubbing them. Chandramukhi is called a horror comedy, but this does not really fit. I prefer to call it a ‘spooky-comedy’. To understand Tamil cinema, this big blockbuster movie is a good example, even for my approach to genre theories. The central location in the film is the Vettayapuram Palace, a beautiful manor with a delightful garden. The interior is in the colonial style with wooden galleries, big paintings and mounted animals. Furthermore, there is a secret chamber, a room behind a locked door where the ghost of Chandramukhi has haunted for more than 100 years. Most of the villagers of Vettayapuram are afraid of this place. Only Durga (Nayantara), a young female music teacher, and her father live in the garden house of this estate. When Sinthilnathan’s (Prabhu) company receives a lucrative contract, he wants to buy the haunted house for himself and his wife Ganga (Jyothika Saravanan) because it is good value for money. There are several narrative strands connected together in this film. Sinthilnathan has rejected an arranged marriage to reunite two families and has married his love Ganga instead. The rejected family accepts his choice, but they also want to move into the new house; however,

110

Genre in Asian Film and Television

in reality, the head of the family wishes for Sinthilnathan’s death. A close friend, Saravanan (Rajnikanth), is coming from America to visit his friend and because he is a famous psychiatrist, he investigates the manor. After some difficulties, he falls in love with Durga, who could not stand him in the beginning. The whole film is rather chaotically made up of many minor stories, comedy episodes and some fight scenes. But there is also a strong main narrative, the spooky house, the appearance of Chandramukhi without being seen, the attempts to unravel the mysteries and the exorcism of the ghost. The superstar Rajnikanth dominates most of the film. While there are several false clues set up in the film – until shortly before the end, it could be possible that the spirit of Chandramukhi really existed – the real story, told by the psychiatrist Saravanan in a know-it-all way, was no mystery at all. Ganga became a split personality and thought she could be Chandramukhi herself. Before she could be cured, everybody who is involved in this story sits at a table around Saravanam, who explains the story and gives us the solution. He narrates Ganga’s past and via several flashbacks we can follow her traumatic experiences. While the analysis of her disease was very scientific, the therapy is unusual and reminiscent of psychodrama, a special form of drama therapy. The characters have to act out the last chapter, when Saravanam becomes the former tormentor of Chandramukthi and has to be killed by her anger. The film was one of the biggest blockbusters ever in Tamil Nadu and it was also the big comeback for the Tamil superstar Rajnikanth. The first scene, probably a prologue, shows some villains beating up the staff of Sinthilnathan’s company somewhere off-road. Having just arrived in India, Saravanam runs across this incident. Here, the whole scene is staged to introduce the superstar: Rajnikanth appears, as in many other films, when innocents need help. Equipped with supernatural power, he fights the rowdies, and most of the time it seems that the whole scene is a homage to earlier Rajnikanth movies. But it is also a cinema of attraction: not only that our superhero is bashing the enemies in a spectacular manner but also the way in which he does it is full of (simple) cinematic special effects and is thus very humorous: for example, when the camera angle shoots him from beneath his shoes when he is walking on a plexiglass floor (at an extreme low angle to exalt the character) or when the camera turns around him while he is fixing one of his shoes like the ‘bullet time’ effect in The Matrix (A. Wachowski and L. Wachowski, USA/Australia, 1999). Initially, you might think that Chandramukhi is a martial arts film like Thambi. But there is something different in its

Michael Christopher 111

aesthetics and choreography, and once Rajnikanth has won the fight, the film turns completely to comedy. Only one more fight will be seen later in the film. For a short period, the film adopts generic themes and aesthetics of martial arts, but it quickly abandons this path to continue with the main narrative. Even so, some visual motives of horror films are included, like the point-of-view camera shots apparently from the perspective of the ghost. These spooky episodes are one of the attractions in the moment, but serve only to flavour the entertainment of the film. As I wrote earlier in this chapter, a film in Tamil Nadu has to be viewable for more than one or two cinema visits, so the element of shock is not necessary to attract viewers. The appearance of the comedian Vadivelu and his important role in Chandramukhi as the funny counterpart to Rajnikanth prompts us to watch this film as comedy. The slapstick episodes when Saravanam is annoying Vadivelu by pretending to hook up with his wife are a recurrent theme in the film. But more than these short episodes, several comical scenes appear in the film, like the romantic relationship between Saravanam and Durga which is built on misunderstandings, trials and tribulations, and an eventual happy end. In addition, because the film was billed as a horror-comedy in trailers and by critics, viewers expected an entertainment film with much laughter and some spooky thrills. The spectators become familiar with the elements of comedy in Tamil film, with its slapstick episodes, its funny social-caste sub-plots (Srinivas and Kaali 1998: 226–7) and romances full of misunderstandings. Torben Kragh Grodal states that, as much as the spectator is familiar with a genre and its iconography, ‘a given set of elements of fiction will . . . have an affective value for the viewer’ (1997: 157). But to make this film special, a flavour of horror is added, which is borrowed from mystery films, as there is no particular tradition of horror films in India.7 At the same time, it seems that in Chandramukhi, martial arts are reduced to an integral element of attraction like song-and-dance sequences, because the viewers expect some narrative interruptions (Gopalan 2002).

Conclusion As we have seen, the term ‘masala film’ does not really fit Tamil cinema. Even in Hollywood, different genres are mixed together and most genres contain elements of others. At the same time, no distinctive catalogue 7

For more detail on the horror tradition in Indian cinema, see Valentina Vitali’s chapter in this volume.

112

Genre in Asian Film and Television

of genre patterns exists in Tamil cinema, with only a few defined genres, such as the mythologicals, neo-nativism or socials. The two blockbuster movies Thambi and Chandramukhi illustrate my hypothesis that the classic definition of genre fails in India, especially in Tamil Nadu. Other categories have to be invoked in order to understand the partially integrated genre clusters in the cinema of Tamil Nadu. First of all, we have to understand that most movies are multi-genre and that genre implies formulaic narratives and aesthetics. Even though the majority of Tamil films have different narrative strands, a main narrative is usually detectable. Thambi offers a modern outlook and some elements of martial arts. The protagonist fights against evil in society to reinstate the moral order, so fight scenes are more dominant than other elements like romance or comedy. Martial arts are prominent in East Asian cinemas and are popular in South India. Tamil movies are normally flavoured with fight-action scenes, so martial arts are very familiar in Tamil Nadu. As we have seen, there is a long history of martial arts in South India as well, so some aesthetics of Thambi are borrowed from the examples of Hong Kong cinema and its successors in Hollywood and China, but the fighting technique is indigenous to South India. However, it is not possible to analyse Thambi as a pure martial arts film; while the cultural impact of South India is obvious, with its song-and-dance routines as integral to nearly every movie, there are other generic elements integrated to excite the viewers. But the generic relationship to the aesthetics, history and formulae between Thambi and other films of the martial arts genre is evident, so a focus on these elements could be helpful in understanding this film. Martial arts sequences are also included in Chandramukhi but, unlike Thambi, comedy takes over the main narrative, and even the spooky elements are more prominent than the martial arts. Chandramukhi combines different genres to entertain the whole family in the cinema hall. For an Indian discourse about film genre, it is important to generate our own categories of genres rather than to merely copy American terms. But the impact of international film language is also very important; as international, indigenous and assimilated genres can be identified within the films, it is important to analyse their interplay. Next to star studies, the analyses of generic patterns in movies can be a useful tool in understanding the relationship between film and spectators, the evolution of certain themes and the development of film language.

Michael Christopher 113

References Anon. (2000) Na¯tya S´a¯stra of Bharatamuni: Raga Nrtya Series No. 2. A Board of Scholars (trans.). New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publishers. Baskaran, T. (1996) The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema. Madras: East West Books. Bordwell, D. (1989) Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buscombe, E. [1970] (2003) ‘The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 11–25. Central Board of Film Certification, (n.d.) Statistics. Available at: www.cbfcindia. tn.nic.in/statistics.htm, date accessed 17 May 2008. Christopher, M. (2006) ‘Das Politische bei Mani Ratnam: Zwischen Tamilkino und Bollywood’, thesis (Magister), Freie Universität Berlin. Dasgupta, S. (2005) ‘Sarkar: Re-presenting Amitabh Bachchan’, EPW, 40(38), 4105–7. Dickey, S. (1993) Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India. Cambridge University Press. ——. (2008) ‘The Nurturing Hero: Changing Images of MGR’, in S. Velayutham (ed.), Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry. New York: Routledge, pp. 77–94. Dudrah, R.K. (2006) Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, New Delhi: Sage. Eleftheriotis, D. (2006) ‘Genre Criticism and Popular Indian Cinema’, in D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 272–9. Ellis, J. (1991), ‘Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy’, in J.G. Butler (ed.), Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 300–10. Gledhill, C. (1985) ‘Genre’, in P. Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book. London: BFI. Gokulsing, K.M. and Dissanayake, W. (1998) Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Gopalan, L. (2002) Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema. London: BFI. Grant, B.K. [1986] (2003), ‘Experience and Meaning in Genre Films’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 114–28. Grodal, T.K. (1997) Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hardgrave, R.L. [1973] (2008), ‘Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu: The Stars and the DMK’, in S. Velayutham (ed.), Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–77. Kaali, S. (2000) ‘Narrating Seduction: Vicissitudes of the Sexed Subject in Tamil Nativity Film’, in R. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Oxford University Press, pp. 168–90. Lequeret, E. (2001) ‘Madras, la ville aux 400 films’, Cahiers du Cinéma, February, pp. 23–5. Neale, S. (2000) Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge.

114

Genre in Asian Film and Television

——. [1990] (2003) ‘Questions of Genre’, in B.K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 159–86. Pandian, M.S.S. (1992) The Image Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics. New Delhi: Sage. ——. [1991] (2000) ‘Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK film’, in R. Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Oxford University Press, pp. 65–96. Prasad, M. (1998) Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——. (2004) ‘Reigning Stars’, in L. Fischer and M. Landy (eds), Stars: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 97–114. Ramachandran, N. and Kajendra, R. (2002) ‘Going South’, Sight and Sound, 12(5), 20–1. Schweinitz, J. (1994) ‘“Genre” und lebendiges Genrebewußtsein’, Montage/AV, 3, 2. Sebastian, P. (2002) ‘Masala vs. Genre’, The Hindu, 16 August. Available at: www. hinduonnet.com/thehindu/fr/2002/08/16/stories/2002081600920300.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Srinivas, R. and Kaali, S. (1998) ‘On Castes and Comedians, The Language of Power in Recent Tamil Cinema’, in A. Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 213–33. Srinivas, S.V. (2003) ‘Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4(1), 40–62. Teo, S. (2000) ‘Love and Swords: The Dialectics of Martial Arts Romance’, Senses of Cinema, 11. Available at: www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/crouching. html, date accessed 17 May 2008. Thomas, R. [1985] (2006) ‘Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity’, in D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham (eds), Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 280–94. ——. (1987) ‘Mythologies and Modern India’, in W. Luhr (ed.), World Cinema Since 1945. New York: Frederick Ungar, pp. 301–29.

7 Defreezing Notions of the Indian Mythological T. Vishnu Vardhan

Stories from the Indian epics, especially the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, were the initial narrative sources for filmmaking in India. These films, popularly known as mythologicals, played a decisive role in establishing the Indian film industries in the silent, as well as sound, eras. In the period between the making of the first Indian silent mythological film Raja Harishchandra (D.G. Phalke, India, 1913) and 1919, 25 films were produced in India and most of them were mythologicals. However, by the 1940s, the pan-Indian popularity of mythologicals declined and they continued as low-budget films, circulating at the margins of the Hindi cinema exhibition sector until the 1980s. Despite the national death of the mythological, Madras emerged as a major film industrial base with mythologicals as a dominant genre after the advent of sound in 1931. This popularity of the mythological in South India was much criticized by the ‘literary public’, but they continued to circulate as a dominant genre, unlike in other Indian regional cinemas. More specifically, the mythological had a rather long and significant presence in Telugu cinema as it remained a commercially viable genre until as late as 1980.1 Given the significance of the mythological in the history of Indian film culture, it is a matter of concern that this genre has neither been adequately historicized nor critically commented on by most of the histories and critical writings on Indian cinema until recently. Hindi cinema has been the focus of film historiography in India, and its parameters have been used as the lens through which all other Indian cinemas have been discussed, while social film, the dominant genre 1 Telugu cinema, also known as Tollywood, primarily caters to Andhra Pradesh, a southern Indian province, and is the second largest film industry in India after Bollywood.

115

116

Genre in Asian Film and Television

within Hindi cinema from the early 1940s, has been at the centre of most writings on Indian cinemas to date. It should be noted that there is a paucity of film studies work on the mythological. Since the 1990s, scholars, especially those from sociological and anthropological backgrounds, have critically commented on the significance of the mythological genre. The majority of these writings are based on the silent and Hindi mythologicals, and ignore the mythologicals in Telugu cinema. This chapter critically examines the existing scholarship on the mythological and problematizes the prevailing notions of this genre. Consequently, I will argue that the prevalent modes of understanding the mythological are inadequate in explaining the significance of the Telugu mythological and I will make a case for understanding the genre as a cultural form. At the outset, I will broadly classify two notions through which the mythologicals are examined. One is the notion of the mythological as a religious film and other is that of the mythological as a national form.

The mythological as a religious film Respondents to the Indian Cinematograph Committee of 1927–8 (ICC)2 tend to use the terms ‘religious film’ and ‘mythological film’ synonymously. They also ascribe the popularity of these films among the socalled ‘uneducated Indian masses’ to the films’ thematic content, which drew from Hindu epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha (ICC, vol. 1, 1928: 348).3 Statements made to the ICC are the first instances where mythologicals are seen as religious films. The assumption at work in the majority of these statements is that filming epic themes catered best to the religious sensibilities of the so-called ‘uneducated Indian masses’. However, the fact that respondents to the ICC were selected primarily, if not exclusively, from among ‘educated Indians’ cautions us to be critical of such an assumption. In practice, there is no real 2

In 1927, the British government set up the ICC to enquire into the state of the cinema in India. Representatives of the film industry, journalists, educators and members of the public were asked to reply to a questionnaire and were interviewed by a panel comprised almost exclusively of British officials. At the end of this process, a long report was compiled. The ICC Report and the respondents’ questionnaires and witnesses (published in many volumes as ICC evidence) today form one of the few surviving and most comprehensive sources of information on the cinema’s first three decades in India. 3 See a written statement of Ardeshir Bilimoria, director of Madan Theatres Ltd. (ICC, vol. 1: 322–3).

T. Vishnu Vardhan

117

evidence that mythologicals actually appealed to the religious sensibilities of the ‘Indian masses’. Yet, little of such caution is applied in most existing scholarly writing on the Indian mythological. The most recent analysis of the mythological as a religious film is Rachel Dwyer’s Filming the Gods (2006). Drawing attention to how little space the study of religion has been given in film theory and historiography, Dwyer observes that film critics and theorists are concerned ‘mostly with the modern and post-modern forms of subjectivity, audience, [and] psychoanalytic and feminist criticism’. She argues that debates on Indian nationalism have ‘been important in certain genres, such as the social film’, but that this approach has led scholars to ignore other genres, including the Indian mythological and other devotional films (2006: 2). Dwyer works with the assumption that mythologicals are ‘explicitly religious’ (2006: 7), yet her analysis of the films undermines her starting point. She starts with an a priori division of Indian films into religious and non-religious categories. The first three chapters of her book deal with three distinct genres – the mythological, the devotional and the Islamicate film – all of which she classifies as religious. Here, I will only focus on what Dwyer has to say about the Indian mythological film. To begin with, she states that the mythological genre is unique to India (2006: 14), in effect ignoring the many mythological films made in Europe and North America, not to mention in other Asian countries such as Thailand, where the mythological film was, and continues to be, a dominant genre. In her chapter on the mythologicals, she analyses a few films, including Shri Ganesh Mahima (Homi Wadia, India, 1950, in Hindi) and Sampoorna Ramayana (Babubhai Mistry, India, 1961, in Hindi). Her analysis shows how much like action films these mythologicals were: ‘these films are more about trick camerawork, stunts and wrestling, than about devotion. Devotion is definitely secondary to stunts and thrills’ (2006: 42). She also argues that the mythologicals were like family dramas and folktales. While constantly seeing in the mythologicals elements attributed to other genres, Dwyer’s analysis refuses to tell us which elements in the films make these mythologicals ‘religious’. For instance, in discussing Jai Santoshi Maa (Vijay Sharma, India, 1975, in Hindi; henceforth JSM) as a mythological family drama, she writes: ‘This film is a generic mixture of the mythological, devotional and the social in the manner of a vratkatha, a story about a fast to propitiate a specific deity rather than a story from the Sanskrit repertoire’ (2006: 46). In her analysis, mythological films actually come across as if they did not offer explicit religious/spiritual meanings – a fact that contradicts Dwyer’s

118

Genre in Asian Film and Television

classification of the mythologicals as religious films. Further, the fourth chapter of the book undermines the classificatory premise of religious and non-religious genres in Indian cinema. In this chapter, she discusses religion in ‘non-religious’ genres, in practice focusing almost exclusively on the Hindi social film or melodrama. She ends up demonstrating how ‘non-religious’ films are replete with the marks of ‘religion, religious communities, religious beliefs and religious practices’ (2006: 132). I am forced to ask the following question: if religion and religious practices are present in non-religious genres, why distinguish these genres from religious ones? This does not prevent her closing her book precisely where she started: with the assumption that the mythologicals are religious films now unproblematically becoming a conviction.

The anthropological framework Rachel Dwyer’s work draws extensively on earlier work by social anthropologists. Veena Das was among the first to analyse mythologicals as religious films. In a seminal essay on JSM (Das 1980), Das attempts to offer a framework of meaning to understand the mythologicals.4 The film tells the story of Satyawathi, a woman who overcomes many domestic troubles through her devotion to the goddess Santoshi Ma. The point of interest is that this story is not found in the epics (puranas), nor is the goddess part of the orthodox Hindu pantheon. The film revolves around devotion towards a relatively new and obscure goddess. In her essay, Das constructs a ‘typology of the relations between human devotees and the cosmic entities’ (1980: 45). She points out that there are two kinds of goddess: those categorized as shakti (ferocious) and those who fall within the category of sati (benign). Das shows that Santoshi has elements of both shakti and sati. On the one hand, she becomes ferocious when the ritual rules governing her propitiation are violated; on the other hand, Satyawathi’s devotion transforms her into a benevolent goddess. For Das, the film ‘[t]ells a story which is at once new and at once understood . . . [I]t uses a grammar for communication which is well-rooted in Hindu culture, but [the film] is not a copy or repetition of earlier myths about mother goddesses.

4 Of the 475 films released in 1975, JSM was one of three super-hits (Lutgendorf 2002: 10). JSM was a small-budget film but a huge commercial success, on a par with the big-budget Deewar (Yash Chopra, India, 1975, in Hindi) and Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, India, 1975, in Hindi). A remake was made 30 years later with the same title and was released in 2006; however, this film was a commercial flop.

T. Vishnu Vardhan

119

On the contrary, it seems to be a myth that is, perhaps, particularly suited to our times’ (1980: 45). Das’s ‘framework of meaning’ of the mythological film comes from a socioanthropological study and understanding of Hindu religious myths. Her analysis of the film is significantly confined to a discussion of the story. While briefly talking about the medium of film, she states that ‘film as a medium does away with the necessity of all mediation’ (1980: 55). But, to the extent that cinema is, precisely, a medium, mediation must necessarily be at work. The crucial question Das fails to address is that, with film, the terms of mediation are not the same as those in pre-industrial or early industrial practices, such as oral transmission and printed media. Instead of engaging with the nature of cinematic mediation, Das views mythological cinema as a transparent medium of popular circulation of ‘Hindu’ myths, whether traditional or contemporary. However, following Stephen Neale’s work on genre (1980), I argue that an examination of the nature of cinematic mediation is significant for an understanding of genre. Such an examination will recognize the mythological film not merely as a product but also as a process of signification of meaning and will thus enable us to see the significance of mythologicals as determined by a set of social practices. Another aspect of Das’s analysis is her focus on the ‘extra-textual’ religious practices that accompanied the film’s circulation. Since JSM’s first release, it has been associated with the spread of a new religious cult – of the goddess Santoshi. Das mentions many instances of Santoshi temples opening across India during and following the film’s run. However, the anthropologist does not discuss in any depth the complexities of this cinematic phenomenon, leaving the reader with the impression that Indian mythologicals do little more than cater to the religious expectations of spectators. Prasad sees these extra-textual religious practices as ‘“topical” religiosity such as occasionally erupts when miracles like weeping Madonnas and milk-imbibing Ganeshas are reported’ (Prasad n.d.). This ‘topical’ religiosity should also be seen in the light of events where temples are being built to film stars, like Amitabh Bachchan in West Bengal and Kushboo in Tamil Nadu, who cannot even remotely be associated with the mythological. While these films are not seen as religious, there is hardly any difference between this phenomenon and JSM. There is a need to study this phenomenon of topical religiosity to better comprehend the religious effects of films in India. However, what is obvious by now is that religiosity is not unique to the mythological, as is assumed by most of the scholarship on the mythological.

120

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Writing on JSM, Philip Lutgendorf argues that Das’s ‘framework of meaning of the mythological’ should be reconsidered (2002: 16). Reviewing the writings on mythologicals and calling for more substantial film studies work on the genre, Lutgendorf maintains that ‘[non-film scholars] are more interested in Hindu goddesses than in Hindi films, and show relatively little interest in the aesthetic and narrative qualities that contributed to the film’s success’ (2002: 15). Though Lutgendorf sets out to analyse the film, in practice his approach remains confined to examining the film’s story. From this, Lutgendorf concludes that the film ‘presents a carefully-structured narrative abounding in references to folklore and mythology and offering trenchant commentary on social convention’ (2002: 16). He also explains how the film ‘develops a “visual theology” that is particularly relevant to female viewers’ (2002: 16). Lutgendorf, like Das, proceeds on the assumption that mythologicals are essentially religious films.

The mythological as a religious film: Darsan as a feature and the mix-up of genres as a symptom In her influential book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, originally published in 1981, Diana Eck argues that in Hindu worship, seeing is a form of touching as well as a form of knowing. Discussing the phrases ‘darsan dena’ (to give darsan) and ‘darsan lena’ (to take darsan), Eck observed that ‘the contact between devotees and deity is exchanged through the eyes. The gaze of the huge eyes of the image meets that of the worshipper, and that exchange of vision lies at the heart of Hindu worship’ (1998: 7). This Hindu notion of darsan,5 as studied by Eck, is often deployed in describing the mythological as a religious film. For instance, Lutgendorf analyses sequences from JSM, which he claims are darsanic. He, like other scholars (Dwyer 2006; Pinney 2004), uses the aspect of darsan, or the darsanic gaze, as being specific to mythologicals while strengthening the assumption that mythologicals are religious. Yet such writing seldom discusses the deployment of the darsanic gaze in other types of film. The darsanic gaze is frequently seen in other genre films, for instance, Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, India, 1977, in Hindi). Set in contemporary India, this film tells the 5

Meaning ‘auspicious sight’ in the Hindu religion, darsan involves the worshipper looking at and, importantly, being in the field of vision of the deity. As Eck emphasizes, darsan is an integral part of Hindu worship. See also Pinney (2004) for an account of darsan in the context of printed images in India.

T. Vishnu Vardhan

121

story of three young brothers separated from their parents and each other. Each brother is adopted into a different family, each belonging to three distinct religious communities: Amar grows up Hindu, Akbar Muslim and Anthony Christian. The protagonists’ mother, who lost her sight in an accident, miraculously regains her vision when two rays of light emanate from the eyes of an image of Sai Baba and enter hers. This happens while Akbar is praying or, more precisely, singing a devotional song to Shirdi Sai Baba. This song is intercut with shots of the mother approaching the god and regaining her vision, in a classic instance of what Eck would define as an act of darsan. Although a variety of generic labels have been used for Amar, Akbar, Anthony – from social to action film – it is clearly not a mythological. Nor is it alone in featuring darsanic moments. It follows that while the concept of darsan is useful in analysing visual exchanges between human and divine figures in Indian cinema, one should be wary of claims that darsan is characteristic or constitutive of mythologicals’ narrative strategies alone. A further problem with the notion of mythological as a religious film is the yoking together of the mythological with the devotional genre. Within the Indian film industry, mythologicals and devotionals are regarded as distinct genres. However, most scholars working with the notion of religious films classify the two types of film under the same mythological category. I suggest that this yoking together of two distinct industrial-commercial categories is a result of the religious framework scholars ascribe to both genres. Being more interested in their religiosity than in the films themselves, scholars show little interest in commercial generic distinctions. From a film-historical perspective, this is an untenable and superficial position. As Madhava Prasad points out, ‘epic characters and Hindu gods in a film are one thing, its appeal to Hindu religious sentiments, its propagation of religious ideology, another’ (Prasad n.d.).6 Seeing mythological films as featuring divine figures, the religious film framework simultaneously assumes that these divine figures transmit religiosity and that thus these films are religious. This notion uses these two parameters as mutually interdependent and ends up with a circular argument, concluding with the notion that devotional and mythological films are religious/mythological films. Assuming that one agrees that the mythological is indeed a religious genre, this line of argument begs the following question: why did the film industry come up with a genre called devotional if the commercial-generic specificity of both mythologicals and devotionals already 6

The author thanks M.M. Prasad for the use of his unpublished article.

122

Genre in Asian Film and Television

catered to the audience’s religiosity? What is the function of the devotional genre? Do audiences’ expectations in relation to devotionals and mythologicals differ? These are questions that any study of these films cannot afford to ignore. Here it is enough to draw attention to an article, ‘Devotional Cult in Indian Talkies’, which appeared in Film Land on 8 April 1933. Signed by ‘An Indian Picture Goer’, a careful reading of the article cautions us not to view mythological films as essentially religious films, nor to overlook the distinction between this and the devotional film: I now propose to deal with the essentially spiritual elements that we find in talkies. The talkies referred to above are like plain stories and in almost all the cases we find the exploits of deified persons, but we have not come across of a single case where the real spirit of spiritualism or the cult of devotion or Bhakti [devotion] has been vividly portrayed with a real human interest. There were so many talkies on the life of Krishna – in every one we found him enjoying innocent dalliance with milkmaids. We found him killing Kansa through miracles, but none of the pictures have the capacity to rouse a spirit of devotion in the mind of the audience who may have spiritualistic bend of mind. In ‘Harishchandra’ and ‘Savitri’ also the spiritual factor rousing devotion or Bhakti was not much in prominence. In ‘Prahlad’ or ‘Dhruva’ the devotion was there but it was not so powerful as to exercise a persuasive influence and besides that they were too out of date to have an abiding devotional factor. [T]he talkies that may have real devotional element must not be too ancient, as the ancient has come to gather much of moss. [The] lives of medieval saints with historical background have life and potency for presenting devotional element. As the lives and teachings of Tulsidas, Tukaram, Soordas, Chandidas, Joydev, Kavir, Nizamuddin alia, Salim Chisti and others are better for devotional aspects or Bhakti cult. (Anon. 1933: 2–4, emphasis added) I have stated above that ICC respondents saw mythologicals as contributing to the religious sensibilities of the ‘general public’. Written only a few years after the publication of the ICC, the above article falls into line with the type of scholarship on mythologicals that views them as religious films. While lamenting the lack of spirituality and devotion in films based on religious epics on the one hand, the article indicates what was expected of mythologicals by the (literate) class to which the writer belonged. On the other hand, it also offered plenty of evidence

T. Vishnu Vardhan

123

that mythologicals failed to offer religious or spiritual meaning in the way that Dwyer, Das and Lutgendorf would have us believe. Moreover, although the author does not use the generic category of the devotional, a distinction nevertheless appears between films about gods and films about saints. It is primarily the saint film that the film industry later labels as the ‘devotional’. By bringing together the two genres, scholars more interested in the religiosity of the films than in the films themselves effectively erase the historical, industrial circumstances that earned these genres their commercial labels. This tendency to mix up genres is symptomatic of the misguided sense that the two types of films share a common trait – that of catering to the spectators’ religious interest. In doing so, the specificity of the films’ social and political functions is also lost. It is not my intention to argue that mythologicals absolutely lack any religiosity. I would rather say that mythologicals cater to religiosity as much as the (dominant) social genre does. In reality, as Dwyer observes, Indian nationalism has been closely entwined with religion, a fact that renders studies of religious iconography in industrial cultural practices very important for the study of the Indian media (see also Pinney 2004). Here it is enough to say that Dwyer, like other scholars, does not pursue her crucial observation, confining it instead to vague notions of ‘textual and generic analyses of films and film history’ (2006: 7) and treating textual and generic categories as unrelated to the social and political contexts from which they emerged and which they helped to shape. Further, in the context of Romila Thapar’s work (2000), it is important to note that historically in India, myths and mythic-material ‘may be functionally religious’, but it ‘can have other functions as well which supersede the sect and speak to the society’ (2000: 37). Thus, the significance of myths needs to be ‘assessed as a social and political statement apart from its religious function’ (2000: 38). Taking a cue from Thapar, I argue that in order to understand mythologicals in all their complexity, it is necessary to engage with the mythological as a cinematic institution rather than as a religious form. This would involve examining the films’ ‘terms of mediation’ as ‘modes of address’ that are as cinematic as they are ways of constructing sociocultural and political subjects.

The mythological as a national form Some of the critical writings on mythologicals examine their role in the creation of a culture industry in the context of the nation’s formation. This notion sees mythologicals primarily as classical ‘national’ texts.

124

Genre in Asian Film and Television

However, there are two strands to this framework. One sees early mythological films as the result of local art and artisanal practices’ encounters with the alien, Western technology of filmmaking. Rajadhyaksha has pointed out that mythological films are Indian films not just because they are made in India, but because they emerge from within Indian culture (1987: 47–78). The other strand argues that ‘mythic material’ emerged as ‘tradition’ in the context of Indian nationalism. According to this strand, early mythologicals were filmic spaces where the tensions between tradition and modernity were played out. These two strands are not necessarily incompatible with each other. In his examination of the early twentieth-century Indian writer Bankim Chandra’s work, Partha Chatterjee argues that ‘the nationalcultural project was not only to define a distinct cultural identity for the nation and to assert its claim to modernity, it was also to find a viable cultural basis for the convergence of the national and the popular’ (1986: 75). Neither language nor racial distinctiveness was a suitable criterion for defining national solidarity. Rather, according to Chatterjee, it was Hinduism that emerged as a viable cultural foundation of Indian nationalism. This argument defines the contours of the framework of the mythological as a ‘national form’. Crucially, it also points to the necessity of understanding the mythological film not as a religious form, but as a technology of governance mobilizing religious narratives. Scholars like Geeta Kapur (1987) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1987) have analysed the mythological in this manner. Writing on the films Sant Tukaram (Damle and Fattelal, India, 1936, in Marathi) and Devi (Satyajit Ray, India, 1960, in Bengali), Geeta Kapur argues that ‘mythic material’ emerged as cultural content during the nationalist movement and was incorporated into various art forms, including cinema. Kapur proposes that: the rising tide of nationalism encourages myths and legends and indeed all aspects of tradition to surface, to literally come up front and take on new or newly adapted forms in the various arts. The tradition thus shows itself (and I am talking primarily of the visual and performing arts), seeking beholders, native and foreign, who have hitherto turned away from it in ignorance or embarrassment. (1987: 80) For Kapur, ‘the recuperation of tradition is not just an ideological operation’ (1987: 79). She suggests that it should be located in the aesthetics of specific art forms, including cinema. Through the focus

T. Vishnu Vardhan

125

on aesthetics, she opens up the important question of the mediation of the address – the cinematic institution’s engagement with the early mythological works, on the one hand as a medium of unifying/defining the national public in the context of emerging nationalism and on the other hand as a medium to address/govern the public sphere. For Kapur, the generic significance of the early mythologicals lies precisely in the nurturing of an emergent national public sphere. Kapur analyses the iconic aspect of the imagery in Sant Tukaram, in contrast to the iconic aspect of the popular paintings of Raja Ravi Verma and of Phalke’s films. Through this comparison, Kapur draws attention to the emergence of a new aesthetic in the 1930s, displayed in Sant Tukaram. This aesthetic difference or development is what she describes as frontality: ‘[f]rontality of the word, the image, the design, the performative act’ (1987: 80). She sees this aspect of frontality as indicative of the growing self-regard of ‘“the cinematic image itself”: which, however naïve it may seem in retrospect was gaining a self-regard and a language of its own’ (1987: 84). Examining Sant Tukaram and Devi, Kapur argues that frontality is the category through which tradition surfaces. The aesthetic change in frontality – from Phalke’s films to Sant Tukaram and Devi – is the filmic process through which ‘religious iconicity is mediated to secular effect’ (1987: 84). It is the frontality of the image that characterizes the cinematic mediation of the icon. The ability of the cinematic image to underscore the image’s iconicity is a critical development in the history of cinema’s use of mythic material. The point is therefore not merely one of content drawn from the Sanskrit epics, but the manner in which cinema mediates it. The ‘surfacing of the tradition’ argument can also be found in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s writing, but with greater emphasis on the political and economic dimensions of this process. Rajadhyaksha’s seminal essay ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’ (1987) examines silent mythologicals prior to 1930. This was the foundational period of Indian cinema, as well as the first and only time in Indian film history when the mythological constituted a dominant, pan-Indian genre, and D.G. Phalke was the major filmmaker of this period. Discussing what he calls ‘the Phalke Era’, Rajadhyaksha explores the phenomenon of Phalke and his mythologicals in the early decades of Indian cinema. It is the rising tide of nationalism that creates a defining space for the surfacing of tradition – a tradition that is constructed as ‘the past’ for the specifically contemporary purpose of nationalism. This tradition constitutes the core identity of the yet to be born or newly born modern Indian nation. Myths and legends in various popular forms

126

Genre in Asian Film and Television

attain a new essence. They are Indian national texts, which are both traditional and modern at the same time. Mythological films, to borrow Chatterjee’s ideas on nationalist texts, ‘were addressed both to “the people” who were said to constitute the nation and to the colonial masters’. To both, mythologicals ‘sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that the backward peoples were culturally incapable of making films in the conditions of (the) modern world’.7 Mythologicals, to use Chatterjee’s words, were ‘denied the alleged inferiority of the colonized people; they also asserted that a backward nation could “modernize” itself while retaining its cultural identity’ (1986: 30).

Mythologicals post-Phalke: the genre beyond the national framework The above understanding of the mythological and its emergence as a national form in the context of rising Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century primarily demonstrates that while the mythological film as a cultural form might be functionally religious, in practice it has other functions, in particular as a national form. This was the time of the birth of Indian cinema with Phalke leading it. As Rajadhyaksha (1987) has rightly argued, Phalke saw the mythological as an indigenous national form that exceeded the boundaries of caste and community and spoke to the Indian national public sphere. This notion of understanding the mythological as a national form, I argue, aptly captures the significance of the genre during the silent era. However, the production and circulation of mythologicals in later years, especially after the 1930s, pose certain challenges to this notion. By the end of 1930s, there was a large amount of popular film criticism calling for the banning of mythologicals. The majority of such criticism saw mythologicals as not contributing to the nation-building process and to the growth of filmmaking practice in India. For instance, Baburao Patel (the then-President of the Film Journalists’ Association of India and editor of Film India), speaking to a group of film producers and film enthusiasts at the premises of the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce on 22 February 1941, reiterated the role and responsibility of the cinema and the film producers to the nation. In an abrasive critique of the then-emerging South Indian film industry in Madras, he 7

The motivations underpinning the constitution of the ICC are evidence in support of these claims.

T. Vishnu Vardhan

127

said that ‘all he finds are mythological subjects, produced in a crude, primitive way and of no use to our present-day life’ (Patel 1941: 37). To him: a film is a little more than entertainment. The primary object of these pictures produced in the south seems to be of making money. The economic distress and the struggle to live have been so intense in this province that the producers have never stopped to consider the weight of responsibility they are shouldering as producers of motion pictures which should essentially help the national existence of our people. (Patel 1941: 37–8) For Patel, myths and legends which were made into mythological films were not helpful in the nation-building process, but sadly underlined the ‘orthodoxy of the dark ages’ (Patel 1941: 38). Patel’s denial, like many of the critics of that time, of the mythological’s role in the nation-building process seems to debunk the idea of the mythological as a national form. For me, this comment is crucial in understanding the critical juncture of the Indian film industry and the mythological genre during the 1940s. It points to the fact that a pan-Indian/national existence of the mythological was lost by the 1940s. Madras emerged as a film-industrial base for South Indian cinemas with the mythological as a dominant genre during this period. Amongst South Indian film industries, the mythological has the longest and most vital historical presence in Telugu cinema, where it remained a commercially viable genre until 1980. Moreover, the Telugu mythologicals, as scholars have argued, contributed to the film and political success of N.T. Rama Rao, who became the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh province within a year of his political debut (see Das Gupta 1991). This aspect becomes even more interesting in light of the fact that the Telugu film industry and public take great pride in mythological films. For instance, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao (2005), a noted veteran actor who has appeared in about 100 Telugu mythological films, says: ‘if you compare Telugu mythologicals with other language mythologicals they won’t stand before us. No language mythological can compete with us or face us . . . In making mythological films we (Telugus) are the standard’ (emphasis added).8 Even Kantha Rao, 8

Recorded personal interview with Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao conducted in May 2005 at his residence in Hyderabad.

128

Genre in Asian Film and Television

one of the top heroes-turned-producers of 1960s and 1970s Telugu films, expressed the same feelings in a personal interview. This sense of regional pride in the mythological genre poses a challenge to scholarship that approaches the genre as a national form. It should be noted that most of the critical work on Indian mythology and mythological films sees them as national texts or national forms. In other words, the bulk of academic discussion of Indian epics (especially the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), either in terms of narrative structure or adaptations into film or television or folk theatre, work with the presumption that these are national texts or texts of national significance. In this context, the claims of people like Gummadi, along with other Telugu film critics and film historians, that Telugus are the authentic people to make mythological films stands as a paradox. Thus, it is imperative to ask why a regionalist claim is made on texts that have a pan-Indian significance. Why is this claim made only at the level of film form? If the epic narratives resonate on a national level, what is it in the Telugu mythological that offers itself to be marked as Telugu? What are the sociohistorical factors that might allow such a claim to be made? What purpose does this regionalist claim serve in the history of Telugu cinema and Telugu culture? These are some of the questions that cannot be answered if we were to freeze our notion of understanding the mythological as a national form. Further, the fact that from the late 1940s to the 1980s, the mythologicals were produced and circulated as low-budget, or what Dwyer calls ‘B-grade’, films in the Hindi film industry makes the understanding of the Indian mythological even more complex. The task of approaching the mythological as a national form, as seen above, offers useful insights and opens up the question of the function of mythologicals in relation to a modern India, a nation that, as has been argued by political historians, is nominally secular but effectively Hindu. That is, while the mythological film as a cultural form might be functionally religious, in practice, precisely as a national form, it has other functions. In a sense, this disproves the predominant assumption, in most of the existing scholarship on the mythological, which sees this genre as essentially religious and catering primarily to the religious sensibilities of the spectators. However, as I have briefly noted earlier, it fails to account for the many significances of the mythological beyond the Phalke era. The framework of national form offers useful methodological tools to analyse the mythological genre, yet there is a need to go beyond the nationalist frames to give a richer account of the Indian mythological. Thus, it is important to analyse genre as a cultural form, but it

T. Vishnu Vardhan

129

is equally important to consider how we approach the cultural form. In this context, one should keep in mind, as Thapar says, that ‘cultural forms are embedded in social realities and when we consciously choose a cultural form we should be aware of this reality’ (2000: 39). It is only then that choice becomes intelligible.

References Anon. (1933) ‘Devotional Cult in Indian Talkies’, Film Land, IV(148), 2–4. Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Delhi: Oxford University Press. Das, V. (1980) ‘The Mythological Film and Its Framework of Meaning: An Analysis of “Jai Santoshi Maa”’, India International Centre Quarterly, 8(1), 43–56. Das Gupta, C. (1991) The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema. New Delhi: Roli Books. Dwyer, R. (2006) Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. New York: Routledge. Eck, D.L. (1998) Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd edn. New York: Columbia University Press. ICC (1928) Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–8. 5 vols. (T. Rangachariar, Chairman). Calcutta: Govt. of Indian Central Publications Branch. Kapur, G. (1987) ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14–15, 79–108. Lutgendorf, P. (2002) ‘A Superhit Goddess: Jai Santhoshi Maa and Caste Hierarchy in Indian Films’, Manushi 131, 10–16 and 24–37. Neale, S. (1983) Genre. London: BFI. Patel, B. (1941) ‘A Complete Black-Out in the South – Baburao Patel’s Blunt Talk at Madras’, Film India, 7(3), 37–8. Pinney, C. (2004) Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Prasad, M.M. (n.d.) ‘Human and Divine: The Mythological Film’. Unpublished article. Rajadhyaksha, A. (1987) ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14–15, 47–78. Thapar, R. (2000) Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

8 The Hindi Horror Film: Notes on the Realism of a Marginal Genre Valentina Vitali

Indian cinemas have not produced horror films except for a short period, between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the genre saw a brief moment of glory with the horror films made by the Ramsay family of filmmakers. The family consists of the seven sons of F.U. Ramsay (1917–89), a radio manufacturer and producer, of whom Kumar, Shyam, Keshu, Tulsi, Gangu and Kiran are actively associated with film and, from the early 1990s, with television (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 191). Most of the Ramsay films were directed by the Tulsi and Shyam team, with Kiran, the youngest, in charge of sound. Their films never occupied the centre ground of cinema in India. Like much horror cinema elsewhere, they were cheaply produced films that circulated at the margins of the industry. Even so, the Ramsay brothers’ films stand out in the history of Hindi and, indeed, of Indian cinemas as a unique moment: although their success in a niche market for just over a decade led other filmmakers such as Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar to experiment with the genre, in practice, the Ramsay brothers’ productions constitute a single instance of horror cinema in India. Nothing like it had been made before and nothing similar was made afterwards. The question I want to explore here is: what made these films possible, even necessary, during the 1980s in India and only then? The tropes of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films are in no way unique. Living corpses, graveyards, crosses, vampires and stakes, haunted Islamicate mansions, tridents, shape-shifting females, angry, manyhanded goddesses and animated objects, all of which form the basic props of these films, were inspired largely by Christian ritual, unashamedly borrowed from the British Hammer films, while simultaneously drawing on Hindu myths and reproducing much of the iconography of Indian mythological and devotional cinema. Practically all the films 130

Valentina Vitali 131

are set in the countryside. Whatever story there is tends to focus on the infringement of this world by aspects of an ‘outside’. The disrupting factors are, as a rule, presented as pertaining to the modern world, and often they take the form of ruthless financial speculation. Female sexuality, either as a primary concern or as a symptom of the disruption of old notions of lineage, is also a regular feature. Arguably, the prominence of Christian iconography in these films is an effect of these parallel sets of tropes. That is to say, on the one hand, it is connected to the way in which Christianity reached India during the early stages, and by way, of colonialism; on the other hand, Christianity is also associated with notions of modernization, at least to the extent that, from the mid-twentieth century at least, it is perceived to have opened up spaces where more egalitarian discourses could circulate than had been the case with other, more indigenous religions. A different set of factors ought to be taken into consideration as far as the prominence of Hindu iconography in the Ramsay films is concerned, and it is to these that I turn below. For now, it is enough to say that religious iconography in the Ramsay films appears to function more like a sales point, a customary ingredient expected of the genre, rather than as a function of the order of discourse or as a point of authority. In other words, unlike in mythological and devotional Indian cinema, in the Hindi horror films, goddesses, demons, crucifixes and curses are not the objective or end of narration, but are rather the means to achieve sensational narrative effects, pretexts to stage moments of fear, suspense and surprise; hence the prominence of vague, syncretic figurations of ‘magic’, which often borrow from several traditions of both religious and secular iconographies simultaneously. My argument is that these horror films mediated what was felt, perhaps obscurely, to be at issue in the new alignments that shaped India’s turbulent 1980s. Some of these issues still speak to us today, while others do not. But to situate the Ramsays’ horror films, or at least their tropes and their aesthetics, within a historicizing perspective, we must take into account the temporalities and delays which shaped the constellation they inhabited, framing the range of cultural production and practices available to these films. After the First World War, when still under British colonial rule, India built up a textile and steel industry that was able for a while to compete internationally. Soon after independence and partition, Jawaharlal Nehru was determined to industrialize, but not by building on the industries India had established in the previous decades. India’s Congress Party, the dominant political party after independence,

132

Genre in Asian Film and Television

rejected the path of growth through exploitation of comparative advantage (by the export of industrial goods). The country was to build up its own machine-goods industries, restrict imports of ‘non-essential’ goods and regulate its larger private firms to avoid the formation of monopolies. Throughout Nehru’s government, this recipe of import substitution dominated social-political strategy (Desai 2002: 237–8). Two forces were at play in this context: an industrial ‘big bourgeoisie’ which relied on the state and its policy of contained capitalist expansion in chosen sectors; and a politically influential, localized and predominantly landed ‘small bourgeoisie’. Congress’s legitimacy in democratic India depended on the latter. Capitalism in India resulted from the uneasy cohabitation of these two bourgeois blocs, with the small bourgeoisie as the dominant faction (Desai 1975). During India’s first ten years as an independent nation, the fundamental contradictions of this uneasy compromise were held at bay by the urgency of, and the sense of euphoria generated by, the nationbuilding project. From the mid-1960s, however, the country experienced an industrial downturn. The late 1950s also brought a massive foreign exchange crisis. Arguing that the state-building project is critically mediated by the nature of state-capitalist relations, Vivek Chibber (2004) has demonstrated that in India, the policy of import substitution led to a weak developmental state. From the 1950s onwards, vertical links which would have connected firms to state agencies and state agencies to the Planning Commission were virtually absent, and horizontal flows of information between state agencies were tenuous. The result was that the implementation of industrial policies was left to a bureaucracy that devised its own ad hoc rules of thumb. This created imbalances in the system. The import substitution model ‘made it possible, and even rational, for Indian capitalists to resist the effort to build a state that could impose discipline on private firms’ (Chibber 2004: 10). Once the state policy apparatus was in place, the biggest firms were also able to bend the state’s policies to their own needs (Chibber 2004: 199–207). The 1957 foreign exchange crisis marked the point at which some of the critical shortcomings of the Indian development model became known to state managers as well as to the public. Instead of a centralized and carefully coordinated system of administration, these developmental initiatives were handed over to the bureaucracy, which, lacking effective means of coordination, established myriad schemes that were overlapping, discontinuous, administratively cumbersome and, in practice, reduced the legitimacy of the measures. ‘The dynamic result of the planning process was to delegitimize the idea

Valentina Vitali 133

of disciplinary planning, while at the same time weakening its main agent’, the Planning Commission (Chibber 2004: 210). In 1966, two years after Nehru’s (her father’s) death, Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. The Congress Party, however, was hit by major defections. At the national elections a year later, it found that popular support had been eroded to the point that it lost half of its majority states. The 1970s were thus marked by what Madhava Prasad (1998b) has called a moment of disaggregation. While Indira Gandhi sought to mobilize popular support among the lower middle and working classes with her own particular brand of populism, that very same populism had the effect of alienating the layers upon which Congress had so far relied for its legitimacy. The main beneficiaries of the social and economic policies since 1947, that is, the middle class, the rich peasants and the small and large capitalists (Chandra 2003: 24), felt increasingly threatened. Rich peasants reacted to repeated official pronouncements about the implementation of existing land reform laws, as well as to the passing and implementation of fresh land ceiling legislation. In 1969, when Indira Gandhi nationalized the country’s 14 largest banks, the capitalist class went on an investment strike. For their part, the middle classes felt hit by a new and highly unpopular scheme of compulsory deposits amounting to a freeze in wages and salaries (Chandra 2003: 27–9). In 1975, accused of ‘corrupt practices’ during her 1971 election campaign, Indira Gandhi was debarred from politics for six years. This event and the formation of a multi-party Janata Front, culminating in a major rally calling on the army and police to disobey ‘illegal orders’, led Indira Gandhi to declare a state of emergency. Two years later, for the first time since independence, the Congress Party, still led by Indira Gandhi, was defeated in the general election. The Janata Party, a coalition of disparate opposition parties, took power. Over the course of barely a decade, this series of events culminated with the ascendancy of Hinduism as a major ideological force and its institutionalization in the political sphere. Broadly speaking, to this day, three notions of secularization have emerged. First, there is the concept of secularization understood as the decline of religious institutions, beliefs, practices and consciousness. Secondly, there is secularism understood as the process of disengagement from, or compartmentalization of, religion from political life. And, thirdly, there is the notion of secularization as connected to the growing importance of rational thought and activity – a dynamic that implies newer claimants to intellectual and moral authority other than religiously sanctioned authority systems (Vanaik 1997: 66). But Achin Vanaik has rightly observed

134

Genre in Asian Film and Television

a fourth notion of secularization in India: a secularism ‘perceived as the unifying principle mediating between and collating different religious communities in order to forge a common struggle for national liberation’ (Vanaik 1997: 67). As the legitimating ground of the ruling coalition collapsed and the Congress Party, as the political core of the nation, splintered, the ruling coalition’s commitment to secularism also began to crumble. The Hindu extreme right party Shiv Sena had lurked at the margins of the political sphere since the late 1960s (Lele 1995). After having offered its support to the Janata coalition in 1977, it switched to the Congress Party in 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power. Attacks against the dalits, the tribals and Muslims sparked off by the Shiv Sena in the 1970s spread across the rest of the country between 1980 and 1984. Exploiting middle and lower middle-class fears of unemployment, the Shiv Sena also promoted feelings and activities against South Indians. By the time it established its political alliance as a dominant partner within the Janata Party (BJP), however, signs of its waning popularity in the Bombay region had become visible. Having to share its influence with a number of other competing forces but with continued support from a core constituency in offices, factories and middle-class neighbourhoods, and with its history of anti-Muslim, anti-dalit, anti-communist and anti-South Indian rhetoric and practices, the Shiv Sena ‘saw itself as well poised to capitalize on the spreading popularity of Hindutva’ (Lele 1995: 1520). By 1991, the first ever BJP ministry took over in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Increasingly building on the Hindu supremacist underpinning of the public sphere – the same sphere which, in 1947, had led to the partition of India and Pakistan – and by then openly mobilizing extremely reactionary religious (Hindu) rituals and forms of social interaction, in 1996, three years after communal riots in Bombay led to the death of 550 civilians, the BJP emerged as India’s largest single party. This was the terrain within which the horror films of the Ramsay brothers functioned. However, the nature of the forces constitutive of this terrain says little about the ways in which the films moved within it. Hinduism and its myths have been an important part of Indian cinema since its inception. Hindu myths were, for instance, the main source for D.G. Phalke’s cinema.1 A profile in the Modern Review of September 1917, for instance, claimed that: 1 The son of a Sanskrit scholar and trained in architecture and landscape painting, Dadasaheb (Dhundiraj Govind) Phalke (1870–1944) worked as a photographer, as a stage make-up man, as an assistant to a German illusionist and as a

Valentina Vitali 135

[Mr Phalke] believes that in our Puranas [epics] there is an inexhaustible mine for the film-producer and it is his experience that films which depict stories from the Puranas are more popular with the cinema-goers than his other films of scenes of Indian life. The Puranic stories are familiar to all, the incidents need little explanation and the films that incorporate these stories grip the audience as no other films will do. (287, emphasis added) By the 1920s, mythological films formed the bulk of Indian silent film production, along with stunt-action and historical films.2 Unlike American cinema and, if in a different way, more like the Italian historicals of the 1910s and 1920s, the films of Phalke and of his contemporaries – figures like Baburao Painter, Kanjibhai Rathod and Suchet Singh, all of whom plucked from it for their subjects – suggest that Hindu mythology was then perceived not as being in tension with notions of Indian modernization, but as a factor instrumental to its realization. For one thing, mythological themes were deemed to be good business. As was evident from the article in the Modern Review, they also played an important part in the nation-building project, as a means of addressing an audience imagined and constructed as ‘the Indian nation’. Phalke was a committed nationalist who saw his cinema as a contribution to the struggle for self-rule. His films were overdetermined by the filmmaker’s encounter with a contradictory object: a regressive colonial rule that presented itself as modern and which addressed him (the colonial subject) in terms of empiricist and imperial notions of historical truths articulated in terms of nineteenth-century expectations of realism.3 For this reason, Phalke entertained an oblique relation to the codes of cinema as it was made in Europe and the US. Seeking to displace colonial accounts of Indian history and reality as ‘untrue’, he set out to occupy a frame and a cinematic apparatus that he perceived as ‘Western’ with ‘Indian images’, in the process also magician. He opened an art printing and engraving workshop in 1908 and soon became interested in the cinema. In 1912, he started Phalke Films on Dadar Main Road in Bombay. Phalke, who to this day continues to be regarded as the founder of cinema in India, made feature films that centred exclusively on themes borrowed from Hindu mythology. 2 For mythological and devotional films in Indian cinema, see Das (1980), Rajadhyaksha (1986) and (1987), Kapur (1987) and (1993), Dasgupta (1989), Hughes (1996a and 1996b), Lutgendorf (2003) and Dwyer (2005). 3 McKeon (1987) offers an illuminating account of the development of this European and imperial compromise formation.

136

Genre in Asian Film and Television

incorporating orientalist constructions of South Asia as a society steeped in religious beliefs and mythological narratives. As Rajadhyaksha (1987) has convincingly argued, this was one of the reasons behind Phalke’s use of Hindu mythology as subject material for his films. That is to say, for Phalke, Hindu mythology was not necessarily a pre-modern narrative form; on the contrary, the films mobilized it for a project – nationbuilding – that encompassed a broad range of horizons, some of them far more progressive and socially modernizing than the historiography India had inherited from the Raj.4 The stated objective of the nationalist Congress was to build a modern and secular nation – indeed, more modern and more secular than imperial Britain. As a result, rationalist expectations of cause and effect were soon brought to bear on stories which, originally belonging to the category of narratives, were earlier seen to require ‘little explanation’. For instance, less than 20 years after the release of Phalke’s best known film, Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra (India, 1917), the critic Jatindra Nath Mitra reviewed the latest releases within the genre of the ‘Semi-Pouranic’ by claiming that ‘in some of them, history has been sacrificed to weave out a tissue of miraculous events. In almost all of them, no attempt seems to have been made to pay any heed to human psychology’ (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 31).5 Another 20 years later, the independent government commissioned a report on the state of the Indian film industry. Under a section entitled ‘Factors Affecting Industry’, the Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951, henceforth RFEC) complained that: the treatment of historical or mythological subjects [d]isplays a lack of perspective and familiarity with history and susceptibilities. There is a freedom in dealing with these themes which ill-accords either with facts or with decorum. History becomes subservient to the theme and religious lore to phantasy or lampooning. Mythology becomes a caricature of religion; it lacks sometimes the solemnity and the significance of religious literature and is often so mixed up

4

For further elaboration of this line of argument, see Mukherjee (1984) and Chatterjee (1986). 5 By contrast, in his review of the films released under the label of ‘Mohamedan’, the critic maintained that while ‘the main virtue of these pictures is their gorgeous dresses and nice settings, their main defect is incoherence; outwardly they appear historical, though inwardly they are nothing but myths’ (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 31).

Valentina Vitali 137

with the grotesque as to be almost indistinguishable from the ludicrous. Little do the producer and the director realize that there is only one step between the sublime and the ridiculous. [W]e would therefore suggest that when drawing upon ancient sources, producers should look upon them not merely as collections of fairy tales but endeavour to interpret on the screen the wisdom that lies enshrined in them. (RFEC 1951: 176) Hinduism had been part of the ideological frame of reference of large sections of the coalition that took over from the British well before independence and partition. However, from 1947, the construction of the Indian nation as modern and secular depended on the clear demarcation of two spheres: history and myth. The modernity of the Indian subject was a measure of his or her capacity to distinguish between the two and to position himself or herself on the side of history.6 This explains the RFEC’s demand that ‘ancient sources’ be interpreted in cinema for their capacity to impart that quintessential tenet of rationalism that was ‘wisdom’. By then, in the Hindi cinema that defined the industry’s generic centre ground, notions of the supernatural were customarily dealt with in a rationalist and secular manner. Take Kamal Amrohi’s beautiful debut Mahal/Palace (India, 1949). Sometimes misleadingly referred to as a ghost story, this Hindi classic is a psychodrama which tells the story of Shankar (Ashok Kumar) as he moves into an abandoned mansion to find that a portrait of the former owner bears a resemblance to his own. Shankar also sees the ghost of the former owner’s mistress, Kamini (Madhubala), who tells him that he must either die if they are to be united or he must marry her reincarnation, Asha, the gardener’s daughter. In the end, however, it all turns out to be a trick staged by Asha, who admits to have masqueraded as the ghost. Along the same lines but released in the year of Nehru’s death, when Indira Gandhi, then Minister of Information and Broadcasting, began to present herself as her father’s successor, Who kaun thi?/Who Was She? (Raj Khosla, India, 1964) centres on Anand (Manoj Kumar), a young doctor obsessed by a woman (Sadhana) who appears to him with different names and in different guises. The story evokes as much the supernatural as notions of madness, to opt, in the end, for a rationalist unravelling of the mystery: Anand’s friend, Dr Ramesh (Prem Chopra), had concocted a plot to drive Anand insane and get hold of his inheritance.

6

See Prasad (1998a).

138

Genre in Asian Film and Television

By the mid-1960s, Hindi cinema’s dominance over the Indian market had begun to crumble. Following the devaluation of the rupee in 1966, the cost of film production increased significantly, leading to a drop in the number of films made. Although two years later figures for all production in India showed a significant recovery, by then Madras had begun to show its potency as a film production centre.7 Ten years later, Tamil and Telugu films, produced in Madras and Hyderabad respectively, finally caught up with Hindi productions. Coinciding with the emergence of South Indian separatist movements pitting themselves against the central government, the rise of the so-called ‘regional’ cinemas in the 1970s also marked the collapse of Congress’s legitimating ground as the ruling coalition by bringing back Hindu mythology into the Indian cinemas’ generic centre ground. The bulk of Tamil and Telugu cinemas of this period and beyond resolutely rejected empiricist notions of history, preferring Hindu mythology as a mode of historical narration, just as silent Indian cinema had done during British rule. By contrast, Hindi cinema continued to hold on to the secularizing ground that had characterized, in name at least, Indian nationalism, staging the explicit return of Hinduism and communalism rather as a set of practices pertaining to the administration of the public and the private spheres, as, for instance, in the films of N. Chandra and, in a different fashion, in those of Manmohan Desai. It is in these years that the Ramsay brothers began to release their best known and most successful horror films. One of the difficulties they present is that these films do not appear to fall in either the mythological (or devotional) or the historical categories. Events in the Ramsay films are not revealed; they are strange and, as such, they are deemed to require an explanation. On the one hand, decades of secularization appear to pre-empt a religious resolution; on the other hand, the political-ideological ground sustaining secularism having collapsed at its core, rational explanations are also presented as blocked. Rationalist notions of cause and effect are not quite barred from the films; rather, they feature as a desirable yet no longer achievable option, like a utopia projected back into the past. At the same time, the films do avail themselves of religious (Hindu and Christian) iconography, for they addressed a national market and a cultural terrain whose ideological 7 Of the 351 Indian films made in 1968, only 89 were produced in Bombay. Madras, by contrast, produced 227, 14 of which were in Hindi (Screen, 10 January 1969: 1, 11).

Valentina Vitali 139

and commercial-industrial substance had also been sustained by this matter, if only in a tacit, non-institutional way. Unlike Phalke’s use of myths, however, the Ramsay films mobilized these discourses precisely because they were deemed to require explanation. Selling all the better for steadfastly refusing to provide closure in either (rationalist-secular or religious) direction while registering the pressures of both vectors, the Ramsays’ horror films capitalized on, to use Tzvetan Todorov’s terminology (1973), hesitation. A case in point is Shaitani Ilaka/Satan’s Circle (Kiran Ramsay, India, 1990), the story of a young woman possessed by a shape-shifting female who needs human (preferably young and female) sacrifices to resurrect her master, the demon Shaitan (literally, Satan). Unlike other victims, the young woman is spared, only for the female fiend to use her body as her reincarnation. Symptoms of possession begin to manifest themselves when she falls in love with a modern young man, leading to sporadic moments of strange behaviour and fits, mainly in the privacy of her room. Her family calls a doctor to see what can be done, but he becomes in turn a victim of the shape-shifting female’s magical powers. The evil-worshipper takes control of the doctor’s hands and has him strangle himself, but not before he admits defeat and recommends that a mystic guru be called in from Nepal. The guru alone can heal the young woman. This realization, carried through to the end of the film, is staged as a major source of distress, not only on the part of the family and the young woman’s boyfriend, but also of the audience, who is invited to witness the primitive and violent procedures leading to the young woman’s liberation with horror and disbelief by way of frontal, static frames presenting the action from a cautious distance. It is worth comparing this scene with, for instance, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, USA, 1973), in which an altogether different aesthetic menu, including subjective points of view, are used to evince precisely the opposite, namely a reconciliation with, and a faith and belief in, Christian and, indeed, Inquisition rituals. This is to say that what marks the Ramsay brothers’ films as moments of 1980s Indian history is not to be found in what we are given as the film’s selling points, which are ingredients to be found in any other horror film. That forms of an ostensibly ‘traditional’ life-style, narrativized in the films as a cluster of ‘religious’ practices and beliefs, should be disrupted by the arrival of speculative capital and other symptoms of what is taken to be modernity is a recurring theme not only in the Ramsay brothers’ and other Hindi or Indian cinemas, but also

140

Genre in Asian Film and Television

in the (horror) cinemas of other countries.8 What made the Ramsay brothers’ horror films unique is the distinctive manner in which stories airing concerns about the arrival of speculative capital and other aspects of modernity were staged in their films – the ways in which the iconography available to the horror genre the world over was mobilized and made to register these preoccupations. It was by means of these specific ways of staging – these narrative strategies – that the Ramsay films addressed 1980s India. What becomes apparent through a close analysis of these films is that by dwelling on and monetizing the hesitation between miraculous and rationalist explanations, the horror films of the Ramsay brothers also plunged into uncertainties and knots that manifested themselves in the chosen menu of strategies and modes of address. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1987) extended his argument about the uses of mythology in early Indian cinema to modes of address in Phalke films and, more particularly, to the filmmaker’s use of frontality – as, for instance, in his Raja Harishchandra. Frontality refers here to a kind of direct address to the viewer by way of a frame arranged in a 180 degree space, as opposed to a 360 degree space.9 Phalke recovered the frontal address from, among other sources, the Parsee and Marathi theatres, 8

For instance, Frances Harding has noted how, in Nigerian horror films or videos, the representation of illicit sex with one or more partners and displacing or unsettling customary family relations is not an end in itself: ‘rather, it is the exposure of the acquisition, by any means, of wealth and power that is the motive for the ensuing sexual and violent acts. The agency for change is the putative efficacious relationship between transgressive sex and a consequent supernatural power to bring about a specific result: the acquisition of wealth and/or power’ (Harding 2007: 11). 9 In cinema, frontality conveys a static point of view and, to that extent, can operate as an obstacle to the subjective and mobile narration effected by strategies based on perspectival vision. In contrast to the latter, a frontal address fixes the viewer within a more strictly ordered, spatial hierarchy, treating the film frame as a flat surface and allocating spaces to the characters and other diegetic elements on the basis of their status or position within a pre-established order. Whereas in a perspectival system, the rendition of ‘reality’ depends on the observer’s (the camera’s) position and point of view as he/she (it) moves within a 360 degree space, the frontal frame presents the viewer with a ‘reality’ within which relations are ‘given’. The order of reality is determined not by the position of a character in its dynamic inter-relation with other elements in the diegesis, nor by the narrator’s orchestration of those relations or points of view, but by an all-encompassing, monocular subject that functions as analogous to a god’s eye view. For an argument against the widespread but misleading notion that frontal modes of address in cinema are symptoms of pre-modern points of authority and social conventions, see Vitali (2006).

Valentina Vitali 141

though in discussions of Indian cinema, frontality is connected to the way in which the term ‘iconicity’ has been used by Geeta Kapur and other cultural historians. Iconicity, rendered in Hindi cinema by way of frontal frames, has been discussed most directly by historian Ravi Vasudevan. Vasudevan argued that Hindi cinema relies, on the one hand, on the perspectival narrative strategies that are also at work in European and American cinemas – such as the reverse angle and spatial continuity from one shot to the next – and, on the other hand, on iconic or frontal modes of address that appear to interfere with perspectival narration.10 While Kapur and Rajadhyaksha demonstrated that frontality has been an important feature of cinema in India since its inception, Vasudevan’s work has shown that after independence, frontality acquired a particularly prominent function in Hindi cinema. I have argued elsewhere that this can be seen, for instance, in Shaheed/ Martyr (Ramesh Saigal, India, 1948) (Vitali 2006). This Hindi nationalist melodrama11 was made by Filmistan, a Bombay-based studio established in 1943 by a breakaway group from Bombay Talkies that elaborated the conventions of earlier studios into the first consistent generic codifications of a post-independence all-India film market (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 95). A hit single-handedly responsible for establishing the famous star pair Dilip Kumar and Kamini Kaushal, Shaheed was especially screened for the Congress Party’s All India Committee in April 1948 before its commercial release in Bombay in August of that year, in time for the first anniversary of Indian independence (Desai 2004: 33). My argument, developed through an analysis of Shaheed and other contemporary Hindi films, was that precisely because of their engagement with discourses of Indian nationalism – that is, because of India’s encounter with a contradictory and, on the whole, deeply regressive force that addressed Indian people by way of narrative strategies such as visual perspective and psychological realism – Shaheed and, with it, post-1947 Hindi cinema resorted to a frontal mode of address as a ‘degree zero’. Deviations from the frontal address are, to use Roman Jakobson’s distinction, the ‘marked’ terms. It is as if the frontal frame – characterized by the absence of a specific point of entry into 10

For instance, in Andaz/A Matter of Style (Mehboob Khan, India, 1949), an image of Hindi star Nargis interrupts, and is lifted out from, the spatial relations established until that point in the scene, as if to be presented to the viewer for special contemplation (Vasudevan 1993). 11 Shaheed tells the story of Ram (Dilip Kumar), the son of a colonial officer and a fervent nationalist, who leaves home to join a group dedicated to armed struggle (qualified as ‘terrorist’) in spite of his father’s disapproval.

142

Genre in Asian Film and Television

what is given by the camera to be seen as ‘the real’ – provided an abstract space marked as no more than the nationalist positing of ‘the real India’. It is my contention that this is precisely where the Ramsays’ films take off from, only to stage the implosion of that very frontality which Hindi cinema had foregrounded as the space-address of the nation. Frontality implodes, for instance, in Hotel (Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, India, 1981). Hotel centres on an unscrupulous group of businessmen who decide to build a hotel on the site of an old Christian graveyard. They trick the priest in charge of the site into selling them the land, claiming it will be used as a playground for children. When he discovers the entrepreneurs’ real intentions, the priest dies of a heart attack. Contractors move in, stack the gravestones in an old shed and dump the bodies in a communal pit, marked only by a pile of rocks. During a party organized by the businessmen to celebrate the hotel’s opening, smoke begins to filter through the stones. Soon, silent, shrouded corpses can be seen stalking through the hotel’s corridors. The businessmen attempt to flee, only to meet a gruesome death. The following scene takes place just before the businessmen’s deaths begin to occur. Its narrative function is to induce into characters and spectators alike a sense of imminent danger, a tangible and undeniable proof that things are not as they should or are expected to be. The uncanny breaks through into daily life and an explanation is in order. Instead, hesitation as to the nature of the strange happenings takes over the film-text at several levels. The scene opens when all but one of the businessmen and the government official who helped them to clear the red tape for the land-sale transaction are in a function room of the newly built hotel. They are joined by the oldest of the group. We gain access to this space as he walks into the room: the camera, to his left at 45 degrees, follows him and simultaneously pulls out slowly. As he steps into the room, the camera stays behind and pans to the left to produce a frontal view of the room. We look at this space as we do at a theatrical stage, slightly above eye level. In this frontal shot of the room, the camera and the actors seem confined within a space of 180 degrees. This frontal point of view initially produces a kind of tableau: three of the entrepreneurs (including a young woman who helped to convince the priest to sell the land with the moving tale of poor children needing a playground) are clearly visible in the background, slightly off-centre to the right. The woman and one of the men are standing; the second man, dressed in white Indian clothing,

Valentina Vitali 143

is seated in an armchair. They are looking at the man who has just joined them and who is now standing in the foreground to the right, his back to the camera. To the left, in the foreground and in near-profile, also looking at the newly arrived partner, is the government official, while in the background, also to the left, stands the fourth businessman. In the background we can also see doors with glass panes and several paintings on the walls. It is evening or night-time. The room is dark, the only light, coming from the doors, producing a bluish effect all around. The centre of the frame is taken up by a brown tea table and chairs on a yellowish rug. As soon as the location and the spatial relations within it are thus set, a conversation begins between all present, each character expressing varying degrees of concern over the possibility of repercussions following their trickery. An argument shortly ensues between two of the entrepreneurs. At this point, the camera moves into the space of action, breaking up the tableau first with a fast zoom onto the face of the whiteclad man sitting in the armchair in the background as he speaks, then cutting to a close-up of his counterpart, who is standing to the very left of the frame in the background. As he walks towards the first speaker retorting angrily, the camera tracks back and pans to the right to follow his movement. It then cuts back to the white-clad, seated man, who, in anger, throws his glass on the floor and gets up from the chair. Here the camera zooms back out as fast as it zoomed in earlier to resume a frontal view of the scene. Although not the original tableau, we now look at the two men in profile, arguing, the white-clad man to the left and the other man to the right of the frame. Here, as elsewhere in this film and, more generally, in Indian cinemas, shots and counter-shots do not quite produce a seamless sense of spatial continuity. There are reasons for this, which vary from film to film. In Hotel, the frontal tableau which set the scene for this sequence breaks open to produce a more synthentic yet far from continuous sense of space because in this sequence, as in other moments in the film, the camera straddles not so much subjective and objective narration but, more significantly as far as Hindi cinema is concerned, between a perspectival sense of space and a frontal one. As soon as the camera returns to a frontal mode, showing the two men in profile, still arguing, a loud noise is heard. We see the two men looking around, and the camera then cuts to an extreme close-up of (a section of) a bookshelf. The camera zooms out fast, showing that the large bookshelves, now entirely visible, are shaking violently. From here we cut back to the

144

Genre in Asian Film and Television

frontal profile view of the two arguing men, followed by a fast zoom into an extreme close-up of the astonished face of the white-clad man. We then cut to an extreme close-up of the oldest businessman, in profile, which is also followed by another extremely close and partial view of the bookshelves. Again we zoom out, and then cut to a frontal and extreme close-up, first of the government official, who is also looking at the shelves (cut to the shelves) still shaking, and then of the young woman, who is doing the same (another cut to the shaking shelves). The scene proceeds in this way for a while, alternating frontal medium shots and/or close-ups of the characters and their faces with frontal views of what they are looking at: shaking bookshelves first and, soon after, views of the hotel’s neo-Islamicate veranda. Smoke is rising from the garden below it. As the howling noise increases, out of the cloud of smoke emerge (through a super-imposition) the barely visible bodies of dead men, clad in white and advancing towards the businessmen like shadows. So far, whether we are looking at the shelves or at the veranda, zooming is the only strategy used spatially and visually to link views of the latter to the close-ups or medium shots of the characters (that is, the link between the looking subjects and the seen objects). However, as the speculators, terrified at the sight of the advancing corpses, run towards the doors of the room, the ‘zoom – close-up – horrific view’ scheme that, up to this point in the sequence, has provided the only alternative to static frontality, gives way to a fluidly mobile camera that follows the characters at a dignified distance as they rush to the doors, looking for a way out. Space here expands and closes, acquiring a flexibility which is dependent on the actors’ movement across the room and which was entirely absent in the first half of the sequence. Yet, precisely at the moment when the film appears to have finally achieved a degree of seamless spatial fluidity, the furniture in the room starts moving by itself, blocking every door and window as soon as a character runs near it. Once all the doors and windows are blocked, drawers and doors begin to open and shut violently as if possessed by an outside force. The protagonists, now moving around a flexing space, shout in a frenzy of panic. Interestingly, none of the many shots showing the mobile furniture shifting along the walls by itself and blocking the doors is shot frontally, not even the shots of the self-opening and closing drawers. These shots are taken at roughly a 65-degree angle. None, that is, except the last one, a 90-degree frontal shot in which we see one of the businessmen standing in front of the large bookshelves. Shaking and blocking a door, it takes up most of the frame. As the bookshelf unit

Valentina Vitali 145

begins to move towards the camera, the space between the camera and the shelves narrows, forcing the man into a smaller and smaller space as it pushes him towards the camera. The shot ends with an image of the upper part of the man’s body in a medium to close-up shot, shouting and waving his arms in the air. This sequence not only marks the beginning of the series of deaths, its modes of address also echo the way in which the businessmen’s deaths are staged. One entrepreneur dies as he walks into the hotel’s cellar and the door shuts behind him, at which point the camera, placed at the top of the stairs leading to the cellar, shows his companions, frontally and below eye-level, their backs to the camera, banging at the door and shouting. When the door opens, the man is leaning against it, just dead and falling against his companions, towards us and the camera. Another death takes place as one of the men trips down the grand flight of stairs which connects the hotel’s lobby to the first floor. As he walks down the stairs, the camera is positioned on the line of action, that is, straight in front of him, at the bottom of the stairs and behind a long pike (one of the pseudo-Islamicate relics decorating the lobby). We see, frontally, the man as he falls towards us and dies impaled on the pike. In yet another deadly instance, frontality takes a more symbolic form. Frightened at the events, the government official runs out of the hotel and seeks refuge through what used to be an underground passage, only to find that it is now blocked by the new hotel’s foundations. No sooner does he realize this than the wall of rocks forming the foundations begins to collapse, slowly, one rock after the other. As he turns around to avoid being crushed and retraces his steps, two rocks appear at the other end of the passage, as if put in motion by an unknown force. The government official is stuck between the very rocks under which were discarded the corpses that were originally buried in the old cemetery. Significantly, this latter scene closes without showing its inevitable conclusion, as if to record in a symbolic manner the impasse faced by the Indian public sphere at the time, caught between contrasting (secular and religious) ideologies. That is to say, it is impossible to say today what kind of and how large an audience Hotel may have had. However, one thing is known: the Ramsay brothers’ films did not define the Hindi cinema’s generic centre ground in the 1980s. Like much horror cinema elsewhere, they were cheaply produced films which were not distributed in city-centre venues. In most cinemas, and especially in marginal productions within exploitation genres such as horror and action films, unaccredited labour is very inexpensive. Financial

146

Genre in Asian Film and Television

considerations must have played when Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay opted to have staff off-screen pushing the furniture along the set’s walls, or behind the walls pushing the drawers and doors open and shut, or yet other, similarly conspicuously cheap special effects. But financial considerations alone are not enough to explain why, among the many inexpensive solutions available to the filmmakers, the Ramsay brothers opted for these particular ones. Here I have considered the cultural substance that must have been at work for the films to register that sense of fear and in just that way. The Ramsay brothers’ films registered the collapse of the ideological and political ground upon which the Congress Party’s legitimacy as the core of modern, secular India rested.12 At a diegetic level, this dimension of 1980s India registered in the films as a necessity to trigger an impasse between rationalist ideas of cause and effect and religious notions of deus ex machina. The films capitalized on the resulting sense of hesitation by resisting closure either way. At another level, this drive to capitalize on what was perceived, however obscurely, as contemporary preoccupations also produced a collapse of the inherited narrative strategies and their limits, breaking open the frontal frame as the favoured mode of national address. By dwelling on and monetizing the hesitation between miraculous and rationalist explanations, these films plunged into uncertainties and knots that manifested themselves in the chosen aesthetic menu. In their narrative strategies, these horror films can thus be read as historical material, as a moment of Indian history when the vacuum left open by the collapse of the ground upon which the Congress Party, as the ideological core of modern, secular India, had built its legitimacy, was being filled by the certainties of religious discourses. The Ramsays’ films took off, and borrowed unashamedly, from these discourses, as they did from a range of other sources. Drawing from the sociocultural, national fabric of 1980s India, they availed themselves of cultural stock which was at times of very recent formation and at other times centuries old. With that stock, they mediated alignments, possibilities and limits for the 1980s that were not necessarily in line with the trajectory set by the emerging power blocs. Some of these limits still speak to us today, some of them do not. The most realist moments in these films are thus the ones that appear to us today as the most nonsensical, or unrealistic, because in their indiscriminating, inclusive grasp – in short, because 12

I would like to thank Paul Willemen for drawing my attention to this particular aspect of 1980s India, as well as for his help and advice on how to relate it to what I call here ‘imploding frontality’.

Valentina Vitali 147

of their desire to be, make and sell cinema – these films diagnostically registered aspects and dimensions of that moment in Indian history, realities which were left behind as rubble by the forward movement – by the certainties – of the regressive forces which, by the late 1980s, prevailed. These forces may well now be informing our perception of these films. By historicizing or re-tracking backwards that ‘forward’ movement, we may be able to begin to grasp the necessity of these films in India in the 1980s.

References Bandyopadhyay, S. (1993) Indian Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the Thirties. Jamshedpur: Celluloid Press. Chandra, B. (2003) In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency. New Delhi: Penguin. Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chibber, V. (2004) Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Das, V. (1980) ‘The Mythological Film and its Framework of Meaning: An Analysis of Jai Santoshi Ma’, India International Centre Quarterly, 8(1), 43–56. Dasgupta, C. (1989) ‘Seeing and Believing, Science and Mythology: Notes on the Mythological Genre’, Film Quarterly, 42(4), 12–18. Desai, M. (1975) ‘India: Emerging Contradictions of Slow Capitalist Development’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), Explosion in a Subcontinent. Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with New Left Review, pp. 11–50. ——. (2002) Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. London: Verso. ——. (2004) Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India. New Delhi: Roli Books. Dwyer, R. (2005) Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Harding, F. (2007) ‘Appearing Fabu-lous: From Tender Romance to Horrifying Sex’, Filmint, 5(4), 10–19. Hughes, S.P. (1996a) ‘Is There Anyone Out There? Exhibition and the Formation of Silent Film Audiences in South India’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Chicago. ——. (1996b) ‘The Pre-Phalke Era in South Asia: Reflections on the Formation of Film Audiences in Madras’, South Asian Studies (July–December), 161–204. Kapur, G. (1987) ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14–15, 79–109. ——. (1993) ‘Revelation and Doubt: Sant Tukaram and Devi’, in T. Niranjana, P. Sudhir and V. Dhareshwar (eds), Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India. Calcutta: Seagull Books, pp. 19–46. Lele, J. (1995) ‘Saffronisation of Shiv Sena: Political Economy of City, State, Nation’, Economic and Political Weekly (24 June), 1520–8.

148

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Lutgendorf, P. (2003) ‘Jai Santoshi Maa Revisited’, in S.B. Plate (ed.), Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 14–42. McKeon, M. (1987) The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mukherjee, M. (1984) Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Prasad, M.M. (1998a) ‘Back to the Present’, Cultural Dynamics, 10(2), 123–32. ——. (1998b) Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajadhyaksha, A. (1986) ‘Neo-Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India’, Framework, 32–33, 20–67. ——. (1987) ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14–15, 47–78. Rajadhyaksha, A. and Willemen, P. (eds) (1999) Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, revised edn. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951). New Delhi: Government of India Press. Todorov, T. (1973) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vanaik, A. (1990) The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India. London and New York: Verso. ——. (1997) The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization. London: Verso. Vasudevan, R.S. (1993) ‘Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 23–24, 51–79. Vitali, V. (2006) ‘On the Frontal Subjects of the Hindi Melodrama: Notes for a Comparative Approach to Film’, Boundary2, 33(2), 159–76.

9 From Genre Flick to Art Film: Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill and Pistol Opera Temenuga Trifonova

Insofar as serialization is premised on the reproduction of a common diegetic world, it limits the potential for the remaking of genre conventions. On the other hand, lacking the open-ended, hypothetically infinite nature of the film series, the film sequel is likely to throw the remaking of genre conventions into greater relief. A sequel recreates the diegetic world established in the original film and simply generates a new series of events/adventures/obstacles for the original characters. Inasmuch as it is mostly genre films that lend themselves to sequelization, one would expect a great deal of consistency between an original and its sequel, both of which are circumscribed by the same generic rules and expectations, regardless of specific differences in terms of storyline. This is not the case, however, with Seijun Suzuki’s Pistol Opera/Pisutoru Opera (Japan, 2001), the long-awaited sequel to his incomprehensible yakuza film Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin (Japan, 1967), for which he was fired by the Nikkatsu Corporation, the studio under which he made his first films. Pistol Opera continues Suzuki’s indirect critique of Japanese militarism in Elegy to Violence/Kenka Ereji (1966), which treated violence as a sublimation of the male protagonist’s frustrated sexual drive. For whatever reason, Suzuki felt that a lesbian warrior (the Agent refers to Stray Cat’s model gun as her ‘lover’ and there are several explicit and implicit references throughout the film to lesbianism) would deliver the strongest critique of militarism, conventionally aligned with masculinity, and of violence as a staple of the yakuza genre. Although Pistol Opera addresses the problem of violence in a much more direct way – characters within the film discuss responsibility, guilt and the uselessness of violence, the latter attributed to sexual repression – it would be wrong to argue that nothing in Branded to Kill prepared us for the sequel’s politicized 149

150

Genre in Asian Film and Television

reflections on violence. The sequel’s aestheticization of violence was just the next logical step in the deconstruction of genre conventions that was already underway in Branded to Kill and Suzuki’s other films from the 1960s. Branded to Kill remains within the orbit of the yakuza film: by foregrounding genre conventions, whether in a flattering, parodic or ironic fashion, Suzuki both exposes these conventions and, at the same time, makes use of them, i.e., concealing them again. Pistol Opera, however, suggests that a serious critique of violence would have to go beyond the playful subversion of genre conventions, in fact beyond film itself. Rather than playing with genre conventions, the sequel substitutes one set of conventions for another: it imports the conventions of other arts – kabuki, photography, installation art, performance art and modern dance – into the medium of film, ultimately reducing the film medium to just one art technique among the many used in the film. In Branded to Kill, described as ‘an unholy marriage of Robbe-Grillet, Robert Aldrich and Tex Avery’ (Hunter 1998: 29), Suzuki freely indulges his fancy for dissociating the image track from the sound track, flaunting and parodying visual and narrative clichés, experimenting with the graphic properties of the film image, with temporal and spatial disorientation, odd camera angles, deliberately mismatched eyelines, a direct address to the camera, intertextual references, absurd characters and theatrical acting. The film tells the story of hamster-faced, rice-obsessed Hanada, a.k.a. ‘No. 3 Killer’ – a caricature of the stereotypical tough yakuza – whose loyalty to the gang becomes confused by his obsession with eliminating the phantom ‘No. 1 Killer’, the top gangster in the Guild’s unofficial ranking of hit men, and by his romantic yearning for the inscrutable femme fatale Misako. Shot in crisp black and white, which gives it an improvisational, spontaneous feel and maintains an impression of realism even when the story veers towards the bizarre and the incomprehensible, Branded to Kill is a stylized genre flick, whose theatricality lies in foregrounding the conventions of the yakuza genre and of classical cinema. Pistol Opera tells the same story, replacing the ridiculous, sex-crazed Hanada with the sexy, lesbian Stray Cat, a female assassin who tries to move up from her rank of ‘No. 3 Killer’ in the criminal underworld. To achieve her goal, she must eliminate ‘100 Eyes’ and ‘Useless Man’, the top-ranked killers of the Assassins Guild. Occupying a tentative place in between experimental film, avant-garde film, experimental theatre on film, filmed performance, kabuki adapted for the screen and installation art, Pistol Opera might be more accurately described as – to use Bazin’s term – ‘mixed cinema’. Suzuki re-uses many of his signature

Temenuga Trifonova 151

techniques but ups the ante: whatever was, in the original film, slightly off-beat, delightfully surreal or simply absurd becomes over-stylized and hyper-self-reflexive. While in Branded to Kill, Suzuki poked some good-natured fun at European art cinema (Antonioni, for instance) – e.g., placing his characters in exaggeratedly minimalist modernist landscapes and cityscapes, setting Hanada’s ludicrous ‘beastly’ rice/sex sessions with his wife in an ultra-modern bare apartment, and alternating between languid and quick pans across long, empty corridors to the accompaniment of a light-hearted, bouncy score – in the sequel, he transforms the sublimely ridiculous into the self-consciously artsy: a bored little girl recites Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ or dances maniacally to Humpty Dumpty’s song, supposedly conveying No. 3 Killer’s loneliness, alienation and a little bit of that all too familiar postmodern ennui. Western film critics tend to regard the Japanese New Wave (from the late 1950s to the early 1970s) as merely derivative of other new waves, the French one in particular (Desser 1988: 3). However, while the French New Wave consisted of independent young filmmakers supported by government subsidies, the Japanese New Wave began at two of the most commercial studios in Japan, Shochiku and Nikkatsu, and grew out of the rebellion of a number of young filmmakers who had been slaving away in the rigid assistant director system with little chance of directing their own films.1 The remaking of genre conventions in Branded to Kill was made possible precisely by the restrictions imposed by the studio production context on imaginative directors like Suzuki, who began his career as a genre hack at Nikkatsu.2 Almost all Nikkatsu films were production-line quickies, made on very low budgets and usually released as the bottom half of double-bills. Looking back to those early years, Suzuki attributes his flamboyant style to his boredom and impatience with the mediocre scripts he was asked to direct, and the simple necessity of standing out among the numerous young assistant directors he was competing with.3 Although his films appeared to be parodies of popular genres like yakuza action films and pink films,4 Suzuki did not parody 1

In the Japanese industry’s assistant director system, the assistant director was expected to learn the ropes of the studio system and follow in the style of their director mentor. 2 Suzuki’s career at Nikkatsu lasted from 1956 to 1968. 3 Interview with Suzuki included on the Pistol Opera DVD. 4 ‘Pink films’ are Japanese softcore pornographic films that first appeared in the early 1960s and came to dominate the Japanese domestic market from the mid1960s to the mid-1980s.

152

Genre in Asian Film and Television

the genres as such but used their limitations as a source of inspiration. His ‘method’ consisted of ‘bring[ing] tired material to life by discarding inessential links in the narrative structures, judiciously exaggerating other elements in the story and decorating the whole with stylized colors and boldly theatrical visual effects’ (Rayns 1994: 7). The shift from ‘theatricality’ understood as stylization of genre conventions (Branded to Kill) to ‘theatricality’ understood as an extension of cinema to other arts (Pistol Opera) is a direct result of the loss of this essential tension between studio/genre restrictions and Suzuki’s eccentric imagination. Pistol Opera tries to approximate the Gesamtkunstwerk5 form of kabuki, a form of baroque theatre combining song, dance, storytelling and skill. It is no accident that Suzuki’s most theatrical film focuses on female protagonists: after all, kabuki was originally a female performance art, banned in 1629 because the Confucianists feared its association with prostitution. Kabuki performing groups consisted of courtesans whose performance was mostly a way of showcasing their ‘goods’ for potential customers. The original kabuki was replaced by boys’ kabuki (with boys playing women’s parts), but this was also banned as the boys presented an equal danger to warriors and priests (Kawatake 2003: 129). The exhibitionism, promiscuity and fierce individualism of No. 3 Killer (code name ‘Stray Cat’) in Pistol Opera, along with her ‘unconventional’ sexual orientation, could perhaps be seen as a kind of indirect acknowledgment of kabuki’s real origins. The theatre architecture in kabuki ‘conforms to the theatrical genre being performed and is strictly determined by it’ (Kawatake 2003: 29); in this, kabuki differs from Western drama, which is generally performed on some type of proscenium stage. The different level of theatricality and audience involvement in kabuki is evidenced in one of the essential elements of the stage: the hanamichi, an aisle-style passageway located at stage right and running through the auditorium. The hanamichi produces a simultaneous effect of identification and alienation (2003: 79), providing the audience with ‘cinematic close-ups’ of the actors as they walk down the hanamichi and strike poses (2003: 39). The construction of the stage, especially the presence of the hanamichi, transforms the entire playhouse into ‘theatrical space’, giving the kabuki audience a sense of dynamic participation in the play that is absent from Western theatre. Although the hanamichi does not figure in his films, Suzuki often uses a kabuki acting technique called ‘mie’, in which an actor strikes a 5

‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, a term attributed to Richard Wagner, stands for the notion of a ‘total’, ‘integrated’ or ‘complete’ artwork.

Temenuga Trifonova 153

pose at dramatic points in the narrative and holds it for several seconds. In the majority of scenes in Pistol Opera, the camera either ‘finds’ the actors already framed, as if posed for a picture, or approaches them through a very deliberate and obvious camera movement (panning, tilting, tracking) and ‘waits’ for them to ‘strike a pose’. The purpose of mie is to transform every moment in a kabuki play into a picture: Pistol Opera is made up of precisely such ‘pictures’ or ‘tableaux’. Almost all interactions in Pistol Opera imitate kabuki’s direct address to the camera; in fact, even when Suzuki’s characters seem to be talking to each other, their dialogue is staged as a monologue. Not only does Suzuki regularly break the 180-degree rule but his characters, often in separate shots, recite their lines as though they were performing on a stage. Suzuki’s films are ‘theatrical’ not only in the sense of being ‘unrealistic’ from a Western point of view, but also in the sense of being ‘non-generic’ from the perspective of established Japanese genres. His versions of the ‘wataridori’ (migrating bird) series,6 which achieved great popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, suggest that the ‘theatrical’ often results from the suspension of genre conventions. In treating the familiar wandering theme in Tokyo Drifter/Tokyo nagaremono (1966), for example, Suzuki is not interested in the moral anguish of the last gangster living according to the old code of honour in an immoral corporate world but, instead, lavishes all his attention on the ‘sudden “unrealistic” theatrical eruptions, gusts of wind or flashes of lighting that have no clear “source”’ (Chute 1994: 13). If the nature of a genre film is to follow conventions, which in turn consists of retracing a certain number of steps or plot points, then Suzuki’s strategy of escaping the generic and the predictable is to condense these familiar plot points as much as possible. The construction of his films is not dramatic: drama unfolds in time (the essence of drama lies in its temporality), whereas Suzuki’s films rely on the principle of condensation and thus spatialization (which aligns them with dreamwork). Whenever we describe a film as ‘theatrical’ (as distinguished from ‘realistic’), we try to capture our experience of it as realistic and diverging from realism at the same time. Branded to Kill is theatrical and stylized precisely because the conventions – spatial, narrative, temporal and visual – that it stylizes are still recognized even as they are undermined, played with or gleefully destroyed. This applies not only to 6

A series of films, including When Does the Migrating Bird Return? (1959), The Wandering Guitarist (1960) and Kanto Wanderer (1963), launched by Nikkatsu in the late 1950s and most famous for starring the cult actor Akira Kobayashi.

154

Genre in Asian Film and Television

genre conventions (e.g., the conflict between a gangster’s duty to the gang and his personal feelings) but also to cinematographic ones. In this film, the theatricalization of space does not destroy its reality, despite the fact that characters move across empty, abandoned, anonymouslooking city spaces (tunnels, apartment blocks) that create the sense of a theatrical space. The theatrical space in Pistol Opera, on the other hand, is a realistic imitation of theatrical space, i.e., the theatricalization of space is here literalized: the action is set on actual stages rather than in real settings that merely resemble stages by virtue of their unnatural emptiness. The last sequence of Branded to Kill takes place in a barely lit empty boxing ring, which metaphorically ‘sets the stage’ for the final shoot out between Hanada and phantom Killer No. 1. The point is precisely that the boxing ring ‘looks like’ or ‘functions as’ a stage but is still a boxing ring. By contrast, the last sequence in Pistol Opera takes place not on something that looks like a stage but on a real stage. Suzuki uses real theatrical stages (the Painless Surgeon’s kabuki stage, the Guild’s secret office, the River Styx, the Terror Exposition) and even when filming in real locations, he treats them as if they were stages by always choosing the most striking and visually over-determined arrangement of bodies and shapes within the film frame. Pistol Opera is dominated by two types of space: a circumscribed, claustrophobic, flattened space that regularly forces actors to pose for the camera and address it rather than each other (e.g., the little front yard where Stray Cat meets Agent Uekyo) or an expansive space, usually in a long shot, that reduces the actors’ bodies to just another part of a general design or pattern (e.g., the big wall at the harbour, the sprawling meadows and fields). Accordingly, the film alternates between meditation and action, between carefully composed static shots of characters conversing or talking to themselves and long (mostly static) shots of characters chasing or fighting each other, entering and exiting the film frame as if it were a stage. The kabuki effect is also evident in Suzuki’s excessive attention to framing (using frames within frames, masking parts of the image or sub-dividing spaces using windows, sliding doors or walls) which he shares with other modernist filmmakers. For instance, the opening sequence of Pistol Opera introduces Stray Cat ‘in silhouette form performing a balletic pistol practice behind a semi-transparent shoji paper screen illuminated to look like a lilac sunset’ (Mes and Sharp 2005: 8). Sound is very important in establishing both the realism and theatricality fundamental to kabuki-stylized naturalism. For example, in a kabuki play, different types of clappers are used to announce the

Temenuga Trifonova 155

beginning and ending of the play or to underscore specific dramatic points in the course of the play. A particular kind of clapper called the ‘tsuke’ is used ‘when characters run, for example, or strike a pose or take part in a fight scene, and serve as sound effects that emphasize, and impress an audience with the grandeur of the actor or his gestures or the dramatic situation of the play’ (Kawatake 2003: 93). In Pistol Opera, Suzuki experiments with sound in similar ways: often, he ends an absolutely silent scene or shot with a single sound (of bells or clappers) to mark the end of the scene or he contrasts long shots featuring no sound with closer shots featuring sound. In kabuki, sudden changes in season may be used to underscore the mood of a scene, to emphasize the significance of an action or to depict a character’s psychological state of mind. In all of his films, Suzuki uses such inexplicable changes in landscape or season to emphasize the dramatic significance of a scene or simply to beautify it: cherry blossoms falling to the ground in the winter, blood ‘spilling over’ the whole screen and colouring it in bright red, a sudden gust of wind or, in Pistol Opera, sudden shifts from spring (bright red flowers) to winter (snow in the countryside) and unexplained cuts from shots of the city to shots of the forest. Insofar as ‘theatricality’ can be conceived as a sort of ‘excess’ in relation to some assumed or implied standard, it is relevant to the study of genre because genre too is a sort of implicit standard or limit used to include certain films and exclude others. To understand how Suzuki experiments with the conventions of the yakuza genre in Branded to Kill and Pistol Opera, it is first necessary to say a few words about the genre itself. Unlike samurai films, which are usually centred on the obligations of vassals to their lords, early yakuza films were distinguished by a strong anti-authoritarian agenda (Macias 2001: 96). Their protagonists can be divided into two types, ‘either wandering, sentimental heroes who abide by strict moral codes, or . . . violent thugs only in it for the money. But be they heroic or backstabbing, the operative word for both schools is “antisocial”: yakuza became folk heroes because their stories are the perfect outlet for noncomformist fantasies’ (2001: 95). The yakuza movies made popular by Nikkatsu in the 1950s and 1960s had their predecessors in the period dramas (jidaigeki) of the wandering yakuza/ronin films of the 1920s and early 1930s, which centred on the protagonist’s sense of displacement and alienation from the community. However, 1950s yakuza films played up the yakuza’s ‘transgressive refusal to adhere to the norms of a corrupt society’ (Standish 2005: 277): the yakuza’s nihilism was presented as a heroic rejection of a corrupt world in favour of an abstract spiritual system or an old code of honour.

156

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Eventually, ninkyo eiga (chivalry films), in which noble yakuza heroes tried to reconcile the conflicting demands of giri (obligation to the gang, to the Godfather) and personal desires, were dismissed as too sentimental and were replaced by Nikkatsu Action and New Action Films ‘intended for a younger, more urban crowd [and] filled with mid sixties pop thrills and glamour’ (Macias 2001: 97–9). The move away from ‘classic jidaigeki’, such as The Loyal Forty Seven Ronin/Chushingura (Kunio Watanabe, Japan 1958) and the ninkyo yakuza films, towards the ‘cruel-jidaigeki’ films of the 1960s and 1970s is reflected in the change of pace (faster) and themes (the films are no longer about ‘endurance and mortification’ but focus on the display and aestheticization of violence typical of Western action films) (Standish 2005: 287–8). The ‘bastardization’ of the genre continued through the late 1960s and 1970s, reflecting an increasingly jaded view of yakuza organizations, as they came to be perceived as scheming entrepreneurs rather than noble defenders of the weak (2005: 298–9). Pistol Opera does not fit into this history of the yakuza genre, according to which ‘the increasing drift towards greater visceral appeals through the specularization of violence encouraged in the digital age has further shifted the emphasis away from violence as a performative language of morality or justice to the display of phallic power as the end point’ (2005: 326). By having Stray Cat commit ritualistic suicide as a means of putting an end to the absurd tournament of self-destruction organized by the invisible Guild, the film tries to be both cool (in form) and moralizing (in subject matter). Insofar as it celebrates Stray Cat’s transgressive refusal to live according to the corrupt Guild’s rules and her loyalty to the old code of honour (which demands a ritualized suicide), the sequel to Branded to Kill appears somewhat anachronistic: though technically more polished or ‘cool-looking’ than the original, Pistol Opera tries to revive the meaning of yakuza films belonging to an earlier stage of the genre’s history and draws on the pre-history of the genre, of which kabuki is an important part. The central dramatic conflict in kabuki plays is that between obligation and emotion in the feudal society of Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) (Kawatake 2003: 29). The conflict between emotion and duty in yakuza films is an extension of this central dramatic motif, although it translates the original meaning of the conflict (essentially a conflict between feudal obligation and devotion to one’s family, friends and lovers), ‘updating’ it as the duty to the gang. In kabuki plays and yakuza films, the protagonist must sacrifice wife, parents or children, and prove his loyalty to the feudal lord. Neither Hanada nor Stray Cat fit neatly the

Temenuga Trifonova 157

two types of yakuza protagonists: wandering sentimental heroes or violent thugs. Far from being ‘anti-social’, Hanada is a charming, eccentric and absurd parody of the stereotypical yakuza. Although the film does reference the motif of the gang double-crossing the gang member by hiring Hanada’s wife to kill him, Hanada’s excessive narcissism and obsessive desire to become No. 1 soon become the central preoccupation of the film. Suzuki twists the genre formula once more by translating Hanada’s loyalty to the gang into ridiculous amour fou for the femme fatale. Breaking the conventions of the genre, Suzuki has Hanada sacrifice himself not for the gang but for a woman: Hanada is more of a sensitive tough guy than a stereotypical yakuza who accepts his destiny. Thus, by parodying the conventions of the genre, Suzuki actually individualizes Hanada’s character. The self-righteous Stray Cat, on the other hand, wears her individualism on her sleeve. She never progresses beyond the first image we see of her in the opening sequence: a paper cut-out, a silhouette behind a Japanese screen door. Like Jeff Costello, the cult character of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (France/Italy, 1967), Stray Cat is not a three-dimensional character but a series of allusions to pre-existing generic codes, from her ‘code’ name (she has no proper name) to her anachronistic kimonos contrasted with the ultra-modern cityscape of some anonymous Japanese city. Like Hanada, Stray Cat is ranked third in the hierarchy of assassins/yakuza hired by the mysterious Guild. As she climbs up the hierarchy, she is thwarted by a series of eccentric enemies, including the ‘Teacher’ (a wheelchair-bound killer, played by Jo Shishido), the ‘Painless Surgeon’ (the Western manager of a kabuki theatre who cannot feel pain and prefers Japanese women) and ‘Dark Horse’ (a killer wearing a blonde wig and a black cloak). Branded to Kill’s Hanada, played in the sequel by a different actor (Mikijiro Hira), is number Zero in the hierarchy; since he is out of the game, he can do little more than reminisce nostalgically about the old days and offer Stray Cat advice she did not ask for. Unlike the typical yakuza, whose entire existence revolves around the gang, Stray Cat is jaded and looking for ways to get out of the Guild. Although the Guild’s ranking is still part of the storyline, Stray Cat lacks Hanada’s obsessive urge to climb up the hierarchy. Hanada remains blasé about high-minded questions of loyalty and obligation, but Pistol Opera’s morally and politically minded hit woman openly challenges the Guild’s corrupt actions and its rankings (also commenting on the exhaustion of the yakuza genre itself, of which such rankings were a staple) as well as Hanada’s nostalgic mumbojumbo about the decline of the ‘art of murder’. It is not out of a sense

158

Genre in Asian Film and Television

of loyalty or obligation to the Guild that Stray Cat takes on the killings; throughout the film, she continually underscores the relative nature of the Guild’s ranking and the absurd violence perpetrated in its name. In Pistol Opera, then, Suzuki tries to use a genre predicated on violence to make a political statement about the uselessness of violence. The intensely theatrical nature of the film might lead one to see it as political, especially since the formal and aesthetic innovations of the Japanese New Wave have been frequently read as a sign of a radical politics, simply because from a Western point of view, Japanese cinema is always already more explicitly theatrical and is thus, supposedly, synonymous with Brechtian distanciation (see Desser 1988: 6). Theatricality is not, however, a form of political consciousness, which is to say that strategies of distanciation are not inherently political. The foremost Japanese New Wave directors – Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura – politicized the yakuza genre by using the gang as a metaphor for Japanese social structure. In Oshima’s The Sun’s Burial/Taiyo no hakaba (1960): the youth gang is compared to the militarist band (gang), thus making it clear that the gang is a microcosm of the nation-state. What Oshima shows is that while the gang demands absolute loyalty from its members, the gang can and does betray an individual gangster. The single citizen owes loyalty to the state, but the State need not, does not, reciprocate. (Chute 1994: 52) Suzuki, however, has never been viewed as a political filmmaker. Elegy to Violence is probably the only Suzuki film that has been seen as somewhat political, in particular offering a commentary on the connection between Japanese militarism and the Japanese education system, although critics find the political edge of that film dulled by the cartoonish, theatricalized violence (Chute 1994: 70). Not only does Suzuki usually treat the gang as a staple of the genre but he also tends to ritualize and romanticize the gangster: Kanto Wanderer/Kanto Mushuku (1963) and Tokyo Drifter are about lonely gangsters living according to the old code rather than being political statements about the repressiveness of the Japanese state. As soon as she kills herself, Stray Cat is ‘transformed’ into a miniature, doubled reflection of herself, which appears in the ‘eyes’ (‘100 Eyes’?) of a pair of binoculars. It remains unclear whether this image is supposed to suggest that through her suicide, Stray Cat becomes ‘100 Eyes’ herself or that her ritualistic suicide is monitored (and, in fact, caused) by the mysterious, omniscient Guild. The ritualized suicide seems to confirm the essentially conservative nature of

Temenuga Trifonova 159

the yakuza film, its investment in the beautiful but fruitless rebellion of the tragic hero. The ambiguous ending throws into doubt whatever feminist and anti-nationalist aspirations the film might have had, and brings into focus the irreconcilable conflict between the sequel’s politics and aesthetics. Pistol Opera treats the central conflict between giri (obligation) and emotional ties in a more direct manner than Branded to Kill, which subordinates the problem of obligation to Hanada’s ridiculous determination to become No. 1 and to his romantic/sexual obsession with Misako. The tone of the sequel, on the other hand, is cynical, jaded and morally indignant rather than absurdist. From the very beginning, Stray Cat is established as a member of the Guild, a hired killer who does not actually believe in the Guild’s rankings but who is tired and bored with the jobs she has been doing for them. Throughout the film, she delivers several speeches about the manipulativeness of the Guild which, she argues, has become blind and is using ‘dirty killing techniques’. The tone of the film keeps shifting between, on the one hand, an almost embarrassing earnestness – in the politically oriented sections, which foreground the break-up of the bond of loyalty between lord and vassal, gang and gang member, state and citizen (the State/Agent Uekyo betrays the individual citizen/Stray Cat) – and, on the other hand, an equally embarrassing romantic admiration for Stray Cat’s morbid, ‘existentialist’ fascination with death. On the one hand, it seems that Suzuki is criticizing the corrupt power of the nation-state. From this point of view, Pistol Opera appears as a rather transparent allegory of the omniscience (hence the name of No. 1 Killer: ‘100 Eyes’) and manipulativeness of the nation-state. The agent who gives Stray Cat her different jobs tricks all members of the Guild into believing that a No. 1 Killer really exists, but by the end of the film, we find out that Uekyo herself is ‘100 Eyes’ and that she has used her unlimited power (an unlimited power only the state could have) to break up the Guild by turning its members against one another, manipulating them into killing one another under the illusion that they would thus become No. 1 in the Guild’s ranking. The film’s pacifist rhetoric is difficult to miss: apart from the multiple references to an International Terror Exposition (the penultimate sequence is set entirely in the Exposition Pavilion), we are constantly bombarded with images of violence and torture, from the big glass jars containing human foetuses, the guillotine silhouetted against a blue screen and the images of the atomic bomb accompanied by accounts of the painfulness of birth to Sayoko’s obsessive dream of bloody national flags, a dream she recounts

160

Genre in Asian Film and Television

draped in an American flag and surrounded by stereotypical ‘representatives’ of rebellious youth. In a series of scenes set by what appears to be the River Styx, Stray Cat encounters the ghosts of the people she has killed and is overcome with guilt and confusion. Her final suicide is easily read as a pacifist act, an act of violence to herself that is supposed to put an end to the violence in which she has been forced to participate all along by the invisible and all-powerful Guild/nation-state. The political allegory extends into a re-examination of national identity through the deliberate conflation of the identities of the three main female characters (Stray Cat, the little girl Sayoko and Agent Sayoko Uekyo). The switch from a male (Hanada) to a female (Stray Cat) protagonist, along with the emphasis on female identity and sexuality, is already political inasmuch as a focus on women in Japanese cinema has typically served to reveal the inner tensions and conflicts in Japanese society. In an interview with Joan Mellen, actress Hidari Sachiko claims that ‘if you want to say something about Japan, you have to focus on women’ (in Desser 1988: 108). The image of women in Japanese society is rather ambivalent, ranging from worship (the Priestess/Mother archetype) to hatred or fear (the Whore archetype) (see Desser 1988: 108). Given that Japanese films did not even feature women until the 1920s (before then women’s roles were played by men), it is not surprising that the very presence of women in women’s roles has already been considered a political act: the sexual explicitness of Japanese New Wave films not only recuperated the eroticism of kabuki but, insofar as it offered a commentary on the sexual repressiveness of Japanese culture, was inherently political. Suzuki became part of the pink film boom at the three largest Japanese studios with his 1964 film Gate of Flesh/Nikutai no mon and other pink films, some with political undertones (Story of a Prostitute/Shunpu den, 1965), others being more generic (Naked Age/Suppadaka no nenrei, 1959; Everything is Crazy/Subete ga kurutteru, 1960) (Desser 1988: 99–102). In Pistol Opera, Suzuki re-politicizes the image of women by conflating the two diametrically opposed archetypes of the prostitute and the priestess, and by representing Stray Cat as a suicidal lesbian warrior who refuses to play by the rules set up by the Guild, voluntarily taking herself out of the competition for the No. 1 ranking. Stray Cat’s self-sacrifice is not, however, meant to redeem a corrupt man; her ritualistic death confirms her place in the warrior class. Throughout the film, Suzuki foregrounds the sexual identity of Stray Cat, Agent Sayoko Uekyo and Sayoko the little girl. During their first encounter, the agent asks Stray Cat whether she is a lesbian. Stray Cat’s answer, as well as her behaviour throughout

Temenuga Trifonova 161

the film, is ambiguous enough not to disprove the agent’s suspicion. The little girl Sayoko, who refers to Stray Cat as her ‘sister’, offers to help Stray Cat masturbate. Eroticism and hints of lesbianism persist in the scene in which the agent kidnaps Sayoko, takes her to what appears to be an all-girl boarding school where everyone wears Victorian-styled laced clothes, dresses her up like a doll and orders her to lick cake frosting from the agent’s fingers. Later in the film, the girl makes up her own face to look like a kabuki actress until her facial features become indistinguishable from those of Agent Sayoko. The girl then proceeds to draw a portrait of Stray Cat by looking at her own reflection in the mirror. The deliberate confusion of female identities is further complicated by the ambiguity of the girl’s place in the narrative: she starts out as a more or less identifiable character, but as Stray Cat and the Agent become entangled in their power struggle, the girl begins to assume a symbolic function, mediating between the other two female characters in a way that emphasizes the blurring of their identities. We expect film sequels, like film remakes, to reflect significant changes in cultural, social, stylistic and technical values, especially when we are talking about a sequel made more than 30 years after the original film, as is the case with Pistol Opera. However, Pistol Opera provides us with the curious case of a sequel that is technically more advanced than the original film yet semantically anachronistic inasmuch as it returns to an earlier, idealistic and sentimental version of the yakuza film, in which the Japanese gangster functioned as a sort of a critic of the status quo, ‘a critic of modern society, a rebel who preferred the ancient warrior code as adopted by gangsters to the cynicism of the modern Progress . . . [and one who] . . . had to pay for his rebellion by dying’ (Chute 1994: 21). Although the sequel appears to be stylistically consistent with the rest of Suzuki’s oeuvre, it also stands out as a demonstration of the influence of the production context on a director’s approach to genre and thus, inevitably, on his style. Suzuki’s transition from studio filmmaking to independent filmmaking resulted in a shift from genre subversion (Branded to Kill) to genre destruction (Pistol Opera). In remaking the conventions of the yakuza genre along gender and political lines and in deliberately exaggerating Suzuki’s already stylized approach to staging and directing, the sequel – made outside the studio system – blurs the distinction between genre films and art cinema, and extends the limits of the medium itself. Pistol Opera is not just a film but a sort of a multimedia experience, a fusion of avant-garde film, kabuki, installation art, performance art and modern dance. The increased level of stylization and theatricalization in the sequel attests to Suzuki’s

162

Genre in Asian Film and Television

broader interest in cinema as an art form rather than in the particulars of a specific genre. Although Pistol Opera is as visually gorgeous as Suzuki’s other films, its indifference to genre conventions pushes it further in the direction of avant-garde art rather than non-conventional cinema. The only thing that keeps it somewhat connected to the yakuza genre are references to the basic storyline of Branded to Kill and the reappearance of characters from that film, but these remain subordinated to Suzuki’s demand for visually startling compositions and, contrary to Suzuki’s long self-professed interest in pure entertainment, for a worthy political ‘message’ that would transcend the ‘low-brow’ nature of the yakuza genre. The result, paradoxically, is a film too blatantly political to be truly radical, a genre film too artsy to be a true yakuza film, an art film closer to art than to film – in short, a film whose politics and aesthetics remain at odds with each other.

References Chute, D. (1994) ‘Branded to Thrill’, in S. Field and T. Rayns (eds), Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 9–19. Desser, D. (1988) Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hunter, J. (1998) Eros in Hell: Sex, Blood and Madness in Japanese Cinema. Washington DC: Creation Books. Kawatake, T. (2003) Kabuki: Baroque Fusion of the Arts, F. and J. Connell Hoff (trans.). LTCB International Library Selection N13. The International House of Japan. Macias, P. (2001) Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Corporation. San Francisco, CA: Cadence Books. Mes, T. and Sharp, J. (2005) The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Rayns, T. (1994) ‘The Kyoka Factor: The Delights of Suzuki Seijun’, in S. Field and T. Rayns (eds), Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 5–11. Schilling, M. (1999) Contemporary Japanese Film. New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill. Standish, I. (2005) A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film. New York and London: Continuum. Washburn, D. and Cavanaugh, C. (eds) (2001) Word and Image in Japanese Cinema. Cambridge University Press.

Part III Genre and Cross-Cultural Representation

This page intentionally left blank

10 (In)Action Film: Genre and Identity in Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle Angelina Karpovich

The Needle/Igla (Rashid Nugmanov, USSR, 1988) was unanimously hailed by critics as both the starting point and the most memorable film of the ‘New Wave’ of Kazakh cinema (Horton and Brashinsky 1992; Zebrina Pruner 1992; Dönmez-Colin 1997, 2006). The Kazakh New Wave was to be a brief but exciting moment that produced a handful of innovative and energetic low-budget films, both informed by and responding to the newfound openness of the perestroika and glasnost reforms, which began in the Soviet Union in 1987. The reforms brought with them a relaxation of state control over most areas of public life. Soviet cinema responded by focusing on topics which had previously been taboo, particularly Stalinist repressions (Repentance/Monanieba, Tengiz Abuladze, USSR, 1987) and contemporary sexuality (Little Vera/ Malenkaya Vera, Vasily Pichul, USSR, 1988; Intergirl/Interdevochka, Pyotr Todorovskiy, USSR/Sweden, 1989). The Needle initially seems to fit into a similar context, with its plot nominally centred on drugs, crime and violence, though the portrayal of these ‘controversial’ topics is never explicit. Another significant, but not explicit, feature of the film is its portrayal of Kazakhstan as a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic site. While the film’s plot does not engage with the issues of nationality or ethnicity in any obvious way, the fact that its protagonist is a member of the Soviet Korean ethnic group adds another layer of complexity to its possible interpretations. In this chapter, I use The Needle as a case study in both generic and national indeterminacy. Film often functions as a response to the sociocultural and political-ideological preoccupations of the environment in which it is produced,1 and instability and change in the wider culture 1

See, for example, the chapters by Liao, Vitali and Mukherjee in this volume. 165

166

Genre in Asian Film and Television

can impact films, as well as other cultural forms, both thematically and aesthetically. With the passage of time, films produced during tumultuous moments encapsulate both the historical changes themselves and the artistic responses they inspired at the time. The Needle was produced on the brink of the fall of not only a state and a state apparatus, but a powerful ideology. It captured Kazakhstan at the moment just before the country had to literally re-Orient itself, reconceptualizing itself not as a constituent of the multi-national yet effectively homogenized/ Russified Soviet Union, but as a newly independent and newly Asian state. If film, and other forms of popular culture, frequently embody or are co-opted into embodying the complex ideals of statehood and nationhood,2 then The Needle is also a case study of what happens when the national project completely falls apart. The Needle is short for a feature film, lasting only 76 minutes. In that time, the protagonist, a monosyllabic young man who may or may not be named Moro (played by the Soviet rock star Viktor Tsoy), returns from Moscow to an unnamed Kazakh town, finds that his ex-girlfriend Dina is addicted to morphine and attempts to rescue her, first by taking her away to the desert which used to be the Aral Sea and then by waging a one-man war against the local drug pushers. Just when it looks like he might have prevailed, he is stabbed. The film’s ending is highly ambiguous: it is not clear whether Moro’s wound is lethal, nor is it clear whether his attacker was acting deliberately on behalf of the drug pushers or randomly. The film ends with the stabbed Moro standing up, lighting a cigarette and walking away from the camera, a typical iconic lone hero (the shot is a direct reversal of the film’s beginning, in which Moro walks towards the camera and lights a cigarette). Less than two years after the film’s release, at the height of his popularity as a musician and countercultural figure, Viktor Tsoy died in a car crash.3 His own death had an impact on the way the fate of his character in The Needle would be perceived by viewers and critics from then on; it removed much of the sense of ambiguity from the ending. This brief plot summary perhaps does not convey how or why The Needle became such a significant film within the Soviet and Kazakh cultural contexts of the late 1980s, or why it achieved both international critical acclaim and widespread domestic box office success. The film proved an instant hit: over nine million tickets were sold in 2

See Liao and Chua in this volume. The details of Tsoy’s death instantly rendered him a posthumous cult figure: the only item recovered unscathed from the wreckage of his car was a tape containing the only master copy of his vocals for what became his band’s last album. 3

Angelina Karpovich 167

the first three months of release in the Soviet Union (Zebrina Pruner 1992); in terms of critical acclaim, it was hailed ‘as one of the top ten Soviet films of the glasnost period, and by some as the major film of the period’ (Horton and Brashinsky 1992: 97). The answer lies partly in the film’s style: The Needle wholeheartedly embraces a pop sensibility in an environment where pop sensibilities had never existed – and were never allowed to exist – before. The hero is monosyllabic, dressed in black and inevitably tragic; Tsoy’s own untimely and tragic death only months later would seal his fate as a post-Soviet James Dean, a charismatic cult figure whose life and death coincided with a key period of social and cultural change. The film delights in its pop cultural associations: Tsoy’s band, Kino (coincidentally, the Russian word for ‘cinema’), provides much of the soundtrack, and another rock star, Pyotr Mamonov, plays the villain drug dealer. At the time of the film’s release, the rock stars were countercultural figures, largely unacknowledged by the mainstream Soviet media. The film’s most striking location, the desert left behind by the receding Aral Sea, had made a tangible impact on Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but the scale of the environmental disaster and its human cost had not been widely publicized in the rest of the Soviet Union, being overshadowed by the more immediate and far-reaching impact of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Thus, in terms of spectacle, The Needle offered the Soviet audiences a close look at an environment and a life-style which had been deliberately overlooked by the mainstream. The pop sensibility of The Needle carries into its treatment of generic conventions. It has been described variously as a ‘burlesque thriller’ (Dönmez-Colin 2006) and a combination of ‘[the] western with bytovoi [kitchen-sink] film, thriller with tragicomedy, drama with light comedy, social fiction with a musical’ (Zebrina Pruner 1992: 799). Horton and Brashinsky refer to it as, at various times, a ‘youth-related movie’ (1992: 67), an ‘action film with a touch of the melodramatic’ (1992: 186), an ‘off-beat, flippant thriller’ (1992: 238) and ‘a cousin of the stereotypical Hollywood thriller, melodrama, and road movie, seen through the lens of a European film mentality, particularly that of the French new wave, which adored old Hollywood’ (1992: 240). In contrast to Horton and Brashinsky’s invocation of the French New Wave and in particular, Breathless/A bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960), with its similar ‘type of hero and the alienated mode of narration’ (1992: 239), Zebrina Pruner situates The Needle within a late Soviet literary and cinematic narrative tradition of pofigism, ‘a term that comes from a Russian slang expression po figu, which indicates absolute indifference’ (Zebrina Pruner 1992: 796).

168

Genre in Asian Film and Television

What is striking about The Needle is the extent to which it flirts with, but resists, conventional genre classifications. It could have been an action film, except that the scale of the action is never big enough. The interlude at the Aral desert between the hero and the woman who would, in a more straightforward narrative, be his love interest is whimsically lyrical, but is not in the least bit romantic. Even the ending is generically confusing: simultaneously potentially tragic and light-hearted. The generic indeterminacy of The Needle prompts a question: where could it have come from? There are few obvious antecedents, either in Central Asian cinema or in the wider context of Soviet cinema. Assessments of the pre-perestroika state of the Kazakh film industry differ. Zebrina Pruner states that ‘the cinematography of Central Asia traditionally had been regarded as a “second-class” regional cinema’ (1992: 792) which ‘showed the influence of Russian ideology in the major themes it developed’ (1992: 793); the history of the Kazakhfil’m Studios had been entirely undistinguished: The Studios started operations in 1944; during the mid-1960s and early 1970s they underwent a process of modernization but they never reached their annual production capacity of six full-length feature films per year. Yet, at the same time, their neighbour, the Kirgizfil’m Studio, won public admiration and international attention from scholars, and was transformed into a cultural centre for the entire Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Kazakhfil’m Studios remained in obscurity. (Zebrina Pruner 1992: 792) Horton and Brashinsky see the relatively lacklustre output of preperestroika Kazakhfil’m as part of a much wider tradition of cultural stagnation: Kazakhstan, like the other Asian republics, had always been notorious in the Soviet Union for its artistic (and nonartistic) conservatism. Each of these republics might give birth to a creative filmmaker or a fresh movie, but the average film was depressingly faceless. From provincial Brezhnevian die-hardism to the miserable technical condition of the studios, everything seemed inimical to change even after change was declared an official policy. (1992: 238) At the same time, Dönmez-Colin (1997) claims that Kazakhfil’m’s output had been successful, if uninspiring:

Angelina Karpovich 169

[Kazakhstan’s capital] Alma-Ata . . . was already the largest film centre of the USSR after Moscow, Leningrad . . . and Kiev. The origins of the Kazakh Film Studios actually went back to the 1930s. . . . Eisenstein shot two parts of . . . Ivan the Terrible there between 1943–45. But propaganda films of the past years, historical dramas stressing Communist views, or love stories with predictable endings, created a cinema with little human interest. (1997: 115) Regardless of which point in history we choose to mark as the start of Kazakh cinema, The Needle was distinctly non-mainstream in both the Kazakh and the wider Soviet contexts, most prominently in its empathic address of youth culture. Perhaps as a result, the film marks a distinct departure from both the themes and iconography of earlier Kazakh cinema. Both Nogerbek (2004) and Padunov (2004) pay particular attention to The Needle’s representation of Kazakhstan’s landscape. Padunov (2004) reflects that one of the most striking aspects of The Needle, as in the other Kazakh New Wave films, is: the virtual absence of Kazakhstan itself except as a metaphorical space within which the human condition is allowed to work itself out as a cautionary allegory. It is not so much that the specificity of the urban landscape and the rural countryside are not absent in the very fabric of each film; it is, rather, that they are included but constantly abstracted, just as the films’ heroes are engaged in quests that are more allegorical than personal. For Nogerbek (2004): Nugmanov . . . ignores traditional filmic images, those pictures of national life reinforced in Kazakh Soviet cinema. He tries to start from scratch, tries to give shape to a new, stylized cinematic space. Nugmanov’s film represents, for the first time in Kazakh cinema, an entirely new, unfamiliar Kazakhstan, with a dried-up sea, and incurably ill drug addict, a strange hero . . . The characters and problematics in The Needle are cosmic ones, they are not attached to any concrete national space. Yet, according to Horton and Brashinsky, it is only the location, however untypical its cinematic representation, that marks the film as Kazakh: the Kazakh New Wave ‘is not Kazakh except in location. In a country [the USSR] overwhelmed with ethnic clashes, the young Asian

170

Genre in Asian Film and Television

filmmakers began to search for a universal mode of film language, not caring much about their ethnic identity’ (1992: 239). The highly ambiguous sense of place introduced in the landscape of The Needle is echoed in the soundtrack. Russian is the predominant language, but it is punctuated not only by Kazakh dialogue but also, seemingly entirely randomly, by English, French, Italian and German programming on the many radios and TV sets featured and heard throughout the film. Linguistically as well as geographically, The Needle seems to deliberately avoid the possibility of being pinned down to any specific location. According to Zebrina Pruner, even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the urban indigenous population of Kazakhstan continued to speak only Russian, while the rural population spoke almost exclusively Kazakh (1992: 793). Rashid Nugmanov himself admitted that The Needle was written and filmed in Russian because ‘In our family we almost never speak Kazakh, but instead we used Russian. I don’t feel strongly about speaking Kazakh, you see’ (quoted in Horton and Brashinsky 1992: 240). To what extent, then, can we talk of The Needle as an ‘Asian’ film? According to Kho (1987): The geographical concept Soviet Central Asia generally comprises the Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kirgiz and Tadzhik [sic] republics . . . This area is located to the north of Iran and Afghanistan and to the west of the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. Historically this region has been at a crossroads between Eastern and Western cultures since ancient times. (1987: 13) Conceptualizing Soviet Central Asia as ‘Asia’ already requires an adjustment; the populations of the region were ‘Russified’ (both linguistically and culturally, for example, through the adoption of Russian-style names) and, indeed, in some Central Asian republics, the population of ethnic Russians could outnumber the indigenous people whose names the republics bore.4 In the Soviet context, the Central Asian republics (along with the other non-Slavic republics) were simultaneously homogenized (through linguistic practices, which imposed Russian as a first language in schools and frequently ‘reformed’ minority languages by replacing their alphabets with the Cyrillic alphabet) and exoticized (through carefully managed centralized promotion of state-approved 4

In the case of Kazakhstan, according to the 1979 census, Kazakhs comprised 36 per cent of the population and Russians comprised 40.8 per cent (Kho 1987: 24).

Angelina Karpovich 171

folk arts and minority-language literature). The association of ethnic cultures with religion was actively diminished in line with the Soviet state’s atheist ideology. The indigenous populations of Central Asia were indoctrinated into identifying first and foremost as Soviet; as Abikeeva (2004) notes in her overview of the post-Soviet cinemas of Central Asia, the fall of the Soviet Union was the moment at which: we understood ourselves as Asia. China, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey – despite the fact that we had always shared borders – remained for us distant and exotic countries. In one night – to be more exact, the day of the fall of the USSR – they became our tangible neighbours. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that ‘an actual unlocking of the cultural borders took place. Central Asia transformed from Soviet to Asian territory’ (Abikeeva 2004). The Needle, produced a couple of years before the fall of the Soviet Union, is very much a product and a reflection of these geopolitical tensions. Abikeeva (2004) sees the films of the Kazakh New Wave as an expression of ‘a new perception of life . . . It wasn’t Soviet anymore and it wasn’t Asian yet’. At the same time, within the Soviet context, the ‘otherness’ of a non-European, non-Russian ethnic identity became largely invisible. In the case of The Needle, Russian critics referred to the film’s origins as ‘Asian’, ‘Oriental’ or otherwise ‘other’, but only in the most superficial terms. Horton and Brashinsky quote Soviet critic Avdotya Smirnova’s remark that ‘The Needle looks at a vice [drugs] with an oriental wisdom. The film speaks not about a vice, but a fate’ (1992: 97). Zebrina Pruner (1992) ascribes the success of the Kazakh New Wave films, exemplified by The Needle, to ‘Eurasian cinema’s attempt to integrate contemporary European Russian culture with the moderate pace and philosophy of Asian civilization. And the cosmopolitan air of the New Wave was the product of the fusion of Asian values with the Russian aspiration toward a western lifestyle’ (1992: 791). Finally, Drozdova (1994) uses a striking metaphor to draw passing attention to the protagonist’s ethnicity, but moves on without any kind of a conclusion about its possible implications: ‘Victor [sic] Tsoy, slashed by the razor blades of his oriental eyes, looks into slack space, where everybody has become exhausted by everything’ (1994: 127). Russian critics, then, seem to possess a vague awareness that the film is somehow non-Russian and that this non-Russianness is somehow significant, yet this avenue is left distinctly unexplored. Contrast this with

172

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Abikeeva’s (2004) perspective on the film’s significance, in an overview which draws on the works of Benedict Anderson and Franz Fanon to place Central Asian cinema in the context of postcolonialism: ‘The new hero had an Asian face – it was remarkable.’ Abikeeva goes on to suggest that the film’s apparent placelessness, discussed above, may in itself be a specifically Kazakh characteristic, though one which would not be obvious to non-Kazakh viewers: Historically, Kazakhs have been living in the region of the intersection of the West and the East, and as nomads, they have been very adaptive to various cultural influences. The Kazakh filmmakers used this cultural ability to adapt and enriched it with a thorough knowledge of Western cinema and Western techniques of filmmaking; this made their films understandable and open to the whole world. (2004) Russian critics’ superficially Orientalist reviews certainly do not consider the film as part of a specifically Kazakh cultural context. The ‘nationality’ of a film is defined here not by the language in which it is made, or quite by the nationality or ethnicity of its creators, or by the location, but by the institutional/financial circumstances of its creation. The Needle is a Kazakh film because it was made by Kazakhfil’m Studios, regardless of the fact that it was written and filmed in Russian, and does not feature Kazakh actors in any of the main roles. Brashinsky and Horton suggest that the absence of a discussion of The Needle’s ‘ethnic origin’ in Drozdova’s review is ‘understandable’ (1994: 129), given the reviewer’s focus on the film’s significance in the context of Soviet youth culture. The novelty of the film’s youth sensibilities, combined with its reflection of the historical moment in which it appeared, were the elements which seemed significant at the time, even to the film’s director. Rashid Nugmanov is quoted as saying that the New Wave of Kazakh cinema was ‘post-perestroika’: ‘It was about young generations everywhere, be they Kazakh or Russian, or anyone else. It was about new relationships and a new mentality. No ideology, no politics. No restrictions’ (quoted in Dönmez-Colin 2006: 173). Yet, as Brashinsky and Horton state, the film ‘was made in Russian in Alma-Ata by a Kazakh who did not speak Kazakh and starred a Soviet-Korean from Leningrad’ (1994: 129). Some 20-odd years after The Needle was made, its immediate impact on youth culture has receded – viewed today, the film’s depiction of drugs and violence seems very tame by current standards, and the once-energetic rock music of its soundtrack has acquired a distinctly nostalgic tone – while the complex hybridity of its ethnic context comes to the fore.

Angelina Karpovich 173

The film’s narrative does not directly address issues of national or ethnic identity, yet these issues permeated the historical context in which it was made. The film’s hero is visibly Asian. His coolly nonchalant demeanour, his status as a lone hero, and his skill and strength in physical combat are obvious and reminiscent of Bruce Lee, whose films had only recently flooded the nascent Soviet video market. The similarity between Moro and Bruce Lee’s characters is striking and is once again highlighted extra-textually by the parallel between Lee’s and Tsoy’s tragic early deaths. Moro’s Asianness is thus clearly symbolic, perhaps even metonymic. Yet, what is this character, whose presence visibly and metaphorically invokes another, non-Soviet, geographically and culturally distant East Asia, doing in post-perestroika Soviet Kazakhstan? As Kuromiya’s history of ethnic displacement in the Stalin era wryly notes, ‘Sometimes people happen to turn up in improbable places’ (2007: 125). Koreans had lived in Russia, particularly in the Russian Far East, near the Japanese border, since the late nineteenth century. According to the 1937 census, 168,259 Koreans lived in the Soviet Union (Kuromiya 2007), a small minority in the context of the vastness of the Soviet Union, but certainly a culturally distinct one, known in the local Korean dialect as the Koryo Saram. Up until the mid-1930s, the Soviet authorities allowed the Korean minority a certain degree of cultural autonomy: ‘the use of the Korean language in schools, the establishment of a Korean theatre in Vladivostok . . . and the publication of a Korean language newspaper’ (Stephan 1971: 141). Thus, while the Koryo Saram had to learn Russian and take on Russified names, at the same time, they were able to function as a community and maintain their own language, life-style and some cultural institutions. In 1937, virtually the entire Korean population of the Soviet Far East was suddenly forcibly deported to Central Asia, mainly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Stalinist regime would go on to purge and displace other ethnic minorities, but the Korean deportation was the first and largest of these. The reason for the deportation was the increasing tension between the Soviet Union and Japan: According to the head of the [security service] NKVD in the Far East . . . who carried out the massive operation, ‘Stalin did not trust the Koreans at all’. Fearing that as long as they lived near the Soviet borders in the Far East, Japan would use them as spies and infiltrate Soviet territory, Stalin ordered their deportations from the standpoint of counter-intelligence. (Kuromiya 2007: 126)

174

Genre in Asian Film and Television

The exact figure given as the number of the deported varies, but the total is certainly in the tens of thousands. Gelb gives the number of the displaced Koreans as at least 37,000 families (1995: 390) and provides an outline of the hardships they had to face: The Koreans were . . . cramped into overcrowded, underheated, broken down, filthy freight cars that transported them across the entire continent of Asia. At least one train derailed . . . killing over a hundred. Those being transported did not even learn their destination until well underway. The victims spent approximately one month in freight cars . . . Families were sometimes separated . . . Some died before reaching their new homes, and obscure way-stations of the Trans-Siberian remained the only markers for their graves. (1995: 400) Once in Central Asia, the Koreans had to adapt to an unfamiliar and inhospitable environment, which they were restricted from leaving. As Kho puts it: When Koreans lived in the Maritime Region in the Soviet Far East, all they had to do was adapt themselves to the Russian style in daily life because their home style, nature and weather were all more or less the same as those of Korea due to its close proximity to that country. But after they were moved to Central Asia, they had to accustom themselves to both the Russian and the local way of life. (1987: 62–3) The story of ethnic Koreans in Soviet Central Asia, then, is a story of continuous displacement, placelessness, oppression and a cultural identity multiple-times-removed. It is also a history which was not publicly acknowledged within the Soviet Union for over 50 years. Perhaps in light of this, it becomes less surprising that neither Russian film critics nor Western scholars ever directly address the ethnicity of the hero in The Needle. Moro’s ethnicity may indeed be incidental to the film’s narrative (there is little doubt that Tsoy was cast in the lead role because he was a cult figure rather than because his character was specifically written as Korean), but his presence is even more remarkable because it is unremarked upon: the Koryo Saram had rarely if ever featured on Soviet screens before. For decades, the forced displacement of a people went hand-in-hand with a lack of public acknowledgment, not only of the displacement, but of the people’s very existence.

Angelina Karpovich 175

Viktor Tsoy was, at the time of his death, one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent ethnic Koreans; Moro, played by Tsoy, takes on some of the actor’s extra-textual characteristics: the character is dressed in the same style as Tsoy dressed in real life, he is as coolly monosyllabic as the rock star who portrays him, and Tsoy’s voice on the soundtrack occupies a decidedly liminal position in the diegesis (Tsoy’s vocal on the non-diegetic soundtrack is literally the same voice as the voice of Moro, and thus functions as a kind of detached metaphorical voiceover). Moreover, Tsoy’s tragic and untimely death not only parallels but ultimately overshadows the film. Given these multiple parallels and the real-life history of ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan, we can assume that Moro is Korean within the narrative. On one level, the film can certainly be seen as a youth-oriented allegory with few references to politics or nationality; on another level, it offers up a portrayal of a desolate post-perestroika country poised, both literally and symbolically, on the border between ‘East’ and ‘West’, in which people of different ethnicities struggle to communicate or belong and in which an ethnic Korean’s journey to Kazakhstan ends in a tragedy. As I suggested earlier in this chapter, The Needle brought into the mainstream multiple topics which had previously not been widely acknowledged in Soviet public discourse: rock music was one and the environmental disaster of the Aral Sea was another. In addition to these, The Needle contains what for most of its Soviet – and, indeed, foreign – viewers would have been the first cinematic portrayal of a Soviet Central Asian Korean. The fact that Moro’s ethnicity is not acknowledged in the narrative and was unacknowledged by Russian film critics of the time5 should not diminish the significance of the very fact that the film makes visible an ethnic minority which had not been represented on screen before. Despite its apparent rootlessness, then, The Needle managed to invoke a distant, and distinctly non-Soviet, Asia. In retrospect, the film certainly appears to have more in common with East Asia than was apparent to Soviet critics at the time of the film’s release. Nugmanov himself drew parallels between his film and his perception of ‘Asian’ philosophy: I do not put symbols into my work. Later, when people discover many things, it is interesting. Initially, I try to stay away from symbols. I was in Kyoto once in the famous Stone Garden. There are no 5 While Viktor Tsoy’s songs remain phenomenally popular throughout the former Soviet Union, particularly in Russia, his Korean roots continue to be virtually unacknowledged. A contemporary Russian audience would be even less attuned to The Needle’s representation of ‘Asianness’ than the Soviet film critics of the late 1980s.

176

Genre in Asian Film and Television

symbols there. It is so perfectly devoid of meaning that you can put so many meanings to it. I was trying to be perfectly meaningless – without meaning, without philosophy, without symbols – an empty shell. (Quoted in Dönmez-Colin 2006: 175) Nugmanov’s reference to Japanese philosophy and its manifestation in art recalls another, much earlier Soviet cinematic innovator. The link between groundbreaking Soviet cinema and East Asian philosophy and art goes back to Sergei Eisenstein’s fascination with Sino-Japanese theatre, art and poetry, which influenced both his technique and his theorization of what cinema could and ought to achieve (Eisenstein 1969). Consciously or otherwise, Eisenstein’s ideas would continue to resonate with Soviet filmmakers and would be particularly relevant to those who, like the members of the Kazakh New Wave, were trying to produce something distinctive, if not downright revolutionary. Meanwhile, Abikeeva (2004) finds obvious parallels between The Needle and Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels ‘because the film directors are troubadours of modern urban life’. The Needle does indeed have the same whimsical spirit as Wong Kar Wai’s films of the 1990s, perhaps because the latter were also made in a culture anticipating an imminent fundamental shift in its politics. The Needle both captured and was itself a product of a particular and unique moment. Its narrative and generic indeterminacy are perfectly understandable in the context of the hugely politically significant and wildly unstable historical moment in which it was produced. The Kazakh New Wave lasted for a brief, though terrifically exciting, moment. Less than 15 years after the release of The Needle, Kazakh cinema returned to its pre-perestroika unremarkableness: ‘recent Kazakh cinema is virtually unknown in Kazakhstan itself . . . [E]ven though all of the movie theatres in [the capital] Almaty have been fully refurbished . . . no Kazakh films are ever screened in these’ (Padunov 2004). This is due in large part to the harsh impact of the country’s adjustment to new political and economic realities, including a move from state-financed to commercial film production and a return to Soviet-style political authoritarianism,6 but in part also to the passing of the uniquely exciting, transitional historical moment in which the Kazakh New Wave came together. The new realities offer plenty of dramatic tension, but very little of the excitement of new freedoms and the anticipation of the unknown which 6

Tellingly, Kazakhstan was the very last of the Soviet republics to declare its independence after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Angelina Karpovich 177

characterized the perestroika moment. Rashid Nugmanov, who moved to France in the 1990s and shifted his focus to human rights activism rather than cinema, has recently mooted plans for an extensive re-edit of The Needle, which could even amount to a remake. While such a film would certainly find an audience among Viktor Tsoy’s many devoted fans in Russia, it remains to be seen whether it could make a larger impact within what is now a very different world.

References Abikeeva, G. (2004) ‘Ten Years Under the Winds of Different Ideologies’, KinoKultura, Special Issue 1. Available at: www.kinokultura.com/CA/A2tenyears. html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Brashinsky, M. and Horton, A. (eds) (1994) Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost. Cambridge University Press. Dönmez-Colin, G. (1997) ‘Kazakh “New Wave”: Post-Perestroika, Post-Soviet Union’, Central Asian Survey, 16(1), 115–18. ——. (2006) Cinemas of the Other: A Personal Journey with Film-makers from the Middle East and Central Asia. Bristol: Intellect. Drozdova, M. (1994) ‘A Dandy of the Postpunk Era or “Goodbye, America, Oh. . .”’, in M. Brashinsky and A. Horton (eds), Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost. Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, S.M. (1969) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. San Diego: Harcourt. Gelb, M. (1995) ‘An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans’, The Russian Review, 54(3), 389–412. Horton, A. and Brashinsky, M. (1992) The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition. Princeton University Press. Kho, S. (1987) Koreans in Soviet Central Asia. Helsinki: Studia Orientalia. Kuromiya, H. (2007) The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lawton, A. (1992) Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. Cambridge University Press. Nogerbek, B. (2004) ‘Demythologizing and Reconstructing National Space in the Kazakh “New Wave”’, KinoKultura, 3. Available at: www.kinokultura.com/ articles/jan2-04.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Padunov, V. (2004) ‘Stars Above Almaty: Kazakh Cinema Between 1998 and 2003’, KinoKultura, 3. Available at: www.kinokultura.com/articles/jan04.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Stephan, J.J. (1971) ‘The Korean Minority in the Soviet Union’, Journal of the Central Asian Research Centre, XIII(3), 138–50. Zebrina Pruner, L. (1992) ‘The New Wave in Kazakh Cinema’, Slavic Review, 51(4), 791–801.

11 The Golden Glow of the Alps: Capitalism, Globalization and Anime’s Dreams of Europe Cobus van Staden

In 2007, I attended a conference where a German architect spoke about the use of public space in South Korea. Specifically, he referred to the plethora of billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising. Flipping through a collection of images on his laptop, he came to one of a beaming blonde couple towering over Seoul. Isn’t it disturbing, said the architect, that despite the economic success of East Asia, they still feel the need to use images of Europeans to appeal to their own fellow Asians? Don’t they have confidence in the power of their own culture? His implication was clear. Europe’s dominance of the world continues – only this time in the form of images. Yet, is this not an over-simplified view of the relationship between non-Europeans and images of Europe? How should one interpret the use of European settings and characters when they are employed in pop culture from non-European countries? This is not idle speculation. To be fair to the German architect, images of Europe seem to have an almost uncanny power. One of the advantages of animation is how it frees the filmmaker from financial constraints. Setting a series in the studio parking lot or on the moon costs roughly the same. Anime therefore provides a rare glimpse into which backdrops filmmakers would choose if they had complete freedom, and a surprising number of Japanese filmmakers seem to be captivated by Europe. Europe crops up with such frequency in anime that it might be described as an anime sub-genre. In this chapter I want to argue that such a genre delineation could give us a fresh look at the process of cultural globalization. I will start the discussion with a brief genre description, before considering a particular example more closely. During the 1970s, a Japanese company called Zuiyo Eizou produced an anime version of Johanna Spyri’s novel Heidi (1880) for television. 178

Cobus van Staden 179

Heidi, a Girl of the Alps/Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji (Isao Takahata, Japan, 1974) became a hit in Japan and ended up being dubbed and shown in many countries around the world. The anime version of Heidi cannot therefore be read simply as a Japanese encounter with European culture, but as a form of cultural globalization. One of the countries where Heidi became a hit was South Africa. When I first met Heidi we were almost the same age – five years old. It was 1979 and she was speaking Afrikaans. Later, when I moved to Japan, I realized that the yodelling Afrikaans theme tune I knew as a child had a yodelling Japanese counterpart. Heidi retains a potent nostalgic power in both South Africa and Japan, a power that is fundamentally related to its depiction of an Alpine life most audience members have never experienced. I believe that analysing the use of European images in anime and the reception of this series in Japan and South Africa will give us clues about the process of cultural globalization itself.

Anime-ic visions of Europe: a genre To try to use a setting or a background to describe a genre, especially in a field as varied as anime, is a risky venture. In effect, it comes down to defining a genre across other, more conventional, genre lines. Even in a time of increasingly smaller, more obsessive genre descriptions, one still needs a compelling reason to engage in such genre-slashing. In my introduction, I gave a clue to my discomfort with the kinds of assumptions made about the Asian use of European imagery. When I started to list different anime versions of this imagery, I realized that, more than other foreign locales, European settings seem to carry a special weight in anime. Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight/Ribon no Kishi (1967), with its background of a medieval fairytale Europe, was not only the origin of shoujo anime, it was also an early example of the use of European settings in anime. But the fashion for European settings in anime was really set off during the 1970s by the 1972 shoujo manga hit The Rose of Versailles/ Berusai no Bara (Tadao Nagahama and Osamu Dezaki, 1979), which was eventually followed by an anime version. A series of anime adaptations of European children’s books followed during the same decade. The vogue for these visions of a bygone Europe created hits like The Dog of Flanders/Furandaazu no Inu (Yoshio Kuroda, 1975), Anne of Green Gables/ Akage no An (Isao Takahata, 1979) and the series I want to concentrate on in this chapter, Heidi, a Girl of the Alps (see Yamaguchi 2004). In addition to these relatively faithful recreations of European originals, Europe has also become the background to many kinds of anime

180

Genre in Asian Film and Television

plotlines – everything from the melancholy maid fetishism of Emma, a Victorian Romance/Eikokukoi Monogatari Ema (Tsuneo Kobayashi, 2005)1 to the robot invasions of Steamboy/Suchiimuboi (Katsuhiro Ootomo, 2004). To these relatively faithful depictions of European locales I want to add the large amount of anime that takes place against the background of what we might call ‘Europe-in-a-blender’. These works take bits from different European landscapes and combine them like modelling clay into a single landscape. The most famous examples of these landscapes are some of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, including Kiki’s Delivery Service/Majo no Takkyuubin (1989) and Howl’s Moving Castle/Hauru no Ogoku Shiro (2004).2 These landscapes are frequently not explicitly identified and the genre division is perforce a visual one. This is because European settings crop up in strange places in anime – such as a Victorian ballroom on a space station in Mobile Suit Gundam/Kidou Senshi Gandamu (Yoshiyuki Tomino, 1981), a small thatched village as a background to fights between thugs with cannons for arms and kids with magic crystals embedded in their hands in Tales of Symphonia/Teeruzu obu Shinfonia (Haruo Sotozaki, 2007) or maybe the ultimate in postcolonial gravity: pre-war Europe as a hologram on an abandoned spaceship that turns out to be a deathtrap in Memories (Katsuhiro Ootomo, 1996) (see Napier 2005). In many of these cases, one could argue that anime and Hollywood use Europe in the same way – to provide a feeling of safe exoticism and ‘classiness’. Yet this is exactly the reason why I thought delineating this genre is important. Whatever one’s own historical relationship to Europe, we all have a Europe hangover. The dominant paradigm in anime studies in English is to view it as an expression of Japaneseness. I have no quibble with this paradigm, but I want to point out that anime is also a globalized cultural phenomenon. As such, it allows us a view into cultural globalization itself. Heidi, a Girl of the Alps provides a perfect lens to look at the power of European images in non-European culture. Even more crucially, it will allow us to ask the following question: do we need specific cultural (that is, nation-state) knowledge in order to enjoy pop culture? If not, how do we follow stories? These are questions that go to the heart of cultural globalization. Before we start, a quick recap of Heidi’s story. Europe, the nineteenth century. An orphan called Heidi is taken from her adoptive home in a 1

In Japan, the English title also appears as Historian Romance Emma. The series is not related to the Jane Austen novel Emma. 2 Miyazaki is a central figure in use of European settings in anime. Apart from his own films, he was also a scenic designer on Heidi (see Oshiguchi 1997: 35).

Cobus van Staden 181

Swiss village to stay with her grandfather, who lives in a small cabin in the Alps. The aunt who has taken care of Heidi up to now has to go to the city to work. Heidi immediately falls in love with the Alps. She accompanies the local goatherd Peter on his daily outings. Three years later, her aunt returns. She has found a position for Heidi as a companion to Clara, the daughter of a wealthy family in Frankfurt and a wheelchair user. Heidi finds it difficult to settle into her new position. She clashes with the housekeeper Miss Rottenmeyer and is gradually overcome by a deep melancholy. Her longing for the Alps starts affecting her health. Recognizing that Heidi’s increasingly frequent bouts of sleepwalking are the symptom of her yearning for Switzerland, the head of the family decides that it is time for her to go back to the Alps. After her return, Heidi is rejuvenated. A year later, Clara comes for a visit. Thanks to the salubrious mountain lifestyle and Heidi’s support, Clara starts walking again.

The communication of ‘European-ness’ When I refer to anime’s use of European culture, I am not referring to Johanna Spyri’s novel as an adapted cultural artefact. Rather, I want to focus on the way Europe is represented on screen. Where it comes to the worldwide consumption of the anime Heidi, the status of the original novel as a European classic is less relevant than the representation of Europe in the series itself. Thus, it might be useful to start by outlining what form ‘European-ness’ takes in the series. Perhaps the most powerful European symbol is the image of the Alps. The mountain is the dominant visual motif of the series and it punctuates many of its most moving scenes. These include Heidi’s arrival at her grandfather’s home, her first view of the snow-clad mountains lit by the setting sun and her realization onboard the train to Frankfurt that she has been tricked by her aunt into leaving the mountains permanently – she rushes to the end of the speeding train only to see the mountains receding in the distance. Even in Frankfurt, the Alps retain their power. Heidi’s yearning to return to the mountains is focused by finding an Alpine landscape in a disused room, a scene that echoes the one mentioned above where she stares at the mountain at sunset. Her return from Frankfurt is punctuated by the approaching peaks. After her return, Heidi and Peter go back to the slopes, lit by the setting sun. The circle from Alps to Alpine landscape painting back to Alps has been completed. The appealing European-ness of the Alpine background is intensified on the level of detail. Heidi wears a dirndl, she plays with goats,

182

Genre in Asian Film and Television

she sleeps in a hayloft, the characters eat cheese and bread, and drink goats’ milk. When one turns to Heidi’s time in Frankfurt, one sees European-ness manifested in the background design – cobblestone streets, neo-classical facades and the curved banister that awes her aunt when they first arrive at Clara’s house. Clothes and accoutrements also communicate this European setting. We see carriages, chandeliers and formally set tables with candlesticks. Europe of the past is also invoked by the presence of servants in lace caps and Sebastian, the footman. While the series beams out ‘Europe’, how those signals are interpreted and used will differ from country to country.

Heidi in Japan I do not want to speak for Japanese people about their relationship to Europe; rather, I would like to point out an interesting contrast between Heidi’s representation of Europe and one from several decades before. In 1927 and in again in the 1947 and 1957 revival versions, the all-female Takarazuka theatre troupe put on a revue called Mon Paris. A travelogue, with song and dance stops in many exotic locales from Tokyo to Paris, epitomized what Jennifer Ellen Robertson has characterized as ‘Japanese orientalism’. Most of the scenes were set against exotic backgrounds such as Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Egypt, which were portrayed less as societies than as a series of static essences (Egypt, for example, features a Cleopatra-like queen). When the travellers reach Paris, they find bustling crowds, the dynamic modernism contrasted with sleeping Asia. They decide to take in a revue, only to find that Mon Paris is also on in Paris – the French have imported Takarazuka. One of the travellers remarks that Paris and the whole of France are like Takarazuka: ‘everyone’s beautiful, enchanted country; a country of dreams smoldering since childhood’ (Robertson 2001: 108). This eruption of Takarazuka in Paris is quite different from the fantasies about Europe we see in Heidi. On a very basic level, Europe’s role changes from the future to the past. In the Takarazuka revue, the characters walking in the bustling boulevards of Paris remark that ‘Japan has much to learn from the West’ (Robertson 2001: 107). The flipside of this sentiment plays itself out in the discovery of Mon Paris in Paris, the fantasy of not only being admitted to the European club but having already been admitted without the need to lobby for the position. A sense of unease about Japan’s status in the world seems to be revealed here. As Robertson points out, this unease translates into positioning Japan with the mythology of modern Europe’s trajectory through time and apart from Asia, which is portrayed as unchanging and cut off from time.

Cobus van Staden 183

However, when one looks at the images of Europe in Heidi and also some of Miyazaki’s films, one sees that the site of timelessness has shifted westwards. Unlike Mon Paris, Heidi carries no suggestion of Japan catching up to Europe. What we see is a Europe of the past. Contemporary Europe has no place in the Heidi universe, not because Heidi is cut off from time (there are suggestions for example of Heidi growing up and hints of changes in the social stratification) but because the past represented by Heidi stands in contrast not to contemporary Europe but to Japan. Japan represents progress, normality, reality. Japan is the one striding into the future and Europe represents the past lovingly preserved. In effect, this represents a Japanese mapping of a European landscape and even of Europeans themselves for its own ends. It is interesting to contrast the position of Japan itself in these fantasies. In the Takarazuka revue, the position of Japan has to be asserted, the desire for full membership nakedly visible. In Heidi, there is no explicit Japanese presence. None is necessary. The European landscape and characters might be coded as European, but they are more powerfully coded as anime. The characters might speak about their yearning for the Alps, but they do so in idiomatically correct Japanese. Even the very European class divisions between the characters are principally expressed through the use of different politeness registers in spoken Japanese. Heidi does not represent the power of Europe in Japan – it represents the power of Japan in Europe. ‘European’ Heidi has been remade into anime. There is no need for an explicit Japanese presence in Heidi because it is intrinsically infused with ‘Japaneseness’. A central aspect of Eurocentrism is the way ‘in which Europe is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the world’s centre of gravity, as ontological “reality” to the rest of the world’s shadow’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 1–2). However, in the case of Heidi, this reality standard lies in Japan. Japan is the real and Europe is the dream, and it is clear that the person dreaming is not European. I presented an earlier version of this argument at a conference about Franco-Japanese relations held in Nagoya in 2007. After my presentation, I spoke with the Swiss Marxist sociologist Alain Bihr. He pointed out that Heidi has functioned as a foundation text of Swiss national identity. A standard of primary-school curricula, the novel’s representation of the Alps as a life-giving force and Heidi’s decline after being taken to Frankfurt was used to strengthen Swiss self-identification in relation to its powerful neighbour. However, the anime adaptation does not demand much actual knowledge about Europe. For example, it does not even emphasize that Frankfurt is in a different country from the Swiss Alps. The nation-state-based political implications of the original

184

Genre in Asian Film and Television

novel have largely disappeared from the anime version. Switzerland has changed from an actual place with its own politics to a fantasy territory. At the same time, the audience’s interaction with Europe does not take place on the level of knowledge, but on that of perception. More specifically, I would like to argue that the non-European audience’s encounter with this on-screen Europe is less related to our knowledge of actual Europe than with our perception of these Euro-tinged images as ‘beautifully past’. This is a version of what Arjun Appadurai (1996) has called ‘nostalgia without memory’. The power of Europe in this series lies not on the level of intelligibility but on the level of appeal. It functions by building atmosphere and providing background. Appadurai has argued that this nostalgia – not driven by actual experience but rather by its lack – is fundamental to contemporary marketing: Rather than expecting the consumer to supply memories while the merchandiser supplies the lubricant of nostalgia, now the viewer need only bring the faculty of nostalgia to an image that will supply the memory of a loss he or she has never suffered. This relationship might be called armchair nostalgia, nostalgia without lived experience or collective historical memory. (1996: 78) In this sense, one might say that Heidi’s European setting is not so different from the way Edo-era Japan is frequently used in anime. Conversely, it becomes difficult to argue that the Japanese use of Edo-era imagery in anime is necessarily more ‘real’ or authentic than its use of European imagery. Nostalgia without memory remains powerful in either case. If this is true, one cannot assume that an audience’s grasp and enjoyment of a piece of pop culture set in Europe is fundamentally driven by their relationship (however negative or positive) with Europe itself. Rather, Appadurai seems to imply that when enjoying pop culture from cultures other than our own, our understanding is crucially influenced by our experience under capitalism itself. However, this does not mean that setting Heidi in Europe means nothing. Heidi in the Alps remains an easier sell than Heidi in the Andes. The world still suffers from a collective postcolonial hangover, which lights images of Europe with a particular conflicted significance. However, I want to argue that Europe’s special emotional power mostly functions as a ‘hook’. Unlike actual geopolitical knowledge of Europe, this Euroappeal is highly unstable, taking on different meanings wherever it lands. In order to make this process clear, I would like to look at Heidi’s reception in South Africa.

Cobus van Staden 185

Heidi in South Africa Heidi arrived in South Africa in 1979, during the height of apartheid. At the time, the government was facing increasing opposition from within – from anti-apartheid activists and the cultural and business communities. This pressure was compounded from without. First World governments found it increasingly difficult to justify their relations with the racist regime and the global condemnation of apartheid started to take on the nature of a moral crusade. International opposition led to trade sanctions and a campaign of cultural and sports isolation. The Afrikaans historian Hermann Giliomee has argued that Western condemnation of apartheid was particularly wounding to a regime which saw itself and its larger project of Afrikaner nationalism as essentially Western. Apartheid retained the colonial trope of bringing light to a dark continent, combining it with a Cold War conception of itself as the protector of Western enlightenment against a communist onslaught. Giliomee raises the possibility that moral sanctions in the form of academic and sports boycotts might have been more effective than economic sanctions in weakening the regime’s hold. Bans on international travel especially hit home, and the fact that government officials could no longer visit Western countries was particularly humiliating. This symbolic repudiation did not just reject apartheid’s claim of being the heir to European civilization, it also rejected its claim to parity with European countries. In a sense, apartheid was attacked on two fronts – its conception of its own past (as the natural child of Europe) was attacked together with its image of its present (as a fully fledged participant in the international community on a par with Europe) (Giliomee 2003). Heidi was first broadcast in South Africa in 1979.3 After years of government opposition, television was partially introduced from 1974, with regular broadcasts only starting on 1 January 1976 (Tomaselli 1989). The broadcasts were limited to a few hours per day, with Heidi 3 South African pop culture of this era is remarkably under-researched, and the importing and dubbing of foreign programmes have received even less attention. This is made more difficult by the fact that the state broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, has undergone several reorganizations during the intervening years and many documents from the era have been lost. I have based my discussion of the dubbing and reception of Heidi on a series of interviews with people who were involved with the project itself. I would like to thank Verna Vels and Marida Swanepoel (involved in children’s programming acquisitions), June Seymour (dubbing supervisor), Izette Korsmann (synching and translation supervisor), Kobus Geldenhuys (translator) and Rina Nienaber (the voice of Peter the goatherd) for sharing their time and memories with me.

186

Genre in Asian Film and Television

falling into the primetime early evening slot. According to broadcast regulations, Afrikaans and English had to receive equal time on air. This led to the growth of dubbing as an integral part of the new Afrikaans television industry. Heidi was acquired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) from Beta, a German distribution company. It had already been dubbed into German. All the people I interviewed about the dubbing of children’s series agreed that the SABC usually did not deal directly with the Japanese production companies, but always bought series at European TV fairs, frequently with German or French soundtracks. This was in part a logistical decision – while people who could translate from French and German to Afrikaans were relatively common, very few had any knowledge of Japanese. Kobus Geldenhuys, a translator who worked on Heidi and several other anime series, told me that while Heidi came with a full German soundtrack, other series (for example, the anime adaptation of Moomin [Masaaki Osumi, 1969]) arrived with only a rudimentary script in English, and that the writers had the freedom to think up their own dialogue to coincide with the animated mouth movements. Everyone who worked on Heidi agreed that particular care was taken with the Afrikaans version. The SABC outsourced the dubbing process to a production company called Sonneblom Films, and the voice actress Rina Nienaber described how she and Sonneblom’s Katinka Heyns (who later became a prominent South African filmmaker) worked together to perfect Peter the goatherd’s lisp. Several of those interviewed ascribed the series’ subsequent success to the quality of the Afrikaans dub. When Heidi was originally broadcast in 1979, it became a phenomenon. Nienaber described to me how she was approached for interviews by several magazines and was featured in a special inset on Heidi in Huisgenoot, South Africa’s most popular weekly magazine. On a web discussion forum dedicated to South African pop culture, I found the following comment from an anonymous contributor: ‘Heidi – it was on Tuesday night at 7 o’clock. Even our school never arranged anything for Tuesday nights because no-one came as everybody was watching Heidi. lol.’4 Heidi was not only popular with children – it became a multigenerational hit. Nienaber told me that she heard the rumour that B.J. Vorster (South Africa’s Prime Minister from 1966 to 1978, whose reign saw the bloody suppression of the 1976 Soweto Uprising) never 4

See www.tvsa.co.za/forum/archive/index.php?t-6094.html, date accessed 2 November 2010.

Cobus van Staden 187

scheduled meetings on Tuesday nights because he was watching Heidi with his grandchildren. How did Heidi’s portrayal of Europe and its cultural specificity relate to its popularity? When I put this question to those I interviewed, I received diametrically opposed answers. On the one hand, several respondents felt the power of the Afrikaans dub made people feel that the series was their own. Marida Swanepoel, who was involved in the acquisition of children’s programming, said the series gave one the feeling that it had originally been made in Afrikaans. That was certainly what I thought as a five-year-old Heidi fan. On the other hand, several respondents also suggested that the European setting was a crucial contributing factor. Kobus Geldenhuys felt that the setting appealed to Afrikaners’ cultural roots. Rina Nienaber suggested that Afrikaners of the era did not really feel that they were living in Africa at all. Due to the overwhelming Eurocentrism of apartheid education, the Alps felt much less exotic than South Africa’s neighbouring states. It seems to me that Heidi’s success is related to Afrikaners’ divergent and conflicted relationship with Europe. At the exact moment that Western Europe was leading the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime and to dissociate itself from its colonial creation, Afrikaners were using dubbing to insert themselves into a nineteenth-century European landscape. The theme tune, which fused Afrikaans lyrics with mock-Swiss yodelling (I owned the LP), became a symbol of apartheid’s attempts to proclaim itself as simultaneously Europe’s heir and peer – much to the distaste of actual Europeans. The irony of course is that all of this was facilitated by Japanese animation. In fact, Heidi’s performance of European-ness was so effective that it continues even today. A few of the people I interviewed insisted that Heidi, a Girl of the Alps actually was European – that the animation was done in Japan but that the original commission was German. In fact, Heidi was an instalment of Sekai Meisaku Gekijou (World Masterpiece Theatre), a series of anime adaptations of Western children’s classics produced by Zuiyo Eizou (later Nippon Animation). It represented a major Japanese move into the European market and also included Moomin, The Dog of Flanders and Anne of Green Gables. All of these series were broadcast in South Africa and several of the people I interviewed also saw them as European originals (see Yamaguchi 2004). It seems to me that Heidi’s appeal to Afrikaners’ cultural roots has almost no basis in actual memory or real European knowledge. In the first place, most Afrikaans families have been in South Africa for at least 200 years and the majority of them originally came from the Benelux

188

Genre in Asian Film and Television

region and France – not Switzerland. I think that rather than finding some hidden European essence activated by the series, many Afrikaans viewers responded to exactly the same nostalgia without memory as their Japanese counterparts. I would argue that Heidi, a Girl of the Alps and other anime visions of Europe prove that while European settings provide powerful audience appeal, it actually represents a very slippery set of perceptions that tends to change meaning and adapt itself to each individual moment of reception. As such, it can aid the popularity of a series, but it cannot sustain its fundamental intelligibility. Heidi’s transition from novel to anime resulted in the loss of much of its Swiss nation-state meaning in favour of a vague ‘European-ness’ that cannot be said to help us understand the story, much as it aids our enjoyment. If one wants to understand what makes the narrative comprehensible in these divergent contexts of reception, I would argue that knowledge of Europe or Europe’s dominance in the world would be of less help than following Appadurai’s argument to its logical end. If the appeal of Europe is a version of nostalgia without memory, then analysing Heidi according to the logic of capitalism itself might bring us closer to understanding how, while the meaning of the European setting can change wildly from context to context, the story remains relatively stable.

The golden glow of the Alps But how does capitalism feature in Heidi? I want to argue that commodity capitalism helps us to find our bearings in a movie through the way it makes narrative time and space visually understandable. Let’s look at time first. Arjun Appadurai has argued that commodities help us to mark time in what has become the everlasting now of consumer capitalism. So, the rhythmic appearance and disappearance of Christmas lights remind us where we are in an increasingly homogeneous year. Similarly, commodities in a fictional universe can help us to navigate temporally. However, cinematic time is so frequently structured according to character development that the role of commodities as temporal beacons takes on the added function of indicating character time. That is, commodities help us to understand how a character is changing over time. This is vividly seen in the narrative weight a change in outfit can assume in the classic Hollywood women’s film, as well as in such contemporary reformulations as The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, USA, 2006) (see Basinger 1993). A similar, if less designer-driven, pattern is visible

Cobus van Staden 189

in Heidi. During the story, Heidi proceeds from free to unfree to free. The first phase begins with her arrival in the Alps and ends with her departure for Frankfurt. The unfree phase commences with her arrival at the Frankfurt house and her meeting with Miss Rottenmeyer, and ends when she leaves the house for the train station on her way back to the mountains. The third (free) stage starts when she arrives back in the mountain village. Still on the way to her grandfather’s house, Heidi encounters her first goats. She shouts with delight and starts running after them, all the while struggling out of layers and layers of clothes. Dropping the dresses and shoes as she moves, she runs off in her slip. The arrival is set up as a shedding of old skins, a rebirth. Having been liberated, Heidi is now free to be herself. This is symbolized by her characteristic pink dirndl, which becomes her permanent costume. When Heidi is taken to Frankfurt, she is still wearing the dirndl. However, the strict and neurotic Miss Rottenmeyer has it burned and Heidi is forced to wear a constrictive, frilly dress. The dress stays on until she returns to the Alps. When she returns, she first stops at Peter the goatherd’s house. She takes her bonnet and dress off and gives them to his mother, walking to her grandfather’s house in her slip – a second rebirth. Her grandfather gives her a new pink dirndl, identical to the one she used to wear. The implication of course is that everything is back to normal, that she is back where she belongs. The dirndl itself might not be particularly important to the story, but its deployment makes it a clue to where the character is in her line of development (imagine, for example, the same scene except that the dirndl does not fit anymore – that becomes a very different narrative message via a different deployment of a commodity). Heidi being forced into an uncomfortable fussy dress and then being released from it helps us to position ourselves within the character’s timeline. The role of commodities to locate ourselves in space is even more powerful. The main spatial division in the series is between the city (Frankfurt) and the country (the Alps). While this division echoes Spyri’s original novel, the translation of the novel into an anime universe complicates this division. It seems to me that the representation of anything as animation also brings it closer to the realm of the commodity. Through animation, the body/object/place is remade into a version of itself that is infinitely more amenable to the market. It is no surprise that animated characters remain the most frequently merchandised. Where a real mouse is turned into Mickey Mouse (and Jerry, Speedy Gonzalez, Itchy, Remy from Ratatouille, etc.), the process is not so much representation as recreation. There is very little mouse left at

190

Genre in Asian Film and Television

the end. Yet, even in the case of more faithful animated recreations, such as the Alpine landscapes in Heidi, one sees a similar process at work. In fact, verisimilitude only increases the commodity appeal of the final product. In 2006, I attended an exhibit of Heidi cells and sketches in Nagoya and in the exhibition notes much was made of the fact that the artists (including Hayao Miyazaki) went to Europe to collect visual references. Being based on reality only increases the commodity nature of the recreation. It therefore becomes impossible to read the division between Frankfurt and the Alps as a division between capitalism and nature. This is because nature, with its abundant flowers and fat little blue birds, lies at the centre of how Heidi is marketed. None of the character goods I have seen depict scenes from Frankfurt. They all feature flowers, goats, grassy hillsides and so on. Even those focusing on non-natural objects foreground the hand-hewn nature of these objects. The series casts a loving eye over rough wooden tables, hand-made bowls and cheese melts made directly over the fire. These stand in direct contrast to the formal table settings, silver and soup courses of Frankfurt. It is no surprise that a recent Japanese TV advertisement featuring Heidi was set in the fire-lit bungalow of her grandfather. This contrast is of course also a deployment of commodities. The goats’ milk, little round loaves of bread, the dirndl, Heidi’s hayloft-bedroom with birds on the windowsill connect directly with the Alps outside the window, a landscape already commodified by the magic of anime. One can therefore say that the deployment of commodities not only helps to make cinematic time but also cinematic space understandable. Heidi’s contrast between the Alps and Frankfurt is therefore less a contrast between nature and capital than a contrast between two realms of capital. The Alps cannot be read as an escape from capital but as a different and more advanced version of capital. The entire arc of the story is not only centred on the distinction between the Alps and Frankfurt – it also proves that the Alps are superior. This highly partisan deployment of commodities also structures the narrative by influencing how the characters develop. In other words, how commodities are arranged not only allows us to keep track of time and space, they also influence changes in character agency. For example, among the goats, Heidi’s favourite is a kid named Yuki. When Peter tells her that her owner is considering doing away with Yuki because she is not giving enough milk, Heidi takes Yuki away and hides her in her grandfather’s barn. Peter and Heidi search the mountain for special herbs that will provide Yuki with the added sustenance that might

Cobus van Staden 191

stimulate her milk. When Peter fails to return with Yuki in the evening, her owner is outraged. He accuses Peter of stealing his goat. Peter eventually caves in and tells him that Yuki is in Heidi’s grandfather’s barn. When the fuming owner yanks open the barn door, he sees Heidi milking Yuki. The mountain herbs have worked. This incident is interesting for what it does not do. While the series as a whole distinguishes between the rural and the urban, the scene makes it clear that this distinction does not clearly put capitalism and the money economy in the urban category. This is not a story about the money-obsessed city versus the innocent countryside. The series makes it clear that the money economy is alive and well outside the city too. Yuki’s owner has a hard-nosed costs-and-benefits relationship with his goat. Heidi is appalled by this relationship and intervenes. However, her intervention (kidnapping/rescuing the goat) is itself not a simple anti-capitalist gesture. She does not try to remove Yuki from the capitalist production cycle, but uses what the mountain provides to improve Yuki’s performance within that cycle. What is at stake here is not the world of capital versus the non-capitalist Alps but two competing realms of capital. Heidi chronicles the interactions between human capital and mountain capital, with Heidi, the character, as the interlocutor between the two. In a way, the Alps here become not the antithesis to capital but its next incarnation. Human society is inferior to the Alps not because it is capitalist but because its particular form of capitalism is inefficient and causes misery. Rather than the nineteenthcentury romantic view of a realm untouched by money, nature here becomes an upgraded form of capital, nurturing human potential to levels beyond what the Frankfurt-based economy can offer. In the process, Heidi’s kidnapping of Yuki becomes less an anti-capitalist Animal Liberation Front tactic and more of a sustainable development/organic farming technique. What I mean here is that there is no attempt to oppose capitalism or escape from it, but rather to reform it towards a higher purpose. Far from removing Yuki from the capitalist production cycle, Heidi uses the mountain’s superior resources to situate Yuki even more firmly within this cycle.5 Despite the focus of the above reading, I am not saying that Heidi, a Girl of the Alps as a whole is a capitalist parable in disguise – rather, I want to argue that the way that commodities are deployed in a 5 Jean Baudrillard proposed a different version of the same situation: ‘It is not “real” nature which suddenly transfigures the atmosphere of daily life, but holidays – that simulacrum of nature, the reverse side of everyday routine’ (2005: 34).

192

Genre in Asian Film and Television

fictional space helps us to navigate within narrative time and space. In fact, I would like to go further and argue that the overlap between commodities and human agency also affects our emotional experience as an audience. Interestingly, the most dramatic agency arc in Heidi does not belong to Heidi but to Clara. She moves from being a wheelchair user to walking on her own, a process that is echoed by her psychological development from phobic and over-sheltered to confident and spontaneous. However, this shift in agency is mainly depicted in the last third of the series. It not only provides the narrative thrust but also the series with a rousing finale, and it also fits into Heidi’s larger arc: Clara’s return to health becomes the validation of Heidi’s desire to return to the Alps. Clara’s journey to health is glimpsed in miniature in the Yuki subplot I discussed above. Like Yuki’s recovery, it is achieved through special elements only found in the Alps. These include mountain air and goats’ milk. Goats’ milk is a recurring element in the series. When Heidi first arrives at her grandfather’s chalet, he gives her goats’ milk to drink. She exclaims that this is the most delicious milk ever and he tells her that she should keep drinking, because the milk is so healthy (and seemingly in endless supply – another depiction of the Alps as a source of abundance). Later, when Clara comes to stay at the chalet, she is also an instant convert to goats’ milk. During the meal, she becomes noticeably more robust, echoing Heidi in shouting ‘Okawari!’ (‘Refill!’). Miss Rottenmeyer is appalled by this behaviour, but Heidi’s grandfather overrules her, again remarking how healthy the milk is and how the mountain air makes everything more delicious. This diet of milk and air makes Clara stronger and stronger. She eventually manages to stand up and walk by herself, an event which becomes the climax of the series.6 Like Yuki, Clara’s return to health is a victory for the Alps, but like Yuki, Clara is freed in order to become more productive. She returns home to

6 The climactic scene where Clara, hitherto confined to a wheelchair, manages to stand is perhaps the most famous scene of the series, one that I have seen parodied by comedians in Japan. The phrase ‘Kurara ga tatta!’ (‘Clara is standing up!’) has become part of Japanese humour. Among the many parodies of the series, I have found a site illustrating different rhyming versions of the phrase, including ‘Kurara ga batta! (‘Clara is a locust’) and another site pushing the conflict between the characters to the extreme by depicting them (including the goats) shooting at each other with sniper rifles. See http://duskindeath.fc2web. com/illust/hd.html and www.geocities.jp/umokaiju/_geo_contents_/sql/sql-033. html, date accessed 2 November 2010. It is also the scene that friends both in South Africa and Japan remember the most vividly.

Cobus van Staden 193

resume her schooling. The salubrious affect of the mountain is therefore not cut off from the labour cycle of capitalism itself. I want to argue that following the characters up to this point, making sense of the story and sympathizing with the characters are processes that are culturally underlain. However, anime’s use of European settings proves that in order to grasp the global consumption of a single cultural artefact, one has to problematize issues of cultural origin. It might be useful to argue that the decoding of such works is culturally underlain, but that this culture is not European, Japanese or South African culture. Instead, the culture that most fundamentally supports the international decoding of such works might be capitalism itself.

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Basinger, J. (1993) A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960. New York: Knopf. Baudrillard, J. (2005) The System of Objects. London: Verso. Giliomee, H. (2003) The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Reconsiderations in South African History). Charlottesville, VN: University of Virginia Press. Napier, S.J. (2005) Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Oshiguchi, T. (1997) ‘Interview with Hayao Miyazaki’, in T. Ledoux (ed.), Anime Interviews: The First Five Years of Animerica Anime & Manga Monthly (1992–1997). San Francisco: Cadence Books. Robertson, J.E. (2001) Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Spyri, J. (1986) Heidi, 1880. New York: Random House Children’s Classics. Tomaselli, K. (1989) The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film. Johannesburg: Radix. Yamaguchi, Y. (2004) Nihon Anime no Zenshi: Sekai wo Sei Shita Nihon Anime no Kiseki [The Complete History of Japanese Anime: The Miracle of Japanese Anime and its Capture of the World]. Tokyo: Ten Books.

12 The Other and the Neighbour: Negotiating Representations of ‘Asia’ in Bengali Films Madhuja Mukherjee

Identities are rarely unified or fixed even when they are presented as a single unit. Particularly in recent times, identities have become more and more fractured and multiple. Moreover, there are various areas of overlap among sexual, gender, regional, racial, linguistic, religious, national, cultural and other identities. Since identity is a construct, its meanings lie as much ‘outside’ as ‘inside’. Therefore, margins of identities are largely fuzzy and often merge into one another as well as with other areas. While this chapter is not about identities per se, I tackle questions of representations and performances of identities, cultures, communities and their interplay. I refer to Bengali films and Hindi films produced by Bengali production houses1 where Bengali actors masquerade as, or perform certain stereotypes of, Chinese or Japanese characters, which are often believed locally to be interchangeable, and discuss this phenomenon in terms of how the images of ‘self’ and ‘neighbour’ are constructed apart from the ‘other’ by working through the conceptions of both sameness and difference. The need for a certain kind of defined identity for the Bengali middle classes may be understood by problematizing the very nature of its identity. The Bengali middle-class identity, or what is described as the Bhadralok identity, is in some ways the dominant ideology in Bengal. 1

While Hindi films (or what has re-emerged as ‘Bollywood’) constitute the dominant popular cinema in India, Bengali cinema is often projected as the alternative cinema, especially since eminent filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen made films in this language. However, Bengali cinema cannot simply be referred to as the regional other because of the presence of the Bengali diaspora (particularly Bangladeshis) all over the world. In fact, since the 1930s, studios from Bengal have produced some of the most popular Hindi films, including Devdas (Barua, 1935). Bengali cinema has its own domain within the popular. 194

Madhuja Mukherjee 195

The general category of Bhadralok is perhaps best translated as the ‘English educated urbanized gentlemen’2 whose class, caste, regional and cultural specificities were often displaced in complex ways onto the realms of culture and work (see Chatterjee 1992). Misra (1978) categorized the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into the commercial middle class, the industrial middle class, the landed middle class, etc. One of his most interesting classifications is that of the educated middle class as ‘Western-educated’ and ‘learned professionals’. Western education brought with it knowledge of world trends and principles, which gave an exceptional characteristic to the Bengali Bhadralok ideology as opposed to the middle classes in other provinces of India or even the (orthodox) landed gentry in Bengal.3 In the nineteenth century, Bengali intellectuals cautiously created the identity of the Bhadralok, which they based on the European middle classes, who were seen to have brought about immense changes from medieval to modern times through movements like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and democratic revolutions. While Europe stood as a model, the Bhadralok identity had to be distinguished from the sahibs. This became particularly crucial when the notion of the ‘new’ educated woman was produced. In short, the identity of the ‘English educated urbane Bengali middle class’ was shaped through a series of oppositions and some similarities, positing itself as distinct from the ‘uneducated’ working classes and the new commercial class as well as the middle classes of other provinces besides the sahibs. Its uniqueness lay in its modern, liberal vision that would (among other things) also generate a condition which was both politically and culturally vibrant.4 What remain unaddressed in this context of identity formation were references to Asia and/or East Asia. While Calcutta (now Kolkata) has a large Chinese (business) community living largely in what is locally referred to as the ‘China-Town’,5 it also witnessed the immigration of 2

Perhaps the word ‘gentleman’ is the closest to the term ‘bhadralok’, given that the expression itself became fashionable under European influences. Derivative words like ‘bhadra’ may be translated as ‘genteel’ and ‘bhadratata’ as ‘gentility’. 3 Ray’s Jalsaghar/The Music Room (1958) and Devi/The Goddess (1960) deal with the educated as well as the landed middle class, and the emergent commercial middle class. 4 In the twentieth century, Bengal would initiate the communist movement in India and would also produce left-liberal theatre movements, film societies, literary debates, etc. (see Chaudhuri 2005). 5 Calcutta also had a large (now dwindling) Anglo-Indian community.

196

Genre in Asian Film and Television

people from Burma during the Second World War. Moreover, North Bengal shares its borders with Nepal and Sikkim (which became part of India in 1975). While issues relating to immigration, the economy, land and other problems may guide the manner in which certain communities are represented in the cultural products of Bengal,6 there is perhaps no one explanation for the ways in which East Asia has been represented in Bengali films. This chapter addresses the unaddressed questions, without attempting to present simple answers to the political and economic complexities of histories of Asian countries. The films I have chosen for this purpose cannot be categorized as a separate genre or sub-genre, with its specific iconographies, characters, spaces, narrative patterns and closures. Instead, I refer to the representations of East Asia as ‘symptoms’ of certain undefined and unarticulated issues. One of the symptoms may be described as the ‘China-Town’ syndrome of Bengali films. This is a reference to the Chinese ghettos that are an integral part of the city, but which remain on the margins and emerge in distorted forms in many Bengali films. Such films were particularly popular immediately after independence, during the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s. These were in most cases obvious ‘Orientalist’7 representations of East Asia. The question of representing the ‘neighbour’ along with ‘other’ has been a recurring theme of several South Asian films; for example, in Hindi popular films, the ‘Pakistani’ has re-emerged as the enemybrother, through films like Border (J.P. Dutta, 1997) and Gadar (Anil Sharma, 2001). Indeed, the on-screen shadow fighting is connected with real cross-border tensions and also with the discursive practices of nationalism, which necessitates formulations of the self, along with the positioning of the neighbour as opposed to the other. Thus, the neighbour is produced through dual oppositions. Now, in the context of Bengali identity politics, I make these distinctions of the neighbour and the other to show how besides geographical proximities and racial similarities, sharing borders which are porous and shifting, as well as common histories of colonial exploitation, produces the notion of the 6

The representation of the (Bengali) Muslim working class, as opposed to the dominant Hindu bourgeoisie, in Bengali films and literature is a case in point. 7 I obliquely refer to Edward Said’s critically acclaimed work in Orientalism (1978). However, without actually borrowing Said’s arguments, I use the term ‘orientalism’ (in absence of any better expression) to show how multiple identities are merged to produce a homogeneous character of the other. The purpose of the chapter is to show how the identity of the other reproduces the idea of the self.

Madhuja Mukherjee 197

neighbour. The neighbour is often depicted as the two-faced ‘enemybrother’, who holds up a mirror to the dualities of self. Sometimes the neighbour is a continuation of the self with certain differences. Depictions of the ‘East Asian’ are somewhat different from the depiction of the ‘Pakistani’ since there have been fewer instances of direct warfare with East Asia (excluding China, as projected in films like Haqeeqat, Chetan Anand, 1964). In fact, Japan was perceived as a possible ally by the Indian ultra-nationalists during the Second World War, just as the British forced Indian soldiers to fight against Japan (see Sarkar 1984). In addition, Burma was seen as a land of opportunities and as an escape to exotica in the early twentieth-century Bengali novellas of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, as well as in the post-Second World War films, when the actual situation in Burma was far from picturesque. In the films discussed here, Burma is chosen as the territory where Indians play out their nationalist fervour. Shot entirely within studios, Bengalis ‘act’ as Burmese in most of the films examined here. While local people merge with the mise en scène, the terrain becomes a mythical landscape, on which issues of culture, dislocation and modernity can be played out. One of the key questions to be asked is: how do Bengalis actually perform as Burmese? Evidently, certain visual prototypes are created, through which the Bengali can display identities of the other and notions of selfhood. As such, the interplay between disguise and that of certain stereotypes becomes interesting. For instance, when Uttam Kumar, the popular Bengali star of the 1960s, performs as a Chinese or Japanese character, how does he do this in terms of gestures, actions and articulations? A close reading of such actions and enunciations can reveal the anxieties of the Bengali middle class and its fractured self-image. Although disguise has a mythical value in Indian cultures and cinemas,8 Indian stars often take up various guises, which do not simply serve narrative functions but also act as extra-diegetic elements portraying the star’s talent. For instance, within the episodic structure of mainstream melodrama, time and again certain scenes are added specifically 8 For instance, even in the great epic Mahabharata, disguise plays a crucial function as Shiva or Vishnu often take up disguises to test the intentions of the followers. Big film stars such as Amitabh Bachchan frequently wear a moustache or a beard to outwit the villain; however, in such situations, fans are expected to recognize the god-like star even though he remains unrecognizable to other characters within the films. Amitabh Bachchan also masquerades as a black performer in Desh Premee/The Patriot (Manmohan Desai, 1982).

198

Genre in Asian Film and Television

to showcase the star’s performative prowess. Nevertheless, Indian actors rarely perform the White-Other; more often, they perform Black or East Asian characters, presumably for their apparent closeness to these races. However, while the Black-Other is presented as powerful – as members of a ‘primitive’ race who are superstitious and strange, and therefore provoking fear – the East Asian-Other, in contrast, is often presented as the sly or the clever neighbour, who may do something peculiar, often for comic relief. While the myth about the prowess of the black race is perhaps derived from European constructions, it is not easy to examine the depiction of East Asians in this manner, especially since one may argue that besides being neighbouring countries, India (and specifically Bengal) shares historical experiences, including histories of colonization, with East Asia and Southeast Asia. However, when a popular star performs this neighbour, the politics of identity and difference are somewhat more complex, as differences are merged and yet made distinct (see Vasudevan 2000).

Performing the neighbour: locating a trajectory in the production of domains and identities The scene: somewhere in Southeast Asia; a Bengali actor (Uttam Kumar) is in disguise. He is dressed as Chinese, is bent and walks down the streets with a gait (like a trot) apparently considered appropriate as a signifier for ‘Chinese’. The mise en scène uses other clichéd Chinese signifiers, like dragons painted on the street walls. The character Sabyasachi looks at a dentist’s shop (another Indian stereotype for the Chinese), then enters another shop and asks for some Indian tea (which is apparently a code word) in Chinese or fake Chinese. Shot in the studios of Calcutta, the space in the narrative is Batavia (now Jakarta), Indonesia; the film is Sabyasachi (Pijush Basu, 1977, in Bengali). Sabyasachi, the protagonist of the film, is a ‘revolutionary’ from the colonial period. In the interim period between the two World Wars, he is shown absconding to Southeast Asia. He considers German and Japanese support to fight the (common) enemy. Sabyasachi is a master of guises and, in 1977, when Uttam Kumar was a very big Bengali star, the nationalist cause was somewhat eclipsed by his star value, and eventually the film became a tableau of his performing abilities. While the sequence mentioned above introduces the problem of the film as well as the hero, it also displays in great detail Uttam Kumar’s talent in switching roles, costumes, make-up, gestures, languages (mostly using words at random, which rarely make sense) and ‘identities’. Although real locations are

Madhuja Mukherjee 199

seldom shown in these films, certain well-known signs come to stand in for place, for instance, ‘local’ people who merge into the background and do menial work are used as part of mise en scène to reproduce certain ideas of popular realism. Often, actors from the hills of northeast India are made to perform these ‘Chinese’. Since this chapter addresses questions of representations of the self and (what I have described as) the neighbour, as opposed to and in continuum with notions of the other, I take a critical look at how at certain moments in Indian political history, these demonstrations became particularly crucial. I primarily read critically acclaimed director Mrinal Sen’s Under the Blue Sky/Neel Akasher Neeche (1958, in Bengali), where the hero is a Chinese immigrant. Played by Bengali actor Kali Bannerjee, the hero, Wang Lu, connects with the Indian nationalist movements, which in turn becomes the catalyst for his political awareness, and eventually Wang Lu associates with larger (communist) ideologies and returns to his land. I also use cameraman-director Bimal Roy’s Hindi film, produced by a Bengali studio, First Person/Pahela Admi (1951), which is set in Burma in 1943; and the eminent writer-director Satyajit Ray’s The Zoo/Chiriakhana (1967, in Bengali), which depicts Japanese characters. In the latter film, Uttam Kumar is once again employed to perform such disguises, as in Sabyasachi, showcasing the acting capabilities of the star/ actor where, among several other disguises, he also acts as Chinese. Sabyasachi is an adaptation of Pather Dabi (1926), the novel by Bengali author Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (1876–1938). Chattopadhyay was one of the most popular writers in India and was a representative of its early twentieth-century novelists. Writing mostly novellas, Chattopadhyay dealt with popular subjects like the problems of individuals and society, tradition and modernity, and social norms and desires. The theme of family was one of the key concerns of his novels, where larger issues were displaced onto a personal terrain. He created archetypal middle-class characters and spaces like the city-village. He was critical of orthodox Hindu social norms and the conditions of women in rural India. His narrative patterns meandered as characters travelled long distances, usually over several years, and encountered different people and situations. Dialogue and speech style were truly exceptional as they involved multiple connotations, which also influenced popular cinema. His narrative style in some ways belonged to the ‘Dickens School’, as he described situations in realistic detail and provoked curiosity in the reader. The themes of the journey, the self-destructive hero and the self-sacrificing heroine were recurring elements in Chattopadhyay’s novels. He was extremely popular for his realistic depictions within

200

Genre in Asian Film and Television

melodramatic structures. His characterizations of men tormented by the symbolic journey from tradition to modernity still inspire many cinematic adaptations, as in Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002, in Hindi), and these were juxtaposed with oppressed-yet-powerful female characters. Often, his novellas dealt with illegitimate relationships, which opened up larger cultural and historical questions. In the Srikanta series (1917–33), the central character Srikanta takes quixotic trips from Bengal to North India as well as to Burma. Detailed descriptions of his travels by sea and the unusual incidents that took place, many of which addressed contemporary social conditions, made these novels extremely popular. In the ‘Abhaya-Srikanta’ sections where the narrative shifts to Burma, Chattopadhyay depicts the dire conditions of Burmese as well as Indian women. Chattopadhyay’s Pather Dabi (1926) was banned by the British government for its anti-Raj plotting; indeed, the author was aligned with the National Congress and delivered many revolutionary speeches to young audiences. The novel maps the colonial time-space and locates the role of the Bengali intellectual in this international timeframe.

Relocating the Bengali identity: international and sub-national contexts Sumit Sarkar (1984) observed more than one ‘trend’ in Bengali politics since the 1920s, as political groups like the extremists (particularly during the period 1928–34), the revivalists, as well as the communists (who produced an awareness of working-class rights and international politics) and the liberal Congress became influential. While studying this regional trajectory of the nationalist movement, it is important to note the growing labour and peasant activism (in Bengal, Bihar and the United Province, for instance) as well as the opposing thrusts of communal conflicts (the Muslim League Meet in 1924 and the Hindu Maha Sabha gathering around 1922–3). This actually allowed the communist groups to become a significant and decisive factor in Bengal. During this period, the left-nationalist journals propagated socialist principles, during which both Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as national leaders (see Nandy 1983). This period was truly a historical magic hour in Bengal, since diverse and conflicting tendencies converged to produce a situation that had multiple and contradictory implications. Bipan Chandra, in his discussion on ‘Colonialism and Modernization’, has argued that the ‘colonial

Madhuja Mukherjee 201

Indian economy was as much a part of world capitalism which needs to be viewed as a single world wide system of which colonial economies were an integral part’ (1979: 3). Although it is questionable whether India became a part of the ‘single world wide system’, since its regional, cultural variations and historical specificities are remarkable, it is nevertheless important to address the fact that, albeit through a violent encounter, India was thus placed within the maze of world capitalism, wars and exploitations. It would be a ‘historical fallacy to assume that India under the British rule . . . remained basically traditional’ (Chandra, 1979: 2). The active role played by Bengalis in national and international politics was crucial in the formation of the middle class-identity. For instance, the local communist leader M.N. Roy, born in suburban Bengal, went on to become the General Secretary of the Mexican Socialist Party in 1918. Roy represented the Mexican Socialist Party in the Second Congress of the Communist International in Russia in 1920, but raised the cause of India’s liberation. There he entered into a well-known debate with Lenin regarding the communist strategies in a colonized nation. This chapter addresses the cultural implications of such political conditions. Here, I wish to refer to Partha Chatterjee’s (1992) rather over-used and debatable argument on how the domain of culture was divided into the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’, and further into a powerful ideological binary, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’. Chatterjee shows how in the everyday, the inner-outer binary were separated into ghar and bahir, or the home and the world. The world came under the external and material domains, while the home came to represent the inner and the spiritual. He wrote: For a colonized people, the world was a distressing constraint, forced upon it by the fact of its material weakness. It was a place of oppression and daily humiliation, a place where the norms of the colonizer had perforce to be accepted. It was also a place, as nationalists were soon to argue, where the battle would be waged for national independence. The subjugated must learn the modern sciences and arts of the material world from the West in order to match their strengths and ultimately overthrow the colonizer. But in the entire phase of the national struggle, the crucial need was to protect, preserve, and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence. No encroachments by the colonizer must be allowed in that inner sanctum. (1992: 121)

202

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Certainly, cultural-political spheres were not as neatly divided into ‘the home and the world’; possibly, there were crucial areas of overlap, where one reproduced the other. However, there is little doubt that the colonized people who experienced economic and political constraints and exploitations would suffer from inner fears, anxieties and traumas, which would mostly remain undefined and often displaced. In this context of political struggles and debates on nationalism, as well as theories of the self and other, the question of identity is problematized. Besides the dominant identity of the English-educated Bengali middle class, militant identities of the Bengali (like that of the character of Sabyasachi, who is apparently a doctor) also emerged.9 Thus, Sabyasachi is able to fight the colonizers ‘wherever’, as ‘whoever’, under ‘whatever’ conditions. Therefore, imaginary far-off spaces, which borrow and reinstitute certain social stereotypes, materialized. However, what becomes even more interesting is the borrowing of such stereotypes in the postcolonial condition.

Post-independence displacements: travels in time and space Pehla Admi (Bimal Roy, 1951, in Hindi)10 is about the nationalist leader Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose’s struggle against the British Army in 1943. Amidst the plot of bloodshed, toil and adversities, the film celebrates Bose’s charismatic persona that compelled ordinary men and women to give themselves up for a greater cause. Set in 1943 – the year of great Bengal famine and war – Pehla Admi juxtaposes issues of war with family. The question of nation is relocated to the familial domain. A love story blossoms between Kumar and Lata, where Kumar is a reluctant revolutionary and Lata dreams of family, love and home. In the midst of such aspirations, Kumar eventually joins Bose’s army and dies to fulfil his father’s wishes. 9

The capturing of the Chittagong Armoury (now in Bangladesh) and the combat on the Jalalabad hills led by Surja Sen in 1930 remain enduring myths in the popular narratives of Bengal, just as the murders of district magistrates and the killing of Stevens by two schoolgirls also attained mythical dimensions. See Sarkar (1984). 10 Kartik Chatterjee’s Mahaprasthaner Pathe/Yatrik (1952) raised more philosophical issues, where each person is answerable for their sins and has to finally shed all forms of masks and vices. As the characters move towards a sacred site, parallels can be drawn with the nation’s journey towards a ‘Promised Land’, a journey which nevertheless appears fractured in the films discussed here.

Madhuja Mukherjee 203

The film is a story of an unwilling anarchist who leaves his fiancée and joins Bose’s militant nationalist outfit, the Indian National Army (INA), to fulfil his father’s (Vijoy Kumar) ideals. The film uses extensive documentary footage (of Bose) and is a tribute and cinematic testimony to Bengal’s involvement in the nationalist movement. The juxtaposition of real footage with fictitious material (shot extensively indoors, with Bengali characters performing as Burmese) makes the film semireal, an imaginary text that contains selective memory. It begins with a title ‘Lest We Forget . . . the symbol our freedom – Netaji [Bose] – and his immortal INA’. Bose’s presence is reinforced in the film in various ways. It begins with newspaper images and stills informing the viewer about his activities in South Asia. Real footage of his speeches add validity to the myth of Bose as a revolutionary, and this sequence ends with an image of a newspaper heading proclaiming ‘Give me Blood; I will give you freedom’. While Vijoy Kumar (Nasir Hussain) argues for Bose’s political activities and ideology, the song Kuin na gayen khushi ke geet . . . (roughly Let’s rejoice . . .) reinforces camaraderie amongst the soldiers, and other narrative elements create expectations that Bose will arrive beyond the stock footage – in ‘flesh and blood’, as it were – on the screen. War is enacted through high-contrast images, close-ups and images of soldiers suffering and struggling. Bose eventually appears and meets the jawans (soldiers). A disembodied, all-powerful voice evokes issues of Motherland, sacrifice, bravery, death and the destruction of the enemy. In the end, Kumar dies during the war and the doctor finds his dead son in an army hospital. In a symbolic gesture, he lifts his son and carries the body to Bose’s image/photograph hanging on the wall. Lata’s narrative runs parallel to this story as she searches for her fiancé in army hospitals. In the process, there is a philosophical growth and Lata emerges as a political person. Thus, while she had initially refused to give away her engagement ring for the cause, in the end she eventually joins the INA and dons the uniform. Though the film begins as an innocent story of lovers detached from the political turmoil of the times, it becomes a story of the sacrifice of self and personal longing for the Motherland. That a newly formed nation would choose to retell its ‘glorious’ histories of the independence movement as early as 1951 is obvious. However, the pertinent point is why do several popular films (particularly of the 1950s and 1960s) repeatedly use East Asia or Southeast Asia as a location to play out its nationalist fervour? Of course, Bose’s political history and the myths about his movements play a significant role; however, such dislocations also allow mythical transformations

204

Genre in Asian Film and Television

of political struggles. While Pehla Admi chooses to depict the nationalist movement in Burma, instead of any place in India, in Neel Akasher Niche, such displacements take place in time. The maverick filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s Neel Akasher Niche is about 1930s Bengal,11 which is caught in the variegated nationalist movements. By Sen’s own admission, the 1930s were the most radical period in India. The Spanish Civil War was at its peak, and the narratives of the involvement of European poets and writers inspired Sen and others radicals. This intercontinental connection extends even further back in time: when India was reeling under the massive anti-colonial struggle, anti-imperialist revolts broke out in Egypt in 1919; Syria and Lebanon experienced armed movements against French dominance; Iraq was alarmed by anti-British movements; in China, the anti-imperialist ‘May 4th Movement’ generated revolutionary fervour in which the Chinese proletariat played an active role; in Korea, Indonesia and Afghanistan, the people’s struggle ushered in a new beginning in the history of mass revolutions. At the same time, in Turkey, the mass rising against colonial rule and the feudal authorities made its impact felt all over the world. Some time later, life in Calcutta changed drastically when Japan joined the Second World War and the war in Asia created an unprecedented disquiet. During this period, people also emigrated from Burma. And then Bengal experienced the devastating famine of 1943. Working in this historical climate, Sen is one of the few directors who has sincerely tackled this question of colonial and postcolonial urban angst. To quote Sen: ‘[a]s soon as I came to the big city, I was seized with a kind of fear. I confronted a crowd, a huge crowd. I felt I was standing alone in the crowd’ (quoted in Mukhopadhyay 1995: 9). When the film Neel Akasher Niche was released, the local newspaper Ananda Bazaar Patrika described it as a film that ‘speaks about inner most feelings of men – which are not limited by time or geographical boundary . . . [T]he most important thing is that he . . . has used the language of cinema’ (Mukhopadhyay 1995: 23). The film went on to be specially screened for the Prime Minister Jawharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and others. The film begins with a shot of a Calcutta monument, on which the words ‘Calcutta 1930’ are superimposed. This is followed by a scene of police chasing young protesters. The image of a Chinese silk-hawker interacting with the British police officer emerges on the screen. They interact in half-Hindi, half-English, languages which were both somewhat foreign to Bengalis in 1930s as well as immediately after 11

Sen’s Mrigaya (1976, in Hindi) is also set in the 1930s.

Madhuja Mukherjee 205

independence. Wang Lu, the Chinese immigrant, traverses the city, while hand-pulled rickshaws cross the screen. Long shots of Calcutta streets are juxtaposed with close-ups of Wang Lu’s feet. Moving around in a Bengali neighbourhood, Wang Lu cries out ‘China silk’ in the first sequence. Some undefined ‘Chinese’ music establishes his character.12 Then, a pan over the cityscape and a voiceover (Sen’s predominant style) recites Wang Lu’s problem. Later, Wang Lu is chased and teased by little boys. A little girl walks in and warns the boys: Never call a Chinese, a Chinese, Or else you will turn into one! You once called a Chinese, a Chinese, Didn’t you? [Turning to Wang Lu] That’s how you turned into one? Initially appearing to be childish nonsense, these lines reveal the primary fear that the other (or the neighbour in this case) actually never existed on their own terms. Becoming an other is achieved through a lack and through a curse. Yet Wang Lu becomes the vehicle by which a series of apprehensions may be grasped. Addressing popular binaries of the Bengali/non-Bengali, Sen reveals Wang Lu’s past and the reasons for his emigration. Through beautiful idyllic shots of China, Wang Lu’s traumatic past is reproduced. The flashback sequence establishes the beautiful landscape of China (mountains and mist) and its people. Here Wang Lu and his sister lead an exceedingly difficult life. As a peasant, Wang Lu suffers exploitation by landowners and eventually falls sick due to overwork. Meanwhile, his sister is raped by the landlord. Wang Lu’s moralistic position forces his sister to flee and, after this, Wang Lu is shown crying by the river, which suggests her death by drowning. The river emerges as an important symbol in the narrative. The song O nadi re . . . (or ‘O river let me ask you, which is your country? Do you travel endlessly? . . . Why are you homeless . . .?’) underlines the darkness of the city (Calcutta) and Wang Lu’s loneliness. High-contrast shots of the shimmering river, juxtaposed with close-ups of Wang Lu, create a poignant moment. The Calcutta river reminds Wang Lu of his own country and the Chinese boatmen, while the soundtrack ironically echoes ‘why do you take me as the other?’. A somewhat similarly titled song is played 12

The well-known singer and music director Hemanta Mukherjee was the producer of the film.

206

Genre in Asian Film and Television

in a scene shot at night where Wang Lu is seen walking around alone in the city on Chinese New Year’s Day. Intriguingly, while Wang Lu is an immigrant, and despite the fact that he lives in the ‘China-Town’, he does not necessarily bond with his ‘own’ people. Moreover, while he speaks broken Hindi and sporadically some English as well, in such ‘introspective’ situations, Bengali songs and the desolate city of Calcutta come to represent his anguish. Evidently, the film is not simply about a Chinese immigrant. It addresses the political turmoil of both the 1930s and the 1950s, and the complexities within a new nation, juxtaposing problems of nationalism with larger issues of internationalism. Wang Lu’s love for his sister and the affection for his country are transferred onto an Indian woman, Basanti, who is a freedom fighter. On one occasion, while travelling in and around the city, Wang Lu notices a larger-than-life, overtly feminine face (with large eyes and lips) used in a cosmetic advertisement. The image reminds him of Basanti, whom he later refers to as ‘sister’. Wang Lu initially goes to sell silk to Basanti, who, being a nationalist, wears only khadi (an indigenously produced thick, coarse cotton cloth). Therefore, Basanti refuses him on the pretext that she does not wear ‘foreign’ clothes. To this Wang Lu says (in broken English): Me no foreigner, Me China-Man, No white, No English . . . Wang Lu shows his eyes and nose to convince her that he is no ‘foreigner’. Sen tells a humanist tale and, charged by his own left leanings, invokes ‘Third World’ solidarity and internationalism. Thus, though Basanti refers to him as ‘brother’ only out of a sense of solidarity, Wang Lu takes it literally and transfers his affections to Basanti and to India. The use of multiple languages becomes a crucial aspect of these displaced anxieties, such as one articulated by Sen here: ‘I still stand by its political content . . . our struggle of Independence was part of the democratic world struggle against fascism’ (quoted in Mukhopadhyay 1995: 25). In the dingy Calcutta ghetto, Wang Lu has an admirer in Maki. While she is drawn towards him, Wang Lu rebukes her. Interestingly, Maki’s friend and Basanti’s husband are suspicious and jealous of Wang Lu’s and Basanti’s relationship (which actually hints at the possibilities of an incestuous relationship). Sometimes, Wang Lu gets gifts for Basanti

Madhuja Mukherjee 207

(silk handkerchiefs and later a khadi sari) and eventually gets involved in her nationalist movement and becomes politicized. Initially, Wang Lu is a confused bystander, listening to his ‘sister’ delivering a speech in a foreign language. Soon, the police arrive, chase them away and beat up the participants of the rally. While Basanti escapes with important papers, Wang Lu follows her (mostly out of curiosity) and ends up being an accomplice. He later risks his own well-being and hides important party papers under his bed. Later, after Wang Lu is offended at her place, Basanti eventually pays him a visit and encounters his milieu and his people. While there are a number of Chinese actors, they remain in the background and simply produce a credible mise en scène of a Chinese ghetto. It is interesting to see how a little-known Bengali actor performs the role of the protagonist in this film, mimicking a ‘Chinese’ walk, wearing Chinese costume and heavy make-up (including a gold tooth), and speaking broken Hindi words. Sen conveys Wang Lu’s loneliness in the big city and his political vacillations as he recounts his past to Basanti. He uses documentary shots of Chinese New Year celebrations as a means of building the narrative. When the iconic face/hoarding of Bengal’s plenitude is pulled down and destroyed, the title song of the film (which is about ‘the blue sky’ under which people suffer) evokes the centrality of nature in Wang Lu’s life. It also evokes a sense of lost plenitude. The climax of film deals with Basanti’s arrest by the British police in 1932. She is jailed for six years. Meanwhile, Japan attacks China. Sen uses footage of warplanes and the face of a young Chinese boy as well as that of Wang Lu, and dissolves them into images of bombing and war. When Basanti is released in 1936, it is through his association with her that Wang Lu becomes a nationalist and returns to China. It is engaging to ask the following question: whose story is Wang Lu narrating? Surely through Wang Lu, Sen presents his own anti-war sentiments. Wang Lu says (in Hindi) ‘people die (in war), children die, women die’. Sen was later influenced by and associated with the French New Wave directors, and used a self-reflexive form in his later films like Calcutta 71 (1972) to address contemporary problems. In Calcutta 71, he examines 1971 as a continuation of the 1930s. Sen was, as mentioned earlier, by his own admission ‘enormously excited’ about the 1930s, as those were the formative years for the Communist Party of India. Made in the early phase of his career, this film remains an anti-war humanist statement, where several issues of identity (fractured by questions of language, race, caste, religion, gender and class) are tackled through displacement. Evidently, there is no one identity of the Bengali, and such

208

Genre in Asian Film and Television

narratives somewhat obliquely confront the multiplicity of identities, albeit through convoluted stereotypes of self, other and neighbour.

Performance and the star: representations and other realities Ray’s Chiriakhana is based on the popular detective stories written by Sharadindu Bandopadhyay. In the film, Uttam Kumar plays Bomkesh Bakshi, the sleuth in search of the truth. In his attempt to solve the mystery, Bakshi goes to a place called ‘Rose Colony’ in the guise of a Japanese man. Armed with a camera, which indicates his love for technology, ‘Mr Okakura’ (or Bakshi in disguise) repeats the term ‘photo’ again and again (which incidentally is the only intelligible word he utters). Curiously, when Bakshi comes to the place with his assistant, Chatterjee, the rickshaw-puller speaking in a particular Bengali dialect mistakes him as Chinese. Chatterjee corrects him, to which the humble man says, ‘It’s all the same’. Ray, working within his realistic mode, uses sarcasm and irony in these portrayals. Perhaps he does not intend to conceal the fact that these are indeed disguises that are rather ridiculous, and copies of the representations in popular Bengali films: both Chatterjee’s and Bakhshi’s beards and moustaches look hideous, and they have to continuously touch them to stop them from falling off. Interestingly, while Bakshi acts as Japanese, it is Chatterjee who utters (nonsense/gibberish) ‘Japanese’ words. Bakshi/Mr Okakura continues to speak either in English to the ‘suspects’ or in Bengali to his colleague and client. Uttam Kumar as Bakshi performs the clichéd ‘East Asian walk’, where he is slightly bent and sort of ‘trots’ around. As discussed earlier, a similar walk is performed by Kali Bannerjee in Neel Akasher Niche and is repeated by Uttam Kumar in Sabyasachi. Of course, in Sabyasachi, Uttam Kumar also acts as a German and in Chiriakhana as an Afghan. Although disguises (including men performing as women and vice versa) are part of Indian mythologies, big and popular stars like Amitabh Bachchan or Rajnikanth, who often play different roles in films, largely draw from the popular notions regarding the star and are more performance-oriented. Mostly, these display the acting skills of the stars. It could be said that Ray was attempting to make a populist film within his realistic mode of representation, thereby both associating as well as differentiating his film from other popular forms. Nevertheless, the roles that the stars take up have ideological implications and are often demonstrations of stereotypes, which reinstate social hierarchies.

Madhuja Mukherjee 209

The point that I am making is that it is difficult to interrogate politicalcultural dilemmas by simply analysing the representations of the other in popular cinema. What emerges through my analysis is that the terrain of the neighbour is also diffused and equally inhabited by the self. In these cases, the neighbour is insistently played by the self, and when a popular star plays inhabits this role, binaries and neat distinctions are problematized further. Moreover, images of different communities from within the nation reproduce internal tensions, for instance, Uttam Kumar playing the Marwari businessman in Sabysachi. It is indeed interesting to note how, at a certain moment in Indian history, such guises were popular elements of Indian films, which have lost much of their acceptability in the context of an emergent global identity.

Acknowledgment My sincere thanks to Professor Earl Jackson, Korea University, Seoul, for reading the drafts of this chapter and offering extremely encouraging comments.

References Chandra, B. (1979) Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Chatterjee, P. (1992) The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, S. (ed.) (2005) Calcutta: The Living City, vols. I and II. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Misra, B.B. (1978 [1961]) The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mukhopadhyay, D. (1995) The Maverick Maestro: Mrinal Sen. New Delhi: Indus. Nandy, A. (1983) The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, S. (1984) Modern India, 1885–1947. Delhi: Macmillan. Vasudevan, R. (2000) Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

13 Genre as Cultural Whimsy: Taking to the Road in The Bird People in China and Cold Fever Felicia Chan

The tacit acknowledgment of an apparently borderless world brought on by economic, if not political, globalization has not altered the fiction of national borders in cinema. It is a fiction that continues to exert its conservatism, exemplified by such cultural protectionism as practised in France, South Korea and the People’s Republic of China against foreign products (Cowen 1998; Anon. 2006; Davis 2010). Cinema with cross-cultural themes occupies that liminal space between fiction and reality, as it sets out to subvert the fiction of national borders, while being subject to the material and discursive realities imposed by the agents of national border patrol, represented by such apparatus as passports, permits, funding structures, etc. The self-reflexivity of the kinds of cross-cultural cinema I shall address here finds voice in Naoki Sakai’s understanding of translation as a process that is ‘always complicit with the building, transforming, or disrupting of power relations’ (2006: 72). Translation, he argues, ‘always inscribes itself in the social topos of incommensurability and difference, and what [he] specifically call[s] cultural difference, to which translation is a response, is anterior to and fundamentally heterogeneous to the conceptual difference of species, the difference between particularities’ (2006: 71). The films addressed in this chapter perform Sakai’s notion of ‘cultural difference’ by adapting the generic conventions of the road movie, thereby taking the issue of cultural translation beyond binary opposites, beyond simple ‘East-West’ dialogues and beyond simple associations of homolingualism with national identity. The films The Bird People in China/Chûgoku no chôjin (Takashi Miike, Japan, 1998) and Cold Fever (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, USA/Japan/Iceland/Denmark/Germany, 1995) are similar in structure, though not in content or style. Both films feature a Japanese protagonist in a foreign land and in so doing question the limits of national 210

Felicia Chan 211

self-identity largely through a series of miscommunications faced by the protagonists as they navigate their alien terrains. The concept of ‘otherness’ is thus laid out as part of a triangulation rather than as a binary relation, a triangulation expressed by Trinh T. Min-ha (1998) as ‘an elsewhere within here’, that is to say, ‘while one is entirely involved with the now-and-here, one is also elsewhere, exceeding one’s limits even as one works intimately with them’. Trinh uses this concept of an ‘elsewhere’ to conceptualize a politics of identity that exceeds the limits of self and other (see also Trinh 1994), and it is with this understanding of identity and otherness that I approach the films’ use of genre as cultural whimsy through a negotiation of the English language and its intimations of globalism. Within these frameworks of negotiation, I explore the films’ adaptation of the road movie genre, traditionally seen as emblematic of American history and culture, for their own purposes in order to dramatize not just the characters’ search for place and identity but also the films’ own reliance on a culturally embedded set of generic conventions that simultaneously allows for difference to be enacted. The first film I address is The Bird People in China, directed by Takashi Miike, who is better known outside Japan for his yakuza (Japanese mafia) films. However, The Bird People marks a change in style – quiet, whimsical and nostalgic for the loss of a simpler era. The story centres on Wada (Masahiro Motoki), a Japanese salaryman, who is sent by the mining company he works for to a remote village in Yunnan, China, to assess the quality of its gemstones with the view to expanding its operations there. He is accompanied by a member of the yakuza, Ujie (Renji Ishibashi), who is sent to make sure his boss gets a share of the spoils. Ujie provides much of the comic relief to the film as well as a passing nod to Miike’s reputation as a maker of yakuza films (see Williams 2004). The road to the village is long and arduous as the two negotiate not just hostile terrain but also a number of linguistic barriers. They are guided by a ‘local’, ironically played by Japanese-American actor Mako (known mainly for his Asian ‘baddie’ roles in Hollywood films and television). The guide’s role is to interpret the Mandarin Chinese for the Japanese travellers. When they get to the village, it becomes evident that not everyone in China speaks Mandarin (see Anon. 2007). So, at one stage, there is, in effect, a four-way communication, beginning from the Japanese men, to the guide, to the village interpreter (who translates between Mandarin and the language of the tribe), to the village chief and back again. The relay is further transmitted via the subtitles to the audience who may not understand any of the on-screen languages.

212

Genre in Asian Film and Television

When they reach the village, Wada encounters an unusual girl with blue eyes who runs a school for children wanting to learn how to fly (with wings). He learns that the village believes in an ancient legend in which they are said to be descended from a mysterious ‘Bird People’, a race of flying humans of whom no one alive has any memory. One day, Wada overhears the girl humming a tune that intrigues him, especially when the song sounds like it is in English. When he questions the girl further, he discovers that her grandfather was a Second World War British pilot who had crash-landed in the mountains nearby decades ago and had never been able to leave the village. The girl is unable to speak English and hums the tune, a Scottish folk song called ‘Annie Laurie’, purely from memory. Through the aid of interpreters, his electronic dictionary and a tape recorder (whose batteries threaten to run out), Wada becomes obsessed with translating the words of the song as a means of coming to terms with his fascination for the girl and the remote simplicity of the village. The fictional interconnectedness in the film of British history (of imperialism in India and of the Second World War) with Japanese history in China (also of imperialism and war) belies the interconnectedness of these historical encounters in the present. It is from Wada’s desire to translate the encounter, through the failing technology of his tape recorder and electronic dictionary, that these historical encounters are yoked together, and his act of translation finds a parallel in the film’s own act of translating by joining. The instance where history, national identity and selfhood intersect and disperse at the same time – as a further example of Trinh’s ‘elsewhere in the now-and-here’ – occurs in the scene where Wada reads for his yakuza companion a line from the grandfather’s diary in English: ‘Commencing tomorrow, I shall be embarking a new life [sic].’ Wada translates this sentence into Japanese for his companion, which is retranslated into the English subtitles (US DVD) as ‘This is the end. From tomorrow, the mornings will be different’. While Japanese-speakers may be able to sense the gains and losses in the translation, if one is simply relying on the English subtitles, a different set of transactions takes place. For non-Japanese-speakers, there is no way of knowing whether the English subtitles translates the Japanese ‘accurately’, but the gap between the diegetic source (the grandfather’s diary) and the paradiegetic target (the subtitles) already brings to attention a certain incommensurability between the two languages, before even taking into consideration the constraints and technicalities of film subtitling (such as the space available on the screen for a fixed number of words and so on) from which the translator must make strategic choices

Felicia Chan 213

(Schwarz 2002). If dubbing is considered a form of cultural domestication, subtitling is considered a form of ‘foreignization’: ‘it is subtitling that contributes to experiencing the flavour of the foreign language, its mood and the sense of a different culture more than any other translation mode’ (Szarkowska 2005). Because it is cheaper to subtitle than it is to dub a film, subtitles tend to be preferred in independent films as they have smaller audiences. The result of this ‘foreignization’ is that ‘the audience is not allowed to forget about the foreignness of a translated film and is constantly reminded of its authenticity as it hears the original dialogues throughout the film’ (Szarkowska 2005). Following his translation of the diary, Wada muses that ‘Probably, from the next day, the grandfather ceased to be British’, and Ujie intones, ‘That’s . . . a real man’. Articulated as they squat over the outdoor toilet, this is the moment when the characters acknowledge and articulate for themselves their national renunciation. It is when they must reconsider their ‘Japanese’ identities and decide whether to stay or return to Japan; each one has to decide on how he will re-form his identity which has been systematically deconstructed during the course of their journey. In an interview produced by Arts Magic for the US DVD, Miike discusses the historicity of the film, in which he equates the unknown that is China (of the time) to the unknown that is right next door to one’s own home in Japan: It was before the rapid economic growth period in China and there was an atmosphere that anything could happen there. Even for us in Japan, there are places that we’ve never been and that we don’t know, like the other side of a mountain near your house. There are places or things that you’re not allowed to go to or to know. For children, this sort of thing is very exciting and expands their imagination. They want to go on an adventure, to learn something they didn’t know before. At the time, China had that kind of feeling, which we could no longer feel in Japan. Japanese people generally long for and admire large continents because we live on a small island. We think there are an extraordinary bunch of people out there that we’ve never met. Furthermore, China in relation to Japan is metaphorically, if not geographically, on ‘the other side of a mountain’. In the film, China is projected as the mythical origin of Japan, signalled in the instance when the visitors encounter a young Japanese scholar in possession of some ancient artefacts apparently linking the two civilizations.

214

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Japan scholar Edwin O. Reischauer writes that while ‘Japan . . . is culturally a daughter of Chinese civilization, much as the countries of North Europe are daughters of Mediterranean culture’, the country owes its cultural and linguistic distinctiveness to its relative geographical isolation as an island (1990: 7). As a result, Reischauer argues that Japanese culture has evolved to become ‘highly self-conscious and acutely aware of their differences from others’ (1990: 8). Yet it is significant that Miike’s film goes out of its way to emphasize the internal diversity within China as well. In this respect, the choice of location in Yunnan is not accidental. According to UNESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) statistics: Yunnan is the second largest ethnic-inhabited province in China, one of the country’s three provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) with an ethnic population of over 10 million. In 1990, there were 51 ethnic groups living in Yunnan; the total population of these ethnic groups was 12.34 million, but it was 14.33 million in 2000, the average annual growth rate was 1.45%. As a result, the province has a variety of spoken and written languages, cultures and religions, as well as forms of marriage and family, and foundations for population development. The distribution of the ethnic population is complicated and generally tends to develop in the direction of scattering and intermingling with each other. ‘China’ in the film is not simply the mythical cultural origin of Japan, but one that is also multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, an idea that resonates with Mika Ko’s reading of Miike’s films as national allegories: the presence of non-Japanese characters within the Japanese body politic of his films . . . constitute a kind of basic constellation, a matrix that organises important dimensions of his films and which we may read as a preoccupation with the homogeneity of Japan – or its lack – as a socio-political entity. Miike’s films tell us about a particular conception of ‘Japaneseness’ in the context of a contemporary Japan allegedly concerned with questions of multiculturalism. (Ko 2006: 131) What interests me is how that national allegory is performed and presented through the engagement of cross-cultural language politics in The Bird People in China and addressed to (presumably) the non-Japanese spectators by scripting them into the encounter as cultural conduits.

Felicia Chan 215

Put differently, it is the address of the non-Japanese – and, equally likely, non-Chinese – spectator that forms the third point of the triangulation, the one who is both ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ at the same time, that completes the circuit of cultural self-investigation. The second film I will address would not usually be considered an ‘Asian’ film. It is a USA/Japan/Iceland/Denmark/Germany co-production directed by Icelandic filmmaker Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, and is also set in Iceland. Its relevance to my argument is how it approaches themes similar to that in The Bird People, but from an obverse point of view. The film’s protagonist is also a Japanese salaryman, Hirata (Masatoshi Nagase), who embarks on a trip to Iceland to pay his respects to his parents who died there. Like Wada in Miike’s film, Hirata’s journey takes the form of a road trip, this time across the icy landscape of Iceland in winter. Like Wada, Hirata meets several strange individuals along the way, including a funeral collector, a kind of spirit or banshee whose screams manage to revive his car, two noisy American hitchhikers and a few Icelandic cowboys, including one who teaches him to drink the most potent alcoholic beverage in Iceland known as the ‘Black Death’. While Miike had his protagonist leave Japan for strange and mythical China, Fridriksson had his protagonist leave Japan for strange and mythical Iceland, Fridriksson’s own homeland. In other words, Fridriksson consciously constructs the land of his birth, and in which he still works, as one that is foreign to the other, although he is keen to draw on its similarities with Japan. In the Director’s Notes to the press release of the film, he writes: ‘Japan has a lot in common with my homeland, Iceland . . . Both are volcanic islands. Both depend on fishing and sea faring. Both are fascinated by stories of ancient warriors and old battles and, of course, with witches, ghosts and spirits of all kinds’ (Fridriksson 1995). It does not, however, take long for the visual differences to emergence, differences the film itself emphasizes by the shift in theatrical aspect ratios between the two locations, from the ‘television aspect ratio’ of 1.33:1 for the scenes in Tokyo to a widescreen 2.35:1 for the scenes in Iceland (Berardinelli 1996). Rather than becoming localized, as Ujie and Wada did in Yunnan, Hirata increasingly becomes one amongst many strangers in the strange land. In the Iceland of Cold Fever, everyone seems to be strange, including the spectator for staying with the film. This celebration of strangeness, described in one review as ‘quirky and crammed with wry humour’ (Ahlund 1994), is mediated throughout by the use of English. The English dialogue is presented as the one layer of normalcy over a very abnormal experience. But this normalcy

216

Genre in Asian Film and Television

is constantly being tested. Unlike Wada’s experience, Hirata’s experience in Iceland is less one of linguistic frustration as one of cultural mis/untranslatability. Hirata is able to speak and understand English, as are most of the people he meets in Iceland, but the facility of language alone is insufficient to guarantee effective communication. This point is made early on in the film when Hirata joins a bus tour with an English-speaking guide and meets two non-English-speaking German tourists. English enables Hirata to communicate with the locals, yet offers him no greater assistance with making sense of their practices. Iceland to Hirata (and no doubt to the audience as well) is not just a ‘strange country’, as he puts it, but is also a country that attracts strange people, judging from the motley crew of acquaintances he meets along the way: there is the taxi driver who stops their journey to take part in a nativity play, the singing workers at the back of an open truck, the funeral collector, etc. The unanswered question remains, long past the end of the film, not why his Japanese parents died there, but why they had travelled there in the first place. How ‘strange’ or ‘normal’ were they? Eyerman and Löfgren write that many American road movies ‘are about escape . . . from an intolerant “normality”’ (1995: 62); Cold Fever, however, subverts this idea and sends Hirata on a reluctant journey away from his idea of normality as a Tokyo salaryman. The notion of foreignness in the film is thus produced a posteriori by the dialectical relationship between normalcy and strangeness, between understanding and non-understanding, one depending on the other constantly for definition. Sakai explains how this dialectic is necessary for translation to take place: If the foreign is unambiguously incomprehensible, unknowable, and unfamiliar, then translation simply cannot be done. If, conversely, the foreign is comprehensible, knowable and familiar, translation is unnecessary. Thus, the status of the foreign is ambiguous in translation. The foreign is incomprehensible and comprehensible, unknowable and knowable, unfamiliar and familiar at the same time. (Sakai 2006: 73) As in The Bird People, we are returned to the sense expressed by Trinh (1998) as ‘[n]ot quite other, not quite the same’, as she attempts to locate the complex positionality of ‘the Inappropriate/d Other’ who both cannot be appropriated and is also inappropriate at the same time. In a land (Iceland) where everyone is an ‘other’, including those who

Felicia Chan 217

consider themselves local, Hirata’s (and the spectator’s) sense of ‘normalcy’ and ‘foreignness’ ceases to be relevant. Ironically, Hirata is compelled to enter this world of strangeness by force of tradition (to pay respects to deceased parents), and it is in fact his desire to ‘get it over with’ that mires him further and further into the Icelandic wilderness: the quicker he tries to get to the next stage of the journey, the further away his detour sends him. It is not too farfetched to describe his journey as Odyssean, except that in Hirata’s case, there is no one waiting at home. Interestingly, the penultimate stop in his journey, before his final embrace of Iceland as a spiritual home, is a tavern which specializes in re-enacting the American West – complete with cowboy and native American costumes and country music. In the last leg of the journey, the road ends and no cars may pass, so he travels on with a local companion on local ponies across the white snow plains, hinting at, though never passing for, the prairie grasslands of the Wild West. It is this hinting of, and yet not substituting for, the American road movie that allows the idiosyncrasies of the narrative to play out without appearing to be out of place. Eyerman and Löfgren argue that because of the cultural specificity of the road movie, attempts to ‘transplant the genre into European settings’ (1995: 70) have not been entirely successful due to differences in the cultural resonances of the romance of taking to the road and ‘basic . . . conceptions of personal challenge and social mobility’ (1995: 73). Cold Fever circumvents this problem by foregrounding the whole issue of cultural translation itself. The protagonist is as foreign to the land as it is foreign to him, and the likelihood that both Hirata and Iceland are also foreign to audiences takes this further. Like Miike, Fridriksson exploits the natural beauty of the landscape and its remoteness in his production of foreignness. The unending swathes of ice that frustrate Hirata’s journey act as exemplary tourist promotion; indeed, almost every review of this film comments on the stunning grandeur of the landscape (Ebert 1996; Holden 1996). Nevertheless, it is a landscape rendered beautiful only because we, unlike Hirata, do not actually have to be in it. The difficulty of filming during the harshness of the Icelandic winter is revealed in the film’s Production Notes (1995): Almost daily snowstorms made even the shortest trip to locations a major adventure. On one particularly stormy day, the camera car (with two assistant cameramen and the camera inside) went over

218

Genre in Asian Film and Television

a cliff; the car was completely destroyed but fortunately the crew members and the camera were unharmed . . . Fridriksson insisted on prowling the back roads to capture the best possible shots. As a result, the crew became accustomed to digging the director’s jeep out of snow drifts . . . two or three times each day . . . When it wasn’t snowing, the weather would change instantly and completely unpredictably to freezing rain or sunshine, making continuity virtually impossible. Another difficulty was the diminishing light: there were only four or five hours of daylight each day. Therefore, what the film invites the spectator to do is to enter the magical world that is cinematic Iceland. The promotion of the Icelandic landscape may encourage a few more tourists to visit (see Karpovich 2010), but given the film’s limited exposure via the international film festival and arthouse circuits, its main address is not simply to a touristic audience but to a culturally touristic audience for whom the quest for strange and different encounters is important, and for whose needs quirky arthouse fare and film festivals aim to cater for. As Adrian Martin puts it: ‘the film festival is what . . . gives the nontraveller his or her glimpse of a wide rich world, so full of different sensibilities, visions and stories’ (Martin 2009: 99). Thus, Cold Fever is not so much a film ‘about’ Iceland as foreign, nor is it a film about simply being foreign in Iceland. Instead, it is a film in which geographical Iceland functions metonymically and mythically as a space in which difference is not so much celebrated as merely taken for granted. The use of English as a local and foreign language is also taken for granted, as is its address to the festival and arthouse audiences accustomed to – even expecting – these performances of strangeness. The address to the festival and arthouse audience is located in the paratextual allusions embedded in the text. To an unfamiliar audience, not being able to pick out these references does not detract from the main narrative of the film. To a knowing audience, the film reiterates their eligibility for membership of an informal club that prides itself on being relatively exclusive, culturally speaking – the club of the arthouse cinephile (see Koehler 2009; de Valck 2007). Fridriksson came to international attention when his previous film, Children of Nature (Germany/Iceland/Norway, 1991), was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and has been said to make films ‘in a manner reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and the Kaurismaki brothers’ (Ahlund 1994). The actor who plays Hirata, Masatoshi Nagase, had previously appeared in a film by the cult director Jim Jarmusch called

Felicia Chan 219

Mystery Train (USA/Japan, 1989). Jim Stark, the co-writer on Cold Fever, produced a number of Jarmusch’s films, many of which have employed foreign actors and non-English dialogue, including Mystery Train. For the diehard cinephile, the real ‘Easter egg’ may be found in the brief appearance of Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki as Hirata’s grandfather. Suzuki is not well known outside Japan, but his B-movie-style films have found a cult following among Western cinephiles, including the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch, and Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (France/Germany/USA/Japan, 1999) is an undisguised homage to Suzuki’s Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin (Japan, 1967) (Wilonsky 2000). The various pathways that may be traced within a film text, beyond the level of its narrative content, exposes the need to take account of this sense of the ‘elsewhere’, both in terms of the film’s circulation and the address of the spectator. Such a path of inquiry is only beginning to open up the kinds of questions that need to be asked about how those identity relations and politics may be understood in a medium whose material viability depends on its ability to negotiate translation barriers (see Willemen 2005). Both The Bird People and Cold Fever present these encounters with the foreign as acts of cultural whimsy told through the international language of film genres, allowing for cultural alienness to be performed through the conventions of the road movie in a humorous way, thus mitigating its threat. John Mowitt argues that when addressing the nature of language, culture and translation in cinema, one should not to speak of ‘foreign language films’ but of ‘foreign film languages’: [The aim is to] stretch the concept of language – especially as applied to the cinema – while at the same time retaining from it, through the grammatical instance of reflexivity, the sort of systemic or structural limits that one might appeal to when disagreeing with someone [. . .] about the sense of the statements being made by a particular film. (Mowitt 2005: 36) If so, to take up Mowitt’s call is to make conscious the encounter with these messages by reassessing questions of cultural ownership, both of language and of cinema, towards those able to address who Sakai and Solomon refer to as ‘the multitude of foreigners’; a multitude comprising the fractured subject, one who, as our experience with the films uncovers, speaks to ‘the multitude of foreigners’ also within us (2006: 335).

220

Genre in Asian Film and Television

References Ahlund, J. (1994) ‘Slagolikt kreativ’, Chaplin (Stockholm) 1. Available at: www. filmreference.com/Directors-Fr-Ha/Fridriksson-Fridrik-Thor.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Anon. (1995) Production Notes. Cold Fever. ——. (2006) ‘Moviegoers to Pay for Film Industry Support Plan’, Digital Chosunilbo. Available at: http://video.phpmyanmar.com/english/video/article/2396/ moviegoers-to-pay-for-film-industry-support-plan.html, date accessed 8 November 2010. ——. (2007) ‘Only Half Chinese Speak Mandarin’, BBC News, 7 March. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6426005.stm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Berardinelli, J. (1996) ‘Cold Fever’, Reel Views. Available at: www.reelviews.net/ movies/c/cold_fever.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Cowen, T. (1998) ‘French Kiss-Off’, Reason. Available at: www.reason.com/news/ show/30691.html, date accessed 2 November 2010. Davis, D.W. (2010) ‘Market and Marketization in the China Film Business’, Cinema Journal, 49(3), 121–5. De Valck, M. (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam University Press. Ebert, R. (1996) ‘Cold Fever’, Chicago Sun-Times, 19 July. Available at: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19960719/ REVIEWS/607190301/1023, date accessed 2 November 2010. Eyerman, R. and Löfgren, O. (1995) ‘Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility’, Theory, Culture & Society, 12(1), 53–79. Fridriksson, F.T. (1995) Director’s Notes. Cold Fever. Holden, S. (1996) ‘An Icelandic Road Movie? Button Up’, New York Times, 5 April. Available at: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0DE6DD 1339F936A35757C0A960958260, date accessed 2 November 2010. Karpovich, A.I. (2010) ‘Theoretical Approaches to Film-Motivated Tourism’, Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development, 7(1), 7–20. Ko, M. (2006) ‘The Break-up of the National Body: Cosmetic Multiculturalism and the Films of Miike Takashi’, in V. Vitali and P. Willemen (eds), Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, pp. 129–37. Koehler, R. (2009) ‘Cinephilia and Film Festivals’, in R. Porton (ed.), dekalog 3: On Film Festivals. London: Wallflower, pp. 81–97. Martin, A. (2009) ‘Here and Elsewhere: The View from Australia’, in R. Porton (ed.), dekalog 3: On Film Festivals. London: Wallflower, pp. 98–106. Miike, T. (2004) The Bird People in China. DVD, Arts Magic. Mowitt, J. (2005) Re-takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reischauer, E.O. (1990) Japan: The Story of a Nation. Tokyo: Tuttle. Sakai, N. (2006) ‘Translation’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 71–8. Sakai, N. and Solomon, J. (2006) ‘Sovereign Police, Global Complicity: Addressing the Multitude of Foreigners’, in N. Sakai and J. Solomon (eds), Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 333–5. Schwarz, B. (2002) ‘Translation in a Confined Space’, Translation Journal, 6(4). Available at: http://accurapid.com/journal/22subtitles.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010.

Felicia Chan 221 Szarkowska, A. (2005) ‘The Power of Film Translation’, Translation Journal, 9(2). Available at: http://accurapid.com/journal/32film.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Trinh, T.M. (1994) ‘Other than Myself/My Other Self’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash and L. Tickner (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. London: Routledge, pp. 9–28. ——. (1998) ‘Inappropriate/d Artificiality’, Trinh T. Minh-ha home page. Available at: www.ced.berkeley.edu/faculty/bourdier/trinh/TTMHInterviews002.htm, date accessed 8 November 2010. UNESCAP (n.d.) ‘Yunnan’. Available at: http://www.unescap.org/esid/psis/ population/database/chinadata/yunnan.htm, date accessed 2 November 2010. Willemen, P. (2005) ‘For a Comparative Film Studies’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6(1), 98–112. Williams, T. (2004) ‘Takashi Miike’s Cinema of Outrage’, CineAction, 22 March, pp. 54–62. Wilonsky, R. (2000) ‘The Way of Jim Jarmusch’, Dallas Observer, 16 March. Available at: www.dallasobserver.com/2000-03-16/film/the-way-of-jim-jarmusch, date accessed 2 November 2010.

14 East Asian Pop Culture1 Chua Beng Huat

The American labour historian Gary Cross argues that ‘consumerism is not an inevitable stage in industrial development. Rather it has been a choice made within complex cultural, political and social contexts’ (1993: vii). Furthermore, ‘increased consumer need would lash workers ever more firmly to their jobs’ (Cross 1993: 39). The consequent ‘work-and-spend’ culture has become an essential part of contemporary everyday life of all wage earners, for whom the constant expansion of consumption remains the primary reason to labour. Historically, American capitalists had invested earlier than anyone else in consumer culture, including mass entertainment, which explains the American domination in the world of mass consumption, from fast food to Hollywood. Since the 1960s, East Asian countries have experienced very rapid and compressed capitalist industrialization leading to the unprecedented expansion of all modes of consumption, from small objects to luxurious automobiles to mass entertainment (Chua 2009). Against the background of the global dominance of the American massentertainment pop culture industry, a regional pop culture industry has been developing and consolidating in East Asia, so much so that we can discursively designate this transnational regional cultural industry as the ‘East Asian Pop Culture’ industry.2 1 This chapter is a synthesis of the papers I have published on this topic since 2000; specific references to these publications are used where appropriate. 2 Research and publications on East Asian Pop Culture are necessarily collaborative efforts of individuals sited in regional locations. The Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, where I have been in charge of the Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster, has generously funded international conferences and workshops on different aspects of the field. These include an agenda-setting meeting in 2002, a workshop on the Korean Wave (2005), a

222

Chua Beng Huat 223

Methodology and substantive focus for different media products Contemporary pop culture artefacts are consciously commercially produced, capitalist-profit-driven, mass-entertainment cultural commodities, typically with very short shelf-lives, in order to stimulate constant and continuous consumption. They are typically mass-media products, including pop music, films and television programmes.3 Each has its unique methodological and substantive issues in production, circulation and consumption. There are familiar patterns of academic analyses of these products, which are partly a consequence of each product’s demand on consumer practices. First, relative to television dramas, music and film have lighter demands on an audience’s time. A song takes no more than a few minutes of attention. A film usually takes no more than a couple of hours. In contrast, television drama demands an audience’s sustained viewing at regular intervals, usually once a week for one episode. Many other activities need to be sacrificed or at least displaced in order to catch the episode each week; efforts have to be made to record an episode if missing it cannot be avoided, and time has to be found to watch the episode before the next instalment is screened the following week. These demands amount to an active involvement with what is on screen, drawing audiences into an intimate virtual relationship with the characters in the drama. Secondly, the degree of transnational popularity of the three products is significantly different. Music is perhaps the least able to reach a transnational audience, because it can be neither dubbed nor subtitled and thus remains incomprehensible to anyone lacking the requisite foreign language competence. Generally, only a small audience of avid fans are found in the export location; dance music might gain wider popularity. The language barrier also explains the common phenomenon of the year-long monthly public seminar on the representation of violence in Asian national cinemas (2006), a workshop on the cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city (2006), a workshop on Asian pop music (2007), a international workshop on Asian cinema (2007) and a workshop on Pop Culture China (2009). The papers presented at these events obviously serve as resource material for this chapter. 3 To the extent that pop culture is the culture of the masses, it is a constitutive part of the larger popular culture. The latter include local cultural practices of long standing, or what we call ‘traditions’, religion and other folk practices which, according to Stuart Hall (1981), may have greater potential for political and social change.

224

Genre in Asian Film and Television

complete rerecording of popular foreign songs in the local language. Films and television programmes can be subtitled or dubbed to make them comprehensible to the target audience. Relative to television programmes which are transmitted into the sitting room of the home, without any additional effort or cost in consumption, the film audience is small in size and has been further reduced by the arrival of DVDs, even more so for foreign films which appeal largely to aficionados. Academically, all three categories of pop culture have been commonly subjected to ideological analyses. There is also a common focus on star musicians and actors of large and/or small screens in ‘celebrity’ studies. Additionally, films are often analysed within a ‘national’ frame, although the idea of ‘national’ cinema is increasingly problematic.

The structure of East Asian Pop Culture At least since the 1980s, regionally produced pop culture products have crisscrossed the national borders of East Asian countries and constitute a significant part of the routine consumer culture of the regional population. Side by side with American pop culture, in every major urban centre in East Asia – Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo – there are dense flows of pop culture products from the same centres into one another, although the directions and volumes of flows vary unevenly amongst them. The regional marketing, distribution, promotion and circulation of pop culture products are now part of the production planning. This thick and intensifying traffic between transnational locations – the economics of this cultural industry, the boundary crossings of products, the crisscrossing of artistes not only geographically but across different media, and the multiple media and modes of consumption of audiences in different locations – lends substance to and warrants the concept of ‘East Asian Popular Culture’ as an object of analysis. Pop culture products include Japanese manga and animation and television dramas. Animation has an international following and its most important markets are in fact in the West. Television dramas, on the other hand, became popular with regional mainstream audiences during the 1990s. Prior to that, there was a trickle of Japanese TV dramas into the region, with Oshin (NHK, 1983–4), broadcast in the mid-1980s, still fondly remembered by the regional audience. Subsequent regional success was somewhat serendipitous because the television producers were not interested, as financial returns from exports were considered to be paltry relative to the high production cost. By the early 2000s,

Chua Beng Huat 225

the regional space of Japanese television drama faced increased competition from the aggressive export of a similar genre from Korea, where the government had targeted pop culture exports as a new economic initiative, just before the 1997 Asian regional financial crisis. The huge influx and immediate popularity of Korean television dramas in the region led to its being labelled the ‘Korean Wave’ by media writers and later referred to as the ‘Korean Invasion’ by those who saw the inflow negatively. Besides television dramas, Japanese and Korean pop music also have their respective aficionados in the region but never achieved a similar level of mainstream popularity as television, as the requisite language competency required for appreciating them is largely absent among the audiences/consumers. In the pop music sphere, the opening of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a huge consumer market provided a much-needed infusion of motivation and energy in reviving the Mandarin pop music industry in the 1990s. The ailing Cantonese pop music (Cantopop) became progressively displaced by Mandarin pop (Mandopop) music. Cantonese singers began to switch to singing in Mandarin to tap into the PRC market, and Taipei emerged as a centre for Mandarin pop music production.4 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dense traffic of pop culture products across the national/cultural boundaries in East Asia defied limiting analysis focused on singular locations. Each East Asian location participates to different and unequal extents in the production, distribution and consumption of the circulating pop culture products. Japan, financially the best endowed, is overwhelmingly the leader in many production aspects of East Asian Pop Culture, such as quality and format. Indeed, Japanese audiences accustomed to the very high visual quality of Japanese TV dramas are likely to turn away from visually lower quality regional imports, which partly explains why Japan was the most resistant location to importing regional pop cultures. In this context, the popularity of the Korean TV drama Winter Sonata/Gyeoul Yeonga (KBS2, 2002) and its male lead, Bae Yong Joon, in Japan is all the more phenomenal (Môri 2008). Since then, Korean TV dramas have increasingly been screened in Japan. On the other hand, Korean pop culture benefited greatly from the ‘illegal’ entry of Japanese pop culture material which, as part of the colonial/postcolonial legacy, had been officially banned 4 Marc Moskowitz (2009) has provided an intensive study of the rise and penetration of Taiwanese Mandarin pop music into the PRC from the mid-1980s to the present.

226

Genre in Asian Film and Television

in Korea since the end of the Second World War; the ban was not lifted until 1998. During the porous ban, Japanese TV dramas were copied and plagiarized freely by Korean producers (Han 2000), so much so that Korean audiences were fully familiar with Japanese pop culture when the latter was eventually officially allowed to enter Korea (Kim 2002). The subsequent success of the Korean Wave may be said to owe much to its adaptation of Japanese production qualities. Finally, Japanese and Korean pop cultures might have remained in relative national isolation or limited regional circulation if not for the massive ethnic-Chinese (henceforth Huaren) population as audience/consumers in East Asia. There is a long history of pop culture flows in different Chinese languages, primarily Mandarin, Cantonese and Minnan (also known as Hokkien or Taiwanese for supporters of Taiwan independence), within locations in which Huaren are in the majority – the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore which, although geographically in Southeast Asia, have an overwhelming, more than three-quarters majority of Huaren – or comprise a numerically significant minority, such as in Malaysia. This history stretches back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical and structural depth of production, distribution and consumption of Chinese-language pop culture in these areas provides us with the empirical basis to designate this relatively well-integrated geocultural economy as a ‘Pop Culture China’ (Chua 2001), in contrast to a ‘Confucian Culture China’ (Tu 1991) or a diasporic China based on business connections and networks (Menkhoff and Gerke 2002).5 Korean and Japanese pop culture products are dubbed and/or subtitled into a Chinese language, usually either Mandarin or Cantonese, and are re-exported to the entire Pop Culture China market. The sharing of a common written script that is comprehensible to individuals who are Chinese-literate facilitates access to cultural material across different, and often mutually incomprehensible, spoken Chinese language(s) speakers; this point will be discussed further later on. Structurally, an East Asian Pop Culture that includes Japanese and Korean products would not be possible without this historically deeper structure of a Pop Culture China. The massive Huaren consumer market, which makes dubbing and subtitling a financially viable undertaking, explains the unequal flow of Japanese and Korean products into Pop Culture China. East Asian Pop Culture is literally built on top of Pop Culture China. 5 Key players in this Pop Culture China from the very beginning are the Shaw Brothers, now a brand name synonymous with the history of the Chineselanguages entertainment empire in East Asia; see Fu (2008).

Chua Beng Huat 227

Circulation in Pop Culture China In accordance with the unequal structure of flow, all the above instances register the flow of pop culture from Japan and Korea into spaces within Pop Culture China. Different Chinese languages predominate in different Huaren-dominant locations: Mandarin in the PRC and Singapore, where all Chinese languages other than Mandarin are banned from the mass media; Cantonese in Hong Kong and Mandarin and Minnan/ Hokkien/Taiwanese in Taiwan. As spoken languages, these three languages may be mutually incomprehensible to a monolingual Huaren. However, the shared written script that is comprehensible to individuals who are Chinese-literate facilitates access to cultural material across mutually incomprehensible spoken Chinese languages. This explains the curious phenomenon of the subtitling of Chinese-language films and TV programmes for Chinese audiences.6 If one does not understand the dialogue, one might be able to read the subtitles. However, if one is Chinese script-illiterate and a monolingual speaker of a Chinese language that is different from the one on screen, then the film/TV programme will remain linguistically incomprehensible.7 With these language differences, it is not uncommon to be watching a film or TV programme with dialogue in one Chinese language (Mandarin) and subtitles in another (Cantonese). Within Pop Culture China, the Chinese language(s) into which imported Japanese and Korean television dramas are dubbed depends on where the dubbing is done.8 When the dubbed dialogue and the subtitles are in two different languages, the route the screen product in question travels within Pop Culture China can become a puzzle: it could first be imported to Taiwan, dubbed and subtitled in Mandarin, then re-exported to Hong Kong, where the Mandarin subtitles remain but Cantonese 6 The current presence of two different written scripts – the complex script that is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and the simplified script used in the PRC and Singapore – along with local innovations, such as Cantonese or Fujian written words or conventional Chinese ideograms to be read in Cantonese or Fujian sounds, may create some confusion among individuals who are not familiar with the two scripts and the other dialect sounds. 7 There are interesting politics of language in this multi-Chinese-lingual community that have been discussed in terms of the general issue of Chinese-identity (Chun 1996). 8 Cross-national joint-productions of films among the East Asian locations have been on the increase in the past decade. However, unlike television programmes, films tend not to be dubbed, thus increasing their ‘multi-Asian-lingual’ character, including multi-accented Mandarin(s) in Chinese language films.

228

Genre in Asian Film and Television

dialogue is added (to cater to the increasing numbers of Mandarinliterate/speaking Mainland population there), then re-exported to Singapore. Alternatively, it could have be dubbed and subtitled in Hong Kong simultaneously, again to cater to the two linguistic populations, or it could be imported into Singapore, dubbed in Mandarin and subtitled in Cantonese, in preparation for re-export to other Pop Culture China locations, including Hong Kong. The audience has no means of ascertaining the route travelled without research outside the screen. Regardless of the languages used and the route taken, circulation throughout Pop Culture China primarily makes East Asian Pop Culture possible.

Domesticating the foreign Now let us turn to the ideological effect of dubbing. At the most immediate level, dubbing is the translation of the dialogue on screen from its original or ‘source’ language to one that is common among the local or ‘target’ audience.9 In dubbing, ‘visual synchrony’ between the translated words and the lip movements on screen, i.e. lip-sync, is most important in creating ‘the impression that the actors on screen are pronouncing the translated word’ to generate the belief that it is a ‘local’ programme.10 Where lip-sync fails, the programme loses a significant part of its ‘reality effect’. Constrained by this need to lip-sync, the translator ‘must move away from literal conceptions of translation’ and ‘put forward alternatives that move away from the source text to focus on the function of the text and on the viewer’ (Varela 2004: 35). That is, some changes to the original dialogue to suit the cultural context of the target viewer are unavoidable and indeed necessary.11 Often, terms, expressions and contextual references of the source language have no equivalent in the target language, obliging the translator to generally orient the translation to the cultural context of the target language and adjust accordingly. At its most extreme, ‘fidelity’ to the original may be so relaxed that a target ‘oral colloquial language’ is used 9

TV programmes are often broadcast in ‘dual sound’ so that the audience can choose via their television sets to watch the programme dubbed in the local language or in the original language with local language subtitles. 10 In addition to lip-synchrony, dubbing must also pay attention to ‘kinetic synchrony’ (synchrony with body movements on screen) and ‘isochrony’ (synchrony in timing of screen characters’ utterances) (Varela 2004: 41). 11 Before dubbing can take place, a translation of the given script has to be undertaken; this is followed by ‘synchronization of the translated dialogue so that it matches the actors’ mouth movements and the other images as closely as possible’ (Martinez 2004: 4).

Chua Beng Huat 229

‘to provide the viewers [with] what they are used to’ rather than sticking to the greater demands of written norms (Agost 2004: 68–9). Elements of the culture of the target audience are thus introduced into the dubbed text, traces of which may be largely erased with attention to synchronization. Ideologically, dubbing is therefore a process through which ‘a particular target culture that, for historical, social and political or economic reasons, seeks to domesticate a foreign product and to make both the translator and the translation invisible’ (Varela 2004: 39). In the case of East Asian film/TV programmes, this effect of domestication is always already facilitated by the relatively similar physiognomy of East Asians. In East Asian Pop Culture, orientation to the Huaren cultural contexts in the dubbing of Korean and Japanese films and TV dramas can be quite pronounced. Take, for example, the very popular Korean period drama series Jewel in the Palace/Dae Jang Geum (MBC, 2003–4) (henceforth Dae), which ‘chronicles’ the rise of a palace cook who subsequently became the first female physician to the Korean Emperor in the sixteenth century.12 This contextual element facilitated translation-dubbing into Chinese languages: it was dubbed into Mandarin in Taiwan one year before being dubbed into Cantonese in Hong Kong.13 To further domesticate the series, the Hong Kong TV station (TVB) intervened directly to provide additional ‘explanation’, in Cantonese voice-over, of the Chinese equivalents to the Korean recipes and medicinal items featured on screen. All these localizing practices have transformed Dae into a ‘local’ drama; in this sense, translation/dubbing is also the ‘transmutation’ of the programme. Audiences are drawn into the consumption of the familiar, which facilitates identification with the characters on screen and which undoubtedly contributes significantly to the popularity of imported film and TV dramas in Pop Culture China.

Preserving the foreign ‘Foreignness’ is a large part of the reason for and the viewing pleasure of watching Korean and Japanese TV dramas by the Huaren audience. This foreignness is preserved in the various visual elements on screen. 12

Consistent with the actual practice during the sixteenth century, written documents within the TV screen, from reports in the imperial court to personal letters, were often written in Chinese characters, not in the Korean alphabet. 13 Significantly, many in Singapore prefer the Cantonese to the Mandarin version supposedly because of the ‘greater authenticity’ of colloquial expressions, as opposed to the relative ‘stiffness’ of the Mandarin version. This is more likely to be an expression of resistance to the official imposition of Mandarin as the only language in broadcast media.

230

Genre in Asian Film and Television

‘Ethnic’ costumes, commonly used as signifiers of culture, are a very convenient vehicle for representing the foreign, as in historical period dramas. However, most of the dramas which circulate through the region are urban contemporary dramas, where international fashion rather than ethnic costumes are featured, although ethnic costumes are often worn by older characters, especially women. Another vehicle to signify foreignness in these contemporary dramas is needed. In the urban dramas, if the sound is turned off, the relatively similar physiognomy of East Asians renders it difficult for one to identify the national origin of a drama, especially in an indoor, close-up shot of the characters on screen, unless one is able to identify the specific actors and actresses. Under such conditions, the foreignness is inscribed in iconic or ‘slang’ images (Khoo 2006) that metonymically represent the city in which the scenes on screen are unfolding: the Tokyo Tower, the telecommunication tower in Shanghai, the Hong Kong ferry, public housing flats in Singapore, consumer and leisure sites such as Jeju Island in Korea and, most generically, street scenes where the neon signs are in a local language. The importance of these foreign locations to the audience is reflected in the fact that many of these locations are marketed and visited as tourist sites by drama fans. As TV sights transform into tourist sites, so audiences transform into tourists. The pleasure and exotica of watching the ‘foreign’ is realized in the tourist gaze (Lee 2004; Hirata 2008). In sum, translated and dubbed dialogue domesticates the film/drama to facilitate identification, while the visual exotic foreign raises obstacles to identification. Taken together, watching imported TV dramas is a fragmentary process of intermittent moments of identification and distancing, rather than one of sustained and unwavering identification with what is on screen (Chua 2008). Additional features of identification and distancing can be teased out by analysing the audience’s response to the narrative of TV dramas but, first, a short introduction to the integration of the television industry in East Asia.

Integration of the TV industry 1) Illegal traffic of the early days In the mid-1980s, as mentioned, the Japanese export of ‘trendy’ dramas to the rest of Asia was largely serendipitous. The Japanese ‘bubble economy’ at the time was able to generate enough profits for the producers such that they were not interested in export markets (Iwabuchi 2004: 7). However, the steady stream of Japanese pop cultural products into Korea, where the products were actively copied and plagiarized, had

Chua Beng Huat 231

already familiarized Koreans with Japanese pop culture when the export ban was finally lifted in 1998. Japanese TV drama exports to Taiwan were also started through illegal channels. With the liberalization of television broadcasting in the late 1980s, cable stations sprouted like proverbial mushrooms in Taiwan, leading Taiwanese businesspeople to return from Japan with DVD sets of the dramas to fill up the abundance of broadcast time on these unlicensed satellite television stations. It was not until the early 1990s that Star TV legally used Japanese dramas as the vehicle to establish an audience base in Hong Kong, which was previously completely dominated by the established channels TVA and TVB. 2) Vehicle to gain audiences In contrast to the serendipity of Japanese TV drama exports, the export of Korean TV dramas was a conscious national industrial strategy. Correspondingly, new or smaller television stations used Korean dramas as the vehicle to establish their presence among their respective local audiences, as Star TV had done with Japanese dramas in Hong Kong. Two good examples are Channel U in Singapore and Hunan Satellite Station in the PRC. In Singapore, in 1999, the local monopoly newspaper publisher Singapore Press Holdings ventured into commercial television with two free-to-air channels, one in English (Channel I) and the other in Mandarin (Channel U). The English channel failed and was eventually shut down. The Mandarin channel was able to establish a significant audience base through a combination of broadcasting Korean dramas and local variety shows. These variety shows had a similar look and feel to those from Taiwan, which in turn were very similar to those in Japan; the general formula seems to be high-energy, rapid-fire commentaries from the team of programme hosts, whose entire focus is on making fun of or embarrassing whoever appears on the show with the hosts. The popularity of Korean dramas pushed the established governmentowned Mandarin Channel 8 to seek similar imports in order to claw back its audience base. This led to a mutually cannibalizing bidding war for the same series. To stop the financial bleeding, the two stations eventually merged in 2004. After the merger, Channel U reconfigured itself as the ‘Asian Pop Culture Channel’, in which movies, dramas, variety and talk shows from all over East Asia are freely mixed in the daily programme offerings, interspersed with locally produced news programmes, making the station a signifier of the idea of an East Asian pop culture itself.

232

Genre in Asian Film and Television

A similar industrial strategy to establish an audience base was used in 2004 by the local Hunan Satellite TV Station in the PRC. The station propelled itself into the national broadcasting space by successfully buying the rights to the popular period Korean drama Dae and being the first to broadcast it nationally. It had obtained the rights from the Taiwanese distributor of the series, beating its competitor from Shanghai, who had been negotiating with the Korean producers (Leung 2008). By the end of the 2000s, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong television dramas have all become integral to the daily programming of the television industries in every East Asian nation, frequently available on free-to-air state-owned television stations and definitely on subscription cable stations. As a result of this routinization of programming, East Asian television dramas no longer generate the same kind of excitement as when Korean dramas first burst onto the scene. However, their mundane presence, awaiting the next big hit, is a measure of the consolidation of a loosely integrated regional television industry that now stands in juxtaposition against the global presence of American television products.

Fragmentary audience As in every communicative instance, TV drama narratives construct a space and position of reception for the audience; this is the space of identification with the on-screen character that is preferred by the director. However, acceptance of the assigned audience space and its implied subjectivity is but one of the many viewing spaces that an active audience can take up. In resisting the viewing position offered, one would be distancing oneself from the character and the action – and hence the message – on screen. Alternating moments of identification and distancing, where and when the on-screen characters are ‘like me/us’ or ‘unlike me/us’, are generated during real-time viewing. This identification/distancing process is complicated by the audience’s awareness of the foreignness of imported programmes, which can raise hurdles to identification while facilitating distancing. These elements unavoidably affect the formation of a stable identity of the audience vis-à-vis the TV programmes.

Identification ladder: human and Asian Within the actual viewing time, at the most immediate level, the most general and abstract level of identification is that of ‘being human’, as in audience comments such as ‘I understand why the character acts the way she does. I would do the same if I were in her position because we

Chua Beng Huat 233

are all humans’. Often, abstract and general identification is rendered indirectly. For example, a Singaporean audience comments: Such things can happen anywhere in this world. It’s just that it is filmed in Japan and the characters are Japanese. But when you are talking about love, sex, and marriage, it happens anywhere in the world where someone, out of a situation, has sex with someone else on a fateful night and then thinks about it and, your know, wonders, ‘Why did I do it?’. (MacLachlan and Chua 2004: 166–7) A less inclusive mode of identification than ‘humans/anyone’ takes the form of ‘I identify with the character because we are Asians’, which ideologically also says ‘we are not like non-Asians’. This generates and affirms a sense of ‘Asian-ness’, despite cultural differences between the production and consumption locations, and may be a manifestation of what is conceptualized as ‘cultural proximity’. It is the basis on this that the conceptual desire for a ‘pan-East Asian’ identity through pop culture consumption is grounded.

Distancing/embracing difference Crucially, conceptually and substantively, in instances of identification, the factual foreignness/difference of the imported TV drama is never erased but merely displaced. Foreignness and difference are just beneath the surface of the general and abstract identifications. They emerge immediately as soon as on-screen characters and actions are contrary to an audience’s sentiment, providing the reasons for the latter to distance themselves from what is on screen. For example, a Singaporean audience of married women apparently have a tendency to reject Japanese dramatizations of sexual relations: [The Japanese] want to be first in everything. Their technology is first and this may affect them. They want to be advanced in everything . . . And unconsciously, it may influence their thinking, their attitude towards sex, their values. (MacLachlan and Chua 2004: 164) The following is another example: I have a wish. I wish these Japanese dramas would not encourage our youths to accept those one-night love relationships so easily, sleep with each other and that’s it. This is very unacceptable. (MacLachlan and Chua 2004: 163)

234

Genre in Asian Film and Television

‘Difference’ between ‘they Japanese’ and ‘Singaporean us’ is emphatic and unmistakable. The specificities of the ‘culture’ of production location are evoked to create ‘difference’ and thus the basis of distancing, of disdain. Difference between local and foreign can, of course, be viewed positively and engender desire for the ‘other’. A particularly poignant instance in recent history of East Asian Pop Culture is the changes wrought by the Korean TV drama Winter Sonata on middle-aged female viewers in Japan. The first-hand experience of the media sociologist Yoshitaka Mo ¯ri (2008) is worth quoting extensively: On the day before Christmas Eve in 2003, I visited my parents in Tokyo. My mother, 65 years old, suggested that we should watch a TV drama together, by saying cheerfully that the hero was so beautiful and the story was so romantic and so on. This was my first encounter with a Korean drama, Winter Sonata. I was a little bit confused by her suggestion, as I have not watched any TV dramas with her since I left home at the age of nineteen. To my knowledge, she has not been a big fan of TV home dramas at all, as she has always complained about the uncultivated taste of home dramas. Moreover, she had a strong prejudice against Korea and Korean people. This had often created an unhappy tension between her and me in the past. When I had a part time job teaching Japanese to Korean residents in Japan during my university days, she was not happy about it and told me to quit it as she was worried that my students might tempt me, though they were only primary school students! Since we had a bitter argument over her unreasonable prejudice, I decided never to talk about Korean issues with her again. The fact that she disliked Korea and Koreans made me sad and even embarrassed, as I had many friends who were Korean residents in Japan. During the 2004 New Year’s holidays, I watched the whole series of Winter Sonata with her. The drama was, in fact, more interesting than I had expected. However, what interested me more was the way in which she talked about the drama and the hero, Bae Yong Joon (nicknamed Yon-sama in Japan), as if she were a [young] girl. I found that she exchanged information about the drama through the Internet or over tea meetings with her friends. She became interested in Korean culture and even travelled to Korea. I started to wonder why Winter Sonata fascinated her so much, why Bae Yong Joon could change her idea on Korea, and what will happen to her during and after the Korean Wave? (2008: 127–8)

Chua Beng Huat 235

Middle-aged Japanese female fans turned up in their thousands when Bae arrived at Tokyo airport. They increased Japanese tourist arrivals in Korea, transforming Korea from a male sex-tourist site to a female ‘friendship’ tourist location. Many Japanese women began to think of the possibility of becoming ‘cultural brokers’ who could work on changing the image of Korea/Koreans in Japan and even improve the international relations between the two nations (Mo ¯ri 2008). While this particular Korea/Japan instance is obviously partly determined by the colonial/postcolonial relations between the two countries, it nevertheless demonstrates that foreign/difference can become a source of not only visual pleasure but also an embrace of the other, instead of disdain and rejection.

Capitalist consumerism temporalities Beyond individual audiences, there is also a macro dimension to the transnational audiences of TV dramas in East Asia. Representations of present-day Japan and Korea in urban TV dramas signify capitalist prosperity and sophistication, and engender an aspiration for it as a possible future among young viewers. Ko Yufen observes: ‘Metropolitan Tokyo is re-presented as the locus where the individuals pursue freedom, love, and careers; the imagery of “Tokyo” is a visual place that mediates between reality and dreams. These dreams have not yet been realized in Taipei, but are already presented on screen . . . the “Tokyo” on screen’ (2004: 123). To individuals in the less developed parts of Asia, Japan today is their imagined ‘future’ in terms of capitalist-consumerist modernity (Thomas 2004: 186). Almost as in the reverse shot in films, according to Koichi Iwabuchi (2004), Japanese audiences tend to see in the struggles of less developed Asia a sense of nostalgia for a past which the Japanese have lamentably lost. Japan’s present is economically these lesser developed people’s future, while the latter’s present is Japan’s past. The two views dovetail nicely on a single temporal dimension of capitalist-consumerism-driven modernity: Japan at the front with the least economically developed countries, such as Vietnam, taking up the rear and the rest lining up in between according to their respective capitalist consumer-culture development.

Layers of audiences 1) Avid fans and fan clubs Audiences/consumers of pop culture can be defined by their commitment of time, financial expenses and ‘loyalty’ to the genre and especially to its artists as celebrities. The most committed in all dimensions

236

Genre in Asian Film and Television

would be the avid fans who will spare no expense in their affiliations and search for products, information and other visceral experiences of being with their idols. Fan clubs are often developed by the companies and professional publicists to sustain audience/consumer interests in extending the popularity of the artists on their roster. Beyond localized organized fan clubs, the most actively engaged fans are to be found on the Internet. The following is a summary of what happened in the case of one Japanese television drama series, Pride/Puraido (Fuji TV, 2004), recounted by Hu (2003): In January 2004, a Hong Kong fan, R, who is a skilled Japanese speaker, did the Chinese subtitling for Pride, a few days after the original broadcast in Japan. She thanks T and A for their supplies of the raw material, and when she made a mistake in the subtitling, she took care to insert a correction by thanking another fan for pointing out the mistake. The version of R’s Chinese subtitling of Pride was extremely popular in the Hong Kong newsgroup through its online circulation by means of BitTorrent. [T]he marketing of another version of Pride produced by a Taiwanese-based leading pirated-Japanese-VCD company seems to be threatened, because R’s version has already been so widely circulated among Chinese fans through the Internet. The inner passions for drama, fan friendship and performance/self-expression are displayed in the context of this Chinese translation/subtitling; being ‘acknowledged by a community of like-minded is a characteristically romantic structure of feeling’. (2003: 177–8). These online communities with sub-fans, i.e., fans engaged in subtitling, are highly organized transnational communities of consumers. The subfans increasingly involve professionals who are needed to subtitle the technical languages of medical and legal terms in the on-screen dialogue. The passion of the language- and technology-savvy consumers/ participants/members drives them to do the painstaking work of initiating and amending the translation and subtitling of their favourite drama series for the benefit of other members of the cyber-virtual fan community, beyond the clutches of profit-oriented market players and the legal constraints, including censorship, of the nation-state. 2) Occasional communities of fans However, pop culture consumers/audiences far exceed avid fan club members. It is the larger and geographically more widespread leisure consumers who account for the ‘popularity’ of a pop culture item.

Chua Beng Huat 237

Leisure consumers are as widely dispersed across geographical space as the distribution radius of the pop culture products, i.e., both locally and transnationally. However, unlike avid fans, leisure consumption is largely a privatized activity, often in the home. Leisure consumers do not actively seek out each other. The ‘community’ of leisure consumers therefore remains latent and invisible, requiring other social institutions to make it manifest and visible. One effective vehicle is the media itself. Significantly, the ‘popularity’ of a cultural product, including an artist, is a result of multimedia attention and coverage. For example, at the peak of the popularity of Japanese trendy dramas: ‘China Times, Taiwan’s most widely circulated newspaper, has produced a weekly section (spanning an entire page) devoted to discussions of Japanese TV dramas.’ Following this success, ‘many of Taiwan’s publishers began to target the young Japanese TV drama fans. This led to the popularization of a new genre of writing, which combines information on Japanese TV dramas with discussions about Japanese fashion or lifestyle’. The result is that ‘Japanese TV dramas and other inter-referential texts bind together to create a “mega-text”’ (Lee 2004: 133).14 Any item in this mega-text could serve to realize the potential community of leisure consumers. The entertainment pages of any newspaper in East Asia are a good illustration.15 The page-space can be conceptualized as an imaginary geography of the ‘community space’ for the entire East Asian Pop Culture. Its geographical boundary is defined by the places that appear regularly in the reportages, namely the production centres of Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei and, very occasionally, Singapore. The page-space is ‘peopled’ daily with East Asian artists, represented through images and information: the likes of Bae Yong Joon in Seoul, Faye Wong in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai in Hong Kong and Jay Chou in Taipei inhabit the page-space at intervals that reflect the rising and ebbing phases of their careers, at greater and lesser frequencies respectively. Reading these pages is a multitude of readers unknown to each other. However, should two or more of the readers happen to be co-present at a social occasion, during which they participate in exchanges concerning the artists, the films or television programmes reported in the pages, as part of the free-flowing social conversation, a ‘community of consumers’ instantly materializes. Such instantiation and materialization 14 15

Lee quotes the idea of the ‘mega-text’ from Su (1999). This section first appeared in Chua (2006a).

238

Genre in Asian Film and Television

as an ‘occasional’ community befit the practices of the overwhelming majority of consumers, where consumption is leisure and entertainment rather than a primary focus of everyday life. When the occasion is over, the community dissolves. Whether it is at the level of intense involvement of avid fan clubs or the leisurely level of occasional communities, consumption communities are inherently unstable. Membership is always ever-changing, in quick succession following the rapid rise and fall of a constant stream of ‘stars’ and/or drama series. Consequently, such communities are too ephemeral to stabilize into effective ‘organizations’ in civil society in order to be able to exert significant and effective influence in the wider society. It is here that one mode of linkage or relationship between the pop culture space and the public space can be delineated.

Pop culture space and the public space East Asian Pop Culture is unquestionably a sphere of transnational cultural practices. Nevertheless, within each location, local consumers of imported pop culture are part of a much bigger community with an overwhelmingly bigger number of ‘non-consumers’. The ‘otherness’ of imported cultural products is an ideological resource for non-consumers to politicize local reception. Non-consumers can readily use their demographic majority to ‘anoint’ themselves as the ‘people’ who ‘defend’ the ‘national’ culture against a foreign cultural ‘invasion’ or ‘cultural imperialism’. They often have the overt support of local pop culture producers and the complicity of the nation-state. Two recent instances illustrate this. First is the case of Chang Hui Mei (Ah Mei), an aboriginal Taiwanese singer who was hugely popular in Pop Culture China.16 In 2000, she sang the Taiwanese national anthem at the inauguration of the elected President, Chen Shui Bian, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, which espouses independence for Taiwan from the PRC. This transformed her into a site for the ‘Taiwan Straits’ politics. The PRC government immediately forced sponsors to cancel her endorsement contracts, remove and suppress all her images from public places, and imposed a ban on her performances. The impact of being denied access to the massive PRC market on any Chinese language(s) artist is nothing short of devastating. It took Ah Mei the next two years to work herself back to a 16

This section first appeared in Chua (2006b).

Chua Beng Huat 239

concert in Shanghai. Then, in 2004, her sold-out concert in Hangzhou was cancelled by local police who ‘feared’ possible riots when a group of self-proclaimed ‘patriotic’ Chinese students protested at the concert site against her supposedly ‘pro-independent’ politics. However spurious this ‘nationalist’ claim of presumably non-consuming protesting students might have been, ‘patriotism’ was never discursively available to Chang’s fans in the PRC. It could be said that this was the beginning of the decline of Chang’s popularity in Pop Culture China. Secondly, and to be expected, the regional success of Korean pop culture has given rise to anti-Korean sentiments. For example, in Taiwan, the counter-discourse militarizes it as the ‘Invasion of the Korean Wave’, suggesting a violation of Taiwan’s national territory. On the day that Bae Yong Joon visited Taipei to promote his movie, April Snow/Oechul (Hur Jin-ho, South Korea, 2005), self-fashioned ‘nationalist’ Taiwanese rock musicians staged a concert to lambast Korean pop culture and Bae himself (Yang 2008). In the PRC and Hong Kong, media professionals, including the star of action-comedies Jackie Chan, protested against the extensive coverage the local media gave to every visiting Korean artist, creating and enhancing their ‘popularity’. In such instances, professional jealousy and self-interest mix with more generalized calls from non-consumers to support local artists who are framed as ‘expressing’ and ‘representing’ national interests, indeed, as ‘national cultural preservation’. Rhetorically, such protests exclude the fans of Korean pop culture from the nation and castigate them as cultural traitors. In these two instances, the pop culture sphere rubs up against the larger popular culture sphere. In the numerically and ideologically unequal contest that ensues, the sign of the ‘nation’ and the imagined ‘national’ culture are discursively and strategically used by nonconsumers to criticize and exclude the consumers of imported, foreign pop culture as ‘less’ than nationalistic. The ‘nation’ is denied to the consumers of imported cultural products. Obviously, the earlier mentioned middle-class Japanese female consumers of Korean TV dramas who imagined themselves as harbingers of change in ‘warming’ relations between Koreans and Japanese, the avid fans who use the Internet to get beneath the censoring gestures of the state and the denial of access by capitalist enterprises, and the transnational active supporters of specific artists in trouble with their respective governments remain trapped within the ressentiment of the region’s international history and politics. This has serious consequences for the possibility of the emergence of a ‘pan-East Asian identity’ through the circulation of pop culture.

240

Genre in Asian Film and Television

Pan-East Asian ‘identity’ In contrast to the globally dominant American media industry, the relatively similar physiognomy of East Asians facilitates identification between the regional audiences with characters on screen in East Asian Pop Culture. This is further facilitated by reference to shared early histories and strong family themes in the narratives; the family reference is often read as reflections on the Confucian emphasis on family as the fundamental unit of society and on filial piety. Consequently, the idea (or a desire) that the regionalization of an East Asian Pop Culture would engender a pan-East Asian identity inevitably arises. Undoubtedly, the passionate activities of fans in engaging a particular iconic artist and/or genre of pop culture reflect the importance of the latter in the fans’ subjectivities. Ex-consumers can readily recall, in fond nostalgia, the period when the consumption of pop culture was an important part of their daily lives. The pop culture of ‘those’ days has been etched into their memories and might have in some ways changed their personalities and their lives. For example, one cannot deny the possibility that many of the middle-aged Japanese women fans may have permanently changed their attitudes towards Koreans as a consequence of watching Korean TV dramas and idolizing Korean actors. However, other factors in media consumption mitigate against the establishment of a stable ‘pan-East Asian’ identity among consumers. First, if transnational East Asian audiences view on-screen representations of each other along a linear capitalist–consumerist–culture developmental sequence, then identification with activities and images on screen is at least as much with a ‘capitalist consumerist modernity’ as with ‘Asianness’. Secondly, any identification with an abstract Asianness is also constantly disrupted by the recognition of difference and distancing from the foreign culture represented on screen. Thirdly, pop culture consumption is, for the overwhelming majority of audiences/consumers, part of their leisure activities and is residual to the necessary routines of everyday life. In the unending layering and interaction of a constant stream of cultural knowledge acquisition that goes into individual identity formation, the impact of such residual activities is likely to be rather weak, although this is an empirical question that requires further research. Fourthly, the life of a pop culture product and the length and depth of audience loyalty are equally ephemeral; neither are fertile grounds for generating lasting effects on individual identity formation. Finally, it has to be recognized that if a pan-East Asian identity were to emerge at all among consumers of East Asian Pop Culture, it would be one of an ‘excluded’ minority in a local and national context.

Chua Beng Huat 241

Looking ahead The rapid expansion of the regional pop culture economy has unavoidably caught the attention of national governments. The governments of Japan, Korea and the PRC have all expressed the desire to transform their pop culture exports into instruments of ‘soft power’ in international diplomacy. Put simply, the idea of soft power is the use of different cultural resources – traditions, symbols, ideas, media products and related celebrities – to project a positive image of a nation in order to influence the perceptions and views of others of the nation and to generate goodwill in international relations and trade for the nation (Lee 2009). In this process, while the nation applying soft power is in full control of the resources used, it has limited control over the channels through which the resources can be transmitted and no control at all over the cognitive processes of the people in the recipient nation. In short, a nation has no control over the effects of its soft power strategies. As such, East Asian Pop Culture audience reception studies have identified some obstacles that might stand in the way of its successful use as soft power instruments. First, most television dramas which have the widest regional audience are dubbed into the local language of the consumption location. Dubbing, as already noted, domesticates the imported product and suppresses its foreignness by absorbing it into the local cultural context. In contrast, foreignness often alienates, creating difference/distance between the transnational audience and the imported products, reducing the product’s ability to influence the former. Secondly, as already noted, in any export destination, the size of local audiences/consumers is always smaller than the non-consuming population. The latter is able to evoke the ‘nation/al’ against the consumers and demonize them as anti-national cultural traitors in xenophobic discourse.17 Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, empirical studies have also demonstrated that television dramas have been influential in changing the mindset of segments of its transnational audience towards the exporting countries, as demonstrated by the middle-aged Japanese female fans of Korean TV dramas mentioned above. At a more general level, Korea has become a popular tourist destination for East Asians, largely as a consequence of the success of its television dramas in introducing the Korean landscape to the regional audience; television viewers have 17

Often, the audience of imported television dramas is predominantly female, so a gendered insult and dismissal of the audience are often added to the xenophobic discourse (Yang 2008).

242

Genre in Asian Film and Television

turned regional tourists as televisual sights become tourist sites. In terms of capitalist consumer culture, Japan and Korea have both served as the reference point for the aspiration of a ‘modern’ lifestyle for audiences in the developing parts of East Asia. However, whatever positive impressions derived from pop culture consumption will finally be subjected to reality checks by the audiences themselves with reference to their own actual experiences with the people and culture of the exporting locations. For example, no amount of television drama is likely to convince a harshly treated, low-wage worker in a Korean multinational company in Vietnam of any claims of intrinsic humanity of Korean culture represented in Korean TV dramas. Throughout this chapter, an underlying assumption has been that, hitherto, the PRC is essentially a location of consumption of East Asian Pop Culture. This is, of course, beginning to change. The financial returns of the regional pop culture have spurred the state-controlled media industry in the PRC to think about competitively deploying various strategies simultaneously. First, the PRC media industry has in fact been relatively successful in exporting regionally historical dramas and dramatized Chinese literary classics, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Sanguo yanyi (c. 1330–1400) and Water Margin/Shuihu zhuan (c. 1290–1499). These have been particularly well received in Pop Culture China, but have also been exported to Korea and Japan. A limited number of contemporary dramas have also been successfully sold to Korean and Japanese stations, such as Drawing Sword/Liang jian (2005) and Soldiers Sortie/Shibing tuji (2006). Secondly, the industry is participating in transnational joint productions, especially films. Joint productions with Hong Kong film companies have injected new financial resources into a weakening Hong Kong film industry while simultaneously introducing new aesthetics, especially commercial entertainment elements, into PRC pop culture production which has been hitherto laden with staid and unrealistic socialist themes. Finally, the PRC pop culture industry itself is undertaking a transformation of its content by splicing mass entertainment elements into its mainstream products while still ostensibly parading socialist selflessness in the interest of the masses, i.e., the nation.18 The PRC pop culture industry is increasingly a player to contend with. The motivation for the PRC to export its own pop culture is not simply economic but perhaps even more importantly ideological. It sees 18

For a detailed discussion of the new developments in the PRC media industry, see Xu (2009).

Chua Beng Huat 243

itself as the birthplace of East Asian civilization and thus is responsible for the ‘proper’ historical accounting and interpretation of what East Asian culture might be. This ideological motivation has been heightened and fuelled by what are, to the Chinese, audacious cultural claims of the Koreans. For example, in the regionally popular Korean television drama Dae, acupuncture was portrayed as a Korean indigenous medical practice. Chinese netizens have also been incensed by UNESCO’s acceding to Korean claims that the ‘Rice Dumpling Festival’ is part of the Korean cultural heritage. These Korean gestures have motivated the Chinese desire to rectify the historical misrepresentations (Xu 2009). More generally, the PRC government and media industry are also concerned that they should be the custodian of what is ‘Chinese’ culture and thus aim to ‘recentralize’ Chinese culture within the global Chinese diaspora. This drive to define Chinese culture is aided by the opening up of the country for location shootings for Chinese-language films and television dramas, especially those of the wuxia (period swordfighting) genre. Location shooting avoids the construction of expensive sets in studios and lends authenticity to the film by featuring the ‘real’ China as a historically actual place where events on screen apparently take place; the agglomerative effect is to reinscribe the centrality of the PRC as the centre of all things Chinese. Given the possible scenarios engendered by the national competitions for soft power through pop culture, the mundane consumption of what is essentially mass entertainment, and a sphere of cultural practice that is often marginalized by academics and intellectuals, has acquired a new layer of political significance and consequence, which will draw even greater analytic attention, this time from beyond cultural and media studies practitioners towards new spheres of interest for political scientists, international relations specialists and real politicians.

References Agost, R. (2004) ‘Translation in Bilingual Contexts: Different Norms in Dubbing Translation’, in P. Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 63–83. Chua, B.H. (2001) ‘Pop Culture China’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 22(2), 113–21. ——. (2006a) ‘Gossip About Stars: Newspaper and Pop Culture China’, in W. Sun (ed.), Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communication and Commerce. London: Routledge, pp. 75–90. ——. (2006b) ‘East Asian Pop Culture: Consumer Communities and Politics of the National’, Studies of Broadcasting Culture (Seoul), 18(1), 89–114.

244

Genre in Asian Film and Television

——. (2008) ‘Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama’, in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 73–89. ——. (2009) ‘From Small Objects to Cars: Consumption Expansion in East Asia’, in H. Lange and L. Meier (eds), The New Middle Class: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmental Concern. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 101–15. Chun, A. (1996) ‘Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity’, Boundary 2, 23(2), 111–38. Cross, G. (1993) Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture. London: Routledge. Fu, P. (ed.) (2008) China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hall, S. (1981) ‘Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”’, in R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Han, S.-M. (2000) ‘Consuming the Modern: Globalization, Things Japanese and the Politics of Cultural Identity in Korea’, Journal of Pacific Asia, 6, 7–26. Hirata, Y. (2008) ‘Touring “Dramatic Korea”: Japanese Women as Hanryu Dramas and Tourists on Hanryu Tours’, in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 143–56. Hu, K. (2003) ‘The Power of Circulation: Digital Technologies and the Online Chinese Fans of Japanese TV Drama’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6, 171–86. Iwabuchi, K. (2004) ‘Time and the Neighbour: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia in the 1990s’, in K. Iwabuchi, S. Muecke and M. Thomas (eds), Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 151–74. Kim, H.-M. (2002) ‘The Inflow of Japanese Culture and the Historical Construction of Fandom in South Korea’, paper presented at the International Conference on Culture in the Age of Informatization: East Asia in the 21st Century, Institute of East and West Studies, Yonsei University, 16 November. Khoo, O. (2006) ‘Slang Images: On the “Foreignness” of Contemporary Singaporean Films’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7(1), 81–98. Ko, Y. (2004) ‘The Desired Form: Japanese Idol Dramas in Taiwan’, in K. Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling Asian Modernities. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 107–28. Lee, G. (2009) ‘A Soft Power Approach to the “Korean Wave”’, paper presented at the Korean-ASEAN Academic Conference on Pop Culture Formations across East Asia in the 21st Century: Hybridization or Asianization, 1–4 February, Burapha University, Thailand. Lee, M.-t. (2004) ‘Travelling with Japanese TV Dramas: Cross-Cultural Orientation and Flowing Identification of Contemporary Taiwanese Youth’, in K. Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling Asian Modernities. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 129–54. Leung, L. (2008) ‘Mediating Nationalism and Modernity: The Transnationalization of Korean Drama on Chinese (Satellite) TV’, in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 53–69. MacLachlan, E. and Chua, G.-l. (2004) ‘Defining Asian Femininity: Chinese Viewers of Japanese TV Dramas in Singapore’, in K. Iwabuchi (ed.), Feeling Asian Modernities. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 155–76. Martinez, X. (2004) ‘Film Dubbing, Its Process and Translation’, in P. Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 3–8.

Chua Beng Huat 245 Menkhoff, T. and Gerke, S. (eds) (2002) Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Mo ¯ri, Y. (2008) ‘“Winter Sonata” and Cultural Practices of Active Fans in Japan: Considering Middle-Aged Women as Cultural Agents’, in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. London: Routledge, pp. 127–42. Moskowitz, M.L. (2009) Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow: Chinese Pop Music and its Cultural Connotations. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Su, Y.L. (1999) ‘Romance Fiction and the Imaginary Reality: Reading Japanese Trendy Drama Socially’, unpublished MA thesis, Graduate Institute of Mass Communication, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan. Thomas, M. (2004), ‘East Asian Cultural Traces in Post-Socialist Vietnam’, in K. Iwabuchi, S. Muecke and M. Thomas (eds), Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 177–95. Tu, W. (1991) ‘Culture China: The Periphery as the Centre’, Daedulus, 120, 1–32. Varela, F.C. (2004) ‘Synchronization in Dubbing’, in P. Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 35–52. Xu, M. (2009) ‘Chinese TV Drama in a Regional Market – Aspiring to be a Leading Cultural Actor?’, paper presented at the International Workshop on Pop Culture China, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 8–9 December. Yang, I. F.-c. (2008) ‘Rap(p)ing Korean Wave: National Identity in Question’, in B.H. Chua and K. Iwabuchi (eds), East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong University Press, pp. 191–216.

Index Aayirathil Oruvan 103 Abuldadze, Tengiz, Repentance/ Monanieba 165 Altman, Rick 1 ‘A Semantic/Synactic Approach to Film Genre’ 1–2 Amar, Akbar, Anthony 120–1 Amrohi, Kamal, Mahal/Palace 137 Anand, Chetan, Haqeeqat 197 Anderson, Benedict 172 Andhra Pradesh 101, 105 Telugu cinema 115 anime 5, 8, 178–93 The Dog of Flanders/Furandaazu no Inu 179 Emma, a Victorian Romance/ Eikokukoi Monogatari Ema 180 European-ness in 181–2 Heidi, a Girl of the Alps/Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji 178–9, 180–93 Howl’s Moving Castle/Hauru no Ogoku Shiro 180 Kiki’s Delivery Service/Majo no Takkyuubin 180 Memories 180 Mobile Suit Gundam/Kidou Senshi Gandamu 180 Princess Knight/Ribon no Kishi 179 The Rose of Versailles/Berusai no Bara 179 shoujo 179 Steamboy/Suchiimuboi 180 Tales of Symphonia/Teeruzu obu Shinfonia 180 visions of Europe 179–81 Appadurai, Arjun 184, 188 April Snow/Oechul 239 Arja, see Balinese theatre Asia distinctive qualities of 3 state-controlled screen media production 3 see also East Asia

audience importance of involvement 28–9 as part of performance 6 Bachchan, Amitabh 208 Bae Yong Joon, April Snow/ Oechul 239 Bali, attitude to death in 22 Balinese theatre 13–32 absence of genres in 15 Arja 15 Keris Pusaka Sakti 24–7 audience involvement 28–9 Derama Gong 14–15 ambek-ambekan 23 Angucap-ucap 17, 23 Condong 17 Gusti Ayu Ratih 17–24 live performance 20–3 Mapaitungan 23 Ngalèmèkin 23 Panangkilan 23 Panasar 17 Panglembar 23 semita 23 televised version 16, 17–20 warming up the audience 16–17 impact of television on 14 kawi 15 live vs. television performances 28–9 mataksu 14 mati 13–14, 29 open-ended dialogue in 24–7 Panji cycle 14 pupuh 15 saling enyuhin 27 temple performances 14, 20–3 urip 13–14 The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City/Shangchang bangbang jun 79, 85, 87, 88, 91, 95–6

246

Index 247 Bannerjee, Kali 199, 208 Basu, Pijush, Sabyasachi 198–9 Bayu Families/Bayu renjia 86 Bazin, André, mixed cinema 150 Bengal Asian identity in 195–6 Bhadralok identity in 194–5 Bengali cinema 194–209 China-Town syndrome 196 First Person/Pahela Admi 199 international/sub-national contexts 200–2 Pehla Admi 202–4 portrayal of East Asia in 196–209 disguises 197–8 ‘neighbour’ 198–200 representations in 208–9 Sabyasachi 198–9 time and space 202–8 Under the Blue Sky/Neel Akasher Neeche 199, 204–8 Bhakri, Mohan 130 Bhansali, Sanjay Leela, Devdas 200 Bian Zhongyun 46 Bihr, Alain 183 The Bird People in China/Chûgoku no chôjin 8, 210, 211–15 Blood Stained Youth 65 Bollywood 2, 101, 104 Border 196 Bose, Subhas Chandra 200, 202 Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin 149–62, 219 breaking frame 24 Breathless/A bout de souffle 167 Brecht, Bertolt 50 Budaya, Bhara 16 Burns, Robert 46 Calcutta 71 207 Can’t Come Down the Mountain 66 Cantopop 225 capitalist consumerism in pop culture 235 Chandra, Bankim 124 Chandra, Bipan 200–1 Chandra, N. 138 Chandramukhi 102, 109–11, 112 Chang Hui Mei (Ah Mei) 238–9

Chatterjee, Kartik, Mahaprasthaner Pathe/Yatrik 202 Chatterjee, Partha 124, 201–2 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 199–200 Pather Dabi 199–200 Chen, Junyu 67–71 Chen, Shuyi, Can’t Come Down the Mountain 66 Chibber, Vivek 132 Chien, Wei-ssu, Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai 66, 67, 68–71 Children of the Moon 61, 66 Children of Nature 218 China 2 Biaozhun Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), state policy on 79 Chongqing Television 84–6 dialect drama 86–8 ma la 88 cultural diversity 214 Cultural Revolution 47 dialect drama 7, 79–100 The Bamboo Stick Army of the Mountain City/Shangchang bangbang jun 79, 85, 87, 88, 91, 95–6 Bayu Families/Bayu renjia 86 bypassing of censorship 94–7 City Talk Show/Long men zhen 86 competitiveness of 92–4 Dongsi Street Xisi Alley/Dongsi jie xisi xiang 80 Everyone is Different/Ren yu ren butong 85 generic traits 87–9 The Hot & Spicy Life Show/ Shenghuo malatan 86, 92, 94 The Legend of Tang Feichang/Tang Feichang chuanqi 85, 87, 88 The Legendary Mr An Shimin/Qiren An Shimin 85 Lin’s Rice Dumplings/Lin Tangyuan 85, 87, 88, 95 Lui laogen 79 Ma dashuai 79 Military Recruitment/Zhua zhuangding 85

248

Index

China – continued Neighbours/Jiefang lingju 79, 86, 88 The New Stories of Governor Wang/ Wang Baozhang Houzhuan 80 Old Uncle/Lao niangjiu 80 reservations about 90–2 Silly Colonel/Sha’er shizhang 79, 85, 87, 95 Spicy Hot Enemies/ Malayuanjia 86, 89 Stories of Mr Able/Ke Deping waizhuan 86, 88 Tales of the Foggy City/Wudu yehua 86, 92, 94 Walking Up Hills and Climbing Up Stairs/Papo shangkan 86 The Wrong Songs Show/Waige hengxin 86 documentary filmmaking 45–60 China Blue 46, 53, 56–9 Out of Phoenix Bridge 46, 53–6 Though I Am Gone 46–9 Yang Ban Xi 46, 49–53 ‘foreignness’ of 57 Huaren consumer market 226 Model Opera tradition 50–3 as mythical cultural origin of Japan 213–14 pop culture 226 circulation in 227–8 language of 227–8 pop music 225 programme drama/lan mu ju 94 Red Guards 48 television control and financing 81–2 fumian xinwen 82 qiye danwei 81 shiye danwei 81 structural development 83–4 three-station merger (san tai he yi) 83 women in empowerment 47–8 identity construction 51 rural-urban migration 53–9 zu xuanlü 80

China Blue 46, 53, 56–9 Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) 80 Chiriakhana 207 cinema Chinese 45–60 Indian Bengali 194–209 Hindi 130–47 Tamil 101–14 Telugu 115–29 Japanese 149–62, 210–19 Kazakh 165–78 cinéma vérité 45, 46, 54 A City of Sadness/Beiqing chengshi 65 City Talk Show/Long men zhen 86 Cold Fever 8, 210, 215–19 celebration of strangeness 215–16 use of landscape in 217–18 courtroom re-creations 6, 33–44 format of 36–7 limitations of format 41–4 pedagogical strategy 37–9, 40–1 quiz and repetition in 39–40 Cross, Gary 222 cross-cultural representations 8, 210–21 cultural difference 210 in pop culture 233–5 dagonmei 53 Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai 66, 67, 68–71 darsan 120–3 Das, Veena 118 Derama Gong, see Balinese theatre Desai, Manmohan 138 Devdas 200 Devi/The Goddess 124, 125, 195 The Devil Wears Prada 188 dialect television 7 dialogue, audience involvement 28–9 Dickey, Sarah 106 disguises 197–8 documentary filmmaking 45–60 China 45–60 China Blue 46, 53, 56–9 Out of Phoenix Bridge 46, 53–6

Index 249 Though I Am Gone 46–9 Yang Ban Xi 46, 49–53 Taiwan 61–76 Blood Stained Youth 65 Children of the Moon 61, 66 Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai 66, 67, 68–71 Gift of Life/Shengming 66, 71–4 The Dog of Flanders/Furandaazu no Inu 179 Dongsi Street Xisi Alley/Dongsi jie xisi xiang 80 Drawing Sword/Liang jian 242 dubbing in pop culture 228–9, 241 Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar 104 Dutt, Guru 104 Dutta, J.P., Border 196 DVD format 4 Dwyer, Rachel, Filming the Gods 117 East Asia pan-East Asian identity 240 pop culture 222–45 audience layers 235–8 circulation of 227–8 language dubbing 228–9, 241 preservation of foreignness 229–30 and public space 238–9 structure of 224–6 television 230–5 portrayal in Bengali films 196–209 disguises 197–8 ‘neighbour’ 198–200 see also China; Japanese cinema Eck, Diana, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India 120 education 35 courtroom re-creations 33–44 edutainment 6 Eisenstein, Sergei 176 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris 105 Elegy to Violence 158 Emma, a Victorian Romance/Eikokukoi Monogatari Ema 180 English language, use of 216, 218–19 ethnic costumes 230 ethnic narrative 173–5

Everyone is Different/Ren yu ren butong 85 Everything is Crazy/Subete ga kurutteru 160 Fallen Angels 176 fan clubs 235–6 Fanon, Franz 63, 172 fictionalization 51 First Person/Pahela Admi 199 Fiske, John 39 format 4 Fridriksson, Fridrik Thor Children of Nature 218 Cold Fever 8, 210, 215–19 frontality 140–1, 143–4, 145 Gadar 196 Gandhi, Indira 133 Ganesan, Shivaji 106 Gate of Flesh/Nikutai no mon 160 Gattegno, Caleb 35 Geertz, Clifford 21 genre Asian films 2 definition of 1–2 in television 4 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai 219 Gift of Life/Shengming 66, 71–4 Giliomee, Hermann 185 giri 156, 159 Godard, Jean-Luc, Breathless/A bout de souffle 167 Grant, Barry Keith 102 Grierson, John 46 hanamichi 152 Haqeeqat 197 Harding, Frances 140 Harvey, Dennis 57 Heidi, a Girl of the Alps/Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji 178–9, 180–93 European-ness in 181–2 in Japan 182–4 nostalgia in 183–4 portrayal of capitalism in 188–93 in South Africa 185–8

250

Index

hermeneutic code 39 Hidari, Sachiko 160 Hindi films 194 Border 196 Gadar 196 representation of ‘neighbour’ in 196–7 Hindi horror films 130–48 Mahal/Palace 137 political background 131–7 Ramsay brothers 130–1, 138–47 Hotel 142–5 Shaitani Ilaka/Satan’s Circle 139 Shaheed/Martyr 141 use of frontality in 140–1, 143–4, 145 Hong Kong 2 action cinema 5 martial arts cinema 107 horror films 130–48 horror-comedy 109–11 The Hot & Spicy Life Show/Shenghuo malatan 86, 92, 94 Hotel 142–5 Hou Xiaoxian (Hou Hsiao-hsien), A City of Sadness/Beiqing chengshi 65 Howl’s Moving Castle/Hauru no Ogoku Shiro 180 Hu Jie 45 Though I Am Gone 46–9 Hughes-Freeland, Felicia 14 hunyu zheng 54 I Love 080 66 iconicity 141 identity Asian 195–6 Bhadralok 194–5 Chinese women 51 in pop culture 240 Imamura, Shohei 158 India 3, 101 import substitution 132 regional cinemas 138 rise of Hinduism 131–4 secularization 134 Indian cinema 104 Bengali films 194–209

genre in 104–5 Hindi films 194, 196–7 Hindi horror films 130–48 Jai Santoshi Maa 117, 118–20 Mahabharatha 115, 128 mythologicals 115–29, 135–6 Amar, Akbar, Anthony 120–1 anthropological framework 118–20 darsan 120–3 Jai Santoshi Maa 117, 118–20 as national form 123–6 post-Phalke 126–9 as religious film 116–18, 120–3 Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra 115 Ramayana 115 Sampoorna Ramayana 117 Shri Ganesh Mahima 117 Tamil Nadu, see Tamil cinema Telugu films 115–29 see also Bollywood; Kollywood; Tollywood Indian Cinematograph Committee 116 Indonesia 3 Intergirl/Interdevochka 165 Jai Santoshi Maa 117, 118–20 Jalsaghar/The Music Room 195 Japanese cinema 2, 149–62 action films 7 anime 5, 8, 178–93 Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin 149–62 jidaigeki films 155, 156 kabuki style, see kabuki manga 224 New Wave 151 ninkyo eiga films 156 ‘pink films’ 151, 160 Pistol Opera/Pisutoru Opera 149–62 theatricality in 152–3 Tokyo Drifter/Tokyo nagaremono 153 ‘wataridori’ series 153 women in 160 yakuza films 149, 150, 155 dramatic conflict in 156–7 giri 156, 159

Index 251 Japanese culture 213–14 Japanese orientalism 182 Japanese pop music 225 Japanese television, Pride/Puraido 236 Jarmusch, Jim Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai 219 Mystery Train 218–19 Jewel in the Palace/Dae Jang Geum 229 Jiang Qing 51–2 jidaigeki films 155, 156 Jin Yong Qin 51 Jogèd Bungbung 18 Kaali, Sundar 106 kabuki 150, 152 dramatic conflict in 156 Gsamtkunstwerk form 152 hanamichi 152 mie technique 152–3 seasonal/landscape changes 155 sound effects in 154–5 tsuke 155 Kanto Wanderer/Kanto Mushuku 158 Kapur, Geeta 124, 125 Karnataka 101 Kazakh cinema The Needle/Igla 8, 165–78 Kazakh New Wave 165, 169, 171, 176 Kazakhfil’m Studios 168 pre-perestroika output 168–9 Kazakhstan 170 ‘Asianisation’ of 171 Koreans in 173–4 Kerala 101, 105 Kalaripayattu 107 Kiki’s Delivery Service/Majo no Takkyuubin 170 Ko, Mika 214 Ko Yufen 235 Kobayashi, Tsuneo, Emma, a Victorian Romance/Eikokukoi Monogatari Ema 180 Kollywood 101, 102 political impact of 102–4 star system in 106

Korea 2 Jewel in the Palace/Dae Jang Geum 229 legal issues 34–5 pop culture 225–6 pop music 225 Solomon’s Choice 34–44 format of 36–7 limitations of format 41–4 pedagogical strategy 37–9, 40–1 quiz and repetition in 39–40 television genres 33–4 use of public space in 178 Winter Sonata/Gyeoul Yeonga 225, 234–5 Korean Wave 225–6 Koreans in Soviet Union 173 Koryo Saram 173, 174 Kumar, Uttam 198, 208 Kuo, Chen-ti, Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai 66, 67, 68–71 Kuo, Li-Hsin 74 Lacan, Jacques, anamorphic stains 67 language dubbing 228–9, 241 in film 216, 218–19 and pop culture 227–9 Larsen, Ernest 45, 53 learning, theory of 35 Lee, Bruce 173 The Legend of Tang Feichang/Tang Feichang chuanqi 85, 87, 88 The Legendary Mr An Shimin/Qiren An Shimin 85 leisure consumers 236–8 Lequeret, Elisabeth 105 Li Hong, Out of Phoenix Bridge 46, 53–6 lianshan 50 Lin’s Rice Dumplings/Lin Tangyuan 85, 87, 88, 95 Little Vera/Malenkaya Vera 165 The Loyal Forty Seven Ronin/ Chushingura 156 Lutgendorf, Philip 120

252

Index

Mahabharatha 115, 128 Mahal/Palace 137 Mahaprasthaner Pathe/Yatrik 202 Mandopop 225 manga 224 martial arts 107–9 Martin, Adrian 218 masala-movies 104–5 mediatization 13 Mellen, Joan 160 Melville, Jean-Pierre, Le Samouraï 157 Memories 180 Miike, Takashi, The Bird People in China/Chûgoku no chôjin 8, 210, 211–15 Military Recruitment/Zhua zhuangding 85 Min, Anchee 50 Mitra, Jatindra Nath 136 Mittell, Jason 80 Miyazaki, Hayao Howl’s Moving Castle/Hauru no Ogoku Shiro 180 Kiki’s Delivery Service/Majo no Takkyuubin 180 Mobile Suit Gundam/Kidou Senshi Gandamu 180 Mon Paris 182 Moskowitz, Marc 225 Mystery Train 218–19 mythologicals 115–29, 135–6 Amar, Akbar, Anthony 120–1 anthropological framework 118–20 darsan 120–3 Jai Santoshi Maa 117, 118–20 as national form 123–6 post-Phalke 126–9 as religious film 116–18, 120–3 Nagase, Masatoshi 218 Naked Age/Suppadaka no nenrei 160 native consciousness 61 Natya Sastra of Bharatamuni 102–3 Neale, Steve 1, 2, 102, 119 The Needle/Igla 8, 165–78 as ‘Asian’ film 170 ethnic narrative 173–5

generic indeterminancy of 167–8 location of 169–70 non-Russianness of 171–2 pofigism in 167 pop culture in 167 soundtrack 170 Nehru, Jawaharlal 131–2, 200 The New Stories of Governor Wang/ Wang Baozhang Houzhuan 80 Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary 46 ninkyo eiga films 156 Nugmanov, Rashid, The Needle/ Igla 8, 165–78 Old Uncle/Lao niangjiu 80 Ootomo, Katsuhiro Memories 180 Steamboy/Suchiimuboi 180 Oshima, Nagisa 158 The Sun’s Burial/Taiyo no hakaba 158 Out of Phoenix Bridge 46, 53–6 Painter, Baburao 135 Patel, Baburao 126–7 Pather Dabi 199–200 Pehla Admi 202–4 Peled, Micha X. 45 China Blue 46, 53, 56–9 People’s Republic of China, see China Phalke, Dhundiraj Govind 125–9, 134–5 Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra 136 Pichul, Vasily, Little Vera/Malenkaya Vera 165 Pickowicz, Paul 45 ‘pink films’ 151, 160 Pistol Opera/Pisutoru Opera 149–62 giri 159 kabuki effect 152, 154 as political allegory 159–60 sound effects 155 space in 154 theatrical space in 154

Index 253 use of mie technique in 152–3 use of seasonal/landscape changes 155 violence in 157–8 pop culture audience layers 235–8 fans and fan clubs 235–6 leisure consumers 236–8 dubbing 228–9, 241 East Asia 222–45 elements of 223–4 The Needle/Igla 167 preservation of foreignness 229–30 and public space 238–9 television 230–2 audience acceptance 232 audience base 231–2 audience identification 232–3 capitalist consumerism 235 distance and difference 233–5 illegal traffic 230–1 Poster, Mark 29–30 Prasad, Madhava 104, 121, 133 Pride/Puraido 236 Princess Knight/Ribon no Kishi 179 Pruner, Zabrina 167, 168, 170, 171 public space and pop culture 238–9 Quanjing Studio 65 Raja Harishchandra/King Harishchandra 115, 136 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 124, 140 ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’ 125 Raja Harishchandra 140 Rajnikanth 208 Rama Rao, N.T. 127 Ramachandran, M.G. 106 Ramayana 115 Ramsay brothers 130–1, 138–47 Hotel 142–5 Shaitani Ilaka/Satan’s Circle 139 Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara 127 Rao, Kantha 127–8 Rathod, Kanjibhai 135 Ray, Satyajit 104

Chiriakhana 207 Devi/The Goddess 124, 125, 195 Jalsaghar/The Music Room 195 reality television 4 Reischauer, Edwin O. 214 religion in film 116–18 extra-textual practices 119 see also mythologicals religious iconography 131 Repentance/Monanieba 165 Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Sanguo yanyi 242 The Rose of Versailles/Berusai no Bara 179 Roy, Bimal First Person/Pahela Admi 199 Pehla Admi 202–4 Roy, M.N. 201 Sabyasachi 198–9 Said, Edward 196 Sakai, Naoki 210 Sampoorna Ramayana 117 Sant Tukaram 124, 125 Sarkar, Sumit 200 Schatz, Thomas 1, 2 Sebastian, Pradeep 105 Sen, Mrinal Calcutta 71 207 Under the Blue Sky/Neel Akasher Neeche 199, 204–8 Shaheed/Martyr 141 Shaitani Ilaka/Satan’s Circle 139 Sharma, Anil, Gadar 196 shenfen zheng 54 Shri Ganesh Mahima 117 Silly Colonel/Sha’er shizhang 79, 85, 87, 95 Singapore 231 Singh, Suchet 135 Smirnova, Avdotya 171 Soldiers Sortie/Shibing tu 242 Solomon’s Choice 34–44 format of 36–7 limitations of format 41–4 pedagogical strategy 37–9, 40–1 quiz and repetition in 39–40 Sotozaki, Haruo, Tales of Symphonia/ Teeruzu obu Shinfonia 180

254

Index

South Korea, see Korea; Korean Wave Soviet Central Asia 170–1 Koreans in (Koryo Saram) 174 Soviet cinema Intergirl/Interdevochka 165 Little Vera/Malenkaya Vera 165 Repentance/Monanieba 165 see also Kazakh cinema Soviet Union glasnost 165 perestroika 165 Spicy Hot Enemies/Malayuanjia 86, 89 Srinivas, Ravi 106 state-controlled screen media production 3 Steamboy/Suchiimuboi 180 Stories of Mr Able/Ke Deping waizhuan 86, 88 The Story of Time 61 strangeness 215–16 The Sun’s Burial/Taiyo no hakaba 158 Suzuki, Seijun 7, 149–62, 219 Branded to Kill/Koroshi no rakuin 149–62, 219 Elegy to Violence 158 Everything is Crazy/Subete ga kurutteru 160 Gate of Flesh/Nikutai no mon 160 Kanto Wanderer/Kanto Mushuku 158 Naked Age/Suppadaka no nenrei 160 Pistol Opera/Pisutoru Opera 149–62 Story of a Prostitute/Shunpu den 160 Tokyo Drifter/Tokyo nagaremono 153, 158 Swimming on the Highway 66 Taiwan 3 documentary filmmaking 61–76 Blood Stained Youth 65 Children of the Moon 61, 66 Dancing Age/Tiaowu Shidai 66, 67, 68–71 Gift of Life/Shengming 66, 71–4 Hakka 73 Kuomintang 62 modernization of 63, 68 nativeness 63–4

Nativization Movement 61–2 New Cinema Movement 61–2 New Documentary Movement 61, 65–8 postmodernism vs. natinalism 64–5 September 1999 earthquake 71–2 Vernacular Literature Movement 69 Tales of the Foggy City/Wudu yehua 86, 92, 94 Tales of Symphonia/Teeruzu obu Shinfonia 170 Talwar, Vinod 130 Tamil cinema 101–14 Chandramukhi 102, 109–11, 112 essence of 105–7 genre discourse 102, 106–7 horror-comedy 109–11 martial arts 107–9 Thambi 102, 107–9, 112 Tamil Nadu 7, 101 Kodambakkam 101 Kurruvarisai 107 Silambam 107 Varmakkalai 107 Tarantino, Quentin 219 television Balinese Derama Gong theatre 16, 17–20 Chinese Chongqing 84–6 control and financing 81–2 dialect drama 7, 79–100 fumian xinwen 82 qiye danwei 81 shiye danwei 81 structural development 83–4 three-station merger (san tai he yi) 83 communication through 4 genre in 4 Korea 33–44 courtroom re-creations 34–44 genres 33–4 ‘nowness’ 39 pop culture 230–2 audience acceptance 232 audience base 231–2

Index 255 audience identification 232–3 capitalist consumerism 235 distance and difference 233–5 illegal traffic 230–1 reality 4 Telugu cinema 115 Tezuka, Osamu, Princess Knight/Ribon no Kishi 179 Thambi 102, 107–9, 112 theatre, Balinese 13–32 theatricality 152–3, 155 thematization 39 theoretism 29 Thomas, Rosie 104 Though I Am Gone 46–9 Todorovskiy, Pyotr, Intergirl/ Interdevochka 165 Tokyo Drifter/Tokyo nagaremono 153, 158 Tollywood 115 Tomino, Yoshiyuki, Mobile Suit Gundam/Kidou Senshi Gandamu 180 Trinh, T.M. 211 Tsoy, Viktor 166, 171, 175 Turner, Graeme 1

Walking Up Hills and Climbing Up Stairs/Papo shangkan 86 Wang Qingyao 47 Watanabe, Kunio, The Loyal Forty Seven Ronin/Chushingura 156 Water Margin/Shuihuzhuan 242 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 2 Winter Sonata/Gyeoul Yeonga 225, 234–5 women in Chinese cinema empowerment of 47–8 identity of 51 rural-urban migration 53–9 in Japanese cinema 160 Wong Kar Wai, Fallen Angels 176 The Wrong Songs Show/Waige hengxin 86 Wu Yaodong, Swimming on the Highway 66 Wu Yii-Feng 65 Children of the Moon 61, 66 Gift of Life/Shengming 66, 71–4 Xiao, Juzhen, Blood Stained Youth

65

Vanaik, Achin 133 Vasudevan, Ravi 141 VCD format 4

yakuza films 149, 150, 155 dramatic conflict in 156–7 giri 156, 159 Yang Ban Xi 46, 49–53 references to film musicals 49–50 Yang, Lizhou, I Love 080 66 Yang Ting Yuen, Yang Ban Xi 46, 49–53

waichu renyuan luidong jiuye dengji ka 54

zanzhu zheng 54 Zuiyo Eizou 178

Under the Blue Sky/Neel Akasher Neeche 199, 204–8