Critical Asian Cinemas – serie

In the ongoing aftermath of the nuclear accident in 2011, filmmakers have continued to issue warnings about the state of Japanese society and politics, which remain mired in refusal to change. Nearly a decade in the making, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima is based on in-person interviews with countless filmmakers, as well as continuous dialogue with them and their work. Author Wada-Marciano has expanded these dialogues to include students, audiences at screenings, critics, and researchers, and her observations are based on down-to-earth-exchange of ideas engaged in over a long period of time. Filmmakers and artists are in the vanguard of those who grapple with what should be done regarding the struggle against fear of the invisible blight—radiation exposure. Rather than blindly following the mass media and public opinion, they have chosen to think and act independently. While repeatedly viewing and reviewing the film works from the post-Fukushima period, Wada-Marciano felt the unwavering message that emanates from them: There must be no more nuclear weapons. There must be no more nuclear power generation. The book is dedicated to convincing readers of the clarity of their message.

Offering the most comprehensive analysis of Korean cinema from its early history to the present, and including the films of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Kim Ki-young, Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Blockbuster and Trans-Cinema situates itself in the local, Inter-Asian, and transnational contexts by mobilizing the critical frameworks of feminism, postcolonial critique and comparative film studies. It is attentive to an enmeshment of the cinematic, aesthetics, politics and cultural history.

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability rethinks theory and style through films that bring the limits of traditional postcolonial frameworks into stark relief. Discover Singapore's preoccupations with space, Yasmin Ahmad's Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesia's investment in genre. These undertheorized films from geopolitically situated cultures narrate colonial identity within a distinctively Southeast Asian story. Gerald Sim's immersive journey nurtures connections between narrative film, commercial video, art cinema, and experimental work with an abiding commitment to self-reflexive theorizing. The book culminates in a reflection on the ethics and politics of conducting knowledge work on world cinema. Sim navigates Singapore's love of maps with the work of Tom Conley and Gilles Deleuze, surveys the city-state's cartographic uncanny, before using the spatial inquisitions in filmmaker Tan Pin Pin's cinema of hiraeth to appreciate Singapore's territorial predispositions. The book then revisits a beloved Malaysian director's voice of modernity alongside Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenologies of listening and globalization. Original readings of Ahmad's oeuvre dwell on the interplay between her ethnic cacophonies and imperfect subtitling. Finally, Sim focuses on the postcoloniality of Indonesia's Cold War alliance with the United States to contemplate the overhang of authoritarian stability within its contemporary cinema's generic recourse.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds—not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s fifteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.Honourable Mention, BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award 2026Longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Prize 2026 (Moving Image category)

This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang Bing's cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with inequality, labour, and migration. His internationally awarded documentaries are considered masterpieces with unique aesthetics that bear reference to global film masters. Therefore, this investigation goes beyond the divides between Western and non-Western film traditions and between fiction and documentary cinema. Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, history, and memory) as its entry point, bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and globalization studies. This volume benefits from the author's extensive conversations with Wang Bing and insider observations of film production and the film festival circuit.

Manoeuvring around mainland China’s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the origins and impact of violent South Korean and Japanese cinema from the late 1990s onward, exploring how South Korean filmmakers were inspired by their Japanese counterparts and reflecting shared economic struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s.Through the concept of “intimate violence,” this book provides a critical account of violence as a means of mediating social relations and articulating the transformations of neoliberal modernity. It offers a detailed analysis of the simulated acts of violence, with particular attention to mise-en-scène, and explores their broader political and philosophical implications. This volume critiques the ubiquity of violence in commercial media and its role in shaping neoliberal sociality and personhood.The Intimate Violence of South Korean and Japanese Cinema is essential reading for students and scholars of East Asian cinema, film and media studies, cultural studies, and political economy, as well as general readers interested in the topic.

Providing a rare example of a national cinema that has managed to overturn the prevailing global paradigm of Hollywood dominance, South Korean films are nevertheless still haunted by the peninsula’s earlier colonial history. Focussing on a series of films produced during the administration of disgraced and then pardoned President Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), this book examines South Korea’s relationship with Japan and how this relationship continues to be negotiated through films and politics. Containing detailed discussion of significant and internationally renowned films including The Age of Shadows, The Handmaiden and the domestically popular, The Admiral: Roaring Currents, this informative text is a welcome addition to South Korean Film Studies that will also be valued for its examination of how film cycles operate in non-Hollywood cinema. Offering a perceptive look at an underexplored area, this book will be embraced by professionals and laypersons intrigued by South Korea and Japan’s frequently tense relationship.

Drawing on extensive research of 153 feature films by 65 female directors, this book examines the dislocation between Chinese women’s cinema and Western feminist theories.The author explores how local feminist discourses in China shape major feminist narratives in contemporary Chinese women’s cinema and establishes “China as methodology” in Chinese cinema studies, offering interpretive paradigms rooted in China’s history, culture and politics. The author introduces frameworks to decode Chinese women’s cinema, including a model of socialist feminist legacies, a liberal feminism that critiques abstract female subjectivity, a consumerist pseudo-feminism characterized by double-distancing, a female homoeroticism that (dis)entangles an indigenous matrix of female bonding and a Western matrix of lesbian sexuality as well as the East Asian mother–daughter relationship underpinned by imperial power dynamics.Chinese Women’s Cinema Through a Feminist Lens is essential reading for scholars and students in gender studies, Chinese cinema and cultural studies.

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Pao-chen Tang theorizes and analyzes this animist imagination—a new mode of filmmaking that delves into both the definition of the cinematic medium and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels an eye-opening vision to examine East Asian history and ecological anxieties of our times. The shamanic protagonists of the animist imagination transform the worldly and medial figurations onscreen into thought experiments on human-nonhuman relationality, modelling for the viewers anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distills this form of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise. This book was supported by the Publication Subsidy Scheme of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

The Evolution of Chinese Popular Cinema provides insights into the Chinese film industry and popular cinema in the past two decades (with a major focus on the films produced since the mid-2010s).The book emphasizes on the film market in mainland China since the mid- 2010s and how it has been dramatically different from the previous decades, featuring big names like Zhang Yimou and Feng Xiaogang. Witnessing an age of baokuan films – films that have renewed box office records, represented by Wolf Warrior 2, The Wandering Earth, Nezha, and Hi, Mom – this study contends that baokuan films have forged a unique category in the landscape of Chinese cinema. It further reveals how these commercially successful films interact with industrial, economic, political, and social elements, illuminating transformations in Chinese filmmaking amid the country’s evolving landscape since the 2010s through the post-pandemic era.It will be an insightful resource for undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and general audiences interested in Asian Studies, Film Studies, Chinese media and cultural studies, contemporary Chinese cinema and cultural industries, and Chinese cinema studies. The book will also inspire researchers in China Studies by discussing the instability of globalization and China’s changing global strategies, state and popular nationalism, and the rise of active audiences through the lens of popular films.

This collective work brings together contributions from academic researchers and film critics who offer analyses of the singular aesthetics of Filipino filmmaker, Lav Diaz's cinema.The cinematographic work of Lav Diaz is steeped in the hopes and suffering of a people exposed to both state violence and the climatic cataclysms that regularly devastate the archipelago. A diary of the filming of Essential Truths of the Lake (2023), as well as previously unpublished interviews and masterclasses, take us to the heart of Lav Diaz's singular creative process, rooted in time and organically confronting places and their inhabitants. His characteristically lengthy films tie in with the destinies of opponents, of the marginalised and the disenfranchised. Confronting history and the tragic consequences of successive colonisations, encouraging resistance, reviving progressively forgotten animist practices, restoring the dignity of those who disappeared: Lav Diaz's cinematic frescoes stand up against silence, amnesia and repression.This volume is perfect for students and scholars alike interested in Asian cinema, film critique and the work of Lav Diaz.

This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang Bing's cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with inequality, labour, and migration.

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability rethinks theory and style through films that bring the limits of traditional postcolonial frameworks into stark relief.

Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China’s most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we know.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds—not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s fifteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

This book is dedicated to convincing readers of the clarity of the message from the filmmakers from the post-Fukushima period that There must be no more nuclear weapons. There must be no more nuclear power generation.

Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking.