From Resentment to Alternative Cooperation: Imagining the Intimate Other in Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese Cinema

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel begins with the idea that transnational East Asian Cinema can be a process of representing the national self in light of an intimate other, a process that cannot help but engage with the entangled history of the region. Colonialism, national division, and international relations have created many deep fissures between cinematic worlds, which in turn generate a vision of those relationships. Yet the cinema is an imperfect generator of ideology through image, as it tends overflow boundaries, finding the self in the other and the other in the self through style and the sensual evocation of affect. Perhaps imagining a counterpart only brings part closer to part, hinting at utopian potentialities of the post-national.

Our panel opens with Evelyn Shih’s paper on spy comedies of Taiwan and South Korea, in which a comic aesthetic resolves the antinomies of the cosmopolitan and the local, the Communist spy and the country bumpkin. Mei-Hsuan Chiang’s paper explores the ways in which the 1970s anti-Japanese film in Taiwan was actually a family affair. Minhwa Ahn documents the unexpected and alternative forms of collaboration between Japanese and Korean Japanese minority filmmakers in the face of post-war US occupation. Finally, Elliott Shr-tzung Shie finds new hope for Taiwan-Japan relations through Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s idiosyncratic act of transnational film production. Throughout the panel, we ask how film genre, such as comedy and melodrama, and authorial style, such as cinema verité or Taiwan New Wave, enable cinema to innervate and transform the transnational.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Elliott Shr-tzung She, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University

Chair

• Earl Jackson, National Ciao Tung University

Individual Presentations

• International Men of Mischief: Genre Play, Gender, and the 1960s Bonds of East Asia - Evelyn Shih, University of California, Berkeley

• Home Is Where the Heart Is: Family Melodrama and Taiwan’s Anti-Japanese Films, 1972-1982 - Mei-hsuan Chiang, University of South Florida

• (Beyond) Cold War governmentality and anti-Japanese sentiments in Postwar South Korean and Japanese films: Co-produced Films Between Zainichi and Japanese as the possibility of alternative communalism - Minhwa Ahn, Korea National University of the Arts

• The Representation of Tokyo, the Tourist Gaze and the Politics of Transnational Production: On Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Japanese film Café Lumiere - Elliott Shr-tzung Shie, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University

Discussant

• Earl Jackson, National Ciao Tung University