Asia-Pacific Film Co-productions

Theory, Industry and Aesthetics

Dal Yong Jin, Wendy Su, Dal Yong Jin, Wendy Su

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000766554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Medien- & Kommunikationsbranche

This book examines cross-regional film collaboration within the Asia-Pacific region. Through a mixed methods approach of political economy, industry and market, as well as textual analysis, the book contributes to the understanding of the global fusion of cultural products and the reconfiguration of geographic, political, economic, and cultural relations. Issues covered include cultural globalization and Asian regionalization; identity, regionalism, and industry practices; and inter-Asian and transpacific co-production practices among the U.S.A., China, South Korea, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand.

Part I

Regionalization, Globalization, and Co-Production

1 Cultural Globalization through Film Co-Productions in the Asia-Pacific Region

Dal Yong Jin

Introduction

Okja—an ungainly mix of benign monster movie, action comedy and coming-of-age fable—created huge controversies at both Cannes and Korea’s film market when it debuted in May 2017. The major controversy of the film by Bong Joon-ho was rooted in its unusual co-production between the Korean film industry and the U.S. cultural industry, which was seemingly not unusual in that it is the mix of the local film sector and the U.S. platform Netflix. Okja was entirely funded by Netflix and was planned to screen for television before the large screen (Dalton, 2017).¹ This movie is one of the latest co-production films between the U.S.A. and Korea, and it was filmed in a number of locations including Seoul, Vancouver, and New York.² With Netflix handling distribution for Okja, “controversy arose over the decision to include the running, as productions are typically subjected to a theatrical run after being screened at the festival” (Deehan, 2017).

Despite its controversies, Okja clearly exemplifies the recent trend of co-production. Until the early 1990s, national film producers took the stance that they should protect and maintain national culture, or “the body of values, practices, and identities,” because national culture was “deemed to make particular nations different from others” (Schlesinger, 1997, p. 372). In fact,

Asia was a jumble of provincial film markets. Works from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand were made largely for domestic markets or European art houses. Other than Hong Kong Kung-fu and mobster flicks, local movies rarely crossed borders within Asia and local filmmakers never collaborated out of their country.

(Beals, 2001, p. 56)

However, producers and film companies in Asia and Hollywood have increasingly turned to international co-production since the late 1990s, because the co-production mode takes advantage of the joint consumption cost structure. It entails jointly developing and producing film and television programs with attributes which make them accessible to audiences in more than one national market (Hoskins, McFayden, & Finn, 1999, pp. 127–129). Some Asian filmmakers have started to pool resources to compete with Hollywood, “producing more cross-cultural hits” (Beals, 2001, p. 56). Asian producers created co-production films between countries in Asia. Filmmakers in Asian countries mostly started to pay attention to co-productions starting in the late 1990s

in the wake of recovery following the 1990s Asian financial crisis and the lifting of barriers to cultural exchange that had long structured the postwar region, producers, filmmakers, and critics alike touted the possibilities of regional coproduction with particular intensity at the turn of the millennium.

(DeBoer, 2014, p. 1)

The significance of cultural co-productions at this moment was

understood to lie not only in its convergence with a region opening to new intensities in capitalist exchange and widening markets. Coproduction’s significance also lay in its function as a technology—that is, as a mode of production that potentiated new forms of encounter, expression, and, ultimately, identity for the region.

(DeBoer, 2014, p. 2; see also Baltruschat, 2010)

In recent years, filmmakers and corporations have developed new strategies to work with Hollywood instead of challenging it, as The Great Wall, a co-production movie between studios in China and the U.S.A. which was released in February 2017, and Okja clearly indicate. This means that since the late 2000s, several Asian film producers, including Chinese and Korean filmmakers, have furthermore turned their eyes to Hollywood, and the U.S.A. more generally, partially because the U.S.A. has paid attention to the Asian markets.

This chapter examines the recent trend of co-production in Asia-Pacific to map out the major features of the global film industry. As the foundation of this volume, it first discusses major theoretical frameworks running through the majority of the chapters, with these frameworks being cultural globalization and regionalization. Since collaboration and convergence are primary characteristics in globalization discourses, we review globalization theories; however, as we mainly focus on the Asia-Pacific region, we advance our understanding of cultural regionalization. It then provides a general documentation of co-productions in the film sector by discussing several key typologies of co-production. This part of the discussion especially identifies whether Asia-Pacific co-productions are more financial and business driven than culturally driven, or vice versa. Finally, it examines why Asian film producers have started to pursue co-productions not only within the same region, but also between countries in different regions, in particular between Asia and the U.S.A. as Hollywood majors rapidly pay attention to the Asian film markets.

Globalization in Popular Culture

Co-production in Asia-Pacific revolves around the dynamics of globalization and regionalization. Globalization in the realm of media and culture has interconnected the world, both culturally and economically. In this regard, the past two decades have witnessed the most remarkable trend in media globalization. In globalization studies, scholars have mainly developed two distinctive and opposing theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, media scholars, including H. Schiller (1976), argued that only a few Western countries, in particular, the U.S.A., were dominant players as many parts of the world had to import American popular culture. The globalization process at this particular juncture identified Americanization since the U.S.A. has long dominated television and film exports around the world. Leading figures espousing the thesis of cultural imperialism, including Herbert Schiller (1989, 1993, 1998) and Robert McChesney (1998) have held that American cultural supremacy is a result of global capitalism, and cultural products such as Hollywood films and American television programs seek to colonize a global audience and help form a hegemonic culture, which threatens the existence of local cultures and the creation of alternative ways of life.

On the other hand, spearheaded by Japan between the late 1980s and early 1990s as could be seen by the rapid growth of Japanese popular culture in many parts of the world, several Asian (e.g., Bollywood movies) and Latin American countries (e.g., Telenovelas) have demonstrated incredible initiative in globalizing local cultural products and businesses. When Japan and some Latin American countries started to develop their culture and exported them to neighboring countries, and then later to Western countries, several theoreticians (Straubhaar, 1991; Thussu, 2007) exclaimed the arrival of cultural pluralism where several non-Western countries play a key role in the global cultural markets. Scholars, such as Appadurai (1990), Featherstone (1995), Kraidy (2005), and Garcia Canclini (1995) argued for the emergence of local popular culture. Regardless of the continuing role of the cultural imperialism thesis in explaining the power relationship in international flows of culture, these scholars emphasized that global interdependency, connectivity, and complex processes involve “all sorts of contradictions, resistances and countervailing forces” (Tomlinson, 1999, p. 16).

In the realm of popular culture, the one-way flow of cultural products from the U.S.A. to non-Western countries has seemingly decreased, while non-Western cultural products from Korea, India, Brazil, and Mexico have penetrated the Western markets, which has resulted in the emergence and growth of De-Westernization. Of course, what is significant in this respect is that only a handful of countries, including those mentioned earlier, have been able to develop their own culture to export as the majority of non-Western countries have no man power, capital, and know-how to compete with Western cultures. Therefore, globalization is more complicated than imagined as we cannot judge the trend by a few cases, but the overall trend, which needs to be carefully interpreted.

Under this circumstance, there has been a third form of globalization, which is a relatively new force. The trend is cultural collaboration between countries, beyond the flow of finished cultural products and information. The dynamic has been manifested in a record high number of film co-productions and the high-profile investments in the entertainment juggernaut Hollywood studios and U.S. cinemas by Asian corporations in Japan, China, and Korea. While globalization of culture primarily occurs through cultural flows of finished programs, including films and television programs, as well as music between countries, co-production in the film and broadcasting sectors has become a particular model of globalization because this mode of cultural production “is created as both an economic and a cultural commodity” (Selznick, 2008, p. 2). Since the late 1990s, in fact, collaboration as a form of co-production of television programs and films between Western and non-Western countries in addition to countries within the same region has been prospering. This means that internationally co-produced films in recent years have substantially affected the cultural landscape of media and culture.

What is at stake is that the popularity of co-production coincides with

the emergence of other commercial production modes such as genre hybridization, reality television and format transfers which all result from changes in the regulatory, economic and technical environment of media industries. Co-productions are naturally linked to the globalization of the economy and culture.

(Baltruschat, 2002, pp. 14–15)

As Murdock (1996, p. 107 cited in Baltruschat, 2002, p. 5) also argued,

co-productions have the [new] potential to explore globalization processes such as the diversification and hybridization of cultures. They could be a very positive device for addressing the new politics of identity but this potential is unlikely to be realized because of the way co-production is organized economically.

Therefore, while admitting to the significant role of co-production in the globalization process, we should critically analyze the consequences of financial collaboration in addition to cultural convergence in globalization, which may provide different perspectives.

Cultural Regionalization in Asia-Pacific

The globalization process varies from region to region around the planet, and therefore, it is critical to understand globalization in conjunction with regionalization within a certain area. In Asia, several countries, including China, Korea, and Japan, have continued developing co-productions as Asian filmmakers have expanded their operations within the region; therefore, films in Asia are more attuned to local tastes, routinely crossing national boundaries (Jin & Lee, 2007; Langdale, 1997; Otmazgin, 2005; Yecies, Keane, & Flew, 2016).). When East Asian countries have created co-production films, sometimes between China and Korea, and at other times between Japan and China, this cultural cooperation and collaboration in East Asia has deep historical roots (Otmazgin and Ben-Ari, 2013) Yecies (2016).

More specifically, co-production in Asia has become crucial in cultural globalization. In the film industry, until the early 1990s, Asia was relatively less important than other regions due to its small market other than Japan. However, with the rapid growth of the Korean, Chinese, and Indian film industries in the midst of changing political and economic milieu, Asia has become one of the most significant parts of global box offices. Based on the increasing role of national film industries in Asia, filmmakers and governments have started to pursue co-productions between countries in the region, which is crucial for cultural regionalization.

In the realm of popular culture, like television programs and films, co-productions lead to cultural integration, and collaboration could be both private-led and government-driven. For example, while several film directors themselves pursue co-productions, governments also initiate co-productions as a form of international treaty to provide some incentives, including tax benefits. In fact, as Dent (2016) points out, different levels of interaction exist, and in particular co-productions are mainly sought for two major motivations, either cultural or financial. It is not possible to eliminate one particular aspect from these several dimensions in understanding film co-productions.

Of course, cultural regionalization could be defined as “the (empirical) process which can be defined as a process of change from relative heterogeneity and lack of cooperation towards increased cooperation, integration, convergence, coherence and identity in culture within a given geographical space” (Schulz, Soderbaum, & Ojendal, 2001, p. 304). This is a broader concept of collaboration than cultural flows of finished products (Jin and Lee, 2007, p. 32). Therefore, cultural regionalization can also be understood

as a comprehensive and multidimensional process, which implies increasing regional cooperation and integration with respect to a number of dimensions, not only political and economic, but also cultural di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Asia-Pacific Film Co-Production: Introduction
• PART I Regionalization, Globalization, and Co-Production
• PART II Film Industry, Collaboration, and Asian Geopolitics
• PART III Cultural Flows, Cultural Globalization, and the Asia-Pacific
• PART IV Aesthetics in Film Co-Production
• Index