The Asian Cinema Experience

Styles, Spaces, Theory

Stephen Teo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136296086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the range and dynamism of contemporary Asian cinemas, covering East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia), South Asia (Bollywood), and West Asia (Iran), in order to discover what is common about them and to engender a theory or concept of "Asian Cinema". It goes beyond existing work which provides a field survey of Asian cinema, probing more deeply into the field of Asian Cinema, arguing that Asian Cinema constitutes a separate pedagogical subject, and putting forward an alternative cinematic paradigm. The book covers "styles", including the works of classical Asian Cinema masters, and specific genres such as horror films, and Bollywood and Anime, two very popular modes of Asian Cinema; "spaces", including artistic use of space and perspective in Chinese cinema, geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, the private "erotic space" of films from South Korea and Thailand, and the persistence of the family unit in the urban spaces of Asian big cities in many Asian films; and "concepts" such as Pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Nationalism and Third Cinema. The rise of Asian nations on the world stage has been coupled with a growing interest, both inside and outside Asia, of Asian culture, of which film is increasingly an indispensable component – this book provides a rich, insightful overview of what exactly constitutes Asian Cinema.

Part I

Styles

1Kurosawa and classical style in Asian Cinema

Pioneering Asian Cinema: Kurosawa as high modernist

One of the more disturbing tendencies in the study of Asian Cinema is the view of it as an overwhelmingly postmodern upstart in a world system long dominated by the advanced cinemas of the West. As a postmodern phenomenon, Asian Cinema has jumped ahead of itself without undergoing a stage of modernity; Asian Cinema is also a reaction against the national – a postnational conceit. In fact, a history of Asian Cinema can be traced by following the trail of national cinema. The beginning of Asian Cinema as a discipline can be traced, more specifically, to the Japanese cinema and to none other than Kurosawa Akira – to that point of his career when he gave us Rashomon (1950), and its appearance at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival. Its subsequent victory in winning the Golden Lion initiated the Western interest in Asian cinemas and the start of the classical period of Asian Cinema. Though a handful of Japanese films were seen in the West in earlier eras, the Japanese cinema (and Asian Cinema as a whole) remained largely unknown. The 1951 triumph of Rashomon turned the situation around, and the classical period of Asian Cinema could be said to have begun then. The idea and vision of an Asian Cinema picked up steam from Rashomon onwards and is now the object of our inquiry.

Rashomon is a historical period movie (what the Japanese call jidaigeki) that is also somehow contemporary. Yoshimoto states that the film has a connection to the sociopolitical context of the occupation period (Yoshimoto 2000: 189), but Rashomon has turned out to be the kind of work that seems to connect to every period and not just as it applies to Japan – a mark of its high modernist sensibility. It has also turned out to be the kind of artistic signpost the title of which has entered the lexicon of cultural studies and the human sciences: the so-called ‘Rashomon effect’ (see Heider 1988). As a film it has generally stood the test of time, primarily standing out for its relentless brilliance of film-making and as a work of narrative experimentation, at least in the modernist sense in which it should be taken. Satyajit Ray put it best in an article on Kurosawa first published in 1966, included in a collection of his writings entitled Our Films, Their Films.

The effect of the film on me, personally, was electric. I saw it three times on consecutive days and wondered each time if there was another film anywhere which gave such sustained and dazzling proof of a director's command over every aspect of film making. Even after fifteen years, whole chunks of the film come vividly back to mind in all their visual and aural richness: the woodcutter's journey through the forest, shot with a relentless tracking camera from an incredible variety of angles – high, low, back and front – and cut with axe-edge precision; the bandit's first sight of the woman as she rides by, her veil lifted momentarily by a breeze, while he lolls in the shade of a tree, slapping away at mosquitoes; the striking formality of the court scene with the judge never seen at all; the scene of witchcraft with the medium whirling in a trance, and the wind blowing from two opposite directions at the same time ...

(Ray 1976: 180–81)

Ray also exclaimed that ‘the triumph of Rashomon was exciting’ in that it ‘was some sort of a challenge to western domination in films’ (Ray 1976: 155), but just what sort of a challenge was it? According to Ray, the film offers ‘just the right degree of universality to prevent alienation while retaining the pull of the exotic’. This suggests that the film does not resist the trap of Orientalism, and Rashomon is perhaps the classic Orientalist work at the point of the instigation of Asian Cinema. However, Kurosawa's challenge was essentially to show that an Asian director could master cinematic technique and to make films with not just artistic but cultural content. In this chapter, we will investigate how Kurosawa has pioneered the classical style of Asian Cinema. In fact, Kurosawa and Ray were the first Asian directors to trigger off the Asian Cinema wave, Ray doing so not long after Kurosawa with his debut film Pather Panchali, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. Together, both Ray and Kurosawa formed a kind of warrior team on the world cinema circuit in the 1950s and 1960s (their best period in terms of their work), intrepidly spearheading and championing the arrival of Asian films and touting their uniqueness of style and content.

The classical style of Kurosawa and Ray rests on their ability to merge form and content. Both are unabashed story-tellers and highly virtuosic in their techniques: Kurosawa is probably more accomplished given that the Japanese film industry has historically been the most advanced in Asia, but Ray was no less accomplished given the limitations he worked under (I will focus on Ray's achievements in the next chapter). Both directors were facilitators of a consciousness, a spirit, of classical Asian Cinema. Without them, we may not have had the textual layering and framework for the emergence of a wider classical Asian Cinema and it would be doubtful whether Asian Cinema could ever have taken off as a field of study today. Kurosawa and Ray were the best-known Asian directors in their time and their work opened doors to a wider appreciation of other Asian directors. Kurosawa paved the way for Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and other Japanese classicists to emerge into the critical field; Ray, equally, was the fountain-head for a wider appreciation of Indian cinema (Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and many others).

More Western directors have remade Kurosawa's films than those of any other Asian director (the most successful in my view being The Magnificent Seven [1960], John Sturges’ remake of Shichinin no samurai/Seven Samurai; but Nora inu/Stray Dog, Kakushi-toride no san-akunin/The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo have all been remade or reworked). Scenes, characters and his overall sense of style have been copied by directors from East to West. Kurosawa remains highly influential and the best-known of Japanese directors more than a dozen years after his death. He was in this respect the most transcultural of Asian film-makers. Significantly, many of Kurosawa's contemporary disciples, if they may be called that, are Asian film-makers, key among them Johnnie To, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. In earlier eras Kurosawa was the model for Asian contemporaries such as P. Ramlee and Hussein Haniff, both of whom worked in the Malay film industry based in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s. P. Ramlee's Semerah Padi (1956), a highpoint of the Malay cinema, contains inventive references to Seven Samurai and Rashomon. The Iranian director Behram Beyzai also paid a tribute to Kurosawa in his epic Gharibeh Va Meh/The Stranger and the Fog (1976).

Kurosawa has, in his turn, paid homages to Western directors in his work, notably John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, George Stevens and Abel Gance – all directors that Kurosawa professed had influenced him in one way or another (Richie 1970: 196). Kurosawa has made films out of the works of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Gorky; he has also borrowed plots from Dashiell Hammett and Ed McBain. Thus Kurosawa embodies the essence of ‘intertextual cinema’ (Goodwin 1994). While intertextuality is often taken to mean the way in which Kurosawa has adapted Western works, methods and influences into the Japanese context, it will be more meaningful from our perspective to explore how Kurosawa's cinema operates on the level of Asian intertextuality: how, in fact, Kurosawa remains an inter-Asian exemplar and icon in Asian Cinema.

Violence and didacticism in Kurosawa

Ray regarded Kurosawa admiringly but noted two elements in Kurosawa's work that generated ‘some mystification’ (Ray 1976: 182) – the stress on action and violence and a tendency towards didacticism. Ray seizes on Kurosawa's description of himself as a man who likes ‘extremes because I find them most alive’ (quoted in Ray 1976: 183) to throw some light on the question of determination, and it may be instructive, therefore, to note that Kurosawa's penchant for violence is something determined by his fondness for extremes. The moments of extreme violence in Kurosawa's films – Mifune's Macbeth figure put down protractedly by a steady stream of arrows in Kumonosu-jô/Throne of Blood, the final duel between Mifune and Nakadai in Tsubaki Sanjurô/Sanjuro, the execution of Lady Kaede in Ran – remain as some of the most catalytically violent moments in all of cinema.

Kurosawa's personality of extremes is, I believe, responsible for the trait of didacticism as a function of extremely violent behaviour in his films. One of his most didactic movies, Akahige/Redbeard, demonstrates this superbly. Redbeard is a gruff, patriarchal figure who thinks nothing of using his skills in judo and karate to break the arms and legs of thugs, in the film's only action sequence, to administer a lesson in ethics. As a doctor, he then proceeds to mend the wounds of all his suffering victims – for that is what the thugs are, victims of Redbeard's didacticism which has been reinforced by violence in the manner of the Chinese wen-wu dialectic. Wen is the civil side, as represented by Redbeard's expertise as a doctor, and wu is the military side, as manifested in Redbeard's martial arts skills in the action sequence referred to above. In Kurosawa's cinema, violence is the praxis of didacticism, or, in other words, violence is wu and didacticism is wen, both traits reinforcing and strengthening each other. As a result, violence never seems gratuitous in Kurosawa's cinema. The didactic ending of Rashomon is logical in the way that it comes as the outcome of the violence that made up virtually the whole film (the physical torment and suffering arising out of the violation of a woman and the wrongful death of her husband). Similarly, Sanjuro's didactic injunction to his young followers for their swords to ‘stay in the scabbard’ follows a breathtaking moment of visceral violence in which Sanjuro strikes his sword into the heart of his opponent, resulting in an explosion of blood spurting out like a geyser from his opponent's chest (Figure 1.1).

The young samurai in Sanjuro are given a succinct lesson in how and when to use the sword, if ever. In fact, the Zen conduct of samurai stipulates that ‘the best swordsman never uses his sword’ (Desser 1992b: 154), or, at the very least, the sword is never to be used to kill for pleasure and for the sake of aesthetic violence. Sanjuro's didacticism is ironic inasmuch as we, the audience, derive pleasure from his violence. His swordplay is what we are supposed to enjoy. We sit in the comfort and safety of the cinema, watching the samurai fight, but the violence is counterpointed by his admonishment to the young samurai at the end. We too are admonished, but at least we have been taught through the experience of violence and are therefore not put off, because admonishment is the logical outcome of violence being the praxis of didacticism.

Figure 1.1. The final spurt of violence in Sanjuro (1962).

If Ray found Kurosawa's violence and didacticism mystifying and problematic, it is probably because both traits seem incompatible with modernist values, but they are also incompatible with each other. From the Ghandian point of view, one shouldn't preach from violence (though in the ancient Chinese Mohist tradition this is permissible). Kurosawa does, and, in the best of his cinema, violence and didacticism counterpoint each other. Kurosawa has been consistently didactic throughout his career. How, then, does one explain his high acceptance rate? A film such as Redbeard, which marks the end of Kurosawa's studio period, contains admirable moments and, like most of Kurosawa's mature works of the studio period, it holds up despite its didacticism owing to the director's technical brilliance and his utter devotion to mise-en-scéne. If the didacticism of Kurosawa's films translates as optimism, as in Rashomon and Redbeard, Yoshimoto argues that ‘it is not necessarily because of (their) affirmation of human compassion and goodness but because of (their) jubilant celebration of film as a medium of storytelling’ (Yoshimoto 2000: 189).

Does the transculturalism of the film medium in some way ameliorate the didacticism of content? This seems highly probable. In some sense, this might also suggest that violence (or action) is more acceptable in Kurosawa's films, but that the combination of violence and didacticism is problematic, and particularly so in the environment of high modernist art which might not value didacticism as a modernist trait. Thus, the mystification about Kurosawa remains, ultimately raising the question of where the violence and the didacticism in Kurosawa come from.

It is important for our purposes to examine Kurosawa from an inter-Asian perspective and to suggest intertextualities of style and theory in the director's work that don't merely connect with the West, and to critique Western views and approaches regarding Kurosawa. To begin with, Kurosawa's didacticism is the outcome of a conscious manipulation of affect which seems very Asian. In Indian culture, rasa is a vital part of the arts (I will discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter on Satyajit Ray) and, while I will not examine Kurosawa from the vantage point of rasa theory, I do suggest that his didacticism is infused with rasa (emotions). Rasa theory can be applied in a generic way to all kinds of films, but it can also point to a conscious effort on the part of the director to knowingly impart emotion leading to moral or ethical lessons.

In her book The Japanese Period Film, S. A. Thornton calls Kurosawa ‘an old-style Confucian lecturer who not only demonstrated the ideals of the way of the bushi but was accurate in presenting the details he used to do so’ (Thornton 2008: 124). Kurosawa inherited the didactic tradition from Japanese theatre (specifically the Zenshinza, an early twentieth-century progressive theatre group), and, as a superb technician, insisted on historical realism. However, Thornton implicitly attacks Kurosawa, suggesting that his historical realism is ‘content without meaning’, basically having no value ‘other than that of antiquarianism’ (Thornton 2008: 125). Thornton is, therefore, not fully appreciative of Kurosawa's didacticism and its association with violence. Kurosawa's didacticism is seen as a trait in the context of historical realism, not so much for the meaning that the didacticism conveys (for it has no meaning in Thornton's eyes). Kurosawa, though, is often loosely called a ‘humanist’ and his didacticism superficially conforms to the expression of that ideal.

Thornton goes on to make the point that there is a tradition of realistic violence in the Japanese epic, drawing on the history of Japan between the tenth and seventeenth centuries, marked by ‘a series of revolts and palace coups, civil wars and local squabbles’ (Thornton 2008: 155). There is a religious dimension to the violence in the Japanese epic:

The historical background of war may be introduced in terms of Taoist concepts of chaos or Confucian ideals of government, but it is Buddhism that lends meaning and significance to the battlefield itself: it is a picture of hell; it is meant to horrify people and turn them to religion.

(Thornton 2008: 155)

In the inter-Asian context of cultural traditions, violence and historical didacticism are not unfamiliar traits and can be found in the Indian epic The Mahabharata and in the Chinese classics Sanguo yanyi {Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin). Kurosawa may have been inspired by the Chinese military romances. The elements of these novels (the tales of hero-legends, the accounts of stratagems and conspiracies, the manouevrings of statesmen, politicos and generals, the acts of bravery and those of treachery and the generic conceit of knights doing good deeds and putting their swords to use for the good of the community or the nation) can be seen more or less in Kurosawa's series of period films: Tora no o wofumu otokotachi/They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail (1945), Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Kagemusha and Ran. All these films form an intermixture of historicism, romanticism, violence and didacticism. Kurosawa would have drawn on these novels as popular cultural traditions that have been ingrained into Japanese society, just as the Japanese language draws on Chinese characters.

Seven Samurai is thus a generic model of what the Chinese call the wuxia genre, a word that the Japanese themselves do not particularly use in reference to their own jidaigeki genre known as chanbara (a pulp expression that comes from the clanging of swords). Possibly inspired by certain episodes in The Water Margin, Seven Samurai best exemplifies the principles of wuxia (what Thornton calls the way of the bushi in the Japanese context) to do good to the community by helping to rid it of injustice and evil, to be selfless and not fear death, to be humble even at the moment of victory and never to boast of one's ability or achievements. All these generic principles are given a visual treatment in Seven Samurai. Thornton calls the film ‘a fairly idealistic portrait of the Confucian bushi motivated by benevolence, as a Confucian bushi ought to be’ (Thornton 2008: 124), though the film offers a lot more to offset what might be taken as the cliches of the genre. There is the near anthropological record of a rural village, a critique of human behaviour, an examination of valour and cowardice and the question of who makes history. (‘It is they who have won; again we have lost’, says Kambei, the leader of the seven, at the end of the film). Such qualities in Seven Samurai are of the ‘anthropomorphic or “humanist” kind’ which, according to Jameson, would soon fall out of fashion as the dynamics of the world system began to change with the onset of late capitalism (Jameson 1992: 56).

Seven Samurai in fact embodied the classic terms of the genre on the inter-Asian level as well as Kurosawa's ant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Styles
• Part II Spaces
• Part III Theory
• Coda
• Filmography
• References
• Index