Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas
Critical Asian CinemasCritical Asian Cinemas features book-length manuscripts that engage with films produced in Asia and by Asian auteurs. "Asia" refers here to the geographic and discursive sites located in East and Central Asia, as well as South and Southeast Asia. The books in this series emphasize the capacity of film to interrogate the cultures, politics, aesthetics, and histories of Asia by thinking cinema as an art capable of critique. Open to a wide variety of approaches and methods, the series features studies that utilize novel theoretical models toward the analysis of all genres and styles of Asian moving image practices, encompassing experimental film and video, the moving image in contemporary art, documentary, as well as popular genre cinemas. We welcome rigorous, original analyses from scholars working in any discipline. This timely series includes studies that critique the aesthetics and ontology of the cinema, but also the concept of Asia itself. They attempt to negotiate the place of Asian cinema in the world by tracing the distribution of films as cultural products but also as aesthetic objects that critically address the ostensible particularly of Asianness as a discursive formation.
List of Illustrations2.1 The Japanese-style restaurant in The Six Suspects, complete with sake bottles and noren door curtain. Courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. 2.2 The American-style nightclub on May 13th Night of Sorrow. Courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute. 3.1 (A-C) Poetic landscapes in The Wild Field (1979). 3.2 Forest as poetic space in Miss Tham's Forest (1967). 3.3 The growing saplings as a symbol of a rejuvenating family/ nation in Miss Tham's Forest (1967). 14.1 The brutal scene of Masa stabbing a man in the brothel, in the promotional film still of The First Error Step, aka Never Too Late to Repent.