In this article, I employ Naficy's expanded concept of accented cinema as an analytical framework to examine two films by Chinese ethnic minority filmmak(2015). The focus is on how these films embody a sense of displacement, vulnerability and confinement through the spatial chronotopes of open, closed and third a central concern with the complexity of belonging by illuminating the multifarious experiences of non-belonging or uncomfortable belonging in various specific contexts. Pema Tseden's work foregrounds the Tibetan experience of confinement and alienation in the face of modernity's encroachment, whereas Zhang L & uuml;'s film explores the diasporic condition and the marginalization experienced by KoreanChinese people in China, offering nuanced understandings of displacement within their respective contexts.
Women working in Indian film industries face many challenges related to equality, freedom and safety. They are not only under-represented in every stage of film production, but also harassed and controlled by patriarchal hegemonic forces. This article examines the possibility of women’s collective action in traditionally masculine working environments of Indian cinema. It focuses on a case study of the Malayalam film industry, the South Indian regional cinema of the state of Kerala, to analyse how the emergence of feminist solidarity can challenge public perceptions of women in the popular medium of cinema. It examines the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), an organization for women workers in Kerala’s film industry, which assisted women in coming forward to discuss gender discrimination and workplace issues in the film industry.
During China's early reform era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, popular film addressed institutional transformation and the effects of change on the lives of ordinary Chinese people. This included transformations in the sphere of education, including the impact of key policies such as the restoration of the university entrance exam. This article investigates the 1986 film Father and Son, a comedy that can be read as a site for dramatizing the ambiguous experience of educational policy change in the 1980s. In Father and Son, while the father in question cherishes the opportunities afforded to his son by new educational policies, the son regards them as a burden and not worthy of serious consideration. This article education in the site of the family home. Specifically, it considers how comedic behaviours, expressions and situations are used to represent tension and differing attitudes towards the prospect of university. By taking a case example of popular Chinese comedy, the article offers insights into cinema's value in bridging official policy and everyday life. It engages with the journal's theme of advancing Asian cinema studies throughout the world, amid asymmetric political equations, by probing debates about cinema's representation of education in a comic way during the early reform era, specifically in the 1980s.
This article compares the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujir & omacr;, highlighting their shared aesthetic philosophy of the everyday. Their similarities extend beyond their treatment of time: both display a profound awareness of their social and historical contexts. By privileging ellipsis, silence and suggestion over central conflict, their works subvert conventional plot structures and cultivate meaning in seemingly trivial gestures or peripheral moments. This philosophy of the everyday transforms absence and understatement into narrative principles, enabling their works to capture the complexities of evolving societies without recourse to spectacle or resolution. Chekhov and Ozu offer formal, thematic and ethical affinities to storytelling that elevates the ordinary into a site of historical and philosophical significance.
Koreyoshi Kurahara’s raucous, disorienting and confounding 1964 film Black Sun challenges viewers’ efforts to find meaning. The film privileges our affective experience over our cognitive ability to make sense of what we see and hear. This article explores the dynamic surrounding meaning and affect in Black Sun through a close reading of three connected foci: jazz, Blackness and salvation. It concludes by linking our affective dislocation as a viewer with the fraught and often incommensurable nature of cross-cultural encounters.
By the late 1960s, India's economic aspirations seemed to be crumbling, indicating the decline of the Nehruvian utopia. This period marked a pivotal moment, influencing the emergence of a new social realist genre. In 1960, Shri B. V. Keskar, the information and broadcasting minister, purchased the property of Prabhat Studio and established the Film Institute in India, which later on became popular as the Film and Television Institute of India. From the beginning, the film institute was led by a group of experts. Eminent filmmakers and alumni of the Film Institute, student lives. By using memoirs, interviews, archival documents and government reports, this article envisages how the pedagogy of the Film Institute of India encouraged a group of young filmmakers to experiment with film theory and praxis, serving as a stepping stone towards a new cinema movement in the 1970s.
This article uses close textual and visual analysis to examine Pema Tseden’s film Tharlo (2015) as an adaptation from fiction to film, reading this transformation as a response to the burden of representation often placed on the renowned Tibetan filmmaker. Although Pema Tseden’s earlier works were praised for their realist portrayals of Tibetan life, he expressed frustration at being categorized primarily as an ethnic film director. Adapted from his own short story, Tharlo marks a shift towards a new cinematic language that opens his work to interpretations beyond realism. By comparing the short story and its film adaptation, this article analyses how specific creative choices expand the narrative scope, develop more complex supporting characters and engage real-world events. Through this process, the characters in Tharlo emerge not as emblems of collective struggle but as individuals shaped by contradictions and desires, gesturing towards the filmmaker’s right to tell stories on his own terms.
This article explores the association of fear and sexuality in the Buddhist figure of the dakini in two recent films by Bhutanese filmmakers, Dechen Roder’s Honeygiver among the Dogs (2016) and Khyentse Norbu’s Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache (2019). Both films consciously connect the Buddhist figure of the dakini, traditional depictions of which are characterized by overt sexuality, with that of the femme fatale. In doing so, they create a profound sense of ambiguity, with the ostensibly benevolent function of dakinis undercut by fear of seduction and sense of sexual threat. However, both films subvert the trope of the femme fatale and reassert the traditional esoteric but benign role of the dakini. Rather than fear being conquered through rationality, it is precisely fear of the irrational and the sexual that drives the radical personal change that is necessary, in the Buddhist world-view, to progress towards enlightenment.
Review of: Dark Fear, Eerie Cities: New Hindi Cinema in Neoliberal India , Sarunas Paunksnis (2019) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 194 pp., ISBN 978-0-19949-318-0, h/bk, USD 30
Four Moods (1970) is a collaborative four-part film directed by Bai Jingrui, King Hu, Li Hsing and Li Han-hsiang, portraying the blurred boundaries between human and inhuman, nature and supernature through distinct emotional ‘moods’, as reflected in its Chinese title: Bliss, Anger, Sadness and Happiness . This article focuses on Bai Jingrui’s Bliss , a reimagining of Pu Songling’s ‘Nie Xiaoqian’ from Strange Tales of Laiozhai . Employing a silent-film style devoid of dialogue or narration, Bai relies entirely on music and sound to tell the story of two contrasting female ghosts. This segment redefines ghost–human narratives by exposing paradoxes in binary oppositions and revealing how the marginalization of the ‘other’ constructs notions of normalcy. Oscillating between fear and fantasy, Bliss reflects dominant aesthetic and ideological conventions of its time. This article underscores Bai’s innovative use of sound to challenge vision-centric norms and disrupt the ocularcentric world-view embedded in western culture.
Review of: Philosophy of Fearism: A Primer , R. Michael Fisher (2022) Delhi: Xlibris, 105 pp., ISBN 978-166983-107-5, p/bk, USD 11.99
This conference report provides a survey of the recent 12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinema (ASEACC) at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. The conference coalesced around the theme ‘Sustainable Futures: Ecologies, Kinships and Communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas’. The report gives an overview of the content of the conference, detailing the activities, presentations, film screenings and discussions across the four-day event. It summarizes key arguments and conceptual framings from delegates’ presentations on contemporary scholarly and creative developments in how Southeast Asia is imagined/performed through cinema. The report outlines several insights from the conference about the way cinema from this region reckons with contemporary challenges such as the ongoing legacy of imperialism and capitalism’s extractive relationship to the environment. Finally, the report points to several areas of enquiry that emerged as promising sites for future research and potential new directions for the field.
Barbara Creed’s concept of the ‘monstrous feminine’ illustrates a natural ‘affinity’ between woman and monster within horror, recognizing both for the potential dangers they are seen to pose to patriarchal society. Although when writing, Creed was referring to western horror cinema, the same theories can be extended to Japanese films. Today, no Japanese horror film is considered complete without its haunting woman spectre, the female onryō or ‘vengeful ghost’ archetype, a trend which dates back from the time of Shindō Kaneto (1912–2012) to the latest film of the Ringu franchise released in 2022. Despite changes in Japanese sociocultural norms over time, the way these vengeful female characters are presented remains arguably consistent, positioning them as more ‘monsters’ and ‘freaks’ rather than women with whom the audience can sympathize. More significant is the trend of visually associating the female onryō with feminine physical traits or behaviour and transforming her into something grotesque. While she is typically depicted as ‘monstrous’ through physical disfigurement or distortion of her body or face, her hair is often shown to be what fully embodies her vengeful spirit. Not only is this association of ‘horror’ with hair distinctly feminine and rarely if ever attributed to similarly ‘monstrous’ male characters, but in recent Japanese horror films, the female onryō ’s hair is also seen disembodied, sometimes even moving of its own accord. Lacking the presence of an explicit female body, this hair of the female onryō can arguably be seen as belonging to any woman, thereby extending the association of horror to the Japanese woman herself.
In the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition protests, the independent filmmakers in Hong Kong have been continuously engaged in artistic filmmaking vis-à-vis the social milieu. By focusing on three independent short films, Night Is Young (Kwok Zune 2020), After the Riots, Before the Liberation (Chung Hong Iu 2020) and Stay If You Can/Go If You Must (Elysa Wendi 2019) as case studies, this article aims to examine how Hong Kong’s independent filmmakers employ cinematic elements to construct fear about social conflicts, state violence, trauma and authoritarianism. Crucially, these independent filmmakers have wisely deployed artistic and experimental cinematic strategies, while constructing the aesthetics of fear in Hong Kong’s independent cinema as a form of metaphorical response to the changing post-handover sociopolitical vicissitudes.
The cute aesthetics of the South Korean series The School Nurse Files indicate a shift in perceiving the essence and manifestation of fear. In Korean popular culture, schools often serve as sites for brutal narratives such as zombie apocalypse, violent bullying or serial murder. In The School Nurse Files , this landscape is utilized for a story resembling Pac-Man, a 1980 maze action video game with cute octopus-shaped ghosts and an invigorating music theme. The show is based on Serang Chung’s novel School Nurse Ahn Eun-young , telling the story of a bright female fear-fighter, destroying evil spirits with a glowing party sword available on AliExpress for less than $1, and her accomplice. Both characters are misfits, eager to confront the obscured source of suicidal thoughts. The series is filled with symptoms of fear, while the origin of students’ suffering remains invisible. As with most trauma-inducing mechanisms of neo-liberal regimes, in Kyoung-mi Lee’s series, evil operates through nurturing destructive desires and exhausting human vitality. To those who can detect it, evil appears in the shape of cute creatures that do not look dangerous enough to call forth immediate action. These adorable aesthetic elements stem from wasted lives. The article draws upon Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to explore the cute aesthetics of The School Nurse Files as a new way to talk about status fears proliferating in contemporary Korea.
The following article analyses three modern Korean films – Hope (2013), Forgotten (2017) and Night in Paradise (2020) – focusing on the ways fear is inextricably linked to familial relationships. It highlights that in these films, fear is often both provoked and soothed by one’s closest relatives, challenging the traditional notion of the Korean family as a safe, nurturing social unit. Instead, family is portrayed as a complex structure that can trigger deep emotional distress. A shared theme across the films is the fear of losing loved ones, particularly due to illness, which adds a layer of suspense and emotional realism. These fears are shown to influence the characters’ decisions and drive the narrative to unexpected and sometimes unsettling conclusions. The article argues that while family is meant to be a foundation of trust and security, in these stories, its breakdown becomes a source of existential fear and identity crisis for the protagonists.
Transhistorical fear is a concept related to historical memory and collective imaginaries that emerge from traumatic experiences in the past. From the emergence of the New Korean Cinema, the industry has attempted to portray narratives about Japanese colonization that focus on the fear of repression and the loss of freedom and Korean identity. Fear has translated into the dissolution of family boundaries through the fading of relations, while values such as freedom, equality and fraternity are questioned or evaporate in front of the colonial period memory. This has caused an accumulated fatigue among the Korean population, generation after generation, with the fear of the demise of humanism. This article analyses the representation of fear generated by ‘cold horror’ in Korean cinema, that is, a state that appeals to a distanced gaze to construct another memory of horror linked to historical memory and implicit in a traumatic national consciousness.
The year 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of the theatrical release of Silat Legenda in cinemas: it was the first animation feature film (in the Malay language) ever made in Malaysia when it was screened in 1998. With a production cost of about RM 5 million (approximately USD 1.2 million), the film was however a box-office flop and did not break even; one film review considered that its animators were ‘not up to mark yet’. In January 2024, the authors talked to Silat Legenda ’s director Hassan Muthalib about the film’s production: he reminisced and reflected on his experiences making this milestone film in Malaysian cinema history over a period of three years.
