Critical methodologies evolve, a more recent group of assumptions replacing an older. At present Western approaches to Eastern cinema are newly crowded with postcolonial stances, the problems of perceiving the "other," the perils of Orientalism, the clutter of genre studies, and much more. One way out is to machete your way through. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, a U.S.-resident Japanese film scholar, has honed a two-way critical tool that divides foreign critics of Asian cinema into two groups.
The first is the area-study specialist who knows the culture and the language, who favors conventional linear narrative and historical chronology, and is, in effect, empirical. The second is the theorist who practices detachment from the object of study, and whose importance is the result of his or her unfamiliarity with the native discourse. By thus radically de-contextualizing Asian "national" cinema, they displace it from its marginal status to the forefront of contemporary film scholarship.
The real division in Western scholarship on Asian film is thus, as perceived by Yoshimoto, not created by any West/East dichotomy but by the opposition between history and theory. A problem, however, is that the two approaches get along with each other quite well. Yoshimoto finds this suspicious.
"We need to re-examine how the differentiation of empirical history from abstract theory creates an illusion that different critical approaches could democratically coexist side by side." This is because "what is at stake is not a specific problem debated in the field of . . . film studies but the question of how [it] is constructed as an academic sub-discipline." And what holds for Japanese studies, the subject of his paper, ought hold for all Western study of Asian cinema.
The question then is academic in the precise meaning of the word. And, since the two volumes being here reviewed are written by and for academics, we have the cutting edge of what turns out to be a rather long-lasting academic opposition.
Most of the contributors are naturally on the apparently progressive side. In "Asian Cinemas," Yoshimoto's essay (reprinted, as are most of those included, from other sources) is titled "The Difficulty of Being Radical," and reflects, it would seem, an academic aspiration.
Country by country, many of Asia's cinemas are examined in this theoretical light, with a section on Bruce Lee as an iconographic but troubled figure -- included not because of his personal problems but because of the difficulties he represents for the academics involved. (Two papers, in the same spirit, are given over to the academic threats represented by Godzilla.)
There is other ample interest in these collected fugitive papers but perhaps their greatest use lies in their demonstration of the importance now given to critical theory in the study of cinema.
Less critical concern is seen in the Ciecko collection. This too is a gathering of papers (here published, apparently, for the first time) but the concern is almost entirely reserved for an Asian cinema "in a changing world," at the blurb puts it. Thus any historical context is taken for granted and we are instead given the latest manifestations.
The papers are about genre, about major industry figures, about co-productions, about commercial interests and cultural policies. Here too there is much of academic interest with a heavy emphasis on the economics of the film industry.
Genre is a leading topic in this collection and how genre fares at the box-office is a concern. We learn about Korean "block-busters," about the new Chinese "entertainment film," and how Taiwan's popular market-appeal dropped off. Darrell Davis, a serious film scholar, titles his paper "Japan: Cause for (Cautious) Optimism" and warns that the perhaps rosy future is almost entirely economical. Quite properly so given the editorial limitations of this collection, but such Variety-like emphasis on "boffo box office" in most of the papers included indicates a corresponding lack of critical concern.
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