It is more than ever before that Asian cinema along with others cinema beyond the Hollywood and mainstream English language cinema have been given so much attention around the world and gradually have become the main engine of the new phase of the cinema where our perception of cinema and the world have been challenged beyond imagination. Not only from the economic and social development but also the increase interest in film cultures and its promotion machines of film festivals that led to the searching for the alternate cinemas both in styles and contexts to accommodate from the wide ranging of mass to the niche markets that comes with the progress of capitalism and globalisation. Asian cinema, 1990s in particular, has come into the fore with the worldwide success of East Asian directors such those from Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers (particularly Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige), Wong Kar Wai and Stanley Kwan from Hong Kong, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao Hsien, and Tsai Ming Liang from Taiwan as well as from many Japanese directors. Beyond any social and political borders the films from these directors have in common in a way they have helped shaping up and opened up an opportunity for a new kind of cinema that allows the direct response to the rapid changes that swiftly blurring the dividing lines between East/West and tradition/modern to different locales in Asia including Thailand and South Korea that become the latest addition in the world cinema circuit. Though they were several specific events in each country that marked different conditions to these films they are similar in many ways whether in theme or style and more specifically how they focus and redefine our perceptions of space and time in which also become a main obsession in our postmodern era.
In this selection of films that I gather for the project feature a particular kind of space as well as time that it is no longer possible to perceive them in a chronological and sensible way that we have long understood. Whether the depiction of neglected half construction building, the abandon block of flat, the unidentified forest, or the space of whole city have locked into its own time and space where past, present and future simultaneously projected into one, where the historical past fusing with the progression into the new era, and where all kind of desires can be met. It is a space of both real and imagined, of one particular place and also could be found anywhere. It is a void, a re-imagine space and time that acts as a destabilising force towards the boundaries that often separated East/West, heterosexual/homosexual, global/local, past/present, etc. and makes it possible for us to rethink and questioning several ways of being in Asia as well as in the world at the turn of the century. In many ways, to understand these depictions of space and time, we, then, will find an alternative way of approaching the cinematic spatial representation which may resemblance to the third space, other space, or lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd (sometimes close-sometimes open) space in such a way that they attempt to blurring the boundaries of any binary oppositions.
Objective :
This project will hope to introduce Asian cinema with its specific locations as a starting point to discuss the subject beyond its geographical and demographical restrictions. By using space and time, a unique depiction of both among this selection of films, as a main point of discussion one can see a rather different perspective that allows us to extend our understanding towards a new kind of cinema as well as to realise the need for the new perception towards the space and time in order to understand the new territories that often form and reform in our contemporary living that this project hopes to open to public discussion.
Film Forum :
There will be six screening of films from the countries such as Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea spread over three days or over the weekend. The attendant of film directors will help to further discuss the subject.
The Seminars :
There is also a seminar alongside the screening:
"Re-thinking cinematic's space and time: how these unique depiction of space and time can be relating to the questions of postmodernity and postcolonialism that surrounds the topic of cinema, Asian cinema in particular, and Asian society as a whole.
The topic will be divided into different parts.
Archive :
There will be an internet-archive as well as the post-script provide for further discussion.
Places and Time :
(To be confirmed)
There were several specific events to mark a dramatic turn of each country and Asian as a whole in the struggling of coming to term with the rapid changes of the society that both eclectic and simultaneous whether from tradition to modern, from modern to postmodern, from agriculture to industrial, from the past to the present and onto the future, and etc. such as the events of Hong Kong returning to mainland China, the collapsing of economics in many countries which post several questions towards the capitalism, globalisation, and modernisation across the region in similar manners.
One may recall the cinema of such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard that also depict time and space in such a unique way. However they are often associated with modernism as well as its transition from modernity to post-modernity in the West while the films I have chosen here may signal the similar process of transition from modernity to post-modernity in the East and possibly the rest of the world yet in a rather different of context of full blown transnationalism and capitalism. The different between the two needs much more space to discuss beyond this project. For further discussion can also be read in Fredric Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).