How The West Was Won: New Perspectives on Transnational East Asian Cinema

Edited by Leon Hunt and Wing-Fai Leung

With the success of Hero, Ringu (and its Hollywood remake), Oldboy and Ong-Bak in the west, contemporary East Asian cinema has transcended geographical, cultural and theoretical boundaries. The articles in this collection will examine films from the Far East and their transnational consumption as an ever changing process, presenting new perspectives that contest existing frameworks in film studies.

The collection will explore development in the transnationalisation of East Asian cinema, with particular emphasis on crossovers, remakes, hybrids and co-productions. How The West Was Won considers Chinese martial arts blockbusters, Japanese horror, and the emergence of 'new' cinemas from Korea and Thailand. The mainstreaming of these films in the west is counteracted by their continuous status as arthouse, independent, cult and even 'extreme' cinema. Equally, popular cinema is no longer the site of contestation, but rather the cross-fertilisation between art and commerce, between simulacrum and the real, between 'dominant' and 'peripheral'.

Notions of originality give way to mutual appropriation, in interregional, transnational and international productions, while the imagining of film-makers as global producers questions narrowly defined national values. At the same time, the universalising and homogenising tendencies of contemporary cinematic experience are marked by the increasingly localised (and domesticated) practices of film consumption.

East Asian cinema therefore challenges existing conceptions in film studies such as textuality, authorship, Hollywood domination, third cinema and national allegory. Approaches to understanding contemporary film-making need to be re-assessed, re-imagined and (literally) re-mapped.

Proposals of not more than 500 words should be sent to leon.hunt_at_brunel.ac.uk and 127830_at_soas.ac.uk.

Deadline March 14th 2005.

Please note that we already have the majority of papers for this collection, and are seeking a small number of abstracts to complete it, thus the tight deadline.

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Received on Sun Feb 27 2005 - 11:59:01 EST