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Reading Journal in Asian Film Culture: " Borderless Feature"

Borderless Feature
(November 4, 2016)

In the recent decades, the appeal of East Asian Cinema created a lasting mark in the global stage with Hollywood remakes of popular regional titles, such as The Ring (2002). Additionally, as Lim has explained in his paper, Hollywood’s appetite for the exoticness of East Asian flavoured cinema created an avenue for inviting homegrown directors to go into Hollywood and remake their own films, such as Hideo Nakata for The Ring 2 (2005), as well as make a name for themselves such as John Woo (16). Other forms of breaking the boundary of regional cinema has been through the inculcation of a multilingual film. Unlike in most Hollywood films where the primary language is English, varying only in accent or regional dialects and jargons, the asian cinema is bound to have a convergence of multiple languages due to its diverse regional activities and ties with each country. The diasporic nature of people, tradition and trade throughout history has allowed for an enrichment of culture within these countries and it would be difficult to completely isolate a theme with a purist cognition without having to overlap or refer to something that was imported. This creates a multifaceted nature for asian films which is not easily noticed in others.

In terms of expanding the notion of a borderless cinema, we can take into account Japan’s persistent otherness that mystifies the West. As Needham explains the surge of popularity of Japanese goods and cultural products in the West, he cites Koichi Iwabuchi’s erasure of race and ethnicity (mukokuseki) that is applied in the marketing value of these products, allowing them versatility and universal acceptance and production (10).

In conclusion, universality of technology has allowed for a boundless connectivity that has started decades ago, making it easier and more accessible in present time. This, coupled with Hollywood’s tendency to grab hold of the “next big thing” and the West’s fixation of the otherness and exotic nature of asian culture, there are likely to be more ways to transgress boundary in cinema, and blurring the line between origin and product. One recent good example is the Japanese game franchise Final Fantasy that has been recently made into a movie “Kingsglaive” (2016) which was spearheaded by Sony Entertainment US, casting all Western Actors. Surprisingly, when the movie was released in Japan, it had to be dubbed in Japanese, even if the franchise was originally Japanese.

Words: 399

Works Cited
1. Lim, Song Hwee. “Transnational Trajectories in Contemporary East Asian Cinemas”, in East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations, edited by Vivian P. Y. Lee, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011, pp15-32

2. Needham, Gary. “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism”, in Asian Cinemas: A Reader And Guide, edited by Dimitris Eleftheriotis & Gary Needham, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006, p.8—16

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