Content area
Full text
East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film edited by Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai. I. B. Tauris 2008. $89.00, hardcover; $31.00 paper. 272 pages
reviewed by Shujen Wang
Of die many recent publications on Asian cinemas, this volume stands out and fills an important void in transnational cinema studies. Many of the Other books center on nations, genres, or trends, and even those diat have globalization as a focus are nonetheless nation-based. With an emphasis on die mutating and die fluid, die editors position this volume in the ever-changing landscape of transnational film production and distribution. The concept of "mutating currencies of transnationality" as expressed in the remake, the arthouse film, the cult/genre/auteur film, and the blockbuster) in transnational cinemas is a particularly useful one that speaks to bodi the recent phenomenon of die Asianizatìon of Western films and the globalization of Asian films.1
The editors frame one of the central questions - what is translatable? - Lby organizing die chapters around four sections that cover history, industry, crossover texts, and the Asianization of Western texts. Are there texts, for example, that are more "global" or translatable in nature and therefore more suitable for remakes? David Desser seems to think so in his chapter comparing Seven Samurai Shichinin no samurai; Akira Kurosawa, 1954) with several notable rerhakes, both Japanese and otherwise (including an Indian remake). He argues that Seven Samurai was removed of cultural and historical specificities so diat it was a text easily adaptable to other locales, historical moments, and even to outer space in the case of Samurai 7 (Toshifumi Takizäwa, 2004), a sci-fi anime reimagination of the original.
Chapters from sections three and four in one way or another touch on the same question of translation and cross-cultural remakes. In "Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood," Gary Xu examines...