Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-cultural Encounters in East Asian Film (World Cinema)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Manchester.Films are produced, reviewed and watched worldwide, often circulating between cultural contexts. The book explores cosmopolitanism and its debates through the lens of East Asian cinemas from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Singapore, throwing doubt on the validity of national cinemas or definitive cultural boundaries. Case studies illuminate the ambiguously gendered star persona of Taiwanese-Hong Kong actress Brigitte Lin, the fictional realism of director Jia Zhangke, the arcane process of selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar and the intimate connection between cinema and identity in Hirokazu Koreeda s Afterlife (1998). Considering films, their audiences and tastemaking institutions, the book argues that cosmopolitan cinema does not smooth over difference, but rather puts it on display.' Cover 1 Half-title 3 Endorsements 4 Series information 5 Title page 7 Copyright information 8 Table of contents 9 List of illustrations 10 Foreword 11 Acknowledgements 18 Introduction: Cosmopolitanism and the cinema 21 1 The cosmopolitan challenge of multilingual cinema 38 Multilingual Chineseness in Hong Kong cinema 46 Dubbing and subtitling in Japanese animation 58 Must cosmopolitanism speak? 67 Concluding remarks 72 2 Cosmopolitan memory and self-reflexive cinema 75 Self-reflexive memory and witness 78 Self-reflexive memory and performance 88 Self-reflexivity and (animated) form 97 Concluding remarks 111 3 Film festivals and cosmopolitan affect 112 Filmic encounters 120 Spatial encounters 123 Cultural literacy and cosmopolitan affect 131 ‘What a wonderful film!’ 133 ‘How can you show a film like this?!’ 135 ‘That film, very good!’ 135 Concluding remarks 137 4 Embodiment as (cosmopolitan) encounter 139 Gallery bodies and films 140 Embodiment and encounter 143 Cosmopolitan geographies 149 The cosmopolitan body 156 Postscript: Critical cosmopolitanism and comparative cinema 161 Notes 168 Foreword 168 Introduction: Cosmopolitanism and the cinema 169 1 The cosmopolitan challenge of multilingual cinema 172 2 Cosmopolitan memory and self-reflexive cinema 178 3 Film festivals and cosmopolitan affect 183 4 Embodiment as (cosmopolitan) encounter 190 Postscript: Critical cosmopolitanism and comparative cinema 193 Bibliography 195 Filmography 210 Index 213