East Asian Film Noir: Transantional Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue

Film noir has been understood as a genre exclusive to Hollywood. But classical US noir’s downbeat sensibility also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and China (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan, that have both participated in and been excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic, past and present. East Asian Film Noir is the first book to explore these films and the filmmakers who made them. Looking at a range of examples from the 1950s to the present – including The Crimson Kimono, Brother, Ghost in the Shell, Nowhere to Hide, Duelist- and Rebels of the Neon God – this work conceptualizes and articulates an internationally situated ‘East Asian film noir’. In doing so, it raises fascinating questions around the politics of representation, authorial activity, genre and local and cross-cultural reception. Film noir has been understood as a genre exclusive to Hollywood. But classical US noir's downbeat sensibility also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and greater China (including Hong Kong) and Taiwan that have both participated in and been excluded from circuits of global-noir traffic, past and present. Noir is a form of generic expression, an international filmic sensibility and a discourse loosely joining innumerable texts and a range of production and reception phenomena. However defined and categorized, the genre offers a compelling frame through which to view individual works, looming political and cultural contexts, film industry and reception activity, and wider circuits and frictions of global screen-media flow. This anthology looks at a range of East Asian films from the 1950s to the present including The Crimson Kimono, Brother, Ghost in the Shell, Nowhere to Hide, Duelist and Rebels of the Neon Go d - that have been explicitly framed as film noir or East Asian noir, or that acquire legibility as noir texts through reception discourse and other critical activity. Contributors look at historical and contemporary cases to understand the terms on which national, regional and transnational cinemas conceive artistic expression. Their conceptualization and articulation of an internationally situated 'East Asian film noir' helps raise questions around the politics of representation, authorial activity, generic and modal positioning and local and cross-cultural reception. Introduction. A very rough guide to East Asian film noir / Mark Gallagher Japan: from post-World War II crime and drama to anime dystopias. Out of the past : film noir, whiteness and the end of the monochrome era in Japanese cinema / Daisuke Miyao ; Kurosawa's noir quartet : cinematic musings on how to be a tough man / Dolores Martinez ; The Japanese Los Angeles of The crimson kimono and Brother / Suzanne Arakawa ; Ghost in the shell : the noir instinct / Dan North South Korea: from postwar modernity to crime and detection on a global stage. Allegorizing noir : violence, body and space in the postwar Korean film noir / Hyun S. Park ; The true colours of the 'action kid' : Seung-wan Ryoo's urban film noir / Kyu Hyun Kim ; A mess of contradictions? : Korean noir in Myung-se Lee's Nowhere to hide and Duelist / Daniel Martin Three Chinas (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan), many noirs. From urban crime thriller to silent ghost story : Rebels of the neon god and Taiwanese neo-noir / Erin Yu-Tien Huang ; Film noir, Hong Kong cinema and the limits of critical transplant / Andy Willis ; Life is cheap : Chinese neo-noir and the aesthetics of disenchantment / Philippa Lovatt ; Tony Leung's noir thrillers and trnsnational stardom / Mark Gallagher ; Double indentity : the stardom of Xun Zhou and the figure of the femme fatale / Chi-Yun Shin. Film noir is often known as a Hollywood genre. But the downbeat sensibility of classic American noir also finds expression in later films from Japan, South Korea and greater China (including Hong Kong) that both participate in and are excluded from circuits of global noir traffic, past and present. This book explores these films and the firmmakers who make them. Looking at a range of examples from the 1950s to the present, it conceptualizes and articulates an internationally situated 'East Asian film noir'. In doing so, it offers fascinating insights into the terms on which national, regional and transnational cinemas conceive artistic expression.