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[Sylvia Chong]

>Second, next semester (at Gallatin School-New York University)  I will be
>teaching for the first time a course called Beyond Good and Evil: Gangsters,
>Violence and the Urban Landscape. Itís an undergraduate class  -
>[interdisciplinary/intercultural] that introduces the Hong Kong gangster film
>phenomenon and tracks the aftermath, so to speak, (Iím trying to avoid the
>simplistic notion of ìinfluenceî - especially thinking about the recent post
>in which it was reported that John Woo spoke of being inspired by a Japanese
>60s film.....)  in Japanese and American gangster films, while asking
>questions about relative ethics, porous boundaries between good and evil,
>urban anomie and alienation, etc. Representative filmmakers of Hong Kong and
>Japan that Iím thinking of include: John Woo, Wang Kar-Wai, Suzuki Seijun,
>Kitano Takeshi. (Films must be available with English subtitles, obviously.)
>My question is: does anybody know of good, thought provoking essays on these
>Asian filmmaker/this ìgenreî in English suitable for undergraduate readings?

Due to a hard-drive crash, the last two months of KineJapan e-mails have
disappeared. Did anyone find an answer to the title of the Japanese film
that John Woo spoke of?

I would be really interested to see the suggested readings for this class
posted to the list. I'm doing research on a tangentially related topic (the
use of blood and explicit violence in action films as a "pornography of
violence"), and have found that, at least regarding violence, most of the
film theory seems to focus on blood in horror films, not action films. I do
recall seeing some essays about the connection between martial arts films
and urban ghetto films (Bruce Lee becoming a "ghetto myth" which then gets
taken up by African-American pop culture), and I wonder if there might be a
circular route between Chinese martial arts films to African-American
"blaxploitation" films to the modern HK gangster film. There definitely
seemed to be a dialogue going on between Chinese martial arts films and
Japanese samurai films in the 60s and 70s where each upped the ante in
terms of violence portrayed (you see the One-Armed Swordsman in China
getting his arm cut off, and then the Kozure Okami series showing bloody
stumps as well). Just a conjecture ...

Sylvia

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Sylvia Chong
Department of Rhetoric
University of California, Berkeley
7408 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2670
schong at hooked.net