Ghost Dog/CTHD/Asian Invasion

[A.M. Nornes]

Jacqui just sent the most interesting treatment of CTHD I've read so far!
I'll leave it below in case you missed it.

So does anyone have a sense for whether or not the same dynamic has occurred
in Japanese film, with yakuza mono, samurai, or whatever? What was the
response to Jarmisch's film? To Black Rain?

Markus


At 11:40 AM -0800 2/14/01, c. jacqui chen wrote:
> The crucifix of Hollywoodized epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
> must carry leaves me bemused. Hong Kong film aficionados
> and scholars deride its stylistic resemblances to Merchant-Ivory
> productions or Pier-1 decor (according to some first-time connoisseurs)
> as rendering a culturally pungent product more odorless for general
> American consumption. Martial arts or wuxia films, made in the frantic
> Hong Kong style, or better in the cannon of King Hu, speak strongly of
> a sense of ownership in aesthetic traditions and identities. Yet this idea of
>
> a cinematic and cultural authenticity has little tolerance for the
> growing hybridity we see in the array of films collectively called Chinese
> cinema, the one increasingly made by Pan-Asian/international collaborations
>and
> filmmakers like Ang Lee who are fashioned by multiple cultural centers and
> wear Chineseness proudly on their lapel.
>
> It's strange to me that Ang Lee's trilogy on the Chinese family
> (Pushing Hands, Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) do not have
> this issue of compromised authenticity as CTHD, when the trio employ
> styles and narrative conventions that are as much melodramatic comedies
> of manner as they deal with changing structures of the Chinese family
> (often laid out against "un-Chinese" phenomena as Diaspora, homosexuality or
> assertive women wearing the seductive scent of modernity.) Any way you look
> at them (as the crude gazes from East and West), the trilogy does not have
> an immediately recognizable difference that CTHD has. It's this difference,
> the shock of feeding something sacredly Chinese and Chinese cinema through
> a hybridized process (in both symbols and dollars) that gets the war room
> going. It does seem these conversations are converging on the good old
> us-them definitions.
>
> Dave Kehr's "Asian invasion" previously discussed here maintains the same
> body vs. technology/spiritual vs. material dichotomies when he tries to
> capture that different aura which sets Asian cinema apart. He cites
> CTHD and Jackie Chan as the body quotient in the cinema supreme (which
> professor Murphy helpfully explains as a nostalgia for the 70s
> melodramatic aesthetics that postmodern American ironists can no longer
> produce as well as ascendant economies in Asia.) As mentioned at the start of
> my rant, to Asian cinema fandom it is in fact that other technology quotient
> in CTHD that pronounces it a traitor, a westernized sellout, of the martial
>arts genre.
> So to each his own...
>
> Jacqui
>
>
> --- "d. freire" <drainer at mpinet.net> wrote:
> > But the direction and cinematography of  "crouching tiger..." is so
> > Hollywood... almost like an American attempt at a Hong Kong film.
> > Even whatever was coherent of the plot also seemed like a formulaic approach
> > to Hollywood success. The end, however, distinguishes itself, with the
> > deaths and the assumption of guilt... where the viewer does not leave with
> > such a happy ending (but perhaps it is supposed to illicit some sort of
> > supernatural belief that dreams come true?)
> >  It did have some token distinctions that all kung fu movies have... (for
> > example, where people in the theater laughed while characters flew, etc...)
> > Of course, the filmmaker cannot take time to explain all Chinese myths
> > before screening a picture.
> >  It wasn't bad, maybe if I watch it again I will like it more. But I do feel
> > slightly disappointed... a similar story to Hong Kong movies, in parts; but
> > a production straight out of California.
> >
> >
> > -d.freire
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Jasper Sharp" <j.sharp at publitec.vnu.com>
> > To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 4:10 AM
> > Subject: RE: ghost dog
> >
> >
> > > I have not seen it, but I have heard on the grapevine that it lifts a
> > > sequence from
> > > Seijun SUZUKI's BRANDED TO KILL - the assination attempt foiled by
> > > butterfly.
> > > As for American genre bending, I think the success of CROUCHING TIGER,
> > > HIDDEN DRAGON
> > > all over the world shows that there are an awful lot of people getting
> > sick
> > > and tired
> > > of the same old Hollywood product being churned out year after year.
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>
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