Horror articles in the new Jump Cut

[Mark Nornes]

The new issue of Jump Cut (now an online journal) has several articles  
dealing with Japanese and East Asian cinema.

http://www.ejumpcut.org

Dread of mothering:
plumbing the depths of
Dark Water

by Nina K. Martin

Hideo Nakata?s 2002 Japanese horror film Dark Water continues a theme  
formulated in his previous film Ringu (1998), in which the struggles  
of single working mothers ? the heroines of both films ? are visually  
expressed through the walls and spaces these broken families inhabit.  
In each film, a child haunts the heroine, a ghost born of both  
violence and neglect, and the only healing force seems to be a  
mother?s love. However, the psyches of these heroines are waging a  
violent battle within their home environments as these kaiden, or  
vengeful child specters, throw into horrifying perspective the demands  
that traditional ideals of mothering enact on these besieged women.



Sentimentality and the
cinema of the extreme

by Jinhee Choi

If cinematic sentimentality, as I hope to argue, can be characterized  
as a mode in which a dualistic moral system motivates character  
actions toward the extreme, then sentimentality has also been  
associated with another genre, not usually seen as melodrama but  
rather as horror, in particular, the so-called cinema of the extreme.  
This subgenre includes such films as Audition (Miike Takashi, 1999)  
and Oldboy (Park Chan-Wook, 2003), which involve graphic violence,  
extensive gore, and overt stylization.

Art of branding:
Tartan "Asia Extreme" films

by Chi-Yun Shin


Indeed, it is commendable that Tartan Asia Extreme has carved a viable  
East Asian film niche, at the same time establishing its name in the  
industry where distribution labels do not normally make much impact in  
the market place.  Questions, however, are raised as to the reductive  
nature of Tartan?s marketing practices, which repackages the films ?as  
exotic and dangerous cinematic thrills.?[7]  In addition, the output  
of the label, and indeed the name of the label itself, invoke and in  
part rely on the western audiences? perception of the East as weird  
and wonderful, sublime and grotesque.  At the same time, the ways in  
which Tartan registers and navigates the vagaries of distinct national  
cultures and different genres gathered under the Asia Extreme banner  
provide a fascinating site to explore how the West consumes East Asian  
cinema.


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