The field of film studies worldwide has responded to globalization by shifting from the national cinema research model to transnational cinema and world cinema models. The chapters in this section address the impact of the era of globalization on film in the East Asian region. Yet, as each of them shows in different ways, the national continues to intersect with the transnational in shaping cinema production patterns and the kinds of films that are made. Not least, one of the defining features of the cultural nation—language—continues to combine with other elements of shared culture to shape patterns of film production and consumption in the region. Therefore, the section is composed of chapters addressing the cinema cultures that remain the three largest in the region: the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese cinemas.
Of the three, it is Chinese-language cinema that has undergone the largest reconfiguration of its production circumstances in recent years. Therefore, Chris Berry’s section focuses on political economy. It traces the emergence of “Chollywood,” the Chinese commercial cinema industry centered on Beijing, but which draws in filmmakers from, and proliferates coproductions across, the Chinese-speaking world, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Berry highlights the distinctive characteristics of Chollywood by placing it in a lineage of transborder configurations of Chinese-language cinema, and argues that the flexible and transnational production circumstances encouraging agile coproduction across borders today characterizes Chollywood as a contingent assemblage rather than a fixed system.
Compared to the Chinese-language cinema, the Korean and Japanese production industries have remained based in Seoul and Tokyo respectively, with their primary audiences in each country. In these circumstances, Soyoung Kim and Aaron Gerow in their sections focus primarily on the types of films that are being made and the themes and formal patterns generated in an era characterized by acute awareness of the transnational. Kim argues that for Korean cinema, the result has been expansive, but in complicated ways, whereas Gerow traces a more reactive and paradoxical reinforcement of national particularity through transnational awareness in the case of Japan.
Kim teases out a complexity in the expansive consciousness that characterizes Korean cinema today. It does include the ambition and reach of Korean blockbuster culture and the Korean Wave (Hallyu) that has swept across East Asia and beyond. But Kim emphasizes that it also includes a new awareness of the legacies of empire, colonization, and the Cold War that shape a haunted “phantom cinema.” This “spectral canon,” as Kim calls it, extends beyond North–South divisions to encompass the ethnic Koreans in northeast China and further afield, as well as the new populations of migrants within South Korea.
Gerow also shows how contemporary Japanese cinema has struck out in new directions in the era of globalization, acknowledging and celebrating zainichi ethnic Korean culture and filmmaking as well as Okinawan cinema and identity, and also engaging in numerous coproductions. However, he argues that a persistent pattern from the past continues to animate many of these and other films. The sense of what Gerow refers to as “inescapable Japan” can indicate not just the reinforcement of a sense of Japaneseness in the encounter with difference, but also at times a struggle against nationalism’s ability to survive globalism and the inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism.
Taken together, the chapters composing the section demonstrate that globalized production and consumption have combined with transnational culture to transform cinema production and the films being made in the East Asian region. But, at the same time, it also demonstrates that the transformation itself continues to be shaped by national cultures, nation-states, national histories, and more.