JOURNAL ENTRY: WEEK 2

For the continuation of the second week we looked at the Western film genre. In the reading for this week it was really interesting to see where the how Asian cinema emerged with Westernisation. It was said that international films played a huge role in constructing the category of Asian cinema. One point that was raised that is key to this category of cinema, is that in order of Asian cinema to establish itself to be viable of film history “it must involve more than a tracing of the globalisation or westernisation of Asia cinema”. This shows that in order for it to be recognised it needs to have its on sort of ‘tail of Western cinema and as they reading says- a sort of ‘Asianisation”.

This reading also raised points that were seen in the film ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’ directed by Takashi Miike in 2007. For example, in Western film genre it is known that the male protagonists don’t say much showing they remain control and mystery over the other characters. We see this evidently by the gun slider in this film as he represents this tradition ‘silent’ hero. What I really liked about this film as it was very clear to see the difference between the two clans (one being red and one being white) this easily showed there was a battle between them as red is a symbolic colour of anger.

An issue that can be seen in this film that this Asian cinema film has undertaken is the discrimination of women/ sexualisation of them. This is interesting to see, because I know that in other genres such as horror and action/adventure women are undermined but never had I thought a Western genre film would also follow this trend of women. This is something interesting I would like to further look into maybe for my genre sketch as it was an issue raised in the earlier years of genre films such as the ones listed above.

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