Funnily enough, the first time I saw Snowpiercer was on a US Blu-ray that I bought from amazon.com, either too impatient to wait for its Australian release (in retrospect, the wait time between the two is somehow shorter than I remembered) or too taken up by the idea that it could be imported that I didn’t stop to think that, including shipping, it would come to the same price. Of course, this purchase further complicates the multicultural, transnational production that Snowpiercer is.

With its source material French; the body of its crew South Korean; primary shooting taking place in the Czech Republic; its special effects produced by a German-formed company; and a cast ranging from the most American of Americans, to a handful of South Korean talents, to big and bold British stars, Snowpiercer is a puzzle box of cultural diversity. Where one national influence ends and another starts is surely near impossible to distinguish, a hailstorm of ethnicities culminating in a damn fine global blockbuster.

Brandon Taylor writes in “The Ideological Train to Globalization” that “Snowpiercer is utterly saturated with the cultural residue of American cinema”, and argues that Bong uses these American blockbuster tropes to subvert, rather than emulate, the filmic language of Hollywood in the creation of a “transnational film vocabulary” (2016). The film is, in turn, a hybrid of Korean and American styles; neither one nor the other, but operating somewhere in a “transnational discourse” that makes it “culturally illegible” to both Korean and American audiences (2016); an open identity.

Typically, transnational film productions are achieved for reasons mostly capital, taking advantage of a lucrative element and sending it widespread. As with the first Hong Kong/US co-production, Robert Clouse’s Enter The Dragon (1973) exploited America’s newfound fascination with kung-fu, the fluent body of Bruce Lee. This would continue with the erratic work of (our beloved) John Woo being accepted and ultimately replicated in the Hollywood mainstream.

Snowpiercer of course differs from these kinds of productions—the US not the dominant force in capitalising on the film’s many profitable elements. Ironically, a creative conflict between Bong and Harvey Weinstein (curse his name) unfolded, resulting in a botched release that saw the distribution rights for the film eventually handled to Radius-TWC, a division of The Weinstein Company that specialise in niche and independent films. Under their control, Snowpiercer received the wide release that it deserved, surely a welcome addition to the pockets of the TWC higher-ups.

The film’s fluidity—its cultural illegibility—then relies on the conventions of the American blockbuster to “apprehend and signify meaning” for transnational audiences (2016). Its structure, character archetypes, pacing, plotting and all the rest rely on the conventions of the dominant mode of blockbuster that have continued to permeate the world for years on end. Where it gets interesting is explored towards the end of Taylor’s paper; has the American blockbuster “manifested its own demise by creating a shared filmic language that is transferable to a global discourse”? Or does it have another trick up its sleeve?

References

Taylor, Brandon. (2016) The Ideological Train to Globalization: Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Snowpiercer. Cineaction; 2016; 98; ProQuest

If you’ve been to the cinemas lately, scrolled through the Action catalogue on Netflix looking for a guilty pleasure, or seen that video of Keanu Reeves in gun training for John Wick 2, you’ve more than likely been exposed to some form of Hong Kong action cinema; either in its purest form (Jackie Chan has been very prevalent in Netflix’s recent additions), or through some form of cultural transposition (Kill Bill, Kingsman and its ilk). Though originally popular through its roots in the kung-fu films of the 70s, Hong Kong action cinema has prevailed in the Hollywood system via its influential triad films: a modern reworking of the punches and kicks thrown by Bruce Lee into a hail of gunfire discharged by Chow Yun-fat, often dubbed “gun-fu”. These Hong Kong crime films—typically investing themselves in the lives of triads—were popularised in the 80s by John Woo and his breakout film, A Better Tomorrow, which paved the way for a long line of highly stylised, crime-centric action films. That Woo and Yun-fat would later move into Hollywood cinema (Woo successfully with Hard Target in 1993, Yun-fat less successfully with The Replacement Killers in 1998), the idea that the choreography and stylisation that made Hong Kong’s action cinema so popular would later be transposed comes as no surprise.

The dynamic between good and evil—manifesting in the dichotomy between the police and the triads—that Woo’s Hong Kong work had become renowned for would find its epitome in his 1997 Hollywood feature, Face/Off. The bodies that usually danced between the light and the dark would become literal in their swapping of identity (Travolta as Cage, Cage as Travolta), and this Hollywoodised take on embodying the split dynamic that popularised Woo’s work would prove influential back at home with Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs in 2002.

The notion of high-concept that the plot of Woo’s Face/Off functions as finds itself prevalent in Infernal Affairs‘ narrative. Two guys: one a cop, one a triad; both working undercover in the environment of the other—surely the perfect elevator pitch. It’s no wonder then that Brad Pitt’s production company picked up the rights in January of 2002 for a Western interpretation of the source material. Scorsese’s The Departed acts a glowing example of the increasingly globalised notion of cinema, where influences are traded mutually, making the distinction between national cinemas only harder and harder to distinguish. Keanu Reeves practically owes his career to John Woo, and the two have never worked together—who would’ve thought?

With Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), we find a director drawn to the successes of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Where Lee’s film was a commercial and critical success in the West, Yimou sought to replicate this, diverging from his arthouse modus operandi after observing the need to make a popular film that could not only “compete against the Hollywood product” (given China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and the relaxation of restrictions on imported foreign films), but “earn the respect of government authorities” in the process of legitimising the arthouse film industry in the future (Levitin, 2006). However, where Yimou goes wrong—according to Jacqueline Levitin in “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of the Flying Daggers: Interpreting Gender Thematics in the Contemporary Swordplay Film — A View From the West”—is in his misreading of the reasons that made Lee’s film such a hit: its embrace of “all aspects of women’s contradictory lives” in ancient China, namely through Zhang Ziyi’s Jiao, whose tale is ultimately the most tragic. Where the narrative of Crouching saw its female characters (Jiao Long, Jade Fox, Yu Shu Lien) fighting against, or used as an examination of, the patriarchal boundaries of their time, the women in Yimou’s blockbuster films no longer strive to break out of or confront some oppression “in a struggle against injustice” as in his previous, female-focused films (Levitin, 2006). Hero, then, is more concerned with replicating the fantastical elements of wuxia films popularised in the West by Lee’s film, or in Yimou’s continued exploration of father figures than his exploration of the tragic lives of women in China’s then-feudal, patriarchal society (Xihe, 2004)—thus deeming the film “firmly in the camp of patriarchy” (Levitin, 2006), a departure from the director’s previous, culturally critical works.

Comparatively, Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006) offers a continued exploration of women in contemporary Iran. Panahi, working under the influence of another, arguably more successful director Abbas Kiarostami—much like how Yimou drew inspiration from the popularity of Lee—creates a cinema that is devout in its examination and scrutiny of the boundaries constructed by Iran’s social and political structures. Offside, perhaps more apt in its comparisons to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than Hero, places women at the centre and examines the structures that keep them disadvantaged. Panahi emphasises this through the claustrophobic use of his camera, the frame as a literal and metaphorical container for the central female characters and their limited perspective (Danks, 2007). Moments of cinematic freedom are restricted to short bursts as the camera is often fixed to one location, be it the cage that the women are forced to reside in for the majority of the narrative, or the buses that take these characters to and ultimately from the stadium. Through this framing we are given a sense of the frustration these women feel; neither we, nor them, with the exception of a few small moments of freedom—which even then are presented only when the camera follows a male character—get to see the field in which the entire film is based around. Our understanding of the game is limited to sound; the sonic elements of the cheering crowd, or the commentary by one of the guards. Panahi’s utilisation of these fundamentally cinematic aspects gives us minor insight into a fraction of the larger injustices that women continue to face day-to-day in contemporary Iran, and beyond. Where Crouching ultimately proves tragic for its female characters, still trapped within the confides of their society, Offside, in its powerful final moments, gives its characters a moment of pure liberation: a national celebration of soccer that—if only for a brief moment—tears down the country’s rigid boundaries and replaces them with something less tangible; a sliver of optimism gliding through the crowd.

References:

Chen Xihe. ” On the Father Figures in Zhang Yimou’s Films: From Red Sorghum to Hero” Asian Cinema. Vol. 15, No 2 (Fall/ Winter 2004) pp. 133-140

Additional Reading: Jacqueline Levitin. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers: Interpreting Gender Thematics in the Contemporary Swordplay Film.” Asian Cinema 17.1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 166-82

Adrian Danks. “The Rules of the Game: Jafar Panahi’s Offside.” Directors Suite: Jafar Panahi – Offside [4,000 word DVD booklet]. Melbourne: Madman Entertainment, 2007.

As objects of transnational cinema, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) operate somewhere separately in this realm, though often overlap. Their influences from the West are clear, but the differences in their reception serves to different them. At a glance, the two films may seem to be similar — they both feature sword-wielding heroes who battle a great evil in a historical setting (that has been transformed and mythologised through its modern sensibilities), and who display a physical prowess that was foreign to their respective Western audiences — but a simplification of their similarities would serve to discredit their idiosyncratic productions and receptions both at ‘home and in the West.

Both films were received exceptionally well in the West, though Crouching was subject to its fair share of criticism. Despite both films drawing heavily on Western influence, Lee’s film in particular was criticised for the notion that its “structural simplicity” attempts to “pander to the taste and visual orientation of the West” (Wu, 2002). The way the film punctures moments with acrobatics, scenes where characters glide with superhuman grace, was seen as the reason that it was so well received in the West — an acceptance based on spectacle rather than the “genuine spirit” (Wu, 2002) of Chinese martial chivalry that films of the genre typically emphasised. The film was seen to be “pseudo-Chinese but not Chinese, pseudo-western but not western” (Wu, 2002), a blurring of the lines between nationalities — where does the film belong, if the director is a Taiwanese-born American, the cast and crew populated with a diverse range of nationalities, its source devoutly Chinese yet its visual style an exoticism of this devotion?

A “cultural chauvinism” (Wu, 2002) is evident in Chinese/Taiwanese viewers responses to Crouching. The film was seen to be “not authentically Chinese”, (Wu, 2002) — however Yojimbo, clearly drawing from Western influences, was not met with the same reaction. Viewers felt that the film’s appropriation of the Western (and western texts) acted as a “subversive act of decolonisation” (Schudson, 2011). By reappropriating the Western within a Samurai context, Kurosawa strung together a product of “cultural hybridity” (Schudson, 2011) which relished in its ‘Japanese-ness’, and ultimately revolutionised the Western genre.

In comparison, Crouching in all its success also paved way for a slew of wuxia films capitalising on the popularity of the genre in the West. Ultimately, Ang Lee’s and Akira Kurosawa’s perception in the West as the most popular and critically acclaimed Asian directors lends their works (and their subsequent reception) as captivating explorations of a transnational cinema — through their influences of, and influences on, cinema at large.

References:
Schudson, A. (2011). Eastern Ways in Western Dress: Cultural Hybridity and Subversion in Yojimbo. [online] Archive-Type: Musings of a Passionate Preservationist. Available at: https://sinaphile.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/eastern-ways-in-western-dress-cultural-hybridity-and-subversion-in-yojimbo/ [Accessed 8 Aug. 2017].

Wu, C-C. (2002) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is Not a Chinese Film. Spectator (Spring, 22.1) pp. 65-79.