W9 | Research | Asian Experience
Asian Cinema as a phenomenological experience
The word ‘experience’ – implies a more phenomenological reception of Asian films but, from this experiential reception, we are prompted to cognitively explore the cultures, languages and societies depicted in the films.
Asian Cinema – it refers to films from Asia generally, to indicate what is new, strange and exotic about a category of non-European, non-Hollywood films.
The most fundamental and pervasive factors
Faces –
The idea of a phenomenological experience of Asian films implies that we have a direct encounter with the situations and the characters within the film narratives. If we think of experiencing Asian films by watching Asian faces and taking in what they reveal to us, we are directly experiencing a factor that will lead us towards a greater appreciation of the films.
Asian faces constitute a physiognomic database of emotion and experience. They may reveal fear, anxiety and sentimentality, or coolness thought and spirituality.
Indian cinema
The Asian face, then, is the key to the soul of Asian Cinema, and there is an element of ‘devotional engagement‘ with the face in Indian cinema that we can draw on to address the face and its connotation of the soul.
Frontality – implies a public response as it involves a direct address to the public, despite subjective meanings that may arise out of the actor’s face.
This ‘publicness’ emphasises once again the phenomenological trait of experience in Asian Cinema, and this experience is predicated on a devotional engagement with the face.
“We might postulate that the frontal privilege given to the face is no more because the face serves as the nexus of emotional expressions (as exhibited in the eyes, facial muscles, etc.) than because the face is an adjunct to the mouth, whose primacy comes from its being the residence of speech.” Nayar 2010:41)
Nayar’s emphasis on speech and orality helps us to consider other parts of the face and eventually the body itself as factors essential to one’s appreciation and understanding of Asian Cinema:
body genres – the Bollywood song and dance genre and the Asian martial arts film. Such body genres are perfect for thinking about Asian Cinema as a phenomenological experience, which leads to a cognitive recognition of wider issues.
“The dances contained in Indian films enable us to question such categories as gender identity, masculinity, and femininity, regimes of visuality, and the carnal consciousness of the body.”
Body in Asian genres impact on reception –
Asian martial arts genre – “movement-art” which implies a phenomenological – or bodily – involvement in reception.
“In this way, viewed movement evokes different phenomenological perceptions (perceptions felt rather than thought) and bodily memories (sensations remembered as feelings rather than as consciously considered recollections) within each body engaged in interpretation. Movement in and of itself is the medium through which kinesthetic (felt, body-to-body) communication takes place, and so the transference of any movement’s ‘meaning’ always involves a range of nonlinear elements. For example … choreographic rhythmic patterns within, or accompanying, movement can contribute significantly to the enjoyment and understanding of any movement performance. This may be, in part, because everyone feels the presence of his or her own internal rhythmic heartbeat and breathing patterns and most people also learn a more esoteric understanding of rhythmic cycles of time.” – Anderson 2009
The body as experience can direct us to a more soulful realisation of our existence, and the way that it can do this through affect – emotion or feeling – as another factor which is possibly unique in Asian Cinema.
Rasa theory – a classical theory formulated on emotion in Indian poetics – means ‘taste or savor, and, as used to denote the essence of poetry, it signifies the peculiar experience that poetry affords us’
Emotion is not merely personal or private but also contains many latent issues of social and national importance which can for a network of related factors in further theorising Asian Cinema – ‘texts and context’ in the ‘social life of Asian Cinema’ – including questions of national cinema, globalization and localisation, the influence of Hollywood and the reaction against it – other political and economic concerns include Asian religions (Buddhism), governing sociopolitical structures and systems (communism), ‘popular’ element (mainstream audience appeal, the use of genres and stars),
altered modernity – represents the complexities of modernisation in Asia, leading both to gain and to loss.
melodrama – issues surrounding the family
Transculturalism – in the formalistic and stylistic sense that David Bordwell has envisioned it, is really the artful manipulation of film, but Asian cinematic point of view – that of the portrayal lf Asian faces or physiognomies, bodies and gestures, emotions and their behavioural patterns – the way Asian look, both in terms of looking and being looked at.
Three areas to discuss Asian films
- Style – genres and auteurs form the basis of the discussion
- classical Asian stylists Kurosawa Akira and Satyajit Ray
- ‘the historical blockbuster style’
- Japanese anime – ‘The abstract transnational style of anime’
- Asian horror and the ghost-story style
- Bollywood style – emphasis on extravagant song and dance
- Spaces – Asian Cinema is understood as a geographic region, involving settings from the rural to the urban, from the private bedroom to the communal living room. There is also the notion of space as we might think of it in Chinese painting, as apparent in the films of certain directors whose manipulation of this kind of space constitutes theoretical analytical models.
- The space of Asian melodrama
- Geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema
- Domestic space centring on the family – in relation to the South Korean cinema
- Erotic space – sexuality
- Theory – conceptual issues raised in conjunction with the rise of Asian cinemas in recent years. These issues revolve around rival theories such as World Cinema, National Cinema, Third Cinema and Hollywood, and how Asian Cinema may compete and eventually become an alternative paradigm.
References
Teo, S 2013, “Introduction”, Asian Cinema Experience: Style, Spaces, Theory, Routledge
Samantha Fan • September 23, 2018