Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 244 pp. (Illus.) US$75.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8166-8949-1; US$25.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8166-8950-7.
Transnational and transregional film coproduction has been a remarkable trend in postwar world cinema, and has become increasingly phenomenal since the 1990s with booming cultural industries in Asia, and in China in particular. Coproducing Asia is a welcome endeavour that explores film collaborations between the two largest Asian powers, Japan and China.
Echoing the opinion that pan-Asian regional film and media coproductions are central to the possibilities of a rising “new Asia,” the book argues for the importance of understanding coproduction as a production technology that could better address the regional cultural geography that is in the making. The book views coproduction more as a site of negotiation than a site of transformation, and interrogates the ways in which regional coproductions become arenas of negotiated meaning and uneven assemblages among a competing range of media geographies, production practices, imaginaries, and technologies. The author claims that Coproducing Asia is not a history and contemporary account of all coproductions among the media capitals of Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong and mainland China up to the current moments. Rather, the book aims to “provide a set of contexts and framings that enable us to interrogate the Asian coproduction and its locations, both material and imaginary, as a simultaneously critical and particular dynamic of transnational film and media” (15). To achieve this end, the author employs a genealogical method to highlight particular moments in which Asian coproductions are engaged in regional media projects.
Addressing three postwar moments of Asia, the book is divided into five chapters. The first two chapters examine regional film and media relationships during the late 1950s and 1970s when Japanese colonial and imperialist legacy was juxtaposed with Eastern Asia’s regional desire for technomodernity. The first chapter addresses the specters of Japan’s imperial occupation of the region and its postwar media development linked to romance coproductions ranging from Night in Hong Kong to Night in Bangkok. The second chapter discusses Hong Kong-Japan coproductions made from the 1950s to the 1970s, and interrogates Hong Kong’s “copying” of new film technologies, rationalized production methods, genres and styles linked to Japan. Chapter 3 analyzes Sino-Japanese friendship coproductions following Japan’s reengagement with the PRC in the early 1970s, by focusing on the NHK-CCTV television documentary series The Silk Roadand TV series A Son of the Good Earth. Chapter 4 explores the context and practices of Japanese cultural industry projects by placing Tokyo as the central media capital of Asia from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chapter 5 investigates the importance of emerging mainland China’s media market and rich resources by examining coproductions like Battle of Wits, Tea Fight and The Longest Night in Shanghai, in order to facilitate an understanding of mainland China as a geography through which the possibilities of new Asian cultural production are imagined and practiced.
The book’s strength is its effort to theorize the phenomenon of coproduction by placing coproduction in historical contexts and viewing it from a cultural specific perspective. In the author’s view, coproduction is a technology and a mode of production that potentiates new forms of encounter and cultural expression. Coproduction is also a site for the negotiation of meaning and identity. Moreover, coproduction is a battling ground on which Cold War structures have been repeatedly reconfigured and a progress-driven capitalist modernity is articulated. The second strength of the book is its engagement with current literature in the field of Asian cinema and Asian cultural studies. The author does a good job of integrating the main arguments of Asian cultural studies literature into her analysis of coproductions. Specifically, the author employs Michael Curtin’s well-known thesis of “media capital,” and attempts to use the coproduction locales of Tokyo, Hong Kong and mainland China to display the development and current formations of Asian media capital.
While Coproducing Asia is a welcome exploration of transnational cinema, the book would have benefited from the following: First, while the author tends to view Japan as a central place of Asian media capital, it may have been better if the author had devoted more space to examining other major media coproduction centres, especially Hong Kong, to expand the width and depth of the analysis of Asian coproductions. Similarly, coproductions between Japan and Taiwan are almost missing from the discussion. Considering Taiwan’s half-century of colonial experience under Japanese imperial rule, Japanese-Taiwanese coproduction should have been a major focus and could have provided more valuable examples for considering coproduction as a site for the negotiation of meaning and identity.
Second, as the author states, coproduction technologies are entwined with discourses, ideologies and practices. When discussing the “copying” practices of Hong Kong’s film industry and martial arts cinema in particular, the book could have engaged in a more thorough discussion of the genre, style and “oriental” flavour of Hong Kong-based coproductions. This thorough discussion can facilitate the audience’s understanding of Hong Kong’s crucial appreciation of Japanese technology and the integration with Chinese cultural elements, so that the audience can get a better idea of the changing dynamics of transnational media and the shifting power of Asian media capital.
Third, it remains unclear what might constitute a “Japanese-Chinese coproduction” in terms of co-investing, co-directing, co-screenplay-writing, or co-starring. Also, the book needs a rationale for the range of movies that the author selects as main objects of analysis. For example, for the coproductions of the 1950s and 1960s, why is Night in Hong Kong selected for analysis but not many other Hong Kong movies in which Japanese actors and actresses starred. For the coproductions of the 1970s and the 1980s, why are The Silk Road and A Son of the Good Earthselected, but not the very influential movie The Go Masters? For recent movies after 2000, why aren’t those popular coproductions selected for analysis, such as Last Love First Love, Shanghai, East Wind Rain, About Love and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles? The book would have benefited from a clear explanation of selection, as well as more primary or secondary sources and interviews.
Wendy Su
University of California, Riverside, USA
pp. 272-274