Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2

Return to Contents»

Taylor-Jones, Kate E. Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers. New York, NY: Wallflower Press. 2013. ISBN: 13-978-0822356844 (hbk). v + 253 pp./ Hyon Joo Yoo

Description: Product Details

<1> Among the questions that should be asked regarding national cinemas outside Hollywood, but that have not yet been properly raised, is whether it is possible or necessary to establish specific conceptual frameworks for understanding different regional cinemas. While conceptual and methodological tools for regional analyses, applicable across various geographical formations, have yet to become widely available, [1] discussions of regional cinemas actually are proceeding. Regarding East Asian cinema in particular, collections of essays have appeared carving out various geographical groupings in single volumes that encompass all or select national cinemas of South Korea, Hong Kong, China and Japan. The presence of the relatively well-established Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema testifies to the desire to configure a comparative frame that would support regional film analyses. Reflecting on this comparative impetus, I am reminded of Naoki Sakai's position that we need to define a new framework that could replace the area studies model that has dominated Asian studies. To this end, Sakai proposes a trans-Pacific framework. Establishing this new model would require "a comparatist analysis of [the] political arrangement in which the Japanese imperialist heritage was accommodated within the anti-communist collective security system promoted by the United States in the 1950's and 1960's in Northeast Asia" (2012: 304). He argues that an understanding of the "transpacific complicity" that helped construct the region called East Asia should be the foundation of comparative studies in East Asia. Accordingly, we need to anchor discussions of East Asian national formations in a compelling theoretical and historical framework, one that involves theorizations of geopolitics. We can extend this principle to discussions of cultural and social formations, as well as to discussions of the media that present and represent them.

<2> It is with this trans-Pacific premise in mind that I have read Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese and South Korean Filmmakers. I wanted to see if and how the book participates in comparative analyses of regional cinema, the scope of which should extend beyond those of many of the currently available essay collections that are often simply compilations of introductory essays on films and directors that do not succeed in articulating a viably comparative method.

<3> Taylor-Jones' book tries to anchor the reading of the filmmaker's bodies of work in a set of "texts and contexts," involving "gender, history, nationalism, economics, artistic movements and war" (6), which characterize the modern and postmodern conditions that pervade the two national cinemas in question. In doing so, the author gives us a comprehensive picture of the location of the gendered body in the cultural imaginations provoked by epochal changes. The book focuses in particular on violence that registers the impact of social unrest and turmoil on the gendered body and on film form, as the result of artistic endeavors that seek to register the turmoil visited upon the body politic. In this respect, the book is a sound summary compilation of the scholarly work that has been done in studies of Korean and Japanese cinemas, providing an array of many useful references. I especially find the reading of Japanese filmmakers informative as it successfully weaves critical frameworks available in Japanese cinema and cultural studies into the reading of individual auteurs, providing a comprehensive picture of historical permutations in cinematic form and ideology in Japanese national cinema. However, I am not convinced that the book succeeds in making a compelling case for why we need to consider Japanese and South Korean national cinemas together.

<4> It does not clearly show how the aforementioned contexts could also tie these two cinemas together within a comparative framework, although it demonstrates how those contexts animate national cinema separately. The book pairs eight different filmmakers, four from each nation, and each set contains two filmmakers who are supposed to represent a specific historical juncture in the respective nations. While the book discusses how each filmmaker reflects the social contexts in their respective body of work, the various pairings from Im Kown-taek/Fukasaku Kinji to Kim Ki-duk/Miike Takashi, lack compelling logic other than that the filmmakers are contemporaries and that each represents the problems and tensions in his and her respective societies. For example, although the paired filmmakers are contemporaneous, the aesthetics that each filmmaker displays in all the pairings are radically different, as are the specific local contexts of the social problems that these filmmakers address. While there is gendered violence in two paired filmmakers' work, we need to pay close attention to the different contexts that produce such violence, rather than treating the presence of that violence as grounds enough for the pairing. One can argue that in a Japanese context, the loss of empire is at the crux of the national trauma that finds manifestations at the cultural and individual level, while Korean trauma derives from colonial politics.

<5> The two countries' experience of war and colonialism are radically different, involving a different context of trauma and a different relationship to the body and gender. Aesthetic differences ranging from neo-realism to expressionism, as well as the way in which each filmmaker engages in genre conventions, could probably be explained through such difference. Furthermore, Im/ Fukasku, Kim/Miike, Lee Chang-dong/Kitano Takeshi, Park Chan-wook/Kawase Naomi, all articulate different politics and aesthetics of gender and the body, despite the fact that they all deal with the theme of gendered violence. Here, one needs to go beyond clarifying how each local context makes the body serve as the locus of trauma. The point is to compare the political, philosophical and aesthetic differences between these filmmakers in a regional context. The core of comparative study would be in clarifying that context.

<6> The comparative framework should work like a translation as conceived by Walter Benjamin. It should reveal something that could not be perceived were our thinking confined in a singular language. Following Sakai's example, if we do not place Japan within a comparative framework that reveals what he calls the transpacific complicity of the U.S. and Japan, we cannot comprehensively reveal the way in which the contemporary nation of Japan emerged as a unique consequence of that complicity or the way in which we can no longer accept the notion of Japan as a unified nation. This comparative framework reveals the manner in which Japan was stitched together in the manufacturing of a nationalism that served the U.S. hegemony in East Asia. In this context, the study of Japanese history as well as South Korean history must involve the study of American history. Comparative research should reveal how two national cinemas are intertwined in that larger geopolitical context, and how that entanglement influences the aesthetic and ideological practices of national cinema.

Notes

[1] My monograph Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema (Lexington Books, 2012) is one of the first single authored books that attempts this sort of comparative approach.

Works Cited

Sakai, Naoki. "Trans-Pacific Studies and the US-Japan Complicity." In The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society. Eds. Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo. Singapore and Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2012

Return to Top»

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.