1st Edition

The Cold War and Asian Cinemas

Edited By Poshek Fu, Man-Fung Yip Copyright 2020
    328 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    328 Pages 42 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book offers an interdisciplinary, historically grounded study of Asian cinemas’ complex responses to the Cold War conflict.  It situates the global ideological rivalry within regional and local political, social, and cultural processes, while offering a transnational and cross-regional focus.



    This volume makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War. Its geographical focus is set on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In adopting such an inclusive approach, it draws attention to the different manifestations and meanings of the connections between the Cold War and cinema across Asian borders. Many essays in the volume have a transnational and cross-regional focus, one that sheds light on Cold War-influenced networks (such as the circulation of socialist films across communist countries) and on the efforts of American agencies (such as the United States Information Service and the Asia Foundation) to establish a transregional infrastructure of "free cinema" to contain the communist influences in Asia.



    With its interdisciplinary orientation and broad geographical focus, the book will appeal to scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including film studies, history (especially the burgeoning field of cultural Cold War studies), Asian studies, and US-Asian cultural relations.

    Introduction

    Part I: Transnational Connections

    1. Art in Propaganda: The Poetics and Politics of Vietnamese Revolutionary Cinema
    2. Man-Fung Yip

    3. Incomplete Pictures: Mediated Immediacy in the South Korean Newsreel, The Frontline in Vietnam
    4. Namhee Han

    5. Gained in Translation: The Reception of Foreign Films in Cold War China
    6. Jie Li

    7. Contested Chineseness and Third Sister Liu in Singapore and Hong Kong: Folk Songs, Landscape, and Cold War Politics in Asia
    8. Lanjun Xu

      Part II: Global Conflicts, Local Formations

    9. Educational Films in Postwar Japan: Traces of American Cultural Policies in the Cold War Period
    10. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano

    11. The Cold War as Media Environment in 1960s Japanese Cinema
    12. Michael Raine

    13. Vehicles of Modernity: Gender, Mobility and Music in Evan Yang’s MP&GI films
    14. Jessica Tan

    15. Socks and Revolution: The Politics of Consumption in Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1964)
    16. Calvin Hui

    17. Archive Revisionisms: Reevaluating South Korea’s State Film Censorship of the Cold War Era
    18. Hye Seung Chung

    19. Indian Cinema, Indian Democracy: An Unusual Cold War Saga, 1947-1989
    20. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

      Part III: Struggle for Hearts and Minds

    21. Tropical Cold War Horror: Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI and the Traumatized Culture of Suharto’s New Order
    22. Michael G. Vann

    23. Entertainment and Propaganda: Hong Kong Cinema, 1946-1959
    24. Poshek Fu

    25. The End of an Era: The Cultural Revolution, Modernization, and the Demise of Hong Kong Leftist Cinema
    26. Man-Fung Yip

    27. Who Views Whom through Whose Lenses? The Gazes in USIS Film Propaganda in South Korea

    Han Sang Kim

    Biography

    Poshek Fu is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on film history, Cold War cultures, and U.S.-China relations. He is the author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford University Press, 1993) and Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 1993). He is also the editor of China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and co-editor of The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2002).



    Man-Fung Yip is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation (Hong Kong University Press, 2017) and co-editor of American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows (Routledge, 2015). His work has also appeared in Cinema Journal, Chinese Literature Today, and numerous edited volumes.