AAAS 282DViolent Visions in EA Cinema

Catalog

This course will explore the role of violence in contemporary East Asian cinema by examining both film media's representational capacity and its aesthetic composition or form. Departing from the contention that films not only create narratives, but also produce thought, we will focus on an analysis of East Asian films produced in the 21st century, to interrogate whether violence can function as an aesthetic, theoretical and/or affective device to rethink the social, the political, the economic, and the historical. Are East Asian films merely faithful representations of the sociopolitical, economic, and historical violence that characterizes the East Asian "reality" of today? Do manifestations of violence in East Asian cinema offer new ways of thinking about and processing sociopolitical/economic/historical conflicts? Or is violence being commodified and reified as "East Asian style" in order to promote and brand East Asian cinema in the global market and circuit of international film festivals? We will address these questions by exploring the ways in which East Asian cinema is placed in a constitutive and disruptive relationship to the forces of the neoliberal state and the global market. These inquiries will be made in two inter-related ways. First, we will study several East Asian films from various nations and productions that include both commercial and independent films from Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan - such as Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Jia Zhangke's Touch of Sin (2013), Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster (2023), and John Hsu's Detention (2019). Second, we will look at specific events and cases of violence with which these films engage, such as gender, racial and class oppression, military dictatorships and the police state, and neoliberal restructuring.