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My claim is that Frant Gwo’s film, The Wandering Earth (2019), fetishises technology and, in so doing, forces Western audiences of the film to face an otherwise outdated thematic motif of social to...

This essay is a critical appreciation of Paul Willemen's proposals for a comparative film studies, illustrated with examples from Indian film history. The suggestion that the universal history of capitalism is the common ground on which a comparative study could be located, and the related questions of value raised by Willemen in the chapters of a forthcoming book are considered here in relation to recent developments in Indian cinema. Willemen suggests a way to avoid the pitfalls of nationalist exceptionalism in cultural studies as well as an abstract universalism that neglects the specificity of capital's presence in different regions of the world.

Paul Willemen proposes the concept of comparative film studies, as an immanent critique of film studies, as an academic discipline—in the development of which the US has played a central role. Is comparative film studies equally relevant for film scholars working outside Euro-American academia? To what extent can the idea of comparative film studies play the similarly critical function in the non-Euro-American context? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, not necessarily by closely explicating what Willemen means by comparative film studies but by re-interpreting or even “misreading” this concept while at the same time trying to remain faithful to the radical spirit of his argument. Using the state of film scholarship in Japan as an example, the essay explores various implications of comparative film studies for academics situated in the place where the discipline of film studies is not firmly established. It particularly focuses on the connections between the global hegemony of US-centered...

Originally written as an introduction to Willemen's unpublished book of essays, this paper provides perhaps the most concise outline available of what he meant by the concept “comparative film studies”. Making a strong case for why all thinking on film should once and for all jettison the discredited framework that saw films at the intersection of national specificity and universal values, Willemen proposes that we replace that intersection as an encounter between “national” histories and the capitalist-industrial production of culture. This requires us, first of all, to replace the very concept of “universality” with what underpins it, namely a pervasive capitalist mode of production. In exploring the historical-narrative constructions of such a capitalist mode, the argument draws from several disciplines to propose that—contrary to conventional views—it is not only language that defines national-cultural memory. He draws from Marx to contend that past generations' accumulated efforts and experiences are...

In assembling this special issue, as a tribute to the writings of Paul Willemen, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies focuses on Willemen's most recent work and on his project of a Comparative Film Studies....

In the concluding essay of his unpublished explorations on Comparative Film Studies, Willemen posits a series of bold strategies to arrive at a theory of value, which would enable him to claim relevance to all geopolitical frameworks that are beset both directly and indirectly by the workings of Euro-American capitalism. Willemen recognizes that the historical frame within which questions of value have to be located is a little different from the historical narrative most often deployed when addressing culture. To understand value in this area, we need to recognize that distinct and co-existing modes of production exist in any social formation, and that contemporary ideological and political constellations within societies “like our own” reveal overwhelming evidence that premodernity is still very much with us. A “pre-modern” ideological frame which aligned god-given social status with power (both physical and political), wealth, wisdom and virtue, finds a productive afterlife within the confusion between...

This essay brings an emergent framework of comparative film studies to illuminate an unresolved site of the colonial cinema of Joseon (Korea) under Japanese rule by mobilizing a set of useful terms such as detour and dislocative fantasy departing from a usual mode of demon of comparison.

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, history has been flooding commercial Thai cinema as never before. These contemporary 'films that go back in time' (nang yon yuk) can be distinguished by their ambition to maximise visibility at both domestic and international levels. Their novelty in the Thai context lies in combining the aesthetics of the nostalgia film, the promotional practices of the high concept film, with the insistent claim of attentive historical representation as a mark of quality and seriousness. The article explores Nonzee Nimibutr's ghost remake Nang Nak (1999) as an exemplary instance of contemporary Thai bourgeois heritage cinema. It argues that the film's signification of heritage takes the narrative form of self-exoticisation, or the inscription of generically arcane Old Siamness for the fascinated gaze of the bourgeois Thai spectator. The article considers the tension between the self-exoticising aesthetics and the yearning for national self-representation, brought out especially acutely in this heritage film's international foray on the film festival circuit.

In the late 1990s, independent Thai films became a new burgeoning industry, with the beginnings of international recognition. Taking three case studies, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Thunska Pansittivorakul’s Voodoo Girls (2003) and Aditya Assarat and Mingmongkol Sonakul’s Ma‐mee/ Three Friends (2005), I argue that the digital format for DVD/VCDs is paving the way for independent filmmakers/producers to participate in the art film market abroad and to cut production costs. Following the economics of money flows makes it clear that ‘independent film’ in Thailand is less about economic independence than a type of branding and packaging of aesthetics and content. While film, economically, is never outside the workings of capital, the content and style of the three film projects considered here seek to break out of the conventions set by the commercial Thai film narrative style.

In about half a decade since May 1998, changes have taken place in the content, production, distribution, exhibition, and discourse of Indonesian cinema. During Reformasi (1999–2001), the rules and regulations of cinema authorized under the New Order government of President Suharto began to be contested and re‐negotiated. The rise of new film genres and changes in concepts about existing genres and formats took place, new discourses emerged, and different communities and institutions arose that identified themselves with certain film genres or which used the medium of film for particular means, such as a medium for advocacy of human rights issues. Five to six years after 1998, it is apparent that besides changes, there are also many continuities: many old film institutions and structures for film production, distribution, and exhibition are still in place, and topics of discourses often recall past discourses of the New Order period or those held in the newly independent 1950s. This paper conside...

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues ...

The discipline of comparative literature and its emphasis on ethno-linguistic units ‘to be compared’ seems quite inappropriate as a model for approaching the study of a thoroughly industrialized cultural form such as cinema. There is no need even to recall the complicity between comparative literature and comparative religion and that Goethe’s notion of ‘world literature’ gestured towards the alleged universality of Western-Christian values as the yardstick with which to measure the degree of a particular, ‘regional’ literary work’s adherence to a norm deemed to be universal.1Nevertheless, it is precisely the whiff of clerical thinking that attaches to comparative literature that provides a clue as to why the notion of comparative film studies may be worth considering, mutatis mutandis. In the West, the shift from religion and its professionals as the legitimators and enforcers of particular regimes of social power to a more secular notion of ‘universal values’ – a shift accompanied by the gradual transformation of clerics into intellectuals and, now, media practitioners – is the history of the emergence of the ‘public sphere’ challenging and eventually supplanting the court as the legitimate site for the discussion of issues of governance. That is the history underpinning the designation of the peculiar mix of moral philosophy and aesthetics known as ‘literature’ – ‘lit and its crit’, as Tom Nairn once put it – as the training ground for ‘modern’ state legitimators (enforcement duties have been passed on to the military and the police). Given that the force driving this change is the one identified by Karl Marx, that is to say, the gradual elaboration and spread of the capitalist mode of production that set about its triumphal globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, and given that the history of cinema coincides with the industrialization of culture enforced in the West since the closing years of the nineteenth century, it must follow that there is indeed a kind of ‘universalism’ that informs cinema as a cultural form.2