Cinema Journal

Of the many recent publications on Asian cinemas, this volume stands out and fills an important void in transnational cinema studies. Many of the other books center on nations, genres, or trends, and even those that have globalization as a focus are nonetheless nation-based. With an emphasis on the mutating and the fluid, the editors position this volume in the ever-changing landscape of transnational film production and distribution. The concept of "mutating currencies of transnationality" (as expressed in the remake, the arthouse film, the cult/genre/auteur film, and the blockbuster) in transnational cinemas is a particularly useful one that speaks to both the recent phenomenon of the Asianization of Western films and the globalization of Asian films.¹

The editors frame one of the central questions—what is translatable?—by organizing the chapters around four sections that cover history, industry, crossover texts, and the Asianization of Western texts. Are there texts, for example, that are more "global" or translatable in nature and therefore more suitable for remakes? David Desser seems to think so in his chapter comparing Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai; Akira Kurosawa, 1954) with several notable remakes, both Japanese and otherwise (including an Indian remake). He argues that Seven Samurai was removed of cultural and historical specificities so that it was a text easily adaptable to other locales, historical moments, and even to outer space in the case of Samurai 7 (Toshifumi Takizawa, 2004), a sci-fianime reimagination of the original. [End Page 165]

Chapters from sections three and four in one way or another touch on the same question of translation and cross-cultural remakes. In "Remaking East Asia, Outsourcing Hollywood," Gary Xu examines the recent trend of Hollywood's remaking of popular East Asian titles and goes through some of the oft-cited reasons for their popularity, including the supernatural aura that defines some of the East Asian texts of the horror genre (such as Ringu [Hideo Nakata, 1998]). He concludes by arguing that the current trend of remaking Asian texts should be viewed in the context of Asia's status as the world's production center and that remaking therefore is Hollywood's way of outsourcing. That said, Xu suggests the emergence of a trans–East Asian cinema as a countertrend in which East Asian filmmakers are collaborating to "assert an East Asian identity."²

The question of "translation" is also brilliantly examined by Adam Knee in his chapter, "Suriyothai Becomes Legend: National Identity as Global Currency." This chapter compares and contrasts the original version of Suriyothai (Chatrichalerm Yukol, 2001) that was released in Thailand to the one that was released internationally; Knee provides a nuanced reading of what happens when "culturally specific" texts are removed from their initial contexts. Herein lies the irony and contradictions of how a "national" text needs to remain culturally specific so as to cater to an international art house cinema audience that desires to see the different and the exotic, while simultaneously being denationalized to remain readable and salable (or pre-salable) in a global film marketplace.

Section two of the book focuses on industry practices that contribute to the uniqueness of, and paradoxes associated with, different "national" film industries in the face of a rapidly changing global film market. Chris Howard's chapter, "Contemporary South Korean Cinema: 'National Conjunction' and 'Diversity,' " for example, examines specifically a phenomenon he terms "national conjunction," in which the importance of the local film market in South Korea is viewed as a combination of "patriotic consumption" and the domination of the market by three major local distributors/ exhibitors.³ Even recent efforts to diversify the local market in Korea are not without a "nationalistic" influence. In the discussion of a global film market in which the role of a "national" cinema is increasingly questioned, Howard's chapter makes a strong argument for the important role of the nation and its cultural policies...