Asia/Pacific Cinemas: A Spectral Surface

This special issue of positions is a collection of thought-provoking essays that challenges the ways in which the West has traditionally experienced Asia/Pacific film. Focusing on film texts from Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, the articles explore the powerful emotions of frustration and alienation that cinema can express in the face of modernization and globalization. Contributors examine how specific films - including Haplos (1982), Chilsu and Mansu (1988), Fresh Kill (1994), and Princess Mononoke (1997) - rework folktales, literary sources, popular memory, lived experience, and history. Some of the films examined here incorporate supernatural elements and/or gay and lesbian narratives that provide an escape from the sexism, racism, homophobia, environmental destruction, and urban alienation that the filmmakers see as the defining characteristics of the postcolonial world. Asia/Pacific Cinema: A Spectral Surface posits that film, with its ability to play with memory, fate, and linear time, creates a space in which to consider alternatives to the dominant cultural, economic, and social norms.