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Cinema in Asia developed at the same time as cinema in the
so-called advanced world except, perhaps, parts of Central Asia
where it became visible only in the thirties of the twentieth
century. India itself has come a long way, considering that just
about 20 films were made in the 1920s. The first, Raja
Harishchandra, was made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. Not
many would be aware that Phalke made over a 100 mythological
film in a short span of 24 years, surely an unparalleled,
laudable feat. It was, however, left to Himanshu Rai to expand
the horizons of film making with Light of Asia in 1925,
an international co-production. The advent of the talkie started
with Alam Ara in 1933. By this time India was producing
200 films annually.
Japan started
producing films, with the initial experiments in 1897
themselves, though the first independent production was made
only in 1909. Unlike in China and India, the American influence
was fairly visible here. Also, unlike China and India, Japanese
cinema presented a far more liberal outlook and variety of
thought, and experimentation with content. It couldn’t,
however, be oblivious of the draconian censorship, especially in
the early thirties when militarist propaganda became the
mainstay of film-making. The golden period of Japanese cinema is
supposed to be from the "end of the silent film era till
the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war." And the content
was almost always family drama. The new wave "period began
with Tomu Uchinda’s Theatre of Life" in 1936. It
was during this phase that some immortal films about women
confronting male domination were made.
The contrary seems
to have been true with regard to China where ‘serious cinema’
dominated till mid-80s, known there as the mainstream cinema.
Paradoxically several films of ‘importance’ in world cinema
history were made in the 30s and 40s of the last century when
films with popular appeal held sway, beginning with Wu Yonggang’s
The Goddess in 1934, "in which female prostitution
was treated perhaps for the first time in films without strong
moralistic tones of condemnation." Sun Yu’s The
Highway released in the same year "reflects an openness
to physical relations among men and women that remains startling
to this day." Similarly, the information about the use of
artistic flourish, at that very time, in Ying Yunwei’s Plunder
of Peach and Plum (when no teaching institutes of any sort
existed) "such as a dolly shot from the interior of a car,
out across a pavement, and into and across a hotel lobby"
sounds as startling as the fact of Satyajit Ray’s Pather
Panchali continuing to be screened every single day
somewhere or the other in the world, fifty years after it was
first released.
The golden age of
Chinese cinema started soon after Mao’s death in 1976. The era
of artistic and authentic films, or new waves films, began with Yellow
Earth in 1985, directed by Chen Kaige, the most celebrated
of the new generation or ‘fifth generation’ of film makers.
The golden age of Hong Kong cinema (skeptics may question it)
was the decade of the 1980s. It was the time when "local
cinema established its identity", and began in 1979, with
makers "born and educated in Hong Kong" as
distinguished from the earlier Shanghai (where the first films
were shown in 1897) and Cantonese immigrants. Films now assumed
a more Western outlook, "without undermining technique and
social reality."
New wave cinema
that generally failed to woo audiences, and won awards almost
everywhere in the festival circuits, seems to have invaded
cinematic vision almost simultaneously, give or take a few years
here or there. But the results have, without exception, been the
same. The mass rejection of experiment for the sake of
experiment, was the case with immortal films. It was visible in
Thailand between 1973-83; in Turkey from 1982 to 1990; in
Vietnam from 1986 onwards, in films from Tiwan during 1982-89.
One could go on extracting these details from various essays
that form a valuable work on the lesser-known aspects of world
cinema. Turkey and Indonesia are among the major film producing
countries, with an output comparable with that of China, Japan
and India.
The volume is
replete with facts little known outside the respective countries
about the growth of cinema in various Asian countries, and the
issues, trends and concerns generally tackled. And they almost
seem universal. It was "in the 80s that Asian cinema came
into its own and flowered most emphatically. Its growth as a
self-conscious art — confident in its experimentation, bold,
even daring in its themes, sophisticated in its techniques and
innovative in its form — was not lost on the world," says
the trio of editors in the short introduction, aptly titled ‘Resilience,
Spirit & Strength’.
Having said
whatever was needed to be said in appreciation of the venture,
one has to note the absence of any contribution by the trio of
editors whose abiding interest in cinema is unquestionable. One
questions the logic of notes on contributions that appears
before an incomplete bibliography; an apology of an appendix
about cinema’s developments in China. The two-part index
unsuitably called ‘Reference to Personalities’ and ‘Reference
to Films’ together with the above-mentioned are unprofessional
appendages in an otherwise invaluable addition to scarce, almost
non-existent serious material on Asian cinema.
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THE
moving image cast its magic spell all over the world more than a
century ago after the Lumiere brothers successfully held the first
public screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris in 1895. And ever since
its impact has remained undiminished whether in telling a story or
documenting reality. That many of these finely told stories have
remained imbedded in human consciousness — Citizen Kane, for
instance, or the still haunting documentation of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki — generation after generation is now only a
matter of academic interest really.
