Lilian Chee - Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia.

Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.

Lilian Chee is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore.

Edna Lim is senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

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9Neoliberalism and Global Cinema

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11Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas

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15Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

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16Postwar Renoir

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17Cinema and Inter-American Relations

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18European Civil War Films

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19The Aesthetics of Antifascism

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20The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film

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21Cinema and Language Loss

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22Cinema as Weather

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23Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

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24Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

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25Crossover Cinema

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26Spanish Cinema in the Global Context

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27Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes

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28Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film

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29Cine-Ethics

Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship

Edited by Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey

30Postcolonial FilmHistory, Empire, Resistance

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31The Womans Film of the 1940s

Gender, Narrative, and History

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32Iranian Cinema in a Global Context

Policy, Politics, and Form

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33Eco-Trauma Cinema

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34American and Chinese-Language Cinemas

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35American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age

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36Asian Cinema and the Use of Space

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Lilian Chee and Edna Lim

Edited by Lilian Chee and Edna Lim

First published 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Asian cinema and the use of space : interdisciplinary perspectives / edited by Lilian Chee and Edna Lim.
pages cm. (Routledge advances in film studies ; 36)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Space and time in motion pictures.2.Space in motion pictures. 3.Motion pictures and transnationalism.4.Motion pictures East AsiaHistory and criticism.5.Motion picturesSoutheast Asia History and criticism.6.Motion picturesSouth AsiaHistory and criticism.I.Chee, Lilian, editor.II.Lim, Edna, editor.
PN1995.9.S668A85 2015
791.43'095dc23
2014029855

ISBN: 978-0-415-70937-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-88557-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

LILIAN CHEE AND EDNA LIM

ACKBAR ABBAS

CHRISTOPHE ROBERT

ESTHER M. K. CHEUNG

LILIAN CHEE

ADAM KNEE

DEBORAH SHAMOON

LAI CHEE KIEN

CHARLES LEARY

TIMOTHY R. WHITE

UGORAN PRASAD AND INTAN PARAMADITHA

SOHL LEE

EDNA LIM

ANOMA PIERIS

Ryan Bishop

Space has a history.

Victor Burgin, In/different Spaces

Space is not given; it is made. Through optics, geometry, technology, cosmology, visual culture models and history, we craft space out of the ether of experience. Our senses, our experience, all of these are learned from the positioning of our unique chronotopes. Technologies of representation are in turn technologies of production, and few have been more productive spatially and temporally than those associated with cinema.