Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

4. Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema

97 Finding the Nation in Transnational Cinema 4 i have reCenTLy encountered a number of films skillfully promoted as transnational cinema, such as The Hotel Venus (2004, Takahata Hideta), which features a multinational cast (American, Japanese, and Korean) all speaking Korean and presented with Japanese subtitles . The film was made with Japanese capital, produced for the most part by a Japanese crew, and was filmed entirely on location in Vladivostok, the administrative center of Primorsky Krai, Russia. This further highlights the contradiction that one encounters in recent transnational cinema. If the transnational is defined, in Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s sense, as “the global forces that link people or institutions across nations,” this film is without any doubt transnational.2 But I find myself asking, What is it that is transnational about this film? In other words, do the film’s production logistics necessarily result in a transnational identity? Might its multinational elements—in particular, the film’s address to a Korean ethnic subject—be better understood within the particular national framework of Japanese exceptionalism among Asian countries? Indeed, there are a number of films that, like The Hotel Venus, are presented as “transnational cinema” without being substantially different from films analyzed in the national cinema practice. Then, what is the reason for identifying those films as transnational over national cinema? The shift from “the national” to “the transnational,” nonetheless, cannot be divorced from the notion of crisis, which somehow carries us back and forth between “home” and “world.” —esther cheung and yiu-wai chu, “Introduction: Between Home and World”1 98 FINDING THE NATION IN TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA The term “transnational cinema” has been used recently as a substitute for or an improvement on the critical framework of national cinema, which itself has been problematized for a number of reasons. A primary reason is the increasing permeability of national borders due to global exchanges of human labor, media information, finance, and other exchanges.3 Specifically in the case of cinema, the present framework of national cinema is increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of a great upsurge in multinational financing, the coproduction of films, and the cross-border flow of stars and skilled labor such as directors, cinematographers, and choreographers. Although anyone can see the escalating incompatibility between the concept of national cinema as a critical framework and the current industrial situation, I am still puzzled by the abrupt shift in cinema and media studies from the national to the transnational in the post–Cold War era. What are the risks and benefits of shifting the critical framework from the national to the transnational? We can see that the idea of transnational cinema—more specifically, the recent shift in the critical frame from national cinema to transnational cinema—brings with it another set of questions, theoretical or otherwise. This chapter examines the issue of the paradigm shift on the levels both of the critical discourses regarding Chinese-language and Nordic cinemas and the film texts, especially focusing on contemporary transnational films from the East Asian region, and it interrogates what profits, if any, the framework of transnational cinema brings us over those of national cinema. At the end of the chapter, I will return to the question, What is so transnational about The Hotel Venus? The Cases of Chinese-language Film and Nordic Cinema Major social and cultural changes since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s—such as the gradual enlargement of the European Union (EU), Hong Kong’s reunification with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1997, and the shift from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995—have led to significant crossnational geopolitical transformations. But have those historical changes wholly transformed the practice of cinema and its products, or is it a matter of how the cinema is “narrated” in the academy, especially in the “global English” academy? In the field of U.S.–based Chinese cinema studies, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu states that “transnational cinema in the Chinese case as well as in the rest of the world is the result of the globalization of the mechanisms of film FINDING THE NATION IN TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA 99 production, distribution, and consumption. . . . Chinese national cinema can only be understood in its properly transnational context.”4 There are three aspects of transnationalism in the Chinese case, according to Lu: the political...