On a recent warm evening in August, I settled into the lush gardens of the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud, in Bali’s hill country, for screenings of two remarkable films: “Island of Demons” from 1933 and “Headhunters of Borneo” from 1936. Directed by Friedrich Dalsheim with Victor Baron von Plessen and, for the first, Walter Spies, these works capture Bali and Borneo under Dutch colonial rule, a decade before Indonesia’s independence in 1945.
Film
As Merle Oberon starred in four dozen films during the golden age of Hollywood, she kept a secret that could have immediately destroyed her career: she was biracial and was born and raised in India. While no longer a secret, her story has all but been forgotten. Mayukh Sen’s new biography of Oberon, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, the first in decades, uniquely delves into her family’s background going back to Bombay and Calcutta, where she was born and grew up.
Kwai-Cheung Lo’s Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building investigates the convoluted relations between cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the 21st century.
Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
The diversification of Japanese Literature available in translation means that the release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami is not met with quite the fanfare it once was, but interest in movie adaptations of the author’s work is higher than ever. This is due at least in part to the enthusiasm with which critics have greeted recent adaptations, with Lee Chang Dong’s Burning winning the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2018, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car taking Best International Picture at the 2021 Academy Awards. Following this success is renewed academic focus on movies based on Murakami’s work, with Marc Yamada’s newly-released Murakami Haruki on Film providing the first English-language overview of the author’s cinematic adaptations.
The Partition of India has inspired cinema, some of which has reached audiences outside South Asia, especially when produced or directed by the Indian diaspora: for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (based on the Booker winner by Salman Rushdie) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House. However, there are more films that draw from partition as setting, theme, entertainment and history in art as well as commercial traditions of film-making in India, and to an extent, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of the individual films in this substantial body of work have been brought together by John W Hood in Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India. By Hood’s own admission, the book is not an exercise in film criticism but a way of exploring the use of Partition, “a gold mine of stories for filmmakers”, as an idea and as a theme.
In 2022, the US Mint released the first batch of its American Women Quarters series, celebrating the achievements of US women throughout its history. The first set of five included Maya Angelou, Sally Ride… and Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American to ever appear on US currency.
Publisher Oxford University Press hails Activism and Post-activism as the first-ever English language work on the birth and development of South Korean nonfiction film. Drawing on more than 200 films and videos, Jihoon Kim’s trailblazing book charts the history of documentary filmmaking in the South from its early “activism” period in the 1980s to what the author calls its modern “post-activism” period in the late ’90s and 2000s. In doing so, Kim highlights the work of marginalized groups—including women, sexual minorities, and the working class—who, without the ease of access modern technology brings to documentary film, would have little platform to speak.
Over the last few years, there’s been a renewed interest in pre-War Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. A screenplay by David Henry Hwang starring Gemma Chan is in the works and the US Mint recently issued a quarter to commemorate her. A novel and narrative non-fiction study were published last year, but there hasn’t been a complete biography of her published in the United States until now. Katie Gee Salisbury, from Anna May’s hometown of Los Angeles, has captivatingly filled this gap in Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, and none too soon at that.
In an interview with Pierre Andre Boutang in 1989, Satyajit Ray, the Academy Award winning director, declared that India has “a fairly backward audience” adding that this “unsophisticated audience” is largely “exposed to the commercial Hindi cinema, more than anything else.” In Rays’ account, the exposure to commercial Hindi cinema is the cause of Indian audiences’ lack of sophistication.
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