TRAFFIC IN GENRE:
East Asian Film and Lecture Series
In conjunction with the WEAI 60th Anniversary. Sponsors: Weatherhead
East Asian Institute, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and
Center for Korean Research
FILM AND LECTURE SERIES SCHEDULE
Film Synopsis:
Vengeance (1970) is one of the earliest collaborative efforts by director Chang Cheh and his star team of David Chiang and Ti Lung. Set in 1920 Peking, a Chinese Opera performer (Ti Lung) confronts his boss over his straying wife and is killed in a valiant fight. Ti's brother (David Chiang) seeks his revenge, culminating in a spectacular gang fight and a surprise ending. The film showcases expert use of cramped interiors in well-designed period settings and though it places more emphasis on knife fighting and judo than kung fu it is clearly a lead-in to subsequent gangster-style kung fu films by Chang Cheh such as the Duel of the Iron Fist and Boxer From Shantung. At the 16th Asian Film Festival, Director Chang Cheh won the Best Director Award, David Chiang won the Best Actor Award and Vengeance went on to win the Best Movie Award and the Iron Triangle.
Film Synopsis:
Maverick Japanese director Takashi Miike, best known for cult classics Audition and Ichi the Killer, re-teams with longtime writing partner Masa Nakamura for this musical western inspired by Sergio Corbucci's violent 1966 classic Django. It's been hundreds of years since the Battle of Dannoura, yet the Genji and Heiki clans continue to battle for a legendary treasure hidden in a desolate mountain town. One day, a lone gunman, burdened with deep emotional scars but blessed with incredible shooting skills, drifts into town. The two clans try to woo the lone gunman but he has ulterior motives. Dirty tricks, betrayal, desire and love collide as the situation erupts into a final, explosive showdown.
Film Synopsis:
Tokyo Story is a 1953 Japanese film directed by Yasujiro Ozu which contemplates the breakdown of the relationship between elderly parents and their children, post WWII. It follows an aging couple, Tomi (Chishu Ryu) and Sukichi (Setsuko Hara), on their journey from their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling, postwar Tokyo. Their reception is disappointing: too busy to entertain them, their children send them off to a health spa. After Tomi falls ill she and Sukichi return home, while the children, grief-stricken, hasten to be with her. The film reprises one of the director’s favorite themes—that of generational conflict—in a way that is quintessentially Japanese and yet universally appealing and continues to resonate as one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces. In Sight and Sound magazine's polls of directors and critics, Tokyo Story is regularly listed as one of the ten greatest films ever made (it was 3rd in 1992 and 5th in 2002 on the critics' poll).
Film Synopsis:
Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain is a groundbreaking film that established Tsui Hark as one of Hong Kong’s best New Wave filmmakers. Loosely based on Chinese mythology, the film stars Yuen Biao as Ti Ming Chi, a soldier caught between warring armies on Zu Mountain. He escapes into the mountain’s mystical regions, which are home to ghoulish evil disciples and noble heroes, all possessing magical abilities. By joining Ting Yin (Adam Cheng), a master swordsman, Ming Chi is thrust onto a perilous quest to find the powerful Twin Swords. They are the only weapons capable of destroying an evil demon, contained temporarily by the wise Long Brows (Sammo Hung). When the demon possesses the swordsman’s body in the palace of a healer Countess (Brigitte Lin), Ming Chi must complete the quest by finding the swords’ keeper and uniting the weapons with the aid of an insecure monk.
Film Synopsis:
A troop of South Korean soldiers in search of a missing patrol unit find that the horrors of war aren't limited to the human realm in director Kong Su-Chang's (GP506) tale of supernatural terror on the battlefield. During the Vietnam War, a South Korean army base begins receiving mysterious radio transmissions from a patrol that went missing six months earlier. With resources dwindling and the battle taking its toll on the fatigued troops, the determined but shell-shocked commanding officer (Kam Woo-Sung) and a ragtag military unit are sent into the desolate stretch of land known only as R-Point to gather clues as to the whereabouts of the missing soldiers. What appeared to be a clear search and rescue mission turns into a harrowing struggle for survival and something far more terrifying than any battle.
Film Synopsis:
Director Kim Ji-woon's 'Kimchi Western' offers a new, unique reworking of its spaghetti
forebears in The Good, The Bad and The Weird. As the Korean peninsula falls into the hands of Japanese imperialists and countless Koreans seek refuge in the vast wilderness of Manchuria, a determined thief (Song Kang-ho), a cold-blooded assassin (Lee Byeong-hun), and a mysterious bounty hunter (Chung Woo-sung) all vie for an elusive map that could lead them to a buried treasure from the Qing Dynasty. As these three strangers converge in a sprawling landscape that none of them can truly call home, they quickly discover that Korean resistance fighters, resilient mountain bandits, and the Japanese army also covet the prized map, resulting in an unpredictable, escalating battle. The Good, The Bad, The Weird was premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
JINSOO AN is an Assistant Professor at School of Design and Media of Hongik University in Korea. He completed a Ph.D. at UCLA with a dissertation on the golden age melodrama films of Korea (from 1953 to 1972). He has written on the topics related to Korean cinema of the 1960s including representation of Christianity, historical drama, courtroom drama, cult film and Manchurian action film. His current project focuses on representation of colonialism as historical past in South Korean cinema. His other interests include history and visuality of interactive media art.
YOMI BRAESTER, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Washington in Seattle, is the author of Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (forthcoming from Duke University Press).
MICHAEL RAINE is Assistant Professor in Japanese Cinema at the University of Chicago. He is writing a book on the tension between a "culture of the copy" in postwar Japanese commercial cinema and a "culture of authenticity" in the Japanese New Wave around 1960. He is also developing a project on image culture in wartime Japan and its territories, with a particular focus on the rhetorical construction of documentary (bunka eiga) and propaganda features (kokusaku eiga). His other interests in film studies include the history of film theory, particularly political modernism and the potential for a Peircian theory of film, and using digital media for teaching and research, including subtitling as both an historical practice and an aesthetic problem in the relation between text and image.
MEE CHANG is an MA student in Korean Literature at Columbia University.
All events will be open both to the academic community at Columbia and the general public. Films, dates & speakers are subject to change.