Cinema and Development: Towards an Ideological History of Asian Cinema as “World Cinema”

Abstract

Is it desirable or possible to theorize about Asian cinema without invoking the history of “world cinema”? Indeed, much comparative work remains to be done to conceptualize collectively—as a regional unit within a global system—the history of Asian cinema in terms of parallel national trajectories, whereby local paradigm shifts in a society’s cultural production are linked to common geopolitical processes of modernization and development that integrate nations into a capitalist global economy. Resituating within the history of “world cinema” as a developing system or language paradigmatic Hong Kong films from the postwar period to the present that address poverty, this essay draws upon Jameson, Casanova, and Moretti for methods to construct a hypothetical model that suggests patterns in the relationship between societal development and the ideological deployment of specific narrative forms and stylistic options in the progressive globalization of the Asian region and its national cinemas.