Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries

Martial arts and the globalization of US andAsian film industries

Christina KleinMassachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Abstract This article investigates how globalization is affecting filmindustries in the USA and Asia. It argues that these industries arebecoming more closely integrated with one another both materially andaesthetically, and that this in turn is leading to the denationalization ofindividual films and film industries on both sides of the Pacific. The articleexplores how globalization is experienced differently by different filmindustries – and by different sectors within individual industries – andhow it entails both losses and opportunities for Asian film makers. Takingthe contemporary Hollywood and East Asian martial arts film as anexemplary cultural style of globalization, it also looks at how integrationinvolves both cultural homogenization and the production of difference.Specific topics discussed include the growth of Hollywood’s Asianmarkets, Jackie Chan and the flow of Hong Kong talent into Hollywood,Hollywood remakes of South Korean movies, the resurgence of Asian filmindustries, Hollywood’s local-language film production and ZhangYimou’s Hero.

Keywords Asian cinema ● Chinese cinema ● Columbia Pictures FilmProduction Asia ● globalization ● Hero ● Hollywood ● Hong Kong cinema● Jackie Chan ● Korean cinema ● martial arts

Introduction

Hollywood today is fascinated with martial arts to an extent unseen sincethe heyday of Bruce Lee in the early 1970s. The studios are importingmajor martial arts stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li from Hong Kong and

Article

Comparative American StudiesAn International Journal

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA andNew Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 2(3): 360–384DOI: 10.1177/1477570004046776

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putting them in a succession of big budget films, while signing second-tieractors like Donnie Yen to multi-picture contracts. Martial arts fight sceneshave become a ubiquitous feature in action films across the genre map,from science fiction (The Matrix, 1999) to vampire (Blade II, 2002) to super-hero (Daredevil, 2003) to video game (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, 2001) togirl’s empowerment (Charlie’s Angels, 2000) to costume drama (The LastSamurai, 2003). Children’s films (Shrek, 2001) and teen comedies (ScaryMovie, 2000) use martial arts to generate knowing laughs, while an inde-pendent film like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai(1999) uses them for existential musing. At the same time, martial artsfilms produced by Asian film industries are finding enthusiastic audiencesin the USA, as evidenced by the expanded holdings of many video storesand the making of a parody film like Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002). AngLee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) broke box office andAcademy Award records for a foreign language film when it crossed overfrom an art house to a mass audience, and in its wake have come theatri-cal re-releases of older martial arts films (Iron Monkey, 1993) and eageranticipation for new fare (Hero, 2002).

A number of factors are driving Hollywood’s embrace of martial arts,from a growing popular interest in many forms of Asian culture to theenthusiastic practice of martial arts by Americans across the socialspectrum. One factor that deserves particular attention is the globaliz-ation of the world’s film industries. Hollywood, of course, has operatedglobally since the 1910s and 1920s (Guback, 1969; Thompson, 1985;Vasey, 1997). Since the 1980s, however, it has entered a new phase ofglobalization that is changing its relationship with local Asian film indus-tries (Balio, 1998; Buck, 1992; Lent, 1990; Miller et al., 2001; Segrave,1997; Wasko, 1994). The big story now is that of integration and de-nationalization. Today we are seeing a partial erosion of the boundariesthat once separated Hollywood from local Asian film industries, and aconsequent intertwining of industries on both sides of the Pacific. As aresult, individual films and entire industries can no longer be adequatelyunderstood within a national framework (Keil, 2001; Lewis, 2001; Staiger,2002). Hollywood is becoming Asianized in diverse ways, while Asian filmindustries are in turn becoming Hollywoodized.

How should we understand this process of integration? Critics ofglobalization who employ the cultural imperialism model (Barber, 1995) orwho have a US-centric perspective that focuses exclusively on Holly-wood’s production and export of film (Miller et al., 2001) would have usthink primarily in terms of domination: global Hollywood is gobbling upa seemingly ever-increasing share of the world’s film markets and in doingso is driving local industries to the brink of collapse and homogenizing theworld’s film culture. Defenders of globalization, in turn, tend to downplaypower inequities between global and local media players: they would haveus think primarily in terms of increased cross-cultural exchange, expandedconsumer preferences and greater aesthetic diversity (Cowen, 2002).

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However, as Charles Acland writes, ‘It does not make sense to be for oragainst globalization . . . [G]eneral theories of the global risk simplifyingphenomena to the point of unrecognizability’ (Acland, 2003: 38). Instead,we must pay attention to the complex nature of cultural globalization bylooking at the diverse ways in which it is enacted and experienced inparticular instances. Ien Ang urges us to acknowledge the ‘contradictorylosses and opportunities’ that the globalization of media systems allowsand to explore the ways in which globalization is ‘actively and differen-tially responded to and negotiated within concrete local contexts andconditions’ (1996: 148). Attending to such local responses and negotiationsgives us a much fuller understanding of the ‘complex and contradictorydynamics of today’s “global culture” ’ (p. 153). It does so in part by forcingus to abandon the fiction of pure, homogeneous cultures that are corruptedby foreign influences (Morley and Robins, 1995: 7) and to recognize thecapacity for agency and strategic maneuvering among peoples who operateoutside the established centers of media production (Appadurai, 1996: 31).

My goal here is to explore some concrete instances of how the inte-gration of US and Asian film industries is being achieved – and how it isbeing negotiated by local actors – as both a material and an aestheticprocess. I am interested in how Hollywood and a number of Asian filmindustries are being knitted together through the transnationalization ofaudiences, labor pools, distribution networks and production capital. Ialso investigate the increasingly circular flows of star personae, visualstyles, and modes of storytelling between global Hollywood and its localAsian counterparts. These processes of material and stylistic integrationare not seamless but are marked by frictions and resistances, as insti-tutional, social and cultural pressures channel the transnational flows offilm culture along certain routes and raise up obstacles in theirpathways.

While homogenization is undeniably one consequence of such inte-gration, so is heterogenization. Localization, as Stuart Hall has argued, isan integral part of globalization. It leads to the proliferation of differencein two distinct ways. First, through global capitalism’s strategy ofworking through the local by absorbing, penetrating and negotiating withit without entirely destroying its unique particularities. And second,through local cultures’ ability to reinvigorate themselves as refuges fromand alternatives to global capitalism’s homogenizing tendencies, in partby appropriating innovations generated by the global that enable them tospeak their locality more effectively (Hall, 1997). The global and the local,far from existing as neatly dichotomized and opposed entities, are in factso interpenetrated as to be ‘mutually constitutive’ of one another (Ang,1996: 153).

The contemporary Hollywood and East Asian martial arts film is amaterial product of an increasingly transnational, trans-Pacific mode offilm production; it is also an expressive sign of cultural localization, inHall’s double sense of that term. We can thus read these films – with their

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contradictory dynamics of homogenization and heterogenization – as anexemplary cultural style of globalization.

The Asianization of Hollywood

We can see one kind of integration taking place in the globalization ofHollywood’s audience. Hollywood in the 1990s became an exportindustry, making movies primarily for people who live outside the USA –and increasingly for people who live in Asia. This has not always been thecase. Foreign audiences have always been important to Hollywood, buttheir relative value to the studios has fluctuated. From the 1910s through1941 they generated about 35 percent of the studios’ film rental income(Vasey, 1997: 7); that figure rose to about 50 percent in the 1960s and early1970s (Guback, 1969: 3), and then dropped back to about 35 percent againin the early 1980s (Segrave, 1997: 288). Foreign earnings began to climbin the mid-1980s and in 1994 they topped 50 percent (Balio, 1998: 60;Segrave, 1997: 288). While foreign film rentals have dipped belowdomestic earnings since 1999, Hollywood today remains heavily depend-ent on overseas audiences: big Hollywood movies typically earn most oftheir money outside the USA and executives now consider foreign audi-ences a primary, rather than secondary, source of revenue (‘All-Time’,2003; Groves, 2001a). This dependence on overseas markets hasprofoundly affected the form and content of Hollywood movies, as studioexecutives have concentrated their resources on the types of films thatcan best cross national, cultural and linguistic borders: spectacle-drivenfilms such as special-effects-heavy blockbusters, action films, starvehicles and physical comedies (Wasko, 1994: 236–7). The globalizationof audiences has had a denationalizing effect on the US film industry:while Hollywood’s blockbusters proclaim their Americanness on thesurface, their style and content has been so tailored to the world marketthat their cultural identity, as Jonathan Rosenbaum (2002: 221) hassuggested, must be seen as more multinational than national.

Asian markets did not become very important to Hollywood until the1990s. Although American films overwhelmingly dominated most Asianmarkets from the 1910s through the 1930s, the scarcity of theaters pluslow-ticket prices kept these markets small and unprofitable (Thompson,1985: 141–5; Vasey, 1997: 85). After World War II many Asian film marketsexpanded, but the studios’ share of them often declined as newly inde-pendent countries developed their own prolific film industries andprotected them with trade barriers; in 1953 Hollywood films occupied 48percent of the screen time in Asia, the lowest percentage for any region inthe world (Segrave, 1997: 286, 230). By the 1990s, however, Asian marketshad become an important arena of growth, as overall economic growth,trade liberalization and multiplexing expanded these film markets andmade them more accessible to Hollywood. In Japan the market share of


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imported (mostly Hollywood) films increased from 46 percent in 1989 to68 percent in 2000 (Segars, 1991: 243; 2002b: 198); in South Korea it grewfrom 60 percent in 1983 to 84 percent in 1993 (Paquet, 2004a; 2004b); andin Hong Kong it jumped from 22 percent in 1989 to over 50 percent in 1997(Elley, 1991: 190; 1999: 161). For the first time, Asian markets begangenerating substantial revenues for the studios: Japan became Holly-wood’s largest single overseas market and although Europe remainedHollywood’s largest regional market, Asia was its fastest growing one(Buck, 1992: 129; Hollinger, 2000). Studio executives today have their eyestrained on China and India, which are poised to embark on the marketgrowth already experienced by other parts of Asia. Although these marketsare still relatively small in terms of total box office receipts and difficultto operate within – China’s remains heavily regulated, while local films areoverwhelmingly popular in India – their potential is vast, given theirincreasing economic prosperity and populations of over 1 billion each.Already, Hollywood films claim about 60 percent of the ticket sales inChina while being limited to only about 30 percent of the screen time(Jones, 2002). In India they take about 3 percent to 5 percent of the overallmarket (a significant improvement over their paltry 0.5 percent share in1996), and have begun to out-perform Bollywood films in some major cities(‘Hollywood Gears Up’, 2002; Nag, 2002; Pearson, 2002).

The corollary to Hollywood’s growing Asian audience has been thedeclining market share of local Asian film industries. Many of these indus-tries saw their production rates and revenues decline in the 1980s andearly 1990s, as home entertainment technology became widely available,piracy ran rampant, and Hollywood presented increased competition.Some of these declines have been quite dramatic: China, for instance, sawits theatrical attendance rates plummet a nearly unbelievable 98 percentbetween 1979 and 2000 (Jones, 2002; Xu, 2002).

As the Hollywood studios became increasingly export-oriented theybegan hiring a broad range of Asian film workers, from big-name stars toanonymous skilled craftspeople; sometimes these workers came to Holly-wood, and other times Hollywood went to them. This transnationaliza-tion of Hollywood’s labor pool was driven by two developments, both ofwhich had roots in the growth of Hollywood’s foreign markets: theincreasing importance of spectacle-driven films and the consequentskyrocketing of film budgets.

In the 1990s there were more Asians working in Hollywood than everbefore, with most of them coming from the world’s third largest filmindustry in Hong Kong. John Woo’s arrival helped pave the way for otherdirectors (Tsui Hark, Peter Chan, Kirk Wong, Ringo Lam, Ronny Yu,Stanley Tong), actors (Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung,Michelle Yeoh) and martial arts choreographers (Yuen Wo-ping, YuenCheung-yan, Corey Yuen). This flow of talent out of Asia and into Holly-wood was unprecedented. Although Hollywood had often borrowed fromEuropean and Anglophone industries, it had never before borrowed so


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heavily from Asia. Several commentators have suggested that studio executives saw these high-end workers – many of whom had loyal fansacross Asia – as a means to penetrate Asian markets more effectively. ‘It’snot just a matter of seeing great talent’, explained one observer. ‘It’s amatter of seeing this talent that comes with a built-in audience which weare highly covetous of’. Others suggested that Hollywood was skimmingthe cream off one of the few other film industries capable of makingmovies popular with audiences worldwide (Hong Kong is the second-largest film exporting industry after Hollywood; Major, 1997: 26–8). Thestrength of the Hong Kong industry has always resided in its unparalleledability to portray action, with martial arts being the form of action thatHong Kong unquestionably did better than anyone else: after World WarII, Hong Kong film makers took a local cultural form deeply rooted inChinese religion, literature and opera and transformed it into a globallyrecognized form of cinematic spectacle. Hollywood hired Hong Kongactors, directors and choreographers in the 1990s because they had skillsHollywood needed. They brought the ability to produce a sophisticated,distinctive form of spectacle to an industry whose global expansiondepended upon the selling of spectacle.

Jackie Chan is a good example of the transnationalization of one kindof film worker: the star. As an actor, director and producer of martial artsand action films, Chan has been a pillar of the Hong Kong film industrysince the 1970s and the most popular star in Asia since the early 1980s.Chan’s box office power while he was in Hong Kong was based on hisunique – and spectacular – star persona. He combined an acrobatic styleof martial arts (based on years of grueling Peking Opera training) withdeath-defying physical stunts (which he always performed himself) andleavened the mixture with a heavy dose of physical comedy (inspired bysilent masters like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd).Aspiring to become a global rather than merely a regional star, Chan triedto break into the US market twice in the early 1980s but failed both times,in part because producers unwilling to accept his existing star personapushed him into the mold of the conventional American action hero.Chan’s breakthrough came in the mid-1990s, when a re-edited and dubbedversion of Rumble in the Bronx (1995) performed well in the USA andencouraged Hollywood to invite him back (Fore, 1997). With the commer-cial success of Rush Hour (1998), Chan became the first male Asian starsince Sessue Hayakawa in the 1910s to make it big in Hollywood. (BruceLee’s Hong Kong films were popular with American audiences in the 1970s,but he died before he could become a major player in Hollywood.) He hassince become a reliable earner for the studios, making a steady stream ofbig-budget films that perform well in the USA and abroad.

Jackie Chan’s Hollywood films are hybrid works in which the qualitiesthat made his Hong Kong films so distinctive have been both modified andmaintained. The Hollywoodization of Jackie Chan is undeniable. He hasbeen squeezed, patted, nipped and tucked in order to fit into a different


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culture industry. Chan’s studio-made films insert him into familiar Hollywood genres, give him a loquacious native-English speaking partnerto carry the dialogue scenes, curtail his tendency towards non-stopaction, and de-emphasize his acrobatic martial arts skill in favor of lessphysically challenging forms of action. The diminished scale of action inthese films is partially explainable by the limitations of Chan’s aging body,which has endured decades of abuse in Hong Kong. It is also evidence ofcertain industrial and cultural frictions: Chan has had to conform toHollywood’s convention that spectacle be subsumed to the demands ofthe narrative, an industrial standard that has defined Hollywood filmssince the 1910s and that contrasts sharply with Hong Kong’s tendency toprivilege spectacle at the expense of narrative. While the ability toproduce spectacle is precisely what Hollywood desired from Chan, itwanted his unique contributions to enhance – rather than challenge – itsestablished mode of storytelling.

At the same time, however, the unique comic-action star persona andperformance style that Chan cultivated in his Hong Kong films remains thedefining quality of his recent Hollywood productions. In Shanghai Knights(2003), as in his early Hong Kong film Drunken Master (1979), Chanportrays an everyman figure whose basic decency coexists with a near-masochistic ability to endure pain. All his films – both Hong Kong andHollywood – foreground his graceful athleticism and his inventive use ofprops, from stools, umbrellas and horses to clock-towers and helicopters.And several of his Hollywood films include scenes with Chinese dialogue,which allow the viewer to see Chan as an authoritative linguistic insider,rather than always as a foreigner in English and, by extension, America.

This transnationalization of Jackie Chan’s star persona is compoundedby the fact that even after cracking Hollywood he has continued to makefilms within the Hong Kong industry. Although his Hollywood and HongKong films are distributed and perform differently in different markets(with American viewers having easiest theatrical access to his Hollywoodfilms and Hong Kong audiences strongly preferring his locally made films;Lo, 2001: 474), there remains a degree of continuity between them recog-nizable by audiences everywhere. As one reviewer wrote in Hong Kong’sSouth China Morning Post, ‘Is there one person left on Earth who, uponcoming across a cinema screening a Jackie Chan film, could seriously ask:“Hmmmm. I wonder what that one is about?” Hardly. We all know exactlywhat we will get . . .’ (Scott, 2002: 4). A film in which Jackie Chan appearsand has some creative control is always to some extent a ‘Jackie Chanfilm’. Chan’s decision to work in both industries at the same time has ledto the simultaneous production by these two industries of a single cine-matic product – the ‘Jackie Chan film’ – that has become familiar to audi-ences around the world. Chan’s transnational ‘brand-scape’ (to modifyAppadurai, 1996) erodes the boundary between the Hollywood and HongKong industries, knitting them together at both the material level ofChan’s labor and the aesthetic level of his unique performance style.


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The move of many of Hong Kong’s top directors, stars and martial artschoreographers to Hollywood has been experienced within the Hong Kongindustry as an economically painful brain drain, and it reflects the highlyunequal relations of power between these two industries. As one Holly-wood entertainment lawyer warned a Hong Kong industry audience inthe late 1990s, ‘If you have talent, we’ll steal it’ (Murdoch, 1999). Suchpoaching of talent strengthens Hollywood while weakening the HongKong industry’s ability to compete in its own domestic market and inother Asian markets. One of the features of globalization, however, is thatit has different consequences in different situations. The transnational-ization of labor does not always weaken local film industries; sometimesit can strengthen them.

While the studios have looked to the Hong Kong industry primarily forworkers skilled in the planning, performance and representation of spec-tacular displays of action, they are turning to South Korea for a verydifferent pool of workers: screenwriters. As Hollywood has focused itsenergies on making the spectacle-driven blockbusters that sell wellaround the world, production and marketing budgets have balloonedfrom an average of $14 million in 1980 (Maltby, 1998: 37) to $102 millionby 2003 (Di Orio, 2004). In response, producers have tried to cut costswherever they can, especially in the area of non-star labor. This efforthas led them, in the past year or so, to discover the booming SouthKorean film industry. Impressed by recent Korean films’ high productionvalues and strong narratives – especially their fresh ideas, well-developed characters and imaginative storytelling – studio executiveshave been snapping up their remake rights (along with the rights for anumber of Japanese films as well; Elley, 2001; Friend, 2003; Lyons,2002). The studios are in effect buying the labor of South Korean andJapanese writers – which is much less expensive than that of theirAmerican counterparts – and incorporating these workers into the Holly-wood system at arm’s length. Rather than weakening the South Koreanand Japanese industries, as is the case with Hong Kong, this form oftransnationalized labor is providing them with a much-needed source ofadditional revenue.

The remakes of these South Korean and Japanese films will be, alongwith Jackie Chan’s films, another example of an Asianized Hollywoodcinema, as American actors portray characters and explore themesoriginally created by South Korean and Japanese writers and aimed atSouth Korean and Japanese audiences. It may be difficult, however, todistinguish between the American and Asian parts of these films, insofaras some South Korean writers have taken to emulating Hollywood modesof storytelling as a way of winning their own audience back from Holly-wood films. Some South Korean critics, in fact, deride their local industryas ‘Copywood’ and claim it has a tendency to produce ‘Hollywood moviesfeaturing Korean faces and Korean food for the purpose of localization,barely a step above dubbing or inserting subtitles’ (Kim, 2003). In buying


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up the labor of these Asian writers, is Hollywood buying somethingdistinctly South Korean or Japanese, or simply localized Asian versionsof Hollywood’s globally successful modes of storytelling? While thestudios are bypassing films that echo Hollywood overtly, part of theappeal of South Korean films no doubt lies in their combination of famili-arity and difference. Like its embrace of Jackie Chan’s Peking Opera- andBuster Keaton-inspired star persona, the integration of Asian screen-writers points to both Hollywood’s new openness to Asian material andto the circular (rather than one-way) nature of global cinematic flows.

There are other instances of the transnationalization of Hollywood’slabor pool. When the Wachowski brothers hired Hong Kong martial-arts-choreographer-extraordinaire Yuen Wo-ping to take charge of the actionscenes in The Matrix, they radically transformed the visual style of theAmerican action film – and brought it into closer aesthetic affiliation withthe contemporary Hong Kong action film. They also precipitated a flow ofHong Kong choreographers into Hollywood, where they have foundsteady employment. Quentin Tarantino’s decision, in turn, to shoot muchof his martial arts film Kill Bill (2003/2004) in China is part of an increas-ing trend in Hollywood to cut production costs by taking advantage ofChina’s inexpensive yet skilled film workers. In a manner similar to thepurchase of remake rights, these runaway productions may helpstrengthen the struggling Chinese film industry by providing a transfer ofboth capital and technical knowledge. Even when they do not draw sodirectly on Asian workers, Hollywood films are being influenced by Asianstyles. Disney animators have started to borrow from the work ofJapanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, while Bollywood’s musical andnarrative conventions are seeping into such mainstream studio fare asDaisy Mayer’s romantic comedy The Guru (2002).

The transnationalization of labor and style is clearly leading to theAsianization of Hollywood – but this Asianization is taking diverse forms.In some cases Hollywood movies are looking more like Asian films, as theyembrace star personae, visual styles and narrative conventions that arestrongly identified with a particular Asian film industry. In other cases,Hollywood’s use of Asian labor facilitates the ongoing, circular flow ofcinematic culture, as Hollywood imports indigenized versions of its own,previously exported styles and modes of narration. In still other cases,the use of Asian labor has no visible effect on style at all, but affects thefinancial organization and strength of both Hollywood and Asian filmindustries. The costs and benefits of transnationalization are distributedunevenly across the industries concerned – each of which is internallysegmented into multiple economic sectors – in ways that muddy thenotion of one national film industry dominating another. Hong Kongproducers have been hurt by the brain drain of high-end talent to Holly-wood, South Korean and Japanese producers welcome the influx of Holly-wood remake money, Chinese directors may benefit from Hollywood’srunaway productions, American blue-collar film workers and some


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screenwriters worry about jobs lost to their Asian counterparts, whileothers find inspiration in Japanese and Indian sources.

The Hollywoodization of Asian film industries

A few years after Hollywood’s foreign audience outstripped its domesticone, the world’s film industries approached another turning point in theirprocess of globalization. Around 1997 Hollywood executives began tonotice that although foreign markets were still expanding, the growthrate of the studios’ share had slowed down considerably and in somecases even reversed (Groves, 1998). Local film industries, it turned out,were showing signs of resurgence. Having been lured back into thetheaters by multiplexes and Hollywood blockbusters in the 1980s andearly 1990s (Stern, 2001), audiences around the world were now return-ing their attention to local films. By the end of the 1990s it looked like theoverwhelming domination of local markets by Hollywood films might bea stage rather than the endpoint of globalization and that it might becoming to an end. ‘None of us believe that U.S. product will sustain the60% to 70% market share that it currently has in many of these terri-tories’, one Columbia executive noted in 1998. ‘Our assessment is that themarket for local-language and local culture films is growing, and willgrow substantially over the next 10 to 20 years’ (Carver, 1998). In 2001,the studios’ overseas receipts fell almost 20 percent from the previousyear, due in large part to competition from what the president of Twen-tieth Century Fox called ‘vibrant’ local industries (Foroohar, 2002; ‘O’seasRentals See Downturn’, 2002).

While signs of revitalization first appeared in Europe, they were soonvisible in Asia as well. Local films secured the number one slot inThailand in 1999 (Nang Nak) and in 2000 (Bang Ra Jan), in 2001 theywere the top earners in Japan (Spirited Away), Hong Kong (ShaolinSoccer), Thailand (Suriyothai), and South Korea (Friend), and in 2002 theytook the top slot in Hong Kong (Internal Affairs), China (Big Shot’sFuneral), and South Korea (Marrying the Mafia). This trend continuedinto 2003, when local films again topped the box office in China (Hero),Japan (Bayside Shakedown 2), and South Korea (Memories of Murder).The nature of this resurgence varies: in some instances, the local marketshare has been boosted by the extraordinary popularity of a single movie(Hero in China, Spirited Away in Japan) and thus may indicate little aboutthe industry’s overall strength. Other industries, such as Hong Kong’s andThailand’s, have been able to produce a steadier flow of popular films. In2001 local films took in nearly 50 percent of Hong Kong’s box officereceipts (Kan, 2002a), the highest share in a decade, and in Thailand theygarnered about 30 percent, the highest share in 20 years (Chaiworaporn,2003b). While these figures still represent declines from historic highpoints, they signal a movement towards growth and ongoing viability.


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Buoyed by their success at the box office, a number of Asian industrieshave increased production. Thailand had 60 films scheduled for release in2003, up from a typical slate of about eight in the late 1990s(Amnatcharoenrit, 2002; Chaiworaporn, 2003a); Japan’s Shochiku studiois using revenues earned from exhibiting and distributing Hollywoodblockbusters to expand its production schedule (Groves, 2003d); andproduction is up in Hong Kong, where the Shaw Brothers studio markedits return to film production with the release of Drunken Monkey (2002),an old-school martial arts film starring Gordon Liu Chia-hui, whosecareer profile was significantly raised by his appearance in QuentinTarantino’s Kill Bill (Kan, 2003b).

South Korea offers the best example of a resurgent Asian industry. In1988 the government, acquiescing to years of pressure from Washingtonand Hollywood, lifted its restrictions on the importation and direct distri-bution of foreign films, a move which caused the market share of localfilms to drop from 27 percent in 1987 (Paquet, 2004a) to a mere 16 percentin 1993 (Paquet, 2004b). The first signs of rejuvenation appeared in 1997,when two local films performed particularly well at the box office. Theboom hit its stride in 1999 with the release of Shiri, a terrorist thrillerthat beat out Titanic as the highest grossing film in South Korean history,and three other local films that made the top ten (Paquet, 2004d). JointSecurity Area quickly surpassed Shiri’s box office record in 2000 (whenlocal films took five of the top ten slots; Paquet, 2004e), and in turn wasout-earned by Friend in 2001 (when local films took six of the top tenslots; Paquet, 2004f). In 2001 local films secured just over 50 percent ofthe domestic market, making South Korea one of the few countries in theworld where viewers preferred local movies to Hollywood fare. Althoughthe industry’s market share dipped slightly to 48 percent in 2002, itrebounded to an even more impressive 53 percent in 2003 and to awhopping 68 percent in the first half of 2004, when two record-breakingfilms (Silmido and Taegukgi) pushed Hollywood’s share of the marketdown to a mere 39 percent (KOFIC 2004a, 2004b). These numbers areparticularly impressive when one takes into account that the SouthKorean industry released only 78 films in 2002, compared to the 262 itimported from Hollywood (KOFIC, 2004c). A number of factors spurredthis revitalization, including solid government support, a screen quota fordomestic films of 146 days a year, an increase in private investment, andmultiplexing, which boosted attendance rates and increased the oppor-tunity for big box office returns. The industry is also learning lessonsfrom its competitors: a new generation of writers and directors is appro-priating stylistic elements from popular Hollywood and Hong Kong films,while producers are devoting more of their budgets to marketing (Kim,2000, 2002; Segars, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2002a).

This resurgence of local film industries can be seen as an unintendedconsequence of Hollywood’s domination of world film markets, as audi-ences turn away from the homogenizing tendencies of global culture and


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seek out movies that express their own cultural particularities. Suchstrengthening of local cultures – one form of localization – can be as mucha part of globalization as is cultural homogenization. It would be amistake, however, to see these revived local film industries in a relation-ship of simple opposition to global Hollywood. Asian film industries arenot so much resisting globalization as learning how to turn some of thetransformations it has unleashed to their own advantage.

Hollywood’s response to the revitalization of local film industries hasbeen to pursue its own strategies of localization. Looking for ways to turna profit on local audiences’ desires to see local movies, Hollywood sincethe mid-1990s has moved into the distribution of local films, both withintheir own domestic markets and internationally (Dawtrey, 1995). Holly-wood’s unparalleled distribution system has long been the key to its domi-nation of foreign markets. No other film industry can match theworldwide network of branch offices, the sophisticated marketing tech-niques, the financial resources, and the privileged relationship to themultiplexes. Today Asian films are being integrated into that system.Disney’s Buena Vista distributed Japan’s blockbuster anime film SpiritedAway in the USA and the popular South Korean horror film Phone (2002)in South Korea and Japan. Sony Classics distributed India’s hit filmLagaan (2001) in the USA and internationally, and Universal recently pre-bought the Japanese distribution rights for Taegukgi, the latest SouthKorean blockbuster (Groves, 2003c). (Local Asian distributors are alsoincreasingly handling Hollywood films in their own domestic markets:Japanese studios regularly distribute Hollywood films and CJ Entertain-ment distributes all DreamWorks films in South Korea, a result of itsparent conglomerate’s investment of over 10 percent in the Hollywoodproduction company; Segars, 2002a.)

While Asian film makers are thrilled to have access to Hollywood’spowerful distribution system, the studios are not simply opening upchannels through which Asian films flow around the world without friction.The studios also act as gatekeepers, filters, regulators and sometimes evenimpediments to the circulation of these films. Films that do not satisfystudio notions of marketability are unlikely to be picked up, therebycreating a disincentive to produce such films, and there is no guarantee thatthose films that are purchased will be marketed well, as Disney showedwhen it gave Spirited Away a half-hearted US release (Kehr, 2003). AlthoughDisney’s semi-autonomous Miramax division is a major distributor of Asianfilms, it has recently become notorious for actually inhibiting their circu-lation in the USA. Miramax has long delayed the release of many filmswhose theatrical distribution rights it owns – including Thailand’s Tears ofthe Black Tiger (2000) and Hong Kong’s Shaolin Soccer (2001) and The Touch(2002) – and is blocking the import into the USA of legitimate VHS/DVDversions of the many films to which it owns the US home entertainmentrights. When it does distribute Asian films – especially commercial actionfilms – Miramax often modifies them by dubbing them, editing them,


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altering dialogue, changing titles and creating new soundtracks (Alliance,n.d.; Dombrowski, 2003; Elley, 2002; Kan, 2002c). In effect, the studio isculturally ‘de-odorizing’ these films by removing or changing thoseelements it believes might hamper the films’ reception among a mass USaudience, including elements that are too culturally specific, potentiallyoffensive, or not up to ‘international’ – i.e. Hollywood – standards(Iwabuchi, 2002: 27). We can see here how globalization’s homogenizingand heterogenizing tendencies work side by side: in making Asian filmsavailable to American viewers, Miramax contributes to the heterogeniz-ation of American film culture, while its modifications of these films stripsthem of some of their culturally distinct features.

Hollywood’s second response to the resurgence of local film industrieshas been to go into the business of making local – ‘foreign’ – movies.Following their move into local-language television production, a numberof studios – including Columbia, Warner Brothers, Disney/Buena Vista,Miramax and Universal – have created special overseas divisions orentered into partnerships to co-produce local language films in Germany,Spain, France, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, India, South Korea, China, HongKong and Taiwan (Brodesser, 2000; Dawtrey, 2002; Dunkley and Harris,2001; Foroohar, 2002; Groves, 2001b). Their goal is to use Hollywoodproduction methods to produce commercially successful local-contentfilms. While some of these films target an international market, mostaddress local audiences. ‘This is a way’, explained one Buena Vista execu-tive, ‘to tap into the increasing local demand in these countries for theirown domestic product’ (Grove, 1997). Local language production hasother benefits for the studios as well, insofar as it allows them to takeadvantage of production subsidies and tax breaks offered by local govern-ments, and to evade local import restrictions and screen quotas. It alsoproduces content for the studios’ media conglomerate parents, whoseworldwide distribution pipelines can carry more movies than can beproduced and released in the USA (Horst, 2002). Such productions havethe added political benefit of fending off charges of cultural imperialism.‘Pouring money into a territory’s local pictures’, observed one Hollywoodexecutive, ‘dissipates the amount of anti-U.S. feeling’ and backs up Holly-wood’s claims to national governments that it is interested in strength-ening, not destroying, local film industries (Carver, 1998).

Much of this foreign-language film production is taking place in Asia,where the Japan-based Sony Corporation has made the biggest invest-ment. In 1998 Sony created Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia, aHong Kong-based subsidiary of its Hollywood studio. This division hassince produced a number of Chinese films, including Zhang Yimou’s NotOne Less (1999) and The Road Home (1999), He Ping’s Warriors of Heavenand Earth (2003), and Feng Xiaogang’s Big Shot’s Funeral (2001) and CellPhone (2003). It has also made Hong Kong films, including Tsui Hark’sTime and Tide (2000), Corey Yuen’s So Close (2002), and Stephen Chow’sKung Fu Hustle (forthcoming), and a Taiwanese film, Double Vision


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(2002), directed by Chen Kuo-fu. In addition, it has a Korean-languageremake of David Mamet’s Things Change in the works (Dunkley, 2002).Most of these films have performed respectably in their own domesticmarkets and some, such as Big Shot’s Funeral, Cell Phone and DoubleVision, were major hits: audiences embraced these films as local produc-tions and took pride in their ability to beat out the imported Hollywoodcompetition (‘Cell Phone’, n.d.; Wu, 2002a). The studio had its greatestinternational success with diasporic Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s martialarts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While the film performedvariably across Asia, it took North America and Europe by storm, gener-ating the highest box office returns of any foreign-language film in UShistory, carrying away four Academy Awards, and raising hopes amongAsian film makers that they might finally be able to penetrate America’slucrative but notoriously closed marketplace.

Hollywood’s decision to begin producing Asian language films is anexample of the corporate strategy of global localization, or ‘glocalization’.In this approach, transnational corporations seek to expand their world-wide market share not by exporting identical products, but by producingtheir products locally under the supervision of managers who can tailorthem to local tastes and conditions (Robertson, 1995). A degree of heter-ogenization, rather than wholesale homogenization, becomes the meansthrough which these corporations extend their reach. Having basicallyinvented the concept of glocalization in the 1980s, Sony urged the studiosto increase their foreign-language production in the 1990s. ‘The Holly-wood-centric view of the world’, said one Sony executive, ‘just doesn’twork anymore’ (Weiner, 1997). And indeed, this change in worldview hasproved profitable for the studios, which in 2002 recovered some of theirlost ground in overseas markets, in part because of their success inproducing and distributing local – or ‘glocal’ – films (Groves, 2003a).

One of the consequences of glocalization is that it no longer makesmuch sense to think of Hollywood as being separate from and incompetition with local Asian film industries. Far from being outsiders tomany Asian film industries, the studios today are thoroughly integratedinto them as local players at the levels of production, distribution andexhibition. Box office figures delineating the relative market share ofdomestic and imported films are losing their relevance as gauges of Holly-wood’s position in overseas markets, since so many ‘local’ films are nowbeing produced and distributed by Hollywood studios. In fact, Hollywoodhas become so invested in local industries that declines in their domesticmarket share have become cause for concern rather than celebration.Says the president of Buena Vista International, ‘We’re very active in co-productions and acquisitions, so we want to see strong local industries’(Groves, 2002). The result is a denationalization of film industries on bothsides of the Pacific, as Hollywood produces foreign language films forforeign markets, and as Asian industries become increasingly integratedinto a corporate system headquartered in the USA.


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It is tempting to see Hollywood’s move into local language productionas a form of cultural imperialism, a backdoor way to take control of localfilm industries and erode their distinctive qualities by producing Holly-wood movies with a local veneer. And indeed the cultural identity of theseHollywood-produced Asian films is sometimes ambiguous: viewers inChina and Hong Kong sometimes saw Crouching Tiger as a faux-ChineseHollywood movie (Klein, 2004). The charge of cultural imperialismbecomes less clear cut, however, if we shift our perspective and see thesefilms as a strategy on the part of local Asian film industries to go globalthemselves: to remake themselves so that they can compete moresuccessfully with imported Hollywood movies and thus reclaim a greatershare of their own domestic markets. Throughout Asia there are reform-minded producers and directors – including many Hong Kong returneesfrom Hollywood (Landler, 2000) – who are changing the way they makemovies and who believe their industries will prosper as a result. For thesefilm makers, Crouching Tiger is one of the most important Asian moviesof this generation because it offers them a model to emulate (Chute, 2003;Hansen, 2001).

The Chinese film Hero has perhaps hewed most closely to Ang Lee’smodel. Like Crouching Tiger, Hero is a swordplay martial arts film set inthe historical past. It was directed by Zhang Yimou, like Lee an art housedirector with a solid reputation in the West, and shot on the mainlandwith all Mandarin dialogue (although Zhang, learning from one of Lee’sblunders, dubbed the voices of his Cantonese-speaking actors so as not tooffend his Mandarin-speaking viewers with their accents; Elley, 2003).Hero was a huge critical and commercial success in China, where its $36million box office made it the highest-grossing Chinese film ever andsecond only to Titanic in overall earnings (Jones, 2003; Muzi News,2003). It was also nominated for an Academy Award as best foreignlanguage film. The film’s success has given the struggling Chineseindustry a much-needed boost in earnings and morale. For all thesereasons, Hero offers a clarifying example of the tactics that Asian filmindustries are pursuing as they seek to reinvent themselves as globalplayers.

The first imperative in the eyes of many Asian film makers is to improvethe production values of Asia’s commercial cinema (Kan, 2002b; MuziNews, 2001; United Press International, 1994). While Asian art cinema hasalways had extremely high standards, trade barriers allowed commercialfilm makers to churn out cheaply made films and still be assured a viableshare of the market. Once Hollywood films flooded in, however, audiences’expectations changed and the local commercial fare looked threadbare incomparison. Film makers throughout Asia became convinced that theycould win their viewers back if they offered them production values morein keeping with the Hollywood standard: stronger scripts, better acting,improved mise-en-scene, and advanced sound and image technology.National governments, no longer able to protect film industries with trade


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barriers, are encouraging this move towards market competitiveness byredirecting resources away from the production of art films, which holdlittle appeal for local viewers, and towards higher-quality commercial fare(Jazmines, 2002; Wu, 2002b). Zhang Yimou treated Hero as a showcase forhis view that the future of Asian cinema lies in well-crafted commercialproductions (Wu, 2003). Zhang has been very clear that he sees Hero as a‘commercial action film’ that differs in important ways from his earlierworks (‘Hero News 58’, n.d.). Yet he brought to this unabashed piece ofgenre work the same exacting standards that one finds in Ju Dou (1990) orRaise the Red Lantern (1992): Hero has first-rate cinematography, ex-quisite costumes and settings, internationally known stars, and evenspecial effects. The Chinese government, which had banned some ofZhang’s earlier films, put its weight behind Hero by promoting it enthusi-astically in the press, allowing it to premiere in Beijing’s hallowed GreatHall of the People, and making every effort to prevent its piracy. Heroembodies the joint effort by Asian film makers and governments to reclaimtheir own domestic markets by producing high quality commercial filmsthat local viewers will want to watch.

The second imperative driving Asian film makers is professionalization.Many Asian film industries, including the region’s largest in Hong Kongand India, have been run in a seat-of-the-pants fashion since the collapseof their studio systems decades ago. Financing came from individualproducers or organized crime, projects were approved and shooting beganwithout completed scripts, sound and camera equipment was outdated,and pre- and post-production were rushed. Today a number of producersand directors are promoting disciplining and rationalizing processes thatecho some of the changes that Hollywood underwent in the 1910s (Bamzai,2001; Chute, 2003; ‘Dil Chahta Hai’, 2002; ‘India: This Lagaan’, 2001; Kan,2002a; Kripalini, 2002; Thussu, 2002). Often these reformers have done astint in Hollywood (Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh), have made a local-language Hollywood film (Zhang Yimou), or have other ties to global capi-talism (India’s Aamir Khan has been a spokesman for Coke and Pepsi).Together, they are institutionalizing film financing, using newer technolo-gies, allocating more time for pre- and post-production, and devoting moreattention to marketing. Such professionalization costs money, of course,and today film budgets are increasing to record heights throughout Asia.While the average Asian film costs less than $1.5 million, South Korea’sResurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002) cost $9.2 million, India’sDevdas (2001) cost $10.2 million, Hong Kong’s The Touch cost $20 million,and Hero cost $31 million.

Where is this money coming from? In addition to professional sourcesof financing such as banks and well-capitalized media companies, localproducers are following Hollywood’s model of pre-selling their films tothe ancillary home entertainment markets, and some industries areconcentrating their resources on fewer films. Collaboration with a Holly-wood studio is one of the most common means of big-budget financing,


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and as such should be seen as a local Asian strategy for survival as muchas a global Hollywood strategy for domination. Zhang Yimou, for instance,financed Hero by pre-selling North American distribution rights toMiramax for a reported $20 million. (Like other Asian films, Hero hasencountered some friction with Miramax: despite apparently demandingthat Zhang trim the film by 18 minutes to make it more palatable toAmerican viewers, the studio did nothing to promote it after it receivedan Academy Award nomination and has repeatedly pushed back its USrelease date; ‘Hero Breaking News 247’, n.d.).

A third tactic pursued by Asian film industries involves regionalization.By pooling resources across national boundaries, producers are able toimprove production values while keeping costs down. A transnationalChinese film industry that brings together Hong Kong, Taiwan, and themainland has been taking shape since the early 1980s (Lu, 1997), and tiesare also being forged among Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, South Koreaand Japan. Extending such regionalization westward, Asian industries arealso forging production ties with the USA, Australia and some Europeancountries (Dore, 2003; Hopewell, 2003). Hero is an example of suchregional film making. Zhang Yimou co-produced the film with Bill Kong ofHong Kong, who also produced Crouching Tiger, and he used his hugebudget to buy the best talent that the region had to offer. Zhang hired starsbased in China (Zhang Zhiyi), Hong Kong (Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung) andthe USA (Jet Li, Donnie Yen). He brought in a cinematographer (Christo-pher Doyle) and an action director (Tony Ching Siu-tung) from Hong Kong,an Academy Award winning costume designer from Japan (Emi Wada),and an Academy Award winning composer (Tan Dun, who also worked onCrouching Tiger) and a violinist (Itzhak Perlman) from the USA. He shotthe film in China, where skilled labor is cheap, and used US and Australianpost-production houses for the special effects. The result is a stylisticallyhybrid film. The actors and martial arts choreography give the film adistinctly Hong Kong feel, the costumes impart a vaguely Japanese look,the soundtrack has clear echoes of Crouching Tiger, while the overall slick-ness of production and the special effects suggest Hollywood’s influence.

The regionalization of Asian film industries can also be seen in theirincreasing orientation towards foreign markets. Most Asian film industriesother than Hong Kong have historically produced films exclusively for theirdomestic markets, and the small size of these markets has kept budgets andproduction values low; even exporting industries such as India’s have beenlargely, although not exclusively, confined to their own diasporic markets.As budgets have risen, Asian producers are beginning to focus more onexports – both within the region and to the bigger markets of the USA andEurope – and overseas earnings are rising to new heights (Segars, 2002a;‘Thailand Movie’, 2002). Bollywood film makers, jealous of the success thatChinese-language art and action movies have found in the West, areparticularly eager to produce cross-over films, although they have not quitesucceeded yet (Boland, 2001; ‘Bollywood Kitsch Goes International’, 2002;


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Dunkley, 2002, Pearson, 2003; ‘1,500 Delegates to Attend Meet on Enter-tainment’, 2003;). The tailoring of films for foreign markets is inevitablyleading to changes in the form and content of Asian films, just as it has inHollywood. Multinational casts and crews have become increasinglycommon as producers seek to satisfy the tastes of diverse audiences, andUS locations, English or American actors, and interspersed English dialoguecan be found in films made with an eye towards Western markets, such asHong Kong’s The Touch, China’s Big Shot’s Funeral, Taiwan’s Double Vision,and India’s Lagaan and Kaante (2003). As is the case with Hollywood films,action and spectacle export well, as attested to by the regional success ofthe terrorist thriller Shiri and the horror film Ringu. Hero, which Zhangdesigned to ‘cater to international tastes’, emulates Crouching Tiger’ssynthesis of art-house and action-film conventions, providing viewers withplenty of dynamic martial arts spectacle as well as an intellectually satis-fying aesthetic experience (Muzi News, 2002). It has also exported well,earing over $30 million in Japan, plus another $40 million in the rest ofAsia and Europe (Schwarzacher, 2003; Oei, 2003).

A fourth tactic pursued by Asian film makers bent on winning back localaudiences has been to borrow elements of Hollywood’s visual and narrativestyle. In many cases, the films that have broken box office records in theirown domestic markets are the ones that have learned the most from thecompetition and appropriated those elements that seem to attract viewers.One of the primary concerns of Asian film makers has been to improve thequality of their screenplays (Kan, 2003a; Young, 1996), which often meanssubordinating spectacle to the demands of a strong narrative. The makersof Infernal Affairs pared down their action scenes to a bare minimum inorder to focus more attention on the story (which prompted a frenziedbidding war for the remake rights among Hollywood studios; Fleming, 2003),and a Miramax executive explained his company’s eagerness to invest inHero by pointing to its ‘really good’ script, noting that ‘a thought-provokingaction film is rather unusual’ (Mazurekewich, 2002). At the same time, Asiandirectors are also borrowing Hollywood’s style of spectacle. The director ofShiri took great pains to emulate Hollywood’s realistic scenes of violentgunplay, going so far as to rent his prop guns from a Los Angeles company,while Shaolin Soccer, a martial arts-sports film that became the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong history, was one of the first Hong Kong films todevote a substantial portion of its budget to digital special effects.

If these Asian films slavishly copied Hollywood in every aspect, theywould be fine examples of cultural imperialism. But invariably they pursuea fifth tactic as well – going local. ‘Local themes with global resources’seems to be the motto of reformers throughout Asia (‘Bollywood KitschGoes International’, 2002). The director of Taiwan’s hit film Double Visioncredited his film’s success to its combination of ‘typical (Hollywood) struc-ture’ and ‘Taiwanese content’ (Kaur, 2002): ‘We have Hollywood productionvalues, a tight story and smart script, but it has themes Asian audiencescan identify with’ (Wu, 2002a). These films must not be so local, however,


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as to jeopardize their exportability; their local stories must also have somebroader appeal. Spirited Away resonates with Japanese religious traditions,while also echoing Western fairy tales and journey myths. Shiri and JointSecurity Area focus on the tensions between North and South Korea andthe deep emotional appeal of South Korea’s ‘sunshine policy’ of rapproche-ment, while also telling stories of trust and betrayal. Lagaan narrates botha fictional episode in India’s anti-colonial struggle and a universal story ofan underdog defeating an unjust oppressor. Shaolin Soccer displays a veryHong Kong sense of humor rooted in masculine humiliation, while alsoreplicating the visual look of globally popular video games. The hybridityof these films is thus triple. They combine Hollywood production valueswith local themes that also have trans-local appeal.

Hero expresses its local cultural identity through its adherence to manyof the genre conventions of the Chinese martial arts film and especiallythrough its display of genuine martial arts virtuosity – precisely thethings that Hollywood martial arts films tend to ignore. The scene of JetLi and Donnie Yen’s encounter is one of the strongest in the entire film,as the film’s pace slows down and the camera pulls back to allow theviewer to linger in the visual pleasures of their highly-skilled combat. Thefilm communicates a more political sense of the local through its storyand theme. The film offers a sympathetic retelling of the well-knownstory of China’s first emperor, the ruthless Qin Shihuang, who unified thecountry circa 220 BC by brutally crushing all opposition, and the severalunsuccessful attempts to assassinate him. Qin’s reputation was rehabili-tated by Mao Zedong, who saw him as an inspirational figure, and heremains a touchstone figure for the Communist Party today as it tries tohold China intact while making the wrenching transition to capitalism(Kahn, 2003). At its heart, this is a film about state formation. It reaffirmsthe need for a strong leader who can create a coherent state out of socialchaos, and it defines heroism as the ability to recognize social stability asa supreme value and to sacrifice one’s life for it. Needless to say, suchvalues are not common in even the most Hong Kong-influenced Holly-wood films and they hardly seem designed to appeal to individualisticAmericans (which may partially explain Miramax’s delay in releasing it).Hero stands as an exemplary instance of the kind of hybrid film that isbeing produced within an increasingly transnational system. Materiallyand aesthetically indebted to Hollywood, no one could confuse it for a‘Hollywood’ film – neither textually, in terms of its visual style, narrative,and ideology, nor in terms of its reception, insofar as Chinese and EastAsian audiences have embraced it as a local film.

Conclusion

My goal here has been to give an overview of what the globalization of USand Asian film industries entails. In doing so, I have tried to move beyond


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the condemnation or celebration of cultural globalization in general byexploring some of the specific complexities that mark the transnationalrelationships within this particular culture industry. I have tried to high-light how all the parties involved are being transformed, although not allin the same way. While Hollywood has the most power to shape thesetransformations, it is a mistake to see Asian film makers and industriesmerely as passive victims – or as being on the brink of death.

One of globalization’s most important consequences is the increasingdifficulty in making clear distinctions between what is a local Asian filmand what is a global Hollywood film, at both the material and theaesthetic level. Hollywood, in many ways, is no longer an American filmindustry: the major studios are not only divisions of global mediaconglomerates, but transnational corporations in their own right thatthink about markets, labor pools, production and distribution on a globalrather than a national scale. Precisely in order to become more globallymarketable, Hollywood films are absorbing many Asian elements, includ-ing various kinds of workers, star personae, styles of action and stories.Asian film industries are likewise becoming less exclusively Chinese,Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean or Indian, as the Hollywood studiosbecome ever more powerful players in local production, distribution andexhibition, and as Asian film makers, in an effort to win back their localaudiences and increase their films’ export potential, appropriate andindigenize Hollywood conventions. Hollywoodization and Asianization –globalization and localization, homogenization and heterogenization – gohand in hand.

The proliferation of martial arts in contemporary commercial Holly-wood and Asian cinema belongs to a century-long cinematic history oftrans-Pacific borrowing and negotiation. It should also be seen, however,as a cultural expression of the new social and economic formations thathave been brought into existence by the latest phase of globalization.When we look at these displays of martial arts on our movie screens, weshould also look through them to the global flows of labor and capital, tothe heightened demand for market-expanding spectacle and action films,to the corporate strategy of glocalization, to the deeply felt need for cine-matic expressions of cultural particularity. We should see these displaysas stylistic manifestations of the complex process of integration that hasreshaped film industries in the USA and Asia over the past 20 years. Theunique properties of the martial arts film make it particularly amenableto global appropriation. It is both a strong genre with deep roots in manyforms of East Asian culture and a flexible one whose many subgenresenable it to blend well with other kinds of films. To borrow from JamesClifford (1997: 251), the martial arts film partakes of both roots androutes: its origins lie deep within particular cultural traditions and it alsotravels well. It is a form of local culture that is thriving under globaliz-ation, adapting to new conditions and taking on new meanings withoutlosing all connection to its origins.


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(consulted 1 August 2004).Kan, Wendy (2002c) ‘Fans Protest Disney’s Editing of Asian Films’, Variety.com

10 November (consulted 1 August 2004).Kan, Wendy (2003a) ‘Local Scripts Still Found Lacking’, Variety.com 11 May

(consulted 1 August 2004).Kan, Wendy (2003b) ‘Shaws Returns to Chopsock’, Variety.com 16 May

(consulted 1 August 2004).Kaur, Manueet (2002) ‘Serial Killer Thriller’, New Straits Times (Malaysia) 27

October: 15.Kehr, Dave (2003) ‘At the Movies: Equal Treatment for Each Film?’, New York

Times 7 February: E13.Keil, Charlie (2001) ‘American Cinema in the 1990s and Beyond: Whose Country’s

Filmmaking is it Anyway?’, in Jon Lewis (ed.) The End of Cinema as We KnowIt, pp. 53–60. New York: New York University Press,

Kim, Carolyn Hyun-Kyung (2000) ‘Building the Korean Film Industry’sCompetitiveness’, Pacific Law & Policy Journal 9(2): 353–78.

Kim, Mi Hui (2003) ‘ “ Copywood” Pix Pay Unwanted Hommage’, Variety.com 13July (consulted 1 August 2004).

Klein, Christina (2004) ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading’,Cinema Journal 43(4).

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KOFIC (Korean Film Commission) (2004b) ‘Korean Cinema Records 68.3% marketshare through May 31,’ June 18, 2004. URL (accessed 9 July 2004):http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/news.

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13 August: 11 (Sec. 2). Lent, John (1990) The Asian Film Industry. Austin: University of Texas Press.Lewis, Jon (2001) ‘The End of Cinema as We Know It and I Feel . . .’, in Jon

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Lyons, Charles (2002) ‘Remakes Remodel Foreign Pix’, Variety 21–7 October: 24.Major, Wade (1997) ‘Hollywood’s Asian Strategy’, Transpacific March: 24–35.


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Murdoch, Blake (1999) ‘FilMart Panel: Output for Asian Film Not Rosy’,Hollywood Reporter 25 June.

Muzi News (2001) ‘Dragons and Tigers Multiply at Cannes Film Festival’, 27May. URL (consulted 15 January): www.muzi.com

Muzi News (2002) ‘Lateline News: 2002–8–3’. URL (consulted 15 January):www.muzi.com

Muzi News (2003) ‘Lateline News: 2003–1–13’. URL (consulted 15 January):www.muzi.com

Nag, Ashoke (2002) ‘Dubs Up Profile of H’wood Pix’, Variety.com 5 February(consulted 1 August 2004).

Oei, Lily (2003) ‘Focus on Zhang Actioner’, Variety.com October 26 (consulted 1August 2004).

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http://koreanfilm.orgPaquet, Darcy (2004d) ‘Korean Film Page – 1999’. URL (consulted 23 May):

http://koreanfilm.orgPaquet, Darcy (2004e) ‘Korean Film Page – 2000’. URL (consulted 23 May):

http://koreanfilm.orgPaquet, Darcy (2004f) ‘Korean Film Page – 2001’. URL (consulted 23 May):

http://koreanfilm.orgPearson, Bryan (2002) ‘H’wood Speaks to Middle Class’, Variety 26 August–1

September: 14.Pearson, Bryan (2003) ‘India Frames Local Biz for Close-Up’, Variety.com 13

March (consulted 1 August 2004).Robertson, Roland (1995) ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and

Homogeneity–Heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and RolandRobertson (eds) Global Modernities, pp. 25–44. London: SAGE.

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Web Alliance for the Respectful Treatment of Hong Kong Films (2004) URL(consulted 23 May): www.petitiononline.com/warthkf/petition.html

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(consulted 1 August 2004).Wu, Nelson H. (2003) ‘B.O. Goes from Zero to “Hero” ’ , Variety 27 January–2

February: 13.Xu Ying (2002) ‘Impact of Globalization on the Cinema in China’, Asian Cinema

13(1): 39–43.Young, Deborah (1996) ‘Local Films Still India’s Sacred Cash Cow’, Variety, 26

February – 3 March: 169.


Christina Klein is an associate professor of literature at MIT. Sheis the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the MiddlebrowImagination, 1945–1961 (University of California Press, 2003) andof ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading’, inCinema Journal. Address: 179 Appleton St, #3, Cambridge, MA02138, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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Martial arts and the globalization of US and Asian film industries

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