Table Of Content

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media Issue 48 Winter 2006 Source: ejumpcut.org Jump Cut was founded as a print publication by John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage in Bloomington, Indiana, and published its first issue in1974. It was conceived as an alternative publication of media criticism—emphasizing left, feminist, and LGBTQ perspectives. It evolved into an online publication in 2001, bringing all its back issues with it. This electronic version was created with the approval of the Jump Cut editors and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA NEW. Classic issues from the past now online Be sure to visit our Classic issues from the past. More reprints of back issues will be added over the next few years. No. 48, winter 2006 (Click here for text only version) Fictions and their viewers Making women warriors: a transnational reading of Asian female action heroes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by L.S. Kim Asian women warriors offer an alternative to the stereotype of passive Asian femininity, yet Orientalism remains a framework for their spectatorial reception, since these powerful Asian action heroes are simultaneously exoticized and fetishized. The Kryptonite closet: silence and queer secrecy in Smallville by Jes Battis This article explores the network of queer secrets and closets within the hit tv show Smallville, as well as the relationship between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor. Twenty-first century Superman: Smallville and New Media mythmaking by Cary M. Jones This article explores the new media texts surrounding Smallville, addressing how the myth of Superman has evolved over time to take advantage of new technologies and maintained its cultural relevancy. DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation by Pavel Skopal Moral fictions Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: Cinema of witness by Amy Kaminsky Bechis uses a popular feature fiction form to try to engage Argentine audiences with the realities of the Dirty War, which had occured over a ten year span thirty years before but was never emotionally absorbed into the national consciousness. What would Buffy do? Feminist ethics and epistemic violence by Shannon Craigo-Snell The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer provides a landscape and language to analyze the complexites of ethics, violence, and sex. It also acknowledges the ways in which feminism, which aims to destroy traditional ways of viewing the world, is violent. The Woodsman: saying the unsayable by Jamie Bennett The Woodsman provides a challenge to popular views on managing sex offenders in the community, providing criticism of current policy, and suggesting more positive alternatives. The Woodsman: full disclosure by Julia Lesage and Chuck Kleinhans The Woodsman is a controversial film in which Kevin Bacon gives a powerful, empathetic performance as a child molester attempting to resettle in the community after being released from prison.The script effectively utilizes narrative tension to evoke or work with the contradictory emotions and perspectives viewers bring to the film. Collateral Damage: terrorism, melodrama, and the action film on the eve of 9/11 by Russell Meeuf Showing how popular images and narratives of terrorism support fundamental U.S. myths about violence and morality, this essay traces in Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage, one of the last action films made in pre-9/11 Hollywood, relations between spectacular violence, rhetoric of terrorism, and logic of melodrama. Films of Michael Haneke: the utopia of fear by Justin Vicari Deeply pessimistic, and preoccupied with the idea of "everyday" apocalypse, the films of Michael Haneke share philosophical ground with the writings of Theodor W. Adorno. New worlds of documentary Introduction: new worlds of documentary by Julia Lesage Terri Schiavo and the media Emergency analysis, Terri Schiavo: introduction The cutting edge: emergencies in visual culture by Janet Staiger In public controversies there is an on-going need to provide possible discourses and stories so that those holding progressive opinions remain unshaken in their opinions and those not yet decided have a reason to adopt progressive interpretations. Schiavo videos' context and reception: timely triage by Diane Waldman An analysis of the legal, medical, and political context of the widely-seen Schiavo video excerpts, the preferred reading offered by the Schindler family and their supporters on their website, and responses on the 'blogosphere' and elsewhere. Emergency analysis: the academic traffic in images by Catherine L. Preston Certain still images of Terri Schiavo became cultural icons as they circulated across media and social arenas. Preston does a cultural biography of the Schiavo images taken together as a "media event. The videographic persistence of Terri Schiavo by Janet Walker Walker explores the ways that photography and video are evidence of the simultaneous presence of life and death and how this is particularly poignant in the case of the Schiavo videos. Television and audio documentary A walk on the wild side: the changing face of TV wildlife documentary by Richard Kilborn "Adapting to survive": reflections on changes occurring in TV wildlife programming as broadcasting becomes ever more competitive. Strange Justice: sounding out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and constructing spin in the name of justice by Steve Lipkin In its cinematic construction, Strange Justice sutures real and recreated materials in a way that models the very processes the film exposes — that is, the way politicians shape public perception and opinion. Giving voice: performance and authenticity in the documentary musical by Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe The term 'documentary musical' ought to be an oxymoron, but British film director Brian Hill has made a specialty of them - Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe explore a new hybrid. Video Vigilantes and the work of shame by Gareth Palmer Shame is seen here in documentary forms as a productive force creating many and varied subject positions. Audio documentary: a polemical introduction for the visual studies crowd by Chuck Kleinhans An overview of what's happening in audio and radio documentary today, including extensive Internet links. Global reach TV news titles: picturing the planet by Sean Cubitt The globe seen in TV news logos is produced by computer graphics technology and implies a globalized, networked subjectivity that is mainly an omnivoyant observer, produced by news gatherers and producers. Les Archives de la Planète: a cinematographic atlas by Teresa Castro An early Frrench photographic inventory of the " known world" uses the model of the atlas, a book of maps, to assemble, organize, and transmit images; it thus constitutes a way of symbolically dominating and grasping the world through vision. Cinephilia and the travel film: Gambling, Gods and LSD by Catherine Russell Peter Mettler’s experimental travel film Gambling, Gods and LSD (2001) is examined as an experiment in transcending the limitations of image culture. This article looks at the film as an epistemological treatise on trans-cultural knowledge that points to the role of cinephilia in global industrial modernity. Independent documentarists Dark Days: a narrative of environmental adaptation by Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray In this presentation of homeless people living below ground in Amtrak tunnels, director Marc Singer provides a romantic narrative of adaptation. Feminist history making and Video Remains by Alexandra Juhasz Video scholar and maker, Alex Juhasz, engages in dialogue with women’s historian, Antoinette Burton, about Juhasz’s latest work, Video Remains, a piece that they propose evidences a feminist history making: a practice that helps align the poetry, evidence, passion, and politics of AIDS. Links AIDS activism today by Danica Amstadt As Video Remains deals with a history of AIDS video activism, the Internet ties together AIDS activists today. Film history Revolting women: the role of gender in Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! and U.S. Depression-era Left film criticism by Chris Robé This essay explores how Que Viva Mexico! might have become one of Eisenstein’s most sophisticated works to investigate gender’s relation to radical political transformation while also elucidating the ways in which 1930s U.S. Left film critics marginalized gender issues within their own columns on Eisenstein’s film. Updated classic Kinesthesia in martial arts films: action in motion by Aaron Anderson Anderson draws on theories of kinesthetics, fight choregraphy, and bodily memory to develop an aesthetic analysis of the role of movement per se in the martial arts film, with particular attention to films of Stephen Seagal. Reprinted here with color stills and shot analysis of sequences from Seagal's Out for Justice. Book reviews "This ain’t no junk." Recuperating black television in the “post civil rights” era by Devorah Heitner Review of Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. White gay male identity and Warhol by Quinn Miller Review of Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s "Blow Job." The last word Education under attack by the editors To top Jump Cut home This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. JUMP CUT A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Making women warriors — a transnational reading of Asian female action heroes by L.S. Kim This essay focuses on gender, genre, and transnationalism, specifically in considering the tradition of the female action hero in Hong Kong and Chinese martial arts films and its debut for Western viewers in the independent, international co-production, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000.[1] This essay examines the Asian female action star within the dual contexts of Asian reception and Western perception. That is, it explores the different reading strategies and the complex tensions that arise because Orientalism inevitably serves as most U.S. viewers' framework for understanding. Are U.S. viewers able to read women warriors through a Chinese Among Hollywood film's first cultural context, or do these characters get re-read as female action heroes, exotically "Oriental" (and as exotic Other)? Does pleasure Ripley, in the ALIEN series come in the female action heroes (identifying with or has an androgynous affirming their subjectivity), or of the “battling babes” appearance, as does... (ultimately objectifying them)? Is spectatorial response necessarily either/or?… in terms of the pleasure in looking, as well as in terms of whether a viewer's ethnic or cultural position dictates who objectifies and who affirms the Asian female action star. In her book, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Rey Chow writes about what she calls “the deadlock of the anthropological situation” in cross-cultural "exchange" (Chow, 1995, p. 177). This "deadlock" indicates the limitations that the history of Western imperialism and colonialism put on cross- cultural exchange. Furthermore, classical anthropology GI Jane. In order to be operates with a premise of a binary structure separating recognized as equally observer/observed. Like Chow, I try to find ways to break out capable of a man in the of a binary logic that necessarily places a non-Asian or non- Navy SEALS, G.I. Jane Easterner in the position of Orientalist objectifier, while at the nearly becomes one. same time, still acknowledging Orientalism as a reading and representational structure, especially when it is taken up by Asian or Asian American directors (for example, Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee). Here I wish to trace relations between the martial arts genre and its forging women as heroes. The central question is this: Is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon something new, or does the film adapt an older tradition? Is it a new way of looking at women, and Asian women, in action or physical combat? How is that newness different when considered in an Asian context vs. a Western one? Contrary to popular western perception, Asian women are not passive, pliant females ready to be rescued by men, or by “white knights,” as Gina Marchetti (1993) writes about with respect to Hollywood films. Asian women heroes are, quite literally, active in the specific genre of the Hong Kong action film, which is derived from Chinese martial arts and Peking Opera traditions, and which has roots in folk legends of women warriors. For example, two famous legends are Wing The Heroic Trio: Does Chun and Fa Mu Lan: Wing Chun learned the southern pleasure come in the technique of martial arts from a Buddhist nun, Ng Mui (who female action heroes devised the system after watching a fight between a snake and (identifying with or affirming a crane) in order to protect her chastity. Fa Mu Lan disguised their subjectivity)... herself as a man in order to fight in her father’s place against the invading Huns. In addition, films have captured the heroic feats of women — from the King Hu epic Come Drink With Me (1966) starring Cheng Peipei, to the modern-day Yes, Madam (1985) starring then-known Michelle Khan before her name change, to the futuristic The Heroic Trio (1993) also with Michelle Yeoh along with Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung. “Lethal ladies” and “battling babes” have dominated Chinese film stories for decades. Women thrive as action heroes in Hong Kong cinema in a way that, until recently, hasn’t happened in U.S. films. However, feminism is not necessarily the reason why. Bey Logan writes: "Contrary to the Western perception of Chinese culture as chauvinistic in the extreme, Eastern cinema has featured an extraordinary number of women warriors compared to Hollywood. Tinseltown has long since relegated women to the stereotypes of victim, prize or queen bitch, whereas Hong Kong actioners have always featured fighting ...or of the “battling babes” females doing battle with the menfolk on an equal (ultimately objectifying footing" (Logan, 1995, p. 153). them)? Charlies' Angels — another Heroic Trio? While the gender politics within Chinese narratives such as wuxia pian do allow woman heroines, it is not because such narratives challenge patriarchy and Confucianism.[2] Rather, the martial arts genre depicts Asian women as simultaneously heroic and traditional. This combination may confound certain western feminist perspectives, which see the two traits as mutually exclusive. Moreover, while women warriors offer an alternative to the stereotyped imagery held by westerners of passive Asian femininity, Orientalism still remains a framework for spectatorial perception. For these powerful Asian action heroes are simultaneously exoticized and fetishized. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon manages a contradictory simultaneity. It shows the film’s stars as both powerful and fetishized, protagonists and visual spectacles. Ironically, such simultaneity has brought about polarized responses to the film. While the film text might successfully and skillfully contain such complexities in treating women warriors, the film’s reception is not easily controlled. That is, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been read differently in East and West, generally favored by the West but disliked by Eastern audiences. Considering Ang Lee’s reputation and One of television's first awareness in producing “quality” films for a middle brow female action heroes, Xena: audience, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is simultaneously Warrior Princess (1995 - new and adapting a tradition. While the figure of the 2001). She serves as the cinematic female action hero is well established in Asian film progenitor for a next culture (Chinese in particular), the deliberate creation of a generation of women transnational film form is relatively recent for both Asian and warriors who hold narrative Western audiences. Here I wish to lay out different contexts of prominence and garner reading and reception of the Asian female action hero aesthetic acceptance of (Eastern and Western broadly speaking). And I will conclude seeing females fight, hard. by drawing out potential implications of forging Asian female Examples include Buffy the action heroes as a cultural commodity in a transnational film Vampire Slayer (1997 - market 2003) which is set in modern day Southern Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was produced and marketed California with a fantasy in quite a different way from the “chop sockies” imported in genre twist, as well as the 1970s from Hong Kong to the U.S. The latter were dubbed, Alias, which moves the clearly a foreign product, while Crouching Tiger, Hidden female action hero into the Dragon was presented in Mandarin and subtitled for non- genre of an espionage Mandarin speaking audiences as an art-house film (though it drama set in contemporary played in the multiplexes). Moreover, while the earlier martial times. arts films emphasized masculine stars (Bruce Lee stands as emblematic), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon clearly gained attention for its female stars and the novelty of seeing women as martial artists. In Kenneth Chan’s recent essay[3] on the transnational reading of women in martial arts as a generic mode, he identifies two main critiques of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. On one hand, cultural essentialists want a "true" representation of Chinese culture and its filmic history. On the other hand, anti-Orientalists argue against exoticizing one’s own and capitalizing on the popularity or fixation of an Orientalist gaze. (Chan sees this as a no-win situation.) Such a spectatorial gaze is gendered, specifically focused on In the last episode and women. In their work on the three actresses — Anita Miu, series finale, Xena (the Maggie Cheung, and Michelle Yeoh — who star in The Heroic character and the program) Trio series, Sheldon Lu and Anne Ciecko discuss how these takes a turn towards the and other films rely on the credibility of the action heroines’ East. Xena is zen, and yet status.[4] Like the stars in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, also a fierce woman warrior they carry a pan-Asian, intertextual, star persona from one 'til the end. film to the next. In an article previously published in JUMP CUT, Aaron Anderson also talks about gender performance of action. However, while Lu and Ciecko argue that female action heroines mark a crisis in masculinity (at least on the level of a particular storyline), Anderson studies the kinesthetic Images from movement in action films as neither "masculine" nor House of Flying Daggers "feminine" per se. He writes: "… at odds with these supposedly 'natural' divisions, Chinese martial arts movements are not so easily divided into masculine and feminine, fight and dance."[5] Such an observation supports my main argument that female action stars are able to occupy and act out in roles that are not Adding to her intertextual singularly traditional. star discourse, Zhang Ziyi is an expert swordswoman in The figure of the Asian female action star contributes to, yet House of Flying Daggers also contradicts, an orientalist structuring of perceived (2004). femininity by western audiences. She is on one hand idealized and exoticized, but on the other, she resists the “lotus blossom”/“dragon lady” split paradigm. Furthermore, one must consider a dual perspective from the start: how the woman is made a hero in/by Asian culture, and how the woman is read as a hero in/by western culture.[6] Why does the martial arts genre lend itself to the construction of women as heroes? Heroism How is an action hero defined and made – narratively, Mei defies gravity in this aesthetically, and industrially – when she is an Asian woman? film too, flying and fighting Furthermore, what happens in the transnational movement of with simultaneous skill. genre and stars from Asia to the U.S.? Michelle Yeoh exemplifies such a star, as her work ranges from an impressive number of Hong Kong films including Yes! Madam (1985), Magnificent Warriors (1986), The Heroic Trio (1993), Supercop (1992), and Tai Chi Master (1993) to the U.S. blockbuster James Bond picture, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the Oscar winner, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) by Ang Lee. In Asian culture (and in Asian film), heroism is demarcated differently than in U.S. narratives. Heroism is culturally specific. Where U.S. action films uphold And, she is blind. rugged individualism, often extolling the “gumption” of renegade cops, those on the fringe of society, and proverbial (and literal) cowboys, heroes in Asian films are considered heroic because they place loyalty to another person, clan, or community above all else. Their heroism comes from the ability to do for others, not for the self; victory comes from sacrifice for the group, not from self-aggrandizement. The capacity to take action has implications beyond a single battle. In most Asian films, the driving force which impels the narrative has as its core issues of loyalty and honor.[7] This can be observed in Japanese samurai films, and certainly also Mei, dressed in disguise as in Hong Kong martial arts films. Such narratives may be a a man, does not disguise magical swordplay drama, an historical kung fu story, or even her exceptional fighting a contemporary gangster gunplay film. As the veritable king of abilities or her fearlessness. gunplay action film, John Woo, said of his groundbreaking film, A Better Tomorrow (1986) (which Logan believes is “a film that changed Hong Kong action film forever”): “It’s not a gangster movie. It’s a film about chivalry, about honour, but set in the modern world. I want to teach the new generation: ‘What is friendship? What is brotherhood? What we have lost. What we have to get back…’” (Logan, 1995, p. 116). The apotheosis of these two kinds of heroism comes with Outnumbered two dozen to death. In Asian film, heroism usually means sacrifice, often to one, Mei is a victorious the death, and particularly for the lead character. At the end of woman warrior. U.S. action films, the hero almost always lives, victorious. (Sidekicks and supporting players may die, but rarely does the leading man.) The Asian hero proves her/his worth, her/his heroism, by living up to a filial pledge to a larger order, and heroic action is practiced for a higher ideal.[8] Martial arts themselves derive from philosophical tenets, most famously from the Shaolin Temple during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). There are three principle philosophical schools that influence the martial arts: Confucianism, with an emphasis on clan and social order; Buddhism, with an But when she is in grave emphasis on compassion and transcendence; and Taoism, danger, the women of the with an emphasis on the natural. All three schools emphasize House of Flying Daggers that action is not merely a physical act. Martial arts training come to assist her. develops the body and the mind; to use martial arts is to engage in both a physical and a philosophical practice. While