Introduction
The field of film studies worldwide has responded to globalization by shifting from the national
cinema research model to transnational cinema and world cinema models. The chapters in this
section address the impact of the era of globalization on film in the East Asian region. Yet, as
each of them shows in different ways, the national continues to intersect with the transnational
in shaping cinema production patterns and the kinds of films that are made. Not least, one of the
defining features of the cultural nation—language—continues to combine with other elements
of shared culture to shape patterns of film production and consumption in the region. Therefore,
the section is composed of chapters addressing the cinema cultures that remain the three largest
in the region: the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese cinemas.
Of the three, it is Chinese-language cinema that has undergone the largest reconfiguration
of its production circumstances in recent years. Therefore, Chris Berry’s section focuses on
political economy. It traces the emergence of “Chollywood,” the Chinese commercial cinema
industry centered on Beijing, but which draws in filmmakers from, and proliferates coproduc-
tions across, the Chinese-speaking world, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Berry highlights
the distinctive characteristics of Chollywood by placing it in a lineage of transborder configu-
rations of Chinese-language cinema, and argues that the flexible and transnational production
circumstances encouraging agile coproduction across borders today characterizes Chollywood
as a contingent assemblage rather than a fixed system.
Compared to the Chinese-language cinema, the Korean and Japanese production indus-
tries have remained based in Seoul and Tokyo respectively, with their primary audiences in
each country. In these circumstances, Soyoung Kim and Aaron Gerow in their sections focus
primarily on the types of films that are being made and the themes and formal patterns gener-
ated in an era characterized by acute awareness of the transnational. Kim argues that for Korean
cinema, the result has been expansive, but in complicated ways, whereas Gerow traces a more
reactive and paradoxical reinforcement of national particularity through transnational awareness
in the case of Japan.
Kim teases out a complexity in the expansive consciousness that characterizes Korean cinema
today. It does include the ambition and reach of Korean blockbuster culture and the Korean
Wa v e (Hallyu) that has swept across East Asia and beyond. But Kim emphasizes that it also