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Last Friday night the NY Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) opened in New York. This is the thirteenth year for the annual event, one that I have been covering from its inception. After some general comments on Asian film, I will conclude with a review of “The White Storm”, a festival film showing at Walter Reader Theater tonight.
Unlike the Indian Film Festival that I covered a month ago, this one features movies that are geared to local audiences rather than Western film festivals and theaters specializing in indie and foreign films. So the typical NYAFF film will be about samurais or gangsters while one from the Indian film festival will be about the plight of Dalits. I would have preferred that the NYAFF curators include more political films but I confess that I am not even aware that they are being made. From what I have gleaned from the Japanese film industry over the past five years or so, there are very few—if any—directors or screenwriters in the Akira Kurosawa or Yoji Yamada tradition nowadays. Perhaps if there were a stronger left in Japan or Hong Kong for that matter, we’d see films being made with a social and political message.
That being said, I am totally devoted to Hong Kong and Japanese gangster and samurai films. In an age when Hollywood “entertainment” means the latest Michael Bay movie, we are better off with a lobotomy. I thought that Atlantic Magazine’s Christopher Orr got the latest installment of “Transformers” just right: “If it truly takes this long to save the world from the depredations of robots that turn into muscle cars, it may be that the world is no longer worth saving.”
full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/06/29/2014-new-york-asian-film-festival/ ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
