As one of the perennial interpretive paradigms of film studies, auteurism has been subject to intense debate over the years. In the context of Hollywood historiography, the concept has often been framed as a “folly” that reduces film history to a catalog of a few dozen exceptional directors. However, the auteur theory has rarely been challenged in the context of East Asian film studies in the West, where, for instance, Japanese film history is often boiled down to the “Big Three” directors (Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu); Chinese cinema is typically reduced to award-winning works by “Fifth Generation” filmmakers (Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) or Hong Kong New Wave auteurs (Wong Kar-wai and John Woo); and Korean cinema is sometimes held up as the home of “Asia Extreme” auteurs (Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk).
Given the power of auteurism in disseminating national cinema outside of its original cultural context, a publication that brings together contemporary Korean and Japanese auteurs in a comparative way should, at least in theory, be celebrated. The premise of Katie E. Taylor-Jones's Rising Sun, Divided Land is that an examination of eight East Asian auteurs (Fukasaku Kinji, Im Kwon-taek, Kawase Naomi, Miike Takashi, Lee Chang-dong, Kitano Takeshi, Park Chan-wook, and Kim Ki-duk) can be fruitful, especially when driven by in-depth film analyses accompanied by career overviews of each director. According to the author, the aim of her book is “to present the works of these directors . . . as reflections of personal visions but also as works that are part of ongoing debates” related to colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, capitalism, globalization, and feminism, among other topics (p. 2).
Despite this promising premise, this book will be of limited value to East Asian specialists and film scholars. For the former group, Taylor-Jones's treatment of both Japanese and Korean modern history as a contextual framework for her discussion of key films is all too basic. Considering the author's background as a scholar of visual culture who does not consult many original-language sources, this deficiency diminishes the utility of her study. From the perspective of film studies scholars, Taylor-Jones's book lacks a clear methodological orientation and is missing the kind of theoretical unity that might bind together her disparate case studies.
One need only compare the author's treatment of four Korean directors to gain a sense of the book's limitations. Taylor-Jones's discussion of Im Kwon-taek focuses on essentialist notions of Korean identity and nationhood, referencing han (national sentiment of sadness), minjung (oppressed people), and minjok (nationhood/ethnicity). While the first concept can be said to apply to Im Kwon-taek's oeuvre, which brims with tragic tales of victimized women and suffering families, the latter two concepts (often associated with left-wing, politicized cinemas of New Wave filmmakers such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo) are less applicable or useful in describing Im's cinema. More fitting concepts, such as chŏnt'ong (tradition), koyumunhwa (traditional culture), Han'guk chŏngsŏ (Korean sentiment), and inbonjuŭi (humanism), could be used to describe the director's auteurist preoccupations. Taylor-Jones's analysis of Korean-ness in Im's cinema falls short of the excellent essays anthologized in David James and Kyung Hyun Kim's edited collection Im Kwon-taek: The Making of a National Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), which challenge the simplistic notion of Im as a purveyor of essential national identity and aesthetics.
The strongest of this book's Korean sections concerns the films of Lee Chang-dong. The author offers insightful analysis of key themes in Lee's body of work, such as the violence of capitalism, social inequality and marginalization, and the rejection of oversentimentality. However, there is little discussion of the filmmaker's realistic aesthetics from a technical perspective, and the author oddly generalizes Lee as someone who offers “postmodern, fractured, alternative narratives” (p. 90), a description that applies more aptly to Hong Sang-soo's cinema.
Taylor-Jones's chapter on Park Chan-wook and Oldboy evinces an effort to address film techniques, looking in particular at shot distances, camera movements, music and sound design, colors, and mise-en-scène. However, these references are fleeting and her central film analysis of Oldboy is largely narrative-based. There are few original theoretical or sociopolitical insights offered up about this most studied of Korean films, which has already generated more than half a dozen academic articles and book chapters in the English language.
Finally, the Kim Ki-duk section, which is primarily engaged with feminist debates surrounding his films and the problem of prostitution in South Korea, reiterates many of the arguments put forth in earlier published works and fails to capture the full complexity of Kim's films from both aesthetic and thematic perspectives.
Given the uneven analysis of these aforementioned auteurs, whose films have already generated a considerable number of rigorously argued publications, one might wonder for whom this book is intended. It is not suitable for advanced scholars or upper-division undergraduate courses, but could serve as a reference text for lower-division introductory Asian film courses. It might also find a home on the bookshelves of a more general readership, one that is looking for less-probing evaluations of contemporary Japanese and Korean cinema that synthesize information from previous scholarship.
