Early Asian cinema and the public sphere

There’s an article by Professor Wimal Dissanayake just published on the Transcurrents site which provides a thoughtful analysis of the position of early cinema in India, Japan and China. Entitled ‘Relationship Between Early Asian Cinema And The Public Sphere‘, it looks at how the early years of cinema in each country, though it inevitably came with Western influences, was strongly directed by local needs and sensibilities. It makes this interesting argument about the purpose of film history:

When we discuss the concept of Asian cinema, it is important to bear in mind its close relationship to the writing of film history. Film history is an open-ended enterprise that admits of pluralities of interpretation. In writing film histories, we produce the historical objects we seek to study. This has great implications for the exploration of the idea of Asian cinema. Today, when we write film histories of diverse Asian cinemas - Indian, Korean, Japanese, Sri Lankan etc - we need to simultaneously occupy different spaces created by the past and history, by transnationalization, by the ever changing shapes of cultural modernities. Writing film history is also a way of charting the course, the preferred trajectory for growth for the future. Hence, in our efforts to understand and map the meaning of the concept of Asian cinema, we need to pay particular attention to the complex ways in which film histories have been produced, and are been produced today.

Of course, historians will always seek good arguments to justify their preoccupation, but he makes sound arguments for the relationship early cinema in India, Japan and China held with the ‘public sphere’ i.e. how the medium naturally/inevitably engaged with the national milieu; film in those countries bore, and still bears, what Dissanayake calls “the imprint of local desire”. It’s well worth reading, even if you are not that familiar with the silent cinema of those countries.

1st International Silent Film Festival

www.goethe.de

While I don’t expect it’s going to affect many Bioscope readers, I’ve just come across notice of the 1st International Silent Film Festival, currently taking place in Manila, Philippines. Organised by the Goethe-Institut Manila, Instituto Cervantes and the Japan Foundation, the festival is taking place 4-13 September, and features silent films from Germany, Japan and Spain. There are just three films showing, a little disappointingly for such a grandly-named venture: Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed/Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926); the Spanish silent The Sixth Sense/El sexto sentido (1929), directed by Nemesio Sobrevilla; and the Japanese A Monster Serpent/Orochi (1925), directed by Buntaro Futagawa. There are further details on the films here.

Prakash Travelling Cinema

Part one

Prakash Travelling Cinema is a delightful short film, posted on YouTube by the filmmaker, Megha B. Lakhani. She made the 14-minute film while at the National Institute of Design, India, and it has gone on to win festival awards.

The film documents two friends who maintain a travelling bioscope show on the streets of Ahmedabad. The ramshackle outfit, which they take around on a hand-cart, comprises a genuine c.1910 Pathé projector, adapted for sound, with peep-holes all around the mobile ‘cinema’ itself (which they call their ‘lorry’), through which children watch snippets plucked from popular Bollywood titles. One of the amazing sights of the film is either of the two men hand-cranking their sound projector at exhausting speed.

Part two

Although they are not showing silent films, the whole enterprise is imbued with the spirit of the original travelling bioscope operators of India, and of course the technology hails from the silent period. The word ‘bioscope’ still persists in places in India for cinema, as it does in South Africa. However, the film wants to do more than show a quaint operation, and it is very much about friendship, conviction, Indian society, and the persistence of a human way of doing things in the face of modern media technologies.

There are an estimated 2,000 mobile cinema shows in India today, and the travelling bioscope has been made the subject of other recent films. There is Andrej Fidyk’s 1998 documentary film Battu’s Bioscope, on a modern travelling show in rural India; Vrinda Kapoor and Nitesh Bhatia’s short film Baarah Mann Ki Dhoban (2007), on modern bioscope workers whch also touches on the history of India film exhibition; and Tim Sternberg’s film Salim Baba (2007), again about a modern travelling bioscope show, this time with an adapted 1897 Bioscope. Plus there’s Tabish Khair’s acclaimed novel Filming, published this year, which moves from a travelling bioscope show in 1929 to the Bombay cinema of the 1940s as a means to examine the rise of modern India. Clearly there’s a metaphor in the air.

Prakash Travelling Cinema was made in 2006, and there’s a full set of credits here. The film is in Hindi, with English subtitles, and on YouTube, owing to its length, it comes in two parts.

A new claim

Another item from the Origins of Cinema in Asia conference, which took place in New Delhi last month. Stephen Bottomore wrote a short piece for the festival news letter, with a claim for what may well be the first exhibition of film to have taken place in India. Here’s his report:

Over the past twenty years I have been researching aspects of early cinema in libraries and archives in the UK and elsewhere. In preparation for the ‘Origins of Cinema in Asia’ conference, which took place over the past two days, I had a rummage through my unsorted material, and rediscovered an especially interesting article from the Journal of the Photographic Society of India of July 1896. In this article the editor tells us that, while projected cinema shows were by then an established fact, he had seen moving pictures of a different kind in India some months earlier:

‘I had an opportunity last cold weather of viewing Edison’s kinetescope [sic] in Calcutta. It was certainly extraordinary… But the pictures were too small, and the duration of the scene too short, to altogether satisfy me. Looking down through an object glass into a breast-high box one was first conscious of a whirring sound, then a sparking light, and presently a picture about 2” square appeared […] The scene was stirring enough in all conscience, and I gathered that it took a continuous chain or band of 1,400 celluloid positives to represent it. This band ran under an illuminated screen below which was an electric lamp – and to bring out the scene required a special camera invented by Edison.’ [He describes the film that he saw: a staged incident of a rescue of people from a fire.]

Although the writer does not mention the date when he saw this film in the peepshow Kinetoscope, he does state that it was, ‘last cold weather’, which would suggest the months at the turn of 1895 to 1896. Let us recall that the first film projection took place in India on 7 July 1896 at Watson’s Hotel in Bombay – indeed, this was the first film projection in Asia we believe. So this writer’s viewing of the Kinetoscope pre-dates India’s first film projection by several months, and therefore this is apparently the first appearance of moving pictures in India, and perhaps in Asia as a whole. (Although the Kinetoscope was seen in America, Europe and Australia in 1895, in Asia, apart from India, it was only introduced from later in 1896 – in Japan and Singapore).

Perhaps my historian colleagues in India – tireless researchers such as P.K. Nair – might already know about this appearance of the Kinetoscope in India in the winter of 1895/96. All I can say is that I have never seen this ‘first’ appearance mentioned in print histories of Indian cinema. And this suggests to me that many other important facts about early cinema in this region might remain undiscovered.

There is still much terra incognita when it comes to early film history, and still much to be learned about the dissemination of films and the means to exhibit them across the globe in the 1890s. The first film entrepreneurs saw the reach of their product in global terms - we as scholars should do so too. Certainly it would seem more work needs to be done to track the worldwide spread of the Edison Kinetoscope, to understand it as an international business phenomenon, and to pursue its many paths of influence.

The Origins of Asian Cinema

Silent cinema was, of course, a worldwide phenomenon, and some good work has been done in recent years to move early film historiography away from Western Europe and America to reach each corner of the globe that the medium touched.

The Bioscope will endeavour to follow suit, so it is a pleasure to have this conference report from Stephen Bottomore on the recent Origins of Asian Cinema conference, held at Osian’s, New Delhi, 21-22 July.

The conference began with welcome remarks by Aruna Vasudev, Festival President. Nick Deocampo, Conference Convener then laid down the conference theme, discussing its concerns and introducing the panel discussants. The themes of what followed included: the arrival of motion pictures and early film conditions in Asia; early filmic practices; Western and native film
pioneers; Asian cinema’s ‘founding fathers’; early cinema’s resonance in Asia and the relevance of its history and practices to Asians; the role of archives and festivals in writing film history; and how Asians indigenised the foreign medium.

The list of participants included the following:

Session 1: WEST MEETS EAST: EARLY CINEMA AND ASIA

Charles Musser (USA); Stephen Bottomore (UK); Nick Deocampo (Philippines); Kim So-Young (South Korea); there was also a presentation on early Turkish cinema.

Session 2: BUILDING HISTORIES/CREATING IDENTITIES: ARCHIVES AND FESTIVALS

Bel Capul (Philippines); Tan Bee Thiam (Singapore); Ashley Ratnavibhushana (Sri Lanka).

Session 3: COLONIAL ORIGINS: EARLY FILM CONDITIONS IN ASIA

Peggy Chiao (Taiwan); P.K. Nair (India); Tadao Sato (Japan); Earl Jackson (Korea); Budi Irawanto (Indonesia).

Session 4. FILM AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE RISE OF NATIONAL CINEMAS

Hassan Abd. Muthalib (Malaysia); Anchalee Chaiworaporn (Thailand); Ngo Phuong Lan (Vietnam); Houshang Golmakani (Iran); Zakir Hussain Raju (Bangladesh).

Perhaps the single most useful paper was Deocampo’s which offered an overview of the origins of cinema in Asia, stressing the colonial context in many countries at the time. Most other presentations, if they were of a historical nature, consisted of a general introduction to that country’s early film history. Exceptions included Bottomore on the early travelogue maker, Burton Holmes; Musser on the importance of national filmmaking in the Philippines, notably in 1912; and Chaiworaporn on the importance of royalty in the origins of Thai cinema. The session on archives and festivals included some of the most dynamic presentations, and this suggested that there is new life in film archiving in Asia and a desire to celebrate the region’s moving image history.

Particularly interesting moments for me included:

• the description of a socially-critical article published in Korea in 1901, in which the author used cinema as an example of vibrancy, in contrast to the sloth of real people;
• a description by the Thai monarch of a Kinetoscope film seen in one of Edison’s machines in Singapore in 1896: of a cockfight. This would be one of the first appearances of these peepshow machines in Asia (the very first was probably in Calcutta in the winter of 1895/96);
• the chance to hear veteran scholars, P.K. Nair and Tadao Sato, give succinct summaries of their countries’ early film history.

This was the second meeting on this theme of early cinema in Asia: a previous conference was held a couple of years ago in the Philippines. It is planned to publish a volume of essays on this theme, some of which will be based on these conference presentations.

Grateful thanks to Stephen for the report, which gives evidence of vital and enthusiastic activity in the writing of Asian early film history, and I certainly look forward to seeing the volume of essays. Osian’s, by the way, is a new arts institution in Delhi, which combines auction house, film centre, art fund and a Centre for Archiving, Research & Documentation.

Sessue Hayakawa

www.amazon.co.uk

There’s a new book out on one of the most intriguing of silent film stars, Sessue Hayakawa. Daisuke Miyao’s Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke University Press) tells the history of the Japanese actor who rose to fame in Hollywood in the silent era, ultimately gaining lasting fame for his role as the camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Hayakawa was born in Japan in 1889, where he became a stage actor. He moved to the USA aged 19, then went back to Japan to form an acting troupe which toured America in 1913. Film producer Thomas Ince gave him a contract. He was an immediate success in titles such as Typhoon (1914) and Cecil B. De Mille’s subtly sadistic The Cheat (1915). His wife Tsuru Aoki often co-starred alongside him. He left America in 1922, eventually settling in France, making occasional films. He died in 1973, having received an Oscar nomination for Kwai.

Miyao’s book focusses on the Japanese racial identity in American film, and how Hayakawa’s great appeal (he had a strong female following) was a mixture of the vogue for the refinements of ‘Japonisme’ and crude fears of a ‘yellow peril’. It’s an important history.