Table Of ContentJump 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
