World Cinema

There has always been a sense in which America and Europe owned film. They
invented it at the end of the nineteenth century in unfashionable places like New
Jersey, Leeds, and the suburbs of Lyons. At first, they saw their clumsy new
camera projectors merely as more profitable versions of Victorian lantern shows,
mechanical curiosities which might have a use as a sideshow at a funfair. Then the
best of the pioneers looked beyond the fairground properties of their invention. A
few directors, now mostly forgotten, saw that the flickering new medium was more
than just a diversion. This crass commercial invention gradually began to evolve as
an art. D W Griffith in California glimpsed its grace, German directors used it as an
analogue to the human mind and the modernising city, Soviets emphasised its
agitational and intellectual properties, and the Italians reconfigured it on an
operatic scale.
So heady were these first decades of cinema that America and Europe can be
forgiven for assuming that they were the only game in town. In less than twenty
years western cinema had grown out of all recognition; its unknowns became the
most famous people in the world; it made millions. It never occurred to its
financial backers that another continent might borrow its magic box and make it its
own. But film industries were emerging in Shanghai, Bombay, and Tokyo, some of
which would outgrow those in the west.
Between 1930 and 1935, China produced more than 500 films, mostly
conventionally made in studios in Shanghai, without soundtracks. China's best
directors - Bu Wancang and Yuan Muzhi - introduced elements of realism to their
stories. The Peach Girl (1931) and Street Angel (1937) are regularly voted among
the best ever made in the country.
India followed a different course. In the West, the arrival of talkies gave birth to a
new genre - the musical - but in India, every one of the 5000 films made between
1931 and the mid-1950s had musical interludes. The films were stylistically more
wide-ranging than the Western musical, encompassing realism and escapist dance
within individual sequences, and they were often three hours long rather than
Hollywood's 90 minutes. The cost of such productions resulted in a distinctive
national style of cinema. They were often made in Bombay, the centre of what is
now known as 'Bollywood'. Performed in Hindi (rather than any of the numerous
regional languages), they addressed social and peasant themes in an optimistic and
romantic way and found markets in the Middle East, Africa, and the Soviet Union.
 In Japan, the film industry did not rival India's in size but was unusual in other
ways. Whereas in Hollywood the producer was the central figure, in Tokyo the
director chose the stories and hired the producer and actors. The model was that of
an artist and his studio of apprentices. Employed by a studio as an assistant, a
future director worked with senior figures, learned his craft, and gained authority,
until promoted to director with the power to select screenplays and performers. In
the 1930s and 40s, this freedom of the director led to the production of some of
Asia's finest films.
The films of Kenji Mizoguchi were among the greatest of these. Mizoguchi's films
were usually set in the nineteenth century and analysed the way in which the lives
of the female characters whom he chose as his focus were constrained by the
society of the time. From Osaka Elegy (1936) to Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and
beyond, he evolved a sinuous way of moving his camera in and around a scene,
advancing towards significant details but often retreating at moments of
confrontation or strong feeling. No one had used the camera with such finesse
before. Even more important for film history, however, is the work of the great
Ozu. Where Hollywood cranked up drama, Ozu avoided it. His camera seldom
moved. It nestled at seated height, framing people square on, listening quietly to
their words.
Ozu rejected the conventions of editing, cutting not on action, as is usually done in
the West, but for visual balance. Even more strikingly, Ozu regularly cut away
from his action to a shot of a tree or a kettle or clouds, not to establish a new
location but as a moment of repose. Many historians now compare such 'pillow
shots' to the Buddhist idea that mu - empty space or nothing - is itself an element
of composition.
As the art form most swayed by money and market, cinema would appear to be
too busy to bother with questions of philosophy. The Asian nations proved and are
still proving that this is not the case. Just as deep ideas about individual freedom
have led to the aspirational cinema of Hollywood, so it is the beliefs which
underlie cultures such as those of China and Japan that explain the distinctiveness
of Asian cinema at its best. Yes, these films are visually striking, but it is their
different sense of what a person is, and what space and action are, which makes
them new to western eye.
The inventors of cinema regarded it as a minor attraction.
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
Question 2
Some directors were aware of cinema's artistic possibilities from the very
beginning.
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
Question 3
The development of cinema's artistic potential depended on technology.
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
Question 4
Cinema's possibilities were developed in varied ways in different western
countries.
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
Question 5
Western businessmen were concerned about the emergence of film industries in
other parts of the world.
TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN
Questions 6 - 12
Complete the notes below.
Choose the correct word and move it into the gap.
Chinese cinema
large number of 6…………………… films produced in 1930s some early films
still generally regarded as …………….……..7
Indian cinema
films included musical interludes
films avoided ………………..8 topics
Japanese cinema
unusual because film director was very ,…………………………….9 two
important directors:
Mizoguchi
- focused on the ………………………10 restrictions faced by women
- camera movement related to ………………………11 content of film
Ozu
-……………………………….12 camera movement

Question 13
Choose the correct answer.
Which of the following is the most suitable title for the Reading Passage?
1, Blind to change: how is it that the west has ignored Asian cinema for so long?
2 ,A different basis: how has the cinema of Asian countries been shaped by their
cultures and beliefs?
3, Outside Asia: how did the origins of cinema affect its development worldwide?
4, Two cultures: how has western cinema tried to come to terms with the challenge
of the Asian market?