Approaching international cinema is a difficult task. I would argue that the IBO is a fan of foreign cinema - they've chosen some pretty well-respected film auteurs and some really canonical film productions. I would perhaps argue that if you're into international cinema, focus only on international cinema - it will greatly improve your depth of analysis. I had Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love when I did my final film presentation (which used to be an oral exam), and I went through all of his past work to fully get a grasp of his unique, non- or counter-Hollywood storytelling techniques.
My interest resides mostly within the department of East Asian cinema, so that's what this section will mainly focus on. The issues identified can be extrapolated to refer to European cinema, but not all the concepts translate. This page specifically will begin with the critique of Hollywood, and then new frameworks proposed by film scholars to analyze Asian and other International Cinema. It will go through a couple of case studies too.
If you are an IB film student, check out the 2019-2020 Film List to see why understanding international cinema is important.
THE DILEMMAS OF THE WESTERN SCHOLAR begins with the fact that the term "Asian Cinema" is largely problematic. Even the term "Chinese Cinema" might be too broad to refer to the whole collection of Chinese films, which reflects different social groups within China. Not all of them are even Mandarin language films - some are Tibetan, some are Cantonese, some are Taiwanese. These national boundaries that group everything into "Chinese Cinema" are purely political and not cultural, and this is where an essay called THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING RADICAL: THE DISCIPLINE OF FILM STUDIES AND THE POST-COLONIAL WORLD ORDER by Mitoshuiro Yoshimoto comes in. He argues that “we are no longer so sure about the coherence of the nation-state and, on the other hand, the idea of history has also become far from self-evident” (27). In that case, we need to think about a different framework to approach this new phenomenon.
David Desser summarizes the main issue in A FILMMAKER FOR ALL SEASONS here - he says that “Film viewers ... learn to appreciate the particularities of a film...[through] making comparisons, implicitly, or explicitly, with other films... in film studies, those norms are based on the classical Hollywood cinema.”
We talk a lot in film studies about "genre theory" and from personal experience, my initial analysis relies so much on the idea of "tropes" and "conventions" and "icons" or "symbols" that appear in films. But that's not really possible unless there is a well-established canon of film conventions, which there is, and it's Hollywood cinema.
Desser points out that the nature of Hollywood Cinema is “usually tied to the dramatic, the action-packed, the relevatory; it relies on a rigid chain of cause and effect from which extraneous detail is eliminated in the interest of ‘moving the plot along” (20). But that's not always the case with Asian cinema, especially Japanese.
Let's step into a case analysis.
Case Study: Ozu Yasujiro and Tokyo Story (1953)
Should you wish to skip over that, I'll leave you with the main conclusion
This main point here comes down to the fact that there are simply different Aesthetic traditions. The Japanese simply have a different appreciation for narratives than Hollywood does.
THE JAPANESE AESTHETIC TRADITION - The deemphasis of drama and the elision of plot elements in theatrical works, the emphasis on mood and tone instead of story in literature.
The field of cross-cultural analysis is difficult - fraught with danger, since we are forced to read works produced by the "Other" through the constraints of our own frameworks/theories/ideologies. Especially because of the underlying relationship between the East and the West which is underpinned by a non-voluntary cultural exchange that is colonialism that is almost inseparable in producing an unproductive power dynamic for scholarly and cultural dialogue.
Appropriation of another culture is also an issue. Desser observes that **“**Homi Bhabha argues... critical theory’s appropriation of the other as a good object of knowledge is an epistemological colonization of the non-west” (32). The “binarism of self/Other, which underlies the project of cross-cultural analysis, is a trap... that abstracts the role of power in the production of knowledge, and depoliticizes the structure of domination found in West/non-West opposition...[that is] neocolonialism.”
Now, this form of appropriation is so popular among the West because of a fantasy that is the "other." Japanese is the ultimate Western Utopia of the west in cinema, because they are close yet different enough from the West:
“The double identity of the cinema - tribal and avant garde” - requires them to choose the cinema of a nation that is perceived to be sufficiently different from, but have some common elements with, Western capitalist nations. Japan fulfulls their utopian dream... Japan’s ambivalent geopolitical position: economically part of the First World but culturally part of the Third World.