Here’s an example of being paid (and fed) to read. I was invited to be a discussant at a book launch Singapore Management University in February 2025. As discussant, it was my role to read a book and talk about it, especially the sections in the book by contributors who would appear in person at the launch, to have a conversation with them about their contributions if you will. The book in question, Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas (2024, University of Amsterdam Press), edited by leading authority of Korean cinema Sangjoon Lee and my longtime friend, scholar of Cambodian filmmaking Darlene Machell Espena, responds to the under-appreciated aspect of Cold War scholarship – its cultural dimensions as they unfolded in Asia.
When one thinks about the Cold War film perhaps visions of utter, cataclysmic destruction of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Dr Strangelove come to mind. But as the Cold War unfolded in Asia, filmmakers here in the region were also making films in response, using films as a form of soft power, to win the ideological battle of hearts and minds. Most did not have the budget to stage devastating war scenes of their Hollywood counterparts. Instead, they used whatever ingenuity and cunning that budget, often supported by US funding, allowed.
Having read Sangjoon Lee and Darlene Espena’s cracking book, not only have I learned so much about this under-appreciated history of the cultural Cold War, but also the interconnectedness and shifting alliances in Southeast and East Asia that can change like the wind changes directions on a given day. There are two overarching themes I’ve identified from my readings of the chapters by our esteemed contributors here today: the aesthetics of the cultural Cold War, and projection.
What struck me the most, from reading Darlene Espena’s, Kenny Ng, Weng-Qi Ngoei, Adam Knee, Sangjoon Lee, and Ting-Wu Cho’s chapters is the mobilisation of a particular aesthetic; often clumsy, vulgar, belligerent, much like the nature of global wars – hot or cold. We are reminded of Hannah Arendt’s work on the nature of political violence; that hyper-masculine violence and warfare become even more brutal and more ridiculous as state power grasp ever more desperately for legitimacy and dominance.
Even the pretentious bombast of cosmopolitan modernity exhibited in the transnational co-productions of 60s Korean espionage films in Sangjoon’s chapter and King Norodom Sihanouk’s elite filmmaking in Darlene’s chapter, which were either made with Hong Kong producers and with US backing and support, is loud and clumsy in their signalling rather than sophisticated and elegant. Perhaps the exception to this is Man-Fung Yip’s chapter on the poetics of North Vietnamese revolutionary cinema, one of the finest contributions in the edited volume.
These qualities: clumsiness, vulgarity, and belligerence are easily mapped to the male body, something Ting-Wu Cho captures quite wonderfully in her chapter on Taiwan Pulp films, using The First Error Step, as a fine illustration.
I’ve learned so much about Taiwan under the Kuomintang government, and how its authoritarianism, shifting alliances between Japan and the US, and the cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic tensions between the waishengren and the benshenren created a genre of exploitation. Also noteworthy is the decline of Taiyupian, or Taiwanese-language films, discussed in Chris Berry’s chapter, to make way of Mandarin-language dominance.
Reading Ting-Wu Cho’s chapter, we gain the impression that the masculine embodiment of pathos or beiqing is an exhausted hard body, utterly militarised, with no legitimate outlet for uncontrolled excess violence. The Taiwanese male body was exhausted by military discipline and emasculation, pulled violently between militarisation and feminisation.
We might think that clumsiness is ineffectual, but it may actually be deliberate, to evade moral responsibility and accountability. We see traces of that in Adam Knees’s chapter on masculine ineffectuality in vaguely Southeast Asian settings. The theme of failure of ambition and grandiosity is discussed in Kenny’s illuminating chapter on Chang Kuo-Sin’s anticommunist media project.
Which brings me to the theme that appears numerous times in this book: projection; how distant and recent historical events and settings are used to project deeply embedded ideological anxieties. Through reading Kenny Ng and Wen-Qi Ngoei’s contributions, we are directed to the projection of historical events onto real-world warfare to aggressively show optimism, but also pro-American, anticommunist fears and anxieties.
Wen-Qi Ngoei’s chapter on the American fantasy to supersede the British in Southeast Asia is all projection, bombast and overall ineffectuality. His closing comment on King Rat is particularly striking in my view. I’ve highlighted it, because it merits re-reading, it is in my view something we ourselves can project onto US global geopolitics today. Allow me to quote the passage in full:
King Rat then concludes on another discomfiting note. As the military transport that Corporal King is on vanishes into the dust and distance, it becomes clear that his success was won not merely by the exploitation of others. King’s accomplishments were made possible by the war itself. The desperation and demoralization of the POWs, their isolation from the outside world, and the very fact of their capture—evidence of defeat and surrender—combined to produce the fertile environment in which the King’s schemes flourished. His most dynamic moment was during the war, a time of suffering. With this, the film offers a troubling perspective on the United States’ presence in Southeast Asia, in the throes of the Cold War, amidst a flagging colonial order: American success comes from the suffering of others (including Americans); it will be secured in unsavory and exploitative ways; it will emerge and always remain insecure, teetering like a domino, ever upright yet in danger of collapse.
Reading Darlene’s chapter, I came to the conclusion that the passing of time after the Cold War is required for Asian films to develop nuanced reflection, creating breathing room for a quieter, more contemplative aesthetic. We see this in Rithy Pahn’s films enumerating the aftermath of a society coming to terms with absolute devastation. These kinds of films seem less interested in loud projections outwards, finding meaning when directed inwards instead. We find that silence and slowness are perhaps the best aesthetic for Cold War films, as they expand the space for moral contemplation and the necessary inward rebuilding of selves and society.
Alicia Izharuddin 