Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Aesthetics and Reception in Cinema offers a renewed critical outlook on Western classic film directly from the pantheon of European and American masters, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Ford, Leo McCarey, Sam Peckinpah, and Orson Welles. The book contributes an "Eastern Approach" into the critical studies of Western films by reappraising selected films of these masters, matching and comparing their visions, themes, and ideas with the philosophical and paradigmatic principles of the East. It traces Eastern inscriptions and signs embedded within these films as well as their social lifestyle values and other concepts that are also inherently Eastern. As such, the book represents an effort to reformulate established discourses on Western cinema that are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Although it seeks to inject an alternative perspective, the ultimate aim is to reach a balance of East and West. By focusing on Eastern aesthetic and philosophical influences in Western films, the book suggests that there is a much more thorough integration of East and West than previously thought or imagined.
Author(s): Stephen Teo
Series: World Cinema
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: xii+286
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Eastern approach
Issues of the East
The Eastern viewpoint
Chapters
Notes
Chapter 1: Star Wars Eastern Saga
The force is the Dao
Orientalism and Oriental West
Techno-orientalism and spiritualism as technology
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 2: Vertigo, Hitchcock’s Chinese Riddle
Chinese red passion
Chinese romantic irony
Chinese melodrama
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 3: Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai
An Eastern exotic thriller
Character and nature
Michael’s Eastern dream
Notes
Chapter 4: Le Samouraï, Eastern Action in the Milieu
Melville’s Eastern tendency
A samurai in Paris
The jianghu in Paris
Death and the dandy
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5: Robert Bresson, French or Daoist?1
The Transcendental in the material
Au hasard Zhuang Zi
Marie and Balthazar
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6: Dreyer’s Vampyr: Wandering in the West
Transcendentalism and the vampire film
The wanderer Gray
Eastern symbolisms
Death and the wheel
Notes
Chapter 7: Eastern Principles in Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns
Peckinpah and the East
Straw dogs
Word and action
Peckinpah’s Chan poetic cases
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: Make Way for Tomorrow, America’s Confucian Classic
Filial Piety as American doctrine
The way of the family
Reverence of the old
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 9: John Ford and Asian Family Values
The family in Ford
Ford’s family and Asian values
Ford’s Irish other personality
Knowing the self, knowing the other
Death and the family
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
