"Contemporary China in Philosophy", Report #3
Yi Youngjae made the third report at the middle-term program “Contemporary Philosophy in China” under the title “The Postcolonial Action Movie as a Contact Zone – A Lawless World”. From the perspective of her field, cinema studies, Yi suggested the possibility that the space of Manchuria, charged with a national history memory, through the contact with the Western genre functioned as a stage of violence, escaping from the state authority.
This escape was represented through the “non-entrusted violence” of vagabonds, thieves, killers and other figures within the colonial setting, during a period of strongly state-regulated cinema production. The Manchuria Western as a lower genre, attracting male audience from the lower social classes, through the hybridity of the world of representations of Hollywood and East Asia, was on the contrary, a device that generated vitality (inherent in the Japanese translation of the “Action Movie” as “Vivid Movie”, which was adopted in Korea).
The excess of the escaping violence, of its overflowing as vitality, reflects itself like a missing part onto the male “injured body”, thus erupting in a distorted intoxication with a restrained wish for revitalization. (Comments by Dennitza Gabrakova)