Writing about Paris in the early twentieth century, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke notes that “the city sucks images out of you, without giving you anything definite in return.” It is as if a radical disconnection between image and city has taken place; the first in a series of other disconnections. Rilke’s precocious insight, I would argue, is even more applicable to Asian cities today. More and more, it seems, images of the Asian city, even as they proliferate and become more vivid, tell us less and less about the city. The city can no longer be represented through...

Anyone looking into the way Asian cities cooperate with cinema in the representation of the present must start with two unavoidable critical texts: Fredric Jameson’s 1989 “Remapping Taipei” and Ackbar Abbas’s 1998 Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance.¹ Whereas before World War II cinematic modernism was in league with Joyce, Döblin, and Dos Passos in rendering cities visible through “symphonic form,” postmodern writers and filmmakers find the city invisible, discordant, and in a fundamental way unrepresentable. Temporal simultaneity and spatial randomness work against this medium of time and space, for in cities today simultaneity could mean being nowhere...

Japanese cinema since the 1980s was noted for its apparent decline, and only recently was its recovery recorded with the performance of several popular films in the domestic market.¹ Parallel to the recovery was Japanese cinema’s artistic achievement by independent filmmakers who emerged from television and video sectors. Miike Takashi is among these directors whose quick, efficient workmanship helped accumulate an impressive repertoire and establish a cult reputation. Like another noted Japanese filmmaker, Kitano Takeshi, Miike pushed a new engagement with the yakuza picture and rendered this genre attractive to fans of Asian popular cinema. But this does not mean...

The relationship between the city and cinema has been an important topic in studies of cinematic modernity. Regarding the increased significance of the city due to the inception of the sound era, Anthony Sutcliffe writes, “[T]he definitive arrival of sound in 1929 confirmed the credentials of the big city, as par excellence the home of noise, as a neutral or even positive setting for feature films.”¹ This is amply manifested in the outpouring of a series of American musicals extolling the excitement of New York, the Chaplinesque comedy containing mild social criticism, and a new genre called the gangster film.²...

Shanghai in Sixty Years (Liushi nianhou Shanghai tan) is a long forgotten futuristic comedy made in the besieged Shanghai of 1938. According to an extant synopsis, at the beginning of the film two men find themselves suddenly in a Shanghai of 1998, following an evening out in the dancehall cut short by their annoyed wives, who promptly placed them “in the doghouse,” in the attic. They fall into a long sleep. In the dreamscape they find themselves in a future Shanghai stranger than paradise, with flying cars and apartments where interior design is instantaneously changeable by remote control. The most...

When we talk about the city in terms of the edge, do we imagine a physical demarcation separating the inside from a periphery outside and beyond? Or is the edge simultaneously “out there” and contained within the city itself? Such ambiguity circumscribes Seoul, which appears to possess the guise of what Rem Koolhaas calls a “Generic City” but whose patina is redolent of something different.¹ This apparent a-historicity is deceptive insofar as its complex history in the last century is marked by traumas encompassing Japanese colonization, the Korean War, Cold War imbroglios, postwar recovery, rapid economic development, authoritarian regimes, and...

It is striking how Chinatown pervades imagining of the future. Asia-Pacific figurations, notably expatriate Chinese enclaves, are pronounced in popular images of urban settings, especially when dystopic. Children of Men (2006) renders a future London choked with snarling rickshaws, immigrants, traffic jams, and insurgents. This is a world of overcrowding, decay, and abrupt violence. Illegal immigrants are called “fugees” (refugees), though faces onscreen are so often Asian, that we might hear “Fuji,” the mountain sacred to the Japanese. A wellspring of Asian-inflected futurism is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?...

This essay examines the imaging — and the imagination — of the Globalized City. The Globalized City is not quite the same thing as the Global City, but both terms acknowledge that globalization is transforming urban life in profound ways. What is it like to live and work in urban space under the new order of globalization? How is it different from life and work in the cities of the old international order — for example, the national capital, the imperial metropolis, or the colonial entrepôt? These questions are crucial to understanding the consequences of globalization and judging its benefits and its drawbacks....

Among the unique features of individual cities, aside from the features that define each place, is the speed with which any city can become at once a singular and global place: a space defined by an indeterminate quality that renders it the only possible place where it is and everywhere else at the same time. A city and the world at once, in an instant, defined by a temporality of place that constitutes the taking place of places. Somewhere, singular and always everywhere, nowhere, the world projected into the universe. Here, I am at the center where I am, wherever...