ike
avid naturalists on a butterfly expedition, European and
American film fanciers have periodically ventured into the
wilds of Asia and brought back exotic native cinemas. In
1951, with the triumph at the Venice Film Festival of Akira
Kurosawa's "Rashomon", the West "discovered" that Japan was
more than a humbled, xenophobic foe; it had a vigorous movie
tradition and a complex, multisided view of the world. The
1956 Cannes Film Festival welcomed Satyajit Ray's "Pather
Panchali" and got a peek at Indian film. That's how things
went for a while: each country was allowed one and only one
filmmaker to bear its standard in the West, to be its
good-film ambassador. In the early '70s, for example, Hong
Kong cinema was Bruce Lee.
That age of condescending connoisseurship has ended, at least among the cinerati. Seeing movies from communist China, Taiwan and, farther offshore, the Philippines has finally convinced the West that it holds no monopoly on highbrow or no-brow movies. Everybody knows that for the past decade Chinese-language cinema has been the most vital and turbulent in the world. Other regions continue to emerge. At Cannes in 1995, the big surprise was "The Arsonist", a Malaysian film directed by We Bin Haji-Saari. The Western cultural establishment has wakened, belatedly, at the high noon of Asia's movie history.
Both East and West have profited from the meeting. In the '50s and '60s especially, Japanese masters had a deep influence on filmmakers abroad; they changed the way movies look. Yasujiro Ozu's severe, head-on camera style, as adapted by France's Robert Bresson, set the tone for a generation of Europe's deadpan minimalists. The films of Kurosawa were a textbook for Western directors - and, even more, for directors of westerns. They loved his galloping camera as it tracked a bandit through forests dappled with ominous chiaroscuro. They studied his treatment of violence, sumptuously choreographed yet disturbingly direct. And they filched his stories. "Rashomon" was remade as "The Outrage", "The Seven Samurai" as "The Magnificent Seven", "Yojimbo" as "A Fistful of Dollars" and again, this fall, as the Bruce Willis action film "Last Man Standing".
