The idea of doing an issue entitled East Meets West began as an excuse to write about our favorite new East Asian filmmakers, that batch of preternaturally gifted artists who have been flowing out of that “other” corner of the globe for the past decade. But coming so soon after our Tsai Ming-liang symposium, we wanted to do something different, and we ended up with something not so much auteurist in spirit as an attempt to bridge a cultural gap rather than creating further ones. We decided to take a rough road, one fraught with dangerous essentialist dead-ends and the possibility of blockages in understanding at every turn. By asking our writers to match a recent Asian film with some kind of Western counterpart, we hoped not to come to any grand conclusions about the vast differences between two worlds of cinema but rather to foster a better understanding of the processes by which we, western audiences and filmmakers, come to terms with our counterparts who live and work a half a world away.

Perhaps more succinctly: the mission here is to take steps towards de-exoticizing the tremendous output of these nations, to validate Japanese, Thai, Korean, and Chinese cinema as something we’re all a part of, not just as movie watchers but as citizens of the Western world. As is more often the case than not, one of our writers captured the spirit of the project better that we could ourselves. For those eager to dive right in, head straightaway to Andrew Tracy’s revealing piece on Naomi Kawase’s Shara and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, both of which have never seemed more essential works of art than they do here.

On a more technical note, this issue of REVERSE SHOT features the inauguration of two exciting new features well worth your attention. The first is an expanded DVD section shepherded into being by our own Nick Pinkerton and Erik Syngle. Before checking out the individual reviews, you’d do well to read Nick’s introductory note to see how we’ve adapted a typically tossed-off bit of filler for most magazines to match the REVERSE SHOT project as a whole.

The second addition is our new Shot/Reverse Shot column. Each issue will feature one or more films taken apart by two authors with drastically different viewpoints, a format that’s found a natural home in television showcases for partisan political hackery that’s been sadly underutilized in an arena that depends no less on the (often heated) exchange of opinions. In a way, Shot/Reverse Shot represents the purest form of one of our core tenets: Multiple writers sounding off from different perspectives around the same theme. This issue features Nick Pinkerton and James Crawford on Sin City, and even though it’s been in theaters for a bit now, it certainly hasn’t received the thorough going-over that it gets in their hands.

We’re also offering our largest, and best collection of interviews yet, featuring Apichatpong Weerasethakul discussing the methods to the not-so-mad madness of Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady, Arnaud Desplechin on the occasion of the release of his masterpiece Kings and Queen relating his views on audience-filmmaker equality and especially, Ohad Landesman’s entertaining and mellifluous, political and humble conversation with Israeli director Keren Yedaya, winner of the Camera d’Or for her potent Or.

There’s a lot to dig through. As usual, happy hunting.

MK & JR

Read the East Meets West Symposium