This book retrospectively looks at the phenomenon surrounding the global emergence of East Asian cinema through the figures of filmmakers and their persisting influence in transmedia domains fostered by networks of paratextual productions. As the landscape of contemporary auteur culture is fluid, then multi-agents, and continuously expanding, transmedia paratexts – plus a mode of self-reflective analysis – allow for the study of this auteur culture that involves diverse practices in different creative domains. Through following the life cycle of festivals’ digital archives, distributor marketing materials, official collectibles, cinephile writings, fan pilgrimage stories, fanvids, directors’ self-projections, and short films, all made by and in relation to East Asian filmmakers, collaborators, and supporters who have been associated with auteur culture, this book explores the intersections between academic and promotional discourses, as well as participatory cultures and performative self-reflections that have shaped contemporary film and media authorship in the last two decades.

The first part of the book pays particular attention to paratextual assemblages surrounding film festivals, multi-platform distribution, and cinephile/ fan creative practices, where media paratexts have been individually and collaboratively created, rewritten, and shared to foster the auteur reputations of selected filmmakers. The second part examines the way individual auteurs and collaborators have responded to the transmedia circumstances that shaped their public recognition. The focus is on alternative modes of performative responses, storytelling, and creative productions that address individuals’ senses of self and relations with both the industry and the public. Across different chapters, discourses surrounding film authorship and East Asian cinema in the last two decades are revisited and expanded to engage with transmedia culture. As the individual chapters that follow will work through case studies on selected filmmakers, networks of collaborators, and their circumstances, this introduction instead contextualizes the book within broader areas of transnational East Asian cinema, post-auteurism and self-reflective auteur studies that intersect with the dimensions of contemporary transmedia culture to be explored later on.

East Asian Film Authorship in Global Film and Media Flows

Individual national cinemas from East Asia have long been the subject of interest outside the region, partly through its geopolitics as shaped by the legacy of colonialism and the Cold War divisions of geographical landscapes.