Epistolary Enunciation in Contemporary Fiction Films in Asia: A Typological Essay

Abstract

In Asia, the socio-linguistic history has sometimes made blossom the epistolary enunciation on the screen and has sometimes made it whiter. Melodramas developed the oralised destiny-letters as hinges of dramatic narration. Even a cinema under communist regime like that of North Korea maintains this model but by diverting it to the profit of his supreme epistolarian and leader. Starting from the 1990s, filmmakers like Shunji Iwai and Jeong Jae-eun screen the letters by assigning them a veridiction power in conflict: social/persona. Wong Kar-wai extends the epistolary enunciation to the whole narrative structure of the voices over of his films as memory interiorities. Finally, the transition to digital and virtual communication spaces has led filmmakers like Hideo Nakata and Jia Zhangke to underline the hauntological distance, spectral in Derrida’s sense; distance linked to the power of invisible big communicators which become inevitable thirds at the heart of all exchanges.