Children caught in crossfire: John Woo and a global affective Cinema

This article begins with an observation of the imitations of Asian cinematic aesthetics, especially John Woo's (Chinese source) "aesthetics of violence," in contemporary Hollywood. The author points out the fallacy of the binary between Hollywood's attention to realistic details and what Hollywood filmmakers usually perceive as "fantastic/otherworldly" in the "Asian elements." The author uses John Woo as the primary example of a global affective cinema, which not only features qing Chinese source (feelings, affects, love) thematically but also relies on qing as the guiding stylistic principle to intensify the emotional and affective power. Drawing on recent scholarships on affect, which has been distinguished from feeling or emotion, he argues that the increasingly popular global affective cinema is different from traditional Hollywood narrative cinema in the sense that it is all about the very effect of intensification, not what is intensified. John Woo's films strike a chord with the international affective politics that seek to move the "irrational," "individual," and "private" affects into the arena of the rational, collective, and public politics. An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of the three central terms in this essay-feeling, emotion, and affect-affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). Affect is the body's way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language.