Analysis on Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Creation of Existentialist Films in the Context of East Asian Localization

Abstract

The core themes of existentialist film, rooted as it is in the postwar European philosophical tradition, are the individual subjectivity, extreme freedom and the confrontation with absurdity. When East Asian filmmakers grapple with these premises they are not merely reproducing Western existentialist aesthetic but are doing so in culturally specific philosophical registers such as Confucian relational ethics, Buddhist impermanence, and Daoist acceptance of contingency, thereby producing hybrid cinematic forms that are not so easily assimilated into either tradition. This study investigates the cross-cultural adoption of existentialist themes in East Asian cinema through three theoretical perspectives: Homi Bhabha's third sphere of cultural enunciation Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding paradigm 3. A comparative philosophy of selfhood: Sartrean individual freedom v Confucian relational identity. Drawing on close textual analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), this essay argues that East Asian existentialist cinema constitutes a unique mode of creative practice in which the irreducible particularity of collective historical experience re-works the existentialist form to produce what I call “relational existentialism”: a filmic mode that discovers freedom, absurdity, and authenticity in, rather than outside of.