Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 4.2, Winter 2019)

CONTENTS Vol.04, No.2 | Winter 2019

OVERVIEW ii

ABOUT MSJ

iii LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Greg Chan

iv CONTRIBUTORS

ARTICLES 01 “LET’S HEAD ON INTO THE HOUSE!”

REVIEWS 80 RETHINKING COMMUNISM IN THE AGE OF TRUMP AND MODI Mahitosh Mandal and Priyanka Das

ANNOUNCEMENTS 85 KDOCS 2020 86 OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang

11 THE LAND BEFORE TIME Michael Sooriyakumaran

24 IN DEFENCE OF LOVE Troy Bordun

36 DOCUMENTARY’S THEATRICALITY AND THEATRICALITY’S DOCUMENTARY Maxime Boyer-Degoul

48 THE HORROR OF CONSUMERISM THROUGH MISE-EN-SCÈNE Joseph Walderzak

58 HOLLYWOOD IMPORTS – SHAKEN AND STIRRED Zachary Karpinellison

VISUAL ESSAY 70 GENDERING BOLLYWOOD Asma Sayed

INTERVIEWS 72 STORYTELLING FROM WITHIN TO REACH AN INNER TRUTH Paul Risker

"Awkwafina" courtesy of Arof Rahman (2019)

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ABOUT MSJ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

OJS CONSULTANT

Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada

Karen Meijer-Kline, KPU, Canada

ADVISORY BOARD

INTERNS

Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada

Sanjay Singh Aujla, KPU, Canada

Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University,USA

Neil Bassan, UBC, Canada

Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, USA

Samantha Larder, KPU, Canada

David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, USA Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA

The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials and

Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

regular columns, are those of the authors and do not necessarily

Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University, Canada

represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board or the

Michael C.K. Ma, KPU, Canada

advisory board.

Janice Morris, KPU, Canada Miguel Mota, UBC, Canada

Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

is published by Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada

Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

WEBSITE

Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

www.kpu.ca/MESjournal

REVIEWERS

FRONT COVER IMAGE

Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada

Courtesy of Matthew Henry. Burst, 2017.

Jack Patrick Hayes, KPU/UBC, Canada Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA

BACK COVER IMAGE

Kent Lewis, Capilano University, Canada

Courtesy of Jake Hills on Unsplash

Carolina Mariana Rocha, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsvillle, USA

SPONSORS

Christina Parker-Flynn, Florida State University, USA

Faculty of Arts, KPU, Canada

Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada

KDocs Documentary Film Festival, Canada

Andrea Meador Smith, Shenandoah University, USA Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India

CONTACT

Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

MSJ@kpu.ca

COPYEDITORS

SOCIAL MEDIA

Heather Cyr, KPU, Canada

@MESjournal

Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada

facebook.com/MESjournal

Janice Morris, KPU, Canada ISSN: 2369-5056 (online)

LAYOUT EDITOR Patrick Tambogon, Wilson School of Design at KPU, Canada

WEBMASTER Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada

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ISSN: 2560-7065 (print)

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, Now more than ever, Asian representation matters.

According to Stacy L. Smith’s USC Annenberg study, Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films, only 1% of lead roles in films go to Asians who, on average, earn 1 out of 20 speaking roles in Hollywood productions. Some directors compound this scarcity—we are looking at you, J.J. Abrams and Rupert Sanders—by casting whites as Asian characters. While Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan Noonian Singh in Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) and Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (2017) are less offensive than Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), they remain indicators of a disappointing lack of progress. Whitewashing and yellowface are such common practices that, as diversity activist @angryasianman notes, “more white actresses have won Oscars for playing Asians than actual Asian actresses have won.”

Asians have long been relegated to playing one-dimensional roles, limited by the entrenched assumption that the minority experience can’t be universal. Conditioned to seeing Asians portraying the exotic girlfriend, the tech-savvy nerd, the silent assassin, the dragon lady or the trusty sidekick, we rarely have had the opportunity to experience them as the leads in a film. Of course the much-heralded Crazy Rich Asians (2018) not only featured Constance Wu and Henry Golding as its leads, but also an all-Asian cast that included Michelle Yeoh, Ken Jeong, and Awkwafina.

However, while Jon M. Chu’s romantic comedy signals a watershed moment, it comes a quarter century after Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993) and nearly 60 years after the release of Henry Coster’s Flower Drum Song (1961), two other films featuring Asian leads and all-Asian casts that broke the ‘bamboo ceiling.’ How do we ensure that such films are more than one-offs that restart the diversity conversation generations apart?

Attitudes and practices are shifting. Much of the debate lives on social media, with hashtags questioning Hollywood’s diversity problem (#OscarsSoWhite) and its lack of imagination when it comes to diverse leads (#StarringJohnCho).

The breakout star of Crazy Rich Asians, comedian Awkwafina, has gone on to make her mark as a dramatic actor in the critically acclaimed The Farewell (2019). Canadian actor Simu Liu, tweeting “Hey @Marvel, great job with Captain American and Thor. Now how about an Asian American hero?,” has since been cast as Shang-Chi in the MCU’s upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). Dev Patel is set to play the titular character in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020). Behind the camera, we have Ang Lee, Mina Shum, Justin Lin, Mira Nair, Meera Menon, and Domee Shi, among others.

You are invited to learn more about the nuances of Asian representation in this special issue.

In solidarity,

Greg Chan | Editor in Chief

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CONTRIBUTORS TROY BORDUN

MAXIME BOYER-DEGOUL

ZACHARY KARPINELLISON

Troy Michael Bordun is a contract instructor in Cultural Studies and Sociology at Trent University and Art History, Sociology and Anthropology, and Communication Studies at Concordia University. His Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan) was published in Fall 2017. He is currently working on an analysis of melodrama in the films of Carlos Reygadas and continuing work on the significance of the solo girl subgenre in online heteroporn. On the latter topic, an article in Celebrity Studies is forthcoming.

Ma xime Boyer-Degoul is PhD student in Cinema and Performing Arts under the supervision of M. Fabien Gérard (Université Libre de Bruxelles). His thesis is entitled “Subjectivity of images of me, otherness and milieu in Japanaese contemporary cinema and anime.” After completing an MA in Classics and an MA in Cinema and Performing Arts, he taught French language for two years in China and is currently living in Japan to achieve his doctoral work. In 2018, a sample of his work was published in his first book, Urban Landscape and the Dishinabitation in Japanese Cinema.

Zach Karpinellison graduated from The University of New South Wales (BA Film Studies, Hons Class 1) in 2018. He has presented papers at the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and Dial S for Screen Studies conferences, and has published film criticism for Rough Cut magazine. His research areas include New German Cinema, Iranian Cinema, and Transnational Film Censorship.

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MAHITOSH MANDAL & PRIYANKA DAS

Mahitosh Mandal, Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata, is the author of Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture (Orient BlackSwan, 2018). His PhD is on “Vivekananda and the Question of the Other: A Critique of Alterity and Subalternity.” He specializes in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and postmodernism in theory and practice.

Priyanka Das, Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata, is a scholar of popular culture who teaches Fantasy literature and critical theory, with specialization in Marxism. Her M. Phil dissertation was on “Objectification of Male Body in Bollywood Movies and Advertisements.” Her PhD is on the politics of visuality in the popular television show Game of Thrones.

PAUL RISKER

ASMA SAYED

Paul Risker, independent scholar, film and arts critic, holds an holds an MA in film from the University of Wolverhampton. He is editor of Film Frame and contributes to various online publications including Little White Lies, PopMatters, Aesthetica Magazine, and FrightFest. Prior to his freelance writing career, he participated in an initiative to revitalise the creative industries, where he project managed, wrote, directed and edited independent short film productions.

He is an MSJ board member and the interviews and festival section editor.

Dr. Asma Sayed teaches literary and film studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She specializes in postcolonial South Asian literature and cinema. Her interdisciplinary research and social activism focus on marginalization of gendered and racialized people and violence against women as represented in literature, film, and media. Her publications include five books and numerous articles in periodicals, anthologies, and academic journals; she also writes community engagement articles on cinema of social justice. She is the President of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies.

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MICHAEL SOORIYAKUMARAN

JOSEPH WALDERZAK

JING XIAN (JESSICA) YANG

Michael Sooriyakumaran is a PhD student in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. For his dissertation, he will be reexamining the Brechtian modernist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s as a transnational group style that filmmakers in different countries adapted to various political and institutional constraints, focusing in particular on the work of Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub and Oshima Nagisa. Michael's writing has appeared in Frames Cinema Journal and Offscreen.

Joseph Walderzak is a professor at Adrian College and Macomb Community College in Michigan. His scholarship has been published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Supernatural Studies, and Studies in the Fantastic, as well as appearing in a number of anthologies conceding film and television. His research interests include feminist and Marxist analysis across various film genres.

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang is a secondyear MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of YouTube and fandom. This year, she presented her research at the Popular Culture Association Annual Conference 2019 and the UC Berkeley Graduate Student Conference on taste and distinction. Most recently, she proposed an original concept called “networked celebrity,”which integrates network analysis with celebrity studies to describe YouTube stars. Jessica is passionate about interdisciplinary methods and complex, nuanced thinking in regards to online cultures.

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viii Vol.04, No.01 | Spring 2019

“Let’s head on into the house!”: The National Abject and the Dangers of Inclusion in Wong Fu’s Asian Bachelorette

BY JING XIAN (JESSICA) YANG | University of Southern California

ABSTRACT In this past year, there seems to have been an unprecedented increase in Asian American images in the media, which has led many to hail this visibility as a new era of improved representation for Asian Americans. What this argument overlooks is the conditions of such visibility, which oftentimes do not provide innovation or revolution from past stereotypes. This paper investigates a two-part YouTube satire called Asian Bachelorette and Asian Bachelorette 2, created by Wong Fu Productions (a popular YouTube channel) in an attempt to highlight the lack of minority representation on ABC’s The Bachelorette. My analysis demonstrates how, in order to become serious sexual partners, the Asian American contestants must exploit racial stereotypes in order to appear attractive to the white bachelorette. Despite contributing to the general visibility of Asian Americans, Asian Bachelorette enacts a process of national abjection, achieving inclusion through self-exoticization and subordination under white subjectivity and desire.

INTRODUCTION

I

n 2012, two nashville, tennessee, football players sued ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette for denying people of colour a fair chance at casting (Gardner par. 2). The lawsuit epitomizes the lack of representation for racial minorities not only on these reality shows, but also in the larger institutions of mainstream media, which are built on foundations of invisibility and exclusion. In order to combat this silence, many have called for an increase in visibility for underrepresented racial groups, but what this call overlooks is the content of such representations.

Since these representations still function under the racist apparatuses entrenched in American mainstream media, mere visibility might do more to harm minority groups than to empower them. This dilemma speaks to the politics of silence versus speech. Racial minorities aspiring to create media content are faced with a choice between working outside the bounds of mainstream media or working within them. The former would perpetuate the exclusion of minority voices from dominant media institutions; the

latter would risk self-alienation through hegemonic conventions ill-fitted to represent subordinated minorities.

Despite the qualms associated with the latter choice, many content creators still decide to fight for inclusion in mainstream media, whatever that inclusion might entail.

One prominent example would be Wong Fu Productions, an independent online studio popular on YouTube as a major source of Asian American content. In 2017 and 2018, Wong Fu created two spoof trailers, Asian Bachelorette and Asian Bachelorette 2, which feature exclusively Asian male contestants vying for the heart of one white bachelorette. These mock productions call attention to the lack of Asian American representation on The Bachelorette. The two videos appropriate the structure and aesthetics of the original reality show, choosing speech over silence. In other words, they choose to enter the discourses surrounding Hollywood (speech), rather than leave it behind (silence).

Much of the popular press and online responses to the spoof have hailed Asian Bachelorette as a triumph for Asian MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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“Let’s head on into the house!”

American visibility. These articles, however, avoid in-depth discussion on the videos’ treatments of Asian stereotypes or dismiss them as pure comedy to be taken at face value.

A closer reading of the videos’ content illustrates a rather problematic acceptance of Asian American subordination. The contestants must play up their racial difference, exploiting stereotypes in order to appeal to white heterosexual desire. My analysis of these videos aligns closely with Karen Shimakawa’s concept of the national abject, a role accepted in the American psyche only because its foreignness and objectionable nature help serve and define white subjectivity (3). In choosing speech over silence, Asian Bachelorette falls victim to the inherently racist ideology of mainstream media. Despite contributing to the general visibility of Asian Americans, Asian Bachelorette enacts the process of abjection, achieving inclusion at the cost of the continued subordination of Asian Americans under white subjectivity and desire.

THE CHOICE OF SILENCE VERSUS SPEECH Understanding the representational context of Asian Bachelorette first requires an exploration of the stereotypes that Hollywood has established for Asian Americans, many of which focus on silence and exclusion. In Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s study of ‘Asian/American’ women, for example, she describes the stereotype of the Lotus Blossom, the Asian woman whose docile and submissive manner makes her an ideal vessel for the projection of white heterosexual desire (75). Her silence facilitates her acceptance of American culture and the seeming emancipation that comes with immigration, modernization, and a leaving behind of one’s traditionalist Asian roots (72, 81). For Asian men, the process of exclusion is literal. As the emasculated worker of the early 20 th century, performing feminized labour such as cooking or laundry, Asian men were unable to become the white man’s sexual rival (Nakamura 190). This prevented them from participating in the romantic world and contributing, reproductively, to the national populace (Shimakawa 16). In addition, many Asian characters were not actually played by Asian actors but by white actors (Kang 102). On the levels of both diegesis and production, Asian American representation in Hollywood is built on processes of exclusion and silence.

For some avant-garde filmmakers, such as Trinh T. Minh Ha, silence, when harnessed correctly, is a useful tool for resistance. In “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial

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Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” Trinh evokes the figure of the inappropriate other, who turns her position as a subordinate minority into one that challenges the dominant subject (3). The inappropriate other embodies liminality, appearing as both similar and different from the subject in order to blur the self-other divide that reaffirms the subject’s wholeness (4). The inappropriate other refuses to articulate the conditions of her existence, maintaining a threateningly ambiguous identity. Put another way, the inappropriate other is also the inappropriate/d other, as the subject is unable to master and appropriate her identity for his purposes and ease of mind (Trinh par. 4). True to her ideas, Trinh T. Minh Ha produces films that do not adhere to the constraints of classical Hollywood conventions. She creates, instead, a site of cinematic representation outside mainstream media where the inappropriate or inappropriate/d other can express herself in her own terms. Her first film, Reassemblage (1982), for example, utilizes disjointed editing and narration in order to forego the authoritative point of view of a conventional documentary (Balsom par. 1). The inappropriate or inappropriate/d other thus embraces exclusion from the mainstream, finding empowerment through the act of leaving behind the techniques of conventional filmmaking. Trinh illustrates how silence and exclusion, despite being the tools of subordination, can also act as an antidote for the conditions of Asian American representation within Hollywood.

While the liminality of Trinh’s inappropriate other facilitates empowerment, liminality can also represent the negative effects of inclusion within the mainstream.

According to Karen Shimakawa, any attempt to represent the Asian American identity must recognize both the foreignness and the domestication that comes with being Asian (distinctively different from white) and American (still included in the national psyche) (3, 17). Shimakawa describes this liminal position as the national abject, something that, “although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole” (2). At first glance, Asian Americans and their immigrant bodies represent the invasion of something foreign, which must be isolated/cut off from white America. This process of differentiating the other, however, helps define white subjectivity in the negative (i.e. white Americans are what Asian Americans are not), which forces Asian Americans to remain present in order to help this self-identification (10). This prevents the national abject

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang

from ever becoming stable or concrete, as it is a frontier that must move to wherever the national subject requires reaffirmation (3). Shimakawa describes this instability as a “constantly shifting relation to Americanness, a movement between visibility and invisibility, foreignness and domestication/assimilation... present and jettisoned,” similar and different (3). More bluntly put, Asian Americans are included into the national whole because they are different and meant to be excluded. Whereas the inappropriate other finds autonomy in exclusion, the national abject must face the consequences of inclusion based on exclusion, a process that prevents the abject from becoming a subject in its own right.

While the inappropriate other and the national abject depict the liminal figure in contrasting ways, they both support Audre Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (2). If we take the master’s house to be mainstream media and the master’s tools to be the aesthetics of mainstream media, this quotation suggests that representation within institutions like Hollywood cannot be favorable to subordinate groups, since mainstream aesthetics will always support the dominant racist ideology. While the inappropriate other finds empowerment through the abandonment of the master’s tools entirely, the national abject illustrates the degrading conditions of existing under the master’s roof, with nothing but the master’s tools at one’s disposal.

In both scenarios, the use of the master’s tools appears as a poor method for altering one’s subordinate position within mainstream media.

Nevertheless, as Kimball Jensen states in her dissertation Narrating Racial Identity Online: Asian American YouTube Channels, the choice “to protest Hollywood or to become filmmakers [in Hollywood]” is still seriously considered by aspiring Asian American media makers (8).

While independent and avant-garde filmmaking afford pathways for protest, as with Trinh’s films, their limited distribution often makes it difficult to pose a significant threat to Hollywood’s well-established images (Jensen 8).

With the introduction of the Internet, though, filmmakers seem to have a third option. They could remain outside of Hollywood while also bypassing the distribution difficulties of independent filmmaking, given the ease of online circulation (9). For many Asian Americans, the Internet offers a space for alternative images, where content creators can engage in self-representation and activists can critique the harmful effects of mainstream media (Sun 294; Chan

163; Jensen 23). In his analysis of race in the digital sphere, however, Alexander Galloway warns against seeing the Internet as an escape from the issues that have haunted film and television (113). He argues that, in the vast diversity offered by the Internet, “difference becomes fodder for injustice” (121). Rather than rising above the racial dynamics of the real world, the realm of digital simulation replicates and purifies racial difference, since representation is “no longer the dirty racism of actual struggle” (i.e. real life embodiment of race) but the calculated decisions of content creators (i.e. digital replication/simulation of race) (Galloway 113). This digital racial coding reflects perspectives on race in rather unadulterated ways, often revealing how representation of racial difference online is directly tied to racist attitudes (120). This emphasizes the importance of the choices online content creators make in relation to race. A decision to simulate the conventions of Hollywood in the digital sphere, for example, can easily facilitate the propagation of racist Hollywood ideology in digital content that appears separate from mainstream institutions.

Nonetheless, not all racial coding is intentionally malicious; in fact, many who choose to adhere to Hollywood conventions often do so in an attempt to appropriate for minorities the benefits of mainstream representation previously reserved for white Americans. For example, ever since its early days, Wong Fu has found a desire for inclusion at the heart of its videos. The group’s first viral hit, “Yellow Fever” (2006), features the stereotype of the desexualized Asian man and his exclusion from the dating game.

The video dwells on the benefits that could be gained from entering the dating world and the frustration that comes from being left out. In contrast to the conception of the inappropriate other, here, exclusion is seen as detrimental rather than empowering. According to Glenn Omatsu’s historical tracing of Asian American activism, this emphasis on entry and access was borne from the yappie culture (meaning young Asian professional) of the 1980s, which focused on the economic benefits of participating in America’s capitalist culture over the social justice and civil rights concerns of the 1960s (299). Fittingly, Wong Fu, contemporaneously with Asian Bachelorette, released a series called Yappie (2018), which reflects on the struggles of those who reap the economic and social benefits of normalization within American society, however tenuous that normalization might be. This demonstrates the alignment of Wong Fu’s philosophy with the movements of the MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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Fig. 1 | Asian Bachelorette contestants drinking champagne, commonly

viewed as an Asian custom. 2:09. Wong Fu Productions, 2017.

‘80s, which helps explain the company’s tendency to mimic conventional mainstream aesthetics. For instance, most of their sketches conform to genres borrowed from cinema, such as drama, comedy, and romantic comedies. For them, this mimicry is a way of imagining Asian Americans gaining access to spaces and benefits traditionally denied to them. As Phil Wang, one of the founding members of Wong Fu, states at the end of Asian Bachelorette, “hopefully we can get to a point someday where it’s not weird to see Asians in this [sexualized] way,” which continues their battle against the trope of the unsexy Asian man and against his exclusion from shows like The Bachelorette. In this way, Wong Fu does not heed Lorde’s warning of the master’s tools being unable to dismantle the master’s house, since they focus, instead, on the benefits of being in the master’s house, or, in this case, the bachelorette’s house. In the Asian Bachelorette, they are literally looking for a way to enter the door.

ASIAN BACHELORETTE AS ENACTING THE NATIONAL ABJECT “It’s time to head on into the house,” says Brittany, the bachelorette in the first installment of Asian Bachelorette. As the group of exclusively Asian men happily follow her in, the moment appears to be a celebration for Asian American representation. To Brittany’s surprise, upon entering, the first thing all the men do is to take off their shoes at the door, a practice perceived to be common in Asian households. While not as intentional or exploitative as the treatment of other stereotypes later on, this visual joke sets the tone for the performance of difference that accompanies the initial impression of inclusivity. In order to fight for their place in the house and combat the stereotype of the unsexy Asian man, the contestants sexualize

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their identities as Asians, using lines such as, “This is a mandarin, like me. Let’s make mandarin juice together,” or “This is dim sum, which is what we will be doing to the lights later,” or even, “Did you know there’s over 720 dialects in Hindi?

Some would say I’m an expert in tongues.” The pun structure of these lines allows them to take on two levels of meaning that directly connect aspects of one’s heritage (food, language) to sex. Instead of resisting an overemphasis on one’s racial identity, these men embrace it and practice self-exoticization in order to showcase their sex appeal. Their place within the bachelorette’s house is therefore contingent on the sexualization of racial difference. Just as the national abject acts as the repulsive other within the national whole (Shimakawa 2), the Asian American contestants, despite gaining entry into the house, must not only accept but exploit their position as the racialized other.

These expressions of difference, however, diverge from the overdetermined markers of race previously used in racist cinematic imagery. According to Kang, due to cinema’s chromatic axis of black and white and the whitewashing of Asian characters (i.e. white actors playing Asian), Hollywood has found it difficult to represent the Asian race onscreen (102). This has led to the use of a myriad of visual indicators (clothes, make-up, behaviour) beyond skin tone to accentuate racial difference (Kang 102). Despite the men’s self-exoticization, these visual indicators initially remain unused in Asian Bachelorette, as the goal of the videos is not to emulate racist imagery of the past. It is significant that these men start from a position of normality (or, alternatively, assimilation): they wear suits, they speak Americanized English, and, most crucial to a dating show, they are attractive by Western standards. In moments when the men perform their Asian heritage, they tend to appropriate objects common to American society in ways specific to one’s Asian identity: Pepcid, medication to prevent the Asian glow; dentistry, a preferred occupation for Asian American families; singing, a popular hobby among the Filipino population; and drinking champagne, a custom of drinking alcohol in one shot (Fig. 1). These objects and practices are not obvious signs of an Asian heritage, but the jokes and stereotypes they appeal to are.

This appropriation helps highlight the liminality of the national abject as both similar and different from the white national subject (Shimakawa 3). While these men appear as typical Americans instead of the overt foreigners of classic Hollywood, they also interact with American culture in distinctively Asian ways, and thus cannot really assimilate.

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang

These expressions of difference, however, are policed

by Brittany, the white subject which the men, as abjects, are meant to serve. In response to seeing the very first contestant, Brittany says, “I was surprised, but hey, it’s great! I’m here to meet all types of guys!” Whereas it might be understandable for Brittany to be surprised at two Asian men getting out of the car, one after another, her comments to just the first contestant show her immediate recognition of the rarity of his racial identity, demonstrating how race is central to her first impression. Her hesitation towards the men’s race, while meant to critique the lack of Asian American representation in The Bachelorette, also primes a certain aversion to the Asian American identity in the spoof. For the most part, Brittany is receptive to the men’s culturally specific advances and takes pride in learning more about the various Asian cultures on display. She becomes distressed, however, when she realizes the mysteries and possible deviances of the Asian body. Two of the men, for example, lie about their appearance (one is 53 but seems much younger, the other has had plastic surgery), which brings her to tears. In another moment, one contestant gifts Brittany a body pillow with her face on it. Since the body pillow is a human-sized pillow depicting a scantily clad female character from anime, it is often associated with the deviant and obsessive sexualities of overzealous anime fans. Brittany’s expression of disgust in this moment deems the pillow an incorrect expression of sexuality. Her negative responses create a level of curation on the men’s various expressions of difference; whereas some differences can be sexy, others, particularly ones to do with the mysteries of the racialized body, are unacceptable.

This is especially significant considering Shimakawa’s claim that the raced body is difficult to interpret and regulate (7).

Since mystery and deviance increase such difficulty, they are frowned upon. Instead, the articulation of one’s identity through stereotypes turns the contestants into fixed, absolute, and easy-to-consume bites of information, which further explains why the men might exploit stereotypes to increase their desirability.

If Brittany’s curation utilizes fear and disgust, then for Stephanie, the bachelorette of Asian Bachelorette 2, her curation rests on the opposite end of the spectrum with fetishization and ‘yellow fever’. In one instance, Stephanie asks a contestant, William Wang, to put on a ninja mask and say “heya”. Although he himself seems disturbed by this, the other contestants are more than willing to embrace this preference of hers and don costumes from Asian pop culture.

Fig. 2 | Asian Bachelorette 2 contestants dress up in costumes from Asian

pop culture, 5:23. Wong Fu Productions, 2018.

With their Naruto cosplay and K-pop inspired make-up (Fig. 2), the men’s performance of difference leaves behind the appropriation of American objects for obvious markers of race that are mere updates to the racialization techniques of classical Hollywood. Since these pop culture references do not resemble the more identifiably racist imagery of cinema, they downplay and mask the continued logical thread of using clothing, make-up, and behaviour to emphasize difference and exoticism. The fact that the men voluntarily take up these costumes is not comforting and demonstrates the degrading conditions they accept upon entering the house as abjects. Since Stephanie fetishizes obvious markers of race, the men amplify their self-exoticization with these markers for her pleasure. In this case, the servile and subordinate nature of the national abject becomes obvious, as the men’s performance of difference is tailored to the particular needs and desires of the white bachelorette. While it is worth noting that the YouTuber who plays Stephanie (Bethany Mota) is herself Latina, in the spoof, there is no indication that she is not white. The diegesis allows her to embody white subjectivity, even if she herself might identify differently.

In addition to the bachelorettes representing whiteness, the gaze of the reality TV camera also reflects a white subjectivity. As Su Holmes notes in her article, “‘The Viewers Have...Taken Over the Airwaves’? Participation, Reality TV and Approaching the Audience-in-the-Text,” reality shows self-consciously incorporate the audience into its textual form (14). Even if, as a spoof, Asian Bachelorette does not entail participation via voting or live audiences, the video can still borrow techniques that bring the viewer more intimately into the fabric of the text. This can, in turn, hail the viewer as the bearer of a particular perspective, in MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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this case, the perspective of white heterosexual desire. One technique has both Brittany and Stephanie looking to the camera whenever something strange happens, hoping to elicit sympathy from the viewer. This aligns their gaze with that of the camera, resulting in moments when both the bachelorette and the camera sexually objectify the male contestants. In Season 1, for example, Brittany sits by the poolside, ogling the men as they swim. Accordingly, the camera provides a copious amount of well-lit, slow motion shots of the men’s attractive naked physiques, with particular attention to their abs. Despite Laura Mulvey’s seminal observation of the misogynistic tradition of the cinematic gaze, here, the camera divides between the bearer and recipient of the gaze along racial lines, subordinating Asian American men to the sexualizing surveillance of white women.

The host also represents the rest of the production crew, which take on the white male perspective that, according to Shimakawa, is meant to be the American ideal (4). The underlying apparatus of the show therefore functions under white subjectivity and visual pleasure, further highlighting the abject’s subordinate position at the receiving end of a judgmental gaze.

Occasionally, the male contestants would also try to garner sympathy from the camera and production crew, but their perspectives are often too pluralistic to form easy alliances with the audience. When Brittany misidentifies Thai food to be from Taiwan, she demonstrates how difficult it can be to navigate the complex national affiliations of those who fall under the umbrella category of Asian American. These national conflicts are then conflated with the romantic competition at the heart

While the inappropriate other finds empowerment through the abandonment of the master's tools entirely, the national abject illustrates the degrading conditions of existing under the master's roof, with nothing but the master's tools at one's disposal.

Additionally, the bachelorettes’ glances off-camera make salient the presence of a production crew. Despite the glimpse of an Asian boom operator (who, humorously enough, makes it onto the spoof in Season 2 as the man being fetishized with a ninja mask), the crew does more to objectify the Asian American contestants than to side with them. All the men’s individual interviews, for example, require them to introduce themselves and their unique qualities, while the bachelorettes forego the lengthy introduction to talk about their feelings and desires. While there is no need for whiteness, as the default identity, to define itself, Asian Americans must constantly reiterate their identity in order to reinforce the stable borders against which whiteness can feel secure (Shimakawa 9). Even this reinforcement, however, is not completely autonomous. In addition to the bachelorettes’ curation, there is a white male host who introduces the jokes before the contestants perform them. This pulls the expression of racial difference under the terms established by the host, as the voice of authority.

06 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

of the show, which prevents any unification between the men’s various perspectives. In Season 2, four men vie for Stephanie’s attention by exploiting their family-owned businesses, each of which hold connotations of different nationalities (the Chinese restaurant, the Korean liquor store, the Vietnamese nail salon, the Cambodian donut shop). As well, in both seasons, several contestants fight over which nations can lay claim to which dishes (whether Jajiangmian/Jajangmyeon is Chinese or Korean, whether chicken and rice is Singaporean or Malaysian). While these national identities are meant to reflect the diversity behind the term Asian American, they also tie the contestants perpetually to their nation of origin and to an identity that is forever foreign. This variety contributes to the instability associated with abjection, which keeps the Asian American identity flexible for the benefit of white subjectivity. As the men flaunt their family-owned businesses, their diversity allows them to cater to Stephanie’s every need, from food to beauty. While, as previously stated, every frontier the abject

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang

creates seems stable, the abject itself is denied the stability enjoyed by subjectivity or even objectivity (Shimakawa 3).

Accordingly, the show’s structure of competition ensures instability through internal conflict; to combat the stereotype of the desexualized Asian man within monogamous constraints, the men must remain divided so that one of them can win the heart of the bachelorette.

The men are unable to harness this instability in any empowering way, as would be the case for the inappropriate other. As Trinh describes, one of the main tenets of the inappropriate other is her silence, powerful as an act of resistance to the clarity of identities within the status quo (4). None of the bachelors can enact this silence, since their unique articulations of the Asian American identity, such as the racialized pick-up lines, are ammunition for competition. Perhaps the closest a contestant gets to silence is William Wang, whose lack of individualized traits makes him a victim to Stephanie’s yellow fever: he is one of the only contestants who does not introduce himself with a unique quirk or a specific Asian national identity, and, in turn, his identity on the show becomes dominated by Stephanie’s fetish. Will’s situation illustrates how there is no room for silence in the master’s house, since the absence of a self-determined identity results in an identity projected onto oneself.

Even though Will is silent, his identity is easily appropriated and altered as Stephanie projects onto him Asian traits she learned elsewhere. This shows how the materials for Stephanie’s appropriation, such as the ninja mask, are not produced by the men themselves, and how, in turn, the power to refuse articulation and become inappropriate/d is not situated with the men.

The men’s difficulty in embodying the inappropriate other is further explained by Trinh’s conception of the figure as a woman who possesses the added exclusion from patriarchy (Trinh utilizes the female pronoun throughout her paper to describe the inappropriate other). The intersectional identity of an Asian American woman provides more transgressive fuel for the inappropriate other, as her silence can threaten the status quo on the fronts of both race and gender. While her femininity ostensibly connotes a lack that aids her silence, the masculinity of the male contestants aligns closer to the absolute and phallic knowledge that comes with articulation. Given these factors, Asian American women would be best suited to represent the inappropriate other, but curiously, they are completely excluded from

Asian Bachelorette. Despite the initial impression of the title, Asian Bachelorette features no Asian bachelorettes, instead casting white women among Asian American men. If the logic of the show remains consistent, then “Asian Bachelor” would feature a white man among Asian American women. At the end of Asian Bachelorette 2, we do see a fake teaser for “Asian Bachelor”, but surprisingly, it breaks structural logic to star one Asian American man.

This frees up the racial identities of the women to be non-Asian, since his Asian-ness fulfills the requirement of the title. Even in a scenario in which Asian American women would logically appear, the spoof denies their existence along with the inappropriate other they could embody. Whatever empowerment the inappropriate other might offer to the spoof is lost and we are left with Asian American men, whose masculinity counter-intuitively hinders empowerment and facilitates their subordinated status in American mainstream culture through this forced articulation.

Alternatively, an argument that potentially decreases the problematic nature of these representations is that the spoof is meant to be parodic and ridiculous. While the videos borrow heavily from the reality show aesthetic, they also qualify as mockumentaries, in which the content is fictionalized, and the form is a reflection on the truth claims of non-fiction film and television (Wallace 15).

According to Wallace’s study on mockumentary comedy, mockumentaries highlight the artifice of the documentary form and draw attention to the alternative meanings which lurk behind the manifest content (20-22). To put it bluntly, mockumentaries are meant to mock, but what exactly is Asian Bachelorette mocking?

The difficulty in answering this question comes from the dual goal associated with the spoof ’s treatment of stereotypes. On the one hand, the spoof ridicules stereotypes in order to critique a society that believes them, while on the other, Wong Fu takes pride in these stereotypes through a process of re-appropriating previously derogatory images for self-empowerment.

The visual joke of the Asian squat (Fig. 3), is an ideal example for exploring this ambivalence. When Stephanie realizes that she forgot to bring chairs for everyone to sit on in the woods, the men, without a word of deliberation, all squat down in unison. The moment reflects the stereotype that Asians have the tendency to squat in public spaces where seats are not available. In “Behind the Scenes – Asian Bachelorette 2,” one filmmaker states, in regard to the Asian MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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“Let’s head on into the house!”

Fig. 3 | The Asian Bachelorette 2 contestants squat down when there are no chairs, 3:32. Wong Fu Productions, 2018.

squat, “We think it’s going to be a big hit”. While being one of the central jokes of the video, the Asian squat seems more organic than the men’s pandering to Stephanie’s ‘yellow fever’. As a result, the moment feels like less of a critique against dominant subjectivity, as the act does not appear forced or exploitative. In fact, portraying the squat as a seemingly natural quirk allows Asian Americans to re-appraise the stereotype as a positive marker of identity. Wong Fu predicted the squat to be so popular that they created T-shirts with the saying “Asian Squat Squad,” seen in the credits screen at the end of Asian Bachelorette 2. This merchandising turns the stereotype into a label not only for their brand identity but also for communities who wish to embrace their Asian American identity. As Shimakawa states, “because the radically excluded abject is not wholly objectifiable… the image constantly wavers… resulting in often diametrically opposed stereotypes” (16). The squat demonstrates how Asian Bachelorette exhibits a similar wavering between satirical critique to genuine avowal. The ambivalence of the abject position plagues the spoof ’s treatment of stereotypes and complicates the claim that the videos are solely parodic.

This interpretation of Asian Bachelorette further breaks down in the finale of season 2, when Stephanie gets engaged to Ben, the winning contestant. Immediately 08 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

after Stephanie puts on the ring, Ben’s mother appears beside them, insisting on growing the family with in-laws and grandchildren. As Stephanie’s expression turns from a smile to a look of hesitance and discomfort, we realize that Ben’s performance of difference has become a reality.

When isolated, the men’s racial difference can be seen as pandering and exaggeration, which draw attention to the artifice of stereotypes. The sincerity of Ben’s traditionalist parents (one ensuring no sex before marriage and the other prioritizing money within a family), though, illustrates how Asian Americans do not merely play up their racial difference, but are genuinely different. The mother embodies the part of the national abject meant to be jettisoned, “the contamination or infection by the contagion—both literal and figurative—that the immigrant body represents” (Shimakawa 8). Unlike her son, the mother’s racial difference does not contribute to her desirability, and actually seems so inherent that it cannot be shut off even when it seems undesirable. The mother’s invasion into her son’s love life shows how her traditional and foreign ways of life threaten the freedom of her new white daughter-in-law.

The representation of stereotypes, in this moment, turns from being artificial to being real, from being a critique on white subjectivity to being a reflection of the Asian American family. This finale verifies the suspicion that

Jing Xian (Jessica) Yang

Asian Americans are inherently invasive and threatening (Shimakawa 7), justifying the constant reminders of racial difference (and thus, potential exclusion), even in the context of inclusion.

While most of the popular press responses to Asian Bachelorette ignore this strange finale, some do reflect on the spoof ’s ambivalence towards stereotypes, albeit in a rather unconscious manner. For the most part, these articles comment on how the spoof positively contributes to Asian American representation in the media (Tejada par.

18; Clift par. 1). The title of one article in particular claims that “‘Asian Bachelorette 2’ Is Back To Break Stereotypes And Steal Our Hearts” (Khoo). Throughout the rest of the article, however, this claim of breaking stereotypes devolves into claims that Wong Fu “pokes fun of Asian stereotypes” and finally that Wong Fu has a “hilarious take on Asian stereotypes” (Khoo par. 8, par. 10). Even though the article starts off with a strong interpretation of the goal of the spoof, it does not stand by its argument. The ending takes a more common stance, stating that Asian Bachelorette demonstrates audiences’ desire “to see more Asian representation on screen” (Khoo par. 12). Despite the promise of its title, the article focuses on Wong Fu’s contribution to visibility and avoids any in-depth exploration of the videos’ treatment of stereotypes.

This positive appraisal also masks the potentially negative consequences Wong Fu’s ambivalence can have on the Asian American community at large. In “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions”, John Corner describes selving, a “central process whereby ‘true selves’ are seen to emerge (and develop) from underneath and, indeed, through, the ‘performed selves’ projected for us” (261). In other words, a performance of the self, however satirical or artificial, can become the basis for a true self. Holmes similarly warns that reality TV can be a resource for everyday performances in the real world, becoming social scripts that demonstrate appropriate behaviour (17). Added to this is the concern of who exactly is watching. Despite the camera in Asian Bachelorette aligning with a white subjectivity, studies on Asian American activities online would suggest the bulk of Wong Fu’s audience to be Asian Americans themselves. According to Sun et al.’s survey of racial minorities online, the impact of alternative Asian American images in the digital sphere is primarily felt by Asian Americans, as they are more motivated than other groups to seek out this type of content (294).

Thus, it is a real possibility that this spoof can feed back into the Asian American community as genuine expressions of

one’s racial identity. Cultural products such as Asian Bachelorette are never just satires (especially given the poverty of Asian American representation elsewhere) and could be contributing to the continued subordination of Asian Americans, despite its hopes of ridiculing such a position.

Premature celebrations of increased Asian American representation should therefore consider the content of the images being put out before taking visibility itself as a triumph.

CONCLUSION While videos like Asian Bachelorette add to the overall amount of Asian American images in the media, their adherence to conventional Hollywood aesthetics and ideology does not necessarily provide any innovation or revolution for the Asian American identity. What these videos seem to support is an acceptance of Asian Americans as the national abject, as a group welcomed into the national whole only if they remain permanently foreign and servile to the dominant group. Rather than dictating the terms of one’s own difference, Asian Americans must deal with white subjectivity determining how the Asian American identity should be expressed. Instead of exploring the empowering potential of stepping outside of this white gaze, Asian Bachelorette aims to alter stereotypes from within the structures and aesthetics of mainstream media. The spoof ’s ambivalent shifts between ridiculing and taking pride in Asian American stereotypes, however, prevent a simplistic interpretation of the treatment of these stereotypes as purely a critique of mainstream media. By mobilizing these stereotypes in a genuine attempt to articulate one’s racial identity, Asian Bachelorette perpetuates the subordinate position of Asian Americans in a predominantly white society.

In spite of this problematic stance, responses to Asian Bachelorette have largely been positive, with viewers deciding to focus on its contribution to the general visibility of Asian Americans rather than on the messages behind the videos’ content (Tejada par. 20; Khoo par. 12). These positive reviews demonstrate how visibility remains the main concern in regard to minority representation, a demoralizing comment on the continued scarcity of minority images and narratives in mainstream media. Nevertheless, this poverty should not make us lose sight of the conditions of representation. The fight for inclusion should also closely consider the terms of such inclusion and what it really means to enter the doors of the master’s and the bachelorette’s house. 

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“Let’s head on into the house!”

WORKS CITED Balsom, Erika. “‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’:

Omatsu, Glenn. “The ‘Four Prisons’” and the Movements of

An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha.” Frieze, 1 Nov.

Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s

2018, frieze.com/article/there-no-such-thing-documen-

to the 1990s.” Asian American Studies Now : A Critical

tary-interview-trinh-t-minh-ha.

Reader, edited by Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu & Thomas C.

Chan, Jason. “Racial Identity in Online Spaces: Social Media’s Impact on Students of Colour.” Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, vol. 54, no. 2, 2017, pp. 163-174.

Clift, Tom. “This Hilarious ‘Asian Bachelorette’ Sketch Perfectly Sums Up Reality TV’s Diversity Problem.”

Chen, Rutgers UP, 2010.

Reassemblage. Directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women Make Movies, 1982.

Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Duke University Press, 2002.

Sun, Chyng, et al. “Shifting Receptions: Asian American

Junkee.com, Junkee, 5 Aug. 2017, junkee.com/

Stereotypes and the Exploration of Comprehensive

asian-bachelorette-diversity/116600.

Media Literacy.” The Communication Review, vol. 18,

Corner, John. “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions.” Television & New Media, vol. 3, no. 3, 2002, pp. 255-269.

Gardner, Eriq. “ABC’s ‘The Bachelor’ to Be Sued for Racial

no. 4, 2015, pp. 294–314, doi:10.1080/10714421.2015.

1085778.

Tejada, Chloe. “‘Asian Bachelorette’ Is The Reality Show We All Need Right Now.” Huffington Post,

Discrimination.” The Hollywood Reporter, 17 Apr. 2012,

Huff Post Canada, 3 Aug. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/abc-bachelor-ra-

ca/2017/08/03/asian-bachelorette_a_23063431/.

cial-discrimination-lawsuit-nathaniel-claybrooks-christopher-johnson-312936.

Jensen, Kimball, et al. Narrating Racial Identity Online: Asian American YouTube Channels. ProQuest

Trinh T. Minh Ha. Interview by Marina Grzinic. trinh t. minh-ha, 2012, trinhminh ha.squarespace.com/ inappropriated-articificiality/.

Wallace, Richard. Mockumentary Comedy: Performing

Dissertations Publishing, 1 Jan. 2016, search.proquest.

Authenticity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018,

com/docview/1867773465/.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77848-8.

Holmes, Su. “‘the Viewers have … taken Over the Airwaves’?

Participation, Reality TV and Approaching the Audience-in-the-Text.” Screen, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 13-31.

Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian American Women, Duke University Press, 2002.

Khoo, Isabelle. “‘Asian Bachelorette 2’ Is Back To Break

Wong Fu Productions. Asian Bachelorette. YouTube, 2 Aug 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag1IisyP1ak&t.

---. Asian Bachelorette 2. YouTube, 19 Sep 2018, www. youtube.com/watch?v=ldMIVjyEN6s&t.

---. “What is a Yappie?” YouTube, 20 Jun. 2018, www. youtube.com/watch?v=iOntet85kBw&t.

---. “Yellow Fever (2006) - Re-Release Official.”

Stereotypes And Steal Our Hearts.” Huffington Post,

YouTube, 28 Jan. 2010, www.youtube.com/

Huff Post Canada, 20 Sept. 2018, www.huffingtonpost.

watch?v=vC_ycDO66bw&t.

ca/2018/09/20/asian-bachelorette-2_a_23533856/.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984.

More Wong Fu. “Behind the Scenes – ‘Asian Bachelorette 2’.” YouTube, 19 Sep. 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PJc6BEszxWk. Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

10 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

The Land Before Time: The Production of Expressiveness and Cultural Difference in Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon

BY MICHAEL SOORIYAKUMARAN | University of Toronto

ABSTRACT In 1933, the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board commissioned the Empire Marketing Board to produce a series of short travelogues to boost the island’s image and promote its chief export. But when John Grierson saw the rushes Basil Wright sent back from Ceylon, he decided they should be combined into a longer, more ambitious work. The resulting film, The Song of Ceylon (1934), baff led the sponsors with its poetic vision of a timeless paradise threatened by the encroachments of modernity, but reviewers praised the film for its formal construction and Wright’s mastery of montage, which affirmed that cinema could be an expressive art. Commentators have also interpreted the film as a guarded critique of the ruinous impact of British imperialism and industrialization on non-Western cultures, but this critique is itself premised upon the assumption of an original separation of European and Asian societies and their absolute difference from one another; it is therefore not irreconcilable with the ideology of colonialism. This article analyzes two kinds of production in The Song of Ceylon: the production of authorial expressiveness, and the production of cultural difference, in order to demonstrate the interdependence in the film of modernist aesthetics and colonialist ideology.

I

n his famous taxonomy of documentary modes, Bill Nichols cites Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) as an example of the poetic mode, which foregoes the conventions of continuity editing in order to “explore associations and patterns that involve temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions” (162, 166). The use of the adjective “poetic,” which comes up again and again in the literature on the film (Aitken 250; Greene 66; Sussex 76), is especially apt as it derives from the Greek word poiesis, meaning active making or production (Bordwell 12). For The Song of Ceylon to be perceived as a work of art, it is necessary that spectators recognize it as an intentionally created object.

Responding to the charge that cinema is a mere mechanical reproduction of reality and therefore not an art, Rudolf Arnheim argues film has the potential to be an art

because the images we see on the screen differ from what the eye perceives in reality, and it is precisely these differences that make cinematic expression possible (9). Accordingly, Arnheim urged filmmakers to consciously stress the properties of the medium “in such a way that the character of the objects represented should not thereby be destroyed but rather strengthened, concentrated, and interpreted” (35). While granting the validity of Noël Carroll’s argument that cinematic expression is possible by other means, namely filming already expressive objects and scenes (135), for the purposes of this article, what is important to note is that The Song of Ceylon is not a neutral transmission of some pre-existing reality; rather, Wright actively shapes his material in order to express a specific vision of Ceylonese culture.1 The means by which he does this are the patterning

1 Although I have not found any evidence that Wright was aware of Arnheim’s writings on cinema, L.M. Sieveking and Ian Morrow’s

English translation of Film als Kunst appeared in Britain in 1933 (Arnheim 1).

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The Land Before Time

But while it is not necessary for contemporary spectators to accept the ideology of colonialism in order to enjoy The Song of Ceylon, we must still acknowledge it as inseparable from our aesthetic pleasure. of motifs in the film’s mise en scène, associative editing, the juxtaposition of sound and image, and the framing of individual shots.

Wright’s vision, however, is not free of ideology. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson observe, “The distinctiveness of societies, nations, and cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic division of space, on the fact that they occupy ‘naturally’ discontinuous spaces” (6). But if one begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected, then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking difference through connection. (ibid. 8, emphasis in original) In other words, it was the uneven relationship between Europe and Asia, rather than their mutual isolation, that produced the unity of the West and the otherness of the Other, and “the radical separation between the two that makes the opposition possible in the first place” (ibid. 14). Accordingly, The Song of Ceylon upholds the ideology of colonialism by reinforcing the assumption of an original separation between the British and the Ceylonese, which was a prerequisite for imperial domination.

Wright’s selection of which images to include and omit, the film’s non-narrative form which abstracts selected images from any sense of linear chronology, and the voiceover narration which implies a continuity of Ceylonese culture over four centuries all work together to create the impression of an organically and internally coherent society bound together by an unchanging cultural essence that transcends history (Said 188; Dirlik 98).

I would like to stress here that it is not my intention to erect, or maintain, a false division between admirable

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form and orientalist meaning, but to show that each produces the other. As Said writes, to believe that politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of literature, scholarship, social theory, and history writing is by no means equivalent to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.

(14, emphasis in original) In other words, an understanding of the ways in which colonialist ideology informs a work of art such as The Song of Ceylon does not diminish the pleasures of that art, but rather, may lead to a finer appreciation of its merits. Of course, it is possible, as Martin Stollery suggests, to imagine an alternative version of Wright’s film that acknowledges what Gupta and Ferguson term “the processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially, and economically interconnected spaces” (Stollery 197; Gupta and Ferguson 14), but then it would no longer be the same film. Through an analysis of the production of authorial expressiveness and cultural difference in Wright’s film, this article demonstrates the interdependence of modernist aesthetics and colonialist ideology in The Song of Ceylon.

THE PRODUCTION OF EXPRESSIVENESS In 1927, John Grierson approached Sir Stephen Tallents, secretary of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), with the idea of setting up a state-sponsored documentary film unit (Guynn 64). The EMB had been established the previous year to promote trade with the Commonwealth (Sussex 4), and the challenge for Grierson as a government employee was to balance conformity to the demands of the [EMB’s] senior management and the Treasury officials responsible for approving the unit’s yearly grants with the production of films that would attract critical kudos and generate a level of support for the [British documentary] movement’s work within the wider film culture.

(Stollery 190)

Michael Sooriyakumaran

This entailed “presenting the movement’s work within film art contexts as Soviet montage cinema’s disciple, basking in the light reflected by its artistic prestige” (ibid. 147), 2 which caused a certain amount of tension between Grierson and government officials. According to Stollery, Grierson “realized that occasional ‘excesses’ which could not be justified on purely instrumental or economic grounds were necessary in order to sustain the documentary movement’s cultural legitimacy,” even if this risked alienating the sponsors (190).

No film better exemplifies this tension within the British documentary movement than The Song of Ceylon.

In 1933, the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board commissioned the EMB to produce four ten-minute travelogues to boost the island’s image and promote its chief export (Star 102),3 but after viewing the rushes Wright sent back from Ceylon, “Grierson decided they should be combined into a longer, more ambitious production” (Stollery 194). The Tea Board was not pleased with this idea, and according to Wright, “Grierson spent three and a half hours convincing them to allow the film to be finished. Song of Ceylon was an unusual film for its time and the Tea Board did not know what to make of it” (Wright qtd. in Aitken 249). In the end, however, Grierson’s gambit paid off: reviewers praised the film as “evidence of a uniquely poetic sensibility” (Stollery 190), with Graham Greene extolling it as “an example to all directors of perfect construction and the perfect application of montage” (25). In order to understand why The Song of Ceylon had the impact it did in 1930s British film culture, it is necessary to examine how it exploits the properties of the medium to express an artistic vision.

Wright’s film consists of a short opening credit sequence, accompanied by a man singing a cappella in Sinhalese, and four major segments, each about ten minutes in length and marked off by a chapter heading printed on a black screen. The first segment, “The Buddha,” which illustrates the impact of Buddhism on the Ceylonese people, opens in primeval darkness with shots of dense foliage representing the island's impassable lowlands (Fig. 1),4 followed by the frenzied dancing of masked men by firelight as the offscreen narrator (Lionel Wendt)

Fig. 1 | Dense foliage in primeval darkness, 00:01:13. DVD, British Film

Institute, 2008.

describes how the ancient inhabitants of Ceylon “did prostrate themselves by night to the honour and service of the devil.” By way of contrast, the next sequence depicts a party of contemporary Buddhist pilgrims in white ascending Adam’s Peak by day, and upon reaching the summit, a member of the party reads aloud from a religious text.

After a fade out, the next sequence begins with a series of shots of stone ruins before returning to the pilgrims, who stop to look at the shadow the mountain casts over the surrounding areas before praying and ringing bells. The segment ends with a short sequence juxtaposing small birds in flight with an ancient statue of the Buddha.

The next segment, “The Virgin Island,” turns from religion to the subject of labour, beginning with the reproductive labour of women fetching water from a well to bathe their children and a man giving alms to a Buddhist monk. The film then cuts to another man climbing atop an elephant, and as the animal moves across the screen from right to left, a dissolve likens its movement to that of a sailboat on the water. After several more shots of boats moving across the screen in the same direction, the film comes to a fisherman casting his net in shallow water while a boy calls out to him excitedly from the shore. A cut on action takes us from the fisherman playfully throwing something at the boy to another man beating his laundry dry on a stone

2 Grierson’s Drifters (1929) had its world premiere at the London Film Society on 10 November 1929, on the same program as the first

public screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the United Kingdom, with Eisenstein in attendance (Sussex 5).

3 Following the dissolution of the EMB in 1934, Grierson’s film unit relocated to the General Post Office (GPO), and it was there that Wright completed The Song of Ceylon (Barnouw 93).

4 According to Paul Rotha, Wright filmed these shots at a public garden in London (cited in Guynn 69).

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The Land Before Time

Figs. 2 and 3 | A cut on action links a fisherman man throwing something toward the shore, and a man beating his laundry dry on a stone in another location, 00:13:32, 00:13:33. DVD, British Film Institute, 2008.

in another location (Figs. 2 and 3). The next sequence, in which we see various people making pottery, sawing pieces of wood, building houses with mud, mending nets, and harvesting rice, ends by juxtaposing two women milling rice with a group of boys on their way to a dance lesson, suggesting the two events are taking place simultaneously.

After the lesson, the segment closes by bringing back the labourers shown earlier, whom we see relaxing at the end of their day’s work.

“The Voices of Commerce” is both a logical continuation of the previous segment in its focus on labour and a sharp break, introducing into the film the sights and sounds of a modern industrial economy. It opens with several shots taken from a moving train as it winds its way through the countryside, followed by an elephant knocking over a tree, while on the soundtrack an unidentified voice says, “New clearings, new roads, new buildings, new

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communications, new developments of natural resources.”

However, as the elephant continues its relentless progress through the landscape, an insert reveals a heavy stone hanging from its neck. Then, over a shot of a young man climbing a palm tree to pick coconuts, we hear another voice say, “For Australia. Calling Toulon, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Colombo,” at which point the film dissolves to a huge ship coming into port before returning to the man on the tree. In the next sequence, shots of telecommunications wires lead into a radio station where white technicians are speaking English and Dutch. Later, we see Ceylonese women picking tea leaves which subsequently arrive at a depot where coolies load them onto a ship. The segment ends with a series of shots of bustling city streets and coolies loading more heavy bags onto ships.

The final segment, “The Apparel of a God,” returns to the religious theme of the opening sequences. It begins with different groups of Ceylonese people—men riding elephants, a mother and her child walking on a dirt path, men on sailboats, a procession of tea pickers carrying empty baskets, and a solitary man in a wooded area—all moving across the screen diagonally from left to right and away from the camera, except for the last who has his back turned directly to the camera. In the next sequence, another solitary man comes upon two large statues of the Buddha (one standing, the other reclining) and makes an offering, and after he leaves, the camera lingers on the statues for several more shots. The film’s climax is an extended sequence depicting a religious festival where a group of men in ornate, sparkling costumes dance for a crowd, and towards the end of this sequence, the film juxtaposes the dancers with still more images of statues. The film ends with several shots of thick foliage, mirroring the beginning of the first segment, followed by “The End” printed on a black screen.

As the preceding description may suggest, The Song of Ceylon consists of a heterogeneous mass of sounds and images recorded in different places and at different times.

How then is Wright able to unify this material to express a coherent vision? For starters, the notion of Ceylon as a discrete geographic entity is in itself a unifying principle— even if, as William Guynn points out, time and space are much more nebulous here than in a city symphony like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which confines itself to the events of a normal day in a typical Soviet city (72). Furthermore, there are numerous recurring motifs—elephants, sailboats, bare feet, oppositions of

Michael Sooriyakumaran

light and dark, and so on—which form significant patterns.

For instance, the frenzied movements of the masked dancers in segment 1 contrast sharply with the more practiced, clockwork movements of the dance teacher instructing his pupils in segment 2. The absence of any dancing whatsoever in segment 3 helps to set it apart from the rest of the film, especially as the dance scenes are all fairly lengthy.

Finally, the dancers in segment 4 are both energetic and coordinated, and their bright costumes link them with the pilgrims in segment 1, suggesting they represent all the best qualities of the Ceylonese people—primitive dynamism, discipline, and deep religious feeling—held in perfect balance.

That said, as Jurij Tynajanov writes, The unity of a work of art is not a closed symmetrical whole, but an unfolding dynamic integrity; between its elements stands, not the static sign of equation and addition, but always the dynamic sign of correlation and integration. (128) Accordingly, Sergei Eisenstein conceived of montage as a dynamic unity wherein “the separate elements produce, in juxtaposition, the generality, the synthesis of [a film’s] theme” (30). Therefore, the filmmaker’s task is to distill the theme of a given work into “a few basic partial representations which, in their combination and juxtaposition, shall evoke in the consciousness of the spectator... the same initial general image which initially hovered before the creative artist” (ibid. 30-31). With this in mind, we can see The Song of Ceylon as a sort of collage in which the disparate, heterogeneous elements cohere into a unified whole while still retaining their distinctness as montage units. At the macro-structural level, the film’s four-part structure brings together the spiritual (segments 1 and 4) and the material (segments 2 and 3) so that, through their juxtaposition, the film produces a total image of the Ceylonese way of life. In turn, it is the combination of two separate but complementary segments that produces each of the film’s major sub-themes (the spiritual and the material), and each segment itself consists of many smaller montage pieces that together produce their own local sub-theme: the civilizing effects of Buddhism, traditional modes of labour, the impact of Western modernity, and transcendent spirituality.

At the level of individual sequences, the film alternates between two different unifying principles. Sprinkled

Figs. 4 and 5 | Stepping out of his home, an old man looks at something off screen right, 00:19:43. In the next shot, we see a dance lesson from his optical point of view, 00:19:44. DVD, British Film Institute, 2008.

throughout the film are several short narrative scenes that employ continuity editing to link shots spatially and temporally, whether or not the events depicted occurred in the same time and space. For instance, during the dance lesson in segment 2, the film cuts to an old man stepping out of his home to look at something offscreen right, followed by an extreme long shot of the dance students which ostensibly represents the man’s optical point of view (Figs. 4 and 5), although we never see him and the students together in the same shot. However, continuity editing in the film remains only a local strategy for unifying individual scenes which are embedded within larger passages of associational editing. The dissolve earlier in segment 2 from an elephant to a sailboat, each moving right to left, links the two images based on screen direction without suggesting any spatial or temporal connection between them. Similarly, although the juxtaposition of the

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Fig. 6 |A procession of men riding elephants moves away from the camera, 00:28:31. DVD, British Film Institute, 2008.

fisherman raising his arms to throw something and another man lowering his arms as he beats his laundry against a stone almost gives the impression that the latter caught whatever it was the fisherman threw, the sudden shift in location from an open beach to an enclosed wooded area foregrounds the ability of montage to forge an association between two unrelated events.

As Wright did no sound recording in Ceylon, he and composer Walter Leigh had to construct the film’s soundtrack from scratch when Wright returned to London (Starr 107), and the diegetic sound effects in the film are never entirely convincing. It is obvious, for instance, that the sound of the boy calling out to the fisherman was dubbed in after shooting. However, it is only in the film’s third segment that Wright employs the type of radically disjunctive audio that Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov called for in their famous manifesto on the sound film, thereby heightening the contrast

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between this section and the rest of the film. Eisenstein et al. worried, not without justification, that illusionistic sound would “destroy the culture of montage, for every ADHESION of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning. [...] ONLY A CONTR APUNTAL USE of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection” (258, emphasis in original). In The Song of Ceylon, the restriction of conspicuously asynchronous sound to “The Voices of Commerce” underscores the implication in this segment that Western modernity has unsettled the timeless natural order of life on the island. In contrast with the earlier portions of the film, where there is a clear connection between Wendt’s voice-over and the images it accompanies, here the film bombards us with a collage of short fragments of speech that either have no direct bearing upon the image on the screen or serve as an

Michael Sooriyakumaran

Fig. 7 |A statue of the Buddha towers over a man approaching on foot, 00:29:57. DVD, British Film Institute, 2008.

Wright's accomplishment in The Song of Ceylon was to have it both ways, opposing the spirituality of the Ceylonese with the materialism of the West without ever explicitly criticizing British imperialism. ironic counterpoint to it. Before climbing a palm tree, a young man stops and puts his hands together as if praying, while on the soundtrack, three male voices repeat the phrase “Yours faithfully” without feeling, as if dictating business letters. Alternatively, the film’s final segment does without speech of any kind to reinforce the impression of moving away from the material world and ascending to a higher spiritual plane.

At the level of individual shots, Wright achieves expressive effects by stressing the attributes of the medium identified by Arnheim—specifically, the necessity of choosing a particular angle from which to photograph an object and the reduced sense of depth inherent in

two-dimensional images compared with natural perception (35-36). The various people moving across the screen from left to right at the beginning of segment 4, for instance, only seem to be turning away from the material world because they all have their backs to the camera (Fig. 6). In the next sequence, a worshipper makes an offering to a giant statue of the Buddha, and a high-angle shot of the statue looming over the man as he approaches in the distance expresses the smallness and transience of human life in contrast with the majesty and permanence of the Buddha (Fig. 7). Yet, the disparity in size between the statue and the man, and the association between the two, would have less force if not for the reduction of depth MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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inherent in a two-dimensional image, which literally places both of them on the same plane (ibid. 61-62). In a 1975 interview, Wright described the effort that went into filming this scene: When we were on our first investigation, soon after we got there, I had been to this shrine and had been terribly impressed with the atmosphere there. I was sitting there by myself... and I saw a little man come and make his offering. So I thought, ‘Right. Well, we’ll do it.’ But it took us the whole day to do it, from 7:30 in the morning until the light went. And this poor little man, to whom I could never apologize enough, had to do it over and over again. (qtd. in Starr 105) Instead of capturing spontaneous reality on the fly, Wright painstakingly constructed his images to achieve artistic effects.

Grierson famously defined documentary film as “the creative treatment of actuality” (8), and The Song of Ceylon demonstrates just how creative documentaries can get.

Far from a mechanical reproduction of some pre-existing external reality, the film’s four-part structure, patterning of motifs, juxtapositions of sound and image, and the framing of individual shots actively shape and interpret the objects and events Wright captured with, or staged for, his camera.

The precise nature of that interpretation will be my focus in the next section of this article.

THE PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE As I noted earlier, there was a certain tension within the British documentary movement arising from Grierson’s ambition to produce films that would find favour with cultural tastemakers while still maintaining good relations with the senior management at the EMB and the Treasury officials responsible for approving the film unit’s yearly grants (Stollery 190). Furthermore, this tension was as much political as it was aesthetic, since the tastemakers were heavily skewed to the left. As Stollery observes, British film journals of the 1920s and 1930s posited a tacit connection between modernist aesthetics and progressive politics: “Close-Up, Cinema Quarterly and Film Art generally assumed that the new ways of seeing perceived within favoured films could eventually contribute to the disseminating of progressive attitudes” (187). At the same time, as Wright later recalled, “We [in the film unit] were all

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well aware that the Treasury was trying to have us closed down. [...] We also knew that the political right wing were particularly hostile to us, and regarded us as leftists” (qtd. in Aitken 247). Grierson’s strategy for defusing this tension was to produce documentaries that could be interpreted by select audiences as “containing encrypted but nonetheless politically progressive commentary on issues such as British imperialism,” while refraining from any explicit social criticism (Stollery 175).

Wright’s Cargo from Jamaica (1933) is a case in point.

Describing the film in an interview in 1980, Wright said: I filmed the loading of bananas in Kingston, Jamaica, and I contrasted it with the unloading in London which was done on an English conveyor belt by machinery with only two men.

In Jamaica, you know, hundreds and hundreds of Negroes carried stands of bananas and were paid practically nothing. (qtd. in Mareth and Bloom 79) Wright’s intention was “to show the toil and sweat involved in this particular work—and indeed, the exploitation” (qtd. in Sussex 33). However, while Ralph Bond, co-founder of the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies, singled this sequence out for praise, his interpretation of it was somewhat at odds with Wright’s stated purpose: “ One sharp cut focuses our minds on the whole meaning of rationalisation and the unemployment it brings in its train. From boat to warehouse the belt conveys its cargo and we visualise the throngs of unemployed dockers waiting at the gates for the jobs that never come. (qtd. in Stollery 176) Indeed, Stollery speculates that the meanings historical audiences attached to this sequence may have varied widely depending on “where it was seen, who was watching, and whether he or she had read Bond’s article. [...] Whether [Bond’s interpretation] would necessarily be arrived at outside of a specifically socialist environment... is very much open to debate” (176-177). In any event, Grierson—then under considerable pressure from the Treasury—considered the film dangerous enough to effectively suppress it by withholding it from wider distribution (ibid. 177).

Although The Song of Ceylon is even less overtly critical than Cargo from Jamaica, Guynn has argued that it is a deeply subversive film nonetheless:

Michael Sooriyakumaran

Commissioned as a work of propaganda to present positive images of the British Commonwealth, the film instead produces an ecstatic vision of a paradise nearly lost. Rather than rediscovering in the world of commerce and its colonial outposts new representations of humanness and beauty, Song of Ceylon produces a critique of the whole enterprise of National Projection,5 stigmatizing the British presence as callous and exploitative. (79) However, as Guynn himself points out, “There is no record... in the literature of any protest on the part of the sponsors against Song of Ceylon for its critique of colonial exploitation or the commentary it tacitly offers on alienated social relations in Britain” (77). To be sure, it is not entirely clear from Wright’s recollections what the Tea Board’s specific grievances were (see Aitken 249), but even if we assume their objections were exclusively aesthetic in nature, Guynn’s explanation for this lack of controversy is peculiar: Wright discovered in the bodies of the Ceylonese, their relationship to the landscape, their customs, and especially their religious practice, everything he saw as lacking in contemporary British society. ‘Ceylon’ becomes the repressed of sovereign Western consciousness—the image of everything that has to be repudiated by the ideology of late capitalism in order to support the status quo. (77-78) Here Guynn conflates the projection of a repressed desire onto another person or group with the belief they have something valuable that one has lost, implying British society in the 1930s viewed a deep connection with nature, tradition, and religion with the same abhorrence as incest or coprophilia.

If the Tea Board did not object to the film’s political implications, it is more likely because Wright’s evident admiration for Sinhalese culture is by no means incompatible with the aims and ideology of colonialism. Indeed, Said lists the orientalist’s “sympathetic

identification” with the object of their study as one of four interlocking prerequisites without which modern orientalism could not have occurred. The others are the continued European exploration of Asia which, in the eighteenth century, “opened [the Orient] out considerably beyond the Islamic lands”; the confrontation with other non-European histories this exploration brought about, facilitating the rise of comparative disciplines; and an “impulse to classify nature and man into types” (116-120). However, even as the concept of the Orient expanded exponentially to encompass almost one third of the planet’s land mass and European scholars began to take a more knowledgeable and detached view of it, the assumption of an original separation of East and West persisted (Said 119). Accordingly, while portraying Sinhalese culture in a largely positive light, The Song of Ceylon still upholds the assumption of an immutable difference between the Ceylonese and the British, with each being internally coherent and occupying their own naturally allotted territory. This is a necessary basis for colonialism as one group cannot subjugate another before defining them as a distinct people. Wright’s decisions about which images to include and omit, the film’s non-narrative form, and its voice-over commentary all work together to reinforce this assumption.

As Said points out, during the Romantic period, many writers and thinkers viewed Asia as a source of regeneration for Europe: Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europe in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. (115) However, by the early twentieth century, the ruinous effects of European colonialism on non-Western societies had given rise to what Fatimah Tobing Rony has termed “salvage ethnography” (101). Writing about Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), 6 Rony observes:

5 The term “National Projection” belongs to Tallents who” formulated the idea of a massive public relations campaign under govern-

ment sponsorship designed to stimulate trade with the Commonwealth. The EMB’s explicit mission was therefore propagandistic: to ‘project’ before the mass public positive images of British industry and commerce” (Guynn 64). Here, Guynn conflates Tallents’ public relations campaign with the British colonial project as a whole.

6 Flaherty worked with the EMB film unit briefly in 1931, during which time he served as a consultant on Wright’s first professional film, The Country Comes to Town (1931) (Sussex 23; Starr 109-110).

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In order to make a visual representation of indigenous peoples, one must believe that they are dying, as well as use artifice to make a picture which appears more true, more pure. [...]

When Flaherty stated, “One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit,” he was not just referring to his own artistry but to the precondition for the effective, “true” representation of so-called vanishing cultures. (102) Accordingly, in The Song of Ceylon, Wright attempts to represent Ceylonese culture in its “pure” state, prior to the arrival of Europeans. This necessitates the suppression of differences within Ceylonese society, since to lose one’s cultural identity to encroaching Westernization, it is necessary to first have a coherent identity. Thus, the film not only ignores the island’s religious minorities in order to construct Ceylon as a Buddhist culture, but also suppresses differences within Sinhalese society, representing it as an anarchic paradise evidently lacking any form of centralized government or monetary economy, much less a class struggle. In segment 2, over a series of shots moving progressively closer to a pottery maker carefully concentrating on his craft, Wendt’s voiceover informs us that “husbandry is the great employment of the country. In this the best men labour. Nor is it held any disgrace for men of the greatest quality to do any work, either at home or in the field, if it be for themselves. But to work for hire with them is reckoned for a great shame and very few are here to be found that will work so.” However, nowhere in the film do we see any Ceylonese people in a position to buy the labour of others, and the voices of commerce in segment 3 belong exclusively to the British and the Dutch.

As Rony observes, the simple narrative of Nanook of the North is well suited to “a racializing representation of the Inuit, which situates indigenous peoples outside modern history” (103): Nanook (whose real name was Allakariallak) is in essentially the same situation at the end of the film as he was at the beginning, implying the Inuit are incapable of change. Similarly, The Song of Ceylon—which does without a continuous narrative altogether—suggests that, following the advent of Buddhism, Ceylonese culture remained essentially frozen in time until the arrival of Europeans. Indeed, to judge by the film, social change on the island was never the result of the individual agency of particular Ceylonese people,

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but always some impersonal outside force, with Wendt’s voice-over suggesting it was the divine spirit of the Buddha himself who brought the religion to Ceylon.

Accordingly, whether they are blissful fishermen or exploited coolies, the people we see in the film never attempt to alter their circumstances by formulating and pursuing goals like characters in a classical narrative film, who are individualized and actively struggle to effect a change in their environment. Thus, the spectator comes to see the traditional artisans, rice farmers, and dance students not as individualized characters living at a particular historical moment, but as representatives of a primitive culture that persisted unchanged for thousands of years until the day white people landed on the island. In short, the film relegates the Ceylonese to the past as “fossilized relics because, with culture substituted for history, they have no ‘real’ historicity and... no real contemporaneity,” since their present is but a simple reproduction of their past (Dirlik 98).

Wendt’s voice-over commentar y strengthens the impression of a static culture outside of modern history. The opening credits attribute the commentary to “Robert Knox in the year 1680,” so even spectators unfamiliar with Knox’s book An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon—excerpts of which we hear in the film’s first and second segments—will be acutely aware of the gap in time between the writing of the book and the making of Wright’s film. In the opening sequences, Knox’s words actually undermine the illusion of real events unfolding spontaneously before the camera by using the past tense. At one point, Wendt says, “In those days, the primitives did prostrate themselves by night to the honour and service of the devil,” suggesting the dance by firelight is in fact a re-enactment of something that used to happen in ancient times (Fig. 8). In subsequent sequences, however, whether the commentary is relating the mythical arrival of Buddhism in Ceylon over images of contemporary pilgrims ascending Adam’s Peak (some carrying suitcases and umbrellas), or the aversion of Ceylonese men to wage labour in the present tense over shots of a pottery maker at work, the effect is to imply a continuity of Ceylonese culture between the late seventeenth century and the early twentieth.

Also significant is the choice of Wendt to read the commentary. In a 1975 interview, Wright identified Wendt as “coming from a racial group called

Michael Sooriyakumaran

Fig. 8 |In a pre-Buddhist Ceylon, a primitive prostrates himself by night to the honour and service of the devil, 00:03:19. DVD, British Film Institute, 2008.

Burghers—descendants of intermarriages between the Dutch colonists and the Sinhalese” (qtd. in Starr 108). And as Stollery observes, “The intonations Wendt brings to the film differentiate his voice-over from the white, middleclass, Southern English speech patterns” found in other British documentaries of the period (192). However, as we never see any Burghers onscreen, Wendt seems to occupy an ambiguous space somewhere between the images on the one hand and the audience on the other, translating “authentic” Ceylonese culture for the Western spectator (sometimes literally, as when his voice-over replaces the sound of a Sinhalese man reading aloud from a religious text in segment 1), while at the same time standing slightly apart from it. One could not ask for a more literal demonstration of Arif Dirlik’s observation that sympathetic identification required the orientalist to become in some measure “orientalized” in order to “speak not just about but also for the Other” (101).

Reflecting on his work at the EMB in 1980, Wright remarked, I wish I could have managed to say more about the diabolical capitalist or British colonial policy which was always so nice and fat. I got a bit of it into Song of Ceylon... but you see, if you’re working for the Empire Marketing Board in the British colonies, you can’t do it. (qtd. in Mareth and Bloom 79) Nevertheless, the cultural prestige of the documentaries produced by Grierson’s film unit depended in part upon the ability of select audiences to perceive subversive meanings within them (Stollery 175). Wright’s accomplishment in The Song of Ceylon was to have it both ways, opposing the spirituality of the Ceylonese with the materialism of the West without ever explicitly criticizing British imperialism. Indeed, the film affirms the unity of the West

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and the “otherness” of the Other, and “the radical separation between the two that makes the opposition possible in the first place” (Gupta and Ferguson 14). Wright’s selection of which images to include and omit, the film’s non-narrative form, and Wendt’s voice-over commentary all reinforce this assumption, thereby concealing “the processes of production of difference in a world of culturally, socially, and economically interconnected spaces” (ibid.).

CONCLUSION The Song of Ceylon is by no means an objective or neutral representation of Ceylonese culture, but it has been deliberately constructed in order to achieve specific artistic and ideological effects. The film’s patterning of motifs, associative editing, juxtapositions of sound and image, and the framing of individual shots all betray a poetic sensibility behind the camera actively shaping and interpreting the pro-filmic content rather than passively recording it, thereby affirming for cultural tastemakers of the period that documentaries could be an expressive art form and not merely a mechanical reproduction of reality

(Stollery 189-191). The film’s prestige also depended upon the ability of those same tastemakers to detect subversive meanings in it (ibid. 175), although there is no evidence to suggest that the films’ sponsors, the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, objected to The Song of Ceylon on anything but aesthetic grounds (Guynn 77). Indeed, the film’s latent critique of industrial modernity and Western imperialism still takes for granted the assumption of an original separation of European and Asian cultures that is a prerequisite for colonial domination. Wright’s formal and stylistic decisions all serve to reinforce the “otherness” of the Ceylonese. Thus, one cannot cleanly separate the film’s aesthetic achievement from its orientalism, as the former would be inconceivable without the latter.

In order words, it is the assumption of difference that enables the production of expressiveness, which in turn reproduces the notion of difference in a kind of feedback loop. But while contemporary spectators need not accept the ideology of colonialism in order to enjoy The Song of Ceylon, we must nevertheless acknowledge it as inseparable from the aesthetic pleasure the film gives us. 

WORKS CITED Aitken, Ian. “Interview with Ian Aitken.” The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology, edited by Ian Aitken, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp. 244-252.

Arheim, Rudolph. Film as Art. Faber, 1983.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film.

2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1993.

Battleship Potemkin. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1925.

Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. Routledge, 2008.

Cargo from Jamaica. Directed by Basil Wright. EMB Film Unit, 1933.

Carroll, Noël. “Medium Specificity Arguments and the SelfConsciously Invented Arts: Film, Video and Photography.”

Millennium Film Journal, nos. 14/15, 1984/1985, pp.

127-153.

The Country Comes to Town. Directed by Basil Wright. EMB Film Unit, 1931.

Dirlik, Arif. “Chinese History and Orientalism.” History and Theory, vol. 35, no. 4, 1996, pp. 96-118.

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Drifters. Directed by John Grierson, New Era Films, 1929.

Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. edited by Jay Leyda, Meridian Books, 1957.

Eisenstein, Sergei, et al. “A Statement on the Sound Film by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov.” Film Form, edited

by Jay Leyda, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 257260.

Greene, Graham. The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism 1935-40, Secker and Warburgh, 1972.

Grierson, John. “The Documentary Producer.” Cinema Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 1933, pp. 7-9.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, 1992, pp. 6-23.

Guynn, William. “The Art of National Projection: Basil Wright’s The Song of Ceylon.» Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video—New and Expanded Edition, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Wayne State UP, 2014, pp. 64-80.

Michael Sooriyakumaran

Man with a Movie Camera. Directed by Dziga Vertov. VUFKU, 1929.

Mareth, Paul, and Allan Bloom. “Interview with Basil Wright.”

Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, 1980, pp. 73-82.

Nanook of the North. Directed by Robert Flaherty. Pathé Exchange, 1922.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, 3rd ed., Indiana UP, 2010.

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Duke UP, 1996.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.

The Song of Ceylon. Directed by Basil Wright. GPO Film Unit, 1934.

Starr, Cecile. “Song of Ceylon: An Interview with Basil Wright.”

Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary, edited by Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, Faber and Faber, 1996, pp. 102-111.

Stollery, Martin. Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism. U of Exeter P, 2000.

Sussex, Elisabeth. The Rise and Fall of the British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson.

U of California P, 1975.

Tynjanov, Jurij. “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor in Verse.”

Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska.

Dalkey Archive Press, 2002, pp. 126-135.

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In Defence of Love: Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole and The Wayward Cloud

BY TROY MICHAEL BORDUN | Trent University and Concordia University

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Tsai Ming-liang’s narratives of ruin are also stories of enduring love. By situating characters in ruinous environments in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), we see the falling away of civility and morality.

In these settings, unable to band together for collective action, the protagonists do not battle for scarce resources but accept their positions and lead bland, bleak, and solitary existences. However, with the emotionally and sexually unfulfilled protagonists of The Hole and the stalled sexual encounter of The Wayward Cloud, Tsai seems to argue for an account of love more attuned to Alain Badiou’s philosophy: love is obstinate and a powerful unchanging element surviving “catastrophic existence.”

I read these two films intratextually through the generic conventions of the musical-romantic-comedy and demonstrate that Tsai's films answer Badiou’s call to rally to the defence of love.

C

ritics of and scholars who study the work of the Malaysian-born Taiwanese director Tsai Mingliang often analyze the ways he builds upon each of his films, creating a limit-case auteurship in which many of the images, actions, spaces, and characters of a single film are out-of-place and nonsensical if his other works are not considered. By limit-case auteurship, I mean that understanding Tsai’s oeuvre necessitates assembling together two or more of his films into a unified whole; each of the films co-exist alongside one other. Tsai reuses plots, characters, and spaces without strong indicators of the direct reference to his other films. Moreover, Tsai’s filmic preoccupations are semi-autobiographical and contain symbols and metaphors that can only be fully understood by exploring the director’s biography and interviews (de Luca, Realism of the Senses 101-111). In this scholarly tradition, I work with the first point of Tsai’s auteurship and bring two films together, The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005), because they share three common themes: catastrophe, music, and love. I unravel these themes by analyzing the director’s use of built spaces, mainly apartments and their corridors which both connect and separate two residents. Tsai is invested in domestic spaces, spaces that are unarguably

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some of the most emotionally-charged. Domestic spaces are often contrasted with “non-places.” For George Benko, ‘“non-place’ is ‘a space devoid of the symbolic expressions of identity, relations, and history,’ as opposed to ‘place’ which offers a sense of identity and location” (qtd in Liu par. 14). In my chosen films, Tsai’s characters share space in an apartment complex in Taipei. However, the apartments become barren non-places in which stories of love unfold.

Given the lack of melodramatic dialogue and gestures, the spaces themselves take on an emotive and affective quality.

Moreover, the emotive and affective quality of the spaces is heightened and intensified by the inclusion of small comedic moments and musical numbers.

Via these themes and non-places, I propose that Tsai reanimates and reorganizes the romantic comedy genre. He visually demonstrates that love is a contingent phenomenon dependent upon a couple’s locale and the intensity of romantic and sexual longing. As we will see, love and space work symbiotically to determine the outcome of the lovers’ desire. Yet, this contingency does not suggest that love is an insignificant part of our life; indeed, in these films, characters’ location in the dilapidated spaces found in Taiwan’s capital reveals a fuller depiction of love in all

Troy Michael Bordun

its complexities, ambiguities, pleasures and pains. Love, as the end goal of many romantic comedies, emerges as a force that can conquer disasters and decay.

SLOWNESS AND SENSATION Tsai is a director of the immobile sequence shot.

For his style, everything that takes place in the sequence requires one camera setup. He will shoot scenes with a fixed camera in “minimalist settings” with “solitary characters” – performed with deadpan visages and gestures – and a general lack of dialogue and “narrative momentum” (de Luca, Realism of the Senses 93). Indeed, the director is a key figure in the 21st century production trend known as slow cinema (de Luca, “Slow Time” 24). Offering an alternative to the fast-paced editing of recent multiplex features, his cinema provides viewers the opportunity to contemplate and fully engage with the image, making it available for us to ask, “What is there to see in the image?” and not “What are we going to see in the next image” (Deleuze 261)? The “extended deferral of the imminence of editing opens a space for reflection on events, encouraging… contemplation of presence, gesture, and material detail” (Flanagan par. 16).

Moreover, such “minimalist communication” opens a place for sensation (Bíró par. 5).

With fixed cameras and extended long takes, the viewer approaches Tsai’s films with the careful eye of a cinephile – one must be a lover of cinema and artists who write in images. In Tsai’s films, thanks to the long take, cinephiles perceive the diegetic reality “through the sheer senses it emanates” (de Luca, Realism of the Senses 11), that is, the spectator becomes sensuously aware of the persons, objects, and spaces depicted onscreen. Tiago De Luca’s account of Tsai’s aesthetic thus captures Christian Keathley’s definition of the cinephiliac moment as “a sensuous experience of materiality in time” as well as overturns apparatus theorists’ arguments regarding passive spectatorship (53). For apparatus theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry, spectators are at the mercy of the projector and screen, forgetting that what they see in their cinemas are fragmented shots stitched together to seem like reality. The cinema thereby resembles Plato’s allegory of the cave (Baudry 171-172). With Tsai’s long takes, the spectator who has apparently “forgotten” the technical workings of the apparatus is instead “constantly reminded of the apparatus” by the materiality of the image and the accompanying sensations (de Luca, Realism of the Senses 113). By reminding spectators of the filmmaking

apparatus through the long take, spectators experience a heightened sense of cinematic temporality and, as viewers explore the content of specific images, they simultaneously achieve heightened cinematic spatial awareness. I will come back to the materiality of Tsai’s cinema in the final section of the essay. For now, it suffices to suggest that this heightened sense of cinematic space is the occasionally fantastic setting Tsai requires so as to narrate two compelling stories of intimacy, romance, and sexual desire.

Tsai Ming-liang is invested in domestic spaces, spaces that are unarguably some of the most emotionally-charged.

ROMANTIC COMEDY WITH MUSIC, SONG, AND DANCE The romantic comedy genre consists of stories in which two characters desire a particular state of living, usually in the form of coupling, marriage, and/or co-habitation, yet they encounter one or more external forces that, in combination with general misunderstandings between the couple, prevent the success of the courtship process. A staple of the comedy and romance genres are “mistaken identity and miscommunication,” but this feature of the genres operate differently in the film’s world than for the spectators: characters are in the midst of confusion about their love story while the spectators “are almost always privy to the truth” (Altman 150). By keeping the truth hidden from the characters and revealing the truth to spectators, viewers may feel emotionally invested in the couple’s struggles – if only the couple knew what I know as a spectator, their love would be successful. Moreover, the protagonists in the romantic comedy genre come up against an ideologically stable milieu and, by the film’s denouement, rather than overcome their ideological conflict, they must socially integrate in order to form their intimate bond (Schatz 458-459).

But Tsai’s characters do not struggle with social integration and ideology so much as they negotiate physical space itself.

Walls, corridors, and holes in the floor alienate characters from one another. These spatial arrangements between characters then require some novel problem solving so that a love story can develop (for example, in Fig. 1, 6, and 8).

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While I have chosen the romantic comedy genre as the heretofore appropriate category to assess Tsai’s work, the more apt generic classification would be along the lines of musical-romantic-comedy within the mode of art cinema.

The latter is essential for understanding Tsai’s cinema. Art cinema characters are psychologically ambiguous and lack clear and defined motives and goals. Moreover, the narratives of art films defy cause-and-effect logic (Bordwell 558-573). Indeed, Jarod Rapfogel suggests that Tsai is the child of Buster Keaton and Michelangelo Antonioni, and the director himself has come to terms with making “art films” (Rapfogel par. 7; Hui, “What is Cinema?” par. 20).

The codes of both romantic comedy and the mode of art cinema are troubled by Tsai’s narratives and aesthetics; however, once we assemble the genre and the mode together, Tsai’s intratextual narrative – the characters in his oeuvre seem to inhabit the same world or, if we like, are unified by the world created by his cinematic project as a whole – and his message about contemporary romance becomes much clearer. Each genre in the triad of musical-romantic-comedy is significant and, by reflecting on each, I aim to better understand Tsai’s cinematic universe, his “modernist aesthetics,” and his account of romance and love in the 21st century (Betz 161-172).

The Hole “blends slapstick comedy with profound pathos” alongside five musical numbers and, similarly, so does The Wayward Cloud (Hughes par. 11). For Rapfogel again, the “most distinctive quality” of Tsai’s cinema is perhaps that “tragedy and comedy exist so comfortably” (par. 2). Interspersed with comedic miscommunication and mistaken identity, the tragedy is that Tsai’s characters’ world inhibits or stalls a successful romance: in the former film, due to a mysterious virus and an abandoned, decaying apartment block, and in the latter, due to a nation-wide drought and one characters’ career in pornography, a genre that is often cited as evidence of “social decay” (Kipnis 162).

THE HOLE: DIVIDE AND RESCUE The Hole depicts a scenario in which there are seven days left before the new millennium. An epidemic has broken out in one of Taipei’s neighbourhoods; a virus with initial flu-like symptoms eventually transforms the behaviour of those affected into something like a cockroach.

Additionally, Taipei is under siege by a non-stop torrential downpour. The government has cancelled garbage collection and trash is tossed into the street; officials have also

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Fig. 1 | The unnamed man peers through his hole in The Hole, 01:08:58.

Arc Light Films, Central Motion Pictures, China Television, Haut et Court, Le Sept-Arte, 1998.

suggested residents leave the area. The Water Company, via radio, announces that it will turn off all water service at midnight, January 1st, 2000. This story is a narrative of ruin and the director himself says this film is sad and full of despair (Kraicer 587-588).

An early scene depicts an apartment complex in the middle of this epidemic. It seems to be mostly evacuated save a few tenants and is therefore a place transitioning to a non-place. The apartment complex is “dilapidated, gloomy and constraining with walls, cage-like iron railings, small rooms, and a small elevator” (Liu par. 37). We follow two of the remaining residents: an unnamed young man (Lee Kang-sheng) and an unnamed middle-aged woman (Yang Kuei-mei). The man lives above the woman. He has little to do but eat, sleep, urinate, and open his underground shop despite never seeming to have customers. She has no pre-occupations except eating, sleeping, urinating, and mopping the floor and walls that are perpetually leaking.

Of course, both watch TV, a solitary engagement if there ever was one. The flood in her apartment, however, brings the two characters together. The drip may or may not be coming from a pipe located in the man’s floor, an absurd conclusion because no pipe would drench an apartment so fully. Nevertheless, a plumber arrives in the first scene and drills a hole to access and fix the problem. Here we have the narrative basis of the title. Two people who have had no contact even in the most catastrophic time are brought together by this hollow connecting their respective apartments (Fig. 1).

Tsai reuses the same actors and many of the same settings in each of his films. The domesticity that features so prominently in all his films is enhanced by the repeated and altered use of this space and the long take encourages our attention to every detail. Thus, few other films rival

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the claustrophobic sense of space in The Hole: we know where each object and each room is in relation to the others, how the man sleeps and eats, and how the woman cleans and uses the bathroom. There is immediate access to the private realm of the woman for both the man upstairs and the viewers (we should note here that only the man receives the visual pleasure – he may look down into the apartment, but the woman cannot so easily peep through the hole in her ceiling). With visual access to each other’s lives, the man and woman witness the tragedy of solitary existence as both operate on the same mundane daily routine. The catastrophe brings them together and in their dilapidated apartments, they parallel domestic acts as well as cooperate on certain projects. The man must not use his toilet because it leaks into her apartment and their water pressure is dependent on the other’s usage, to name a few comedic examples. In their numbing solitary confinement, the man and the woman share time and space despite not physically occupying the same space, as custom and architecture dictate that homes, however small, are separated by walls and floors (Fig. 2). The man and woman thus do not fuse into a romantic couple with a singular perspective or goal (for example, to wed one another and live happily ever after); rather, through their forced connection, they develop two perspectives on domesticity and later, the world crumbling around them. The editing of the film emphasizes these two perspectives, often cutting back and forth between their respective lives and the similar ways in which their day-today activities merge.

The symbolic hole, then, is the view into the other person’s world, whether we see characters looking-through it or not. It is often luminous, this hole; asking for one to peep through it is not unlike using the viewfinder of a video camera. (The physical hole in the floor parallels the way a camera lens provides a peephole for audiences to gaze through.) The fluorescent bulbs also light up some hallways and corridors while others remain dimly lit. The play of light and dark throughout the film is thus a play on interpersonal encounters within domestic spaces and not the mere bleakness of the characters’ isolation. The tragedy of the film is easy to point out: these characters are left to their own devices and, as the city and apartment block crumbles around them, they could benefit from one another’s assistance if they could overcome the architectural barriers (Rapfogel par. 2).

The deteriorating spaces are contrasted with fantasy scenes and therein we find a more profound sense of tragedy.

Whose fantasies they are is not exactly clear – it could be the man’s, woman’s, or both. For this film as well as The Wayward Cloud, Tsai choreographs lip-sync musical numbers to the songs of 1950s Hong Kong pop sensation Grace Chang. These numbers, to varying degrees, represent the interiority of the character, as well as a sort of collective dream-in-general within the catastrophic existence of everyday life. The real of the catastrophic is interrupted and these musical spectacles “serve to penetrate and transform… real space [into] a zone of indeterminacy where the real is falsified and burlesqued” (Herzog 192). It is also clear that these numbers, akin to the musical genre, serve as (ambiguous) insights into the burgeoning love between the man and woman. Richard Dyer calls such an analysis into the musical numbers “representational,” that is, deciphering the meaning of the numbers for the plot. On the other hand, at the level of a “non-representational” analysis, we must also acknowledge and appreciate that the costumed characters and the poor lip-syncing and dancing are a pleasure to watch (Dyer 468-472).

The first song features the unnamed woman and begins after a banal television program. On this program, the hostess extolls the taste and quality of instant noodles, making it seem the food of an elite class. The program

Fig. 2 | The man and unnamed woman coexist but on different floors in The

Hole, 00:47:33. Arc Light Films, Central Motion Pictures, China Television, Haut et Court, Le Sept-Arte, 1998.

The play of light and dark throughout the film is thus a play on interpersonal encounters within domestic spaces and not the mere bleakness of the characters' isolation.

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Fig. 3 | In The Hole, the unnamed woman sings “Oh Calypso” in her

Fig. 4 | In The Hole, the man extends his arm through the hole to rescue

decrepit lobby and elevator, 00:13:32. Arc Light Films, Central Motion Pictures, China Television, Haut et Court, Le Sept-Arte, 1998.

the unnamed woman, 1:24:14. Arc Light Films, Central Motion Pictures, China Television, Haut et Court, Le Sept-Arte, 1998.

transitions with fluidity and we find the woman elegantly dressed in an elaborately lit elevator in the apartment complex, itself still decrepit. The song “Oh Calypso” describes the pleasures of dance as a way to escape a hard day’s labours (Fig. 3). The shot directly following the first song and dance solidifies this point. After the first tune concludes in the sparkling elevator, we cut to the man, drunk and passed out in the lift – he does make his way back to his apartment only to vomit in the hole and into the woman’s home. Later, the man peers through the hole into the woman’s apartment and this action cues the second tune. “Tiger Lady” lyrically establishes her initial fright at this intruder. The song’s setting is the stairwell of the complex. Third, after some exchanges between the man and woman regarding the leak and plumber, the next song and dance alter our perception of the two individuals and their feelings towards one another. This tune shifts from distance and isolation as the two characters finally dance together in the corridor. The lyrics describe the desire the woman has for this man. The prominent theme of these numbers is decadence and elegance amongst the ruins: the performers are well-dressed and made-up, happy and flamboyant, lip-syncing and dancing to the backdrop of cold and lonely elevators, stairs, and corridors. Tsai claims that the musical scenes “are specifically tied to the locations,” expressing the characters’ desire to escape from the current catastrophic existence (Kraicer 582). As is common in every category of Dyer’s analysis of the musical genre, songs and dances are a form of escapism (468).

Between the third and fourth song, fantasy and desire are played out in a sequence set in the present-tense, non-dream world. The woman, already losing herself to the virus, is stripping the walls of their coverings while talking erotically on the phone. A pun makes it clear that she is 28 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

talking to an admirer when she repeats the illusory caller’s question, “what am I doing?”, then replies “stripping.” She asks if the person on the other end of the phone wants to look through his hole in the ceiling as she undresses. As she begins to sensually touch herself, we cut to the unnamed man at work – she fantasized this call.

Prior to the fourth number, the woman is alone in a bath, sitting idly; she suddenly sneezes and is presumably now infected with the virus. The film then cuts to a concrete stairway decorated with bright satins. The tune “Achoo Cha Cha” is about being tied to a romantic partner one no longer wants – the singer is allergic to commitment, or in the narrative of the film, now that she has become infected with the virus, she can no longer sustain a relationship with the man upstairs. The remaining minutes of the film follow the woman as she crawls on the floor like a cockroach and hides underneath her mounds of paper towel.

Seeing her behaviour and recognizing the viral symptoms, through many tears and groans of physical exertion, the man upstairs hammers at the floor to enlarge the hole and rescue her. But his struggles appear to mostly be in vain – a hammer alone cannot crack and break hard concrete.

Initially, the hole aligned his life with hers and now it blocks a pathway to rescuing her.

It is possible to misread the fantasy of the final musical number, done without lip-syncing. The woman emerges from her mound of paper towels, no doubt very ill. Having produced an arm-sized hole in the floor/ceiling, the man upstairs passes down a glass of water, then extends his arm, and finally lifts her up into his apartment (Fig. 4). Yet, the next sequence is an impossibility at the level of reality. First, Robin Wood observes that the hole was not big enough for the woman to pass through; second, even if he was successful in his rescue, there has been no indication of any persons

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recovering from the virus (56). This is a very tragic turn to what could have been a coming together of the two characters. Instead, Tsai remains at the level of fantasy as the final shot is of the two characters dressed in evening wear (“gaudy attire associated with weddings in musical comedies”), slow dancing to Chang’s “Alone Together” (Wood 56). This bleak finale never quite gives us the happy ending we want. Rather, Tsai concludes the film with the words, “In the year 2000, we are grateful that we still have Grace Chang’s songs to comfort us,” followed by his handwritten signature on the screen.

In the midst of catastrophic existence, love is obstinate and refuses to be denied its existence.

Although the film does not have a happy end, The Hole is nonetheless a love story or, “it’s almost a love story” (Rapfogel par. 13). Tsai denies such accusations, claiming that the woman is intentionally much older than the man so as to deny the possibility of love (Kraicer 582). Instead, I claim here that the refusal of a real or believable romantic ending is to give us a different look at love, something akin to the philosophy of love Alain Badiou has been espousing in his work. Love is not marriage with procreation, nor is it the spontaneous and otherwise passionless sexual encounter, or interchangeable monogamous partnerships over the course of several decades. It is instead the “scene of the two,” where two do not fuse into one but come to share, see, and experience the world from dual perspectives (Badiou 38-40). This is what the hole in the film accomplishes. In the midst of catastrophic existence, love is obstinate and refuses to be denied its existence (Badiou 83-85). As the man hammers away at the floor in a flood of tears, he maintains his commitment to the woman below, exemplified in the final dance number. It is a tragic end but also shows us “fidelity,” that is, the “transition from random encounter to a construction [of love] that is resilient” (Badiou 44). Fidelity is required for an accurate definition of love: to remain

with love, to persevere in love against all odds, against all viruses and catastrophes, and to endure in crumbling and decaying spaces. Love is re-invented in The Hole or, the film rallies to the defense of love, against its lackluster expression through any combination of marriage, promiscuity, and dating websites. In these ruined spaces, unlikely love is realized and struggled for.

THE WAYWARD CLOUD: SEX DROUGHT The Wayward Cloud is another narrative of ruin and decay, albeit at a more conceptual level than The Hole and its physically deteriorating spaces. The Wayward Cloud ’s attempt to showcase decay is more apparent in the realms of morality and decency, yet the architectural divisions are no less significant. Again, two characters must come together to fulfill their sexual desires despite the walls, corridors, and door and window frames that stand in their way. Again, like the previous film, five musical numbers visually demonstrate the characters’ interiority.

The Taipei of The Wayward Cloud is the antithesis to the never-ending precipitation of the Taipei featured in The Hole. Water, as every scholar and critic of Tsai’s oeuvre notes, arises as a symbol in each his films. In this particular film, the city is in a drought, and the lack of water serves as a metaphor for unfulfilled sexual desire. Due to the lack of water, the juice from watermelons serves as Taipei residents’ drink of choice. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to Hsiao-Kang (Lee), a burgeoning porn actor. In the opening montage, Hsiao-Kang and a Japanese porn star use a watermelon to enhance their sexual episode: Hsiao-Kang tongues and fingers the fruit, shoves large chunks of it into the woman’s mouth, and finally dons the husk as a hat. The remainder of the film is, for all intents and purposes, similar to the narrative in The Hole: in an apartment complex, while working on porn shoots, a man encounters a resident by the name of Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi) and develops an attraction to her.1 As they spend time with one another, unlike the characters in The Hole, these two protagonists overtly desire each other and want to consummate their relationship.

The majority of the largely dialogue-free film is comprised of the two characters going about their day-today lives, sometimes apart and at other times together.

1The Wayward Cloud is the only direct sequel Tsai has made. It follows the events of What Time is It There? (2001) and The Skywalk is Gone (2002). To appreciate the narrative development of The Wayward Cloud, no details of these prior films are important except when Hsiao-Kang meets Shiang-chyi and she asks, in one of the few spoken lines, “Do you still sell watches?” (Hsiao-Kang sold watches in What Time), and at the end of Skywalk, Hsiao-Kang has an interview to perform in porn.

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Fig. 5 and 6 | V-shapes in The Wayward Cloud indicate sexuality, 00:08:54

and 00:52:31. Arena Films, Arte France Cinéma, Homegreen Films, and Wild Bunch, 2005.

What The Hole and The Wayward Cloud visually articulate is a continuum of romantic gestures and feelings.

Indeed, as Stanley Cavell suggests, the romantic comedy genre is “a comedy of dailiness” (15). As in The Hole, The Wayward Cloud ’s characters’ affection for one another does not quite materialize, despite their best efforts. The Wayward Cloud withholds the characters’ direct expressions of love and sex. The film immediately suggests, however, an abundance of eroticism: V-shapes, like the opening of legs, are featured prominently. The opening montage cuts back and forth from Hsiao-Kang’s sexual performance and Shiang-chyi watching the news about the drought shot through the V-shape of her legs (Fig. 5). Moreover, the V-shaped corridors introduced in an early long shot, where Hsiao-kang’s co-lead in the porn production passes

by Shiang-chyi unnoticed, re-emerges later in the film as Hsiao-Kang scales the wall like an insect as his crush feeds him (Fig. 6). An evident erotic intensity permeates many of the characters’ encounters. But even in the porn video store 30 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

sequence later in the film, Tsai will not offer us a fulfilled sexual encounter. In this porn video store sequence, Shiangchyi attacks Hsiao-Kang with kisses and caresses, yet, due to his career as a porn actor (unknown at this point to Shiang-chyi), he cannot rise to the occasion. Hsiao-Kang can only perform sexually when performing in front of a camera or, as revealed in an earlier scene, watching (the production of ) porn itself.

The characters’ sexual union eventually take places and does so in a controversial final scene in which both Brisbane and Berlin film festival audience members walked out. An act of taking advantage of an unconscious body inadvertently leads the man to realize his attraction to the other woman. In this final sequence, Shiang-chyi finds the Japanese porn actress unconscious in an elevator, her state likely the result of dehydration. The scene resembles the one shown in The Hole wherein the unnamed man is found drunk and unconscious in the elevator. Upon finding the actress, Shiang-chyi and a member of the porn crew carry the actress’s body back to the set, and here, Shiang-chyi discovers her love interest is, in fact, a porn actor. HsiaoKang appears embarrassed but nevertheless continues with his job: an unconsciousness actress does not stop the crew from completing the shoot.

As we saw in The Hole, architectural divisions are heightened by the lack of dialogue – the people that populate Tsai’s oeuvre cannot speak to one another and the spaces they inhabit further discourage conversation and stifle desire, intercommunication, and community.

For example, in Shiang-chyi’s apartment, a wall separates the kitchen and living room. Tsai shoots a sequence in this apartment from a perspective which symmetrically divides these two spaces. In a long shot and in one take, Shiang-chyi pours glass after glass of watermelon juice for Hsiao-Kang (Fig. 8). The latter pretends to enjoy it and, when she returns to the kitchen, he pours the juice into a plant. It is likely the case that his porn performance has indefinitely turned him off watermelons. Tsai makes this humorous exchange possible due to his investment in the architecture of everyday spaces, further demonstrating a common theme in the director’s oeuvre, namely, “personal fumblings – often stemming from romantic longing and sexual confusion” (Lim par. 3). (The first musical number articulates the importance of these longings as well. In a filthy water reservoir, almost emptied due to the drought, Lee’s character sings of wanting to meet his true love.)

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Fig. 7 | In The Wayward Cloud, Hsiao-kang has sex with the unconscious

Fig. 8 | Architecture separates the two lovers in The Wayward Cloud,

porn actress as Shiang-chyi watches, 01:39:19. Arena Films, Arte France Cinéma, Homegreen Films, and Wild Bunch, 2005.

00:38:50. Arena Films, Arte France Cinéma, Homegreen Films, and Wild Bunch, 2005.

In the final scene, another divide separates HsiaoKang and Shiang-chyi but then transforms into a space in which they come together. After the unconscious porn actress is returned to the set, Shiang-chyi follows HsiaoKang back to his work in a nearby apartment. In this porn set/apartment, the lovers are again divided by a wall (Fig. 7): Shiang-chyi leers at the porn shoot through an internal window in a partition wall (or, better, through a large hole in the wall). This concrete barrier acts as a metaphor for the inhibitions of the two characters. Hsiao-Kang, the actress, and the production team begin to act and film the sexual episode and, as Hsiao-Kang’s sexual performance continues, initially in a rather disinterested and lackluster manner, his gaze at Shiang-chyi soon arouses both of them.

She becomes the stand-in for the unconscious porn actress, herself making the necessary moans and groans for sexual intercourse. It appears as though she masturbates to the sight of Hsiao-Kang now vigorously raping the unconscious actress. Given that the characters never speak to each other, always expressing themselves with flirtatious glances and bodily expressions, instead of uttering the words “I love you,” Shiang-chyi nearly reaches orgasm while staring at her lover and Hsiao-Kang finally expresses his desire and affection for her via an orgasmic, wordless exchange. At the moment prior to his orgasm, he tosses aside the porn actress and rushes to the gaping hole in the wall. He forcibly penetrates Shang-chyi's mouth and ejaculates (Fig. 9). A close-up then presents Hsiao-Kang’s buttocks, sweating and twitching, followed by a cut to an extreme close up of Shiang-chyi in blissful tears. Her tears are symbolic: the drought, that is, their lack of sexual activity, has come to an end.

A simultaneous reading of The Hole and The Wayward Cloud shows that Tsai uses physical barriers to symbolize the forces that blocks characters from connecting in a

meaningful manner. He also uses holes in these barriers to dramatize people’s attempts at connection. In the latter film, Shiang-chyi is rightfully shocked about the rape of the unconscious actress but her shock is the realization that morality and civility have fallen away and fell into ruin. Yet this decay is the catalyst for their passion – “it is also the expression of love [the characters] arrive at, and we (as spectators) bear witness to its power” (Bandis et al. par.

13). However, the scene may be misread and solely enjoyed for its neat and tidy resolution (we receive no indication as to whether the Japanese woman regained consciousness or whether Hsiao-Kang and the porn crew were reprimanded for their act of sexual violence). Extreme cinema – if we position The Wayward Cloud within this 21st century art cinema trend of sex and violence – is therefore one of the most dangerous art cinema movements we have recently seen (Bordun 11-12). There is no question here about the sickening rape depicted in this film, yet Tsai, as I argue in the next section, uses the act of violence to critique the porn genre while drawing our attention to the materiality of the film.

What The Hole and The Wayward Cloud visually articulate is a continuum of romantic gestures and feelings. In these two films, Tsai presents romance apart from normalcy, clichés, and even decency. Love is, above all else, indecent, excessive, and as Badiou suggests, obstinate. Love is presented here with these qualities because of the strangeness of our protagonists. Tsai’s characters are “‘eccentric’ … and ‘weird’ … and behave ‘the way people generally behave… when they’re alone – that is to say, very oddly’” (Bao, Chow, and Rapfogel qtd. in de Luca, Realism of the Senses 141).

The transitions and the musical numbers themselves emphasize the eccentricity of the characters. As we saw MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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Fig. 9 | Hsiao-kang finds his woman through the hole in The Wayward Cloud, 01:45:44.

Arena Films, Arte France Cinéma, Homegreen Films, and Wild Bunch, 2005.

with The Hole, love escapes from normalcy and cliché and into the realm of song and dance. This is similarly the case for The Wayward Cloud. Early in the film, a pensive HsiaoKang floats in a water reservoir. His idle reflections then transition into the first song. It expresses Hsiao-Kang’s long search for lost love and thereby provides the motivation for a love story. Shortly after this reverie, Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-Kant meet. The former then lip-syncs a tune that expresses joy at their reunification (the two had briefly met in Tsai’s What Time is it There? [2001]). From the following sequence of their meal preparations and flirtation, we infer that the characters had a first date. As a substitute for sex, Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-Kang slowly smoke a cigarette together. However, the next song, featuring both our characters, describes mixing up dates and general confusion with dating, but this tune must be from Hsiao-Kang’s perspective as the porn video store sequence follows next.

Appropriately following this fumbling encounter of failed intimacy, the last song contains lyrics about keeping focus and not losing track of one’s goal, a song that again parallels Hsiao-Kang’s inability to get aroused outside of the

porn set.2 In this tune, the lyrics “Gently let your spirits rise” take on a double meaning. The character’s inability to come together until the end of the narrative marks the relative difficulty everyone has in succeeding in the sexual and romantic realm. Tsai mentions, “If you look at real life, sex is difficult. All human relationships are difficult” (Hui, “Ming-liang…” par. 6).

I find these musical insertions to be more successful than those displayed in The Hole in terms of their entertainment value, exposure of a character’s interiority, and as Fran Martin suggests of The Hole, better exhibition of “the productive power of desire” (par. 11). The film is also more successful in bringing fantasy out from the musical numbers. Throughout the picture, there are many instances of the fantastic incorporated into the ordinary, more on par with the sentiments we experience when falling in love. For instance, the first song takes place in a water reservoir where Hsiao-Kang is bathing himself, and as Shiang-chyi’s faucet produces little soap bubbles that float into her bedroom while she sleeps, the two lost lovers are visually connected.

Once our characters meet, Hsiao-Kang helps Shiang-chyi

2 A third musical number begins after a humorous sequence between Hsiao-Kang and an unnamed actress (Yang) performing sex in the shower. Due to the drought, the shower water runs out; the porn crew then sprays water onto them as they continue to perform. The woman’s visage conveys immense sadness and paints a grim portrait of a career in pornography. Her despair at objectification is heightened by the transition to her own lip-synced musical number, whose lyrics express degradation by men “so brutal and jaded,” and how she must sell her soul to keep her heart true.

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retrieve a luggage key that she had dropped onto the street which was then paved over. He excavates it with a knife and miraculously a spring unveils itself (in the midst of a drought!), symbolic of the love the two will develop. My reading of that moment is evinced by the subsequent transition to the second song which, as mentioned, contains lyrics that anticipate a future romance together.

The Wayward Cloud is comic, tragic, magical, and truthful, making us aware of the interplay of fantasy and love. Or, if we like, when one is falling in love, encounters become sites of (figurative) magic. This is what I find so intriguing about Tsai’s philosophy of love and sex. In many films, classic and contemporary, Hollywood and art cinema, love is often shown to be full of jealousy and heartbreak, and it often turns violent, murderous, or suicidal due to unfulfilled and frustrated fantasies. Tsai, while still retaining a hint of pessimism by stalling romance in both films discussed above, nevertheless demonstrates that fantasy is a necessary force that brings people together romantically, sexually, and emotionally.

CONCLUSION: THE MATERIALITY OF TSAI’S CINEMA On a surface level, the final scene of The Wayward Cloud could be a comedy in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Keaton, and Jacques Tati. The scene brings our attention to the illusion of cinematic pornography via the feigned groans and moans as the porn actress’s postsynced dubbing is, humorously, Shiang-chyi’s real pleasure.

Shocking or offending spectators seems less important to Tsai than breaking spectators from their narrative absorption. In line with the production trend of extreme cinema, then, Tsai mobilizes graphic representations of sex and rape both in the service of narrative and as an intervention in the romantic comedy genre (Frey 16-29). Additionally, as I introduced by way of apparatus theory, Tsai’s cinematic style aims to counteract the experience of cinema as a solely narrative medium. The rape cum love story of The Wayward Cloud also has much to do with Tsai’s investment in the materiality of cinema.

Tsai’s cinema dispenses with the cinematic illusion of reality brought about by narrative, editing, and cinematographic techniques, and instead reorients ways of seeing. With every shot, every cut, and the narrative itself as it unfolds in The Wayward Cloud, Tsai makes us aware of the illusion: long takes from a single vantage point; long shots rather than medium close-ups but also extreme

close-ups of mouths stuffed with phalluses and phallus substitutes; shots which split the frame in two; the presence of a camera crew showing us the utter absurdity of pornography; and the close-up “money shot” in another diegetic porn shoot featuring Hsiao-Kang and the actress from The Hole, Yang Kuei-mei. For this “money shot” performed in the middle of The Wayward Cloud, we hear the whiff of squeeze bottle before some kind of creamy substance squirts onto the actress’s face. To walk out at the end of this film and shout “Fuck you!” at the screen, as an audience member at the Brisbane Film Festival did, is to miss Tsai’s efforts to bring us to the work of filmmaking itself and his critique of the cinematic illusion (Bandis et al. par. 1): [Tsai’s] work programmatically reminds the viewer of its constructedness: it gives the apparatus its material weight…. The unwavering stare of its fixed camera destabilizes the representational dimension of the image, calling attention instead to the film medium and the materiality of the profilmic event. Unlike the cinema which Baudry dissects, in which the “eye… is no longer fettered by a body”, here the eye is obstinately fettered by a body, that of the actual camera, which, endowed with a stubborn, solid immobility, enhances the sheer thereness of minimalist, sometimes empty, interior spaces. (de Luca, Realism of the Senses 120) While my above remarks aim to account for the film’s final sequence – not to defend its content but provide reasons for its projection onscreen – an earlier sex scene further emphasizes mine and de Luca’s arguments. In this sequence, the Japanese actress is performing a masturbation scene for the porn crew’s camera. Hsiao-Kang peers from behind a doorway and touches himself with growing vigor and speed. If we are in any way perturbed by HsiaoKang’s voyeurism, that is, getting himself off on the framed image of her body, framed by a doorway which is also the frame of the film, then the film is successful in its attempt to awaken us from narrative absorption as we too become voyeurs of the actress and Hsiao-Kang. Tsai has said he is “pro-sex but anti-pornography” and he is sickened with pornography using the body as “a piece of flesh” (Bandis et al. par. 13; Tsai qtd. in Lee, 128). Thus, in this scene, as well as the final coming together of the two lovers, in a cunning play with bodies and images, we are made uncomfortable MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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In Defence of Love

by the projection of the porn actress, Hsiao-Kang’s masturbation, the exchange of looks among characters, camera and camera setups, our own voyeurism, and the depiction of a bodies taken as mere flesh. Tsai thereby disconcerts spectators’ engagement with sexual representations as well as confronts them with the materiality of the (mainstream) pornography genre. Vivian Lee suggests here that the deployment of looks… not only places the audience in a voyeuristic position as a way of questioning our disavowed presence and affective absence…, but also betrays the camera’s own complicity in structuring/facilitating the various positions of the look that both critique and perpetuate the power relations exhibited by the camera lens. (124) Tsai makes a usually private consumption of images public and exposes the materiality of cinema and its structure of looks. Whether public or private, mainstream heteroporn is typically geared for men who get off to the body of a woman without her direct knowledge.

The director is vocal about his investment in the materiality of cinema. Tsai provocatively claims in an interview, I want the audience to be constantly reminded that they are watching a film. They are watching a film in the theater. There’s a distance.

They should have a viewing attitude. There’s no need to be absorbed in the viewing. They can choose to be absorbed and also to pull back.

(Hui, “Cinema Has Its Own Realism” par. 7) Lee reaffirms Tsai’s interest in “material density of the profilmic event.” In The Wayward Cloud ’s final scene, there is “hope for self-renewal through the breaking down of isolation of sexual/social inhibitions and the creation of an active female spectatorial position that short-circuits the male/female, subject/object structure of cinematic representation” (Lee 127). Such a short-circuit situates Tsai as a practicing film theorist to be sure and a genre filmmaker committed to rethinking the deployment of generic codes. 

WORKS CITED Altman, Rick. Film/Genre, BFI, 1999.

Badiou, Alain, with Nicolas Truong. In Praise of Love, translated

by Peter Bush, Serpent’s Tail, 2012.

Bandis, Helen, et al. “The 400 Blow Jobs.” Rouge 9 (2009). rouge. com.au/rougerouge/wayward.html. Accessed 3 Feb. 2013.

Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema.”

Film Theory & Criticism, 7th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.

171-189.

Betz, Mark. “The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Genealogy.” Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society,

Bordwell, David. “From Poetics of Cinema.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj.

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 558-573.

Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press, 1981. de Luca, Tiago. Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, I.B. Tauris, 2014.

---. “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal vol. 56, no. 1, 2016, pp.

23-42.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by

Literature, Film, edited by Maria N. Ng and Philip

Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of

Holden, Hong Kong University Press, 2006, pp. 161-172.

Minnesota Press, 1989.

Bíró, Yvette. “The Fullness of Minimalism.” Rouge 9 (2006). rouge.com.au/9/minimalism.html. Accessed 3 Feb. 2013.

Bordun, Troy. Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.

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Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj.

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 465-478.

Troy Michael Bordun

Flanagan, Matthew. “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in

Schatz, Thomas. “Film Genre and the Genre Film, From

Contemporary Cinema.” 16:9, vol. 6, no. 29, 2008, 16-9.

Hollywood Genres.” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic

dk/2008-11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed 12 Sept.

and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan

2019.

and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj. Bedford/St.

Frey, Mattias. Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture. Rutgers, 2016.

Herzog, Amy. Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moments in Film. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Hughes, Darren. “Tsai Ming-Liang.” Senses of Cinema, vol. 26, 2003, sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/tsai/.

Accessed 26 December 2012.

Hui, La Frances. “Tsai Ming-liang: What is Cinema?.” Asia Society, 15 Nov. 2009. asiasociety.org/tsai-ming-liangwhat-cinema. Accessed 20 Feb. 2013.

Martin’s, 2011, pp. 453-465.

Tsai, Ming-liang, director. The Hole. Arc Light Films, Central Motion Pictures, China Television, Haut et Court, Le Sept-Arte, 1998.

---. What Time is it There?. Arena Films and Homegreen Films, 2001.

---. The Skywalk is Gone. Homegreen Films, Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporaine, 2002.

---. The Wayward Cloud. Arena Films, Arte France Cinéma, Homegreen Films, and Wild Bunch, 2005.

Wood, Robin. “The Hole.” CineAction vol. 48, 1998, pp. 56-57.

---. “Ming-liang on the Difficulty of Sex and Relationships.” Asia Society, 15 Nov. 2009. asiasociety.org/tsai-ming-liangdifficulty-sex-and-relationships. Accessed 20 February 2013.

---. “Tsai Ming-liang: ‘Cinema Has Its Own Realism.’” Asia Society, 17 Nov. 2009. asiasociety.org/tsai-ming-liangcinema-has-its-own-realism. Accessed 20 Feb. 2013.

Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. Indiana University Press, 2006.

Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Duke University Press, 1999.

Kraicer, Shelly. “Interview with Tsai Ming-liang.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 8, no. 2.

Lee, Vivian. “Pornography, Musical, Drag, and the Art Film: Performing ‘Queer’ in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp.

117-137.

Lim, Dennis. “Tsai Ming-liang Opens the Floodgates.” The Village Voice, 26 June 2001. villagevoice.com/2001/06/26/ tsai-ming-liang-opens-the-floodgates/. Accessed 4 May 2018.

Liu, Kate Chiwen. “Family in the postmodern ‘non-places’ in the films by Atom Egoyan and Tsai Ming-liang.” Fu Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics, vol. 34, 2001, eng.fju. edu.tw/Canada/paper/egoyan_tsai/index.htm. 23 Feb. 2013.

Martin, Fran. “The Hole.” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 4 (2000).

Rapfogel, Jared. “Tsai Ming-liang: Cinematic Painter.” Senses of Cinema, vol. 20, 2002, www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/ tsai-ming-liang/tsai_painter/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2013.

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Documentary’s Theatricality and Theatricality’s Documentary: Japanese Filmmakers’ Counter-vision of Models and Exoticism

BY MAXIME BOYER-DEGOUL | Université Libre de Bruxelles

ABSTRACT Since its origins, cinema has had documentary value. Early film pioneers filmed the daily activities and then more distant and exotic cultures such as Japan. Over time, the Western gaze has influenced this culture and has gradually led it on the path of modernization. Cinema itself is a symbol of this modernization. In attempting to appropriate this filmic device, some Japanese filmmakers understood the artificiality of its process of reproducing a reality and considered films as an artificial representation. After the Second World War, there was a opposition between these two ways of thinking.

On one hand, films such as Ichikawa Kon's documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad were explicitly presented as icons of the socio-economic model of reconstruction. On the other hand, filmmakers concerned with the preservation of Japanese identity, threatened by the American occupier, heavily rejected an approach in order to propose a counter-vision.

Ironically, Ozu Yasujiro, the “most Japanese” of Japanese filmmakers, embodies this counter-vision at the dawn of postwar propaganda discourses. He who gave films what Western eyes would see as testimonies of the traditions of Japan was actually the perfect example of the anti-Western sense of realism. More contemporary filmmakers are in the continuity of this idea that is to conceive cinema as a mean to question identity and the place of the modern Japanese individual.

These concerns sound even more necessary at a means in his history when the Japanese model so much vaunted through propagandist pictures suffered a frightening decline.

INTRODUCTION

S

ince its origins, cinema has had a documentary component. Film pioneers recorded the daily activities of their immediate environment before turning their attention to more distant, more exotic cultures.

Japan is one such culture which has fascinated the Western eye in terms of architecture and tradition. But over time, the Western gaze itself has influenced Japanese culture and has gradually led it to the path of modernization, of which cinema is a symbol. In attempting to appropriate this cinematographic device, some Japanese filmmakers have understood the artificiality of its process of capturing and reproducing reality. The postulate of these filmmakers is

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not to adopt a Western approach, like the documentary by filming scenes said to be representative of their culture for the sake of realism. On the contrary, it consists of posing reality as a representation for spectators.

After the Second World War, there was an opposition between these two ways of thinking at the time of the reconstruction of Japan. With this in mind, films such as Ichikawa Kon’s documentary Tokyo Olympiad (Tokyo Orinpikku 1965), about the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, are posed as icons of the socio-economic model of reconstruction. On the other hand, some filmmakers are more concerned with the preservation of the Japanese identity

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

threatened by an accelerated westernization of the country through the American directives embodied by General MacArthur, “the new sovereign, the blue-eyed shogun, the paternalistic military dictator, the grandiloquent but excruciatingly sincere Kabuki hero” (Dower 182).

One sign of oppression leveraged under occupation is CCD (Civil Censorship Detachment). This legislation listed 33 forbidden topics such as atomic bombs, occupation policy, or military forces in any kind of media or art (like cinema). Mention of censorship itself was prohibited.

After the end of the occupation in 1951, and some of these taboos, Japanese authorities continue to follow occupier’s directives that were deeply implemented into bureaucracy (190-191). As a result, some filmmakers distanced themselves from an approach deemed propagandist in order to propose a counter-vision. In the same year, while authorities were busy praising Japan through the Olympics, a new Japanese film genre, pinku eiga (“pink movie”) was born and about to cause scandals. Through pinku eiga like Tombstone (Namari no bohyo, 1965), Wakamatsu Koji frames a young Japanese man who kills an American soldier to save his mother from rape. His depiction of sexuality and violence, considered as depravation by the Japanese authorities, is an explicit criticism of American presence. However, sexuality and violence are not restrained to pinku eiga: other filmmakers like Oshima Nagisa1 or Kiju Yoshida 2 use them to elaborate a political cinematographic wave.

Ironically, long before this ideological opposition to American occupation, it is Ozu Yasujiro, whose aesthetic and method make the Japanese consider him as the “most Japanese of all their filmmakers” (Richie xi), who seems to embody this counter-vision at the dawn of post-war propaganda discourses. With films like Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) or The Taste of tea (Sanma no aji, 1962), Ozu’s works were mostly considered in Western eyes as documentaries, testimonies of the traditional mores of Japan.

However, some of his peers, such as Kiju, support a different reading: Ozu was actually the perfect example of the anti-cinema, or in other words, the opposite vision to the Western vision of cinema.

More contemporary directors like Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Tsukamoto Shinya are illustrative figures of a new generation of filmmakers that emerged during the 1990s, which in turn heralded a new social crisis equally as resonant as that of the 1960s. Indeed, this contemporary period has been called the “lost decade” because of events that have symbolically and concretely shaken the roots of the Japanese social model. In Cure (Kyua, 1997), his first international success, Kurosawa depicts a detective investigating murders committed by apparently unconnected perpetrators. He eventually faces a mysterious amnesiac who may be the key to the case -- or not. In Tetsuo (1989), acclaimed at FantaFestival in Rome, Tsukamoto depicts a salaryman slowly turned into a being made of metal.

The story of perpetrators killing for no reason is reminiscent of the attack in the Tokyo subway by the Aum Sect 3.

As well, the portrait of a man merging with the metal trash produced by modern society is potentially illustrative of the consequences of the Japanese asset price bubble’s collapse (1980s-1990s). However, such oversimplified readings of these works would be too restrictive and don’t consider them as pure cinematographic objects.

Thus, in the continuity of filmmakers like Ozu, the main concern is not to create works about the specific tragedies of Japan. They follow that idea of conceiving cinema as the possibility of a gaze, not documentary towards its culture. Via fictional aspects, their work questions the place of the modern Japanese individual within their environment, and thus probes the very notion of Japanese identity.

This process is highlighted at a moment when the model so praised by propagandist discourses is subject to a frightening decline.

DOCUMENTARY AND EXOTICISM The first image of the film Tokyo Olympiad is a poster of the Tokyo Olympiad of 1964. It shows the red disc of the Japanese flag on a white banner. Below it are the Olympic rings and the inscription “Tokyo 1964,” followed by “The Olympics are a symbol of human aspiration.” The first shot frames the sun. The next one follows a demolition ball striking a concrete structure. Another point of view shows

1 His most famous example is In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korida, 1975), relating the true story of Sada Abe, who had an affair with a man she eventually killed. The movie received special attention because of its very graphic sexual scenes.

2 Director of Eros + Massacre (Eros + Gyakusatsu, 1970) 3 On March 20, 1995, several members of the cult movement Aum Shinrikyo, led by Asahara Shoko, released sarin on three lines of the Tokyo subway. In this attack, 13 people were killed and about 6,000 others suffered long-term sequelae.

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Documentary’s Theatricality and Theatricality’s Documentary

Fig. 1 | Crumbling buildings in Tokyo Olympiad, 00:01:22. Toho, 1965.

Fig. 2 | Opening of Tokyo Olympiad, 00:02:01. Toho, 1965.

this demolition ball hitting a building. The violence of the impact is expressed by the transition from one point of view to another. The fifth shot shows a building wall heavily crumbling (Fig. 1). A sixth shot shows the same scene, but from an establishing shot that frames the surrounding buildings. A seventh image briefly shows Japanese workers, and an eighth shot shows an aerial view of Tokyo. With crossfades, the editing slips from the city to a sports stadium and then films it from the ground through a circular tracking shot, leading to the appearance of the opening with the English title (Fig. 2). Successive shots show the stadium from different angles. Next comes a series of shots filmed first from a car in a tunnel, then on sprawling roads that cross the city of Tokyo, and finally ends on the image of a modern Tokyo with crowds and cars. Finally, the Japanese title appears4.

After the Second World War, the reconstruction of Japan continued an intense wave of modernization, already initiated with the Restoration of Meiji (1868-1912) and touted as a socio-economic model in the eyes of the world.

The illustration of this Japanese miracle was the Olympiads of 1964. Indeed, Ichikawa Kon, famous director of The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1965), was hired to make a film related to the event. In 1965, the documentary Tokyo Olympiad was released. The film depicts Japan’s newfound grandeur through athletes from all over the world on the 4 Depending on the film version, the two titles may be switched.

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occasion of this exceptional event. This image greatly contributes to Japan’s return to the international scene as well as to communicating its model to all nations of the world attending or participating in the Olympic Games.

Thus, on the one hand, it paints a portrait of a distant objective reality destined to be exported and to fascinate foreign eyes. On the other hand, both by the purpose of the film and its export, it reinforces the legitimacy of the post-war model of the Japanese people.

From its origins, the genre of documentary has been associated with the idea of travel. In the continuity of photography, cinema gives the possibility to capture and reproduce distant realities and by extension, to breathe the feeling of travel through a screen. This notion was born in the West and from this window to the world, crystallized the idea of the documentary as objective testimony reported from distant horizons. The Lumière brothers and other cinema pioneers sent their collaborators around the world to bring back “exotic” scenes.

With time, this idea of travel associated with documentary is coupled with an ethnological dimension thanks to the capture of typical events. But this is where the limits of documentary objectivity become clear. Indeed, every filmmaker has a specific gaze for the object they want to show. Framing, speech, and editing expose the subjectivity of a gaze through the objectivity of what is shown on the screen. In some cases, the presence of the filmmaker and the mechanical eye of their camera is, voluntarily or not, a factor of manipulation -- an interference with the elements of the reproduced reality. As Roland Barthes states in his essay about photography, It can happen that I am observed without knowing it (…). But very often (…) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.

(Barthes 10) In this sense, behind the intention of a director lies an ideology visible through a gaze instituted on the produced images. Between documentary and propaganda, the border becomes tenuous. In 1935, Leni Riefenstahl produced Triumph des Willens (Fig. 3), which concretizes the moment

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

when the documentary puts itself at the service of an ideology that a political power tries to institute to the masses of a country and even beyond its borders. Beyond its propagandist message, the film is praised for its mastery of the purest cinematographic language (Brockmann 150-165); that is to say, the power of images and not of speech5. This feeling is reinforced by Olympia (1936), a documentary about the 1936 Olympiad in Berlin. In this case, the purpose is to make viewers accept or even love a dominant ideology whose truth is induced by the objectivity of the images.

Ichikawa’s film is introduced by the title which is presented in both Japanese and English. On one hand, the Japanese title aims to promote the sporting event and to make the public accept the sacrifice of an ancient world for the benefit of a new modernity. On the other hand, the Western title promotes this new modernity in the eyes of foreign spectators and leads them to see a country more open to the world, as well as to westerners under the pretext of wanting to be closer to a westernized way of life. Indeed, following this double opening, the film traces a history of the ancient Olympic Games, going back to Ancient Greece through the ruins of sports fields. Through runners carrying the Olympic flame in Greece, a bridge is made across the different countries of the world until the flame reaches the Tokyo Olympiad.

Ironically, the same year, the French filmmaker Chris Marker produced Le Mystère Koumiko (1965), a sort of filmic wandering shot during the 1964 Olympics revolving around a Japanese woman, Muraoka Koumiko, born in Manchuria, speaking French, whom the filmmaker describes as neither “the Japanese model” nor “the model woman nor the modern woman.” In contrast with post-war Japan models, Marker – like Koumiko – shows no interest in the event, but rather in what is not shown in the images of its reconstruction. Conversely, the images he captures from this new Tokyo raise a vision of an invisible Japan still haunted by the specter of war, although erased by reconstruction and modernization. By associating a sample of Olympiad images with a French and non-Japanese commentary, Marker underlines how Japan’s viewpoint on itself follows and is articulated by Western perspectives. By adopting this distorted view of the “stereotypes” of the Japanese miracle, the filmmaker indirectly portrays them as simulacra.

Fig. 3 | Triumph des Willens, 01:02:59. Universum Film AG, 1935.

Therefore, it sounds ironic that a French filmmaker delivers a documentary filmic essay in opposition to the usual objects of this genre while a Japanese filmmaker adopts an approach and an instituted point of view close to Western documentary productions. Ichikawa uses Westerners’ tools in order to better sell a vision of Japan to them while Marker breaks up with these processes by filming his vision of Japan. In his book Le Dépays, he emphasizes the artificiality of the filmic process by which he shapes “his” Japan. Because, to him, “imagining Japan is a way to know it”: Such are the things of my country, my imagined country, my country which I have totally invented, totally invested, my country which is so exhausting me that I am no longer myself except in this change of scenery. (Marker)

COUNTER-VISION Documentary demonstrates the sociological influence and role of cinema and how its limits reveal the flaws of a dominant discourse. The intention of the director determines the choice of the images shown; that is to say, the way in which a reproduced reality is a truncated reality, according to a subjective viewpoint.

In Le Mystère Koumiko, Chris Marker frames the least typical Japanese woman from a Western point of view.

Consequently, he poses a critique of Western hegemonic

5 Charles Chaplin, a burlesque specialist in American cinema and an icon of silent cinema, embodies the quintessence of a purely visual art. His final speech from The Great Dictator (1940), an open criticism against Nazism and Hitler, is the least interesting part of the film because it relies on the verbal to deliver a glimpse of hope while the entire film is based on burlesque situations ridiculing totalitarianism through visual humor.

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Documentary’s Theatricality and Theatricality’s Documentary

[O]n the one hand, [Tokyo Olympiad] paints a portrait of a distant objective reality destined to be exported and to fascinate foreign eyes. On the other hand, both by the purpose of the film and its export, it reinforces the legitimacy of the post-war model of the Japanese people. thought and in that way highlights the ideological conflicts of a Japan that takes this thought as a model. This contradictory issue is crystallized by the film’s last sequence, showing Koumiko aboard a train while voice-over provides a verbal discussion between her and the filmmaker.

She states: Always, something happens. Anything. They will arrive one by one, on the line of human history. And for me, these are incidents of every morning thrown out the door. When I was a child, I lived only by sensations on the tongue or by the voluptuousness of cold smells. Just around the same time, the human was about to suffer. They went to war, they were prisoners.

They were resisting. They cried. They wept and the human tanks were torn apart. And today, knowing it, I am astonished. I am more astonished that I did not know for a long time. I am astonished every morning. Every morning, I am surprised, I do not understand anything. I do not know how to comment. But soon, they will arrive, the results of the events. It’s like the wave of the sea. Once it arrives, an earthquake, even if it’s a distant accident, the wave comes little by little and it finally reaches me.

(La Sofra, 1967) The 1960s were punctuated by the emergence of divergent movements against the Japanese new social model.

Writers (Mishima Yukio), avant-garde artists (Terayama 6 Title of the film refers to Jean Genet’s work, Journal d’un voleur (1949).

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Shuji, Kara Juro, Hijikata Tatsumi), and filmmakers (Wakamatsu Kôji, Oshima Nagisa) used their own means of expression to criticize an economic model based on consumerist culture exported from the United States, which has occupied and still occupies Japanese territory, notably through the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, whose renewal in 1960 was source of violent riots. In 1968, Oshima made Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku dorobbi nikki), following a kleptomaniac who steals books. They are not just books, but works from authors such as George Bataille, Jean Genet 6 or Jean-Paul Sartre -- books that inspired the avant-garde movements of the time, including Mishima.

Oshima’s film is thus representative of this opposition between a dominant culture inherited from the American occupation and the search for alternative cultures. In this context of intellectual effervescence, it seems logical for works such as Sartre, Genet or Antonin Artaud to emerge and resurface throughout Japanese history. Kara, who is involved in the film with his troupe, is an eloquent illustration: Sartre is the main subject of his graduation thesis at the University of Meiji; he calls his theatrical troupe, created in 1967, Jôkyô Gekijô (‘situation theater’) and his first theatrical production is a free adaptation of La Putain Respectueuse written in 1946 (Powell 178).

This movement reflects a search for new forms of expression that break with “the advent of a modernity focused on efficiency and profitability” (Thomas 272) that inspires a great delusion to Oshima: When evening came, dwellings bathed in the setting sun, like matchboxes, gave, with their contours drawn too distinctly, an impression of artificial manufactory. When I thought of the life that people were leading in these little boxes, a cry denouncing the nonsense of existence rose from the bottom of my heart (...). The sensitivity of the Japanese has not changed: on the contrary, as if they wanted to make a mockery of the emotions that I, a naive young man, had felt then, people have filled their reinforced concrete house with synthetic standardized articles or chemical, and have made each piece of their apartment the scene of new home-drama quite mild. (Oshima 249)

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

Fig. 4 | Tokyo Story, 00:38:57. Shochiku, 1953.

The artificiality of the new ways of life that Oshima compares to the register of the home drama finds special meaning in filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro’s works. As we know, Ozu’s films are fictions, not documentaries. But to the Western eye, these fictions are coupled with a documentary or even ethnological interest, supported notably by moments of narrative suspension. Simple shots of gardens, temples, and clothes hanging from the wind are all fragments of the way of life of the Japanese of the period in which the films that reproduce a disappeared reality are found when discovered by the eyes of the spectators. In fact, Western critics have often depicted Ozu as a Zen filmmaker, a representative example of the Japanese tradition, particularly by the genre often associated with him: the home drama. Yet analysts such as Noël Burch or Donald Richie have tried to build more interesting aspects.

We say “tried” because, to this day, although many people bring his stone to the building, Ozu has left no definitive interpretation to his images. Richie associates Ozu with the home drama 7, but this statement is half true because the home drama is particularly characteristic of the filmmaker’s post-war period. This may be one of the reasons why Burch, as he considers that post-war films offer very little renewal, is only interested in the pre-war period until There was a father (Chichi ariki 1942).

As for these suspended moments, Richie calls them “empty sceneries” or “empty shots” while Burch calls them “pillow shots” and defines them as a kind of “still life” whose function is to “suspend the diegetic flow” as well as to set “a decentering effect as the camera settles

for a moment, sometimes a long time on some inanimate aspect of the human environment.” Burch’s interpretation resonates with that of a Japanese filmmaker, Kiju Yoshida, in that this type of shot illustrates the conscious expression of “dissent from the world view implied by the Western mode of representation” which is an “anthropocentric” world-view. “Empty and often long-lasting,” these shots “are fully built from a graphic view, and require to be explored like paintings” (Burch 175-177).

Indeed, Kiju is opposed to Western considerations that associate Ozu’s works with documentary and exoticism. He considers Ozu as much less concerned with home drama than the cinematic modern device as a medium. For example, Kiju sees in the stillness shots Ozu’s awareness of the cinematic artificial process aiming to replace human eyes with camera lenses. With this in mind, Ozu poses cinema as an art of imitation of the real, as “when we look at the actual conditions of this world through the camera’s lens, we must deny the random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye’s constant movements in order to focus on one point” (Kiju 55).

In Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), a retired couple, Hirayama Shukichi and Tomi, go to visit their children in Osaka and Tokyo. However, the children don’t have enough time to spend with their parents.

Their daughter, Shige, asks Noriko, the widow of their son Shoji who died in the war, to take them to visit the capital. After a tour on a tourist bus, Noriko takes them to Ginza to contemplate the city. During this scene, Kiju emphasizes that the couple and Noriko look at the city but the camera does not frame what they are contemplating, leaving only an empty image (Fig. 4). This brings the filmmaker to state Although Tokyo undoubtedly lies in front of them, the city becomes a space of absence, and it becomes clear that it is not the elderly couple who looks at Tokyo, but Tokyo as a space of absence that is looking at the elderly couple.

(Kiju 146) This space of absence echoes the words of French filmmaker Jean Epstein and denies the idea of a Japanese picturesque. Epstein considers the picturesque cinema as “zero, nothing, nothingness,” as meaningless as talking “of colors

7 Jasper Sharp interview with Donald Richie, available at http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/donald-richie/

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shares similarities with traditional Japan’s perception of “subject altered, carried away, in the light of fetishes and masks” (Guillain 14).

The filmmaker Kurosawa Kiyoshi approaches this modernity of the gaze in that it highlights not the objectivity of the camera’s gaze on reality, but rather the subjectivity of such a gaze:

Fig. 5 | Barren Illusions, 00:03:53. Eurospace, 1999.

to a blind man.” In his opinion, “film is only susceptible of photogeny” and “picturesque and photogeny coincide only by chance” (Epstein 95).

The French title of the film, Voyage à Tokyo (‘Trip’ or ‘Travel to Tokyo’) is explicitly an invitation to travel for French spectators imbued with this documentary culture.

In fact, this title adapts the film in order to be seen as a pure object of exoticism, regardless Ozu’s true intentions. While the Western gaze would see a documentary-like picture of the Japanese way of life, Ozu is more concerned by a documentary gaze of the artificiality of the representation of the “Japanese way of life.”

In this sense, Ozu’s cinema is highlighted as a reproduced staged reality and does not show a high interest in depicting Japanese culture for foreign eyes. Further, those who read this artificiality as an authentic testimony of traditional Japan delight in the simulacrum of a model that artists such as Oshima or Kara denounce.

NOWADAYS In his preface to the photographer Louis Guillain’s work on Noh theatre and contemporary arts, Michel Sicard links the modern view of the world with Japan’s view of otherness by reminding us of “a time when photography captured the real world.” Then, photography turned into the mind of an artist which “was a living and organizing eye behind his lens.” Guillain expresses that such a modus ended and that we now “have to indulge in the image by this anonymous sensor, without really framing or building, without choosing too much the flow of things.” This new way of watching, to project a gaze, aims “to travel endlessly in the streets, on the sidewalks, in crowds, places and non-places, surfaces and interstices.” However, this apparently contemporary new way to frame the world

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Cinema is photography. So you have to be realistic enough. But the realism must be based on staging. If we really made the camera show everything we wanted to show, it would obviously look even more realistic. But there would be no idea, no invention. (Kurosawa 93) Kurosawa considers the documentary-like view as a sterile capture of the real while the cinema allows filmmakers to invent a reality without hiding its artificial character, which is then revealing the subjectivity of its author.

Which, in this sense, echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of cinema: cinema is not just “merely a play photographed in motion,” but an original means of expression through the choice and grouping of the shots (MerleauPonty 70).

Thus, interaction with the world is followed by a questioning of perception of this world and its representations. Barren Illusions (Ôinaru gen’ei, 1999) focuses on two characters, Haru and Michi, in a (un)determined future – in 2005 – wandering without any purpose. The only particular detail is Haru volunteering as a test subject for an experimental vaccine against the effects of regular falls of pollen, although it may involve side effects such as a risk of sterility.

At the beginning of the film, while it’s dark, Haru steals a bicycle and rides a few meters in an anonymous street from right to left before colliding with a pile of garbage cans and falling down (Fig.5). In this scene, Kurosawa uses a tracking shot to follow the young man on a parallel movement. Starting from a static shot, and as the young man traverses the space, the camera follows a non-fluid path. Kurosawa pays attention to the use of travelling shots in his films in that this figure “deeply reveals the tension of a scene, and puts the viewer in tension.”

Moreover, for Kurosawa, “this relationship between image and outside is also played out at the film set, between the image recorded and the effort made to film it. Whether for a landscape or characters, the image is imbued with what is happening behind the camera” (Tessé-Delorme 81-82).

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

The use of traveling disturbed by this unstable riding appears as an intentional sign that reminds viewers of the camera’s presence, as well as the interaction that arises between the camera and its object. Thus, through travelling, off-screen becomes in-screen as well as in-screen becomes off-screen. This movement erasing and creating the cinematographic space is articulated by the character’s subjectivity and perception of time while recalling the artificial nature of the capture of the scene. However, this same “movement” also confines the character in the frame and thus returns him introspectively to his own immobility, his inaction. Although wandering on this bike, Haru moves in the frame’s spatial emptiness.

Contemporary Japanese filmmakers have kept in mind an awareness of the artificiality of film media and how it influences them in that they do not seek to build an objective discourse, but rather, a way of expressing subjectivity. Therefore, the notion of identity is often at the heart of their works and will articulate the images of the story as well as these images will articulate the identity of its characters. In this sense, these filmmakers will portray the influence of the modern Japanese environment, particularly the urban environment, on subjectivity. In the same way, the film as a tool from modernity, a tool for capturing and reproducing a reality, will be an important source of influence on the expression of an author’s subjective reality through his characters.

This idea is similar to Deleuze’s analysis of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s works in which he observes that “the distinction between what the character saw subjectively and what the camera saw objectively vanished, not in favour of one or the other, but because the camera assumed a subjective presence, acquired an internal vision, which entered into a relation of simulation (‘mimesis’) with the character’s way of seeing.” Through the contamination of these “objective” and “subjective” images, the filmmakers influence their stories in an impersonal perspective that sublimates their artificial dimension. In fact, the “story no longer refers to an ideal of the true which constitutes its veracity, but becomes a ‘pseudo-story’, a poem, a story which simulates or rather a simulation of the story” (Deleuze, Cinéma 2 194).

Deleuze quotes Pasolini who said that “the director has replaced wholesale the neurotic’s vision of the world by his own delirious vision of aestheticism.” He calls this process “free indirect discourse” which consists of “an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable

On one hand, the Japanese title aims to promote the sporting event and to make the public accept the sacrifice of an ancient world for the benefit of a new modernity. On the other hand, the Western title will promote this new modernity in the eyes of foreign spectators and lead them to see a world more open to the world under the pretext of wanting to be closer to their way of life. acts of subjectivation simultaneously, one of which constitutes a character in the first person, but the other of which is present at his birth and brings him on to the scene.” Thus, this process induces “a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it.” In brief, a correlation between a character’s point of view and the camera as another point of view that “thinks, reflects and transforms the viewpoint of the character.” To crystallize this way of perception, neurotic condition of character appears essential as it crystallizes “the difficult birth of a subject into the world.” That allows the camera to not just reflect such the character’s perception of his world, but to show “another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected” (Deleuze, Cinéma 1 106-108 In this continuity, Tsukamoto Shinya operates an approach that is both similar and different from the relation to reality. Indeed, if his visual style – often rougher – differs considerably from filmmakers such as Ozu or Kurosawa, he also shares their question of perception and a certain state of contemplation.

Tokyo Fist (Tokyo Fisuto, 1995) follows Tsuda – played

by Tsukamoto – a salaryman who works for an insurance company and is engaged to Hizuru. The first moments of the film show him walking from apartment to apartment to present the latest news in health insurance. His boss also asks him to visit a boxing club, which is a good business for

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Fig. 6 | Tokyo Fist, 01:14:13. Kaijyu Theater, 1995.

Fig. 7 | Tokyo Fist, 01:27:50. Kaijyu Theater, 1995.

the company. As he leaves the boxing club, one of the boxers notices him and catches him in the subway. His name is Kojima (Tsukamoto Koji) played by Tsukamoto Koji—the filmmaker’s brother and a boxer – and is Tsuda’s former classmate from high school. Tsuda appears uncomfortable in the presence of Kojima and tries, in vain, to avoid him.

Things get worse when Kojima goes back to the couple’s apartment and tries to seduce Hizuru. When Tsuda comes back from work, Hizuru tells him what happened. In the same time, Kojima phones and provokes Tsuda, telling him how sweet Hizuru is. After that, Tsuda unleashes his rage by smashing a wall with his fists. Then he goes directly to Kojima’s place, despite Hizuru’s attempts to stop him. There, the confrontation takes a hostile turn as Tsuda raises his fist to Kojima. But the boxer knocks him out without any difficulty in front of Hizuru. Following this incident, Tsuda becomes more oppressive towards Hizuru. The woman, no longer willing to endure this situation, leaves Tsuda to go to Kojima’s apartment for answers answers on the link between the two men. For his part, Tsuda shows up at the boxing gym and starts training (Fig. 6).

The city of Tokyo is a recurring place in the works of Japanese filmmakers such as Kurosawa or Tsukamoto. The 44 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

latter devotes several of his films to this city and the title of this one is even more explicit. Emblem of the modernization of Japan, symbol of a post-Hiroshima society, a place of depersonalization and wandering... From the 1960s to the 1990s, the importance of this “urban space boom (…) grows in the lives of the Japanese people. The city of the anonymous crowd, the city as a cradle of modernity, the city as a space reproducing what the Japanese of the postwar period recognized as their ideal: the American way of life” (Yatabe 105).

Tsukamoto introduces his film both as a play and as a documentary. The first shots introducing the main character – that he plays himself – shows him standing on the platform of a train station (Fig. 7). Then he goes down the stairs in the middle of an anonymous crowd and walks to his office before starting to approach potential customers.

Like in theatrical documentary, Tsukamoto puts himself on the stage of a typical modern Japanese scene by embodying the prosperity icon developed over the post-war years: the salaryman. However, from the Western viewpoint, which would be more fascinated by cultural monuments such as Imperial Palace or Golden Pavilion, this picture of the salaryman is more anti-typical as it carries the American occupier’s legacy. Like Ozu or Kurosawa, Tsukamoto frames a de-historicized Tokyo, dispossessed of its identity through reconstruction but also through the gaze turned upon it. This picture shares some documentary-like view on Japan’s modern way of life through social depiction of an icon of prosperity. However, Tsukamoto bypasses this point of view by physically interfering in these images through his character of Tsuda. As a result, his presence introduces the fictional element into an authentic-like reality. Tsukamoto moves away from his position as omniscient and omnipotent filmmaker to become the visual element of the artificial fiction in the real world.

This position finds a significant meaning towards the middle of the film, through an important personage even if it appears only in rare moments: Tsuda’s father. Hospitalized and dying, the father haunts the son through the image of a fallen patriarch who is no longer able to leave his hospital bed. Thus, after a training session, Tsuda goes to the hospital and learns of the death of his father. When he arrives at his father’s room, he only sees a nurse gently lifting the sheet in the air like if she was covering the body of the deceased. However, the body has already been removed and at the same time, it still seems present but in its absence. Following the death of his father, Tsuda

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

receives a phone call. First, he thinks he’s talking to Kojima, then thinks about Hizuru. Her voice answers, saying that she had a feeling about the death of Tsuda’s father. The salaryman asks to see her and makes an appointment near the highway. There, he waits all night long but she does not come. He then finds himself wandering in Tokyo, in the middle of the crowd, in the subway, in an elevator, in more and more underground and narrow alleys and corridors of concrete and metal, poorly lit spaces. Eventually, he resurfaces in the crowd, his clothes dusty, while a voiceover from his answering machine relays a message from an unseen coworker worried about his disappearance, but probably more for professional reasons than personal ones (Figs. 8, 9, and 10).

During this scene, the distance between the fictional character and the director is blurred. The combination of both gives rise to a bitter observation about the nature of the modern Japanese person embodied by Tsukamoto: the loss of any form of rooting, of belonging to a place necessary for the building of an identity. This lack of connection between the individual and his environment is even more accentuated both by the fictional character of Tsuda and by the filmic process that reduces Tokyo to some ‘any’ space, space de-territorialized and framed as a stage for representation. Deleuze draws a brief history of these spaces and notes that “after the war, a proliferation of such spaces could be seen both in film sets [decors] and in exteriors, under various influences. The first, independent of the cinema, was the post-war situation with its towns demolished or being reconstructed, its waste grounds, its shanty towns, and even in places where the war had not penetrated, its undifferentiated urban tissue, its vast unused places, docks, warehouses, heaps of girders and scrap iron.” Thus, this type of space retains one and the same nature: it no longer has co-ordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualise them (…). It is therefore shadows, whites and colours which are capable of producing and constituting any-space-whatevers, deconnected or emptied spaces. (Deleuze, Cinema 1 169) There is a proliferation of such spaces in Tsukamoto’s and Kurosawa’s movies, but also in other contemporary filmmakers’ works, such as Aoyama Shinji's or Shibata Go's. But they are part of the very continuity of Ozu’s

Figs. 8, 9, and 10 | Tokyo Fist, 00:51:40, 00:52:50, 00:53:20. Kaijyu

Theater, 1995.

By distilling a sample of Olympiad images accompanied by a French and non-Japanese commentary, Marker associates these images with a Western vision that Japan tends to take as a model. By adopting this distorted view of the “stereotypes” of the Japanese miracle, the filmmaker indirectly qualifies them as simulacra.

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If Tokyo is a recurring scene among filmmakers, it is a depersonalized Tôkyô, with no name, no spatio-temporal landmarks, a landscape dehistoricized both by the gaze of the camera and the presence of industrial deserts – remains of the lost decade – which endures. works. Thus, when reviews see this kind of space as a simple contemplative gaze related to Japanese sensibility, Kiju speaks of the contemplation scene from Tokyo Story: This Ozu’s Tokyo shows gigantic chimneys from a garbage incineration plant in a remote corner of the city, or even clothes swaying in the wind on terraces. Rather than scenes watched by the elderly couple in Tokyo, these are depersonalized images seen by anonymous people. (Kiju 146) The approach of filmmakers such as Kurosawa and Tsukamoto excludes the ethnological register of Western documentary to better reinvent a Japan and reveal the artificiality of an allegedly objective discourse on the post-war legacy and its socio-economic model that has shown its limits particularly during the 1990s.

If Tokyo is a recurring scene among filmmakers, it is a depersonalized Tokyo, with no name, no spatio-temporal landmarks, a landscape de-historicized both by the gaze of the camera and the presence of industrial deserts – remains of the lost decade – which endures. As a consequence, the characters of these films find themselves dispossessed of their identity under the mechanical eye’s gaze as well as cold and sterile buildings made of metal and glass.

In fact, the filmic image as a mental image finds its extension in the city of Tokyo, which becomes mental landscape and space of the disappearance, crystallization of the historical-social vision that the filmmaker produces in the continuity of the post-war period’s legacy, that is a vision of the Japanese miracle as a historical-social desert, characterized by “an already popular array of de-historicized signs and symbols that encourage consumers to see themselves as national subjects” (Sakamoto 3).

CONCLUSION In his Sociologie du cinéma, Pierre Sorlin considers that cinema carries an important ethnographic part because it provides information like documentaries

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or reportages could do. With time, it follows the evolution and the mutations of modern societies. As a result, “the construction founds the cinematographic image of society, society as shown in cinema.” Therefore, the image is not “the ‘full-scale’ duplication, reproduction of observable data but the transformation of these data in accordance with accepted principles within a social ensemble” (Sorlin 270).

The 1960s mark the economic and industrial boom of Japan, a new Japan rising from the ruins of the postwar period. Cinema itself is a documentary gaze on this reconstruction coupled with an ideological tone for this triumph, as demonstrated by the Tokyo Olympiad. However, it is against this silent manipulation of images that subversive filmmakers keep in mind – just as Ozu did – that “the camera reveals the secret (...) shows the back side of a society, its slips.” In fact, cinema becomes “a sort of ‘counter-analysis’ of society” and reveals “other reading systems” (Sorlin 50-51). Thus, instead of sticking to the capture of an objective reality likely to be perceived as a testimony of Japanese particularism, these filmmakers consider the cinema as a pure mode of representation. In that view, this Japanese cinema has no authentic but its artificiality and, ironically, invites to question the Japanese identity within a social fiction in crisis. 

Maxime Boyer-Degoul

WORKS CITED Ai no korida. Directed by Nagisa Oshima. Argos Films, Oshima Productions, Shibata Organisation, 1975.

Banshun. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Shochiku, 1949.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

Hill and Wang, 1981.

Oshima, Nagisa. "Ecrits, 1956-1978. Dissolution et jaillissement". Cahiers du cinéma, Cahiers du Cinéma/ Gallimard, 1980.

Powell, Brian, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A century of change and continuity. Routledge, 2002.

Biruma no tategoto. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Nikkatsu, 1947.

Richie Donald. Ozu. University of California Press, 1977.

Brockmann, Stephen. “Triumph des Willens (1935):

Sakamoto, Rumi. “‘Will you go to War? Or will you Stop

Documentary and Propaganda. ” A Critical History of

being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi

German Film, serie Studies in German literature, linguistics,

Yoshino.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol.6, no.1, 2008,

and culture. Camden House, 2010. pp.150-165.

pp.1-16.

Burch, Noël. Pour un observateur lointain : Forme et signification dans le cinéma japonais. Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard, 1982.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 1 – L’Image-mouvement, Editions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1985.

---. Cinéma 2 – L’Image-temps, Editions de Minuit, coll. Critique, 1985.

Chichi ariki. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Shochiku, 1942.

Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Epstein, Jean. Ecrits sur le cinéma Tome 1. Seghers, Cinemaclub, 1974.

The Great Dictator. Directed by Charles Chaplin. Charles Chaplin Film Corporation, 1940.

Eros + Gyakusatsu. Directed by Yoshida Kiju, Gendai Eigasha, 1970.

Guillain, Lionel. Le Théâtre Nô et les arts contemporains.

L’Harmattan, 2008.

Kiju, Yoshida. Ozu ou l’anti-cinéma. Institut Lumière/Actes sud – Arte Editions, 2004.

Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. Mon effroyable histoire du cinéma. Entretiens avec Makoto Shinozaki. Rouge Profond, coll “Raccords”, 2007.

Kyua. Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Ikeda Tetsuya, Kanno Satoshi, Shimoda Atsuyuki, Tsuchikawa Tsutomu, 1997.

Le Mystère Koumiko. Directed by Chris Marker. La Sofra, 1965.

Sanma no aji. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Shochiku, 1962.

Sharp, Jasper. “Donald Richie.” Midnight Eye. n.p., 8 December 2003. 14 April 2015. http://www.midnighteye.com/ interviews/donald-richie/ Shinjuku dorobbi nikki.

Arakawa Masaru, Sozosha, Kinokuniya, 1968.

Sorlin, Pierre. Sociologie du cinéma. Aubier Montaigne, coll. historique,1977.

Shinjuku dorobbi nikki. Arakawa Masaru, Sozosha, Kinokuniya, 1968.

Tessé, Jean-Philippe, and Delorme Stéphane. “Le monde tremble (Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, on February 13th and 14th 2009 in Paris). ” Cahiers du Cinéma, vol. 643, 2009, pp.76-83.

Tetsuo. Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. Kaijyu Shiata, 1989.

Thomas, Benjamin. Le Cinéma japonais d’aujourd’ hui. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009.

Tokyo Fisuto. Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. Kaijyu Shiata, 1995.

Tokyo Monogatari. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Shochiku, 1953.

Tokyo Orinpikku. Organizing Committee for the Games of the XVIII Olympiad, 1965.

Triumph des Willens. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Reichsparteitagfilm, 1935.

Yatabe, Kazuhiko. “La société japonaise et la modernité.

Intégration, différentiation, réflexivité. ” Japon, le renouveau ?. (February 2002). pp.71-132.

Marker, Chris. Le Dépays, Herscher, 1982, n.p.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sens et non-sens. Gallimard, coll. NRF, 1966.

Namari no bohyo. Directed by Koji Wakamatsu. Wakamatsu Koji, 1965. Ôinaru gen’ei. Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Horikoshi Kenzo, and Matsuda Hiroko, 1999.

Olympia. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Olympia-Film, 1936.

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The Horror of Consumerism through Mise-en-Scène: A Class Analysis of a Failed Horror Remake Cycle, 2004-2010

BY JOSEPH WALDERZAK | Adrian College

ABSTRACT This article explores the anticlimatic suspense sequence, a phrase used to describe the use of mise-en-scène to build suspense and tease the killer, within a recent cycle of slasher film remakes. Despite the ubiquity of these scenes in the horror genre, there has been little attention paid to them. Their function as a formulaic device used to tease the climax and provide suspenseful interludes between exposition renders them analytically unattractive. However, these scenes often answer some of the most basic questions one can ask of the horror genre: What is used to frighten the audience? How is the audience frightened? Why are certain elements or objects of a film’s mise-en-scène used in these scenes? How these scenes then inform questions of horror pleasure is obvious, but what is more apropos to this study is the question of how these scenes supplement the ideology of the films. Under this interpretation, the seemingly apolitical nature of the sequences as a result of their formulaic necessity is complicated by analyzing these sequences and their mise-en-scène as ideologically constructed. I argue the anticlimactic suspense sequences serve one of two purposes: they supplement the film’s narrative to create a cohesive ideology or they provide an ideology to the inchoate or ambiguous horror text. As such, these sequences are essential to analyzing the horror genre and the goal is to illuminate the ideological vitality of such an analysis. Furthermore, the article refines existing methods for conducting class analysis and expands the role of mise-en-scène.

A

young nubile teen girl hears an ominous noise and creeps through the darkness to find what lurks within it. Fearful of a notorious killer, the girl carefully inspects her surroundings until she – and the audience with her – is startled by an innocuous object: the family cat, a fallen tree branch, a malfunctioning appliance. The climatic confrontation of the killer and the final girl still awaits, as this suspenseful sequence is designed to scare the audience, construct and maintain atmosphere and tone, and tease the willing audience of what it is certain to come. For the horror fan, these moments of suspense are a quotidian part of the horror film experience yet are unquestionably one of the genre’s diverse sources of pleasure.

The active horror fan, inured to the genre’s formula, can attempt to decode the film’s form and composition to anticipate how, when, and what will compose the film’s suspense, while the passive viewer may surrender to the film’s most basic of pleasures.

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Despite the ubiquity of these scenes in the horror genre, there has been little attention afforded to them.

Their function as a formulaic device used to tease the climax and provide suspenseful interludes between narrative driven scenes presumably renders them analytically unattractive. Beyond their tacit inclusion in the contentious dialectic revolving around the pleasures of the genre, the anticlimactic suspense sequence is discarded as nonessential. However, these scenes and their mise-en-scène often answer some of the most basic questions one can ask of the horror genre: What is used to frighten the audience?

How is the audience frightened? Why are certain elements or objects of a film’s mise-en- scène used in these scenes?

These scenes inform questions of horror’s pleasure, but what is more apropos to this study is the question of how these scenes supplement the ideology of the films. Under this interpretation, the seemingly apolitical and formulaic nature of the sequences is complicated by recognizing these

Joseph Walderzak

sequences as ideologically constructed through art direction and composition. I argue the anticlimactic suspense sequence serves one of two purposes: to supplement the film’s narrative to create a cohesive ideology, or to provide an ideology to the inchoate or ambiguous horror text. As such, these sequences are essential to analyzing the horror genre, and the goal of this article is to illuminate the ideological vitality of such an analysis.

DEFINING THE FAILED GENRE CYCLE Because this approach to the genre is largely unexplored, the body of texts to choose from is immense and formidable. The selection of a remake cycle which took place in the 2000s is far from arbitrary but is, at least partially, the result of gravitating towards films which have been dismissed by scholars (and panned by critics).

The inclination towards spurned horror texts severely and obligingly limits analytical options; horror scholars ubiquitous lamenting of the genre’s dismissal by the academy broadly belies the immense attention actually paid to the genre. Horror films which have reached canonical status within the slasher subgenre (Halloween [1978] and Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974] without question) have garnered such attention that any analysis of their suspense sequences would merely provide superfluous corroboration to widely accepted claims about class in most cases. Likewise, the remakes of these canonical films have drawn significant negative attention, their adaptations charged for failing to maintain the politics of their originals. In Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, David Roche laments that remakes cling “to patriarchal attitudes their 1970s counterparts sought to question” (93). Roche’s analysis of the films’ politics treats the films’ class ideology as a whole where the sequences of suspense are implicitly included despite their exclusion from direct analysis. Therefore, Roche’s claim that Haddonfield, the setting of Halloween, is a synecdoche for white middle-class patriarchal suburban America applies equally to the anticlimactic sequences of suspense despite their omission from Roche’s analysis. What can be gained from approaching these sequences in canonical films (and their sequels and remakes) is validation of scholars’ narrative analysis. To approach films without an extant body of analysis, such as what will be considered below, allows for the potential of this approach to be wholly demonstrated. Establishing this approach with disdained

and ignored films should provide a model for application to films which have attracted considerable attention.

The cluster of remakes considered in this study were released starting in 2006 and includes films whose original iteration were released during what Richard Nowell identifies as the original slasher cycle. Nowell’s intentions are ambitiously revisionist, aiming to challenge the widely accepted belief that the horror films marketed their violence to appeal to male audiences. Nowell shows how teen slashers were disproportionately attracting young girls and how levels of violence were influenced entirely by the MPAA, an assertion which contradicts the massively influential work of Carol Clover among others (36). Part of Nowell’s process is to develop an industrial context for the development of the slasher film in which he employs the terminology “cycle,” jettisoning misleading labels such as fad, stalker, cluster and genre (45). Developing a rather intuitive set of labels (Pioneer Productions, Trailblazing Hits, Cash-In Productions, Failures), Nowell creates a way for understanding how genre cycles develop and eventually fail; this approach lends itself well to other genres, but also has value in narrative analysis. As such, what follows is not a consideration of a contemporary cycle, but of one that failed to materialize, with a particular emphasis on the films which were failures. My designation of a film as a failure is not based on box office returns, but whether the film garnered a sequel. In a genre where sequels are so rampant, it substitutes as an de facto sign of success. The inability to generate a sequel is more apt to describe why When a Stranger Calls (2006), for instance, was a failure despite its profitable box-office receipts. Moreover, the legacy of failing to generate an immediate sequel (inside of seven years) aligns with the remakes of the films considered here: When a Stranger Calls, Sorority Row (2009), Prom Night (2008) and Friday the 13th (2009). Fixating on films which were critical and largely commercial failures accentuates their class ideology and how those ideologies manifest in the films' form of suspense and horror.

CLASS AND THE HORROR FILM The work on class in horror film pales in comparison to other identity politics, particularly gender and sexual identity. It is this relative neglect combined with how explicit the films’ narratives engage with tenets of capitalism which motivates a focus on class in the suspenseful sequences. Robin Wood’s work on class has become

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highly influential despite the fact that it has failed to garner adequate replication within horror studies. In part, this could be due to Wood’s explicit critique of capitalism, a position which claims capitalism features methods of suppression which maintain the allure of freedom while offering consumerism as comfort. Wood approaches horror films, particularly slashers, from both a Marxist and psychoanalytic methodology wherein he identifies forms of repression which transforms people into “monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists” (64). This article focuses on how sequences of horror frame “bourgeois patriarchal capitalism,” particularly through imagery of consumerism. While Wood’s approach is broader and more theoretical than textual, his tenet that normality is threatened by a monster is retained and expanded to include both what is meant to be terrifying beyond the monster, and what form the monster’s terror takes (71). This analysis will also complicate how repression manifests in slasher films, identifying how it is capitalism and consumerism itself which is shown as the monstrous.

Wood is quick to praise the genre for its ideology and foregrounding of the repressed, but he may even understate the cynicism towards capitalism inherent in the horror genre. Matt Hills notes horror “restores the repressed and reconfirms the surmounted” (53), but this cannot be accomplished without implying other aspects of repression, and a close analysis of the form of horror shows what the monster may in fact imply is the state of repression itself.

Yet, how this conversation has shifted from representations of middle-class identity in the original slasher cycle to images of wealth and high-class consumption in many 21st century remakes has largely been a task of mise-en- scène.

Likewise, Annalee Newitz praises and illuminates how the horror genre indicts capitalism by arguing that the monsters and killers of the genre are results of an alienating capitalist society. Claiming the serial killer is homo economicus, Newitz characterizes the horror antagonist as a cultural and economic critique (31). She claims, “the murderous act is the result of their inability to stop working and consuming” (31). Jointly, Newitz and Wood establish a Marxist perspective on the genre as much as they do a textual methodology, which invites diverse approaches to texts which adopt such a class perspective. Newitz’s investigation of The Stepfather (2009) importantly outlines how her methods anticipate my own and demonstrates how a focus on the anticlimactic suspense sequence supplements traditional class analysis. Providing an interesting 50 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

interpretation of The Stepfather’s narrative, Newitz posits it is the free market which allows for the killer to individuate himself and continue his serial behaviour; moreover, David’s (the film’s titular killer played by Dylan Walsh) murderous frustration becomes overwhelming when he is faced with his failure to organize the family by economic principles (28). A consideration of the suspenseful sequences only accentuates what Newitz articulates about the film and what Wood states about the genre’s emphasis on the family. Unlike a number of films in this article, nearly every suspenseful scene’s mise-en-scène involves David: he is what is horrifying. So the question shifts from what is scary to what is the context of the horror, and does it inform the film’s class ideology? David’s quest for patriarchal bliss – serving as patriarch to a broken household – is constantly challenged by tropes of domestic life: the nosy and meddling neighbour, the distrusting friends of his wife, the defensive and combatant ex-husband. David’s homicidal eradication of these forces speaks to the difficulty of adhering to patriarchal ideals, but their suspicions of him are frequently economic. A friend of David’s doomed fiancé Susan (Sela Ward) revokes her initial endorsement of him when he mysteriously quits a realty job when prompted to fill out paperwork. His brief success as a realtor, notably another form of façade, then undermines his ability to reasonably evade his economic duties of paying taxes. So, while Newitz is right to claim it is free market capitalism which enables David’s serial killing, David’s carnage is equally the result of the burden of the expectations of capitalist society. It may be the imperfections of suburban life that David is eradicating, but the relation of some of these imperfections with capitalism suggests it is capitalism’s horrors which produce a monster like him.

Suburban life and its underpinnings are not merely narrative fodder, but the horrific substance of the film’s seemingly innocuous art direction.

THE HORRORS OF CONSUMPTION: WHEN A STRANGER CALLS AND SORORITY ROW The value of investigating the form of suspense and horror is demonstrated in the ideologically aimless When a Stranger Calls. Boldly expanding the infamous opening sequence of the original to a full-length feature, the film’s narrative meandering is to be expected. With the most basic of character development, the film’s protagonist, Jill (Camilla Belle), is forced to spend the evening

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babysitting in order to pay back her father for the cellphone bills fees she accrued after having gone over her minute allotment. This lapse in judgment is the result of talking with her boyfriend about his infidelity with one of Jill’s friends, Tiffany (Katie Cassidy). The brief setup gives way to Jill being terrorized by a mysterious caller while babysitting. Although the narrative is remarkably rudimentary, the setup does plainly entertain the genre’s tropes: Jill is punished for a consumptive act. While not sexual or illegal in nature, Jill’s phone overage fees are presented as the reason for her punishment; the fact that it takes an unexpected and murderous form illuminates, rather than distorts, the relationship between her consumptive act and its subsequent punishment. As simplistic as the narrative is, it should not be surprising that the film or its similarly vacuous original has failed to garner significant textual analysis; however, the remake’s form of suspense supports the narrative’s commentary on consumption.

Jill’s consumptive behaviour demands her punishment, but it also directly leads to her being mysteriously terrorized; therefore, consumption invites terror. Remarkably, the film’s form consistently corroborates the relationship between terror and consumption. The film’s opening scene adheres to this dynamic as a murder takes place in a house outside of a carnival, a spectacle of conspicuous and superfluous consumption. As the murder takes place, it is quick cuts to Ferris wheels, carousels, and other rides – paced by violent orchestration determined to cue expectations of the lurid – rather than the murder itself which is displayed to the audience. An aerial shot of the vacated carnival precedes the arrival of a detective at the scene of the crime the following morning. The message of the opening sequence could not be clearer: murder is a spectacle akin to carnival attractions.

Jill’s wasteful consumption seems destined for the same punishment, but first she is tormented through a series of suspenseful sequences in which her employer’s conspicuous consumption is a form of terror. The menace of conspicuous consumption, if not wealth altogether, is introduced as Jill’s father drops her off at the mansion where she is to babysit, eerie music indicating the terror which lurks at the sight of the enormous house. The horror of the house itself is made clear as its abundant luxuries torment Jill before and to a much greater extent than the mysterious man who subsequently calls her (Fig. 1).

Jill’s exploration of the house leads to a number of suspenseful encounters with the specter of consumption.

Fig. 1 | The interior from When a Stranger Calls does not provide a safe

refuge from the ominous fog; rather, it supplements the eerie ambiance through its low-key lighting and staging of high-class furniture pieces, 00:16:43. Screen Gems, 2006.

Fig. 2 | Jill, centre-framed in the background, is outwardly lost gazing into

the garden and aviary. The serenity and beauty of the image contradict the sinister mixture of silence and chaotic chirping, 00:13:49. Screen Gems, 2006.

She is startled when her innocent attempt to work the television creates a cacophony of sound as she attempts an array of remotes which first trigger the fireplace and then a blaring opera track, evoking simultaneous connotations between horror and high culture. As she shuts everything off, she is momentarily alarmed by a Rodin-like statue at the top of the stairs, before calming her nerves as she snoops through jewelry, perfume, and dresses of the woman’s closet. As she holds a dress up to herself admiringly in the mirror, she is startled by a noise which she concludes was made from the live-in housekeeper feeding the birds in the aviary (Fig. 2).

Only a few moments pass before Jill is startled by the house alarm, of which she rationalizes as being accidentally tripped by the maid, and again – in one of the more effective jump scares – when the indoor sprinklers activate as Jill recognizes the maid’s mysterious absence.

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Fig. 3 | A high-angle shot minimizes Jill and expresses her powerless

state both in terms of her consumptive fascination and her position as unknowing prey, 00:28:36. With local, low-key lighting foregrounding Jill, this type of shot is often replicated with the looming pieces of art providing anti-climactic frights. Screen Gems, 2006.

Fig. 4 | When the stranger first appears in the house to Jill, he is back-lit

to mimic the looming statues, 01:11:20. The dense fog which appeared outside of the house in Fig. 1 now fills the aviary, blurring the distinctions between safety and danger, wilderness and domesticity. Screen Gems, 2006.

iconography: the opera track, the fine art and jewelry, the indoor garden, and the service staff. That it is these items which cause Jill’s terror serves as a cautionary tale to Jill whose frivolous consumption results in a terrorizing from bourgeois consumption itself, or more mundane forms of convenience such as the ice machine which distresses Jill.

Simultaneously, Jill is othered as an outsider to bourgeois culture, horrified by its iconography, while fascinated by its conveniences and luxury. To return to Wood’s theory, Jill’s middle-class normality is threatened by the monster of bourgeois leisure and consumption.

Jill’s experience contrasts to Tiffany's, who comes to visit in order to make amends, but is ultimately terrorized when she leaves the house. The form of Tiffany’s suspense involves trees outside of the house, cutting between her attempt to get to her car and the wind on the branches. The scene reaches its climax when a tree branch blocks Tiffany’s passage past the house gate; she decides to move the

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tree branch, and while her fate is not verified, her death is clearly implied. Tiffany’s punishment, in the wild of nature, matches her sin of betraying Jill. While Tiffany’s social infraction does not meet a social punishment in the way Jill’s consumptive sin amounts to a consumptive form of terror, the breaking of a social norm (confirmed through her desire to ransack the liquor cabinet of Jill’s stead) demands her punishment outside of society, as represented by the upscale home at the centre of the narrative.

Both Jill and Tiffany are preoccupied with consumption and the film’s mise-en- scène uses this preoccupation to expose all forms of consumption as terrifying. Preoccupation with consumption – particularly sexual activity – is far from uncommon in the genre, but When A Stranger Calls’ mise-en-scène illuminates how the specter of consumption constantly looms as a terrifying force. As Jill’s phone tormentor becomes foregrounded in the narrative, the peril of consumption wanes; however, repeated uses of establishing shots of the house, the threat of the guest house, and the prominence of statues as sinister atmosphere maintain the consumptive subtext by visually focusing on wealth (Figs. 3 and 4).

Moreover, the way in which these consumptive elements figure into the climax cannot be mistaken. When on the run from the killer, Jill retreats to the indoor garden pool where she encounters the housekeeper’s dead body; she is figuratively made prey by the expectations of her bourgeois employer. When Jill is captured, pinned to the ground, and choked by the killer, she is able to escape his grasp by remotely turning on the fireplace which sets the him on fire. Her mastery of the fireplace remote, following her initial ineptitude with the array of remotes, demonstrates both the terror and power of bourgeois consumption. Despite its lack of a complex narrative, approaching When a Stranger Calls through an analysis of its form, particularly its suspenseful sequences, reveals how mise-enscène provides a cohesive class critique which positions consumption as a sinister punishing and terrifying force to victim and assailant alike.

Sorority Row follows a more traditional slasher film formula with a superficial social critique involving the iniquitous and debased activities of the titular sorority. Like When a Stranger Calls, Sorority Row’s protagonist of sorority sisters faces punishment for an offense; after a revenge prank goes murderously wrong, resulting in the death of their sorority sister, the girls decide to cover-up the accident rather than going to the authorities. Importantly, the

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girl’s sin was not murder (as it was genuinely an accident), but their decision to hide the body in order to ensure that the rest of their lives would not be ruined. More to the point, covering up the accident allows for a prolonging of the hedonistic sorority lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. The film’s denouement provides an indictment of this perspective by having the killer echo these sentiments, claiming everything he did was to preserve his and his girlfriend Cassidy’s (Briana Evigan) future; his status as valedictorian and using his gown as disguise as he goes on his rampage further demonstrates the relationship between the pursuit of economic success and evil. While the remake changes the target of the prank and supplies a more sympathetic motivation for its design, it retains the accidental murder and the rationale of the cover-up in a manner which belies Roche’s claims that remakes jettison the politics of the originals. In fact, this class commentary is far more salient, if less obvious, than the social critique of sororities which is patently contradicted in the film’s climax. The virtues of sorority sisters are beatified through their steadfast loyalty to one another in the film’s finale (an aspect left more ambiguous in the original), particularly demonstrated in the rescue of Cassidy, easily the most sympathetic of the protagonists. Cassidy’s survival is only possible through the efforts of the frantic Ellie (Rumer Willis) and through her fortuitous bracelet which breaks her deathly plummet, the bracelet bestowed upon the graduating sisters as a sign of their bond to one another.

What make the commentary on class and consumption far more cohesive is how these themes emerge in the anti-climatic suspense sequences. The consumptive lifestyle they protect by lying comes to define the nature of the terror they face. Chugs (Margo Harshman), the group’s most wanton member, is killed in her psychiatrist’s office after having agreed to exchange sex for drugs. As she waits for him, she takes to drinking from the bottle until the killer forces the bottle down her throat, before slitting her neck and leaving her for dead. Chugs’ murder cannot be severed from the consumptive lifestyles the sorority sisters attempted to preserve. These are illustrated via the wealth required for private psychiatrist care, the trade of sex for drugs, and the abusive drinking which itself becomes the murder weapon. The link between consumptive acts and a character’s murder is a trope of the genre, but seldom is the desire for the consumptive lifestyle itself so intricately linked to the aesthetics of the character’s murder.

Even those outside the circle of the girls in cahoots are

Suburban life and its underpinnings are not merely narrative fodder but the horrific substance of the film's seemingly innocuous art direction. murdered for their infractions. When an underclassmen overhears Jessica (Leah Pipes) – the sorority’s most calculating and callous member – admit to being involved in the murder of Megan (Audrina Patridge), she is killed by the gown-adorned murderer. The initial suspense of the scene, though, involves whether or not Jessica or Claire (Jamie Chung), another sorority member involved in the tragic prank, will discover the underclassmen in the shower.

The underclassmen’s desire for a more prestigious lifestyle, albeit the dubious honour of bathing in the senior shower, is what creates the suspense and what amounts to her fatal punishment. The following death, entrenched in another suspenseful sequence, continues the pattern. When Claire attempts to shut-off the house’s hot tub, which is mysteriously malfunctioning and has spewed bubbles across the lawn of the house, she is murdered off-camera, her body discovered by Cassidy and Ellie. The hot tub itself is iconography of leisure and wealth but it is further encoded with meaning as in an earlier scene. Jamie and Mickey (Maxx Hennard) had sex in the hot tub, an event instigated through Jamie’s striptease coercion of a somewhat reluctant Mickey. As such, the hot tub evokes this event and the promiscuous party lifestyle encapsulated in the scene. That Jamie’s murder is hidden by bubbles spreading across the yard, the same bubbles which hid her breasts (and presumably the off-screen sex act) from the audience, establishes a connection between a lavishly promiscuous lifestyle and murder. The mise-en-scene of the film allows the hot-tub to transcend its role as a narrative set piece and move towards being a sight of consumptive horror, through its low-key lighting a sense of connection with the killer is drawn ( Fig.5).

The locations of these deaths are also telling. Chug’s death in the industrial and sterile environment of her psychiatrist’s office, the underclassmen’s murder in the private senior bathrooms, and Claire’s amidst the bubbles of the house’s hot tub contrasts with the industrial site of the accident and the construction site of the house

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Fig. 5 | The bubbles’ elegance may hide the gowned-murderer in Sorority

Row. While employing severe shallow focus, the fountain, pillars, and lavish landscaping are ever-present. Summit Entertainment, 2009.

Jill's exploration of the house leads to a number of suspenseful encounters with the specter of consumption. renovations. Mickey is the only victim who is killed at such a site and his death is clearly an exceptional instance given the plentitude of suspenseful scenes which merely tease murder. As the lone male victim, the film suggests yet under-develops a subversive approach to gender in which female consumption is uniquely problematic. For instance, Ellie slowly traverses the house’s dark lurid basement – amidst typical horror aesthetics of a light bulb swaying – but what she finds is only the clue, of sorts, of the bloody coat which they buried with Megan’s body. Likewise, when they return to the site of the accident and burial, Cassidy is lowered into the well to find a message from the killer and discovers the absence of Megan’s corpse. Through these scenes, a juxtaposition is established which contrasts the dark settings where threats are teased and the comparably opulent settings, filled with luxury and consumption, where young girls are killed. It is this dynamic difference between the mise-en- scène that creates suspense and produces a class ideology.

Crucially, the girls that fail to survive the film’s narrative are not necessarily those who are more involved in the trick (Chugs and Jessica planned the revenge, but the others’ complicity made them all equals), but the ones who held most steadfast to protecting the potential for maintaining

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and achieving a particular lifestyle or who are conspicuously displayed enjoying such a lifestyle. In fact, when Jessica feels she has escaped the killer and Cassidy, yet again, attempts to persuade her to go to the police to confess their involvement, Jessica remains intransigent before being killed by Cassidy’s boyfriend, revealing the killer to the audience.

That it is Cassidy’s boyfriend who is the killer illuminates how the crime of the sorority is the pursuit of a particular lifestyle enabled by the cover-up, rather than the prank itself. Cassidy was not privy to the prank and was the most resistant to the cover-up, but her capitulation to her sisters inspires her boyfriend to provide the ultimate concealment of her sin. When her boyfriend confesses that everything he did was to ensure their successful futures (an utterly unfulfilling denouement given the extreme nature of the murders), a congruence between the motivation of the sorority and the killer is made explicit. The lifestyles and futures the sorority so desperately want to protect is what murderously consumed them.

THE SUSPENSE OF A KNOWN KILLER Slasher films which identify the film’s killer provide a different form of suspense than the mysterious contexts of When a Stranger Calls and Sorority Row. In these films, much like The Stepfather discussed above, the sequences of suspense are typically caused by the killer, but there remains value in understanding how the mise-en-scene of these scenes inform the film’s class ideology. Friday the 13th (2009) acts as both remake and sequel as the film attempts to simultaneously reboot the series while imbuing the characters with knowledge of the events in the first film. As such, the characters are as aware of Jason Voorhees's (Derek Mears) identity as the killer as the audience is – the suspense of the film is not who the killer is, but how and when he will kill each character. Therefore, the suspense of the film is rather abbreviated (the thrill is to witness the audacity of the murders, an anticipation of their style as opposed to a study in suspenseful form), but the circumstances of each murder – while temporarily sundered from the broader narrative – provide an ideological subtext which supplements the film’s ideology. While the film explicitly engages with gender scripts, particularly masculinity, and plays with the psychoanalytic legacy of the genre (Jason’s relationship with his mother is foregrounded), the film trades in a class ideology which is equally visible and persuasive.

Joseph Walderzak

The film’s lengthy opening sequence introduces five characters who are camping in the area of Crystal Lake Campground and who ultimately meet their demise at the hands of Jason (with the exception of Whitney [Amanda Righetti], who is taken prisoner). The narrative reasoning for their camping in the area is so that two of the men can steal as much marijuana as they can carry from a field. As such, their endangerment is the result of their greed, their drive for class advancement; the scenes of horror enforce this dynamic. Wandering into the field to relieve himself, Wade (Jonathan Sadowski) discovers the marijuana field and has an almost orgasmic reaction as he handles it and sniffs it; his earlier discussion of their potential to get rich from the marijuana suggests his excitement is entirely economic. Wade is killed by Jason shortly after his discovery and his partner in crime, Richie (Ben Feldman), is likewise murdered immediately after he too discovers the marijuana. Richie’s joy of stumbling onto the marijuana is interrupted by his immediate terror of finding Wade’s body, connecting their economic plans with death. Richie flees upon discovering Wade’s body only to find his abandoned girlfriend being burned alive just before he steps into a bear trap. These circumstances oppose those of Mike (Nick Mennell) and Whitney who trespass into Jason’s cabin, where the atmosphere of squalor creates a false sense of suspense as Jason murders the rest of their group. The wretchedness of Jason’s poverty is juxtaposed with the carnage he left behind at the campsite and marijuana fields.

While Jason returns to his house and murders Mike, the opening introduces a discourse on class – particularly on class passing – which is reinforced in the film’s subsequent narrative. Rather than positioning consumptive activity as a source of danger and suspense, the film’s opening punishes those looking for a quick payment, not unlike the relationship between filmic gangsters and capitalism as described by Robert Warshow and expanded upon by countless others. Jason is not merely a representative of poverty murdering those with wealth, but a figure who targets those who fetishize their consumption and aspire for social mobility.

The subsequent group of teens are presented as obnoxious as they are wealthy. Introduced as they arrive at a gas station in a Cadillac Escalade, they retreat to alpha male Trent’s (Travis Van Winkle) swank cabin where they immediately complain about the lack of cell service, an apt reduction of the characters’ priorities as much as it is blatant foreshadowing (Fig. 6). Roche’s claims that

Fig. 6 | A high-angle shot, nearly giving a bird’s eye view, once again shows

the characters' lack of power in Friday the 13th, 00:29:16. The camera does not adopt the killer’s point of view, but opts to show the luridness of ostentatious wealth. Paramount Pictures, 2009.

remakes have largely abandoned the political radicalism of the original slasher cycle may apply somewhat to the narratives of this particular failed cycle, but the mise-enscene, particularly the set direction, of the films is a political formation in itself.

The group spends the night playing drinking games and smoking marijuana, a symbol of economic opportunity in the opening sequence that transforms into a sign of leisure class prosperity. The meaning-laden aspect of marijuana appears tangentially when a man who is interviewed by Whitney’s investigating brother, Clay (Jared Padalecki), offers to sell to him and then is immediately killed by Jason in a sequence all but entirely devoid of suspense. Superficially, the frequent use of marijuana by Jason’s victims prior to his acts of murder may be confused as being akin to all the leisure and promiscuous activities which are routinely punished throughout the film (and the slasher film sub-genre of horror as a whole). In the opening sequence, Richie and his girlfriend are having sex in their tent before he wanders into the woods to find both marijuana and Wade’s body. Likewise, two of Trent’s guests, Chelsea (Willa Ford) and Nolan (Ryan Hansen), meet their end in a ludicrous topless wake-boarding scene, a moment which obscures the aspects of leisure with unambiguous promiscuity and sexual consumption. Yet, the death of another of Trent’s invitees, Chewie (Aaron Yoo), illustrates how intricately class is related to terror and, ultimately, death. Chewie is sent to Trent’s shed after he breaks a family heirloom and is tasked with fixing it. Arriving in the shed, Chewie rants about how the shed is as big as a house before raiding Trent’s family’s alcohol stash, sniffing it (like Wade and the marijuana) and commenting that it

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While the film explicitly engages with gender scripts, particularly masculinity, and plays with the psychoanalytic legacy of the genre (Jason's relationship with his mother is foregrounded), the film trades in a class ideology which is equally visible and persuasive. “just smells like money” before meeting his demise. This sequence of horror demands that leisure and consumption cannot be severed from class, particularly in how class is emphasized immediately prior to a character’s demise at Jason’s hand. In fairness, the suspenseful sequences in the film’s climax fail to evoke any ideological consequences: Lawrence’s (Arlen Escarpeta) failed rescue of Chewy, Jason’s quick dispensing of Bree (Julianna Guill), a cop is brutally murdered as soon as he arrives, and in the finale Trent, Clay, Jenna (Danielle Panabaker), and Whitney combat Jason – Trent failing to survive – in a capacity more akin to action fare than the suspense of the horror genre. Nevertheless, while the frenzied climax of the film jettisons what had been a rather cohesive - if tangential ideological commentary on leisure and class ambition, the failed film accentuates how these features are ubiquitous, despite not being as enticing as the palpable psychoanalytic and gender politics that are often the basis of scholarly enquiry in horror.

Prom Night (2008) retains the prom as the setting for murderous debauchery but alters the setup of its original significantly, replacing the victim’s cover-up of a crime with a troubled history involving a psychotic teacher (Fig. 8). This change removes any culpability on the killer’s targets and somewhat depoliticizes the film in the manner Roche laments with the iconic slasher cycle. Moreover, the mise-en-scène of the remake departs dramatically from its source material. Like Friday the 13th, Prom Night’s killer, Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech), is disclosed to the audience early in the film and much of the narrative follows his perspective (a rather bizarre narrative choice given that he conjures no sympathy nor is he an iconic figure).

Analytically, Prom Night presents a challenge as so much of the film consists of what could only uncontrovertibly be considered narrative filler: the drive to the prom, numerous dance interludes while at the prom, and a plentiful reserve of teen romance melodrama. In part, the characters’ obsession with the prom lends itself to a class analysis but linking this is to a broader class narrative is a quixotic endeavor; beyond the most superficial engagement with 56 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

gender scripts, Prom Night’s politics are arguably absent beyond its discourse on consumption. Importantly, the form of the suspense sequences constantly engages with consumption and luxury. Fenton’s murders almost always take place in the confines of luxurious hotel suites or final girl Donna’s (Brittany Snow) enormous family house, creating an aesthetic contrast of the ugliness of murder with the spectacle of luxury which is commiserate with its ideological relationship (Fig. 7).

The beauty and intrinsic wealth of Donna’s coastal town, her massive house, her dress, hair and corsage, and the limo they take to prom, the extravagance of which demands the audience’s suspension of disbelief, are all fetishized. This fetishization is akin to how the genre fetishizes the killings, but Prom Night relinquishes such fetishization in favor of quick, often off-camera, murders (at least partially the result of its PG-13 rating) which amount to a film obsessed with luxury but without a tangible ideological position. The murders in the original film take place in various locations within the high school hosting the prom; as such, the remake advances a more salient view on bourgeois consumption. Unlike Newitz’s theory that monsters or killers are the result of capitalist alienation, it is as much the false needs and consumptive desires of the victims which define the genre’s relationship with capitalism and class.

CONCLUSION: THE MONSTER AS CONSUMER AND CAPITALIST When Robin Wood describes repression as what makes us into the “monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists”(71), he is interpreting the horror’s monsters as a vehicle which challenges that state of normality. The inevitability of the return of the monster (in sequels, but also in the reboots Wood all but anticipates) suggests that what is repressed is only a temporary state: confronting the repressed is an iterative process much the same as films sequels and genre cycles. Yet, Wood avoids how the monster often embodies the very state that repression

Joseph Walderzak

Fig. 7 | The luxurious hotel suite, the site of several characters’ murders,

is frequently filmed at a distance so that the characters are captured in symmetrical long shots that draws attention to the opulence in Prom Night, 00:29:17. Sony Pictures, 2008.

amounts to; that is to say, the monster is equal to being the “monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalist” as it is to being the manifestation of the repressed.

Sure, Jason’s poverty and his relationship with his mother exemplifies Wood’s view of horror films as allowing the audience to explore their repressed desires and fears only to welcome their ultimate narrative suppression. Those features of his being, as well as his masked appearance, are intended to be terrifying, but the ideology of Jason’s horror extends beyond his aberrant appearance and behaviour and includes the context of his murders, which in turn encapsulate the horror of bourgeois, patriarchal capitalism.

Likewise, the specter of bourgeois consumption is the true horror that plagues Jill in When a Stranger Calls. The killer at once provides the viewer a confrontation with what is repressed (violence, sex acts, grotesqueness, squalor), but also alternates between combining these features with hegemonic capitalist ideals or, at the least, includes those features in the form of its horror and in the passive indictment of his victims; the audience is left to be terrified of what we are: the killer’s rationale for killing no different than his victim’s for living. 

Fig. 8 | The most memorable setting of the original Prom Night is the

abandoned building, often framed at acute angles to complement its dilapidation, in which a childhood tragedy takes place, 00:00:28.

Simcom Productions, 1980.

WORKS CITED Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992.

Friday the 13th. Directed by Marcus Nispel, Paramount Pictures, 2009.

Hills, Matt. The Pleasures of Horror. Continuum Publishing Group, 2005.

Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Duke UP, 2006.

Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Continuum Publishing Group, 2010.

Phillips, Kendall. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Praeger, 2005.

Prom Night. Directed by Paul Lynch, Simcon Productions, 1980.

Roche, David. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To? University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Rockoff, Adam. Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. McFarland & Company, 2011.

Sorority Row. Directed by Stewart Hendler, Summit Entertainment, 2009.

Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience. Harvard UP, 2002.

When a Stranger Calls. Directed by Simon West, Screen Gems, 2006.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text.

Columbia UP, 2012.

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Hollywood Imports – Shaken and Stirred: Representing and Positioning the Spectator

BY ZACHARY KARPINELLISON | University of New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper considers the representation of the Chinese spectator. The Chinese Film Bureau’s efforts to censor Hollywood films and recalibrate their appeal to a domestic audience have arguably failed to neutralise Hollywood’s hegemony, and, perhaps more damagingly, have drawn attention to botched efforts to insert Chinese content and performance. My paper takes as its focus the continued, collaborative efforts of the Chinese film industry and Hollywood to capture the attention of an imagined, ideal Chinese spectator. Through an analysis of two films censored for their release in China, Skyfall (Mendes 2012) and Iron Man 3 (Black 2013), and their reception, I explore the ways that the reality of discursive, autonomous and diverse spectatorship undermines the ideological project of censorship.

I

It is one thing to assume that cinema is determined in ideological ways, to assume that cinema is a discourse (or a variety of discourses), to assume, that is, that the various institutions of the cinema do project an ideal viewer, and another thing to assume that those projections work. (Mayne 30)

n conceiving of methodologies of Asian representation, the discussion focuses on being seen and heard on screen. This is a positive insight; an increase in the representation of Asian performers and crew members on and behind the screen is unquestionably valuable and meaningful for Asian audiences. However, I turn the discussion to a different matter of representation: that of the Asian spectator; specifically, the Chinese spectator. I explore the way the Chinese State and film industry conceive of the spectator, and the willingness of Hollywood to participate in that construction.

My examination of the Chinese spectator in this context is not from the perspective of lived experience. I am not a Chinese person. Rather, I seek to reveal the historical structures and ideology which have crudely homogenized the Chinese spectator, in an effort to produce films that cater

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and appeal to an imagined generic and ideologically compliant spectator. The Chinese Film Bureau’s efforts to censor Hollywood films and recalibrate their appeal to a Chinese spectator have failed to neutralize the ideological hegemony of Hollywood, and perhaps more damagingly, have drawn attention to the failure to intertwine Chinese themes and performers within these Hollywood films.

Here, I focus on changes made to two tentpole Hollywood films, Iron Man 3 (2013) and Skyfall (2012), to produce Chinese versions. These changes take two forms: the restriction of certain content, and the inclusion of Chinese characters and specific values of the Chinese Communist Party. However, regardless of the method of censorship, the changes fail to be effective because they are too interruptive.

They fail, therefore, to neutralize the ideological impact of Hollywood blockbusters in China.

THE CENSORSHIP ‘COMMANDMENTS’ The website ChinaHollywood.org is a resource designed to assist Hollywood filmmakers in producing content compliant with Chinese policies. (Censorship | China Hollywood Society). To help foreign filmmakers access the lucrative Chinese market, the website

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summarizes Chinese censorship rules into nine “commandments” which outline what cannot appear on screen. The existence of these rules acknowledges that the Chinese film industry is open to the global market, while at the same time reinforcing and protecting the Chinese State and its values. Lin Lü argues that these censorship rules broadly reflect a Chinese value system that is still beholden to the legacy of Confucianism, which demands a more conservative approach to explicit sexual content and violence (22-24). These ‘commandments’ expand upon the prohibitions listed in Article 25 of China’s Regulations on the Administration of Movies: 1. Distorting Chinese civilization and history, seriously departing from historical truth; distorting the history of other countries, disrespecting other civilizations and customs; disparaging the image of revolutionary leaders, heroes and important historical figures; tampering with Chinese or foreign classics and distorting the image of the important figures portrayed therein; 2. Disparaging the image of the people’s army, armed police, public security organ or judiciary; 3. Showing obscene and vulgar content, exposing scenes of promiscuity, rape, prostitution, sexual acts, perversion, homosexuality, masturbation and private body parts including the male or female genitalia; containing dirty and vulgar dialogues, songs, background music and sound effects; 4. Showing contents of murder, violence, terror, ghosts and the supernatural; distorting value judgment between truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, righteous and unrighteous; showing deliberate expressions of remorselessness in committing crimes; showing specific details of criminal behaviors; exposing special investigation methods; showing content which evokes excitement from murder, bloodiness, violence, drug abuse and gambling; showing scenes of mistreating prisoners, torturing criminals or suspects; containing excessively horror scenes, dialogues, background music and sound effects; 5. Propagating passive or negative outlook on life, world view and value system; deliberately

6.

7.

8.

9.

exaggerating the ignorance of ethnic groups or the dark side of society; Advertising religious extremism, stirring up ambivalence and conflicts between different religions or sects, and between believers and non-believers, causing disharmony in the community; Advocating harm to the ecological environment, animal cruelty, killing or consuming nationally protected animals; Showing excessive drinking, smoking and other bad habits; and Opposing the spirit of law (China Hollywood Society). (World Intellectual Property Organization 2001)

The ‘commandments’ themselves are sourced from the 2008 SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) guidelines which summarize the law.

SARFT was a Chinese governmental body formed in 1998 to regulate and censor film, television and radio content, but these commandments have been recognized informally and unofficially since the early 1980s (China Hollywood Society). SARFT was expanded to include the media of print and press in 2013 and its name was changed to the State Administration of Print, Press, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT). In 2016, the Chinese government produced a new law, the Film Industry Promotion Law, which includes, in Article 16, some new censorship provisions and others that replicated provisions in Article 25 of the earlier law (China Law Translate). In line with this change, in March 2018 the Chinese government dissolved SAPPFRT. The enforcement of the new censorship regime now falls to the Central Propaganda (Publicity) Department of the Chinese Government (Zhang par. 5).

While formal legal requirements create the censorship regime, there are in fact two distinct approaches to film censorship in China. In the first form, Chinese censors, in collaboration with the Chinese Film Bureau, make direct interventions under the law either by directly editing and adjusting films, or requesting that the original producers of the film make the adjustments and resubmit the film for reassessment. The second form of censorship occurs through collaborative engagement in production and development with Hollywood. The former kind of censorship tends to involve deletion of content; the latter can involve the addition of new content. The films considered in this paper fall under the 2012 - 2013 regulations;

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Fig. 1 | A frame omitted from the Chinese release of Skyfall, 00:44:09. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Columbia Pictures, 2013.

namely, the commandments drawn from the SARFT guidelines cited above. They demonstrate both additive and subtractive censorship.

CENSORSHIP IN PRACTICE Both Skyfall and Iron Man 3 were significantly altered in order to secure their release in China. These changes provide an insight into the different kinds of censorship employed by the Chinese state together with Hollywood and offer a window through which we might assess their effectiveness. Skyfall represents a more traditional example of content control. Scenes, dialogue, and specific details have been removed from the film in an attempt to preserve a particular presentation of China’s image. In Iron Man 3, however, entire scenes, cast members, and product placement have been added to the film in an effort to make it more ideologically cohesive with China’s image both domestically and internationally. My formal analysis of these films will demonstrate that the two methods of censorship have a limited capacity to change the imagined ideological meaning and reception of the films.

In Skyfall, the most overt change is the removal of a sequence involving a murder. In the general release version, audiences are shown the brief and cavalier assassination of a Chinese security guard working in the lobby of a skyscraper.

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The killer is a minor villain named Patrice (Ola Rapace) whom Bond has pursued from Morocco to Shanghai in the hopes of repossessing a hard-drive containing the location and identity of a number of MI6 agents. The unremarked killing of this security guard is entirely in keeping with a trope of action and spy films (Fig. 1).

The death is depicted in two brief low-angle shots from the perspective of Bond sitting quietly in his car.

Bond watches calmly as Patrice walks into the lobby of the tower and shoots a security guard. Patrice is first shown in a medium shot, and with Bond’s side mirror obscuring part of the frame. Then, at the exact moment Patrice fires his weapon, the shot distance shortens, and a close-up shows the guard falling to the ground and Patrice dragging his body away. This death is not unlike the numerous injuries and deaths shown in the film’s opening sequence in Morocco. Despite the fact that this kind of collateral carnage is a mainstay of action cinema, in the Chinese version, the murder of this security guard is treated differently from other incidental deaths in the film. In fact, it is excised from the Chinese version of the film altogether. A closer examination of the decision to remove this scene exposes a broader failure to uphold the ideological framework that is generated by the Censorship Commandments. Removing the guard’s murder complies with the censorship commandments, but

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Fig. 2 | A frame omitted from the Chinese release of Skyfall, 00:44:11. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Columbia Pictures, 2013.

generates a new source of sovereign vulnerability that leaves the building open to infiltration (Fig. 2). An unguarded building in central Shanghai is suggestive of fragile State security. The censors’ decision to modify this scene may be understood as a direct response to the breach of the second ‘commandment’: “Disparaging the image of the people’s army, armed police, public security organ or judiciary” (China Hollywood Society). The rule against disparaging the image of public servants is part of the larger ideological imperative of the Chinese government to ensure the Chinese public sees other countries (or in this case, Western corporate entities such as those emanating from Hollywood) as respectful of Chinese governmental authority.

Lin Lü notes this tension in the kinds of political censorship applied to film by Chinese authorities (22). There are competing drives to promote the “open door policy” developed in the early 1980s, as well as to continue to advocate for China’s value, self-sufficiency, and sovereignty. He argues that this kind of censorship is essentially consistent with governmental and self-regulated censorship around the world. He offers examples of written and unwritten regulations in the United States and Australia which ban films that incite acts of terrorism. However, he notes that specific to the Chinese example is a tension between globalization and internal domestic political stability. Censorship in China

must be used to assert a socialist objective that reaffirms the governmental power and authority within China, as well as maintaining an outward looking, globalized Chinese public image. This is a complex and intercultural dynamic that presents and challenges perceived notions that China maintains authorial and creative control. The change involving the removal of the security guard described above is cosmetic in its slavish application of the censorship code, but it does not alter the overall narrative force of the film, which arguably restabilizes British imperialism through its now altered depiction of unfettered movement in the sovereign state of China.

The Chinese version of Iron Man 3 takes a different approach entirely from Skyfall. The transnational collaborative process that drove the production of the film supported the creation of a second version specifically designed to appeal to Chinese sensibilities and audiences by adding exclusive Chinese characters and scenes. Aynne Kokas argues that Iron Man 3 is what she terms a “faux-production” (32). Kokas explains this term as follows: Faux-productions … occur when either the producer or the Chinese government declines to complete the co-production process after having received co-production approval for at least part of the film’s production process. (32) MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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By offering the film “faux-production” status, China exerts control over its own exhibited version of the film, but also influences the content of the general release version.

Kokas queries this suggestion on the basis that the results of the faux-production arrangement have some clear benefits for the United States-based production companies, benefits that would outweigh concerns about undue influence.

Namely, the American production companies gain access to Chinese resources in the form of a partnership with DMG Entertainment, without submitting to the normal procedure for co-production status. This includes access to a major Chinese star for the entirety of the film, an imagined understanding of Chinese viewership, and making the film suitable for Chinese screens. In doing so, this arrangement allowed Hollywood to produce a film that was intended to appeal to the Chinese market, without compromising its appeal to the familiar Western base.

The additional scenes involving Chinese characters, present completely new perspectives which draw on different temporalities and the knowledges of characters that do not appear at any other point of the film. One scene involving a phone call appears to be a flashback, and other scenes do not offer any evidence of a clear causal relationship with the rest of the film. The scenes are interspersed throughout and together develop a peripheral narrative about performing a dangerous operation on protagonist Tony Stark. The side narrative is used to demonstrate China’s biotechnological and medical expertise. Sequences include small talk between the two doctors played by Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing. In one of the scenes, the doctors reassure each other of their capacity to overcome

the risks of the surgery, and in another, Wang’s Dr. Wu reiterates this in a phone call in which he promises that “China can help.” Finally, in one other sequence Dr. Wu drinks a glass of milk, promoting Chinese dairy and beverage brand Yili before walking towards the operating room.

This transforms the narration of the Chinese version of Iron Man 3 dramatically. The additional sequences reallocate narrative emphasis, and the audience’s source of knowledge is expanded beyond that of the protagonist and antagonist. These two minor characters, one of whom only has one line, are, through the additional scenes, given the same narratological privilege as the main characters. Bordwell and Thompson’s definition of restricted narration is useful here, because the audience still has knowledge limited to the characters of the film, but the priorities of that knowledge are shifted in the Chinese release (84).

Notably, actor Wang’s Dr. Wu does appear in the Western release version of the film, but only for two very brief moments. In the film’s opening scene, a pre-Iron Man Tony Stark is obnoxiously and narcissistically parading himself around a 1999 New Year’s Eve party in Bern, Switzerland. Stark is momentarily introduced to Dr. Wu, who says nothing except “nĭ hăo” before Stark makes a suggestive joke about a scientist he is courting, and Wu looks visibly surprised. This brief exchange serves only to develop Stark’s character, depicting his cavalier and immature attitude towards socializing with other intelligent people. In the film’s penultimate scene, Wu reappears wearing a surgical facemask, with most of his face obscured, and for another eight seconds to perform seemingly impossible

Fig. 3 | Iron Man with Dr. Wu and Chinese schoolchildren, a scene only included in the Chinese release of the film. Marvel Studios, 2013.

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Fig. 4 | Production still of Iron Man and Dr. Wu at a press conference, a scene only included in the Chinese release of the film. Marvel Studios, 2013.

surgery on Stark. It is unlikely that director Shane Black and the filmmaking team would expect audiences to retain the image of Dr. Wu from the opening scene because Wang has little to no celebrity status outside of China.

Despite this, he appears in the final scene of both versions of the film.

In the Chinese version, Wang’s Chinese celebrity status is showcased with an additional four minutes of screen-time allocated to his character. These additional scenes also feature another very well-known Chinese actor in Fan Bingbing, as a fellow doctor who is unnamed in the film, but who offers support and friendship to Dr. Wu. Fan has very few lines in the Chinese release, despite featuring in half of the additional scenes. On the whole, these additional Chinese sequences are slower paced than the rest of the film; very little happens in each shot. This compounds the sense that these brief moments of dialogue are inconsequential to the plot. The scenes feature much longer takes, more theatrical staging and blocking of characters, and much less camera movement. These differences are not subtle, they are easy to recognize, and the aesthetic differences between the two versions of the film are profound. They are so jarring that some journalists suggested that the additional scenes were not even made by the same filmmaking team (Ashcraft par. 3). There is visual evidence to support

this: Black’s directorial style throughout the rest of the film features tight close-ups, incredibly rapid cuts, and a number of panning and tracking shots to depict the lateral movement of action within the film. By contrast, these inserted scenes are relatively static. The result of these differences is the creation of a sharp disconnect between these additional scenes and the rest of the film. These scenes, designed to prioritize Chinese ideological and commercial interests, are too overt to be seamlessly integrated into the rest of the film. Their insertion has a counter-productive effect and significantly weakens their appeal. From a formal analytical perspective, scenes that jar and are interruptive undermine the integrity of the narrative structure. One would expect that Chinese audiences would resist the influence of a film which was poorly structured and lacked narrative coherence. In fact, there was significant resistance evidenced by audience responses to the film.

RECEPTION AND CONSTRUCTING THE VIEWING POSITION I now turn to the domestic reception of these films. I argue that at the heart of changes noted above is an ideal spectator that is unrealistic. Both additive and subtractive censored versions of the films cater to an ideologically aligned viewing position that is ultimately impossible MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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for a Chinese (or, for that matter, Western) spectator to inhabit. The project of the Chinese versions of both these films has in large part failed as is evidenced by their negative critical reception. The reality of diverse and autonomous spectatorship undermines the Chinese censors’ ideological project.

Following Judith Mayne’s assertion in my epigraph quoted at the beginning of this paper, I argue that in the context of Hollywood films imported to China, there is no reliable, consistent or causal link between the ideological framework generated by Chinese censors and a spectator’s response. Mayne argues that there is a problem with the traditional conceptions of spectatorial engagement that have either given full authority to the apparatus (the cinema) or allowed the spectator to be influenced only by their pre-existing political and philosophical alignments. In response to these two poles of spectatorship theory, Mayne advocates a divergence from the dominant practice towards a negotiated spectatorial position that recognizes that spectators are influenced by the apparatus but have a dialogical relationship with it (159).

Jean-Louis Baudry’s theory of the cinematic apparatus is useful in examining the concept of a film’s ideological effect. His theory offers one way of understanding how cinema might be used to address a spectator via a particular ideological frame, through a process of interpellation.

Interpellation is an idea advanced by Louis Althusser in his work on the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and offers the claim that the spectator, or subject of an apparatus, is also constituted by that apparatus. I draw on the different assertions of Mayne, Baudry, and Althusser to conceptualize contemporary forms of Chinese spectatorship, in which spectators actively negotiate their response to a film and, I argue, resist complete ideological alignment. I also refer to the theories of “soft” and “hard power” devised by Joseph Nye, which build on the legacy of apparatus theory.

Jean-Louis Baudry, responding to the work of Louis Althusser, asserts that the unique configuration of the cinema constructs the ideal circumstances in which to subject audiences to or align them with dominant ideologies. The cinematic apparatus is on a continuum with the principle of linear perspective. Linear perspective is historically informed by fifteenth century Renaissance artwork and the concept of perspectiva artificialis, in which the illusion of three dimensions is applied to a two-dimensional plane by assigning the viewer a single position from which everything within an image extends (Edgerton 24). This 64 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

linear perspective leads Baudry to the conclusion that art and institutions which are controlled by and subservient to the “dominant (bourgeois) ideology” take advantage of a “monocular” viewing position to control how subjects imagine their reality (Rushton 39). Baudry further argues that the apparatus that comprises the cinema continues to utilize this linear, centred perspective, and in so doing, situates the spectator in a position from which they can intuit and absorb meaning. As he puts it, “This system, a recentering or at least a displacement of the center (which settles itself in the eye), will assure the setting up of the ‘subject’ [the spectator] as the active center and origin of meaning” (Baudry and Williams 40).

The historical principle of a single and ideal viewing position, Baudry argues, coerces the viewer into seeing the work in a pre-determined way. Baudry’s argument is deliberately opaque regarding the identity of the spectator, because the theory of Ideological State Apparatuses is dependent on an assumption that the apparatus is capable of inventing its own spectators, viewers, and subjects.

The ideological imperative of these ISAs is so powerful and coercive that, according to Baudry and Althusser, the subject’s identity, and the illusion of their individuality is constituted by the apparatus itself (Bielecki 15). This is what Althusser terms “interpellation.” This means that the apparatus is believed to constitute a spectator that is ideologically structurally aligned with and therefore perfectly responsive to the beliefs that inform the film they are watching (Althusser 160-162).

THE IDEAL SPECTATOR The process of interpellation requires that the category of the subject exists before the individual has interacted with the ISA. In other words, an individual who engages with an ISA is forced to become the singularly ideal subject of the interaction because the representation of ideology is notionally constitutive of them. Interpellation is treated as a given in Baudry’s work. In this instance, however, the individual is the spectator. The implication of this theoretical treatment of the spectator and apparatus is that the dominant ideology is so embedded in the work of the film, that it only appeals to a specific, singular spectator. The apparatus is, however, compelling enough that this singular spectator is, to use Baudry’s term, “hailed” by the film, and for Baudry and Althusser, this means an individual’s subject viewing position can be assumed.

Zachary Karpinellison

Specific to Baudry’s work on cinema as an ISA is the “transformation of objective reality” (40). Baudry argues that what is especially corrupting and coercive about the cinema as an ISA is that it begins with the camera. He believes the camera is a site of inscription for objective reality and the process of editing the footage then transforms, distorts, and adjusts this objective reality. Finally, the projection of this edited footage masks evidence of the transformation of objective reality. In effect, this process, according to Baudry, forces the subject (spectator) to imagine reality and their own existence in a way which conforms to the version of reality that the cinematic apparatus has constructed (40).

ALTHUSSERIAN THEORY, THE CHINESE STATE, AND SOFT POWER DISCOURSE Althusser presents the ISA as a system of control that counters the “Repressive State Apparatus” (RSA). The ISA relies on cultural objects and institutions, such as schools and the press, to exert its power and influence (126). The RSA is a system that uses violence, aggression and direct interference to design and control a society (126). Examples of RSAs include police, wages, and the judiciary. These apparatuses are conceptually similar to Joseph Nye’s theory of “soft” and “hard power,” a concept that has currency in the Chinese policy documents (151-155).

“Soft power” refers to cultural institutions, including the cinema, that take advantage of cultural capital and resources to influence society by way of attraction and enticement. Soft power reinforces dominant ideology without use of overt or aggressive force. “Hard power,” however, refers to the use of military, violence or aggression to force a citizenry to abide by and obey the dominant ideology.

Yasushi Watanabe and David L. McConnell explain the difference between Nye’s theorization of “hard” and “soft” power, and the Althusserian theory of the ideological and repressive state apparatus: Althusser’s (1971) concept of the “ideological state apparatus” rests on the assumption that the exercise of power in capitalist societies can be subtle, disguised and insidious… By contrast, Nye’s formulation of soft power is distinctive in its generally positive view of the exercise of power and the way in which structural power is linked with the agency of states. (xxii)

Unlike the apparatus theories presented by Althusser and Baudry, Nye’s term “soft power” can actually be found in the political rhetoric and policy of the Chinese Communist Party (Voci and Hui 8). In 2014, Xi Jinping noted the “promotion of soft power” as an important part of the Chinese government’s international and domestic agendas (qtd. in Voci and Hui 8).

Nye’s theories of soft power are viewed as broadly positive, safe uses of power as an alternative to violence.

Soft power discourses are also used to theorize intergovernmental diplomacy. Althusser’s analysis, by contrast, can be used as a tool to understand regimes of power as they operate domestically within spaces like the Soviet Union. However, it is useful to register the similarities between Althusser and Nye’s theories because this highlights the institutional and theoretical commitment to a division between power by force, and power by culture. In fact, the Chinese government’s use of the term “soft power” in their cultural policy documents confirms the view that they believe they can exert their influence using institutions like the cinema. On this basis, my analysis of power, apparatus and spectatorship will accept, as a defensible position, the view that the Chinese state and its governmental bodies perceive of art and other cultural goods as being capable of projecting an ideological position and agenda onto the citizenry.

Consider the implications of this state-sponsored belief in the ideological potential of art for Chinese representation. If the film in conjunction with the apparatus has the capacity to determine and mould its ideal and cooperative spectator, then it can be further reasoned that this process problematizes the capacity for a culturally and ideological diverse and discursive spectatorial response.

Instead, the process, as understood by Baudry, means that the film enlists the attention of any and all spectators, but reduces their individuality to a single, unified response to the work. Therefore, perceiving of spectators as being capable of being hailed, to use Baudry’s words, presents substantial obstacles for meaningful representation of and connection to Chinese spectators. In aligning this theoretical framework with the goal of the Chinese Film Bureau’s intervention in these Hollywood films as an effort to appeal to a non-white, non-Western, non-hegemonic spectator, specifically from China, a deep flaw is exposed.

A homogenized, managed version of Chinese identity on screen does not guarantee the interpellation of a Chinese subject or spectator.

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The censorship is poorly executed because…the ideological imperative has been overtaken by a commercial imperative.

I argue that the Hollywood films which enter China and are censored are inherently dynamic works.

The censors exert soft power by applying Chinese domestic ideological principles to films that are designed for a different audience. I propose that China’s approach to film importation imagines that its own regime of soft power can neutralize Western cultural and economic norms embedded in Hollywood films. This is not to suggest that Western ideology is passively received by Western audiences, but instead to show that the Chinese government erroneously believes itself capable of neutralizing Western ideology through the exercise of “soft power.”

TROUBLING APPARATUS THEORY According to Baudry, any cinematic experience that is designed by a dominant, hegemonic institution such as Hollywood, controls and co-opts the viewing position and serves to reinforce the dominant ideology (43).

Under this theoretical framework, if the Chinese film industry is an equal or more dominant hegemonic institution, it should be able to simply tweak a Hollywood film to ensure it does not conf lict with its ideological interests. Baudry’s argument, however, presents several problems – namely, it strips a spectator of their autonomy to disagree with, or even disengage from the imagined reality presented to them. Indeed, the theory of the ISA insists on the unification of the viewing experience, suggesting that the projection of ideology is so powerful that all audiences can be reduced to a single ideal subject, a subject constituted by the apparatus itself. In contrast, Mayne argues the monolithic authoritarian approach of Apparatus Theory renders marginalized and diverse spectators invisible. She writes: there is a consistent tendency [among apparatus theorists] to conflate literal gender and address – to assume, that is, that if the film addresses its subject as male, then it is the male viewer who is thus addressed.(Mayne 127)

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Jonathan Crary argues that since 1820 there has been a shift away from the idea of the eye as a passive recorder of objective reality, toward the idea that vision is made inside the eye (28-30). In other words, what we see is a subjective experience tied to the behavioural characteristic of the organ. In this way, Crary provides a different account to Althusser and Baudry of the historical continuity of the concept of monocular vision. Crary contends that scientific and literary fascination with the physiological quality of the eye in the early nineteenth century reconfigured the way, in the Western tradition, vision was understood (29). Crary does not, however, suggest that spectators, or as he calls them, “observers,” are free to have pluralistic approaches to ideology (30). Instead, he recognizes the influence of the dominant ideology on individuals. Nevertheless, he argues that their concept of vision and perspective is incongruous with the fifteenth century model of vision. Crary takes a Foucauldian approach to history whereby he recognizes its discontinuities and in so doing, reveals that the viewing position and the act of viewing itself has been more closely associated with the body by scientific and cultural discourse, than scholars like Althusser and Baudry would accept. The continuation of a model of single point, linear perspective is found by Crary to be unsustainable and anachronistic.

Mayne and Crary’s critique of apparatus theory is particularly useful for understanding why China’s attempt to control their ideological message through the use of soft power is ultimately unsuccessful. Diverse and autonomous spectators cannot be wholly interpellated by ISAs like the Chinese film industry.

IRON MAN 3, SKYFALL & SPECTATORSHIP I have argued that the censorship of Hollywood films released in China failed to effectively execute an ideological agenda. The formal changes are too disruptive and fail to neutralize the cultural and economic norms embedded in Hollywood cinema. This is also demonstrated by the critical reception of the films by audiences, journalists, and film critics inside China. Iron Man 3 and Skyfall both secured impressive box office returns in China, with Iron Man 3 brief ly holding the record for highest grossing film in Chinese history (Cheney; Tsui).

However, despite this economic success, complaints about the Chinese censors’ interference in both films informed critical reception of the works.

Zachary Karpinellison

For example, several journalists reported on the poor reception of Iron Man 3’s additional scenes in Chinese exhibition contexts. Brian Ashcraft, writer for online popular culture site Kotaku, cites a number of Chinese blogs as well as anecdotal accounts to convey the strong negative response to the scenes. Ashcraft writes: People’s Daily, which is owned by the Chinese Communist Party, ran an article titled: “Iron Man 3 Draws the Audience Ire: This Type of Special Chinese Version Is Pointless” (钢铁侠 3引观众吐槽：这种中国特供版不要也罢).

The article, which was originally published

by Yangtze River Post, reads: ‘All the problems of the movie can be forgiven. That is, all except the parts with Fan Bingbing and Wang Xueqi. This China centric portion is just terrible. It’s a pointless commercial with lots of plot holes.”’(Ashcraft) The language of this criticism suggests that disengagement with the film occurs at the specific moment in which Chinese intervention becomes apparent. The inclusion of the additional scenes is the very thing that stopped Chinese spectators from being, as Baudry would argue, interpellated by the ideological project of the film. However, in addition to negating the possibility of interpellation, this critical response to the film highlights that a more complex form of spectatorship begins to form. The Chinese audience, according to this critic, is not interpellated by the additional sequences, but they are also not interpellated by the film as a whole. Further, they are not convinced by the inclusion of Chinese actors. If anything, these performers appearing unexpectedly in the film are tokenistic moments that inspire discomfort and confusion. Here the Chinese’s film industry’s intervention in the film hopes to faithfully represent a Chinese spectator by rendering Chinese performers on the screen, but the motivations for doing so become more noticeable and disarming than the actual value of having these culturally familiar performers on-screen. The hegemonic Hollywood narrative of colonial or Western supremacy does not supplant the attempt at interpellation by the Chinese censorship regime. Instead, Chinese audiences were made all too aware of the distinction between both the Chinese and general release version of films and this allowed them to engage with films in a more complex and multifaceted way (Shine). The kind of spectatorial engagement that occurs is a mixed, and more active one,

where a Chinese audience member can choose to engage with one part of the film while rejecting the ideological advances of another.

This process is what Hamid Naficy, in his re-theorization of spectatorship, terms counterinterpellation (3). Naficy argues that in addition to the way in which interpellative filmmaking and theory recognizes the “hailing” of viewership, there should be a recognition of counterinterpellative viewing practices which involve spectators “haggling” with the work they’ve been presented (15-17). For Naficy, rather than becoming complicit in the ideological workings of a film, or actively resisting or protesting against the content of a film, spectators in their cultural and individual autonomy are able to demarcate a complex relationship with the content of the film. This relationship fulfils both the need to identify with the work, and to establish distance from the work. Further, the experience of culture is not treated as a spectatorial trait in dialogue with the film. Instead, in Naficy’s assessment, cultural identity is in fact brought to the work of a film and thus radically alters the experience and power of the apparatus. This process of haggling provides a solution to the problem posed by Mayne. It is not theoretically or ethically sound to simply replace the monolithic authority of the apparatus with the monolithic authority of a spectator (Mayne). Instead, Mayne advocates for a dialogical negotiation, and I propose that Naficy’s counterinterpellative mode can achieve this.

Fundamentally, while filmmakers and institutions may construct an ideological framework to which a film like Iron Man 3 or Skyfall is subject, they cannot control the forms of spectatorship which emerge in response to these films. An example of this is queer audiences’ engagement with the Iron Man franchise in China. Despite any instance of queerness on screen being censored in accordance with commandment three, queer Chinese fans of the Iron Man franchise have produced underground queer fanfiction that subverts the heterosexual narratives of the films (Wei 7). This specific and important form of engagement with the film in no way erases the ideological messaging accomplished by the filmmakers, but instead it re-composes and re-imagines the film to perform a different political function.

Similar to the domestic Chinese response to Iron Man 3, there is a small amount of scholarship and criticism that is available regarding the Chinese reception of Skyfall. In the newspaper SHINE, an English language paper written and distributed inside China, an article published in January MISE- EN - SCÈNE

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Hollywood Imports – Shaken and Stirred

2013 bemoans the alterations made to Skyfall. They make reference to professor Shi Chuan from Shanghai University who used the censors’ specific omission of diplomatically sensitive content to call for changes to, and redrafting of, China’s censorship policy. He says, “Movie regulators should respect the producers’ original ideas, rather than chopping scenes arbitrarily.” “Censored ‘Skyfall ’ Angers Bond Fans,” also cites Yin Li, the vice chairman of the China Film Association, as advocating for greater freedom for filmmakers “so that that a more favourable environment can be created for the country’s movie industry” (SHINE).

Chuan’s and Li’s concerns evidence the ineffectiveness of strict, superficial adherence to Chinese censorship guidelines. The changes made to Skyfall do not promote a pro-China ideological message, nor do they effectively neutralize the dominant storytelling practice of Hollywood; instead, they add gaps to the narrative and confuse audiences. The censorship regime may remove negative references, but ultimately, it fails to assert the Chinese government as the dominant ideological mode. As a result, the film limits full interpellation. Instead, as with Iron Man 3, the audiences must haggle with the film.

There are a number of different dynamics at play in the censorship of Skyfall. Firstly, the sharp and interruptive changes made to the general release version of the film are arguably counterproductive to the ideological message the Chinese censorship regime is trying to promote. Secondly, the specific choices of which lines of dialogue to cut, and which details to change, reflect the Chinese censors’ imagined ideal spectator, who seems to be at odds with the critical reception of the film. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the censorship does not recognize the autonomy of Chinese audiences and critics to reject whatever Orientalizing, problematic undertones might be present in narrative and artistic choices of an unedited version of the film.

There is a substantial distance between what the censors have imagined as an ideal, spectatorial response to the film, and the actual response to the film, as evidenced by the critical reception documented in newspapers and argued by academics. This distance can be attributed to the ineffectiveness of Chinese censorship methods. However, it is possible that the censorship is poorly executed because, in this instance, the ideological imperative has been overtaken by a commercial imperative. Yuxing Zhou argues that censorship in the years after Skyfall has become more comfortable with allowing Chinese viewers to grapple with 68 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

problematic depictions of China on-screen, and in so doing enabled an environment with more creative freedom (2445). In fact, Zhou speculates that the “arbitrary” changes to Skyfall might have been included as a diversionary tactic, to distract the market from the fact that the Chinese Film Bureau wanted to delay the film’s release date in China.

This delay created space for domestic films to thrive, without the risk of competition with a Hollywood blockbuster.

This control of the market, a form of protectionism, may ultimately be a more effective method of ideological control than the individual, often superficial instances of censorship. This much more holistic approach to controlling access to content, it might be argued, is an immediately more powerful form of censorship and use of soft power than the actual changes to the films themselves.

CONCLUSION This paper illustrates that the simple depiction of people who resemble the spectator, and ideas that are supposed to be familiar to the spectator, is an insufficient mechanism for cultivating valuable and resonant forms of on-screen Asian representation. Chinese spectators may, in fact, reject wholesale efforts to force instances of contrived representation, instead using Hollywood films as sites of connection where the differences between China and the United States are negotiated by haggling with the content of the film. This is, of course, not to say that more Asian actors, performers, cast, and crew should not be represented on and behind the screen: they should. However, I argue that thoughtless and mechanical instances of representation produce complex and variegated forms of engagement and identification from spectators who respond to the disparity between themselves and the people and ideas that stand in for them on screen. 

Zachary Karpinellison

WORKS CITED Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State.” Lenin and Philosophy,

Lu, Lin. Reform of Chinese Film Censorship: What China Can

and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 2nd Edition,

Learn from the Experience of Australia, the United Kingdom

New Left Books, 1977, pp. 123–73.

and the United States of America. 30 Aug. 2012. University

Ashcraft, Brian. “Why Many in China Hate Iron Man 3’s Chinese Version.” Kotaku Australia, 3 May 2013, www.kotaku.com. au/2013/05/why-many-in-china-hate-iron-man-3s-chineseversion/ Accessed 20 July 2018.

Baudry, Jean-Louis, and Alan Williams. “Ideological Effects

of Sydney, PhD dissertation.

Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. Routledge, 2002.

ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ unsw/detail.action?docID=169503.

Naficy, Hamid. “Theorizing ‘Third-World’ Film Spectatorship.”

of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film

Wide Angle, vol. 18, no. 4, Oct. 1996, pp. 3–26. Project

Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, Dec. 1974, pp. 39–47. CrossRef,

MUSE, doi:10.1353/wan.1996.0022.

doi:10.2307/1211632.

Bielecki, Paul M. Rethinking Baudry’s Apparatus Theory in Light of DVD Technology. June 2007. College of Fine Arts of Ohio University, PhD dissertation, etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd. send_file?accession=ohiou1180533851&disposition=inline Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. “Narrative as a Formal System.” Film Art: An Introduction, Eleventh edition, McGraw-Hill Education, 2016, pp. 68–105.

Brady, Anne-Marie. “China’s Foreign Propaganda Machine.”

Journal of Democracy, vol. 26, no. 4, Oct. 2015, pp. 51–59.

Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jod.2015.0056.

“Censored ‘Skyfall’ Angers Bond Fans.” Shine, 23 Jan. 2013,

Nye, Joseph S. “China and Soft Power.” South African Journal of International Affairs, vol. 19, no. 2, Aug. 2012, pp. 151–55. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/10220461.2012.706889.

Rushton, Richard. “Apparatus Theory: Baudry and Metz.” What Is Film Theory?: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates, Open University Press, 2010, pp. 34–51.

Xinhua News Agency. “Censored ‘Skyfall’ Angers Bond Fans.”

Shanghai Daily, 23 Jan. 2013, archive.shine.cn/nation/ Censored-Skyfall-angers-Bond-fans/shdaily.shtml.

Skyfall. DCP. Directed by Sam Mendes, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer & Columbia Pictures, 2013.

Tsui, Clarence. “Skyfall Crosses 100 Million Yuan Mark in

archive.shine.cn/nation/Censored-Skyfall-angers-Bond-

China.” Hollywood Reporter. www.hollywoodreporter.com/

fans/shdaily.shtml.

news/skyfall-crosses-100-million-yuan-415307. Accessed

China Hollywood Society, Censorship |. chinahollywood.org/ censorship. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018.

China Law Translate. “Film Industry Promotion Law 2016.” Film Industry Promotion Law 2016, 7 Nov. 2016, Accessed 15 June 2018. www.chinalawtranslate.com/2016年电影产业 促进法lang=en.

Cheney, Alexandra. “‘Iron Man 3’ Breaks Opening Day Records in China.” WSJ, 2 May 2013, blogs.wsj.com/

28 Oct. 2018.

Hui, Luo, and Paola Voci. “Screen Cultures and Discourses of Power.” Screening China’s Soft Power, edited by Luo Hui and Paola Voci, Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018, pp. 1–19.

Watanabe, Yasushi, and David L. McConnell. Soft Power Superpowers. Routledge, 2015.

Wei, John. Queer Encounters between Iron Man and Chinese Boys’

speakeasy/2013/05/02/iron-man-3-breaks-opening-day-

Love Fandom. SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 2649256, Social

records-in-china/. Accessed 12 May 2018

Science Research Network, 1 Sept. 2014. papers.ssrn.com,

Crary, Jonathan. “Modernizing Vision.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. 26–27.

Edgerton, Samuel Y. The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope:

papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2649256.

WIPO. “Regulation on the Administration of Movies.” World Intellectual Property Organization. Accessed July 22, 2018.

Zhou, Yuxing. “Pursuing Soft Power through Cinema:

How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision

Censorship and Double Standards in Mainland China.”

of the Universe, 2009, Cornell University Press, PhD

Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 9, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp.

dissertation.

Kokas, Aynne. Hollywood Made in China. U of California P, 2017.

Iron Man 3. DCP. Directed by Shane Black, Marvel Studios & DMG, 2013.

239–52. Crossref, doi:10.1080/17508061.2015.1049878.

Zhang, Laney. “China: First Law on Film Industry Effective in March.” Global Legal Monitor. 28 Feb.2017, www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/ china-first-law-on-film-industry-effective-in-march/.

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VISUAL ESSAY

Gendering Bollywood ¹

BY ASMA SAYED | Kwantlen Polytechnic University

I

ndian cinema produces films in many languages and is the world’s largest film industry. Hindi films produced in Bombay, commonly referred to as Bollywood films, have the largest market share of Indian cinema and the greatest audiences; these films target both Indians and Indian diaspora communities in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries. As these films reach vast national and international audiences, Bombay cinema has enormous cultural influence and the power to reinforce or disrupt stereotypes. However, as multiple scholars have argued, Bombay cinema has played a significant role in maintaining patriarchal, nationalist, and populist views that condone the marginalisation of women and minorities. The films have, by and large, upheld Indian social ideals of female purity and chastity.

In fact, female characters in Bollywood have been represented through clear dichotomies of good woman versus bad woman. Leading female characters are almost always good and triumphant and typically conform to what are perceived as traditional Indian cultural values: a good woman is a pure virgin, a sacrificial mother, a dedicated wife; she is submissive, confined to the domestic sphere, and willing to sacrifice her own needs for the good of her family, particularly her husband. Conversely, a villainous woman is represented as a vamp: commonly working as a prostitute or a bar dancer, or as an upper-class woman who has been corrupted by Western influences and has therefore forgotten her Indian values. Yet, as Indian society continues to push the definitions of acceptable gender norms and behaviours, Bollywood cinema is increasingly becoming a site for experimentation. Nonetheless, historically, Bollywood films have accorded stereotypical roles to women, and barring some films which have emphasized women’s liberation, the majority of films lack progressive representation.2 

1 My video essay, “Female Objectification in Bollywood Films," which focuses on the representation of women in Hindi cinema, is now available in the online issue of Mise-en-scéne: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration (Vol. 04, No. 02). Watch the video essay associated with this feature on the journal’s YouTube channel: http://journals.sfu.ca/msq/index.php/ msq/article/view/165/pdf 2 This content has been published elsewhere in Asma Sayed's papers on Bollywood cinema.

See the Works Cited listing at the end of the video essay for further details.

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Asma Sayed

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INTERVIEWS

Storytelling from within to Reach an Inner Truth: An Interview with Colin Minihan and Brittany Allen

BY PAUL RISKER | University of Wolverhampton

Fig. 1 | Brittany Allen in What Keeps You Alive, 00:29:59. Digital Interference Productions, 2018.

F

ilmmaker colin minihan and actress Brittany Allen have forged a collaborative relationship behind as well as in front of the camera. Allen has produced and been a lead or co-leading actress in three of Minihan’s four feature films: Extraterrestrial (2014), It Stains the Sands Red (2016), and What Keeps You Alive (2018). Possessing a creative versatility for storytelling, she composed the soundtrack for What Keeps You Alive, and wrote, directed, and edited the short film Valentines Day (2014), which centres on a former couple who find their paths crossing again one night.

Extraterrestrial, It Stains the Sands Red and What Keeps You Alive are connected by both geographical isolation and the themes of their respective narratives. While the desert setting of the zombie apocalypse in It Stains the Sands Red sharply contrasts the woodland cabin of the other two films, thematically they all tap into a similar set of emotions. Respectively, a group of friends are tormented by extraterrestrial visitors; a woman is stalked across the desert by an unrelenting zombie; Jules (Brittany

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Allen) in What Keeps You Alive realises to her horror that her partner Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) has sinister intentions for their first year wedding anniversary.

Each film centres around characters experiencing anxiety amidst an intense struggle for survival within the framework of genre, but which belong to different sub-genres.

In conversation with MSJ, Minihan and Allen (Fig. 1) discussed the nature of fear in the filmmaking process and the transformative experience of performance, the transition from writer to director, and despite an ending that threatens to spark criticism, the director’s commitment to the ending he envisioned.

PR: Why filmmaking or acting as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

CM: I grew up in a very small town of 25,000 people, on the northern tip of Vancouver Island — quite cut off from any city. And it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive through

Paul Risker

the mountains to get to a real movie theatre. So going to the movie theatre for me as a kid was a huge adventure. It was an experience, and then we would drive back through the mountains with just the headlights illuminating the forest highway, and my imagination would be let loose on that drive. I always found it very inspiring to go to the cinema because it was such a rarity when I actually got to go.

I have one memory where I had made a short film that I’d edited it together. I was thirteen-years-old and I started making shorts when I was quite young — just pissing around with the camera, which was fun. But I remember making one short in particular, and editing it that night, and then taking the video, the Mini DV or whatever it was down to the basement and playing it on a small TV by myself. That same natural experience I had in the movie theatres, I felt for my own work, and in that moment I literally said out loud, even though it was three in the morning, and no one was there, “I’m going to be a filmmaker.” I was thirteen [laughs].

BA: I was really young as well when I decided I wanted to do this [to act]. Yeah, I was a crazy kid and when I was fouryears-old there was a school talent show that you could only audition for once you were in Grade 1, which was when you were about six-years-old. I begged my mom to ask the teacher who ran the talent show if I could audition, and I sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz (1939). And then when I was in Grade 2, I did the same thing by begging my mom to ask the teacher if I could audition for the school play, which I was three years too young to do, and I played Bo-Beep in Babes in Toyland.

When I was young, a lot of it was musical theatre and there was one moment — oh God, I think I’m going to cry when I talk about it. I was nine-years-old and I was driving past one of the big theatres in Toronto, and I think The Lion King (1994) might have been playing. My parents had probably taken me to see it a few months earlier, and I guess I broke down in the car and begged my parents to help me get an agent, because I just wanted to do it so badly.

It’s something that in my adult life I like to take a step back from and redefine why I do it, because as a kid, I obviously was just instinctively drawn to performing, to singing, to being on stage, to acting and imagining things through those worlds. But I also think some of it as kid becomes about the attention that you are getting, the approval and the praise that you are getting. So yeah, I have definitely had to redefine why I do it now, and it’s a constantly evolving

thing. But it’s the kind of thing that for years through the ups and the downs, I would have moments where I was, “I can’t do this anymore, I need to do something else,” and now in the last couple of years, I’ve just fully decided, “Oh no, I will always do this.” I will incorporate new forms of expression into what I do, like scoring and music, but this will always be a part of me, because I do love it. I’m just addicted to it also, and I’m addicted to the moments where you are able to tap into something very honest in yourself…

CM: Speaking as your partner and seeing a lot of that addiction play out, it’s almost an addiction to overcoming fear, because every role I feel there is so much fear attached for an actor. It doesn’t matter if you are guest starring or you are just in for a day, or if you are the lead, you are overcoming so much to step up in the moment and be real, and to go somewhere else.

BA: Yeah, pretty much every single role, and I feel this is really common among actors, but also maybe among a lot of people involved in film. I get zero sleep the night before the first day of shooting because I am absolutely terrified, and it is such a thrill to feel such terror, and then at the end of the day realise you pushed through it — you feel more confident.

PR: Interviewing director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s for Me, Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), he said, “…the medium and the mystery of the process is that I could wake up one day and not know where to put the camera.” Can the filmmaking process be likened to stepping into a void, but is that uncertainty or fear that you have both referred to a source of motivation?

BA: Exactly, and for me as an actor, if I were to give into my fear, then it would likely result in a pretty predictable performance, because it would result in me making safe choices, and doing the same thing take after take. So the scariest thing is to step into every take and go, “I don’t know how this is going to come out. I’m just going to let go of how I just did the scene, I am going to commit fully, and I’m going to just jump.” So that’s the scariest thing, but from that is where the best work comes, I think.

CM: It is a void you step into, and you just pray in the moment that you do know where to put the camera.

Maybe you don’t pray — I don’t believe in God.

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PR: How do you view the place of What Keeps You Alive within your body of work? And would you agree that the filmmaking process a constant learning curve, with each film having the capacity to teach you something individual and specific to that experience?

CM: I’ve never really thought, “Oh, I can’t do this movie because how does it fit with my other movies?” It’s tough.

You definitely grow with every film and I feel like I’ve learned so much since making my first film, Grave Encounters (2011). I probably learned the most through the one film that I've made that I would call a failure, which was Extraterrestrial (2014) (Fig. 2), because it cost a lot to make, it didn’t make its money back, and it was poorly reviewed. But through the process I would say that I learned so much about coming at my work with less cockiness more than confidence. And also to trust in my own instincts a lot more, and not let the notes of a manager in LA or something effect the screenplay in a way that intuitively I knew was wrong, but I did it anyway to get the film made. So to fight for your own ideas, and there are obviously exceptions to that.

BA: I feel though that you’ve gotten to a place that you have a really great balance, in that you are very strong about your vision, and you’re not going to let every person’s opinion affect the story. But also, when you hear a good idea, you are so open.

CM: Who has the best idea — I hope for that. And there’s never an ounce of ego, whereas maybe when I was twenty-six and I directed Extraterrestrial there was a lot of ego. So you learn to completely let go of ego I think and trust in being able to identify the best idea, the most improvised take, whatever it is, and to not be so bullheaded.

PR: I recall David Fincher saying how a little ego is needed to help you take the knocks in this business — to pick yourself up and to carry on.

CM: I would absolutely agree with that.

BA: And you also need a little bit of ego to run a set, to be able to have a ton of people in every department asking you, “How should I do this?” You need to trust your instincts enough in that moment to give answers to everyone.

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Fig. 2 | Colin Minihan (right) on the set of Extraterrestrial.

PR: A storyteller doesn’t need to only be good at telling stories, he or she needs to have the right personality. Is the literary world more suited to the introverted storyteller, whereas filmmaking, with a crew and their many questions more suited to the extrovert? And just as the personality of the individual spectator can influence their response to the film, the storyteller’s personality can influence the story, or guide you towards certain types of stories. Within this, right and wrong in the critique or response to a film becomes clouded.

CM: It is just so incredibly subjective. What I love somebody else may hate, so you can’t please everybody when you make a film. Talking about ego a little more, I think that’s something that isn’t even ego, it’s just reality. If I don’t listen to that person’s critique, it’s not my ego, it’s just the fact that I see the world through a very different lens than they do.

BA: And you see that in the response to a film as well, where one person will come out of the theatre saying, “I loved this part,” and then the next person will say, “That part drove me crazy, why did they do that?”

CM: Talking about personality types, because writing is so dramatically different than directing, I’m an introvert too.

I lock myself away and I am writing for months to crack a script, and I edit my films as well, everyone so far, and that’s arguably more introverted than writing. So in between those two things you have this area called production, where you need to be the most extroverted person on the planet, and the most confident and in control on the set — whatever inner demons you are struggling with on any given day, to be able to maintain a cool level head while getting through what is often a very tight schedule packed with very little sleep. So I definitely imagine myself taking off one hat and putting on another through the whole process, especially with independent film and learning the business of film sales because that is a totally different hat.

Paul Risker

Occasionally I have to put that hat on midday to have a conversation with someone, and then take it off to go creative again. But a camera has always done a weird thing to me ever since I was young. It was almost creating worlds as a kid behind the viewfinder — I felt so much more confident and comfortable communicating what I wanted. So it’s something that I always just felt, and I very much think that I have that director’s personality as a result of the way I have always felt behind the camera. I don’t know what it does, but it turns me into a different person.

BA: I would say that actually. I guess I’ve gotten so used to it now, but I really do feel that you access a different part of your voice even, and a different physicality when directing. It’s like you go deeper... [laughs].

PR: Colin, do you see a striking difference or a change in Brittany when she’s on set working?

CM: I feel the change is astronomical because sometimes the character is so different than who Brittany really is.

One of the things that I love about Britt is that she’s just a classic character actor; she’s not a method actor, and so she’s not painful to work with. She’s not that character on set, you can actually talk to her.

BA: Well, sometimes I do prefer to be addressed by my character [laughs].

CM: But I think everybody does, even the filmmaker because you are so in the moment that they don’t want to step outside of the world.

BA: There was a time after What Keeps You Alive I remember, a few weeks, maybe even a month later where you said, “You know it’s okay to let go of Jules.” And I remember you hit me deep in that moment — I hadn’t realised that I had been holding onto her so much, because for Jules I did drop my voice down, I did embody a harder side of myself, even though she goes to such an emotional place, there was an hardness near the beginning at least. And yeah, I think it was a struggle afterwards because also with Jules I found things out about myself playing that role that I really liked, and I thought, “Oh, I want to hold onto this.”

But I didn’t know how to adapt that into who I had always been, and so it was a bit of a struggle. Maybe I was trying to hard to hold onto some of those things, instead of just trusting that I could still be myself, knowing that I have those aspects inside of me.

CM: It is such a different experience that you have in front of the lens, and I live with and hold onto a film for a long time as well. But what I hold onto is entirely different than you [Brittany]. What I hold onto is the annoying shot that’s slightly out of focus or, “Oh, I wish the Steadicam operator pivoted to the left two seconds earlier there in that moment.” I’m thinking about that kind of shit, and I can’t even watch it, but you are holding onto that emotional state of mind you were in when you [Brittany] were making it, and you were there. It’s very different.

PR: Interviewing filmmaker Sean Brosnan for My Father Die (2016), he explained: “I know a lot of friends who pick their themes first or they’ll pick a story and then say: ‘What do I want to explore?’ I find for me that is very limiting because I just like to explore a world and its characters; to see what theme comes out of that and to let the story dictate it.” Each storyteller takes a different approach, but to speak about theme, are you attentive to specific themes from the outset or is it a journey of discovery?

CM: Every script is different. I used to direct and come up with concepts for music videos, and I think it’s good storytelling practice if you approach the three minute music video as if there is a narrative, a theme to it, because you have to hit that, and you only have a limited time to do it.

And you have to shoot the band and sell them as well. But every time is different because sometimes the theme can come from an image that you get in your head first, and maybe that image is what sparks the story. Or maybe it’s a character you really like that you want to explore, and ultimately, that character may slowly reveal the theme. Or you just may have a subject you’re interested in exploring, which is an undertone of everything that is happening, and the characters and the story come from that. So I feel story can come from a lot of different places, and it just depends on the moment in time where that idea becomes the idea that you are going to make.

BA: Whenever we’ll be talking about ideas, we’ll be exploring something and because it’s just a theme, it’s too broad — it’s more of a feeling...

CM: A feeling is so hard to be the starting point of, “Where do I go from there?” And an image can evoke a feeling too, and I’ve had so many powerful images that I say,” There is a film in there somewhere — I hope some year from

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in that moment the power behind it speaks volumes, and everyone can relate to being betrayed or hurt on some level, and I just take it to the extreme in What Keeps You Alive.

Fig. 3 | Brittany Allen and Hannah Emily Anderson in What Keeps You Alive.

Digital Interference Productions, 2018.

now I find and discover what that is.” But I feel like the simple question of, “what if?” Is the best place to start from a story perspective, and that’s usually, “What if this happened? What if you were married and you didn’t know the person you were married to at all? What if they turned out to be a psychopath?” And that then becomes cause and effect, and that can help with a thriller that’s happening in real time for the most part, which just guided the entire script.

BA: I also think that you sometimes discover your themes after you’ve written the first draft. With a recent film Colin co-wrote that they just finished filming called Z (2018), you guys had written the first draft and you sent it out to some people, and I feel like some of their responses were, “Oh, this aspect is great, build up this theme.”

You’re not necessarily writing the script to serve the theme to begin with, but once the themes become unearthed...

CM: You can service them and keep them consistent.

PR: Watching the film, what drew me in was a certain feeling that is evoked when things start to become apparent. It is a moment that taps into our familiarity of trust being broken, and its placement is important — the need to build to it with pacing and patience, to benefit the the story on an emotional level as it unravels in its aftermath.

CM: I definitely did not want to come to the big moment in the film too soon, and the multiple hats that I wear is such a challenge. The business man in me that wants to be able to get a distribution deal knows that every distributor out there is going to say, “Can that happen ten or fifteen minutes earlier?” So I have to be like, “Fuck that guy for a minute! I’m not going to wear that hat here, and I’m going to trust what I know is the better version of this film, and put my art first”, which I always do. But yeah, I feel 76 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

PR: I look at film as being a psychological construct — built around the levels of consciousness. The Jungian concept of the shadow complex relates to the drama of What Keeps You Alive — Jules struggling against her shadow, desiring civility over conflict, as opposed to Jackie who has been consumed by her shadow. Jung argued that in the confrontation with this complex was necessary for us to discover moral authenticity — allowing it to erupt and to be incorporated into our consciousness. This relates to Jules’s character and supports the notion that film is a psychological construct.

CM: It’s a great way to read it, but for me, Jackie’s darkness isn’t just the classic shadow, it’s a disease in her. I personally relate more to the theme of trust and betrayal, and less so to maybe more [to Brittany] your character allowing darkness to overtake her a bit, so you can have a chance at survival, and obviously struggle immensely getting over this betrayal, to find this darkness and that anger. But for me, the film really is about not knowing the person who you love the most (Fig. 3).

BA: I think as people, what you are talking about is something that both Colin and I deal with in different ways — just in that for me, I’m somebody who repressed my shadow self for years, and swallowed it, and lived in a constant state of anxiety because of it [laughs], and so I think one of the reasons I was drawn to Colin...

CM: Is because I let the darkness out.

BA: I knew that he lived a little bit more on the edge, and he would encourage that to come out in me too. And maybe for you, it’s kind of about getting to know that darkness in yourself, and not letting it overtake you — harnessing it and using it. I do think that he harnessed his — he’s the one who wrote the words that Jackie says, and you went to a place in yourself to find that.

CM: Very much so.

BA: So yeah, how can you let it out in a way that is constructive...

CM: And not destructive to oneself.

Paul Risker

PR: At some point in critiquing the film, one needs to ask where the line is between the storytellers and the characters…

CM: I wrote the film from within, but I wasn’t studying every psychopath and every piece of dialogue that has been said in recorded interviews. I was saying those lines from within me, through my voice, and so I was channeling a certain level of darkness in order to write that character.

And also I want it to be fun and so she does it with a wink and a nod. But it comes from within, and so on the page I put the light and the fucking dark down.

BA: Colin is a night owl, especially when he’s writing and editing, and sometimes he won’t go to bed until 5am in the morning. And I remember some nights he’d come to bed…

CM: I was an asshole.

BA: No, no, I don’t remember that side of it. I just remember you coming in and being shocked with what you had just come up with. You were shocked at the darkness.

CM: It’s fun to go there.

BA: But that’s after hours of harnessing it.

CM: I love going somewhere, and the same way that you as an actor fall into the character, I get that opportunity.

There’s nothing more exciting than when you are writing a script, when you’re writing the lines and you’re literally crying as you are saying them. And you are not crying for what that character is saying, you are crying because you are reaching a part of yourself that is just so truthful, and you’re putting it on the page, or in this case I was just angry [laughs]. But that was exciting to be an animal.

PR: A part of the conversation around this film will be about when it should have ended, which divides the audience. Why did you choose to not end it sooner?

CM: It would be a cop out to end it sooner. To end any film at the moment where the audience may be like, “Oh, that’s satisfying; oh, my heart feels warm walking out of the cinema,” fuck that feeling. That’s not what I’m after when I make movies — I want the opposite of that. I am perfectly happy pissing people off with an ending and letting them discuss it, because at least then I’ve evoked a real feeling, versus this feeling of, oh, I’m satisfied you know with my Hollywood ending. Especially writing and directing

an independent film where I have final cut, I’m going to end the movie wherever the hell I please.

I always had the visual in my head of seeing Jackie as a young girl shoot the bear, when in actuality, portraying that visually and seeing her death through that lens was just so poetic for me, that there was no escaping that that’s how I wanted to end the picture. And that was the most awesome scene to discover in the edit, how it would come together too because that’s very much a scene where not every frame is storyboarded. That’s not really my style, I like to be in the moment and find in the moment where I’m going to shoot it and how it’s going to flow together.

But it was just one of those magical scenes that I think is one of the best parts of the picture, and if you can go along with the ride to get there, you’ll be so much more satisfied than if I had ended it ten minutes earlier, at a more obvious point.

PR: I recall asking C. Robert Cargill about the violent ending of Sinister (2012), and he spoke about the need for the pay-off. The earlier ending of What Keeps You Alive is arguably bolder…

CM: I don’t even see it as being bold, I see it as being a safe choice to be honest, and I think the ending that I went for is by far the bolder version. And the bolder version would have been had I not had you [Brittany/Jules] breathe at the end, but I do, and I wanted to just do that because it’s kind of funny, because it’s something that I very much struggled with — should she die, or should I give the audience a little bit of hope? I just felt the film had been such an amazing battle of wits and strength up until that point, and on the last day of the sound mix, which is basically the final place you get to change your film, I said, “You know what, fuck it. Unmute that — I want her to breathe.” And I feel like it leaves room for the sequel [laughs]. I killed you brutally the last time in Extraterrestrial, and you are so blatantly going to die in It Stains the Sands Red (2016) (Fig. 4). I don’t know, Jules is a fighter.

PR: The audience is often guilty of watching a film and expecting a character to act rationally, to suppress impulses that we ourselves in the context of the story would not necessarily do. This could critique the argument that the earlier ending was the stronger ending, by exposing the unrealistic expectations we have for the behaviour and choices of characters.

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Storytelling from Within to Reach an Inner Truth

Fig. 4 | Colin Minihan and Brittany Allen on the set of It Stains the Sands Red. Dark Sky Films, 2016.

BA: It’s almost like when you are watching a film, you are able to have the 20:20 sight that you wouldn’t have if you were in the film — if you were that person in that moment. So because you are sitting at a safe distance and you are analysing it, and you are already thinking ahead, then yeah, your sense of what would be rational in that moment...

CM: Is totally skewed. But for me that’s always a challenge in the writing, of how do I keep this story going?

How do I not just have this story be a thirty-minute picture? And I want the audience to have fun and to go along with the ride, and if I can entertain them throughout that journey without losing them to logical gaps that they seek out from a safe distance, then I’ve done my job. But if everyone wants to pounce on a character for not shooting her at the moment she has the chance, well sure I could have wrote that, but that would have been a cop out as well.

I just feel storytelling is a delicate art form, especially a movie like this where there’s two characters for ninety percent of the film. Those are incredibly challenging films to write because you can’t cut to the ‘B’ story and then cut back at a convenient time, which is all every movie ever does now. So when you’re stuck with those characters and they’re not cutting away to any side narrative, of course the audience are going to question her actions. And they would 78 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

respond differently because they are a different person. And if you’re still thinking that there is an ounce of you that can convince her to drive away before the neighbours show up at dinner, and they’re saying to the character (at the screen), “No, it’s not going to work,” that’s good too. I’m happy with them being angry in that moment because they’re invested, and the key is keeping them invested, whether they like the action or not.

PR: As a storyteller you shouldn’t care whether the audience is happy or not, or rather, pleased with the experience of the film?

BA: Yeah, I think it would get in the way of telling your story.

CM: If I worry about pleasing people and trying to write the happy ending, then I’m totally not wearing my artist hat, I’m wearing my business hat.

BA: I have to think about that as an actor too, if sometimes I am walking on the set with people I haven’t met before, or producers I really respect who have done a lot of work, there’s a part of me that might want to please them, and I just have to tell that part to, “Please leave.”

And, “I’m going to just commit to my work in this moment and make choices that serve the work, not the people.” Obviously it’s a collaboration, but if I’m trying

Paul Risker

to please people in my art, then again, it will clam me up and make me insecure, and I will not trust my instincts.

CM: And you just don’t have time to do that.

BA: I think that unfortunately why so many people don’t make things is because, and it’s a feeling I can relate to, so I empathise with it, but it’s because we are so afraid of what other people will think, and our wanting to please other people.

CM: Some artists make it half way through and then doubt themselves. And it’s not that they’re doubting themselves, they are worried about other people’s thoughts.

BA: Afraid of what the response will be, and yeah, of course we always expect that people are going to hate it for some reason too.

CM: And they might, and if they do great. Whatever, onto the next one.

BA: You’ll survive. That’s definitely something I’ve admired about Colin ever since I’ve met him, is that he’s somehow been able to not let that get in his way.

CM: When I had that moment at thirteen and I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker, it wasn’t so I could get glowing reviews — it was so I could create that world, express myself and tell my story, whatever story that is.

The reviews and opinions of people, that’s the worst part of filmmaking — it’s actually letting the film go. I’d be perfectly happy leaving some of my films in a vault that only I could watch them, but that’s not the case. In this business you have to actually let your baby go, and at that point the film is no longer the filmmaker’s, it’s the world’s, and it’s a cruel world I’ll tell you.

BA: Yeah, but it’s also really exciting to hear people take away from it their own personal interpretation, and to see a community get built up around a film, and to have people conversing about it and debating it. I think that’s so cool that it has its own life. 

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REVIEWS

Rethinking Communism in the Age of Trump and Modi: The Bengali Film Ghya Chang Fou sets a Milestone in Cinematic History

BY MAHITOSH MANDAL AND PRIYANKA DAS | Presidency University

N

ot everyone can be a film critic. It is perhaps true that like literary criticism, one needs to be trained in film criticism as well. However, every work of art elicits a certain response that could be valuable for a discursive engagement, be it appreciation, disapproval, or simply indifference. When we watched Joyraj Bhattacharjee’s film Ghya Chang Fou, which was independently made in 2017 but never released commercially, we fell short of words. It left us shocked, mesmerized, baffled, disturbed, scared, embarrassed, aroused, happy, and angry. We simply did not know how to phrase our initial feelings. It took us some time to digest what had happened on the screen in a fully packed auditorium at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata. As we tried to recollect our experiences afterwards, we felt that what we witnessed was not only a dream narrative about the communist revolution, but also a revolution in the history of cinema itself. This is particularly true in the context of West Bengal, India, where communism had a stronghold for over thirty-four years.

The first impression one has on watching Ghya Chang Fou is that it is somewhat impenetrable as a narrative. It is risky to make any conclusive statement about a film which offers a dense debate about the past, present, and future of communism on a thematic level, while on a structural level it turns out to be a bold experiment with the cinematic form. But one needs to brave this risky job – not in spite of, but precisely because of, the film’s thematic and structural richness and complexity.

In order to explain the title of the film, one confronts the challenges of translation due to cultural difference. The Bengali expression “Ghya Chang Fou,” which, lexically, could be considered as just two words “Ghyachang” and “Fou,” is actually an example of onomatopoeia. Whereas “Ghyachang” is the sound of cutting something into two

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with a quick, single blow, “Fou” is the sound of breathing out air to do something – for instance, to extinguish a lamp. In fact, the phrase can be traced back to a song from the 1978 classic Bengali movie Charmurti, where “Gho Chang Fou” is chanted during the ritualistic sacrifice of a human being. Arguably, “Ghya Chang Fou” has this connotation of beheading, and thereby almost magically putting an end to something. One reviewer claims that the film is a sociological allegory about beheading Marxism (Nigam). Can one agree with this view? There is only one instance of what could be called a literal “ghyachang” – and that happens after a prolonged BDSM scene between two adult siblings in which the sister suddenly slits her brother’s throat. Further, there is another instance of a sort of murder when the leader of the communist party is shot and he apparently dies – after the director’s voice asks him to die, thus insinuating an authorial intervention as is typical of a postmodern narrative. Then, the leader comes back to life, weirdly claiming that communism, and thereby a communist, never dies. This is merely an act of shooting and not “ghyachang.” Moreover, the dead magically coming back to life could very well be interpreted as an optimistic view that Marxist communism would come back to power in Bengal. Hence, it symbolizes resurrection rather than beheading. Yet, if this instance is symbolic of beheading Marxism, it is only in a purely comic sense. Such comic threads turn Joyraj’s otherwise serious screenplay into a kind of an absurdist narrative.

Perhaps the most confusing scene in the entire film occurs at the very outset. All the characters get into an elevator in the basement of a huge housing complex. They push the button to go to the top floor (and the director ensures that a lot of things happen in the elevator). However, when they leave the elevator they are seen walking through a dark city lane. Did they go up or did they come down

Mahitosh Mandal and Priyanka Das

in the elevator? In the final scene of the movie, the female protagonist goes up in the elevator once again and it seems she has entered the film-editing room. Godard once said that a movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – but not necessarily in that order. Joyraj seems to be saying that getting into an elevator to go up might not necessarily take you to the top floor. This sequence could also be read from within a deconstructionist framework whereby the grand narrative of scientism – for instance, the laws of physics regarding motion and space – is challenged.

One could also consider this scene as a surrealist moment – you go up to the top floor only to find yourself amidst the labyrinth of a dark city lane as if you are on the set of an Ingmar Bergman movie. If Ghya Chang Fou is a communist dream narrative, then the dream begins exactly at this surrealist moment.

The film has a complex plot, but the bulk of the events take place at a dinner party where a number of characters from almost all age groups gather to celebrate the success of communism. Once they arrive at the party after a long silent walk through the dark city lanes, the leader of the group, an elderly Bengali communist typically dressed in white kurta and dhoti, prepares to deliver a formal speech. He claims that they have planned this celebration because after a long, tiring revolution, they have at last successfully abolished class-exploitation from the world and the history of class struggle has now come to an end.

They then decide to observe a one-minute silence in memory of the martyrs.

However, instead of respecting the martyrs, they get into a serious debate. While one of the characters claims that the one-minute duration has ended and that they should sit down, the other protests, claiming that according to his watch, one minute has not yet passed and that they should continue observing silence. What is the use of being a communist, he angrily declares, if he cannot predict time? Thus, what appears to be a celebration of communism turns into a prolonged, multidimensional debate about the theory and praxis of communism – which constitutes the central theme of the entire film. For instance, the debates eventually grow into heated conversations about the anarchism of Bakunin, intolerance of Engels, the relevance of Lenin, Plekhanov, Petrakov and Vera Zasulich, the systematic discursive exclusion of communists like Ivan Babushkin and Stepan Khalturin who hailed from the Russian working class, the Jewish identity of Marx, and so on and so forth. These are intriguingly blended

with provocative discussions on communism in Bengal – from how Rabindranath responded to communism to how Bengali communists have been pathetically caught up in the theoretical tradition of Western communism and have failed to address the issues like caste-oppression.

This entire discourse is, however, placed within a self-critical framework. The communist party, a character argues, cannot just be a forum for debates; organizational plans must be executed. This is Marxian insofar as Marx and later neo-Marxists like Antonio Gramsci focused on a “philosophy of praxis” – philosophers interpreted the world; the point, however, in a sense, Marx implied, don’t just think, act! Slavoj Žižek, very interestingly, turned this dictum upside down by claiming, “don’t act, just think!” (Big Think). For Žižek, who is a self-declared Marxist, communists have been in existence for over a century, but the question is twofold: how have they succeeded, and where have they failed? What explains the rise of rightists all over the world on the very face of leftist politics? Perhaps it is time to rethink Marxism and to make a proper assessment of communism. Joyraj’s film is a solid contribution to this project of reformulating Marxism in times of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.

A unique critique of communism that the film evokes from the beginning to the end is the relationship between sexuality and revolution. The real trick of capitalism, a character argues by way of alluding to Engels, rests in how family and state, through the ownership of property, control sexual relationships. If revolution means changing everything from the roots, then shouldn’t communism revolutionize sexuality and thereby resist bourgeois repression of sexuality? What should be the approach to sexuality from a communist perspective? Or, does one completely dismiss the question of sexuality and promote, as another character enjoins, a spiritual path as a new way of life?

However, what stands out in this context is an extreme form of sexual liberation that is portrayed in detail in the movie.

The debates on the relationship between sexuality and revolution eventually lead to one of the most elaborate orgies in cinematic history. While partners are shared as common property, the detailed scene about sexual intercourse between a brother and sister deals a huge blow to conventional bourgeois attempts to control sexuality through various means, including the prohibition of polygamy and incest and the promotion of repressive religious morality. The movie itself becomes an artistic rebellion against the bourgeoisie.

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Rethinking Communism in the Age of Trump and Modi

And then there is the major concern of communism’s relation to violence. One of the characters argues that a revolutionary must soak his hands in the blood of his class-enemy in order to earn that designation. In fact, at the end of the film, this character is killed, his throat slit by his own sister at the climax of a BDSM sequence. The murder of the brother is justified metaphorically by evoking the idea that a revolution sustains only through sacrifice.

However, the film also articulates the disturbing thought that communism has cost so much in terms of blood. If we extend this discourse of violence vis-à-vis communism, then those of us who are acquainted with what happened in the infamous incident of Gulag in Russia would feel disturbed.

It is not entirely possible to do a literal reading of Joyraj’s film because it speaks in symbolic and metaphorical terms as well. The big fat candle put at the middle of the dinner table – the venue where all debates take place in the middle of the night – functions as a phallic symbol, indicative of the sexual overtones and undertones which pervade the whole movie. While observing silence for the dead, the characters debate the exact duration of one minute, and all of their watches seem to have stopped. The symbolism of the dysfunctional watch and the collapse of time – from Dali’s Persistence of Memory to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries – has been explored in a number of great works of art in the twentieth century. By linking the temporal symbolism to “Marxist prediction” (the failure of the Communist Party of India [Marxist] to foresee its own decline in West Bengal, for instance), Joyraj adds a new dimension to this coveted artistic motif. And then there is the symbolism of the severed human hands preserved in the refrigerator, which, supposedly, are to be served with butter at the dinner.

Can this frozen flesh be explained in terms of cannibalism?

Or, by extension, is that how communism has progressed – surviving on the sacrifice of its revolutionaries? Throughout the film, there is also the repeated presence of street dogs. In some shots, the camera deliberately focuses on them for a considerable amount of time. Could one say that the canine world is accommodated within a communist discourse which has traditionally represented the downtrodden from among the humans alone? If yes, then Ghya Chang Fou offers a new form of inclusivist communism.

One could go on and on unpacking the rich thematic complexities of Joyraj’s narrative. However, one needs also to talk about Joyraj’s masterful use of the cinematic form. The most striking aspect of Ghya Chang Fou is its exhaustive use of sound and camera. Žižek once made a 82 Vol.04, No.02 | Winter 2019

very poignant remark about the cinema of David Lynch.

“In Lynch’s films,” Žižek stated, “darkness is really dark.

Light is really unbearable, blinding light. Fire really hurts, it’s so hot.” (Žižek). The cinema of Joyraj offers an intense experience of events happening not only onscreen, but also as if right in front of our eyes. When the musical scores are played it appears that the audience is witnessing a live musical performance – the sound almost overflows the screen. When the sexual encounters and other scenes are shown, it appears that every sound, every act, every image is performed by flesh and blood humans, right then and there, and not projected on a screen. The scenes are intense, authentic, immediate, and even tactile.

And then there are those wonderfully crafted meta-cinematic moments. The director’s voice intervenes in the narrative on crucial occasions, demanding that the characters perform certain actions as required (as seen in Fig. 1). In addition, when one sees the real-life academician Ben Zacharia and the actor-director Q featured as themselves, one realizes the extent to which the film employs the postmodern techniques of narration by way of breaking the ontological frames of reality and fiction. Further, the film employs a playful use of parody and pastiche– evoking themes ranging from Bollywood movies to videogames – which adds to the effect. One could also mention the element of voyeurism – almost in the way in which Hitchcock uses the technique – as the audience is made to feel that they are peeping into and eavesdropping on events which are being recorded by someone else.

Ghya Chang Fou is an independently made film, funded by some friends and well-wishers. Despite being screened in various international film festivals, the film was never officially released in the commercial theatres. There could be two reasons behind this. One, Joyraj deliberately does not want the film to become a money-minting product.

Those who are acquainted with Joyraj’s works know that he consistently promotes an anti-capitalist approach to the dissemination of art. But two, and more significantly, the film demands bold spectatorship. The film can play a trick on the audience by exposing their prejudices which are too easily hidden in the garb of fake progressivism. There is a high chance the audience might feel scandalized by scenes of female masturbation and BDSM shown unabashedly on the screen. The debates on communism might appear very serious, sometimes obscure as well as funny – but a nuanced reading would unfold that Joyraj is opening up possibilities for the regeneration of leftist politics. Furthermore, unlike

Mahitosh Mandal and Priyanka Das

Fig. 1 | The Communist leader dies on the director's command, 00:42. Bhattacharjee 2017.

an avant-garde work of European high modernism, Joyraj’s work does not insist on alienating the audience by way of demanding the highest level of hermeneutic efficiency. By keeping the audience glued to the screen, by making them experience moments of laughter, embarrassment, blankness,

shock, and insight, and with its perfect balance of the seriocomic, the film ultimately becomes a postmodern work of art. Ghya Chang Fou is not a regular alternative cinema (a paradoxical term, to be sure) from Bengal. It is ready to set a milestone in cinematic history. 

WORKS CITED Bhattacharjee, Joyraj. “Ghya Chang Fou Official Trailer.” YouTube, 26 Nov. 2017, youtube.com/ watch?v=_MCbSQMw5Ew. Big Think. “Slavoj Žižek: Don’t Act. Just Think.” YouTube, talk by Slavoj Žižek, 28 Aug. 2012, youtube.com/ watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ. Ghya Chang Fou. Internet Movie Database (IMDb). imdb. com/title/tt7462164/. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019.

Nigam, Aditya. “‘Beheading’ Marxism, Unleashing Desire: Ghya Chang Fou and the Marxist Unconscious.” Kafila, 31 Dec. 2018, kafila.online/2018/12/25/beheadingmarxism-unleashing-desire-ghya-chang-fou-and-themarxist-unconscious/. Žižek, Slavoj. The Per vert’s Guide to CinemaLacanian Psychoanalysis and Film. PDF file, 26-27. / beanhu.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/ the-perverts-guide-to-cinema/.

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OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS ISSUE 5.2 · WINTER 2020

For its upcoming issue, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (MSJ) currently seeks submissions that encompass the latest research in film and media studies. Submission categories include feature articles (6,000–7,000 words); mise-en-scène featurettes (1,000–1,500 words); reviews of films, DVDs, Blu-rays or conferences (1,500–2,500 words); M.A. or Ph.D. abstracts

Mise-en-scène across the disciplines Transmedia Film spectatorship Auteur theory Adaptation studies

JULY

5

(250–300 words); interviews (4,000–5,000 words); undergraduate scholarship (2,000–2,500 words) or video essays (8–10 minute range). All submissions must include a selection of supporting images from the film(s) under analysis and be formatted according to MLA guidelines, 8th edition. Topic areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Frame narratology Pedagogical approaches to film and media studies Genre studies Cinematic aestheticism

Documentary studies Fandom studies Seriality Film/video as a branch of digital humanities research

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS JULY 5, 2020 Please sign up as an author through the registration portal to begin the 5-step submission process: journals.sfu.ca/msq/msq/index.php/msq/user/register

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ABOUT THE JOURNAL Situating itself in film’s

ABOUT THE JOURNAL Situating The itselfJournal in film’s visual narravisual narrative, Mise-en-scène: tive, Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration of Film & Visual Narration (ISSN 2369-5056) (ISSN 2369-5056) is the first of its kind: an international, is the f ir st of it s kind: an international, peer-reviewed journal focused exclusively on the artistry peer-reviewed journal focused exclusively on of frame composition as a story-telling technique. With its the artistry of frame composition as a storyopen-access, open-review publishing model, MSJ strives telling technique. With its open-access, opento be a synergistic, community-oriented hub for discourse review publishing model, MSJ strives to be a synthat begins at the level of the frame. Scholarly analysis of ergistic, hub forcamera discourseangles, camera lighting, community-oriented set design, costuming, that begins atdepth the level of the and frame.

Scholarly placement are proximities, of field, character analysis of lighting, set design, costuming, just some of the topics that the journal covers. While pricameraconcerned angles, camera depth marily with proximities, discourse in andofaround the film frame, MSJ also includes field, and character placementnarratological are just some ofanalysis at the scene and sequence level of related media (television the topics that the journal covers. While primarily and online) with within its scope.

Particularly welcome are articoncerned discourse in and around the cles that dovetail current debates, research, film frame, MSJ also includes narratological and theories asanalysis they deepen the understanding of filmic at the scene and sequence level of storytelling.

The journal’s contributing writers are an eclectic, interrelated media (television and online) within disciplinary mixture of graduate students, academics, its scope. Par ticularly welcome are ar ticles filmmakers, film scholars, and cineastes, a demographic that dovetail current debates, research, and that also reflects the journal’s readership. Published theories as they deepen the understanding of twice a year by Simon Fraser University, MSJ is the official filmic storytelling. The journal’s contributing film studies journal of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in writers are anCanada. eclectic, interdisciplinary Vancouver, It is included mixture in EBSCO’s Film and of graduate students, academics, filmmakers, Television Literature Index. film scholars, and cineastes, a demographic that also reflects the journal’s readership. Published twice a year by Simon Fraser University, MSJ is the official film studies journal of Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, Canada.

It is included in EBSCO’s Film and Television Literature Index.

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