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11 The times of subjectivity and social reproduction.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction is expressly forbidden. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources.
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction is expressly forbidden. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources.
On: 14 May 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 789685088] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713701267 The times of subjectivity and social reproduction Paul Willemen Online Publication Date: 01 June 2008 To cite this Article Willemen, Paul(2008)'The times of subjectivity and social reproduction',Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,9:2,290 296 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965661 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370801965661 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008
ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/08/02029007 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965661
The times of subjectivity and social reproduction
Paul WILLEMEN
Taylor and Francis
ABSTRACT
A reflection on the reasons why we take films such as Hous as cherished cinephilic objects and on the ways that we, as critics, often try to disguise our desiring relation to films.
K
EYWORDS
: Cinephilia, identity, subjectivity, aesthetic form, Hou Hsiao-Hsien Instead of launching on a declaration of love for Hous cinema, let me begin by counting the ways in which I do
not
love Hous films. First, I do not appreciate Hous films for their complexity. Teaching film makers and photographers has taught me that there is no connection whatsoever between complexity and quality. Really bad work is also extremely complex and capable of rais- ing the most fascinating topics and issues if you pay attention to the full range of a works signifying dimensions. Secondly, I do not appreciate Hous films for telling me about Taiwan nor for displaying a Taiwanese identity. The search for a Taiwanese identity is, mercifully, not something that Hous films embark upon. On the contrary, any notion of identity to be detected in his films is there only as some- thing oppressive, restrictive, a pressure that tries to push you into a box. To foist iden- tity-searching onto Hous films strikes me as an act of aggression that can be perpetrated against any film, regardless of what it is like or about. Perhaps it may be necessary to recall the difference between, on the one hand, asking what growing up and living in a particular time and place makes of you, and, on the other, the act or the desire to present a specific, determinate answer to such a question, as if there were only one correct possible answer. As for telling me about Taiwan, again, Hous films are not particularly special. All films made in or about Taiwan display or convey aspects of the texture of life as it is lived in that spatial-temporal terrain politi- cally formatted as Taiwan. Hous films do not tell me more in this respect than any other film shaped in and by Taiwan. It is not so much what Hous films say about Taiwan that is of interest, but, of course, how they say it. To put it another way: it is not Hou who speaks about Taiwan; it is Taiwan that speaks in Hous films, and in order to hear
that
speech,
that
voice, we first have to learn to detect it and learn to listen to it in a great many Taiwanese films. Only then, by hear- ing the many different ways in which Taiwan speaks in and through cinematic discourses may we begin to understand something of what that voice is trying to tell us. However, it is worth recalling at this point, firstly, that the socio-historical context of the production is never a matter of just a singular voice: it manifests itself as a forma- tive pressure in a range of discourses (or voices). Moreover, it is never the only pres- sure on cinematic enunciation: there are many others, including the many voices the intersection or condensation of which can be said to constitute the directors subjectivity.
1
In that respect, Hous films are in them- selves, merely fragments of a discourse. As such, they do not tell me more about Taiwan than any other Taiwanese film. Hous films may make it easier for me to read how social-historical dynamics D o w n l o a d e d
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291 shape the textures of lived lives in Taiwan, but that is not an argument in favour of his work. To appreciate his films for informing me about Taiwan would be tantamount to allowing myself dutifully to follow wher- ever he directs my attention, and to believe the information served up for me. Such a process of reading his films would, in effect, save me the trouble of having to find out for myself. Besides, if I want to know about Taiwan, Hous or anyone elses films are not the best or the most practical way to find out. I would do better to read a couple of books on the subject. Thirdly, I do not like Hous films because he is a world cinema author. I am sensitive to that claim, of course, but it is a sensitivity that deserves some critical examination. What am I being invited to subscribe to when I am invited to regard Hou as a great world cinema author, as I am, for instance, by Kent Jones in an essay in
Film Comment
, where he laments the fact that Hous films are no longer sold or marketed in the US on the basis that he is a world cinema author (Jones 1999). What notion of authorship is being invoked in such cases to cue and format my way of paying attention to Hous films? I do not object to a directors name being used as a brand name to sell and market a film. Cinema is an industrial practice as much as it is a cultural one, and for film makers to make films, it is essential that their work makes a reasonable amount of money. It is not the issue of commodification and marketing in itself that I object to. If I did, I would be opposing the very notion of cinema that enables Hous films to exist at all. The prob- lem lies in the fact that marketing always involves the mobilisation and reinforcement of ideas and pleasures that are deemed capa- ble of persuading us to pay for the commod- ity in question. In other words, marketing always involves an authoritarian regulation of social-cultural reproduction. Marketing cues us as to what we are supposed to find pleasurable or unpleasurable. A lot of money and effort is also devoted to telling us what we should not find pleasurable. But whether or not a director deserves to be singled out for his or her way of exploring cinemas potential is a decision one should reach only after seeing the films. It must not be a piece of cultural baggage with which we enter into the cinema. It is, of course, also possible that Hou is promoted as a great author because his work is supposed to tell me, so much better than anyone elses, about the complexities of peoples lives in Taiwan, or about the universal human condition anywhere and at any time, and who does so in ways that, according to the aesthetic framework that I am supposed to share with the journalists and marketeers in question, count as inno- vative, unprecedented, new. Let us call this the Nobel Prize notion of authorship. And let us not dwell too much on the fact that the Nobel Prize was instituted by an industrial tycoon who had grown fabulously wealthy in the arms trade. The Nobel Prize notion of unique and exemplary universal excellence is no more than the reverse side of the general and average universal anonymity attributed to the numbers of bodies that could be blown to bits by his industrially manufactured and marketed explosives. If I am moved to go and see Hous films because he is presented to me as a great author of world cinema, then I am not seek- ing to appreciate Hous work; I would be merely seeking confirmation of the univer- sality and exemplariness of the cultural and institutional histories that happen to have formatted
my
mental and aesthetic world. Critics or journalists who promote Hou to me as a world author are in fact demanding that I accept the universal excellence of the commodity that they are marketing and that I should accept to derive pleasure and satis- faction from films only in the ways that I am enjoined to do by them. That is the reason, of course, why only the spokespeople for certain kinds of aesthetic ideologies are invited to use newspapers and broadcasts as platforms from which to regulate the repro- duction of social-cultural values, and why only very few, very rhetorically skilled people can participate in such platforms at all responsibly. If I consent to appreciate Hous films for any of the above reasons (complexity; D o w n l o a d e d
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information about Taiwan and Taiwanese identity; world cinema author status), I will have lost precisely the most valuable, that is to say, the specifically cinematic dimensions of Hous work, because I will have reduced his work to a device that mirrors a narcissis- tically gratifying mask that I, in conjunction with the institutions that have formatted me, have fashioned for myself. How, then, can I come to terms with the fact that I do love Hous films? There is, first of all, the important opportunity that Hous films offer to clarify for myself the issues I have just discussed. Admittedly, Hous films are not the only ones that invite me to embark on such a clarification. What specific aspect of Hous films then activates those questions for me? In trying to suggest answers to this problem, I will, briefly, re- visit all three reasons why I do not appreci- ate his films, but, this time, look at them from a different angle. First, the question of complexity. In a special issue of the French magazine
Trafic
(n. 50, 2004) re-posing Bazins question What Is Cinema? to a broad range of contemporary critics and film makers, Alain Bergala contributes a very interesting but incredibly reductive essay on
his
desire for cinema, speaking mainly as a film maker. Punning on Bazins essay on cinemas realist (I would say indexical) ontology, Bergala called his own contribution: On the Onto- logical Impurity of Cinemas Creatures. In Bergalas context, impurity is to be under- stood as referring to the regrettable ubiquity of polluting substances that makes purity an unattainable ideal. Bergala then proceeds to tell us how he has made his peace with the inevitably sinful, that is to say, mixed and complex dimensions of cinema, erecting his own personal desire for the bodies of his actors into the very definition of cinematic mise en scne. He writes
In the history of the arts, cinema asks, in a totally new, unprecedented manner, the question of the relation between the imagined creature (roughly, the creature that the creator has in mind), the real creature (what painters and photographers call a model) and the creature actually inscribed in the work (the figure, the character incarnated in the film). [What is constitutive of cinema is that] what one sees on the screen is never due simply to an abstract process of enunciation, but is always also, physically, the result of a relation between creator and creature. This relation in cinema is inescapable and has no equivalent in any other art form. It is an inter-subjective relation that puts into play the entire gamut of effects, emotions and human drives. It is a relation between bodies within the representational space itself, because in cinema [t]he intervals between charac- ter-bodies
and
the physical-desiring interval between a creator and his or her creature-bodies modulate the very same space, visible on the screen. The relation between creator and creature in cinema is played out in the same space as the relations between character- figures. (Bergala 2004; my translation)
In this way, Bergala posits cinematic space as essentially modulated, constituted by two multi-dimensional axes: the space config- ured by the relations between bodies
in
the film and the space configured by the desir- ing look of the film maker as s/he modulates those relations. The intersection of these two spaces would then constitute the diegetic cinematic space resulting from the activity of mise en scne. Bergalas premise here is that of character narration, assuming that what the film maker wants to see and work with is fired by a desire for actors bodies. Bergala waxes lyrical about the complexities of faces and the subtleties of gesture. But what he disregards is the desire to see and read the physiognomy of land- and city-scapes, a desire that inscribes character-bodies not as objects of desire for and in themselves, but as catalysts, as revelators of the rhythms and energies of history. Or, as Hou put it in an essay he contributed to the web-journal
Rouge
, figures in landscapes (or cityscapes) as revelators of the weight of the many diverse historical forces that, operating with different rhythms and temporalities, have moulded the particular social-historical scenes, lived by the characters (Hou 2003). D o w n l o a d e d
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293 The historicity implied in the emphasis on the physicality of actorial bodies and their physiognomies also operates, potentially, in relation to geographic, rural or urban spaces, and to the way histories are inscribed
there
. To expand slightly on Hous own phraseol- ogy (as translated into English), his films or, at least, those of his films that are set in Taiwan and deal directly with aspects of the histories that shaped contemporary Taiwan confront us with the following question: how to read and convey the specific gravity of the diverse historical dynamics that combined to shape social existence here, now, in Taiwan? In order to allow that ques- tion to emerge, Hou has developed a variety of rhetorical strategies, adapted to the partic- ular conditions of film making in Taiwan at the time of production, identified and described by critics as a personal style, an authorial aesthetic. From my point of view, it is a mistake to characterise an authorial aesthetic in terms of recurring formal rhetor- ical devices. And it is an even greater mistake to suggest that cinema must be seen exclusively in terms of the modulation of inter-personal desires, as Bergala does in his way, and as the Hollywood pimps travelling the world offering training courses in char- acter-based screenplays do in their way. Hous films show us that the world into which we are born and in which we have to learn to live, is shaped by the specific weight of historical forces and rhythms that have impacted on that particular time and place. Another way of phrasing Hous question would then be: how do we, how can we, live with the weight of history here, on the particular patch of geo-temporal space that we inhabit? And I am certain that in order to explore that question, Hou will feel free to adopt any formal rhetorical device that he deems useful and will refuse to be limited to the range of devices that allegedly define and distinguish Hou as an author, in the same way that, for instance, Brecht energetically refused to be restricted to the use of Brechtian alienation devices. Having thus touched on the question of authorship, let me add straight away that an engagement with the shapes and pathways traced by the weight of history in Taiwan is also an insufficient characterisa- tion of Hous work, as it would be of any author. What matters is the hypothesis contained in and proposed by the film about the economy, that is to say, the hier- archically ordered interrelations between the forces evoked. By giving different weights to such social-historical rhythms as they coagulate into lived-time (by organis- ing foreground/background relations, regulating the amount of screen-time allo- cated to them, etc), a film offers a hypothe- sis about the way social formations function, including about the way that they format the people living in those forma- tions. In this respect, David Bordwells analysis of the way Hous films deploy lens-technologies, mobilising technological constraints (only a limited number of lenses were available to Hou) to place his charac- ters into intensely dynamic social spaces, is instructive (Bordwell 2005: 186237). The second axis that organises Hous films is the axis of movement, that is to say, the very rhythms of historical tempo- ralities with their formative dynamics rather than merely registering the weight of history. In the language of structural linguistics, one could say that Hous films elaborate the specific ways in which diach- ronic pressures (rhythms of change) striate and energise the layers of situations experi- enced as synchronic, as conditions of life, the existing state of affairs in a particular time and place. The debate that often surfaces in the more philosophically inclined journalistic reviews of Hous work, about whether his films are peculiarly Taiwanese (and therefore incomprehensible to non-Taiwanese view- ers) or universal (which allows European and American viewers to ignore what Hou has to say about living in Taiwan) is irrele- vant. The point is that if Hou manages to make us see how historical forces not only shape but also energise given situations, then his films are capable of helping each of us to understand a little more about the particular situation that shapes our existence and our options for change in our here-and-now. D o w n l o a d e d
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The complexity of the films and their ability to tell me something about Taiwan are thus merely side-effects of a discursive strategy that exploits the (locally available) potential of cinema to convey at one and the same time a state of affairs, the dynamics of its formation and the forcelines delineating its potential transformations. Hou shows us land- and city-scapes as forcefields, lets call them life-scapes, always caught in the tension between the weight of inertia, and the ineluctable pressures that shaped, and will continue to transform, social existence, energising it and making it ceaselessly morph into something else. Let me clarify my point with a few exam- ples of the way Hou weaves temporal rhythms and spaces together. Towards the beginning of
A Summer at Grandpas
(1984) there is a shot of a solid looking bridge. This bridge indexes industrial time in its design and materials, but it is also a fixture for more than one generation. The camera then moves, without a cut, to show the river underneath it, indexing natural time while also operating as a metaphor for the flow of time, and we may assume, unless contra- dicted in the film later which it is not that the river is a long-term feature of the land- scape and was there well before industriali- sation came about. The shot then holds and tilts slightly to reveal, in the distance, a group of kids splashing about in the river. Here, generational and maturational time are added to the temporal layering, but this phase of the shot also inaugurates a sense of the recent past, a new beginning and a settled group of people all at the same time, includ- ing an indication of a moderate degree of affluence since the children have the time to go and play together. In one brief sequence shot, Hou establishes the scene, inaugurates the story and orchestrates a dense network of temporal rhythms, incarnated in the land- scape that frames the events that will unfold. What is more, the distances involved (e.g. starting with the bridge in mid-shot and going via the river to the kids in long-shot) convey also that the physical, geographical and industrial context in which the kids are playing has to be registered and taken into account in its own right as important if we are to understand something about those children. In other words, the shot very economically places the youngsters in a complex temporal frame in which a variety of historical rhythms coagulate to form a landscape that shapes the world inhabited by the children. Cutting straight to the kids splashing about would divert attention from this context and reduce the landscape to a more or less atmospheric backdrop for a discourse about eternal, universal child- hood such as conventional humanist, char- acter-centred narratives might (and often do) wish the viewers to deploy as the relevant cognitive frame for understanding the film. Valentina Vitalis contribution to this collec- tion cites examples from the American trade journal
Variety
that advocates such a reading of the children in the film, ignoring the mise en scne of the shot that I have just described (Vitali 2008). Similarly, later in the same film, Hou pans the camera across the crown of a tree, then tilts down to kids climbing the tree, then up again to the crown. This shot comes after a scene in which grandpa shows some old photographs to his grandson. No voices are heard explaining the scenes depicted in the photographs, but grandpa is seen point- ing out details to the boy who is decidedly interested in them (or in the unheard expla- nation). The photographs date back to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Cutting from that scene to the tree and the kids climb- ing into it, evokes a temporality that incorpo- rates the period of Japanese occupation into the diegetic present of the narrative, with the trees temporality (the tree obviously has been there for at least as long as grandpa has been alive and therefore was there at the time of the occupation) binding together elements of historical, natural, generational and biographical time, not to mention the long- term (ancestral) past and the recent past (childhood) of the films narrator.
Good Men, Good Women
(1995) opens with a long-held shot of a group of people walking through a landscape. They sing a patriotic socialist song that dates the scene: they are on their way to join the Communist uprising in mainland China. Here, again, the D o w n l o a d e d
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295 shot weaves together a complex web of temporal rhythms, ranging from those at work in the landscape (with a beautiful tree prominently featuring, its leaves registering the movement of the wind) to the historical time of Chinese nationalism, the political time of the relations between Taiwan and China as well as of the civil war, the biographical time of the protagonists who become more individuated and distinct as they come nearer the camera, and the tempo- ral rhythms involved in social reproduction (especially at a time of violent social change). In this opening shot, we also have an emphatic deployment of cinematic time (the sequence shot lasts for quite a few minutes), which, by the end of the film, when the shot is repeated, has acquired further temporal dimensions: it is a shot of a film-within-a- film, derived from a play the performance of which irrupts into the film at various times based on an autobiography of an actress whose story forms the impetus of the film while being juxtaposed with the biography of a young, contemporary Taiwanese actress whose life-story occupies the time-frame of the post-White Terror generation. Different historical, cinematic and biographical temporalities resonate in the same shot when it is reprised at the end of the film. Further examples can be given, also in
Good Men, Good Women
, of Hous way of cutting tempo- ral networks and resonances together, at times moving from colour to black-and- white, that convey the loss of the ideals of solidarity that animated the actors who went to join the Communist revolution and the growth of a painfully competitive individu- alism in the last few decades, incarnated primarily in the young modern actresss life. The transition here is marked by a black-and- white shot of a bicycle rider at night as he goes to fix a public notice in a village announcing the brutally repressive measures taken by the Chang Kai-shek government. We only see the beam of the bicycles light on a narrow gravel path and the riders pedalling feet, as if the narrative is moving through the narrow point of an egg-timer. Many commentaries on Hous films also refer prominently to the alleged Chineseness of the films, invoking the importance of Chinese aesthetics, philosophy and pictorial traditions. Such references are less than helpful. Let me illustrate this point by way of a reference to a Taiwanese film made by King Hu just a few years before the so-called Taiwanese New Cinema took off:
Raining in the Mountain
(1979). Hus film engages directly with Buddhist philosophy and explicitly quotes established, classical pictorial compositions derived from Chinese painting, especially in the long opening sequence of the film showing three people journeying on foot through landscapes. These painting-citations are impressive, even beautiful, but pictorialist, static. The images are given as tableaux for contempla- tion. The landscapes featured are presented as compositions to be appreciated aestheti- cally. In that sense, one could say that King Hus film engages directly with aspects of so-called traditional Chinese aesthetics. On the other hand, many critics, and not only in the Orientalist West, emphasize Hous traditional Chinese aesthetics, even though his films do not look in the least like
Raining in the Mountain
s opening sequence. Yan, for instance, argues that Hous films illustrate traditional Chinese aesthetics because they are grounded in a fusion of the human with nature (Yan 1988). While there is probably truth in such a claim, it fails to note the difference between King Hus pictorialism and Hous way of inscribing figures in land- scapes. I would argue that Hou does indeed engage with various aspects of aesthetic thought in China (how could it not be?), but that he accentuates the transformative potential within such images, the energies that make and un-make such landscapes. In other words, while King Hu cites and tries to follow a notion of classic Chinese aesthetic practice, Hou cites aspects of classical picto- rialism in order to allow for the emergence of the energy pressures at work in the depicted scene. Hus engagement with clas- sical aesthetics is citational and normative, Hous is transformative. And this brings me to my tentative and somewhat risky closing remarks. I have talked about Hous films as forcefields on D o w n l o a d e d
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the join between diachronic pressures and the perennial temptation of restful stasis. Here I simply want to note an impression left by Hous last two films to date,
Millennium Mambo
(2001) and
Caf Lumire
(2004). The spaces in
Millennium Mambo
are extremely restricted, while
Caf Lumire
is set in Japan. Especially with regard to the last film, I have the impression that the further Hous films go from the diagnostic- synoptic forcefield mise en scne he deploys to convey life-scapes in the ChinaTaiwan historical nexus, the more abstract his films become. As the dynamic, energised weight of history becomes lighter, less directly and immediately felt in all its dimensions, the films accentuate more and more the kinetic lines traced by temporal rhythms. Especially in
Caf Lumire
, scenes have become cross- roads, spaces where lines of communica- tion, urban transit and train lines intersect. The impression left on me, at least is that the powerful but sometimes very slow moving rhythms of social, generational and biographical histories that shaped Hous images have come to be replaced by the kinetic networks of transport and communi- cation technologies. The peculiar combina- tion of stasis and movement incarnated by communication and transport networks appears to have replaced the more long- term historical forcefields on display in Hous earlier films, as if the thickness of experienced life in Taiwan has dissolved somewhat, leaving instead almost abstract, graphic spaces energised by the potential intersection of the different kinetic rhythms of communicational and transport networks that simultaneously connect and fix
2
or freeze social relations. If I had to characterise the relevance of Hous films in contemporary world cinema, it is to that shift from one notion of historical dynamics to another that I would look for a possible answer.
Notes
1. In a remarkable essay, Chua Beng Huat tried to circumscribe an East Asian public sphere by tracing a voice speaking of cultural-economic connectivity through the circulation of the most banal cultural artefacts, news and gossip maga- zines. See Chua (2004). 2. I use fix here in the sense of David Harveys reliance on the concept of capitals spatial and temporal ways of fixing the problems involved in the falling rate of profit. See David Harvey (2003, esp. pp. 4344).
References
Bergala, Alain (2004)
Trafic
50: 23. Bordwell, David (2005)
Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging,
Berkeley: University of California Press. Chua, Beng Huat (2004) Conceptualising an East Asian popular culture,
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
5(2): 200221. Harvey, David (2003)
The New Imperialism,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2003) In search of new genres and directions for Asian Cinema, Lin Wenchi (trans.),
Rouge
1, http://www.rouge.com.au/1/ index.html. Jones, Kent (1999) Cinema with a roof over its head,