Global Cinema Networks 0813592720, 9780813592725

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GLOBAL CINEM A NET WORKS

Media Matters Media Matters focuses on film, television, and media within a transnational and interdisciplinary frame: environmental media, media industries, media and democracy, information media, and global media. It features the work of scholars who explore ever-expanding forms of media in art, everyday, and entertainment practices. Under the codirection of Patrice Petro and Cristina Venegas, the series is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The center seeks to foster innovative and collaborative research that probes the aesthetic, political, economic, artistic, and social processes of media in the past and in our own time. Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, eds., Global Cinema Networks

GLOBAL CINEM A NET WORKS Edited by

Elen a Gorfinkel a nd Ta mi W illi a ms

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gorfinkel, Elena editor. | Williams, Tami, 1970– editor. Title: Global cinema networks / edited by Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams. Description: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Series: Media matters | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017055375 | ISBN 9780813592732 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813592725 (softcover) | ISBN 9780813592749 (epub) | ISBN 9780813592763 (web pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—History—21st century. | BISAC: Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | Art / Film & Video. | Social Science / Media Studies. Classification: LCC PN1995 .G5435 2018 | DDC 791.4309/05—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055375 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2018 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks Elena Gorfinkel

1

Part I: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics 1

Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema Dudley Andrew

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2

Frame Adrian Martin

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3

Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China John David Rhodes

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The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary James Tweedie

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4

Part II: Global Ideality, History, Representation 5

Toward an Archaeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt and Its Reception in France Laurent Guido

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When Cinema Was Humanism Karl Schoonover

7

African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation N. Frank Ukadike

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Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema Patricia White

97 117

141 159

v

vi

Contents

Part III: Kinships, Identifications, Genres 9

10

Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema Luisela Alvaray

181

Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance Peter Y. Paik

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The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández Gilberto M. Blasini

214

12

The Gangster Film as World Cinema Jian Xu

228

Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema Tami Williams

244

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Index

251 253 257

GLOBAL CINEM A NET WORKS

INTRODUCTION Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks Elen a Gor f inkel

The last two decades have seen both a reconsideration of the geopolitics of cinema as global art form, commodity, and industry and a sense of a world unmoored and rewritten by processes of globalization and technologization. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf optimistically characterized emergent digital technologies and the global reconfiguration they offered for film in an affirmative, liberatory light: The digital revolution will surpass that imbalance. The First World will thus lose its centrality of vision as the dominant view of the world. The globality of our situation will no longer leave any credibility for the assumptions of a centre and a periphery to the world. We are now beyond the point of thinking that we received the technique from the West and then added to it our own substance. As a filmmaker, I will no longer be just an Iranian attending a film festival. I am a citizen of the world. Because from now on the global citizenship is no longer defined by the brick and mortar of houses or the printed words of the press, but by the collective force of an expansive visual vocabulary.1

Makhmalbaf ’s enthusiasm for the onset of digital cinemas was grounded in a hope that more filmmakers, working in non-Western nations and outside of hegemonic, capital-intensive industries, would gain access to film technologies. The potentials of democratized access could, in her estimation, rewrite the codes of cultural citizenship—eschewing material, spatial, national, and linguistic boundaries—and point to a truly global aesthetic unbounded by location and pervasive hierarchies between center and periphery. Although 1

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the utopian possibilities Makhmalbaf envisioned have not necessarily come to pass, the rhetorical force of her assertions—and the cinematic imaginary they construct—provide a useful point of departure for considering the status of world cinema and the discourses that have attended it almost two decades on. The notion of world cinema itself seems to have emerged as a concept, discursively, as Michael Chanan has suggested, in the context of both said digital transformation and a slightly older paradigm shift—namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall in 1989–1991 and the onward march of neoliberalism after.2 To take account of these technological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical transformations, Global Cinema Networks brings together international film scholars to discuss the aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social figurations of global cinema in the twenty-first century. It thus engages in a conversation about the shifting sites of global cinema in an era of digital reproduction and amid new modes of filmic circulation and aesthetic convergence, taking analytic aim particularly at recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Alongside this investigation of contemporary forms, the volume likewise looks back at instances in film history that present points of contact between historical discourses of globalization and the “worldliness” of cinema and the bleeding edge of contemporary film practices.

Cinema’s Place The turn-of-the-twenty-first-century anxiety regarding the waning of the analog film medium has coincided with the slow attrition of a physical location for gathering, a place for cinema to collectively take place. Makhmalbaf ’s speech itself alludes to the reduced primacy of the spatial as a determinative feature of the digital. The medium’s fundamental dispositif in theatrical exhibition has shifted and continues to move toward varied personalized and particularized modes of delivery and nodes of ever-more-granular contact with screens.3 Perhaps the narratives of celluloid cinema’s loss and decline partake too much in a nostalgic alliance and affinity for the material, starkly opposed to the immaterial. Yet film theory has continually reminded us of cinema’s originating virtuality and its material immateriality.4 It is hard to dispute that in the context of the digital era, the pragmatic coordinates of making films and watching films have reshaped the film medium—its formal features and modes of circulation, exhibition, and reception in this new century. The spatial and temporal coordinates of contemporary life in postindustrial modernity have continually expanded and contracted as the presence and drive of instantaneity, a ceaselessly networked now-ness, organizes life and labor across scales, distances, and time zones. The “flexibility” of digital forms of watching moving images—or in less fortunate phrasing, instantly “accessing content”—makes

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film seem more present, accessible, interwoven in world spectators’ daily lives while also seeming more dispersed, diffracted, ephemeral, transient. Thus the impress of technological, as well as economic, ideological and social networks on an idea of the moving image in its imbrication with an idea of the global is undeniable. Consequently, the very question of the place and location of cinema—as evoked in Makhmalbaf ’s resounding call for a global film aesthetic driven by a victory of accessible technology over the tyranny of “technique”—has been challenged in relation to film’s changing status as object, medium, industrial commodity, exhibition apparatus. Vinzenz Hediger notes that recent debates in film studies have opened up the status of film as medium alongside the place of cinema, as defined by location and the national. He writes, “What cinema is can no longer be defined just by an enumeration of artistic achievements hailing from specific places of cultural origin. The list and the map are in crisis.”5 Lists and maps—the very ordering, epistemic frames through which world cinemas have been cataloged, evaluated, zoned, and rezoned—have also come into question. Some of this collection’s contributors, particularly Dudley Andrew, Adrian Martin, Jian Xu, and Patricia White, pursue such lines of inquiry. Their work attests to the challenge posed to fixed filmic geographies and the crisis of some of its spatial metaphors and the need to seek other emergent models and frameworks that might exceed the ossification of the reductively national, locational, or territorial. Such discussions, of course, aren’t new in world cinema scholarship, which has examined transnational cinematic flows and has also expanded and reasserted the fundamentally mobile, polycentric identities of global film practices, taking into account regional specificities in relation to processes and methods that cut conceptually across times, spaces, and geographies.6 In his own account, Hediger claims that on the register of both the theoretical and the discursive, the very notion of world cinema is itself a “symptom of this topological turmoil.”7 He continues, The category of World Cinema may be understood in terms of an attempt to retain, or regain, the lost unity of the object “cinema.” The concept of World Cinema contributes to the work of redrawing the maps of cinema, of cinema as an experiential space, of cinema as an object of affect and perception, and of cinema as a cultural object. Whether we discuss the crisis of the dispositif or the various topographies and topologies of cinema, we are engaged in what Gaston Bachelard . . . calls “a task of geometrisation,” a task of ordering the phenomenon under analysis in a spatial representation, and thus in creating new taxonomies for our object of study, the cinema.8

With such topological turbulences, by no means absolute, emerge some considerable paradoxes. One may find that even as access to forms of global film cultures increases and proliferates at new sites and zones of relocation, such as the

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museum, the microcinema, as well as the personal screen and via the engorged digital “archive” (the streaming menu or Netflix queue, the YouTube watch list, the torrent collection), our wider sense of access diminishes, bound to the distressed, compressed scales of the temporal. The feeling of increasing time pressure and “social acceleration” in public and private life, as sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa has schematized, emerges out of an intensification of the global flow of capital, goods, objects, people, and images in a sped-up economy that privileges exchange and circulation, one that tends to erodes place-bound experience.9 This can be seen in the longer duree as the extended process of the “annihilation of space by time,” as Marx long ago proclaimed. Global cinema practices and aesthetics are not exempt from the impact of such economic, technological, and sociocultural acceleration, but they also present a countervailing potential and alternative models of temporal experience. Following Hediger’s implication in his consideration of the force of duration in the eminent Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s epic nine-hour documentary West of the Tracks (2003), it might be productive to move from conceptualizing global cinema as one that takes place to one that also takes time—that ever disappearing and seemingly scarce commodity.10 In works like those of Wang Bing and his contemporaries such as the Filipino Lav Diaz or the Malaysian-born Taiwanese Tsai Ming-liang, we are confronted with a global aesthetic whose idiom is an extended temporality wrought through the forging of a materialist image out of a profilmic reality, one that combines, according to Hediger, duration with “emanation,” this emanation being a “surplus that adds to the world.”11 Hediger thus persuasively claims that we must enter a new epistemic-analytic frame in thinking about world cinema, that of the “geo-temporal.”12 Indeed, the specific intersection of the geographical and geopolitical and the temporality of networked contemporary life, as well as the frameworks used to make sense of this geotemporal experience of the moving image in late capitalist modernity, require greater thought. Thus this collection examines what problems and questions are posed by new scales, experiences, and manipulations of temporality for thinking about and framing global cinema. While spatial metaphors and frameworks of location have and will continue to remain essential in understanding the global in world cinemas, especially as cinema contends with globalization, this collection asserts the conjunction of global cinema’s geopolitics with a contemporary approach to temporal forms.

Art Cinema, Global Aesthetics, Flexible Geographies Rather than attempting to redefine or critique global cinema or world cinema as a total category or a perfect ontology, seeking some lost unity or totality, how might one characterize global cinema today as well as account for the blind spots

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that have left many corners of world filmmaking practice unknown and undistributed to broader publics? What cinematic practices, shared spaces, and modes of collectivity persist or fall away in this era of increased digitization but also polarization? How does one consider what falls out of the system of mapping altogether—the nonnetworkable and unmappable? And most important, what modes and methods of analysis become salient in respects to such emergent forms of access, dispersal, and opacity? Employing a retrospective and synthetic set of strategies for accounting for both contemporary and historical iterations of global cinema, the chapters collected here conceive of the global filmic not only as a set of films, material practices, technological processes, or aesthetic categories but as an idea and ideality. In film studies as a field, the last two decades have come with an invigorated and efflorescent body of scholarship complicating the categories of global cinemas and world film practices. Different approaches have stressed variegated iterations of notions of the global, the local, and the world and have interrogated the complexities of the national and the transnational, and of forms of translation and transit, in considering the linkages and networks between cultures of filmmaking and film reception.13 Chanan, Thomas Elsaesser, and others have noted the preponderance of art or auteur cinema or what Argentinian filmmakers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas considered Second Cinema in defining the constellation of world cinema.14 Tracing the development of films, filmmakers, and aesthetics associated with art cinema, Global Cinema Networks follows on the work of Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, who have productively historicized a consideration of global art cinemas in the context of “world cinema studies.” They assert the notion of art cinema as necessarily always already a global or world cinema, as they have insisted on the hybrid, impure nature of this mode, with its “ambivalent” relationality to institution, industry, location, and genre but also its geopolitical urgency in how it allows us to think about the global, the comparative, and the transnational precisely through cinematic form.15 Many of the contributors here consider films that fall under the banner of transnational art cinema. As coeditors, collaborators, and cinephiles, we were struck by one manifestation in world cinema over the course of the aughts—that of a slow cinema aesthetic, discussed in varied ways by several contributors (Martin, Tweedie, Andrew, Blasini, Rhodes). This formal tendency employs a predominantly realist, contemplative, long-take tradition associated with midcentury and political modernisms, but it also departs from or remakes modernist aesthetics in a variety of ways. Seen in contemporary films by noted and emergent makers (e.g., Jia Zhangke, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Tsai, Pedro Costa, Kelly Reichardt, and Lisandro Alonso, among many others), it must also be contended with in the novelty of its insistence on the cinematicity of the moving image precisely as the medium

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and large national industries have transitioned toward digital modes of shooting, editing, postproduction, projection, and storage.16 The durational aesthetic strategies of slow cinema makers both dialogue with modernist European canons in their formal register and also derive complexly from local specificities and indigenous modes of image making and storytelling. Their geotemporal interventions require the spectator to prioritize form and the phenomenology of filmic spectatorship while also demanding an attentive and attuned gaze. A prominent example is the work of Thai-born Cannes Grand Prix winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose diasporic travels to film school in Chicago eventually returned him to his home in Thailand, a rich site in which he has made haunting, perplexing films that embed the trajectories of a long-take style with indigenous, spiritual narrativities and allegorical figuration that bespeak recent political struggles, folk oral traditions, and ghostly tales. In the early 2000s, the modes of slow aesthetics seemed to be truly global and pervasive, circulating across national boundaries and appearing in distinct forms in films from Argentina, Thailand, Turkey, Taiwan, Iran, and Romania, among other locations. In some cases, the tendency was accused of falling into a generic or “default international” or “festival style,” bespeaking the popularity of these films at international festivals and among curators and programmers more than in the maker’s home nations.17 This critique itself subscribes to a slightly cynical, albeit deeply infrastructural and ideological analysis of the geopolitics of the festival scene as a determinative economic, taste, and aesthetic network. It acknowledges the complicated facture of the category of location or region as a useful heuristic for understanding world film practices. But could one also see the aesthetic of slow cinemas through the spirit of the “collective force” of global conventions utopically described by Makhmalbaf in her paean to the political and representational possibility of digital modes, particularly for non-Western filmmakers? And further, if we were to decenter both auteurism and nation as primary templates of meaning, what might it mean that a film might be more of a festival (funded, say, by the Hubert Bals Fund or made at a transnational pedagogical outpost/ training ground that attracts diasporic filmmakers) than of a nation, national context, or a placed site—subject to the collective flows, friendships, interests, and concatenations of care and influence? With the scholarly rise of film festival studies as well as new industrial histories and analyses of production cultures and funding operations, such networks of circulation and production become eminently more legible and can necessarily be subjected to deeper interrogation.18 Emblematic of a globalizing aesthetic form that seems to both insistently inscribe and refute locality, “slow” films are testaments to the hybridized maps of festival cultures, networks of geopolitical aesthetic influence, and more dispersed and diffractive modes of distribution and circulation facilitated by the digital era. But they also, in their formal preoccupations with decelerative time,

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suggest a forceful and persuasive critique of time pressure in and of a neoliberal moment as well as alternative models of attention, care, and being-with. Looking beyond this instance of global film practices and new aesthetic forms as resoundingly global in their scope and reach, as editors we were keen to consider other such points of formal and representational convergence in global cinemas and to pose the question to the work of globality as equally an aesthetic and a political project. Along with the manifestation of the slow film, with its insistence on durational presence, what is made visible in the “network narrative” and “modular” multiple-protagonist films of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) or Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007)—a mode discussed also by contributor Adrian Martin—is the figuration of human connection and connectivity. Network narratives evidence that world cinema practices are indexing something about the fractious nature of human relationality in late capitalism, and the stakes and costs of globalization seen otherwise across borders and territories.19 Such cinemas dramatize the visibility of circuits of exchange between historical and contemporary aesthetic traditions as well as the networks and connections among different regions, film cultures, and practices. In the present moment, network connectivity is itself a pervasive and pernicious discursive and ideological trope that conceals other relations of power. In addition to tracking films that explore sensory realism and temporal experimentation and that allegorize networks, this collection seeks to understand how historical forms and styles might recur or grow recursive in ways inclusive of, but not necessarily limited to, strategies of temporal experimentation. What persists, loops, and belatedly returns in new cinematic materializations, conventions, and locations in the broad field of practice of world cinema studies? Might there be historical antecedents and conversations to be drawn from not only the network between different “waves” and periods of filmmaking but also unexpected or comparative frameworks or methodologies?20 And might there be ways to think the coexistence or, as Martin suggests here, “multihistorical,” valences of “late cinema” as we know it and new digital forms with practices linked to early cinema traditions—for example, in the instance of thinking a “new silent cinema” or a cinematic atavism?21 And how might the very historicity of global cinema or world cinema as a category be complicated by such elastic geotemporalities?

Movements, Circulations, Processes of Global Cinemas Therefore, what began with an impulse to assess a very specific aesthetic formation in the context of digital networks has developed into a collection that has tasked key scholars—who have elsewhere persuasively written about world

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cinemas—with addressing the multivalent changes occurring in transnational and global film culture in aesthetic and technological terms as well as through the prisms of methodology and historicity. The category of analysis of “world cinema” is a troubled and problematized one, complicated by varied accounts and disputes in film studies over the past decade. Skeptics of the category have framed a series of productive questions, among them, Is world cinema merely a way to package, intellectually or pedagogically, the film practices of non-Western nations or to append the films of the Global South by Eurocentric scholars? Is world cinema a useful category at all in light of its definitional associations with the complicated articulations of the fields of world literature or world music?22 And further, is world cinema a way to make scholars from white Anglo-European nations comfortable with what they do not yet know about distant parts of the world, collocated in a convenient package for pedagogical use? These are all compelling and persuasive questions that speak to the limitations and generativity of the concept. While we prefer the appellation global cinema, which partly evades the presumption of world, it is instructive to adhere to what Lucia Nagib so rightly proposes in order to produce a “positive” and productive concept for the ethical category of world cinema. Nagib argues that it is necessary to think world cinema through something other than the frame of “otherizing or exoticizing”; instead, we must consider it as a “cinema of the world . . . as circulation.”23 The framing is novel and urgent not only because it harnesses the necessary element of movement so central to cinema’s formal substrate but because it recalibrates cinema’s worldliness as a function of its capacity to move. Nagib invites us to see film itself as a form of cultural movement and transit in process. The flows and transits of cinema also align with the exceedingly speedy and instantaneous manner through which digital technology and its global networks facilitate, redirect, and sometimes confound access. Nagib configures world cinema as a formation that exceeds disciplinarity and can become a methodological project—a process as much as an object, “a way to cut across history according to waves of relevant films and movements, thus creating flexible geographies.”24 Nagib invites film studies scholars to think reflexively about how we frame or engage the notion, not only in a constant state of redefinition, but also apart from the persistence of oppressive and limiting binary modes of analysis, embracing multiple and emergent theoretical frameworks.

Times and Networks This volume contains diverse perspectives on an idea of a world that has expanded and contracted—made both too near and too far, moving both too fast and too slow—through emergent media technologies and processes of

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globalization in a time more and more defined by the presence, operation, and permeation of networks. From file-sharing networks to social media to informatics infrastructures, cellular forms, viral contaminations, and social and political organizations, networks have become, for better or worse, one of the reigning metaphors and modes of sensemaking of the twenty-first century. The network has become seemingly the most persuasive contemporary formal model for mapping nonhierarchical, relational connections; interactions; processes; flows; and exchanges across complex systems.25 In the enmeshing of users and producers in digital distribution economies and production ecosystems, the utility of networks operates as an explanatory model that seems to better account for the relations between agents and large-scale systems, sedimenting interactions and exchanges over time. Networks—as image and concept—are being marshaled to examine not only digital or communication forms but also economic, industrial, affective, aesthetic, and neural nets. Through their material and discursive ubiquity, networks reconfigure the valence, mobility, and legibility of world film practices, able to frame both historical and emergent patterns. However, both recent developments and dark underpinnings of the digital economy have only confirmed the insights of media theorists Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Seb Franklin, among others, who remind us that networks are not neutral or value-free.26 Networks are always means and instruments of control, of uneven power dynamics, even as the idea or image of networks is called on to signify untrammeled freedom or autonomy. Chun articulates how networks are often made isomorphic with the “free flow” of trade in global markets and the liquidity of speculative finance.27 She argues that the specific temporalities of the twenty-first-century media environment are organized by an illusion of empowered media consumption and autonomous taste building; as “produsers,” we provide free attentive labor and aggregated data in our everyday browsing, working, buying, and preferential activities to media conglomerates.28 Tastes, habits, consumer choices—the very materials of late capitalist consumer identity—become the iterative substrate and invisible labor of digital life. And most recently, the furor regarding the utilization of data aggregated from social media to swing and influence U.S. elections suggests that the ideology of network connectivity trades the attention-capital of user desire in service of the political manipulation of our material and social realities. Chun, for her part, details how the imagination of the network and the desire to use networks as epistemic tools, as models for social and systemic totality, has dovetailed with the historic development of neoliberalism and the metastases, booms, and busts of global capitalism in its late financialization stage.29 By identifying and ascertaining the workings of networks, contemporary thinkers aim to engage in more salubrious modes of elaborating the aesthetic in relation to the social. Chun reminds us that it was Fredric Jameson, in his notion of cognitive

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mapping, who proposed that the inability of subjects to locate themselves within the unfathomable operations of global capital was the very symptom of postmodernity.30 For a number of this volume’s contributors, Jamesonian cognitive mapping is evoked as an evocative, if now historical, form of analysis against which to consider and grapple anew with questions of perspective, point of view, granularity, and scale in world cinema. To the extent that networks seem, for the time being, to address or ameliorate a desire to grasp and grapple with the unfathomable scale of global capital, Chun suggests that the epistemological desire for totality to which technological networks appeal works to conceal the true meanings of the failures and fissures of any epistemic system. The conceptual and practical value of those failures, inefficiencies, and blind spots is precisely where the political possibility of networks resides—in the linkage to imaginaries and imaginations of the collective, not as a “swarm,” but as a democratic assembly and radical collective, an assemblage and route toward political feeling and action. In another domain of humanistic criticism, the prevalence of thinking network as form, or what Patrick Jagoda calls “network aesthetics,” necessitates an interrogation of infrastructural, affective, and phenomenal components of visual media in relation to our experience of moving images.31 Like Jagoda, Caroline Levine takes a formalist, rather than a historical materialist, tack to a consideration of the network as a formal device that operates through expansions, crossings, chance, and intersection—one that reaffirms ways of reading the social in the “affordances” of aesthetic form.32 What does this quandary of the tyranny and utility, the potentials and dangers, of network temporalities imply for cinema in its dispersed, diffracted, and remediated fate as it persists and reforms itself—embedded in various other intertextual media? And to what degree does the network reconfigure or erode the spatiality of the global—and indeed, of global cinema—through its temporal manipulations and colonizations of lived time with the time of technicity? A cinematic instantiation and global imagining of the affective, embodied, and unevenly lived components of a network temporality appears in the recent feature of Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams, whose film El auge del humano (The Human Surge; 2016) pursues uncharted terrain in its formal and narrative experimentation. Resembling experimental ethnography as well as the laconic dream states seen in the films of Weerasethakul, this roving hybrid docufiction is structured as a triptych, unfolding in three locations: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Maputo, Mozambique; and Bohul province in the Philippines. The film also uses multiple formats for each segment—Super 16mm, Blackmagic digital camera reshot off a computer on Super 16mm, and RED digital video, respectively—implying a heretical, hybrid approach to platforms and the cinematicity of the image. The film consecutively follows three groups of twentysomethings, mainly young men, as they wander through their respective towns

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seeking employment, killing time, looking at their cell phones, talking in chatrooms, and waiting and trying to “connect,” catch a Wi-Fi signal, and get online. The temporal atmosphere of the film is languid, yet its idiom is mobile, as the moving camera inventively follows and observes its subjects with both detachment and a quality of intimacy. Actors both play for and improvise with the camera within their own life worlds, shooting the shit, talking pop philosophy, and speculating. Moving from flooded city streets and cramped family apartments in Buenos Aires, to a town in Mozambique, to a rural province in the Philippines, one of the key devices that spectacularly connects one location with the next is the use of a cut that conjoins and occupies networks. In one striking scene, the Argentinian lads pose and partake in sex acts with each other on a webcam (presumably, they do this for some precious cash); while this transpires, a zoom in on the screen links performers and their presumptive viewers, the subjects of the subsequent section of the film in Maputo. Such magisterial and showy shifts of perspective and location via a technical interface embody a twenty-first-century aesthetic invested in the dead times within networked life. They also manifest a cinematic navigation of the network form in a fusion of connective motifs—the cut, the narrative axis, and the compression, collapse, and distance between simultaneously existing geotemporal worlds. Williams cast nonprofessional actors, some of whom he met through friends and some of whom he found or friended or scouted on social media, a technological form embedded in the film’s diegetic and extradiegetic labor practices. The improvisatory, ambling, durational quality of the work is tempered with its keen sense of casual yet persistent movement and circulation, and it is

Figure I.1. Laconic connectivity and the latency of the network in The Human Surge (Edu-

ardo Williams, 2016)

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driven by a keen understanding of precarious labor and youth culture and an affinity for temporal affects and habits in the Global South. For these youth, the virtues of the network form seem to be bound up in its promise, but in practical terms, it is in fact an architecture of failure, asynchrony, and unrequited desire. In the final third, disparate geographical and filmic spaces are hyperbolically linked through the camera’s zoom into an anthill and reappearance in an earthy patch located in Bohul—a cosmic movement that enters into the buzzing geological loam of the earth itself. We convene with youngsters who wander through a forest, eventually landing at a swimming hole, while they discuss where they might find internet access. As dusk settles, they continue to walk, seeking a cybercafé but finding that they have all closed. The film concludes with images from a cold-surfaced, blue-tinged factory, a lab that inspects parts of tablet computers, bringing the unequal access to and the uneven temporalities of the networked age to a conclusion on images of the activated, abstracted screens themselves, the labor of their assembly or manufacture decidedly offscreen. Emblematic of the cinema that Makhmalbaf perhaps imagined, and an antidote to the romance and chronicity of connectivity figured in the more popular genre form of the network narrative, Williams’s The Human Surge embodies the geotemporal possibilities of a twenty-first-century global cinema finding its cinematic idiom and its form in the very material conditions and realities out of which the network imaginary is forged.

Chapters, Frameworks, Interventions Taking up this notion of flexible geographies and geotemporalities in the contexts sketched previously of the age of the network, this collection approaches the question of world cinema through a set of frames that remain persistent and relevant despite changing priorities in film culture and film studies. These frames, specifically those of methodology, temporality, and aesthetics of abstraction and geopolitics; of identity, history, and representation; and of generic forms and modes of kinship, allow us to open the conversation on world cinemas to new juxtapositions, forms of analysis, and comparative interpretive and historiographic strategies. The chapters here move through and against a set of allegorical figures, themselves models of cinema’s capaciousness as frame, window, and portal onto and of the world (Martin, Andrew). They also oscillate between conceptions of surface and depth (Rhodes, Tweedie); between horizontality and verticality (Schoonover, Guido); between the overwhelming and inherently constrained mythos of open access and the creative possibilities borne out of conditions of social regulation, restriction, and economic privation that give shape to political subjectivities (Ukadike, White, Blasini); and between the formulaic, quixotic,

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and compliant and the transformative, transgressive, and violating elements of global forms and genres (Xu, Alvaray, Paik). In all the chapters here, our contributors consider the persistence of certain units of knowledge and tropes or motifs that might guide new understandings of global cinema. Despite claims of a borderless, territorially unfixed world facilitated by technological networks and globalizing capital, the pervasiveness of spatial metaphors requires new languages to make sense of cinema’s forms—in terms of the space of the social and the space of the image itself and the cinematic image as a spatial form, rendered in new times and temporalities. The chapters also foreground the question of temporality itself as a determinative quality of the global. Although of late we have witnessed an insistence in critical theory and humanistic scholarship on the value of nonrepresentational analysis, our contributors point to the radical necessity to not foreclose on the politics of representation and the embeddedness of cinema in notions of identity, even in a discursive culture that seeks or fetishizes the asubjective or anti-identitarian. And even as some have challenged a “grand theory,” or the indulgences of theorization, our contributors remind us that the fate of humanistic inquiry lies in its capacity to understand the function of abstraction. Abstraction requires the theoretical in order to grapple with the workings of power, ideology, and their uneven and shifting relations, and our contributors engage vigorously with theoretical framings that might most productively render world cinema a new concept. Further, they examine the way that the forms and formal components of cinema are themselves politically instrumental. They show us how filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Tsai, Akin—in their use of a filmic frame, the functionality of a cut, the heft of a long take, the revision of a genre—inscribe such forms with relations of power but also the means of its critique. The chapters here stage conversations about aesthetics, space and ideology, history, politics and identity, and generic modes. In the first part, on cartographies, geopolitics, and aesthetics, Dudley Andrew and Adrian Martin offer two diverse perspectives on cinema as a formal totality and the desire to grasp its shape through new hermeneutic tropes. Andrew revisits his earlier field-defining essays on world cinema, challenging his own reliance on the motifs of mapping and the atlas, rendering them insufficient, if still suggestive, models for imagining world cinema’s forms. Mobilizing the opposition of surface versus depth and playing with the implications of networks on global art cinemas, Andrew traces some motifs of mobility, connectivity, history, and memory in the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, Jafar Panahi, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, among others. Andrew calls for a return to depth as a way to get beyond the surface metaphors of maps and globes. This “geology of cinema” proposes a way to dig in, past instrumentalizing geographies, into the richness of moving-image practices in a widened temporal,

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historical, aesthetic, and technological frame. Discussing Panahi’s purloined, dissident documentary This Is Not a Film (2011), Andrew eloquently lays out the possibilities and trajectories of a twenty-first-century cinema that materializes and gives shape to the workings of history, even as it operates as a device of complex capture, a “mise-en-abyme” of Panahi’s own filming strategies and past films and the layered histories of Iranian cinema. Following on Andrew’s reflection on the tendencies of contemporary global aesthetics, Adrian Martin in turn considers the function of the frame itself as an operative logic and operational trajectory of recent world cinema. Seeking to ascertain, from a macro view, the presence of a global cinema aesthetic and approaching the problem multihistorically across varying time scales, Martin recovers a 1948 text by art historian Étienne Souriau on dramaturgical space in theater and the preponderance of the cube and the sphere as operating principles for theatrical form. Martin deploys these insights regarding dramaturgical geometries to work through the materialization of global film styles in the twenty-first century around the question of the frame and framing. Taking the formal limit of the frame as his case and his definitional parameter, Martin suggests that recent world cinemas move in one of two directions: toward reinforcing the frame or undoing it. Examining a kaleidoscopic range of filmic examples, from Terrence Malick to Pipilotti Rist, from Michael Haneke to Ken Jacobs, Martin suggests that recent global cinemas attempt either to reframe, in a state of composing, “working the frame,” or to deframe—that is, to “shatter” it—as their millennial options in the extremes of world moving-image culture. Both Andrew and Martin, in their distinct approaches to formal construction, present ways of thinking film history and film aesthetics dialectically, in a state of revision and reinscription. The conjunction of form with specific geospatial networks is examined subsequently by John David Rhodes and James Tweedie, who consider the function of urban geographies and of a spatial imaginary in the works of distinct groups of filmmakers that, while at odds, through the arguments elaborated here, produce many unexpected affinities. John David Rhodes considers the transhistorical formal legacy of Italian modernist art-house auteur Michelangelo Antonioni for contemporary slow or contemplative filmmakers, such as Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. Taking up the spatial logics of abstraction in Antonioni’s films, Rhodes makes a bold claim regarding the geopolitical nature of abstraction—refuting a rhetorical predisposition to view abstraction as an antipolitical mode of mere “empty” formalism. Examining Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo—China (1972) as a contested, controversial text, Rhodes anatomizes the cultural collisions rendered in both its reception and its form, considering the way conceptions of abstraction—from Wilhelm Worringer to Fredric Jameson’s theorization of cognitive mapping—might help us understand the labor of

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abstraction in Antonioni’s and other artists’ works. Abstraction, Rhodes claims, is fundamentally a juxtaposition between dissonant spatial and temporal coordinates indicative of the uneven logics of global capitalism, coordinates that engage and address a laboring spectator and extract a labor that is nothing if not a political form of thought. James Tweedie, in his contribution, questions the relations and interfaces between the urban and the cinematic, drawing on William Mitchell’s notion of the “city of bits” to consider the politics of space and conceptual abstraction at work in the formal features of contemporary Chinese documentaries. He looks to Chinese documentaries by Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing that negotiate between the industrial ruin and the futuristic utopia while also relying on an “atavistic” mode that hearkens back to strategies of realist representation from cinema’s earliest days. Tweedie explores how the stability of conditions of space itself is undermined by digital and capitalist development, which thus challenges the cartographic maps Andrew also questions in his chapter. Tweedie’s chapter operates as a productive foil for Rhodes’s claims and puts Jameson’s cognitive mapping to a different conceptual use to understand both the transformation of the Chinese city and landscape and the shifting allegiances and strategies of documentary makers in their spatial intervention in Chinese landscapes of development, reconstruction, resource extraction, and depletion. Extending the comparative conjunction of historical and contemporary cinemas across Andrew’s, Martin’s, Rhodes’s and Tweedie’s chapters, the second part of this book, concerning global ideality, history, and representation, moves across temporal scales to historical examples and precedents that might reframe world cinema as an interwar and postwar development—one mediated by critical spectators invested in the capacities of cinematic movement to figure and refigure the very definition of the human. The legacies of humanism are very deeply felt in the first two accounts of the specific historicity of world cinema, as they do the work of analyzing historical receptions as nodes and sites of knowledge production, places where new ideas of cinema’s worldliness and connectivity are being forged. Laurent Guido considers critical reaction to Walter Ruttmann’s Melodie der Welt (1929), a symphonic documentary that portends to present spectators with a “melody of the world” through a montage of affinities between starkly opposed geographical locations of human movement. As a predecessor of films such as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaansqatsi (1982), which use vanguard techniques to compress and condense global action, Guido argues that the reception of the film reveals critics attempting to ascertain a lexicon for a worldly rhythm and, by implication, a problematized model of human universality in an era of colonial encounter, rendered through new devices of cinematic form. In his chapter, Karl Schoonover, like Guido, deploys reception history and turns to moments of encounter in what Fred Turner has termed the “democratic

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surround” created by midcentury U.S. modes of visual culture.33 Schoonover traces the discursive construction of a postwar liberal humanist spectator, tendered through accounts of cinema as an apparatus for global, humanitarian feeling. Weaving together critical, intellectual, and industrial reception of films ranging from social-problem films, to Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946), to Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944), Schoonover synthesizes wide-ranging accounts of midcentury cinema around the emergent figuration of humanist “understanding” established in counterpoint to a notion of the American nation as stable, hegemonic ground from which to encounter the world in a new Cold War order. Tracing writing from Barbara Deming to Ralph Ellison, Siegfried Kracauer to Walter Wanger, Schoonover points to a historical moment where an idea of cinema as a global, affective form was being generated through its capacity to construct and move spectators into an engaged state of empathy and mimetic feeling, a blurring of “compassion and comprehension.” In another register of receptivity and humanism, the affective and the empathic provide some of the ground for the next two chapters, which explore representation’s stakes with respects to identities and social publics. N. Frank Ukadike examines the emergence of a new Nigerian cinema commonly known as Nollywood and its conjunction of technological expediency and narrative novelty, framing it as a new moment in the history of African cinema, one that diverges from the canons of earlier African auteur cinemas and embraces both video technologies and a cinematic populism as the basis of its immediacy and appeal to global audiences. In contrast to the overt political and aesthetic aims of earlier African cinemas, Ukadike argues that the commercial motivations of Nollywood filmmakers create a distinct, populist, mobile form. Nollywood’s low-budget mode of production, distribution, and storytelling offers access to new global markets and, in relying on popular modes and generic styles, provides emergence to new African voices and subjectivities. Patricia White extends her work on women’s cinema as world cinema, taking the case study of the diasporic Iranian American film by Maryam Keshavarz, Circumstance (2011), a film that thematizes the global circulations of lesbian identity in diasporic networks, moving between art-house publics and transnational feminist circuits. Situating the liminality of the film’s director as a diasporic Iranian American subject in relation to the films treatment of a cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical feminist lesbianism, White positions Circumstance as an emblematic and intersectional work, drawn from its currency as a mobile text with varied locations and significations—Iran, Lebanon, U.S. indie market, Iranian black market, and DVD and digital distribution. White illustrates the film’s circulatory liminality—its usage and awareness of lesbianism as a market “hook” and signifier of freedom and human rights seen through the frames of a “humanitarian gaze,” linked to what Schoonover has mapped in very different

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terms in his chapter. White’s account of Circumstance, not as a pure “foreign” film but as an independent, diasporic, and “accented” film—following on Hamid Naficy—allows us to consider the ecosystem of festival selection, global audiences, distribution networks, and notions of diasporic and sexual and gender identity constructing world cinematic meanings. The last part of the book, which focuses on kinships, identifications, and genres, continues the prior’s examination of identity formations and publics to sketch out new approaches to film genre and uses genre to frame new developments in film practice and film theory. These chapters take the shape of specific case studies of varied films, but they also make larger claims about genre as an instrument of global aesthetics. To the extent that genre houses representational tropes central to notions of family, gender, and nation, these chapters examine the central role in these locations of kinships—be they filial, taxonomic, or erotic—in constructing boundaries, territories, and power dynamics. Luisela Alvaray explores the representation of transgressive teenage subjectivities in recent Venezuelan films La hora cero (2010) and Hermano (2010), both made by first-time directors. Alvaray locates the preoccupation with errant or rebellious youth in contemporaneous demographic and sociocultural changes in Venezuela as well as in relation to film industrial trends and practices. Examining the popularity of youth as subjects and the immense financial success of both films, Alvaray contextualizes the deployment of violent teenage characters as the operation of a social critique, one that makes visible those marginalized and oppressed through apparatuses of state power and control in Venezuela’s recent history. Peter Paik, also using a case-study approach, takes on the perverse family dynamics of South Korean cinema, exploring in depth the ways the fatal mother figure in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) attests to the uneven path and quality of temporal compression in the nation’s experience of technological and developmental modernity. The notion of moral law in relation to South Korea’s uneven modernity manifests in characters that recalibrate the values and logics of the family as an absolute, absurdist, and violent order. Paik examines how Guem-ja, the avenging female protagonist, paradoxically is able to figure “universal” values while mediating the conflict between accelerating economic development and tradition. Gilberto Blasini examines the temporal structure of Julián Hernández’s films, extending a discussion of queer desire and new queer cinemas to the contemporary contexts of Latin American and specifically Mexican cinemas. Blasini explores how Hernández’s films articulate queer identity and longing, providing moments of formal interruption that queer the film’s allegiances to conventions of cinematic realism, the quotidian, and the everyday. Blasini’s analysis attests to the geopolitics of sexuality in cinema’s formal strategies and devices, as he

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elaborates a notion of “temporal corrugation” to map the translocal and transnational natures of queer desire as well as the ways the irruption of desire produces a sensory, and not merely sexual, “phenomenological attraction” for the spectator that operates at a formal level as well as in relation to cultural and social codes. In the collection’s final chapter, Jian Xu proposes that we consider the field of genre as a way to rethink world cinema, examining the labile and plastic nature of the gangster genre as a modality that moves across the globe, taking on specific forms in different production and regional contexts. Engaging with debates in the constitution of world cinema as a heuristic category and returning to Dudley Andrew’s earlier essays on atlases, maps, and vernaculars of world cinema, Xu offers a novel approach to reconsidering the gangster film.34 Mobilizing this popular genre in particular rather than art cinema, Xu contends that the gangster film is not merely a prevalent mode of American Depression–era cinema but a form that might speak across borders, thus enacting the flexible geography that Nagib proposes to articulate new codes and alternate imaginings of kinship, fealty, and origins. Xu helps us understand the dynamics and global appeal of codes of honor and violations of social order manifested in the figure of the gangster. This cognitive mapping of the genre allows for a radical comparativist project to emerge, one that considers global forms, local vernaculars, and films as an allegorical register of the “onset of capitalist modernity” as well as its ongoing mutations in the digital, networked present in new zones and geographies in developing nations. Rather than a universal code drawn from a Hollywood origin, in this figuration of global cinema, the popular genre opens onto a polycentric world. In conclusion, we return to what Hediger termed global cinema’s “geotemporal” dimension and its capacity for emanation and duration. The questions and political stakes of cinema’s capacity to make time as well as to steal, or take time, remain central to some of the guiding motifs of this book. What are the stakes of making and taking time for the ever-increasing variety of cinematic viewing experiences, even as the moving image itself is presented in more and more temporally truncated ways, diffused across multiple screens and locations? How might we coimplicate with screen time, as well as with the geological times of history, filmic and social? If not a shared space any longer, what remains of the shared time that global cinemas offer? If anything, what the contributions here reveal is the persistence of the ideality of global cinema, a geotemporal imaginary that houses multiple, polycentric, palimpsestic, overlapping worlds and relations.

Notes 1. Samira Makhmalbaf, “The Digital Revolution and the Future of Cinema (2000),” in Film

Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott Mackenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 580.

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2. Michael Chanan, “Who’s for ‘World Cinema’?” (Keynote paper presented at the Wild

Things of World Cinema Conference, King’s College London, May 2011), http://www .mchanan.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Reflections-on-World-Cinema.pdf. 3. On the notion of the cinematic dispositif, see Raymond Bellour, “The Film Spectator: A Special Memory,” in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch et al. (Vienna: Austrian Filmmuseum, 2012), 9–21; Adrian Martin, “Turn the Page: From Miseen-scène to Dispositif,” Screening the Past, no. 32 (August 2011), http://www.screeningthepast .com/2011/07/turn-the-page-from-mise-en-scene-to-dispositif/; Francesco Casetti, The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Erika Balsom, “A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins,” Screen 50, no. 4 (2009): 411–427. 4. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 5. Vinzenz Hediger, “What Do We Know When We Know Where Something Is? World Cinema and the Question of Spatial Ordering,” Screening the Past, no. 37 (October 2013), http:// www.screeningthepast.com/2013/10/what-do-we-know-when-we-know-where-something -is-world-cinema-and-the-question-of-spatial-ordering/, emphasis added. 6. In their discussion of remapping and reframing world cinemas, Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann propose a “longitudinal” and “latitudinal” approach that can account for both historical and geographical specificity and abstraction that, while using spatial metaphors of global navigation, holds the too-easy territorialization of cinema in check. See the introduction to The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, ed. Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–5. 7. Hediger, “What Do We Know?” 8. Hediger. 9. Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan TrejoMathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 10. On cinema’s historically embedded relationship to location and the function of cinema as index of place and place as index of cinema, see Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, introduction to Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, ed. Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), viii–xxix. 11. Hediger, “What Do We Know?” 12. Hediger. 13. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); Song Hwee Lim and Stephanie Dennison, eds., Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). 14. Thomas Elsaesser, “World Cinema: Realism, Evidence, Presence,” in Theorizing the Audiovisual Media, ed. Cecilia Mello and Lucia Nagib (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3–19; Chanan, “Who’s for ‘World Cinema’?” 15. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–30. 16. Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014); Ira Jaffe, Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Tiago De Luca and Nuno Barradas-Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Tiago De Luca, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).

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17. See Steven Shaviro, “Slow Cinema v. Fast Films,” The Pinocchio Theory (blog), accessed August 2017, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891. 18. Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); Cindy Hik Yung Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Festival Networks,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 82–107; Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne, eds., Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit (St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009). 19. David Bordwell, The Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2009), 189–252; Paul Kerr, “Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 37–51; Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 20. As contributor James Tweedie exhaustively analyzes in his book on global “new waves” in the East and West: The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 21. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo, eds., New Silent Cinemas (New York: Routledge, 2015). 22. See Lim and Dennison, Remapping World Cinema. 23. Lucia Nagib, “Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema, ed. Lim and Dennison, 35. 24. Nagib, 35. 25. A recent example of thinking network as form in literary theory is Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 26. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,” Theory Culture and Society 28, no.  6 (November 2011): 91–112; Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). 27. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Networks NOW: Belated Too Early,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed. David Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 289–315. 28. Chun, 293. 29. Chun, 294. 30. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 31. Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 32. Levine, Forms. 33. This extends his larger project, as seen in his book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), of considering midcentury liberal humanist regard vis-à-vis the corporeal operations of neorealism as a scene of global witnessing. 34. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 45, no. 2 (2004): 9–23; Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 59–89.

1 • BEYOND AND BENE ATH THE M AP OF WORLD CINEM A D udle y A ndre w

Cartography, New and Old We should expect to turn to maps when exploring a topic that bears a name like “world cinema.” Critics and historians didn’t come up with that term—the film industry did, just after the Great War ended, the “World War,” as it was called. The first studio took on the name “Universal” with its famous logo of the globe. Other entertainment powers followed, all of them projecting an aspiration to reach or control the world. Look at the image of RKO, which preceded each of its products wherever they were shown. When I first taught world cinema, I decided to make use of the model of an atlas of different kinds of maps that we could turn to—and return to—in taking account both of cinema’s complexity and of the equal complexity of its most interesting films. “An Atlas of World Cinema”1 was my first attempt to orient students within an unbounded field of research. Today, I find that article and the atlas inadequate. For the metaphor of the map—even the world map or globe—can be seriously misleading both in its grand ambition and in its local utility. We need a new cartography. So another metaphor subtended my second “orientation” article. This piece dealt with periods and phases in film history to complement the spatial emphasis of the atlas. I called it “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema.”2 The phrase time zones is found in any atlas, since these are often displayed on maps to distinguish the position of every place on Earth relative to the position of the sun, with twenty-four meridians corresponding to the hours of the day. Actually, the political map interferes with the pure logic of this map of twenty-four meridians, as anyone making a phone call from, say, 23

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Bogotá, Colombia, to Santiago, Chile, knows. These cities sit on nearly the same meridian, yet for some of the year, they are separated by two hours’ time. Rational time, the time of the sun and the Earth, is the plaything of politics. Beijing’s political decision defies its astronomers by submitting the entire country to its central clock, even if it takes the sun five hours to cross this nation. Being out of phase produces jetlag, the experience of crossing time zones, after flying through those meridians at a rate of speed high enough to blur two moments. “What time is it?” asks the bewildered traveler as he lands. “Where am I?” he wonders as he resets his watch and wonders if he should eat breakfast or dinner. The filmgoer might ask similar questions when emerging from the faroff setting of a particularly absorbing movie into the sunlight or the streetlight of his hometown. André Bazin felt this in São Paulo in 1954. Following the jetlag of flying to South America from Paris, he surely experienced the cinematic jetlag of looking at some 1954 Brazilian film just after seeing Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, which everyone agreed was the most “modern” film of that year. And what if a Chinese film of 1954 had been projected? It would have appeared as if it belonged to another decade. He would have felt pleasurably disoriented, for cinema is out of phase with itself. It is futile to map time and difficult to produce a cartography of film history or map the experience of any film. Take at random an art film from 2000 called Luna Papa. “Just where did Luna Papa take place?” I asked my students. “What is that language being spoken?” Titled Brillo de Luna when it played in Buenos Aires, it is a Tajik film, but why is the film listed on IMDB as an Italian production? If you turn to a map showing how many films come from Central Asia, hoping to locate more films like Luna Papa, you won’t discover much. But you can imagine the film’s distribution trajectory. What kinds of audiences had a chance to see it? Festival audiences, first of all. Luna Papa played in the major festivals (Venice, Berlin, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance), though no Asian or Latin American festival programmed it, nor did Hong Kong or Pusan. But besides its commercial run in Buenos Aires, it also played in Colombia after making the rounds in Italy, Russia, France—indeed, all over Europe except the English-speaking countries—and it was never released in U.S. theaters. If you were to follow the careers of a great many such films, you might arrive at a hypothesis about the distribution of cinematic taste or the marketing strategies governing various genres. You could also chart the ratio of films that come from “peripheral” regions but aim for a cosmopolitan audience, as opposed to those from the same region destined solely for local consumption. Maps can help scholars who research production statistics and box-office performance. With graphs, they can track fluctuating audience tastes. Hollywood studios in the classical era mapped out a worldwide marketing strategy. As Nataša Ďurovičová has noticed, the postwar world map that

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the studios drew up looks remarkably similar to the little globe visible today on the back of many DVD packages, displaying the six zones put in place to thwart piracy and capitalize on the staggered release of a title.3 In the classical Hollywood days, films would be rolled out one region at a time and progressively within the region after big-city premieres. But worldwide maps like this are of diminishing importance. Those DVD zones are quickly being obviated by all-region players as well as video streaming and YouTube, while theatrical distribution no longer requires trucks to carry cans of celluloid to the theater but merely passwords that allow projectors to instantly access the images that hover above us all in “the cloud.” We have come to believe in a global rather than an international cinema. But let’s not move to the cloud or the globe too quickly. The map delineating nations—the international map—may have lost its value, but regional maps can help film scholars; we can imitate demographers who track movements of people, diseases, fashion, and of course, cinematic fads, as these drift across contiguous areas like weather patterns bringing warm fronts, cold fronts, storms, and inundations. Maps work best for phenomena that overrun the political borders meant to control civil and cultural life. Neighboring peoples, despite the borders that separate them, are likely to share films, as they do language, food, and manufactured goods. Take East Asia, certainly the most complex and interesting region for film scholars. There you can see that national and international policies may regulate entertainment from the top down (through subsidy, taxes, trade agreements, censorship, and cultural missions), but popular culture, like religion and slang, has been able to spread in an unregulated fashion via migration, performance (song), the internet, and media piracy, spreading transnationally just as a fad or a disease spreads. Even if the source of a phenomenon like Hello Kitty or Astro Boy can be identified, the speed and directions of its expansion is worth mapping. Because of its history of economic and military dominance in the region, Japan would seem the likely origin of genres such as the ghost film that drift down the Pacific coast of Asia, with streams of films exhibited, then later produced, by South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore. Mainland China has been able to ward off many of these genres (even ghosts were unable to pass through its political walls), but around 2000, piracy, world trade agreements, and star images on the World Wide Web have changed things. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) didn’t produce a true ghost film until Painted Skin in 2008, but it is now turning out a couple each year. A map could show the bottom-up transnational movement of cinema in East Asia, as so many films draw on actors, genres, and money coming from different Asian locales.

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Regional or transnational maps can also be overvalued. This would certainly be the case for any map of the Balkans, since there has been surprisingly little cinematic traffic among Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. I wonder about the South American region, where languages and scripts are much closer to each other than they are in the East Asian region. Does the political map of nations still make sense here? How much have genres and styles moved from country to country, region to region, and across the globe through the decades? Understanding such movement was exactly Miriam Hansen’s enterprise in her “vernacular modernism” project, and it is at the heart of the recent studies of the “new waves” of the 1960s and 1980s that have been shown to wash around the globe, appearing on different shores.4 Since World War II, developments in cinema have best been tracked at the various film festivals, which always aim to turn up new trends. In fact, film festivals themselves have mutated over the decades, repeating the changing maps I have been pointing to; not only have they multiplied, but their function has changed. From 1945 to 1970, they were international: Cannes and Venice screened the films that were chosen by each nation to represent it, like the Olympic Games. But after 1968, festival programmers began to choose their own films, to scour the world in search of something new or startling. Festivals were cosmopolitan, like city-states. Around 1988, with Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals funds and with Sundance’s script development program, festivals began to isolate or foster trends that would spread. They saw their mission as transnational and grass roots. And now, in this new millennium, festivals are often considered nodes in a global network. There are thousands of festivals today. They increasingly serve as semiconductors through which films pass like electrons through a charged lattice of atoms, being amplified in the process. Festivals attract industry personnel and journalists from all nations who “network” so as to produce or market films in the hopes that one will “go viral” and suddenly take over screens everywhere. Festivals themselves exist in a network: films, producers, actors, and critics appear first at one and then at another. There is even a network of scholars working on the topic of festivals. They post and receive minute-by-minute notices so as to keep up with the multiple film events occurring simultaneously around the globe. Yes, a network of scholars who study the network of festivals. Now compare this new metaphor, which is linked to the World Wide Web, to the military language of traditional distributors, whose marketing strategies are mapped out country by country; or compare the instantaneity of the network to the counterstrategies art films have always employed that aim to spread outward from their place of production, proceeding like bacterial contagion. Especially in the new millennium, film scholars have turned from the map to the network when trying to visualize how films are made (multinational packages) and distributed (festivals, YouTube, on-demand streaming).

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Cognitive Maps for the New Millennium It should require a cartographer or sociologist or economist, not a critic, to speak about patterns of cultural movement. So let me turn to several films that can speak back to the maps and perhaps to the demographers and sociologists. Fredric Jameson taught us to look at films as “cognitive maps” that orient us in a world too complex to visualize. Actually today, Jameson would give up the word map altogether, for (ahead of me) he recognized a crucial cognitive shift in the strongest films since the new millennium. This shift duplicates the one I have just described—from the international and transnational maps of the twentieth century to the global network of the twenty-first. Wong Kar-wai spoke seductively to cinephiles of the 1990s, especially with Chungking Express (1994). Even though its images show nothing but a small district of Hong Kong, it exemplifies my concept of jetlag, which is associated with the map of modern cinema. Just recall Tony Leung, Cop 663, who spends his time pining for women who have flown across the Pacific as air hostesses. He lives a dual-time existence, dreaming of California many hours away while at home, he is anxious about Hong Kong’s own “expiration date.” For Hong Kong was living in two time zones in the 1990s: Beijing time and international trade time. People must have felt bewildered as things slowed down and sped up. In 1997, the year that Hong Kong’s status as a British protectorate expired, Wong Kar-wai traveled as far as he could to produce Happy Together (1997); going to Buenos Aires, which is twelve hours around the globe from Hong Kong. The characters of that film travel north to Iguaçu Falls and south to Tierra del Fuego in their effort to avoid the trauma of the handover of their homeland in Asia. The final sequences occur after the main character returns to Asia from Latin America. Yet we don’t see him reach Hong Kong. Instead, he stops in Taipei, where, on a TV screen, a newscaster from Beijing announces the death of Deng Xiaoping, suggesting political change. What will be this character’s homeland when—or if—he finally reaches it? Wong Kar-wai was the ideal world director of the 1990s because his cosmopolitanism was congruent with tastes everywhere, even while his films are careful to orient themselves geographically. It makes a difference where his films take place, where his characters travel, and what places they refer to—namely, Tokyo. In the Mood for Love (2000) may be set in a district of Hong Kong, but Tokyo is ever on the minds of the couple, and Tony Leung concludes the film in another time zone altogether, at Angkor Wat. The expression of dual time that I find at the core of Wong Kar-wai’s style is taken up explicitly in the title of Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2000), which presents us with two places and two time zones at once, not to mention two periods of film (French new wave, Taiwan new cinema). After 2000, geography seems to have lost much of its power to organize drama. The last James Bond movie in the twentieth century was called The World

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Is Not Enough, something many art films sensed in the new millennium. Just look at Jia Zhangke’s masterpiece Shijie (The World; 2004). In the Beijing World Park, all places are at once present and absent. Geography no longer represents distance, for every place is available simultaneously. Similarly, the young workers in the park keep their social communities permanently available on their cell phones. Cognitive mapping is irrelevant in the era of Google Maps. What happened in the ten years between Chungking Express and The World? Cell phones became ubiquitous, and so did DVDs. Wong Kar-wai’s reputation was made for, and made by, film festivals and VHS tapes. In the United States, Chungking Express was introduced by Quentin Tarantino, who is known as the cinephile of the videotape store; this is where he had discovered Hong Kong and other cinemas. Such stores, if you remember, organized their hundreds of nonHollywood films primarily by geographic locations. My own local store featured a map of the aisles of the store to assist the shopper looking for Spanish films or Chinese or Brazilian titles. In 2001, Franco Moretti, the literary theorist who wrote Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) and from whom I borrowed the idea of the atlas, published an essay called “Planet Hollywood”5 in which he analyzed the layout of VHS tapes in video stores from different boroughs of New York City to arrive at a demographic map capable of classifying clients of stores based on the density of holdings, country by country, genre by genre. He did not pursue this research further, evidently realizing that this crude methodology was not up to the task of understanding the workings of world cinema even in its older phases, and it seems ludicrously inadequate to our new century. My point is that until a decade ago, it seemed most reasonable to parse cinema by national origin of directors, the way libraries shelve books about different national cinemas. But in the early 2000s, things could be seen to have changed. In the United States, video stores were renting more DVDs than VHS tapes, and the sale of DVDs had begun to outpace video rentals in any format—plus there were glimmerings of films on demand. The system of distribution had changed in 2004, which is the year Jia Zhangke made The World (shot, by the way, on HDCAM). Moreover, Jia’s characters are very different from those of Wong Karwai. The latter operate (or think of operating) on an international stage, crossing borders via airplane, going from and returning to home, and suffering jetlag, whereas Jia’s characters remain in one place but sense themselves situated in a network that connects them to everything they need to care about. They live and work in a picture book of cultures. The fact is that travel abroad is effectively denied them, though we hear of one character who made his way to Paris and hopes to be joined at the end of the film by his wife. For all the workers at the Beijing World Park, no passport will take them outside China’s borders. Instead, screens of all sorts seem to widen their horizon while enclosing them in an electronic hall of mirrors. In the film’s most self-referential moment, the troubled

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couple, Tao and Taisheng, creates their own video souvenir at one of the Park’s concessions. Positioned before a blue screen, they are composited into a magic carpet flight around the Eiffel Tower. In reality, they have never flown anywhere. Moreover, they can always visit the large-scale model of the Eiffel Tower right there where they work every day. Their cell phones, like the theme park, reduce distances to almost nothing, while they expand the imaginations of those who go nowhere. Hence Jia’s clever reversal, whereby grand cultural monuments are miniaturized while trivial cell phone messages on tiny screens are inflated to fill the cinemascope screen.6 In Tao’s mind, and in the theater where we watch this film, the cell phone image looms as large as the huge projections that amplify and double her performances on stage. We can see the impact of the cell phone screen on her face whenever she answers its call—twice on the monorail, then later in the Venetian piazza in the rain. At any moment, a message may arrive offering escape. Each animated vision ignited by text appearing on the tiny screen is a fantasy of unimpeded movement across vast space, a magic-carpet ride. Cell phones open the dreamscape of the young generation who populate The World while they bind couples who need never to feel separated from one another. “Motorola has a new global tracking phone,” one girl tells a jealous boy. “You can always know where your girlfriend is.” Indeed, Taisheng and Tao keep track of their global positions within the park so they can remain together—be present in real time—even while she is on a monorail bound for “India.” More important, cell phones are nodes in a network that links the isolated workers of the “World” to millions of other young people, all of them ready to be sucked into the possibilities offered by the tiny screens they obsessively check. The network, just like the theme park, has shrunk the world and altered the “cognitive map” of the young Chinese drawn to Beijing. These “internal Chinese immigrant” workers are at ease in India, Egypt, Thailand, Japan, France, the United States, and Italy. Tao is quite ready when told to play the African girl in a pageant. It doesn’t matter that she’s never left China or even seen the ocean. “It makes no difference” to her, since “difference” is spurious in the theme park. In “Our Changing World” (which is the title of the film’s final chapter), everything (and everyone) is completely available everywhere—that is, on-screen. The World is one of many films that challenge us with the indifference that is the ultimate effect of the network that stretches around the globe and yet goes nowhere. The world of the Word Wide Web is indeed wide, but it is also flat and difficult to escape. When I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival, it struck me that I was not unlike the visitor to the theme park who is invited to “See the World in a Day,” since I was just then sampling five national cinemas a day while remaining inside a movie complex in Toronto. I too journeyed to India, Egypt,

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Thailand, Japan, France, the United States, and Italy. Today, this experience is no longer the privilege solely of the festival goer. With Netflix on demand and other video-streaming services, every computer monitor can serve as a festival site. Just as you can be in contact with anyone on the globe with your cell phone or via Skype, so you can see any movie; it doesn’t matter where you are. It just doesn’t matter. This is what troubles Nadia el Fani, the combative Tunisian filmmaker who wants “difference” to matter. In 2003, she made Bedwin Hacker about a dissident Tunisian woman from a nearly off-the-map village who asserts the distinctive identity of her neglected people against the ubiquitous homogeneity of French television. Instead of passively watching broadcasts from Paris (as if these emanated from the Eiffel Tower), the Bedwin Hacker worms into the heart of the French computer system to disrupt its TV news and, far worse, its soccer programs with a cartoon camel carrying messages that urge dissidence. Sending signals via a retractable antenna that emerges from a deep well outside her adobe house to a string of relay stations, including one in South Africa, she literally disempowers “La Defense,” the aptly named hub of France’s militaryindustrial complex. But because her desert transmitter and relay stations are on the grid, if only barely, she can be tracked—and tracked down. The system is self-monitoring and self-regulating, and it won’t long abide such viruses. An underdog film to be embraced, Bedwin Hacker nevertheless must play by the rules of a game with odds that are stacked against it. Paced by electropop music, snappy parallel editing whips us back and forth across the Mediterranean, from the dramatic geology and ancient ruins of North Africa to various Parisian locations. Bedwin Hacker is, in the end, a spy thriller, complete with a romantic subplot that ends when the pivot character, a journalist torn between his Tunisian heritage and his Parisian career, hurls his cell phone into a ravine to escape the network that had overtaken his life. The film itself, however, needs to stay on the network in order to fantasize the reversal of the polarities of power in the world. Dissident cinema, like dissident politics, is in a struggle over the net, but it is played out on the net. The heroine who is the Bedwin Hacker spends a lot of time on a keyboard and in front of a monitor. Moreover, the film was produced by Canal+Horizon, a wing of the giant French television conglomerate that can afford to support films that attack it. Canal+Horizon. That name tells us a great deal. In fact, there is no “horizon” to a network like Canal+. The broadcasting model, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, has given way to the web without center or horizon. I have been speaking as if the smooth, flat, and indifferent world of the web had come to pass and was accepted by all except a few romantics such as Tao, who commits suicide to escape this world, and the Bedwin Hacker, who remains attached to the distinct values of her premodern birthplace. But the persistence

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of nations with their sovereignty and their borders mocks this utopia. All too often, nations have impeded both free movement and ideas. So much is this the case that the web, while occasionally a target of dissident hackers who want to bring it down, has often been a means of dissent for victims locked within their nations. In China, Ai Weiwei may no longer have his passport, but his videos find their way around the world, creating a kind of web surrounding him like armor. This leads me to Jafar Panahi, who makes an even better case for the value of networks, since one was activated to support him when he was detained on his way to Cannes in 2010 and put under house arrest for “acting against national security.” Many of us signed the petition that was drawn up at Cannes on his behalf and that instantly appeared on our computer screens. This petition failed, but it let Panahi calculate the size of an audience ready to watch whatever he might somehow create. But what could he possibly have to show us? A year later, as the legend has it, a thumb drive carrying This Is Not a Film (2011) was smuggled in a birthday cake out of his quarantined apartment, which must serve as this film’s only setting. There was a screening at Cannes, where that petition had been drafted a year earlier, and then This Is Not a Film began to light up screens in numerous countries. Those screens are on the festival grid, a cinephile network. A DVD eventually appeared—first in Brazil—and small screens everywhere (no doubt even in Iran) now display his clandestine effort. Both Panahi’s minimal narrative and the one-location setting of this work challenge what cinema is; This Is Not a Film seems to have no space within which to expand beyond the here and now of his apartment. But geography matters little in twenty-first-century cinema. This reduction of represented space is in inverse proportion to the global distribution that the film itself is receiving. Long ago, Panahi talked about the elastic leash that lets some people roam farther than others from the prisons that we all inhabit.7 In this film, Panahi’s leash is no more than a dozen meters; his setting is completely local, yet this lets his imagination roam. His iguana represents the wild outdoors in his home. The internet, despite all the censorship and filtering, brings him messages and connects him to festivals. Prohibited from making a film, he lets himself be recorded as he recounts the film he was attempting to make at the time of his arrest. That script happens to concern a female character also confined to a single apartment and to a tiny bedroom within it. But in that bedroom, a window opens to the outside, where possibilities await. Panahi diagrams the set he has in mind by laying tape on his Persian carpet, whose own design encourages us to recognize, en abyme, that this outline of the set is a miniature of Panahi’s apartment that we are watching. Here geology comes into play, for the script he reads is an earlier level, or stratum, of the film we are watching. So too is the cell phone clip of the alley and the character’s room that Panahi shot when scouting the location. The cell phone shows him come out of the bedroom, go down the stairs, and move toward

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Figure 1.1. Panahi diagrams his imagined film, This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb

and Jafar Panahi, 2011)

the open door just before the recording stops, predicting just what will occur at the end of This Is Not a Film. In other words, the script he wrote for a real film a year before is fulfilled in his manner of acting out in this nonfilm. The philologist Eric Auerbach would categorize this structure as a “figura.” And philology, which we could call textual geology, is just what is needed to make sense of this unusual cinematic document. For instance, the philologist would recognize the television screen in the apartment as a device of direct discourse, something akin to quotation marks, since whatever appears on it is someone else’s discourse cited directly. This is where Panahi’s previous films can speak to us while he controls the zapper from within the space of his apartment. One clip comes from his film The Mirror (1997), allowing Panahi to point out that this title and the little girl’s doubled image is a figura for his own situation. The television also brings the world into Panahi’s closed space, directly addressing him and us and dating the film precisely, since the live broadcasts show us the March 11, 2011, tsunami in Japan. This window to the world has its counterpart in Panahi’s actual picture window, which gives onto Tehran. At first, we see mainly construction cranes, but then the sounds and bursting light of fireworks alert Panahi to events making history on the streets. He would say that he scarcely directs this film (indeed, he has been forbidden to do so), yet just as he claims that his actor directed him toward the significance in Crimson Gold (2003) and just as his actress in The Circle (2000) was directed by the location she found herself in, so this nonfilm’s narrator, Jafar Panahi, finds himself directed by history. Thus the strictures of This Is Not a Film, like its apartment

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setting, are not really confining; to the spectator ready to read as deeply as a philologist, the screen holds layers of significance to be interpreted as history, including history in the making. Yet on his cell phone, Panahi speaks of wanting to break out of this confinement and connect to liberation politics through a global network of cinephilia. Panahi knows this network well, for he traveled along it when accompanying his earlier films. In 2001, he followed The Circle beyond Iran’s borders, where it would never be shown, onto the festival circuit. This film, whose title evokes Dante’s Inferno, tracks the clandestine movement of outcast women imprisoned from womb to jail. Ducking between cars, behind alleys, and trying to make contact at public phones, they are tethered to Tehran, unable to board a bus to take them beyond its center. Yet The Circle took Panahi to many festivals—as far as Hong Kong and then on to Buenos Aires. But it was while on this journey that he found himself thrown into prison—not in Tehran, however, but in the United States, at JFK Airport, where his United Airlines itinerary obliged him to change planes. On U.S. soil, he was held as an undesirable, incarcerated for several days until he was ultimately returned to Hong Kong and thence to Tehran. Don’t tell him about the smooth space of a wired globe. This Is Not a Film concludes with a long sequence in an elevator. “The elevator is a magic box for stories,” Panahi’s mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, once told scriptwriting students. It is another confining device that encourages ingenuity.8 It is also a mechanical device to shift from one place (and plotline) to another. Think of Inception (2010), with its elevator that stops at different levels of reality. Fredric Jameson praises Inception as a twenty-first-century thriller because it has stepped beyond the geography of this world, using the elevator to deposit characters and spectators in totally distinct geographies, in other worlds altogether. Panahi’s elevator does something similar. In the film’s final sequence, it descends, stopping at each floor of the apartment building to pick up trash from the unknown lives hidden behind doors. Below the living quarters, in the dark of the parking garage, Panahi follows the man who rolls the trash bin out into the courtyard. Panahi then holds still as he sees the gate, beyond which he cannot go; on the street, the winds and flames of history are glimpsed. People are crying; it’s not clear whether they do so in pain or exhilaration. Panahi’s geology has drilled to the deepest layer of his location, Tehran—there the molten core of Iran’s prehistory churns in the magma of history in the making.

Conclusion The distinction between map and network, between twentieth-century narrative models and those of our new century, between cinema as an international industry and cinema as a transnational phenomenon is hardly as sharp as I have

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drawn it here. Yes, we now have a new genre of “network narratives” like Amores perros (2000), Babel (2006), Syriana (2005), and Inception. These films track various separate stories whose seemingly unrelated characters are nodes that light up under the electric current of some event so that the pattern of their constellation can emerge and their material or mystical connections are revealed. But surely, most films today are still best mapped as plotlines that move dramatically across borders. As for the economic, social, and political world, nation-states persist in this supposedly global era. Cartographies, new ones or old, have their uses, but they are designed to shows us the surface, and they generally fail to represent what is beneath. Hence, following Bazin, I conclude with an urgent call for a geology as well as a geography of cinema. My final example, meant to establish the profundity—the depth—of good cinema, is a film that won the Palme d’Or at the same Cannes festival where This Is Not a Film was first screened. Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) puts the human future and the cinematic future literally in another light. For Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the future is entirely a matter of light and depth, of light penetrating the depth. Its oblique detective plot concerns a police inspector, a lawyer, and a doctor (a triumvirate of rational inquiry) trying to extract from a murder suspect the secret of where the body of his victim lies buried. The suspect says it can be found in a shallow grave near a tree, a fountain, and a bridge, but he can’t be sure of the exact spot because they are in the middle of Anatolia, the vast, unremarkable center of Asia Minor, and there are an abundance of these markers. Still, the body must be exhumed, brought to light. Headlights lead the entourage along

Figure 1.2. Light in the depth of darkness, Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Cey-

lan, 2011)

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the curving roads of the undulating surface of Anatolia, these lights positioned so as to knife into the suffocating darkness to expose one possible gravesite after the next. Ultimately, there is a confession, and the body is pulled out and then cut open in an autopsy as the medical examiner searches for the cause of death, a search that is actually, like Faust’s, for the source of life. By this point in the narrative, the source of life already shone forth in a remarkable sequence in the precise center of the film. The search party, exhausted and frustrated after hours of futile explorations, stops to rest and eat at the farm of the mayor of a bleak village in the hinterlands. The electric power suddenly cuts out, “a frequent occurrence,” the mayor complains to his guests, all bureaucrats from the capital, Ankara. Everyone sits in the dark—off the electricity grid—while lanterns are called for. One of these is carried by the mayor’s daughter, the first female we have seen after an hour of screen time. She arrives with the traditional tray of tea, an apparition of exquisite and utterly unexpected beauty nearly floating across the muddy yard skirting. She opens the door and silently offers each man a glass of tea. Each takes the tea, but only after taking in this vision, a “beauty,” as the lawyer says, “utterly lost and hidden in this god-forsaken village.” Her appearance hinges this two-part film, since the suspect, as if touched by a miracle, weeps and then divulges the location of the body. In fact, he is probably not the murderer at all but is covering up for his developmentally impaired younger brother or for his mistress. We will never know the cause, despite many hints provided (hints about the suspect but also about the detectives, their family difficulties, their disabled children, their guilt over other deaths, and so on). In the final sequence of the autopsy, the unspeakable is revealed: the doctor discovers a clump of dirt clogging the esophagus of the victim. Evidently, the man had been buried alive. The doctor, shocked though he is, decides not to record this troubling finding in his report. This fact will lie buried forever in the dark. Turkey’s history of violence will be covered over again, this time officially. But Nuri Bilge Ceylan has shown us the power of the light—in his case, the light of cinema—even if it cannot penetrate the strata of history beneath the scarcely marked surface of this undifferentiated land called Anatolia. What kind of cartography will lead modern cinema to the history it should expose? Or rather, what kind of cinema will become the cartography of our future? Electronic saturation is upon us and promises much, but we need films that take us off the grid of the network and dig deep.

Notes 1. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Cul-

ture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006).

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2. Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,”

in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 59–89. 3. Nataša Ďurovičová, “Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translatio,” in World Cinemas, ed. Ďurovičová and Newman, 90–120. 4. The best study is James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 5. Franco Moretti, “Planet Hollywood,” New Left Review 9 (May–June 2001): 90–101; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005). 6. Emmanuel Burdeau, “Nouvelles du monde,” Cahiers du cinéma, no.  602 ( June 2005): 30–32. 7. David Walsh, “An Interview with Jafar Panahi, Director of The Circle,” World Socialist, October 2, 2000, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/10/pan-o02.html. 8. Abbas Kiarostami’s “four golden rules” were the subject of an article by Paul Cronin after his experience with the director at London’s French Institute in May 2005. See Paul Cronin, “Four Golden Rules,” The Guardian, June  16, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/film/ 2005/jun/17/1.

2 • FR A ME A dr i a n M a rtin

Yes, the grandfathers said that there was a frame. Later, the Nouvelle Vague said there was an angle. And us, we say there is a height, which is the height of the eyes of our interlocutor. Our films are more a dialogue, subjective and dialectical, than a point of view on the world, as it was for those who preceded us. —Philippe Garrel, 1983 The fatal presence of a screen, of whatever kind, all too easily restores the partition that the screen was intended to eliminate. —Étienne Souriau, 1948 I’m after more fun with gravity, I envision a cinema that leans way out there . . . and takes off! —Ken Jacobs, 2006

The explosion, over the past two decades, of what has been dubbed world cinema—which means, at a simple level, that some of us in Western countries are more aware of the vast totality of global production than at any other time in the history of film theory or criticism—poses some fascinating and tricky new questions. Can we speak of a global aesthetic, and shifts in that aesthetic, from one decisive period (which can be as short as a few years) to the next? What is the scope of the method of comparative film studies that the late Paul Willemen proposed—where the accent is put no longer on the minor deviations of socalled small nations from the hegemonic Hollywood model of classical narration but rather on the fraught drama of each nation’s negotiation with the onset and uneven development of industrial modernity?1 All attempts to characterize what is distinctive about world cinema today are, whether consciously or symptomatically, grappling with these questions. Thus 37

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we have witnessed the birth of a discourse on a new type of cinema—originating from Iran, Taiwan, Hungary, Argentina, Turkey, Thailand—variously labeled slow, contemplative, or minimalist. Involved in these films (by Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Béla Tarr, Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Apichatpong Weerrasethakul, among many others) is a concerted effort to redraw the parameters of cinematic time, space, performance gesture, genre, and fiction. Equally involved (as Lúcia Nagib and Tiago de Luca have proposed) is a renewed relation to particular kinds of realism—the physical realism of authentic, local detail married to a type of experiential realism on the spectator’s part: filmic duration felt by and embodied in each viewer.2 I situate my own reflection on world cinema by focusing on a specific material question: the situation of the filmic frame. The genealogy proposed by French filmmaker Philippe Garrel in the first of my epigraphs is more suggestively poetic than soundly historical, but it is useful as a schematic starting point.3 Early cinema began with a sense of the frame as a static, defining, master unit—the screen’s imposing rectangle comparable to the proscenium arch of theater. As cinema developed its syntax, its classical language of narration (André Bazin’s synthetic account of this evolution still holds good as a basic description),4 it became a matter of specific filmic angles, of shots and their ordering in a découpage, thus creating, at its greatest point of achievement, what Garrel calls “a point of view on the world.” Finally, with the acknowledgement of cinema as an art and the rise of directorauteurs as its prime artists, there arose a displacement or supersession of mere angle, however powerfully and expressively achieved. Cinema transforms itself into a question of height in the sense that the eye or mind of the filmmaker must meet, or come into a dialogue with, the human subjects depicted on-screen, whether in fictional or nonfictional formats. Here Garrel is referencing not the birth of artistry in filmmaking—since classicism had well and truly already arrived at that—but a specifically modern, post–Nouvelle Vague type of artistry, at once ultrasophisticated and highly personal and hence “subjective and dialectical.” Garrel is gesturing here toward a particular morality or ethics of the act of filming. At each stage of Garrel’s sketched genealogy, there is a kind of disappearance and a preempting: the brute frame or screen (favoring, whether it wished to or not, a documentary recording of any actuality before it) vanishes in favor of many angles or shots stitching up a highly composed and conventionalized fictional illusion, and then angle is dissolved into a nobler, more philosophical category—that of height or interactive regard. Chantal Akerman, to take another contemporary example, has described her own filmmaking approach in terms very similar to Garrel: “When you avoid low angles and subjective shots, you avoid fetishism. When you film frontally, you put two souls face-to-face equally; you carve out a real place for the viewer. So it’s not God-like.”5

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One of the most distinctive and fascinating things about the state of world cinema today—both the state of its works and the state of the discourse upon it—is the fluidity with which these founding concepts of frame/screen, angle/ shot, and height/regard mingle. This is not an ahistorical phenomenon so much as a multitemporal, multihistorical one, capturing well the types of mixed speeds and diverse (even confused) rates of adoption of galloping modernity happening all over the world. Take, for instance, the acclaim heaped on Wang Bing’s painstaking documentary Three Sisters (San Zimei; 2012) right from the moment of its first screenings. This film, identified with China’s independent documentary movement, activates the aesthetics of both the frame (in its patient, observational gaze) and the regard (in the respect and love we feel from the maker to his subjects and in the way it equates the fullness of its screen time with the rhythms of everyday life). By the same token, it is no stranger to the intricacy of the most fine-tuned découpage in its long-form structuring as a carefully edited chronicle; indeed, one Lisbon film festival jury, awarding its highest prize of the year to the film, described it as a veritable “reinvention of the great realist novel of the nineteenth century.”6 Three Sisters offers the clear case of a modern film that is (in Garrel’s terms) “subjective and dialectical” and also archaic, with a sense of time, space, and framing that takes us back to cinema’s earliest, inadvertently documentary days. So it is not really the case (as Garrel wanted to suggest) that angles replaced frames and that an ethos of height then replaced angles. All these forms and possibilities—and the many kinds of discourse that have accompanied them over time—coexist in our modern space. As Willemen would have analyzed it, they form an uneven network: simultaneously, in different parts of the world, in the hands of particular agents, certain tendencies of the frame come to the fore and establish a provisional, hierarchical relation from the given components. To rack focus on the questions raised today by this coexistence and networking, I choose to concentrate on the first of these terms: frame. The film frame is in crisis. This sensationalist, journalistic thought formed in my head during 2011, when current cinema—and not just in its world cinema branding—seemed to be doing the splits, heading in two starkly different, bifurcated directions, thus leaving a certain familiar middle ground of excellence fallow. No longer were we witnessing what critics (and many moviegoers) love to cultivate as the artfully composed frame, the shot that displays its powers of mise-en-scène, choreography, dressing, positioning, and staging. What was taking its place? At the one end, a wave of films—endlessly bemoaned by critics with weak or queasy constitutions—that seemed to wish to do away with the inconvenience of

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a solid, preexisting frame altogether, destabilizing it (and us) through a flurry of frenzied, unmoored camera movements and follow shots. Works including Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011) from Iran and the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid with a Bike (2011) from Belgium have brought this mode an almost mainstream respectability (A-list Hollywood directors such as Michael Mann have also used it)—a handheld camera plunges in, recording (more or less choreographically), in long takes, an almighty tangle of bodies in motion, cries, confrontations, confusions, and encounters. This style or manner is primarily associated, in the popular filmgoing imagination, with Lars von Trier (Melancholia, 2011) and Terrence Malick (with his trilogy of contemporary society in To the Wonder, 2012; Knight of Cups, 2015; and Song to Song, 2017). There are many distinctions that one could make inside this broad style—referencing the pioneering U.S. independent John Cassavetes, Israel’s Amos Gitai, Chile’s José Luis Torres Leiva, and so on, each of whom execute this technique very differently, with various levels or degrees of artifice and spontaneity—but let us stick with the handy caricature, the mass tendency, for the moment. At the other end, a group of films—both within world cinema and right at the heart of commercial production—that eschew the artfully composed frame in favor of an almost archaeological feeling for the frame as it stood, mute and unbending, in the earliest cinema: wide, static, in deep space, with either a great deal of or very little action playing out within the four sides of the rectangle. We recognize here not only elements of the style of Hou and Alonso (or, from an earlier underground period, Andy Warhol) but also the conceits that drive such horror-thrillers as the Paranormal Activity series of six films (2009–2015, coproduced by former film scholar Steven J. Schneider), where the principle generating the fiction’s images is some form of automatic recording or surveillance. Here the frame, in its standard theater-to-cinema lineage, is displaced by our modern experience of a screen—especially the ubiquitous computer screen of the kind that would routinely store or play back such mechanized images. And—in a further unexpected cross-fertilization of progressive art and recustomized genre conventions—the rules governing the arrangement of these images seem to follow the gamelike structures of what media theorists increasingly call dispositifs.7 Let us pause to untangle the polysemy of our keyword, frame. As indicated, the term has an archaic connotation, evoking early cinema. However, the term for cinematographic composition and mise-en-scène is framing, indicating a wresting and taming of the brute function of the primal rectangle of the movie theater, bending and molding it to a guiding, artistic will, an aesthetics. Today, in the digital twenty-first century, the frame is also (as already mentioned) the display screen—with many audiovisual works, from the movies piped into luxury hotel rooms to Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour marathon installation The Clock (2010), unfussily stretched (whatever their original aspect ratio) to fit

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the preferred widescreen TV format. Thus, so far, we have indicated those types of frame analyses that would come under the umbrella of art history, whether old school or new school. Ivo Blom, for example, has analyzed all manner of pictorial framing devices, their uses and implications, in the films of Luchino Visconti, drawing on the work of Victor I. Stoichita.8 Then there is framing in the broader, cultural-political sense in which Judith Butler uses the word in her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?: a social frame, both literal and metaphoric, is what shapes and contains our knowledge and understanding of things inside the frame while excluding other types of knowledge and understanding.9 This type of analysis is given a further philosophical twist in Eyal Peretz’s The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame.10 One ultramodern film for the internet age that skillfully combines several of these meanings of frame is the agit-prop piece Redacted (2008) by Brian De Palma, who Peretz believes is a central auteur of the “off-screen,” where various discourses on U.S. war involvement come wrapped in the embedded frames of web pages, domestic video diaries, or TV news screens. So the frame is indeed in crisis today. But which frame? When commentators (some of whom are otherwise highly perceptive) cry foul over either the seasickness induced by the handheld camera or the boredom induced by static, contemplative long takes, they are no doubt dreaming of two modes of cinematic style that they perceive to be in danger of vanishing. First, there is the fluid and classical mise-en-scène style associated, during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, with directors such as Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray in their classical prime, as well as Max Ophüls, Douglas Sirk, Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, and many others, such as Clint Eastwood today. The style is also linked with key figures in the history of film criticism who described and celebrated it, including André Bazin, Roger Tailleur, and Victor F. Perkins. In this mode, the film frame—the pictorial composition—is, in a highly sophisticated and elaborated way, an organizing window, a mobile “point of view on the world.” Des O’Rawe, in an important text, puts this even more strongly: “The moment a fragment of perceived reality is framed, it becomes an invention . . . everything framed is unreal, and every frame is marked by a trace or memory of the real it has left in its wake.”11 Second, via the central figure in film history of Fritz Lang and the writing of people including Serge Daney, Frieda Grafe, and Manny Farber, there is a transition to another, radicalized and formalized version of the classical style, taking in Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Abbas Kiarostami, and more recently the entire Berlin School, of which Christian Petzold (Barbara, 2012) is the finest exemplar. Here we encounter a greater self-consciousness, an expressive hardening, a rigorous systematization of the frame playing on what is on-screen or off-screen at any given moment, and on the exact relation of image

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to sound, the two tracks often set into a conflictual relation via their montage.12 At its experimental extreme, as in the work of Harun Farocki, this mode leads to the creation of what I will later call (after Stoichita’s discussion of early modern metapainting) a metaframe: where framing not only openly demonstrates itself but also gains an extra, allegorical level, gesturing to and embodying what a frame (in Butler’s sociopolitical sense) can be and how it can work. We can observe the extremes of the current situation of the frame—both the archaic (precinema) and the experimental (postcinema)—in the evolving career of David Lynch. When he tackles television, as in the series Twin Peaks (1990–1991, 2017), he locks down a precise aesthetic strategy based on the explicit motto of working the frame—that is, composing strictly for the four sides of the televisual square. This is no doubt because TV clearly appeals to him as a form of primitive, constrained cinema. For evidence of this, see his inventive contribution to the Lumière and Company (1995) project, where a typically obscure and sensational Lynchian melodrama is re-created in a one-minute take, filmed with the oldest still-functioning movie camera. But when Lynch walks the plank of a digital postcinema in Inland Empire (2006), his every effort (via tiny digital cameras) is to distort, bend, decenter, or overload the framed image—producing, to use Thomas Elsaesser’s arresting phrase describing Austrian director Michael Haneke, “images that are at once overframed and unframed.”13 So we have, at one end of our present moment, a frame that moves everywhere, thus seemingly collapsing the frame altogether as best and as strenuously as it can. At the other end, we have a frame that is so obvious and rigid that it seems to want to negate any practice of the subtle art and craft of framing, at least as it is conventionally defined. Both of these strategies can seem like a denial of the frame, an attack on the very idea of it, or perhaps above all, an escape from its limitations, an artful avoidance or passionate transcendence of it—an antiframe. However, since we are still usually watching the results inside a frame, the antiframe is a species of impossibility: a self-deconstructive logic that can (as we will see) go a long a way both in theory and in practice. I have already cited Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick as two popular touchstones of the new mood of the frame in contemporary cinema. Trier is at the origin of this chapter, less for his usual handheld camerawork than for a startling pronouncement he once made in a documentary. Framing in cinema, he confessed, has no evident logic for him; it just does not make any sense, he simply cannot grasp it. This is an oddly self-negating or self-defeating statement for any visual artist to make, surely—since it would seem difficult, even impossible, to approach the arts of cinema, video, painting, or design without some basic, essential conception of the frame. However, even if Trier is being his typical, tricksterish, disingenuous self here, his comment prompts reflection: How could one actively go about making a film and yet still somehow disregard the frame?

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When Trier made his office comedy The Boss of It All (2006)—composed mainly of people sitting in bland workrooms and talking at each other—he knew he could not take his usual willfully chaotic route; something spectacularly counterintuitive was called for. So he invented (as is his wont) a game with rules, a dispositif that he called Automavision, to generate an automatic way of framing. He would set up and block out the scene with the actors in the conventional way, but the final choice of camera angle would be dictated, according to randomly generated parameters, by an on-set computer—no matter what was going on inside the frame. What results, from shot to shot of even the blandest dialogue sequence, is indeed spectacular, a veritable catalog of cinematographic no-no’s: heads cut off; ungainly placement of foreground objects; too much empty headroom in the shot; truncated, unbalanced, badly lit compositions; a blank spot at the center of the frame; and last but not least, no reframing to catch even the simplest mise-en-scène of the actors’ movements! Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) offers a different, more obviously poetic case study. Richard Brody of the New Yorker revealed something fundamental about the contemporary situation of the frame when he remarked on his blog, Malick daringly tries to capture not just memories but the feelings aroused by the act of memory—indeed, to represent subjectivity itself, by way of the cinema. He composes the film around daily infinitesimal things that surge back to mind, out of time, in vivid detail, and he catches them in shots that are floating, travelling, unmoored from the ground and, above all, seemingly unencumbered by a frame. Memories have no frame; they slide out of a pictorial boundary to remain infinite at the edges, bending around to include oneself—and maybe even several versions of oneself, present and past, as seen from without and from within.14

For Brody, The Tree of Life is primarily an exercise in artistic subjectivity, a film of mental imagery. What strikes me is how Malick’s assault on the frame is also an assault on gravity, especially the human body’s gravity. Running, swaying, balancing, falling—and, in To the Wonder (2012) and Song to Song (2017), a great deal of dancing—constitute the central action, with the camera joining in and exaggerating the constant, precarious loss of gravitational forces. It is as if the principle of bodily gravity has been literally knocked off its center from one end of the film to the other, and much of The Tree of Life is devoted to the demonstration or elaboration of exactly this thought-image of the cosmically off-kilter. There are three contexts I wish to bring to bear on the general bifurcation of the frame in contemporary world cinema. The first comes from a realm of

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Figure 2.1. Destabilization of the frame in The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

philosophical aesthetics, the second from a tradition in modern art, and the third from a certain through line (as screenwriters say) in film theory and criticism. I begin in the late 1940s with a figure who is usually relegated to a mere cameo in the history of film theory, even though it is a decisive, walk-on part—someone whose whole body of work is being rediscovered today in Europe. This is Étienne Souriau, whom we can thank for the notions in modern film studies of diegesis and the profilmic world (the spatial, phenomenal field that is organized for, or simply finds itself in front of, the camera).15 In a farreaching essay of 1948 on the aesthetics of the performing arts—his main example being theater, across all its changing, historic forms— Souriau poses two kinds of dramaturgical spaces.16 The first he calls the cube, associated with the classical style of theater viewed in and through the proscenium arch, and the second he calls the sphere, which relates to all types of theater in the round, ancient or modern. It is a simple and familiar enough distinction, but Souriau’s evocative descriptions of these two types of spaces, and what can happen within them, could have been designed for the diverse, multiplatform audiovisual arts of our present century, with their starkly extreme tendencies. Indeed, Souriau, in a charming moment, even speaks of two kinds of artistic personalities or sensibilities, the “Cubics” and the “Sphericals,” “if I may dare speak of them as though they constituted a race, a nation, or a sect.”17 For Souriau, the plastic space of the cubic in theater—which we can easily extend to the window effect of classical mise-en-scène in cinema—is like a box that is “opened on the side facing the spectator.”18 It is involved in the “bringing into concrete existence of a small, well-defined fragment, cut out of the universe of the work.”19 As a dramaturgical aesthetic, the cube has three essential traits. First, its basic realism: “Everything in the cube must be incarnated or represented concretely,” no

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matter its degree of stylization.20 Second, a cubic space has orientation or aspect: it faces the spectator in one direction only, creating a “dynamic force in a horizontal plane pointing like an arrow,” so that even if an actor turns his or her back to the audience, it will necessarily become “a dynamic back.”21 And the third trait, again protocinematic, is what he calls a “predetermined, confining architecture”: “This little piece of universe is internally organized, and the physical aspects of this organization are imposed from start to finish on everything that happens within the box.”22 Spherical space is utterly different on all three counts: “No stage, no hall, no limits. Instead of cutting out a predetermined fragment in the world that is going to be set up, one seeks out its dynamic center, its beating heart, the spot where the action is emotionally at its keenest and most exalted. This center is permitted to irradiate its force freely and without limits. . . . [The performers] are the center, and the circumference is nowhere—the point is to push it out into the infinite, taking the spectators themselves into the limitless sphere.”23 It is not hard to see just such an aspiration to a limitless irradiation of energy in The Tree of Life. Or, to take a very different example, the canny confrontation of dance cubes and dance spheres in the popular Step Up series (2006–2014, with a Chinese remake in 2017), where dance combat scenes always begin with two intercut cubic spaces (gangs advancing toward each other, glaring into the lens), only to eventually liberate a free, spherical space in which everyone, trained dancer or mere spectator, is part of the action, involved in the whirling show. Baz Luhrmann’s TV series The Get Down (2016–2017) further elaborates this mise-en-scène of dance. A beguiling aspect of Souriau’s evocation of the sphere is that he describes it less as an actuality or a fully real practice than as an “ideal” or “dream”24—or a myth, akin to Bazin’s “myth of total cinema.”25 In cinema, we might say, spherical space is the frame beyond the frame. Now I will jump ahead at least two decades from Souriau’s conjecture to land on a particular plateau in the development of modern art, especially contemporary painting and video art. In the mid-1980s, filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin remarked that such modern arts had to be understood in terms of a dual relation to the frame: “Painters, having taken into account the lessons of cinema, have decided to do two things—one, to put in question the notion of the frame; and two, to put in question the notion of the single image.”26 He was no doubt thinking, among other examples, of the work of his friend and colleague, painter and critic Manny Farber, in whose monumental “table top” and movie-related paintings we see these tendencies furiously at work—questioning the frame by saturating it, layering it, and testing its limits while at the same time creating energetic paths and tracks out and off the edges, infinite trails for the spectator’s eye and mind. Efforts to question the notion of the frame by now form a classic, almost venerable tradition in modern art. A 2012 retrospective in Melbourne of the video/ installation artist Pipilotti Rist began, in its initial antechamber, by quoting—and

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deliberately overloading with multiple planes and superimpositions—what she calls the “suspicious box” of the classical frame.27 Then the viewer walked into vast rooms where the action happened in wildly uncubic shapes on the ceiling or was projected through layers of curtains—an echo of another venerable avant-garde tradition, that of expanded cinema. This retrospective connected, for me, with a key work from the 1970s finally reconstructed and distributed: Nicholas Ray’s fascinating multiscreen experiment made in collaboration with film students, We Can’t Go Home Again (1976), as well its accompanying documentary testimony by Susan Ray, Don’t Expect Too Much (2012). In the latter, we hear audio of Ray yelling these immortal words at his class: “I don’t wanna see a fucking rectangle anywhere!” Avant-garde art and cinema offer a privileged field for heated debate over the frame and methodologies of framing. At one extreme, Hollis Frampton, in his “A Lecture” of 1968, began with a pure patch of light as defined by the projector beam, declaring, “It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less.”28 For Frampton, the frame defined a necessary limit, a given—both the most basic formal constraint and the richest material basis for creative and scientific work. Escaping the frame was not Frampton’s concern; rather, he wanted us to really see it, to always be aware of it. In a completely different way to David Lynch, Frampton also devoted himself to working the frame, plumbing all its potentialities. The same would go for many avant-gardists, in their diverse ways, from Kurt Kren to Stephen Dwoskin. Michael Snow provides an intriguing point of historical transition: in his obsession with stretching and squeezing the image, from his earliest efforts through to *Corpus Callosum (2002), Snow situates himself at the paradoxical point where the frame is retained, while being carried to its breaking point. On the other side of this avant-garde debate, we have Ken Jacobs and his fervent dalliance, across several decades, with homemade, three-dimensional processes. Even given its current, possibly ephemeral moment of being a fad in commercial cinema as a built-in part of digital projection systems, it is hard not be impressed by the number of truly talented filmmakers drawn to the 3-D format at present, from Wim Wenders (Pina, 2011) and Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010) to Tsui Hark (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, 2011) and Godard (Goodbye to Language, 2014). In the case of Jacobs and his Nervous System presentations (where he manually operates two movie projectors simultaneously), we find an entirely customized, anarchic treatment of vision perception in three dimensions—and a special discursive myth to go with it. In a text of 2006, Jacobs begins by evoking the fact that we are drawn—across the arts, as well as in fairgrounds—to things “that tilt dangerously . . . deviating from the vertical/horizontal, the square.” He continues, “The cinema aims to disturb the transfixed viewer, leaning him/her, through sound and vision, this way and that, thrilling the viewer (let’s presume) with a risk-taking exercise

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while he/she does nothing more than watch a movie. . . . We need to be carried away! And to remain in movement, or we dissipate.”29 Again, as in The Tree of Life, it is a question of the gravity principle, and according to Jacobs, it is “hard for a 2D movie, fixed to a vertical/horizontal screen, to convincingly challenge gravity.”30 And so Jacobs moves, in his own experiments, into 3-D, which offers a film that “lurches, pulling the viewer into its lurching. . . . I’m after more fun with gravity, I envision a cinema that leans way out there . . . and takes off!”31 This takeoff is the ultimate expression of the antiframe dream—an event that would end what Jacobs sees as the dull process of putting things right that occurs in every standard film: “Soon as that happens, the play is over.”32 And IMAX is not the answer for Jacobs: hopelessly compromised and normalized, IMAX “reins in the psychosomatic manipulation of bodies.”33 Jacobs has always been drawn, no doubt with keen ambivalence, to this almost Russian constructivist ethos of creating the new viewer—even the new person or citizen—through the sensory manipulation afforded by film. I turn now to my third way of contextualizing the contemporary situation of the frame to revisit a particularly heated moment of critical reflection that occurred mainly in the late 1970s in many countries at once. Part of what spurred this reflection was a sustained investigation of the connections and disconnections between cinema and painting in that period. Something curious had taken place by the mid-1970s: with the appearance of a certain type of art that was cinematic, in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways, something of cinema was crystallized in a place that was not cinema—and hence given back to cinema to deal with and deepen. This may well be a dynamic of film history in general, once again occurring in an uneven wave across the world network. In 1978, Pascal Bonitzer, a leading light of the Cahiers du cinéma team (and later a celebrated screenwriter and director), wrote a programmatic essay titled “Deframings,” which was also the name he gave his 1985 book on cinema and painting. In the essay, Bonitzer sets himself polemically against what he calls a certain “abduction” of the spectator, which he equates with the sadistic mastery of auteur-artists, as well as of an entire, perfected classical system—the precise, very material way that films and paintings can “snatch the spectator into [their] interior.”34 Bonitzer also posits, however, a type of redemption—an escape hatch from this classical, representational system—in the “unmastered space of modern art” and specific techniques or approaches in this art that rather than holding the spectator in ransom to a beyond, instead make “the painting the place of a mystery, of a suspended, interruptive narrative, of a question eternally without an answer.”35 These techniques fall under the umbrella of deframing: an entire modern aesthetic of “unusual angles, limbs suggestively truncated, inadequate reflections in clouded mirrors”;36 “empty shots, strange angles, bodies alluringly fragmented or shot in close-up”;37 “the displaced angle, the radical

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off-centeredness of a point of view that mutilates the body and expels it beyond the frame to focus instead on dead, empty zones barren of décor.”38 In the realm of art, the pivotal figures crystallizing a deframing aesthetic for Bonitzer include Leonardo Cremonini and Jacques Monory (it is intriguing that much of this work exists in various tributaries of Pop and Post-Pop Art—i.e., highly stylized forms of figurative representation). And the heroes of his deframed cinema include Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Marguerite Duras, Robert Bresson, Raúl Ruiz (for whom he would write several scripts in the 1990s), and Chantal Akerman (with whom he frequently collaborated). Where classical cinema is obsessed with every type of centering (of the frame and of the spectator), this new cinema is constantly evacuating its center, hurling things to the edges of the frame and beyond, like in Farber’s paintings. Or, equally, the very notion of a center is redefined, moving away from a literal, pictorial assumption: thus Godard’s frequent, gnomic complaint during the 1980s that his cinematographers did not realize that the center of a shot was never simply given by laws of composition or geometry—it had to be actively, arduously found. Bonitzer’s influential essay ends on a gesture almost of exasperation. Referring to Godard’s TV work of the 1970s, he comments, “What is important is neither framing nor deframing, but what shatters the frame.”39 What leads to this crowning remark is his awareness that deframing is constantly co-opted, used by the classical system of representing and narrating: punctual effects of disequilibrium, dissymmetry, and so forth are crucial effects in the process of suture (as it was theorized in the 1970s by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Stephen Heath, and others) or, in Jacobs’s terms, “putting things right.” Today, a thousand mediocre thrillers have fulfilled this prediction: all it takes is a seemingly precarious (but perfectly calculated and staged) tilt shot, De Palma style, to absorb into the film a certain useful number of effects of excess, strangeness, or emptiness. Indeed, Bonitzer offers an important precision (here anticipating O’Rawe’s objection that fancy, aesthetic deframing is, after all, just another form of compositional framing under a different name): do not confuse genuine deframing with mere obliquity. This obliquity is the ruse of moving pictures that are on their covert way to the same old balance and suture: it is the oblique, in this sense, that sucks us in, like a whirlpool, to the screen center. Whether sucked in or shattered, this was, once upon a time in film theory, the drama of the subject in process, the spectator chained or liberated in the course of his or her involvement in a given film. It was a concept we too quickly forgot when cultural studies told us, in the 1980s, that we were perfectly free to do as we please as spectators—which is never entirely the case. Cinema is, rather, the face-off, the mortal combat between different regimes of the “psychosomatic manipulation of bodies,” as per Ken Jacobs.40 Or as Bernard Stiegler might say, within the framework of his nuanced, pharmacological theory of culture and its effects, choose your poison!41

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In world cinema today, we find many rich and inventive variations on strategies of deframing. A relatively gentle variation comes in the form of work on light, with its mobile effects of vignetting or its concentration on specific zones within the frame—a kind of deliberate wasting or selective eating away of the frame, breaking it up into variable pictorial zones and components. This is what we find, for instance, explored with special acuity in the work of Lynne Ramsay or in Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (2008). A more aggressive instance is provided by Peter Tscherkassky’s reworked found-footage films such as Outer Space (2001), derived from the horror film The Entity (1981). Here, vignetting is combined with multiple overlays of the film strip in order to take the project of wholesale reframing and deframing to a dramatic, rhetorical breaking point. Tscherkassky loves the moment when, through the accumulation of energies and intensities, there can be nothing left but a blank film strip or a dazzling white frame—Frampton’s rectangle of light in which we see “all films” at once. There is a quite contrary tendency in contemporary cinema, however—a kind of restoration of the frame, but not in the classically expressive, window-like, mise-en-scène sense beloved of Bazin and evident in Renoir’s films. Rather, it is what I referred to earlier as the metaframe, where the frame is considered, attenuated, strategic, and above all, self-conscious—taking into itself, intellectually or intuitively, all the general theories of the frame as social order, prison, constraint, and context. This too has a history in art, relating to that period in Early Modern painting, theorized by Stoichita as well as the Australian philosopher Andrew Benjamin, where the medium of painting must enact or stage itself and has to (in Benjamin’s words) “hold the frame in place” through a complex, sometimes unstable layering of internal, embedded frames and levels.42 Such layering occurs, for example, in Jan Gossaert’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin (1521), where the literal presence of multiple frames within frames, arches within arches, and columns within columns works to set out a permissible relation between human artist and divine model, between the hand (of man) that creates and the hand (of the angel) that guides. We find here an indication of exactly the type of comparative study—of conflicting media within the long, troubled, and global history of modernity—that Paul Willemen hoped to port into film theory in the twenty-first century. In our time, the metaframe serves more of a political purpose than a religious one (although this archaic resonance never entirely disappears)—namely, to divine and clarify the connections between different worlds, or logics of worlds (to use Alain Badiou’s book title),43 and among various social orders, levels, networks, and multiple systems. This was already a latent aspect of the complex framing in Douglas Sirk or Yasujiro Ozu, but it has become an even more rigorous practice today to the point of generating plot structure, as in the well-known

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example of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)—a film that hinges on the enigma of its framings (“at once overframed and unframed”), its impossible or mysterious camera placements, banal yet full of a very contemporary menace. “The frame as such is part of the picture”—this is what Raymond Durgnat observed, prophetically, of Jerry Lewis’s comedic deframings in the 1960s.44 Such moments in today’s fiction or nonfiction films tend to signal high points of omniscient narration—whether that controlling narration is felt to be the storytelling consciousness behind the work, the controlling logic of a social system, or both. There is another reason we have today entered the era of the metaframe. As Rachel Schaff has persuasively argued, in all recent discussions that pose the question of what cinema, in some fundamental or ontological sense, really is, a crucial, technological facet is underplayed. This is the very fact that cinema comes about, photochemically—in the camera that records, the film strip that is developed and printed, and the screening that is projected—through the gate of a rectangular frame. And it is precisely this technological complex of the frame—subsuming all the subsequent aesthetic and political quarrels, for and against, that it ignites—that disappears in the realm of digital technology. Digital media strenuously mimic the conventions of framing—for many aesthetic and industrial reasons and because new technological phases always hang on to the familiar operational concepts and perceptual habits associated, in the public’s mind, with their predecessors—but they have no strict need of them in order to function. This leads Schaff to conclude, “It is clear that the frame remains perhaps the only ever-present quality of cinema.”45 In a digital time, the frame thus becomes a kind of phantom—but a phantom hanging on to world culture for dear life, since it is in the name of the frame that cinema, in all its manifestations, paradoxically continues to exist, and even thrive, as that “cinema to come” that Francesco Casetti celebrates.46 To work the frame as an archaic form or to radically shatter it: these are the two poles I have tried to define on an axis of aesthetic options shaping key tendencies in contemporary world cinema. I could adapt the following formulation by Étienne Souriau about the cube and the sphere as my own, placing the word cinema where he, in 1948, wrote theater in order to capture the tension of this current moment in the poetics of the now: “And so the true life of theatre oscillates between these two opposite poles; it quickens and draws enthusiasm from their struggle, from their double and contrasting impulses, from the ever-lasting nostalgia these two extremes have for each other.”47

Notes 1. Paul Willemen, “For a Comparative Film Studies,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no.  1

(2005): 98–112.

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2. Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (London: Continuum, 2011); Tiago

De Luca, Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 3. Philippe Garrel, interview by Alain Philippon, “Un rêveur en état d’urgence,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 344 (February 1983): 15. 4. André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” trans. T. Barnard, in What Is Cinema? (Montréal: Caboose, 2009), 87–106. 5. Chantal Akerman, interview by Nicole Brenez, “The Pajama Interview,” LOLA, no.  2 (2012), http://www.lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html. 6. I was a member of this jury; the quote (from jury president Andrei Ujica) is transcribed from my handwritten notes taken during the public presentation of the award. 7. See Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 8. Ivo Blom, Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017); Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 10. Eyal Peretz, The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2017). 11. Des O’Rawe, “Towards a Poetics of the Cinematographic Frame,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 3 (2011): 5. 12. In a Facebook post in 2012, celebrated film theorist / historian Tom Gunning expressed his despair that recent art films “have just lost the ability to see the world in a frame.” His faith was subsequently restored by a viewing of Hal Hartley’s Meanwhile (2011), a film that foregrounds “the choice where the camera is placed; what is in the frame and what isn’t; what colors are shown, how things enter and leave the frame.” Tom Gunning, “I saw two quite good films this last month,” Facebook, March 29, 2012. 13. Thomas Elsaesser, “Michael Haneke’s Mind Games,” in A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundmann (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 62. 14. Richard Brody, “The Tree of Life: Roots and Shoots,” The Front Row (blog), New Yorker, May  24, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/05/the-tree-of-life -terrence-malick .html, emphasis added. 15. For a strong, persuasive statement on the rehabilitation of Souriau and his importance for philosophy, see Bruno Latour, “Reflections on Étienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence,” trans. Stephen Muecke, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 304–333. 16. Étienne Souriau, “The Cube and the Sphere,” trans. Claude P. Viens, Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 1952): 11–18. 17. Souriau, 15. 18. Souriau, 12. 19. Souriau, 12. 20. Souriau, 12. 21. Souriau, 13. 22. Souriau, 13. 23. Souriau, 13. 24. Souriau, 16. 25. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” trans. T. Barnard, in What Is Cinema?, 13–20.

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26. Jean-Pierre Gorin, “Trains of Thought,” Filmviews, no. 133 (Spring 1987): 13. 27. Peggy Phelan, Elisabeth Bronfen, and Hans Ulrich Obst, Pipilotti Rist (London: Phaidon,

2001), 15. 28. Hollis Frampton, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 125. 29. Letter included in Nicole Brenez, “Recycling, Visual Study, Expanded Theory—Ken Jacobs, Theorist, or the Long Song of the Sons,” trans. A. Martin, in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 169. 30. Brenez, 169. 31. Brenez, 170. 32. Brenez, 169. 33. Brenez, 170. 34. Pascal Bonitzer, “Deframings,” trans. Chris Darke, in Cahiers du cinéma, vol. 4, ed. David Wilson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 197. 35. Bonitzer, 198. 36. Bonitzer, 198. 37. Bonitzer, 199. 38. Bonitzer, 200. 39. Bonitzer, 201, emphasis added. 40. Brenez, “Recycling, Visual Study,” 170. 41. See Bernard Stiegler, “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema,” trans. D. Ross, Screening the Past, no.  36 ( June 2013), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/06/the -organology-of-dreams-and-arche-cinema/. 42. See Stoichita, Self-Aware Image; and Andrew Benjamin, “On the Image of Painting,” Research in Phenomenology, no. 41 (2011): 181–205. 43. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 44. Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), 237. 45. Rachel Schaff, “The Photochemical Conditions of the Frame,” Cinema & Cie., no. 26–27 (Spring/Fall 2016): 64. 46. Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 47. Souriau, “Cube and the Sphere,” 18.

3 • ABSTR ACTION AND THE GEOPOLITIC AL Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China J ohn Dav id Rhodes

Stephen Holden’s review of Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’amour (1995) in the New York Times, in a matter-of-fact tone of self-evidence, makes a genealogical connection between contemporary art-house East Asian cinema and the legacy of Michelangelo Antonioni: Michelangelo Antonioni’s brooding meditations on urban alienation may not be fashionable in America right now, but they have exerted a powerful influence on modern Asian cinema. “Vive l’Amour,” Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting second feature, is a virtual homage to the Antonioni films “La Notte” and “Eclipse.” As in those early-60’s masterpieces, the gleaming anonymous architecture and thoroughfares of a booming metropolis (here it is contemporary Taipei) frame the blank spiritual lives of characters who drift through the city in a state of melancholy disconnection . . . The end of the film aspires to a grand, Antonioni-like gesture with an extended tracking shot of the unhappy Mei-mei walking through a desolate urban park. Blending allusions to “L’Avventura,” “La Notte,” and “The Passenger,” the scene ends with a prolonged, highly emotional closeup of Mei-mei. But Yang Kuei-mei is no Jeanne Moreau or Monica Vitti. Where the performances in Antonioni’s films balanced the symbolism with a feeling of character, “Vive l’Amour’s” trio remain abstract gossamer figures in a moody urban reverie.1

The tone at the very end of this review I find hard to gloss; it seems that, ultimately, Tsai’s film is not entirely flattered by Holden’s comparison. But I am 53

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more interested here in the comparison itself. On the surface of things, Holden is drawing an obvious and obviously important connection between the work of Antonioni and Tsai. But there is a richer web of associations being woven at the level of Holden’s suggestive language. Antonioni is—typically—identified with a condition of “alienation,” with an emphasis on architectural spaces and surfaces whose geometry apparently provides concrete figuration of such alienation.2 His stylistic legacy, moreover, can be sensed in Tsai’s aesthetic of real-time duration as well as his tendency to oscillate between a distant view of things in long shot (the views of the city’s immensity) and an extremely intimate proximity to the objects of the camera’s gaze (the close-up of Mei-mei). Abstraction, which seems implicitly at stake across Holden’s description, makes a literal appearance in the last line. The characters in Vive l’amour are abstract (two dimensional, antipsychological?), as is the landscape they inhabit and as are the Antonionian stylistic gestures deployed to frame and record these characterological and geographical abstractions. My intention in what follows will be, to some extent, to belabor and elaborate the implications of what Holden is able to take for granted and what many commentators have also asserted, both implicitly and explicitly: Antonioni’s gift to contemporary “global art cinema” is the practice of abstraction, a term that I mean to specify and evaluate in theoretically precise terms.3 This practice of abstraction is also, I want to argue, a working practice, by which I mean it is a mode of labor that is also invested in tracking and documenting (both implicitly and explicitly) modes of labor and shifts in political economy more broadly. Abstraction, as a visual/artistic method, is not a means of producing a sort of objective correlative to the so-called emptiness or vagueness of characters’ lives; it is a means of identifying—at the very least, of making visible—a relation between human subjects and globalized political economy. In this sense, Antonioni’s abstraction and its practical reuses by a contemporary filmmaker like Tsai Ming-liang is a matter not just of artistic genealogy but also of conceptualizing the political force of stylistic method in contemporary cinema. I will first gloss the question of visual abstraction as a consistent preoccupation in Antonioni’s work, as filmmaker and as critic, then turn to ground an understanding of this practice in the art theoretical discourse of abstraction itself. Here I will refer to Wilhelm Worringer’s strange and influential theory of abstraction. Next I compare Worringer’s understanding of abstraction to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping.” Finally, I turn to Antonioni’s controversial documentary on China, Chung Kuo—China (1972), in order to understand how this film embodies a contact between Antonioni and East Asia that anticipates the contours of the later, looser encounter figured by his influence on a filmmaker like Tsai Ming-liang.

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Abstraction and/as Geopolitics Antonioni’s short essay “The Event and the Image” from 1963 provides a useful starting place for this investigation. The essay opens on what sounds like a set of theoretical propositions about the cinema—and Antonioni’s cinema, in particular—and then shifts, somewhat abruptly, to contextualize these reflections inside, or perhaps merely to set them paratactically alongside, a snippet of biographical memoir. Methodologically, the movement is from theory to biographical narration, from abstraction to referential particularity. In this sense, the essay reverses the typical trajectory of theory, which tends to move from the particular to the general, and also reverses the movement of abstraction, which typically begins with a concrete particular in order to stylize it into the form of a generality. Antonioni suggests that the filmmaker’s task, like that of the painter, is one of “seeing.” But whereas the painter seeks to reveal “a static reality,” the filmmaker pursues “a reality which is never static.” The filmmaker, therefore, “is always moving toward or away from a moment of crystallization” and seeks to render “this movement . . . as a new perception.”4 The desire to apprehend and visualize a new perception culminates in a “new character” for the cinema or, perhaps more simply, a new sort of cinema that is “no longer merely figurative.”5 This new sort of cinema, I think it should be uncontroversial enough to say, is the European art cinema of which Antonioni is so exemplary.6 If this new cinema is “no longer merely figurative,” then what is it? What preoccupies it? Antonioni seems to offer an initial answer: “The people around us, the places we visit, the events we witness—it is the spatial and temporal relations these have with each other that have a meaning for us today, and the tension that is formed between them.”7 A preoccupation with people, places, and events would characterize any form of representational, narrative cinema; the specificity of whatever it is Antonioni is getting at does not lie here. Instead, the meaning of the em dash that connects and divides the two parts of this sentence seems to ask to be read as instead: rather than merely represent people, places, and events, a cinema that is “no longer merely figurative” will seek to picture—to create images of—the “relations” and “tension[s]” that bind these things together. These relations and tensions are, presumably, not always given as objects of vision; they are abstractions, perhaps. So how do we see them? Antonioni provides the answer in the essay’s second half. After a break, a gap in the page (not unlike the curious em dash in the sentence I’ve just analyzed), Antonioni begins to narrate, in present tense, a set of sights and incidents at a seaside resort. The essay reads almost as a scenario in a screenplay: “The sky is white; the sea-front deserted; the sea cold and empty. . . . There is nobody on the beach except a single bather floating inert a few yards from the shore.”8 The bather, bobbing on the waves in the midst of this scene of

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everyday villeggiatura, is a corpse: “A glance is enough to tell that the bather is dead. The pallor of his face, the mouth full of saliva . . . The body is stretched out on the sand with the stomach in the air, the feet apart and pointing upwards.”9 Antonioni describes the business that ensues around the corpse, the arrival of the police, the awkward resumption of normality. Then in the final paragraph, Antonioni tells us that this event and its images are taken from his own experience: “It was wartime. I was at Nice, waiting for a visa to go to Paris to join Marcel Carné, with whom I was going to work as an assistant.”10 Antonioni wonders how one would set about making a film about this event and the emotions it aroused. His advice: “Remove the actual event from the scene, and leave only the image described in the first four lines.”11 Antonioni wants his imagined film to condense “the malaise, the anxiety, the nausea, the atrophy of all normal feelings and desires, the fear, the anger” of and at a particular moment in historical time. But what we might call the “realist” contingencies of the event (Who is the bather? How did he drown?) do not interest Antonioni: “The event here adds nothing: it is superfluous  .  .  . The true emptiness  .  .  . I felt when  .  .  . I found myself in that whiteness, in that nothingness, which took shape around a black point.”12 In other words, Antonioni suggests that we apprehend the “relations” and “tensions” that preoccupy him by going back to the image of people, places, and events. The image itself, as image, is abstracted from its narrative context and, in being so abstracted, becomes visually abstract or the grounds of abstraction. Antonioni first describes the corpse in detail (its pallor, the saliva issuing from its mouth) but then renders it abstractly as “a black point.” I have lingered over this essay because I believe it presents us with an argument for abstraction—for a mode of vision achieved through the squinting of one’s eyes, through the withdrawal of vision to a point at which the concretely particular assumes the form of a mere disposition of shapes, or else through an overcathexis of the particular so that it is pried out of its relation to and embeddedness in the external world. Antonioni’s insight and method in this essay instructs us that abstraction is already promised by and embodied in the concretion of the particular, whose ipseity both hides and discloses the universal. This description is, I also think, an adequate account of the sorts of cinematic practices in contemporary global art cinema, like that of Tsai Ming-liang, that have been compared to Antonioni’s. In what follows, I want to suggest a way of sharpening a sense of what abstraction might mean in considering the geopolitics of contemporary world cinema. I should make clear that I am hardly the first to have employed the concept of abstraction in attempting to come to terms with Antonioni’s filmmaking—particularly the specific style of his filmmaking. Peter Brunette, for instance, refers often to Antonioni’s abstract style in relation to his “antirealist” approach to his material.13 More substantively, Seymour Chatman has

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offered a sensitive formalist account of what he calls Antonioni’s “flat ‘abstract’ style,” especially in the films that he refers to as the “great tetralogy”: L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Il deserto rosso (1963). Chatman writes, “In one way or another, all the films of the tetralogy glory in the lines and masses of plane geometry. Characters are frequently pinned to walls, which are either bare or simply but elegantly divided by a vertical line or two. . . . Lines and masses suggest moral or psychological entrapment, unbridgeable alienation or the like. Love is often literally ‘barred.’ But whatever the connotation, the lines and masses remain lines and masses, and to ascribe them entirely to local plot symbolism may be to distort the films’ intentions.”14 Chatman’s concern that these severe and severely abstracting formal features not be themselves abstracted into signifiers for universal human emotions is welcome and instructive. To shore up his defense of his antimetaphoric reading, Chatman quotes twice from a famous interview with Antonioni conducted by Jean-Luc Godard. The first quotation suggests an intention on Antonioni’s part simply to meditate on and re-present the beauty to be found in the forms thrown up by modernity: “My intention was to point out the beauty in this world, where even the factories have an extraordinary esthetic beauty.”15 Chatman finds more useful another of Antonioni’s comments on the same subject: “I feel I must express reality in terms that are not completely realistic. Take for instance the abstract white line, which comes into the shot at the beginning of the scene [in Il deserto rosso] in the little grey street [where Giuliana, the film’s main character is planning on opening a shop]. This line interests me much more than the car, which arrives. It’s a way of approaching the character through material objects rather than through her life. Her life basically is only relatively interesting.”16 Chatman suggests that Antonioni’s formal method “makes the contours of visible objects speak to the characters’ uncertainty about the new order of things.”17 Chatman’s gloss here is interesting because he joins with Antonioni in suggesting that the director’s mode of visual representation (the mode of seeing in the films) is deeply connected with and a response to some sort of shift in human experience. Antonioni’s becomes a periodizing gaze in these accounts. However, Chatman retreats from the position he has just staked out when he says that the objects, as Antonioni frames them, “speak to the characters’ uncertainty.” How different is this formulation, really, from reading these “lines and masses” as symbols for human interiority? My point here is not to charge Chatman’s account with naïveté but rather to demonstrate how difficult it is to maintain the position that Antonioni’s abstraction is not “about” anything. While Antonioni’s abstract methods of framing and shooting do often intersect with and seem to express the alienated conditions of his characters’ lives, Chatman’s attempt to make abstraction matter less abstractly than this remains worthwhile. What he misses, and what I want to

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explore, however tentatively, is the way in which Antonioni’s abstraction may be the most concretely political dimension of his filmmaking. I also want to suggest that this mode of abstraction may be the director’s most significant legacy to contemporary global filmmaking. Before going further, it might also be worth stating more forthrightly what has been implicit: for Antonioni and those who write on him, abstraction can mean several interconnected things, just as the word signifies variously in discourses of aesthetics and aesthetic criticism more broadly. In some instances of Antonionian abstraction, the profilmic is framed (from a great distance or from very close up) so as to render the cinematic image unrecognizable, to turn it away from cinema’s supposedly ontological representationalism and toward a mode of nonfiguration or antirepresentationalism. In other instances, abstraction refers to the opaque actions of characters in the film whose motivations we cannot read and are never fully disclosed to us. In yet others, a profilmic detail—the corner of a building, or a piazza, or the back of a human head—is cut away from what surrounds it by the camera so as to deliver it up as an isolated fragment of the real. Abstraction literally names “a process of withdrawing or withdrawal,” and in all these examples, we witness a pulling away (from the demands of intelligible narration) or a drawing too close so as to draw something under the camera’s inspection away from its accustomed signification or functioning. I want to turn to a text that informs Chatman’s discussion of abstraction: Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, first published in 1907. Worringer’s aim, briefly put, is to displace the beautiful as it was expressed through “naturalist” art—that is to say, “realist” or realistically mimetic art—in order to

Figure 3.1. Abstraction in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1963)—pulling away or drawing too close

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overturn its hegemony in the hierarchy of the arts. Worringer defines naturalism as the “approximation to the organic and the true to life”18—verisimilitude, in other words. He is thinking primarily of “cisalpine” art—that of Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.19 For Worringer, naturalism expresses a kind of false consciousness; its “precondition” is a “happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomenon of the external world.”20 Such confidence is “the result of innate disposition, evolution, climatic and other propitious circumstances,” all of which lead to an “unproblematic sense of being at home in the world.”21 In opposition to naturalism (which, again, we might read as “realism”), Worringer posits the category of abstraction, the “urge” to which “is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in many by the phenomena of the outside world.”22 Worringer finds the most powerful instances of abstraction in the art of “certain culturally developed Oriental peoples,” however—and this is a major subtlety in Worringer’s argument—given that all art must proceed from some fundamental alienation (some ineffaceable difference or distance) from the world it represents, then abstraction is the ontology of all artistic representation, regardless of whether the work of art is classified as “naturalist” or “abstract.”23 Only abstraction remains true to art’s ontology of a foundational alienation.24 Abstraction contends with the “entanglement of phenomena,”25 and those who practice it do so with an attitude that is, for Worringer, the exact opposite of a sense of “being at home in the world”: “The happiness they sought from art did not consist of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world . . . but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness . . . of finding a point of tranquility and a refuge from appearances.”26 Space is the crucial, haunting feature of the world that feeds what Worringer calls the “urge to abstraction.” In Worringer’s account, “It is precisely space which, filled with atmospheric dread, linking all things together and destroying their individual closedness, gives things their temporal value and draws them into the cosmic interplay of phenomena; most important of all in this connection is the fact that space as such is not susceptible of individualization. Space is therefore the major enemy of all striving after abstraction.”27 Worringer offers a fascinating way of explaining or imagining the need for and causes of abstraction. I do not mean so much to contest or confirm Worringer’s thesis or theory, nor am I interested in assenting to his hierarchical valuations of naturalism and abstraction. Rather, I want to note two things: (1) His theory suggests a genealogy for abstraction that asks us to see it as a historicized and historicizable mode. Though the grounds of his assertions might today appear somewhat dubious, his account of abstraction is thoroughly geopolitical insofar as it suggests that modes of aesthetic comportment arise from and respond to specific geographical and material contexts (the “cisalpine” versus

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the “Oriental”). (2) His account of abstraction as a refuge from the “entanglement of phenomena” that we encounter in space resonates curiously with a more recent and very powerful periodized account of the relation between the spatial and the aesthetic. I am thinking of Fredric Jameson’s understanding of the “unrepresentable” totality of postmodern space. According to Jameson, “The new space that thereby emerges [in late capitalism] involves the suppression of distance . . . and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places, to the point where the postmodern body . . . is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed.”28 Both Jameson and Worringer write about a relation between historical period and aesthetic form, in which the latter must contend with or guard against the radical challenge of the former. In both accounts, space figures the threat to the historical subject and his or her access to experience. Whereas Worringer’s historical narrative proposes a turn to abstraction as a way of responding to the threat posed by space, for Jameson, the contemporary subject (artist, filmmaker, cultural producer) is encouraged to turn to what Jameson has famously termed “cognitive mapping.” This concept Jameson borrows from the urban theorist Kevin Lynch’s 1961 book The Image of the City. In this book, Lynch proposes that “good city form” allows the city’s inhabitant—through her interaction with “legible” coordination of monuments, landmarks, geographical features, and so on—to form a clear “cognitive map” of the city that not only lets her know where she is but also grounds her claim on belonging and civic identity.29 The too-much-ness and too-close-ness of postmodern space is, according to Jameson, “the truth of Postmodernism.”30 Cognitive mapping, in its centrality to the new political art, “will have to hold to the truth of Postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”31 What is difficult to understand about cognitive mapping—this is a difficulty that Jameson confesses—is what it looks like, if it has a form, if it resides in the object (via the artist’s conscious and unconscious handling of form) or in the critical activity of the subject (the reader/theorist). Jameson is clear that it is not “a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space,”32 nor is it to be found in postmodern aesthetic practices (of which Jameson approves) like Hans Haacke’s conceptual museological critique that “redirects the deconstruction of perceptual categories specifically onto the framing institutions themselves.”33 In Jameson’s analyses of cognitive mapping—his essays on Dog Day

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Afternoon or his reading of All the President’s Men, for example34—it is challenging at times to tell apart the artifact in which such mapping seems to take place and the critical activity that traces the mapping. At times, certain formal features seem crucial to its constitution (e.g., the long crane shot in the Library of Congress at the end of All the President’s Men),35 but at other times, cognitive mapping seems to depend on and be subtended by performance styles, intertextual frames of reference, or the presence of “a media term” as “an analogon or material interpretant for this or that more directly representational social model.”36 The opacity and slipperiness here are probably consubstantial with the term’s richness and productiveness, but I want to make a potentially pedestrian or flatfooted move and suggest that abstraction might be a method for understanding and visualizing what Jameson proposes under the rubric of cognitive mapping. More simply, what I mean is that visual abstraction is already cognitive mapping and that the pressure of thinking geopolitically is already what is at stake in abstraction itself. Reading Jameson alongside Worringer is not intended to collapse the modern(ist) into the postmodern(ist) or to disavow the historical discontinuities that separate Worringer’s moment from Jameson’s. But the uncanny similarity between Worringer’s explanation of abstraction’s geopolitics and Jameson’s program of cognitive mapping suggests that Jameson’s term could be usefully (if anachronistically) mapped (if I may) onto Worringer’s privileging of abstraction as a mode of picturing the world so as to act in it. In both cases, a mode of picturing something becomes a way of linking the thing pictured to things (forces, flows, populations) that cannot be fit into a picture. And despite the fact that Jameson refers to him as a “modernist,”37 Antonioni could just as sensibly be understood as a postmodernist. Moreover, Jameson’s account of cognitive mapping (and of the postmodern works that embody or enact it as a practice) could be understood to continue to smuggle in a modernist confidence in the work of art’s criticality. In any case, my intention here has been to point out the way in which the discourse of visual abstraction (Worringer) is itself already geopolitical and that its affinity with Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping—the best examples of which, according to Jameson, are found in contemporary East Asian cinema—might therefore suggest that abstraction offers us an insight into or a way of conceptualizing what is powerful, compelling, and unsettling in contemporary global cinema.38 To investigate this critical intuition further, I want to turn to a literalization of these coordinates—that is, to the documentary film that Antonioni made in and about East Asia, Chung Kuo—China..

Antonioni Goes to China: Chung Kuo—China Chung Kuo figures what is surely one of the most notorious examples of the intersection of filmmaking and the geopolitical. As Xin Liu has usefully narrated,

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Chung Kuo—China resulted from the Chinese government’s attempt to establish warmer relations with the West (Europe and the United States) following China’s distancing of itself from USSR after the Sino- Soviet split of the 1960s.39 Radiotelevisione italiana (Rai), Italy’s national broadcasting company, first approached China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the idea of sending an Italian filmmaker to China to shoot a documentary. According to Liu, the idea was greeted warmly, in part because “Antonioni was widely recognized as a left-wing intellectual who, from China’s point of view, would introduce China to the West in a positive way and help China raise its international reputation.”40 Mistaking Antonioni—whose politics were somewhat inscrutable, at best—for a Maoist might have been the Chinese authorities’ first mistake. (Did anyone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs bother to watch an Antonioni film before issuing the invitation?) In any case, Antonioni was afforded the opportunity to travel with a small film crew for a furious period of shooting that lasted five weeks, during which Antonioni and crew were always accompanied by Chinese officials who carefully monitored the choice of subjects for shooting.41 Given the enormity of the country and the time constraints of the five-week shooting period, Antonioni (through the agency and collaboration of his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli) had to shoot the Chinese landscape and the Chinese themselves in a somewhat hurried and improvised manner. Antonioni said that this period of time offered him only “a quick glance” that forced him to see China “with a voyager’s eye.”42 Antonioni’s accounts of the filming process consistently stress both his enjoyment of his experience in China and his sense of the Chinese officials’ approval of his work. Antonioni even related that Chinese officials greeted the film with praise when it was screened at the Chinese Embassy in Rome.43 However, upon the film’s wider release, it was bitterly condemned. Excoriating reviews of the film were published in a variety of Chinese newspapers, and these articles were translated and circulated in Italy and elsewhere.44 It is worth noting that much of the film’s cinematography, with its emphasis on panning, zooming, and traveling shots (taken from moving vehicles), suggests the loose feel of the way in which Los Angeles was captured in Zabriskie Point (1970). (Interestingly, this earlier fiction film was also accused of having missed the point of its subject matter.45) The film was formally banned by the Chinese government, and Chinese officials attempted to prevent the film from being screened at film festivals and broadcast on television in the West. Liu’s account of the film’s reception in China places the controversy inside the context of internal Chinese politics. According to Liu, the criticism of Chung Kuo—China was a veiled attack by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and the “Gang of Four,” her “political clique,” on Zhou Enlai, the premier, who Jiang Qing wanted to prevent from succeeding the declining Mao. Liu writes, “The massive criticism campaign against Antonioni was partly a scene

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created by the Gang of Four as part of their plot against Premier Zhou Enlai, which went far beyond the film itself.”46 One thing about the entire affair that remains compelling is the fact that regardless of whatever complex of political alliances and enmities explains the refutation of Chung Kuo, the critique of the film is framed in terms that take issue with the film’s style. There were, of course, complaints about the film’s content, its choice of subject matter—for instance, the criticism that Antonioni “skipped the stirring sights of collective labour and turned his camera solely on old people and a sick woman.”47 But even this critique is, in a sense, a stylistic critique—an analysis of and objection to where the camera was positioned, about the images it framed, and about the scale, texture, and architecture of these images. One such instance of stylized abstraction that attracted indignant repudiation occurs in some shots that Antonioni took of the Nanking Bridge, a construction that, as the film’s voice-over narration tells us, is a “majestic work” (una opera maestosa). The bridge is a construction made of steel, six kilometers in length, which took fifty thousand workers eight years to build. The views of the bridge offered by the film are typically Antonionian—which is to say, they share the sort of visual abstraction of industrial architecture, achieved by framing and zooming, that we see, for instance, in Red Desert (1963). We see the bridge first from afar, in a panning long shot that renders it as a thin horizontal line bisecting a hazy atmosphere of what we take to be water and sky. However, both sea and sky are nearly the same color, so only the bridge indicates a possible seam of distinction between one and the other. We see it then at closer range via a zooming lens that continues to flatten it against the background of the sky. Next a tilting pan, taken from under the bridge, on a moving boat (which we do not see). Then a short sequence of shots from farther away, the bridge receding diagonally into the distance. Then again, with the flattening telephoto lens, the bridge becomes a graphic ground against which are pressed more traditional (or in any case, less modern) wooden (fishing or trading) boats. In short, as I have already suggested, we see nothing, formally, that we have not seen in Antonioni’s earlier work. Chinese critics saw things somewhat differently, however. In an article published originally in the paper Renmin Ribao on January 30, 1974, and titled “Bad Intentions and Abject Manoeuvres,” Antonioni’s sins against China were aired in detail. The article’s author blames Antonioni for looking at the wrong things (and not looking at the right things) but also complains about the manner in which things are looked at. Here is a particularly rich passage: “During the entire film one never sees a new machine tool, nor a tractor, nor a good looking school, nor a building site in full swing, nor an abundant harvest. Yet he [Antonioni] has dedicated numerous panoramic shots and close ups to sequences that, by his own account, served only to calumny China and its people. . . . Filming the great bridge at Nanking over the Yangtse, he expressly chose hideous camera angles,

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giving the impression that the bridge is crooked and unsteady. And to ridicule it further, he introduces an image of pants hung out to dry under the bridge.”48 The status of these shots of the bridge becomes something of a leitmotif in discussions of the film. Antonioni felt it necessary to rebut this particular criticism at some length in an interview: I have been told that I showed the bridge in Nanking in a diminished way, not triumphal enough. I must say that in fact the day I went to shoot it was a foggy day and I asked to be allowed to return another day. There is a long shot of the bridge left in the film, I think, but it doesn’t show the bridge in a very expressive way. I had to limit myself to take shots of the bridge from closer by, and naturally, passing underneath it, the bridge appears slightly deformed. But that is our way of looking at things, from an individualistic viewpoint. That is the point of departure that our own social context creates. When certain aspects of reality fascinate me, my first instinct is to record them. We, as descendants of Western civilization, point our cameras at things that surround us, with a certain trust in the interpretative capacities of the viewer.49

Initially, Antonioni almost seems to want to offer an explanation for why the shots look as they do, as if his critics were correct. But he moves from an anecdotal account of the film’s production history to a more theoretical mode of defense, and while Antonioni’s informal comments here should not be read as theory per se, they nonetheless reinstantiate Worringer’s tendency, which is to offer geopolitical contextualization to explain modes of aesthetic (stylized) comportment. Antonioni, of course, inverts Worringer’s geopolitical maps. As, in Worringer’s terms, a “Cisalpine” artist who emphasizes the “individualistic” impulse, Antonioni would seem here to be speaking of empathy and not abstraction. Despite the muddled nature of his discourse, what Antonioni means here is that the “deformed” view of the bridge extends from an impulse to abstract—to tear away—a part, insofar as doing so more powerfully allows the spectator to experience the whole from which the part is shorn and whose totality it better expresses precisely because it has been abstracted. (Interestingly, the critic writing in Renmin Ribao would seem to object both to these shots’ abstraction, which produce an image of an unstable structure, and their realism—those pants drying in the sun. For the Chinese critic, Antonioni fails as abstractionist and as realist.) But for Antonioni, abstraction extends from a geopolitical perspective that is meant to be encountered as such—not just as an image but as an articulation of worldview precisely because it is an (abstract) image. Most interesting about the entire affair here is that both he and the Chinese critics are capable of understanding this fact: both recognize the image’s abstraction as a powerful mediation of geopolitical power. The Chinese critic may be disingenuous, or

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compelled by ideology or historical context to write in a certain way, and Antonioni may be diffuse or complacent, but both are clear on this point.50 The Antonioni-China affair was so notorious in the 1970s, especially in leftleaning intellectual and artistic circles in Europe and North America, that Susan Sontag closes her influential On Photography with a consideration of the debates surrounding Chung Kuo. Sontag writes, “Nothing could be more instructive about the meaning of photography for us  .  .  . than the attacks on Antonioni’s film in the Chinese Press in early 1974.”51 The fact that a film—and not a still photograph—should be what Sontag feels best expresses the nature of photography suggests something of this episode’s resonance. Sontag’s discussion pits a “we” who experience photography in one way against “the Chinese” who experience it differently. “We”—we Westerners, she means—look to photography as the source of “picturesque of disorder, the force of the odd angle.” “The Chinese,” on the other hand, prefer their photography “straight on, centered, evenly lit, and in its entirety.”52 Clearly, “we” occupy the space of abstraction, “the Chinese” that of realism. Sontag slides between referring to “the Chinese” and “the Chinese authorities,” but clearly she has in mind the point of view of an official bureaucratic, ideological hegemon: the point of view of the state. Sontag writes, “The Chinese don’t want photographs to mean very much or to be very interesting. They do not want to see the world from an unusual angle, to discover new subjects. Photographs are supposed to display what has already

Figure 3.2. Abstracting Chinese development in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo—China (1972)

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been described. Photography for us is a double-edged instrument for producing clichés (the French word that means both trite expression and photographic negative) and for serving up ‘fresh’ views. For the Chinese authorities, there are only clichés—which they consider not to be clichés but ‘correct’ views.”53 Bearing in mind that Sontag goes to some effort to suggest that “Chinese” attitudes reflect state ideology, even a generous reading of this passage reveals something of the tendency to, in Rey Chow’s terms, “primitivize” the nonWestern perspective here.54 It would be easy to deduce from Sontag’s account that “the Chinese” are somehow less sophisticated than “we” are. What her account misses, and what I have been trying to emphasize, is the fact that both West and East—Antonioni, or “we,” and “the Chinese”—share the recognition that abstraction itself maps geopolitical tension.55 I would argue that the images of the bridge might be productively understood as an example of abstraction as “cognitive mapping”—as a method of attempting to relate the concrete local particular (the bridge) to a larger global totality of, in Jameson’s words, “inventing new geotopical cartographies.”56 The larger totality being mapped in Chung-Kuo would be the geopolitical moment at which China “opens its door,” so to speak, to the West (to Italy, to Antonioni) and all the undergirding and attendant political, economic, social, and cultural forces that flow into and out of and eddy around this moment. The abstract and abstracted image of the Nanking Bridge gives us the concrete particularity of that bridge. Antonioni’s method of picturing and framing it, however, ensures not just that we see in these images the bridge or “China” or “Maoist progress” but also that we see “Antonioni,” “the West,” as well as an entire history of pictorial abstraction that attempts to explore (and, pace Worringer, contain) a world of terrifying complexity. Thus an entire welter of geopolitical events and forces are laminated together in the “deformed” image of the Nanking Bridge. Abstraction serves as a means of connecting things through alienation.57 However absurd their criticisms of Antonioni were, this is something “the Chinese” saw. Curiously, it something that Jameson himself does not see. In one of his exemplary essays on cognitive mapping, Jameson dismisses Antonioni’s documentary in a throwaway parenthetical remark that tells us less about Chung-Kuo—China, cognitive mapping, or the film under discussion—Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977)—than it does about the left critical consensus regarding the film. Jameson argues that in Tahimik’s film, “travelogue is rescued and transformed, not by metamorphosis into the great Western spatial image (as, say, in Antonioni’s notorious documentary on China), but rather by regression to some first and more primal level of photography.”58 I must admit that, unfortunately, I have not seen Tahimik’s film, so I cannot evaluate the comparison; however, Jameson’s liquidation of Chung Kuo—China as “the great Western spatial image” (whatever that may be) seems to me to miss completely—in a way that not even

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“the Chinese” did—the geopolitical complexity of both Antonioni’s film and the scandal of its reception. Recently, in her book Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Homay King has written sensitively about Chung Kuo—China, deflecting the consistent charges that the film is exoticizing, or orientalizing. Echoing the terms of critics before her, she suggests that Antonioni’s is an “ethnography predicated on aesthetic surfaces rather than on the penetration and exposure of deep-lying secrets.” King continues, “It is not so much that China is unrepresentable, Antonioni seems to say, as it is that one can only see what is there to see.”59 The abstracted image that gives us access to what there was to see, however, gives us more than what was there before the camera’s gaze. Abstraction—the plucking out of the detail from what Worringer calls the “entanglement” of the whole, or the flattening of the whole’s entanglement into a graphic image—seems to me not only to convey to us the visual pleasure of its own “lines and masses,” according to Chatman, but also to force on us an awareness that an attempt is being made to see something in a particular way. This mode of seeing, while willfully stylized, is also a contingent mode of seeing, one inflected—scarred, even—not just by the exigencies of a foggy day or a hurried shooting schedule but by the weight and complexity of a radical geopolitical encounter.

Taiwanese Antonioni? The opening shot of Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’amour offers us an extreme close-up of a key dangling from the lock of a doorknob in what appears to be the empty corridor of an apartment building. In the film, empty apartments are illegally squatted and used as meeting places for erotic assignations. The key given to us by this opening shot, which gives us entry into the world of the film, also gives the characters entry into the empty apartment. The empty apartment, however, is not merely an empty figure or a figure of emptiness in Vive l’amour; rather, it is a metonymy of the larger East Asian economy and its position inside the global economy. Taiwan’s economy—one of the four “Asian Tigers”—experienced a period of major expansion and an increase in living standards from the 1960s to the 1990s (and beyond). In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal “reforms” in the regulation of the housing market and changes in the Taiwanese state’s oversight of public housing led to large-scale speculation in the construction industry and the housing market. Neoliberalization encouraged rising property prices and exaggerations in the ratio of disposable income to mortgage costs. Affordable housing for lower-income citizens of Taipei has diminished: in the 1990s, slums were cleared in order to build parks, but no low-income housing was built to rehouse those who were displaced from the city center.60 Thus we see

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that the empty apartments, inside whose walls we and the characters in this film spend so much time, are the material indices of this economic expansion (or overexpansion). The abstraction of this extreme close-up that begins the film does not abstract the doorknob and its key from a larger social totality but rather concretely embodies that totality. The extreme close-up itself signals that thinking—and picturing—this totality is only possible by an apprehension of it via the concrete particular. The unfathomable size and complexity of the global economy is at once inconceivable (on the order of the sublime), but is also generative of spaces, places, and objects that are apprehensible in their concrete locality. The creation of new localities and an emphasis on (and even fetishization of) the local qua local are part and parcel of the global economy’s effects, but this privileging of the local should also be read simultaneously as an index of and conduit to the global. Thus this abstract and abstracted image of a doorknob that gives access to an empty apartment produces meanings that are locally meaningful and also legible as signs of global economic development. The visual cathexis of a detail like the key dangling from this doorknob is typical of the way in which Antonioni abstracts a detail from an otherwise realist mise-en-scène and displaces it from the contiguous profilmic to not only meditate on the detail as detail—as aesthetic particular—but also provide a clue to understanding its imbrication in broader systems of meaning and broader systems of economic development. For comparison, we might look to Red Desert, a film that, like Vive l’amour, explores the spatial and psychic contradictions at stake in the context of an economic boom (Italy’s “economic miracle” of the late 1950s and early 1960s). In this film, we witness the camera’s focus on a stripe of

Figure 3.3. The abstraction of the concrete particular in Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1996)

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blue paint on a white wall during a scene in which workers are being recruited to immigrate to South America to work in the oil industry. Initially, we might think that the camera has “lost the plot,” but then we might consider that the camera’s attention to this stripe of paint has translated it out of its typical register (just this blue paint on this factory wall) and transformed it into a pure, universal figure of visual abstraction. The formal operation (the camera’s focus on and framing of this piece of the profilmic) by which a concrete particular is translated into a universal is not unlike how these workers (whose particular faces the camera has studied, only moments before, with near ethnographic fascination) will be plucked out of the web of local relations that have structured their lives and inserted into a global labor force (a market in abstract labor) in which their particularity will matter less, or matter differently, in different spaces. The relation between Tsai’s practice and Antonioni’s—a relation that is predicated on a practice of abstraction—seems to me to be legible in precisely these terms. Abstraction is a mode of contending with both local, sensual concreteness and the sublime incomprehensibility of the global economy. Despite, however, the apparent logic and appropriateness of thinking through Tsai’s practice in relation to Antonioni’s, and despite the frequency with which this has been done, doing so has proved difficult, complex, and even controversial at times. Angelo Restivo has written compellingly about the connections between Tsai’s cinema and Antonioni’s. For Restivo, who is very much in conversation with Jameson, it is “the empty apartments—themselves interchangeable ‘slots’ within the urban center” that act as the material basis for the film’s formal experimentation.61 Restivo is interested in the instances of Antonioni’s “pure opticality,” which he also understands, in Lacanian terms, as “uncanny points of anamorphosis.”62 Although he does not privilege abstraction per se, he nonetheless evokes it—for instance, when he speaks of techniques shared by Antonioni and Tsai of “embedding . . . the human within tightly composed architectural grids.”63 Restivo links a “decentered” gaze—that produces sights and scenes of “distortion” but that ultimately suggests the “impossibility of subjectivity itself ”—to the impossibility of “map[ping] out some understanding of the global order itself.”64 Restivo’s emphasis on impossibility is in tension with Jameson’s understanding of cognitive mapping as a possibility—not of seeing the global order but of “sensing” and beginning to describe and represent (or “map”) not just its immensity but also its structures and modes of operation and appearance or nonappearance.65 Abstraction, I would argue, because it is a mode of mapping—of making something sensually sensible that is not immediately representable (despite the fact of the abstract representation’s immediacy)—is a mode of possibility, not impossibility. In attempting to trace a “modernist genealogy” for Tsai’s filmmaking that links him to European art-cinema auteurs like Antonioni, Mark Betz usefully

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charts the insistence and frequency of critics’ comparisons of the two filmmakers while also generously fleshing out the—often underarticulated—logical basis for such comparisons. After making absolutely clear that there are real ties of radical affiliation that link Tsai’s work to Antonioni’s, Betz cautions that “while it is valid . . . to see Tsai’s project in relation to European modernism, it is equally important to realize how embedded this project is in Taiwanese cinema and culture.”66 Betz criticizes Jameson’s “geopolitical aesthetic” and his practice of cognitive mapping as enforcing “a kind of Western economic stagism.”67 Betz sees Jameson’s model as always already privileging the Western, historically antecedent artistic practice, in whose footsteps the third-world artist must follow; he goes on to argue that this model indexes “a myopia that leads to expressions such as ‘the Taiwanese Antonioni.’”68 I agree with Betz that a formulation like “the Taiwanese Antonioni” is one we should approach cautiously, but I also submit that it is one that we would be unwise to refuse. Antonioni’s films preceded Tsai’s, and so the influence of the former on the latter (or critics’ desire to trace such an influence, whether it is one consciously felt and mediated by Tsai or not) is something we can accept without implying that such influence is baleful or an index of colonialism or first-world-ism.69 There is something, after all, useful in a term like “the Taiwanese Antonioni”: it suggests that Tsai’s cinema is embedded in a history—of forms and global flows—that it does not merely imitate but deforms. If I read his essay correctly, then I think Betz would likely agree with me that a phrase like “the Taiwanese Antonioni” forces what is meant by Antonioni to undergo some process of deformation and estrangement. Moreover, we might think that the proper name Antonioni refers not to Antonioni himself, or even to his films, but rather to a stylistic project of abstraction that is named by this name. When we recognize an affinity between one filmmaker (one stylist) and another, our understanding of both filmmakers changes because recognition is itself productive of an experience of what Alexander García Düttmann calls “a middle which is not determined by fixed coordinates.”70 To see the Antonionian in Tsai is not to re-cognize Tsai as Antonioni—to reify a set of shared traits or fix a pattern of influence—but rather to sense this middle.71 This middle is the middle we sense at the end of Vive l’amour, the ending that Stephen Holden describes in the quotation that I began with, an ending that leaves us in the middle of an urban landscape that itself seems to have no end on a long take that threatens to be just as interminable. In this final scene, Mei-mei, one of the central characters—a real estate agent, occupied by trying to sell and rent Taipei’s seemingly excessive number of unoccupied middle- and upper-middle-class apartments—has something of a breakdown as she wanders or walks purposefully (it’s hard to tell which) into Park No. 7, which was then one of Taipei’s new gardens, created in the space created by the slum clearances mentioned previously.72 In a

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long tracking shot, we follow Mei-mei as she walks along a paved path, adorned periodically by insipid white planters, that meanders through the freshly dug-up park. The park looks as postapocalyptic as it does newly planted. It is a raw landscape, one coming into being. It acts as a nearly formless ground to Mei-mei’s figure; however, the park is itself figure to another ground—that of high-rise Taipei’s sawtooth skyline, which also had only recently come into being. Thus Meimei’s figure is projected onto a doubled ground of abstract surfaces: first the park and next Taipei’s skyscrapers that hem it in on all sides. The shot could, of course, be read as infinitely realist/documentary—which, in a sense, it is—however, so much muddy waste and so many jutting towers in the distance combine to create a profounder impression of the “lines and masses” (Chatman’s phrase again) that we see in Antonioni. Eventually, we follow Mei-mei to some sort of openair auditorium, made of row upon row of slatted wooden benches, upon one of which Mei-mei sits, just a couple of rows behind an elderly man who is reading a newspaper. The impression is of even more lines and masses and is very similar to a famous shot that Antonioni produces in Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore, 1950) when two characters meet on the benches of an aquatic recreation park outside Milan.73 Finally, the film settles on Mei-mei via a long-take close-up shot in which she cries for more than five minutes. Then the film ends. It was through watching Vive l’amour, with its obvious insistence on Taipei’s landscape of developmental overproduction, that I was first led to think more seriously about Antonioni’s emphasis on developing landscapes in Italy. Both film practices find in these landscapes the raw visual material for a cinema of

Figure 3.4. Lines and masses and the human figure in Vive l’amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1996)

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Figure 3.5. Lines and masses and the human figure in Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

abstraction. Seen together and thought about side by side, Tsai’s cinema and Antonioni’s do not comfortably confirm the situation of a West that sits in one part of the world that can be counterposed to an East that sits somewhere else.74 Both practices practice an abstraction that does not render them exchangeable as practices; rather, it renders visible, however provisionally, the way in which global capital has rendered the world, in its many parts and locations, so abstractly exchangeable. This, I think, is Antonioni’s lesson, and it is Tsai’s as well—the lesson of abstraction as a visual impression of an immense totality, an impression as universally intangible as it is locally concrete.

Notes 1. Stephen Holden, “Film Festival Review: Vive l’amour; a New Apartment as Empty as Its

Occupants,” New York Times, March 23, 1995, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res =990CE6DE133DF930A15750C0A963958260. 2. For a tracing of the major terms (or clichés) by which Antonioni’s cinema has been both praised and blamed, see Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, “Interstitial, Pretentious, Alienated, Dead: Antonioni at 100,” in Antonioni: Centenary Essays, ed. Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (Basingstoke: BFI, 2011), 1–17. 3. The term global art cinema is used self-consciously in a recent and major reference point on the subject, the eponymous collection by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Galt and Schoonover’s understanding of art cinema’s inherently rich and complex relationship to

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geopolitics has been influential on my thinking here. I will turn to some of the scholarship that aligns Tsai with Antonioni in this chapter’s last section. 4. Michelangelo Antonioni, “The Event and the Image,” in The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, ed. Carlo di Carlo, Giorgio Tinazzi, and Margaret Cottino-Jones (New York: Marsilio, 1996), 51. This essay was originally published as “Il fatto e l’immagine,” Cinema nuovo (1963); the English translation was first published in Sight & Sound (Winter 1963–1964). 5. Antonioni, 51. 6. I have written about this essay as an informal theorization of art cinema and in relation to the question of Antonioni’s style in “Antonioni and the Development of Style,” in Antonioni: Centenary Essays, ed. Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 276–301. 7. Antonioni, “Event and the Image,” 51. 8. Antonioni, 52. 9. Antonioni, 52. 10. Antonioni, 53. 11. Antonioni, 53. 12. Antonioni, 53. 13. Peter Brunette, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 14. Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or the Surface of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 119. 15. Quoted in Chatman, 119. 16. Quoted in Chatman, 119. 17. Chatman, 119. 18. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge, 1963 [1907]), 27. 19. Worringer uses this term frequently, but see in particular pp. 28–31. 20. Worringer, 7. 21. Worringer, 45. 22. Worringer, 15. 23. Worringer, 15. 24. Even the discourse of “losing oneself ” in the work of art that Worringer criticizes in the discourse of the empathy theory that he is attacking is already an instance of “self-alienation” (24–25). 25. Worringer, 20. 26. Worringer, 16. 27. Worringer, 38. 28. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 411–412. 29. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 [1960]). 30. Jameson, Postmodernism, 54. 31. Jameson, 54. 32. Jameson, 54. 33. Jameson, 157. 34. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 35. Jameson, 77–82. 36. Jameson, Postmodernism, 415.

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37. Compare Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 42. Elsewhere in the same book in reference to Blow-Up, although the term modernist is not used explicitly, Antonioni is clearly positioned as a modernist filmmaker in distinction from postmodernist filmmakers like De Palma and Coppola, who pay homage to Antonioni in a variety of ways. Jameson associates Antonioni with a “Heideggerian and metaphysical” approach to filmmaking and assumes that the questions that a film like Blow-Up asks are fundamentally ontological (20). Jameson, however, seems to need Antonioni to be a modernist in order for his readings of De Palma and Coppola as postmodernists to cohere. It could be just as plausible to read Antonioni, especially the Antonioni of the late 1960s and 1970s, as postmodern. For an account of Blow-Up that links the film to art practices that have been decisively understood as postmodern, see Matilde Nardelli, “BlowUp and the Plurality of Photography,” in Antonioni, ed. Rascaroli and Rhodes, 185–205. 38. An essay like “Remapping Taipei,” for instance, performs a case study in cognitive mapping on a Taiwanese film (Edward Yang’s Terrorizer, 1986), Jameson’s close analysis of which (mentioned in the previous footnote) refers repeatedly back to Antonioni. Jameson does not emphasize the abstract nature of Antonioni’s visual practice, as I am interested in doing here, but rather invokes the reflexivity of a film like Blow-Up. See Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” in Geopolitical Aesthetic, 114–155. For a skeptical estimation of the influence Jameson’s essay has had on studies of contemporary East Asian art cinema, see Emile Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 127–131. 39. Xin Liu, “China’s Reception of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 2, no. 1 (2014): 23–40. 40. Liu, 26. 41. Antonioni claimed, “Everything I did in China was done in complete accord with the people who were there to accompany me. Usually there were eight of them. In Nanking there were fourteen. Thus I never did anything that wasn’t allowed and I never shot anything without their being present.” Gideon Bachmann, interview with Michelangelo Antonioni, “Talking of Michelangelo,” in Architecture of Vision, ed. di Carlo, Tinazzi, and Cottino-Jones, 329. 42. Bachmann, 327. 43. Bachmann, 327. 44. See the documents translated and assembled at “Repudiating Antonioni’s Anti-China Film,” Peking Review, February  22, 1974, http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking -review/1974/PR1974-08d.htm. A dossier of articles and documents related to the film was edited by Francesco Bolzoni and published in Italy in the Rivista del cinematografo 3/4 (March–April 1974). 45. For a survey of the negative responses to the film on the part of American critics and for a radical rethinking of the film’s importance, see Angelo Restivo, “Revisiting Zabriskie Point,” in Antonioni, ed. Rascaroli and Rhodes, 82–97. 46. Liu, “China’s Reception of Michelangelo,” 29. 47. Yang Kuei, “Refuting Antonioni’s Slanders against Inshein County,” Peking Review, February  22, 1974, http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1974/PR1974-08d .htm. 48. “Intenzione malevola e manovra abbietta,” Rivista del cinematografo 3/4 (March–April 1974): 22, my translation. Susan Sontag also quotes excerpts from this passage (though in a different translation) in her discussion of the film at the end of On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 170–171. I discuss Sontag’s analysis of the controversy over the film in what follows. 49. Bachmann, “Talking of Michelangelo,” 328.

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50. One could genealogically trace this encounter back to the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci’s travels to China in the sixteenth century and his production of a marvelous “Mappamondo,” or world map. On this subject, see Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). 51. Sontag, On Photography, 169. 52. Sontag, 172. 53. Sontag, 173. 54. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 20–21. 55. It is also important to note that Liu’s contextualist account of the affair would also elide the crucial role that abstraction plays for both sides of the debate. 56. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 189. 57. Thus my understanding of abstraction here departs somewhat from (or deforms, abstracts) Worringer’s use of the term. His privileging of abstraction over empathy intended to criticize empathy theory’s complacent understanding of the work of art as a medium of connection or attachment. Worringer understands abstraction’s shoring up of itself through a rigidity of forms as a means of separating and protecting the subject from a bruising experience. At the same time, however, abstraction’s work was, therefore, to grant the subject an experience of quasi-repose or aesthetic sovereignty over experience, which could be read, then, as a means of establishing a relation through alienation. 58. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 204. 59. Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 111. 60. For a useful account of these developments, see Yi-ling Chen, “Provision for Collective Consumption: Housing Production under Neoliberalism,” in Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development, ed. Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok (New York: Routledge, 2005), 99–119. In the same volume, Kuang-Tien Yao takes up this history of neoliberal urban development directly in relation to Tsai’s filmmaking. Kuang-Tien Yao, “Commentary on the Marginalized Society: The Films of Tsai Ming-Liang,” in Globalizing Taipei, ed. Yin-Wang Kwok, 219–240. 61. Angelo Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 161. In this section of his book, Restivo is also talking about Edward Yang’s Terrorizer, the subject of Jameson’s “Remapping Taipei,” and his comments here on Vive l’amour are meant, I believe, to echo Jameson’s suggestion that in Yang’s film, “Taipei is . . . mapped and configured as a superimposed set of boxed dwelling spaces in which characters are all in one way or another confined.” Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” 154. 62. Restivo, Cinema of Economic Miracles, 160–161. 63. Restivo, 159. 64. Restivo, 160–164. 65. See, for instance, the beginning of Jameson, “Remapping Taipei”: “The social totality can be sensed, as it were, from the outside” (114). 66. Mark Betz, “The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Genealogy,” in Reading Chinese Transationalisms: Society, Literature, Film, ed. Maria N. Ng and Philip Holden (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 166. 67. Betz, 169. 68. Betz, 169. 69. Perhaps Betz dislikes the way in which “Taiwanese Antonioni” subsumes Tsai’s name. But his essay itself traces lines of influence (the term genealogy appears in the title) that run

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from earlier European to later East Asian film practices. Betz implies that such terms are themselves implicitly “neo-colonial.” To my mind, they are, on the one hand, perhaps one of the film critic’s too-convenient arsenal of tropes—tropes that testify to the critic’s own authority as someone who knows about cinema. But they are also traces of an experience of recognition whereby a new thing is put in relation to an old(er) thing. Recognition, properly understood, should mean that both things look differently when their relation has been recognized. “Taiwanese Antonioni,” however cheap this term is, as a trope, nonetheless testifies to a social materiality of film culture that would have constituted part of the matrix out of which Tsai’s films emerge. Betz suggests that rather than calling Tsai something like “the Last Modernist,” we might call him “the First Modernist” (170). However, doing this might efface the lived experience of having to work through and out from under the weight of history—not just of the history of the West’s attempts to colonize, dominate, and interfere with the rest of the world but of film history (whether European or Asian), of the history of the circulation and reception of films in and across time. 70. Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition, trans. Kenneth B. Woodgate (London: Verso, 2000), 93. 71. I have used Dütmman’s work to theorize what I refer to as the “queer labor” of style—something that comes into view, for instance, when accounting for the relation between the work of Douglas Sirk and that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. See “Fassbinder’s Work: Style, Sirk, and Queer Labor,” in A Companion to Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2012), 181–203. 72. Yao’s essay, “Commentary on the Marginalized Society,” cites this as the precise location of this scene (232), as does Pin-chia Feng in “Desiring Bodies: Tsai Ming-liang’s Representation of Urban Femininity,” Tamkang Review 34, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 3–4. 73. See my discussion of this shot in “Development of Style,” 280–281. 74. For a fascinating and very useful essay that arrives at some similar conclusions via different coordinates, see Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/ tsai_european_undead/.

4 • THE CIT Y OF BITS AND URBAN RULE Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary J a mes T w eedie

The title of this chapter draws from William Mitchell’s 1996 book The City of Bits and from a contemporaneous essay by Françoise Choay titled “Urban Rule and the Death of the City” (“Le règne de l’urbain et la mort de la ville”). Both ask about the fate of the city under the influence of new image-making and information technologies, and both suggest that the postmodern city itself has undergone a fundamental transformation and merged quintessential material structures—streets, buildings, monuments—with the seemingly incompatible category of the digital. Cities are composed of bits, Mitchell suggests, and the “URBAN,” writes Choay, is the “operating system” of contemporary society. The question motivating this chapter is how to situate the multiple, privatized screens of contemporary moving-image production and reception in relation to the history of cinema and the space of the city. Is contemporary cinema marked primarily by its departure from the celluloid history of cinema, and is it therefore just another phenomenon that has become digital—another instantiation of the phenomenon described by Mitchell and Choay? What is the relationship between the urban and the cinematic, these two social, economic, and aesthetic systems, these protocols of organization and control? And finally, what are the local effects of these developments in the real-world laboratories of accelerated urbanization, globalization, and digitization? Using contemporary Chinese documentary cinema as its primary interface with moving images and the politics of space, this chapter argues that filmmakers 77

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in China have staged a confrontation between urban rule, this operating system of a new social order, and the ruins of prior conceptions of social space and human interaction, many of them equally futuristic in their day but currently on the verge of ruination. And they undertake this reclamation project through an equally atavistic conception of cinema that harks back to the earliest realist and documentary traditions. The city documentaries of Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing are films about archaic futures that offer both alternatives to the marketdriven urban development in contemporary China and a cautionary tale about its relentlessly futurist orientation, as each constructs a chronicle of the dying days of the socialist industrial system, with Jia focusing on Chengdu and then Shanghai and Wang organizing a monumental three-part film around the metal industry in the northeastern city of Shenyang. Drifting away from the city, a twodecade series of documentaries reflects the increasingly rural orientation of the work of Wu Wenguang and his workshop collaborators, whose films often posit the countryside rather than the past as an alternative to China’s current model of globalization and its most recent manifestations in the digital city. Jia and Wang suggest that urban archaeology is media archaeology, with the corollary that urban theory must also be media theory (and vice versa) because any alternative to the “city of bits,” a phenomenon of space, code, and screens, must offer an alternative to the conceptions of urban space and media that have become the very substance of city life. At Wu’s studio—which focused in the 1990s on avant-garde artists and urban intellectuals and has now become a center of large-scale collaborations, many of them dispersed to locations throughout the countryside—the antispectacles of village elections and historical testimony are recorded through an unspectacular visual style that recalls some of the most archaic conceptions of cinema as a documentary medium. Viewed as a totality, the digital filmmaking pursued by Wu and his collaborators presents a counterbalance to the digital economy and its visual culture, and it reflects a departure from the urban present dominated by that aesthetic and social system. Mitchell’s account of the informational and flexible city was sparked by the intuition in the mid-1990s that a fundamental change had taken place in the structure of cities: many functions previously performed in the physical space of cities were being transferred into cyberspace. One result of this transformation was that the spatial, cartographic, and topological organization of the city—its configuration around a common meeting ground like a town square or green or access to resources like water from a central well or concentrations of industry in particular zones—has declined in importance, giving way to what Mitchell calls an “antispatial” and “incorporeal” system.1 Mitchell argues that advanced communication systems have rendered proximity and materiality less crucial in the

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development of urban life, commerce, communities, and belonging. “The new urban design task,” he writes, “is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places and electronic interconnections between them.”2 One implication of his argument is that many of the most enduring utopian visions of the city have grown archaic or even obsolete since the physical encounters in city streets or public venues have been virtualized and now take place online or over social media. The significance of this upheaval is well understood by everyone with access to a computer or cell phone, as this revolution in communication systems has taken place during the lifetime of all but the youngest people, and the rhetoric deployed by Mitchell is now familiar in popular discourse, even if we may disagree with the often boosterish and exaggerated tone in Mitchell’s original text or contemporary variations on the theme. These transformations also pose unique challenges for film studies, given the centrality of the city and theories of the urban public sphere in one of the field’s key conceptual paradigms from the past half century: Miriam Hansen’s idea of vernacular modernism and its underlying debt to the work of Jürgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge, the key philosophers of the urban public sphere.3 Some theorists have emphasized the continuities between theories of cinema developed before and after this imagined divide: Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto’s study of “cinephiles and cinephilias,” for example, posits a regeneration of cinephilia in the digital age and a democratization of the tools of criticism.4 We see in Jullier and Leveratto a replacement of the lost cities of the early twentieth century with a form of virtual modernism flourishing in the city of bits. At about the same time as Mitchell, in a 1994 essay composed for a Pompidou Center exhibition on modern urbanism, Choay identified a transitional moment in the history of the city linked to the development of modern media technology. Rather than invoke the more commonplace touchstones in recent urban theory by alluding, for example, to the rise of the postmodern city, she describes a transition from a utopian urbanity to an almost all-inclusive and menacing “URBAN.” The conceptual opposites of the urban have been overwhelmed and overtaken by a more abstract model of urbanity divorced from geographical spaces and manifested in the technologies emanating from the city: “high-speed rail and underground networks; the large passenger aircraft . . . new telephone applications allowing long-distance access to computer data and the instant delivery of written messages.”5 The “age of discreet urban entities is over,” she writes, and the era of “universal, scattered and fragmented urbanization” has begun.6 The “URBAN” is the “operating system” of this new cultural and political order, and it “is valid and applicable anywhere, in town or country, village or suburb.”7 Choay urges us to overcome the mystifying effects of nostalgia, shift our attention from

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the city as it used to exist—as a distinct spatial unit—and instead concentrate on these boundless, pervasive manifestations of urban rule. That she identifies the “URBAN” as an “operating system” (rather than, say, the more actualized “image of the city” described by Kevin Lynch) is revealing because it suggests that urbanity has becomes a process and a substrate rather than a specific location or form, that it has been dissociated from the geographical confines of the city or the verticality of its buildings and the horizontality of its streets.8 Traditional markers no longer delineate the city, she suggests, and the familiar social, architectural, visual, and aural phenomena have merged with the less concrete realm of codes and protocols. Nor does the definition of the modern city depend on the distinction between city and country, a clash of seeming opposites so important to Lewis Mumford. The operating system of the marketized world—its code, its unrepresentable but undeniably real rules of governance and development, its mediated logic—is visible less clearly in the monuments on display in downtown business districts than in flexible, infinitely adaptable spaces like highways, suburban research parks, and malls, all outposts of the urban that can exist almost anywhere, even within the countryside usually framed as the conceptual opposite of the city. Mitchell’s work verges on a celebration of the promising and potentially transformative emergence of the “soft city.” With a more alarmist tone, Choay suggests that this displacement of bricks by bits is perfectly consistent with the dominant ideologies of our time and therefore represents not a digital revolution but a sedimentation of existing structures of power. Thinking through all the implications of this epochal change in the form of the city would be impossible without a corresponding theory of media. Jonathan Beller argues that cinema is the “operating system of the visual” in the new era of global capitalism, that the cinematic experience has become a prototype for the new attention economy focused not on industrial production but on the “commodity-image” processed by the “worker-spectator.”9 “This conversion of spectating, generally perceived as a consumer activity, into a socially productive activity depends on the establishing of media as a worksite of global production,” Beller writes.10 If watching and responding to images on the internet generates enormous value for the corporations that host or curate them, then the basic operations of cinema have become generalized, pervasive, even fundamental to an emerging media-centered social and economic order. While Choay sees the “URBAN” as an operating system of an emerging world order, and Beller views cinema in the same terms, does this difference mark a theoretical conflict between scholars primarily oriented toward urban studies and media? Or does it signal a historical transition between the modern industrial economy of the twentieth century and the rise of social media in the twenty-first? Or is there a fundamental historical and conceptual connection between the urban and the cinematic, one that bridges the divide between the last decade of the last

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century and the early years of the current one? Although Choay’s essay was written before the outbreak of social media, the changes in technology and habits of media consumption represent an extension of urban rule through means other than the birth of a new social order. And many arguments made in defense of the new sociality made possible by digital media and cell-phone culture hinge on a belief that something like the old city survives within this reconfigured environment, that the virtual creates its own forms of proximity, corporeality, and connection. On the other hand, documentary cinema in China today often relies on an aesthetic and social model borrowed explicitly from modern urbanism and cinema, with contemporary digital documentary imagined not as a subsection of this overarching operating system but as a vital connection to another era in the history of cinema and cities. To adapt a phrase of Thomas Elsaesser, these films present new urban history as media archaeology.11 Like much scholarship at the intersection of new technology and urban space, the work of Mitchell and Choay is vaguely reminiscent of science fiction: someday, this line of fantastic thinking goes, in the city of bits, we’ll dematerialize ourselves and travel around town through the internet rather than the subway; someday, after the dawn of urban rule, the whole world will be completely urbanized, and we’ll finally actualize the dystopian vision of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But underlying these far-fetched scenarios is an undeniable, here-and-now reality. As Greg Lynn and others have suggested, in the age of computer-aided design, architecture is visualized, almost from its inception, as a sequence of bits, and the process of designing buildings now overlaps with the modes of animation used to construct CGI cities in cinema.12 Think here of the endlessly folding and unfolding city constructed and destroyed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s “architect of dreams” in Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), the urban imagination underlying recent Japanese animation and its vision of the future, and the “digital multitude” described by Kristin Whissel: all represent the spaces and crowds of the city without recourse to urban locations or subjects at all.13 At the earliest stages of its life span, architecture is an environment composed of bits, and instead of going to the movies and gazing at a cinematic New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, we can view their computer-generated doubles as though looking at a premonition of what they will become. And the prophecy of an endless urban realm is closer to fact than fiction: in 2007 or 2008, the majority of the world’s population lived in cities for the first time in history, and by 2050, that proportion is expected to increase to between 70 and 80 percent.14 If the contemporary world city has become a phenomenon of screens as well as steel, the remarkable revival of digital documentary filmmaking offers a

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corrective to a more pervasive model of visual images as an advertisement for consumer products and the city offered up for consumption. Indeed, one of the most telling signs of the volatile and contentious status of the image in contemporary China has been the stunning revival of documentary filmmaking, which is remarkable both for the sheer quantity of films produced since the early 1990s and for the exceptional works of art and social activism that have emerged from this new documentary movement, most notably West of the Tracks (Tiexi qu; 2003), Wang Bing’s nine-hour account of the decline of heavy industrial factories in Shandong; a series of important city documentaries focused on the hardships that have accompanied urban renewal in the past two decades; and the ensemble of work produced by Wu Wenguang and the collaborators at his Caochangdi Workstation. In most cases, these films are distinguished from more pervasive and long-standing patterns of documentary filmmaking in China, where the didactic style of voice-over instruction and illustrative images remain common forms. As Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel argue, the New Documentary Movement defined itself in opposition to this official mode of representation familiar from state-run television and was notable for its “commitment to record contemporary life in China outside any direct control of the state.”15 The result was a transformation of documentary filmmaking from a professional activity associated with formulaic styles and entrenched institutions to an individual or small-scale collective enterprise more akin to “amateur” productions or anthropological field work than glitzy broadcast television.16 In tandem with China’s transition from a collective society to a hybrid “socialist market economy” and finally to a form of capitalism in all but name, a diverse cohort of filmmakers has turned to the documentary as a means of recording both the effects of these radical changes on preexisting communities and the new social formations that have emerged in their aftermath. Wu Wenguang’s work from the 1990s and early 2000s is emblematic of this phenomenon in part because he is one of the pioneering figures in this movement but also because his first four feature-length documentaries chronicle the rebellion of a generation of young artists against the cultural inertia of statesponsored arts in Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dream (Liulang Beijing: Zuihou de mengxiang; 1990), then the appeal of a newly possible cosmopolitanism in At Home in the World (Si hai wei jia; 1995), and eventually the development of itinerant art troupes after the collapse of a socialist art system in Jianghu: Life on the Road (1999), a counterpart in the realm of documentary to Jia Zhangke’s Platform (Zhantai; 2000).17 His 2002 film Dance with Farmworkers (He mingong tiaowu; 2001) depicts the preparation for and ultimate realization of a performance featuring migrant workers in an avant-garde meditation on construction work and the status of the outsiders in Beijing, but once again, the location illustrates the particularities of this transitional moment: an art gallery occupying an

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open, glass-walled warehouse on the site of a former state-owned textile factory, this space for the display and performance was initially envisioned as a means of adding cultural capital to the real estate development that surrounded it.18 More recently, Wu has helped train and furnish equipment for nonprofessional filmmakers—many of them farmworkers, students, and other outsiders to the art and media establishment—to make documentaries rooted in “folk memory” and, in the first of these projects, the history of China’s “Great Famine” at the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s. Across this enormous body of multiauthored work, several geographical trajectories emerge. First, we see in the 1990s a cosmopolitan ideal, with the “four seas,” or the world at large, imagined as a “home” and artists migrating to global cities abroad or to increasingly worldly urban centers in China itself. From the early 2000s, however, Wu’s films have instead focused on the condition of migrants who remain in a position of marginality and precarity due, for example, to their lack of a hukou, or residence permit, without which they are officially excluded from many privileges of city life. But they also attest to a more general division of Chinese society into relatively prosperous coastal cities and a countryside that glimpses the economic spoils of “opening to the outside world” only after the shock of internal migration or through heavily mediated images. Wu’s documentary project centered on the famine could be viewed as a further turn away from the allure of the modern city and a renewed attention to the historical roots of the contemporary urbanrural divide. Wu’s manifestoes frame this interest in folk memory as a process of return, usually from cities to the countryside, as students and other villagers who migrated for work revisit a “place where they had roots but which they had abandoned.”19 Viewed over the course of more than two decades, Wu first deploys documentary cinema as a display of the attractions of the cosmopolitan city, even when its promises remain inaccessible and their realization remote; he then transforms digital documentary into a medium concerned above all with what remains outside the city—with landscapes and social systems that could be characterized as the conceptual other of contemporary global modernity. While the subjects and environments have changed dramatically during Wu’s career, especially after he became a producer and mentor supporting filmmakers from a range of backgrounds, his approach to the documentary has remained consistent even as the image ecology in China has undergone a profound shift. In the contemporary city of bits, with images and screens proliferating around the urban environment, the documentary has been absorbed by an overwhelming tide of ambient images, and on video websites like Youku, short, documentarylike videos chronicle events captured on the run alongside celebrity gossip and other light entertainment. One challenge faced by the contemporary documentary is how to preserve the social function of this mode of cinema, especially given the struggles of the New Documentary Movement to demonstrate

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the critical possibilities of small-scale DV projects in the 1990s and 2000s, an era when one of its signature aesthetic and methodological strategies—a realist recording of life as it happens (jishizhuyi, or on-the-spot realism)—became a mainstream practice prone to the same cycles of viralization and forgetting familiar to nearly all modes of contemporary video. The films produced through the initiatives launched by Wu and his workshop focus on the countryside in the present and recent past, and they bear witness to the traumatic history of uneven development in China while also excavating an old-fashioned but still-vibrant notion of cinema deployed as a medium for recording and presenting testimony. One of the most urgent tasks facing contemporary Chinese filmmakers is the imperative to make films that respond to or remain outside the domain of urban rule. For filmmakers like Wang Wo, the strategies of avant-garde experimentation serve as a marker of the distinction between cinema and the almost ubiquitous flicker of LED advertising or ambient television. In Outside (Waimian; 2006), the routines of everyday life and the welter of urban commotion merge on-screen as the chaos of images and sounds in the film exceeds the tumultuous reality in the city itself. But for Wu Wenguang and his collaborators, the most profound strategy for maintaining the oppositional relationship between the camera and the world around it has been to depart from the city altogether, to make films that attest to the limits of urban expansion through their exploration of rural and village life in contemporary China, even as the boundaries between the city and the country have blurred. As Stefan Landsberger writes, “Urbanisation has become noticeable in the countryside. In an attempt to stem the flow of migrant workers to the metropoles in the East, the government has designed plans to restrict the expansion of large cities while encouraging the growth of small towns.”20 Or as Lu Xinyu argues in relation to a series of documentaries and fiction films set in mining camps, “With modernization, the village has become internal to the city and internal to modernity.”21 The city has expanded to the point where it exists everywhere, at least in some attenuated form, and village and urban spaces are woven into the same undifferentiated fabric. As a result, nearly all cinema is a product of this urbanized environment, and one ambition evident in the work of Wu and his studio is to create an exception to this urban rule. In Wu’s own films and the larger collective projects emanating from his workshop, one of the principal forms of opposition in an urbanizing and globalizing China is to leave the city behind by creating an implicit juxtaposition between the city films produced over the past two decades and an equally vibrant mode of township and village cinema. In the Villager Documentary Project (Cunmin yinxiang jihua), which trained ten amateur directors from the countryside to document the emergence of a fledgling system of contested elections, local filmmakers examined a public sphere that contrasts profoundly with both its

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Habermasian ideal and the more consumer-oriented conception of citizenship and participation on display in contemporary Chinese cities. Launched in 2005, this initiative explored the contemporary countryside’s unique combination of a lingering utopian socialism, authoritarian party politics, and democratic aspiration, most remarkably in the work of Jia Zhitan, a fifty-four-year-old farmer and first-time director. As Huang Xuelie suggests, Jia’s films use “weather, the growth of plants and crops and festivals as markers of time,” highlighting their difference from the accelerated pace of both mainstream cinema and contemporary urban life.22 They therefore allude to another temporality and the “marginalised status of the countryside and the loss of traditional values in this era of urbanisation and economic reform.”23 The films produced in the multiauthored and polycentric projects organized out of Wu’s collaborative studio, most recently located at Caochangdi, also represent one of the more compelling examples of the Chinese ecocinema described by Sheldon H. Lu.24 This work reveals a complex set of negotiations in which rural life exists in a precarious relationship with an urban rule manifested not only in particular cities but—as in the case of Cili Zhuoma’s The Spirit Mountain (2005), a film about a Tibetan enclave in Yunnan province—in the transformation of whatever lies outside the city into a commodified version of itself reinvented for the gaze of tourists. Whether they consider the cultural and environmental consequences of a tourist economy or, in Zou Xueping’s Trash Village (2013), the unmanageable accumulation of waste produced by contemporary patterns of consumption, these films reveal the intertwined relationship between humanity and the environment in the era of urban rule. They also propose an alternative to the mediatized environment of the city by crafting a new combination of digital tools and folk art, a belated manifestation of the new mode of cinema predicted by Julio García Espinosa in his 1969 manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema.”25 Espinosa called for transformation of film from an adjunct of capitalist modernity into a vehicle for folk knowledge and culture. In his famous and mysterious concluding line— “Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything”— Espinosa suggests that the most powerful response to ubiquitous and often reactionary media is to saturate the world with images that evoke another history and temporality where the democratic aspirations of art survive. The Villager Documentary and Folk Memory Projects revive this folk cinema by deploying DV technology guided by the life experience of local filmmakers to document the devastation of rural lands and the ambitions of these filmmakers’ communities. With cameras dispersed across the Chinese countryside and a style that defies the norms of mainstream media production, these projects mark a return to the imperfect filmmaking that developed and perished alongside the failed artistic and political revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Refusing to succumb to the pressure of modernization and urbanization, the rural documentaries of

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Wu and his collaborators instead imagine another form of ubiquitous cinema in which art will “disappear into everything.” The recent documentaries of Jia Zhangke—especially 24 City (2008) and I Wish I Knew (2010)—offer a series of sharp contrasts between the various conceptions of the city and the space outlined previously. In consecutive shots from I Wish I Knew, for example, he shows the historic Bund in Shanghai followed by the new Pudong skyscrapers famously hatched out of farmland over the course of two decades. This kind of opposition also brackets the entire narrative, as the opening sequence of the film shows Zhao Tao walking along a Bund imagined in a state of ruin, and at the end of the film, she arrives at the destination she’s been heading toward all along, the site of the Shanghai World Exposition in 2010. We see the historical city and a future avatar that has at once the fantastic status of science fiction and an aura of inevitability, as many of the social and economic plans necessary to produce this global city are already well under way. At once architectural and highly mediated, a spectacle of outdoor screens and pavilions that present the world through an interior organized around more LED displays, the World Expo represents a future in which the city has merged with digital media at the interface made concrete by the screen. Jia’s project in this and his other city documentaries is to mirror that process by returning to the cinematic screen as an interface with other conceptions of the city and social life. In these recent urban documentaries, Jia combines the strategies usually associated with ethnographic cinema and far more staged and stylized images, creating a hybrid genre at the intersection of observational realism and self-conscious artistry. In 24 City, Jia joins together shots of a decommissioned munitions plant undergoing redevelopment and interviews with the plant’s former workers—the

Figure 4.1. The Bund in imagined ruins in I Wish I Knew ( Jia Zhangke, 2010)

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Figure 4.2. The Shanghai World Exposition site in I Wish I Knew ( Jia Zhangke, 2010)

stuff of traditional documentary cinema—with carefully posed group portraits and fictional stories recounted by professional actors like Joan Chen and Zhao Tao. In a narrative progression that follows the demolition of the factory and its replacement by a large apartment complex (to be named “24 City”), the film also depicts a passage from a site where a realist aesthetic can depict the accumulation of history still present in the surroundings to an entirely new environment that seems resistant to a filmmaking strategy that allows objects and settings to imbue the film with an otherwise unrepresentable past. Jia’s strategy here is to drift through the gates of the factory into a crystallization of China’s socialist history and to float over the walls of the real estate development—a construction site surrounded with images advertising the city on the ascent behind and around them—and into the tenuous reality of the scaffolding, girders, and eventually the empty hallways. The film experiments with a new documentary aesthetic attuned to a reality where urban environment is the product of the erasure of history and where the image ecology of the city is replete with obstacles that obscure the visibility of the current situation and banners or screens heralding the emergence of a bright future. The staged, sometimes deliberately archaic images in Jia’s documentary are a response to the futurist tendencies in the urban environment of the new 24 City development and its innumerable counterparts throughout China. I Wish I Knew is a formal and conceptual sequel to 24 City, though his object is no longer the specific history of a forgotten factory on the outskirts of Chengdu but a century and a half in the current capital of Chinese finance and trade, Shanghai, as it prepares for the 2010 World Exposition, its quasi-official coming out as a contemporary world city, an event akin to Beijing’s Olympic Games in 2008. With funding from the Shanghai Film Studio, the film was created specifically for screening at the expo, and Jia structures the film around a series of interviews with figures intimately related to the past and future of Shanghai, with subjects ranging from

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historical icons to the racecar driver, blogger, and poet Han Han. Using many of the same formal techniques as 24 City—the combination of life captured on the run and staged portraits; the gaze that lingers between spectatorship at an event taking place now and witnessing an event from the past—it recounts the personal stories of usually elite residents of and exiles from the city, including the children of long-dead gangsters or revolutionaries, aging movie stars, and present-day tycoons. In Shanghai, the cast of characters recalls the glitz and glamour and revolutionary fervor of the city’s distant past, as a third of the subjects owe their prominence to film, with descendants of important historical figures another key constituency in the picture. Interspersed throughout the film, we see clips from various moments in the Shanghai’s glorious film history and its interconnections with the historical life of the city. We see, for example, the real-life model worker Huang Baomei in the shell of the factory where she used to work and the Xie Jin film created to disseminate a mythological account of the actual person. In another scene, the glass windows of a café become the screen used to display the cinematic history of Shanghai while the daughter of a murdered revolutionary looks on. Here film becomes a tool that testifies to the persistence of history, including historical visions of the future that were never quite realized. In a nation and a city undergoing the perpetual revolutions of global capitalism (and where even lip service to the communist interregnum has become muted or reduced to kitsch), this vision of Shanghai is equally relentless in its attention to the multiple histories on display in classical Chinese cinema—to an almost Leibnizian unfolding of other compossible worlds.26 At the end of the film comes the final revelation of its present-day context: the World Expo site, a vision of the future and the apotheosis of the science fictions that help constitute the dream of a future city and therefore exert a real influence on everyday life in the real world. Yet Jia’s film emphasizes the exceptionalism of

Figure 4.3. Witnessing history through cinematic images, I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke, 2010)

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this site—the prototype of a city of bits, the seat of urban rule—and its distance from the city displayed for the film’s first hour and a half. Of particular interest for Jia are the almost paradigmatic sites of the public sphere emphasized by Hansen, Kluge, and Habermas: the restaurant, the café, the tea house, the movie theater, and other prototypical places of public gathering and interaction. These sites are associated with cinema and other seemingly archaic medium forms: the poster, the group photograph—all of which appear as stylized as the interviews conducted in equally theatrical settings. In fact, the film seems to suggest that in a world shaped by the visions on display in the exposition (most of them sponsored by governments or, in the case of the U.S. pavilion, corporations), reality is no longer waiting, persevering, enduring in perpetuity for the camera eventually to discover and record it. Reality has to be staged in these films or displayed in the archaic photographic, cinematic, and theatrical styles of the twentieth century rather than the mobile, fluid, protean frame of the twenty-first. To understand what Shanghai could have been, Jia suggests, it is necessary to revisit earlier visions of the future and combine a more conventionally archaeological project—the excavation of a city that has been replaced by a more modern version of itself—and a media archaeology focused on the unrealized and abandoned potentials now relegated to the distant and forgotten past. In addition to the several key scenes that show Zhao Tao on foot in systematically opposed spaces in Shanghai, especially the historical center of the Waitan or Bund and the new financial and business district in Pudong, Jia also explores contemporary urban space at the front of moving vehicles, most notably in transitional sequences when the camera seems to be attached to a vehicle on a busy street or an electric tramway. These scenes of mobility stand in dramatic contrast to the highly staged and stationary interviews, whose subjects assumes deliberately dedramatized poses even as they sit alongside a racetrack (Han Han) or discuss moving personal stories.

Figure 4.4. Han Han posed alongside a racetrack, I Wish I Knew ( Jia Zhangke, 2010)

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The contemporary city and its future manifestation in the 2010 World Exposition seem oddly depopulated, with its history depicted in a state of ruin and its future taking shape in abstract forms and on an inhuman scale. Together with the quotations from Shanghai cinema excerpted throughout the film, these scenes of cars and trains in motion invoke another paradigm for thinking about urban space and its experience. They summon a model that harks back to early attempts to link cinema, the city, and modernity in the work of filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann as well as Shanghai films like Crossroads (Shizi jietou; Shen Xiling, 1937), which also lingers on images of the urban tram as its cars pass through literal crossroads and become narrative nodes, and characteristic clanging bells fill the soundtrack. What remains in the film is not merely a vision of the city through film—a compendium of classic movies about Shanghai, an exercise in nostalgia—but a more thoroughgoing excavation of a city through the screen that provided the principle historical interface between urban experience and a previous conception of modern media. The imagination of an alternative to the future Shanghai on offer at the exposition begins not with inconophobia or a retreat from the city and to nature but instead with a return to the modernity that developed at the nexus between cinema and urban existence. For Jia and for Chinese spectators and filmmakers more generally, Shanghai cinema has represented the apotheosis of that utopian modernity, and I Wish I Knew is both an unabashed celebration of its example and a circumspect account of the urban media complex on the verge of overtaking it. At once an idiosyncratic account of the decline of iron and copper factories in Shenyang and a microcosm of an entire way of life in the final months of its terminal decline, Wang’s West of the Tracks presents these core concerns in their most comprehensive and poignant form. The film focuses in unusual detail on the labor involved in stamping copper sheets or forging steel, and its vision of workers on the job or the rhythmic and lugubrious movements of the heavy machinery recalls both early socialist realist cinema and, more obliquely, the celebration of a mechanical age in avant-garde films like The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) and Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924). But Wang’s film also lingers in the unofficial, less obviously productive spaces of the factory, as workers in the break room or shower exchange masculine banter and reveal their anxieties about a future when the work unit is no longer the primary means of organizing everyday life in China. As in Jia’s 24 City, the factory in West of the Tracks crystallizes the successes and failings of the socialist experiment presented in some of its complexity, with individual aspirations and tragedies meticulously connected to the collective experience of the entire district. It seeks to recount the stories of individuals and the masses,

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the private future and the public past, without privileging either mode of social organization or perspective on China’s modern history. The film begins and, after the transition to another of its feature-length segments, frequently resumes with long takes shot from the perspective of a train engine passing through the city of Shenyang and into the rail yards alongside the factories of Tiexi district. Reminiscent of the early film genre called the “phantom ride,” these shots also represent “an unseen energy [that] swallows space,” as they construct an uncanny combination of the train, the camera, and the human eye that travels through the city streets and finally creak to a stop in the ruins of the factory district.27 Tom Gunning writes that the phantom ride was a popular mode of filmmaking in the late nineteenth century because it encapsulated the combination of dread and amazement, “an excitement pushed to the point of terror,” that characterized the contemporaneous experience of early cinema. But Gunning also argues that these films contradict the common and almost certainly apocryphal belief that the “primitive” spectators fled from the screen when confronted with the menacing sight of onrushing trains and streetcars. These early films rendered visible the revolution taking place in the consciousness of urban subjects on the verge of the twentieth century. “The audience’s reaction,” he writes, “was the antipode to the primitive one: it was an encounter with modernity. From the start, the terror of that image uncovered a lack, and promised only a phantom embrace. The train collided with no one. It was, as Gorky said, a train of shadows, and the threat that it bore was freighted with emptiness.”28 The shots that bookend West of the Tracks also depict a “train of shadows” filled with shades of the modernity envisioned in the earliest years of cinema. And the film appears to eulogize a period in Chinese and world history when cinema epitomized the promises of a modern revolution, and the new China founded in the late 1940s represents in the most fundamental sense a continuation of a century-long project. In Wang Bing’s film, marketization has replaced modernization as the most transformative force in contemporary China, and the market and the televised image now concentrate the dread and anticipation of the new era, superseding the films and trains that fascinated the audiences of early cinema. Amid the despair that accompanies a series of factory closings, a sense of excitement and possibility erupts sporadically in the film as various figures voice their hopes for a more prosperous future. That sentiment is best demonstrated when, at a 2000 banquet thrown for office workers at the soon-to-be-shuttered factory, one of the women facing the threat of unemployment launches into a stirring karaoke performance of Zhang Ye’s relentlessly optimistic anthem “Enter the New Era” (“Zoujin xin shidai”). As multiple television screens in the restaurant exhaust the repertoire of stereotypically happy and romantic images, she belts out buoyant lyrics that seem to belie her own situation, only to be joined by

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another patron in the restaurant in a duet that reinforces the message hinted at in the title: China is progressing into a historical moment characterized by unprecedented hope and prosperity. The song references the “new era” and the “future” repeatedly, and it expresses the desire to communicate a confidence about the coming age to the entire world. Even as they allude to an array of popular songs and slogans from the socialist period—“The East Is Red” and “Spring Story” among them—the lyrics insist on the inherent novelty of the new era inaugurated by the revolution of reform and opening to the outside world. Immediately before this scene, another female administrator at the factory frames this sense of anticipation in more economically inflected language as she advocates experiments in privatization: “It’s not certain that this road will be good or bad or whether it will take us anywhere. But Deng Xiaoping says that you have to feel the stones in order to cross the river. If you’re able to cross, then cross. If not, then think of another way.” Even if the coming year is likely to be even more difficult, she believes in the fundamental correctness of China’s current path of social and economic reform. Yet Wang Bing constructs this scene as a series of juxtapositions and contradictions: between female and male workers and their respective communities of labor, between the future-oriented narrative of the nation and the far less optimistic present, and between karaoke television and the documentary itself. If the screens suspended from the ceiling of the restaurant allow a vision of China’s future to circulate, Wang Bing’s film gives visual form to an endangered past and the conflicts that reign during the period of transition. That form is a deliberate and observational mode of cinema that harks back to a particular mode of realist and documentary filmmaking founded on a faith in the cinematic image that bears witness to the environments and way of life captured on camera and preserves them in some of their ambiguity and obscurity. Wang Bing begins and ends with an image of a train in motion as it glides along the tracks through obsolete factories and through the history still embodied in those decaying spaces. It is almost literally a tracking shot, with the camera attached to the locomotive, the intertwined histories of cinema and railroads linked in a gesture of both nostalgia and witnessing. Lu Xinyu’s magnificent essay on the film emphasizes the retrospective quality of this gesture: “Today, the decline of industry in northeast China means the end of the historical mission of the socialist planned economy. Tiexi, a place that suffered the development of heavy industry in a Third World socialist nation-state, a place with the working class constrained by the narrative of today’s market economy, has been burnt into our memory by the documentary West of the Tracks. Why did we build such factories? Why did this become the dream of an entire age? Why did we want to create a world, and why did this world collapse in the end?”29 In the conclusion to Wang’s masterpiece, we can also glimpse an alternative to the “URBAN” or cinematic “operating systems” imagined by Choay and Beller at the turn of

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the twenty-first century. Rather than view the history of Chinese cities and film through a conceptual framework borrowed from software and digital media, Wang reverses this gesture, refusing to “enter the new era” with only the language and image-making apparatus of the emerging social, economic, and aesthetic system. Wang remains a passenger on Gorky’s “train of shadows.” This film both carries forward and provides new momentum for the seemingly archaic understanding of the documentary that continues to exercise a profound influence on Chinese cinema in the era of digital video. Wang Bing, Wu Wenguang, Jia Zhangke, and other documentary filmmakers working in China today approach both their subjects and their form in an archeological manner, with cities viewed through the relics underneath or the landscapes beyond them, media framed by a history and archaeology of media, and the emerging city of bits viewed from the front of a train that never quite comes to a stop.

Notes 1. William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge: MIT Press,

1996), 8, 10.

2. Mitchell, 160. 3. See Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular

Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77.

4. See Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto, Cinéphiles et cinéphilies (Paris: Armand Colin,

2010).

5. Françoise Choay, “Le règne de l’urbain et la mort de la ville,” trans. Alistair Clarke, in The

City: Critical Essays in Human Geography, ed. Jacques Lévy (London: Ashgate, 2008), 106. Choay, 107. Choay, 107. See Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover: Dartmouth University Press, 2006), 78, 130. 10. Beller, 112. 11. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinemas 14, no. 2/3 (Spring 2005): 75–117. 12. See Greg Lynn, Form (London: Rizzoli, 2008). 13. See Thomas Lamarre on the urban environment in The Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru, 1995) in The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 65. 14. For the report forecasting this trend toward further urbanization, see United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision,” United Nations, February 2008, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/ wup2007/2007WUP_Highlights_web.pdf, 1. See also James Tweedie and Yomi Braester, “Introduction: The City’s Edge,” in Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia, ed. James Tweedie and Yomi Braester (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); and Ashley Dawson and Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction: Global Cities of the South,” Social Text 81 22, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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15. Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Introduction,” in The New Chinese Documentary Movement, ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 10. 16. Berry and Rofel, 9, 10. 17. For an interview detailing the development of Wu’s early career, see “Gerenhua yu zuo fangshi: Wu Wenguang fangtan,” in Jilu Zhongguo: Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong, by Lu Xinyu (Beijing: Sanlian, 2003), 3–34. 18. Sasha Su-Ling Welland chronicles the history and development of this site and analyzes the relationship between art and real estate in “Ocean Paradise,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 3 (2007): 419–435. 19. Wu Wenguang, “Opening the Door of Memory with a Camera Lens: The Folk Memory Project and Documentary Production,” China Perspectives 100, no. 4 (2014): 37. 20. Stefan Landsberger, “The City’s (Dis)Appearance in Propaganda,” in Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture, ed. Jeroen de  Kloet and Lena Scheen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 132. 21. Lu Xinyu, “Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement: Engagement with the Social,” trans. Tan Jia and Lisa Rofel, in New Chinese Documentary Movement, ed. Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Rofel, 42. 22. Huang Xuelei, “Murmuring Voices of the Everyday: Jia Zhitan and His Village Documentaries,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, no. 2 (2016): 168. 23. Xuelei, 174. 24. See Lu, “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity,” in Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, ed. Lu and Jiayan Mi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 1–14. 25. See Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut 20 (1979): 24–26, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema .html. 26. Both Ackbar Abbas and Yomi Braester evoke this otherworldly quality of the recent films of Jia Zhangke when they describe the “spectral” relationship between his cinema and the modern Chinese history. See Ackbar Abbas and Yomi Braester, “Speed and Spectacle in Chinese Cities,” in Spectacle and the City, ed. de Kloet and Scheen, 25; and Yomi Braester, “The Spectral Return of Chinese Cinema: Globalization and Cinephilia in Contemporary Chinese Film,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 29–51. 27. Tom Gunning discusses this genre in “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film before Griffith, ed. John Fell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 362. 28. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Position: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 129. 29. Lu Xinyu, “West of the Tracks: History and Class-Consciousness,” trans. J. X. Zhang, in New Chinese Documentary Movement, ed. Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Rofel, 73.

5 • TOWARD AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF GLOBAL RHY THMS Melodie der Welt and Its Reception in France L aurent Guido

Over the past twenty years or so, the idea of globalization has taken hold in cultural discourses and practices at a time when new information and communication technologies have appeared and the transnational flow of audiovisual works has intensified. This change of paradigm is perceptible in particular in the recurrence of the same montage structure in a few diverse productions such as advertisements, Hollywood film sequences,1 and edifying documentaries on ecology.2 This montage structure consists of using a cadenced sequence of shots to bring together visual motifs from different geographical areas with the explicit aim of offering a synthetic view of the world. Contemporary mass culture aside, historical investigation of this peculiar cinematic form would probably bring out the crucial character of certain periods. Thus the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as a time replete with cinematic experimentation around the idea of circulation between dominant countries and postcolonial areas—for example, Johan van der Keuken’s “North-South Triptych” (1972–1974), Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (Sunless; 1983), and a clear model for present-day environmental documentaries, Godfrey Reggio’s “Qatsi Trilogy,” with music by Philip Glass (1983, 1988, 2002). To go back even further, to cinema’s origins, we would also have to examine the ways in which various “exotic” films were screened together3 in an attempt to let the viewer take in the diversity of landscapes and peoples on various continents in a single viewing.4 97

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But in fact, it was in the interwar period, in an “avant-garde” cinema governed by principles of musicality and rhythm, that such a filmic synthesis of the world truly came into being. Emblematic of this trend was German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann’s Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World; 1929), whose techniques drew on the universal ideals found in a variety of rhythmic utopias, which had been in vogue since the beginning of the twentieth century. In support of this assertion, I will not only address the structure of the film itself but also compare it with various discourses of the day, such as its critical reception (particularly in France by columnists such as Émile Vuillermoz and Alexandre Arnoux) and, more indirectly, certain contemporaneous conceptions of rhythm. We will see in particular the light that can be shone on these questions by taking gesture into account by means of the way in which the essential motifs of dance and labor were taken up in the same era as Ruttmann’s film. Unlike his famous and widely studied film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City; Germany, 1927), Melody of the World has, until recently, rarely been shown.5 As a result, there is a lack of historical documentation, with the exception of that around the pioneering role this Tobis Klangfilm production played in experiments using synchronized sound.6 This technological turning point, however, did not bring about a break in Ruttmann’s experiments with visual rhythm, as he saw the transition to sound film as an opportunity to pursue this exploration of the synesthesia between montage and musical structure. Like many other experimenters of the day, he began working in painting before taking up abstract animation (the Opus I–IV series, 1921–1925). Then in the latter half of the decade, he switched to a documentary and thus figurative mode. This shift toward iconic representation should not be viewed as a step backward or as a kind of compromise. On the contrary, ideas around musicality, even in their most radically antifigurative iteration (Wassily Kandinsky and Frantisek Kupka in painting; Hans Richter and Germaine Dulac in film), were most often founded on concerns around universal communication and the essence of language, creating resonances not only aesthetic in nature but also social and cultural. Thus while Berlin reuses the abstract rhythms found in Ruttmann’s early short films to compare various human and mechanical motions found in the metropolis of Berlin, Melody of the World, for its part, enacts this same logic of bringing together through montage on a larger scale, thereby aspiring to the universal ideals that were always a part of this painter-filmmaker’s experiments. More than just a travelogue made for a shipping company operating between Hamburg and North America (a Weltreisefilm, supposedly following the trajectory of a ship around the planet), Melody of the World displays from the outset Ruttmann’s communitarian impulse. In fact, his explicit objective, as an initial title card states, was to “expand understanding of the multiple forms of human life and to make visible the underlying link between human beings.”7

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The ship’s ongoing geographical trajectory outlined at the beginning of the film quickly yields to a montage of views of different places on the planet, constantly underscored by original music composed by Wolfgang Zeller. At first, Melody of the World appears to be a veritable catalog of conventional avant-garde devices of the interwar period. Apart from the traffic and sports scenes typical of “city symphony” films, most of the sequences are assemblages of visual fragments of canonical motifs such as a fairground (similar to Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle, 1923), a lift bridge (similar to Joris Ivens’s De brug [The Bridge], 1928), and the gears of industrial machinery (Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoappartom [The Man with a Movie Camera], 1929; and Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zemlya [The Earth], 1930). These references to other films are quite systematic in order to further the film’s singular method, which compares the various elements of this iconographic base with their equivalents around the world—from feats of physical prowess to modes of transportation, festivities, leisure activities, buildings, social rituals, and so on. In a sense, the “city symphony” genre served as a model for constructing a “world symphony,” with the difference being that the latter does not so much vaunt new transportation and entertainment technologies as it downplays their radical novelty, suggesting that they are only extensions, or even the conclusion, of fundamental ancestral processes in human society. As demonstrated by a few sections of the film more directly related to these traditional or even “archaic” motifs (the figure of the Madonna and child from Western sculpture in marble to present-day iterations in Asia and Africa, or the long comparison between a number of architectural styles; see fig. 5.1), Melody of the World expresses an aspiration typical of the first half of the twentieth century, one long ignored or denigrated—that of seeing industrial modernity from the perspective of the past through scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology. The recirculation of Platonic or Aristotelian conceptions of universal rhythms in Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics and Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy thus provided the synesthetic utopias in vogue with historical arguments to justify the perceived metrical similarities of poetry, music, and dance. It was against the background of concerns such as these that film critics and theorists, particularly in France (Ricciotto Canudo, Élie Faure, Léon Moussinac, and others8), would associate a post-Wagnerian fantasy of sweeping social synchronization with the future development of the new medium once its artistic legitimacy was established. To better understand the logic at work in Melody of the World, and before taking up its specific techniques in more detail, we must first look at the discourses around its release—in particular, in the French press, where musical conceptions of cinema had been widely proposed and debated throughout the 1920s. In March 1930, for example, the Revue du  Cinéma gave a prestigious tribune to Walter Ruttmann, who provided his only published declaration on the film,

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Figure 5.1. Motifs within architectural details in Melodie der Welt (Walter Ruttmann,

1929).

which was unpublished in German in Ruttmann’s day.9 The article’s title, “La Symphonie du monde,” confirms that the film had indeed been conceived as a “symphony of the world.” This term symphony was commonplace in aesthetic discourses on the cinema in the 1920s, used more specifically by most of the filmmakers and film theorists devoted to musical conceptions of film, such as Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Paul Ramain, and Émile Vuillermoz. These artists and thinkers were captivated by the model for the montage of images provided by the possible harmonious composition of elements fundamentally different from one another by making them “resonate together” (the etymological sense of the word symphony).10 This architectonic concern shows clearly in Ruttmann’s declaration, which states—with respect to the visual fragments at his disposal, taken from documentary films of diverse origins—that his “essential task” was to “order the scattered material so as not to fall into a ‘newsreel.’” He added that this

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structuring operation respected a fundamental principle, that of “giving tangible form to everything that stirs people, through the ages and across every boundary.”11 It was this idea of universal revelation that Émile Vuillermoz perceived in his column in Le Temps: Dashing the greatest distances to nothing with a stroke of the scissors, the filmmaker shows us the disconcerting oneness of the human animal’s destiny and character. The filmmaker follows the obscure path of the same instinct, highlighting a gesture that begins in Paris or Berlin and continues in central Africa and carries on in Japan before ending in Oceania. People are the same everywhere, perceptibly carrying out the same rituals, seeking out the same emotions, arriving at the same solutions to the great problems that torment them. This poignant circle . . . lets us hold our planet in the palm of our hand.12

In another text on Melody of the World, Vuillermoz takes up the same points and develops this final idea a little further: “Just as we see emperors hold the globe in their hand, viewers have the sensation of possessing our planet in their hands. They can weigh it, handle it, circle around it.”13 All these expressions suggest a paradigm of physical contact, a haptic relation between film and viewer, adding the sense of touch to the sensorial dimensions the cinema offers. In fact, this feeling of heightened physical involvement on the part of the viewer depends on the rhythmic faculty of montage, as the great dance critic André Levinson remarked when he reviewed Melody of the World in March 1930. He describes the film’s mechanisms, which, in his view, accomplish this “miracle of rhythm”: “These images that flash by at such great speed create on the screen an apparition so brief that they appear to be superimposed, simultaneous, facing one another, perceived at the same time. This is the densest montage effect that has ever been practiced. Our vision fragments into the wink of an eye, into momentary glimpses.”14 Here Levinson takes up an idea shared by numerous theorists of the day (in particular, Lionel Landry15), for whom the goal of ultrarapid montage—most often limited to particular sequences—being developed at the time in some films was to create not a sense of speed but rather a sense of instantaneousness. The diverse shots succeed one another at such a fast rate that the motifs depicted end up becoming confused in the viewer’s mind, giving real expression to a kind of “accelerated” thinking capable of creating a synthesis of the multiple fragmentary aspects of modern reality. This notion of simultaneity was fundamental to the expanded perception of the world, which cinema gradually became the vehicle for in the interwar period. Montage, by juxtaposing images of lands remote from each other at an unbridled pace, was seen as able to generate a sensation that distances were collapsing. This conception, whose importance

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is often underestimated in the historiography of cinema’s avant-gardes and was focused primarily on the question of speed, is nevertheless present in several foundational texts of modernist thought on the cinema. When in 1911, Ricciotto Canudo saw the film medium as offering the spectacle of “the farthest countries, the most unknown people, the least known of human customs,” he identified, after speed, the second “symbol of modern life” revealed by the cinema: the “destruction of distances,” the source of an “immediate [familiarity] with the most diverse countries.”16 Similarly, The 1916 Futurist Cinema manifesto, constantly referenced for its celebration of the rapidity newly generated by the world of technology, also has a passage devoted to this notion of simultaneity. For the futurists, the “polyexpressive symphony” that it is the cinema’s destiny to constitute should be based on the reality being filmed (“the universe will be our vocabulary”) in order to develop a new mentality or “sensibility” that will “intensify the creative imagination, and give the conscious mind an overwhelming sense of both simultaneity and omnipresence.”17 Returning to the topic a few years later, Canudo concluded that contemporary existence was becoming “more and more simultaneous” in light of the “human eyes which multiply their vision beyond measure of spaces, beings and things.”18 It is possible to follow this discourse throughout the 1920s. In this view, the undeniable acceleration of life’s rhythm brought on by modern communication technologies such as film and radio will in the end do away with distances and establish a kind of simultaneous connection on a global scale. In 1925, the filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier, for example, saw cinema circulating “around the globe,” bringing humanity to be “transported everywhere at all times, in keeping with our present-day law of travel and Instantaneousness [sic].”19 As another French filmmaker, Jacques de Baroncelli, remarked at the same time, the cinema makes it possible to “travel the world in an armchair” and thereby to reveal a “common clay” proper to a “universal state of mind.”20 These ideas were developed at the end of the decade in a series of highly utopian declarations by writers on the cinema. In 1929, for example, the surrealist Philippe Soupault described film’s potential in terms that, for a reader today, seem to refer more to a networked computer than to an image projected onto a movie screen: “Spectators facing the screen can now see everything, and in the wink of an eye. In a few minutes they pass from Buenos Aires to London, from Vancouver to Vladivostok. . . . In short, the cinema puts the vast world, the unknown world, within our reach on a few square meters of white canvas. The constant surprise of discovery disconcerts and impassions the person in the street. They are enchanted by this feeling of a new and prodigious power.”21 This last feeling, of omnipotence, is the same one that Sigmund Freud commented on with cruel irony during these same years in Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he compared technological man to a god with artificial limbs.22

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But the enthusiasm generated in the late 1920s by the emergence of a new planetary “sheaf ”23 has less to do with the superiority complex described by the great psychoanalyst than it does with the ideal of the rhythmic synchronization of peoples. A notable sign of this can be seen in a statement by the writer André Maurois, who saw the figure of Charlie Chaplin as the universal reference of a new gestural culture founded on attraction and imitation: “A Charlie Chaplin film is playing at the same time in Chicago, Barcelona, Tokyo and Honolulu. . . . A Chinese coolie, in the Yangtze valley, amuses his friends by walking with his feet wide apart, his legs grotesquely bent, a small cane in his hand: he is imitating Charlie.”24 Following the logic of this phantasmal example, the simultaneous circulation of the same film around the entire world was believed to created common desires and mimetic reflexes, despite the completely different mentalities and sociohistorical contexts at work. While this mythology of the cinema as a universal language runs through countless writings in the interwar period—Béla Balázs described some of its essential principles in his volume Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man) in 192425—in France, it found especially fruitful resonance in the work of Canudo,26 Epstein, and L’Herbier27 and especially in Élie Faure’s ideas on the aesthetic and social functions of the film show. In his texts on the cinema, this eminent art historian constantly sought to connect the film, an especially mimetic and gestural new form of expression, to the unifying virtues of collective spectacles seen in the great bygone civilizations. Already in 1920, he saw in “cineplastics,” the finished form of future cinema, the resurgence of the same fundamental principle running across eras and geographical areas: “As far back as we look, among all the peoples of the earth, and at all times, a collective spectacle has alone been able to unite all classes, all ages, and, as a rule, the two sexes, in a unanimous communion exalting rhythmic power.”28 With Faure, this idea is taken up as part of a broader theoretical perspective, one formulated in a synthetic manner in L’Esprit des formes (The Spirit of Forms; 1927, the final volume in his monumental Histoire de l’Art), in which he argues for the existence of a “Great Rhythm” running across eras and civilizations. The very carefully arranged layout of this book is an indication of the ambition to demonstrate, in a single volume, the common principles connecting the diversity of artistic forms (fig. 5.2). The sequences of images in Melody of the World, taken from very different eras and cultures, can certainly suggest the research conducted by Aby Warburg into the Pathosformel during those same years. But Faure’s Spirit of Forms would seem to be a more productive and relevant reference for understanding Ruttmann’s syncretic ideal, particularly in the way it posits a relation between biological forms and those produced by the machine world (e.g., see the way he associates the skeleton of a cetacean and the hulk of a seaplane or the gears of a motor and a fossilized ammonite). Even more explicitly, in this same book, Faure takes

Figure 5.2. Demonstrating the principles that connect the diversity of aesthetic forms. Élie Faure, Histoire de l’Art. L’Esprit des formes (Paris: G. Crès, 1927).

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up the relations between dance and cinema, two forms of expression that, in his view, wondrously reveal the structures of the universe: “The cinema and the dance can yield us the secret of the relations of all the plastic arts with space and with the geometrical figures that give us at once the measure and the symbol. The dance in every epoch, like the cinema in ours, is charged with uniting plastic art with music, through the miracle of a rhythm at once visible and audible.”29 This correlation of these two ways of representing movement, “choreography” and “cinematography,” is part and parcel of a key idea in aesthetic thinking about rhythm in the early years of the twentieth century. Because there is a rhythmic quality in both the movements found in the temporal arts and the spatial relations that regulate visual compositions, it was felt that the cinema, as an extension of dance, joined “Rhythms of Space” with “Rhythms of Time,” in Canudo’s famous formulation.30 As suggested by the expression “moving round” employed by Vuillermoz in his review of Melody of the World, the motif of the dancing body is endowed with a central function in one of the most accomplished sequences in Ruttmann’s 1928 “symphony of the world.” Coming near the end of the film, this segment links the varied representatives of a global community connected by gestural expression, above and beyond geographical and cultural barriers. Placing thirty shots end to end in two minutes, Ruttmann develops a gradual climax, reinforced by music adapted to the physical movements and visual variations produced by the shot changes. To give a sense of continuity to gestures from one space to the next, he uses various transition techniques to take up or match the action. Thus in the initial shots, the human figures appear gradually, shifting from one continent to the next to enter into an increasingly collective dance (fig. 5.3). The transhistorical motif of the round then makes it possible, from one image to the next, to connect the archaic tradition to the modernity of jazz-age chorus lines. Through a variety of repetitions (a whirling dress, the number of figures in the frame), shifting viewpoints (a vertical composition succeeding horizontal movement), and progressions (from couples to groups), the sequence employs the idea of a unified chain with respect to both the editing between shots and the movements in the images themselves (supplementary persons entering the frame, the dancers’ relatively lively tempo). In this way, it echoes a central distinction described by Léon Moussinac between two fundamental kinds of rhythm, exterior and interior.31 The comparison of two women’s posture with that of a peacock, far from being condescending, takes up a reference in the same sequence to the fundamental animallike nature of the human being, a theme that recurs frequently in the film (a tree climber associated with a monkey, two sumo wrestlers compared to two Bovidae). The rest of the sequence slows down somewhat and culminates in two images: two Cambodian women are framed sitting down, thus semimotionless, followed by the longest shot in the sequence (twenty seconds,

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Figure 5.3. Sequencing the rhythms of a collective dance, Melodie der Welt (Walter Rutt-

mann, 1929).

or a sixth of the thirty-two-shot segment), in which an adult and a child execute the same cadenced movement. This final framing serves to relaunch the dancing because it inaugurates a new, increasingly rapid series of images devoted almost exclusively to male groups. This “climactic” logic is by no means original, as it can be seen throughout the 1920s in numerous rapidly edited dance sequences, including those of the round in Kean (Edmund Kean: Prince among Lovers, Alexandre Volkoff, 1924), the farandole in Maldone (Misdeal; Jean Grémillon, 1928), and the flamenco in La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet; Jacques de Baroncelli, 1929). At the heart of this last section, one shot in particular grabs our attention: a man dances while snapping his fingers and looking into the lens of the camera. Coming at the most intense moment of the entire sequence, this looking at the camera appears to express a concern to transmit corporeal rhythm from the camera to the viewer. The image appears to highlight the haptic logic that marked the critical reception of Melody of the World discussed previously, rooted in several aesthetic and psychological texts dating from the early twentieth century that argue that the gesture of a spellbound dancer, carried along by the rhythm, is capable of being conveyed to the viewer to the point that the body of the latter enacts a mimetic muscular activity.32 This image enables us to better grasp the

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objectives of this dance scene: Ruttmann’s goal was not solely to explain, analyze, and bring to the fore the archaic gestural community but also to bring it into play physically—to bring it up to date though the film medium by seeking an immediate celebration of the same universal vibration. In the 1920s, this insistence on the different aspects of dance culture was not limited to the cinema. Dance was then understood in all its forms, from new choreographic expressions linked to jazz, music-hall entertainment, chorus girls, and the circus to the ancient or “exotic” forms that spread in the wake of colonial expositions. This extended view can be seen in particular in the many lavishly illustrated dance books that were published at the time in Germany, the United States, and France and that, like the montage techniques in Melody of the World, juxtapose in their photographic compositions dance postures borrowed from various cultures. Within this vast body of work (such as Arnold Genthe’s The Book of the Dance, 1916; and Hermann and Marianne Aubel’s Die Künstlerische Tanz unserer Zeit, 192833), André Levinson’s publications stand out in particular. Levinson is one of the principal critics cited with respect to the reception of Melody of the World (La Danse d’aujourd’hui; 1929 [fig. 5.4]; Les Visages de la danse, 193334). This logic of assembled images, in which folkloric dances from various continents are juxtaposed with their more modern equivalents, can also be seen in certain collages by the Dada artist Hannah Höch, which express a quest for synthesis similar to that of Ruttmann. In the volume Album (c. 1933),35 for example, the juxtaposed images on facing pages attempt to create the same effect of simultaneity that Melody of the World seeks to enact through rapid montage (fig. 5.5). These works directly reference the layouts of the period’s illustrated magazines, from which Höch drew her visuals. These include numerous film magazines, which also, in a more lurid but also fairly studied manner, place multiple facets of the dance world together, as can be seen in several graphic compositions appearing in the magazine Pour Vous in the early 1930s.36 And it was in this periodical, at the precise moment that Melody of the World was being released in France, that there appeared an article by Fernand Divoire, a cultural columnist who was developing ambitious ideas around rhythm37 and who was a great champion of modern dance (his volume Pour la Danse, published in 1935,38 would employ the exact same layout principles as has just been discussed). In this evocatively titled text, “De Tahiti au Mexique, l’écran recueille les danses de l’Univers” (“From Tahiti to Mexico, Dance Gathers the Dances of the Universe”), Divoire attributes to cinema the revelation of dance’s protean forms around the world, revealing so many traditions and folklores founded on the expression of a sole collective rhythm: “All that, becoming superimposed on us, gives us points of comparison and enlightens us on the science of this long history of dancing humanity.”39 Divoire’s turn of phrase explicitly echoes

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Figure 5.4. Exploring the postures of dance. André Levinson, La Danse d’aujourd’hui

(Paris: Éditions Duchartre & Van Buggenhoudt, 1929).

the simultaneity effect discussed earlier: in the end, all the choreographic images put on-screen by the cinema give rise to a feeling of superimposed images in the viewer’s mind. This cinematic updating of the rhythmic gesture does not stop at the strictly visual level but extends throughout Melody of the World to the aural dimension, as music—now mechanically synchronized with film—endeavors to reinforce

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Figure 5.5. Hoch’s collages emphasizing synthesis and simultaneity in the juxtaposition of global dance traditions. Hannah Höch, Album (c. 1933).

the continuity between the various dancing figures (e.g., by means of a repetitive beat or the taking up of the same motif) just as much as it does to underscore the highlights of the action (by means of “Mickey Mousing,” or matching the music to the action) or to bring out the principal effects of gradation or ambience (changes of volume or tempo, etc.). This constant and solid musical support, broadly promoted in most film circles since the turn toward institutionalization in the years 1908–1913, was employed by Ruttmann in his earliest abstract films (Opus I had an original score by Max Butting). To this is added, in Melody of the World, the various musical sounds and, in particular, the noises emanating from the world on-screen.40 Thus on a few occasions in the film, the music fades in favor of various symmetrical aural sequences in which the sounds emanating from the sources depicted on-screen engage with each other like a call-and-answer activity. This is the case in another section of the film that is focused on the movements associated with labor. Even more directly than with dance, this reference to working gestures is tied up with various anthropological and psychological ideas. In the late nineteenth century, a number of studies were carried out concerning the rhythmic labor of numerous so-called primitive peoples. Among these studies were the widely disseminated volumes Primitive Music by Richard Wallaschek and Arbeit und Rythmus by Karl Bücher.41 Later, Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-Gourhan would demonstrate the importance of rhythmic pounding in humankind’s primordial labors and this labor’s

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unfolding in a rhythmic atmosphere that guided the coordinated action of the muscles and of hearing and sight.42 In the mid-1920s, one of the most eminent representatives of this same anthropological tradition in France, Marcel Jousse, published his dissertation on rhythmic gesture. His book caused quite a stir in the cultural milieu and attracted the interest of a number of film critics and theorists in particular. For Jousse, the study of “uncivilized” societies made it possible to rediscover an entire immemorial “labor” of human gesture. This labor was manifested in the updating of a language whose two dimensions, the visual and the aural, appear in fact to be inseparable because they are consubstantial: The attentive observer who travels the world studying its semiological gesticulations sees re-appear before his eyes all the labor that has been carried out in human societies since there have been people who think while reliving their actions. He would rediscover the events whose memory history has not retained and which go back to the spontaneous gesture itself; ancient phenomena that only induction can make us aware of. . . . In most societies which are still spontaneous, he hears with his own ears and sees with his own eyes two languages, one manual and the other oral, coexisting and modeled on each other, of which previous ages have preserved only an imperfect hieroglyphic trace devoid of meaning; the past becomes the present.43

Unlike former means of writing, which Jousse deems too implicit and incomplete (the “hieroglyphic trace”), a contemporary anthropological perspective thus appears to be capable of encompassing the entire reality of the world. And it is precisely this ambition that Ruttmann sought in a sense to engage via a then fairly widespread view of the film medium not only as a machine for recording movement but also as something that analyzes or brings out underlying relations that are invisible or imperceptible to the human eye. The poet Alexandre Arnoux, in a commentary on Melody of the World, effectively restates Ruttmann’s fundamental project (which the latter had explicitly formulated in his Revue du Cinéma article mentioned previously)—that of identifying in the seeming fragmentation of the world a profound unity created out of rhythmic connections: The world of appearances, when we observe it superficially, seems to us dispersed, incoherent, anarchic. Its races, countries and times have nothing in common; the savage is as different from the civilized person as the animal kingdom from the vegetable; scientific progress has distanced us so much from our ancestors of past centuries that we have slipped free of their heredity; mores and religions divide nations and continents; there is no solidarity on earth; isolation, mistrust

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and contradiction triumph. But if we dig beneath this heterogeneity, if we try to reach beyond this variegated and fragmented illusion, beyond this heteroclite phantasmagoria, beyond the mysterious relations which sustain the universe and prevent it from crumbling and falling into dust, we will find rhythm and measured harmony, which is to say music.44

Among the many sequences in Melody of the World that seek to restore this universalism of Romantic inspiration through rapid montage is a section devoted specifically to work-related gestures. As we progress through an audiovisual ballet once again employing acceleration, weavers are juxtaposed with a metalworking machine and a worker’s hands with the rotations of a printing press. Hammers, saws, and anvils find their natural extension in industrial tools. This section of the film, like others, prompted enthusiastic commentary from Arnoux: “Walter Ruttmann, composer of a two-part score for the eye and the ear, in which noises, sirens, machines and cries mingle with extraordinary ease, has written a poem of analogy and connections, a novelistic documentary of the unity of the human universe.”45 This “choreographic” vision of various working movements obviously poses a problem even greater than that posed by dance: Is such a lyrical celebration of the universality of working gestures not too elementary? Does it not overlook the factors that differentiate these gestures and would make it possible to highlight, not their seeming similarities, but the inequalities of status or power between individuals because of social or ethnic distinctions? Numerous questions of the same order, far removed from the sympathetic reaction under review here, have been raised in order to demonstrate the limits of the rhythmic paradigm on which Ruttmann’s project was founded. This critical perspective was clearly outlined by Pascal Michon in his important essay on rhythm as a formal model during the first period of “globalization” in the years 1890–1940.46 Without addressing cinema specifically, Michon speaks of the differing viewpoints on the emergence of a veritable “rhythm utopia” in philosophical, social, and anthropological ideals in the interwar years.47 Although the principal participants in this debate agree on a conception of rhythm based on the new forms of mobility generated by industrialization, they were often in disagreement with respect to the value that should be granted to these new forms. Thus the German critic Siegfried Kracauer, to whom Michon assigns a central role, saw the new rhythmic tendencies of his day as the sign of an intense mechanization of the body, something he deemed emblematic of the alienation of individuals under the simplified cadences of mass industrial production.48 At first glance, this analysis appears to be radically remote from the logic of Ruttmann’s “cinematic dance.” Melody of the World, by means of constant concern to create rhythmic linearization and rhythmic vectors, seeks to bring about

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the intermingling of ancestral gestures (folkloric ballet, agricultural labor) with corporeal mechanisms brutally generated by modern industrial life. It tries to obscure the reality of the radical break that Kracauer identified in the irruption of new forms of purely ornamental international dance, oriented entirely toward a tautological celebration of rhythm. We might nevertheless view the obsessive scansion of this documentary as echoing perfectly the gradual desubstantializing of the saltatory gesture that Kracauer associates with the growing uniformity of people’s perceptions of the world, meaning the standardization process taking place, by means of new communication modes and technologies, on a planetary scale: “The more the world shrinks thanks to automobiles, films, and airplanes, the more the concept of the exotic in turn also becomes relativized . . . someday it will designate any spot in the world whatsoever. . . . Just as travel has been reduced to a pure experience of space, dance has been transformed into a mere marking of time. . . . If in the earliest eras dance was a cult practice, today it has become a cult of movement; if rhythm used to be a manifestation of eros and spirit, today it is a self-sufficient phenomenon that wants to rid itself of meaning.”49 Even though Kracauer’s remarks do not directly address Melody of the World, his observation can easily be applied to Ruttmann’s film. For the film draws from its numerous visual references only a never-ending reiteration of the same isochronic and uniform beat. This, in any event, is the reproach that emerges from the few texts devoted by this great critic to the work of his compatriot. In October 1928, for example, Kracauer reviewed a sound film made by Ruttmann, Deutscher Rundfunk (1928), in which, even as he praises certain technical innovations on the level of the synchronization of sound and image, he basically excoriates this naive eulogy to the possibilities of radio, declaring it to be “quite devoid of meaning.” For Kracauer, the film contents itself with being a mere “collection” of images (this choice of terms was cruelly aimed at the supposed vacuity of Ruttmann’s montage) “arranged to create an artificial unity, even though the isolated pieces which make it up rebel at unification.” For Kracauer, Ruttmann should have tried to accentuate the singular nature of each visual segment rather than attempt to connect them absolutely by means of “transition” effects with the goal of “subjecting them, as in the film Berlin, to a literary conception foreign to the image, as the optical medium is not able to create the necessary connections.”50 This harsh criticism of the utopianism of the “visual symphony” dear to Ruttmann found more thorough expression in 1929 in another of Kracauer’s Frankfurter Zeitung columns. There he refers not to Melody of the World but once again to Berlin, Ruttmann’s previous “musicalist” production, which Kracauer reproaches for its associative logic and compares to the more rigorously discursive form of this logic developed by the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera, Kracauer says, is “a film made up solely of associations. Something like what Ruttmann undoubtedly wanted to do in Berlin, Symphony

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of a Great City. But whereas the latter’s associations are purely formal—it appears that in his sound films he is also content with external, unexplained connections—Vertov’s montage brings out a meaning in the correlation of these pieces of reality. Ruttmann juxtaposes them without explaining them; Vertov interprets them as he depicts them.”51 It is quite possible to transpose this contrast between the two urban symphonies by Ruttmann and Vertov onto the contrast between their two “world symphonies,” Melody of the World and Shestaya chast mira (A Sixth Part of the World; 1926). In certain sequences of the latter film, Vertov employs rhythmic strategies that are entirely comparable to those of Ruttmann. But although he works with the same motifs, in the end he arranges them quite differently, in particular by comparing dance and work gestures in order to juxtapose the elite and the common people, the West and colonized countries.52 In Vertov’s work, juxtapositions are explicitly discursive, analytical, and political. For Ruttmann, they refer, in a more engrossed and lyrical fashion, to the great aesthetic and cultural paradigms of an era fascinated by the possibilities of the cinematic apparatus—especially those possibilities that foresaw a new rhythmic order to the universe. Translated by Timothy Barnard.

Notes 1. See, in particular, the speech by the American president in Armageddon (Michael Bay,

1998) and the international media coverage of the September 11, 2001, attack in World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006). 2. In particular, Home (Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 2009), whose mode of distribution replicated the film’s message. In addition to its theatrical release, this feature film circulated worldwide from the outset on the internet. 3. A typical body of work can be found in the Lumière operators’ activity of bringing back pictures from around the world, most often seen through a colonialist prism, when they were not directly filmed in colonial expositions in the West. This idea can also be seen in the slogan of the company the Bioscope and Urban Films in 1903: “We put the world before you.” 4. Not to mention the influence on film screenings by the projection of still images as animated images—for example, magic lantern plates in the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, which were designed to be projected and juxtaposed various picturesque tableaux from around the world with the possibility of creating a sequence out of them (e.g., Carpenter and Wesley productions in London around 1850 and those of Edward George Wood in the 1880s and 1890s). 5. The film was released on DVD in 2010, Berline, die Sinfonie der Großstadt & Melodie der Welt, 2 DVD set (Filmmuseum München collection no. 39). 6. This is basically the focus of the few pages devoted to Melody of the World in the reference volume on Ruttmann. Jeanpaul Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1988). For the connection to the avant-garde, see also Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2007), 206–221. Finally,

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Michael Cowan provides a detailed view of the film’s comparative aesthetic in the context of German culture of the day (the press, tourism, advertising, etc.) in his reference work Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde—Advertising—Modernity (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2014), 82–95. 7. The title card reads in German, “Das Verständnis für die mannigfachen Formen menschlischen Lebens zu vermehren und das Verbindende unter den Menschen zur Darstellung zu bringen.” 8. On this point, and on many other topics raised in the present article, see my volume, Laurent Guido, L’Âge du rythme: Cinéma, musicalité et culture du corps dans les théories françaises, 1910–1930 (Lausanne: Payot, 2007; Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2014). 9. Jeanpaul Goergen, in Walter Ruttmann, provides only a German translation of the text published in La Revue du cinéma. 10. See, for example, Abel Gance, “Nos moyens d’expression: Extraits de la Conférence faite par Abel Gance à l’Université des Annales le 22 mars 1929,” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous 133 (May 15, 1929): 7–8. 11. Walter Ruttmann, “La Symphonie du monde,” La Revue du  cinéma 8 (March  1, 1930): 43–45. 12. Émile Vuillermoz, “Chronique cinématographique: La Mélodie du  Monde,” Le Temps, November 16, 1929, 5. My thanks to Pascal-Manuel Heu for pointing this reference out to me, along with that in the following note. 13. Émile Vuillermoz, “Une Synthèse philosophique,” Radio-Magazine, November 24, 1929. 14. André Levinson, “Le film sonore: La ‘Mélodie du monde’ et le miracle du rythme,” Radio-Magazine, March 9, 1930, 5. 15. “In the cinema there is simultaneity when two or more series of pictures corresponding to distinct actions are interwoven in such a way that, before any of the pictures in one series can produce a complete impression, it yields to a picture in another series, with the complete impression resulting from the overlapping of the series.” Lionel Landry, “Simultanéisme,” Le journal du ciné-club 6 (February 20, 1920): 11. 16. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art” (1911), in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, vol. 1, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 60. 17. F.  T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla and Remo Chiti, “The Futurist Cinema” (1916), in Critical Writings, by F. T. Marinetti, trans. Don Thompson, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 260, 262. 18. Ricciotto Canudo, “Les cent versets d’initiation au lyrisme nouveau dans tous les arts. Suite et fin,” La Revue de l’époque 17 (May 1921): 927–932. 19. Marcel L’Herbier, “Esprit du cinématographe,” Les Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925): 32–33. 20. Jacques de Baroncelli, “Le cinéma au service d’une humanité meilleure,” Les Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925): 221. 21. Philippe Soupault, “Le malaise du cinéma” (1929), in Écrits de cinéma 1918–1931, ed. Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux (Paris: Plon, 1979), 60. 22. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002), 36. 23. “The cinema appears to have been reserved for the age when humankind, having reduced distances to the point of doing away with them, could hope to hold before it the image of the whole world. Everything makes certain, this art itself, that we are on the threshold of a planetary era in which humankind, brought together in an immense sheaf, will rediscover its integration by remaking, at the other end of time, the new Adam.” René Schwob, Une mélodie silencieuse (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1929), 136.

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24. André Maurois, “La poésie du cinéma,” in L’Art cinématographique III (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), 2–3. 25. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn, 2010). Originally published as Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des  Films (Vienna and Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924). For an understanding of the mimetic theories underlying the writing of this text, see Mikhail Iampolski, “Profondeurs du visible: À propos de Der sichtbare Mensch,” trans. Régis Gayraud, 1895 62 (2010): 28–51. 26. “We need something else. We need rich visions of humanity, and that around us in particular. Cinema alone can convey this and spread it everywhere. For it is a universal language. . . . For although we may be mistaken about a text, interpretation or translation, grimaces of joy and suffering are the same amongst every race, in every region, in every language.” Ricciotto Canudo, “Il faut sauver le film français” (1921), in L’Usine aux images, ed. Ricciotto Canudo (Paris: Séguier-Arte, 1995), 70–71. 27. Film seemed to them, respectively, as “the most lively and most rapid of languages” ( Jean Epstein, “À l’affût de  Pasteur,” L’Europe nouvelle, December  30, 1922) and an “international language of silence” (Marcel L’Herbier, “Cinématographie et démocratie,” Paris conférences, 1924). 28. Élie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics” (1920), in The Art of Cineplastics, trans. Walter Pach (Boston: Four Seas, 1923), 15. 29. Élie Faure, The Spirit of the Forms, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930 [1927]), 310. 30. Canudo, “Birth of a Sixth Art,” 59. 31. Léon Moussinac, “Rythme ou mort,” in Naissance du cinéma (Paris: J. Povolovski, 1925), 75–84. This text is a republication with a few modifications of Moussinac’s article “Du rythme cinégraphique,” Le Crapouillot, March 1923. This chapter was shortened in the version of Naissance du cinéma included in the collection of Moussinac’s writings titled L’Âge ingrat du cinéma (Paris: Ed. du Sagittaire, 1946). 32. On this topic, see Guido, L’Âge du rythme, 261–265 (the chapter “Mimétisme et attraction du mouvement corporel”). 33. Arnold Genthe, The Book of the Dance (Boston: International, 1920 [1916]); Frank Thiess, Der Tanz Als Kunstwerk (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1920); Hermann Aubel and Marianne Aubel, Die Künstlerische Tanz unserer Zeit (Königstein: Karl Robert Langewische Verlag, 1928). 34. André Levinson, La Danse d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions Duchartre & Van Buggenhoudt, 1929); André Levinson, Les Visages de la danse (Paris: Grasset, 1933). 35. Published by Hatje Cantz (Ostfildern, 2004). 36. See, for example, André Maugé, “Le cinéma a révélé les beautés secrètes de la danse,” Pour Vous 185 ( June 2, 1932): 8–9. 37. See his lecture, Fernand Divoire, “Le Rythme dans tous les Arts,” Conferencia 14 (5 July 1929): 81–89. 38. Fernand Divoire, Pour la Danse (Paris: De la danse/Saxe, 1935). 39. Fernand Divoire, “De Tahiti au Mexique, l’écran recueille les danses de l’Univers,” Pour Vous 38 (August 8, 1929): 8–9. 40. Melody of the World was made at a time when Ruttmann was experimenting with optical sound in films such as Weekend (1930), consisting solely of a soundtrack, like a work of musique concrète. 41. Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music (London: Longmans, Green, 1893); Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (Leipzig: B. H. Teubner, 1909 [1893]).

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42. Marcel Mauss, Manuel d’ethnographie (Paris: Payot, 1967 [1947]); André Leroi Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). 43. Marcel Jousse, Études de psychologie linguistique: Le style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les Verbo-moteurs (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1925), 42. 44. Alexandre Arnoux, Du muet au parlant: Souvenirs d’un témoin (Paris: La Nouvelle édition, 1946), 91–92 (based on a lecture given in 1934 at the Université d’été in Santander). 45. Arnoux, 91–92. 46. Pascal Michon, Rythmes, pouvoir, mondialisation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005). 47. Michon, 191–218. 48. This is Kracauer’s famous idea of the “mass ornament”: “Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers, and barely even observes it himself. It is conceived according to rational principles which the Taylor system merely pushes to their ultimate conclusion. The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller girls.” Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78–79. 49. Siegfried Kracauer, “Travel and Dance” (1925), in Mass Ornament, trans. Levin, 65–66. 50. Siegfried Kracauer, “Tonbildfilm: Zur Vorführung im Frankfurter Gloria-Palast,” Frankfurter Zeitung, October 12, 1928, translated here from the French. 51. Siegfried Kracauer, “Der Mann mit dem Kinoapparat: Ein neuer russischer Film” (1929), in Siegfried Kracauer, Le voyage et la danse: Figures de ville et vues de films (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1996), 9, translated here from the French. This critique of the city symphony develops a previous comment by Kracauer on Berlin: “These brains know nothing better than to than to go into raptures over this insane proximity of glitter and misery, right and left, because the meaning of their great imaginary city consists in absorbing these unresolved contrasts.” He continues, “This is also why no detail in this ‘symphony’ has a symbolic effect. Whereas in the great Russian films, for example, columns, houses and squares are clearly shown in the human signification, with unheard of acuteness, here we see scraps aligned that no one can truly say why there were put there. Is that Berlin? No, it’s a dreadful copy, the product of an extremely regrettable intellectualism.” “Wir schaffens” (1927), in Siegfried Kracauer, Le voyage et la danse, 84, translated here from the French. 52. This sequence, for example, compares on the one hand groups of black dancers in the West, explicitly depicted—by both the sequencing of the images and the intertitles—as sources of entertainment objectified by the Western capitalist gaze, and on the other hand, African farmers exploited by the colonial regime (released by EYE in 2010; 7′45″ to 11′40″).

6 • WHEN CINEM A WAS HUM ANISM K a r l Sc ho onov er

Film theory has often distanced itself from the word humanism. In fact, the first generation of academic film theory was determined to rescue the cinema from the clutches of humanist movie critics. Vivian Sobchack has written that a “sloppy liberal humanism  .  .  . retrospectively characterized cinema studies before it was informed by the scientific methods and technically precise vocabularies of structuralism and semiotics.”1 This offhand remark encapsulates a prevailing late-twentieth-century attitude toward those who wrote about cinema before film theory. The word sloppy reflects a sense that this prior work was motivated by an overly liberal—if not loose—humanism, one plagued as much by its political naïveté as it was by its lack of conceptual rigor. Accordingly, this humanism was not the product of an intentional philosophy or political program. Instead, it appears as an incidental tendency, an unconscious ideology. Sobchack assumes a reader familiar with what is wrong with this kind of humanism. Her usage nods to a field still awash in 1970s Screen theory’s dismissal of liberal humanism, a phrase that effectively consolidated the journal’s appropriation of apparatus theory’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity (the truth of the image derives from a singular human perspective) with a critique of unthinking realist illusionism (the truth of the image derives from its direct reflection of reality).2 When we turn to the actual writings from the decades before film studies, does humanism lurk as an unspoken ideology? In the conclusion to his wellknown 1944 analysis of cinema, The Hollywood Hallucination, Parker Tyler refers to humanism in anything but an unconscious manner. He writes, “Through the camera’s eye, Hollywood has developed a tremendous faculty for the presentation, however inadequate, of the classical-humanist world of men and women. Inherent in its visual realism lies the irreducible tag of the human norm, that 117

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‘armature’ on which mankind must work its future miracles.”3 For Tyler, the medium’s inherent realism will save even the most escapist impulses of the Hollywood dream factory. By exploiting that medium (its technology referenced here by the camera), Hollywood films cannot help but contain a humanist destiny, one that might in the future answer to “our intrinsic social hope.”4 Tyler was not the only one to intertwine humanism, the world, and cinema’s medium specificity. Looking at a very different kind of text, the 1951 special issue of UNESCO’s general-interest magazine the Courier devoted to the medium, we find cinema still carrying a humanism with a fully articulated political cadence.5 Liberal humanism appears here as neither an abstract nor a philosophical entity. Instead, it is a political necessity for a postwar world, one that the Courier finds practically implemented in recent films that carry an “expression of a new humanism.”6 The magazine forwards an account of medium specificity that highlights cinema’s capacity to figure the globe both through its worldly images and in the technological/institutional structures that enable those images to travel. In part, the Courier attempts to evidence how cinema has been used by recent films to “issue a call for, and preach, real human understanding.” Canvassing top film journalists from Europe and the United States, the issue performs a survey of international films with humanist content. As might be expected, this survey begins with Italian neorealist filmmaking and uses neorealism as a frame for reports on contemporary British and American dramas, children’s films, science films, and art documentaries. This understanding of a globalism enabled by and through the cinematic image—“a mirror of mankind’s social responsibility”7—anticipates today’s notion of “world cinema.”8 Midcentury accounts of the medium, like UNESCO’s, encourage us to see cinema as a medium with the propensity and obligation to speak to world politics. Another article in the Courier’s special issue argues for the political significance of new festival awards recognizing “humane values.”9 While indirectly addressing the content of films, this article describes an institutional practice and its effects on both production and reception. The issue also contains a transnational statistical analysis of the content of newsreels. In mixing traditional content-based film criticism and transnational institutional analysis, the Courier urges its readers to see humanism across a spectrum of film practices and not restricted to any specific genre, style, or even a variety of content. The diversity of the magazine’s examples also insists that humanism derives from neither modes of production nor national film cultures. The Courier locates humanism in a range of techniques, ones by which the medium of cinema and its global infrastructure could proliferate “international understanding.”10 The Courier demonstrates another feature characteristic of midcentury film writing: it attempts to connect the architecture that the medium of cinema builds for its subject and the geopolitics of that period. It considers how the structures

Figure 6.1. An editorial for the film special issue of UNESCO’s magazine, the Courier.

Figure 6.2. A table illustrating cinema’s globalism in the Courier.

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through which cinema asks its viewers to see the world may be attuned to the international ideological struggles of the period. The illustration of the magazine’s lead editorial, titled “International Understanding and the Cinema,” depicts a movie camera / projector with lines radiating from its lens that touch various sites on the Earth’s surface. This illustration suggests that cinema organizes the world by simultaneously gathering and sharing images. At the bottom of the same page is another illustration that figures the world in another form. Here a flattened world map serves as the base for a chart that represents the large numbers of cinema seats that exist in every major region of the world. These two depictions of the world of cinema suggest that its technology and its distribution infrastructure are crucial to its capacity as a medium of “international understanding.” The text of the editorial offers a third depiction of the globe, one still very much ravaged by war: this is a “shattered world,” “a tortured world,” where “the frontiers which divide mankind [not only are], and not evenly mainly, the national or political” but exist as imagined differences.11 Cinema is what erases the distances of imagined frontiers. Whether it be the filmic apparatus on top of the world or the vast infrastructure of exhibition that spans all continents, cinema’s globalism helps “create a harmonious world.”12 Taken together, the illustrations and writings that constitute this issue accept cinema as the prevailing technology through which many people see the world and orient themselves to the forces that bind and divide that world. As with Parker, the Courier signals that humanist culture emerges not simply from specific films and film styles but from cinema as a medium. For the Courier, cinema’s technical, textual, and institutional structures not only anticipate a new peaceful global order by visualizing a more interconnected world; cinema also allows its viewers to partake in building a more unified globe. The names given to that harmonizing force of cinema are international understanding and humanism. From the late 1940s until at least the mid-1950s, cinema’s humanism was regularly referenced in the political commentary offered by newspaper op-eds, congressional debates, peace lobbyists, international NGOs, and forums on public education. Meanwhile, the organs of a burgeoning middlebrow film criticism began regularly to use cinema’s political relevance as a defense of the medium, a justification deployed almost as frequently as the long-standing vindications of the medium via its artistic merit. In its 1945 inaugural issue, Hollywood Quarterly (now Film Quarterly) editors asked what cinema meant after World War II, and they imagined it creating “new patterns of world culture and understanding.”13 With television’s popularity on the rise, the latter publications turned greater attention to the medium’s specificity and, in particular, to the unique capacities of its screen to expand its viewer’s worldview.14 In what follows, I will suggest that if we take into account critical writings on cinema in midcentury America, humanism doesn’t appear quite as sloppy or unconscious as Sobchack and Screen suggest. Humanism was a technology best implemented through cinematic

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machinery. Meanwhile, cinema’s ontology was retrofitted (reinforced) as a machine with automatic predilection for humanistic image production (as Tyler, the Courier, and Hollywood Quarterly suggest). Before jumping to expose the contradictions and limitations of this discourse via symptomatic close reading, I want to examine these texts head-on and acknowledge their existence as theories of a kind, unpacking the particularities of their provocations, polemics, and postulations. For both the promoters and the critics of cinema’s liberal humanism, the medium’s technical and institutional features were enmeshed in the politics of the world more than they ever had been. In the first half of this chapter, I am interested in how the medium of cinema defines the rhetoric of the midcentury humanism than I am in the sincerity of that political project or the veracity of its account of film aesthetics. Even false logics can have profound effects. Given that the liberalism of cinema’s humanist impulses figures prominently in this rhetoric, its definition will receive attention in my discussion. Imagining cinema as a medium of international understanding, critics and other commentators leaned on a theory of cinema’s globalism to promote liberalism: the moving image’s international appeal, technology’s automatic registration of diverse lives, film narrative’s apparent universal means of expression, and the industry’s reach (actual and desired) across a world less encumbered by borders. Cinema’s instrumentality was also understood to be crucial for its provision of a venue for liberalism. This was a virtual space in which to encounter the diversity and otherness of the world and thus one in which a particular viewer’s borders of community were expanded or obliterated. As a columnist in Film Culture saw it, “The movies, of course, are a boundary-annihilating form, easily transmissible past linguistic and cultural barriers (as well as barriers of literacy).”15 The experience of cinema was thus a means of implementing liberalism that involved transforming national subjects into world citizens. It was also a metaphor for and illustration of that process in action. Equally important to my argument are contemporaneous voices of critical dissent, and the second half of this chapter looks at writers who carefully present the cinematic image as neither simply a reflection of global realities nor a measure of the period’s humanist zeitgeist. They see it as an engagement with the affective structures that aim to buttress postwar transnationalism, naturalize economic liberalization, and endorse the expansion of U.S. imperialism. Midcentury critics such as Ralph Ellison, Siegfried Kracauer, and Barbara Deming take on the liberalist humanist subject of postwar cinema, exposing him or her as a figure of frailty, exhaustion, vulnerability, and enervation. Toward the end of the chapter, I look at the films that these critics mention to explore how the films reflect on the cinematic apparatus and to see what those accounts of the medium can tell us about the cinema and its subject in the period.

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While drawing from a broad range of texts, my discussion intentionally avoids engaging with a concept of “liberal humanism” as it exists before or outside of midcentury film culture. In this sense, I want to resist reducing the political content found in cultural forms and texts to simple derivations of bigger ideas drawn from more important spheres. In place of an epiphenomenal approach that would instrumentalize the medium and its textualities, I will continually read the terms cinema and liberal humanism as mutually constitutive. It is impossible to know the specificity of one in this period without knowing that of the other. For this reason, I will forgo supplying a separate intellectual history of liberal humanism outside of film discourse.16 This stems from my belief that a full definition of how this term was defined in this period could not be sustained without invoking cinema. Here my argument follows the lead of media historians such as Fred Turner and Anna McCarthy, who argue that we should see midcentury institutions of visual media and the discourses that surround them as the sources of political thought, not its by-products.17 For both historians, media are not simply instruments of indoctrination. Rather, the specific modes of engagement, mediation, and textuality allowed for by institutions and technologies not only informed midcentury American’s political views; these media forms also came to constitute what Americans understood as political experience, including postwar democratic personhood, world citizenship, and liberal humanism. While McCarthy’s investments remain with television and Turner addresses all sorts of visual culture, other historians, such as Peter Decherney, Haidee Wasson, and Zoë Druick, highlight the period’s political investment in cinema’s institutional and technological specificity.18 In describing the precedents of the contemporary category of world cinema, Dudley Andrew argues that a postwar embrace of Japanese films in the United States and Western Europe reflected a specific “‘universal humanism’ that intellectuals everywhere held up in the face of the Korean and Cold Wars.” Andrew ties the emergence of this universalist humanism to institutions: “Modern cinema, emerging at festivals and cine-clubs, could be shaped by developments anywhere on the globe, and could in turn enlarge the sensibility of humans everywhere, letting Westerners comprehend the world.”19 Charles R. Acland argues that the politics of the 1940s was articulated in the explosion of noncommercial film exhibition, including film societies and educational uses of cinema in schools and libraries. These new film cultures contributed to efforts to “establish a postwar liberal consensus,” and motion pictures helped “the full [flow] of a liberal public sphere, technologically structured . . . in which debate and discussion still reigned and world citizenship might still emerge.”20 But Acland cautions against regarding these efforts as boosts to actual democracy. He reminds us that popular visual culture’s “liberal rhetorics of pluralist and community-based participation” often covered over Cold War surveillance

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and ideological indoctrination.21 A similar set of caveats can be found in Kristin Thompson’s work, who argues that the critical discourse of realism carried a particular historical specificity in the postwar period because contemporaneous critics made the realist impulses of the period films seem more radically universalizing than they in fact were.22 According to Chris Cagle, Hollywood social-problem films grant us access to the question of postwar liberalism not simply in their narrative concerns but in their deployment of genre-specific style conventions. Cagle’s account demonstrates precisely how imbricated liberalism was with specific industrial modes of production and exhibition (i.e., the process of making realism into a genre).23 This research demands that we ask not only what role cinema played in providing spaces from which liberal humanism could emerge but also how liberal humanism was an essential feature of the retooling and rebranding of motion pictures as an aesthetic experience. With the impact of the 1948 Paramount decision and the success of television looming, the Hollywood industry looked for ways to capitalize on their global distribution to make up for losses from the domestic market and wartime embargos. For a figure like MPAA president Eric Johnston, the postwar ethics of a common humanity presented an opportunity to rebrand the motion picture as more than just a commodity. Liberal humanism emerges in his thinking as a world system and a universalism. Johnston wrote a long essay for the organization’s 1946 annual report, arguing that cinema holds a vital potential “as an instrument for securing world understanding and its more important by-product—peace.”24 Later that same year, this text was included as supporting evidence in the congressional report “Postwar Economic Policy and Planning” alongside another essay by Johnston entitled “Expanding World Horizons.”25 In this text, Johnston lays out his globalism and his sense of cinema’s political role in the postwar world. He begins by describing how the “social space” of the world feels smaller due to the speed of travel, ease of communication, economic interdependency, and the atom bomb. Johnston understands this as a question of technology: “By all technological standards, the world is one community.”26 Technological innovations have triggered a sense of common welfare and the waning importance of physical borders, which makes the midcentury an urgent moment for new, globally attuned cultural forms. Despite its sudden propinquity, the world’s unity is never guaranteed. In fact, Johnston laments that feelings of foreignness persist between humans despite the globe being one world. And it is here that he introduces cinema as the antidote that will sync human relations to the new scale of the globalized world: “The peoples of the world will cease to seem strange or foreign to one another only when they know each other as neighbors do. To bring them to such knowledge of one another is a mission which the motion picture is pecularly [sic] fitted to perform.”27 The medium is thus a technology to transcend space in a manner quite

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unlike other new technologies of travel, communication, finance, or warfare. For Johnston, the medium can answer globalism’s moral imperative of inclusivity because of its technical and institutional propensities to be enjoyed and understood by all: “It is the only medium of communication in which all the peoples of the world can speak to on another in the universal language of pictures.”28 As with many of his fellow midcentury commentators, Johnston’s argument for cinema’s medium specificity depends on a notion that movies have an ability to connect a fractured world, linking humans despite their cultural differences and resolving schisms of opposing groups through a virtual encounter of each other: “Knowing each other through film, the most widely diverse human groups begin to get the feeling of what it means to reside on the same planet and as members of the same race.”29 Here humanism is a belief triggered by a feeling, comprehension originating in a virtual encounter. Liberal knowing comes more from an experience of understanding brought on by cinematic seeing than it does from studying books for knowledge. Like the projectionist/cameraman standing on top on the world in UNESCO’s Courier, cinema is imagined by Johnston as a machine that traverses immense distances and draws impossible concordances between different scales, condensing and dilating space in a way that obliterates vast geographical distinctions. In this discourse of cinematic humanism, the world becomes visible not as a specific place but as a virtual sphere of intersubjective relation—an arena of mutual recognition and interaction. In other words, picturing the world—grasping it in one’s mind’s eye—depends not on accumulating a vast internal storehouse of snapshots from a variety of locales but rather on allowing oneself to enter the imaginary space of the foreign encounter and embrace the other that one finds there. The world is rendered in these worldly imaginings and in the valuing of certain relationalities over others, or what both film aesthetics and cultural anthropology terms proximetrics.30 Liberal humanism both is analogous to and seems to need cinema’s conventional implosion of distinct proximities. We might liken liberalism to the racking of focus between various framings, perspectives, and intimacies whose aggregate is world understanding.31 Like the Courier, Johnston’s text locates cinema’s political function in its technology and industrial infrastructure as well as in certain kinds of content. As both apparatus and institution, Johnston’s cinema operates as a liberalizing force in the world because it makes the world known in its images and in the experience of its consumption. It both promotes the harmonized world to come and provides a beacon of that world in its liberalism: “The community of film spectators is a symbol of the world community yet to come.”32 Eventually, Johnston uses the liberal humanist vision of movies as a justification for freeing up trade, lubricating the flow of cinema around the world, and curtailing the regulations levied on the film industry: “The free interchange of ideas is even more

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important than the free interchange of goods. There must be no obstacles to the transit of media of communication.” He continues, “There may be as yet no satisfactory monetary medium for world trade in goods, but the motion picture does provide an adequate medium for world trade in ideas. Not to use it as such is to squander one of our best resources for world peace.”33 Cinema is a means or a currency but also a resource. It is a commodity and a thought. It is an experience of universal commonality and diversity. It is a leveler and multiplier. Cinema becomes a vehicle of humanitarian concern, a tool for transcending difference, and a machine that allows openness to be learned and reinforced through experience. Liberalism brings tolerance together with open markets, humanitarianism with new techniques of venture capitalism, the common good with the ease of globalized trade, and international understanding with commodity-driven values such as equivalence. Many of cinema’s most vocal midcentury supporters use the word understanding as shorthand for the politics of cinema’s humanist medium specificity. This includes Johnston’s and Gerald Mayer’s “world understanding,” the Courier’s “international understanding,” and what Kracauer refers to as “mutual understanding.”34 Similar uses of understanding also appear in the bold statements about the medium found in the mission statements of film societies, debates about primary school curricula, public library journals, and independent film distributors’ advertising. The medium’s potential to facilitate a liberal humanist world lies in its ability to expand parameters of understanding by establishing new transits of global affective engagement, creating universally legible images, and thus collapsing distance between experiences otherwise remote to each other. The understanding subject need not travel to understand its remotest other. In his book Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus, Richard Maltby argues, “The Second World War wrought fundamental changes in the bases of American political thinking,” and liberalism supplied the period with a mode of being able to embody otherwise incommensurate political experiences and ideas without contradiction or conflict.35 Maltby questions the political integrity of this debate-averse practice of democracy; he also questions the sincerity of its diverse allegiances. In liberalism, he finds a suspiciously adaptable if not slippery mode of thinking. Liberalism is predatory, able to colonize covertly through its pluralism and subjective flexibility. Today’s corporatized doublespeak would call this remaining nimble. Liberalism “is above all a sentimental form of politics, whose reactions are rooted in an emotional acquisitiveness, which imagines and then—through the mechanism of displacement—transforms the world along the likes of its own self-definition.”36 Understanding offers a central “mechanism” or “tool” for liberalism and typifies the latter’s disingenuous modes of accommodation—namely, generating totality and consensus by devouring difference through false analogies and

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baseless affinities.37 With its blurring of the “distinctions between compassion and comprehension,” the scenario of humanitarian understanding is central to liberalism’s mythology and its political dominance.38 Maltby equates understanding with the imperious acquisitional logic at the heart of late capitalist democracy’s ideal subject: “To be understood was to be absorbed into the benevolence of the liberal consensus, and to be understanding was to be an active part of that consensus.”39 The liberal status quo is then, for Maltby, built on the acceptance of a kind of ascendancy of the understanding subject over those who are understood: “The understood object was afforded a compassionate concern that revealed the centrality of a sentimental paternalism to the understanding liberal elite.”40 The paranoia of HUAC hearings looms large in accounts of liberalism in this period. Take, for example, the limited discussion of liberalism in Thomas Schatz’s Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, from the canonical series “History of the American Cinema.” When the “liberal-humanist” characteristics of cinema are mentioned, they are associated with a specific genre, the social-problem film, and not with the larger discourses on the medium itself.41 Furthermore, this discussion of these liberal-humanist films too quickly associates them with leftist politics and muddles the terminology in a way that doesn’t recognize the emergent discourses of liberalism that distance themselves from communism through invoking humanity alongside the free-market trade. In a well-known 1949 essay “The Shadow and the Act,” Ralph Ellison’s critique of the social-problem film reminds us of liberalism’s complexity in the period, particularly its more conservative and protoneoliberal stance before and after the Red Scare.42 In the following passage, he questions the function of emotional catharsis that Hollywood’s race films hope to trigger in white audiences: “It is as though there were some deep relief to be gained merely from seeing these subjects projected upon the screen. It is here precisely that a danger lies. For the temptation toward self-congratulation which comes from seeing these films and sharing in their emotional release is apt to blind us to the true nature of what is unfolding—or failing to unfold—before our eyes.”43 Ellison’s reading exposes what Maltby identifies as the sentimentalizing gesture of liberalism: the ascendency of the understanding subject over the understood object haunts the spectator. Ellison also deems the postwar film’s politics of cathartic release counterproductive to any truly productive critique of racism. Cinema, for Ellison, allows merely seeing to substitute for political doing, and the semiprivate experience of film watching alleviates any need to behave differently in public. Ellison sees liberalism’s traps being exacerbated by a new brand of supposedly humanist cinema that fosters virtual and temporary experiences of concerned understanding. Films of the period themselves present cinematic consumption as a practice of humanism by rendering the otherwise passive activity of watching as a form

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of political action. Movie theatres are no longer spaces of diversion and escape but portals to a world of ethical obligation and venues for political participation in the world on a global scale. Several forties films actually reflect on the cinematic apparatus as forging intercontinental transits of compassion, connecting a new global citizenry. Two films about war orphans, The Search (Fred Zinneman, 1948) and The Boy with the Green Hair ( Joseph Losey, 1948), describe the paucity of the still photograph to foreground the richness of cinematic scenarios of witnessing. At the same time, other films from this period—including Brute Force ( Jules Dassin, 1947) and Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)—question the idea of secondhand experience in a way that unsettles the presumptive American spectator’s relation to global politics. These particularly smart films even comment on the new globalism at key moments. For example, the denouement of Hitchcock’s parable of isolationism, Shadow of a Doubt, comes when the FBI officer and Teresa Wright’s love interest “police the world.” One could also argue that these films pose as many questions about American interventionist politics as they resolve. Although often branded a Cold War humanist, Siegfried Kracauer wrote essays from the late 1940s and early 1950s that evidence his acute awareness of the limitations of contemporaneous cultural discourses aimed at reeducating the postwar American. These essays reveal a critical and often incredulous stance toward efforts to liberalize the subject, sensitively responding to arguments for the use of films in school classrooms and UNESCO’s efforts to promote “mutual understanding and good will between the peoples of the free and democratic world.”44 In reviewing a Lancelot Hogden collection of essays, Kracauer takes issue with the author’s naïve and instrumentalizing endorsement of “world-wide visual education . . . to promote international understanding.” Imagining current mass visual culture as a kind of “pictorial esperanto” flattens cultural differences and replaces them with “a uniform world culture.”45 In his most famous essay from the period, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” Kracauer adopts a cautious approach to a form of proxied affect that recent films seemed to offer their viewers.46 Cinema’s modes of virtual engagement are, for Kracauer, morally undecided and particularly dangerous in the context of the postwar United States, where he finds average Americans beleaguered by a sick psyche. They carry around what he calls the “urgency of the emotional need,” which seems strikingly similar to Maltby’s diagnosis of the liberal subject’s desire to blur compassion and comprehension.47 For Kracauer, this affective hunger can erode moral fortitude. He contends that recent Hollywood films are not only addressed to these urgent needs but also uniquely satisfy them by inviting a “vicarious participation in these specific varieties of cruelty, violence.”48 However, he argues, “the feeling of uneasiness stirred up in the audience at the spectacle of an everyday world full of totalitarian horrors is left unrelieved.”49 In doing so, Hollywood takes

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advantage of the geopolitical ambivalences of the postwar American subject. Through a fascinatingly complex determinism, Kracauer outlines how the thrills and chills of mainstream “terror films”—including The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945), Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945), and The Dark Corner (Henry Hathaway, 1946)—bespeak the psychological and ideological instabilities of postwar America. According to Kracauer, the typical Hollywood film is tailored to the particular frailties of the American subject in the late 1940s. This type of film colonizes the subject’s deep sense of vulnerability that his fear will overtake him when he finally confronts the largeness of the postwar world. Similarly to Ellison, Kracauer suggests here that cinema erodes the distinctions between inner and outer experiences. By transcending intrapsychic boundaries, cinema renegotiates the borders governing interpersonal relations, political exchange, and transnational agency. From these descriptions, the subject who emerges from the boundary annihilating qualities of the liberal’s film screen retaliates by interiorizing the world around him. In this sense, the postwar spectator is a narcissist, always either personalizing what he sees as his own or projecting himself outward onto the world. Kracauer writes, “The political and social struggles of our time are not concerned merely with external changes and new borders—they involve the very core of our existence.”50 In this context, the Hollywood terror film is, for Kracauer, reactionary in the fullest sense of the word. Despite the dangers of such a film, it also allows this critic the opportunity to unpack spectatorship and reveal its inner ambivalences toward the world, understanding, and political practice broadly conceived. In arguing for a revision of how popular films engage with the politics of a liberal world, Kracauer’s essay outlines a theory of the postwar mode of spectating. The critical perspective triggered by the critic’s analysis of these films is crucial for how it makes obvious—visible, even—the unconscious of American society. Not unlike Hollywood’s proponents, Kracauer locates the politics of the cinema in its immersive architecture of identification, its structures of seeing, and its projection of otherness. Orson Welles’s 1946 film The Stranger is one that Kracauer includes in the “Terror Films” essay. In staging a contest between worldly concern and the isolationist tendencies of small-town America, the film turns to the cinematic apparatus as a tool for the wayward subject’s ethical reformation. Loretta Young plays this wayward subject, Mary, a woman pathologically repressing the fact that her new husband is a Nazi war criminal hiding in the guise of a New England prepschool teacher. As if to hold the world and the truth at bay, Mary grows increasingly obsessed with keeping the curtains closed at home. The film equates her compulsion to block out outside light (projected illumination of sorts) with an isolationism, apathy, and willful ignorance. Eventually, her stubborn refusal to see the truth is tested and worn down in a scene where she is shown documentary footage of Nazi concentration camps by a war crimes investigator,

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Mr. Wilson, played by Edward G. Robinson. Mr. Wilson provides an impromptu voice-over narration for Mary, explaining the horrors that he asks her to watch while also conveying the urgency of his mission to find war criminals lurking in suburban America. He prompts Mary to see truth in the images and reacquaint herself with her better conscience. The documentary footage shows an injured man pulled from war’s rubble, pleading for mercy. Other images call out for witnesses, exposing an otherwise unthinkable scale of violence. The Stranger stands as one the first instances when popular American audiences saw footage of the camps. Thus embedded in the film’s drama of sights urgently in need of witnessing is actual documentary footage that comes with its own nondiegetic demand to be seen. The audience of these war images (diegetic and theatrical) should be compelled to act on behalf of the bodies projected on the diegetic screen. The film presents cinema as an engine of justice by documenting and displaying pictures of the war’s once hidden atrocities. “Why do you want me to look at these horrors?” Mary exclaims, recoiling from the screen as if images contain material inappropriate for consumption. Her reaction serves as a corrective to any spectator who finds himself looking away. As such, the film endorses not only cinema’s role in resolving the troubles of the world but also the film spectator’s necessary participation in this process via image consumption.

Figure 6.3. In The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946), Mary is made to watch footage of the

Holocaust.

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Given this film’s investment in rehabilitating the American subject and broadening the horizons of her sense of political and moral obligation, it is productive to consider how this scene represents the mechanism of cinema. In this darkened room, the flickering light of the projector also references the qualities of an interrogation or intense psychological retraining. Unlike her rejection of a photograph, Mary seems less able to look away from the cinematic image. Cinema is presented as an unsparing reformer, compelling its spectators to watch and disallowing them from turning away. The viewing scenario becomes a derepression chamber of sorts, able to effect Mary’s catharsis if not in the very moment of consumption then eventually in her sudden epiphany a few scenes later. Another curious fact about this scene is how it grants the cinematic apparatus a prominent position in the room. The projector appears in more than half of the shots of this sequence, and its presence is dominant in several compositions even when it doesn’t take up that much of the frame. At one moment, Mary accidentally bumps into the projector, as if this inconvenient truth teller has gotten in her way. The film shown is silent, but the sound of the projection mechanism persists throughout the scene. When the film ends, the sound of the filmstrip running out of the gate and flipping over the reel makes Mary jump. The flickering light continues after the filmstrip has run all the way through the projector. The reflected pulsations of light hitting the faces of its diegetic viewers belies the film’s eagerness and anxiousness about the power of cinema’s role in political change. The projection scene’s undertones of forced will complicates the notion of liberal humanist understanding, making it a much more violent process for the subject than described in the critical texts supporting cinema’s peacekeeping capacities in the period. Mary’s denial is disturbing and extreme, but we should not forget that this is a fiction film. Its desire to demonstrate the costs of ignoring the horrific dangers of totalitarianism takes an odd turn. It suggests that a just and humane world calls for paternalistic means of mediation when necessary to maintain freedom. The tool for such an intervention is cinema. For other commentators in the period, imagining the liberal rehabilitation of the subject via cinema is less controversial. In an essay for Public Opinion Quarterly, Hollywood producer Walter F. Wanger identifies a critical need to “reorient ourselves realistically to the world of 1950.” Cinema is a central means of achieving this reorientation, the psychological training ground for resisting the aggressor (i.e., the impending spread of totalitarianism).51 In addition to the military and economic might of the United States, Wanger argues, we need to construct other forms of protection, ones that build “strength of character, ideals, and standards.”52 In this context, cinema should be used as it was during wartime to help in the “struggle for men’s minds.”53 In this “ideological contest,” Wanger claims, “the motion picture is the most important medium we have for spreading enlightenment.”54 As such, it can be unleashed as a weapon of soft control in

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a mode analogous to the UN’s education programs or the Marshall Plan. In fact, according to the author, “the motion-picture industry has been the nearest thing to . . . a Marshall Plan for ideas.”55 Like many of the writers mentioned previously, Wanger paints a picture of the public conception of cinema’s role in society as lagging behind its inherent potential: “The sooner the Literati and the leaders of this country realize what a tremendous force for good the motion-picture industry is, the sooner perhaps we will be able to employ the film in solving some of the pressing world problems.”56 And when both the world and Hollywood wake up to the political potentials of cinema, Wanger hopes, we will see “Donald Duck as World Diplomat!”57 Even before the Marshall Plan was implemented, Walt Disney had recognized Donald’s capacity for transnational diplomacy. In 1944, his studio released The Three Caballeros, a feature-length film about the famous duck touring Latin American countries to visit a diverse group of avian friends and a few live-action performers. (The film is famous for its technical mastery of the drawn characters interacting and dancing with actual humans.) The scholarship on this film places it firmly within the ideological project of U.S. imperialism, and quite rightly so, since the U.S. State Department had provided Disney with funding from its Good Neighbor Policy to complete to the film.58 However, the film remains a wildly unstable text, especially concerning the question world humanism. Prominent essayist (and later, key feminist activist) Barbara Deming’s 1945 essay on The Three Caballeros recognized the ambivalences of the film and offers not only a fascinating perspective on the globalism that Disney’s film proposed but also a scathing critique of the midcentury American spectator I have been describing.59 Although the political stakes of Deming’s argument are less overt than Kracauer’s, her work maintains a fascinating critical edge through its metaphors and attentive analysis of how form both depicts and shapes its subjects. For example, it would be easy to talk about the retrograde stereotyping performed in this version of Latin American life or the myopia of this film’s geography lesson, which seems only able to map Central and South America as areas for North American exploitation and/or zones needing to be disciplined. But Deming instead directs our attention to the subtle ways that the film formulates a North American perspective via an anthropomorphism of bird characters. She says we don’t learn much about Latin America from The Three Caballeros, but we do learn about ourselves, our sense of the foreign, and the limits of our worldviews. How the film articulates this perspective through cinema is what Deming finds both most complex and troubling. Her symptomatic reading of the film, one that Kracauer said he admired, reveals a North American subject in crisis. Deming accepts the critical challenge of these increased stakes and calls the film’s bluff by unpacking its notion of the subject. To say that this essay mounts a postcolonial critique would be a stretch. But in its sensitivity to form as a tracing

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of North American subjectivity, it provides a fascinating account of the aesthetics of liberal humanism’s relation to U.S. imperialism. Deming’s reading of the film reveals a midcentury spectator who is under siege but still insistently claiming his or her place at the center of a new world order. Kracauer picks up on this insight, paraphrasing Deming as follows: “That shattered universe is symptomatic of the way we feel about the world now around us.”60 This film swoops in and out in a series of what Deming terms “departures and returns,” almost pathologically eager to constantly forge new vistas.61 Deming makes clear that Donald can always return to the firm ground of home and that this home also offers itself as a “solid base.” However, the home that this film provides Donald is peculiar for its emptiness, she writes. It exists as a perfect blankness, a place that defies spatial definition, a neutral area. For Deming, this film’s images repeatedly perform a semantic emptying out in the service of an ever-hungry imperial gaze: “Disney has a hearty enough appetite for the material with which he is dealing, eventually to let ‘the center fall apart,’ and cease to attempt these meaningless returns [home].”62 In a mise-en-scène eager to establish the periphery as a zone needing to be disciplined, the film seems almost subversively ambivalent about describing nonperipheral spaces such as the homeland, home base, and core identity. This is “a world in which ‘the center cannot hold.’”63 One could read this empty core as simply the blankness of the dominant ideology—that is, the unnamed and nonfigurable hegemony of U.S. domination. And yet Deming understands this blankness as destabilizing to the very subject initially proposed by the film. In the end, she suggests that the film has a disorienting geopolitics. She writes, “For instead of viewing the world from a periphery, as in the first section, we view it now from blind center. We have a nightmare view.”64 Here Deming’s approach, like Kracauer’s, locates politics in the disposition of the subject, and we are reminded of Maltby’s suggestion that we see liberalism “as a state of mind, a condition to be diagnosed rather than an ideology to be analyzed.”65 When confronted by a film proclaiming medium specificity alongside politics, her essay alerts us to the film’s envisioning of the cinematic apparatus as a cultural interface that both grounds and decenters the subject on-screen. The Three Caballeros equates the experience of being in the world with literally being in the image itself. Characters easily travel between great swaths of time and space via the threshold of the projected image’s frame. In Donald’s interactions with the screen, the filmstrip, and the on-screen diegesis, we discover a vision of the medium that aggressively blurs the divisions between world, viewer, and image. The film takes advantage of its own cinematicity (its animated imagery) to produce this jumble of image and reality.66 The film projector is shown as a machine able to broaden the subject’s ability to be in the world, and it is crucial

Figure 6.4. The Three Caballeros shows Donald Duck consumed by the screen.

Figure 6.5. Donald’s friends resist their rendering as flat images.

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Figure 6.6. In its vision of the cinematic medium, The Three Caballeros aggressively blurs

the divisions between world, viewer, and image.

to note here that Donald’s projector is a specifically portable one, not unlike the variety widely used by schools, public libraries, and other community venues during this period, and for which a whole market of rentable 16mm education and entertainment films would become available. The projection and consumption of the moving image allow Donald to travel, meet his international cousins, and get swept up in a flurry of cosmopolitan glee. The boundary violations become geopolitical in an overt sense (referencing relations between regions, nationalities, and ethnicities), and they come at a cost to Donald’s subjectivity. What’s remarkable here is the frailty that Donald embodies. His increased physical mobility seems to lessen his control. Travel unanchors him subjectively. He is sure of his own curiosity but is easily startled, taken off guard, or overwhelmed. These qualities are always true of Donald’s character throughout his films, but here they are inflected with the politics of the foreign encounter, the idea of worldliness, economic codependencies, tourism, and international understanding. The consequences of the flexibility that defined the liberal humanist subject are taken here to an absurd extreme of nimbleness. Deming argues that it is in the hallucinatory sequences toward the end of the film that these subjective instabilities reach their climax. These sequences describe the visual limitations of the worldly subject through an “image of a world that ‘cannot hold.’”67 So while cinema transports the subject, it also undoes that subject. Here cinema’s force is not only palliative;

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Figure 6.7. Hallucinatory sequences in The Three Caballeros register the unanchored

frenzy of the neocolonial subject.

this medium does more than merely inoculate, compensate, release, or manage anxiety. The spatial perversion of the moving image poses a threat to the subject’s stability, and spectacle fulfills the promise of that threat. Openness to the world comes at an expense to the subject’s psychic fortitude. It should not surprise us that Disney’s film seems attuned to the potential damage that neocolonial expansion can wreak on the middle-class American subject. After all, the imperial subject disoriented by exoticism is a common trope of colonial texts. The film does, however, suggest that fracturing of the subject occurs through and by cinema. The image offers no concrete space of rehabilitization (the empty home) and little opportunity for stabilization through composition (framing, to-be-looked-at-ness, etc.). Furthermore, Caballeros clearly aligns cinematic technology with the unsettling of our imperial subject (Donald) and its viewer rather than their fortification. While Deming doesn’t elaborate a theory of cinema in any overt terms, what I find remarkable is her essay’s implication of the subject as a geopolitical entity embodied in and by cinema. If nowhere else than in Deming’s essay itself, cinema’s subject is refused the ability to mold the world in its image. Midcentury writers understood the movies as a platform for the spectator’s adoption of a globalized look that would lead to world understanding.

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They saw cinema’s sensorium—that is, the medium’s uniquely immersive interface—fostering a new liberal humanism that could underwrite a globalization to dispel the menace of totalitarianism. What cinematic engagement involved at the middle of the century was, I believe, a particular geopolitical proposition that recast and repurposed cinema for the emergent needs of the world system. Cinema offered virtual experiences of connectivity and liberal affection to its imagined spectator as a means of reenvisioning his or her place in the world. The supposed “world understanding” offered by the medium inoculates that spectator from any fractious and uncertain consequences of midcentury globalism, and in this version of the aesthetics of cinema, such “understanding” may actually sublimate political concern. This apparently outward-looking humanist was actually inwardly motivated. According to the films, sights can make us feel differently, but at the same time, inner feelings lead to seeing differently. In this overt renegotiation of outward and inward, these films revised what it means to be “in the world,” anticipating a different globalism for the postwar era. The writings on cinema from this period demonstrate how audaciously critics imagined their role not only in relation to films but also in relation to public culture and debates about the political future of the world. From their critical perspectives, cinema reveals things that we might not otherwise understand about political being. This is what makes the writings of Ellison, Kracauer, and Deming particularly important. Their writings describe how intertwined postwar liberal humanist subjectivity is with the refashioning of cinema’s medium specificity in this period. Moreover, these three authors demonstrate how a critical practice—that is, reading film form—can undo the worldly surety of the U.S. subject. Their practice of criticism recognizes the stabilizing effects of this subjectivity to a new world order, but it also unsettles the prescriptive comforts of the American spectator’s relation to global politics. When read with the sensitivity characteristic of Ellison, Kracauer, and Deming, the films of the period reveal how the Cold War struggle over political ideology was a struggle to dominate the perceptual parameters of the subject. The films also provide a perspective on those shifts, opening up the possibility of modes of vision that do not conform to the binary logic of the Cold War as promoted by world’s most vocal ideologues. Ellison, Kracauer, and Deming remind us that the implosion of subjective insides and outsides that cinema ferments carries no ethical guarantees. Cinema’s midcentury subject derives as much from contemporary geopolitical struggles as it does from any innate moral obligation toward humanity. The liberalism of “world understanding” does not ensure the viewer’s ascension to a charitable subjectivity. Nor does its virtual brotherliness necessarily equate with an unselfish concern about the reach of democratic liberty in the world.

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Notes 1. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1992), xiv.

2. Across a range of essays, the term humanism was accompanied in Screen’s pages in the

1970s and early 1980s by adjectives such as Hollywood, banal, basic, popular, Western, and most often bourgeois and liberal. In 1986, Simon Watney reflected on the journal’s consistent “challenge to realist aesthetics and vulgar humanism embodied in crude reflection and/or expression theories of cultural practice.” Simon Watney, “Canvassing Screen,” Screen 27, no. 5 (1986): 50–54. See also the issue on neorealism and, in particular, Christopher Williams, “Bazin on Neo-Realism,” Screen 14, no. 4 (1973): 61–68; and Mario Cannella, “Ideology and Aesthetic Hypotheses in the Criticism of Neo-Realism,” Screen 14, no. 4 (1973): 5–60. For seventies film theory, humanism also references the Enlightenment’s placement of human perception at center of knowledge that Comolli calls this “hegemony of the eye.” As he describes it, “the image produced by the camera cannot do otherwise than confirm and reduplicate ‘the code of specular vision such as it is defined by the renaissant humanism,’ such that the human eye is at the centre of the systems of representation, with that centrality at once excluding any other representative system, assuring the eye’s domination over any other organ of the senses and putting the eyes in a strictly divine place (Humanism’s critique of Christianity).” Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 126. 3. Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), 246. 4. Tyler, 246. 5. UNESCO, “The Cinema,” special issue, Courier: Publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 4, no. 9 (1951): 3. Although Courier’s special issue on cinema is not mentioned, Zoë Druick’s research on UNESCO’s film programs provides a useful backdrop for this discussion: “‘Reaching the Multimillions’: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 66–92; and “UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 81–102. See also M. Todd Bennett, “One World, Big Screen: The United Nations and American Horizons,” in One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 89–135. 6. Luigi Chiarini, “The Italian Film: A Mirror of Mankind’s Social Responsibility,” in “The Cinema,” special issue, Courier, 3. 7. Chiarini, 3. 8. The politics of picturing the world as a space of universal human values has been questioned by several scholars of visual culture. See, for example, Tiago De  Luca, “Figuring a Global Humanity: Cinematic Universalism and the Multinarrative Film,” Screen 58, no.  1 (2017): 18–37; Martin Roberts, “‘Baraka’: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 3 (1998): 62–82; Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 55–84. 9. Stephen Watts, “A Film Award with a Real Purpose,” in “The Cinema,” special issue, Courier, 7. 10. Chiarini, “Italian Film,” 3. 11. Rob McLean, “International Understanding and the Cinema,” in “The Cinema,” special issue, Courier, 2. 12. McLean, 2.

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13. Quoted in Eric Smoodin, “Introduction: The Hollywood Quarterly, 1945–1957,” in Holly-

wood Quarterly: Film Culture in Postwar America, 1945–1957, ed. Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xi. 14. And Cinerama wasn’t always the answer. In fact, huge screens only abetted what Orson Welles described as “the crisis in world cinema” because enlargement “impoverishes the film itself ” and dwarfs the spectator’s sense of themselves. Welles calls for a return to a “human scale.” Orson Welles, “Ribbon of Dreams,” in International Film Annual, no.  2, ed. William Whitebait (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 164, 165. In surveying the idea of world cinema across the twentieth century, Dudley Andrew argues that other media offered an extension of human vision (television) like cinema, but the cinematic medium was unique: “[Film] spectators can channel their fascination with the screen into a discourse about what they see reflected there: a view of the world, a point of view about how to live with in it or how to change it. This was the promise of that [cinematic] public sphere.” Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 69. 15. David Riesman, “The Oral Tradition, the Written Word, and the Screen Image,” Film Culture 2, no. 3 (1956): 2. 16. This is, by no means, to say that the commentators I discuss don’t partake in instrumentralizing the medium or reaching outside discourses of cinema to make their arguments. For more extensive discussions of “humanism” and visual culture of the mid–twentieth century, see Justus Nieland, “French Visual Humanisms and the American Style,” in A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950, ed. John T. Matthews (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 116–140; and Mattias Frey, “The Critical Question: Sight and Sound’s Postwar Consolidation of Liberal Taste,” Screen 54 (2013): 194–217. 17. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York: New Press, 2010). 18. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American, Film and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Druick, “‘Reaching the Multimillions’”; Druick, “UNESCO, Film, and Education.” 19. Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 73. 20. Charles Acland, “Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionists: Post-World War II Consolidation of Community Film Activism,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 384, 394. Other work by Acland relevant to my concerns here include “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946–1957,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Grieveson and Wasson, 149–181; and “Hollywood’s Educators: Mark May and Teaching Film Custodians,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Acland and Wasson, 59–80. 21. Acland, “Classrooms, Clubs,” 173. 22. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 23. Chris Cagle, “The Postwar Cinematic South: Realism and the Politics of Liberal Consensus,” in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, ed. Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn B. McKee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 104–121. See also Chris Cagle, “Realist

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Melodrama,” in Sociology on Film: Postwar Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 126–156. 24. Eric Johnston, “The Motion Picture as a Stimulus to Culture,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 254 (November 1947): 102. 25. Expanding World Horizons in Postwar Economic Policy and Planning: Hearings before the United States House Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning, 79th Cong., 2d Sess. 2594–2621 (1946) (statement from Eric Johnston, MPAA president). 26. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 27. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 28. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 29. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 30. Art historian Arnold Hauser concludes his four-volume The Social History of Art with a chapter titled “The Film Age,” in which he describes cinema’s essence as the oscillation of proximities: “It is the simultaneous nearness and remoteness of things . . . that constitutes the spatio-temporal . . . which is the real medium of film and the basic category of its worldpicture” (243). Hauser later likens cinema’s admixture of proximities to Proust, in which the “boundaries of space and time vanish in this end and boundless stream of interrelations” (244). These descriptions stick with the reader when they reach the chapter (and the book’s) concluding paragraph calling for art to “extend the horizon of the masses as much as possible” (259). Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 4 (New York: Vintage Books, 1957). 31. For more on this, see my work on critical discourses surrounding neorealism and how they map spectatorial engagement in ways that confound spatial logic. This is an impossible scale of brutal humanism, which I term distanced proximity in the chapter “The North Atlantic Ballyhoo of Liberal Humanism” in my book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 69–108. 32. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 33. Expanding World Horizons, 2598. 34. Siegfried Kracauer, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, ed. Johannes von  Moltke and Kristy Rawson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 81, 85, 102, 125, 154, 192. Kracauer is often skeptical of these efforts, as I will discuss later in this chapter. 35. Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983), 224. Cagle provides a political history of liberalism that serves as an excellent corollary to Maltby’s account in Cagle, “Postwar Cinematic South,” 106–108. 36. Maltby, Harmless Entertainment, 225. 37. Maltby, 252. 38. Maltby, 243. 39. Maltby, 244. 40. Maltby, 244. 41. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 386. In the 1950s volume from this same series, Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959, Brian Neve’s “HUAC, the Blacklist, and the Decline of Social Cinema” offers a more nuanced account of this period and acknowledges Johnston’s complex and shifting politics, briefly mentioning the emergence in the late 1940s of a “new anti-Communism liberalism.” Peter Lev, ed., Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003), 65–86.

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42. Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” The Reporter, December 6, 1949, reprinted in John Callahan, ed., The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 302–309. 43. Ellison, “Shadow and the Act,” 308. 44. Watts, “Film Award with Purpose,” 7. For a discussion of Kracauer’s branding as a Cold War humanist, see Johannes von  Moltke and Kristy Rawson, “Introduction: Affinities,” in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. von  Moltke and Rawson, 22. For Kracauer’s thoughts on screen education, see Siegfried Kracauer, “Total Teaching,” in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. von Moltke and Rawson, 190–191; and Siegfried Kracauer, “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. von Moltke and Rawson, 81–104. 45. Siegfried Kracauer, “Pictorial Deluge,” in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. von Moltke and Rawson, 194. 46. Siegfried Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” Commentary 2 (1946): 132–136, reprinted in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. von Moltke and Rawson. For further perspective on this essay, see Edward Dimendberg, “Down These Seen Streets a Man Must Go: Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Hollywood’s Terror Films,’ and the Spatiality of Film Noir,” New German Critique 89 (2003): 113–143. 47. Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 134. 48. Kracauer, 134. 49. Kracauer, 134. 50. Kracauer, 136. 51. Walter F. Wanger, “Donald Duck and Diplomacy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 14, no.  3 (September 21, 1950): 443. 52. Wanger, 443. 53. Wanger, 444. 54. Wanger, 451. 55. Wanger, 444. 56. Wanger, 450. 57. Wanger, 452. 58. Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “‘Surprise Package’ Looking Southward with Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131–147. Scott Schaffer, “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories,” Postmodern Culture 6, no. 3 (1996): 1–18. 59. Barbara Deming, “The Artlessness of Walt Disney,” Partisan Review 12, no.  2 (Spring 1945): 226–231. 60. Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 135. 61. Deming, “Artlessness of Walt Disney,” 229. 62. Deming, 230. 63. Deming, 228. 64. Deming, 230. 65. Maltby, Harmless Entertainment, 224. 66. As mentioned previously, Caballeros was one of the earliest feature films to use animated and live action performers dancing in the same sequences. 67. Deming, “Artlessness of Walt Disney,” 227.

7 • AFRIC AN CINEM A Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation N. Fr a nk Uk a dike

Given the imperialist connotations of movie making and the politics of representation, as well as the limited access to technologies in a digitally divided world, a discussion of African cinema is entangled in questions of authority in relation to politics, power, ideology, and state practices, with sociocultural, economic, and political implications. To what degree can these “technical re-orientations,”1 in the words of Tunde Kelani, be used to dismantle the hegemonic grip on cultural productions, global exchanges, and consumption? This question implicitly frames the role of technology and the expanding frames of representation within African film practice. This chapter, then, explores the genesis and current shifts and challenges in African cinema’s endeavor to break away from the dogmatic mold and constraints affecting its production of culture and its distribution. In examining patterns of production and dissemination, it deals with the unique ways—especially in the context of the Nigerian cinema (i.e., Nollywood)—that the production and dissemination of video films in the digital age have communicated globally to and through these very different cultures.

Old-World African Films versus Nollywood For some time, Africa has struggled to find its own voice within the film canon. Stifled by foreign distributors’ monopoly in Africa as well as funding issues and the lack of interest in creating commercialized, entertaining, fictional film representations of Africa, first-generation African filmmakers found little room for their films in either the African or global markets. Moreover, native filmmakers 141

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had to fight the stereotypes that the Western model of film production and content bestowed on Africa, as evidenced in such films as Missionaries in Darkest Africa (1912), The Terrors of the Jungle (1913), Voodoo Vengeance (1913), Trader Horn (1931), King Solomon’s Mines (1937), Sanders of the River (1935), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and the Tarzan jungle melodrama epics—more than forty of them made by Hollywood over a period of seventy years.2 Thus as the early pioneers in African filmmaking embarked on refuting Western perceptions of Africa, they wanted to use cinema as a tool for education and as a means of sharing the reality of Africa from a specifically African perspective. Likewise, a close link can be drawn between the independence movements of many African nations and the birth of their distinct cinemas. This newly found independence led to an African desire to see Africa and Africans represented on the big screen. However, as Ayo Vaughn points out, “This cinema was to become a cinema of awareness and protest. It was to highlight African culture and history and to denounce whatever could be a drawback to the harmonious evolution of African countries from colonial or neocolonial bondage to full-fledged independent nations.”3 The history of true African film shows that, from its inception, it was not created for entertainment and profit (like its commercial Western counterparts); African filmmakers were more concerned about crafting a cinema that could decolonize the mind, as it was clearly geared toward informing and teaching. (As promising as this may seem, it is also one of the factors that has limited the scope of its dissemination—a point we shall return to later.) As such, these filmmakers wished to share the realities of Africans’ lived experiences and strove to highlight issues affecting the continent. Film for them, then, was intended as a societal catalyst. What makes African cinema so unique is that its pioneer filmmakers—such as Ousmane Sembene, Oumarou Ganda, Med Hondo, and Mahama Johnson Traoré, to name a few—were able to blend typical filmmaking strategies with elements of Africa’s cultural codes within a context of an innovative revolutionary cinema of awareness. Despite the fact that several great African filmmakers studied filmmaking abroad, African cinema is distinct from that of countries like the United States, Italy, France, and Russia. African filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene and Med Hondo are participants in a social project of edification that has been instrumental in creating a uniquely African cinema. Films such as Black Girl (1966), Borom Sarret (1963), and Soleil O (1969) are unique in their construction and revolutionary in their message. Although different techniques were applied early on in order to render the narrative structures culturally and politically specific, the unifying factor for achieving this goal, in its varying practices, was the creation of a cinematic art based on the philosophy that film and politics are inextricably interwoven. This position is diametrically opposed to that seen in the contemporary Nigerian video film milieu, where the new phenomenon of video films crystallizes a unique cultural art that has remained true to its primary

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objective—commercial viability. By comparison, the earlier generation/tradition of the African filmmaking initiative deliberately eschewed commercialization while promoting its cinema of awareness (cinéma engagé, as in the francophone region) in order to draw attention to immediate and past experiences. Even when a black African film first appeared in 1955 (when a group of African students in Paris made the short film Afrique sur Seine), it focused heavily on themes of colonial oppression: emigration, alienation, and racial discrimination. Similar themes, such as cultural alienation, social and economic exploitation, traditional versus Western influence, unemployment, corruption, the position of women in a male-dominated society, and even polygamy, pervaded subsequent African films.4 The creation of films focused on these themes essentially helped disseminate the idea that African citizens needed to address these issues in their communities. Thus the pioneering African films were overly particular regarding the regions, countries, and the continent of Africa, and their narrative structures did not possess the sort of universal appeal (in terms of reach and entertainment) that filmgoers could relate to beyond Africa. This generated a common sense of apprehension in the international realm. Addressing this concern, therefore, is where Nigerian cinema comes into play—namely, its ability to push its films beyond its borders. The African filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s sought to demystify the demeaning Hollywood cinematic (mis)representation of Africa. Such African films were not created for materialistic ends; they were about crafting a cinema that educates and diffuses oral traditions, in Griot’s dictum—as in West Africa when storytelling turns out to be a way of maintaining a tradition of oral history. Let us consider the early work of Ousmane Sembene, the father of authentic African cinema. Set in the capital city of Dakar, Senegal, Sembene’s Borom Sarret depicts the African’s experience of life in a typical colonial setting. In the film, a cab driver feels that each day is a continuation of the next, with no room for progress or growth. The film shows the schism between the wealthy and the poor and the lifestyles within an Africa city in transition. So it is that the cab driver exclaims in wonderment, “That house, that building!” as he enters the wealthy area known as “the Heights,” the likes of which he had never seen before, since he and his family live in the poor neighborhood, the medina of Dakar. Throughout the film, this cab driver grapples with how he will feed his family as he criticizes modernity. In the film, Sembene pans the camera across the gleaming white high-rises in the wealthy, more European part of the city. He uses a low camera angle to display the grandiose nature of the Heights, a typical Sembenian way of using coded political language to analyze African dichotomies. In her article “Film as a Catalyst for Social Change,” Andrea Dahlberg notes that Borom Sarret “is amongst the first, and certainly one of the most insightful, representations of the social life of a people lost in the space between tradition and postcolonial society. But Sembene was profoundly interested in social

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change and his raison d’être for making films was to reach the widest audience of Africans living in a postcolonial world and draw them into the project of constructing their own future.”5 In contrast, it would be difficult to find a similar sentiment about a Nollywood film. Unlike Sembene’s films, those of Nollywood lack the strong collective sentiments and overt politicization reflected in early African cinema. Although Nollywood film does mirror some aspects of contemporary African society, some have argued that the plotlines and structure do not necessarily reflect the plight of postcolonial African culture. Furthermore, Dahlberg notes that Sembene made films with only “the widest audience of Africans in mind,”6 which is distinct from Nollywood filmmakers, who know that a lucrative global market exists for their films if they are made in a certain manner. Because Nollywood aspires to mobilize its audience beyond Africa, the structure of films is not necessarily combative, as in the revolutionary cinema aesthetics of the pioneering phase, or Third Cinema.7 Instead, it weaves together the conventions of entertainment cinema, where special effects, magic, melodrama, and outrageous story lines reign supreme in order to maximize spectator appeal. Indeed, since the 1990s, African cinema has emerged as a driving force within the international cinema circuit due to the emergence of Nigerian cinema. However, Nollywood’s conception, means of production, and mass marketability have shaped an African cinema distinct from the African celluloid filmmaking that emerged shortly after independence in the 1960s. The growth of filmmaking in the pioneering years was hampered by a lack of infrastructure and funding and distribution and exhibition problems. It is important to state that the situation varied according to the patterns of colonization in Africa; for example, the francophone region received support and funding from the French government, while the anglophone and lusophone regions were not as lucky as their French counterparts. However, in all regions, the development of the film industry was still a mirage—that is, until the Nigerian cinema’s transformation that would lead to the evolution of Nollywood in the late 1980s. Surprisingly, despite being a relative newcomer to the film industry scene, Nollywood can be ranked among the much older film production circuits, Hollywood and Bollywood, in terms of viability and box-office sales. However, although Hollywood and Bollywood maintain stable and consistent modes of production, aesthetics, and economic factors, Nollywood still encompasses a wide range of these factors in its film catalog. Thus when compared to the other circuits, despite the rather unorthodox way in which Nollywood functions, it still managed to achieve remarkable economic success and, more important, popularity that soon led to signs of having been welcomed as a major player in the global film market. Through Nollywood, African filmmakers have been able to make films about Africa for Africans on a mainstream level—industrial and commercial.

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Moreover, unlike early African cinema, one of the most prominent and distinguishing characteristics of Nollywood is its use of unique production techniques, which have become routine in Nollywood and that filmmakers from many other African countries now emulate, thus helping establish or expand the burgeoning other “woods”—“Sollywood” (Southern Africa), “Riverwood” (Kenya), “Ghallywood” (Ghana), and “Bongowood” (Tanzania), to name a few. First, the producers rely on local funding and do not have to fly to Europe, as the earlier francophone filmmakers did and still do, or run to the United States to solicit for funding to make their films. The industry capitalizes on its straight-to-video mode of production and is known for its low budgets and record-breaking production times. A typical Nollywood film can be completed in less than two weeks for less than $20,000. Second, when the films are made, they are aggressively marketed and foisted onto their audiences. Nollywood’s shoving-it-down-the-throat marketing strategy is still very much its means of galvanizing huge audiences to this day and has successfully promoted industry viability and sustainability since its inception. Although some media pundits criticize the “rat race” that Hollywood has become, with all of its wheeling and dealing, Nollywood can be viewed as simply a flat-out race to produce films as quickly and inexpensively as possible. A Hollywood film can become entangled in many stages of production, which means it can take years before a script turns into a film or before that film is introduced to the public. In Nollywood, however, films are made at a remarkably fast pace, and the national and international markets eagerly await each new production. This is partly because African movies have become a staple for audiences across the continent due to viewers’ familiarity with the themes, subject matter, and cultural parallels. Similarly, in the age of globalization, Nollywood films have become a cultural sensation, a phenomenal art cherished by Africans at home and with a loyal and fast-growing fan base in Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. This territorial expansion is possible only because, according to Jason Njoku—the cofounder of iROKOtv, the leading online platform for distributing African movies—“Nollywood serves an audience thirsty for love, drama, intrigue, comedy, redemption, action and more. [In addition,] the end product is unique: African stories, by African people, for Africans.”8 And Nollywood has not disappointed its teeming audience in terms of delivering on that core production code.

From Topsy-Turvy Beginnings to New Initiatives Although there was sporadic film production in Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not until the 1994 release of the box-office hit Living in Bondage that what is known today as Nollywood garnered both national and international attention.

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The film tells the story of a man who joins a secret cult in order to be rich and successful in life. To accomplish this goal, he must kill his wife in ritualized sacrifice. He gains enormous wealth as a result, but the ghost of his wife torments him wherever he goes. The movie was released in the city of Onitsha by NEK Video Links, which is owned by Kenneth Nnebue, who sponsored Living in Bondage’s producer and director, Okey Oguejiofor and Chris Obi-Rapu, respectively. The film was made in Igbo with English subtitles, making it accessible to Englishspeaking countries. Not only did it become Nigeria’s first commercial film; it was also its first real entertainment film. With the creation of this film and those that followed it, the rise of what is now the second-largest film industry in the world, and the largest in Africa, came into being. Nollywood has produced many distinguished titles, the success of which can be attributed to its unique method of doing business—namely, its production techniques, distribution efforts, and use of relatable themes that appeal to audiences from all walks of life. Situating the discourse of Nigerian cinema within the overall concept of African cinema, it is important to note how their rapid formula in all phases of production oscillated between the various genres—drama, melodrama, action, romance, and so forth—a practice that brought almost instantaneous recognition to the Nigerian film industry and transformed the overall notion of African cinema/cinematic discourse.

Figure 7.1. Kenneth Okonkwo of Living in Bondage fame. Courtesy of Kenneth Okonkwo.

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Reasserting the Public Interest via a Successful Formula In the first decade or so of African cinema, filmmakers attempted to give didacticism preference over entertainment for the purpose of creating awareness of the ongoing struggle for liberation and reclamation of Africa’s cultural heritage, which was long distorted by the colonial legacy. Films made during this period were culturally and politically specific—that is, they were inundated with instructional value meant to elicit and advance knowledge about Africa. However, it was the preference that Nigeria gave to entertainment over didacticism that has given Nollywood its illustrious standing in the world today. The successful formula of Living in Bondage—bold storytelling, a dose of “black magic” along with its good-versus-evil story line, and quick and easy distribution via VHS—certainly contributed to its unprecedented success. Nevertheless, the success of Nigerian cinema should not overshadow the importance of “oldworld” African cinema. The celluloid filmmakers’ focus on didacticism in the beginning stages of African cinema was important in the 1960s and 1970s, as it was necessary for African voices to be heard expressing their dislike of colonialism and the negative state that it had left their respective countries in. It was also important in that it presented Africa through the eyes of Africans in order to provide a truthful, positive image of the continent, which is a far cry from the classic Hollywood depiction of Africans as “savages,” jungle “cannibals,” people living among lions, and so forth. Moreover, the focus of African cinema on didacticism was important in informing Africans—especially ones struggling with illiteracy, poverty, and a lack of education—of the true state of their countries. This strategy was in consonance with the prevailing mood in the third world, where the notion of a Third Cinema was born in the 1960s and 1970s out of oppression and resistance, as in the revolutionary Latin American cinema of that time. So also in Africa during this period, the political use of cinema intertwined with liberationist struggles, culminating in the pursuit of independence by the colonized nations in the two hemispheres. The basic Nollywood formula is for cheaply made films to be rushed straight onto videotape, VCDs, and DVDs. The strategy of flooding the market with films on a weekly basis helped propel Nollywood into the global cinematic consciousness at lightning speed. Since its inception, Nollywood’s video films have had a profound transnational visibility and an accelerating popularity due to informal networks of distribution. While opening the industry to negative and positive connotations related to and ranging from narrative and stylistic elements to production quality, Nollywood and its films have been extremely dynamic in their outreach and connection with diasporic communities in the African motherlands.

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Because of a lack of organized distribution channels, when the producers began churning out films at an alarming rate, pirated copies of Nigerian videos also increased, circulating throughout Africa as well as to the immigrant communities living in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Although these illegal activities did not contribute per se to the development of the Nollywood economy, illicit circulation of Nigerian video films has played enormous role in the industry’s recognition and demonstrates the potential for a viable, lucrative market, which Nollywood producers hope could be harnessed through effective reorientation of the distribution system. This has also put its cinema in league with both Hollywood and Bollywood. Pierre Barrot makes an interesting assessment, noting that “it is the very fact that its [Nollywood’s] production budgets are so modest and its character so prolific and ‘industrious.’ Even if one puts aside the multiple remakes, sequels and plagiarisms, there are still 9,000 films telling thousands of stories that speak to an audience of millions across the African [diaspora].”9 This can be viewed in contrast to the first wave of African filmmakers, who, due to financial constraints, made fewer films, sometimes one in twelve years, as in the case of Kwaw Ansah of Ghana, who seemed primarily concerned with giving Africa a voice. Above anything else, their work shed light on the plight of Africa. They were highly concerned with using cinema as a means of giving Africa back to its people and breaking through the molds that colonization had placed on African cinema and society. However, this practice, coupled with new postcolonial problems such as debilitating economic issues neither helped elevate filmmaking nor gave national cinemas the industrial status it craved. Most of the celluloid films made during this period were not distributed and ended up in closets to gather dust. The filmmakers’ struggle against technological and infrastructural constraints also needs to be pointed out. The digital transformation of the film medium guaranteed quick turnout and was less tedious for Nollywood producers. By comparison, the pioneers of the African celluloid filmmaking faced the daunting task of shooting in 16 or 35mm and had to do postproduction work overseas, typically in France. Similarly, these early filmmakers lacked exhibition facilities, while the proliferation of DVD players and easy access to television sets in numerous homes in Nigeria and the African continent accelerated Nollywood’s popularity and success. These changes attest to the shifting conditions in the economic, political, ideological, aesthetic, and even cultural spheres—thus prompting the need to navigate conditions that militantly limit or restrict the production, distribution, and exhibition of films. In contrast, we have to acknowledge a lot of other changes in Africa, such as the geopolitics of trade, which is making it easier for films to get international audiences, and the technological transformation of the film medium to digital that favored Nollywood filmmakers more than the African celluloid pioneers.

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Because of the relative ease with which their films are made, starting at first with the archaic, antiquated home-video camera and now the digital format, Nollywood films can be found everywhere, hawked by street vendors in every African country from Rabat to Cape Town, pirated and watched over and over again. Their popularity is unprecedented in the history of African popular culture, and “aside from the music industry, there has never been any other aspect of African culture that has resonated in such a big way, achieved such a high profile, and above all made such a big impact on the population.”10 As mentioned, another important distinction is the early filmmaker’s use of 16 or 35mm film, while Nollywood films were generally shot using home-video cameras but now use the digital format, often resulting in lower-quality products that look like home movies. In this regard, Rabiu Mohammed’s contention “that Nollywood movies don’t have a budget for technology, but they do have stories to tell”11 is apropos of the pioneering phase of the video revolution—because the industry is reversing what used to be a retrogressive technological trend, in terms of equipment, into a productive upgrade of production facilities. By using home-video technology rather than the celluloid film of its predecessors, Nollywood often leaves the viewer with a diminished sense of depth and artistry in comparison to that found in the work of early African filmmakers. However, what Nollywood loses in creativity and narrative perfection, it gains by focusing on stories and a popular mode of address that people of all ages can enjoy and benefit from, ranging from corruption and women’s rights to romance and pure comedy. The shift from politically laden themes to a film industry that provides a wide spectrum of themes as reflected in the genres mentioned previously has greatly contributed to the Nigerian film industry’s success. However, Nigerian films are not strictly entertainment. Films such as Tunde Kelani’s Thunderbolt (2000), which deals with marital infidelity, address issues important to modern-day Africans. The difference in the use of innovative narrative tactics—for example, adding taboo elements like adultery and the deployment of special production techniques, such as the conventions originating from blending cinematic codes (e.g., mise-en-scène, expressive editing, and lighting) with cultural codes (parables, oral art, folklore, supernaturalism, and other theatrical conventions deriving from the Yoruba popular traveling theater tradition, the “Alarinjo”12), coupled with the use of creatively integrated sound and visual effects—is one of the main differences between Nigerian cinema and the older tradition of African filmmaking. These techniques have proven to be highly successful in targeting a specific audience.13 Funding plays an important role in Nigerian films and is one of the primary driving forces behind the success of the industry. From its inception, Nigerian films have been produced almost exclusively with Nigerian money. Because Nigerian filmmakers heavily depend on locally generated funds for production,

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interdependence with private citizens is extremely important. This differs greatly from the development of African cinema in, for example, francophone countries that relied on the French Ministry of Cooperation and Development for financial support, and in a way, it makes current Nigerian cinema more autonomous. Nigerian films’ use of English as the lingua franca adds to the power of their distribution. It is more likely that a person will be inclined to watch a film that is already in English rather than one in a different language, even if subtitles are included. Moreover, Africa’s first filmmakers’ works made little impact on the international cinema market; they were relegated to festival circuits with no commercial appeal, as the majority of the films were extremely didactic, leaving some analysts wondering what caused this small local market (Nollywood video films) to grow into such a prosperous conglomerate that has displaced foreign media in much of Africa and is now marketed all over the world. Although some have attributed this sudden boom to the use of English rather than local languages in connecting with a larger audience, aggressive marketing via the use of posters and billboards, trailers, and television advertising to the now awesome power of the internet has played an enormous role in Nollywood’s success. The use of English and other Western models of promotion is another key difference distinguishing Nollywood from early African cinema, when there was no internet, Netflix, Amazon, or YouTube as channels of film dissemination. It is important to recall that Ousmane Sembene was so disappointed when he noticed the lack of his novels in bookstores in African countries he visited that he opted for filmmaking in order to reach a larger African audience. However, there was no distribution mechanism owned and controlled by Africans that would have promoted the films he made or the films made by other African filmmakers. At this juncture, let me remind the reader that foreign aid, specifically controlled by the French, helped produce many of the African films of this period, and in most cases, distribution rights were sold to the funding agencies who were not obligated to distribute the films upon completion, as many were not—especially those critical of French imperialism. By producing films in English, Nollywood producers accessed the market. In contrast, early African filmmakers were highly concerned with maintaining the authenticity of their characters’ language and dialect. It was also a way of Africanizing the film language. Although it could be argued that Nollywood has lost sight of the pioneers of African cinema’s intention to give cinema back to the African people by choosing to make films in English, Nollywood is boldly showing that it does not intend to make films only for Africans, as its films are widely distributed and viewed all over Africa, the Caribbean, and simply put, the African world encompassing all continents. Regarding the use of language, it is also not an exaggeration to claim that Nollywood filmmakers are experts in navigating Nigeria’s complex ethnic formation in how they have displayed sensitivity toward

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accommodating marginalized groups. In this regard, Ike Oguine notes that Nollywood’s “most amazing contribution might be the films in Nigeria’s indigenous languages which do justice to the depth and dynamism of those languages and reach the millions of [the] citizens who do not understand English.”14 One of the most prominent films to come out of Nollywood is Osuofia in London (2003), directed by Kingsley Ogoro. This film affirms that Nollywood has been making strides in the international cinema market and that it has its own method of doing so. In a December 11, 2004, edition of All Africa News, Ogoro is quoted as saying, “When I was doing [Osuofia in London], I had it at the back of my mind that I was shooting a commercial movie. I didn’t see anything cinematically creative. It was only an idea that I saw was very easy to understand and cross-culturally thematic.”15 Osuofia in London is an easily understandable comedy that appeals to people across Africa and the world. The film narrates a simple story: Osuofia (played by the megastar of the Nigeria comedy, Nkem Owoh) receives an unexpected letter from the fiancée of his late brother in London, whom he had not seen or heard from in a long time. He leaves his village for London for the purpose of inheriting his brother’s wealth, including his fiancée, Samantha, a white woman. His adventure opens him up to a cultural shock, an unprecedented clash of Western culture with African, the likes of which he never thought existed nor had experienced. When the film was released, it promptly became the most controversial movie ever created in Nigeria—disparaged for wallowing into exotic cliché while at the same time glorified by another sector of the audience who admired it for instigating the greatest laughter among spectators since the beginning of Nollywood. The film might have portrayed Africans in the movie as simple and timid and Osuofia, the star of the film, as a lewd and lascivious creature blinded by the good looks of a Caucasian woman (a typical archetypical character reminiscent of Hollywood depictions of black people), but it could also be read as an anticolonialist narrative imbued with turnaround images—images that enable us to see beyond the surface meaning to rethink the larger consequences of colonial and neocolonial encounters— from the gamut of imperialism to cultural assimilation and noncompliance to which the film alludes. For example, the contrasting lifestyles between the village and London, Osuofia’s brash behavior with the woman with her legs apart, and his demanding of the types of food he ate in his village at McDonald’s are conveyed with popular comedic conventions and are more hilarious when observed not in its reductionist sense but as a revisionist history placed in the context of cultural imperialism. As one person’s meat could be another’s poison, I argue that depending on what a viewer is accustomed to seeing, it is possible to interpret the movie through various lenses of indoctrination. African and third-world cinemas have long been considered antithetical to “dominant” narratives—that is, Hollywood—because of how they construct

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Figure 7.2. Osuofia in London. Courtesy of Kingsley Ogoro.

alternative structures. On the question of representation, Teshome H. Gabriel discusses cinematic meaning as it pertains to informed versus uninformed viewers. He notes how third-world cinema unfortunately can function as a source of confusion for viewers outside the various cultures where the films are produced because of the manner in which cinematic conventions are appropriated and subverted in order to render the themes culturally and politically specific. As compared with the cross-cultural appeals of Nollywood, the cultural specificity of early African cinema made it difficult for international viewers to fathom. Gabriel states that “understanding Third World films involves not only such symbols, it also extends to the very subject matter of films and to the treatment of characters.”16 Gabriel explores how a film text can be unrecognizable or confusing to a Western audience due to cultural boundaries that reinforce prejudices or ideologies. Although this concept relates to understanding the vision of early African filmmakers, unlike Nollywood, the forefathers of African cinema mainly intended to speak to Africans in an attempt to prevent having Hollywood and other European or Western modes of thought shape African societies. Nollywood films, like Osuofia in London, which uses comedy and caustic satire to erase cultural boundaries and limitations, are specifically produced to appeal to global markets. This special appeal also derives from Nollywood’s ability to cultivate a powerful star system akin to Hollywood. The star of Osuofia in London

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is top-ranked Nigerian actor Nkem Owoh, who, like other superstar actors and actresses—such as Genevieve Nnaji, Ramsey Noah, Joke Silva, Omotola Jalade Ekeinde, Richard Mofe Damijo (RMD, as he is popularly called), and a host of others—guarantee box-office success. I stated earlier that Nollywood films lack the depth and formal innovation of their predecessors. When thinking of such films as Camp de Thiaroye (1988), for example, the viewer can recall stunning images of Sembene’s camera panning the desolate camp following the massacre and close-ups of the characters’ faces, enhancing the bond between the characters and the audience. In comparison, the images one draws from Osuofia in London are comedic scenes and have little to do with artistry, mastery of form, or camera pyrotechnics. The films created by Sembene and his contemporaries explore African traditions and attempt to break away from Western ideas, using film form and aesthetics to emphasize their stories. Nollywood filmmaking, on the other hand, is more concerned with creating a large volume of films in a short period of time with easily understandable, relatable stories and well-admired superstars—the types that African celluloid production was unable to produce. Although Nollywood films have narratively improved over the years, aesthetically, the majority of the films are still sloppy and replete with amateurish camera work, inaudible or oversimplified sound tracks, lighting problems, and exaggerated acting. It is this lack of creativity that marks the distinction between what critics are calling the old and new Nollywood, with new Nollywood exemplifying films that exhibit higher budgets, higher production values, and greater creativity than the average Nollywood video film. Films in this category include The CEO (Kunle Afolayan, 2016), The Wedding Party (Kemi Adetiba, 2016), ’76 (Izu Ojukwu, 2016), Isoken ( Jadesola Osiberu, 2017), 30 Days in Atlanta (Robert Peters, 2014) and Confusion na wa (Kenneth Gyang, 2013).

Riding the Digital Age Charles Igwe, a Nollywood film producer who is also one of its savviest industry players, goes into great detail as he gives his views on the Nigerian film industry and the innovative business attitude that has taken place in response to the new technological possibilities offered by the internet, digital video technology, and changing markets. Within this context, he notes, The realities of Nigerian economy have required that we should distill our own unique and peculiar method of producing motion pictures, and that we have done. Hollywood cannot shut us off any more because that is no longer possible. When it was only up to a few people to decide what to show in the U.S. and where to show it, that was okay, but now everybody is on the Internet, you can

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access anything from the Internet from anywhere in the world. So if I got a product that is valid for people anywhere in the world I can reach them from here, from my office.17

As Nigerian films are rapidly penetrating local screens within and outside of the African continent and within the exhibition outlets of the diasporic communities in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, they have also begun to conquer the internet. There are now numerous sites where anyone can gain access to, view, or buy Nigerian films. In addition, Nollywood films are available on Netflix, and following Netflix’s example, thousands of Nigerian films are available for rental in the United States through the internet. iROKOtv, the leading well-funded online platform for distributing African movies widely watched in the diaspora, has a vast array of Nollywood titles. This innovative platform is so well organized and has become such a household name that people have begun to wonder if this is not the “Netflix of Africa.” In Good Copy Bad Copy (2007), a Danish documentary about copyright and culture in the context of the internet directed by Andreas Johnsen and colleagues, Charles Igwe says that Nigeria is “the first country in the world to accept and develop digital video as an origination format for feature films. [It] is also the first in the world to make direct to video as a first line of release. The Americans are coming to that now.” He continues, “The DVD [format] has essentially saved the studios of Hollywood, but Nigeria went there first.”18 (I have not been able to substantiate the above claims.) However, some critics, including this writer, Biodun Jeyifo, and Tunde Kelani, argue that technology has been appropriated retrogressively in Nollywood and that this is responsible for a rapid turnover that places too much emphasis on quantity over quality. The irony is, as Biodun Jeyifo has observed, that “Nollywood films are often very poor in quality and yet these films are the rage of the continent, they constitute the repertoire of the most preferred and most popular national cinema tradition in Africa.”19 He does not, however, condemn all the films that have been produced in Nollywood. Arguing that there are exceptions to the norm, he cites Osuofia in London as being a good film. He also cites Modupe Temi (2008) and Amazing Grace (2006) by Jeta Amata and Campus Queen (2004), Savoroide (1999), and Agogo Eewo (2015) by Tunde Kelani.20 Of course, Jeyifo’s observation was made in 2008, and since then, the industry practitioners have made remarkable improvements in terms of organization, structure, and film aesthetics. Hence the term New Nollywood, though superficial on some levels, has been ascribed to the new and aesthetically improved creative tradition that has emerged. Irrespective of whether the majority of the films have been shoddy and sloppy, the praise that has been showered on these works is emblematic of the Nollywood contradiction. This is so because

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Nollywood packages its products as a medium of expression and entertainment for a growing audience numbering in the tens of thousands who perceive the films as more relevant to their lives and better than anything Hollywood, Bollywood, or any other “wood” has offered them. Criticism of such radical films— from the anticolonialist films of the pioneering years to video films produced since the 1980s—has ranged from praise to scorn. This stems from a challenge to the expectations the audience has of a film. Some critics have repudiated Nollywood films, dismissing them as rubbish. Some have refrained from calling the video films cinema. Yet the fact remains that millions of people are tuning into Nollywood, whose brand of products remain what they have called them—films; and so be it, indefatigably stamped and sanctioned, there is a unique kind of world cinema, the Nigerian cinema! From this perspective, Nollywood’s mode of production can be digested through its sweet and sour taste. Those who do not like it repudiate it for its straight-to-video mode of production and/or its low production values. But this system of production has made this Nigerian cultural production abundantly lucrative, arguably satisfying the appetite and yearnings for more images that make sense to the people of Africa. In the beginning, the audience did not care about technical quality, and the majority still do not care. And the fact that Nollywood films continue to consolidate their diasporic audiences is a clear indication that while Nollywood is offering an expanded definition of the cinematic art and film language, it has also developed ways of doing business that are contrary to the established “dominant” paradigms. Consider this blog from the “Arts and Entertainment Discussion Lounge” on the popular BBC program Have Your Say, where people responded to the debate about whether the African film industry can be improved: In the United Kingdom we have [television] stations that show Nollywood films and I must agree with the commentator on the aspect of quality. Bearing in mind the amount of money the industry is getting, by now we should surely be seeing improvements on the quality, particularly sound as well as editing some overemphasized scenes. I am not by any means comparing the movie industries. As a matter of fact I applaud the Nollywood movie industry for their efforts and I disagree with anyone who says the actors are NOT talented. That is absolutely untrue. Nollywood has some very talented African actors and actresses. Yes some may not come across as the most talented, but that’s everywhere. Even Hollywood has some untalented actors too.21

The blogger continues, “We must bear in mind that their style will obviously be different from Hollywood (but that doesn’t necessarily mean inferiority in terms of ability). If, like the writer states, the quality is improved (which is

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probably already being worked on), we will surely enjoy the movies and see the industry continuing to grow.”22 As this quote shows, the case against parading mediocrity as genial art as the video boom proliferates is an everyday debate across Nigeria and the continent. Some argue that the quality of Nollywood film compared to several years ago is improving, but the fact remains that filmmaking there is artisanal and has not quite measured up to the standards of African 16–35mm celluloid film production, which attained neither the mark of excellence accomplished by the Yoruba traveling theater (the Alarinjo) nor the zenith of the creative writers of Onitsha Market literature, as Jeyifo has pointed out.23 For example, Osuofia in London is a film that appropriates familiar themes of Nollywood productions, such as family cohesiveness, benevolence, and the spirit of communalism; women’s status in society and traditional culture; and old and new ways of life. It does so by contrasting African culture and ways of life with Western norms and traditions in a comedic atmosphere that spells contradiction for the viewer.

Conclusion Through the rapid production of films that appeal to an international market, Nollywood has changed the direction of African cinema from the social-injustice-driven plotlines of Africa’s early cinema to the more entertaining and highly marketable films that make up Nigerian cinema. Nollywood films might not have been able to develop a powerful creative film language, but their unique methodology has led to a certain transformation in the industry. Like the black British situation where the paucity of films created obstacles for film criticism until the situation changed, the proliferation of Nigerian films, steeped in a regenerative agenda, ushered in new patterns of film signification and ways of redefining the notion of spectatorship. As an educator, I was surprised when after screening the first part of Osuofia in London, my students liked what they saw and demanded to see the second part. Their open-mindedness lead them to appreciate a new world unfolding before them, one they could view through a new lens that enabled them to examine Nigerian cinema and cultural studies and, more important, treat Nigerian films “not as some strange side phenomenon, but as part of a genuine cinematic culture that plays by its own rules,” to paraphrase Cameron Bailey.24 I will conclude by stating that the inspirational pedestal on which this Nollywood agenda stands is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s declaration that out of oppression comes a new humanism—that the third world “must start over a new history of man,” and therefore, Africa “must not be content to define itself in relation to values which have preceded it.”25 This point affirms the many voices

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that have spoken out in favor of why this unique cinema (Nollywood) should be encouraged to keep growing and following the agenda it has carved out for itself, especially in defining its own aesthetic prerogatives, even if that means going against the traditional ways of conducting film business. Perhaps by going against the grain, a new global attitude toward art and freedom of expression and a new way of thinking about cinematic art, film, commerce, and consumption patterns will begin to take shape.

Notes 1. Tunde Kelani, “Spielberg and I: The Digital Revolution,” in Nollywood: The Video Phenom-

enon in Nigeria, ed. Pierre Barrot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 92.

2. For a detailed discussion of African images in film, see N. Frank Ukadike, “Western Images

of Africa: Genealogy of an Ideological Formulation,” in Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 35–58. 3. Quoted in Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 11. 4. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 84. 5. Andrea Dahlberg, “Film as a Catalyst for Social Change: Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret,” Bright Lights Film Journal, October  31, 2003, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/42/ borom.php. 6. Dahlberg. 7. I am referring to the political use of cinema when, in the 1960s and 1970s, cinema functioned as an integral arm of the struggle for independence in Latin America, Africa, and other marginalized communities. 8. Jason Njoku, “How This Internet Business Makes Millions by Bringing African Movies to the World,” Ripped Jeans Nation, August 24, 2016, https://rippedjeansnation.blogspot.com/ 2016/08/how-this-internet-business-makes.html. 9. Pierre Barrot, Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), xi. 10. Barrot, xi. 11. As quoted in Paul Berger, “In Search of ‘Hidden Tears’ and Other Products of Nollywood,” New York Times, February  20, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/ nyregion/thecity/22noll.html?_r=0. 12. For a fuller discussion of the Alarinjo theater tradition’s impact of Nigerian films, see Ukadike, Black African Cinema. 13. For example, a Yoruba film typically uses the local language, and the majority of Tunde Kelani’s films are shot in the Yoruba language. 14. Ike Oguine, “Nollywood Looks to the Future,” New Internationalist, October  2, 2004, http://newint.org/columns/viewfrom/2004/10/01/nollywood/. 15. Fred Iwenjora, “Nigeria: Home Video: My Plans for across the Niger—Ogoro,” Vanguard, December 11, 2004, allafrica.com/stories/200412130259.html?page=2. 16. Teshome H. Gabriel, “Other Places, Other Approaches,” in L’Afrique et le centenaire du cinéma, ed. Pan-African Federation of Film-Makers (Paris: Présence africaine, 1995), 238. 17. Conversation with the author. 18. Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke, dirs., Good Copy Bad Copy, Rosforth, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mntVh15W1uY.

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19. Biodun Jeyifo, “Will Nollywood Get Better? Did Hollywood and Bollywood Get Bet-

ter?” West Africa Review 12, http://www.africaknowledgeproject.org/index.php/war/article/ view/627. 20. Jeyifo. 21. See also Charlotte Attwood, “Is Nollywood Destroying Africa’s Film Industry?,” BBC, June  9, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/africahaveyoursay/2010/06/is-nollywood -destroying-africa.shtml. 22. See Attwood. 23. Jeyifo, “Will Nollywood Get Better?” 24. Cameron Bailey, in praise of Nollywood Lady, a film by Dorothee Wenner, distributed by Women Make Movies. 25. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 55.

8 • CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema Patric i a W h ite

A scene in Maryam Keshavarz’s lush and affecting debut feature, Circumstance (2011), the story of a forbidden romance between two Iranian schoolgirls, functions as a canny commentary on the film’s positioning within global cinema networks. At the urging of their visiting Iranian American friend Hossein, the young women, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), join him and Atafeh’s cousin Joey in a scheme to dub Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008) into Persian for the video black market.1 Explaining his desire to circulate this LGBT civil rights–themed film in Iran, Hossein asks the youth, “Don’t you want to change your circumstances?” In its invocation of media and/as social change, its depiction of politically progressive transnational youth culture, and its attention to local resignifications of globally circulating LGBT representations, the scene alludes to the film’s circumstances of production and reception. As a film by a young, film-school-trained, Iranian American woman director, Circumstance builds on the success of queer- and cultural identity–themed films within the U.S. independent film sector to address new subjects. At the same time, its dramatic conflicts and Iranian setting bring into play familiar audience assumptions about international art cinema and gender oppression under Islam. The conflation of lesbian desire with both freedom and the forbidden facilitates the film’s circulation across borders. This chapter teases out the ways that contemporary queer, diasporic, and film culture networks mark the film’s form and terms of address. Approaching the text through a reading of its discursive 159

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surround, I argue that this flexible address mobilizes the filmmaker’s feminist vision in new forms of cross-cultural encounter. As I document in Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015), transnational funding and training opportunities, as well as proliferating festival and distribution outlets over the past several decades, have enabled increasing numbers of women around the world to direct and circulate feature-length films that express their authorial vision. The book traces the discursive dimensions of these material circuits, including the positioning of the very concepts of sexuality, gender equity, and cultural authenticity as art-house commodities. In a discussion of the work of established Iranian diasporic artists Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, 2007) and Shirin Neshat (Women without Men, 2010), I argue that their turn to filmmaking deploys their artistry and cultural capital—in the sense of both their reputations and their identities as Iranianborn women—in a critique of the Western association of the Islamic Republic with the oppression of women. At the same time, it is in part this very association that creates a market for their work, enabling their transition from other media (graphic novel and fine art photography/installation) to filmmaking.2 Lacking the status of these established artists but poised at the crossing of domestic and international circuits, Keshavarz is both a beneficiary and an agent of changing circumstances for women filmmakers. Her film’s decidedly aestheticized yet very personal vision reaches out to cosmopolitan queer, diasporic/ Iranian, and U.S. independent film communities as well as global cinephile circuits. In film circles, Circumstance is identified as a Sundance film, the prestigious brand of U.S. independent film. Audiences, however, are as likely to receive it as a “foreign” film. Circumstance offers a key example of the contemporary worlding of U.S. independent women’s cinema. A Persian-language American indie shot in Lebanon, the film circulated in international festivals (including LGBT networks), U.S. and European art-house circuits, DVD and streaming outlets with their personalized algorithms, and the Iranian black market—with lesbian sexuality as its passport. Circumstance is thus both irreducibly specific and exemplary of today’s transnational cinema and its multidirectional flows. The film’s self-reflexive dubbing scene is a dense node in a shifting network of meanings around the production of cinematic sexuality and national belonging.

Circumstances of Production, Distribution, and Exhibition Circumstance is New York University film school graduate Keshavarz’s first fiction feature; her previous works include Rangh Eshgh (The Color of Love; 2004), a feature-length documentary about the politics of love in Iran, and a

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prize-winning queer-themed short, The Day I Died (2005), made in Argentina, where she studied. Keshavarz also has a production credit on her brother Hossein’s feature Dog Sweat (2010), shot underground in Iran. Circumstance, set in post-9/11 Iran against a background of political repression and paranoia (vaguely sketched in a manner commensurate with its limited budget), tells the story of Atafeh’s romance with her less-privileged classmate Shireen. Their sexual relationship is a catalyst for conflict within Atafeh’s bourgeois Tehran family. The film thematizes the state’s incursion on affective bonds—both romantic and familial—through the intrusive gaze and growing Islamicization of Atafeh’s elder brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai). A recovering addict, he is recruited by the Morality Police and becomes an agent of their correction within the household. When the young women’s behavior comes to the attention of the law, a marriage is brokered between Mehran and Shireen. With everyone under the same roof, the melodrama heats up. Circumstance’s final image depicts Atafeh in a taxi, on her way to an elsewhere the film leaves unrepresented. Produced by New York–based independent Karin Chien, the film is a successful product of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, which supports a film through to completion. Keshavarz’s script, written in English, was developed at the Screenwriters Lab; her work at the Directors Lab earned her the festival’s Adrienne Shelley Women Filmmakers Grant. Keshavarz teamed up with cinematographer Brian Rigney Hubbard and composer Gingger Shankar through the program. When completed, the film competed in the U.S. dramatic category at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the audience award for best feature. Circumstance was picked up at Sundance by Participant Media, an entertainment company that partners with distributors on “movies that matter,” designing social action campaigns for the features and documentaries on its roster.3 Released by Participant and Roadside Attractions in August 2011, Circumstance took in a modest half million at the U.S. box office. Reviews were favorable, and it competed for the prestigious John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards before its release on DVD and iTunes. In short, despite its atypicality in an independent field often criticized for its Hollywood orientation and preponderance of white male auteurs, the film navigated the itinerary from script to screen with notable success.

Lesbian Solicitations Participant’s marketing tagline for Circumstance, “Freedom Is a Human Right,” signals its key theme of sexuality only vaguely, soliciting audiences to experience themselves as free, rights-bearing subjects in relation to the foreign other. At the same time, the

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image on the film’s poster, of the central couple arranged for the camera’s gaze even as they are lost in their love for each other, depends on an art-house history of lesbianism as a signifier of sexual novelty and thus of a kind of foreignness in and of itself.4 Of course, queer-themed work is no longer considered daring in this way. It has had a sure footing in the specialty box office at least since 1992, when a critical mass of crossover indie features prompted B. Ruby Rich to organize a panel called “New Queer Cinema” at Sundance.5 Moreover, the four to five million Iranians living abroad—an estimated half million to one million in the United States—are a potential and media savvy market for Circumstance. But rather than targeting queer and/or Iranian-heritage niche audiences explicitly, the distributors aim broadly, conjuring a connotative field through the juxtaposition of female bodies and the discourse of human rights violations elsewhere. The motto “Freedom Is a Human Right” sent viewers of the film’s trailer to takepart.com, Participant’s digital division, where the list of five things one can “do now” to take part in change begins with “Buy the DVD.” The campaign identifies consumption of the film itself as an exercise of freedom. Consistent with the appeal of the website, Circumstance follows an itinerary through press accounts and art-house and DVD markets in which lesbianism and human rights, however complexly figured in the film itself, form an attractive package. Circumstance’s marketing grabs the attention of Western audiences by contrasting the audacity of female homoeroticism with patriarchal Islam. On one

Figure 8.1. Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, production still used on the poster of Cir-

cumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011).

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level, the girls’ passion is readable as (only) a metaphor of resistance against a backward, oppressive culture; Western enlightenment contrasts with Eastern despotism, secular acceptance with religious intolerance. If the film seems to counter then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s notorious claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran, it does not depict self-proclaimed queer communities or identities.6 Iran is the imagined setting for the youthful protagonists’ expression of the human spirit through impossible love. At the same time that lesbianism serves as a humanist sign in the film’s grassroots campaign, it is used as a visual come-on in the film’s poster and publicity stills. Arguably, the former provided a cover for the titillation of the latter in its reception. The film’s conventionally feminine leads and hazily defined setting solicit an orientalist gaze seemingly outside history. Circumstance garnered favorable and sometimes prurient press: “Outrageously sexy” in the Boston Globe, “Provocative and taboo-busting” in the Los Angeles Times, “Stirringly sensual” in Entertainment Weekly, and “Daring, hot and forbidden” in New York magazine. When the Hollywood Reporter says that Circumstance “Lifts the veil on Iran,” the phrase betrays ignorance of the many Iranian writers, artists, journalists, and bloggers both in and outside the country who have given a complex picture of current life and culture in the Islamic Republic—not to mention the country’s celebrated film culture. The trope invokes a marketable image of brave and beautiful girls ready to cast off the chador, one that the poster can be seen as affirming. In fact, the sensuous mise-en-scène seems to display the film’s recognition of lesbian sexuality’s historical function in the so-called foreign film. As Mandy Merck writes, “The lesbian romance is an ideal subject for a cinema which takes its sex seriously and in some sense sells on that basis. It provides a sufficient degree of difference from dominant heterosexual conventions to be seen as ‘realistic,’ ‘courageous,’ ‘questioning’ . . . but it does this by offering literally more of the same, more of the traditional cinematic use of the figure of the woman to signify sexual pleasure, sexual problems, sex itself.”7 The release title of Circumstance in France was En Secret (In Secret), in Denmark it was Forbudt Kaerlighed (Forbidden Love), and the red color scheme of the love scenes is correspondingly salacious. From Mädchen in Uniform (1931) through Persona (1966) to Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), lesbianism has remained a lure for art-house audiences.8 Not unlike the topoi of boarding schools and prisons that offer opportunities for same-sex contact in so many novels and films, the art house is an institutional setting for what I would like to call circumstantial lesbianism.9 It is a place of experimentation beyond identity or political claims. Is Circumstance offering more of the same or introducing a different difference through its setting? In an astute and impassioned analysis on Huffington Post of media misreadings of Circumstance at the time of its release, curator and scholar Roya Rastegar objects, “It would be tragic to characterize Circumstance

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as an ‘Iranian lesbian’ film, as many have done.”10 The film is not an Iranian but a diasporic production. Moreover, Rastegar argues, the homoeroticism it explores is ill served by Western categories. The proliferation of LGBT film festivals around the globe since the 1980s has been accompanied by debates about the imposition of Western, rights-based identity politics on divergent histories and practices of sexuality and representation.11 Indeed, while the film references a touch point of U.S. American LGBT identity politics in Milk, it is coy about whether “lesbian” is an appropriate label for its heroines. On the one hand, their refusal to name their love invokes alternative histories of female homoeroticism; on the other hand, their affair comes in the context of cosmopolitan youth culture, in which they experiment with drugs, petty crime, and sex with men. Asserting both that the film is not Middle Eastern and that “it is highly problematic to transpose [Western] categories onto the Middle East,” Rastegar gives voice to the contradictions that structure both the text and its contexts as it travels. The misrecognitions and slippages through which lesbianism stands for “something else” arise within the middlebrow channels in which independent and foreign-language films circulate.12 But they are also a product of the film’s address to multiple constituencies, including queer Iranian diasporic viewers like Rastegar, who bring different knowledge and experience to the film. To arrive at that sweet spot, we need to look at the intersection of several different film histories.

Sundance’s Lesbian Lineup Among Circumstance’s constituencies is a now-acknowledged market niche of queer women eager to be solicited by diverse media content. Removed in setting from the U.S. queer community, as a product of U.S. independent film culture via Sundance, Circumstance consciously engages idioms of contemporary lesbian representation and attendant forms of address to lesbian audiences (among, and overlapping with, others). Sundance—and the worldwide diffusion of the Showtime drama The L Word (2002–2009), which drew on Sundance-tested talent—has had a role in cultivating this audience since the early 1990s. Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner’s modest black-and-white feature debut Go Fish (1994), the first lesbian film of the new queer cinema, premiered at Sundance. The film was developed as a feature by Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin, fresh from their collaboration on Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and the success of Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991; Vachon’s debut as a producer)—both part of the origin story of new queer cinema. Go Fish also has a place in the Sundance mythology as the first film in history to be sold during the festival, and it went on to do strong business given its extremely low budget. On the level of representation, Go Fish linked the 1990s phenomenon of “lesbian chic” with the self-representation of

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a dyke community defined by feminist politics and racial and class diversity. When the makers were tapped to join the team of what remains the most widely circulating text of lesbian chic by, for, and about lesbians, Showtime’s The L Word (2002–2009), Troche and Turner brought their sensibility with them. Initially, the breakthrough on premium television corresponded with a downswing in lesbians making theatrical features (evidence of an ongoing struggle for the sustainability of women filmmakers’ careers). This changed with the breakout of Lisa Cholodenko’s long-in-the-making The Kids Are All Right (2010), which premiered at Sundance, launching a successful run right up to a historic Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The year after the debut of The Kids Are All Right, Circumstance competed in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic section against fellow New York University grad Dee Rees’s African American lesbian teen drama Pariah (2011).13 The next year, Aurora Guerrero’s Mosquita y Mari (2012), about the intense and surprising friendship of two young Chicanas, premiered at the festival. Already in the pipeline when Cholodenko’s film premiered, this lesbian of color miniboom cannot be credited to that film’s success. Indeed, all three films departed decisively from Cholodenko’s upper-middle-class white American homonormativity and movie-star imprimatur.14 In subject matter and perspective, the three debut features represent the influence of the priorities of the Sundance Institute on the festival’s programming.15 Pariah was developed in the Feature Film Program (FFP) alongside Circumstance, and Guerrero was a participant in the Native/Indigenous Lab (and later named an FFP Fellow). The Sundance Institute’s lab experiences produce tight networks among the participants and forge important contacts within the independent film world. They also begin to stamp the films with certain similarities. “Sundance films” are often recognized through style and production values—for example, the expressive color cinematography of Circumstance and Pariah by Hubbard and Bradford Young, respectively. While all three films undeniably represent their individual writer-directors’ visions, they share humanist messages and schoolgirl coming-of-age plots with strong autobiographical strains. As feature films by and about queer women of color, they solicit a diverse contemporary lesbian audience. They also define a distinct moment of convergence of auteurism and identity politics at Sundance.

Circumstance as “Foreign” Film Both artistically and institutionally, Circumstance is part of a new era of U.S. independent film that is more inclusive of the stories of LGBT people of color. But unlike Pariah and Mosquita y Mari, Circumstance’s filming, setting, subtitles, and style abstract it from that context and link it to the Sundance Institute’s

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increasing bid for a place in world cinema circuits. The addition of juried prizes in dramatic and documentary world cinema competitions in 2005 expanded the festival’s identity beyond its status as the premiere U.S. venue for independent film. Circumstance is an easy fit in the ecosystem of the international festival circuit, which welcomes films from promising auteurs and newly christened waves that challenge traditional forms of national cinemas. Often, these films are supported by European cultural funds. Extending the award criteria to a U.S. film, Circumstance was supported by two of the most important of these, Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund and France’s Fonds Sud Cinéma. Participant acquired Circumstance with an eye toward “expanding our international outreach with foreign language storytelling.” In his book Indie, Michael Z. Newman notes that by the 1980s, “American independents had come to replace foreign imports as the arthouses’ bread and butter.”16 As a diasporic film set in Iran, Circumstance channels both histories and navigates new transnational flows. In the new millennium, American independents depend on foreign financing and compete in international festival networks and struggle to maintain a theatrical presence amid new delivery systems. The film’s producer, Karin Chien, attempts to navigate the terms of the film’s trans/national identity in an open letter to the Producers Guild of America, contesting a rule that restricts awards criteria to English-language productions. (Conversely, the Oscars exclude U.S. productions from the foreign language film category.) “It’s possible this rule is a holdover, but from when? It was over a decade ago when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon broke the $100 million box office mark for foreign language films,” Chien says. “Does the language of a movie mean more to the PGA than the nationality of the producers, or the movie’s primary audience?” English-language hegemony, she implies, is an artifact of Hollywood hubris unsuited to the diversity of independent production.17 She also specifies the film’s U.S. provenance and address in ways that are not necessarily apparent to viewers of the film, who often understand it to be Iranian. Subtitles insert the film into the distinct network of value and recognition of international art cinema. The audience member must combine what Newman defines as “indie viewing strategies,” focusing on character and form, with foreign-language-film literacy. The common idiom of subtitles allows monolingual viewers to see the settings and origins of foreign-language films as, in a sense, interchangeable. Subtitled and set and shot in the Middle East, Circumstance is primed for misreading as “foreign.” National and ethnic identities can also be perceived as interchangeable through the construction of the Muslim woman as figure of oppression,18 for Circumstance does not resemble actual Iranian films. Obviously, an Iranian film with homoerotic subject matter would not pass the censors. But more specifically, the film’s display of the female body departs from the very conditions of representability of

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gender relations that obtain in Iranian cinema (and to different degrees, in other regional media). Women must cover their heads at all times in Iranian film, even in domestic settings in which it strains verisimilitude; this is because an actress on-screen is appearing in public in front of men. Arguably, the film’s transgression of Islamic codes of modesty solicits an outside, orientalist gaze, aligning it with numerous international coproductions about North African and Middle Eastern women that have been criticized for framing national stories in ways that court Western audiences.19 As a diasporic filmmaker, however, Keshavarz is well aware of these codes, and as we shall see, her strategy is to jam them.

Circumstance as Accented Cinema For Rastegar, Circumstance is the “apotheosis of the diasporic imagination”; viewers who expect it to “contribute or conform to a canon of either queer cinema or Iranian cinema” are misrecognizing the director’s vision.20 Hamid Naficy’s Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking offers the most comprehensive critical approach to specifying such a vision. His landmark text locates common stylistic features, production modes, and political work across a transnational, multigenerational group of filmmakers living and working outside their ancestral countries. Naficy argues that accented filmmakers inflect dominant cinematic language with their histories and experiences in large part through markers of style.21 While the corpus his text addresses is wide ranging—from Jonas Mekas to Trinh T. Minh-ha—his own ethnic and scholarly background make his account of what he calls the interstitial production of Iranian accented cinema especially rich (he identifies a corpus of 307 films).22 His focus is on the cultural production of two waves of Iranian immigrants—those who migrated during the Western-backed regime of the Shah from the fifties through the seventies and those exiles who fled after the Iranian Revolution in 1979—and their different orientations toward the state and culture, in both home country and host nation.23 Born in 1975 in Brooklyn, Maryam Keshavarz is among a third generation of cultural producers—children and grandchildren of these immigrants and exiles—who are developing new themes, styles, and forms of collectivity appropriate to their experiences as U.S. citizens maturing as artists after 9/11. Keshavarz grew up spending summers with her large extended family in Iran. Her film’s story of gender, sexuality, and fraught familial dynamics against an uncertain political climate is drawn from this experience. Even though she flatly states in an interview with the venerable lesbian/ bisexual entertainment news website After Ellen, “The author is dead,” reception of Keshavarz’s work is inevitably marked by her biography.24 Like many women directors in world cinema, she is discursively positioned as a cultural

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ambassador to outsiders. Living in diaspora, she is also a translator, open to challenges from insiders.25 On the one hand, she challenges the symbolic function placed on women filmmakers from Iran and elsewhere that I detail in Women’s Cinema World Cinema—her modern female characters sing in public and appear in T-shirts and party clothes on-screen. On the other hand, her authenticity is doubted.26 Keshavarz’s background and her film’s portrayal of youth rebellion are recognizable to many Iranian Americans of her generation and to other children of immigrants that maintain family ties to their home countries.27 But setting her film in Iran means that the history of displacement and cultural hybridity built into that experience is only alluded to in the film itself, and general viewers are unlikely to discern it. Still, as Naficy argues, displacement and hybridity characterize the very form of accented cinema, defining the manner in which Circumstance is “not foreign”—set in, but not of, Iran. As a mark of this deterritorialization, the film’s dialogue is literally accented. Keshavarz wrote the script of Circumstance in English to be translated into Persian. The film’s cast hailed from all over the Iranian diaspora—Canada, the United States, and Europe—and were coached in the accent of contemporary Tehran for their roles. Naficy details recurrent “chronotopes of exile and displacement” in accented cinema that can readily be identified in Circumstance.28 Examples of such figures of time and space are expansive visions of land and sea—figures of the idealized homeland—contrasted with suffocating enclosed spaces and connected with the experience of the host country. A seaside family trip is the occasion of Atafeh and Shireen’s first lovemaking. The morning after, they strip to their underwear to swim in the sea, a sharp contrast with the previous day’s trip to the beach, when the men swam and the women remained covered. In scenes set in the family home in Tehran, in contrast, heavy drapes and furnishings and a lurking camera lend a sense of entrapment linked to the use throughout the film of surveillance footage. The film’s stylized color scheme accents its symbolic spaces with the warm reds of passion and the cool blues of repression. Music—for Naficy, a fundamental aural register of individual and collective identity—is thematically central to the film in Atafeh’s family’s shared love of Western classical and Persian music inflected with dissident hip-hop tracks. With its direct critique of state power, Circumstance (again the title is notably both versatile and vague) is shaped by the political ruptures and migrant realities that define the work of the earlier generations of Iranian diasporic makers that Naficy discusses in An Accented Cinema. But its emphasis on youth culture and the centrality of themes of gender and sexuality bring new figures of connection and rupture to accented cinema. Moreover, Circumstance and films like it are globalizing independent American cinema itself with this next-generation immigrant sensibility.

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The film’s use of actors speaking Persian as a second language and its shooting on location away from where its plot is located are projections of the aforementioned sensibility onto a cinematic Iran. In what follows, I will argue that the film embraces the simulacre as well in its representation of lesbian desire, relying on figures of fantasy and literal projection (as in the dubbing scene). In her groundbreaking book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath argues, “If ‘diaspora’ needs ‘queerness’ in order to rescue it from its genealogical implications, ‘queerness’ also needs ‘diaspora’ in order to make it more supple in relation to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization.”29 The film invokes different constructions and histories of female homoeroticism as well as debates within diasporic and transnational queer studies about global gay discourses. Keshavarz positions her text precisely within this rich exchange. The reading of the film that follows details how the frames of its reception mark the text itself.

Queer Projections Circumstance’s opening immediately raises questions of enunciation and address. Over the credits, a female voice whispers a question: “If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” Another female whisper responds, as if speaking for us: “Anywhere?” Answered in the affirmative, she declares, “Somewhere that you could sing, and I’d be your manager.” The film’s first images fade in, depicting the exotic dance of an unidentified female body in medium closeups. If the image track waves the veil of orientalist seduction, the soundtrack introduces this transgressive vision as the girls’ shared fantasy. The viewer is hailed by the film’s opening images and voice-over in the place of the best friend / female lover herself. This intimacy defuses the voyeurism of the seductive imagery without disavowing its erotic appeal. These first moments explicitly connect female sexuality to a particular imagination of the world, which cinema can facilitate. The couple desires to leave Iran, where women are forbidden from singing in public. The filmmaker herself is “manager” of the desire to be elsewhere. The “anywhere in the world” is realized on-screen; as the credits unfold, we finally see the face of the dancer, Atafeh, lip-synching to the Persian classic “Bordi Az Yadam” (“You Forgot Me”; sung by Leila Forouhar). A reverse shot puts this fantasy image into a dimensional space. In a cabaret setting, Shireen languorously smokes as she gazes at the performance: Cary Grant to Atafeh’s Marlene Dietrich. Evoking a “Western” sexual subculture and depicting an orientalist “object” with agency, the film’s first moments define its strategy. Cut to the girls at school—a kind of Mädchen in Islamic uniform scene, in which the disciplinary regime signified by roll call is disrupted by the friends

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passing a tiny paper crane down the line, a thread of color across the blue-gray uniforms. Sartorial politics continue to define both the girls’ experiences and the viewer’s, as Atafeh and Shireen meet up later in a sequence that mediates the extremes of the first two. The sequence begins with what appears to be surveillance camera footage, a monochrome image of the modestly dressed girls on the street, but soon bursts into color after the diegetic introduction of a Persian rap song. Cut to the track “Party” by Zedbazi are images of the friends brilliantly dressed in loose, contrasting red and blue headscarves that upend stereotypes of Iran’s black-clad women. They directly court the camera and the viewer’s gaze as they skip, blow bubbles, and lean out over the railing of a bridge. A signature swirling camera movement appears to suspend the couple over the cityscape, Beirut as Tehran a literal image of deterritorialization. As the sequence continues, Atafeh and Shireen arrive at an underground party, removing their hijabs to expose club clothes. Clothing, camera, and music embrace freedom of movement; diegetic space and time are defied by the images on the bridge, which appear to be a subjective reverie. The shift from objective to subjective in these sequences anchors the filmmaker’s own perspective in a simultaneous address to insider and outsider audiences, as these are variously defined along cultural/linguistic, subcultural/sexual, and generational axes. Such shifts also characterize three important dimensions of the film: the dubbing scenes comment explicitly on transnational media flows, a fantasy sequence draws on the aesthetics of lesbian chic, and surveillance footage implicates the film’s own point of view as “informing.” These shifts in enunciation allegorize the problems—and promise—of appealing to both intimates and strangers with the film’s multivalent images, sounds, and stories. Atafeh and Shireen meet up with Hossein and Joey after hours at a recording studio to dub Milk. The scene begins on a beat of silence before Joey’s voice

Figure 8.2. A sequence edited like a music video shows Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and

Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) in Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011) free in the city.

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comes in over an image of Sean Penn as Harvey Milk delivering an impassioned speech, the four friends framed in silhouette on the other side of the glass booth. Hossein yells, “Cut!” and instructs Joey to sound more “gay” in the next take (the word is not translated into Persian). The two girls giggle while Joey does the second take with an exaggerated lisp in the reverse shot. Ostensibly, the scene comments on the translation of U.S.-style gay politics onto the global scene—asking how elections, protests, and (by implication) assassinations signify in the era of Ahmadinejad. (Although scripted before, the film was shot during the Green Revolution protesting his claim to the presidency after the 2009 Iranian election.) But rather than embracing or condemning the importing of Western identity politics, the film asks instead to consider what “gay” sounds like. With what accent or inflection is it conveyed? How is it received? Finally, the scene suggests that the film’s Iranian protagonists, and behind them, its makers, do not inhabit identities that are completely “other”; instead, they retranslate Western identity politics with a full awareness of the performative dimension of sexual and cultural categories. The pirating scenario also comments on the consumption of Western pop culture more generally. Joey doubts Milk’s market appeal and suggests that they instead dub Sex and the City “for mainstream subversion” and throw Milk on the same DVD. The choice is a significant one: Sex and the City’s “mainstream subversion” is presumably associated with depictions of female sexuality, and the show’s mixed messages about female autonomy resonate in the film’s themes and visual aesthetic. But Sex and the City threatens subversion on the level of its gendered address. The heroines of Circumstance aspire to be sex-positive cosmopolitans like the stars of that HBO show; they literally speak for Sex and the City during a later dubbing scene that calls on them to synchronize moans

Figure 8.3. Dubbing Milk in Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011).

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of pleasure. These accents are disturbing to Joey, who yells “Cut!” out of turn, claiming, “Iranian ladies don’t sound like that.” Despite the dubbing and retakes, this sequence affirms the film’s own female authorship and address. The girls’ fantasies underscore this theme with their distinctive mise-en-scène. Echoing the opening dance sequence, a later set piece depicts their dream of fleeing to Dubai. The fantasy begins in a lipstick lesbian bar and ends with the pair decoratively writhing in the glass-walled suite of a beachside luxury hotel. The scene would seem purely exploitative if it didn’t resemble so closely the televisual aesthetic of female sexual empowerment popularized by Sex and the City and its franchise—the film Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick Kelly, 2010) is actually set in Dubai. More specifically, the girls fantasize in the lesbian language of the The L Word (the show was advertised as “same sex, different city”).30 Framing these scenes as the naive vision of the couple allows the film to disavow imposing a “global gayze” on non-Western sexualities while enjoyably mashing up cabaret and harem iconography.31 The shots that bracket the fantasy sequence are among the film’s most distinctive: Atafeh and Shireen flop down on a bed, facing opposite directions as the camera rotates overhead; the camera returns to this position and movement after the interlude. This innovative film language makes a spectacle of queer Muslim women’s spectatorship. In addition to the visible frames of the dubbing and fantasy sequences, the incorporation of unmarked surveillance footage adds another duality to the film’s enunciation. We do not learn the source of this footage until midway through the film, when we see Mehran wearing headphones, reviewing surveillance footage of the dubbing scene. This highly recursive image aims the film’s political critique at media censorship. Although the film depicts a much more overt human rights violation when Atafeh and Shireen are subjected to

Figure 8.4. Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) and Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) imagine someplace where they could be free.

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virginity tests by the Morality Police, its focus is on the private rather than the public sphere, as Mehran collects footage ostensibly to inform on his own family. Eventually, the distraught Atafeh’s explorations uncover the surveillance setup, which includes cameras in their bedrooms. Mehran has captured footage of his sister and his wife making love. Atafeh jealously views footage of her brother and girlfriend. The improbable device leads to dramatic revelations (the revenge-sex scene that follows Atafeh’s discovery trumps the film’s earlier manicured caresses) and to Atafeh’s decision to leave Iran. The minimalist aesthetics of much postrevolutionary Iranian filmmaking are widely seen as a strategy to evade censorship. Rather than showing too little, Circumstance, with its lush aesthetic and sex tapes, could be seen as showing too much—defusing the film’s political impact and reducing it to a story of Mehran’s insecurity. The privatization of Mehran’s motives may weaken the critique of the state’s intrusion on sexuality, but it brings us back to the concerns of the diasporic filmmaker, whose work is subject to great scrutiny lest it betray her community. Internal surveillance is not restricted to Circumstance’s use of grainy hidden-camera footage; it infects the film’s overall narration through camera placement and movement. Ostensibly making a film about Iran, Keshavarz may also be speaking of something closer to home. The sexual content of the surveillance footage allegorizes her own defiance of disciplinary definitions of Iranian femininity with a bold film about female sexuality. Rather than viewing the film’s lesbian content as another accent, a way of (over)selling a story of human rights, we have located it within histories of both independent cinema and diasporic cultural production. The film’s ending is inconclusive: Does Atafeh’s departure for Dubai signify her embrace of modernity? Of a lesbian identity?32 A track by feminist hip-hop artist Farinas energizes the otherwise somber shot of her in tears as the taxi drives away in semidarkness. The lyrics are not subtitled.33 Like its ending, Circumstance is marked by differentiated, even conflictual forms of address and contradictory affects. Rastegar excoriates the film’s tone-deaf reception: “Circumstance’s poetic possibilities are barely legible to audiences and critics who either praise the film for its daring exposé of illicit activities or fault the film for lacking authenticity.”34 Rastegar’s diagnosis, contrasting an orientalist mainstream reception with a defensive minoritarian one (on the part of both diasporic and queer audiences), is spot on. Yet the frames that Rastegar sees as imposed on Circumstance by reviewers—for example, that it “provide[s] an ‘insiders’ peek into lesbian life in underground Tehran”—are unavoidable. I suggest that these frames are the very conditions of visibility of the film—and thus of its poetic success. Widely circulating ideas about lesbian and Muslim difference are the horizons on which the film projects its own fantasies of emergence.

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Notes 1. I first presented this material at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies meeting in Bos-

ton in March 2012 on a panel organized by Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt. Thanks to them and to Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Kristen Fallica and Lucy Fischer at the University of Pittsburgh, and Anu Koivunen at the University of Stockholm for invitations that allowed me to develop the argument. Schoonover and Galt open their book Queer Cinema in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016) with a reading of this scene in Circumstance. 2. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting 21st Century Feminisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 88–103. 3. TakePart, now incorporated into Participant Media’s main website, was initially branded as Participant’s “social action network.” Participant was founded by social entrepreneur Jeff Skoll in 2004, with the motto “A story well told can change the world.” Participant designs social action campaigns for each of its films and television shows, which include high-profile issue-oriented documentaries like The Cove (2009) and more puzzling dramatic selections like The Help (2011). In addition to its role as a hub for followers of these films, TakePart included original journalism, socially responsible lifestyle product recommendations, and ways to take action: “Accompanying each article you read on TakePart, you’ll find a way to take meaningful and immediate action—sign a petition, donate, send support, take a pledge. Even better, each action is vetted by our intimidatingly knowledgeable Social Action team, so you know you’ll be lending your voice to a good cause.” “About Us,” Participant Media, n.d., http://www.takepart.com/about-us. 4. See, for example, Mandy Merck, “Lianna and the Lesbians of Art Cinema,” in Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brundson (London: BFI, 1986), 166–175. On the influence of European art cinema on the language of lesbian cinema, see also Patricia White, “A Lesbian Carol for Christmas,” Public Books, December  24, 2015, http://www.publicbooks.org/blog/a-lesbian -carol-for-christmas; and “A Handmaiden’s Tale,” Public Books, November  13, 2016, http:// www.publicbooks.org/blog/a-handmaidens-tale. 5. B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 6. “Ahmedinejad Speaks; Outrage and Controversy Follow,” CNN, September  24, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/24/us.iran/. The president’s spokesperson clarified that the claim “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country” meant that there were fewer there. “President Misquoted on Gays in Iran: Aide,” Reuters, October 10, 2007, http:// www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-gays-idUSBLA05294620071010. According to the law in Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death. 7. Mandy Merck, “Dessert Hearts,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar (New York: Routledge, 1993), 378. 8. Comparing Blue Is the Warmest Color with Stacy Passon’s Concussion, Eric Hynes pithily characterized the treatment of sex in the male-authored versus the female-authored lesbian film: “Show and tell.” Hynes, “Explorations in Identity and Pleasure Messages of ‘Concussion’ and ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color,’” New York Times, September 27, 2013, http://www.nytimes .com/ 2013/ 09/ 29/ movies/ messages -of -concussion -and -blue -is -the -warmest-color.html ?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 9. On these chronotopes, see Lee Wallace, Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (New York: Routledge, 2009). 10. Roya Rastegar, “Circumstance and Dangerous Elicitations of Truth,” Huff Post Culture, September  6, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roya-rastegar/circumstance-and

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-dangerou_b_947489.html. Rastegar and Keshavarz are collaborators for the multimedia installation “Between Sight and Desire: Imaging the Muslim Woman.” 11. Dennis Altman, “Global Gaze/Global Gays,” GLQ 3 (1997): 417–476. 12. The disavowal of the sexual allure of lesbian content and the claims to universality often go together, as memorably documented by Vito Russo, with a range of quotations including William Wyler (“The Children’s Hour is not about lesbianism, it’s about the power of lies to destroy people’s lives”) and Gordon Willis (“Windows is not about homosexuality, it’s about insanity”). Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 126. 13. See my essay “Pariah (2011): Coming Out in the Middle,” in Possible Films, ed. Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 133–143, which presents a similar case study of how a commercial view of identity politics determines cinematic forms and distribution pathways, channeling aesthetic and political visions into narrative filmmaking with a humanist frame. 14. See Jack Halberstam, “The Kids Aren’t Alright!,” Bully Bloggers (blog), July  15, 2010, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/the-kids-arent-alright/. 15. Roya Rastegar sees a shift in Sundance festival programming in “Evolving Narrative Structures Forge New Cine-Love at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival,” Camera Obscura 81 (Winter 2012): 148–157. The Sundance Film Festival is only one program of the nonprofit Sundance Institute. Research conducted by Stacy L. Smith, Katherine Pieper, and Marc Choueiti at USC’s Annenberg School reports that “for dramatic features, females accounted for 24.4% of all competition helmers [directors] and 13.9% of all non competition helmers” of films shown at the Sundance Film Festival from 2002 to 2013. Female participation was stronger in Sundance Institute programs such as the Feature Film and Documentary Program Labs, where women made up 42.6 percent of participants over the same period. Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles Women Filmmakers Initiative, “Exploring the Barriers and Opportunities for Independent Women Filmmakers Phase I and II,” press release, January  20, 2014, https://www.sundance.org/pdf/press-releases/Exploring-The-Barriers.pdf, 10. Further research showed that women’s projects coming out of the labs were just as likely to be completed and exhibited in prestigious venues as were men’s projects, underscoring the importance of such programs to the sustainability of women’s careers: “Early career support through a Lab can level the playing field for females and may help establish the interest level women have in a directing career.” Female Filmmakers Initiative Cofounded by Sundance Institute and Women in Film, Los Angeles, “Exploring the Careers of Female Directors: Phase III,” Sundance Institute, April 21, 2015, https://annenberg.usc.edu/sites/default/files/ MDSCI_2015Female_Filmmakers.pdf, 20. See the webpage “About Women at Sundance,” Sundance Institute, n.d., http://www.sundance.org/initiatives/womenatsundance. 16. Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 17. Chien opened with this acknowledgment: “Circumstance is a hard film to categorize: it’s a story of teenage love and personal freedom set in Iran, filmed in Beirut, edited in Chile, finished in France, and financed primarily by U.S. sources. And the film is in Farsi. We knew we were a long shot to be nominated, but we were still excited by the prospect.” Scott Macaulay, “An Open Letter to the Producers Guild of America from Producer Karin Chien,” Filmmaker, December  12, 2011, http://filmmakermagazine.com/36145-an-open-letter-to-the-producers -guild-of-america-from-producer-karin-chien/#.WTLEeRPyuXQ. The Guild’s response accidentally punned on the film’s title: “In short, circumstances have conspired to make the present difficulties surrounding the determination of award eligibility for foreign language

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films more than problematic.” Scott Macaulay, “The PGA Responses to Karin Chien’s Open Letter,” Filmmaker, December  15, 2011, http://filmmakermagazine.com/36330-the-pga -responds-to-karin-chiens-open-letter/#.WTLDxRPyuXQ. Interestingly, the rules of the foreign-language film category of the Oscars were changed in 2005 to allow nations to submit films in a minority-language film, hence Canada’s entry, Deepa Mehta’s Hindi-language film Water (2005). 18. Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Women, Islam and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Among the films that invoke the Muslim woman as a symbol of oppression, see, for example, The Stoning of Soraya M. (Cyrus Nowrasteh, 2008). 19. Randall Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 303–319. 20. Rastegar, “Circumstance and Dangerous Elicitations of Truth,” Huff Post Culture, September  6, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roya-rastegar/circumstance-and-dangerou_b _947489.html. 21. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 22. Naficy, 18. 23. Naficy, 75–87. 24. Sydney Baloue, “An Interview with Maryam Keshavarz,” After Ellen, June 9, 2001, http:// www.afterellen.com/movies/88937-an-interview-with-maryam-keshavarz. 25. See the discussion of Deepa Mehta in White, Women’s Cinema, 76–88. 26. See the discussion of Samira Makhmalbaf in White, 56–67; and Patricia White, “Global Flows of Women’s Cinema: Nadine Labaki,” in Media Authorship, ed. Cynthia Chris and David Gerstner (London: Routledge, 2013), 212–228. 27. Sundance 2014 featured not one but two debut feature films by young Iranian American women directors. Filmmaker Desiree Akhavan stars as a hapless Brooklyn college grad dumped by her girlfriend in Appropriate Behavior, and Ana Lily Amirpour delivers a stylized Persian-language vampire film in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In this context, Circumstance’s address to queer cosmopolitan, Iranian diasporic, and cinephile audiences no longer seems so hard to place or reconcile. 28. Naficy, Accented Cinema, chs. 5 and 6. Michele Aaron develops the concept of accented cinema in her fascinating examination of Angela Maccarone’s film Unveiled (2005), the story of a queer Iranian refugee in Germany who adopts a male identity. Aaron, “Passing through: Queer Lesbian Film and Fremde Haut,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 3 (2012): 323–339. 29. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 110. 30. Candace Moore, “Having It All Ways: The Tourist, the Traveler, and the Local in The L Word,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 3–22. 31. The phrase is Dennis Altman’s. Altman, “Global Gaze,” 417–476. 32. My reading of Circumstance is indebted to Gopinath’s reading of Deepa Mehta’s Indiaset lesbian-themed film Fire, especially her understanding of the multiple possibilities of the film’s ending. For astute discourse analyses of the reception of Fire, see Sujata Moorti, “Inflamed Passions: Fire, the Woman Question, and the Policing of Cultural Boundaries,” Genders 32 (2000), http://www.genders.org/g32/g32_moorti.html; and Jigna Desai, “Homo on the Range: Mobile and Global Sexualities,” Social Text 20, no. 4 (2002): 65–89. 33. As the DVD commentary notes, the director and composer Gingger Shankar translated the lyrics and decided the structure of feeling of the song would convey

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something to non-Persian speaking viewers, while these different registers would be available to others—especially the young, feminist, Persian-speaking music fan. 34. Rastegar addresses the following critics’ demands of the film: Make an explicit critique of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Testify to the oppression of women and human rights abuses towards gays and lesbians. Provide an “insiders” peek into lesbian life in underground Tehran. Contribute or conform to a canon of either queer cinema or Iranian cinema.

9 • HERMANO AND LA HORA CERO Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema Luisel a A lva r ay

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

—Mahatma Gandhi

The noblest cultural manifestation of hunger is violence.

—Glauber Rocha

Exploring violence in the lives of young people in urban peripheries is a recurring theme in contemporary Latin American films. Violence has been a structural component in a number of features about youth, which have become a form of denunciation of a social malaise, or a form of criticism of the social causes for the misery that many people endure. Probably the most widely known contemporary example is Cidade de  Deus (City of God; Fernando Meirelles, 2002). But the 1990s and 2000s saw an unprecedented number of films about young people and violence—films such as Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes; Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro, 1997); La vendedora de rosas (The Rose Seller; Víctor Gaviria, 1998); Central do Brasil (Central Station; Walter Salles, 1998); Rodrigo D (Víctor Gaviria, 2000); Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000); Cronicamente Inviável (Chronically Unfeasible; Sergio Bianchi, 2000); Machuca (Andrés Wood, 2004); Los herederos (The Inheritors; Eugenio Polgovsky, 2008); Pelo Malo (Bad Hair; Mariana Rondón, 2013); Heli (Amat Escalante, 2013); and La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream; Diego Queimada-Diez, 2013), to name a 181

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few.1 Youth, violence, marginalization, exploitation, survival, and uncertainty are some of the words that resonate throughout. The socioeconomic disadvantage of these films’ characters and its consequences is a recognizable story in many cultures, and it is common rhetoric in films all over the world. João Luiz Vieira has fittingly talked of films about urban street kids as a transnational genre, describing, for instance, how City of God successfully impacted audiences from Rio to Manila.2 Joanne Hershfield also identifies a circulation of “transglobal discourses about youth and youth culture producing what some call a hybrid identity that is made available to an audience not defined by historical, geographic, national or cultural boundaries.”3 How such an identity is constructed, nonetheless, is historically specific and relates to concrete local discourses about youth culture. It positions and gives particular meaning to the experiences of young people within a national context. Audiences in a particular community will interpret the cinematic stories that equate youth and violence vis-à-vis current debates about these issues in their public spheres. Laura Podalsky contends that films that deal with youth-related topics are positioned within a “larger discursive network” in their societies.4 But because the consumption of transnational films about youth culture has increased through theatrical and the ever-more-common online releases, global discourses about youth are intertwined with the local and invariably become one of the factors that contribute to articulate nation-specific ideas. In other words, a global lens helps define the local discourse and vice versa. It would be hard to argue that there is any significant proportion of people in the world that have not watched, or at least know about, films about violence and youth, such as Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), which was screened in forty-four countries, or City of God, which was screened in forty-five countries.5 Thus local discourses on and imagery about youth and violence nowadays have these films as inevitable references. The possible articulations between the flows of the global and the local that were foreshadowed by scholarly voices since the 1990s—Arjun Appadurai and Daniel Miller in anthropology, David Morley and Douglas Kellner from a cultural studies perspective, just to name a few—are now a reality, and the flows seem more interdependent than ever imagined.6 In addition, such interaction not only happens at the content level but also has noticeable effects in regards to film language. Contemporary transnational youth films tend to include a mix of recognizable cinematic devices and genres that range from realism to melodrama, from documentary-like images to fast-paced editing and stylized visuals. Regarding the depiction of violence, Hollywood has, indeed, been a prolific producer. It has been the target of multiple criticisms coming from both the political left and right, as it has sometimes been perceived as the promoter

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of violent acts in society. Film scholars have more readily tried to explain representations of violence within different and more complex histories and contexts. In classical Hollywood, violent narratives compel viewers to have visceral responses. Therefore, the story oscillates between advancing the narrative and creating audiovisual spectacles.7 But beyond the structuring of violence as spectacle, as is the typical case of the crime genre in Hollywood, in Latin America, these films have a referential quality that strongly connects representation with reality, and they are usually read as a cultural exegesis of the situations they depict. Rather than promoters, they are signs of social deprivation and inequalities that articulate larger social discourses on violence and marginalized youth. Therefore, the cinematic aesthetics of violence is inextricably linked in this context to the ethics of social institutions and actors involved in the stories depicted. Supporting this view, Geoffrey Kantaris states that “in mass-cultural globally marketed forms, the violence of social exclusion is almost always rendered monstrous or else eroticized/fetishized. . . . The violence registered in Latin American urban cinema is somehow more symptomatic.”8 Latin American films often generate a representational space that includes urban dwellers and places of social exclusion exceeding systemic discipline and control. These films make visible otherwise overlooked subjectivities that are typically reduced to violent traits in mainstream media. In Venezuela, a country where 50  percent of the population is under the age of twenty-six, youth culture is not peripheral in the landscape of media representations. But it is a fact that much of the young population comes from the financially deprived margins. Youth has therefore often been equated with socioeconomic disadvantage and the criminal activity that may derive from such a condition. Hermano (Brother; Marcel Rasquin, 2010) and La hora cero (The Zero Hour; Diego Velasco, 2010) provide reflections on these issues. The two films happen to be among the most profitable ever in the country, which adds to their unparalleled international trajectories. Considering the ongoing debate about the aesthetics of poverty and violence, there are some questions that seem pertinent. What functions might the transgressive subjectivities of the main characters play in Venezuelan society at large? Could these films with their bold aesthetics be part of a renewed engagement with reality? How can we interpret their function in a politically polarized society, as a Hollywood company bought the rights to remake one of them? How have these cinematic discourses been inserted into globalized circuits, and how are they contributing to the global discourse of youth in cinema? By engaging narratively and extratextually with disenfranchised communities, and through stylistic experimentation, Hermano and La hora cero became critical “events” in the Venezuelan cultural context while, at the same time, capturing the attention of international distributors and audiences.

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Cinematic Violence: Spectacle or Critique? Talking about cinema, today the representation of violence(s) in Latin America is a phenomenon enjoying excellent health. —Luis Delgado9 When talking about the aesthetics of the films Hermano and La hora cero, some U.S. critics refer to the codes of crime-action films coming from Hollywood.10 There are, however, distinctions in the way these films may be inscribed into the U.S. and the Latin American cultural contexts. Even though cinematic violence has served different functions in U.S. cinema, it seems accurate to say that the entertainment value has prevailed—historically, violence has been part of a strategy to lure audiences to the screens. Authors Marsha Kinder and Stephen Teo contend that violence is structured in U.S. cinema like an “attraction,” as defined by Tom Gunning for early films.11 In this sense, Kinder describes the narrative workings of violence in three Hollywood films, stating that there is “a narrative orchestration of violence in which action sequences function like performative ‘numbers,’ interrupting the linear drive of the plot with their sensational audio and visual spectacle yet simultaneously serving as dramatic climaxes that advance the story towards closure.”12 Therefore, the narrative of violence, Kinder suggests, contains a rhythmic series of events to unravel emotional impact and render some humor in its excess. In Latin America, however, the structuring of violence on the screen has traditionally been connected to a politics of denunciation, particularly after the political manifestos of the 1960s.13 In 1965, Glauber Rocha contended that “Cinema Novo shows that the normal behavior of the starving is violence; and the violence of the starving is not primitive. . . . From Cinema Novo it should be learned that an esthetic of violence, before being primitive, is revolutionary. It is the initial moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the colonized.”14 Rocha declared that to film the truth was the ultimate goal of the filmmaker. In this way, violence could be read as a metaphor for resistance—as Randal Johnson contends, to achieve the higher goal of social and political liberation.15 Hence filmic violence served as a means to criticize and denounce the faulty promises of the state and the real conditions of the disenfranchised. Although Rocha was talking from a specific historical conjuncture, his call continued to resonate with different intensities throughout Latin America. The violence depicted in recent films, for instance, is mostly related to social inequalities and the inefficacies of governments to adequately respond to them—yet exempt from the overt political call theoretically stated in the past.16 Kantaris analyzes films made in the 1990s that belong to the tradition of cinematic social realism, such as Amores perros, La vendedora de rosas, and Pizza, birra, faso. These films, he

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maintains, continue to expose social exclusion and systemic failures as a critique of dominant national images.17 In tandem with this idea, Luis Delgado affirms that as the process of globalization continues, Latin American cinema is “in tune” with people’s struggles, revisiting poverty, discrimination, and injustices.18 Certainly, by focusing on the marginalized other, these films open spaces to convey ways of life and develop forms of identity with which disempowered urban dwellers could relate. Expanding the idea to the transnational context, Vieira sustains that symptoms of social disruption and injustice, when shown through film, “lend authenticity to the representation of social ills and other forms of violence in contemporary international cinema.”19 Specifically regarding Venezuelan cinema, films with social outcasts prevailing in the story are not uncommon in national film production. Alvaro M. Navarro asserts that more than half of all films produced in the 1990s showed some form of violent acts, murders, and corrupted individuals and institutions.20 Indeed, numerous films in the list of the most popular productions in Venezuela are films about young marginal subjects and crime and delinquency (see fig. 9.1).21 But the majority of them were made in the 1980s, after a successful start by director Clemente de la Cerda in the 1970s.22 In the 2000s, a new public interest in the peripheral worlds of poverty and delinquency was evidenced with the box-office success of Eduardo Jakubowicz’s

Figure 9.1. Thirty most-watched Venezuelan films and number of spectators since the

films premiered (1976–2011). Courtesy of the Centro Nacional Autónomo de Cinematografía de Venezuela (CNAC).

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Secuestro Express (2005), followed later on by Hermano and La hora cero. The three films, apart from their local financial success, traveled the international circuit through festivals and foreign distributors. In contemporary Venezuela, a cinematic aesthetics of violence is unavoidably connected to a culture of violence equated by mainstream media with individuals living in the slums. This was attested to in a study conducted by Leonardo Tablante about the representation of poverty in the media. Among his conclusions, Tablante states, “The three [main] newspapers understand crime as the principal symptom of violence connected to poverty. Although it is true that violence not only happens on the social spaces of the poor, these are the principal places covered in news of current events and crime reports.”23 He sustains that poor individuals are stigmatized by the media and that the topic of poverty is treated superficially—it tends to be naturalized and is seldom connected to its structural causes.24 Beyond the media’s representation of poverty and violence, it is a verifiable fact, however, that the number of homicides in the country has increased exponentially.25 The growth of the figures is so alarming that in 2003, judicial authorities arbitrarily stopped publishing homicide statistics.26 This situation might explain the domestic popularity of the films Hermano and la hora cero. In this context, film has taken the place of (d)enunciator of unresolved social problems (played down by the government) and of peripheral stories that have not been told—many times relying both on events that have actually occurred and on nonactors representing characters whose worlds resemble those of their own lives. It is probably this approximation to reality that has made films about crime and violence among the most popular in Venezuela. The revelation of extreme subjectivities could be a way in which hegemonic society is peeking into impenetrable shantytowns where the law of the street rules over any enforcement of institutional order. The films might just provide a psychological explication and moral understanding of faceless statistical figures about homicides and other criminal activity. Hermano and La hora cero were the most profitable Venezuelan films in 2010 and historically among the films most watched through theatrical exhibition. However, the impact of Hermano was felt locally even before the film was released. Executive producer Enrique Aular and production company A&B were the architects of Hermano’s social project. They designed a series of workshops to teach filmmaking during the preproduction stage. People in the locations where the film was to be shot learned to write scripts, produce, direct, and act. Ultimately, they made their own documentaries. Many of those in the workshops later worked as cast or crewmembers during the shooting of Hermano; consequently, some of them found in filmmaking a career to follow.27 In addition, after Hermano was completed, the producers created an alliance with United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Venezuela and determined that a percentage of the box-office proceeds would be used to expand the workshop into other

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shantytowns. As a supplementary activity, UNICEF correspondents showed the DVD of Hermano in many communities and used the film’s plot to spark discussions about people’s everyday struggles.28 In this way, more than a film, Hermano became a sociocultural event, helping the very people represented on-screen. Intratextually, the film elaborated on the subjectivities of marginalized young characters—ordinarily othered in hegemonic media representations—and extratextually, it gave some people the tools to find a career in filmmaking or the critical language to reflect on their own social realities.

Transgressive Subjectivities There are those of us that don’t belong to the species but as a mistake—the anomaly that confirms the precision and equilibrium of things. —From a poem by Claudia Masin29 One of the central aspects of these two films is the development of main characters who—both with their mere existence and with the choices they make—defy the sociocultural structures in which they are immersed. Hermano tells the story of two kids raised as brothers struggling to earn a chance to play professional soccer. Daniel (Fernando Moreno) and Julio (Eliú Armas) play in a dirt soccer field of a Caracas slum, where scouts usually come to recruit new players. However, Julio is also involved with the slum’s criminal mafia. Tragedy strikes when their mother is killed in a shoot-out and Julio desires vengeance. Daniel, who has witnessed the killing, intends to protect Julio by not revealing who the murderer is. Jonathan Dollimore explains how socially marginalized subjectivities may become symbolically central to the societies that produce and want to eradicate them. He differentiates between at least two forms of transgression: one that attempts to find a new sense of authentic self through digression and resistance while subverting normalized values and one that experiences self as a permanent play with difference—an inversion of binaries, a constant decentering of the subject, and thus an experience of liberation from any essential being. These two notions reflect the ongoing debate in the fields of cultural and gender studies between essentialism and antiessentialism. In both cases, however, the opposing nature of the transgressive other reaffirms the normalized identity in a “perverse dynamic [that] denotes certain instabilities and contradictions within dominant structures which exist by virtue of exactly what those structures simultaneously contain and exclude.”30 Nevertheless, even though these forms of transgression may produce the same dynamic they want to escape, they are certainly a starting point for an oppositional politics. They deconstruct and reveal the repressive limitations of normative subjectivities and shake the instituted structures of subordination

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and domination. The desires of both Daniel and Julio are explorations of individual forms of transgression that challenge systemic essentialism in different ways. Daniel embodies a force of good that wants to transcend his underprivileged environment through his hard work and passion for soccer. He desires not only his own well-being but also his brother’s, to the point that when he is offered a contract with the professional Caracas Fútbol Club, he says he will only accept the terms if the scouts reconsider his brother’s talent. Julio, contrarily, plays an unstable and uncertain self that wanders between his love for the sport and his manifest desire to be an active player in the criminal mafia of his barrio (shantytown). In a climactic scene, the bare-chested brothers play a soccer match where the stakes are higher than ever before. The setting is an abandoned, debris-filled space with ruined columns that may allude to a big sports arena or a Roman circus. The space in decay may, indeed, be considered an external manifestation of the fragmented lives of the two players. They seem like gladiators fighting for survival who (like gladiators of the past) have been socially marginalized and raised under harsh conditions. A rapid montage combined with a soft music that progressively accelerates is designed to bring out the emotional truth of the characters as they play their best game. Symbolically, they are playing their destiny, making a life decision that may either be a way out of poverty or will perpetuate the cycle of criminal life in the slum. Sports are thus at the ethical frontier of legality and social order.

Figure 9.2. Brothers Daniel (Fernando Moreno) and Julio (Eliú Armas) play a highstakes game in Hermano (Marcel Rasquin, 2010).

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Daniel’s essentialist quest for an authentic self, one led by his passion for soccer, is opposed to Julio’s thirst for vengeance. While the definition of fixed and naturalized identity has served ominous functions in world history, some scholars have asserted that identities defined as essential have also historically served important functions in actual ideological struggles.31 In this sense, the stable identity performed by Daniel, the embodiment of goodness in an unlikely environment, becomes a figure of dissent if gauged against social expectations constraining marginalized youth in Venezuelan society. With his individual strength, he tries to overcome the disadvantages of his underprivileged upbringing. He is the representation of the noble character audiences root for, which could be said to be customary within the genre, and who may or may not make it out of his deprivation. Daniel is Buscapé (Rocket) in City of God and Jamal in Slumdog Millionaire. Julio, on the other hand, represents a more nebulous notion of insubordination. His resistance shows the struggle between two unpromising systems that attempt to subjugate him—the state and the mafia—and his form of transgression resides in this ambivalence. In this sense, Diego Del Pozo asserts that violence in Latin America “is the only way [for marginalized subjects] of obtaining certain rights that [people from] other social strata take for granted.”32 Many times, youth violence is a reaction to social rejection and exclusion. Both Daniel and Julio are attempting to move beyond the conformist seclusion of marginalized urbanites contained in the peripheries of the city. In La hora cero, different questions arise. At the start, main character “Parca” (a slang term for “the Ripper”) reveals, through his voice-over narration, that he is a hit man and that this is to be the last day of his own life. Hence the film begins in medias res in a climactic and excessive scene, narrated by a character who is to die. In this way, we see a character challenging ethical standards from the start. Parca is carrying Ladydi, a pregnant woman with a bullet in her abdomen, down the narrow stairway of a Caracas slum. He calls out to his pal “Buitre” (Vulture) for help, to which Buitre responds by suggesting that they run from the scene. But when Parca insists, Buitre reluctantly agrees to help. Disregarding Ladydi’s vulnerable condition (she is pregnant and wounded), Buitre remarks, “Watch it, man, you’re getting blood on my new shoes.”33 Introduced in this way—where for Buitre, a human life has less value than a pair of shoes, and for Parca, a life is worth the money he is paid to eliminate it—the characters certainly may seem cruel and heartless to an average viewer and, accordingly, corroborate the connection between young men in the slums and criminal activity. These images reproduce the established notion of criminality and otherness represented in mainstream media. However, as the narrative progresses, the characters make choices that make us question our initial assumptions about them. A doctors’ strike in Caracas’s public hospitals serves as the background of the story. Parca and Buitre arrive

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at a shut-down hospital but force Dr. Cova to assist Ladydi. Because of the lack of medical resources, they decide to move to a private medical facility. Upon arriving, they shut the facility down and kidnap all inside. From then onward, the events evolve around a spectacle of media, police officers, politicians, and bystanders, all with their unique interests playing into the chaotic situation. Unlike Hermano, whose story is basically contained within the slum, the story of La hora cero happens in a more diverse space—a medical facility—and directly involves institutional and repressive state apparatuses. Questions of power, class, and representation are intertwined with the configuration of the characters’ subjectivities. Ultimately, the conflicted situation proves decentering to most characters. Parca utilizes the media to attempt to get medical attention for disadvantaged people who cannot pay for service in private clinics. Buitre betrays his partner in crime. Dr. Cova oscillates between keeping his medical oath and shooting the aggressors. A politician who allegedly came to control the situation has a particular interest in having Ladydi killed. A television reporter wants to get the scoop and exploit the critical circumstances to advance her career. Most important is Parca’s evolving subjectivity. As the narrative progresses, his character is made more complex. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the transgressive nature of carnival mentions the inversion of roles (“the world inside out”) as one of the strategies to undermine the official discourse.34 Inversion, as Dollimore states, is a way to destabilize the norm and bring attention to social limitations. In La hora cero, Parca’s initial demonic demeanor is progressively replaced by candid and heroic gestures. His actions are justified through a series of flashbacks—he is depicted as the product of an unruly system that does not support its abandoned children and closes opportunities for its youth. In the end, nothing is what it seemed to be. The tables are turned when the politician appears as the most corrupt person, and Parca ends up as a hero for the disenfranchised people. Parca’s decisions question the naturalized borders between the legal and the illegal, the accepted and the unaccepted, the norm and its other. His transformative, decentering self is a form of permanent transgression that deconstructs a broken-down social and political system and, in turn, challenges its stability. The trajectory of this character proposes a transformation that is more complex than “essential” characters like Daniel, Rocket, or Jamal. From being the antihero, he becomes the hero, yet he is destined to die. He is Jairo, from Los olvidados as much as Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1981) and Rodrigo D. He is “the mistake of the species,” the social anomaly that needs to be put away or annihilated. Even more relevant to this argumentation is Bakhtin’s notion of “grotesque realism” to refer to how the excessive physical body becomes a locus for the transcoding and displacement of meanings. The radically modified body becomes, thereby, the representation of a collective subversion. Bakhtin highlights the

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connections between a grotesque body, collective identity, and social context. He argues that the grotesque body is not presented “in a private, egotistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all people.”35 In this sense, the image of Parca in La hora cero is striking from the start. His almost fully tattooed body conveys a sense of bending the norm. He is a visual representation of otherness occupying the center of the screen— the excess displacing established codes of discipline. La hora cero offers a representational space that complicates the subjectivities of transgressive others, thus providing the viewer with a more sympathetic understanding of a social class that directly suffers the incompetence of a disjointed society with inefficient and corrupt institutions, including the executive power, the police force, and the media.

Representing the Poor: Reality as Excess Every work of art is realistic because it is a way of registering man’s presence on earth. —Roger Garaudy After all, what is the entire history of [Latin] America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real? —Alejo Carpentier In his prologue to The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier explores the seemingly fantastic quality of Latin American reality. He contends that such reality is so vast and rich that it may surpass the means to represent it. (“The marvelous truth of the matter devour[s] the painter.”)36 Reality cannot be contained within the paradigms of Eurocentric modernity because there is a sense of wonder that defies Western logic. This form of the real cannot be qualified as fictional, Carpentier argues. The fantastic—the marvelous—is part of actual existence. I go back to Carpentier’s work, since it seems a suitable framework to attempt to understand the quality of the real as represented in the films analyzed.37 The stories of both films may seem excessive, as they defy our conceptual parameters of the real and even the conventional tropes of realism. Yet in the divided Venezuelan political camp, audiences from both sides of the partisan spectrum claimed that both films represented the truth about the lives of disenfranchised youth as they know it.38 Director Diego Velasco, nonetheless, has said that when he showed La hora cero at several venues in Central America, audience members criticized the story of the film for its alleged exaggeration of reality.39 To understand how the sense of the real is being constructed in the two films, I will refer to the media representation of poverty on Venezuelan television,

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both through newscasts and fictional telenovelas (television soap operas), to then explore how these tropes may have found their way into the narratives of the films. Under President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan society was divided into at least two well-defined political camps, which continue to define the contentious political field to this day: people who support the government’s ideological project (the Bolivarian Revolution, as it was named) and those who oppose it.40 Such segmentation corresponds to a similar division represented through the national audiovisual media. In his comprehensive analysis of media representations of poverty, Tablante refers to the ways that television, through news segments and telenovelas, participates in shaping dissimilar images of shantytowns and the lives of its dwellers. News segments broadcast on state channels tend to be propagandistic of the government’s policies and show the poor in a positive light—as optimistic, outgoing, and proactive people. Contrarily, news segments on some private channels tend to be more critical—they show how the absence of effective governmental actions has kept poor people in their misery while privileging the voice of the reporters as mediators of the conflicts presented.41 Therefore, people typically watch news broadcasts on the networks that they feel best represent their views.42 In the fictional worlds of telenovelas, Carolina Acosta-Alzuru proves that some telenovelas, such as Cosita Rica (2003–2004, Venevision), became very popular because of the complex ways that the characters embodied and reacted to the socioeconomic realities lived by most Venezuelans. She affirms that Cosita Rica was part of a tradition of telenovelas de ruptura (transgressive telenovelas), of which the best example was Por estas calles (1992–1994, RCTV). This tradition runs parallel to that of the telenovela rosa (rosy telenovela), which tends to center on reductive characters and simplistic plots—generally featuring love stories among characters from different social strata.43 Through affect, the codes of transgressive melodramas such as Cosita Rica allowed Venezuelans to reflect on political and socioeconomic daily life. The dramatic excess, and not necessarily its realism, became cathartic to its viewers.44 Both the serious quality of realistic news and the playful and melodramatic quality of telenovelas are weaved into the narratives of the films under analysis. When watching Hermano and La hora cero, viewers may relate to them in several ways: first, through the realism with which the films depict marginalized peoples and places; second, through their melodramatic emotional impact; and third, through their bold cinematic styles. As Hershfield asserts, these three cinematic tropes are characteristic of what she terms the “global youth genre.”45 I will expand on each one of these tropes to attempt to understand the films’ sociocultural impact. Following a trend of many international films that deal with youth and violence, the producers of Hermano and La hora cero combined professional and nonprofessional actors to enhance the performative realism of their films. Such was the case of Los olvidados, Pixote, City of God, De la calle,

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Slumdog Millionaire, and Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair, 1988), for instance. Without any experience as an actor, hip-hop artist Rubén Zapata (also known as Zapata 666) was chosen to play Parca, La hora cero’s main protagonist. Julio, in Hermano, was embodied by nonactor Eliú Armas and was cast alongside experienced actor Fernando Moreno, who played Daniel. Both films were shot in real barrios, and the characters used urban slang. The realism achieved by these strategies was combined with the emotional impact of the plots. Intertwined in the stories are the themes of motherhood and family union. The figures of the single mother and the pregnant young woman are not central in the narratives but are symbolically primordial, nonetheless. In La hora cero, saving Ladydi’s unborn baby becomes the central motif of the story, which emotionally connects the main characters. In Hermano, Daniel was an abandoned baby found among trash by his nonbiological mother. As a teenager, Daniel persuades his friend, who is single, to keep her unborn baby. These particular aspects of the stories point to the theme of family union, or its tragic rupture, which builds the affective worlds of the films. While the soccer and gang themes already place Hermano within a normative perspective of gender—and refer us back to the male-centered crime and gangster genres—the iterative tension to keep community and family together is a reference to a common trope of the family melodrama, a genre typical of telenovelas usually centered on female characters and their perspectives. Targeting diverse gendered worlds may account, in this way, for the success of Hermano and La hora cero across generations and audiences.

Figure 9.3. La hora cero (Diego Velasco, 2010). Intertwined in the stories are the themes of motherhood and family union. Ladydi (Amanda Key) and Parca (Zapata 666).

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Finally, the dynamic visual styles of both films, clearly reinforcing climactic narratives, contributed to their appeal among national and international audiences. A few examples may illustrate this point. The first image of La hora cero seems to be of a starry sky slowly dissolving into daylight. With the light comes our realization that what seemed to be stars were the light bulbs of shacks in a shantytown. Such an establishing shot sets up the principle of oppositions and ambiguities on which the narration is based—oppositions that twist what seemed hopeful (the starry night) into what may be less than bright (life in a slum), or vice versa. The principle of opposites continues in the credit sequence, where images and audio coming from different media (newspapers, radio, and television) render the dialectical tensions between the medical institution and the state, serving as the backdrop of the story. The tensions are also suggested by the lyrics of the song framing the scene—while a conflicted society is presented, the lyrics describe the purported pleasure of living in Caracas. As a result, the credit sequence functions as shorthand to many of the conflicts within the story. But it is also a direct reference to the real, since many of the remediated images are of media coverage during an actual 1996 medical conflict. The preamble of the film creates a pact with the viewer that sets the excessive real and the fictional story in a continuum. Hermano, on the other hand, achieves a hybrid combination of genres through dynamic editing (most resourceful in the climactic game between the two brothers) and well-crafted cinematography. Balanced compositions contrast with the gritty content of the story and make it more palatable for mainstream audiences. The aesthetics of both films seem to reflect, to a certain extent, the background of some of its makers. While directors Marcel Rasquin and Diego Velasco had scholarly studies in film, Velasco and Hermano’s producer Enrique Aular had previous experience in advertising. The combination of their skills could explain the appealing, border-crossing nature of their dynamic visual styles. This was certainly the case with Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, whose background in advertising marked the style in City of God and became a focus of controversy thereafter, challenging the realism of political films from the past. Thus a global or transnational youth film genre implies a mix of tropes from different styles and genres negotiated uniquely and discretely in each film. There is, however, a real referent that in the case of Latin American films is necessarily connected to the social discourse the films are articulating—as “unaccustomed insight” or as an “unexpected alteration of reality,” in Carpentier’s words.46 Therefore, even beyond the films’ hybrid natures, the real appears as the excess of representation.

Empowering Otherness Film director Diego Velasco has expressed his admiration for Hollywood action films, in terms of their resourcefulness and effects, and has made explicit

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how La hora cero was an attempt to compete with them. However, he has also pointed to the action sequences he created as a strategy to make viewers sympathetic to the film’s characters.47 The goal of his film, he affirms, was to invite people to reflect on urban violence: “It was important for me to show that violent actions have consequences in order to invite those who experience such realities to reflect upon their own condition, and to show that there is always the possibility of redemption and change.”48 Following this line of thought, representing violence may continue to be in some instances a form of reflection on the power of the state over the individual as much as the reaction of the individual vis-à-vis the state’s power. What stood out abroad, nonetheless, was its entertainment value. La hora cero was eventually broadcast by both HBO and HBO Latin America; Maya Entertainment sold DVDs of the film in the United States; and through a sales representative, the film was sold to Indonesia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Germany, among other countries.49 Finally, the rights for a Hollywood remake were sold in 2011.50 Film director Marcel Rasquin, on the other hand, tells the story of screening Hermano in Mumbai, India, to a crowd of hundreds of kids. After the screening, a group of them approached him and asked, “Did you make this film about us?”51 Hermano is a story that could happen anywhere and mirrors the lives of kids living in slums, barrios, favelas, or villas miseria anywhere in Latin America and beyond.52 It seems that the way of approaching a gritty and unconscionable reality exceeds Latin America and echoes realities well beyond its borders. Yet both the story and the film’s entertainment value played a part when it was selected for distribution abroad. Hermano was picked up for theatrical and DVD release in the United States by alternative distributor Music Box Films and by the German company M-Appeal for distribution in Europe.53 Both films, one way or another, used codes and stories that transcended the local to gain cross-cultural spectators. The cinematic worlds in Hermano and La hora cero take the place of the previously unrepresented—of subjectivities that are seldom investigated through mainstream media. Then there is the emotionality linked to melodrama. Like telenovelas, these films suture their audiences through their affective landscapes. Melodrama in these films serves to connect audiences with narrative and stylistic codes they know, since it is a genre commonly watched by Latin American audiences and, surely, by other audiences around the world.54 Additionally, there is full use of the cinematic language, in terms of narrative turns and visual rhythms, to make these films unique references in Venezuelan film history and to cement their success abroad. Finally, there are timid optimistic outcomes in the stories. This is where these films as cinematic critiques turn into hopeful discourses. Salvation or condemnation of the main characters solidifies the political commentary of the films in

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this genre. In Hermano, a brother is sacrificed in the service of the other brother’s salvation. In La hora cero, Parca’s transgressions are ultimately his spiritual redemption and the salvation of a symbolic new couple. In the end, Parca dies, but Ladydi and Dr. Cova hop onto a helicopter on the roof of the hospital that drops them in the slum where they live. A new symbolic couple literally and figuratively falls from the sky and is welcomed by a group of children, thus constituting a young family unit. Those who were the purest are saved in the end. They suggest a new beginning in the land of the hungry and the poor.

Notes 1. Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950) marked the genealogy of the genre that has been a con-

stant parameter to determine the state of Latin American societies. For a list of recent films, see Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Carolina Rocha, introduction to Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–29. 2. João Luiz Vieira, “The Transnational Other: Street Kids in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 226–243. 3. Joanne Hershfield, “Youth and Urban Space in De la Calle and Amar te Duele,” Transnational Cinemas 3, no. 2 (2012): 142. 4. Laura Podalsky, “The Politics of Dissaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American Cinema,” in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, ed. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 109. 5. See “Release Info,” IMDB.com, accessed May  28, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0317248/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_dt_dt. 6. See some of the works from the 1990s about globalization, including Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 1994); David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995); and Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1995). 7. J. David Slocum, introduction to Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–36. 8. Geoffrey Kantaris, “The Young and the Damned: Street Visions in Latin American Cinema,” in Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Stephen Hart and Richard Young (London: Arnold, 2003), 178–179. 9. Luis Delgado Arria, “Violencias, políticas de identidad y género en Macu, la mujer del policía, La vendedora de rosas y Cidade de Deus,” Objeto Visual 10 (2004): 31, my translation. 10. See, for example, John Hazelton, “The Zero Hour,” Screendaily, July 25, 2011, http://www .screendaily.com/reviews/latest-reviews/-the-zero-hour/5030235.article; Robert Koehler, “The Zero Hour,” Variety, August  22, 2011, http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117945863 ?refcatid=31; and Jeff Sneider, “RCR Wins Right to Remake Zero Hour,” Variety, September 27, 2011, http://variety.com/2011/film/news/rcr-wins-right-to-remake-zero-hour-1118043505/.

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11. Marsha Kinder, “Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions,” in Violence and American Cinema, by Scolum, 63–100; Stephen Teo, “The Aesthetics of Mythical Violence in Hong Kong Action Films,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 8, no. 3 (2010): 155–167; Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 229–235. 12. Kinder, “Violence American Style,” 68. 13. Access to the manifestos in Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997). 14. Glauber Rocha, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” trans. Randal Johnson and Burnes Hollyman, in Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 70. 15. Randal Johnson, “Brazilian Cinema Novo,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 3, no. 2 (1984): 95. 16. Think of the titles I mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter, for instance. 17. Kantaris, “Young and the Damned,” 182. 18. Delgado Arria, “Violencias,” 32. 19. Vieira, “Transnational Other,” 226. 20. Alvaro M. Navarro, “Gozo, placer y violencia en el cine venezolano de los 90,” Objeto Visual 13 (2007): 155. 21. The films in the table that show violent contexts are Homicidio Culposo, Macu, Secuestro Express, La hora cero, Manon, Graduacion de un delincuente, Colt Comando, Cangrejo, Retén de  Catia, Sicario, Soy un delincuente, Cangrejo II, El atentado, Hermano, Retén de mujeres, Cuchillos de fuego, and Reincidente. 22. In the 1970s, Clemente de la Cerda made the first two box-office hits: Soy un delincuente (1976) and Reincidente (1977). 23. Leopoldo Tablante, “Pobreza en su tinta: Representaciones periodísticas de la pobreza en Venezuela,” UCAB, Centro de Investigación de la Comunicación, Caracas, 2008, 152, tp:// dspace.ucab.edu.ve/handle/123456789/45863, my translation. 24. Tablante, 117. 25. In 1998, there were 4,550 homicides in Venezuela, more than 21,000 in 2012, and more that 28,000 registered for 2016. See Francisco Peregil, “La inseguridad, azote de Venezuela,” El Pais (Madrid), March 18, 2008; Pedro García Otero and María Isoliett Iglesias, “Observatorio de violencia calcula 21 mil asesinatos en 2012,” El Universal (Caracas), December 28, 2012; and “Venezuela registra un aumento de los asesinatos,” El Pais (Madrid), December 29, 2016. 26. In turn, a new NGO, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, was created in 2005 to compile data-supported figures related to criminal violence in Venezuela. See https:// observatoriodeviolencia.org.ve/. 27. Enrique Aular, interview with the author, December  5, 2012; and Judith Myers, “Hermano / Marcel Rasquin,” Director Talk, August  23, 2012, http://earthwize.org/wordpress/ directortalk/2012/08/23/hermanomarcel-rasquin/. Aular was also the creator of Platanoverde, an experimental site and magazine to talk about urban youth culture in Venezuela. See http://www.platanoverde.com/staff.php. 28. Myers, “Hermano / Marcel Rasquin.” 29. Claudia Masin, “La luz de la luna / Moonlight,” El poeta ocasional (blog), February 16, 2017, http://elpoetaocasional.blogspot.mx/2017/02/claudia-masin.html?m=1, my translation. 30. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1991), 33.

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31. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 26; and Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 393–394. 32. Diego Del Pozo, “Olvidados y Re-creados: La invariable y paradójica presencia del niño de la calle en el cine lationamericano,” Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana (2003): 88, my translation. 33. Diego Velasco, dir., La hora cero (The Zero Hour), Venezuela, Centro Nacional de Cinematografía, Factor RH Producciones, Hollywood Studios International, Subcultura, 2010. 34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 8–11. 35. Bakhtin, 19. 36. From Alejo Carpentier’s prologue of The Kingdom of This World, trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Zamora, reproduced in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 85. 37. Carpentier focuses on literature, music, architecture, and the concepts of time and history. 38. Aular, interview with the author, and Diego Velasco, interview with the author, January 19, 2013. 39. Velasco, interview with the author. 40. Hugo Chávez ruled Venezuela for several consecutive presidential periods, from 1998 until his death in 2013. 41. Tablante, “Pobreza en su tinta,” 60–63. 42. Globovisión became the last private channel presenting an oppositional perspective. The rest had been shut down or bought by the government through surrogates. Finally, in 2013, an economic group close to the government bought Globovisión. 43. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Venezuela es una telenovela (Caracas: Editorial Alfa, 2007), 31. 44. Acosta-Alzuru, 264–265. 45. Hershfield, “Youth and Urban Space,” 142–143. 46. Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 86. 47. Valentina Ruiz Leotaud, “La hora cero: Cine de acción a la criolla,” Dominical (Caracas), October 10, 2010, 16. 48. Douglas Gómez Barrueta, “La violencia tiene consecuencias,” interview with Diego Velasco, Tal Cual (Caracas), January 2011, my translation. 49. Gómez Barrueta. 50. Sneider, “RCR Wins Right.” 51. “Hermano Director Marcel Rasquin Interview,” CineMovieTV, August 25, 2012, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GmZaToMOEE. 52. Contrarily, Slumdog Millionaire did not sit well with audiences in India, who saw it as an exaggeration and play on clichés about India. See Madhur Singh, “Slumdog Millionaire, an Oscar Favorite, Is No Hit in India,” Time, January 26, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/ arts/article/0,8599,1873926,00.html. 53. Aular, interview with the author. 54. About the success of telenovelas worldwide, see, for instance, Janet McCabe and Jim Akass, eds., TV’s Betty Goes Global: From Telenovela to International Brand (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).

10 • BET WEEN LOVE AND THE MOR AL L AW The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance P e ter Y. Pa ik

War, urbanization, rapid economic growth, and political conflict— such are some of the tumultuous historical conditions that spark the emergence of the cinematic new waves. Italian neorealism, the first of the major postwar European movements, sought to bring about the social and cultural renewal of Italy after the fall of the fascist regime by focusing on the hardships of the poor and the heroism of the antifascist and anti-Nazi resistance. The French New Wave presented itself as an artistic revolt against the classicist tradition of filmmaking in France, yet it also unfolded under the backdrop of the dramatic economic, technological, and cultural transformation of the country by the ambitious policies of the newly inaugurated Fifth Republic.1 The New German Cinema of the 1970s mounted a sharp critique of the newly prosperous West Germany that had achieved a stunning economic recovery within the orbit of the Cold War alliance led by the United States. Postwar Japanese cinema likewise flourished during the country’s recovery from wartime devastation and the return to civilian rule. The new South Korean cinema, as with the postwar new waves, also emerges in the wake of profound political and economic change. However, the South Korean context is, in certain respects, more cataclysmic than the conditions that marked the rise of the new cinemas in Western Europe and Japan. Like Germany and Japan, the Korean peninsula had suffered the destructive impact of total war—most of its cities were leveled, and approximately 10 percent of the population lost their lives. But whereas Japan 199

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and the Western European nations, having become industrialized during the late nineteenth century, could take advantage of modern bureaucracies, technological expertise, and a well-developed infrastructure to help them recover from the destruction of wartime, South Korea bore the additional burden of having to build a modern industrial economy from a population that was still largely agricultural. The war, moreover, left South Korea one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income that was lower than that of Haiti, Ethiopia, and Yemen. Relief aid from the United States, which felt an obligation to prop up South Korea as an ally on the front lines of the Cold War struggle, made up the bulk of the economy during the immediate postwar years. But from the 1960s to the 1990s, the country achieved stunning economic growth rates as South Korea set up modern industries and transformed itself into a successful export-oriented economy. South Korea has since joined the ranks of the globe’s advanced economies, as its GDP places it among the top fifteen in the world. But the remarkable ascent of South Korea from the desperate poverty of the 1950s to the affluent consumer society of the present was nevertheless accompanied by political upheaval, labor turmoil, and the brutal suppression of prodemocracy demonstrations by the country’s military rulers. As sociologist Chang Kyung-Sup puts it, the South Korean experience of modernity is “compressed” in nature, in that South Koreans have undergone in less than half a century the far-reaching political and economic transformations that unfolded over the course of two centuries in Europe and North America. Not only did South Korea create an industrial capitalist economy in an unprecedentedly brief span of time, but it also underwent a fundamental political shift in which massive prodemocracy protests forced the military regime to hold free elections. But if South Korea has traversed an enormous distance economically in transforming itself into a developed industrial economy and politically in becoming an energetic liberal democracy, the country remains, in certain respects, strikingly traditional in its values and outlook. Chang observes that the “establishment” of “industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy, pragmatist sciences,” and other elements of modern society did not emerge out of a “creative succession” or “progressive overcoming” but took the form of an “unsystematic historical transition,” which left relatively intact “traditional institutions, values, and relationships” as well as the corruption and exclusions such premodern values and traditional bonds tend to generate within modern capitalist societies.2 Indeed, those from the West will often perceive something “uneven” about South Korean modernity, as it is possible to come across traditional beliefs, feelings, and practices coexisting—with varying degrees of fluidity or discord—alongside modern or postmodern ways of life. The new South Korean cinema manifests the compressed and uneven nature of the South Korean experience of modernity in a variety of ways. Although it

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has produced a notable group of directors specializing in making art films, such as Kim Ki-duk, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Bong Joon-ho, and Hong Sang-soo, commercial filmmaking has also flourished in South Korea since the box-office success of the action film Shiri (1999). One tendency that has characterized commercial productions and, to a lesser extent, art films is the mixing of genres. The collision of disparate stylistic and narrative conventions has become a recurring feature of South Korean film. Comedy is joined to horror film in The Quiet Family (1998), which evokes the despair of South Koreans during the Asian financial crisis, and the gangster film in Hello, Dharma (2001). The Host, the monster movie that set a box-office record in 2007 by selling more than ten million tickets within three weeks, also presents a biting political satire of the U.S. military presence and the South Korean government, which is depicted as endangering the lives of its citizens through its inept and heavy-handed measures. Science fiction, horror, and comedy all come together in Save the Green Planet (2003), in which globalization is revealed to be an alien conspiracy. But in addition to combining genres in unusual ways, South Korean cinema is also notable for depicting character types in a manner that often stands at odds with their representations in the West. For example, the much-acclaimed film Oldboy (2003), directed by Park Chan-wook, is unique in its depiction of the Freudian primal father, the fearsome patriarch who commits incest with his offspring, as a positive character. Similarly, in the third film of Park’s Vengeance trilogy, Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geumjassi; 2005), the female protagonist emerges as the bearer of universal values, a role that traditionally in the West is reserved for male figures. Lady Vengeance opens with the release of a woman in her early thirties from prison after having served a thirteen-year sentence for the abduction and murder of a five-year-old boy. The case of Lee Geum-ja, the voice-over narration tells us, had riveted the nation due to the attractive looks of the suspected culprit and the shocking nature of her alleged crime. Geum-ja’s tirelessly altruistic behavior while in prison, where she volunteered for the most difficult and unpleasant jobs, along with a fake conversion to Christianity, has earned her an early release. But she stuns the reverend who has advocated for leniency on her behalf by tossing aside the raw tofu that he offers to her to eat as a sign of her resolution to lead a moral life. The gesture with which she knocks over the plate stands as the first in a series of honest actions that will, she hopes, culminate in her exacting vengeance against the man who forced her to go to prison. Geum-ja proceeds to visit friends who were freed ahead of her and finds employment as a pastry chef, her skills in the kitchen having impressed a baker who visited the prison some years before. She also calls on the parents of the murdered boy, shocking

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them by trying to cut off her fingers on their coffee table in atonement for her guilt, but she only manages to sever her little finger before the boy’s father intervenes. Over the course of these encounters with figures from her past, the film flashes back to the incidents that led to Geum-ja’s imprisonment. It is revealed that Geum-ja was not guilty of the killing but had confessed to it in order to protect her infant daughter from the real murderer. While still a high school student, Geum-ja became pregnant and felt she could not turn to either of her divorced parents for support. She instead pleaded with a former teacher of hers, an unsavory character who had once made sexual overtures to her, to take her in. The teacher, named Mr. Baek, later devised a ransom scheme to extort money from a wealthy family, but after Geum-ja succeeded in abducting a boy named Won-mo, Mr. Baek murdered the child instead of releasing him back to his parents. Mr. Baek then took into his possession Geum-ja’s own daughter, threatening to kill the infant unless Geum-ja confessed to having murdered the boy she had kidnapped. After Geum-ja is sentenced for the crime, Baek places her daughter in an orphanage, from where she ends up being adopted by an Australian couple. Learning of her daughter’s whereabouts after breaking into the orphanage and going through its records, Geum-ja resolves to visit the girl, named Jenny by her adoptive parents, just to see her once and then to bid her farewell. In the meantime, Geum-ja’s plan is set in motion by her friends. One of them provides her with a pistol, which, in light of Korea’s strict gun laws, amounts to an unusual and generous favor. Another locates the whereabouts of Mr. Baek, a third manages to get a job at the same English-language school where he teaches, and the fourth seduces and marries him, putting the finishing details on the trap. The film creates a light-hearted mood in showing the almost absurd lengths to which Geum-ja’s friends are willing to go to help her. The flashbacks that depict the extravagant acts of charity and kindness that Geum-ja has performed to win their loyalty are presented with a sort of quirky humor. She gives away one of her kidneys to an ailing cellmate, volunteers for the difficult task of caring for a North Korean spy suffering from dementia, and gradually neutralizes the prisoner most feared by the others, a bullying sadist known as the “witch,” who stands at the top of the prison pecking order. Though these scenes—in which Geum-ja enthusiastically throws herself into the rigors and routines of life in a women’s prison—evoke a humorous sense of disproportion between action and response, the comical atmosphere dissipates as an uneasy recognition dawns on the viewer: Geum-ja’s cheerfulness and generosity stem from an implacable and unrelenting drive to take revenge against the man responsible for her imprisonment. Her generous favors and kind actions arise from the ruthless determination and cold calculation demonstrated by those seeking to overthrow governments or build criminal empires. Indeed, Geum-ja is able to execute her

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plan by creating a network in which each member is indebted to her in some significant way and thus shows an unwavering fidelity to her cause. That those in her power are unreservedly willing to do her bidding bears out the troubling reality that such a network based on unconditional social obligations is, in essence, authoritarian. As a revenge thriller, Lady Vengeance is close to the genre of film noir, and the depiction of its female protagonist reveals striking similarities and differences with the figure of the femme fatale in Hollywood films. As Janey Place observes, it is in film noir that female characters are routinely depicted as “intelligent and powerful.”3 They are defined by their excessive desires and dangerous ambitions. Whether she lays claim to her independence from men (Laura, 1944), attempts to return to her glory days as a movie star (Sunset Boulevard, 1950), seeks to become a nightclub owner (Night and the City, 1950), or breaks with the stifling conventions of middle class life by murdering their husbands and living off the insurance money (Double Indemnity, 1944), the woman in noir takes the initiative by igniting the main conflict of the narrative; the excessive desires and ambitions of the “dangerous lady” set off the chain of events that directly threaten the life of the male hero.4 The fact that the women in film noir do not know or refuse to recognize the place given to them in society by traditional gender norms is relayed by a visual style that makes her the center of the compositional focus and highlights her “freedom of movement.”5 But the noir woman pays for her freedom and for her potency and dominance, often by being destroyed at the end of the film. Film noir raises the specter of a controlling, sexually irresistible, and physically and emotionally dominant woman in order to reaffirm the myth of patriarchal control, whereby the display of her “dangerous power” is followed by the spectacle of her downfall.6 Like the figure of the dangerous woman in noir films described by Place, Geum-ja serves as the focal point of the narrative of the film, and her face and movements dominate its visual compositions. As noted by Place, the gaze of the viewer and of the other characters all flow irresistibly toward the enigmatic face of Lee Young-ae, which shifts in volatile and alluring ways from naive to haughty to mischievous to anguished. Yet the camera also frames her in unorthodox ways. After she callously rejects the advances of the woman who had been her lover in prison, the subsequent close-up frames Geum-ja’s tilted head from a low angle but obstructs the full view of her visage by cropping the part of her face below the upper lip. The angle of her head, seen against the bottom of the frame, makes her look as though she were drowning, but she wears a remote, impassive expression on her face. Geum-ja comes to life when her lover asks if her plan of revenge is under way, and her determined face is framed this time in another low angle shot that shows the lower part of her face, again tilted, but now crops the part of her head above her right eyebrow.

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Figure 10.1. Geum-ja is ready to press ahead with her plan.

In a later scene, Geum-ja is shot in a straight-on angle as she studies the diagram for a pistol that the husband of a friend has pasted to a wall, but then the camera suddenly cranes upward to frame her in a high-angle shot, which typically signifies the weakness or vulnerability of the character and connotes the superiority of the viewer to the figure on the screen. The red bars of her prison cascade downward over her solemn face as the present dissolves into a reminiscence of her imprisonment. Likewise, in the scene in which she has finally trapped Mr. Baek and looms ominously over her gagged prey, dressed in black as the angel of his death, her drive for vengeance becomes briefly suspended as she weeps and apologizes to daughter for the sins that caused her to become separated from girl. Geum-ja’s outbursts of raw emotion—after repeated close-ups in which she wears a sphinxlike look of detachment that perplexes the other characters and tantalizes the viewer with the promise of secrets to uncover—have the paradoxical effect of casting into relief the mastery she has achieved over her passions. It is not simply the fact that she dissimulates her feelings but rather that the terrible predicaments into which she has been thrown have taught her to manipulate her emotions as well as those of others. She has had to first survive in prison and then achieve a position of social dominance within it so that she might one day avenge herself against Mr. Baek. The film also emphasizes Geumja’s mobility, both in geographic terms as she crosses the ocean to find her daughter and with respect to the social hierarchy as she moves without constraint up and down the ranks of society, from the seedy milieus of the criminal underworld to the luxury high-rise apartments of the professional upper middle class. The ease with which she traverses the realms of the rich and poor, and of the lawful and the lawless, reflects her chameleon-like mastery of social types, which ominously portends her ability to inflict catastrophe on others who happen to make even the most superficial sort of contact with her.

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Figure 10.2. Geum-ja wears an enigmatic expression on the day of her release from prison.

But strikingly enough, Geum-ja is not punished for being a dominant woman driven by a socially destructive passion who effortlessly seduces and uses both men and women for her own ends. Rather, the film punishes her for doing something that almost every loving parent would have done under the same circumstances: telling a lie—and allowing a criminal to go free—in order to save the life of his or her own child. Indeed, the first part of the film appears to move in the direction of an allegory of authoritarianism in South Korea, but the subsequent series of events that unfold after Geum-ja prepares to execute her bound and gagged quarry veers into a thought experiment that tests the moral law and its inexorable demands against the strongest of human bonds—that between parent and child. Geum-ja removes Baek’s gag and has him translate her apologies, spoken in Korean, into English for her daughter, Jenny. Geum-ja tearfully explains to Jenny the pain she felt in having to give her up and apologizes for taking part in the actions that brought about their separation. Geum-ja adds that when she has completed her business with Baek, she will return Jenny to her adoptive parents in Australia. “My sins are too deep and too great for me to take care of a sweet child like you,” she tells the girl. Mother and long-lost daughter, who had been sullen and embittered up to this point, embrace and achieve reconciliation, even if they must once again separate and continue to live apart. Left alone with Baek, Geum-ja tries to shoot him but holds back each time, as though unable to find the proper instant to perform the deed to which she has dedicated her life. During these moments of hesitation, the alarm on Baek’s cell phone goes off, and when Geum-ja fishes it out of his shirt pocket, she discovers several trinkets attached to it, including the marble she recognized as belonging to the boy whom they kidnapped and whom Baek murdered. The significance of these items is not relayed verbally. An almost entirely wordless sequence follows: a close-up of a ring, a miniature figurine, and the telltale orange marble

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gives way to a medium-long shot of Geum-ja, who lets out a gasp. A guilty look passes over Baek’s face in close-up, as a tune evoking dread commences on the soundtrack. She holds the phone in front of Baek’s face and removes his gag, but puts it back in when he refers to “those kids.” Geum-ja gives an agonized wail as she strikes Baek’s body and drags him over the floor by his necktie. The terrible consequence of Geum-ja’s lie, told to save the life of her daughter, was that Baek went on to murder four other children. As cruel and wrenching as Geum-ja’s discovery is, nothing prepares the viewer for the scenes that follow. Geum-ja calls the detective who had investigated her case thirteen years ago and agreed, despite his disbelief, to accept her confession. Their search for evidence in Baek’s apartment turns up snuff videos showing his victims shortly before their deaths, tearfully calling out to their parents to come save them. As difficult as these scenes are to watch, the film becomes even more harrowing when the parents of the murdered children arrive to view these recordings of the final moments of their children’s lives. Park takes a nonlinear approach to presenting this sequence, which is particularly effective in heightening the sense of dread and guilt felt by Geum-ja over the unintended consequences of her false confession, as parents, a grandmother, and a sister file into the dilapidated schoolroom. A series of brief shots cuts between the couples and family members waiting to view the videos and the moments during which they actually watch them. Their looks of solemnity and reserve immediately give way to faces wracked by grief and anguish as they see their children pleading for their lives. These rapid shots, each lasting no longer than two seconds, both prepare the viewers for what is to come and bring them face-to-face with their helplessness, as these momentary glimpses into the future are followed by the same scenes playing out in the duration of conventional narrative cinematic time. The sorrow, rage, and grief of the parents are no longer passing flashes but are rendered with an agonizing fullness that throws the viewer into an alarming proximity to unbearable loss. In that sense, it is a rare film in which the viewer is led to ask if what she is seeing is really happening: frightened, tearful children about to be murdered, their parents convulsing with anguish. As the screening of the videos comes to an end, the room fills with wails of the parents, growing increasingly louder, while Geum-ja stands alone at the front of the room, leaning forward and holding her head in a pose of excruciating regret, her bandaged pinkie incongruously erect as a sign of the power she wishes now to relinquish at any price. When the parents calm down, the group discusses what they are to do with Baek, who is sitting tied to a chair in the next room. As the detective stands by, Geum-ja explains that they can either hand Baek over to the police or inflict a “personalized” punishment on him. The father of Won-mo, the first child murdered by the teacher, expresses his reluctance to take part in an extrajudicial

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Figure 10.3. Geum-ja is overwhelmed by the anguished cries of the grief-stricken parents.

killing, while one of the mothers protests handing the murderer over to the police because they will not inflict on him the brutality and violence he deserves. They settle on killing Baek themselves and then draw lots to determine the order in which they will take turns wounding him, making sure that Baek remains alive for the last person to finish him off. These deliberations are piped through a loudspeaker into the room where the murderer sits. The first person to stab Baek is the mother of Won-mo, who asks the teacher how he could do such terrible things. He replies that no one is perfect. The subsequent scene shows the woman opening the door in a state of shock, her hand wound tightly around a bloodstained knife. She collapses into the arms of her husband, while the detective is forced to pry the blade loose from her fingers. Next comes a group of four parents, one of whom tells his wife that their revenge won’t bring their son back from the dead. But the furious parents descend on Baek anyway. They are followed by a working-class father and his daughter, who has to plead with her father to prevent him from butchering the teacher outright with his ax. They too collapse to the floor after their turn, as though they had inflicted the blows upon themselves rather than upon the murderer responsible for their torment. Last to go is the grandmother, who looks with an icy rage at the bloodied teacher before burying the scissors that belonged to her murdered granddaughter into the back of his neck. The raw nerves touched by Lady Vengeance have to do with the worst fears of any parent, recalling Hecuba, the bleakest of the Euripidean tragedies, as well as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In Hecuba, the erstwhile queen of Troy, reduced to slavery after the fall of the city, avenges the murder of her youngest son by Polymestor, the king of Thrace, by blinding him and murdering his children. For philosopher Eric Voegelin, Hecuba represents the disintegration of the tragic art, as the moral universe that sustained it collapses under the weight of corruption and disorder: “The soul no longer becomes wise under suffering,

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but breaks under its fate and becomes a dog.”7 The worst loss, from which there can be no recovery nor any hope for the future, is the extinction of one’s family line. In this regard, it is notable that all Baek’s victims seem to have been only children. In Dostoevsky’s novel, the torture and killing of children play a determining role in Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against God. Ivan recounts the cruel spectacle of Turks terrorizing their Slav subjects by impaling Slavic infants on bayonets and by making babies smile before shooting them at point-blank range. In his most vivid anecdote, a mother is made to watch as her eight-year-old son is torn to pieces by dogs because the boy threw a stone that injured the paw of a boyar’s favorite hound. These instances of innocents forced to endure horrific suffering from the most powerful moral argument for atheism, causing Ivan to “return his entrance ticket” to God. Though Lady Vengeance ventures into the unsettling territory of the worst kind of loss, the film performs yet another surprising reversal after the grieving parents have taken their revenge. The group is shown performing the chores necessary to conceal the killing: they roll up the bloody tarp placed beneath Baek’s body, mop up the blood stains on the floor, and pose together for a picture to deter any of them from revealing their secret. After burying the corpse in a nearby forest, they gather at the bakery where Geum-ja is employed. She lights candles on a chocolate cake she has prepared for some special occasion, possibly for herself, when one of the parents almost absentmindedly begins to sing the birthday song. The other parents join in the singing, each naming his or her own child, and then blow out the candles. The lights go back on and they partake of the cake. The emotional register of the scene is, again, elusive. It is not quite a black mass, as in Jan Svankmajer’s subversive film Lunacy (2005), in which the eating of a chocolate cake takes place during a satanic ceremony that celebrates the revolutionary overthrow of the old authoritarian regime, although the parents, grandmother, and sister are shown enjoying the taste of a sweet delicacy after carrying out what is essentially a lynching. It is not quite a superfluous appendage to the catharsis produced by the killing either, although the sense of release it evokes comes across as vaguely incongruous, making one wonder what new provocation Park might have up his sleeve. Instead, Lady Vengeance achieves one of the weirdest and most strangely moving scenes in cinema. Finishing their plates, the parents write out their bank account numbers on slips of paper and hand them to Geum-ja so that she will transfer to them the ransoms they paid to Baek. During the silence that falls over the table, the working-class father reveals that in France, a break in the conversation is said to indicate the passing of angel. The camera then dissolves to the faces of the parents looking up and then to the trinkets they hold in their hands while a melancholy tune plays on the soundtrack. This sequence is filmed by a fisheye lens, which distorts the image at the edges of the frame. The

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camera cranes downward, evoking the movement of a supernatural gaze, and then upward—this time without the distortion—to frame smoke rising near a chandelier. The family members, seated silently, look up as though they were searching for something, straining to see some object or entity that is not quite present, as though for a brief second, an image of their child had manifested itself. The spell is abruptly broken the moment the camera rises to frame the chandelier, as Geun-shik, Geum-ja’s boyfriend, who is completely in the dark about the proceedings, walks through the door. The mourners quickly rise from their seats, making remarks about how the weather has suddenly changed, then quickly disappear into the darkness. The scene in the bakery calls to mind the elusive moments in a dream when a secret is about to be revealed, and the intense interest felt by the dreamer serves to awaken him from it, as in Freud’s famous account of the father, mourning his recently deceased son, who dreams that the son appears to him covered in flames and rebukes him, “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” One of Freud’s explanations for the dream is that the father wanted to see his son and so prolonged the dream, transforming the reality in which a candle had fallen and set fire to the son’s shroud into a vision of the child still alive and addressing him.8 Similarly, the focused gazes of the parents, grandmother, and sister in Lady Vengeance convey the sense that they are dreaming, but dreaming in a shared and collective way, engaging in a form of communion that is only made possible by the most agonizing experience of grief. In this brief reverie, they come together as a community that is bound by the deepest suffering and the most irreversible guilt. We might say that in a way, they form a utopian community, based on a shared understanding they have gained in the most wrenching manner imaginable. Park, however, underscores the cruel fact that such a community cannot exist in the ordinary daylight of the legal order, as the entrance of Geun-shik, who is portrayed in the film as a gentle innocent, has the effect of waking the dreamers from their sleep. It is tempting to argue that the killing of Baek is the necessary step to experiencing this fragile and elusive utopia, regardless of how evanescent it proves to be. The communion between the parents would not have taken place unless they first came together to commit an appalling act of violence. These moments of release from the laws of reality—in which the limits of time are suspended—cannot be willed, for the shattered lives that confront Geum-ja belong to those for whom hope exists no longer in the world but in those realms that lie beyond it. One might then ask why the parents refrain from blaming Geum-ja for the deaths of their children, since her decision to cover up for Baek enabled him to remain at large. The lack of animus toward Geum-ja arises from the unspoken fact that every one of the parents would have done the same thing were they placed in Geum-ja’s position. The moral law that calls for justice toward strangers

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proves universal in the breach, but the impartiality of justice begins with the recognition of the power of one’s passions and attachments. But if the awareness and understanding of Geum-ja’s predicament cause those who suffered as a result of her confession to refrain from condemning her, Geum-ja condemns herself in her zeal to save her child by making herself appear credible as a murderer. When she first tries to confess to the killing, the detective refuses to believe her, and his interrogation reveals that she is, in fact, innocent. The detective understands that Geum-ja is lying for the sake of protecting someone but is reluctant to accept her confession. But during the reenactment of the crime, Geum-ja attacks the dummy of the boy with such violence that the detective stares back at her in astonishment. Geum-ja casts a look at the detective and the crowd surrounding him that is confrontational, yet her eyes glare with the opaque fixity of a predator that has just delivered a killing strike to its prey. In this moment, she establishes beyond any doubt that she is willing to kill a child if it means saving the life of her own daughter. In other words, to save her daughter, she murders Won-mo in her imagination. Thus when the parents stab Baek, and Baek sits bleeding profusely from his wounds, Geum-ja reels back and forth as though she were the target of their rage. Her reattached finger, wrapped in a bandage, stands apart from the other fingers as she holds her hands over her ears to muffle the screams of her betrayer. But as mentioned previously, Geum-ja’s power is not something that can be found in a fully democratized and modernized society. Geum-ja, through the force of will and unflagging determination, is able to make herself into something approaching an authoritarian leader whose beneficence serves as a vital aspect of her charisma. Though to the legal order, as well as to the pastor who has fallen in love with her, she appears as the “kindhearted” and saintly Geum-ja—a “living angel,” as one of the parishioners calls her—to her fellow prisoners, she takes over the title of the “witch” after she uses her wiles to kill the feared and hated

Figure 10.4. Geum-ja makes herself capable of killing a child.

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murderer who is the cause of much terror and apprehension among the other prisoners. The charismatic authority of Geum-ja is such that the other prisoners spontaneously want to help her, yet at the same time, there is no way for anyone to deny her the favors she requests. Park’s film thus contains the startling twist whereby the only way that Geum-ja—stigmatized several times over as a single mother, child-murderer, and an ex-con—is able to fulfill her plan of revenge is to avail herself of the structures of power that modern capitalist democracies, with their impartial and impersonal notions of justice and their emphasis on the rule of law and transparency, would condemn as authoritarian. Geum-ja emerges as a fatal mother whose devotion to her daughter causes her to bring death to the children of others. As such, she represents a potent figure of two sides of South Korea’s modernity. The experience of compressed modernity marks her original predicament, which reflects the social disintegration and the dissolution of traditional ways of life brought about by rapid social change. It is the loosening of long-standing taboos against divorce, which permits her parents to break up the family and most likely become detached from a larger support system of relatives, and Geum-ja’s engagement in premarital sex that culminates in her plight, which she seeks to escape by taking shelter with a man who turns out to be a psychopath. Mr. Baek is also portrayed as a figure uprooted by urbanization and the arrival of economic affluence: he is a man who can lead a middle-class existence without contact with friends or a network of relatives—as well as indulge his appetite for killing children—on the basis of his intelligence and competence alone. But if Geum-ja is a victim of both circumstances beyond her control and her own poor decisions, she never makes excuses for herself or her predicament. She is anything but a modern hyperindividualist who blames abstract social forces for the hardships and frustrations she encounters. Indeed, if she thought of herself as a helpless victim of her situation, regardless of how trying her predicament truly was, she would have lacked the determination and willpower to devise and implement her scheme for revenge. But although Geum-ja is relentlessly driven in her quest for revenge against Mr.  Baek, her desire for vengeance is not her strongest. Rather, the very intensity with which she pursues her quest sets her up to encounter the moral law in its most forbidding proportions. For the moral law imposes on us a duty that we must fulfill, even at the risk of great sacrifice. Against the moral law, even the desire to protect the life and well-being of one’s own children is to be reckoned as a “pathological interest.”9 Indeed, in Kantian terms, Geum-ja realizes in retrospect that her decision to protect her daughter was a choice to reduce the children whom Baek later murdered as the means to saving the life of her own child. Had she lacked any concept of the moral law, she would have quietly taken her revenge against Baek without contacting the families of the murdered children and the detective who was responsible for her

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case. Instead, Geum-ja’s previously indomitable reserve crumbles before her grief at the loss of innocent lives. She discovers that she cannot resist the moral law’s demand that we fulfill our duty, even if it means sacrificing our happiness and well-being. Lady Vengeance has the character of a thought experiment in which the most understandable and perhaps forgivable of deceptions has the most cruel and appalling consequences. But it is only by placing into conflict the demands of the moral law and the desire to protect one’s loved ones, a conflict that unfolds as a traumatic encounter, that the measure of South Korea’s incomplete modernity is revealed. The weakness of the rule of law in comparison to other industrialized democracies, the favoritism shown toward one’s kin and other members of one’s social network, and the difficulties of those without social connections to advance in the society underscore the distance of South Korean society from a social order shaped and governed by a universal conception of justice. Although South Korea has managed to turn itself into a modern economy and navigate a successful political transition to parliamentary democracy, many Koreans still bemoan the lack of an ethic of fairness that binds all citizens, regardless of their station in life, as entrenched interests are all too often able to use their influence to evade regulations and other legal and political constraints. Indeed, the 2014 sinking of the ferry, the Sewol, which took nearly three hundred lives—most of them high school students—threw into relief the corrupt practices that enabled the company that owned the ferry to evade safety regulations for years and overload the vessel with cargo before its final voyage.10 The film concludes with a farewell meeting between mother and daughter, as the mother offers her daughter a cake covered in white icing and exhorts her to live her life without sin. The offering of the cake mirrors the opening scene of the film, in which Geum-ja is offered tofu by the minister. But what does Geumja mean when she tells her daughter to “live white”? Is she telling Jenny to be more thoughtful and to avoid acting in ways that will cause her to be deprived of her freedom and her moral autonomy? Or is Geum-ja paradoxically telling the girl not to do what she did, in saving the life of her own child at the expense of the lives of other children? This latter possibility of course negates the very existence of Jenny herself, as Baek would have taken her life had Geum-ja heeded the imperative of the moral law. Geum-ja, at the very least, appears to express the wish that Jenny have the strength of character to obey the moral law. But the film provides an answer in the form of Won-mo’s ghost, who refuses to forgive Geum-ja when he manifests himself after the group of parents leave the bakery. Geum-ja crumples again in grief and despair when Won-mo silences her in the exact manner whereby she silenced Baek—by gagging her with a ball attached to a leather head strap. But the spirit of Won-mo also awakens Jenny from her sleep, leading the girl to walk out into the winter night in search of

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her mother. Won-mo’s anger does not extend to the child whose life was saved at the cost of his own. In that sense, the ghost demonstrates the modern repudiation of collective punishment, whereby children are made to suffer for the mistakes or crimes of their parents. But the ghost withholds his anger not only on the grounds that children are innocent but also because of the commemoration of the dead that Geum-ja makes possible in sacrificing her personal revenge to those who have suffered far greater pain than she. It is in this ceremony that the nation of South Korea, created by suffering and sacrifice, is summoned into existence so that it may become something more than a heedless and forgetful consumer society.

Notes 1. See Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 2007), 5–6; and James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14–17. 2. Kyung- Sup Chang, South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 11. 3. Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 47. 4. Place, 57. 5. Place, 56. 6. Place, 56. 7. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 15: Order and History, Volume 2, The World of the Polis, ed. Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 339. 8. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 330. 9. Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 38. 10. See Yong Kwon, “Ferry Tragedy: A Righteous and Overdue Rage over Corruption,” The Diplomat, May  28, 2014, http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/ferry-tragedy-a-righteous-and -overdue-rage-over-corruption/; and Jun Ji-hye, “Ferry Disaster Result of Corruption,” Korea Times, July  8, 2014, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2014/07/116_160599 .html.

11 • THE QUEER MEXIC AN CINEM A OF JULIÁN HERNÁNDEZ Gi lberto M . Bl a sini

Through its long history, Mexican cinema has exemplified the ways in which national filmic discourses find finer development when they engage in dialogues with their social, aesthetic, and ideological counterparts in other countries. Partly due to the geographical proximity and their stature in the international arena, Hollywood and U.S. cinema in general have always been understood as the most evident of these dialogical international interactions, especially when it comes to the economic and technological arenas. However, Mexican cinema has also benefited greatly from its exchanges with artists and traditions from Russia (Sergei Eisenstein, Arcady Boytler), Spain ( Juan Orol, Luis Buñuel), Argentina (Libertad Lamarque, Hugo del Carril), and Cuba (Ramón Peón, Ninón Sevilla, María Antonieta Pons), just to name a few examples. Some of these exchanges have increased since the late 1980s and the 1990s due to the way that coproductions have become the dominant financial avenue for making and distributing films not only in Mexico but all over the world. Ana M. López argues that “an international ‘art cinema’ practice within which national specificities are almost of no consequence” emerged during this period and helped Mexican films find broader circulation in Latin America and other global markets.1 Interestingly, what López identifies as “an international ‘art cinema’ practice”—at least in a more traditional sense—can be understood as a point of entry into a larger arena where a notion of Mexicanness can be articulated filmically for global audiences. My chapter constitutes a preliminary step toward apprehending how Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández has attempted to articulate a cinematic queerness that engages national elements as well as international ones. His body of 214

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work—shorts, medium-length, and feature films—has been dedicated to constructing visions and versions of queerness in the context of contemporary Mexican society. His first three features—Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamás acabarás de ser amor (A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky; 2003); El cielo dividio (Broken Sky; 2006); and Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (Raging Sun, Raging Sky; 2009)—have loose and meandering narratives with very minimal dialogue. As the running time of each film increases (from 80 minutes to 140 minutes and finally to 190  minutes, respectively), the plot also wanders ever more slowly and aimlessly. The quotidian lives of gay men in Mexico City are at the center of Hernández’s explorations of love, obsession, fear, and jealousy. Everyday life, however, is sporadically interrupted by subjective moments of desire, lust, anxiety, and fantasy, resulting in temporal corrugations that queer the apparent realism in these texts. These interruptions become even more prominent with each film, not only creating a more palpable tension between what is real and what is imaginary in the diegesis, but also rendering queerness into a phenomenological cinematic attraction that needs to be dealt with, and not just at the erotic level. I will illustrate this point with a short analysis of Mil nubes de paz. In Making Things Perfectly Queer, Alexander Doty suggests that the queerness of cinema / mass culture develops in “three areas: 1) influence during the production of texts; 2) historically specific cultural readings and uses of texts by selfidentified gays, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, and 3) adopting reception positions that can be considered ‘queer’ in some way, regardless of the person’s declared sexual and gender allegiances.”2 My approach relates more to the first two areas. Yet I wonder if the third is also implicit in the project to an extent. One of the challenges of thinking about cinematic queerness is the fact that queer film is not exactly or necessarily a genre that has emerged out of a particular cinematic industrial context but one that sprung out of both critical reflections and activist practices in the late 1980s and early 1990s mostly in the United States, Canada, and England.3 In 1992, B. Ruby Rich’s essay appeared in the September issue of Sight and Sound and helped solidify what has become a distinct subfield of investigation in our field: queer cinema studies. Following the trends of what she had observed in several film festivals in the United States (Sundance), Canada (Toronto), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Rich proposes the emergence of a film movement constituted by independent gay and lesbian films and videos “that were doing something new, renegotiating subjectivities, annexing whole genres, revising histories in their image.”4 Rich suggests that cinematic queerness entails processes of regenerating, reconstructing, and reenvisioning what has become accepted truth or common sense. On the one hand, these processes allow for the articulation of contemporary subjectivities that challenge both heteronormativity and homonormativity. The devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic and the

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intense activism by groups from some of the most affected communities (e.g., gay men) in the face of an apathetic government constitute some of the key reasons for the sociopolitical transformations that ushered in the new queer cinema (NQC). On the other hand, these revisionary processes also allow for cinematic experimentations with the formal, narrative, and stylistic capabilities of film and video. In 2000, Rich revised her original essay in a short piece titled “Queer and Present Danger” (which also appeared in Sight and Sound). In it, Rich stated that what she initially had labeled as a movement should be understood more as a moment. As she puts it, NQC “was meant to catch the beat of a new kind of filmand video-making that was fresh, edgy, low-budget, inventive, unapologetic, sexy and stylistically daring.”5 Shifting political priorities at the top ranks of LGBT groups (from eradicating AIDS, which now could be controlled through a combination of drugs, to gay marriage and adoption of children) as well as the proliferation of LGBT film festivals and the commodification of LGBT audiences directly impacted the NQC’s driving impetus to the point that, Rich argues, queer films became mainstream products for a niche market. Interestingly, Rich doesn’t acknowledge any Latin American queer films until her 2006 contribution to the dossier “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out,” edited by Chris Straayer and Thomas Waugh for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. In “The New Homosexual Film Festivals,” Rich proposes that one of the three most important trends in LGBTQ film festivals—which at this point have become “of that which mainstream popular culture does not intend to embrace”—is “the rise of a brilliant ‘third queer’ cinema outside of the North American-Western European axis.”6 Since Rich is not only a connaisseuse but also a champion of Latin American cinema (as her influential essay “An/Other View of Latin American Cinema” clearly exemplifies),7 it is curious that it takes her more than a decade to identify the presence of cinematic queerness in the context of Latin America—although texts like Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All; 1990) and De eso no se habla (I Don’t Want to Talk about It; 1993), both by María Luisa Bemberg, and Mécaniques célestes (Celestial Clockworks; 1995) by Fina Torres can all be categorized under the queer rubric, as can Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), which won a Special Teddy Award during the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. More than an intentional omission from Rich’s part, then, I would like to read this deferral in the acknowledgment of queer films as a marker of the time needed for ideas and styles not only to circulate in our contemporary global world but also to strike a chord and potentially thrive in new geographical contexts. In this way, queerness becomes intertwined with the “closely related landscapes of images” that Arjun Appadurai names mediascapes and ideoscapes.8 On the one hand, cinematic queerness could be understood as a mediascape,

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since it is part of the “image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality  .  .  . [that] offer to those who experience and transform them [with] a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.”9 At the core here is how these scripts—which, in this case, are focusing on queerness—“can and do get disaggregated into a complex sets of metaphors by which people live as they help to constitute narratives of the Other and protonarratives of possible lives, fantasies that could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement.”10 On the other hand, if we think of queerness as a subcategory of the broader term sexuality (which could stand in with the key words that Appadurai highlights in his study), we could think about how queerness might “require careful translation from context to context in [its] global movements” as well as how its use “by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate [its] translation into public politics.”11 Julián Hernández was born in Mexico in 1972 and studied filmmaking at the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos of the Universidad Autónoma de México (1989–1994). He is a founding member of the film collective Cooperativa Cinematográfica Morelos, along with Roberto Fiesco, Aurora Ojeda, and Diego Arizmendi. As Sergio de la Mora explains, the Cooperativa Cinematográfica Morelos, which has made more than twenty-five fiction films in less than twenty years, has an unusual continuity “in Mexican film history, not only for its longevity as a collective, but also for the quality of its films and the consistent level of narrative and formal experimentation.”12 Hernández’s first (2003) and third (2009) feature films won the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, while his second (2006) obtained a Special Jury Award at the Toronto International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Key elements in these films are not only the depictions of the daily lives of gay men but also how their narrative constructions render them simultaneously new and familiar. In other words, these narratives work to immerse audiences in the lives of characters in ways that make viewers experience these gay men’s worlds while avoiding traditional psychologizing conventions, particularly through backstories rendered through dialogue. The scarcity of dialogue as well as the particular attention to actions—be they real or fantasy—and diegetic sounds stand as examples of Hernández’s stylistic tactics that help not only convey a distinct sense of locality and cultural specificity (e.g., Mexico City’s ancient Centro Histórico) but also create a particular cinematic experience where the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist in a queer kind of way. A pivotal queer transformation that Hernández enacts in his feature films is to disregard the hegemonic Mexican / Latin American sexual system that has been traditionally invoked to apprehend sexuality—gay or otherwise—in Mexico. As Tomás Almaguer explains in his essay “Chicano Men: A Cartography of

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Figure 11.1. Gerardo in the city

Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” the Mexican / Latin American sexual system “confers meaning to homosexual practices according to sexual aim—i.e., the act one wants to perform with another person (of either biological sex).”13 He further explains that this sexual system is “based on a configuration of power of gender/sex/power that is articulated along the active/passive axis and organized thought the scripted sexual role one plays. It highlights sexual aim—the act one wants to perform with the person toward whom sexual activity is directed—and gives only secondary importance to the person’s gender or biological sex.”14 As a result, “although stigma accompanies homosexual practices in Latin culture, it does not equally adhere to both partners. It is primarily the analpassive individual . . . who is stigmatized for playing the subservient, feminine role.”15 In the Mexican context, the gender-coded equation where masculinity is equated with the active/dominant personality and femininity with the passive/ submissive one is historically connected to cultural myths surrounding the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century, such as the betrayal of la Malinche, the Nahua woman who became Cortez’s lover and supposedly facilitated the process of conquest.16 As a result of these myths, gay men—just like women—find themselves unfairly placed in the politically suspicious position of traitors (of their people/nations). The narratives of previous Mexican films dealing with gay men, such as El lugar sin límites (Arturo Ripstein, 1978) and Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1985), specifically hinge on the pervasiveness of this sexual system, although each film deals with it differently—tragically in Ripstein’s case and parodically in Hermosillo’s text. In his influential book Cinemachismo: Masculinities and

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Sexuality in Mexican Film, Sergio de la Mora revisits the history of Mexican cinema in order to examine how discourses of sexuality and gender have found articulation through films and popular actors/performers (e.g., Pedro Infante, Gael García Bernal). In particular, de la Mora is interested in “identify[ing] and celebrat[ing] the rich queer legacy in Mexican film and popular culture.”17 His approach, however, is far from being simply celebratory. De la Mora studies “the pervasive presence of . . . an ideology of heterosexual male supremacy that in Mexico gets wedded to the institutionalized post-revolutionary State apparatus.”18 For de la Mora, Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites constitutes a key text that attempts to challenge Mexican heteronormative structures as they relate to male sexuality in general and same-sex male desire in specific. As he persuasively demonstrates, the film shows “how rigidly drawn is the border of the public display of sexual desire between men. Heterosexual masculinity is revealed as conflicted and contested.”19 The centrality of heterosexuality that de la Mora examines in order to discuss gayness, however, is not a central factor in how Hernández constructs his characters. In Hernández’s films, the gay main characters engage in sexual relations—for example, physical, emotional, and even transactional—that are not necessarily determined by the Mexican system of el chingón (macho aggressor) / la chingada (passive and defenseless victim) that Octavio Paz characterizes as one of the most pervasive hegemonic discourses in Mexican culture in his influential book El laberinto de la soledad.20 Although Hernández’s films do not follow the Mexican sexual system, they still explore the interrelationship between desire and power. In fact, misguided and/or unrequited desire as well as the difficulty if not impossibility of figuring out the difference between desire and love constitute the narrative impetus in both Mil nubes de paz and El cielo dividido. In addition, as de la Mora explains, Hernández’s films “break from a long tradition in Mexican cinema of stereotyping gay males as comic relief and as tragic cross-dressers, as in the 1960s comedies starting Mauricio Garcés and fichera sexploitation movies from the 1970s, or the grotesque gay characters in Arturo Ripstein’s films, including El lugar sin límites.”21 Hernández is able to break away from the troublesome tradition of stereotyping that de la Mora describes in part through the cinematic queer inspiration that he musters from European art cinema, especially gay directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Reiner Werner Fassbinder.22 For example, Hernández has named two of his films after texts by these artists. The entire title Mil nubes de paz is taken from the last stanza of Pasolini’s poem “The Persecution,”23 while the title for his fourth film, Yo soy la felicidad de este mundo (I Am Happiness on Earth, 2014), “is the Spanish translation of Ich bin das Glück dieser Erde, the title of the project in which director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was working when he died.”24 In Mil nubes de paz, the main character’s internal conflicts are reminiscent of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) and Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973) and Fox and His Friends (1975). In these films, the main characters’ personal desires

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and aspirations are at odds with the possibilities proffered by their social context. They lack material resources, social standing, or political clout and struggle with a sense of agency. In addition, Hernández is greatly invested in exploring the ways in which his characters inhabit city spaces—just like Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, did before him. The specificity of Mexico City as an urban landscape not only becomes a source of inspiration but also provides a geographical grounding for the queer subjectivities depicted.25 Interestingly, these depictions are not exclusively about reclaiming space through the depictions of queerness—for example, the way in which the young lovers Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) and Jonás (Fernando Arroyo) hold hands and kiss all over the National Autonomous University of Mexico campus as well as bus and subway stations in El cielo dividido. It is also about the ways in which characters navigate the limits of possibilities available to them in a patriarchal country like Mexico—for example, the adult theater where cruising and sexual acts take place in Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo. Mil nubes de paz centers on Gerardo ( Juan Carlos Ortuño), a working-class teenager who has dropped out of school and left his home to live on his own. Gerardo works at a pool hall frequented only by men. There he meets Bruno (Juan Carlos Torres), a man older than him with whom Gerardo has sex one night. After this brief encounter, Bruno becomes the source of Gerardo’s love and desire. Throughout the rest of the film and until his (apparently) premature demise on a bridge, an overwhelming feeling caused by unrequited love hunts Gerardo and guides his encounters with others in different locations of Mexico City.

Figure 11.2. Gerardo watches Bruno

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The film’s narrative never shows Gerardo questioning his sexuality. He exists in a world where he doesn’t need to doubt himself because men are the objects of his desire. The fact that almost all of the film is filtered through Gerardo’s subjectivity helps convey a palpable sense of queerness. However, Mil nubes de paz also depicts other positions about same-sex desire that reveal the complexities and contradictions of sexuality. For example, his one-night stand, Susana (Salvador Álvarez), asks Gerardo to leave his apartment as soon as the sun comes up. Susana tells Gerardo that he needs to keep up appearances because his neighbors are out to get him for being gay. Antonio (Salvador Hernández) starts crying after penetrating Gerardo. Perhaps the most troublesome case is Jorge (Manuel Grapain Zaquelares). He flirts with Gerardo on the street and lures him to an abandoned building only to beat Gerardo up in an act of gay bashing. The film’s male characters consistently struggle with committing to their emotions. The way in which Bruno dismisses Gerardo after their sexual encounter is similar to how Gerardo deals with both Susana and Antonio. Two of the film’s secondary characters, Mary (Rosa María Gómez) and Nadia (Clarisa Rendón), have had their lives complicated by men. Mary is the most extreme of the cases, since she is pregnant and hiding it from her boss to avoid being fired. In addition, Mary has the only scene that depicts her subjectivity besides Gerardo. While discussing with Gerardo the difficulties of living without many material resources, Mary is shown smiling in front of a store while caressing her belly. She tells Gerardo that she hopes her unborn child will have a better life than both of them. However, she doesn’t know how to make this wish a reality. I would argue that women are positioned within the spectrum of queer characters whose lives have been troubled and burdened by men. As a result, the film’s narrative organization is always infused with the emotional angst of unrequited love and unfulfilled hopes. Gerardo’s subjectivity as the guiding force behind the film’s narrative organization is exemplified through the tactical inclusion of brief flashbacks and flashforwards that either provide background information to clarify points (e.g., he cannot call Bruno because he has thrown away his phone number) or characterize Gerardo’s state of mind (e.g., Susana asking questions about Bruno serves to illustrate Gerardo’s despair and frustration). In addition, Hernández includes two key moments that exemplify what I would call corrugated time. This temporality creates a disruption in a text that has hitherto mostly used long takes and other realist conventions. The first sequence takes place on a bridge that Gerardo frequently visits throughout the film. Gerardo is shown in a medium shot on the right side of the frame at one of the bridge’s two edges. The camera continuously moves until it reaches the other (i.e., left) side of the bridge. The traffic below the bridge in the background evidences the temporal continuity of the uncut shot. However,

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this same continuous shot shows Gerardo at two other spots on the bridge—in the middle and at the end of it. Since Gerardo is not shown moving in front of the camera, the sequence produces a jarring effect between the spatiotemporal continuity and Gerardo’s presence in other places on the bridge that would have required a clear visual depiction of the character’s translocation across the structure. This unusual, disorienting effect is one of the text’s attempts to convey cinematically a sense of queerness. Gerardo’s simultaneously fluid and interrupted displacement expresses the main character’s private turmoil that encompasses a combination of desire, longing, hope, and disappointment.26 The second sequence closes the film. Gerardo is in the middle of the bridge looking down at the cityscape. The camera, which has been placed behind him, zooms over his right shoulder until it stops at a point outside of the bridge. As Gerardo starts to remember some of the things that different characters have told him, the camera rotates 360 degrees as if he were turning around to see what is behind him. Yet when the 360-degree rotation ends, Gerardo is shown standing where he was before. The words that he hears in his mind combine, among other things, harsh criticism from his mother, Anna (Perla de la Rosa); paranoid advice from Nadia; and naive encouragement from Mary. The sweetness of Mary’s words (“You can’t fool me. I can see it in your eyes. That’s love.”) elicits a radiant smile and laughter. Gerardo starts to walk away joyfully when he recalls Susana’s warning about Bruno (“We are nothing, but he’s the king of kings.”). Suddenly, Gerardo stumbles and grabs the railing along the edge of the bridge. After regaining his composure, he is able to walk a short distance until he remembers Bruno’s misleading words: “I’ll be in touch with you. I’m not afraid

Figure 11.3. Gerardo on the bridge

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because I know you will be with me. Because I know we will have to be together someday. It’s for real, just like love is for real. I hurt you, I love you.” Gerardo falls to his knees and then collapses to the ground.27 After his collapse, the screen flashes to white. The short sequence of the sexual encounter between Gerardo and Bruno plays in more detail. As it is coming to a close, Gerardo says in a voiceover, “If you only knew how long the road has been to be with you.” At the end of the film, it is unclear if Gerardo has died or not. Whichever state he is in—be it unconscious, dying, or dead—this moment gets infused with a significant sense of queer desire that exists alongside and potentially transcends the struggles and despair that have marked most of Gerardo’s life. The unexpected 360-degree camera rotation at the beginning of the sequence had already attempted to represent phenomenologically a sense of queerness that was simultaneously—and potentially, contradictorily—singular and ubiquitous. In addition, Gerardo’s final voice-over statement conveys, if albeit paradoxically, the need to continue fighting for the fulfillment of same-sex desires in the face of heteronormativity.28 Along with the discourses articulated in his films, I would like to propose that Hernández’s stance toward the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences could also be understood as a defiant queer position. The day after the nominations for the 2011 Academy Awards, Hernández shared with his then 2,420 Facebook friends the following statements: “Only 5 films were submitted to the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [for the Best Foreign Language Award]! I urge film producers and filmmakers in Mexico not to submit their films to the Academy. This will give a good jolt to that obsolete Academy that should be given its final burial already. The

Figure 11.4. Gerardo collapses

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Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Is Dead!”29 Later that day, Hernández posted another sarcastic statement on his Facebook page: “I earnestly commend the distinguished Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (may it rest in peace) for the double nomination of [Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful], the film that it proudly sent to represent our national cinema at the Oscars party. Now I hope that the film’s producers and distributors would lend a print to the Mexican Academy for this year’s expensive celebration. Really.”30 Given Hernández’s success in international film circuits—for example, the Berlin Film Festival, the Toronto International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival—his words need to be read as a passionate challenge to what he understands to be the Mexican Academy’s privileging of artistic normativity. (To an extent, Hernández’s words are also reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 bitter dispute with the Spanish Film Academy over voting procedures, which lead to his and his brother’s departure. Seven year later, however, both Pedro and Agustín rejoined the Spanish Film Academy.) Although the establishment of a niche market might have contributed to the loss of NQC’s original edge, it has also opened channels of distribution and exhibition for filmmakers like Hernández. The ever-growing global film festival circuit that privileges products generally categorized as art cinema has also helped Hernández find broader international audiences for his films. As a result, he has been able to share his cinematic visions of a world where queerness is an integral part of Mexico and its society. This Mexican queerness is grounded in quotidian life and recognizable settings—for example, cars, streets, apartments, pool halls, university campuses, and film theaters. As Hernández states in the final credits of Mil nubes de paz, “This is a Mexican film shot in El Popular Café, [at] the College of Sciences and Humanities’ eastern campus, in the markets of San Felipe and Unidad Piloto, in the STC Metro Pantilán terminal, and in many streets and

Figure 11.5. Película Mexicana

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houses of Mexico City.” Yet the ordinary events that take place in these locations are infused with the characters’ erotic desires, emotional longings, and existential yearnings. At key moments, Hernández provides cinematic renderings of the combination of emotions by aesthetically manipulating his texts through the creation of a corrugated temporality. This temporality not only helps convey a sense of queerness about the characters but also transforms the cinematic experience for audiences. Future avenues of exploration should continue investigating specific ways to contextualize discourses of queerness in the Latin American context. A fruitful possibility could be to explore how particular events might have shaped the construction of sexuality and gender. So, for example, I wonder about how the legacies of torture and repression that emerged out of the Dirty War in Argentina provide a historical filter for partially grounding the queerness in the sexualities of Amalia (María Alche) in La niña santa (The Holy Girl; 2004) and la Vero (María Onetto) in La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman; 2008), both by Lucrecia Martel. In a similar way, the construction of atypical sexualities in the lead female characters of Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow; 2009) are intricately connected to violence that has been perpetrated against indigenous populations in Peru by the state as well as groups like the Shining Path.

Acknowledgments Research for this chapter was made possible, in part, by the support of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM). Tasha Oren, Joel Richter, and John Meier made up my first sounding board for the concept of corrugated time. Part of this project was presented at the 2012 Latin American Studies Association’s International Congress in San Francisco, California. I would like to thank the other members of the Transnational Latin American Cinema and Television panel: Luisela Alvaray, Yeidy M. Rivero, Dolores Tierney, and Cristina Venegas. My deepest gratitude goes to Tami Williams and Elena Gorfinkel for the original invitation to participate both in the World Cinema, Global Networks conference at UWM and the anthology that serves as its afterlife. Their support, humor, intelligence, and friendship through the years have been a constant source of joy, solace, and strength. Thanks also to Joel Román Mendías and Michael D’Amodio, who graciously hosted me during the final writing stage of this chapter. Finally, I would like to dedicate this chapter to my dear friend and colleague Sergio de la Mora. Rereading his book Cinemachismo reminded me of how much our field and the world at large need thoughtful, engaging, and pleasurable scholarly works with clear political and cultural agendas. ¡Gracias, Sergio!

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Notes 1. Ana M. López, “A Cinema for the Continent,” in The Mexican Cinema Project, ed. Chon A.

Noriega and Steven Ricci (Los Angeles: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 1994), 11.

2. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi.

3. An obvious point of departure would be B. Ruby Rich, “Homo Pomo: The New Queer

Cinema,” in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 164–174. 4. B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 15. 5. B. Ruby Rich, “Queer and Present Danger,” Sight & Sound 10, no. 3 (March 2000): 22. 6. B. Ruby Rich, “The New Homosexual Film Festivals,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 621. 7. In 1991, Rich published her influential essay “An/Other View of New Latin American Cinema,” Iris13 (1991): 5–27, in which she proposes a particular genealogy of the new Latin American cinema to examine the role that women directors had in the Americas during the 1980s. 8. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 35. 9. Appadurai, 35. 10. Appadurai, 35–36. 11. Appadurai, 36. 12. Michael Guillén, “Sergio de la Mora Pays Tribute to Julián Hernández,” Twitchfilm.net, February 21, 2009, http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/2009-san-diego-latino-film-festivalsergio -de-la-mora-pays-tribute-to-julian/. 13. Tomás Almaguer, “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 257. 14. Almaguer, 257. 15. Almaguer, 257. 16. Almaguer, 258. 17. Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 5. 18. De la Mora, 7. 19. De la Mora, 132. 20. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Ciudad de  México: Fondo de  la  Cultura Económica, 1950). 21. Quoted in Guillén, “Sergio de la Mora.” 22. I would like to propose that Hernández’s films exemplify how productive dialogues among different cinematic discourses can be created in such a way that they are both national and international. As Paulo Antonio Paranaguá argues, the history of Latin American cinema needs to be apprehended in relation to cinematic practices in the United States and in Europe. This triangular relationship, which he argues goes beyond cinema to include Latin American culture in general, allows for a dialogical understanding of the transformations that Latin America cinematic practices have historically undergone without falling into binary logics such as cultural imperialism. See Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, “América latina, Europa y Estados Unidos: Relaciones triangulares en la historia del cine,” Journal of Film Preservation 62 (2001): 9–15. 23. Luis Bernardo Jaime Vázquez, “Hernández and the Prison of Desire,” El ojo que piensa: Revista virtual del cine iberomaericano (2002), accessed June  26, 2009, http://www .elojoquepiensa.cucsh.udg.mx/numero01.html.

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24. Andrew Darley, “I Am Happiness on Earth: An Interview with Julián Hernández,” Polari Magazine, 2014, accessed May  5, 2016, http://www.polarimagazine.com/interviews/ happiness-on-earth-an-interview-with-julian-hernandez/. 25. The use of main actors whose skin and facial features are more indigenous than “European looking” constitutes another way in which Hernández makes the queerness of his films Mexican. 26. Hernández creates similar types of spatiotemporal manipulations in his other films with different effects. For example, El cielo dividido includes a sequence where Gerardo (Miguel Ángel Hoppe) is anxiously waiting for his boyfriend, Jonás (Fernando Arroyo), at a bus station. This sequence has a different tone because both young men are reunited at the end of it. 27. Gerardo’s collapse at the end of the film is somewhat reminiscent of Fox’s demise in R. W. Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends. Yet Hernández provides a somewhat hopeful ending (partly because Gerardo does not commit suicide) to his film, while Fassbinder makes the end tragic and bleak. 28. The potential of queerness to transcend our world finds full articulation in Hernández’s Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo. In the film, Kieri ( Jorge Becerra) and Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) experience an undying love that reunites them in death in a different dimension. 29. Julián Hernández, “¡5 películas inscritas en la AMACC!,” Facebook post, January 26, 2011, https://www.facebook .com/permalink .php?story_fbid=150634804990147&id=589712216. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Spanish are mine. 30. Hernández.

12 • THE GANGSTER FILM AS WORLD CINEM A Jian Xu

What is world cinema? The question has been the subject of many discussions in the past, though by and large, the term remains vague in its popular usage. What fueled many past discussions was a general dissatisfaction with world cinema’s reference either to the sum total of national cinemas (which inevitably privileges the nation at the expense of other formations not defined by ethnic, geopolitical boundaries) or to non-Western cinemas as a whole (often as an antithesis of Hollywood cinema, resulting in a reductive binary approach). Out of the discussions, a new conception of world cinema does take shape, albeit mainly on a theoretical level: it posits the interconnectedness of cinematic practices beyond the national and continental boundaries, thus opening up the possibility of a cosmopolitan perspective for multifarious forms and styles beyond binaries or search for origins, recognizing instead border crossing, transculturation, and hybridity as necessary properties of filmmaking in the age of globalization.1 One obvious advantage of this new conception of world cinema is the potential solution it affords to the critical impasse in previous efforts to decenter Hollywood cinema. It is recognized that the hegemonic position of Hollywood cannot be conjured away by the coexistence of an alternative cinema. The usual way to define world cinema as non-Hollywood cinema is then, in Lúcia Nagib’s words, “restrictive and negative,” because the practical result is that “it unwittingly sanctions the American way of looking at the world, according to which Hollywood is the center and all other cinemas are the periphery,” and because “the American paradigm continues to prevail as a tool for its evaluation.”2 Among the efforts to correct this undesirable notion of world cinema is Dudley Andrew’s article “An Atlas of World Cinema” (2006), which aims to reconceptualize world cinema in terms of a set of different types of maps, “each providing a different 228

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orientation to unfamiliar terrain, bringing out different aspects, elements, and dimensions.”3 Andrew is using a metaphor to propose a way of material selection and structuring for building a course or compiling an anthology on world cinema, which requires diversity or even discreteness of contents that can still come together under some sort of unity. Hence “its essays and materials model a set of approaches, just as an atlas of maps opens up a continent to successive views: political, demographic, linguistic, topographical, meteorological, marine, historical.”4 Andrew’s atlas metaphor offers a promising way for conceiving a polycentric cinematic practice, though how this is to be done specifically is not self-evident, not even in Andrew’s subsequent explanation of each of those metaphorical aspects. For instance, under “linguistic maps,” Andrew suggests that we see classical Hollywood cinema as the Latin of the cinematic medium—“not spoken purely today,” even in its own country—whereas the cinemas of other continents and countries serve as vernaculars, which came into existence through a process of differentiation against the universally recognized classical language.5 Clearly, the relationship between Latin and vernaculars here still signifies a dichotomy between Hollywood and other cinemas of the world. For this reason, Lúcia Nagib criticizes Andrew while acknowledging the value of his approach: “Andrew’s method has the immediate merit of relativizing Hollywood’s importance as a mainstream cinema and showing how peaks of production, popularity and artistic input are attained in different times and places across the globe. However, the distinction between Hollywood and the rest of the world still reverberates in his approach when he qualifies world cinema as ‘foreign and unfamiliar’—something that sounds at odds with the highly mixed audiences of today’s film theatres and courses both in Europe and the US.”6 However, I want to suggest that there is a different way to understand Andrew’s figure of Latin versus vernaculars in “An Atlas of World Cinema.” Andrew derives from Franco Moretti’s essay “Conjectures on World Literature” the dialectics between center and periphery, which is not necessarily a problematic approach when applied to world cinema, depending on what conclusions or strategies one makes out of it. I believe that as long as the world’s cultural production is still governed by unequal relations of power, we should not refrain from talking about it. To deemphasize the cultural hegemony of Hollywood wouldn’t make that hegemony disappear. Moreover, a dialectical relationship is bound not only by opposition but also by mutual dependence, befitting such matters as cultural influence, borrowing, and transplanting—which always involves two-way traffic—and generating the dynamics of power’s ceaseless formation, transfer, shift, or decline. In his article, Andrew discusses what actually happened in the history of world cinema (when Hollywood was “unapologetically imperial, literally colonizing countries and continents”) as well as what is happening in contemporary times (“It is hard not to get

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behind music, genre, dance and custom, particularly when hundreds of millions of people celebrate exactly these things far from the clutches of Hollywood”).7 He is, in fact, critical about both and in favor of a more inclusionary world cinema. In the section covering “linguistic maps,” Andrew translates the dialectic of center and periphery into one of classical language and vernacular, which, though placing Hollywood temporarily prior to other national cinemas, is not privileging Hollywood in terms of either thematic or formal superiority. As vernaculars influence each other as much as they counterinfluence the classical language (which Andrew says is now more remembered than practiced), they don’t inevitably lead to hierarchies in aesthetic quality or social significance between center and periphery—or between Hollywood and the rest of the world. Instead, there will emerge a set of complicated interrelations of world filmmaking that, after half a century of uneven development and unequal exchange, lead to formations of multiple centers of film production and consumption on a global scale. These interrelations formative of multiple centers call for a geography of difference that encourages the interchange of ideas, images, and technology, facilitating flows of cinematic energy through different time zones and fostering a feeling of jetlag in the contemporary film experience. Time zones, jetlag, and flows are terms from the title of Andrew’s 2010 article, which masterfully adds historical temporality to the mapping of space in the atlas article.8 But in this newer article, global cinema and network are not positive concepts. They mark the last phase of world cinema, which shrinks the transnational space and reduces the difference needed for cinematic creativeness. Above all, the network (along with entropy) characteristic of this global cinema phase has almost saturated film production and distribution, siphoning off the feelings of décalage (shift) that Andrews believes is so elemental to film experience without offering anything existentially new. But in his chapter in the current volume, Andrew has obviously reevaluated networks: they are no longer the nemesis of the set of films he lovingly demonstrates to belong to the class of world cinema (e.g., The World and Once upon a Time in Anatolia); here the networks coexist with the twentieth-century maps to become the central metaphor of the twenty-first century. But Andrew recognizes the inadequacy of these horizontal concepts. Following André Bazin, he calls for a vertical method of geology to complement that of geography. Thus we have from Andrew a rather complex understanding of world cinema that may, I wish to argue, still be able to resist the global cinema he posits as currently impoverishing us of genuine film experience. I suggest we put Andrew’s linguistic map to the test and see if it yields a multicentered perspective essential to the new concept of world cinema I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. We may find an analytical model through which the ideas of atlas, Latin versus vernaculars, time zones and historical phases, jetlag, and networks can be concretized and their critical felicity examined. Since Moretti uses a literary genre,

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the modern novel, as his model, I suggest we too use a film genre. Given the fact that popular genres have posed difficulties for some previous projects aimed to challenge the hegemony of the world system that privileges Hollywood, I will examine one such popular genre: the gangster film. Besides being useful to the studies of how popular film genres (not just international art films) partake in world cinema, I hope that through some specific instances of border crossing, transculturation, and hybridization, it will become clear that the concept of world cinema can still hold its own in the face of globalization that threatens to supersede the geography of difference. It would be interesting to see how the history of world cinema can find its embodiment in the history of a film genre. The gangster film has had a notable history of border crossing and transculturation between national cinemas as a popular genre. It also has had many dynamic contacts with international art-film cultures and served as a carrier of modernist aspirations for technical innovation and hermeneutic depth. The broad range of vernacular expressions it finally acquires as a result of those border crossings, cultural contacts, and transculturations stretch in both horizontal and vertical directions: it can be both a genre of plastic surfaces and a cinema of depth, adapting to differing social conditions and markets while delving into the most fundamental issues about the human condition. With these two qualities combined, the gangster film exemplifies some of the most outstanding characteristics of this newly envisioned world cinema. While Moretti’s modern novel originated in Europe, the gangster film originated in Hollywood and was already a distinctive genre in the 1930s, with a narrative pattern, iconography, character types, determinate themes, and so on. Although since the 1950s its generic language became unstable because of the genre’s diffusion and surface-structure change as well as its subsequent decline in the middle decades of the century—due in part to the enforcement of censorship in the 1940s—its deep structure held its own, which enabled its revival in the 1970s and 1980s. This revival, however, cost the purity of its generic language. As a system of convention, the genre became increasingly hard to define. Under the influence of the auteur theory, such directors as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and later Quentin Tarantino reinvented the generic codes with their personal visions, producing a set of vernaculars in the very metropole of the genre’s cultural geography. The diversity of the vernaculars has since increased in the heart of the metropolis, ranging from gangster epics like The Godfather (1972, 1974, and 1990) to what is now called the hip-hop gangsta film,9 calling into question from within the medium’s imperial center any prescriptive approach to a definition of the genre that will place it outside history. Away from the imperial center, even more significant changes have occurred since the American gangster film first traveled to the world. Since the 1950s, its generic form has been bent, hybridized, or parodied to fit the cultural needs

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of the local, but however it changes—insofar as it is recognizable as belonging to the genre—it harks back in some way to its classical origin. Unlike other popular film genres that have gone international, such as slapstick comedy, musical, or horror, the gangster film is not defined by types of emotion or sensation; it is very much a form determined by a range of meaning that can be specified—meaning in its classical expression pertaining most to the existential condition of modern cities, to the dislocation of ghettoized immigrants struggling to adapt to a harsh environment, to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, or to the myths of individual success propagated through the American dream. But the gangster film’s affective economy, though less bodily than that of horror or melodrama, can be rather complex. The pleasure it produces, according to some critics, is akin to that of tragedy, leading to a release of emotion not too different from catharsis.10 In fact, the genre’s complex affect is closely connected with a metaphorical power inherent in the genre, which functions as shorthand for a set of issues and problems that have always been the genre’s central concern. This affective-metaphoric dimension was significantly reinforced when the genre acquired the visual and narrative traits of film noir, thereby deepening the pervasive sense of doom and transforming it into an aesthetic property. From a historical materialist point of view, however, what makes the gangster film a popular genre in world cinema is the becoming global of the set of issues and problems represented in the genre through its form. This is different from the American western, for instance, which relies on mythic constructions to generate global referentiality. The most concrete example of the gangster film’s early border crossing as a mature form can be seen in the French film Rififi (1955). Jules Dassin, an American who directed such noir films as Naked City and Night and the City in the forties and fifties, was blacklisted as a sympathizer of the American Communist Party. Exiled to France, he made his first breakthrough in directing Rififi. Rififi could be seen as a perfect gangster film with a spellbinding noir texture. It contains all the themes and motifs of its American prototype: money, desire, success, greed, women, masculine pride, nightlife, crime, and the city, with the quick rise and the precipitate fall of the gangster hero. The story is set in downtown Paris, where behind the alluring facade of wealth and elegance lurk the back alleys and bystreets of the underworld, a fitting symbol of capitalist modernity. Dassin’s literal border crossing contours some similar border crossings in the genre. It helps us remember how, some fifteen years prior to his exile, Fritz Lang and a host of other German émigrés—musicians, writers, directors, actors, and producers—crossed multiple national borders to reach California, bringing German expressionism to Hollywood. This is an early instance of border crossing between art film and popular cinema that questions the purity of the genre’s classical language.

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Figure 12.1. Rififi’s noir-steeped imagery ( Jules Dassin, 1955).

Border crossings lead to transculturation, which gives rise to various local vernacular forms. To be sure, not all crossings and transculturation necessarily produce a vernacular form. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) and François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960), for instance, started as gangster films but ended up retaining so little of its convention that they transcend the generic template they initially adopted. But these are not failed transculturations. The gangster still performs an important narrative function, but instead of being the hero in his own genre, he serves to inscribe a broad existentialist ethos and perhaps also a phenomenological aesthetic in dialogue with Hollywood. This intertextual dialogue with Hollywood inspired the new German cinema and left its mark on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The American Soldier (1970). Fassbinder’s The American Soldier is a parody that pushes the gangster hero to the extremity of hard-boiled darkness in the underworld, only to find himself destroyed by the even darker forces on the side of the law. That is perhaps what Fassbinder meant when he said that he wanted to make films as wonderful and universal as those of Hollywood, but less hypocritical. It is interesting to note, however, that the noir-thick texture Fassbinder lavishly produced in homage to Hollywood crime films has deep roots in German cinema. The American Soldier contains narrative components and character types that jar with the genre’s convention. The unrequited love suffered tragically by the

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Figure 12.2. The chambermaid theatrically acts out an “antigenre” noir in The American

Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970).

chambermaid, for instance, disrupts the generic coding. As she tells a story of racial prejudice while Rick, our protagonist, and the call girl embrace behind her in bed, or when she stabs herself with a knife as the couple walk down the stairs, our attention is called to the transgressed boundaries of the genre as well as the rules of its fictionality. Such self-conscious gestures do find their way into many gangster films in world cinema. Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine (1993), for instance, deliberately undermines the audience’s habitual expectation of narrative action by distending the time of purposeless waiting as a group of gangsters are banished by their higher boss to an island to be killed. Instead of focusing on the central conflict, the film dwells on the trivial details of the gangsters’ daily living, such as waiting for the rain to fall so that they could wash themselves or the breakdown of the car necessitating their walk back for the other car to get it jump-started. As such details patiently build up, they augment the duration of time itself, the time of waiting, which has a strange poetry of its own—a lyrical quality under which violence can erupt at any moment. Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo (1996) is another example. It is a film set in postwar Vietnam, where slow economic recovery drives young people to crimes. Whereas it is not uncommon for a gangster film to depict how honest, hardworking people join gangs for a way out, it is rare to portray them retaining their goodness and eventually getting out

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of the gangs unscathed. If it were not for the gangster content, which contains almost every narrative action, Cyclo is arguably more of a bildung story in which the brother and sister undergo trials and tribulation to become mature. It could also be read as a national allegory, as it contains enough textual material for that subject to be foregrounded. These formally self-conscious films are, in a sense, deterritorialized vernaculars. They are not tied down to one national or local culture. Vertically, they are connected by the international art-film culture, and together, they serve as the mise-en-abyme of the genre’s semantic possibility.11 These films show that the relationship between Latin and vernaculars, which gives rise to interesting interactions and exchanges, do not always spell the relationship between center and periphery. To recognize that the gangster film originated in America, which subsequent international productions of the genre’s films often reference, does not in any way make these international productions secondary. The deterritorialized vernaculars transcended many patterns of thought and imagery that made the classical form meaningful, and their vertical probings for hermeneutic depth made them inclined to transgress what people accepted to be the genre’s convention. Of course, the majority of the gangster films produced throughout the world are not deterritorialized vernaculars. Many of them are rooted in a localized, popular culture. Instead of intentional condensation of sense, such films develop extensional properties of reference that integrate the genre’s thematic and formal significance with the social life of the local. A good example of this can be seen in the Hindi film Satya (1998). Satya has a conventional gangster story line that contains every prescripted action, including the romantic relationship between Satya, the main character, and his girlfriend, Vidya, as she obviously stands for the normal society to which the gangster hero can never return. The utopian nature of their romantic relationship, through its tragic though inevitable failure, serves only to reinforce some of the generic codes long held to be essential. What is remarkable about Satya’s film form is its integration of the film narrative with the lyrical moments of singing and dancing, which apparently disrupt action and stop time. These lyrical moments are fairly long, and their richness may not be readily evident, as the unsubtitled lyrics keep their full meaning away from an outsider of India’s pop culture. In fact, they serve the themes, characterization, and plot in significant ways: they reveal the psychological makeup or the moral qualities of the characters; they provide important catalytic materials for what Roland Barthes calls cardinal events, thus preparing for the momentum of the ensuing narrative; and they deepen the themes by highlighting the sanctity of human life and the beauty of a love relationship soon to be destroyed. Such a Bollywood production as Satya easily stretches over three hours with an intermission for snacks and socializing, yet it is nothing like an auteurist tour de force like Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America (1984). For Satya’s

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Figure 12.3. Musical episodes in Satya (Ram Gopal Varma, 1998) break no rule of popu-

lar Hindi cinema.

Indian audience, the intermingling of the gangster narrative with their traditional entertainment medium breaks no rule. There is nothing arbitrary in the discontinuity between the two forms. Obviously, there is a new contract drawn between filmmaker and audience, a negotiated agreement that authorizes the cultural rooting of the gangster film in the Bollywood soil. Satya is the result of a fruitful horizontal cultural contact that brings about the hybridization of its outer form. Such a localized hybrid form is also an international success, but its vernacular popularity no longer owes allegiance to Hollywood, just as American film noir is no longer German. Like Bollywood, Japan’s film industry is yet another center of film production in its own right, its many interactions, exchanges, and transculturations with Hollywood notwithstanding. In the gangster films produced in Japan, we can find a subtler case of hybridization, or a more ambiguous horizontal interrelation with Hollywood. As many would believe, Japan has its own tradition of the gangster genre in the yakuza film, which can claim a hundred-year-long history. But in fact, it was only in the 1970s that yakuza films began to come close to the gangster genre under discussion here. In its traditional form, the yakuza film invariably portrays its hero as an honorable man, though often a wandering outlaw, who fought to preserve traditional values of loyalty and selflessness. A “film of a chivalrous nature,” the values it celebrates resemble those of the American westerns rather than those of the gangster film. It thrives on the opposing values between social obligation and personal inclination.12 But rapid changes in postwar Japan eventually made the genre’s formula unpopular. After its golden age in the 1960s, the yakuza film declined along with the Japanese film

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industry. Among the main reasons for the industry’s decline was its inability to keep pace with the rapid social changes and compete with the American movies that became dominant in the world market. The few available studies on the subject seem all to confirm that it was Kinji Fukasaku who single-handedly revived the genre in the 1970s. It was Fukasaku who eliminated the outdated allegorical conflict between good and evil and the superhero yakuza, who could always be counted on to help good prevail. With investigations into several yakuza organizations himself, Fukasaku adapted a novelist’s reworking of a yakuza’s memoir into a five-film series titled Battles without Honor and Humanity (1973).13 Although the importance of this work to the yakuza film is comparable to that of The Godfather to the American gangster film, it actually marks the beginning of the Japanese gangster film. Historians of Japanese cinema dutifully mention the social factor: successful reconstruction of Japan’s capitalist economy brought about a rising tide of gangsterism with no code of honor. It seems that an advanced economy bred similar conditions in which classical American gangster films thrived. The influence of the American gangster film, which was readily available in Japanese theatres then and likely helped Fukasaku make his breakthrough, is not mentioned. But starting with his Battles without Honor and Humanity, the yakuza film acquired many characteristics of the gangster film. The process of hybridization is invisible because it occurs in the genre’s inner form. As unconscious borrowings that happen among all cultures, they merge into local cultures later. Auteurist bias may well be another reason film scholarship has noted no significant processes of hybridization in the yakuza film, as it often leaves the popular genre in the cold. But whatever the American influence, the yakuza film is obviously not American. This is because the set of culturally shared patterns of thought that give it meaning is distinctively Japanese. If the American gangster film derived its most fundamental structuring of thought from Puritanism, social Darwinism, and the Horatio Alger myth, as Edward Mitchell has noted,14 the yakuza film may at most have had some indirect influence from the welter of unresolved contradictions that gives the American gangster film its ambivalent or ambiguous attitude toward justice, freedom, and the sources of good and evil. The yakuza film has relied on Japan’s own traditional beliefs and values for the sense of contradiction that besets human desire, will, responsibility, or obligation and developed different convictions about good and evil or held a set of dissimilar attitudes toward the modern city, family, society, gender relations, violence, law and order, and so on. It has indeed traveled a very long distance from those chivalrous tales to the kind of high-level psychological abstraction found in, say, Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (1999) or Ichi the Killer (2001). One cannot help being struck by the utmost sense of despair in the obscene violence that suffuses some of Japan’s

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contemporary gangster films. Whatever “vernacular modernism” they may be, they are different from the American kind. In them, environmental conditions seem no longer the main causes of human misery; it is often the inhuman abyss inherent in the human—the utterly irrational cruelty in the rational mind—that serves as the source of wickedness and depravity. Some of Tarantino’s works, for instance, are certainly influenced by such features of irrational violence, annulling the deep-seated notion of gangsters’ undertaking as pure business (“It’s nothing personal, just business,” as the classical gangster would say to one of his opponents or associates whom he is about to kill.) In Hong Kong gangster films, the hybridization of both the outer and the inner forms can be traced. Clearly influenced first by the Latin of the genre, Shanghai cinema bequeathed to Hong Kong the legacy of representing urban modernity as well as its diseases after the communists took Shanghai in 1949. The gangster film finds a place in the new city of Hong Kong by being a commodity that can wear several hats at the same time. It is a hard-boiled thriller mingled with tender romance, a screwball comedy mixed with masterly kung fu fights, or a schmaltzy melodrama interspersed with tragic grandeur. This impurity of affect and form is the result of hybridization at the outer form. The merging of the local taste and style into the genre’s inner form is far subtler, but in such a gangster classic as A Better Tomorrow (1986), the moral superiority of the gangster hero—who is ever ready to sacrifice himself to uphold loyalty and obligation to his father’s will, brother’s career interest, and friends’ future—is still observable. The conflict between good and evil, outgrown in the yakuza film some fifteen years ago,

Figure 12.4. The watery graveyard in which the gangsters bury their dead in Dead or Alive

(Takashi Miike, 1999).

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still functions here as the basis of a melodramatic appeal. The gangster’s moral principle, self-sacrifice, loyalty, desire to reform through obeying the law; the authority figure of the father; and the melodrama (both as affect and as narrative structure) are all foreign to the American gangster film but not to those produced in many other countries where traditional popular cultures survive. Through such directors as John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, who brought many of these formal “excesses” to Hollywood, the vernacular of Hong Kong cinema—already described by some critics as more Hollywood than Hollywood—has counterinfluenced Hollywood. The contributions made by such localized singularities have enriched and intensified the metaphorical power of the gangster genre as a whole—the power to interpret and comment on the social historical processes that are still driving many enterprising individuals to live outside society and law. The genre’s metaphorical capacity to engage the issues and problems brought about by the onset of capitalist modernity can in part be seen in its formal flexibility, which allows those issues and problems a broad range of inflection and refraction. Although the gangster film is mostly commercially produced, it often carries a force of critical negation, subversive of the very idea of universal modernity through capitalism. The Brazilian film City of God (2002), for instance, depicts how a Rio favela housing project brought about a politics of bare life and violently separated an entire segment of the population from civic society. It provocatively shows how the neoliberal engineering of biopower subjected lower-class Brazilians to violent drug gangs and police brutality. The Russian film Tycoon (Oligarch; Pavel Longine, 2002) returns to the genre’s classical preoccupation with the central dilemma of a capitalist democracy—the dilemma between individual and society—and uses it to present a series of problems within the Russian context. The film interprets Russia’s recent history of transition to capitalism by tying it to organized crime. On top of the semantic and syntactic elements of the gangster genre, the film draws on the narrative structure of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to complicate the relationship between past and present. Its hero’s survival of betrayal and murder and his final resolve to take on the Kremlin in a battle for power obviously rewrites the gangster genre’s formula.15 The need to find solution for problems in Russia’s perestroika has led the film to put a positive spin on the American dream. The film is, of course, a mytho-metaphor for Russia’s dependence on its individualist entrepreneurs for the nation’s future. Criminals though they undoubtedly are, they are represented as far more preferable to the political aristocrats whose greed for money and power serves only to frustrate the nation’s best effort to revitalize the economy. I hope that the samples I provide not only evince the necessary perspective of a geography of difference complemented by a geology of depth but also capture the sense of décalage, or jetlag, that Andrew thinks is at the heart of the film medium. Whereas watching any of these films requires a jump to a different time

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Figure 12.5. In Tycoon, the entrepreneur-gangster is clearly a hero in Russia’s transition to

capitalism (Pavel Lungin, 2002).

zone and a different city (Munich, Hanoi, Moscow, Mumbai, Paris, and Tokyo), what is interesting is that in addition to Andrew’s notion of the global factors that make today’s network—the development of digital technologies, the increase of international cooperation, the connection between film festivals, and above all perhaps, the flows of capital and personnel on an unprecedented scale—there is the flow of the creative forces of a film genre that has always been linking the pockets of film production and consumption in a quiet, unassuming fashion. If we are not partial to certain ideas of critical cinema but open to a phenomenological perspective of cinema as the very expression of the flow of life itself, then the migration and transculturation of a genre from continent to continent to form a multicentered network should also be an important story of the film medium, which is highly worthy of scholarly attention. But the story of a film genre’s global network must be preceded by that of a structure that is capable of identifying a group of genre films as belonging to each other. The formation of a structure then necessitates a center. As Derrida tells us, “The center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.”16 The classical film codes of Hollywood necessarily provided a center for the gangster film for almost half a century. There is much in the strength of the American gangster prototype that enabled it to travel far and wide and thrust its roots into the soil of many other continents. But Derrida also tells us, “The center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible.”17 Here, I want to invoke Thomas Schatz’s idea of a film

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genre as having both a dynamic surface structure and a static deep structure to help us understand Derrida’s seemingly contradictory notion of a center that opens up and closes off play.18 If Derrida’s center is close to the static deep structure of a film genre proposed by Schatz, it then provides a genre a relatively stable identity by giving it a meaningful narrative system based on spectators’ shared knowledge of rules (Schatz compares it at one point to la langue in Saussure’s linguistics). It thus ensures the genre’s cultural significance. At the same time, the center also makes possible a dynamic surface structure, which permits the play (Saussure’s la parole, consisting of an unlimited range of individual utterances) of each genre film.19 But the play of each genre film always exceeds what the center permits, producing many different vernaculars. The accumulation of those playful vernaculars will eventually change the shape of the static deep structure and its classical center. In a sense, the deep structure itself is formed by the accumulated perceptual experience of the viewers, which has gradually hardened into rules. This dynamic openness that all genre films are capable of is what makes a film genre evolve. Thus the dichotomy between center and periphery, between Latin and vernacular—understood in these dynamic terms between film genre and genre films—would not simply serve to solidify a binary opposition. On the contrary, our study suggests that it can be a necessary first step toward a dialectic relationship leading to a polycentric world cinema. The gangster film, nourished by both art film and popular cultures elsewhere, and through the processes of border crossing and transculturation, has made dramatic expansions beyond the center of its origin and produced the vernaculars that eventually changed the center. The genre now requires a structure much larger and more extensive than a single national cinema, one with multiple interrelated centers. It is time, therefore, to unthink the gangster film as an American genre and to think of it seriously as a genre of world cinema—and perhaps also, I suggest, to think of the history of the gangster film as embodying the fundamental logic of the history of world cinema. To continue to place it within a single center would be, again in Derrida’s words, a nostalgic “reduction of the structurality of structure,” or an attempt “to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play.”20 In the final analysis, however, what has given the genre so much expressive vitality and staying power is the alienating process of the capitalist system and the way that process has brought forth, on a planetary scale, an urban sprawl in conjunction with a mode of life dominated by exchange value. With its accumulated capital and technological concentration, Hollywood has been the symbol of the capitalist metropolitan center, which expands its influence to as many peripheries as possible. Yet what it produced in the classical form of the gangster film is not ultimately universal. This is because the image of capitalism emanating from an industrialized metropolitan center that is ideologically engaged

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elsewhere in order for its capital to flow unimpeded is no longer a dominant one. It is being replaced by a world picture of multinational capitalism developing in a decentered network in which ideology becomes secondary to the generation of new capital and the opening of new markets. Since the movement of world capitalism is marked by uneven development, the genre is compelled to develop different story forms to address the diversity of lived experience. Hence the diversity of the vernacular forms of gangster films in the world. But the time may have again run ahead of our effort at conceptual renewal: as transnational capital moves to control the world’s economy in its final stage of development, the problems and issues that the genre is concerned about have become ideologically more complex and morally more ambiguous than ever, but perhaps not so much in what we call “developed” postindustrial countries. There is reason to believe that the genre will play a vital role in the public imagination in those “developing” countries or “emerging” economies where the experience of privatization and corporatization of national economies is still traumatic. In this sense, it is difficult to anticipate what future mutations the gangster film may undergo. It may retain much of its appeal in the postindustrial countries by a predominantly aesthetic-technological sophistication while losing the vitality of social engagement it enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s, for the social and economic ground on which the genre was first invented is now shifting out of Hollywood. That is, of course, the historical materialist basis for the view that it is no accident that the history of the genre in some way parallels the history of world capitalism. That is also why the genre, to neoliberal complacency about universal progress through capitalist democracy, seems always an embarrassing allegory.

Notes 1. For a general statement of the position, see Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, “Sit-

uating World Cinema as a Theoretical Problem,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 1–15. 2. Lúcia Nagib, “Toward a Positive Definition of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema, ed. Dennison and Lim, 30, 31. 3. Dudley Andrew, “An Atlas of World Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema, ed. Dennison and Lim, 19. 4. Andrew, 20. 5. Andrew, 23. Andrew derives the notion of the vernacular from Miriam Hansen’s “vernacular modernism,” which refers in her work to classical Hollywood cinema. But Andrew uses the word to refer to non-Hollywood cinemas in difference to the Latin of the classical medium. 6. Nagib, “Toward a Positive Definition,” 33. 7. Andrew, “Atlas of World Cinema,” 23, 27. 8. Dudley Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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9. Despite The Godfather’s monumental significance to the genre, it is still a vernacular

against the genre’s classical form shaped by such films as Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), and The Public Enemy (1931). 10. The earliest (perhaps also the best-known) study of the gangster film as modern tragedy is Robert Warshow’s “The Gangster as the Tragic Hero” (1948), in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 127–133. 11. There is another sense in which the making of Cyclo is a deterritorialized event. The film is in Vietnamese and set in Hanoi, but the director, Tran Anh Hung, grew up in France, and the film’s funding and postproduction is certainly French as well. The film is well received in China partly because the main gangster character is played by Liang Chaowei, a well-known Chinese actor. Such international cooperation is certainly on the increase, with less and less attention paid to the genre’s national identity as well as the classical format it draws upon or transgresses. 12. See Keiko Iwai McDonald, “The Yakuza Film: An Introduction,” in Framing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, ed. Arthur Nolletti Jr. and David Desser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 165–192. 13. See Keiko Iwai McDonald, “Kinji Fukasaku: An Introduction,” Film Criticism, no.  1 (1983): 20–32. 14. Edward Mitchell, “Apes and Essences: Some Sources of Significance in the American Gangster Film,” in Film Genre Reader, II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 203–212. 15. The formula that stipulates the gangster’s inevitable fall. 16. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279. 17. Derrida, 279. 18. Thomas Schatz, “Film Genre and Genre Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 691–702. 19. Schatz, 691–702. For Schatz’s use of Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole, see p. 693. 20. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279.

EPILOGUE 24 FRAMES Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema Ta mi W illi a ms

Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames (2017), the final film of the late master Iranian director (1940–2016), had its world premiere at the seventieth Cannes Film Festival in May 2017, a century after the consolidation of the medium as an industrial practice and ninety years after its standardization at twenty-four frames per second.1 A stunning meditation on cinema, nature, technology, censorship, life, death, love, and loss, and the final adieu of a celebrated artist—an accomplished photographer and poet, designer, illustrator, and painter and an iconic filmmaker, writer and/or director of more than forty films—the title is a vestige of the era of the film strip, which, before the digital age, once seemed to be its eternal material form.2

What Global Cinema Is Kiarostami’s 24 Frames is a pivot point for cinema. Eluding easy categorization as narrative, documentary, fiction, live, animated, photographic, or CGI, it contains all of these in some measure.3 Mobile and immobile, abstract and political, local and global, immersive and contemplative, the film is capacious, experimental, and interactive in its form. The film functions in many ways as an open text, a site of many networks: geopolitical, aesthetic, media archaeological, geological, and economic. It connects to the works of this volume in its relation 244

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Figure E.1. A still of a window, a vignette from 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017).

to global film history, film festival culture, and as a work that is in some regards unfinished—with the premature passing of its director, a global cinema icon—in its position and timeless vision in relation to an unknown future. Resonating with the radical immobility of his compatriots’ This Is Not a Film (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, 2011), shot under house arrest on an iPhone and DV-cam (see Andrew in this volume), Kiarostami’s 24 Frames is at once a filmmaker’s film and a spectator’s film, a film of the moment to be experienced in the moment.4 A unique artistic vision shattering myriad production constraints, giving us a geotemporal experience that only the cinema can provide, it is also, like the best films for Kiarostami, one that truly “start[s] in the audience’s mind after leaving the theater.”5 What Kiarostami leaves behind is a series of still photographs, culled from life and nature over a forty-year period, mostly by the filmmaker himself, and animated over three years (with the assistance of Ali Kamali) in an editing process completed by his son Ahmad.6 Each frame, conceived from the fixed point of view of a still photograph, yet extensively manipulated on a computer before being projected for moving image audiences/spectators, tells the story of cinema’s filmic past and its digital future. Constructed around a literal frame, natural or manmade, each image serves as both a window and mirror for its viewers’ reflections, approaching something consonant with the politics of a “direct” or “pure” cinema.7 Weaving together a rich tapestry or network of film historical references, its slow, affective, and contemplative structure sings a hymn to the creative liberties and power of cinema in the face of political repression and the constraints and struggles that continue to mark our current political climate in a time of increased nationalisms, border restrictions, and the epic (dis)location of migrants and refugees. Likened by some critics to an installation piece (akin to his five-part film Five, 2004, dedicated to Ozu), 24 Frames is pure cinema.8 Each image, in its stillness and its movement, insists on being experienced in its full cinematic duration.

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Composed of twenty-four static shots or segments, each one four and a half minutes in length, shown over close to two hours (114 minutes), the film provides a view through twenty-four literal frames, natural or man-made, playing out the medium’s eternal ballet between realism and formativism and emphasizing its cinematicity.9 Each frame (or view onto a scene) harkens back to the history of the medium in its materiality and to its ontological or essential characteristics: it reminds us of what film is by using (technologically) what it is not. And through its digitally animated photography, it gives us what cinema is in its very essence.10 Relatively wordless and playful, like some silent-era precursors (and almost without actors, story, and décor), it gives us the essentials of cinema, life with its lines and forms, in movement and rhythm.11 If, as Godard once said, cinema is life at twenty-four frames per second, Kiarostami gives us twenty-four literalized frames of an insistent duration, each animated still frame a poetic and allegorical reflection on cinema and life.

Past and Future Created and viewed from a fixed vantage point, 24 Frames is an intimate visual dialogue between the artist/creator and spectator. Unconstrained by narrative considerations, it is a film that accommodates current geopolitical uncertainty as a harbinger of global cinema in an age of networks, a vessel equipped to bear whatever the future may bring. It marks what came before and gestures to what will come after. Like avant-garde works before it, it acknowledges its intermedial past while, in its abstraction and openness as a text, laying the terrain for new cartographies, new histories and identifications, new subjectivities and kinships, and new forms of cinema.

Regarding 24 Frames Redolent of Plato’s cave, the film opens with the primordial evocations of a snow globe—as if captured through a camera obscura or a magic lantern slide show soon to turn tableau vivant—greeting the spectator with stillness and then the subtle and gradual movement of smoke rising, snowflakes falling, and birds and other animals (horizontally or diagonally) crossing the frame. The object of (or backdrop for) the layered animation, a still frame of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s iconic painting The Hunters in the Snow (or The Return of the Hunters, 1565)— one of a series of twelve panels or landscape paintings that depict different months of the year—signals the film’s multimedia approach while also introducing a theme dear to Kiarostami: the cyclical nature of change. Kiarostami’s son Ahmad elucidates his father’s approach to representing borders and geopolitics (revolution, war, other social issues): “His nature is of trees,

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not streets. Street names change when a revolution happens, but trees live the same way: they start having leaves in spring, fruit in summer, shed leaves in fall, sleep in winter, no matter who is in charge.”12 At first, 24 Frames aptly entrances us with its evocative vignettes of winter, a season of meditation and reflection holding a promise of renewal. In its second image, a car window opens onto a fixed snow scene with horses dancing, a joyful meeting of nature and technology. We are decidedly in the world of cinema, yet a cinema that foregrounds its own staging or construction, bringing our attention to our own ephemerality amid our heedless assaults on nature, despite a fancied boundless perseverance. A third scene disorients us with defamiliarizing imagery (cows on a beach rendered via green screen), combining realist elements via formativist effects reminiscent of an early Méliès film. Moving forward with a simple reflective and nostalgic form (scenes 4–12)—and using the artful frame of a balustrade, the planetary flow of ocean waves, small boats, and patterns of birds in flight—24 Frames invites us on a historical journey, from the pre- and early cinema of the late nineteenth century (Marey; Muybridge; Edison’s first studio, the Black Maria, 1893; Lumière; Méliès) to the 1920s avant-gardes, including Soviet montage (Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, 1925; Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1929); and from a 1930s to 1940s aesthetic realist use of off-screen space (Renoir, Welles, Rossellini) to the 1960s direct cinema and the structuralist films of the North American avant-garde (especially Snow’s Wavelength, 1967, a forty-five-minute, tension-producing zoom in through the window of a highrise loft, and La Région Central, 1971, a three-hour kaleidoscopic, rhythmic, and transcendental survey of a barren alpine landscape). Throughout these scenes and into its second half (scenes 13–24), the film delights in the semiotic play of sound and image, often evoking alternate temporalities of nature: a cave, a tumbleweed blowing, animals copulating, rain falling, snow tumbling, a sheepdog corralling, wolves howling, a house with a window, wayfaring pigeons, swallows. Kiarostami once joked that he became a filmmaker because he was a bad painter.13 In these frames or variations on a theme, as in the modernist abstraction of Antonioni (Rhodes) and the urbanism of Ruttmann (Guido) and Jia (Tweedie) discussed in this collection, we already have all the drama of cinema. If as Godard said, “All you need is a girl and a gun,” Kiarostami gives us that as well: deer, birds, and the sound of gunshots; a road traversing a painterly landscape, more cows, birds, trees, and passing clouds; a beach, a dog, a snow scene—we are given sex and death, narrative conflict and resolution, and impressions of a rebirth. Yet amid debates on the Anthropocene, Kiarostami’s film—which decenters the human, appearing in only two scenes—forges a new path and shows that we can still think creatively and productively about global politics and the future of a global cinema and its stakes.14 The penultimate sequence, the sound of a chainsaw felling trees and the arch that frames our

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view, spurs us to reflect on the continued environmental destruction and man’s impact on global ecology. (The high framing of the shot further elides geotemporal specificity by literally decentering—through off-screen framing—both the human and the terrain beneath.) In the last of Kiarostami’s twenty-four frames (accompanied by A. L. Weber’s song “Love Never Dies”), we return to window, a winter snowfall, a desk with a computer editing suite, the closing kiss of a Hollywood film (The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler, 1946)—a farewell, perhaps, from a master and icon of global cinema, Abbas Kiarostami—and finally a view of sleeping woman, perhaps the spectator herself, caught between life and a dream. Underscoring the film’s status as a digital composition, the concluding vignette is also a final embrace of the constructed or “human-made” nature of the photographic and cinematic image that characterizes Kiarostami’s oeuvre.15 As in his earlier films, 24 Frames remains both deeply humanist and inherently political in its reflexivity, offering us an expansive vista for reflection on cinema and our interconnectedness in an age of global networks.

Global Cinema in an Age of Networks In its rich compositing, 24 Frames—like Matisse’s colorful collages cut from paper at the end of his life and the chapters in this book—reminds us that global cinema is always about creating intersections and interconnections. From its intermingling of genres and modes and its excavation and redrawing of the parameters of cinematic space, time, and gesture (cf. Martin’s “Frame”), Kiarostami’s film affirms its affinities with early, classic, and postwar modernist films (Dulac, Ozu, Marker, Antonioni, Akerman) and its kinship with other innovative contemporary and contemplative filmmakers (some discussed in this volume, such as Apichatpong, Ceylan, Jia, Tarr, Tsai, and Hernández). While paying homage to the past and the present, it also sparks questions about the future of cinema. With the departure of Kiarostami along with other iconic and radical cineastes (Akerman, Marker), what does it mean to make films in a time of losses? How do we negotiate these losses? In an era of neoliberal politics amid the rise of extremist right-wing populism, and in the wake of fluctuations of asymmetrical state and nonstate powers, dialectics of authoritarianism, and (de)centralization, what kinds of cinema can and will sustain us and provide the sphere of resistance and critique? Far from the idealism of cinema as an instrument of human universality (see Guido’s critique, herein), what is the future of global cinema and global cinema culture? This collection traces different tendencies while framing the notion of global cinema in relation to its past and future. In light of Kiarostami’s significance to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century global cinema, the global festival circuit, and the embrace of digital film technologies and modes of image-making—but

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also in consideration of the current state of global politics—24 Frames is vital to understanding global cinema and its networks. In the film’s own reflections on the past and future of global cinema, we also see the uncertainty of cinema’s future in the current climate of instability and “fake news.” With what some critics call the “global turn,” 24 Frames points to the need for something new, urgent, and radical—and to simply how much we need cinema and global cinema networks.

Acknowledgments I would like to express my profound thanks to Ahmad Kiarostami for his overwhelming openness and generosity in responding to my queries about his father and 24 Frames. I am indebted to Adrian Martin, Mike Maggiore, Jennifer Peterson, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa for their invaluable conversations on the film, and to Liz Helfgott, editorial director at the Criterion Collection, for generously providing access to 24 Frames before the final printing of this chapter. (My first impressions of this film, which stayed with me through the seasons, were confirmed.) I am deeply grateful to Professor Hamid Naficy (Northwestern University) for his kind and generous collegiality (as a fellow UCLA critical studies film and TV PhD graduate) and for putting me in touch with Ahmad Kiarostami. I would like to dedicate this short epilogue to the memory of our colleague, my former UCLA professor, and a cherished mentor, Teshome H. Gabriel (1939–2010), who first introduced me to Kiarostami’s work and who taught me, like many of my UCLA colleagues (see Blasini, Alvaray in this volume), about the power of shared knowledge and shared love of cinema, culture, beauty and truth.

Notes 1. Known as “sound speed,” this frame rate became the new standard starting in 1927. 2. See Owen Gleiberman, “Cannes Film Review: 24 Frames,” Variety, May 23, 2017, http://

variety.com/2017/film/reviews/24-frames-review-abbas-kiarostami-1202441197/. A pioneer of the Iranian New Wave, Kiarostami was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Taste of Cherry in 1997. 3. Ahmad Kiarostami beautifully explains the intermediality of his father’s project: “24 Frames, in my mind, was the essence of his art. It was a juncture between poetry, photography, and cinema. It has all elements of photography he enjoyed, but has more room for creating a space.” Of the film’s creative digital inception, he says that his father “put together those shots from different parts of his photography, and created the space he had in mind. He was one of the least technical people (he could barely use a cell phone), but he knew what he wanted from technology to bring what he had in mind to life. Something that was not completely possible with real cinema.” Ahmad Kiarostami, email to the author, August 25, 2017. The lengthy passages from our correspondence constitute a parallel account of the filmmaker and his 24 Frames. In a chapter on interconnections and networks, they seemed too precious not to include here.

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4. The cineaste’s son affirms, “Generally speaking, he didn’t make films thinking about the

audience or revenue or any of that, but he made this film truly for himself.” Kiarostami, email to the author. 5. Noted by Kiarostami, email to the author. 6. Along with additional elements sourced from the internet, these images were animated by Kiarostami in close collaboration with Ali Kamali. Ahmad, his son, worked on the film’s completion for about five months to get it ready for Cannes. Kiarostami, email to the author. 7. Ahmad Kiarostami elucidates his father’s investment in digital filming, revealing a suggestive approach close to that of “direct” or “pure” cinema: “He started finding . . . freedom in technology many years ago . . . when he went to Africa to ‘take notes’ for his documentary, ABC Africa, with a primitive digital camera. Later on, he decided to use those ‘(video) notes’ as the main material for his film. It liberated him from having a crew. Later on, he used that in his film 10, and then Five (which is the closest film he has done to 24 Frames). Digital technology was a tool he used to eliminate a lot of things from the process to get to a more pure form of cinema.” Kiarostami, email to the author. 8. Kiarostami’s wordless film Five, shot on the northern shore of Iran on the Caspian Sea, is composed of five long takes of minutes minutes in length. 9. For more on the director’s life and films and on the realist/formalist dichotomy in his work, see Gilberto Perez, “History Lessons,” in The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 260–272; Alberto Elena, Abbas Kiarostami, vol. 58 (Naples: Guida Editori, 2002); and the beautiful expanded second edition of Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, vol. 143, expanded 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). For more on 24 Frames, see Imogen Sara Smith’s recent essay, “In Our Time: Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames,” Film Comment, February 6, 2018, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/24-frames/. 10. See Dudley Andrew’s exploration of cinema’s phenomenological ascendance in his book What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010). 11. See Germaine Dulac, Ecrits sur le cinéma: 1919–1937 (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 2018 [1994]). 12. Kiarostami, email to the author. 13. His son Ahmad sheds light on the freedom his father felt as photographer: “My father . . . jokingly said that he became a filmmaker because he was a bad painter. But he was a great photographer, and in recent years he said, more than a few times, that he enjoyed photography more than making films. He was getting more and more tired of storytelling in the normal sense, and all other limitations that came with making films. In his photos, he could tell a story without getting stuck in stories and structures, and he didn’t have to deal with producers, budget, etc.” Kiarostami, email to the author. 14. For debates on the notion of the Anthropocene and cinema, see Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 15. Putting his father’s digital compositing in perspective, Ahmad Kiarostami notes, In his films, almost all shots were “manmade.” The famous shot in Where Is My Friend’s Home? [1987], that hill with a tree on top of it and the zigzag path, was completely manmade. There was no path there. He brought a group of kids to walk up and down for several days to create that path. There was a very small tree on top of that hill, and he added a lot of leaves to it to make it a big tree. Isn’t that a manmade shot? This time, he used computer to make the composition he had in mind, but in essence, it is no different than that shot in Where Is My Friend’s Home? (and many other shots in his films). (Kiarostami, email to the author)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book originated from an international conference, World Cinema, Global Networks, held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM) in April 27– 28, 2012, and sponsored by the Center for International Education (CIE). The work for the conference and this subsequent collection was also supported by UWM CIE Global Studies Fellowships (2012–2013). The volume was also made possible by support from UC Santa Barbara Carsey-Wolf Center. The editors would like to thank the contributors for their fantastic essays and their patience and perseverance as this project moved toward publication. Many UWM colleagues, staff, and students made this book possible. We would like to thank A. Aneesh, Erica Bornstein, Ingrid Jordt, Lisa Silverman, and Natasha Borges Sugiyama for their inspiration and early conversations about globalization and networks. The CIE Center staff, particularly Mark Brand, Tracy Buss, and Eric Herhuth, helped make the event run smoothly. Our friend Joel Richter lent his aesthetic sense for the program design. We would also like to thank all of the conference participants and interlocutors—particularly Nataša Ďurovičová, Neepa Majumdar, Hamid Naficy, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Bhaskar Sarkar—for their lively conversations and contributions to the event and its afterlife. Our deepest gratitude goes to our longtime colleague and center director, Patrice Petro, for her leadership and insight in coorganizing the conference, her guidance in preparing this collection, and her boundless generosity, support, and friendship. We also give thanks to the editors of the UC Santa Barbara Carsey-Wolf Center Media Matters series, Petro and Christina Venegas, for their enthusiasm for this project. We would like to express our utmost appreciation to Jennifer Blanc-Tal and the entire Rutgers team as well as our excellent indexer, Angela Miccinello. Profound thanks are due to Leslie Mitchner for stewarding this book—her patience, encouragement, and assistance throughout were essential. Immense thanks are due to Timothy Barnard for translating Laurent Guido’s essay and to the Press for supporting this important work. We are also grateful to our UWM research and editorial assistant, Hugo Ljungbäck, for his invaluable time, care, and attention to detail in aiding the preparation of the manuscript. For their conversation, conviviality, hospitality, and humor, we also give our heartfelt thanks to our fabulous UWM film studies colleagues Tasha Oren, 251

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Acknowledgments

Andy Martin, Peter Paik, and particularly, Gilberto Blasini, whose exuberance is unmatched and whose laughter always sustains us. Elena Gorfinkel would like to thank Adrian Martin for his invitation to the World Cinema Now conference at Monash University in Melbourne in 2011, where some of the ideas for this volume percolated, as well as Jennifer Johung and Alex Pickett for their support and advice throughout. Tami Williams would like to thank Anika Wilson and Mark Porreca for their love and support as well as to honor her UCLA mentor, Teshome H. Gabriel (1939–2010), for his inspiration and critical insight into the power of the image and of cinema, as “intolerable gifts” that continually enacted and lived, always contain another.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Luisel a Alvar ay is an associate professor of Media and Cinema Studies at

DePaul University. As a Fulbright and an OAS scholar, she attended UCLA, where she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in critical studies in film and television. She specializes in Latin American cinema, transnational cinemas, cultural studies, documentary studies, and film historiography. Alvaray’s research has been published in Cinema Journal, Cultural Dynamics, Communication Teacher, Transnational Cinemas, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Film & History, Emergences, Objeto Visual (Caracas), Cinemais (Rio de Janeiro), and Film-Historia (Barcelona). She is also a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinemas, Latin American Melodrama, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World and has published two books in Spanish: A la luz del proyector: Itinerario de una espectadora (2002) and Las versiones fílmicas: Los discursos que se miran (1994).

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. Before moving to Yale in 2000, he taught for thirty years at the University of Iowa directing the dissertations of many illustrious film scholars. He began his career with three books commenting on film theory—including the biography of André Bazin, whose thought he continues to explore in What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (2010)—and the edited volumes Opening Bazin (2011) and A Companion to François Truffaut (2013). He also translated Bazin’s writings on the New Media of the 1950s. Andrew’s interest in aesthetics and hermeneutics led to Film in the Aura of Art (1984), and his fascination with French film and culture resulted in Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005), coauthored with Steven Ungar. Currently completing Encountering World Cinema, his teaching and research take up questions of World Cinema/ literature, such as translation and adaptation; issues in twentieth-century French intellectual life, especially theories of the image; and French cinema and its literary and philosophical relations. Gilberto M. Bl asini is an associate professor of English and director of the

Film Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His work has appeared in the anthologies The Latin American Road Movie (2016), Miradas al margen: Cine y subalternidad en América Latina y el Caribe (2008), Film Analysis: 253

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A Norton Reader (2013), Prospero’s Isles: The Presence of the Caribbean in the North American Imaginary (2004), and Visible Nations: Latin American Film and Video (2000) as well as in the journals Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Caribbean Studies, Centro: Journal for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Objeto Visual, and Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures. Along with Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, he moderates the Milwaukee chapter of the Cinema Club. Elena Gorfinkel is senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London.

She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017) and coeditor, with John David Rhodes, of Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011). Her writing has appeared in Screen, Discourse, Camera Obscura, Framework, Cinema Journal, World Picture, Jump Cut, INCITE, LOLA, Cineaste, Sight & Sound, and numerous edited collections.

L aurent Guido is a film historian and professor at the University of Lille. He was professor and chair at the University of Lausanne (2007–2014) and was notably invited to teach at Montreal, Paris-Nanterre, and Brussels. His work addresses the relations among cinema, music, and dance, focusing on rhythmic representations of bodily movement in modern mass culture and media. Most recent books and edited volumes include L’Age du  Rythme (2007; 2014), Aux sources du burlesque (2010, with L. Le Forestier), Rythmer/Rhythmize (Intermédialités 18, Fall 2010, with M. Cowan), and Between Still and Moving Images (2012, with O. Lugon). He is currently completing a book on Richard Wagner’s influence on film theory and history and a research project about dance in early cinema. Adrian Martin is an adjunct associate professor of Film and Screen Studies

at Monash University (Australia) and lives in Vilassar de Mar (Spain) as a freelance writer on the arts. He also makes video essays in collaboration with Cristina Álvarez López. He is the author of seven books, the most recent being Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (2014). He is coeditor of LOLA journal and of the book Movie Mutations (2003).

Peter Y. Paik is a Humanities Korea Professor at Yonsei University. He is the

author of From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (2010) and the coeditor of Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered (2008) and Debt: Ethics, the Environment, and the Economy (2013). He has written on the cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Situations, on the animé of Mamoru Ishii and Hiroyuki Okiura for Animation, and on contemporary horror cinema for Mimesis, Movies, and Media: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred. His other articles have appeared in Theory and Event, Postmodern Culture, the Yale Broch Symposium, and Religion and the Arts. His current projects include a study of contemporary South Korean film and the idea of meritocracy in modern culture.

Notes on Contributors

255

John David Rhodes is the author of Spectacle of Property: The House in Ameri-

can Film (2017), Meshes of the Afternoon (2011), and Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007). He is the coeditor of several anthologies, including Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011), which he coedited with Elena Gorfinkel. He is a founding editor of the online film theory journal World Picture. He teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is the director of the Centre for Film and Screen.

Karl Schoonover is an associate professor (reader) of film and television studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (2012), coeditor of Global Art Cinema (2010), and coauthor of Queer Cinema in the World (2016). Ja mes T weedie is an associate professor of comparative literature, cinema, and media at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization, which won the 2014 Katherine Singer Kovács book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and coeditor (with Yomi Braester) of Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia. N. Fr ank Ukadike teaches in the Department of Communication and the Pro-

gram in Africana Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. His most recent book is Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse (2014). His research interests include Black diaspora cinemas, third-world cinema, film history and criticism, and cultural studies. Patricia White is Eugene Lang Research Professor of Film and Media Stud-

ies and coordinator of gender and sexuality studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015) and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999), and her work in feminist and queer film studies has been published in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, GLQ, Screen, and the edited collections Indie Reframed, Out in Culture, and A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, among others. She is coauthor with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience (5th ed., 2017) and coeditor, with Corrigan and Meta Mazaj, of Critical Visions in Film Theory (2011). White serves on the board of the nonprofit feminist media arts organization Women Make Movies, the advisory board of Film Quarterly, and the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura.

Ta mi Willia ms is an associate professor of film studies and English at the Uni-

versity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), editor of The Moving Image volume 16, issue 1 of Early Cinema and the Archives (2016), coeditor of Performing New Media, 1895–1915 (2014),

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Notes on Contributors

and Germaine Dulac: Au-delà des impressions (2006). Her articles have appeared in multiple languages for journals and collections including 1895 (Paris), Cinema & Cie (Bologna), Ekran (Ljubljana), Framework (United States), Kinémathek (Frankfurt), LOLA, Cinémathèque française (Paris), Musée Olympique (Lausanne), and Wiley-Blackwell (United States). She is the president of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema, and a coordinator of the Women Film Pioneers Project (France) and the Media Ecology Project-Library of Congress Paper Prints pilot. Jian Xu teaches comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin–

Milwaukee. His main research and publications have been in modern Chinese literature and film, though as a comparatist, he has a strong interest in world literature and cinema. He is currently working on a book project titled From History to Becoming: Literary Worldmaking in Postrevolutionary China. After its completion, he will make further forays into the transculturation of film genres in world cinema.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics represent figures.

10 (Abbas Kiarostami), 250n7 24 City ( Jia Zhangke), 86, 90 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami), 244– 250, 245 30 Days in Atlanta (Peters), 153 ’76 (Ojukwu), 153 A&B (production company), 186 Abbas, Ackbar, 94n26 ABC Africa (Abbas Kiarostami), 250n7 abstraction, 12, 13, 14–15, 53–76, 247 Abstraction and Empathy (Worringer), 58 Academy Awards, 165, 166, 175n17, 223, 224 accented cinema, 167–169 Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Naficy), 167 Acland, Charles R., 122 Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina, 192 Adetiba, Kemi, 153 aesthetics, 11, 11, 70, 103, 104, 105, 244 Afolayan, Kunle, 153 African cinema, 141–158 Afrique sur Seine, 143 After Ellen, 167 Agogo Eewo (Kelani), 154 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 163, 171

Ai Weiwei, 31 Akerman, Chantal, 38, 48, 248 Akhavan, Desiree, 176n27 Akin, Fatih, 7, 13 Alarinjo theater, 149, 156 Album, 107 Alche, María, 225 alienation, 53–54, 66 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder), 219 All Africa News, 151 All the President’s Men, 61 Almaguer, Tomás, 218 Almodóvar, Pedro, 224 Alonso, Lisandro, 5, 38, 40 Álvarez, Salvador, 221 Amata, Jeta, 154 Amazing Grace (Amata), 154 Amazon, 150 American Communist Party, 232 American Soldier, The (Fassbinder), 233–234, 234 Amirpour, Ana Lily, 176n27 Amores perros, 34, 181, 184 Amsterdam Film Festival, 215 Andrew, Dudley, 122, 138n14, 193, 228–229, 230, 239–240, 242n5, 245 anglophone region, 144 animation, 81, 131–132, 134–135 257

258

Index

Ansah, Kwaw, 148 Anthropocene, 247 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 48, 53–59, 61–67, 220, 247, 248 Appadurai, Arjun, 182, 216–217 Appropriate Behavior, 176n27 Arbeit und Rythmus (Bücher), 109 archaeological/architecture details, 81, 86, 97–116, 100 Argentinian cinema, 214, 225 Arizmendi, Diego, 217 Armas, Eliú, 187, 188, 193 Arnoux, Alexandre, 110–111 Arroyo Fernando, 220, 227n26 art cinema, 4–7, 72n3 “Arts and Entertainment Discussion Lounge,” 155 atavism, 7, 15, 78 At Home in the World (Si hai wei jia; Wu Wenguang), 82 “Atlas of World Cinema, An” (Andrew), 228 attraction, cinematic, 18, 83, 103, 184, 215 Aubel, Hermann, 107 Aubel, Marianne, 107 Auerbach, Eric, 32 Aular, Enrique, 186, 194 auteur theory, 231, 237–238 authoritarianism, 205, 210, 248 Automavision, 43 Babel (Iñárritu), 7, 34 Babenco, Hector, 190 Bachelard, Baston, 3 “Bad Intentions and Abject Manoeuvres,” 63 Badiou, Alain, 50 Bailey, Cameron, 148 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 190–191 Balázs, Béla, 103

Ballet mécanique (Léger and Murphy), 90 Bals funds, Hubert, 26, 166 Baomei, Huang, 88 Barbara (Petzold), 41 Baroncelli, Jacques de, 102, 106 Barrot, Pierre, 148 Barthes, Roland, 235 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 247 Battles without Honor and Humanity (Fukasaku), 237 Bazin, André, 24, 34, 41, 45, 49, 230 Becerra, Jorge, 227n28 Bedwin Hacker (el Fani), 30 Beller, Jonathan, 80, 92 Bemberg, María Luisa, 216 Benjamin, Andrew, 49 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City; Ruttmann), 98, 112–113 Berlin International Film Festival, 216, 217, 224 Berlin School, 41 Berlin Wall, 2 Bernal, Gael García, 219 Berry, Chris, 82 Best Years of Our Lives, The (Wyler), 248 Better Tomorrow, A, 238 Betz, Mark, 69–70, 75n69 Bianchi, Sergio, 181 bildung story, 235 Biutiful (Iñárritu), 224 Black Girl, 142 Black Maria, 247 Blade Runner (Scott), 81 Blom, Ivo, 41 Blow-Up, 74nn37–38 Blue Is the Warmest Color, 163 Bolivarian Revolution, 192 Bollywood. See Indian cinema

Index

Bong Joon-ho, 201 Bongowood, 145. See also African cinema Bonitzer, Pascal, 47–48 Book of the Dance, The (Genthe), 107 Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Schatz), 126 Boosheri, Nikohl, 159, 162, 170, 172 borders / border crossing, 231–234, 241, 245, 246 Borom Sarret (Sembene), 142, 143–144 Boss of It All, The (Trier), 43 Boston Globe, 163 Boyle, Danny, 182 Boytler, Arcady, 214 Boy with the Green Hair, The (Losey), 127 Braester, Yomi, 94n26 Breathless (Godard), 233 Bresson, Robert, 41, 48 Brody, Richard, 43 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 207–208 Bruegel, Pieter, 246 Brunette, Peter, 56 brutal humanism, 139n31 Brute Force (Dassin), 127 Bücher, Karl, 109 Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dream (Liulang Beijing: Zuihou de mengxiang; Wu Wenguang), 82 Bunuel, Luis, 196n1, 214 Butler, Judith, 41 Butting, Max, 109 Caché (Haneke), 50 Caetano, Adrián, 181 Cagle, Chris, 123 Cahiers du cinéma, 47 Camp de Thiaroye (Sembene), 153 Campus Queen (Kelani), 154

259

Canal+Horizon, 30 Cannes Film Festival, 26, 31, 34, 244 Canudo, Ricciotto, 102, 103, 105 Caochangdi Workstation, 82, 85 capitalism, 9–10, 80, 82, 88, 200, 232, 239, 240, 241–242 Carné, Marcel, 56 Carpentier, Alejo, 191, 194 cartography, 23–26, 34. See also mapping Casetti, Francesco, 50 Cassavetes, John, 40 Cassavetes Award, John, 161 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog), 46 cell phone, 28, 29, 30, 31–33, 245 censorship, 172–173, 231 Central do Brasil (Central Station; Salles), 181 CEO, The (Afolayan), 153 Cerda, Clemente de la, 185 Ceylan, Nuri Bilge, 5, 34–35, 34, 38, 248 CGI, 81 Chanan, Michael, 2, 5 Chang Kyung-Sup, 200 Chaplin, Charlie, 103 Chatman, Seymour, 56–57, 67, 71 Chávez, Hugo, 198n40 Chen, Joan, 87 “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior” (Almaguer), 218 Chien, Karin, 161, 166, 175n17 China, 25, 61–67, 238, 243n11; Beijing, 82–83; the Bund, 86, 86, 89; Chengdu, 78, 87; documentary cinema, 77–94; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 62; Nanking Bridge, 63–64, 66; Pudong, 89; Shandong, 82; Shanghai, 78, 86, 87–90, 238; Shenyang, 78, 90–93; Tiexi district, 91, 92; the Waitan, 89

26 0

Index

Choay, Françoise, 77, 79–80, 81, 92 Cholodenko, Lisa, 165 choreography, 105–111 Chow, Rey, 66 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 9–10 Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai), 27–28 Chung Kuo—China (Antonioni), 54, 61–67 Cidade de Deus (City of God; Meirelles), 181 Cili Zhuoma, 85 cinema. See global cinema Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (de la Mora), 219 Cinema Novo shows, 184 cinematic humanism. See humanism cinematography and choreography, 105–107 Circle, The (Panahi), 32–33 Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz), 162, 165–173, 170, 171 Citizen Kane (Welles), 239 citizenship, 85, 122 city, 78–81, 86, 99, 220. See also urbanism/urbanization City of Bits, The (William Mitchell), 77 City of God (Meirelles and Lund), 182, 189, 192, 194, 239 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 102 classical language, 229–230, 232 classicism, 38 Clock, The (Marclay), 40 Coeur fidèle (Epstein), 99 cognitive mapping, 9–10, 14–15, 27–33, 54, 60–61, 66, 70. See also mapping Cold War, 122–123, 127, 136, 199–200

colonialism/postcolonialism, 70, 75n69, 135, 135, 144, 147, 148, 151, 155 communism, 126, 139n41, 232, 238 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 137n2 conceptual abstraction, 15 Confusion na wa (Gyang), 153 “Conjectures on World Literature” (Moretti), 229 connectivity, 7 consumption, patterns, 85 contemplative cinema, 38 Cooperativa Cinematográfica Morelos, 217 Coppola, Francis Ford, 74n37, 231 *Corpus Callosum (Snow), 46 Cortez, Hernán, 218 Cosita Rica, 192 Costa, Pedro, 5 Courier, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125 Cove, The, 174n3 Cremonini, Leonardo, 48 crime-action film codes, 184 Crimson Gold (Panahi), 32 Cronicamente Inviável (Chronically Unfeasible; Bianchi), 181 Crossroads (Shizi jietou; Shen), 90 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 166 Cuba, artists and traditions, 214 cube, 44–45, 50 cultural imperialism, 226n22 culture: cross-cultural encounters, 159–160; influence, 229; mass, 215; production of, 141, 144; social disintegration, 21; traditional values, 200; transculturalization, 228, 231, 233, 236, 240–241, 256 Cyclo (Tran), 234–235, 243n11 Dahlberg, Andrea, 143–144 Damijo, Richard Mofe (RMD), 153

Index

dance and cinema, 105–111, 106, 109 Dance with Farmworkers (He mingong tiaowu; Wu Wenguang), 82–83 Daney, Serge, 41 Dante, 33 Dardenne brothers, 40 Dark Corner, The (Hathaway), 128 Darwinism, 237 Dassin, Jules, 127, 232, 233 Day I Died, The (Maryam Keshavarz), 161 Dead or Alive (Miike), 237, 238 De brug (The Bridge; Ivens), 99 décalage (shift), 230, 239 Decherney, Peter, 122 De eso no se habla (I Don’t Want to Talk about It; Bemberg), 216 “default international,” 6 “Deframings” (Bonitzer), 47 De la calle, 192 de la Mora, Sergio, 217, 219 de la Rosa, Perla, 222 del Carril, Hugo, 214 Delgado, Luis, 185 delinquency, 185–186 Del Pozo, Diego, 189 Deming, Barbara, 121, 131–132, 134– 135, 136 “democratic surround,” 15–16 Deng Xiaoping, 92 De Palma, Brian, 41, 48, 74n37, 231 Depression era, 18 Derrida, Jacques, 240–241 Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man; Balázs), 103 Descartes, René, 117 despotism, 163 “De Tahiti au Mexique, l’écran recueille les danses de l’Univers” (“From Tahiti to Mexico, Dance

261

Gathers the Dances of the Universe”; Divoire), 107 Deutscher Rundfunk (Ruttmann), 112 diasporic communities, 147–148, 154, 159, 160, 164, 166–169, 173 Diaz, Lav, 4 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 81 didacticism, 147, 150 diegesis, 44 Die Künstlerische Tanz unserer Zeit (Aubel and Aubel), 107 Dietrich, Marlene, 169 digital cinema. See digitization digitization, 1, 2, 6, 141–158, 240, 244, 250n7 Dirty War, 225 Disney, Walt, 131–135 dispositif, 40 distribution, 120, 123–125, 141, 144, 145–146, 147–148, 150, 160–161, 195, 224 Divoire, Fernand, 107–108 documentary, 39, 77–94, 97 Dog Day Afternoon, 60–61 Dog Sweat (Hossein Keshavarz), 161 Dollimore, Jonathan, 187, 190 Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Hermosillo), 218 Donald Duck, 131–132, 133, 134–135, 135 Don’t Expect Too Much (Nicholas Ray), 46 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 207–208 Doty, Alexander, 215 Double Indemnity, 203 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 99 Druick, Zoë, 122 Dulac, Germaine, 98, 100, 248 Duras, Marguerite, 48 Durgnat, Raymond, 50 Ďurovičová, Nataša, 24–25

262

Index

Düttmann, Alexander García, 70, 76n71 DVD, 161, 162, 195, 245 Dwoskin, Stephen, 46 Eastwood, Clint, 41 economic issues, 121, 134, 143, 148, 182, 200, 244 Edge of Heaven, The (Akin), 7 Edison, Thomas, 247 educational uses of films, 122, 127, 134, 142 Eisenstein, Sergei, 214, 247 Ekeinde, Omotola Jalade, 153 El auge del humano (The Human Surge; Williams), 10–12, 12 El cielo dividido ( Julián Hernández), 219–220, 227n26 el Fani, Nadia, 30 El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 219 Ellison, Ralph, 121, 126, 136 El lugar sin límites (Ripstein), 218, 219 Elsaesser, Thomas, 5, 42, 81 empathy theory, 75n57 English language, 150, 166. See also language Enlightenment, 137n2 En Secret (In Secret), 163. See also Circumstance Entertainment Weekly, 163 Entity, The, 49 environment, 83, 85, 87, 97, 248 Epstein, Jean, 99, 103 Escalante, Amat, 181 Espinosa, Julio Garcia, 85 Euripides, 207 European art cinema, 55, 69, 219 “Event and the Image, The” (Antonioni), 55 “exotic” films, 97 exoticism, 135

“Expanding World Horizons” ( Johnston), 123 eye, dominant sense, 137n2 fake news, 249 family union, 193, 196 Fanon, Frantz, 156 Farber, Manny, 41, 45, 48 Farhadi, Asghar, 40 Farina, 173 Farocki, Harun, 42 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 43, 76n71, 219–220, 227n27, 233 Faure, Élie, 103–105 feminism, 160, 173 fetishism, 13, 38, 68, 183 fichera sexploitation movies, 219 fiction, parameters of, 38 Fiesco, Roberto, 217 Fifth Republic, 199 “Film as a Catalyst for Social Change” (Dahlberg), 143 film codes, 184, 240 Film Culture, 121 film festivals, 6, 26, 144, 148, 150, 160, 166, 215, 224, 240, 248. See also specific film festival film noir, 230, 232, 234, 236 Film Quarterly, 120, 121 film societies, 122 Five (Abbas Kiarostami), 245, 250n7 Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (Tsui), 46 folk memory, 83 Folk Memory Project, 85 Fonds Sud Cinéma, 166 “For an Imperfect Cinema” (Espinosa), 85 Forbudt Kaerlighed (Forbidden Love), 163. See also Circumstance formativism, 246, 247

Index

Forouhar, Leila, 169 Fox and His Friends (Fassbinder), 220, 227n27 Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Butler), 41 framing/frame, 12–14, 37–39; in contemporary world cinema, 43–49, 44; deframing strategies, 47–48, 49–51; film frame, 39–43, 245; metaframe, 42; methods of, 57; of representation, 141–158, 203–209, 222 Frampton, Hollis, 46, 49 France, 97–116, 148, 243n11; Ministry of Cooperation and Development, 150 francophone region, 143, 144, 150 Frankfurter Zeitung, 112 Franklin, Seb, 9 French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), 27, 37–38, 199 Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate; Fina Torres), 216 Freud, Sigmund, 102, 209 Fukasaku, Kinji, 237 funding sources, 144–145, 149–150, 160, 166, 243n11 Futurist Cinema, 102 Gabriel, Teshome H., 152 Galloway, Alexander, 9 Galt, Rosalind, 5, 72n3 Gance, Abel, 100 Ganda, Oumarou, 142 Gang of Four, 62–63 “Gangster as the Tragic Hero, The” (Warshow), 243n10 gangster film, 228–243 Garcés, Mauricio, 219 Garrel, Philippe, 38 Gaviria, Víctor, 181

263

gender equality, 160 genre, 38, 240. See also specific genres Genthe, Arnold, 107 geography, 4–7, 230, 239–240 geology of cinema, 9, 30–34, 230, 239–240, 244, 247 geopolitics, 4, 12, 14, 53–61, 70, 244, 246 German cinema, 199, 233 Get Down, The, 45 Getino, Octavio, 5 Ghallywood, 145. See also African cinema Ghanan films, 145, 148. See also African cinema ghost film, 25 Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, A, 176n27 Gitai, Amos, 40 Glass, Philip, 97 global aesthetics, 4–7 global art cinema, 72n3 global cinema, 1–2; abstraction and the geopolitical, 53–76; African cinema, 141–158; appellation, 8; categorizing, 4–7, 122, 244–245; Chinese cinema, 53–76, 77–94; connectivity of, 136; Disney films, 131; framing, 37–52; gangster film, 228–243; humanism defined by cinema, 117–140; human understanding, 118, 119, 120, 123–124; imperial center, 231–232; lesbian cinema, 159–177; love and moral law, 199–213; mapping, 23–36; media archaeology and urban space, 77–94; medium promoting humanism, 121, movements, circulations, processes, 7–8; networks, 1–20; past and future, 244–250; place/location of cinema, 2–4;

264

Index

global cinema (continued) queer Mexican cinema, 214–227; rhythms, 97–116; South Korean cinema, 199–213; times and networks, 8–12; unique capacities, 120–121; Venezuelan youth cinema, 181–198 global turn, 249 Globovisión, 198n42 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 216 Godard, Jean-Luc, 41, 46, 48, 57, 220, 233, 246, 247 Godfather, The (Coppola), 231, 237, 243n9 Go Fish (Troche and Guinevere Turner), 164 Gómez, Rosa María, 221 Goodbye to Language (Godard), 46 Good Copy Bad Copy ( Johnsen), 154 Good Neighbor Policy, 131 Gopina, Gayatri, 169 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 45 Gorky, Maxim, 91, 93 Gossaert, Jan, 49 Grafe, Frieda, 41 Grandrieux, Philippe, 49 Grant, Cary, 169 Graphs, Maps, Trees (Moretti), 28 Great Famine, 83 “Great Rhythm,” 103 Great War. See World War I Green Revolution, 171 Grémillon, Jean, 106 grief, experience of, 206–209, 207 Griot. See oral traditions Guerrero, Aurora, 165 Gunning, Tom, 51n12, 91, 184 Gyang, Kenneth, 153 Haacke, Hans, 60 Habermas, Jürgen, 79, 85, 89

Haneke, Michael, 42, 50 Han Han, 88, 89 Hansen, Miriam, 26, 79, 89, 242n5 Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai), 27 Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus (Maltby), 125 Hathaway, Henry, 128 Hauser, Arnold, 139n30 Have Your Say, 155 Haynes, Todd, 164 HBO network / HBO Latin America, 171, 195 Heath, Stephen, 48 Hecuba (Euripides), 207 Hediger, Vinzenz, 3, 4, 18 Heli (Escalante), 181 Hello, Dharma, 201 Help, The, 174n3 Hermano (Brother; Rasquin), 183, 186–189, 188, 190, 192–196 Hermosillo, Jaime Humberto, 218–219 Hernández, Julián, 214–227, 248 Hernández, Salvador, 221 Hershfield, Joanne, 182, 192 Herzog, Werner, 46 hip-hop gangsta film, 231 Histoire de l’Art, 103 historicity, 7, 8, 15 history (frame), 12, 230 “History of the American Cinema,” 126 Hitchcock, Alfred, 127 Höch, Hannah, 107, 109 Hogden, Lancelot, 127 Holden, Stephen, 53–54, 70 Hollywood, 147, 182–183 Hollywood Hallucination, The (Tyler), 117–118 Hollywood Quarterly. See Film Quarterly

Index

Hollywood Reporter, 163 Holocaust, 128–130, 129 homoeroticism, 162, 164, 169 homosexuality. See lesbian cinema; queer cinema Hondo, Med, 142 Hong Kong gangster films, 238–239 Hong Sang-soo, 201 Hoppe, Miguel Ángel, 220, 227n26 Horatio Alger myth, 237 horror genre, 232 Host, The, 201 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 38, 40 HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), 126 Huang Xuelie, 85 Hubbard, Brian Rigney, 161, 165 Huffington Post, 163 Huillet, Danièle, 48 human gesture, labor of, 110 humanism: adjectives with, 137n2; brutal humanism, 139n31; in cinema, 117–140; liberal humanism, 121–123, 132, 136, 156; vulgar humanism, 137n2; world, 131 Hunters in the Snow, The (The Return of the Hunters; Bruegel), 246 Ichi the Killer (Miike), 237 identity, 12 Igwe, Charles, 153, 154 Il deserto rosso (Red Desert; Antonioni), 57, 63, 68–69 Image of the City, The (Kevin Lynch), 60 IMAX, 47 Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, The, 243n10 imperialism, 121, 131–132, 135, 141, 150, 151, 226n22

265

Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Gopinath), 169 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 7, 181, 224 Inception (Nolan), 33, 34, 81 independent/indie cinema, 16, 160, 162, 166, 173 Independent Spirit Awards, 161 Indian cinema (Bollywood), 235–236 Indie (Newman), 166 Infante, Pedro, 219 Inferno (Dante), 33 Inland Empire (David Lynch), 42 international understanding, 120, 121, 125, 134, 135–136 “International Understanding and the Cinema,” 120 Internet, 150, 153–154 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai), 27 Iran, 160–173 Iranian Revolution, 167 IROKOtv, 145, 154 Islam, 159 Isoken (Osiberu), 153 isolationism, 127, 128–129 Italy, 62 iTunes, 161 Ivens, Joris, 99 I Wish I Knew ( Jia Zhangke), 86, 86, 87, 88, 89 Jacobs, Ken, 46–47, 48, 49 Jagoda, Patrick, 10 Jakubowicz, Eduardo, 185–186 James Bond movies, 27–28 Jameson, Fredric, 9–10, 27, 33, 54, 60–61, 66, 69, 70, 74n38, 75n61 Japanese cinema/animation, 81, 199– 200, 236–237

26 6

Index

Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 99 jetlag, 23, 24, 27, 230 Jeyifo, Biodun, 154 Jianghu: Life on the Road (Wu Wenguang), 82 Jiang Qing, 62 Jia Zhangke, 5, 28–29, 78, 82, 86–90, 93, 94n26, 247, 248 Jia Zhitan, 85 jishizhuyi, 84 Johnsen, Andreas, 154 Johnson, Randal, 184 Johnson Traoré, Mahama, 142 Johnston, 123–125, 139n41 Jousse, Marcel, 110 Jullier, Laurent, 79 Kalin, Tom, 164 Kamali, Ali, 245, 250n6 Kandinsky, Wassily, 98 Kant, Immanuel, 211 Kantaris, Geoffrey, 183, 184 Kazemy, Sarah, 159, 162, 170, 172 Kean (Edmund Kean: Prince among Lovers; Volkoff), 106 Kelani, Tunde, 141, 149, 154, 157n13 Kellner, Douglas, 182 Kenyan films, 145. See also African cinema Keshavarz, Hossein, 161 Keshavarz, Maryam, 159–173 Keuken, Johan van der, 97 Key, Amanda, 193 Kiarostami, Abbas, 13, 33, 38, 41, 244–250 Kiarostami, Ahmad, 245, 246–247, 249n3 Kids Are All Right, The (Cholodenko), 165 Kid with a Bike, The (Dardenne brothers), 40

Kim Ki-duk, 201 Kinder, Marsha, 184 King, Homay, 67 Kingdom of This World, The (Carpentier), 191 King Solomon’s Mines, 142 Kitano, Takeshi, 234 Klangfilm, Tobis, 98 Kluge, Alexander, 79, 89 Knight of Cups (Malick), 40 Korean War, 122 Kracauer, Siegfried, 111–113, 121, 127–128, 131–132, 136 Kren, Kurt, 46 Kupka, Frantisek, 98 La Danse d’aujourd’hui (Levinson), 107, 108 Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geumjassi; Park), 199–213 La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet; de Baroncelli), 106 La hora cero (The Zero Hour; Velasco), 183, 189–196, 193 La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream; Queimada-Diez), 181 la Malinche (Nahua woman), 218 Lamarque, Libertad, 214 La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman; Martel), 225 Landsberger, Stefan, 84 Lang, Fritz, 41, 81, 232 language: in African films, 150– 151, 157n13, 160, 166, 168–169, 175n17, 229–238, 241, 242n5 La niña santa (The Holy Girl; Martel), 225 La Notte (Antonioni), 53, 57 La Région Central (Snow), 247 “La Symphonie du monde,” 100

Index

La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow; Llosa), 225 Latin American cinema, 147, 181, 216 Latin classical language, 229–230, 232, 235, 238, 241, 242n5 Laura, 203 La vendedora de rosas (The Rose Seller; Gaviria), 181, 184 L’Avventura (Antonioni), 53, 57 L’eclisse (The Eclipse; Antonioni), 53, 57 “Lecture, A” (Frampton), 46 Lee Chang-dong, 201 leftist politics, 126. See also liberalism Léger, Fernand, 90 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 88 Leone, Sergio, 235 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 109 lesbian chic, 164–165 lesbian cinema, 159–160; audience solicitation, 161–164; production, distribution, exhibition, 160–161; Sundance lineup, 164–165. See also LGBT films L’Esprit des formes (The Spirit of Forms; Faure), 103 Les Visages de la danse, 107 Le Temps, 101 Leveratto, Jean-Marc, 79 Levine, Caroline, 10 Levinson, André, 101, 107 Lewis, Jerry, 50 LGBT films, 169–173. See also lesbian cinema; queer cinema L’Herbier, Marcel, 102, 103 Liang Chao-wei (Tony Leung), 243n11 liberalism, 121–126, 132, 136, 139n41, 239, 248 lines and masses, 71, 71, 72 list, as catalog, 3

267

Little Caesar, 243n9 Liu Xin, 61, 62–63 Living in Bondage (Obi-Rapu), 145– 146, 146, 147 Llosa, Claudia, 225 Longine, Pavel, 239 López, Ana M., 214 Los Angeles Times, 163 Losey, Joseph, 127 Los herederos (The Inheritors; Polgovsky), 181 Los olvidados (Bunuel), 190, 192, 196n1 Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (King), 67 Lost Weekend (Wilder), 128 love and moral law, 199–213 “Love Never Dies” (Weber), 248 Lu, Sheldon H., 85 Lucrecia, Martel, 225 Luhrmann, Baz, 45 Lumière, Auguste, 247 Lumière, Louis, 247 Lumière and Company (David Lynch), 42 Lunacy (Svankmajer), 208 Luna Papa (Brillo de Luna), 24 Lund, Katia, 181 lusophone region, 144 Lu Xinyu, 84, 92 L Word, The, 164–165, 172 Lynch, David, 42, 46 Lynch, Kevin, 60 Lynn, Greg, 81 Machuca (Wood), 181 Mädchen in Uniform, 163 Madeinusa (Llosa), 225 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 1–2, 3, 6, 12 Making Things Perfectly Queer (Doty), 215

268

Index

Maldone (Misdeal; Grémillon), 106 Malick, Terrence, 40, 42, 43 Maltby, Richard, 125–126, 132 Mamma Roma (Pasolini), 219 Mann, Michael, 40 Man with a Movie Camera, The (Vertov), 90, 98, 112–113, 247 Mao Zedong, 62, 66 M-Appeal, 195 mapping, 3, 5, 23–36, 75n50, 228– 229, 230. See also cognitive mapping Marclay, Christian, 40 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 247 Marker, Chris, 97, 248 marketization, 91, 144, 145, 150 Marshall Plan, 131 Martel, Lucrecia, 225 Marx, Karl, 4 mass ornament, 111, 116n48 Maurois, André, 103 Mauss, Marcel, 109 Maya Entertainment, 195 Mayer, Gerald, 125 McCarthy, Anna, 122 Mécaniques célestes (Celestial Clockworks; Fina Torres), 216 media archaeology, 78, 81, 244 media theory, 78, 80 Mehta, Deepa, 175n17 Meirelles, Fernando, 181, 194 Mekas, Jonas, 167 Melancholia (Trier), 40 Méliès, Georges, 247 Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World; Ruttman), 97–116 melodrama, 193, 195 Merck, Mandy, 163 Metropolis (Lang), 81 Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, 223

Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 223–224 Mexican queer cinema, 214–227 Michon, Pascal, 111 “Mickey Mousing,” 109 migrants/refugees, 245 Miike Takashi, 237 Milk (Van Sant), 159, 164, 170–171, 171 Milk, Harvey, 171 Miller, Daniel, 182 Mil nubes de paz ( Julián Hernández), 219–224 minimalist cinema, 38 Mirror, The (Panahi), 32 Mirtahmasb, Mojtaba, 245 Missionaries in Darkest Africa, 142 Mitchell, Edward, 237 Mitchell, William, 77, 78–80, 81 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 41 modernism, 26, 60, 70, 77–94, 212, 231–232, 238, 239, 242n5, 243n9, 247–248 Modupe Temi (Amata), 154 Mohammed, Rabiu, 149 Monory, Jacques, 48 montage structure, 97–101, 107, 110, 247 moral law, love and, 199–213 Moreau, Jeanne, 53 Moreno, Fernando, 187, 188, 193 Moretti, Franco, 28, 229, 231 Morley, David, 182 Mosquita y Mari (Guerrero), 165 Moussinac, Léon, 105 movement, expressing, 105–111 MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), 123 Mumford, Lewis, 80 Murphy, Dudley, 90 musicals, 99–100, 232

Index

Music Box Films, 195 Muybridge, Eadweard, 247 Naficy, Hamid, 167–168 Nagib, Lucia, 8, 228, 229 Nair, Mira, 193 Naked City (Dassin), 232 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 220 nationalism, 245 naturalism, 59 Navarro, Alvaro M., 185 Nazi concentration camps, 128–129 NEK Video Links, 146 neocolonialism, 75n69 neoliberalism, 67, 248 neorealism, 2, 9, 118, 139n31, 239 Nervous System presentations ( Jacobs), 46 Neshat, Shirin, 160 Netflix, 4, 30, 150, 154 network aesthetics, 10 networks, 1–20, 34, 230, 240, 248–249 New Documentary Movement, 82, 83–84 New German cinema, 199, 233 Newman, Michael Z., 166 new queer cinema (NQC), 216, 224 “new waves,” 26 New Yorker, 43 New York magazine, 163 New York Times, 53 New York University, 160, 165 Nigerian cinema. See Nollywood Nigerian video film, 142–143 Night and the City (Dassin), 203, 232 Njoku, Jason, 145 Nnaji, Genevieve, 153 Nnebue, Kenneth, 146 Noah, Ramsey, 153

269

Nolan, Christopher, 81 Nollywood, 141–145. See also African cinema “North-South Triptych” (Keuken), 97 Nouvelle Vague. See French New Wave Nouvelle Vague, post-, 38 NQC. See new queer cinema Obi-Rapu, Chris, 146 Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame, The (Peretz), 41 Ogoro, Kingsley, 151 Oguejiofor, Okey, 146 Oguine, Ike, 151 Ojeda, Aurora, 217 Ojukwu, Izu, 153 Okonkwo, Kenneth, 146 Oldboy (Park), 201 omnipotence, feeling of, 102–103 Once upon a Time in America (Leone), 235 Once upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan), 34–35, 34, 230 Onetto, María, 225 On Photography (Sontag), 65 Ophüls, Max, 41 Opus I–IV (Ruttmann), 98, 109 oral traditions, 143 O’Rawe, Des, 41, 48 Orol, Juan, 214 Ortuño, Juan Carlos, 220 Oscar award. See Academy Awards Osiberu, Jadesola, 153 Osuofia in London (Ogoro), 151–153, 152, 154, 156 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 48 Outer Space (Tscherkassky), 49 Outside (Waimian; Wang Wo), 84 Owoh, Nkem, 151, 153 Ozu, Yasujiro, 50, 248

27 0

Index

Painted Skin, 25 Panahi, Jafar, 31–33, 32, 245 Paramount Pictures, 123 Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio, 226n22 Paranormal Activity, 40 Pariah (Rees), 165 Park Chan-wook, 199–213 Participant Media, 161–162, 174n3 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 219 Passenger, The (Antonioni), 53 Pathosformel (Warburg), 103 Paz, Octavio, 219 Pelo Malo (Bad Hair; Rondón), 181 Penn, Sean, 171 Peón, Ramón, 214 People’s Republic of China. See China perestroika, 239 Peretz, Eyal, 41 performance gesture, 38 performative realism, 192–193 Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik), 66 Perkins, Victor F., 41 “Persecution, The” (Pasolini), 219 Persepolis (Satrapi), 160 Persona, 163 personhood, 122 Peters, Robert, 153 Petzold, Christian, 41 “phantom ride,” 91 Pina (Wenders), 46 pirated copies, 148–149, 159, 170–172 Pixote (Babenco), 190, 192 Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes; Caetano and Stagnaro), 181, 184 Place, Janey, 203 place of cinema, 3 “Planet Hollywood,” 28 Platform (Zhantai; Jia Zhangke) Plato, 246 Podalsky, Laura, 182

Poison (Haynes), 164 Polgovsky, Eugenio, 181 Pons, María Antonieta, 214 Pop/Post-Pop Art, 48 populism, right-wing, 248 Por estas calles, 192 postcolonialism. See colonialism/ postcolonialism “Postwar Economic Policy and Planning,” 123 Pour vous, 107 poverty and delinquency, 185–186, 192, 200 Preminger, Otto, 41 Primitive Music (Wallaschek), 109 Producers Guild of America, 166, 175n17 Proust, Marcel, 139n30 proximetrics, 124, 139n30; distanced proximity, 139n31 Public Enemy, The, 243n9 Public Opinion Quarterly, 130 Puritanism, 237 “Qatsi Trilogy” (Reggio), 97 “Queer and Present Danger” (Rich), 216 queer cinema, 214–227. See also lesbian cinema; LGBT films “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take Two: Critics Speak Out,” 216 “queer labor” of style, 76n71 Queimada-Diez, Diego, 181 Quiet Family, The, 201 Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo, 220, 227n28 race films, 126 racism, 126 Radiotelevisione italiana (Rai), 62 Ramain, Paul, 100

Index

Ramsay, Lynne, 49 Rangh Eshgh (The Color of Love; Maryam Keshavarz), 160–161 Rasquin, Marcel, 183, 188, 194, 195 Rastegar, Roya, 163–164, 167, 173, 177n34 Ray, Nicholas, 41, 46 Ray, Susan, 46 realism, 38, 58–59, 64, 65; antirealism, 56; experiential, 38; neorealism, 2, 9, 118; observational, 86; on-thespot (jishizhuyi), 84; performative realism, 192–193; physical, 38; postwar period, 123; sensory realism, 7; social realism, 16, 184–185; via formativism, 247 reception history, 15 recognition, 75n69 Redacted (De Palma), 41 Red Desert. See Il deserto rosso Red Scare, 126, 232 Rees, Dee, 165 refugees/migrants, 245 Reggio, Godfrey, 97 Reichardt, Kelly, 5 religious intolerance, 163 “Remapping Taipei” ( Jameson), 74n38, 75n61 Rendón, Clarisa, 221 Renmin Ribao, 63 Renoir, Jean, 41, 49, 247 representation (frame), 12 Restivo, Angelo, 69 revenge sex, 173 revenge thriller, 203, 211, 213 Revue du cinéma, 99, 110 rhythmic gesture, 108, 110 rhythms, archaeology of global, 97–116 Ricci, Matteo, 75n50 Rich, B. Ruby, 162, 215–216

Richter, Hans, 98 Rififi (Dassin), 232, 233 right-wing populism, 248 Ripstein, Arturo, 218, 219 Rist, Pipilotti, 46 Riverwood, 145. See also African cinema RKO, 23 Roadside Attractions, 161 Robinson, Edward G., 129 Rocha, Glauber, 184 Rodrigo D (Gaviria), 181 Rofel, Lisa, 82 Rondón, Mariana, 181 Rosa, Hartmut, 4 Rossellini, Roberto, 24, 247 Ruiz, Raúl, 48 Russia, 2, 62, 214, 239, 240, 247 Russo, Vito, 175n12 Ruttman, Walter, 90, 98–116, 247 Safai, Reza Sixo, 161 Salaam Bombay! (Nair), 193 Salles, Walter, 181 Sanders of the River, 142 Sans soleil (Sunless; Marker), 97 Satrapi, Marjane, 160 Satya, 235–236, 236 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 241 Save the Green Planet, 201 Savoroide (Kelani), 154 Scarface, 243n9 Schaffe, Rachel, 50 Schatz, Thomas, 126, 240–241 Schneider, Steven J., 40 Schoonover, Karl, 5, 72n3 Scorsese, Martin, 231 Scott, Ridley, 81 Screen, 117, 120, 137n2 Search, The (Zinneman), 127 Second Cinema, 5

271

27 2

Index

Secuestro Express ( Jakubowicz), 186 Sembene, Ousmane, 142, 143–144, 150 sensory realism, 7 Separation, A (Farhadi), 40 Sevilla, Ninón, 214 Sewol (ferry), 212 Sex and the City, 171–172 Sex and the City 2, 172 sexuality, concept of, 160, 168, 217, 219, 221 “Shadow and the Act, The” (Ellison), 126 Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), 127 Shah of Iran, 167 Shanghai Film Studio, 87 Shanghai World Exposition, 86, 87, 87, 88, 90 Shankar, Gingger, 161, 176n33 Shelley Women Filmmakers Grant, Adrienne, 161 Shen Xiling, 90 Shestaya chast mira (A Sixth Part of the World; Vertov), 113 Shijie (The World; Jia Zhangke), 28–29 Shining Path, 225 Shiri, 201 Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut), 233 Showtime network, 164 Sight and Sound, 215–216 silence in film, 115, 170, 208, 212 silent cinema, 7 Silva, Joke, 153 Siodmak, Robert, 128 Sirk, Douglas, 41, 50, 76n71 Skoll, Jeff, 174n3 Skype, 30 slapstick comedy, 232 slow cinema / slowness, 2, 5–8, 14, 38, 245

Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle), 182, 189, 193, 198n52 Snow, Michael, 46, 247 Snows of Kilimanjaro, The, 142 Sobchack, Vivian, 117, 120 social Darwinism, 237 Social History of Art, The (Hauser), 139n30 socialism, 82, 85 social media, 8, 9, 80–81 social order/change, 204, 211–212 social-problem film, 123, 126 social realism, 16, 184–185 Solanas, Fernando, 5 Soleil O, 142 Sollywood, 145. See also African cinema Sonatine (Kitano), 234 Song to Song (Malick), 40, 43 Sontag, Susan, 65–66 Soupault, Philippe, 102 Souriau, Étienne, 44–45, 50 Southern African films, 145. See also African cinema South Korean cinema, 199–213 Soviet Union. See Russia space: abstraction vs., 59–60, 65; cinematic, 38, 168, 249n3; feature of digitalization, 2; politics of, 15; social, 123; spatiotemporal manipulations, 227n26; spherical, 44–45, 50; urban, 78–81, 86, 220; virtual, 121 Spain, artists and traditions, 214 Spanish Film Academy, 224 spatiotemporal manipulations, 227n26 spectatorship, 80, 94n26, 126–136, 172, 245, 246 Spiral Staircase, The (Siodmak), 128 Spirit of the Mountain, The (Cili), 85

Index

Stagnaro, Bruno, 181 Steiner, Rudolf, 99 Step Up, 45 Stiegler, Bernard, 49 St. Luke Painting the Virgin (Gossaert), 49 Stoichita, Victor I., 41, 42, 49 Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore; Antonioni), 71, 72 storytelling. See oral traditions Straayer, Chris, 216 Stranger, The (Welles), 128–130, 129 Straub, Jean-Marie, 48 subjectivities, 181–198, 215–216, 220 subtitles, 166 Sundance Institute: Directors Lab, 161; Documentary Program Lab, 175n14; Feature Film Program (FFP), 161, 165, 175n14; Film Festival, 26, 161, 175n14, 215; lesbian lineup, 164–165; Native/Indigenous Lab, 165; New Queer Cinema panel, 162; Screenwriters Lab, 161; U.S. Dramatic section, 165 Sunset Boulevard, 203 Svankmajer, Jan, 208 Swoon (Kalin), 165 symphony, described, 100, 105 synchronization of peoples, 103 Syriana, 34 Tablante, Leonardo, 186, 192 tableau vivant, 246 Tahimik, Kidlat, 66 Tailleur, Roger, 41 Taiwan, 27, 67–72, 199 takepart.com, 162, 174n3 Tanzanian films, 145. See also African cinema Tarantino, Quentin, 28, 231, 238, 239 Tarr, Béla, 38, 248

273

Tarzan jungle melodramas, 142 technology, 120, 132, 141. See also specific technology; digitization Teddy Award, 216, 217 telenovela rosa (rosy telenovela), 192 telenovelas (television soap operas), 192, 193, 195 telenovelas de ruptura (transgressive telenovelas), 192 television, 120, 123 temporal corrugation, 18, 215 temporal experimentation, 7 Teo, Stephen, 184 terror films, 127–128 Terrorizer (Yang), 75n61 Terrors of the Jungle, The, 142 textual geology, 32 Thacker, Eugene, 9 Third Cinema, 144, 147, 152 This Is Not a Film (Mirtahmasb and Panahi), 31–33, 32, 34, 245 Thompson, Kristin, 123 Three Caballeros, The (Disney), 131– 132, 133, 134, 134–135 Three Sisters (San Zimei; Wang Bing), 39 Thunderbolt (Kelani), 149 time, 4, 38, 168, 227n26, 239 time zones, 23–24, 230, 239–240 Toronto Film Festival, 215 Toronto International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, 217, 224 Torres, Fina, 216 Torres, Juan Carlos, 220 Torres Leiva, José Luis, 40 totalitarianism, 127, 130–131, 136 To the Wonder (Malick), 40, 43 tourism, 134 Tovoli, Luciano, 62 trade, geopolitics of, 148–149 Trader Horn, 142

274

Index

Tran, Anh Hung, 234–235, 243n11 transnational visibility, 121, 147 Trash Village (Zou), 85 Tree of Life, The (Malick), 43, 44, 45, 46 Trier, Lars von, 40, 42–43 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 167 Troche, Rose, 164–165 Truffaut, François, 233 Tsai Ming-liang, 4, 5, 13, 53, 67–72, 248 Tscherkassky, Peter, 49 Tsui Hark, 46 Turner, Fred, 122 Turner, Guinevere, 164–165 Twin Peaks (David Lynch), 42 Tycoon (Oligarch; Longine), 239, 240 Tyler, Parker, 117–118, 120, 121 understanding. See international understanding United Nations, 131; UNESCO film programs, 118, 119, 120, 124, 127; UNICEF, 186–187 universalism, 123 Universal Studio, 23 Un lac (Grandrieux), 49 URBAN (operating system of contemporary society), 77, 79–80, 92 urbanism/urbanization, 14, 53–54, 77–94, 220, 247 “Urban Rule and Death of the City” (“Le règne de l’urbain et la mort de la ville”; Choay), 77 urban street kids, 182 U.S. State Department, 131 Vachon, Christine, 164 Van Sant, Gus, 159 Varma, Ram Gopal, 236 Vaughn, Ayo, 142

Velasco, Diego, 183, 191, 194–195 Venezuelan youth cinema, 181–198 Venice Film Festival, 26 vernacular language, 229–230, 232, 235, 238, 241 vernacular modernism, 26, 79, 231, 233, 238, 242n5, 243n9 Vertov, Dziga, 90, 98, 112–113, 247 Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini), 24 Vieira, João Luiz, 182, 185 Villager Documentary Project (Cunmin yinxiang jihua), 84–85 Villegas, Guillermo, 227n28 violence in youth cinema, 181–198 virtual modernism, 79 Visconti, Luchino, 41 Vitti, Monica, 53 Vive l’amour (Tsai), 4, 5, 53, 67–72, 68, 71 Voegelin, Eric, 207–208 Volkoff, Alexandre, 106 Voodoo Vengeance, 142 voyager’s eye, 62 Vuillermoz, Émile, 100–101, 105 vulgar humanism, 137n2 Wallaschek, Richard, 109 Wang Bing, 4, 39, 78, 82, 90–93 Wanger, Walter F., 130–131 Wang Wo, 84 Warburg, Aby, 103 Warhol, Andy, 40 Warshow, Robert, 243n10 Wasson, Haidee, 122 Water (Mehta), 175n17 Watney, Simon, 137n2 Waugh, Thomas, 216 Wavelength (Snow), 247 Weber, A. L., 248 We Can’t Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray), 46

Index

Wedding Party, The (Adetiba), 153 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 6, 10, 38, 248 Welles, Orson, 128, 138n14, 239, 247 Weltreisefilm, 98 Wenders, Wim, 46 West of the Tracks (Wang), 4, 82, 90–93 What Time Is It There? (Tsai), 27 Where Is My Friend’s Home? (Abbas Kiarostami), 250n15 Whissel, Kristin, 81 White, Patricia, 160, 168 Wilder, Billy, 128 Willemen, Paul, 37, 39, 50 Williams, Eduardo, 10–12 Willis, Gordon, 175n12 women, oppression of, 160, 166–167 women filmmakers, 160, 168. See also specific filmmakers Women’s Cinema / World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (White), 160, 168 Women without Men (Neshat), 160 Wong Kar-wai, 27–28 Woo, John, 239 Wood, Andrés, 181 World, The, 230 world cinema. See global cinema world citizenship. See citizenship World Is Not Enough, The, 27–28 world understanding. See international understanding World War I, 1, 23, 120–123

275

World War II, 122–130, 136 Worringer, Wilhelm, 54, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 75n57 Wu Wenguang, 78, 82–86, 93 Wyler, William, 175n12, 248 Xie Jin, 88 yakuza film, 236–238 Yang, Edward, 75n61 Yo, la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All; Bemberg), 216 Yoruba traveling theater, 149, 156, 157n13 Yo soy la felicidad de este mundo (I Am Happiness on Earth; Ich bin das Glück dieser Erde; Pasolini), 219 Youku (website), 83 Young, Bradford, 165 Young, Loretta, 128, 129 youth cinema, 181–198 youth culture, 159, 168, 182 youth rebellion, 168 YouTube, 4, 150 Zabriskie Point, 62 Zapata, Rubén (Zapata 666), 193, 193 Zaquelares, Manuel Grapain, 221 Zeller, Wolfgang, 99 Zemlya (The Earth; Dovzhenko), 99 Zhao Tao, 87, 89 Zhou Enlai, 62–63 Zinneman, Fred, 127 Zou Xueping, 85