TRANSNATIONAL CHINESE CINEMA

Useful Link(s): 

• First featured on: https://singaporereviewofbooks.org/2015/08/12/transnational-chinese-cinema/ (12th August 2015)

Chinese cinema has a history that has stretched beyond a century, yet film scholarship in this field has only begun to flourish in the past two decades. The complexity of “Chinese cinema” is perhaps the foremost reason for this torpid movement in academia. What does being Chinese mean? At various historical and geographical moments, this question carries vastly different interpretation —lingual, racial, national and cultural— each attached to its own unique set of problems. Certainly the complications increase when we try to understand Chinese-ness in a likewise perplexing discipline: cinema. The filmic medium has been an important arena for debates and negotiations of gender, sexuality and embodiment issues, enlightening scholars on how bodies function on screen.

With this in mind, Transnational Chinese Cinema does not aim to provide all the answers to explain what Chinese cinema is or what it is not. Instead it cuts deep into the confounding entanglement, “to begin a conversation around questions of corporeality and desire” and “film production, distribution, exhibition, and reception in a transnational Chinese context” (9). The collection of ten essays puts together the perspectives of scholars at various vantage points in the film studies domain. This article aims to highlight the exceptional efforts in this critical endeavour.

The ethics of failure is a key entry point in the understanding of Transnational Chinese Cinema. In Chapter One, “The Ruined Bodies of Transnational Chinese Cinema”, Brian Bergen-Aurand offers an enlightening and innovative reading of ruins. While ruins are conventionally linked to destruction and decay, the writer reimagines it as a site for rebirth and revival, highlighting the “experience, history, memory, culture, preservation, heritage and inheritance” that comes together with it (47). A vital justification brought forth in this chapter would be the theory of the ruined gaze, which is a way of looking at films by exposing and displacing the gazes of classical apparatus theory. By directing this focus onto films such as In the Mood for Love (2000), Bergen-Aurand offers an opportunity for spectators to “rethink the ethics of neighbours and locality in regard to these films and the spectral bodies they imagine” (47).

Building on this notion of failure, Mary Mazzilli explores the strategy of failure in films of Ruan Lingyu and Lin Dai in Chapter Three, “Female Chinese Stars on Screen: Desiring the Bodies of Ruan Lingyu and Linda Lin Dai”. Mazzilli posits that a close reading of these actresses’ films unveils a resistance against traditional gazes that position women as the fetishist object of the male gaze. The failure of feminine embodiment to align itself to the directorial narrative and cinematic frame activates a spectatorship that refutes the objectification of the feminine other.

Chapter Six, “Thinking the Inutility: Temporality, Affect and Embodiment in Useless and Walker” is another remarkable piece in Transnational Chinese Cinema which follows in the same vein as the previous essays. Hongfei Liao alerts us to the dangers of capitalism throughout his piece and further illustrates how the conception of “inutilizing the inutility” in Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang’s documentary films could be a potent force to resist against capitalism’s belligerence. The writer warns that filmic representations of inutility run the risk of being re-appropriated by capitalist logic. Hence it is necessary to rethink a new politics of “inutilizing the inutility” that could transgress this system of consumption, “for the purpose of endlessly relaunching more action and rethinking” (151). Liao thus embraces the embodiment of failure in these films, specifically in its temporality, affect and embodiment, as it activates “the audience to judge the scene”, calling us to “problematize [the] filmic problematization and even our own problematization” (152).

Bergen-Aurand describes the transnational Chinese film model as the ideal cinematic model to address questions about film production, distribution, exhibition and also reception in the introduction essay of Transnational Chinese Cinema. Sim Jiaying explicates this notion most thoroughly in Chapter Two, “Transnational Cinema as a Matter of Address: Considering Eros and Embodiment in Wong Kar-wai’s The Hand”. Sim expounds the manner in which Wong’s short film invokes a transnational cinematic reception through an “affective mode of address” (63). Instead of relying on filmic narrative to create meaning, Sim explains that Wong’s segment in Eros (2004) rely on film style to draw out spectator desire. This is a key component in understanding what transnational cinema can do and how transnational cinema can affect audiences on an international scale, regardless of their locality.

Other remarkable essays in Transnational Chinese Cinema include Hee Wai-Siam’s comprehensive account of famous film auteur Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work in “Coming Out in the Mirror: Rethinking Corporeality and Auteur Theory with Regard to the Films of Tsai Ming-liang” and Andrew Grossman’s insightful cultural study of Hong Kong’s adult rated cinema in “Random Act of Sensible Violence: Horror, Hong Kong Censorship and the Brief Ascent of ‘Category III’”.

Overall, Transnational Chinese Cinema touches the edge of previously unexplored grounds, providing new perspectives on the ways films can be read. By incorporating the sensibilities of scholars adept in film theory, embodiment studies, philosophy and cultural studies, the collection engages insightfully with Chinese cinema, charting the way we encounter transnational Chinese cinema and how we in turn interact with it.

Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and Ethics of Failure.  Eds. Brian Bergen-Aurand, Mary Mazzilli, Hee Wai-Siam. Los Angeles: Bridge21 Publications, 2014.

TENDENCIES IN BOO JUNFENG AND EVE SEDGWICK

Useful Links:

• Original Short Film URL: http://youtu.be/YGlG1AVq1PU 
• First featured on: http://foreigninfluence.com/2014/04/10/tendencies-in-boo-junfeng-and-eve-sedgwick/ (10th April 2014). 

Edits:

• A revision has been made regarding the definition of “keluar baris”. (1st May 2016)

Anyone who takes a first look at Boo Junfeng’s Keluar Baris (2007) would immediately assume that this Singaporean short film is merely about a boy’s anxiety over his pending National Service enlistment. However, anyone who has read and absorbed the work of the prominent queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would probably have a radically different interpretation of it. In her 1993 book, Tendencies, Sedgwick asserts that institutions often align their principles neatly, creating a strict unified ideology which, in turn, produces silent presumptions about our identity. Social structures simplify reality and, in turn, simplify our visions of ourselves. In an attempt to vitiate the rigidity of such systems, Sedgwick proposes a perverse reading of texts, a reading that goes against the grain, that imbues these systems with fascination in order to disengage us from their enforced rigor. She asks us to uncover the queer nuances embedded in texts by unsimplifying them. Seeing “queer” aspects as the “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically,” Sedgwick offers queer readings as alternatives views of our world (with political potential) that are so often neglected or hidden by the heteronormative paradigm.

Queer representations are heavily policed and discouraged across Singapore’s media landscape. In the Censorship Review Committee Report 2010, guidelines on television programming provide clear indications to screen PG13 shows only after 11pm. Programs with any portrayal of queer characters—such as Glee—typically belong in this category and are effectively exiled to a timeslot outside primetime. In film and theatre, homosexual content is routinely classified as “explicit” regardless of the degree of sexual explicitness. Given these national regulations, it is undoubtedly difficult to find images of queer life in any Singaporean media.

However, such overt restrictions do not mean that queer representations do not exist in across Singapore. It simply means that we have to take a closer look to uncover the queer moments in our texts. Filmmakers might find ways to smuggle queer meanings into their art. Texts could also gain new connotations over time. It is thus vital to review the media to search for queer meanings hidden in them. The works of Boo Junfeng, and Keluar Baris in particular, offer moments that prompt our engagement with Sedgwick’s charge for a queer reading because they resist simplifying our social structures and our senses of ourselves.

Keluar Baris presents opportunities for readings that could radically subvert a conventional default heteronormative interpretation of it and provides a guide for reconsidering our approach to other works by Boo Junfeng and other Singaporean artists.

The film follows the story of an eighteen year-old boy who returns to Singapore from Spain to serve his National Service (NS). NS is a mandatory conscription program every Singaporean male has to go through for 22 to 24 months and then remain on reserve for until he is 40 or 50 years old, depending upon rank. Throughout the film, the recruit seems particularly melancholic. Characters around him are quick to explain his gloom as an anxiety towards enlistment, and these explanations may hold some validity. However, there are gaps and dissonances throughout the film that suggest he could also be suffering from a certain homosexual anxiety and desire that continue to trouble him.

A lingering shot of a Spanish boy.

“Keluar Baris” is a Malay military command for dismissal, commonly used in the Singapore Armed Forces. It signifies a dismissal from duty, a return back home. The return home, back to one’s family would often be regarded as a cheerful event. Yet he seems to appear more displeased about keluar baris. Could it be the obvious lack of familial warmth? Or the pending enlistment that every single person in the film can’t seem to stop mentioning? Yet, even as these possibilities may obtain, a key instant suggests that the boy’s melancholy might actually stem from the possible separation from a likely gay relationship from overseas. While the boy sits in his room browsing pictures on his computer, a portrait of a young male Spaniard flashes across the screen. It could be brushed off as a casual perusal of his travel photos, but the mise-en-scène bends things. The shot is framed by the recruit’s shoulder, which invites an erotic gaze at the back of his neck and over his arm. As he clicks through the photos, the camera lingers for a full second when he reaches the photo of the Spanish boy, suggesting the heightened importance of this person. The mild sexual tension created by the relation between the recruit’s body and the foreign portrait builds. Then, it is quickly dissipated when the recruit’s father steps into the room. The gay sensibility of this scene is returned to the heteronormative framework of the straight household.

Gazing at enlistees. 

The film’s excess drama around enlistment could be construed as a view of conscription as the seizure of one’s personal liberty by the state, in general. Yet, it could also refer to a more specific situation. It is widely known and accepted that queer soldiers are severely marginalised within Singapore’s military. Soldiers who openly declare their homosexuality or present themselves as queer are required to register as “302.” They would subsequently be banned from command schools and combat vocations. This discriminatory practice is normalised in the armed forces and Singapore. Thus, the boy’s misery when he sees two uniformed enlistees on the bus could be more than just his apprehension towards enlistment. It could be an invocation of his distress over being discriminated against. He could be looking at his own fear of being forced out of the closet or the fear of being forced to stay in.

An airplane flying into the distance. 

The film also sets up a relation between Spain and Singapore, between a land of longing and a land of pragmatic demands. In the closing scene, the boy looks out the window and we see a plane flying into the distance. This seems rather peculiar as it hints of his desire to leave, even though he just returned. Welded with the soundtrack of piano tinkling throughout the film, his melancholy over being “home” becomes an opening for queer interpretation. Spain legalised same-sex marriage in 2005. Singapore retains the Penal Code Section 377A, which criminalises sex between men. Spain symbolises a queer time and place for this boy. Singapore represents a present home tied to heteronormative simplification and rationalization.

Boo’s skilful insertion of Spain as the boy’s gay sanctuary could go unnoticed by spectators, but on a closer reading, such an understanding seems logical and plausible. These gaps in the film twist and bend the heteronormative reading that has dominated our way of viewing films. Sedgwick’s proposal for a queer reading of texts hence disarticulates and disengages from the usual normative methods of consuming art straight. It is a call to “run against the grain” and embrace the multitude of possibilities spread throughout queer.