Seeing Is Finding Different Perspectives: no

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Seeing Is FindingDifferent Perspectives no
happing ending for the monolithic viewerRujie
WangCollege of Wooster
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Four Problem Areas

• The purpose of art
• Aesthetic and narrative styles
• Race matters
• English subtitles

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Differing Purposes of Art and Life

• Art for arts sake or as a vehicle of change
• Art as entertainment or as representation of life
  (social reality)
• Anthropocentrism (teleology) versus Chinese
  cosmology (meaningful coincidences)
• Western humanism and Eastern religion

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How views differ between U.S. and other cultures

• Commenting on a screenplay by Ken Kesey, Arthur
  Miller said that it revealed the American faith
  in the infinite possibility of growth for the
  individual person, and that its theme was a
  quintessentially American belief that despair
  is still for us a kind of frontier to be crossed
  when in other places in the world it is a
  permanent condition of life.
• Arthur Miller, American playwright

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Chinese Literary Thought and Chinese Cinema

• First, whereas in Western expressive theories the
  creative character of the imagination is of
  central importance, Chinese expressive theorists,
  with a few exceptions like Lu Chi and Liu Hsieh,
  seldom emphasize creativity. For example, whereas
  Coleridge describes the Secondary Imagination
  (the artistic imagination) as the faculty that
  dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
  recreate, and Wordsworth likewise asserts, The
  imagination also shapes and creates, similar
  statements are hardly ever found in Chinese
  expressive theories. This difference may be due
  to, as I suggested earlier, the absence in
  traditional Chinese philosophy of the concept of
  an anthropomorphic deity as the Creator of the
  world, in contrast to the Judaeo-Christian
  concept of God the Creator, which provided a
  model for the concept of the artist as creator.
• James Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature, Univ.
  of Chicago Press, 1975, p.87

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The World as A Moral or Natural Universe

• The late Dr. Hu Shih, eminent historian of
  Chinese thought and culture, used to say with sly
  delight that centuries of Christian missionaries
  had been frustrated and chagrined by the apparent
  inability of Chinese to take sin seriously. Were
  we to work out fully all the consequences for
  Chinese society of the model offered by an
  organismic cosmos functioning through the
  dynamism of harmony, we might well be able to
  relate the absence of a sense of sin to it. For
  in such a cosmos there can be no parts wrongfully
  present everything that exists belongs, even if
  no more appropriately than as the consequence of
  a temporary imbalance, a disharmony. Evil as a
  positive or active force cannot exist much less
  can it be frighteningly personified.
• ____ Frederick W. Mote, Intellectual
  Foundations of China
• Princeton University Press, 1989. p.21

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Values, Attitudes, and Histories

• But in India, it despotism is normal for here
  there is no sense of personal independence with
  which a state of despotism could be compared, and
  which would raise revolt in the soul nothing
  approaching even a resentful protest against it,
  is left, except the corporeal smart, and the pain
  of being deprived of absolute necessaries and of
  pleasure. In the case of such a people,
  therefore, that which we call history is not to
  be looked for. This Hinduism makes them
  incapable of writing history all that happens is
  dissipated in their minds into confused dreams.
• ___ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy
  of History, Dover, 1956 pp.161-2

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For instance, the Frenchman Maupassants Une vie
is human literature about the animal passions of
man Chinas Prayer Mat of Flesh, however, is a
piece of non-human literature. The Russian
Kuprins novel Jama is literature describing the
lives of prostitutes, but Chinas Nine-tailed
Tortoise is non-human literature. The difference
lies merely in the different attitudes conveyed
by the work, one is dignified and one is
profligate one has aspirations for human life
and therefore feels grief and anger in the face
of inhuman life, whereas the other is complacent
about human life, and the author even seems to
derive a feeling of satisfaction from it, and in
many cases to deal with his material in an
attitude of amusement and provocation. In one
simple sentence the difference between human and
non-human literature lies in the attitude that
informs the writing whether it affirms human
life or inhuman life. Humane Literature by
Zhou Zuoren in Modern Chinese Literary Thought.
ed. Kirk Denton. Stanford UP, 1996. Pp.155-6
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Chen Duxiu, leader of Chinese Communist Party

• Chinese literature today is lifeless and stale,
  unable to stand next to that of Europe. . . . .
  The problem of Confucianism has been attracting
  much attention in the nation this is the first
  indication of the revolution in ethics and
  morality. ... The classical literature is pompous
  and pedantic and has lost the principles of
  expressiveness and realistic description.
  Eremitic literature is highly obscure and
  abstruse and is self-satisfied writing that
  provides no benefit to the majority of its
  readers. In form, Chinese literature has followed
  old precedents it has flesh without bones and
  body without soul. It is a decorative and not a
  practical product. In content, its vision does
  not go beyond kings, officials, spirits, ghosts,
  and the fortunes or misfortunes of individuals.
  As for the universe, or human life, or
  society--they are simply beyond its ken. Such are
  the common failings of these three kinds of
  literature.
• _______Chen Duxiu On Literary Revolution, p.144

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Aesthetic and Narrative Styles

• How life is understood affects the way human
  stories are told
• Cultural values and attitudes are embedded in the
  narrative patterns of history and literature
  (film)
• Differing emphases create modes of representation
  and aesthetic styles

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Story as Event

• This is the fact that, despite our easy
  acceptance of the commonsense premise that
  narrative is that branch of literature which
  relates a sequence of human events, it is
  precisely in the area of defining the event as
  an existential unit that we find a wide
  divergence of conceptual models from culture to
  culture.
• _____ Andrew Plaks, Chinese Narrative. Princeton
  University Press,1977. p.314.

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Narrative Patterns in the Classical Novel

• The ubiquitous potential presence of a balanced,
  totalized, dimension of meaning may partially
  explain why a fully realized sense of the tragic
  does not materialize in Chinese narrative. ....
  But in each case the implicit understanding of
  the logical interrelation between these fictional
  characters' particular situation and the overall
  structure of existential intelligibility serves
  to blunt the pity and fear the reader experiences
  as he witnesses their individual destinies. In
  other words, Chinese narrative is replete with
  individuals in tragic situations, but the secure
  inviolability of the underlying affirmation of
  existence in its totality precludes the
  possibility of the individual's tragic fate
  taking on the proportions of a cosmic tragedy.
  Instead, the bitterness of the particular case of
  mortality ultimately settles back into ceaseless
  alternation of patterns of joy and sorrow,
  exhilaration and despair, which go to make up an
  essentially affirmative view of the universe of
  experience.
• Andrew Plaks, Ibid. Pp.351-2

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Race Matters

• Orientalism
• (film as ethnography)
• ways in which Chinese and/or Asians appear in
  Western works of imagination according to racial
  stereotypes

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Rey Chow

• The production of images is the production not
  of things but of relations, not of one culture
  but of value between cultures even as we see
  'Chinese' stories on the screen, we are still
  confronted with an exchange between 'China' and
  the west in which these stories seek their
  market.
• _______ Primitive Passions.
• Columbia University Press, 1995. p.60.

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Orientalism in Broken BlossomsChinese as
emasculated and asexual
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Orientalism in Good EarthChinese as backward but
kind-hearted
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Film as Auto-ethnography

• Orientals Orientalism ways in which Chinese
  reinvent themselves as they are perceived in the
  West

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New Year Sacrifice, dir. Xia Yan, 1956cultural
rituals against women
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Self-Reinvention as sexually potent and full of
primitive passion in Red Sorghum
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Raise the Red Lantern, dir. Zhang Yimou,
1991exoticization of women and concubinage
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Red Sorghum, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1991exoticization
of primitive peasants
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Ermo, dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 1996exoticization of
primitive peasants
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Old Well, dir. Wu Tianming, 1987primitive
existence and savagery
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Farewell My Concubine, dir. Chen Kaige,
1993physical abuse and brutality against children
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Farewell My Concubinephysical abuse and
brutality against children
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Farewell My Concubinephysical abuse and
brutality against children
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Sheldon Xiaopeng Lu

• The end result of Zhang's film art may seem to
  be his ability to tell the Western audience
  enchanting, exotic stories about the other
  country 'China' through stunning visual images.
  He has offered the Western viewer a museum of
  precious Chinese objects, costumes, and
  artifacts. He has presented a dazzling array of
  icons and symbols of his 'China' green sorghum
  field, red sorghum wine, colorful strips of
  cloth, dye mill, red lanterns, red pepper, and
  puppet show. He has told lurid stories of murder,
  incest, polygamy, and concubinage. He has
  rendered on screen masquerades of terrifying
  political events such as the Great Leap Forward
  and the Cultural Revolution. All these spectacles
  have been masterfully manufactured for the
  pleasure and gaze of the Western viewer.
• Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu. Transnational Chinese
  Cinema. University of Hawaii Press, 1997. p.126.

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Sheldon Xiaopeng Lu

• Some films achieve a transnational status
  precisely because they are seen as possessing an
  authentically 'national' 'Chinese' 'Oriental'
  flavor by Western audiences. In the meantime, the
  domestic Chinese audience dismisses the same
  films as 'misrepresentations' and
  'mystifications' of China."
• Ibid. p.12.

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Rey Chow Primitive Passions

• Although Zhang (Yimou) may think that he is
  making films about China, what he is doing is
  representing a timeless China of the past, which
  is given to us in an imagined because
  retrospective mode. The China, which is signified
  mythically, is the China constructed by
  modernitythe modernity of anthropology,
  ethnography, and feminism. It is also a China
  exaggerated and caricatured, in which the past is
  melodramatized in the form of excessive and
  absurd rituals and customs. p.145

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Montage, Speech, and Subtitles

• Film language versus speech
• Does action speak louder than words?
• Do written words stand in the way of action?
• Accents, dialects, and meanings of the written
  word what is lost in translation (English
  subtitles)

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Sergei Eisenstein, Russian film director

• The first experimental work with sound must be
  directed along the line of its distinct
  non-synchronization with the visual images.
• _____Film Theory and Criticism
• by Gerald Mast p.318.

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Ju Dou, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1990philosophy and
personal names
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Comrades, Almost A Love Storydir. Peter Chan,
1996cultural identities and dialects
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In the Heat of the Sundir. Jiang Wen,
1993philosophy and personal names
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City of Sadness, dir. Hou Xiaoxian, 1989cultural
identities and dialects
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Roland Barthes, French linguist and thinkerTo
understand a narrative is not merely to follow
the unfolding of the story, it is also to
recognize its construction in storeys, to
project the horizontal concatenation of the
narrative thread on to an implicitly vertical
axis. To read (to listen to) a narrative is not
merely to move from one word to the next, it is
also to move from one level to the
next. ______ Image-Music-Text. trans.
Stephen Heath. New York Hill and Wang,
1977. p. 87.
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Conclusion

• There is not unmediated perception and the
  narrative films we teach are never
  self-explanatory. For these films to be read as
  signs, we have to put in place systems of meaning
  according to which moving images are organized.
  "Since every sign supposes a code," says Roland
  Barthes, "it is this code that one should try to
  establish. The photographic paradox can then be
  seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one
  without a code, the other with a code."
• ________ Roland Barthes, Ibid. p.19.