Revisionist History

1
Revisionist History

• Historical revisionism is the reexamination of
  the accepted "facts" and interpretations of
  history, with an eye towards updating it with
  newly discovered, more accurate, and less biased
  information. Broadly, it is a skeptical approach,
  that history as it has been traditionally told
  may not be entirely accurate.
• While reinterpreting past events in light of new
  facts is the essence of good scholarship, corrupt
  history may distort these facts as a means of
  influencing readers' beliefs and actions for
  politically motivated reasons.

2
Farewell My Concubine
Revisionist history

• Historical Reading(Scar, Root-Seeking)
• The film as revisionist history a statement
  against the Communist -Marxist metanarrative
  (rooted in Legalism)
• Homosexuality depicted as a perversion
• State suppression of individuality, creativity,
  traditions, mythologies
• 8 Model Plays (under Mao)

3
7 Periods of Chinese History in FMC
First Empire 200 BCChu-Han Wars, legend of
King Yu 1925 Beginning of Nationalism 1937
Japanese invasion 1949 Communists takeover (PRC
est.) 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution 1977
Economic and social reforms (11 years
after CR, when film begins) 1993 After
Tiananmen Square (1989) (when film
was made)
4
Chinese Legalism

• School of LawWarring States Period (475 BC to
  221 AD)(Seven warring states, including Chu, Qin
  and Han)
• Written laws with clear and strict punishments
• Iron-fist rule, with no exceptions
• Punishments must be heavy to maintain order and
  ensure no one challenges authority
• Pragmatism takes precedence over custom and
  tradition
• Families divided if they became too large
• Strict order and structure

5
Chinese Legalism

• Man is inherently selfish and evil
• The emperor is the son of heaven
• It is his mandate to rule
• All subjects to the emperor must know and keep
  his place in order to maintain harmony in the
  cosmos
• Dissent violates the order of the cosmos
• To maintain order, Legalism advocated burying
  dissenters alive, burning books, secret police
  and encourage neighbors to inform on each other
• Women were owned by men

6
Legacy of Mao?

• Founder of the Peoples Republic of China
• The Long March (1933-35), retreat from Chinese
  Nationalist Part
• Repelled Japanese (1937-1945)
• Defeated Chiang Kai Shek (1949)
• Great Leap Forward Rapid industrialization and
  collective agriculture (resulted in death of 15
  to 40 million)
• Cultural Revolution
• Destroyed and prohibited traditional Chinese art,
  traditions and religious icons and temples

7
Legacy of Mao?

• Detractors
• Responsible for the deaths of 40 million to 70
  million people
• Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns (against
  corruption, waste, bureaucracy, bribery, theft of
  state property, tax evasion, cheating on
  government contracts and espionage) resulted in
  tens of thousands of executions and suicides
• Era of fear, in which family members and
  neighbors spied and reported on each other
• Damaged and destroyed much of Chineses culture,
  traditions, and religious treasures

8
Legacy of Mao?

• Supporters
• Laid the foundation for modern China
• Brought stability to a large complex nation
• Improved education, housing and health care
• Reduced crime and corruption
• Eliminated unemployment and inflation
• Opened trade with the West
• Savior of the nation and visionary

9
The Gang of Four

• Leaders of Cultural Revolution
• Arrested one month after Maos death (1976)
• Accused of being counter-revolutionaries
• Blamed for the worst excesses of the societal
  chaos during the revolution
• Viewed by many as a show trial
• Scapegoats for the new government
• Maos wife only one who remained defiant and
  defended herself said she was a true
  revolutionary, loyal to Maos orders and vision
• She committed suicide in 1991

10
Chen Kaige

• Born in 1952 (now lives in New York)
• Graduated from Beijing Film School
• Influenced by scar literature movement (during
  the Hundred Flower Movement)
• Father was a well-known director
• Became a member of the Red Guard and denounced
  his father
• Only Chinese film to win the Palme dOr
• Hong Kong film-goers rated it the Chinese film
  of the century
• Initially banned in China
• Available via black market DVDs

11
A Feminist ReadingofFarewell My Concubine

12
PostModern Attack on Metanarratives
Reconstructing identity

• Feminist films challenge dominant cultural
  metanarratives
• Farewell My Concubine
• Legalism and communism (Mao Marxism)
• The state is the answer
• Fire
• Patriarchial-based myths and legends

13
Feminism
Deconstructing icons

• A challenge to patriarchial / phallocentric
  metanarratives
• Political/social
• Psychological
• Mythic/literary
• Based upon concept that identity is a culturally
  based social construction (not natural)

14
Feminist Literary Theory
The Second Sex

• SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)
• The Second Sex
• Questioned the othering of women by Western
  philosophy
• Rediscovery of forgotten womens literature
• Revolutionary advocacy of sexual politics
• Questioning of underlying phallocentric, Western,
  rational ideologies
• Celebration of pluralism gender, sexual,
  cultural, ethnicity, postcolonial perspectives

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
15
Feminist Literary Theory
Gender As a Social Construct

• Exorcise the male mind
• Deconstructs logocentricism of male discourse
• Sees gender as a cultural construct
• So are stereotypes
• Focus on unique problems of feminism
• History and themes of women literature
• Female language
• Psycho-dynamics of female creativity

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
16
Feminist Literary Theory
Feminizing Freud

• JULIA KRISTEVA (1941-)
• Psychologist, linguist novelist
• Influenced by Barthes, Freud Lacan
• Dismantles all ideologies
• Disagrees with patriarchal views of Freud and
  Lacan
• Pre-Oedipal maternal body source of semiotic
  aspect of language

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
17
Feminist Literary Theory
Madness, Holiness Poetry

• Masculine symbolic order represses feminine
  semiotic order
• Semiotic open to men and women writers
• Semiotic is creative--marginal discourse of the
  avant garde
• Raw material of signification from pre-Oedipal
  drives (linked to mother)
• Realm of the subversive forces of madness,
  holiness and poetry
• Creative, unrepressed energy

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
18
Feminist Literary Theory
Binary Equals
as

• ALICE JARDINE, Gynesis (1982)
• Woman as a binary opposition
• Man/woman
• Rational/irrational
• Good/evil
• Implied male logocentricism
• The concept of jouissance

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
19
Helene Cixcous
The Joy of Jouissance
as

• Critic, novelist, playwright
• Picks up where Lacan leaves off
• Denounces patriarchal binary oppositions
• Women enter into the Symbolic Order differently
• Deconstructs patriarchal Greek myths
• Femininity (jouissance) unrepresentable in
  phallocentric scheme of things
• Favors a bisexual view

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
20
Helene Cixcous
Deconstructing Sigmund
as

• Women are closer to the Imaginary
• Women more fluid, less fixed
• The individual woman must write herself
• Feminine literature not objective erase
  differences between order and chaos, text and
  speech inherently deconstructive
• Admires Joyce and Poe
• Men can produce feminist literature

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
21
Queer Theory
Queer Ideas
as

• Gender and sexuality not essential to identity
• Socially constructed
• Mutable and changeable
• Self shaped by language, signs and signifiers.
• Self becomes a subject in language, with more
  multiplicity of meaning.
• Western ideas of sexual identity come from
  science, religion, economics and politics and
  were constructed as binary oppositions

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
22
Queer Theory
Deconstructing Sex
as

• Queer theory deconstructs all binary oppositions
  about human sexuality.
• Encourages the examination of the world from an
  alternative view.
• Allows for the inclusion of gender, sexuality,
  race and other areas of identity by noticing the
  distinctions between identities, communities, and
  cultures.
• Challenges heterosexism and homophobia, in
  addition to racism, misogyny and other oppressive
  discourses while celebrating diversity.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM
23
Different Ways to Read a Film/Novel

• Archetypal
• Freudian / Lacanian
• Ideological
• Deconstructionist
• Feminist
• Queer
• Post-colonial

24
Internal Battle of the Sexes
Jacques Lacan (1901-81)

• IMAGINARY (feminine)
• Mother
• Plentitude
• Creative
• Dreams fantasies
• Illogical
• Madness
• Holiness
• Freedom
• Rebellion
• Ideal
• Individual expression

• SYMBOLIC (masculine)
• Father
• Lack and desire
• Restrictive authority
• Ordered reality
• Logic
• Controlled sanity
• Ritual
• Repression
• Social conformity
• Accepted imperfection
• Social conformance

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
25
Farewell My Concubine
Revisionist history

• Historical Reading(Scar, Root-Seeking)
• The film as revisionist history a statement
  against the Communist -Marxist metanarrative
  (rooted in Legalism)
• Homosexuality depicted as a perversion
• State suppression of individuality, creativity,
  traditions, mythologies
• 8 Model Plays (under Mao)

26
Farewell My Concubine
You are who you love

• Psychological reading
• Love and and identity
• The other defines us
• Lack of the other frustrates our desire for
  fulfillment
• Yin/yang (hermaphrodite)
• Douxi idealized image of Xialou
• Juan idealized image of Douxi
• Frustrated, broken relationships
• Pressure of state leads to betrayals
• Psychological neuroses

27
Farewell My Concubine
A Lacanian twist

• Psychological reading
• Social construction of identity
• We all have female side that is repressed by the
  patriarchal symbolic order (language and laws)
• Plot driven by ironic twist of Lacan theory
• Douxi forced to become girl
• Douxi lives in Kristevas world of poetry,
  holiness and madness

28
Farewell My Concubine
Freudian slip-ups

• Freudian reading
• All people are bisexual
• Bisexuality/Oedipal complex resolved by presence
  of father figure (order/rules)
• Douxis is never resolved
• Master becomes his father / superego(the
  authoritarian gaze)
• Ego is battleground between id and superego

29
Farewell My Concubine
Displacing our anxieties

• Freudian reading
• Desires frustrated develops neuroses and employs
  defense mechanisms
• Depression
• Repression
• Paranoia
• Displacement
• Projection
• Transfers/displaces unresolved conflicts and
  aggressions onto substitute object (Xialou and
  opera)--cathexisis

30
Farewell My Concubine
Language speaks us

• Lacanian reading
• Douxis identity constructed outside himself
• Language used to construct his identity
• Remains in the imaginary stage
• Never adjusts to the patriarchial symbolic order
• Searches for the ideal (maternal state of
  plentitude) experiences perennial lack
• Existential hero of the feminist order
  (creativity, beauty, holiness, poetry, loyal to
  the ideal)

31
Farewell My Concubine
The yin and the yang

• Metaphysical reading
• Yin/yang
• Incompleteness in this life
• Yearn for perfection
• Desire for harmony with all nature
• Adoration of enlightenment (the bodhisattva )
• Suffering is the result of desire
• There is foulness in men and women
• Karmic retribution

32
Farewell My Concubine
Karma

• Metaphysical reading
• Calamity and misfortune cannot gain entrance
  of their own into a persons life. It is the
  individual who calls them in.

33
Farewell My Concubine

• Great films can be read on many levels
• Historical /social
• Psychological
• Metaphysical