Critical Interventions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. x, 271 pp. (Illustrations.) US$59.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5158-3.
The terrain of world cinema studies has been a treacherous one. This is because the terms of our comparison have been historically and ideologically coded through the epistemic violence of colonization and decolonization––and more recently, neoliberalization, recolonization, and renationalization (see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988], 276–286; see also, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Multiculturlaism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003]). In addition, we often forget that such epistemic violence affects not only the voices of the colonizer and the colonized, but also those critical attempts made by intellectuals (including ourselves) who seek to reconfigure their own subaltern position. In Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas, Michelle Bloom scrutinizes a series of film coproductions between Sinophone and Francophone cinematic auteurs and communities. For her, establishing a comparative discourse requires an acknowledgement of the inevitable process of othering in both the objects of study and our critical language (14–21). Her book demonstrates that such a discursive process puts the critical agent (self) and the object critiqued (other) under erasure, thus leaving the traces of their erasure visible. Such a process of erasure in turn enables us to critique the very structure of differences that in-forms the epistemic violence at the first place (for the concept of “under erasure,” see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Spivak [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997], 62).
Bloom’s study is divided into two parts: Franco-Taiwanese cinema and Franco-Chinese cinema. The former may or may not bear any traces of the auteurs’ nationality, ethnicity, or cultural sensibility, yet the absence of these traces haunts the film texts as a presence of the structure of differences that constitute France/China and the Other (29). As opposed to their Taiwanese counterparts, which tend to focus on mixture and intertextuality, the mainland Chinese auteurs make visible intertextual “failures” such as displacement, mistranslation, and misunderstanding (137). Yet, these failures are crucial in the configuration of authority, power, and agency out of the epistemic violence that constitutes the difference between “China and the West.”
Each film Bloom studies is best considered a site where a mode of cross-cultural dialogue is reconfigured. In her analysis of Cheng Yu-chieh’s Yang Yang (2009), Bloom scrutinizes the way the film recodifies the term métissage. Even though the term can be interpreted simply as “mixed race,” it carries the connotation of biological impurity and moral degeneracy from the colonial discourses; yet it also makes visible the liminal space at which the racialized and gendered power asymmetries in such discourses can be turned into a site from which new social relations can be reimagined (34–37). Yang Yang’s representation and negotiation of métissage is indeed symptomatic of the way the métis/métisse has been treated in both French and Sino-Taiwanese discourses. Featuring actor Sandrine Pinna (Zhang Rong-Rong), who herself is a métisse, the film makes visible the struggle of a métisse left behind in Taiwan by her French engineer father (hence, a “product” of neocolonialism), in a society where she has trouble naming––let alone positioning––the racio-cultural liminality at which she has been abandoned (43–71).
While métissage can be considered a symptomatic form of negotiation, intertextuality can be regarded as a cinematic auteur’s active claim of their creative agency. In her analysis of Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2002) and Face (2009), Bloom examines Tsai’s painstaking references to the works of François Truffaut (1932–1984). Tsai does so by casting Truffaut’s “double” Jean-Pierre Léaud in the former film, and his signature actresses Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye, and Jeanne Moreau in the latter. In addition, he also reconfigures the relationship between the image and the spectator by restaging and referring to specific scenes in Truffaut’s works, thus actively rewriting the authorial relationship between the director and the spectator. In so doing, the power asymmetry between France (as the author of the Nouvelle Vague) and Taiwan (whose auteur [Tsai] re-authors and reauthorizes the Nouvelle Vague through such intertextuality) is also revised (78–108). For Bloom, intertextuality is further developed as cinematic makeover by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), as Hou does not simply remake the 1956 film Le Ballon rouge (Albert Lamorisse). Instead, he hybridizes, displaces, and rewrites the overall semiotic structures between France and Taiwan, a process that actively demands the spectators to rethink the structure of differences that underlies our understanding of their interdependent relationship (111–136).
For Bloom, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001) examines the power of translation by representing moments at which translators, through deliberate mistranslation, bring about social changes, individual freedom, and new means of expression during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Yet, such liberty is ultimately limited by social classes and global political asymmetry (139–159). In her analysis of Tang Xiaobai’s Conjugation (2001) and Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004), Bloom studies how imitation is not necessarily a sign of subservience, but can be appropriated by the imitator as a means of making visible the structure of differences that constitute the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. It also enables those who are confined within “China” as a political community to traverse their sense of economic and sociocultural entrapment (186–187).
Bloom’s study offers not only an insightful scrutiny of a series of individual texts, but also tropes by which we can open up further discussions of inter- and intra-cultural cinemas. In the end, the term “Sino-French” is best understood not as one that recalls the historically unsettling dynamic between the self and the other, but the productiveness and emancipatory potential of a dynamic that enables us to resist any temptation to reach a settlement.
Victor Fan
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
pp. 577-579