The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and The Staging of Globalization (James Tweedie, 2013)

The Age of New Waves
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art cinema and the staging
of globalization
James Tweedie
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tweedie, James, 1969
The age of new waves : art cinema and the staging of globalization / James Tweedie.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 9780199858286 ISBN 9780199858309 (paperback)
1. New wave filmsHistory and criticism. 2. New wave filmsTaiwanHistory and
criticism. 3. Motion pictures and globalization. I. Title.
PN1995.T795 2013
791.43'611dc23
2012048584
9780199858286
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
{ contents }
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Youth, Cities, and the Globalization of Art Cinema
part i
1. The Mise-en-Scne of Modernity: The French New Wave, Paris,
and the Global 1960s
45
2. Walking in the City
83
3. New Wave Futures
129
part ii
4. The Urban Archipelago: Taiwans New Wave and the East Asian
Economic Boom
143
5. Morning in the Megacity: Taiwan and the Globalization

of the City Film
178
6. The Haunting of Taipei
195
part iii
7. Chinese Cinema in a World of Flows: The New Wave
in the Peoples Republic of China
209
8. The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China
238
9. On Living in a Young City
276
Conclusion: Was There an American New Wave?
303
Notes
Index
313
339
{ acknowledgments }
I began studying the French new wave while writing an undergraduate honors
thesis under the direction of Joss Marsh at Stanford University, and my interest in Chinese cinema was sparked while teaching English at the Chinese
Academy of Science in Beijing soon after graduation. The new cinemas of
Europe and East Asia were personal and intellectual interests before they
became professional ones, and this project has been motivated from the outset
and throughout by the excitement generated by the films themselves.
Although this project is not based on my dissertation, I began developing
the conceptual framework in courses on transnational cinema, neorealism,
and postmodernism taught by Nataa uroviov and Angelo Restivo at the
University of Iowa. Iowa City was a wonderful place to study film and literature, and I benefitted enormously from the atmosphere of excitement and
energy created by the faculty and graduate students at the University. At Iowa,
I also benefitted from the generosity and guidance of Garrett Stewart, whose
example I try to live up to in my own work as a scholar and a mentor to
graduate students.
I had the wonderful opportunity to begin writing about globalization
during a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, initially with the support
of a Ford Foundation Crossing Borders grant and then the Yale Center for
International and Area Studies (now the MacMillan Center). The organizers
of the Crossing Borders program at Yale, Vilashini Cooppan and Michael
Holquist, were exceptional mentors who recognized the key role of the arts
and humanities in understanding the world being created through globalization. This book is in the most important sense a continuation of that initiative.
Since those days in New Haven, Susie Jie-Young Kim has remained a valuable
sounding board and a guide to the newest new waves. Dudley Andrew deserves special thanks for too many reasons to enumerate here. Suffice it to say
that without his support, this book simply wouldnt exist.
I had the good fortune to present selections from this project to perceptive
audiences at various conferences in the United States and Taiwan. I offer
particular thanks to the participants and especially the organizers of those
events, including the following: Elena Gorfinkel, Patrice Petro, and Tami
Williams of the University of WisconsinMilwaukee; Eileen Cheng-yin
Chow and Carlos Rojas at Duke University; Dudley Andrew at Yale University; Rich Cante of the University of North Carolina; Lin Wenchi of National
Central University in Taiwan; Eileen Walsh at Skidmore College; and Robert
viii
Acknowledgments
Ru-Shou Chen, Darrell William Davis, and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, who planned
a truly memorable event at National Taiwan University. I also presented material from the manuscript to the Moving Images Research Group at the University of Washington. Selections from the book have appeared in a slightly
different form in the following edited volumes and journal: The Oxford
Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, eds. Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas
(Oxford University Press); Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew, with Herv
Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford University Press); Cinema at the Citys Edge:
Film and Urban Networks in East Asia, eds. Yomi Braester and myself (Hong
Kong University Press); Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and the State of
the Arts, eds. Robert Ru-shou Chen and Darrell William Davis (Routledge);
and Public Culture.
At the University of Washington, I have received the support of a phenomenal group of friends and colleagues in Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature, including Jennifer Bean, Yomi Braester, Tamara Cooper, Willis
Konick, and Sudhir Mahadevan. Yomi and I also co-organized a 2006 conference called Cinema at the Citys Edge, which focused on the relationship
between urbanization and media in East Asia, and I extend my thanks to the
participants in that conference. I was also able to spend several summers
teaching (and learning) at the University of Washingtons Summer Program
in Chinese Film History and Criticism at the Beijing Film Academy. I am particularly grateful to Yomi, the founder and organizer of the Program, and to
the students, faculty, and filmmakers who made it such a unique and productive experience. My department ChairsCynthia Steele, Gary Handwerk, and
Mel Vaughnmade it possible to strike a balance between teaching and
research, even during difficult budget times. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen allowed
me to write much of the section on the French new wave while teaching on a
UW program in Paris. This book also received exceptional assistance from the
Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and its
director, Kathy Woodward, and associate director, Miriam Bartha. Valuable
writing time was made possible by the Simpson Centers Society of Scholars
program and by the University of Washingtons Royalty Research Fund.
The editors and staff at Oxford University Press, especially Shannon
McLachlan and Brendan ONeill, have been ideal partners in this process.
Brendan has shepherded the book from beginning to end with incomparable
grace and wisdom.
I owe special debts of gratitude to my parents, sisters, and brother, whose
contributions to this project date back the farthest, and to Ning Ning, who
always makes Beijing feel like a second home.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Sasha Welland, who has been my companion from the very beginning of this project and on our many journeys since
then, and to Lino and Zola, a new generation in our family and a source of
inspiration, joy, and confidence in the world to come.
Introduction
youth, cities, and the globalization
ofartcinema
The story of global Hollywood, a familiar tale of American blockbusters

occupying screens and imaginations around the world, is one of the most
powerful and pervasive narratives of globalization in circulation today. Viewed
as a triumphant or apocalyptic force, the omnipresent American film industry
often serves as a prototype for globalization itself, as the most popular and
lucrative films appeal to audiences on a planetary scale, to a public imagined
as a vast market that extends across national boundaries. Regardless of the
background of the writerand the case of Hollywood crops up regularly in
the mainstream press and popular nonfiction by journalists, as well as more
academic studies in political science and economicsthis story remains one
of the principle examples of a seemingly ineluctable process in which the
cultural messages we transmit through Hollywood and McDonalds go out
across the world to capture, and also to undermine, other societies.1 For a
century, Hollywood cinema has been a crucial component of this expansion
of market capitalism, as both a profit-generating good and a widely circulating
billboard for the benefits of a particular version of modernity. This economic
juggernaut and widespread aesthetic standard also provides the major touchstone for studies of globalization in the film industry, even for critics and scholars who otherwise resist the stranglehold of American cinema on the international film market. Hollywoods capacity to attract diverse audiences in distant
locations resonates perfectly with conventional accounts of economic globalization and its borderless world, and its unmatched record of box office hits
appears to ratify this vision. Few cultural products can compete with Hollywood, especially when the market provides the framework of analysis and the
standard of success.
The proliferation of new waves on the international art house and film
festival circuits is one of the few cinematic phenomena from the past half century with a global reach that rivals the geographic range and ambition of
Hollywood. This book contends that these movements are best understood
not as isolated events but as a series of interlaced moments, as an alternative
vision of global modernity, and as an opening onto the world promised in
the phrase world cinema. The new waves surface as one dimension of the
visual culture of accelerated modernization, and they accompany a sequence
of urban, youth, and consumer revolutions whose universe of reference points
and comparisons inevitably extends beyond national frontiers. At the end of
the twentieth century, skyscrapers rising over freshly cleared ground in Taipei
or Shanghai and luminous ads on colossal LED screens seemed to mark the
threshold to the future, but these contemporary phenomena were woven into
a long historical sequence that dated back to the 1950s, when the hegemony of
American-style capitalism expanded across western Europe and into pockets
of East Asia. This book is concerned with the films that emerged together with
and documented the construction of these environments, but it also situates
this cinematic and cultural experience in a more expansive context than traditional nation-based histories usually explore. With precious few exceptions,
Hollywood is the one film industry with the political and economic clout to
establish an apparently permanent presence beyond the boundaries of its domestic market and define the terrain of global image culture as its territory.
Global new wave cinemas have been one of the exceptions to that rule.
This study focuses not on the world seen through the lens of Hollywood but
on globalization glimpsed from the margins, where market forces arrive along
with visions of a future already portended by Hollywood cinema itself. Beginning with the emergence of the French new wave in theaters around the world
in the late 1950s, a series of new cinemas and new waves incited a revolution,
an explosion of world cinema, an insurgency devoted to the representation
of the modern and the real.2 In three overlapping phases corresponding
roughly to the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, filmmakers, producers, and
critics developed a small but dynamic art cinema market that provided an
international venue for films produced outside the direct control of Hollywood. From France to Finland, from Germany to Japan, this fascination with
newness rejuvenated world cinema in the 1960s and early 1970s, and both
domestic and foreign observers were quick to encapsulate these widely dispersed movements in a rhetoric of commonality whose preferred term of art
was new wave. In the 1980s, new waves from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ireland,
Spain and numerous other locations joined this refrain. By the 1990s and early
2000s, the Chinese, Mexican, and Korean waves had become primary sites of
innovation in the realm of art cinema. The revolutionary promise of nearly all
these movements lay in the assertion that novelty can replace received wisdom
as the source of authority in the arts, that cinema can be harnessed to the
transformative energy of youth and derive its aesthetic and conceptual dynamism from the turmoil of global modernity rather than the stability of a local
tradition.
Introduction
While this book focuses on both the virtues and the limitations of that
desire for originality, what matters at the outset is the international and collective nature of the fantasy that has spread across the globe and flaunted its
disregard for borders. During the postwar era, the category of youth became
an essential reference point for the filmmakers of the French new wave, Japans taiyozoku (or Sun Tribe) and the directors of the associated new wave,
Britains Teddy Boys and angry young men, and their counterparts in other
youth-based rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s. They paralleled the rise of Julio
Garca Espinosas imperfect cinema, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getinos Third Cinema, and Glauber Rochas aesthetics of hunger, all of which
enlisted film in the nationalist and anticolonial movements of the 1960s. These
movements held in common their emphasis on culture, especially popular
culture, as a revolutionary force and their status as local manifestations of a
global movement. Writing on the period that he identifies as the age of three
worlds, a period that overlaps at its outset with the first new waves, Michael
Denning says:
as we look back on the last half of the twentieth century, it seems clear
that culture moved to the foreground. It is not, to be sure, that there had
been no culture before 1950, but it was always in a periods background.
Historians dutifully included it in a supplementary chapter on arts and
culture as they surveyed the age of Jackson and Victoria. But suddenly,
in the age of three worlds, everyone discovered that culture had been
mass produced like Fords cars; the masses had culture and culture had
a mass. Culture was everywhere, no longer the property of the cultured
or the cultivated.3
The art cinema of the 1950s and after has drifted constantly between high and
low traditions, between popular media and rarefied art, between transnational
youth culture and the gallery or museum; it is culture in both the elevated
and universalized, the archaic and contemporary, senses of the word. What
the cinematic new waves have globalized is a hybrid, mutually contaminated
cultural categoryart cinemathat lies at the border of mass communication
and art.
As Denning suggests, the radical redefinition of culture in the postwar
era coincided with even more ambitious attempts to redraw the geopolitical
boundaries in a postcolonial world; and the mass media, at once art forms and
instruments of social engineering, lay at the nexus of those intertwined representational and political projects. He writes:
the differentiation of cultural studies in the age of three worlds was . . . the
result of the emergence of yet another aspect of social realitythe culture
industries, the mass media, mass communicationswhich seemed to have
its own autonomy, its own logic, and its own power. Though intertwined
with state, market, and civil society, the media, as it is called in daily
life, seemed to occupy an imaginative space equal to the state and the
market. Thus the study of the logic of this new world, the logic of mass
communication, the logic of culture in a new sense, became the fifth
social science, a postmodern social science, linked . . . to that other reorganization of the social sciences in the age of three worlds: area studies.4
Cinema and music were the most influential media linking the decentralized
and far-flung participants in this global transformation, and films and songs
became the primary devices for imagining and developing an embryonic international movement liberated from the restraints of an established local tradition and obeisance to an acceptable canon of foreign masterpieces. At the
core of this phenomenon was the category of youth culture, whose transnational movements drew a disorienting and unfamiliar map of the world. The
battle lines between generations were local and national, but lines of affinity
linked the Teddy Boys and the taiyozoku, while ignoring the niceties of national borders and the division of the world into East and West or North and
South. A new generation of filmmakers and musicians demonstrated that the
so-called European age in modern history began to yield place to other regional and global configurations toward the middle of the twentieth century.5
Maps of world cinema over the past half century have been further complicated by the imperfect alignment between the three worlds and the three
cinemas.6 The discrepancy between the naming conventions used to describe
the worlds and their cinemas is symptomatic of the ambiguous and undertheorized status of the global new waves in the world system that developed
after World War II. This partitioning of the planet into a numbered sequence
of alliances was the dominant geopolitical model after the Bandung conference of 1955 divided the globe into the domain of Euro-American capitalism
(and its outpost in a reconstructed Japan), the communist bloc in the Soviet
Union and its satellites, and the independent postcolonial states. The cartography of film history gathers together very different sets of nations. The first
cinema of Hollywood and the major western European studios merge with the
equally conventional, resource-intensive, flawless productions in what Lenin
called the most important art. The Third World celebrates a form of imperfect cinema whose material poverty becomes a marker of its more direct engagement with the reality of the postcolonial condition. And in between lie
the second art house cinemas associated initially with European movements
like Italian neorealism and the French new wave but also with clusters of artists who crop up in the metropolitan centers of global capitalism (for example,
the British and Japanese new waves, American direct cinema, or John Cassavetes). The international new waves are both more and less like Hollywood,
and both closer to and more distant from Third Cinema, than is commonly
understood. This book attempts to situate the new waves between these two
Introduction
worlds and their cinemas: it examines the allure of American pop culture and
global capitalism, but it also revisits several formative moments in the evolution of the contemporary global system, moments when the world order was
only beginning to take shape and wavered on the cusp of an alternate future.7
This book begins at a crucial era in the ongoing rivalry between European
and American conceptions of culture, the period in the 1950s when French
filmmakers used American cinema as a tool to confront a lifeless tradition of
quality that dominated their domestic industry. But the book also provides
an account of the ambivalence and regret that surfaced in the earliest new
wave films and exploded in French cinema of the late 1960s. Then it analyzes
the image-making strategies that documented a similar combination of fascination and regret during Taiwans incorporation into a global market in the
1980s and Chinas attempt to link tracks (jiegui) with the world during its
era of Reform and Opening. As the narrative engages with all three film cultures, it illuminates the commonalities among their discrete film industries.
Each of these cinemas is discovered by an international film circuit at the same
time that a domestic economic revolution signals the societys engagement
with an emerging system of global markets; each wields the threat and promise of transnational film movements to confront the inertia of its home industry; and, at once a product and an account of globalization, each becomes a
record of the disruption that follows in the wake of socioeconomic upheaval.8
This book envisions the logic of the new waves as the representation of globalization from the frontiers of an emerging world market in images. Marked by
their relatively limited economic resources and therefore their difference from
Hollywoods aesthetic ideals, these films always bear the stain of their locality;
they are relegated to the festival circuit and the domain of world cinema,
where anachronistic survivals of the local continue to dwell; they exist in a
liminal position between lived history and anticipated future, between the
confines of a material environment and the images that serve as harbingers of
a global culture in the making. Neither inside nor outside, the new waves inhabit the chaotic verges of this market revolution and bear witness to an agedefining historical phenomenon as it unfolds.
Because of its importance and its scope, the upsurge of new cinemas demands to be considered in its global dimensions, but in the discipline of film
studies the new wave either remains a formless and oceanic metaphor without history or substance, or it falls under the rubric of particular national cinemas, as the French, Japanese, or Hong Kong new wave. Although the
tendency to catalog these movements within familiar geographical, industrial,
or linguistic boundaries helps to identify the domestic circumstances from
which they arise, it may also obscure one of their most innovative and revelatory dimensions: their repetition and simultaneity in various locations and
their resistance to the habitual attribution of a local place-name. That territorial marker tends to limit the purview of scholarship to domestic conditions of
production and reception, and as a result, film scholars and critics have ignored the most revealing transnational dimensions of these cinematic movements, overlooking the many links and interactions among them. Each appearance of a new wave is itself a symptom: it celebrates the persistence of
novelty and local specificity in a world of homogenizing culture industries;
but it can also ring hollow, like a marketing slogan designed to achieve product differentiation in the increasingly crowded international film festival circuit. The difficult and nearly impossible task is to speak of new wave cinemas
in the plural while also recognizing the uniqueness of each particular situation, to recognize historical specificity while also acknowledging that each of
these cinematic new waves is one among many.
A national cinema framework forecloses the possibility of situating these
films in the broader context of the international festival circuit that developed
in the immediate postwar era and the subsequent emergence of an exportoriented art cinema in the 1940s and 1950s.9 The purpose of this book is to
move beyond those scholarly boundaries and provide a global and comparative analysis of new wave cinemas, to demonstrate how another conception of
world cinema has operated on the margins of the Hollywood-centered system
for the past five decades. There are inherent risks in this jump from one geopolitical reference point to another, as the solid ground prepared by a research
tradition begins to recede. But this departure from the conventions inherited
from the age of area studies also opens up enormous possibilities, especially
when a multifaceted social totality begins to materialize and draw together
thediscrete events and locations visible from a single vantage point. As Neil
Smith suggests, the importance of jumping scales lies precisely in [the]
active social and political connectedness of apparently different scales, their
deliberate confusion and abrogation.10 With that motivation in mind, this
book attempts to construct a framework that allows us to leap outward from
the most local of conditions to the national, regional, or even global processes
into which they flow. And others have already taken that risk, including generations of filmmakers whose sense of their own universe is infinitely larger
than the carefully delimited domain of the state.
The Universal Language of Images

Cinema has always been a global phenomenon. The threat of McDonaldization, Coca-colonization, and the all-conquering Hollywood blockbuster looms
over contemporary discussions of globalization and culture, while the promised efficiency of economic integration and the ideal of a universal modernity
motivate more optimistic chronicles of the process. But similar fears and aspirations have dominated critical and industrial accounts since the invention of
cinema. The current era of globalization has merely rekindled those fears and
Introduction
revived many of the utopian promises that inspired early filmmakers. Before
World War I, French cinema was a major exporter of films to the United
States, and most of the films screened in American theaters were produced in
foreign countries. Latin American theaters at that time were dominated by
French and Italian cinema.11 While American production companies were also
competitive in these early film marketsfor example, a program of Thomas
Edison films was screened in Shanghai as early as 1897, one year after the first
Lumire brothers film debuted in that citythere have been other contenders
for the role of global film hegemon, including France in the earliest years of
the medium, and the Soviet Union, which dominated film culture in the Eastern Bloc and the distant outposts that lay in its sphere of influence during the
Cold War. Particular regions experience their own dynamics of power and
resistance, with the Hong Kong film industry exerting its power over East and
Southeast Asian screens and Indian cinema overshadowing smaller national
industries in South Asia. But fear of global homogenization in the realm of
cinema and economic anxiety about an already mature or impending monopoly in the film business are usually provoked by Hollywood, now an
outdated and excessively local place-name in a world of runaway productions,
but a symbol of the glamour, familiarity, and dread that accompanies American cinema on its advance around the globe.
After the destruction of many of its rival industries in World War I and the
consolidation of a classical narrative system, American movies assumed an
increasingly dominant position in world film markets. In 1920, with a postwar
influx of Hollywood cinema beginning to overwhelm European producers,
Emile Vuillermoz eulogized the once glorious French film industry: The
French cinema is about to perish. Its demise is no more than a matter of
months. . . . French filmmakers then either will have to become Americanized
under the guidance of the American film companies [harbingers of a regularized aesthetic] or else disappear.12 Critics and industry insiders penned similar polemics in response to this Hollywood juggernaut, often using the same
neologismAmericanizedto describe audiences transformed by the influence of this foreign cinema. In language that anticipated countless later
denunciations of the pernicious effect of American film, a 1927 article in Britains Daily Express characterized the seemingly unstoppable spread of Hollywood as a foreign invasion that would imperil British spectators, weaken their
loyalty to the empire, and target those considered most vulnerable to the fantasies displayed on the silver screen. The bulk of our picture-goers, asserted
the author, are Americanised to an extent that makes them regard a British
film as a foreign film, and an interesting but more frequently an irritating
interlude in their favourite entertainment. They go to see American stars; they
have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, dream America; we have several million people, mostly women, who, to
all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens.13 The association
of Hollywood cinema with cultural imperialism remains one of the most

common frameworks for discussions of transnational art and media circulation, and it echoes similar concerns in the first half of the twentieth century.
In the period immediately after World War II, Hollywood expanded its
influence around the world with the help of goodwill toward the United States
and the unprecedented political power accrued in the wake of its victory in
Europe and Asia. In 1950, the producer Walter Wanger portrayed Hollywood
as a celluloid Athens and described its films as an opening salvo in a worldwide barrage of ideas that will break through barriers and reach people everywhere.14 This alliance between Donald Duck and diplomacy would have
commercial and material benefits as well, Wanger hastened to add.15 In one of
the most explicit formulations of the old adage that trade follows the film, he
wrote: we have done a great service not only selling America but also American products.16 Nataa uroviov suggests that as early as the mid-1920s
many Hollywood executives considered their films more than expressions of
a particular national consciousness and more than an alternative, competing
cultural idiom.17 She argues that for many Hollywood executives and especially B.P. Schulberg, Paramounts production chief, the Americanness crystallized in the movies was an epitome of universal human evolution, subsuming under it all the local currencies of cultural exchange.18 American cinema
was an effective advertisement for American products because it appeared to
be selling something else, a less specific but still powerful vision of America as
the seat of modernity itself.
Familiar sentiments also animated the more recent controversy about a
cultural exception that shields domestic films and other audiovisual productions from international free-trade agreements. Steven Spielberg joined
the many in Hollywood who condemned screen quotas as an infringement on
the right of art and ideas to move freely. We cannot lock our borders any
more than we ought to close our minds, he argued in a statement issued
during the 1993 GATT negotiations.19 Seven European directors, including
Pedro Almodvar, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Wim Wenders, responded to
this lobbying campaign with a full-page ad in Daily Variety: Dear Steven, We
are only desperately defending the tiny margin of freedom [allotted] to us.
Weare trying to defend European cinema from complete annihilation.20 In
the more colorful words of a Libration editorial, governments and citizens
around the globe were forced to counter the threat posed by blockbusters like
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), with its almost irresistible combination of
cuteness and terror, and confront, with renewed vigor, the yankosaurs who
menace our country.21 When free trade results in a virtual monopoly on
film screens, when it threatens local cultural traditions, when it undermines
the very foundations of national belonging, then ministers of culture and foreign trade, industry professionals, and newspaper editorial boards begin to
argue for a different conception of cinema, with images no longer a good to be
Introduction
bought and sold but an essential element of a peoples identity and a contributor to their basic human dignity.22 An atavistic definition of culture and an
equally atavistic geopolitical model resurface in order to impede the unremitting advance of a borderless mass media governed only by the logic of the
market.
Despite this long history of apprehension about a homogeneous global culture, the possibility of a cinema without borders has not always incited such
anxiety, even outside the national film industries with the most to gain. Arising alongside the first concerns about cultural colonization, films first generation of artists and theorists anticipated a time when a universal language of
images would transcend borders erected in the name of cultural and linguistic
difference. Writing in Cin-Journal in 1912, the prolific and influential French
critic Yhcam suggested that an ideal form of cinema would overcome the fundamental obstacles that inevitably bedevil literature. Unlike the novelist or
poet, the scriptwriter of the cinema solves the problem of the diversity of
languages. For him there is no need of either Volapuc or Esperanto. His drama
is understood everywhere and by everyone, by the Chinese as well as the Parisians, by the Spanish as well as the English, by the Russians as well as the
Arabs. His field of action has no boundaries; he writes for the universality of
all peoples.23 The first film entrepreneurs also envisioned a global marketplace, with stars, studios, or directors evolving into brand names capable of
publicizing and disseminating their product to a worldwide pool of consumers. In theory and practice, as both an idealized art form and a business like
any other, cinema was launched onto a global stage in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Despite the challenge posed by the coming of sound,
those universalizing ambitions remained even after linguistic difference rendered the utopian visions of early cinephiles increasingly outlandish and unrealizable. The multilanguage versions produced between 1929 and 1933 in the
Paris suburb of Joinville combined these idealistic and commercial motivations, as they hoped to unite the efficiency of assembly-line manufacture
using the same sets and a screenplay translated into several European languages, a slightly more targeted variation on mass productionwith the faded
dream of a universal cinema, now scaled down to a multinational rather than
genuinely or plausibly global project. Although the catastrophic devastation
of World War II brought that period in film history to a halt, the utopian ambition of a world cinema manifested itself again in the immediate aftermath of
the conflict. The burgeoning of an art house and film festival circuit developed
into one of the major sites for this alternative conception of cinematic globalization, and the various new waves cinemas were key components of this nascent network of dispersed filmmakers and spectators.
Before the term new wave was coined in the 1950s, Italian neorealism was
the major postwar export phenomenon appealing to art house audiences, with
films like Roberto Rossellinis Rome, Open City (Roma, citt aperta, 1945) and
10
Vittorio De Sicas Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) selling out theaters
elsewhere on the continent and overseas. While an international success on
this scale would have been impossible to anticipate in the cultural and economic conditions that prevailed in Italy in 1945, three years of genuinely stunning triumphs established neorealism as the paradigm for a certain manner of
art cinema, a model for later filmmakers to adopt and aspire to. The so-called
Andreotti Law of 1949 contributed to the downfall of neorealism because it
choked off access to foreign sources of revenue. The law provided subsidies for
films suitable . . . to the interests of Italy and denied export permits to films
guilty of slandering Italy abroad.24 Andreotti envisioned cinema as a mechanism to make known abroad what is being done in our country and display
what is new where building, progress, work is concerned.25 But the Andreotti Law and its aftermath helped underscore another key dimension of the
films emerging from Italy after the war: cinematic modernism often conflicted
with the economic and political project of modernization because those two
manifestations of the modern clashed in the realm of visual culture, because
they circulated through and cultivated different modes of image-making. According to the ministerial logic of the time, the interests of Italy would be
defended if filmmakers depicted the nations ascent into the ranks of modern
economies instead of harping on the rubble left behind after the war and the
actuality of uneven development. And while Andreotti himself would pursue
this agenda in various government positions, including prime minister seven
times, Italian cinema began to converge with more dominant trends in a globalizing film industry. It became one of the earliest outposts of runaway productions, when directors like Sergio Leone created spaghetti westerns at a
lower cost than Hollywood could match in the deserts of southern California.
It opened a small niche for itself as an exporter of genre films like the swordand-sandal epics of the 1950s. And it eventually embodied the transformations of Italys economic miracle when actresses like Gina Lollobrigida and
Sophia Loren became synonymous with elegance and impeccable taste and
served as talismans for the march toward a postindustrial economy. Movies
were instrumental in this makeover, as a state with virtually no fashion industry before World War II quickly positioned itself as one of the worlds preeminent arbiters of style and the center of a transnational fashion empire centered in Milan.
Neorealism proved surprisingly capable of traveling, but it was channeled
into the relatively limited domain of art cinema, and Italy never developed a
film industry with a sustained commercial appeal on a global scale, unlike the
trade in style that was sustained with the assistance of Italian cinemas most
important stars and directors. The heirs of De Sica and Rossellini would find
themselves exploring a similar niche in the global film market (Pasolini and
Antonioni, for example). Others would operate in a modernized domestic industry organized around the logic of overseas production and flexible labor,
Introduction
11
or in a glamorized show business reimagined as an adjunct to the fashion

trade. By the 1960s, a new generation of Italian filmmakers were looking for
inspiration outside the domestic tradition, and Bertolucci was mesmerized by
the promise of a new beginning emanating from critics and directors associated with Cahiers du cinma: what I liked in those days was the Nouvelle
Vague. I felt much closer to the French. I saw bout de souffle during the early
summer of 1960 in Paris, and I had the feeling that something was starting
from zero there, that all the films I had seen up to then constituted the cinema
before bout de souffle.26 From Rossellini to Bertolucci, from Leone to Loren,
these individuals are best understood as contributors to a global system of
images, yet their films materialized through distinct production practices, circulated through discrete distribution channels, intersected with the others
only in passing, and opened onto very different worlds.
Even this schematic history suggests that from its inception, film has circulated through far-reaching international networks and that scholarship should
attempt to retrace the complicated itineraries followed by texts and filmmakers, along with the network of comparisons that developed around them. But
the process of globalizing the study of cinema remains in its infancy. Attempts
to think beyond the borders of the nation in cinema studies typically focus on
the growing dominance of American cinema in the global film marketplace,
from the classical studio era to the emergence of new Hollywood in the late
1960s and global Hollywood in the past two decades.27 The limitation of this
interest in the international reach of American cinema is its tendency to focus
exclusively on the products, economic models, and aesthetic systems emanating from Hollywood. With few exceptions, these accounts suggest that
Hollywood cinema, symptomatically shorn of its own national adjective, is
uniquely situated to spread outside the narrow confines of its homeland.
When one talks of cinema, one talks of American cinema, said the Brazilian
director Glauber Rocha during the heyday of Third Cinema in the 1960s. For
this reason, every discussion of cinema made outside Hollywood must begin
with Hollywood.28 But for many critics, the study of globalization in cinema
never extends beyond this tentative first step. Or, as Franco Moretti asks, if the
discussion begins with an acknowledgment of the popularity and financial
power of American cinema, must it also end with Hollywood?29 Scholarship
on other popular filmmaking traditions with a transnational following, including those of India and Hong Kong, offers an alternative to this EuroAmerican history of globalized culture.30 Research focused on postcolonial
filmmaking has also attempted to displace Europe and the United States from
the still center of the film world, not by celebrating the triumphs of an alternative regional or global media power but by examining the hybrid identities
that characterize colonial centers like London and Paris, or the survival of the
most local cinematic traditions in the aftermath of empire.31 These studies
tend to adopt models of cultural conflict in which the fundamental reference
12
points are drawn from the historical experience of imperial conquest and occupation, revolutionary nationalism, or migration. And they offer one of the
few opportunities to examine an expansive network of films produced outside
the orbit of Hollywood; they reveal a global system marked by the colonial
ordering of space, the process described by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the
worlding of what is now called the Third World. 32
Building on this important work in postcolonial film studies, this book attempts to escape the provincial realm of the European and Hollywood film industries; but it also develops a framework for understanding postwar conditions
that are no longer compatible with a paradigm inherited from nineteenthcentury notions of imperialism. This book analyzes the relationship between
three distinct film cultures and what Victoria de Grazia calls an irresistible
empire, a market empire constructed in the image of the worlds first regime
of mass consumption.33 Hollywood cinema has always been a vital medium
for disseminating the wonders of the market, and de Grazias work on European cinema in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between film and trade, between images of abundance and
the goods to follow. An object of fear and desire, the market emerges as a
threat to sovereignty and deep-seated conceptions of local and national identity; the market also possesses the allure of modernity, the possibility of liberation from entrenched and stifling traditions, and the promise of democracy through consumption. When critics, producers, and filmmakers refer to
a new wave, they gesture toward the periphery of the market empire described by de Grazia, to a region in the process of transition to, negotiation
with, and resistance to this new dominion of markets. Allusions to the new
waves conjure up a separate sphere of financing, distribution, and exhibition
that remains a distinct niche compared to its more pervasive American counterpart. And they refer to a particular array of filmmaking strategies, especially the revival of neorealism and a long-take aesthetic organized around
mise-en-scne, in the context of the burgeoning production of consumable
images.
The unavoidable paradox is that invocations of the new wave celebrate an
alternative to a globalizing film market, and they protest a product deemed
irredeemably commercial and indifferent, but they do so through the formulaic catchphrase new wave. Claude Chabrol begins the chapter on the nouvelle vague in his 1976 autobiography by comparing the publicity campaign
waged on behalf of the new wave to ubiquitous ads for new consumer products: in 1958 and 1959, my buddies at Cahiers and I, having moved into directing, were promoted like a new brand of soap. We were the nouvelle vague,
and that very appealing slogan proved instrumental in the marketing of the
young filmmakers.34 It also tapped into a broader political and economic fascination with things new: if the popular press spoke so much of us it was
because they wanted to impose the equation: De Gaulle equals Renewal. In the
Introduction
13
cinema like elsewhere. The general arrives, the Republic changes, France is
reborn! . . . Make way for youth!35 The new wave in France is a cinematic
record of that rebirth and the disenchantment it engenders when the paradigm of consumer culture subsumes elements of French society previously
considered enduring and monumental. With his manifest ambivalence,Chabrol helps illustrate the paradoxes that persisted in France during the 1950s and
1960s and throughout the age of new waves: the new wave is an art slogan;
it is a routinized manner of invoking the new; and its films are at once products of a nascent global system and enduring documents of the vanishing
thatensues.
The New Wave Arrives

New wave is one of the rare critical terms in film studies not borrowed from
art or literary history, and given both its importance in the field and its unusual provenance, a brief cultural etymology is in order. The phrase nouvelle
vague migrated to film criticism from the mass circulation media that proliferated in France after World War II. It was coined by the writer and editor Franoise Giroud to describe the vast demographic cohort whose formative years
fell after the end of the war. Under Girouds leadership, the news magazine
LExpress chronicled the impact of le baby boom, and in 1957 it undertook
an ambitious sociological survey of young adults, partly in an attempt to
gather data on current and potential readers, but also to gauge the difference
between the youth of the time and preceding generations. The magazine ultimately presented its findings as proof of a profound generational shift and
announced the arrival of the new wave. The demographic explosion was
undeniable, but Giroud believed that the novelty of this period was also
beyond dispute, that the transformation from the deprivation of the postwar
era was total and irreversible. Its very simple, she recalled; in 1946 in France
there was literally nothing.36 While she referred most directly to the culture of
scarcity and rationing imposed under wartime conditions, to a nation hungry
for consumer goods, from nylon stockings to refrigerators, from records to
automobiles, she also welcomed the possibility of a new beginning and advocated a form of radical social reconstruction through a consumer revolution
that used the middle-class American lifestyle as its beacon.37 From this condition of near annihilation rose a society intent on cultivating an economy of
abundance through seemingly endless increases in productivity.
The twin demographic and cinematic new waves joined a cacophony of
competing novelties, as the new man and new woman, both refashioned by
mass consumption and modern technology, sped through the freshly paved
streets of redesigned cities and retreated to just-constructed and furnished
suburban apartments. Just after the return to power of de Gaulle in 1958 and
14
under the new constitution of the Fifth Republic, the French state attemptedto
remedy a shortage of housing stock and facilitate rapid urbanization through
a dramatic acceleration in the pace of demolition and building, especially in
areas designated Priority Urbanization Zones (Zones urbaniser en priorit),
an urban planning category targeted for government investment between 1959
and 1967. Usually located in the suburbs, these districts were designed on the
premise that accommodations, industry, and offices would remain compartmentalized but connected by the automobile. One result of this process was a
series of new cities, many constructed as satellites of Paris, with massive
housing projects at their physical and social centers and highways or railway
lines linking them to the core areas of le-de-France. If the baby boom was
necessarily accompanied by a building spree, that ambitious construction
scheme was in turn accompanied by a mobi-boom (in the words of a 2011
exhibit at Les Arts Dcoratifs), an explosion of design that revamped the
relationship between French urbanites and the object world around them.38
Led by a nouvelle vague of product designers and corporations like Roche
Bobois and Ligne Roset, this design movement attempted to realize at the level
of everyday life the official project of modernization, to bestow a concrete and
popular form on an abstract process directed from above.39
The cultural background for this period is recounted most remarkably by
Kristin Ross in her 1995 book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, and many of the factors
she considers are fundamental for any study of cinema during a moment of
economic miracles. She analyzes, for example, the periods omnipresent discourse of cleanliness, with the word clean used in both a literal sense, as the
ultimate goal of newly available and ubiquitously advertised scrubbing and
sanitizing products flooding the market, and metaphorically, with dirty and
unhygienic manifestations of premodernity slated to be razed and replaced by
a new city of sleekness and shine. She then chronicles the privatization of collective and public spaces, and a valorization of newly remodeled but standardized apartments as, paradoxically, an oasis of individualism and an ultramodern retreat from modernity; the demolition of large swathes of urban
landscapes deemed unhealthy or just insufficiently modern, with the result
that between 1954 and 1974 fully 25 percent of the surface architecture in Paris
was destroyed and rebuilt; the infiltration of the language and imagery of advertising into other modes of communication; and the emergence of new
forms of popular media, like television, that threatened more established
forms of art and entertainment, like cinema. She argues that the French new
wavesin cinema, in design, and in the population at largeemerged under
the aegis of American hegemony, and she analyzes the stormy process of negotiation with this particular mode of modernization, especially with the revolutionary impact of American-style mass consumption. In a study devoted
also to the experience on the home front of Frances clean war in Algeria,
Ross suggests that the upheaval in French cities, both inside and outside the
Introduction
15
home, amounted to a metaphorical colonization in the realm of everyday life.

Or as Philippe Roger argues in his account of the relationship between France
and its American enemy: In the twentieth century, France was invaded by
the United States. You will not find this sentence in any history bookbut
there is another history, intuitive and stubborn, that nations prefer, in general,
to the one schoolchildren learn. In the unofficial annals of Frances collective
memory, the American invasion is an obvious fact and, for France, one of the
major events of the last century.40 Youth culture, mass media, and urban
space were among the most prominent sites of that invasion, though they
also reveal the limits of that battlefield metaphor, as the weapons of the colonizer included the elusive power of style and the allure of the modern. The
iconic churches and state structures remained, of course, but the new, cleaner,
supposedly more efficient cityscape became the focal point of public investment and the popular imagination.
In his study of the physical environments inherited from the postwar transformation of France, Marc Aug focuses on new satellites of urbanity constructed outside the city proper and a novel category of space created in the
wake of the periods economic and social revolutions. He argues that nonplacesmost notably the airport, the supermarket, the industrial park, the
autoroute, the cabins of mass transportation, and the extended transit camps
where the planets refugees are parkedhave become the emblematic locations of a new historical era.41 Often hidden in plain sight, their impact has
been paradoxically obscured by glass walls and abundant lighting. They signal,
for Aug, a transition away from the modernity imagined by the likes of
Baudelaire and Benjamin in the early twentieth century and into a period of
supermodernity. The era of supermodernity is characterized above all by the
acceleration of history and an overabundance of events, which suggest
that the smooth plastic seating of the boarding area or the slick polished fuselage of the high-speed train are theaters of excess rather than paragons of
efficiency.42 If local practices and direct experience were once the determinative forces in individual lives, the new historical era is shaped increasingly
by distant events mediated through images, by a shrinking of the planet
through communications and transportation technology and a subsequent
alteration in the scale of distant societies linked tenuously over airwaves and
through airspace.43 The result, Aug suggests, is a spatial overabundance
and a subsequent devaluation of the environments that once constituted the
core of local identity.44 Since Malraux, he writes, our towns have been turning into museums (restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas,
pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed
trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in
them.45 But, he adds, this turning away, this bypassing, is not without some
feeling of remorse, as we can see from the numerous signboards inviting us not
to ignore the splendours of the area and its traces of history. Paradoxically, it is
16
at the city limits, in the cold, gloomy space of big housing schemes, industrial
zones and supermarkets, that the signs are placed inviting us to visit the ancient monuments.46 Baudelaire once envisioned a modernity marked by the
proximity and juxtaposition of distinct temporalities and conceptions of space,
a willed coexistence of two different worlds, chimneys alongside spires.47
That clash of temporalities defined the modern city for Aug, while its disappearance has become the distinguishing feature of supermodernity.48 Relics
ofa social, political, and aesthetic model based on the logic of contradiction
and friction, the new waves allow for the persistence of the modern into the age
of supermodernity. Aug writes that we live in a world that we have not yet
learned to look at, and the new waves teach us to view the world cinematically,even at moments when newer media offer equally compelling models and
metaphorsflow, the network, the city of bitsfor urban reconstruction.49
In her contribution to the 1994 catalogue accompanying a Pompidou
Center exhibition on the fate of the modern city, Franoise Choay offers another account of this transition from the urban ideal that served as a lodestar
for artists and planners in the early twentieth century and its successor, a networked rather than an industrial cityscape. In this essay, Urban Rule and the
Death of the City, she argues that the physical spaces and ideological values
crystallized in the term city have been obscured and displaced by what she
calls the urban. If, as Lewis Mumford suggests, the preindustrial town was
part and parcel of the countryside that surrounded it, the urbanity of highway
networks and communications technology now surrounds its conceptual and
ecological opposite, the rural. Beginning in the 1960s, she suggests, a series of
technical innovations in transportation and communicationhigh-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 messagescreated the possibility of being everywhere at once.50 With the introduction of those technologies, the age of [discrete] urban entities is over, and the history of cities is guided by the ideal
ofuniversal communicability and must contend with its consequences, including a universal, scattered and fragmented urbanization.51 Space has
been reimagined through the analogy of a network dedicated to distribution
and communication, and its operating system, which is valid and applicable
anywhere, in town or country, village or suburb, can be called URBAN.52 The
French new wave chronicles the decay of the modern idea of the city, along
with the dawn and dispersal of urban rule; and over the course of the 1960s,
the new wave looks at this urban operating system through the unsettled
and outmoded cinematic gaze developed with the city in mind.
If this youthful and metropolitan gaze now appears central to the new wave
vision, the earliest critics of the French new wave also defined it through the
inherent and energizing incongruities of its way of seeing, in addition to the
more straightforward catalog of styles, cineastes, and stars habitually used to
Introduction
17
define a movement in film. In 1960, in an influential account of the Young

French Cinema, Andr S. Labarthe cited four major influences on the developing new wave: (1) Italian neorealism, (2) documentary films, (3) American
cinema, and (4) television.53 If that peculiar constellation of influences produced the new wave in France, its important to realize how jarring the juxtapositions and collisions can be: think of Jean-Pierre Melvillethe subject of
a book by Ginette Vincendeau with the telling subtitle An American in
Parisroaming the streets around Place Pigalle preparing to shoot Bob the
Gambler (Bob le flambeur, 1956), a masterpiece of the city film genre, with its
documentary-like record of the haunts in this gritty neighborhood. And then
think of him driving his massive Cadillac, listening to Glenn Miller on the
Armed Forces Radio Network, wearing a Stetson hat, heading to the cinema
to see the American detective films that he watched with almost fanatical interest.54 The seemingly bizarre and sometimes embarrassing outliers in the
Cahiers circlepeople like Luc Moullet, who advocates the wholesale Americanization of French cinema in his 1959 essay on Samuel Fullershould be
seen as occupying the same discursive universe as Godard, Truffaut, Rivette,
and Fereydoun Hoveyda.55 Far beyond the consumerist fantasies indulged by
the pages of LExpress, Moullet explores the darkest extreme of the periods
fascination with American culture. Other Cahiers critics negotiate a middle
path: hence their elevation of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks to the
pantheon of filmmakers, to the apotheoses of the Hollywood auteur, to miraculous seers capable of mediating between American mass culture and individual authorship. A Hitchcocko-Hawksian cinema demonstrated that one
could Americanize by degrees. At the other extreme, we have Jean Rouchs
aspiration toward an intensely localized documentary; or the ethos of location
shooting that informs the extraordinary opening sequence of The 400 Blows
(Les Quatre cents coups; Truffaut, 1959), a tour of Paris by car, with that landmark of landmarks, the Eiffel Tower, always in the background; or the countless street scenes in Godards Breathless ( bout de souffle, 1960), which together create what Michel Marie calls a veritable geographic portrait of 1959
Paris.56 Or perhaps most comprehensive of all, the omnibus film Six in Paris
(Paris vu par), released in 1965, which assigned a neighborhood to each of its
contributing directors and allowed them to fan out to particular districts and
together create a map of the city. These filmmakers embraced the possibility of
documenting Paris at the moment of its second massive modernization, and
the dynamism of cinema in the period comes primarily from the collision,
even with the span of a single film, of this desire to record the particularities of
a unique local experience and to participate in what seemed like a universal
modernity.
If we can posit an end of the new wave in France, it corresponds roughly to
the emergence of a society of the spectacle, which Debord defines as a social
relationship between people that is mediated by images.57 Godards Two or
18
Three Things I Know about Her (Deux ou trois choses que je sais delle, 1966)
portends this new regime where commodities and space become images, and
it constitutes an early backlash against the dynamic modernization of Frances
economic miracle, the nations initiation into a world of mass-produced automobiles motoring along ever-extending highway networks, and cities spiraling outward in their wake. The film betrays the exhaustion of the new waves
initial documentary project and migrates instead toward spaces that could be
documented anywhere and therefore need hardly be filmed at all. The films
final shot, a still life with commodities, displays products assiduously arranged
on the lawn of a newly built suburban housing project and announces the total
collapse of object and commodity, architecture and image (Figure I.1). If the
new wave exists in the liminal space between two conceptions of the cinematic
image, if it documents the present reality of a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing society, it is primarily concerned with the confrontation between a material world of walls and an emerging society dominated by cinematic, televisual, and advertising images.
Angelo Restivos magisterial The Cinema of Economic Miracleswhich focuses primarily on Italian cinema in the 1960s before extending its scope to the
geopolitical periphery of Taiwan and Brazilsuggests that this experience was
not isolated in France and that the category of the economic miracle allows for
comparative analysis of the experience of this abrupt transformation. Restivos argument hinges on the belief that two regimes of the image coexisted
during Italys economic miracle.58 The first perceived the image as a medium
of preservation during a period of massive and disquieting transformation; in
this model the image served as a record of a whole way of life on the verge of
disappearance and bore witness to change and to loss. The second regime,
which emerged in a moment when new technologies like television became
increasingly efficient at producing and disseminating images, was a means of
figure i.1 Two or Three Things I Know about Her.
Introduction
19
manufacturing desire in an economy reorganizing around consumption; it

provoked the cycles of obsolescence and renewal that this reorganization entailed. One the one hand, the image was documentary in a very literal sense: it
served as a means of preserving a record for posterity. On the other, an inimical regime of the image undermined that very process of preservation by generating new cycles of demolition, reconstruction, and accumulation. That is
the ambivalent and transitional status of the image in the cinema of economic
miracles. This model emphasizes the undecidable and transitional status of the
image during the economic miracle, as a residual faith in the validity of the
image at the theoretical core of neorealism yields to a society of spectacle and
simulation, as cinema alternates between these two conceptions of the image,
using one to critique the other, dwelling on and in the documentary image
even as the object preserved on film disappears from the landscape.59 As the
Italian director Vittorio De Seta suggests, the pace and scope of this revolution
in Europe was stunning: life changed, and with it the quality of life, as if
orders had been handed down. Although invisible and unexpressed, they
acted like commands that had only to be pronounced for the old models and
values, especially those of rural life, to become obsolete and discarded. It was
this period of the late fifties and early sixties for which La Dolce Vita served as
a sort of watershed. . . . Urbanism, industrialism, consumerism, prosperity
this entire human transformation occurredand was experiencedlike a natural disaster.60 If the environments and ways of life in place before World War
II had solidified into a form of second nature, an accelerated wave of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s rendered change itself the new human condition rather than any lasting physical and social structures. The two regimes of
the image in new wave cinema are attuned to both conceptions of modernity,
to the second nature of the prewar era, the manmade devastation of the war,
and the natural disaster that ensued. And because the postWorld War II art
cinema developed under the aesthetic influence of neorealism and in the historical conditions of the economic boom, it became one of the primary mechanisms for the documentation of that new consumer culture and its prototypical environments.
Taken together, the case studies in this book suggest that the postwar new
waves were intimately associated with the transnational youth and urban culture that has evolved over the past half century and transformed the global
film industry but also developed a distinctive mode of image-making with
only an oblique connection to the constant innovation of the design or fashion business. First, these film movements chart the rise of youth as a key demographic category and as the principal agent of social and cultural change
(replacing, for example, the working class in Marxist formulations). Youth
becomes the crucial concept for reimagining revolution in a global age.
Second, these films document the emergence of cities as a prototype for the
20
reconception of society, with urban space and communities providing an alternative to existing models like the factory, the nation, and other inherited
paradigms for the organization of social space and belonging. Third, these
new cinemas develop in tandem with the twin processes of globalization and
marketization and chronicle a period when cultural and economic innovation
is relocated from the nation to the market and the world at large. Fourth,
these cinematic movements emerge into a specific nichethe international
art cinemathat channels films toward particular audiences and often limits
the scale of their exposure, while also providing a platform for a critique of the
dominant model of American-style markets. The films of the new waves are
characterized by this paradox: they enter the global network of art cinema by
producing images that allude to the tradition of realist filmmaking and in the
process document a locality present in front of the camera. Their global aspirations are balanced by their attention to the real in all its specificity, and their
claims to novelty are belied by a fascination with relics of the past.
In his 1979 elegy for the age of the French new wave, Les Trentes Glorieuses,
ou la rvolution invisible, the demographer Jean Fourasti provides a conclusion to the story of the nouvelle vague first penned by Giroud two decades
before. Written with a combination of sociological detail and nostalgia, the
book affirms that the generation glimpsed in fledgling form in the statistical
profiles of LExpress eventually experienced a socioeconomic revolution with
profound ramifications in everyday life. The new wave in film developed in
tandem with the youth movement hailed in the popular press and the economic miracle later glorified by Fourasti, but with cameras roaming the
streets of Paris and theaters projecting those images around the world, French
cinema of the 1950s and 1960s belied one key assumption evident in his subtitle: that the revolution was invisible.61 Reimagined as a global phenomenon, the new wave cinemas of the past half century have placed the massive
but obscure processes of globalization and marketization on view; have regenerated conflict between nonplaces and the traditions they erase; have documented the remains of the modern city during the fabrication of a new model
of urbanism; and have situated art cinema and its characteristic ways of seeing
at the core of an emerging media and physical environment, a metropolis
overtaken by images, that remains with us today.
The Globalization of Art Cinema

Although it persists as a reference point for critics and audiences, the category
art cinema has been relegated to a less prominent position in film studies
over the past two decades. This marks a precipitous descent from the heyday
of the 1950s and 1960s, when auteur theory served to sanctify a cadre of directors as true artists and when the production of art films was supported by state
Introduction
21
subsidies and tax breaks, as well as a growing network of theaters, festivals,

and journals. The main reason for the decline of art cinema and its auteurist
imprimatur was the understandable unwillingness to bestow the status of art
on one mode of filmmaking while denigrating others as merely popular or
commercial, ignoring the enormous cultural significance of even the most
profit-motivated movies and dismissing the particular brilliance of studio
productions, the mysterious collective virtuosity that Andr Bazin called the
genius of the system.62 But as Steven Neale suggests, the nascent institutions
of art cinema were also guided by democratic aspirations, as several European
countries attempted to counter American domination of their indigenous
markets in film and also to foster a film industry and a film culture of their
own.63 Governments and funding organizations have nurtured a market in
cinematic arts as a bulwark against the invasion of domestic screens by popular films from abroad. Academic interest in the domain of art cinema has
waned not because this task is no longer urgent (after all, Hollywood has
greater reach and economic leverage than ever) but because of the seeming
futility of this particular strategy of resistance, which concentrates limited resources on a circumscribed niche market and, despite its initial motivations,
tends to cultivate small, elite audiences. These films have become the cinematic equivalents of the prize-winning novels that constitute a globally salable
commodity in the literary market. The novel thus provides, in Timothy Brennans formulation, the form through which a thin, foreign-educated stratum
(however sensitive or committed to domestic political interests), has communicated to metropolitan reading publics, often in translation. It has been, in
short, a naturally cosmopolitan form that empire has allowed to play a national role, as it were, only in an international arena.64 In many of its manifestations, art cinema has performed virtually the same function in major
cities and other cultural centers around the world.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Screen theory and Birmingham
School cultural studies rose to prominence in cinema and media scholarship,
critics (and some filmmakers, Godard most prominent among them) began to
laugh at the notion that art cinema constituted a viable alternative to its classical counterparts. According to this critique, the sumptuous images created
by the likes of Antonioni amount ultimately to empty exercises in bourgeois
self-expression and sources of visual pleasure for intellectuals. In that eras
most heated debates about the politics of culture, Art Cinema was often defined as the enemy: as a bastion of high art ideologies and the kind of
cinema to be fought.65 In the wake of those clashes, cultural studies has focused on the possibilities of resistance opened by even the most commercial
media products and the utopian goal of a more democratically controlled
mass media. More recent studies of art cinema (often building on the interventions of David Bordwell and Neale in the 1980s) have tended to consider it
alongside other film traditions, as a commercial category in its own right, with
22
its own history, its own standards and practices, and its own audience formations. Adapting strategies more familiar in the study of popular genres, Bordwell identifies the formal conventions and implicit viewing procedures
that together define this distinct branch of the cinematic institution.66 Films
created in this particular mode foreground ambiguity in the narrative instead
of relying on clear cause-effect chains, they emphasize character psychology
rather than action, they highlight visual style, and their audiences use a different set of protocols to decode them, most often through recourse to the author
as the unifying figure whose long-term preoccupations serve as the ultimate
source of clarity and meaning. This research has forever demystified the work
of even the most revered and persistently canonized directors. No longer
viewed as the site of innovation itself, no longer conceived as the diametric
opposite of a classical cinema produced according to the logic of industrial
efficiency and repetition, art cinema has become yet another cultural institution that channels filmmakers into particular conventions, makes possible
particular stories and images, and forecloses other avenues of creation and
collaboration.
While art cinema usually deploys a set of formal conventions that distinguish it from more commercial standards, its institutions are also intimately
connected to larger tendencies in prestige cultural markets, most notably the
massive expansion in the number of literary and art prizes, biennials, film
festivals, and award-granting organizations. As James F. English argues in his
study of this modern craze for arts awards, participants in this universe of
festivals and prizes habitually decry the excesses of a world where honors
often seem to outnumber the worthwhile works of art. He writes that the rise
of prizes over the past century, and especially their feverish proliferation in
recent decades, is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement
only in terms of stardom and success, and that is fast replacing a rich and
varied cultural world with a shallow and homogeneous McCulture based on
the model of network TV. Prizes, from this vantage point, are not a celebration but a contamination of the most precious aspects of art.67 But English
suggests that this seemingly paradoxical combination of ritual lament and
continued expansion is symptomatic not of the failure of the economy of
prestige but of its smooth functioning as a means of capital intraconversion.68 Even as cities, governments, and wealthy capitalists achieve fame and
fortune through the rapid production of goods and services, even as they
engage in economic activities where the newest and latest fashion renders last
years model almost immediately obsolete, they also hope to enhance and
solidify their reputations by associating them with qualities that endure beyond
the current product cycle. Film festivals, along with literary prizes and international art showcases, are one of the mechanisms through which institutions transform, cement, or even elevate their status in the global cultural
Introduction
23
economy. While Denning views a global explosion of popular culture transmitted through mass media, the worldwide network of prizes has developed
into its mirror opposite: artistic distinction recognized on a global scale. Echoing scholars as diverse as Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, and Daniel Bell,
English maintains that this tendency emerges in parallel with transformations in the cultural field as a whole;69 and he argues that this sudden and
widespread intensification of the awards scene from the early 1970s onward is
implicated as both a cause and an effect of much broader transformations in
the mode of cultural production. These profound historical shifts have been
widely understood in terms of the rise of cultural capital.70 The historical
trendwhich originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
but accelerated after World War II and became a dominant social and economic force from the 1970s onis characterized by the expansion of the cultural field into a core sector of the global economy, with creative workers and
technocrats engaged in the production and manipulation of images and information rather than industrial output, traditionally defined. Prizes and festivals facilitate and normalize this magnification of the domain of culture, removing cultural products from the realm of mere commerce and allowing
them to bask in the aura of art.
The history of film festivals is central to this narrative of culture run amuck.
The first major convocation dedicated exclusively to cinema was the precursor
of the Venice Film Festival, the Esposizione Internazionale dArte Cinematografica of 1932. The Festival de Cannes was established in 1939 as an alternative
to the fascist spectacle in Italy. Despite these earlier experiments in the highprofile festival, the circulation of films and artists only gathered momentum
after the War, as a year-long calendar of events and a global itinerary of destinations took shape. If Mussolinis government established the Biennale at
Venice for the glory of his regime and the Italian nation, and if German and
American authorities founded the Berlin festival in 1951 to showcase the success of denazification and democratization, the circuit of cinematic events has
grown much more global and less nationalistic in orientation over the intervening years. Film festivals have become a backdrop for the interaction between the most local mediumfilms that record the people, actions, and environments directly in front of the cameraand the most itinerant audiences
and artists. These sites are exceptionally cosmopolitan contact zones where
artists, critics, financiers, and the general public mingle with their counterparts from all around the world. In its ideal form, the festival resembles the
pilgrimages theorized by Benedict Anderson in his studies of nationalism; and
these highly ritualized cinematic eventswhich are often described in quasireligious language, with devotees converging annually on Cannes or Venice
or Torontoserve to uproot their audiences from their particular origins and
constitute new subjects of the festival itself.71 But they take place in peculiar
and rarefied environments, where the national identities of filmmakers and
24
the insistent locality of their images coexist uneasily with the deterritorialized
atmosphere of the occasion, the sense that the space of the screening halls and
lobbies is more directly linked to equivalent locations in other festival cities
than the buildings and people just beyond the walls of the theater. With the
proliferation of festivals, the festival site has become a nonspace that facilitates
the flow of people through theaters and hotels and speeds moving pictures
into the global circulation of images. Julian Stringer suggests that the struggle
for recognition among global cities and their aspiring rivals now energizes the
international film festival world more than the ostensible competition among
films, especially in the current moment, when over five hundred such events
have rendered each of them superfluous and diluted the value of all but the
most prominent prizes.72 These celebrations of art function only partly to establish the worth of particular films, and instead serve to produce a form of
cosmopolitan identity and trace a new world atlas, where local cultural workers link directly into a global economy of images, often bypassing the intermediaries of the state. The world thus envisioned from the perspective of the film
festival circuit appears to replicate rather than resist the logic of late capitalism. The film festivals, the films that receive their endorsement, and the art
houses that specialize in showing those newly canonized works thus form a
vanguard of the spread of capital now reconceived as culture and circulated in
the immaterial form of images.
After these many recent critical accounts of art cinemamost of which
provide equal doses of demystification and indictmentwhy bother redeeming that category today? The most direct response to this question is that art
cinema remains one of the precious few examples of a cinematic network with
a global reach, beyond the obvious example of Hollywood and its worldwide
distribution system. Over the course of its development as an institution since
the 1950s, this mode of filmmaking has provided an extended meditation on
the process that constructed and spread this market system to the world at
large. Both the films conceived as objects with material histories and the
images conceived as documents of a particular moment bear witness to this
era of incipient globalization. Among the most important teachings of Michel
Foucault is the observation that institutions and disciplinary regimes are not
merely negative, limiting, regulatory forces. We must cease once and for all
to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it
censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.73 Through
their cultivation of particular objects and rituals of truth, film festivals and art
house theaters can be productive of new practices that in some cases challenge
and subvert the very control mechanism that once seemed incontestable, undeviating, the inevitable order of things. For much of the past half century, art
cinema has marshaled one of the few historical challenges to the cinematic
prototype realized by global Hollywood; and filmmakers and critics have
Introduction
25
invested it with some of the most profound utopian aspirations, often with
promises that exceed its actual capacity to effect change, but also with an acute
awareness that a utopian vision is currently unrealizable except in the ethereal, fragile, and always imperfect form of aesthetic experimentation. The
films themselves are holdovers from an era before the seemingly inexorable
spread of a global market, and the theater has become a relic of other temporalities and archaic models of filmmaking, a challenge to the contemporary
logic of the festival that envelops it.
Master Shots
Access to even the relatively minor and secondary art cinema market requires
submission to certain standards and conventions, and a return to the long history of new wave cinemas helps identify those conventions and clarify their
role in the development of this institution. This book argues that the single
most important legacy of French new wave cinema was the concept of miseen-scne developed by the critics and filmmakers associated with Cahiers du
cinma and that this idiosyncratic vision of film has become the very definition of new wave cinema in subsequent decades. Walter Benjamin argues in
his Artwork essay of 1935 that the mechanical medium of cinema is linked
inevitably to the at once liberating and devastating forces of industrial modernity. Cinema is, at the most fundamental level, a product of the Machine Age,
and the artists he celebratesmost notably Dziga Vertov, the most extreme
and experimental director in the Soviet montage traditionconstructed a
theory of the medium around the dynamic and annihilating power of the machinery they viewed as the driving force of a revolution that was alternately
picking up steam and sputtering all around them. Cinema is an intimate part
of the world it depicts because of its own imbrication in modernity. Histories
of the rise of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1910s tend to focus on the
transformation of a multifaceted medium with a range of possible futures into
a vehicle for storytelling in the tradition of the short story or eighteenthcentury realist novel. Narrative cinema evolved into a tool for the integration
of primarily urban populations from disparate ethnic, linguistic, and racial
backgrounds, and with the rise of classical continuity editing, filmmakers
learned to gloss over the shocking, mechanical dimension of the medium envisioned by Benjamin as its principle source of emancipation. Cinema in each
of these theoretical models becomes a mediating force that either harnesses or
subdues the historically new conditions of the early twentieth century.
The writings of Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Bazin, and many others
develop a theory of cinema attuned to the particular conditions of postwar
modernization. They assert, sometimes with outrageous conviction, that the
essence of the medium is mise-en-scne, the term of art that refers to the
26
elements of cinema that overlap with theater: figures posed and in motion,
props, lighting, costumes, and sets. Cinema, they argue, is neither a storytelling medium nor a mechanical device like the car or train but a phenomenon
of bodies, objects, and space recorded with the incomparable precision and
fidelity of the camera. Andrs Blint Kovcs writes that over the course of at
least the first sixty years of film history, one could not reasonably speak about
a cinematic tradition whatsoever. Cinema as a cultural tradition was first invented by the auteurs of the French new wave.74 But while inventing this
tradition, the key figures of the new wave performed a radical revision of film
history and theory, as they disregarded the seemingly fundamental conventions of narrative and montage and instead reimagined cinema as a visual
medium at the intersection of theatrical staging and mechanically recorded
reality.75 In his 1959 Cahiers essay Sur un art ignor, one of the major manifestoes and theoretical treatments of mise-en-scne, Michel Mourlet argues
that cinema creates meaning through the recording of modifications of space,
and in the greatest films the placement of actors and objects and their movement in the frame should express everything.76 As Jacques Aumont suggests
in his later intellectual history of the concept, this key cinematic model should
not be confined by the walls of the theater and the strictures of aesthetics.
Mise en scne is everywhere, and cities in particular are governed by the
gestures of the metteur en scne, who assumes many guises, official or unofficial, personal or collective.77 Mise en scne, he writes, resides at the root of
all imaginable cinematographic art, as long as cinema consists of filming
human bodies in the process of imitating, playing, feeling, living in a frame, in
an environment, in a space, in a time, that is to say, as long as cinema tells stories with images.78 The new wave in France is an account of the ubiquitous
acts of stagecraft that construct the spatial and material reality of postwar
modernization. This fascination with mise-en-scne therefore opens onto one
of the most contested social and political fields of the time: the physical ramifications of the Marshall Plan of ideas, as that ideology permeated the material culture of the period and saturated spaces with new images and objects.
The nouvelle vague was one of many attempts to reckon with the new people
and environments produced in the 1950s, to situate bodies and objects in that
historically unprecedented setting.
This emphasis on mise-en-scne is consistent with the critical stance that
helped launch the careers of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and many
other figures from the Cahiers cohort but contradicts canonical accounts of
the new wave that have developed in the interim. The jump cuts of Godard are
often viewed as the prototypical stylistic gesture of the new wave and auteur
theory as its primary critical intervention. In retrospect, however, the films of
the major French new wave directors, including the work of Godard and the
many artists on the fringes of that loosely organized movement, especially
Agns Varda and Alain Resnais, are remarkable for their intricately staged
Introduction
27
scenes of bodies walking through the city and encountering the unanticipated
spaces and objects that surround them. The jump cut is a stylistic device that
imitates the dynamism of the young protagonists in a society thriving on innovation and motion. In the context of classical continuity editing, it signifies
incompetence; in the hands of Godard, it signifies energy and nonchalance.
During their formative years spent writing and thinking about cinema, the
critics at Cahiers offered only occasional, disjointed comments about this type
of editing trick and instead crafted an elaborate theory, even a philosophy, of
mise-en-scne. Unlike theorists who suggest that film is inevitably implicated
in scenes captured by the camera and manipulated in the editing room, the
axiomatic position that founds a cinema of mise-en-scne is that the world in
front of the camera is different and separate from the film, that objects are
distinct from images. This practice retains the etymological associations of the
word object with both its common contemporary meaningspresented to
the senses, tangibleand its more distant connotations: situated in front
of, against or contrary.79 As practiced in the French new wave, a cinema
organized around mise-en-scne may reflect the vision of the director, but it
also respects the defiant otherness of the material world recorded by the filmmaker and projected on-screen.
This materialist conception of cinema developed at precisely the moment
when the new man and new woman of the 1950s, the historically new structures and spaces of the postWorld War II city, and the new objects of the
consumer revolution began to redefine French society. As Douglas Smith
writes, postwar French culture was preoccupied with materials, and the
major French intellectuals of the time were famous for their meditation on the
meaning of objects: from Gaston Bachelards history of matter in Western
philosophy and Claude Lvi-Strausss celebration of bricolage to Roland
Barthess alternately rhapsodic and demystifying snapshots of tail fins and
toys and Jean Baudrillards more encompassing system of objects.80 Writing
in the mid-1960s, with the expansion of French consumer culture well under
way, Baudrillard insists on the unprecedented nature of the material abundance overwhelming Frances large cities and attempts to develop a theory
and taxonomy founded on objects: Could we classify the luxuriant growth of
objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species,
sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products,
appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a
remarkably stable species.81 With the advent of our consumer society, he
writes, we are seemingly faced for the first time in history by an irreversible
organized attempt to swamp society with objects and integrate it into an indispensable system designed to replace all open interaction between natural
forces, needs and techniques.82 He later suggests that metaphors drawn from
the domains of geology or botany are no longer appropriate for this new age
28
of material culture: we are seeing the emergence of a systematization based

on fluidity that seeks connotations no longer in earth or flora, which are static
elements, but instead in air and water, which are fluid ones, as also in the dynamic world of animals.83 Drawing on a combination of Marxist theory and
American management and industrial design treatises from the 1950s and
1960s, Baudrillard situates the new culture of objects between these two theoretical traditions, with the residual materialism of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries yielding to an age of flexible accumulation and planned
obsolescence.84 In his elaborate taxonomy and philosophy of this new class of
objects, he envisions the onset of what Zygmunt Bauman later called liquid
modernity, a phase when the conditions under which [a societys] members
act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and
routines.85 In Baudrillards formulation, the objectonce the quintessence of
materiality and an antidote to the abstractions of philosophy, the wooden
table handed down from generation to generation or the thing itself that
grounds all but the most idealist meditationshas undergone a fundamental
transformation into the momentary crystallization of a society in flux. If one
is to understand this new social and cultural condition, the object, previously
a humble and receptive supporting actor, must now share center stage with
the new men and women in the theatrical space of the modern city.86
The objects that best encapsulated the cultural and ideological transformation of the time were remarkable not for their appearance or function but for
their revolutionary material: plastic. Smith writes: plastic is both homogeneous (always and everywhere the same artificial matter) and polymorphous
(capable of assuming the form of any other material). It not only challenges
traditional materials but threatens the very notion of material itself, dissolving
it into a flow of malleable meanings. As such, plastic epitomises the emerging
consumer society with its emphasis on signification rather than substance.87
He concludes that ideology is plastic and plastic is ideology. But the equation
between plastic and the operations of capitalism is not merely discursive. For
the transformative powers attributed to plastic are ultimately those of capitalism itself, understood as an open-ended process that accumulates wealth
through the ceaseless transformation of one commodity into another. Plastic,
then, is not just ideology but the very essence of capitalism.88 Plastic facilitates innovation and flexibility, a constant flow of new products, at the expense of other social and aesthetic values. It also portends the supermodern
environments described by Aug, spaces where the pervasive newness results
in a nonspace devoid of contradiction. Films by Alain Resnais and Jacques
Tati focus on the literally flowing petrochemicals in the factory and the consumer items produced from them, but they always situate them in a scene of
contradiction. For that reason, they are, like the other new wave filmmakers
discussed in this study, late modernist filmmakers, holdovers from another
era in the intertwined histories of cinema and objects.
Introduction
29
If a material environment molded from plastic serves as one emblem of a

social and ideological transformation in the films of the 1950s and 1960s, so
does the prevalence of images as a feature of the cityscapes in new wave
cinema. Georges Perecs iconic 1965 novel Les Choses, ostensibly about its titular things, depicts a society incapable of distinguishing between objects and
images, and the narration with its flowing, cascade-like style frequently evokes
a material world transformed into fleeting visual sensations. In this landscape
of images, the characters become spectators dumbfounded by the plentitude of
their at once overwhelming and insubstantial surroundings: But these glittering visions, all these visions which came surging and rushing towards them,
which flowed in unstoppable bursts, these vertiginous images of speed, light
and triumph, seemed to them at first to be connected to each other in a surprisingly necessary sequence, in an unbounded harmony. It was as if before
their bedazzled eyes a finished landscape had suddenly risen up, a total picture
of the world, a coherent structure which they could at last grasp and decipher.89 If Perec represents the troubling permeability between the world of
things and images, a landscape of screens and pictures poses an even more
existential problem for filmmakers dedicated in part to the depiction of physical reality. These images in the cityscapebillboards, posters, neon signs, outdoor movie theaters, ambient television in public spacesare they objects
distinct from cinema? Or is a camera depicting an environment of images no
longer engaged in the production and preservation of contradiction, no longer
witnessing a scene with chimneys alongside spires? Are films enduring records
or works of art rather than consumer products, or is celluloid, itself made of
plastic, just another throwaway object? The supermodern space par excellence
would be a landscape consisting entirely of images, the most disposable and
ephemeral form of architecture. The films of the new wave also document the
spread of images in the environment and the specter of constant, live programming, a society where images are everything, everywhere. This dilemma
is present in the earliest new wave films, as Breathless constructs a city replete
with images, and Godards dystopian science fiction film Alphaville (1965)
imagines a totalitarian society where television monitors extend as far as the
eye can see. The French new wave represents a moment when, in Deleuzes
phrase, the rise and inflation of images in the external world results in the
transformation of urban mise-en-scne into a site of spectacle.90 The relationship between the inhabitants and the city is reconceived not as a haptic, embodied experience but a form of spectatorship.
The links between the elements of mise-en-scne changed radically over
the course of the 1950s and 1960s, and the primary limitation of the Cahiers
critics was their habitual unwillingness to think about the social, economic,
and ideological forces that managed the scene of a modernizing France. The
mise-en-scne visible in the French new wave stages the changing relationships between subjects, objects, and space, even if the theorists of the time
30
were unable to extend their concept of mise-en-scne to its logical conclusions. Location shooting and the long takethe strategies that have become
art cinemas most enduring qualities and clichsare also mechanisms for
recording a way of life threatened by the peculiar conception of modernity
that ascends to a position of global dominance over the period covered in this
book. The films of the French and other new waves capture a glimpse of a
future on the threshold of its arrival; they inhabit a landscape constructed in
one social and economic system and experience a moment of transition; they
reveal, in other words, the present when the walls from the past are being dismantled and the new faades are about to be unfurled.
In 1967, in the pages of Cahiers itself, Andr S. Labarthe announced the
death of a word.91 Mise-en-scne had been one of the key critical concepts
used over sixty years to translate into language an elusive medium combining
images and sound, but cinema had mutated and reinvented itself under new
historical conditions and with new aesthetic possibilities and constraints.
Armed with an outdated vocabulary, he writes, we critics can only speak
properly about outdated films.92 Moreover, the word had grown impossibly
capacious over the years, as it adapted itself to new films, with those internal
transformations authorized by the belief that mise-en-scne was a loosely defined concept as well as an array of specific filmmaking practices visible onscreen. The term could refer to either the elaborately choreographed camera
work of Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) or shots flung from the trowel in
Robert Aldrich;93 it could refer to the inimitable performances of Katherine
Hepburn or the less exalted documentary heroes embodied by Jean-Pierre
Laud in the films of Truffaut, of Godard, of Eustache, of Skolimowski.94
Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, mise-en-scne had evolved into a
Janus-faced concept referring to both Hollywoods precise management of the
image and more haphazard sequences that characterized the new wave. Both
that seeming incoherence and the more radical experiments of the late 1960s
sounded a death knell for the word. The language of film criticism, Labarthe
argued, should be influenced by the contemporary discourses of advertising
and cybernetics or by arts with longer histories than film, including painting,
sculpture, and music. But in the chapters that follow, I suggest that Labarthes
pronouncement of the death of mise-en-scne was premature for a number of
reasons. First, the development of that concept into a seemingly incoherent
mlange, that sweeping reformulation of a technical term to include both classical Hollywood studio pictures and their structural opposites on the lowbudget independent scene, was actually one of the key intellectual projects of
the new wave directors and critics. The French new wave itself could be defined as the exploration of that paradoxical space between competing conceptions of mise-en-scne. Second, the concept has remained a powerful critical
and organizing principle in global cinema over the past half century, long after
the demise of a particular movement in France. True to his elliptical style,
Introduction
31
Labarthe ends his obituary for the term mise-en-scne with an allegory: a Chinese author tells the story of blind fishermen who one day throw their nets
into a field. Come on; lets open our eyes: cinema has moved on. Lets not fish
for it anymore. Lets hunt after it.95 Cinema has indeed moved on, but not
only through the invention of new popular media or the type of formal experimentation that tangled the fishing nets of Cahiers critics in the 1960s. The
ideas of the new wave and of mise-en-scne have endured because they have
traveled so quickly and in so many directions, because critics focused on either
the abstractions of theory or the particularities of national cinema have been
unable to track them down.
The transnational new waves of the past half century have, if anything, rejuvenated the practice of cinematic mise-en-scne, especially with the development of the master shot aesthetic in East Asian film. For that reason, this
book follows its discussion of French cinema in the 1950s and 1960s by tracing
the resurgence of this mode of filmmaking in the context of Taiwans economic miracle in the 1980s. This book situates Taiwans new wave at the forefront of a series of new waves sweeping the international film festival world in
the 1980s. From the 1983 omnibus film often credited with marking the advent
of this new era, The Sandwich Man (or The Sons Big Doll; Erzi de da wanou),
the development of the new cinema paralleled Taiwans transition to a new
stage in its economic modernization, as the heavy industrialization of the
1970s gave way to an information-based, high-technology, and consumptionoriented economy in the early 1980s. By 1995, an export-oriented art cinema
had become an established component in the governments long-term strategy of developing a media and communications industry radiating from the
hub of Taipei. Part II focuses in particular on Hou Hsiao-Hsiens early films
documenting the disappearance of the rural landscape of his childhood and
the movement of Taiwans center of gravity from that countryside to the cosmopolitan environments of Taipei and Kaohsiung. Part II also considers
Edward Yangs frequent meditations on the cityscape of Taipei, especially his
attention to domestic interiors and his tendency to film reflections rather than
structures, with the qualities habitually attributed to architecturepresence,
structure, stabilitytransferred from stone and steel to the image. Part II also
includes an analysis of global city films by Hou and Tsai Ming-liang, both of
whom represent a spectral return of Taiwanese cinema to Paris. What Time Is
It There? (Tsai; Ni nabian jidian, 2001) follows revenants of Antoine Doinel
(the protagonist of The 400 Blows) and Miao Tien (a regular member of Tsais
ensemble) as they shuttle between Paris and Taipei. Tsais Visage (Lian, 2009)
tracks the production of a film inside the Louvre. And The Flight of the Red
Balloon (Hou; Le Voyage du ballon rouge, 2007) is an extended remake of
Albert Lamorisses classic tale of a young boys voyage around the city. But in
the careers of the filmmakers and the recent trajectory of Taiwan cinema,
these international adventures are located alongside a series of films that
32
examine the particular history of film and the city in Taiwan, including Tsais
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Bu san, 2003) and Hous Three Times (Zui hao de shiguang, 2005). What these examples suggest is that global new waves are most
productively considered not as a nostalgic homage to a golden age of European cinema but as interlinked phenomena generated by youth and cities in a
market era. And in the master shot cinema of Yang, Tsai, Hou, and other
directors from Taiwan, cinematic mise-en-scne becomes the interface between art and this historical drama of bodies, objects, and space. In this context, cinema traces the connections between these global movements of young
consumers and cities but remains resistant to the homogenization that results,
as the films inevitably record the enduring difference of Taiwans experience
of modernity.
Part III focuses on the emergence of a new wave cinema, especially a cinema
organized around the possibilities of mise-en-scne, in the films of Fifth Generation Chinese directors like Zhang Yimou, and then on the preeminent contemporary director operating in the master shot mode, Jia Zhangke. Part III
follows two parallel tendencies that characterize Chinese cinema from the international breakthrough festival successes of the 1980s to the present. First, a
broad range of filmsfrom Imar productions like Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing
Mala Tang; Zhang Yang, 1997) to Feng Xiaogangs A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi,
2000), Big Shots Funeral (Dawan, 2001), Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003), and If You
Are the One (Feicheng wurao, 2008)reflect the increasingly cosmopolitan
atmosphere of major eastern seaboard cities in China that have been the focus
of Chinese reform policies since the mid-1980s. Second, a number of realist
and documentary filmmakers chart a trajectory away from the international
city craze and toward the task of preserving utopian dimensions of previous
modernization projects currently threatened with eradication.96 These directors also document the condition of youth experiencing this profound transition between two ways of organizing space and community. Over the course
of a series of city films by directors like Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke, and Ning Ying,
the documentary image coexists with ubiquitous global brands, and the
global-local becomes more than an academic slogan: it describes the editing
pattern between scenes or even the itinerary within a single shot. In these
films most revealing moments, the camera glides alongside construction sites
whose existence on the screen serves not to advance the narrative but to divert
or even arrest it. These are films about old cities in the process of reinvention
and the young people who inhabit them with both fascination and regret.
Much Chinese cinema has become an advertisement for the consumer revolution; but recent documentaries and realist films concentrate instead on bodies
captured in a state of inertia, while an energized and cosmopolitan China, the
China linking tracks with the world, appears only through stray construction sounds or reports from faraway coastal provinces. In contrast to Marxs
assertion that revolutions are the locomotives of world history, Benjamin
Introduction
33
suggests that revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train

namely, the human raceto activate the emergency brake.97 Concluding
with Jia Zhangkes urban cinema, Part III views these films as a display of incongruous bodies, objects, and spaces: would-be passengers stalled on the side
of the tracks, outmoded factories and work units, supermodern constructions
that clash with a lingering socialist ideology and ethic. Part III also views these
as cinematic emergency brakes that document the new frictions emerging in
contemporary Chinese cinema.
Cold War New Waves

This comparative account of new wave cinemas challenges some still potent
taboos in film criticism, most notably the Cold War divide between capitalist
and communist states, but the cartography of new waves altered the cultural
frontiers separating Eastern and Western Europe. Although the first and most
famous new wave was launched in France in the 1950s, that label soon became
a Cold War term of art, with various movements sweeping Eastern and Central Europe, from Czechoslovakias new wave before and during the Prague
Spring to the Yugoslav new film or black wave of the late 1960s. As with abstract expressionism in the politicized art environment of the 1950s, the new
waves emerging from the Soviet sphere of influence attracted inordinate attention from critics and government officials who were interested in highlighting the discrepancy between free artists in the West allowed to pursue
personal artistic expression, state artists in the East forced to work through
bureaucratically and politically dictated channels, and the new waves of Central and Eastern Europe, a bastion of freedom within an oppressive communist order.98 In this context, freedom itself was defined as the survival of a
more individualistic, auteurist mentality within the state system.
Youth rebellion, sexuality, and popular culture were key elements of this
narrative. In films like Milo Formans Talent Competition (Konkurs, 1963),
which exploits the comedy inherent in the chasm between the musical taste of
the older and younger generations, and The Loves of a Blonde (Lsky jedn
plavovlsky, 1965), which begins with a young woman singing a folksy love
song while pounding away at her guitar, the revolutionary potential of youth
culture lies less in direct political statements than in the pursuit of idle activities like pop music, and its almost mandatory accompaniments in cinema:
romantic love and sex. Within its less accessible formal structure, Vra Chytilovas Daisies (Sedmikrsky, 1966) eliminates almost all narrative threads and
replaces them with the pursuit of short-term pleasure: the two women at the
center of the film try to fleece an older man out of some money before abandoning him on a train; they enact a revenge fantasy on a former lover or current suitors by slicing away at sausage, bananas, and other phallic objects with
34
a scissors; and the last scene shows an apocalyptic orgy of consumption and
destruction, as they devour (or spoil) a massive banquet in a hall set for hundreds before the film ends with flurry of images depicting nuclear explosions
and other acts of wanton devastation. Or in Closely Watched Trains (Oste
sledovan vlaky; Ji Menzel, 1966), the young trainee at the station overcomes
his own sexual inhibitionshe has suffered through several humiliating erotic
encounters and attempted suicide from the shameat exactly the moment
when he joins the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation and agrees to bomb
a German supply train. He is shot while dropping the bomb but manages to
blow up the train and himself, his obliteration coinciding with a moment of
celebration and a foreshadowing of victory for his fellow insurgents at the station. These characters rebel in a manner reminiscent of Herbert Marcuse, with
his suggestion that the libidinal energy of youth can be harnessed for revolutionary politics.99 They also recall the counterintuitive lessons of Georges Bataille, who points to the anthropological and philosophical evidence suggesting that the management of excess through ritualistic waste lies at the core of
economic activity rather than the efficient exploitation of scarce resources.100
The films suggest that personal gratification is itself a socially powerful act, no
matter how counterproductive it seems, and auto-annihilation offers a radical
alternative to efficient participation in or continued obedience to a social
order run by old men. While these filmmakers were subjected to increasing
censorship after the Prague SpringChytilov, for example, was prevented
from making another film until the mid-1970s, and Forman, outside the country during the events of 1968, eventually sought exile in the United States
they were also enlisted in a Cold War propaganda exercise. Dina Iordanova
writes that art was part of the ideological battle between the two camps. . . .
Film festivals were thought of as Cold War instruments, and in the West there
was a tendency to judge the artistry of cinematic works coming out of the Eastern Bloc according to the level of dissent displayed.101 They also judged both
artistic merit and dissent by the level of youthful exuberance and absurdist
comedy on parade, and the films became local manifestations of a more extensive youth uprising against implacable and dreary Communist Party authorities.
While many of the characteristics of these Czechoslovak films are reminiscent of similar tendencies in France and elsewhere in Europe and Asia, the existence of new waves on both sides of the Iron Curtain suggests that either the
term has been applied inappropriately in these vastly different contexts or the
idea of the new wave requires a remapping of postWorld War II geography. A
comparative reading of the Cold War new waves would focus on the diffusion
of revolutionary energy in the staging and scenery of these various movements
instead of concentrating almost exclusively on the narrative function of youth,
music, and other forms of resistance through popular culture. Closely Watched
Trains, for example, examines the process of subject formation through costumes donned and destroyed, with the acceptance of an ideological position
Introduction
35
and a function in the larger social order represented through the solemn ritual
of putting on a railroad workers uniform and, in a mock coronation, a cap. The
devolution of that order is then represented through the physical disintegration
of the stationmasters uniform. Instead of being narrativized, ideology is literalized, rendered concrete in the costume that facilitates the assumption of a position of relative privilege and leisure in exchange for social quiescence. Or, in a
more pervasive strategy visible in many films of the Czechoslovak new wave,
the ritualistic exercise of ideologyreciting slogans, speechifyingbreeds neither enthusiasm nor outright dissent but indifference, with that refusal to play
along visible in the posture and gestures of the characters rather than any specific dialogue or plot twists. Rebellion is communicated through lethargic
movements of the body and inappropriate objects of affection. In The Firemans Ball (Ho, m panenko; Forman, 1967) and Closely Watched Trains, all
politics is represented at the most fundamental level as political theater, as
power manifesting itself in the ability to force an audience of citizens to participate as they watch a fiction unfold in the everyday arena of a ballroom or
train station. The Czech new wave conceives of authoritarian politics as the
orchestration of mise-en-scne on a grand scale, and the revolutionary politics
of youth begins with the refusal to play an assigned part in the chorus and the
cultivation of a demeanor, a way of posing the body, that clashes with an ideology of consensus and conformism. As with James Dean or Belmondo, rebellion
is written on the body, and the atlas of youth cinema in 1960s draws lines of
influence or affinity that foreground this uprising within the mise-en-scne.
Czech new wave films repeatedly contrast the pervasive rhetoric of socialist
modernization with the disappointments manifested in an everyday object
world marked by scarcity and primitive accumulation rather than abundance
and technical sophistication. On both sides of the East-West divide, Cold War
new waves documented the theatrical performances of power visible in both
state and commercial culture, as well as the youth movements that developed
alongside and against them.
Pests and Comparisons

The experience of accelerated modernization has reshaped societies across
the globe over the past half century, and with increasing frequency over the
past two decades. The explosion of new waves onto the international film
scene is a symptom of this process and indicates that art cinema itself has
been globalized, in the sense both that filmmakers participate in their own
minor networks of circulation and that they observe a modern project finally
extended to a global scale. In its comparative dimensions, this book analyzes
the persistence of two conceptions of the image from an era of globalization
before that term gained widespread acceptance to an era when political and
36
cultural theorists speak of nothing else. This book also develops a paradigm
for thinking beyond the borders of the nation and over a period of several
decades, a stretch of time that for the discipline of film studies qualifies as the
exceptionally longue dure. One way of understanding that connection would
be to talk about transgenerational influence, with the French new wave providing a set of strategies and techniquesrelying on a new generation of usually young directors, craftspeople, and actors; deploying the long take; shooting on locationlater adapted by the Taiwanese new wave or new cinema.
One way of studying this phenomenon is to identify and list the various homages, the direct correspondences between one era and the next, which can be
an interesting exercise but often devolves into a trivia contest. Invoking this
model of Western original and foreign copy can also be dangerous, as it constructs a teleological narrative, with one new wave always destined to follow in
the wake of the previous one. This is the mode of historiography that Dipesh
Chakrabarty warns against: in this historicist fallacy, all monumental events
occur first in Europe, then elsewhere, with the West once again envisioned as
the epitome of development that shows the rest of the world, in Marxs phrase,
the image of its own future.102
The tendency to see new waves cropping up everywhere in world cinema is
often tainted by this problematic orientation, as it domesticates the difference
of world cinema by constantly invoking a primary and originary European
cinema that looms large and overshadows the mere copies that appear elsewhere in the world. One response to that dilemma is to shy away from what
Benedict Anderson calls the specter of comparisons. There are good reasons
to be wary. As Pheng Cheah argues, comparative work has always been contaminated by the fact that in the past, the grounds of comparison were undeniably Eurocentric. Not only was the material starting point of comparison
always from Europe or the North Atlantic. Comparison also had a teleological
aim.103 Or as Partha Chatterjee contends, in language that applies to Andersons models of both nationalism and comparison: I have one central objection to Andersons argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to
choose their imagined community from certain modular forms already made
available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world
shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.104 Cheah suggests that the
ultimate aim of comparison was not to challenge familiar European models
but to affirm a certain idea of Europe as a world historical model.105 Andersons most compelling response denies the validity of any conventional narrative of origins: these processes have no Originator or, more precisely, emanate from a ceaselessly changing, here-and-now, Us rather than any specific
geopolitical entity or region.106 When subjected to the challenges of realpolitik, Andersons abstract, romanticized argument loses some of its force, but he
also helps establish a framework for comparative history by suggesting that
Introduction
37
the habit of thought that seeks out origins and actors can fail to identify more
pervasive and systemic causes, like the spread of capitalism itself.
If historians of the nation and film scholars remain wary of this comparative mode, filmmakers have proven much more daring. Tsai Ming-liang provides an emblem and a model of this form of comparison in What Time Is It
There? and the form of his title, a question that demands an answer, is the
first of many provocations. Tsai is not content with recalling favorite scenes
and featuring beloved actors in cameos. Instead, the film imagines nothing
less than an alternative form of history. Again we return to Chakrabarty, who
asserts that historical analysis is too often incapable of explaining the impact
of specters and ghosts and other vestiges of premodernity on modern human
history. He suggests that historical time is not integral; it is out of joint
with itself.107 The specters in Tsais filmboth the ghostly image of Antoine
Doinel on a screen in Lee Kang-sheng s bedroom and the haunting return of
Lees deceased father in Parispose an invitation and a challenge to rewrite
the history of the French new wave from the perspective of contemporary
Taiwan, and to locate Taiwans new wave of the 1980s and early 1990s in an
unbound series that includes French cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s and
whatever new waves come next (Figure I.2). Tsais film suggests that our current global temporality is out of joint, that the ghosts of previous new waves
haunt the DVD stalls and television screens of contemporary Taipei, and
that these spirits bear with them the long history of a global modernization
project. After a development initiative demolished the bridge in Taipei where
the opening encounters of What Time Is It There? were filmed, Tsai returned
to the location to shoot a brief epilogue, The Skywalk Is Gone (Tianqiao bu
jian le, 2002). Like a set after the final day of production, the city itself had
figure i.2 What Time Is It There?
38
been struck, and this eerie short film is a record of a material environment
that endures in a ghostly form, even after its demolition, and a disposable
space that could be anywhere in Taipei (or Paris) or nowhere at all. Tsais
presentation of Paris is a return to a city and a set and an exploration of the
relationship between those two conceptions of cinema and space, between
what has disappeared and what remains. In this comparison across geographical boundaries and historical moments, ghosts serve as translators,
literally the ones who carry things (the traces of a body, experience, history)
along with them. Their return to Francenot in an act of homage or homecoming but as a revision of the most utopian aspirations that guided postwar
modernityhelps signal the transition to whatever comes after the half century of new waves. These ghosts are modern; they are also a vehicle for the
modernist act of comparison, which itself is predicated on the perpetuation
of difference and contradiction, on the impossibility of a perfectly homogenous space of flows.
Anderson begins his meditation on the process of comparison with an account of a key passage from Rizal describing the everyday act of strolling along
a garden pathway in a colonized city: these gardens, Anderson writes, are
shadowed automatically . . . and inescapably by images of their sister gardens
in Europe.108 The colonial subject can no longer matter-of-factly experience
them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar.109 In a loose translation of Rizal, Anderson labels this phenomenonthe vision of a domestic,
familiar, close-at-hand environment only in relation to its counterparts far
awaythe spectre of comparisons.110 Nationalism, Anderson argues, is born
of such comparisons. Globalization is made possible by denying them. In Andersons formulation, nationalism becomes possible only in the homogenous,
empty time of modernity, and certain cultural forms (mostly famously the
novel and the newspaper, both manifestations of print capitalism) demonstrate how this new conception of time pervades even the most quotidian activities of the new national subject. In this temporal paradigm, people in one
corner of the nation can imagine themselves within a social simultaneity that
also includes other, perhaps distant, probably unknown and unseen members
of the same community. If nationalism takes place in the homogenous, empty
time of one modern moment, the process of globalization installs the world,
rather than any particular nation, as the major ground of comparison. Anderson envisions the nationconceived as a utopian cultural creation rather than
the brutal product of violent revolutions and government bureaucraciesas
both a product of and a resistance to the homogeneity of modern times. The
nation makes possible the survival of even the most endangered local histories.
A global era would lead ultimately (in some infinitely deferred but still approaching moment in the future) to the destruction of points of dissension and
friction, including the revolutionary nationalism that Anderson so steadfastly
defends.
Introduction
39
Tsai Ming-liangs ghosts are uprooted from the history of any particular
nation, not only because of the contested political status of Taiwan but also
because Tsai no longer views the French new wave at the end of an inverted
telescope, with the faraway viewed as though close at hand. The figure of the
ghost has replaced the optical illusions that jar Anderson into the accident of
comparison. These ghosts of new waves past and future are able to wander
back and forth in time precisely because both moments occupy a modern
period that exists outside time and outside the frontiers of the nation. They
invite comparison across historical boundaries as well as geopolitical borderlines. The contemporary world envisioned by Tsai has assumed a far more
chaotic form than the still familiar constellation of nations in Anderson. As
Cheah suggests, the fundamental substrate or condition of possibility of individual nations, a ground that should serve as a fundamental principle of
comparison and that should inform all theorizing about nationalism, is a form
of entropy. This entropy is not easily arrestable as an empirical thing or presence because it is nothing other than the spectralizing processes of capital,
forces of upheaval and change that destabilize what is at rest and break down
what is organically whole. These forces are sometimes associated with the
more general term modernity. 111 Tsais film documents a moment when
that upheaval and instability began to overspill the bounds of the nation and
resistance took a variety of shapes, some old and recognizable (the survival of
the nation itself, the persistence of premodern cultural forms) and some new
and still in the process of becoming (a conception of the world as more than
the free flow of capital and its homogeneous, empty time extended to a global
scale). In both its forms and its pattern of allusions, Tsai also conjures up
ghosts from the history of art cinema, revenants from an era when an alternative to the spread of global Hollywood seemed like a viable, if remote, possibility. One of the governing assumptions in Tsais film is the ultimate comparability of recent Taiwanese cinema and Truffauts opening salvos of the French
new wave. This book attempts to theorize the grounds of that comparison by
linking those historical moments together in a global history of economic
miracles, with their utopian promises and unresolved contradictions crystallized in the bodies, objects, and spaces that together constitute the mise-enscne of postwar modernity. Like What Time Is It There? this books overarching goal is to allow each film and historical moment to show its age.
Over a decade after the publication of The Spectre of Comparisons and two
decades after Imagined Communities, Anderson composed a short essay responding to his critics, most notably those who complained that his title was
the result of a mistranslation. Anderson replied with a concession: I now
agree that my translation of demonio as spectre was a real mistake. When
visiting the Philippines a few weeks ago, I noticed for the first time that demonio, which has long made an easy, unnoticed entry into Tagalog, is used all the
time in one quite specific social context, and no other. Harried mothers, driven
40
to distraction by ceaselessly energetic, naughty, and noisy small children, yell

at them: Demonio ka! Which obviously cannot be translated as You Spectre!
But also not as You Demon, You Bogeyman, or even I think You Devil. The
connotation is You Pest! Comparisons are like that, they buzz, and buzz, and
refuse to go away or to be quiet. Irritating and distracting, but not spectral.112
In its current usage the term new wave is also a pest: it appears to have no
fixed abode, to travel haphazardly around the globe, to flit away whenever we
try at long last to do away with this infernal annoyance and speak about cinematic movements in their singularity and specificity. Irritating and distracting,
it draws our attention away from the real work of scholarship grounded in
limited historical periods and national traditions. But perhaps the concept of
the new waveat once specter and pesthaunts and hovers and buzzes
around the film world because it has outlived its initial function as a signifier
of the new but has not yet exhausted its capacity to generate knowledge about
the role of cinematic images in a historical sequence that extends over half a
century. Historical analogies are never more than suggestive, writes Perry
Anderson. But there are occasions where they may be more fruitful than predictions.113 We are likely witnessing something that beggars our powers of
comparison precisely because it is unprecedented, and because it unfolds like
the prototype of something new. The paradox of the present moment is that
comparison becomes necessary in eras like our own precisely because the
grounds of comparison are so uncertain and unstable. The new wave persists
as a slogan, a marketing tool; but it also endures as an invitation and provocation to a global and comparative study of cinematic movements throughout
the age of new waves.
Cinema has always existed within a worldwide framework, and we should
therefore resist attempts to erase that longer history of border-crossing cinema
and focus exclusively on the current moment, with the academic and popular
fascination with all things global. As Anna Tsing argues, this revised version of
globalization exudes a peculiar charm and charisma; it entices with an allure
unmatched since the moment when modernization was a galvanizing ambition
and a mesmerizing force.114 Under the influence of this charisma, theorists of
globalization have established the flow (of goods, people, and images) as the
emblematic metaphor for the most significant historical trends of the past two
decades. But Tsing suggests that flows eventually encounter friction, they are
directed into the restricted space of channels, and they inevitably flood over
landscapes with their own immovable features, their own form of resistance to
this seemingly irresistible force. From one perspective, the new wave represents yet another flow of goods or a channeling of disenchantment and restive
energies into a relatively minor and isolated niche market. Its claims to novelty
therefore ring hollow, like a marketing slogan designed to achieve product differentiation in the increasingly crowded international film festival circuit. But
for reasons related to the historical experience of compressed modernization,
Introduction
41
each new wave also revives a documentary ethic and a concept of mise-enscne that together foster the preservation of the vanishing on film. If it is possible to speak of new waves beyond the borders of the nation, the first consideration is the common experience of accelerated modernization and absorption
into the boundless movement of a global marketplace; the slogan new wave
has become a symptom of that process. But the persistence of this desire to
document, this other regime of the image, also provides a record of resistance,
a refusal of the logic of flows. A comparative history of new waves allows these
films to display what was worth preserving and what persists. If miracles are
the spectacular creation of something from nothing, the marvelous arising out
of ashes or dust, this book counters that logic of miraculous new beginnings
with a spectral history of images, in which the past lingers after its demise and
ghosts begin to appear everywhere. And they become, by virtue of their
number, witnesses not only to their own histories but also to the continual
manufacture of new beginnings, to the serial production of miracles.
{ part i }
Paris Belongs to Us
{1}
The Mise-en-Scne of Modernity

the french new wave, paris, and the global 1960s
The French new wave is supposed to be a cinema of auteurs. In one of the

most famous and influential essays in the history of film criticism, a twentyone-year-old Franois Truffaut denounces the so-called tradition of quality
in French cinema, a mode of filmmaking that revolves around the screenwriter and privileges adaptation from canonical literary sources. On the grave
of this insufficiently cinematic tradition, he heralds the beginning of a new
era when directors will be the true authors of movies that reflect their personal visions.1 Over the next three years he condemns the French film establishment at every opportunity, and his attack culminates in a 1957 piece in
Arts, which proclaims to its readers and to cinephiles everywhere: You are all
witnesses in this trial: French cinema is dying under the weight of its false
legends.2 The reign of a turgid and timid cinma de papa has come to an
end, he suggests; the film of tomorrow will be made by adventurers rather
than careful disciples of precedent and tradition.3 A vocal cohort at Cahiers
du cinmaric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Truffaut,
along with many influential but less prominent figuresbecame the guardians of the journals quasi-official policy of foregrounding the essential role of
the director in film production, the famous politique des auteurs. A small
number of filmmakers, most notably Hitchcock and Hawks, the favorites ofa
clique at Cahiers soon dubbed the Hitchcocko-Hawksians by Andr Bazin,
were elevated into living emblems of this auteurist conception of cinema.
Every film by these canonized directors crystallizes their overarching
philosophy of life and art, and every last detail on the screen, every shadow or
play of light, becomes a figure in [the] carpet traced brilliantly by the artist
whether he or she does so consciously or not.4 This story of the rise of the
auteur in the 1950s is one of the best known in the history of film studies, and
despite its inherent limitations, amply elaborated in decades of subsequent
criticism, auteur theory has profoundly influenced the development of the
46
discipline. This tale also helped found the institution of art cinema by retroactively constructing a pantheon of esteemed directors, channeling new filmmakers into the auteurist framework, and more generally transforming entertainers into artists. The international film festival and art house circuits
remain a cinema of auteurs in the tradition established by Cahiers, and especially by Truffaut.
Over the course of the 1960s, the French new wave became one of the paradigmatic modernist movements in cinema, and its revolutionary credentials
in the film world were burnished by an intimate association with rebellious
youth challenging institutions across French society. The words modern,
new, and young, with their often overlapping connotations, were used
almost interchangeably in the period. Throughout the 1950s, Cahiers critics
distinguished the modern cinema of preferred directors like Roberto Rossellini, Nicholas Ray, and Alain Resnais from classical narrative film and the
tradition of quality. In 1960, Andr S. Labarthe christened the phenomenon
of new directors making first films the young French cinema.5 And after the
international breakthrough of Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais, critics, filmmakers, and audiences around the world referred constantly to the artistic
insurrection emanating from France, the new wave, and situated it among
the many new cinemas emerging at the time. A group of young directors,
most still in their twenties, teamed up with unproven actors and crew members and together proclaimed a profound generational shift in French film
culture. With one of the worlds hottest film journals as their platform, the
critics at Cahiers du cinma offered effusive and uncompromising praise for
the first features of Truffaut, Godard, and the other members of the Cahiers
circle, claiming the mantle of modernism for this work and attributing its
avant-garde achievements to the directors themselves. Youth, modernism,
and an individualistic notion of film authorship were conflated in this period,
often at the urging of key filmmakers and critics, and have remained roughly
synonymous in the many histories of the new wave.
These developments in the movie business paralleled a broader cultural
fascination with the postwar baby boom generation and its relationship to the
modernization of France.6 Raised after the hardship of a half century of European and global conflagrations and in the relative affluence of the Trente
Glorieuses, this generation experienced modernity as a phenomenon of comparatively lavish consumption, especially when juxtaposed with wartime conditions. But these youth also witnessed the unsettling reorganization, modernization, and Americanization of French society under the aegis of the Marshall
Plan. They lived in the penumbra of violent conflict in Algeria. And they matured under the vague but undeniable menace of catastrophic superpower
conflict. The children of Marx and Coca-Cola, to use the moniker from the
1960s coined in leftist circles and made famous by Godard, developed in
tandem with both utopian and horrific notions of the modern. The term new
47
wave itself emerged in the context of widespread polling campaigns designed

to frame these changes through the lens of social science and disseminate
those findings to the general public. Film critics added the intellectual support
necessary to link this broader and unfocused social obsession with youth to
the films premiering at festivals and theaters in France and around the world.
French new wave cinema was a phenomenon generated by the young people
who came of age after World War II and imagined themselves not as inheritors
of age-old national traditions but as pioneers in a modern and increasingly
cosmopolitan world. As each major anniversary passes and its aging participants hark back with nostalgia, new wave cinemas status as the epitome of the
periods dynamic youth culture and revolutionary modernist aesthetic etches
itself more deeply into the canonical understandings of the time.
Some of the most insightful studies of French postwar modernization and
new wave cinema have resisted this almost axiomatic association of French
film in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the dynamism of both youth and
modernity. Kristin Ross, for example, suggests that the periods obsession
with cars and cleanliness, with speed and suburbanization, with neat structuralist models for language and society and equally tidy cities, masks a failure to
acknowledge the nations continued participation in a dirty colonial conflict
in Algeria, a war whose underlying nationalist rationale belied the ubiquitous
claim that France had launched a new era in its history.7 Contrary to the ubiquitous rhetoric of economic progress, the nation moved at several incongruous speeds and in contradictory directions in this period. It hurtled along in
sleek new cars, guided by a mentality akin to Michel Poiccards in Breathless:
Dont use the brakes. Cars are made to go, not to stop! The broader agenda
of accelerated modernization also proceeded at a breakneck pace, with the
precipitous demolition of older, supposedly unsafe and unclean environments
and the rapid development of modern commercial architecture, housing projects, and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, the nation moved in
reverse, with the persistence of colonialism abroad and racism at home and
with the populist movement of Pierre Poujade, nostalgic for the virtues of a
France symbolized by small towns, organized around the concerns of the
petty bourgeoisie and opposed to government-sponsored development. And
the nation went nowhere at all, with society imagined by structuralist thought
and technocratic practice as a series of neatly organized units in a rigid, glacially evolving, virtually timeless system.8 Nino Frank, the critic best known
for coining the phrase film noir, suggested that film criticism was also conscripted into the domain of technocrats in the 1950s, and he warned against
the coming bureaucratization of criticism, with the supposedly fresh perspectives offered by a new and enthusiastic generation at Cahiers also a manifestation of the rise of the specialist governed by routine and resistant to
the change visible on the streets of the city and on the screen.9 French society
in the 1950s appeared to be moving too fast while also lingering at a standstill.
48
In her pathbreaking study Masculine Singular, Genevive Sellier adds that

French new wave cinema often disregards the truly revolutionary elements in
postwar society to advance a far more conservative agenda. She argues that the
gender politics of the most prominent new wave filmmakers are consistent
with the most reactionary trends of the period, and the absence of a single
first-time female director between 1958 and 1962, the key years when the new
wave developed into a cultural force, suggests that there was nothing genuinely innovative about the representation of gender in the films usually labeled
new wave and even less in the sexual politics of an ostensibly transformed
industry. Instead, she maintains that the dynamic, sexually empowered,
modern woman embodied by new stars like Brigitte Bardot was rejected by
the new wave filmmakers in favor of a conventional vision of woman seen as
the new avatar of the eternal feminine or the nave victim of the alienation
of mass culture.10 The dominant strain of new wave cinema is voiced in the
first person masculine singular and dedicated to the glory of the most archaic virile values.11 Like many film historians, Sellier also argues that the
label new wave obscures a fundamental divide between the politically progressive and more aesthetically adventurous filmmakers usually classified
under the rubric of the Left Bank group, including Varda, Resnais, and
Chris Marker, and the more politically conservative directors who gathered at
the Cahiers offices and used its pages as their launching pad. The conformist
political orientation of the Cahiers directors and critics is most evident, she
suggests, in their depiction of women on-screen but extends to a much broader
range of political concerns, including the war in Algeria. Most of the filmmakers habitually associated with the new wave espoused an explicitly or implicitly retrograde vision of society at odds with the actual revolutions in gender
relations and colonial politics occurring in popular films, in the mainstream
press, and in the public spaces of major French cities. The celebrated cineastes
of the new wave, she suggests, were far less modern than their times. After the
powerful critical evisceration performed by Sellier, it is difficult to view the
films of the French new wave through the modernist frame constructed by
the filmmakers themselves. This and other indispensable revisionist accounts
of the new wave attempt to recuperate the contending conceptions of modernity that vied for hegemony during this transformative period in French
history. They also allow us to glimpse the truly remarkable and perhaps even
definitive quality of French modernity during the era of the new wave: itsunevenness and contradictions, its faith in the liberating power of popular culture, including Hollywood cinema, and its at times lamentable defense of
tradition despite the seemingly inevitable trajectory of modernization. The
directors of the French new wave, especially the figures associated with Cahiers, embodied all of those tendencies at once.
With those many caveats in mind, this chapter begins from the premise
that a half century of disproportionate attention to the directors of the French
49
new wave has obscured the truly radical dimension of film culture in the
period, which is characterized above all by a fundamental change in the representation of bodies and objects in space. In searching for and valorizing the
hidden hand of the director, the canonical account of the rise of the auteur
loses track of actual figures and actual carpets: the body of Jean-Paul Belmondo or Jeanne Moreau moving through and interacting with the objects
and built environments of their time. Soon after the first articulation of the
politique des auteurs, more levelheaded critics like Bazin countered that there
was much more to cinema than the input of a director. In a blunt repudiation
of fawning auteurist criticism, he pointed out that the the subject also counts
for something and emphasized the importance in American cinema of the
genius of the system, especially the productive pressure of genres that transcend the work of any individual or studio.12 From the late 1960s onward, and
especially in the last two decades, film historians and theorists have attempted
to displace the author from this privileged position at the heart of film history.
Critics target Truffaut and the other advocates of auteur theory around the
world (most notably Andrew Sarris in the United States) for their grandiose
and excessively romantic models of authorship and invoke the contributions
of other artists on the set, including stars, screenwriters, producers, and the
various craftspeople who contribute to the look of a film.13 The key pictures of
French new wave cinema were as much the creation of stars like Moreau and
Bardot, writers like Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, deal makers
like Pierre Braunberger and Claude Chabrol (wearing his producers hat), or
cinematographers like Raoul Coutard and Henri Deca as they were the product of the directors who featured at the top of the marquee. Sellier argues that
this obsession with the creative expression of the director ramifies into the
domain of labor relations in the film industry, with the crew member reduced
to an informal and part-time entertainment-industry worker.14 The contradictory legacy of the New Wave, she concludes, is . . . both to have allowed the recognition of the filmmaker as artist, and, at the same time, to
have imposed an extremely restrictive model of what constitutes an artist,
one that reduces creativity to a formal game alone, outside of any sociocultural stakes.15 This chapter attempts to rediscover the sociocultural contribution of the new wave by locating it outside the confining sphere of authorial
vision and intention.
Other critics have returned to the landmarks of the new wave and discovered that their once revolutionary style appears commonplace and clichd
after the passage of time, suggesting that the modernist masterpiece prized
for its innovation is also the product of a historical moment that inevitably
comes to an end. Wheeler Winston Dixon writes: seen today bout de souffle seems primitive, classic, not at all the audacious ground-breaker it seemed
to be in 1959. The jump cuts which were so radical then are now a staple of
MTV; shooting on location to enhance the illusion of reality is a staple of
50
contemporary cinema practice.16 More recent author-centered approaches,

undertaken after the waning of auteur theory in academic circles, no longer
celebrate the eternal quality of the masterpiece and instead observe that the
films have aged, especially when the analysis focuses on the virtuoso displays of
editing, the enthusiastic embrace of less cumbersome equipment, and the refusal of a studio aesthetic in favor of unpredictable location shooting, the strategies used to capture the youthful dynamism of these films time. In the new
millennium, in a cosmopolitan film culture heavily influenced by the new wave
and revolutionized by the advent of lightweight, high-quality digital cameras,
the aspects of Breathless that appeared most exciting and unconventional in the
1960s are the stuff of standard reality television fare and multiplex cinema
rather than art on the cutting-edge. Directors are inextricably linked to the
industrial system that supports their work, and their ostensible innovations,
their moments of virtuosity and poetry, are more like fads that soon lose their
edge or, if they achieve almost unimaginable success and enter the mainstream
of cinematic production, become prosaic and utterly unremarkable. If the
new wave consisted exclusively of jump cuts and rough camera work, the ostentatious stylistic gestures most readily attributable to the auteur, it would
have ceded its prominent position in film history to the next new thing and
faded into obscurity long ago.
Despite the many attempts to discard auteur theory altogether or rein in
the romantic exuberance displayed on the pages of Cahiers, studies of the new
wave remain excessively focused on the directors and other authors of the
films and inadequately attentive to the nuances of the politique des auteurs as
it developed over the course of the 1950s, especially the intimate relationship
between new wave cinema and a historically defined material culture. These
studies fail to account for the idiosyncratic itinerary followed by the periods
key critics while they traced connections between the image and the filmmaker. Auteur theory revolves first and finally around the central authority of
the director, but between those first principles and the conclusive findings of
the genius of Hitchcock or Nicholas Ray, the critical practice at Cahiers takes
long divagations through complex spaces littered with objects and enlivened
by the movement of people and machines. These critics see in Douglas Sirk
thebrightly hued trinkets, the pink shirts and candy-apple red cars, the atmospherics of artifice, that had by the 1950s become the marker of modern
cinema. Sirks operatic plots are a pretext for a pageant of young actors decked
out in outrageous costumes and settings awash in the colors of the twentieth
century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics.17 And the films of
the critics-turned-directors of the new wave also lose themselves in the figures
they trace as the camera and its subject maneuver through the cramped hotel
rooms and apartments of a modernizing France or the bustling, car-filled
streets of Paris. While auteurist criticism emphasizes the vision of a singular
51
artist, the process of making a film involved weaving the abstractions of the
imagination together with the resistant objects and spaces of the time.18 Before
being signed and sealed by the authority of the author, the new wave was a
cinema of mise-en-scne.
Mise-en-scne is traditionally characterized as all the aspects of film that
also pertain to theater: lighting, costumes, sets, props, acting, and the movement of bodies, all the elements that together shape the interaction between
beings and objects before the camera. But in the eyes of the Cahiers critics, this
technical term becomes the very essence of cinema. Brian Henderson argues
that mise-en-scne is nothing less than the art of the image, though in practice the concept is so loosely applied that it remains cinemas grand undefined term.19 He adds that in most contexts, the true cultivation and expression of the image as suchas opposed to the relation between images, which
is the central expressive category of montagerequires the duration of the
long take (a single piece of unedited film). . . . The long take is the presupposition or a priori of mise-en-scne, that is, the ground or field in which mise-enscne can occur. It is the time necessary for mise-en-scne space.20 New wave
cinema was the invention of individual directors only to the extent that they
dedicated themselves to an art of the image and produced a chronicle of
mise-en-scne space. In their quest for the holy grail of auteur status, new
wave directors subjected themselves to the constraints of a cinematic model
organized around the principle of mise-en-scne. While the auteurist critics
associated with Cahiers became famous or infamous for reviving nave conceptions of the creative genius and applying them to an industrial and collaborative medium like film, while their overarching framework foregrounds the
distinctive vision of the director, their focus on mise-en-scne grounds their
theories, which are derived from a mlange of Italian neorealism and Hollywood cinema, in an intensely local and historical practice. The key new wave
films are themselves exercises in the orchestration of bodies and objects in
space, and the mise-en-scne of new wave cinema is as much a product of the
times as the gift of any individual artist or cohort of filmmakers. For this
reason, a study of French cinema in the 1950s and 1960s must focus not only
on the new waves innovative mode of production, its industrial structure, its
reception, and other clear (if sometimes difficult to ascertain) historical facts
but also on the gestures its stars perform, the fashions they wear, the cities
they navigate, the objects they covet and discard, the buildings that surround
them, the neon signs that illuminate their way, and the images plastered on
walls and billboards.21 The other history of French new wave cinemathe one
that extends beyond the authority of the director and into the most intricate
details captured in the imageis told through its mise-en-scne.
In this chapter, I argue that over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, youth,
cities, and cinema became the most conspicuous sites where debates about
modernization, markets, and consumer society were staged in France; but I
52
also maintain that the interplay of these complex and contradictory forces is
registered in the domain of mise-en-scne and therefore requires the same
attention to the image demonstrated by the best criticism of the period. More
sociologically inclined accounts of new wave films tend to focus on the readily
identifiable and reliable linguistic evidence contained in the screenplay or reviews.22 Jacques Rancire advocates a renewed focus on narrative and oldfashioned dramatic action to counteract a formalist and aestheticizing impulse in film theory.23 Other critics and philosophers of cinema, taking their
cues from the realist filmmakers favored by Bazin, put their faith in the irreducible complexity of the world recorded by the camera and projected on the
screen. Deleuze, who writes about hundreds of films while barely mentioning
their plots, exemplifies the extreme case of a film theory focused on the visuality of cinema and the possibilities of the image. At their best (and of course
there were also moments of humorous or disquieting failure) the critics in the
French new wave, including the group at Cahiers, were extraordinarily attentive to those possibilities. Jean Domarchi writes that in a sense Hiroshima
[mon amour] is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva, and films like The 400
Blows and Breathless are as much about the interactions of the bodies of the
actors and the space around them as the vicissitudes of the narrative.24 The
young generation and the characteristic locations of the new wave era are alluded to in the deliberately contrived and half-baked plots contained in periods notoriously slack screenplays but are represented more directly in the
movement of bodies through a space registered on the surface of the cinematic image. The modernization of France materializes at times in stories
focused on cars and other consumer products or in characters with historically new vocations, like the pollster and teenage beauty queen in Godards
Masculin fminin (1966), but more often appears on-screen as a ubiquitous
and diffuse phenomenon, an event present in countless details each too insignificant to mention. Mise-en-scne was the mechanism for depicting a transformative eventthe emergence of an American-style modernity organized
around consumption and the marketmanifested not through grand ideological statements but through a pervasive, commonplace, and over time
almost pedestrian transformation of everyday life. As this model of development spreads across the globe, a variation on the cinema of mise-en-scne
accompanies it, and the revelations of space and objects compete with the
often limited perspective of the auteur.
Viewed as a phenomenon of mise-en-scne, the French new wave belies its
reputation for innovation and therefore resists the conclusion that the films
are outdated because they were always somewhat classical in their construction (the standard verdict on Truffaut) or because their manner of revolution,
their fast-paced editing and obsession with poses and performance, is now the
norm (early Godard). The films of the French new wave are remarkable in
retrospect not because their style reflects the newness of their time but because
53
they envision the urban environments around them as a stage where the modernization of France plays out on the terrain of everyday life. Although marketing campaigns and posterity eventually focused on the imprint of the
author, the new wave began when filmmakers and critics asserted that cinema
should be made with the bodies, objects, and spaces gathered in front of the
camera rather than the pen of the scriptwriter or the blade of the editor. Accounts of life on the set of these early new wave films are revealing because
they demonstrate that the mode of production forced the filmmakers to insinuate themselves into the space of a functioning city, with a parade of passersby captured by a hidden camera or staring into the lens wielded by the
cinematographer. In other cases, as in the shooting of the final scene of Breathless, a crowd surrounded the cast and crew as they photographed Jean-Paul
Belmondo prostrate on the ground or Jean Seberg gazing blankly and imitating the signature gestures of her dead boyfriend. Marked as outsiders by their
camera and the affectations of the actors, the production itself was a spectacle;
but in the new wave, that performance was rarely isolated in the separate space
of the studio and instead competed with the spectacle of the city that momentarily enveloped the filmmakers and then dispersed. The border between
cinema and the city is porous in these films, and their production strategies
facilitated those movements into and out of the world of the film. As important, the city of Paris became a permanent set for the films, an environment
where some elements were in constant fluxthe cars, the pedestrians, the
slower but still dramatic progress of construction and demolitionand others
adhered to a different temporality: the monuments designed to last forever,
the buildings that weather over the course of decades or centuries, the streets
whose layout traces various ancient and modern maps of the city. If the logic
of classical Hollywood or French production required a flexible and often disposable environment whose existence was validated only by the presence of
the camera, the new wave staged its drama in a space at once far more dynamic
and enduring than any studio set. Cinema during the new wave was the record
of a series of encounters among a range of artists, including the director but
also the stars and the crew, and the space of the city; it was a work of art reimagined, in Duchamps words, as a kind of rendezvous.25
When combined with an aesthetic oriented around mise-en-scne, the results are indeed revolutionary, but not for the usual litany of reasons. Like
other modernist movements, the filmmakers and critics of the French new
wave searched for the essence of their medium, discovered it in mise-enscne, and constructed a philosophy of cinema around it. But mise-en-scne
itself is as old as the theater; it is neither modern nor ancient nor particularly
noteworthy as an approach to making or writing about films. What distinguished the French new wave was the transformation of an aesthetic originally
developed on the tightly controlled compounds at Paramount or Warner
Brothers into an interface with actual spaces beyond the studio lot. The path
54
to auteur status passed directly through the city of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.
And as the politique des auteurs expanded from a critical strategy focused on
mainstream, usually Hollywood, directors to a method of film production, the
cinephiles of the new wave were forced to make films out of raw materials
usually considered the opposite of cinema, the real world rather than the artifice of the soundstage. The cinematic revolution attributed to the French new
wave was already present in the world that surrounded the camera, in the
bodies of the young generation featured everywhere in the films, in the new
machines and objects proliferating around them, and in the city that became
a force of both modernity and history. The essential formula of the early new
wave films was to let young people loose in an old city. The films then tracked
the transformation of an urban environment in the throes of renewal and a
young generation that was growing disillusioned with the brand of revolutionary modernity they both encountered and represented.
Staging the New Wave

In his touchstone history of Cahiers du cinma, Antoine de Baecque argues
that the journal aged in reverse during its first decade in existence: Cahiers
was established in 1951 when it emerged from the ruins of the recently folded
Revue du cinma and entered the vibrant French film scene with an array of
editorial stances and critical predilections already in place. It discovered its
youth only in the mid-1950s, after issuing a string of polemics against the film
establishment and the cinma de papa, the most famous and vituperative of
them launched by Truffaut.26 Youth, de Baecque suggests, was not present at
the origin of Cahiers but was encountered by its most observant critics in the
world they inhabited and imported back into its office and editorial meetings.
Despite the sensible and measured objections raised by Bazin and the heated
opposition of a leftist faction headed by Pierre Kast, the journal developed
into the one of the most conspicuous mouthpieces for this youth movement
by the late 1950s. The famous 1958 issue dedicated to the youth of French
cinema featured both extracts from screenplays by Chabrol, Malle, Marker,
Rivette, Rouch, and Truffaut and an obituary for Bazin, marking the symbolic passage from one era in the journals history to the new wave proper.27
And when a throwaway scene in Breathless spotlighted a young woman trying
to sell Cahiers to Michel Poiccard and asking do you support youth, the allusion was no longer an in-joke directed at a small group of critics and readers, but a widely understood reference to the twenty-something critics at the
most famous French film publication at the time, along with the new generation of filmmakers they supported and were themselves joining. Michels
comeback is noteworthy, too: I prefer the old. His contrarian instincts and
gruff demeanorpeople who accost him on the street usually get an earful or
55
worsepartly explain this response. But it also suggests that by the time the
new wave arrived with Truffauts 400 Blows and Resnaiss Hiroshima mon
amour, the young generation was no longer an essentially countercultural
force. Even in the heyday of the journal, when it positioned itself as a promoter of young critics and cinephiles, the key players at Cahiers expressed
doubts about this dedication to the cause of youth and the assertion that
cinema itself was a vibrant medium aligned with burgeoning youth cultures
in France and elsewhere. In 1955, ric Rohmer, the slightly older but equally
fervent mentor of the young Turks at Cahiers, wrote that while he had
praised cinema for its air of health, that health has already been subjected
to a thousand threats. Its old age is, perhaps, closer than we suspect.28 In the
same year, Cahiers would remove the word tlcinma from its title, turning
away in part from the emerging medium of television and dedicating itself to
old-fashioned cinema in a theatrical setting, a format that maintained only a
tenuous hold on the youth audience of the time. Cahiers devoted itself to an
aging medium at precisely the moment it proclaimed its allegiance to the
youth of the time and inaugurated a young cinema with all its pretensions
to modernity. Whether the critics at Cahiers were the voice of the young cinephile, or older than their years, or slowly merging with the jeunes cadres
charged with administering a simultaneously modern and changeless realm,
the age of the French new wave was, from the beginning, subject to debate.
The new waves disorderly combination of young and old is conceptualized
in the idea of mise-en-scne developed by the Cahiers critics and rendered
visible in the films they idealized and then made. During the 1950s in France,
youth culture was a key element of the soundtrack of daily life, especially the
pervasive pop music emanating from radios and record players; but it was
primarily a phenomenon of mise-en-scne subject to continual reinvention
through the upheavals of personal style and fashion, the repertoire of poses
and movements practiced and perfected by the body, the objects that served as
tools and props, and the prototypical settings of each generation. Pascal Ory
draws explicit connections between the tumultuous built environment in
France and its developing media ecology, especially the rise of the new wave
in film, the popular press exemplified by LExpress under Franoise Giroud,
and youth-oriented radio programming and publications like Salut les copains, a variety show broadcast over the airwaves from 1958 and adapted into
a pop magazine in 1962.29 The explosion of interior design during the eras
mobi-boom was merely one manifestation of a broader phenomenon that
included an inundation of mass culture, the establishment of a civilization
of leisure, and the expansion of a consumer society, each with its characteristic locations and a constituency of (usually young) devotees.30 The changing
landscape of architecture and objects suggested that the world itself was a
product of design, an effect of staging, rather than a preexisting universe to
bediscovered and observed. Youth in the new wave period was inextricably
56
bound to this understanding of design. Truffaut suggested that the literary

precursors of the new wave were distinguished by a similar fascination with
the objects that constitute a world and usurp the position usually occupied by
the human subject. In a 1961 interview, he provided a shorthand description
ofthe genre of youth fiction known unofficially as Saganism through a series
of objects and related narrative lines: sports car, bottle of scotch, short-lived
loves, etc.31 The tradition of quality decimated by Truffauts manifesto was
also defined early in the history of Cahiers as the product of a certain category
of space and object, the country home and the grand magasin, the locations
that, according to Michel Dorsday, hasten cinema toward its death.32 Like
the young couple at the end of Louis Malles film The Lovers (Les Amants,
1958), the artists and characters of the new wave flee from the manor homes of
the aristocracy and relocate to a new environment with a different array of
characteristic structures and ideological baggage to match. In the eyes of the
major Cahiers critics, cinematic artistry is visible when a filmmaker makes
mise-en-scne into an interface with the modern world, when he or she recognizes design as a foundational condition of modernity itself.
Along with the politique des auteurs, mise-en-scne was the intellectual
and artistic touchstone for Cahiers critics in the 1950s, and the singularity of
their favored directors is visible on-screen in the choreography of movements
and gestures, the choice and placement of objects, or the revelation of a setting. What distinguishes the writing of these young critics is an attention to
detail that allows the ostensibly industrial products of Hollywood to be
treated alongside the masterpieces of European and Asian art cinema. The
film may be contemporary or classical, American or French or Japanese, popular or virtually unknown, but Cahiers critics frame their approach to cinema
as a radical innovation precisely because of their attention to artistic craftsmanship evident in the mise-en-scne. Film is an art because it is the product
of an artist, they argue, and artistry in cinema consists primarily of mise-enscne. Their fervent campaigns in favor of particular directors constitute their
most famous intervention in film theory and criticism, though the novelty of
this position is merely to extend to industrial and mechanical entertainment
the aura of high art usually reserved for museum pieces or works of canonical
literature. In their assertion of a fundamental connection between authorship
and mise-en-scne, however, this relationship between tradition and modernity becomes more complex. On the one hand, by importing the concept of
mise-en-scne into cinema, they adopt a strategy of criticism that emphasizes
its overlap with theater, the ancient art despised by Cahiers critics like Truffaut, at least when the text assumed a domineering role in the production of
a film. On the other, the practical result of this focus on mise-en-scne is to
take bodies, objects, and spaces seriously, to transform mere functions in a
narrative (the hero, the villain, the victim) or props (the gun, the flower) or
backdrops (the painted skyline) into the center of curiosity for the critic and
57
audience. If the jump cuts and asynchronous sound of films like Breathless
flaunt their violation of the rules of classical filmmaking, and if the critics
bombastic rhetoric in praise of certain directors is equally outrageous, the
quotidian task of criticism at the journal was a far more pedestrian affair. It
involved looking carefully at the environment depicted on-screen and the
bodies and objects that filled it. One of the most curious dimensions of new
wave cinephilia, the tendency to watch the same film over and over again, a
habit of movie-going best exemplified by Truffaut, is justified only when this
assiduous attention divulges details that would otherwise remain too numerous or obscure to notice even after three or four viewings. In his book devoted
to the work of Jean Renoir, Bazin writes that his commentary proceeds from
the screen, and the same holds true for the key Cahiers critics, even if they
deploy this variation on close reading in an auteurist framework, as part of an
overarching quest for clues to the vision of the artist.33 In the politique des
auteurs lies the foundation of a politique des oeuvres focused intensely on
the physical body and material culture of both the historical eras depicted in
films and the contemporary world viewed with equal intensity by the directors of the new wave.
The work of art in the eyes and ideology of the major Cahiers critics consists primarily of characters, objects, and spaces; comments on editing are exceedingly rare in this period, compared with the number of observations
about mise-en-scne. Montage forbidden, Bazins intentionally polemical
declaration of support for a realism based on the documentary qualities of the
cinematic image, could serve as an unofficial motto for the criticism practiced
by the younger cohort at Cahiers. Bazin wrote that certain types of action
oppose the use of montage to attain their plenitude. The expression of their
concrete duration is obviously contradicted by the abstract time in which
their reality and spatial unity is placed in evidence, particularly in comic or
tragic situations based on the relationship between man and objects.34 The
work of Howard Hawks follows an unusual itinerary on its path to the pantheon, as it bypasses the editing suite altogether. Rohmer rebukes Hawks for
the banality in his editing, praises his sensitivity to the precise delineation
of gesture and its duration, and because gesture is infinitely more cinematic
than editing, elevates this flawed practitioner of the art of montage to the privileged position of one of the greatest directors in film history.35 Like Bazin,
Rivette praises the fundamental honesty of mise-en-scne.36 In an article on
Mizoguchi, he revives many familiar tropes about the universality of cinema,
but with mise-en-scne serving as the lingua franca of directors around the
world: these filmswhich tell us, in an alien tongue, stories that are completely foreign to our customs and way of lifedo talk to us in a familiar language. What language? The only one to which a film-maker should lay claim
when all is said and done: the language of mise-en-scne. . . . If music is a
universal idiom, so too is mise-en-scne: it is this language, and not Japanese
58
that has to be learned to understand Mizoguchi. 37 Even directors whose

style would seem to preclude a disproportionate and almost exclusive focus
on the contents of the imagemost notably Hitchcock, with a famously omnivorous approach to filmmaking, from the long takes of Rope (1948) to the
voyeuristic eyeline matches in Rear Windowwould become exemplars of
the fundamental truth that cinema is at the most essential level a medium of
mise-en-scne. Writing under his birth name, Maurice Schrer, Rohmer celebrates Hitchcock not because he spins the most fabulous plots but because he
pays the most attention to the brute power of the thing he shows.38 And with
this record of seemingly excessive attention to Hitchcocks realism and his
mise-en-scne already turning his worshippers at Cahiers into objects of ridicule, those critics were relieved to learn that their idol had just completed an
obsessively realist film that finally comported in almost every way with their
published opinions. Truffaut writes triumphantly: Cahiers du cinma thanks
Alfred Hitchcock who just filmed The Wrong Man solely to make us happy
and prove to the world the truth of our interpretations.39 Chief among those
now confirmed interpretations was the assertion that Hitchcock had always
been, first and foremost, a master of mise-en-scne.
While Mizoguchi and other Japanese directors also occupied a key position
as the Cahiers critics elaborated on their theory of mise-en-scne, Italian
cinema remained the most common reference point, aside from the local industry in France and the global behemoth in Hollywood. Because of their
skeleton crews and scaled-down productions, the early Italian neorealist films
were the most obvious candidates for this mode of criticism, as Rossellini or
De Sica maintained their individuality amid the din, chaos, and anonymity
ofa crowd. Unlike so many protagonists in their filmsthe Ingrid Bergman
character devoured by a mob of religious pilgrims fighting to glimpse a miracle in Voyage to Italy (Viaggio in Italia; Rossellini, 1954) or the father and son
in Bicycle Thieves disappearing into the multitudes in Romethe postwar
Italian director remained a distinct authorial presence in the eyes of Cahiers
critics, and that presence was visible primarily in the handling of mise-enscne. The voluminous Cahiers writings on postwar Italian cinema (and the
equally voluminous articles by these critics in other venues) continually ignore
the role of montage, downplay the importance of the scenario, and highlight
the central position of a mise-en-scne viewed as a direct conduit to the characteristic preoccupations of the director. In his review of Umberto D, Bazin
writes:
De Sica devotes more than one reel to showing us Umberto D in his
room, closing the shutters, tidying a few things, looking at his tonsils,
going to bed, taking his temperature. So much film for a sore throatas
much as for a suicide! And yet the sore throat does play at least a small
part in the story, whereas the most beautiful sequence of the film, in
59
which the little maid gets up, hasstrictly speakingno dramatic resonance at all: the girl gets up, potters about in the kitchen, chases away the
ants, grinds the coffee . . . all these unimportant actions are recorded
for us in strict temporal continuity.40
In Bazins reformulation, De Sica documents the mundane interactions of the
main characters and the material world, but with the concentration usually
dedicated to moments of operatic intensity. This world of confined rooms and
coffee grinders deserves as much attention, Bazin suggests, as the staples of
epic and melodrama: war, love, suicide. And in a 1959 interview with Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette, Rossellini confirms the central premises
of this Cahiers fascination with mise-en-scne and implicates himself in their
project: montage is no longer necessary. Things are there . . . why manipulate
them?41 If the French new wave can escape the tyranny of auteur theory, Rossellinis observation points toward an exit from the dominion of the artist:
cinema is more than a directors medium because, regardless of the intervention of any individual, things are there.
A handful of older but still active French directorsthe generation who,
like Rossellini, bridged the immediate postwar era and the age of new waves
were never subjected to Truffauts assault on the tradition of quality, and
Robert Bresson exemplified for the Cahiers critics the rare French film tradition worthy of admiration and salvation. Given the criterion of evaluation in
place at Cahiers, the decision to celebrate the work of Bresson above nearly
every other French director save Renoir seems once again to reflect the incoherence of their aesthetic vision and the limits of their business acumen. Bresson was best known, after all, for literary adaptations like Les Dames du Bois
de Boulogne (1945), his more contemporary version of a story by Diderot, and
Diary of a Country Priest (Journal dun cur de campagne, 1951), based on a
novel by Georges Bernanos. With its conspicuous elegance, the dialogue in
both films is resolutely literary, and the Bernanos adaptation displays its literariness directly on the screen, in long passages where we see the priest writing
longhand in his journal, and in what amounts to the same gesture, the writer
producing the source novel. Moreover, the films of Bresson were greeted with
indifference by contemporary audiences, lacking both the crossover potential
of the early new wave films and the smaller but fervent Art et Essai audience
that nurtured alternative film production in France from the late 1950s on. His
disenfranchisement from the mainstream film industry could be considered a
badge of honorhe was the one filmmaker left who hasnt sold out, according to Rivettebut if younger directors wanted a role model to guide their
development into full-fledged filmmakers with a vision and an audience,
Bresson was the worst possible mentor.42
Yet in their focus on gestures, objects, and spaces, the films of Robert Bresson exemplify the principles Cahiers critics prized above all others. When
60
French critics and filmmakers began to formulate a theory of mise-en-scne,

Bresson was one of the first to venture a definition, and he focused initially on
camera angle and shot length as its key features, linking it to the more common
technical term dcoupage.43 His later writing on cinematography and acting
points to a developing precision in his model of mise-en-scne, and among the
most profound insights in his theory and practice of cinema is a unique commingling of apparently discrete categories like the object and the human figure.
Bresson writes: the persons and the objects in your film must walk at the same
pace, as companions.44 His transformation of the actor into a model, an obscure, object-like entity rather than a transparent window onto psychological
depth, underlies this vision of cinema as a medium where divine grace is found
in the humblest objects and manifested in the most mundane gestures. Pickpocket (1959) is a study of the balletic hand gestures and consummate skill of
small-time thieves, but it also situates their action in the everyday spaces of the
city: the racetrack, the train station, the unremarkable sidewalk. The pickpocket
succeeds by becoming indistinguishable from the crowd or the space that surrounds him; while lurking and lying in wait, he blends in among the anonymous bodies, the lampposts, and the signs. The model aspires to spiritual transcendence but achieves it only after blurring all distinctions between humanity
and the material world.
Written under the growing influence of Cahiers-style criticism and the new
wave itself, Susan Sontags 1964 essay on Bresson reflects a similar fascination
with the object world and the transformation of the human figure from the
dramatic center to one element of many in the mise-en-scne. She emphasizes
the importance of certain categories of space, most notably the cell, in Bresson;45 she sees a landscape populated by opaque characters and a director
interested in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls, a
variation on Truffauts claim that Bresson composes a dialogue between the
soul and objects;46 and she reframes the work of Bresson not as a classical
exercise in storytelling and convincing personification but as a collection of
simple and humble gestures. In The Diary of a Country Priest, she writes, the
most affecting images are not those of the priest in his role, struggling for the
souls of his parishioners, but of the priest in his homely moments: riding his
bicycle, removing his vestments, eating bread, walking.47 And in A Man Escaped (Un condamn mort sest chapp, 1956), the vast majority of screen
time is devoted to equally undramatic actions: Fontaine scraping at his door
with the spoon, Fontaine sweeping the wood shavings which have fallen on
the floor into a tiny pile with a single straw pulled from his broom.48 If Bressons films begin with the rejection of any classical or commercial standards
of success, they become the paragon of French cinema because meaning resides not behind or beneath the surface, with those depth metaphors implying
that the surface is an illusion and reality lies below, but in the gesture itself and
the interaction between the human body and the material environment. If
61
Bresson conjured up a spiritual style from the domain of humble people

and objects, the younger generation of new wave directors eventually rejected
his metaphysical framework, especially his narratives of escape, sacrifice, and
redemption.49 In the new wave proper, nothing exists beyond the objects and
images that tantalize with the possibility of liberation and construct their own
variation on the prison cell.
If the existence of an unmanipulated world of things in themselves serves
as an axiom in the Cahiers approach to neorealism, the famously artificial
realm of Hollywood poses a unique problem: how can the vision of the director be disentangled from the dozens or hundreds of other influences on any
major studio production? American cinema occupies a pivotal position in a
theory of mise-en-scne because finding the hand of an individual artist
within the routinized process of the mature studio systemwith the director
and stars supported by a crew of dozens of professionals engaged in specific
tasks on the sethas always been an insurmountable challenge, even for the
most dedicated or fanatical observer. Cahiers critics focus on the mise-enscne of American cinema because that aspect of the production process involves various overlapping roles on the set, because it falls within the purview
of many, and because it often escapes the attention of marquee-obsessed producers concentrating primarily on their major investments, the stars and the
script. As Thomas Elsaesser writes, given the fact that in Hollywood the director often had no more than token control over choice of subject, the cast,
the quality of the dialogue, all the weight of creativity, all the evidence of personal expression and statement had to be found in the mise-en-scne, the
visual orchestration of the story, the rhythm of the action, the plasticity and
dynamism of the image, the pace and causality introduced through the editing.50 Location shooting, nonprofessional actors, natural light, and other elements of the neorealist mode of production manifest the same truth of
cinema as their mirror opposites in Hollywood: colossal sets constructed on a
soundstage, the star system, classical three-point lighting, and an elaborately
coordinated product of hundreds of hands. This relentless focus on mise-enscne allows the critics to locate normally distinct realmsItalian neorealism
and Hollywood studio productions, loose episodic narratives and the classical
screenplay, the street and the studioin the same critical framework.
Although the staging of props and sets in the Hollywood studio provides a
prototype for their treatment of other cinematic traditions and the reality outside the soundstage, the Cahiers critics also subject American cinema to a profound transformation, as they view it against the grain of traditional film criticism and an industrial logic that emphasizes the story over the visuality of the
image. In the eyes of Rivette (with Otto Premingers 1952 film Angel Face as his
muse) the script serves only as a pretext in the masterpieces of the classical
Hollywood system, despite the contributions of an army of screenwriters. The
story merely presents an opportunity to create certain characters, studying
62
them with painstaking attention, observing their reactions to one another, and
finally drawing from them particular gestures, attitudes and reflexeswhich
are the raison dtre of his film, and its real subject.51 In the same year, writing
in defense of Jacques Becker, Truffaut made a similar observation about the
filmmakers who escaped the tyranny of the screenplay in the French cinema
after World War II: what happens to Beckers characters is of less importance
than the way it happens to them. The plot, no more than a pretext, gets thinner
with every film.52 But the denigration of the screenplay, of the plot and the
word, the pre-text, poses a much more radical challenge in the context of a
Hollywood system renowned for films with snappy dialogue and fast-talking
dames and for bidding wars waged over the hottest story material.53 Rivette
argues that directors like Preminger no longer accept the primacy of the text
or the classical Hollywood model of narrative and editing: Preminger believes first in mise en scne, the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated
complex that seems suspended in space.54 The result is mise en scne for its
own sake, for what is cinema, if not the play of actor and actress, of hero and
set, of word and face, or hand and object?55 Their enthrallment with mise-enscne marks the closest the major critics of the new wave came to a pure aestheticism divorced from the real world of history and politics, and their treatment of American cinema often verges on an insulated, formalist enterprise.
At the same time, however, this reconception of cinema as mise-en-scne also
represents one of their most direct engagements with the politics of the postwar economic miracle because their obsession with a world of bodies, objects,
and environments begins to escape the pretext, the scripted narrative of progress, of capitalist modernization. The aestheticism of mise-en-scne for its
own sake opens onto a materialist cinema resistant to the omnipresent drama
starring new men, new women, and a new city. In their desperate search for
the traces of an authorial presence, the critics at Cahiers du cinma develop a
strategy for reading one of the most artificial of filmmaking traditions against
the grain of the narrative.
The identification of mise-en-scne as the very essence of cinema extends
beyond the work of outsiders and innovators into the genre system at the
heart of industrial Hollywood. In the hands of a gifted director and on the
pages of Cahiers, even the most formulaic of genres becomes an occasion for
the exploration of pure mise-en-scne. Rohmer confesses his aversion to the
western in its entirety, identifying the stereotypical settings and character
types as one source of his displeasure: I am not crazy about Westerns. The
genre has its requirements, its conventions, like any other, but they are less
liberal. The plains, the herds, the wooden towns, the guitars, the chase scenes,
and the eternal good guys and their rugged bravado, their traces of Scottish or
Irish humor, are apt to tire anyone from this Old World.56 More hospitable
to the western, Bazin returns frequently to this staple of the Hollywood genre
63
system, especially the work of Anthony Mann. Although much less dogmatic
than his younger and more effusive colleagues, Bazin lavishes attention on the
material world displayed on Manns vast horizontal screens and the setting
that stretches off into the distance. Despite his admonition that the key to
American cinema lies not in the auteur but in the genius of the system,
Bazin also reads mise-en-scne as the interaction between the consciousness
of a director and the physical world. He writes:
For Anthony Mann landscape is always stripped of its dramatically
picturesque effects. None of those spectacular overhanging rocks in
the deserts, nor those overwhelming contrasts designed to add effect to
the script or the mise en scne. If the landscapes that Anthony Mann
seems fond of are sometimes grandiose or wild, they are still on the
scale of human feelings and action. Grass is mixed up with rocks, trees
with desert, snow with pastures and clouds with the blue of the sky.
This blending of elements and colours is like the token of the secret
tenderness nature holds for man, even in the most arduous trials of its
seasons.57
In this fundamentally reconceived notion of cinema, the camera is no longer
an apparatus, a machine, the force of industrial modernity envisioned by Benjamin but is an anthropomorphized constituent of the mise-en-scne. The
camera has a point of view, it sees, it glides through the scenery, it weaves together discrete elements into a holistic environment. Bazin writes: In most
Westerns, even in the best ones like Fords, the landscape is an expressionist
framework where human trajectories come to make their mark. In Anthony
Mann it is an atmosphere. Air itself is not separate from earth and water. Like
Cezanne, who wanted to paint it, Anthony Mann wants us to feel aerial space,
not like a geometric container, a vacuum from one horizon to the other, but
like the concrete quality of space. When his camera pans, it breathes.58 In the
famous conclusion to his essay on Bicycle Thieves, Bazin writes that in a perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, there would be no more actors, no more
story, no more sets, and no more cinema.59 His meditations on Anthony
Mann extend that model of total cinema to an even more provocative extreme. Rather than facilitate the disappearance of the machinery of film production into the world itself, the classical western has transformed the natural
environment into the last bastion of tenderness in an often brutally violent
society, a sanctuary where an endangered humanism survives, a natural world
reimagined according to the values promulgated by Hollywood itself. There
are no more landscapes, only mise-en-scne made to measure for Anthony
Mann; there are no more characters, only a camera that breathes.
Although Mann, Hitchcock, and Hawks remained the key reference points
at Cahiers throughout the 1950s, the journals most peculiar and telling infatuation was the younger, less established, less commercially successful director
64
Nicholas Ray. The obvious reason for this adulation was Rays relative youth
and his carefully cultivated image as an outsider, an image that was crystallized forever by his iconic 1955 film Rebel without a Cause and its star, James
Dean, who perished in a car accident the same year, at just twenty-four years
of age. Because he never grew old, Dean became the embodiment of youth
itself for audiences around the world and for actors like Ishihara Yujiro in
Japan and the French critics and filmmakers then emerging in France. His
indelible presence in the mise-en-scne of just three filmshis iconic poses
and gestures, his swaggering and sulking demeanor, his alternately intense
and casual sexualityendure as archetypal images of youth. But Dean alone is
incapable of rescuing a bad picture, and Truffaut concludes that Giant (George
Stevens, 1956) is merely three hours and twenty minutes of deadly boredom
tinted with disgust!60 Moreover, the film is everything that is contemptible
in the Hollywood system. . . . Its a silly, solemn, sly, paternalistic, demagogic
movie without any boldness, rich in all sorts of concessions, pettiness, and
contemptible actions.61 The difference in quality between Rebel and Giant,
Truffaut suggests, should be attributed to their directors: George Stevens is a
cheat, a fraud, and Nicholas Ray is the best current American director.62 In
the eyes of the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, Ray could invigorate classical American cinema for a new generation and, like the self-styled rebels at Cahiers,
launch a youth movement behind the camera to match the precocious talent
of stars like James Dean. Only that emotional bond, that sense that Ray was
their counterpart in the Hollywood of their time, explains the fervor expressed
in the countless essays devoted to Ray. In the estimation of Truffaut, anyone
who rejected Hawks and Ray would benefit from the following snippet of
friendly advice: Stop going to the cinema, dont watch any more films, for you
will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition,
a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema.63 Or in the words of Godard:
There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance
(Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is
Nicholas Ray.64 Or Hoveyda: if people insist on thinking that Party Girl is
rubbish, then I proclaim, Long live this rubbish which so dazzles my eyes,
fascinates my heart and gives me a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. 65 No
director could possibly live up to the extravagant hype bestowed on Nicholas
Ray, especially when relatively routine productions like Party Girl are advertised as a portal to paradise.
If Godard and many of his colleagues believed that cinema is Nicholas Ray,
what are the qualities of this cinema reconceived in the image of Rebel without
a Cause or Party Girl? Why elevate Ray and his work to a position of definitional importance? If the shared condition of youth and their sense of identification partially explain this zeal, they fail to account for the sheer volume of
criticism in Cahiers dedicated to Ray and the meticulous, almost loving attention to detail in that analysis. In the eyes of the Godard, Truffaut, and Rays
65
most perceptive defender, Hoveyda, Ray becomes an embodiment of the aesthetic principles advocated by the young generation of Cahiers critics who surrounded Rohmer and responded to the incitements of Truffaut. In the opinion
of Godard, Ray is able, even in his lesser films, to translate the unnatural colors
of a modernizing American onto the screen: No reservations are necessary . ..
in praising the deliberate and systematic use of the gaudiest colours to be seen
in the cinema: barley-sugar orange shirts, acid-green dresses, violet cars, blue
and pink carpets.66 On the most superficial level, this critical reception reframes Ray as a colorist whose mise-en-scne reflects the transformations in
taste and visual culture in the 1950s and 1960s. In an interview with Charles
Bitsch, Ray betrays a dedication to mise-en-scne that extends beyond the
shocks of color into the fundamental process of shooting the film. He reveals
that his procedure on the set often involved recording a master shot for as
long as there [was] film in the camera and that in key moments, like the staircase sequence in Rebel, choosing not to cut away from that long take, preferring to let events unfold as though witnessed through the gaze of a bystander.
He adds that the camera often assumed the position of another actor wandering through the set, while he orchestrated a melody of the look between characters and the environment around them.67 He also discusses the centrality of
architecture in his approach to cinema, though he suggests that the influence is
less direct than critics usually maintain, especially when they focus on his decision to model the James Dean characters home on his own or his early apprenticeship in the offices of Frank Lloyd Wright. The buildings in his films are not
direct copies of originals drawn from his own experience or the realization of
blueprints glimpsed on Wrights drafting tables. Instead, he suggests that the
influence is generalized into a certain way of looking at things, especially his
use of the wide screen spaces opened up by CinemaScope.68 I like the horizontal line, he says, and the horizontal was essential for Wright.69 The discussion
then broadens into a meditation on the relationship between architecture and
cinema, with Ray asserting that architecture is the backbone of all the arts.70
What matters for Ray, or more precisely what Ray emphasizes in the context of
an interview with Cahiers du cinma and under the pressure of persistent
questioning, is the capacity of cinema to represent space and reveal relationships within it. Hoveyda asserts that even Party Girl, a commissioned piece
with an imposed screenplay and an idiotic story, contains a cascade of
ideas . . . in the mise-en-scne.71 He acknowledges that the subject of a film
matters very little to me . . . because I am convinced that mise-en-scne can
transfigure it. And if I add that the whole of cinema is ultimately mise-enscne, it is precisely because that is how everything is expressed on the
screen.72 Young Nicholas Ray, director of James Dean, icon of the new generation of French filmmakers, is venerated not only for his symbolic status as
the vanguard of emerging American filmmakers but also as a dedicated believer in the more vital principle that cinema should be defined as the staging
66
of a world before the camera. Cinema is Nicholas Ray only because he is

among the greatest Hollywood practitioners of the art of mise-en-scne. Ray is,
in other words, foremost among many directors enlisted to demonstrate the
truism that cinema is mise-en-scne.
Cahiers critics advocate a cinema of mise-en-scne with such uncompromising determination that the moments of doubt are all the more revealing, as
are the subtle variations from the increasingly familiar party line. On occasion, the direct connection between the director and mise-en-scne begins to
blur, as stars and other contributors to a collective production move to the
forefront. Rivette argues, for example, that Jean Gabin usurped the role usually reserved to the director in his major films of the 1930s. He writes:
In fact, Gabin wasnt an actor, he was something else. He wasnt an
actor, he was someone who brought a character into French cinema,
and it wasnt only scripts that he influenced but mise en scne as well. I
think that Gabin could be regarded as almost more of a director than
Duvivier or Grmillon, to the extent that the French style of mise en
scne was constructed to a large extent on Gabins style of acting, on his
walk, his way of speaking or of looking at a girl. Its also what gives the
great American actors their dynamism, actors like Cary Grant, Gary
Cooper or James Stewart. For instance, Anthony Manns mise en scne is
definitely influenced by James Stewarts style of acting. Now, I cant see
any actor in France at the moment who has that power of his own to go
beyond just acting.73
Even Luc Moullets notorious hymn to violence in his essay on Samuel Fuller
identifies a rupture between the will of the director and its manifestation onscreen: intentions are continually being corrected by mise en scne. Fuller,
who seemed so strongly attached to his fine ideas on America and the beauty
of democratic life, contradicts himself in every frame.74 Moullet uses the twoword sentence fragment On coherence to introduce the consistencies visible
over the long career of Fuller, but mise-en-scne soon reveals the fundamental
incoherence of this directors vision.
In the journals most revealing passages on mise-en-scne, critics like
Godard express concern that criticism oriented toward the figures, objects,
and settings present on-screen may fail to recognize the most complex and
timely dimension of films equally concerned with what fills the interstitial
space between these physical markers. What matters are not the elements of
mise-en-scne but the relationships among them. Again turning to Ray,
Godard writes that the 1957 war film Bitter Victory is remarkable because it
refuses to be distilled down to the kind of iconic still image routinely used in
advertising campaigns. No single portrait of a star or desert landscape can
crystallize the meaning of a film notable for the incessant movement among
the elements of mise-en-scne rather than the human and material world
67
itself. Godard writes: it is in this sense that Bitter Victory is an abnormal film.
One is no longer interested in objects, but in what lies between objects and
becomes an object in its turn. Nicholas Ray forces us to consider as real something one did not even consider as unreal, something one did not consider at
all. Bitter Victory is rather like one of those drawings in which children are
asked to find the hunter and which at first seem to be a meaningless mass of
lines.75 One limitation of Cahiers du cinma for most of its first two decades
was a tendency to resort exclusively to the auteur as the figure responsible for
connecting that otherwise meaningless mass of lines. Godards later work as
a filmmaker could be characterized as a search for the conceptual apparatus,
or more precisely as a process of discarding and adopting a series of intellectual frames, to guide his filmmaking. He embraces Americanization and its
capacity for reinvention in Breathless. Masculin fminin (1966), an intensely
critical study of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, contrasts the state and
corporate strategies for understanding the inner workings of society, especially the widespread practice of polling, with the revolutionary leftist and anticolonial slogans bandied about by minimally committed youth. And in Two
or Three Things I Know about Her, the intellectual apparatus is literally displayed on-screen, as a series of footnotes rendered in visual form through
close-ups of book covers, an acknowledgment of the limits of mise-en-scne
as a mechanism for revealing the nuances of socioeconomic relationships that
remain far from transparent in the real world. As observed in everyday critical
practice, the concept of mise-en-scne developed at Cahiers is incapable of
transforming a chaotic accumulation of characters, objects, and settings into
anything more than the manifestation of a directors vision. The critical enterprise in its most banal form moves strictly and obediently back and forth between the auteur and his or her creation. But this insistence on the absolute
primacy of mise-en-scne over other filmmaking strategies also creates opportunities that the Cahiers critics themselves rarely considered, and then
only in passing. In a 1967 lecture, Foucault argued that in contrast to the nineteenth centurys obsession with history, the great object of intellectual and
artistic enthusiasm in our own era seems to be space: we are in the age of
the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and
the scattered. A period in which, in my view, the world is putting itself to the
test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in time but as a net that
links points together and creates its own muddle.76 At its most profound, the
cinema and criticism of the new wave is a product of this new-found fascination with space, and mise-en-scne becomes the primary strategy for linking
points in this increasingly intricate network of flows, objects, and the occasional bottleneck. If, as Deleuze suggests, postwar art cinema is committed to
the representation of time rather than narrative events, the new wave announces a slight variation on that theme, with space now liberated from the
demands of drama and action.
68
New wave mise-en-scne is fascinating not only because it participates in

the emerging system of objects but also because it documents the muddle
created and glossed over by that system. What happens when the mise-enscne escapes the intentions of the director, when the material world depicted on-screen corrects the vision of the filmmaker, when bodies and
objects become obstacles to the smooth performance of auteurist criticism?
What happens when the seemingly blank space between them becomes a site
of resistance or holds the promise of revelation once borne by the people and
objects themselves? If the modernization of France in the years just before
theFrench new wave was at the most fundamental level a reorganization of
the relationship between the population and their material environment, the
mise-en-scne of these films presents a detailed record of that transformation.
While histories of the new wave have been dominated relentlessly by the commanding figure of the auteur, the most insightful criticism of the time gestures
beyond the purview of the director and toward the very core of the emerging
social and economic system of the new France. Rampant cinephilia often
blinded critics to the historical specificity of national cinemas and ensured
that they had little to say about the actual condition of Italy or the United
States, but the elevation of mise-en-scne into the very definition of cinema
reveals a great deal about the France of the 1950s that inspired this mode of
criticism: this was the moment when everyday life was transformed into a
performance on the stage of the city, when streets were being flooded with
images, when reality itself was becoming cinematic. The fundamental insight
of the Cahiers critics was to seize on a concept initially associated with a studio
aesthetic and develop it into their primary interface with all forms of cinema
and with the world itself. By situating every figure, object, and space in an
elaborate mise-en-scne, they recognized that this becoming cinematic of
identity, of a city, and of an economic mode of production was one of the
fundamental processes of their time.
Classical Plastics
While mise-en-scne was one of the major intellectual and aesthetic obsessions for French new wave critics, they usually discussed this fundamental
concept in passing, in countless short pieces prompted by the task of interviewing directors or reviewing new releases and revivals. As a result, this intellectual mainstay of modern cinema and criticism never received the detailed
inquiry it deserved. There was no contemporaneous book-length study to
elaborate on and refocus a diffuse, ad hoc theory of mise-en-scne. Rohmer
and Bazin, two critics who frequently departed from the quotidian practice of
film reviews and produced longer meditations on aesthetic and philosophical
topics, were responsible for the periods most ambitious examinations of this
69
term of art and, more important, ventured into the overlooked terrain between the raw materials of mise-en-scne. In his extended essays devoted to
theatre and cinema, Bazin suggests that behind and around the world of objects and physical structures lies Nature, which marks the limits of the
domain affected or controlled by directorial intervention. Rohmer argues that
the dynamic, perishable, imminently modern medium of celluloid suits the
atmosphere of the mid-twentieth century as classicism once comported with
ancient Greece or Rome. While Nature and the classical sound incorrigibly old-fashioned and therefore hopelessly out of place in any discussion of a
youthful, modernizing France in the period after World War II, both Bazin
and Rohmer take extraordinary pains to situate those archaic notions in the
artificial environments under construction at the time. Nature is modern,
Bazin suggests, and the classical dimension of cinema has little to do with
ancient and timeless values of order and proportion, Rohmer argues. Instead,
cinema is simultaneously modern and classical because it exists in perfect harmony with a historical moment characterized above all by its constant innovation. Cinema is a medium dedicated not to balanced forms that transcend
time but to the quotidian revolutions taking place in the age of new waves.
Cinema is modern because its classical, or classical because its modern: these
two formulations amount to variations on the same fundamental understanding of the relationship between cinema and history.77 (Godard appears to echo
this sentiment a decade later in Band of Outsiders [Bande part, 1964], when
a bibliophile English teacher writes the following equation on the blackboard:
classique = moderne.) Each of these critics approaches mise-en-scne as a
complex interstitial zone where conceptual opposites collide, where the periods most profound social and political conflicts play themselves out, and
where only the faintest traces of nature and classical form remain.
ric Rohmers five-part Cahiers essay titled Le Cellulod and le marbre,
because it develops one of the periods most substantial theories and philosophies of mise-en-scne, was a touchstone for the circle of critics who gathered
around him at the journal, and it remains a valuable document for historians
hoping to understand this pivotal concept. Over the past four decades, however, the piece has fallen into relative obscurity, primarily because Rohmer
disavowed the piece and refused to allow publishers to reprint it.78 The reasons
for that recantation are obvious in retrospect. The essay positions cinema at a
commanding position above the other arts and, amid intense competition,
merits strong consideration for the most extreme manifestation of cinephilia
produced in that decade. Cinephilia was both a galvanizing force and an affliction at Cahiers, and Rohmers essay, written from the position of a film
buff,79 is a demonstration of its liberating and incapacitating potential. More
important, one bizarre passage identifies film as an occidental medium and
the culmination of centuries of artistic development in the West, and only the
West.80 Rohmer was justifiably embarrassed by these positions and dismissed
70
the piece with a sweeping critique: there are too many things that I no longer
believe and that now seem horribly nave to meso much so that Id have to
write notes that are longer than the essay.81 Relegated to a peripheral position, the essay eventually disappeared behind the sheer volume of film criticism produced at the time. Despite these understandable misgivings and subsequent neglect, the essay occupies a crucial position in the history of the
journal and the new wave because across five issues from February to December of 1955, Rohmer spelled out the largely implicit philosophy of mise-enscne underlying much Cahiers criticism in the first half of the 1950s. Through
the vehicle of other art forms, most notably architecture, he explored the relationship between cinema and the world of bodies, objects, and space. And like
so much criticism and cinema in the new wave era, the writing of ric Rohmer
acquires a political valence despite, or perhaps because of, its single-minded
attention to aesthetics, because his obsession with mise-en-scne, with identities and objects and environments, focuses his writing on the most contested
arenas of public life in modern France.
Rohmer begins by sounding the familiar themes of cinephilia and generational transition. He writes that the relationship between cinema and the
other arts has traditionally been conceived as a dichotomy between a commercial, popular, mass medium, an art of the present, and the more highbrow repositories of timeless truth and beauty.82 But, he writes, our generation sees differently. . . . It has for cinema the respect one owes to weighty
monuments from the past. Its judgment has been formed not randomly at
screenings, but in the learned shadows of the Cinmathque.83 As Sellier
points out, French intellectuals have been haunted since the middle of the
nineteenth century by the fear of confusion between mass culture and elite
culture,84 and Rohmers essay at once illustrates and contradicts that assertion: he deploys an antiquated classical rhetoric to describe a mass medium,
the better to obscure the democratic dimensions of modern technology and
popular culture behind a veil of esoteric language; but he also contaminates the
classical through this imagined association with cinema, suggesting that the
masterpieces of ancient art are no longer hermetically sealed in the past. Walter
Benjamin asserts that the traditional work of art is separated in time from the
observer in the present and belongs to the era of myth and legend rather than
history, while cinema destroys the aura surrounding that venerable sculpture
or painting by bringing us in direct contact with the mass-produced object
and locating this new art form in the neon lights of the modern city rather
than the obscurity of ancient ritual.85 Rohmers argument both overlaps with
and diverges from Benjamins, as he removes classical art from its mythical
shroud while reinventing cinema as an auratic art. After his initial gesture
toward the new youth and their serious, studied, reverent cinephilia, Rohmer
launches into a series of reversals that lend cinema the qualities habitually
attributed to more established art forms. This strategy is consistent with the
71
characteristic Cahiers treatment of Hitchcock, Hawks, and other Hollywood

directors in a manner usually reserved for the most venerated old masters.
Cinema is not associated here with B-movie factories like Monogram Pictures, the Poverty Row studio celebrated by Godard in his dedication to
Breathless, but with the high seriousness of hushed museums and other temples of art. Rohmer has performed a procrustean contortion, with cinema becoming an almost unrecognizable medium, a phenomenon of marble rather
than the silver screen and flashing marquees. Yet he also suggests that movies
are characterized on the most basic level by a fragility attributed to their combustible and impermanent materials, the celluloid and chemical compounds
used to capture images on film. He writes: it will seem strange that this century, so respectful of monuments to the past, so skilful at restoring and conserving them, invents the most perishable of all forms of art.86 Cinema is the
privileged medium of its time for a series of paradoxical and seemingly incoherent reasons: because it can rival the eternal masterpieces of art or literature
and because it wont last long.
As the introductory paragraphs suggest and as the rest of the essay confirms, Rohmers argument is couched in deliberately archaic language but
highlights the peculiar and historically unprecedented relationship between
the enduring and the ephemeral in French cinema during the new wave era.
Despite his outmoded rhetoric, Rohmer seeks to reconcile his habitual respect for tradition, his love of cinema, and his fascination with Hollywood
and American modernity. In the Cahiers special issue The Situation of
American Cinema in 1955, he writes that the films of the great Hollywood
directors have always been enough to reassure me and convince me that
for the talented and dedicated film-maker the California coast is not that
den of iniquity that some would have us believe. It is rather that chosen
land, that haven which Florence was for painters of the Quattrocento or
Vienna for musicians of the 19th century.87 What makes cinema distinct,
he suggests, is its direct connection to the material culture of its time, a connection that in the tradition of Bazin he links to the ontology of a photographic recording of reality. He writes: we are constantly reminded that
the cinema is an art even though it rests on a mechanical mode of reproduction. I affirm, on the contrary: the power to reproduce exactly, stupidly, is
the most certain privilege of cinema. But then, one will say, how does the
creator intervene, and where is his freedom? His freedom? Everywhere, and
in great measure. What a cineaste worthy of the name intends to share with
us is not his admiration for museums, but the fascination exerted on him by
things themselves.88 Directors and critics may be connoisseurs of cinema
and participants in the cult of expertise and specialization, but that erudition does not entail a mastery of the world itself, where the artist remains an
amateur, a casual collector, a nave eye confronted by an utterly unfamiliar reality.89
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Rohmer holds that the objects that attract the attention of the modern filmmaker are impermanent products of a civilization in the thrall of innovation
or consumer items accessible on a mass scale. In this environment of constant
transformation, the filmmaker is motivated not by deep immersion in a singular work of art but by perpetual movement among the materials that constitute the contemporary milieu. In this essay, Rohmer moves far beyond a
technologically determinist or essentialist understanding of the relationship
between film and modernity, and he argues that celluloid and movie cameras
are modern not by virtue of the apparatus or the brute realism of the mechanically recorded image. Each of those components is fundamental, he suggests, but they all contribute to a much broader project that ultimately revolves around a staging of the relationship between people and objects in
space. The elitist overtones and implications of Rohmers critical work, so
redolent of the class-based French distinctions between high and mass culture, begin to dissipate when the newly aggrandized figure of the cineaste interacts with the material culture of his or her time. Cinemano longer an
autonomous art with an autonomous creator, the essential qualities of elite
art, according to Bourdieuis interwoven with the identities, objects, and
spaces that provide the raw materials for its mise-en-scne.90 To be modern,
Rohmer writes, is not necessarily to glorify confusion under the pretext that
that ancients extolled the virtues of order and harmony; it is not to take pleasure in grayness because they sang of light, or ridicule man because they exalted him. The cineaste discovers that he is immediately capable of drawing
his material from the present world, and he has no reason to depart from
classical optimism. He is happy in his time, and, in him, his time finds the
ideal bard.91 By invoking the legacy of classical art in the context of contemporary cinema, Rohmer displays his penchant for paradox, as well as a characteristic conservatism. But he also emphasizes that cinema is both an unabashedly contemporary medium and a classical art, not because of its timeless
forms but because it fuses with the physical environment of the mid-twentieth
century, because it creates nave records of brute objects, because it too is
made of plastic.
In his review of Bicycle Thieves, Bazin suggests that the ideal form of
cinema would result in the end of cinema as we know it, and Rohmer likewise
writes that classicism and modernism rush toward mutual annihilation: the
atavistic bard launches into the modern world and merges with the uncontrollable forces that surround him; the filmmaker masters his or her subject
matter by relinquishing that mastery and vanishing into the mise-en-scne.
The ends of cinema imagined by Bazin and Rohmer diverge at the point of
destination, where Bazin locates a reality of infinite complexity shaped by the
hand of God and Rohmer an increasingly artificial environment designed
and constructed in the recent past. Rohmer suggests that the human relationship with objects and spaces in the postwar era is radically different from the
73
fascination with the outmoded and archaic that motivated the surrealists and
other artists enthralled by the detritus of civilization. He emphasizes the distance between a contemporary experience and the setting explored by earlier
artists and philosophers of material culture: far from us lies the antiquarian
bric-a-brac dear to Breton: our supposedly modern poets manifest a very suspicious taste for the most ephemeral material: they are always revealed to be
powerless to welcome into their work the fabricated objects that the modern
world has made our partners at each instant. And, if they ever name them, the
objects assume the outmoded pose of a magic lantern or a gramophone in
thecellar. Airplanes, automobiles, telephones, firearms: the cinema, far from
making them into monsters, takes them for what they are in everyday use,
and their movements become extensions of the man.92 What made France
modern in the mid-1950s was the burgeoning culture of objects, including
marvels of high technology and a consumer culture centered on disposable
and instantly replaceable products. What made cinema modern in the view
of Rohmer and his protgs at Cahiers was that the filmmaker existed in perfect harmony with a world undergoing a revolution in its own mise-en-scne.
Foucault remarked that Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a
fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.93 And a cinema
of mise-en-scne and master shots thrives in the world of the second half of
the twentieth century (and the future will determine if it ceases to breathe
anywhere else).
Rohmers overriding concern is the relationship between cinema and the
material environment of contemporary France, and the fifth and final installment of his lengthy essay is devoted to the art of space par excellence
architectureand more specifically to the variation on modernist design
that he calls the architecture of apocalypse.94 Illustrated with images of
LasLomas de Urdaneta on the outskirts of Caracas, suburban midcentury
modern homes designed by Richard Neutra, and furniture exhibits from
Milan, the essays fifth part identifies particular modes of contemporary architecture and design as the spark for his meditation on the eternal and the
ephemeral: the expansive housing block and the horizontal, open-plan
home pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. He describes the aspirations of
this modern architecture as the hope of a new life, neat, clear, made to the
measure of our pleasure, of our thirst for liberty.95 In this context, he presumes to abandon, for just a moment, the armchair of the critic, even that
of the amateur, to consider the cinema, no longer as it is in itself . . . but in
its genesis, at the heart of this civilization, or more exactly of this modern
life.96 He then launches into a long and telling digression on the meaning
of architecture, which he distinguishes immediately from arts like painting
and poetry, whose task is to reproduce or to sing, to create a microcosm
or a simulacrum.97 The productions of the architect, on the contrary, form
an integral part of the world itself, they are things among things, whose
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ambition is not to remake nature, but to enrich it with new acquisitions.98

This passage on architecture comes as close to a definition of an ideal form
of cinema as Rohmer offers at this stage of his career: film should aspire not
to the traditional ideal of art imagined as a window onto the world but
tothe more modern condition of being part of the world itself, a thing
among things. Rohmer is also concerned with the emergence of an entirely fabricated world, in which people return home, not to forget the
world, but to rediscover it on the screen and through the loudspeaker. Do
we benefit from this exchange? he asks.99 There is, he suggests, a cinema
that abides in the world itself and another mode of image-making and reception (identified elsewhere as television) that becomes a substitute for the
world. Citing Hitchcocks Rear Window and Platos allegory of the cave, he
bemoans the rise of the figure of homo spectator driven to the brink of
quasi-total isolation, a situation envisioned several years later in Tatis
Playtime (Figure 1.1).100 Rohmer posits, in other words, a difference between
cinema as architecture and cinema enclosed in architecture, cinema as a thing,
as one object among many, and the pure image broadcast to an isolated spectator via the television screen.
Rohmer then voices, in his role as amateur rather than architecture or film
critic, a brief and bland statement in favor of historic preservation, bringing
the essay to an end with a whimper rather than a bang. But the inventiveness
of his argument lies in its willingnessand this insight is a more positive
byproduct of the periods cinephiliato view the world itself in terms derived
from cinema, as a choreographed play of humanity amid the material culture
of his time. The limitation of Rohmers visionand this limitation stems
from his elevation of film above all else, including politicsis its reliance on
figure 1.1 Playtime.
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a vaguely defined classicism to explain the complex and rapidly changing

relationship between people, objects, and the historically new spaces unfolding on the streets of cities and captured by the camera. Over the course of the
decade, the logic that governs that interaction was increasingly influenced by
the rise of American-style capitalism and the imperatives of consumption.
What makes an object matter in cinema? What makes it an object of desire?
Which objects seem excessive or incongruous in their surroundings? Rohmer
remains silent on these crucial questions because he never explores the implications of his own title, with its ominous foreshadowing of a dystopia to
come. Little in the essay would justify the title architecture of apocalypse.
The catastrophe glimpsed in the offing by Rohmer is not a disaster arising
from poor urban planning or architecture, though he does lament the rise of
ephemeral structures and the devastation of the historical city. That apocalypse is primarily a hybrid architectural/cinematic one: over the course of the
1960s the urban environment would be reinvented as something new and
impermanent, as a perishable substrate like celluloid rather than a stable
structure chiseled out of marble. This transitory city would become the principal setting for the new wave by the time Godard and Jacques Tati embarked
on their suburban films released in 1967, Two or Three Things I Know about
Her and Playtime. There is no marble in their vision of the city, and even for
a fervent cinephile like Rohmer, celluloid cityscapes are signs of an apocalypse rather than the dawn of classical harmony. And if the Paris of Godard
and Tati would eventually devolve into a mediatized space, the ephemeral
modern medium of film represents for Rohmer, in a tragic reversal worthy of
Aeschylus or Sophocles, one of the most enduring records of a world rendered obsolete in the process of modernization, the marble of the twentieth
century.
The Invisible Mans Cigarette

While Rohmers five-part essay examines the relationship between film and
painting, literature, and architecture, he neglects the art form at the center of
Bazins most expansive piece dedicated to the relationship between film and
the other arts: theater. But in both Rohmer and Bazin, architecture serves
as a conceptual fault line, a limit case that defines the boundary between
dramatic productions and modern media predicated on the construction of
artificial environments or on their access to a world outside the theater,
studio, or museum. The trajectory of the argument further develops Bazins
realist ontology of film but offers a variation on the more familiar notion of
cinema as a mechanical recording of reality, an index of the world captured
with exceptional fidelity by the camera. In his two-part Theater and Cinema
essay, originally published in 1951 in consecutive issues of Esprit, Bazin
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focuses instead on the relationship between each medium and the props and
settings that establish the credibility of fictional characters and their surroundings. The question, in other words, is how an obviously simulated
backdrop assembled on stage or projected on a screen asserts its authority as
a representation of a physical reality experienced under radically different
conditions in everyday life. In one of his most counterintuitive arguments,
he suggests that even marvelous and spectacular effects on-screen, even the
most improbable sights staged only for the camera or concocted in postproduction, provide evidence of the realist nature of the photographic image.
These special effects are, in fact, the most valid justification, according to
Bazin, because rather than depending on the imagination or generosity of
the spectator, filmmakers are obliged to make their fantasies visible in the
image, as though a purely imaginary world freed from gravity or occupied by
supernatural beings could be photographed by the same matter-of-fact
camera that follows Antonio Ricci and his son Bruno through the streets of
Rome in Bicycle Thieves.101
The previous section of the essay, Behind the Dcor, emphasizes the hazards involved in any attempt to achieve a realist aesthetic on the stage due to
the fact that theater depends ultimately on the difference between the artificial, architectural space demarcated by the sets and the unstaged world presumed to exist elsewhere (and captured in cinema by the camera). In Bazins
view, there is no such thing as a slice of life in the theater because both the
drama depicted on stage and theatrical special effects depend on a repertoire
of elaborate conventions tacitly accepted by the general public.102 Welcomed
into a position of complicity with the actors, we ignore the fact that the footlights are not the autumn sun, and this tacit contract with the audiencefounds
the theater.103 The proper space of cinema begins on the other side of those
painted sets, in the light of the sun. Cinema moves outward from the bare
boards that hold up a theatrical faade, exploring a stage that, as Bazin writes,
has no wings.104 The gambit that inaugurates a realist cinema, in Bazins argument, is its refusal of that architectural space and its age-old conventions,
asthe centrifugal force of cinema overtakes everything caught in the everexpanding ambit of realism. The pallid man entering a misty theatrical stage is
quickly understood to be a ghost, and if the other actors fail to see him, he
must also be invisible. But, Bazin argues, all trick work must be perfect in all
material respects on the screen. The invisible man must wear pajamas and
smoke a cigarette.105
The invisible man does indeed wear pajamas and smoke a cigarette because
he would not exist independent of the mise-en-scne that defines him (Figure1.2). As the iconic stills from the film suggest, he is a creation of the props
that dangle from his unseen hands and the costume that drapes over absent
arms and legs. With his body erased in postproduction, this character is no
longer a phenomenon of flesh recorded by the camera, but a figure presumed
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figure 1.2 The Invisible Man.
to exist as a complement to the mise-en-scne, as an extension of the material

culture around him. Objects and spaces are real in this scenario, and bodies
are absent. We can only see the invisible, Bazin suggests, as a void in space
or a gap between the costumes and props depicted in all their physicality
on-screen. Arising in the context of a discussion of realist cinema, Bazins
invocation of the sci-fi master James Whale, one of Hollywoods least realist
filmmakers by any definition, provides a textbook example of what Jacques
Rancire calls the cinematographic fable. Rancire suggests that writing on
cinema often unfolds as a fable, as it dissects even the most resolutely narrative films and extracts privileged moments of pure cinema, examining
them in isolation, as emblems of the medium.106 Because Bazins reference to
Whale alludes to debased genre films and incredible scenarios, it is the most
implausible of cinematographic fables: the pajamas and cigarette of the invisible man become, through this contrarian logic, a demonstration of cinematic realism. A fable of realist film is grafted onto the bandaged, sunglasseswearing, smoking-jacketed body of the invisible man. But Bazins Theater
and Cinema essays also allow him to confront the caricature of realist film
theory most commonly attributed to him and play with the supernatural language of ghosts, absent presences, and other traces of reality that hover at the
limits of the visible. Even in the example of the invisible man, our eyes work
backward from concrete evidencefrom sartorial clues and smoke signals
to reimagine the contours of a figure whose body remains absent from the
screen. Fabulous or not, this mixture of reality and illusion, objects and emptiness, materiality and artifice is pure cinema, or more precisely, cinema in its
inherently impure form.
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In Theater and Cinema, Bazins fable is not based on a banal and nave
notion of photographic realism; instead it advances a theory of film consistent
with the conceptions of cinematic mise-en-scne that would emerge at Cahiers du cinma over the succeeding decade and links Bazins writing on realism to a broader social and political narrative in circulation in France in the
1950s. The arrival of the new wave corresponded to the rise of what Jackson
Lears calls a fable of abundance propagated mainly in advertising but also
through other mass media. He writes: during the last two hundred years,
advertisements have acquired a powerful iconic significance. Yet they have
been more than static symbols: they have coupled words and pictures in commercial fablesstories that have been both fabulous and didactic, that have
evoked fantasies and pointed morals, that have reconfigured ancient dreams
of abundance to fit the modern world of goods.107 Although his topic is
American advertising, Lears echoes the observations Baudrillard made about
the underestimated domain of commercial language and images in France. In
The System of Objects, Baudrillard writes: Those who pooh-pooh the ability of
advertising and of the mass media in general to condition people have failed
to grasp the peculiar logic upon which the medias efficacy reposes. For this is
not a logic of propositions and proofs, but a logic of fables and of the willingness to go along with them. We do not believe in such fables, but we cleave
tothem nevertheless.108 Advertising, he suggests, is a a show (. . . the most
democratic of all), a game, a mise en scne. Advertising serves as a permanent
display of the buying power, be it real or virtual, of society overall.109 Bazin
drafted his account of the difference between theater and cinema when French
society was on the verge of its transformation into a culture of commercial
plenitude and popular media were becoming the principle means of dissemination for a narrative about young citizens remade in the image of global
movie stars, refashioned through mass-market styles, and surrounded by a
dazzling assortment of backdrops and props. Like the title character in James
Whales film, the new men and women of the 1950s and 1960s were defined
primarily through the mise-en-scne that enveloped them. In writing on the
relationship between theater and film, Bazin also addressed the fable so prominent in French popular culture in the 1950s, the science fiction told everywhere in words and images, then conjured up in steel and glass, that its possible and desirable to strike the old set and launch a far more fantastic
production as though on an empty stage.
For reasons both aesthetic and historical, architecture lies at the conceptual
core of Bazins meditation on theater, cinema, and mise-en-scne. Bazin asserts
in this essay and throughout his career that our experience of space is the
structural basis for our concept of the universe and for our understanding of
cinema.110 Even the most incredible flicks starring bizarre creatures on faraway
planets appear real in the simplest sense of the term because the impossible is
presented in a setting that corresponds in a fundamental way to our embodied
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perception of the world. Adapting Henri Gouhiers observation about theater,

Bazin writes that the cinematic image can be emptied of all reality save one
the reality of space.111 Bazins historical moment, with his most productive years
falling between the end of World War II and his death in 1958, existed in the gap
between two models of urban space and development: between the anticipation
of postwar reconstruction and its realization, between the omnipresent children
of early Rossellini and what Pasolini called the monstrous youth of Italys economic miracle and the French new wave, between the rubble that preoccupied
neorealist filmmakers and the suburbia constructed over the succeeding two
decades.112 That is the environment inhabited and documented by the new wave
directors. In that context, architecture provided a key reference point for critics
and filmmakers alike, most notably Bazin and Rohmer. Bazin remarks that on
the most superficial level, as an aesthetic practice and a practical undertaking,
theater is necessarily architectural: it consists of a visible stage demarcated by
walls and darkness; it is designed and constructed, confined and limited, our
built environments displayed in miniature. There can be no theater without
architecture, he writes, before listing a series of architectural examples linked to
his conception of theater, from the cathedral square to the arena of Nmes,
from the trestle stage on a fairground to the rococo amphitheaters of the
boulevard houses.113 Theater is coterminous with its architectural environment,
he suggests, and the actors become their characters by passing into the architecture and return to the real world immediately after exiting via the wings of the
stage. If theater is defined by the foundational gesture of turning away from the
world, if it establishes an architectural barrier of stone or wood, cinema is characterized by its rejection of the confining conditions of the stage and its sets, by
what Bazin calls a denial of any frontiers to action.114 Theatrical faades provide compelling simulations only because of their less spectacular backing,
which at once supports and marks the limits of the dramatic setting. A film
aesthetic developed on the studio lot would also depend on architecture or sets
and backdrops, as Kracauer suggests in his account of a visit to the Universum
Film AG (UFA) soundstages, which consist of copies and distortions that have
been ripped out of time and jumbled together. They stand motionless, full of
meaning from the front, while from the rear they are just empty nothingness. A
bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm.115 The
result, in Kracauers eyes, is a world where everything is guaranteed unnatural
and everything exactly like nature.116 Bazin suggests that the space proper to
realist cinema, on the other hand, lies beyond the scenery wagons and painted
backdrops and beyond the walls of the theater or soundstage.
Bazin proposes the concept of Nature to describe this amorphous realm
outside architecture, drawing a clear divide between the separate domains of
the constructed and the natural, the artificial and the real, the theatrical and
the cinematic. Nature, in Bazins formulation, consists of whatever remains
outside architecture and the other elements of mise-en-scne, enveloping and
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enveloped by the marks of human cultivation, like the white space in a Chinese
ink-and-brush painting, like the hands and face of the invisible man. Bazins
eccentric vision of Nature is defined primarily through its association with
cinema, and it therefore rejects the green, environmental connotations of
the term, especially the nostalgia for flowing fields, country estates, and an
unadulterated premodern realm divorced from the messiness of twentiethcentury history and politics. In the neorealist films analyzed by Bazin and the
later work of French critics and directors who developed under his mentorship, the escape from theatrical architecture usually corresponds to the decision to leave the soundstage behind and film on location, often on the streets
of a city. He began writing about cinematic realism at a moment when the city
became a topic of obsessive interest to Italian directors like Rossellini, who
deployed lighter, more portable newsreel cameras to liberate the cinema from
the confines of the studio, or like De Sica, whose melodramatic narratives were
also realist precisely because he located these stories in the built environmentof postwar Rome. The elaborate Parisian city films of Truffaut, Rohmer,
Godard, and Rivette revive this recent tradition, and their gratuitous, virtually
unmotivated images of architecture and urban spacesometimes flipped
through like snapshots from a summer vacation, sometimes subjected to an
ethnographic gazereproduce the atmosphere of a city. Nature permeates
urban as well as rural space, especially in the Italian city films of the 1940s, and
therefore corresponds more closely to the second nature described by Benjamin than an idyllic landscape of forests and grasslands. Nature is inherently
modern in Bazins conception of cinema and cities because over the course of
the twentieth century, crowds and streets, trains and cars, steel and celluloid
became the stuff of everyday life in urban settings. The modern had undergone
a transition from revolutionary novelty to routine reality over the first half of
the twentieth century, and one of the centurys most shocking technological
innovations, cinema, developed in tandem with this second nature. Yet like
nature itself, these constructed and manipulated environments also retain the
capacity for accidents and happenstance beyond the power of the planner or
filmmaker to organize and control. The paradigmatic realist films escape from
one conception of architectureas a barrier, artificiality and transience, mere
dcorand emerge into another, with the architecture of the city now a crystallization of reality and the location of possibility in the modern order. Bazins
task in these essays and his writing on neorealism is to link theater and cinema
with two very different architectural paradigms and to reimagine the urban
setting, with its layers of history and experience, as the seat of a radically reinvented Nature.
Soon after Bazins death, French new wave filmmakers became the principle proponents of a cinema that meanders back and forth between these ostensibly distinct spheres. Films like Breathless and Truffauts Shoot the Piano
Player (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960) are populated by generic B-movie personalities, a cast of gangsters, molls, and other escapees from the soundstage who
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roam free in the actual spaces of the city. In the opening credit sequences of
The400 Blows and Breathless, Truffaut and Godard identify the dual legacies
embodied in the French new wave: Truffaut dedicates his film to the memory
of Bazin; Godard cites the influence of Monogram Pictures, a Hollywood
B-movie factory specializing in popular genres. These opening frames suggest
that the new wave was a mlange of artifice and reality from its inception in
1959, and even before, in the bizarre combination of gangster movie and city
film perfected by Melville in Bob the Gambler (Bob le flambeur, 1955) and revived in Le Doulos (1962). Rivette returns almost obsessively throughout his
career to scenarios that merge theater and cinema, beginning with the preparations for a performance of Shakespeares Pericles entangled with an intricate
conspiracy plot and a documentary-like evocation of the city in Paris Belongs
to Us (Paris nous appartient, 1961). In Rivettes films, there is no clear separation between the ephemeral space of the theater and the enduring, real-world
sets of cinema shot on location. Varda, in perhaps the most suggestive formulation, later describes her documentary cinema dedicated to Parisian neighborhoods as a thtre du quotidien. Filmmaking in the French new wave
took place outside architecture, in the sense that the camera escaped from the
studio and explored actual locations scattered throughout the city. The films of
the period were fixated on architecture envisioned as the crystallization of the
nations modernization and the history that vanished along the way. But these
directors lingered on the wings of the stage, refusing to ratify a clear distinction between these two models of representation and architecture. This space
on the verge of the theatrical and the real is the province of mise-en-scne.
Part1 of Bazins essay Theater and Cinema was published just two months
after the first issue of Cahiers appeared, and it reflects his utopian vision of a
cinema grounded in reality, as well as a high modernist belief in medium specificity. Cinema must have a nature and be true to it, he suggests. The concept of
mise-en-scne amplified over the course of the 1950s at Cahiers reflected the
profound changes undergone in French cinema and society during that decade,
especially the reconception of urban space as the privileged location where the
theatrical converges with the real and where Nature is always already modern.
The market and an economic model based on consumption were also becoming the reigning ideology in the city, the unseen force that linked together the
elements of mise-en-scne, the lines that allowed new men and women to see
the otherwise incoherent and fragmented world taking shape around them.
In his later criticism devoted to the films of the 1950s, especially the work of
Fellini, Bazin recognized that the distinction between theater and cinema was
threatened by developments in both cinema and the world at large. Bazin
characterized Fellinis Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria, 1957) as the logical endpoint of one conception of cinema, as a feature-length voyage to the
end of neorealism.117 For much of the film, Fellini takes cinema on a voyage
to the theater, as Cabiria is welcomed on stage by a hypnotist and joins pilgrims at an elaborately staged religious shrine with a cast of hundreds. At the
82
end, the protagonist, Cabiria, acknowledges the presence of the audience, revealing the artificiality of any scenario unfolding in the unnatural space of the
movie theater, surrounded all the while by a chorus of young people walking
along a country road and serenading her (to her evident delight). Her final
implicating gaze threatens to remove us quite finally from our role of spectator and destroy the illusions that found the cinema.118 But the film carries us
to another end, one defined more literally and spatially, as Bazins characterization of the film as a voyage invites us to do. Cabiria lives in the farthest
verges of the Roman borgate, in the shacks just beyond the modern city under
construction in the background. In their at once utopian and dystopian plan
for what they called a No-Stop-City, the radical Italian architects of Archizoom imagine a postmetropolitan urban space consisting of potentially
limitless urban structures, a neutral and transformable space given over to
consumption and itself consumable, disposable, ephemeral.119 Kazys Varnelis
summarizes the problem identified by Archizoom and their hoped-for solution: that late capitalism had no use for the traditional city or for qualities of
place and that the creation of the subject through consumption would [lead]
to a new, less alienated form of homogeneity.120 In Cabiria, the development
of an expansive No-Stop-City is a work in progress, with cranes visible everywhere on the horizon. But the crucial importance of the city and its architecture is apparent in the way Fellini uses these construction projects almost literally to frame the romance between Oscar and Cabiria. The film concludes
with a doubly imbricated fantasy of escape from the city: into the romantic
domesticity she glimpses only in movies and through a keyhole at the palatial
home of movie star, and from the edge of the city back into an impossibly
pastoral vision of nature, a fantasy no less absurd than the one proposed and
dashed by her villainous lover. Cabiria carries us on a voyage to the end of
neorealism because there is no exit from the city under construction in the
distance, because the theatrical city and its architecture threaten to overtake
the cinema defined by its departure from that stage. Cabiria becomes a kind of
filmed theater on the grandest possible scale, with the modernizing city of
Rome as its stage; or perhaps Fellini discovers that while there are still no
wings in the cinema, the world around him has merely replaced the theater
with the spectacle of reality. There, at once on stage and off, or in a new category of space that blurs those physical and conceptual distinctions, the teenage chorus greets Cabiria to remind her that there is no escape from the expanding set that a new generation of youth will make their home.
{2}
Walking in the City
The age of the French new wave overlapped with a period of unprecedented
urbanization and an equally unprecedented intellectual and artistic concern
with the question of the city. The nations Trente Glorieuses was the setting
for a massive migration to the major cities in France, and above all to Paris,
which became a laboratory for experiments with new configurations of urban
space. Between 1954 and 1974, nearly a quarter of the citys built environment
was razed and reconstructed. The 1960s in particular witnessed a series of
major urban planning initiatives and attendant controversies: the Paris Master
Plan of 1965; the 1962 proposal to relocate the central market at Les Halles; the
redevelopment of Beaubourg over the next two decades; and the organization
of a dedicated business district on the outskirts of the historical city, in the
area known as La Dfense. Established in 1958, La Dfense was the site of a
sustained building boom that concentrated the regions vertical office architecture just beyond the city limits. (That campaign began with the Esso Tower
in 1963, when the zone was still in its planning stage, gathered steam in the late
1960s, and has continued through several subsequent waves of development
from the 1970s to the present). The period also saw the construction of the first
residential skyscraper inside the city limits, on rue Croulebarbe, from 1958 to
1960, and the last skyscraper in Paris (Tour Montparnasse) between 1969 and
1972. This vast construction and redevelopment schemea project of almost
unimaginable scale, even in a city that underwent the radical process of Haussmannization a century beforewas initiated primarily because of the postwar
baby boom and an influx of people to the Paris region: the population of lede-France, the administrative title for the greater metropolitan area, increased
by 2.5 million (or 29 percent) between 1954 and 1975, far exceeding previous
and subsequent growth rates.1 The building spree on the outskirts of the city
reflected the palpable need for suitable housing. At the same time, however,
the population of the historical center of Paris declined by 550,000, to just
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under 2.3 million, suggesting that this demographic explosion was accompanied by an equally profound and only tangentially related reorganization of
the space of the city. Suburban le-de-France became the home of increasing
numbers of immigrants and workers arriving from the central city, elsewhere
in France, and from abroad; and large swathes of the city proper were modernized and gentrified, to be inhabited by professional classes, entertainment
and retail venues, and tourist attractions. The center of gravity of the city
shifted irrevocably over the course of two decades, as the population migrated
toward the suburbs and key sections of the historical core of Paris were transformed into commemorative versions of their former selves.
While the regions population increase and other demographic data helped
rationalize the administrative push toward construction and renovation, the
remodeling of the city was also governed by a broader reconception of space
under the influence of information science and cybernetic theory. The city
was once the paragon of historical materialism, the site where the working
class would congregate and revolt in Marxist formulations, or the promise of
modern technology writ large. From the 1950s onward, a new model based on
the imperative of movement, the power of information, and the allure of
media guided urban planners and architects at the cutting edge of contemporary trends. Under the leadership of Paul Delouvrier, the haut fonctionnaire
charged with the redevelopment of the region in the 1960s, the ambitious
Paris Master Plan of 1965 prioritized circulation between the city center and
various new cities constructed as satellites on its periphery. The Rseau Express Rgional (RER) commuter rail network and other public transportation
initiatives were launched in this period, but the automobile exerted the most
profound influence on the patterns of circulation envisioned by Delouvrier
and realized in a network of highways encircling and crisscrossing the city.
Kristin Ross writes that while the introduction of the automobile on a mass
scale coincided with urbanization and industrialization in the United States,
intricately interlaced urban environments in Paris had to accommodate enormous infrastructure projects designed to facilitate the movement of cars, including the construction of the Priphrique beginning in 1956 and the Right
Bank Expressway in the mid-1960s.2 The automobile and its resulting spatial
dislocations were thus perceived not as a continuation of a modernization
process begun at the cusp of the twentieth century but as a radically new brand
of modernity with its own spatial system.
Over the course of the 1960s, the cultural status of the automobile shifted:
still one of the most glamorous products of the industrial era, it adapted to
the age of communication and circulation, despite the contrast between the
ethereal ideal of frictionless flows and the weightiness of its steel and chrome;
and its dedicated spaces, the highway chief among them, became the principle metaphor for the transmission of less tangible objects, especially packets
of energy and information. As Larry Busbea writes in his study of French
experimental and conceptual architecture during the 1960s, urban space
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85
came to be seen not as a neutral container but as a conductive medium for the
movements and exchanges of people, information, and objects.3 He argues
that the dominant tendency in both governmental and avant-garde discourses on the city was to apply the model of nonmaterial structures to
real social space. Rseau, nappe, trame, tissu, and combinatoire were the keywords of the period, whether one was an urban planner or a literary theorist.4 In words that echo Godards fascination with the lines drawn between
the elements of mise-en-scne, Busbea suggests that perhaps the most important characteristic of the new spatial culture was an almost exclusive emphasis being placed on the spatial relationships adhering between objects,
people, and places.5 The new wave city was defined not only by its physical
structures but also and increasingly by lines of movement and connection, by
the currents of energy and flows of information, goods, and bodies coursing
through seemingly blank spaces.
Even the humble domicile began to reflect the changes taking place on the
scale of the city. Baudrillard described the condition of the modern homedweller as a continual openness to objective messages and identified syntagmatic calculation as the everyday strategy necessary to make meaning amid a
deluge of objects.6 As Henri Lefebvre added in 1974, in a summation of the changes
undergone over the previous two decades, the most material and corporeal entities were reframed as conduits for the uninterrupted flow of energy and data:
consider a house, and a street, for example. The house has six storeys and
an air of stability about it. One might almost see it as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its stark, cold and rigid outlines. . . .
Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, stripping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs and its thin,
non-load-bearing walls, which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture. In the light of this imaginary analysis, our
house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of
energy which run in and out of it by every imaginable route: water, gas,
electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals, and so on. Its
image of immobility would then be replaced by an image of a complex of
mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits. By depicting this convergence
of waves and currents, this new image, much more accurately than any
drawing or photograph, would at the same time disclose the fact that this
piece of immovable property is actually a two-faceted machine analogous to an active body: at once a machine calling for massive energy
supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. The occupants of the house perceive, receive and manipulate the
energies which the house itself consumes on a massive scale.7
Both a body and a screen, both a consumer and a dazzling projection, the
building has assumed the qualities usually associated with living beings and
cinema, as it feeds on energy while its faade obscures the flows entering and
86
exiting through its hidden infrastructure. The new image of the city attempted to render visible the trame or rseau underlying the deceptively immobile surfaces of traditional dwellings, and new trends in architecture and
urban planning incorporated a cybernetic reality into both the appearance
and the structure of the built environment. Other theorists and filmmakers
returned the body to the equation not because it provided an analogy for
spaces that consume energy or process information but because the human
figure moves slowly and otherwise, because, unlike the contemporary highway
or house, it seemed to resist this reconception of society as a network of flows.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century the result of this process
was evident in both its apotheoses, like the Centre Georges Pompidou on Plateau Beaubourg, a building initially imagined as an enormous screen, and the
fervent nostalgia for simpler times evident in the signature cultural projects of
the era of commemoration: museum-building, heritage cinema, and other
prominent attempts to return to the certainties of the national past.8 An archcommodity, Beaubourg was meant to be consumed, writes Sylvre Lotringer.
Like Disneyland, it is there to hide the fact that the whole world has become
a museum, an overloaded memory, and that there is hardly anything worth
remembering anymore.9 The lamentations of Lotringer signal a dramatic departure from the vision of the city and the museum in new wave cinema. In an
emblematic scene from Godards Band of Outsiders (Bande part, 1964), the
three protagonists scamper through the Louvre while attempting to set a world
record for the fastest tour of the museum (and, at nine minutes and forty-three
seconds, finish just behind the benchmark set by Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco). Implicit in this extended gag is the assumption that the museum is a
space apart from the city, that the titular gang can zip past venerated artworks,
escape to the real crystallization of modernity and history that lies beyond the
courtyards of the Louvre, and linger for a while. In a footnote to his essay
dedicated to one of the exemplary directors of the western and his idiosyncratic mise-en-scne, Bazin writes: there is less and less action in Anthony
Manns Westerns, and he seems to have set himself the ideal goal of making a
film where the hero has nothing more to do than ride a horse for 120 minutes.10 A variation on this formula also helps define the iconic films of the
early French new wave: the heroes and heroines often have nothing more to do
than walk through the city for minutes at a time. In their preoccupation with
this relatively deliberate form of movement, the filmmakers echo a broader
intellectual fascination with this particular experience of the city: the Situationist concept of the drive, for example, is predicated on the transformative
encounter between a body open to the suggestions of the stimuli around it and
the urban environment envisioned as the sum of those possibilities; and
Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life, a weaving
together of several strands of thought about the quotidian that developed in
France over the preceding three decades, includes a chapter titled Walking in
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87
figure 2.1 The 400 Blows.
the City.11 In the ambulatory cinema of the new wave, the contortions of plot
are often mere pretexts as the directors pursue a less programmed ideal, with
the protagonists set loose in an uncontrollable mass of other bodies, buildings,
shops, automobiles, street signs, and movie marquees, the stuff that together
constitutes the mise-en-scne of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.
These are some of the emblematic scenes of the new wave: Antoine Doinel
plays hooky from school and rambles through the city in search of a movie
theater by day and shelter by night (Figure 2.1). The unnamed character played
by Emanuelle Riva roams through a neon-lit Hiroshima and, after a jarring
match on action that emphasizes continuity as well as distance, alongside the
stone walls of Nevers in France (Figure 2.2). Michel Poiccard and Patricia
figure 2.2 Hiroshima mon amour.
88
figure 2.3 Breathless.
Franchini stroll on the Champs-lyses and in the Opra district, where they
talk about sex amid a crowd of passersby as interested in the camera as the
conversation (Figure 2.3). Clo Victoire, dressed in black, tears off her wig and
marches through a Paris viewed through her eyes and edited together with her
memories and fears, an urban geography that combines the common and historical with the idiosyncratic and personal (Figure 2.4). And even outside the
core groups of filmmakers associated with Cahiers du cinma or the Left
Bank School, the act of walking in the city emerged as one of the most revelatory of cinematic actions. In Jean-Pierre Mockys film Les Dragueurs (1959),
we see young men assembling on a quai and then ambling along the Seine and
figure 2.4 Clo from 5 to 7.
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figure 2.5 Les Dragueurs.
flinging pickup lines at the women who pass (Figure 2.5). Mockys Paris is already youthful and sexualized, an ancient city prepared for an epochal confrontation with modernity. Even Monsieur Hulot, the signature character developed by Jacques Tati and brought home to Paris from his vacation, is
recognizable not only through his archaic dress and umbrella but also by his
irregular loping gait. In his Parisian films, Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime
(1967), Hulot is one of the few elements of mise-en-scne that refuses to respect the authority of the straight line. And in perhaps the best known example of all, the now legendary scenes in Elevator to the Gallows, Madame Tavernier, embodied by Jeanne Moreau, saunters through a landscape of Parisian
cafs and neon lights, with a postbop Miles Davis score adding density and
sensuality to the atmosphere (Figure 2.6). None of these examples could be
figure 2.6 Elevator to the Gallows.
90
characterized by the now clichd notion of modern alienation, especially the

interpretation that views heroes of modern narratives as abstract entities
disconnected from their environments.12 What all these scenes have in
common is their combination of young people and cities, the corporeal and
the concrete. The city is experienced through the most deliberate of vehicles,
the human body; the lugubrious pace of the pedestrian, rather than the racing
automobile or careering train, momentarily sets the tempo for cinema. These
characters both move and linger in space; they walk with a demeanor that
defies the periods dominant metaphors of circulation, communication, or
flow. This figure in motion also becomes a support for the eyes and ears that
absorb and process a welter of information present in the streets, architecture,
and crowds. Like a camera traveling carefully through the city, the body serves
as a device for recording the goings-on throughout town. The city is imagined
as an extension of the body in motion and the body as an extension of cinema.
And neither the city nor the characters appear to be going anywhere fast.
The New Wave City

Beginning in the 1950s, a new planning regime aimed at maximizing the efficiency of circulation reshaped the cityscape of Paris, and the physical effects of
that new paradigm provoked intense reactions from both mainstream and
radical urban theorists. Among the most unconventional of these responses
emanated from the Groupe Espace and Groupe Architecture Principe under
Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, who concocted fanciful structures antithetical
to the model of the flow. Their favored model for architectural form and function was the bunker, and instead of littering their interiors with trendy but
throwaway tables and chairs, they preferred the anchoring effect of clunky,
immovable furniture. Virilio has characterized his obsession with durability
and his insistence on the salutary effect of barricades as a product of his peculiar initiation into the dynamics of architectural transformation: as a child
during World War II he witnessed attacks on his hometown of Nantes and the
resulting destruction of about eight thousand buildings. He says: first of all,
my interest in architecture has been an interest in the ballistic. Military architecture is not static and is not concerned with the resistance of materials. It is
an architecture of ballistics: gazes, masks, screens and other means of deflecting shots. Which is to say that the act of destroying is part of the construction.
Architecture opposes destruction. It does not oppose rain, climate, habitability, but it is supposed to withstand destruction. . . . Basically I became interested in architecture because of war, through the destruction of cities and the
awareness that there was a totalitarian space. I lived through this totalitarian
space.13 Drawing on this analogy between disposable architecture and the
predations of war, the most famous Architecture Principe concept from the
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1960s, the oblique, affirms their dedication to spaces and objects that restrict
the flow of people, traffic, and information.
Their inclined floors compel the human body to struggle against gravity
during everyday activities and frustrate any preconceived schemes for interior design. The body is forced to move against the grain, to recline on the
floor, to make do without basic amenities in a space fundamentally inhospitable to the placement and use of even basic furniture. The burden of the flesh
and the floor itself become obstacles in the work of Architecture Principe,
and the highest aspiration of design, they suggest, is to hinder rather than
facilitate movement by accentuating the weight of materials and the body.
The individual will always be in a state of resistance, says Virilio, whether
accelerating as he is going down, or slowing down as he is climbing up,
whereas when one walks on a horizontal plane weight is nil (or equal).14 Expanded to the scale of the city, this orthogonal paradigm results in what Virilio calls a third urban order, a sequence that begins with the horizontal
order of the village and countryside and then yields in the twentieth century
to a second phase dominated by the skyscraper.15 At the onset of the era of the
orthogonal and the oblique, towers were being built everywhere, on the
banks of the Seine and elsewhere. The tower was the most exalted type of architecture. Our opposition to the tower was absolute.16 The solution offered
by Virilio and Parent was nothing less than a reconceptualization of movement in opposition to the model of frictionless circulation privileged at the
time, and each of their designs aspired to a cumbersome, corporeal, and enduring modernity. It almost goes without saying that few would choose to
live or toil under the circumstances devised by Parent and Virilio, and beyond
their signature building, the bunker church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay
in Nevers, few of their designs were ever realized. But because of its impracticality and its incompatibility with the tendencies of the time, their idiosyncratic vision of architecture as a means of impeding flows suggests that they
recognized the implications of this widespread reinvention of space and
defied it with a singular intensity.
Despite their dedication to a medium that depends on relatively ethereal
components like light, the filmmakers of the French new wave also imagined
space, bodies, and objects as obstacles to be encountered in all their materiality rather than cleared away to make room, once and for all, for the smooth
progression of images. In its violations of the rules of continuity editing and
especially during its languorous long takes that chronicle the slow passage of
time, the barriers scattered in space, and the heaviness of the body, the French
new wave explores the ramifications of the oblique topology theorized by Virilio. The figures wending their way through the streets of Paris in the films of
Godard or Varda experience the new wave city as an oblique space. And in a
fortuitous coincidence, the most famous building designed by Parent and Virilio is located in Nevers, the hometown of the female protagonist, known only
92
as Elle, in Alain Resnaiss Hiroshima mon amour. As it bridges discrete

times and locations with false continuities possible only in cinema, that film
imagines a new topology for the city in the aftermath of the most devastating
bombardment of World War II. From his documentaries in the 1950s to Last
Year at Marienbad (1961), Resnais both records the spaces of an earlier manifestation of French modernity and realizes on film a visionary model of architecture and urban space. Commenting on the difference between pragmatic
and experimental design, Virilio writes: architecture is an art of containment.
Visionary architecture contains that which is not, or not yet. It is the presence
of an absence, an object contrary to objectivity.17 The films of the French new
wave are also documents of this absence, of the uncontainable excesses that
the practical, state-sponsored architecture and urban planning of the 1950s
and 1960s were ultimately unable to suppress. And they do so primarily
through their own manipulation of bodies and objects in the architectural
spaces present before the camera and, in the case of Resnais, reimagined in the
editing room.
If the films of the French new wave share with Virilio this resistance to the
space dedicated primarily to circulation and communication, they also share
the concerns of the most influential urban theorist of the period, Henri
Lefebvre; and the period often recognized as the heyday of the new wave, the
years from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, also marks a significant change in
Lefebvres approach to the problem of the city.18 In fact, the development of
the new wave as an urban phenomenon corresponds almost exactly to the era
bookended by Lefebvres utopian celebration of urban life, The Right to the
City, and his far more sanguine accounts of the social production of space
under the pressures of hypermodernization. Looking back at the long postwar debate about the fate of the city in France, Lefebvres magnum opus, The
Production of Space of 1974, attempts to reconfigure Marxist thought for a
new era of circulation and flows, an era when spatial and political boundaries
are no longer clearly demarcated. Among the most prescient aspects of
Lefebvres theoretical writingone he returns to repeatedly, stressing the
links between his work and the onset of globalizationis the assertion that
the related problems of space and the city must be considered on a world
scale.19 The book also revises and extends the observations made in Space
and Politics, a less comprehensive volume envisioned as a sequel to The
Right to the City. Although these two studies foreground space as a key
conceptual category, the city remains Lefebvres principle reference point,
and that focus on space reorients his work away from the physical and legal
dimensions of urban life (new construction, historical preservation, the relationship between political power and users of public land) and toward its less
material manifestations, especially the reconception of cities as centers of
consumption and transmission rather than production. Our chief concern
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is with space, he says, though he quickly adds that any consideration of

space subsumes the problems of the urban sphere (the city and its extensions) and of everyday life (programmed consumption), the phenomena of
postwar existence that have displaced the problematic of industrialization.20 In distinguishing his task from economics and other social sciences,
Lefebvre argues that the study of space requires more than the enumeration
and description of products (object, things) in a manner reminiscent of
book-keeping; it challenges the scholar and citizen to do more than count
the things, the various objects, that space contains and instead reveal the
social relationships embedded in it.21 The Production of Space is therefore
an elaboration on his earlier writings on the city and a chronicle of the rise of
leisure as a conceptual and economic category, with space serving as the
umbrella term that joins together these distinct phenomena from two ages in
the history of cities. But like his contemporaries writing on cinema, Lefebvre
also searches for a conceptual framework to understand both the materiality
of objects in themselves and the network of relationships that envelops them.
Space is the term of art for this at once physical and intangible system.
As he attempts to reorient discussions of cities toward the materiality of
space, Lefebvre challenges the dematerialized, abstract, metaphorical rhetoric
of space fashionable in critical theory of the 1960s and early 1970s. While the
beginnings of philosophy were closely bound up with the real space of the
Greek city, the connection was severed later in philosophys development,
and later references to the idea of space were ethereal and ungrounded.22 No
limits at all have been set on the generalization of the concept of mental space,
he writes.23 We are forever hearing about the space of this and/or the space of
that: about literary space, ideological spaces, the space of the dream, psychoanalytic topologies, and so on and so forth.24 Aside from its invitation to hazy
language and fuzzy concepts, this metaphorical understanding of space is also
consistent with the most harmful trends in urban development over the preceding decade. He points out, for example, the peculiar kinship between this
mental space and the one inhabited by the technocrats in their silent offices,
as both are prone to divorce concrete realities from the more abstract protocols of thought and urban design.25 As space becomes one of the major concerns of political figures, intellectuals, and inhabitants of the major cities in
France, Lefebvre criticizes the popular penchant for speaking about it in ahistorical and generic terms; he seeks to expose and counteract the spread of a
homogenous empty space as both a theoretical tool and an everyday reality.
He identifies, in other words, the complementary tendencies to refer constantly to space and to evacuate that term of all its material and historical
significance.
If it is no longer adequate to conceive of space as an empty container to be
filled by the stuff of modern life, he argues that space is instead one of the most
94
delicate and contested products of the twentieth century, a stage where all the
other struggles over identity, resources, and aesthetics take place. In the most
exemplary instances of modernist architecture and urban planning, as in the
Sagrada Famlia in Barcelona, the ostensible monstrosity of the structure reveals that what is obscene is modern reality, and here it is so designated by
the stagingand by Gaud as stage-manager.26 Non-verbal signifying sets
serve as an antidote to the abstractions and generalities of a purely discursive
allusion to space: music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and certainly theatre, which in addition to a text or pretext embraces gesture, masks, costume,
a stage, a mise-en-scnein short, a space. . . . To underestimate, ignore and
diminish space amounts to the overestimation of texts, written matter, and
writing systems, along with the readable and the visible, to the point of assigning to these a monopoly on intelligibility.27 One of the major limitations of
The Production of Space is a tendency to define its central concept, space itself,
through a series of negative comparisons: social space is constituted neither
by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data, nor by a void packed
like a parcel with various contents.28 Although cinema warrants only a couple
of passing mentions in that book, the result perhaps of his mistrust for youth
culture and reductive association of film with exclusively commercial media,
Lefebvre comes as close as possible to a direct definition in this brief passage
on the nonverbal dimensions of space and their role in the staging of reality.
And here he veers remarkably close to the new wave conception of cinema as
the accumulated elements and acts of mise-en-scne. Space is produced,
writes Lefebvre, though he could have added like a film.29
From the vantage point of the mid-1970s, the France envisioned by Lefebvre
is an almost entirely artificial realm, a world of sets and staged interactions
rather than natural environments or accumulations of historys second nature.
Although (social) space is a (social) product, that has not always been the
case, he suggests, and he links the production of new locations and the process
of modernization.30 Natural space is disappearing in the dominant economic paradigm in twentieth-century Europe and especially the accelerated
modernization of postwar France.31 The fact is that natural space will soon be
lost to view. Anyone so inclined may look over their shoulder and see it sinking below the horizon behind us. Nature is also becoming lost to thought. . . .
Even the powerful myth of nature is being transformed into a mere fiction, a
negative utopia: nature is now seen as merely the raw material out of which
the productive forces of a variety of social systems have forged their particular
spaces.32 The forces of history smashed naturalness forever, he concludes,
and upon its ruins established the space of accumulation (the accumulation
of all wealth and resources: knowledge, technology, money, precious objects,
works of art and symbols).33 Cities, too, have undergone a profound reinvention, he argues. Echoing Marc Augs description of the prototypical supermodern locations, he writes that the abstract space created by capitalism
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95
and neocapitalism is founded on the vast network of banks, business centres

and major productive entities, as also on motorways, airports and information lattices.34 These are the prototypical spaces of the future city. Together
with these changes in the physical landscape, the codes that govern the communal experience of urbanity have been updated, also in accordance with the
regnant ideology of the time. Rohmers ideal form of art is a cinema of marble,
an enduring object in a world of modern products, and he falters in his attempt to define the relationship among these objects, retreating into an illusion of classical harmony; Lefebvre defines space itself as the relationships that
prevail in the material world and the codes that govern them. He writes that
(social) space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other
products: rather, it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneitytheir (relative) order
and/or (relative) disorder. It is the outcome of a sequence and set of operations, and thus cannot be reduced to the rank of a simple object.35 A space,
in other words, is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things.36
Space also unleashes desire, implicating human wants and aspirations in
this intricate web of interactions.37 Lefebvre suggests that the future of psychoanalysis lies not in the treatment of human patients but in understanding
the unconscious of the city, this spectacular setting composed not only of
physical structures but also the dreams and desires that endow these settings
with significance.38 The production of space is partly a phenomenon of urban
planning and building materials, but Lefebvres definition of space encompasses far more than the visible and tangible city. No longer a void, nor a
container, nor a collection of buildings and people, space becomes for Lefebvre
the totality of the forces that operate within the city, including the psychological and ideological compulsions that drive accumulation, innovation, demolition, and reconstruction. In the bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption, space is planned and governed by authorities but also provokes a dynamic of desire that operates according to eccentric and often inscrutable motivations.39
Although he begins with a critique of abstract invocations of mental
space, his own analysis slips into a psychoanalytic register because it confronts the limits of materialism in the interstices between objects or physical
structures, in the relations and values but for which a city really would be a
container and space a void. He suggests finally that the city should be considered a work-in-progress created by the citizen rather than a monument to be
worshipped or product to be consumed. In language reminiscent of Bazin and
his allusion to a cinematic ideal whose realization would be the end of cinema,
Lefebvre writes that the ideal city would involve the obsolescence of space: an
accelerated change of abode, emplacements and prepared spaces. It would be
the ephemeral city, the perpetual oeuvre of the inhabitants, themselves mobile
and mobilized for and by this oeuvre.40 The city crystallizes both the failures
96
inherent in the production of modern space and the utopian possibilities of a

fantasy world suspended between past and future, between the museum and
the utterly disposable product, a world whose closest analogue is the perpetual
making and remaking of a work of art. One of the most concrete examples of
this otherwise abstract conception of urban space would be the production of
new wave films on the streets of Paris with crowds of bystanders gathered
around, interspersed with Godard, Coutard, Belmondo, Seberg, and the rest
of the cast and crew. The new wave ideal is to render the gap between the film
and urban life as indistinct as possible. Production stills reveal the porousness
between the city and the cinema, as the inhabitants and passersby watch the
exceptional event of the making of a film before returning to the quotidian act
of making the city.
Lefebvres lingering Marxist sensibility and the dispiriting reality on the
ground usually tempered his utopian fantasies, and his work rarely elaborates on the mechanisms that could, under certain circumstances, prolong
the life of the city reconceived as a work, performance, or production. Because of the relentless dissolution of space and its historical patterns of use
and experience, Lefebvre counsels against the obvious tactic of resistance: an
assault on the existing and emerging spatial regime. He writes: it might be
supposed that our first priority should be the methodical destruction of the
codes relating to space. Nothing could be further from the case, however,
because the codes inherent to knowledge and social practice have been in
dissolution for a very long time already. All that remains of them are relics:
words, images, metaphors.41 The more promising approach would be the
preservation and reactivation of those relics through a variation on the Situationist dtournement. The inhabitants of the city can establish new patterns
of interaction with their surroundings and enlist spaces conceived according
to a bureaucratic or commercial rationale into new models of action and
community. He writes: an existing space may outlive its original purpose
and the raison dtre which determines its forms, functions, and structures; it
may thus in a sense become vacant, and susceptible of being diverted, reappropriated and put to a use quite different from its initial one. A recent and
well-known case of this was the reappropriation of the Halles Centrales, Pariss former wholesale produce market, in 196971. For a brief period, this
urban centre, designed to facilitate the distribution of food, was transformed
into a gathering-place and a scene of permanent festivalin short, into a
centre of play rather than of workfor the youth of Paris.42 The persistence
of those obsolete codes and their possible reclamation provoke pangs of nostalgia and uncharacteristic optimism in Lefebvre, but he remains equally
aware of the dystopian potential in the channeling of youthful energy toward
patterns of consumption, the fate that would eventually overtake les Halles in
the 1970s and 1980s.
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The city under construction in the 1960s and 1970s consisted of newly
modernized spaces and increasingly archaic words, images, and metaphors; it
consisted of the unfamiliar and the obsolete; it consisted of networks resistant
to mapping because different ideological paradigms and historical epochs coexisted and overlapped. But a world without maps is the epitome of the abstract, mental space that Lefebvre strives consistently to contest and render in
historical and material terms. If mapping is no longer possible in the increasingly complex and networked spaces of globalization, Lefebvre proposes
another conceptual model:
a much more fruitful analogy, it seems to me, may be found in hydrodynamics, where the principle of the superimposition of small movements
teaches us the importance of the roles played by scale, dimension and
rhythm. Great movements, vast rhythms, immense wavesthese all collide and interfere with one another; lesser movements, on the other
hand, interpenetrate. If we were to follow this model, we would say that
any social locus could only be properly understood by taking two kinds
of determinations into account: on the one hand, that locus would be
mobilized, carried forward and sometimes smashed apart by major tendencies, those tendencies which interfere with one another; on the
other hand, it would be penetrated by, and shot through with, the weaker
tendencies characteristic of networks and pathways.43
Though the French new wave heralded the arrival of a young generation and
their rupture with the past, the hydrodynamics of the period were far more
turbulent than accounts of unidirectional Americanization or an enduring
Frenchness would suggest.44 Instead, in new wave cinema, resistance to the
flow of American-style capitalism resides in the space depicted on-screen and
in the mise-en-scne. The new material culture of consumer products features
prominently in the films, as do the images and advertisements that adorn the
urban landscape. But the films of the 1950s and 1960s begin to obstruct the immense waves of history when they depict the survival of obsolete codes and
chronicle the everyday production of urban life, when they envision the city as
an oeuvre being remade by its inhabitants rather than a product. And because
of the overriding importance of the films themselves to the history of cinema
and of France, we turn now to the paradigmatic images of the French new wave.
Walking to the Gallows

Often cited as a precursor to the French new wave due to its stylistic similarities and the youth of its twenty-four-year-old director, Louis Malle, Elevator
to the Gallows offers one of the periods darkest premonitions of the imminent
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modernization of new wave Paris. That eras ambivalence toward the city
under construction, though most evident than in the scenes of Jeanne Moreau
searching for her absent lover on the Champs-lyses, imbues the entire film
with a paradoxical sense of propulsion toward the future and revulsion at the
world glimpsed on the horizon. Although the film appears at the outset to
celebrate the romance of Florence Carala and Julien Tavernierindeed, to
frame their passion as a shock and insult to a corrupt capitalist system, just as
Malles 1958 film The Lovers (Les Amants) would imagine an extramarital
affair as an escape from an exhausted artistocracyall acts of rebellion and
heroism are rendered ineffective by the end of the film. Aside from a handful
of Hollywood noir productionsespecially the emblematic and grotesquely
cynical Billy Wilder films Double Indemnity (1944) and Ace in the Hole
(1951)it would be difficult to find a darker view of humanity, a world as replete with villains and devoid of innocents as Malles prelude to an execution.
Mr. Carala, the fabulously wealthy businessman, appears to be a master of
shady arms and oil deals, with Julien, a former paratrooper and war hero,
serving as his designated fixer. The young couple presented as the double of
Julien Tavernier and Madame Carala are almost nihilistic in their singleminded focus on the accumulation of material goods and their obsessive fascination with their own image. The young woman overcomes her indifference to her boyfriend only when he pretends to be Julian, and both revel in
his momentary status as a war hero, sophisticated businessman, and owner of
a convertible. They are driven to kill by a similarly odious German couple not
because their plot has been exposed and they may be liable for car theft and
various lesser crimes but because the Germans long ago saw through their
faade of sophistication, because their image has been punctured and their
temporary maturity and urbanity has collapsed into humiliation. Although
Louis pulls his gun to regain his self-respect and authority, and he fires his
weapon on the spur of the moment, he seems neither repentant nor remorseful: the actual death of another is fitting recompense for the symbolic death of
his illusions. And when they decide to commit suicide to avoid culpability for
their murders, they plot out an extremely romanticized and ritualized process that nonetheless, and not unexpectedly, fails. If they embody the youngest adults in France in the 1950s, the new wave generation raised in relative
affluence after the war, the film harbors no sympathy for their ideals and no
hope for the future. The representatives of the state fare little better, as the
detective charged with investigating the murder of the German couple appears more concerned with self-promotion than the successful resolution of
the case, and only an accident allows the more professional Lino Ventura, in
a minor role, to allocate the various measures of responsibility. Even the
doorman at Carala headquarters, a likeable if brutish man who once served
under Tavernier, is diminished by his nave faith in Tavernier, his former
commander; and despite his almost childlike devotion, he accidentally foils
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Taverniers perfect murder and hastens his heros journey to the gallows by
turning off the buildings power supply and leaving him stalled between
floors. And the industrious and technologically savvy secretary, who stays
after hours to operate the switchboard, provides cover for the gunfire in her
bosss office with the metallic whirring of her electric pencil sharpener fed by
an endless supply of blunt implements. Even the well-intentioned embodiments of noble ideals like loyalty and hard work become unwilling accomplices in the destruction of those ideals. In Elevator to the Gallows, any inherited standards of justice and ethics are quickly enlisted into the causes they
abhor, and the social transformations of the 1950s have produced a world so
inimical to traditional standards of proper conduct that dignified actions
result in catastrophe rather than a just or happy ending. And amid the otherwise optimistic popular accounts of the rise of a young generation, Elevator
to the Gallows locates a contrary note of doubt in the phenomenon underlying that confidence: the incipient modernization of the state, the city of Paris,
and the youthful subjects poised to inhabit it. It is one of the most grotesquely
cynical films ever made in France.
From the opening images of the film, it is impossible to determine whether
the ultramodern headquarters of the Carala enterprise and the other glimpses
of the future are the portents of a techno-utopia to come or an update of
Chaplins Modern Times (1936), with Charlots hilariously and hauntingly
automated factory replaced by a world of glass curtains and barely useful
gadgets. As it conspicuously cultivates this hypermodern look, the film betrays a fascination with sparkling mirrored surfaces and emphatic architectural lines but also recoils from the artificial imperatives of speed, convenience, and novelty (Figure 2.7). The film envisions a futurist city whose
figure 2.7 Elevator to the Gallows.
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appearance of architectural and technological modernity far exceeds the

actual conditions in Paris at the time, and that modernity is the site of its dark
morality tale. In an interview with Qubec television, Malle suggested that his
film from the end of the fifties was announcing the 60s and that in an attempt to cultivate a modern look reminiscent of American cinema and present a Paris more modern than itself, he was forced to cheat: for example,
theres a motel in the film, supposedly just outside of Paris, but there was only
one such motel in France, and it was quite new, near a beach, 200 kilometers
from Paris. That was the only motel in France. Thats where we filmed. Besides that, the film shows a very modern Paris, very modern buildings, freeways. Its Paris as it would be ten years later. . . . The building where the elevator is: there were only five such buildings in all of Paris.45 Louis Malles Paris
is a bit imaginary and prematurely modern, as its sleek office blocks, landscape of highways, and motels constructed in deference to the automobile
were still in the offing in the France of the mid-1950s. The film predated the
most extensive campaigns of curative demolition and suburban construction
that would transform the traditional urban center and its surrounding region
but foreshadows the results of that process, providing a glimpse of an entirely
urbanized universe that would reappear in the suburban housing estates of
Tatis Playtime and Godards Two or Three Things I Know about Her. Malle
presents a premature but plausible vision of a landscape traversed by widening highways and dotted by motels, and he anticipates the fear of the expanding city expressed by Lefebvre: the urban fabric grows, extends its borders,
corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, urban fabric, does not
narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country. In this sense, a vacation home, a highway,
a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric.46 Elevator to
the Gallows sets its tale of ill-fated romance in an environment of equally
doomed and traumatic urbanism.
What distinguishes Elevator to the Gallows from the dystopian visions of
the later films of Tati and Godard is its simultaneous fascination with and
repulsion from the city experienced by the body and captured by the camera.
If Baudelaires vision of modernity was predicated on the lingering presence
of the premodern and the powerful juxtapositions made possible under
those conditions of incipient and incomplete transformation, Elevator to the
Gallows locates its main action at the ultramodern sites where those contradictions have been erased. But the film also transitions into the city previously excluded from the frame, a city where traces of the past remain. The
credit sequence of the film is an exercise in the gradual expansion of the
frame and the reincorporation of modernity into spaces that stage its residual contradictions. The film begins with an extremely tight close-up of Jeanne
Moreaus face, then Maurice Ronets face with slightly wider framing, then a
series of increasingly long shots of the stylish Carala building, revealed first
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as the diagonals traced by metal cladding on its surface and eventually as a

modern office building, but a lone structure, a construction without a context. Malles Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le mtro, 1960), with its manic,
youthful, transformative energy running amok in a city of quirky antiquarians, views the city from the opposite perspective, the vantage point of its
endangered past. But the Paris of Elevator to the Gallows teeters on the verge
of rapid and unsparing modernization. In one of the few images where the
modern and its history are imagined in all their inherent and dynamic contradiction, the film reveals the stunning, panoramic vista unfolding through
the floor-to-ceiling windows of Mr. Caralas office, with the Basilica of the
Sacr-Coeur visible atop Montmartre in the distance. And in this moment
another conception of the modern cityas a landscape of skyscrapers and a
selection of carefully preserved and framed monumentsemerges into visibility. Lefebvre argues that even the appearance of contradiction can become
an illusion in a carefully stage-managed presentation of history and nature.
The view of Montmartre framed in a plate-glass window is likewise a demonstration of domination rather than contradiction, as an increasingly powerful modern framework encloses a previous model of urbanity. This is a totalizing vision of modernity equal to the earlier shots of the Carala buildings
glass and steel shell, and it again anticipates the moments in Playtime when
Tati provides a tantalizing but ephemeral glimpse of the Eiffel Tower as a
reflection in a swinging door. The past is visible only as an image through the
lens provided by the modern city currently under construction.
The one sequence of the film that momentarily eludes this defeatist narrative of endangered tradition and corrupting modernity is the series of shots
following Florence Carala on her march through the streets of Paris. Filmed
on location on the Champs-lyses, with natural lighting emanating from the
cafs and shops lining the street, this sequence helps establish the template
that later new wave films would adopt. In these sequences, Madame Carala is
both encapsulated in and alienated from the atmosphere of a Parisian night.
She stares from a distance at the underpopulated streetside tables, gazes
through a plate-glass window at the men hanging around inside, and fails repeatedly to uncover information about the whereabouts of her lover and accomplice in the murder of her husband. After a brief and elliptical encounter
with an old acquaintance, she is eventually rounded up, brought to a police
station, and implicitly accused of prostitution, until the mention of her illustrious married name and husband results in her immediate release. The city
discovered by Madame Carala is a far cry from the still regnant visions of Parisian caf life defined by Renoir and other celebrated artists of the Belle
poque; it is a noirish city devoid of the joyous bustle of the crowd, the sparkle
of light, and the flash of color.
Yet these scenes and the city also reveal the dynamism of a body in motion,
the possibility of knowledge gained through the experience of the senses, the
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thrill of identity discarded and anonymity reclaimed. The Miles Davis score at
once underscores the somber quality of the setting and accentuates the grace
and the dance-like quality of Moreaus movements. This hippest of American
musicians lends an air of style to her character and her quest. Her modernity
is a phenomenon of a young, elegant body in a decaying, anonymous, yet invigorating space; she moves in an environment that offers the promise of liberation while she remains in motion, though it eventually retracts that promise and confirms that Madame Carala will always be her husbands wife. This
walk through the city is her sole realization of those possibilities, and their
ultimate denial suggests that the film still resides in the space between two
historical eras, a moment when the codes of conduct in urban space were undergoing a slow but uneven process of revision. As she walks through a cold
and inhospitable urban environment, Jeanne Moreau is modern, and the city
is not.47 And in this sense, Elevator to the Gallows establishes the paradigm of
the walk through the city, a mode of representing urban space that becomes
one of the defining activities in French new wave cinema. In these sequences,
we see the modernity of the subject confronted with age-old sexism and excluded from institutions controlled by commercial interests and the state; at
other moments the citya showcase for architecture and automobiles, fashion and technologyis imagined at the vanguard of a new society under construction, though without resolving the problems inherited from the existing
order and everywhere in evidence. The walking body confronts each myth
with its inherent limitations and inconsistencies; it is the survival of contradiction itself in an environment dedicated to the elimination of all sources of
friction. In Elevator to the Gallows, the walk through the city becomes a
moment of revelation when tradition and modernity undergo a radical reversal, when the eras gleaming, high-tech faades are peeled away to reveal their
more fundamental fractures and frailty. That precociously modern city also
provides, if only for a moment, a preview of the new wave to come.
Breathing Spaces
In this period of intense and accelerated modernization, the city, the human
body, and the cinema oscillate between the epitome of the modern and its opposite. In the space of a single film, or even the same scene, the director lavishes attention on the dashing spectacle of the automobile and on the alternative mobility of the body, suggesting that each possesses its own relationship to
space and to cinema. In Breathless, for example, the scene with Belmondo and
Seberg walking down Boulevard des Italiens, a long take lasting about ninety
seconds, resolves into a driving sequence of about the same length with thirteen cuts, each shot taking place in a different location of the city and linked
only by the editing process and an oddly continuous soundtrack. As Michel
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recites a list of Patricias most beautiful body parts, dismantling and paying
homage to her figure at the same time, the increasingly rapid jump cuts fragment and recompose the city. If Paris in the 1950s and 1960s was reorganized
around the imperatives imposed by the automobile and the goal of circulation
between the historical city and new satellite towns, the city characterized by
hypermobility and mechanized vision coexists with an almost retrograde conception of a pedestrian and embodied vision. The new wave and its philosophy
of cinema linger in the liminal space between these two paradigms of the city
and the medium. Neither entirely absorbed into nor viscerally opposed to this
modern project, the French new wave portrays a figure that resists at one
moment the modernity that it otherwise embraces. This characteristic is nowhere more evident than in these key instances of the mobile body distinguished by its deliberate openness to the city and, seconds later, by the blindness and exhilaration of speed.
On the most basic narrative level, as a succession of dramatic scenes,
Breathless presents a series of contradictions between the embodied and the
mechanical experience of the city. As it shuffles through these seemingly incoherent narrative segments and their respective styles, the film represents time
and space in radically incommensurate ways, as long stretches on the road
pass in an instant and then nothing happens for minutes on end, or the most
famous locations in Paris fly by while seemingly insignificant ones linger on
the screen for what seems like an eternity. As Ross has demonstrated, French
society in the 1950s was obsessed with the automobile, which crystallized the
thrill and promise of Americanization while also threatening the conception
of identity bound up in locations rendered obsolete by the car itself. She returns repeatedly to examples from new wave films that bestow inordinate attention on the car at rest and in motion: the display of motors and fenders in
the automobile repair shop and gas station in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg; Jacques Demy, 1964); the reverence for an American
convertible in Demys Lola (1960); and the symbolic power of car ownership
in Robert Dhrys La Belle Amricaine (1961) and Jacques Roziers Adieu
Philippine (1962). Ross brackets the career of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s by
focusing on his drastic reconsideration of the function of the automobile in
French society. She argues that
the distance from his first film, A bout de souffle (Breathless), made
in 1959, to films like Weekend or Made in U.S.A., made six or seven
years later, is significant. Around the time of Breathless Godard wrote
that things American have a mythical element which creates their
own existence; his hero, Michel Poiccard, steals only T-Birds and Cadillacs, and worships Humphrey Bogart: the films style slides unevenly back and forth between Hollywood and Paris as though its director shared his heros fascination for things American. Weekend,
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however, best remembered for its eight-minute tracking shot of an

interminable car wreck, registers Godards total estrangement from
the American-inspired technological wizardry he had admired in his
days as a film critic.48
She argues, finally, that the technological and industrial prototypes for automobile manufacturing informed the development of classical cinema, and
film in turn helped cultivate a love affair with the automobile: In production,
cars had paved the way for film; now, film would help create the conditions for
the motorization of Europe: the two technologies reinforced each other. Their
shared qualitiesmovement, image, mechanization, standardizationmade
movies and cars the key commodity-vehicles of a complete transformation in
European consumption patterns and cultural habits.49 The result is a reorganization of habits of vision that privileges the experience of rapid movement
by a relatively immobile driver/spectator: the automobile and the motion it
creates become integrated into the drivers perception: he or she can see only
things in motionas in motion pictures. Evanescent reality, the perception of
a detached world fleeting by a relatively passive viewer, becomes the norm,
and not the exception it still was in the nineteenth century.50 Breathless remains one of the periods most extreme examples of this burgeoning fascination with the car and the possibility of vehicles and images that circulate.
Despite this infatuation with the automobile in French society at the outset
of the new wave, the contradictions apparent when viewed across the trajectory of Godards career in the 1960s, especially in the light of his political radicalization, are also present in a more muted form in Breathless. They appear
most dramatically in the shocking variations in the ways time and space
unfold, especially in the sequences when Michel and Patricia walk through
Paris or spend almost a half hour of screen time just hanging out. When they
arent speeding through the city, with their car and the editing style working
together to accentuate their dynamism, Michel and Patricia represent the antithesis of the ideals of action and mobility. The principle characters in Breathless, most notably Michel, the car thief and aficionado, spend about eight minutes in a car over the course of a film with a running time of ninety minutes.
Much of that time is spent ostensibly in transit from one location to another,
and interludes of comic insolencehe yells insults at hitchhikers or orders a
cab driver to stop so he can pull up a womans skirtbreak up what would
otherwise appear to be mere filler in a poorly scripted plot or a waste of good
film stock. But these sequences are excessively long by almost any standards of
film production, and aside from Michels first journey from Marseilles to Paris
(about two minutes of screen time), all present either a postcard vision of the
city or an erasure of its recognizable topography. The most famous of these
sequences, the one discussed above, involves Michel driving with Patricia and
commenting on the beauty of her neck, breasts, voice, wrists, forehead, and
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knees, while the continuous voice-over clashes with the jump cuts that constantly relocate the couple in the geography of the city. With its canted framing and backseat setup, the camera resembles a passenger craning his or her
neck to view Patricias face in profile. The editing creates a series of false match
cuts, with Patricias head centered in the frame and the city undergoing a process of fragmentation and displacement. Godard frequently characterized the
jump cut as a tool of efficiency: it edits out the boring parts of the film, makes
it flow better and faster. This economically constructed narrative, a story without a recognizable city, coexists with a tour of instantly identifiable landmarks,
the face of the city that appears in travel brochures and films. The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame are glimpsed in passing, though
their framing and inclusion in the final print is clearly purposeful. Like The
400 Blows, which devotes its credit sequence to a tour by car of the neighborhood around the Eiffel Tower, or Chabrols Les Bonnes Femmes, which begins
with a fixed shot of a steady stream of traffic circulating around the monument in the Place de la Bastille, Breathless is littered with images of the citys
most recognizable icons viewed through the windshield or amid a sea of cars
(Figure 2.8).
While cruising through town in a cab, Michel also points out the building
where he was born, a typical four-story walkup, and the eyesore across the
way, a more contemporary six-story structure with balconies extending all the
way around it. Buildings like that get me down, he says. They ruin the whole
block. I have a taste for beauty, he adds. One question at the core of Breathless
figure 2.8 Breathless.
106
and the new wave more generally is how the film corresponds to this modernization of the city and the complementary vision of a tourist-friendly Paris,
with its taste for a particular brand of beauty. These seemingly incompatible
visions of spacehistorical preservation for the sake of a commemorative
economy and demolition for the sake of efficient transportationamount to
two facets of the same process of modernization, the devastation and the reactive impulse to restore and preserve the past. What remains intriguing about
Breathless is the fact that each of these perspectives on the city is associated
with technologies of transportation, in most cases the automobile, and in one
instance stock footage of the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Notre Dame taken
from the air. In its mobilized vision of the city, the film identifies the contradiction crystallized in the machinery of modernity and the solution that would
eventually become the norm during Frances subsequent age of patrimony:
The destruction of the city is counterbalanced by its partial conversion into a
museum. As Jean-Pierre Babelon wrote, after the successive waves of renovation and expansion at the Louvre designed to meet the growing appetite for art
in the 1980s, the question now is how to preserve the masterpieces of human
creation from a devouring process of consumption that could, if allowed to
go on unchecked, swallow them up altogether. And how does one preserve the
city, which is continually giving ground to the expanding museum?51 In
Breathless, the Paris seen by car is both an ultramodern environment designed
for efficiency and a preview of the carefully staged city of commemoration.
But as Godard demonstrates again in Band of Outsiders, there are always other
ways to navigate through the city and the museum.
While Breathless does echo the periods fascination with the automobile,
those scenes of the city viewed from a car window occupy very little screen time
when compared with the far less spectacular site of Michel and Patricia sitting
together in a hotel room or apartment, adopting various poses, talking about
love and sex, and from the perspective of classical Hollywood or French cinema,
doing nothing. Approximately thirty-three minutes, or more than a third of the
entire film, is spent in three long scenes located indoors, most remarkably in
the twenty-four-minute sequence unfolding entirely in the cramped quarters
of room number 12 at Htel de Sude. Shot with a skeleton crew consisting of
Godard, Coutard, the script supervisor, Suzon Faye, and the camera operator,
Claude Beausoleil, the scene occupies a significant position in the lore of the
film, because by any film-school standards it lasts far too long and because its
uncomfortable conditions of production suggest that this distended period of
lingering and dawdling was crucial to the overall conception of the film.52 The
agonizingly slow pace slams on the brakes, bringing to a halt the mobile, carcrazy society viewed elsewhere in the film and unfolding at a tempo incompatible with the demands of narrative economy or the contemporary cultural ideal
of circulation. The barely scripted dialogue meanders, and the camera movements and pattern of editing appear to be dictated not by the imperatives of
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efficient storytelling but by the peculiarities revealed in the mise-en-scne. The

long seduction is the narrative heart of this sequence, but what unfolds alongside the verbal interaction between Michel and Patricia is a more revealing
drama involving two bodies interacting with each other and their surroundings. The eroticism of the sequence is the product not of a witty one-liner, as in
most Hollywood genres and the screenplay-driven tradition of quality, but
the fact that neither leaves despite the pointlessness of the dialogue. The scripted
elements are recited almost as a pretext for the at once improvised and ritualistic interplay of Michel and Patricia. Godard characterizes the overlap between
his own production philosophy and that of documentary filmmakers like Flaherty and Rouch in this way: all great fiction films tend towards documentary,
just as all great documentaries tend towards fiction.53 The location of Godards
documentary is a tiny hotel room in Paris, and its subject is the physical relationship and emotional rapport between two young people. The body is the
most reliable index of youth in cinema, and this extended sequence in the Htel
de Sude exists primarily as a display of its young protagonists and stars, a celebration of their sex appeal. In its extended rebellion against the obligations of
classical cinema, its disregard for niceties of dialogue and the demands of narrative, this otherwise sluggish sequence may be one of the most radical experiments in Godards early career. Beyond any of the subtleties of composition or
the expressive capabilities of the stars, it communicates above all the refusal to
obey the rules (including the rules of filmmaking) when more urgent matters
are at stake. This sequence literally embodies the defiance that would characterize the young French cinema in the early 1960s: the sequence gives a physical
form to a broader rebellion against social mores and cinematic standards and
foregrounds the youthful body as the vehicle of that revolution.
At the same time that it violates the norms of classical narrative structure
and elevates the reality of the body to its guiding principle, the Htel de Sude
scene also explores the relationship between the human figure and images.
Most notably, the sequence features a series of comparisons between Patricia
and posters, photographs, or reflections: first a reproduction of Renoirs portrait titled Mlle. Irne Cahen dAnvers (1880), then a glossy picture of herself,
then her own face in a mirror. The setting is at once Spartan and replete with
pictures that adorn its otherwise blank walls. This is a sequence where the
most basic human desires are implicated in deeply layered conceptions of
beauty. The body is cloaked in images, as Patricia relates herself to those ideals
and performs beauty in the presence of painted, photographed, and reflected
points of comparison. Throughout the film, Michel also indulges in a performance of the gangster role and the insatiable Don Juan, but in the slow development of this sequence, he begins to forget his role and lose track of the obligations entailed by his persona. These characters inhabit and discard various
roles in the course of this sequence, often with the help of the props scattered
around the apartment: hats, shirts, sheets, and the posters and pictures that
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figure 2.9 The 400 Blows.
occupy a privileged position in the frame. Their youth established as a fundamental fact, Michel and Patricia begin to demonstrate how little their age matters when identity has become a product to be fashioned and consumed. This
sequence revisits a common visual motif in new wave cinema, which before
and after Breathless regularly features characters gazing at images of themselves, at faces and bodies that, while their own, challenge their essential
conception of themselves. We see Antoines mother in The 400 Blows searching perhaps for a youthfulness sacrificed to motherhood (Figure 2.9). Antoine
himself, at the same table, tries (and fails) to look more mature and streetwise
than his years. Clo, confronted everywhere with a hall of mirrors, confronts
the gap between the timeless beauty of her image and the illness eating away
at her body (Figure 2.10). Catherine wipes off her makeup in Jules and Jim
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figure 2.11 Jules and Jim.
(Jules et Jim; Truffaut, 1962), figuratively removing her mask of devotion and
fidelity, while Jim watches her and sees the outsider that he has become (Figure 2.11). And one of the young shop assistants in Chabrols Les Bonnes
Femmes (1960) uses a television set as a mirror (Figure 2.12). Five years before
Breathless, in one of the precursors to the new wave, Melvilles Bob the Gambler, the gangster craps out early in the morning and sees an aging mug in
the mirror, a face that seems incompatible with his previous life of gambling, crime, and womanizing in the demimonde of Pigalle (Figure 2.13).
Similar scenarios, with the tough guy introducing himself to the audience by
staring at his face in the mirror, occur in Melvilles Le Doulos, Mockys Les
Dragueurs, and Breathless itself. The Htel de Sude sequence in Breathless
figure 2.12 Les Bonnes Femmes.
110
figure 2.13 Bob the Gambler.
is the apotheosis of this tendency in the French new wave because so much of
the sequences twenty-four minutes is dedicated to the interaction between
the body and the image, between youth imagined as an undeniable fact whose
proof is the body itself and the ubiquitous ideals and fantasies that always
shroud the human figure. Patricia and Michel escape from the whir of motors
and the activity of the city but discover that there is no sanctuary from the less
tangible but equally adamant reality of images; those images are, like flesh and
bone, the stuff theyre made of.
While many memorable sequences in Breathless are located in the world of
automobiles and foreground their rapid editing and cinematically supplemented energy, and while the plurality of the screen time takes place indoors
and advances at a languorous pace, the primary exceptions to these experiences of the city appear in three extended sequences taking place on foot:
Michel and Patricia on their two long walks in the city, a total of about five
minutes, and the final death scene, with Michels comic escape, his last, stumbling steps, and the lagging pursuit by Patricia and the police. Filmed by a
camera hidden in a mail cart, with the lens pointed through a hole in the
canvas and Coutard covered by a pile of packages, these scenes demonstrate
Godards commitment to location shooting and natural light. They also manifest his desire to relocate cinema within the everyday life of urban France, a
position cinema occupied in its earliest days, as revealed in the Lumire brothers actualities that were made near their photographic equipment factory in
Lyon. These scenes are remarkable also for their incorporation of the crowd
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into the developing drama, as the looks of the passersby into the camera and
at the actors suggest that the film has identified and continually transgressed a
boundary between cinema and the real world. These stray glances identify the
cast and crew as outsiders to the everyday life of the city, even as they continue
to glide along the sidewalk, ignoring that occasional acknowledgment of the
limits of film. By including the footage that would be edited out of any wellmade, classically styled film, these sequences demonstrate the new wave devotion to a documentary ethic and the legacy of neorealism: they display their
roughness as a badge of honor, a mark of their difference from the studiobound quality productions of the time. And from the distant vantage point
of fifty years in the future, these shots on the streets of Paris serve an invaluable function as records of a historical moment: they document the faades of
the buildings, the advertisements and public signage, the style of dress, the
way people walked and comported themselves in the streets, the ambient
sound of urban bustle, all the things that together comprise the atmosphere of
the city.
The most technically complex of these shots, a virtuoso long take that follows Michel and Patricia in the Opra district, is also remarkable because of
the scenes that bracket it in the film. After the end of their walk, the two
lovers hop into one of Michels stolen cars, and we join them en route to her
lunch meeting with her boss; this is the segment featuring the generous
supply of jump cuts and the first appearance of what will become his last
words: You are really dgueulasse. And before the walk, we see Michel
stealing a few francs from an unsuspecting patron in a public restroom, a
well-placed karate chop to the neck, the most effective weapon in cinema,
serving to incapacitate his victim. At the tail end of their walk, the film
flaunts its stylishness and energy; at the beginning, it displays its reverence
for the entirely artificial world of the B-movie. And in the middle, Michel
and Patricia walk along the boulevard, surrounded by the accidents of that
particular moment in history: the people on the sidewalk, the ephemera of
light and weather. Equally dramatic are the transitions between these various categories of space: when Michel leaves the restroom, he flings down the
empty wallet, swings open the door, and in a device that could be described
as either a jump cut or a match on action, that is to say, as one of two incompatible extremes, he swings behind Patricia and takes his place at her side.
The film leaps suddenly from one location to the next using an uncategorizable transition that underscores either the link or the gap between the simulated, obviously staged encounter between Michel and his mark and the material, historical environment of Paris in 1959. Far more than the obvious
and sensational jump cuts introduced by Godard and endlessly imitated, the
transition between these two spaces reveals the inherent tensions and possibilities of the new wave. This manner of false continuity, or faux raccord,
suggests that there is an exit from the studio-like setting where characters
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inhabit the roles and masks of gangsters and other stereotypes offered up by
the movies. If there is a sanctuary from a world dominated by the image or
the machinery of modern life, the primary avenue envisioned for that retreat is the city street. In Breathless and in French new wave cinema more
generally, the city is at once the first territory claimed by hypermodernization and the last vestige of the real.
Cities of Sadness
Alain Resnais was among the first new wave filmmakers to burst onto the international film scene in 1959, with Hiroshima mon amour, but his relationship to the Cahiers critics-turned-filmmakers remains controversial. In the
interest of taxonomical precision, Resnais, Varda, and Marker are more often
categorized in scholarly studies as Left Bank filmmakers to highlight their
association with the traditional academic and intellectual center of Parisian
life, their more conventional training in the arts, their more philosophical and
poetic concerns, and their direct engagement in the political struggles of the
1950s and 1960s.54 Roughly a decade older than their counterparts at Cahiers,
the Left Bank group also matured in a different historical context, with the war
and its immediate aftermath the formative environment of their youth and
the economic boom and colonial war the major social phenomena of their
twenties and thirties. (Varda was in her mid-twenties when her first film was
released in 1955 and thirty when the new wave gathered momentum at the end
of the decade; Resnais was thirty-seven when Hiroshima mon amour was released; Marker was a year older than Resnais.) Their films are also characterized by an experimental aesthetic more obviously constructed around montage than mise-en-scne. It is possible to compose a compelling narrative
about the philosophical, political, and aesthetic agenda of the Left Bank filmmakers that makes them appear worlds apart from the Cahiers group forming
just a few kilometers away.
But this bifurcated account of French art cinema in the period overlooks
many of the personal and thematic connections between the groups. On an
anecdotal level, Godard made a series of cameos in the 1950s and 1960s, including appearances in Cahiers-centered productions like Le Coup du berger
(directed by Rivette in 1956 and scripted by Chabrol and Bitsch), Rohmers Le
Signe du lion in 1959, and his own early pictures; but he also starred in the
film-within-a-film segment of Clo from 5 to 7, a contribution of time and
sweat equity that suggests these two cohorts were less insular than naming
conventions would imply. And while the critics greeted the work of their
fellow Cahiers alums with excessive, boosterish praise, they were far from
reticent in celebrating the work of Resnais, Varda, and others outside their
circle. Resnais in particular was recognized by Rohmer as the author of the
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first modern film of the sound era in an expansive roundtable discussion

dedicated to Hiroshima, and his work earned the more substantial honor of
being taken seriously instead of being hyped.55 While it is important to remember the distinctions between the two schools, the commonalities are also
difficult to ignore, including their concern with the fundamental questions of
youth and space in the era of transnational flows. Both dimensions of the new
wave emerged at a historical moment when movements of goods, images, and
ideas originating across the globe had as profound an impact in Paris as the
happenings on either side of the Seine. The short-lived 1950s film journal
St.Cinma des Prs, named after the center of Parisian intellectual life in the
1950s, the site where Sartre and other leading writers and philosophers held
court at bustling hubs of activity like Les Deux Magots, was far more radical
in its advocacy of unquestionably bad American films than even the most extreme outliers at Cahiers du cinema. And Truffaut published his first article in
the Bulletin du cin-club du Quartier Latin in 1950. At a moment when circulation, communication, and border-crossing images were the principal buzzwords in politics and culture, the river posed only a minor obstacle in the
interaction between these groups of filmmakers and critics.
The work of Alain Resnais presents both the strongest case for the existence of a Left Bank school and the most obvious challenge to these internal
distinctions among new wave filmmakers. In addition to the generational
divide between himself and Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and many others at
Cahiers, Resnais displayed little of the conspicuous cinephilia that became
the house policy for those critics and the source of the journals key shibboleths. Moreover, Resnais was trained formally at the Institut des hautes tudes
cinmatographiques (IDHEC), the major French film school, not haphazardly at public screenings in cin-clubs and the Cinmathque, and his specialization was the technical skill of editing rather than the less precisely defined aspects of filmmaking that fall under the rubric of mise-en-scne.
Resnais also collaborated regularly with avant-garde writers, most notably
Duras and Robbe-Grillet, and his model of artistic partnership ceded an unusual degree of creative control to screenwriters, especially during this auteurist era. Given the significant contribution of these nouveau romanciers,
many of the films of Resnais are better characterized as products not of the
Left Bank group but of the literary new wave, and his films oscillate between
these various influences. In Last Year at Marienbad, the product of his closest
collaboration with a writer, the convoluted plot closes off any connection to
a reality outside the film and, like the novels of its cocreator, Robbe-Grillet,
circulates around a series of voids where the comforts of character and narrative coherence would usually reside.56 At the same time, the observational
camera lingers in spaces and on objects filmed in an idiosyncratic documentary style developed by Resnais in his earliest films. Robbe-Grillet argues that
one can think of Marienbad as a documentary about a statue, and despite
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its notorious difficulty, the film confronts the baroque complexity of its form
with the facticity of the material surroundings that appear on-screen.57 In a
review that helped launch the career of Robbe-Grillet and provided a critical
framework for the nouveau roman, Roland Barthes famously dubbed this
novelistic school objective literature, though he downplayed many of the
connotations of this term, especially its implications of incontrovertible
truth, and instead emphasized a more literal definition: this was literature
that positioned itself nearest the object.58 Robbe-Grillets literary world
consists largely of objects taken from the urban environment (sidewalk directories, professional-service signs, post-office notice boards, electric gates,
bridge superstructures) or from ordinary surroundings (light switches, reading glasses, percolators, dressmakers dummies, packaged sandwiches). Natural objects are rare, Barthes adds. Through this cascade of objects, the
novel teaches us to look at the world no longer with the eyes of a confessor,
a physician, or of Godall significant hypostases of the classical novelist
but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon but the
spectacle before him, no other power than that of his own eyes.59 If the prototypical Robbe-Grillet novel recounts a walk through a city of disjointed
objects and pure surfaces, and if his cinematic collaborations partially reflect
that influence, the films of Resnais also insist on the historical and material
dimension of objects and spaces.60
Finally, Resnais was an overtly political director from the start. His thirtyminute documentary short on the transnational trafficking in African art,
Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi; codirected with Marker in 1953),
was censored by French authorities because its final reel launches an unsparing attack on French colonialism and other racist practices in France and the
United States. Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955) was shuffled in and out
of the program at Cannes because of its potential to reopen wounds from
World War II and threaten the emerging political order in Europe. And Hiroshima mon amour (1959) provoked the same response at French film festivals
because of its barely concealed attack on American military actions, beginning with the dropping of two atomic bombs over Japan but continuing with
the arms race and the specter of nuclear holocaust looming over the Cold War
world. These were precisely the issues that the Cahiers cohort (with rare exceptions like Kast) avoided, preferring to turn their attention to the cause of
cinema. At the same time, however, Resnais was concerned with the implications not only of American power during open hostilities but also its cultural
imperialism in peacetime; he was concerned with not only the conduct of colonial warfare in French territories overseas but also the implications of that
militarization on everyday life in the seemingly detached home front. The
films of Alain Resnais focus, in other words, on the implicit linkages between
traumatic historical events that occupy the headlines and therefore public
consciousness and the less dramatic, unexceptional tragedies occurring with
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such frequency that they provoke only a muted outcry. In his work of the new
wave era, these less spectacular but still profound histories are presented less
often through his virtuoso montage sequences and primarily through miseen-scne, especially the staging of urban space.
Over the course of the 1950s, Resnais was best known for a series of documentaries that concentrate on the fate of objects and environments. Employed
initially as a maker of industrial or informational films sponsored by corporations or government agencies, Resnais is one of the few internationally renowned directors whose filmography includes titles reminiscent of a houseand-garden or travel program on television, including Les Jardins de Paris
(1948) and Chteaux de France (1948). Despite the relatively fast turnover rate
in his projects and the diversity of his subject matter, the one constant in this
period, a preoccupation no doubt encouraged by his various employers, was a
meticulous attention to the spaces that formed the raison dtre of the films. In
Van Gogh (1948), Guernica (1950), and Gauguin (1950), he focused on exalted
works of art and their creators; and while his earlier pictures often disappeared
from the radar screens of French audiences and critics, his films about artists
and masterpieces fascinated the Cahiers contingent concerned with the status
of cinema as an art. These were films that considered their own medium the
equal of painting and therefore borrowed some of the glory of canonical art.
Over the course of the 1950s, however, the documentaries made by Resnais
and several key collaborators, including Chris Marker, shifted their attention
to the concrete social context and away from the abstract aura of art and cultural objects. The first of these, Statues Also Die, examines the dissipation of
the cultural significance of African art as it travels from its site of production
to galleries in France. All art, the film suggests, is site specific, and the relocation of these statues and ritual artifacts to Paris results in their transformation
into exotic commodities and generic signifiers of difference rather than contributions to a particular cultural order. In its title and over the course of its
thirty minutes, the film treats objects as living and dying beings, endows
spaces with the capacity to kill, and replaces the narrative functions in classical
cinema (the hero, the heroine, the villain) with the elements of mise-en-scne.
Toute la mmoire du monde (1956) also examines the relationship between
a category of object, the book, and a particular historical and institutional
context, the Bibliothque nationale, where a copy of each book published in
France is preserved for posterity. The narrative conceit of the film is to follow
a fake volume called Marspublished by Seuil, where Marker worked in the
late 1940s and 1950s, it features in its table of contents the names of Resnaiss
friends and collaborators, including Armand Gatti, Marker, and Vardaas it
enters the cataloging system. The book then winds its way through the stacks
and eventually rolls into the reading room, where it escapes the confines of the
archives, achieves some measure of liberation, and reembarks on the quest for
truth that is, the film concludes, happiness itself. Structured like a walk
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through the library, this journey of a single book, one object lost among millions, examines the spaces that channel and constrict the production of knowledge and wisdom, from the guards who watch over the premises like prison
wardens to the syringes used to inoculate the collection against mites and
other diseases that threaten the longevity of this important national patrimony. As the voice-over and visual presentation search for the appropriate
metaphors, the library becomes a prison camp, a hospital, and, in the famous
closing shot, a cavernous space akin to a cathedral, as the camera rises to ever
greater heights, eventually reaching a perspective from which the vast reading
room and the entire domain of human knowledge come into view. The film
explores, in other words, the relationship between a small physical objecta
thin volume of poetryand the environment that both constrains and perfects it, that accentuates its materiality while transforming it into an object of
veneration and the epitome of human aspiration. While the film represents
the manhandling of pages and bindings, focusing on their physical form and
fragility, we learn that these books are not mere objects and the library is the
site of their transubstantiation. In that sense, Toute la mmoire du monde is
not a traditional narrative or explanatory documentary; instead it frames the
everyday goings-on at one of the worlds most prestigious libraries as a drama
of objects and spaces, of carts passing through long corridors, of books dying
of neglect and being coaxed slowly back to life in the hands of the reader. Despite its grandiose and all-encompassing title, the film is concerned less with
memory than the simple mnemonic devices called booksone particularly
exalted subgroup in Baudrillards system of objectsas well as the institutions that house them and thereby stage the preservation and production of
knowledge.
Although (or perhaps because) it was funded by a major conglomerate and
produced as an informational film about the plastic industry and its products,
Le Chant du styrne remains one of the periods most profound meditations
on the emerging material culture of the 1950s. Sponsored by Pechiney, the
massive French metals and chemical corporation, the film begins with an epigraph from Victor Hugo concerning humanitys mastery of the physical
world: man commands blind matter and to his will it bends. The first images
then present a stunning display of the mass-produced and disposable objects
that would redefine modern consumer culture in France, though the framing
and scale often disguise their identities and uses. There are ladles, cups, tennis
rackets, and a bowl shown in close-up, while other red and blue forms are
virtually unrecognizable, shapes and lines rather than objects with functions.
Shifting register rapidly as it experiments with the appropriate metaphors to
characterize these unprecedented creations, the voice-overa text in alexandrines written by the nouveau romancier and poet Raymond Queneau and
recited by the actor Pierre Duxlavishes the most artificial and poetic syntax
and diction on mundane objects formed in molds. The film then situates these
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modern marvels in an industrial environment most precisely characterized as

the technological sublime, as an occult zone where wondrous transformations
occur through the interventions of applied science. Edward Dimendberg
notes, for example, that nearly the whole film takes place in unnatural lighting, as though the entire universe was replaced by an artificial replica.61 The
machines that produce these red bowls are the font of life, the voice-over suggests, a womb every bit as mysterious and awe-inspiring as the primal forces
of nature. As with his dying statues and sick books, Resnais anthropomorphizes objects and transfers them to the narrative center traditionally occupied by the human figure. As Dimendberg writes, straddling the genres of the
artistic short and the commissioned industrial film, and thus the categories of
culture and commerce, [Le Chant du styrne] treats plastic as both object and
subject, a fact of everyday life but also a strategy for organizing cinematic
vision.62 Plastic is a petrochemical material used to produce objects, a broader
complex of technologies, an ideology (of mass consumption and disposability), and a way of seeing that privileges the spectacle of innovation. Plastic is
also the key mechanism and metaphor of the economic miracle, and the
voice-over accentuates, during an extended sequence (just under three minutes in a film that lasts under fourteen) of tracking and crane shots that follow
the lines drawn by intricate networks of pipes, the relationship between plastic
and the periods ubiquitous metaphor of the flow: pipe by pipe we return to
the source, through a desert of channels running their course, to the raw material, the abstract substance, as yet unrevealed, endlessly circulating, potent,
concealed. The styrenes song is the promise and temptation floating in the
air in postwar capitalist modernization, the dream of a perfectly malleable
world where material prosperity emerges from the mystical combination of
unknown, abstract materials and the magic of technology. The experiments
with identity that characterize so many new wave films are themselves reconceptions of humanity in the image of plastic: character is malleable, these films
suggest, a consumer product to be given the once-over and discarded on a
whim. If the object world and settings of documentaries are embedded in a
complex and layered historyas in the key French documentaries of the
1950s, including the films of Rouch, Marker, and Resnaisthe plastic products exhibited in Le Chant du styrne are remarkable because their history is
obscured behind a technology and ideology that everywhere foreground their
newness and their quasi-miraculous birth.
The society depicted in Le Chant du styrne is a former industrial landscape
reborn as a consumer utopia of unfathomable prosperity. The film was shot in
DyaliScope, a widescreen format akin to CinemaScope, and Resnais emphasizes the relationship between this expansive frame and the twelve-syllable
structure of the alexandrine.63 In his often-cited condemnation of widescreen
cinema, Godard (via Fritz Lang in Contempt) attacks the seemingly endless
horizontal frame in Scope as a format suitable only for snakes and funerals.
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Yet as Lisa Cohen argues, widescreen cinema was also intimately connected to
a particular conception of space: the centrifugal movement of cities outward
from their historical cores and toward the formerly underpopulated and unbuilt spaces of the suburbs.64 Widescreen cinema is a format attuned to the
accumulation of space and objects, to a parade of excess in addition to long,
thin lines. DyaliScope composes a fable of abundance, and as an advertisement for Pechiney, the film presents the plastic industry as one mechanism for
delivering on the promise of mass consumption, with petrochemical flows
congealing momentarily before yielding to another product in the endless accumulation of new plastic goods. But it also represents the migration of that
aesthetic and ideological model outward in space, with the infinite flexibility
and disposability of plastic now rivaling rootedness and monumentality as
core social ideals. At the same time, as Dimendberg adds, the film displays a
palpable longing for another era in the history of modernization, an era
evoked through long tracking shots of massive and seemingly indestructible
machines used to produce the compliant material at the center of the film:
the duration of the sequence and the intensity of the cameras fixation upon
this site betrays a nostalgia for an older mode of production, one whose gleaming parts, linear elements, and geometric volumes refer to the first machine
agethe very cultural ambiance seemingly rendered obsolete by the flowing
immateriality of plasticas its referent.65 These loving, lingering shots foreshadow in more modest form the slow tracking shots that Resnais pioneers in
films like Toute la mmoire du monde, Hiroshima mon amour, and Last Year
at Marienbad. And with a bright blue sky in the background almost as stunning as the dyed styrene, with nature itself viewed as the height of artifice, they
depict the second nature that developed over the first half of the twentieth
century. Simulating a walk through the factory just as Tout la mmoire strolls
through the library and Marienbad meanders through memory, these sequences evoke one conception of space while wandering through its successor. Le Chant du Styrne represents the rise of plastic as the substance of the
economic miracle, but the deliberate journey through its site of production
and a society reborn also reveals the traumatic vanishing of another. The film
provides a tutorial in reading a space of flows according to the enduring logic
of the system that predates it.
More than any other film of the period, Hiroshima mon amour is a story
about locations that disappear and endure. Its main characters, referred to only
by the pronouns Il and Elle in the screenplay, decide at the end of the film
to refer to each other by the names of their hometowns, Hiroshima and
Nevers. Character is a product of space, even when those environments are
associated in world and personal history with catastrophe. In this context, the
film begins by citing many of the familiar tropes of documentary filmmaking,
the strategies habitually used to document a place, while presenting in the voiceover a meditation on the possibility of documentary images in the aftermath of
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an act of devastation, especially the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After a series of stunning shots of two intertwined bodies covered in ash and
snow, the film begins with a catalog of possible modes of representing and remembering these events, most prominently a museum exhibit featuring artifacts produced under the conditions of extreme heat and radiation after the
blast, including a melted bicycle wheel, and photographs of human bodies
posed to reveal their wounds. This opening sequence also includes alternative
forms of evidence: the corridor of a hospital, presumably shot in the present,
where victims were treated in the hours and days after the attack; documentary footage of the ruined city; and horrific cinematic recreations with actors
and makeup. While this footage flashes across the screen, the voice-over alternates between the main female and male characters as Elle describes what
she saw and what the images directly display. Il then insists: you saw nothing at Hiroshima. The precise significance of this nothingness lies at the heart
of the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic program of the film. It underlines the difference between her secondhand experience of Hiroshima and the
more direct trauma of this man who survived but whose family perished in
the attack, along with the necessary gap between the historical and presenttense confrontation with trauma: in restrospect and at a distance, you saw
nothing at Hiroshima. It refers to the incapacity of these images to convey the
totality of the trauma unleashed under the horrific conditions of the bombing:
you saw nothing. It also alludes to the evacuation of all categories of identity,
all habitual strategies of organizing and categorizing the material world now
in ruins: you saw the collapse of your way of understanding even the most
basic aspects of human life; you saw your most precious illusions reduced to
ashes; you saw nothing. Later in this sequence, the film displays the possibility
of a sanitized and commercialized commemoration that serves primarily as a
mechanism of forgetting: atomic bomb tours, gift shops with souvenirs, an
apparatus that domesticates an unthinkable reality. As illustrations of the
limits of vision and empathy, these sequences are also designed as demonstrations of the limits of montage. Her voice-over names an object or a general
category as it appears on-screen in all its specificity, followed by another and
another in a series of shots edited swiftly together; his voice-over then denies
the very thing named and placed on display. Montage serves not to reconstruct the truth of history but to exemplify the pitfalls that must be overcome
in order to comprehend a reality, or a nothingness, that cannot be seen.
Hiroshima mon amour explores the boundaries between montage and
other modes of filmmaking during an extended sequence that follows Elle
on a walk through the nighttime streets of Hiroshima and, through series of
geographically and chronologically impossible match cuts, alternates these
present-day images with her youthful memories of Nevers. What begins as a
walk through a rebuilt Hiroshima, a city of museums and hotels, movie theaters and dance clubs, billboards and neon lights, becomes an experiment in
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cinematic and psychological geography that rivals the remapping of the world
imagined by Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers. The sequence is distinguished from these earlier exercises in pure and playful editing because it disguises the cuts between times and spaces with the trappings of continuity:
long, slow tracking shots that follow her movement through Hiroshima are
linked to equally slow, already mobile shots in Nevers, suggesting a seamless
transition between the two shots, times, and places. The devices and illusions
normally associated with continuity editing are used to mask a radical violation of the laws of physics made possible through montage. Resnais deploys a
similar tactic in Last Year at Marienbad, which features of series of faux raccords designed to conjure up an imaginary continuity between the current
location and Marienbad, between this year and last. Marienbad also features a
languorous, 360-degree camera movement that appears to begin in one time
and place before gliding imperceptibly to another, with no visible indication
of a cinematic, physical, or temporal transition. In Hiroshima mon amour, a
film about the aftermath of one of the greatest acts of mass destruction in history, the stakes of this aesthetic decision are far more profound than in the
intriguing but detached surroundings of Marienbad. But in each film, Resnais
flaunts a tantalizingly concrete place-name in the title and then mobilizes the
editing conventions and habits of viewing associated with classical realism,
only to undermine that faith in the necessary relationship between the cinematic image and the real world recorded by the camera. One sequence flows
into another, despite the apparent impossibility of that unchecked motion.
Hiroshima suggests that the habits of geography are the actual illusion and
that modernity entails a fundamental reconception of the relationship between discrete times and places. If at the beginning of the sequence the difference between these environments is glossed over through the trickery of editing, by the end the mise-en-scne reveals their commonality, as both inscribe
on their blank walls and in their empty streets the lingering effects of catastrophic loss.
The foundational provocation of the Hiroshima is to conceive of a world
historical event originating in massive devastation in the same context as a
personal tragedy for an individual forced to deal with its consequences in isolation. The film asserts that this connection between Hiroshima and Nevers is
both a logical reconception of global geography in the aftermath of trauma,
and a figment of pure cinema. The film succeeds if that connection appears to
be a phenomenon not of cinematic artistry but of the spaces themselves. At
the conceptual core of this sequence is a question about the nature of cinema
as a medium dedicated to the magic of montage, with its disregard for the
dramatic unities, or to the staging of reality in time and space. As in the simultaneously abrupt and seamless transition from the studio environment to the
street in Breathless, Resnais uses an idiosyncratic combination of the match
cut and the jump cut, with the devices that usually facilitate the flow of images
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becoming at once an obstacle to and a vehicle of that flow. And by the end of
Hiroshima mon amour, the technique of editing and its false movements
yields to a truth inherent in the mise-en-scne. As both places and characters,
Nevers and Hiroshima are linked, the film suggests, because they epitomize
the evacuation of identity, the loss of self, the void in ideology and subjectivity
necessary to love the other and the enemy. Love itself becomes a variation on
the theme of annihilation: devour me, deform me to your image, Elle says.
As she concludes her walk through Hiroshima, her voice-over lingers on a
parting sentence: a time will come when we can no longer name what binds
us. Its name will eventually be erased from our memory until it vanishes completely. She has experienced the failure of memory, even when she promises
never to forget; she has witnessed the futility of attempts to see the trauma
of Hiroshima from the limited perspective of a French woman returning to
the scene at the end of the 1950s. But the more complex task of Hiroshima mon
amour is to distribute this vanishing into space itself. Forgetting is accomplished through the mise-en-scne of the city or commune, as flashing lights
and plastic souvenirs in Hiroshima, these tools of visibility and memory, obscure the history of catastrophic loss, and the victory parades in Nevers mask
the traumas that were enacted in cellars and behind locked doors. The possibility glimpsed at the end of the film is a redefinition of the place name not
only as the people, structures, and objects that fill it, not only as a signifier of
fullness and prosperity, but also as the void at its center, the losses that a community endures and then struggles mightily to forget. In the process, Resnais
begins to redefine mise-en-scne not as the accumulation of objects but disappearance concealed by an illusion of plenitude.
Paris in the Afternoon

Vardas Cleo from 5 to 7 has long been recognized as one of the most important cinematic meditations on the relationship between gender and the gaze,
and more recent studies have characterized it as the epitome of the new wave
city film.66 Starring Corinne Marchand, the film presents its title character, a
statuesque pop singer, as an exemplar of the modern femininity modeled on
the prototype of Brigitte Bardot: she has a successful career with seemingly
unlimited potential; she meticulously cultivates her public persona; and she is
a star who attracts looks of recognition or envy wherever she goes. But Clo
begins not with a celebration of its heroines modernity and liberation but
with a note of tragedy: the title character has just undergone tests for stomach
cancer and passes the afternoon waiting for the results, keeping herself occupied and distracted, and occasionally succumbing to a series of inevitable
emotions, including trepidation and panic. She tries to convince herself that
her deathless image matters more than her body: as long as Im beautiful, Im
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alive, she says in voice-over, while gazing at her face in a mirror. At the intellectual crux of the film is an attempt to reconcile those seemingly opposite
conceptions of both femininity and cinema. The image crystallizes the ideals
of flexibility and openness to complete transformation, and the body glimpsed
in the mirror, the body reconceived as an image, becomes the substrate for an
infinitely changeable persona rather than a fixed identity. But the film juxtaposes Clos immortal and malleable beauty with an insistently physical body
that resists this reduction of reality to the free circulation of images. The difference between Bardot and Clo, or between the films of Roger Vadim and
the new wave proper, rests in the new waves tenacious opposition to the incipient postmodernism glimpsed in France during the 1950s and 1960s and
exemplified in the twin figures of the new woman and man. Marketed like a
consumer product and surrounded by images of herself in various guises,
Clo must confront the limits of this emerging conception of personhood; and
in a task intimately linked to the self-exploration of her heroine, Varda invents a model of cinema attuned to the inescapable presence of images in contemporary society while maintaining the fundamental link between documentary footage and the material world. The film begins by engineering this
clash between the vision of identity as pure appearance and the mortality of
the body, between the image viewed as the emblem of a new society of the
spectacle and a seemingly archaic conception of cinema as an index of reality.
And the stage for these dramatic and philosophical conflicts is the terrain of
the city.
Over the course of its ninety minutes, the film chronicles, in a close approximation of real time, Clos movement through and interactions with
various locations in the city: the home of a fortune-teller, who foresees death
in Clos future; a caf and a hat shop with a friend; at home with her assistant,
her lover, and two of her collaborators in the pop music business; an art studio
and movie theater with another friend; and in the longest segment of this film,
Parc Montsouris with a young soldier about to ship out to Algeria and face his
own mortality. Clo and the soldier eventually head to the hospital PitiSalptrire to learn her diagnosis, which is delivered in an almost glib and
anticlimactic manner: while sitting at the wheel of his convertible, the doctor
reveals that she has cancer but gives her an optimistic (and perhaps excessively positive) prognosis. The narrative is structured around two hours of
anticipation and delay, with the dispensation of medical truth posited as the
end of the story that began with the fortune-teller and that alternative revelation of Clos fate, but the diagnosis functions more like an obligatory and
perfunctory resolution of that question than the conclusion of her story. For
that reason, when Varda distributed surveys about the film to members of the
Cin-Club des Avant-Premires, critic Serge Daney responded to the question
Will the young woman, Clo, die? with the phrase AUCUNE IMPORTANCE.67 If this seemingly crucial detail is of no importance, what matters
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instead, he suggests, is the exchange of looks among the viewers, the other
characters in the film, and this woman ostensibly condemned to death. If illness serves as a pretext that launches the film, Clo then embarks on a journey
with only a tangential relationship to the plot and its rigid progress from
minute to minute and event to event. At once literal and figural, her walk
through Paris is a voyage of self-discovery that could devolve into the kind
of clich suggested in that common idiom; but the film complicates that familiar narrative as it follows Clos physical itinerary through the mise-en-scne
of contemporary Paris and charts her position within that adamantly concrete
space.
Clos path through the city provides one of the most extensive examples of
what Tom Conley calls the cartographic impulse in cinema, and in her 1995
autobiography, Varda includes her own map of the territory depicted in the
film, complete with stills plotted on the location where they were filmed.68
Readily identifiable landmarks and signs appear throughout the film, but few
of them fall in the category of tourist icons, like those dotting the cityscape in
Breathless. Instead, the film follows an idiosyncratic trajectory through particular neighborhoods and records their incidental happenings on a particular
day. The film maps both a city recognizable to its inhabitants and the accidents of the moment. Underlying this cartographic dimension of the film is
the assumption that cinema corresponds in a direct way to reality. At the same
time, however, a reconstruction of Vardas cinematic atlas of Paris fails to account for the most transformative scenes in the film, the scenes that focus less
on Clos location than her movement through space and her physical, embodied encounter with the simultaneously spectacular and material world visible along the way. In her 1975 documentary Daguerrotypes, a film dedicated
to her own Paris neighborhood and its inhabitants, Vardas voice-over characterizes the streets pervasive atmosphere and its resident types as a mlange of theater and reality:
it all began because of Chardon Bleu, an odd boutique two steps from
my home on rue Daguerre. The time as it passes at Chardon Bleu made
me sensitive to the time of small business. Rather than cross into the
looking glass, I wanted to pass through the windows on the shops of my
street. Two minutes from Tour Montparnasse, its basically a normal
street, with people who pass by and talk, people who live behind each
door, behind each window. Each morning, the curtain rises at this theater of everyday life: the bread, the milk, the hardware, the meat and the
linens.
From her earliest films, Varda conceives of space, and especially urban space,
as a thtre du quotidien, and Clo, with its windows and mirrors, its spectators and people on display, is one of her most thoughtful meditations on the
interaction between theatricality and the real. The city provides the sets and
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the props, and Clo has comfortably assumed her assigned position in this
environment, as a beautiful object to be worshipped by fans and passersby
alike. She abides in a hall of mirrors where she gazes at her stunning and
youthful appearance and confronts its manifest contradictions, given the precariousness of her health. In this atmosphere of alternately empty and aggressive images, Clo learns to appropriate the power of the gaze, to see the world
as though through the lens of a camera and reedit the raw materials recorded
in her memory. When she throws off her wig and walks through the city, a
space envisioned according to the logic of spectatorship is transformed into a
space reorganized according to a different new wave ideal: Clo, like her contemporaries from Cahiers du cinma, and like Varda herself, assumes the role
of filmmaker rather than remain an object of the gaze. And that cinema is reconceived in the image of Clo: as a product of the studio released onto the
streets of the city; as an uneasy combination of spectacle and reality; as a vehicle for the circulation of mere images and, as Clo discovers on her journey
through Paris, a phenomenon rooted in particular and tangible locations.
Although Varda asserts that she saw few canonical films before becoming
a director herself (in interviews she cites Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941] as
the only example that comes immediately to mind), she was almost certainly
the most distinctive and accomplished stylist of the early new wave. Before
turning to cinema in her mid-twenties, Varda graduated from art school at
the Louvre and the cole des beaux-arts and worked as a staff photographer
at the Thtre national populaire. The result of that training and practical
experience is visible immediately on the screen: her well-crafted and intricately composed images are far more polished than the rough shots captured
on the fly by many of her peers, including the unsystematically schooled Cahiers contingent. Her earliest feature, La Pointe Courte (1955), explores the
boundaries between an elaborately staged and embellished style on the one
hand and a documentary realism rooted in a specific environment and its
community on the other. She develops in this first film an aesthetic that prefigures the new waves contradictory and energizing combination of a hyperstylized cinema and its seeming opposite, an observational mode based on the
capacity of the camera to register a direct and faithful recording of reality. Set
in a tiny fishing community near Ste, the southern port city where Varda was
raised, the production of La Pointe Courte was inspired by an old friend prevented by illness from returning to that beloved village. Given this unusual
chargeto remain faithful to her own memories of the area and to create a
film that would substitute for an actual voyage to the regionVarda was
compelled to communicate a factual and experiential account of life on the
Mediterranean coast, and the film responds first and foremost to cues arising
from the location rather than the aesthetic preoccupations of the director. The
opening sequence verges on ethnographic filmmaking, as the camera tracks
slowly through unpaved streets and whitewashed buildings, with clotheslines
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festooned overhead. Soon afterward, the camera appears to wander out of

these public spaces and enters the private home of a village family eating
dinner amid the chaos of screaming children and the tragedy of a bedridden
boy on the verge of death. In this and every other scene, Varda conveys basic
facts about the conditions of life in the region: its human and natural environment, its material poverty, and its relationship to the trends and powers emanating from the major cities that seem like distant lands. With a plot that focuses primarily on the plight of a young couple on the verge of divorce, a plot
with little direct connection to the village itself, the primary medium for that
thick description and reportage is the cinematic image.
Varda alternates these conspicuous allusions to documentary cinema and
the quotidian life of the village with a mode of portraiture more reminiscent of
fashion magazines or the most self-consciously artificial compositions of Fellini. Steven Ungar highlights the importance in La Pointe Courte, and elsewhere in Vardas oeuvre, of theatrical scenarios and staged photographs, including tableaux vivants featuring human incarnations of paintings.69 The
tableau is one of the apotheoses of cinematic mise-en-scne, as it constructs an
image that sacrifices narrative to an extravagant pause, to the drama of poses
and gestures, to bodies enveloped by objects and space.70 Elsewhere in the film,
Varda pursues a realism predicated on location shooting and faithfulness to
an unfolding situation discovered on the ground, but in these theatrical moments the film marks itself as a creation of the studio and a finished product of
the directors skilled hand. These two worlds coexist uneasily in the film, just
as the couple coexists awkwardly with their surroundings and the villagers.
These young lovers reveal themselves as outsiders (though the male protagonist, played by Philippe Noiret, was born there) by their tendency to lapse into
philosophical discourses about love and their penchant for long bouts of silent
meditation, usually side by side. Virtually wordless but extravagant like a masquerade, these tableaux are the height of theatricality, and as the film moves
from chapter to chapter, from an account of village life to the collapsing relationship between the lovers, these two conceptions of cinema are juxtaposed
with an almost palpable incongruity. The couple has returned from the city,
and the baggage they carry is an aesthetic derived from the modish mannerisms and demeanor of the city. Among the many dramas staged in La Pointe
Courte is the encounter between this unabashedly theatrical style and a documentary ethic with roots in Italian neorealism and films like Viscontis work
La Terra Trema, with its painstaking attempt to capture the social and economic conditions in a Sicilian fishing village. In her first feature, Varda experiments with a formula found five years later in the work of Truffaut and
Godard, though with different variables. Rather than set B-movie gangsters
loose in real locations of Paris, Vardas film brings equally artificial figures, a
couple of moody and brooding young lovers, to a rural village that stages their
own confrontation with reality.
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Clo from 5 to 7 also presents a variation on that new wave formula, but the
setting poses a new array of problems, as the film unfolds in the heart of the
French culture industry, the milieu of pop stars and high fashion, an environment in which images matter as much as concrete spaces and material objects.
Vardas ornate compositions present a dazzling mise-en-scne of mirrors and
plate-glass reflections, which reflect the image of Clo herself and an ephemeral city glimpsed as it glides by outside. In the most stunning of these sequences, Clo tries on hats while the camera tracks around her, recording her
face directly and then her reflection in a mirror. As pedestrians, cars, buses,
and even a parade with horse-mounted, dress-uniformed cavalry officers
progress up the street, the camera captures the city through a window and
then its likeness in a mirror (Figure 2.14). Coupled with the crystalline clarity
of every shot, this steady progression from the bodies and objects themselves
to their reflection creates a vertiginous sensation, as the film blurs the distinction between Clo and her mirror image, or actual cars and their copies consisting only of light on glass. Varda links the transformation of Clo into a
disembodied image to the dematerialization of architecture and the stuff of
everyday urban life, suggesting that this heroines destiny, foretold by a psychic and perhaps confirmed by a doctor, is intricately intertwined with the fate
of the city under a cohort of technocrats. In Daguerrotypes, Varda expresses
her desire to move away from the mirror and pass through clear glass into the
bustle and commotion of the city, but she also emphasizes that reality itself is
organized in a theatrical manner, as a series of performances with a Parisian
neighborhood as the setting, a cast of locals, and props provided in the course
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of normal commerce. In Clo from 5 to 7, even the windows resist that smooth
passage from the spectral city of images to an authentic existence beyond mirrors and glass. The material foundation of the city has become a phantasmagoria shimmering in an ambiguous middle ground between spectacle and reality. Clos ubiquitous image circulates within a parade of insubstantial
bodies and spaces, and her transformation from an object of the gaze to a
subject of vision occurs only after she learns to see the city otherwise.
The moment in the narrative when Clo becomes a seer rather than an
image corresponds exactly with her walk through a city that alternates incessantly between the real and the artificial. At this point in the film, Clo flees
from all the people who continue to elevate her into an icon of beauty and
femininity, including her lover and the songwriting duo who stop by her
home to sound out their latest creations. Clo tears off her wig, dresses all in
black, stops by the Caf du Dme, and begins walking rapidly but with obvious purpose through the alleys of Montparnasse. As in Hiroshima mon amour,
this march through city streets combines two radically different cinematic traditions and ways of engaging with the world disclosed to the camera. The sequence begins with documentary-like images of the streets and passersby seen
from Clos perspective, and the soundtrack accentuates the click-clack of her
footsteps on the pavement, the clatter of shoes on stone standing in for her
absent body. This walk through the city is the moment when the world outside the studio, the Paris that existed long before the shooting began and persists long after the director calls cut, is appropriated for the purposes of
mise-en-scne. But Varda almost immediately begins combining this direct
recording of urban reality with memories from the immediate pastpeople
drinking at a caf, a street performer swallowing a frog, all viewed earlier in
the filmand staged images whose barely moving subjects resemble photographic portraits. These tableau-like pictures of Cleos songwriters and her
lover belong in a separate category with only a tenuous connection to documentary cinema or memory: they advertise not their authenticity but their
artificiality, elegance, and coldness. The unquestionably real spaces of the city
are intercut with images whose actual references points are either subjective
or nonexistent. Clo is forced to navigate not only the streets of Paris but also
a simulated space that exists in several registers of reality and fantasy as the
same time. The scenes that correspond directly to her point of view also bear
traces of their conditions of production, as the pedestrians who cross paths
with Clo stare into the camera with the sometimes knowing and sometimes
uncomfortable look of people being filmed. A camera has replaced the body
of Clo in order to gather the footage for this sequence, and the deliberate and
empowering act of walking in the city is interchangeable with the process of
filming it. The montage sequence then consists of memories and imagined
scenes spliced together as though at an editing table. When Clo begins to
refuse her assigned and previously embraced position as object of the gaze,
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she enlists the tools and practices of filmmaking in the hope of reconstructing
her own subjectivity. Toward the end of the sequence, she encounters another
street performer, this time engaged in a form of self-mutilation. This segment,
at once reflecting her subjective fears of a cancer that threatens her own body
and representing the violent potential of any crowded and anonymous space,
suggests that the city has become a threatening and traumatic site. At this
moment, there is no longer a boundary between her own memories and the
documented city, between montage and mise-en-scne, between a world reordered by the director and reality recorded by the camera.
In her account of the genesis of the film, Varda writes: I imagined a character walking in the city, a character troubled by her mortality and by a nagging fear: do beauty, mirrors, and the gazes of others fail to protect us?
Varda asks.71 But at the heart of the project was a bet on Paris, a wager that
the answer to those fundamental questions about the power of the look and
the vulnerability of the body could be found in Clos exploration of specific
streets and neighborhoods in the Paris of the early 1960s.72 And if the film realizes that ambition, its success is in large part due to the synergistic relationship between Clo and its urban setting, whose beauty, mirrors, and crowds of
admiring gazes are unlikely to provide much protection in an age of rapid
modernization. Her quest in the film is to locate herself outside the circulation
of ephemeral images and within a modernity than endures. Like her counterparts in Hiroshima mon amour, Breathless, and Elevator to the Gallows, Clo
walks through the city in order to confront the artificiality that infiltrates and
contaminates reality itself and to rediscover what remains after the staging of
the world. And on the way she discovers cinema.
{3}
New Wave Futures
The French new wave was supposed to be a vision of the future. In his essay on
the sorry state of French cinema in 1957, Truffaut celebrates the adventurers
who will make the films of tomorrow and transforms the director from a functionary to a swashbuckling hero who attacks the holdovers in a stagnant film
industry and guides a new generation of artists. The future glimpsed by Truffaut
and company was supposed to be the domain of those auteurs. The future
would also be made by young people in the new wave imagination, and the city
would be the site of that revolution. Although many of the foundational films
of the early new wave end with a note of ambivalence and even regret, they also
contain a glimmer of optimism in the society viewed in a crystal ball. Clo flees
from her excessively image-conscious surroundings and discovers a confidant,
even if both of their fates remain uncertain; Hiroshima and Nevers are capable of naming both their love and the site of their trauma. Even a seemingly
tragic ending like the death of Michel Poiccard comes after such a joyride and
a celebration of cinema that his shooting and collapse on the street loses much
of its gravity; we learn also that the complexities of translation have shielded
Patricia from the true force of his condemnation, and wesee her adopting his
signature gesture (itself, of course, borrowed from Bogart). Even The 400 Blows,
which ends famously with Antoine Doinel blocked by an impassable body of
water and at a standstill, continues in its three sequels with the suggestion that
despite some personal twists and turns, all turned out well in the end for Antoine after his confrontation with a cold reality that day on the beach.
By the mid-1960s, however, the less idealistic and tantalizing results of
postwar modernization were inescapable in France, even if they had remained
obscure a decade before. If the future foreseen in 1959 and the early 1960s is
not nearly as dark as Louis Malles premonition in Elevator to the Gallows, the
difference stems from Malles decision to leap forward to the last stages of an
ongoing transformation rather than lingering in the present. At the moment
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of their appearance on-screen, the films pod-like motel structures were only
slightly more recognizable than a spaceship or lunar base. The other early
new wave films are documents not of an urbanity to come but of the period
of transformation itself, with all its paradoxes and possibilities. The genre
usually dedicated to the representation of the future, science fiction, surfaces
only on rare occasions in French cinema during the 1960s, and with films like
Breathless or the gangster pictures of Melville already so artificial in their fundamental, B-movie conceits (if not their realization), science fiction seems
almost like an unnecessary embellishment. Astonishing spectacles have
already fused with the stuff of everyday life. When science fiction does emerge
in the 1960s, the genre is distinguished by its shocking ordinariness, by the
decision to locate fantastic tales or time travel or interstellar warfare in actual
locations in contemporary Paris. Just as other new wave pictures combine
theatricality and documentary realism, the sci-fi films of the period situate
their fantastic narratives in recognizable environments in the city. The future
will result in a bizarre reconfiguration of urban life, these films suggest; it will
also be dystopian and authoritarian, and its harbingers have already arrived.
Godards Capital of Pain

Godards Alphaville begins almost literally in medias res: in an already entrenched totalitarian state ruled by a technologically sophisticated ruler, his
nearly omniscient and omnipotent computer, and his legions of henchmen
and amid the things, including robotic, barely human figures, that both stand
in metonymically for this dehumanizing system and provide a mechanism for
its reinforcement. Godards narrative focuses on an outsider, in this case a spy
from another region of the galaxy and another genre, the detective Lemmy
Caution, played by the American actor and French film legend Eddie
Constantine. In typical Godardian fashion, at least in the earlier part of his
career, the director draws his inspiration from the possibilities of juxtaposition and hybridization, as one mode of storytelling and filmmaking collides
with another to concoct, in the ideal scenario, a surprising and insightful
vision inaccessible from any single perspective. In Breathless, that formula
brings together a documentary mode and the gangster film, while in Alphaville
the quintessential hard-boiled detective confronts the virtually lobotomized
agents of a society numbed by satisfaction and enslaved by their power-mad
leader. But as in Godards earlier films, this seemingly genre-driven plot is
situated in actual environments in Paris, as he stages a clash between characters framed as artificial creations of the movies and the city that surrounds
them. Shot on location in areas where high-rise housing and office architecture dominate the skyline without the contradictions posed by the persistence
of history, the film presents that conception of the city as one of the key
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figure 3.1 Alphaville.
characteristics of the totalitarian society depicted on-screen (Figure 3.1). In

Masculin fminin (1966), one of the Godard films with the most footage captured on location, the camera alights on everyday street scenes and sites where
massive construction and demolition projects are taking place (Figure 3.2).
Alphaville is the future city devoid of its past, perhaps the first of many successive Alphavilles, each built on the ruins of its predecessor, each the new
beginning of a sequence that soon lies aborted and abandoned.
The space of Alphaville is also thoroughly mediatized, a landscape of screens
and slogans. In the headquarters of the citys intelligence apparatus, televisions
figure 3.2 Masculin fminin.
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figure 3.3 Alphaville.
are the preferred form of ornament, including a sculptural arrangement of

monitors in triplicate that anticipates later experiments with television art
(Figure 3.3).1 This signals Godards increasing fascination and concern with
the rise of ambient images and their transformation into the setting of everyday life, and in films like Masculin fminin, one marker of the expansion of a
consumer society is the infiltration of television into the most commonplace
environments, including the laundromat (Figure 3.4). Alphaville presents a
figure 3.4 Masculin fminin.
New Wave Futures
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full-fledged society of the spectacle rather than the speculative version seen in
Godards films set in the present. With its ubiquitous banks of computers and
contemporary architecture, the film constructs a narrative of the future out of
the raw materials available in the present, portending a totalitarianism to
come in those already existing spaces and linking that political vision with the
rise of an information society. Godard and Coutard shot much of the footage
at night, with sensitive film stock pushed to its limits, and together they constructed a prototypical noir setting, but with contemporary Paris and its future
avatar substituting for Los Angeles of the 1930s.2 The film frames, in other
words, a conflict between modes of filmmaking drawn from the past, science
fictional narratives set in the future, and the modernizing environment of
Paris in the 1960s. Unlike Markers more dystopian La Jete, however, Alphaville ends with the destruction of this city and its totalitarian empire, as
Caution and Natacha Von Braun assassinate the leader of Alphaville (her
father), leave his henchmen staggering and dazed, and reduce the computerized brain of Alpha 60 to smoking ruins. They then hop into a car and head
down one of the citys many highways to safety in the borderlands. Godards
political radicalization and his experimentation with the possibilities of a politicized form of cinema, the most remarkable facet of his career over the
course of the 1960s, emerges in nascent form in this science fiction film that
portends a totalitarian future and, through its fantasy of escape, a captivating
way out.
In later films like Weekend, there is no exit from the apocalyptic landscape, and with its famous reel-long traffic jam and almost sculptural accumulation of wrecked and burning cars, the countryside has succumbed
to the process of modernization that began with the city. Every space has
become a set,every body a character, every violent act a gag, every pool of
blood just watered-down ketchup. And as the main characters dig through
a cars twisted steel and dead bodies to find a valuable handbag, the ideal
envisioned in the early days of Cahiers has been realized: this, Godard suggests, is a world consisting entirely of mise-en-scne, where objects have
become props in the role-playing of life itself, where architecture can be
torn down and rebuilt at will, a world remade according to the logic of
cinema. If Godard the critic looked for the underlying system to connect
the barely traced lines among the elements of mise-en-scne, Godard the
filmmaker has found that the cinematic image is not a mechanism for laying
bare that political and economic order. At the end of Made in the USA, after
the extravagant details of a political conspiracy and murder plot are revealed, the response from the films main characterLszl Kovcs, one of
Michel Poiccards pseudonyms in Breathless, and one of many explicit links
between the film that launched the new wave era in Godard and the one
that helped draw it to a closeis an infantile stream of emptyphrases designed to obscure reality by denying it and drowning it out: mise-en-scne,
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mise-en-scne, mise-en-scne, he says. Once the cinematic strategy that

foregrounded the relationships among a film, a director, and the world on
a screen, mise-en-scne has become synonymous with deception, falsification, the manipulation of reality by obscure forces behind the scenes. In the
cinematic mode of production, moving images are the system itself.
Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966)a backlash against the
dynamic modernization of Frances economic miracle, the nations initiation
into a world of mass-produced automobiles motoring along ever-extending
highway networks, and cities spiraling outward in their wakeends with the
stillest of shots, a moment of anticinema (see Figure I.1). Boxes of brightly
packaged cleaning products stand upright on the lawn of a suburban housing
project, echoing the equally self-promoting and utterly uniform buildings in
the background. Production stills from the film show Godard assiduously arranging these boxes of Lava, Ajax, and Matic: mass-produced in the factory,
bundled into cartons, shelved, thrown in a cart, a bag, and a trunk, they rest
finally before the camera in a deliberate, even serene arrangement, a still life.
Atget wandered around Paris early in the morning, its streets deserted, objects
littered on the ground, still teeming with significance from the night before;
and he photographed those relics of urban life, in Benjamins words, like
scenes of crime, photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence.3
Zolas characters rambled through les Halles, the belly of Paris, marveling at
the colossal still lifes that took shape like the most amazing paintings; and
he wrote about the enormous productive forces, the capacity for creation and
commerce on display in the old market district.4 Arman gathered garbage
throughout the city, catalogued his discoveries, and presented them in overflowing displays of prosperity in ruins; his most renowned installation,
LePlein (1960), combines an illusion of abundance, the menace of overflowing mounds of waste, and the possibility that these objects might be retrieved
from the trash heap and then renamed and redeemed after their veneer of
novelty has been destroyed by obsolescence. Godard, in contrast, shoots the
deserted Parisian suburbs like an adman embellishing the goods on offer in a
television commercial or a glossy magazine spread. These are the genres best
suited to this historically new terrain, he suggests, because every act, including
the planning and construction of cities, has been reduced to an act of mise-enscne. Godards final shot admits no confidence or possibility of redemption
into the material world of the late 1960s Parisian suburb. It envisions that
material culture as an exercise in sameness differentiated through marketing,
an abundance of signs and images masking an absence of humanity. A still life
with commodities, Godards final shot draws its power from the incongruity
between the standardized content and its exquisite framing, between the loudness of the packaging and the sacral silence of their presentation. Godard,
always fond of auguring endsthe next year, he would conclude Weekend
(1967) with an intertitle declaring Fin de conte. Fin de cinmatransforms
New Wave Futures
135
these products to announce the end of the still life, for a genre whose obsessive
attention transforms its objects into something beyond surfaces or labels can
only recede in importance when those objects are reduced to tokens in a ubiquitous political economy of signs. Godard leaves us with a new city, a young
city, and a city on the verge of consuming itself.
Tatis Wager
If Godard developed into the loudest voice of disenchantment in the French
new wave, a voice that grew increasingly confrontational and didactic at the
end of the 1960s, the filmmaker who continued to represent the ambivalence
of the early new wave was an old-school physical comedian, Jacques Tati.
Two decades older than the key figures in both the Cahiers and Left Bank
groups, and a maker of genre pictures rather than art house films, Tati is
rarely grouped with the major directors of the new wave, except in broad
historical accounts of the period stretching from 1950s to the 1960s, the
height of activity in Tatis career. His Hulot character was a box office and
critical success inboth Monsieur Hulots Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot,
1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), which garnered the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film and catapulted its director to an unexpected level of
public exposure, financial wherewithal, and artistic flexibility. And his success in all those realms depended first and foremost on his capacity as a performer, on an almost balletic control of his tall frame and gangly limbs, on a
body whose spectacular contortions are among the periods most stunning
commentaries on the modernity located in the gap between Hulots frame
and the frame of the image. Hulot always keeps his distance from the modern
environment that surrounds him, sizing it up, weighing its appeal, and
threatening to topple it in an act of comic irredentism. In that sense, Tatis
attempt to reclaim everyday life from the tyranny of objects locates him very
comfortably in the tradition of political comedy pioneered by Charlie Chaplin, and for both actor/directors the body was the vehicle for that critique, the
last site to resist the colonizing force of modernization. Just as Chaplins
body bridles against the mechanical devices designed to feed and confine
him, Tati strays from the manicured and choreographed pathways that guide
human movement in Mon Oncle and Playtime, and he refuses to slump into
the supposedly form-fitting chairs arrayed for his comfort. Chaplin was unquestionably silent cinemas greatest critic of industrial modernity, and by
the late 1950s and especially with Playtime, Tati emerged as one of the most
incisive observers of the successor to that socioeconomic system. With his
weathered trench coat, hat, and umbrella replacing Chaplins signature
bowler and cane, Tati and his infinitely resilient body offered one last refuge
against the prevailing ideology that aspires above all to novelty and smooth
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functioning. And in that sense Playtime remains one of the last holdovers
from a new wave aesthetic and ethic based on the principles of mise-en-scne
and the exploration of bodies in space.
In one of the acute ironies that often accompany the production of capitalintensive artworks like a film, Playtimea movie viewed inevitably as a satire
of the aggrandizing modernist bent in architecture and urban planning, especially the massive building projects on the outskirts of Parisalmost began
with an investment in real estate. After the domestic and international success
of Mon Oncle and a triumphal tour of the United States that culminated in a
summit with the great physical comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd,
Tatis clout in the French film industry was enormous. He returned to France
to pursue two ambitious projects, one called The Illusionist and the other
Recreation, and he leveraged his recent accomplishments to receive exceptional financial backing for the latter, which eventually became known as
Playtime. The film began production with a budget of $2.5 million, and no
expense was spared in its planning phase: it would be shot in 70 millimeter
and would avail itself of actual locations and the most fastidiously constructed
sets in order to capture the overwhelming scale of the vast office and housing
blocks then under construction around the city. Tati considered shooting all
of the early airport scenes at Orly but quickly realized that the airport authorities would balk at his requests for several weeks of shooting in a functioning transportation hub. The logistics of large-scale film production clashed
profoundly with the demands of an economy reorganizing around the imperatives of international commerce and tourism. The more substantial and
time-consuming sequences in new office towers posed an even more daunting
logistical challenge, as there were very few finished projects on the scale Tati
imagined. Like Louis Malle in Elevator to the Gallows, Tati was determined to
project a vision of the future onto the present, to provide both a premonition
of the Paris to come and a document of contemporary desires that were surfacing but still unrealized. Playtime explores not the city that existed at the
time but the logical consequences of the periods aspirations toward modernity: Playtime imagines a space where everything that once embodied the
national past and crystallized the promise the city, including previous manifestations of modern architecture, has vanished.
Tati had to construct this dreamworld himself, and a friend posed one tantalizing option: using the already considerable budget for the film and some
additional capital from real estate developers, Tati could build a genuine office
tower that would first serve as the most imposing set in film history and then
be rented out or sold to investors. In this anecdote, two conceptions of the
city, one associated with cinema and one with real estate speculation, are
roughly equivalent undertakings: if a film is going to consume valuable resources and countless hours of labor in the construction of sets, why not
parlay that expenditure into a profitable investment in economically viable
New Wave Futures
137
projects outside the studio walls? Why not leave a legacy of physical structures
constructed in accordance with the vision of the director? Why not allow the
director of fiction films to become a real world shaper of cities like the architect or government planner? What not blur once and for all the fundamental
distinction between cinema and the city? The funds were insufficient for such
an ambitious undertaking, even on a generously budgeted film, but that
moment in the production history raises as much as any other incident in film
history the constitutive similiarities and differences between the cinematic
and the architectural, between studio space and the city. The environment
constructed under Tatis direction would have to be different from the actually existing city and even from its future manifestations currently under development. And underscoring that difference was the belief that a city should
not be imagined along the lines of a studio set, that society should not be
structured according to the logic of cinema. The most pressing concern for
Playtime was to accentuate the irreducible particularities of both artificial and
real space, rendering the entirely new and disposable environment in all its
undeniable attractions and grotesque consequences. In this sense Tatis film,
with its famously elaborate and expensive sets, veers eerily close to the kind of
location shooting celebrated in the earliest years of the new wave: its location
is the future city under construction, the still unrealized dreamland of the
masses, the logical conclusion of a process already under way in the present.5
When faced with the shortage and inaccessibility of actual architectural
spaces and the financial impossibility of constructing them himself, Tati chose
a more conventional cinematic plan expanded to a historically unprecedented
scale. He acquired a piece of land in Saint-Maurice, a southeastern suburb of
Paris, with the aim of filming Playtime on the site and bequeathing the studio
and its sets to other filmmakers.6 Tati aspired to the creation of an enduring
space for film production, rather than a city itself. And with those goals in
mind, he launched into a set-building project unprecedented in the history of
French cinema and rivaled only by a handful of films, Hitchcocks Rear
Window (1954)with its four-story set featuring fully functioning apartments
equipped with water and electricitymost prominent among them. The skeptical French press soon coined a name for this city sprouting up on the outskirts of Paris: Tativille would become the shorthand used to describe this
visionary glimpse of the modernist city and this undeniably real instance of
cinematic folly. The construction of this city-like set and set-like city would
encounter a string of humanmade and natural disasters, and the films budget
ballooned to $12.5 million, making it the most expensive picture in the history
of French cinema. A freak windstorm destroyed the almost completed sets,
delaying the production schedule by an irrecoverable amount of time, and
Tatis notorious micromanaging and idiosyncratic directorial style added
more impediments to the shoot. The production phase dragged on for two
and half years, and in the process Tati repeatedly tapped alternative sources of
138
funding to keep the project afloat, eventually sacrificing the contributions of

friends, his family estate, and the rights to his own films. The production of
Playtime was a disaster by any standards of fiscal responsibility.
Constructed beyond the farthest verges of neorealism and at the outskirts
of the city, Playtime also tests the limits of standard models of cinematic realism: it contains moments of pure cinema that unfold in long takes and exquisite depth of field; but it explores an entirely artificial, just-completed, and
soon-to-be discarded space where the aging modernity of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century and nature itself exist only in traces: the image of
the Eiffel Tower reflected in the glass of a swinging door; the flowers that
nobody wants to buy but everyone wants to photograph; and the untutored
gestures of Hulot. Tatis earlier films often signal a transition between one
category of space and another, with the process of exiting and entering, the
liminal moment of passage, clearly demarcated in the narrative and mise-enscne. In Mon Oncle, we see the space associated with Tatis Hulot separated
by a crumbling wall from the modern amenities that engulf his sister and her
family. The transition in Mon Oncle carries us from Tatis domain to a modernity so pervasive and all-encompassing that the natural world exists only to be
enclosed and tended, made into props, like the manicured lawn and the fishshaped fountain that spouts an unreliable stream of water into the air. Ross
calls Tati one of the great analysts of postwar French modernization, and she
focuses on the fantasy of communication at play in Tatis world: everything
communicates goes the mantra of Madame Arpel in Mon Oncle, with the
corollary that whatever fails to communicate, whatever impedes the circulation of objects, words, and images, is rendered obsolete and threatened with
eradication.7 The film begins with shots of cars driving down the road, with
their fenders and fins shown in close-up against the background of pavement
and dashed lines, with the tight framing designed to exclude from the image
anything dating back before, say, 1955. Hulot later goes to work at a plastic
hose factory owned by his brother-in-law, and as he travels from his sisters
home to that industrial compound, the aesthetic of the modern suburb is
linked directly to its site of production. But Hulot eventually returns home to
his idiosyncratic neighborhood and building, and he traces an itinerary predicated on the persistence of several historical eras and models of urban space.
In Playtime, almost nothing exists beyond the massive set, with its miniature
airport terminal and skyscrapers painstakingly constructed along the lines
of their counterparts at Orly, La Dfense, and the grands ensembles. Tatis
Playtime portends a nightmare of total enclosure within this thoroughly
modernized environment, inside the films massive set, a world where all is
architecture. This city is also thoroughly mediatized, as its architectural forms
resemble a radio expanded to a massive scale or a television screen with the
urban life on display behind plate-glass windows (see Figure 1.1). With its inescapable glass waiting rooms and maze of cubicles, Playtime marks the end of
New Wave Futures
139
a Bazinian fable of realism precisely because it represents the total absence of

Nature conceived as outside architecture and its replacement by a stage set
constructed for a particular purpose and struck when its moment has passed.
In its nearly perfect duplication of the city then under construction, Tativille
demonstrates that the city itself has become expendable in the age of media
spectacle. Despite his hours of wandering, Hulot is unable to find the wings of
this elaborate stage.
But the title Playtime is not exclusively ironic. We see the process by
which the new skyscrapers and the plastic landscape become a second (or
third) nature, and we see the cars circling a roundabout and enjoying their
failure to circulate. The collapse of this modern project is inevitable, the film
suggests, and after its downfall, the roadway, the cars, the gas stations, all
these icons of postwar French culture, will be repurposed into a playground.
We also see the persistence of patterns of activity and movement that recall
an era before the construction of massive sets, especially in the posture,
gestures, and gait of Hulot himself. Lefebvre describes a new category of
space emerging in the aftermath of postwar modernization, and he alludes to
the survival of the past even in the most artificial environments that begin
with a seemingly final act of eradication: nothing disappears completely,
however; nor can what subsists be defined solely in terms of traces, memories or relics. In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows.
The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring
and remaining actual within that space. Thus primary nature may persist,
albeit in a completely acquired and false way, within second naturewitness urban reality.8 Hulot represents the survival of whatever has been rendered obsolete and abject in the space of modernity. The proliferation of
Hulots in Playtimethe result in part of Tatis desire to retire the character
not by eliminating him from the script but by producing dozens of replicas,
by disseminating him throughout the space of the citysuggests that the
past returns in an almost spectral fashion, materializing then vanishing,
present then absent, everywhere then nowhere. The most humorous and
revealing example of this process comes from the elaborate and distended
restaurant sequence, whose oppressive duration seems designed to follow
the process of hypermodernization from inception to realization to
destruction, all in one segment of a single film. As the gaudy ornaments
begin to cascade down from the ceiling and the customers begin to leave,
Hulot and the buildings doorman find themselves fighting over a glass door
that soon shatters. Because the guests continue to come and go, the doorman
grabs the brassy handle and opens and closes the missing door, his arms
swinging back and forth, as though the heavy but transparent object
still existed. Hulot also bodies forth the past, as he walks through a now vanished city whose traditional architecture and patterns of movement survive
only in the peculiar, circuitous paths and intricate, inefficient mannerisms
140
that attest to another way of interacting with objects and space. The uneven
temporalities of postwar modernity are present in the films mise-en-scne.
The French new wave was supposed to be a vision of the future, but it now
offers its most radical possibilities as a record of the transition between two
stages of modernization. Tatis Playtime and the other new wave city films
exist at the threshold between two eras, and they continue to hold out the
alluring possibility of walking through doors that no longer exist.
{ part ii }
The Boys from Fengkuei
{4}
The Urban Archipelago

taiwans new wave and the east asian
economic boom
In 1987 over fifty filmmakers and critics signed and published the Taiwan
Cinema Manifesto, at once an assault on the islands film establishment and
a plea for another cinema located outside the commercial cinema.1 The
production and circulation of this document represented one of the major
literary events in the history of world cinema, the equivalent for Taiwans new
wave of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, which launched the New German
Cinema, Dogme 95s vow of chastity, and a handful of similar attempts to
intervene in a visual and aural medium through the imposition of mere
words. In its direct challenge to an older generation in the domestic film industry, this brief statement also recalled Truffauts 1954 essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, the young critics broadside against the tradition of quality and cinma de papa. The Taiwanese manifesto unfurled a
banner under which loosely affiliated members of a small film community
could gather both in opposition to the established power brokers and in anticipation of films to come. Its emphasis on historically aware filmmaking
and cultural self-determination also resonated with a widespread nativist
literary movement then exploring particularly Taiwanese (rather than panChinese) conceptions of identity. Beyond these ripples in the film culture in
Taiwan, the manifestos impact in the international arena was also profound.
As Marjorie Perloff argues in the context of the Italian Futurists, manifestoes
are often works of art whose value exceeds the explicit demands and proclamations in the text.2 While the Taiwan Cinema Manifesto lacks the flair of the
Second Futurist Proclamation, with its unforgettable title Lets Kill off the
Moonlight, it fortified the position of Taiwan, which for years had struggled
for international recognition in the diplomatic sphere, on the map of world
cinema.3 Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien had already achieved some recognition with a string of modest festival successes in the mid-1980s, but in a
framework that usually identified them as auteurs, with all the individualist
144
connotations of the term. The eventual incorporation of these films and artists into a narrative about Taiwan allowed the stunning work then appearing
on screens at home and abroad to develop into a collective vision rather than
the eccentric products of sui generis directors. The manifesto and its aftermath confirmed that something surprising and remarkable was happening
not just in discrete pictures by one or two artists but across the whole of Taiwanese film culture. The document also signaled the beginning of a gradual
migration of the vital center of art cinema from the European new waves of
the 1960s and the Third and imperfect cinema of Latin America to East Asia
at the moment of the regions economic miracles. From the late 1980s to the
mid-1990s, a film festival without an entry from Taiwan was no longer considered on the cutting edge of world cinema, and programmers competed
with each other to show the latest work from Hou, Yang, or Tsai Ming-liang.
A marginal location in geopolitical terms, an island on the edge, Taiwan
suddenly found itself at the center of global art cinema, and it established a
template for other directors and film industries across the region and the
world.4
As the 1990s progressed, however, Taiwanese cinema began to lose its
allure in the international film circuit. While Hou and Yang remain canonized
figures with an avid following among critics, cinephiles, and a new generation
of artists in Asia, younger directors from Taiwan have returned to the margins
of both the domestic and international film business, with Taiwanese audiences almost exclusively interested in American and Hong Kong blockbusters
and festivals looking elsewhere (across the Straits to mainland China, to
Korea, to Thailand) for the latest cinematic fashion. Film professionals in
Taiwan have since characterized the famous manifesto not as the advent of a
new era in the history of world film but as a death knell for the islands already
wounded industry and a self-defeating initiative for the directors themselves.
According to these producers, critics, and filmmakers, the new wave ebbed
toward a tragic conclusion but managed to live long enough to kill off the
Taiwanese film industry for a generation.5 In an average year at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, films produced in Taiwan regularly garnered less
than 1 percent of the domestic box office; even in a spectacularly successful
year like 2002, when the record-shattering success of Chen Kuo-fus Double
Vision (Shuang tong) skewed the numbers upward, Taiwanese films earned
only 2 percent of the receipts. Hong Kong films usually earn 16 percent, and
Hollywood receives a vast majority of the approximately 95 percent that remains. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis argue that with regard
to consumption, Hollywood is the de facto national cinema of Taiwan.6 And
international exposure and triumphs at Cannes or Venice no longer guarantee domestic acclaim. While Taiwanese films still earn respectful screenings
and occasional awards from major festivals, a badge of honor on the art
filmscene, their domestic marketing campaigns often conceal that fact and
145
accentuate (or manufacture) links between these films and their competition
at the multiplex: their youthful stars, their tie-ins with popular media, their
association with popular genres. A more precisely delineated periodization of
Taiwanese cinema, such as the one offered by Peggy Chiao (Jiao Xiongping),
would pinpoint the rise of a first new wave with the debut films and ascendance to domestic and festival renown of Yang and Hou, then the emergence
of a second new wave with directors like Tsai, and finally a post-new-cinema
era characterized by the increasingly important role of global blockbusters
and brand-name film franchises.7 Taiwans new wave therefore occupies an
ambivalent position in film history: directors from this small and diplomatically isolated island with 23 million inhabitants have produced some of the
greatest works of art in the history of cinema, an achievement of breathtaking
proportions; but this narrative of success has also become a cautionary tale
about filmmakers and producers excessively devoted to art cinema, overly
covetous of international acclaim, and inadequately attentive to the demands
of the young people who buy the lions share of movie tickets. The innovative
and modern cinema envisioned by Taiwans new wave rarely coincided with
the novelty visible elsewhere in an increasingly dynamic society experiencing
an economic transformation and all its attendant social ramifications. While
many filmmakers in Taiwan still aspire to another cinema, that has become
an increasingly solitary undertaking, with few investors, theaters, and spectators willing to support a failed revolution.
To characterize the following three chapters as a narrative of unrealized
ambitions will perhaps doom them to the same fate as the film industry they
describe. Failure is an orphan, and readers in search of the new, the vital, the
globally imperative will be tempted to skip to the subsequent section on the
mainland Chinese new wave of the 1980s and beyond. But the premise of this
section is that the collapse of Taiwans new wavein particular the discrepancy between its conception of aesthetic modernism and the modernity under
construction elsewhere in Taiwanese societyprovides a paradigmatic and
cautionary example for all subsequent cinematic new waves. Taiwans new
cinema surfaced at the beginning of a series of new waves sweeping the international film festival circuit in the 1980s. At the vanguard of this global tendency, the films of Hou, Yang, and Tsai (and many other figures with a more
limited but still important filmography) developed a style characterized by
austere formal features: the refusal of a glitzy studio aesthetic; a preference for
location shooting; and especially a revival of the long shot/long take aesthetic
and a cinema organized around intricate mise-en-scne, a strategy that led
some critics to dub these Taiwanese filmmakers the master shot school. A
generation of young East Asian filmmakers, with their penchant for slowmoving, minutely choreographed scenes and a meticulous attention to the
representation of space now fall under the rubric of master shot directors or,
on occasion, in a more personalized homage to one of the greatest influences
146
on contemporary cinema from the region, the school of Hou.8 James Udden
points out that the overall trajectory in Hous career has moved toward ever
longer takes, beginning with an average of 17 seconds per shot in The Sandwich
Man, expanding to 35 seconds in Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen, 1986),
and topping out at 158 seconds in The Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua,
1998).9 Tsais films regularly average over fifty seconds per shot, with The Hole
(Dong, 1998) stretching to over one minute, and other filmmakers from
Taiwan, including Wu Nian-jen, Lin Cheng-sheng, and Chang Tso-chi, construct films around long and elaborately staged shots.10 The typical contemporary Hollywood film ranges from under two to ten seconds per shot, as do
Hong Kongs equally kinetic action pictures, which fall at the faster end of that
spectrum, and its slightly more deliberate romances and comedies. As a resurgent global Hollywood rebounded from its slump of the mid-1960s and discovered a new economic model constructed around the windfall profits of the
blockbuster, critics viewed the careful and unhurried realism of Taiwanese
cinema as the antithesis of the spectacles spawned by the astounding success
of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) or the action cinema produced in Hong Kong
by John Woo and others. Over the next two decades, filmmakers and producers influenced by the blockbuster mentality designed high-concept films
around an iconic image (the vertical shark poised to strike, the white-suited
dancer with his arm thrust upward, the Mexican standoff) with the films
brand and franchise omnipresent, instantly recognizable, and marketable
across media platforms.11 Taiwanese films were not only produced outside the
immediate orbit of Hollywood, their audiences at film festivals and art house
theaters envisioned them as an antidote to the global blockbuster, with all of
its implications of homogenized aesthetics and cultural imperialism. In contrast to the blockbuster, a phenomenon of economics and energy, Taiwans
new wave was inefficiency and slowness made visible, its images designed to
linger on the screen far beyond the duration necessary to convey a single overriding idea. The brand name associated with Taiwanese cinema was intimately connected to the multiplicity and endurance of the master shot. In the
mise-en-scne of Taiwans new wave, art house and festival audiences saw
everything that the blockbuster was not, though that mentality also positioned
Taiwanese cinema as a structural outsider to mainstream practices of film
production and consumption.
Yet that narrative of aesthetic and political marginality overlooks two absolutely crucial dimensions of Taiwan cinema and society in the new wave
era. First, the discovery of the Taiwanese new wave in all its structural
marginalityas the location of another cinema, as the privileged site of artistic innovation in a commercialized film worldoccurred when Taiwan was
experiencing a transition to a new stage in its economic miracle, as the heavy
industrialization of the 1970s gave way to an information-based, technologydriven, and consumption-oriented economy over the course of the 1980s.
147
Relegated to political isolation after 1971, when the Peoples Republic of China
(PRC) assumed the United Nations seat that the Republic of China had
occupied since 1945, the government of Taiwan pursued a strategy of progressive integration into as many international economic and cultural institutions
as its ambiguous diplomatic status would allow. Government officials compensated for Taiwans isolation by prioritizing innovation in targeted
technology sectors and vitality in the cultural sphere. By the end of the 1980s,
a period of unprecedented economic dynamism, Taiwan had become a manufacturing hub specializing in various high-tech industries, especially the production of computers and semiconductors. Taiwans cultural and political
authorities also advertised the island as the repository of the imperial collection of classical Chinese art and as a center of contemporary artistic production, especially in cinema. At once an outsider in a world of multiplexes and
akey component of the late twentieth-century film canon, the Taiwanese new
wave flourished at the moment when Taiwan itself was negotiating its
admission into a globalizing capitalist order. Suspended on the verges of that
market system, Taiwan rendered inadequate the common spatial metaphors
of inside and outside, margin and center. In late capitalism, writes Fredric
Jameson in his essay on Yangs The Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi, 1986), even the
center is marginalized.12
Second, the Taiwanese new wave resists its habitual characterization as an
utterly marginal cinema because it overlaps in significant ways with its more
commercial counterparts. Despite the very real and profound differences in
the look and sound of these films, and despite their significance as an alternative to the blockbusters emanating from Hollywood and Hong Kong, Taiwans
new cinema was from the outset a government and studio undertaking. As
Yeh and Davis argue, officials responded to a crisis in domestic film production at the end of the 1970s with policies designed to cultivate a new generation of filmmakers, creating an intimate connection between directors, major
studios, and the state cultural apparatus. The result, however, was not a
straightforward exercise in commerce or propaganda but an author-centered
system in which directors . . . take precedence over national cinemas and the
nation-state.13 Even as that auteurist industry took shape, its key artists straddled the boundary between the industrial mold of genre movies and the
individualist paradigm of art cinema. Hou began his career as a director of
well-made but relatively conventional romantic comedies, and while he is best
known in critical circles for his historical trilogy (City of Sadness [Beiqing
chengshi, 1989], The Puppetmaster [Ximeng rensheng, 1993], Good Men, Good
Women [Hao nan hao n, 1986]) and other films set in the distant or recent
past (Flowers of Shanghai and A Time to Live, a Time to Die [Tong nian wang
shi, 1985), he has devoted equal attention across his career to the condition
ofyoung people migrating to or settling in the city: in The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui lai de ren, 1983), Dust in the Wind, and Millennium Mambo
148
(Qianximanbo, 2001), in the final section of Three Times, and even in Goodbye
South, Goodbye (Nanguo zaijian, Nanguo, 1996), with its suburban sprawl
dotted with karaoke bars and other hideouts and haunts for gangsters. The
most recent of these films star significant local and regional celebrities like Shu
Qi and Chang Chen. Yang is also justly famous for historical epics like
ABrighter Summer Day (Gulingjie shaonian sha ren shijian, 1991), but he is
first and foremost a maker of city films that chronicle the lives of young outcasts and cosmopolitan professionals in Taiwans capital (Taipei Story [Qing
mei zhu ma, 1985], The Terrorizers, A Confucian Confusion [Duli shidai, 1994],
Yi Yi [2000]). Tsais films are all located in urban youth subcultures populated
by thieves, squatters, gamers, and sexual minorities. On the most basic level of
the conceit, these films are far closer to the mainstream of late twentiethcentury and contemporary cinema than the hypothetical opposite extreme
usually designated art.
None of these directors, despite their fascination with youth culture and
cities, and in many cases their use of plot elements and character types drawn
from popular genres like the gangster film, has made a film like Breathless,
with its moments of dynamic editing and enthusiastic embrace of American
popular culture, let alone the more commercial variations on the theme produced in contemporary Hong Kong and Japan. And while Tsai advertises his
affection for Truffaut, and Lee Kang-sheng has developed into his own Antoine Doinellike alter ego, the style of Tsais films never approaches the relatively brisk pacing and narrative economy that Truffaut developed into his
signature style, especially after his early new wave successes. Among the
myriad possibilities open to them, the style that these Taiwanese directors
seized on and developed into their own interface with the world was organized
around the core principle of mise-en-scne, and over the past three decades
that mode of filmmaking has become the defining feature of new wave cinema
in Taiwan and abroad. Their marginality in the domestic and global film economy, their estrangement from the youth audience of today, in short, their
supposed failure, is largely a matter of aesthetics, pacing, and ultimately a
philosophy of cinema at odds with contemporary tendencies in global media
production and consumption. For that reason, it is all the more imperative to
understand how and why Taiwanese filmmakers cultivated and persisted with
that aesthetic even after its consequences were abundantly clear.
Beyond the obvious possibilities related to personality and circumstance
perhaps the filmmakers were attracted to the prestige of international film
festivals and art cinema; perhaps they worked together and developed this
style collectively or admired each other and developed it at a respectful distance; perhaps they grew comfortable making a living and working in this
highly regarded milieu; perhaps they just liked making movies this waythis
chapter offers three explanations for the development of the master shot
school in Taiwan in the 1980s and after. First, filmmakers in Taiwan never
149
experienced the thrill of liberation promised by global popular culture because its primary producer and exporter, the United States, was viewed with
ambivalence or, at worst, as a neocolonial power.14 Anti-colonialism was
already a potent force in Taiwan when the new wave began, and its first films,
including The Sandwich Man, make the foreign presence in Taiwan one center
of attention. The possibility of shocking the film establishment by adapting a
lowbrow B-movie never exerted the same gravitational pull as in France or
Italy, and Taiwans new wave genre experiments tend to rely on more local
and regional references (like Tsais homage in The Hole to the songs of Grace
Chang) and resolve (again, as in The Hole) into a more measured, even sluggish style. Second, the new wave in Taiwan chronicles a process of negotiation
with and partial integration into a global system that remains incomprehensibly vague and abstract. Many of the most concrete manifestations of globalization are spatial, as neighborhoods are demolished and redeveloped with
infusions of local and transnational capital and, as in Taipei, the countryside
becomes an extension of the expanding city imagined as the hub of economic
and cultural production. A cinema of master shots and mise-en-scne, a
cinema of space rather than the cause-effect chains of narrative or the dynamism of editing, is designed to document the emergence of a new spatial order
as in materializes in the cities of Taiwan. Third, that new urban order is already cinematic, though it invokes a particular conception of movies and invites resistance through alternative modes of filmmaking. As Christine Boyer
argues in The City of Collective Memory, the representational model for this
new urbanism of perpetual movement in which fatuous images and marvelous scenes slide along in paradoxical juxtapositions and mesmerizing allusions is the cinema and television, with their traveling shots, jump-cuts, closeups, and slow motion, their exploited experience of shock and the collisions of
their montage effect.15 The devices she cites are all drawn from a cinematic
paradigm modeled on the intensified continuity style of contemporary Hollywood or other classical cinemas rather than the staged reality on view in the
films of Hou, Yang, or Tsai. The city of images apparent in the background of
French new wave cinema has become one of the dominant models of thinking
about, planning, and constructing cities. To hark back to another cinema, a
cinema of bodies in motion on the stage of urban space, is also to envision
another model of the city. The new wave in Taiwan is a glimpse of globalization from the disappearing and endangered margins, from the outside that
finds itself linked, however precariously, to a nascent world system foreshadowed on screens and billboards around the city. The films of Taiwans new
wave represent the mise-en-scne of that liminal and transitional space between indigenous island cultures, the relics of Japanese colonial modernity,
and the unfinished development projects initiated by the Kuomintang on the
one hand and on the other the material culture of globalization glimpsed in
the offing in the early 1980s and slowly washing ashore.
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The Landscape of Healthy Realism

Film culture in Taiwan, like most of its counterparts around the world, was a
transnational venture from its very inception at the tail end of the nineteenth
century, but the absence of a domestic film production capacity under Japanese
colonial rule meant that for half a century the landscapes, villages, and cities
viewed on Taiwans screens were actually Japanese, mainland, or American
locations. Taiwans first screening in 1896 consisted of a Japanese entrepreneur
showing short films with an Edison Manufacturing Company Kinetoscope,
and movies imported from Shanghai and Japan were the standard fare for
much of the first half of the twentieth century. Idiosyncratic Japanese practices
like the enduring figure of the benshi converged with transnational Chinese
film distribution and local linguistic diversity to make Taiwanese cinema a
unique hybrid of various regional film cultures. Domestic projects in Taiwan
were generally limited to coproductions with Japanese filmmakers, and in most
years the output of films with major local input consisted of a single picture, or
none at all. While mainland and Hong Kong filmmakers often look back to a
golden age of Chinese-language film in the 1930s, the heyday of the Shanghai
studios, as a foundational moment in both those cinematic traditions, memories of the olden days of Taiwanese cinema are more ambivalent: film culture in
Taiwan was shaped by a vibrant regional cinema that flourished in the 1920s
and 1930s, but colored by colonial domination, the stunted growth of the domestic industry, and the absence of the islands themselves from films projected
in local theaters. Over time, filmmakers and audiences domesticated the technology and the conventions of classical cinema, but for the first half of the
twentieth century, the most intimate details of mise-en-scne remained foreign.
With strict censorship regulations in place in the immediate postwar era,
the late 1940s and early 1950s also saw limited film production in Taiwan, and
only in the 1960s did a combination of local investment and regional film
trade with Hong Kong begin to invigorate the Taiwanese industry. The most
notable beneficiaries of this moment of openness and largesse were a handful
of directors who learned their craft in Hong Kong but resettled in Taiwan,
including the now legendary figure of King Hu (Hu Jinquan). Born in the
mainland in 1931, Hu relocated to Hong Kong in 1949, and by the end of the
1950s had established himself at the Shaw Brothers Studio as an art director,
screenwriter, and actor, among many other roles. Moving up through the
ranks, he eventually became a director for several Shaw Brothers productions,
including the landmark swordplay film Come Drink with Me (Da zui xia,
1966). Immediately after reviving that genre in Hong Kong, Hu left the Shaw
Brothers stable and spent the next decade, the most productive of his career,
working in Taiwan. With Dragon Inn (Long men kezhan, 1967) he created an
action film designed to compete with other popular international genres of
the period, especially the popular borderless action (mukokuseki akushon)
151
pictures churned out by Japanese and Hong Kong studios and inflated into
one of the most lucrative international franchises by Ian Fleming and the producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Indeed, Hu suggests that
despite its historical setting, Dragon Inn belongs to a kind of ancient Chinese
espionage. It was made to respond to the prevalent James Bond 007 spy
genre.16 For mainland exiles like Hu, Taiwan was also the repository of millennia of Buddhist and Daoist traditions with origins across the Straits, and in
films like A Touch of Zen (Xian, 1970) the verdant mountain landscapes of
Taiwan stand in for inaccessible mainland locations endowed with layers of
history. Taiwan, with a past alien to many directors born on the mainland,
became a studio setting, with its natural environment envisioned as a replica
of Tang and Ming dynasty China rather than a location to be explored and
represented in its own right.17 Unlike the more mundane genre films of the
government-sponsored Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), Hus
combination of ancient tradition and thrilling action sequences was also marketable abroad, and a 1975 jury at Cannes belatedly recognized him and
ATouch of Zen with the first major festival award ever granted a Chinese film
(in this case, a prize for superior technique). Thus began the two-decade
fascination with Taiwanese cinema on the international film circuit, but Taiwans film industry launched itself into that global circulation of images with
an act of displacement and misdirection. Unlike the early Japanese and Shanghai prints distributed in Taiwan, King Hus films were produced in island locations, but only as a stage for chaotic action sequences and a substitute for an
ancient mainland landscape, at once mythical and historical, populated by
flying sword fighters, imperial scholars, and ghosts.
From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, Taiwan-based production companies directed their efforts almost exclusively toward a domestic market of
Taiwanese and Mandarin speakers.18 Although Taiwanese-dialect films were
subjected to censorship restrictions (like all local media at the time), this alternative to the hegemonic and quasi-official Mandarin cinema remained one of
the most vibrant dimensions of the islands cultural life into the early 1970s. In
terms of sheer production volume, Taiwanese-dialect films (taiyu pian) comprised the largest segment of the market until 1968, and in the early 1960s the
annual output of taiyu pian surpassed that of Mandarin films by as many as
120 to 7.19 As Yingjin Zhang argues,
culturally, no equivalent of a bourgeois public sphere or civil society was
conceivable in a police state under martial law, but cinema as a public
space existed and indeed flourished in Taiwan, especially during the
heyday of Taiwanese-dialect films. In a fashion similar to county fairs,
going to see a dialect movie was a routine family event, a kind of communal celebration that resembles, when considered on a large scale, a
grassroots folk arts movement in Taiwan. The experience of a communal
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gathering at a dialect screening thus approximated that of the carnival,

where the sacred becomes profane, the dignified is ridiculed, and
incredibly and therefore more gratifyinglyeven the emperor speaks
Taiwanese dialect on screen.20
If Taiwanese-dialect films began to explore the possibility of a local culture
rooted on the islands themselves rather than the mainland, the Mandarin
cinema in Taiwan was more directly oriented toward the familiar Cold War
goals: these films were at times propaganda vehicles, at times an amusing diversion, and, in the ideal scenario, ideology made entertaining. And that
ideology often prescribed a pastoral vision of Taiwan, a land of minimally invasive modernization, a haven for fishermen and yeoman farmers, a universe
apart from the mass industrialization and collective agriculture of the mainland. Taipei, the temporary capital, remained an afterthought in a cosmology and geopolitics centered on the mainland, and it rarely featured in films
of the period except as an underexplored setting, monumental government
architecture, or a foil to a more wholesome rural life.
Over the course of the 1960s, Taiwans Government Information Office
gradually lifted some censorship restrictions, and filmmakers ventured onto
less familiar terrain. They began to question the pastoral ideal of the previous
decade and address both the reality of rural hardship and the historically new
conditions and contradictions of an urbanizing society. These reforms were in
part market driven: the CMPC developed a more aggressive production and
marketing strategy to pursue overseas markets and win back Taiwanese audiences who had abandoned local productions in favor of more dynamic and
entertaining films imported from Hong Kong. In order to cultivate new foreign markets and recapture the domestic one, the CMPC expanded its stable
of directors and launched a new genre of films known as healthy realism.
With the development of a large-scale domestic production capacity in the
1960s, the focus of Taiwanese cinema broadened from the five thousand years
of Chinese tradition to less spectacular scenes drawn from the particular local
experience of modernity. Healthy realism represented the first stage of that
process, and as Yeh and Davis argue, the key directors of that period exerted a
more substantial influence on the new wave than is generally acknowledged,
especially in their engagement, however gradual and limited, with the conditions of modernization in Taiwan.21
One of the most marked distinctions between the healthy realist generation
and its successors is their treatment of space and its relationship to the process
of modernization. Taiwans new wave films of the 1980s disregard the mythology of the legendary past and its characteristic locations, the primary settings
for King Hu and other martial arts masters; instead, in their treatment of more
recent history and contemporary settings, they begin with the premise that
Taiwans identity has been radically reconstructed in the modern era, and
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especially with the onset of the economic reforms and the urbanization of the
landscape. While healthy realism likewise resists the allure of ancient dynastic
history and represents the modernization of the islands as a significant event,
it nevertheless perpetuates a vision of Taiwan as a primarily rural land with
consistent and enduring values rooted in village and small town life. With few
exceptions, healthy realism differs from the new wave in its insistence that the
road back to the pastwith that past imagined, both temporally and spatially,
as the premodern countrysideremains open. Its mise-en-scne and narratives revolve around the timeless attractions of that pastoral setting. Factories
sprout up in the landscape, characters travel to and even settle in cities, but the
topography of Taiwan remains decidedly rural. These melodramatic narratives and uplifting tales developed a substantial following in Taiwan and
among overseas Mandarin speakers, and they constitute one of the golden
ages in Taiwan cinema, though they also respect the boundaries of politically
acceptable discourse. They insist on the fundamental health of Taiwanese society while tempering that optimism with a cautious and tentative realism.
The CMPC ventured into international prestige markets with these early
healthy realist films, and the work of Lee Hsing garnered awards at festivals in
Hong Kong and Japan. The marketing campaign for Oyster Girl (Ke n; Li Jia
and Lee Hsing, 1964) introduced the film as a giant work that signifies the
take-off of domestic productions, a challenge to the stage of international
cinema and a march toward overseas markets.22 With such grand and global
ambitions in mind, the Government Information Office acknowledged that
severe censorship restrictions could not remain in place, though in the last
instance, after raising potent questions, filmmakers were required to present a
harmonious and prosperous image of Taiwan to itself and the world. Loosened political restraints and market demands therefore alternated with vigilant oversight, and the openly critical dimension of the films was dampened
by mandatory observance of the six nosno privileging of social darkness,
no instigation of class hatred, no pessimistic tones, no romantic sentiments,
no meaningless creation, and no erroneous ideology.23 A modern cinema devised with young urban audiences in mind is almost inconceivable under
those conditions, and early new wave films like Yangs Taipei Story appear to
embrace the negativity forbidden in the 1960s.
CMPC productions like Oyster Girl and Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia,
1965)both directed by Lee Hsing, the most renowned healthy realist
filmmakerreflect the limitations and the possibilities of their prudently innovative era.24 These films depict a more youthful Taiwan challenging its
quasi-official identity as the timeless repository of an ancient Chinese tradition; they also allude to the enormous generation gap separating a younger
cohort raised primarily in the new Taiwan and an older cohort with roots on
the mainland. But filmmakers had to remain content merely to acknowledge
the existence of social turbulence. Reminiscent of socialist realism and its
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repertoire of types, these films revolve around absurdly idealized characters:

beautiful, intelligent, industrious, and, indeed, healthy, they work on oyster
and duck farms, attempting to modernize production practices while maintaining their age-old connection to rural values and a whole way of life in the
countryside. And the fields and markets are brimming with fruit, vegetables,
and other markers of prosperity, all the products of their virtuous labor. The
less hearty antagonists are also grossly stereotyped, with greed the determinant of their every action and malevolence written on their bodies. These villains stand opposed to the course of history itself, as they present an obstacle
to the traumatic but necessary and hopeful process of modernization, and to
the rural family, with its promise of stability and its vital role in the maintenance of traditions. Almost gratuitous establishing shots frame a landscape
where animal life and vegetation coexist peacefully with power plants, and
narratives attempt to reconcile modernity and a serene natural environment with an even stronger allure (Figure 4.1). Healthy realism alludes to
the contradictions of an ancient, pastoral ideology transplanted across the
Taiwan Straits and into a modernizing era. The physical strain of agricultural labor, the dangers and vicissitudes of a living earned at sea, the temptation to leave the ancestral village and migrate to the city: all of these emerge
momentarily, before a phantasmatic resolution permits the attractions of
rural life to prevail. More often than not, in the tried-and-true formula that
endures across time periods and persists across genres, a romance unites a
beautiful heroine and a strapping hero, and all the values that accrue to one
figure 4.1 Beautiful Duckling.
155
(an intimate relationship with the land; the preservation of a familys everyday practices and social mores) realize their perfection and continuation by
assimilating their ostensible opposite (advanced production techniques,
knowledge acquired in the city or abroad, etc.). Healthy realism represents an
early stage in the transition from a rural, agrarian society to an urban and
cosmopolitan one, with modernitys inevitable traumas on fleeting display,
before their ultimate containment and resolution.
Scenes of a Crime
In the early 1980s, the CMPC and other established studios faced a decline in
box office revenue and the loss of their markets in Southeast Asia; they also
confronted a demographic shift in the industry, with a cohort of aging directors like Hu and Lee and few promising prospects to take their place. In
response they adopted a newcomer policy (xinren zhengce) to encourage
first-time directors and help launch their careers, usually with low-cost pictures, including a series of omnibus films later credited with inaugurating the
new wave. The policy also paved the way for younger directors already working in the industry, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, to reinvigorate tired generic
formulas or discard them altogether for an aesthetic and narrative approach
that might appeal to younger audiences. These newcomers also posed a direct
challenge to established practices in the film industry with their low budgets,
nonprofessional actors, location shooting, and collaborations with writers
who had secure reputations outside the movie business and could therefore
afford to take risks. While the healthy realist genre film usually concludes with
a return to the certainties of rural village life, these key omnibus filmsmost
notably In Our Time (Guanyin de gushi, 1982), best known as the first film of
the new wave and the directorial debut of Edward Yang, and The Sandwich
Manfocus much more acutely on the condition of accelerated modernization, migration from the country to newly developed cities and towns, and the
particular problems of youth in a historical context unfamiliar to them and
their elders. In Our Time literally plots a course across four films from rural
past to urban present, and it links that movement in space and history to narratives of maturation, beginning from childhood and ending in young adulthood. More than any aesthetic innovations, this dramatic act of deracination
and relocation distinguishes Taiwans new wave from the films of previous
generations. Or more precisely, the development of the new waves cinematic
stylethe long shot/long take, master shot aesthetic, the preference for location shooting rather than studio settings, the use of nonprofessional actors,
the stripped-down, relatively unadorned images and soundsis intimately
related to the emergence of the city as a fundamental spatial and formal problem during the 1970s and early 1980s. The new wave in Taiwan is the search for
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an aesthetic, a regime of images and sounds, adequate to the historically new

environments of its time.
The most acclaimed new film of the early 1980s, The Sandwich Man, takes
place during the first of several waves of social upheaval, focusing on the social
and personal consequences of the eras sweeping transformations and especially on lives at the margins of an economy that seems to be burgeoning elsewhere and for others. Adapted from Huang Chunming stories set in the 1960s,
at the outset of the economic miracle, this omnibus film was the most direct
experiment with aesthetic strategies and themes that would guide the new
cinema over the next two decades. In each segment, the narrative revolves
around an image connoting commercial culture or cosmopolitanism, and
each concludes with a kind of reckoning with the implications and consequences of that image. Hou Hsiao-hsiens breakthrough film, the first of three
shorts that comprise The Sandwich Man, begins with an explosion of urbanity,
of signs that fill the frame and traffic noise that overwhelms the soundtrack,
even in the small-town setting of Zhuqi. The main character has found a job
as a human billboard for a movie theater, literally making a spectacle of himself, helping to market moving pictures (including Oyster Girl) in the theater
by transforming his own body into the most mobile of advertisements and
thereby permeating every sector and street of the town. In the final sequence,
after his son seems not to recognize him without his costume, he puts on his
makeup in order to be recognized, inhabiting the character he plays by day
and the picture hanging just beside him, suggesting that a new form of mediation has intervened in even the most human of activities based in the most
intimate of social relations. Assumed out of economic necessity, the mask
now becomes the hallmark of his identity. Set in 1962 and filmed in the early
1980s, Hous film establishes a generational conflict between the father adapting to this new environment and the next generationone that includes the
directors of the new wavewho will have grown up in increasingly dazzling
conditions where the struggle for recognition requires ever more spectacular
strategies. Becoming modern in The Sandwich Man involves an unending
process of discarding, adopting, and even becoming the images that circulate
around him and adorn his walls. In the new world foreseen from the vantage
point of this town, even the most concrete manifestation of humanitythe
body itselfbecomes a flexible and compliant sign rather than the marker of
a fixed identity. In Hous glimpse of the future, vanishing and reappearance
are the fundamental conditions of identity.
The second segment of the filmVickis Hat (Xiao Qi de na ding maozi), by
Zeng Zhuangxiangdeals explicitly with the education of a historically emergent generation of consumers and salespeople, and the film begins with
images of the industrializing countryside before transitioning to a class in
which two aspiring salesmen learn about their product, an imported Japanese
steamer that offers the promise of convenience to the buyer and prosperity to
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figure 4.2 Vickis Hat (from The Sandwich Man).
the people who manufacture and sell it. The segment focuses relentlessly on
an advertisement the salesmen place on walls around their district and near
the warehouse that doubles as their home. In one shot through the warehouse
door, the ad in the distance occupies the center of the frame before an elaborately and elegantly choreographed camera movement again frames the ad in
the center (Figure 4.2). This segment of The Sandwich Man is about the selling of the economic miracle through ubiquitous images of imported progress
and the bodies of the salesmen and the little girl, Vicki, who quite literally
bear the scars from that process. Vickis Hat is also one of the most directly
anticapitalist films in the new wave era: two men hope to make a living selling
cookery, but it proves defective and eventually explodes, nearly slicing one of
their heads off. And beneath her hat, Vicki appears to have a disfiguring
injury or disease. An object of almost obsessive fascination for one of the
salesmen, the hat seems to represent either a bold assertion of personal style,
the equivalent of their ads and slogans, or an attempt to keep a secret under
wraps. He stares at it indiscreetly while others eye the wares being demonstrated and sold, and his gaze is juxtaposed with the acquisitive looks of the
consumers. He eventually betrays her and removes the hat, to her horror and
disgust. In a relatively straightforward manner the film explores the gap between image and reality, between the advertised future of modern consumption and the reality of bodily experience. But it also confronts the allure and
the trap of images with exceptional subtlety, especially when it explores the
relationship between advertisements and a concrete reality represented by
the body and architecture. In Zengs segment of The Sandwich Man, there
is no privileged perspective outside the world of advertisements, no exit
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through the wings of this artificial space into the eternal landscape imagined
by healthy realism or the materialist realm posited in neorealism. The image
itself has become the crux of the problem, as the film almost literally revolves
around images on walls instead of escaping into the past or another possible
future.
The third segment, The Taste of Apples (Pingguo de ziwei), directed by
Wan Ren, begins with a montage of shots of Taipei at dawn, looking almost
abandoned, like a city awaiting the people who will someday inhabit it. Or, to
borrow Walter Benjamins memorable description of Atgets photographs of
Paris, Wan Ren shoots Taipei like the scene of a crime (Figure 4.3). And, sure
enough, the crime soon occurs. After a montage of empty streets and no
sound but a jackhammer, we see a car accident in which a massive sedan
driven by an American soldier runs into a Taiwanese man on his bicycle. A
consular official then talks to the driver, predicts that an accident with a mere
laborer will have few significant diplomatic consequences, and recommends
that he find the victim and take him to the hospital. The film became a cause
clbre when censors balked at its depiction of an underdeveloped Taiwan
and an essentially neocolonial relationship with the United States and demanded several revisions. This critique of the American presence in Taiwan
tapped into a larger vein of protest against total westernization and echoed
roots-seeking literature focused on the historical and cultural difference of
Taiwan in an emerging global system.25 A press campaign and persistence
by the filmmakers eventually restored those cuts, but the almost surreal
atmosphere of the film would have retained its critical dimension despite the
elimination of individual scenes. That anticolonial critique is inscribed not
figure 4.3 The Taste of Apples (from The Sandwich Man).
159
only in the screenplay but also in the spaces explored in the film. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, with a driver and Chinese-speaking policeman searching for the laborer, the camera wanders through a dense cluster of homes about to be demolished, their residents moved to high-rises just
visible in the distance. At one point, a flashback follows the main characters
on a train as they relocate to the metropolis, imagined by these migrants as a
space of endless possibility, and even of miracles, a place where even their
mute daughter will be able to speak. The present reality of their circumstances
suggests that this dream has been relegated to the realm of unrealized fantasy, with the accident representing the nadir of that fall from grace. But in
the span of a few minutes, we see the dawn of a new fantasy in the impossibly
white American hospital (called the White House in Huang Chunmings
story), its astonishing whiteness evocative of a new beginning on a blank
slate, a screen onto which the family projects its fantasies of a global future,
fantasies supplied in no small part by movies themselves. After a couple of
fades to white that mark off the perhaps feverish delusions of the father on his
hospital bed, the film concludes with another pure white image, another
marker of delusion, soon revealed to be a wall on which hangs a portrait of
the family that reemerges from this brush first with devastation and then
with unimaginable prosperity. The film entertains and then, through its very
dark comedy, attacks the fantasy that the most intimate structures of everyday life can absorb and adapt to radical change as easily as this profoundly
ironic concluding picture on the wall seems to suggest. From the sound of
jackhammers at the beginning to the demolition and construction projects
involving the Taiwanese familys home and to the end result glimpsed in the
hospital, the film suggests that the consequences of neocolonialism are spatial as well as economic and military, that the city also bears the scars of
uneven geopolitical relations. This final segment of The Sandwich Man is
about the whitewashed surface of the screen, the miracle of beginning from
nothing, and its correlative fantasy that nothing exists to be destroyed or lost
or mourned.
Viewed across the trajectory of the entire omnibus film, The Sandwich Man
charts an itinerary to a city characterized by its cleanliness and technological
sophistication but also by its foreignness in geopolitical terms, by its association with trauma and danger, by the familiar modernist condition of alienation, and by its vacillation in and out of two categories of space: footage shot
on location in the actual city or town and a studio-like setting where everything is shiny and new but utterly dislocated from its surroundings. Wan
Rens segment and the Sandwich Man more generally register this movement
from one space to another or, more precisely, to an urban environment where
the two locations begin to lose their distinction and the blank space of the
studio becomes the closest conceptual analogue for the development of the
city itself. Wans Super Citizen (Chaoji shimin, 1985) continues this exploration
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of the Taipei cityscape, again presenting it as a site where fantasies of freedom

and prosperity confront the reality of uneven economic, social, and political
possibility. This film also encountered problems with the censors and was exhibited only in a mutilated form. With the lifting of martial law in 1987 and
gradual political liberalization, the geopolitics of the city remained one of the
most prominent topics for filmmakers in the new wave. But The Sandwich
Man, so historically significant for launching the careers of young directors
and providing a heartening example for others with the same aspiration, also
inaugurated a new era in the history of Taiwanese cinema because of its attention to two issues of overriding importance over the coming two decades: the
urbanization of the islands and the role of images in the mise-en-scne of the
new cityscape.
The Urbanization of Hou Hsiao-hsien

Since its inception in the early 1980s and over the past three decades, the new
wave in Taiwan has been framed in critical accounts by the biography and
filmmaking style of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Born in Guangdong in 1949, the year
the Chinese civil war ended and the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, Hou
moved with his family to Taiwan at the age of two and grew up in an urbanizing area of the still rural south. Although his background was typical of
many waishengrenthe mainlanders who moved to the islands, usually at the
end of the warhis family settled far from the Kuomintang-dominated capital in a multicultural and polyglot Taiwanese environment surrounded by
benshengren: native-born Taiwanese speaking the local Minnan and Hakka
languages. Hous biography, which straddles the geographical divide of the
Taiwan Straits, therefore raises the politically sensitive question of the relative
Chineseness and Taiwaneseness of his films and the new wave more generally.26 Hou has been unabashed in claiming and celebrating his identity as a
Taiwanese filmmaker, but he is regularly discussed in the broader context of
Chinese-language cinema, a somewhat incoherent classification, given his fluency in Taiwanese, his accented Mandarin, and the linguistic pluralism in his
films. His career has also unfolded like the archetypal success story of the
small-town boy who makes good on a grand stage: raised on a geographically
and diplomatically isolated island, he attended art school and began working
in various capacities in the Taiwanese film industry; he achieved prominence
with a series of biographical and autobiographical films in the early 1980s and
rose to the international art house and festival equivalent of stardom with
major awards at Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Venice (among many others)
for his historical films of the late 1980s and early 1990s; and as early as 1988 a
New York Film Festival poll of world critics identified him as one of three directors most likely to shape the future of cinema.
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Hou did indeed shape one future of cinema as a founding influence on the
so-called master shot school, whose adherents include illustrious figures from
a younger generation of Taiwanese directors like Tsai Ming-liang, Lee
Kang-sheng, and Chang Tso-chi, the Korean directors Hong Sang-soo and
Lee Kwang-mo, Japans Hirokazu Koreeda, and an astonishing number of
young filmmakers in mainland China, from Jia Zhangke and Wang Chao to
Zhang L and Liu Jiayin. The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien have signaled the rise
of a cinematic style based on mise-en-scne in Taiwan and elsewhere in East
Asia, and understanding this phenomenon requires an archaeology of this
mode of filmmaking early in Hous career and during the Taiwanese economic miracle, along with a more global analysis of the new waves relationship to the art film markets and the rise of domestic and international
blockbusters. Roger Ebert once remarked that the entire movie distribution
system of North America is devoted to maintaining a wall between you and
Hou Hsiao-Hsien.27 On the other hand, an alternative mode of distribution
and exhibition has developed around this other system, reconnecting cinema
to the actual walls being constructed, to the spaces of demolition and redevelopment, to the societies in the process of emergence, in cities like Taipei,
Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai.
Hous status in the development of East Asian cinema is perplexing because
he established his reputation with a series of historical and autobiographical
films set in the rural past rather than urban present, while a subsequent generation of master shot directors has deployed this deliberate aesthetic in a
series of city films set in hyperkinetic urban spaces. Hous work is often characterized as the counterpart to that of roots-seeking writers like Huang
Chunming, with a shared commitment to capturing the everyday realities of
the Taiwanese sociohistorical experience.28 Because of their proximity in time
and subject matter to Taiwans nativist (xiangtu) literature of the 1970s and
early 1980s, the earliest films of Hou Hsiao-hsien also invite the same critique
that greeted the work of Huang, Chen Yingzhen, and others: these films are
exercises in nostalgia and wistful fantasy, the argument goes, as they attempt
to rediscover and preserve the particular Taiwanese languages, landscapes,
and ways of life that shaped the islands and their history. Critics have also
linked his retrospective orientation to a pan-Asian Confucian revival, with an
abiding respect for patriarchal traditions and the authority of the father (in
City of Sadness, The Puppermaster, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, etc.), another
marker of conservatism.29 All of Hous films from the period revolve around
the spaces and rhythms of rural village life and return obsessively to images of
Taiwans coastline and countryside, to the fishing villages of the Penghu Archipelago or the mining communities of the northern mountains or the lush
forests of the more tropical south. These films repeatedly invoke the most
cherished foundations of a local identity, building a soundtrack around the
vernacular but unofficial languages of Taiwan, lingering on images of the land
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itself, and in films like A Time to Live, a Time to Die, reconstructing the
physical environments that stemmed from the unique experience of Japanese
colonialism imposed on people living on the outskirts of a Chinese empire.
Despite these similarities to Taiwanese literary movements of the time, the
cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien remains distinct from the roots-seeking archetype
usually regarded as its proper frame, and those differences are important reference points in any attempt to historicize his films and the new wave they
helped launch and epitomize. Most important in relation to both xiangtu narratives in Taiwan and urban cinema in contemporary Asia, Hous earliest
directorial projectsfrom his early, genre-driven romance pictures to his
semiautobiographical films from the mid-1980soften involve narratives of
travel or migration between the urban and the rural, usually by a young protagonist imagined as an incipiently modern subject. While these films invite
analysis within a roots-seeking paradigm, they are also youth pictures focused
on characters who venture back and forth between the village and the city,
sometimes within and sometimes outside the frame of the narrative. His films
map a complex path from the language and space initially associated with a
homelandvernacular speech, recognizable locations with a history visible in
the built and natural environment, and established cultural traditionsto the
urban centers that increasingly serve as Taiwans interface with a modern
future. In The Boys from Fengkuei and Dust in the Wind, that transition is explicit; in Summer at Grandpas (Dongdong de jiaqi, 1984) it serves as a framing
device; and in A Time to Live, a Time to Die, the longing tone of the voice-over
implies that the events recounted in the film took place at a profound distance
in time, and perhaps in place, from the present. While these are common devices in roots-seeking fiction, which often features a cosmopolitan interloper
returning home after a long separation or attempting to discover a pastoral
ideal in someone elses past, Hous films are focused as intensely on the separation as the return and on the reality of disappearance rather than the fantasy
of remembered times and spaces miraculously restored and reinhabited.
One further controversy raised by Hous films revolves around the web of
relationships among a modernist art cinema, the process of modernization,
and his nostalgic, recuperative, and at times conservative project. To the extent
that they feed a commemorative impulse in contemporary Taiwan, they partake in what Marilyn Ivy calls a discourse of the vanishing in a Japanese context, where certain objects, sites, and rituals produce nostalgia because they are
kept on the verge of vanishing, stable yet endangered (and thus open for commodifiable desire).30 The films are commodities that circulate in certain rarefied, usually elite circles and tap into nave and nostalgic sentiments about the
pleasures and simplicity of rural life or another era in the history of Taiwan,
before its implication in the deracinating, transnational flows of goods and
capital. The emergence of a minor tourist industry related to Hous work, with
visitors exploring the village where Dust in the Wind was filmed, suggests that
his films did tap into a profound sense of longing and an aspiration to return to
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imaginary roots, even when the original locations were already obscured
behind layers of fictionalization. But in nearly all of his films, especially his
work from the early and mid-1980s, that description of the nostalgic dimension
of Hous films requires one major qualification: these locations exist in memory
and acquire a more concrete form only in cinema. There are always insurmountable obstacles posed by a retrospective voice-over or prohibitive distances between one location and the next, as in the unusually long train ride
home at the beginning of Dust in the Wind. Whether or not these sites are
considered endangered and vanishing or dead and gone depends on how the
cinematic image is defined and deployed. On the one hand, the past is recreated in all its particulars, with houses and furniture and other markers of everyday life presented in almost ethnographic detail; on the other, the many layers
of remove suggest that this historical era has passed and no longer belongs to
the category of the perpetually vanishing. If healthy realism resolved every
conflict by returning to the countryside imagined as a contemporaneous alternative to the city, as the space at the end of the road, by the time of his semiautobiographical films of the mid-1980s, Hous nostalgia no longer admits the
possibility of return. The way back from the city is closed for good, he suggests.
If Hous quasi-autobiographical films from the mid-1980s move beyond
this discourse of perpetual danger and disappearance, his earliest films display
an almost painful awareness that their subjects are indeed on the verge of vanishing. In a series of light romances from the early 1980sall made with limited
directorial control and designed to compete in the Spring Festival commercial
film rushthis concern with the relationship between a vanishing rural past
and an urban future becomes a matter of paramount importance. Along with
their prescribed, clich-riddled scripts and their agonizingly hip fashions and
locations, these films balance that necessary attention to commercial filmmaking practice and the most contemporary cultural trends with a more melancholy attention to the traditions they replace. In the chapter centered on Hou
in his study of staging in cinema, David Bordwell devotes an unusual degree of
attention to these star vehicles produced for Hong Kong pop music idol Kenny
Bee and the Taiwanese pop singer Feng Feifei, films that scholars and critics
have habitually neglected, despite their role in launching Hous career. Bordwell argues that even in these relatively insubstantial productions, Hou begins
to demonstrate his difference from the more commonplace romances of the
1970s, most notably in his more restrained style, his embrace of the location
shooting made necessary by minimal budgets, his preference for longer takes,
and his experimentation with a master shot aesthetic that reduces the amount
of analytical editing in each scene.31 While staying within the basic generic
framework of Taiwans youthful romances of the 1970s, Hou begins to combine this fascination with emerging urban spaces and an even more urgent
concern for the rural environments of his own upbringing.
Beyond the formal innovations visible in the early phase of his career, Hou
also translates these generic and stylistic conventions into an increasingly
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complex map of Taiwan, and establishes an almost dialectical relationship

between an urban youth culture, with its dominant genres and mode of image-making, and the rural way of life once seen as the safeguard of Taiwanese
identity. While the healthy realism of the 1960s helped define that identity
through its roots in the rural landscape, and the increasingly commercial and
youth-oriented cinema of the late 1970s helped redirect the attention of a new
generation toward global trends in pop culture, Hous films of the early 1980s
bring together those two dominant tendencies in recent Taiwan cinema.
Cheerful Wind (Fenger tita cai, 1981), for example, begins in a windswept
Penghu coastal village, with waves breaking on the shore and a frame dominated by a virtually empty expanse of sand and a sky crowded with clouds.
And as the camera follows a character in his quest for a restroom or outhouse,
it reveals a message painted on the wall of a structure between the sand and
the road: no photography. Seconds later, with this official hostility to photography already proclaimed, the film then discovers renegade photographers
of two different and competing persuasions: a large and well-equipped camera
crew filming a commercial for laundry detergent, and a female member of the
crew who wanders off for furtive forays into documentary photography, with
rural villagers and their customs the object of her gaze. Exploiting Penghus
rugged natural environment and relative isolation, this ad campaign emphasizes the contrast between a new and improved detergent and the ostensibly
old and unchanging village that greets it with bewilderment. The detergent
itself, a tool in the related projects of modernization and cleanliness, is associated with the type of image that brings the cast and crew to this island in the
first place: the advertisement that creates and disseminates desires for the
future, for a clean slate, for something novel and presumably improved.
The young woman who branches out on her own participates in a different form of image production, a mode of documentary photography that
collects a record of a way of life threatened by the very process of modernization that deposited the commercials camera crew in this village. At the
beginning of the film, we see her stepping into the street to photograph a
horse-drawn cart as it clatters down the narrow, beachside lane. Later in the
film, she sloshes through a rice field to photograph a stranger winnowing
grain from chaff. In both cases, her appearance and almost aggressive demeanor signal her difference from the world she hopes to capture on film.
When she and the crew return to Taipei, these locations endure only in the
form of photographs, and the immense distance between that rural environment and the contemporary capital becomes a preoccupation in the narrative
and especially the mise-en-scne. The subjects of the photographs, whose
association with ancient forms of work and transportation lends them iconic
status as representatives of a timeless past, clash with her quintessentially
modern occupation in the media and the instantaneously dated fashions of
the urban hipsters around her. The film shows these skilled operators of the
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camera now in the position of media consumer, as they observe documents

on a screen or in a slide viewer rather than on the streets of now distant
villages. One of the recurrent aesthetic and philosophical questions at the
core of Cheerful Wind and subsequent Hou Hsiao-hsien films is this: what is
the status of documentary images in a new urban environment composed
largely of other images?
Later in Cheerful Wind, after a series of fortuitous coincidences, the female
photographer happens upon the passenger in that horse-drawn cart, a blind
man who had also become an unwitting actor in the commercial. (Even a
blind man can appreciate the cleaning power of this detergent is the improvised theme of the ad campaign.) The film then develops into a somewhat
formulaic romance, with the director of the soap commercial and the blind
man becoming rivals for her attention. The former invites her to join his
newest project scheduled to begin shooting in Europe; the latter prepares for
an operation to restore his sight. And all the while, the film returns to fundamental questions about image-making practices and the people and spaces
deemed their appropriate operators and objects. In a scene outside a Taipei
park, the blind man poses with a camera while the female photographer
hides behind a tree and captures candid footage of shocked faces encountering the incomprehensible vision of a sightless photographer. Much recent
scholarship on Taiwans literature, film, and history has focused on its unusually complex experience of colonial domination, with a succession of
powers asserting their control across the generations. And roots-seeking literature has testified to the survival of local traditions in the aftermath of a
colonial project. In this postcolonial scholarship, roots-seeking narratives,
with their mixture of mandarin speech patterns and indigenous dialects (and
mainland dialects with a longer history on Taiwan), give voice to a longoppressed and silenced subaltern rooted in the islands themselves rather
than Japan or the homeland envisioned by the Kuomintang. But beginning
in films like Cheerful Wind, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks provocative
questioncan the subaltern speak?yields to a more technologically inflected alternative: can the subaltern wield a camera?32 To what extent, the
film asks, are the documents produced by technologies like photography and
cinema always implicated in a modern paradigm that necessarily excludes
the subaltern? Who bestows and who claims the power to make images?
While Cheerful Wind poses these poignant questions, its initial, tentative responses yield to the more urgent task of resolving the romantic plot, which
culminates in the medically improbable restoration of the blind mans sight
and his last-minute arrival at the airport. This succession of wonders and
close calls convinces the female photographer to remain with the man rooted
in a countryside, a man whose biography is so redolent of Taiwanese history
but who, through a medical miracle, has been granted the vision to secure his
standing in the modern world.
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While Cute Girl (Jiu shi liuliu de ta, 1980), Cheerful Wind, and The Green
Green Grass of Home (Zai na hepan qingcao qing, 1983) all introduce this clash
of generations and historically emerging and threatened spaces, Hous more
personal films produced between 1983 and 1986 mark his most profound engagement with the new wave condition of young protagonists encountering,
often for the first time, the unfamiliar environments of the contemporary city.
Each of the four films originates in an autobiographical narrative by a writer
associated with the roots-seeking tendency in Taiwanese literature, and in all
but A Time to Live, a Time to Die, the story charts the dominant geographical
movements of the period, between seaside or mining villages and the islands
major urban centers. And each allegorizes that movement as a conflict and
transition between a rural past where knowledge and revelation could conceivably emerge through a process of return to sources and a global future
crystallized in the mobility and chameleonic transformations made possible
in the city. The mainland rarely registers in this new scenario, except as a
doubly estranged location that exists only in the hazy memories of an older
generation and surfaces as they recall their own pasts and unrealized dreams
of return. This estrangement is most clearly embodied in the figure of the
grandmother in A Time to Live, an endearing character whose affliction with
senile dementia and nostalgia leads her on daylong walks guided by an impossible map, whose jumbled geography would allow her to walk from her home
of over two decades to her ancestral homeland across the Straits. Her son, the
father of the films main character, had brought his entire family to Taiwan
because of its relative comfort and promise: he was intrigued by the prospect
of houses with running water, the retrospective voice-over recalls. And he
lived out his remaining years expecting to return to the mainland, never
buying permanent furnishings for the house, and never constructing a durable mythology and identity from the materials available in Taiwan. Dai Jinhua
argues that the relationship of the parents to Taiwan is most clearly expressed
through the mise-en-scne, especially through disposable bamboo furniture
that instead of providing material support for family history and the passage
of generations now signals their provisional sense of place and belonging.33
The roots-seeking writers of the 1970s would maintain that an identity and
mythology located in Taiwan was present all along and suppressed under conditions of martial law. But in Hous autobiographical films this roots-seeking
impulse confronts the new historical conditions of the 1980s: if they imagine
an older generation as inhabitants of an incoherent temporal and spatial
universe, they also present a new generation in the equally incoherent, abstract, and ultimately unrealizable landscape of an emerging global culture
and economy. His films document the moment when an aging and obscure
atlas is exchanged for a glossy and fabulous new one.
This series of films begins in 1983 with The Boys from Fengkuei, which follows a group of close friends on their journey away from Fengkuei in the
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Penghu Islands and relates the story of their acclimation to life in the major
southern port city of Kaohsiung. Not rooted in either environment, the film
instead focuses on acts of displacement and relocation. Like each of Hous
early films, The Boys from Fengkuei accentuates the various stages of these
journeys by documenting the modes of transportation that carry the boys
along and detailing the specific waymarks with close-ups of bus stops and
train station signs. While these are conventional variations on the establishing
shot and such signage lends a superficial air of authenticity to any film hoping
to establish its bond with a particular place, they appear with such regularity
in Hous work, especially during this period, that they deserve mention alongside his more virtuoso camera work. Even as they proclaim their association
with places like Fengkuei and the Penghu Islands, these films are at least as
concerned with the process of locomotion that disrupts those links; while they
lavish attention on seascapes and lush mountain forests, as though attempting
to rediscover the literal manifestation of those roots through an excess of attention to the land, they also return obsessively to station signs and other, less
natural, more arbitrary markers of place. Not just a chronicle of hometowns
or life on the road, Hous films instead accentuate the contradictions faced by
young characters who can no longer decide whether they belong here or there.
The procession of roads, vehicles, harbors, stations, and signs suggests that
these young men and their counterparts throughout Taiwans new wave are
undergoing an initiation into the vertiginous condition of a life spent unmoored and in motion.
The earliest scenes of The Boys from Fengkuei observe that the related processes of dislocation and urbanization have long been linked to a cinematic
project, especially in the era of postwar economic miracles. After horsing
around in the streets of Fengkuei, mistakenly harassing the occupant of a
public toilet, and generally enjoying the freedom of their adolescence, the
boys continue the fun by sneaking into a movie theater, where a European
film promises a more frank display of sex and skin than its Taiwanese alternatives. As they watch an English-dubbed print of Rocco and His Brothers (Rocco
e i suoi fratelli; Luchino Visconti, 1960) and complain that the film is in disappointing black and white, Annie Girardot eventually rewards their attention
by hiking up her skirt and showing off her legs. Before this exhibition, however, Viscontis film, initially framed with the heads of the Fengkuei audience
in the foreground and then with the images from Rocco filling virtually the
entire screen, relates the story of migrants from southern Italy arriving at a
modern housing project on the outskirts of Milan. With their possessions
overflowing from a horse-drawn cart, these internally displaced Italians are
instantly identified as outsiders by the locals. They come from the south, the
Milanese comment, and the subtitles identifying them as southerners are displayed in two separate shots in Hous film, the second a tighter framing that
emphasizes the Parondi familys now inescapable condition of belonging
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somewhere else. These lingering shots highlight the many mechanisms that
reinforce the outsider status of these migrants, including their outdated mode
of transportation and its juxtaposition with the identical white apartment
blocks, machines for living, that sustain an entirely different sense of community and sociality from that of the village they left. These scenes from Visconti
that the boys from Fengkuei watch help situate their predicament in a longer,
global trajectory of modernization, with the economic necessities and enticements that led Rocco and his family to Milan existing in a long historical process that implicates the globalizing Taiwanese economy of the late 1970s and
early 1980s. The integration of these two moments in film history also reminds
us of the impossibility of drawing direct links from one time period or location to another. While still in Fengkuei, the boys express their dissatisfaction
with the old-fashioned and colorless images, suggesting that their experience
of the film is primarily an exercise in misrecognition: they are expecting something that itself crystallizes a particular vision of modernity in all its technological prowess and libidinal liberation; what they discover instead is a vision
of economic development in all its constitutive unevenness and an unrealized
sexual revolution glimpsed only in fleeting images.
Out of some combination of boredom and a sense of adventure, this group
of friends from Fengkuei eventually leave their hometown and travel to Taiwans second city, Kaohsiung, as it balances on the verge of its nearly total
transformation in the 1980s. They eventually settle into a room located on a
traditional courtyard and undergo a familiar process of acclimation, as they
seek romance, entertainment, and employment. One of the boys earns a living
by selling tapes of pop music in a market stall. Two more find work at a Proton
factory that produces car audio players. One of the major contributors to and
beneficiaries of Taiwans economic miracle, Proton was founded as an independent company in 1981 and thrived after the introduction of its pocket AM/
FM radio in 1982. It then branched into the production of clock radios, televisions, and other consumer electronics products like the ones manufactured
and transported in The Boys from Fengkuei. From their first days in Kaohsiung,
this band of migrants from rural Taiwan find themselves on the cusp of a profound social and economic transformation. Their experience of the city commences with a bus ride that also serves as a tour of its particular version of
economic and architectural modernity. That building is great. Ill live there,
one says. When they step off the bus, they pass by a sign advertising real estate
in a new high-rise, before wandering down a side street overseen by the skeleton of another large multistory structure. A young con artist then approaches
on a scooter and sells what he advertises as tickets to a racy European picture
playing in that shell of a building. They arrive at the eleventh floor only to
discover that they have been cheated: theres no theater, no projector, no
screen, just an empty concrete space, whose unfinished structure opens out
onto the expanding city (Figure 4.4). The boys walk over to the missing walls,
a poor substitute for a screen, but discover that what replaces their promised
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figure 4.4 The Boys from Fengkuei.
picture show is as marvelous as any film. With the gaps in the wall approximating the aspect ratio of Hous film itself, they glimpse from this great height
the economic miracle itself, a miracle whose skeleton they gather in and before
whose image they stand as spectators. This show is a spectacle constructed
from steel and concrete and glass, but as one of the boys points out, as they
look out through the aperture, the city itself appears on a big screen and in
color.
This group of migrants encounter a city and cinema without walls. Malrauxs writing on The Museum without Walls advocates a destruction of the
barriers between canonical masterpieces and a mass public. It imagines what
happens when art emerges from its institutional confines and engages with
the world as an embodiment of pure style and image, and media based on
mechanical reproduction provide the key to realizing that ideal. In Hous
film, the problem is not merely the destruction of entrenched and obstructionist institutions but the possibility that a new society will remain an unfinished project, endlessly deferred in favor of new images of modernity that rise
to meet and envelop its inhabitants. These young friends from Fengkuei can
no longer determine whether cinema opens onto a new society in the making
or marks the limits of the possible, whether this city has been transformed
into a utopian vision or a second-rate swindle, whether the cinema represents
the world outside the theater or merges with an unbounded urban spectacle,
a city of images. And Hous characters think about the city and all it
representschange, possibility, modernity itselfby looking at it. For Deleuze, the rubble strewn after World War II and the construction of generic,
unfamiliar, historically unprecedented environments in the wars aftermath
altered the way the human subject and its cinematic surrogate interacted with
the world. He writes that the postwar period has greatly increased the
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situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no

longer know how to describe. These were any spaces whatever, deserted but
inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were
seers.34 Confronted with a city between demolition and renewal, a modernity
in the making, these young characters from a remote fishing village become
seers as well as agents, and their status as spectators dominates the scene.
But even as his deliberate shots record an abundance of details, Hou is concerned with the limitations of seeing. In The Boys from Fengkuei, the editing
pattern in scenes often alternates between his signature master shots and closeups or medium close-ups shot along an imaginary axis linking the camera and
the subject. These scenes rarely feature lateral movement at all, and in most
instances the only editing involves a single cut and a tighter shot along the
central axis. This editing pattern reveals the boys as they sit along the wall of an
oceanside house in Fengkuei; it frames and reframes their dance performance
for a neighborhood girl as waves crash behind them; it presents and represents
Ching-tzu in the same location after his return from Kaohsiung; it distances
and advances toward him as he reads a letter revealing that his father has died.
This pattern recurs in film after film in this period, most prominently and famously in City of Sadness, where the same shots and reframings return at various points in the narrative, and each successive iteration becomes a record of
all that was lost between one historical moment and the next. The beauty and
obscurity of Hous work results from the infinite interpretative possibilities
opened by this simple but immensely evocative pattern. If a conventional
master shot serves to establish the spatial relationships in a scene and creates a
context for the editing that analyzes that space and prioritizes information in
it, these crucial shots in Hous work barely warrant the label master shots.
Rather than analyze reality by constructing a hierarchy of information, these
long shots and long takes reveal the world in all its irreducible complexity. The
world invoked in these films extends far beyond the limits of the frame and
exhausts the capacity of these young men to stitch together the fragments they
glimpse from their perch in an unfinished building. Although they open the
film with a series of pranks, and although they launch the main narrative by
migrating to Kaohsiung, The Boys from Fengkuei is not a tale of people in
action and moving through space; instead it collects a record of the changes
taking place in the world around them. The camera observes a world undergoing a profound transformation but also presents the seers who witness and
experience that transformation, the people who are at once actors in this narrative and observers at some remove from the events that occur outside the
bounds of the frame and together constitute the history of their time.
Dust in the Wind, a film set in a northern mining village, also deals with the
exodus and return of a young generation seeking a more prosperous future in
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figure 4.5 Dust in the Wind.
the city, this time Taipei. In the shot that marks the conclusion of the famous
tunnel sequencein which the light at the end of the tunnel becomes a slowly
opening aperture, the image adjusting from all black to an explosion of color
and movementa young couple, Wan and Huen, walk alongside the tracks and
toward the unfurling screen for an open-air movie, a fluttering piece of cloth
that threatens to conceal the landscape so crucial to Hous sense of place and
that becomes entangled with power lines and the other machinery of modernity
(Figure 4.5). As Fredric Jameson noted about this shot and the opening moments of Goodbye South, Goodbye, the railroad occupies a privileged position
in Hous films precisely because trains are themselves a form of media, as central to the process of building community and mapping its political and cultural terrain as the newspapers distributed by train and read by passengers on
their travels to all corners of the island.35 The train, like other media, creates
and reaffirms collectivities while also facilitating their dilution and dispersion.
For Hou, a filmmaker profoundly invested in the cinemas capacity to record
and safeguard an archive of remembered spaces, that utopian aspiration coexists uneasily with a fear that the media of communication are also involved in
a process of concealment, that disclosure also contributes to a kind of closing
off. The film that eventually plays in the open air is Beautiful Duckling, an
allusion to a specifically Taiwanese archive of cinematic classics and a film
whose narrative trajectory leads back to the countryside. But the roads and
tracks from Hous mining town lead to the city and to a movie theater with a
different conception of cinema, a place where painted billboards of coming attractions afford a glimpse of a cinematic future, and where Hous insistent
framing betrays an almost paranoid fixation on images looming in the background (Figure 4.6).
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Dust in the Wind ends with a haunting depiction of the village life that
welcomes Wan home after military service and Huens marriage have shattered his dream of romance in the big city. Shot in one of Hous signature
camera setups, with the camera at a distance from the subject and the frame
filled by the natural environment around them, he talks with his grandfather
about the weather and crops until their conversation falls into silence. His
grandfather then looks around, taking in the trees and hills, and again in one
of Hous characteristic and idiosyncratic maneuvers, the film cuts from its
distant position to a tighter one along the same axis (Figures 4.7 and 4.8). The
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visual dimension of the image has been restricted, but the soundtrack then
restores the fullness of the landscape, as a chorus of birds and insects evokes
the plenitude rather than the poverty of their surroundings. The film concludes with an extreme long shot of hills and water punctuated by a whistle
and then accompanied by a soundtrack at once nostalgic and mournful. Hou
uses his long shots and long takes, his cinema designed around the possibilities
of mise-en-scne, to document a way of life on the verge of vanishing, but the
editing and sound also underscore the limits of that mode of observational
filmmaking. For all the complexity of urban existence at this time, a complexity evident in the work of Hou and the other directors of Taiwans new cinema,
a manner of filmmaking attuned to the objects and architecture of Taipei or
Kaohsiung faces a different set of representational problems in the fields,
skies, and seascapes encountered at the end of Dust in the Wind. At this
moment in history the city confers material form on a nascent ideology of
abundance; the city endows the global future with a local manifestation in the
here and now. Hous rural landscapes evoke another form of profusion, as the
expansive concluding shot and crescendo of ambient sound allude to a universe of almost unimaginable vitality; but the film can never erase the narrative associations that link this vibrant space with the past, mourning, and the
rapidly diminishing margins of a global economic system where the city has
ascended to a position of hegemony.
If Hou is still known for his historical films and his early invocations of the
rural environment in Taiwan, he is now primarily a director of city films,
though his recent production schedule suggests that he is as likely to make a
film in Tokyo (Caf Lumire, 2003) or Paris (The Flight of the Red Balloon)
as Taiwan. He no longer stages an encounter between migrants from the
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countryside and the expanding cities of Taiwans economic boom but instead
settles almost exclusively in the already urbanized realms of Taipei, Kaohsiung,
Tokyo, and Paris. A paradigmatic figure of 1980s nostalgia for village life and
then early twentieth-century modernity, Hou now concentrates on the globalized cities that occupy center stage in a twenty-first-century economy, and his
long-take aesthetic, once deployed as a strategy for preserving the vanishing
locations of rural Taiwan, now invokes the unremarkable generic spaces of
the apartment tower or the virtual realm of the computer screen, the forgettable and the ephemeral. If one purpose of the master shot is to present time
and space prior to their division through editing and to follow the interaction
between the figure and its environment, the almost abstract images of
Millennium Mambo begin to unsettle and obscure their location. The film
begins with a shot of a woman walking through a tunnel framed at a low and
canted angle, with a ceiling of grey concrete blocks and washed-out lightbulbs
the only visible dimension of the setting (Figure 4.9). The film seems reluctant
to allude to its location with any specificity, and it often replaces what would
otherwise be establishing shots with abstract images featuring bright colors
and strong graphic elements but little information about the place. Juxtaposition and contradiction, the core of his aesthetic and thematic undertaking in
the 1980s, have been replaced by pure light and color. Nostalgia remains, as in
Three Times, with its three storiesthe first from the 1960s, the second a silent
film with subtitles set in the teens, and a third from contemporary Taipei
connected by the continued presence of two actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen.
Introduced by an undulating long take over a pool table and an elaborate if
understated seduction, the first segment reveals Hous continued longing for
that period in Taiwans history, that moment when youth could embrace their
figure 4.9 Millennium Mambo.
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own modernity in a setting that retained traces of the past. The second represents his nostalgia for the golden age of silent cinema, when film consisted
almost entirely of a choreographed interactions for the camera. But in the
third, the visual register is distinguished by the same blurring and displacement that characterizes Millennium Mambo, with computer and cell phone
screens now dominant elements of the mise-en-scne. In several close-ups,
the frame is almost coterminous with the monitor, and the only action is the
constant refreshing of the screen and the production and arrival of words. If
the temporary film screen hanging over the train tracks in Dust in the Wind
was only a fraction of the universe visible in that location and the final shot
alluded to a world absent from the frame, the monitors in Three Times represent a much more totalizing vision of contemporary communications technology. The city has become the new site of loss for Hou Hsiao-hsien, and
from Fengkuei to Three Times to his most recent voyages, his urban cinema
reveals exactly what hes missing.
Even in Le Voyage du ballon rouge, his affectionate remake and expansion
of Albert Lamorisses 1956 film The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge), we are introduced not to the balloon itself but to its image painted on a mural (Figure 4.10). For this reason, perhaps, The Flight of the Red Balloon represents a
departure from Hous recent work, or perhaps a way of reinventing the master
shot aesthetic for an era when screens and images now dominate the cityscape.
One of the most significant features of the film is the near irrelevance of the
titular red balloon, especially in comparison with the original story by Lamorisse. In this contemporary version of the tale, the balloon is almost immediately
transformed into an image, a mural more reminiscent of Chris Markers cats
than the seemingly massive balloon, more like a dirigible, that leads little
figure 4.10 The Voyage of the Red Balloon.
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Pascal on his tour of the institutions and environments of 1950s Paris. Hou is
not interested in the physical being or object per se and instead concentrates
on the mere image and mirage that occupy a crucial place in the contemporary world city, with its combination of concrete and glass materiality and
ambient LED displays. The short film by Lamorisse had once served as one of
Bazins key examples of the virtues of the long take: Bazin suggests that the
film must respect the homogeneity of space, the object and the boy must
occupy the same shot, and those shots must depict their physical and temporal presence in a city marked by oppressive elders and ample avenues of joyful
escape. The balloon itself offers the perfect device for linking bodies, things,
and the space around them, and the result is what Bazin calls an imaginary
documentary.36 This passage provides one answer to the much-repeated criticism that Bazins theory of cinematic realism neglects the documentary but
also opens onto the aesthetic and philosophical stakes in Hous much longer
remake, itself an imaginary documentary located in a different time and a
historically transformed city. Hou displaces the balloon and focuses for long
stretches on the family narrative of a puppeteer, her son, and their mainland
Chinese nanny, an aspiring filmmaker studying in Paris and working on her
own remake of The Red Balloon. As with all of Hous films, however, the narrative threads remain loose and fail to account for the bulk of screen time,
which is dedicated instead to the exploration of the interior and exterior
spaces, homes and parks, windows and walls and the images that adorn them.
At once an homage to a beloved childrens classic and a film commissioned
by the Muse DOrsay, Hous Red Balloon reflects that constitutive paradox: it
is an art film about the obsessions of a young child, a merging of cultural landmarks and the itinerant ways of a boy and his balloon. Produced as part of the
same series as Summer Hours (LHeure dt, 2008) by Olivier Assayas, Hous
film marks a significant departure from that vision of cinema and its relationship to cities and museums. Assayas had insisted that the mise-en-scne in
that account of the burdens of inheritance consist of actual objects culled from
the museum collection, endowing his production with what Adorno called a
museal quality, an unsettling mixture of the museum and the mausoleum,
the living tradition and its funereal aftermath.37 Perhaps chastened by the fact
that Lamorisses Pascal and his balloon would have been refused entry to the
museum, just as they were turned away from school and the streetcar, Hou
includes the museum only twice: in the second instance, from the outside, as
a cluster of balloons float over the former train station and continue over the
expansive Parisian cityscape, and first, on a school field trip that settles down
in front of Flix Vallottons painting Le ballon, when the teacher departs from
a straightforward introduction to the salient facts about the canvas and begins
to engage in a pedagogy of the image. She identifies an enigmatic trace in the
painting, a mysterious red ball, the excessive detail that remains unexplained
in any narrative version of the painting and therefore haunts the image. In
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eliminating the balloon for large stretches of the film, Hou transforms that
object into a site of absence, the indispensable object we search for incessantly,
though usually in vain. And then in focusing so intently on a ball glimpsed
only through a few faint brush strokes, a mere spot on the canvas, the film
suggests that the objects that used to occupy the central position in cinema
have been replaced by images. The imaginary documentary envisioned by
Bazin has been replaced in Hou by a documentary on images, with people,
objects, and spaces a supporting cast rather than very stuff of cinema. The film
at once revises and reaffirms a conception of cinema that Hou, as much as any
director, has helped to disseminate around the world: he creates a realist, observational city film, a stroll through Paris and an exploration of its interiors.
He also reimagines the city film genre for the age of ambient images. In this
adaptation of the Lamorisse classic, media usually fail to converge, pictures
are examined as material objects in a historical, physical environment, and
Hous film, with all the trappings of a childrens fable, gazes at the hovering
and drifting images that, like the original red balloon, shadow a new generation on their journeys around the city.
{5}
Morning in the Megacity

taiwan and the globalization of the city film
In the past decade, the relationship between cinema and the city has been one
of the most productive avenues in film studies, and one motivating force behind
that project is an uncertainty about the future of a medium that engages with
both the abstract reality of global flows and the more localized environments
visible in documentary images linked to the site where they were recorded. The
several volumes devoted to the subject of the cinematic city demonstrate the
possibilities of organizing a research project at the nexus of the modern city
and one of its emblematic art forms.1 By creating a dialogue between cinema
studies and the social sciences at the forefront of the spatial turn in critical
theorygeography, urban studies, anthropology, and sociologyscholars seek
to place images in the social and spatial context of their reception and production. Linking cinema and cities allows us to combine one of the areas of film
scholarship most amenable to sociological and industrial analysis with one of
the most prominent preoccupations of modern and contemporary filmmakers:
the historically new spaces and cityscapes of the modern metropolis, the juxtapositions and gatherings of people it makes possible, and the dynamism of the
city itself. These recent collections of essays have traced the parallels between
the development of cinema and urban experience, most remarkably in the city
film series adopted, for example, by Roberto Rossellini in postwar Rome or by
Walter Ruttmann in his portrait of Berlin. And the recent explosion of work on
cinema as vernacular modernism explores the intimate connection between
cinema and a litany of phenomena emanating from the city. This school of
thought positions cinema alongside trends in fashion, design, advertising, and
architecture and aligns film with the promises of mass consumption and the
dreams of a mass culture, as well as the technologies that disseminated those
trends, promises, and dreams: photography, radio, and cinema.2 In Miriam
Hansens foundational essays, vernacular modernism is virtually synonymous with urban experience from the 1920s through the 1950s, and classical
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Hollywood cinema develops into the first global vernacular circulating from
urban center to urban center, creating a network of interlacing modernities.3
Linking Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Shanghai, this new vernacular traces a unfamiliar map of modernity, prefiguring much of the recent research on the evolving network of world cities, with many of the same nodes
prominently represented on modernitys earliest and latest maps.
But each of these new studies of cinema and the city betrays an awareness
that the experience of urban life has changed remarkably under the multiple
pressures of globalization and with the emergence of the expansive and almost
limitless megacities currently under construction throughout Asia. This focus
on the city rather than the more familiar category of the nation also reflects the
growing importance of cities in the process of globalization, as the disaggregation of the nation-state system leads to innovative forms of governance at
more encompassing and narrower levels than the nation and as subnational
actors like cities become increasingly powerful and autonomous locations of
control. Most pertinent from the purview of film studies is the fact that this
fascination with the cinematic city has arisen at a moment when the development and marketing of a vibrant cultural life (including film festivals) has
become a means of extending a citys brand recognition and enhancing its
stature in the burgeoning competition for prominence in the global economy.4
Alongside these changes in the form and status of the metropolis, revolutions
in digital technology and reception environments suggest that even the most
basic terms in film studiescinema and the cityhave undergone an epochal
transformation and that the relationship between film and urban life has entered a new phase. This historically new condition reveals the limitations of an
approach that carries forward into the twenty-first century the same conceptual and critical categories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Margaret Morse and others have suggested, the relevant terms may not
be cinema and the city; we may instead be entering an era of digital video
and the greater metropolitan area, or mobility and the megacity.5 These may be
less catchy phrases, but they illustrate how even the most basic conceptual categories collapse under the force of successive, wide-ranging transformations.
Given these tendencies in the global economy, in recent world cinema, and
in film studies, it should not be surprising that the relationship between
cinema and the city of Taipei has been the subject of extraordinary interest in
recent years. Wang Wei identifies a stark divide that appeared in the 1990s: if
Taiwanese identity was the dominant subject in films from previous eras
(from the healthy realist classics of Lee Hsing to the roots-seeking narratives
of the early Hou Hsiao-hsien), a fascination with Taipei characterizes more
recent film from Taiwan.6 Earlier representations of Taipei situated the city in
a nationalist framework whose center was always located outside the island;
others placed the city in an urban-rural dichotomy in which an essentialized
Taiwanese identity was inherent in isolated landscapes and in traditional
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customs on the verge of vanishing. But as Lin Wenchi points out, the new
cinema produced the first Taiwanese films concerned primarily with the
promise of the city and the less grandiose reality on the street, Taiwans first
city films; and by the 1990s Taipei itself became a vital and imperative presence in Taiwan cinema.7 The study of Taiwan cinema has begun to reflect this
urbanization of the films themselves. In 1995, the Golden Horse Film Festival
organized a symposium on the representation of Taipei in Taiwan cinema and
produced a volume of essays that details the history of films located in that city
and anticipates many of the trends that animate contemporary Taiwanese
film. More recent books like City Zero and Movie Theaters in Taipei are devoted either to the screen projection of Taipei, to the city constructed of and
by light as well as glass and concrete, or to the physical environments that
nurtured an urban film culture, from the era of movie palaces to the current
moment of the multiplex.8 Yomi Braester has expanded the scope of this
scholarship to include the relationship between Taiwanese film and the more
overtly politicized domain of urban planning.9 Paul Virilio once argued that
the screen, the crossroads of all mass media, long ago usurped the function
of the city square. For this reason, more than Venturis Las Vegas, it is Hollywood that merits urbanist scholarship.10 Having developed into one of the
crossroads of the art cinema world, Taiwans cinema is also generating its own
urbanist scholarship.
After the recovery from the Asian economic crisis of the 1990s and the intensified globalization of Taiwans culture and economy, filmmakers began to
identify the city as the site where the pleasures and threats of globalization
play themselves out. The result is a revival of the city film genre in Taiwan and
elsewhere in the region. At a moment when networks of interlinked cities
usurp much of the political importance once attributed to nations, artists in
Taiwan are increasingly concerned with the condition of the city as a form, as
a collectivity, and as an environment. As cities become increasingly important
command and control centers in the global economy, as the city grows both
spatially and in regional and global importance, and as it acquires a newfound cultural capital, it also defers access to the urban experience that once
defined the city itself. Under these circumstances, filmmakers like Edward
Yang and Tsai Ming-liang have adapted and transformed the city film for a
new era when the city no longer represents a finite crystallization of modernity, the future realized and glimpsed today, but instead expands and attenuates along the uncertain trajectory of globalization itself.
Outside the City

But first, what was the city film? And what is it now? Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
outlines a number of defining characteristics of the city film, including a
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preference for location rather than studio shooting and the transformation of
urban environments from a suitable, stable, readily recognizable backdrop
into an object of narrative desire and sustained exploration.11 For NowellSmith, the crucial and definitive feature of the series is the citys excessive presence, its recalcitrance, its inability to be subordinated to the demands of the
narrative.12 If, as Deleuze suggests, cinema is not merely another medium of
representation but also a way of thinking, an adjunct to philosophy, the excessive and seemingly unmotivated presence of the city on-screen serves as the
site where artists and critics think through cinema and consider the abstract
promises, historical forms, and concrete failures of the real city.
This fascination with the spaces and the possibilities of the city emerged
early in the history of cinema, from the moment of the first actualities, and
film critics and theorists from the earliest days of the medium have maintained that it developed in parallel with the modern city. As Leo Charney and
Vanessa Schwartz argue, modern culture was cinematic before the fact,
and the culture of modernity rendered inevitable something like cinema,
since cinemas characteristics evolved from the traits that defined modern
life in general.13 Modernity, they continue, cannot be conceived outside
the context of the city, which provided an arena for the circulation of bodies
and goods, the exchange of glances, and the exercise of consumerism. Modern
life seemed urban by definition.14 But that definition of modernity also contains an important caveat acknowledging the mutability of the city form in
history. The twentieth-century vision of the city emerging in tandem with the
cinema had undergone crucial changes from the nineteenth century. The city
film is not a tale of flneurs and arcades but instead bears witness to what
Hansen calls the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, mass
annihilation, of rationalization, standardization and media publics.15 In the
work of Ruttmann and Vertov, the city film explores the intimate connections between the space of the city and the logic of large-scale mechanization
and Taylorization, with film becoming a privileged interface in this assemblage of architecture, bodies, and machines. As James Donald suggests in an
essay on Ruttmann and Vertov, however rationalized and disenchanted
modern societies may become, at an experiential level (that is, in the unconscious) the new urban-industrial world has become fully re-enchanted.16
The return to the city in contemporary film and theory suggests that the city
has once again become enchanted territory during the current moment of
globalization. The films of Yang and Tsai stage a confrontation between the
enduring and perpetually renewable appeal of the city in all its glorious abstraction and the intensely fragile environment that comprises the reality of
a lived city.
Because of Taipeis decades-long status as a temporary capital, and because
of Taiwans compressed and radical modernization from the 1970s onward,
the Taipei city film provides an extremely sensitive record of that fragility. The
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new wave ushers in a genuinely new era in the representation of Taiwans

capital, replacing the more circumscribed and patriotic visions of the previous
three decades. Lee Ching-Chih outlines five periods in the history of the city
film in Taipei: first, the reconstruction period in the 1950s, when films focused on the plight of refugees and soldiers transplanted from the mainland
into unfamiliar and often desperate conditions and on the equally unsettled
migrants from Taiwans rural south; then two periods of relatively unremarkable production in the 1960s and 1970s when obligatory patriotism necessitated a focus on glorious state symbols and upper-class enclaves, and when the
White Terror forced filmmakers to turn inward, with relatively innocuous
interiors replacing the exteriors now charged with increasing political significance and fraught with danger.17 Beginning with the new wave and the onset
of Taiwans economic miracle of the late 1970s and 1980s, films from the
breakaway period documented the inescapable problems accompanying
rapid urbanization, the attractions of a nostalgic return to an imagined rural
past, and the possibility of emigration from Taiwan and flight from the persistent and intractable aftereffects of previously inconceivable prosperity. Finally, in the fifth period, covering the 1990s, Taipei films focused more minutely on the various groups and subcultures present in the city, on a more
precise mapping of a subdivided cityscape, on an almost sociological survey
just as the city underwent unprecedented transformations that demolished
many of the landmarks of the previous eras of Taipei cinema.18 The buildings
and public spaces that once stood for the city were replaced with the multiplexes, malls, and arcades whose surfaces resisted localization because of their
ubiquity and uniformity. Lee traces the history of a cinema charged with representing the particularities of a local identity while acknowledging Taipeis
ambiguous and provisional status in the minds of the ruling elite, the eternal
allure of the rural, and the successive economic revolutions manifested in the
built environment of the city, from the days of the economic miracle to the
current era of globalization.
Unlike the many ancient imperial centers in East Asiaunlike, for example, Changan, whose population soared to over 1 million during the Tang
dynastythe metropolis of Taipei is a relatively recent construction. In 1940,
the population of Taipei was only 0.3 million, with much of its modest expansion occurring under Japanese occupation. By 1961, however, the population
had grown to 1.15 million, as mainlanders gathered in a capital that now concentrated the wealth of a nation in exile. The city was home to 2.7 million by
the heyday of the new wave in the late 1980s, and dramatic growth continues
to the present, with minimal fluctuations in the population of Taipei proper
and significant expansion in the area immediately surrounding it, the county
lands recently renamed New Taipei City, whose population tripled between
1979 and 2010 to almost 4 million. While this process of urbanization follows
the rhythms of Taiwans unique postwar history, it also accompanies the
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sudden rise of its fellow Asian tigers, and Taipeis closest analogues are
found not on the island but in Seoul and Singapore. It exists both within a
network of globalized cities and inside its more conventional geographical
boundaries. From the onset of political and economic liberalization, investors
and government planners have transformed Taipei from a center of light
manufacturing into a regional hub for heavy chemical and high-technology
production taking place on its outskirts and elsewhere in Asia. The modern
history of Taipei is marked above all by its phenomenal population growth, by
its development into a command-and-control center for international finance
and high-technology industries, and by the expansion of the city outward to
include formerly independent outlying areas. The result is the contemporary
megacity that dominates the northern half of the island and whose circles of
influence spread across the Straits, south to Hong Kong, north to Japan and
Korea, and across the Pacific to the United States. Andrea Branzi once observed that a citys skyline is the graph of a societys capital accumulation and
expenditure, with the peaks of its skyscrapers representing the height of its
affluence.19 Taipei 101, completed in 2004 and then the tallest building in the
world, represents the culmination of a process of Taiwanese economic development that stretches back at least four decades and that accelerated remarkably in the 1980s. A citys outward push is much more difficult to graph,
because it depends on enclosure, demolition, and erasure rather than the construction of visible monuments. While the Taiwanese governments marketing campaigns inevitably feature 101s grand silhouette, the films of the new
wave have ignored these shrines to capital and focused instead on the horizontal dimension of development, on the condemned and buried city rather
than symbolic structures designed to convince us that they just might last
forever.
Taipei Story, or the Interior

The two directors who became synonymous with the new cinema over the
course of the 1980s and 1990s, Yang and Hou, reflect the rise of an urban
generation in Taiwanese cinema and society. Both were born on the mainland in 1947 but relocated to Taiwan as infants during the civil war. Yang
grew up in Taipei and studied electrical engineering in Taiwan before earning
a masters degree in engineering and computer science from the University
ofFlorida. He then enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California but dropped out after one year, disillusioned by the commercial orientation of the program. He worked in the computer industry in Seattle for
much of the 1970s, before his exposure to the many revolutionary film movements at the timeespecially Werner Herzog and the new German cinema
rekindled his fascination with a particular kind of art film. By the early 1980s,
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he had returned to Taiwan and worked on television productions before Desires, his episode of the collective work In Our Time, established him as one of
the most promising directors of this new cohort. Yang returns obsessively to
the narratives of a new urban generation in nearly all of his films, from Desires, with its coming-of-age in the 1960s narrative punctuated by the music
of the Beatles and images from the Vietnam War, the hallmarks of the global
1960s, to That Day, on the Beach; Taipei Story; The Terrorizers; A Confucian
Confusion; Mahjong (1996); and Yi Yi. And he repeatedly characterizes himself and his films in relation to the city of Taipei. He describes Taipei Story as
a narrative of lost romance, but with the city as the object of affection: thats
the way I looked at the city at the timewe were breaking away from the past
and our ties are inevitably romantic ones.20 He also characterizes his own
identity in terms of urban rather than national or transnational affections and
affiliations: I consider myself a Taipei guyIm not against Taiwan. Im for
Taipei.21 As Leo Chanjen Chen argues, Yangs films also rely on a fundamentally architectural conception of cinema as an art where images and space
converge.22 Viewed together, over the course of his career, his films demonstrate the centrality of the city, and especially the capital, in the consciousness
of the new wave in Taiwan.
By the 1990s, Yangs exercise in cognitive mapping rarely referred to village
life or the natural environment at allin Yi Yi the latter exists almost exclusively in the form of a ritualistically nurtured house plant placed on a balcony
overlooking a busy boulevard paved gray, marked by painted lines, and roaring with cars and scooters. Instead, his characters wander from one global
metropolis to another, listening to music from somewhere else, consuming
images from somewhere else, harking back nostalgically to a mythical era
that day, on the beach, in the terms offered by his first solo filmwhen the
known and remembered landscape served as the primary indicator of time
and place. All of these tendencies would suggest that Yangs films have ventured far from the realist ambitions of the earliest new wave films, that they
have counteracted the myth of a satisfied rural Taiwan with a myth of dislocation and disembodiment. But as Davis and Yeh argue in the context of A
Brighter Summer Day, theres a thickness in the texture of this film that demands perceptual immersion to properly appreciate it, let alone grasp its
more subtle historical allusions.23 And this thickness, this resistance at the
level of the image to the smooth flow of time and space, also marks his films in
a contemporary setting, with the city becoming the location where these contradictory tendencies play themselves out on glass curtain walls. The mise-enscne in nearly every Yang film is designed to reproduce the dynamism and
appeal of the global city, while, as with the peculiar plant in Yi Yi, reintroducing incongruity and friction within that immaculate modernity.
Taipei Story begins with a concrete illustration of the act of mise-en-scne,
as well as its theoretical and social stakes. A three-minute credit sequence
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opens in a virtually empty interior, the shell of an apartment that a young

professional woman (Ah-Chin, played by Tsai Chin) is planning to decorate
and make her home. That void is slowly filled with the props that will begin to
constitute her world. In the first shot, she and her childhood sweetheart
(Lung, played by Hou Hsiao-hsien) stand before a sliding glass door and gaze
out at other buildings and whatever is shielded from the cameras view by a
wall. She suggests that they install shelves in the bedroom to hold a television,
stereo, and VCR; they discuss the financing for this substantial and expensive
project; he tests out the light switches and wiring; she rubs her foot on the
wooden floor. The camera then returns to the same setup used in the first shot,
an image that seems to gesture toward a vista unfolding outside while withholding that view and remaining confined within the apartment walls. The
final shots in the credit sequence show the already decorated apartment with
a curtain blocking the window, along with an assortment of objects that fill
the previously empty space, including framed pictures, the stereo and television, a dresser, a mirror, and sunglasses. Although the Chinese title of the
film is borrowed from an aphorism that literally means green plum and
bamboo horse and is conventionally used to describe the innocent affection
of young lovers, the work itself is as much the story of a city and its paradigmatic spaces as a tale of exuberant and then failed romance. To understand
human relationships and urban life in Taiwan in the 1980s, the film suggests,
we must begin with the basic elements of cinema: with objects and space and
the bodies that circulate among them. If the film seems jaded from the opening moments, its title rendered ironic by the fact that the lovers had split up
long before their awkward and formal meeting in the apartment, the one
aspect of modern life still endowed with exuberance and vitality is the new
cinema itself.
The image that brings this credit sequence to a close echoes a similar composition and effect in Yangs film The Terrorizers, as the characters again stand
on the brink of the inside and the outside, while the camera maintains its
distance from whatever they see and experience. This almost contemporaneous film also displays Yangs interest in mise-en-scne, especially in the narrative and cinematography focused on the fragmentation of urban experience
(adimension of the film famously analyzed by Fredric Jameson), and in the act
of, again literally, decorating an apartment, this time with photographs rather
than props, or rather with images that are now interchangeable with the concrete shell that surrounds them, with pictures that recall fashion photography
and spectacular image-making practices but may also provide evidence that a
crime has been committed.24 In the Taipei of the mid-1980s, photographic and
moving images are at once the highest form of commodity reification, to use
Debords phrase, and a mode of witnessing that recalls cinemas most sincere
realist movements, including the paradigmatic Italian case of the mid-1940s
and extending to mainland Chinese artists like Jia Zhangke in the 1990s. While
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Yangs films of the 1980s recount a series of exhausted or failed romantic relationships, they also reflect the earnestness of the Manifesto for a new cinema,
which begins by expressing its suspicions about existing film institutions but
concludes with a flurry of statements outlining the possibilities for film in
Taiwan, many introduced by the phrase We hope. . . . And while their location is often a city confronted by a thoroughgoing aesthetic and spatial transformation, the camera remains at once encapsulated within and protected
from the city, fascinated and energized but not captured by the excesses of the
epoch. Love and the romantic allure of the city die quickly in these films, but
cinephilia is alive and well.
In both Taipei Story and The Terrorizers, it would be difficult to characterize these signature shots of a thin, glass barrier between the home and the city
through habitual, shorthand references to an interior or exterior; they instead
explore the threshold between these two commonplace divisions of space, between the domestic and the public, and between interior design and architecture or urban planning. These sites exist at the border between on the one
hand the studio-like setting of the apartment, a virtually vacant setting that
the characters will then decorate, creating their own collection and arrangement of domestic objects, and on the other the urban environment that exists
on the other side of that glass, the reality that extends and endures beyond the
interventions of filmmakers on the scene, the city transformed into a stage for
the historical drama of globalization. In other words, this scenario and this
category of shot introduce a conflict between cinema viewed as mise-en-scne,
as the construction of space and the manipulation of objects and orchestration of bodies within it, and cinema viewed as a realist, observational medium
in the Bazinian mode. Like the characters in this sequence, the filmmakers of
Taiwans new wave explore the verges of these two conceptions of space and
two modes of filmmaking, the threshold where one spills over into the other.
In a discussion of Mahjong, Yang suggests that contemporary urban society
is itself a stage, with people wielding character-defining objects like fax machines and telephones and with space organized by a huge network of telephone cables and flight routes.25 Yangs achievement as a filmmaker was to
compose a realism attuned at once to the ethereal and the material in the objects and environments of his time, to communications technology that constructs transnational networks, to the abstractions of globalization that nonetheless manifest themselves in the everyday existence of city streets, apartment
blocks, and the props inside them.
Yang is not the only filmmaker in the era of Taiwans New Cinema to explore the complex and changing interface between interior and exterior space.
Hou has always been attentive to the intricacies of the interior, especially in
the keenly remembered family home in A Time to Live, a Time to Die, the location where the drama of living and dying actually takes place. And in Good
Men, Good Women, a series of almost aggressive faxes confront a young
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woman with excerpts from her stolen diary, disturbing the ostensible peace of
her domestic space through a communication technology imagined as an invasive force that threatens to transform her private life into public information. But his most dramatic formulation of this relationship between inside
and outside is the memorable scene in The Boys from Fengkuei when the young
men stand in the concrete shell of an ongoing development project, a structure too speculative and unfinished to have an interior and an exterior, and
from their perch high above the city look out at an expanding Kaohsiung,
itself viewed as a similarly tentative and incomplete project. In Vive lamour
(Aiqing wan sui, 1994), Tsai Ming-liang presents the tale of a real estate agent,
her lover, and a squatter, all of whom wander in and out of a vacant apartment
and become partners in a mnage trois. The interior of the apartment always
contains an unseen third player who disrupts and challenges the illusion of
domestic bliss provided by this provisional home. In The Hole, Tsai examines
the slow destruction of a self-contained private space, the infection of that
jealously guarded interior by a mysterious disease, and the eventual revitalization of that environment as it becomes a shared rather than a solitary domain.
The Hole proposes an allegorical model of the relationship between interiors
and exteriors, as the relentlessly enclosed space of the home is menaced by
surveillance and infiltration, but the characters are eventually liberated when
the walls and floors begin to crumble. And Tsais Visage again reveals the directors obsession with enclosed and crumbling spaces, with the simultaneous
and contradictory desire for isolation and visitation from outside evident in a
female lead (played by Laetitia Casta) who attempts to black out the windows
of a vacant apartment and then launches into elaborate performances in the
most famous Parisian landmarks.
While the work of mainland Chinese directors like Jia Zhangke and Liu
Jiayin suggest that this fascination with the interior and its mise-en-scne
should be framed in regional and industrial termsas a practice of a particular mode of art cinema currently prevalent in East Asiarather than under
the aegis of national cinema, the most notable recent practitioners of this art
of mise-en-scne have been Taiwanese, especially Edward Yang. His penchant
for showing the interior through a reflective glass curtain wall, most notably
in Taipei Story and Yi Yi, suggest that his exteriors serve not as establishing
shots designed to present basic facts about a location and therefore to orient
the viewer but as a radical reconsideration of the relationship between inside
and outside, with the surface of the image, the structure of the building, and
the depths of an open office space compressed onto a single plane. The camera
focuses on these two categories of space at once, and the viewers wandering
attention brings the eye back and forth between the interior and the exterior.
To be inside the home or an office block is not to inhabit a retreat or a sanctuary but to stand on the verge of a social space beyond those thin, fragile, or
even nonexistent walls.
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In his famous essay on nineteenth-century Paris, in a section called LouisPhilippe, or the Interior, Walter Benjamin describes the burgeoning market
in interior design during the ascendancy of the French bourgeoisie and links
this aesthetic sense to a broader economic and social tendency toward privatization. He writes: for the private person, living space becomes, for the first
time, antithetical to the place of work. The former is constituted by the interior; the office is its complement. The private person who squares his accounts
with reality in his office demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions.26 He adds that the development of a personal sanctuary or refuge
and these escapist metaphors appear in Benjamins work and in the literature
of the periodis antithetical to the broader cultural and political concerns of
the masses. Benjamin writes that for the individual bent on retreating into a
carefully crafted interior, the desire for solitude is all the more pressing since
he has no intention of extending his commercial considerations into social
ones. In shaping his private environment he represses both. From this spring
the phantasmagorias of the interior. For the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past.
His drawing room is a box in the world theater.27 In Benjamin these phantasmagorias give way to phenakistoscopes, kinetoscopes, and other precinematic
devices: the interior is also a camera obscura, a technology that makes one
world visible and hides another. With their insistent return to spaces at the
boundary between the private and the public realm, the filmmakers of Taiwans new cinema pose a challenge to this bourgeois conception of interior
space; and the images at the beginning of Taipei Story suggest that the world
theater imagined by Benjamin, with its allusion to box seats and a stage, has
been replaced by other media technologies and art forms that better capture
the late twentieth-century relationship between the interior and publicity.
Hollywood blockbusters like Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) devote enormous resources to the creation and destruction of CGI cities, the tantalizingly
real illusion of an exterior world. The interior has become the domain of world
cinema, a cinema that lavishes attention on the object world, the body, and
the architecture that reflects and structures social practices: in short, a cinema
devoted to the material and corporeal that bear traces of the local or national
past and the global future.
If Benjamin wrote about the private individual and his or her characteristic
space in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the new cinema approaches
the problem of the interior in the context of the radical and unsettling privatization of housing that occurred in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, a period
marked by the feverish intensity of its speculative cycles, as well as moments
of stagnation and precipitous collapse. The development of Taiwans cities
over the past three decades has largely been determined by its position as a
manufacturing and then service hub in the global economy and by the more
fundamental need for adequate housing, especially when immigrants from
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the mainland began to relinquish the dream of triumphant return and settled
in permanently, most notably in Taipei. Although many of these waishengren
had been occupying unsatisfactory temporary dwellings for decades, the official response to this pressing problem was deferral. In 1976, only 1.8 percent of
the citizens of Taipei inhabited government-provided apartments, reflecting
the minimal government outlays in this area, and only 46 percent of homes
were owner-occupied dwellings.28 Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the
encouragement of a culture of home ownership became one of the principal
strategies of urban development in Taipei, and as a result home ownership
rates soared to 65.2 percent in 1985 and 80.2 percent in 2000, one of the highest levels in the world.29 This increase corresponds with an equally dramatic
increase in the wealth of the urban population and with government policies,
especially mortgage deductions, designed to promote this investment but also
amounts to a rapid and radical reinvention of the concept of home as both the
site of domestic life and a valuable and vulnerable financial asset, with its fragility exposed above all during the cyclical but increasingly frequent economic
busts. Braester, Lin Wenchi, and others have written about the impact of the
reinvention of Taipei on Taiwans new cinema, and Braester has concentrated
in particular on the destruction of provisional (but long-standing) veterans
villages (juancun) and their representation in film.30 But I would like to shift
the focus from the grand scale of the city, the site of government and corporate investment and monumental construction, or the slightly more manageable domain of the neighborhoodthe realm of urban planners and civic
activiststo the intimate environments of the interior, because the drama of
privatization often plays itself out in that quietly charged domain. Yangs films
offer a paradigmatic view of the interior during a period when the vulnerability of housing to broader economic shocks clashed with the celebratory rhetoric of ownership and control.
In their treatment of the cinematic interior, Taiwans new wave films
challenge the fundamental division between the domestic retreat and the real
world outside. In films produced on a soundstage, everything is essentially
an interior, even the painted landscapes and skylines. The auteurist critics
and filmmakers of the French new wave, especially the cohort linked to Cahiers du cinma, identified mise-en-scne as the key act of filmmaking because in a studio system focused relentlessly on stars and screenplays, the
director could oversee the placement of objects and choreograph the movements of actors, asserting control over this vast range of quotidian and habitually overlooked activities. The opening sequence of Taipei Story illustrates the difference between a classical paradigm and the regime of the
interior ushered in by the new cinema. With its refusal of a clear separation
between interior and exterior space, the film constantly wanders across the
threshold between private objects and the architecture of the city. Baudrillard argues that glass is the paradigmatic building material in the system of
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objects because it creates the illusion that everything communicates, at

once eradicating and reversing the commonsense relationship between the
interior and the exterior: indeed, the modern house of glass does not open
onto the outside at all; instead it is the outside world, nature, landscape, that
penetrates, thanks to glass and its abstractness, into the intimate or private
realm inside, and there plays freely as a component of atmosphere. The
whole world thus becomes integrated as spectacle into the domestic universe.31 In Yangs films, the interior appears to be protected by sliding glass
doors and glass curtain walls, but his many images of apartment and office
windows represent not an aperture onto the cityscape outside but the realization that despite the owners care and vigilance, the interior is nothing
more than a mirror image of the world outside. Yang shows us the thin barrier that separates private and public space because his characters never retreat into a secure personal domain; instead they transition from the city,
with the process of privatization unfolding on a monumental scale, to the
home, with its intimate but equally politicized drama between people and
the system of objects.
The most privileged object in Taipei Storys various interiors is the television set, whose glass surface appears in close-up in several key scenes. While
it follows the unraveling of the relationship between Lung and Ah-Chin, the
film associates these two characters with very different worlds and emphasizes their seemingly incompatible systems of economic and social value. AhChin surrounds herself with a cohort of other professionals and indulges in
the consumerist pleasures made possible by the relative affluence of a globalizing economy. Mired in the past, Lung runs a fabric business and longs for
the glory days when he played baseball in his youth. The television exists on
the verge of those two social spheres and between past and present: first,
when we see Lung watching a videotape of a baseball game and recalling his
own career as an accomplished Little League player, and then when Ah-Chins
sister watches the commercials interspersed between the action of a baseball
game, fast-forwarding past the balls, strikes, and home runs and concentrating on the ad for a fragrance called Because; and finally, in the films secondto-last sequence, as Lung slowly bleeds to death on an empty street, beside a
pile of discarded household items, including a large television set. He spends
his final living moments amid the refuse of a domestic interior now littered
on the sidewalk. As Lung stares at the blank screen of this trashed and disconnected television, he begins to fill the small screen, and then the frame of
Taipei Story itself, with grainy footage of his own fantasy, a news broadcast
that covers a victory parade for triumphant Little Leaguers returning home
from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and reports on the highlights of their victory in the championship game. The strong, silent type, Lung breaks from his
usually reserved demeanor and reveals his most intimate fantasya combination of the utopian internationalism of Little League baseball tinged with
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the tragedy of lost youth and unrealized potentialbut instead of conjuring

it up in his own imagination, he appropriates it from the quasi-public domain
of the airwaves and the television screen. Like the window opening onto the
city, the enchanted glass of the television screen appears to provide a privileged perspective on the world viewed on-screen, as we see events unfolding
outside or elsewhere without being seen. At Lungs most intimate and emotionally charged moment, as he sits near death and recalls his childhood, his
body and consciousness are replaced by a completely mediatized version of
his cherished memories. And Yang presents that jubilant vision not in vibrant, saturated color and deafening sound but in a fuzzy, grayed picture of
1970s television and the crackling sound that accompanies it. What we see in
this scene is the nearly total destruction of the barrier between interior and
exterior conceived as psychological metaphors, as a relationship between the
spectator and the image, and as discrete physical and architectural spaces.
Yangs film begins with an attempt to claim, cultivate, and wall off a private
space but concludes with a radical reversal of that opening gambit: while the
television set, a domestic object among many, has been abandoned on the
side of the road, Lung has internalized its images to such a degree that when
his life flashes before his eyes, all he sees is television.
Taipei Storys final scene shows Ah-Chin discussing the layout and design
possibilities of a new office, though the space remains completely empty,
aside from a regular array of structural columns. And as she gazes out at the
city, her own face merging with the building, the reflections of passing cars
begin to glide by on an ornamental glass strip whose dimensions suggest the
frame of a cinematic image. What is cinema in this age of privatization and
in the eyes of the new Taiwanese directors who develop in parallel with that
process? Is cinema a directors medium that reflects the personal vision of
an individual artist, the private property of the auteur? Or is the camera
distinct from the objects it records? Is it a technology capable of producing
authentic documents of a particular time and place? Or do the films play
with a more postmodern notion of cinema and television as mere images, as
simulacra among shadows? If, as Baudrillard suggests, we have all become
spectators in the new system of objects, are the characters at the beginning
of Taipei Story watching an intimate film in the theater of the city, or are
they about to draw the curtain and consume the necessarily public images
of television in the privacy of their own homes? The opening sequence and
denouement of Taipei Story suggest that Yang operated at the margins of
the spaces and media he explored, playing one off the other, viewing each in
the process of becoming something else. He shows us images circulating on
television but anchored to an object and encased in plastic and glass; he
shows us monumental buildings that reflect a cinematic spectacle of light
and motion and the at once privatized and mediatized interiors of the new
Taiwan.
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figure 5.1 Yi Yi.
Yangs last films construct a city almost entirely out of shadows and reflections, a space at once massive and ephemeral. In Yi Yi, the glass walls of
Taipeis office buildings reveal the work carrying on inside them, then the
citys spectacular play of light and motion, and then the surfaces where the
two collide (Figure 5.1). Fredric Jamesons crucial essay on The Terrorizers
notes the extraordinary number of shots with people looking out from their
apartments onto a city in the process of construction, and this privileged but
walled-in vantage point becomes, in Jamesons argument, an allegory for the
relationship between Taiwan and the world system: Taiwan is somehow
within the world system as its citizens are in their city boxes: prosperity and
constriction all at once, he writes.32 As Taiwan becomes integral to the
global economy, it discovers both its provisional centrality and its political
marginality; as Taipei becomes a central concern in new wave cinema, the
images reveal both its enormity and its impermanence. By the time of Yi Yi,
the question is how to film and document a city in which the reality of demolition and reconstruction leaves few standing environments of memory,
in which the past resides in spaces as transient and disposable as images. Or
as Virilio writes, from the aesthetics of the appearance of a stable image
present as an aspect of its static natureto the esthetics of the disappearance
of the unstable imagepresent in its cinematic and cinematographic flight
of escapewe have witnessed a transmutation of representations. The emergence of forms as volumes destined to persist as long as their materials
would allow has given way to images whose duration is purely retinal.33 In
Yangs film we witness a transformation in the relationship between cinema
and the city: cinema is no longer a force of preservation that records for
posterity the sites rendered obsolete by forces of modernization; and cinema
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is no longer a spectacle in its own right, one that complements the dazzling
modernity of the city. Instead, this is a film in which the qualities habitually
attributed to architecturepresence, structure, stabilityare transferred to
the image. And the tendency toward disappearance, flux, and instability is
attributed to the built environment itself. In the films interplay of structures
and reflections, Taiwans hub of international commerce extends as far as
the eye can see and dissolves into pure image. Suspended between screen
and substance, enveloping us in the most undeniable physical presence and
the most disorienting optical illusions, these reflections glimpsed in passing
are the image of the economic miracle, the economic miracle in its own
image, the miracle itself.
While Yang has been justifiably characterized by Leo Chanjen Chen as an
architect manqu, his establishment of a production company, Miluku Productions, specializing in animated films and television programs suggests
that graphic design, the image drawn by hand or with software and not recorded by the camera, was also central to his vocation.34 In recent years and
particularly with the advent of computer-aided design and drafting, architecture itself has been transformed into the end result of animation rather than
the actualization of a scaled-down model and its miniaturized materiality.
And as storyboard and CGI films have virtually eliminated the need for architecture, exteriors, and cities, blockbuster cinema has once again retreated
into an interiorized domain. The studio has become a world theater that
opens onto entirely digital cities and landscapes. But perhaps the more accurate way of understanding this transition in Yangs career, a transition
tragically interrupted by his early death, is not as a movement away from realist cinema and the physical spaces of Taipei but as a continuation of this
career-long fascination with mise-en-scne. What is animation, after all, but
staging in its purest and least encumbered form, without the limitations imposed by photography, the human body, and actual, historical, material, contingent spaces? The environments glimpsed outside the newly decorated
apartment and the brand-new structures viewed from the architects office in
Taipei Story, these material manifestations of fascination and regret, can be
sketched on the storyboard and rendered in CGI. The world envisioned from
those windows and balconies was undergoing a process of continual redesign
and reconstruction, with that cycle now its quasi-natural condition, replacing
the narrative of roots-seeking so prominent in the earliest pictures of Hou or
the cool modernism of Yang. And Taipei Storys tale of fading youthful romance can now be retold without any physical connection to Taipei at all; if
his career had not been foreshortened, perhaps Yang himself would have
been its author. On the other hand, Yang was among the most important
filmmakers of the space and the era before the interior was everywhere and
the camera served as an adjunct to the art of animation. His paradigmatic
films display a new city and lifestyle at the moment of their construction and
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diffusion, but with a determination to capture the reality of that ephemeral

environment, moment by moment, room by room. For Yang, being an auteur
in the late twentieth century meant occupying that liminal zone pictured so
frequently in his films, with the interior spilling out onto the streets of Taipei
and cinema occupying a temporary but revelatory position between the stage
and the world.
{6}
The Haunting of Taipei
While Hou Hsiao-hsiens early films betray an overwhelming nostalgia for the
town and village life of his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, Tsai Ming-liangs
films are equally nostalgic, but for the forms of urban modernity with no place
in a pastoral or nativist philosophy. Tsais early work constructs an allegory
around the dynamics of occupation and eviction, encampment and displacement in contemporary Taipei. I-Fen Wu suggests that Rebels of the Neon God
(Qingshaonian Nezha, 1992) is the most precisely located of all Tsais films, as
it presents a localist vision of West End youth culture.1 Vive lamour, a film
set during the speculative housing boom of the 1990s, is the most literally
concerned with community and property, as the accidental and then repeated
encounters of a disgruntled real estate agent, a squatter, and a street peddler
transform the commodity of housing into a laboratory for new forms of kinship. His later Taipei films continue to foreground the dilemmas posed by a
city whose physical existence has been produced and remains under siege by
successive modernization campaigns. While Taipeis monumental architecture features occasionally in his films, relatively nondescript and interchangeable apartments constitute the dominant spaces in Tsais world. And he
returns to those environments obsessively, filming them with virtually still
cameras in takes whose duration emphasizes both their undeniable physical
existence and their vulnerability. Their ordinariness and ubiquity leaves these
spaces particularly susceptible to neglect, decay, and destruction, while the
stillness and disproportionate attention of the camera renders even the most
minor change conspicuous and evocative.
Taken together, the films of a second generation of new wave directors,
including Tsai, Chen Kuo-fu, and Lee Kang-sheng, constitute an ongoing attempt to document the development of the modern city of Taipei, as reflected
on the glass faades of buildings or in illuminated cityscapes at night, and to
collect traces left behind by its waves of modernization and decay. Deteriorating
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walls and mounds of rubble mark the fading of the ideals of utopian modernism
and anticipate their replacement by what Rem Koolhaas calls the generic
city.2 No longer a utopian future glimpsed in the present, the Taipei of Tsai,
Chen, and Lee has outlived a modernizing era and now faces a new wave of
expansion, eviction, and demolition. Like many of their contemporaries in
Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, these directors shuttle between fantastic genre
pictures, especially ghost films where the dead wander through the same space
as the living, and a skeptical futurism in which contemporary cities seem incompatible with human lifedefined in part by its relationship to physical
environments and their embodied memory. To inhabit Taipei, these directors
suggest, is to haunt the city, to endure in the manner of a ghost that channels
one historical era into another and carries forward a memory of the absent
and invisible. In telling stories about ghosts and other antiquated spirits, they
counter the more common, futuristic, highly mediated tales about skyscrapers
and fortunes rising upward, and they focus instead on the people and everyday structures of life that have gone missing in the city below. Their films are
chronicles of a city, its phantoms, and a spectral urbanism thats never in the
time and place where it belongs and always seems out of joint with the world
city being constructed around it.
Trash Cinema and Junkspace

Dudley Andrew describes contemporary Asian ghost films as the shadow or
underside of urban postmodernity, and he notes their enormous versatility
and popularity in the region and beyond, as art house takes on the genre alternate with global blockbusters like Ringu and its multiple remakes.3 Under the
influence of the Asian economic booms of the past half century, he suggests,
the traditional cohort of rural ghosts inhabiting abandoned wells and haunting country estates has migrated to the city, where they also exact revenge for
past injustice. The ruined city and its upwardly mobile successor have become
one of the privileged sites of both a cinematic haunting and an archaic urbanity that thwarts the logic of urban extension and renewal. A low genre and
urban rubble have fused into a new formula for thinking about the local
impact of globalization. Tsai, perhaps the most intellectually demanding artist
of Taiwans second new wave, admits that his otherwise austere pictures are
infused with irrational belief systems that live on through everyday practices
and popular culture. I am very superstitious and I believe in ghosts, he says
in an interview devoted primarily to Goodbye Dragon Inn. That is why there
is talk of them in the film, and so many old things. . . . This inclusion of older
elements had something to do with the theater and the fact that it seemed so
unreal. It has a quality of crossing across time and from the human realm to
the nonhuman. Whenever you enter a theater you are actively giving up your
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own real time. That provides a sense of mystery.4 Tsais ghosts have relocated
to the city and now embody traditions, including the evening at the movie
palace, that appear incompatible with the gleaming modernity of contemporary Taipei.
As he represents the marginalization and eradication of previous forms of
urbanity, Tsai and his characteristic mise-en-scne foreground the environments identified by Koolhaas as Junkspace, a space left behind after the decline of the modern era. If space-junk is the human debris that litters the
universe, Koolhaas writes: Junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the
planet.5 It results, for example, from the reincorporation of suburbia into
the city in the form of massive shopping malls and festival marketplaces, or
in any attempt to revive past glory through a process introduced by the prefix
re-: restore, rearrange, reassemble, and so on.6 The term encompasses a
range of discordant styles and hybrids: Interiors refer to the Stone and Space
Age at the same time.7 Architecture can be modeled on every national tradition or historical style at once, and at the stroke of midnight it may all revert
to Taiwanese gothic.8 This geographical and temporal chaos makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were.9
Koolhaas links these at once fabulous and ruined structures to their equivalents in media when he likens Junkspace to a television studio and then to
more contemporary screen cultures: Because it cannot be grasped, he writes,
Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a
screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia.10 If there is any possibility of redemption amid this expanding rubbish heap, it lies in the remnants of former geometries that create ever new havoc, offering forlorn
nodes of resistance.11 Tsais work resides in those former geometries, and
his conception of media is filmic (and therefore archaic by design) rather than
televisual or digital. His films proceed with the deliberate, floating pace of a
haunting rather than the incessant movement that results in immediate forgetting. In Tsais pictures, Junkspace can harbor some utopian possibilities
precisely because of what remains behind as junk and the architectural and
urban history that endure in it. For Koolhaas, an emblematic image of the
contemporary city consists of empty streets and malls being cleaned out between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m., the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift.
Although he situates the medium in a less glamorous and exalted position
than Ruttmann or Dziga Vertov, Tsai searches through the aftermath of preceding waves of modernization and cinema, the night shift undoing the
damage of the day shift. While Koolhass suggests that only what is dead can
be resurrected and memory itself may have turned into Junkspace, Tsai
concentrates on the ghosts left behind and their uncanny relationship to the
memory of the city.12
As Yeh and Davis point out, Tsais work also contains a neglected dimension
of camp, an element of coarse humor and extravagant performance intimately
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connected to entertainment traditions and local character types in Taiwan.13

They comment on the eventlessness and sheer boredom of his films, suggesting that the constitutive excess of a camp aesthetic has been translated
into an excessive experience of time that unfolds too slowly even for art
cinema and of space that predominates over action.14 In her foundational
essay on a camp sensibility, Susan Sontag argues that camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others: clothes, furniture, all the elements
of visual dcor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp.15 She adds that
most campy objects are urban because they are products of a world defined
through its artifice rather than a preexisting nature.16 Tsais films, in addition to their exploration of homosexual desire and its unique relationship to
camp, are remarkable for the way they link excess and urbanity, for the inordinate degree of attention he lavishes on high-rise interiors and evacuated
public spaces, on virtually empty apartments and zones where nothing happens, on an otherwise unexceptional, mundane world that is nonetheless
transformed into an aesthetic object. That overload of space and dcor is
almost always rendered through a patient and observant aesthetic, an excess
of cinematic realism, on the one hand and on the other an extravagant display
of other arts, especially costuming, set design, and the other key aspects of
cinematic mise-en-scne. Together with recurrent sight gags where Lee Kangsheng gallivants around in his underwear or shakes off an incurable crick in
his neck, Tsais films foreground another form of overkill: the overbearing
presence of bare walls and other locations devoid of any outward signs of the
transformative events that have produced them. The Skywalk Is Gone takes
place entirely in the aftermath of an unseen eventthe destruction of the pedestrian overpass featured in What Time Is It There?and the short film itself
is organized around the ghostly persistence of that architecture and its corresponding aftereffect on urban practices. The city and its structures are almost
oppressively present in his films, but Tsai, in a paradox that defines his work,
also envisions Taiwanese urban modernity as a fragile and endangered way of
life that can only be recuperated through compensatory excess on the screen.
Everyday urbanity becomes a spectacle in its own right as the camera focuses
relentlessly on interiors filled with bright fish tanks and kitschy ancestral
photos, on song-and-dance routines whose stage is the hallway and curtains
the elevator doors, and on massive stacks of toilet papers, showers of crumbling concrete, and cascades of water emanating from leaky pipes. Like a ghost
clanging its chains in the attic, the city refuses to fade quietly away in the films
of Tsai Ming-liang.
Although the extraordinarily popular work of Chen Kuo-fu is usually
classified apart from the less commercially successful films of Tsai, Chens
films also concentrate on the transformations of the city of Taipei and the
ghostly manifestations of its past. Treasure Island (Zhi yao wei ni huo yi tian,
1993) is an urban gangster film set in Taipei, and it deploys the genre and the
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mobility of the crook on the run to draw a map of the citys diverse social
spaces, from the sites of fabulous wealth to the locations of decay and criminality to the less categorizable spaces in between. In The Personals (Zhenghun
qishi, 1998), the loneliness of the personal ad becomes the conceit for a story
that soon gathers a microcosm of the city in a small teahouse, a Bakhtinian
assembly that re-creates the social totality by orchestrating its many voices.
In Double Vision (Shuang tong, 2002) contemporary Taipei is a site where
the most extreme manifestation of global capitalismthe overnight hightech billionaireconstructs a faade for the most traditional philosophies
and superstitions, and cops patrol the streets in search of serial killers and
immortal spirits. The World Tower (Shijie Dalou) that fronts for a Daoist
temple becomes the grandest of Junkspaces, a spectacle that dazzles because
of its incoherent combination of the mythical past and the mythical present,
neither imagined as a viable future on a mass scale, neither rooted in a lived
history. No longer a glimpse of a utopian future, the city consists of a bizarre
combination of shiny new and venerable old fantasies. But the most peculiar
and powerful moments in Double Vision occur in the brief interludes when
the camera presents a cityscape at some indeterminate hour between day
and night. In the narrative, these shots serve a useful function: they are a
pausing for breath between periods of intense action, and the last occurs in
the morning, just before we discover the death of Richter, the final victim
needed for the Daoist spirit to achieve immortality. These are establishing
shots in the most general sense: they situate the film in a particular space, a
city seen from a distance that provides the panoramic vision of picture postcards but also obscures the spectacular faades and magnificent interiors
under construction. These shots of a city photographed from its margins
seem to search for a privileged perspective on a place now defined not by its
possibilities but by its contradictions, by the tension between the picturesque image of its branded core and the centrifugal forces that send it scattering outward. Unmotivated and photographed in a crepuscular light, these
images offer a ghosts-eye vision of Taipei, a ghost town in Chens words,
despite its spectacular and vibrant ascent as a hub of regional economic
life.17
In Chens films, as in Hou, Yang, and Tsai, the political and cultural conflicts produced in the era of global capitalism are at once spectralized and
spatialized. In his essay on The Terrorizers, Jameson writes of this new urbanity in language that fuses the raw materials of cinema, light and time, and
architecture: What is grand and exhilarating, light itself, the hours of the
day, is nonetheless here embedded in the routine of the city and locked into
the pores of its stone or smeared on its glass.18 These images from Double
Vision provide the reverse shot for Yangs from fifteen years earlier and a
return to the foundational problems confronted in the new wave city and its
cinema (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). While the World Tower represents the allure of
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figure 6.1 The Terrorizers.
figure 6.2 Double Vision.
the global city viewed in all its splendor, these shots seem determined to depict
the light over the city and the hours of the day from a distant vantage point,
beyond the charismatic force of the citys faades. Chens film pauses for
breath by returning to the vision of cranes, high-rises, warehouses, freeways,
and sprawl. On the margins of the aspiring global city stands the megacity, not
merely a quantitative expansion of the modern metropolis, an increase in
population and an incessant outward sprawl, but also a qualitative transformation of urban form and the promise of the city. The megacity looks back at
the structures marked as world or global from their ever-expanding
verges, a periphery too valuable to abandon entirely but too massive to allow
inside. The films of Tsai present the future city from its most intimate recesses
and from the vestiges of a recent but seemingly archaic era; Chen examines
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the ultramodern World Towers that proclaim the inevitable future, the reconstructed temples that recover a mythical past, and then, from a distant perspective, the only location where something like a city remains.
Tsais films The Hole and Goodbye Dragon Inn also inhabit the remains of
modern Taipei and provide an occasional respite from the otherwise relentless downpour of rain and concrete through the visitation of ghosts from a
pop culture past. Produced as part of a global series of films foreseeing the
transition to a new millennium, The Hole unfolds in a disintegrating, almost
completely evacuated apartment complex. The few remaining inhabitants
either don surgical masks to stave off disease, succumb to the fever and crawl
bug-like through evacuated markets, or produce makeshift, mask-like coverings, momentarily averting the collapse of a building that appears every bit
as endangered as its inhabitants. As many critics have remarked, the film
eerilyforeshadows the SARS crisis, with its omnipresent masks and medicoarchitectural diagnosis of sick buildings; and it portends the abandonment
of potentially dangerous gathering places in urban centers during the height
of the emergency. But this allegory of contamination and quarantine also illustrates the waning of a modern conception of the city based on the rationalized construction of a public culture, on the transformative experience of
media technology, and on the paradoxical possibility, in these regularized environments, of contingency, chance meetings, haphazard juxtapositions, the
unexpected and unregulated. In The Hole, the same media technologies disseminate a fear of public spaces, now deemed both dangerous and undesirable. The Hole also embraces, even cherishes, moments of intense nostalgia
evoked by a lip-synched impersonation of songstress Grace Chang, her music
revamping the suddenly neon-lit hallways and lobbies of the bland apartment
block. While media are intimately implicated in the films mysterious crisis
and represent the stern voice of officialdom, they retain a trace of their original promise when they devolve into archaic forms, when their usefulness as a
commercial or propaganda vehicle has been largely exhausted and, like the
apartment blocks in The Hole, they endure as the crystallization of another
model of collectivity and community. Goodbye Dragon Inn stages an even
more elaborate allegory of decay and survival in a Fu Ho Theater faced with
imminent closure. While its massive screen memorializes King Hus Taiwanese classic, the marginal spacesthe service hallways, restrooms, and broom
closetsof the theater become the sites of clandestine, subversive, erotic encounters. And in perhaps the most stunning moment of the film, the light
from the projector seems to seep through the screen itself, a play of light and
shadows cast on the face of the theaters ticket-taker. Set in a theater rendered
obsolete in an age characterized by new media consumption habits, the film
evokes a space at once sick and haunted by the relics of a preceding era,
haunted above all by a failure to maintain the utopian promise embodied in
the cavernous theater built for a past city and its imagined audience of the
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figure 6.3 The Missing.
future. Lee Kang-shengs film The Missing (Bu Jian, 2003) unfolds in the characteristic spaces of the new era, with the pervasive blue light of the monitor
replacing the alternation of darkness and white light, and with the body of the
viewer now flattened onto the plane of the screen, creating a world of total
compression and confinement (Figure 6.3). The image is everything, rendering obsolete the expanded geography of cinema envisioned in Tsais film, a
zone extending from seats themselves to the area behind the screen, to the
projection booth, to the closets and hallways just beyond the penumbra of the
image, and finally to the totality of public spaces that developed in the orbit of
cinema. Tsai presents the decaying infrastructure of a cinema that is no longer,
and he displays an archive of both cinematic images and modernist ambition,
though both are now isolated from the public space that once formed the necessary link between cinema and the modern city.
Koolhaass 1995 essay The Generic City concludes with a parable: imagine
a film set in an ancient marketplace, he suggests, with buyers, sellers, and their
goods passing constantly through the frame, the shots animated by excited
gestures, the soundtrack punctuated by shouts. Then switch off the sound and
imagine the same scene run backward through the projector: The now mute
but still visibly agitated men and women stumble backward; the viewer no
longer registers only humans but begins to note spaces between them. The
center empties; the last shadows evacuate the rectangle of the picture frame,
probably complaining, but fortunately we dont hear them. Silence is now reinforced by emptiness: the image shows empty stalls, some debris that was
trampled underfoot. Relief . . . its over. That is the story of the city. The city is
no longer. We can leave the theater now.19 Tsais Taipei films are often predicated on the steady demolition and decay of a cinema and a city that are no
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longer. The movie palace epitomizes the urban experience that developed in
parallel with the cinema; and outmoded sites like the Fu Ho Theater, relics of
another era that have somehow lingered into the present, evoke an entire collective experience of modernity in which cinema served to document and
shape the city itself. In films like The Hole and Goodbye Dragon Inn, we see the
history of cinema running backward, with theatrical screens inhabited by
ghosts from another era in film history. Tsais homage to Dragon Gate Inn
stages an apparently decisive departure from the crumbling and leaking edifice of the theater; but it presents this ostensibly exhausted, decades-old location as a space at once comforting and utterly unfamiliar, as the home of a
specter that inevitably returns in another guise because it was never alive
enough to die, never present enough to become absent.20
The Missing of Taipei

Again like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsais chronicle of urban life at the turn of the
millennium includes a series of recent voyages outside Taiwan: to Paris in
What Time Is It There?, to Kuala Lumpur in I Dont Want to Sleep Alone (Hei
yan quan, 2006), and to Paris again in Visage. This itinerary manifests a combination of personal historyTsai was born and raised in Malaysiaand the
vagaries of international art film financing, a universe in which European organizations loom large. As my introduction has suggested, What Time Is It
There? is haunted by ghosts who travel around the world and by the specter
of comparisons. Ghosts are powerful figures because they are rooted in the
lived history of a particular body and because they are liberated from it, because they move freely, without physical and political restrictions, and invite
the real-world anxiety that accompanies the crossing of borders. Tsais cinematic travels are driven by the spectral logic of comparison that draws two or
more histories together in the span of a narrative or the boundaries of a frame.
Visage reveals the gravitational pull of the European film-funding agencies,
the centrality of France in a certain narrative of postwar art cinema, and an
attempt to reframe the Eurocentric economic and cultural narratives of film
history from the perspective of recent East Asian directors who, like the
young urbanites gazing at the city in Edward Yangs films, find themselves at
once peripheral and indispensable to that system. Tsais work embodies the
spectral position described by Pheng Cheah at the time of the East Asian
economic meltdown: it is at once the mirror image of capitalism and an
invocation of archaic forms of culture and community marked by their
finitude and their persistence in a spectral condition.21
Tsai views Paris and the most venerable French institutions, including the
cinema itself, from the vantage point of a series of outsiders and antiquated
figures redolent of the history of film. Visage was sponsored by a Louvre
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project aimed at providing a view of the museum at odds with its traditional
associations: with national patrimony, with tourists and art historians, and
with the big exhibition, the blockbusters equivalent in the domain of art.
Tsai was one of the first choices for this eccentric vision of this most French
and global of museums. Insistently nonnarrative, Visage is the apotheosis of
museum rather than multiplex cinema; aside from the usual examples from
Warhol, it is difficult to imagine a film with more limited commercial prospects. Like so many of Tsais films, Visage aggressively foregrounds its status
as an art house picture and auteurist production, as it contains a seemingly
unrelenting cascade of references to Tsai and his previous work: the fish tank
and floods; the familiar cast centering on Lee Kang-sheng, Norman Atun,
and Jean-Pierre Laud; the impossibly deep focus and long takes, and their
incongruous juxtaposition with elaborate musical numbers; the emphasis on
enclosed and crumbling spaces; and the appearance of Tsai himself in the
films final shot, directing the show from within. Despite the often-repeated
anecdote that Tsai would station himself outside Taiwanese theaters and
cajole or shame spectators into buying tickets to his films, Tsais work in
Paris unfolds like a parody of a legendary or infamous art cinema too esoteric
and ambitious for its own good. His brief voyages to the geographic center of
world art cinema flaunt his unrelenting formal experimentation and reflect a
determination to remain on the periphery of the already marginal art film
world. Even as Tsais films are inevitably received, by design and critical
habit, under the sign of their director, they also revise the familiar understanding of cinematic authorship as a purely individual and idiosyncratic
pursuit; his films are just as inevitably categorized as products of Taiwan or
even Taipei, including his films set abroad. Tsais films are always already
meditations on the relationship between Taiwan and the metropoles around
which world cinema revolves.
Among the directorial preoccupations that resurface in Visage is the obsession with sealed-off and disintegrating spaces, with the simultaneous and contradictory desire for seclusion and visitation from outside. The film revolves
almost exclusively around a series of elaborately staged scenes, with the musical performances giving way to tableaux and brief reenactments of the myth
of Salome. In Visage, the musical numbers featured in Hole have broken free
from their narrative and spatial enclosure, a housing block in Taipei,
andbecome almost the entirety of the film. With very few analogues in contemporary cinema, the films closest reference point is perhaps Matthew Barneys Cremaster cycle (19942002) rather than any other semicommercial art
film.As in Barneys work, with its assiduous attention to the production of
sculptural objects, with film reinvented as a document of bodies at work and
play, Visage focuses not on the story but on the creation of images through the
interaction of bodies, props, and architectural settings, often in a backdrop of
renowned but in this context underutilized Parisian landmarks. Instead of the
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grand galleries, Tsai treats us to the pipes and service walkways of the Louvre
and an immense superhighway whose reflection is layered onto the windows
of a nearby hotel, overwhelming the space of the hotel with its concrete lanes
and painted lines, virtually eliminating the interior and its illusion of refuge.
Like so many of the directors in Taiwans new cinema, Tsais film treats everyday objectscleavers and cutting boards, refrigerators and fish tanks, windows and wallslike the centerpieces of a work of art, like things of immense
value, not in monetary terms like Barneys million-dollar sculptures but as
repositories of a societys material history, as props in the theater of quotidian
gestures, as reminders of other conceptions of value itself. But these isolated
tableaux and occasional star sightings become a film rather than a performance only if we reimagine cinema not as a storytelling vehicle or an animated storyboard or a witness to a gallery performance but as a paradoxical
medium that is both realist and staged. The ghost is the emblematic figure in
this conception of cinema: it is fantastic, artificial, unreal, yet it remains present like anything else in the image; it hovers between the actual and the false,
between the material and the ethereal. As it travels around the world and returns home to Taiwan, Tsais work is also a spectral visitation by some of the
earliest ambitions of the Taiwanese new wave and its desire for another
cinema.
That cinema, Taiwans new wave, has explored the dialectical relationship
between reality and mise-en-scne, and it remains a source of ideas and inspiration because this tension is evident in equal measure in the cities under construction throughout East Asia and in the cinema itself. In the 1980s, a cohort
of Taiwanese filmmakers fled the confines of the studio, tearing down the
walls that separated cinema from reality; then they found themselves enclosed
in a new array of sets as the cities around them were being refashioned in the
image of cinema; and they both followed and choreographed the movements
of characters at a moment when models of cosmopolitan identity were reshaping the sense of self and belonging of a young generation. Tsai has represented all of these processes over the course of his career: the demolition and
reinvention of urban space; the truth of a realist cinema founded on a nave
faith in the capacity of the camera to reveal the world in an image; and the
falsity of cinema, its theatricality and artifice, its creation of a microcosm of
urban space on-screen at a time when global capitalism was constructing a
very different city, with Taipei as one of its principal staging grounds.
Like the theater in a state of collapse in Tsais Goodbye Dragon Inn, and like
the architects and planners of contemporary global cities, the concluding images
of Lee Kang-shengs film The Missing also envision a cinema without walls. The
films final shot seems to re-create in a construction site in contemporary Taipei
the fundamental elements of Platos allegory of the cave, one of the most persistent metaphors for cinema, with a captive audience in the theater staring at
shadows on the screen, diverting their attention from the reality taking place
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figure 6.4 The Missing.
elsewhere, behind them, outside the walls of the cinema. If Goodbye Dragon Inn
marks the decline of one notion of modernity that people still insist on inhabiting, The Missing follows the shadows released from the confines of the theater,
prancing along outside, constructing a coming culture of images on the streets
of a future city (Figure 6.4). Goodbye Dragon Inn mourns the modern city
while acknowledging that even nostalgia comes to an end. The Missing is a
failed search for what goes missing at the end of the cityits environments of
memory and the human relations made possible by those spacesand for
some as yet untheorized combination of new urban spaces, digital media, and
the cinema that lingers on long after the end.
{ part iii }
24 City
{7}
Chinese Cinema in a World of Flows

the new wave in the peoples republic of china
In the concluding images of The River Elegy (Heshang; directed by Xia Jun and
written by Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, 1988), the fabled waters of the
Yellow River flow toward Chinas eastern seaboard, and after plunging into
their roiled and muddied estuary, merge with the blue expanse of the Bohai
Sea and the Pacific Ocean. One of the most significant and controversial programs ever aired on Chinese television, this six-part miniseries constructs an
elaborate allegory around these crucial images of water: the Yellow River represents the genesis and survival of a Chinese tradition now seen as exhausted,
while an oceanic space engulfs the China of lore and opens onto the developed
world, modernity, the future. The program was initially broadcast to a national audience in 1988, and it sparked both admiration and disgust, with
audiences either echoing its death song for an ancient culture rooted in a
series of age-old symbolsfrom the dragon to the yellow earth of the Shaanxi
loess plateaus to the Yellow River itselfor defending a multifaceted tradition
from this unrelenting attack. While some embraced the vision of modernity
offered by the writers and director primarily responsible for the series, others
accused them of advocating total westernization, of encouraging the wholesale adoption of foreign technologies and socioeconomic systems and ignoring
the imperative to salvage whatever elements of the tradition deserved, after
extensive contemplation and debate, to be salvaged, even in the new era that
had surely arrived. The Great Cultural Discussion that consumed Chinese
intellectuals for much of the 1980s was just such an opportunity for reflection
on Chinas long cultural history and its relationship to an inexorably modernizing moment. For many intellectuals, The River Elegy represented the culmination of the Great Cultural Discussion, which arose in the aftermath of the
Cultural Revolution and blossomed in the mid-1980s. And because the events
of June 4, 1989, brought that moment to a premature end and inaugurated an
era of retreat and dispersion in intellectual circles, The River Elegy also serves
210
as a fitting conclusion to that vibrant period in Chinese history: fitting not

only because its preoccupations reflect the dominant debates of the period but
also because it portends the new conception of modernity that China would
pursue over the next decade. The rush toward the future represented by the
indistinct symbol of the sea yielded at once monumental and familiar results:
the largest in a fifty-year series of East Asian economic miracles.
What interests me, however, are the images that conclude the television
series, the shots of churning, agitated waters that mark the collision of the
storied river and the sea. More than any of its explicit argumentsand the film
presents those positions with a directness that Li Tuo associates with the bigcharacter posters (dazibao) of the Cultural Revolution and Chris Berry with
the pedagogical, propagandistic documentarythose images remain themost
ambiguous and contemplative ideas presented over the course of The River
Elegys six hours.1 From beginning to end, the documentary communicates
less through explicit argumentation and more through the juxtaposition of
familiar images and an at once lyrical and estranging recitation. As the waters
from two sources crash into each other, the incantatory voiceover proclaims
that the Yellow River must dispel its fear of the vast ocean. . . . The water of
life comes from the ocean and returns to the ocean. After a thousand years of
isolation, the Yellow River can finally glimpse the azure sea. The trajectory
ofthe entire series leads relentlessly to this space between China and whatever
lies in the waters just beyond its border, a zone of occult instability where
flows of images, goods, and capital clash and converge.2 One of the primary
ideological imports to China during the Reform era has been this vaguely
naturalized, hydrological metaphor of the global flow of people, goods, and
images and the attendant dematerialization of the representational strategies
used to imagine culture and society. Liudong renkou, the name for the floating
population of internal migrants, is the most obvious use of this term to describe the effects of economic reform, but liudong ziben, floating capital, is one
of the primary forces that make this migration necessary and possible. During
the last two decades of the twentieth century, a key question for filmmakers
and artists was whether or not cinematic images belong at the vanguard of the
movement toward a particular vision of modernity crystallized in these images
of water on the east coast of China and at the edge of aspace identified, in the
common parlance of the period, as the world. TheChinese economic miracle celebrated during the Olympic Opening Ceremonydirected by Zhang
Yimou and featuring images of water raining down from the scrim at the top
of the Birds Nest stadium, an idyllic landscape with grasslands and calm
rivers, and the mellifluous sounds of Lang Lang playing piano at the center of
a miniature Birds Nestis largely the product of Chinas integration into
global flows of capital, labor, goods, and images. In the Opening Ceremony,
water seen as a figure of tranquility serves as a perfect counterpoint to the
images of turbulence viewed at the end of The River Elegy because the raison
211
dtre of the newly repurposed state has been to manage and control the negative effects of global capitalism, to damn them up and dissipate them when
possible.
While the primary focus of the 1990s shifted to the mechanisms and ramifications of economic reform, intellectuals in the 1980s, the creators of River
Elegy among them, had concentrated mainly on the possibilities of cultural
reform. The Great Cultural Discussion unfolded as a series of fevers and
crazes that rapidly generated excitement among intellectuals and fizzled out
almost as quickly.3 Cultural histories of the 1980s have therefore tended to
focus on the ephemeral nature of these trends, chronicling each rise and precipitous fall, and charting the sudden appearance of the next dazzling and
then doomed cultural phenomenon. In these narratives, the period becomes
at once a utopian moment full of noble and ambitious experiments and a time
of profound flux, lurching from one extreme to another, embracing the most
modern global trends and returning to sources in the Chinese tradition. What
unites these diverse movements is the tendency of writers, artists, philosophers, and critics to focus on cultural issues broadly conceived: scar literature searched for some survival of humanity in the aftermath of the Cultural
Revolution; roots-seeking narratives searched for the origins of Chinese
identity by returning to a mythical past; neo-Confucian scholars ventured
even farther into the past to unearth in Confucius and his commentators a
prototype for the modernity that China seemed on the verge of realizing;
futurologists, at once influenced by popular historians of science and working
for a government-sponsored think tank, hoped to produce a culture of technical innovation and counteract the inertia that results from a stultifying fidelity
to tradition. These movements, with all of their innumerable internal debates
and contradictions, competed with many more projects aimed at introducing
social and aesthetic change through the privileged medium of mass culture.
Broadcast to tens of millions of screens, the final shots of The River Elegy confronted viewers with one provocative thesis, rendered tangible in the river and
ocean waters, about the necessary conclusion of the Cultural Discussion. The
images visualize the end of one conception of Chinese civilization, built
around a repertoire of culturally and politically laden symbols, and the ascendancy of another geopolitical and cultural universe, one that overturns the
accumulated monuments from five thousand years of tradition and instead
heads out to sea, with the ultimate goal of surfacing in the new trade routes of
an emerging Pacific Rim and connecting with the flows of goods of the global
economy. Throughout the series, invocations of dragons and walls accentuate
the oppression perpetuated in the name of the emperor and in the construction and maintenance of barriers. And for every shot of the Yellow River
imagined as the origin of Chinese civilization, another shot displays the nearly
annual destruction wrought through spring floods, suggesting that the natural
course of a river is not to follow a well-plotted route but to erode and overflow
212
its banks. The films highly overdetermined imagery and equally pedantic and
polemical narration announce the conclusion of a long historical sequence
based on habitually deployed cultural symbols, with culture conceived as a
force that regulates a particular and localized community, as a mechanism for
maintaining boundaries and channeling erratic energy. This documentary
welcomes the beginning of an era dominated by the logic of less tightly controlled and therefore potentially liberating global flows.
The visual register of The River Elegy circulates around rushing rivers and
global currents, but for the past two decades Chinese intellectuals, artists, and
politicians have been searching for other appropriate metaphors to describe
the process known at its inauguration in the late 1970s and early 1980s
as reform and opening to the outside world (gaige kaifang). As the 1990s
brought several long-coveted markers of global recognitionfrom impending WTO membership to Beijings admission into the rarified ranks of world
cities, when it earned the rights to host the 2008 Summer Olympicsentering
the world (rushi) became a favorite analogy for this process. In the first
decade of the twenty-first century, a more evocative, more transporting figure
of speech has dominated both the vernacular and academic discourse in a
China now seen as linking tracks ( jiegui) with the world. The seemingly
archaic rhetoric of crossborder train travel and the dead-as-a-doornail metaphor of connecting railroad tracks with different gauges now describe a global
phenomenon more likely to occur on international flights or cargo ships, and
through televised images or electronic funds transfers.4 The initial goal of internal, domestic reform has been superseded by the primary ambition to connect with global economic and cultural networks. Produced at a moment
when the plans for integration into a global economy and culture were under
way but still largely unrealized, The River Elegy harks back to the most archaic
imagery of all, as it envisions this process of joining a global economy and
culture though the natural metaphor of rivers and oceans, the former flowing
and then vanishing into the latter. Yet, as Anna Tsing argues, streams and
tides in the natural world are never as free from friction as these rhetorical
invocations in politics and economics would suggest.5 Waters follow a course,
eroding it at a deliberate and sometimes glacial pace; they pass through
landscapes riddled with immovable objects. If, as Tsing suggests, theories of
globalization have been enticed by the metaphor of the flow and therefore
envision the world as vectors of movement rather than the frictions that channel, direct, and oppose that energy, these final images of The River Elegy
present us with the contradiction at the core of this moment in recent Chinese
history and globalization itself.6 Like their counterparts in the worlds of industry and finance, many filmmakers within and outside China have aspired to a
cinema that flows around a smooth world with aqueous fluidity. The section
that follows is concerned primarily with the sites of resistance that develop
along the jagged and uneven landscapes of contemporary Chinese cinema and
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culture, especially in its representations of space, and even more specifically,

the city. Using the images of Chinese new wave cinema as its primary guide,
and therefore unfolding according to a very different itinerary and ideology
from The River Elegy, these chapters revisit the precarious conditions of experimentation during the last two decades of Chinas twentieth century and
examine the fascination with the new, the modern, the youthful, and the urban
during that transitional age. If River Elegy establishes a fundamental conflict
between tradition and the contemporary era, the modern pastand therefore
the history of Chinas twentieth century, of semicolonization and revolution,
and of modern art forms, including cinemararely features in the films assault on legendary symbols and its worshipful account of a global future.
What follows is a study of Chinese cinema at the end of the twentieth century, a period when the images produced by and exported from China rushed
east along with the waters charted in The River Elegy: from the landscapes of the
nations rural interior toward the massive megacities of the booming coastal
region, from the countryside that provided an enduring repertoire of national
icons to Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, economic and political seats of a
rising world power. While Fifth Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and
Chen Kaige were deeply embroiled in the Cultural Discussion of the 1980s, and
while their own contributions from the period were often situated in the rural
heartland of China, their later films and those of a succeeding cohort of directors were oriented toward the cities where remnants of Chinese tradition and a
lingering socialist system merged with the inflows of international capital. In
this sense, these chapters follow routes familiar from official accounts of recent
Chinese history: this was the moment when China opened to the outside
world, and cinema both documented and followed that movement. But that
well-known history reframes the 1980s as the necessary winding down of the
socialist era and the inevitable precursor of the market fever of the 1990s. What
that account overlooks is the unpredictable present that comes into being
when the past has not yet exhausted itself and when the future remains vague
and uncertain. After hours of preparation for a display of the future where
China integrates itself into this system of flows, the screen at the end of The
River Elegy reveals a present reality of turmoil and turbulence.7 What follows is
an account of cinema that inhabits this zone of instability where surviving traditions, including the relatively recent but still decades-long tradition of socialist modernity, face the radical event promised by a global market in the offing.
Chinas Modern Past

Although cinema from the PRC emerged onto a global stage for the first
time in the mid-1980s, earlier generations of filmmakers had also imagined
themselves in a political and ideological landscape that extended far beyond
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the borders of China. During the first golden age of Chinese cinema in the
1930s, the film culture in major cities like Shanghai was characterized above
all by its cosmopolitanism: posters for a wide range of foreign and domestic
productions lined the streets of the city; magazines for aficionados and general readers alike devoted pages to film reviews, as well as movie news and
gossip from around the world; and diverse audiences drawn from across the
spectrum of social classes would find themselves gazing one moment at the
latest release starring Ruan Lingyu and the next at Shirley Temple. By the
heyday of the Chinese studios in the 1930s, Chinese and foreign cinema together constructed a vision of the world for domestic audiences, who existed
at once in a local, everyday, concrete realityof urbane fashions mixed
alongside desperate poverty and elegant enclaves in a still-underdeveloped
and semicolonized Chinaand in a network of circulating images that
linked one film capital to its counterparts elsewhere in the world. Chinese
cinema was becoming international at the very moment it was becoming
Chinese.
The devastation of Japanese colonialism and World War II left the Chinese
film industry in ruins and forced the evacuation of its key figures to Hong
Kong and other places of relative sanctuary, but war did not extinguish the
cosmopolitan ideal in Chinese cinema. In urban areas controlled by the
Kuomintang, Hollywood films returned to Chinese screens immediately after
the defeat of the Japanese army and attracted audiences comparable to the
most popular domestic films until about 1948.8 That degree of distribution and
exhibition of American cinema in China would not be equaled again until the
1990s. After the founding of the PRC and a roughly three-year period that saw
the nationalization of the film industry, Chinese cinema replaced one conception of a universe constructed in the image of Shanghai, Tokyo, New York,
Paris, and London with another whose lodestars were Moscow, Yanan, and
the various capitals of socialist and anticolonial revolution. Chinese filmmakers and audiences were thus differently dislocated, with their feet on the
ground of a nascent socialist state and their screens filled by visions of the international communism to come.
During the early years of the PRC, the major force molding Chinas sense
of the world was the Soviet Union; and socialist realism rapidly ascended to
the status of a quasi-official style of artistic production, replacing the less
formulaic narratives of Chinese cinema from the 1930s and the classical
Hollywood style. As the name for a particular literary genre and mode, the
term socialist realism was coined in the Soviet Union in 1932 and eventually became a quasi-official template propagated on a global scale by Soviet
institutions of art education and production.9 The 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty
of Friendship and Alliance laid the groundwork for cultural interaction between the two countries, but the circulation of images and expertise traveled
almost entirely in one direction, from Moscow and Leningrad to the younger
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communist state. Chinese arts officials immediately effected a large-scale

sovietization of the nations cultural apparatus, consolidated a previously
decentralized arts education system, and established a system of arts academies modeled on their counterparts in the Soviet Union. Despite the
continued existence of nonconformist artsometimes underground, sometimes abovesocialist realism became the de facto national style in China,
its influence extending to all major media, from literature to painting to
film. For administrators and artists imbued with the patriotic spirit of the
times, classical Chinese painting possessed the virtue of a national style, an
art form to be preserved and celebrated for its uniquely Chinese origins; but
socialist realism seemed to crystallize the eras twin promises of modernity
and internationalism, and embodied, at least in the early and mid-1950s,
the future of art. The triumvirate of ideological commitment, Partymindedness, and national/popular spirit became the dominant principles for works produced under the influence of Soviet socialist realism,
while peasant and proletarian revolutionaries and other positive heroes
soon populated Chinas pages, screens, and canvases.10
For filmmakers and officials involved in the industry, socialist realism appeared to be the future of Chinese cinema in the 1950s, and again the Soviet
model proved influential.11 Even before the end of civil war in 1949 and before
the adoption of foreign production models, the Chinese film industry began
a rapid transformation from an agglomeration of devastated private enterprises into an integrated, state-run entertainment and propaganda system.
The major studios were nationalized toward the end of the war, and a steady
stream of investment increased the manpower involved in film production
and contributed to the technological development of their facilities. In 1953,
five Soviet advisors were appointed by the Chinese Ministry of Culture to
oversee the reconstruction of the Chinese film industry, and over the subsequent decade the film production system tended toward the kind of massification and centralization that characterized Soviet cinema in that period. The
Beijing Film School was founded 1951, and its successor, the Beijing Film
Academy, in 1956. These institutions helped define and promulgate a style of
directing and acting, along with an overall look that characterized Chinese
cinema in the first decades of the PRC. In the late 1950s, a series of film journals, including Film Art, established an intellectual framework for theorizing,
criticizing, and normalizing the aesthetics of a new Chinese cinema. In 1958,
the China Film Archive was founded and charged with screening important
domestic and foreign films, rediscovering what remained of the existing masterpieces of Chinese cinema and, most important, collecting a new canon in
the making. Despite the somewhat chaotic conditions in a film culture undergoing a rapid makeover, the studios, film education system, critical apparatus, and archive were all guided by the ide phare of a socialist realism
designed to reconcile the political and aesthetic dimensions of film and link
216
them to an international movement considered at the time to represent the

apex of artistic modernity.
Chinese socialist realism and its related modes, including proletarian
mass culture, Yanan literature and art, and the Maoist genre, were designed to bridge the gap between the recent revolution and the still unrealized
future, with the uncertainties of the present forgotten and the promises of the
socialist state fulfilled momentarily on the silver screen.12 Socialist realism
therefore concealed a series of inherently unstable compromises, as the desire
to represent reality, to document the complexity of the here and now, confronted the imperative to demonstrate and celebrate the signs of development,
even prosperity that, according to orthodox doctrine, should follow in the
wake of revolution. Socialist realism in China, perhaps more than anywhere
else in the emerging communist world, given the scale of its challenges,
became an exercise in leaping past the unsettling problems experienced in the
everyday life of a partial and halting modernization project. That project combined a technocratic and scientific vision with an idealist imagination, and, in
Zhou Enlais formulation, the heroic characters and hyperbolic plots of socialist art staged the dialectical clash and synthesis of two forces: revolutionary
realism and revolutionary romanticism.13 The artists of the 1950s and after
willed modernity into ersatz existence on screens and posters everywhere, and
they engaged in a process of catching up to the more developed nations of
the first and second worlds, attaching the label of realism to this exercise in
anticipation and speculation. More akin to science fiction than documentary
film or journalism, socialist realism imagined an actually existing utopia instead of displacing it to a distant planet or projecting it forward to the year
2001. For Zhang Xudong, the prospective aspect of socialist realism defines
this phenomenon in China as much as the more prominent character types
and stylistic conventions that so quickly descended into orthodoxy and now
survive as kitsch. Contrary to conventional wisdom about this seemingly conventional mode of representation, Zhang argues that socialist realism entailed the utmost ambition and the most extreme fantasy of modernity.14
During its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he writes, socialist
realism was not just expected to deliver the political program of a social transformation poetically, but also to provide the aesthetic concreteness and
palpabilitythrough its artistic focus on details and typical figures in
typical environmentswhich were otherwise tantalizingly scarce in a lifeworld being built from scratch.15 Only by acknowledging this tension between its impossible realist brief and its more fantastic, forward-looking
dimension can the utopian appeal of this mode of art production endure
alongside its more obvious authoritarian structures. The almost absurdist
appearance of so many films and paintings from the era are only redeemable
as failed attempts to represent an otherwordly vision of modernity and to exorcise the specter of comparisons with nations (including the Soviet Union,
217
both big brother and rival) that seemed to form the technological vanguard
of a new era. Zhang maintains that the official arts of the 1950s should be
viewed not as intensely tragic or vaguely embarrassing blunders but as embodiments of the same impulse that generated the canon of high modernism
itself. He writes:
if we can see socialism as a historically rational project of modernity in
certain circumstances (no matter how irrational and maddening the
circumstances of this rationality were or always have been), we may be
ready to acknowledge the fact that socialist realism is, after all, a radical
form of modernism and a radical formulation of the mainstream Enlightenment idea of modernity. The central characteristic of Chinese
socialist realism, then, lies both in its radicalism, reinforced by a
catching-up model of modernization and modernity, and in the
internal heterogeneity, resistance, and supplementation provided by the
peculiar course of the Communist revolution (as a peasant-intellectual
revolution) and by the persistence of a native, traditional cultural and
ethical structure.16
The same dynamicsthe overarching structure of comparison, and the goal
of drawing level and someday linking up with the modern worldcontinued
to energize Chinese cultural and political discourse in the 1980s, after the
Maoist era and the reign of a quasi-official socialist realism had come to an
end. Zhangs work on socialist realism emphasizes the continuity between
Chinas new era and the often repudiated socialist cultural system. He writes:
the first decade of the Peoples Republic saw a massive social and cultural
reorientation in which the Soviet Union became the grand model for China, a
future world realized in the present. To that extent, the futurologist craze for
Western technology and social management in post-Mao China found its archetype in the national project of imitating the USSR throughout the 1950s.17
For this reason, Zhang locates the seemingly unprecedented innovation of the
1980s within a much longer trajectory that demonstrates how the mantle of
modernity passed from the Soviet prototype in the 1950s to the American and
European one in the 1980s:
While the intellectual elite denounced the official mode of representation as sheer propaganda, they made socialist realism (broadly defined)
the radical opposite of the cultural vision which evolved from radical
social transformation, as well as of anything touted by the West as the
spatialized image of the future. The 1980s saw an intense disengagement
from the state discourse, which in turn embraced the newly generated
social experiences and codified them in terms of the international language of modernism. The various new waves in Chinese literature,
cinema, art, theater, and architecture all defined themselves vis--vis
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socialist realism thus reinvented. This negative reinvention of socialist

realism, when viewed alongside the way the modernist discourse defines
itself, reveals the shared ground and the sociopolitical dependence of the
new upon the old, which is an implicit theme of Chinese modernism in
the New Era.18
More than the repudiation of a seemingly archaic world system and avid implementation of its successor, Chinas new waves of the 1980s exist in the liminal space between one conception of global modernity and another, and they
therefore provide a record of the overlaps, the intransigence, the uncanny
presence of that obsolete order in a moment that otherwise advertises its
difference.
After the collapse of the Cultural Revolution and during the transitional
moment that followed in its wake, film slowly returned to its position among
the most important arts. Despite the interference of censors and an understandable reluctance to challenge the political order directly, a series of films
in the late 1970s and early 1980s began to envision a future glimpsed through
the still obscure lens of economic and social reform. The ambiguous, unfinished, and unknowable quality of that transformation became a recurrent
subject in films and criticism during the crucial but understudied period that
extended up to the stunning film festival successes of the Fifth Generation. As
Chris Berry argues in his account of Chinese cinema in the period between
the end of the Cultural Revolution and the incipient New Era, this departure
from the orthodoxy of the preceding ten years began with tentative steps, and
in some cases with an apparent continuation of the same narratives and
formal systems that governed the previous system of film production. He
suggests, however, that these cautious and faltering attempts to tinker with a
film establishment constitute the first cinematic manifestation of a fundamental, unprecedented, and sustained change in the social and cultural
formation as a wholepostsocialismand that they emerge relatively autonomously, indicating that postsocialism is a disaggregated phenomenon
that emerges gradually in fits and starts in different parts of the socio-cultural
formation in different ways and at different times.19 Although far from revolutionary in its stories or formal strategies, cinema immediately after the fall
of the Gang of Four slowly breaks free of the monolithic and conformist
grand narratives of modernist progress to focus on the localized, experiencebased narratives of individual characters and the groups they participate in.
In these circumstances, although this group of films has not won lasting
praise according to the aesthetic art house standards of international festivals,
it marks the beginning of Chinas postsocialist cinema.20 And by the early
1980s, Chinese artists entered an at once unique and eerily familiar moment
when China remained poised between the socialist past and a still obscure
219
future. If immediately after the Revolution, Mao envisioned China as a blank

sheet of paper, radical futurists in the 1980s saw an equally promising opportunity for wholesale transformation. In that period, cinema became one of
the primary mechanisms for commenting on the possible futures ready to be
inscribed or performed or filmed. In both critical and artistic discourses, that
meditation on the socioeconomic circumstances of the time alternated with
more fundamental and philosophical debates about the nature of the cinematic image, as theorists considered the possibilities of a realism based on the
photographic properties of the medium, filmmakers began to escape the
soundstage and explore the streets of cities and villages in the throes of reform,
and nearly all participants in the film world characterized the new cinema as
an alternative to the legacy of socialist realism. At the core of that project,
however, lies the fundamental and energizing contradiction of the Reform
period: the new conception of realist cinema constantly exposed the uneven
and incomplete status of the reforms themselves, revealing both the volatile
present and the modern past that posed a challenge to the emerging hegemony of the market.
The Future Seen from the Fourth Generation

Mainstream studio productions from the early Reform era help illustrate the
inextricable relationship between the promise of reform, the inheritance from
Chinas previous modern era, and the residual possibilities of the mechanically produced image. These films suggest that a fascination with youth, the
promise of the city, and the possibilities of modernist cinema were not isolated in an aesthetic avant-garde and emerged well before the explosion of the
Fifth Generation onto the international film scene. Those elements constituted the zeitgeist of the Reform era from the outset, as filmmakers, artists,
and critics began to reimagine the category of youth as the new source of
cultural innovation and reject the rural orientation of the Chinese Communist Party and the revolution of the first half of the twentieth century. These
key indicators of radical social transformation are as prominent in the socalled Fourth Generation films of the late 1970s and after, the films that ushered in a new conception of cinema after the relatively barren years of the
Cultural Revolution, as the work of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige. The Fifth
Generation engaged in more radical formal experimentation and indulged in
the fantasy of a youthful uprising against entrenched political power, but they
usually did so from the relatively safe remove of narratives set in the feudal
past. Less obviously experimental in their style and ideology, their immediate
predecessors located their uprising squarely in the present and in so doing
began to challenge the existing order and inaugurate a period of innovation in
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Chinese cinema. The Fifth Generation marked the continuation and extension
of this earlier movement in Chinese film history rather than newness created
where there was nothing at all.
Wang Haoweis film What a Family (Qiao zhe yi jiazi, 1979) and Hu Binglius Country Couple (Xiang yin, 1983) help bookend the transitional period
between the onset of reform and the rise of the Fifth Generation and reveal
the conceptual and aesthetic concerns that captivated filmmakers from the
very beginning of that transition. Although located at the opposite extremes
of the social and geographical landscape (with What a Family centered on a
household in the center of Beijing and Country Couple on a husband and wife
who have never seen a train), each film frames its narrative with the staging
of a photograph, situating the periods most profound transformations in relation to the modernity represented by the photographic image. Perhaps best
known for her 1983 film Sunset Street (Xizhao jie), one of the most unapologetically proreform films of the period, Wang Haowei has for most of her
career been a dependable assistant and later director on mainstream films
produced by Chinas major studios. She began studying at the Beijing Film
Academy in 1958, and after graduation worked in several capacities on relatively undistinguished pictures throughout the early 1960s. Like nearly all of
her contemporaries, she was turned away from the temporarily shuttered
film industry during the Cultural Revolution; and she encountered further
political misfortune in 1975, when Haixia, her directorial debut (with Qian
Jiang and Chen Huaiai), was directly criticized by Jiang Qing for perceived
favoritism toward Deng Xiaoping.21 With the fall of the Gang of Four, she
was soon rehabilitated and became one of the most powerful women in the
Chinese movie industry for several decades, eventually serving on the censorship board and then the censorship appeal board. She is as far from an avantgarde provocateur as possible in the current Chinese film system. Yet the
thematic and theoretical problems at the core of What a Family anticipate the
concerns that Fifth Generation directors would later address, though from
the radically different vantage point of a committed member of the Chinese
arts establishment.
What a Family begins with a portrait session featuring a recalcitrant,
frowning father, his wife, and their two children. First seen upside down and
with loose focus in the ground glass of a large view camera, this family appears initially through the mediation of lenses before engaging in informal,
picture-time banter with each other and the photographer. They receive instructions from the expert behind the camera, practice and perfect their poses,
and finally still themselves when the light flashes and the shutter clicks. This
precredit sequence lasts nearly a minute and a half in a ninety-two-minute
film and invites a comparison between the social dynamics revealed as the
plot unfolds and the family structure displayed first in negative beneath the
films title and then in the frame hanging with pride of place on the wall of
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figure 7.1 What a Family.
their apartment (Figure 7.1). Although it appears remarkably conventional in

comparison with the later and more obviously meditative work of Chen Kaige
and Zhang Yimou, the film is one of a series of films by directors in their late
thirties and forties (i.e., filmmakers educated and trained before the Cultural
Revolution) that address the growing gap, soon to become a chasm, between
an older population imbued for decades with the values of revolution and an
irreverent younger generation whose socialist ideals are fading away, soon to
be replaced by the pleasures of the marketplace.
The film most forcefully announces itself as a product of the times when it
departs from the studio environment and locates the camera on the streets of
a city where the very definition of modernity is undergoing a process of revision. Still present are the major boulevards and monuments that mark Beijing
as a center of economic development and state power, but the camera registers those sites with much less devotion and alacrity than films from the
seventeen years after the revolution.22 Instead, it lavishes equal attention on
the consumer goods available in shop windows and at markets set up outside
the factorys work unit gates. Wang initially envisioned the film as a showcase
for new production methods being developed in reformed factories, and her
account of the films production foregrounds the original fieldwork and interviews that informed the films scenes of factory life.23 But the film is far from a
propaganda film about new production methods, and its difference from that
genre resides in its presentation of young people, the city, and their relationship
to a newly developed capacity to produce abundance. Rather than construct a
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city from discrete shots of the massive edifices that symbolize the power and
durability of the capital, a long horizontal tracking shot instead glides alongside a table overflowing with fruits and vegetables, a seemingly endless supply
of ephemeral goods. Far different from the revolutionary youth and positive
heroes in socialist realist films, the new generation in What a Family spends
much of its leisure time window shopping and admiring the fashions on display there. The films most stylistically virtuoso moment involves an accelerated montage sequence that intercuts between shots of exhausted students in
a dance class and the same young hoofers gulping down soda at a small restaurant, with the whole episode introduced by a display of neon signs advertising
cloth, cola, toothpaste, radios, and liquor (Figure 7.2). The images speed by
with a combination of admirable energy and almost grotesque distortion, and
that vertiginous movement marks the films most direct engagement with and
clearest repulsion from the still nascent and barely visible youth culture of the
time. More than any of the mainstream productions of late 1970s, this montage sequence displays a conspicuous fascination with a burgeoning but still
mystifying youth culture. Enraptured by neon, the film begins to resemble the
excessive and barely motivated shots of flashing advertisements that distinguish Seijun Suzukis Tokyo Drifter (Tokyo nagaremono, 1966) and other films
from Japans dynamic film industry under the influence of its own new wave.24
For a fleeting instant, a relatively conventional Chinese director wanders as
close to the youth-driven Japanese new wave as was possible in the late 1970s.
In this moment, the film goes haywire, as a director predisposed to safe,
figure 7.2 What a Family.
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careful, unremarkable aesthetic choices suddenly experiments with a far less

predictable, far more shocking approach to the medium. Wangs tightly
framed shots momentarily make cinema a conduit for the energy of the neon
sign and a city consisting almost entirely of lights and language. The cuttingedge cityscape collapses cinema and advertising and architecture onto the
same pulsating surface. If, in Marxs famous formulation, capitalist modernity
constructs a world in which all that is solid melts into air, what better manifestation of a successor and perhaps an existential threat to the socialist project than the neon sign, whose source of pyrotechnics is already an inert gas,
light as air.
If this relatively unrestrained sequence, located almost exactly in the
middle of the narrative, introduces the cinematic style and leisure habits of
the new generation, What a Family ultimately seeks refuge in the certainty of
the still photograph that launched the film. In this historically unfamiliar universe, the youthful vanguard is defined largely through acts of consumption,
and proper socialist values require not the denial of those temptations but a
healthy degree of self-regulation. The two main lines of the plotone centered on the introduction of electronic devices to make the textile factory an
efficient producer of varied designs and the other a love story involving the
familys only son and a virtuous bookstore employeeshowcase the ramping
up of industry to meet the demands of a consumer society and the insulation
of the family from the effects of that process. The main twist in the romance
narrative hinges on a fear that the son has fallen in love with the films most
conspicuous example of an excessive and self-indulgent consumer rather than
his actual object of affection, a model citizen cast from the mold of Lei Feng.
What a Familys comic misdirection sets up a universe with two forking paths,
one where the household is forced to accommodate a radical and rampant
cohort of consumers and another that circles back to the starting point of the
film, with the slightly larger family posing for another photograph, one whose
frame happily includes more of the same instead of reluctantly accommodating the most unbridled forces of change. Over the course of the next two decades, Chinese filmmakersfrom directors of official main melody pictures
to makers of commercial independent films like Feng Xiaoganghave proceeded down the path that Wang Haowei examines throughout What a
Family and disregards in the final frame. If the chaos of the neon montage
sequence represents a dizzying and unsustainable manner of transformation,
the films final still image suggests that the frenzied, centrifugal energy
glimpsed elsewhere in the film can be safely excluded from the stable structures of society, held in abeyance outside the frame, dismissed finally as a
momentary misunderstanding.
The narrative of Country Couple also accentuates the importance of family
photographsas personal mementoes, as historical documents, and even,
for some rural households, as an index of modernitythough in this case, the
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image itself never materializes before our eyes. Like What a Family, Country
Couple has received relatively limited and tepid critical treatment in recent
years, but it won the Best Feature prize at the 1984 Golden Rooster awards
and generated much controversy among a divided film press at the time of its
release. It joins a series of slow-paced, painstakingly observational films
including Zheng Dongtians Neighbors (Linju, 1981) and a series of films by
Xie Fei and Huang Jianxinthat counteract the theatricality of an increasingly discredited socialist realism with a deliberately unspectacular style. Set
in a riverside village, the film focuses primarily on a river ferry punter, his
wife, and their close friends and family; it concerns, in other words, the everyday lives of common people, and it examines them in a manner reminiscent more of neorealism than the Maoist genre that aggrandizes workers,
peasants, and soldiers as the vanguard of the revolution. The plot and dialogue suggest that lives in this village are characterized by an almost perpetual continuity, as the husband spends most of his time occupied with the
operation and maintenance of his small ferry and the wife works in their
house and on a nearby farm. When asked what she has planned for the day,
she habitually responds that today will be like any other; when her daughter
presents a homework assignment, she remarks that her class completed the
same assignments when she was a student years before. The film thus unfolds
in a temporality familiar from traditional anthropology and ethnographic
film: village life remains the same across the generations, as people work the
same fields and inhabit the same homes as their forebears from decades or
perhaps even centuries before. At the same time, Country Couple introduces
a number of disturbances that threaten the age-old order, most notably a
younger woman whose fascination with fashion and other forms of leisure
activity, including cinema, mark her as an outsider to this stable system. But
in a remarkable reversal of the situation in What a Family, this character, the
budding consumer, establishes herself as a force of development in this usually stifling village environment. In this backwater where few have seen a
train, that key icon of modernity from an earlier era in cinema, this younger
woman becomes the gadfly who urges her fellow villagers to submit to a
desire for the modern rather than remain in a state of inertia.25 Femininity
acquires an almost revolutionary power in the film, though only when allied
with the irresistible force of consumerism.26 Unlike the comforting stability
on display at the end of What a Family, the conclusion of Country Couple
valorizes a social transformation criticized only because it arrives too slowly
and too late.
When the wife in the eponymous couple discovers that she has an apparently terminal form of cancer, the husband also recognizes that they have for
too long remained confined in a rut, deferred their own pursuit of happiness,
and through their labor constructed more of the same rather than a genuinely
new home or society. In its starkest form, this realization is expressed in a
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self-criticism: the husband acknowledges that their household has been

exploitative and unequal and that he should have allowed his wife to pursue
her own material aspirations, most clearly crystallized in a jacket that she decided not to buy. That object was too expensive, its purchase too indulgent,
and it appeared too early in lives still focused on saving for the distant future.
As this brief description suggests, the film rapidly turns from realism to melodrama, as everyone soon regrets their acts of self-denial: they have, for much
of the film and most their lives, been too frugal, too conscientious, and now
enjoyment arrives too late for the unadulterated pleasure that they always
postponed to some indefinite point in the future. Yet, as many critics have
suggested, melodrama and realism are often less distinct than their characteristically operatic or bland faades would suggest. Both unfold in the arena of
everyday life and focus on the family matters, romances, and workaday
struggles of common people. As Peter Brooks suggests, an otherwise ordinary
environment explodes into melodrama when a plain, unadorned, realist description can no longer provide access to truths that remain invisible or
hidden beneath the surface of things, when the reality principle is overcome
by a refusal of censorship and repression.27 For this reason, melodramas
mode must be centrally, radically hyperbolic, the mode of the bigger-than-life,
reaching in grandiose reference to the noumenal realm.28 The melodrama in
Country Couple also gestures toward this unrepresentable and intangible
sphere, as the film is driven by desires that remain impossible to visualize
most notably the allure of modernityexcept through awkward devices like
the jacket that bundles together a nexus of profound political, economic, and
social transformations. This melodrama serves as the functional equivalent of
the unbridled montage sequence at the core of What a Family, as both devices
allude, through narrative or editing techniques, to a modernity that has not
yet come to fruition and therefore remains invisible to the recording mechanisms of the camera.
The final moments in Country Couplewhen the husband and wife travel
by foot and wheelbarrow, along a dirt path, with the ultimate goal of taking
her photograph by the traindemonstrates just how irresistible that aspiration toward a vague but infinitely desirable modernity became at this moment
in the early 1980s. The film concludes with a stereotypical shot of the couple
walking along a path that extends off into the distance but with no village or
train in sight. The only sign of that promised land comes in a layered
soundtrack as the squeak of the wheelbarrow on an uneven path fades into the
screech of train wheels, steel sliding along steel. If the woman had hoped to
photograph herself beside the tracks and therefore to produce indisputable
evidence of her own imbrication in modernity, the end of the film locates the
realization of that dream somewhere over the horizon, beyond the mountains,
at the end of the path, anywhere but within the frame now present on the
screen. This almost literal quest for modernity results finally in a deferral of
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that promise, an allusion to the pure potential that echoes on the manipulated
soundtrack but remains unphotographable and ultimately invisible within the
confines of the image itself. Country Couple is a film that everywhere focuses
the gaze of the camera on the current situation of Chinese peasants in a particular riverside village, but the moment of modernity lies in the unseen future
rather than the present.
Each of these films is structured around the scene of photography and the
actual or latent possibilities of the mechanically produced image, and they
represent a much broader mediation on the status of this photographic image
in late twentieth-century China that extends from the cinema to experimental
art and critical theory. The emblematic portraits that bookend What a Family
and the unrealized photograph that concludes Country Couple combine the
mesmerizing transformations undergone throughout Chinese society during
the Reform period and a renewed fascination with the status of the photographic image itself. Is the photograph a neat conclusion to an otherwise open
narrative, a way of drawing events to a close as the shutter snaps shut? Is the
image of modernity a consumable object like the goods that spark the fascination of characters and drive the narrative in films throughout the early Reform
era? Or is the image implicated in more lasting projects that extend through
memory into the past and endure into a future under construction? If photographic and filmic images have for most of the century crystallized and popularized a vision of modernity, what form will modernity take in this new New
Era? The history of the Chinese new wave in art and cinema is a series of
tentative answers to those questions. If movies like What a Family and Country
Couple experiment with these concepts from the very conservative hub of the
mainstream studio system, a new cohort of critics and artists, above all the
directors soon known as the Fifth Generation, would relocate this meditation
on the truth value of the cinematic image from the margins of an otherwise
conventional film, from a clever device that frames or contains or continues a
narrative, to the very core of the filmmaking process itself. And this revival is
fundamentally linked to the nearly simultaneous development of a youthoriented consumer culture where images become the most consumable items
of all. By the early 1990s, the major cities of China would be transformed into
radically mediatized environments, first through the billboards promising a
vision of the future and then through television and LED screens located in
most public and commercial spaces. The transitional period of the 1980s remains a moment of undecidability in the gap between two conceptions of the
image and between a socialist world system in decline and capitalist globalization at the summit of its power and appeal. Despite the seemingly profound
transition signaled by their respective names, both the Fourth and Fifth Generations are characterized in the 1980s by a Janus-faced perspective on Chinas
revolutionary society and an increasingly market-oriented and globalized
future.
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The Walking Stick of Cinema

At the end of the 1970s, Chinese filmmakers emerged from one of the most
profound crises ever experienced by artists in any country or historical period.
Over the course of the Cultural Revolution, the industry was idled for long
stretches, with production severely curtailed and no feature films produced at
all from 1967 to 1969. Because the Maoist revolutionaries framed their movement as a permanent struggle against the bureaucratizing tendencies of the
state, and because film studios are often large, state-funded, bureaucratic
entities, the Cultural Revolution soon targeted the Chinese film industry, replacing the popular entertainment offered by cinema with more cheaply and
locally produced forms of communication and entertainment like the poster
and socialist variations on traditional Peking opera. Even after the most contentious and violent moments at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, studios
encountered severe restrictions in their choice of subject matter, and adaptations of the Eight Model Operas remained the quasi-official cinematic genre
until a modest expansion in film production in 197375 and the more profound transformation of the movie industry that occurred after the fall of the
Gang of Four in 1976. The slow slackening of those constraints in the late
1970s allowed film professionals to consider the possibilities of a revived industry and less oppressive intellectual climate. Most film historians, theorists,
and critics argue that this new era in Chinese cinema was launched at the
tail end of the 1970s by a handful of tentative but still momentous experimentsthat trickled out of the major studios, most notably Troubled Laughter
(Kunaoren de xiao; Deng Yimin and Yang Yanjin, 1979) and Little Flower
(Xiao Hua; Zhang Zheng, 1980). Those films also inspired a remarkable outpouring of critical writing in journals like Film Art and Film Culture. Because
many influential filmmakers were also critics (e.g., Zhang Nuanxin and
XieFei), and many theorists were directly involved in the education of young
artists at the recently reopened Beijing Film Academy, the interaction between production and theory was exceptionally intense in the early years of
the Reform period, with particular films sparking extended critical controversy and manifesting the same desires (for modernism, for antitheatrical
cinema, for a specifically Chinese approach to the medium) that motivated the
most prominent critics of the period. The most influential and often-cited
texts remain a pair of landmark essays from 1979Bai Jingshengs Throwing
Away the Walking Stick of Drama and The Modernization of Film Language, by Zhang Nuanxin and Li Tuoand those essays contain a record of
those aspirations in the early Reform era and portend the dominant tendencies in Chinese cinema over the coming decade. For Bai, Zhang, Li, and an
influential group of theorists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the process of
reconceiving cinema began with the denigration of drama and a celebration of
films fundamental relationship with modernity.
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Bais title and catchphrasewith its allusion to a hoary dramatic tradition

used as a crutch to stabilize the fledgling medium of cinemaestablishes a
dichotomy between the incipient modernity promised by film and the habits
of thought that prevented earlier Chinese artists from harnessing that dynamism. It is true, Bai writes, that film absorbed a great deal from drama on
its way to becoming an art form. It was with the help of drama that film took
its first step. However, now that film has become an independent art form,
does it have to rely on the walking stick of drama forever?29 Operating under
an evolutionary model of film history, Bai argues that cinema should jettison
the encumbering relics of less modern forms, as well as their accoutrements of
artistic prestige. The specificity of that eras cultural constellationnot yet
beholden to the market, no longer exclusively oriented toward a future communist utopia, no longer rooted in a feudal tradition weakened over the past
four to eight decadesis what these critical writings continue to preserve, as
they record the idiosyncratic conception of the modern that energized Chinese
society in the 1980s. The bogeyman of drama represents in Bais argument at
least two seemingly opposed conceptions of theatricality. In the first, drama
does not embody specific forms of stagecraft or space or relationships between
actors and the audience; it becomes the mere antithesis of modernity, a mode
of artistic production at long last rendered obsolete by the more vital and imperative medium of film. And in the other, cinema confronts a much more
recent nemesis, the insistently dramatic productions of the eight model
operas, whose cinematic versions often highlight their theatrical origins, in
some cases even filming the curtains of the theater and displaying without
apparent unease the obviously constructed and painted sets arrayed on a proscenium stage. In Bais imaginary timelinewith media of various ages overlapping momentarily, passing on their walking sticks, and then falling forever
behindthe modern film at the tail end of the 1970s should try to outstrip
both precinematic forms of theater and the hyperstylized, deliberately retro,
almost anticinematic operas that constituted the dominant film culture for the
better part of a decade. Cinematic modernism at the dawn of the Reform
period is therefore loosely linked to other moments when Chinese filmmakers
imagined themselves at the vanguard of a revolution directed at tradition in
its most pervasive and pernicious forms. At the same time, this modernism
remains bound by more immediate history and wages its most urgent struggle
against the more recent past, with model operas representing the devolution
of dramatic narrative to pure formula, dramatic gesture to the pose, and
dramatic space to a handful of iconic locations. These operas represent the
devolution of socialist realism to a purely formalist exercise isolated from the
material conditions outside the theater. Throwing away the walking stick of
drama requires that filmmakers redefine their relationship to that materialworld, to the untidy spaces and frayed social relations that a generation
offilmmakers had ignored in order to remain in an idealized revolutionary
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universe. Bai concludes with the following exhortation: It is time that we

throw away the walking stick of drama that we have used for so long. We
should let ourselves go and make great progress in our filmmaking.30 The
rejection of canned opera would contribute not only to the development of
cinema as an independent art form but also to a more socially productive relationship between the filmmakers and the transformed nation they were now
ready to observe.
Although Bais essay launches an intense assault on a theatrical manner of
filmmaking, the metaphor of the stage has also been viewed as a liberatory
model of the relationship between art and the world. As Rebecca Karl argues,
in the late Qing dynasty and the early twentieth century, the trope of the
world imagined as a stage offered one of the most powerful conceptual paradigms for Chinese intellectuals attempting to redefine their role in a system
of nations.31 More particularly, this conception of national revolutions occupying the same temporality and the same figurative global stage makes
possible a non-Euro-American consciousness of globality, a vision of the
world imagined from a Chinese perspective.32 The world observed from the
China of the late nineteenth century was a stage energized by the immanence of global transformation.33 Karls theatrical prototype of emerging
nationhood envisions contemporaries walking the same boards and confronting a similar array of counterrevolutionary forces. She therefore veers as
far as possible from the model of nationalism constructed by Benedict Anderson, who focuses not on the corporeal presence of the actor but on the
spectral images of other nations glimpsed over a vast distance and through an
ultimately unreliable optical device that distorts even as it telescopes across
space.34 When Reform-era Chinese artists and intellectuals discarded the
walking stick of drama, they also abandoned the earlier historical formation
that challenged a Euro-American model of global revolution. While the eras
filmmakers left something behind, including the version of theatrical globality
produced on the cusp of the twentieth century, they also engaged with the developing historical situation that would encircle them over the coming decade.
Bai marks, in other words, a departure from the fixed sets of a theatrical space
into a cinematic environment without wings, from the playhouse proper into
an environment continually restaged before the camera and defined by its
mise-en-scne.
If Bais essay identifies the traditions to be overcome, Zhang and Lis essay
The Modernization of Film Language maps an unfamiliar region best understood not as a stage or nation but a world, where the specter of comparisons looms large and the comfortable proximity and corporeality of theater is
replaced by a model borrowed from modern optical technologies, including
film. Although Zhang and Li foreground the familiar analogy between filmic
structure and languagea conceit with roots in the very first days of film
theory and the dominant conceptual model for critics operating under the
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influence of the linguistic turn of the 1960s and 1970sthe imagined structural
clarity of language rapidly recedes in importance, and their essay instead celebrates the allure of modernization. Zhang and Li identify at the outset a fundamental problem facing Chinese cinema in the moment of transition between
the Maoist and Reform eras: the cinematic language we have used in many
contemporary films is clich-ridden.35 And, like Bai Jingsheng, the authors
blame an excessive reliance on drama for the persistence of a hackneyed, formulaic conception of cinema. They characterize the filmmaking process as the
breathless pursuit of theatrical action: screenwriters search hard for drama,
directors go all out to produce drama, and performers do all they can to act it
out.36 The result, they suggest, is often merely canned drama instead of
films that honestly, naturally, and vividly reflect real life. A common criticism
given these films by their audience is that they are artificial. Aside from their
false content, a major reason is their strongly dramatized representation.37 At
one side of a conceptual divide lies a Chinese tradition that considers cinema
an inheritor of the mantle of theater and therefore a derivative art destined to
repeat a familiar repertoire of dramatic plots, conflicts, and gestures. Zhang
and Li establish cinematic modernism as a force charged with disrupting this
state of inertia and delivering Chinese film from this condition of alternately
habitual and enforced artificiality. As in the nearly contemporaneous writing
of Deleuze, modernism becomes the antithesis of the clich, and The Modernization of Film Language takes great pains to define the contours of an
emergent cinema dedicated to reality rather than the simulated scenarios of
the stage.38 This effort to distance modern filmmakers from their more traditional counterparts in theater reflects the influence of a variety of sources,
both foreign (the modernist films and critical theory circulating among industry professionals and intellectuals) and domestic (the lingering memory of the
excessively theatrical model operas and the artificial realms constructed in
socialist realist films). With modernization evolving into one of the
buzzwords of Zhang and Lis timemost prominently in the call, issued by
Zhou Enlai and adopted as a guiding principle by Deng Xiaoping, for rapid
development in the fields of agriculture, industry, technology, and defense,
known in shorthand as the four modernizationsThe Modernization of
Film Language inserts film into this overarching project. The essay also positions cinema as a privileged medium to record, narrate, and comment on that
colossal undertaking. The authors argue that the basic need to change and
modernize cinematic language lies in the fact that China has already entered
into a New Era. The realization of the four modernizations is a significant
revolutionit demands an extensive and thorough change both in our
economic base and superstructure, as well as in our ideology and living conventions.39 The modernization of film language, Zhang and Li suggest,
represents one of the key mechanisms for transforming the superstructure of
Chinese culture and society, reflecting the precise nature of that change, and
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introducing unfamiliar elements into a system that for almost a decade

remained sealed off from the outside world. Cinema is at once part of an endeavor rooted in the particularity of the early Reform era and an opening onto
a much broader historical and cultural terrain.
Even as they locate the origins of this contemporary struggle for cinematic
modernism in the fall of the Gang of Four, Zhang and Li also launch into a
whirlwind history of film, with particular emphasis on European art cinema
from Italian neorealism through the French new wave and the New Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s. The Modernization of Film Language, while it
establishes a critical distance from a conventional, conformist, and bureaucratic domestic film industry, also carefully distinguishes between its own version of modern art and the discourse that would soon fall under the rubric of
total westernization. The cinematic modernism advocated by most critics in
the major Chinese Reform-era film journals involves, through an obscure and
mysterious process, the nationalization of concepts, strategies, and movements with origins primarily in Europe and the United States. Adopting the
unsettling, spectral framework of comparison, Zhang and Li almost immediately raise objections to that overbearing and one-sided model of influence.
They write: It takes a great deal of effort in many ways to raise the standard of
film art. To achieve this, the most urgent step at the present is to learn from
the art of world cinema. Of course, during this process, one problem must be
solved properly, that of nationalization. We must learn from the good and
progressive art of foreign film in order to turn it into our own element through
the power of nationalization, and improve and develop the film art of our own
nation.40 This struggle, although it harks back to debates in the early twentieth century about the possibility of maintaining a Chinese cultural essence
while adopting instrumentally valuable ideas and technologies imported from
abroad, explicitly highlights the problematic nature of this relationship, even
if the essay as a whole is couched in the rhetoric of progress and national development. The essay ends with a cautionary note: Finally, we want to point
out that although we emphasize the modernization of cinematic language, we
neednt mechanically take over and thoughtlessly imitate foreign cinematic
language. We should take a practical and realistic attitude toward foreign film.
We should digest whatever we learn from the cinematic language of foreign
films, integrate it with the real life of the Chinese people, and create a modern
cinematic language of our own that can manifest the unique style of our
nation. In short, we should learn first, then digest and ultimately assimilate.41
If their predecessors in late Qing intellectual circles imagined a global revolution using the raw materials of traditional Chinese drama, Zhang and Li conceive of a new global order spliced together from fragments of film history.
One lingering question is whether or not the one problem [that] must be
solved properly, the problem of nationalization, can actually be solved in a
satisfactory and enduring way, especially as, over the course of the coming
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decade, in a moment of incipient globalization, the world would overtake the

nation as a primary reference point for artists and theorists alike. The temporary conditions of modernization described by Zhang and Li appeared in a
historical window that lasted for less than a decade. During this period, the
national served as a brake on the headlong rush into a future dominated by
the discourse of globalization, and modernization referred at once to a domestic experience of the twentieth century and a foreign model to be adapted
with varying degrees of fidelity and resistance. By the late 1990s, despite the
constant journalistic and political allusions to a rising and globally assertive
China, that brake had become less effective, losing much of its capacity to
resist the movement of images and ideology into the country. Filmmakers
concerned with that process of domestication, with the complex interface between a global ideal and the everyday reality of China, are celebrated abroad
as the darlings of an international film festival circuit, while being relegated to
the margins of the Chinese film market. Whatever friction once existed
between the modern and the global has been dispatched safely offshore. Modernization and globalization slowly morph into the same phenomenon, omitting the vaguely defined but, for many Reform era artists and critics, still
imperative stage of nationalization.
For other key Chinese theorists, the same overarching interests
modernization, opening to the outside world, and the survival of national
particularityremained paramount, and even seemingly technical debates
about cinematic style were energized by these at once loftier and weightier
concerns. Zhang Junxiangs 1980 Essay Done in Film Terms, a relatively
conservative defense of the art of screenwriting and a Chinese tradition of
literary cinema, concludes with an apologia for the concept of national
form.42 Even at the outset of widespread reform and Chinas long-delayed
engagement with artistic trends beyond its borders, Zhang foresees the inherently limited and inevitably partial quality of this transformation. He argues
somewhat syllogistically that the Chinese way of thinking and feeling must
be of Chinese national style and the living habits, language, and ethics of
characters should also be national. No one debates this.43 The precise definition of the national remains elusive, but this essay ostensibly composed from
the raw materials of film maintains that an inexhaustible reserve of Chinese
subjects and forms is preserved in its literary heritage. And in an essay concerned initially with the process of cinematicizing texts written for the screen,
film literature serves as gravitational force guiding Chinese cinema back
toward a national form.44 He concludes by reversing the relationship between
foreign and domestic that would structure most conceptions of the world in
Chinese cinema and cultural theory: the national, he suggests, is neither a relic
of an earlier geopolitical era nor the touchstone by which to measure the validity of global precepts; instead, the path toward globalization passes through
the national. We dont oppose learning from foreign experiences, he writes,
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but we should not ignore our own traditions. We should inherit them and, at
the same time, continue to make our own innovations. It is to create our own
new forms and means of representation that we learn from foreign countries.
I dont agree that our film is for the four billion people of the world, not just
the one billion of China. I firmly believe that our film can be open to the
world only if it is first open to Chinese audiences.45
Although Zhang could not have anticipated these developments, in two
decades films like Hero (Yingxiong; Zhang Yimou, 2002) and House of Flying
Daggers (Shimian maifu; Zhang, 2004) would adopt this formula in pursuit of
a Chinese blockbuster whose storyline and acrobatics remain rooted in various domestic literary traditions but whose ambitions and marketing launch it
into a global marketplace. These commercially successful films harvest a literary tradition for dramatic scenarios, and they visualize those tales with
cutting-edge computer-generated imagery, the editing strategies and pacing
of contemporary action films and video games, and an approach to packaging
that appeals to star- and genre-conscious audiences around the world. Viewed
in hindsight, Zhang Junxiangs model of literary nationalization resembles
one of Chinese cinemas most successful strategies of globalization, a strategy
implemented only after a two-decade period of experimentation. While those
short-lived experiments of the 1980s and 1990s are the primary focus of this
chapter, they existed in a cultural context in which many artists and theorists
identified a seemingly contradictory project as their ultimate aspiration: the
preservation of a Chinese national culture (however vaguely defined) and its
integration into the seemingly universal, modernizing movements of the time.
If Chinese intellectuals once imagined global revolution as an act of stagecraft
and located marginalized nations at the center of the drama, Zhang Junxiang
recounts a similar, non-Euro-American narrative of recent world history
but with cinema as the medium at the core of his geopolitical aesthetic. His
essay composed of film terms, read alongside the films produced in China
during this moment of transition, becomes a provocation to revise the history
of cinema in this period and engage with this profound experiment at redefining the global order through the stuff of cinema, with the screens and images
of modernist films resting momentarily between the national past and the
world to come. The unanswered question at the core of Zhangs essay is how a
film can remain grounded in local history and become modern, how it can be
Chinese and global, true to the reality outside the studios in Beijing or Xian
and worldly in its desire to adapt modernist strategies to the Chinese screen
and eventually leap outward toward an international audience.
In the domain of Chinese film criticism, one key manifestation of those
contradictory obsessions with opening to the world and defending a national
foundation is the renewed engagement with the work of Andr Bazin, Siegfried
Kracauer, and other theorists of the realist image. This revival of interest in
canonical European film theory occurred as part of a far-reaching mission to
234
translate a broad spectrum of Western philosophy and cultural theory, a task

that also encompassed Gan Yangs massive editorial and translation projects,
including the Modern Western Classics Library (Xiandai xifang xueshu
wenku) and Culture: China and the World (Wenhua: Zhongguo yu shijie).
These endeavors originated in 1986, the height of Culture Fever, and resulted in the dissemination of a range of canonical European and American
philosophy and cultural theory. Although Bazin and other modern film critics
had been introduced to Chinese specialists in the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution interrupted that process of engagement and assimilation.46 After their
republication in 1979, these Chinese translations helped revive a Bazinian
conception of realism, at the same time that decades of recently rediscovered
theoretical essays (many of them antirealist) also circulated in film circles.
Zheng Dongtian argues that Bazins realist tendency and his personal and
professional commitments to Italian neorealism and the French new wave
helped establish his credentials among Chinese artists schooled primarily in
socialist realism and Soviet montage. For this reason, he became a spiritual
icon for Chinese cinema of the new period, especially the increasingly influential group of young cineastes from the Fourth and Fifth Generations.47
From about 1982 onward, the ongoing debate about the concept of film
shifted the focus of artists and theorists away from the ideological foundations
of the screenplay and toward questions of ontology and the image. Hu Ke suggests that Chinese and European theories of realism served initially as an antidote to the Soviet influence that founded the major Chinese film institutions
and continued to structure their philosophy of cinema even after the SinoSoviet split. Although Chinese modes of realism from the 1920s and 1930s remained influential, society and the situation of that era had already changed,
and Chinese filmmakers needed a concept of cinematic realism suited to
national modernization.48 The result, Hu argues, was a fusion of various Chinese and European realisms particular to the early Reform era. The cinema
and theory of the period accentuated a collective feeling and allow[ed] the
whole society to face and publicly acknowledge the relationship between these
images and their authentic existence, whether it had already taken place or
was still in the process of happening.49 Although the theoretical and aesthetic
debates are often focused on the long take, composition in depth, and other
formal issues, the presumed relationship between the image and reality allows
these seemingly esoteric discussions to address, if only obliquely, the sensitive
political issues of the time. Hu suggests that Chinese filmmakers and scholars
have endowed the aesthetics inherited from Bazin with a political significance
missing from the conventional and purely formal vision of realism as yet another stylistic choice.50 Because of this necessary interaction between the aesthetic of reality and everyday cultural politics, the Chinese reinvention of
Bazin is probably a closer approximation of the totality of Bazins thought
than the purely formalist caricature that was constructed in the 1960s in the
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West and has lingered in film studies into the present.51 Realist cinema is
defined by the interaction of the camera and the world it records, and it becomes political precisely because the world itself, with all its promises and
contradictions, provides the raw materials for its mise-en-scne.
In the early Reform era, the rhetoric and philosophical orientation of the
most prominent Chinese film critics revolved around these questions of ontology. In Film Is Film, an essay that echoes the analysis of Bai Jingsheng
and identifies the specific characteristics that distinguish film from its predecessors, Yang Ni emphasizes that the specificity of the cinematic image lies in
its mechanical basis. What is the foundation of film? he asks.
The objective materials that make the existence of film possible
mechanical equipment such as the camera (including film) are the major
componentsconstitute its roots. The technical ability to record actuality is the basis of cinematic representational strategies (including
narrative style). The most basic artistic means of film is the use of the
camera to present a documentary imitation of reality. In terms of the
characteristics of filmmaking devices, we may label this as the redemption of physical reality. To emphasize the redemptionthe actual
shootingwe usually call this characteristic, documentary. I believe that
among the many components of the cinematic medium, the prevailing
element that most represents and determines its artistic features is its
documentary nature.52
Like theorists of modern art and like Bazin and Kracauer themselves, Yang
bases his concept of film on a modernist search for the inherent qualities of
the medium; and in the Chinese context that search for the essence of
cinema begins by differentiating between theatricality and reality, with
the former representing a dead end for contemporary filmmakers and the
latter its more promising future.53 He writes: Dramaturgy not only did not
originate from film itself, but conflicts with the documentary nature of film
and to a large extent weakens cinematic aesthetics based on the redemption
of physical reality (Kracauer). Rather than lead Chinese filmmakers to invent
dramatic situations, we should propose to them the recognition of the potentials of cinematic imitation and depiction of reality, and utilize these potentials in shooting, narration, and other representative devices. Film is film. It is
not a visual interpretation of drama, nor is it a synthetic work of art.54 Like
nearly all advocates of realism, Yang begins by asserting rather than proving
that film is necessarily, by its physical and mechanical nature, the representation of reality.55 That conception of realism is more compelling when it enumerates in passing the specific characteristics of a realist film, and for Yang the
essence of cinema lies in its details: Abundant details are not allowed to exist
in drama, he writes, because in theater the stage and its props are designed to
concentrate attention and constrain excess, sweeping away the clutter that
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distracts from the story arc traced by figures on stage.56 That accidental quality
is the basis of cinematic specificity, and it provides a theoretical framework for
the response of critics like Ni Zhen to the shocking aesthetic of Yellow Earth
(Huang tudi; Chen Kaige, 1984): the film as a whole is elaborated through
image, and subsequently conveys ideological content and artistic information
in terms of shots and by revealing specific objects within the frame.57 Cinema
is defined not only by the precision of its craftsmanship but by the excess of
materiality that inhabits the frame.
In a 1981 essay, Film Form and Films National Form, Zhong Dianfei advanced a similar argument about the necessary specificity of the medium of
film and highlighted the inevitable link between the camera and a particular
location. This defense of cinema founded on the relationship between image
and reality once again segues into an argument about the specificity of national cinemas. He writes: Film as a means of reflecting objective images can
achieve a superhuman visual capacity. Therefore, its main methodthe
imagedoes not need translation. As long as life as manifested by film artists
is realistic, itfilmis by nature national.58 If Zhang Yimous later films represent one strategy for the conquest of global film marketsa combination of
national traditions and an international style of action cinemathe writing of
Yang and Zhong follows the opposite trajectory: film, they suggest, is most
cinematic when it records a superabundance of details, when the image documents a reality in excess of the demands of any dramatic narrative, when it
accentuates the particularity of the world before the camera rather than the
universality of its spectacle. From his earliest films, beginning with Xiao Shan
Goes Home (Xiao Shan hui jia; 1995) and Xiao Wu (1997), Jia Zhangke develops this antidramatic conception of realism, this cinema of distended time
and details that overload the viewers capacity to perceive, categorize, order,
and forget. The deepest roots of Chinese independent cinema in the 1990s lie
in these attempts in the filmmaking and theory of the early 1980s to envision
the process of opening to the outside world in cinematic terms, with the mechanically produced, documentary image becoming the interface between
contemporary Chinese society and the icons of globalization beginning to circulate on the nations elaborately designed urban stages. Later chapters in this
part of the book explore the increasingly stark differentiation, especially over
the course of the 1990s, between these two modes of filmmaking; but both
tendencies originate in the reconception of cinema by Chinese filmmakers
and theorists just after the end of the Cultural Revolution, a moment that coincides with Chinas reorientation toward the global market and its attempt to
reconcile cinematic modernism with the specificity of Chinese life in the late
twentieth century.
For Zheng Dongtian and many others, the most dynamic element in this
new environment, the force most capable of revitalizing Chinese cinema, was
the young generation then graduating, after an enforced hiatus, from Chinas
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art and film schools. This group of young and middle-aged directors (which
is to say, those under about forty) were the most fortunate in Chinese history, Zheng wrote, and he emphasized that by 1982 these youthful, hopeful,
and relatively inexperienced filmmakers were responsible for about 44 percent
of all movies produced in the country, or more than double the figure of just
three years before.59 This sense of anticipation, along with the volatile mixture
of formal and ideological experimentation, constituted the backdrop for the
Fifth Generation of filmmakers who emerged at this time. This cohort was
studying at precisely the moment when the concept of film was developing
into a more widespread intellectual fever. Critics like Shao Mujun asked how
debates about this concept conformed to the demands of the time and suggested that adapting the theories of Bazin and Kracauer merely substituted for
a more thorough debate about modern film theory, allowing critics to
resolve, almost magically, a much more intractable intellectual and cultural
problem.60 Others emphasized the process of nationalization that could adapt
this particular concept of realism to the historical moment and specific challenges present in China at the time. And for an important strain of Chinese
criticism in the 1980s, what distinguished realist cinema was its capacity to
mediate between the fantasy of the present imagined in socialist realism and
the equally fantastic future on offer in the vision of intellectuals bent on total
westernization. Chinas new generation of directors were the instigators of
this new cinema, and their primary strategy was a realism linked to the location rather than the studio. The films of the Fifth Generation provide one map
of that eras most significant locations, and in those breathtaking landscapes a
group of young artists and actors insinuate themselves into the most traumatic and emblematic sites in the nations recent history. If The River Elegy, in
its ultimately pessimistic verdict, asserts that the ancient symbols of an ultrastable nation can never be rejuvenated, the films of the Fifth Generation present
a much more evocative and ambivalent engagement between an old country
and the youth poised in the space between two revolutions.
{8}
The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China
Since the 1980s and especially at the turn of the millennium, critics writing
a fledgling history of contemporary Chinese cinema have latched onto the
device of the generation, identifying a series of rapid transitions to the Sixth,
Seventh, and Eighth (at last count) generation of ever younger filmmakers.
Given the compressed modernization undergone in Chinese society over the
past quarter century, this accelerated march of history, with one generation
lasting less than a decade and quickly ceding the mantle of innovation to the
next new arrivals, does capture the frenetic quality of a moment defined by fits
and starts and unfinished experiments rather than clearly identifiable tendencies unfolding across a longer stretch of time. This narrative of Chinas artistic
generations, this dizzying blur of history, is also imbued with irony because it
was motivated at the outset by a desire to comprehend an already eventful
century of Chinese modernity by organizing a hundred years of revolution
into discrete categories that would lend themselves to the production of
knowledge. The philosopher and aesthetician Li Zehou first attempted, from
the perspective of the late 1970s and 1980s, to divide modern Chinese art and
literature into historically inflected generations dating back to the turn of the
twentieth century. Outlined in the postscript to his monumental Essays on
Modern Chinese Thought, Lis cohort model transcends an individualist understanding of history and accentuates the shared experience of traumatic and
transformative events. When we refer in everyday speech to our times, we
reveal traces of the wave-like movement of history, he writes.1 Underlying
Lis philosophy is a belief that human affairs are characterized by the passage
from the old to the new and that the past and present take shape in the withering and continuity of generations.2 Despite the inevitable false starts and
dead ends, the impulse to write a generational history of Chinese cinema derives from an awareness that at the onset of the Reform era, Chinese society
jettisoned many of the guiding principles of the socialist period and proclaimed
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the advent of a new New Era. Under the emerging paradigm, revolutions
were not directed by helmsmen consulting and composing founding documents. Instead, newness itself became the engine of history. In this sense, the
history of several generations of Chinese filmmakers, a history told in waves,
with one rising and crashing and flowing into the next, merges seamlessly and
inevitably into the longer, international narrative of new wave cinema. As with
other new waves, Chinese cinema from the 1980s onward becomes both a reflection on and a product of an era of unremitting transformation. It is at once
a localization of the transnational history of art cinema, a resistance to the
spectacular novelty of the market, and a manifestation of that very logic of
renewal, as generational upheaval becomes a strategy of product differentiation in the film world and a vehicle for preserving a modernism defined in
opposition to globalizations market empire.
Although it originated in Lis intellectual history of modern China, this
generational model was almost immediately appropriated into the vocabulary
of filmmakers and critics, beginning with the now legendary Fifth Generation.
In its initial usage in the context of film, the name Fifth Generation referred
to the 1982 graduating class of the Beijing Film Academy, the first cohort to
study at the Academy after its closure during the Cultural Revolution and reopening to new students in 1978. That class contained several of the most
prominent figures in recent Chinese cinema, including Chen Kaige, Zhang
Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Ning Ying, and Li Shaohong. Most of these directors have resisted the numerical precision and collectiving impulse of the
term Fifth Generation, preferring instead to accentuate their identity as individual artists. In his memoirs and firsthand history of the contemporary
Beijing Film Academy, Ni Zhen, a screenwriter, film theorist, and Academy
faculty member immediately after the resumption of classes, emphasizes the
diverse biographical experiences even among that small group of directors.3
Ranging from scions of well-known film industry families and longtime inhabitants of old Beijing (Chen and Tian) to relatively disadvantaged amateurs
from inland provinces (Zhang), the students at the reconstituted Academy
resisted neat, all-encompassing classifications.
The irony of this long-festering dispute over group names is that the opposition to the term Fifth Generation, usually formulated as a desire to treat
artists as individuals with a unique sensibility and signature style, already signals a generational shift. If earlier filmmakers and critics had envisioned the
history of cinema in parallel with the history of the nation, constructing a
narrative of classes in conflict or coming together, accentuating the role of
collective agents of history rather than the separate stories of discrete actors,
the first wave of Reform-era film professionals questioned the fundamental
premise underlying this approach to historiography. In the last two decades
of the twentieth century, class identification began to recede, and in the
minds of these critics and filmmakers, the individualand, especially in the
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1990s, the individuals social surrogate, the young consumerreplaced massive social formations as the motor of history. Fifth Generation directors reflected the characteristic transformations of their era when they refused to be
considered as a group and asserted their status as singular artists. But during
the 1980sand, again, what makes this period particularly fascinating is its
transitional status, its overlapping historical formations, the tenuous balance
of several competing ideologiesa naming system that pinpointed the difference between generations seemed like a logical and productive exercise,
especially when it distinguished between directors whose education or professional careers corresponded to distinct periods in Chinese history. Although the fame of superstar directors like Chen and Zhangeach his own
production enterprise and brand namehas reduced the Fifth Generation,
in the eyes of contemporary critics, to a relic of a bygone era in Chinese film
history, that seemingly obsolete and conspicuously dated language helps preserve and bear witness to the very different mentality of the 1980s. To recover
the generational thinking of that era is also to read recent Chinese history
against the grain and recognize the ways that a collective ideal has manifested itself long after the demise of the socialist system. Inscribed in the history of the Chinas new wave and displayed in its films is the decline of communal history and the emergence of a global order whose ideological center
is the individual. Still rooted in the traumatic and utopian history of their
nation but also free agents in the international marketplace, the filmmakers
of the Fifth Generation explore the middle ground between China and the
world.
The generational history of Chinese film, a history motivated by simultaneously collectivizing and privatizing impulses, is thus a product of the singular circumstances of the early Reform era; and the filmmakers of the Fifth
Generation embody and represent on-screen the unique experience of the
1980s, when a repertoire of reference points culled from decades of Maoist
cinema and culture combined with the new logic of the market. For this
reason, audiences have been fascinated with both the directors and their films,
and as one critic suggests, the life story of Zhang Yimou would have made
for a great movie.4 Classmates at Beijing Film Academy, the filmmakers of
the Fifth Generation underwent similar training, embarked on their apprenticeships in the trade at the same auspicious moment, and eventually launched
their careers under the banner of that institution. In his Memoirs from the
Beijing Film Academy, Ni Zhen links this formative experience to the unprecedented social and economic transformation taking place outside the gates of
the campus, and he foregrounds the influence of a burgeoning popular and
commercial culture. He writes: twenty million educated youths are packing
up and returning to the cities from the icebound north and the steamy forests
of the tropics. Sanyo boom boxes have just gone on sale and people form
lines to buy them so long that one cannot see the end of them. This simple
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machine multiplies the enthusiasm for learning English. And, of course, it is

also used to enjoy the lilting tunes, over and over again, of Taiwanese pop
singer Teresa Teng.5 The Fifth Generation, despite their subsequent (and in
many cases temporary) distinction in art house and festival circles, developed
in an atmosphere that celebrated popular culture as a force of potentially revolutionary change. The immediate cultural context of their cinema, the atmosphere that permeates every aspect of the films and their production, includes
grand literary and philosophical modes as well as the latest trends in music
and fashion. The overriding concern for Beijing Film Academy graduates
in the early 1980s was how to position cinema, a medium traditionally encumbered by prohibitive costs and burdensome bureaucracies, in relation to
this still unofficial and often underground pop revolution without incurring
severe sanctions from government officials and censors. The result was a
hybrid system in which informal networks of artists sought out areas of relative autonomy within the gigantic studio bureaucracy. The unstructured and
opportunistic quality of this system was not unique to the film world. This
almost accidental gathering of young artists and intellectuals is a constant
theme in the many biographical accounts of the period, including the nostalgic and melancholy Our Generation and Jianying Zhas collection of interviews with major figures from the period, The 1980s.6 The Fifth Generation of
filmmakers is linked inextricably to that environment of experimentation,
and their work helps remove the international art cinema from splendid isolation and rediscover its more immediate circumstances, as one facet of a
broader cultural dynamic driven by emerging artists in historically new social
and economic conditions.
Most accounts of the directors of the Fifth Generation sound a variation on
the theme of youth, viewed positively as a turn away from the older cadres in
charge of government and the sclerotic arts bureaucracies, or negatively as the
unrefined work of disrespectful dilettantes. As this cohort of filmmakers finished its education, progressed into the Chinese studio system, and eventually
developed a global reputation, observers both inside and outside China repeatedly gestured toward their youth and modernist aesthetic as their distinguishing features. The 1988 headline of an Australian festival preview best
captures this association between new cinema and the rise of a generation:
Riding the New Wave in Old China.7 A similar formula is repeated in festival catalogs and film reviews from the mid-1980s onward. A Reuters article
titled Chinas New Film-Makers Seize the Gauntlet reports on the international success of Chinese filmmakers in the late 1980s and announces (somewhat sensationally) that this new generation . . . is experimenting with ideas
long considered taboosexuality, pacificism, capitalism.8 A New York Times
news story on the presentation of the Berlin International Film Festivals
Golden Bear Award to Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang; Zhang Yimou, 1987)
identifies Zhang, Chen, and their cohort as a new generation of Chinese
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movie makers whose films examine sexuality and human emotion more realistically than Chinese films have done in recent years.9 In a variation on a
theme heard throughout the early years of the Fifth Generation, the same article quotes Zhang Yimou on the importance of the unique experience of the
young people who came of age during the Cultural Revolution and emerged
into a new age with a future-minded perspective and different expectations. They want to break with China of the past and represent the modern
Chinese society. Tony Rayns, one of the critics most responsible for ushering
Chinese cinema into the international arena, wrote that against all odds and
expectation, Chinas younger film-makers have succeeded in reinventing and
revitalizing their cinema.10 Rayns repeatedly underscored their status as
young intellectuals (zhiqing) during the Cultural Revolution and locates the
origins of their mentality in both the trauma of that event and the unbridled
experience of teenagers freed from the strictures of school and family. And in
a retrospective account of several years of Chinese film festival triumphs, Lee
San Chouy of the Straits Times argues that cinema from across the sinophone
world and especially the PRC announced its arrival on the international stage
at Venice, Berlin, and Cannes; in language that underscores the perceived
youthfulness of this cinema and an implicitly generational conception of history, he describes this emergence as a coming of age.11 He repeats this phrase
several lines later, suggesting that Cannes was the principal site for the coming
of age of Chinese cinema, and this simultaneous emphasis on growing up
and moving beyond the boundaries of the nation suggests that Chinese filmmakers were undergoing a process of maturation into subjects of the world
itself. The overarching narrative of Chinese cinema in the Reform era revolves
around the central themes of generational rebellion and globalization, with
young directors enlisted at once into a geopolitical saga that spanned the Cold
War and the age of global capitalism and a timeless tale of youth in the throes
of development.
The Fifth Generation was a young cinema, and that youthful mentality is
most prominent in the tendency to explore the implications of the contemporaneous moment of transition rather than the safer topic of revolutionary history or the promise of a still hazy future. The periods primary innovations
emerged from the gaps between the previous system of cultural production,
including the expansive network of studios extending across the country, and
the informal and tentative arrangements that were pieced together in the early
Reform era. While the censorship system still imposed changes on screenplays and final cuts, and while the formal and informal pressures of a conservative studio and ministerial bureaucracy continued to influence film production, the industry reawakened from several years of inactivity and took
advantage of one of the most relaxed cultural environments in New Chinas
short history. After nearly a decade of limited production opportunities, the
compulsory replication of model operas, and the aesthetic obligations of the
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three prominences, the last two years of the 1970s were characterized by a
palpable sense of relief and visible signs of artistic experimentation.12 That
moment of possibility presented studio officials and culture bureau officials
with a number of immediate crises, most notably the lack of experienced personnel ready to resurrect Chinas moribund film industry. Young directors
like Zhang Yimou (born in 1950 and therefore the oldest of the group), Chen
Kaige (born in 1952), and Tian Zhuangzhuang (1952) stepped into positions of
responsibility in their late twenties and early thirties and began working as
cinematographers and directors on full-scale productions. Many of these opportunities presented themselves at relatively marginal studios in provinces
far from the cultural centers of Beijing and Shanghai. The young directors and
producers were paralleled on the other side of the camera by a company of
young actors who specialized in dramatizing the nascent generational rebellion about to explode across Chinese society. From the earliest days of the new
Chinese cinema, those actorsmany of them graduates of the Central Academy of Drama, another post-1949 institution whose history mirrors that of
Beijing Film Academyinterpreted roles that embodied an ongoing struggle
against the social, political, economic, and sexual repression represented by
their elders. The early careers of Gong Li, Jiang Wen, and, several years later,
Jia Hongsheng progressed through a series of these unruly young characters,
and their star personae were intimately linked to the defiant characters they
portrayed.13
While authority over cultural policy was concentrated primarily in the capital, Chinese film production was a remarkably decentered operation, and that
permitted relatively inexperienced artists and producers to assume positions
of power at an early age. Chinas network of film studios was constructed to a
large extent during the 1950s, a period of massive investment in the culture
industries, and its immediate model was again the Soviet system. The network
of facilities stretched across the country, with relatively poor interior provinces
housing their own production capacities. Because trained directors, many of
whom had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution,tended
to return to Beijing, Shanghai, and the other cultural centers, the most prominent studios like Beijing Film Studio and Bayi were relatively inhospitable to
younger filmmakers. Production quotas were higher and the pace of activity
was faster at the major eastern studios; but the smaller western provinces presented young filmmakers with immediate opportunities to write screenplays,
operate the camera, or even direct for either a studio proper or its youth production group. Executives like Wu Tianming, head of the Xian Film Studio,
and himself a relatively young director in his early forties, and Guo Baochang,
head of the Guangxi Film Studio and a respected veteran director, transformed
previously marginal locations in the Chinese film industry into the key sites of
innovation in world cinema in the 1980s. Attracted by these unprecedented
possibilities, a large contingent of the nascent Fifth Generation migrated west.
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The film usually considered the debut of the Fifth Generation, One and Eight
(Yi ge he ba ge; 1983), was produced by Guangxi Film Studio with Zhang Junzhao directing and Zhang Yimou behind the camera. The periods breakthrough film, Yellow Earth, was sponsored by Guangxis Youth Production
Unit and featured the legendary collaboration of director Chen Kaige, cinematographer Zhang Yimou, and art director He Qun. Even the more established
east coast studios participated, if less fervently, in this westward migration and
youth movement. Tian Zhuangzhuang, for example, took the helm together
with Xie Xiaojing and Zhang Jianya for Red Elephant (Hong xiang), a childrens
film set in Xishuangbanna and made for the Beijing Youth Production Studio
in 1982.14 These opportunities in the rural west and south presented themselves because Chinas basic studio infrastructure remained intact, despite
years of neglect, and because the transition to the Reform era opened a momentary void in the ideological structure governing cultural production. The
youthful cinema of the Fifth Generation developed from the dynamic combination of industrial maturity and a new cultural system in the process of
emergence.
The films created by this group of young and middle-aged directors accentuate the generational transition slowly taking place in Chinese society.
On-screen, in their sensuous images of everyday life, and off, in their accompanying accounts of the fieldwork involved in finding and learning about
their rural locations, early Fifth Generation cinema presents stories and images
rooted in concrete situations. But for aesthetic and political reasonsthe precise limits of expressive freedom and the penalty for treating sensitive political
subjects remained unclearthese directors also deployed the oblique strategies of allegory. In nearly every film, the primary building blocks of that allegory are expansive landscapes, the hierarchical social structures governing
rural life, the brutal subjugation of young women, or the struggle between an
older generation and a young interloper who challenges that order and threatens to overturn the oppressive system whose history, the films imply, extends
back into the legendary past. The most cogent criticisms of the Fifth Generation maintain that these allegories are inadequately attentive to the nuances of
history. The inaccuracies are particularly pernicious, these arguments suggest,
when the transnational reach of these films is factored into the equation. For
audiences at film festivals and art houses around the world, audiences with
very little independent knowledge about China and few reasons to question
the apparent reality of the images, the elaborate rituals and feudal social structures may acquire the aura of history. Among the most persuasive of those
condemnations is Dai Qings Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern,
which highlights the absurdity of the basic scenario that organizes the films
plot and visual register: a wealthy man with several wives flagrantly advertises
the details of his sex life with a pyrotechnic display of lanterns.15 And while
Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong denglong gaogao gua), released in 1991, came
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relatively late in the cycle of Fifth Generation films and revealed the sedimentation of a narrative formula and visual style, critics have identified many of
the same tendencies in films from the earliest days of this ostensible modernization of Chinese cinema.
Rey Chows Primitive Passions advances the most incisive critique of these
films by suggesting that they serve very different purposes for their diverse
and global audiences: on the one hand the excessive visual dimension of the
films, the stunningly colorful and cruel and beautiful images, contain an immanent protest against the grayness and aesthetic orthodoxy of Maoist arts,
especially during the Cultural Revolution. On the other, they appear in a space
that is bifurcated between the art museum and the ethnological museum and
oscillate incessantly between their two constitutive forms: works of art released into the international film market and autoethnography that exposes
the backwardness of Chinese feudal customs to the supercilious gaze of foreign spectators.16 That ethnographic component is a crucial feature in all of
these films, beginning with Yellow Earths obsessive attention to marriage
rituals and rain dances, local dress and work routines, and the musical performances and songs found in communities scattered throughout the loess plateaus alongside the Yellow River. The main male character in Yellow Earth is
a soldier in the Eighth Route Army charged with collecting folk music to inspire the troops already fighting for the Communist cause and to convince
local peasants to ally themselves with that project. He is, in other words, a
soldier and an ethnomusicologist. At the core of the critique of the Fifth Generations autoethnographic impulse is a rejection of the mythological view of
the past, especially as it manifests itself in the filmed customs and rituals that
belong to the temporality of legends rather than the history punctuated by
revolution and trauma that constitutes Chinese modernity. In films like Raise
the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and even Yellow Earth, history has been subsumed
by a spectacular parade of myths. If the power of allegory lies in its capacity to
provoke different responses in different times and places, its danger also lies in
that openness and ambiguity and, as important, in the moments of closure
when a particular audience sees a mirror held up to society rather than the
shattered world of allegory envisioned and theorized by Walter Benjamin.
Allegory is in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things, he
writes.17 The lingering question inspired by these films is whether they respond to the traumatic decline of Chinas modern experiment by constructing
an allegorical cinema from those ruins or reconstruct a familiar, feudal vision
of the nation for foreign audiences to recognize and domestic audiences to
disavow.
While the responses outlined by Dai and Chow offer a powerful critique of
the Fifth Generation, one dimension of the films that remains resistant to this
reading is the allegory of generational conflict played out across individual
texts and the broader cinematic culture of the time. Although their narratives
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are located in feudal surroundings untouched by the modernization process

of Chinas twentieth century, the films also feature agents of modernity and
even revolution: young protagonists, both male and female, who subvert the
established order by rebelling against the old men who stand for and dominate
that archaic system. In the prototypical Fifth Generation filmsbeginning
with One and Eight and continuing with Yellow Earth, The Old Well (Lao jing;
Wu Tianming, 1986), and Red Sorghumthe narrative is launched by acts of
youthful rebellion and a refusal to obey the rules of an inherited social structure. The heroes in One and Eight are young criminals whose disregard for
thelaw and social order prepares them for daring acts of wartime resistance
that sweep away the decaying colonial system and usher in a revolutionary
moment. In Yellow Earth, a soldier in the Eighth Route Army travels to the
Shaanxi hinterlands in order to collect folk songs and thereby provide a
soundtrack for the peoples struggle. He discovers that his own romanticized
and politicized vision of the peasantry is incompatible with the seemingly ancient social structure he discovers in this isolated region, a structure whose
embodiment, the rapidly aging father of two young children, becomes an impediment to fundamental change. The soldier thus poses a challenge, however
courteous and respectful and ultimately ineffectual, to this elderly patriarch
and all he represents. More profound and powerful and intemperate is the
uprising of Cuiqiao, who rushes headlong into the struggle for liberation with
a ferocity that her mentor, the soldier, with his commitment to the long-term
aims of the Communist Party, is unable to match. With only her personal experience of an oppressive feudal system and the most elementary primer in
socialist principles, she flees from that brutal social structure, and her apparent drowning becomes the films most radical gesture and most ardent sacrifice, far exceeding those of the soldier who opposes a feudal order intellectually but lacks the resolve to dedicate himself to that cause. Her youth and
alienation from all entrenched ideologies make Cuiquiao the near perfect embodiment of a revolutionary spirit. After her disappearance, in the films stunning final sequence, her younger brother, Hanhan, spots the soldier in the
distance and heads toward him, struggling against the movement of local villagers performing an ancient rain dance. Like his sister, Hanhan becomes a
vehicle for the most passionate rebellion precisely because of his youth and
inexperience, because he has rejected a decaying social order without identifying with the society to follow. The differing fates of the soldier, Cuiqiao, and
Hanhan are often interpreted as a critique of an indifferent Party and a fatalistic gender allegory in which the male savior fails to rescue an oppressed girl,
whose valiant but desperate struggle for liberation results only in her own
death. But the film layers an allegory of youth onto this gendered signifying
system; and while the plot hinges in part on gender difference, on the various
roles and fates assigned to its heroes and heroines, it also displays a generational
solidarity that stretches across the gender divide. The allegorical dimension of
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Yellow Earth is predicated on the understanding that the overarching myth of

a fully realized Chinese modernity on display in Maoist cinema has been shattered beyond repair. The Fifth Generation then revisits the possibilities of the
modern in the ruins of the socialist experiment and the remnants of the feudal
system that lingers on, and it positions youth outside both preexisting political orders.
This attempt to channel the energy of a new generation often disregards the
pitfalls of recent Chinese history, especially the idealistic images of young
revolutionaries produced during the seventeen years after Liberation, then the
usurpation of power by Red Guard factions, with their often violent tyranny
of youth. Prior to the rise of a youth-oriented, urban cinema in the 1990s,
Chinese filmmakers rarely departed from a romanticized, relatively formulaic
portrayal of young protagonists. In the Maoist era, the modernist dimension
of socialist realism is apparent in the pivotal role played by the category of
youth in the periods narratives of social, economic, and ideological development. Zheng Jing situates the emergence of the new filmmakers and youth
culture in the 1980s and 1990s in the longue dure of youth films (qingchun
dianying) in China, with a handful of titles becoming emblematic of the experience of the generation represented on-screen and seated in the audience.18
Titles that refer or allude to youth (usually qingchun or qingnian) abound in
the archive of Chinese cinema immediately after liberation and during the
Cultural Revolution. For Zheng, the youth films of the 1950sincluding The
Footsteps of Youth (Qingchun de jiaobu; Su Lu and Gong Yan, 1957), Girls from
Shanghai (Shanghai guniang; Cheng Yi, 1958), and Youth in the Flames of War
(Zhan huo zhong de qingchun; Wang Yan, 1959)epitomize the volatile combination of Maoist ideology and the young subject, with political discourse
remaining in a position of dominance and youthful energy and romance
imagined as another, secondary force wielded by the guiding hand of ideology.19 In Maoist cinema, young people are imagined as an erratic but dynamic
group, a source of energy and exuberance to be directed away from bourgeois
or feudal temptations and toward the aims of the revolution. But by the late
1950s and into the 1960s, filmmakers confronted a series of fundamental and
ultimately irresolvable historical and representational problems: How could
they manage the revolutionary potential of youth even after the revolution
itself had grown old and transitioned into a bureaucracy, and how could they
harness that potential energy without threatening the stability of the Partystate itself? One common response in both the political and cinematic realms
was to send young people to the countryside and especially toward the nations western frontier, directing the forces of revolution elsewhere in society, far from the modernizing cities. In films like Footsteps of Youth and The
Young Generation (Nianqing de yi dai; Liang Zhihao and Zhang Huijun,
1976), the narrative unfolds as a series of attempts to discipline the revolutionary passion of youth, with Young Pioneers and Red Guards directing their
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revolutionary fervor at the vestiges of tradition, usually at a safe geographic

remove from Beijing, Shanghai, and other centers of power. And those films,
like many from their respective periods, conclude with images of intrepid
youth boarding a truck or train and heading west to Qinghai or Xinjiang, the
revolutionary spirit reembodied in youth and remobilized at the frontiers of
the nation. While these narratives progress toward a climactic relocation, they
also finesse and gloss over the contradiction laid bare in this generational
transition, as active participants in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the
civil war with the Kuomintang pass the baton to a younger cohort raised in a
socialist society. The characters are young, but the revolution is not, and the
youth films from the 1950s1970s aspire to the phantasmatic resolution of that
contradiction.
In The Young Generation, this familiar but nonetheless volatile mixture of
spatial and historical transitions is distilled down to its purest form, and for
well over a decade this story of an ageless revolutionary fervor helped define
political virtue for a new demographic raised almost exclusively in New China.
The popularity and importance of The Young Generation is demonstrated by
the fact that the title actually refers to a group of related texts, including the
original stage play from 1963, a series of local operas adapted from the play, a
1965 film, and another screen adaptation from 1976.20 Although the following
discussion refers to the later of those two films, the sheer abundance of stories
based on The Young Generation suggests that for audiences and cultural authorities this particular narrative encapsulated some of the problems posed by
the new youth entering maturity in the 1960s. The film recounts the melodramatic story of a family whose three generations and three teenage and twentysomething siblings are drawn from at least three separate biological families.
At the core of the narrative and its thematic development lies a pair of promising young geologists with impeccable revolutionary credentials but varying
degrees of commitment to the cause, especially at a distance of fourteen to
twenty-seven years from the fighting itself. Lin Yusheng embodies the flagging of that revolutionary spirit: now a student in Shanghai, he has feigned
injury to avoid returning to his work brigade in the remote southwest; he succumbs to the bourgeois temptations available during a period of relative affluence compared with the deprivations of the war years; he listens to Western
dance music; he pays conspicuous attention to fashion; he dismisses the importance of practical knowledge and instead continues write a dissertation; in
sum, he pursues a life of bourgeois indulgence. In this tale of doubles and
mirror opposites, Lins adopted brother, Xiao Jiye, manifests all the ideals
lacking in his less virtuous counterpart: he is a robust and practical young
man; he has relocated to Qinghai to utilize his knowledge of geology in a
large-scale mining project; and he downplays his far more serious illness in
order to return to his adopted rural home and vocation as soon as possible.
Xiao Jiye is, in short, the films positive hero and a crystallization of the eras
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vision of honorable youth. But in a crucial scene that retraces and clarifies
some of the films convoluted family lineages, we learn that Lin is the orphan
of Communist veterans who perished in a Kuomintang prison camp during
the civil war and therefore a figure worthy of sympathy rather than contempt.
And, in a tear-filled denouement that tests the limits of melodramatic excess,
his adoptive father attempts to remedy the boys dissolute ways by handing
over a long-concealed letter written by Lins biological mother to her child,
just before her execution. After recounting the progress of the Communist
forces, the letter says: you may forget your father and your mother, but you
must never forget that there are still class enemies in the world, and that you
are a descendant of the proletariat. It exhorts him to struggle to the end,
follow the Party, serve the people, and never forget [his] roots. After the
room erupts in bouts of sobbing, Lins adoptive brother steps forward and
declares that the letter is not only a message of love and an inspiration bequeathed from parents to their son but also a challenge from the first revolutionary generation to the whole generation of youth, who must never abandon the aspirations of their predecessors.
While the sentiments, formulaic language, and staging of this family melodrama are familiar from other Chinese films of the Maoist era, this sequence
illustrates the complexity of the periods conception of generational transition and transmission. The scene revolves around the story of a family, with
wisdom passed down from parents to their son, but in this case youthful parents deprived of their adulthood (and all its opportunities for betrayal and
compromise) communicate with a new generation at a critical moment of
decision. The voice of the revolution is forever youthful, and when it begins to
age and fade into the distance, cinema can still recreate the illusion of presence and restore its faint promise. As in so many films of the period, the
family structure has been disrupted, the parents have perished, the children
know their immediate forebears only through legends and letters, and the
familythe most intimate social grouping and most powerful mechanism of
ideological reproductionassumes a radically new form. The generation vies
with the family for prominence in this narrative of miraculous communication from the edge of the grave. The revolution does not depend on the standard lines of transmission; it can lie dormant for years before another propitious moment arrives. The most important element in this equation is youth,
for a modern revolution must always address itself to a society and a generation to come.
The role of the youthful revolutionary undergoes a profound reconsideration in the early 1980s and a fundamental transformation in the Fifth Generation films produced in the middle of that decade. Zheng Jing again notes the
prominence of youth pictures in the first years of reform, with films ranging
from Xie Feis Our Field (Women de tianye; Xie Fei, 1983) to Zhang Nuanxins
Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji, 1985).21 What a Family, released at the very
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onset of this period, contains a premonition of unconstrained youth whose

energy is divorced from a historical mission and oriented primarily to acts of
consumption. And by the time of The Old Well and Red Sorghum, youth is no
longer faithful or subservient to an idealized moment in the past; instead it
becomes a flexible and insubstantial category that adapts to ever-changing
conceptions of modernity. The dead letter from the past remains lost; it is
never rediscovered and reanimated in the voice of a new generation. During
this transitional period, the dominant Maoist conception of youthful idealism and enthusiasm in service of a past revolution wanes, and the cosmopolitan and consumerist visions of Chinas urban generation emerge. Uprooted and evacuated, youth becomes the privileged signifier of newness in
the accelerated and experimental modernization campaigns and the cinema
of the late twentieth century. The allegories of revolution during the 1980s
foreground the utopian vision of youth presented earlier by a previous generation of writers and intellectuals but reverse the much older conception of
minority as a time of apprenticeship and reinvent the process of aging as a
devolution and betrayal of an original ideal rather than the progressive attainment of learning and cultivation. The youthful protagonists of the Fifth
Generation already have their answers and ambitions when the films begin.
The plot is concerned not with their initiation into the revolutionary masses
but the pursuit of a means to realize their fully formed vision of liberation or
revenge.
The domestic and international reception of the Fifth Generation as the
product of youthful rebellion was intimately related to the perceived modernism of their filmmaking style, especially their combination of unobtrusive,
observational realism with stunning colors and compositions. The directors of
the Fifth Generation developed an unconventional approach to the medium,
and that novelty complemented both the biographies of the artists and the
fictional revolts enacted repeatedly on-screen. As Chow points out, the pleasures made possible through the imagethe stunning furrowed landscapes of
Yellow Earth, the vibrant fields of Red Sorghum, and later but most dramatically, the pools of roiled dye and the cavernous warehouse ornamented by
festooned silk in Ju Douelicit different responses from audiences concerned
with either the formal elements of the image or the political ramifications of
displaying a distinctly unmodernized nation before a global audience.22 Wu
Tianming recounts that he received hate mail after the release of films produced by his Xian Film Studio, including one that pegged his international
success directly to its awkward display of dirty secrets. A: I hear Wu Tianming has won an award, begins the letter, in the form of a dialogue. B: Why?
A: Because he dared to take off his mothers clothes to show to foreigners. B:
He really is a hooligan.23 If many mainland Chinese spectators and critics
found it difficult to divorce these stunning images from the appallingly backward conditions they also revealed, the critics and juries who welcomed the
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films with glowing reviews and festival prizes envisioned their formal beauty
as an act of rebellion in itself, an aesthetic challenge to the perceived grayness
and conformity of an official socialist aesthetic. Some responses condemn the
films for their descent into mere image or view the stunning scenery and
colors as a respite from the plot.24 Others praise the wondrous sweep of
the landscapes and enthralling, sensuous command of the director while
dampening that enthusiasm with a paradoxical feeling of riches and impoverishment, as the sophistication of the filmmaking and immaturity of
the writing leave the film too close to the surface.25 Others celebrate the
power of the pure image, situate the films in an ongoing modernist pursuit
of the specificity of the artists medium, and avoid the corresponding caveats
and reservations.
For Chow, this diversity of responses suggests that the surface of the image
in the key Fifth Generation films possesses a semiautonomous power of defiance, and the wash of bright color and the off-kilter framings often contradict
or render ambiguous the narrative contained in the screenplay.26 The breathtaking images created by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige possess an allure that
can never be reduced to a mere linguistic summary of the plot or description
of the contents and style of the image. That inherent ambiguity allowed the
films to frustrate a preapproval system still focused on specific and itemizable
violations in the screenplay rather than the vague infractions that result in the
postproduction censorship of a completed film. But if the surface of the film is
not reducible to the narrative penned by the screenwriter, the images and the
stories do complement each other in the sheer audacity of their display of
defiance: the visual register is at least as dismissive of the conventions of the
Chinese film establishment as the characters in Yellow Earth or Red Sorghum
are of their elders. The Fifth Generation films are marked as outsiders in the
domestic Chinese film industry by the apparent modernism of their images,
by the fact that their surfaces are more than mere illustrations of a story and
often clash with the explicit messages reiterated in the narratives. But these
Fifth Generation films are not exclusively aesthetic experiments, nor are they
calumny directed against a modernizing nation or manifestations of a quasioedipal clash between one peer group and its successors. The Fifth Generation
prizes the new in the visual domain as a counterpart to the new men and
women whose youth remains a primary qualification for the heroic ambitions
they seek to realize. The shifting horizons, deep landscapes, and saturated
colors of the ancient plains are the most prominent aesthetic markers of the
youthfulness that permeates Chinese cinema in the 1980s. The Fifth Generation is characterized by a litany of lacks and lossescharacters without the
standard repertoire of heroic characteristics, directors without the requisite
experience, films that jettison many of the conventions inherited from socialist realismbut those voids open onto a new cinema attuned to the social
transformations of the time.
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Wu Tianming and the Art of Transition

Although Wu Tianming has never achieved the global stardom of directors
like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, Old Well remains one of the most striking
examples of what would become a Fifth Generation blueprint, with conspicuously unconventional images, a younger cohort of actors, and protagonists
engaged in a bitter struggle with elders who are portrayed as the antithesis of
modernity. At the same time, Wu departs from the embryonic formula of the
period by setting his youthful narratives in the present rather than the seemingly distant, feudal past. If the result is a necessarily dampened and understated form of rebellion when compared with the work of Chen and Zhang,
films like Old Well and Life (Rensheng, 1984) are potentially bolder engagements with the contemporary situation precisely because they refuse the political deniability afforded by the trappings of myth and legend. There is no
haze between the lens of Wu Tianming and the historical situation he films. At
once revolutionary and adamantly of their time, Wus films help relocate the
broader Fifth Generation interest in youthful rebellion in the contemporary
moment that other filmmakers address only through allegory.
Old Well focuses primarily on the construction of a well in a remote and
chronically parched area of Chinas northwest. The residents of a village called
Old Well repeatedly abandon unrewarding, unfinished wells and begin to excavate new ones, a never-ending process punctuated by momentary optimism
and inevitable failure. A local stele attests to this long history of endeavor and
disappointment, and like so many films of the 1980s, Old Well alludes to a narrative that stretches back into the premodern past and, by virtue of the sheer
number of names and generations involved, into legendary times largely undocumented by historians, except the villagers who carved the stele itself.
(And in a pungent demonstration of the questionable value of this historical
record, the once-lost stele is found serving a more utilitarian function: as the
cover for a familys toilet.) Old Well is a film about one generation after another replicating ad infinitum and ad nauseam the past of their forefathers; it
is also about the possibility of a revolutionary break that interrupts this cycle
of inertia and repetition.
Played by Zhang Yimou, an icon of this generation both in front of the
camera and behind it, the character who embodies that revolutionary impulse is Sun Wangquan. Too poor to offer a traditional bride price for his real
object of affection, another villager named Zhao Qiaoying, Wangquan instead marries a widow whose money can be used to pay for the wedding of his
brother and subsidize the search for a new well. Once again, the libidinal
desire of youth conflicts with a social system designed to ensure stability and
continuity by constraining those desires, and the oppressive limitations of
that structure manifest themselves simultaneously at the personal and social
levels. This leap from the personal to the broader domain of politics is most
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evident in the films most ostentatiously modernist moment: when Wangquan

and Qiaoying, victims of an attempt to sabotage their most promising and
sophisticated well, are trapped together at the bottom, Wu Tianming superimposes an image of the two in a suggestive embrace and a shot of the expansive landscape, the individual pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfillment literally layered onto the most enduring emblem of the Chinese nation, the land
itself (Figure 8.1). If the narrative links this couple with a small-scale but still
epic engineering project, on the level of the image their intertwined bodies
acquire equally grand significance as they begin to dissolve into and remain
superimposed on a landscape of rugged hills. Lisa Rofel suggests that the
Reform era ushered in a pervasive historical allegory centered on the overthrow of socialist artifice and a return to natural instincts long suppressed
under Maoist social engineering, a return in its most common manifestations
to gender difference based in the fixed coordinates of biology or to a quasiDarwinian conception of social competition and triumph by the innately superior.27 The desires of the two protagonists are as natural as the mountains
and water, the film suggests, as Chinese as the yellow earth, and as eminently
modern as the construction project whose temporary failure engineers their
romance. Desireand in Old Well, this desire is at once individual and collective, carnal and technocratic, a simultaneous aspiration toward personal
satisfaction and economic development, a romantic union realized within
the infrastructure of a modern futurebecomes one of the primary motors
of history.
figure 8.1 Old Well.
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Although both the film and its director are very much products of their
time, the case of Old Well and Wu Tianming, slightly older and more established in the early 1980s than Zhang and Chen, also demonstrates the fundamental connection between this period and earlier traditions in Chinese
cinema. Once again, this continuity manifests itself in the overarching attempt
to redefine the cinematic realism that was previously a privileged genre (in the
1930s) and the socialist realism that was an inescapable template in the Chinese film industry since the 1950s. Wu attended the Beijing Film Academy
before the Cultural Revolution and made his directing debut in 1979, in the
first months of the new era. In 1984, he became the head of the Xian Film
Studio, where he supervised many of the key productions of the Fifth Generation, including Huang Jianxins film The Black Cannon Incident (Hei pao shijian, 1985), Tian Zhuangzhuangs The Horse Thief (Dao ma zei, 1986), Zhangs
Red Sorghum, and his own films. Wu emphasizes that from the beginning of
his career, he viewed realism as the first step toward the summit of modern
art, and he describes his ambition to become the kind of director who makes
realism his lifelong creative path.28 His chronicle of the filmmaking processfor Old Well (a very detailed account disseminated in fragments through
his writings and interviews) highlights the quasi-ethnographic, participantobserver role of the director and his crew during the two months they spent
living in a village still lacking basic amenities like electricity and running
water, a village several years removed from the most recent local screening of
a movie. The film draws heavily, Wu suggests, on what we saw and heard,
and crystallizes the learning gleaned from several years of travel in over forty
counties of Shaanxi, Gansu, and other relatively undeveloped provinces, all
stops on the scouting and shooting itinerary for his films.29 He adds that the
strict demands of realism guided not only the plot and characterization but
also the choice of details, camerawork, set design, acting, sound, color, costumes, makeup, and props.30 That realist ethic also limited the camera to perspectives that plausibly approximated those of characters in the film, virtually
eliminating close-ups, for example. The few close-ups appear primarily in
crowd scenes, as a photojournalistic camera picks out representative members
of the community for closer scrutiny, and the realism of another medium
complements the more familiar cinematic tendency to preserve the spatial relations of an environment through more inclusive long shots. Like Yellow
Earth, the realism of Old Well begins with ethnographic credentials that it
wears like a badge of honor.
But if every dimension of Old Well was created under a realist imperative
and a commitment to the specificity of its location, how do the virtuoso flourishes, the superimposition of the embrace and the landscape foremost among
them, contribute to this aesthetic goal? And if these particular shots signal
amomentary departure from this realist agenda, in what direction are they
tending? In other words, if realism is the first step toward a modernist aesthetic,
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what comes next along this trajectory? Wu suggests that Old Well was conceived as a realist work with real people, real events, real images, and real
language; but at the end of the film he also hoped to make the audience feel
something more expressionist at a deeper level and launch them on a trajectory leading from reality toward more abstract concepts.31 That a filmmaker
would imagine his own work as a combination of a very strictly limited realism and a more expansive and uncontrolled expressionism is not surprising.
These occasional departures from the ascetic imperative of cinematic realism
are present in all but the most dogmatic and experimental modes of realism
practiced by Andy Warhol in Sleep (1963) or in the Chinese context by contemporary digital filmmakers like Cui Zien. These shots are symptomatic of
the failures of a realist project whose limitationsits deliberate pacing, its enclosure in a specific space and timeconflict with the lofty ambitions of a
generation bent on moving faster and traveling farther than the unwieldy
camera and its confining frame will permit. In Old Well the realist imperative,
that governing impulse that launched Wu on his travels through dozens of
counties and cultivated an aesthetic with roots in those locations, falls by the
wayside at precisely the moment when youth emerges as the vanguard of a
new modernity. In this crucial scene, a generation with little actual power and
only the vaguest sense of its destiny becomes the phantasmatic site, deus and
machina all in one, where societys actually existing contradictions achieve
their imaginary resolution.
Despite this premonition of and overlap with the more resolutely youthoriented cinema to come in the 1990s, Old Well concludes with an image of
the villagers returning their prized recent acquisitions and refusing to occupy
their assigned position as consumers in the new economy. In the late 1970s,
What a Family presented an outdoor market with an abundance of goods on
display, and a long horizontal tracking shot led the viewer on a tour of this
new marketplace. This long take, the films most realist image in the Bazinian
sense, accentuates and guarantees the scale of this bounty. The end of Old Well
provides a bookend to Wangs celebration of the eras burgeoning prosperity,
as residents of the village begin to return the goods they accumulated early in
the film. In an extended tracking shot, Wu Tianming presents the astonishing
abundance that the villagers have decided to forego in order to finance the
completion of their well. Having just celebrated the revolutionary force of romance, the film concludes with a scene predicated on the deferral of desire for
material wealth. This film reveals one dimension of the Fifth Generation films
that distinguishes them from their predecessors in the Maoist era and their
successors in the 1990s: Old Well exists at the crossroads of two cultural and
economic systems, one driven by the urgent ambitions of the young and one
rooted in the communitarian experiments of the previous four decades. Old
Well, as it invests extraordinary narrative energy in the youth represented by
its two main characters, lavishing its most conspicuously virtuoso filmmaking
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on the culmination of their desire, also envisions the excesses discernible even
in that early period of reform and entertains the possibility of reining in that
reckless abandon. At once futurist and retro in its aspirations and ideology,
the film emerges at a historical moment when the capitalist modernity of the
late twentieth century overlaps with its socialist predecessor. Old Well and the
other great films of the early Fifth Generation reveal the contradictory cultural
logic of this era, a time when modernity itself was no longer and not yet a
template ready to be mechanically applied, when the future was a fantasy and
a relic at the same time, a vision to be imagined and an object to be excavated.
Wu Tianming had embarked on his first experiment with that transitional
ethic and aesthetic in Life, which as much as any film in the period demonstrates the contradictory forces that drew Chinese artists simultaneously
toward a revolution in the past and an equally profound transformation taking
shape along the nations eastern seaboard. Produced at the same time as Yellow
Earth, Life explores many of the same landscapes and social formations that
occupied the attention of Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and their collaborators.
The lingering shots of furrowed landscapes, the prematurely aged patriarchs
who work the fields, the younger generation at once repelled by and constrained within a deeply entrenched social system: these are the commonalities that link Life and the more celebrated Yellow Earth. But the differences are
also telling, as they hint at the limits of the possible during this period in Chinese history, as well as the extent of the radical ambitions nurtured by filmmakers like Wu and Chen. Set in the prerevolutionary past, Yellow Earth ventures into a series of relatively drastic experiments with a pared down cast and
an almost entirely evacuated mise-en-scne. Only the sounds of wind and
mournful local songs fill the empty space between loess hills that stretch as far
as the eye can see. The allegory of generational uprising enacted in the film
assumes the concrete form of Cuiqiao and Hanhan, whose drastic acts of insurgency include the attempt to abandon their home and family and even a
probable suicide. The film is poised delicately between a narrative set in a comfortably distant past and an allegory of generational rebellion with clear implications for the present. Life begins with many of the same basic elements, but
as in Old Well, Wu locates his tale of upheaval in the much more sensitive political environment of the present. While his characters and his own filmmaking experiments are less audacious than those of Chen or Zhang Yimou, Wus
insistence on confronting the conditions of the present carries his own work
and career to the boundaries of permissible criticism in the late socialist era.
If the paradigmatic Fifth Generation films like Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum realize their modernism only by divorcing it from the present, Wus
most important films pose a more subdued aesthetic challenge but venture
onto more perilous political and social terrain. The main characters in Life are
again an educated young man and a woman from his home village, and the
film begins as a familiar tale driven by two irreconcilable desires: the simple
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attractions of a traditional existence in the countryside and the difficulty of

returning home from a city associated with modernity, prosperity, and the
future. The films main male protagonist, Gao Jialin, had been posted as the
teacher at the village school but now works in the fields because a wellconnected but underqualified teacher has replaced him. Although the plot
follows a trajectory of departure motivated by career ambition and return,
romance again drives the narrative. In a triangular relationship that links
country and city, as well as professional frustration and success, the main male
protagonist falls in love with both his hometown sweetheart, Liu Qiaozhen,
and a former schoolmate with powerful family contacts in faraway Nanjing. As
in Old Well, love and sexual desire engender two conflicting aspirations: to
return home to the countryside, with all its promises of security, familiarity,
and continuity, and to head east toward the big city, with its more spectacular
promise of modernity. The appeal of the city is crystallized even before Gao
Jialin rekindles his romance with his school friend. In a striking montage sequence, he flips through the pages of a magazine with photographs of Chinas
major cityscapes, their most technologically advanced and conspicuously fashionable icons filling the screen. In these close-ups of glossy images, the film
and this propaganda magazine share the same tantalizing fantasy of highways,
airports, and high-rises. The final shot of the sequence shows a photograph of
an airplane that suddenly takes flight, this succession of still images at last becoming cinematic, their modernity now a phenomenon of motion and sound
and powered by Gaos imagination. In this moment the propaganda vehicle,
the film itself, and the consciousness of its hero become indistinguishable
(Figure 8.2).
Gaos interest in his old high school friend merges with the promise of the
city presented in that magazine and absorbed into his own fantasy, and a narrative charged by that personal and sexual desire plays itself out over the
figure 8.2 Life.
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social geography of contemporary China. Life is concerned above all with the
simultaneous failure of its two contradictory stories: a roots-seeking narrative set in a young graduates home village and a story of migration to the big
city. Gaos voyage out of the countryside is sabotaged by the intervention of a
jealous cadre, and he instead heads home to find that in his absence Qiaozhen
has married a robust but unschooled farmer. The film ends with a long shot
ofGao walking along the road home, the same perspective from which we
glimpsed his earlier departure, though the image is now tinged with loss and
regret, as both nostalgia for village life and the thrill of the city have been exposed as perilous illusions. Viewed together with the more paradigmatic Fifth
Generation films set in the legendary past and shrouded in myth, Life reveals
another facet of the same cultural situation. Zhang and Chen indulge in fantasies of youthful rebellion but dislocate them from the present and the city.
Wus film is insistently contemporary, and its acts of defiance are motivated
by the unrealized dream of a modernized and urbanized China. But Gao
Jialin never attains the status of the self-sacrificing martyrs and decisive insurgents who populate films like Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum, and he never
inhabits the modernity exhibited in the heyday of Maoist cinema and featured
momentarily in a magazine spread and his own imagination. If it is right to
rebel, as Mao suggested, those youthful uprisings almost always result in failure in the Fifth Generation cinema of the 1980s. Society is rarely transformed;
heroes and heroines rarely end the film by heading off into a bright future.
The films of a transitional figure like Wu Tianming also suggest that the utopian modernity glimpsed in mainstream cinema and again in the fantasy sequence of Life remained a dream deferred in the early years of the Chinese
new wave.
The Appeals of Zhang Yimou

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Zhang Yimou experienced a
precipitous ascent from internationally renowned director of art films to one
of Chinas best-known celebrities on the national and global stage. The spectacular opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics reinforced the status he attained at the helm of worldwide box office successes like
Hero and The House of Flying Daggers. But this narrativeof Zhangs rise from
director of visually stunning but obscure films to a persona whose stardom
transcends cinema itselftends to elide the many twists and turns that complicate a straightforward account of his career, especially during the 1990s,
when he underwent this profound conversion from art cinema to genre pictures popular in China (the Spring Festival melodrama) and around the world
(big-budget action pictures). If Wu Tianming and his work embody many of
the contradictions inherent in Chinas transition to the Reform era, the career
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of Zhang Yimou, and in particular his films from the 1990s, document the
keytransformations that have taken place in China over the past quarter century, including the rise of youth and cities in the national imaginary, the redefinition of newness and modernity, and the entrenchment of a state capitalist system in all but name. He remains best known for the lush images of Ju
Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, or the dazzling special effects and martial
arts prowess on display in Hero, or the translation of those cinematic techniques onto every surface of the Birds Nest Stadium at the opening of the
Olympics. But the films that signal a key transitional moment in both Zhangs
career and Chinese society are his least stylistically representative and most
documentary-like productions, The Story of Qiu Ju and Not One Less.32
Those films revisit the generational allegories present in his earlier work,
but each transfers the reality of conflict from the legendary past to the present
moment, and from the countryside to the city. The spatial movement from
rural to urban develops into the primary plot element in each of those films,
which become meditations on the significance of the city itself as a social and
cultural entity in the Reform era. Like their protagonists Qiu Ju and Wei
Minzhi, the films present this displacement as a necessary stage in the pursuit
of the promise of the city envisioned as a seat of modernity, justice, and the
masses. It is a site for airing grievances to officials in positions of power or,
through a broadcast released over the airwaves, to a much larger public imagined not as subjects of the state, but as an audience, as a group constituted not
by a political revolution but by modern media. Zhang reframes the city in
terms reminiscent of media rather than political theory, as the structures of
urbanity are replaced by screens and the citizenry is reinvented as an audience
connected by media rather than the people linked by a common ideology or
revolutionary mission. If there is an overarching trajectory to Zhangs career,
it tracks his movement from art house to multiplex or from beautiful but obscure allegories to crowd pleasers. But on a more minute level, his career is
also notable for its gradual transition from one mode of appeal to another: his
earliest directorial efforts dramatize a rebellion against authority but appeal
finally to cultural and political elites ranging from international festival juries
and critics to government reformers; his later films are powerful precisely because they appeal to a mass audience in general and nobody in particular.
Zhangs transformation is exemplified first by Qiu Ju and Not One Less, his
most intensely located experiments in realist cinema and urban mise-enscne, and then the rejection of cinematic realism in his virtually placeless
CGI-driven blockbusters of the 2000s. In the work of this most celebrated of
Chinese filmmakers, the passage from the lush and brutal Fifth Generation
films of the 1980s to the global bonanza of Hero takes an unexpected but revealing detour through remote villages and provincial towns in Shaanxi and
Hebei and then through urban streets viewed through the eyes of rural women
momentarily lost in the city.
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Made in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and before the Fifth
Generation had become a marketable phenomenon in its own right, Zhang
Yimous first films appealed to few specific audiences, or at least none the artists and producers could count on. As one of the cinematographers on One
and Eight and the director of photography on Yellow Earth, Zhang was involved in the creation of the signature atmosphere and aesthetic of the early
films of the Chinese new wave: the rural villages and barren landscapes, the
painstakingly catalogued and hyperbolically displayed folk customs, the saturated colors, the disorienting camera angles, the stark collision of oppressive
brutality and cinematic beauty.33 Zhangs directorial debut, Red Sorghum, accentuates the qualities that distinguish these early features: the images are
more astonishing, the folk customs more elaborate and excessive, the caricatured tyrant and the young revolutionaries separated by a more profound
chasm. Although they reached an even larger audience around the world, Ju
Dou and Raise the Red Lantern were intensifications of the same founding
tendencies of the early Fifth Generation rather than the invention of something new. As such, they inspired admiration for this intensity and provoked
passionate enmity for the directors apparent descent into formulaic exercises
in style. For Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, Ju Dou is
even more beautiful and complex than Red Sorghum, both in its ravishing
uses of color and its grim critique of feudalism.34 But for Hal Hinson, the film
devolves into a purely aesthetic exercise with little narrative or character development: as a result, the movie seems oddly vacant at its center. As gorgeous as it is, Raise the Red Lantern never achieves any momentum or weight.35
Whatever the valence of the response to his films, most critics identify the
basic elements of an authorial imprint in the films of Zhang Yimou and construct a lineage that places Zhang, together with Chen Kaige, at the origins
of a cinematic revolution that either produced a steady succession of significant films or rapidly devolved into empty repetition. What distinguishes
Zhangs work by the mid-1990s, however, is its departure from the widely
lauded Fifth Generation blueprint and its reconsideration of the status of
thecinematic image, as the director known above all for spectacular cinematography experiments with the understated possibilities of the documentary, with images that serve first and foremost as facts linked to a material
reality in contemporary China. And in the late 1990s, he returns to the longdeferred question of the audience, with the truth value of the documentary
image envisioned as just one of many sources of power, and a limited and
relatively inconsequential power at that, in a film inaccessible to the gaze of
the masses.
The red peppers dried in bunches and ground with a pestle provide a
glimpse of the signature color schemes long favored by Zhang, but The Story
of Qiu Ju marks a radical shift from the visual virtuosity of his previous
work to a reserved and observational style, at least until the films famous
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concluding shot. The film begins in the aftermath of an exchange of insults

and a violent altercation between a village chief and Qiu Jus husband, who
has mocked the leader for being unable to produce a son and in turn received a kick in the crotch. Fearing that this low blow means the end of her
familys future procreation, Qiu seeks contrition and compensation from
the village chief, who stubbornly refuses to admit wrongdoing. The narrative follows Qius journey along country roads and city streets as she appeals her case from one administrative level to the next, all with the goal of
obtaining the justice denied by officials in smaller towns and municipalities,
and with the secondary effect of exploring the many gradations of Chinas
uneven development and its rapid but still incomplete process of urbanization. The film thus unfolds as a series of departures, journeys, and returns,
and in each case the outbound destination becomes a larger town or city,
with more bustling streets, cannier crooks, and more abundant markers of
economic prosperity. If she begins in her home village and travels first to a
county seat, by the time of her final voyage she finds herself scampering
across crowded boulevards and facing a panel of distant judges. Zhang often
follows Qiu Ju along this itinerary with a hidden camera and long lens that
capture the everyday life of roads and cars, the built environments and
human interaction, the energy and perpetual motion that surround her.
And the film displays an uncharacteristically dressed-down and unglamorous Gong Li, as her character clothes a pregnant figure in the least fashionable approximations of contemporary fashion and wanders through thealien
and alienating conditions of the towns and cities that had previously seemed
unapproachable.
This disconnect between the village experience of Qiu Ju and her adventure in the city is most apparent in the radically different image and media
environments she encounters in her home life and on the road. She walks
through a market and sees traditional Chinese New Year posters and thenubiquitous portraits of Mao Zedong, but they share the same space with a
welter of contemporary images: publicity shots of pop stars; global movie
icons like Chow Yun-fat and Arnold Schwarzenegger; a vaguely artsy, blackand-white photo of a half-dressed couple embracing at the beach; a Peking
opera troupe in full regalia; and kitschy, soft-focus pictures of irresistibly cute
cats. Shown in close-up in a film that otherwise relies on a long shot aesthetic
in public places, these images dominate the frame for a moment and presumably command the rapt attention of Qiu Ju herself. She also passes by the
construction sites already dotting Chinas modernizing cityscapes and the
billboards plastered on the walls around them. A young mother and a child
enact an everyday drama with their arms around their brand new refrigerator, but on a scale that dwarfs the flesh-and-blood passersby and against a
bright yellow backdrop that energizes the color palette of the neighborhood
around them (Figure 8.3). If the first films made by Fifth Generation directors
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figure 8.3 The Story of Qiu Ju.
conjured up bold color schemes and located that visual spectacle at the core of
their formal experimentation, by the time of Qiu Ju that colorful life has migrated from the images of avant-garde filmmakers to the commonplace commercial environment of the major Chinese cities. (One of the many lifestyle
magazines targeted at young urban consumers was Binfen, Colorfulness.)
The mother and daughter in this advertisement occupy a world every bit as
vibrant and dazzling as a Zhang Yimou film but without the ubiquitous resentment and inevitable upheaval that eventually culminate in violence in Red Sorghum or Ju Dou. The future promised to the inhabitants of this city and
glimpsed by Qiu Ju is vivid and luminous but eerily tranquil, a Fifth Generation aesthetic writ large but emptied of the animosity and rebellious energy
that characterized its tumultuous vision of society.
With Gong Li again in the lead role, The Story of Qiu Ju resembles an
allegory of Fifth Generation cinema, an attempt to diagram the movement
of Reform-era Chinese film in both space and time. Beginning with stories
set in the countryside and a vaguely historicized feudal past, the directors
eventually migrated to the city and the contemporary moment, locating
their films in that dynamic environment; but they discovered that what
counted as a revolutionary gesture in the 1980s, a combination of formal
innovation and youthful energy, was rapidly becoming the status quo in an
urban China reinvented according to the new imperatives of consumption.
Make it new was no longer the prerogative of avant-garde artists and
filmmakers; it was becoming the dominant narrative of the state, the economy, and the budding Chinese culture industry. Qui Ju leaves her village
seeking justice within a creaky moral and legal framework that still shapes
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her sense of identity and vision of the world, but the pace of transformation in Chinas cities has outstripped her capacity to reimagine a social universe and situate herself within it. An inhabitant of the New China constructed after liberation, Qiu Ju falters when confronted with the emblems
of the more recent consumer revolution. At the same time, she is guided by
a Maoist conception of justice that lingers on, and her attempts to order an
unfamiliar universe result in a clash between an inherited ideology and the
complex material conditions around her. The stars glimpsed on posters
represent not only the icons of an emerging era of popular culture but also
the infiltration of a broader world into the threshold spaces of Chinas
cities.
The young mother and child on the billboard, imagined as young consumers, are the iconic figures who replace the revolutionaries and model citizens
who constituted the image repertoire in public space over the previous four
decades. One of the emblematic characters in Chinese literature and film of
the 1920s and 1930s was the new woman or modern girl, whose revolutionary
gestures were linked in fundamental ways to their self-fashioning and embrace of the most contemporary trends. The female revolutionary was also a
staple of Maoist cinema, with the several iterations of The Red Detachment of
Women and The Red Lantern serving as the most prominent examples. The
modern girl of the 1930s and the revolutionary and martyred Maoist woman
were embodiments of the zeitgeists of their historical eras, and their images
seemed to crystallize the future in the fashions they displayed on their very
bodies or glimpsed on the horizon and just beyond the border of the image.
But from the vantage point of the 1990s, Qiu Ju is a holdover from a now
outmoded period in Chinese history. Qiu is what no longer counts as a new
woman; she is at once an old-fashioned socialist and an aspiring consumer in
an era rapidly redefining modernity itself, with the socialist legacy superseded by market reform and the imperatives of economic growth. And as she
ventures farther from home, on a voyage across uneven temporalities as well
as vast geographic distances, she relies continually and unwaveringly on a
conception of right and wrong that appears as out of place in this contemporary environment as she does herself. Qius appealboth her personal attraction as a character in the film and her dogged pursuit of justiceharks back
to the previous, pre-reform period in Chinese history. Though it remains
unfashionable and even alien in these new surroundings, that appeal is what
constitutes the drama and the friction in a film that could, like so many contemporary Chinese movies, celebrate the flood of images and people that
lend excitement and transformative energy to the city. When she no longer
wanders the streets of the city, she spends the night in an outmoded but relatively familiar environment, a hostel for workers and peasants. One door
down, in the business of constructing new images and identities, is the New
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Wave Hair Salon (Figure 8.4). That unresolved contradiction between two
conceptions of modernity is the energizing force behind the film and Chinas new wave cinema more generally.
After her seemingly unsuccessful petitions at lower levels of the judicial
system, Qiu Ju returns home to await a final verdict and give birth to her child.
The road narrative that leads her to increasingly urbanized and unfamiliar
spaces now winds down, and Qiu welcomes a return to sweet normality.
When she goes into labor at a performance of Chinese opera and encounters
serious complications, the village chief comes to the rescue by helping transport her through the rugged, snowy landscape and into the lifesaving hands of
a doctor. Order is reestablished in the village, respect for authority reigns, and
a new generation is born into a social and political system restored to its previous condition of stability. But Qius voyage to the city and into the upper
reaches of the bureaucracy is not without consequences at the village level, as
an official investigation concludes that the village chief broke her husbands
ribs. Police arrive to take him into custody and transfer him to jail, to be
charged eventually with assault. In a reenactment of the scramble across the
hillsides that saved her child and her own life, Qiu runs alone to intercept the
cars hauling the village chief away, their sirens growing fainter as they head off
toward an administrative seat somewhere outside the frame and beyond her
own understanding of political and moral topography. On her voyage to the
city, Qiu encountered the limitations of her experience and her habitual mode
of interacting with an environment now contaminated by traces of the new,
the modern, and the global. When she returns home, however, she realizes
that she has become the contaminant, the force that irreversibly disrupts the
existing social order. At the end of the film, she confronts the profound chasm
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between the notion of justice she once adhered to and the final resolution
meted out from the centers of power. The increasingly global economy and
ethereal logic of the market will construct an even more abstract and unimaginable social geography.
The final image of the filma close-up of Qiu Jus face, stilled like the concluding portrait of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, her perpetual motion
finally arrested as the sirens pull away and the celebration continues in the
village belowis one of the emblematic images of China suspended between
two eras and two conceptions of the world (Figure 8.5). In this moment, Qius
personal trajectory intersects with a narrative of social and economic reform,
and the result is a complete standstill while society as a whole, outside the
image, invisible to her and the camera, marches on. This shot signals a radical
departure from the failed but self-assured revolutions dramatized in Zhangs
first films, as well as the narratives of anticipation and deferral in films from
the early 1980s, including Country Couple. Almost a paradigmatic example of
the affection-image as theorized by Deleuze, this close-up exists in the gap
between the unique experience of the individual defined in the process of becoming and the strictly limited possibilities open to her in history. Deleuze
writes:
ordinarily, three roles of the face are recognizable: it is individuating
(itdistinguishes or characterizes each person); it is socializing (it manifests a social role); it is relational or communicating (it ensures not only
communication between two people, but also, in a single person, the
internal agreement between his character and his role). Now the face,
which effectively presents these aspects in the cinema as elsewhere, loses
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all three in the case of the closeup. . . . A character has abandoned his
profession, renounced his social role; he is no longer able to, or no
longer wants to communicate, is struck by an almost absolute muteness;
he even loses his individuation, to the point where he takes on a strange
resemblance to the other, a resemblance by default or by absence.
Indeed, these functions of the face presuppose the reality of a state of
things where people act and perceive. The affection-image makes them
dissolve, disappear.36
The final shot of The Story of Qiu Ju is a fleeting glance at the dissolution of a
network of social structures and the void that appears in their absence.
Set in a remote village with a relatively small cast and shot in an intriguing
but not entirely unfamiliar realist style, the film is far from revolutionary in
any meaningful sense of the term. But it is one of Chinese cinemas most
thoughtful accounts of the condition of living at the threshold between historical periods. At the end of the journey that occupies most of the film, Qiu
arrives at a transition rather than a conclusion, and she peers into a universe
where justice and community, the very foundations of social life, are as unfamiliar as the environments she encountered in towns and cities far from
home. Because the world has undergone transformations that render inadequate the language and conceptual apparatus from the previous era, one of the
only representational strategies adequate to this modernizing moment is an
allusion to one of the most traditional genres, the portrait. But instead of the
confident leader gazing into a bright future, we see the hesitating and trembling face of a citizen unable to foresee the ramifications of the changes unfolding before her. What began as Zhang Yimous most conspicuously realist
film, his most consistent engagement with the documentary mode, culminates
in affect rather than realism, in the evocative image of a face rather than the
image-fact that elsewhere establishes the aesthetic and ethical foundation of
the film. The new image environment of the city consists of global pop culture
icons or playful mothers and children, a spectacle of urban affluence, and
Zhangs realist mode captures that atmosphere in all its alluring splendor. But
the concluding shot is a personification of historical dislocation that has no
place in the official and commercial vision of Chinas present and future. It
attests to the uneven development of Chinese image environments in the
1980s and early 1990s, where the picture as a self-evident fact coexists with the
consumable icon and then the portrait of Qiu Ju in all its indescribable and
uncontainable affect.
Released seven years later, Not One Less is often grouped together with The
Story of Qiu Ju as a continuation, even an intensification, of the realist approach to filmmaking adopted by Zhang in the early 1990s and abandoned in
the historical epic (To Live, 1994) and period drama (Shanghai Triad, 1995) he
produced in the interim. The film is set in a small Hebei village, where Wei
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Minzhi, a modestly educated thirteen-year old girl, is asked to be a substitute

teacher at a rural school whose one regular teacher is about to return home to
take care of his ailing mother. Recognizing that the substitute is unable to
teach regular academic subjects in the accustomed way, the departing teacher
insists that she keep only one promise while hes away: she must ensure that all
of the current students remain in the class, at once the minimum standard
he appears resigned to the fact that students will learn very little in the
interimand an ambitious goal, given the difficulty of retaining students in
economically underdeveloped areas of the countryside. The bulk of the screen
time is devoted to the search for one student from a devastated family (his
mother is seriously ill and his father deceased) who migrates to the city for
work and therefore fails to show up to class one day. Like The Story of Qiu Ju,
Not One Less is both an intensely local production, made with the people and
the materials discovered on location, and a festival film with its sights on international audiences and accolades. Both films adopt a similar narrative
structure, as they begin in the enclosed and remote environment of a northwest village but soon become road narratives that carry their female protagonists far afield and eventually to the unfamiliar streets of a major city. In each
case, the woman encounters something unexpected on the road and is followed home by something equally unanticipated: the imprecise and unsatisfying resolution of Qius court case; and the deluge of donations and press attention resulting from Wei Minzhis appearance on television. And both films
again, like so many Zhang Yimou films of the period, focus on the travails of a
younger generation, as Qiu takes a stand against a seemingly abusive and
complacent village head, and a teenager becomes the primary authority figure
in a classroom full of children. As the diametrically opposed fates of the two
heroines suggest, however, these ostensibly similar films are in fact radically
different undertakings from distinct moments in Chinese history and the
career of their director.
All of these adventures in rural and urban areas are depicted in a style
known in casual critical shorthand as realist, though Not One Less operates in a very different realist tradition from Qiu Ju. The earlier film deploys
a conspicuously rough, almost guerrilla mode of cinematography, especially in the scenes shot on active streets with a hidden camera and a long
lens. And the editing maintains and even emphasizes the artifacts of those
shooting conditions: the sudden and disruptive appearance of cars and unknowing extras who pass between the lens and the protagonists; the lessthan-exquisite framings that result from less-than-optimal camera placement; and the confused or confrontational stares of passersby who catch
the crew in the act. Not One Less foregrounds a different set of realist credentials, first in its choice of subject matterthe limited educational opportunities for Chinas rural underclassbut most conspicuously in the
concluding credits that identify the major players as nonprofessional actors
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and list their names, homes, and occupations, all of which closely parallel
the information revealed about the characters in the film. If Qiu Ju veers
as close as Zhang ever gets to the imperfect cinema advocated by Latin
American filmmakers in the 1960s and early 1970s or the on the spot realism or xianchang of Chinas 1990s documentary filmmakers, Not One Less
strives for and projects a much more polished aesthetic: luminous in the
darkest corners of a dilapidated and barely lit one-room schoolhouse; impeccably framed and economically edited; devoid of the rough-hewn quality that distinguished the hidden-camera footage in Zhangs earlier foray
into cinematic realism. By emphasizing that the individuals before the
camera are real people playing variations on themselves in a film, Not
One Less draws on a filmmaking tradition that dates back most notably to
Italian neorealism, and it makes that inheritance unmistakable by virtually
spelling it out in black and white at the end of the film. The gesture of authenticity that roots the film in the everyday lives of real Hebei students
and teachers, village leaders and television presenters, also inserts the film
into the transnational history of cinema. Through the mechanism of cinematic realism, each of these films becomes at once intensely localized (in its
attention to specific places and people) and implicitly globalized (in its adaptation of established and institutionalized modes of art cinema). Realism is
therefore the multifaceted set of practices and functionally vague critical
term that both situates a film in a particular location and facilitates its passage into the international arena. Rey Chow argues that the critical praise
that accompanied Zhangs move toward a more conventionally realist cinema
is symptomatic of a bias underlying the reception of Chinese film more generally.37 In the global distribution of cinematic and artistic labor, Chinese
filmmakers are assigned the role of native informants who reflect their environment in a transparent manner rather than elite artists who transform it.
For Chow, the vociferous celebration of Zhangs films in the early 1990s
culminating in a Golden Lion at Venice for Qiu Juwas an ambivalent sign
of both his increasing prominence on a global stage and his ghettoization as
a mere realist.38
Although Not One Less may adopt modes of realist filmmaking familiar on
the international festival circuit, the films significance lies not in its conformity to international standards of realism but its conspicuous failure in the
same arena that so warmly greeted Qiu Ju. While Zhangs previous films had
garnered great acclaim at festivals and official condemnation or feigned indifference at home, and while Qiu Ju had received praise from both foreign festivals and domestic Chinese critics and cadres, Not One Less marked a profound reversal of fortune. After the film was selected only for the Un Certain
Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival and denied admission to the more
prestigious awards competition, Zhang withdrew it from Cannes and published a wide-ranging condemnation of the festival in the Beijing Youth Daily.
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He had become a defender of Chinas right to make films for its domestic audience without regard to the aesthetic and political standards of elite opinionmakers overseas. Between those two films, whose production spanned most of
the 1990s, a significant change took place in Zhangs career and in large segments of the Chinese film industry more generally. Over the course of that
decade and into the 2000s, the emphasis on facticitythe attention to very
local conditions recorded assiduously by the camerarapidly receded, to be
replaced by a logic of publicity (with power residing less in the facts themselves than in the capacity to disseminate meaning over the broadest possible territory and to the greatest number of viewers). The trajectory of Zhang
Yimous career over the 1990s is marked by a transition from what Bazin
called faith in reality, a belief that cinemas power comes from its capacity to
record concrete facts, to a faith in communication as a general principle and
goal rather than any specific medium. From his early allegories, where meaning remains necessarily submerged, to the relatively unobtrusive but unspectacular rendering of reality in Qiu Ju, to the simple, unmistakable, and ultimately beautiful message broadcast over the widest possible media networks
that occurs at the denouement of Not One Less, Zhangs films become celebrations of the multimedia image rather than the exploration of reality through
the particular mechanisms of cinema.
And Not One Less is a narrative of that transformation. The movement
from village to city is accompanied by a transition from the relentless materiality of rural poverty to the ethereal realm of broadcast media. At the core of
the city, secured behind walls and jealously guarded, lies the television studio
that constructs a very different but far more consequential vision of reality
than the one Wei Minzhi knows through hard-earned experience. The key
scene, when a hesitant Wei finally launches her message over the airwaves,
helps encapsulate the stakes involved in Zhangs reconception of postcinematic media and his embrace of the emerging image culture in late twentiethcentury China. After her arrival in the city, Wei begins to search for the missing student, Zhang Huike, in the most obvious and straightforward manner,
but a series of setbacks forces her to invest her last few renminbi in the materials to produce posters with the vital facts about Zhang Huike: male, 11 years
old. From Shuixian Village. Third grade student. Wearing a checkered shirt
and light gray pants. Not very tall, hair not long, neither fat nor thin. Because
his family is poor, his mother is sick, and his father died young, he left school.
But those efforts stall after she receives unsolicited criticism from a man in the
waiting room at the station. All of this is useless, he says. The text is too faint,
he suggests, and anyway the poster lacks contact information and any call to
action for the reader to follow. Moreover, it needs a picture, or some other
device to attract the attention of the people in a world full of competing sources
of news and amusement. The poster in general and Weis big-character style
in particular follow the model of old-school socialist communication, and
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Weis very old-fashioned mission will remain unfulfilled unless she finds a
way to exploit contemporary technologies like television. If she manages to
broadcast her message over the airwaves, as the amateur ad critic in the train
station urges, then the whole city will know. Wei resorts to television only
after experiencing the disappointing consequences of other, apparently obsolete forms of media.
After this setback, Wei heads immediately to the local television station,
finds that it has closed for the evening, and spends the night on a nearby
street. When she wakes, she discovers that her remaining posters, a waste of
money with a total readership of one unimpressed man at the train station,
have blown away. As she waits for the gates to open, she tries a variety of
means, most of them hopelessly nave, to pitch her announcement to the
stations executives and finally reach its audience. Her relentlessness pays
offhere the film veers far from the vernacular sense of the term realism
and through the benevolent intervention of the head of the station, she finds
herself face to face with the presenter on the stations highest rated show, a
news and feature program called Today in China. Like many such programs
on Chinese television at the time, this show airs the grievances of common
citizens while also dampening those criticisms through framing devices that
foreground official efforts to alleviate those problems. The optics of the
studio reinforce that conflict between the everyday plight of young students
from the countryside and the conditions necessary to make this story suitable for a wider public. As Wei Minzhi sits before the intimidating camera
in uncharacteristic silence, unable to tell her story and voice her concerns
about the well-being of Zhang Huike, the backdrop depicts an idyllic scene
with green fields and a bicycle (Figure 8.6). Wei is unable to publicize the
figure 8.6 Not One Less.
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economic predicament of the countryside unless her words are translated

into a new medium and absorbed into a preexisting system of images and
clichs. The disconcerting reality of the presentthe crumbling schools and
students forced by poverty from the classroomis inserted in a futureoriented narrative centered on the pastoral landscape that, in this mythical
vision of past and future, the countryside has been and will become again.
Weis participation in this interview consists almost exclusively of a poignant silence, as she faces off with a polished presenter and a Sony camera
shown in close-up, the machinery of the studio opposed both physically and
metaphorically to the media naf and the image of a tranquil, unadulterated
landscape. This is a confrontation between Wei and the spaces she represents on the one hand and contemporary technologies of representation on
the other. She has to inhabit an unfamiliar rolean unsophisticated and
helpless victim of modernity and an ambassador from an impoverished but
still redeemable landscape and rural way of lifein order to launch her
appeal in the language and acceptable imagery of the mass media. If Qiu Ju
is never able to adapt to the role offered her in contemporary China, Wei
reluctantly and instrumentally assumes the persona that allows her to launch
a successful appeal to the public. She finally breaks down crying and speaks
poignantly about her concern for Zhang Huike, and in the aftermath of the
interview, phone calls from concerned citizens flood the station and donations pour into the previously empty coffers of the school. The flow of images
soon facilitates the flow of money.
Chows reading of the film emphasizes that the students have all along been
receiving an education in the new conception of money that accompanies the
new era in China. Over the course of the film, the normal classroom activities
(mainly rote exercises in copying texts from a blackboard) evolve into increasingly complex discussions of money and the value of labor. When Wei
decides to search for Zhang Huike and needs money for transportation to the
city, she enlists the students to donate their pocket change and when that
proves insufficient to perform manual labor at a local brick factory. But their
simple calculationsmoving a certain number of bricks at a certain number
of renminbi per brick should yield a definite sum of moneyprove futile
when they discover that labor no longer translates simply into a clear monetary value. Their humanistic endeavor is founded on what Chow calls a logic
of productionism, which compels Wei and her students to assign a fixed
value to an easily measurable amount of work.39 Although, as Chow writes,
this method of making money is based on a basic exchange principleX
units of labour x Y units of cashits anachronism is apparent precisely in the
mechanical correspondence established between two different kinds of values
involvedconcrete muscular/manual labour, on the one hand, and the abstract, general equivalent of money, on the other. . . . At the heart of this rationale is an attributed continuum, or balance, between the two sides of the
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equationa continuum whereby effort logically and proportionally translates

into reward.40 The new system of value emerging in the Reform economy is
founded not on the simple correspondence of work and money but on an increasingly abstract notion of value catalyzed by images that produce and provoke the desire to consume, as well as nostalgia for the past that has been demolished during the production of the new. Chow therefore envisions this
voyage from a rural to an urban environment as a transition from an archaic
regime of value and the image to its more contemporary, marketized version.
Weis migration to the city is thus really a migration to a drastically different
mode of value production, a mode in which, instead of the exertions of the
physical body, it is the mediatised image that arbitrates, that not only achieves
her goal for her but also has the ability to make resources proliferate beyond
her wildest imagination.41 The ending of the film situates the broadcast image
at the core of this new system of value, for no amount of work could possibly
yield the windfall unleashed after a few mostly silent minutes on television.
But the cost of that televised performance is equally significant: a resilient and
resourceful Wei Minzhi becomes a stereotypical figure in order to receive the
beneficence of the predictably moved urban audience. She becomes the embodiment of a traumatic vision of the countryside, and financial contributions
are intended to alleviate this human suffering while restoring the landscape to
a presumably natural condition of beauty and plentitude. Under these conditions of acute poverty, the film suggests that the most immediate remedy is the
rejuvenation of clichs in a new idiom and the remediation of age-old narratives in front of the luminous backdrop of a television studio.
Not One Less, which focuses primarily on Weis tenacity and the falsity of
the clichs that eventually overshadow her, exists between these two regimes
of the image and of monetary value. Are Zhang Yimous experiments with
cinematic realism repositories of material facts that, like the bricks moved
around the factory by Weis students, need to be transported from one location to another in order to acquire an instrumental value? Or do films only
realize the full extent of their social power when they deploy their capacity for
mythmaking and mobilize the desires of an audience engaged on a grand
scale? If the image is, as Debord suggests, the highest form of commodity fetishism, does a politically engaged cinema resist that translation of real people
and objects into commodified images, or does it embrace that process and leverage its new-found power in the abstract universe of markets? Not One Less
is the last Zhang film to embark simultaneously on both of those tasks. It is at
once a realist account of the material conditions in Chinas less prosperous
regions and an acknowledgment that the real-world effects of friction-free
mass communication are far more profound than the less compliant images
grounded in the aesthetic and ethic of documentary filmmaking. Bazin argues
that the mechanically produced image is a replica of reality and therefore an
undeniable fact: the photographic image is the object itself, he writes.42 If
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that ideal guides the filmmaking for much of Qiu Ju and some of Not One Less,
for the Zhang Yimou of the twenty-first century, cinema is no longer a privileged medium capable of documenting the world with exceptional fidelity because reality itself has been refashioned after the cinematic image. In a world
where posters of pop stars have been replaced by ubiquitous ambient television and the urban China of work units and factories has been replaced by
colorful billboards portending the future city, images are no longer the foundation of an appeal to justice; they are instrumental to the world imagined on
those billboards and under construction behind them.
From Hero onward, Zhang has harnessed the power of cinema created in
the image of mass media. In Hero, The House of Flying Daggers, and The Curse
of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia, 2006), Zhang has directed spectacular films that hover between history and legend. He transforms
the raw material of his filmsthe conspicuously Chinese stories, the bodies of
the actors who populate his films, the historically inflected costumes, and the
action sequences based on traditional martial artsinto images evacuated of
potential sources of friction. Unencumbered by the demands of historical
accuracy and fidelity to the world before the camera, then outfitted in the familiar trappings of genre films based in the distant past, the images shift effortlessly between fact and legend. The presence of instantly recognizable panChinese stars smoothes the passage of his films throughout the East Asian
market and beyond. And the relentlessly contemporary appearance of the
CGI ensures that the films never becomes backward-looking homages to martial arts cinema from the King Hu or Chang Cheh school. Zhang adapts one of
the mainstays of Chinese genre cinema, the martial arts epic (wuxia), and injects it directly into the mainstream of contemporary action cinema, the most
popular and profitable global genre. The history and locality that once impeded the transnational flow of images has been transformed into the stuff of
a global action film franchise whose principal target is the lucrative urban
youth audience. If Zhangs work once dramatized the process of generational
upheaval rooted in the history of Chinas early Reform era, his most recent
films accept that transformation as a fait accompli and now project a society
acclimated to its new status quo.
Despite its entertaining cinematic pyrotechnics, stylized fight sequences,
and tense plot centered on attempted assassination, Hero generated significant controversy in Chinese intellectual circles for its perceived quiescence.
Critics debated the allegorical significance of a film that unfurls toward an
expected assassination but concludes with its eponymous hero lapsing into
inaction, cowering before the leader, and paying obeisance to authority. Is its
defense of the emperors rule of all under heaven (tianxia) a barely submerged
apology for increasingly forceful assertions of mainland Chinas global power?
Or is the film a celebration of the reigning ideology of globalization, with the
emperor merely a figurehead for the emerging market empire poised to spread
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unchecked across the globe? In examining the role of these films over the
career of Zhang Yimou and the long trajectory of the Fifth Generation, what
matters is not the adjudication of this disputeand given the increasing stature of China in the global capitalist system, these seemingly opposed interpretations of the film are not necessarily in contradictionbut the stark contrast
between the allegories that launched the Fifth Generation and the global
action films that signal a transition to something else. In an era characterized
by the proliferation of intense and captivating images, Zhangs films strive for
even greater intensity; and because scope of distribution and breadth of appeal
have replaced truth as the primary criteria of value, his cinema aspires above
all to deliver thrills to a global audience measured in the hundreds of millions.
As Michael Curtin argues, the box office success of filmmakers like Zhang,
Ang Lee, and Stephen Chow has subverted long-standing assumptions about
the effects of globalization on media industries around the world:
the global future is commonly imagined as a world brought together by
homogeneous cultural products produced and circulated by American
media, a process referred to by some as Disneyfication. Other compelling scenarios must be considered, however. What if, for example, Chinese feature films and television programs began to rival the substantial
budgets and lavish production values of their Western counterparts?
What if Chinese media were to strengthen and extend their distribution
networks, becoming truly global enterprises? That is, what if the future
were to take an unexpected detour on the road to Disneyland, heading
instead toward a more complicated global terrain characterized by overlapping and at times intersecting cultural spheres served by diverse
media enterprises based in media capitals around the world?43
Or, to add a more circumspect conclusion to this list of provocative questions,
what if the results of this process are at once a burgeoning of domestic media
production systems throughout the region and the creation of a theme park
under another brand name?
If River Elegy advocated a simultaneous movement away from the traditional icons of Chinese identity and toward the eastern seaboard and its
threshold to a global modernity, Zhang has developed a more effective formula for entering and thriving at box offices around the world: he takes those
unmistakably Chinese icons, uproots them from their contentious history,
renders them as pure, frictionless images, and rejuvenates them through an
almost alchemical reaction with new media. In the process, Zhang has developed the paradigm of a new mode of global filmmaking in which the aesthetics, production and marketing strategies, and economic logic of the Hollywood blockbuster have been adapted and indigenized, with period costumes,
spectacular martial arts, and CGI replacing, for example, the gunplay and explosions of the technothriller, the crisp fashions and cutting-edge gizmos of
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the James Bond franchise, or the stylized body armor, spaceships, and robots
of futuristic science fiction. No longer subscribing to the new wave ideal of a
cinema that impedes the effortless and efficient flow of images, Zhangs films
instead consist of graceful and intricately crafted pictures that, like his signature point-of-view shots of daggers and arrows slicing through the air, are
designed to speed across the screen and over the Internet with as little resistance as possible. The most recent films of Zhang Yimou are constructed in
the image of the market poised to dominate all under heaven.
{9}
On Living in a Young City
New wave cinema is concerned with the cultural impact of the jackhammer,
the wrecking ball, and the crane, and then with the more flexible structures
that arise in the aftermath of that demolition and fledgling reconstruction. In
the age of new waves, the city is redefined not first and foremost as the seat of
power or tradition but as something new, as a showcase for innovation and a
portal to the future on display on screens and signs that preview a city to
come. The title of this chapter alludes to Patrick Wrights classic study of the
heritage movement in 1980s England, On Living in an Old Country, which
examines a moment when the ancient and venerable acquired a social prominence and monetary value that would have been inconceivable just a decade
before.1 The new wave in Chinaespecially the rise of the Sixth Generation in
the 1990s, when some of the most onerous political restrictions of the 1980s
were relaxed and independent financing allowed filmmakers to circumvent
the ones that remaineddocuments a period when newness vied with five
thousand years of history in the repertoire of images projected abroad and at
home. The national past receded in importance, to be replaced by the national
present and future. This craze for the new is crystallized in films by young directors, investment-grade avant-garde art, and the rapidly rising skyscrapers
of Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen but also informs the less visible and tangible processes through which individuals and groups form their identities. In
this sense, the duplicative language in the phrase new new era (xin xin shiqi),
coined to describe the acceleration of reforms in the 1990s, follows the logic of
intensification as well as supercession: the period of Reform and Opening, the
age of Chinas new wave, is characterized by markers of transition from a socialist state to an increasingly capitalist and privatized one; but the signals of
newness are displayed and repeated so often and with such vehemence that
they bear the hallmarks of a marketing campaign designed to convince the
domestic and global public that everything is genuinely new in this new time.
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Nothing exemplifies that ideology and obsession better than the city framed
not only as a museum for the monumental past but as a site where the most
ephemeral of qualities, newness, is imagined and performed by young people
in a theatrical environment of skyscrapers and flickering signs.
This account of the emergence of the Sixth Generation implies more continuity between the 1980s and the 1990s than is generally accepted and suggests
that the fascination with youth that energized the earliest Chinese new wave
films persisted into the next decade. And while the films of the 1990s display a
more explicitly urban and cosmopolitan outlook, that seemingly distinct perspective also harks back to the work of Wu Tianming in films like Life and the
narratives of migration to the city directed by Zhang Yimou, including The
Story of Qiu Ju and Not One Less. The events of June 4, 1989, obviously loom
large over any discussion of Chinese culture in the late twentieth century and
create a profound caesura, with the uprising and crackdown resulting ultimately in severe censorship and the exile of countless key artists. That moment,
which also signals the destruction of many utopian aspirations for the Reform
period, marks the limits of any attempt to view the two decades through their
continuities rather than their disruptions. But what links the before and the
after periods in this traumatic history is the evident contradiction between the
official goals of political stability and economic innovation, a conflict that was
visible at the onset of reform and remains in place into the present. In Chinese
cinema and culture of the late twentieth century, youth provided a physical
and corporeal vehicle for the new and in that sense embodied a quasi-official
vision of the nations future. At the same time, rebellion by young people (including migrant workers and young graduates with limited economic prospects) became one of the key political problems that the state was called on to
manage. The new new era was personified by its youth, by a generation that
bodied forth this periods inherent and ultimately unresolved contradictions.
New Media and the Megacity

As with the Fifth Generation, the reception of more recent Chinese cinema in
both domestic and overseas arenas has centered on the youthful concerns represented in the films and the young directors, most of them born in the 1960s
and 1970s, who brought those stories to the screen. After three to four years of
relatively cautious filmmaking and overt repression after 1989 and in the early
1990s, youth and rebellion once again emerged as key reference points for
Chinese filmmakers, with contemporary urban environments replacing the
countryside and the past as the privileged cinematic settings. Virtually the
same repertoire of adjectives once used to describe the films of Chen Kaige,
Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Yimou was recycled for the work of Wang
Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, and Zhang Ming. In a 1994 story in the Straits Times,
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Wong Kim Hoh wrote that the move toward bigger and more conservative
projects by Fifth Generation directors like Tian had presented more recent
film school graduates with an opportunity to usurp these directors position in
the cultural avant-garde. According to Wong, youthful energy, and in abundance too . . . is the trademark for the group of filmmakers who came after
Tian and his contemporaries.2 Wang Xiaoshuais film The Days (Rizi; 1994) is
the primary example of this youthful sensibility, but the article cites Zhan
Yuan and Xuan Lian as other directors at the cusp of this new revolution at
the cinema where rebels rule. This continuity suggests that the divide between generations in Chinese cinema has not altered the framework through
which critics and audiences receive the films. Although the identities and biographies change from year to year, the narrative remains the same: youth has
been asked to wage a permanent revolution.
The other symptomatic site exists toward the other end of a spectrum
ranging from the intensely local point of observation to a virtually imponderable scale: massive megacities, like those under construction along the eastern seaboard of China. In many of these films, the city itself becomes a crucial
structural component, a title character or protagonist that signifies too much
to be relegated to the position of mere setting and backdrop. In Ning Yings
film I Love Beijing, the third in her Beijing trilogy, the occupation of the main
protagonist, a taxi driver, forces him to traverse the city streets, from the hippest cosmopolitan bars to then-distant Tongxian in the eastern suburbs. And
like some of the earliest film genres, like the phantom ride, when a camera
was attached to the front of a streetcar, simulating the experience of motion
and presenting the most dynamic possible vision of the city, I Love Beijing
fuses the camera and the car, so that the vehicle itself provides a medium for
recording the transformation of the city, especially in the recurrent shots of
construction sites scattered along the side of the road and in eerily and uncharacteristically empty shots of the result of that construction. The plot of
Suzhou River (Suzhou He; Lou Ye, 2000) is also constructed around a character on the movea motorcycle courierwho traffics in illegal goods and who
is later assigned to drive the daughter of an underworld figure around the
city. The films narrator is a man with a camera, a professional videographer,
who records all the events as though witnessing everything simultaneously
through the lens and with his own eyes. In the opening sequence, when the
narrator recounts the history of Suzhou River and jump cuts interrupt and
link documentary footage gathered from a boat floating down the river, the
voice is humanized, and the visual register is digital. The trajectory of the film
takes us from the banks of Suzhou River, in a pocket near the old and new
centers of the city, to a convenience store on the outskirts of town, where the
courier finally rediscovers the young girl after several years of looking. And
along its journeys through the city and in its moments of rest, the film
establishes at least two interconnected modes of spectatorship: one when the
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figure 9.1 Suzhou River.
main characters watch bootleg VCDs in Madas flophouse; and the other
when they watch the city itself, with that emblem of the future metropolis
the Oriental Pearl Towerdominating the frame (Figure 9.1). This film, like
many films emerging from the megacities of contemporary China, establishes
itself in a particular quarter of Shanghai, but Suzhou River is equally concerned with the more abstract relationship between the city, the camera, and
the spectator, and its shaky, handheld camera constantly unsettles the perspective of the viewer presented with both the spectacle and debris of contemporary urban life.
A series of shots of the murky Suzhou River opens the film and locates it
not only in specific buildings and districts but also in an itinerary. In this
opening sequence, the camera seems to be recording images of construction
and demolition sites along the banks of the river and then images of people
floating along on barges or staring down from bridges that span the water.
This opening bears many of the telltale signs of documentary footage, especially in its constitutive roughness, and the foundational conceit of the film
that most of the events were filmed as they occurred through the handheld
video camera of the narratorforegrounds its documentary ethic and authority. But this initial barrage of images is better characterized by its difference from rather than its similarity to conventional documentary filmmaking.
By opening with a series of awkwardly framed shots edited together in an
unpolished manner, the film advertises itself as the kind of cinema that most
filmmakers would leave on the proverbial cutting-room floor or its digital
equivalent. Suzhou River revels in the illusion that this privileged moment in
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the film was salvaged from uncaptured MiniDV cassettes or superfluous sectors of a hard drive, just as artists use found footage to rediscover cinema from
the margins of its limited commercial realm, preferring celluloid left to recoil
on hard ground or deteriorating in a garage to the latest release of a blockbuster on the silver screen. That junk footage remains especially close to the
scrap heap in those moments when people stare out of the environments
along the river and toward the camera, with these errata edited together in a
succession of jump cuts that expose the lack of continuity and coherence in
the original shots. During an era characterized by global flows of people,
goods, and images, these shots are recorded by a camera located on a barge
traveling on the water, winding through an environment that now seems antiquated, another eras space of flows, movement, and migration. The narrator
describes Suzhou River as the repository of centuries worth of stories . . . and
rubbish and Shanghais dirtiest river. This urban refuse is an emblem of
another time, or more precisely another eras vision of modernity, its conception of what a life of motion might entail. At the outset, the film presents itself
as the story of an old city, a city with a history, a city subjected to but surviving
the blows of the wrecking crew.
In its juxtaposition of an obtrusive style and spectacular subject matter,
the film foregrounds the relationship between images conspicuously identified and displayed as a kind of rubbish, as the decaying survivals of another
historical moment, and the vision at the end of their unpredictable and jumpy
journey down the river: the Pudong New Area. For Suzhou River also flows
into something. Along its itinerary the camera also captures a glimpse of
what now counts as the new space of global circulation: the soaring skyscrapers of Pudong and the Oriental Pearl Tower and hotel that looms in the background throughout the film, the landmark of landmarks, the inescapable,
prescribed destiny of the city that haunts every attempt to imagine another
possible future. The film then develops into intricately intertwined love stories, first between a videographer and a woman who, dressed in a mermaid
costume, swims around in a fish tank in a seedy bar, and second, between the
courier and the daughter of a dealer in smuggled alcohol, a teenager who
looks remarkably like the mermaid. Although the film is replete with unusual
plot twists, it also resolves into an urban, youth-centered narrative with bar
scenes and night-club angst, a familiar and well-traveled genre in recent
world cinema. The film begins with eminently discardable images that dont
belong in a film at all, and dont belong to either the official past of the city or
its projected future; it then threatens to resolve into the kind of film found
everywhere in the cosmopolitan film world, the kind of story so common it
need hardly be told at all. The film rattles the screen with a series of rough,
habitually discarded images before continuing in a more familiar idiom that
situates a globalizing youth culture in the massively expanding city, in this
case Shanghai in the midst of the world city craze. Suzhou River also bears
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witness to the triumph of a youthful conception of urban space and a reorganization of the city film around the experience of a new generation.
The struggle to represent contemporary Shanghai through images is a
struggle conducted not in the media (or, in other words, over the airwaves or
through the tabloids) but in ongoing competition among various technologies to become the privileged medium of representation. As a phenomenon of
geography, architecture, economics, and demographics, the megacity develops in two seemingly contradictory directions: it crystallizes around a
branded, cosmopolitan core, a place where all the worlds images come to
play and engage in coopetition; but it also spirals outward, with the development of suburban housing estates and industrial parks stretching, in the case
of Shanghai, all the way to Suzhou itself, and patches of farmlandthe most
retro of all the obsolete spaceslittering the industrial landscape displaced
from the center of the city and relocated in the historical countryside. Because
of its status as a historically new urban form, the megacity is always a mediated or, more precisely, a multimedia phenomenon that develops in tandem
with new mechanisms of digital image production and dissemination. Suzhou
River is the story of the emerging megacities of China allegorized in cinematic
terms, with one mode and ethic of documentary filmmakingthe attempt to
record ways of life and previous conceptions of modernity on the verge of
disappearancejuxtaposed uneasily with a kind of cosmopolitan pop mode
so prevalent on the world film festival circuit and on television. And this
youth culture is a crucial battleground in the confrontation between these two
modes of filmmaking: DV documentary is the most significant convergence
of technological innovation and age-old filmmaking imperatives since Italian
neorealism, when newsreel cameras from World War II allowed filmmakers
to work without the technical support of the studio, or the French new wave,
when a new generation of portable cameras facilitated a low-budget, relatively
unfettered mode of production. Films like Suzhou River pose but leave unresolved this fundamental question: Is the DV revolution and its attendant
youth subculture a revolution in the image of Sony and a glorification of the
glossy new cosmopolitan faade of the city, or has DV revitalized the documentary itself for a new era? Has the digital revolution faciliated the survival
of documentary filmmaking in a radically new form, a medium whose ubiquity and mobility lend themselves to the preservation of the modernity and
the city that remain? What is the relationship, in other words, between this
new medium and the old city?
Suzhou River addresses these concerns in its opening sequence by relating
the detritus of the city to cinematic trash, but Lou Yes vision of Shanghai both
overlaps with and remains distinct from the category of urban decay that
Koolhaas calls Junkspace. Koolhaas alludes to new categories of the image,
like the screensaver, that emerge in tandem with technologies that facilitate
new media consumption, and he suggests that Junkspace is also characterized
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by incessant movement and circulation. It is the space whose specificity and

identity have been erased or forgotten and therefore the ideal, frictionless
conductor for the passage of people, goods, and images themselves. Junkspace
is a medium, much like digital media or television, which are also concerned
primarily with transmission and which are distinguished, like the screensaver
or the flow of programming, by a refusal to freeze.3 Despite its hip, fastpaced editing style, the footage that opens Suzhou River is remarkable because
of its refusal to flow. It reveals the gap between the old city being torn apart
and the new style of image production that documents the process of demolition and displays it on-screen. The Shanghai viewed in these stuttering frames
is out of joint with the medium used to represent it. Films like Suzhou River
exist at a liminal stage in the history of Chinese cinema and cities: the Shanghai
constructed over the course of the twentieth century remains; the new Pudong
area looms across the water; and young filmmakers wield new filmmaking
technology to document this moment of epochal transformation. In this environment, moving pictures are the mechanism for inventing an urban future
and for slowing the flow of images and desires to a halting pace. Lou Yes shots
of Shanghai stutter precisely because they are never mere images, evacuated
environments without memory or identity, Junkspace. If much of the love
story unfolds like the plot of any other film (and, as many critics have suggested, it closely resembles Hitchcocks Vertigo), the stunning opening sequence of Suzhou River remains a landmark in recent Chinese film because it
enlists a young cinema in the cause of documenting the old city. If the film
presents itself as a salvage operation at the outset, with its parade of unpolished, eminently discardable images, with the excess usually glossed over in
the process of making a film, it also reminds us that the excessive dimension
of the contemporary urban environment is history itself.4 Unlike computer
software that rejects as unreadable any files produced in an archaic version of
the application, Suzhou River is constantly translating cinema and old Shanghai into a medium for the next century.
Other Shanghai filmmakers have developed a mode of filmmaking divorced from the historical city and have cultivated, even embraced, the deracinating, liberating possibilities of a new city reinvented as a space of circulation. Rather than pit themselves against the flows of images and capital that
characterize the contemporary world city, these films create an aesthetic attuned to a globalizing visual culture and the Junkspace through which these
images propagate. The film that most conspicuously cultivates this aesthetic of
Junkspace is Andrew Chengs Shanghai Panic (Women haipa; Cheng Yusu,
2001), a very low-budget DV docudrama that takes place in a succession of
nightclubs, convenience stores, and newly renovated apartments. And when
the film does emerge from these interiors into Shanghai just after the turn of
the millennium, even momentarily recognizable locations dissolve from
stone, concrete, and glass into abstracted swirls of neon and fluorescent light.
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The film both records and actively constructs a kind of transitional space in
which construction sites are ubiquitous but the future has been preordained
and foreclosed; there is no agency involved in recording or documenting a
city under those conditions; agency has to be discovered and added almost
desperately, in a state of panic, in the process of postproduction. In Shanghai
Panic, extraordinary measures are taken to remove people from the built environments of the city, as, for example, when characters disappear in a ball of
incandescent light. And even when this film offers an expansive view of the
city and identifies it as home, the camera begins to wander, zooming in to
follow an airplane barely visible in the upper left corner and cutting only after
a dizzying camera movement whose speed seems designed to exceed the dynamism of the airplane. Although Cheng identifies the film as docudrama, it
departs radically from one principle aesthetic and ethic of documentary filmmaking: the attempt to associate people with their location and its history.
Instead, Shanghai Panic suggests that the young generation have already delinked themselves from an official past and likely future inscribed everywhere
in the environments of the city, and the film traces a panicked escape from
those narratives, replacing them with images of movement and energy itself.
If Suzhou River transforms the cinematic image into a medium that stutters
when confronted with the remainder of the city, Shanghai Panic takes digital
filmmaking to the opposite extreme by short-circuiting the activity of documentation and recognition that roots a film in a particular location and its
history.
Aside from these aesthetic distinctions, Lou Yes film represents a radically
different approach to urban filmmaking because of its choice of location: a
seemingly obsolete section of the city that persists after its prophesied demise.
Suzhou River, like the creek itself, winds through the city of Shanghai, from its
central business district to its margins, connecting its futuristic faades, the
past it displays for the gaze of tourists, and the junk that exists between the
national past deemed worthy of recovery and the global future now identified
as the only worthwhile pursuit. If, as Nowell-Smith suggests, the city film is
best understood as a resistance to the mythological narrative of the city, perhaps Suzhou River reveals the most about the city of Shanghai in the moments
when the narrative pauses for breath, especially as the camera glides alongside
demolition and construction sites whose existence on the screen serves not to
advance the narrative but to divert or even arrest it. While construction always
occurs in the context of a strategy, that is to say, a narrative, that plan remains,
by definition, unrealized. The construction site is a space whose narrative is
always subject to unexpected variations. The promise of contemporary Chinese cinema resides in the films that respond to that construction site not by
imagining and auguring the future it foretells but by recording it, lingering in
the image, displaying the city not as it was or will be but in the fleeting ambiguity of the present.
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The City and Its Spectator

Jia Zhangke has helped define the Sixth Generation in Chinese cinema, first
through his painstakingly cultivated realist aesthetic, and second through his
vociferous criticism of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and the other commanding
figures of the preceding generation. Jia describes at least two key moments of
inspiration and frustration that illustrate his relationship to these celebrated
directors with a worldwide following. He suggests that his profound disappointment with Chinese cinema in the early 1990s, above all with Zhang and
Chen, compelled him to begin working on his first film, Xiao Wu (1997): I
was getting ready to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy and, after four
years of watching Chinese films, I still hadnt seen a single one that had anything to do with the Chinese reality that I knew. After the Fifth Generations
initial success, their artistic works started to undergo a lot of changes. . . .
There was a very clear disconnect between these films and the current Chinese
reality that we are living in.5 In a 2001 interview conducted before Zhangs
recent success as a director of action films, Jia proclaimed the end of the Fifth
Generation as an artistic force: unfortunately, as auteurs they didnt have a
long life span. Too much was demanded of them far too quickly. In China, its
quite inconceivable how our auteurs have changed in their creativity. Chen
Kaige, for example, has made nothing that I like after Farewell My Concubine
(1993). And as for Zhang Yimou, I havent liked any of his films.6 Yet Jia also
hints at the formative influence of the early pictures of the Chinese new wave
during his undergraduate years at Shanxi University in the mid-1980s. Immediately before dismissing the recent work of Zhang and Chen, he suggests
that he wanted to become a director after seeing Yellow Earth.7 In another
interview he reveals that while he didnt have the slightest notion who Chen
Kaige was or what Yellow Earth was about, that film changed my life. It was
at that moment, after watching Yellow Earth, that I decided I wanted to
become a director and my passion for film was born.8 Although Jias comments on Zhang Yimou have also run the gamut from outspoken praise of his
early work to vituperative attacks on the mythical martial arts blockbuster,
The Story of Qiu Ju veers as close to the aesthetic of Jia Zhangke as any film by
a Fifth Generation director. The clean break between generations identified by
critics and seconded by Jia himself obscures the many undeniable links between the foundational moment of the Chinese new wave in the early 1980s
and the more conspicuously realist cinema of Jia Zhangke and other key directors of the 1990s. Despite their relentlessly contemporary settings and their
staunch resistance to the mythology embraced by Zhang and Chen, the films
of Jia Zhangke are remarkable for their continuity with the cinematic project
unveiled in the first years of the Chinese new wave.
One of the distinguishing features of Jia Zhangke and his work, a quality
abundantly clear in his public self-representation as an artist aware of his own
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imbrication in history, is a tendency to connect the personal qualities, fashions,

and objects associated with particular characters to the architectural, social,
and media environments inhabited by those characters. The protagonists in his
films are not products of their environment in a direct and reductive sense, but
they are manifestations of the same overarching political and cultural forces
that fabricate space and the subjects who dwell in it. They are, in Foucaults
words, determined inhabitants of space.9 In his earliest feature films, Xiao
Wu and Platform (Zhantai; 2000), the location that occupies the literal and
moral center of his meditation on the environments of modernization is Jias
home town of Fenyang, a county-level city in Shanxi province and a world
apart from the massive capitals of government or finance on Chinas eastern
seaboard, or even from the provincial seat of Taiyuan. From his second short
student film, Xiao Shan Goes Home (Xiao Shan hui jia; 1995), the story of a
young chef in Beijing who tries to convince someone to accompany him home
for Spring Festival, Jias work has focused on the simultaneous allure of the
small-town past and the contemporary big city, especially for a young generation presented with the states relatively lax enforcement of household registration (hukou) policies and an array of economic and cultural opportunities in
burgeoning urban areas. In other words, Jia considers, from the hindsight provided by the 1990s, the familiar new wave formula of young people fascinated
by the promise of the city, though he tempers that enthusiasm with a more
jaundiced attitude toward the urban revolution and an exceptionally acute understanding of the way of life abandoned in the process of globalization.
While Zhang Yimous Qiu Ju found herself out of synch with the cultural
and spatial metamorphosis of the Reform era, the title character of Xiao Wu is
equally dislocated from his hometown and out of joint with the trends of the
time. A pickpocket who, in his own simultaneously aggrandizing and diminutive rhetoric, works with his hands to get by, Xiao Wu embodies the persistence of a set of moral codes and social values into a period when they are
rapidly receding into obsolescence. In the first of the films three narrative
segments, he discovers that a close childhood friend, Jin Xiaoyong, now a successful entrepreneur and local success story, has refused to invite Xiao Wu to
his wedding to avoid any association with his past as a petty criminal. Whatever bonds once united these blood brothers are casualties of Jins aspiration
to legitimacy as a businessman. After Xiao Wu leaves a wedding present, a red
envelope with cash, Jin sends an emissary (played by Jia Zhangke, in a rare
cameo) to return the gift with the explanation that Jin does not want dirty
money lifted from the wallets of strangers. Xiao Wu uses pointed language to
assert that Jins businesseswhich include cigarette sales, karaoke parlors,
and a new hotelare far from pristine; and Jin responds almost immediately,
again through his underling, that his cigarette business is trade rather than
trafficking and his bar girls are involved in the entertainment business
rather than the illicit skin trade. Laundered through language and cloaked in
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the magical rhetoric of the market, Jins morally and perhaps legally questionable ventures have become conspicuous signs of success covered by a fawning
media that he assiduously cultivates. If Jin and Xiao Wu stood together and
worked with their hands in the olden days, Jin has moved up in society by
distancing himself from his old friends and working on his image, a transition
to a new moral and media environment that Xiao Wu is never able to navigate. The same dedication to now obsolete ethical codes governs Xiao Wus
relationship with Hu Meimei, a karaoke hostess, and their romance occupies
the middle third of the film. While Xiao Wu presents himself as a paragon of
rugged masculinityhe sneers and talks tough, earns his money through guts
and guile, and refuses to participate in the modern courtship ritual of singing
karaokehe eventually falls in love with Meimei, buys her an engagement
ring, and against his initial inclinations, finds himself smiling, singing, and
dancing with her. But Meimei aspires to something more grandiose than life
in a backwater town, and she abandons him at what seems like the first opportunity when some customers from Taiyuan sweep her away in their car.
When his life reaches its nadir and he hopes for some comfort or perhaps even
salvation from Meimei, he finally receives a brief message over his pager
blandly wishing him well, drawing the films love story to a melancholy and
anticlimactic conclusion.
After the twin betrayals by Jin Xiaoyong and Hu Meimei, Xiao Wus closest
friend is a shopkeeper whose business, like every small store on his street, is
marked with the ubiquitous sign for demolition, forcing everyone in the area
to relocate and make way for what promises to be a vast renewal project.
While the shopkeeper himself reflects the ambivalence felt by many in the face
of this disruption and its unforeseeable effects, one of the friends helping him
move views the upheaval in a more positive light: if they have to tear it down,
then tear it down. If the old doesnt get out of the way, the new cant take its
place. The shopkeeper responds that hes seen the demolition, but the new is
still nowhere to be found. Although newness has entered the world of Fenyang, it hasnt taken the same material form as the brick-and-mortar structures it sweeps away. And in the final segment of the film, a police officer
subjects Xiao Wu to public humiliation by handcuffing him to a guy-wire in
plain view of a growing crowd of onlookers. If Xiao Wu was once able to
maintain some dignity in his position as a petty thief with a code of honor, a
small entourage, and some money to throw around, this punishment is more
devastating to his delusions of grandeur than any interrogation in a police station. While Jin has managed to transform himself from a petty thief into a rich
man with a girl and the respect of the public, Xiao Wu has become his towns
bad example, a pest or black sheep, in the words of a onetime sidekick. In
the transition to the new era, Jin and Xiao Wu have parted ways, and while Jin
can do nothing wrong, Xiao Wu stays behind as the caretaker of an archaic
value system and persona that have, over the course of a few years, become
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incompatible with the times. The character of Xiao Wu is remarkable above all
for this untimeliness, for the profound incompatibility between his outmoded
way of life and the radically unfamiliar conception of modernity under construction throughout the film.
Despite his rough-edged, tough-guy persona, Xiao Wu is also a spectral
presence in the film, as he wanders through a landscape of demolition and
reconstruction without adapting to the changes, like a ghost wearing an antiquated costume in contemporary surroundings, communicating through affected gestures, speaking a dead language. Jin Xiaoyong, Hu Meimei, the television reporter, and other like-minded young characters are the embodiment
of the new mentality of the 1990s, and they are distinguished by their embrace
of a future visible primarily in the form of images rather than the concrete
form of buildings and public infrastructure. They revel in the possibility of
remaking their images from scratch or assuming a public persona (of a businessman, or an actress in Beijing, or a concerned citizen) over the airwaves
rather than inhabiting a familiar and tangible space. If Xiao Wu is a revenant
from the past, others around him have adapted successfully to their new surroundings by projecting themselves into a mediatized future. At the end of the
film, Xiao Wu is alone, surrounded by but apart from the community he once
inhabited, gazed at but looked down on. At stake in this ending is also a reconception of the public, the crowd, and communication, with Xiao Wus
archaic values isolating him from the masses and the increasingly regnant
ideology of the market: the public morality is shifting toward a celebration of
privatization and eliminates or exorcises, like a pest or a ghost, the warped
collectivism (honor among thieves) embodied by Xiao Wu. Derrida suggests
that the emergence of new media environments has resulted in the displacement of the frontier between the public and the private. . . . And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press,
tele-communications . . . that which in general assures and determines the
spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present
nor absent: it spectralizes.10 As Jias film unfolds, we see the progressive spectralization of both the town of Fenyang, as this seeming backwater becomes a
home of aspiring actresses or local media personalities who co-opt the public
airwaves to embellish their images and accumulate private fortunes. The final
image of Xiao Wu handcuffed on the curb is haunting precisely because its
impossible to know just what the streetside spectators are looking at: is it
Xiao Wu the old-school criminal now transformed into a spectacle; is it the
camera and crew, technology on display, an awkwardly material presence of
supposedly immaterial media; or is it some combination of the two, the character who harks back to another era seemingly replaced in the space between
shots by the media itself? (Figure 9.2). Whatever disappears when Xiao Wu is
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figure 9.2 Xiao Wu.
replaced almost imperceptibly by the camerahis physical presence, his way

of life, his mentality, his historyis the foundational loss at the philosophical
center of Jias conception of cinema and defines the relationship between the
old medium of film and late twentieth-century China.
As Jias films chart Chinas economic ascent, the recognizable environments
of small-town life are replaced by a mediascape of background sounds emanating from radios and movie theaters, along with the blue light of ambient television. Over the course of his two decades of filmmaking, the cityscapes of modern
China have demonstrated that architecture and media technology are now two
aspects of the same phenomenon, an urban rule that manifests itself in material
structures and in fleeting projections of light. The retrospective glances of his
hometown trilogy could be dismissed as an exercise in nostalgia or framed as
Jias venture into the semiautobiographical genre made famous in the films of
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of his most obvious and often avowed influences. But Jia
is also one of Chinas most astute chroniclers of the transition from the socialist
city to the mediatized world on display in major urban centers like Beijing and
third-tier towns like Fenyang. Modernity is almost exclusively a mediated phenomenon in the early films of Jia Zhangke. Framed on television screens and
heard with intermittent pops from a portable radio, modernity exists as the
image and soundtrack to another reality. Juxtaposed with the visual register of
realist images captured on city streets, Jias intricately composed soundscapes
feature the background noises that propagate the promises of the future, establish (through constant reinforcement) a common narrative about the trajectory
of society, and reintroduce the incongruous realities of the present: karaoke
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singers recite tales of romance in the new China, and newsreaders trumpet the
latest economic advances, while loudspeakers advertise pork for sale at the
home of a local farmer and the pounding noise of heavy machinery and hammers shatters any momentary lapse into quietude. Jias soundtracks are a record
of uneven development in all its inescapable contradictions. And the televisions
present from Xiao Wu onward allow the films to juxtapose the material and
immaterial reality of contemporary China, the vision of the future on display in
select cities along the east coast and the untimely relic of the past embodied by
Xiao Wu himself and the Fenyang crumbling all around him.
More epic in scope, Platform moves beyond the snapshot of a principle
character out of step with the accelerating pace of his time and instead follows
a cast of performers longitudinally, as they attempt to adapt to successive
waves of cultural and economic renewal. Once again, the overlapping temporalities of Reform-era Fenyang lie at the core of Jias political and philosophical project. Because it was intended to be his first feature (and was abandoned
temporarily because of the costs associated with a sweeping historical drama),
Platform sketches out many of the intellectual concerns that guide his later
films and outlines a prehistory of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the period
that occupies his attention in nearly all of his recent work. The film follows a
performance and theatrical troupe from Fenyang as they negotiate the decadelong transition to the Deng Xiaoping era and a socialist market economy. The
choice of material and style of presentation undergo serial makeovers with the
changing times, as do fashions, social mores, and pop culture references. From
their first performance of the Maoist propaganda play The Train to Shaoshan,
the repertoire of source material veers from songs with a reformist bent to
punk rock, and the structure of the troupe changes from a state-owned collective to a private enterprise with a geographically misleading but hip title Shenzhen All-Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band. Over the course of the
film, the special economic zones of southeast China provide a touchstone for
new trends in culture and fashion, and the symbolic lodestar for Chinese society migrates from the birthplaces of the revolution to cities like Shenzhen, a
backwater during the Maoist period and one of Chinas instant cities. But
the first shot of the film emphasizes that the most recent and conspicuous aspirations to novelty are not in themselves revolutionary in modern Chinese
history. As the audience chatters about local gossip before the performance of
Shaoshan, the story of a pilgrimage to Maos hometown, a wall behind them
displays an enormous illustration labeled Map of the New Countryside Construction Guidelines. The reforms charted in the background of that shot will
be every bit as new as the New China ushered in by Mao himself, yet over
the course of the decade recounted in Platform, a series of competing claims to
innovation will burst onto the scene and just as quickly be forgotten.
Platform focuses on the at once shocking pace and excruciating slowness of
reform, on the experience of perpetual transformation that yields to ever more
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upheaval rather than the satisfaction of arrival. After the initial performance of
Shaoshan, the group gathers on their bus, waiting for a few stragglers holding
up their return to Fenyang. The final person to board the bus, Cui Mingliang
(played by Wang Hongwei, a regular in Jias hometown trilogy, and the male
lead in the first two installments), explains that he has arrived late because he
was on the toilet. He receives a dressing-down from the leader, who summarizes his displeasure with a salty aphorism: when the lazy mule is attached to
the mill, the shit and piss start to flow. The chief continues with a litany of
complaints directed at Cui Mingliang, including a criticism of his unconvincing simulation of a train whistle. Cui counters that hes never been on a train
and has only a vague idea of what its supposed to sound like. Two principal
concerns, both present in Xiao Wu, structure this dense and evocative opening:
the undeniable attraction of the genuinely revolutionary, as well as the just
plain new, be it a train or a new musical style or a city rising from farmland, and
the lingering memory of past revolutions that endure as a running commentary on the pretensions of whichever cultural, economic, or political project
currently claims the status of modernity. Cui Mingliang and his fellow performers are the cultural avant-garde eager to experiment with perms, bellbottoms, and the latest trends in dance and music. Through their embrace of
whatever counts as contemporary fashion, they pose a challenge to entrenched
social and cultural norms. But they are also like the proverbial mule whose
primary form of resistance is delay, deferral, refusal, sluggishness. Although
Zhang Jun assumes the role of cutting-edge trendsetter, and Cui Mingliang
almost immediately follows his lead, Cui is conspicuous precisely because his
avant-garde persona clashes so visibly with the less forward-looking dimensions of his character, because like Xiao Wu, he seems to embody an array of
outmoded values that his fashionable clothes, hair, and music seek to obscure.
Like the husband and wife in Country Couple, Cui Mingliang is motivated by a
desire for the most striking forms of novelty, but he recognizes over the narratives ten-year span that those aspirations remain in the offing and that, in the
words of Bruno Latour, he has never been modern.11
When the performers on the bus respond to their leaders criticism with a
chorus of train whistles, their sounds filling a now blackened bus and screen,
the dynamic of hope and deferral is unmistakable: they have entered an era of
rapid turnover in styles and a continual acceleration of the process of reform,
but they still uphold the much older and more persistent dream of modernization previously crystallized in the mechanical locomotion of the train. The
song that provides the title of the film likens its protagonists short-lived
love to waiting on a platform at a station, with love always heading outward
and no prospect of an inbound train. Over the course of the first Reform decades chronicled in the film, a capitalist modernity centered on the market
replaced the formerly new socialist project, whose relics persist in the slogans
pronounced on walls throughout the film and in the mapping of agricultural
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production displayed in the first shot. Platform is concerned at once with the
desire that energizes capitalism, the cultural mechanisms used to spark and
propagate this desire, and the aftereffects of a waning but ineradicable longing
that manifests itself when the sound of an imagined train emanates from the
very different physical surroundings of a long-distance bus. On its most basic
level, Platform is about the material conditions under which China links
tracks with the world in the 1980s and 1990s; but it also lingers on the platform where the people stand and marvel as a new version of modernity speeds
past them. The film gazes at the stages and screens where people perform their
own relationships to the pasts they inhabit and the futures they imagine.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests that cinema has always existed in a privileged
relationship to the train, as the machinery of mass transportation and mass
media have shared a fascination with speed, the annihilation of time and
space, and the consequent development of new modes of technologically assisted perception.12 But Jia reformulates the familiar understanding of the relationship between the railroad and cinema by removing his characters from
the train: panoramic perception may be possible from the privileged perspective of the window seat, but in Platform the train is significant precisely
because it passes without altering the conditions alongside the tracks, because
after a momentary glimpse of the steel casing of modernity, life continues as it
did before. The modern is no longer imagined as a material object that encloses its subjects, carries them along for the duration of their journey, and
imposes a radically reoriented perspective on events; instead, it offers a
glimpse of a future that flashes by in an instant, while the subject waits beside
it, spectator and bystander rather than a heroic figure engaged in the reconstruction of society. The train is no longer an undeniably material force or the
medium that transforms our powers of perception and relationship to the environment; the train is instead reframed as an image. If, in Marxs famous
formulation, modernity is disorienting because under the pressure of constant innovation all that is solid melts into air, Platform traces the advent of
a new era in Chinese history when even the most iconic and material manifestations of the modern are evaporating before the eyes of a crowd reimagined
as audiences and witnesses rather than agents of history. Under those conditions, the film suggests, the most revealing perspective on events is somewhere
on the verge of modernity rather than inside it, as the characters in Jias film
watch a previously dominant conception of the future disappear on the horizon and fade away.
The World (Shijie, 2004) examines the globalized environment that emerges
in the wake of that speeding locomotive. Set in a Beijing theme park that displays scale models of the most recognizable global landmarks, the film once
again considers the relationship between China and the process of globalization, though in this instance the world is no longer a distant phenomenon
perceptible only in stray sounds emanating from boomboxes and fashions
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brought back from Guangzhou. Instead, the particular version of the world
crystallized in the theme parka limited but nonetheless alluring series of
highlights of a world tour; the planet miniaturized, condensed, and made
accessible though the copy and the imagehas, in the decade between the end
of the historical period depicted in Platform and the turn of the millennium,
passed from a remote possibility to an inescapable reality too trivially present
to warrant a mention. If the ubiquitous billboards advertising the prospective
city already rely on this familiar repertoire of global icons, then the theme park
has become redundant, an inefficient, archaic, excessively literal version of a
world already visible in more compelling images circulating on the Internet.
Over the course of the 1990s, China entered the world 2.0, and the physical
structures of the theme park have ceded pride of place to computer and cell
phone screens. In 1999, Xinlang or new wave became the corporate name of
one of Chinas largest Internet and communications companies, also known as
Sina. A new generation of youth are fascinated by the possibilities inherent in
that new media environment, especially its expansive worldliness and nascent
digital communities, rather than the promises of the old cinematic new wave
and the physical spaces it surveyed. But Jias film reveals the gap between the
sloganeeringthe park promises that its visitors will see the world without
ever leaving Beijingand the material manifestations of that world on the
ground. The miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, the great pyramids, London Bridge,
the Taj Mahal, and many more devolve into a running joke and a setting for
lighthearted group pictures. Their proximity and decontextualizationthey
are surrounded by the generic space of the theme park and a landscape of
equally uprooted iconsbecomes an allegory for the particular experience of
the world on offer in turn-of-the-millennium China. Globalization can be realized as long as the camera never leaves the park, the central business district,
and the other theaters constructed in accordance with the theme of a small and
integrated world. But Jias film repeatedly counteracts the temptation to represent an ultramodern environment where nothing exists outside the regnant
ideology of globalization. The grandiose promise of the world yields to the
banal reality of the park, and the monuments appear in extreme long shots
against the less spectacular skyline of Beijing. This is the contemporary variation on Baudelaires chimneys clashing with church spires, and narrative and
visual registers of The World are constructed through a series of similar juxtapositions. The theme park presents globalization viewed at once from within
its captivating logic and from the perspective of an older, seemingly obsolete
modernity that lingers on the margins and in the interstitial spaces created by
the cycle of demolition and construction that clears out the old order and sets
the stage for the new.
As the films main and peripheral characters wander through the theme
park, the monuments become almost irrelevant to the exercise of tourism
because what matters is not the absurd itinerary from the Eiffel Tower to
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Manhattan to the Taj Mahal but the gaze of the spectators in this eccentric
collection of familiar structures. As Marc Aug writes, there are spaces in
which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of the spectator were the essence of
the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were
his own spectacle.13 The World is only mildly concerned with the amusing
site gag of pyramids located just down the Thames from London Bridge, as
the camera focuses instead on visitors engaged in the reversal of the gaze
described by Aug. The theme park presents a semblance of a visible and tangible world, and it allows the spectator to experiment with a cosmopolitan
persona while staring (often apathetically) at the monuments scattered across
the lot. But, most important, the visitor beholds a world where geographically
dispersed locations are connected through the most mundane acts of looking
and walking. As the camera reveals a progression of identifiable faades, the
spectator becomes the crucial constituent in this otherwise outlandishly cosmopolitan situation. What matters in the film is not the buildings and costumes but the tourist gazing at the spectacle of the world. The spectators formulate a plausible relationship between themselves and the fragments of
cities and landscapes that stand metonymically for both the impossibly vast,
complex, and ultimately unrepresentable planet and the dominant economic,
political, and cultural logic of our time. The park is remarkable because it reveals the fundamental vacuousness of the globe as a contemporary conceptual category, and in the absence of anything substantial behind that faade,
the absolutely essential role of the viewer in conjuring up a coherent narrative
and image of globalization. In this park displaying the most recognizable
icons of global culture, there is no world, only a spectator.
The view from the Eiffel Tower is suspiciously, improbably cosmopolitan
in The World, and the film then examines alternative constructions of the
world in the relationship between Russian and Chinese performers at the park
and the more novel and captivating perspective offered through new screen
cultures, especially the cell phone. In The World, that promise takes the form
of text messages that signal a transition into animated sequences with characters escaping their geographical and bodily boundaries and taking flight
(Figure 9.3). In one instance, a bus travels along Changan Street, with Tiananmen Square to the right, the Forbidden City to the left, and images from New
Years celebrations around the world flashing on television screens that almost
outnumber the passengers. Just as the films main character passes the portrait
of Mao Zedong, she checks her cell phone, and her boyfriends brief messagehow far can you golaunches her and the film into an animated reverie that remains shocking for its departure from the observational realism
that distinguishes Jias other work. These sequences help illustrate both the
allure and the limits of a mediated liberation: she can escape her everyday life
through communication networks or visit all the wonders of the world in a
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figure 9.3 The World.
theme park, but the film always resolves into another mode of image-making
that situates these flights of fancy in the less extravagant environments that
surround the themed spaces of global Beijing. As Akiko Busch suggests, with
our cell phones, email, and assorted forms of wireless communication, the
elusive corridors of cyberspace have whetted our appetite for what we can
touch, hold, taste, see. In the virtual age, the sorcery of the physical has intensified.14 Jias films of the early 2000s are inspired by this paradoxical form of
magic: the world invoked on television and cell phone screens coexists with an
atavistic materialism that in the eyes of his young protagonists appears equally
out of place, like a specter from the recent but forsaken past.
But outside the theme park, the view from a roof top is worlds apart from
the commanding outlook provided by the observation deck on the Eiffel
Tower. Despite the ubiquitous rhetoric of the moment, Jias Beijing on the cusp
of the early twenty-first century is still a phenomenon of scaffolding and rebar
rather than a fully realized modern project (Figure 9.4). For some viewers
figure 9.4 The World.
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and critics, experiencing the oppressive duration of one of Jias long takes feels
like watching paint dry, but that is one purpose of this lingering and deliberate
aesthetic: his films are patient chronicles of the process of construction and
demolition, development and decay; and as they hesitate in this interval when
modernity is at long last about to arrive, they expose the contradiction between promise and actuality. His characters wait by a platform for the anticipated train to arrive, or cluster in a theme park with miniature renditions of
the major monuments of the world, or stand on top of a recently poured concrete floor while icons of globalization fly overhead. These characters inhabit
the gap between the promise of a global future and the histories that have not
yet come to an end.
From Xiao Wu to The World, Jia Zhangkes towns and cities crystallize an
unrealized, decaying, and recently superseded vision of modernity, but Still
Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006) and 24 City (Ershisi Chengshi, 2008) begin his migration away from the rapidly expanding cities of the eastern seaboard and
toward locations in the south and west where the project of dismantling a
modern project was undertaken a decade later and has not yet been fulfilled.
More precisely, these films wander away from the symbolic centers of a globalizing China to Chengdu, one of Chinas largest if less conventionally glamorous cities, and Chinas most ambitious modernizing project, the massive Three
Gorges Dam. Many scholars, including Anna Tsing and Maria Kaika, have
identified the big dam as one of the paradigmatic symbols of modernization,
as it represents the desire to catch up to the developed world through the
acquisition of the most advanced technology realized on the grandest scale, or
a model of development pushed . . . on the nation by development banks and
domestic elites.15 It becomes a manifestation of what Kaika, following Jane
Marcus and Susan Buck-Morss, calls the collective sublime of modernity.16
It is also one of the most conspicuous examples of modern nature, or the
encroachment of technology into realms once considered the outside or the
definitional opposite of modernity. If The River Elegy concluded with the
Yellow River crashing and flowing into water linked rhetorically with modernity and globalization, Still Life travels upstream to a location on the verge of
catastrophic destruction beneath the blocked waters of the dam. With hammers pounding in the background and scavengers picking through the wreckage, Still Life reveals the dismantling of towns about to be flooded and lost as
the site of present-day experience and repository of history and memory. With
the most valuable components of their infrastructure largely destroyed and relocated elsewhere, the material culture deemed too unwieldy or too commonplace to preserve will be drowned with these towns. Aside from the narrative
structure, the films primary organizing principle is a series of superimposed
titles that identify a sample of everyday objects dispersed throughout the film
and eventually presented in carefully framed, lingering close-ups. These titles
focus primarily on a class of objectsliquor, tea, toffee, cigarettescommonly
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used in the exchange of gifts and the establishment of guanxi, and they therefore hint at a complex web of social relations that extends well beyond the
items themselves. The film, as it hesitates on these boxes, tins, and bottles, divorcing them from the forward rush of the narrative, presents a series of cinematic still lifes that allude to a slower temporality than the flow and other key
metaphors for the process of globalization suggest. They also hint at a less utilitarian relationship between images and stories. These unhurried shots transform paper and glass into objects of contemplation rather than forgotten relics
of consumption. Like these once lively villages facing extinction by the rising
waters, these objects are likely to remain submerged for generations, to be rediscovered in an altogether different era when currently unimaginable circumstances result in their excavation. The objects left behind lie at the opposite end
of a continuum of modern nature represented at the other extreme by the big
dam: as deeply imbricated in human relations as the river or the land, these
objects nonetheless lack the symbolic power of the concrete structure and the
literal and metaphorical power it generates.
The still lifes in Jias film are redolent of two very different traditions of
cinema that accentuate the peculiarity of everyday objects: the ethnographic
mode that focuses on the minute differences that characterize a particular
community, including differences in material culture, gift-giving, and the
immense social significance of seemingly minor physical items; and the paradigmatic science fiction scenario that imagines the interaction between an
ostensibly advanced future civilization and the ruins of a now destroyed
culture preserved only through objects isolated from their previous social
context. The films ethnographic dimensions are present from the earliest
moments, when a three-minute sequence records the faces, bodies, and possessions of passengers on a ferry along the Yellow River in the Three Gorges
area. The camera finally arrests on the figure of Sanming, shifted from a
moving but supporting role in Platform (he played a miner and the cousin of
Cui Mingliang) to one of the narrative centers of Still Life. Sanming is introduced as one character among many on this crowded boat, but his story also
encapsulates a range of social tragedies: he is searching for his wife, who fled
Shanxi sixteen years before and whose only trace is an address in this soonto-be-destroyed village of Fengjie; but, as we later learn, he had purchased his
wife from marriage brokers, and her departure is reframed not as a loss for
Sanming but as an act of liberation on the part of women rebelling against a
marriage based on physical and economic coercion. Unable to track her
down, Sanming decides to wait in the village and joins one of the wrecking
crews charged with tearing down the little infrastructure and architecture
that remain. Sanmings task, then, is to destroy the very location previously
envisioned as the culmination of his quest and in the process to bury the
clues he once hoped to unearth. At the core of the film is a profound problem
confronting anyone interested in the historical dimension of a radically
modernizing society: how does the artist or filmmaker preserve for posterity
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the traces of a culture dedicated to self-destruction and wholesale transformation? The films still lifes then become the center of that ethnographic and
archaeological project, as it reconstructs the web of intimate relations without which these objects are the mere detritus of a lost civilization. And in the
process, Jias film aspires to the material condition of the objects it displays:
in an image environment flooded with ephemeral advertisements for a society in the making, an environment where the Three Gorges themselves
appear on currency, the physical surroundings that channel the flow of water
transformed into an ornament that beautifies the flow of cash, his intensely
slow still lifes are a source of friction that impedes the rush of moving pictures, an invitation to linger in the domain of objects and images, and to reestablish a connection between the material world and film. These beautifully
composed, deliberately artful shots are therefore manifestoes for a cinematic
realism attuned to the image culture of Chinas developing hypermodernity.
Still Life, like so many of Jias films, concentrates on the process of aging,
not only of characters but also of built environments and social systems. My
past films were about the youth culture, he says, but this film talks about
the result of this changing so thats why you see older people. Fengjie is like
an old person.17 Both the traces of a socialist past and Jias conspicuously
artful images are presented as relics of an irreversibly bygone era rather than
a golden age that contemporary citizens and artists should attempt to revive.
Or, more precisely, the modernizing drive of the second half of the twentieth
century is imagined not as a dream betrayed or a paradise lost but as a utopian project that endures primarily in the relative abstractions of culture.
Still Life displaces the ubiquitous contemporary desire to link tracks with
the world of global capitalism and instead conjures up a decades-old conception of Chinese modernity that lingers on because it never passed beyond its
incipient stage, because the Cultural Revolution and then reform and opening to the outside world marked the transition to another political experiment rather than the exhaustion and decay of the socialist enterprise. What
happens, Jias films ask, when new Chinas genuinely radical social and political innovationsthe work unit or danwei, for example, that structures
the collective experience in Platform before privatization and disintegration
of the troupeare discarded and replaced by ways of living drawn from a
repertoire of private options exchanged on the market? How can a film
allude to and preserve that history without succumbing to the dangerous
temptations of nostalgia? Unlike the prototypical heritage and nostalgia pictures of the late twentieth century, Jias most recent films are relentlessly
impure in their evocation of both the past and the present. This disavowal of
a golden-agist mentality is evident in the animated sequences of The World,
which entertain the attractions of contemporary image culture and destroy
the exclusive pretensions to truth often associated with official modes of
representation and with observational realism: these moments belong
neither to Maoist aesthetics nor to the postWorld War II art cinema;
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they are irruptions of a cultural order and conception of the image that challenge the assumptions underlying those political and aesthetic systems.
That constitutive impurity assumes an even more shocking form in the science fiction sequences of Still Life, which undermine the films painstakingly
earned authenticity and estrange the modern project that founded the PRC. In
these bizarre, unexplained, and virtually unprecedented sequences, a UFO
races across the sky, and a massive concrete monument blasts off into space
before the eyes of transfixed but remarkably nonchalant spectators. They respond much as the theme park employees in The World do when confronted
with an equally implausible reconfiguration of global geography, with an alternative universe in which all the significant tourist sites are proximate and
readily approachable. If socialist realism was a radical vision of modernity
akin to science fiction because it represented the fulfillment of an imaginary
utopia in the present, these flying saucers and ballistic buildings at once reveal
the underlying illusions of filmmaking in the Maoist era and establish a relationship of continuity with the houses and factories being dismantled elsewhere in the film. While the artists of Maoist China were constructing a series
of elaborate faades that obscured the truth of underdevelopment and realized
a communist ideal at odds with the systems often modest, real-world triumphs and spectacular failures, Jias fleeting gestures toward science fiction,
his fantastic and far-fetched flourishes, reframe the history of socialist art production as a mode of science fiction, which is to say false and implausible on
the one hand and utopian on the other. The films principle characters are
depicted as onlookers before a spectacle that transcends the more commonplace acts of demolition and construction because they inhabit a world where
the most miraculous images have become mundane (Figure 9.5). While The
figure 9.5 Still Life.
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World renders the flights of fancy in animated form, marking a distinction

between the artificial spaces and figures created through digital technology
and actual locations and bodies recorded by a camera, Still Life erases that
crucial distinction and allows these eerie simulations to infect the ostensibly
real world. Skyscrapers, big dams, and other hypermodern construction sites
have become the norm in a Chinas major cities and select sites across the
country, but because of the persistent inequality of economic development,
this project still requires mobilization at the level of image production and
circulation. Cinema, television, streetside advertising, the entire panoply of
images saturating the airwaves, Internet, and billboards in contemporary
China: these are the media that propagate a vision of the nations fabulously
prosperous, techno-utopian future. The science fictional moments in Still Life
foreground the profound transition under way in China, but they suggest that
the current modernizing project crystallized in the Three Gorges Dam is a
continuation of decades of grand promises rather than a transition to a new
historical era. Their form, with images of the impossible occupying the same
locations and generating the same detached response as the most undeniable
reality, reveal the complexity of the representational problem faced by artists
and filmmakers in this environment. Image-based arts like film become a
medium for preserving the society undergoing widespread demolition, while
also mounting a spirited resistance to the facile postmodern assertion that the
image is everything. Jia reverses that formulation by suggesting that the most
implausible fictions have, through relentless repetition and enforced familiarity, become the stuff of everyday life. But in the still lifes and realist practices
that comprise the rest of the film, other conceptions of the image remain.
24 City is concerned with the dismantling of the socialist system that once
organized the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people and, like a
series of documentaries in the past decade, West of the Tracks most prominent among them, focuses on the effects of this transformation on the level of
the work unit, one of the most profound social experiments in new China at
the time of its creation and an equally immense experiment at the moment of
its eradication. The film assembles a collection of stories that revolve around
an enormous munitions factory in Chengdu slated for demolition and redevelopment as a private housing complex called 24 City. Told through a series
of interviews with aging workers and families associated with the obsolete
factory, as well as the young, prospective inhabitants imagining their future
lives in chic new apartments, these discrete but complementary narratives
illustrate the scale of the economic and social transition currently taking
place in China and demonstrate the centrality of urban space as a showcase
for this revolution. With reality at least as spectacular as fiction, the filmmakers can merely record the monumental changes taking place on the factory
floor and the sites of demolition and construction. Unlike many films with
similar settings and political agendas, however, 24 City is a hybrid of fact and
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fiction, as five interviews with workers and retirees from the factory are interwoven with fictionalized elements developed in a workshop-like manner and
performed by professional actors (including instantly recognizable celebrities
like Joan Chen). On the border between fiction and documentary, these invented interviews are the mirror opposite of the spacecraft and soaring structures of Still Life because they represent a mundane, undeniable reality with a
roughness and on-the-fly aesthetic (for example, the long, static shots and
slightly awkward, oblique camera setups) usually associated with guerrilla
documentary, while also adopting strategies from fiction filmmaking (the star
system, polished performances, the visual clarity of HD video). The workers
involved in the demolition of the factory are presented not only in interviews
and engaged in their labor but also in stylized group photos that allude to that
common photographic practice in the socialist era. Even as the film affirms
the existence of a literally concrete history embedded in the walls of this factory and ingrained in the memories of its former workers, 24 City alludes to
the complexity of extricating that reality from the flood of images and ensuing desires that constitute an equally undeniable and often more alluring reality in todays China.
After demolition of the factory is all but complete and construction on the
housing development begins, Jia displays this historical transition in one
fluid camera movement. At the beginning of the shot, a wall adorned with
greenery advertises the project, promising a garden in the city, but as the
camera cranes up, the pit obscured behind the wall becomes both an evocation of loss and an allusion to a fragile future that puts the lie to the billboards
that surround it. If the early Fifth Generation filmmakers imagined the 1980s
as a new beginning for Chinese cinema, Jia Zhangke no longer envisions his
own work with the same nave faith in the possibilities of a new cinema projected onto a blank wall. In the films final sequence, a young woman played
by Zhao Tao discusses her dreams while standing in a building under construction and staring out at the rest of the project located on the verge of the
city. As in so many of the new wave films from China and elsewhere, this
youthful urban subject is at once a participant in the narrative of the city and
a spectator beholding its construction with a mixture of indifference and awe.
Itself caught between documentary and fiction, 24 City is an elegy for the city
that once existed in this location, an attempt to preserve it on film, and a reflection on the diametrically opposed longings that lead some to mourn its
loss and others to celebrate a world where the new city is everywhere, all the
time. The housing development lies on the outskirts of town, with a barren
field just beyond, but it also portends the future of the space just beyond the
walls of the construction zone. If the iconography of socialist realism often
featured young women staring off into the distance and looking forward to
the glorious future in the offing, 24 Citys final sequence shows Zhao Tao in a
contemporary variation on that theme, with privatization now superseding
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the socialist experiment and poised to spill over into the landscape outside
the frame.
If China has spent the past two decades linking tracks with and accelerating toward the world, Jias films celebrate the political and social power of
inertia. In contrast to Marxs assertion that revolutions are the locomotives
of world history, Benjamin suggests that revolutions are an attempt, by the
passengers on this trainnamely the human raceto activate the emergency
brake.18 In Jias account of a cavernous factory in 24 City, a history of Chinese
modernity lingers on in the bricks and bodies that inhabit the demolition site,
even after the end of the socialist era and Chinas entry into the world market.
Like the new wave films that preceded it, Jias work is an emergency brake that
reimagines the cinematic image as a source of friction rather than the quintessence of globalization and its flows. One of the most cogent rebukes to the
boosterish accounts of contemporary Chinese economic development is the
assertion by Jia Zhangke, Wang Bing, and other filmmakers that China has
been constructing its own modernity for at least a century and that, like the
delirious New York eulogized by Koolhaas, this aspiration passed into premature senility before its life was completed.19 These films embody what
Wang Hui calls an anti-modern theory of modernization.20 Both a critique
and a reconceptualization of modernity, Chinese intellectual history in the
twentieth century combined the search for modernization and reflections on
the devastating consequences of Western modernization.21 No longer the
most forward-looking of media, this cinema of persistence and endurance has
become a means of exploring the seemingly obsolete utopias of the twentieth
century; and in the hands of filmmakers like Jia, Zhang L, Hou Hsiao-hsien,
and countless others from China, Taiwan, and other sites of the regions economic miracles, the camera has become an instrument of this antimodern
aspiration toward modernity.
What the recent history of the Chinese new wave demonstrates is that the
age of new waves has always been guided by an antimodern conception of
modernity. From the documentary imperative that drives the street scenes in
the French new wave to the contemporary cityscapes of Edward Yang and
Tsai Ming-liang and to the painstaking realism practiced in mainland Chinese
cinema today: these insistently local images that resist the logic of flows remain
one of the definitive qualities of art cinema into the present. But these directors also display the modernity of their time in all its allure, suggesting that a
comprehensive form of realism must also exhibit the commercialized images
that have become both the dominant visual culture of our time and the conceptual opposite of their own realist practice. Realism must inevitably migrate
along the asymptote of reality described by Bazin when it depicts an environment saturated with other images, when the world recorded by the camera
consists in large part of ambient screens and billboards advertising a vision of
the future. But it would be a mistake to associate the new waves of the past half
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century with the supermodern project that so often occupies the frame. The
age of new waves is instead this moment of transition, this condition of being
in between rather than inside or outside. In the key documents produced from
that liminal position, most notably new wave cinema itself, we glimpse not the
future on display or the past being superseded but the reality of the transition,
with its overlapping historical eras and modes of image-making. We see, in
other words, a moment of possibility that would not survive for long, that
lingers on in a ghostlike form and returns in the next new wave, and the one
after that. We see a conception of modernity that continues to haunt contemporary artists and audiences precisely because it challenges the model of perpetual novelty being marketed in the brandscapes of contemporary cities. We
see, finally, a cinema that could not yet imagine what it meant to be modern
and a culture that, over the course of a decade, could no longer imagine another way of living. And the new waves, the prototypical modernist movements in cinema, demand to be revisited and reviewed not because they
remain fresh and new in the early twenty-first century but because of their
radical otherness, because they construct a record, one of the few that endures, of a historical opportunity that was soon foreclosed. The new wave is
not an account of what modernity is in the here and now; its not a demonstration of what cinema is; instead it returns like a revenant from another modernity that was visible in flashes but never realized.
Conclusion
was there an american new wave?
It is unusual to write a book about globalization and cinema without a chapter

devoted to the most prominent and far-reaching example of this phenomenon: the American film industry. As the authors of Global Hollywood argue,
Hollywood appears in nearly all descriptions of globalisations effectsleft,
right and third waysas a floating signifier, a kind of cultural smoke rising
from the economic fires of a successful US-led crusade to convert the world
to capitalism.1 The major studios and distribution companies based in southern California and New York have developed an economically successful
formula based on efficient and transparent storytelling, special effects, and
massively marketed stars, and the American film industry now owns 4090
percent of films shown in most overseas markets.2 It has also established a
prototype for media enterprises in a global age. With its runaway productions using rented facilities and contract workers spread around the world,
Hollywood has joined other industries vying to reduce labor costs by seeking
out a lower-paid, usually nonunion workforce outside the craft system established in the United States in the late 1920s.3 This system has replaced the
Cold War paradigm of two separate spheres of media production based on
diametrically opposed economic and ideological models. The market empire
now covers most of the territory formerly controlled by the socialist bloc. The
case of Barrandov Studios in Prague is one of many such examples from eastern and central Europe: the center of the new wave in the 1960s and the
broader Czechoslovak film industry since the 1930s, the studio is now a favorite destination for film productions hoping to utilize skilled craftspeople and
reproduce the look of old Europe without incurring the costs of filming in
Germany or France. Even the Mosfilm lot, the crown jewel of the Soviet movie
industry, has started hosting foreign coproductions.4 The age of three worlds
has also ended in the global film industry, as countries like China, India,
South Korea, and Thailand have been incorporated into what Miller and his
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coauthors call the new international division of cultural labor, especially in

labor-intensive work like animation and special effects.5 The various ages of
the second half of the twentieth centuryof Cold War divisions between East
and West, of three worlds, of new waveshave culminated in a global media
landscape where American corporations dominate. Hollywood has evolved
into a more powerful and pervasive presence than under the irresistible
empire of the first half of the twentieth century. The results of Americanization are on display in the films emanating from the worlds largest and most
successful dream factory, and the new Hollywood, with its flexible and globalized production model, has become the lodestar for the reform of film industries around the world. The narrative of globalization circulating around the
film world today sounds surprisingly like journalistic accounts of American
triumphalism or critical responses to cultural and economic imperialism.
Measured in dollars and eyeballs in front of the screen, this tale of global
Hollywood is one of the most important stories of contemporary cultural globalization, but when it remains the only story, it obscures the history and
future possibility of transnational media exchanged outside that system or
flowing in reverse and affecting the American market. Vijay Prashad argues,
for example, that the films of Bruce Lee and other kung fu stars, most of them
products of the Golden Harvest, Cathay, and Shaw Brothers studios in Hong
Kong, served as alternative models of heroic action for African- and AsianAmerican audiences in the United States and for young spectators in Africa in
the 1970s.6 Melvin Van Peebles has suggested that his approach to the production of Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (1971), which essentially launched
the blaxploitation genre, was profoundly influenced by his experience living
in Europe and studying the style and mode of production of marginal European filmmakers in the 1960s. The relationship between Hollywood and the
new wave cinemas of the 1960s provides yet another example, as for close to a
decade filmmakers like Arthur Penn and John Cassavetes, screenwriters like
Robert Benton and David Newman, and actor-producers like Warren Beatty
were hoping to spark a revolution in Hollywood cinema akin to the mutiny
led by Truffaut and Godard; they hoped to incite what Beatty called the
American new wave. That term faded from the lexicon of American film
criticism shortly after it surfaced in the mid-1960s, to be replaced by the
now familiar new Hollywood or, more recently, American independent
cinema. This conclusion asks why the American new wave is rarely characterized in those terms and what that absence reveals about the globalization of
cinema today and the Cold War context that helped generate the first new
waves after World War II.
The burgeoning of this short-lived American new wave remains one of
the few moments when cinema in the United States was treated not as the
engine of film history but as part of a decentered cinematic universe. And
this opening onto broader international film movements was crucial to the
Conclusion
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marketing and reception of new American films at the time. In a momentous1967 article, The Shock of Freedom in Films (introduced by a Robert
Rauschenberg cover featuring Bonnie and Clyde), Time maintained that the
most important fact about the screen in 1967 is that Hollywood has at long
last become part of what the French film journal Cahiers du cinma calls the
furious springtime of world cinema, and is producing a new kind of movie.7
Critics and filmmakers imagined a global cinematic network no longer beholden to Hollywood, a map of world cinema that exaggerated the importance of European cinema, especially French and Italian, but also championed an eclectic and transnational sensibility that in retrospect reveals the
limitations of todays cinematic universe, where the dominant categories are
Hollywood and its independent other. Most studies of the relationship
between American and European cinema during the late 1960s and 1970s
focus either on the travel of individual artistsmigrs to Hollywood or
rarer cases like Van Peebles, who migrated eastward to Holland and France
before returningor on stylistic borrowings and quotations. Among the
most illustrative examples are the screenwriters for Bonnie and Clyde, Benton
and Newman, both intense Truffaut fans, who self-consciously envisioned
their film as the American manifestation of the French new wave. The sexual
revolution embodied by Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim would erupt in Faye
Dunaways Bonnie, and the fascination with gangster life that energizes Shoot
the Piano Player would reanimate the historical figures of the Barrow gang.
We hear also about stylistic changes ushered into American cinema under
the influence of those European new waves: the jump cuts, the jerkier rhythm
of the editing, the reinvigoration of old American genres, and the homages to
specific shots and characters in European films of the 1950s and 1960s. Belmondos Michel Poiccard, for example, appears to lose a lens from his sunglasses in Breathless, and Beattys Clyde wears their mirror opposite, a pair
missing the other lens. While Hollywood had previously specialized in escapist entertainment, and a generation of teens had been tutored in rebellion by
the popular beach movies of the early and mid-1960s, at long last a crescendo
of global movements had resulted not just in a little sex, drugs, and rock and
roll but an artistic revolution that seemed to allude far beyond the shores of
the United States. In this most superficial but nonetheless revealing sense,
stylistic choices are a means of constructing geopolitical maps: to make a film
according to the tenets of classical Hollywood cinema is to assert that the
filmmakers present and future belong in certain institutional and national
frameworks, most likely within the confines of the American film industry;
and during this brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, directors, producers, actors, and screenwriters imagined a very different cinematic world.
Through their own biographies, as well as their aesthetic strategies and modes
of productions, many challenged the hegemonic political and cultural divisions between Europe and America, the Eastern Bloc and the West, or the
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global North and South. To reconstruct that map from the distance of over
forty years is an exercise in estrangement akin to consulting a medieval atlas,
as land masses known to be large appear minuscule and many of the geopolitical entities usually considered indispensable and enduring warrant the
scantest attention. The idea of the new wave was enough to conjure up a
substantially different map of cultural geography.
If it is possible to sketch a narrative of world film in the 1960s that incorporates both the French and the Czech new waves and then traces their ramifications into the 1980s and 1990s, how does the cinema of the United States, obviously one of the major Cold War players and the worlds dominant cultural
power, fit into this story? Was there actually a new wave in the United States?
The phrase American new wave has continued to bounce around film history and criticism since the end of the 1960s: in surveys of film history or
critical biographies of the key players from the period;8 or, more comprehensively, in the Walker Art Centers exhibition and catalog The American New
Wave, 195867.9 And the term hovers around all narratives of recent American cinema. Mark Harris, for example, in Pictures from a Revolution, a recent
history of five films that sparked a transformation in the business and aesthetic paradigms in American cinema, refers repeatedly to the desire on the
part of key players in that period, including Beatty, Benton, and Newman, to
make the first American French New Wave movie.10 And in a retrospective
1995 interview, Benton recalls that while formulating the story idea for Bonnie
and Clyde, he and Newman steeped themselves in the influences on the early
new wave and the breakthrough films of the period. They watched Gun Crazy
(Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), The 400 Blows, Breathless, and Shoot the Piano Player
(as well as Hitchcocks Rope [1948]) and, with these many influences percolating in their minds, were compelled to write the screenplay for an American
New Wave movie about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.11 They were initially fixated on Truffaut and Godard as the best candidates to direct the film,
but after a long process of negotiation and reflection, Truffaut dropped out to
pursue other previously agreed projects. Godard, in characteristic fashion,
wanted to shoot immediately, in a hurry, and in New Jersey. When the producers pointed out that location shooting near the gangs old haunts in Texas
was essential to the concept and that winter weather would require a wait of
several months, Godard chastised them for their obsession with meteorology. He then brought the meeting to a close and dropped out of the project
shortly thereafter. From the late 1960s onward, the American new wave developed without a direct connection to actual French filmmakers, new Hollywood became a phenomenon in its own right, and the unusually powerful
influence of a foreign film culture in Hollywood began to wane.
In that brief window of opportunity, a handful of directors constructed an
alternative film history that escapes the gravitational pull of Hollywood and
unfolds in a polycentric space where new waves propagate in Japan, France,
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Italy, and elsewhere in the world. Arthur Penn, the replacement for Truffaut
and Godard at the helm of Bonnie and Clyde and the director of the Hollywood film most conspicuously influenced by European art cinemas, Mickey
One (1965), occupied a crucial position in the rise of the American new wave,
as did more marginal figures like Cassavetes and Van Peebles. Mickey One,
with its painstaking (that is to say, laboriously filmed and expensive) depiction of Chicago and Detroit on the verge of their decline into the capitals of
the Rust Belt, and Bonnie and Clyde, with its location shooting in small towns
along country roads, suggest that Penn was one of the filmmakers most interested in the actual transformation of the landscape of the United States and its
mythologies of space across the twentieth century, from the Depression-era
small town to the big city at the height of its industrial productivity and its
gangland displays of power and masculinity. Penn later described Bonnie and
Clyde as a story about the agricultural nature of the country,12 and Robert
Kolker draws a distinction between the gangsters framed as creatures of the
city in films like Mickey One, with the darkness and fragmentation of the city
providing a necessary layer of protection, and the country gangster isolated
in the open space of the prairies.13 One of Penns achievements in these two
films is to spatialize and historicize the gangster genre by representing outlaws
and outsiders within the landscapes that reveal the limits of law and order at a
particular historical moment. Through a series of city films set in New York,
Cassavetes exhibits his fascination and concern with the transformation of
American cities in the postwar era. As Jonas Mekas suggests, Shadows (1959),
a story of interracial relations and Beat-era New York, maintains a sense
of spontaneity that characterizes both the city and the method actors bent
on becoming someone else rather than merely performing a role. He says:
through improvisations and outbursts of feeling, the film slowly builds up
and grows, without any sense of imposed force, and simultaneously an image
of the city emerges, with its downtown nights and its night people14 After his
move to Hollywood, Cassavetes remade himself as a chronicler of the historically unprecedented space of suburbia, with films like Faces (1968) alternating
between the horizontal landscapes and architecture of a newly reconstructed
southern California and the bodies who inhabit those environments and reinvent themselves as creatures of the suburb. And in registering the rise of these
settings, Cassavetes experimented with ever longer takes, enormous piles of
exposed footage (the original cut of Faces was eight hours long), and greater
degrees of spontaneity in the production process, most of which took place at
his own home. All of these suggest that at a certain point in his development
of a philosophy of film, narrative economy disappeared as an overriding concern, and instead he pursued a cinema focused on characters moving through
the unfamiliar spaces of a suburbanizing America. And in his approach to
characterization, Cassavetes adopted a strategy best summarized by Vincent
Canby in his review of Husbands (1970): it is a narrative film without any real
308
narrative, and although it is a movie about three characters, those characters

are seen almost exclusively in terms of their limiting relationship. Its as if
someone decided to photograph a tug-of-war and photographed only the
rope between the contestants.15 Emanuel Levy argues that these thematic
concerns, formal features, and production practices make Cassavetes a unique
figure in American cinema of the period: he was the American new wave.16
Melvin Van Peebles, one of the innovators in the development of AfricanAmerican urban cinema, makes city films, but with barely a glimpse of the
postcard or apocalyptic versions of urban Los Angeles or New York visible in
mainstream American media at the time. Instead, Van Peebles adapts the new
waves guerrilla filmmaking techniques and obsession with genres to the locations that complement and contradict the vision of small towns and aging
cities in Penn or the dense, vertical Manhattan and horizontal Los Angeles
suburbs of Cassavetes. Van Peebles spawns a new genre and a decade-long
cinematic fascination with African-American inner cities. Penn, Cassavetes,
and Van Peebles would then be the closest equivalent of a new wave produced
at a moment when Hollywood and New York were abuzz with excitement
about the new filmmaking movements in Europe and Japan and they reveal
this kinship not because of their overt celebration of that influence but because of their overriding interest in the changing topography of the decaying
industrial city and the emergence of suburbia, with all their inescapable effects
on the mise-en-scne of postwar America.
While the urban cinema of Penn, Cassavetes, and Van Peebles represents
one common approach to the changing topography of America, the iconic
space of the period remains the open road. The car or motorcycle hurtling
down the country highway implies a very different cartographic project than
the intricately mapped cities of Mickey One or Shadows. It begins with a quixotic search for an authentic space outside the city and expanding suburbs, a
quest for a mythical real America best exemplified by the road scenes in Easy
Rider (1969). At both the physical periphery and intellectual core of this mythology lies the frontier. Robert Ray has suggested that by the 1960s filmmakers
had begun to mark the closing of the frontier in the American West, and Barbara Klinger demonstrates the crucial role of the highway system, constructed
largely in the 1950s, in contributing to this closure and spawning a cinema and
visual culture dedicated to exploring the artificiality rather than the natural
profusion of the landscape.17 But in this period, the aura of European art
cinema also authorized and reinvigorated this search for the frontier. In the
process of reimporting its own clichs about the gangster and rugged individualism from Europe, after laundering them abroad, American cinema received
the gift of its own youth, or at least the ability to imagine its age-old fables as
new again. The clich was reinvigorated by the frisson of the foreign and reframed as art. On its release, Andrew Sarris criticized Easy Rider as an extended precredit sequence and a motley combination of innovative, fast-paced
Conclusion
309
aesthetics and the oldest American mythology of escape from civilization,

living off the soil, and departure again on the open road.18 Richard Goldstein
of the New York Times responded with a defense of this apparent navete: I
guess I really want to believe in that kind of silliness. Because the adventures of
Captain America seem terribly moving to me. Give me chills, because they
suggest that if you separate the land and technology of America from its politics, you have a valid basis for patriotism. It may seem dialectically and esthetically unsound, but I want to believe that Easy Rider is a travel poster for
the new America.19 But what is the new America advertised in this period?
During the American new wave, the United States begins to exemplify the situation that Jameson identifies as the condition of postmodernity: the nearly
total expansion of late capitalism and the commodity form so that previous
models predicated on an inside and outside, models based on the concept of
contradiction, are immediately engulfed by the forces they ostensibly oppose.20
The new cinema marks the end of this old world order in the space of the
United States but also provides a premonition and a paradigm of globalization
itself: the export and subsequent search for America all around the world, with
economic miracles producing a brighter and newer version of it, a vision that
it rediscovers and admires for its youth and vigor and that convinces it once
again of its timeless mission and destiny.
But there is another way to think about the relationship between American
cinema and the new waves. In the crucial period during the late 1960s when
Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and the other paradigmatic new Hollywood
productions were under development, Larry Turman bought the rights to a
relatively unsuccessful first novel called The Graduate, a story of an affluent
young man with a promising future who nevertheless sees no reason to get out
of bed or the pool. He engages first in passive rebellion and then increasingly
outrageous challenges to the values of his parents and their suburban lifestyle.
The project eventually attracted Broadways brightest directing star, Mike
Nichols, and one of Hollywoods most talented screenwriters, Buck Henry, but
while adapting the novel to the screen, they faced several major obstacles. First
were the sparse dialogue and nearly total absence of descriptive passages,
which resulted in minimalist creations where the personalities should be and
a setting with almost no concrete reality except for a few place-names mentioned in stray lines of conversation. More complicated was the fact that the
novel, based loosely on the personal experience of the author, Charles Webb,
was already several years old, and many of its most intriguing lines of dialogue
sounded dated, including some peculiar advice dropped at a party with an air
of solemnity: if Benjamin wants a rewarding future, a family friend suggests,
one simple word offers the key to happiness and prosperity: plastics. The
problem for Henry was that the era of plastics had already arrived in the 1950s
and early 1960s; it was the ubiquitous present-day reality rather than a wave of
the future. And the suburbs where Benjamin lives and navigates through
310
simultaneous affairs with Elaine Robinson and her mother are the aesthetics
of plastic writ large and inscribed onto the landscape. The swimming pools,
the fish tanks, the manicured lawns: these are pure artifice constructed from
the raw materials of nature. And from the moving sidewalk at the airport to
Benjamins Alfa Romeo, movement through the city has become a carefully
controlled and channeled activity, an act of compliance or consumption.
The novel was written at a moment when the transformation of the American mise-en-scne remained unfinished business, when escape to another environment seemed like a legitimate possibility, but the film takes place in a
much more oppressive landscape. The Graduate paints such a bleak image of
the space of suburbia that Benjamins flight onto the open road seems inevitable, and the evergreens of northern California and the urbanity of Berkeley
offer the promise of respite from what he fears will become the rest of his life.
But when the camera begins to explore these suburban spaces and their alternatives, the director cues the music, and the unforgettable Simon and Garfunkel tunes begin to play. These are among the most telling moments in the film
because of their association with the best-selling soundtrack and because of
the details they gloss over or conceal. The scenes when the film becomes the
image track for folk rock are precisely the moments that would otherwise
mark the emergence of mise-en-scne from the background to the conceptual
center of the film. These moments of passage from one location and category
of space to another, these vital shots where the new spatial realities of the
second half of the twentieth century come into view: these segments are relegated to their habitual position as mere setting, and 1960s American cinema
begins its love affair with the key revenue generators for the film industry in
the 1970s, the soundtrack and other commercial tie-ins that would eventually
reinvent the film as a billboard or commercial for other products. If The Graduate was supposed to be one of the breakthrough films of an American new
wave, perhaps it suggests instead that this wave in American cinema had already passed before the New Hollywood even began.
If there was an American new wave, it may be located in the moment between the writing of The Graduate and its realization as a film, the period between the dissemination of plastics and their inescapable reality, between the
relics of earlier twentieth-century modernity and the objects and spaces imagined as disposable and flowing. When Jack Kerouac wrote The Town and the
City in 1950, the title itself presupposed a fundamental difference between the
two spaces imagined as opposites within a social and ideological system. By
the time of On the Road (1957), a novel ostensibly focused on journeys along
rural American highways and therefore the forgotten America later explored
in Easy Rider, Kerouac downplays the reality of towns, villages, and the highway, focusing instead on his adventures in a network of cities across the country. Kerouacs novels witness the vanishing of a landscape overtaken by expanding suburbs and the road itself. This period also corresponds to the tail
Conclusion
311
end of classic film noir, one of the key American city genres, and the films that
inspired the French new wave. With its prototypical formula of gruff urban
characters transplanted to southern Californias emerging suburbs, noir also
represents a space in the process of transformation. Hitchcocks Psycho (1960),
set on the road between Phoenix and Los Angeles and then on a lost highway
rendered obsolete by the interstates then under construction, would be another example of a film located in this gap between modernity and the spatial
system that eventually overtook it. And the 1950s films of Nicholas Ray, with
their iconic images of rebellious youth, their elaborate reconstruction of the
architecture of conformity, their furious violence directed at the totality of the
stage that surrounds them, these, too, are among American cinemas key documents of a transformation projected onto the spaces of everyday life. If there
is an American new wave, it may have less in common with the films that
come after the global new waves of the 1960s than the films produced just
before, the films that reveal the inherent contradictions of American modernization within their mise-en-scne. While the critics at Cahiers du cinma
converged on these objects and spaces as a material manifestation of the vision
of an author, and while French film criticism from the period is notoriously
impervious to the subtleties of U.S. history, their focus on the mise-en-scne
of Hollywood and in their own productions suggests that the American new
wave may be the chronicle not of the late 1960s and after, the era of Easy
Riders and Raging Bulls, but the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and
early 1960s, the moment when the urban and industrial modernity of the
early twentieth century began its transition to a global model of production,
suburban living, and the abandoned city. As they focused obsessively on the
mise-en-scne of Hollywood cinema, the critics and filmmakers of the French
new wave were witnessing the Americanization of America, the dissemination of a soon-to-be global ideology in the communities and landscapes of the
United States.
In the age of new waves, cinema that refuses to flow nonetheless circulates
on a transnational scale, and films that foreground their locality reach a worldwide following, even if their distribution network has never rivaled the domain
of Hollywood. Images both move and linger on, much like the new waves
themselves and the history they capture in a frame. Alain Badiou argues that
the current moment of globalization marks the conclusion of a long political
sequence based on the logic of contradiction, the waning of a model of history
theorized most comprehensively by Marx, and the beginning of an obscure era
characterized by emerging forms of political and cultural resistance.21 Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri maintain that the world is becoming smooth, and
they herald the ascent of a new age of empire . . . characterized by a fluidity of
forman ebb and flow of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration.22 Political and cultural change are now immanent in the uncontrollable flows of images and people unleashed by the process of globalization,
312
they suggest. Anticipating these debates of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, Baudrillards 1968 treatise on the system of objects describes a
new situation in which objects come to have a status just as ephemeral as that
of words or images, resulting in a condition of planned flimsiness and continually eroded synchrony where all negation becomes impossible. There are
no more contradictions, no more structural changes, no more social dialectics.23 The age of new waves of the second half of the twentieth century coincides with the halting and discontinuous transition between these two paradigms, but the films also reveal the persistence and vitality of contradictions
located not outside and elsewhere but within the fundamental structures of
society: the body, the world of objects, the cityscape, and cinema. These films
witness the survival of friction and defiance in the flickering images usually
seen as the epitome of the global flow and harbingers of a smooth world. The
persistence of this idea of cinema through decades of new waves suggests that
the unfinished modern era in world and film history has not yet vanished from
the scene.
{ notes }
Introduction
1. Ronald Steel, When Worlds Collide, New York Times, July 21, 1996.
2. See Peter Cowie, Revolution: The Explosion of World Cinema in the 1960s (New York:
Faber and Faber, 2004).
3. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 1.
4. Ibid., 45.
5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3.
6. See Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and
Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World, in
Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); Julio Garca Espinosa, For an Imperfect Cinema, in Toby Miller and
Robert Stam, eds., Film Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and Jim Pines and
Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI, 1990).
7. The OED suggests that the first usage of the term globalization in its contemporary
sense of the development of economic and other institutions on an international scale was
in 1959.
8. Some critics have explored the connections between and among these distinct film
cultures. Lian Wenguang, for example, considers the connection between the French
new wave and the Chinas Fifth Generation in Zhongguo di wu dai yu faguo xinlangchao dianying bijiaolun [A comparison of Chinas Fifth Generation and the French
new wave], Film Art (March 1994), 7985. The most detailed and comprehensive of those
comparisons is visible across the work of Peggy Hsiung-ping Chiao on the new waves in
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and France. See Chiao, Faguo dianying xinlangchao [The French
new wave] (Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005), and Taiwan dianying 90 xin xinlangchao [New new wave of Taiwan cinema in the 1990s] (Taipei: Maitian chuban,
2002).
9. See Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America
since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
10. Neil Smith, Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale, Social Text 33 (1992), 66.
11. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001), 60.
12. Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 19071939
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 225.
13. This article was quoted in a House of Commons debate on the Cinematograph Films Bill
in 1927. Accessed February 21, 2013, at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1927/
mar/22/cinematograph-films-bill. See also Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey, Temporary
American Citizens: Cultural Anxieties and Industrial Strategies in the Americanisation of
314
Notes to Pages 812
European cinema, in Catherine Fowler, ed., The European Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 181.
14. Walter F. Wanger, Donald Duck and Diplomacy, Public Opinion Quarterly 14.3
(Autumn 1950), 444.
15. Ibid., 443.
16. Ibid., 446.
17. uroviov, Translating America: The Hollywood Multilinguals, 19291933, in
Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory, Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), 141.
18. Ibid.
19. Quoted in Barry James, Box Office or Front Line?: Movie Receipts Illuminate Trade
War, International Herald Tribune, October 6, 1993.
20. Paid advertisement in Daily Variety, October 29, 1993.
21. Quoted in Tom Shone, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Summer (New York: Free Press, 2004), 225.
22. On the French role in insisting on a cultural exception in world trade agreements,
see Jonathan Buchsbaum, The Exception Culturelle Is Dead, Long Live Diversity: French
Cinema and the New Resistance, Framework 47.1 (2006), 521.
23. Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 7677.
24. Quoted in Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Italian Film from 1942 to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 91.
25. Quoted in Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 18961996 (London: Routledge,
1996), 8687.
26. Cowie, Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 1960s (New York: Faber
and Faber, 2004), 133.
27. See Guback, The International Film Industry; Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire:
Americas Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002).
28. Quoted in Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), 35.
29. Moretti, Planet Hollywood, New Left Review 9 (2001), 100.
30. On Bollywood and the global reach of South Asian cinema, see Jigna Desai, Beyond
Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge,
2002). On the global dimensions of Hong Kong cinema, see David Bordwell, Planet Hong
Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless
World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
31. See Pines and Willemen, Questions of Third Cinema; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam,
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994);
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake, Rethinking Third Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003).
32. Spivak, Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism, Critical Inquiry 12.1
(1985), 243234. Sasha Welland examines the relationship between Spivaks concept of
worlding and the various worldspostcolonial, socialist, capitalistunder construction
Notes to Pages 1219
315
in the second half of the twentieth century. See Welland, Experimental Beijing: Contemporary Art Worlds in Chinas Capital (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006).
33. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 5.
34. Chabrol, Et pourtant je tourne (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1976), 135.
35. Ibid.
36. Giroud, I Give You My Word, trans. Richard Seaver (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1974), 108.
37. Ibid.
38. Mobi Boom: Lexplosion du design en France, 19451975 (Paris: Les Arts Dcoratifs,
2010).
39. Hlne David-Weill, preface to Mobi Boom: Lexplosion du design en France, 19451975
(Paris: Les Arts Dcoratifs, 2010), 8.
40. Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, trans. Sharon
Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 339.
41. Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John
Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 34.
42. Ibid., 28, 29.
43. Ibid., 31.
44. Ibid., 35.
45. Ibid., 73.
46. Ibid., 74.
47. Ibid., 92.
48. Anna McCarthy offers a critique of Augs concept of the non-place in Ambient
Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001),
3 and 78. She advocates a site-specific or quasi-ethnographic approach to reception in
these new environments.
49. Aug, Non-Places, 3536. See also William Mitchell, The City of Bits: Space, Place,
and the Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
50. Choay, Le rgne de lurbain et la mort de la ville, trans. Alistair Clarke, in Jacques
Lvy, ed., The City: Critical Essays in Human Geography (London: Ashgate, 2008), 106.
51. Ibid., 107.
52. Ibid.
53. See Labarthe, Essai sur le jeune cinma franais (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1960).
54. See Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris (London: BFI, 2003).
55. See Moullet, Sam Fuller: In Marlowes Footsteps, in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du
Cinma: The 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 145155.
56. Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), 83.
57. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1994), 12.
58. Restivo, The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 108109.
59. Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 11.
60. Quoted in Andrs Blint Kovcs, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema,
19501980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 189.
316
Notes to Pages 2027
61. Fourasti, Les Trentes Glorieuses, ou la rvolution invisible (Paris: Fayard, 1979).
62. Bazin, On the politique des auteurs, in Hillier, 1950s, 258.
63. Neale, Art Cinema as Institution, Screen 22.1 (1981), 11.
64. Brennan, The National Longing for Form, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and
Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 56.
65. Neale, Art Cinema as Institution, 12.
66. Bordwell, The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice, in Fowler, European
Cinema Reader, 94.
67. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 23.
68. Ibid., 10.
69. Ibid., 34.
70. Ibid., 74.
71. See Bazin, Du Festival considr comme un ordre, Cahiers du cinma 48 (June
1955), 68.
72. Stringer, Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy, in Mark Shiel
and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global
Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 137.
73. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1995), 194.
74. Kovcs, Screening Modernism, 16.
75. Kovcs argues that modernist cinema, including the new wave, was primarily narrative and presented cinemas reflection on artistic or cultural traditions outside of cinema.
He adds that modernisms most salient formal traits are not specific to the cinema; rather,
they are cinematic applications of the stylistic features of modern art more broadly. This
conception of modernism seems incompatible with some modernist movements in cinema,
especially Italian neorealism and the French new wave, that rely on the medium-specific
photographic dimensions of film, including its capacity to produce a realistic and authoritative representation of the external world. Although Cahiers critics referred frequently to
trends in other modernist arts, especially the American novel, the idea of mise-en-scne
advanced in Cahiers is also an attempt to develop a theory of modernism specific to cinema.
See Screening Modernism, 17, 52.
76. Mourlet, Sur un art ignor, La Mise en scne comme langage (Paris: Henri Veyrier,
1987), 35, 42.
77. Aumont, Le Cinma et la mise en scne, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 4.
78. Ibid., 9.
79. These definitions are drawn from the 2010 online edition of the OED. The French
word objet has similar etymological roots.
80. Smith, Le Temps du plastique: The Critique of Synthetic Materials in 1950s
France, Modern and Contemporary France 15.1 (2007), 136. See also Baudrillard, The
System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Bachelard, Le Matrialisme
rationnel (Paris: PUF, 1953); Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1994); and Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John and Doreen Weightman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
81. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 1.
82. Ibid., 144.
Notes to Pages 2836
317
83. Ibid., 63.

84. For example, Baudrillards account of this new material world draws on Ernest
Dichters work The Strategy of Desire and Pierre Martineaus Motivation in Advertising:
Motives That Make People Buy.
85. Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 1. Bauman introduces the concept of liquid modernity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 115.
86. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 26.
87. Smith, Le Temps du plastique, 137.
88. Ibid., 140.
89. Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties and a Man Asleep, trans. David Bellos (Jaffrey,
N.H.: Godine, 1990), 93.
90. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 206.
91. Labarthe, Mort dun mot, Cahiers du cinma 195 (November 1967), 66. Adrian
Martin examines the death and afterlife of the concept and practice of mise-en-scne in
Mise en scne is Dead, or The Expressive, The Excessive, The Technical and The Stylish,
Continuum 5.2 (1990), 87-140.
92. Labarthe, Mort dun mot, 66.
93. Labarthe borrows this phrase from Chabrol.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Zhou Yi-Xing, The Prospect of International Cities in China, in John R. Logan,
ed., The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 60.
Zhou adds that becoming an international city was the stated goal of nearly fifty Chinese
cities in the 1990s.
97. Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Howard Eiland, in Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings, eds., Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, 19381940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), 402.
98. See Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts
and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001), and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea
of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
99. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1974).
100. Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books,
1991), 21.
101. Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe (London: Wallflower, 2003), 33.
102. Marx, preface to first edition, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 2011), 13.
103. Cheah, Grounds of Comparison, in Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah, Grounds
of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2.
104. Chatterjee, Whose Imagined Community?, Empire and Nation: Selected Essays
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 16.
105. Cheah, Grounds of Comparison, 2.
106. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World
(London: Verso, 1998), 57.
318
Notes to Pages 3749
107. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.

108. Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, 2.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. Cheah, Grounds of Comparison, 5.
112. Anderson, Responses, in Culler and Cheah, Grounds of Comparison, 245.
113. Perry Anderson, The Ends of History, in A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso,
1992), 375.
114. Tsing, The Global Situation, Cultural Anthropology 15.3 (August 2000), 328.
Chapter 1
1. See Truffaut, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies
and Methods: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
2. Truffaut, Vous tes tous tmoins dans ce procs: Le cinma franais crve sous les
fausses lgendes, Arts, May 15, 1957. This and other early Truffaut essays are collected in Le
Plaisir des yeux: crits sur le cinma (Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 2000).
3. Ibid.
4. Franois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol use this phrase, borrowed from Henry James,
to allude to the figures drawn, consciously or otherwise, by the hand of the author and visible to the perceptive critic. See Truffaut and Chabrol, Entretien avec Alfred Hitchcock,
Cahiers 44 (February 1955), 42.
5. See Andr S. Labarthe, Essai sur le jeune cinma franais (Paris: Le Terrain Vague,
1960).
6. See, for example, Nicole de Maupeou-Leplatre, Pour une sociologie des jeunes dans
la socit industrielle, Annales: conomies, Socits, Civilisations 16.1 (1961), 8798.
7. See Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 79.
8. Ibid., 179.
9. See Le Pour et le contre, Cahiers du cinma 12 (May 1952), 4148. Although Bazin is
slightly more paternal and lighthearted, he also recognizes the conspicuous display of expertise in the Cahiers circle: they speak of what they know, of what they love, and it is always
beneficial to listen to specialists. See his seminal essay on the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, Comment peut-on tre Hitchcocko-Hawksien?, Cahiers du cinma 44 (February 1955), 1718.
10. Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 20.
11. Ibid., 7, 25.
12. As is often the case, Bazin uses the same filmmakers celebrated by the younger Cahiers critics to counteract their claims about authorship and mise-en-scne, in this case
John Huston. For the observation about the importance of the subject, see Bazin, De
lambigut: The Red Badge of Courage, Cahiers du cinma 27 (October 1953), 4954. For
his famous comment on the genius of the system, see Bazin, On the politique des auteurs, in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinma: The 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 258.
13. The most comprehensive political critique of auteur theory in English is John Hesss
two-part essay La politique des auteurs: World View as Aesthetics, Jump Cut 1 (1974),
Notes to Pages 4956
319
1922, and La politique des auteurs: Truffauts manifesto, Jump Cut 2 (1974), 2022. See
also Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 19291968 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Da Capo Press, 1996).
14. Sellier, 40.
15. Ibid., 224.
16. Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997), 18.
17. Truffaut, The Films in My Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1994), 149.
18. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the point in depth, this
comparison with the act of weaving suggests that some filmmaking practices are what Tim
Ingold, in an essay titled On Weaving a Basket, describes as dynamic, morphogenetic
processes. He argues that to emphasize making is to regard the object as the expression
of an idea; to emphasize weaving is to regard it as the embodiment of a rhythmic movement. . . . We are inclined to look for the meaning of the object in the idea it expresses
rather than in the current of activity to which it properly and originally belongs. Auteurist
criticism looks for the idea originating in the auteur, but it usually disregards the activity of
making, or more precisely, weaving a film and, in the context of the new wave, its necessary
relationship to mise-en-scne. See, On Weaving a Basket, in Fiona Candlin and Raiford
Guins, eds., The Object Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 88.
19. Henderson, The Long Take, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 315. One of the most direct answers to the question What is mise-en-scne? was posed in a 1959 essay by Alexandre Astruc with that very
title, but his first sentence proves deliberately deflating and underscores the ambiguity surrounding the term: One doesnt need to have made a lot of films to realize that there is no
such thing as mise-en-scne. See Astruc, What is mise en scne?, in Hillier, 1950s, 266.
20. Henderson, 315.
21. Michel Marie, The French New Wave, trans. Richard Neupert (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003).
22. If there is a flaw in Selliers study of the new wave, it is a tendency to focus on narratives, reviews, and other textual evidence to tease out the attitudes of the directors and
critics of the time. This approach often disregards the complexity of cinematic images that
constitute a more ambiguous but still relevant document of the period.
23. See Rancire, La Fable cinmatographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 11.
24. Domarchi et al., Hiroshima, notre amour, in Hillier, 1950s, 63.
25. Quoted in Thierry de Duve, Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 70 (Fall 1994), 71.
26. De Baecque, Les Cahiers du cinma: Histoire dune revue, vol. 1, lassaut du cinma,
19511959 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinma, 1991), 62.
27. See Cahiers du cinma 90 (December 1958), 3577.
28. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (V): Architecture dapocalypse, Cahiers du
cinma 53 (December 1955), 2829.
29. Introduction lhistoire culturelle des Trente Glorieuses, in Dominique Forest,
ed., Mobi Boom: Lexplosion du design en France, 19451975 (Paris: Les Arts Dcoratifs,
2010), 22.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. France-Observateur, October 19, 1961.
320
Notes to Pages 5664
32. See Dorsday, Le cinma est mort, Cahiers du cinma 16 (October 1952), 5558.
33. Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon (London: W. H.
Allen, 1974), 90. The context of this remark is a discussion of depth of field and the centrality of actors in Renoirs filmmaking process.
34. See Bazin, Montage interdit, Cahiers du cinma 65 (December 1956), 3236.
35. Hillier, 1950s, 78.
36. Rivette, Gnie de Howard Hawks, Cahiers du cinma 23 (May 1953), 1223.
37. Rivette, Mizoguchi Viewed from Here, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 264.
38. Schrer, Le Soupon, Cahiers du cinma 12 (May 1952), 6366.
39. Quoted in de Baecque, 87.
40. Bazin, Umberto D, trans Jim Hillier, in Hillier, 1950s, 181.
41. Fereydoun Hoveyda and Jacques Rivette, Interview with Roberto Rossellini, trans
Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 212.
42. Bazin et al., Six Characters in Search of Auteurs, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s,
36.
43. Andrs Blint Kovcs, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 19501980
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 221222.
44. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen:
Green Integer, 1997), 79.
45. Sontag, Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson, in Against Interpretation
and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 186, and Truffaut, The Films in My Life,
86.
46. Sontag, Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson, 188.
47. Ibid., 189190.
48. Ibid., 190.
49. Ibid., 177.
50. Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005), 244.
51. Rivette, The Essential, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 133.
52. Truffaut, The Rogues Are Weary, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 29.
53. For an account of the rise of the screenwriter in the classical Hollywood system, see
Patrick McGilligan, ed., Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywoods Golden
Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). See also Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking
Dames (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
54. Rivette, The Essential, 134.
55. Ibid., 135.
56. Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 128.
57. Bazin, Beauty of a Western, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 167.
58. Ibid.
59. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972), 60.
60. Truffaut, The Early Film Criticism of Franois Truffaut, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85.
61. Ibid., 87.
62. Ibid., 86, 126.
63. Truffaut, A Wonderful Certainty, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 108.
Notes to Pages 6473
321
64. Godard, Beyond the Stars, trans. Tom Milne, in Hillier, 1950s, 118.
65. Hoveyda, Nicholas Rays Reply: Party Girl, trans. Norman King, in Jim Hillier, ed.,
Cahiers du Cinma: The 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 127.
66. Godard, Nothing but Cinema, trans. Tom Milne, in Hillier, 1950s, 117.
67. Charles Bitsch, Interview with Nicholas Ray, in Hillier, 1950s, 123.
68. Ibid., 121.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Hoveyda, Nicholas Rays Reply, 122, 123, 125.
72. Ibid., 127.
73. Bazin et al., Six Characters in Search of Auteurs, 37.
74. Moullet, Sam Fuller: In Marlowes Footsteps, trans. Norman King, in Hillier,
1950s, 153.
75. Godard, Beyond the Stars, 118.
76. Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge, 1997), 330.
77. Rohmer was not the only Cahiers critic to make this link between antiquity and the
modern art of cinema. In the same year that Rohmer published his extended essay on the
topic, Philippe Demonsablon titled an essay on Herman Mankiewicz Des anciens et des
modernes and sounded a similar theme. See Cahiers du cinma 49 (July 1955), 4445.
78. A translation of portions of the essay is available in Christopher Williams, ed., Realism and the Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 5468. In 1965 Rohmer
directed an installment in the series Cinastes de notre temps titled Le Cellulod et le
marbre.
79. Eric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty, 2.
80. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (IV), Cahiers du cinma 52 (November 1955), 25.
81. Rohmer, Taste for Beauty, 12.
82. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (I), Cahiers du cinma 44 (February 1955), 33.
83. Ibid.
84. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 18.
85. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220224.
86. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (I), 33.
87. Rohmer, Rediscovering America, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 89.
88. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (II), Cahiers du cinma 49 (July 1955), 11.
89. Ibid., 13.
90. Bourdieu outlines the process by which an artistic field asserts its autonomy, including
the key phase: claiming the right to defend for itself the principles of its legitimacy. See The
Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 61. In Distinction, he argues that popular media like cinema
become more autonomous and legitimate through their recognition by academic and other
institutions with the power to bestow canonical status. See Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 26.
91. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (III), Cahiers du cinma 51 (October 1955), 7.
92. Ibid.
93. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 262.
322
Notes to Pages 7383
94. Rohmer, Le Cellulod et le marbre (V), Cahiers du cinma 53 (December 1955), 22.
95. Ibid., 26.
96. Ibid., 22.
97. Ibid., 24.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 28.
100. Ibid., 26. In his invocation of Platos cave allegory, Rohmer anticipates Jean-Louis
Baudrys much more elaborate discussion of the link between the viewing conditions of the
theater, the cinematic apparatus, and the apolitical condition of blindness that ensues.
See Baudry, Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, trans. Jean
Andrews and Bertrand Augst, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 294.
101. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 108.
102. Ibid., 89, 108.
103. Ibid., 86.
104. Ibid., 105.
105. Ibid., 108.
106. Rancire, La Fable cinmatographique, 11.
107. Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New
York: Basic Books, 1994), 2.
108. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 180.
109. Ibid., 187.
110. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, 108.
111. Ibid.
112. Pasolini, Tetis, trans. Patrick Rumble, in Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa, eds., Pier
Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 246.
114. Ibid., 105.
115. Kracauer, Calico-World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg, in Candlin and Guins,
Object Reader, 326.
116. Ibid.
118. Ibid., 92.
119. Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City, Residential Parking, Climatic Universal System, in
K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 59.
120. Varnelis explores the work of Archizoom and the No-Stop City in A Brief History of Horizontality, Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica (March 2003), accessed February
19, 2013 at http://varnelis.net/articles/horizontality.
Chapter 2
1. Population figures for Paris and its greater metropolitan area accessed February 20,
2013 at http://cassini.ehess.fr/cassini/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=26207 and http://
www.iau-idf.fr/fileadmin/Etudes/etude_356/nr_31_la_population_des_departements_
franciliens_de_1851.pdf. For a summary of the census data on French urbanization from
1936 to the present, see http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?ref_id=ip1364.
Notes to Pages 8495
323
2. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 53.
3. Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia In France, 19601970 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2007), 10.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ibid., 12.
7. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 9293.
8. Pierre Nora, The Era of Commemoration, in Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: The
Construction of the French Past, vol. 3, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia
9. Lotringer, Consumed by Myths, in Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France: 195898 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications,
1998), 43.
10. Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinma: The 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 168.
11. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), 91
12. Andrs Blint Kovcs, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 19501980
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 65.
13. Paul Virilio and the Oblique: Interview with Enrique Limon, in John Armitage,
ed., Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001), 51.
14. Ibid., 53.
15. Ibid., 54.
16. Ibid.
17. Quoted in Busbea, Topologies, 98.
18. For an account of Lefebvres role in the urban uprisings of 1968, see Jean-Louis Voileau, Les Architectes et Mai 68 (Paris: ditions Recherches, 2005).
19. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 412.
20. Ibid., 89.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 14.
23. Ibid., 3.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 6.
26. Ibid., 232.
27. Ibid., 62.
28. Ibid., 27.
29. Ibid., 46.
30. Ibid., 30.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 31.
33. Ibid., 49.
34. Ibid., 53.
35. Ibid., 73.
36. Ibid., 83.
324
Notes to Pages 95113
37. Ibid., 97.

38. Ibid., 36.
39. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London:
Continuum, 2002), 68.
40. Lefebvre, Right to the City, Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman
and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 173.
41. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 25.
42. Ibid., 167.
43. Ibid., 87.
44. See Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and Philippe Rogers The American Enemy: A
Story of French Anti-Americanism, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005). Vanessa Schwartz offers a contrary perspective in her account of the French
influence on American and cosmopolitan culture in the postwar world. See Its So French:
Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007).
45. Interview with Louis Malle, Parlons Cinma, Elevator to the Gallows, directed by
Malle (1957; New York: Criterion Collection, 2006), DVD.
46. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003), 34.
47. In this sense, she embodies the figure of the wandering woman identified by Mark
Betz as a key reference point for European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. He argues that
the loss of colonial empires, inter- and intranational migration, and xenophobia serve collectively as absent causes or suppressed knowledges of modern French and Italian cinema.
As modern women wander on the screen, their transgressions are subjected to a form of
recolonization and containment that parallels and compensates for the loss of empire.
See Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2009), 98, 99.
48. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 4446.
49. Ibid., 38.
50. Ibid., 39.
51. Babelon, The Louvre: Royal Residence and Temple of the Arts, in Realms of
Memory, vol. 3, 284.
52. This account of the production was narrated by set photographer Raymond Cauchetier in Raymond Cauchetiers New Wave, accessed February 20, 2013 at www.ascmag.
com/blog/2010/03/22/raymond-cauchetiers-new-wavepart-one/.
53. Godard on Godard, ed. and trans. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 132.
54. Richard Roud categorizes this group of filmmakers under the rubric Left Bank
cinema in The Left Bank, Sight and Sound 32.1 (Winter 196263), 2427. Claire Clouzot
revises this list to include literary filmmakers, including Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras,
and Alain Robbe-Grillet. See Le Cinma franais depuis la nouvelle vague (Paris: Nathan,
1972), 4648.
55. Domarchi et al., Hiroshima, notre amour, trans. Liz Heron, in Hillier, 1950s, 61.
56. Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Words on Last Year, trans. Raymond
Durgnat in Harry M. Geduld, ed., Film Makers on Film Making (Bloomington: Indiana
325
57. Ibid., 172.

58. Barthes, Objective Literature, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston,Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 13.
59. Ibid., 24.
60. In other words, I suggest here that Robbe-Grillet represents not a Left Bank tendency opposed to a Cahiers new wave but a middle ground between the literary new wave
constructed in the image of the nouveau roman and the more cinematic new wave organized around mise-en-scne and theorized at Cahiers.
61. Dimendberg, These Are Not Exercises in Style: Le Chant du Styrne, October 112.1
(2005), 78.
62. Ibid., 65.
63. Queneau quotes the remarks from Resnais in his Oeuvres compltes, vol. 1, ed.
Claude Debon (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 1261.
64. Cohen analyzes the relationship between CinemaScope, suburban space and architecture, and the sauntering figure of Marilyn Monroe in The Horizontal Walk: Marilyn
Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality, Yale Journal of Criticism 11.1 (1998), 259288.
65. Dimendberg, These Are Not Exercises in Style, 80.
66. See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). At least three essays have examined the representation of Paris in the film, including Jill Forbes, Gender and Space in Clo de 5 7,
Studies in French Cinema 2.2 (2002), 8389; Jim Morrissey, Paris and Voyages of SelfDiscovery in Clo de 5 7 and Le Fabuleux destin dAmlie Poulain, Studies in French
Cinema 8.2 (2008), 99110; and Janice Mouton, From Feminine Masquerade to Flneuse:
Agns Vardas Clo in the City, Cinema Journal 40.2 (2001), 316. Steven Ungar provides
the most detailed and insightful itinerary through the film and its vision of Paris in Clo de 5
7 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
67. Excerpts and copies of the questionnaires, including Daneys response, are in Kelly
Conway, A New Wave of Spectators: Contemporary Responses to Clo from 5 to 7, Film
Quarterly 61.1 (Fall 2007), 3847.
68. Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
207. Ungar points out that the original screenplay for the film also included a map. See
Clo de 5 7, 36.
69. Ungar, Clo de 5 7, 24.
70. See James Tweedie, The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in
Derek Jarmans Caravaggio, Screen 44.4 (2003), 379403.
71. Varda, Varda par Agns (Paris: Cahiers du Cinma, 1994), 48.
72. Ibid.
Chapter 3
1. Christine Mehring discusses the postwar origins of television art in Television Arts
Abstract Starts: Europe circa 19441969, October 125.1 (2008), 2964.
2. Coutard describes the strategy for shooting Alphaville at night in Chris Darkes companion to the film, Alphaville (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 14.
3. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 226.
326
4. mile Zola, The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 22.
5. In her study of the refugee camp located on the grounds of Cinecitt in Rome, Noa
Steimatsky argues that Italian neorealist filmmakers departed from the studio and filmed
on the streets of the city not to capture reality more directly but to avoid the far more dire
conditions faced by the ill-housed masses who remained victims of the war for years after
its apparent end. See Steimatsky, The Cinecitt Refugee Camp, 19441950, October 128
(Spring 2009), 2250. Tati represents a variation on the ongoing conflict between a realism
of the studio and the city. Unlike his new wave counterparts who preferred to shoot on
location, Tati builds his own city to suggest that the set is now coterminous with reality
itself.
6. See David Bellos, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (London: Harvill Press, 1999).
7. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 105.
8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 229.
Chapter 4
1. Zhan Hongzhi, Minguo qishiliunian Taiwan dianying xuanyan [Taiwan cinema
manifesto, 1987], in Taiwan xin dianying [Taiwan new cinema], ed. Peggy Hsiung-ping
Chiao (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 111118.
2. Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of
Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 80.
3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Gnter Berghaus (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 22.
4. Chris Berry and Lu Fei-I use the term island on the edge to characterize the many
forms of marginality reflected in contemporary Taiwan cinema. See Berry and Lu, Island
on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2005).
5. As Lu Fei-I and others have pointed out, the new wave made up only about 8 percent
of films produced during the 1980s and topped out at eleven total pictures in 1984. Lu,
Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue [Taiwan cinema: Politics, economics, aesthetics]
(Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998), 105.
6. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure
Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 8.
7. See Chiao, Taiwan dianying 90 xin xin langchao [New new wave of Taiwan cinema in
the nineties] (Taipei: Maitian, 2002).
8. See, for example, Nathan Lee, Global Lens, 2007, Village Voice, January 9, 2007.
9. Udden, No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
10. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005), 292.
11. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
12. Fredric Jameson, Remapping Taipei, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and
Space in the World System (London: BFI, 1992), 155.
327
13.Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 6.

14. See Chua Beng Huat and Younghan Cho, Editorial Introduction: American Pop
Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13.4 (2012), 485494 and Shunya Yoshimi, America
as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War,
trans. David Buist, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.3 (2003), 433450.
15. M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 47.
16. Quoted in Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 51. See also Yeh, Taipei as Shinjukus Other, in Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, eds., Cinema at the Citys Edge: Film
and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
17. See Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997), 88.
18. Local dialect films used Taiwanese or Minnanese, a close relative of the Amoy dialect. Minnanese is spoken in most regions of southeast Chinas Fujian province.
19. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 129.
20. Ibid., 148. See also Ye Longyan, Chunhua menglu: Zheng zong taiyu dianying xingshuai
lu [A record of the rise and fall of Taiwanese-dialect cinema] (Taipei: BoyYoung, 1999).
21. Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 2. Guo-juin Hong discusses the history of
healthy realism, with a particular focus on Lee Hsing, in Taiwan Cinema: A Contested
Nation on Screen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 65.
22. See Lu, Taiwan dianying, 105.
23. Ibid., 103104.
24. Lee is listed as codirector of Oyster Girl, though he was technically second in command to Li Jia on the production.
25. Ming-yan Lai discusses the opposition to Americanization and Westernization in
Taiwanese culture from the 1970s on in Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in
China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2008).
26. Udden, No Man an Island, 1323. This linguistic diversity under the rubric of
Chinese-language cinema provides one example of the complex formations of identity
in what Shu-mei Shih calls the sinophone world. See Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
27. Ebert, Cannes Coda: Why Its All Worth It, Chicago Sun-Times, May 24, 2005.
28. June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 9. Yip provides a detailed introduction
to the history of roots-seeking literature in recent Taiwan history and reads the work Hou
Hsiao-hsien in that context. This chapter differs from her account of Hous films by suggesting that the cinematic, which is to say modern and technologically mediated, form of
his work reframes his nostalgia in fundamental and transformative ways.
29. See, for example, the discussion of Confucianism in Hou and other recent Chineselanguage directors in Ni Zhen, Classical Chinese Painting and Cinematographic Signification, trans. Douglas Wilkerson, in Linda Erlich and David Desser, eds., Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1994), 75.
30. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 65.
31. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 194195.
328
32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994).
33. Dai Jinhua, Hou Hsiao-Hsiens Films: Pursuing and Escaping History, trans.
Zhang Jingyuan, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 9.2 (2008), 243.
34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xi.
35. Jameson made this observation at his keynote address for the conference Double
Vision: Taiwans New Cinema, Here and There, Yale University, October 31, 2003.
36. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 46.
37. Theodor Adorno, Valry Proust Museum, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 175.
Chapter 5
1. See Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds., Cinema and the City: Film and Urban
Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds., Screening the City (London: Verso, 2003); Linda Krause and Patrice Petro, eds., Global Cities:
Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 2002); Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion
Books, 2002); and David B. Clarke, The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997).
2. Miriam Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular
Modernism, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999), 69.
3. Ibid., 68.
4. Julian Stringer, Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy, in
Cinema and the City, 134144.
5. See Margaret Morse, An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall
and Television, in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193221.
6. Wang Wei, Taipei in Transformation, in Robert Ru-Shou Chen and Gene-Fon
Liao, eds., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei [Focus on Taipei through cinema 19501990]
(Taipei: Wanxiang tushu gufen youxian gongsi, 1995), 62.
7. Lin Wenchi, Taiwan dianying zhong de taibei chengxian [The emergence of Taipei
in Taiwan cinema], in Chen and Liao, Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taibei, 78.
8. See Hong Yueqing, Chengshi guiling: Dianying zhong de Taibei chengxian [City zero:
The presence of Taipei in cinema] (Taipei: Tianyuan chengshi wenhua shiye youxian
gongsi, 2002), and Lee Ching-Chih, ed., Taibei dianyingyuan: Chenghsi dianying kongjian
shendu daoyou [Movie theaters in Taipei: A city tour in films] (Taipei: Meta Media, 1998).
9. See Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
10. Virilio, The Overexposed City, in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (London:
Routledge, 1997), 389390.
11. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Cities: Real and Imagined, in Shiel and Fitzmaurice,
Cinema and the City, 104.
12. Ibid.
329
13. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, introduction to Charney and Schwartz, eds.,
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley : University of California Press,
1995), 3.
14. Ibid.
15. Miriam Hansen, America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and
Modernity, in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 363.
16. James Donald, The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces, in Chris Jenks, ed., Visual
Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 83.
17. Lee Ching-Chih, Xunzhao dianyingzhong de Taipei: Guopian zhong dui Taibei
dushi yixiang de suzao yu zhuanhuan [In search of Taipei in the films: Domestic movies in
forming and transforming Taipeis urban images], in Lee, Taibei dianyingyuan, 41.
18. Ibid., 3035.
19. Andrea Branzi: The Complete Works (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 5051
20. Interview with Leo Chanjen Chen, Taiwan Stories, New Left Review 11 (2001), 133.
21. Interview with John Anderson, in Anderson, Edward Yang (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2005), 37.
22. Leo Chanjen Chen, The Frustrated Architect: The Cinema of Edward Yang, New
Left Review 11 (SeptemberOctober 2001), 115.
24. Jameson, Remapping Taipei, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in
the World System (London: BFI, 1992).
25. See Yangs interview with Peggy Hsiung-ping Chiao, Mahjong: Urban Travails, in
Cinemaya 33 (Summer 1996), 24.
26. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in Reflections (New
York: Schocken Books, 1986), 154.
27. Ibid.
28. Chu-Tzu Hsu, Urban Dwelling Environments: Taipei, Taiwan (masters thesis,
MIT, 1976), 4.
29. Yi-Ling Chen, Provision for Collective Consumption: Housing Production under
Neoliberalism, in Reginald Yin-Wang Kwok, ed., Globalizing Taipei: The Political Economy of Spatial Development (New York: Routledge, 2005), 109.
30. See Braester, Painting the City Red, and Lin, Taiwan dianying zhong de Taibei
chengxian.
32. Jameson, Remapping Taipei, 155.
33. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e),
1991), 25.
34. See Chen, Frustrated Architect.
Chapter 6
1. See I-Fen Wu, Flowing Desire, Floating Souls: Modern Cultural Landscape in Tsai
Ming-Liangs Taipei Trilogy, Cineaction 58 (2002), 60.
2. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, The Generic City, in Jennifer Sigler, ed., Small,
Medium, Large, Extra-Large (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1239.
330
3. Andrew, Ghost Towns, in Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, eds., Cinema at the
Citys Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2010), 40.
4. Jeff Reichert and Erik Syngle, Ghost Writer: Reverse Shot talks to Tsai Ming-liang,
Reverse Shot (Winter 2004), accessed February 19, 2013, http://www.reverseshot.com/
legacy/winter04/tsai.html.
5. Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, in Chuihua Judy Chung and Sze Tsung Leong, eds., The
Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Kln: Taschen, 2001), 408.
6. Ibid., 415.
7. Ibid., 410.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 415.
10. Ibid., 409
11. Ibid., 414.
12. Ibid., 420.
14. Ibid., 220.
15. Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, in Against Interpretation (New York: Anchor
Books, 1990), 278.
16. Ibid., 279.
17. Quoted in Andrew, Ghost Towns, 41.
18. Jameson, Remapping Taipei, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in
the World System (London: BFI, 1992), 155.
19. Koolhaas, Generic City, 1994.
20. Warren Montag, Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derridas Specters of Marx, in Mike
Sprinker, ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx
21. See Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 383.
Chapter 7
1. Li Tuo links the rhetoric and the form of River Elegy, its tendency to assert a position
rather than argue and present evidence for it, to precursors in the Cultural Revolution. See
Zha, Bashi niandai fangtanlu [The 1980s: Interviews] (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2006), 277.
Berry argues that River Elegy adopts the structure and strategies of a common category of
Chinese documentary, the zhuanti pian, or special topic film, which provides visual materials as illustrations for a political argument to be disseminated from the leadership to the
public. See Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism, in Zhang Zhen,
ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First
Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 115136.
2. Frantz Fanon uses the phrase zone of occult instability as he distinguishes between
the fluctuating movement of everyday life and the tendency of intellectuals to search for
stable truths, often by trying to get back to the people in that past out of which they have
already emerged. Fanon argues that poets (and by extension other artists and intellectuals)
331
must inhabit this area of volatility and revolutionary turmoil, and I would argue that the
makers of The River Elegy abandon this zone immediately after discovering it, that this
region is not occult in any significant sense because its meaning in the film has already
been assigned. Fanon concludes his discussion with language reminiscent of cinema, suggesting that the role of art during a revolutionary moment is to provide a medium to illuminate this obscurity so that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our
lives are transfused with light. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 227.
3. Wang Jing examines these crazes and fevers in High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Dengs China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Zhang
Xudong analyzes Chinas cultural and philosophical atmosphere in the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on the Great Cultural Discussion and cinema, in Chinese Modernism in
the Era of Reforms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
4. Ezra Vogel summarizes the cultural etymology of the phrase linking tracks in the
following way: in the 1930s, some of the Chinese warlords had no railroads because they
had a narrower gauge than the national railway, leaving a wider distance between the rails.
The warlords had to design a way to make the tracks compatible in order to form a national
railway system. Now, China uses linking tracks to describe the process of adjusting various traditional practices so that they can interface with the global system. The Emperor
Is Far Away: Understanding the Challenges Faced by the New Leader, Harvard International Review 25.2 (2003), 38.
5. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 56.
6. See Tsing, The Global Situation, Cultural Anthropology 15.3 (2000), 327360.
7. James Rosenau suggests that turmoil was a key but often overlooked factor in world
politics in the late twentieth century, and he focuses on the impact of turbulence as well as
the effects of seemingly stable actors like nation-states. See Turbulence in World Politics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
8. See Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9697.
9. See Katarina Clark, Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive
Hero, in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeni Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 2750.
10. Leonid Heller, A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories, in Lahusen and Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores, 52.
11. Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 200201.
12. Zhang Xudong, The Power of Rewriting: Postrevolutionary Discourse on Chinese
Socialist Realism, in Lahusen and Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores, 282.
13. Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 202.
14. Zhang, Power of Rewriting, 293.
15. Ibid., 291.
16. Ibid., 283.
17. Ibid., 287.
18. Ibid., 301.
19. Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the
Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4.
20. Ibid., 132133.
332
21. These biographical anecdotes are drawn from a question-and-answer session with
Wang at the University of Washingtons Summer Program in Chinese Film Theory and
Criticism at the Beijing Film Academy.
22. Wu Hung discusses the relationship between those wide boulevards and the modernization of Beijing in Remaking Beijing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
23. Wang Haowei, Bu si liang zi nan wang (Beijing: Zhongguo Dianying Chubanshe,
2002), 39.
24. David Desser identifies that movement as a simultaneous eruption of many of the
social issues and cinematic themes and styles present in the French new wave, especially the
rebelliousness of the baby boom generation in Japan. This rebelliousness is also manifested in the signature style of new wave directors in the late 1950s and 1960s, including
Seijun Suzuki. See Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to Japanese New Wave Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1, 99.
25. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
26. Zhang Zhen examines the relationship between gender, youth, and the emergence
of consumer culture during the 1990s in Mediating Time: The Rice Bowl of Youth in Fin
de Sicle Urban China, Public Culture 12.1 (2000), 93113. Films like Country Couple and
What a Family foreshadow the rise of the figure of the disruptive female consumer, and the
seemingly premature appearance of this character type suggests that films in the early
Reform period also viewed her as the nexus of profound cultural conflicts.
27. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the
Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 41.
28. Ibid., 54.
29. Bai, Throwing Away the Walking Stick of Drama, trans. Hou Jianping, in George
S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, eds., Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era
(New York: Praeger, 1990), 5.
30. Ibid., 9.
31. Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
32. Ibid., 5.
33. Ibid.
34. Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World
35. Zhang and Li, The Modernization of Film Language, trans. Hou Jianping, in
Semsel et al., Chinese Film Theory, 11.
36. Ibid., 19.
37. Ibid.
38. See Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 208211.
39. Zhang and Li, The Modernization of Film Language, 19.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 20.
42. Zhang, Essay Done in Film Terms, trans. Hou Jianping, in Semsel et al., Chinese
Film Theory, 35.
333
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 27.
45. Ibid., 37.
46. Hu Ke provides a concise summary of those encounters between Bazin, Kracauer,
and other theorists of cinematic realism and Chinese filmmakers and scholars in Zhongguo dianying zhenshi guannian yu Bazan yingxiang [The Concept of Truth in Chinese
Cinema and the Influence of Bazin], Dangdai dianying [Contemporary Cinema] 145 (April
2008), 612.
47. Zheng Dongtian, Yi qun zhongguo nianqing dianyingren yu yi ge waiguo zhizhe de
shenjiao [The Spiritual Exchange between a Group of Young Chinese Cineastes and a
Foreign Sage], Dangdai dianying 145 (April 2008), 5, 4.
48. Hu, Zhongguo dianying zhenshi guannian yu Bazan yingxiang, 7.
49. Ibid., 9.
50. Ibid., 10.
51. See Dudley Andrew and Herv Joubert-Laurencin, eds., Opening Bazin (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
52. Yang, Film Is Film: A Response to Tan Peisheng, trans. Hou Jianping, in Semsel
etal., Chinese Film Theory, 6667.
53. Ibid., 68.
54. Ibid., 60.
55. Daniel Morgan suggests that many of Bazins assertions about the reality of the
photographic image are variations on the ordinary language philosophy practiced by
Wittgenstein and later Cavell. See Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,
Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006), 443481. Yangs essay is likewise founded on a deceptively complex definition of cinematic realism constructed out of plain language.
56. Yang, Film Is Film, 65.
57. Ni Zhen, After Yellow Earth, trans. Fu Binbin, in George Semsel, Chen Xihe, and
Xia Hong, eds., Film in Contemporary China: Critical Debates, 19791989 (Westport, Conn.:
Praeger, 1993), 33.
58. Zhong Dianfei, Film Form and Films National Form, trans. Li Xiaohong, in
Semsel et al., eds., Chinese Film Theory, 103.
59. Zheng Dongtian, Only Seven Years: Thoughts on the Explorations of Middle-Aged
and Young Directors (1979 to 1986), trans. Hou Jianping, in Semsel et al., eds., Chinese
Film Theory, 86, 87.
60. Shao Mujun, Dianying meixue suixiang jiyao [A summary of random thoughts on
film aesthetics], Dianying yishu [Film Art] (November 1984), 20.
Chapter 8
1. Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun [Essays on modern Chinese thought]
(Beijing: Dongfang Chubanshe, 1987), 343344. Li previews this model of intellectual history as a series of waves in Zhongguo jindai sixiang shilun [Essays on modern Chinese
thought] (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979), 480.
2. Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun, 344.
3. See Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of Chinas Fifth
Generation, trans. Chris Berry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 850.
334
4. Norman Yam, Straits Times, March 11, 1991.

5. Ni, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy, 84.
6. See Xiao Quans Women zhe yi dai [Our generation] (Guangzhou: Huacheng Chubanshe, 2006), and Zha, Bashi niandai fangtanlu [The 1980s: Interviews] (Beijing: Sanlian
Shudian, 2006).
7. Robert Thomson, Riding the New Wave in Old China, Sydney Morning Herald,
July2, 1988.
8. Guy Dinmore, Chinas New Film-makers Seize the Gauntlet, Reuters, April 20,
1988.
9. Chinese Film Named Best in Berlin, New York Times, February 25, 1988.
10. Chen Kaige and Rayns, King of the Children and the New Chinese Cinema (London:
Faber and Faber, 1989), 1.
11. Lee San Chuoy, Straits Times, June 4, 1993.
12. The three prominences were used to emphasize the importance of the hero in socialist realism by distinguishing among lesser and greater embodiments of the periods social
ideals.
13. Brnice Reynaud discusses Gongs star persona in Gong Li and the Glamour of the
Chinese Star, Sight and Sound 3.8 (1993), 1215. Jias star persona lies at the heart of a film,
Quitting [Zuotian] (Zhang Yang, 2001), based roughly on his life, including his rise to
prominence in cinema and his later drug addiction.
14. The Beijing Youth Film Studio remained a site of innovation for at least a decade,
and perhaps its charge of cultivating young artists compensated for its location near the
center of the Chinese political and film establishment. The Straits Times highlights the
status of this studio as the primary producer of experimental and avant-garde film in the
late 1980s and 1990s. See Chinas art film studio, Straits Times, February 12, 1992.
15. Dai Qing, Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern, trans. Jeanne Tai, Public
Culture 5.2 (Winter 1993), 333337.
16. Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary
Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 38.
17. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998), 165.
18. Zheng Jing, Qingchun dianying de chengzhang daolu [The growing up of youth
cinema], Dianying pingjia [Movie review], May 2007, 10.
19. Ibid.
20. Tang Xiaobing, The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents: On the Staging of Socialist
New China in The Young Generation, in China Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian
21. Zheng, Qingchun dianying de chengzhang daolu, 10.
22. Chow, Primitive Passions, 152153.
23. Quoted in Louise Branson, The Sleeping Dragon of the Screen Wakes Up Under
Chinas Open-Door Policy: Film Is Coming Into Its Own, Toronto Star, August 27, 1988.
24. Walter Goodman, Chinas Yellow Earth, New York Times, April 11, 1986.
25. Hal Hinson, Sorghums Syrupy Soapbox: Sensuous Propaganda in Chinas Ode to
the New Laborer, Washington Post, October 21, 1988.
26. Chow, Primitive Passions, 168.
27. See Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
335
28. Wu, Meng de jiaoyin [The footprints of dreams] (Beijing: Zhongguo Dianying Chubanshe, 2005), 104.
29. Ibid., 92.
30. Ibid., 104.
31. Ibid.
32. Yang Yuanying discusses the transitions undergone by both major and less renowned Fifth Generation filmmakers as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s. See Yang, Pan
Hua, and Zhang Zhuan, eds., 90 niandai de di wu dai [The Fifth Generation in the 1990s]
(Beijing: Beijing Broadcasting Institute Press, 2000).
33. When Technicolor began its transition from a developer and manufacturer of film
production technologymost notably its signature dye transfer processto television, it
sold the equipment at its British facility to the Chinese film industry. The particular quality
of the colors in the early Fifth Generation films, including Ju Dou, is related to that technological atavism. As Roger Ebert writes in his review of Ju Dou, that is why the bright colors
in the vats of the textile mill will remind you of a brilliance not seen in Hollywood films
since the golden age of the MGM musicals. Not that this story would have been very easily
set to music. Chicago Sun-Times, April 12, 1991.
34. Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 262.
35. Hinson, Raise the Red Lantern, Washington Post, May 8, 1992.
36. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 99.
37. Chow, Not One Less: The Fable of a Migration, in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films
in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: BFI, 2003), 145.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 147.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 148.
42. Andr Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, in What Is Cinema?, vol.1,
ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.
43. Curtin, Playing to the Worlds Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film
and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4.
Chapter 9
1. Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2. Wong, Revolution at the cinema: Rebels rule the new Chinese cinema, Straits
Times, March 10, 1994.
3. Koolhaas, Junkspace, in Chuihua Judy Chung and Sze Tsung Leong, eds., The
Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Kln: Taschen, 2001), 409.
4. See Jerome Silbergeld, Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal
Triangles, and Chinas Moral Voice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 946.
5. Interview with Michael Berry, in Berry, Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures: Jia
Zhangkes Hometown Trilogy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 128129.
6. Interview with Stephen Teo, Cinema with an Accent, Senses of Cinema 15 (July 2001).
7. Ibid.
8. Interview with Michael Berry, in Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary
Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 185.
336
9. Foucault, Of Other Spaces, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1986), 22.

10. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5051.
11. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
12. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and
Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 10.
13. Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John
Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 86.
14. Busch, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects: Essays on Design and Everyday Life
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 15.
15. See Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton
16. Kaika, Dams as Symbols of Modernization, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 96.2 (2006), 278.
17. Interview with Jia, International Herald Tribune, September 22, 2006.
18. Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Howard Eiland, in Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings, eds., Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, 19381940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), 402.
19. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New
York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 11.
20. Wang, Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity, trans.
Rebecca Karl, in Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China, ed. Zhang
Xudong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 167.
21. Ibid., 167, 168.
Conclusion
1. Miller et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001), 18.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. For a roughly contemporaneous account of the rise of craft unions in Hollywood, see
Morton Thompson, Hollywood Is a Union Town, Nation, April 2, 1938: 381383.
4. Nick Holdsworth, Russian Film Investment, Hollywood Reporter, August 16, 2005.
5. See Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 4482. See also Asia Shops Juggle U.S. Animation
Jobs, Variety, October 25, 2007; Avarind Adiga, The Next Big Draw for India, Time,
July5, 2004; Thailand to Take Advantage of Asian Animation Boom, Bangkok Post, September 6, 2010. The trend toward outsourcing the most labor-intensive film work has affected other high-wage countries, including Japan. See, for example, Yuka Hayashi, Discontent Seeps into Japans Anime Studios, Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2009.
6. See Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth
of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 126149.
7. The Shock of Freedom in Films, Time, December 8, 1967.
8. See, for example, the chapter American New Wave, in Virginia Wright Wexman
and Jack C. Ellis, A History of Film, 6th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2005), 329.
9. The exhibition produced a catalog, The American New Wave (Minneapolis: Walker
Art Center, 1982).
337
10. Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 150.
11. See Christian Keathley, Robert Benton, Film Comment 31.1 (JanuaryFebruary
1995).
12. Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 153.
13. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42.
14. Quoted in George Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at
the Breaking Point (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 9.
15. Canby, Film: Very Middle-Class Friendship, New York Times, December 7, 1970.
16. Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York: New
York University Press, 1999), 102.
17. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 19301980 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 254; Klinger, The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in
Easy Rider, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie Book (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
18. Sarris, Easy Rider, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 19551969 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1970), 446.
19. Goldstein, Captain America, the Beautiful, New York Times, August 3, 1969.
20. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1997), x.
21. Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, New Left Review 49 (JanuaryFebruary
2008), 2942.
22. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 332, 202.
{ index }
c indicates chapter, f indicates material in figures, and n indicates material in endnotes.
bout de souffle (Godard), 11, 17, 49, 103.
See also Breathless
abstract expressionism, 33
Academy Awards, 135
Ace in the Hole (Wilder), 98
Adieu Philippine (Rozier), 103
Adorno, Theodor, 176
advertising
American cinema as, 8
Bazins realism and, 301
for Bitter Victory, 66
Chabrol on new wave, 12
in Cheerful Wind, 16465
Chinese cinema as, 32
fable of abundance, 78
film criticism and, 30
Godard and, 18, 134
Le Chant du styrne as, 118
mise-en-scne in, 78
Ross on, 14
in The Sandwich Man, 15657
in The Story of Qiu Ju, 262
for Taiwanese films, 14445
in Tokyo Drifter, 222
in vernacular modernism, 178
in What a Family, 22223
in The World, 292
aesthetics of hunger, 3
affection-image, 26566
age of three worlds, 34, 303
Aiqing Mala Tang (Zhang), 32
Aiqing wan sui (Tsai), 187. See also
Vive lamour
Aldrich, Robert, 30
alexandrine, 116, 117
Algeria, 14, 4648, 122
Almodvar, Pedro, 8
Alphaville (Godard), 29, 13033, 325n2
American media
as advertising, 8
Bazin on, 21, 49, 63, 318n12
Cahiers du cinma and, 17, 6167, 71
Chinese cinema and, 214
direct cinema, 4
editing of, 6162, 305

French new wave and, 5
globalization and, 274, 3034, 309
Godard and, 67, 304, 3067
hegemony of, 79, 303
history of, 78
Hollywood (see Hollywood)
image in, 61
jump cuts in, 305
mise-en-scne and, 6167, 310
new men/new women and, 62
new wave, 30411
St. Cinma des Prs on, 113
world trade agreements and, 89
American New Wave, The, 306, 336c10n9
Amoy dialect, 327n18
Anderson, Benedict, 23, 3640, 229
Anderson, Perry, 40
Andreotti Law, 10
Andrew, Dudley, 196
Angel Face (Preminger), 6162
Ang Lee, 274
animation, 193, 293, 297, 299, 304
anticolonialism, 3, 149
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 10, 21
architecture
animation and, 193
Busbea on, 8485
Chinese new wave, 21718
in city films, 181
consumption of, 86
images and, 31, 184
Koolhaas on, 197
Lefebvre and, 94
Parent, Virilio, and, 9092
realism and, 80
in supermodern space, 29
in world cinema, 188
Archizoom, 82, 322n120
area studies, 4
Arman, 134
art
awards and prizes for, 22
Babelon on Louvre, 106
340
art (continued)
Benjamin on, 70
Bourdieu on qualities of elite, 72, 321n90
Cahiers du cinma on cinema and, 56,
321n77
Chinese new wave, 21718, 276, 298
Chinese socialism and, 216, 298
in Cold War, 33, 34
Fanon on role of, 331n2
free trade agreements and, 8
Kovcs on modernism and, 316n75
Lefebvre and, 96
Lis cohort model for, 238
Malraux on, 169
in Maoist China, 21416, 298
Resnais films on, 114, 115
Rohmer on, 7074, 95
television, 132, 325
Tsais Visage on, 2034
art cinema
American media and, 308
audience for, 2022
characteristics of, 22, 301
consumers and, 19
culture and, 3
decline of, 21
Deleuze on time vs. narrative in, 67
democracy and, 21
economic miracles and, 144
founding of, 46
individualists in, 147
local-global, 35, 239, 268
Modernization of Film Language on, 231
novels and, 21
phases of development of, 2
Taiwan Cinema Manifesto on, 14344
Tsai and, 198, 2034
wandering woman in, 324n47
Art et Essai audience, 59
Arts, 45
Artwork essay (Benjamin), 25
Assayas, Olivier, 176
Astruc, Alexandre, 319n19
Atget, Eugne, 134, 158
Atun, Norman, 204
Aug, Marc, 1516, 28, 9495, 293, 315n48
Aumont, Jacques, 26
auteur theory
Bazin on, 49
of Cahiers du cinma, 4546, 4950, 67
cinephilia and, 57
critiques of, 4951
Czech new wave and, 33
evolution of, 54
in film studies, 20, 4546
Index
Hess on, 31819n13
Hollywood and, 17, 54, 61
Jia Zhangke and, 284
Kovcs on, 26
mise-en-scne and, 26, 5051, 189, 319n18
neorealism and, 51
on objects, 189
politique des oeuvres and, 57
Rossellini and, 59
Taiwanese new wave and, 147
weaving and, 319n18
awards and prizes
Academy Awards, 135
for art cinema, 2224
Golden Bear, 241
Golden Lion, 268
Golden Rooster, 224
for Hous films, 160
marketing and, 144
for A Touch of Zen, 151
Babelon, Jean-Pierre, 106
Bachelard, Gaston, 27
Badiou, Alain, 311
Bai Jingsheng, 22729
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 199
Bande part (Godard), 69, 86. See also Band
of Outsiders
Band of Outsiders (Godard), 69, 86, 106
Bandung conference, 4
Bardot, Brigitte, 48, 49, 12122
Barney, Matthew, 2045
Barrandov Studios, 303
Barthes, Roland, 27, 114
Bataille, Georges, 34
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 15, 16, 100, 292
Baudrillard, Jean
on books, 116
on consumers, 2728
Dichter and, 317n84
on glass, 189190
Lears and, 78
Lefebvre and, 85
object theory of, 27, 28, 189190, 312
on syntagmatic calculations, 85
The System of Objects, 78
Taipei Story and, 191
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 322n100
Bauman, Zygmunt, 28
Bayi Film Studio, 243
Bazin, Andr
advertising and realism of, 301
on American cinema, 21, 49, 63, 318n12
approach to criticism, 57
architecture and, 7576, 7880
Index
on Bicycle Thieves, 63, 72
Cahiers du cinma evolution and, 54
Cavell and, 333n55
Chinese cinema and, 23335, 237
cinema theory of, 2526
on De Sica, 5859
on expertise of Cahiers circle, 318n9
faith in reality of, 269
on Fellini, 8182
The 400 Blows and, 81
ghosts and, 76, 77
on Hitchcocko-Hawksians, 45
Lefebvre and, 95
on long shots/takes, 176
modernism and, 81
on montage, 57
on Nature, 69, 7980
neorealism and, 234
on Nights of Cabiria, 8182
obituary for, 54
on objects, 69, 77, 176
on photographic images, 272
on politique des auteurs, 49, 318n12
realism and, 52, 57, 7581, 176, 23335, 301
on The Red Balloon, 176
on Renoir, 57, 320n33
on special effects and images, 76
Theater and Cinema, 7581
on Umberto D, 5859
on Westerns, 6263, 86
Wittgenstein and, 333n55
Zheng Dongtian on, 234
Beatles, 184
Beatty, Warren, 304, 306
Beausoleil, Claude, 106
Beautiful Duckling (Hsing), 15354, 171
Becker, Jacques, 62
Bee, Kenny, 163
Beijing
Jias city films of, 288, 29194
Nings city films of, 278
Olympics, 21012, 25859
What a Family in, 22021
Wu Hung on, 332n22
Beijing Film Academy
Central Academy of Drama and, 243
diversity of students at, 239
Fifth Generation at, 239, 240
film theory and, 227
founding of, 215
Jia Zhangke at, 284
Ni Zhen on, 239, 240
Wang Haowei at, 220, 332n21
Wu Tianming at, 254
341
Beijing Film Studio, 243
Beijing Youth Daily, 268
Beijing Youth Film Studio, 244, 334n14
Beiqing chengshi (Hou), 147. See also City
of Sadness
Bell, Daniel, 23
Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 35, 49, 53, 102, 305.
See also Poiccard, Michel
Benjamin, Walter
on allegory, 245
on art, 70
Artwork essay, 25
on Atgets photographs, 134, 158
Aug and, 15
on interiors, 188
Marxism and, 3233, 301
on mechanics of filmmaking, 25, 63
on modernity, 25
on Paris, 134, 158, 188
on revolutions, 301
Rohmer and, 70
on second nature, 80
supermodernity and, 15
Two or Three Things I Know about Her
and, 134
benshi, 150
Benton, Robert, 3046
Bergman, Ingrid, 58
Berlin Film Festival, 23, 160, 241, 242
Bernanos, Georges, 59
Berry, Chris, 210, 218, 326c4n4, 330n1
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 8, 11
Betz, Mark, 324n47
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica), 10, 58, 63,
72, 76
Big Shots Funeral (Feng), 32
Binfen, 262
Birmingham School, 21
Bitsch, Charles, 65, 112
Bitter Victory (Ray), 6667
Black Cannon Incident, The (Huang Jianxin),
254
blaxploitation genre, 304
Bob le flambeur (Melville), 17, 81. See also
Bob the Gambler (Melville)
Bob the Gambler (Melville), 17, 81, 109, 110f
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 3057, 309
Bordwell, David, 2122, 163
Bourdieu, Pierre, 23, 72, 321n90
Boyer, Christine, 149
Boys from Feng-kuei, The (Hou), 14748, 162,
166170, 175, 187
Braester, Yomi, 180, 189
Branzi, Andrea, 183
Braunberger, Pierre, 49
342
Brazil, 18
Breathless (Godard). See also bout
de souffle
about, 10212
Alphaville and, 130
American cinema and, 67
Bonnie and Clyde and, 305, 306
Cahiers du cinma in, 54
characters in, 8081
Clo from 5 to 7 and, 108, 123, 128
critiques of, 49
Domarchi on, 52
editing of, 57
400 Blows and, 52, 81, 108
on the future, 129
Hiroshima mon amour and, 121
identity in, 108
images in, 29
on location, 53
long shots/takes in, 102, 111
Made in U.S.A. and, 13334
Marie on scenes in, 17
modernity in, 103, 106
modernization in, 106
Monogram Pictures dedication in, 71, 81
movement in, 47
neorealism in, 111
science fiction and, 130
Shoot the Piano Player and, 8081
soundtrack of, 57
space in, 1034
Taiwanese new wave and, 148
walking scenes in, 8788, 11012
Brennan, Timothy, 21
Bresson, Robert, 5961
Breton, Andr, 73
Brighter Summer Day, A (Edward Yang),
148, 184
Britain
London, 11, 214
Teddy Boys in, 3, 4
Broccoli, Albert R., 151
Brooks, Peter, 225
Buck-Morss, Susan, 295
Bu jian (Lee Kang-sheng), 202. See also
Missing, The
Bulletin du cin-club du Quartier Latin, 113
Bu san (Tsai), 32. See also Goodbye
Dragon Inn
Busbea, Larry, 8485
Busch, Akiko, 294
Caf Lumire (Hou), 173
Cahiers du cinma
American cinema and, 17, 6167, 71
Index
approach to criticism, 5657
on art and cinema, 56, 321n77
auteur theory of, 4546, 4950, 67
Bertolucci and, 11
in Breathless, 54
Chabrol and, 12, 45
de Baecques history of, 54
De Sica and, 58
on editing, 27
evolution of, Bazin and, 54
Frank on, 47
gender and, 48
Hitchcocko-Hawksians of, 17, 45, 64, 71
Japanese cinema and, 5758
Left Bank filmmakers and, 48, 112
mise-en-scne and, 25, 26, 3031, 189, 311
modernization and, 29
neorealism and, 58, 61
nouvelle vague, 1114, 20, 26
politics and, 48
Resnais and, 46, 11215
Rivette and, 17
Rohmer and, 45
Rossellini and, 46, 5859
Sellier on, 48, 49
Tati and, 135
television and, 55
Time on, 305
Varda and, 112, 124
youth and, 5455
camp, 19798
Canby, Vincent, 307
Cannes Film Festival
domestic acclaim and, 144
establishment of, 23
Hous films at, 160
Hus films at, 151
Lee San Chouy on Chinese cinema
and, 242
Night and Fog at, 114
Not One Less at, 268
pilgrimages to, 23
A Touch of Zen at, 151
Zhang Yimou on, 268
capitalism
Aug on, 9495
Bandung conference and, 4
Beijing Olympics and, 21011
Cheah on East Asian, 203
Chinese communism and, 211, 213, 276
cities and, 82
comparative histories and, 3637
Jameson on, 147
Lefebvre and, 9495
Index
novels and, 38
plastic and, 28
postmodernity and, 309
capitalist modernity, 223, 256, 290
Carala, Florence, 98, 1012
cartographic impulse in cinema, 123
Cassavetes, John, 4, 304, 3078
Casta, Laetitia, 187
Cathay Studio, 304
Cauchetier, Raymond, 324n52
Cavell, Stanley, 333n55
Cayrol, Jean, 324n54
Cell Phone (Feng), 32
censorship
Brooks on melodrama and, 225
of Chinese cinema, 218, 241, 242, 251, 277
of Czech cinema, 34
of Statues Also Die, 114
of Taiwanese cinema, 15053, 158, 160
Wang Haowei and, 220
Central Academy of Drama, 243
Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC),
15153, 155
Centre Georges Pompidou, 86
Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
(Truffaut), 143
Cezanne, Paul, 63
CGI. See computer-generated imagery
Chabrol, Claude
on Aldrichs shots, 317n93
on French new wave, 13
on Hitchcock, 318n4
Le Coup du berger, 112
Les Bonnes Femmes, 105, 109
on nouvelle vague, 12
on politics, 1213
productions of, 49
Resnais and, 113
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 36, 37
Chang, Grace, 149, 201
Chang Chen, 148, 174, 273
Chang Tso-chi, 146, 161
Chaoji shimin (Wan), 159160
Chaplin, Charlie, 99, 135
Charney, Leo, 181
Chteaux de France (Resnais), 115
Chatterjee, Partha, 36
Cheah, Pheng, 36, 39, 203
Cheerful Wind (Hou), 16466
Chen, Joan, 300
Chen, Leo Chanjen, 184, 193
Cheng, Andrew, 28283
Chengdu, 295
343
Cheng Yi, 247
Cheng Yusu, 28283
Chen Huaiai, 220
Chen Kaige
background of, 239
at Beijing Film Academy, 239
career of, 24344
classification of, 219
critiques of films of, 256, 258, 260
fame of, 240
Farewell My Concubine, 284
Fourth Generation and, 221
Great Cultural Discussion and, 213
images of, 251
mise-en-scne and, 256
modernism and, 256
New York Times on, 24142
Sixth Generation and, 277
Wu Tianming and, 252, 254, 256, 258
Yellow Earth (see Yellow Earth)
Chen Kuo-fu, 144, 19596, 198201
Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-ping, 145, 313n8
Chicago Reader, 260
China
Beijing (see Beijing)
capitalism in, 211, 259, 276, 290
Changan, 182
cinema in (see Chinese cinema)
colonial rule of, 214
communism in, 211, 21415, 217, 219, 228,
24547, 249, 276, 298
Cultural Revolution in (see Cultural
Revolution)
Edisons films in, 7
film studios in, 227, 243
Great Cultural Discussion in, 209, 211, 331n3
international cities in, 317n96
June 1989 events in, 209, 277
Karl on stage and history in, 229
linking tracks with, 5, 32, 212, 291, 297, 301,
331n4
Lumire brothers films in, 7
marketing the new, 276
modernism in New Era, 218
modernity in, 301
New Era in, 218, 230, 23839
New New Era in, 27677
Olympics in, 21012, 25859
Red Guards in, 247
Reform and Opening era, 5, 210, 27677, 297
socialism in, 21314, 216, 238240, 251, 276,
288, 29799
Taiwan and, 147
Three Gorges Dam, 29596, 299
344
China Film Archive, 215
Chinese cinema
Fourth Generation, 219220, 226, 23334, 237,
239244
Fifth Generation (see Fifth Generation)
Sixth Generation, 238, 255, 27678, 284
Seventh Generation, 238
Eighth Generation, 238
as advertising, 32
censorship of, 218, 241, 242, 251, 277
consumers and, 32
documentaries, 32
Eight Model Operas and, 227, 228230
facticity in, 269
futurists and, 219
globalization and, 23133, 274
golden age of, 150, 214
Hollywood and, 214
Lis cohort model and, 23839
literature and, 23233
Maoist (see Maoist films)
master shots in, 32, 161
mise-en-scne in, 32
modernism and, 23031, 233, 23536, 239, 241
nationalization of, 21415, 231
new wave (see Chinese new wave)
outsourcing to, 3034
Red Guards in, 24748
in Reform era (see Reform era cinema)
socialist realism in, 21419
Soviet cinema and, 21417, 243
space in, 32
Taiwanese cinema and, 15052
three prominences in, 24243, 334n12
WWII and, 214
Young Pioneers in, 24748
Chinese new wave
Fifth Generation (see Fifth Generation)
architecture and, 21718
development of, 32
French new wave and, 313n8
modernism and, 239
modernity and, 218
realism in, 32, 250, 25455
Reform era cinema and, 238244, 249250
Zhang Xudong on, 21718
Choay, Franoise, 16
Chow, Rey, 245, 25051, 268, 27172
Chow, Stephen, 274
Chytilova, Vra, 3334
Cinastes de notre temps, 321n78
Cin-Journal, 9
Cinema of Economic Miracles, The (Restivo),
1819
Index
CinemaScope, 65, 117, 325n64
cinematic new waves
aesthetics of hunger and, 3
American, 30411
audience for, 20
consumers and, 2, 1213
conventions and standards for, 25
functions of, 1920
Hollywood and, 12, 4
imperfect cinema and, 3, 4
marketization and, 5, 20
modernity and, 3012
paradox of, 20
promise of, 2
scholarly assessment of, 40
studies of, 56
Third Cinema and, 3, 4
on transitions, 302
Cinematograph Films Bill, 313n13
Citizen Kane (Welles), 124
city films. See also specific cities
architecture in, 181
Lee Ching-Chih on periods of Taipei, 182
nature in, 80
noir, 47, 98, 311
Nowell-Smith on, 283
in Reform era, 259
space in, 181
Taiwanese, characteristics of, 18081
wandering woman in, 324n47
City of Collective Memory, The (Boyer), 149
City of Sadness (Hou), 147, 161, 170
City Zero, 180
Clo from 5 to 7 (Varda), 88, 108, 112, 12124,
12629, 325nn6668
Closely Watched Trains (Menzel), 3435
Clouzot, Claire, 324n54
CMPC, 15153, 155
Cohen, Lisa, 118, 325n64
Cold War, 7, 3335, 114, 152, 242, 303
Come Drink with Me (Hu Jinquan), 150
commodity fetishism, 272
communism
artists and Chinese, 298
Bais film criticism and, 228
in Cold War new wave films, 33, 34
global capitalism and Chinese, 211, 276
socialist realism and Chinese, 217
in Yellow Earth, 24547
in The Young Generation, 249
computer-generated imagery (CGI), 188, 193,
233, 259, 273, 274
Index
Confucian Confusion, A (Edward Yang), 148, 184
Confucianism, 161, 211, 327n29
Conley, Tom, 123
Constantine, Eddie, 130
consumers
Baudrillard on, 2728
in Country Couple, 224
De Seta on, 19
early film entrepreneurs and, 9
gender and, 332n26
Giroud on, 13
history and, 240
Le Chant du styrne on, 116
in Masculin fminin, 132
of modernity, Chatterjee on, 36
in The Old Well, 255
in Taipei Story, 190
in What a Family, 22123, 255
consumption
Archizoom and, 82
Babelon on Louvre and, 106
in Daisies, 33
de Grazia on film and mass, 12
democracy and, 12
Fifth Generation and, 262
by French baby-boomers, 46
Lefebvre on, 9293, 95
Restivos Cinema of Economic Miracles on,
1819
Ross on, 14
in The Sandwich Man, 31, 157
Contempt, 117
continuity editing, 25, 27, 91, 120, 149
Cooper, Gary, 66
costumes
Bazin on, in The Invisible Man, 7677
in cinema and theater, 26, 51
in Closely Watched Trains, 3435
in Sirks films, 50
in Tsais films, 198
Wu on, 254
in Zhang Yimous films, 273
Country Couple (Hu Bingliu), 220, 22326, 265,
290, 332n26
Coutard, Raoul, 49, 106, 110, 133, 325n2
Cremaster (Barney), 204
Cui Zien, 255
cultural capital, 23
Cultural Revolution
aesthetics of arts during, 245
345
Berry on cinema after, 218
big-character posters of, 210
collapse of, cinema and, 218
directors in, 243
European film criticism and, 234
filmmaking during, 227
Fourth Generation cinema after,
219220, 226
Rayns on Fifth Generation in, 242
The River Elegy and, 330n1
scar literature after, 211
socialism and, 297
Wang Haowei and, 22021
youth films in, 247
Zhang Yimou on, 242
Culture: China and the World, 234
Curse of the Golden Flower, The
(Zhang Yimou), 273
Curtin, Michael, 274
Cute Girl (Hou), 166
Czechoslovak cinema, 3335, 303, 306
Daguerrotypes (Varda), 123, 12627
Da hong denglong gaogao gua (Zhang Yimou),
24445
Dai Jinhua, 166
Daily Express, 7
Daily Variety, 8
Dai Qing, 244, 245
Daisies (Chytilov), 3334
Daney, Serge, 12223, 325n67
Dao ma zei (Tian), 254
Davis, Darrell William, 144, 147, 152, 184,
19798
Davis, Miles, 89, 102
Dawan (Feng), 32
Days, The (Wang Xiaoshuai), 278
Da zui xia (Hu Jinquan), 150
Dean, James, 35, 64
de Baecque, Antoine, 54
Debord, Guy, 17, 185, 272
Deca, Henri, 49
de Certeau, Michel, 86
dcoupage, 60
de Gaulle, Charles, 12, 1314
de Grazia, Victoria, 12
Deleuze, Gilles
on affection-image, 26566
on film as way of thinking, 181
film theory of, 52
on French new wave films, 29
modernism and, 230
on narratives vs. time, 67
on post-WWII environments, 169170
Delouvrier, Paul, 84
346
demographic new wave, 13, 4647
Demonsablon, Philippe, 321n77
Demy, Jacques, 103
Deng Xiaoping, 220, 230, 289
Deng Yimin, 227
Denning, Michael, 34, 23, 3034
depth of field, 138, 320n33
Derrida, Jacques, 287
De Seta, Vittorio, 19
De Sica, Vittorio
Antonioni, Pasolini, and, 10
Bazin on, 5859
Bicycle Thieves, 10, 58, 63, 72, 76
Cahiers du cinma and, 58
Ladri di biciclette, 10
realism in films of, 80
Umberto D, 5859
design
Baudrillard on objects and industrial, 28
cinematic new waves and, 19
computer-aided, 193
French mobi-boom and, 14, 5556
interior, 186, 188, 198
modernity and, 56
Rohmer on architecture, modernism, and, 73
of sets, 198, 254
in theater, 23536
in vernacular modernism, 178
Desires (Edward Yang), 184
Desser, David, 332n24
Deux ou trois choses que je sais delle (Godard),
1718. See also Two or Three Things I Know
about Her (Godard)
Dhry, Robert, 103
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson), 5960
Dichter, Ernest, 317n84
Diderot, Denis, 59
Dimendberg, Edward, 116, 118
direct cinema, 4
directors
auteurs (see auteur theory)
Cahiers du cinma on, 4546
in Cultural Revolution, 243
of Fifth Generation, 213, 220, 226, 237,
239244, 25051
in French new wave, 4546, 4850
Labarthe on first films by, 46
of Maoist films, 223, 230
of Reform era cinema, 22123, 230, 23637,
24244
Taiwanese, newcomer policy for, 155
Wu Tianming on role of, 254
Disneyfication, 274
Index
Distinction (Bourdieu), 321n90
Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 49
documentaries
Breathless and, 111
cameras for, 281
Chinese, 32
French new wave and, 17, 301
Godard on, 107
images in, 272
by Jia Zhangke, 32
by Marker, 115, 117
Reform era cinema and, 235
Resnais and, 11319
Shanghai Panic and, 283
on the spot realism of Chinese, 268
Suzhou River and, 279, 281
24 City and, 300
Varda and, 12225, 127
Zhang Yimou and, 266
zhuanti pian, 330n1
Dogme 95s vow of chastity, 143
Doinel, Antoine, 31, 37, 87, 108, 129, 148
Domarchi, Jean, 52
Donald, James, 181
Dong (Tsai), 146. See also Hole, The
Dongdong de jiaqi (Hou), 162
Dorsday, Michel, 56
Double Indemnity (Wilder), 98
Double Vision (Chen Kuo-fu), 144, 199201
Dragon Inn (Hu Jinquan), 15051, 201, 203
Duchamp, Marcel, 53
Duli shidai (Edward Yang), 148. See also
Confucian Confusion, A
Dunaway, Faye, 305
Duras, Marguerite, 49, 113, 324n54
uroviov, Nataa, 8
Dust in the Wind (Hou), 146, 14748, 16263,
17073, 175
Duvivier, Julien, 66
Dux, Pierre, 116
DyaliScope, 117, 118
Easy Rider (Hopper), 3089, 310
Ebert, Roger, 161, 335n33
economic miracles
American media and, 309
art cinema and, 144
The Boys from Feng-kuei and, 16769
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies and, 14
Fourasti on French, 20
images made during, 19
Italian cinema and, 10
Lee Ching-Chih on, 182
Index
Olympics and Chinese, 210
Pasolinis monstrous youth of, 79
plastic and, 11718
Restivo on, 1819
The Sandwich Man and, 156, 157
Taiwanese cinema and, 31, 146, 161, 182,
193, 301
and, 134
Edisons short films, 7, 150
editing
of American films, 6162, 305
in Breathless, 1057
Cahiers du cinma on, 27, 57
of Chinese documentaries, 32
continuity, 25, 27, 91, 120, 149
of French new wave films, 2527, 50
by Hawks, 57
in Hiroshima mon amour, 119121
in Hous films, 170
jump cuts (see jump cuts)
master shots and, 163
in Not One Less, 268
Resnais and, 113, 119121
Eisenstein, Sergei, 64
Elevator to the Gallows (Malle), 89, 97102, 128,
129130, 136
Elsaesser, Thomas, 61
English, James F., 2223
Ershisi Chengshi (Jia Zhangke), 295. See also
24 City
Erzi de da wanou, 31. See also Sandwich
Man, The
Esposizione Internazionale dArte
Cinematografica, 23
Esprit, 75
Essay Done in Film Terms (Zhang Junxiang),
23233
Essays on Modern Chinese Thought (Li), 238
ethnography
Country Couple and, 224
Fifth Generation films and, 245, 254
Hous films and, 163
La Pointe Courte and, 124
Still Life and, 296
Eustache, Jean, 30
expressionism, 33, 63, 255
Faces (Cassavetes), 307
facticity, 269
false continuity, 111
Fanon, Frantz, 33031n2
Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige), 284
347
fashion industry in Italy, 1011
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (Ross), 1415
Faye, Suzon, 106
Feicheng wurao (Feng), 32
Fellini, Federico, 19, 8182, 125
Fenger tita cai (Hou), 16466
Feng Feifei, 163
Fenggui lai de ren (Hou), 147. See also Boys from
Feng-kuei, The
Feng Xiaogang, 32, 223
Fifth Generation. See also Chinese new wave
allegory and, 24445
art cinema and, 241
Bazin and, 23334
consumers in films of, 250
critiques of, 24447, 25054
Cultural Discussion and, 213
etymology of term, 239
factors affecting, 241
at film festivals, 218
Fourth Generation and, 219220, 226, 237,
239244
identity in films of, 239
images in films of, 226
individuality of, 239240
Jia Zhangke and, 284, 300
locations in films of, 237
Maoist films and, 240, 245, 247, 249250,
255
modernism and, 25051
modernity in films of, 24647, 250, 252
modernization in films of, 250
perspective of, 226
Sixth Generation and, 255, 27778
Film Art, 215, 227
film criticism
advertising and, 30
Bais, communism and, 228
bureaucratization of, 47
of Cahiers du cinma, 2526, 45
Chinese and European, 23335
Cold War and, 33, 34
Labarthe on language of, 30
linguistic, 5, 52, 229230
nouvelle vague, 13
Film Culture, 227
film festivals. See also specific events
auteurs at, 46
capitalism and, 24
Chinese filmmakers at, 232
Cold War and, 34
consumers and, 22
Fifth Generation at, 218
348
film festivals (continued)
functions of, 24, 179
Hiroshima mon amour at French, 114
history of, 2324
identity and, 2324
images and, 24
nationalism and, 23
purpose of, 2223
Taiwan films in, 144, 151, 153
Film Form and Films National Form
(Zhong Dianfei), 236
Film Is Film (Yang Ni), 235
film noir, 47, 98, 311
Firemans Ball, The (Forman), 35
Flaherty, Robert, 107
Fleming, Ian, 151
Flight of the Red Balloon, The (Hou), 31, 173,
17577
Flowers of Shanghai, The (Hou), 146, 147
Footsteps of Youth, The (Su Lu & Gong Yan),
24748
Ford, John, 63
Forman, Milo, 33, 34, 35
Foucault, Michel, 24, 67, 73, 285
Fourasti, Jean, Les Trentes Glorieuses, 20
400 Blows, The (Truffaut)
age and image in, 108
Bazin and, 81
Bonnie and Clyde and, 306
Breathless and, 52, 81, 108
counterculture and, 55
credit sequence of, 105
Domarchi on, 52
on the future, 129
opening sequence of, 17
The Story of Qiu Ju and, 265
walking scenes in, 87
What Time Is It There? and, 31, 3739
Fourth Generation, 219220, 226, 23334, 237,
239244. See also Reform era cinema
France
Algeria, colonial rule of, 14, 4648, 122
architecture in, 14, 47, 55, 81, 8386
baby boom in, 13, 14, 4647, 67
Paris (see Paris)
population data for, 8384, 322n1
post-WWII transformation of, 1315
Poujades populist movement in, 47
Resnais films censored in, 114
transportation initiatives in, 84
Trente Glorieuses of, 46, 83
zones urbaniser en priorit in, 14
Franchini, Patricia, 8788, 1038,
11011, 129
Frank, Nino, 47
free trade agreements, 89
Index
French cinema
heritage, 86
history of, 7, 9, 26
Joinville, 9
master shot in, 73
new wave (see French new wave)
Truffaut essays on, 45, 54, 56, 318n2
Vuillermoz eulogy of, 7
world trade agreements and, 314n22
French new wave
architecture in, 81, 92
author-centered approach to, 50
baby boom and, 4647
Bresson and images of, 61
cameras for, 281
capitalism and, 97
Chinas Fifth Generation and, 313n8
on cities, 16
consumers and, 1213, 17, 27
developmental influences on, 17
directors in, 4546, 4850
Dixon on, 49
documentaries and, 17, 301
editing of, 2527, 50
emergence of, 1314, 4547
gender and, 48
Hong Kong new wave and, 313n8
Japanese cinema and, 332n24
legacy of, 25
long shots/takes in films of, 91
marketing of, 1213
modernism and, 4648, 53, 316n75
modernity and, 54, 301
montage in films of, 26
neorealism and, 58
new men/new women and, 46, 122
objects in, 49, 60, 9192
politics and, 48
politique des auteurs of (see auteur
theory)
Ross on, 1415, 47
Sellier on, 48, 49
sociological accounts of, 52
space in, 9192
spectacle and, 1718, 29
Taiwans new wave and, 31, 3639,
313n8
tradition and, 26
Vadim and, 122
youth and, 3, 46, 5455
Fuller, Samuel, 17, 66
Futurists, 143, 219
futurologists, 211, 217
Index
Gabin, Jean, 66
Gan Yang, 234
Garca Espinosa, Julio, 3. See also Imperfect
cinema
GATT, 8
Gauguin (Resnais), 115
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), 8
Generic City, The (Koolhaas), 202
German new cinema, 143, 183
Getino, Octavio, 3. See also Third Cinema
ghosts
Anderson and, 39
Andrew on, 196
Bazin and, 76, 77
Chakrabarty on, 37
Chen Kuo-fu and, 196, 19899
in Jia Zhangkes films, 287, 294
King Hu and, 151
Lee Kang-sheng and, 196
purpose of, 38, 39, 196, 203, 205
in Tsais films, 3739, 19698, 201,
203, 205
Giant (Stevens), 64
Girls from Shanghai (Cheng Yi), 247
Giroud, Franoise, 13, 20, 55
Global Hollywood (Miller et al.), 3034
globalization
American media and, 274, 3034, 309
Badiou on, 311
change and, 31112
cinematic new waves and, 5, 20
definition of, 313n7
film studies and, 179
first usage of term, 313n7
flow metaphors and, 212
ghost films and, 196
images and, 24
Lefebvre and, 92, 97
nationalism and, 38
nationalization and, 23133
paradigm of, 309
Reform era cinema and, 242
spatial manifestations of, 149
in Still Life, 296
Taiwanese cinema and, 149, 18082
Tsing on charm of, 40
in The World, 29193
Edward Yang and, 186
Godard, Jean-Luc
bout de souffle (see bout de souffle)
advertising and, 134
Alphaville, 29, 13033, 325n2
349
American cinema and, 67, 304, 3067
architecture and, 18, 80, 133
on art cinema, 21
Band of Outsiders, 69, 86, 106
Breathless (see Breathless)
Busbea and, 85
at Cahiers du cinma, 17, 45
cameos by, 112
on documentaries, 107
editing of, 52
on French baby boomers, 46, 67
in French new wave, 46
Hollywood and, 304
images of, 13234
jump cuts of, 2627, 49, 57, 103, 105, 111
Made in U.S.A., 103, 13334
Masculin fminin, 52, 67, 13132
mise-en-scne and, 26, 30, 66, 69, 13334
modernization in films of, 133, 134
Moullet and, 17
objects in films of, 133
politics and, 104, 133
on Ray, 6467
Resnais and, 113
Ross on, 1034
space and, 91, 1034, 131, 133
space in films of, 91, 96
Tati and, 135
theory of cinema of, 2526
Two or Three Things I Know about Her,
1718, 67, 75, 100, 134
Varda and, 125
Weekend, 1034, 133, 13435
on widescreen cinema, 117
Golden Bear Award, 241
Golden Harvest Studio, 304
Golden Horse Film Festival, 180
Golden Lion Award, 268
Golden Rooster awards, 224
Goldstein, Richard, 309
Gong Li, 243, 261, 262, 334n13
Gong Yan, 24748
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai), 32, 196, 2013,
2056
Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou), 148, 171
Good Men, Good Women (Hou), 147,
18687
Gouhier, Henri, 78
Graduate, The (Nichols), 30910
Grant, Cary, 66
Green Green Grass of Home, The (Hou), 166
Grmillon, Jean, 66
Griffith, D. W., 64
Guangxi Film Studio, 24344
Guangxi Youth Production Unit, 244
350
Guanyin de gushi (Edward Yang), 155.
See also In Our Time
Guernica (Resnais), 115
Gulingjie shaonian sha ren shijian (Edward
Yang), 148. See also Brighter Summer
Day, A
Gun Crazy (Lewis), 306
Guo Baochang, 243
Guo-juin Hong, 327n21
Hai shang hua (Hou), 146. See also Flowers
of Shanghai, The
Haixia (Wang Haowei, Qian Jiang,
Chen Huaiai), 220
Hansen, Miriam, 17879, 181
Hao nan hao n (Hou), 147. See also Good Men,
Good Women
Hardt, Michael, 311
Harris, Mark, 306
Hawks, Howard, 17, 45, 57, 71
healthy realism, 15255, 158, 163, 164,
327n21
Hei pao shijian (Huang Jianxin), 254
Hei yan quan (Tsai), 203
Henderson, Brian, 51
Henry, Buck, 309
Hepburn, Katherine, 30
He Qun, 244
Hero (Zhang Yimou), 233, 25859, 273
Herzog, Werner, 183
Heshang (Xia), 20913. See also River Elegy, The
Hess, John, 31819n13
Hinson, Hal, 260
Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais)
about, 118122
Clo from 5 to 7 and, 127, 128
counterculture and, 55
Domarchi on, 52
at French film festivals, 114
on the future, 129
identity in, 119, 121
modernity in, 120
Hirokazu Koreeda, 161
Hitchcock, Alfred
Cahiers du cinma on, 17, 45, 71
Chabrol and Truffaut on, 318n4
images of, 58
long shots/takes in films of, 58
Psycho, 311
Rear Window, 58, 74, 137
Rope, 58, 306
Index
Vertigo, 282
The Wrong Man, 58
Hole, The (Tsai), 146, 149, 187, 201, 203
Hollywood
auteur theory and, 17, 54, 61
beach movies, 305
capitalism and, 1, 303
craft unions in, 336n3
Daily Express on, 7
earnings of, 144
globalization and, 1, 11, 3034
histories of rise of, 25
iconic images of, 146
Rohmer on, 71
runaway productions of, 303
screenwriters/scriptwriters in, 320n53
shot length in, 146
Taiwan cinema and, 144, 146
urbanism and, 180
vernacular of, 179
homosexual desire, 198
Hong gaoliang (Zhang Yimou), 241. See also
Red Sorghum
Hong Kong cinema
earnings of, 144
golden age of, 150
hegemony of, 7
kung fu heroes of, 304
shot duration in, 146
Taiwanese cinema and, 146, 15052
WWII and, 214
Hong Sang-soo, 161
Hong xiang (Tian, Xie Xiaojing, Zhang Jianya),
244
Ho, m panenko (Forman), 35
Horse Thief, The (Tian), 254
Hou Hsiao-hsien
art cinema and, 162
background of, 16061, 183
The Boys from Feng-kuei, 14748, 162,
166170, 175, 187
Caf Lumire, 173
capitalism and, 199
categorization of, 14344
Cheerful Wind, 16466
City of Sadness, 147, 161, 170
critique of films of, 156, 160177
Cute Girl, 166
Index
diverse subjects of films of, 147
Dust in the Wind, 146, 14748, 16263,
17073, 175
Ebert on, 161
The Flight of the Red Balloon, 31, 173, 17577
The Flowers of Shanghai, 146, 147
French cinema and, 31
Goodbye South, Goodbye, 148, 171
Good Men, Good Women, 147, 18687
The Green Green Grass of Home, 166
identity in films of, 156, 161, 166, 179
images of, 156, 16165, 169, 171, 17377
long shots by, 146
long shots/takes in films of, 163, 170, 173, 174
master shots by, 32, 161, 163, 170, 175
Millennium Mambo, 14748, 17475
mise-en-scne and, 32, 161, 166, 173, 17576
modernity in films of, 16869, 17475, 301
newcomer policy and, 155
objects in films of, 177
The Puppetmaster, 147, 161
reality in films of, 149
The Sandwich Man, 146, 155, 156
space and, 18687
Summer at Grandpas, 162
Taiwanese literary movements and, 16162
in Taiwanese new wave, 145, 160
Three Times, 32, 148, 17475
A Time to Live, a Time to Die, 147, 16162,
166, 186
Tsai and, 195
Visconti and, 16768
House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou), 233,
258, 273
Hoveyda, Fereydoun, 17, 59, 6465
Huang Chunming, 156, 159, 161
Huang Jianxin, 224, 254
Huang tudi (Chen Kaige), 236. See also Yellow
Earth
Hu Bingliu, Country Couple, 220, 22326, 265,
290, 332n26
Hugo, Victor, 116
Hu Jinquan, King Hu
Come Drink with Me, 150
Dragon Inn, 15051, 201, 203
locations favored by, 152
A Touch of Zen, 151
Tsai and, 201
Zhang Yimou and, 273
Hu Ke, 234, 333n46
Husbands (Cassavetes), 3078
Huston, John, 318n12
351
identity
Aug on, 15
automobiles and, 103
in Chinese literature, 211
colonial hybrid, 11
free trade agreements and, 89
healthy realism and, 164
in Junkspace, 282
Lee Ching-Chih on, 182
market and, 12
plastic, 117
in sinophone world, 327n26
IDHEC, 113
I Dont Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai), 203
If You Are the One (Feng), 32
Illusionist, The (Tati), 136
I Love Beijing (Ning), 278
images
affection-image, 26566
Anderson on spectral, 229
Bazin on, 76, 272
Boyer on, 149
Debords society of the spectacle and, 17
Deleuze on, 29, 26566
fragility of, 71
Hu Ke on, 234
justice and, 273
Koolhaas emblematic, 197
in mise-en-scne, 2627, 30, 5152
modernity and, 19
in neorealism, 19
objects and, 27, 29, 165
Perec on, 29
photographs (see photographs)
Restivo on regimes of, 19
of tableaux vivants, 125
textual approach and, 319n22
universal language of, 9
Yang Ni on, 23536
Zhong Dianfei on, 236
imperfect cinema, 3, 4, 144, 268
Inception (Nolan), 188
Indian cinema, 7, 3034
individualism, 14, 308
individualists, 33, 46, 14344, 147, 238, 240
industrialism, 19
Ingold, Tim, 319n18
In Our Time (Edward Yang), 155, 184
Institut des hautes tudes cinmatographiques
(IDHEC), 113
interior design, 186, 188, 198
international city craze, 32
352
Invisible Man, The (Whale), 7678
Iordanova, Dina, 34
Ishihara Yujiro, 64
Italian cinema
Andreotti Law and, 10
Cahiers du cinma and, 11, 58
futurists and, 143
history of, 7
modernism and, 10
nature in, 80
neorealism in (see neorealism)
post-WWII transformation of, 910
Restivo on economics and, 1819
runaway productions of, 10
Italy
cinema (see Italian cinema)
fashion industry in, 1011
Milan, furniture from, 73
postwar economy and images of, 1819
Ivy, Marilyn, 162
James, Henry, 318n4
Jameson, Fredric
on capitalism in Terrorizers, 147
on cityscape in Terrorizers, 199
on construction in Terrorizers, 192
English on awards and, 23
on mise-en-scne in Yangs films, 185
on postmodernity, 309
on railroad in Hous films, 171, 328n35
Japan
atomic bombing of, 114, 119
China, colonial rule of, 214
cinema (see Japanese cinema)
Taiwan, colonial rule of, 150, 162, 165
Tokyo, 17374, 214
Japanese cinema
master shots in, 161
outsourcing in, 336n5
Taiwanese cinema and, 15051
taiyozoku in, 3, 4
What a Family and, 222
Jaws (Spielberg), 146
Jia Hongsheng, 243, 334n13
Jiang Qing, 220
Jiang Wen, 243
Jianying Zha, 241
Jiao Xiongping, 145. See also Chiao, Peggy
Hsiung-ping
Jia Zhangke, 3233, 161, 185, 187, 236, 284301
Jiu shi liuliu de ta (Hou), 166
Joinville, 9
Journal dun cur de campagne (Bresson),
5960
Index
Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou & Yang Fengliang), 245,
250, 259, 260, 262, 335n33
Jules and Jim (Truffaut), 1089, 305
jump cuts
in American cinema, 305
description of, 27, 105
Dixon on, 49
of Lou, 278, 280
of Resnais, 120, 121
urbanism and, 149
Junkspaces, 197, 199, 28182
Jurassic Park (Spielberg), 8
Kaika, Maria, 295
Kaohsiung, 168, 187
Karl, Rebecca, 229
Kast, Pierre, 54, 114
Keaton, Buster, 136
Ke n (Li & Hsing), 153. See also Oyster Girl
Kerouac, Jack, 310
kinetoscopes, 150, 188
Klinger, Barbara, 308
Kolker, Robert, 307
Kongbu fenzi (Edward Yang), 147. See also
Terrorizers, The
Konkurs (Forman), 33
Koolhaas, Rem, 196, 197, 202, 28182, 301
Korean cinema, 161, 3034
Kovcs, Andrs Blint, 26, 316n75
Kracauer, Siegfried, 79, 233, 235, 237
Kuleshov, Lev, 120
Kunaoren de xiao (Deng & Yang), 227
Labarthe, Andr S., 16, 3031, 46, 317n93
La Belle Amricaine (Dhry), 103
La Dolce Vita (Fellini), 19
Ladri di biciclette (De Sica), 10. See also Bicycle
Thieves
La Jete (Marker), 133
Lamorisse, Albert, The Red Balloon, 31, 17576
Lang, Fritz, 117
Lang Lang, 210
Lao jing (Wu Tianming), 246. See also Old Well,
The
La Pointe Courte (Varda), 12425
Lsky jedn plavovlsky (Forman), 33
Las Lomas de Urdaneta, 73
Last Year at Marienbad (Resnais), 92, 11314,
118, 120
La Terra Trema (Visconti), 125
Latour, Bruno, 290
Lears, Jackson, 78
Laud, Jean-Pierre, 30, 204
Le Ballon, 176
Le Ballon rouge (Lamorisse), 17576. See also
Red Balloon, The
Index
Le Cellulod and le marbre (Rohmer),
321n78
Le Cellulod et le marbre (Rohmer), 6972
Le Chant du styrne (Resnais), 11618
Le Coup du berger (Rivette), 112
Le Doulos (Melville), 81, 109
Lee, Bruce, 304
Lee Ching-Chih, 182
Lee Hsing
Beautiful Duckling, 15354, 171
Guo-juin Hong on, 327n21
identity in films of, 152, 179
Li Jia and, 327n24
Oyster Girl, 15354, 156, 327n24
Lee Kang-sheng, 37, 148, 161, 19596, 198,
202, 204
Lee Kwang-mo, 161
Lee San Chouy, 242
Lefebvre, Henri, 85, 9297, 100, 101, 139,
323n18
Left Bank filmmakers, 48, 11213, 135, 324n54,
325n60
Lei Feng, 223
Lenin, Vladimir, 4
Le notti di Cabiria (Fellini), 8182
Leone, Sergio, 10
Le Plein (Arman), 134
Les Amants (Malle), 56, 98
Les Bonnes Femmes (Chabrol), 105, 109
Les Choses (Perec), 28, 29
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson), 59
Les Dragueurs (Mocky), 8889, 109
Le Signe du lion (Rohmer), 112
Les Jardins de Paris (Resnais), 115
Les Quatre cents coups (Truffaut), 17. See also
400 Blows, The
Les Statues meurent aussi (Resnais), 114
Les Trentes Glorieuses (Fourasti), 20
Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Tati), 135
Lets Kill off the Moonlight, 143
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 27
Le Voyage du ballon rouge (Hou), 31, 17576.
See also Flight of the Red Balloon, The
Levy, Emanuel, 308
Lewis, Joseph H., 306
LExpress, 13, 17, 20, 55
LHeure dt (Assayas), 176
Lian (Tsai), 31. See also Visage
Lian lian feng chen (Hou), 146. See also Dust in
the Wind
Lian Wenguang, 313n8
Libration, 8
Life (Wu Tianming), 252, 25658, 277
Li Jia, Oyster Girl, 15354, 156, 327n24
Lin Cheng-sheng, 146
Linju (Zheng Dongtian), 224
353
Lin Wenchi, 180, 189
Lin Yusheng, 24849
Li Shaohong, 239
literature
avant-garde, Resnais and, 11314
Benjamin on, 188
identity in Chinese, 211
Lis cohort model for, 238
novels (see novels)
objective, 114
Perec on images and objects, 29
scar, 211
vs. scripts, 9
socialist realism in, 21415, 216
of Taiwanese nativist movement, 143, 161
Taiwans roots-seeking, 158, 16162, 16566,
193, 327n28
Truffaut on objects in, 56
Little Flower (Zhang Zheng), 227
Li Tuo, 210, 227, 229232, 330n1
Liu Jiayin, 161, 187
Li Zehou, 23839, 333n1
Lloyd, Harold, 136
Locarno Film Festival, 160
Lola (Demy), 103
Lollobrigida, Gina, 10
London, 11, 214
Long men kezhan (Hu Jinquan), 150. See also
Dragon Inn
long shots/takes in mise-en-scne, 12, 30, 51
Loren, Sophia, 10
Lotringer, Sylvre, 86
Louvre, 31, 86, 106, 124, 2035
Lou Ye, Suzhou River, 278283
Lovers, The (Malle), 56, 98
Loves of a Blonde, The (Forman), 33
Lu Fei-I, 326c4n4, 326c4n5
Lumire brothers, 7, 110
Made in U.S.A. (Godard), 103, 13334
magazines, 55
Mahjong (Edward Yang), 184, 186
Malle, Louis
Elevator to the Gallows, 89, 97102, 128,
129130, 136
The Lovers, 56, 98
screenplay extracts in Cahiers, 54
Zazie in the Metro, 101
Malraux, Andr, 15, 169
management theories, 28
Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia (Zhang Yimou),
273
Mandarin cinema, 15152
Man Escaped, A (Bresson), 60
354
manifestoes, 143
Mankiewicz, Herman, 321n77
Mann, Anthony, 63, 66, 86
Maoist films
female revolutionary in, 263
Fifth Generation and, 240, 245, 247,
249250, 255
images in, 263
modernism in, 247
modernity in, 258
Primitive Passions on, 245
socialist realism in, 216, 247
illusions of, 298
Yellow Earth and, 247
youth in, 247250
Mao Zedong, 218, 258, 289
Marchand, Corrinne, 121. See also Victoire,
Clo
Marcus, Jane, 295
Marcuse, Herbert, 34
Marie, Michel, 17
Marker, Chris
age of, 112
categorization of, 48, 112
cats, red balloon mural and, 175
documentaries by, 115, 117
extracts of screenplays in Cahiers, 54
La Jete, 133
Statues Also Die, 114, 115
Toute la mmoire du monde and, 115
Marshall Plan, 46
Marshall Plan of ideas, 26
Martin, Adrian, 317n91
Martineau, Pierre, 317n84
Marx, Karl
on capitalist modernity, 223
model of history of, 311
on modernity, 291
on revolutions, 32, 301
on Western development, 36
Marxism
Baudrillard on objects and, 28
Benjamin and, 3233, 301
Foucault on, 73
French baby boomers and, 46
Paris and, 84
working class in, 19
Masculine Singular (Sellier), 48
Masculin fminin (Godard), 52, 67, 13132
master shot
editing and, 163
mainland Chinese cinema and, 32
Index
purpose of, 170, 174
of Ray, 65
Taiwan cinema and, 3132
match cut, 105, 119, 121
materialism, 27, 28, 84, 95, 158
McCarthy, Anna, 315n48
McDonalds, 1
Mehring, Christine, 325n1
Mekas, Jonas, 307
Melville, Jean-Pierre
Bob the Gambler, 17, 81, 109, 110f
description of, 17
Le Doulos, 81, 109
science fiction and films of, 130
Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy (Ni),
24041
Menzel, Ji, 3435
Miao Tien, 31
Mickey One (Penn), 307, 308
Millennium Mambo (Hou), 14748, 17475
Miluku Productions, 193
Ming-yan Lai, 327n25
mise-en-scne
in advertising, 78
artistry of, 56
Assayas on, 176
Astruc on, 319n19
Aumont on, 26
auteur theory and, 26, 5051, 189, 319n18
Bazin and, 6869, 7681
Bresson on, 60
Cahiers du cinma and, 25, 26, 3031, 189, 311
capitalism and, 62, 97
consumers and, 27
consumption and, 52, 81
costumes and, 51, 94
in Czech new wave, 35
dcoupage and, 60
definition of, 2526
design and, 56
development of, 25
economics and, 62, 81
editing and, 27
evolution of concept of, 30
Gabin and, 66
identity and, 72
images in, 2627, 30, 5152
Labarthes obituary for, 3031
Left Bank filmmakers and, 112
limitations of, 67
long shots/takes in, 12, 30, 51
Martin on death of, 317n91
master shot and, 31, 32
materialism in, 27
modernism and, 316n75
modernization and, 26, 29, 5253, 62
Index
Mourlet on, 26
music and, 57
Nature and, 81
neorealism and, 58
objects in, 27, 2930, 5157, 6768
plot and, 87
Robbe-Grillet and, 325n60
scenery and, 189
Sontag on, 60
space in, 27, 2930, 5153, 56, 68, 81
spectacle and, 29, 53
staging and, 189
subjects in, 2930, 55
tableaux vivants and, 125
theater and, 51
walking and, 8690
youth and, 55
Missing, The (Lee Kang-sheng), 202, 2056
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 5758
Mlle. Irne Cahen dAnvers (Renoir), 107
Mocky, Jean-Pierre, 8889
modernism
alienation and, 159
Bazin and, 81
Kovcs on, 316n75
mise-en-scne and, 316n75
neorealism and, 316n75
Rohmer on architecture, design, and, 73
socialist realism and, 21718
vernacular, 17879
modernity
Aug on, 15
Baudelaires vision of, 100
Benjamin on, 25
capitalist, 223, 290
cars in U.S. vs. France and, 84
Charney and Schwartz on culture of, 181
Chatterjee on postcolonial world and, 36
cinematic new waves and, 3012
collective sublime of, 295
Confucianism and, 211
design and, 56
French baby boom and, 4647
images and, 19
liquid, 28, 317n85
Marx on, 291
nationalism and, 38, 39
objects and, 73
in Parent and Virilio designs, 91
postcolonial, 36
socialist realism and, 21517, 298
modernization
anti-modern theory of, 301
355
common experience of, 41
in Czech new wave films, 35
four areas of Chinese, 230
French baby boom and, 4647
mise-en-scne and, 26, 29, 5253, 62
mobi-boom design and, 14
modernism and, 10
Ross on, 1415, 47
Modernization of Film Language (Zhang & Li),
227, 229232
Modern Times (Chaplin), 99
Modern Western Classics Library, 234
Monogram Pictures, 71, 81
Mon Oncle (Tati), 89, 13536, 138
Monroe, Marilyn, 325n64
Monsieur Hulots Holiday (Tati), 135
montage
Bazin on, 57
images in, 51, 149
in neorealism, 58
Rossellini on, 59
in Soviet cinema, 25
urbanism and, 149
Moreau, Jeanne. See also Carala, Florence
auteur theory and, 49
in Elevator to the Gallows, 89, 98, 100, 102,
324n47
in Jules and Jim, 1089, 305
Moretti, Franco, 11
Morgan, Daniel, 333n55
Morse, Margaret, 179
Moscow, 214
Mosfilm, 303
Moullet, Luc, 17, 66
Mourlet, Michel, 26
Movie Theaters in Taipei, 180
Mumford, Lewis, 16
Murnau, F. W., 64
Museum without Walls, The (Malraux), 169
music
in Cold War new wave films, 34
in Elevator to the Gallows, 89
French youth culture and, 55
globalization and, 4
in The Hole, 201
score, 89, 102
soundtracks (see soundtracks)
in Visage, 204
in Edward Yangs films, 184
Mussolini, Benito, 23
356
Nanguo zaijian, Nanguo (Hou), 148. See also
Goodbye South, Goodbye
nationalism, 3, 23, 36, 38, 39, 229
nationalization, 21415, 23133, 237
Nativism and Modernity (Lai),
327n25
Neale, Steven, 21
Negri, Antonio, 311
Neighbors (Zheng Dongtian), 224
neorealism
Andreotti Law and, 10
auteur theory and, 51
Bazin and, 234
cameras for, 281
images in, 19
Labarthe on, 17
locations for, 80, 326c3n5
materialism and, 158
modernism and, 316n75
montage in, 58
revival of, 12
spectacle and, 19
Neutra, Richard, 73
New Era
Berry on, 218
cinema in (see Reform era cinema)
modernism in, 218
Modernization of Film Language
on, 230
socialism and, 23839
Newman, David, 3046
new men/new women
in Chinese literature/film, 263
as consumers, 13, 81
economic models for, 81
materialism and, 27
objects and, 28
newspapers, 38
new waves
age of three worlds and, 34, 303
cinematic (see cinematic new waves)
demographic, 13, 4647
New York City, 179, 214, 301, 307
New York Film Festival, 160
New York Times, 24142, 309
Nianqing de yi dai (Liang Zhihao & Zhang
Huijun), 24749
Nichols, Mike, 309
Night and Fog (Resnais), 114
Nights of Cabiria (Fellini), 8182
Index
Ni nabian jidian (Tsai), 31. See also What Time
Is It There?
1980s, The (Zha), 241
Ning Ying, 32, 239, 278
Ni Zhen, 236, 239, 24041, 327n29
Noiret, Philippe, 125
Nolan, Christopher, 188
Not One Less (Zhang Yimou), 259, 266273, 277
nouveau roman, 114, 325n60
nouvelle vague, 1114, 20, 26
novels
art cinema and, 21
Cahiers du cinma on, 316n75
capitalism and, 38
in Godard films, 67
Hollywoods beginnings and, 25
nationalism and, 38
of Robbe-Grillet, 11314, 325n60
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, 18081, 283
nuclear explosions, 34, 114
Nuit et brouillard (Resnais), 114
Oberhausen Manifesto, 143
objects
Assayas on, 176
auteur theory on, 189
Baudrillard on, 27, 28, 78, 189190, 312
Bazin on, 69, 77, 176, 272
campy, 198
discourse of the vanishing of, 16263
etymology of, 27, 316n79
Godard on Ray and, 67
images and, 27, 29, 165
industrial design and, 28
in mise-en-scne, 27, 2930, 5157, 6768
Perec on, 29
Robbe-Grillet and, 114
widescreen cinema and, 118
observational realism, 250, 293, 297
Old Well, The (Wu Tianming), 246, 250,
25256
One and Eight (Zhang Junzhao), 244,
246, 260
On Living in an Old Country (Wright), 276
On the Road (Kerouac), 310
On Weaving a Basket (Ingold), 319n18
Ory, Pascal, 55
Oste sledovan vlaky (Menzel), 3435
Our Field (Xie Fei), 249
Our Generation, 241
Oyster Girl (Li & Lee), 15354, 156,
327n24
Index
Parent, Claude, 9092
Paris
Atgets photographs of, 134, 158
Benjamin on, 134, 158, 188
Busbea on, 8485
Delouvriers Master Plan for, 84
in French new wave films, 17, 20, 2627, 29,
5354, 68, 8081, 8497
in Godard films, 29, 75, 80, 8688, 91, 10311,
130, 13335
in Hous films, 17677
identity in, 11
in Malles films, 89, 97101
Marxism and, 84
materialism in, 84
in Mockys films, 8889
modernity and globalization, 179
population of, 8384
post-WWII transformation of, 1415, 27,
8384
in Resnais films, 2627, 115
in Rivettes films, 8081
in Rohmers films, 80
St. Cinma des Prs in, 113
in Tatis films, 75, 89, 135140
in Truffauts films, 80, 176
in Tsais films, 31, 3738, 187, 2034
in Vardas films, 2627, 81, 91, 12128,
325n66
Paris Belongs to Us (Rivette), 81
Paris nous appartient (Rivette), 81
Paris vu par, 17
Party Girl (Ray), 6465
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 10, 78
Penn, Arthur, 304, 307, 308
Peoples Republic of China (PRC), 147, 21415,
217, 242, 298. See also China
Perec, Georges, Les Choses, 28, 29
Perloff, Marjorie, 143
Personals, The (Chen Kuo-fu), 199
phenakistoscopes, 188
photographs
Bazin on, 272
Benjamin on Atgets, 134, 158
in Breathless, 107
in Cheerful Wind, 16465
as commodity reification, 185
in Country Couple, 220, 226
in Hiroshima mon amour, 119
in La Pointe Courte, 125
in The Terrorizers, 185
in 24 City, 300
357
Pickpocket (Bresson), 60
Pictures from a Revolution (Harris), 306
Pingguo de ziwei (Wan), 15859
plastics, 2829, 50, 72, 11718, 309, 310
Platform (Jia Zhangke), 285, 289292,
296, 297
Platos allegory of the cave, 74, 2056,
322n100
Playtime (Tati)
about, 135140
Elevator to the Gallows and, 89, 100,
101, 136
Rohmer and, 74, 75
sets for, 326c3n5
Two or Three Things I Know about Her and,
100
Poiccard, Michel, 47, 5455, 8788, 10211, 129,
133, 305
postmodernism, 122, 299
postmodernity, 196, 309
Poujade, Pierre, 47
Practice of Everyday Life, The (de Certeau),
8687
Prashad, Vijay, 304
Preminger, Otto, 6162
Primitive Passions (Rey Chow), 245
Priority Urbanization Zones, 14
privatization, 14, 188191, 287, 297, 300301
productionism, 271
Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 9294
prosperity
De Seta on, 19
Jameson on, 192
Le Chant du styrne on, 117
Super Citizen on, 160
in Taiwanese cinema, 154
Proton, 168
Psycho (Hitchcock), 311
psychoanalysis, 95
Puppetmaster, The (Hou), 147, 161
Qian Jiang, 220
Qianxi manbo (Hou), 14748. See also
Millennium Mambo
Qiao zhe yi jiazi (Wang Haowei), 22026. See
also What a Family
Qingchun de jiaobu (Su Lu & Gong Yan),
24748
Qingchun ji (Zhang Nuanxin), 249
358
Qing mei zhu ma (Edward Yang), 148, 185. See
also Taipei Story
Qingshaonian Nezha (Tsai), 195
Queneau, Raymond, 116
Quitting (Zhang Yang), 334n13
Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern
(Dai Qing), 244
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou), 24445,
259, 260
Rancire, Jacques, 52, 77
Rauschenberg, Robert, 305
Ray, Nicholas, 46, 6467, 311
Ray, Robert, 308
Rayns, Tony, 242
realism
Bazin and, 52, 57, 7581, 176, 23335, 301
Cahiers on Hitchcocks, 58
Chinese nationalization and European,
237
Cui Zien and, 255
definition of, 268
Film Form and Films National Form
on, 236
Film Is Film on, 235, 333n55
healthy, 15255, 158, 163, 164, 327n21
images and, 301
melodrama and, 225
neorealism (see neorealism)
observational, 250, 293, 297
politics and, 235
socialist (see socialist realism)
on the spot, 268
Warhol and, 255
Rear Window (Hitchcock), 58, 74, 137
Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai), 195
Rebel without a Cause (Ray), 64, 65
Recreation (Tati), 136. See also Playtime
Red Balloon, The (Lamorisse), 31, 17576
Red Detachment of Women, The, 263
Red Elephant (Tian, Xie Xiaojing, Zhang Jianya),
244
Red Guards, 24748
Red Lantern, The, 263
Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou)
award for, 241
Chow on, 250
critique of, 260
Life and, 258
modernism in, 256
narrative of, 246
The Story of Qiu Ju and, 262
Wu Tianming and, 254
youth in, 250, 251
Index
Reform era cinema. See also Fourth Generation
Bazin and, 23334
capitalism and, 24142
Chinese new wave and, 238244, 249250
city films in, 259
Cold War and, 242
directors of, 22123, 230, 23637, 24244
documentaries and, 235
Eight Model Operas and, 228230
elements of, 219
Essay Done in Film Terms on, 23233
European realism and, 23335
female consumer in, 332n26
Film Form and Films National Form on, 236
Film Is Film on, 235, 333n55
film theory and criticism of, 22728
historiography of Chinese cinema and, 239240
long shots/takes in, 234
Maoist films and, 247250
mise-en-scne of, 229
modernity in, 22728
photography and, 226
Rofel on allegory in, 253
socialist realism and, 219, 222, 224, 237
specificity of, 236
theater and, 227230, 235
youth in, 247250
Renoir, Jean, 57, 64, 320n33
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 101, 107
Rensheng (Wu Tianming), 252. See also Life
Resnais, Alain, 2628, 46, 48, 92, 112121. See
also Hiroshima mon amour
Restivo, Angelo, 1819
Revue du cinma, 54
Reynaud, Brnice, 334n13
Right to the City, The (Lefebvre), 92
Ringu, 196
Riva, Emmanuelle, 52, 87
River Elegy, The (Xia), 20913, 237, 274, 295,
33031nn12
Rivette, Jacques
architecture in films of, 80
on Bresson, 59
at Cahiers du cinma, 17
city films by, 8081
on Gabin, 66
Le Coup du berger, 112
on Mizoguchi, 5758
Paris Belongs to Us, 81
on Premingers Angel Face, 6162
on Rossellini, 59
Index
theater and cinema in films of, 81
Rizal, Jos, 38
Rizi (Wang Xiaoshuai), 278
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 49, 11314, 324n54, 325n60
Rocco and His Brothers (Visconti), 16768
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Visconti), 16768
Rocha, Glauber, 3, 11
Rofel, Lisa, 253
Roger, Philippe, 15
Rohmer, ric
architecture and, 70, 7375, 80
Benjamin and, 70
at Cahiers du cinma, 45
capitalism and, 75
Cinastes de notre temps, 321n78
on classical influences, 6972, 7475
on French new wave films, 55
on Hawks, 57
on Hitchcock, 58
on Hollywood, 71
on identity, 70
Le Cellulod et le marbre, 6972
Lefebvre and, 95
Le Signe du lion, 112
on objects, 70, 7275
on Resnais, 11213
on space, 70, 7273
Tati and, 74
on Westerns, 62
Roma, citt aperta (Rossellini), 9
Rome, 9, 8182, 178, 326c3n5
Rome, Open City (Rossellini), 9
Ronet, Maurice, 100
Rope (Hitchcock), 58, 306
Rosenau, James, 331n7
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 260
Ross, Kristin, 1415, 47, 84, 1034, 138
Rossellini, Roberto
Antonioni, Pasolini, and, 10
cameras used by, 80
children in films of, 78
city films by, 178
Godard on, 64
Rome, Open City, 9
Voyage to Italy, 58
Rouch, Jean, 17, 54, 107, 117
Roud, Richard, 324n54
Rozier, Jacques, 103
Ruan Lingyu, 214
Ruttmann, Walter, 178, 181, 197
359
Sacrificed Youth (Zhang Nuanxin), 249
Saganism, 56
Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay church, 91
Saltzman, Harry, 151
Salut les copains, 55
Sandwich Man, The (Hou, Zeng, & Wan), 31,
146, 149, 155160
Sanxia haoren (Jia Zhangke), 295300
Sarris, Andrew, 49, 3089
SARS crisis, 201
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 113
scenery, 34, 63, 79, 189
Schrer, Maurice, 58. See also Rohmer, ric
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 291
Schulberg, B. P., 8
Schwartz, Vanessa, 181, 324n44
science fiction
Alphaville, 29, 13033, 325n2
Bazin and The Invisible Man, 7678
Breathless and, 130
Melville and, 130
socialist realism and, 216, 298
in Still Life, 296, 29899
score, 89, 102. See also soundtracks
screenplays/scripts
Chinese censorship of, 242, 251
excerpts in Cahiers, 54
of Fifth Generation, 243, 251
for French new wave films, 52
for Joinville films, 9
for Le Chant du styrne, 116
linquistic critique of, 52
Rivette on, 6162
screensaver, 281
Screen theory, 21
screenwriters/scriptwriters
Essay Done in Film Terms on, 232
of Fifth Generation films, 251
in Hollywood, 320n53
for Le Chant du styrne, 116
vs. novelists, 9
Resnais and, 113
Seberg, Jean, 53, 102. See also Franchini,
Patricia
Second Futurist Proclamation, 143
Sedmikrsky (Chytilov), 3334
Seijun Suzuki, 222, 332n24
Sellier, Genevive, 48, 49, 70, 319n22
sets
Bazin on, 63, 76, 79
in cinema and theater, 26, 51
design of, 198, 254
for Joinville films, 9
360
sets (continued)
vs. locations, 5354, 61
Paris as French new wave, 53
for Playtime, 13639, 326c3n5
in Premingers films, 62
Tsai and, 198
Shadows (Cassavetes), 307, 308
Shanghai, 214, 278283
Shanghai guniang (Cheng Yi), 247
Shanghai Panic (Andrew Cheng), 28283
Shanghai Triad (Zhang Yimou), 266
Shao Mujun, 237
Shaw Brothers Studio, 150, 304
Shih, Shu-mei, 327n26
Shijie (Jia Zhangke), 29193
Shimian maifu (Zhang Yimou), 233. See also
House of Flying Daggers
Shock of Freedom in Films, The, 305
Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut), 8081, 305, 306
Shouji (Feng), 32
Shuang tong (Chen Kuo-fu), 144, 199
Shu Qi, 148, 174
Sigh, A (Feng), 32
Sina, 292
Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and
Alliance, 214
Sirk, Douglas, 50
Situationism, 86, 96
Six in Paris, 17
Skolimowski, Jerzy, 30
Skywalk Is Gone, The (Tsai), 3738, 198
Sleep (Warhol), 255
Smith, Douglas, 27, 28
Smith, Neil, 6
socialism
art and Chinese, 216, 298
capitalism and Chinese, 213
Chinese cinema and, 214, 216, 240
Cultural Revolution and, 297
Czech new wave films and, 35
Jia Zhangke and, 288, 29899
New Era and, 23839
in Not One Less, 269
supermodern constructions and, 33
24 City on, 299
in Yellow Earth, 24647
socialist realism
Bazins realism and, 23334
Chinese theater and, 230
development of, in Chinese art and media,
21419
Index
Eight Model Operas and, 228
Fifth Generation and, 251, 254
heroes in, 222, 334n12
iconography of, 300
internationalism and, 21516
in Maoist films, 247
Reform era cinema and, 219, 222, 224, 237
science fiction and, 216, 298
in Soviet art and cinema, 21415
theatricality of, 224, 230
youth in, 222
Solanas, Fernando, 3. See also Third Cinema
Sons Big Doll, The, 31. See also Sandwich Man,
The
Sontag, Susan, 60, 198
soundtracks
of Breathless, 102
of Clo from 5 to 7, 127
of Country Couple, 22526
of Dust in the Wind, 173
of The Graduate, 310
of Jia Zhangkes films, 288290
of The Sandwich Man, 156
Soviet cinema
hegemony of, 7
montage tradition in, 25
Mosfilm, 303
socialist realism in, 21415
Soviet Union
China and, 21417
space
abstract, 9495
of Alphaville, 131, 133
Aug on, 15, 9495, 293
Bazin on, 63, 7779
Bresson and, 59, 60
Busbea on, 85
character and, 118
Chen Kuo-fu and, 199
Chow on, in Reform era cinema, 245
in city films, 181
colonial ordering of, 12
Denning on, 4
drama and, 228
in the Eight Model Operas, 228
in Faces, 307
Foucault on, 67
images in supermodern, 29
information science and, 84
Index
Junkspaces, 197, 199, 28182
in mise-en-scne, 27, 2930, 5153, 5657,
68, 81
in The Missing, 206
obsolete, farmland as, 281
in Pickpocket, 60
Ray and, 65
in The Red Balloon, 176
The River Elegy on, 210
in Shanghai Panic, 283
The Skywalk Is Gone on, 38
Sontag on, 60
supermodern, 29
in What Time Is It There? 38
widescreen cinema and, 118
worlding of, 12
Space and Politics (Lefebvre), 92
special effects, 76
spectacle
in Alphaville, 13233
Aug on, 293
in Clo from 5 to 7, 127
Debords society of the, 17, 122, 133
in Hous films, 156, 169
neorealism and, 19
Taiwanese realism and, 146
in Xiao Wu, 287
specter of comparisons, 36, 203,
21617, 229
Spicy Love Soup (Zhang), 32
Spielberg, Steven, 8, 146
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 11, 165
Statues Also Die (Resnais & Marker), 114, 115
St. Cinma des Prs, 113
Steimatsky, Noa, 326c3n5
Stevens, George, 64
Stewart, James, 66
Still Life (Jia Zhangke), 295300
Story of Qiu Ju, The (Zhang Yimou), 259269,
271, 273, 277, 28485
Straits Times, 242, 27778, 334n14
Stringer, Julian, 23
Su Lu, 24748
Summer at Grandpas (Hou), 162
Summer Hours (Assayas), 176
Sunset Street (Wang Haowei), 220
Sun Tribe, 3
Super Citizen (Wan), 159160
supermodernity, 1516, 28, 29
surrealists, 73
361
Sur un art ignor (Mourlet), 26
Su Xiaokang, 209
Suzhou He (Lou), 278283
Suzhou River (Lou), 278283
Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song, 304
System of Objects, The (Baudrillard), 78
tableaux vivants, 125
Taipei
capitalism and, 2
in Chen Kuo-fus films, 19596, 198201
government strategies for, 31, 183, 189
in Hous films, 31, 17374
in Lee Kang-shengs films, 19596
Mandarin cinema and, 15152
population of, 182
studies of cinema and, 179194
in Tsais films, 31, 3738, 18081, 195205
in Wans films, 158160
in Edward Yangs films, 31, 148, 153, 18081,
184194
Taipei Story (Edward Yang), 148, 153,
184191, 193
Taiwan
cinema in (see Taiwanese cinema)
colonial rule of, 150, 162, 165, 182
economy of, 31, 146, 18889
housing in, 18889, 195
as island on the edge, 144, 326c4n4
languages in, 151, 160, 327n18, 327n26
martial law in, 151, 160, 166
political status of, 39
population of, 145, 182
PRC and, 147
Restivo on geopolitics of, 18
Taipei (see Taipei)
Taiwan Cinema Manifesto, 14344, 186
Taiwanese cinema
breakaway period of, 182
censorship of, 15053, 158, 160
city film characteristics, 18081
consumers and, 32
earnings of, 144
golden age of, 153
government and, 31, 147, 15053, 182
history of, 15053
Hong Kong cinema and, 146, 15052
identity in, 143, 205
images in, 145
Japanese cinema and, 15051
Lee Ching-Chih on periods of Taipei city
films, 182
362
Taiwanese cinema (continued)
long shots/takes in, 145, 146, 155
Mandarin, 15152
marginality of, 146, 148, 192, 326c4n4
master shot in, 3132, 14546, 14849, 155
mise-en-scne in, 32, 14546, 148, 153, 205
modernization and, 15255, 162, 181
newcomer policy for directors, 155
new wave (see Taiwanese new wave)
realism of, 146, 15255
reconstruction period of, 182
space in, 149, 152, 188
taiyu pian of, 15152, 327n18
White Terror and, 182
Taiwanese new wave
censors and, 158, 160
cities and, 184
development of, 3132, 14547, 15256
first film of, 155
French new wave and, 31, 3639, 313n8
on interiors, 189
six nos and, 153
statistics on, 326c4n5
Taiwan Cinema Manifesto and, 14344, 186
Taiyozoku, 3, 4
Talent Competition (Forman), 33
Taste of Apples, The (Wan), 15859
Tati, Jacques, 28, 89, 97101, 135140, 198,
326c3n5. See also Playtime
Taylorization, 181
Technicolor, 335n33
Teddy Boys, 3, 4
television
in Alphaville, 29, 132
and architecture, 74, 85
in Chinese public/commercial spaces,
226, 273
French youth culture and, 55
Italys postwar economy and, 1819
Junkspace and, 282
Labarthe on French new wave and, 17
Mehring on art, 325n1
as mirror, 109
in Not One Less, 267, 269272
The River Elegy, 20913, 237, 274, 295,
33031nn12
Rohmer on, 74
Ross on French cinema and, 14
urbanism and, 149
Index
Temple, Shirley, 214
Teng, Teresa, 241
Terrorizers, The (Edward Yang), 147, 148,
18486, 192, 199, 200f
Thai cinema, 3034
That Day, on the Beach (Edward Yang), 184
theater
Bazin on, 7581
costumes and sets for, 26, 51
design in, 23536
in Rivettes films, 81
socialist realism in Chinese, 230
Yang Ni on drama in, 23536
Theater and Cinema (Bazin), 7581
Third Cinema, 3, 4, 11, 144
Three Gorges Dam, 29596, 299
Three Times (Hou), 32, 148, 17475
Throwing Away the Walking Stick of Drama
(Bai), 22729
Tianqiao bu jian le (Tsai), 3738. See also
Skywalk Is Gone, The
Tian Zhuangzhuang, 239, 24344, 254,
27778
Time to Live, a Time to Die, A (Hou), 147,
16162, 166, 186
Tirez sur le pianiste (Truffaut), 80. See also Shoot
the Piano Player
Tokyo, 17374, 214
Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki), 222
Tokyo nagaremono (Suzuki), 222
To Live (Zhang Yimou), 266
Tong nian wang shi (Hou), 147. See also Time to
Live, a Time to Die, A
Toronto Film Festival, 23
Touch of Evil (Welles), 30
Touch of Zen, A (Hu Jinquan), 151
Toute la mmoire du monde (Resnais),
11516, 118
Town and the City, The (Kerouac), 310
trains, 291
Train to Shaoshan, The, 289290
Treasure Island (Chen Kuo-fu), 19899
Troubled Laughter (Deng & Yang), 227
Truffaut, Franois
art cinema, film festivals, and, 46
article in Bulletin du cin-club du Quartier
Latin, 113
on Becker, 62
on Bresson, 60
at Cahiers du cinma, 17, 45
Index
Certain Tendency of the French
Cinema, 143
essays on French cinema, 45, 54, 56, 59, 129,
143, 318n2
film construction, critique of, 52
The 400 Blows (see 400 Blows, The)
in French new wave, 46
on Giant, 64
on Hitchcock, 58, 318n4
Hollywood and, 3046
Jules and Jim, 1089, 305
on literature, 56
on objects, in literature, 56
on Ray, 64
Resnais and, 113
Shoot the Piano Player, 8081, 305, 306
style of, 148
Tsai and, 148
Varda and, 125
Tsai Chin, 185
Tsai Ming-liang
architecture and, 195, 198, 201, 204
background of, 203
Barney and, 2045
capitalism and, 199, 203, 205
Chen Kuo-fu and, 198201
city films by, 31, 3738, 18081, 195205
French cinema and, 31
ghosts and, 3739, 19698, 201, 203
Goodbye Dragon Inn, 32, 196, 2013, 2056
history in films of, 3739
The Hole, 146, 149, 187, 201, 203
Hou and, 195
images of, 2045
Junkspaces and, 197
local references in films of, 149
long shots by, 146
marginalization and, 197
master shots by, 161
modernism and, 196, 202
modernity in films of, 38, 195, 19798,
206, 301
objects in, 205
realism, reality, and, 149, 198, 205
Rebels of the Neon God, 195
The Skywalk Is Gone, 3738, 198
space and, 38, 187, 195, 19798, 2015
in Taiwanese new wave, 145
363
on theater and cinema, 19697
Truffaut and, 148
Visage, 31, 187, 2035
Vive lamour, 187, 195
What Time Is It There? 31, 3739,
198, 203
Tsing, Anna, 40, 212, 295
Turman, Larry, 309
24 City (Jia Zhangke), 295, 299301
(Godard), 1718, 67, 75, 100, 134
Udden, James, 146
Umberto D (De Sica), 5859
Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The (Demy), 103
Un condamn mort sest chapp
(Bresson), 60
Ungar, Steven, 125, 325n66, 325n68
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), 217. See also Soviet Union
United States (U.S.)
French films in, 7
media in (see American media)
Resnais films and, 114
Ross on cars in, vs. France, 84
Taiwan and, 149, 15859
Universum Film AG (UFA), 79
urbanism, 19, 20, 100, 149, 196
urbanites, 25
urbanity
Andrew on, 196
Aug on, 15
codes governing, 95
in Elevator to the Gallows, 98, 101
Mumford on, 16
as spectacle, 198
in The Terrorizers, 199
in Tsais films, 19798
in Zhang Yimous films, 259
Urban Rule and the Death of the City
(Choay), 16
USSR, 217
Vadim, Roger, 122
Vallotton, Flix, 176
Van Gogh (Resnais), 115
Van Peebles, Melvin, 304, 305, 307, 308
Varda, Agns
background of, 124
categorization of, 48, 112
364
Varda, Agns (continued)
Clo from 5 to 7, 88, 108, 112, 12124, 12629,
325nn6668
Daguerrotypes, 123, 12627
Fellini and, 125
La Pointe Courte, 12425
map for Clo, 123, 325n68
neorealism and, 125
questionnaires on Clo, 122, 325n67
scenes in films of, 2627
space and, 91, 12324, 12728
space in films of, 91, 12324
on theater and cinema, 81, 123
Varnelis, Kazys, 82, 322n120
Venice Film Festival, 23, 144, 160, 242, 268
Ventura, Lino, 98
Venturi, Robert 180
Vertigo (Hitchcock), 282
Vertov, Dziga, 25, 181, 197
Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini), 58
Vickis Hat (Zeng), 15658
Victoire, Clo, 88, 108, 12124, 12628
Vietnam War, 184
Vincendeau, Ginette, 17
Virilio, Paul, 9092, 180, 192
Visage (Tsai), 31, 187, 2035
Visconti, Luchino, 125, 16768
Vive lamour (Tsai), 187, 195
Vogel, Ezra, 212
Voyage to Italy (Rossellini), 58
Vuillermoz, mile, 7
Walker Art Center, 306, 336c10n9
Wang Bing, 301
Wang Chao, 161
Wanger, Walter, 8
Wang Haowei, 22026, 249250, 255, 332n21,
332n26
Wang Hongwei, 290
Wang Hui, 301
Wang Jing, 331n3
Wang Luxiang, 209
Wang Wei, 179
Wang Xiaoshuai, 277, 278
Wang Yan, 247
Wan Ren, 158160
Warhol, Andy, 203, 255
weaving, 319n18
Webb, Charles, 309
Weekend (Godard), 1034, 133, 13435
Welland, Sasha, 31415n32
Welles, Orson, 30, 124
Index
Wenders, Wim, 8
Wenhua: Zhongguo yu shijie (Gan), 234
West of the Tracks, 299
Whale, James, 7678
What a Family (Wang Haowei), 22026,
249250, 255, 332n26
What Time Is It There? (Tsai), 31, 3739,
198, 203
widescreen cinema, 11718
Wilder, Billy, 98
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 333n55
Women de tianye (Xie Fei), 249
Women haipa (Cheng Yusu), 28283
Wong Kim Hoh, 278
Woo, John, 146
World, The (Jia Zhangke), 29195, 29799
world cinema, 2, 188
World Trade Organization (WTO), 212
World War I (WWI), 7
World War II (WWII)
Closely Watched Trains set in, 34
European cinema and, 8, 9
film festivals and, 23
Italian fashion industry after, 10
nouvelle vague cohort and, 13
Restivo on image regimes and, 19
Virilio in, 90
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 65, 73
Wright, Patrick, 276
Wrong Man, The (Hitchcock), 58
WTO, 212
Wu Hung, 332n22
Wu I-Fen, 195
Wu Nian-jen, 146
Wu Tianming, 243, 246, 25058, 277
Xia Jun, The River Elegy, 20913, 237, 274, 295,
33031nn12
Xiandai xifang xueshu wenku (Gan), 234
Xian Film Studio, 243, 250
Xiang yin (Hu Bingliu), 220. See also Country
Couple
Xian (Hu Jinquan), 151
Xiao Hua (Zhang Zheng), 227
Xiao Jiye, 24849
Xiao Qi de na ding maozi (Zeng), 15658
Xiao Shan Goes Home (Jia Zhangke), 236, 285
Xiao Shan hui jia (Jia Zhangke), 236, 285
Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke), 236, 284290, 295
Xie Fei, 224, 227, 249
Xie Xiaojing, 244
Ximeng rensheng (Hou), 147. See also
Puppetmaster, The
Index
Xinlang, 292
Xizhao jie (Wang Haowei), 220
Xuan Lian, 278
Yang, Edward, 3132, 14349, 153, 155, 180200,
301
Yang Fengliang, Ju Dou. See Ju Dou
Yang Ni, 23536, 333n55
Yang Yanjin, 227
Yangya renjia (Hsing), 153. See also Beautiful
Duckling
Yang Yuanying, 335n32
Ye, Lou, 32
Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu, 144, 147, 152, 184, 19798
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige)
Chow on, 25051
communism in, 24547
critique of, 24647, 256
ethnography and, 245, 246, 254
Guangxis Youth Production Unit and, 244
He Qun and, 244
history and, 245
Life and, 256, 258
mise-en-scne in, 256
modernism and, 256
Ni Zhen on, 236
The Old Well and, 254
socialism in, 24647
Zhang Yimou and, 244, 260
Yhcam, 9
Yi ge he ba ge (Zhang Junzhao), 244. See also
One and Eight
Yingjin Zhang, 15152
Yingxiong (Zhang Yimou), 233. See also Hero
Yip, June, 327n28
Yisheng tanxi (Feng), 32
Yi Yi (Edward Yang), 148, 184, 187, 19293
Young Generation, The (Liang Zhihao & Zhang
Huijun), 24749
Young Pioneers, 24748
youth
in beach movies, 305
in Chinese cinema, 277
Chinese documentaries on, 32
in cinematic new waves, 24, 19
in Cold War new wave films, 3335
as consumers, 55, 73, 332n26
in Fifth Generation films, 250
French new wave and, 1314, 46, 5455
kung fu heroes of, 304
libidinal energy of, 34
in Maoist films, 247250
365
in The Old Well, 246, 250, 252, 255
in Reform era cinema, 247250
in socialist realist films, 222
Youth in the Flames of War (Wang Yan), 247
Yugoslav black wave, 33
Zai na hepan qingcao qing (Hou), 166
Zazie dans le mtro (Malle), 101
Zazie in the Metro (Malle), 101
Zeng Zhuangxiang, 15658
Zhang Jianya, 244
Zhang Jun, 290
Zhang Junxiang, 23233
Zhang Junzhao, One and Eight, 244,
246, 260
Zhang L, 161, 301
Zhang Ming, 277
Zhang Nuanxin, 227, 229232, 249
Zhang Xudong, 21618, 331n3
Zhang Yang, 334n13
Zhang Yimou
background of, 239, 240
at Beijing Film Academy, 239
on Cannes Film Festival, 268
career of, 24344, 25859, 269
classification of, 213
critiques of films of, 258275
The Curse of the Golden Flower, 273
on desires of Fifth Generation, 242
fame of, 240
Fourth Generation and, 219, 221
Hero, 233, 25859, 273
House of Flying Daggers, 233, 258, 273
images of, 251
imperfect cinema and, 268
Ju Dou (see Ju Dou)
King Hu and, 273
To Live, 266
mise-en-scne and, 32, 256, 259
modernism and, 256
modernity in films of, 259, 271
neorealism and, 268
New York Times on, 24142
Not One Less, 259, 266273, 277
Olympics and, 210, 25859
One and Eight and, 244, 260
Raise the Red Lantern, 24445, 259, 260
realism in films of, 259, 266273
Red Sorghum (see Red Sorghum)
Shanghai Triad, 266
Sixth Generation and, 277
366
Zhang Yimou (continued)
The Story of Qiu Ju, 259269, 271, 273, 277,
28485
strategy for global markets, 236
Wu Tianming and, 252, 254, 256, 258
Yellow Earth and, 244, 260
Zhang Yuan, 277
Zhang Zhen, 227, 332n26
Zhan huo zhong de qingchun (Wang Yan),
247
Zhantai (Jia Zhangke), 285. See also Platform
Zhan Yuan, 278
Zhao Tao, 300
Index
Zheng Dongtian, 224, 234, 23637
Zhenghun qishi (Chen Kuo-fu), 199
Zheng Jing, 247, 249
Zhi yao wei ni huo yi tian (Chen Kuo-fu),
19899
Zhong Dianfei, 236
Zhou Enlai, 216, 230
Zhou Yi-Xing, 317n96
zhuanti pian, 330n1
Zola, mile, 134
Zui hao de shiguang (Hou), 32. See also Three
Times
Zuotian (Zhang Yang), 334n13

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