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The times of subjectivity and social reproduction
Paul Willemen
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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008

ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/08/02029007 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649370801965661

The times of subjectivity and social reproduction

Paul WILLEMEN

Taylor and Francis

ABSTRACT

A reflection on the reasons why we take films such as Hous as cherished cinephilic
objects and on the ways that we, as critics, often try to disguise our desiring relation to films.

K

EYWORDS

: Cinephilia, identity, subjectivity, aesthetic form, Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Instead of launching on a declaration of love
for Hous cinema, let me begin by counting
the ways in which I do

not

love Hous films.
First, I do not appreciate Hous films for
their complexity. Teaching film makers and
photographers has taught me that there is
no connection whatsoever between
complexity and quality. Really bad work is
also extremely complex and capable of rais-
ing the most fascinating topics and issues if
you pay attention to the full range of a
works signifying dimensions.
Secondly, I do not appreciate Hous
films for telling me about Taiwan nor for
displaying a Taiwanese identity. The search
for a Taiwanese identity is, mercifully, not
something that Hous films embark upon.
On the contrary, any notion of identity to be
detected in his films is there only as some-
thing oppressive, restrictive, a pressure that
tries to push you into a box. To foist iden-
tity-searching onto Hous films strikes me as
an act of aggression that can be perpetrated
against any film, regardless of what it is like
or about. Perhaps it may be necessary to
recall the difference between, on the one
hand, asking what growing up and living in
a particular time and place makes of you,
and, on the other, the act or the desire to
present a specific, determinate answer to
such a question, as if there were only one
correct possible answer.
As for telling me about Taiwan, again,
Hous films are not particularly special. All
films made in or about Taiwan display or
convey aspects of the texture of life as it is
lived in that spatial-temporal terrain politi-
cally formatted as Taiwan. Hous films do
not tell me more in this respect than any
other film shaped in and by Taiwan. It is not
so much what Hous films say about Taiwan
that is of interest, but, of course, how they
say it. To put it another way: it is not Hou
who speaks about Taiwan; it is Taiwan that
speaks in Hous films, and in order to hear

that

speech,

that

voice, we first have to learn
to detect it and learn to listen to it in a great
many Taiwanese films. Only then, by hear-
ing the many different ways in which
Taiwan speaks in and through cinematic
discourses may we begin to understand
something of what that voice is trying to tell
us. However, it is worth recalling at this
point, firstly, that the socio-historical context
of the production is never a matter of just a
singular voice: it manifests itself as a forma-
tive pressure in a range of discourses (or
voices). Moreover, it is never the only pres-
sure on cinematic enunciation: there are
many others, including the many voices the
intersection or condensation of which can be
said to constitute the directors subjectivity.

1

In that respect, Hous films are in them-
selves, merely fragments of a discourse. As
such, they do not tell me more about Taiwan
than any other Taiwanese film.
Hous films may make it easier for me
to read how social-historical dynamics
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shape the textures of lived lives in Taiwan,
but that is not an argument in favour of his
work. To appreciate his films for informing
me about Taiwan would be tantamount to
allowing myself dutifully to follow wher-
ever he directs my attention, and to believe
the information served up for me. Such a
process of reading his films would, in effect,
save me the trouble of having to find out for
myself. Besides, if I want to know about
Taiwan, Hous or anyone elses films are not
the best or the most practical way to find
out. I would do better to read a couple of
books on the subject.
Thirdly, I do not like Hous films because
he is a world cinema author. I am sensitive to
that claim, of course, but it is a sensitivity that
deserves some critical examination. What am
I being invited to subscribe to when I am
invited to regard Hou as a great world
cinema author, as I am, for instance, by Kent
Jones in an essay in

Film Comment

, where he
laments the fact that Hous films are no
longer sold or marketed in the US on the basis
that he is a world cinema author (Jones 1999).
What notion of authorship is being invoked
in such cases to cue and format my way of
paying attention to Hous films? I do not
object to a directors name being used as a
brand name to sell and market a film. Cinema
is an industrial practice as much as it is a
cultural one, and for film makers to make
films, it is essential that their work makes a
reasonable amount of money. It is not the
issue of commodification and marketing in
itself that I object to. If I did, I would be
opposing the very notion of cinema that
enables Hous films to exist at all. The prob-
lem lies in the fact that marketing always
involves the mobilisation and reinforcement
of ideas and pleasures that are deemed capa-
ble of persuading us to pay for the commod-
ity in question. In other words, marketing
always involves an authoritarian regulation
of social-cultural reproduction. Marketing
cues us as to what we are supposed to find
pleasurable or unpleasurable. A lot of money
and effort is also devoted to telling us what
we should not find pleasurable. But whether
or not a director deserves to be singled out for
his or her way of exploring cinemas potential
is a decision one should reach only after
seeing the films. It must not be a piece of
cultural baggage with which we enter into
the cinema.
It is, of course, also possible that Hou is
promoted as a great author because his
work is supposed to tell me, so much better
than anyone elses, about the complexities of
peoples lives in Taiwan, or about the
universal human condition anywhere and at
any time, and who does so in ways that,
according to the aesthetic framework that
I am supposed to share with the journalists
and marketeers in question, count as inno-
vative, unprecedented, new. Let us call this
the Nobel Prize notion of authorship. And
let us not dwell too much on the fact that the
Nobel Prize was instituted by an industrial
tycoon who had grown fabulously wealthy
in the arms trade. The Nobel Prize notion of
unique and exemplary universal excellence
is no more than the reverse side of the
general and average universal anonymity
attributed to the numbers of bodies that
could be blown to bits by his industrially
manufactured and marketed explosives.
If I am moved to go and see Hous films
because he is presented to me as a great
author of world cinema, then I am not seek-
ing to appreciate Hous work; I would be
merely seeking confirmation of the univer-
sality and exemplariness of the cultural and
institutional histories that happen to have
formatted

my

mental and aesthetic world.
Critics or journalists who promote Hou to
me as a world author are in fact demanding
that I accept the universal excellence of the
commodity that they are marketing and that
I should accept to derive pleasure and satis-
faction from films only in the ways that I am
enjoined to do by them. That is the reason,
of course, why only the spokespeople for
certain kinds of aesthetic ideologies are
invited to use newspapers and broadcasts as
platforms from which to regulate the repro-
duction of social-cultural values, and why
only very few, very rhetorically skilled
people can participate in such platforms at
all responsibly.
If I consent to appreciate Hous films for
any of the above reasons (complexity;
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Paul Willemen

information about Taiwan and Taiwanese
identity; world cinema author status), I will
have lost precisely the most valuable, that is
to say, the specifically cinematic dimensions
of Hous work, because I will have reduced
his work to a device that mirrors a narcissis-
tically gratifying mask that I, in conjunction
with the institutions that have formatted
me, have fashioned for myself.
How, then, can I come to terms with the
fact that I do love Hous films? There is, first
of all, the important opportunity that Hous
films offer to clarify for myself the issues
I have just discussed. Admittedly, Hous
films are not the only ones that invite me to
embark on such a clarification. What specific
aspect of Hous films then activates those
questions for me? In trying to suggest
answers to this problem, I will, briefly, re-
visit all three reasons why I do not appreci-
ate his films, but, this time, look at them
from a different angle.
First, the question of complexity. In a
special issue of the French magazine

Trafic

(n. 50, 2004) re-posing Bazins question
What Is Cinema? to a broad range of
contemporary critics and film makers, Alain
Bergala contributes a very interesting but
incredibly reductive essay on

his

desire for
cinema, speaking mainly as a film maker.
Punning on Bazins essay on cinemas realist
(I would say indexical) ontology, Bergala
called his own contribution: On the Onto-
logical Impurity of Cinemas Creatures. In
Bergalas context, impurity is to be under-
stood as referring to the regrettable ubiquity
of polluting substances that makes purity
an unattainable ideal. Bergala then proceeds
to tell us how he has made his peace with
the inevitably sinful, that is to say, mixed
and complex dimensions of cinema, erecting
his own personal desire for the bodies of his
actors into the very definition of cinematic
mise en scne. He writes

In the history of the arts, cinema asks, in
a totally new, unprecedented manner,
the question of the relation between
the imagined creature (roughly, the
creature that the creator has in mind),
the real creature (what painters and
photographers call a model) and the
creature actually inscribed in the work
(the figure, the character incarnated in
the film). [What is constitutive of
cinema is that] what one sees on the
screen is never due simply to an
abstract process of enunciation, but is
always also, physically, the result of a
relation between creator and creature.
This relation in cinema is inescapable
and has no equivalent in any other art
form. It is an inter-subjective relation
that puts into play the entire gamut of
effects, emotions and human drives. It
is a relation between bodies within the
representational space itself, because in
cinema [t]he intervals between charac-
ter-bodies

and

the physical-desiring
interval between a creator and his or
her creature-bodies modulate the very
same space, visible on the screen. The
relation between creator and creature in
cinema is played out in the same space
as the relations between character-
figures. (Bergala 2004; my translation)

In this way, Bergala posits cinematic space
as essentially modulated, constituted by two
multi-dimensional axes: the space config-
ured by the relations between bodies

in

the
film and the space configured by the desir-
ing look of the film maker as s/he modulates
those relations. The intersection of these two
spaces would then constitute the diegetic
cinematic space resulting from the activity of
mise en scne. Bergalas premise here is that
of character narration, assuming that what
the film maker wants to see and work with is
fired by a desire for actors bodies. Bergala
waxes lyrical about the complexities of faces
and the subtleties of gesture. But what he
disregards is the desire to see and read the
physiognomy of land- and city-scapes, a
desire that inscribes character-bodies not as
objects of desire for and in themselves, but as
catalysts, as revelators of the rhythms and
energies of history. Or, as Hou put it in an
essay he contributed to the web-journal

Rouge

, figures in landscapes (or cityscapes)
as revelators of the weight of the many
diverse historical forces that, operating with
different rhythms and temporalities, have
moulded the particular social-historical
scenes, lived by the characters (Hou 2003).
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The historicity implied in the emphasis on
the physicality of actorial bodies and their
physiognomies also operates, potentially, in
relation to geographic, rural or urban spaces,
and to the way histories are inscribed

there

.
To expand slightly on Hous own phraseol-
ogy (as translated into English), his films
or, at least, those of his films that are set in
Taiwan and deal directly with aspects of the
histories that shaped contemporary Taiwan
confront us with the following question:
how to read and convey the specific gravity
of the diverse historical dynamics that
combined to shape social existence here,
now, in Taiwan? In order to allow that ques-
tion to emerge, Hou has developed a variety
of rhetorical strategies, adapted to the partic-
ular conditions of film making in Taiwan at
the time of production, identified and
described by critics as a personal style, an
authorial aesthetic. From my point of view,
it is a mistake to characterise an authorial
aesthetic in terms of recurring formal rhetor-
ical devices. And it is an even greater
mistake to suggest that cinema must be seen
exclusively in terms of the modulation of
inter-personal desires, as Bergala does in his
way, and as the Hollywood pimps travelling
the world offering training courses in char-
acter-based screenplays do in their way.
Hous films show us that the world into
which we are born and in which we have
to learn to live, is shaped by the specific
weight of historical forces and rhythms that
have impacted on that particular time and
place. Another way of phrasing Hous
question would then be: how do we, how
can we, live with the weight of history here,
on the particular patch of geo-temporal
space that we inhabit? And I am certain
that in order to explore that question, Hou
will feel free to adopt any formal rhetorical
device that he deems useful and will refuse
to be limited to the range of devices that
allegedly define and distinguish Hou as an
author, in the same way that, for instance,
Brecht energetically refused to be restricted
to the use of Brechtian alienation devices.
Having thus touched on the question
of authorship, let me add straight away
that an engagement with the shapes and
pathways traced by the weight of history in
Taiwan is also an insufficient characterisa-
tion of Hous work, as it would be of any
author. What matters is the hypothesis
contained in and proposed by the film
about the economy, that is to say, the hier-
archically ordered interrelations between
the forces evoked. By giving different
weights to such social-historical rhythms as
they coagulate into lived-time (by organis-
ing foreground/background relations,
regulating the amount of screen-time allo-
cated to them, etc), a film offers a hypothe-
sis about the way social formations
function, including about the way that they
format the people living in those forma-
tions. In this respect, David Bordwells
analysis of the way Hous films deploy
lens-technologies, mobilising technological
constraints (only a limited number of lenses
were available to Hou) to place his charac-
ters into intensely dynamic social spaces, is
instructive (Bordwell 2005: 186237).
The second axis that organises Hous
films is the axis of movement, that is to
say, the very rhythms of historical tempo-
ralities with their formative dynamics
rather than merely registering the weight
of history. In the language of structural
linguistics, one could say that Hous films
elaborate the specific ways in which diach-
ronic pressures (rhythms of change) striate
and energise the layers of situations experi-
enced as synchronic, as conditions of life,
the existing state of affairs in a particular
time and place.
The debate that often surfaces in the
more philosophically inclined journalistic
reviews of Hous work, about whether his
films are peculiarly Taiwanese (and therefore
incomprehensible to non-Taiwanese view-
ers) or universal (which allows European
and American viewers to ignore what Hou
has to say about living in Taiwan) is irrele-
vant. The point is that if Hou manages to
make us see how historical forces not only
shape but also energise given situations, then
his films are capable of helping each of us to
understand a little more about the particular
situation that shapes our existence and our
options for change in our here-and-now.
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The complexity of the films and their
ability to tell me something about Taiwan
are thus merely side-effects of a discursive
strategy that exploits the (locally available)
potential of cinema to convey at one and the
same time a state of affairs, the dynamics of
its formation and the forcelines delineating
its potential transformations. Hou shows us
land- and city-scapes as forcefields, lets call
them life-scapes, always caught in the
tension between the weight of inertia, and
the ineluctable pressures that shaped, and
will continue to transform, social existence,
energising it and making it ceaselessly
morph into something else.
Let me clarify my point with a few exam-
ples of the way Hou weaves temporal
rhythms and spaces together. Towards the
beginning of

A Summer at Grandpas

(1984)
there is a shot of a solid looking bridge. This
bridge indexes industrial time in its design
and materials, but it is also a fixture for more
than one generation. The camera then
moves, without a cut, to show the river
underneath it, indexing natural time while
also operating as a metaphor for the flow of
time, and we may assume, unless contra-
dicted in the film later which it is not that
the river is a long-term feature of the land-
scape and was there well before industriali-
sation came about. The shot then holds and
tilts slightly to reveal, in the distance, a group
of kids splashing about in the river. Here,
generational and maturational time are
added to the temporal layering, but this
phase of the shot also inaugurates a sense of
the recent past, a new beginning and a settled
group of people all at the same time, includ-
ing an indication of a moderate degree of
affluence since the children have the time to
go and play together. In one brief sequence
shot, Hou establishes the scene, inaugurates
the story and orchestrates a dense network of
temporal rhythms, incarnated in the land-
scape that frames the events that will unfold.
What is more, the distances involved (e.g.
starting with the bridge in mid-shot and
going via the river to the kids in long-shot)
convey also that the physical, geographical
and industrial context in which the kids are
playing has to be registered and taken into
account in its own right as important if we
are to understand something about those
children. In other words, the shot very
economically places the youngsters in a
complex temporal frame in which a variety
of historical rhythms coagulate to form a
landscape that shapes the world inhabited
by the children. Cutting straight to the kids
splashing about would divert attention from
this context and reduce the landscape to a
more or less atmospheric backdrop for a
discourse about eternal, universal child-
hood such as conventional humanist, char-
acter-centred narratives might (and often do)
wish the viewers to deploy as the relevant
cognitive frame for understanding the film.
Valentina Vitalis contribution to this collec-
tion cites examples from the American trade
journal

Variety

that advocates such a reading
of the children in the film, ignoring the mise
en scne of the shot that I have just described
(Vitali 2008). Similarly, later in the same film,
Hou pans the camera across the crown of a
tree, then tilts down to kids climbing the tree,
then up again to the crown. This shot comes
after a scene in which grandpa shows some
old photographs to his grandson. No voices
are heard explaining the scenes depicted in
the photographs, but grandpa is seen point-
ing out details to the boy who is decidedly
interested in them (or in the unheard expla-
nation). The photographs date back to the
Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Cutting
from that scene to the tree and the kids climb-
ing into it, evokes a temporality that incorpo-
rates the period of Japanese occupation into
the diegetic present of the narrative, with
the trees temporality (the tree obviously has
been there for at least as long as grandpa has
been alive and therefore was there at the time
of the occupation) binding together elements
of historical, natural, generational and
biographical time, not to mention the long-
term (ancestral) past and the recent past
(childhood) of the films narrator.

Good Men, Good Women

(1995) opens
with a long-held shot of a group of people
walking through a landscape. They sing a
patriotic socialist song that dates the scene:
they are on their way to join the Communist
uprising in mainland China. Here, again, the
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shot weaves together a complex web of
temporal rhythms, ranging from those at
work in the landscape (with a beautiful tree
prominently featuring, its leaves registering
the movement of the wind) to the historical
time of Chinese nationalism, the political
time of the relations between Taiwan and
China as well as of the civil war, the
biographical time of the protagonists who
become more individuated and distinct as
they come nearer the camera, and the tempo-
ral rhythms involved in social reproduction
(especially at a time of violent social change).
In this opening shot, we also have an
emphatic deployment of cinematic time (the
sequence shot lasts for quite a few minutes),
which, by the end of the film, when the shot
is repeated, has acquired further temporal
dimensions: it is a shot of a film-within-a-
film, derived from a play the performance
of which irrupts into the film at various times
based on an autobiography of an actress
whose story forms the impetus of the film
while being juxtaposed with the biography
of a young, contemporary Taiwanese actress
whose life-story occupies the time-frame of
the post-White Terror generation. Different
historical, cinematic and biographical
temporalities resonate in the same shot when
it is reprised at the end of the film. Further
examples can be given, also in

Good Men,
Good Women

, of Hous way of cutting tempo-
ral networks and resonances together, at
times moving from colour to black-and-
white, that convey the loss of the ideals of
solidarity that animated the actors who went
to join the Communist revolution and the
growth of a painfully competitive individu-
alism in the last few decades, incarnated
primarily in the young modern actresss life.
The transition here is marked by a black-and-
white shot of a bicycle rider at night as he
goes to fix a public notice in a village
announcing the brutally repressive measures
taken by the Chang Kai-shek government.
We only see the beam of the bicycles light on
a narrow gravel path and the riders
pedalling feet, as if the narrative is moving
through the narrow point of an egg-timer.
Many commentaries on Hous films also
refer prominently to the alleged Chineseness
of the films, invoking the importance of
Chinese aesthetics, philosophy and pictorial
traditions. Such references are less than
helpful. Let me illustrate this point by way of
a reference to a Taiwanese film made by
King Hu just a few years before the so-called
Taiwanese New Cinema took off:

Raining
in the Mountain

(1979). Hus film engages
directly with Buddhist philosophy and
explicitly quotes established, classical
pictorial compositions derived from Chinese
painting, especially in the long opening
sequence of the film showing three people
journeying on foot through landscapes.
These painting-citations are impressive,
even beautiful, but pictorialist, static. The
images are given as tableaux for contempla-
tion. The landscapes featured are presented
as compositions to be appreciated aestheti-
cally. In that sense, one could say that King
Hus film engages directly with aspects of
so-called traditional Chinese aesthetics. On
the other hand, many critics, and not only in
the Orientalist West, emphasize Hous
traditional Chinese aesthetics, even though
his films do not look in the least like

Raining
in the Mountain

s opening sequence. Yan, for
instance, argues that Hous films illustrate
traditional Chinese aesthetics because they
are grounded in a fusion of the human with
nature (Yan 1988). While there is probably
truth in such a claim, it fails to note the
difference between King Hus pictorialism
and Hous way of inscribing figures in land-
scapes. I would argue that Hou does indeed
engage with various aspects of aesthetic
thought in China (how could it not be?), but
that he accentuates the transformative
potential within such images, the energies
that make and un-make such landscapes. In
other words, while King Hu cites and tries to
follow a notion of classic Chinese aesthetic
practice, Hou cites aspects of classical picto-
rialism in order to allow for the emergence
of the energy pressures at work in the
depicted scene. Hus engagement with clas-
sical aesthetics is citational and normative,
Hous is transformative.
And this brings me to my tentative and
somewhat risky closing remarks. I have
talked about Hous films as forcefields on
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the join between diachronic pressures and
the perennial temptation of restful stasis.
Here I simply want to note an impression
left by Hous last two films to date,

Millennium Mambo

(2001) and

Caf Lumire

(2004). The spaces in

Millennium Mambo

are
extremely restricted, while

Caf Lumire

is
set in Japan. Especially with regard to the
last film, I have the impression that the
further Hous films go from the diagnostic-
synoptic forcefield mise en scne he deploys
to convey life-scapes in the ChinaTaiwan
historical nexus, the more abstract his films
become. As the dynamic, energised weight
of history becomes lighter, less directly and
immediately felt in all its dimensions, the
films accentuate more and more the kinetic
lines traced by temporal rhythms. Especially
in

Caf Lumire

, scenes have become cross-
roads, spaces where lines of communica-
tion, urban transit and train lines intersect.
The impression left on me, at least is that
the powerful but sometimes very slow
moving rhythms of social, generational and
biographical histories that shaped Hous
images have come to be replaced by the
kinetic networks of transport and communi-
cation technologies. The peculiar combina-
tion of stasis and movement incarnated by
communication and transport networks
appears to have replaced the more long-
term historical forcefields on display in
Hous earlier films, as if the thickness of
experienced life in Taiwan has dissolved
somewhat, leaving instead almost abstract,
graphic spaces energised by the potential
intersection of the different kinetic rhythms
of communicational and transport networks
that simultaneously connect and fix

2

or
freeze social relations.
If I had to characterise the relevance of
Hous films in contemporary world cinema,
it is to that shift from one notion of historical
dynamics to another that I would look for a
possible answer.

Notes

1. In a remarkable essay, Chua Beng Huat tried to
circumscribe an East Asian public sphere by
tracing a voice speaking of cultural-economic
connectivity through the circulation of the most
banal cultural artefacts, news and gossip maga-
zines. See Chua (2004).
2. I use fix here in the sense of David Harveys
reliance on the concept of capitals spatial and
temporal ways of fixing the problems involved
in the falling rate of profit. See David Harvey
(2003, esp. pp. 4344).

References

Bergala, Alain (2004)

Trafic

50: 23.
Bordwell, David (2005)

Figures Traced in Light: On
Cinematic Staging,

Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Chua, Beng Huat (2004) Conceptualising an East
Asian popular culture,

Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies

5(2): 200221.
Harvey, David (2003)

The New Imperialism,

Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2003) In search of new genres
and directions for Asian Cinema, Lin Wenchi
(trans.),

Rouge

1, http://www.rouge.com.au/1/
index.html.
Jones, Kent (1999) Cinema with a roof over its head,

Film Comment

35(5): 468, 51.
Vitali, Valentina (2008) Hou Hsiao-Hsien Reviewed,

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

9(2): 280289.
Yan, Huizeng (1988) The poetic realism of Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, Pesaro Film Festivals documen-
tation booklet.

Authors biography

Paul Willemen was part of the editorial group of

Screen

in the 1970s; he edited

Framework

in the 1980s
and is the author of many books on cinema, includ-
ing

Questions of Third Cinema

(with Jim Pines, 1987),

The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema

(with Ashish
Rajadhyaksha, 1995) and

Looks and Frictions

(1994).
He is currently research professor at the University
of Ulster.

Contact address:

165 Shernhall Street, London E17
9HX, UK.
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