The age of new waves: art cinema and the staging of globalization 9780199858309, 9780199858286, 9780199367665

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Introduction: Youth, Cities, and the Globalization of Art Cinema (page 1)
PART I
1. The Mise-en-Scène of Modernity: The French New Wave, Paris, and the Global 1960s (page 45)
2. Walking in the City (page 83)
3. New Wave Futures (page 129)
PART II
4. The Urban Archipelago: Taiwan's New Wave and the East Asian Economic Boom (page 143)
5. Morning in the Megacity: Taiwan and the Globalization of the City Film (page 178)
6. The Haunting of Taipei (page 195)
PART III
7. Chinese Cinema in a World of Flows: The New Wave in the People's Republic of China (page 209)
8. The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China (page 238)
9. On Living in a Young City (page 276)
Conclusion: Was There an American New Wave? (page 303)
Notes (page 313)
Index (page 339)

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The Age of New Waves

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The Age of New Waves ART CINEMA AND THE STAGING OF GLOBALIZATION James Tweedie

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tweedie, James, 1969The age of new waves : art cinema and the staging of globalization / James Tweedie.

p. cm.

Includes index. ISBN 978-—0-19-985828-6 — ISBN 978-0-19-985830-9 (paperback) 1. New wave films—History and criticism. 2. New wave films—Taiwan—History and criticism. 3. Motion pictures and globalization. I. Title. PN1995.1795 2013 791.43 611—dc23

2012048584 9780199858286

13 579 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

| CONTENTS }

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Youth, Cities, and the Globalization of Art Cinema 1 PART I

and the Global 1960s A5 2. Walking in the City 83 3. New Wave Futures 129 1. The Mise-en-Scene of Modernity: The French New Wave, Paris,

PART II

Economic Boom 143 of the City Film 178

4. The Urban Archipelago: Taiwan’s New Wave and the East Asian

5. Morning in the Megacity: Taiwan and the Globalization

6. The Haunting of Taipei 195 PART III

7. Chinese Cinema in a World of Flows: The New Wave

in the People’s Republic of China 209

8. The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 238

9. On Living in a Young City 276

Notes 313 Index 339 Conclusion: Was There an American New Wave? 303

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{| 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 inter-

est 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 Nata’a Durovicova and Angelo Restivo at the University of Iowa. Iowa City was a wonderful place to study film and litera-

ture, 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 wouldn’t exist. [ 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 Wisconsin—Milwaukee; 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 Hervé

Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford University Press); Cinema at the City’s 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 Lit-

erature, including Jennifer Bean, Yomi Braester, Tamara Cooper, Willis Konick, and Sudhir Mahadevan. Yomi and I also co-organized a 2006 confer-

ence called Cinema at the City’s 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 Washington’s 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 Chairs—Cynthia Steele, Gary Handwerk, and Miceal Vaughn—made 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 Center’s Society of Scholars program and by the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund.

The editors and staff at Oxford University Press, especially Shannon McLachlan and Brendan O’Neill, 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 compan-

ion 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.

The Age of New Waves

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Introduction YOUTH, CITIES, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF ART CINEMA

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 writer—and 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 economics—this story remains one of the principle examples of a seemingly ineluctable process in which “the cultural messages we transmit through Hollywood and McDonald’s go out across the world to capture, and also to undermine, other societies.”' 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. Hollywood’s 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 cen-

tury with a global reach that rivals the geographic range and ambition of

2 The Age of New Waves 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.* 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 3 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 collec-

tive 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, Japan’s taiyozoku (or Sun Tribe) and the directors of the associated new wave, Britain’s 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 Garcia Espinosa’s “imperfect cinema,” Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's Third Cinema,” and Glauber Rocha’s “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 period’s 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 Ford’s cars; the masses had culture and culture had a mass. Culture was everywhere, no longer the property of the cultured or the cultivated.’ 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 category—art cinema—that 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 reality—the culture industries, the mass media, mass communications—which seemed to have its own autonomy, its own logic, and its own power. Though intertwined

4 The Age of New Waves 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.* 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.” 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.”° 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 5 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.’ 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 Taiwan’s incorporation into a global market in the 1980s and China’s 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 society's 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.® 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 Hollywood's 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

6 The Age of New Waves 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 dificult 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.’ 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 the discrete 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.”'® 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 7 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." While American production companies were also competitive in these early film markets—for example, a program of Thomas Edison films was screened in Shanghai as early as 1897, one year after the first Lumiere brothers film debuted in that city—there 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.’'* Critics and industry insiders penned similar polemics in response to this Hollywood juggernaut, often using the same neologism—“Americanized”—to describe audiences transformed by the in-

fluence of this foreign cinema. In language that anticipated countless later denunciations of the pernicious effect of American film, a 1927 article in Britain’s 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.’'’ The association

8 The Age of New Waves 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.””’ This alliance between “Donald Duck and diplomacy” would have commercial and material benefits as well, Wanger hastened to add.’” 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.”!° NataSa Durovicova 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.”"” She argues that for many Hollywood executives and especially B.P. Schulberg, Paramount’s 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.”’* 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.” Seven European directors, including Pedro Almodovar, 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. We are trying to defend European cinema from complete annihilation.”” In the more colorful words of a Libération 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.”*! 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 9 bought and sold but an essential element of a people’s identity and a contributor to their basic human dignity.** An atavistic definition of culture and an equally atavistic geopolitical model resurface in order to impede the unremit-

ting 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, film’s 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 Ciné-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.”** 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 production—with 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 Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma, citta aperta, 1945) and

10 The Age of New Waves Vittorio De Sica’s 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.”** 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.”* 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 nation’s 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 Italy’s 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 world’s 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 cinema’s 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 cinéma: “what I liked in those days was the Nouvelle Vague. I felt much closer to the French. I saw A 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 A bout de souffle.”*° 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, cir-

culated 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.” 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 ema-

nating 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.”* 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?”” 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.*” 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.*' These studies tend to adopt models of cultural conflict in which the fundamental reference

12 The Age of New Waves 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.’”* 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 “world’s first regime of mass consumption.”*? Hollywood cinema has always been a vital medium

for disseminating the wonders of the market, and de Grazia’s 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-scene, 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.™ 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!”*’ 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 that ensues.

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 Francoise Giroud to describe the vast demographic cohort whose formative years fell after the end of the war. Under Giroud’s leadership, the news magazine L’Express 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. “It’s very simple,” she recalled; “in 1946 in France there was literally nothing.”’° 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.*’ 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 The Age of New Waves under the new constitution of the Fifth Republic, the French state attempted to 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 a urbaniser en priorité), 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 Ile-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 Décoratifs), an “explosion of design” that revamped the relationship between French urbanites and the object world around them.*® 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.”

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 period’s 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 ad-

vertising 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 waves—in cinema, in design, and in the population at large—emerged 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 France’s “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 book—but there is another history, intuitive and stubborn, that nations prefer, in general, to the one schoolchildren learn. In the unofficial annals of France’s collective memory, the American invasion is an obvious fact and, for France, one of the

major events of the last century.”*? 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 Augé focuses on new satellites of urbanity constructed outside the city proper and a novel category of space created in the wake of the period’s economic and social revolutions. He argues that “nonplaces”—most notably the airport, the supermarket, the industrial park, the autoroute, the cabins of mass transportation, and “the extended transit camps where the planet’s refugees are parked”—have become the emblematic locations of a new historical era.*’ Often hidden in plain sight, their impact has been paradoxically obscured by glass walls and abundant lighting. They signal,

for Augé, 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.” 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.* The result, Augé suggests, is a “spatial overabundance” and a subsequent devaluation of the environments that once constituted the core of local identity.“ “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.”* “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 The Age of New Waves 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.”*° 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.””” That clash of temporalities defined the modern city for Augé, while its disappearance has become the distinguishing feature of supermodernity.* Relics of a 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. Augé 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 metaphors—flow, the network, the “city of bits’—for urban reconstruction.”

In her contribution to the 1994 catalogue accompanying a Pompidou Center exhibition on the fate of the modern city, Francoise 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 communication—“high-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 messages” —created the possibility of being “everywhere at once.”°° With the introduction of those technologies, “the age of [discrete] urban entities is over,” and the history of cities is guided by the ideal of “universal communicability” and must contend with its consequences, including a “universal, scattered and fragmented urbanization.”°*' 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.” 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,” André S. Labarthe cited four major influences on the developing new wave: (1) Italian neorealism, (2) documentary films, (3) American cinema, and (4) television.” If that peculiar constellation of influences produced the new wave in France, it’s important to realize how jarring the juxtapositions and collisions can be: think of Jean-Pierre Melville—the subject of

a book by Ginette Vincendeau with the telling subtitle “An American in Paris’—roaming 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.°* The seemingly bizarre and sometimes embarrassing outliers in the Cahiers circle—people like Luc Moullet, who advocates the wholesale Americanization of French cinema in his 1959 essay on Samuel Fuller—should be seen as occupying the same discursive universe as Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and Fereydoun Hoveyda.*° Far beyond the consumerist fantasies indulged by the pages of L’Express, Moullet explores the darkest extreme of the period’s 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 Rouch’s 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 Godard’s Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960), which together create what Michel Marie calls a “veritable geographic portrait of 1959 Paris.”°° 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.”°” Godard’s Two or

18 The Age of New Waves 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 France's economic miracle, the nation’s 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 wave’s initial documentary project and migrates instead toward spaces that could be documented anywhere and therefore need hardly be filmed at all. The film’s 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 Restivo’s magisterial The Cinema of Economic Miracles—which focuses primarily on Italian cinema in the 1960s before extending its scope to the geopolitical periphery of Taiwan and Brazil—suggests 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. Restivo's argument hinges on the belief that two regimes of the image coexisted during Italy’s economic miracle.** 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

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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.” 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 occurred—and was experienced—like a natural disaster.”° 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 post-World War IJ art cinema developed under the aesthetic influence of neorealism and in the historical conditions of the economic boom, it became one of the primary mech-

anisms 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 cul-

ture 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 The Age of New Waves 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 niche—the international art cinema—that 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 révolution invisible, the demographer Jean Fourastié provides a conclu-

sion 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 L’Express 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 Fourastié, 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.”°' 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 André Bazin called “the genius of the system.”®* 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.’ ® Governments and funding organizations have nurtured a market in cinematic arts as a bulwark against the invasion of domestic screens by popu-

lar 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 Brennan’s 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.”™ In many of its mani-

festations, 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 era’s 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.”® 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 The Age of New Waves 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.”™ 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.”® 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.”® 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 inter-

national 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”;” 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.””” The historical trend—which 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 on—is 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 d’ Arte 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 Mussolini’s 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 medium—films that record the people, actions, and environments directly in front of the camera—and 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 events—which are often described in quasireligious language, with devotees converging annually on Cannes or Venice or Toronto—serve to uproot their audiences from their particular origins and constitute new subjects of the festival itself.” But they take place in peculiar and rarefied environments, where the national identities of filmmakers and

24 The Age of New Waves 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.” 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 cinema—most of which provide equal doses of demystification and indictment—why 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.”” 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-scene developed by the critics and filmmakers associated with Cahiers du cinéma 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 celebrates—most notably Dziga Vertov, the most extreme

and experimental director in the Soviet montage tradition—constructed 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-scéne, the term of art that refers to the

26 The Age of New Waves 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. Andras Balint Kovacs 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.” 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.”° In his 1959 Cahiers essay “Sur un art ignoré,’ one of the major mani-

festoes and theoretical treatments of mise-en-scene, 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.”’’”° 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 scene is everywhere, and cities in particular are “governed by the gestures of the metteur en scene, who assumes many guises, official or unofhcial, “personal or collective’”” “Mise en scene, 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.’’® 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-scéne 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-scéne 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 Agnes 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-scéne. 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-scéne 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 meanings—“presented to the senses,” “tangible”—and its more distant connotations: “situated in front of, against” or “contrary.””’ As practiced in the French new wave, a cinema organized around mise-en-scene 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 struc-

tures and spaces of the post-World 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 Bachelard’s history of matter in Western

philosophy and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s celebration of bricolage to Roland Barthes’s alternately rhapsodic and demystifying snapshots of tail fins and toys and Jean Baudrillard’s more encompassing “system of objects.”*° 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 France’s 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.”*' “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.”** He later suggests that metaphors drawn from the domains of geology or botany are no longer appropriate for this new age

28 The Age of New Waves 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.”*? 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. 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 society's] members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines.”®° In Baudrillard’s formulation, the object—once 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 meditations—has 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.*° 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.”*’ 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 capital-

ism 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.”** 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 Augé, 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 Perec's 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 glitter-

ing 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-” 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 cityscape—billboards, posters, neon signs, outdoor movie theaters, ambient television in public spaces—are 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 Godard’s 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 Deleuze’s phrase, “the rise and inflation of images in the external world” results in the transformation of urban mise-en-sceéne into a site of spectacle.” 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-scéne 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-scene visible in the French new wave stages the changing relationships between subjects, objects, and space, even if the theorists of the time

30 The Age of New Waves were unable to extend their concept of mise-en-scéne to its logical conclusions. Location shooting and the long take—the strategies that have become art cinema’s most enduring qualities and clichés—are 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 facades are about to be unfurled. In 1967, in the pages of Cahiers itself, André S. Labarthe announced the “death of a word.”’' Mise-en-scene 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.””* 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-scéne 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;” it could refer to the inimitable performances of Katherine Hepburn or the less exalted “documentary heroes embodied by Jean-Pierre Léaud in the films of Truffaut, of Godard, of Eustache, of Skolimowski.”” Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, “mise-en-scéne” had evolved into a Janus-faced concept referring to both Hollywood’s 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 Labarthe’s pronouncement of the death of mise-en-scéne was premature for a number of reasons. First, the development of that concept into a seemingly incoherent mélange, 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-scene. 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-scéne with an allegory: “a Chi-

nese author tells the story of blind fishermen who one day throw their nets into a field. Come on; let’s open our eyes: cinema has moved on. Let’s not fish

for it anymore. Let’s hunt after it.””? 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-scene 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-scéne, 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 Taiwan’s “economic miracle” in the 1980s. This book situates Taiwan’s 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 Son's Big Doll; Erzi de da wan‘ou),

the development of the new cinema paralleled Taiwan’s transition to a new stage in its economic modernization, as the heavy industrialization of the 19708 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 government’s long-term strategy of developing a media and communications industry radiating from the hub of Taipei. Part II focuses in particular on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s early films documenting the disappearance of the rural landscape of his childhood and the movement of Taiwan’s center of gravity from that countryside to the cosmopolitan environments of Taipei and Kaohsiung. Part II also considers Edward Yang’s 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 architecture—presence, structure, stability—transferred 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 Tsai’s ensemble) as they shuttle between Paris and Taipei. Tsai’s 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 Lamorisse’s classic tale of a young boy’s 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 The Age of New Waves examine the particular history of film and the city in Taiwan, including Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (Bu san, 2003) and Hou’s 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-scéne 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 Taiwan’s experience of modernity. Part III focuses on the emergence of a new wave cinema, especially a cinema organized around the possibilities of mise-en-scéne, 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 films—from Imar productions like Spicy Love Soup (Aiging Mala Tang; Zhang Yang, 1997) to Feng Xiaogang’s A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi, 2000), Big Shot’s 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.”° 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 Marx’s 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 race—to activate the emergency brake.””” Concluding with Jia Zhangke’s 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 Czechoslovakia’s 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.”* 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 Milos Forman’s 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 (Lasky jedné plavovlasky, 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, Véra Chytilova’s Daisies (Sedmikrdsky, 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 The Age of New Waves 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 (Ost?e sledované vlaky; Jiti Menzel, 1966), the young trainee at the station overcomes his own sexual inhibitions—he has suffered through several humiliating erotic encounters and attempted suicide from the shame—at 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.” 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.'”° 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 Spring—Chytilova, 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.”'*' 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 post-World 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 worker’s uniform and, in a mock coronation, a cap. The devolution of that order is then represented through the physical disintegration of the stationmaster’s 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 ideology—reciting slogans, speechifying—breeds 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 spe-

cific dialogue or plot twists. Rebellion is communicated through lethargic movements of the body and inappropriate objects of affection. In The Fireman’s Ball (Hort, ma 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-scene 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-scene. 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 The Age of New Waves 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 durée. One way of understanding that connection would be to talk about transgenerational influence, with the French new wave providing a set of strategies and techniques—relying on a new generation of usually young directors, craftspeople, and actors; deploying the long take; shooting on location—later 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 Marx’s phrase, “the image of its own future.”'” 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.”'”° Or as Partha Chatterjee contends, in language that applies to Anderson's models of both nationalism and comparison: “I have one central objection to Anderson’s 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.”'** 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.”!’ Anderson’s 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.'°° When subjected to the challenges of realpolitik, Anderson’s abstract, romanticized argument loses some of its force, but he also helps establish a framework for comparative history by suggesting that

Introduction a7 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.”'’’ The specters in Tsai’s film—both the ghostly image of Antoine Doinel on a screen in Lee Kang-sheng ’s bedroom and the haunting return of Lee’s deceased father in Paris—pose an invitation and a challenge to rewrite the history of the French new wave from the perspective of contemporary Taiwan, and to locate Taiwan's 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). Tsai’s 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 (Tiangiao bu jian le, 2002). Like a set after the final day of production, the city itself had

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38 The Age of New Waves 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. Tsai’s 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 France—not in an act of homage or homecoming but as a revision of the most utopian aspirations that guided postwar modernity—helps 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.”'® The colonial subject “can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar.”'” In a loose translation of Rizal, Anderson labels this phenomenon—the vision of a domestic,

familiar, close-at-hand environment only in relation to its counterparts far away—the “spectre of comparisons.”'!° Nationalism, Anderson argues, is born of such comparisons. Globalization is made possible by denying them. In Anderson’s 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 nation—conceived as a utopian cultural creation rather than

the brutal product of violent revolutions and government bureaucracies—as 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-liang’s 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.’”"" Tsai’s 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 Tsai’s film is the ultimate comparability of recent Taiwanese cinema and Truffaut's 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-enscene of postwar modernity. Like What Time Is It There? this book’s 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 The Age of New Waves 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.”"'” 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 wave—at once specter and pest—haunts 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.”''’ 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.''* 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-enscene 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.

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The Mise-en-Scéne 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 Francois 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.’ 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.”* The reign of a turgid and timid “cinéma 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.’ A vocal cohort at Cahiers du cinéma—Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Truffaut, along with many influential but less prominent figures—became the guardians of the journal’s 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 of a clique at Cahiers soon dubbed the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians” by André 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.* 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 The Age of New Waves 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 para-

digmatic 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, André S. Labarthe christened the phenomenon of new directors making first films “the young French cinema.” 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 world’s hottest film journals as their platform, the critics at Cahiers du cinéma 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.° 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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 period’s 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 period’s 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 nation’s 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.’ 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 Poiccard’s in Breathless: “Don’t 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.® 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.’ French society in the 1950s appeared to be moving too fast while also lingering at a standstill.

48 The Age of New Waves In her pathbreaking study Masculine Singular, Genevieve 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 naive victim of the “alienation of mass culture.”’® 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.”"' 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: its unevenness 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.’* 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.’ 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 producer’s hat), or cinematographers like Raoul Coutard and Henri Decaé 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.” “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.”!° 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 discov-

ered that their once revolutionary style appears commonplace and clichéd 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 A 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 The Age of New Waves contemporary cinema practice.”'® 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 period’s 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 the brightly 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. Sirk’s 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.”'” 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.’* Before being signed and sealed by the authority of the author, the new wave was a cinema of mise-en-scéne. Mise-en-sceéne 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-scéne is nothing less than the “art of the image,” though in practice the concept is so loosely applied that it remains “cinema’s grand undefined term.”'’ He adds that in most contexts, the “true cultivation and expression of the image as such—as opposed to the relation between images, which is the central expressive category of montage—requires the duration of the long take (a single piece of unedited film). .. . The long take is the presupposition or a priori of mise-en-scéne, that is, the ground or field in which mise-enscene can occur. It is the time necessary for mise-en-scéne space.”*? 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-scene 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-scene. While the auteurist critics associated with Cahiers became famous or infamous for reviving naive 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-scéne grounds their theories, which are derived from a mélange 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-scéne 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 wave’s 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.*' The other history of French new wave cinema—the one that extends beyond the authority of the director and into the most intricate details captured in the image—is told through its mise-en-scene. 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 The Age of New Waves also maintain that the interplay of these complex and contradictory forces is registered in the domain of mise-en-scéne 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.”” Jacques Ranciére advocates a renewed focus on narrative and oldfashioned dramatic action to counteract a formalist and aestheticizing impulse in film theory.” 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.** 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 period’s 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 Godard’s Masculin féminin (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-scene was the mechanism for depicting a transformative event—the emergence of an American-style modernity organized around consumption and the market—manifested not through grand ideo-

logical 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-scéne 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-scéne, 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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 mar-

keting 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 pass-

ersby 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 Breath-

less, 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 momen-

tarily 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 flux—the cars, the pedestrians, the slower but still dramatic progress of construction and demolition—and 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 Duchamp’s words, as a “kind of rendezvous.”*° When combined with an aesthetic oriented around mise-en-scéne, 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-enscene, and constructed a philosophy of cinema around it. But mise-en-scéne 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 The Age of New Waves 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 cinéma, 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 cinéma 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 “cinéma de papa,” the most famous and vituperative of them launched by Truffaut.*° 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 journal’s history to the new wave proper.” 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. Michel’s comeback is noteworthy, too: “I prefer the old.” His contrarian instincts and gruff demeanor—people who accost him on the street usually get an earful or

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 55 worse—partly explain this response. But it also suggests that by the time the new wave arrived with Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Resnais’s 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, Eric 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.”** In the same year, Cahiers would remove the word télécinéma 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 cine-

phile, 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 wave's disorderly combination of young and old is conceptualized in the idea of mise-en-scéne 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-scéne 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 L’Express under Francoise 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.”” The explosion of interior design during the era’s “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.*® 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 be discovered and observed. Youth in the new wave period was inextricably

56 The Age of New Waves 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 of the 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.”*' The “tradition of quality” decimated by Truffaut’s 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.”’* Like the young couple at the end of Louis Malle’s 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-scéne 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-scene 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-scene. Film is an art because it is the product of an artist, they argue, and artistry in cinema consists primarily of mise-enscene. 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-scéne, however, this relationship between tradition and modernity becomes more complex. On the one hand, by importing the concept of mise-en-scene 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-scéne 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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 critic’s 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.*’ 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-scene. “Montage forbidden,” Bazin’s 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.”** 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 priv-

ileged position of one of the greatest directors in film history. Like Bazin, Rivette praises the “fundamental honesty” of mise-en-scéne.” In an article on Mizoguchi, he revives many familiar tropes about the universality of cinema, but with mise-en-scéne serving as the lingua franca of directors around the world: “these films—which tell us, in an alien tongue, stories that are completely foreign to our customs and way of life—do 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-scéne. . . . If music is a universal idiom, so too is mise-en-scéne: it is this language, and not Japanese

58 The Age of New Waves that has to be learned to understand ‘Mizoguchi.’”*’ Even directors whose style would seem to preclude a disproportionate and almost exclusive focus on the contents of the image—most notably Hitchcock, with a famously omnivorous approach to filmmaking, from the long takes of Rope (1948) to the voyeuristic eyeline matches in Rear Window—would become exemplars of the fundamental “truth” that cinema is at the most essential level a medium of mise-en-scene. Writing under his birth name, Maurice Schérer, 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.”°* And with

this record of seemingly excessive attention to Hitchcock’s realism and his mise-en-scéne 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 cinéma thanks Alfred Hitchcock who just filmed The Wrong Man solely to make us happy and prove to the world the truth of our interpretations.”*’ Chief among those now confirmed interpretations was the assertion that Hitchcock had always been, first and foremost, a master of mise-en-scene. While Mizoguchi and other Japanese directors also occupied a key position as the Cahiers critics elaborated on their theory of mise-en-scéne, 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 of a crowd. Unlike so many protagonists in their films—the 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 Rome—the 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-enscene. 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-scéne 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 throat—as 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 59 which the little maid gets up, has—strictly speaking—no 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.” In Bazin’s 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-scéne and implicates himself in their project: “montage is no longer necessary. Things are there... why manipulate them?”*' If the French new wave can escape the tyranny of auteur theory, Ros-

sellini's observation points toward an exit from the dominion of the artist: cinema is more than a director's medium because, regardless of the intervention of any individual, “things are there.” A handful of older but still active French directors—the generation who, like Rossellini, bridged the immediate postwar era and the age of new waves— were never subjected to Truffaut's 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 d’un curé 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 honor—he was the “one filmmaker left who hasn't sold out,” according to Rivette—but 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.” 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 The Age of New Waves French critics and filmmakers began to formulate a theory of mise-en-scene, 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 découpage.* His later writing on cinematography and acting points to a developing precision in his model of mise-en-scéne, 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.”™ 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 Sontag’s 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-scene. She emphasizes the importance of certain categories of space, most notably “the cell,” in Bresson;* 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 Truffaut's claim that Bresson composes a “dialogue between the soul and objects”;*° 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.”*” And in A Man Escaped (Un condamné a mort s est échappé, 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.” If Bresson’s 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.” 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-scene because finding the hand of an individual artist within the routinized process of the mature studio system—with the director and stars supported by a crew of dozens of professionals engaged in specific tasks on the set—has always been an insurmountable challenge, even for the most dedicated or fanatical observer. Cahiers critics focus on the mise-enscene 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-sceéne, 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.”°? Location shooting, nonprofessional actors, natural light, and other ele-

ments 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-enscene allows the critics to locate normally distinct realms—Italian neorealism and Hollywood studio productions, loose episodic narratives and the classical screenplay, the street and the studio—in 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 Preminger’s 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 The Age of New Waves them with painstaking attention, observing their reactions to one another, and finally drawing from them particular gestures, attitudes and reflexes—which are the raison d étre of his film, and its real subject.”°' 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 Becker’s characters is of less importance than the way it happens to them. The plot, no more than a pretext, gets thinner with every film.”°* 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.’ 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 scéne, 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.””* The result is “mise en scéne 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?”*’ Their enthrallment with mise-enscene 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-sceéne 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-scéne 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 cinéma develop a strategy for reading one of the most artificial of filmmaking traditions against the grain of the narrative. The identification of mise-en-scene 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-scene. 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.”°° More hospitable to the western, Bazin returns frequently to this staple of the Hollywood genre

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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 Mann’s 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-scéne 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 scéne. 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.””

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-scene. 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 Ford’s, 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.”°* 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.””’ 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-scéne 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 journal’s most peculiar and telling infatuation was the younger, less established, less commercially successful director

64 The Age of New Waves Nicholas Ray. The obvious reason for this adulation was Ray’s 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-scéne of just three films—his iconic poses and gestures, his swaggering and sulking demeanor, his alternately intense and casual sexuality—endure 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!” Moreover, the film “is everything that is contemptible in the Hollywood system. . . . It’s a silly, solemn, sly, paternalistic, demagogic movie without any boldness, rich in all sorts of concessions, pettiness, and contemptible actions.”® 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.” 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, don’t 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.”® Or in the words of Godard:

“There was theatre (Grifhth), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.” 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.’”® 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 Ray’s

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.’°° On the most superficial level, this critical reception reframes Ray as a colorist whose mise-en-scene 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-scéne 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.” 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 character's 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 Wright's 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.® “T like the horizontal line,” he says, “and the horizontal was essential for Wright.’” 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.’” What matters for Ray, or more precisely what Ray emphasizes in the context of

an interview with Cahiers du cinéma 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-scene-’”' He acknowledges that the “subject of a film matters very little to me... because I am convinced that mise-en-scéne can transfigure it. And if I add that the whole of cinema is ultimately mise-en-

scene, it is precisely because that is how everything is expressed on the screen.’”” 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 The Age of New Waves 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-scéne. Ray is,

in other words, foremost among many directors enlisted to demonstrate the truism that cinema is mise-en-scene. Cahiers critics advocate a cinema of mise-en-scéne 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-scéne 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 wasn’t an actor, he was something else. He wasn’t an actor, he was someone who brought a character into French cinema, and it wasn’t only scripts that he influenced but mise en scéne as well. I

think that Gabin could be regarded as almost more of a director than Duvivier or Grémillon, to the extent that the French style of mise en scene was constructed to a large extent on Gabin’s style of acting, on his walk, his way of speaking or of looking at a girl. It’s also what gives the

great American actors their dynamism, actors like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper or James Stewart. For instance, Anthony Mann’s mise en scéne is definitely influenced by James Stewart’s style of acting. Now, I can’t see any actor in France at the moment who has that power of his own to go beyond just acting.”

Even Luc Moullet’s 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 scéne. Fuller, who seemed so strongly attached to his fine ideas on America and the beauty of democratic life, contradicts himself in every frame.”’* Moullet uses the twoword sentence fragment “On coherence” to introduce the consistencies visible over the long career of Fuller, but mise-en-scene soon reveals the fundamental incoherence of this director’s vision.

In the journal’s most revealing passages on mise-en-scene, 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-scene 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-scéene rather than the human and material world

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.”” One limitation of Cahiers du cinéma 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.” Godard’s 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 féminin (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-scéne 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-scéne developed at Cahiers is incapable of transforming a chaotic accumulation of characters, objects, and settings into anything more than the manifestation of a director’s 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-scene 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 century’s 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.”” 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-scéne 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 The Age of New Waves New wave mise-en-scene 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-enscene 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 the French new wave was at the most fundamental level a reorganization of the relationship between the population and their material environment, the mise-en-scene 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-scéne 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-scene, 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-scéne 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-scéne. 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 period’s most ambitious examinations of this

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 69 term of art and, more important, ventured into the overlooked terrain between the raw materials of mise-en-scéne. In his extended essays devoted to theatre and cinema, Bazin suggests that behind and around the world of ob-

jects 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 I, 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 it’s classical, or classical because it’s modern: these two formulations amount to variations on the same fundamental understanding of the relationship between cinema and history.”” (Godard appears to echo this sentiment a decade later in Band of Outsiders [Bande a part, 1964], when a bibliophile English teacher writes the following equation on the blackboard: “classique = moderne.”) Each of these critics approaches mise-en-scéne as a complex interstitial zone where conceptual opposites collide, where the period’s most profound social and political conflicts play themselves out, and where only the faintest traces of nature and classical form remain. Eric Rohmer’s five-part Cahiers essay titled “Le Celluloid and le marbre,” because it develops one of the period’s most substantial theories and philosophies of mise-en-scéne, 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.”* 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 afflic-

tion at Cahiers, and Rohmer’s essay, written from the position of a “film buff,””’ 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.®° Rohmer was justifiably embarrassed by these positions and dismissed

70 The Age of New Waves the piece with a sweeping critique: “there are too many things that I no longer believe and that now seem horribly naive to me—so much so that I'd have to write notes that are longer than the essay.”*' 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 sub-

sequent 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-enscene 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 Eric Rohmer acquires a political valence despite, or perhaps because of, its single-minded attention to aesthetics, because his obsession with mise-en-scéne, 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 genera-

tional 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.** But, he writes, “our genera-

tion 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 Cinémathéque.”®* 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,”** and Rohmer’s 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.“ Rohmer’s argument both overlaps with and diverges from Benjamin’s, 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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.”*° 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 won't last long. As the introductory paragraphs suggest and as the rest of the essay confirms, Rohmer’s 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.”*” 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.”** 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 “naive” eye confronted by an utterly unfamiliar reality.”

72 The Age of New Waves 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 sug-

gests, 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 Rohmer’s 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. Cinema—no longer an autonomous art with an autonomous creator, the essential qualities of elite art, according to Bourdieu—is interwoven with the identities, objects, and spaces that provide the raw materials for its mise-en-scéne.” “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.”*' By invoking the legacy of classical art in the context of contemporary cinema, Rohmer displays his penchant for paradox, as well as a char-

acteristic 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 naive 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-scene. 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

The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 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 the cellar. 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.””* 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 protégés at Cahiers was that the filmmaker existed in perfect harmony with a world undergoing a revolution in its own mise-en-scene. Foucault remarked that “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.””* And a cinema of mise-en-scene 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). Rohmer’s 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—

architecture—and more specifically to the variation on modernist design that he calls the “architecture of apocalypse.”” Illustrated with images of Las Lomas de Urdaneta on the outskirts of Caracas, suburban midcentury modern homes designed by Richard Neutra, and furniture exhibits from Milan, the essay’s 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.”” 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.” 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” ora simulacrum.” “The productions of the architect, on the contrary, form

an integral part of the world itself, they are things among things, whose

74 The Age of New Waves ambition is not to remake nature, but to enrich it with new acquisitions.”” 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 to the 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.” 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 Hitchcock's Rear Window and Plato’s 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 Tati’s Playtime (Figure 1.1).'°” 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 willingness—and this insight is a more positive byproduct of the period’s cinephilia—to 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 Rohmer’s vision—and this limitation stems from his elevation of film above all else, including politics—is its reliance on

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The Mise-en-Scéne of Modernity 75 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 Man’s Cigarette While Rohmer’s five-part essay examines the relationship between film and painting, literature, and architecture, he neglects the art form at the center of Bazin’s 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 Bazin’s 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

76 The Age of New Waves 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.'°' The previous section of the essay, “Behind the Décor,” 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 Bazin’s 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.”!°* 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 audience founds

the theater." 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 facade, exploring a stage that, as Bazin writes, has “no wings.”'”* The gambit that inaugurates a realist cinema, in Bazin’s argument, is its refusal of that architectural space and its age-old conventions, as the “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.”'”° The invisible man does indeed wear pajamas and smoke a cigarette because he would not exist independent of the mise-en-scéne that defines him (Figure 1.2). 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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flinging pickup lines at the women who pass (Figure 2.5). Mocky’s 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-scéne 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 cafés 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

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Walking in the City 91 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).”’* 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.’” 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.”'° 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 ina fortuitous coincidence, the most famous building designed by Parent and Virilio is located in Nevers, the hometown of the female protagonist, known only

92 The Age of New Waves as “Elle,” in Alain Resnais’s 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.”"” 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 Lefebvre’s approach to the problem of the city.'* In fact, the development of the new wave as an urban phenomenon corresponds almost exactly to the era bookended by Lefebvre’s 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, Lefebvre’s 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 Lefebvre’s theoretical writing—one he returns to repeatedly, stressing the links between his work and the onset of globalization—is the assertion that the related problems of space and the city must be considered on a “world scale.”'’ 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 Lefebvre’s 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

Walking in the City 93 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.””? 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.”*! 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 philosophy’s development,” and later references to the idea of space were ethereal and ungrounded.” “No limits at all have been set on the generalization of the concept of mental space,” he writes.” “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.” 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.” 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 The Age of New Waves 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 Familia in Barcelona, the ostensible monstrosity of the structure reveals that “what is obscene is modern ‘reality,’ and here it is so designated by the staging—and by Gaudi as stage-manager.”*° “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-scene—in 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.”*” 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.”** 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-scene. “Space is produced,” writes Lefebvre, though he could have added “like a film.”” 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 history's 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.*” “Natural space is disappearing” in the dominant economic paradigm in twentieth-century Europe and especially the accelerated modernization of postwar France.*' “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.” “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).”** Cities, too, have undergone a profound reinvention, he argues. Echoing Marc Augé’s description of the prototypical supermodern locations, he writes that the “abstract space” created by “capitalism

Walking in the City 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.”** 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. Rohmer’s 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 simultaneity—their (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.”*? A “space,” in other words, “is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things.””° Space also “unleashes desire,” implicating human wants and aspirations in this intricate web of interactions.°’ 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.** The production of space is partly a phenomenon of urban planning and building materials, but Lefebvre’s 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, de-

molition, 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.” 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.”*° The city crystallizes both the failures

96 The Age of New Waves 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. Lefebvre’s 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.”*' The more promising approach would be the preservation and reactivation of those relics through a variation on the Situationist détournement. 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 détre 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, Paris's former wholesale produce market, in 1969-71. 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 festival—in short, into a centre of play rather than of work—for the youth of Paris.” The persistence of those obsolete codes and their possible reclamation provoke pangs of nos-

talgia 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.

Walking in the City 97 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 waves—these 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.”

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.“ 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-scéne. 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 “im-

mense 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 period’s darkest premonitions of the imminent

98 The Age of New Waves modernization of new wave Paris. That era’s ambivalence toward the city under construction, though most evident than in the scenes of Jeanne Moreau searching for her absent lover on the Champs-Elysées, 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 Tavernier—indeed, to frame their passion as a shock and insult to a corrupt capitalist system, just as Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers (Les Amants) would imagine an extramarital affair as an escape from an exhausted artistocracy—all acts of rebellion and heroism are rendered ineffective by the end of the film. Aside from a handful of Hollywood noir productions—especially 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 Malle’s 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 facade 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 naive faith in Tavernier, his former commander; and despite his almost childlike devotion, he accidentally foils

Walking in the City 99 Tavernier’s perfect murder and hastens his hero’s journey to the gallows by turning off the building’s 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 boss’s 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 Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), with Charlot’s 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

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100 The Age of New Waves 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 Québec 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, there’s 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. That’s where we filmed. Besides that, the film shows a very modern Paris, very modern buildings, freeways. It’s Paris as it would be ten years later. . . . The building where the elevator is: there were only five such buildings in all of Paris.”* Louis Malle’s Paris is “a bit imaginary’ and prematurely modern, as its sleek office blocks, land-

scape 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 Tati’s Playtime and Godard’s 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.”*° 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 Baudelaire’s 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 Moreau’s face, then Maurice Ronet’s face with slightly wider framing, then a series of increasingly long shots of the stylish Carala building, revealed first

Walking in the City 101 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. Malle’s Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le métro, 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. Carala’s office, with the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur visible atop Montmartre in the distance. And in this moment another conception of the modern city—as a landscape of skyscrapers and a selection of carefully preserved and framed monuments—emerges 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 building’s 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-Elysées, with natural lighting emanating from the cafés 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 café life defined by Renoir and other celebrated artists of the Belle Epoque; 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

102 The Age of New Waves 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 Moreau’s 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 husband’s 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.*” 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 city—a showcase for architecture and automobiles, fashion and technology—is 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 era’s gleaming, high-tech facades 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

Walking in the City 103 recites a list of Patricia’s 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 Demy’s Lola (1960); and the symbolic power of car ownership in Robert Dhéry’s La Belle Américaine (1961) and Jacques Rozier’s 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 Ca-

dillacs, and worships Humphrey Bogart: the film’s style slides unevenly back and forth between Hollywood and Paris as though its director shared his hero’s fascination for “things American.” Weekend,

104 The Age of New Waves however, best remembered for its eight-minute tracking shot of an interminable car wreck, registers Godard’s total estrangement from the American-inspired technological wizardry he had admired in his days as a film critic.” 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 qualities—movement, image, mechanization, standardization—made movies and cars the key commodity-vehicles of a complete transformation in European consumption patterns and cultural habits.”” 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 driver’s perception: he or she can see only things in motion—as 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.”*” Breathless remains one of the period’s 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 Godard’s 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 aren’t 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 insolence—he yells insults at hitchhikers or orders a cab driver to stop so he can pull up a woman’s skirt—break 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 Michel’s 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

Walking in the City 105 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 Patricia’s face in profile. The editing creates a series of false match cuts, with Patricia’s head centered in the frame and the city undergoing a pro-

cess 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 Chabrol’s 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 city’s 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

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106 The Age of New Waves 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 space—historical preservation for the sake of a commemorative economy and demolition for the sake of efficient transportation—amount 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 France’s 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?””’ 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 period’s 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 Hétel de Suede. 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.” 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

Walking in the City 107 efficient storytelling but by the peculiarities revealed in the mise-en-scéne. The long seduction is the narrative heart of this sequence, but what unfolds along-

side 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.”°’ The location of Godard’s “documentary” is a tiny hotel room in Paris, and its subject is the physical rela-

tionship and emotional rapport between two young people. The body is the most reliable index of youth in cinema, and this extended sequence in the Hétel de Suede 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 Godard’s 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 Hétel de Suede

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 Renoir’s portrait titled Mlle. Irene Cahen d’Anvers (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

108 The Age of New Waves

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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 Antoine's 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. Cléo, 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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The Urban Archipelago TAIWAN S 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 island’s film establishment and a plea for “another cinema” located “outside the commercial cinema.” The production and circulation of this document represented one of the major literary events in the history of world cinema, the equivalent for Taiwan’s new wave of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, which launched the New German Cinema, Dogme 95's “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 Truffaut’s 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” the young critic’s broadside against the “tradi-

tion of quality” and “cinéma 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 manifesto’s 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.* While the Taiwan Cinema Manifesto lacks the flair of the Second Futurist Proclamation, with its unforgettable title “Let’s 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.’ 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 The Age of New Waves 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 region’s economic miracles. From the late 1980s to the mid-1i990s, 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.*

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 island’s 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.’ 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-fu’s Double Vision (Shuang tong) skewed the numbers upward, Taiwanese films earned only 2 percent of the receipts. Hong Kong films usually earn 1-6 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.”® 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 film scene, their domestic marketing campaigns often conceal that fact and

The Urban Archipelago 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.’ Taiwan’s 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 lion’s share of movie tickets. The innovative and modern cinema envisioned by Taiwan’s 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 Taiwan’s new wave—in particular the discrepancy between its conception of aesthetic modernism and the modernity under construction elsewhere in Taiwanese society—provides a paradigmatic and cautionary example for all subsequent cinematic new waves. Taiwan’s 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-scéne, 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 The Age of New Waves on contemporary cinema from the region, the “school of Hou.”* James Udden points out that the overall trajectory in Hou’s 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).” Tsai’s 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.'” The typical contemporary Hollywood film ranges from under two to ten seconds per shot, as do Hong Kong’s 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 produc-

ers 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 film’s brand and franchise omnipresent, instantly recognizable, and marketable across media platforms." 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, Taiwan’s new wave was inefhiciency 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-scéene of Taiwan’s 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 marginality—as the location of “another cinema,” as the privileged site of artistic innovation in a commercialized film world—occurred 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, technology-

driven, and consumption-oriented economy over the course of the 1980s.

The Urban Archipelago 147 Relegated to political isolation after 1971, when the People’s 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 com-

pensated for Taiwan’s 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 pro-

duction of computers and semiconductors. Taiwan’s 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 a key 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 Yang’s The Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi, 1986), “even the center is marginalized.”'” 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, Taiwan’s 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.”'’ Even as that auteurist industry took shape, its key artists strad-

dled 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 |Beiging chengshi, 1989], The Puppetmaster [Ximeng rensheng, 1993], Good Men, Good Women |Hao nan hao nti, 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 of young 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 The Age of New Waves (Qianxi manbo, 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 A Brighter 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 Taiwan’s capital (Taipei Story [Qing mei zhu ma, 1985], The Terrorizers, A Confucian Confusion [Duli shidai, 1994], Yi Yi [2000]). Tsai’s 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 Doinel-like alter ego, the style of Tsai’s 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-scéne, 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 econ-

omy, 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 way—this

chapter offers three explanations for the development of the master shot school in Taiwan in the 1980s and after. First, filmmakers in Taiwan never

The Urban Archipelago 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.’ 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 Taiwan’s new wave genre experiments tend to rely on more local and regional references (like Tsai’s 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-scéne, 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.”'’ 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 Taiwan’s new wave represent the mise-en-scéne 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.

150 The Age of New Waves 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 Taiwan’s screens were actually Japanese, mainland, or American locations. Taiwan’s 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-scene 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)

The Urban Archipelago 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.” '° 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 (Xianii, 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.’” Unlike the more mundane genre films of the government-sponsored Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), Hu’s combination of ancient tradition and thrilling action sequences was also marketable abroad, and a 1975 jury at Cannes belatedly recognized him and A Touch 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 Taiwan’s 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 Hu’s 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.'* Although Taiwanese-dialect films were subjected to censorship restrictions (like all local media at the time), this alternative to the hegemonic and quasi-ofhicial 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." 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 acommunal

152 The Age of New Waves 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 gratifyingly—even the emperor speaks Taiwanese dialect on screen.”° 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 di-

version, 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, Taiwan’s 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.” 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. Taiwan’s 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 Taiwan’s identity has been radically reconstructed in the modern era, and

The Urban Archipelago 153 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 past—with that past imagined, both temporally and spatially, as the premodern countryside—remains open. Its mise-en-scéne 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 narra-

tives 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 nii; 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.”** 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 no’s’—“no privileging of social darkness,

no instigation of class hatred, no pessimistic tones, no romantic sentiments, no meaningless creation, and no erroneous ideology.”” A modern cinema devised with young urban audiences in mind is almost inconceivable under those conditions, and early new wave films like Yang’s 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 filmmaker—reflect the limitations and the possibilities of their prudently innovative era.“ 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

154 The Age of New Waves 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

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The Urban Archipelago 155 (an intimate relationship with the land; the preservation of a family’s 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 modernity’s 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 direc-

tors 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 films—most 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 Man—focus 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 Taiwan’s new wave from the films of previous generations. Or more precisely, the development of the new wave’s cinematic style—the 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 sounds—is 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

156 The Age of New Waves 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 era’s 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-hsien’s 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 media-

tion 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, Hou’s film establishes a generational conflict between the father adapting to this new environment and the next generation—one that includes the directors of the new wave—who 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 humanity—the body itself—becomes a flexible and compliant sign rather than the marker of a fixed identity. In Hou’s glimpse of the future, vanishing and reappearance are the fundamental conditions of identity. The second segment of the film— Vicki's Hat (Xiao Qi de na ding maozi), by Zeng Zhuangxiang—deals explicitly with the education of a historically emer-

gent 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

The Urban Archipelago 157

Kitt! } a FIGURE 4.2. Vicki's 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. Vicki's 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 detective 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 Zeng’s segment of The Sandwich Man, there

is no privileged perspective outside the world of advertisements, no exit

158 The Age of New Waves 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 Benjamin’s memorable description of Atget’s 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

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 célebre 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.” 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

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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 Huen’s marriage have shattered his dream of romance in the big city. Shot in one of Hou’s 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 Hou’s 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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176 The Age of New Waves 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 Bazin’s 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.”*° This passage provides one answer to the much-repeated criticism that Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism neglects the documentary but also opens onto the aesthetic and philosophical stakes in Hou’s 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 Hou’s 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 children’s classic and a film commissioned by the Musée D’Orsay, Hou’s 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 (L’Heure d été, 2008) by Olivier Assayas, Hou’s film marks a significant departure from that vision of cinema and its relationship to cities and museums. Assayas had insisted that the mise-en-scéne 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.*’ Perhaps chastened by the fact that Lamorisse’s 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 Félix Vallotton’s 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

The Urban Archipelago 177 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 reafhirms 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 Hou’s film, with all the trappings of a children’s fable, gazes at the hovering and drifting images that, like the original red balloon, shadow a new generation on their journeys around the city.

155

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.’ By creating a dialogue between cinema studies and the social sciences at the forefront of the spatial turn in critical theory—geography, urban studies, anthropology, and sociology—scholars 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.* In Miriam Hansen's foundational essays, “vernacular modernism’ is virtually synonymous with urban experience from the 1920s through the 1950s, and classical

Morning in the Megacity 179 Hollywood cinema develops into “the first global vernacular” circulating from urban center to urban center, creating a network of interlacing modernities.° 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 modernity’s 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 disaggrega-

tion 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 city’s brand recognition and enhancing its stature in the burgeoning competition for prominence in the global economy.’ 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 studies—cinema and the city—have 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.°’ 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.° 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

180 The Age of New Waves 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, Taiwan’s first “city films”; and by the 1990s Taipei itself became a vital and imperative presence in Taiwan cinema.’ 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.® 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.’ 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 Venturi’s Las Vegas, it is Hollywood that merits urbanist scholarship.”'° Having developed into one of the crossroads of the art cinema world, Taiwan's cinema is also generating its own urbanist scholarship. After the recovery from the Asian economic crisis of the 1990s and the intensified globalization of Taiwan’s 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

Morning in the Megacity 181 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." For NowellSmith, the crucial and definitive feature of the series is the city’s excessive presence, its “recalcitrance,’ “its inability to be subordinated to the demands of the

narrative.’’’ 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 cinema's characteristics evolved from the traits that defined modern life in general.”'’ “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.”"* 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 flaneurs 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.”’° 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 uncon-

scious) the new urban-industrial world has become fully re-enchanted.”" 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 Taipei's decades-long status as a temporary capital, and because

of Taiwan’s compressed and radical modernization from the 1970s onward, the Taipei city film provides an extremely sensitive record of that fragility. The

182 The Age of New Waves new wave ushers in a genuinely new era in the representation of Taiwan’s 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 Taiwan’s 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.'’ Beginning with the new wave and the onset

of Taiwan’s 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.’* 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 Taipei's 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 Asia—unlike, for exam-

ple, Chang’an, whose population soared to over 1 million during the Tang dynasty—the 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 Taiwan’s unique postwar history, it also accompanies the

Morning in the Megacity 183 sudden rise of its fellow “Asian tigers,” and Taipei's 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 city’s skyline is the graph of a society’s capital accumulation and expenditure, with the peaks of its skyscrapers representing the height of its affluence.’” Taipei 101, completed in 2004 and then the tallest building in the world, represents the culmination of a process of Taiwanese economic devel-

opment that stretches back at least four decades and that accelerated remarkably in the 1980s. A city’s 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 government's marketing campaigns inevitably feature 101’s 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 master’s degree in engineering and computer science from the University of Florida. 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 time—especially Werner Herzog and the new German cinema— rekindled his fascination with a particular kind of art film. By the early 1980s,

184 The Age of New Waves 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: “that’s the way I looked at the city at the time—we were breaking away from the past and our ties are inevitably romantic ones.”” He also characterizes his own identity in terms of urban rather than national or transnational affections and afhliations: “I consider myself a Taipei guy—I’m not against Taiwan. I’m for Taipei.”*' As Leo Chanjen Chen argues, Yang’s films also rely on a fundamentally architectural conception of cinema as an art where images and space converge.** 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, Yang’s exercise in cognitive mapping rarely referred to village life or the natural environment at all—in 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 flm—when the known and remembered landscape served as the primary indicator of time and place. All of these tendencies would suggest that Yang’s 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, “there’s a thickness in the texture of this film that de-

mands perceptual immersion to properly appreciate it, let alone grasp its more subtle historical allusions.”*? 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-enscene 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-sceéne,

as well as its theoretical and social stakes. A three-minute credit sequence

Morning in the Megacity 185 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 camera’s 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 with-

holding 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 Yang’s 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 Yang’s interest in mise-en-sceéne, especially in the narrative and cinematography focused on the fragmentation of urban experience (a dimension 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.” In the Taipei of the mid-1980s, photographic and moving images are at once the highest form of commodity reification, to use Debord’s phrase, and a mode of witnessing that recalls cinema’s 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

186 The Age of New Waves Yang’s 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 architec-

ture 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-scene, 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 Taiwan’s 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.”* Yang’s 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 Taiwan’s 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

Morning in the Megacity 187 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 l'amour (Aiging 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 ménage a 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 Tsai’s Visage again reveals the director’s 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-scéne should be framed in regional and industrial terms—as a practice of a particular mode of art cinema currently prevalent in East Asia—rather than under the aegis of national cinema, the most notable recent practitioners of this art of mise-en-scene 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 viewer’s 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.

188 The Age of New Waves 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.”*° He adds that the development of a personal “sanctuary” or “refuge” — and these escapist metaphors appear in Benjamin’s work and in the literature of the period—is 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.”*’ 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 Taiwan's 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 privati-

zation 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 Taiwan’s 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

Morning in the Megacity 189 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 offcial 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.* 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.” 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 Taiwan’s new cinema, and Braester has concentrated in particular on the destruction of provisional (but long-standing) veteran’s villages (juancun) and their representation in film.** 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 neighborhood—the realm of urban planners and civic activists—to the intimate environments of the interior, because the drama of privatization often plays itself out in that quietly charged domain. Yang’s 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, Taiwan’s 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 cinéma, identified mise-en-scene 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 illus-

trates 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

190 The Age of New Waves 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. °' In Yang’s 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 owner’s 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 Story’s 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-Chin’s 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 film’s 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 fantasy—a combination of the utopian internationalism of Little League baseball tinged with

Morning in the Megacity 191 the tragedy of lost youth and unrealized potential—but 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 Lung’s 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. Yang's 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 Story’s 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 director’s 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.

192 The Age of New Waves -

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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 Sor-

ghum 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

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 263 her sense of identity and vision of the world, but the pace of transformation in China's 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 China's 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. Qiu’s appeal—both her personal attraction as a character in the film and her dogged pursuit of justice—harks 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

264 The Age of New Waves

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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 China’s 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 previ-

ous condition of stability. But Qiu’s voyage to the city and into the upper reaches of the bureaucracy is not without consequences at the village level, as an ofhcial investigation concludes that the village chief broke her husband’s

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

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 265 Zj ;

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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 film—a close-up of Qiu Ju’s 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 below—is one of the emblematic images of China suspended between two eras and two conceptions of the world (Figure 8.5). In this moment, Qiu’s 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 Zhang’s 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 (it distinguishes 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

266 The Age of New Waves 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.”°

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 cinema’s 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 unfa-

miliar 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 Yimou’s 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 Zhang’s 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 China’s 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

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 267 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 he’s 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 interim—and 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 in-

ternational 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 Qiu’s court case; and the deluge of donations and press attention resulting from Wei Minzhi’s 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 matter—the limited educational opportunities for China’s rural underclass—but most conspicuously in the concluding credits that identify the major players as nonprofessional actors

268 The Age of New Waves 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 China’s 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 Zhang’s 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 Zhang's move toward a more conventionally realist cinema is symptomatic of a bias underlying the reception of Chinese film more gen-

erally.’’ 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 Zhang’s films in the early 1990s— culminating in a Golden Lion at Venice for Qiu Ju—was an ambivalent sign of both his increasing prominence on a global stage and his ghettoization as a mere realist.*®

Although Not One Less may adopt modes of realist filmmaking familiar on the international festival circuit, the film’s 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 Zhang’s 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.

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 269 He had become a defender of China’s right to make films for its domestic audi-

ence 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 Zhang’s 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 facticity—the attention to very local conditions recorded assiduously by the camera—rapidly 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 Yimou’s career over the 1990s is marked by a transition from what Bazin called “faith in reality,” a belief that cinema’s 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 unspec-

tacular 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, Zhang’s films become celebra-

tions 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 Zhang’s 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 Wei’s big-character style

in particular follow the model of old-school socialist communication, and

270 The Age of New Waves 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 naive, to pitch her announcement to the station's executives and finally reach its audience. Her relentlessness pays off—here 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 station’s 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

fa |“

7| Ro | :2

FIGURE 8.6 Not One Less.

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 271 economic predicament of the countryside unless her words are translated into a new medium and absorbed into a preexisting system of images and clichés. The disconcerting reality of the present—the crumbling schools and

students forced by poverty from the classroom—is 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. Wei’s 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 naif 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 role—an unsophisticated and helpless victim of modernity and an ambassador from an impoverished but

still redeemable landscape and rural way of life—in 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. Chow’s 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 insufhcient to perform manual labor at a local brick factory. But their simple calculations—moving a certain number of bricks at a certain number of renminbi per brick should yield a definite sum of money—prove 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.” “Although,” as Chow writes,

“this method of making money is based on a basic exchange principle—X units of labour x Y units of cash—its anachronism is apparent precisely in the mechanical correspondence established between two different kinds of values

involved—concrete 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

272 The Age of New Waves equation—a continuum whereby effort logically and proportionally translates into reward.”*° 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 de-

molished 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. “Wei's 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.”“ 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 clichés 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 Wei’s tenacity and the falsity of the clichés that eventually overshadow her, exists between these two regimes of the image and of monetary value. Are Zhang Yimou’s experiments with

cinematic realism repositories of material facts that, like the bricks moved around the factory by Wei’s 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 China’s 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.” If

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 273 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 televi-

sion 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 films—the conspicuously Chinese stories, the bodies of the actors who populate his films, the historically inflected costumes, and the action sequences based on traditional martial arts—into 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 Zhang’s work once dramatized the process of generational upheaval rooted in the history of China’s 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 emperor’s rule of all under heaven (tianxia) a barely submerged apology for increasingly forceful assertions of mainland China’s 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

274 The Age of New Waves 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 dispute—and given the increasing stature of China in the global capitalist system, these seemingly opposed interpretations of the film are not necessarily in contradiction—but 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, Zhang’s 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 over-

lapping and at times intersecting cultural spheres served by diverse media enterprises based in media capitals around the world?” 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 tradi-

tional 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

The Fifth Generation and the Youth of China 275 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, Zhang’s 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.”

195

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 Wright’s 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.’ The new wave in China—especially 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 remained—documents 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 China’s 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.

On Living in a Young City 277 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 nation’s 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 period’s 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,

278 The Age of New Waves 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.”* Wang Xiaoshuai’s 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 Ying’s 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 move—a motorcycle courier—who traffics in illegal goods and who

is later assigned to drive the daughter of an underworld figure around the city. The film’s 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

On Living in a Young City 279

FIGURE 9.1 Suzhou River.

main characters watch bootleg VCDs in Mada’s flophouse; and the other when they watch the city itself, with that emblem of the future metropolis— the Oriental Pearl Tower—dominating 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 narrator—foregrounds 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

280 The Age of New Waves 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 era’s space of flows, movement, and migration. The narrator describes Suzhou River as the repository of “centuries worth of stories... and rubbish” and “Shanghai's dirtiest river.” This urban refuse is an emblem of another time, or more precisely another era’s 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 back-

ground 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 don’t belong in a film at all, and don’t 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

On Living in a Young City 281 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 devel-

ops in two seemingly contradictory directions: it crystallizes around a branded, cosmopolitan core, a place where all the world’s 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 farmland—the most retro of all the obsolete spaces—littering 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 filmmaking—the attempt to

record ways of life and previous conceptions of modernity on the verge of disappearance—juxtaposed 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 unre-

solved 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 facade 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 Ye’s 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

282 The Age of New Waves 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.” 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 Ye’s 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 Hitchcock’s 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.* 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 Cheng’s 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.

On Living in a Young City 283 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 Ye’s 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 facades, 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.

284 The Age of New Waves 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 hadn’t seen a single one that had anything to do with the Chinese reality that I knew. After the Fifth Generation’s

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.”’ In a 2001 interview conducted before Zhang’s recent success as a director of action films, Jia proclaimed the end of the Fifth Generation as an artistic force: “unfortunately, as auteurs they didn’t have a long life span. Too much was demanded of them far too quickly. In China, it’s 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 haven’t liked any of his films.”° 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.”’ In another interview he reveals that while he “didn’t 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.” Although Jia’s 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

On Living in a Young City 285 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 Foucault’s words, “determined inhabitants of space.”’ 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 Jia’s home town of Fenyang, a county-level city in Shanxi province and a world apart from the massive capitals of government or finance on China’s 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, Jia’s 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 state’s relatively lax enforcement of household registra-

tion (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 Yimou’s 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 film’s 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 Jin’s 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 Jin’s businesses—which include cigarette sales, karaoke parlors, and a new hotel—are 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

286 The Age of New Waves the magical rhetoric of the market, Jin’s 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 Wu's 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 masculinity—he sneers and talks tough, earns his money through guts and guile, and refuses to participate in the modern courtship ritual of singing karaoke—he 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 film’s love story to a melancholy and anticlimactic conclusion. After the twin betrayals by Jin Xiaoyong and Hu Meimei, Xiao Wu’s 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 doesn’t get out of the way, the new can’t take its place.” The shopkeeper responds that he’s seen the demolition, but the new is

still nowhere to be found. Although newness has entered the world of Fenyang, it hasn’t 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 town’s 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

On Living in a Young City 287 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 Wu's 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 in-

stituted, 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.”'° As Jia’s 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 it’s

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

288 The Age of New Waves

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replaced almost imperceptibly by the camera—his physical presence, his way of life, his mentality, his history—is the foundational loss at the philosophical center of Jia’s conception of cinema and defines the relationship between the old medium of film and late twentieth-century China. As Jia’s films chart China’s 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 Jia’s 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 China’s 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, Jia’s 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

On Living in a Young City 289 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. Jia’s 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 Jia’s 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 China’s “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 Mao’s 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

290 The Age of New Waves 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 Jia’s 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 he’s never been on a train and has only a vague idea of what it’s 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 per-

formers 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 narrative’s ten-year span that those aspirations remain in the ofhng and that, in the words of Bruno Latour, he has “never been modern.”"' When the performers on the bus respond to their leader’s 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 moderniza-

tion previously crystallized in the mechanical locomotion of the train. The song that provides the title of the film likens its protagonist’s “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

On Living in a Young City 291 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.'* 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 en-

vironment; the train is instead reframed as an image. If, in Marx’s 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 Jia’s 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 globaliza-

tion, though in this instance the world is no longer a distant phenomenon perceptible only in stray sounds emanating from boomboxes and fashions

292 The Age of New Waves brought back from Guangzhou. Instead, the particular version of the world crystallized in the theme park—a limited but nonetheless alluring series of highlights of a world tour; the planet miniaturized, condensed, and made accessible though the copy and the image—has, 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 China’s 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 Jia’s film reveals the gap between the sloganeering—the park promises that its visitors will “see the world without ever leaving Beijing’—and 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 decontextualization—they are surrounded by the generic space of the theme park and a landscape of equally uprooted icons—becomes 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 Jia’s 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 Baudelaire’s 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 film’s 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

On Living in a Young City 293 Manhattan to the Taj Mahal but the gaze of the spectators in this eccentric collection of familiar structures. As Marc Augé 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.”'? 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 Augé. The theme park presents a semblance of a visible and tan-

gible 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 facades, the spectator becomes the crucial constituent in this otherwise outlandishly cos-

mopolitan 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 facade, 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 charac-

ters escaping their geographical and bodily boundaries and taking flight (Figure 9.3). In one instance, a bus travels along Chang’an Street, with Tiananmen Square to the right, the Forbidden City to the left, and images from New Year’s celebrations around the world flashing on television screens that almost outnumber the passengers. Just as the film’s main character passes the portrait

of Mao Zedong, she checks her cell phone, and her boyfriend’s brief message— how far can you go’ —launches her and the film into an animated rev-

erie that remains shocking for its departure from the observational realism that distinguishes Jia’s 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

294 The Age of New Waves

2. eee - : } :

——> : re i F _—. ~