Thresholds of Visibility
On Chinese Modernity and Films of Jia Zhangke and Tsai Ming-liang
Excerpt
Tsai Ming-liang’s short film The Skywalk is Gone (2002) opens with a long still shot from the back with a woman staring at a huge LED billboard in front of a department store at the center of Taipei. The film follows the woman as she finds herself utterly disoriented in the city. A skywalk where she used to buy a watch from a small vendor is gone, replaced by an underground passage. Such a highly symbolic gesture of conversion poses a question on the radical spatial reconfiguration in Taipei that not only disorients people, but also renders people invisible to maintain a more homogenous, modern look of the city. Such politics of visibility stands the center of my theorization in this senior thesis. By looking at three aspects of “visibility“—temporality, spatiality, and popular culture—in Jia Zhangke and Tsai’s oeuvre, I argue that their films reveal the paradoxical logic of visibility and probe the ontology of cinema and the Chinese socio-economic reality.
Chapter 1, “Remembrance of Lost Time,” looks at Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) and Jia’s Platform (2000), where we take a cinematic journey back to the past time, not as an indulgence in the past glory, but as a critical moment of reflection. Echoing The Skywalk is Gone’s lamentation and reflection over the loss of communion in time, the first part examines how these two filmmakers revive paradoxical entities in history to transcend the boundaries of cinema and the writing of national history.
Just like the woman in the short film who has difficulties navigating around Taipei, the protagonists in Vive l’Amour (1994) and Xiao Wu (1997) similarly find themselves alienated and homeless in their hometowns, where spatial construction/destruction and consumerist media permeate every corner of the city. Chapter 2, “Walking in the City,” is at once an observation of their forced flânerie in space as well as an inquiry into new possibilities of enunciation: if alienation and separation have rendered these characters muted, how can cinema present an alternative mode of speech? How do Jia and Tsai’s urban spatial practices make visible the hidden problems behind the homogenous urban/media landscape?
Chapter 3, “Reimagining Popular Culture,” returns to the question at the beginning: how does our inability to see paradoxically allow us to see what we’ve ignored? Taking “popular culture” as a springboard, this chapter examines The Hole (1998) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) how popular culture as a blinding force nevertheless opens up a cinematic imaginary which allows us to read the future potential of communication.
Throughout the thesis, “thresholds of visibility” always remains the critical framework through which we try to understand cinema, national rhetorics, and modernization. It is precisely through paradoxes—between visibility and invisibility, construction and destruction, linearity and cyclicality, imaginary and reality—that connections, borders, limitations, and new possibilities erupt.
Full thesis can be found here.
Fu-Ho Theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Xiao Wu
Goodbye Dragon Inn
The Hole
Vive l'Amour
Xiao Wu
The Hole
Vive l'Amour