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4.Determining Indeterminacy: TO LIV(E)
and CROSSINGS
In The Geopolitical Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System, Fredric
Jameson devotes a chapter to Edward Yang’s TERRORIZER.
Jameson notes that the film is poised between the modern and the
postmodern:
What we must admire, therefore, is the way in which the filmmaker has arranged for these two powerful interpretative temptations—the modern and the postmodern, subjectivity and textuality—to neutralize each other, to hold each other in one long suspension in such a way that the film can exploit and draw on the benefits of both, without having to commit itself to either as some definitive reading, or as some definitive formal and stylistic category. Besides Edward Yang’s evident personal mastery, the possibility of this kind of mutually reinforcing suspension may owe something to the situation of Third-World cinema itself, in traditions in which neither modernist nor postmodern impulses are internally generated, so that both arrive in the field of production with a certain chronological simultaneity in full post-war modernization. (p. 151)
TO LIV(E) and CROSSINGS can be looked at in a similar way. They
can be seen as works suspended between the modern and the
postmodern; indeed, their textual strategies rely on this deeply
rooted indeterminacy to explore people and issues that are
themselves difficult to determine.
Like Yang, Chan is profoundly influenced by European cinema. The
English title, TO LIV(E), for example, conjures up both Godard
and Gorin’s LETTER TO JANE as well as Ingmar Bergman’s
many works with Liv Ullmann. Chan
characterizes the film as "inevitably a response to both
Bergman and Godard." (p.
6) Chan's film can be looked at as part of the international
New Wave discussed by Robert
Kolker in The Altering Eye. In her insightful essay on the
film, "The
Aesthetics of Protest: Evans Chan’s TO LIV(E),"
Patricia Brett Erens outlines the various ways in which the
film draws on Godard. As Erens observes, TO LIV(E) favors an
aesthetic sensibility rooted in a Brechtian tradition of dramatic
distance and political engagement.
Peter Wollen’s
model of looking at Godard’s political films as
"counter cinema" can be used here to further elucidate
this legacy in both TO LIV(E) and CROSSINGS. TO LIV(E), for
example, is organized around a series of letters addressed to Liv
Ullmann. These letters admonish Ullmann for her criticism of Hong
Kong’s deportation of Vietnamese "boat people" in
December, 1989. Ullmann fails to mention Hong Kong’s own
uncertain future when it becomes part of the People’s
Republic of China, still bloodied from the events that June.
Rubie (Lindzay Chan) composes these letters, that are sometimes
read as voice-overs and sometimes read by the character directly
addressing the camera. The letters run parallel to other plot
lines involving Rubie’s lover, family, and circle of
friends.
By taking the scene in which Rubie reads her first letter to Liv
as a case in point, the impact of Godard can be very clearly
seen. Using a shot of boats as a transitional device, the tinny,
hollow sound of a recording of Cui Jian's "Nothing To My
Name" comes up on the sound track. The film pans across an
audience; Rubie is seated in the auditorium. A dance performance
("Exhausted Silkworms") [10 MB AVI Clip], inspired by the events of June
4th, takes place on stage. Three male dancers, dressed simply in
white shirts and black pants, tear their clothes to form gags
and, later, nooses. A red scarf is pulled out of one dancer's
shirt like spurting blood. As "Nothing To My Name"
ends, one dancer falls, as if shot. Suspended for a moment with a
freeze frame, he finally lands on the ground, as the audience
applauds.
This performance is layered by the inclusion of Rubie's first
letter as a voice-over. As the dancers perform, Rubie's address
to Liv Ullmann (and, through her, to the world at large) adds
another dimension to both Cui Jian's rock music, which says
nothing explicit about "democracy" or politics at all,
and to the performers' reenactment of the Tian'anmen
demonstration and its suppression. As the dancers act out this
violence, accompanied by Cui Jian's harsh and direct vocals,
Rubie likens Liv Ullmann to a respected, distant portrait coming
to life and slapping her in the face with accusations of cruelty
and indifference. Rubie not only complains of Ullmann's ignorance
about the Hong Kong situation that this public condemnation of
the treatment of the Vietnamese displays, but also questions her
timing. Coming just months after Tian'anmen, an event that was
taken by many in Hong Kong as a barometer of what to expect after
1997, Rubie reminds Ullmann that the population of Hong Kong may
soon find themselves in the same boat, so to speak, as the
Vietnamese.
In this scene, then, there is a juxtaposition of two visual
planes. One features Rubie as the originator of the letter.
Close-ups of her face accompany the voice-over presentation of
the contents of the letter, grounding the letter in the person of
Rubie as a fictional character. The other visual plane, using the
same images, features Rubie as a spectator, clearly moved by the
dance presentation. There are also two audio planes. Cui Jian's
music and the sounds of the auditorium on one plane, and Rubie's
voice-over letter to Liv on the other. In this fragmented
presentation of narrative information, all the elements of
"counter cinema" come into play. Narrative
intransitivity comes to the fore in the casual introduction of an
evening at the theatre for Rubie's character; time is thrown out
of synch because Rubie writes the letter heard in the voice-over
at another time and in another place away from the theatre. There
is an estrangement from the character of Rubie as she becomes a
mouthpiece for the people of Hong Kong, addressing an actual
person about actual events, in addition to being a fictional
character involved in other plot developments. Her address is not
to other fictional characters, but to Liv, and to the world at
large represented by the film audience. Foregrounding occurs as
the film spectators are invited to see themselves as witnesses to
the dance performance, and, by extension, the events in
Tian'anmen, and think of themselves, with Rubie, as something
more than spectators. Watching Rubie look at a political work of
art foregrounds TO LIV(E)'s own status as a similar work of
political commentary. The diegesis splits, featuring a
self-contained performance work within the film. Aperture must be
noted, since an understanding of the references in the dance
depends on a familiarity with the mass media spectacle of June
4th, including photos of the demonstrators standing together in
the square, Cui Jian's presence, etc. The unpleasure of the
breaking of classical conventions is self-evident, as is the
non-fictional basis of the entire scene as a commentary on actual
events; i.e., the expulsion of the Vietnamese, Ullmann's trip to
Hong Kong and public condemnation of Hong Kong's action, the
events of June 4th in Tian'anmen, etc. Fictional and
non-fictional realms overlap.
However, it may be too tempting, at this point, to conclude that
TO LIV(E) is simply imitation Godard. There is another element to
this scene that takes the film in a radically different
direction. While Rubie is presented as an agent addressing
Ullmann, a spokesperson for Hong Kong, and as a spectator of a
dance piece (and, by extension, a political event), Rubie is also
depicted as distracted. Near the beginning of the scene, she
looks at her watch and looks around the auditorium. Later, the
fact that Rubie is waiting for her brother, Tony (Wong Yiu-Ming),
is revealed. Rubie's relationship with her brother, his fiancée,
and her family propels the film into another, totally different
arena, i.e., the realm of the love story and family melodrama.
Rubie may be the voice of Hong Kong, but she also plays the roles
of daughter, sister, lover, and friend in other parts of the
narrative. Her distraction as a character points to a more
general "distraction" found within the narrative
itself. To echo Jameson, the "textuality" of counter
cinema meets the "subjectivity" of the melodrama, the
"woman's film," and the love story.
There is a similar sense of distraction in CROSSINGS. While less
directly indebted to the European New Wave, CROSSINGS still bears
the marks of cinematic modernism. Again, fiction and non-fiction
overlap as actual footage of Tian'anmen 1989 is cut into
newscasts in which fictional characters appear. Dance
presentations divide the diegesis further into self-contained
fictional realms. Characters again function as mouthpieces for
policies or ideas as well as fictional creations involved in
narrative events. Rubie (again played by Lindzay Chan) reappears
to serve this function again, appearing on New York television as
the public voice of the Chinatown community and, through
voice-over excerpts from a diary, as the personal voice of the
Hong Kong emigrant. However, while TO LIV(E) has more clearly
demarcated divisions between the various layers of the discourse,
CROSSINGS, closer to Yang's TERRORIZER and other works of the
Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Wave, experiments with time and space
to a much larger degree. Distraction, in fact, becomes
disorientation, since, from scene to scene, it is often difficult
to figure out whether the location is New York or Hong Kong.
In one scene, for example, Mo-Yung (Anita Yuen), the film's
female lead, has just finished a meeting with Rubie in Central
Park. She walks past a shop window with a model airliner on
display. The film cuts to a shot of clouds passing over the moon,
followed by a graphic match on a toilet bowl. Mo-Yung is
vomiting. Members of her family come back from a shopping trip
and notice the smell of the vomit. In this case, the transition
from New York City to Hong Kong and earlier story events is quite
abrupt. The shot in the bathroom offers no clue to Mo-Yung's
whereabouts. Rather, this disorienting presentation of time and
place mirrors the contemporary experience of immigration. Unlike
previous generations of explorers, pilgrims, colonialists,
pirates, and other travelers, contemporary wanderers travel
according to a different set of rules and restrictions.
Instantaneous communication via international telephone lines
connects the spaces again in a different way.(Later, in the scene
mentioned above, Mo-Yung receives a call from her boyfriend Benny
(Simon Yam) in New York, again reorganizing the sense space
presented in the film.) Jet travel condenses the time and space
between New York and Hong Kong even further. If the spectator is
disoriented following the character's disorientation, then the
fictional world simply reflects a postmodern experience of time
and space.
Here, Jameson's difficulty with Yang's TERRORIZER as both modern
and postmodern begins to make sense for TO LIV(E) and CROSSINGS
as well. While both have elements of counter cinema and both fit
within the generic parameters of Hong Kong commercial film as
love stories, crime stories, and melodramas, they seem to be
doing something that adds up to more than just the sum of these
modernist and commercial parts. They have a
"schizophrenic" quality that can be seen in their
titles. The English title, TO LIV(E), is a deconstructed play on
words referring to Liv Ullmann, LETTER TO JANE, and a heartfelt
desire for the people of Hong Kong to somehow endure and "to
live." The title in Chinese, roughly translated as LOVE
SONGS FROM A FLOATING WORLD 
, refers to the other face of the film
that deals with romantic relationships and a Chinese tradition of
misdirected and/or impossible love.
CROSSINGS offers a similar case in point. The
English title conjures up images of immigration, exile, nomadism,
the modern metropolis as a "crossroads," while the
Chinese title, WRONG LOVE 
, refers to unhappy affairs of the heart.
As the titles imply, these polyglot films offer a multiple
address and, potentially, a multiple interpretation, or at least
a divided ordering of narrative hierarchies, for the
English-speaking, art film audience at festivals and art cinemas
globally, for the expanding circle of Asian American film
spectators, and for the Chinese-speaking audience looking at the
films in relation to the standard Hong Kong commercial product.
However, it is wrong to look at the films as
split discourses in this way, because there is another possible
address that needs to be taken into consideration. Rather than
operating as a dialectic between the art film and the commercial
love story, between English and Chinese, the films can be taken
as palimpsests where the elements overlay one another, obscuring
meaning for some, illuminating a different kind of meaning for
others. A new meaning is not created through the clash of
contradictory discourses, as can be seen in the work of Godard.
Rather, layers sit on top of one another, some (almost)
postcolonial in English, some diasporic and accented in American
English, some (almost) post-socialist in Chinese, some modern and
part of the tail end of an international New Wave, others
postmodern and part of contemporary global cinema culture.
Although TO LIV(E) and CROSSINGS are quite different, more than a
single director links the works together. Taken as a set, they
comment on certain common themes (e.g., Hong Kong 1997,
immigration, changing family and social relationships in
"Greater China," etc.) from two different temporal and
spatial perspectives. TO LIV(E) primarily looks at the edginess
of Hong Kong residents who are able to leave, but may or may not
leave before July 1997. CROSSINGS looks primarily at newly
transplanted Hong Kong émigrés in New York City, i.e., at
immigration as a fait accompli rather than as a possibility. Two
anchors hold these two films together. One is a contemplation of
June 4th in Tian'anmen Square, and the other is Rubie. The first
represents a common location away from both Hong Kong and the
world beyond the People's Republic at a specific point in time
that galvanized the world's attention on China. The other
represents a certain face and voice that embodies the
socio-political as well as the personal, psychological issues
addressed by both texts. Both Tian'anmen and Rubie are difficult
to pin down, and it is the indeterminacy of both that forms the
heart of this analysis of these films.
Continue to Part IV: From Tian’anmen to Times Square