Isa on her Moonlight Boat (Closed)

Herbert Schwarze

2011-11-17T14:39:00.001-05:00

11/18/2011

Dan and I met while she was visiting Boston. She said Chang Loong passed away last year at the age of 25. I felt I just lost a friend.

11/20/2011

After talking to a few friends, I was able to put the day to a weekend in July, 2010. I start to feel terrible about it.

11/21/2011

Shi Zhuo told me it was probably July 10, 2010.

Deborah Kerr

2011-11-08T21:40:00.001-05:00

I love men, sometimes more than I love my own kind. I love how they focus on what they do. Once they figure out what they want, they don't play sitting on the fence. I especially love how they chase after women, once they know whom. In my opinion, women like to play games, but only because they get to determine the rules and when to bend them. I myself have no doubt been in that position.

I invented rules, then I kept pushing the envelope too, as if it must be a fun thing to do. I enjoyed the unpredictability of outcomes yet my control over them. I created a uniquely themed ride, I took a man with me, and we enjoyed ourselves like there were no tomorrow. I am able to say that there have been great memories. However, the past is now behind a stained glass, like in a Wong Kar-wai film.

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking throusth a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. - In the Mood for Love (2000)

Some words I read before certainly did not register on my mind as they do now. I wish there is a way for me to conclude my story up till this point. But as I always warn Mike, your past will catch up with you.

Paul Virilio

2011-03-19T14:37:00.010-04:00

I am constantly in and out of reality these days. I slip out from a conversation easily, and I often stop in the middle of what I am supposed to do. Where does my mind go? The past, maybe. But it feels more like a fantastic present that I have invented for myself - it just feels like I am back in the past.

Recently I read a short screenplay I wrote about four years ago. I named it "1216" mainly because that was the day I thought I met Solly, a guy I used to like. Well, I made a mistake. I met him on December 18, 2005, not the 16th, and that was also the date I started a blog at Xanga.com. A lot happened there.

I remember in college, I read a short story in Professor Anderson's American Short Fiction class; in it, the author writes that people forget years and remember moments. This is certainly true for me.

This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while the snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying "snow," my lips move so that they kiss the air. (Ann Beattie "Snow")

When I am confused, I like to open my right palm and read it religiously. The lines dance stories for me. I enjoy spending hours deciphering them. Yet today I seem to have come to an inconclusive conclusion again.

Yes, I believe there are "emotionally charged" words. My heart stirs too when I see them.

Cui Yongyuan

2010-12-28T13:06:00.002-05:00

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.3105.001 Ethical Direction: Chinese Independent Documentary
Prof. Zhang Zhen and Prof. Angela Zito
December 18, 2010
Amateur Video in High-Profile Socially Engaged Projects:
The Chinese Village Documentary Project in Focus
Last year, I wrote a research paper on Through Navajo Eyes, which is a series of seven films made by seven Navajo film students under the supervision of Sol Worth, a communications professor and John Adair, an anthropologist in 1966. Worth and Adair selected seven Navajo film students and taught them how to use the film camera. The goal of their project was to find out if there was any connection between film language and language. I studied the films by the Navajo students in detail and also read about their culture and language. To my disappointment, the project did not yield any groundbreaking results, and the findings were to a large extent inconclusive. As I pondered over the significance of the films and their inclusion on the National Film Registry, I suddenly recalled and was deeply struck by an incident that Worth and Adair described in the earlier phase of the project. According to them, they sought the approval of a prominent medicine man, Sam Yazzie, in the Pine Springs Navajo community before they started soliciting people to be in the project. Sam, after listening carefully to the academics explain what the project was about, asked them three questions. First, he asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” To this, the two professors answered no confidently. Sam then asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any good?” The professors answered no again but with some hesitance. Finally, Sam asked, “Then why make movies?” To this, they fell silent. The awkward situation made them shoot some awkward replies, which they could not recall in detail afterwards.[1] In their co-authored book about the project many years later, it is said that at the time Sam did not own any sheep at all. His three questions were mean to be metaphorical. “Then why make movies?” I ask too. I make it the guiding question of my paper on the China Village Documentary Project.
The China Village Self-Governance Documentary Project (from here on the Village Documentary Project or VDP) is a project initiated as part of the EU-China Training Program on Village Self-Governance by veteran Chinese documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang and his assistant Jian Yi. It started in September 2005, but the project lived on till today. In 2005, announcements about the project were made on the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend as well as on the web. Any Chinese rural resident could apply, but only ten would be selected as finalists in the video category plus a hundred in the photography category. This paper looks specifically at the video category of the project. As promised by the project organizers, the ten finalists would get free transportation to and from Beijing, free food and lodging during their stay in Beijing, each person a digital video (DV) camera, a tripod, ten blank video tapes, free lessons on operating the DV camera and making documentaries, and last but not least, free access to editing facilities.[2] Except for the actually shooting, all other activities were conducted on site of Caocangdi Workstation, which is a non-profit art center for performance art, documentary film and video, and video art, founded by Wu and his wife choreographer Wen Hui in April 2005. The workstation is located in the Caochangdi Art District, which is a newly constructed art district outside the more famous 798 Art Zone in Beijing. The workstation shares close proximity with other art and cultural centers in the district such as award-winning independent filmmaker Zhao Liang’s Three Shadows Photography Art Center and the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA); together they form the front line of China’s contemporary art scene. Designed by renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei and generously supported by diverse international institutions and programs, such as the Asian Cultural Council from the United States and the Zürich International Theater Festival from Switzerland, the workstation is solidly world class. According to their founders, the workstation serves the public totally free-of-charge. Anyone can use its space and its facilities for study and information exchange. Additionally, it houses its own archive, which is professionally maintained to last into the future.[3] All these features of Caochangdi Workstation are new and exciting in China’s art world. However, more likely than not, they are vaguely grasped, if at all, by the villagers involved in the project. This is a point that I will come back to in a later section of my paper.
As it turns out, the Village Documentary Project has a fairly decent website where much related information about it can be found. Besides the introductions to the ten rural filmmakers and their works, the villagers’ reflections on the project, Wu’s own journal entries, and Wu’s correspondences with the villagers are open for anyone to read. While these may cater to an academic audience who are interested in doing research about the project besides those who already harbor an intense interest because of the fact that they were participants in the project, the news digest, media report, awards and comments may cater more to the general public because they are not as voluminous and formidable. In fact, except for the crude layout of the website (anyone with the most basic-level training in HTML can use preset templates to make these webpages), I would consider the publicity of the project well executed, and the excellent content shall add merit to the project as a whole. Not surprisingly, one of Wu’s journal entries reveals his intention to keep everything well-documented. On November 6, 2005, he wrote, “I would probably stay in each filmmaker’s place for roughly three days (including travel time). I will see what technical help they need for shooting, whether there is any problem with their topics, and I will also document them during shooting and in their everyday life. I plan to use both video- and audio-recording. These materials may be used for a book publication in the future.”[4] As we can see, Wu is very passionate about the project, and he has a special use for his collections too. I think that if not for this passion, Wu would have treated his work as mundane chores (i.e. making frequent cross-country trips and completing tasks), and he would have let much potentially important information slip past him as unremarkable white noise.
This is why I think Wu’s passion needs some address. His filmmaking career has certainly added an indispensable and fascinating dimension to the project, and it is essential to look at it closely. Thanks to many of Lü Xinyu’s publications on Wu and others, whom she thinks are pioneers to China’s independent production scene in the early 1990s, Wu is now known in the west as the most important founding member or sometimes the father of China’s New Documentary Cinema or the New Documentary Movement, which was putatively launched by his first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990). In 1990, Wu was working in a production team of the Special Topic Program of China Central Television. He quit this job and became an independent filmmaker not long after. Like others who also abandoned their jobs at the state television station, Wu was unhappy with the mainstream documentary practices. He rejected the patronizing form of state documentaries as well as their pretentious rhetoric in favor of a down-to-earth and cinéma vérité approach whose goal was to represent unadulterated and unaltered reality, especially the everyday life as lived and experienced by ordinary Chinese people.[5] This line of thought had guided him in his career up until 1996. From 1996 to 1998, he did not make any documentaries because he became jaded with the life and job of following people around with a huge video camera. From 2000 on, he transitioned to a new approach to documentary, which is best described as a free form of documentary filmmaking. As he has confessed, he no longer worked with preset topics in mind but shot footage whenever he felt like to. To him, video documenting was becoming like writing diary. He only edited the footage into a documentary when he found the inspiration to do it. Out of this new approach he made Dance with Farm Workers (2001), Search for Hamlet (2002), You are Called an Outsider (2003), as well as Fuck Cinema (2005). While these documentaries were unique in their own ways, Wu stated that he was getting increasingly bothered by the fact that they all dealt with people on the low rungs of society. He felt skeptical of, bored with, and rejected the documentation of others’ miseries. Here is an excerpt from his reflection:
One day, I saw an article on the Internet, “Flying like a Migrating Bird, but All in Vain.” It is said that in regard to the people who are living low lives, “although you document them, you do not help them.” I was hurt by this remark. I dare not say if my documentaries documented anything, or if they revealed anything, or if they represented anyone. I was ashamed to say so . . . Somehow by making a documentary of a miserable person, you become a successful artist, and you get a free air-ticket to go to a film festival. On this end, you are rhapsodizing about your film in front of an admiring audience. Yet on the other end, your subjects are carrying on their miserable lives with little or no change. In the beginning you probably do not feel bothered, but after a while, you will have questions about it.[6]
Although in my opinion it is not imperative for all documentary filmmakers to help their filmed subjects because that should be someone else’s responsibility, I could sympathize with Wu, especially because it is not his dream to lead a rich and comfortable bourgeois life – he was an “educated youth” who volunteered to work in Yunnan from 1974 to 1978 – in which case he would have less difficulty distancing himself from his subjects. I think his new realization about the documentary form and its function lends itself to his pursuit of yet another way of making documentaries and making use of them, which resonates with Sam Yazzie’s concern. Tracing Wu’s filmmaking career, I think it is becoming obvious why we can say that he has found his place in the Village Documentary Project.
I would like to add some words here about Wu’s assistant Jian Yi, who is another key figure in the project; their partnership was also crucial for the project. Jian was probably more famous for his fiction film Bamboo Shots (2007), which received the Bronze Zenith Award at the 31^st Montreal Film Festival and documentary Super, Girls! (2007), which tells the story about a group of ordinary city girls entering the Super Girl Singing Contest, a popular television show in China terminated in 2007, before he and his wife Eva Song formally launched the IFCHINA Original Art Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University in Ji’an, Jiangxi in June 2009. Jian studied in both China and the United States. One of his master’s degrees is in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame.[7] Jian is fluent in English, meaning that he is a great facilitator when it comes to researching and applying for funds and grants. For instance, IFCHINA was partially funded by the Dutch fund Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. Having spent a year in the U.S., Jian was also exposed to various American cultural organizations and was aware of different kinds of international supportive programs that Wu was not firsthand. Jian often spoke fondly about Appalshop – a 41-year-old documentary film studio founded by Bill Richardson, which he came into contact in Whitesburg, Kentucky.[8] Appalshop was Jian’s great inspiration for ARTiSIMPLE Studio, which he founded in 2005, the same year that the Village Documentary Project was launched, as a center for collaborative community and citizen projects. Appalshop also inspired Jian’s subsequent organization, IFCHINA, the first-of-its-kind non-profit art and cultural organization that documents the stories of a city and memories of its communities, families, and individuals. On the newly launched website of IFCHINA, its mission is stated in clear terms, including “raise[ing] civic awareness” and fostering “a stronger sense of shared human values.” Among many great things that the organization does is the teaching of video-making to ordinary citizens. And like the archive of Caochangdi Workstation, IFCHINA is planning to establish its own museum, called the Museum of Memories, to house all the artworks produced.[9] All these dreams and ambitions of Jian show great consistency in terms of ideology with his collaboration with Wu, the fact of which should strike us as the immergence of a new turn among Chinese independent filmmakers in the China’s independent documentary world.
Before I make any attempt to theorize the new turn and discuss whether it is legitimate to label the project as such, I would like to analyze the project in terms of its life history from the villagers’ point of view first. As we know, the villagers have been credited for their directorial responsibilities for the documentaries produced. Since that is the case, they shall be treated seriously and respectfully for that role. As I have mentioned earlier, some of the villagers’ journal entries are available online. These documents actually assemble into a comprehensive production log, which covers a wide range of production-related issues such as inclement weather, equipment failure, and permissions for shooting. However, I argue that the most fascinating and fundamental aspect of the villagers’ writing is their self-awareness, and sometimes more accurately their self-reflexivity, which forms the basis for all actions taken. I will highlight certain observations, emotions, and ideas as noted down by the villagers.
First of all, almost all of the villager filmmakers expressed disbelief about the project in the beginning. Jian Yi’s hour-long documentary on the project, Seen and Heard (2006), features different villagers talking about their encounters with and initial reactions towards the terms of the project. Supplementary to the visual evidence in Jian’s film, the villagers’ written records give additional textual testimony. In his piece titled “Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True,” the oldest villager among the group, Nong Ke, from Guangxi Province, reproduces the dialogue that he had with his family right after he learned of his acceptance into the project. Nong’s son wanted to knock some sense into his old man by referencing the numerous advertising hoaxes that happened in China every day. More worried than concerned, his wife also tried hard to give him some reality checks by shooting rhetorical questions at him. She disparaged his calling of the project as something serious by comparing it to raising livestock (reminiscent of Sam’s metaphorical question); she half-mockingly discouraged him from participating in it by saying that he was too old and had no proper education anyway. Being put on the spot, Nong reacted much more strongly than in private. He refused to bend and said that Southern Weekly could not trick people like him. He promised his wife that he would raise more pigs to make up for the money if he were tricked. Despite the determination to embark on the journey to Beijing, which was to be his virgin voyage, and his public declaration to pay due cost if the plan went awry, Nong confessed that he did still feel uncertain and had sleepless nights.[10] For a farmer like him, we shall understand that the stakes behind the simple act of participating were extremely high because an entire year’s savings on raising livestock and selling farm produce could be wasted on pursuing like-natured quixotic dreams. In this sense, Nong as well as the other less privileged villagers are noteworthy for their courage, albeit quite foolhardy to their friends and family. The journey was to be taken alone; it became the ultimate test to see if an ordinary villager with little education could live larger than his or her life.
The villagers’ train rides to Beijing were all safe and smooth. But once they arrived, their experiences were filled with constant shocks. In fact, I argue that they were having a heightened sense of the self, which had probably been left dormant in most of their lives. Jia Zhitan, from Hunan Province, has a descriptive writing style. His journal entries from November 1^st to 4^th, 2005 give us a good idea of the portion of the project that took place in Caochangdi Workshop Art Center in Beijing. Interestingly, he was taken aback by Ai Weiwei’s architectural design of the center at first. “The brown-colored iron gates were shut tight. There was not even a sign next to the gate. The only thing lacking in the design were perhaps barbed wires. Dog barking welcomed us in. It was getting dark, but I could not see a single light in the quiet space,” he writes. “Is this place a detention center?” Jia’s first impression for Wu was a negative one too because Wu looked like a shady contractor with his unkempt beard. Jia’s suspicions only subsided the next day after the first meeting with the event organizers, some of whom were foreigners, passing out the cameras and tapes as promised.[11] Upon receiving his lot, Nong did a simple calculation. He writes, “I learned from the check that this tiny gadget, no bigger than my palm, cost more than the price of seven pigs. My God! Seven pigs! I would have to labor for a year for that amount of money, not counting 4,000 jin (or 2,000 kilograms) of corn and 1,000 jin (or 500 kilograms) of concentrated fodder in addition to it.”[12] For Nong and Jia at least, the short stay in Beijing gave them many “first” experiences such as first time seeing foreigners and people of an ethnic minority in person and first time touching high-tech camcorders. These experiences allowed them to see themselves in relation to the outside world, and that was where their surprises came from. Additionally, because the villagers were also making practice films and were forced to shoot each other and later looked at the tapes, they saw how they looked, talked, and moved in film and must be aware of how they compared to others.
The shooting process was challenging to the villager filmmakers, each in its own way. Like the project organizers, we tend to assume that the villagers would have easier access to their fellow villagers and the daily happenings in their respective villages. However, that was not always the case, and the ease with which we assume them to have with finding the subjects of their documentaries was not always true. As we will see, some of them had to make effort in networking and interact beyond their everyday social circles. As indicated in Shao Yuzhen’s diary, making a documentary about self-governance in her village in the outskirt of Beijing was not an easy task because she needed to sell her ripe Bok Choy, which was still in the field and needed transportation to go to the city, she needed to get rid of all the sweet potatoes still at home, and she also needed to hand-pick the cotton in her cotton field. Busy running multiple tasks at once, she was frustrated with herself because she always made silly mistakes such as forgetting to charge the battery of her camcorder or remembering to charge it but failing to connect the battery to the power chord securely and thus missing the shooting of certain events. At night, she worried about how to speak to the local party secretary about her documentary in order to get the necessary permission and support, and how to approach the village committee so that they would start the meetings on land contracts as soon as possible, especially within the required production period of her documentary. In the end, we know that her request was ignored or effectively turned down, and she resolved to filming random people and things. However, the process of her negotiating with those with title and power was necessarily valuable. In her dairy, she also mentioned her daughter, who played with her camcorder, and she noticed that her daughter could use it much better than she could. She exclaimed that she was getting old, but she was determined to get the documentary done at all costs because otherwise she would never be someone.[13]
Similar to Shao, Zhou Cengjia also went through quite some wanderings before he finally found a subject. At first, he went to talk to his village accountant about filming the reconstruction of the new power grid in his village. However, he was told that he would need to wait for them to get permission from higher up authorities before he was allowed to film. “What servility!” he cries out in his diary. “Even the village cadres cannot understand the significance of this project. How sad this is!” Since he could not find support in his own village, Zhou made contacts outside it. He called his former classmate who became the head of a neighboring village. Luckily his independent-minded former classmate was willing to participate. Zhou was a diligent filmmaker. Although he had to spend time on managing his shop, he had many ideas about his documentary and filmed many things happening around him other than his former classmate. During the month that he was working on the shooting, it rained frequently, so he complained about the bad weather several times. External restraints aside, he blamed himself for not knowing how to use the computer and send emails over the Internet too.[14] Though difficult, the shooting process became a self-discovery process and a self-improvement process for Zhou. The basic skills that he would learn by trying to get the documentary done are beneficial to him in the long run.
For the younger villagers amongst them like Wang Wei from Shandong Province and Yi Chujian from Zhejiang Province, it was comparatively easier to handle the camerawork and find subjects. As we can see from Jian’s Seen and Heard, Wang has an outgoing and congenial personality. His reflection on the project shows something quite different from the older generation. He describes his inner thoughts and emotions in much greater detail than the aforementioned villagers. While on the bus going back home, he pondered over the concept of villager self-governance. He thought that the current state of villager self-governance was underdeveloped, and he questioned whose responsibility it would be to realize villager self-governance. He set his topic to be the dispute over land contracting within his village. By going around interviewing people and making the documentary, he realized that he was getting unbelievably more worried than his fellow villagers about the situation. Although he sympathized with the village cadres that the fellow villagers had little education and thus low suzhi or civility, which was a factor to be considered when carrying out large-scale land reforms, he sympathized with a few villagers who were living under over the extreme poverty. “Has societal development ever benefited them? Did they get their share in the country’s economic takeoff?” he asks. “How many times can they eat meat in a year? How many times can they make dumplings? When was the last time that they bought new clothes? Was it a dozen years ago? Or did it never happen?”[15] He condemned the indifferent look cast upon them by his village especially because some of the people in the village were living a life many times better-off, yet those people were unwilling to let go and kept delaying letting go of the land that they occupied despite the fact that every villager should have a share of the land by law.
The final versions of the villagers’ documentaries last between ten to fifteen minutes. As the credits show, not every documentary was edited by the villagers themselves. Obviously there are practical limitations involved in teaching every one of them film editing, such as their varying learning abilities and possible time constraints and time conflicts with their personal lives. Looking at the edited films, however, we can see that it was not the project organizers’ attention to eliminate all technical errors of the shot footage. Instead, some errors were deliberately included, and the ten edited documentaries exhibit a variety of existing well-known documentary practices. In a way, the villagers’ works have undergone a facelift to gain legitimacy to enter relevant international film festivals. In Zhou Cengjia’s film about his ex-classmate, Village Head Wu Aiguo, the final two shots were an obvious technical mistake. A wide angle shot of Wu Aiguo walking into the distance is followed by a telescope shot of Wu Aiguo, just as his body is beginning to decrease in size. Zhou probably wanted to show his subject leaving; however, the message was wrongly constructed and delivered because in order to show someone leaving it is necessary to avoid zooming in and out and starting a new frame. One of the Navajo film students, Mike Anderson, made a practice film about the growth of a piñon pine. As an amateur, Mike made a similar mistake. Because “all the trees both small and large were shot as close-ups filling the full frame,” Mike “failed to communicate the process of growth which can be shown when something small becomes big.”[16] This is probably a trivial point, but the inclusion of this mistake seems deliberate because Zhou’s film was not edited by him but Li Haihan, whom I presume to be a professional editor. Amateur mistakes aside, if we looking the ten films together, we shall notice that they roughly cover all the established documentary forms. There are occasional talking-head interviews (with Wu Aiguo, for example), direct cinema observations (children leaving school), cinéma vérité-style participatory shooting (stopping a couple in a bad quarrel), cinéma vérité-style provocative questioning (asking people why they did not vote in their village elections), journalistic narration (introductory remarks about different locations), and interestingly too, an autobiographical impulse (filming one’s own actions), which may categorize better with amateur video aesthetics. Overall, they form a palette of documentary visuals, making the end omnibus or anthology film a strong candidate to be selected and shown alongside professional productions in the festival circuit.
I understand that Wu and others can get guilty by endlessly making documentaries about miserable people, and I agree that people too can get bored with watching this kind of films, which tell stories of victimhood. However, I would like to stress that in the case of China, where human rights issues are far from being resolved at the present, such documentaries still play an important role. The expansion of China’s middle class is true to a certain extent, but given the scale of its population and the fact that majority of the population is still rural, meaning that various kinds of social welfare are not sweeping in practice, we ought to bear with the number of films about underprivileged people. Therefore, the case for documentaries to be an empowering medium shall be accepted to last for a relatively longer period of time in China. This view is echoed in Chinese human rights activist and lawyer Teng Biao’s writing:
Village officials sold village land without disclosing records and accounting details, resulting in vigorous campaign among the villagers. With the help from the lawyers, journalists, and scholars, villages go against and denounce the officials. In 2005, the Taishi incident in Panyu, Guangdong, became one of the famous cases of the Chinese Civil Rights Movement. Ai Xiaoming’s documentary, "Taishi" recorded the event. Lawyers were beaten, villagers were arrested, and the whole village was enveloped in an atmosphere of terror. The last scene of the documentary showed filmmaker being beaten in containment by a group of unidentified gangs. In horror, with her car door broken, she called for help. The producer then added the following subtitle: "During the shooting process, I found that many agencies have video cameras, I think the villagers should have a video camera of their own.”[17]
In reality, the ten villagers chosen for this project may inadequately represent all rural Chinese. They may be considered to evade even harsher realities experienced by certain groups among them. The fact that this project is a collaborative project between Chinese independent documentary filmmakers and the European Union gives an extremely strong backbone to the villager filmmakers selected. The continuing exposure of the project on newspapers also to a great extend ensured its transparency. These factors add on to the potency of the use of documentary as a political tool.
Jia Zhitan is one of the villagers who continued to make documentaries after the 2005 phase of the project was over. His later experiences with making documentaries provide some solid responses to Sam’s question of why make movies. First, Jia started and is now the director of “a committee of an orange growers’ cooperative, which enjoys great popularity among some 200,000 local growers.” The fame that he has gained from the high-profile transparent Village Documentary Project allows him to have great trust from those who know about it. 200,000 is not a small number; he probably cannot remember everyone’s name in the cooperative, but he represents them and fights for them with his camera. Second, in 2008, Jia made a documentary about “outraged villagers petitioned against a coal mine for discharging high levels of pollutants into drinking water sources and its owner’s misuse of the environmental protection subsidy of nearly 2 million yuan ($294,000).” “He sent the 20-minute video to the State Council in October 2008 and Premier Wen Jiabao was quick to respond for resolving the issue.” Third, he continues to explore the use of documentary and uses his spare time to record local history, which will soon die with the people who bear witness of it. For example, he interviewed a widow whose husband committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. That man was purged because he had previously been given a scholarship by Kuomintang to study. Jia sobbed behind the camera as he listened to the widow talk because when he was a child, his life was saved by the man. Jia carries his video camera around and films people and things when he feels compelled to. Sometimes he winds up in a fight and is threatened to have his camcorder destroyed. He often responds in those situations that there is nothing wrong to record reality. As his fame grows, more and more powerless people come to him and plead his help. However, he is not able to help everyone. Li Shibing, 72, sought Jia’s help with getting the compensation of his land after being relocated. Jia turned him down because he was under great pressure at the time. Three weeks later after Li spoke with Jia, Li committed suicide.[18]
What the above incident tells us is perhaps the insufficiency of cameras or similar projects that aim to teach people how to amplify their stories and make themselves seen and heard. Indeed, from 2005 on, probably inspired by the Village Documentary Project, a group of projects that share similar organization structures have sprung up in China. Just this year, the Environment & Human Short Documentary Project was conducted as part of a green project called “Qing Guo Qing Cheng Huan Jing Xin Guan Cha [Green Country Green City Environmental and Spiritual Observation],” which was organized by the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology (SEE) Foundation, Beijing Indie Workshop (founded in 2005 by Zhang Xianmin), and the Tencent Company for Public Welfare. College students from over 200 institutions were encouraged to participate in this project by submitting documentary proposals that explore contemporary environmental problems and construct innovative solutions. Of the proposals, 20 were selected as finalists. These students were given free training in video filmmaking as well as a small fund to complete their documentaries. The winners were shown at the Ullens Centers for Contemporary Art (UCCA) on November 9^th, 2010 in Beijing. Some of the films produced are already available online at sina.com, which is one of the largest and most popular Chinese websites. Another example is Jian Yi’s IFCHINA Original Art Studio’s Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University. As is mentioned earlier on in the paper, IFCHINA uses the same model to teach ordinary Chinese how to use the video camera and tell their own stories. All of their works will be housed in the Memories of Museum (currently under construction) and will be free for public viewing. It is not hard to see that the three examples all put little emphasis on copyright issues and on commercial distribution. Despite making 20,000 yuan for airing their documentaries on TV twice, all the villagers involved in the Village Documentary Project expressed little interest in having their films official distributed. Wu mentioned that he also did not want to complicate the project and similar projects in the future by bringing in commercial partners. This differentiates the amateur videos by the villagers and perhaps other kinds of amateur videos, especially in the last century in the United States, as the argument made by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible goes, “the utopian and independent impulses of amateurism have been complicated by professional, commercial and official interests from the beginning.”[19] The significance of this cluster of Chinese projects, I argue therefore, points to something quite original compared to the more well-known route to fame in the Chinese independent cinema world.
Since the early 1990s, the way to have a serious career in documentary filmmaking for Chinese independent filmmakers has been to start making an award-winning documentary film in the international film festival circuit. After getting some awards, these independent filmmakers can then be more credited to secure funding for their next productions through official channels. Very often the funding comes from abroad, through film festivals, independent donors, international television stations, and grants from established cultural institutions. For examples, the Motion Pictures Association (MPA) Asian Pacific Screen Academy Film (ASPA) Fund is automatically open for application to ASPA Award winners, the Asian Film Fund by the Pusan International Film Festival has a special grant for documentaries, and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema offers NETPAC cash awards at 28 film festivals in 21 countries. If international support is unfortunately out of reach, Chinese independent documentary filmmakers have the option of applying for a limited amount of financial support by their local, regional, and in some cases national television stations. Investments, however, are rare because venture capital companies are more likely to fund fiction films, which have better profit returns. Going back to the Village Documentary Project, it is a pioneer in establishing a new mode of production and distribution. It awakens Chinese filmmakers that they need not limit themselves to making art alone, they need not be solidary fighters for whatever cause, their contacts in society are wide-ranged, so they can collaborate with different institutions for different purposes, and finally, they are capable of turning their subjects into filmmakers.
In October 2010, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation art was opened in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. Ai was commissioned by Tate for this exhibition. He hired almost the entire town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province from 2008 on to make life-size porcelain sunflower seeds. 150 tons of fake sunflower seeds were made in the end and shipped aboard. Ai paid all his workers using the money that he received from Tate. It was said that the town was on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved by Ai. If such is the case, what parallels can we draw between Ai , Wu, and Jian? Obvious, all three are Chinese; they have all been recognized for their art and/or films internationally; interestingly, all three also started engaging ordinary Chinese in their art or their work directly. I thought in the beginning that the engagement they were able to offer were insignificant because Ai’s workers were doing menial jobs and Wu told his film students to use their cameras to observe people and things and not to make probing documentaries like China Central Television’s program “Jiao Dian Fang Tan [Topics in Focus].” I thought the observational method that Wu preferred prevented the villagers from making use of their intelligence and thus reduced them to like-natured factory workers, who were just passively carrying out orders and operating a sophisticated machine. Additionally, I also paralleled the amateur videos by the villagers as just another kind of products carrying the “Made in China” label because they looked low-quality. However, my own views changed. I found out that the villagers became self-conscious during the project. Although they were asked to record reality and never required to rigorously examine or organize it, they have learned many valuable things, about themselves, about others, about what they could do for their villages once they had a camera. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The camcorders were permanently given to the ten villagers. Some have continued to work with Wu and make documentaries and other not. I think that the important thing is not whether they become documentary filmmakers because the impact of the project is and should be beyond the ten of them. Society at large actually benefits from the Village Documentary Project and other similar projects, especially when they receive wide and transparent press coverage, because ideas will beget ideas. These projects are inspiring to in many good ways. Last but not least, the successes that these projects achieve will contribute to the building of a transnational infrastructure for new modes of production and distribution. In a rapidly modernizing nation still struggling to make everything work nicely together, I see these infrastructure-builders epoch-making.

[1] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2^nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 32.
[2] China Independent Documentary Film Archive, “China Villagers Documentary Project,” CIDAF News & Events, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.cidfa.com/modules/project.php?pid=4.
[3] “Caochangdi Workstation Art Center,” Caochangdi Workstation Intro, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/english/about_us.htm.
[4] Wu Wenguang, “Cun Min Ying Xiang Ji Hua Gong Zuo Shou Ji [Village Documentary Project Diary],” Caochangdi Workstation, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectworknote.html.
[5] Matthew David Johnson, “’A Scene beyond Our Line of Sight’: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, ed. Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 51-6.
[6] Wan Jing, “Jiu Shuo Lao Wu Qu Zhao Mei Nü Wan Le [Let’s Just Say Old Wu Left here Looking for Pretty Girls],” Southern Weekly, Oct. 31, 2007,
http://www.infzm.com/content/6826.
[7] “Jian Yi: Documentary Filmmaker and Photographer,” The New School India China Institute, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.newschool.edu/ici/subpage.aspx?id=23832.
[8] Jian Yi, “Message from the Co-founders,” IFCHINA Original Art Studio Participatory Documentary Center Annual Newsletter 2009 (English), Jan. 22, 2010, 2.
[9] “Who Are We?” IFCHINA Original Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.ifchinastudio.org/.
[10] Nong Ke, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen [Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True],” Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings],
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[11] Jia Zhitan, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Oct 31 - Nov. 4, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[12] Nong, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen.”
[13] Shao Yuzhen, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 5 to 13, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[14] Zhou Cengjia, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 22, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[15] Wang Wei, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 7, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[16] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 96.
[17] Teng Biao, “China: The Use of Citizens Documentary in Chinese Civil Rights Movements,” translated by florence, Interlocals, Aug. 19, 2010,
http://interlocals.net/?q=node/361.
[18] Li Xiaoshu, “Farmer’s Harvest of Reality,” Global Times: Discover China, Discover the World, June 9, 2010,
http://special.globaltimes.cn/2010-06/540395.html.
[19] Melinda Stone and Dan Streible, “Introduction: Small Gauge and Amateur Film,” Film History 15, no. 2 (2003): 123.

Han Sanping

2010-12-28T13:00:00.002-05:00

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
December 18, 2010
High-Grossing Chinese and Korean Blockbusters and Their Role in the “Renaissance of National Cinema”
Blockbusters mobilize expansive social resources, assemble a great variety of talents, attract a wide range of audience, and make enormous profit returns. They cultivate a movie-going culture, help industrialize and streamline a country’s film industry, and put national cinema on a par with the best of Hollywood. This paper uses specific examples to discuss and compare how Chinese and Korean blockbusters help build their respective film industry, and the subsequent contributions that they make to their respective national cinema.
In my best judgment, the Chinese film industry has many things to learn from the South Korean film industry. During the course of this semester, the films that we have watched and discussed and the texts that we have studied give many pointers as to how to understand the renaissance of Korean national cinema. While the renaissance of Korean cinema is a good term to describe the rise of Korean cinema, I would like to pick this idea of renaissance apart because like the more popular notion, “hallyu” (sometimes “hallyuwood”), it indicates something temporary, and like a wave, it will soon fade away. Yes, all cultural phenomena have life cycles; they are all subject to “death.” However, isn’t it too early to issue the death certificate to Korean cinema? Can’t we think of it as still being in the process of making? I believe that much work still remains to be done to have Korean cinema realize its full potential, and for that to happen, the Korean cinema must not dwell on its past achievements. As for Chinese cinema, the same humility applies. Chinese films must understand that at the present, they are just beginning to make a splash. Major hits exist, but the overall quality is low. Although the numbers associated with its rate of growth are staggering, the industry is at large immature. At the managerial level, different authorial voices representing different authorial forces are still vigorously competing against each other. With no prior experiences, China’s first film industry legislation has yet been set in place to help sort out various kinds of legal matters. On top of these, the industry also perches precariously on China’s economy, whose future as we know has generated widely contrasting views. It shocked the world that China overtook Japan as the second largest economy in the world in the second quarter of 2010 in August 2010. Predictions also say that at the current rate, its economy will overtake the U.S. in the year 2035. But in reality this is just press. China’s problems far outnumber its achievements. There are so many potential pitfalls that the vista ahead really looks no more promising than a huge landmine.
The South Korean film industry is ahead of the Chinese film industry by at least ten years. This is also roughly I think how much South Korea’s economy is ahead of China’s economy structurally. Ten years may seem short, but (increasingly) they can be a long time in creating a big gap in the development of a film industry. As we know, new technologies replace old ones rapidly nowadays; the media and cultural landscape is also constantly being reshaped. In the last century, after the end of the Korean War (1950-3), South Korea’s film industry underwent a boom. The late 1950s and 1960s are widely known to be the Golden Age of Korean cinema, boasting many well-made domestic films. For China, this period was also a productive time. Movie-going was part of the popular culture, and a steady supply of films were made for the general public who could watch them at extremely low prices. However, while the Korean film industry continued to mature under the pressure of a series of nationwide democratic movements, China’s film culture was completely halted in 1966 because of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which no films were made. Although the industry was resuscitated after the political tumult, from the end of the 1970s to roughly the mid-1990s, it was doing notoriously badly in terms of box office. The lackluster performance was due to the industry’s haphazard transition from being centrally planned to being market-driven. The transition was partial and passive in practice because resistance to the reform was strong at every level. For one thing, the film culture was still largely conservative. It was structured on the Soviet-style command economy from the early 1950s. Everything from production quotas, to film licensing, to film distribution, and to film exhibition went according to the central government’s directives, giving no heed to the market. Neither Hollywood nor Western European imports were allowed into the country. The China Film Corporation (CFC) also adopted the so-called flat-rate film purchasing system whereby it contracted a studio’s entire production output regardless of quality. While it benefited the Fifth-Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who thrived in this space without having to face the consumers, the number of tickets sold kept dropping from 1980 to 1985, and the industry lost more and more money each year. Finally in 1986, studios were allowed to have a share in the box office revenue generated. It was this direct interest in the market along with various distributors’ and exhibitors’ growing autonomy from the CFC’s monopoly that finally enabled a new round of reforms in the industry, including horizontal integration with other businesses and the downsizing of the various overemployed distributors.[1]
In 1985, South Korea made an important trade agreement with the United States to drop its screen quota for domestic films from the previous number of one third of a year in 1976 to 146 days or 2/5 of a year. This resulted in an influx of Hollywood films in the domestic market, which was later thought to be the key external factor that helped spur the Korean film industry to make high-quality films. Internally, the financial support from well-endowed conglomerates or chaebol like Samsung and Hyundai enabled secure funding for big-budgeted films. In many cases, the corporates’ ways of conducting businesses helped streamline the industry. For instances, market research suddenly became an integral part of the pre-production process, and test screenings were added before the actual premieres. Overall, the industrialization of the film industry allowed it to establish a greater industrial chain, mobilize greater social resources, and in turn generate greater profits. Marriage Story (1992) was one of the first films produced in this manner; its success was later modeled and improved upon by other productions. It is thought that before the 1997 financial crisis hit the Asian market and resulting in the withdrawal of chaebol, the Korean film industry had actually already had a more-than-basic business infrastructure in place, which would account for the subsequent successes of a steady stream of commercial films since the 1999 hit Shiri (1999). On the Chinese side, China approved the importation of ten international blockbusters annually as late as 1994. Over the next fifteen years, the number slowly climbed to twenty. In 1995, just a year after the relaxation of importation policy, foreign films generated 70-80 percent of the total box office. As a counter measure to encourage domestic film production by generating profit for investment, the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television allowed Chinese studios to distribute imports on CFC’s approval list in 1996; the condition given was that one quality domestic film must be made in exchange for one imported film.[2] These measures and others slowly recovered the movie-going culture in China. As the statistics show, China’s box office revenue increased from $219.6 million in 2004 to $909 million in 2009, which equaled to an average 30% increase per year. In 2010, the revenue is expected to exceed $1.4 billion, keeping up with the previous growth rate. As for the number of films made domestically, it increased from 145 in 1995 to 456 in 2009. This number is expected to exceed 500 in 2010. By the end of 2009, the total number of multiplexes was 1670 and the total number of screens 4723, 626 of which were new screens added in 2008.[3] And the daily growth rate for the number of screens is currently at 3.3.[4] Major South Korean exhibitor Lotte Cinema is set to launch its first theatre this month. It also plans to open ten more sites in China in 2011, adding 70 more screens in 2011 and another 52 in 2012.[5] Reading these numbers I can feel blood pounding in my ear. On the one hand, they harbinger a great march forward. On the other, the rocketing numbers make me uneasy. I wish I could find out exactly how much revenue share Chinese domestic films have made in all the yearly totals from 1994 on so that I can then compare their growth. Unfortunately the statistics on the Chinese film industry are hard to come by even through the official Chinese websites.[6]
The growth of the Korean film industry is told in many different ways; one may perhaps attempt to tell it as a series of successful films that overtake Hollywood films in attracting the domestic audience. Shiri (1999), JSA (2000), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003), Taegukgi (2004), The King and the Clown (2005), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), The Host (2006), Scandal Makers (2008), The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008), Haeundae (2009) are all such examples. From the list, it is not too hard to see that their themes and undertones have shifted from more solemn topics involving sensitive political history to relatively lighter-hearted topics that deal with imaginary disasters or fantasy history. I think that the same trend applies to Chinese blockbusters, which are starting to lighten up their stories. Feng Xiaogang’s If You Are the One (2008) is a comedy; it is the third highest grossing domestic film. Feng’s latest big hit Aftershock (2010), which topped the chart, is a tragic drama dealing with the aftermath the 1978 Tangshan Earthquake. Up till this point, Feng has been making comedies only. For the purpose of this paper, my focus is set on another Chinese blockbuster The Founding of a Republic (2009). In my opinion, this film roughly sets the life clock of the Chinese film industry to Korean’s JSA (2000) a decade earlier. Both films have created box office miracles but are not the first ones to do so in their respective countries. I think that it will be interesting to compare how they tell extremely well-known histories to their respective national audiences in ways that are new and engaging. Can their successes be copied? If so, what lessons can we glean from them so as to serve the ever present need of constructing national cinema?
The Founding of a Republic (2009) was made for the 60^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the First Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). It covers the Chinese history from the end of World War II to 1949, known as the Chinese civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Party of Communists (CPC). The film does not focus on the battles. Instead, it focuses on the important historical figures during this history, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling, Soong Ching-ling, etc. However, it is not a drama about only a few of them either. The history is told through all of them without dramatizing any one of them. As is unbelievable as it sounds, 170 Chinese movie and television stars played in this film. Many of them appear on screen for just over a few seconds for very small roles. Jackie Chan plays a journalist for example, Zhang Ziyi is one of the women’s representatives who are taking a photograph with Mao, and Tony Leung Ka Fai shows up briefly as a photograph intruder. It is said that many of the stars came to act in the film without demanding any pay. In fact, if everyone did, the budget would have gone way beyond 37 million yuan ($5.56 million). I shall note here too that the film had a comparatively much shorter production period than most Hollywood films. It was made in roughly ten months, one third of the time of an average Hollywood film. In the beginning, the production team only assembled the core group of actors and actresses. The extreme successful marketing team, which advertised for this film while it was still in the production stage, did a great job of attracting star attention. New players joined the group as the production was taking place, and the team grew bigger and bigger as time went by in the snowball effect. Though new hiring was not included in the original budget, since many of them volunteered, the film was able to get completed within its budget. Some have attributed the snowball effect to the personal clout of one of the directors of this film, Han Sanping, who is also the chairman of the China Film Group Corporation (another name for the CFC), which as is mentioned earlier, is a very powerful national institution. This view may be a little skewed because patriotic sentiments are quite enough for a Chinese actor or actress to raise him or herself to this kind of occasion (sadly things may change in the future). Although on the one hand, no consumer will want to pay to watch a leitmotif film about China’s national history, on the other, the deep seated humiliation that Chinese bear of their modern history not counting the most recent two decades is not easily suppressible, especially if it has been aroused in the right manners.
In his essay “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” Frances Gateward comments on the relationship between cinema and national history. He writes that “cinema has become central to the national historical memory, providing younger generations engaging and readily available mimetic experiences of the monumental traumas of which they have no firsthand recollection.”[7] The marketing team of the film knew very well that they were going to face an audience that was young, most of whom would be in their 20s and 30s. As the subsequent market survey results show, 51.81% of the sample audience who watched this film was between 20 to 29 years old, roughly 20% was from each of the 30- to 39-year-old group and the 40-and-above group, and the rest came from people below 20.[8] How to make the 20-year-olds understand how the CPC gained its legitimacy as the leading party of China and why the KMT failed in this cause? Indeed, how did the KMT fail? I will discuss one scene in the film. I argue that this scene helps neutralize Chiang’s character, contrary to the more popular but negative imagination of Chiang for majority of people in mainland China. Together with the rest of film, Chiang’s mistakes and his resultant defeat are cleverly contextualized. The message is such that history can be cruel sometimes; bad political decisions can and will result in disastrous outcomes.
This scene happens in the quiet open space of a park. It says “Nanjing” on screen. Chiang and his son first appear in an extreme long shot, walking and talking. The color scheme is toned down, showing the wet rain-washed cement floor in black and grey and the distant foliage in dark shades of green. Chiang is dressed in a black changshan (a traditional Chinese long shirt for men) while his son Ching-guo in a grey Zhongshan suit (also known as Mao suit in the west). A flight of pigeons wipe the screen every now and then as they fly across the foreground to the background and back again. Chiang tells his son in a solemn voice that he flew back from Manchuria because of him. Madame Chiang was leaving for the U.S. to ask for help (effectively money help). At this crucial point, the KMT could not afford any tumult. A heavy tap of his walking stick on the ground followed by a sudden close-up of him accentuates this message, which is targeted at Ching-guo. Ching-guo responds by saying that the entire economy of China would collapse if the corrupted Kong family was not punished. “I absolutely understand,” Chiang lets out a deep sigh. “The corruption of the KMT is in the bones.” He continues to exhort his son that although punishing the corrupted is important, the timing and the degree are crucial too. A shot-reverse-shot shows Ching-guo in a grimace. The shot returns to Chiang as he utters, “It’s tough. You lose the party if you proceed. You lose the country if you don’t.” The disagreement between them is subtly conveyed through another medium shot of Ching-guo. Although he tells his father that both the country and the party are at the brink of disaster, his father cuts him short. Chiang gives a one-sided exhortation-cum-lecture on the most crucial things at hand. He walks up the stairs, exits the frame, leaving Ching-guo in an ethical suspension. A slightly tilted high-angle camera shot on Ching-guo suggests his inferior position in this matter. Even though he is eager to help, the corruption of the KMT, as Chiang says, has become incorrigible. By contrasting the will to correct evil and the evil itself, the point on the corruption of the KMT is very well delivered. Moreover, it is extremely easy to relate to for contemporary Chinese audiences because ironically, the CPC has also become a corrupt party after it gained power (despite its constant crackdowns on corruption). In as short as 2 minutes and 8 seconds (the entire length of this scene), we see that as a leader, Chiang has his priorities – he needs to call the U.S. for help and he needs to save the South (the North is taken by Mao). However, Chiang is bound hand and foot. His armies are tired; his people are suffering; his leadership is in a peril.
In JSA (2000), as we have seen, the North Korean soldiers are humanized. They are shown to be just as curious, funny, warm-hearted, and yet powerless as the South Korean soldiers. Even though these approachable images of them as created by the film go against the prevalent demonized images in popular media, they are easy for South Korean audience to accept through dramatization. After all, North Koreans and South Koreans are related both jus sanguinis and jus soli. The foregrounding of their male bond, fraternal love, and mutual devotion sweeps aside the political disparities between the two sovereignties. Tragedy only ensues when the political disparities erupts from below again. I read somewhere that Director Park Chan-Wook once said that he was a devout reader of Sophocles. Antigone, written by Sophocles in 442 BC, is exactly a tragedy brought about by the conflict between one’s devotion for one’s family and one’s devotion for one’s city. In theorizing tragedy, Hegel has deemed Antigone the best Greek tragedy ever written because it shows the underlying rubric of the tragic form – the conflict of two equally good causes. Interestingly, Park’s film Old Boy (2003) also resonates with another Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus the King, written in 429 BC. (The voluntary blinding of his eyes by Oedipus and the voluntary cutting of his tongue by Oh Dae-su powerfully pass on a cluster of metaphorical messages. For example, in order to gain true insights and peace of mind, corporeal faculties like vision and speech may not be the relevant any more. Oedipus the King was deemed by Aristotle as the best Greek tragedy in his book Poetics. As for Sophocles, his playwright career is developed highly systematically. He constantly seeks improvement using theory.) By absorbing the vitality of Greek literature and mixing it in his Korean movies, Park is “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
In the case of The Founding of a Republic, literature and other established cinematic methods are borrowed but new grounds are broken too. If The Founding of a Republic had tried to humanize Chiang as well as the others instead of historicizing them, it would have ended up a historical drama. I think that China’s founding history is perhaps too heavy and expansive to allow for simple dramatization, which could easily trivialize or travesty history. Maybe I feel this way because I was not raised in a democracy and therefore resist trying to understand history from more personalized points of views, or through heroism, friendship, etc. I respect literature with all my heart; however, I like to see cinema being challenged to explore its capacity too. As we know, personalized accounts of history are copious in cinema. In China, dramas about Mao and on Chiang are everywhere. The Found of a Republic does something quite different from those dramas because Mao is not the protagonist and certainly not the entire story. This is not to say that the film does not humanize the characters. Rarely can one imagine Mao Zedong happily getting drunk or Zhou Enlai losing his temper. These unconventional snippets of their lives aim to shorten the distance between the national leaders and the general public. However, that said, I can see that these character subplots are never developed fully, meaning that The Founding of a Republic is still firmly about the history and not about the people. The film does not judge individuals based on who they are. Nothing is personal. For example, when David Kung, the General Manager of the Yangtze Company and also Ching-kuo’s cousin, defiantly refuses to sell his hoarded supplies in his godown, he says that he is a businessman and this is how to do business. In fact, conflicts abound in this film, but time and again, every bad guy is contextualized, historicized.
Other noteworthy sequences in The Founding of a Republic include the round table discussion about the design of China’s national flag and the voting on China’s national anthem. These symbolic objects are highly emotionally charged for Chinese nationals. How the design and the song are determined behind the scene has never been depicted in cinema until in this film. During the voting, a delegate, who is played by a very famous Chinese actor and comedian, Feng Gong, keeps raising his hand to speak but keeps missing the opportunity as others speak first. Finally he speaks after the camera falls on him the twelfth time, but he says coyly that everything has been said already. This kind of humor downplays the individual. We laugh at him because we understand that he is just as eager as everyone else except not as lucky to be the first one to speak. By laughing at his final and only remark, we acknowledge that the agreement has been reached; our laughter is our way of participation and our way of support. In fact, humor is a great way of reaching out to the audience. In JSA, there are many memorable scenes where we laugh at the characters too. For example, while every other guard is standing like a column in the demilitarized zone, Sergeant Lee and Jeong Woo-Jin spit on each other across the border, violently suppressing their own laughter. In a way, if the audience laughs too, they are guided into being subversive and into disrespecting the border.
Thanks to the aggressive marketing by the Marketing Company of the CFC, the box office success of The Founding of a Republic was a miracle. An interview with the manager of the company, Jiang Fude, reveals many exciting new methods that they have adopted to promote this film. It used to be that marketing was never taken seriously for domestic films; the marketing branch of the CFC was set up as late as 2007. At first, they tried to market it as a holiday film for the 60^th anniversary of China. However, as more and more stars joined the production, they quickly changed gear and started marketing it as a commercial film instead. Also, they did not make use of the commercial space on the state television China Central Television (CCTV) but made use of available platforms and created new channels for film advertising. For example, 4,000 sales agencies of Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd were mobilized to promote the trailer; yet, Tsinghua had never had any trade relation with the movie industry. The company’s strategic maneuvers greatly reduced the total marketing cost, which was budgeted at 10 million yuan ($1.5 million); the total revenue generated in the marketing sector tripled the cost. Many new chains were added on to the company’s existing operational chains, creating an expansive network of support.[9]
The Founding of a Republic made 420 million yuan ($63 million), ten times of its total budget. It is ranked as the second highest grossing domestic film made in China’s film history. This year, Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, which made 647.75 million yuan ($97 million), trumped it. Aftershock was co-produced by Huayi Brothers Co. – a private company unlike the state-run CFC – and IMAX. It will be interesting to see how Huayi and the CFC compete to have a share in the Chinese market in the future. As is evident in the recent five years, Chinese domestic films are climbing up the box office revenue chart one after another. With the success of each one of them, the industry slowly matures too. I think this is probably what has already happened in South Korea a decade earlier. As for national identity in national cinema, I think The Founding of a Republic is a rare achievement because it strikes a balance between individuals and history. It is entertaining but it is not entertainment. The film actually requires one to pay close attention to grasp the history. Watching this film feels like walking into a huge historical museum; you can feel its solemnity and a certain kind of openness. In our last class, Professor Jung-Bong Choi suggested that culture had shifted from following politics to following economics in the last five decades. Maybe Korean cinema has completed this transition while Chinese cinema is still in it. On another note, if the CFC integrates well with the market but at the same time remains a state enterprise and pits itself against the more commercialized Huayi, will the Chinese film industry be divided? If that happens, maybe the CFC will continue to promote national cinema by making quality pictures with non-escapist content, while Huayi will join the league with CJ Entertainment, making whatever to sell?

[1] Ying Zhu and Seio Nakajima, “The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry,” in Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, edited by Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010): 23-8.
[2] Ibid., 28-33.
[3] Ding Wenlei, “Building China’s Hollywood,” Beijing Review, Feb. 18, 2010,
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/business/txt/2010-02/11/content_246761.htm.
[4] Cheng Qi, “China’s Box Office is Expecting to Exceed 10 Billion Yuan in 2010,” China Economy, Nov. 18, 2010,
http://www.ce.cn/culture/whcyk/gundong/201011/18/t20101118_21979862.shtml.
[5] “CineAsia to Honor Lotte Cinema in December,” Yahoo! Movie News & Gossip, Nov. 14, 2010,
http://fe.movies.fy6.b.yahoo.com/news/usmovies.thehollywoodreporter.com/cineasia-honor-lotte-cinemas-december.
[6] Here are some combined results of the ten highest grossing Chinese films from my own research: 1) Aftershock (2010) yielded 647.75 million yuan ($97 million); 2) The Founding of a Republic (2009) yielded 420 million yuan ($63 million); 3) If You Are the One (2008) yielded 325 million yuan ($48.8 million); 4) Red Cliff I (2008) yielded 321 million yuan ($48.2 million); 5) Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) yielded 295.5 million yuan ($44.4 million); 6) Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) yielded 293 million yuan ($44 million); 7) Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) yielded 291 million yuan ($43.7 million); 8) A Simple Noodle Story (2009) yielded 261 million yuan ($39.2 million); 9) Red Cliff II (2009) yielded 260 million yuan ($39 million); 10) Hero (2002) yielded 250 million yuan ($37.6 million). Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) is currently playing in theaters, so its box office revenue is still growing.
[7] Frances Gateward, “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007): 194.
[8] China Film Art Research Center and China Film Archive, The Document of The Founding of a Republic (Beijing: China Film Press, 2010), 547.
[9] Ibid., 439-51.

Zhang Jingyin

2010-10-11T14:11:00.005-04:00

For some reason this site no longer allows me to color my texts. I still want very much to write my posts in a tripartite fashion, but I can't do it any more.

Mike had me made an announcement on Facebook that he would terminate his Facebook account. I didn't like it because I didn't like the inconsistency in his words and actions. Not long ago he cared a lot about accepting a friend request on Facebook and pestered me about my delay in helping him with it. Now, he told me his executive decision to have it closed. He said he was afraid of identity theft. Why now? Why not earlier?

We had our fourth class on New Chinese Documentary in Angela's house. I think we had a good discussion, and I know I spoke up a lot more times than any of my classmates. I was the presenter.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema

Professor Jung-Bong Choi

Week 7 (10/21/2010): Korean Blockbuster

A paradox has been twirling in my head since yesterday’s class on Korean blockbuster. Obviously not all American films have a market in South Korea because of the fact that they are culturally specific. The screen quota that South Korea eventually lifted in 2006 would be redundant even if it were kept in place. There is no doubt that Hollywood films target at the largest number of audience possible by churning out de-contextualized narratives that offend as few as they can. But American films do not equate Hollywood films. Left unrestricted by the quota, they may still not guarantee a good return unless it is arguable that South Koreans have a penchant for American films for some other reasons.

Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000) are both considered the mainstay of the first phase of Korean blockbuster, which exploits nationalistic sentiment above all. Both films tell stories of a divided Korea and hearken back to the Korean War. They set box-office records along with unprecedented popularity for two consecutive years respectively. For a few years after them, big-budgeted films using the same themes continued to reap box-office receipts in Korea. For examples, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005). The war fever only seems to have subsided as the second wave of Korean blockbuster caught on. With more developed technology, experienced management, mature venture capital, as well as an admired ambition to take on an even greater regional market, the second phase of Korean blockbuster is rid of cultural and political odor to resemble Hollywood even more.

In Sung Kyung Kim’s paper “’Renaissance of Korean National Cinema’ as a Terrain of Negotiation and Contention between the Global and the Local: Analyzing Two Korean Blockbusters, Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000),” Sung systematically explores the success of the two films according to the economic and industrial background at the time of their releases, audience’s expectations, and the mass-appeal characteristics of the films. While his methodology can be repeatedly applied to analyze all successful large-scale movies made in and for the domestic market, his findings are historically specific to South Korea. The 1997 financial crisis, which Sung suggests has made Korean nationalistic sentiment reach a new height, also affected countries and regions like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Though the film industries in these different places were not developed uniformly, anti-Hollywood campaigns did not sweep these other places and nationalistic sentiments were also kept at bay. Sung enumerates relevant government policies that helped vitalize Korean cinema, for examples, the Film Promotion Fund, the Cultural Promotion Fund, and tax incentives for private investors. However, the key factor that set off the ‘renaissance’ is arguably not monetary. The freedom to touch tabooed subjects in unconventional ways is the blessing of the Korean New Wave directors. This freedom was not just felt and enjoyed by Korean artists. Korean people in general felt the need to stop ostracizing their Northern neighbors. According an archived article by the Federation of American Scientists, “[i]n a public opinion survey conducted on the February 25 inauguration day, an overwhelming majority of 93.8 percent supported the Government's North Korea policies. Even in a survey done after the North Korean submarine incursion in June, 62.4 percent of the people supported the Sunshine Policy.”[1] Sung makes a point that “it is important to avoid dogmatic and suppressive nationalistic ideas and attitudes, and to dehumanize and demonize minority groups within the nation” (Sung 10). This may just be an accurate appraisal of South Koreans’ mentality in 1999 if the survey is correct and credible.

In “’Military Enlightenment’ for the Masses: Genre and Cultural Intermixing in South Korea’s Golden Age War Films,” David Scott Diffrient offers his view on 1960s Korean auteur Lee Manhee’s films about the Korean War. He gives extensive textual analysis of two of Lee’s films, The Men of YMS 504 (1963) and The Marines who Never Returned (1963), in order to prove that they give a fair cinematic representation of the war. One interesting observation that he makes is a similar question asked in both films. In The Marines who Never Returned, the question is “Why should I die?” In The Men of YMS 504, the question is “Why did my father die?” Apparently both questions are self-reflexive, but Diffrient posits that they exhibit characters’ consciousness that “personal survival could take precedence over heroism and national or political agendas” (Diffrient 45). This is a perfect example whereby the meaning of a text is created by the reader, the idea of which Roland Barthes argues in his famous essay “The Death of the Author.” Lee’s films were officially labeled as “military enlightenment” and “anti-Communist” by censors who worked for the Park Junghee regime because they read the films totally differently from Diffrient. These politically charged questions obviously did not manifest themselves as being politically subversive in their minds. More likely than not, they regarded these questions as rhetorical questions that were meant to elicit voluntary anti-Communist thoughts and sentiments. Under the Cold War atmosphere, majority of South Koreans must have complied with that line of thinking.

Kim Kyunghyun takes a similar approach as Sung in explaining the success of Shiri and JSA, but what is unique about his analysis, other than socio-economic reasons that he lies out, is the psychoanalytic component. These psychoanalytic arguments are very sophisticated at places, but they are worth reexamination. At the most superficial level, and to put it very bluntly, both Shiri and JSA ostracize females. In Shiri, Lee Myunghyun the female sniper is gunned down by her lover despite the fact that her military excellence surpasses that of many men. In JSA, Major Sophie Jean desperately tries to probe but at last remains at the peripheral of the male universe despite her excellent investigation skills. Kim associates the superior-yet-inferior status of these two female protagonists with the myth in psychoanalysis that film is a medium born of male fantasy. To digress here a little, most American screenwriting classes teach students that for narratives to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they have to be charged with actions, without which stories only move forward sluggishly. If we grant pro-action as having more resonance with the male rather than the female gender, then Lee Myunghyun and Major Sophie Jean will ultimately embody the male fantasy of female failure when women try to emulate men physically and rationally. Kim takes a step further. He writes,

The Korean War and the postwar authoritarianism had unleashed political terror that eventually led to the characterization of trauma through male masochism . . . genre films vied for remasculinization, transposing its historical pains and gentrifying it into pleasurable elements of gender relations ready for commercial consumption. (Kim 274)

The necessary assumption of Kim’s arguments is that Korean males are largely, if not solely, responsible for the vicissitudes of Korean people in the twentieth century. Despaired Korean males, who have indeed also suffered a great deal as soldiers and militants, find solace when they can finally confer the commonly agreed and admired male characteristics – such as the power to fight and the power to probe – to women. Through fantasies of “male masochism,” which I take to mean the loss of their lover or friends in Shiri and JSA respectively, “male subjectivities are born” (Kim 275). These subjectivities must be self-reflexive because they reveal the contradictions in males themselves. They are made aware of their own failures by the very male values that they uphold. After all, “male masochism” produces pleasures perhaps just like female masochism. Using psychoanalysis as the lens to read Shiri and JSA, Kim certainly enriches the textual analysis. Whether to agree with him is however another matter.

[1] Federation of American Scientists, “The Government of People’s Sunshine Policy toward North Korea and Plans for Implementation,” 1999 South Korea Special Weapons Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Missile Proliferation News, April 12, 1999. http://www.fas.org/news/skorea/1999/990412-sunshine.htm (accessed October 22, 2010).

Xia Jun

2010-09-14T00:55:00.005-04:00

There is a lot of energy in Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen's New Chinese Documentary class, but I think that it needs a better direction.

I have a slightly less distressing reaction towards today's film than what had been articulated in class. In my humble opinion, the documentary is structurally biased towards Mou Sen and his artist friends. Although Mou seemed to lead a financially and materially more stable life than his students, his failure to secure funding was never discussed. The editing was deliberately evasive. Just imagine: things would have turned out so differently if only he had found sponsors.... and although he failed, he tried.... who doesn't fail? who can predict the future?....

On the other hand, the students were all in full spotlight. With so many lengthy close-ups on them, the most immediate effect on spectators is identification. However, were they really the victims? When the rehearsals were taking place, hardly anyone showed interest in engaging with the play intellectually. They felt they were involved in the play, but it was only because they were involved intuitively and emotionally.

The students were victimized not by Mou but by a generational and cultural fault at large - Chinese people don't learn how to think for themselves. The students were victims because they weren't skeptical. In a culture where kids are brought up to be respectful and obedient to their superiors, in such social milieu, young people are easily manipulable.

My last point is on "'muscle' memory," brought up by Chi-hui. "Muscle" memory would be forgiven whereas brainwashing will not. As we know, one form of brainwashing is to repeatedly say something to someone, or have someone repeat something. In the film, right from the beginning, we see the students saying out loud their commitment to the play. That was brainwashing. That was a low technique that Mou used.

Wang Bing

2010-09-10T21:56:00.005-04:00

Sharing the office with us are Michael Hong, CEO of ImaginAsian TV, and David Chiu, VP of ImaginAsian TV. I confused their names a lot. David is the one who is going to marry soon, and Michael is the one who is married.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

Reflective Paper on My Internship at dGenerate Films Inc.

From April to September this year, I interned at the New York-based non-theatrical distributor of contemporary independent Chinese feature films and documentaries, dGenerate Films Inc. My job responsibilities there included writing blog articles on contemporary Chinese cinema and related topics, doing marketing research, as well as assisting various office works. Every now and then, I was also asked to translate emails, interviews, and articles from Chinese to English or from English to Chinese. I did these additional assignments delightfully and indefatigably because until I started doing them I had not realized my passion and talent for translation. When I applied for this internship in March, I considered it the perfect internship for me because of my strong interests and background in Chinese politics and culture. After five months of working there, I still think so.

dGenerate Films Inc. has a short but exciting history. Currently Vice President of Programming and Education, Kevin Lee, once told me about its birth story. According to him, the company was founded in 2008 by Karin Chien. Though already a well-established producer, Karin had actually had no connection with native Chinese filmmakers prior to 2007. She learned from Kevin and other business contacts that many award-winning Chinese films did not have any distribution channel in North America. Given that these films could absolutely not be exhibited or distributed legally in China for they touched sensitive issues as the Chinese government deemed, the need to institutionalize their distribution outside China was clamant. Karin flew to China in 2007; through friends and colleagues, she quickly got herself connected to a whole group of Chinese underground independent filmmakers in Beijing and Shanghai. When she came back to the United States, she assembled a group of professionals to start a distribution company. Initially Karin and her team only secured the distribution rights for seven to eight films, but the team’s hard work and dedication expanded the company’s catalog steadily over time. dGenerate now has twenty-six films in its catalog, including Dong, which is a documentary by Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke.

I bore the momentousness of the establishment of the company in mind as I worked there. The first blog article that I was asked to write was on director Xu Xin’s documentary Karamay(2010), which premiered at this year’s 34th Hong Kong International Film Festival. I did not have the chance to watch the documentary, but through research, I learned about it in every detail.Karamay recounts the “12/8/94” fire incident in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. On that day, a regional schoolchildren dance and singing performance was going on in the Karamay Friendship Theater when a fire broke up in its backstage. Instead of evacuating the children first, the event organizers ordered the children to remain quiet but let the government officials and party members who were present at the event to escape first. Due to time delay as well as failure to open alternative exits, 323 people were killed by the fire, 288 of which were schoolchildren. After the fire, the victims’ families demanded an official apology from the government, but the representatives that they sent to Beijing were escorted back to Xinjiang in custody. Director Xu tracked down some of these people and the victims’ families; he interviewed them about the incident and its aftermath; he finally edited the interviews into a six-hour epic that reexamines the otherwise unknown and forgotten past. I spent one afternoon working on this article, perusing news articles and editorial pieces about the incident as well as people’s blogs. I felt that my effort had its own significance. Even though compared to Xu, I still knew very little about the event, especially the agony experienced by the families, I was able to write about and publish what I had learned about the film on the web, as part of a larger body of journalistic work dedicated to similar politically conscious independent film productions by Chinese directors. The result was truly rewarding and made me feel larger than life.

Over the course of my internship, I have written many more articles that dealt with Chinese politics and culture and Chinese cinema, but I did not focus on the independent cinema frontier exclusively. In July, I was asked to write a piece on China’s most successful box-office director, Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock, which tells the tragic story of a family split apart during the Tangshan Earthquake in 1978, known as the deadliest earthquake in the twentieth century. Because dGenerate owns Du Haibin’s 1428, which is a documentary on the aftermath of the equally deadly Sichuan Earthquake in May 2008, I needed to find a way to tie these two films together – despite their many differences – with some conception of the overall landscape of Chinese cinema. Aftershock was set to be released in China on Wednesday, July 22; I worked till midnight on Monday, July 20 to complete my first draft. Kevin, who was in China at the time, gave me guidelines and instructions through Google Talk. The finished piece was a combined effort of both of us. We agreed that natural disasters such as the earthquakes had their intrinsic value of being used as raw materials for movies; however, different formative and realistic approaches to such raw materials can yield surprisingly divergent results. The approach that Du adopted elevated his documentary the status of a historical record of the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake; it presented the alternative story that the state press dismissed; therefore, it is thought-provoking. On the other hand, the approach that Feng undertook aimed at moving movie audiences; it needed to preach love against disasters and adversity; therefore, it is emotionally charged. In Kevin’s edit, he modified the academic tone of my draft, and he shifted the focus more on Du than on Feng. I appreciated these changes because I knew that the final version needed to serve an audience with a special interest in Chinese independent cinema and who was not necessarily an academic. In addition to that, I valued the collaboration process, and I could see its lasting benefit on me as a writer.

My continuing research and writing kept supplying me with new data and insight of Chinese cinema; the need to always tie the new information and ideas to (both the form and the content of) the films owned by dGenerate also forced me to think critically about the larger picture. I agree with the view that many Chinese film scholars and industry figures have already advocated, that is, the commercial cinema and the independent cinema have a symbiotic relationship. Over the past decade, the figures of the Chinese commercial film industry are truly stunning. Just to name a few: in 2002, 38 films were produced under the state’s official production code, but in 2009, the number jumped to 456; from 2004 to 2009, China’s box office grew from $219.6 million to $909 million, with an increase of over 30% per year; in 2010, the expected box office revenue is over $1.4 billion, with the first half of the year already contributing $714 million of that total; lastly, the number of screens in China is still under 5,000, roughly the same as that of South California, but multiplexes are mushrooming steadily all over China. Yet, these figures only tell half the story because the other half, that is, the figures of China’s underground productions, are challenging for anyone to tally. The best anyone can do is to follow up with these underground productions. If such films are not winning awards at international film festivals, they can be found at independent theaters and art houses (although I have to add, more true in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Yunnan than anywhere else). News reports on them are available to read too if one knows where to look.

Besides blog articles, the other big task that I was assigned to do was marketing research. I made use of Google Alert to stay updated about Chinese cinema. I used the links that were sent to me daily in my Google Alert emails to find out about the most active Chinese film enthusiasts and the most popular websites on Chinese cinema. By doing that, I updated and expanded the company’s press lists. I also researched on cinema studies professors in American universities, picking out those who specialized in Chinese cinema or related fields, such as East Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Language and Literature, etc. Earlier on in the summer, I was asked to compile a list of organizations that sponsored free summer outdoor movie screenings in a number of cities here. I heard from my supervisor that summer was a slow season for the company, so additional revenue needed to be brought in through such channels. I was aware of the “China’s Past and Present” film series at Asia Society this March just before I started working at dGenerate. All the films shown there were all from us. However, I am not positive that we supplied our films to another film series this summer, at least not that I know of.

I mentioned translation as my joy of life, which remained undiscovered until I worked at dGenerate. At first, I was only asked to add time codes to a transcription that someone else had done. Kevin posted the videos of the interview on Youtube, and I was responsible to cut up the transcription into single lines and enter the exact seconds in the format of “0:00:00.000,0:00:00.000” for them. The interview lasted 45 minutes, but it took me almost two working days to get the .sbv files right so that they could be read by Youtube and be displayed as subtitles. I could not have possibly enjoyed such a tedious job if Kevin did not give me the next interview to translate and transcribe. The interview was with director Jian Yi at Beijing Apple Store. It was the third interview of a conversation series that we cosponsored with Apple Inc. The translation was smooth. Although I had always been worried that I did not know how to say many technical terms in Chinese, when I heard these Chinese terms, their English equivalents came to mind surprisingly fast. I think that it has to do with the fact that I have had an English education since fifteen, and I tend to process studies-related information in English rather than in Chinese. After the Jian Yi interview, I got assignments to translate interviews every now and then. I translated and transcribed an interview with Zhao Liang; I transcribed a Question and Answer session with Zhao Liang at Asia Society; I translated interviews that were published at other websites with Yang Jin and Huang Weikai; I translated an article written by Jia Zhangke; I also translated bits and pieces of articles for my blog posts as well as many emails that Karin needed to send out to the directors in our contact list. The more I do it, the better at it I get.

Overall, this internship has been a valuable experience. It matched my interests, and I enjoyed working hard for them.

Alfred North Whitehead

2010-03-15T20:30:00.005-04:00

Mike got into Rutger's Ph.D. program in Political Science!

I got an internship at dGenerate Films!

We had dinner at the basement of Empire State Building without knowing where we were!

I stayed at Mike's place for the first time, met his Mom and Dad.

Shi Xi's thesis is going to Cannes!

Na is returning to Dubai!

Mike got a job teaching English in China!

Siegfried Kracauer

2010-03-04T10:37:00.001-05:00

A bunch of randomly selected NYU graduate students and I had dinner with President John Sexton at the University Penthouse tonight. The dinner lasted for a solid four hours from 6:30 pm to 10:30 pm. At the end of the four hours, I felt that I was getting a fairly good sense of who John was.

I remember some of the things that John said tonight very well.

Make love your priority. Find someone, love him/her truly, and let the rest of your life spin out from there.
Do what your passion tells you to do. Be true to yourself.
When I asked him how NYU Dental School became such a success after it had almost been closed down, he gave me the story of the dean of the school. A charismatic personality seemed to be what counted most, along with the ability to work with people and make them work for the same goal.
John is a deeply religious man, who believes in the soul, God, the love of his wife, his love for her, and last but not least, the humanities.
Facts don't tell the truth.
John respects women, taught at a girls' school, and hired many women to be the deans at various schools of NYU.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.2123 Hollywood Cinema to 1960

Professor Moya Luckett

March 1, 2010

How do Pre-code films treat race? How persuasive is Doherty’s account that racial difference relates to fears about a society fundamentally destabilized by the Depression?

Unlike post-Code films, pre-Code films treat race rather unabashedly. Between 1930 and 1934, Hollywood productions enjoyed more latitude in terms of film content and casting than Hollywood productions after 1934. Although non-white actors and actresses appeared on screen much less often than whites, it was nothing close to their near total disappearance in classical Hollywood period. African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans all showed up –their presence sometimes even surpassing that in real life. Racial stereotypes were often affirmed, but occasionally they were ridiculed and challenged too. In Doherty’s account of pre-Code Hollywood, racial difference often mixed fears with desires, and they were linked to other social tensions in the worst years of the Depression. However, I would like to think that some of the fears coincided with, rather than causing or adding on to, other social tensions.

The portrayal of African Americans in early 1930s Hollywood films was bold, especially if we take the existent Jim Crow laws into consideration. Blacks often appeared as servants, the fact of which defied the separate but equal status for blacks and whites that the Jim Crow laws mandated. For instance, in Baby Face, Lily (Barbara Stanwyck) and Chico (Theresa Harris) shared more than a mere master-servant relationship together. Besides exploitation, there was protection from the master to the slave as well as the other way around. En mass, blacks compromised of a cultural background in many films too. While this may be thought of as a realistic approach and is arguably innovative, some scholars argue that it creates formal inconsistencies that bring down the artistic value of a film. As for blacks, seeing their fellow countrymen on screen was first and foremost a celebration because their presence in society was at least acknowledged. However, the fact that the camera always stayed a distance from them reduced this kind of acknowledgement to its bare minimum. It was as if no one had any interest in getting to know the conditions of black livelihood. The camera’s position reinforced the cultural attitude towards blacks at that time.

Asian Americans appeared on screen in similar ways as African Americans, but there was a fundamental difference too, which centered on the combination of exoticism and eroticism. Asian Americans were immigrants rather than slaves when they first came to America. Working as gold miners, railroad workers, plantation workers, and laundry men, Asian Americans made their own livings, but none of these jobs were considered prestigious. Chinese immigrants typically congregated in their enclosed enclaves like Chinatowns, where outsiders had little knowledge of. Language difference further distanced many Asian immigrants from mainstream Americans. All these factors helped create the impression that Asians were mystical. In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns were often known for its drug dens and brothels, despite other kinds of businesses that thrived there. Chinese women, therefore, exuded erotic flavors in the popular imagination because of their immediate association with the evils of Chinatown. Movie businesses, in need of making profits, exploited this aspect of Chinese Americans. For example, Hollywood allowed Anna Mae Wong to rise as a star in the silent era. Her stardom, like other Asian Americans’ stardom, ended shortly with the advent of sound because there was the fear that talking Asian women’s eroticism would no longer be shrouded in silence (Doherty 268). White actors and actresses took over major roles in films that dealt directly with Asians.

Native Americans received a slightly more privileged treatment than the other two minority groups in movies. Often, they appeared in adventure films, which harbored nostalgia more than anything else as they reminded people of the recent past when the country was still growing into its shape. Because they were geographically more remote, and that they were most often associated with nature, Native Americans were admired for a range of skills that modern men did not possess, given too that they were figures of defeat. Erotic desires was present in films that featured Native Americans, but similar to African American and Asian American roles, authentic Native American roles were ceded to white and Latino actors and actresses.

The reason that minority groups hated being played by people other than their own was two-fold. On one hand, even though movie businesses were declining in the Depression and both major and minor studios were struggling to keep themselves in business, movie stars were still considered prestigious jobs with salaries way above the average. On the other, none of these minority groups would readily accept that among them there were no talented actors and actresses to take up roles that were essentially about themselves. To be denied the right to compete against whites for acting in movies was like to be denied the right to earn a living. Feelings of aversion against such blatant inequality could be aroused rather naturally.

The reason that mainstream Americans hated seeing whites playing other ethnic groups had more to do with the cultural prejudices than economic ones. When whites attacked such films, they circumvented their criticisms with morality. In their opinion, having a white actor play a black or an Asian man stripped the white actor of his superiority over people of color. And any film with an attempt to ridicule white’s superiority degenerated into burlesque. Ultimately, they were afraid of such suggestive table-turning on screen because they also knew that their superior status in reality was arbitrary and could be overturned. Having the minority groups succeed in moving up the social ladder, which had been set according to skin color, was too big a threat to existing social orders for which whites were enjoying.

One specific such threat was miscegenation. Most people in the 1930s believed that desiring someone of a skin color other than one’s own was morally wrong because it was against nature. If movies portrayed or suggested miscegenation in a positive light, this belief would be challenged or ridiculed. However, morality aside, the concrete impact on people’s lives when they did marry someone of a different ethnicity were less about morality than about a range of economic concerns, such as inheritance, social welfare, educational privileges, and business benefits. People’s fears for changes in these areas are apprehensible, but they are not entirely rational because American society was moving toward desegregation and equality no matter what—these changes would help accelerate and improve rather than hinder and destroy the existing social structure and institutions.

Interestingly though, off screen, racial difference was already starting to collapse. Movie theaters were segregated public places in the 1930s, especially in the south. However, because theater owners had to minimize cost and maximize profit from every one of their screenings, many defiantly ignored the segregation laws. Whites, blacks, and other ethnic groups all attended movies at the same setting. Doherty also points out in his book that racial mixing among the young was quite widespread. Before the age of sex, children played with one another on the streets of America regardless of their ethnic origins. Furthermore, with a bad unemployment rate, whites lost jobs that were thought to be exclusively theirs and competed against blacks and other ethnic groups for less prestigious jobs. Along with the jobs that whites lost was their superiority. Conversely, a market in its ruins allowed innovative individuals regardless of their ethnic backgrounds to rise up as long as they grasped the right opportunities, such as the famous duo Amos ‘n’ Andy.

In July 1934, the Production Code Administration was formed. The Code proved to stabilize racial difference on screen under Joseph I. Breen’s supervision. Around the same time, American economy also started to convalesce slowly. Despite the fact that these two things happened at around the same time, they were not the direct result of each other. Although racial segregation laws were not lifted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, across America between the 1930s and 1960s, educated blacks were speaking up for themselves and accomplished many things, which were destabilizing to the exiting social hierarchy in many ways. For example, Willa Brown, the first female African American pilot, founded the National Airman Association of America. She and her friends trained black pilots and lobbied the Congress for abandoning racial segregation in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Apparently, what films stopped showing and refused to show about the advancement of ethnic groups in society happened rapidly in reality. Fears based on intuition from what one could perceive in movies, therefore, should not be considered a major contributing factor to social instability. The fact that racial difference stabilized in all Hollywood productions after 1934 is never an accurate reflection of what was happening in reality, and to think that racial difference on screen could imply social instability off screen is very naïve, for the relationship between the two can be extremely complicated.

Doherty has done a good job to differentiate the treatment of racial difference in pre-Code Hollywood and Hollywood after the Code in his book. He makes us aware of the insurrectionist impulses in pre-Code productions as well as their contexts. It is, however, always problematic when a film historian tries to use the content of movies alone as cultural evidence for real social issues. Doherty does provide statistics to support his arguments, such as the percentage of African Americans in American population. He also discusses the movie-going experience for people in the pre-Code era. His arguments, as a whole, still offer very little in terms of the extent and the impact of the fears that were relatable to a society fundamentally destabilized by the Depression. In fact, rather than fears, if we agree with Stan Brakhage that to see is to behold and to behold is to fear not (Brakhage 228), pre-Code films actually offered reassurances. They rendered racial difference visible, so instead of inciting fears of racial difference, they eliminated such fears.

Works Cited

Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Brakhage, Stan. “From Metaphors of Vision.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 5^th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Thomas Tirino

2010-02-28T15:20:00.003-05:00

Bad roommate days.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.3049 The Culture of Archives, Museums, and Libraries
Professor Howard Besser
February 22, 2010

Observational Study at Guggenheim Museum and Brooklyn Central Library

“This place really inspired me!”
– A visitor at Guggenheim Museum

“I just want to say ‘thank you.’ This is such a great program!”
– A user at Brooklyn Central Library

Of all the bits and pieces of conversations that I have eavesdropped at Guggenheim Museum on Saturday, February 20, 2010 and at Brooklyn Central Library on Sunday, February 21, 2010, I picked the most positive ones for this assignment. I think that they accurately reflect what most people want to get out of their visiting experiences at these public institutions. Of course, they do so because these public facilities allow them to.

Most of my expectations of what I would encounter at Guggenheim were met. Like any Saturdays (in fact I was told by an intern there, not just Saturday, but any day), Guggenheim was packed with people from all over the world. I arrived there at about 2:20 PM. There were over 80 people lining outside the museum. On average, they waited 10 to 15 minutes to get in. I used a special entrance for members; the wait time for me was zero.

The main thing that was holding the line up was the limited number of ticket counters. Guggenheim hardly has a lobby for visitors, so if the ticket sellers have not finished servicing the visitors at hand, the next visitors have to wait outside the museum. I think that this is a brilliant architectural design because passers-by easily get the impression that this is a popular place of interest.

Brooklyn Central Library does not give the same kind of impression. In a sense, crowdedness makes a public library less popular. I arrived just before it opened at 1:00 PM on Sunday. Just like at Guggenheim, there were people waiting to get in. However, they were not in a line. Some were eager and waited right outside the entrance, but majority were loitering around, idly chatting with friends and families.

Both Guggenheim and Brooklyn Central Library had exhibitions on their first floors. Interestingly, Guggenheim did not feature inanimate objects but a kissing couple. It was the first time in the museum history that the entire first floor was cleared of all other art objects for this kind of human exhibition. Visitors politely stood at fifteen feet away to look. Their gaze usually lasted for no more than two minutes. However, towards the end of the day, I saw brave little kids venturing ever closer to the kissing couple and imitating their movements on the floor. They made people laugh, but the performers tried to be as professional as they could, so they remained nonchalant. At Brooklyn Central Library, the lobby exhibition was on Sesame Street. There were illustrations from various publishing houses. They attracted library users of all ages.

Virtually no one took out a camera and photographed in the lobby of Brooklyn Central Library despite the exhibition, but many visitors did so at Guggenheim. The guards at Guggenheim had to constantly go up to the visitors to remind them that photography and videotaping were not allowed. This rule was implemented rather haphazardly because visitors outnumbered museum guards so much that it was clearly impossible for the guards to keep a vigilant eye at everyone. I saw many who took pictures from above, since the design of the building allowed such abundant viewpoints. There were free audio tours for visitors in six different languages. If anyone is interested in retaining the information they have heard in the audio tour and seen by looking at the artwork, he or she is welcomed to go to the gift shop by a book on Guggenheim’s collections. Otherwise, the information is not to be circulated freely.

Similarly, Brooklyn Central Library stopped library users from photographing and videotaping when it held public performances and film screenings too. At 1:30 PM, it played two short films under the title “American Pioneers.” Both featured important African Americans in black history as part of an ongoing program on black cultural history. At 4:00 PM, pianist Thomas Tirino, the leading interpreter of Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona, performed Lecuona’s music at the library’s lower-level hall. Before and during the start of each of these events, the program director, Jay Kaplan, kindly reminded the audience to respect the rights of the films and the artist and not to record and reproduce these works in any way.

While Guggenheim attracted visitors from a diverse background, Brooklyn Central Library catered to the needs of the local residents. At Guggenheim, I constantly ran into people who spoke foreign languages: French, German, Mandarin (of different accents), Korean, Spanish, etc. English was heard in different accents too. Demographically, there were fewer Asians, but even fewer blacks. I only encountered one black for the entirety of my stay, which lasted four hours. At Brooklyn Central Library, there were people of different colors, but percentage of blacks compared there compared to Guggenheim was significantly higher. Nearly one third to a half of the library users were blacks. One librarian who gave out pamphlets near the entrance of the library avoided me when I passed her by. She only gave me one after I asked for it. While she was telling the black patrons where to go for the free screenings, I had to approach her in person a second time to ask for such information. I did not conclude that I was not welcomed to see the films—one was on Willa Brown, the first female African American pilot, the other was on one of the first desegregated schools in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957—but I sensed that the program was targeted to black audience to educate them about their cultural history and perhaps to inspire them too.

Earlier I mentioned that most of my expectations of Guggenheim were met; however, they were challenged too. Walking up the spiral ramp, I was accosted by a little boy about ten years old. He introduced himself to me first and then started asking me questions while we kept walking up the ramp. “What is progress?” He asked. I told him that progress was from zero to one and from one to zero, and it was a gain and loss. He passed me to a young man of about my age when we reached a certain height, and the young man kept the conversation going. “What did you recently lose and gain?” He asked me. This rely race kept me going to the highest point of the ramp, and by the time I reached there, I had talked to the two that I mentioned just now, a woman in her 30s, and an old man in his 60s. There was not enough time for the old man to convince me that women needed men but men did not need women, and romantic love was a very recent invention because I disagreed with him at too many points. He ended the conversation rather abruptly from the perspective of the conversation, but I was not too disappointed because we also reached the top of the ramp.

This interactive experience at Guggenheim changed my view of a museum being a place where visitors passively absorb information or passively being inspired by artwork. Talking to strangers in a museum setting somehow let us trust them with a piece of our private thoughts and feelings. Later I found out that artist Tino Sehgal came up with this “Work in Progress” project. I think his is a very innovative idea, and I believe for those who have been approached like me, the visiting experience at Guggenheim left a special mark on their psyche too.

At Brooklyn Central Library, attendees at the piano concert were free to talk to Thomas Tirino after the show. I lined up for his autograph. While in the line, I heard people speaking to him in Spanish, saying “thank you.” The library was supposed to be closed at 5:00 PM. But the concert lasted longer than an hour. Tirino played one more piece, which was not on the performance but he wanted to dedicate it to a “her” who had passed away. In the end, we were guided to a special exit to leave the library. Everyone around me had a smile on his or her face.

Both Guggenheim and Brooklyn Central Library had their upcoming programs online, and whoever who is interested in knowing more and knowing in advance can sign up their Email newsletters. On location, there are flyers and pamphlets to be picked up too. Brooklyn Central Library has diverse programs for many different social groups. There is one class in March that will address the effects of domestic violence on perinatal health, one on drug assistance, one on suicide prevention and postvention, computer classes in French and Spanish, and various family events. On the flyer that I got at Guggenheim, upcoming performances and shows are listed chronologically.

At the Café in Brooklyn Central Library, I sat next to a woman in her fifties. She was making Pom Poms, and we started chatting quite naturally. A black girl joined our conversation. At first both the girl and I were interested in how to make Pom Poms. After a while, the conversation started to drift in different directions. The black girl told us that she came to the library every day. She attended a knitting class in the library. She came to watch a movie every one and then. Basically, she seemed like that she knew almost everything that was going on in the library. A little later, she also mentioned that she had 27 siblings and she was the fourth youngest in the family. The woman inquired a little about me and told me earnestly that it would be hard for me to get a job once I graduated. She was well-meaning, so I listened and nodded. Sitting around us were all kinds of people, talking. I finally left to use the Internet. As I was gathering my stuff to go, I suddenly realized how great a public facility like a public library was. It catered to different people and their different needs, but all in one space, in harmony.

David Blaine

2010-01-20T07:35:00.004-05:00

My relationship with Mike is having a new low point. It started roughly before Chinese New Year-cum-Valentine's Day. Mike went to visit a friend in Boston and stayed in her apartment for almost a week. He told me that he had been exchanging emails with her since January and also wrote the longest email in his life to her. While in Boston, they went to see Avatar together, went to Cape Code together, and did a bunch of other things together. Wasn't that very nice of Mike? He proved to me that they were just normal friends by calling her in front of me and letting me hear the tone that he used. I didn't say anything about it after that.

Today, the first thing I read on my cell phone was Mike's text messages. He said he was too tired last night to practice Chinese with me, and because he didn't have his cell phone with him, he couldn't reply my messages until very late at night. But he did respond my Facebook message blandly. And he sent me an email with lots of exclamation marks with no relevance to me. I think he sent that to me by mistake, but he denied it.

I begged him for emotional support today because I was sad. He, like the Americans he described, couldn't differentiate sadness from depression. He suggested that I get self-help books, go to support groups. My negative emotions of him reached a new high at those moments. "Exercise also helps," he suggested, right after I explained him that I could fall apart so do not hurt me, and I needed emotional support from him. He showed no signs and no interests in either of those. I was extremely hurt, I cried.

A moment ago, I told him that to sound cool, I would just respond that if he could give, great, but if not, fine, but this was nothing that I wanted. The revelation of my weakness invited more and more of his violence. He told me that the world is a composition of shit. I never know I could hate Mike this much.

So, after I told Elizabeth that you would be here on Friday, she threw another tantrum. She was ranting a number of things that were hard for me to keep track of. Each time I was about to win an argument, she brought up something else. Her most useful trope was to say that I didn't speak standard English so she couldn't understand what I meant. I suppose she could understand "more fair" instead of "fairer"? Basically we went around in circles. In the end, she shouted at me, "Stop!" from her room, after she slammed the door close. And in a burst of anger, she said she would transfer the bills under my name without my approval.

The whole conversation is still somewhat fresh in my head, so I will try to reproduce parts of it as best as I can.

It started off by her asking me our plan for the weekend. I said we would go out on Sunday, but for the rest of the time, we were probably going to stay in because it would be cold outside. She responded by saying that it was not so cold like the subway wasn't going to be running or restaurants weren't going to open. And then she went on to prove her point that I obviously had a problem because I didn't go out. I asked her how she could be sure that I had not been going out. She said it was because every time she came back, I was here. I told her that this observation could not be used to prove that I never went out. In fact, I went to events that she wasn't aware of. At some point there, she modified her accusation to "you don't go out at night." She stated, young people of my age should go out at night or else they are not normal.

I am also not normal vaguely because my boyfriend has bipolar, according to her. She used both your illness and the December incident to prove that you couldn't be trusted. I didn't have much to say on the December incident because you were wrong. But I pointed out to her that you had never left the front door open since then and had always taken your shoes off when you came inside the apartment. She then said that bipolar people don't change. I disagreed with her by saying that some bipolar people did recover successfully, as can be referenced in various researches. She said that she knew bipolar people in her life and knew doctors and psychiatrists, so I should not tell her that she didn't know much about bipolar. Yet, she never confronted my point that some bipolar people could recover.

Then at some point she tried to argue that I did not show her respect. But I reminded her that she said things like "your parents don't teach you," "you have a problem," and "you are not normal," which couldn't be count as respecting me in any sense at all.

In the midst of this, she complained that I left the kitchen light on. Listen to how crazy this is. She caught me when I was just moving my laptop to my study. I was literally plugging the cord, and I didn't even have a chance to put the lights in my study on! Anyway I got up to go to the kitchen to turn the lights off. But she blocked my way! I asked her to stand aside so I could go, but she wanted me to back off first. My left hand accidentally touched hers when I turned, and she squeaked, "Don't touch me!" I let her be.

I asked her to stop wasting my time and tell me what she wanted. She said the bill. So for quite some time during the long conversation, she tried to negotiate how we could split the bill because I seemed to have used more electricity. I had my points. 1). Her hairdryer, which she uses in the morning, is of 1000-1500 watts. But my light bulb is only of 60 watts. How can we calculate the electricity bill fairly? 2). I paid 50% of the electricity bill for the past winter break. Should I have paid that at all, since I wasn't even here? For 1), she said she would stop using her hairdryer from now on. For 2), she said that let us not deal with the past.

"Let us not deal with the past." That was incredibly funny for her to say because all she had been arguing with me was things from the past. In fact, the "charges" against me from the past, as brought up by her right after then, was how I was responsible for giving her troubles by letting her drive my stuff from Boston to New York. I was calm, I maintained my poise, I made it very clear to her that at that point in time, she knew just as clearly as I did, that I didn't need anything from Boston, for I was determined to buy new furniture. It was her who said that it would be nice to not have to go and buy a new kitchen table etc. She also said that she didn't appreciate your help with moving the furniture because she could have asked her friends to come. Somehow I was "pathetic" to have used her for help and have stayed in Mark's apartment for the night before the moving, despite the fact that I could stay in my friend's place too; but she was not pathetic, though she used your help.

She called me a liar too, all because I said in the summer that these should be the best years of my life and she could see that I didn't live up to it. In order to live up to it, I needed to do what she deemed necessary for a young woman to do. So I asked her, "Didn't Mark and you lie about treating me back when he came to visit too?" It threw her into a rage. She said that I should have brought them a gift when I stayed at their place, and because I didn't, it showed how I didn't know the American culture, and how my parents "don't" (not just "didn't") teach me. But I bought them an expensive meal the night I stayed over. Oh, wasn't what I did a worthless thing to do?

And she said that when she used the "f" word, it was not an insult on me. Is "You could f***ing tell me" an insult? Is "F*** off" an insult?

We didn't settle on the bill eventually. Obviously I didn't agree to pay for 70% of the electricity bill, which she suggested. My terms were 55% of the units used each month and a fifty-fifty share of the basic service charge. She didn't not agree to that. So right now, we are unresolved.

Asclepius

2009-12-05T00:10:00.006-05:00

On the train to school today, I was hallucinating. Last night I did it to console myself. This time it was involuntary. He emerged next to me and I wanted him to go away.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1015 Film History/Historiography (Streible)

November 29, 2009

The Significance of Through Navajo Eyes in Film History: Why is the Glass Half Empty?

Through Navajo Eyes is a series of seven films made by seven Navajo film students under the supervision of Sol Worth, a communications professor, and John Adair, an anthropology professor in 1966. Worth and Adair undertook this project because they were interested in how people of a different culture and language from them would use the camera differently to tell their own stories. Initially, the innovativeness of their project caught my attention, so did the possible groundbreaking results that the project promised. However, after having studied the Navajo, the seven films, as well as the various components of the project, I came to view the connections between the films and Navajo culture rather superficial. Even though I was delighted to then examine the contributions of this project to visual anthropology, I was still not convinced of its influences on other projects as direct or significant. The project is like an impromptu speech marked by grandiose gestures coupled with loud slogans; it lacks both the thoroughness and coherence of a well-prepared speech that is able to generate sustained debates and discussions. It is difficult to think of what use these films will provide in the future besides perhaps their sentimental values. In this paper, I will make informed and systematic arguments about why this work has failed to deliver its full potential in the context of ethnographic film history and theories.

I would like to begin my description of the historical currents that gave birth to this project with a fact that most people do not know about today.

In the Second World War, the US Army Signal Corps used men from several Indian nations. Most significantly, the US Marine Corps deployed 420 Navajo men to convey the most important messages among Allied forces in the Pacific. Navajo is spoken by very few people outside the tribe and the Japanese were never able to crack the encoded Navajo communications. The recruits coined the new Navajo terms for unfamiliar military concepts. For example, “submarine” was translated into Navajo as “Iron Fish.”[1]

I will come back to the major features of the Navajo language in the later part of this paper. The point of the above passage is to show that even though when we think of wars, hard sciences like physics and chemistry that are directly related to weaponry tend to come to our minds first, they alone do not exhaust the military vocabulary. There was a strategic benefit of having Navajo soldiers as code talkers, and this shall make a toast both to the Navajo and soft sciences.

In fact, the Cold War period in America was when soft sciences came into the limelight and began to flourish. According to one source,

When the Soviets launched their Sputnik in 1958, the United States was shocked into awareness that it was lagging behind in the hard sciences. Government funds were poured into a crash program designed to improve the teaching of science at all levels. But within a few years social scientists began to be concerned that their fields were being neglected. One result was the establishment of Educational Services Inc. (ESI)—which later became the Educational Development Center—in Cambridge, drawing on Harvard and MIT intellectual resources and funded by the National Science Foundation. It was decided that the social sciences could best be represented in the primary grades by anthropology, using the exoticism of other cultures to convey basic concepts.[2]

As an added validation to this source, among the founding fathers of visual anthropology, quite some studied or taught at Harvard during this time, for examples, John Marshall, David Gardner, and Timothy Asch. Worth and Adair’s Navajo project was partially funded by the National Science Foundation too. Unfortunately, despite having the grant numbers of their project on hand, GS 1038 and GS1759,[3] I was unable to get hold of the documents associated with these grants. I was even told by the Award Search branch of the NSF that they “could not find awards (active or expired) associated with Sol Worth or John Adair,”[4] which came as almost too big a surprise for me. Consequently though, I was forced to think of other ways of assessing how this project was important to larger institutions in society.

As a side note, there are some other instances of unverifiable information in Worth and Adair’s book, Through Navajo Eyes. It is stated in the book that “copies of all the film materials made by the Navajo and all the notes and interview transcriptions are on deposit at the Library of Congress and can be viewed there.”[5] However, from the correspondence that I had with a librarian at the Library of Congress, the library did not have such materials.[6] The librarian also directed my attention to Willow Roberts Powers’ book Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word. In it, Powers writes,

Adair recorded some discussions between Navajo filmmakers as part of a project carried out in the 1970s. He labeled the tapes with the names of the discussants, but the original quality was very poor, and the speakers were clearly at variable distances from the tape recorder. It is difficult to distinguish one speak from another, and, of course, the listener does not know which voice belongs to which name. Adair himself could have identified them at the time, but the poor quality of the tapes makes it possible that, twenty-five years later, even he might not have been able to identify all the voices. Transcription now would be neither easy nor worth attempting.[7]

The year in the paragraph about the project should be a mistake on Powers’ part.

With the government’s support and the funds attached, it was only natural that researchers from various fields came up and busied themselves with innovative projects. However, we ought not to rely on these factors alone to understand the coming about of Worth and Adair’s project. Visual anthropology as a new branch of anthropology had been maturing itself up to this point due to factors both within and beyond the discipline. Firstly, in terms of technology, mid-1960s saw the arrival of light-weight synchronous-sound cameras in the market. This new technology reduced the amount of equipment that anyone needed to carry in order to make visual and audio records of events on film. Anthropologists, or more specifically ethnographers, who worked in primitive societies where travelling light meant a great deal to them, suddenly had the opportunity to shoot film with sound without the help of a sound crew. 1963, the year that David Gardner released his ethnographic film, Dead Birds, was regarded widely in the field as a watershed in the history of ethnographic film: “Before Dead Birds, there was a mere handful of films that could be called ethnography; in the decades since Dead Birds, thousands have been made.”[8] The key factor contributing to the transition was the sync-sound camera.

Secondly, within the discipline, there had been at least three shifts in terms of the development of its practices before 1966. It was only with the accompanying theoretical development, previously absent or marginalized, that university-based visual anthropology projects appeared on the horizon. I shall note that different authors have written the history of visual anthropology differently. My goal is to find the common threads that run through all of them. The first stage in the development of visual anthropology is the era of explorers and scientists who pointed their cameras at other people to reveal other ways of life. Robert Flaherty was an explorer living with the Inuit in the Arctic who staged Nanook of the North and sold the film to his own people to let them experience the exotic; Felix-Louis Regnault was a physician who subsequently became interested in anthropology and filmed human movements for his own studies.[9] Pioneer anthropologists Alfred Cort Haddon (a zoologist), Franz Boas, and Baldwin Spencer shot footage of Torres Strait, the Kwakiutl, and the Australian Aborigines respectively. All these films are exhibitionist in nature and frequently self-explanatory because they show actions mainly. A viewer does not necessarily need any accompanying text to understand what is going on in the pictures; it did not matter whether the actions were simple like dancing or complex like making an igloo.

The second stage in the development of visual anthropology shows an increased emphasis on the potential of the film camera to capture atmosphere; this roughly covers the period between 1930s and 1950s. As can be noted in ethnographic films during this period, visuals are not simply used to illustrate pictorially what is present in the text; they are used to convey what words fall short of describing. To put it another way, ethnographic films were becoming more observational than illustrative. Margaret Mead is an important figure during this period because of her proactive advocacy for the use of film and video in ethnographic research. She argued that sending an ethnographer to a remote place on earth where a culture or a language was either rapidly dying or rapidly changing with only a pen and a notebook was an obsolete practice. As an experienced fieldworker well-trained in ethnography, she had gone through the problems with relying on words only to bring to life the day-to-day experience of another people and culture. She called for the incorporation of film into ethnographic research and practice.[10] In fact, it is also she who invented the term “visual anthropology.” Unfortunately, at the time, her ideas were too progressive; many of her contemporaries hesitated to adopt such a practice in their research immediately.[11]

The third stage in the development of visual anthropology shows the shift of ethnographic films from being observational to reflexive; it roughly corresponds to the 1960s and beyond. Instead of trying to pretend that the camera was invisible in the space that it intruded, ethnographic filmmakers made its presence openly felt. People in the film knew that they were being filmed, and a great part of the final films consisted of interviews. Jean Rouch is remarkable for using this method to elicit and sometimes provoke responses from his filmed subjects. He even went ahead to build his own film school based on this concept, which he named cinéma vérité. Rouch’s influences were felt all over the world. Today, we consider that he has inspired a generation of ethnographic filmmakers to use the camera creatively by going beyond the surface and delving deeper into the cultures that they are filming.

From a historical perspective of visual anthropology, Worth and Adair’s project does not seem to fit into the illustrative, the observational, or the reflexive model very well, but some anthropologists find a smart way out by coming up with two even broader categories of ethnographic film, namely, filming others and filming selves. I will discuss why Worth and Adair’s project fails to contribute significantly to this conceptual framework either when I discuss the project in detail later. Here, however, by outlining the history of visual anthropology, I only want to point out why the project is innovative but albeit a little foreign to the field in the traditional sense. The researchers seemed to want to find out everything by putting the camera into the hands of their subjects, but they were clearly lacking a direction.

Here are a few more major factors that could help contextualize the Navajo project. First, “[t]he mid-1960s and into the 1970s was a period of intense research integrating research in anthropology, cognitive studies, and generative linguistics.”[12] Many cross-disciplinary topics became questions of interest and problems of contention, which encouraged any number of collaborations between researchers of different academic backgrounds and trainings. In the case of the Navajo project, Worth was a communications professor who had been involved in teaching film to a diverse group of people whereas Adair was an anthropology professor who had done fieldwork in the Navajo community twenty-eight years ago. Secondly, the African American civil rights movement, which lasted from 1955 to 1968, was still underway in America when the project took place. The fact that Worth had previously taught African American youth to make film to tell their stories may be taken into account for the fact that he wanted to work with another type of less privileged minority group. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans were indeed pressing hard for their civil rights. In fact, 1968 was the year that the US government passed the Indian Civil Rights Act. Thirdly, Native Americans had been in the popular imagination of American general public since their appearance in a number of westerns as early as 1939 in John Ford’s Stagecoach. Yet, these immensely popular fiction films often portray Native Americans as hostile, lawless, and uncivilized salvages. Since anthropologists are always concerned with painting accurate pictures of ethnic groups, Worth and Adair’s project might have a hidden purpose of countering some of these stereotypes of Native Americans. Last but not least, in 1959, George Mills, then a Ph.D. candidate, undertook a project in which he had a random sample of Navajo adults draw pretty, ugly, and free-style pictures of anything they wanted. Mills studied these paintings with great care. His goal was to find out if there were any substantial connections that he could draw between Navajo art and culture.[13] Just like Worth and Adair, Mills also published his findings in a book. I doubt if Adair was unaware of Mills’ book because he was an expert on the Navajo. The two projects seem similar in that both have the goal of gaining an understanding of the Navajo through their artwork and the making of their artwork. However, to my disappointment, Mills demonstrates much more in-depth understanding of the Navajo culture and makes much more meaningful connections in his book than Worth and Adair in theirs.

I have missed factors like the development of tourism and transportation to account for the increasing awareness of Navajo culture in the larger world. However, these will show up in my paper shortly because they are also more directly related to the project. My biggest criticism of the project is its lack of a proper hypothesis. Worth and Adair did not have anything specific to prove or disapprove in mind when they started it. Instead, they seemed simultaneously interested in many aspects of film, communication, and anthropology. Their most pressing question is too broad to answer: “If people can communicate through film—if people of varying cultures can use it widely as both makers and viewers—it becomes necessary, in order to understand this form of human interaction, to find or formulate some of the patterns, codes, rules, conventions or even laws by which such communication takes place.”[14] They mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the principle of linguistic relativity, which states that “each language provides particular grooves of linguistic expression that predispose speakers of that language to see the world in a certain way,”[15] but they did not provide a thorough understanding of the Navajo language in the book. As a result, we are never sure if their findings add proof to or contradict the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. They included a short chapter on the Navajo history and culture in the book, but they formulated no hypotheses from there either. They assumed that the “patterns, codes, rules, conventions or even laws” that they spoke of would grow out of the project and catch their attention immediately, but how could they recognize these features without some ideas about what they were or could be at least?

Next, the analyses of the findings do not contextualize the Navajo universe well enough and therefore often pass as a group of sporadic comments. The amateurish nature of the films adds further question marks to the analyses. For example, it is hard to tell whether the Navajo students really felt prohibitive to show close-ups of people’s faces because of their culture or because they did not know how to use the film language effectively. There are a total of three close-ups shots in the seven films. The numbers are not indicative of anything. For another example, in The Old Antelope Lake, Mike Anderson shot footage of the Old Antelope Lake by going clockwise around the lake and using 360 degree pans. When asked by Worth if the edited footage seemed odd to him, Anderson responded negatively because Navajos always surveyed the land clockwise. It would be interesting if Worth and Adair had gathered others’ reactions about Anderson’s film. However, the fact that this stylistic choice was not made in the other films leaves us question too if this is indeed an instance of indigenous aesthetics. As a matter of fact, Worth and Adair never went further to discuss indigenous aesthetics.

After the films were completed, Worth and Adair noted that some of their students borrowed film of sheep roaming and gazing from one student, Susie Benally, who had plenty of it. The analysis they made was that the students were not comfortable shooting anything that did not belong to them because they did not want to get into undesired disputes with other members of their community about property. At the time, not many households in their community, Pine Springs, Arizona, had sheep; showing sheep near whichever family lived was only a symbolic prestige. I am not sure how valuable this is to any anthropologist who studies the Navajo, but it is clear that whoever wishes to use it needs to dig it from Worth and Adair’s field notes.

Another important finding was the amount of walking in the finished films. In A Navajo Weaver, Susie Benally shows her mother taking several trips to gather needed raw materials for weaving. In The Navajo Silversmith, John Nelson shows a Navajo silversmith out in the field searching for a silver mine. In Intrepid Shadows, Al Clah uses extensive amount of footage of a man walking on land. In The Spirit of the Navajos, Mary-Jane and Maxine Tsosie follows their grandfather Sam Yazzie as he gathers ingredients for a curing ceremony. While the content of their films was expected by Worth and Adair for they knew that Navajos were proud of their rugs, their silver crafts, and their traditions, the extensive walking scenes surprised them because they could not see any meaning in what they deemed as simply connection shots. They expected the Navajo film students to cut these scenes out, yet the students insisted on having them. Sometimes the choices were even made against shots which apparently had more important actions taking place. Worth and Adair tried to explain their students’ choices by making connections of the act of walking to Navajo myth and storytelling. They discovered that getting from one place to another occupied great lengths in Navajo folklore and concluded that walking was a unique feature in Navajo’s way of seeing and understanding the world. In fact, this is reflected in Navajo language too. Mills quotes Clyde Kluckhohn, an expert on the Navajo language:

Navaho is overwhelmingly a verbal language. Most nouncs may be thematic, and adjectives are slightly altered verbs. The most fundamental categories distinguish types of activity. Similarly, Navaho thinking is relentlessly concerned with doing, with happenings. This fits with the view of the universe as a process, with the emphasis on the interconnections between events, with the stress on situation as opposed to qualitative absolutes, with the animation attributed even to natural phenomena.[16]

The word “interconnections” stands out in the above quote. Clearly all the students did not just happen to show more excessive footage of walking in their films, but must have at some level tried to reenact the importance of journeying in the well-known stories in their culture. However, as much as I agree with Worth and Adair that scenes of walking are more than a mere amateur mistake in the Navajo films, I also want to know why in their analysis, except the translations of three folk tales, no other quotes from famous anthropologists or linguists on the Navajo, such as Harry Hoijer, are used, at least not in this section. The importance of this finding contrasts unfavorably with their blatant negligence of others’ works on similar subjects. Therefore, like an orphan, the project is left pathetically to fend for its own.

Worse yet, sometimes Worth and Adair are just not well-informed by Navajo culture. In their analysis of Al Clah’s film, it shows that they forget to consult proper references: “Perhaps following his actor in his search for the mine or for herbs, for roots, for stone or for the source of the wheel that turned gave him a sense of assurance in an unfamiliar situation—certain this is characteristic of Navajo psychology: if you are uncertain of yourself in a particular situation, don’t remain still—travel.”[17] This is clearly a contradiction to what Mills has in his book on Navajo art and culture. Mills writes, “When in a new and dangerous situation, the Navaho tends to do nothing…The American tradition says, ‘When danger threatens, do something. The Navaho tradition says, ‘Sit tight and perhaps in that way you may escape evil.’”[18] In the next bullet point, Mills adds, “Escape is an alternative to doing nothing.”[19] To run away is only an option when the danger becomes too great for anyone to sit and wait.

When Worth and Adair first went into the project, they could have formulated a few workable hypotheses, not necessarily in relation to ethnography or communications. For example, Native Americans are famous for their non-linear but circular ways of viewing and constructing history. Worth and Adair could have narrowed down the scope of their project by only investigating if the Navajos’ way of filmmaking complied with their story-telling. However, they did not. Their ambition spanned both the fields of communication studies and ethnography. Although I appreciate their collaborative endeavor, I remain skeptical about the outcome. I have explained why their project lacks anthropological contextualization, now I will turn to why even from a communications perspective, their project, though making some exciting discoveries about different people’s learning abilities in the context of filmmaking, still is problematic in its entirety.

For example, Worth and Adair learned that the Navajos were fast at learning skills like operating the camera, using the light meter, and cutting film. They had a great sense of distance and light, and these strengths combined helped them master the technical aspect of filmmaking more quickly than most mainstream Americans. Worth said that he was impressed by the progress of his Navajo film students. He probably has an authoritative voice in making such a comment because he had worked with middle-class white youth, graduate students, as well as African-American youth before.

As a contrast to the graduate students that Worth had taught who often had trouble coming up with stories to be made in a film, and a contrast to the African-American youth who were spontaneous and had an easy time using up whatever film they had, Worth also noted that the Navajo students went about making their films in a very moderate and admirable manner. All of them had in mind exactly what their stories were going to look like before they started shooting. Like good weavers who start thinking about the design of a rug or a scarf when they are out gathering raw materials, the Navajo film students too, had the stories to be made in their minds early in the preparation stage.

Because control factors apply to this project, one factor being not allowing any outside influence on the students’ choices of what to film and how to film, one member of the group, Al Clah, an artist, was clearly not given enough help to fully develop ideas for his film. Clah expressed his wish to make a film of what it felt like to be an outsider in a Navajo community other than his own (he was the only one who was not from Pine Springs but a community fifty miles away). He struggled hard with bringing his emotions on to images. Yet, Worth and Adair refrained from giving Clah extra attention. Another student, John Nelson, stumbled upon the meaning of montage in one of the very first lessons by asking if people would get confused if he showed the picture of a crow next to that of some other birds. However, Worth and Adair did not give Nelson any straight answers to his question or explain to him how montage worked. In their book, Worth and Adair repeatedly mention that film is a language; but in the project, they refused to furnish their students with the full vocabulary of this language, even when the needs presented themselves. This suggests how desperately they wanted to prove that a different people could use the camera differently from them, but not how a different people could use the camera the same but express themselves differently.

In the next portion of my paper, I will show how others think about this project and what they perceive to be its influences. Positive reviews include Karl G. Heider’s. Heider argues,

If Worth and Adair are right, then Navajo films would be somehow “in Navajo” and would therefore be the raw material for ethnography, not ethnography itself. The most valuable aspect of the project was to raise the question of the culturally specific nature of films. The implications of this are of great importance to ethnographic films. There is a great need for more research in this direction.[20]

Kimberly A. Sultze, a Ph.D. student at New York University, actually wrote her dissertation on the cultural specificity versus universalism of film in 2001. She uses the Navajo films as an example in her discussion. Her conclusion about the project is that Worth and Adair had a strong will of finding differences between Navajos and them, yet they could not justify if their own way of making films was the western way, neither could they know “what a failure to speak film could look like.”[21] She also notes some inconsistencies in their book. For example, some of the interviews were not transcribed from the actual tape-recordings but their field notes. Even though she strives for a balanced view of the project in the end by crediting Worth and Adair for other parts of their research, I do not think she has made any attempt to wipe out the problems that she has stated about the project.

Brief theoretical praises for the project could be found all over the place, but very often, they are made without intending to be questioned further. Mead supported Worth and Adair’s project from the beginning. In her article “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” Mead argues against a form of protectionism in visual anthropology, which she means for “the isolated group or emerging new nation” to “[forbid] filmmaking for fear of disproved emphases.”[22] She uses Worth and Adair’s project as an example for this type of constructive solution. Basically, Worth and Adair’s project demonstrates “the articulate, imaginative inclusion in the whole process of the people who are being filmed—inclusion in the planning and programming, in the filming itself, and in the editing of the film.”[23]

To Emile de Brigard, Worth and Adair’s project is a continuation of Jean Rouch’s legacy of eliciting responses from filmed subjects. According to her, they went further by “elicit[ing] a ‘visual flow’ that could be analyzed semiotically.”[24] Earlier in the paper I argued that Worth and Adair’s project was not exactly in the vein of ethnographic film. My opinion still holds because the most valuable responses that Worth and Adair have elicited are not captured on film. For one thing, the content of the films is not interactive. The Navajo film students basically used the camera like the founding fathers of visual anthropology; they shot images that are largely illustrative. They meant for the films to teach their younger generation how to do things correctly. For another, Worth and Adair did not assist their students fully to find the right expressions for their stories-to-be-told. Al Clah is again an example.

Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch exalt Worth and Adair’s project for “[making] an important contribution toward developing ways to get film that illustrates the perspective of subjects.”[25] A slight variation of this kind of praise is that the project is “a ‘revolutionary development of emic understanding.’”[26] “Emic” is just another way of saying “that which pertains to the insider” for linguists. I feel responsible in telling those who think so that the Navajo film students did not always honestly present their life on film. For example, Navajos have never excavated silver mines, yet John Nelson shows in his film The Navajo Silversmith the silversmith walking to a silver mine to get silver. When asked, Nelson responded that this was how to tell a story.

Even though I have been criticizing Worth and Adair’s project so far, it would be hard for me to deny its inspirational value in other academic fields. Both Fadwa El Guindi and Richard Chalfen, who was a graduate assistant to Adair when the Navajo project was taking place, see Beryl Bellman and Bennette Jules-Rosette’s sociological project in 1977 as being influenced by Worth and Adair’s project. In the 1977 project, video cameras were handed out to two informant groups, one in West Africa and the other in Central Africa. Both groups were asked to film similar events. The goal was to study how the two groups differ in constructing visuals and in turn also study their different cognitive systems.[27]

Another related area, which I hesitate to call it an area of influence, of Worth and Adair’s project is indigenous media. None of the Navajo film students of Worth and Adair went on to become filmmakers, so the direct link to indigenous media is absent. In Steven Leuthold’s book Indigenous Aesthetics, he discusses the works of two indigenous videographers, George Burdeau and Victor Masayesva Jr. I can see the great values of their films and videos to the Native American communities that they belong, especially because they were broadcast on television. I can also understand why some use the term “bio-documentary” coined by Worth for the Navajo students’ films to describe Masayesva’s video art. However, I cannot convince myself that the Navajo project has had direct impact on a number of indigenous media both in Native American nations and elsewhere in the world. These include The Video in the Villages Project, directly by Vincent Carelli, the Mekaron Opoi Djoi Project, and even the establishment of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in Canada.[28] Additionally, neither Burdeau nor Masayesva have ever been aware of Worth and Adair’s project.

In writing about the future of visual anthropology, Sarah Pink conceives of three ways that visual anthropology can be used. First is for visual anthropology to continue revealing human commonalities and differences beyond the power of words. She also emphasizes that ethnographic films shall always be made with sufficient “cultural contextuali[z]ation and theoretical framing.”[29] Second is for visual anthropology to be “a conduit of the public responsibility of anthropologists.”[30] Although she does not, I think she can expand her category to include indigenous media. Often these indigenous videographers or filmmakers or television programmers are not anthropologists, but anthropologists are invited to participate in these programs by being interviewed or by playing other related roles. The third way that visual anthropology can be used is to let it engage with various “interdisciplinary social sciences.”[31] In my paper, I have listed Bellman and Jules-Rosette’s project in 1977 as an example. There shall be many more fascinating research topics in the production, content, dissemination, and interpretation of audio-visual materials too.

I appreciate Worth and Adair’s initial ideas, I think some of which really resonate with Pink’s third category of future visual anthropology, but because the project lacks a clear focus and its findings are often shallow and eclectic, I am inclined to think of it as “‘rather short-lived and, retrospectively, is seen as a somewhat sterile and patronizing experiment’” like Faye Ginsburg does.[32] There was so much uncertainty as to where the films belonged that when the films were released, “they gained popularity mostly in experimental film circles or as avant-garde works.”[33] In the Pine Springs Navajo community, the films “continue to be shown to and viewed by families, community groups, and schools…Nelson reported that viewers were impressed, some making comparisons of environmental details, such as trees, bushes, and dry grounds.”[34] No doubt that as time goes by, the films has gained sentimental values in a closely-knit community, and people begin to recognize them as stamps of time and as local knowledge. On the other hand though, I am not sure how those are going to be incorporated into any theory in visual anthropology. Perhaps this still proves my point that the project is innovative but its course in history rather erratic.

Worth and Adair sought the approval of a famous medicine man, Sam Yazzie, in the Pine Springs community before they began their project. After hearing the two professors talking about the project, Yazzie asked three questions intermittently, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” If not, “Will making movies do the sheep good?” And finally, “Then why make movies?” Yazzie did not own any sheep at that time, but Worth and Adair reported that they had been haunted by Yazzie’s questions all along.[35] Ironically, Navajo living in their reservations today have electricity to power their televisions and DVD players but have to drive their trucks to places miles away to get fresh water supply.[36] I witnessed this myself when I visited Grand Canyon last year. All these facts seem to criticize Worth and Adair’s project rather subtly. I remain disappointed at their project because it has not improved the welfare of the Navajos in the region; neither has it contributed significantly to the history and theories of visual anthropology. I come to understand the sheep in Yazzie’s questions as a placeholder. I think his questions would remain valid without mentioning the sheep. If Worth and Adair had had a clearer hypothesis, if they had some ideas about what their movies would be good for, their project could have turned out much better. Lastly, I like how Navajo weavers always know the design in their heads before they start to weave. This is probably the biggest takeaway from Worth and Adair’s project.

Notes:

[1]Larry J. Zimmerman, Native North America: Belief and Ritual, Spirits of Earth and Sky (London: Duncan Baird, 1996), 54.

[2] Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film. Rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 45.

[3] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), xxv.

[4] Hui Wang, Email, Oct. 15, 2009.

[5] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 8-9.

[6] Rosemary Hanes, Email, Oct. 21, 2009.

[7] Willow Roberts Powers, Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word (Oxford: AltaMira, 2005), 24.

[8] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 40.

[9] Emilie de Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 15-16.

[10] Margaret Mead, “Introduction: Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 3-10.

[11] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 28-31.

[12] Fadwa El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy: Essential Method and Theory (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004), 140.

[13] George Mills, Navajo Art and Culture (The Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1959).

[14] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 21.

[15] William A. Haviland and others, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 11th ed. (Australia: Wadsworth, 2005), 107.

[16] Mills, Navajo Art and Culture, 124.

[17] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 207.

[18] Mills, Navajo Art and Culture, 121.

[19] Ibid., 121.

[20] Heider, Ethnographic Film, 48.

[21] Kimberly A Sultze, “Looking for the Universal—Looking for the Cultural: A Critical Analysis of the Debate between the Universalist and the Relativist Perspectives on Moving Images” (PhD diss., New York University, 2001), 127.

[22] Margaret Mead, “Introduction: Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words,” 7.

[23] Ibid., 8.

[24] Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” 31.

[25] Timothy Asch and Patsy Asch, “Film in Ethnographic Research,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 7th ed. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 343.

[26] Steven Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 73.

[27] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 147.

[28] Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics, 73.

[29] Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (London: Routledge, 2006), 133.

[30] Ibid., 137.

[31] Ibid., 140.

[32] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 144.

[33] Ibid., 142.

[34] Ibid., 143.

[35] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 5.

[36] El Guindi, Visual Anthropolgy, 145-6.

Martin Heidegger

2009-12-04T22:06:00.003-05:00

I start to understand why so many don't make it, myself included.

I feel incredibly stressed at the start of this new semester. Last semester I got two A-'s and an A.

"To repeat something is to make it possibly anew." -Agamben

I am not totally satisfied with Professor Choi's answer to why a Korean-Japanese director chooses to conform the popular imagination of Korean communities in Japan, in Blood and Bones. Why repeat the stereotypes? Why repeat the prejudices? Is there something more than eliciting excitement by presenting a "whole" people, previously kept invisible in this kind of medium? I think there is.

The quote above is where I derived a different reasoning from. Basically I think that by repeating something made up by others about ourselves, we are possibly altering the nature of that thing. A different sensibility would be added to the things said each time we repeat the things. Over time, this change in the sensibility of things said can effect a change in the original meanings attached too. An analogy I can think of is our memories. We repeatedly go back to a memory, but what we get out of that memory isn't always the same, we go back to that memory in different settings, and we use that memory in different contexts. A philosopher like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Heidegger shall explain this way better than I can.

Margaret Mead

2009-12-02T21:06:00.007-05:00

I took Tyger to the central island, left him there with a fellow bath house owner. He promised to feed Tyger and teach him everything he would need to make a living. I went straight ahead to the mountains to receive my decree. A guard, they told me. Here's where I shall spend days and nights patrolling and I shall keep in mind that if I stay around long enough and keep myself sane, the chance of finding the blue source will increase enormously. I see the whole thing as a pilgrimage, except I am circling the island the whole day instead of venturing out into the open sea. I make my landings every other week and stop by the bath house to see Tyger, who by now has accumulated his own customers, a lot of them, male, female.

I will get my draft of the film history paper finished today, so tomorrow I can focus on the little postcard assignment and an additional post to Dan's Film Historiography blog. On Friday, I should be able to start my paper on La Jetee. I hope to get that done by Monday. And starting from next Tuesday, I will be doing my paper for the Japanese Cinema class. I still don't have a good topic for that class yet, but I have taken a course on Modern Japan, and I have done most of the readings for that class, so finding a topic that I can write 15 pages should not be too hard. And on December 15, oh yeah, I will fly home!!!!!

Professor Streible spoke of a filmmaker W.S. Van Dyke quite a few times yesterday. It happens that I came across this guy too in my research for my final paper, which is on ethnographic film history and theory. I would like to share something I know of him here.

In the field of ethnographic film, W.S. Van Dyke (1889-1943) was known for having collaborated with Robert Flaherty but later broken off with Flaherty because they had different ideologies about making films of ethnic groups. Here's Karl G. Heider's comparison of Van Dyke and Flaherty in his book Ethnographic Film:

But while Flaherty pictures the brave-and-noble-savage in the Arctic, Samoa, and Ireland, the Polynesian films of Van Dyke and Murnau show the noble-savage-corrupted-by-civilization...It is interesting that audiences of today find Flaherty's documentary films more palatable than the Polynesian feature films. But actually the Van Dyke and Murnau films should be more appealing to anthropologists because they at least allude to real sorts of problems in real sorts of situations. Modern anthropology is much more concerned with the cultural conflicts ofTabu than with the reconstructed initiation ceremony of Moana. (Heider 26)

I underlined the last sentence of the quoted passage, for it informed my own understanding of this history of visual anthropology. To me, there are roughly three stages of development: the illustrative/exhibitive, the observational, and the reflexive. Today's ethnographic films have learned to cover all three areas. The educational documentaries that we watched class yesterday, especially the poverty films, are good examples of how we deal with visual materials in the future. I would like to think so because I agree more or less with Sarah Pink's arguments in her bookThe Future of Visual Anthropology. Basically, she argues that film can continue to be used for research, film can continue to the ever disappearing present, and film can can play an active role in public affairs.

Orsen Welles

2009-11-24T01:48:00.010-05:00

I have been obstinately living in a strange state of mind by not paying attention to the present, not seizing the moment, I leave things open and leave things untouched with the strange hope that later on I will be able to color them in whatever ways I want.

11/11 11/25

My first kasha knish. I had it at a vintage knish place on 2nd Avenue close to Landmark's Sunshine Theater in Lower East Manhattan. The photos on its wall showed Barbara Streisand and Woody Allen once frequented it too.

"Myths are powerful, as they distort and conceal in their extreme simplifications and falsifications of reality. By ignoring a great mass of information they identify essential order, purity, and blessed simplicity. Myths can be elevating to a nation, enabling people to cohere, to energize, and to compel themselves to defy rational limits. Yet, myths can can be disastrous, causing a nation to lose touch with reality and with its shared humanity with others. Japan's myth of monoethnicity has both these powers, constructive and destructive." -Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Hirokazu Koreeda

2009-11-21T00:02:00.003-05:00

There could be no hope, no present, without forgetfulness.

Red Cliff at Landmark Sunshine Theater.

Spoke with Professor Zhang Zhen, Professor Choi Jung-bong, Professor Dan Streible, and Professor Bill Simon.

A head start on my film history and historiography paper. Professor Streible gave me a high 96-97 for my paper abstract. Good work!

My midterm paper for Professor Simon's class on film form and film sense is only a B+. However, I am totally motivated to write an A paper for the final.

Professor Allen Weiss gave me the permission to enroll in his course on Landscape in Film and Performing Arts. I'm really happy. Maybe I can write the final paper for the Contemporary Japanese Cinema class on landscape. I need to think more about it in the next couple of days.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1010 Film Form/Film Sense (Simon)

November 20, 2009

Abstract of Final Paper

The narrative in Chris Marker’s La Jetee is constructed by still photographs and third-person voice-of-narration, with occasional sound effects. Simultaneously a sci-fi fantasy and a romantic tragedy, the film intrigues me formally as well as thematically. I want to investigate the film’s gradual shift from sci-fi to romance using Murray Smith’s structure of sympathy. Additionally, because all sci-fi fantasies operate on some level of escapism as a comment or critique of the present, I want to narrow down the subject(s) of this film’s comments or critiques. The fact that the film makes us understand the protagonist’s longing for the past and his choices of going back and even dying in it seems like a comment on the triumph and tragedy of personal will over group will. The fact that the film makes us learn that the future sometimes resides in the past also seems like a comment on predestiny and determinism, which are not necessarily pessimistic because they teach us that life isn’t all about accidents, isn’t always random, but may have a purpose to it.

Chimamanda Adichie

2009-11-08T19:59:00.006-05:00

Blinking is a bodily form of editing.

Wilmington, Delaware. Baltimore, Delaware. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mike has larger breasts than I do, so what? Mine will produce milk if I am pregnant with a child, but his won't. Additionally, small breasts mean that they don't change shape very much over time. They don't sag. They will look just as pretty twenty years later as they do now. I am happy with my body. So be it.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema (Choi)

November 7, 2009

Japan’s Harmony Revisited

I have abandoned two drafts for this assignment already; both were about a page long, and titled “Seeing through Koreeda: on Surreal Moments from the Past” and “Notes on Forgetting and Forgiving in Koreeda’s Films” respectively. I had to because I felt like forcing compliments for Koreeda out of myself with little sincerity. I want to criticize his films because in truth it was tormenting for me to sit through. Of the four films that I have watched, each one echoes how harmonious Japanese society is. Critics and scholars praise Koreeda for exploring and examining death and memory, which I do not disagree. Koreeda’s films are quiet, meditative, and even beguiling. However, nobody thinks that he perpetuates the age-old passivity of Japanese people in service of Japan’s prized but problematic harmony. He is very much like Ozu in this sense because both are possessed by a deep affection of their country and their culture. This love has prevented both from penetrating their everyday life with a sufficiently sharp vision. Often in Koreeda’s films, being meditative is equal to being nonjudgmental, and coming to terms with one’s past means transcending instead of resolving one’s problems. I hope by accounting for where and how my uneasiness arises, I will contribute to the discussion of Koreeda as well.

I can focus on all four of Koreeda’s films in this essay, but since the assignment requires only two, I would like to pick Maborosi (1995) and After Life (1998). My reason to do so is largely because of the order that the films were released. Nobody Knows and Still Walking came out later, in 2004 and 2008. If we presume that Koreeda’s film career has a pattern of development, I would like to point out that his later works tend less to mystify the world but rather to deal directly with its shortcomings. To me, such a trend is a sign of maturation of Koreeda, but this alone will not stop me from reproving certain key aspects of his earlier works.

Maborosi achieves an unusual level of aesthetics by having seemingly eclectic shots together. Many of these shots do not contribute directly to the narrative, but they are perfect for establishing the milieu in which the story takes place. The film opens with a medium shot of Yumiko when she was still a teenager. A few characters are introduced together with Yumiko at this stage including Yumiko’s future husband Ikuo, her grandmother, and her parents. However, none of them is given special attention because no close-up shots are used, just like in the rest of the film. The highlights of the opening sequence, instead, are the tunnel, the bridge, the noise of train as it passes by, and in general, an ordinary working class neighborhood.

I should mention that this kind of focus on the environment rather than on the people is prominent throughout the film. When Yumiko moves in with her second husband, an extreme long shot shows us the shore where their house is located. When Yumiko’s little boy plays in the fields with his sister, they are both just two small dots against the vastness of their surroundings. Seldom are they placed in the foreground, which is almost always a scenic part of nature. One of the most memorable long shots from the film is towards the end of the story when Yumiko follows a group of mourners at the beach. Geometrically, having a procession of people walking alongside the ocean is neat. The music also helps situate us in the mood of the mourners.

However, having long shots throughout the film, especially when Yumiko finally lets her emotion come forth, is so powerful that it stifles too. From the conversation between Yumiko and her second husband, we learn that death is enigmatic, suicides are inexplicable, and a fatal attraction to death could happen to anyone. Yumiko’s emotional eruption is assuaged by her second husband’s mystic story of his father. She never utters another word after his response. Everything is simply back to normal. From the mise-en-scène, a similar kind of containment is imposed. The pathos of the environment overrides the emotions of the characters to the point of trivializing the latter. Everything gives the impression that Koreeda tries to preach an attitude of resignation to life.

Another uneasiness I have with Koreeda’s mystical approach to suicides is to think that people will walk away from the film thinking that all suicides need not be looked again twice. On one hand, a person going through the loss of a loved one needs consolation in order to go on with his or her life. If mystification is what is expedient, it is what is desired too, for necessity is the mother of invention. However, mystification is not the solution to future suicides, and I am concerned about how much curiosity is needed to trigger a suicide. By being monochromic in its attempt to explain away death and suicide, Maborosi becomes somewhat limited because it seems best at addressing only a moderate group of people who are snarled by unpleasant memories of the past.

In terms of offering different perspectives on our memories of the past, After Life is a greater achievement than Maborosi because it encompasses views of people from all walks of life. Its documentary style renders many one-person storytelling scenes compelling. The acting in those is neither restrained nor dramatic; the characters look natural probably because they act for themselves. While the location that the film takes place is extremely ordinary with not much to look at, the people animate the scenes with their different idiosyncrasies. The meditation takes on a different turn by not focusing so much on landscape and environment as on genuine interpersonal communications.

Various characters recall their best moments in life. While listening to them, I wondered what mine was too. Koreeda must have anticipated such a reaction from his audience, so he plays with our expectation. The kind of happiness that one chooses for a final reenactment needs to be sharable. Therefore, the idea that a shared joy is a double joy is reinforced. During the course of trying to recall one’s life, both happy and sad memories surface. Even though there are no real villains in this particular group, minor unethical deeds like infidelity and forgery of real age often come up. Plot-wise, those who have had satisfying lives and are able to pick a memory to be taken with them will be guaranteed the passage to Heaven. Otherwise, they remain in the limbo to serve the newly dead until they become aware of a truly significant memory to themselves.

Surveying the memories that different characters have picked, it is fairly easy to reconstruct an imaginary Japan according to their memories. There are promiscuous salary men, uneducated prostitutes, docile housewives, disenfranchised youth, and so on and so forth. The act of picking a good memory is isomorphic to the act of hiding away unpleasant things, and the idea that Japanese people have a tendency to stomach the unpalatable repeats itself again and again. The moment when the 21-year-old young man goes completely unbridled by the working system of the limbo is somewhat different because it is liberating; however, the young man is a hologram with no true attributes. He alone has no real power to overturn anything in the limbo. The overall harmony, the coming and going of half-dead souls, and the function of the limbo will simply remain undisrupted.

Once again to play devil’s advocate, I will not extol Maborosi and After Life for what they achieve. The idea of harmony is banal to me because it is just another platitude. I am glad that Koreeda has reduced the usage of long shots and long takes over the years because heavy reliance on them to give a holistic view of the world can be limited too. As for lingering shots of inanimate objects, though I know that they comply with the principles of voids and silences in Zen aesthetics, I want to say that they are also ambivalent. Critics likes to refer to Buddhism when they come across a director like Koreeda or Ozu, but Buddha is actually quite an existential thinker in that he teaches us, unless something is true to you, it is not absolutely important for you to know if it is the Truth. I dare ask Koreeda what he intends the function of an empty room or an empty field to be besides introducing pauses and cultivating sentiments, both of which tone down human presence and importance so that harmony could ensue.

Simone de Beauvoir

2009-10-25T19:48:00.005-04:00

Warmth.

Oliver came with Mike to see Al Gore at Barnes&Noble to have their books signed. Mike and I went to a lecture in Tisch that evening. Returning from the lecture to my apartment, Mike and I tried, but we were so awkward that we didn't even get into any position. I was kinda disappointed because he only touched me when I asked him to. He said that he was nervous and was afraid that he could ruin it. He also said that he always really wanted to start a family. I guess I should believe him.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1010 Film Form/Film Sense (Simon)

October 30, 2009

The scene I chose is from Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007). It is Chapter 16 on the DVD scene selection menu, under the title “Needle and Thread.” Requested by Mr. Yee, Mak Tai Tai goes to meet him in the Japanese district. Like before, she has no idea as to what to expect there. The road before her is full of risk, and she knows that with each step forward the danger intensifies. Yet she knows the fearsome irony that with each step his trust is earned too. I want to argue that the film is focalized through her in this scene. What she observes about him will not only complicate her emotional state later on, but also challenge spectators’ ideological norms.

The scene begins with a brief long shot of a guarded bridge, which is the entryway of the Japanese district. It is nighttime; several trucks of heavily armed Japanese soldiers are leaving the district while incoming vehicles and pedestrians are stopped and checked by Japanese sentries. Mak Tai Tai’s car pulls near. She hands her entry permit to her chauffeur and asks, “Is it Mr. Yee’s idea to come to the Japanese district?” There is no reply from the chauffeur except a slight, almost undetectable nod.

Probably the chauffeur has been told to be quiet; his obedience in this case then contrasts finely against Mak Tai Tai’s self-imposed composure. She gets off the car on a busy street. Apparently having never been here before, she steals a few glances all around her as she walks up the front stairs of a building, keeping each movement as discreet as she can. While she is in the foreground, behind her on the street are all kinds of identifiable Japanese. For examples, two women dressed in identical kimonos hover past, and Japanese soldiers in their uniforms roam about in groups of two or three too. The building that she enters looks western because it has a few Greek columns on its facade. Undoubtedly European colonizers must have occupied it before the Japanese.

In a tracking shot, Mak Tai Tai is shown moving through this physical space; music begins to change from non-diegetic (movie soundtrack) to diegetic (Japanese singing) as she goes inside the building. As much a surprise to her as to us, the interior of the building is a completely different world. Fusumas, tatami mats, and a wooden stairwell tell us that the Japanese have constructed a tea house inside the building. Soon a Japanese hostess dressed in an elaborate kimono comes to the front door to greet Mak Tai Tai. Even though Mak Tai Tai speaks Japanese, she asks for Mr. Yee’s whereabouts in Mandarin. The hostess, though able to understand Mak Tai Tai in Mandarin, replies in Japanese. The language difference hardly raises any racial tension here, but it is something to keep in mind. Mak Tai Tai sits down to take off her shoes, her background is again highlighted. The tea house has a dance floor; it is where the Japanese singing comes from.

Mak Tai Tai follows the hostess to some inside guest rooms. In a quick sequence with many cuts and handheld camera movements, Mak Tai Tai is shown being accosted by a drunken Japanese general. He mistakes her to be one of the tea house’s girls and drags her to his chamber where a group of Japanese generals are drinking away with oirans. Also in the room are some singing and dancing geishas. Because most of the shots are based on her point of view, and she is on her feet while the rest are on their butts—the only standing general has embarrassedly fallen down onto the floor as a result of trying to pull Mak Tai Tai into the room—the way that she looks at them is almost censorious. The drunken men all look idle and worthless, while the women, though sober, appear nonetheless very pathetic.

Finally the hostess saves Mak Tai Tai from getting into more troubles with the Japanese. Mak Tai Tai is ushered to the last room at the end of the corridor. The first shot from inside the chamber shows Mak Tai Tai at the far end of the frame while Mr. Yee is in the foreground with his back facing the camera. Two rows of Japanese coffee tables with left-over food on them indicate a dinner has just taken place. Mr. Yee’s seat, which is closer to the rear end of the room, hints that he is unlikely one of the most important people who have attended the dinner. Mr. Yee initiates a conversation. He says that he is punishing himself by waiting for her. However, when she probes the real reason that he invites her here, he evades the question by saying that he has just finished some business.

Before Mak Tai Tai goes to sit down with Mr. Yee, she takes off her overcoat and closes the last shoji in the room. Following her movement, the camera reveals two men walking down the corridor in a heated discussion. They have apparently not noticed Mr. Yee, but a cut to a reaction shot of Mr. Yee shows him bending his head to avoid eye contact with those men. Mak Tai Tai observes his uneasiness and elegantly slides close the shoji. Two more reaction shots of Mr. Yee show a frown on his face and several blinks following that. Mr. Yee seems to be suppressing some unpleasant thoughts on his mind, but only after a while is he able to calm himself down. He starts a monologue by first commenting on the singing next door, “They sing like they’re crying, like dogs howling their dead masters. These Japanese devils kill people like flies, but deep down they’re scared as hell. All our days are numbered since the Americans entered the war. Yet here we are with our painted faces, listening to their off-tune songs.” He sneers, “Just listen.” Obviously Mr. Yee is incredibly distressed at the moment because otherwise he would not choose to talk about his feelings. He works for Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government, which is a puppet government supported by the Japanese, who are responsible for numerous war atrocities in China including the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937. Someone like him has no respect to speak of because he is simultaneously despised by his countrymen and emasculated by the Japanese. When Mak Tai Tai makes a guess of why he wants her here, that is, he wants her to be his whore, he makes a self-ridicule by saying that he knows better than her about how to be a whore in the place. The statement is equivocal. By spending so much time with the Japanese, he indeed knows better about how to be an oirans or a geisha. However, being with the Japanese has also reduced him to an inferior sex with little, if no power. The collaborationist government upholds pan-Asianism as one of its three key principles, but in reality, it is nothing more than a downtrodden slave to Japan.

Docilely leaning on his lap, Mak Tai Tai listens to Mr. Yee intently. After some careful thought, she suggests that she sing a song for him. This is an especially significant moment. In terms of physical space, both of them are inside a Japanese tea house, which is inside a European building, which is inside the Japanese district, which is inside China. Trapped doubly in the imperialists’ powers in his home country, Mr. Yee could only liken himself to a prostitute and laugh at himself. Mak Tai Tai ventures to sing a folk song in Chinese in this extremely complicated space. Her voice does not simply wipe out the Japanese singing next door; it represents the Chinese resistance, which is also the political movement that she affiliates herself with.

The song Mak Tai Tai sings is from a 1937 Chinese film Street Angel by Yuan Muzhi; a slave girl from north China who is forced to leave her home and work for a nasty landlord sings the same song in that film. It was immensely popular during the war years and loved by old and young alike. Divided into three parts, the song goes back and forth between melancholy and love with increasing intensity. In Lust, Caution, this intensity is matched by the distance between Mak Tai Tai and Mr. Yee as well as the degree of close-up on both of them. She starts singing ten feet away from him. The first part of the song goes like, “From the end of the earth to the farthest sea, I search and search for my heart’s companion. A young girl sings while he accompanies her. Your heart is my heart. Your heart is my heart.” Mak Tai Tai dances as she sings, and Mr. Yee chuckles as he smokes.

If the first part of the song is somewhat sweet, the second part begins to pain the heart. Mak Tai Tai leans against a fusuma and casts a downward glance as she sings, “Looking north from my mountain nest, my tears fall and wet my blouse. Missing him, I will not rest. Only love that lasts through hard time is true. Only love that lasts through hard time is true.” Mr. Yee’s hand begins to shiver as he listens to this part of the song. He finally has to put down his cigarette because his hands shake more and more violently. To cover it up, he pours himself a cup of sake. In 1942, Japanese has already occupied most of China. The nationalist government kept retrieving as the Japanese military force advanced. The capital of the nationalist regime was relocated first from Nanjing to Shanghai, and then from Shanghai to Wuhan, and finally from Wuhan to Chongqing. Many refugees from the north fled to the south, and they were living through hell. Mr. Yee knows this very well. Among the agents that he has interrogated, some must have been separated from their lovers. Furthermore, Mak Tai Tai has come to occupy a tender part of his heart. He may be thinking that their love is hard-earned and therefore true.

Mak Tai Tai is attuned to what Mr. Yee is thinking and feeling. She sits down next to him as she goes on singing the third part of the song, “In life, who does not cherish the springtime of youth? A young girl to a man is like thread to its needle. Ah, my beautiful man. We’re like a threaded needle, never to be separated. We’re like a threaded needle, never to be separated.” Several interesting camera and editing choices are used here. First, in the long shot where the two of them are seen, a vase of plum blossoms is seen between them, matching their eye line, in the background. Flowers signify springtime; both the plum blossoms and the flowers on Mak Tai Tai’s cheongsam resonate with the theme of youth in the lyrics. Secondly, Mak Tai Tai lifts the cup of sake for Mr. Yee and waits for him to drink it before she sings “a young girl to a man is like thread to its needle.” Her pause accentuates the metaphor because anyone who hears the word “youth” in a song is likely to reminisce, at least a little, about his or her youth. We do not know Mr. Yee’s past, but he must have one, and it is almost certain that his past is better than his present, for a person’s wellbeing is tied to his or her country’s wellbeing. Lastly, Mak Tai Tai touches Mr. Yee’s hand and caresses it as she repeats the last line of the lyrics. At this point, Mr. Yee’s emotions have become overwhelming. The camera tracks his hand’s movement as he wipes his tears away and holds her wrist. A little puzzlingly, she looks somewhat nonchalant and unmoved by the song she sings whereas he is completely absorbed by it. As she shifts her body a little, he responds by letting her hand go, smiling very lightly, and then giving her a round of applause. The scene ends with a close-up shot of her face as she smiles quietly at him.

To conclude, this scene is intensely internally focalized through Mak Tai Tai. Even though she has not yet toppled over to love him, as can be argued by the fact that she contains her emotions whereas Mr. Yee has let his rupture, her meeting with him at the Japanese tea house is a potential seed of love. Personally, I find Dublin’s sudden declaration of love unfathomable in Notorious because to me there are insufficient contexts to summon his change from being so cold to suddenly so warm to Alicia. However, in Lust, Caution, I think Ang Lee has aligned us with Mr. Yee (through internal focalization through Mak Tai Tai) before showing Mak Tai Tai’s falling in love with him later. This scene is more crucial for understanding how genuine his love is for her than the love scenes because sex is one-dimensional while love encompasses many meanings beyond the body. Mr. Yee’s emotional attachment to Mak Tai Tai is probably a greater source of uncertainty and dilemma than his bodily attachment to her. There is no doubt that she loves her country because she sacrifices herself for this cause. However, when the man that she hates shows that he is not a quisling without feelings for his home country, she is no longer as determined to have him executed as before. In the end, the scene posts a question for all of us: if a monster can be truly touched by a song, is he really a monster?

Jacques Derrida

2009-10-25T01:48:00.004-04:00

I became nocturnal.

Mike's mother invited me to Thanksgiving dinner. I don't think I will be comfortable there because there'll hardly be any balance in their house if I go: five Harrisons versus one outsider, five white people versus one Asian girl, five native English-speakers versus one international student. I'm not even always comfortable with Mike, how can I be with his family? I also think that because it is only his mother who really wants to see me, I can visit her alone on another occasion. For example, I can take a train to New Jersey and meet her in person over a weekend. Mike is not in good terms with his father and his big brother. What will my presence in Mr. Harrison's house do except to complicate their relationship? I am not the intruder type of person, and I won't be a miracle to their household.

Do they have other guests too? If that is so, I think I will go because it will just be a big family party.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1015 Film History/Historiography (Streible)

3. How might any one of these concepts be used in the historical study of one of the films we have screened? (nation, studio, classical style, audience)

Smoodin’s essay “Regulating National Markets: Chinese Censorship and The Bitter Tea of General Yen” demonstrates how the concept of nation can be used in the historical study of Hollywood films. His research materials comply with Bordwell’s stringent materialistic criteria. Among his primary sources are correspondences between high-profile personnel, memorandums of their conversations, and various legal documents between China and America. Because he is able to synthesize 1930s Hollywood movie business with 1930s Chinese history and international relations, his analysis passes muster with the interdisciplinary standard of film history that Grieveson, Sklar, and Crafton advocate. Most importantly, his findings open up the discussion of film genre development, illuminate yet more factors affecting the success or failure of a film, and “call for a more nuanced understanding of the place of American movies in the world” (Smoodin 75). Such complex achievements could only be sufficiently appreciated with White’s philosophical investigation of the notion of narrative in mind. To White, a film historian’s must concoct both the historical and non-historical aspects of the past so as to make a logical and useful explanation of the past.

Although Smoodin’s essay is praiseworthy based on a range of film historiography theories, it does not spell out all the ways that the concept of nation can be used for writing film history. First of all, it is possible to go into more depth with film reception. Allen and Gomery mention a British film historian, Roy Armes, in their book. Armes argues that outside America, many countries’ film history begins in viewing American films instead of making their own films (A&G 61). He proposes that film historians start examining film reception in some Third World countries as an effort towards building a more comprehensive understanding of film history. Immediately, each Third World country presents itself as a different case study. For some primitive societies like the Papua New Guineans, or nomadic peoples like the Mongolians, film history does not even begin with imported Hollywood films. The first outsiders who visited them with some kind of filmic technology were anthropologists. Films were made for ethnographic research purposes. In some cases, shot footage was edited and shown to the filmed subjects, but the impact of film on their ways of life was hardly of any lasting significance or interest for follow-up research. Film served itself as a tool and then quietly withdrew from its intruded space; presently nothing could be inferred further.

Unlike primitive societies, civilized societies interested business people from Europe and America much more than anthropologists. Movies arrived in China, India, and other places in the world first and foremost as a commodity fighting a place in their markets. Exactly because movies were not simply a commercial product but a cultural product too, when their content was deemed inappropriate, they met resistance in the recipient countries. In the 1930s, China’s Censorship Board vigorously fought with American film companies for a fair representation of Chinese people in Hollywood movies. The staunch determination to either have it right or have nothing could not be divorced from the political climate of China at that time.

China had been the world’s biggest exporter during the Qing Dynasty until it went downhill starting from the first Opium War (1839-1842) with the British. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the country was getting worse as a whole as regional warlords fought one another incessantly in hope of becoming the ruler of all. One of these warlords, Yuan Shikai, almost succeeded, but he expressed no wish to modernize China. Yuan was only interested in becoming an emperor again himself. Although he had a group of warlords under his command, his death in 1916 plunged China into another round of even bloodier internal conflicts. Throughout 1910s and 1920s, there were many political movements among Chinese intellectuals to save China. The Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) was founded in 1919, and the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1921. With the aid from the Soviet Union, KMT’s power grew fast and steadily over the years. After the Northern Expedition, which lasted from 1926 to 1928, the KMT reunited China by eliminating several local warlords, and it established the nationalist government in Nanjing in the same year. However, because the KMT was internally divided into leftwing and rightwing, and its chairman Chiang Kai-shek saw the communists as a potential threat to building a nationalist regime, open warfare and underground assassinations never ceased. Worst of all, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. The nationalist government’s military power stretched very thinly in dealing with all its enemies. Even though Japan had no right to colonize Manchuria, it did so like the other European colonizers at that time. While these foreign countries were exploiting and mistreating ordinary Chinese, the KMT focused its attention on vanquishing the remaining warlords and the CPC. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, more and more Chinese began to affiliate themselves with the CPC rather than the KMT because the CPC called for the eradication of all foreign powers from China whereas the KMT let them trample over China freely. From 1927 to 1937 otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War, KMT’s armies did not succeed in wiping out the communists. The CPC only grew bigger and stronger as a result of KMT’s enmity and partly Mao Zedong’s military prowess.

In his essay, Smoodin gathers the statistics needed for his arguments. For example, he has the number of movie theaters in China in the 1930s. However, he has very little to offer in terms of whether the film was close to the reality of China at that time, and he refrains from going any further into the Chinese mentality other than presenting what is available in the official letters. From the Chinese history of 1930s, it is not hard to tell that the people who went to theaters were not the majority of Chinese because most Chinese were far from being well-off. China’s censorship board allowed them to watch movies of American life and crave for such a life, but it did not want them to watch a movie about war- and poverty-struck China and acknowledge that “this is China.” Furthermore, it did not want the world to recognize China in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Chiang’s army was fighting warlords in the 1930s. Since General Yen dies in the story, the biggest problem with the film could not be so much about its plot as about its depictions of Chinese refugees and soldiers, which might become meaningful signifiers of China.

America has never worried about what signified itself because it is the cradle of moving images. One derogatory picture simply does not have the power to overturn the general perception of it. As a capitalist country, America will rather let its economic concerns dictate in its movie business. In American theaters today, foreign-made blockbusters tend to be pushed to art houses, even though some of these are tailored for a Hollywood audience. The reason for this could be that these foreign-made movies would not make as much money as American movies. Red Cliff, made in China by John Woo, which will be released here in November 20, 2009, shall be an excellent case study for this speculation. Another reason that American commercial theaters exclude foreign features could be that so many homemade movies are competing to be exhibited that foreign films are simply pushed to the end of the line. Unfortunately not everyone with an agenda in film research can penetrate the cooperate world and get to the bottom of their business.

Increasingly though, the role of politics is becoming clearer and easier to spot in the movie business. In April 2008, Stephen Spielberg criticized China for selling weapons to the Sudanese government and resigned his job as the art director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Mysteriously, in the same year, Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullwas banned in China. The official reason that China’s Censorship Board gave termed Spielberg’s film derogatory to communism, but the communists in the film were Russian, and the film was released in Russia. More mysteriously, in the following months, Chinese movie theaters played no Hollywood films; they were all replaced by domestic movies, especially Hong Kong films. For a period of time, a Google search of Spielberg’s name yielded nothing in all Chinese websites.

It is not true that Chinese hate Spielberg. There are Indiana Jones fans in China just as anywhere else in the world. However, people have no power in overturning the state’s decision. Westerners can grit their teeth at Chinese for being incomprehensibly collectivistic and patriotic; they can say that they do not understand why Chinese do not lobby the national censorship board; they can criticize China for its lack of human rights. However, they must not overlook the fact that ordinary Chinese do not suffer much from such oppressions. Since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was still released in Hong Kong, it would be impossible that it never traveled to the mainland. In fact, unless Hollywood decided not release this film at all, mainland Chinese would see it.

Right now, Hollywood films still dominate the moving picture world, but the rest of the world, and especially Asia, have been cranking out high quality movies for their domestic markets too. These films were once grouped by nations and popular writings referred to them as national cinemas. Quite often, national cinemas show signs of fostering a national identity and consciousness. For example, Chinese films during the post-Republic era from 1949 to 1966 shared a strong patriotic undertone that was cheeringly embracive—minority groups participated actively in the moviemaking sector, both as directors and actors and actresses, and produced many popular titles. As a film historian, such movements are perfect for historical discussions of film, for their political backgrounds allow ample room for detailed thematic and stylistic analysis.

However, arguably, national cinema could only remain popular and identifiable for a period of time in any nation’s film history. The increasingly extensive collaboration between and among nations in recent years in producing films is slowly eroding the concept of national cinema, and “transnational” cinema is slowly replacing national cinema. Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou was partially funded by a Japanese company. It is just one out of numerous such examples. Very frequently too, Hong Kong films are shot in multiple locations all around Asia. While the concept of nation interests a western film historian because it is useful in thinking about film reception outside his or her home country, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, it is an exciting concept for non-western film historians too because film is a potentially useful political token. Film censorship used to center on film content only, but film content is so open-ended that film censorship is able to hem and haw until it lodges itself in useful political purposes. In the case of China, the picture of film history can suddenly expand ten-fold in size because where we used to find film audiences film audiences may no longer be found, and an underground film culture needs to be contextualized in the discussion of film reception.

Hegel thinks that history is a chain of self-reflections, and the progress of history will eventually lead humankind to self-consciousness. For me, film history seems more purposeful than any other history. With the concept of nation, it awakens and expands a film historian’s political consciousness immeasurably.

Shinya Tsukamoto

2009-10-18T18:02:00.009-04:00

It's blue love; it's what I've asked for. Mike needs my love, he doesn't need my body. In return, he gives me plenty of respect, which is what I need too. I don't want to be confused again.

I am more than a little moody this week. I've blamed it all on my environment, which can't be too wrong.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
Professor Jung Bong Choi
October 18, 2009

Welcome to Shinya Tsukamoto’s Cityscape

A peculiar kind of photosynthesis permeates and energizes Shinya Tsukamoto’s cityscape. If the source of sight or the eye is taken to be the sun, when it illuminates Tsukamoto’s cityscape, the eye will eroticize male and female bodies fused with technology. There is actually plentiful magic that a gaze can do, but with Tsukamoto sexuality seems crucial.

Presumably, most of Tsukamoto’s films take place in Tokyo. Whether or not Tokyo is indeed the way he portrays, certain features do not escape the popular imagination of the city. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is a good example of this because it catered to the desire of seeing modern Japan in decadence outside Japan. Without foregrounding Yatsu’s metal fetish, the film opens with the scene where Yatsu inserts a metal tube in his thigh. The stark lack of explanation immediately taps on spectators’ imagination of Japan as a technology-saturated modern country. The answer to why a man goes through excruciating pains to fuse metal with his body is only made clear: he wants to and he needs to. The film clenched an award at FantaFestival in Rome in 1989, which is the heyday of Japan’s economy. Apparently, a character with a metal fetish was more relevant than exotic at that time. Two other Tsukamoto’s films, Tokyo Fist and A Snake of June, also won awards at foreign film festivals. In them, Tokyo is presented as a concrete jungle facilitated by neat and fast modern transportation. The setting up of such a milieu is crucial to the understanding of the stories because the cityscape needs to be constructed before any subsequent “chemical” reaction takes place.

Tsukamoto confesses that he has always “wanted to make a film in which every image is infused with eroticism” (Mes 167). This seems to be a problematic statement against what Tom Mes argues earlier in his book, Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. Mes writes that “this element of eroticism, so overt in Tetsuo, would be almost entirely absent from his later work until…A Snake of Jane,” and “[t]he maturation of Tsukamoto’s themes would go hand-in-hand with the disappearance of eroticism from his work” (Mes 66). Maybe I have overlooked the subtle difference between eroticism and sexuality, but it is very unlikely that the themes of body, gender, technology, and cityscape all vitiate with that of sexuality. They probably coexist and are over shone by a particular gaze in all of Tsukamoto’s films. My confidence in saying this is based on Catherine Russell’s paper “Tokyo, the movie.” Even though this passage refers to an entertainment district called Yoshiwara in the Edo era, it speaks powerfully to contemporary Japan too: “Known as the floating world, its residents cultivated an attitude of resignation to a life of enforced inactivity, in which aesthetics and erotic indulgences provided the only imaginary escape from a very restrictive and repressive social structure” (Russell 214). In a way, the narrow space in Tetsuo’s apartment, the stiff architecture of Yukio’s house, the dried well that Yukio is stuck in, and the physical confinement that Tsuda constantly experiences all pave way to sexual liberation, which is the only way that the protagonists will ever set themselves free. Ian Buruma, who has written extensively on Japan and has influenced many others, makes a point that the Japanese seek occasional outlandish fantasy releases because they are otherwise always buttoned up and contained. I think his point is true for Tsukamoto too.

Takeshi Kitano

2009-10-11T02:19:00.014-04:00

My first kiss. I was so happy. I cried.

I miss Mike.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema
Professor Jung Bong Choi
October 10, 2009

Miike’s Legacy of Shrilling Violence

Needles (male-sized for Kakihara; female-sized for Asami), knives (fancy handknives belonging to Wong’s underage sexual partner; secret blades sticking out from Ichi’s heels), hooks (piercing Suzuki’s back side so as to hang him from the ceiling), sabers (that almost chop down Suzuki’s head), and metal wires (Asami’s favorite slicing weapon) are the signatures of Takeshi Miike’s films. Because of the extreme shrilling sensations that they produce, in the same films, glasses, wine bottles, and baseball bats are rated secondary, whereas gun-shootings, car-chasings, and fistfights simply do not compare. What leads to the use of such vicious weapons in Miike’s films? How do such tortures happen? What ends do they achieve? Based on three of his films, Ichi the Killer, Shinjuku Triad Society, and Audition, this essay explores Miike’s legacy of shrilling violence.

The skeletons of the three stories have one thing in common, that is, their characters often commit violent acts out of revenge and hatred; however, there is an additional flavor in Ichi the Killer, which is a perverted sense of sadomasochist pleasure. In Audition, Asami, a ballet dancer, tortures Aoyama, a film company executive, as a form of punishment. Probably once a victim herself, she is reminded of her pains by men that flirt and sleep with several women. In Shinjiku Triad Society, a more nuanced form of hatred and revenge is played out by the characters’ complex backgrounds. Kiriya is a corrupt cop who is tipped by yakuza gangs. He is determined to eradicate Wong, a generous gangster leader who donates his money to his poor native village in Taiwan. Even though Kiriya is half Japanese and half Chinese, his feelings towards Chinese seem more inclined to the negative side because he used to be physically humiliated as a Japanese war orphan in China. Being Taiwanese and thus Chinese, Wong becomes Kiriya’s enemy doubly. The plot of Ichi the Killer also is fraud with hatred and revenge, but the film’s sadomasochistic undercurrent often gains an upper hand. Ichi is mentally ill. Even though most of the time, he kills because he is told to avenge his bullies, when sufficiently provoked, he kills for pleasure too. For examples, he slices both Karen’s and an unknown prostitute’s throat after seeing these women becoming tantalizingly weak and fearful. Kakihara shares Ichi’s love for pain and violence. Uninhibited by guilt as in Ichi’s case, Kakihara devises as many different ways as he can of torturing his victims; he then performs these tortures with an audience, not lease bothered if anyone should have a similar appetite.

Violence not just happens in Miike’s films, it rarely happens unplanned. The party that inflicts pain must be in total control of the situation while its victim must be totally vulnerable. Ichi is trained in karate; theoretically he only needs people to spread out nicely in an open space to conduct his surprise attacks. However, Kakihara plays with completely immobile and defenseless bodies. He ropes one to a chair and hooks another to a ceiling, all according to his whim. In Audition, Asami poisons Aoyama before she goes on to cut off his foot and pierce his innards and eyeballs. InShinjiku Triad Society, Kiriya slams a chair on the face of a prostitute who is a threat to no one at the moment that it happens. In another occasion, Kiriya rapes her with her hands cuffed. To summarize, unbalanced power dynamics tunes the violence in Miike’s films one notch up, making it shrilling. When two parties’ strengths are evened out, nothing is as exciting anymore. For example, the numerous gunfight scenes in these three films actually do not leave a strong impression on anyone at all.

The questions of why such violence happens and how such violence happens shall finally be tied with the more important question of the significance of such violence. On one level, shrilling violence is sensational; it helps make Miike’s films fairly distinctive among other directors’ works. Having such an edge over his competitors is necessary to survive in Japan’s film industry in the 1990s, as Miike mentions so himself in an interview in the DVD of Shinjiku Triad Society. On a second level, the shrilling violence can have a deeper meaning because it is both a gesture of offering and of cautioning. Miike is like someone who hands out heroine while disseminating information about the awful consequences of inhaling this pernicious substance. There are more than just a few opportunities in Miike’s films where spectators can sympathize with the characters. While it is tempting to identify with them, the will to distance from them is made present by the shrilling violence too, though I believe that the reason to pull back is well extended beyond the shrilling violence per se.

Roland Barthes

2009-09-23T21:58:00.015-04:00

The feeling is not mutual. He sees her as a means to stay alive until his luck changes.

A nasty dream about virginity last night.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

H72.1118 Contemporary Japanese Cinema

Professor Jung Bong Choi

October 4, 2009

Some Things are Better Left Unsaid

Often a film with little dialogue draws considerable attention to its pace and rhythm. It can be likened to music without lyrics, or a man with few words (in which case his movements become notable, or even mesmerizing in some cases). The pace of Takeshi Kitano’s films, as seen in Kikujiro, Hana-bi, and Violent Cop (not purposely selected to suit this analysis), is at once prominent with the use of music soundtracks and the inserts of amateur paintings, which recompense the unsaid.

Like a shrewd parent who chooses the right moment to exhort a child, a clever filmmaker chooses the right moment to elicit a particular emotion. Kitano does this repetitively in all three films by first, situating us in a stretch of complete silence, occasionally ruptured by mundane but always scanty dialogue, and second, flooding us with an overflow of great music. In Kikujiro, for example, when little Masao and Kikujiro arrive at Masao’s mother’s new home, the main theme starts to play just when Masao’s mother is seen walking out of the house with her daughter and husband. Before this shot, multiple cuts are made with different focuses on Masao and Kikujiro, both only speak the bare minimum to keep the story going. Masao anticipates as much as he hesitates; the contrast between the close-up shot of him and the long shot of him helps set up this dynamic. When all is finally clear to Masao, that the address is right, although the name is wrong, and that his mother has remarried, music comes on screen and accentuates his moment of realization. It then continues to pour, until it spells out how hurt Masao is. The use of music proceeded by silence or near-silence, therefore, paces the film.

Before the uniqueness of this pace is clearly laid out, another outstanding feature in Kikujiro and Hana-bi shall be addressed. Apparently, both films are punctuated by shots of colorful figurative drawings of people, animals, or landscapes. Thanks to these deliberate breaks, the films sometimes resemble kabuki plays. For example, in Hana-bi, a painting of falling snowflakes, which are depicted in the form of kanji, is followed by the scene where another round of violent killings takes place. In a way, the painting opens a new chapter of violence and self-destruction by titling it. Our eyes follow the camera as it moves across the canvas in a tracking shot; finally, some large writing in red ink appears on the snow-covered ground, saying “suicide.” There are other ways of interpreting the functions or the meanings of the paintings in this film. For example, the flower-headed animals can be understood as an allegory of the superficial beauty and civility of Japanese people whereas in truth, they are not any less animalistic than others. Alternatively, we can say that Japanese people are people without faces, and people without faces are people without identities. Such interpretations and analysis can go on in pages, but to all my intents and purposes, the key point here is that every implicit filmmaker develops a unique pace, and the relationship between the implicitness and the uniqueness is directly proportional. For Kitano, he constantly downplays an emotion until he sees fit to let it erupt. Music and paintings are used extensively in making such eruptions happen. The results range from humor in Kikujiro, sarcasm in Hana-bi, to anger and rage in Violent Cop.

“I hate having to explain everything; that’s what all this comes down to,” confesses Kitano in an interview, “Respect at Last? Hold Your Tickets,” in the January-March issue of Japan Quarterly. It should go without saying that he avoids long, fluent, and continuous dialogue for this reason, and he must have relied on other fine arts like music and paintings for the same reason too. His comedy,Kikujiro, complies with this confession, and his thrillers and dramas, Violent Cop and Hana-bi, do so too. Other formal elements, such as camera movement and mise-en-scène, are likely to have contributed to this unique pace. For example, some film scholars have looked into the significance of walking in his films. However, to my first viewings, the use of music soundtracks and paintings stood out most.

Imamura Shohei

2009-09-17T15:24:00.005-04:00

Here's something good for you to do: let's bring out the life in you, using your pen and brush.

8/30 arrived in boston

8/31 met tianhao and deyu for lunch. had them move my furniture. stayed over at mark's place

9/1 drove from boston to new york with elizabeth, met mike, asked mike to stay for the night, which he did

9/16 president's forum at the new school with mike, watched Jabberwocky with mike at my place. he looked great

9/17 first history and historiography class. i wanted professor dan streible's master narrative on film history, but he withheld it

Written on a postcard, our first assignment in the film history/historiography class.

The problem with "refashioning" the past in Lowenthal's word, or building "master narratives" in Staiger's, is two-fold: the act of looking at the past, and the act of writing about the past. Staiger's "correspondence" and "reflection" model forsake the fact that history is greater than the sum of its parts, though both allow us to examine the past. Additionally, with each new theory, the corpus expands. (Just like how the permutations of our expressions do not exhaust our consciousness.) A master narrative will be extremely narrow in scope, but depending on our needs we will work something out.

Itami Juzo

2009-08-11T19:04:00.006-04:00

See what the world does to a new gifted child over time.

Although I missed the total solar eclipse, I will get to see a meteor shower tonight. I've never seen a single meteor in my life. Hope I will get to see one this time.

Mike sent me a text message at 4 am.

Chang in NYC. Northeastern style food at a Chinese restaurant in Flushing. The Museum of the Moving Image with Xi Shi and Chang. Metropolitan Museum. Central Park. Vietnamese restaurant. MoMA. T-mobile. 53rd street. Shanghai food. Strand. Not for Sale in Astoria Park with Sarah Ip, Joseph Chan, Ada Lin, Becca Wong, Gene Carmichael, Chang, Xi Shi, and Mike.

I watched Inugami by Wasato Harada in my first Contemporary Japanese Cinema class with Professor Bong-Jung Choi.

I guess the biggest conflict in the story is whether Miki should leave or stay in Omine.

Miki does not leave because she loves the village's closeness to nature. She grew up there, has never been outside, loves her job in the paper mill (although she denies that it's a mill), and doesn't seem to have any burning desires except for a big regret about her past, which is her lost baby.

However, Miki also has two violent emotional breakdowns where she speaks out loudly that she does want to leave. She isn't being explicit as to why she wants that both times, so we are free to fill in the gaps, which isn't that hard. Her family does not show her much respect, probably because she is a spinster, even though her paper business must be supporting her family in one way or another; she is not jealous of anyone for what he or she has -- for examples, Rita's youth (her young, beautiful, and perfect body as she walks out of the bath naked), Sonoko and Takanao's defiant sex play in her paper mill (somewhere near the beginning of the film), etc.-- but her sister-in-law bites her whenever the occasion arises just because she looks younger and younger each day; and most of all, her identity as a Bonomiya woman who is thought to be cursed, who gets blamed and hated for bringing bad luck.

Another major conflict that Miki has, i guess, is whether to accept her role as the protector of Inugami. Her attitude changes from suspicion to submission. Even though she is saved in the end, she is still on the way of sacrificing herself in order to save and protect, maybe not the rest of her villagers, but those whom she loves.

I think both of these conflicts give us a chance to appreciate the idea of virtue in a woman in Japanese culture, that such a woman is and should be altruistic.

On another note, the film gives us so many perspectives to experience the story that it does produce a kind of dizziness. Sometimes the camera travels through space, there are some awesome panoramic shots, as if we are the powerful dog gods ourselves; sometimes it is static, making us the complete outsider, or the objective speculator; and some other times we got put in the shoes of the minor characters in the story, like Seiji's grandmother who died of a heart attack. I think we can definitely say more about these deliberate choices.

Joseph Nye

2009-07-31T23:19:00.010-04:00

It's not the right time to reflect on my actions yet, because the effects of my actions have not been revealed fully. I owe him an answer.

I will have a place to stay for the next school year. It's in Brooklyn near Prospect Park. Both Elizabeth and I are happy to have finally decided on where we are going to live, after dealing with our broker and the management company's scam. She is now back to Boston to spend the weekend with her boyfriend Mark.

Mike and I presented our little speech at the First Wikipeida Conference at NYC. It was well-

done. That evening, Bolin, Chen Xi, Mike, and I went to Joe's Shanghai restaurant in Chinatown for dinner. It was a very happy day for me. Mike also asked again to be formally my boyfriend. I

could tell that he was triggered by jealousy because a couple guys who wanted to sit next to me.

Tarot Card Reading:

My Past: Knight of Cups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_of_Cups)

My Present: The World 21 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Tarot_card))

The Magician 1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_(Tarot_card))

Ludwig van Beethoven

2009-07-10T00:09:00.015-04:00

Weakness does not equal moral inferiority. Men and women are moral equals.

I don't like text messaging because for me it's an excuse for not calling. It's true that people can multi-task when they send text mesages, but I prefer doing one thing at a time. My biggest problem in phone conversation is probably speed. I often have to think very long before I know what to say. This is not a mental illness, is it?

I got a little nervous looking at the course offerings. Will I be able to handle the new school year's work load? I start to question my ability again.

This afternoon I almost fainted in the subway because of my terrible cramps. I arrived at MoMA on time for Shoah but my cramps just got worse. I had to lie on the bench just outside T1 to rest. A guard came over to me to check if I was okay. She wanted me to go and get some ginger ale. I thanked her, but I really didn't have any strength to go. At around 4 pm, I got back home. Luckily Mike didn't visit this weekend for it would have been terrible.

Mike I daydreamed the following story because I came to the conclusion that it was a challenging thing to love you or to make you love a woman. For one thing, you have been and are still involved in and will probably continue having sex with many people. How will you be able to explore love with me if you can have sex as freely as you want with other women? (Red love) For another, you learn perfectly on your own, so anything less productive is less desirable. How will I be able to keep up with your expanding tank of knowledge without ever feeling bad about myself if I am not able to keep up with you? (Blue love) Furthermore, you don’t give a damn to the conventional duties that society sort of imposes on us. How is there anything in reality that we will ever amount to? (Grey love)

I’m not giving up on my tri-color understanding of love. I’m writing this poem to explore something else though. I thought green could be a temporary way of dealing with you.

Once upon a time there was a prince named Make,

with the surname Hay.

On a bare piece of land stood his castle,

entry was restricted to very few people.

Gypsies traveled there.

They liked to set up camps at the foot of the castle,

where they could cook smelly foods and sang vulgar songs.

In the darkness of the night,

an obscure red door purposely left ajar would welcome the ladies in.

The prince told the professionals,

“You can have these pearls, but you won’t have it for free.”

Night after night, month after month, year after year,

the prince had never counted how much wealth he had spent like that,

or how many passports to heaven he had renewed like that.

As long as he could recall, however, nothing except these crappy camps had ever appeared outside the castle,

until one day an oak sprang into his sight.

The green was something new,

so at first it really took his breath away.

He took a book from his library, used the blue door, ventured outside, sat under the tree, and read.

The bark gave him a sense of security, the canopy a sense of protection.

The smell was right, the temperature was right, the walking distance to his castle was right.

He was elated like never before, so he declared,

“The oak is mine!”

Gypsies still came, so did a green rider on a white horse.

“It’s only me, let me come in,” the rider knocked at the front door.

“Go away, it’s shut tight,” said the prince.

“I’ve come out of pure curiosity, only life can quench it. My world is worth returning to, so I will leave empty-handed. Plus, I don’t have much time, so let me come in.”

“There’s nothing in here for you. If there is, you won’t have a sense of taking part. Leave me and my oak at once,” said the prince. “Just go away.”

(The conversation is taken from Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Conversation with a Stone.")

While the rider remained at the door,

the rider’s horse ate away at the oak.

Since the prince would not let them in,

they gave up in the end.

The rider and the horse walked around the castle before they finally left,

with the horse shitting constantly along the way.

Days later, the bare piece of land where the castle stood started to turn green.

Weeks later, more green.

Months later, small oaks were visible.

A year later, a young forest.

The prince hated how his oak was no longer unique among the oaks.

Most annoyingly of all,

they kept growing.

Deep down under the castle, their roots kept invading.

In the middle of the air, their dampness eroded the castle walls.

The prince would wake in the middle of the night, feeling his bed shifted an inch up,

and another inch for anther night.

Because of these trees, gypsies also came less often too,

their caravans were too big to be maneuvered in the narrow space in the growing forest.

From a distance, the castle began to look afloat in an ocean of greenness.

Inside it, the condition was getting worse and worse and worse.

At times the prince would curse the stupid rider and the stupid horse.

“If they ever come back, I will make them my slaves,” he swore. “They are not only responsible for clearing out my land, they are also responsible for building me a new castle just like the one before!”

But the horse had long died of old age, so the rider had technically long ceased to be a rider.

And even if the prince succeeded in seizing the rider, sooner or later he would find out that it was a woman. What would she do except putting up a wood cabin for him, and only with his help?

For all I know, slowly the prince has lost everything he once had. However,

if he misses them badly enough, he will tame the forest and rebuild his castle from scratch.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2009-07-05T23:23:00.023-04:00

If evil comes from weakness, why's that nobody says evil comes from women? Aren't women the weaker sex?

07/01 Flushing Public Library (Walter Benjamin, monad, dyad, eschatology, Charles Baudelaire, Bertolt Brecht, epic theatre, Gestapo). Curry beef.

07/02 MTA monthly pass ($89). East Village (Amy and Mariana). OISS (Heather). NYU Student ID (expire in 08/2013!). Bobst Library. 9 pm.

07/03 4 am. Chinese Embassy (42nd St), M42, MoMA (student membership $50), The Edge of Heaven (2007, Cannes). Mike didn't jump.

07/04 Elizabeth Paulsen and Mark. Think Coffee (Iced Spanish Latte). Tropical Malady (2004) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. July 4th Fireworks at Hudson River (40th St). "Thank you" message.

07/05 P.S.1 MoMA. The Wayward Cloud (2005) by Tsai Ming-Liang. MoMA SummerGarden Concert.

07/06 Home. 黑太阳(Josh)改名叫巫明；贺明(Mike)改名叫贺冥。Sarah is working on a human trafficking awareness campaign, her job is to do a write-up for the program, there will also be a documentary about human trafficking in August. I will attend this event. Just saw Ziyun's wedding photos. I feel really happy for her. She is a beautiful bride.

07/07 Chinese Embassy (closed at 2:30). A dream woke me up: I was trying to hit two flies in my room. I did it. I checked 周公解梦. It looks like that it's a bad dream. However, right after I hit the flies, I left the room and found a little boy dressed in ethnic clothes on the street. I loved his patchwork, which was still in the process of being completed. I asked him where he came from, he replied, "Peru." I paid him 10 dollars and let him promise me to give me this piece after he completed it. He smiled and nodded.

07/08 Sarah Ip at 1 pm. Korean food. Sarah is now a food blogger. She takes pictures of food and restaurants and writes about them. Julia Abrams at 5 pm. We walked around in Central Park and had dinner in a high-end Cuban restaurant. I had Tilapia with fruit sauce. It tasted like Heaven. :)

07/09 Bad stomach. Conversations with Contemporary Artists. With Teresa Margolles. Bolin.

07/10 See Judy's apartment at 7 pm. Discussion with Mike at 9 pm.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strown

In myriad bits; while each believes

His little bit the whole to own.

-Richard Burton

Carl Laemmle

2009-06-28T14:42:00.006-04:00

I started to like the new place.

Elyssa is right. The rent near Washington Square or West Village is more like $1,200-1,300 per month

Amy and Mariana asked me to be their roommate. The apartment is in East Village. The rent is 1000 exclusive of utility bills. Like they said, the place was small, but it was cute.

Mike went bungee jumping in Canada.

It took Mom a total of 50 hours to fly back home. Her flight from Seoul to Wuhan was canceled. After they put her on a plane from Seoul to Shanghai and bought her ticket to fly from Shanghai to Wuhan, she was yet to encounter more unlucky things. Because of thunder storm in Shanghai and Nanjing, her flight was delayed. In the end, her baggage and her person arrived in Wuhan on different flights. It's her first time traveling home from abroad, and it's definitely the most dramatic one.

I got my NYU ID. The lady there made a mistake by putting its expiration month as 08/2013. She must have thought that I was an incoming undergraduate freshman. In fact, this was not the only time that such things happened to me at NYU. A girl, who was caught in the rain and drying herself up in the bathroom, also asked me if I was a freshman. I clarified by saying that I was, but a graduate freshman. She looked surprised, but I changed the topic soon.

I woke up at around 4 am today, had some reveries, turned on my laptop, and started writing.

A Week Later

mike, my answer is yes, we are having a relationship now, but i can't promise you that it's a lasting and meaningful relationship.

let's put all kinds of relationships on an imaginary scale, on the lower end, we have short and adventurous relationships, on the upper end, we have lasting and meaningful relationships. i think ours is towards the lower end, even though i don't disagree that it has the looks of a lasting and meaningful relationship.

many things are required for a long and lasting relationship. for instance, both girl and guy need to know what they want, what they need, what they have, and what they don't. however, the process of finding these things out often lasts longer than the duration of the relationship.

you don't have to read this paragraph, but i have to say it. by agreeing to relationship-status with u, i have hurt a dear friend, even though i believe he will forgive me. i owe him so much, still.

that's all. i won't write any more now. my neurological current will get too strong in no time if i keep reasoning with my emotions. curbing doesn't do much, i will let mine flow into reservoirs. do you know what reservoirs are? they are memories. they don't get mixed up with the actually current. -tian

Pathé

2009-06-24T23:55:00.024-04:00

Two things this summer. Turn him on. Turn him off.

The three-day trip to NYC ended faster than I thought. My biggest impression is that the "here" and the "now" do not matter much to New Yorkers, who are always rushing and who must always want to be somewhere else. I don't think that Mom likes NYC as much as Boston. In fact, she is not impressed by NYC. However, she became grumpy whenever we stopped at a tourist attraction. While she wanted to have her picture taken, I had to shrug my shoulder and say "Sorry, Mom, I forgot my camera in Boston." Actually, not having a camera at hand was not a problem for me. At least, it allowed me to see the city more intimately. Moreover, it could all be fated! - I will not be another anonymous passer-by who is only interested in taking pictures but someone who will really get to know NYC.

Penny and David.

Michael Jackson died yesterday at the age of 50. This man is a total mystery to me. It's strange; I somehow know that I will die in 2066.

Departures by Yojiro Takita.

Plots of land in the area had been acquired by retired Methodist clergy and various religious and community organizations. When the first moviemakers arrived around 1903, the suburb had a population of just 166. William De Mille remembered that it "was largely peopled by folks from Missouri and Iowa," many of whom "had gone west to die." Pepper trees lined the muddy streets, orange groves stretched across the fields for miles, and the hills were wrapped in "heat waves you could actually see." Rabbits vastly outnumbered people in the bungalows and the rickety wooden barns, which were later pressed into service as studios. The churchgoing locals were deeply suspicious of the movie people, having already heard rumors of the debauchery and drunkenness that seemed to be already an integral part of show business, an image hardly helped by the sleazy reputation of the nickelodeons. "No dogs or actors allowed," read signs placed in the windows of rooming houses across Los Angeles. Locals called the studios "camps" and referred to the film people as "the movie colony." It was as if the film community were exiled in the desert, a feeling exacerbated by the fact that the train journey from New York lasted five uncomfortable days, first passing through Chicago, then across the drab Midwest plains to the desert, where the perspiring passengers would fling open the windows to escape the insufferable heat, only to be assailed by waves of coarse sand. Finally to arrive in California was, recalled one early traveler, like "coming out of an inferno to a paradise."

Puttnam, David. Movie and Money. 66

Gustave Flaubert

2009-06-20T22:52:00.009-04:00

My temporary job as a shepherdress ended yesterday. I didn't like the way I parted with Gon's sheep because I rushed it through. I remember Tyger wishing me to go to next month's Flying Folks Tournament with him. He said that he would be happy only if I was there to watch. To his disappointment, I declined the invitation. The decision was no more because I was scared of this dangerous game than because I could be ungodly busy then.

Chang's cousin Wen Bin will pick us up from the bus terminal tomorrow. I thanked Mike, Penny, and Bolin for agreeing to help me. Yes, Mike is right, the party is canceled. I think he went with his Jewish redneck friend to Mir Hossein Mousavi's protest in New York today, but I don't think he has Alzheimer's disease.

Chang came over for dinner today. I told him what I thought would be a good topic for his photo essay, which he would soon need to submit for his next round of graduate application.

"if I am somewhat ashamed of my sentimentality and the way it apes my deepest emotions, most people who cry in movies do not usually live their entire lives in response to the experience, nor do they reflect analytically upon their tears. I have."

-Dr. Michael Harrington

(copied from Mike's Facebook. I am surprised that Dr. Michael Harrington doesn't know that there are just very blue people around. These blue men and women only turn red in the dark facing a movie screen.)

William Blake

2009-06-15T14:07:00.014-04:00

To return a favor of an old friend, I became his shepherdress and have been herding sheep for the past two months. I named one quiet beautiful lamb Tyger. I pay a lot of attention to Tyger because he is different from the rest. I like how gentle Tyger smells, even if I bury my nose in him.

Ziheng will start working on June 29. He is not happy with the grade for his final project. In fact, he hates college because his professors suck, and college has been a waste of time for him. Soon he will work a job that he hates. Is there a way out?

Mike did not write any more emails to me, but I still think about him sporadically these days. I refrained from asking him more questions because I knew he probably could not give me any more exact answers.

I believe that both Roy and Mike have dived down at their own perils.

I will move to NYC in July, but next week I will visit NYC first.

The Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

"On this island there is only a single house, but a large, pleasant, and comfortable one which, like the island, belongs to Bern Hospital and in which a tax collector lives with his family and servants. He maintains a large farmyard, a pigeon house, and fishponds. Despite its smallness, the island is so varied in its terrain and vistas that it offers all kinds of landscapes and permits all kinds of cultivation. You can find fields, vineyards, woods, orchards, and rich pastures shaded by thickets and bordered by every species of shrubbery, whose freshness is preserved by the adjacent water. A high terrace planted with two rows of trees runs the length of the island, and in the middle of this terrace a pretty reception hall has been built where the inhabitants of the neighboring banks gather and come to dance on Sundays during harvests" (63).

Marcel Proust

2009-06-13T18:02:00.014-04:00

身无彩凤双飞翼，心有灵犀一点通。-李商隐

Her promises are like butterflies, hovering for a while, then nowhere to be found.

I finished Aquinas 101 last night. I have a sudden urge to watch The Postman again.

I finished scanning all my notes from college today. Time flies. I feel very content.

"part of friendship is to assist one another in spiritual as well as worldly duties; indeed the former is more necessary for attaining our main end--beatitude in heaven" (15).

"After several great journeys in his life, and worn out by almost continuous teaching and writing, he who had been a traveler now entered the life of plain vision and comprehension of all that he had labored to put into words" (16).

"Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) . . . thought that God cannot be simple if he possesses attributes . . . St. Thomas, however, thought that we are not confined to negative names but can speak about God affirmatively because, as he points out elsewhere, every negation rests on an affirmation" (22).

"One reason why we do not know what God is, is that he divine light is hidden from us by its simplicity . . . we can know that God exists but now what he is . . . By faith, however, we are joined to the unknown imperfectly, because we are joined to what is above the power of natural reason" (27, 28, 29).

"the gap between something and nothing is an infinite one, which only an inifinite being has the power to cross" (35).

"St. Thomas holds that God does not act by necessity of nature but by knowledge and understanding" (36).

St. Thomas "thought that the true explanation of diversity in the world was neither necessity nor chance but the ordering of God's wisdom, which he saw manifested in the order of the world" (38).

"nothing is more intimate to a thing than its existence" (39).

"things come from God's knowledge in the first place" (40).

"Existence is prior to the good because existence is the first good that is sought by everything; the first thing everything seeks is to preserve its existence" (45).

"Nothing recedes wholly from the good; otherwise it would cease to exist altogether" (50).

"evil is only found in things that are good by nature" (50).

"The beauty of the mind itself lies in its concord, or agreement, with truth" (55).

"Nothing is loved unless it is first known, St. Thomas repeats, following St. Augustine. We naturally love to know and love our knowledge. In the same way, the Word that comes forth in God as he thinks of himself is 'a word breathing forth love' (verbum spirans amorem)" (63).

"God dwells in us, St. Thomas says, as what is known exists in the mind and what is loved exists in the lover" (67).

"St. Thomas starts from the principle that all creation is good; what makes a thing good is its likeness to God. In St. Thomas's view, the goodness of creation requires the existence of beings who are like God in having incorporeal nature" (72).

"it is form that gives existence to matter anyway, according to the philosophy of Aristotle . . . A form can exists on its own if it has some kind of activity. This will be an immaterial activity" (73, 75).

"Evil . . . does not lie in the mater but in the will" (75).

"In Christian tradition the angels have been divided into a hierarchy of nine orders, three sets of three. The first set comprises Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; the middle set, Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; the third set, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels . . . The three sets of orders can be divided by saying that the first reflects the attributes of God (who is love, knowledge, and justice); the second, his government; and the third, the execution of his providence . . . Archangels are the messengers of God, and angels are entrusted with watching over individual human beings . . . every angel is its own species . . . But the difference between one species of angel and another must be one of intellect, for they have a purely intellectual nature . . . God thinks of everything with one concept, and the nearer an angel is to God, the simpler it is . . . The higher the angel, the greater its power of seeing all the conclusions contained in an axiom. We have to argue from step to step to discover conclusions by discursive reasoning, but an angel, properly speaking, does not reason: it simply sees things by intuition. They do this by the light of their intellect" (76, 77, 78).

"As it was necessary for them to choose it freely, it was also possible for them to lose it by their own choice . . . There are two principle sins of the intellect: pride and envy . . . They sinned by wanting to be like God by their own strength, not by God's power. Nothing can be equal with God, because everything else receives its existence from another, and so shares in existence . . . The angels remained fixed in their first choice for several reasons . . . an angel reaches its perfection straight away with one movement of its will, since it is simple" (83).

"'psychology,' which literally means 'the study of the soul'" (99).

"'Since the soul naturally moves the body, a spiritual movement of the soul is naturally the cause of an alteration of the body'" (100).

"hope turns into joy and fear into sorrow or pain" (102).

"timid persons are frustrated by their lack of power and se themselves driven into a corner; they then turn around and attack what oppresses them with unexpected force" (104).

"when things become warm they fuse together . . . cold things do not easily mix" (106).

"We would rather be without sight than understanding, St. Thomas remarks . . . we receive joy from the two activities of inquiry (inquisitio) and contemplation" (108).

"the brain and imagination get tired . . . The remedy for the sorrow that comes from overwork is games and rest, St. Thomas recommends" (109).

"The greatest pleasure of the senses comes from the sense of touch" (109).

"Great pleasure or pain prevents us from thinking, St. Thomas observes, becaues thought involves the use of the imagination, which is absorbed by pleasure or pain, as all the powers of the soul are rooted in its essence" (110).

"one of the effects of anxiety is to restrict the movement of the body" (111).

"The memory of evil brings joy when we see ourselves now free from it" (112).

"As Aristotle says, a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved" (113).

"The contemplation of truth softens sadness and pain . . . As rest is the remedy for the body, so pleasure is for the soul" (114).

"'A gentle answer breaks anger' (Prv 15:1) . . . 'vengeance is sweet'" (117).

"For Aristotle good actions flow from the virtuous character, but for St. Thomas a person is good because he or she does good actions" (120).

"We should have solicitude about the needs of others rather than our own" (127).

"Prudence especially demands the mean in acting . . . The mean between the two, of being neither too fearful nor too daring, is the virtue of fortitude" (127).

"The Old Law restrains by fear of punishment, the New inclines use by the promise of eternal things" (143).

. . .

"the intellect's knowledge is only completed by love" (189).

"Aristotle counts friendship as a virtue (it is the only virtue to which he devotes not just one but two books of the Nicomachean Ethics), because being friends with others involves the practice of all the virtues . . . For Aristotle, friendship is part of happiness (eudomonia, or human flourishing and well-being)" (190).

"Aristotle says that there are three kinds of frienship: the useful, the pleasant, and the honorable . . . Aristotle thought that only friends of this third kind are truly friends, and Aquinas that only this kind can be perfect friendship" (191).

"no one can bear sorrow alone for a long time . . . The mere presence of the other makes one happy; friends find one another's company delightful . . . goodwill, generosity, companionship and conversation, concord and sympathy . . . For Aristotle, we love ourselves when we love the good of the higher part of our nature, which is reason. This most of al seems to be ourselves, he says, because it controls the emotions . . . for good reasons, their own existence is desirable: they like their own company, have entertaining memories, and have minds furnished with topics for contemplation" (192, 193, 194).

"Aristotle thought that our highest happiness lies in contemplation, for this is most like God's activity, but he does not associate this with the love of God. For the Christian, however, ethics is not just about the noble life, as it was for Aristotle, but about friendship with God" (195).

"St. Bonaventure . . . says that in things beneath us knowledge is more important than love, but in things above us, where our knowledge must remain imperfect, love counts for more than knowledge" (201).

"The more we are friends to ourselves, the more we can be friends to others" (202).

"we can only have contemplation imperfectly in this life, because we do not yet see clearly but only as in a mirror, with faith" (203).

Thomas Edison

2009-06-04T23:58:00.010-04:00

Angels are good or bad from the very first instant. Will is immaterial. Who won't need more time?

Cambridgeside Galleria. Spectacle Island. Georges Island. Fort Warren.

Scanned my notes for Spring 09, Fall 08, Spring 08, Fall 07, Spring 07, Fall 06.

Chen Guang.

Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas.

Niagara Falls.

Je ne veux pas travailler

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage

Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre

Les chasseurs à ma porte

Comme les p'tits soldats

Qui veulent me prendre

Je ne veux pas travailler

Je ne veux pas déjeuner

Je veux seulement l'oublier

Et puis je fume

Déjà j'ai connu le parfum de l'amour

Un million de roses n'embaumerait pas autant

Maintenant une seule fleur dans mes entourages

Me rend malade

Je ne veux pas travailler

Je ne veux pas déjeuner

Je veux seulement l'oublier

Et puis je fume

Je ne suis pas fière de ça

Vie qui veut me tuer

C'est magnifique être sympathique

Mais je ne le connais jamais

Je ne veux pas travailler

Non

Je ne veux pas déjeuner

Je veux seulement l'oublier

Et puis je fume

Je ne suis pas fière de ça

Vie qui veut me tuer

C'est magnifique être sympathique

Mais je ne le connais jamais

Je ne veux pas travailler

Non

Je ne veux pas déjeuner

Je veux seulement l'oublier

Et puis je fume

Translation:

My room is like a prison
The sun's rays bar the window
Hunters are at my door
Like little soldiers
Who wants to take me away

I do not want to work
I do not want to eat
I just want to forget him
And then smoke (a cigarette)

I already knew the scent of love
A million roses don't smell so sweet
[because] Now a single flower in among them
Makes me sick.

Repeat chorus "I don't want to work...

I am not proud of it
Life, which wants to kill me
It is wonderful to be sympathetic
But I don't know how.

The chorus repeats several times.

Susan Sontag

2009-05-30T20:58:00.009-04:00

"If we continue down the path we appear to have chosen, the danger exists that we will end up exactly where we seem to be heading." -written on the bookcover on same day as my graduation seven years ago

Roy treated me today. I had a blueberry scone and a cup of rooibos tea. Roy said, "everything is political." He told me that he did not expect himself to be an expert on German cinema, but he is one now. He said that I might like Walter Benjamin's work because I was a little like Walter Benjamin. I went to Borders after lunch to find out more about Walter Benjamin. There was only one book by him left, Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Roy also told me that he did not like Facebook. I did not believe the reasons he gave except that Facebook was a waste of time for him. He will let me meet some of his friends in New York in the future when he goes there. I need to remember to say "hi" for him to a couple of people at NYU. Near the end, he said that it was nice talking to me. Me too! We shaked hands and parted. I guess his second favorite city is Berlin because that was what's written on his gray T-shirt.

I woke up this morning thinking that I would be a PhD student.

Dear Roy,

I stopped ruminating over my shortcomings. Something in me is beginning to change, and I have to thank you for making such a change possible.

The two lines on the scroll are written by a poet named Li Bai (701-762AD) in a poem called "Bidding Farewell to A Dear Old Friend." You notice that instead of giving you a general idea of what the poetry means, I only disclosed the meaning of each character to you. The line on the right says nothing but floating clouds, a roaming man, and his expectations, wishes, and longings. The line on the left mirrors it by saying nothing but the setting sun, a dear old friend, and the emotions or sentiments associated with these two objects.

I searched some open sources for a presentable translation, but I was quite unhappy with what I found. One source even misinterprets the two lines as "I shall think of you in a floating cloud, so in a sunset think of me." I do not think that Li specifies which object symbolizes whom here. The poem is only specific to the point that it tells you what's in the picture, and nothing further is being instructed. I like how the clouds and the sun are not motionless. The clouds are light and floating, they are in a beautiful contrast to the sun which is weighty and setting. I also like how the idea of a wandering man and that of a dear old friend appear to generate two opposing sentiments, but in fact create a powerful emotionally-charged unison. Furthermore, I like how the poem gives the reader freedom to think about what goes on in the two men's hearts and minds. In some other contexts, the last character of the right line also means reasoning, and the last character of the left line love or passion. From all these contradistinctions, you can just see how well this poem is written!

If you really really want a general translation of the two lines, I hereby provide you with my own. Hope that it will work: "Looking at the floating clouds, I can understand the thoughts of a roaming man; and seeing the setting sun, I can feel the love of an old friend."

Thank you again for taking me as a friend. (Now I can boast to people that I have bought a friend with ten words.)

Forever,

Isabel

David Lynch

2009-05-29T11:29:00.010-04:00

I will be very glad if I am a very good actress.

Spent a couple of hours at Borders reading The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine because I saw Mike reading this book accidentally. Ran into Manda who was studying for an exam in the cafeteria. The book was interesting. I finished three chapters and skimmed through the rest of it. New vocabulary learned: vasopressin, oxytocin, dopamine, and amygdala.

You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.

So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things.

And they might agree with their friends or argue with their friends-but how could they agree or argue if they don't already know? The interesting thing is, they really do know more than they think.

I like the saying: "The world is as you are."

Desire

Desire for an idea is like bait. When you're fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in-those ideas.

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it's a little fish-a fragment of an idea-that fish will draw in other fish, and they'll hook onto it. Then you're on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

There's an expression: "Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole."

Here's the thing, though. When you meditate and bliss starts coming up inside, it is not as painful. You can ride through things like this and live through it. But it has killed a lot of people. It has made them not want to make a film again.

It's a matter of talking and action and reaction.

If you're an artist, you've got to know about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create, you've got to have energy; you've got to have clarity. You've got to be able to catch ideas. You've got to be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress in this world. So it just makes sense to nurture the place where that strength and clarity and energy come from-to dive in and enliven that. It's a strange thing, but it's true in my experience: Bliss is like a flak jacket. It's a protecting thing. If you have enough bliss, it's invincibility. And when those negative things start lifting, you can catch more ideas and see them with greater understanding. You can get fired up more easily. You've got more energy, more clarity. then you can really go to work and translate those ideas into one medium or another.

Sleep is really important. You need to rest the physiology to be able to work well and meditate well. When I don't get enough sleep, my meditations are duller. You may even dip into sleep at the beginning of your meditation, because you're settling down. But if you're well rested, you'll have a clearer, deeper experience.

Maybe even in a sleepy meditation you're transcending a little. But it's far better to have a very clear, clean system as you go in. And when you dive, it's very powerful, very deep.

I've been very lucky. Along the way, there are people who help us. I've had plenty of those people in my life who've helped me go to the next step. And you get that help because you've done something, so you have to keep doing it.

Softer than the flower where kindness is concerned. Stronger than the thunder where principles are at stake. - Vedic Definition of the Enlightened

You experience that, and know it by being it.

Stress doesn't catch them; it's like water off a duck's back.

Maybe enlightenment is far away, but it's said that when you walk toward the light, with every step, things get brighter. Every day, for me, gets better and better. And I believe that enlivening unity in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say: Peace to all of you.

May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease. / May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one. / Peace.

St. Thomas Aquinas

2009-05-22T00:43:00.006-04:00

Was I a very good actress?

Mike gave me a book, Aquinas 101. On the cover he wrote, "Don't stop believing! (unless ur educated)."

Mom broke my mechanical flower.

Talked to Professor John Bernstein today. He gave me the emails of a couple of BU students who had graduated earlier, including Henry Fan.

RG invites me to his house this Saturday. I totally look forward to it because I have been invited.

歌曲：《上上签》

歌手：周华健专辑：现在(now)

电视剧《花木兰》片尾曲

了解你难如登天

我真不在乎再要多少时间

心若倒悬仍怠谢天

我最美的发现

男人婆只是表面其实你心思细过锦缎缠绵

日子久了就明白众人中我还是首选

我得承认男人有时蠢话连篇

男人有时蠢话连篇

多亏(几次)有你处处留了颜面

我有几次心不在焉将真话说得肤浅

我得承认男人有时蠢话连篇

男人有时蠢话连篇

越是在意越是想不着边

男人总是蠢话连篇

留在身边讨厌没有又挂念

感情事怎会随便

不会将爱恨舌分视若等闲

只要你不以为我颠让我在你身边

那一年上上的签我等着看它是否真的灵验

虔诚的心不改变众人中我会是首选

Zhang Yimou

2009-05-10T23:43:00.006-04:00

My one and only love.

Zhang Yimou withdrew. He is no longer coming.

Picnic at the Common's. SPUD. Lava.

The party is over.

Penny came. Mike came. Mike left. Penny will leave soon.

Night Falls on Manhattan

Sean Casey: "8 months ago, I was ready to resign. Because it was all so much more complicated than I imagined. It started when I was an A.D.A., just as you hope to be soon. My first time out, first time in night court, I had 18 cases to handle. And as you'll soon find out, you have to arraign your perps within 24 hours of their arrest. 1/2 hour before court, I finally get all my yellow sheets down from Albany. And the first guy up, I've never seen before. But his yellow sheet shows that he's got one prior conviction for robbery. But I don't know if he mugged an old lady in an alley to feed his habit, or he stole food from a supermarket to feed his kid. And later I get involved in a case where breaking the law was more just than upholding the law. And upholding the law killed a man. Now, I don't have to prepare you for a job where circumstances are black and white. I was lucky. I had a case like that to launch my career. Now you're gonna spend most of your time in the gray areas. But out there, that where you will be face-to-face to who you really are. And that's a frightening thing to ask of you, and it might take a lifetime to figure out. For me, I know I have 2 things. I know I still have complete faith in the law. And I also know I'm fallible. And I just hope God is not finished with me yet. For you, it's gonna depend on who you are right now. If you're in for the hustle, I guarantee you're gonna come across a case that you actually believe in, and you're gonna lose it. It's gonna break your heart and you'll be damned. And if you are a saint, well, I guarantee you you're gonna come across a case where you are gonna have to make a deal, and you're gonna win it. And that will break your heart. And you'll be damned. So you might as well believe in it from the believing. Hurts less that way. If you get tired, get out, cause I'll fire you. If you find the funny stories are starting to matter more than the case, get out or I'm gonna fire you. And if, God forbid, you wake up one day and you just don't care anymore, then please, just get out. Because then I'm gonna really have to fire you. But if you're ready to take that kind of risk, welcome. And as an old retired cop used to say to me, 'Nail it.' And good luck to you all."

Charles Griswold

2009-04-28T09:10:00.009-04:00

Casuistical! Cherchez la femme.

My biggest wish is to become a good speaker like Charles Griswold. I may have to become an easy speaker like Alex first. I used to be in the debate team too. Ah, that was such a long time ago!

Mom's here. All is ok. She made dinner for me. We took several strolls in the neighborhood. I also bought her a new sweater. At one point, I talked to her about Ziheng. She predicted that I might be Ziheng's true love.

A handbag. My birthday present.

The happiest birthday girl.

Nancy Marrs gave me quite a task: looking for clips for the president's speech for Zhang Yimou. I did my best.

Called 911 last night because Kevin refused to turn down the music at 3am. It was blasting.

Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.

I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate into cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.

Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness--your awareness--is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.

My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life. For me it has been the way to dive deeper in search of the big fish. In this book, I want to share some of those experiences with you.

Oriana Fallaci

2009-04-27T12:45:00.004-04:00

Who stopped? He loves me, absolutely. Who says that women should be? Let's come to terms with ourselves, with nature, with love. An irrational choice led me here. I burned his drafts, I burned his ideas, I burned his time and energy. The gods ask me why. I answer, I don't get it. I tried to study with my heart, but my brain proves incapable of grasping the ideas. Take the notes away please. I asked for them, I know. But I am no good at interpreting them. They are Melquíades's mysterious parchments. They are beyond my comprehension, maybe now, maybe forever. At least I tried. Of course I am Queen of the Middle Waters, that's why I deign to speak only when asked or when I think that I have things to say. Otherwise, I am a good listener.

Professor Griswold took us out for a free dinner at Chef Chang's. He told us that his father sold pots and pans, so did his grandfather. Today's our last class. In his closing remarks, Professor Griswold talked about love, self-sufficiency, self-dependence and dependence on other people, self-falsification, redemption (what are we redeeming ourselves from?), being esteemed by others and being estimable, the difference between pleasing others and being esteemed by others, two kinds of philosophers being philosophers of systems and philsophers of aporia, death, needs versus desires, an unending self-explication that is nonetheless open-ended, Rousseau's writing of paradoxes. Rousseau is full of paradoxes.

James, Andrew, Austin, Adriana, Ashish, Griswold, and I were on one table. Alex, Ben, Chrissy, Ryan, Hannah, Bonnie, and Matt were on the other table. James was the first person to speak to me. Adriana and I talked briefly about rabbits.

This is it. For April.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH412 Philosophy of the Enlightenment
April 27, 2009

After reading Emile Book V, I remain skeptical of Rousseau’s treatise on education because of the following reasons. Is a method as carefully modulated as his method absolutely needed for the education of a good man in society? I do not criticize his being methodological, but I would like to argue that in an interactive medium, people’s lives by and large rest on a few important decisions and perhaps some significant moments, both of which seem to come about by chance too. I suppose that among the readers of Emile, only a small number will truly understand Rousseau, so what if those who have not fully grasped Rousseau try to raise their children according to his advice? My understanding of what is natural, interestingly being informed by Rousseau in this case, warns me of trusting him completely. He may teach me how to think, but he cannot teach me what to think. Even if what I think turns out as what he would like me to think in the end, I shall not regret wasting the time to discover such truths. In addition, why does Rousseau write a book for the new-born? What happens to the corrupted souls in society? If after all the painstaking effort, Emile were to deviate from Rousseau’s intended path for him, would Rousseau disown Emile? I also cannot figure out why Rousseau did not raise his own children. Did he love them or hate them? Was he simply indifferent to them? While it is a wise choice to separate young Emile and Sophie for some years, nothing explains Rousseau and his children’s separation. If Rousseau is a proponent of individualism—as we can see, he wants Emile and Sophie to remain friends in their marriage, and each shall retain an independent mind—could he have favored an extreme form of individualism for his children? Lastly, I worry that Rousseau has not understood the relationship between his character and his philosophy after writing Confessions, so he can be said to have only touched on individualism. Here is a deconstructionist question: are not the past, the present, and the future personality-driven?

Bob Dylan

2009-04-26T16:01:00.002-04:00

The threat of romantic love.

It's called a thurible.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

PH300 Ancient Philosophy

April 26, 2009

Aristotle defines the soul to be what a living thing must have. The soul is inseparable from the body, it informs the functions of the body, and therefore it determines the category of a living thing. According to Aristotle’s own words, “[t]he soul…must be substance as the form of a natural body that is potentially alive…substance is actuality; hence the soul will be the actuality of this specific sort of body” (412a20). He likens the soul to the sight and the body to the eye. Since the sight ceases to exist when the eye ceases to exist, the soul vanishes when the body dies too. However, the soul is not a uniform entity. Aristotle subdivides it into its nutritive, perceptive, and reasoning potentialities. Whereas the soul of a plant has a nutritive potential, the soul of a human being has all three potentialities. Aristotle also states, “The soul is the cause and principle of the living body” (415b9). He must be thinking that any living body is healthiest or at its best when it fulfills what its soul is capable of being.

As a contrast to Aristotle’s notion of the soul, Plato thinks of the soul as an entity separable from the body. The soul can travel from person to person, and it retains the memories of each of its living cycles. After many uses, the soul can be worn out. Furthermore, Plato seems to think that a living thing does not necessarily die when its soul leaves; it may be unconscious, inactive, or fast asleep, but it can be alive and can function as normal. Aristotle actually criticizes Plato’s view in De Anima: “This vindicates the view of those who think that the soul is not a body but requires a body; for it is not a body, but it belongs to a body, and for that reason it is present in a body, and in this sort of body. Our predecessors were wrong, then, in trying to fit the soul into a body, even though it appears that not just any old thing receives any old thing” (414a20).

Brunhilde

2009-04-25T23:23:00.004-04:00

Soulmate.

I offered Yvonne's room to Mike so that he will have a place to stay when he comes here. He said that he could stay with his dad's friend over in Cambridge, but that woman was an crazy old person. He sounded almost too calm when I called, like a completely different person from a couple of nights ago. After hearing the horrible news of that BU medical student, I began to worry about Mike. Is he gonna be okay?

Isabella Tianzi Cai

PH258 Philosophy and Literature

April 25, 2009

Written by famous playwright Richard N. Goodwin and starring Emmy award winner Edward Herrmann, Two Men of Florence is an interesting theatrical reenactment of the historical confrontation between Galileo Galilei and the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. It is a serious play that explores the human capacity for science and religion. Centered on Galileo, it is by nature tragic, but it also stimulates our intellect and renders some old questions new. The stage is alive throughout, appealing to and surprising our senses at various places.

The play begins with the burning of a Dominican monk Giodano Bruno, who holds heretical beliefs such as the heliocentric view of the world first proposed by Nicholas Copernicus. Bruno is seen in the cold blue spotlight through some translucent draperies; only his words penetrate through the engulfing flames without any distortion. As a result of this special stage effect, the initial tone of the play is set rather chillingly. I almost wanted to cry for the poor old man.

The play then follows a less disturbing emotional trajectory till the end. Galileo’s (Jay O. Sanders) discovery of dissimilar objects falling in space in equal time is conveyed through his body language and his speech. Interestingly, the more nonchalant the people surrounding him are, the more sympathetic we as audience are. When his daughter Maria Celeste (Molly Schreiber) shows signs of understanding and tolerating his over-joyousness, the force of my sympathy weakens.

I bet Goodwin had wanted us to be affected by Maria by giving her a couple of fairly long monologues. Indeed among all other characters in the play, she appeals best to the average spectator in the theater. However, her affectionate voice prevents the play from achieving its tragic potential because we could pity Galileo more if he had not only been trampled upon more by his adversaries but also distanced by his daughter. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argues that people tend to sympathize with sorrow more than joy and great anguish effects more sympathy than small chagrin. Since Goodwin must know how to make a play more dramatic, I think that he must have purposely suppressed our emotions in this play so as to engage our intellect.

The play may get very intense at parts because of all of its philosophical discussions on science and religion. However, its stage art is superb. Three or more scenes, happening at different places and at different time, can take place simultaneously on the stage because of a multi-lane center wheel that accommodates different groups of interlocutors. The rendering of the stars is near-perfect for it is extremely close to my own experience of them in the countryside under the summer sky: the stars are numerous, they press hard to the eye, they are both near and far, and they even twinkle! As for smell, there is the smoke from the thuribles. Also in one scene, Galileo’s room is wrapped around by an amazing ceiling-high tapestry of real candles lit by Maria and fake candles undistinguishable from the real ones. Usually the set-up from one act to the next act take very little time or no time at all because the props can move with the floor.

If a film were to be made from the same story, it could be more intimate. However, Two Men of Florence allows us to look at the actors and the actresses unfiltered. At times, Jay O. Sanders’s and Molly Schreiber’s performances made me forget the physical theater.

Herder and Schiller

2009-04-20T21:45:00.009-04:00

I want to go on a picnic.

Mike phoned and asked me how to ask a woman out. He wasn't sure which way to be. The cool and indifferent kind? Or the straightforward kind? I can't decide for him, but in the end he seems to have chosen the latter, which is probably better. Also, he agrees that he thinks too much. I think that thinking too much is always a sign of love.

Professor Charles Griswold will take all of us out for dinner next Monday! We will go to Chef Chang's on Beacon Street. It's really rare to have professors who treat undergraduates this well. I love him!

Isabella Tianzi Cai

PH258 Philosophy and Literature

April 23, 2009

Question 4: Bergson claims that “mechanical rigidity” is the source of our laughter. Do you think that he is correct? Discuss at least two of his examples and two of your own.

Bergson’s claim that “mechanical rigidity” is the source of our laughter presupposes our intelligence in discerning the regularities in our surroundings. Basically, without the knowledge of what is supposedly going on, we will not discover what is rigid. Bergson associates such kind of knowing with our intellect rather than our emotions. He writes,

In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, thought perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. (63)

In order to laugh, we must prevent our emotions from taking over our intelligence. Expansive sympathy kills laughter because with it will eliminate the distance between the self and the other, which is critical for our intelligence at work. British writer Angela Carter has once said famously that “comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” If the dynamics of spectatorial distance in dramatic art are correctly understood here, we shall grant Bergson the premise of his claim.

Secondly, by “mechanical rigidity” that causes laughter, Bergson has in mind all aspects of a human being but puts his emphasis on the physical. With respect to our body, he discusses its forms, its gestures, and its movements; with respect to our mind, he only focuses on our psychology. According to him, the comic element in a human face does not come from its “ugliness” but its “rigidness” (79). Caricature elicits laughter from us because we see in it someone’s “whole life . . . crystallised into [a] particular cast of features” (76). A typical example would be the caricature of Marilyn Monroe; most pieces exaggerate her fake full lips and artificial eyebrows in order to make us laugh at her heavily “made-up” face. Yet, which female film star can afford to appear in the public without make-up?

The “mechanical rigidity” of our gestures and movements are easy to picture. Bergson gives the example of a speech maker. That person’s repeated gesticulation will leave an impression on his audience, who will then laugh when they correctly predict his movements (80). Bergson’s logic is as such,

The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living . . . This deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter. (82)

I do not agree with Bergson on this point because people repeat themselves indeed. Furthermore, repetition in drama can be both tragic and comic. In Antoine de Saint Expúry’s The Little Prince, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer keep doing what they are doing. They are reduced to their functions, but they do not make the little prince laugh at all. As a reader, I also did not laugh when I pictured them in my mind.

Bergson adds “an automatic regulation of society” as the cause of our laughter (90). His example is the custom-house officers who asked a bizarre question out of context. I would like to expand the definition a little by coining a new phrase—“an automatic regulation of a culture or a place.” One time my father was reading the newspaper while my mother was watching the television. My father came across some news of Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea and read it out loud. My mother, clearly absentminded at that moment, asked, “How come her last name is not Ke?” (Clinton is translated into Ke Lin Dun in Chinese while Chelsea is translated into Qie Er Xi.) Her question is funny, but it is because she had been thinking in Chinese.

Work Cited

Bergson, Henri. “Laughter.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkin University Press, 1980. 61-192.

Iphigeneia

2009-04-18T22:31:00.006-04:00

Beauty exists not in the desire for beauty,

it runs away with the desire for it.

Instant beauty may be deliberate,

but constant beauty will never be.

You will end up in beauty when you pursue something other than beauty,

so my young friend,

--why not focus your attention other than beauty?

The second last paper on Emile is hard to write.

Isabella Tianzi Cai

PH412 Philosophy of the Enlightenment

April 23, 2009

Why does Rousseau appeal to the most natural attribute of Sophie when he conjures her up? As he states it: “Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man” (357). This is a powerful statement and difficult to refute because what is, is. In fact, Aristotle precedes Rousseau in this view by fusing the formal cause and the final cause of a thing. Aristotle would agree with Rousseau that because Sophie is a woman, she ought to be a woman.

However, what is a woman? Although Rousseau does not idealize women including Sophie, his description of women is by and large historically and culturally constrained. Sometimes, he even discriminates against women for their intelligence: “The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women. All their studies ought to be related to practice” (386). I would rather think people in terms of their temperament and disposition when commenting on their intelligence. Just like in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment, some people are extroverted (E), others introverted (I); some are intuitive (N), others sensing (S); some are thinking (T), others feeling (F); and lastly, some are judging (J), others perceiving (P). Their analysis, which posits that INTP type handles abstract theories best of all, is far more convincing than Rousseau’s discussion on women and their intelligence.

Nevertheless, some of Rousseau’s observations correspond to those of my own. For example, I agree that generally speaking, “[m]an says what he knows; woman says what pleases” (376). I am glad that Rousseau does not think that it is a fault to be sensitive and attuned to people’s sentiments because men and women ought to complement each other, but I still find an assessment like that of MTBI speaks more volumes about what people are and not just who men or women are.

Henri Bergson

2009-04-13T00:18:00.022-04:00

A Poem (undergoing revision)

When her young eyes first looked at the world,

they were overwhelmed by its complexities, and

its beauty evoked a swarm of desires in her heart:

how to be smart? how to be pretty? how to be assertive? how to be cool? . . .

Seeing the melancholy in the old eyes surrounding her,

she no longer knew if her dreams would remain dreams if she aged too.

Those eyes didn't speak.

Shrouded in mystery, they defeated her curiosity.

Wisdom comes with age.

She wished that she could be 32 instead of 23.

When her young eyes then looked into her self,

they were disappointed by the messiness of her thoughts.

Maybe she has overlooked the natural orderliness of her mind by asking questions like:

what is love? what is generosity? what is forgiveness? what is virtue? . . .

Tidying up one corner, another appeared even messier.

Labor changed into fatigue and exhaustion,

and ideas also laughed hard at her.

Reason is not part of nature.

She wished that she'd not been a thinking thing but a wild flower.

Ziyun called. Sweetest thing! She will have two wedding banquets, one in Hangzhou, one in Singapore.

Chang must be very relieved but is probably disappointed too. He didn't get in Chapman. Next year he will be hunting for jobs and also re-applying some film graduate schools.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH412 Philosophy of the Enlightenment
April 13, 2009

Two interesting analyses of reason emerge in Emile Book IV. First, if we consider reason and conscience as the guidance of our actions, we shall realize that the latter outperforms the former. Rousseau writes, “Too often reason deceives us. We have acquired only too much right to challenge it. But conscience never deceives; it is man’s true guide” (286). The problem with reason is its persuasiveness. A mind that is not well-developed remains corruptible by false reason. Even if all arguments are logical, some are good while others bad. This is why Rousseau wants Emile to trust his conscience, which is developed internally despite its somewhat mysterious and illusive origin, rather than his reason, which is the exact opposite of conscience by being stimulated externally, in certain obscure situations.

Other qualities of reason that Rousseau keeps reminding us are its dryness and coldness. Supremely good reason may be painfully boring. This is why Rousseau wants to be careful with reasoning with Emile:

Never reason in a dry manner with youth. Clothe reason in a body if you want to make youth able to grasp it. Make the language of the mind pass through the heart, so that it may make itself understood. I repeat, cold arguments can determine our opinions, but not our actions. They make us believe and not act. They demonstrate what must be thought, not what must be done. If that is true for all men, it is a fortiori true for young people, who are still enveloped in their senses and think only insofar as they imagine. (323)

The disparity between people’s thoughts and actions is easliy explicable if we agree with Rousseau’s insight into the nature of reason. Although people know that it is wrong to do something bad, sometimes they still choose to do it because the reason not to do so is too cold and dry to stop them. Since Emile is to feel the same some time soon, Rousseau’s solution is to instill a good faith in Emile before Emile loses his heart. Rousseau thinks that religion is helpful in this case, but I see the role of religion mainly to counter the coldness and dryness of reason.

Anaximander

2009-04-09T16:45:00.013-04:00

Can I appreciate comedy? Can I ridicule tragedy?

My first time celebrating Passover with Jews and non-Jews at Julia's. Becca, Julia, Mary, Adrian, Sean, Rose, Kasha (from Poland), Danielle, Aya Ruthwell, another girl, and I all sat on the floor around a coffee table in the living room. Here are some of the new vocabulary I learnt (I am not able to spell all their names so I looked some of them up in Wikipedia): Matzos, Matzo Brittle-Julia showed me how to make it, ten plagues, Seder, Maror, Four cups of Wine, Afikoman, Haggadah, Charoset, boiled eggs, Manischewitz Kosher wine. I got to be the Wise Child. I also held Afikoman for ransom, which was a box of blackberries. Julia, Becca, and Rose sang a lot during the dinner. Everybody brought a bottle of wine over, and there were a lot of laughter.

Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH300 Ancient Philosophy
April 10, 2009

Aristotle states that happiness is the best good for human beings. There are two reasons. First, whatever things we do, we do “for the sake of our happiness” (1097b5). Second, happiness is complete (1097b5). We may think that to exercise regularly makes us healthy; however, Aristotle will argue that health is not the end goal in this case but our wellbeing or happiness. As for the second reason, Aristotle argues that it is absurd to think of happiness as lacking something because we cannot increase our happiness when we are happy.

Once Aristotle pins down happiness as human beings’ ultimate pursuit, he seeks to clarify what it is exactly by looking at “the function of a human being” (1097b25). To understand “the function of a human being,” we have to distinguish human beings from plants and animals first. The function of plants or animals should not overlap with the unique function of human beings. From this, Aristotle concludes that human beings must value reason above all other activities and treat reason as the ultimate route to our unique happiness. In Aristotle own words, “we take the human function to be a certain kind of life, and take this life to be the soul’s activity and action that express reason” (1098a10). Aristotle also replaces “reason” with “virtue” in his writing (1098b15); the replacement can be read as a further narrowing down of this unique happiness that human beings should pursue, namely, to live a moral life.

Aristotle has a clear conception of how happiness should manifest itself on human beings. Although I know that he is right, I also know that people have this urge to challenge a notion once it is stated clearly and distinctly. Human beings love clarity as well as vagueness. We need orderliness but at the same time also cannot live without messiness. I think that Aristotle’s arguments will probably face more challenges from scientists who do research in animal behaviors, but I do not think that Aristotle’s conclusion that human beings’ ultimate pursuit to be happiness is wrong.

Thales

2009-04-06T14:42:00.005-04:00

Diving into a clear pool. Nervous, agitated, focused, tense, disoriented, confident, felicit.

I went to another Zhang Yimou Week event last night after my swimming class. Professor Roy Grundmann was there too. He lost so much weight that I could almost not recognize him. I made two comments during the discussion. My comments were not very well stated, but I did have a point! In China, power manifests itself in rigid political structures. History has proven it over and over again!

Isabella Tianzi Cai

April 6, 2009

Thank you (Professor Ye, Megan, and others) for organizing this event. It’s wonderful to be here and talk about Zhang Yimou! (We do it for a week! Awesome!) I assume that most people here today have not seen Ju Dou. I hope by the end of presentation, some of you will be interested in seeing this film. It will be screened here tomorrow at 3 pm.

Freedom and Morality in Ju Dou

We say that a man is free when he or she is free to think and act, both for his own good. Perhaps in different cultures, the means to the same end varies drastically. However, it is absurd to think that people would harm to themselves for no good reason. This is why I think that the story of Ju Dou was tailored to awaken the thoughtless, unreflective, and apathetic lot, who has continued to live like dogs in China even today.

Yang Jinshan (Jinshan meaning a gold mountain) is a miserly silk dyer. He has an adopted son, Yang Tianqing, who is about forty years old. Jinshan has had two wives, who were rumored to have died in his hands without leaving him an heir. Ju Dou, the third woman bought into the household, much younger than the men, suffers no less. However, she rebels. Encouraged by Tianqing’s love (or lust, which I am not sure here), she takes control of her life and does not die tragically under Jinshan’s tyranny.

The film provokes our moral sentiments at various twists and turns of the plot, most of which centers on Tianqing, whom I would like to characterize as a chained man who is afraid of freedom. One night, Jinshan tortures Ju Dou again. Ju Dou screams at the top of her lungs. Tianqing, not more angry than scared, grabs a hatchet and cleaves a wooden stair which led to Jinshan and Ju Dou’s room. Why does the director make us witness Tianqing throughout this scene without an insert of what actually happens in Jinshan and Ju Dou’s room? In the end, Tianqing retrieves. A potentially revolutionary effort is stifled, and most distressingly, this event habituates Tianqing to cowardice.

Tianqing is presented with a perfect chance to kill Jinshan at one point. Jinshan lies unconscious on the way home after falling off his mule. Tianqing finds Jinshan in the dark. Carrying Jinshan on his back, Tianqing could have easily thrown him off the cliff. Especially after all the unthinkable maltreatment that Jinshan has committed against Ju Dou, we expect nothing to stop Tianqing from doing so. Yet, Tianqing is hesitant. He cannot bring himself to kill a person who has already killed his two wives and who, if lives, remains a threat to Ju Dou. Are we to conclude that Tianqing is too kind? Or are we supposed to question the man’s notion of freedom and morality?

Tianqing respects Jinshan because of Jinshan’s title. The hierarchy in the extended household is set: Jinshan is the head of the household whereas Tianqing is only an adopted son. As long as a male with a blood tie to Jinshan or Jinshan himself lives, Tianqing will not be recognized as anything more than a family slave. Tianqing understands the hierarchy, but it seems that as long as he can live, he does not challenge it. In his mindset, the hierarchy is something permanent, just like how our ancient Greek philosopher Thales views water as the ἀρχή or the first principle.

In contrast to Tianqing, Ju Dou does not condition herself to the hierarchy. She remains silent when it is necessary, but whenever she notices a chance to improve her wellbeing, she seizes it. She speaks of death frequently; she is so ready for it that she is no longer afraid of breaking the rules and the traditions. No question that she has her brief moments of happiness when she smiles beautifully, but Tianqing, with wrinkles all over his face, always smiles with incredible reserve and ineffable ache.

The story has a tragic ending. All the efforts that Ju Dou and Tianqing have made to live in peace end up no more eclectic than self-destructive. The apparent conclusion is that if you go against a rigid system without actually changing its structure, the system will crush you. When Ju Dou suggests that Tianqing and her son shall leave the village and start a life somewhere else, Tianqing says, “Don’t bring that up again. We have been through it all before. We have to look after the business and think about Tianbai.” For Ju Dou, the desire for freedom is her drive. For Tianqing, freedom does not matter that much. He is satisfied with sneaking out with Ju Dou and having quick sex under a scarcely frequented bridge. Throughout the film, he is the same old coward who waves the hatchet but who never confronts his authority.

On the other hand, we shall also ask ourselves if this man is really free to go if he makes such a choice. His reputation will follow him everywhere, and his life will be equally hard too. Whereas a woman, who is a subsidiary wherever she goes, wrecks no greater havoc than being called bad names, a man has to bear real burdens like supporting a family. Ju Dou has already produced a son. While she can count on her son to take care of her during her old age, Tianqing can only count on his labor. He sleeps in a different household and comes to work for Ju Dou in the day. He is afraid that by giving up this life, he will have no life.

Gladly that age is far gone. There are traces of China’s feudal hierarchy which persist in the Chinese mindset, but to think China as a country where arranged marriages happen everywhere is absurd. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese eradicated bad traditions along with those good ones. Peasants freed themselves from their oppressive landlords, but students also purged their teachers and professors. In other words, freedom and morality have failed to go hand in hand. As a filmmaker, Zhang Yimou has captured the root of the problem with Chinese culture especially in the 1920s. Chinese culture instills morality like respect, filial piety, and other values, but it chains every newborn to what his or her ancestors believe. Tianqing’s words still ring in my mind, “Don’t bring that up again. We have been through it all.” Many scholars have used the word “circular” to describe the East. I think that the function of Ju Dou is exactly to help divert this circular path by being provocative in an efficient way.

Cicero

2009-04-06T00:48:00.009-04:00

When am I free?

I presented my paper as part of the student panel on Zhang Yimou on Monday. After my presentation, Professor Cathy Ye asked me to be her T.A. My first time! I was so happy!

Isabella Tianzi Cai
PH412 Philosophy of the Enlightenment
April 6, 2009

“We judge happiness too much on the basis of appearances; we suppose it to be where it is least present” (229). Young people are easily fooled by appearances because appearances are most immediate to their senses. The old proverb goes, to see is to know. This applies best to young people who lack experiences in social interactions. Therefore, they do not recognize that “[b]oisterous games and turbulent joy veil disgust and boredom” and “melancholy is the friend of delight” (229). They also do not understand that “[t]enderness and tears accompany the sweetest enjoyments, and excessive joy itself plucks tears rather than laughs” (229). With no idea that appearances can be false, they are easily influenced by those who appear to have fun.

However, I wonder why when a young person witnesses wild joys, he or she does not experience jealousy. Rousseau warns us of the awakening of amour-propre due to comparison that one makes between oneself and others (235). The only logical conclusion that I can draw from the afar mentioned arguments is that reason is the sole culprit of amour-propre. Before there is reason, comparison is impossible, and jealousy is nowhere to be found. With the advent of reason in children, comparison springs into life and along comes amour-propre.

Of course, reason also guards us against amour-propre. Good judgment helps us decide our dominant passions: they can be “humane and gentle or cruel and malignant,” or they can be “passions of beneficence and commiseration or of envy of covetousness” (235). My own experiences confirm the relationship that I draw between amour-propre and reason because I often find people who are older than me share my joys and sorrows more readily than those who are younger. I do not think those who are older could have abandoned their reason when they sympathize with me, but I doubt that many of my younger friends know how to distinguish true happiness from apparent happiness.