The Authorship of Place (original) (raw)

When I first encountered Hou Xiaoxian's and Jia Zhangke's films as a student of film history, I felt an immediate and intimate connection to the rural settings depicted in them, as if I were setting foot in the actual shooting locations in the Taiwanese and Chinese countryside. The images of the rural landscapes (see Figure 0.1) fashioned by these and other directors associated with the Taiwan New Cinema, and Fourth through Sixth Generation Chinese Cinema-known collectively as the New Chinese Cinema-felt uncannily familiar, blurring with memories from my own childhood of growing up in a rapidly transforming Asia. Alas, the experience of witnessing the countryside disappear in my childhood neighborhood in northern Taiwan-and be redeveloped overnight into industrial parks and luxury housing-was a traumatic memory I thought I had long forgotten until it was vividly projected onto the silver screen. Sitting in the college auditorium experiencing the settings as if I were at a virtual homecoming, I felt certain that the location-shot works of the New Chinese Cinema captured in their portraits of rural 1. The term "auteur" refers to filmmakers who exhibit distinctive and consistent narrative and aesthetic tropes throughout their works. In its original formulation by French film theorists contributing to Cahiers du Cinema, auteurs were conceived of as directors who made art out of images, whose creative visions shone through in spite of commercial constraints. As critics of the auteur theory later pointed out, however, the notion of autonomy is itself a myth-especially in the capital-and laborintensive film industry. Unlike their French New Wave predecessors, none of the auteurs in this work claim to create art for art's sake or seek to fashion art in a social vacuum. Indeed, one of the strategies Chinese and Taiwanese auteurs have employed to differentiate themselves from their Western counterparts is by stressing how their works are impacted by their sociocultural, institutional, and political environments, thus making their films authentic "documents" of their lived experiences. 4. This is a pattern that can also be found in numerous other interviews with Western scholars and critics, such as in Michael Berry's Speaking in Images (2005). Ostensibly to avoid controversy, it is more common to find Chinese and Taiwanese auteurs describing their influences in terms of their cultural identity, philosophical views, autobiographical background, and artistic training than in their politics. 5. The question of how places are "made" has been a fundamental one in the field of cultural geography since the 1970s. One of the first waves of scholarship to systematically theorize the role of agency in making sense of place can be found in the field of humanist geographies, perhaps best known through Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place (1977). Complicating earlier studies that viewed landscapes as the effects of predetermined sociocultural practices, Tuan's landmark contribution proposed that place should be viewed as a fundamental building block in a subject's sense of phenomenological, cultural, and social being. He argued that our identities, sociocultural belief systems and worldviews, as well as relationships with others not only occur in settings that are preexisting "containers" of action but are constitutive of place itself. This book thus joins the rapidly growing film and media studies subfield of location shooting studies to examine the complex relationships between cinematic representations of place and the cultural politics of film and media production. A field currently dominated by histories and production studies of Hollywood (James 2005; Palmer 2016; Gleich 2018; Gleich and Webb 2019; Steinhart 2019), relatively few book-length studies based in Asian production 7. In the pioneering collection of critical studies on Hollywood location shooting, Joshua Gleich and Lawrence Webb (2019) argue that such a sociological approach would involve systematically examining location shooting as social practices in a workplace or social environment "stratified by class, race, and gender relations" (5). 8. According to Daniel Steinhart (2019), postwar Hollywood film directors who shot on location aimed to craft images that only looked visually authentic. This is in sharp contrast to European New Wave auteurs, such as the Italian neorealists, who strove to arrive at film "truth" through location shooting (Nowell-Smith 2013). For the Chinese and Taiwanese auteurs in this book, creative practices are in general viewed in less immediately commercial or individualistic terms. Rather than constituting simply a form of artistic craft or an experiment in existentialist truth seeking, location shooting-along with other aesthetic techniques-is viewed by auteurs as a social practice through which the individual finds his or her unique voice through cultural critique. 20. Similarly, Hou Xiaoxian has, in response to Michael Berry's interview question regarding the recurring motif of "movement" and the "dialogic relationship between the country and the city, " explained that the meaning underlying his focus on mobility is his "longing for the world outside. " Hou continues to elaborate how "living in a small, closed space, it is only natural to look to the outside in order to develop. This longing for the outside seems to have almost unconsciously worked its way into my films in these road sequences" (2005, 257). 21. This does not imply that auteurs experience rural places solely through the tourist perspective. Bearing fraught relationships with their shooting locations-as those uprooted from stable notions of place and belonging by radical sociocultural and geopolitical changes-New Chinese Cinema auteurs clearly engage in what Hamid Naficy (2001) has called "accented" modes of production. In existing auteur studies of New Chinese Cinema directors, one of the primary lenses through which the auteurs' styles are examined is how accented lived experiences such as exile, homecoming, nomadism, and homelessness impact their aesthetics. My study seeks to both complement and complicate these studies by looking at how auteurs' accented lived experiences are dialectically related to their experiences of place through the tourist gaze. I argue that it is precisely because of auteurs' "accented" lived experiences, which defamiliarize their perceptions of the communities and spaces encountered in the midst of production, that the tourist gaze becomes such a fundamental aspect underlying their experiences of rural places.