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Outside in: ‘accented cinema’ at large

2006; Routledge; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14649370600849223

1469-8447

Asuman Suner,

Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics

Abstract Abstract This paper aims to engage in a critical analysis of the concept of 'accented cinema' recently developed by Hamid Naficy to refer to the emergent genre of exilic/diasporic filmmaking. Naficy's theorization of 'accented cinema' in particular and discussions around exilic/diasporic cinema in general will be challenged on the basis of the observation that the cinematic styles and thematic preoccupations associated with exilic/diasporic films consistently appear also in wide‐ranging examples of contemporary 'world' cinema that are often classified under the rubric of 'national cinemas'. To illustrate this observation, the paper provides a parallel reading of three recent films – A Time for Drunken Horses (1999) by Kurdish‐Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, Happy Together (1997) by Hong Kong director Wong kar‐wai, and Distant (2002) by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan – whose directors cannot possibly be considered as 'exilic/diasporic' in a conventional sense. Yet, it will be argued, the styles and thematic concerns associated with exilic/diasporic cinema manifestly prevail in all three films discussed in this paper as well as in many other examples of contemporary 'world' cinema. Departing from this observation, the paper will open up the new genre of 'accented cinema' to further questioning and suggest that unless the mutual entanglement between exilic/diasporic filmmaking and national cinema is disclosed, the notion of 'accented cinema' will not be sufficiently able to realize its critical potential. Keywords: Exilenational cinemaexilic/diasporic cinemaaccented cinema Notes 1. Deleuze and Guattari define 'minor literature' as a mode of discourse characterized by the 'deterritorialization of language', 'connection of the individual to a political immediacy' and 'collective assemblage of enunciation' (Deleuze and Guattari 1986 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]: 18). 2. Since the 1980s, several scholars have talked about exilic/diasporic experience as a productive aspect of cultural production in film studies. Kobena Mercer, for example, maintains that the 'diaspora perspective' in Black independent filmmaking in Britain has a critical potential to 'expose and illuminate the sheer heterogeneity of the diverse social forces always repressed into the margin by the monologism of dominant discourses' (Mercer 1994 Mercer, Kobena. 1994. "'Diasporic culture and the dialogic imagination: The aesthetics of Black independent film in Britain'". In Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 66). Teshome H. Gabriel, likewise, speaks of black independent cinema as 'nomadic' (a term emphasizing its African roots) for it has been informed by an experience of marginalization and deterritorialization (Gabriel 1994 Gabriel, Teshome H. 1994. "'Thoughts on nomadic aesthetics and the black independent cinema: Traces of a journey'". In Out There: Marginalization and contemporary cultures, Edited by: Ferguson, R. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. [Google Scholar]). In a similar wane, Trinh Minh‐ha's writings in the 1980s draw upon the paradoxes and possibilities of diasporic marginality in cultural politics of representation with a special emphasis on the question of gender (Trinh 1991 Trinh, T. Minh‐ha. 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 3. In The Skin of the Film, Laura U. Marks, for example, uses the term 'intercultural cinema' to describe the work of those filmmakers who are cultural minorities living in the West, often recent immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa (Marks 2000 Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 'Intercultural cinema', as a movement coming from 'the new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centers', according to Marks, is increasingly becoming a genre characterized by 'experimental styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge, or living as a minority in the still majority white, Euro‐American West' (Marks 2000 Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 3). Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze (1986 Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement‐image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 1989 Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time‐image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]) and Henri Bergson (1988 Bergson, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory, New York: Zone. [Google Scholar]), the particular focus of Marks' work is the ways that diasporic filmmakers excavate and rediscover cultural memories through appeals to multisensorial forms of recollection. 4. Naficy's (2001 Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) book develops a 'model' for the accented genre (an ideal type so to speak) and seeks to chart all the features that would possibly characterize it, although these features appear only partially in individual films that he discusses. 5. Wong tasted displacement at an early age. Talking about his transplant from Shanghai to Hong Kong as a child, he says 'when I got there, I spoke nothing but Shanghainese, whereas Cantonese was, and still is, the local dialect. For some time, I was totally alienated, and it was like the biggest nightmare of my life' (Wong 1997b Wong, Kar‐wai. 1997b. "'A dialogue with Wong Kar‐wai: Cutting between time and two cities'". In Wong Kar‐wai, Edited by: Lalanne, J. M. Paris: Editions Dis Voir. [Google Scholar]: 100). 6. 'Happy Together: A Story about Reunion' is the English title of the film. Rey Chow indicates that the Chinese title, which has been borrowed from the Chinese translation of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up and literally means 'unexpected revelation of scenes of spring', does not only sound quite different from the English one, but has also quite different connotations in the context of Hong Kong culture (Chow 2001 Chow, Rey. 2001. "'Nostalgia of the new wave: structure in Wong Kar‐wai's Happy Together'". In Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, Edited by: Tinkcom, M. and Villarejo, A. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 230). 7. Ghobadi, Wong and Ceylan received respectively the Camera d'Or, Best Director and Grand Jury Prizes for A Time for Drunken Horses, Happy Together, and Distant in Cannes Film Festival in the years 2000, 1997 and 2003. Ghobadi shared his award with Hasan Yektapanah's Jom'eh. Apart from the Grand Jury Prize, Distant, also won the acting awards for its two male leads (Mehmet Emin Toprak and Muzaffer Özdemir). Mehmet Emin Toprak, Ceylan's cousin and an amateur actor playing in all three of Ceylan's films, tragically died in a car crash the day after Distant was selected for the Festival. Sharing the Best Actor award with Muzaffer Özdemir, Toprak became the first actor ever to win a prize at Cannes posthumously. 8. Following its theatrical release in 2003, Distant reached a total audience of 57,745 in Turkey. In France, more than 80,000 watched the film in only three weeks following its theatrical release in February 2004 (Radikal, 'Uzak'ı Sevdiler', February 6, 2004 Radikal, 'Uzak'ı Sevdiler' (2004) February 6. [Google Scholar]). 9. Rey Chow reads Happy Together as a nostalgia film of a different kind in which nostalgia is '…no longer an emotion attached to a concretely experienced, chronological past; rather it is attached to a fantasized state of oneness, to a time of absolute coupling and indifferentiation' (Chow 2001 Chow, Rey. 2001. "'Nostalgia of the new wave: structure in Wong Kar‐wai's Happy Together'". In Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, Edited by: Tinkcom, M. and Villarejo, A. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 232). 10. For more discussion on Nuri Bilge Ceylan's cinema, see Suner (2004 Suner, Asuman. 2004. 'Horror of a different kind: dissonant voices of the New Turkish Cinema'. Screen, 45(1): 305–323. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 11. According to Rey Chow, compared to Ho's self‐aggrandizing and unfaithful attitude in Happy Together, Zhang's presence provides the suggestion of an alternative kind of affective relationship, one in which Lai's faithful and nurturing way of loving would become a mutually shared practice (Chow 2001 Chow, Rey. 2001. "'Nostalgia of the new wave: structure in Wong Kar‐wai's Happy Together'". In Key Frames: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, Edited by: Tinkcom, M. and Villarejo, A. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 237). 12. For more discussion on how the concept of the 'Third World' has appeared in film studies, see Shohat and Stam (1994 Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). 13. In the 1980s, the notion of Third Cinema was again taken up by film scholars. Teshome Gabriel reformulated some of the Third Cinema theses in his 1982 book Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Gabriel 1982 Gabriel, Teshome H. 1982. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. [Google Scholar]). In the 1986 Edinburgh Film Festival, the notion of Third Cinema was selected as a central concept. Following the conference, Paul Willemen and Jim Pines edited a volume in 1989 entitled Questions of Third Cinema (Willemen and Pines 1989 Willemen, Paul and Pines, Jim, eds. 1989. Questions of Third Cinema, London: BFI Publishing. [Google Scholar]). 14. In a recent article, Robert Stam suggests that the alternative aesthetics proposed by 'Third Cinema' manifestos typically revalorizes, by inversion, what had formerly been seen as negative, especially within colonialist discourse. 'At the same time, these aesthetics tends to turn strategic weakness into tactic strength. By appropriating an existing discourse for their own ends, they deploy the force of the dominant against domination' (Stam 2003 Stam, Robert. 2003. "'Beyond Third Cinema: The aesthetics of hybridity'". In Rethinking Third Cinema, Edited by: Guneratne, A. and Dissanayake, W. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 32). Stam focuses on three related aspects of these aesthetics: constitutive hybridity; chronotopic multiplicity; and the common motif of the redemption of detritus (loss, damage, injury). 15. Accented films, according to Naficy, tend to be less polemical in their ideological positioning and do not necessarily engage in Marxist politics and class struggle like many Third Cinema films did. Instead, their key concern seems to be the questions of displacement, belonging and identity and how they are experienced in both private stories of individuals and public stories of diasporic communities (Naficy 2001 Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 30). 16. Naficy makes this assertion about the situatedness of accented cinema as a response to Teshome Gabriel's argument that Third Cinema films may be made anywhere, by anyone, about any subject in a variety of styles and forms as long as they are oppositional and liberationist (Naficy 2001 Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 30). 17. For an extensive discussion and critique of the celebratory approach to 'exile', see Pels (1999 Pels, Dick. 1999. 'Privileged nomads: On the strangeness of intellectuals and the intellectuality of strangers'. Theory, Culture and Society, 16(1): 63–86. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 18. At its worst, a restrictive definition of 'situatedness' would serve to assist the center's appropriation of the periphery. For more discussion, see Nelly (1993 Nelly, Richard. 1993. "'Postmodernism and periphery'". In Postmodernism: A Reader, Edited by: Docherty, T. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. [Google Scholar]). 19. Naficy himself makes a similar point in an earlier article as he dwells on the multiple modalities of placement and displacement in contemporary global world and concludes that 'exile' should not be conceived as a generalized condition experienced by displaced people equally and uniformly (Naficy 1999 Naficy, Hamid. 1999. "'Framing exile: From homeland to homepage'". In Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, Edited by: Naficy, H. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]).