Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2
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Free-Indirect-Discourse Reboot: Beijing Queer Independent Cinema as a Mediating Environment / Victor Fan
Abstract
In this essay, I first introduce the background of queer independent filmmaking in Beijing—in theory and practice—and its uneasy, if not outright antagonistic, relationship with a state authority that has compelled filmmakers, festival curators, and critics to rethink and reconstruct queer cinema, as what Weihong Bao would call a mediating environment. By mediating environment, I mean that contemporary Chinese queer cinema is best understood not only as a collection of films, but also an interactive and intersubjective sociopolitical and critical discourse among the audience, political activists, filmmakers, critics, and scholars through film and video, critical writing, on-site and online discussion, film festival, or even education and protest that put into question the overall dispositif in which queerness is defined, constructed and reconfigured.
Keywords: Queer Independent Cinema, dispositif, free-indirect discourse
<1> In the past few years, my colleagues and I at the Chinese Visual Festival in London and some scholars who attended the Beijing Independent Film Festival began to notice the emergence of a new group of independent queer filmmakers based in Beijing, including Kokoka (pseudonym of 薛鉴羌 Xue Jianqiang, 1984- ), Yang Pingdao (1980- ), and Zheng Kuo (郑国霖, 1976- ). These directors depart from an earlier generation of Chinese queer filmmakers like Fan Popo (范坡坡, 1985- ) and Cui Zi'en (崔子恩, 1958- ), and in fact, Chinese duli (independent) filmmakers who started their careers in the 1990s in terms of their cinematic style and understanding of how the cinematographic image, in its approach to reality, can serve as a form of direct political engagement. For example, like Fan and many earlier independent filmmakers, these new queer directors continue to use the film language of xianchang (situatedness), often compared to cinéma vérité or direct cinema, but not as a method of "objective" documentation (cf. Robinson 2013: 34-35, 84-91). Rather, they use it as a form of direct corporeal engagement that puts into question the viewers' subjectival position and sense certainty. Meanwhile, unlike Cui, these new filmmakers stay away from stylized camerawork, editing, coloration and special effects that seek to create a critical distance between the spectators' perception and the reality the film represents. Instead, they make fictional representations of acts of violence committed by young men from abandoned towns and villages with a keen sensibility to the camaraderie between men and the corporeality of the male body. They do so by employing deliberately rough camerawork, gritty texture and interruptive editing that uncompromisingly break any sense of narrative continuity, logical coherence and aesthetic elegance.
<2> The emergence of this new form of queer cinema signifies a need of a new mode of cinematic intervention as these filmmakers wrestle with the continued invisibility of independent queer cinema in China, and to reevaluate realism as a strategy of engaging the audience in queerness not only as a critical discourse, but also as an embodied experience. In this essay, I first introduce the background of queer independent filmmaking in Beijing—in theory and practice—and its uneasy, if not outright antagonistic, relationship with a state authority that has compelled filmmakers, festival curators and critics to rethink and reconstruct queer cinema, as what Weihong Bao would call a mediating environment (2015: 30). By mediating environment, I mean that contemporary Chinese queer cinema is best understood not only as a collection of films but also as an interactive and intersubjective sociopolitical and critical discourse among the audience, political activists, filmmakers, critics and scholars through film and video, critical writing, on-site and online discussion, film festival, or even education and protest that put into question the overall dispositif in which queerness is defined, constructed and reconfigured.
<3> Thereafter, I turn to two films made by Kokoka, Huoxing zonghezheng (火星综合症Martian Syndrome, 2013) and Canfei kehuan (残废科幻Deformity Sci-fi, 2013). I argue that these two films exemplify a cinematic experience that refuses to ground itself in any form of subjective positionality; yet in so doing, the cinematographic image oddly embodies a highly subjective sensorium of someone who has lived through such experiences of physical and social violence. Such a strategy resonates with what Pier Paolo Pasolini would call a free-indirect discourse, i.e. a poetry of im-signs that defies grammatical logic, yet derived from the unconscious deposit of fear, anxiety, desire and pleasure, which directly engages the spectators to work through their sociopolitical traumas (1976: 1: 544). By reconfiguring queer cinema as a free-indirect discourse, these films critique the conflicting senses of fear, alienation, nihilism, self-hate and sadomasochism of those queer subjects under state violence and surveillance. In so doing, they make visible, or in fact, sensible, the dispositif that informs the spectators' sense certainty, allowing them to rewrite the established understanding between the sociopolitical norm and queerness.
Contemporary Queer Cinema as a Mediating Environment
<4> Independent queer cinema emerged in the PRC in the early 1990s. Since then, Beijing-based filmmakers and festival curators have maintained an uneasy relationship with the city government. Despite the fact that the state gradually acknowledged the legitimacy of independent filmmaking in China between 1995 and 1999 and that homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) still considers explicit representation of queer sexuality and non-normative gender identities as grounds for denial of a license for distribution in mainstream movie theaters and broadcast television (Mo and Xiao 2006: 146; Qu 2003: 192). In 2001, the first Beijing Queer Film Festival (BQFF) opened in the South Wing of the Peking University Library. It showcased six medium-budget fiction films including Zhang Yuan's Donggong xigong (東宮西宮East Palace, West Palace, 1995), Liu Bingjian's Nannan nünü (男男女女 Men and Women, 1999), and Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu ( 藍宇, 2001) (2015). Even though the festival received an acknowledgement from SAFRT, the university projectionist interrupted the screening of East Palace, West Palace and decried it as morally corruption. The projectionist's complaint brought the festival to the attention of SARFT and the Beijing city police. Since then, subsequent editions of the BQFF were forced into exile in independent art galleries, foreign embassies, cafés, artist communes and other venues, as city police constantly interrupted screenings and discussion sessions by accusing them of breaching sanitation regulations or endangering public safety (Bao 2016).
<5> As Bao Hongwei argues, the presence of state surveillance and intervention inspired festival curators Cui Zi'en, Fan Popo, and Stjn Deklerck to turn their attention from studio-style fiction films to Beijing-based documentary films and experimental fictions that use cinema as a form of direct audience engagement. In addition, these festival organizers chose their sites of exile strategically to signal their positionality vis-à-vis the city of Beijing and the state. For example, the second edition of the BQFF took place in the Songzhuang Art Village outside the city, under the auspices of the Li Xianting Foundation and the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF). The following year, however, the festival curators moved the screenings back to galleries, cafés and community centers in Central Beijing to reoccupy the urban center. Yet, these strategies also signaled to the city government that the BQFF considered itself not only a cultural event but also a mode of political activism, triggering an even higher level of police intervention and surveillance through the internet and mobile phones. As a result, the seventh edition of the festival mobilized a series of overseas servers to stream the films online, and in one event, the festival attendants boarded a train from Beijing to Dalian to watch a film distributed by USB sticks during their voyage (Bao 2016; "Political Ceremonies" 2015).
<6> In this sense, contemporary queer cinema in Beijing is best understood as a public sphere where private opinions about queer identities, values and ethics are publically exchanged, discussed, disseminated and reconfigured (Hansen 1999: 59-77). Yet this public sphere is constantly rendered invisible, and its participants must constantly seek new modes of mediation that can either effectively resist state power or insist within its institutional structure in order to decode and recode its dispositif or ideological mechanism. Chris Berry, in fact, argues that the term "public sphere" is not directly applicable to contemporary China, especially the boundary between the private and the public that, after half a century of socialist intervention and under a rapid transition between state and corporate modes of public surveillance, is constantly revised, blurred and challenged. For Berry, in post-socialist China, public spaces are formed that cut across different mediating platforms, where private opinions are indeed exchanged, decoded and recoded under governmental or social surveillance; yet these spaces are highly fragmented, and they constantly reconstitute themselves without any attempt or even desire to construct a structurally coherent "sphere" (Berry, Harbord and Moore 2013: 1-15, 110-134).
<7> In Fiery Cinema, Weihong Bao proposes the idea of conceptualizing the cinema as part and parcel of a larger "mediating environment," i.e. an assemblage of interrelated yet semiautonomous social, cultural, and political discourses and media that (1) makes transparent those sociopolitical relationships that are informed by the larger dispositif; (2) allows different perspectives and ideas to resonate in the process of mediation; and (3) agitates the participants of the mediating environment by engaging themselves in political actions (2015: 30). In this light, contemporary independent queer cinema in the PRC can be considered a mediating environment that makes transparent the intersecting relationships between the various public spaces within the larger dispositif, mediates conflicting opinions by creating affective resonances, and agitates its participants to engage themselves in political actions.
<8> It is important to remember that queer film festivals in other cities do not face the same level of challenge as the BQFF. For example, the ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival enjoyed mainstream publicity and corporate sponsorship. In a way, being one of the four direct-controlled municipalities in the PRC (the others being Beijing, Tainjin and Chongqing), a level of governance immediately below the Central government, the city government of Shanghai enjoyed a high degree of administrative autonomy. In the eyes of city government, ShanghaiPRIDE helps promote the image of Shanghai as a culturally liberal and cosmopolitan space, a site of major business opportunity and a gay-friendly tourist attraction. In fact, the Shanghai curators sometimes criticize their Beijing counterparts for being too stubborn in their commitment to political activism (Bao 2015). [1] Nonetheless, such obstinacy, I argue, is a direct result of state surveillance and police intervention, a power that strips queer filmmakers and audiences of their political agency by reducing them to bare lives that can be managed, regulated or even legally persecuted.
<9> The idea of bare life is, in fact, important for us to conceptualize the relationship between state power and the queer filmmakers and activists it seeks to manage or even persecute. In "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Critique of Violence," 1921), Walter Benjamin identifies two functions of violence in relation to the law: the lawmaking violence, by which a new legal order is constituted; and the law-preserving violence, a violence that stems from an authority outside the law, which punishes individuals who exercise violence against the law. For Benjamin, lawmaking violence has its root in Hellenistic mythic violence, according to which the gods and goddesses annihilate the mere (i.e. animal or prepoliticized) lives that challenge fate with bloodshed. These challengers are punished not because any law was broken; rather, the mere lives bear the guilt of standing against the power of fate, and the act of retribution by the gods and goddesses instantiate a new law founded upon this guilt. Law preserving violence, however, has its root in the Judaic-Christian notion of divine violence, a violence
rooted in a commandment that prevents its own violation. It aims at preserving and managing the sacredness (being severed or standing outside) of the "total condition" of being human. This "total condition" of being human is, ironically, none other than mere life, and the divine power strikes, threatens and even annihilates the sacred life without bloodshed, i.e. by concealing the evidence that the life it punishes must stand outside the law as mere life before the retribution takes place (Benjamin 1978: 277-300).
<10> In Homo Sacer (1995), Giorgio Agamben distinguishes the difference between zoē (biological life) and bios (political life). He argues that the term sacer (sacred or sever) signifies a life that is neither holy nor profane, but a ban or severing of a human life from the political community. A sovereign occupies precisely this position, allowing them to exercise an authority they derive from the absence of the law in order to constitute the law of the polis. For the same reason, however, anyone from the political community can kill them without breaking the law (1998: 71-115). When Agamben reworks this idea in Stato di eccezione (State of Exception, 2003), he identifies this state of exception as pure violence. He argues that in this zone, since the law-in-force is suspended, the political life and the community, whose interiority and exteriority the law seems to define, also dissolve. From the point of view of the law-in-force, this zone seems to be outside the law; yet this absence of the force-of-law, and the biological life that inherits it, is the foundational element of the law-in-force. It is a force that executes and manages this biological life and lends such life the status of its political life (Agamben 2005: 50-51).
<11> The term "bare life" is often understood as a marginalized group that is depoliticized and executed by the state. Nevertheless, such an understanding overlooks the Möbius-like structure of the relationship between political power and bare lives in the way that both the state and the bare lives are politicized and depoliticized (in a way, politicization is depoliticization) by an abstract authority derived from their state of exception. What appears to be the interiority of a political community is, in fact, the exteriority from which members of the political community act as the agents and patients of violence. As I shall demonstrate, the difference between the older and newer generations of Chinese independent queer films lies in the latter's awareness that "victims" of state power are, in fact, co-implicated in the dispositif that informs the discursive space where queer subjects are actively subjectivized and desubjectivized, politicized and depoliticized. Meanwhile, the depoliticized and dehumanized lives stand against the state's law preserving violence by actively exercising their own law making violence—precisely, as bare lives.
Stylistic Shift: From Subjectivization to Desubjectivization
<12> Since the 1990s, Beijing-based queer filmmakers have instrumentalized the cinema as a means of reclaiming their political agency, and many of them continue to do so to this day. As Luke Robinson aptly points out, documentary filmmakers fully embrace the idea of xianchang (situatedness) not only as an aesthetic device, but also as a means to constitute the cinematographic image as an embodiment of queer consciousness, and as a medium of intersubjectival negotiation (2013: 34-35). The term "situatedness" was first coined by early independent filmmakers including Zhang Yuan (张元, 1963- ), Wang Xiaoshuai (王小 帅, 1966- ), Wu Wenguang (吴文光, 1956- ), Duan Jinchuan (段锦川, 19XX- ), Lou Ye (娄烨, 1965- ), and Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯, 1970- ), and is often compared to cinéma vérité in some of these directors' penchant to employ an observational camera to present an objective mode of reality. Nevertheless, as Wu Wenguang argues, the observational camera does not guarantee objectivity; rather, by using it, one asserts the presence of the camera as an observer and a mediator of the relative positionalities among the filmmaker, the filmed subjects and event, and the larger sociopolitical discourse that informs the way by which the audience understands the event and the mediated image (Zhang 2006: 33; Lü 2003: 9, 11, 31). For queer filmmaker and curator Cui Zi'en, the situatedness technique breaks down the divide between the filmmaker, the image, and the audience by allowing all the parties to partake of the event as an embodied experience—and in the film festival, an active political intervention (Zhang 34-37).
<13> For instance, in Laizi yingdao (Chinese characters VaChina Monologue, 2013], Fan Popo documents the performances, workshops and interviews of university professors, students and social educators, who perform localized versions of Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologue (1996) in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. In the film, these performers and educators speak to the camera directly, and the spectators are fully aware of the presence of the camera and Fan Popo not as their interlocutors, but as participants who actively engage them in a political dialogue. These interviews are then intercut with recordings of the actual performances and workshops without any voiceover or commentary. According to one of the educators Lin Xu, the workshop participants brought the play and the film to the countryside to educate young women on gender identities and sexuality, in a way akin to Mao Zedong's idea of shangshan xiaxiang (up to the mountains; down to the villages), a political movement in the late 1960s in which university graduates resettled in the country in order to inculcate the farmers with socialist theory, and to learn from the farmers their lived experience of socialist reality.
<14> We may find that in the idea of situatedness, the boundary between the individual and the collective is ambiguously defined. In fact, Lin's reference of Mao's "up to the mountains; down to the villages" is both symptomatic of those socialist values from the past that remain dormant in the postsocialist present, and characteristic of a longing for a socialist modernity that has never come to fruition. Based on the writings of Wu Wenguang, Yingjin Zhang aptly argues that the concept of individuality emerges in postsocialist China not as an absolute value that stands against the collective. Rather, the collective is reconfigured as an assemblage of mutually dependent yet potentially conflicting positionalities, while an individual's subjectivity, once positioned in relation to other positionalities, is inevitably involved in a process of active deconstruction (2006: 34-37). For Chen Mo and Zhiwei Xiao, a term that emerged around 1999, wowo zhuyi (me-me'ism) carefully captures this idea by juxtaposing two subjectival positions, wowo (me-me) into a dualistic unit, thus encapsulating the individual and the collective into a dialectical relationship (2006: 148).
<15> As Jason McGrath argues, this equivocal relationship between the individual and the collective is in itself symptomatic of postsocialist modernity. For McGrath, postmodernity is not a simple return of capitalist modernity after a wholesale failure of socialist modernity. Rather, postsocialist modernity is "a form of global modernity that takes place after the collapse of socialist modernity, yet it occupies a temporality between a socialist modernity that is both 'not yet' and 'has already failed,' and a modernity that has yet to be materialized and cannot possibly 'be.'" It is because modernity is in itself driven by a "desire to consume and the illusion of free choices always circulate around an absence, a void the consumers and free individuals aim to pursue in the first place" (Fan 2016; McGrath 2008: 13-15, 55-58). In a sense, postmodernity makes visible, or in fact, sensible, the very void that constitutes the core of modernity—be that capitalist, socialist or postsocialist—and by extension, the co-implication of the individual in the larger circulation of consumerist desire, and the dispositif that guarantees the continual circulation of such desire.
<16> As I have argued elsewhere, the ambiguity between individuality and collectivity is, in fact, symptomatic of a deeper conflation among three concepts: individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy. In capitalist modernity, these three concepts are often packaged as mutually dependent. Even in Lacanian psychoanalysis, individuation takes place when an imaginary subjectivity is constituted, which gives an "individual" an illusion of mobility and political autonomy. In postsocialist modernity, individuation does not always guarantee subjectivity and autonomy (2016). As Kiki Yu argues:
In the postsocialist era, the individual is liberated from the ideology and social system of collectivism through the process of decollectivization. By using the light and simple digital camera, the individual turns the camera lens to the self in order to make visible their subjectivity courageously, and magnify their personal voice openly. Nonetheless, the film is also part and parcel of a reality in which the individual has yet to be liberated completely from the social relationships inherited from the traditional collectivist past [that is, both in feudal and socialist societies]. In fact, their conflicts are multi-layered, as they are embedded in the complex relationships in the family, among people, and between people and the state. In sum, as a practice, this kind of image is highly constructive: in the multiple and interconnected relationships, individual subjectivity is being reconstructed over and over again. (2012)
<17> In other words, contemporary independent queer cinema is not necessarily about an individual versus a collective, for this dualistic concept presupposes the fact that both the individual and the collective are states of being that are diametrically opposed to each other. Rather, based on Gilbert Simondon's idea, I argued elsewhere that individuation is not a state of being, but a process of becoming:
If individuation is indeed an ongoing process, there is no being, but only a process of becoming. Each stage of individuation is in itself a potentiality for deindividuation, as ontogenetically connected energies (e.g. generated by substances, members of a society, animals, or objects) produce a set of critical points—irregularities that set themselves apart from the "norm." In this sense, "I" come to identify myself, or become subjectivized, as the critical points that constitute "I" individuate themselves from other ontogenetically connected energies. Yet this process of individuation and subjectivization does not sever myself from other ontogentically connected "beings"; rather, it produces other possibilities by which I relate to them, possibilities that can only be actualized through a process of deindividuation and desubjectivization. (Fan 2016; cf. Simondon 2015: 75-81; Combes 2013: 1-24)
In this sense, the homo sacer (severed man) is in fact not entirely cut off from the political community at large; rather, it is ontogenetically connected with other severed lives as new critical points are in the process of informing. Individuality and collectivity are not absolute values; rather, they are relationships between critical points that constantly seek their own redefinitions through acts of juridical violence.
Poetry of Cinema Rebooted
<18> For the independent queer filmmakers today, given that the state constantly individuates and deindivuates, subjectivizes and desubjectivizes queer lives as homines sacri, what is at stake is not how these depoliticized lives can reindividuate themselves as political subjects, but how they are co-implicated in this process of deindividuation and desubjectivization within a juridical mechanism to which both the state and the depoliticized lives subscribe. By understanding their agency in this process, the spectators may actively rethink the ways by which they can take control of this process of deindivuation and desubjectivization not as a means of reindividuating and resubjectivizing themselves under the social hegemony, but as a form of liberation from the hegemony itself.
<19> Of all the contemporary Beijing-based queer films, Kokoka's works stand out as prime examples of this new mode of intervention. What strikes most viewers about Kokoka's works is his wujiezhi (unrestrained) visual style, one that defies ideas such as narrative logic and audiovisual elegance in camerawork and editing, a sensibility that underlines both studio and independent filmmaking. Kokoka began his career as an amateur filmmaker, after he dropped out of school at the age of fifteen. Hence, at first glance, it is tempting to label his style "amateur." Nevertheless, the unrestrainedness of his style is so consistent and systematic that it must be understood as a poetics in its own right.
<20> Martian Syndrome is about a young gay man who seeks refuge in his own home against his suitor. The young man calls his friend to join him. During the course of the film, the young man claims that both he and his suitor are Martians. They met on the outskirt of Beijing and the young man took his suitor in. His suitor promised that he would adjust to his life on earth financially and emotionally, but the suitor turned out to be a liar. The young man kicked his suitor out of his house and accused his suitor of harassing him. The young man's friend talks to the suitor and threatens to call the police, yet the suitor claims that it is the young man who keeps inviting the suitor back to his house. The entire film is shot with a night-vision camera on a two-hour long DV tape, with minimal cutting between the young man and his friend inside the house and the suitor outside. The camera mostly stays from a third-person observational position, with the three characters occasionally looking into the camera lens. In the final half-hour, the film interrupts these long takes by cutting back to some of the earlier moments in the film to reveal the inconsistency of the young man and the suitors' testimonies. In the end, the young man and his suitor has a talk between a screen door. Their conversation reveals that their relationship is a highly codependent and sadomasochistic one, as the young man willingly forgives the suitor and acknowledges his pleasure of going through the ritual of being harassed by his suitor, shunning him, and condoning him in a vicious cycle.
<21> It is tempting to read Martian Syndrome allegorically as the film refers to Cui Zi'en's 2004 film Xingxing xiang xixi (星星相吸惜Star Appeal), allegorizing gay men as Martians who are attracted to and treasure the company of other Martians. Nonetheless, Kokoka is less interested in creating a visual metaphor, than in engaging the audience in a structure of feelings of "desperation, confusion, fear, and nihilism" under public surveillance and state power (Mudge 2015). As Yu argues, "Martian Syndrome documents the isolated selves in a public space. These selves narcissistically expose themselves [in front of the camera], and they also unrestrainedly unveil the personal secrets of those people around them at a zero-degree distance." For Yu (2012), the film is symptomatic of the young generation of gay men's desire to seek family relationships and sense of protection in a society that actively deprive them the opportunity to do so.
<22> For me, the young men in Martial Syndrome are not actively seeking family relationships in a traditional sense; rather, the film makes tangible sensations and longings that are often mutually conflicting and inconsistent. Unlike Cui's Martians, who are gradually ostracized by the earthlings as their mutual attraction becomes increasingly visible, the young man and the suitor in Martian Syndrome are victims of each other's sadomasochistic desires. In the beginning of the film, for example, the young man speaks to the camera person (presumably Kokoka himself) about his predicament. Through the lens of the night-vision camera, we are asked to see the young man nervously seeking safety and protection in the dark, groping for his cigarettes, and exposing his state of vulnerability. Yet, this night-vision camera reminds us the omnipresence of public surveillance of which we are partaking by watching the film. In fact, by occasionally addressing the camera, the young man, his friend, and his suitor not only perform for the camera voluntarily and put into question the truth value of their performed testimonies, but also actively implicate the spectators into the process of surveillance as they monitor the process of their negotiation. To a certain degree, we begin to feel that the young man's state of vulnerability is in fact performed for the camera as a narcissistic erotic display (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Physical and Mental Vulnerability as Narcissistic Erotic Display
<23> Throughout the film, the young man begs the camera person and his friend to stay and keep him company, and the longer we stay with the young man and listen to his complaint about his suitor, the more we begin to witness and experience his fear of loneliness in the dark, his nihilistic view of being different in a hostile urban environment, and his confused affect towards submitting himself to his suitor's harassment. Shot in a summer night, the young man and his friend remain bare-chested, and in order to comfort the young man, his friend caresses his chest in an erotic manner, thus suggesting that although the young man's codependent and self-abusive relationship has generated all his anxiety and fear, he is ultimately drawn to it because it gives him sexual satisfaction and comfort. Towards the end of the film, the young man talks to his suitor through a screen door. The young man explains to his suitor that violence and harassment cannot solve any problems (Figure 2). Immediately after he has made this statement, Kokoka cuts to the footage from an earlier part of the film, in which the young man confesses to the camera that he wishes to chop his suitor to pieces (Figure 3). In this sense, the film critiques not only the violence of state power, but also the masochistic pleasure of submitting oneself to state power and self-effacement, as well as the body politics of desire that propels the sadomasochistic relationship between the state apparatus and the bare lives, and among gay men who are desperate for comfort and pleasure.
Figure 2. Violence-No Solution
Figure 3. The Wish—to Exercise Violence Against His Suitor
<24> Deformity Sci-fi is set in a post-apocalyptic village outside Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. The film can be roughly understood as a coming-of-age story of a teenage gangster who seeks pleasure in extreme physical violence. After his father dies of tuberculosis, the boy grows up into a young man, and he moves to Taiyuan and joins a small gang from whom he seeks camaraderie and corporeal. Being unable to enter any heteronormative relationship and driven out of his existence by the police, the young man tries to return to his hometown. But his trip is interrupted as he takes a break along the river, where his Martian mother appears in the sky and condemns him eternally from family life and manhood.
<25> In one register, Deformity Sci-fi follows a certain Oedipal/post-Oedipal logic. In the beginning of the film, the teenage gangster goes home to visit his dying father. The father spits out some phlegm onto a tissue and asks the son to ingest it as a contract of agreement that the son will take care of the mother after his death (Figure 4). In the ritual, the father in fact accuses the son of killing him because of the son's ruthlessness and unruliness. This promise is never fulfilled. On the contrary, the son abandons his family and joins a gang in Taiyuan. This ritual is transferred from the kinship between the father son to an alternative kinship between men, as the young man is asked to drink a cup of water after his "brother" in the gang has spat into it (Figure 5). Throughout the film, the young man constantly seeks camaraderie and companionship through exchanges of blood, urine, filth, phlegm, and other bodily fluids with other gang members, as though these abject rituals would enable him to revisit not only the trauma of his father's death, but also his drive of abandoning or even killing his father. Symbolically, this ritual of male-to-male bonding constantly reminds the young man and the viewers of his act of "patricide." By repeating this ritual, same-sex bonding becomes simultaneously an act of rebellion against the father and heteronormative kinship, and a rite of passage in which an alternative kinship is fostered out of their acts of violence (as gangsters). This sadomasochistic quest for male bonding through acts of violence in fact bars the young man from forming any heterosexual romance, and in the end, the young man is killed by an omnipotent Martian mother who spits on his face from heaven.
Figure 4. Phlegm as a Contract of Agreement
Figure 5. Spittle as a Contract of Loyalty.
<26> That being said, this narrative logic is not immediately apparent upon the first viewing of the film. It is because formally, the film is composed of a seemingly aleatory selection of styles that systematically defies any form of visual or narrative logic: from breathtaking static shots of the sceneries of the countryside to unstable handheld cameras that observe and capture scenes from angles and perspectives that are not motivated by any narrative logic; from long takes to montage; and from straight-on camera angles to turning the camera upside down. The effect of this systematically eclectic style is akin to what Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) would call a free-indirect discourse. In his essay "Il cinema di poesia" ["Cinema of Poetry," 1965], he compared the way cinema communicates with the way the "deaf and dumb Neapolitans" did with each other by means of signs and gestures. He argues:
One can suppose … the existence of a unique system of signs by gestures as unique instrument of communication for man … : it is from such a hypothetical system of visual signs that language derives the foundation of its existence and the possibility of allowing the formation of a series of naturally communicative archetypes. (1: 544)
Pasolini calls these communicative archetypes im-signs, the basic units that make up "the world of memory and of dreams." Elsewhere, I argue that the im-sign is:
an irrational form of "linguistic instrument" that "prefigures" and makes up the photographic image. For Pasolini, the im-signs are "images of communication with oneself (and of only indirect communication with others, in the sense that the image which another person has of a thing about which I am speaking constitutes a common reference)." In this sense, the im-sign is not in the order of human consciousness (as understood in European terms). Rather, it is a schema that an individual draws from her or his memory, as she or he recalls a mode of sense-perception from a past event and regenerates an affective state associated with it. (1: 544-545, 548)
<27> The im-signs communicate by means of its pre-grammatical history and its grammatical (syntagmatic) relationship. It therefore defies any linguistic grammatical logic. For Pasolini, the language of cinema is the language of poetry, and the irrational always escapes from the syntax and forms. Yet, the im-sign has a fundamental contradiction in its communicativeness. In one register, it is a form of "communication with oneself (and of only indirect communication with others, in the sense that the image which another person has of a thing about which I am speaking constitutes a common reference" (Pasolini 1:544-545, 548). In this sense, it is a form of communication that is embedded in the addresser's subjectivity. Yet, precisely because it follows the order of dreams and memories as understood by all human beings, the im-signs, once presented as a cinematographic image, claims the appearance of an objective reality.
<28> Pasolini argues that a "free indirect discourse" in the cinema is one in which "the author penetrates entirely into the spirit of his character, of whom his thus adopts not only the psychology but also the language" (1: 548). For him, the classical Hollywood shot-reverse-shot, by cutting into the subjective views of the characters from an establishing long shot, and by framing these subjective views within the narrative cause-and-effect logic, ultimately puts the characters' subjectivities within the filmmaker's or the camera's. Instead of doing this, Pasolini believes that by juxtaposing shots that appear to be highly objective not by means of cause-and-effect logic, but by means of affective connection, the spectators would begin to give up trying to read the film prosaically as a story. Rather, as in reading a poem, the spectators would grasp the overall affect of the poem. As Gilles Deleuze argues, each shot or im-sign functions like a harmonic, and the spectators are engaged not in the appreciation of every single note, but the sum effect of all the harmonics as a piece of music or temporal experience (Deleuze 2001: 81; Fan 2015: 80). As I explain elsewhere:
Each fragment produces a set of "harmonics" that make up the overall perception of the "dominant image," like the way a music listener would sense and be stimulated by a set of harmonics, but perceive only the musical tone they build up synthetically. The shock is therefore not simply a momentary experience of imagistic difference. Rather, it is a set of "suprasensory relations" that sends a "nervous vibration" that informs the spectators' "totally physiological sensation." It is such harmonic vibration that produces the very cortex that "gives rise to thought, the cinematographic I THINK: the whole as subject." It is from this cortex that a sentient body (of the film image) is concretely defined, as in "I see, I hear . . . I FEEL." It is a body, as Deleuze claims, that does not impose itself as an obstacle between the image and thought, but as the necessary container of thought. (Fan 80)
<29> In fact, Director of Chinese Visual Festival James Mudge (2015) argues that De-formity Sci-fi is perhaps best understood not as a prosaic representation of the boy's story, but as a poetic juxtaposition of highly objective images captivated by an observational camera; yet the sum effect of these objective shots is a subjective embodiment of the structure of feelings this boy lives through: the abandonment by his family, the annihilation of the post-apocalyptic environment, the comfort and pleasure he seeks from violence and same-sex companionship, and his impotence in front of women. The one consistent feature of all the images is their situatedness or objectivity, as the camera never fails to assume a position of an observer who insists upon watching, surveying, and monitoring the lives of these young men from what Yu would call a "zero-degree distance" (Figure 6). If we use Roland Barthes' idea of "writing degree zero" (1970) to understand Yu's idea of "zero-degree distance," the situatedness of the film is best understood not as a form of objective observation. Rather, it actively engages in the scene by constantly challenging the positionalities among the camera, the filmed characters, and the spectators. In addition, the sum effect of these seemingly "objective" im-signs is a direct engagement of the viewers in the unconscious deposit of these characters' fear, anxiety, desire, and pleasure. By forcing the spectators to come face-to-face with the abject experience of witnessing phlegm, blood, and urine exchanged between the father and the son, and among the gangsters as rituals of loyalty and masculinity, the film as a whole etches the traumatic experience of wanting to fit in and grow up through ritualistic endurance of disgust, and the constant alienation and ostracization from heteronormative social values and kinship.
Figure 6. Situatedness as Im-sign
Conclusion
<30> Martian Syndrome and Deformity Sci-fi exemplify a new form of queer cinematic experience that refuses to ground itself in any form of subjective positionality, and in so doing, the cinematographic image embodies a highly subjective sensorium of someone who has lived through such experiences of physical and social violence. This new form of queer cinematic strategy does not seek to educate or activate the potential of direct political engagement in a didactic manner. Rather, these films put into question both the state power and heteronormative social values that render the LGBTQ community invisible and reducing them as bare lives. It also critiques the conflicting senses of fear, alienation, nihilism, anxiety, self-hate, and sadomasochism of those queer subjects under state violence and surveillance. In so doing, these films make sensible, the dispositif that informs the spectators' sense-certainty by engaging the audience in the sum effect of the film's image as an im-sign or free indirect discourse. In so doing, the film not only allows the spectators to sense and experience the traumatic affects of physical and mental violation, but also, as Deleuze would argue, such sensation of alienation also generates a thought in the spectators, thus allowing the spectators to rethink—and hopefully, reconfigure—their own co-implication in the institutional and ideological apparatus where they are both agents and patients of violence.
Acknowledgement: Unless otherwise noted, all images were acquired under a Creative Commons license.
Notes
[1] I wish to thank David Chalmers for his conversation about the ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival.
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