Magical Realism in Transnational Cinema
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MAGICAL REALISM IN TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA CODY LANG A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO August 2020 © Cody Lang, 2020 ii Abstract This project is an analysis of the magical realist genre in cinema, specifically its multiple forms found in transnational cinema. The status of magical realism in film as a genre will be questioned and this project argues that the concept is best understand as a transgeneric critical category rather than a genre in the conventional understanding of the term. Magical realism as academic concept has been discussed in-depth in literary theory and this project extends those discussions into the field of cinema. The history of criticism of magical realism is summarized as it applies to studying film with special attention given towards the semiotic differences between literature and cinema. Furthermore, this project explicates the distinct ways that magical realism operates in cinema in contrast to literature while also noting the shared aesthetic strategies between each media. Each section covers a thematic topic observed in transnational magical realist cinema: metafiction in overt and covert forms; the representation of historicity; and the representation of marginalized subjectivities, specifically looking at how magical realist cinema presents issues of class, gender, race, and sexual identity. The final thematic discussion discusses the possibility of utopian discourses in magical realist cinema, the attempts to envision a less exploitative social collective according to a variety of cultural and national contexts in late-capitalism. Key films discussed in this project include: Death by Hanging (1968), Underground (1995), Naked Lunch (1991), Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Miracle in Milan (1951), The Tin Drum (1979), Synecdoche, New York (2008), Tropical Malady (2004), Gozu (2003), Daughters of the Dust (1991) among many other works. iii Acknowledgements I want to thank my supervisory committee, Dr. Arthur Redding and Dr. Sharon Hayashi, and my supervisor Dr. Scott Forsyth. I want to thank my examiners Dr. Susan Ingram and Dr. Malini Guha and Dr. Janine Marchessault for chairing my oral exam. I also want to thank Kuowei Lee for all of his help during my time at York University. I would also like to thank CUPE 3903 for their support during my time as an employee at York University. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Barry and Denise Lang, my in-laws Dr. Peter Victor and Dr. Maria Paez-Victor, and my family Carmen, Rio, and Sacha for their support. iv Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Magical Icons and Magical Words .............................................................................. 35 Chapter 3. The Construction of Reality and Fantasy in Magical Realism .................................... 66 Chapter 4. Magical Metafiction .................................................................................................... 93 Chapter 5. Fantastic Historicity .................................................................................................. 135 Chapter 6. Oppositional Subjectivities and the Expansion of Reality ........................................ 177 Chapter 7. The Utopian Dimension in Magical Realist Cinema ................................................ 228 Chapter 8. Conclusions ............................................................................................................... 254 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 264 1 Chapter 1. Introduction This project is the study of the paradoxical term magical realism as it appears in cinema. Like its literary counterpart, magical realist film is in many ways, more so than other film genres, an international category. But unlike its literary counterpart, it did not begin in a specific geographical space but disparately in pockets of international cinema throughout the last 100 years. I first came to this project by a sort of backwards trajectory, wanting to study certain filmmakers, such as Jacques Rivette, Jerry Lewis, Alexander Sokurov, Takashi Miike, and Raúl Ruiz, that used anti-realist or non-realist forms of narrative filmmaking that I found difficult to classify, and the writing on these filmmakers also did not have any satisfactory way of explaining their breaks with realism. The term I found most appropriate was magical realism because it captured the way these filmmakers simultaneously use and reject realism in their films without simply using fantastic modes such as low- and high-fantasy films. Understanding how magical realism manifested itself in the context of the medium of film necessarily led me to specify the modes it shared with other film genres, such as surrealism, horror or gothic, science fiction, and fantasy. Studying magical realism’s hybrid nature and generic complexity also elucidated the way artistic discourses function in concert with or in contradiction to each other, illuminating how genres function in general as multiplicities of various discourses that coalesce into a stable artistic form. The argument I will develop throughout this analysis regarding the generic definition of magical realist film will be to define the term in cinema as a transgeneric phenomenon. Specifically, I will show how magical realism in film is not primarily defined by a codified narrative structure, a distinctive film form, semantic materials, nor is it defined by particular 2 period or national contexts. It is a type of narrative strategy that is primarily defined by the complex mixing of realist and fantastic discourses into a synthesis which resolves the tension between those two, historically, opposed discourses in narrative works. Transgeneric as a concept allows one to explore how magical realist cinema is able to become a relevant artistic form in a variety of cultural contexts, periods in film history, and most importantly how it is able to attach itself to other formulaic, industrial, and popular film genres like the comedy, the crime film, romance stories, and historical dramas. I will demonstrate throughout this work that magical realist cinema is primarily defined by its essential narrative strategy of combining two aesthetic discourses with very specific thematic concerns: the representation of the process of a narrative work, or metafiction; and the interrogation of the past and the way it is constructed, or historicity; oppositional subject positions, or the ex-centric. The final section will deal with the political interpretation of this critical category, the utopian dimension of the transgeneric phenomenon in cinema called magical realism. Magical realist film has not enjoyed the same amount of scholarly attention as other film genres of the fantastic like science fiction, horror, fantasy, gothic, and surrealist films. The majority of the research on magical realism is focused on the literary form of the mode, its origins in the Latin American context, and its eventual export to the global context. Therefore, to summarize the discourse of the term involves summarizing with the way it has been used in literary criticism. It has also become a minor term in art history as well, both before and after it was used in literary theory. In what follows, I will trace the history of the term magical realism in painting, literature, and film. 3 The first use of the term in aesthetic theory came from Franz Roh in his discussion of post-Expressionist paintings in the Weimar Republic during the 1920s.1 Roh defined “magic realism” in painting as a return to reality that celebrated the mundane and everyday. The “magic” in the term refers to the perceptual gaze used to capture reality which made the everyday seem uncanny, strange, and marvelous.2 It was not so much that the subject matter made this painting mode distinct from previous works, but by scrupulously depicting familiar objects it generated a new way of seeing the world and rendered the everyday in an uncanny fashion.3 In this context, magical realism is framed in epistemological and perceptual terms; it refers exclusively to the way objects and subjects are presented in art but not what is represented. The only stipulation that Roh observed against the content of magic realism was a general rejection of spiritual subjects. In Latin American literary criticism, the term was used independently of Roh’s writing to explain how Latin American literature differs from European works, especially surrealism, realism, and naturalism. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier used the term lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) to refer to Latin American culture and its representation in literature. He described Latin American literature as marvelous because, in the culture that produced it, the