The Intensity of Recollection-Images in Suspicious River and the Law of Enclosures

The Intensity of Recollection-Images in Suspicious River and The Law of Enclosures BY MOHSEN NASRIN A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor Philosophy In Cultural Mediations Carleton University Ottawa, On © June 2016, Mohsen Nasrin The Intensity of Recollection-Images in Suspicious River and The Law of Enclosures ------------------------------------- Table of Contents List of Illustrations (ii) Acknowledgement (iii) Abstract (iv) Introduction: (1-18) Chapter 1: Literature Review (18-65) Chapter 2: Bergsonian Cinematic Time (66-90) Chapter 3: More on conventional films and theories of temporal confusion (91-125) Chapter 4: Multilayered Experience of Time in Suspicious River (126-143) Chapter 5: Digital/Analogue Indications of Time in Suspicious River (144-1621 Chapter 6: Paramnesia or Déjà vu in Suspicieuse River (162-177) Chapter 7: Affection-Image and Eradication of Space/Time in the Cinema of Lynne Stopkewich (178-195) Chapter 8: Queered Time and Queered Clocks in The Law of Enclosures (196-222) Chapter 9: Performance of Time in The Law of Enclosures (223- 243) Chapter 10: Canadian Endism: Canadian Cinema’s (Dis)engagement with Time over the Turn of the Century (244-257) Conclusion: (258-264) Bibliography: (265- 273) List of Illustrations: 1- Ju-on 137 2- Suspicious River 141 3- Suspicious River 147 4- Suspicious River 147 5- Klute 150 6- Suspicious River 154 7- Suspicious River 156 8- Suspicious River 158 9- Suspicious River 159 10- Kissed 161 11- Suspicious River 168 12- Suspicious River 171 13- Kissed 187 14- Kissed 188 15- Suspicious River 189 16- Suspicious River 190 17- Suspicious River 191 18- Suspicious River 193 19- Suspicious River 194 20- The Law of Enclosures 210 21- The Law of Enclosures 213 22- The Law of Enclosures 218 23- The Law of Enclosures 220 24- The Law of Enclosures 222 25- The Law of Enclosures 231 26- The Law of Enclosures 243 ii Acknowledgment First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. André Loiselle, my thesis supervisor, for his patient and unflagging support over many years. Secondly, I would like to thank all the professors in the various departments of cultural mediations and film studies who also helped me over an extended period. Finally, I would like to pay tribute to my dear mother whom I unfortunately lost four years ago in the middle of writing this thesis. Not only am I indebted to her for her life-long support and devotion, but also for her having passed on to me her love of cinema. iii Abstract There is a long tradition of film scholarship dealing with the representation of time in cinema, generally focusing on the techniques that signify more or less explicitly temporal shifts in the unfolding of the narrative. Some of these critical approaches to the representation of time are useful in untangling the sometimes extremely complex imbrications of past, present, and future displayed in contemporary films where causality and chronology can prove ostentatiously deconstructed. However, few film scholars have paid attention to films that conceal temporal layering behind the guise of mundane realism. Seemingly simple films such as Lynne Stopkewich’s Suspicious River (2000) and John Greyson’s Law of Enclosures (2000) appear on the surface to be concerned only with the day-to-day existence of ordinary people living in “ordinary times”. However, upon closer inspection, these Canadian productions construct an experience of time that is far more ambivalent than initially assumed. This dissertation intends to develop an analytical model for such films based on some aspects of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time. Using this Bergsonian lens, I intend to show how virtually imperceptible juxtapositions of temporal frames are used in these films to evoke the simultaneous experience of past and present. Focusing primarily on Suspicious River and The Law of Enclosures, this dissertation examines how representations of memory and the act of remembrance evoke Bergson’s theory that events run into each other without specific points of transition. Consequently, recollection is not treated as a means by which to understand the present, but as a fluid layering of time that resists symbolic, linear, and quantitative progression. The past is not treated as a means to determine the destiny of the lead character; the past is not reduced to a representation of what is logically antecedent to the present; rather, it has been actualized horizontally in present-time. In short, the multilayered experience of time in films such as Suspicious River and Law of Enclosures reflects how the subject submerges her experience of the present into a virtual past, wherein her memories coexist with and extend into the present. Ultimately, this might have something to do with what Peter Harcourt once identified as a quintessential feature of Canadian cinema: “suspended judgment.” It is an attitude whereby Canadian film characters remain thoughtfully detached and disengaged from the urgency of timely reactions and consequently resist falling prey to the controlled temporal structure of instrumentalist consumerism. iv Introduction Part One: Why Suspicious River and The Law of Enclosures The experience of time in cinema can take on a wide variety of forms ranging from the linear chronology of classical Hollywood motion pictures and the conventional flashback structure of film noir to the reversed narratives of some contemporary films such as Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan) and the utter deconstruction of time found in the more convoluted examples of experimental cinema such as Decasia (2002, Bill Morrison). This dissertation focuses on certain types of films that neither ostentatiously call attention to temporal manipulation nor treat time as a stable signifier of causality. Rather, the films that interest me subtly deploy time as a multiplicity of layers which are shown to coexist within a single, realist space. The seamless juxtaposition of present and past in these films coincides with the nearly imperceptible intersection of the objective and subjective fields within the context of everyday experience. This suggests that temporal confusion is not the stuff of conspicuously complicated spectacles, but rather unfolds as part of “ordinary” engagement with the continuous occurrence of life. These films represent a unique corpus that does not easily yield itself to conventional approaches to the analysis of time in film and, therefore, require a new approach to the examination of cinematic temporality. There is a long tradition of film scholarship dealing with the representation of time in cinema, generally focusing on the techniques that signify more or less explicitly temporal shifts in the unfolding of the narrative. Some of these critical approaches to the representation of time can prove useful in untangling the sometimes complex imbrications of past, present, and future displayed in contemporary films such as Memento, Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé), Run Lola Run (1998, Tom Tykwer), and Caché (2005, Michael Haneke), where causality and chronology are continuously distorted. But few film scholars have paid attention to the films I am interested in, which conceal temporal layering behind the guise of mundane realism. Seemingly simple films such as Lynne Stopkewich’s Suspicious River (2000) and John Greyson’s Law of Enclosures (2000) appear on the surface to be concerned only with the day-to-day existence of ordinary people living in “ordinary times.”1 However, upon closer inspection, these and other similar films construct an experience of time that is far more ambivalent than initially apparent. I would argue that temporality in such films is never subordinated to the chain of events. This dissertation intends to develop an analytical model for such films based on some aspects of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time. I propose to label this corpus “Bergsonian Cinema.” As will be shown throughout this study, certain aspects of Henri Bergson’s conception of temporality can 1 In accordance with what the titles of my two chapters on The Law of Enclosures suggests, John Greyson himself claims that it is one of his most realist films about a straight couple while it actually becomes one of his most queer films. Bergson’s definition (or perhaps problematization of) realism would be interesting to bring to bear on the seemingly “straight” style of Greyson’s film. Regarding realism, Bergson writes, “the invariable order of the phenomena of nature lies in a cause distinct from our perception, whether this cause must remain unknowable, or whether we can reach it by an effort (always more or less arbitrary) of metaphysical construction.” He goes on to say that, “for realism as for idealism, perceptions are ‘veridical hallucinations’ state of the subject, projected outside himself.” (In Matter and Memory, 68). In short, for Bergson, we do not perceive things as they really are. Reality is an undivided continuous flux. But we always internalize the world virtually. 2 be used productively to analyze films whose complex temporal structure might initially go unnoticed. This dissertation primarily addresses the peculiar role that memory and the act of remembrance play in the two little-known Canadian films, Suspicious River and The Law of Enclosures. My intension is not to claim that these works present a uniquely Canadian perspective on the past’s interaction with the present (such an argument would probably be impossible to make convincingly). But the fact that these are Canadian productions is relevant to the way time is narratively constructed. I will further explore the “Canadianess” of these works in the last chapter of this study. For now, suffice it to say that, for both ideological and economic reasons, Canadian cinema has tended to develop representational practices that emphasize their “distinctiveness” from the classical Hollywood model through the use of realist or even naturalist techniques that resist straightforward narrative unfolding.

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