The Politics and Pleasures of Visualizing the Sent-Down Youth in the Global Film Market

Chapter 3 The Politics and Pleasures of Visualizing the Sent-down Youth in the Global Film Market The classic cinematic organization depends upon the subject’s willing- ness to become absent to itself by permitting a fictional character to “stand in” for it, or by “allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees.” The operation of suture is successful at the moment that the view- ing subject says, “Yes, that’s me,” or “That’s what I see.” —Kaja Silverman1 ∵ Using King of the Children, Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (hereafter cited as Xiu Xiu), and Little Chinese Seamstress as examples, this chapter explores the extent to which films about the Cultural Revolution make sense to film crit- ics and audiences in a global market. How does the geopolitical environment illuminate directors’ mnemonic construction of the past? Using what kind of remembering and by what means is that creation of memory possible “under the conditions of cultural migration, of ethnicity hailed and refracted narcis- sistically through verbal language or visual images?”2 What narrative and film techniques do diaspora filmmakers, in the cases of Xiu Xiu and Little Chinese Seamstress, employ to allow themselves to “become absent to itself by permitting a fictional character to ‘stand in’ for it, or by ‘allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees” in one’s imagining and evoking of their past for an audience living in a drastically different social environment and historical condition?3 How can we see memory making as the means of self-formation 1 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 205. 2 Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 139. 3 By definition, Chen Kaige is not a “diaspora” director. His films produced after King of the Children, such as Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Fengyue 风月 [Temptress Moon, 1996], were, however, predominantly accepted by international film circles and primarily made for audiences outside China until his reengagement with the domestic audience in films such as He ni zaiyiqi 和你在一起 [Together, 2002]. The phrase quoted in this sentence is from Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 205. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�355�_005 74 Chapter 3 and identity configuration, often enacted through images of time, space, and body? Two theoretical concepts, “interpellation” and “suture,” are particularly illu- minating and instrumental in answering these questions. In his study on the operation of ideology in society, Louis Althusser found that ideology “func- tions” such that it “recruits” subjects among the individual or “transforms” individual into subjects through an operation that he called “interpellation” or “hailing.” He argued that the process by which individuals are compelled to identify with ideologies in their cultural environment is just like the police calling: “Hey, you!” As soon as the individual being called turns around, he becomes a subject, for he has realized that “it was really him who was hailed.”4 Among other theorists, Kaja Silverman further elaborates on this operation in literature and film, noting that “the individual who is culturally ‘hailed’ or ‘called’ simultaneously identifies with the subject of the speech and takes his or her place in the syntax which defines that subject position. The first of these operation is imaginary, the second symbolic. The concept of interpellation would thus seem to be intimately related to that of suture.”5 Furthermore, crit- ics have found that the operation of cinematic suture depends upon a “shot relationship”—shot/reverse shot and other cinematic models—which are seen as the agency “whereby meaning emerges and a subject-position is con- structed for the viewer.”6 In this critical light, this chapter demonstrates that the operation of a text about China’s past in cross-cultural cultural contexts, either a screenplay originally produced in China in the case of King of the Children, or one made by a diaspora filmmaker for the local audience in his or her adopted country in the cases of Xiu Xiu and Little Chinese Seamstress, is not only related to the “past” but largely determined by the current social and cultural environment in which one is immersed. The text is thus inevita- bly encoded and, at the same time, prone to be lured to, trapped by, or lost in prevailing ideological and artistic stereotypes. And “if the interpellation of the ethnic subject, in the end, is about the successful internalization and incor- poration of a hailing from the outside, how is such interpellation detectable symptomatically in the actual instance of cultural representation?”7 To answer this question, this chapter examines cinematic sutures in King of the Children, 4 For Louis Althusser’s discussion about the concept of “interpellation,” see his Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174–175. See also Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 218–219. 5 Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 219. 6 Ibid., 201. 7 See Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 139..

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