©2016 Tara Coleman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED RE-VISIONS OF THE PAST: LYRICISM AS HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE POETRY AND FILM by TARA COLEMAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature Written under the direction of Weijie Song And approved by _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Re-visions of the Past: Lyricism as History in Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Film By TARA COLEMAN Dissertation Director: Weijie Song This dissertation investigates the role of lyricism in mainland Chinese and Taiwanese poetry and film. The project centers on the directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke, whose films are frequently described as lyrical despite their detailed, realistic recreation of the past. The analysis of these filmmakers is paired with chapters dealing with poetry by Ya Xian, Bei Dao, Xi Chuan and others. Drawing on concepts from both the Chinese and Western traditions, the dissertation identifies key poetic strategies that are operative in the films while taking into account the particularities of each medium. Lyricism is a flexible term that has been applied variously to these poems and films in an attempt to capture the way they translate the affective layers of historical experience into comprehensible artistic forms. Much more than a genre or style, lyricism is the result of a particular activation of the reader or spectator, who must participate in the meaning- making process and therefore bring something of his or her own emotional and personal resources to the work. Because of that self-conscious participation, the experience of lyricism therefore enables a particular historical consciousness that can be a productive alternative to the more typical narrative forms of historicism that these artists reject. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Weijie Song, and my committee members, Richard Serrano, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Xiaojue Wang, for their invaluable support and feedback throughout this process. This project has evolved a great deal since I first proposed it during my exams, and my committee has helped me to follow the argument wherever it led. Professors Elin Diamond and Andrew Parker provided much-needed guidance and mentorship at key stages in my training. I drew on much of my coursework here, but I particularly want to acknowledge Rebecca Karl, whose provocative and stimulating course, “Translation, Modernity, History,” was where I first encountered the pairing of Walter Benjamin and Peter Osborne, which plays a major role in the theoretical foundation of this analysis. A Mellon Summer Study Fellowship in the summer of 2012 allowed me to travel to Shanghai, China, where I did research on the documentary and independent film scenes in China, which became the foundation for my fourth chapter. Support from the Graduate School – New Brunswick and the Program in Comparative Literature made it possible for me to spend the summer of 2014 in Hong Kong, where I conducted additional research related to both the poetry and film components of this project. Finally, completing the dissertation would not have been possible without a dissertation fellowship from the Confucius Institute of Rutgers University. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank my parents, Bruce and Genine Coleman, who encouraged me to go as far as I could with my education, and my wife, Patricia Thams, who moved with me to the U.S. and worked hard so that I could pursue my dream of earning a PhD in Comparative Literature. I owe this achievement to them. iii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………….……1 Chapter 1: Lyrical Montage: Juxtaposition in Modernist Taiwanese Poetry…..….…….32 Chapter 2: Reflecting at a Distance: the Personal Films of Cinematic "Poets" Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien…………………………………….…….97 Chapter 3: Performative Lyricism in the Poetry of Bei Dao and Xi Chuan……...…….148 Chapter 4: Lyricism of the Unspoken: The Body and Performance in Jia Zhangke’s Films……….……………….………………………………238 Coda…………………………………………………………………………………….332 Appendices ……………………………………………………………………………..337 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………355 iv 1 Introduction It would come as a surprise to many contemporary American students, for whom the prospect of reading a couple of pages of poetry often seems incomparably more difficult than watching a short film, that at a moment in time not long after the birth of cinema, one could suggest that poetry and cinema are comparable precisely because of their equivalent density and semantic complexity. This is precisely the argument made by the Russian formalist critic Yuri Tynyanov in his article, “The Fundamentals of Cinema” part of the collection Poetika kino (The Poetics of Cinema) originally published in 1927. For these theorists, cinema had already begun to evolve far beyond its initial function as a passive recording of the world, and the resources of montage editing and shot construction were allowing it to develop into an art form whose capacity for expression was only beginning to be recognized. Several essays in this collection consider not only the formal properties of film construction in relation to more traditional poetic analyses, but also attempt to seriously consider the ways in which poetry and cinema relate to one another in terms of their mechanisms of expression. Tynyanov writes that techniques such as camera angle and other forms of stylistic transformation are what allow the objects captured by the camera to become artistic. Just as everyday language becomes poetic in part through the intense focalization achieved by poetry, in cinema, the “man” or “object” being represented become transformed both stylistically and semantically, becoming the “‘man’ and ‘object’ of cinema” (38). Far from a mechanical reproduction of the real, he sees in cinema a “crowding of relationships” between the objects in a photograph or film shot as compared with natural vision, which is comparable to the 2 density of the imagery in a poem when compared to ordinary speech. This leads Tynyanov to the conclusion that, Shots in film do not ‘unfold’ in a sequential, gradual order, they are precisely exchanged. This is the foundation of montage. They replace each other just as a single verse line, a single metrical unit, replaces another one on a precise boundary....It may seem strange, but if we are to make an analogy between film and the verbal arts, then the only justifiable analogy will be not with prose, but with verse. (45) While Tynyanov’s analysis here is, for obvious reasons, strictly formalist, my own interest in the analogy between film and poetry derives in large measure from an attempt to account for the experience of this unfolding. While the poetic can be defined in terms of clearly-defined measures such as metrics, prosody and so on, it is also something phenomenological, an experience that strikes one as poetic even if the form that engenders that response is not what we would typically term “poetry.” This dissertation seeks to bring together films and poetry under the rubric of lyricism, a term which I use to account for the particular effects of the works under discussion on their audiences. Though they vary a great deal in their aesthetic presentation, these works all attempt to engage with personal memory in all of its minutiae and ordinariness without prescribing a particular (particularly national) narrative framework within which that memory must be understood. This non-linear temporality is captured by Tynyanov’s description of the unfolding common to the progression of poetry and film, but in the works I discuss here, that temporality carries a powerful affect which is not generally accounted for in more formalist comparisons of film and poetry. Indeed, it is likely that the difficulty of bringing together these two very different art forms without being either hopelessly vague or dryly formalist, has been behind the relative scarcity of studies comparing film and poetry in the almost 90 years since the Russian formalists first made the attempt. There are many examples of poetic language 3 being used in descriptions of cinema, and of cinematic techniques (I will focus on montage here), being used to describe poetics. I attempt here a more sustained engagement with the relationship between these two art forms, while recognizing their distinct differences. A special feature of my approach here is that I rely on insights from outside of the largely (but not exclusively) Euro-American focus of film theory in order to account for what I identify as a particular instance of comparison between poetry and film. I use the term “lyricism” to describe the commonality between the poems and films under discussion because it helps me to move beyond questions of form and explore the emotional, affective and finally, historical dimensions of these works which coalesce into a singular effect on the reader or viewer. The works I examine here were created by artists from mainland China and Taiwan, which have their own distinct diversity of cultures and languages, as well as co-dependent but starkly different histories. Despite their many differences,