Filmmakers vs. Film Studies

Film studies is an exceptionally strange field of academic study.  It is populated by academics with years of higher education in some of the most arcane aspects of the humanities.  Many of those who write about film are well-versed in thinkers that the general public is totally unfamiliar with—Lacan and Foucault—or have read little of--such as Freud.  What I find most ironic about film studies is that the academics study one of the most proletarian segments of modern entertainment—movies.  In an effort to keep everyone’s feet firmly planted on terra firma, notice that I did not use the overly academic term “film”.  Average people do not see “films”.  They go and see movies or, depending on the variety of English you speak, they go to the cinema.  Only cinephiles and academics watch “films”.  One “ out” for those university academics who write about “films” is to opt out of 95% of the movies ever produced and eschew Hollywood and other mainstream fare and concentrate on various types of non-Hollywood productions, mostly American indie films and non-English-language “art films”.

In the past 18 months, I have plunged into the world of Chinese film studies as described, debated and delineated by the film studies mavens.  In many ways, I have been forced into reading a certain type of academic writing (the Lacan-Foucault-Freud variety) because that is pretty much all there is in Western languages (English, primarily) that covers Chinese-language cinema.  To get beyond a very basic encyclopedic treatment of Chinese Language cinema or fanboy writing, I have been forced back into a type of academic writing I found tedious and mostly unenlightening (and unenlightened?) back when I was a graduate student in art history at the beginning of the post-modern, post-structuralist, post-about everything you think you know about anything movement.  Chinese language films seem to be the current darling of film studies.  From the number of articles published in academic journals and collections of articles compiles into book-length monographs, the field seems to be “ hot”.  About 20-25 academics churn out an amazing array of variations on pretty much 2 or 3 themes.  The incursion of native-born Chinese scholars into this field in the past few years may finally open things up—though they can be even more dogmatic (and Western) in their approach to these films than their non-Chinese speaking Euro-American colleagues.

The irony of the historiography of Chinese Language film studies is that, with a few exceptions, these films are popular entertainment.  Something I have noticed in reading/watching numerous interviews with directors, cinematographers, actors, action directors, costume designers, etc. is that these people are not intellectuals.  First and foremost, they are craftspeople and must take raw material and create a popular entertainment product out of it.  Most of the thinking that goes into these films is focused on addressing practical problems and producing a product that will be at least marginally acceptable to the market-place and the investors.  Movie making is at least as much a business as it is an art.  Very rarely is it a highly intellectualized and theoretical construct.  So why, I have to ask, is the highly intellectualized theoretical construct the primary lens though which these films are viewed by academia?  There seems to be a serious disconnect between what these entertainments aim to achieve and how they are evaluated and judged by academia.  

Those who make movies focus primarily on formal aspects of film making, while those who study these same films disregard almost entirely the craft of film making and focus, instead, almost entirely on intellectual theorizing of an order that would never cross a filmmaker’s mind.  Seeing a fairly self-conscious filmmaker like Wong Kar-Wai dodge questions about the “ meaning” of what he is doing as a filmmaker is telling.  I think this reluctance to engage in a theoretical analysis by a director about one of his films that is “ in the can” betrays the very different worlds in which the creator and the academic evaluator live.  Once the film is completed, the editing and post-production work finished, the film ceases to have much interest for the filmmaker.  It is the act of creation and its crystallization into a final product that holds the appeal.  This product, divorced from the process that produced it pales in comparison.  But for the modern academic studying such films, the finished film is not the end but the beginning of a process that quickly spins away from the physical product itself and soon indulges in a type of intellectualizing exercise that in many cases mitigates the physical construct of the work itself.  Reading many such dogmatically theoretical deconstructions of one or another aspect of a film I have already seen (this is where Lacan, Foucault, Freud, Judith Butler, Bergson, etc. ad nausea come in), I am struck by how little of the film is actually captured or examined by this type of treatment.  Often I am left knowing more about the state of film studies and its various rows than I am about any actual film.  It is like sitting down and enjoying a marvelous dinner that features, among other dishes, a chicken dish.  This dish has an enticing aroma, is composed of many ingredients and flavoring agents—some of which are identifiable and others only hinted at.  One of the ingredients is chicken.  But, taking the analogy to film studies to absurd (though perhaps not) lengths, imagine then reading an article about just this chicken dish—and all that is discussed is some aspect of poultry factory farming technique that may (or may not, if this is an organic chicken) have gone into the bird that was actually used in the dinner you have just eaten.  Yes, there was chicken in both the dish and its discussion, but has the author, in fact, focused on one of the more fundamental aspects of what constituted that marvelous dinner, and, if not, what may have been lost as a consequence?

I am not saying that theory is all bad.  Some theories from the gender studies camp, for example, have been very enlightening when applied to certain Chinese-language films.  But this tends to be the exception rather than the rule.  Mostly the reading I have been doing about Chinese-language film has helped me to identify directors and films that sound intriguing.  Occasionally subjects like the meaning of the impending 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China and how this has surfaced in the work of a number of Hong Kong filmmakers have been helpful and though-provoking when applied to a certain number of films.  I have also gleaned some useful historical information that has helped me orient the history of many of these films in both a historical and artistic context that has proved illuminating.  But sadly, for all the thousands of pages read, I have gained much less understanding of Chinese-language films than I had hoped.  Mostly, I feel, I am missing a great deal of cultural context that can only be supplied by native speakers and citizens of the political entities in which these films were produced.  

One of the reasons that Stephen Chow has been so neglected by Western academics is because of the intricate Cantonese wordplay that no translator can hope to capture, in addition to some very specifically Hong Kong concerns that, unless a native points them out to you, are totally lost on the foreign viewer.  But I have to ask myself why the films of Stephen Chow struck the popular nerve/chord they did precisely when and how they did in Hong Kong from 1990-1999.  I also have to ask why he changed from a very Cantonese language-specific type of film to a more international variety just after the hand-over of Hong Kong to China and the necessity to get away from films that would be accessible only to a native Cantonese-speaking audience.  I just read today that Kung Fu Hustle was a huge hit in Mainland China, something that would have been inconceivable for his earlier language-based comedies.  It is also no coincidence that this was truly the breakout film that made him a star in the West and opened the doors of Hollywood for future projects.  (Though one wonders if this will be yet another failed attempt by Hollywood to capture Hong Kong lightening in a bottle?)  But have the academics thought about any of this?  Hardly.  It doesn’t seem to fit in with any of the rarefied theories that they feel are a necessary jumping off point for any discussion of Chinese film.  Too bad.  They generally feel uncomfortable dealing with films and directors that have become too popular.  Any film that achieves popular success is suspect.  The number of academic treatments of films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; and Farewell, My Concubine that are openly critical of these films and their directors precisely because they have achieved so much success--as if this in some way must betray artistic integrity--is astonishing.  But, on the other hand, the reverential treatment of almost unwatchable “art films” never ceases to amaze me.  I have been tricked into wasting two hours on several occasions by the enthusiasm of these academics for films that failed to engage me on any level whatsoever (and I can stomach a lot more intellectualizing in a film than most people).  Sometimes a film is such a pure joy as visual spectacle (Hero), or the convergence of acting, direction, art design, and cinematography into something with both surface appeal and deep resonance (In the Mood For Love; Farewell, My Concubine) or the intersection of important social and personal issues through extraordinarily sensitive performances (July Rhapsody) that I don’t care about any deeper “meaning”.  Sometimes a movie is just the interplay of light and sound in time.  A movie is first and foremost an ephemeral combination of visual surface and sound that can move the viewer on a deep level,  Once the lights come up, the film may elicit an intellectual analysis, but for the time we are in the thrall of the experience of the film itself, such theorizing is the farthest thing from our minds as we surrender to the pure pleasure that is being offered to us.  I fear that far too many academic film types have forgotten the sheer joy that only a movie can give.

Here are some You Tube vignettes of some of my favorite Chinese films.  Tellingly, the one "art house" film of the bunch, Ann Hui's "July Rhapsody" is poorly represented on You Tube and the scenes where Jacky Cheung, as a Chinese literature teacher, was in the thrall of language as he recited classic Chinese poetry, were no where to be found.  If you care about language, about the past as it is preserved in language and about a present where the past doesn't matter and a future where the past has been forgotten (and don't mind watching a 40 year old man go through a mid-life crisis in the arms of his 17 year old female student), I highly recommend "July Rhapsody".

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRyU2mK4Rls

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGeOO3BLC_A

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXqAcmDtEXc