March 2007: Homay King

Homay King, Bryn Mawr College

"The Shanghai Gesture"

Respondent: Suzanne Gauch, Temple University

Friday, 2 March 2007

6:30pm-8pm

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 220

Directions to TUCC

This talk is from a book entitled Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Projection, and the Enigmatic Signifier, in which I claim that Hollywood has represented East Asia not simply as other, but as hopelessly enigmatic. Scholars such as Gina Marchetti, Rey Chow, Darrell Hamamoto, E. Ann Kaplan and others have shown Hollywood’s Orientalism entails the exoticization, eroticization, and emasculation of Asia and its diasporas. I suggest that closer analysis reveals that classical Hollywood cinema also projects the East as an epistemological aporia, a space of radical indecipherability. In the cinematic imaginary, Asian cities appear to be populated by withholders of ambiguous and dangerous secrets that are irretrievably lost in translation. Classical Hollywood films depict East Asia and its diasporas as labyrinthine worlds teeming with enigmatic signs. One might say that Hollywood has made the Orient into what psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche calls an “enigmatic signifier”: an emblem of what is withheld from Western comprehension and impossible to decode. The fact that this aesthetic is reproduced in movie palace architecture suggests that its pleasures and perils are not limited to explicitly Orientalist films, but form a constitutive part of American film culture. Orientalism, in other words, is not merely a marginal feature of the American cinema, but a core fantasy that lies at the heart of the American film experience.

In this talk, I identify a trope that I call “the Shanghai gesture,” whereby the enigmatic is projected eastward. This trope works upon Orientalist details of mise-en-scène from many films of the classical era, in particular films noir. In The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946), seemingly marginal touches of décor — Thai sculpture, Chinese silk gowns — are overdetermined and come to bear the burden of explanation for unresolved aspects of the detective narrative. This trope is replicated in self-conscious form in Chinatown (Polanski, 1974), where the title of the film and the ethnic enclave it names seem arbitrary, but are in fact central to the film’s logic and to the undoing of the film’s protagonist. The “Shanghai gesture” involves a double displacement: first, a move whereby Eastern ornament is saddled with narrative burden, and second, a move to contain this anxiety. In the films I discuss, this second move often takes the form of a retreat into a familial enclave, usually an Oedipal one, that reasserts sameness over difference, endogamy over exogamy. Chinatown’s famous incest plot refers to and critiques this cultural work, where the Name of the Father is reasserted over and against the enigmatic signs of the East. This strategy for the reassertion of white, masculine authority and possession appears in other films in less hyperbolic forms. Of special interest in this respect is Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, a film in which a similar relation is played out between the paternal Arthur Bannister, a symbol of paternal law, and his wife Elsa, who is tainted by her Shanghai past. I argue that these films reveal a collapse of this strategy, which ultimately fails to contain the Orient: like Gilles Deleuze’s crystal-image, the East returns as a fused, opposing facet in the prism of western subjectivity.

Still from The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles 1947)

Homay King is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and her A.B. in Modern Culture and Media and English Literature from Brown University. Her writings have appeared in Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Discourse, Qui Parle, Fort/Da, and the collection Jeff Wall: Photographs. Her essay “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I” is forthcoming in Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She is currently working on a book called Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Projection, and the Enigmatic Signifier, forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Suzanne Gauch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Temple University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial studies, with a focus on literary and cultural exchanges between the Islamic world and Europe, gender studies, and the cinemas of the global South. Her book, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), analyzes how contemporary North African writers and filmmakers legitimate their own artistic practices and political engagements--and navigate increasingly complex circuits of transnational exchange--by paying tribute to the legendary storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights.

Poster for Chinatown (Roman Polanski 1974)