​2016 International Conference on
Sounds, Images, and Texts on China's Periphery

 

Victor FAN (King’s College)

Topic: Subjectival Catharsis: Time and De-Subjectivization in Pema Tseden’s Tharlo

​

​

Pema Tseden (པད་མ་ཚེ་བརྟན།) is a director of Tibetan descent. After his graduation from the Beijing Film Academy in 2004, Pema made a number of feature films set in his home region Amdo, including Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum [The Silent Holy Stones, 2005], ‘Tsol ba [The Search, 2009], Khyi rgan [Old Dog, 2011], and Tharlo (2015). Because of his politically sensitive position as a Tibetan filmmaker in Beijing, Pema chooses to work within the official censorship system of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and he has always been careful with not endorsing any one political position. Meanwhile, Pema is regarded by some of his fellow filmmakers, critics, and academic scholars as a pioneer in the creation of a “Tibetan cinema.” But what does it mean by building a Tibetan cinema when the very idea of a Tibetan political subjectivity is best understood as a potentiality that has yet been actualized?

 

Understanding Pema’s works therefore requires an active rethinking of how an independent filmmaker may “speak from” a subjectival position multiply occupied by contesting sociocultural identities and modes of political consciousness. In this presentation, I discuss Tharlo, a film about Tharlo (played by popular comedian Shide Nyima), a shepherd capable of reciting Mao’s speech from memory, who goes to town in order to take a picture for his identity card application. In town, he meets and falls in love with Yangtso (Yang Shik Tso), a young urban hairdresser who is charmed by Tharlo’s rustic masculinity and money. Eventually, Tharlo sells his sheep and take all the money to Yangchuo, in hopes that they would use the money to travel around the world. Nevertheless, next morning, Tharlo finds out that Yangtso has fled with his money, which has the effect of stripping away not only Tharlo’s material belongings, but also his dignity, manhood, memory, subjectivity, and eventually sense-certainty. This film engages the spectators’ bodies in a process where time is made sensible as Tharlo’s travel and life experience are laid out in a mundane and undramatic manner. Nonetheless, such a seemingly tranquil passage of time is constantly enveloped by an obstinate contestation between Tharlo’s personal belief, and a world in which he lives impacted by Chinese neoliberalism. However, I argue that Pema offers neither a political address nor solution––at least explicitly. Rather, politics today has already been transduced into the inner structure of each individual’s mode of quotidian existence. What the film does is bring the audience to a point of what I would call “subjectival catharsis”—a point where an individual is desubjectivized, from which new relationships between an individual and the collective are reconfigured as pure potentialities.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

Kim Ho IP (Freie Universität Berlin)
Topic: Center, Periphery and Ver-stehen: Regenerative Power Brought by the Peripheral
​​

In connection with a particular community and culture, central or peripheral as descriptions of performative actions are often associated with social and political power. In my research supported by the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures" in Germany, cases from diverse cultures are interwoven to expose the discourse of a center-periphery model that questions binary oppositions. Center and periphery are not necessarily two dichotomous polarized categories. Moving from one center to a new center, transformation takes place. In such transforming movement, the periphery functions as dynamics collapsing centers and re-establishing new centers. As a result, the implied value judgement and hierarchies within the center-periphery model can be emancipated by performative actions.
 
This presentation will select examples taken from a series of cross art-form performances I have curated in the UK. From the practitioner’s angle, these examples illustrate the quest to emancipate from the binary oppositions: the mainstream and the ethnic minority, home and travel, as well as tradition and re-invention. In the event entitled Cathay House Blend, communities in Scotland were brought together, revealing diverse ways in contesting for Chinese-ness between the local and the diaspora community. The notion of home is explored through another case study from Taiwan: Wu Hsing-Kuo and his Contemporary Legend Theatre. To confront with the growing peripherality of the tradition of Jingju (Beijing Opera) in Taiwan, his interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear demonstrates the determination to be “more Jingju than in Beijing”. Last but not least,  the presentation will summarize the contribution of the center-periphery model towards the concept of displacement of cultures and traditions. This is illustrated by the term ver-stehen, in german, which embraces both the understanding and, in some ways, re-invention through the initial misinterpretation of an indigenous idea.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Kwai-Cheung LO (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Topic: Nature’s Call: Sound in the PRC’s Ethnic Minority Ecocinema
 

This paper examines the ecocinema about the ethnic minorities in the People’s Republic of China through the aspects of film sound (including dialogue, music, song, sound effects, and silence).

For several decades until the early 2000s, ethnic minority films have been mainly dubbed in Putonghua even though the non-Han ethnic performers do not necessarily speak the Chinese language. Such film genre is created by the PRC to seem to speak on behalf of the non-Han ethnic communities as well as to give “voice” to these groups that have been repressed and underrepresented throughout Chinese history. Such ideological ventriloquism is also meant to educate the majority Han audiences that the PRC is a multiethnic nation-state while reinforcing the Han hegemony. The ethnic bodies dubbed in Han voice, on the surface, provide a sense of homogeneity and continuity, but the Han audiences could be fascinated by seeing “oneself” (the coincidence of image and sound) being the other (as an exotic ethnic as well as a new socialist self). This paper argues how the image-sound unity (or unified identity) also designates its very division or split. Even if it has been domesticated and sinicized, sound/voice can never be contained as it is the intrusion of an outside into the inside (paralleling to the advent of the modernity that turns the existing order out of joint). Although the soundtrack produces an immediate effect of interpellation (one is summoned into a position of listening and figuring out the meaning), the hailing yields the subject probably less by the recognition in the call of the Other than by the impossibility to comprehend the agitating voice that cannot be disposed of and that never entirely fades away.

The term “ecocinema” (shengtai dianying or yuan shengtai dianying in mainland neology) does not merely refer to using film medium for raising consciousness of preserving nature. I extend the term to cover the productions about ethnic environments and ecological issues of the 1950s and 1960s that promote and propagate environmental transformation and ecological modernization in order to “green” the ethnic wilderness and to improve the ethnic groups’ harsh living conditions. My paper examines how these two kinds of ecocinema in the PRC operate through the dialectics of salvation and damnation paradoxically by idealizing the ethnic indigenous cultures as well as by disparaging the ethnic communities as those to be rescued. It looks at how the film sound opens up a rupture in reality where fantasies come flooding in.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

 

Reinhard STRAUB (National Chung-Hsing University)
Topic: English Language Music as Sinophone Articulation

​

Shih Shu-mei has explicitly encouraged the application of the Sinophone to areas beyond literature, such as film, music and performance. Visual arts are one field where Shih has proven her concept to be useful. But just how far can the Sinophone take us in the enquiry about other forms of cultural production, especially those where language is not as central to the articulation as it is in literature, film, and theater? Would it make sense to speak about “Sinophone architecture”? “Sinophone dance”? Counterintuitive as it may sound, perhaps it would indeed make sense, but under just which conditions?

This paper aims to explore what the Sinophone as a category has to offer in the enquiry about music, and whether the (performative) nature of music, in return, may shake some of the very foundations of the concept, e.g. by challenging the way we think about the use of Sinitic languages as the central watershed for an articulation to be, or not to be, relevant for Sinophone studies. Following a few general remarks about Sinophone music, I will provide a brief case study from Taiwan to illustrate my main argument.