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Inter-Asia Cultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713701267

Thinking about Hou s films

Kumar Shahani

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2008

To cite this Article

Shahani, Kumar(2008)'Thinking about Hou's films',Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,9:2,297 299

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10.1080/14649370801965687

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, 2008

ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/08/02029703 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370801965687

Thinking about Hous films

Kumar SHAHANI

TaylorandFrancisRIAC_A_296734.sgm10.1080/14649370801965687Inter-AsiaCulturalStudies1464-9373(print)/1469-8447(online)OriginalArticle2008Taylor&[email protected]

Is he the child that she will not abort or is hethe lover on the phone, speaking a strangetongue? The probable father, projected intothe future, outside of history? Or thewitness, himself?

When I asked him who of the three hewas, the life in the womb, the voice of anidentity in limbo or the observer of a narra-

tion designed by him, he stared at meintensely, then laughed heartily:

Kha-I

Can be. Possibly

He was observing the principle of indi-rection. Possibly, he could be any of thethree or all of them at the same time. Therelationships/deflections on a pool tableremain undefined, even if the intention is toget to reach the pouch.

Is that intention or desire or instinctualresponse of survival in an exiled body?

To reach the deepest recess of the inte-rior space.

A structure that begins enveloping thebody with its softness.

The Chinese consciousness from aforgotten Formosa to re-incarnate in aJapanese womb without presuming theexistence of a soul.

That elusive substance conjured ashaving left in death the body that it earlier

inhabited to bring itself to be borne by ahigher form of life in its trajectory tonirvana.

The disembodied voice is both thedesire of and for the Japanese womb.

For those imperial Rising Sun designs toyield to foetus-folds that can give birth tothe as yet unknown life, the signs of its exist-ence being explored in the cybernetics of

cinema, its origins in significantly ambiva-lent train-sounds, at first unheard, evokedby their steaming mechanical arrivals onmute screens and stations.

Yes, similarly, in the sacred planes ofsoft-edged right angles, within the diffusedback light of Ozus tea-houses individuatedsquares lies the knowledge of attention.

These metaphysical but de-idealizedplanes are inhabited by arrivals and depar-tures, exits and entries into wombs, intonaked, netted pouches, curved to contain,unseen as on a billiards table.

The sacrificial ceremonials of everydaypain become manifest against and throughthe semi-permeable space, calibrated by thegrids of sliding doors, beyond which maybe the inside that offers comfort withdiscretion.

Not the obscure object, but perhaps the

infinite sense of erotic duration, elaboratedlike the citys map.

Long before we knew how to pull focusor the Renaissances original premises forthe technology of lenses, the Chinese paint-ers seem to have realized that to depict themountain, one must paint the mist. Startingwith the binaries of yin-yang, one is ledthrough the conflation of mythologicalmeaning to the processes of relationshipsthat express themselves geometrically.

Sometimes, the relationships allow the

dialectics to grow into layers of hexagramsand other quantities of lines that gettogether to generate a hieroglyph. Like theoracle bones that make up a calligraphy ofsigns and ciphers. The meaning is gener-ated as if there is a predict probabilities.Each gesture is a gamble taken to meet acontingency.

Yet, the stakes are high.


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298

Kumar Shahani

They suggest the direction that Taiwanshistory of uncertainty continues to stumblethrough, in every way.

Islands dont know where they belong.Everyone claims them. Some royalty givethem away in dowries. Or develop them as

fortresses of comprador power, usurpingboth common land and property by priva-teering, piracy and the ultimate takeover bydifferent colours of imperial power.

February 25th is unleashed again andagain, in that people who claim democraticor traditional legitimacy become the greatestbetrayers of their own blubbering causes.Death, destruction, scorched earth hadpreceded the events already, not only at theend of the Second World War, but perhapswell before that. Perhaps many times over,

as the beautiful Formosa was held by andtossed between the Ming and the Manchu,the Dutch, coveted by the Portuguese, colo-nized by the Japanese, wrested by thewarlords, militarized by the Americans,seduced and threatened by its original BigBrothers.

What should one do but witness it all.Birth and death are simultaneous in

Hous films, translated as forms of coales-cence of life energies that forever engender

the loss of patrimony.It is not as if an essence dies and re-appears. It is one level of consciousnessreceding and another emerging, rather likean archaeological site, reminiscent of theones that Eisenstein cited in Que Viva Mexico

(1932). Only, over here the stratification is inprogress, incomplete.

Incompletion seems to be the principleof several epic endings, even if they seem toresolve the great tangles of questions thatbreed more and more unto infinity. I find

that when I design the coda of movementfor my films, I do not want to let go off therichness of ambivalence that resonates inany cinematographic image.

Perhaps Hou does not want to dothat either even when he speaks of pota-toes being more difficult to grow thanginseng! After all, the potato accompaniedthe industrial revolution everywhere, alongwith the uprooting caused by the events

surrounding it, the specifically urban formsof the degradation of human life.

The blatant and continuing erasureof South and Central American culturesaccomplished by the proselytiser and thegunman is too well-known to merit a recall.

But, the potato, suspected wherever it went,was able to conquer more than the conquis-tadors and other Iberians!

So little is known of the potential

of resis-tance against hegemonies that the Maya andthe Inca may have had in their own proposi-tions of music, painting, gesture all therelationships between the sensual and theabstract to carry us to higher and higherforms of freedom. That may be why we voidthe images of Zapata, Frida, Che. As if theywere neither persons nor icons, mere post-

ers for memorial occasions?Far away, in Asia, founding cultures

have initiated several bouts of suicidalentropy, led by the Gang of Four, replacingChinese opera by Beethoven and hissymphonies by hamburger crunching.

So little is as yet known of the proposi-tions embedded in cultures other than thosethat were gobbled up into the hegemonisticGreco-Roman-Enlightenment continuum, inspite of the claims of the self-styled sub-

altern in the post-modern.Hegemonistic thought tends to erase allother paradigms, leaving us to play withdisjointed fragments, like bricoleurs.

Thus, both individual and social actionassume the forms and colours of a kaleido-scope, unexpected and delightful, but disal-lowing a qualitative change. The code is asfatalistically embedded within as the totalothering of subjectivity. Determinisms of allkinds are thereby made to look triumphantand, therefore, TRUE! It is a kind

of hardening of structures that imitatesthe sclerosis in the body. So, is truthtoday the experience of multiple closuresencountered in anonymous action, govern-ing individual predicaments of desire andseparation, changing addresses all the time?

What loses out is the active subject thatboth proposes and acts on the proposal atboth the individual, compassionate leveland on the broader cultural manifestations


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Thinking about Hous films

299

of coming together to ensure the continuingpresence of affirmative action.

The centrifugality of action in most ofHous films in the outdoors (except inA Cityof Sadness

, 1989) reflects the postmodernlack of faith of the citizen in his own rela-

tionship to the structures that hardenaround him.

As a result, he may revert to individualpreoccupations that may be useful in thefuture but are gratuitous in the present,such as research, such as recording (

CafLumire

, 2004).There is a new distance being created

between the individual and the institutionsof individualism, based on what a personowns, since Locke and Adam Smith.

In the era of gun-runners, drug

peddlers, and oil merchants who hold theworld to ransom, there is a frightening,vertical symmetry engendered by their rulesof the game; it is not the composure ofnatures lateral accords. True harmonies aredifferentiated by miniscule errors in theirsimilarity, almost touched by mischief andmystery, forever inviting one to explore ininfinite intimacy all experience.

Can the flowers of Shanghai be gath-ered for primitive accumulation?

Or will they turn out to be as stilted andcold as property deeds?Even amongst those women who sell

their sexuality for tomorrows survival,there is a residual tenderness, arising out oftheir own aspirations that refuse to getjaded by the instant abuse implicit in exist-ing modes of exchange. One can cling to a

cell-phone, not to a man. As for ones self,one can find ones atman in the generalizedtrace of ones visage, in its clich in thesnow. All one has to do is to bury ones facein the whiteness. You may thereby discoverthe first principles of Japanese/Far Eastern

design.It is believed, in the nearer East as well,

that self-knowledge is the beginning andend of all science.

The mask is the Self.There can be no greater subjugation

than the one brought about by a consumerculture.

Authors biography

Kumar Shahani is one of the most significant film-

makers working in India today. He has developedan epic idiom that engages with contemporaryissues. Shahanis films explore cultural memoriesembedded in classical Indian art forms, texts andobjects. His visual explorations of Indian music anddance, the classical Indian epic and contemporaryliterature mark his practice as unique in the historyof Indian cinema. Shahani also engages with Euro-pean cinematic traditions. His first feature,Mirror ofIllusion

(

Maya Darpan

, 1972), is regarded as Indiasfirst formalist film. His oeuvre is considered along-side renowned directors Pier Paolo Pasolini,Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jacques Rivette

and others whose work is similarly entwined withthe visual arts. Shahanis other important filmsinclude: The Wave

(

Tarang

, 1984), The Khayal Saga(Khayal Gatha

, 1988), Kasba

(1990), Immanence

(

Bhavantarana

, 1991), Persistence of Vision

(1996), FourChapters

(

Char Adhyay

, 1997), The Bamboo Flute

(

BirahBharyo Ghar Aangan Kone

, 2000).

Contact address:

[email protected].

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