Sentimental Martial Fabulations

The disciplinary separation of film studies from cultural studies is an academic gesture whose result amounts to shackling thinking and enquiry into artificially separated orders. In order to reactivate their interimplication and imbrication, I have emphasised the supplementary relations between film and other aspects of culture, such as lived daily life and daily practices. In Sentimental Fabulations (Chow 2007), Rey Chow proposes an approach to understanding the works of certain so-called Fifth Generation Chinese film makers by exploring the relations between attachment to values that are older and other than those of the cinematic image in what she calls an 'age of global visibility'. Consequently, Chow offers a provocative and stimulating way to reconfigure questions not only of realism but also of reality, at the same time as offering us a way to rethink what I am proposing is the essentially gestural character of martial arts culture, perhaps of all orders, but certainly whenever it meets film.

 

Chow herself rarely mentions martial arts, whether inside or outside of films. The closest she ever comes is mentioning the existence of 'martial arts films' as an example of a familiar category of commodity or practice among other familiar types or stereotypes of 'Chinese things'.

 

But such mentions are not mere 'listing', or the abusive failure to 'read' or take seriously the object or topic being mentioned. Rather, they occur in moments of conceptual reconfiguration, such as in the following remarkable passage from the introduction to Sentimental Fabulations:

 

With respect to the recent Western European and North American fascination with East Asian cinema, the first question to ask, then, is this: should we try to direct such fascination back at some authentic, continuous Asianness lying beyond the alluring cinematic images, or would it not be more pertinent to see Asianness itself as a commodified and reproducible value, made tantalizingly visible and accessible not only by the filmic genres of the action or martial arts comedy, the love story, and the historical saga but also by an entire network of contemporary media discourses – economic rivalry, exotic cuisine, herbal medicine, spiritual and physical exercise, sex trade, female child adoption, model minority politics, illegal immigration, and so on – that are at once sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital? Part of my goal in this study is to argue that Chinese cinema since the 1980s – a cinema that is often characterized by multinational corporate production and distribution, multinational cast and crew collaboration, international award competition activity, and multicultural, multiethnic reception, as well as being accompanied by a steady stream of English-language publications, written (not infrequently by those who do not speak or read Chinese or consult Chinese-language sources) for an English-reading market – is an inherent part of a contemporary global problematic of becoming visible. As much as belonging in the history of Chinese culture, the films involved should also, I contend, be seen as belonging in the history of Western cinema studies, in the same manner that modern Asia, Africa, and Latin America, properly speaking, belong in the history of modern European studies. (Chow 2007: 12-13)

 

One important dimension to the work of Chow that I want to draw attention to here relates specifically to the fact that despite foregrounding the complexity and near ubiquity of commodified media/representational images in the contemporary 'age of visibility', she neither abandons non-media 'reality' nor makes facile or febrile statements about its 'death'. Thus, although there may be no 'authentic, continuous Asianness lying beyond the alluring cinematic images' – indeed, although the very idea of an authentic continuous Asianness may itself be the product of the alluring cinematic images that conjure it up – and although we should 'see Asianness itself as a commodified and reproducible value'; Chow's aim is neither to try to kill nor to ridicule any desire of or for it. It is rather to emphasise that all of this is 'made tantalizingly visible and accessible not only by the filmic genres of the action or martial arts comedy, the love story, and the historical saga but also by an entire network of contemporary media discourses' (emphases added).

 

If more and more areas of life are entangled within, captured by, experienced in relation to and constituted through 'an entire network of contemporary media discourses', Chow does not abandon the question of the rest, the remainder, the remnants, traces, or residues of something at least apparently former and other than contemporary media discourses. And this is precisely where the notion of the sentimental comes in:

 

If contemporary cultures are caught up in what I have been referring to as global visibility – the ongoing, late capitalist phenomenon of mediatized spectacularization in which the endeavor to seek social recognition amounts to an incessant production and consumption of oneself and one's group as images on display, a phenomenon in which subjectivity has become, willy-nilly, object-ivity – how do we come to terms with older – or increasingly estranged – forms of interpellations such as self-restraint, frugality, filial piety, compliance with collective obligations, inconspicuous consumption, modesty about exhibiting and thrusting oneself (including one's body parts and sexual interests) forward as a cause in public, and so forth, wherein the key is not exactly – perhaps exactly not – becoming visible? How might we go about handling the tenacity, in the midst of global visibility – itself a new kind of aggressive, oftentimes oppressive, reality – of residual significatory traces of a different kind of social behavioral order? Such traces [are] often emergent in the form of a vaguely anachronistic affect whose mere survival points to another modality of attachment and identification – and whose noncontemporaneity stands in mute contrast to the glamour of global visibility… (Chow 2007: 22-3)

 

In other words, Chow proposes that the sentimentality of many Fifth Generation films is precisely the residue or symptom not simply of 'something old', but rather of 'the old, now lingering in the enigmatic form of an intensity (in the form of some emotionally guarded and clung-to inside) that seems neither timely nor fully communicable' (23). Indeed, she adds that the sentimentality she regards as the 'predominant affective mode' (14) of many Chinese films is 'neither timely nor fully communicable – especially not across cultures' (23, emphasis added), even though she regards it as 'an inherent link to the nexus of becoming visible' (23). This lack of smooth cross-cultural communicability arises because, to Chow, it arises from, bespeaks and speaks back to 'the remains of a collective cultural scaffold'. Indeed, what Chow wants to draw into visibility is what she calls the 'sentimental interstices – the remains of a collective cultural scaffold – that lend the images their support' (23).

 

The first point I want to note about all of this is that what is being developed and deployed here is a strong argument about the complexity of relations between film and culture. The second is that, as subtle and complex as it may seem, Chow is working through and helping to find a way to make sense of some very familiar material. For instance, anyone who has read reviews of Hong Kong and Chinese films released for Anglophone audiences in the US or UK will be aware of the frequency of observations about the films' frequent sentimentality. This is so even – indeed, I will argue, particularly – in relation to Hong Kong and Chinese martial arts film, which are overwhelmingly structured by the kinds of sentimentality that Chow identifies in relation to the non-martial but very definitely art films that she examines.

 

I have written before about the flurry of Hong Kong films released between 2008 and 2013 that – to coin a phrase – 'sentimentally fabulated' Bruce Lee's wing chun kung fu teacher, Ip Man (Bowman 2013). In my earlier explorations of these films, I focused more on the way they reactivate and 'replay' Bruce Lee, with a peculiar 'afterwardsness' that is entirely appropriate to their object. After all, Ip Man came 'before' Bruce Lee (historically), but he was only reinvented as some kind of Chinese cultural hero after Bruce Lee, in the wake of Bruce Lee, and because of the earlier global fame of Bruce Lee. These films include Ip Man (2008), Ip Man 2 (2010), The Legend is Born: Ip Man (2010) and Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013), as well as – more famously, perhaps – Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster (2013), plus films that reactivate and replay Bruce Lee via different stand-ins, such as Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (2010). However, as well as in the terms in which I approached these films then – which read their use of afterwardsness and stand-ins for Bruce Lee in terms of a rethinking of the post-1997 relations between Hong Kong and the PRC – it is equally possible to read them in terms of their not unrelated sentimentality.

 

During the same period, Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) was released – a martial arts film whose strongest and perhaps most widely remarked feature was its painstaking recreation of the Hong Kong of 1905. Reviewers noted this detail, and recommended it to viewers accordingly, while also often warning Western viewers to brace themselves for lashings of sentimentality – according to what Chow calls the most 'conventional understanding … of the sentimental', namely 'as an affective orientation/tendency, one that is often characterized by apparent emotional excess, in the form of exaggerated grief or dejection or a propensity toward shedding tears' (15). Exactly this form of sentimentality is present in Bodyguards and Assassins and many other Hong Kong and Chinese martial arts films of the same period.

 

However, Chow continues, 'when examined closely, such emotional excess is only a clue to a much broader range of issues' (15). For instance, she argues that it is eminently possible to 'understand the sentimental not only as an instance of affect but also as a relation of time', and specifically 'as an affective state triggered by a sense of loss' or as 'the symptom of the apprehension of an irreversible temporal differentiation or the passing of time' (15). This argument seems not only plausible but actually necessary when one considers the fetishization of an imagined Hong Kong (or Shanghai) of times gone by, as it appears in all of the films mentioned above – especially, perhaps, Bodyguards and Assassins, which actually gained fame in part precisely because of its reconstruction of and older incarnation of Hong Kong, that city 'of disappearance' (Abbas 1997).

 

Consequently, as well as the matter of film's relation to (other areas of historical, cultural and political) reality with which we began, we are now also faced with a range of other (cross-)cultural questions. For Chow:

 

The pertinent question to be derived from these cross-cultural considerations is not exactly how to apply them to Chinese film or how such "Western theory" does not fit "Chinese reality" but rather the question of a particular discursive relation: how can the symptoms of prominent affective tendencies, as detectable in certain films, be theorized in relation to the foundations and practices of social interaction? With this question in the foreground, the sentimental, instead of being equated with the occurrence of affective excess per se, can more fruitfully be rethought as a discursive constellation – one that traverses affect, time, identity, and social mores, and whose contours tend to shift and morph under different cultural circumstances and likely with different genres, forms, and media… (Chow 2007: 17)

 

The 'particular discursive relation' that interests me here and that is motivating this discussion of film is, to reiterate, one that I earlier characterised in a general sense as supplementary; one that I would like to refine slightly now and characterise as pedagogical. This will be the way that I will theorize 'the symptoms of prominent affective tendencies, as detectable in certain films … in relation to the foundations and practices of social interaction'.