This year the AAIFF runs from July 15th to July 24th. With a smaller selection of films from last year, the choices are consistently good and occasionally remarkable. Opening Night has been handed over to award-winning Filmmaker Raymond Red, who is no stranger to international audiences. He was the first and remains the only Filipino to have won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his 2000 short film, Anino. In Manila Skies we follow Raul (Raul Arellano), a struggling day laborer who tries to cobble together some money for a trip back to his childhood home in Romblon, where he hopes to help his ailing father. Raul’s attempts to secure a more lucrative job abroad are stymied by Manila’s suffocating bureaucracy.

After a disastrous turn of events, Raul ends up using a gun and grenade to return to the innocence he longs for. With guerilla-style framing that emotes claustrophobia and anxiety, Red propels us through the grime and heat of the city and never lets up. Unbalanced by a long, meandering middle section, the film nonetheless is a vital commentary on social injustice in the “modern” world.

The Friday night pairing is delectably off-kilter with Slice, a Thai horror thriller screening concurrently with Wo Ai Ni Mommy, a documentary about adoption from China. Slice, taking a cue from recent, excellent Korean thrillers, leaves audiences in brilliant suspension as we meet truly awkward characters in rural settings.

The opening screen titles of Woi Ai Ni Mommy let us know that since China began its international adoption program, over 70,000 children have been sent to live in American homes. In this bird’s eye documentary we follow one family, the Sadowskys, as they bring home a second orphan from Guangzhou, China to Long Island, New York. Fang Sui Yong, a precocious and head-strong eight year old is forced to acclimate quickly to her new life as Faith Sadowsky.

Saturday highlights include Bruce Beresford’s latest, Mao’s Last Dancer. A biopic about Cunxin Li, it tells the story of this renowned ballet dancer’s transition from Communist China, hand-picked by Madam Mao, to his success and struggles in the United States. Though rather predictable in its set pieces, Beresford manages to invest a convincing emotional depth throughout.

Saturday’s Centerpiece Presentation of Au Revoir Taipei is one of the better films I’ve seen all year, and I promise this is not an overstatement. A love story interrupted by a gangster film, all undone by a screwball comedy is the only apt description for this wonderful romp directed by first time feature director, Arvin Chen. Kai (Jack Yao) is a lovelorn college student, abandoned by his girlfriend, Faye, for the allure of Paris. In his futile attempt to learn French from a book and escape the monotony of waiting until he can see her again, he parks himself on the floor of a local bookstore every day where he meets Susie (Amber Kuo). Interweaving various storylines, Chen takes us through the shops, alleys, and parks of Taipei in crisp, electric night cinematography. We follow a distracted cop, Kai’s best friend, and the gangster’s bumbling henchman as they all try to discern the mystery of love, wrapped up for easy transport.

Sunday ends with At the End of Daybreak. Starting with a disturbing scene of animal cruelty which frames the entire film, Ho Yuhang doesn’t shy away from hard truths. Tuck Chai (Tien Yu Chui), an aimless 23 year old, is involved with Ying (Meng Hui Ng), a reckless high school student. They see each other as temporary distractions from the imposition of expectations and responsibilities placed on their young shoulders. Ho Yuhang captures the complexity of familial entanglements, the consequences of corporal punishment, and the lack of class mobility through a kinetic lens that masterfully flows from heart-wrenching close-ups to sweeping action sequences.

Closing Night on July 21st features the Mamma Mia-esque romantic comedy The People I’ve Slept With. Angela (Karin Anna Cheung) has a healthy sexual appetite, and when she finds herself pregnant she must embark on a journey to not only find the father, but herself.

The Shorts programs are also rather ambitious with themes as varied as family, love, hidden true stories, humor, and a special focus on Taipei. The First Kiss program includes an ode to the serendipity of love in Tall Enough. From the director of Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins, we witness the unfolding romance between an interracial couple portrayed in snug frames and tender close-ups.

In another short, Works of Art, a sumptuously filmed New York is explored through Art (Paul Juhn). He is a struggling actor, running to casting calls during lunch breaks from a boring job. Tired of being typecast and ignored, his friend offers him the acting job of a lifetime. While pretending to be someone else, he runs into the one real thing he has been missing all along.

Throughout the festival there are also various panels, including ones on green film-making and overcoming copyright hurdles for those so inclined. All in all, this year offers multivalent options, even within the same film. It will not be uncommon that comedy and family drama enthusiasts will be sitting next to each other or thriller junkies and doc hounds will have something to talk about at the same screening. Take a chance, and you’ll probably walk away with a story to tell!

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie– The man, the myth, the meglomaniac all discussed in brilliant black and white cinematography.

Saturday Night– James Franco’s inside look at the preparation involved in one episode of the iconic comedy franchise…John Malkovich in drag anyone?

Gerrymandering– An in-depth dissertation on the often confusing and ridiculous redistricting that occurs before elections to ensure votes by race, class, or population size. Only for die-hard policy wonks!

I caught Night Catches Us last night at the New Directors/New Films Festival. I went in with way too high expectations given the dynamic combination of Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie. It is still rare to see African-Americans play the leads in complex dramas, much less two actors in their prime, and I was eager to sit-in.

The story focuses on two former Black Panthers whom reunite during a 1976 Philadelphia summer. As is likely with a movement that encouraged armed resistance in protection of community and family, there is a lot of psychological trauma to wade through. Having spoken to former Black Panthers personally, I appreciated the portrayal of justified paranoia that encircles the characters, whether through bugged phones, insipid surveillance, or opportunistic cops. COINTELPRO was also a constant source of intimidation and fear perpetrated by the government to disrupt a myriad of free-thinking movements in the 60′s–the Panthers being a favorite target.

However, the personal relationships seemed to be under duress, competing with repetitive stock footage and an overpowering soundtrack. Mackie does what he can to bring an internal life to Marcus. Turmoil seethes beneath his eyes and under the burden of his black duffel bag, which belies a history of moving often and quickly. And it pains me to admit this, but Washington may have been miscast. Her clipped phrasing and too easy smile mark her immediately as not of this time. She is built up as the emotional linchpin of the story, but her climactic scenes fizzle quickly without delving into her motivations in a convincing way.

Veteran actors from The Wire–Jamie Hector and Wendell Pierce almost destabilize the piece, given their instant recognition. I’m not one to typecast, but they do it well enough without me, as it feels they are playing watered down versions of their Baltimore doppelgangers.

Ultimately, despite my apprehensions, more films like this need to be made, as access to these stories require a large stage to provoke discussion. The struggles of that time are still portrayed in cliche and costume. Night Catches Us has not completely escaped that quicksand, but it is a step forward. I look forward to seeing if first-time director Tanya Hamilton continues to unearth this rich, untapped well in her future work.

NATIONAL FESTIVAL TOUR FEATURES IN BERGENFIELD
Presented by Clearview Cinema and ACV

Come experience another big screen presentation of AAIFF09′s best features at the Bergenfield Clearview Cinema starting Friday, April 2 through Thursday, April 8. Our selection will guarantee to satisfy your divergent tastes! Be it about a raunchy story of two performers in the Philippines, a laugh-out-loud dysfunctional family in Jersey or a sweet tale about a little girl who loses her bus pass, these films will sure to entertain. So bring a date or take your family and grab some popcorn, sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

HUBAD (Philippines) Director: Mark Gary and Denisa Reyes
KARMA CALLING (United States) Director: Sarba Das
LI TONG (China) Director: Nian Liu
PASTRY (Hong Kong) Director: Risky Liu

For more info, tickets and schedules please visit http://www.clearviewcinemas.com/exciting_events/aiff.shtml

2. Hurt Locker
Can Kathyrn Bigelow direct the next James Bond film? I really think that franchise needs to sip whatever she’s drinking. Her heroes fully isolate themselves to the point where the outside world starts to ripple with paranoia, premeditation, and evil, but unlike Quantum of Solace there is a deep understanding of politics, family, and responsibility—the real marrow of the mundane. And have no doubts, this stuff is inherently cinematic. I will take a tense, deliberate bomb defusion over a visually muddled car chase any day.

3. Humpday
Two straight, male buddies decide to sleep together over a dare–sounds like a bad joke really, but Lynn Shelton pulls off a deeply funny and effective study of the male psyche, cultural norms, and thirty-somethingness. Actors Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard and Alycia Delmore should also be given their due for making these characters believable and fully schizoid like we all really are. Our image of ourselves is rarely tested in daily interactions, so one mimics the liberal, open-minded intellectual in theory until life calls your bluff. Uncomfortable laughter was never so liberating!

4. Big Fan
Obsession is one of the most perplexing emotions to convey on screen, as it is so all-consuming—saturating every pore of the afflicted—that two dimensions seem inadequate to capture all of its wicked energy. The particular micro-world of sports fanaticism is done even less justice. However actor Patton Oswalt and writer/director Robert Siegel captured all the slovenliness, delusion, and anxiety that are characteristic of the fan drop kicked over the edge. True derangement turns out to quite funny in retrospect.

5. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Nicholas Cage has finally returned from the wilderness of depressing action films and family friendly dreck to shock us into attention. It probably won’t last, so even more reason to soak it up now! Cage shuffles about like a rabid dog motivated by a lust for drugs, guns, women, and drugs in that order. Somehow under all this vice, he creates a sympathetic sociopath who is ironically led hellward due to a good deed. When I first heard this was a Werner Herzog film I thought it must all be some joke. Why would he troll in such pedestrian fare as a cop drama? Alas now I know only one with Herzog’s sardonic view of humanity could create such an off-kilter love note to New Orleans.

6. Avatar
Despite hokey dialogue and predictable plot machinations, James Cameron managed to transport me out of my stationary seat, stale air, and awkward eyewear for what seemed like a comfortable eternity. Pandora is the most fully convincing virtual environment I’ve seen on film since Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Therefore, it is not surprising that the successful depiction of Gollum convinced Cameron that his long-gestating dream was possible. Taking cultural and natural cues from Earth didn’t manifest the fully alien, but rather the fully convincing. I await the inevitable sequel…

7. An Education
A lovely meditation on the arrogance of youth, this gem slowly reveals itself. What I like most besides Carey Mulligan’s puckish wit, is the patience and care with which the camera sweeps onto a moment in time. It feels like a memory even though all the action takes place in a present past. We are seduced along with Jenny, and we root for her even as we curse her naïveté.

8. Moon
Though a slight film by any definition of a space epic, the actor Sam Rockwell pulled off the impossible. He created two characters from the same DNA that live life in convincingly divergent health, relative age, and sanity so that I genuinely forgot he was alone on the set. Director Duncan Jones seems to have materialized from the ether with this succinct reverie on what it means to be human at a very inhumane time. My secret dream is that truly forward-thinking space operas like Space Odyssey 2001, Alien, and Solaris will make a resurgence. Hopefully Moon is a sign of the times.

9. Goodbye Solo
Lead actor Souleymane Sy Savane is refreshing as a good-hearted, immigrant taxi-driver. So rarely do we encounter hard-working transplants in American film even though reality would be a perfect source of stories. Ramin Bahrani has made a career of exploring the lives of people depicted on the edges, but who are actually at the heart of our cultural experiment. Souleymane’s personality is so infectious and endearing that his encounter with a self-loathing and bitter William, played with acerbic zeal by Red West, seems unfair for us as well as Souleymane. They both end up leeching a little bit of the other’s spirit and ultimately both learn that life is full of duplicity.

10. Up in the Air
For once Clooney’s deadpan delivery, wry smirks, and facial pratfalls equaled the sum of its parts in a film that is actually kind of serious. Everyone I know is unhappily, under, or unemployed so following around an individual who fires company lifers for a living is a hard sell. However Jason Reitman takes the opportunity to tackle the simple question: What is the meaning of life? Is it having an office to trudge to everyday or is it pursuing your dreams or is it finding a “co-pilot” to enjoy life with? The answer is obvious, but we are too stubborn to see it, so we might as well be kind to everyone we meet lest they become our bosses, lovers, or friends some day far off in the future…

The Rest of the Best

11. Gomorra
12. Up
13. Broken Embraces
14. Zombieland
15. The Road
16. Children of Invention
17. Watchmen
18. Star Trek
19. Rudo y Cursi
20. The Maid
21. Summer Hours
22. Black Dynamite
23. Antichrist
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox
25. The Messenger
26. Coco Before Chanel

Biggest Disappointments

Tyson, District 9, Funny People

What I Missed and Want to See

The Headless Woman, The Informant!, 500 Days of Summer, Where the Wild Things Are, Me and Orson Welles, Julia, Treeless Mountain, The White Ribbon, Brothers, In the Loop, A Serious Man, Two Lovers, Sugar, Crazy Heart, Collapse, A Single Man, The Exploding Girl, Medicine for Melancholy, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Of Time and the City and The Baader Meinhof Complex

IS ANTAGONISM OUR NATURAL STATE?

How do we define a new cultural moment which actively splinters its forebears and resists continuity in the classical sense? Jameson attempts this by explicating clear constituent tropes in the typical postmodernist work. The first is a depthlessness onto which originary cultural elements have been projected or duplicated ad infinitum. This is explicit in advertising and the work of Andy Warhol in particular. The second is the de-emphasis of linearity as embodied by “pastiche” and the “schizophrenic” state of mind. The continuum of daily existence has devolved into a puzzle of atemporal shards. The third is the growing awareness that the world is no longer graspable by the solitary human mind. We are living in an era when the sublime is our only riposte to an ever-increasing lack of information because there is just too much to assimilate. For Jameson this tripartite formulation is the epitome of postmodernism. Those film scholars who have taken up the challenge to apply these ideas to the medium have often found an iconic example in Blade Runner. I will concentrate exclusively on the theoretical work of Scott Bukatman, Giuliana Bruno, and Vivian Sobchack. They all focus on different aspects of Jameson’s postmodernity thesis, using his seminal essay for their own intellectual ends. While they all manage to bring out subtle nuances of his theory on application to the film, Jameson’s unaltered formulations are remarkably durable.

Blade Runner is set in a future Los Angeles (by way of Tokyo and New York) where rampant pollution and nuclear fallout has forced most of the population off-world. Those left on Earth are either too poor to afford transport or are so genetically inferior that they are forced to remain for fear they contaminate the colonists. In order to facilitate the exploration and terra-forming initiatives of off-world colonies, synthetic humans have been grown to perform the demanding work. They also provide comfort to soldiers and citizens, and protect “human” interests in space overall. These humanoid replicants have been engineered with a four-year life span. For some replicants this is an intolerable fact which causes them to rebel against their makers. For this, they are hunted down and “retired” to spare humanity.

In Scott Bukatman’s “Blade Runner and Fractal Geography” we see a recurrent fascination with Jameson’s notion of spatial deflation. “But there are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment…The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense…” (Jameson, 9). During the high modern phase there was a new play of surfaces in a fetishistic mode. Surfaces connoted commodity and fabricated desire. Thus, they were growing resistant to the emotional attachment of a subject and suggested a “waning of affect.” As we devolved more and more into living through filmic, architectural and graphic facsimiles of nature, we became alienated from our surroundings. Postmodernism has completely fractured our relationship to the image so that we now live in a world composed of fragments in synchronicity. Humans have lost the diachronic impulse which fosters education and life experience. The televisual landscape and the internet are expressions of this new age. Bukatman uses the precept of depthlessness as a framing device but diverges from there. He locates a hidden profundity in the media saturated screen, Deckard’s Esper machine, and in the eye itself.

Bukatman opens up the spatial contours of the film and moves beyond Jameson’s flatness to Mandelbrot’s fractalness. The fractal describes a phenomenon in which subdivided parts of a geometric shape are identical to the whole, implying an endless depth of form and structure. “The new monument is no longer the substantial spatiality of the building, but the depthless surface of the screen” (Bukatman, 132). These screens project the relics of a mass-mediated culture in the forms of smiling Japanese women popping pills, enticements to “Enjoy Coca-Cola,” or vaguely Stalinist entreaties to “begin again” on an off-world colony. Bukatman’s claim is that these projected light shows have replaced the solidity of the building as a cultural marker. In that transposition the flat image has taken on the qualities of the constructed space, creating depth where there ostensibly is none. Though they lack physicality, the advertisements mimic the psychological nadirs of the human subject. They serve a stabilizing function in this society, sustaining its mores and rhythms. The transformation from ephemera to crux is empirically analyzed by the Esper machine.

Deckard uses the Esper to examine a photo found at Leon’s apartment in an attempt to determine the whereabouts of the fugitive replicants. “Through Deckard’s instructions the ‘depthless surface of the screen’ is probed, tested, and finally entered. The screen, that frontier separating terminal and physical realties, is rendered permeable, and the space behind it becomes tangible and controllable” (Bukatman, 136). Like an analogue to our own memory, the machine scans images, focuses in on important details, and comes to important realizations. This new memory machine which Bukatman constructs has the power of linking the existential to the mnemonic. In an odd way, which Bukatman doesn’t acknowledge, this machine is capable of confirming the humanity of a synthetic being. Its dialectical opposite is the Voight-Kampff machine which takes humanity, in the form of empathy, away from the replicant and reasserts the superficiality of being. The fear is palpable on Bryant’s face as Deckard openly wonders whether the machine will work on the Nexus 6. If it doesn’t, where will the new ontological line in the sand be drawn? Both these mechanical contraptions work through the exigencies of the eye.

The eye is probably the most important trope in Blade Runner. A close-up of an eye is one of the first images in the film. It reflects the Hades-like Los Angeles that we are about to enter. As stated briefly before, the eye is also a vital part of the Voight-Kampff testing procedure which reads unknown gradations in ocular activity (jargonized by Tyrell as “capillary dilation of the blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris”). Moreover, it is Roy Batty’s declaration of “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes” to Chew at EyeWorks and his eloquent final speech detailing those visions that, I argue, ensure his humanity. For Bukatman the eye is the tool by which we scrutinize the world, from the unquantifiable grandeur of the Tyrell building to the serial number on an artificial snake scale seen through a microscope. He labels the various permutations of this space, the cinematic—an impression with allegiances to Jean Epstein’s photogenie. The unceasing dimensional shifts in the film compel the spectator to fully invest him/herself in the image. We are brought back to the positivist rationale for photography in the nineteenth century, which rightly claimed that this new apparatus would allow us to see the world in ways we never considered before.

Even though Bukatman’s fractal system goes a long way towards tying together many of the visual set pieces in the film, I would note a few exceptions. Bukatman does not parse out the representational depth in the replicants themselves. Let’s look at a character like Rachel, who symbolizes the ultimate stage of replicant evolution. She is made in humankind’s image, endowed with human memories and emotions, and does not know herself to be anything but human. Yet in this consumer society, she is not a person, but a product. “More human than human is our motto.” This advertising slogan, blurted by Tyrell, leads us down a rabbit hole of paradoxes. If she is more like us than ourselves, shouldn’t she be afforded the same rights as us if not more? If we take this logic to its full extension aren’t her memories then more real, her body more substantial, her life more valuable than our own. By denying these replicants their right to life, by virtue of their enslavement and finite life spans, we are punishing our better selves to absolve our own guilt over their creation. They become utter manifestations of that repressed guilt that come back to destroy us.

Moreover, Bukatman ignores the obvious two-dimensionality of the ever-present neon signs and the read-outs in the flying spinner cars that substantiate Jameson’s original observations. Their flatness contravenes his scalar analysis of the world and introduces a sense of stasis. The constant repetition of the neon dragon’s flicking tongue offers no escape from the suffocating diegesis. We are trapped, as is Deckard, in a world of surfaces. There is a constant interplay between the horizontal flatness of the Tyrell building or the sprawling street scenes, and the vertical depth of a world without a tangible top or bottom. The endless repositioning of the fractal perspective is contested, as the narrative simultaneously ensnares us on the rain-slicked streets, confines us in the spinner’s bubble, or abandons us in the labyrinthine spaces of the Bradbury building. Finally, there is superficiality in structure itself. The world of the film is retro-fitted, meaning that new architecture has literally been built on top of the old. The future is solely on the surface. The characters’ clothing, mode of address, and mannerisms also seem to be bred from film noir conventions of the past, with a thin veneer of futurity applied to situate them in this new world.

Giuliana Bruno explores these past/future dichotomies in her essay, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner.” She employs Jameson’s exploration of pastiche and schizophrenia to ground her arguments. Jameson discusses in detail the postmodernist reliance on pastiche to create new artistic forms out of an amalgamation of prior historical moments. The new is regularly a copy of an original, but since the old forms are growing increasingly obscure, the simulacrum results. The simulacrum is a postmodernist entity which cannot be distinguished from the original because the original no longer exists. Bruno allies these ideas with the postindustrialist ethic in which the capital momentum has shifted towards reproduction. “The disconnected temporality of the replicants and the pastiche city are all an effect of a postmodern, postindustrial condition: wearing out, waste” (Bruno, 65). The remnants of the consumer society are everywhere in the form of this detritus. Hence, an aesthetics of recycling exists in the world of the film to reclaim some of the past and create new models. Those include the retro-fitted buildings, the new ethnic combinations forged through proximity, the strange sounds of cityspeak, the Egyptian lines and interiors of the Tyrell building, the Mayan motifs in Deckard’s apartment, and the distended Roman columns of the Bradbury building. “Pastiche, as an aesthetic of quotation, incorporates dead styles; it attempts a recollection of the past, of memory, and of history” (Bruno, 67). Pastiche also enters the interior life of the replicants. This is most obvious with Rachel whose memories are a combination of other people’s. For the criminal replicants, who know what they are, piles of photographs serve as referents to some time in the past, some moment where they existed before the present. This tenuous duration through image allows them to retain a semblance of personality and individuality, like the naturally-bred humans that they are trying so desperately to mimic.

The replicants are trying to avoid the symptoms of schizophrenia. Jameson defines this psychosis through Lacan as “a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning” (Jameson, 26). This linguistic order of signifiers allows a human to describe his/her temporality and know it to be true. The replicants have a curtailed lifespan, so their syntagmatic links are frayed as they have not developed naturally. They are unable to avoid the psychic stasis of the schizophrenic; they only have access to life as a series of presents. Roy Batty is denied a past on visits to Chew, J.F. Sebastian and Tyrell and is subsequently deprived of a future because he refuses to submit to language. He uses violence to communicate his needs like a child acting out for neglectful parents. Bruno emphatically concludes, “The schizophrenic temporality of the replicants is a resistance to enter the social order, to function according to its modes. As outsiders to the order of language, replicants have to be eliminated” (Bruno, 70).

Bruno also extends the Lacanian analysis by placing the replicants in the world of the Imaginary. They are still trying to distinguish the nature of the image staring back at them in the mirror stage. Moreover, their desire, characteristic of the Imaginary, is to be human but this is impossible. Ensuing is a profound sense of loss that causes a mental rupture from which the replicants can’t recover. The replicants will never attain the balance which the later Symbolic order provides. The Symbolic is just outside their grasp since they have no way of perfecting language without a history. Therefore the laws of man, based upon the acquisition of that language, have no place in their world. The replicants have been given the bodies of adults, but their emotional capacity remains infantile. They are only slightly advanced beyond the Real where all their needs were provided for possibly in a lab or hatching facility. In conclusion, Bruno reveals a phenomenological link between mother, history, and photography in the narrative. All these tropes are manifestations of the past, especially childhood—an elusive concept to a being born as an adult. Both Leon and Rachel (the only two replicants to take and fail the Voight-Kampff test) succumb to their synthetic nature when confronted with the apparition of mother—Leon through a question about his history and Rachel by way of a living photograph. Mother, in the Lacanian sense, represents home, nurture, and morality. The replicants are excluded from these realms.

Bruno is thorough in her re-appropriation of Jameson. Nevertheless, she does abandon some of his more salient points. She never discusses “nostalgia” as a motivation for pastiche. The mere design of the replicants harks back to a time when humans were not hobbled by the effluence and conflicts of the industrial age. The technological acuity of humans in 2019 may be more advanced, but they have grown more frail as they depend on the replicants to do all the heavy lifting, literally. There is also a nostalgia inherent in the film noir aesthetics of the film. Rick Deckard is simply a modern equivalent of Humphrey Bogart’s rumpled detectives and Rachel is a stand-in for every femme-fatale that ever misled a private eye on celluloid. Jameson’s “intertextuality” also bestows the characters with more emotional depth to the point where we can align ourselves with Deckard’s motives even if he barely speaks. The original audience for the film would have been well aware of Harrison Ford’s previous roles. The confident egotists of Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) are a stark contrast to Deckard’s brooding anxiety.

One more missed linkage involves the syntagmatic parameters. Bruno references the indigenous cityspeak in relation to pastiche, but it must also be related to schizophrenia as a clearly established language system itself. For the viewer the signified and the signifier are indeterminate. We are told that the vernacular is spoken by other inhabitants of the city. However, as an imaginary language created by Edward James Olmos just for the film, we have no way of deciphering it. Yet, cityspeak functions as a bridge in the narrative between the motives of the police department and those of Gaff as related to Deckard. Consequently, we enter into a schizophrenic relationship with these authority figures and have no sense of their history as it relates to this unfamiliar world. We do not know why they have decided to “retire” replicants instead of deactivate or reprogram them. Nor do we know why they have chosen Deckard for this mission. Moreover, Gaff’s origami figures remain enigmas since we have no language to decipher them. The inability to comprehend constitutes Jameson’s final boundary between art and postmodernity.

Jameson names this unperceivable network the sublime. Using prior definitions by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the nexus of this idea revolves around a conceptualization of the divine, but that is only one application. There is an unbridled dread and incredulity which invades the human mind when confronted with a deity, a universe, a planet, or any infinitely branched system which we cannot comprehend. Jameson finds the ideal literary representation of sublimity in the cyberpunk expulsions of William Gibson. The intangible bytes which surf through cyberspace exist in a world that the human psyche can’t quite control. This capitulation to electronic signals leads to paranoia, as subjectivity is eradicated. Ironically, Blade Runner preceded and influenced this cyberpunk movement.

Vivian Sobchack in her final chapter, “Postfuturism,” from Screening Space outlines the shape of the unfathomable. Blade Runner is again one paradigm used to fill this metaphorical space. We are surrounded by electronic flotsam, the discernible vestiges of the sublime. This constant reminder of another existence beyond physicality has transformed humanity. Sobchack believes that our mediated insertion into cyberspace “…has recast human being into a myriad of visible and active simulacra” (Sobchack, 229). These simulacra are not bound to the indexical and can exist autonomously from us in a world where our bodies can’t travel. Hence, in a culture where humans can now be alienated from themselves, the alien or the other no longer signifies the same fear it once did. We are the aliens; The replicants are us.

In Blade Runner, the spectator and the protagonist are constantly re-orienting themselves in order to come to terms with this infinitely dense sensorium. As is common with the human psyche, the narrative displaces society’s confusion onto an “evil other.” This is usually codified as a huge corporation with the ability to control the invisible networks of information that we can barely discern. “This is space that finds its most explicit figuration in the impossible towering beauty of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation Building—an awesome megastructure whose intricate façade also resembles a microchip” (Sobchack, 234). Tyrell has been able to synthesize a crushing amount of bio-engineering technology to recreate humankind. In the intertextual world of the science-fiction film, such a mastery of the sublime is always deemed unnatural (partially by its perceived impossibility) and can only have negative consequences. We are not meant to conquer the sublime. If we do, then aren’t we technically gods? That hyperconsciousness would render culture pointless. Luckily, in our world culture is still viable, even if remarkably mutated. Postmodern logic can accommodate the sublime into our way of life.

Now culture can only be glimpsed at random intervals. This incomprehension is literalized in Blade Runner due to what Sobchack calls an “inflation of space,” a theory functionally identical to Jameson’s “hyperspace.” This inflation is identified by an “excess scenography” which crowds the mise-en-scéne. The fabricated space brings the spectator into contact with the sublime. Space is anthropomorphized, and like a collector classifies, gathers, preserves, and displays objects. “Trash and waste, pollution and decay, are visualized as curious and beautiful, postmodern sensibility finding aesthetic pleasure and sublimity in the accumulations and transformative decay of the cityscape…” (Sobchack, 263-64). Ne’er-do-wells scavenge for trash on the grimy streets, even claiming Deckard’s car as a site for scavenge. Pris hides in a pile of garbage to attract J.F. Sebastian. Zhora runs through a chaotic gauntlet of costumes, cars, umbrellas, and finally glass. This inflation though has it consequences in the diegesis. Primary among those is a “deflation of temporal value.” Time no longer flows in a rational manner that presupposes history, language, and causal forces. Blade Runner though is ambivalent about this shift towards spatial representation. It is apparent that time is still regarded highly by the inclusion of the replicant’s four year life span in the story, interspersed shots of Batty’s hand seizing up to that deadline, and his eloquent speech on the rooftop which references his memories as “…lost in time like tears in rain…” Nonetheless, the spatial dominance in contemporary science fiction augurs a new postmodern cinematic language.

I would add one vital element to Sobchack’s inflation thesis. The cascading, ominous tones of Vangelis’s score imply a world outside the normal flow of melody and tempo. The music almost never stops, constantly adding expansive layers of melancholy and awe. In addition, Sobchack does not engage Jameson’s mention of “derealization” in her argument. It is a fleeting sense that reality is as artificial as modern forms of art. In Blade Runner this doubt is prevalent. Rachel asks Deckard early in the film whether he’s ever retired a human by mistake. There is also the contentious matter as to whether the protagonist we have been identifying with throughout the film is human or another replicant. This question enlivens Jameson’s conception of the “terrifying” and the “exhilarating” as we contemplate an answer. If Deckard is a replicant, the dissolution of boundaries theorized by the film would be complete; Homosapiens will have come to an end brought on by our own hubris.

Jameson ends his essay with a hypothesis. He believes that the only way for us to interact with the sublime in the future will be to develop an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” This diagrammatic overlay would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson, 51). This system would reclaim subjectivity from the fragmenting impulses of depthlessness, pastiche, schizophrenia, and sublimity. It would create a political dynamic capable of integrating personal ideology and global awareness, all through technology. At the end of her essay, Sobchack glances over “cognitive mapping” and offers Born in Flames (1982) as an idealized example of mapping put into practical use. I offer Blade Runner as a counterexample. Aren’t the replicant’s brains the beginning of this advanced cultural logic? Once they are allowed to temporally transcend, their engineered brains will be able to surpass ours. The part of their minds that is constructed will be able to hold yottabytes of information, and the part that mimics our own will have the time to craft an individualized ideology. Replicants are the perfect solution to the postmodernity crisis. They are immune to the vicissitudes of cultural logic. They will succeed despite our impotence, at least on film.

The replicants are searching for empathy and memory in a city inscribed with memory on its walls in thick layers of dirt. Conversely, humans exist in a constant state of amnesia as the highways of the mind only extend in one direction. The past recedes as we feverishly search for the novel. The social theorists discussed in my essay are also searching—grappling with the nature of the simulacrum. They are digging for clues in Jameson’s intricate composition. Postmodernity, however, offers few answers. Instead, its fluid borders generate an unending cavalcade of suppositions. Blade Runner is a film about the choices we make. It is invested in our contemporary moment. What still counts as human, whether at the embryonic dawn or the “accelerated decrepitude” of dusk? Is reminiscence really a part of lived experience or more a function of the imagination? What is that elemental spark that allows us to abstract ourselves and engage in reveries of divergent realities and theories? Can this ember ever be duplicated? How do we shelter emotional veracity from an increasingly coded world? Do we really want to know the answers?

Works Cited

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York:
Verso, 2002.

Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2007.

Bruno, Giuliana. “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner.” October, Vol. 41
(Summer 1987), pp. 61-74.

Bukatman, Scott. Blade Runner. London: British Film Institute, 1997.

Bukatman, Scott. “Blade Runner and Fractal Geography.” Terminal Identity. Durham,
Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 130-137.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism
Debate.” New German Critique, No. 33, Modernity and Postmodernity (Autumn
1984), pp. 53-65.

Jameson, Fredric, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 1-54.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Postfuturism.” Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.
New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 223-305.

In Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express the frenzied ruminations surrounding lost love, loneliness, and irrepressible change are rendered impressionistically on the screen. The film is broken into two discrete stories. I will be focusing my discussion on a scene between Officer #633 (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Fay (Faye Wong) that takes place towards the middle of the second half. It is their first truly intimate moment together after an indeterminate amount of time flirting and engaging in charged small talk. Like two celestial bodies they are inexplicably drawn to each other but continue to rotate around one another endlessly, never touching. Here, they collide gently.

(Minute 6:57 to 11:33)

Ironically, the scene starts with the officer running to his apartment because he senses that his ex-girlfriend has returned to him. He is still infatuated with his former fling and Fay remains a strange curiosity. The audience learns of his motivation through a voice-over narration which is internally focalized. First, we see the officer running along the street from a high angle shot. Wong then uses elliptical editing, via simple cuts, to transport us to the officer’s apartment complex, up the stairs, and around the corner from his door. A slow-motion effect is employed as the officer approaches the door to heighten the anticipation for the desired encounter. Moreover, we hear every footstep clearly isolated on the soundtrack as if it’s in tune with the rushing of his pulse. As the door is thrust open the camera resumes normal speed and we are plunged into a flooded living room. The longing of the character is immediately deflated by reality, and the audience’s expectations are jettisoned along with the protagonist’s. Later when he actually does run into his former girlfriend in the convenience store, we are cued to the fact that he is moving on with his life by the subdued nature of his reaction. She no longer inspires a heart-pounding race through the streets, but just a simple smirk.

The next shot is of a lone blue flip-flop floating into frame from underneath the couch. This is an obvious allusion to Fay as she was the one who bought these and snuck them into the apartment. The juxtaposition of this shot right after the officer’s disappointment indicates that Fay might help fill the void in his home. She has already surreptitiously floated into his life. As he cleans up the water spillage, we see his image refracted and multiplied by the mirrors on the wall. Over this image his voice-over narration starts again. “When a person cries, you can simply give him a piece of tissue paper to dry his tears. But when a house cries, you really have a lot of work to do.” This anthropomorphization of the apartment is analogous to the officer talking to his raggedy dish cloth, the soap, and various stuffed animals in his apartment to stave off the loneliness. Since we never see Leung’s character cry in the film, the flooding becomes a symbol of his emotional state. The water is the tears he would cry if he allowed himself to feel his loss fully. Our inability to see him directly and only through the mirrors also suggests his confused stated of mind and the problems with “seeing” explored throughout the film. Major characters, including Fay, are often shown wearing sunglasses, and it is the lack of perception that unravels the officer’s relationship in the first place. He never realized that the air hostess would want variety in her food and subsequently in her men.

As the officer continues to clean, we get a close-up of his feet and the aforementioned flip-flops. Fay is subtly inserted into the narration again, and it is no surprise that as he moves towards the door to discard the trash, he startles her on the other side. She is holding a clear plastic bag full of live fish. She has brought them for the officer’s aquarium, but has to fumble as to an excuse when he questions her. The audience knows that she has been coming to his apartment for weeks ever since his ex-girlfriend dropped off a goodbye note and his keys at the Midnight Express. Since the officer already attributes his house and the items therein with a consciousness, he doesn’t seem to notice the fresh bars of soap, the clean dishes, the re-appearance of family pictures, the stuffed Garfield, new sheets, new clothes, and of course all the new fish. The reality of what’s been going on simply can’t break through his itinerant mourning. As Fay attempts a hasty retreat it is as though she is metaphysically restrained by her duplicity. She cannot move forwards or backwards and is forced to confront the object of her obsession. Before while she was in the apartment, he was an invisible presence and she was free to run around, jump on the bed, yell out the windows, and move without restrictions. In effect, she could be his girlfriend without him ever knowing, but the fear of actually being in a relationship and being circumscribed by someone else’s expectations terrifies her even though she craves intimacy- hence her liminal dilemma. Fittingly, when the officer attempts to help her into his apartment to rest her legs she surprises him and the audience by pushing his hand off her arm. It is the first time we are witness to the contradictions in her actions.

We then suddenly hear the officer’s voice-over narration again and he’s talking about his ex-girlfriend and his memories of massaging her legs after a flight. This time though he is massaging Fay’s legs, and he remarks that this is the first time he’s felt a woman’s legs since his ex-girlfriend left. He then asks Fay to stay for a while. He is starting to see the futility of holding on to the past and is entertaining the idea of being interested in someone else, even if he can’t bring himself to admit it yet. At this moment we see both the officer and Fay reflected in the mirror that previously only held his image. The narration is hinting at a possible romance if only they can see themselves honestly and not through misdirection.

The officer puts in a CD he finds on the table. Not coincidentally, the song happens to be California Dreaming which introduced Officer #663 at the beginning of this second story. What first starts out as non-diegetic music continuing from the previous story is revealed to be diegetically placed in the Midnight Express. It is Fay’s favorite song and she plays it at deafening levels whenever possible so that she doesn’t have to think. Straining to speak over the loud music, the two have their first miscommunication. When the song starts to play again at the officer’s apartment their thoughts are also misaligned. We hear Fay speaking in a voice-over narration for the first time. “I know his girlfriend doesn’t like this song at all. The CD is mine. I left it here a few days ago. I am starting to wonder if sleepwalking can be passed on to others. Wonder if I’ve been too nervous.” As the last words are spoken we now see Fay reflected and doubled by the mirrors in the apartment. We are focalized with her for a brief moment and the duality of her emotions is made explicit once more. We sense a desire that she may want to stop sleepwalking and awake to the reality of her feelings for the officer but this revelation is undercut as she falls asleep immediately after we hear those words. The song also abruptly ends at this instance and we are dropped into a startling silence soon filled by the officer’s voice-over. The officer sits down next to Fay and promptly falls asleep too. The voice-over informs us that he wishes he could wake her, but decides to let her sleep for some reason unknown to him. Sleepwalking is a communicable disease after all for these would-be lovers. Neither can wake up to their own longing.

The scene ends with a montage of shots. First we see them sleeping on the couch in the mirror, then a medium close-up of their sleeping faces followed by the officer now alone sprawled out on the couch with the curtains closed, and at last we see him again through the aquarium still alone in what might be the morning. This visual pun places the officer in the aquarium with the fish and intimates that he too is trapped in a box of sorts, unable to take control of his own fate. It also links him with Fay again and the fish she’s left behind. The focus shifts to the fish in the foreground and then we get the final shot of the scene—the vibrant, flower-patterned curtain partly drawn open so we can see the people ascending the escalator outside the window. The audience is returned to the outside world and we are reminded that regardless of this brief diversion people are still going about their business just like any other day. Even though we and the characters have been pulled out of the commotion for a brief moment, time moves on. Faye has successfully managed to run away this time, and they remain separate entities, unbowed by the forces working to bring them together.

Wong illuminates a steamy Hong Kong on the verge of political turnover. He manages to transform this ominous background into a whimsical reverie on human nature and the contradictions of love. Connections are easily lost and burgeoning romances parry almost instinctively. In the world of the film this makes all relationships tenuous at best. Yet, people still yearn subconsciously to find true love despite their own idiosyncrasies. The dissected scene is connected to themes in the earlier story and to the movie as a whole. Leitmotifs include running, sunglasses, mirrors, obscured windows, fish, food (appetite/hunger), discarded messages, and rain. The audience is allowed a peek into the lives of these characters through these sundry thematic lenses. Still, we are denied a clear resolution just as the characters are continually denied answers to their wandering. The audience doesn’t know whether Fay and the officer will ever be together or if they will find happiness in someone else’s arms. Nonetheless, we are happy to have met them and can navigate the curlicues of our own predilections with our eyes a little wider.