By Panpan 

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                                  A desire for change can only come about by drawing on fantasy.
                                         – Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema” 
 

1. A Form of Temporal Critique


In Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Bliss Lim elaborates a form of temporal critique, to put it briefly, how can the cinema, especially fantastic cinema, insinuate the limits of homogeneous, disenchanted time when it is arguably an instantiation of it. Temporal critique, in Bliss’ sense, would serve as the starting point and the critical approach of film analysis of Center Stage (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1992).

On the one hand, cinema can be the exemplar of homogeneous time. First of all, it’s because every cinema, like clocks, converts heterogeneous temporalities into a series of equidistant uniform intervals- 24 frames in every second. Also, in the case of Center Stage, the efforts to seek Shanghai film history in 1930s and offer the chronicle of Ruan Lingyu’s films on screen can be said to follow the logic of clock and calendar and to find a position of Hong Kong itself in the discourse of Chinese history.

On the other hand, as Bliss brilliantly argues, fantastic cinema has the tendency to reveal that homogeneous time is not “reality” but rather a translation, because the persistence of supernaturalism tends to insinuate the limits of disenchantment. 

In Center Stage, Ruan Lingyu tells Chen Yanyan in jest that she would spend one hour penciling one of her eyebrows in Beijing and spend two hours in Harbin- here it is inadvertently revealed that clock time does not tell the truth of duration but exemplifies an illusion. 

Central to Bliss’ analysis is through the ghost/ specter’s haunting and return, multiply temporal rhythms, which fail to coincide with the homogeneous time logic, are created within fantastic narratives. Although Center Stage is not a ghost film in general sense, it is quite possible, if not more accurate, to considered as a specter/ ghost story –as Virilio suggests, “the star is only a specter of absorption proposed to the gaze of the spectator, a ghost that you can interview.” At least, Center Stage is no doubt a fantastic narrative that “juxtaposes two (or more) radically different worlds.” 

The most striking example of multiply temporal rhythms in Center Stage is perhaps the remake of a scene in The New Woman（dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934). In this scene, Maggie, on her deathbed, by mimicking Ruan Lingyu, accuses the social oppression and injustices that cause woman’s suffering, and raises a strong protesting voice, “I do want to live! I do want revenge!” (Fig 1) It is noteworthy that Wei Ming, the female protagonist of The New Woman, is based on the actual life story of Ai Xia, an actress and scriptwriter. At this moment, Maggie is simultaneously Ruan Lingyu/ Wei Ming/ Ai Xia. It is, exactly a moment crosshatched with various temporal rhythms, or in Gilles Deleuze’s words, “a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration: a single event can belong to several levels, the sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order.” “The past,” as Bliss’ depicts, “is not dead, but instead paradoxically coexists alongside the present.”

It is in a quite similar way that Steedman portrays the presence of history in the archive: as dust that has come down from the past and that will never disappear entirely.  Actually, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the film Center Stage is an archive. In this sense, what Stanley Kwan did when making this film, is to breathe in the “dust”, or to collect the ashes of time. 

                   

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Fig 1
 

 

2. Memory and Reminiscence


Hardly can a temporal critique be fulfilled without investigating the narrative structure of the film. Ruan Lingyu’s life events in Center Stage, are not in a flow, but in a cluster, always going back and forth- an instance here would be the scene in which Ruan Lingyu, who had determined to commit suicide, kissed every director in the party – whenever she kissed one director, it cut to the director sitting before her deathbed and delivering the eulogy and then cut back to the scene of the party. 

Amelie Hastie notes the distinction of history and memory: history is in a flow while memory is in a cluster.  Given the dichotomy of public/private, objective/subjective, flow/cluster, history/memory, it’s better to say that Center Stage is the reconstruction of memory, rather than “the reconstruction of history,” articulated by Shuqin Cui and other scholars.  It is within the space of memory that, we are allowed to “dream at the frontier between history and legend.”



Abbas regards Center Stage as the biography of Ruan. I would argue, however, what the memories here make up, precisely speaking, is not a biography but a series of reminiscence- in Benjamin’s definition, “reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to a biography… for biography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”



 



3. Translating Time: Resistance and Nostalgia


The tropes of translating one time logic to another, in Chakrabarty’s and Bergson’s senses, are both addressed in Bliss Lim’s work.

According to Chakrabarty, recasting the nonmodern as a precursor to modernity involves an act of translation of the thorny, enchanted time into the homogeneous disenchanted time. Shanghai in the 1930s, is just such a society in transition between nonmodern and modernity.

According to Bergson, behind the colonial trope of time-as-space, of the globe as a kind of clock, the “all is given” logic of homogeneous time- To maintain that the future holds the same thing for everyone, that the future is already known since their future can be extrapolated from “our” past- should be exposed.  What worried Hong Kong people in the pre-1997 period was largely, the possibility of the arrival of “a new colonizer” and the “to-be-extrapolated” future of Hong Kong. 

If it’s admitted that Hong Kong in the 1990s, parallel with Shanghai in the 1930s, was suffering from the translation into from the spectral time to the clock time, then, can it be said that the spectral time of Center Stage, through the haunting and return of Ruan Lingyu, indicates the resistance of Hong Kong towards 1997?

The attitude of Hong Kong, in the penumbra of 1997, seems to be more conflictiing, complicated and “may be characterized as nostalgic, that is, as infused with the pain and pleasure of remembering what is gone beyond recovery.”  “Nostalgia straddles the line between homogeneous and heterogeneous time: it betrays a kinship to a linear, teleological time, depicting a stable past at a remove from the present. But its appropriate revisiting of the past also pulls away from the notion of chronologically ordered, separate times and tends towards a plural understanding of temporal cohabitation and co-implication.”  Nostalgia, at the same time, means the acceptance of change, the acceptance of a world that is already different. The consciousness of change can also be glimpsed in the beginning of the film, when Maggie says, “It’s not very important whether the audience will remember me. Even if they do so, it will be different from the way they think of Ruan.”



4. The Allegory of Hong Kong



In the sequence of the photographic stills of Ruan from her earlier career, the voice-over of the off-screen director offers Maggie and the audience commentary about Ruan’s passiveness during the production of her earlier films. Upon hearing this comment, Maggie exclaims, “Wasn’t she much like myself?” Maggie’s sympathetic response here, delivered with a tone of self-mockery, seems to be the clue of the whole framing structure of the film: to see the past through the filter of the present,  to apprehend the world in relation to our own possibilities.

It’s true that, in many aspects, the legend of Ruan Lingyu in the 1930s serves as the allegory of Hong Kong in the 1990s. As Abbas and other scholars have pointed out, they are both “a time that out of joint”:  for the former, it’s at the transition between silent films and talkies; for the latter, it’s at the time of Hong Kong’s forthcoming reversion to China in 1997. Just like Ruan Lingyu, lots of Hong Kong people spoke poor Mandarin at that time. The dilemma of Ruan between two men, more or less has some reference to the position of Hong Kong between China and Britain. In the film, Stanley Kwan asks Maggie whether she believes she will still be remembered in “50 years”, which accords with the “50 years” of considerable independence in terms of the sociopolitical structure of Hong Kong, guaranteed by the Joint Declaration of 1984.

The conflicted dual cultural identity of Hong Kong, could be illustrated by the shot in which Maggie has two bodies of herself in the mirror. [Fig 2] In addition, the face of Maggie is always filmed in cast shadows in the film [Fig 3] - as a stereotyped cinematic code, it suggests the anxiety and the instability of the mental state of Ruan Lingyu and mirrors the similar mental experience of Hong Kong people.





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Fig 2

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Fig 3

5. Reality and Illusion


The film is peppered with self-reflexive moments. For instance, we see the acting “director” emphasize his final remarks on Ruan’s death while Ruan rises up from her “deathbed” to let an assistant add makeup to her face. Another self-reflexive moment occurs in the scene that Maggie, indulged herself in the emotion of the character, is sobbing under a white blanket, with the diegetic director, Jiahui sitting by the side of her bed. In a single long and high-angle shot, the real-life director Stanley Kwan enters the frame to remind Jiahui: “You forgot to lift up the blanket to have a look at Maggie.” At these moments, the reliability of history/memory is seriously questioned- what we call history/memory might be merely an illusion.

More interestingly, in Center Stage, even the layer of making the film, including Stanley Kwan himself, is not considered as the “reality”. In the scene where Kwan interprets Ruan’s life to Maggie who is sitting in front, the camera moves beyond Kwan’s shoulder to a mirror on the opposite wall, capturing the reflection of Kwan and two film technicians operating the camera behind him. [Fig 4, 5] Here, the final boundary between illusion and reality is erased, or we can say, a magical reversion has happened to illusion and reality.

 

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Fig 4

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Fig 5

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References


[1] Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
[2] Ackbar Abbas, “The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Déjà Disparu,” in  Asian Cinema: A Reader& Guide, ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 72-99.
[3] Paul Virilio. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. trans. Philip Beitchman. (NY: Semiotext Press, 1991).
[4] Gilles Deleuze, “From Cinema 1 and Cinema 2,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and [5] Marshall Cohen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 216-239.
[5] Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
[6] Amelie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[7] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
[8] Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, (NY: Schocken Books, 1986).
[9] Water Benjamin, “These on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-264.
[10] Fredric Jameson, “Nostalgia for the Present,” in Classical Hollywood Cinema: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Jane Gaines (Duke University Press, 1992)
[11] Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema”，in Notes on Woman’s Cinema, ed. Claire Johnston, (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973), 24-31.
[12] Shuqin Cui, “Stanley Kean’s Center Stage: The (Im)possible Engagement between Feminism and Postmodernism,” Cinema Journal 39, No.4, (Summer, 2000), 60-80.
[13] Berry Michael,“Stanley Kwan: From Spectral Nostalgia to Corporeal Desire,” [interview], in Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, ed. Michael Berry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 440-57.

[14] Lin Wenqi, “Post-modern Style, Post-colonial Hong Kong: Anti National Allegory in Stanley Kwan’s films,” 后现代的风格，后殖民的香港：关锦鹏电影中的（反）国家寓言in Identification, Difference and Subjectivity: From Feminism to Postcolonial cultural imagination, ed. Jian Yingying (Taipei, Lixu Culture Press, 1997), 175-216.