Contemporary Franco-Chinese Cinema: Translation, Citation and Imitation in Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time is it There?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

My appreciation goes to Sheldon Lu for giving me the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at the Modern Language Association's 2003 convention in the session, “Asian Cinema in the Age of Globalization.” Thanks also to the University of California's Center for Ideas and Society for providing a residential fellowship, which allowed me to complete this article, and to my East/West research group colleagues Derek Burrill, Mariam Beevi Lam and Yenna Wu for their insightful readings and helpful feedback on a draft of this piece. My gratitude to Craig Stein for his expert editorial and technical support in addition to his generous sharing of ideas.

Notes

¹My thanks to Mariam Beevi Lam for sharing her insights on Maggie Cheung's career and Olivier Assayas's depiction of it.

²The last name of Virginie Ledoyen, whose parents are Spanish, is Fernandez, complicating her “Franchness.” Although one's parents' nationality does not dictate one's own, it is notable that she assumed a “very French” stage name, borrowed from her paternal grandmother, “masking” her Spanish surname. < http://www.adoring.net/virginieledoyen/biography.htm >. Accessed February 3, 2004.

³Hsieh 94. This translation from the French, as well as all subsequent ones, is my own.

⁴Thanks to Yenna Wu for inspiring my reading of re-education as re-molding in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

⁵I define the “film proper” as everything that takes place prior to the tacked-on coda or flash-forward frame gratuitously added to the novel in the cinematic adaptation and occupying its last thirty minutes. See Seguret.

⁶Ghost Dog, review of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, December 23, 2003, Cinémasie. < http://www.cinemasie.com/fiche/oeuvre/balzac/noscritiq ues.html?langtext = fr >. Accessed February 10, 2004.

⁷Many thanks to Craig Stein for pointing out that Truffaut's Milk Bottle scene takes over Tsai's screen and suggesting the implications thereof.

⁸Godfrey Cheshire, Independent On-line, Movie Feature, October 29, 2003, < http:// indyweek. com/ durham/2003-101-29/movie.html >. Accessed February 4, 2004. Other critics who characterize Tsai as Beckettian are Tony Rayns (Sight & Sound, July 2002, 57), Nick James (Sight & Sound, September 2002, 27) and Jean-Sébastien Chauvin, “Et là-bas, quelle heure est-il? de Tsai Ming-liang,” Cahiers du cinéma, (October 2001), 80–81.

⁹Even if a French New Wave filmmaker such as Jean-Luc Godard used long takes in a film such as Breathless, his jump cuts and handheld camera radically contrast Tsai's static shots.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle E. Bloom

Michelle E. Bloom is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Her book Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession was published by Minnesota in 2003. She has written articles on authors and directors ranging from Balzac, Champfleury and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam to Henry James and François Truffaut which have appeared in journals including Comparative Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly and Symposium. She is currently working on a book-length study of the aesthetic and cultural interactions between France and Asia.