Speech

“Cold War in Acoustic Unconscious: Gendered Memory of Artist Film along with the First Island Chain”

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The paper looks into the social memory of the cold war through the creative asynchronicity between sound and visual in the artist films and how do those most of asynchronicity refract upon the presentness of those local events during the cold war. By doing so, I aim to engage the late cultural theorist Tosaka Jun's writings on film in order to address the potentiality of re-politicalizing transregional leftist mourning in the everydayness of filmic media. Cinema has often functioned as a critical point of entry for reflection on and critique of subject formation, including subject formation amid the colonialism, neocolonialism and nation-building regimes of the post-World War II period. However, to what extent may moving image media, including documentaries, feature films, experimental shorts, etc., also be understood to help enunciate historical realities beyond the grand narratives of dominance? Invoking aspects of Marx’s labor theory of value, the late film scholar Paul Willemen proposed that “image-discourses, and thus the technologies associated with them, provide a particularly propitious terrain for narrations venting the tensions associated with the dead labor issue.” This paper proposes that, in the context of Cold War Asia, one particularly effective way of drawing out such tensions is by focusing on the asynchronicity between a film’s sounds and images. In other words, as alluded by Walter Benjamin’s initial proposal of optical unconscious, in which he suggested how cinema expends human perception both epistemologically, I examine how those moments of sensorial asynchronicity in modern screen media also challenges the narrative tradition of history writing. 

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By shifting the focus from the positivity embodied by visual domain of cinema to the negativity of the soundscape, the paper aims to explore a sounding character of cold war remembrance practicing in the mode of “acousmatic listening.” Examples of “acousmatic listening” are drawn from artist films along the first island chain, including the Okinawa artist Futoshi Miyagi’s Flower Names (2015), the Filipino documentary filmmaker Nick Deocampo’s Oliver (1983), the Filipino experimental filmmaker John Torres’ People Power Bombshell: A Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016), and the Vietnam artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Eleven Men (2016). In addition to their shared inquiries regarding the unsettled past and their resonating approaches of repurposing off-screen spaces and strategies of enunciation in the filmic context, these works either utilize non-diegetic sound elements, namely narration and voiceover, or create a sense of sensorial disorientation, particularly drag queen performances of lip sync. Based upon such dialectical tensions between the visible and the audible, I attempt to situate a gendered regime of representation by historicizing how during the post-war period the ‘c’ of cinema comes to stand for capitalism, colonialism, and cold war, and how the cinema constituted by this trinity has been suffused with patriarchal violence. In other words, instead of focusing on questions of what the contents of artists’ films are about, this paper will shed light on why and how the artists produced these films – a preliminary inquiry establishing a firmer grounding from which to approach the question of meaning.