Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Chinese Cinema

"Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures" examines the haunted sites and transmedia possibilities of trans-Chinese cinemas that reveal the fictionality of Chineseness as ethnic, ideological, linguistic, or national affiliation. From site visits and in-depth interviews, I consider the remains of Fuhe Grand Theatre, which Tsai Ming-liang bid farewell to in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), as an accidental archive of the materiality of cinema. I then locate its afterlives in Chu Yin Hua's photographic project Goodbye, Goodbye Dragon Inn (2007) and the digital restoration of King Hu's restored Dragon Inn (1967), to argue for the luminous intertwining of cinematic worlds as a mode of survival. In Chapter Two, through the elliptical editing of In the Mood for Love and the various forms of substitution (one lover for another) on the level of plot and also of location, I develop the conventional practice of creating geographical illusions as part of the palimpsestic invisibilities of cinema. I argue that this invisible substitution, common in the practice of filmmaking, forms an interstitial non-encounter that has ethical implications. In Chapter Three, I connect this analysis of the surfacing of invisibilized worlds to the affective screenscapes of post-2010 independent cinema in Singapore and Malaysia that contest authoritarian narratives of progress. "Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures" concludes with imaginations of alternative futurities in two video series: Tsai Ming-liang's seven-part "Walker Series" (2012–2015) and Charles Lim's multi-year "SEA STATE Series" (2008–present). This dissertation shows that the phantomaticity of cinema can illuminate the phantasms of sovereignty. Through foregrounding the densities and textures of my archives, I argue that the visible world of cinema operates as an "as if," in which each film constitutes a world-making project of memory and forgetting, and is embedded in unequal networks of psychical, physical and spectral relations.2024-08-2