University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

"What else can I do?": Cinematic slowness, anti-liberal affect and authenticity in An Elephant Sitting Still

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"What else can I do?": Cinematic slowness, anti-liberal affect and authenticity in An Elephant Sitting Still

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Content “WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?”:
CINEMATIC SLOWNESS, ANTI-LIBERAL AFFECT AND AUTHENTICITY
IN AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL
by
Ellen Li
A Thesis Presented to the
FACUL TY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, AR TS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulllment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES)
August 2022
Copyright 2022 Ellen Li
Table of Contents
Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Background & Critical Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Plot Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Overview of Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Chapter 1: Historicizing Aesthetics of Slow Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Slow, Contemplative Time in Cinema and the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Locating Slow Movies in the PRC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Slow Realism Against Liberal Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Chapter 2: Orientating Aect in An Elephant Sitting Still . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
T owards Optimism, One Step at a Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Walking as Thinking, Feeling in Reprieve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Aesthetic Disorientation Engenders Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Chapter 3: Slow Politics and Alienation/Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Undoing Liberal Aect with Deliberate Discomfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Liberal Authenticity and Existential Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Following the Authentic, Wherever it May Be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
“What else can I do?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
One Final Aesthetic Ruling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
ii
Abstract
This thesis explores the sensible surface of slow cinema in the lm An Elephant Sitting Still
(2017, dir. Hu Bo). Through close readings of the lm’s characteristic slowness, I attempt to articulate
how its aesthetics seize precedence over narrative contents in generating aective and ideological
substance, and what it means for the protagonists’ stories to take the form of disorientating slow time.
T o elucidate its style, I examine the neorealist historical origins of slow cinema and designate the genre
as antithetical to prevailing social, political, and economic liberal models. As well, I demonstrate how
the protagonist’s preoccupation with the titular elephant reveals critique of domineering liberal
fantasies in contemporary mainland China (PRC), including void promises of upward mobility and
authentic being. I propose that ultimately, to experience cinematic slowness is to refuse the pace of
liberal desire, to retreat into the time-image in reexivity, and to be alienated by duration as though it
were authentic, real time– as though it were life itself.
iii
I. Introduction
T o the extent that a work [of art] seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without
loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive
works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so
wholly centered is he in his style.
– Sontag
1
What is compelling about slow cinema in China today? The genre is foremost dened by a
deceleration of cinematic time that generates little excitement among movie-goers of the 21st century.
More often than not, nothing really happens– hardly a formula for box o ce success under the
homogenizing inuence of decorated Hollywood commercialism. Altogether with austere setting, zero
emotion and minimal diegesis, slow cinema carries an air prone to intellectualization and
catastrophization, owed in large part to its conjuring of existential stillness and moralistic quiet. In a
speed-oriented global market, slowness functions as a critical medium of our present social realities;
mapped on the political spectrum, enthusiasts of cinematic slowness reside “probably to the left”.
2
My
intrigue concerns the aesthetic ideology of slow cinema: what is the value of slowness to the lived
experience of contemporary audiences? How might we describe the esoteric aesthetics of cinematic
slow time or slow movement to make it more real or transparent to us? This paper attempts to realize
what exactly is ercely vital, if inscrutable, about slow cinema, through a priority of its aesthetic and
aective registers. I assess how formal, stylistic slow cinematic qualities crystallize felt tensions of
2
Ira Jae, “Introduction,” in Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action (New Y ork: W allower Press, 2014),
8.
1
Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New Y ork: Picador USA, 1965), 33.
1
PRC’s contemporary moment in the recently acclaimed Chinese independent lm, An Elephant
Sitting Still/ 大象席地而坐 (2017, dir. Hu Bo/ 胡波).
While decision to focus on this particular work is admittedly self-indulgent (it is one of few
eminent pictures lmed in this author’s hometown), the movie is an impressive legacy of mainland
China’s independent cinema which continues to be singular in its mercurially adaptive response to
post-1970 rapid national market reforms and consequent drastic social eects. T o say that slowness
matters politically in the PRC today is an understatement. T outed as an incisive critique of the nation’s
post-industrial society, Hu’s lm elicits ideological discussions that necessitate broader discursive
connections to liberalism, globalization and so on. However, any inherent political critique is rst
apprehended through an aective atmosphere enabled by slow cinema aesthetics. T o legibly interpret
its style, I examine the dimensions of slow cinema by tracing its historical origins, development as well
as its intersections with other genres. In a series of textual analyses, I reiteratively return to the
aesthetics of slow time and mobility to reveal its political etchings. I seek to honor, as much as possible
without compromising academic credibility, Sontag’s classic rethinking of art criticism: “in place of a
hermaneutics we need an erotics of art”.
3
I set out to explore the sensuous surface of slow cinema– the
aesthetic pleasure or displeasure gathered through immediate sensory experience– to prioritize in
analysis the style and subsequent aect of cinematic slowness rst, and interpretation of its content or
meaning second.
3
Sontag, “ Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New Y ork: Picador USA, 1965),
14.
2
Background & Critical Reception
Hu received a B.F.A. in directing from Beijing Film Academy in 2014, and went on to win Best
Director at the Golden Koala Chinese Film Festival for his short lm Distant Father (2014).
4
In
addition to his accomplished lmmaking career, however, he was no less an extraordinary writer of
plays, scripts and books. 2017 would become a year of highest highs and lowest lows for the
writer-director. During this time, he published a short story collection and a novel, respectively titled
Big Crack ( 大裂) and Bullfrog ( 牛蛙), both under the pen name Hu Qian ( 胡迁).
5
His close
mentorship with renowned Hungarian cinema verite lmmaker Béla T arr began in 2017, during his
participation in the FIRST Training Camp as part of China’s FIRST International Film Festival
Financing Forum, where he likely sourced the bulk of his industry knowledge and support for the
production of his rst feature lm.
6
Adapted from his short story of the same name, An Elephant
Sitting Still was completed in October that same year, set to release the following February. Hu
committed suicide on October 12, 2017 at the age of 29, never having witnessed the lm’s success at
international lm festivals– Berlin, Hong Kong, Sydney, to name a few– and award as Best Adapted
Screenplay at the 2018 Golden Horse Awards. T arr, presenting a screening of Hu’s movie at the
T oronto International Film Festival, tearfully recounts his time knowing the visionary lmmaker:
His eyes showed an uncommonly strong personality… while working, however, he was very
sensible and kind. He listened to everybody and paid attention to detail. He was constantly in a
rush. Maybe he knew he didn’t have much time… he couldn’t accept the world and the world
couldn’t accept him.
7
7
KimStim, 2019.
6
KimStim, 2019.
5
KimStim, 2019.
4
KimStim, “ An Elephant Sitting Still Press Kit,” 2019.
3
Simultaneously alongside the lm’s resounding acclaim stood the elephant that is the director’s
suicide which few lm critics seemed able to resist commenting on– and understandably so.
8
There is
no shortage of veried reviews praising the lm’s cinematic realism, precariously linking the
unfortunate circumstances of the lm’s release to its narrative premise; at certain points, discussions
about the movie begin to resemble ctionalized iterations of the director’s eulogy. The tragedy-driven
discourse surrounding An Elephant Sitting Still is to an extent expected, even exhorted, bearing our
cultural xation upon the tortured, creative genius gure. T aking into account the lm’s
condemnation of a uncaring society, it may appear counterintuitive to comment on its psychic
hopelessness without mention of Hu’s personal troubles; for one instance, critic David Ehrlich begins
his review with viscerally graphic imagery of the lm as “a suicide note written with blood in a dirty
patch of hard snow.”
9
A piece by Justine Smith– published on veteran lm critic site RogerEbert.com–
is much less sensationalist, but nonetheless prefaces with an abridged biography that sets the tone for
the bulk of the review: “Hu Bo took his own life.”
10
The line between personal life and artistic output
is further distorted in another review by Aliza Ma, contending that the lm is “inevitably imbued with
a sense of individual tragedy and isolation, becoming an arresting epitaph to a erce artistic spirit and
sadly truncated personal history.”
11
While I am siding with a critical methodology that (aspirationally) reads Hu’s lm wholly in
and of itself, I do not endeavor to dismiss the aforementioned reviews as reductive or overly
sentimental. It should be relayed that I rather believe sentimentality is as inevitable a response to death
11
Ma, “Ice Age.”
10
Justine Smith, “ An Elephant Sitting Still”, Roger Ebert, 2019.
9
Ehrlich, “‘ An Elephant Sitting Still’ Review.”
8
David Ehrlich, “‘ An Elephant Sitting Still’ Review,” Indiewire, 2019.
4
as death itself. Certainly an entangling of the lm’s interpretation with the director’s passing is not
initiated with harmful intentions but more likely empathetic impulse. Perhaps in an obvious sense,
there is a mournful aect that overlaps in public reception of the art and the artist, irrespective of prior
knowledge in one or the other. The shock of Hu’s death stirs as much unease as the slow deaths in his
lm, and for whatever reason we are inclined to leave this unease unscrutinized and indistinct. Grief,
loss, aftermath of a loved one passed: is there any value, any reprieve to distinguishing these feelings
from the ctional and the real? Here, my intervention is that our ability to receive the movie as
emotionally charged is not inevitable but coerced through slowness. What is truly inevitable is, in the
end, style.
Plot Summary
An Elephant Sitting Still is set in an unnamed town (lmed on location in Jingxing county of
Hebei province), the image of late capitalist industrial decay. Documenting a day in the lives of four
protagonists, the lm follows as they meet in “a series of interconnected hapless-life-altering events.”
12
The late director’s magnum opus begins in a cold early morning, before school is in session at an
unnamed, rural-industrial Chinese town, and ends same-day late at night in the apocryphal
Manzhouli. Everything which happens in between is more or less a walking-pace journey that brings
together four individuals in the bleakest of circumstances. T o introduce the sparsely inhabited
narrative, we might begin with the character most proximate to the role of a leading protagonist. Wei
Bu is a jaded sixteen-year-old high schooler whom we follow on his way to a bustling school of
12
Aliza Ma, “Ice Age,” Film comment, 2019.
5
uniforms; he carries with him a rag-tag rolling pin and meets his friend who carries, inexplicably, a gun.
They coordinate in advance to defend against a relentless bully, who accuses Wei’s friend of stealing his
phone containing blackmail content. After a confrontation that ends in the bully unconscious, Wei
ees the scene and embarks on the long run away from home to evade the bully’s vindictive family as
well as local authorities. Two other lost individuals, Huang Ling and Wang Jin, eventually join him on
a night bus to the place on which Wei has xated his hope, Manzhouli, a town further north that is
rumored to house a circus elephant. This elephant is not rst alluded to by Wei, but rather by a man in
the lm’s opening scene who is later revealed to be the elder brother of his bully.
Yu Cheng is the formidable leader of a local gang, but his on screen appearances belie more ripe
vulnerability than tough persona. In the lm’s opening scene, he stands smoking languidly by a
window, recounting an anecdote of the elephant to the woman with whom he has an aair. Neither
she nor he seem particularly invested in the other, which imparts even more dread upon the scene’s
end: her husband, Yu’s close friend, comes home early. He asks Yu if the shoes are his, who responds in
the a rmative. His friend then jumps o the balcony by the window, and Yu runs out the apartment,
away from the scene. He initially denies being a witness of this suicide, which weighs on his conscience
as a consequence of his desperation for intimacy. W e later learn that he is scorned by the woman whom
he loves and renounced by his parents who favor his younger brother, pronounced dead at the hospital
shortly after Wei pushed him down the stairs. Heeding his family’s demands, Yu takes to the task of
revenge and scours the town with gangsters to unearth Wei, though when the two nally meet at a
railway station, it becomes clear that they have more in common with one another than with their
respective families, not least of which being the elephant in Manzhouli. Yu is the only one out of four
6
protagonists to remain behind in their hometown and pivotally helps Wei purchase a one-way ticket
out.
The second time the elephant is mentioned in dialogue, we witness a conversation between Wei
and his school crush, Huang; the pair exude mutual angst but like all lovers in this story do not possess
much chemistry at all. He waxes poetic about Manzhouli’s elephant and she bitterly rejects his
invitation to run away together, mocking his naivete while withholding her own childish fantasies.
Huang lives with her single mother, who works long hours and struggles to nd time for domestic
duties, for which her daughter seems to resent her; we rst greet Huang in their barely lit apartment,
walking to the bathroom and discovering it ooded. Tired of constantly picking up after her parent,
she takes social refuge in an unsavory relationship with her school’s vice dean unbeknownst to Wei and
anyone else, though the extent of their intimacy is never conrmed beyond scenes of innocuous
conversation at school, in a restaurant, and in the vice dean’s home, which Huang confesses shakily to
her mom as “clean and tidy” unlike their own dwelling.
13
When photographs of their public outings
are anonymously posted on social media, the scandal annihilates Huang’s already disaected life,
leading her to follow Wei’s path of escape.
Whereas all above described protagonists are painted as responsible for their own undoing,
Wang Jin’s fate is sealed by his own children in the lm’s opening moments. Wang, W ei’s 60-year-old
neighbor, learns that he will be sent to a hospice because allegedly, there is no alternative; his
granddaughter needs to reside in the “good” school district and that means her parents do, too,
13
An Elephant Sitting Still, directed by Hu Bo (KimStim, 2017), 02:55:01.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07ZS4XXVZ/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
7
nevermind that their apartment with not enough space for four is legally the property of Wang. The
only reason keeping him from send-o is his little white dog, and in a comically brutal twist, the dog is
killed by another, bigger dog. Wei intermittently crosses paths with Wang when leaving or entering
their apartment building; signicant encounters unfold after Wei runs away from home and Wang
leaves the dog owner’s apartment defeated, then again at the train station near the lm’s end. They are
united by mutual loss of home and crippling socioeconomic alienation; on a walk, W ei asks him to
borrow money for a train ticket out in exchange for his most valuable possession, a billiards stick.
Though he does not have money to lend to Wei, he agrees to hold on to his prized item. The dog owner
drives by in a white SUV, presumably having followed W ang, and disembarks to physically assault Wei.
Overview of Chapters
In accordance with Sontag’s criticism, this paper attempts to steer away from overinterpreting
Hu’s aesthetic vision with speculation of his personal life or motives; the lm’s style and form speaks
su ciently for itself, articulated through a global lineage of cinematic referents steeped in
anti-liberal-capitalism tradition. As such, Chapter One oers a broad overview of the slow cinema
genre, its common formal congurations, and the signicance of slowness as a subversive aesthetic
departure from the default speed of contemporary global media. Though I designate An Elephant
Sitting Still as an example of contemporary slow cinema, the lm simultaneously represents
overlapping stylistic traits found in China’s post-Sixth generation or Generation Independent lm
genre, as well as mid-20th century neorealist cinema. T o better understand the temporal or durational
aesthetics of slow lms, I borrow from Deleuze’s theories of the time-image as a new cinematic form
8
popularized in the post-World War II era. By historicizing the origins and intersections of Slow cinema,
I argue that the persistence of cinematic slowness in the contemporary moment disrupts neoliberal
aesthetics by presenting an alternative aective structure.
Chapter Two embarks on a textual analysis of the lm's aesthetic slowness that manifests
primarily in Hu's selective camera direction and long, close-up shots of protagonists walking, both of
which deliberately disorient space-time to reect the protagonist's aective alienation. Referencing a
body of non-ction literature on the subject, I examine how walking has been documented as a
contemplative act, and how this translates to the adaptation of walking pace as a thinking pace in a
cinema of contemplation. Moreover, the lengthy and frequent presence of on-screen walking operates
as an aesthetic signier of social alienation and detachment enabled by an urban, post-industrial
environment. Borrowing from notions of orientation and optimism by aect theorists Sara Ahmed
and Lauren Berlant, I posit the act of walking as a slow embodied site of temporal and spatial
disorientation in which characters' external or physical trajectory conduct their internal, aective or
spiritual journeys relative to an object of desire. The deliberate process of disorientation directs them to
the myth-like elephant in Manzhouli, but more signicantly engenders their coming together, oriented
towards one another in shared aect.
Chapter Three discusses the political implications of aesthetic slowness in An Elephant Sitting
Still, particularly stressing its satirical critique of the global neoliberal tourism mode which promises
authentic relief from socioeconomic alienation. The alienation-authenticity dialectic in tourism,
proteering from the drive to seek existential comfort, resonates with Berlant’s inquiry into relations of
cruel optimism in American society from the 1990s onwards. Hu’s decelerated aesthetics of travel and
9
mobility engenders an aective sphere of crisis and trauma that echoes “dissolving assurances” of
“upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” for members
of China’s lowest social strata.
14
Although the protagonists are not tourists in the strictest sense, the
lm signicantly positions them in relation to a touristic destination– the elephant in Manzhouli.
Nowhere to be seen are conventional scripts of travel and tourism as leisurely activity, an invigorating
departure from everyday or existentially authenticating for the middle-class. On top of spiritually
depleting social interactions, Hu illustrates avenues of travel and commute that are lethargic, laborious,
and ultimately alienating for the lm's underclass main characters. The mundane misery of Hu’s
direction is palpable en route to the aspirational elephant, and remains so until the lm's
transformative nal minutes.
In short, I am attempting to outline how form seizes precedence over the aforementioned
diegetic contents in articulating aective substance, and what it means for the protagonists’ stories to
take the form of slowness. Why does slowness work and more crucially, what does the labor of slowness
contribute that conventional speed does not? Why indeed is Hu’s lm so wholly centered in his style?
Amidst insurmountable alienation– slowness– the slightest shift in movement, in time, seems to
reckon with hope. Slowness can be read as ideological, yes, but its form speaks doubly to the
immanence of temporality that is not adequately explained by the transcendence of ideology alone.
The task of unveiling the sensible value of slow cinema aesthetics is potentially theoretically
untouchable because its political resistance at the level of form is precisely the inverse of academic
criticism’s occasional gesture towards resistance in content and consistent rigidity in form. Therefore,
14
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 12.
10
my eort to realize the eectivity of slow cinema is simultaneously a misrecognition of academic
design, a mimetic slow performance insofar as both its aesthetic form and discourse are not readily
accessible to audiences slowness professes to endorse. I propose that to experience stylistic slowness is
to refuse the rhythms of liberal desire, to retreat into the time-image in reexivity, and to be alienated
by durational embrace as though it were authentic, real time– as though it were life itself.
11
II. Chapter 1: Historicizing Aesthetics of Slow Cinema
An Elephant Sitting Still provokes many questions dear to the slow cinema genre. Prioritizing
stillness at a runtime of nearly four hours, the lm is a prominent example of both the global slow lm
canon as well as China’s post-Sixth generation cinema. The 30-minute opening sequence nds Yu in
an expressionless close-up as his best friend jumps from a high-storied apartment. The suicide,
however, is not the point. The point remains in the room motionless and dead-eyed, the Steadicam
trained on Yu as he runs outside, approaching the blurry inkblot of an unmoving body, then turning
course to abandon in the opposite direction. This marks the beginning to a story of four protagonists
who are all running–or more accurately, wandering aimlessly– away from consequences caused directly
or indirectly by their personal actions. Béla T arr believes narrative storytelling is overused by popular
movies to mislead viewers “into believing that something has happened [when] in fact, nothing really
happens.”
15
Such cynicism informs a crucial tenet of slow cinema: it is less morally objectionable to
convey material reality than it is to produce fantasy and spectacle. The same sentiment permeates slow
movements beyond the silver screen: slow food, slow medicine, slow design, etc. Slowness opposes the
“criteria of speed and spectacle” magnied by neoliberal capital, presenting as an antidote to the
postmodern consumer, though not necessarily at all enthusiastically received.
16
Indeed, the likelihood of box-o ce success for slow movies is lower than low. There are simply
few audiences young or old, especially in the US, that would attend a two and a half hour long
16
Jae, 9.
15
Jae, Slow Movies, 14.
12
screening of Nietzsche-mental-breakdown-inspired lm, The Turin Horse (2011, dir. Béla T arr) over
any happy-go-lucky lm starring Hollywood’s newest darling. W e go to the movies to be moved,
cheered in some way; nobody “objects to having [their] morale maintained” when outside the cinema,
reality exists in wait.
17
Why make the case for slow cinema at all? Armed with an uncannily immobile
camera and equally unanimated characters, plot and dialogue, the genre is pessimism personied.
Mise-en-scene is dull and lacking in creative range, foregrounded with actors that appear inconsolably
dejected to be there, a at aect that drones along to numbingly long takes full of absence and
unresolved desolation. T o the average audience, the lack of post-production editing can make for a
tedious if not emotionally unbearable experience. For one, a 30-minute scene that follows a person
walking through a lifeless landscape is rife time for conjuring uneasy questions to mind– ‘slow cinema’
is sometimes interchangeable with ‘contemplative cinema’–and encourages viewers to confront
“cheerless aspects of existence that are likely to worsen if ignored, but drape them in stillness,
blankness, emptiness and silence.”
18
Not only do we bear witness to emotions of the very worst kind,
we also leave without any catharsis attributed to the expression of such feelings. Yet, the resulting
boredom and aective purgatory may well be the reason why cinematic slowness is here to stay.
Slow, Contemplative Time in Cinema and the World
At the turn of the 20th century, speed emerged as a cult ideology to the modern consciousness,
the prerequisite state for accessing pleasure.
19
Why did slowness lose its libidinal currency and how,
19
Song Hwee Lim, “T emporal Aesthetics of Drifting: T sai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness,” in Slow
Cinema, eds. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 88.
18
Jae, 9.
17
Jae, 9.
13
seemingly at the peak of rapid globalization, did it regain its appeal? Song Hwee Lim directs our
attention to the buzzword “sustainability” taking root among middle class consumers, activists and
academics in the 21st century, indicating a transformation in collective desire “from quantity to
quality, from waste to taste, and from speed to slowness.”
20
The broadly termed “slow movement” and
slow cinema gained traction synchronously in an attempt to “counter the compression of time and
space” as well as to “bridge the widening gap between the global and the local” enacted by
globalization.
21
Alongside ecocriticism and environmentalism, slow movements embody a new public
political consciousness of local responsibility eecting change on a global scale; similarly, slow cinema
tackles the problem of constant speed in contemporary society through literal representations and
narratives of deliberate duration.
This emphasis on subjectivizing time poses a challenge to both common audiences and lm
critics alike, rst as a source of boredom or distress and second as a philosophically di cult object of
study. Time is theoretically impenetrable on its own and cinematic time mimics in its unquantiable,
subjective quality that is contingent upon physical, psychical, historical and sociocultural variables.
Even by designating An Elephant Sitting Still as a slow movie, I risk missing the mark entirely since my
perception of slowness could very well be another’s sense of speed. Moreover, as Lim points out,
relatively little has been published on theories of cinematic slowness, and likely even less on the
function of slowness in Chinese cinema. I cannot be absolutely certain that the pacing of Hu’s lm is
exactly betted to freshly theorized specicities of global slow cinema, and the verdict is still out on
21
Lim, 89.
20
Lim, 88.
14
whether China’s eclectic-as-ever assembled Generation Independent lmmakers remotely identify with
the genre of slow cinema. Nonetheless, textual analysis solidies the resemblance between Hu’s
long-take aesthetics and those found in the lms of his artistic mentor T arr.
How does time dier in a cinema of slowness compared to a cinema of speed? Slow cinema is
stylistically incomplete without a corresponding representation of narrative time and durational time.
An example of narrative time is the “trope of waiting”, while durational time manifests as the long
take.
22
Contrary to the conventions of popular cinema, in which narrative time is frequently prioritized
as subject by condensed, rapid-re durational time, slow movies nd both narrative and durational
time in sync. Often this means that diegesis begins and ends within the course of a day or night, as time
is strictly positioned as an aesthetically invariable subject. Such reformulation presents a very dierent
cinematic image to an audience familiar with the existing mainstream aesthetic form, and subsequently
congures “new modes of sense perception and [induces] novel forms of political subjectivity.”
23
Indeed, cinematic imposition of duration organically produces time itself as a subject of
representation, and to this extent as an aesthetic embodiment. With the collapse of narrative and
durational time into one whole, slow lms engender not only new textual evidence of temporal
subjectivity but simultaneously new avenues of sensorial perspective among spectators. Slowness
generates a dierent kind of feeling precluded by the hegemony of fast neoliberal aesthetics.
The aesthetics of cinematic time are famously articulated in Gilles Deleuze’s theoretically
opaque Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in which he discusses the unique formal qualities of Italian
23
Ranciere, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London
and New Y ork: Continuum, 2006), 9.
22
Lim, 90.
15
neorealist cinema, a movement that laid the foundation for temporal aesthetics within Slow Cinema.
Deleuze identies the aesthetic dierence of neorealism from realism as emblematic of cinema’s shift
from the movement-image to the time-image. He builds on theories of early cinema (1895-1945) by
Henri Bergson, who critiques the unrealistic concept of movement in realist cinema based on the same
misconceptions of our natural perception. Bergson expresses that real movement is perpetually
changing materiality with no beginning or end and not disjointed constructions of the mind as so
facilitated by the movement-image, in which action is butchered into distinct images by cuts, forming
the temporal lacunae that allows the viewer “to perceive the eect of movement” and hence to react to
its pregiven form.
24
Such a process requires little participation of thought from spectators as the
function of the movement-image is to trigger the automatic “sensori-motor reexes” of its audience to
complete the whole image with the presented parts of action and intervals between action.
25
Although
Deleuze argues the movement-image prevailed in pre-World W ar II cinema, it remains the dominant
structure of contemporary popular narrative cinema, while the time-image is common in experimental
and especially Slow Cinema.
In the postwar period, neorealism rose to prominence with a new kind of cinema exhibiting
assemblages of “purely optical [and aural] situations”, a cinema “of the seer and no longer of the
agent.”
26
The previously dominant forms of sensory-motor signs in realism are replaced by
optical-sound signs in neorealism’s time-image and transform cinematic time from predetermined or
26
Gilles Deleuze, “Beyond the Movement Image,” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh T omlinson and
Robert Galeta (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 2.
25
Conley, 175.
24
T om Conley, “Movement-Image,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005), 174.
16
cliched to legible yet in oscillation. This novel time-image cinema is also referred to as the
thinking-image for it betrays little movement or action without audience contemplation. Critically,
such images are “imbued with duration” and thus are “neither successive nor chronological”; the
time-image is transcendental in the Kantian sense, complete and pure alone.
27
The viewer experiences
its optical-aural qualities vividly, notwithstanding its signication that is often unconcerned with
narrative but exudes an eect what Deleuze terms a ‘time-crystal’. Characters or their actions are no
longer the source of subjectivity, rather subjectivity is rendered only through an acute “perception of
time,” by the “environs of time in which [characters] are held.”
28
Thus in time-image cinema, “time
itself– no longer occluded by action, motion or emotion– becomes salient.”
29
Locating Slow Movies in the PRC
T o examine how slow cinema gures in the mainland Chinese lm circuit, I turn to scholars
that clarify the complex divisions of the PRC’s many cinematic movements. Both aesthetic quality and
thematic content of An Elephant Sitting Still are consistent with those of its contemporaneous
Generation Independent (or post-Sixth Generation) cinema, which displays a continued a nity for
depicting social realities in accordance with past works of PRC’s Sixth Generation and even earlier
Second Generation, as well as the neorealism school. Qualities of Italian neorealist cinema resonate
almost completely with the central identiers of slow movies, suggesting that the two share a lineage of
geopolitical intentions. Neorealism highlights the underbelly of capitalist societies, portraying
29
Jae, Slow Movies, 4.
28
Conley, 281.
27
Conley, “Time-Image,” 280.
17
protagonists belonging to the lowest social strata and their sacrices in the face of industrial, or more
contemporarily, global neoliberal developments. Sixth Generation staple director Jia Zhangke’s early
lms Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) exemplify this, while his later lms have been
debated for their political integrity, rumored to be compromised by state censorship.
30
Similar to Jia’s
lms on mainland China’s subaltern subjectivities, Hu presents a downtrodden ensemble cast dealing
with their deeply unhappy, wretchedly mundane day-to-day. Where they diverge could be the marking
of dierence between neorealist and slow cinema; the politics of both genres assuredly lean to the left,
but in slow movies the ideological threads are more so tangled and cast aside for priority of relaying
humanistic lament.
Cultural critic and lm scholar Dai Jinhua articulates the historically convoluted periodization
of Chinese cinema and the active hand of Orientalism in determining the reception and censorship of
mainland Sixth Generation lms, of which representative works include Beijing Bastards (1993, dir.
Zhang Yuan), The Day in Winter-Spring (1993, dir. Wang Xiaoshuai), W eekend Sweetheart (1995, dir.
Lou Ye), and Roaming in Beijing–The Last Dreamer (1990, dir. Wu Wenguang).
31
Encompassing
post-1989 projects like “independent lm”, “new documentary lm” and “underground lm”, Sixth
Generation productions were often underserved by Western lm critics, who preferred instead to
exaggerate its dierences from Fifth Generation cinema exemplaries such as Red Sorghum (1988, dir.
Zhang Yimou) and The King of Children (1987, dir. Chen Kaige).
32
Similar to their reception of Fifth
32
Dai, 74.
31
Dai Jinhua, “ A Scene in the Fog: Reading the Sixth Generation Films,” in Cinema and Desire: Feminist
Marxism and Cultural Politics in the W ork of Dai Jinhua, eds. Jing W ang and T ani E. Barlow, (V erso, 2002), 75.
30
David Leiwei Li, “The world of Jia Zhangke viewed: Neorealist aesthetics against Neoliberal logic,” in Economy,
Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema (New Y ork: Routledge, 2016), 170.
18
Generation movies, reviews emphasize in excess the contextual “outside reality” rather than the textual
reality captured on screen.
33
That global capital and rapid sociopolitical developments drastically
impacted the cultural productions of China in the 1990s is not ction, but certainly was blown out of
proportion by Western lm circuits investing excessive amounts of discursive and monetary interest by
way of heavily-ideologized misreadings and burial of the Sixth Generation’s inherent artistic reality.
Despite eclectic and variegated assemblages of style, representation, and technique, Sixth
Generation cinema appears fundamentally counter-cultural in its exploration of youth and
disillusionment; diaristic, journalistic tone occasionally insuerable and narcissistic; Didion-esque
essays grounded on-the-site of happening cultural scenes; and altogether provocatively, attention to the
mundane rather than the parable.
34
Hardly any of this matters under the reigning post-Cold war
discursive structure, as China remains inextricable from the “Western Orientalist imagination” and the
global market for Chinese independent lm is conditionally validated by the West’s enthusiastic
“mapping of China’s democracy, progress, resistance, civil society, and the marginal gure.”
35
The
domestic failure and censorship of such independent lms appears paradoxical, though can be
understood as a response to their success in international lm festivals. If its accoladed global status
relies on Western intellectual validation of Chinese realities, then in an act of cinematic treason, Sixth
Generation lms must play in the political favor of the West and neglect any Communist “grand
narrative of progress.”
36
What Dai argues resonates still with the contemporary circulation of Chinese
36
Cecilia Mello, “If These W alls Could Speak: From Slowness to Stillness in the Cinema of Jia Zhangke,” in Slow
Cinema, eds. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 138.
35
Dai, 90.
34
Dai, 94.
33
Dai, 74.
19
independent lms, of which a growing majority are made possible by non-domestic funding and
sponsoring parties. The current era of post-Sixth Generation cinema or Generation-Independent
movement exists outside of itself much like its predecessors, struggling to maintain primary agency
over its own image and subjectivity.
Slow Realism Against Liberal Capital
Scholar David Leiwei Li historicizes the xation upon marginal and mass identities in Sixth
Generation and onwards cinema, recalling similar themes from Second Generation cinema produced
between the 1920s and 1940s, during China’s rst signicant encounter with colonial capitalism (the
“rst coming”). In response to rampant economic instability and social polarity, neorealist aesthetics
emerged independently in Italy’s cinema during the 1940s, as well as in China’s Second Generation
cinema in the 1930s, a phenomenon that lm scholar Zhen Zhang describes as “a pre-neorealist
neorealist cinematic practice.”
37
This “transnational and transhistorical practice of cinematic realism”
is revived in Sixth Generation cinema, an aesthetic retracing which can be attributed to China’s
renewed encounter with global capital, or the second coming of neoliberalism.
38
The urge for
documentary delity, unlike the Fifth Generation’s obsession with discarding social relevance for
aesthetic purity, supports a rendering of mass precarity that engenders neorealist subjectivity or
activism that is in sensitive response to the pain of neoliberal makeover and subjectivity. Further, Sixth
Generation cinema’s insistence on social reality or maintenance of an existential connection between
the image and the referent, or the Lacanian signier and the signied, heeds to postmodernist
38
Li, 175.
37
Li, Economy, Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema, 175.
20
cautioning against simulated representation and thus seeks to preserve “the social and material in the
face of global capitalism’s dramatic… liquidation of all social relations into sole relations of exchange
and extraction.”
39
Both the revival of neorealist cinema and founding of slow cinema are aesthetic interventions
in the continual bulldozing forces of capitalism, as such their textual makeup reects the particular
social realities they seek to address and remediate. It is therefore di cult to dierentiate between the
two as their means and ends coalesce nearly entirely, if only separate in their temporal conceptions. T o
this end, slow cinema can be imagined as a 21st century iteration of neorealism, particularly as a
dialectical construct to the neoliberal cinemas and aesthetics that Li articulates. Neoliberalism, as a
structure of global capitalism, facilitates the production and circulation of material and immaterial
goods, but to conclude the denotation there is a great underestimation of the extent neoliberal logics
govern our daily lives. It is a structure of feeling and desire, an overruling authority that informs the ego
in a manner not unlike the superego. The neoliberal economy cannot work to merely produce
commodities, but must produce consumers and their thinking and ethics, their aective perceptions,
their pleasure. This process is “incomplete without its correspondent aesthetics'' prominently featured
in mainstream media that create spectacles to shape the consumer’s unconscious mind, while
simultaneously eacing pieces of corporeal reality irrelevant to the making of a good consumer
subject.
40
Critically, contemporary popular cinema arbits the manipulation of time, whether through
temporal discontinuities or acceleration, to dissociate spectators from time’s mundane passage and
40
Li, 169.
39
Li, 177.
21
instill expectation or desire for an abundance of pleasurable time that is inaccessible without constant
participation in a society of spectacle. The distancing of spectators from “real time” is one of the
signicant practices of cinematic time through which intent is manifested and diegesis is fashioned
meaningfully. Neoliberalism is successful because its libidinal drive is quite tenable without ideological
justication; our attachments to and desires of objects external to ourselves commands optimism, even
as said objects reveal time and again their obstinate unavailability and our own fantastical, wishful
thinking.
In this chapter, I have broadly delineated the global and PRC-specic historical entanglements
between cinematic slow time aesthetics, social realism and liberal-capitalist critique. Slowness, as Lim
explicates, emerges across geopolitical borders to counter shrinking space-time availability under
globalization by oering an alternative structure of being and feeling. Li’s discussion of neorealist
cinema and its revival supplements Deleuze’s theory of the time-image; exploitative conditions of
industrial capitalism produced a newfound urge in cinema to represent social experiences of the
masses, a cinema in which time itself is desired as subject for its collective experience. Whereas past
Fifth Generation cinema predominantly catered to the charitable eye of Western lm festival critics and
sponsors, Sixth Generation and current Generation-Independent cinematic trends are more critical of
mainland China’s encounter with the enduring eects of global capital, its formal aesthetic quality
comparable to that of early 20th century neorealist cinema in response to increasingly precarious social
realities. Time is the medium through which slow cinema reorganizes and elucidates aective
experiences of the subaltern class. Overwhelmingly, time conducts alienation. The following chapter
scrutinizes the durational aesthetics of physical mobility–or a lack thereof– throughout scenes of An
22
Elephant Sitting Still. An intimate reading of Hu’s selective camera movement, distance and focus
demonstrates how protagonists’ aect is mediated through deliberate disorientation in lieu of punctual
narrative events.
23
III. Chapter 2: Orientating Aect in An Elephant Sitting Still
A notable proportion of the slow lm genre captures the conventionally liminal moments of
daily life, in particular the “everyday organized by capitalism” as well as “the overwhelming ordinary
that is disorganized by it.”
41
Accordingly in An Elephant Sitting Still, mundane scenes of protagonists
walking constitute a signicant duration of the lm’s diegesis. The innocent act of walking, in addition
to formal and aesthetic qualities guaranteed by Hu’s camerawork, competently organizes or orientates
the movie’s atmospheric and aectively profound spiritual alienation. Within deliberate walking
scenes, Hu favors close framings of protagonists expressions and of the backside of heads, wavering as a
Steadicam is expected to, moving in tandem to a walking speed. The eect is a contemplative, aective
present and presence in which spectators are transported to think and feel as the characters do. One
might argue that this repetitive emphasis on walking alludes to embracing the proverbial journey over
the destination, but to protagonists Wei and Yu, the destination certainly presents as an object of
obsession, and crucially an object that orients their movement. In a lm of sparse dialogue, the
elephant in Manzhouli is referenced by Wei and Yu throughout the lm, and towards the end unites
the two characters at their rst and only coincidental meeting at a railway station. Y et even as this
destination is exalted by their imagination, neither the elephant nor its place of seating is shown, save
for the elephant’s audible cry piercing the night in the nal shot.
41
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 19 (italics original).
24
Towards Optimism, One Step at a Time
In the introduction to their book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant argues that the historical
present is perceived aectively, foremost a felt experience rather than a contemplative one. From this
central claim, the critical theorist investigates the contemporary American phenomenon that they term
“cruel optimism,” a kind of subject-object relation that manifests when a desired object becomes “an
obstacle to your ourishing.”
42
Optimism compels individuals to venture out into the beyond, in
pursuit of proximity to a “satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own;” it is a form of
aective attachment to the world that sustains expectation and possibility.
43
When any given object of
attachment presents itself to be evidently unattainable, then the optimism is cruel, with examples
ranging from social mobility to intimate relationships. Berlant tackles the fantasy of the “good life” and
its function in a contemporary moment where ordinary existence is increasingly marked by traumatic
events and “systemic crisis.”
44
Emphatically, optimism is “an orientation toward the pleasure that is
bound up in the activity of worldmaking,” a shared aect carried by bodies “continuously busy judging
their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they nd themselves.”
45
Although
optimism does not appear in its conventional sense in An Elephant Sitting Still, Berlant’s intervention
determines the pursuit of the elephant as a relation of cruel optimism, and the act of walking as a
collective aective response by characters who are “overwhelmed, forced to change, and yet also
stuck.”
46
46
Berlant, 35.
45
Berlant, 26, 27.
44
Berlant, 21.
43
Berlant, 11 (italics original).
42
Berlant, 10.
25
Writer Rebecca Solnit illuminates the long historiography of walking or bipedalism, an unique
ability developed through human evolution. For anthropologists, theories of bipedalism are widely
speculated with no single accepted explanation for its origin and purpose, though it seems certain that
“upright walking is the rst hallmark of what became humanity.”
47
In Western philosophy,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the rst to write considerably about “walking as a conscious act” owed to
his own life-long a nity for walking. The act was so instrumental to his thinking that his nal
unnished book, Reveries of a Solitary W alker, is divided into chapters each named Promenade or
‘walk’ and details his musings and recollections amassed during his daily strolls.
48
Writing in
Confessions, the thinker stated that should he stop walking, he “cease[s] to think; [his] mind only works
with [his] legs.”
49
This connection between walking and contemplation is also a rmed by Soren
Kierkegaard’s journals, in which he expresses his contemplative experiences in urban settings:
…my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the
tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its
object […T o] bear mental tension such as mine, I need [the diversion] of chance
contacts on the streets and alleys.
50
While Rousseau embarked on his leisurely walks primarily through country and rural
landscapes, Kierkegaard ventured on foot to think and work submerged in the bustling activity of city
life. That he found the streets of Copenhagen to possess the most ideal conditions for his thinking
seems to be heavily inuenced by his consistent isolation from others and preference for eeting social
interaction. On city streets, the act of solitary walking establishes one to be somewhat detached but not
50
Solnit, 24.
49
Solnit, 14.
48
Solnit, 22.
47
Rebecca Solnit, W anderlust (New Y ork: Viking Penguin, 2000), 32.
26
incapable of connection, and alienation is temporarily suspended through engagement in minor
voyeurisms like overheard gossip, abrupt contact with strangers, or unexpected run-ins with friendly
acquaintances.
51
The above position on urban walking is decidedly niche, perhaps anachronistic and
geographically specic. In America, cities increasingly resemble “enlarged suburbs, scrupulously
controlled and segregated, designed for the noninteractions of motorists” and disappearing chance
encounters between pedestrians.
52
Construction of buildings and freeways has replaced former urban
capacity for public space with private structures; city dwellers can walk in the spaces leftover, but may
not nd much respite from alienation. ‘Streets’ no longer represent a concentrated current for social
exchange and mobility, though the term continues to connote roughness and danger associated with
society’s lower strata.
53
An Elephant Sitting Still is deliberately set in Jingxing ( 井陉), a county under
the administration of Hebei’s capital Shijiazhuang, infamous for its severe year-round air pollution and
hazy gray appearance; it is rumored that Hu, insistent on portraying an su ciently depressive
cityscape, delayed the lming schedule after the central government alleviated inclement atmospheric
conditions for an o cial conference. As a mainland county-level city, Jingxing cannot be classied as a
city in the strictest sense; accordingly, the lm navigates an amalgamation of rural and urban
landscapes in the prominent mining-industry area that are monochromatically dystopian in character.
53
Solnit, 176.
52
Solnit, 176.
51
Solnit, 24.
27
Walking as Thinking, Feeling in Reprieve
Wei’s initial appearance establishes the aective work of walking noticeable in the intentional
ordering of traumatic and mundane sequences. After a violent altercation ending in his bully
unconscious, Wei walks home to pack his things, walks to his grandma’s home where he nds her dead,
then leaves to inform his uncle before again walking away. Throughout this duration, there is an acute
disconnect between the camera and narrative action; we are made privy not to the events of trauma,
but to Wei’s post-traumatic walks. Hu’s directive lens presents walking as an active experience of
reection and feeling rather than a passive, forgettable motion. The absence of screen time dedicated to
situations in which “something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life”
grants a nearly excessive amount of duration to that which never materially happens or is expressed, the
emotional and aective experience of the protagonists.
54
Not so coincidentally, the undocumented events concern mortality: the suicide of Yu’s best
friend, followed by the injury and eventual passing of Wei’s bully, the death of Wei’s grandma, the
death of Wang’s dog, and the speculatively fatal head injuries of the vice dean and his wife caused by
Huang. We witness death’s aftermath endured by the living, who have no choice but to remain in the
rhythms and attachments of daily life. Walking conducts thinking in a manner similar to how a
cinematic long take encourages audience contemplation to the extent that both processes impose a
duration, during which attention and focus is sustained. W alking translates to an excess of “nothing
happening” on the silver screen, transforming into an apparatus for expressing the inner worlds of
characters; the usual conventions of cinema, such as dramatic acting, meaningful montage editing and
54
Berlant, 15.
28
dialogue, are replaced by extensive single-camera tracking shots that match the pace of walking, or the
pace of thinking through feeling.
Simultaneously also, Wei’s frequent walking scenes reect the trope of a runaway kid
wandering the streets, though these streets do not tra c in much benevolence. Quite on the contrary,
most of his encounters and interactions end sourly or violently. In one scene, a shuttlecock ies over a
fence onto the sidewalk where Wei walks, and an elderly man calls at him to kick it back to him. Wei
walks on and swears at the man, who in turn threatens to ght him but is held back by the fence and
his friends. Another bigger misfortune strikes at the train station, where Wei unknowingly purchases a
fake ticket from a gang member, who assaults him upon confrontation. Other protagonists experience
similarly dismal public incidents: Huang is photographed with her vice principal by an anonymous
gure, incurring her humiliation on social media; Wang’s dog is killed in an alleyway and never
retributed; Yu is spurned by a former lover in a restaurant. Often walking alongside cars, across barren
dirt roads, or through dark alleyways, the protagonists are predominantly alone in the literal and
metaphorical sense. Hu constructs a world where people move like solitary animals, his claustrophobic
use of shallow focus consistently uncomfortable with prolonging shots that involve more than one
player at a time. At the lm’s most pivotal moments, protagonist interactions are made one-sided and
monologue-like by the handheld camera’s stubborn, shaky focus on only one or the other participant,
regardless of their role as speaker or listener. There is seldom opportunity for experiencing
Kierkegaard’s authentic aective relief; close ups alienate the protagonists from their surroundings and
the audience from narrative clues.
29
Aesthetic Disorientation Engenders Orientation
Upon a closer look at Wei's confrontation with his school bully, the camerawork prioritizes
Wei’s felt experience rather than the reality of events. The catalyst scene for Wei’s eeing his home and
pursuit of Manzhouli happens very quickly and ambiguously due to the camera’s selective focus and
framing. Both Wei’s friend and the bully are positioned mostly beyond the frame; the bully taunts Wei
by saying his dad was red for accepting monetary bribes, and a rolling pin falls out of W ei’s jacket. He
grabs Wei by his jacket collar and Wei defensively shoves him o, and we witness Wei’s eyes widen to
thudding noises, then quiet. After a brief pause to eect shock, the Steadicam moves in a 20-second
sequence, rst from a medium close-up on Wei to circling slowly, shakily behind him and nally
panning downwards to the bottom of a staircase. Yu’s younger brother lay there motionless and not
within focus, resembling the incoherent dark mass of the earlier suicide’s body, while a portion of Wei’s
arm in a corner of the frame is in sharp clarity. Reacting in the same register of panic as Wei, the camera
whips around to tail him running down an adjacent stairway and away from school. He arrives home
but does not enter the building, instead stalling to drink from a plastic water bottle; a woman, out of
focus for her entire appearance, approaches Wei with posters of a lost dog:
Have you seen a big white dog? Like this [oers poster, no response]. Hey, I’m talking
to you! Did you hear me? [no response] It’s obvious you’re a punk that wanders the
streets everyday, somebody’s going to beat you to death sooner or later!
55
In this sequence of events, the camera moves and focuses with an intentional disorientation
that embodies Wei’s subjectivity and conscious perception. This is not out of the ordinary for cinema,
since the protagonist or narrator is often the eyes and ears through which the audience apprehends the
55
An Elephant Sitting Still, 00:55:44.
30
narrative, however unreliable their position may be. Evidently, the woman with the lost dog is clearly of
no concern to Wei in his adrenaline daze, thus she never moves past her cameo as a gure shrouded by
gaussian blur. What is registered from the Steadicam’s selective focus and delayed reaction corresponds
to Wei’s dissociated interiority as the day unfolds and his life’s course is irrevocably altered by his
impulsive actions. Rather than confront the consequences, he chooses to evacuate the scene and directs
his full attention to leaving his home, or moving away. From here, W ei’s long walking or bus riding
interludes could be framed as an aective response insofar as his guilt or fear of prosecution drives his
nonstop mobility. If “consciousness is [embodied], sensitive, and situated” and perception is “a way of
facing [an object],” then walking is a simultaneous disorientation and orientation of subject aect
because of objects that appear and disappear along movement’s path, impressions that arise and recede
into the background of attention with forward motion.
56
Indeed, “what gets our attention depends
[on which] direction we are facing,” what is relegated to the background and foreground, or what is
familiar or unfamiliar; the paused frame renders Yu’s little brother an impressionistic shadow because
Wei is not paying attention to the strange lifeless body before him, instead he is becoming hyper-aware
of what this incident means for his own life trajectory.
57
His decision to run is self-preservational,
perhaps selsh, an attempt to disalienate himself and recover a semblance of direction.
The lead characters are uninterested in what their hometown has to oer beyond a way out,
and more to the point, the selective camerawork deliberately conceals potentially intriguing prospects
of their environment. This worldview can be contrasted to that of the aneur, or that which is
57
Ahmed, 29.
56
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006), 27.
31
associated with the strolling gure as designated by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project.
Acquainting walking with leisure and observation, the aneur is a ctional type that Benjamin argues
emerged in early 19th century Paris, alongside complex and expansive developments of the city. Urban
crowd gatherings further cultivated a sense of being foreign in one’s own place of living, producing a
new kind of subject that was comfortably “at home in this alienation.”
58
The anonymity granted by
densely populated quarters is crucially a liberating factor for the aneur whose walking in leisure and
pleasure resists “the speed of industrialization and the pressure to produce,” yet the gure’s wandering
gaze cannot but be drawn to the dazzling visual spectacle that is commercial culture.
59
Indeed, the
aneur’s penchant for acquiring sights in promenades abound resembles a proto-touristic behavior.
Both the tourist and aneur perform wandering excursions as subjects alienated by modern life; the
cinematic representation of such wandering might then translate to a proxy for modern alienation. But
even in aimless movement, there are certain orientations that maintain bodily relations to spatial
surroundings. T o walk is to be set in motion regardless of direction, in a space regardless of setting. In
other words, wandering does not entail an entire loss of oriented being and could even be a means for
orienting oneself, for retrieving that familiarity from a place of repetitive disconnect.
Dening what it is to be orientated, Sara Ahmed brings forth the example of Edmund
Husserl’s writing table as an object that orientates the phenomenologist, even as it recedes into the
background: the table is a surface from which “to think and toward which [one directs] attention.”
60
Orientation, imbricated with lived experience, accounts for the many ways we might be proximate to
60
Ahmed, 4
59
Solnit, 200.
58
Solnit, 199.
32
objects or others, structuring how we “inhabit space” and more critically, the people and things “we
direct our energy” and focus towards.
61
Ahmed points out that without disorientation, it is less likely
that we notice when we are in an orientated state; we do not actively think about orienting our bodies
to align with space and others unless something arises as strange or unfamiliar. T o this end, orientation
concerns the “intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places” or bodies “feeling at home” in their spaces,
demonstrating that spatial forms are not exterior but rather “like a second skin that unfolds in the folds
of the body.”
62
Disorientation occurs when “the extension of bodies into space” fails, when bodies are
disallowed from comfortable inhabitance.
63
Moreover, orientations engage time insofar as they arrange
the present and “point us toward the future” through a sequence of directions that constitute life’s
course.
64
It is useful to consider Ahmed’s study of embodied orientation in the context of An Elephant
Sitting Still, where intentional technical disorientation and meandering direction give rise to characters
who are constantly orientating themselves. W ei directs himself to travel to Manzhouli, a conviction
that reorientates Huang and Wang after each losing their original place, and signicantly engenders a
turning point for Yu to face the reality of his best friend’s suicide.
Wei’s cruelly optimistic quest for escape cultivates one of few heartwarming moments of the
lm in a tense exchange with Yu. Their meeting is facilitated by a man who sold Wei fake train tickets,
coincidentally a member of Yu’s gang. When W ei confronts him, he replies that the person receiving
the money isn’t him and tells Wei that if he wants his money, he has to follow suit. A long walking
sequence ensues, and they arrive atop a secluded hill. Initially, the man threatens to kill Wei if he does
64
Ahmed, 21.
63
Ahmed, 13.
62
Ahmed, 8, 9.
61
Ahmed, 3.
33
not give him more money; then, learning his name from his ID card, a second gang member instructs
Wei not to leave and phones Yu. Briey cutting away to Wang walking to retrieve his granddaughter,
the next shot of Wei is a medium close up of his newly bruised cheek, then from afar, slowly
approaching the eld of focus, is Yu:
Yu: My little brother is dead. What are you thinking about?
Wei: What?
Yu: If, right now, you were standing on the balcony in a tall building, what would you
be thinking about?
Wei: I would think, “what else can I do?”
65
Something shifts in Yu upon hearing his quiet speech, disarming his original duty of avenging
his younger brother. The meaning of Wei’s rhetorical question is intentionally vague, implying both
that he has no choice but to jump, or that he must think of something else to do, some other course of
action. With one concise phrase, Wei captures Yu’s sympathy and quite possibly the lm’s central
thesis. If, to the four protagonists, life is merely unending emotional purgatory and alienation, then
death does not seem so di cult a choice. T ruthfully, there is not so much as a morsel of hope given to
them from the very start. Wei and Huang know their school will be demolished before graduation and
that they will have no future if they do not relocate. Wang knows that his family will send him to a
elderly home where he will be until he dies. Yu witnesses his best friend choose death before his very
eyes and spends the entire movie dodging responsibility, haunted by guilt. Yet undeniably, nothing
succeeds in breaking their willed optimism, their instinct to move past death literally by walking or
running away. The trauma Wei has faced does not diminish his will to live, but rather sharpens it.
65
An Elephant Sitting Still, 03:17:10-03:17:52 (translation my own).
34
Against all odds, he has chosen life; Yu seems to realize that just as simply, his friend chose death. He
nally calls the mother of his deceased friend to inform her that he was a witness.
T o reiterate, Hu achieves an aesthetic disorientation through decisive camera focus, movement
and distance in combination with prolonged sequences of walking. The eect of such disorientation is
aectively generative, insofar as it embeds subjective alienation within the experience of cinematic time.
Both as a contemplative and durational activity, walking embodies the task of orientating physical and
metaphysical senses, its signied presence eliciting audience participation in collective reorientation.
Aect theorists illuminate the inextricability of orientation from lived experience. Berlant expounds
optimism as the cruel orientating force that moves us closer to the physical world, towards a temporal
present and future, while Ahmed demonstrates how disorientation is a critical requisite for orientation,
whether in body, identity or other existential categories. In the following chapter, I place the
dis/orientation framework in reciprocal relation to the alienation-authenticity dialectic to explore the
ideological remnants within Hu’s aesthetic slowness.
35
IV . Chapter 3: Slow Politics and Alienation/Authenticity
Slowness is political because of its aesthetic intervention that induces alternative sensory and
existential discoveries entwined with the alienation-authenticity dialectic. Here, I borrow Ranciere’s
dictation of the precise dimensions of politics, the political, and aesthetics. First, politics is an
interruption of what Ranciere theorizes as “the distribution of the sensible”– a law that is upheld by an
“organizational system” otherwise known as the police order– which “presupposes a prior aesthetic
division between the visible and invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable”
and thus determines who is included or excluded from any given community.
66
Plainly, politics is a
transformation that occurs when our sensory perceptions, what we see or hear, become attuned to
something other than or hidden from the routine order of everyday life. Second, Ranciere interprets
the political as “relational in nature, founded on the intervention of politics in the police order” that is
not necessarily a unitary ideological or state establishment.
67
If, for instance, what is normally buried
deep within the aesthetic eld of order suddenly emerges at the surface in clear view, then the political is
mobilized in reaction to this now perceptible unequal aesthetic surface. Finally, aesthetics “refers to a
specic regime of identifying and reecting on the arts,” or enacts “congurations of experience that
create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.”
68
Ranciere’s
locating of aesthetics as critically engaging the human senses, and politics as intertwined with sensory
perception, helps to clarify the political and existential value of cinematic slowness.
68
Ranciere, 9, 10.
67
Ranciere, 3.
66
Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 3.
36
Like many Generation Independent lmmakers, Hu lifts the veil of liberal commercial culture
obscuring subjectivities for whom both socialist and capitalist revolutions have failed. New mediatized
visibility and imaging of the economic underclass emerges counter to the hyper-commercialization of
90s popular culture, a result of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations engendering “collapse of
socialist ideology and consequent ending of hope for imminent political reform.”
69
Formerly organized
by political “mass movements” and leaders of “elite culture,” social order and hierarchy in the PRC
became quickly reorientated vis-a-vis “leisure, shopping, and consuming.”
70
In literary works, the
political becomes subsumed under the commercial as class division becomes an abstract reality
legitimized through uncritical language and narratives of liberal self-fulllment.
71
T elevised programs
are ooded with celebratory representations and discourse of a “newly risen middle class” and the
“New Rich,” while static silence engulfs the millions displaced and impoverished by urbanization.
72
Within proliferating sites of consumption such as shopping plazas (guangchang) and popular media,
the poor are not aorded any space or time, nowhere to be seen; they exist outside this vacuum in an
alternate reality.
Undoing Liberal Aect with Deliberate Discomfort
There is an alternate time-space that comprises An Elephant Sitting Still, where liberal
commercial culture is relegated to a faraway distance to accommodate instead individuals whose lives
are oriented by all the invisible cruelty of globalization and none of its espoused optimism. It follows
72
Dai, 223.
71
Dai, 232.
70
Dai, 221.
69
Dai, 220.
37
that the lm’s slowness functions as a thorough indictment of the “widening class divisions in Chinese
society, the result of rapid marketization.”
73
The main characters’ desire for movement and gravitation
towards Manzhouli is foregrounded by extreme socioeconomic alienation imparted by Hu’s deliberate
aesthetics. Viewers bear witness to fundamental distrust and apathy permeating society, a consequence
of liberal economic commercialization of interpersonal relationships that is exemplied in an exchange
between Wang and an unnamed owner of Pipi, the lost white dog that Wang had witnessed killing his
own dog. Arriving at the middle-class owner’s apartment complex, Wang carries the body of his now
deceased pet in a plastic bag and calmly confronts him in the following excerpt:
Wang: I went to the vet's. My dog is dead.
Dog owner: How much do you want? I’m not going to pay the vet bills.
Wang: I just came here to tell you that your dog bit mine to death.
Dog owner: Why are you telling me this? How much money do you want? How much
is it worth? Your dog must have bitten mine, right? Did I ask you for money? You
wanna blackmail me, is that it? [Look,] I crashed into a car a few days ago and got out.
That driver didn't get a single penny from me. Y ou think you can rip me o now? Who
cares about your dog!
74
This unpleasant conversation concludes with neither Wang nor the dog owner arriving at a
place of understanding or compromise. It is unclear what exactly W ang had desired from the exchange,
but the owner automatically assumes his motive to be mercenary and reacts defensively with no
remorse. Though the entire scene runs for approximately two and a half minutes, the viewing
experience feels to be much longer because of the stylistically intractable mise-en-scene. Wang stands in
a dark hallway while the dog owner is backlit, holding his front door open, and both characters are
cloaked in shadow with incidental lighting just barely illuminating their expressionless proles. No
74
An Elephant Sitting Still, 1:15:15-1:17:54.
73
Dai, 221.
38
background noise, everything a shade of black or white except the two faces. Visual and aural
background qualities are minimal to heighten the harsh intensity of spoken delivery. With every line,
time stretches and struggles to accommodate their dissonant aective presences. There is no cutting
away or intersplicing of camera angles; the camera changes focus manually, moving with uncertainty
between a medium shot of both parties, to isolating Wang in a medium close-up as the dog owner yells
accusations, then lazily pulling away to end on a medium-long framing of both men that pauses for
over 20 seconds in silence. If aect determines the present, then cinematic slowness engages in aesthetic
splintering of aective realities to reveal alienating disjunctures in a liberal-capitalist society. By
transforming the eld of perception, slowness generates new modes of being and existence that overlap
in dialogue with notions of the authentic.
Liberal Authenticity and Existential Alienation
The term ‘authenticity’ requires clarication due to its convoluted history as “a philosophical
concept which has been uncritically introduced into sociological analysis.”
75
Amidst innumerable
theoretical and discursive denitions, authenticity takes shape as a metaphysical, “pervasive ideal” that
governs social and political theory.
76
Generally speaking, modern introspection of the self gures
prominently in the development of authenticity as a moral-psychological ideal: what is being oneself,
authentically? How can the self achieve authentic being? Rousseau dened authenticity as an
existential nature of being that is obliterated by the arrival of society or the social contract, and a
76
Somogy V arga and Charles Guignon, “ Authenticity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020), 2.
Critique of Authenticity, 1 (italics original).
75
Erik Cohen, “ Authenticity and Commoditization in T ourism,” in Annals of Tourism Research (Pergamon Press,
1988), 374.
39
century later Marx stipulated the conditions of capitalism to be the end of authenticity and cause of
alienation.
77
Heidegger’s conception of authenticity in Being and Time is most aptly translated as
“ownedness,” or “the idea of owning up to and owning what one is and does” as the most “fully
realized human form of life,” emphasizing that to be true to oneself is not to commit to a
predetermined internal assemblage of “feelings, opinions and desires,” but rather to take active
responsibility for the continually unfolding nature of existence in its intersubjective and temporal
wholeness.
78
In other words, an authentic living is a conscientious acceptance of one’s own temporality
and a self-reexive adaptation according to one’s temporal existence. It requires the ceaseless reection,
revision and decisive determination of individual morals and practice.
On the other hand, neoliberal authenticity possesses a Lacanian tendency for fantasy that
engenders a kind of slow violence obfuscated by a promising facade of self-fulllment. This is what we
nd in tourism marketing practices, politics of representation in media, and so on. Among
contemporary delineations of authenticity in tourism studies, key scholarships adopt and reformulate
theorizations of the authentic originating in existential philosophy. Dean MacCannell establishes the
tourist as a category of modern man, alienated by his everyday inauthentic position in society that
consequently elicits “an interest in the ‘real life’ of others,” framing a pursuit of observable authenticity
as the primary desire of tourist endeavors.
79
Late modernity, disconnecting individuals from their labor
and environment, designates everyday life to be a spectacle in which truth and reality may be
performed; this is the modern artice of the Real that is implicit in tourism’s pursuit of authenticity.
79
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A new theory of the leisure class (University of California Press, 1999), 91.
78
V arga and Guignon, “ Authenticity,” 3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
77
Ning W ang, “Rethinking Authenticity in T ourism Experience,” in Annals of Tourism Research (Pergamon
Press, 1999), 350.
40
Building on MacCannell’s exploration of tourist desire for displays of authentic objects or places, Ning
Wang posits the term ‘existential authenticity’ as an alternative framework for understanding tourist
motivations. This discourse marks a shift from tourism authenticity’s external origin to an internal
one, prioritizing introspective processes of the tourist gure that are activated by nominal experiences
in tourist spaces. Whereas MacCannell determines objective and constructive authenticity to be
directly composed of any tourist site or object’s reality or unreality, W ang intervenes that “existential
authenticity can have nothing to do with the authenticity of toured objects.”
80
Protagonists imagine Manzhouli’s elephant as a life-a rming object, a belief unconrmed by
any circumstantial evidence in the lm and thus proximating W ang’s designation of existential
authenticity as internally ratied. At a glance, there are many more similarities between Wei’s journey
and a tourist experience, including but not limited to the long process of scavenging for funds and
modes of transportation, the destination’s dubiously Real yet popular sightseeing object, and the
promise of escape from the mundane. The elephant in Manzhouli is a xed, authentic counterpoint to
the protagonists’ aimless movement, and its stillness is evoked by Yu’s opening monologue as a
perplexing mystery:
He told me the other day, there is an elephant in Manzhouli. It sits there all day long.
Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks, or maybe it just enjoys sitting there. I
don’t know. People gather there, watching it sitting still. They feed the elephant food
but it takes no notice.
81
Manzhouli is postured as a destination possessing an extraordinary, unique sight, and attracts
as much desire for the authentic as any other modern tourism site. Y et, the lm dedicates next to no
81
An Elephant Sitting Still, 00:00:19–00:01:32.
80
W ang, “Rethinking Authenticity,” 352.
41
eort to its fanciful or utopian advertisement; the only evidence that Manzhouli is a tourist destination
appears when Wei is on the bus, absently looking over a brochure. Even so, it is clear that W ei’s
intention is not to arrive in Manzhouli as a tourist but rather as a domestic migrant, permanently
relocating to start anew. Both Wei’s and Yu’s preoccupation with Manzhouli’s elephant suggests their
empathetic connection to its resolute existence, even if it is a life as an object of spectacle, or a life only
valuable as entertainment for others at its own expense. There is an unspoken curiosity inherent in
their aspirational desire to see the elephant that is ultimately existential, as though the sight would
enlighten some authentic core of their being.
Lacan interprets authenticity as a necessary imaginary coping mechanism that soothes the
crippling, compulsory alienation of human existence; emphatically, “authenticity is a fantasy born out
of [alienation].”
82
T o be human is to be a living Subject “characterized by fundamental alienation,” and
consequently driven to an endless pursuit of authenticity in the Other, a pursuit that is uniquely
facilitated by travel and tourism.
83
This Lacanian fantasy, immortalized by the absence of everyday
space-time within touristic sites “constructed as the symbolic opposite” environment to a society that
perpetuates our alienation, is neither moral nor immoral, rather simply an automatic condition that
develops in the Subject’s psyche.
84
The touristic “dierentiation, in terms of location, routines, habits,
and diets” temporarily separates subjects from daily reality, and it is within this separation that one may
recover an authentic self, though the recovery is by no means permanent.
85
Both Heideggerian and
85
Knudsen et al., 37.
84
Knudsen et al., 42.
83
Knudsen et al., 43.
82
Daniel C. Knudsen, Jillian M. Rickly, and Elizabeth S. Vidon, “The fantasy of authenticity: T ouring with
Lacan,” in Annals of Tourism Research (Elsevier Ltd., 2016), 34.
42
Lacanian notions of authenticity as bound to ‘being’, or movement through time, and existential
human alienation oers a potential explanation for its impressive discursive inuence and further, its
transcendence of ideology. How the authentic competently shapeshifts into the solution for alienation
engendered by society, colonialism or late-capitalism suggests it is an irremediable desire inherent to the
human unconscious.
Following the Authentic, Wherever it May Be
Authenticity is directive, orientational; in all its political forms, the arrival of the authentic
necessitates the departure from alienation. Under the liberal model, it is attainable for a cost: come
away from the place you call home and discover some authentic part of yourself. For revolutionaries, it
is what comes after liberation, a powerful mobilizing force. On the other hand, Heiggederian and
Lacanian theories maintain that human life is a persistent pursuit of the authentic, the former stressing
continual decisive change and the latter automatic, machinic desire. The slowness that comprises Hu’s
lm emphasizes the cruelty of attachment to and the existential uncertainty of authenticity, conveying
a condition of perpetual psychological crisis among the socially alienated protagonists. Under the
PRC’s liberal economic turn, centralized market reforms that purport to direct citizens to a wealthy
future appear less clear, dilute and uncertain to the lm’s working class youth. Hu imbues
representations of desire and mobility with slowness that disorients as much as it subverts mainland
China’s existing liberal economic structures. If authenticity arrives only to orientated subjects, then the
protagonists cannot but be alienated. Long takes of walking, taking the bus or train and other displays
43
of excruciatingly lethargic mobility directly correlate with social mobility or the lack thereof available
to the underclass, limitations most harshly felt by younger generations.
Once greatly outnumbered by audiences of big cities, audiences from “small and mid-sized
cities” now dominate domestic Chinese box o ces.
86
Especially signicant is the number of youth
from lower-ranked cities of “varying educational levels” who are the most “fanatically devoted lm
consumers.”
87
Consequently, Hu’s depiction of disillusioned youth of an invisible economic class is
one that in theory resonates with Chinese cinema’s majority audience. The various obstacles and
traumas Wei and Huang experience are relevant to contemporary youths' realities in exploring the
dilemma of mobile devices and social media: Wei is targeted by the bully because of a lost cell phone
and Huang is ostracized due to social media exposing her inappropriate relationship with the vice dean.
In stark contrast to the speed of reaction enabled by the Internet is how protagonists navigate their
grueling aftermath, revealing large discrepancies and discontinuities in access between modern
advancements of technological mobility and material or socioeconomic mobility. The work of
cinematic slowness mimics queer disorientation of spatial-temporal forms and subsequently embeds
political critique of liberal obsession with speed. Slowness engenders an alternate mode of seeing and
being not unlike how Ahmed’s queer orientations trouble the liberal designation of normative social
positions.
However critical of China’s liberal marketization, the lm is neither nostalgic for a socialist past
or future, nor suggestive of any particular ideological solution to the cruel present. An aesthetic
87
Hong, 95.
86
Yin Hong, “Film Culture Development in the W ake of New China’s ‘Pretonpian Society’” in Film Studies in
China (UK: Intellect, 2017), 95.
44
slowness denies any suggestion to a politics of sentimentality; in the lm’s denouement, Wei, Huang
and Wang’s spiritual and existential solidarity arrive with no expectation of liberal sympathy, indeed
selshly and authentically. This is part of what dierentiates Hu’s slow realism from trending
international cinemas of precarity that play into “the rise of liberal politics as global currency [in] the
post-cold war neoliberal era, where the visibility of [lives] under duress oers symbolic capital for state
and market institutions.”
88
Moreover, an aesthetics of slowness recongures travel, heavily advertised
by the global market economy to be an existentially authenticating mode of leisure for the middle class,
as an alienating process for the underclass. The elephant, postured as a destination or sight to see,
assumes the position of a fantastical, desirable site of authenticity as commodied by modern tourism;
yet, the disorienting and alienating journey the elephant compels forms a satire of the liberal model, a
Marxist as well as existentialist critique.
88
Feng-Mei Heberer, “Sentimental Activism as Queer-Feminist Documentary Practice; or, How to Make Love in
a Room Full of People,” in Camera Obscura 34, no. 2 (2019), 41-42.
45
V . Conclusion
“Now, encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of
power) is statutorily a language of repetition: all o cial institutions of language are
repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually
repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a
political fact, the major gure of ideology.”
– Barthes
89
I have attempted to delineate thus far, with eclectic connections to frameworks developed in
critical theory, lm theory, aect theory and tourism studies, the radical aect produced by slow
cinema aesthetics in An Elephant Sitting Still that condemns prevailing liberal structures and above all,
imagines and a rms possibilities for being in solidarity in spite of living, breathing alienation. I trace
the stylistic peculiarities of slow cinema to neorealist origins and designate its contemporary resurgence
as a contraposition or alternative to the social, political, and economic liberal aesthetic and aective
structure. As well, I illustrate the precise aesthetic dimensions of cinematic slowness by performing a
series of textual analyses of Hu’s lm, highlighting the disorientating function of its Steadicam and
depiction of walking as an contemplative apparatus for aective transformation. Finally, I demonstrate
how Wei’s stubborn, naive pursuit of the elephant in Manzhouli is a relation of cruel optimism that
ultimately reveals critique of domineering liberal fantasies in contemporary China, including but not
limited to void promises of upward mobility and most unnervingly, authentic being. An aesthetic
slowness cries protest against the aspirational neoliberal ‘good-life’, bears witness to its brutal deception
and prolongs it in deance. Throughout unbearable stillness, we bear it still.
89
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (Canada: HarperCollins, 1998), 40.
46
Somewhat embarrassing for this author is the deep irony of touting slow cinema as radical,
anti-liberal while its very experience excludes a substantial audience who may not have su cient leisure
time to view such lengthy productions that purport to represent their realities. I am tempted to amend
my invocation of Sontag’s erotics of art with Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical formulation of the eld of
cultural production that calls for a “radical contextualization” of all literary and artistic works: analysis
must consider works in their textual and intertextual totality, in relation to historical, sociocultural
developments and possibilities, all at the same time.
90
In my project to distance An Elephant Sitting
Still from its tragedy-xated rave reviews, I neglected to recognize– or perhaps felt too cognitively
dissonant at the thought– the glaring discrepancies in its critical and audience reception.
Hu was a graduate of one of China’s most prestigious lm universities, his mentor T arr among
the world’s foremost distinguished lmmakers; the festival juries, the critics whom I cite in my
introduction likely possessed higher degrees and access to the right connections that paved way to their
current status as arbiters of cultural taste. I myself am a graduate student with, to be sure, zero
authority whatsoever in the hierarchy of popular lm criticism that has already embalmed Hu’s work
as masterful and worthy of acclaim. But this does not mean that I have not participated in a criminally
long formal analysis defending the validity of slow aesthetics and by proxy my personal taste, an
analysis that has inevitably universalized “aesthetic and cultural practices which are in fact products of
privilege.”
91
Criticism cannot su ciently evaluate art objects without reexivity, and I’ve yet to grow
into the condence of maintaining a reliable self in academic writing. How do I convince anybody that
91
Bourdieu, 24.
90
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 1993), 9.
47
this lm in and of itself matters, that slowness matters, if to me it matters atopically? What would you
believe, if not my aesthetic judgements and theoretical prattling?
“What else can I do?”
I should concede that any initial condence that I could– successfully, uently, without veering
into pure amateurish poetry– complete a minimum 40-page thesis interpreting a four-hour long movie
while avoiding overinterpretation was gravely misplaced. It is not that I retract my original intent of
prioritizing the lm’s aesthetic slowness as paramount to its aect and ideology; that intent still is
rattling in my skull and feels as imperative to me as it was when I began writing. Yet I do not have the
ability to make you see and feel exactly as the lm does. If I were dogmatically faithful to Sontag’s
sentiment, I would think it best for us to watch the movie and skip the discourse. My hopeful reading
of Hu’s vision and insistence upon its not-all-pessimistic message is a reection of attachments to its
time and place, and assuredly, this project relates to me as an object of cruel optimism. When Wei
discovers his grandmother alone and no longer alive, Hu makes a point of nobody but W ei nding her,
the audience immobilized by the Steadicam’s refusal to enter the scene. I could not see; yet how I
wanted to. What cruelty!
I cannot rationalize how An Elephant Sitting Still pushes past the agonizing weight of grief to
convey hope.
92
I cannot shed the image of his blank expression, his calm stride as he leaves his
grandmother’s home, his pacing around outside of the Shijiazhuang North railway station. I cannot
forget that inside, in the early morning, the slick linoleum oors catch sunlight. Sunlight? I had walked
92
I feel, on some days, it never did.
48
too quickly– ever impatient to be home, to see my grandmother– to recognize the uneven surface of
reality carrying me, the impossibility of that thick smog emanating the brightness of a clear sky. I do
not know how to articulate exactly what it all means to me, but I have tried to do it anyway, just like
every other time I’ve ended up here, writing what loss requires of me. “What else can I do?”
93
What all feels like long, long ago, before I dove headrst into the reviews, the theories, the
scholarly criticism, even the lm itself, that idiom in the lm’s original title– “席地而坐”–confounded
me like most basic Chinese idioms do. Over a video call from across the Pacic ocean, I asked my
grandmother about what it means, expecting very little in response though hoping for an answer of any
kind, maybe a question of the cursory sort she had grown accustomed to repeating every time we
called: “where are you right now? When are you coming home?” But her expression in the pixelated
light held unchanged in thought. She deliberated; I blinked my eyes dry. I watched her restate the
idiom, slip into some semblance of clarity and enunciate in a tone so habitual from her teaching days:
“to touch the ground and sit rmly upon it.” I think because of her, for better or for worse, I will
always know exactly what Manzhouli’s elephant looks like, know how and where and why it is seated
not just in Hu’s lm but in this world, at any given second that feels like hours, years.
94
I see the
elephant in its entirety and why Hu, so centered in his style, never betrays it.
94
I want to believe for better– this is page 49 after all!
93
An Elephant Sitting Still, 03:17:52 (W ei replying to Yu).
49
One Final Aesthetic Ruling
The nal ten minutes of An Elephant Sitting Still depict Wei, Huang and Wang’s night bus
ride, teeming with empty darkness that nearly succeeds in devouring the vital spark Wang delivers at
the train station from which they depart:
Wang: You can go wherever you want. Yes, you can. However, you’ll nd nothing
dierent. I learned this once I’ve wasted most of my life away, so I have to sugar-coat it: “There
must be a dierence.” Do you understand? [...Y ou’re] looking for something else. I’m telling
you to stand right here and look over at the other side. You believe that it must be better than
this. But you can’t go. By not going, you learn to live with it here.
95
T o the hum of an idling engine, the end scene arrives with a wide establishing shot and an
indistinct group of passengers accompanying the three protagonists, all positioned in a narrow stream
of light cutting through the center of opaque night. They stand in a vague circle formation, kicking a
shuttlecock between one another, stopping every now and then to pick up the bird, begin again. I
think it could go on like this for hours, years. The elephant cries oscreen. T ogether in place,
unmoving, unyielding, they listen.
95
An Elephant Sitting Still, 03:39:15–03:40:46.
50
References
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University
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An Elephant Sitting Still. Directed by Hu Bo. KimStim, 2017.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07ZS4XXVZ/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. HarperCollins Canada, 1998.
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Creator Li, Ellen (author)

Core Title "What else can I do?": Cinematic slowness, anti-liberal affect and authenticity in An Elephant Sitting Still

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/21/2022

Defense Date 07/21/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,affect,alienation,An Elephant Sitting Still,anti-liberal,authenticity,China,Hu Bo,independent cinema,neorealism,OAI-PMH Harvest,orientation,slow cinema,time-image

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Chio, Jenny (committee chair), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Yasar, Kerim (committee member)

Creator Email ellenli@usc.edu,li.ellen98@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111373666

Unique identifier UC111373666

Legacy Identifier etd-LiEllen-10888

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Li, Ellen

Type texts

Source 20220721-usctheses-batch-958 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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