Indisciplinary Cinema: Jia Zhang-Ke’s Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)

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TRAC 4 (1) pp. 43–66 Intellect Limited 2013

Transnational Cinemas Volume 4 Number 1

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/trac.4.1.43_1

Keywords

Indisciplinary filmessay-filmtransnationalityChinese contemporary

cinemaJia Zhang-Kedissensus

Carolin overhoff ferreiraFederal University of São Paulo (Unifesp)

indisciplinary cinema:

Jia Zhang-Ke’s Hai shang

chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)

abstraCt

This article aims to introduce a new concept, the indisciplinary film, by studying an outstanding contemporary example: Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010). The concept is inspired by Jacques Rancière’s idea of philosophy as an area of knowledge that thinks between disciplines, as well as by his concept of the aesthetic regime that replaces notions such as ‘modern’ and ‘avant-garde’ by foregrounding the potential signification of brute materiality since French literary realism. I argue that indisci-plinarity in the context of cinema can replace the notion of the essay-film as a cate-gory of analysis and point out why and how it can shift the discussion towards key issues such as the relation between method and fiction, politics and aesthetics, and reception. With regard to I Wish I Knew, I show how the film ‘thinks’ between disci-plines by addressing Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux. Aesthetically, heterogeneity, discontinuity and fluctuation can be sensed and contemplated in every shot and by means of montage. I therefore conclude that the wishful thinking of the title does not come true on purpose. Rather, the film’s indici-plinarity is in tune with the Chinese title (Legend of the Sea) that points to the fact that all stories that have been told so far about the city are fictions.

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1. Laura Rascaroli (2009: 30) suggests that the essay is a literary tradition that goes back to Cicero and Seneca. George Lukács ([1910] 1978) speaks of Plato as a predecessor.

2. Whereas some define it as a major narrative form of the modern world (see Scherer 2001), next to fiction, non-fiction and experimental cinema, others sustain that it is an anti-genre that should not be pushed into classification, since it transgresses all existing genres and subgenres (see Krohn 1992; Alter 2006; Pantenburg 2006; Rascaroli 2009).

introduCtion

I Wish I Knew (2010) by Chinese film-maker Jia Zhang-Ke was commissioned by the World Exposition of Shanghai in 2010. The film engages with multi-ple layers of Shanghai’s contemporary reality, Chinese history, and, above all, transnational identity, highlighting the city’s role as receiver and producer of migrants, namely after the Mao Zedong Revolution in 1949. It proposes an encounter with the brute materiality of the city under construction and collects fragmentary tales from its past and present inhabitants that challenge our outlook on modern China and our ideas on its history and identity, and even its film culture.

This article will perform a close reading by first claiming it as an indisci-plinary film, a concept I am developing as an alternative to the essay-film. By adapting Jacques Rancière’s (2006) neologism with which he terms philosophy’s potential to think between disciplines for film studies, I am aiming to propose an analytical tool that will prove more helpful for the analysis of such films. My aim is to accomplish for feature films what other scholars are currently propos-ing for avant-garde film: to abandon modern cinema’s characterization as auto-reflexive and subjective, also common denominators of the filmic essay.

Film-makers and theoreticians have argued for the concept of ‘the essay-film’ as a way to inscribe film into the history of modernism. Indisciplinarity, on the other hand, offers the possibility to grasp a deeper understanding of film as a sensorial and cognitive art form since it reveals the construction of fictions and calls attention to film’s capacity to make us experience aesthetic heterogeneity and dissent. Following Rancière (2006a: 20) and his ideas on art and the avant-garde, I am suggesting that we should abandon the notion of modernity in cinema and analyse the trans-historical relation between knowl-edge, politics and aesthetics articulated in film instead.

Jia’s film is particularly interesting in this context. First, because it serves as a perfect example for the identity of contraries that characterize the indis-ciplinary film; and second, it presents a variety of strategies that reveal the transnational in sounds and images. I will try to show that I Wish I Knew is less interested in border crossing than in their implosion. It is a polyphonic and polycentric film centred around the principle that temporal and spatial contraries are actually strongly interconnected. I shall argue here that this is best understood by using indisciplinarity as an analytical tool.

indisCiplinarity versus the essay-film

Claiming the essay as a genre for film theory and practice has been an impor-tant item on a political agenda: to defend the mass medium as a serious art form whose critical and reflexive capacity is comparable to philosophy and other disciplines of knowledge. Michel de Montaigne, who first introduced the essay in his famous book, was, on the other hand, more interested in human limitations.1 The Essays presented ‘without masks’ the thoughts and the ‘essence’ (Franz 1993: 34) of its author, so as to delineate how to under-stand and live with human imperfections. Nonetheless, self-observation and reflection, disregard for rules and schemes, idealization or typification lay at its core. While this could be regarded as an ‘indisciplinary’ methodology that thinks beyond disciplines, the essay was quickly adopted as a genre in a wide range of subjects, from philosophy to human sciences and the arts, among them film. The genre question is actually the one issue that still divides schol-ars in the theorization of the essay-film.2

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3. Richter’s examples are the English films by Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil Wright and John Grierson, as well as those by film-makers around Jacques Brunis in France and Henri Storck in Belgium.

Sergei Eisenstein was the first to embrace the concept for October (1929), maintaining that cinema was ‘capable of articulating ideas’ (Eisenstein 1975: 290). Based on Eisenstein, Bela Balázs ([1930] 1972) argued in the 1930 that the ‘Gedankenfilm’ mediated abstract ideas through sensitive forms and intellectual thought through the effect of images. In the same line, Hans Richter pondered in 1940 that the essay-film was a much-anticipated variation of the documentary film, capable of visualizing ideas and thoughts by making the invisible visible.3 Almost a decade later, in 1948, Alexandre Astruc ([1948] 2009) could not name a filmic example that deserved to be called an expression of thought. In his notorious text on the camera-pen he was nevertheless certain that this hypothesis would soon become a reality. Only a few years later, Jacques Rivette ([1955] 1977) described Roberto Rossellini’s feature Viaggio in Italia/The Lonely Woman (1954) as an essay, sustaining that cinema was as capable of being essayistic as literature by stressing the film’s remarkable mix of everyday details and ideas. In 1958, André Bazin spotted a film that fitted Astruc’s foresight perfectly: Lettre de Sibérie/Letters from Siberia (1958) by Chris Marker. Fascinated by an editing style that cut from eye to ear (called horizontal montage), Bazin claimed that this could take documentary film-making to a new level. Astruc, for his part, reckoned that the camera-pen would be as much a tool for fiction as for documentary. In 1965, German film-makers Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz and Wilfried Reinke (1992) picked up on the ideas of Balász by concentrating their attention on the dialectical relation-ship between aesthetics and concepts in films that they considered suitable for the communication of complex ideas. In the same year, Jean-Luc Godard designated his Pierrot Le Fou (1965) an essay-film (Liandrat-Guigues 2004: 9). Roughly at the same time, in 1969, Argentinian directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino ([1969] 1976) signposted what the essay-film could offer to the development of their ‘Third Cinema’ in Latin America.

When the essay-film became a key concept in film studies in the 1980s, mainly in German (see Möbius 1991; Kanzog 1991; Blümlinger and Wulff 1992; Krohn 1992; Hattendorf 1999; Scherer 2001) and French (see Noguez 1977; Bellour and Laurent 1997; Bellour 1990) academia, the concerns changed only slightly. In the wake of the definition of modernist art (Greenberg 1960) and avant-garde film (Sitney [1975] 1987), subjectivity of point of view and auto-reflexivity were singled out as characteristics of films that encourage active spectator participation and involve the audience in the decoding of inven-tive sound to image montage. When the concept’s theoretical discussion and usage as an analytical tool spread in the following decade around Europe (see Aprá 1997; Ortega and Weinrichter 2006; Rascaroli 2009), reaching North and South America (see Alter 2006; Corrigan 2011; Migliorin 2010) at the turn of the new millennium, it was generally agreed that the essay-film was an open artwork that breaks away from the parameters of established genres, questioning their and the medium’s limits by disregarding established hierar-chies between literature, philosophy and visual media. In short, it was modern cinema’s most modernist accomplishment that made its audiences think and question established knowledge by means of its film-maker’s authorial style.

George Lukács, in 1910, and later Theodor W. Adorno, in 1958, strongly influenced this mindset by stressing the centrality of the author and his articulation of doubts and critique of ultimate knowledge. Whereas both authors’ observations on the importance of experience were not so eagerly remembered, Adorno ended up complicating matters for the reception of the essay in art theory. He argued that the essay ‘mediates [reflective thoughts]

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4. Percepts and affect are understood by Deleuze and Guattari (1996: 168) as ‘autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them: Combray like it never was, is or will be lived; Combray as cathedral or monument’.

through its own conceptual organization; it proceeds, so to speak, methodi-cally un-methodically’ (Adorno [1958] 1991: 101). This paradoxical state-ment made up for much of the mystification of the essay-film. Another of his comments proved equally polemical but helps explain why film-makers from Eisenstein to Getino were attracted to this label. The German philosopher differentiated sharply between art and non-art by claiming that even though the essay shared the possibilities of non-conceptual works of art, it was still non-discursive and therefore not an artistic expression. In this light, it seems only reasonable to question the distinction between disciplines that produce knowledge and art that does not by claiming the essay for film art.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1996: 5) well-known definition of the philosopher as a creator of concepts is less restrictive and much sharper with regard to the differences between art, science and philosophy. And it demon-strates that the film-maker’s worries and those of today’s film scholars have lost ground. Accepting that each field of knowledge is creative and interre-lated, Deleuze and Guattari explain that they all think, even though in very different ways:

[…] from sentences or their equivalent, philosophy extracts concepts (which must not be confused with general or abstract ideas), whereas science extracts prospects (propositions that must not be confused with judgments), and art extracts percepts and affects (which must not be confused with perceptions or feelings). In each case language is tested and used in incomparable ways – but in ways that do not define the difference between disciplines without also constituting their perpetual interbreeding.

(1994: 24)

Art is undoubtedly capable of thinking: ‘Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 66).4 No need to declare film’s capacity to think by associating it with the essay.

If the essay-film was successful in fighting film’s case as high art, it can prove misleading as an analytical tool. Let me briefly demonstrate this with I Wish I Knew. The film juxtaposes very diverse filmic material: interviews with people involved in Shanghai’s cultural and political history and present; views of the city and of the neighbouring Hong Kong and Taipei where many Shanghainese migrated, as well as shots of anonymous passers-by and work-ers that are contemplated in long shots; footage from Chinese film history, including films by Taiwanese and Hong Kong film-makers; and sequences with an unidentified ‘fictional’ female character that wanders through Shanghai’s historical sights and constructions. If we looked for its self-reflexivity and the author’s subjectivity, we would ignore Jia’s aesthetic dissent: the multiplicity of voices and gazes summoned to disclose the transformation of the city, the transnational bonds he establishes between the different Chinas, but also the relationship between history and the desire for progress, or his foregrounding of aesthetic kinship that exceeds the idea of cinephilia and also participates in defining Chinese transnationality.

Instead of looking to literary theory and its interest in unconventional self-scrutiny and personal vision, as film-makers, theoreticians and scholars of the essay-film have done for decades, a turn towards philosophy might offer a more productive methodological approach: the study of the relation between the production of knowledge and aesthetics, in short, indisciplinarity.

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the indisCiplinary film

While Jacques Rancière’s concept is indebted to some of Theodor Adorno’s ideas, indisciplinarity presents an original take on the problem of method that makes it very attractive to film analysis. The author claims that disciplines are not defined a priori by their methods, but rather by ‘constituting an object as an object of thought and as the demonstration of a certain idea of knowledge’ (Rancière 2006: 6). This stands in the tradition of Kantian critical thought, but is also reminiscent of Michel Foucault. The relation between power, truth and subject is, however, enhanced by the question of aesthetics. Thus, science is not only seen as a ‘war machine against allodoxy. But what is called allodoxy is, in reality, an aesthetic dissent’ (Rancière 2006: 6). The disciplines of knowl-edge are being criticized more radically and from a different vantage point. In fact, they are accused of trying to neutralize everything that breaks away from consent and threatens social balance, everything that would put the distribution of social roles and occupations at risk. In short, everything that aims to restruc-ture what the author calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2006a).

Following Deleuze and Guatttari, Rancière’s main target is again philosophy’s rival, sociology. But factually, all human and social sciences are in his sight. Post-structuralism’s lessons have been learned: the boundaries hide the fact that methods actually unfold into the construction of stories. While Jacques Derrida would speak of deconstruction, Rancière calls this indisciplinarity. He defines it as a way of thinking that reveals the borders established by the various disciplines, as well as their purpose as weapons in their ‘war’ against aesthetic dissent. For that reason, methods do not examine a territory but try to define it by telling stories. Any area of knowledge, with philosophy at its lead, needs to pay attention to the tales of other disciplines – which they call methods – in order to maintain its indisciplinarity (Rancière 2006: 11).

Like Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière sees no difference between the different disciplines. It is the construction of their stories that varies: ‘Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of the absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines’ (Rancière 2006: 6). In one big stroke Rancière also does away with differences between science, art and politics. Fictionality is, indeed, the one trait they all share: ‘Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct “fictions”, that is to say material rear-rangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done’ (Rancière 2006a: 39).

It is surprising that when the philosopher speaks of film, apart from chal-lenging the avant-garde discourse of pure art, he positions art film again as opposed to classical Hollywood narrative, as though cinema was destined to produce fables and not fictions. He actually says that:

The art of cinema has been constrained, empirically, to affirm its art against the tasks assigned to it by the industry. But the visible process by which it thwarts these tasks only hides a more intimate process: to thwart its servitude, cinema must first thwart its mastery. […] The film fable is a thwarted fable.

(Rancière 2006b: 11)

Would it not make more sense to speak of fictionality here as well instead of referring to a dramaturgical technique? I believe film does not need to thwart its mastery, since the mastery itself is only a fiction of film history.

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5. Exploring this heterogeneous potential, the works of art of the aesthetic regime differ from those of earlier artistic rules: the ethical regime of images and the regime of representation. Echoing Adorno, Rancière (2006a: 3) explains: ‘a product identical with something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos, the intention of the unintentional, etc.’

Given this contradiction in his thoughts on the film fable, let me extend the discussion to Rancière’s definition of the aesthetic regime where the relation between fable and fictionality is argued more clearly. By employing a philosophical concept to define art, this other axiom in Rancière’s thinking has two key goals: to define art in the singular, i.e. abandon the idea of art’s specificity, and to question the very idea of modern art. And it offers a defini-tion of realism that is not only groundbreaking for film but proposes another way of defining indisciplinarity.

The turning point towards the aesthetic regime is spotted in two instances: in German idealism and in literary realism. With regard to the latter the author develops a dynamic concept: ‘its inaugural moment has often been called realism, which does not in any way mean the valorisation of resem-blance but rather the destruction of the structures within which it functioned’ (Rancière 2006a: 39). Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is the philoso-pher’s prime example. He argues, and this is of the utmost importance for my critique of the essay-film, that the book does not bear the traces of its author’s intervention, i.e. his subjectivity, but, rather, of the indifference and passivity of things without will or significance: ‘The fictionality specific to the aesthetic age is consequently distributed between two poles: the potential of meaning inherent in everything silent and the proliferation of modes of speech and levels of meaning’ (Rancière 2006a: 37).

Consequently, we are dealing with a completely different way in which reality is perceived and expressed: this realism retracts from the imitation of action and highlights the ‘brute’ materiality of the objects, remembering, at the same time, their narrative potential.5 Pre-established borders are imploded and new experiences proposed that aim to reconfigure the distribution of the sensible. Is this not Rancière’s very own definition of indisciplinary? And is film not an art form for which this is particularly true? It is worth noting that recent scholarship on the avant-garde film has put forward a compa-rable redefinition. Gabriel Jutz (2010), Bruce Elder (2008) and A. L. Rees (2011), for example, have questioned authors such as Clement Greenberg and P. A. Sitney, who famously defended self-reflexivity and subjectivity, by fore-grounding the relation between materiality and performativity in films from the early 1920s to the present.

Since indisciplinarity is concerned with the fictions of disciplines that construct borders and consent, its main objective is described not only as the foregrounding of these fictions, but also as the re-configuration of the sensible and thus as an aesthetic of dissent. Rancière’s definition of dissent is as follows: ‘Dissent has as its aim what I call the cut-out of the sensible, the distribution of private and public spaces, of issues that are dealt with or are not, and of the actors that have or have not a motif to be there to take care of them’ (Rancière 1996: 373). The idea of the aesthetic regime, which is grounded in what I would like to call ‘heterogeneous realism’ believes in the necessity of an aesthetic dissent, not in the Marxist sense but as a means for a democracy that needs to question the binary oppositions on which consensus is built.

When elaborating on the aesthetic regime, the author actually speci-fies a number of characteristics that may serve as key indicators for film’s indisciplinarity. They all share a fundamental ‘identity of contraries’ (Rancière 2006: 24) and I would like to summarize them as follows in order to use them as methodological tools for film analysis: the co-presence of temporalities; the in-definition of borders between the reason of facts and the

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6. The author also mentions the subversion of the distinction between high and low, popular and cultured, but this does not seem to be important for film since it is, factually, always a popular mass medium with the potential of being an artwork.

7. Citation from http://ranciere. blogspot.com/2007/ranciere-emancipated-spectator.html, accessed 3 January 2012.

8. It is surprising that essay-film theorization has never picked up on the writings of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault and their questioning of the central position of the author.

reason of fictions; the suspension of the opposition between the activity of thought and the passivity of sensible matter; and, generally, and, finally, the re-composition of the landscape of the visible (Rancière 2006: 20–41).6

Let me look at two of these features more carefully as they are especially important for a revision of the characteristics associated with modernist art, modern cinema and the essay-film. Film studies, developing on Brecht’s ideas on anti-Aristotelian theatre, has a long tradition of defining the spectator as body-less and of challenging his passive, ocular perception, as for exam-ple, in the apparatus theory, the discussion on continuity editing, suture and the panoptic view, or in feminist film theory. Much recent film scholarship has contested this point of view. As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010: 164) put it: ‘Cinema is not a case apart of perception with proper rules; the brain processes all sensible perception and that of the body, in cinema and anywhere else’. Rancière (2009) too argues for the concept of an emancipated spectator by saying that there is no distinction between active and passive reception whatsoever: ‘Spectatorship is not the passivity that has to be turned into activity. It is our normal situation’.7

With regard to the essay-film, recent theoretical debate has gone from the activation of the spectator towards the idea of a dialogue between author and audience (see Rascaroli 2009). Although it sounds more dynamic, it factually remains based on distinguishing the essay-film from other films by overesti-mating its cognitive reception and by forgetting, or ignoring, sensitive stimuli that are equally important in the process of constructing signification. One could argue that heterogeneous realism is in fact grounded on the sensitive engagement with the ‘brute’ presence of materiality. If we can agree that any film is always active and passive, cognitive and sensitive, we might be able to look more closely at the way in which films try to re-distribute the sensible and produce dissent. This seems to be especially important in the case of I Wish I Knew since it was made in an authoritarian context, despite its being commissioned work.

A second point needs further clarification: the author’s subjectivity. I would argue that since Montaigne, self-observation has been much more important to artists than authorship. I would even claim that the so-called ‘subjectivity’ that has been singled out as the key characteristic of the essay-film, has been a misinterpretation of Montaigne’s intent to focus on self-scrutiny, i.e. the setting up of a stage for experiences that makes life’s heterogeneity perceptible. Much of the theorization of the essay-film, strongly influenced by auteur theories in the context of modern cinema, is actually built on this ‘fiction’. In the case of I Wish I Knew, the relations established with other films by means of clips stand in the dialogic tradition indicated by Mikhael Bakhtin8 but might offer deeper insights when studied as an indisciplinary editing of China’s film history.

Let me summarize my arguments: Even though the essay-film looks back on more than 80 years of theoretical discussion, a number of concerns have persisted and some questions have remained unanswered. The indisciplinary film as a theoretical framework aims to resolve these issues or to prove that they have become obsolete. Accordingly, it wants to settle the question of whether film can ‘think’ by arguing that it does so between disciplines in order to work towards the redistribution of the sensible by means of dissent. This brings the discussion about the essay-film as genre to a close. By using Rancière’s defini-tion of realism, it goes beyond a questioning of the boundaries between fiction and documentary by foregrounding art’s interest in the signifying poten-tial of recorded reality and brute materiality. As a result, subjectivity and the

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centrality of the author lose their position as key characteristics. Finally, and in tune with current scholarship, formal aspects become less important and the idea that the essay-film ‘activates’ the spectator is revised.

I trust that the concept of the indisciplinary film can change our perspective on film in general and on the essay-film in particular by shifting our attention towards vital features for future theorization and film analysis outlined above. I will now examine I Wish I Knew in order to point out how the film ‘thinks’ between disciplines by constructing its heterogeneous realism. Borrowing from Rancière’s definition of the aesthetic regime, I will focus on what I consider the key characteristics of indisciplianary films: the co-presence of temporalities; the in-definition of borders between the reason of facts and the reason of fictions; the suspension of the opposition between the activity of thought and the passivity of sensible matter; and the re-composition of the landscape of the visible. I will argue that the film’s indisciplinaritiy is related to Jia’s interest in constructing Shanghai’s and China’s transnationality by foregrounding the bonds between its peoples, its stories, its landscapes and its films.

I WIsH I KneW – an indisCiplinary film

Co-presence of temporalities

The first sequence of I Wish I Knew makes us experience history as discon-tinuous and accidental by visualizing temporal heterogeneity. In a subtle yet powerful way, seven shots establish this indisciplinary reconceptualization of the relation between time and history. As a result, China’s biggest metropolis can be perceived as a place of tensions between the multiple layers of the past and its contemporary drive towards stylish urban development.

Fading in from black, the first shot makes us look over the back of a tradi-tional imperial guardian Lion that faces rubble, a street with heavy traffic, simple two stored houses, and, in the far background, sky-scratching modern apartment blocks. In the following shot we see the bronze lion in close-up, his stylized mane being polished, as is the rest of the city by means of its new constructions.

When a medium shot displays the cleaner, digital roaring sounds are intro-duced into the soundtrack’s romantic tune of symphonic strings, as though the symbol of past glories was in fact alive. A cut to a close-up of the Lion’s cub under the paw indicates that the director is focusing on the female that represents a biological idea of time, the cycle of life (her male counterpart holds an embroidered ball that represents the world). The focus on the lion-ess and her offspring also echoes the hint to the future, signposted in the first shot through the modern buildings under construction, but now under the premise of nature’s ways.

Figure 1: Shots 1 and 2 of I Wish I Knew.

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Figure 4: Shots 7 and title of I Wish I Knew.

The subsequent shot proposes another perspective by taking us across the street. We now see the pair of guardian lions, which became popular during the Han Dynasty (206 bc–220 ad), in front of an additional yet more modern icon of the past, the Bank of Communications. It was founded in 1908 as one of the first major national banks and chartered ‘the bank for develop-ing the country’s industries’ during the early years of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). A zoom lens condenses the division gates between the roads, the barriers in front of the rubble and the decorative lions into an image that visu-ally translates the impediments to upcoming fortune that the lions as mythic protective benefits and the bank originally stood for. It is not only a comment on the heterogeneity of time, but also on the dialectic between construction and destruction that constitutes it. The sixth shot explores the vulnerability of progress to time further. The lion is merely a fragment out of focus on the left corner, while a construction worker passes in slow motion, carrying another street barrier on his shoulder.

A quick cut takes us to an over-the-shoulder shot in which the lion, prominently seated on the left corner, watches the cars floating by, equally in slow motion. While the past is always present, the prosperous future is only in the making and might not be reached as fast as economists and urban

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developers would like to think. Symbols and signs of prosperity have always been invoked, but the rubble from the past remains in the picture, as does the flow of time that follows its own rules. Each of these shots is indisciplinary, in the sense that they dismantle the intent to construct Shanghai as a success story of progress by means of the co-presence of temporalities.

re-Composition of the landsCape of the visible: transnational identity

After a fade to black the Chinese and the English title can be read: ‘Legend on the Sea’ in ideograms (Hai shang chuan qi) and ‘I wish I knew’ in Latin alphabet. Tony Rayns offers an illuminating comment on both:

[…] like most of Jia’s films, the title is quoted from a song – it’s primarily concerned with knowledge. […]. (The Chinese title, incidentally, testifies to Jia’s own cinephilia: it echoes the Chinese title of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai [1998] by switching the syllables of ‘Shanghai’ to produce ‘Hai Shang.’ Hou’s title Hai Shang Hua means ‘Flower on the Sea’ and Jia’s means ‘Legend on the Sea.’). But the acquisition of knowl-edge is the main thing.

(2010)

I will return later to the significance of this and other cinephile dialogues, as well as to the question of knowledge. At the moment, I would like to focus on the Chinese title and its maritime and historical connotations, since images of ships or ferries on rivers or the sea, filmed in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei are used as visual metaphors for the city’s fluctuating, transnational, identity. They are related to a second important theme that informs Jia’s indisciplinary approach: migration.

As mentioned earlier, I Wish I Knew was a commissioned film. Since Jia Zhang-ke is a leading figure of the sixth generation of film-makers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), internationally recognized at least since the 2006 Golden Lion for Still Life, this raised suspicion that his independent and initially underground film-making was going mainstream. The Expo was, beyond dispute, a patriotic event with strong ideological implications. Trying to show off the PRC’s leading position in the world through state-of-the art architecture and profound urban restructuring, the investment in capital and human resources was enormous. However, the director told financers from the start that he would focus on émigrés. Despite the fact that he is now an inter-national star, this does not diminish his dissident take on the subject, which accentuates, in contrast to the official discourse, that Chinese national identity is, as Yingjin Zhang (2010: 126) has phrased, cinematically ‘both ‘fluctuating’ and ‘unfinished’. In the wake of the academic discussions on transnationality, the author describes Chinese Cinema as follows:

It is fluctuation because of its unstable geopolitical and geocultural constitution in China’s fractured landscapes of nationhood; it is unfin-ished because of its historical ruptures of regime change and its periodic movement of border crossing and self-fashioning. […] I have further emphasized that Chinese cinema is dispersed ‘historically, politically, territorially, culturally, ethnically, and linguistically’.

(Zhang 2010: 126)

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Spectators can experience the metaphorical drifting of Shanghai’s and China’s identity right after the title of the film. Instead of telling us some-thing about the city, this long sequence has one aim: to develop the sensation of floating.

While the music score shifts briefly from western strings to a Chinese melody, a zoom lens glances through a grid that remains as a blurred pattern in the foreground. The objective follows a boat that is steaming from right to left in the direction of the harbour. At the same time, the camera pans from left to right. And the two opposite movements result in our experience of the relativity of movement. The two stills above demonstrate that even though the boat has moved towards the harbour, it remains almost in the same spot. The camera movement not only makes us feel unstable, because it subverts our fixed point of view, it comments on progress in space by working against our expectation. More importantly, though, it engages simultaneously with our sensations and our ideas on Shanghai, which might begin to drift in a new direction.

reason of faCts and reason of fiCtions

After briefly displaying the indisciplinary relationship between past and present, and subsequently setting up Shanghai’s floating identity as though the film was turning the ideograms ‘Legend on the Sea’ into complex moving images, the camera cuts to a full shot of a group of people on a ferryboat.

In the centre, a woman is sitting on a scooter, looking directly into the camera. As the camera dollies in on her, she keeps on gazing into the objective. Anonymous characters are frequently depicted and they are as important as the seventeen people interviewed in the course of the movie. When registered in public places, they either ignore that they are being filmed, or engage with the intruding camera by glancing, waving or talking to the crew. Long shots,

Figure 5: Shots following the title of I Wish I Knew.

Figure 6: Anonymous passengers on ferry in I Wish I Knew.

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camera movements and close-up shots create a thought-provoking uncertainty about their role in the film. This is another indisciplinary strategy: to introduce people from the streets that are haphazardly the focus of the camera in order to give them space and time as though they were fictional characters. It is this awareness of passers-by and the potential significance of their ‘stories’, as well as the creation of atmosphere, tone and the stimulation of moods that blur the boundaries between the reason of facts and the reason of fictions.

The visual sequences described above, that capture buildings, waterways and people of Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong, serve as complements to the interviewees that are the structural backbone of the film. In a conventional documentary, these interviews would represent the reason of facts. This is not the case here. By means of the cinematographic strategies mentioned so far, as well as by others that I describe below, they are presented as fragmentary parts of a mindboggling puzzle.

According to the places where the interviewees live, there is a constant come and go between the different Chinas. Five interviews take place in Shanghai, the following four in Taiwan, another three return to Shanghai only to speak about family members that left for Hong Kong, which is visited for another three interviews. They offer recollections of Shanghai’s and China’s history that triggered off migration to Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many inter-viewees speak about indirect memories of their parents’ or grandparents’ who participated actively in the political, economic and cultural life of the city. Only when we return to Shanghai for two other statements by an economic upstart and a young man who covers a wide range of activities (artist turned race car driver turned famous political blogger), the characters are the protagonists of contemporary stories.

Since the three megalopolizes are set at the water, it is easy to lose track of which city the interview is taking place in, even though they are introduced with establishing shots and orienting titles. In other words, the recomposing sense of fluctuation remains. Thus, the film abandons its purpose as a commis-sioned work on the story of Shanghai and takes the shape of a mosaic on the various cities that belong to the different Chinas.

Following the fragmentary logic of memory, the testimonies also display a constant flux between historical moments in the three major cities. Despite historical key dates that pop up repeatedly, there is no timeline. There are references to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949/1950) between the Kuomintang (KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party), the then governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China (CPC); to the Sino-British Treaty of Nanking signed in 1842 that ended the Opium war, opened Shanghai to foreign trade and turned it into a prosperous city; to the years around the proclamation of the PRC by Mao Zedong in 1949 and the subsequent invasion of Shanghai that set off the division of the country and resulted in mass migration to Taiwan, then named the Republic of China (ROC); and, still, to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). But there is obviously no disciplinary interest in accurate accounts or interpretations of these events. On the contrary, the lack of historical coherence works in favour of making the transnational bonds perceptible, which account for the deeper symbolic mean-ing of the remembered events: their impact on people and their emotions, and the traces they left in their lives.

There is one specific character in I Wish I Knew that explores the borders of storytelling from an additional angle. It is, at the same time, the film’s

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most hermetic and most revealing figure with regard to Shanghai’s history and identity. After the sequence on the ferryboat, there is a shot of cargo barges in front of The Bund, Shanghai’s famous waterfront area with historical buildings and wharves, where the international trading houses and clubs line up prominently. Titles tell us that we are in present day Shanghai, in 2009, that is, in the year Jia Zhang-Ke is making his film. A woman looks around as though she was seeing the place for the first time. She is dressed in white, the Asian colour for mourning. Where is she from? Who is she mourning? There is no explanation. In fact, it will take 30 minutes before we see her again in front of the Bund. It is later in the day and she observes the construction work. Another 40 minutes pass before she returns. Then we see her sitting in a cinema where she watches a scene from Wutai Jiemei/Two Stage Sisters (1964) by Xie Jin, in which Shangguan Yunzhu plays one of the leading roles. When the actress is seen in a close-up, the woman in white bends towards the screen and scrutinizes her.

The next shot shows her running through the rain, emotional. The voice of the next interviewee fades in. It is Wei Ran, son of the actress, who tells his mother’s and his sister’s story. His mother committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution and the life of his sister was equally tragic. A student at the Shanghai Conservatory, she tried to escape with her boyfriend to Hong Kong. He was captured and killed himself; she was taken back and publicly criticized. When she had a child, it was given up for adoption. In the following shot we see the woman in white descending a staircase and then passing in front of a man. It is implied that she is the granddaughter of the actress and has returned to Shanghai to track her story. Even as the clips do not reveal that Two Stage Sisters is a propaganda film, we know that the actress, her daughter and granddaughter became factual victims of the Cultural Revolution. Making a film about Shanghai for the Expo means that the time has come to return and do the mourning of these loses.

From a western perspective one can easily draw a line between the woman in white and the angel of history, Walter Benjamin’s critical alle-gory that implodes history’s continuity, causality and progress. Benjamin’s ([1940] 2003) celebrated concept from 1940 also argues that un-mastered history affects the immediate present. It is necessary to acknowledge what has not been known of the past, so that we can awaken from myths and dreams. This seems to be the role of the woman in white. At the end of the film we see her walking up the stairs of a catwalk that crosses a busy motorway. Then

Figure 7: The woman in white at the cinema in I Wish I Knew.

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she stands still. Filmed from a low angle and in slow motion, she contem-plates the construction work.

The shot is reminiscent of Benjamin’s text:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastro-phe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

([1940] 2003: 249)

The slow motion translates the desire to stand still, to contemplate the moment that is propelling Shanghai into the future and makes it forget the catastrophes of the past that the film tries to remember by offering an indisci-plinary take on its history and identity. There is, however, a crucial difference between Benjamin’s angel and the woman in white. She is a human of flesh and blood whose mourning makes her capable of looking at both past and the future under construction.

But time also does not cease for her. The next shot affirms that there is, factually, no standstill. But it also exemplifies time in the heterogeneous and humanist way that inspires the entire film. We cut from the woman in white to the point of view shot of an electric train tracking through the city buildings. The shot tilts slightly, fixing the cables that give it energy. Once more this uncommon perspective makes us feel unsteady. Inside the train close-up and medium shots gaze for long seconds at real, ordinary people on their way to work or study. They are silently floating in space and time, nodding their heads mechanically in the rhythm of the train’s movement towards a future that they do not seem to be in control of. Not by chance, only the woman in white, the fictitious character, is as aware of the co-presence of temporalities, as is Jia’s film.

Figure 8: The woman in white as ‘angel of history’.

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aCtivity of thought and passivity of sensible matter

In tune with the visual sequences that depict Shanghai and the other cities and their people, the camera demonstrates an unconventional interest in space and time when filming the interviewees’ oral testimonies. Settings and camera movements constantly comment on the stories told and create images of complex signification. I would like to focus on the first interview as an example for the construction of multiple meanings in these sequences that result from the suspension of the opposition between activity of thought and the passivity of sensible matter.

Chen Danqing was born in Shanghai in 1953 to a family of migrants from Guangdong, the most populated Chinese province. Sitting on a designer chair in what looks like one of the defunct factories or warehouses often depicted throughout the film, he talks about the effect of the Cultural Revolution on a rich neighbouring family he and his siblings used to peek on, and remembers the children gangs on the streets that one had to be part of. Both childhood memories share an awareness of social hierarchies: the juvenile fascination with a sophisticated lifestyle and the submission to power structures from an early age onwards.

Even though not acknowledged in the film, Chen became famous for his Tibetans (1979–1980), a series of paintings that represented a change of para-digm in Chinese art: from monumental Socialist Realism to small scale, inti-mate portraits in the tradition of French realist Jean-François Millet. While the artist is now respected and officially recognized, it is not by coincidence that Jia opens with the personal memories of the Cultural Revolution of a contem-porary artist who took part in the subversion of representational hierarchies. His film, as well as Chen’s art, is representative of what Rancière (2006a) calls ‘the aesthetic regime’, whose interest lies in substituting storytelling with the description and the signifying potential of the material world.

The choice of the interviewee as a statement on the relation between politics and aesthetics is not only enhanced when one knows Chen’s biog-raphy and artwork. More importantly, this relation is accomplished by the way he is being filmed. As Jia once observed: ‘For me, the physical space is where all human activity takes place. The space’s atmosphere mixes with the fate of man to create a unified picture. That’s in accordance with traditional Chinese aesthetic, which blends emotions and locations together’ (Jia cited in Asia Society 2010).

Here the space is an (ironic) comment on the Cultural Revolution: the artist is seated in a fashionable western-style armchair while the factory is in ruins. The blend of emotions and location form a single picture of the paradoxical nature of history: the recognized artist has become mainstream,

Figure 9: Chen Danqing: the first interview.

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while the factory, the workplace of the people, the hegemonic force of the PRC, is in decay.

The sequence visualizes again the co-presence of temporalities and it recomposes our visual field. Each shot actually draws our attention to framing and focusing. For example the camera pans from left to right, filming the artist from behind bars that are in the objective’s view, similar to the grid in the river sequence. The partial obstructions make us experience again an indisciplinary take on history: there is no coherent image of the past, only a conjunction of unclear takes that evoke, like memories, thoughts and sensations. Jia does not simply frame his interviewees so that we can listen to their stories. He sets up a dialogue between the passivity of the locations and the personal accounts so as to offer a comment with his camera on the fictions.

re-Composition of the landsCape of the visual: transnational film history

When the camera returns to the streets after the interview, we do not watch original material but gritty footage from Lou Ye’s feature Suzhou River (2000). In contrast to other clips later in the film, this one is incorporated without credits. Filmed from the river, the hand-held camera captures factory build-ings that are being destroyed and abandoned warehouses on the riverside of the Suzhou River that used to be the other side of Shanghai’s glitzy urban makeover. Suzhou River offers the same impression of both floating and chaotic city life by means of zooms, fast camera movements and tilted angles as seen in the opening of I Wish I Knew. Jump cuts add an artistic edge to the feel of home-video making. Underscored by a melancholic violin, there is the same interest in anonymous people who stand on bridges or are passing by on a barge displayed in the earlier sequence of the ferryboat.

The incorporation of this clip into I Wish I Knew is as much a political statement as the interview with Chen Danqing. Suzhou He/Suzhou River was never screened in China and its director was banned from film-making for two years after showing his film without permission at the International Rotterdam Film Festival. Making it at least partially available during the mega event of the Expo 2010 is not only a re-habilitation but also an act of dissent. It is also a confirmation of a shared aesthetic interest: the sequence is completed with additional footage shot by Jia Zhang-Ke in 2009 that

Figure 10: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000).

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discloses the new and polished face of the urban development with trendy apartment blocks that replaced the warehouses.

Like the interviews, the inclusion of the clips is a way of documenting and commenting on the co-presence of past and present. The director is careful to be unbiased and his interviewees represent not only Chinas’ tran-snational identity but also the diversity of social and cultural activities and political ideologies within the different Chinese societies before and after the separation of the country in 1949. There is the son of an assassinated secre-tary of the Chinese Civil Rights Alliance and the grandson of an important industrialist; but also a great-grand daughter of a Kuomintang general, a daughter of an assassinated communist, a woman from the working class, the son of an actress and the daughter of a film director, the daughter of a mafia boss, the daughter of a war lord, the son of a civil servant, etc. Depending on their history they live in the PRC, the ROC or in Hong Kong. The entire politi-cal and social spectrum gets to express their stories and emotions, and there is no judgment with regard to their political ideas.

The citations of films by other directors via clips participate in the crea-tion of a sense of heterogeneity and transnationality, even when excerpts of propagandistic movies are included. The first declared citation is a perfect example. Wang Peimin is filmed on set during the shooting of a historical film epic. Her father, Wang Xiaohe, was a communist secretly sentenced to death in 1948, less than a year before Mao’s victorious invasion of Shanghai on ‘Liberation Day’, 25 of May 1949. The photographs taken on this day are all she ever knew of him. Fading in from black we see monochrome pictures on which Wang Xiaohe is first held by policemen and then lies dead on the floor. After these inserts, the interviewee describes the devastating effect of her father’s death on her mother. She then remembers an episode when her mother thought she might find her husband among the Communist soldiers who were marching into the city. The photographs and the heartfelt tale both document the violence and injustice committed by the Nationalists. However, an excerpt from Zhan Shanghai/To Liberate Shanghai (1959) by Wang Bing, an overtly ideological film that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the liber-ation date, is juxtaposed and throws a different light on the historical context.

At the end of the clip an actor who plays Mao leaves no doubt about the equally aggressive attitude of the new regime, especially in historic retrospect: ‘the liberation of Shanghai marks the thorough destruction of imperialist

Figure 11: To Liberate Shanghai (1959) by Wang Bing.

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forces in China […] Let those warmongers tremble in front of the power-ful Chinese people!’. There is a cut from a Chinese flag flying in the wind to a film projector that is projecting yet another perspective on the historical moment. We see a sequence from Hong Shi Si/Red Persimmon (1996), a film by Taiwanese film-maker Wang Tung, in which a Kuomintang soldier, inspired by the director’s father, tells a character based on his mother that they are under siege by the Communists. Her question ‘Can we survive?’ is responded by the film-maker himself, who, sitting in a cinema, narrates his memories of the family’s flight to Taiwan and thus hints at the potential violence of the Communists feared by his celluloid mother.

The propaganda film counterbalances the sorrow of the daughter of a communist, whereas the Taiwanese film demonstrates that matters were much more complex, recovering yet another perspective that exposes that both sides suffered from the violence of the conflict.

While these clips work against a biased outlook on China’s history, other citations are interested in the historic context as a result of shared transna-tional aesthetic preoccupations. The interview of another Taiwanese director, internationally acclaimed Hou Hsiao-Hsien, is set on a train. It starts with a tribute by Jia to the famous train sequence that opens his Lian Lian Feng Shen/Dust in the Wind (1986), part of a trilogy on the coming of age of young Mainland Chinese who migrated to Taiwan in 1949. Hou, the winner of the Golden Lion for Bei Qing Shang Shi/A City of Sadness (1989), then speaks about another film, the already quoted Hai Shang Hua/Flowers of Shanghai that takes us back to imperial China, namely the Qing Dynasty before the first Republic. The choice of a topic from pre-separation times reveals the cultural and affec-tive bonds that Taiwanese maintain with the continent.

Moreover, by replicating Hou’s aesthetic, Jia declares their affiliation. Dai Jinhua actually observed this kinship between Chinese film-makers from different national backgrounds within the films. The scholar makes the point that Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s movies – especially Flowers of Shanghai – are not, as is generally believed, more political than those of the Fifth Generation of Chinese mainland film-makers, but are ‘part and parcel of the same phenom-enon of alternative politics in its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics’ (Dai 2008: 239). I Wish I Knew affirms this reading when Jia assumes Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s perspective with his own camera.

Asserting China’s transnational bonds further, the next sequence returns to Shanghai’s architectural heritage, the Yuyuan Garden, built by a government

Figure 12: Red Persimmon (1996) by Wang Tung.

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9. Bibliographical information by Sontag (1977: 132): ‘A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks – A Criticism of Antonioni’s Anti-China Film “China”’ (Peking Foreign Languages Press, 1974), that appeared in Renmin Ribao on January 30, 1974; and ‘Repudiating Antonioni’s Anti-China Film’ , Peking Review, No. 8 (February 22, 1974).

officer in even more remote times, during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), and opened to the public in 1961. Keenly watching anonymous visitors, Zhang-Ke’s camera then takes us to a traditional teahouse. The images shot there are used as a cue to remember one of the most polemical films ever shot on Chinese soil, Chung Kuo/China (1972) by Michelangelo Antonioni. The celebrated left-wing film-maker had been invited by the Communist authori-ties to make a documentary on the revolution. He was flabbergasted when his film was banned and vilified in the entire country by means of an official eighteen-page pamphlet two years later.9 Even international screenings of the film were cancelled, and the ban was only lifted in 2004.

Jia uses, in fact, simple shots of people drinking tea and juxtaposes them with contemporary images shot by himself of people drinking tea. The ideo-logical quarrel around the film only emerges through an interview with Zhu Qiansheng, assigned to accompany the renowned Italian film-maker at the time. He relates that he asked Antonioni why he was filming their back-wardness even before his superiors threatened to interrupt the shooting. Susan Sontag’s seminal discussion of the polemic around China helps to understand this reaction by clarifying the aesthetic and political problems that Communist China faced with the film:

Nothing could be more instructive about the meaning of photography for us […] than the attacks on Antonioni's film in the Chinese press in early 1974. They make a negative catalogue of all the devices of modern photography, still and film. While for us photography is intimately connected with discontinuous ways of seeing (the point is precisely to see the whole by means of a part – an arresting detail is a striking way of cropping), in China it is connected only with continuity. Not only are there proper subjects for the camera, those which are positive, inspirational (exemplary activities, smiling people, bright weather), and orderly, but there are proper ways of photographing, which derive from notions about the moral order of space that preclude the very idea of photographic seeing.

(Sontag 1977: 132)

China’s attention to everyday details and simple people, who are depicted in close-ups so as to attribute importance and significance to them and what they do, is notorious. By introducing the film by means of a short clip and the interview, Jia evidences two points: first, Antonioni’s cut-out of China’s reality is still partially valid, some things have not changed (as he proves with visual sequences before and after other interviews), in this specific case people still drink their tea and chat as they used to in 1972; and second (simi-lar to the sequence after the clip from Lou Ye or before his interview with Hou Hsiou-Hsien), his own aesthetics are in tune with those of Antonioni’s film shot almost 40 years earlier.

The quotations of films by different film-makers suggest a shared world-view that translates into the same heterogeneous realism: an indisciplinary way of seeing with political implications that aims to recompose our visual field. Susan Sontag’s remarks on the critique Antonioni suffered is compara-ble to Rancière’s idea of the aesthetic regime:

The more numerous the variations of something, the richer its possibili-ties of meaning: thus, more is said with photographs in the West than in

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China today. Apart from whatever is true about Chung Kuo as an item of ideological merchandise (and the Chinese are not wrong in finding the film condescending), Antonioni’s images simply mean more than any images the Chinese release of themselves.

(1977: 135)

After remembering the debate around Antonioni’s film, I Wish I Knew presents the other side of this aesthetic concept in a clip cited during an interview with Huang Baomei, a model worker distinguished by Mao in 1956 who gained the leading role in a propaganda film by Xie Jin. Once she recalls the day she met Mao, we see a short excerpt from Huang Baomei (1958) and discover that its soundtrack was cited for her cinematographic entrance in I Wish I Knew, creating an ironic contemporary echo. The music plays on when, following the end of the interview, Huang walks through the inoperative textile factory where she worked all her life and found national fame. As always, Jia’s images and sounds say more than those of the film we just saw: they not only contrast with the refurbished western-style cinema in which she is filmed, they also speak of the end of an era. The next cinematographic citation suffered from ideological misinterpretation too and shares the characteristics of the aesthetic regime: Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun/Spring in a Small Town (1948) by Fei Mu. After an excerpt, Fei Mu’s daughter Li Wei offers details on how her father’s life and reputation were ruined after 1949.

Thus, Jia rehabilitates, in actual fact, three features and proclaims them, as well as the Taiwanese films mentioned earlier, implicitly, part of the same transnational film practice. The editing of fragments of Chinese film history is essential to his project of thinking and experiencing Shanghai. It is comple-mented by a clip from a Hong Kong film, Days of Being Wild (1990) by Shanghai-born Wong Kar-Wai. The first movie of the world-famous direc-tor is, as most of his other films and also as I Wish I Knew, an allegory on the complicated transnational Chinese family relationships.

ConClusion

I have argued that the concept of the indisciplinary film can replace the concept of the essay-film since its role to posit film as an auto-reflexive and subjective modern artwork that rivals with philosophy and human sciences in its capacity to think has become obsolete. Moreover, some of its theoretical questions have remained unsolved or are misleading. By substituting a theo-retical question from literary theory with a philosophical concept coined by Rancière, I have presented indisciplinarity as a more fitting concept. I have claimed that it focuses directly on the problem of method by revealing disci-plinary storytelling. Furthermore, I have suggested that the concept enhances our understanding of film as a sensorial and cognitive art form that calls atten-tion to the identity of contraries and thus intends to redistribute the sensible by making us experience heterogeneity. Dissent, in both aesthetic and politi-cal terms, is, in fact, indisciplinary film’s main goal.

I have indicated four characteristics, based on Rancière’s definition of the aesthetic regime – which I believe can be described as indisciplinary artworks – and used them as methodological tools. To illustrate how the concept works, I have studied these characteristics in I Wish I Knew by Jia Zhang Ke. and have shown that the film works with multiple layers of meaning and thus develops dissent from consensual ideas on time (national and film), history

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and identity. Chinese identity is transnational, unstable and in constant flux. Heterogeneity, discontinuity and fluctuation can be sensed and contemplated in every shot and by means of montage. As the English title claims, the film is about knowledge, but this knowledge is only wished for and impossible to be attained. The Chinese title actually indicates more clearly that the city is a legend on the sea, that is, the stories on her are fictitious. Accordingly, I Wish I Knew does not construct a story. Rather, it thinks Shanghai between the disciplines of human and social sciences, and outside of fiction and docu-mentary aesthetics by invoking human experiences from the entire political and social spectrum of the Shanghainese population, including emigrants to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The film knows no historical teleology, not even Benjaminian metaphysics. On the contrary, it recovers humanness and compassion in Chinas’ biggest and fastest growing city. The aesthetic experience it offers is mainly related to the city’s transnational identity. In fact, its dissent relies in making us see, feel and think about the multiple belongings of Shanghai’s people, culture and history. This heterogeneity could not be grasped as self-reflexivity or the film-maker’s subjectivity. Quite the reverse, Jia establishes throughout an aesthetic kinship with directors who share the same political aim: to address the differ-ent Chinas in all their diversity and interdependence.

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suggested Citation

Ferreira, C. O. (2013), ‘Indisciplinary cinema: Jia Zhang-Ke’s Hai shang chuan qi/I Wish I Knew (2010)’, Transnational Cinemas 4: 1, pp. 43–66, doi: 10.1386/trac.4.1.43_1

Contributor details

Carolin Overhoff Ferreira teaches contemporary cinema at the Federal University of São Paulo. She is the author of Identity and Difference – Postcoloniality and Transnationality in Lusophone Films (2012) and Diálogos Africanos: um Continente no Cinema (2012), and editor of O Cinema Português Através dos Seus Filmes (2007), Dekalog – On Manoel de Oliveira (2008), Terra em Transe – Ética e Estética no Cinema Português and Manoel de Oliveira – Novas Perspectivas sobre a Sua Obra (forthcoming).

Contact: Rua Alagoas 515/113, 01242-001 São Paulo, Brazil.E-mail:

Carolin Overhoff Ferreira has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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