(Rey Chow) QUESTIONS:
An over investment or over-theorization in identity politics may allow the object of study (cinematic image) to disappear, but is this a result of methodology, academic trends or individual approach? (perhaps naïve on my part but) Could we not think of European theories that were not only born out of a specific time and place – ie. post-war Italy (Bazin) or Marxist working class (Benjamin) – as some sort of investigation of identity? Is there any relationship to identity politics in their ideas?
Chow asks us to think of cinematic images as artifice, which will then allow us to think about the relation between economic, fantasy and identity, but from what “standpoint” would one deal with these issues if the images are no longer representing real bodies? Is there really a universal of these relations?
She charges postmodernist trends with identity politics in film as being politically regressive but is her suggestion of seeing Asian cinema as a “reproducible phantom, an exotic yet consumable commodity, made tantalizingly accessible… sustained by and contribute to the global flows of capital” any more progressive? (1393) What would be the implication of studying “Asian” cinema or any cinema this way? Aren’t most commercial HW films seen as reproducible-phantoms-as-commodity already?
Chow notes that Gledhill and Williams characterize the moment as one of “impending dissolution of cinema within globalized multimedia,” but she herself believes that cinema is not yet at risk. However if we were to include cinema as part of this globalized multimedia, can “new media” be seen as a technological advancement or have the potential to bring spectacle, the visual image and technological innovation back into the foreground?
