Paris Long-Take: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Flight of the Red Balloon
Resource
中外文學, 40(4), 039-073
Journal
中外文學
Journal Volume
40
Journal Issue
4
Pages
039-073
Date Issued
2011-12
Date
2011-12
Author(s)
Abstract
The discourse on the “long take” as an important cinematic technique has long been dominated by the realist aesthetics proposed by the French film critic Andr? Bazin since 1950s. This paper attempts to take Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien and his 2007 French language film, Flight of the Red Balloon, as a point of departure to explore the possibility of deterritorializing the dominant discourse on the long take.
In light of the long take as one of the most prominent cinematic signatures of Hou Hsiao-hsien, this paper will start with a conceptual displacement of鏡, the central character in the Chinese translation of the long take by境, a homonym to鏡 in Chinese and the key word in the Chinese translation of the French word milieu, in a wish to shift the obsessive attention on the one single shot to the changing sensation of the milieu. In French, the Latin roots of milieu point to “surroundings,” “medium,” and “middle.” In the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, milieu combines all these three meanings and can be differentiated into interior-exterior milieu, intermediate milieu and annexed milieu. They further conceptualize “rhythm” as the trans-coding from one milieu to another milieu and “territory” as the territorializing process of milieus and rhythms. For Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art is to create a new “bloc of sensation,” a new “territorial assemblage.”
What the floating transparency of Flight of the Red Balloon gives is exactly the dynamic expression of Paris as a new “territorial assemblage.” Therefore, the juxtaposition of the French director Albert Lamorisse’s Le Ballon rouge (1956) and Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon provide not merely cases for the exploration of intertextuality, cinema revisited or mise en abyme, but also the chance to see how the latter trans-codes the former as “lightness,” as “folding,” as “material and morphogenic happening.” This incessant trans-coding makes the red balloon everywhere in Hou’s film and thus gives us a Paris as the dynamic image of a body-city, as a “multi-pli-city” of the “long-take, milieu-take and everyday-take.”
Subjects
長鏡頭，侯孝賢，《紅氣球》，情境，節奏，界域
long take, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Flight of the Red Balloon, milieu, rhythm, territory
Type
journal article