Images between Images: Cinematic Inventions of the Everyday By Linda Ai-Yun Liu BA, Amherst ...

217 Pages·2012·0.73 MB·English

Images between Images:

Cinematic Inventions of the Everyday

By Linda Ai-Yun Liu

B.A., Amherst College, 2000

M.A., Brown University, 2003

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Providence, Rhode Island

2011
© Linda Ai-Yun Liu 2011

All rights reserved
This dissertation by Linda Liu is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date
Philip Rosen, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date
Mary Ann Doane, Reader

Date
Lynne Joyrich, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date
Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School
iii
Vita

Linda Ai-Yun Liu (b. 1977, Taipei, Taiwan) received her B.A. in English from Amherst
College in 2000 and her M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in
2003. She has taught at Brown University.
iv
Acknowledgments
I am first of all grateful to my committee, Philip Rosen, Mary Ann Doane, and
Lynne Joyrich, whose guidance, support, and constructive criticism helped to make this
dissertation possible. I give special thanks to my advisor, Philip Rosen, whose intellectual
rigor, close readings, and considerate feedback have assisted substantially in every step of
the writing process. This dissertation would also not have been possible without the
generous support of Amherst College’s Edward Poole Lay Fellowship. Thanks are due as
well to the Film and Media Studies concentration in Amherst College’s English
Department, where my interest in cinema studies began, and to Helen von Schmidt,
whose courses helped to plant the seeds of my cinephilia.
I am additionally indebted to my fellow graduate students at Brown whose
collegiality has created an inimitable sense of community. Portions of this dissertation
have been presented at the Modern Culture Workshop, where participants provided
thoughtful feedback that helped to hone ideas and provide food for thought: Stephen
Groening, Josh Guilford, Hunter Hargraves, Maggie Hennefeld, Pooja Rangan, Anita
Starosta, and Matt Tierney. From the beginning, Keri Holt and Lelia Menendez have
been invaluable sources of moral support, friendship, and remarkably fun grocery trips.
The staff of my department, Liza Hebert, Richard Manning, and Susan McNeil, has also
helped me every step of the way with their encouragement, knowledge, humor, and
tremendous kindness.
I cannot thank my family enough for their love and unwavering support, which
has sustained me through the years. Mention should also be made of Annalivia, Charlie,
v
and Patio Cat, the nature of whose assistance cannot be measured in human language.
And, finally, I thank Ted Robitaille, whose love, companionship, advice, patience, and
support have given me the gifts of time and well-being—gifts for which I will be
eternally grateful.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..v

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 1: Leaves Trembling in the Wind: Wonder, Cinema, and the Everyday…….9

Chapter 2: Archive of the Everyday: Imagining Contemporaneity through the

Local Actuality Film……………………………………………………..56

Chapter 3: Routine Representations: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,

1080 Bruxelles, and Women’s “Domestic” Cinema in the 1970s………105
Chapter 4: Open Images and Undiscovered Worlds: Re-inventing the
Everyday in Le Quattro Volte and Syndromes and a Century…………..142

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………....187

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1

INTRODUCTION

The temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation,
for this temporality is held to be ongoing and nonreversible and, at the same time,
characterized by repetition and predictability. The pages falling off the calendar,
the notches marked in a tree that no longer stands—these are the signs of the
everyday, the effort to articulate difference through counting. Yet it is precisely
this counting that reduces differences to similarities, that is designed to be ‘lost
track of.’ Such ‘counting,’ such signifying, is drowned out by the silence of the
ordinary.
—Stewart 14

This dissertation is motivated by a fascination with the ambiguous notion of the
“everyday,” its contradictory temporality, and why it is that some people can be said to
belong more to the everyday than others. Its overarching argument is that the everyday
was and continues to be an “invention” of modernity and modern technologies of
representation, and that cinema is one of the key technologies involved in the invention
of a modern sense of the everyday. This dissertation’s use of the phrase, “invention of the
everyday,” is borrowed from Rita Felski, who recently noted the growing number of
recent intellectual inquiries interested in the subject of the everyday. A central term for
cultural studies and feminism, the term “everyday” or “everyday life” is frequently
invoked by scholars interested in what Felski calls “micro-analysis” and “history from
below,” but rarely is it ever explicitly defined (75). Similarly, the everyday is invoked
frequently in cinema studies, but rarely is it the focus of sustained theoretical exegeses. It
is as if this reticence on the part of scholars echoes the vernacular or commonsensical
understanding of the everyday as a level of experience so mundane and commonsensical
2

that it goes without explanation. Felski, on the other hand, argues that the everyday can
indeed be defined as a concept invented by twentieth-century intellectual discourse, in
addition to being a distinct phenomenon of capitalist modernity. Building on the notion
that the everyday became increasingly visible as an object of representation under
modernity, my own argument will delineate the ways in which cinema contributed to and
helped to define this process.
While the “inventedness” of the everyday is a major assumption of this
dissertation, it is not for the sake of proving that the concept is solely a product of
discursive determinations. Rather, my thesis makes recourse to an intellectual tradition
(which is discussed in more detail in Chapter One) that looks upon the everyday as both a
category of the social imaginary and as that which exceeds or is not entirely attributable
to cultural codification. The proponents of this tradition can be said to favor a negative
definition of the everyday, aligning it with phenomena that are customarily overlooked or
considered unworthy of representation.1 Maurice Blanchot typifies this critical approach
in his characterization of the everyday as “what is most difficult to discover.” For him,
the everyday should not be located in the statistical “average” of a given society, but
rather in its “hidden present”—its more oblique and less self-evident movements (13).
Thus, in a culture ruled by the desire to keep “abreast of everything that takes place at the
very instant that it passes and comes to pass” and represents the everyday to itself as a
constant stream of things that “happen,” the everyday also resides in what “escapes” such
representations and “belongs to insignificance” (Blanchot 14). Even more so than the

1 Key critics in this largely Francophone tradition include Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot,
Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre. Michael Sheringham traces this history to the sixties and discusses
how it evolved into the eighties in his book, Everyday Life: Theories and Histories from Surrealism to the
Present. I engage with this critical work in more detail in Chapters One and Two.
3

continuous stream of events offered up by our ever prolix media culture, as Blanchot
argued, it is “platitude,” encompassing “what lags and falls back, the residual life with
which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse,” that contains the hidden
significance of the everyday (13).
This characterization of the everyday as the “hidden present” is particularly
germane to cinema’s double nature as both a contingent and a synthetic mode of
representation. My thesis argues that this double nature gives cinema a special “affinity”
for what Blanchot called platitude and residual life, which is different from saying that
film has a transparent relationship to a preexisting reality. Rather, I argue that cinema’s
affinity to the everyday is tied to its ability to record and reveal portions of the referential
world2; that is, cinema does not so much function as a window onto a preordained world
as it facilitates unfamiliar configurations of and new ways of perceiving that world. This
dissertation engages centrally with an under-examined and much misunderstood idea:
Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of everyday life as an “inherent affinity” of cinema. In
dialogue with recent reevaluations of Kracauer’s writings, as well as debates in cinema
studies on indexicality, my thesis shows the pivotal importance of indexical contingency
in his conception of cinema’s affinity with the everyday. Instead of reading indexical
contingency in terms of a fixed relation between photochemical image and external
referent, I consider its status as an agent for aesthetic and epistemological discovery. In
this regard, cinema discloses the everyday, not in a realist or positivist sense, but in a
radically non-anthropocentric guise comprised of habitually unheeded and culturally

2 I am indebted to Miriam Hansen for this insight into cinema’s dual recording and revelatory
capacity, which she argued is crucial to Kracauer’s theory of film’s distinct identity (“Introduction” xxv).