World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable and the hard place of the as yet unknown

University of Birmingham

World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable

and the hard place of the as yet unknown

Stone, Rob; Freijo Escudero, Luis

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10.1080/25785273.2021.1873572

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Stone, R & Freijo Escudero, L 2021, 'World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable and the hard place of

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World Cinema between the rock of the

unknowable and the hard place of the as yet

unknown

Rob Stone & Luis Freijo

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World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable and the

hard place of the as yet unknown

Rob Stone and Luis Freijo

Department of Film and Creative Writing, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

ABSTRACT

Hypotheses that instigated the possibility of destabilising and de-

westernising lm theory have inspired a critical framework for

analysing World Cinema that demands new and evolving under-

standings of its construction and uidity, particularly in relation to

its lost pasts and possible futures. Referencing several key works in

this eld and responding to David Martin-Jones’s Cinema Against

Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

(2019) in particular, this article questions what is unknowable and

as yet unknown about World Cinema. Following Derrida, it argues

that the answers lie in how World Cinema gains meaning(s) through

the process of diérance (dierence and deferral of meaning),

particularly through genre. Deploying and dismantling genre the-

ory in case studies of Wind River (Sheridan 2017), Chung Hing sam

la/Chungking Express (Wong 1994), Faa yeung nin wa/In The Mood

for Love (Wong 2000), Moonlight (Jenkins 2016) and Widows

(McQueen 2018), the article targets the logjam of ethical hesitancy

in approaching World Cinema and, holding that impurities in wes-

tern cinema constitute trace evidence of new paradigms happening

elsewhere in World Cinema, posits empathy and its deferral as

essential to an understanding of the dynamics of the cinemas of

the world.

KEYWORDS

World Cinema; genre;

Derrida; empathy;

de-westernisation; theory

Three women, one Black, one Hispanic and one White, enter a sauna. Antagonistic

strangers at ﬁrst, they leave united in common cause of revenge. The scene occurs in

Widows (McQueen 2018), wherein ideas of something unknowable or as yet unknown

play out in a dialectical performance of exposure, which makes diﬀerences explicit, and

erasure, which makes them irrelevant. Naked under towels and glistening in a way that

emphasises both their ethnic distinctions and their common gender, these women

resolve their diﬀerences through empathy. Meanwhile the framing makes the unity of

their organic forms stand out against the rigid geometry of their surroundings (see

Figure 1). Extrapolated for a symbolic reading, these women are cinemas of the world,

ostensibly held here in relation to genre ﬁlmmaking and Hollywood, but actually bound

up in a complex matrix of postcolonial, neoliberal, gendered and globalising concerns

CONTACT Rob Stone [email protected] Department of Film and Creative Writing, 31 Pritchatts Road,

University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, U.K.

This article has been corrected with formatting changes to in-text citations. These changes do not impact the academic

content of the article.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS

https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2021.1873572

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/

licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly

cited.

that extend the debate over erasure and appropriation established in Unthinking

Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, wherein Shohat and Stam argued that

‘the residual traces of centuries of axiomatic European domination inform the general

culture, the everyday language, and the media, engendering a ﬁctitious sense of the innate

superiority of European-derived cultures and peoples’ (1994, 1). Aiming to demote

Hollywood to one of many cinemas of the world, their use of the concept of ‘trace’

echoed Derrida and was key to their argument, which diagnosed a cultural hierarchy in

which European culture, including ‘the neo-Europeans’ of North America and Australia,

‘bifurcates the world into the “West and the Rest”’ (Shohat and Stam 1994, 1). This

hierarchy is articulated around a strategy that ‘organizes everyday language into binar-

istic hierarchies implicitly ﬂattering to Europe: our “nations”, their “tribes”; our “reli-

gions”, their “superstitions”; our “culture”, their “folklore”; our “art”, their “artefacts”; our

“demonstrations”, their “riots”; our “defense”, their “terrorism”’ (Shohat and Stam 1994,

2). So what is ‘ours’ and what is ‘theirs’ in this image from Widows?

The argument for equivalency between Hollywood as a nom de guerre of mainstream,

commercial western cinema and other cinemas of the world is not qualitative nor

quantitative. Instead of comparing like for like in the matter of Hollywood and

Bollywood melodramas, or Nollywood and Hollywood gangster ﬁlms, for example,

Shohat and Stam destabilise hierarchies in order to set in motion a way of thinking

that is fuelled by ‘relational and radical polycentric multiculturalism’ (1994, 48). Their

emphasis is ‘less on intentions than on institutional discourses, less on “goodness” and

“badness” than on historically conﬁgured relations of power’ (Shohat and Stam 1994, 3).

Nevertheless, they do conﬂate wide-ranging arguments by claiming that ‘one name for

Eurocentrism is Hollywoodcentrism,’ which locates the start of ﬁlm history at the post-

World War II industrial exploitation of ﬁlm and its consequent ‘soft power’ erasure of

other cultures (Shohat and Stam 1994, 29). But whereas the de-westernising of ﬁlm

theory and criticism – and indeed, ﬁlm history – has struggled to escape the simplistic

Figure 1. Exposure makes diﬀerences explicit and erasure makes them irrelevant in Widows (McQueen

2018).

2 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

binary equation that ‘centralizes Hollywood as a kind of language in relation to which all

other forms are but dialectical variants’ (Shohat and Stam 1994, 30), so too has it tended

to demonise Hollywood in ways that reinforce its centrality. Entrapment in this binary

equation is clearly inseparable from the limits of our knowledge. Hence, a tautology: we

do not know what we do not know. So how then might we recognise what Jameson posits

as new ‘paradigms of interpretation’ (see Hardt and Weeks 2000, 31–114) in a foreign

(relative) or other (comparative) cinema if our pathways to knowledge are blocked by our

not knowing what we do not know? This Socratic conundrum is ancient but pertinent to

the study of ﬁlms from ‘other’ cinemas of the world, wherein ethical address wavers

between the pessimism and resignation of perceiving and holding that such things are

unknowable, and the optimism and enthusiasm of contending they are only as yet

unknown. Should Anglophone studies wait for other cinemas to be made knowable by

other critics, scholars and ﬁlmmakers, or are ethical manoeuvres by Anglophone critics,

scholars and ﬁlmmakers, such as language acquisition and prolonged immersion, viable

attempts at making other cinemas known, albeit at the risk of a limited western perspec-

tive on their meaning?

In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, Dennison and Lim

argued that categorisation is a futile way to go about answering ‘what is world cinema?’

(2006, 1). Instead, their anthology oﬀered case studies of ‘hybridity, transculturation,

border crossing, transnationalism and translation’ that accumulatively suggested World

Cinema might be ‘a discipline, a methodology and a perspective’ (Dennison and Lim

2006, 6–7). This cautious exploration of World Cinema was continued by Iordanova,

Martin-Jones and Vidal in Cinema at the Periphery, which noted that ‘accented, inter-

stitial, intercultural, underground, or minor cinemas are just some of the terms used by

various authors to advocate the mounting urge to conceptualize cultural production that

takes into consideration the global interchange of players, be they big or small, prevailing

or frail’ (2010, 3). Destabilisation was a vital stage in understanding the dynamics of

World Cinema that demanded dismissal of distinctions between ‘the West and the Rest’

as well as any imbalance between peripheral and central perspectives in order to reveal ‘a

scholarly space where the multiple peripheral strands may speak for themselves without

having to face the onerous burden of constantly explaining themselves in the context of a

Eurocentric construct’ (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, and Vidal 2010, 4). This idea that

peripheral strands should speak for themselves rather invalidated analyses of World

Cinema from the Anglophone ‘centre’, however, and left hanging the question of whether

ﬁlms from the variable periphery were now unknowable or as yet unknown.

Breaking the ethical logjam were two proto-manifestos in 2012. Theorizing World

Cinema oﬀered consensus that ‘once notions of a single centre, primacies and diachroni-

cities are discarded, everything can be put on the world cinema map on an equal footing,

even Hollywood, which instead of a threat becomes a cinema among others’ (Nagib,

Perriam, and Dudrah 2012, xxii), while De-Westernizing Film Studies sought ‘polycentric,

multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical

perspectives found in ﬁlm as both an artistic medium and an academic ﬁeld of study’ (Bâ

and Higbee 2012, 1). Both asserted that de-westernising does not entail an enclosed and

readily deﬁned critical term but rather an ongoing process entrenched in a constant

debate between scholars, ﬁlmmakers and audiences in a global context. Thus, the

concepts of World Cinema that were erected on the ‘scholarly space’ incorporated ﬂux

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 3

so that ideas ‘from sources outside of the traditional Western spheres of inﬂuence’ were

equal to those attempts at ‘understanding how case studies drawn from a range of global

ﬁlm cultures can inform contemporary debates in ﬁlm theory’ (Bâ and Higbee 2012, 12).

Subsequent surveys of World Cinema erased hierarchies in their structure. In Queer

Cinema in the World, Schoonover and Galt argue that studies of cinema histories have

been undertaken from an ‘overly hetero’ perspective and counter this with an under-

standing that ‘queer cinema enables diﬀerent ways of being in the world and, more than

this, that it creates diﬀerent worlds [by] a process that is active, incomplete, and

contestatory and that does not presuppose a settled cartography’ (Schoonover and Galt

2016, 5–6). The Derridean notion of trace appears here too, as a means of identifying

queerness as ‘a spectral disturbance in the textual ﬁeld’ (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 162).

In a similar vein, The Routledge Companion to World Cinema devised a critical frame-

work based on interaction between longitude (‘geographical areas, ways of mapping or

remapping the landscape and extent of World Cinema’) and latitude (‘new theoretical

strategies pertaining to thematic and practical ways of understanding and negotiating

World Cinema’) that was aimed at ‘revealing, exploring, explaining and considering

commonalities and diﬀerences between the scale, engagement, strategies and anomalies

of areas of ﬁlmmaking activity worldwide’ (Stone et al. 2018, 2–4). Both volumes posit the

act of questioning as an ethical, critical stance that must be adopted for the study of

World Cinema. What was still missing nonetheless, was not the Socratic knowledge that

we did not know things (that was a given), but the answer to whether what we did not

know was unknowable or as yet unknown.

This question concerns Martin-Jones in Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical

Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, which investigates ‘cinematic depictions

of the past – speciﬁcally lost pasts (disappeared, censored, forgotten, eradicated) [that]

are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with others’ (2019, 2). Martin-Jones

posits that a world of cinemas oﬀers spectators encounters with lost pasts that can make

them ‘hesitate, and potentially [. . .] recognise the relative centrality of their own place in

world history’ (2019, 2). He regards these cinematic encounters, which ‘indicate the

unknowability of lost pasts’ (2019, 50), as opportunities for doubt and reﬂective misgiv-

ings about the West’s assumption of heading a hierarchy in the matter of World Cinema.

His critical framework, which blends the Deleuzian time-image with the ethics of

liberation devised by Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel within world-systems

theory, de-centres the Eurocentrism of the time-image and re-purposes its ideological

potential as a means of ‘reconnection with the world [. . .] because of its re-activation of

world memory’ (Martin-Jones 2019, 74). The time-image is thus a vehicle-forum for

hesitance about one’s own place in the world when confronted by ﬁlms that ‘deny the

denial of coevalness to which regions under colonialism have been subjected’ as they oﬀer

‘leftover glimpses of a totality we will likely never recover: the virtual past, world memory’

(Martin-Jones 2019, 99, 10–1). Yet, by conﬂating the lost pasts of colonial abuses with

histories of colonial power and taking up other perspectives on the present, ﬁlms can

point to as yet unwritten futures. And so it is here, from Martin-Jones’ assertion of

unknowability that we respectfully depart towards the deferral of knowledge that is only

as yet unknown. The wider context of lost pasts includes questions of memory, politicised

rewritings of history, heritage and much else, but our concern is with ﬁlm form and genre

as another ‘scholarly space’ for considering how we move away from a lost past towards a

4 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

possible new future. Martin-Jones locates this ‘future yet to come’ (2019, 176) in territory

similar to Deleuze’s modern political (minor) cinema that contributes to ‘the invention of

a people’, where the past is preserved and the present passes, thereby creating their future

(Deleuze 1989, 40). However, we are concerned with the potential for a multiplicity of

possible futures to overcome a lost past or ‘oﬃcial’ history, and therefore positioned

closer to Holtmeier’s contention that each of these futures has the potential to not only be

realised but politicised through subjectivity (see Holtmeier 2019). This is because, where

Holtmeier claims that ‘cinema approaches an existential register in depicting the lived

experiences of individuals caught in the midst of these civilizational clashes’ (Holtmeier

2016, 305), we see potential for empathy.

For example, the authentic encounter with the lost past of Native American culture in

Wind River (Sheridan 2017) erases any future ‘oﬃcial’ history of blaming tribal cultures

in the matter of child abuse within the remnants of those cultures. It does this by

deploying a procedural detective thriller to re-direct blame for a killing towards the

original genocide inﬂicted upon Native Americans and the abrogation of responsibility

for this and its survivors ever since. American history stalls in Wind River when

confronted with the baseline of at least three lost pasts. Firstly, the lost past of the

genocide itself, which has a minor and muted place in American cinema. Secondly, the

lost past of what those Native American tribes might have achieved and become if they

had not been wiped out and their potential erased. And thirdly, the passing-present of the

ongoing erasure of Native American tribes that have never been federally recognised.

These three lost pasts in Wind River also indicate the Derridean notion of the specter in

relation to hauntology, wherein it is a trace that results from the injunction between a

present-past that never meets and a present-future that never comes (Derrida 2011,

45–7). This specter exerts its haunting from the lost pasts acknowledged by Martin-Jones,

but also from the lost futures that may never happen because, as Derrida explains, ‘at the

bottom, the specter is always the future, it is always to come, it presents itself as that

which could come or come back’ (2011, 48). This ‘haunting belongs to the structure of

every hegemony’ (Derrida 2011, 46) and its presence is felt in the snowblind Wind River,

which is haunted by the lost past of the Native American genocide, the lost futures of the

murdered characters in the ﬁlm, the lost presents of those characters whose lives are

destroyed by the socioeconomic isolation of their reservation, and the erasure of the

Native American people and culture as a whole.

The facts of this lost past are that while 573 Native American tribes were federally

recognised following the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (231 of which were located in

Alaska), the award of tribal status was only reached via a process that a 2009 Senate

Committee on Indian Aﬀairs reported was ‘broken’, ‘long’, ‘expensive’, ‘burdensome’,

‘intrusive’, ‘interminable’, ‘unfair’ and ‘subject to bureaucratic interpretation’, thereby

demonstrating that erasure of lost pasts through bureaucracy can both equal and cover

up military intervention (Committee on Indian Aﬀairs 2009). Martin-Jones provides a

framework for understanding such erasure through his notion of colonial history as an

operation of Orwellian doublethink, whereby ‘although the evidence is clear before the

settler colonist’s eyes that there is another history enmeshed in the land, they are able to

simply pretend it does not exist, state the validity of their own claim on this otherwise

history-less territory, and make it theirs’ (2019, 83). In the case of the Native American

genocide that haunts Wind River, this doublethink is enacted via the bureaucratic process

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 5

of selecting and validating the Native American identities of tribes that existed prior to

the arrival of European settlers and the cultural erasure in Hollywood westerns where

Native Americans were mostly savages, obstacles to civilisation, and guilty, therefore, of

provoking their own extermination. Yet Wind River provincialises the American-

European audience’s notion of its centrality in the world, relegates its history, and

punctures the hubris that comes with its assumption. There is a reckoning here as in

Martin-Jones’ case studies [Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall

His Past Lives (Weerasethakul 2010), También la lluvia/Even The Rain (Bollaín 2010) and

El abrazo de la serpiente/Embrace of The Serpent (Guerra 2015)], with each of these ﬁlms

leaving audiences with the thought that their/our lost pasts cannot be retrieved, that the

only thing that can be ethically achieved by such ﬁlms is the realisation that other

existences and histories once occurred but are now unknowable. But the question

remains of how this logjam of ethical encounters by ﬁlmmakers and audiences with

the lost pasts of ‘their’ cinemas and the lost histories of ‘our’ world might be resolved or

negotiated. Indigenous ﬁlmmaking, such as the recent surge in ﬁlms with a Native

Canadian provenance that includes Blood Quantum (Barnaby 2019), The Incredible

25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw (Niro 2019) and The Body Remembers When the World

Broke Open (Hepburn and Tailfeathers 2019), has been heralded by the Indigenous Film

Conference as a way to ‘reclaim our silence and invisible stories’ (Mitchell 2018).

Nevertheless, the rights to representation are often tied up in wider questions of authen-

ticity and legitimacy, as demonstrated by academic studies of indigenous ﬁlms [see, for

example, de Valck (2018, 393–403) on Tanna (Butler and Dean 2015)] and the afore-

mentioned Senate Committee on Indian Aﬀairs, which criticised the validation of some

tribes and the rejection of others not only by the US Federal government but by other

tribes too.

Those 573 tribes currently recognised by the US Federal government all fulﬁlled the

seven criteria for recognition established by the 1978 Indian Claims Commission, which

included demands for evidence of long-standing historical community, outside identiﬁ-

cation as Indians, political authority, and descent from a historical tribe, but it took the

Shinnecock Indian Nation thirty-two years from its application in 1978 to oﬃcial

recognition in 2010. And what of all those who did not meet the criteria, such as the

Pascua Yaquis, the Death Valley Timbisha Shoshones, the Houma, and the Tiguas of El

Paso (Miller 2006)? In Wind River, a veteran White hunter called Corey (Jeremy Renner)

helps a White FBI agent (Elisabeth Olsen) to investigate the murder of a young Native

American woman in Wyoming, but what distinguishes this procedural crime drama is its

complication by the un-remembering of tribal customs by the Eastern Shoshone Native

American characters that they interrogate such as Martin (Gil Birmingham). The lost

past of the Eastern Shoshone is not only in the past but in the present too, for it holds the

missing key as to why the girl was murdered, meaning the absence of any narrative

resolution is therefore also and always in their (and our) future too. In the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal

scene, Corey ﬁnds Martin sitting in the snow outside his house with a painted face.

Martin admits that his eﬀorts at performing grief are ignorant and redundant, however,

for the blue and white marks he fashioned as his ‘death face’ are meaningless: ‘I just made

it up. There’s nobody left to teach me.’ Instead of tribal identity, the made-up death face

exhibits its erasure (see Figure 2). The subsequent fade to black is followed by a title card

explaining how statistics are kept for every group of missing people in the US except

6 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

Native American women, that nobody knows how many are missing. The lost past of the

Eastern Shoshone is erased and so unknowable; but how might audiences, ﬁlmmakers

and scholars of World Cinema proceed past this ethical encounter with the lost past of

this Native American tribe that is also our/their own?

As for the Senate Committee on Indian Aﬀairs, determining the authenticity of Native

American representation in Wind River is an irresolute matter. Is the ﬁlm itself devalued

and de-authenticated by employing Gil Birmingham, an actor of Comanche ancestry, to

play an Eastern Shoshone? If there are no Shoshone actors available, can even this

attempt at telling what is left of their history by a non-indigenous White Texan writer-

director attempting to broker representation and appropriation be discounted? The

‘historically conﬁgured relations of power’ that were key to Shohat and Stam’s argument

lie at the core of the ethical questions thrown up by even this well-intentioned encounter

with a lost past, which appear insurmountable and therefore contribute to the logjam.

Well intentioned because writer-director Taylor Sheridan spent several periods in the

Pine Ridge reservation of the Arapahoe and Shoshone and claims ﬁrst-hand experience

of the racism they encountered (‘I was being judged not by my race, but by theirs’) as well

as tribal elders advising him to make a ﬁlm that would ‘tell the worst of what is here

because the worst of our history is not our fault’ (Ayuso 2018). Subsequently, Sheridan

submitted the screenplay of Wind River to these Shoshone and Arapahoe elders – ‘I

wanted them to read it and I wanted their blessing. They were very happy that someone

was telling their story’ – cast numerous Native American actors, and told Olsen that her

character was ‘a stand-in for America’s collective consciousness’ (Darling 2017). This,

after his initial plan of having Native American characters as protagonists was compro-

mised by casting Renner and Olsen, two of Marvel’s Avengers, in order to obtain funding

(Ayuso 2018). Nevertheless, at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Sheridan was confronted

with ethical questions about his telling a story of a lost past that was arguably not his to

tell. His response to the Un Certain Regard award for Wind River acknowledged the

logjam and called for a breakthrough by means of impassioned representation:

Figure 2. Instead of tribal identity, a made-up death face exhibits its erasure in Wind River (Sheridan

2017).

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 7

It is a great shame of my nation the manner it has treated the original inhabitants of North

America. Sadly, my government continues that shame through an insidious mixture of

apathy and exploitation. There is nothing I can do to change the issues aﬄicting Indian

Country, but what we can all do as artists—and must do—is scream about them with ﬁsts

clenched. What we CAN do—is make sure these issues aren’t ignored. (Thompson 2017)

In other words, what Sheridan advocated was representation of the lost past of the Native

Americans by any means necessary and by anyone able as a strategy of deferral that was

justiﬁed by the changes this might provoke in the cause of its endgame, that of enabling

representation of the lost pasts of Native Americans by Native American ﬁlmmakers.

The ethical credentials of Wind River are increasingly challenged and demanded of

western representations of otherness in World Cinema, thereby dismantling hierarchy.

The debate over who has the responsibility and legitimacy to tell a story that represents a

history of any kind, whether directly in the ﬁlm itself or indirectly in the analysis of that

ﬁlm, is central to Martin-Jones’ concerns about World Cinema, where unknowability

stands in lieu of lost histories that can be veriﬁed, which cannot be veriﬁed because they

are lost. However, if we read unknowability in structuralist terms, we may posit that the

other’s past (and so our own) is the signiﬁed, which is not unknowable but as yet

unknown because knowledge of it (and so why it matters) is deferred in a Derridean

sense and strategy, which may break the logjam produced by the assumption of unknow-

ability in relation to World Cinema. This deferral of an as yet unknown meaning relates

directly to Derrida’s concept of diérance, which combines the meanings of ‘defer’ and

‘diﬀer’. Derrida destabilises the structural pattern of sign-signiﬁer-signiﬁed in which

meaning is achieved when the three concepts successfully interconnect by positing that

this operation can never be successful in the ﬁrst place, since sign, signiﬁer and signiﬁed

exist in diﬀerent times and therefore cannot be reconciled (1976, 64). The resulting

vacuum within the structuralist equation is what Derrida denominates the ‘trace’ (1976,

64). This is a concept that already permeates our argument because it features in Shohat

and Stam’s understanding of Eurocentrism as ‘residual traces’ (1994, 1) of colonial

domination, in Schoonover and Galt’s concept of the queer as a ‘spectral disturbance

in the textual ﬁeld’ (2016, 162) and in Derrida’s own specters in relation to Martin-Jones’

lost pasts. Therefore, positing Derrida’s trace as the key to unlocking the unknowability

of World Cinema brings to the boil an argument that has simmered for decades. Because

Derrida holds that the existence of the trace causes meaning to be deferred, as per his

deﬁnition of diérance, so the success or meaning of the combination sign-signiﬁer-

signiﬁed (the reason why it matters) is postponed, pending the conditions for a connec-

tion between the three elements, which means the reason why it matters is not unknow-

able but only as yet unknown.

At the same time, why it matters may diﬀer from any original meaning as a result of

adding undetermined extra time to the resolution. Depending on our spatial and

temporal position in the world, any given ﬁlm made by ‘others’ may not appear readily

discernible at ﬁrst instance because we lack enough knowledge to connect sign-signiﬁer-

signiﬁed. The answer to why a ﬁlm matters is postponed, but the search for the knowl-

edge that ‘unlocks’ a ﬁlm to which we are ‘the other’ has at least begun. Potential is thus

restored to studies of World Cinema, even though the signiﬁed of ﬁlms is deferred, which

does not matter if one’s own lack of knowledge is accepted as the basis for the act of

questioning because this restores the ethical element to the structuralist equation and

8 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

breaks the logjam of scholarship on World Cinema. ‘Our’ answers are not and cannot be

the sign of knowledge because of the apparent unknowability of subjects, such as what is

to be an Eastern Shoshone (unless we are an Eastern Shoshone with an exclusive lock on

representation that transcends individualism, which returns us to the hubris that under-

pins the logjam). The sign of knowledge must therefore be the question: that is, knowing

what we do not know in order to know what question to ask. And if we ask enough of the

right questions in an ethical manner, then the signiﬁed might be understood as that

which matters at any given time and place. To those being represented and doing the

representing, that which matters might be their lost past, remembered for us and them.

Thus, it no longer matters that Martin in Wind River made up his death mask. What

matters (what is signiﬁed) by our questioning of Martin – ‘What’s with the paint?’ ‘It’s my

death face.’ ‘And how do you know what that is?’ – is that his (and our) lost past is being

represented. Moreover, it is in this present moment that a future is suggested in which

Martin’s made-up death mask initiates a new history by re-attaching itself to an old one.

And so the impasse is breached by questions (signs of knowledge) becoming signiﬁers

(the ethical questioning of that which is apparently unknowable) in order to get at what is

signiﬁed (that which matters), albeit deferred (as yet unknown).

Empathy becomes a fundamental tool in this process, as is reﬂected in the ending of

Wind River, where Martin and Corey represent this as a sharing of someone else’s

‘congruent feelings’ (Plantinga 2009, 10). Having lost a daughter to rape and murder

himself, Corey empathises with Martin’s pain by means of positing questions that carry

both personal and social, and ultimately political, resonance. Personal, because he knows

how it feels to lose a child. Social, because he has lived on the reservation, married a

Native American woman and knows, if only partially, the congruent feelings of loss of the

Eastern Shoshone tribe as a whole. And political, because Corey and Martin sense that

each young woman who is murdered and unaccounted for sustains the ongoing geno-

cide. Empathy is what enables Corey to accept the Socratic principle of acknowledging

his lack of knowledge as a prior condition for the acquisition of knowledge and thus ask

Martin the right questions. The challenge to World Cinema scholars is similar, but rather

than allow this notion to ﬂoat away into etiological discourse, we shall attempt to ground

it in a structural one. Speciﬁcally, we shall attach the Derridean concept of the deferral of

the meaning of the dierence to the signiﬁed (that which matters) in the structuralist

equation sign-signiﬁer-signiﬁed and apply this to the study of genre in World Cinema.

This shift toward genre theory serves two objectives in the study of World Cinema.

Firstly, it clariﬁes the nuances within the structuralist equation of sign-signiﬁer-signiﬁed

as the basis of an open question rather than a closed statement because genre ﬁlmmaking

oﬀers readily deﬁned structures within ﬁlm theory in terms of form, meaning and

industrial practice. Secondly, it explores genre as an aspect of World Cinema theory

that has remained largely ignored in key texts on World Cinema. In Film/Genre Altman

conceives of genre as grounded in historicity rather than abstract theory and criticises

genre analysis that has the objective of creating pure categories and clear boundaries

(2012, 216–26). Instead, he focuses on generic cycles within Hollywood’s industry and

proposes that genre is ‘not the permanent product of a singular origin, but the temporary

by-product of an ongoing process’ that is governed by industrial dynamics aimed at

creating brief cycles of ﬁlms that, if successful, are replicated by other studios, thus

turning into a genre, which is understood as such by the industry, ﬁlmmakers and

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 9

audience (2012, 54, 61). Altman concludes that ‘genres are not only formal arrangements

of textual characteristics; they are also social devices that use semantics and syntax to

assure simultaneous satisfaction on the part of multiple users with apparently contra-

dictory purposes. That is, genres are regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of

diverse factions into a single uniﬁed social fabric’ (2012, 195). He therefore refers any new

example of a genre back to the Hollywoodcentric ‘blueprint, structure, label and contract’

as if he were a patent lawyer (Altman 2012, 14). Following Altman, this ﬁxed-point

perspective in Anglo-American scholarship and criticism has tended to prevail in World

Cinema studies, where any ﬁlm with genre tropes from anywhere in the world, such as a

Romanian western or a Japanese science-ﬁction ﬁlm, is to be disentangled from the

Hollywood formula and system to which it supposedly remains subject. In other words,

the signiﬁed is mainly explained or ‘made sense of’ by reference to Hollywood, regardless

of all that is unknowable or as yet unknown about a ﬁlm. Some critics and scholars,

foreign or otherwise, albeit perhaps pending translation (or their acquisition of language

or cultural knowledge or that of other scholars and critics), may claim and share under-

standing of further meanings, but most genre ﬁlms remain subject to this ﬁxed-perspec-

tive analysis. In Genre and Hollywood, however, Neale extends the notion of genre

outside the realm of Hollywood into non-western cinemas and among the elements

that he identiﬁes within this more worldly and historical discussion of genre are ‘expec-

tations [,] texts [,] categories, corpuses, the norms they encompass, the traditions they

embody and the formulae that mark them [. . .] as ubiquitous, multifaceted phenomena

rather than as one-dimensional entities to be found only within the realms of Hollywood

cinema or of commercial popular culture’ (2000, 25–8). Neale’s praxis for the study of

genre includes industrial rationale, economic optimisation and the aesthetic aspects of

genre ﬁlms ‘as myths with a cultural and social function’ (2000, 254–5). He also limits his

argument, however, by invariably identifying non-Hollywood examples of genre ﬁlms

within the restrictive conﬁnes of national cinemas such as ‘the Indian mythological, the

Japanese samurai ﬁlm, or the Hong Kong wu xia pan or swordplay ﬁlm’ (2000, 9). This

means that his argument does not conclude with ﬂuidity but another ﬁxity. Nevertheless,

Neale’s praxis does suggest how a ﬁlm may speak for itself through its own structural

equation. Just as Barthes builds upon Saussure by recognising that signs are the genome

of myths and, therefore, that myth in its most basic form is a type of speech, so Neale

builds on ﬁlm as myth, as form, as speech: that is, not just a collection of elements making

up a narrative (or history) but a way of saying something that is structured in this certain

way (see Barthes 2013, 215–274). Moreover, leaning forward into postmodernism reveals

a corollary with the structural equation of sign-signiﬁer-signiﬁed that is discernible in

Jameson’s ideas about parody, pastiche and paradigm, albeit problematised by retrograde

notions of their hierarchy that are entangled in postcolonialism too.

In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson reads genre as a

cultural phenomenon inscribed in modernist and postmodernist dynamics and conceives

of parody and pastiche as ‘new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more

temporal arts’ (1992, 6). For Jameson, parody, pastiche and new paradigms can reveal the

evolution of postcolonialism. Parody exposes colonial tropes by exaggerating them to the

point of ridicule, which suggests they are obsolete. Pastiche, meanwhile, entails a melange

of the colonial and the post-colonial, wherein there can be tensions but also reconcilia-

tions, even aﬀection. Parody and pastiche are seen explicitly in the two half-stories of

10 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

heartbroken Hong Kong cops in Chung Hing sam la/Chungking Express (Wong 1994).

The ﬁrst half-story is a parody of western tropes with its desperately romantic Cop 223

(Takeshi Kaneshiro) embroiled in a neon-lit ﬁlm noir with a femme fatale in a blonde wig

(Brigitte Lin). However, the generic visual trappings are only the backdrop to Cop 223

struggling to ﬁnd cans of pineapple with expiry dates that suggest existence beyond the

pending handover of Hong Kong to China after 100 years of British administration on 1

July 1997. Unable to postpone this deadline and thereby retain meaning, these nihilist

characters succumb to parody and spend a drunken, sexless, bored night together that

reveals the redundancy of the western iconography (the dead language of the gangster

genre) that deﬁnes them (see Figure 3). This, as Jameson explains, is ‘the imitation of a

peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead

language’ (Jameson 1992, 17).

After the handover, however, the ﬁlm’s second half-story sees Cop 663 (Tony Leung)

hanging out and falling for a pixie-girl waitress called Faye (Faye Wong), and the

melange of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ inﬂuences in multicultural Hong Kong is rendered

as pastiche. There is tension here but aﬀection too, as well as eﬀorts at reconciliation,

such as in Wong’s performance (on the soundtrack and in character) of ‘Dreams’ by The

Cranberries in Cantonese. Cop 663 leaves the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, which was

established by the British Hong Kong government in 1844 and dropped its ‘Royal’ preﬁx

in 1997, and buys the café while Faye takes ﬂight as an air hostess, only to return several

months later to ﬁnd a new future for them both in Hong Kong. Thus, while the ﬁrst

‘colonial’ half-story of Chung Hing sam lam eﬀects a parody of western inﬂuences on

Hong Kong, the second ‘post-colonial’ half-story accepts the pastiche that endures.

Indeed, Chung Hing sam lam revels in this pastiche, roistering with aural and visual

motifs such as ‘California Dreaming’ by The Mamas and The Papas playing repeatedly

Figure 3. The dead language of genre in Chung Hing sam la/Chungking Express (Wong 1994).

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 11

while the twisting hand-held camerawork enhances the haptic, sensorial, near-fetishiza-

tion of the musical montages. Consequently, the resultant aesthetic experience commu-

nicates a freshness, a potential, and a frisson that responds to all the possibilities available

to these characters, and thereby embodies Theodor Lipps’ modern concept of empathy as

Einfühlung or ‘feeling into’ something (see Lipps 1907), such as the unknown of post-

handover Hong Kong.

Shohat and Stam’s historically conﬁgured relations of power presage the diﬀerent fates

of the two sets of couples in Chung Hing sam la, but what remains to be determined is

whether a new paradigm might emanate from post-colonial Hong Kong and how this

might be recognised if it does. One way of overcoming any unknowability of Hong Kong

cinema might be to study it intensely, which requires immersion, language acquisition

and research into any number of themes thrown up by new ﬁlms. Another might involve

waiting for subtitled examples of Hong Kong cinema to reach western festivals, cinemas

and streaming platforms, which risks a limited number oﬀering an unrepresentative

selection. There is a third, non-exclusive way, however, and that is looking for and

‘feeling into’ the impurities in western cinema that constitute trace evidence of new

paradigms happening elsewhere in World Cinema. This duly directs the task of identify-

ing what is new and not belonging to western cinema to the possible impact of others that

results from a global matrix of myriad encounters between cultures, scholarship, audio-

visual material, ﬁlms and ﬁlmmakers. In other words, backwash from the logjam of

unknowability, inﬂuencing and informing western cinema, might indicate the existence

of new paradigms as yet unknown, much like scientists know an otherwise unknowable

star has been created in an as yet unknown universe because of the trace elements from it,

like light and radiation, that wash back into our own.

Impurities as trace evidence have been collected by Nagib and Jerslev (see 2014). The

task is also implicit in Galt and Schoonover’s understanding of global art cinema (2010)

and Queer cinema in the world too (see Schoonover and Galt 2016). Otherwise, simply

spotting impurities can too easily over-determine a biased response and result in

‘blindspotting’. Blindspotting occurs when the samurai stylings of Kill Bill: Vol. 1

(Tarantino 2003) and the Bollywood dance-oﬀ of Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle and

Tandan 2008), for example, are read by western critics as knowing pastiche, while non-

western features such as Nollywood gangster ﬁlm O-Town (Obasi 2015) are assumed to

lack intrinsic value and be indebted to a hegemonic ﬁlm culture that has less to do with

colonialism and more to do with mass culture and postmodern fads in genres driven by

global capitalism. Blindspotting also happens when a ‘consensus’ of western critics,

ignorant of Chinese science-ﬁction’s long-standing concern with rehabilitating science-

based projections of humanistic futures since the early 1990s, only compares Liu lang di

qui/The Wandering Earth (Gwo 2019) to ﬁlms directed by Michael Bay and declares it

‘won’t win many points for originality’ (Rotten Tomatoes 2021a). Furthermore, while

analysis of the cross-pollination of inﬂuences between two cultures within a speciﬁc

period can reveal the dynamics of World Cinema [such as Kenneth Chan’s plotting of

aesthetic, industrial and cultural references as evidence of interaction between China and

Hollywood during the 1990s and 2000s (see Chan 2009)], mapping the present-past is an

iterative process distinct from our attempt at reading impurities as traces of a ﬂuid

movement forwards in the holistic dynamics of World Cinema, where meaning is not

retrospectively determined but continually deferred to the present-future.

12 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

In Derrida’s view, the law of genre is ‘precisely a principle of contamination, a law of

impurity, a parasitical economy’ (1980, 59). Asserting the deﬁnitive inﬂuence of western

genres such as the western or the melodrama therefore also causes ‘blindspotting’,

whereby initial recognition of generic tropes obscures recognition of anything else and

contributes to the logjam. For example, following the parody and pastiche of Chung Hing

sam lam, the noirish melodrama of Faa yeung nin wa/In The Mood for Love (Wong 2000)

was received as indebted to the aesthetic sense and sentiment of All That Heaven Allows

(Sirk 1955) and the amour fou of Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958). Indeed, the haptic sense of

longing in the scenes of journalist Mr Chow (Tony Leung) and his neighbour Mrs Chan

(Maggie Cheung) falling for and yet resisting each other while their spouses are having an

aﬀair resulted from an ‘overt engagement with the aesthetic’ (Galt and Schoonover 2010,

6) that meant that critics and audiences were blindspotted by the ‘impurities’ of foreign

food, music, clothes, language and sexual mores in what resembled a Sirk-Hitchcock

hybrid set in the 1960s Hong Kong, while the social and political context and meaning of

the ﬁlm remained comparatively unexplored. Nevertheless, it is precisely Faa yeung nin

wa’s overt engagement with its aesthetic that allows for Einfühlung, that is, ‘feeling into’

its deeper concerns about the potential that was lost in lost histories. In fact, Faa yeung

nin wa considers a lost past far greater than that of the unconsummated romance, one

that is signalled by the jarring interruption of the lush melodrama by grainy newsreel of

General Charles de Gaulle visiting Phnom Penh in 1966. This visit was a last moment of

pageantry for Cambodia before civil war engulfed the region and it was marked by a

spectacular sound and light show at the Angkor Wat monument. Cambodia had declared

independence from France in 1953 and its ruler, Prince Sihanouk, had hoped to wester-

nise his country, but De Gaulle’s visit took place in the midst of the Cold War between

western and communist blocs at the point when American involvement was escalating in

Vietnam. De Gaulle used the opportunity of his address at the Olympic stadium to call on

the US to leave, while pointedly not demanding the same of China, which had just begun

its Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. The pretence of Cambodia’s neutrality was

soon destroyed by evidence of North Vietnamese military bases in Cambodian territory

that were being equipped by China, which funded the growing war eﬀort and deployed

engineering and artillery forces in the border area. De Gaulle’s address therefore embol-

dened the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which was backed by China in its ﬁght against the US,

and hastened the conﬂict that exposed American and Chinese interests in Southeast Asia

as well as the genocide that erased nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population along with

its past, the potential of its present, and seemingly any possible future. The implication of

Mr Chow in this lost past and deferred future is evident in the ﬁnal scene of Faa yeung

nin wa, which sees him visiting Angkor Wat as a journalist in 1966, but any clarity to this

political subtext and what it signiﬁed was otherwise deferred, buried like the secret that

Mr Chow whispers into a hole in a monument and then blocks up with earth. The

suggestion is that this secret is his love for Mrs Chan, but what if it was Chinese

involvement in Cambodia? Then, the personal sheds coincidence and becomes political,

even though the ﬁlm’s signiﬁed is rendered unknowable because we do not hear the

signiﬁer of the actual whisper of this journalist employed by Chinese media, sent ﬁrstly to

cover the visit of De Gaulle to Cambodia and, secondly, to not cover the Chinese presence

in Cambodia.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 13

This lost past of Mr Chow and China was not unknowable, however, only deferred and

as yet unknown, pending 2046 (Wong 2004), the sequel to Faa yeung nin wa, when the

two ﬁlms could be read as two half-stories about the lost past and potential future of

Southeast Asia, much like the two half-stories of Hong Kong in Chung Hing sam lam. Faa

yeung nin wa ends with the scene of Mr Chow in Angkor Wat, while 2046 has him

writing a science-ﬁction novel about a futuristic train transporting people to the year

2046, where it is supposed they can reclaim their lost memories. Yet 2046 is actually not

the potential of the future but the lost past, for it is the number of the room where Mr

Chow met and failed to consummate the aﬀair with Mrs Chan in Faa yeung nin wa. The

lost past of Faa yeung nin wa and the possible future of 2046 thus seem irreconcilable due

to the erasure of any passing present with potential in the space between them. Yet this

space between them is represented, albeit paradoxically, in the deleted scenes that feature

on the Tartan DVD of Faa yeung nin wa. Just as when Derrida proposes to place ideas

and concepts under erasure he is following Heidegger’s process of discussing the concept

of Being, whereby he crosses the word ‘Being’ out and then prints both the original word

and its crossing-out, so the inclusion of deleted scenes on the DVD of Faa yeung nin wa

shows them to be both crossed out (deleted from the ﬁlm) and printed (as special features

for the DVD) in a Derridean sense. In addition, it is possible to state that these scenes

were both ‘unknowable’ at the time of the ﬁlm’s cinema release because they had been

deleted from the ﬁlm, and ‘as yet unknown’ because they were pending the release of this

DVD (and subsequent Criterion blu-ray of 2021).

In one 11-minute ‘deleted/printed’ scene entitled ‘Chapter 3: The Seventies’, Mrs Chan

is shown to have foregone the high-collared Chinese cheongsams, close-ﬁtting dresses

that deﬁne her restricted movement while ‘signalling the progression and repetition of

time, speciﬁcally the time loops that characterise mourning as well as nostalgic recollec-

tion’ throughout Faa yeung nin wa (Berghahn 2019, 43). Rather, she now wears casual

western clothes of blouse and skirt that point to her imminent emigration (see Figure 4).

Mr Chow, meanwhile, is represented by his young wife, a singer from Singapore (another

British colony and trade rival) who considers renting and changing the apartment Mrs

Figure 4. Mrs Chan meets Mr Chow’s Singaporean wife in a deleted and printed scene on the Tartan

DVD of Faa yeung nin wa/In The Mood For Love (Wong 2000).

14 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

Chan is leaving, thereby overwriting any memories that the place holds of the lost past of

her unrequited love for Mr Chow and installing the present passing potential of a

diﬀerent possible future for herself (and Singapore) with Mr Chow (and China) instead.

Is the passing present of unrequited love an unknowable lost past or an as yet unknown

possible future? A Derridean approach to this deleted scene may argue that its erasure

from Faa yeung nin wa posits the necessary deferral of meaning that happens in the space

between diﬀerences and is constructed ‘by the network of oppositions that distinguish

them and relate them to one another’ (Derrida 1984, 10). This is because, following

Derrida, a ﬁlm gains its meaning through the process of diérance (diﬀerence and

deferral of meaning), which necessitates postponement and delay. Merely reading the

impurities of Faa yeung nin wa as evidence of Southeast Asian-ﬂavoured Sirk-Hitchcock

pastiche is insuﬃcient when compared to subscription to diérance, which acknowledges

the network of oppositions in all of World Cinema. This network means that the signiﬁed

of Faa yeung nin wa is not only found in relation to its sequel (2046) and its predecessors

(All that Heaven Allows and Vertigo, to name but two) but by its backwash of inﬂuence

on World Cinema too, including western ﬁlms such as Moonlight (Jenkins 2016a).

Several critics recognised the aesthetic inﬂuence of Faa yeung nin wa on Moonlight

[and its director concurred (Jenkins 2016b)] but ﬂipped the hierarchy deployed in the

reception of Faa yeung nin wa, whose style was deemed its meaning, because Moonlight

was judged a paradigm in American cinema on account of how its conﬂated themes of

outsiderness and otherness in the matter of being Black, homosexual and poor, when

allied with an aural and visual design and aesthetic that inserted strangeness into the

mainstream, demanded attention for its insurgent foreignness. Moonlight revealed the

backwash of World Cinema in more than aesthetic or formal terms, however, because

what signalled a new paradigm in American cinema was its very indebtedness to World

Cinema for aﬃnitive indications of the signiﬁed (why Moonlight mattered). Whereas

Moonlight signiﬁed otherness in relation to retrograde notions of western society, culture

and cinema, this signiﬁed also appeared congruent with other feelings or expressions of

otherness and outsiderness in World Cinema, whose identiﬁcation beyond the recogni-

tion and admission of Faa yeung nin wa was nonetheless deferred. Based on the play In

Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight is set in the 1980s

in the impoverished Liberty City area of Miami at the height of the war on drugs by the

Republican administration and it describes both the crack-ravaged Liberty City where

McCraney and Jenkins grew up and the stagnant community of its present. Following the

Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation, middle-class families moved out of

Liberty City and lower-income Black families moved in to properties that were mostly

owned by absentee landlords (Nebhrajani 2017). By 2000, the population of Liberty City

was 94.69% Black, 3.04% Hispanic and 0.59% White (City of Miami Planning and Zoning

Department 2000). In response to Moonlight’s depiction of Liberty City in relation to

American cinema and society, Simran Hans duly notes ‘the use of midnight blues and

purples, and the vast wides that encompass Chiron’s single, isolated ﬁgure, work to create

an otherworldly atmosphere, all heightened sensation and simmering, feverish emotion’

(2018). Indeed, as its director attested, Moonlight refers to the cinema of Wong Kar-Wai

in this manner, but it is not ‘otherworldly’ because of its aesthetic choices alone. The

otherworldliness of its multifaceted protagonist, who is rendered as child, adolescent and

adult as well as Black, poor and gay, is also that of Liberty City in relation to the rest of

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 15

Miami and, by extension, to the US as a whole. Paradigmatic is Moonlight’s concentrated

otherness, which challenges White-centric, middle-class, hetero-normative depictions of

Americanness, just as Lovers Rock (McQueen 2020) in the Small Axe anthology chal-

lenges similar simulacra of Britishness. Moonlight, like Lovers Rock, is not only ‘other-

worldly’ but a world of the other, which, as Stephen W. Thrasher perceived, ‘eschew[s] the

white gaze and exist[s] entirely inside of blackness’ (Thrasher 2016). Indeed, Jenkins’

recourse to the dialect of Liberty City was so essential to the ﬁlm’s otherworldliness that

he resisted code switching and rejected subtitles for its distribution, precisely because, as

McCraney insists, Moonlight’s world of the other is (and should be perceived as) foreign

in regard to what passes for American society, culture and cinema:

That accent is thick and musical. Like if you’re watching Shakespeare, it takes you a minute

to get attuned to it, to get involved, and that’s good. It’s like, wouldn’t you like to come visit

these wonderful people? Yes, this guy’s a drug dealer, I know what he does, but let me into

his world for a moment. (Del Barco 2016)

Reading Moonlight as a ‘foreign’ ﬁlm in American cinema therefore avoids blindspotting

while rendering it subject to the process of diérance, which is pending the identiﬁcation

of congruent feelings with other examples of World Cinema, such as the ﬁlms of Wong

Kar-Wai. Moreover, whereas Faa yeung nin wa seems to participate in a genealogy

anchored to ‘the West’ and Moonlight’s referral to Faa yeung nin wa makes it redolent

of ‘the Rest’, these apparent contradictions are presupposed by Derrida, who ‘would

speak of a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of,

without having membership in a set’ (1984, 59). Participation without belonging is

evident in Moonlight, wherein the signs of Black identity, homosexuality and poverty

require both exposure to make these diﬀerences explicit in its drama, and erasure to make

them irrelevant in the sense that they oﬀer no impediment to the empathy elicited by

‘feeling into’ the ﬁlm via its aesthetics. In the ﬁrst scene, for example, a long take presents

Juan (Mahershala Ali) supervising drug deals and Chiron (Alex Hibbert), nicknamed

Little, running from bullies. The mark of genre, the exposure, is found in the setting of

the ﬁlm and its focus on the social consequences of drug dealing and poverty. Instead of

utilising the documentary approach that might brand the ﬁlm as social realism or

generically limited, however, the long take in which the camera circles the characters

with a shallow depth-of-ﬁeld erases the context and any convention or cliché, leaving

characters whose subjectivity searches for empathetic connections. By repetition and

reﬁnement of these visual and aural motifs in ways that echo Chung Hing sam lam and

Faa yeung nin wa, Moonlight creates an aesthetic ritual of exposure and erasure in three

chapters that pushes signs of Blackness, homosexuality and poverty to the front of the

screen while rendering the signiﬁers of love between Juan and Little in the ﬁrst chapter,

between the teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders) and Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) in the second,

and between Chiron as an adult nicknamed Black (Trevante Rhodes) and the adult Kevin

(André Holland) in the ﬁnal third, as precursors to the signiﬁed (that which matters),

which is empathy (see Figure 5). Diérance from one chapter to the next accumulatively

transcends any limitations and signals the approach of a new paradigm in American

cinema.

As stated, diérance is a neologism coined by Derrida that is formed by the combined

meanings of ‘diﬀer’ and ‘defer’ and it relates to the notion of ‘trace’ elements in the post-

16 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

structuralist chain of signiﬁcation that expresses ‘the relationship to a past, to an always-

already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to

presence’ (Derrida 1976, 64). Trace elements are like signs sought within the universe

of activity before and beyond it by scientists responding to static from the Big Bang,

which is an always-already-there that can hardly be conceptualised and prior to which

nothing can be imagined. Shohat and Stam, and Altman too, suppose that Hollywood is

the Big Bang of World Cinema and that traces of it abound, but the truth is that the

ongoing Big Bang of World Cinema encloses Hollywood (the West). Derrida hints at the

complexity of these relations within the sign as being between the signiﬁer and the

signiﬁed, seeing them not as subsequent nor as clear-cut as in the original Saussurean

model, but rather broken by the diﬀerent times – present and past – in which the

elements of the sign coexist: ‘Since past has always signiﬁed present-past, the absolute

past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past”’ (Derrida

1976, 64). This leads Madan Sarup to conclude that ‘the sign marks an absent presence.

Rather than present the object, we employ the sign; however, the meaning of the sign is

always postponed or deferred’ (1993, 44). In this he follows Derrida, who deletes and

retains the deleted sign, arguing that:

Deletion is the ﬁnal writing of an epoch. Under its strokes the presence of a transcendental

signiﬁed is eﬀaced while still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible the very

idea of the sign. In as much as it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and

logocentrism, this last writing is also the ﬁrst writing. (Derrida 1976, 23)

As read by Sarup, Derrida utilises this method because the concept of the sign is

‘inadequate yet necessary’ which is why the word is marked by a cross but not completely

Figure 5. Diﬀérance signals the approach of a new paradigm in Moonlight (Jenkins 2016b).

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 17

deleted (Sarup 1993, 33). Faa yeung nin wa not only marks its deleted scenes with a cross

and keeps them but also marks All that Heaven Allows and Vertigo too, just as Moonlight

marks Faa yeung nin wa with a cross, but none of these ﬁlms are deleted. Referral to All

that Heaven Allows and Vertigo is an inadequate yet necessary part of understanding Faa

yeung nin wa, which is an inadequate yet necessary part of understanding Moonlight. But

the most important strategy for World Cinema studies is to cross out but not delete the

knowledge (and knowability) gained from looking backwards for inﬂuence upon any ﬁlm

in question, while also looking forwards into a new epoch of diﬀerence and deferral of

meaning that points towards the as yet unknown, whereby All that Heaven Allows and

Vertigo defer to Faa yeung nin wa for their meaning while Faa yeung nin wa defers to

Moonlight and so on. Thus, although the meaning of these ﬁlms is deferred in relation to

one another, each ﬁlm represents diﬀerence when considered individually, as do all the

ﬁlms in World Cinema, which co-exist at the same time and in a multi-directional ﬂow.

Deferral is constant because the search for a new paradigm within World Cinema cannot

be concluded by stating its existence, only by constantly asking how the paradigm might

be constructed next and where it might be located next so that the act of questioning

overrides unknowability and posits World Cinema as being as yet unknown. Recognition

of the absent presence of World Cinema in Hollywood might be deferred until its

backwash hits, which is detectable in the impurities coming to the fore of American

ﬁlms such as Moonlight and Widows. However, the true signiﬁed (that which matters) is

the levelling of World Cinema studies that depend upon the deferral of meaning so that

erasure of any and all hierarchy can occur, thereby breaking the logjam of unknowability

and inaugurating a deletion or ‘last writing’ of what World Cinema has previously meant

and a new approach or ‘ﬁrst writing’ of what it can signify.

Finally then, in order for diérance to function as it should in the study of World

Cinema, we must resist being blindspotted and instead read ﬁlms as being ‘under erasure’

or ‘sous rature’ ﬁrst (Derrida 1976, 23). This is the same ethical stance posited by Martin-

Jones, but whereas he contends that ﬁlms such as Loong Boonmee raleuk chat, El abrazo

de la serpiente and También la lluvia speak of erasure, this might be resolved by reference

to even these ﬁlms’ own structuralist equations, which delete generic tropes and then

show both the trope and its deletion. Even Loong Boonmee raleuk chat, dubbed ‘deeply

enigmatic’ by a consensus of western critics (Rotten Tomatoes 2021b), is decipherable by

the structuralist equations that Apichatpong Weerasethakul admits to dissecting in

sections shot as diﬀerent genres that show tropes and their deletion, including ‘old

cinema with stiﬀ acting and classical staging [,] documentary style [,] costume drama

[and] my kind of ﬁlm when you see long takes of animals and people driving’ (Green

2014, 128). Although a ﬁlm such as Loong Boonmee raleuk chat can contain generic

tropes, their erasure is beyond parody and pastiche, which refer backwards to other ﬁlms

for knowability rather than deferring meaning towards the as yet unknown. Erasure is the

arena of new paradigms, where western audiences will and can only (possibly) recognise

a new paradigm in World Cinema when it washes back to the west. Where Wind River,

Chung Hing sam lam, Faa yeung nin wa, Moonlight, Loong Boonmee raleuk chat and

Widows expose the tropes of genre, they also leave or create a space where a new

paradigm can grow, one that is not limited by referral but liberated by deferral. The

trace – and visual and aural evidence of this as impurities – links one with the other, but

with the further complication that this liberation by deferral is ‘the becoming-absent and

18 R. STONE AND L. FREIJO

the becoming-unconscious of the subject’ (Derrida 1976, 69). Attempts at understanding

World Cinema by reading traces rely upon recognising the absent presence of ﬁlms

within each other and yet leaving space for ‘the desire of presence’ (Derrida 1976, 69) too,

which is both exposed and erased, referred and deferred and, to answer the question

posed in our introduction, both theirs and ours.

Three women, one Black, one Hispanic and one White, leave a sauna. Back in Widows,

wherein the tropes of the gangster ﬁlm are subject to a shift in genre and gender

dynamics, the question with which we began of ‘what is “ours” and what is “theirs”’ in

the scene in the sauna is both exposed and erased because the answer is both referred and

deferred. Like Moonlight, Widows makes the paradoxes of referral and deferral, exposure

and erasure, ours and theirs, evident and does not seek their resolution. It only explores

diérance by inviting its audience to ask where and why this is happening and what will

happen next. As a gangster ﬁlm, its Chicago setting is elemental, being once associated

with Al Capone and later with Donald Trump; yet in the multi-racial make-up of these

female characters with idiosyncratic motives for a heist there are trace elements of

backwash, of what is happening in the rest of World Cinema. In the sauna, for example,

Widows employs erasure to literally strip the genre elements down to their core, where

the women feel into congruent feelings of marginalisation and abuse that result, not

without tension, in a performance of female unity amidst racial diversity that promises to

erase the White American male from the gangster genre. The scene is a synecdoche of the

entire ﬁlm because it exposes diﬀerences (such as them being female and the colour of

their skin) and erases everything else (such as their social status). It therefore enacts

referral and deferral of meaning: referral to the signs of countless gangster television

series and ﬁlms in which White male gangsters sit around in saunas [including The

Sopranos (Chase, HBO, 1999–2007) and The Irishman (Scorsese 2019)] and deferral to a

signiﬁed that is as yet unknown. It not only claims the sauna as a space for females who

are sexual but not objectiﬁed as such, it also suggests the gangster genre will be literally

redressed by these characters as something approaching a new paradigm of feminist,

multi-racial, pan-sexual protest against neo-liberalism, patriarchy, misogyny and any

remnants of colonialism. Thus, like Moonlight, the otherness and outsiderness of Widows

within American cinema is not unknowable, because it relies upon referral to gangster

tropes for its spin, but what it signiﬁes (why it matters) is also deferred, as yet unknown

and pending questions that connect with ideas of race, gender, sexuality, economic status,

social sedimentation, and much else besides that is happening in World Cinema.

And where might this awareness of referral and deferral, of a Derridean deployment of

diérance, point next for studies of World Cinema? At the climax of Widows, the group

of women having pulled oﬀ their heist, the wounded Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) is left

outside a hospital. Her survival is unknown, her existence unknowable, until ﬁnally, in an

epilogue, Veronica (Viola Davis) encounters her by chance at a diner. Both Veronica and

Alice have clashed several times throughout the ﬁlm, so Alice leaves the diner alone. The

camera follows her in a tracking shot while she opens her car, but before she gets in

Veronica’s call is heard: ‘Alice?’. The camera then pans left oﬀ Alice to frame Veronica on

the sidewalk as, with a tentative smile, she asks: ‘How you been?’. And the ﬁlm then cuts

to black. This is because the expression and understanding of diérance is empathy,

whose meaning is made most visible by its lack. Although the plots of genre ﬁlms are

closed, the ongoing trajectories of their respective protagonists are expressed via

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 19

congruent feelings even though their potential is unrequited and unexplored. Despite the

fade to black, therefore, the ending to Widows is only deferred, pending a bridge of

empathy between characters once again separated by their diﬀerences. And because the

fade to black erases referral and exposes deferral it assumes a responsibility to ask and try

to answer questions, which is what will push World Cinema studies forwards, towards

what might appear to be the rock of the unknowable but is only the hard place of the as

yet unknown.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/R012725/1].

Notes on contributors

Rob Stone is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham and the author of Spanish

Cinema (2001), Flamenco in the Works of Federico Garcia Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), Julio

Medem (2007) and Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013, 2nd edn 2018), co-

author of Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History and co-editor of The Unsilvered Screen:

Surrealism on Film (2007), Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2013), A

Companion to Luis Buñuel (2013), Screening European Heritage (2016), The Routledge

Companion to World Cinema (2018) and Sense8: Transcending Television (2021).

Luis Freijo is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the

University of Birmingham and holds an AHRC-funded Midlands 4 Cities Doctoral Scholarship.

His research expertise is in the dynamics of World Cinema as it relates to genre studies and, in

particular, the global Western. He has recently co-authored books on Grupo salvaje (2019), Alien

(2019), Los siete magníﬁcos (2020) and El apartamento (2021) and contributed chapters on the

relation between genre ﬁlmmaking and politics to The Routledge Companion to European Cinema

(2021), Sense8: Transcending Television (2021) and Screening the Crisis: U.S. Cinema and Social

Change in the 21st Century (2021).

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