Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

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A Par-asian Cinematic Imaginary

Grace An

To cite this article: Grace An (2006) A Par-asian Cinematic Imaginary, Contemporary French and
Francophone Studies, 10:1, 15-23, DOI: 10.1080/17409290500429152

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17409290500429152

Published online: 19 Aug 2006.

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Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 15–23

A PAR-ASIAN CINEMATIC IMAGINARY

Grace An
With an introduction by Timothy Murray

Cogently articulating the miscegenation of cultural identity in film and literary culture
in postwar France, Grace An first conceptualized her insightful notion of the ‘‘Par-Asian’’
in the 2000 special issue of Sites on ‘‘Cinema, Video, New Media.’’ Her article on Olivier
Assayas’ Irma Vep dwells not only on the paradox of reviving New Wave French cinema
with a Hong Kong action actress but also on its implications for a Hollywood-based global
cinema. She since has gone on to articulate a systematic research and pedagogical program
concerning ‘‘Par-Asian Visualities,’’ now in development at Oberlin College where she has a
joint appointment in French and Cinema Studies.
Her critical approach to France’s complex artistic and cultural relation to the Far
Orient praises Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, in this issue of Sites, for their
experimental appropriation of footage, imagery, and critical reflection from Japan, while
also dwelling on the paradox of something I think along the lines of contemporary
‘‘Japonisme,’’ an acknowledgment of the mystery of the cultural other while also a sign of
the centralizing point of view of the French, metropolitan artist. Her reading of Level 5
traces a sophisticated path between the melancholy of loss and the film’s curious relation to
the figure of Japan in Hiroshima Mon Amour. What is stunning is how she weaves a
reading of these two films as documentary sources of French-Asian cultural transference
while also situating them in relation to reflections on the current technological condition.
In a longer version of this condensed essay, she informs her important elision of tropes of
technology and culture by subtle with economical citations of philosophical and
psychoanalytical reflections on the technological, from Heidegger to Deleuze, and how
they frame French representations of gender and race.
It is important to note that An’s approach to ‘‘Orientalism’’ promises far from yet
another thematic, deconstructive, or even ‘‘cultural studies’’ approach to the politics
of colonialism and its relation to France. Departing somewhat from the French tradition,
Grace is guided by the imperative of reading French Orientalism via the Orient and its
broader global imaginaries rather than positioning it as a concept confined to and

ISSN 1740-9292 (print)/ISSN 1740-9306 (online)/06/010015–9 ß 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17409290500429152
16 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

emanating from the Mediterranean. Rather than taking the simple path of denouncing
Marker and his peers for colonialist tendencies, An reflects on how deeply the fantasy
of Japan and its Asian essence have become a crucial part of postwar cinematic
representations of French ontological purity. An thinks it necessary to contemplate the
lasting impact of the French ‘‘interiorization’’ of the Orient, as well as the French denial
of its own ‘‘Orientalness,’’ by framing the figure of the Orient as an aesthetic and
technological trope. This welcome project on the ‘‘Par-asian’’ promises to transform French
‘‘postcolonial’’ studies, which now will be reading postwar France through Grace An’s
insightful ‘‘parasian’’ lens.

Near the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959, screenplay
by Marguerite Duras), a French woman (‘‘Elle’’) and a Japanese man (‘‘Lui’’)
are sitting on a hotel balcony overlooking the city of Hiroshima (Figure 1).
Elle is an actress who has traveled to Japan to act in a post-war film about peace.
Lui is an architect and her new lover, whom she met the night before. Lui asks
Elle a deceptively simple question: ‘‘Qu’est-ce que c’était pour toi, Hiroshima
en France?’’ Her response constitutes the remainder of the film, an arduous
and non-linear narrative about a past defined by the killing of her German lover
on the eve of the liberation of France at the end of World War II, and her
subsequent punishment for sleeping with the enemy. After the shaving of
her head by her townspeople and an ensuing period of isolated madness in her
parents’ cellar, she left her hometown Nevers for Paris on the night when the
French learned that Hiroshima was bombed.

FIGURE 1 ßArgos Films

 A PAR-ASIAN CINEMATIC IMAGINARY 17

Hiroshima mon amour names the process by which an anonymous French

woman invokes this city, as if to claim it as her own. Less personalizing perhaps,
‘‘Hiroshima en France’’ conceptualizes the film’s meta-narrative about the act
of understanding Hiroshima through the French cinematic screen. Given that the
film also situates the recollection of the French past on the site of a recon-
structed Japanese city, ‘‘Hiroshima en France’’ is suggestive of the transnational
framework through which the meanings of such historical events and places must
be considered. This kind of memory work—taken par l’Asie, or through Asia—
informs the beginning of a post-WWII Par-asian cinematic imaginary, consisting
of a repertoire of images and discourses through which French writers,
filmmakers, curators, and artists negotiate cross-cultural encounters with East
Asia, through frameworks that are no longer circumscribed by the national.1
‘‘Par-asian’’ refers to the different relationships that artists have explored
between France and Asia, as well as the moments of French self-critique that
have been undertaken par l’Asie. A reader familiar with French literary
history will recognize my neologism as an echo of Montesquieu’s play with
‘‘persan’’ and ‘‘parisien’’ in Lettres persanes (1721), a significant text in the history
of French Orientalism.2 Yet given the vast referentiality of the term ‘‘Orient’’
(i.e. North Africa, Persia, Turkey, etc.), ‘‘Par-asian’’ specifically addresses
East Asia. In works such as Hiroshima mon amour, Un Barbare en Asie
(Henri Michaux, 1933, with prefaces added in 1945, 1967, and 1984), and
Level 5 (Chris Marker, 1997), I have analyzed how they represent East Asia, first
by dismantling earlier narratives of China and Japan, and then by replacing them
with new accounts that recognize the increased importance of these cultures
after WWII. These artists sense, however, that their understanding or
knowledge of these cultures will be bound by the limits of the artistic
technologies they use. They not only try to change the way East Asia is
understood in France, but to transform the very artistic media they employ
in order to fully reckon with the phenomenon of a Par-asian encounter.3
Hiroshima mon amour has been the originary text for this Par-asian imaginary,
and it has never stopped haunting audiences since its first appearance in theatres.
Cinematic spectators remain captivated by the connection that Resnais and
Duras introduced between nuclear catastrophe in Japan and female introspection
in France. How could romance between a French woman and a Japanese
man (itself already risqué for the time) arise from the cinematographic mosaic
of different registers of images, ranging from face-less bodies covered in sweat
or dust, to documentary-esque footage of mutilated and burned Japanese
victims, devastated landscapes, and re-enactments of horrific scenes of war?
How could one French woman’s story of loss, transgression, and punishment
compete with the scale of nuclear destruction? The legacy of Hiroshima mon
amour was so powerful, enigmatic, and inexhaustible Resnais’ fellow Left Bank
contemporary, Chris Marker, paid homage to it almost forty years later in his
1996 film, Level 5.
18 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Level 5 presents another French woman, Laura, whose grief over the loss of
her recently dead lover becomes intertwined with Japanese history. Laura tries
to complete the unfinished CD-ROM that her lover has left behind: a strategy
game on the Battle of Okinawa, the last and bloodiest major campaign of the
Pacific War (which led to the bombing of Hiroshima only six weeks later), the
last secret of World War II to be excavated out of ‘‘Japanese amnesia.’’ She tries
to change the rules of the game—and by extension, the fate that befell
Okinawa—but the computer screen message ‘‘ACCESS DENIED’’ flashes upon
her every intervention. Thus Laura learns everything possible about Okinawa, a
prefecture that became the sacrificial pawn of the Japanese Empire and shocked
the world by its mass suicide, since Okinawans were told not to surrender to the
American enemy (see Christy). Her travels to/through Japan take place on the
‘‘OWL’’ (‘‘Operation World Link,’’ or the internet) and the CD-ROM—media
technologies that demand as much deciphering and decoding as the historical
mystery inherited from her lover. Her interrogation eventually turns onto
herself as she deconstructs her own French subject position. Okinawa comes to
full recollection and reconstruction, but Laura’s identity is only further buried
with her own irretrievable past.
Viewers familiar with Chris Marker know Sans Soleil (1982), another film
on Japan. Lesser known is yet another film about Japan, or actually about
a Japanese woman, titled Le Mystère Koumiko (1965). Level 5 was an intermediary
step toward his CD-ROM, Immemory (1997), a digitalized œuvres complètes
containing fragments of his earlier work on East Asia (see Bellour and Roth,
Lupton). Reminiscent of Elle, Laura is perhaps his most explicit quotation of
the film; she also claims ‘‘Okinawa mon amour’’ as the title for her love story.
Nevertheless, Marker’s cinematographic signature in this indirect re-make of
Hiroshima mon amour manifests itself in his contextualization of the film in
the history of representational practices and technologies. Marker reconsiders
the representation of the Franco-Japanese relationship in Resnais’ film and
rewrites it with technological interfaces that foreground yet complicate the
psycho-cultural ones in place. Between Resnais and Marker, then, the viewer
bears the task of tracing both the genealogy of encounters between France
and Japan, and the genealogy of media technologies that enable and mediate
them. In fact, the confrontation that one inevitably experiences with the
medium overshadows the encounter with Okinawa/Japan. The ultimate
destination may not be the representation of Japan, but an inhabitation of
the means, the moyens, the in-between—a confrontation with the media
technologies themselves.
In this vein, fifty years after Okinawa and Hiroshima, Marker mobilizes film
history as a means of answering an imperative to reflect on the 20th century in
order to retrieve what may still be learned, and precisely because of the new kinds
of access that people like Laura have literally at their fingertips. Since Resnais and
Duras have already established a French-Japanese space after World War II,
 A PAR-ASIAN CINEMATIC IMAGINARY 19

the question of Japan’s signification ‘‘en France’’ assumes a different resonance in

the context of Level 5 at the end of the twentieth century. In this article, I will focus
on Level 5 because of its negotiation of the legacy of Hiroshima mon amour, as well as
its wrestling with the lures, pleasures, benefits, pitfalls, and challenges that have
characterized the Par-asian imaginary since its originary film.
***
A close look at the progression between Hiroshima mon amour and Level 5
reveals Laura as a late 20th century revision of her 1959 predecessor, Elle. Elle
is nameless and travels to Japan. Laura has a name, and while she travels to Japan
through cyberspace, she is grounded in Paris, surrounded by computer
equipment in a claustrophobic director’s studio. The viewer first experiences
her through voiceover (as with Elle), which becomes immediately matched with
her face and body to give the impression of an identifiable and coherent subject
(unlike Elle). As the one who narrativizes the CD-ROM, Laura serves as the
porte-parole of reflections on the history of viewing technologies, reacts to
accounts of loss and tragedy in Okinawa, and ultimately personalizes this
historical catastrophe in an intimate address to the viewer throughout the film.
Laura appears as the enunciative anchor of Level 5, the pivotal interface around
and through which this mosaic-esque and hybrid film unfolds (see Murray
and Turim for incisive commentary on these films).
Laura summons the outside world to come to her through the OWL
(Operation World Link) and her computer, enjoys access to databases
worldwide, and supposedly plugs into others’ ‘‘nervous systems.’’
Nevertheless the encounters that are offered by the Network require her
to undergo self-effacement if not self-estrangement and anonymity. Falsely
intimate conversations with strangers, along with points of contact enabled
by pseudonyms and masks, serve merely as baseline conditions of alterity
in the liminal space in which Laura will pursue an encounter with Okinawa.
Any sense of a coherent self can only fade into the thresholds in which she is
positioned.
The narrative structure of Level 5 departs from Hiroshima mon amour since
the history of the Battle of Okinawa appears more autonomous and discrete
vis-à-vis Laura’s reflections on the subject. The geographic spatialization, the
alternation between the French and Japanese languages, and the notable
difference between Laura’s melancholic love narrative à la Duras, on the one
hand, and the documentary-esque remembrance of Okinawa, on the other, all
mitigate the collapsing of the historical catastrophe in Japan into the love story
of a French woman. Even though Laura is grounded in her Paris studio, she
explores Okinawa because the excavation of its past may help her bring back her
own. It is particularly in this cyber—or liminal— space between Paris and
Okinawa that Laura (like Elle) cannot resist the identificatory lure into Okinawa,
yet ultimately into alterity and self-estrangement.
20 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

Laura’s encounter with Okinawa most explicitly represents the ways in

which an encounter with East Asia leads to a confrontation with the technologies
of encounter at hand. Narrativized as someone who studies images, Laura gives
voice to the historicization of visual technologies (cinema, the computer, OWL,
and the CD-ROM). She even mockingly jokes about a conversation with an
‘‘ethnologue futur’’ about the current practice of consulting a spiritual entity
called the computer, entailing ‘‘les rites funéraires de ces étranges peuplades’’ of
the 20th century, and that endow the computer with one’s memory, to the
extent that the computer will have become the memory. The excavation of
history, then, gives way to the anticipation of future accounts of the cultural
effects of electronic and cyber activity. The emphasis on the ‘‘study’’ of things—
whether of Okinawa, media technologies, or images—belies a strange
vacillation between identification with and yet critical distance from the
objects, methods, and interfaces under investigation.
Between Hiroshima and Level 5, then, the genealogy of encounters between
France and Japan, on the one hand, and the genealogy of media (i.e. cinema,
digital culture, cyberspace), on the other, are necessarily intertwined. The
resistance challenging Laura comes as much from technology as it does from
the Japanese and Okinawans. Instead of providing Laura with a direct
identificatory move from France toward Japan, the computer foregrounds itself
as the mediation by which such a relationship is produced. The computer game,
for example, was already explained as an invented mode of access into WWII.
There are also scenes when Laura complains about the problems of technology:
codes that don’t work, unimaginative passwords, and limitations of access.
While Level 5 can be viewed as a techie’s paradise, it reflects honestly about the
frustration and limits of technology. Laura’s sentiments about technology take a
darker tone, however. Her computer and her internet work succeed in reviving
the Okinawan past, but she cannot revive her dead French lover. The more
Okinawa comes to full recollection, the more erased Laura becomes. Her past is
lost. Laura tells us that she has time-aches like head-aches. And yet she adds,
‘‘C’est à moi, ce n’est pas à moi, une migraine de temps.’’ She is in touch with
something that is not hers; she is suspended in the liminal space of her ‘‘adopted
identifications’’ (Turim), her virtualized and vicarious experiencing of a history
that, despite all of her empathy, still belong to strangers.
In Level 5, Laura functions as a critical Par-asian interface, a narrator of a
certain history of representational practices, a critical tool for the excavation
of others’ histories. Laura inhabits the threshold of this Par-asian connection, to
the extent that she narrativizes herself into virtuality. In fact, at the end of the film,
Laura is reduced to a password that no longer works. The film ends with a screen
response of ‘‘I don’t know how to laura’’ (Figure 2), as if to drive her image work
and the competencies into oblivion. When this message flashes on the screen—
the very last frame of the film— ‘‘laura’’ is literally a screen and a password.
 A PAR-ASIAN CINEMATIC IMAGINARY 21

FIGURE 2 ßArgos Films

At the end of Level 5, the suspending state of non-competency electrifies

the threshold inhabited by the entire film. First, the cinematic screen coincides
completely with the computer screen, alerting us to the passing of cinema,
vanishing into the thresholds of newer media. ‘‘Laura’’ appears in the film yet
only to disappear into the thresholds as well, finishing the film as an infinitive
(‘‘to laura’’), a virtual and un-actualized condition, an idea whose potential
activity has been lost in the fold between Paris and Asia, or between the screens.
What could ‘‘to laura’’ mean? To study images critically, to access an encounter
with an other, to identify with that stranger and eventually use that identification
for purposes of self-critique, to excavate the inheritance of ideologies of the past
through the history of 20th century images, to simply learn as much as one can
about Okinawa? Perhaps ‘‘to laura’’ means to cultivate and deploy one’s cultural
and technological competencies (itemized above), while historicizing them and
exploring their potentiality—or to create future temporary frameworks through
which one may better explore and contemplate cross-cultural encounters and
relationships.
Driving Hiroshima mon amour and Level 5 is the conflict between, on the one
hand, an identificatory lure that leads French subjects to pursue an empathic
relationship with Japan, and on the other, the nagging impossibility of cross-
cultural encounter and understanding. The resistances confronted by Elle and
Laura eventually redirect the identificatory lure, and then activate the
interrogation of the technologies that supposedly enable those encounters and
constitute identities—national, political, and personal—in such exchanges.
Eventually Hiroshima and Okinawa serve less as cinematic objects of observation
and more as interfaces comprising part of the very technologies that are
redefined for cinematic-historical critique. I am arguing that the presence of
‘‘Japan’’ defies representation and comes to look back at the French during these
22 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

crucial moments of criticalness in their films, which ultimately call French

cultural and technological competencies into question. Why is it so important?
It’s because these interactions with the screens and what lies beyond those
screens are constitutive acts—not only constituting that which has been seen,
but also the person doing the image work, the person undertaking the visual
excavation at home. Laura and Elle are French women who are constituted by
how they are seen, as well as by what they ‘‘saw’’ in ‘‘Japan.’’ They are
constituted perhaps even more by what they did not see in ‘‘Japan,’’ as insisted
upon by the repetition of ‘‘Tu n’as rien vu,’’ the opening statement of this entire
post-WWII Par-asian imaginary. What these films have at stake, then, is not as
much Chineseness, Japaneseness, or even Frenchness, but the challenges and
demands of the encounter itself, in the Par-asian space of in-between.
Nevertheless, these writers and filmmakers are not resigned at the outset.
What drives these efforts is a vision of an empathic and meaningful cross-
cultural encounter that can surpass the limitations of their means of contact,
as well as the limitations of the frameworks, and particularly national ones at
that. The pursuit of a Par-asian relationship persists at the beginning of the
21st century and still refers back to 1945 and the immediate post-war period in
order to excavate meanings that remain unexhausted and incompletely
explored. The trans-cultural and trans-historical reflection that is characteristic
of these films testifies to the complexity of a Par-asian imaginary, and the
technologies that enable or thwart its navigation and critique.

Notes
1 Two Japanese films have also taken up the legacy of Hiroshima mon amour: H Story
(Nobuhiro Suwa, 2001) and Women in the Mirror (Kiju Yoshida, 2002). Their
part in this Par-asian cinematic imaginary deserves ample discussion as well.
2 For interesting accounts of French Orientalism in the 18th and 19th centuries,
see Norindr, Lowe, Behdad, Bongie, Clifford, and Ha.
3 I first presented this idea of a Par-asian imaginary in the Fall 2000 issue
of SITES.

Works Cited
An, Grace. ‘‘Par-asian Screen-Women in Irma Vep.’’ SITES: Journal for 20th Century
and Contemporary French Studies Fall 2000. It has been revised and will be
reprinted as ‘‘A Par-asian Cinematic Imaginary in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep’’
in Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora.
Eds. Peter Feng, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See Kam. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
in press.
 A PAR-ASIAN CINEMATIC IMAGINARY 23

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham:
Duke UP, 1994.
Bellour, Raymond, and Laurent Roth. À propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris
Marker. Paris: Y Gevaert and the Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.
Christy, Alan S. ‘‘The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa.’’ positions 1.3 (1993):
607–637.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Ha, Marie-Paule. Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras, and Barthes. Albany: State
U of New York P, 2000.
Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.
Lupton, Catherine. Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. London: Reaktion Books,
2004.
Murray, Timothy. ‘‘Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital: Chris Marker’s
Cinematic Ghosts.’’ Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 102–123.
Norindr, Panivong. Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film,
and Literature. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996.
Turim, Maureen. ‘‘Virtual Discourse of History: Collage, Narrative of Documents
in Chris Marker’s Level 5.’’ SITES: A Journal for 20th Century/Contemporary French
Studies. (Fall 2000): 367–383.
Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Written on the Body. Urbana and Chicago: U of
Illinois P, 1987.

Grace An is assistant professor of French and Cinema Studies at Oberlin College.

She is at work on a manuscript, whose working title is Par-asian Encounters: a
Transnational Imaginary between France and East Asia since 1945. Her main interests
are French cinema and literature of the 20th century, with a focus on the French
interest in East Asia since WWII.

Timothy Murray is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Director of

Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature and in Film and Video Studies at Cornell
University. He is Curator of The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell
Library, and Co-Curator of the on-line exhibition space, CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA.
He is completing two monographs, Digital Baroque: Temporal Folds and the Memory of
Cinema and Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art.