Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique

by Bliss Cua Lim

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception.

Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Academic, Cultural Studies

360 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2009

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bliss Cua Lim’s Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique analyzes how horror films in Asia map out a structure of feeling in fantastical hauntings. Cua Lim’s use of the fantastic and haunting is culturally tied to the idea that the land/space remembers genocidal, personal, and violent wrongs inflicted against a group. For Cua Lim, horror films (like The Grudge) demonstrate through the figure of the ghost that the space not only remembers but retains the structures of feeling that produce the violence. This is to say that Cua Lim understands the fantastic in cinema as running against progressive temporal linearity in society by demonstrating a delayed response, or a mnemonic response through ghostly hauntings to demonstrate how space retains affective “feelings” from historical wrongs. In doing so, Translating Time suggest that they in which we read these structures of feelings on film may be able to translate to how we read these hauntings on physical spaces/locations in the world. Readers interested in temporality, horror, genre studies, cinema, philosophy, and East Asian studies will find this book of to be of interest for their respective fields.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bergsonism, the fantastic, aswangs and ghost films. Honestly, medyo masakit sa ulo as a film-studies-major-kuno. Yung first chapter at least because Lim is already asking a lot from the reader: to suspend everything you know about time and how it works in the physical earth. Like that meme "time is a social construct" because indeed, that is the book in a nutshell. Basically, if we are to be more inclusive of fantastic (i.e. the supernatural) then we have to rethink how we view time in cinema, specifically, "homogenous" or uniform time. Kasi nga ghosts are not of this world and thus "this" time. I enjoyed the chapters discussing different horror films like Butch Perez's "Haplos" and Hideo Nakata's "Ringu" (and its Hollywood remake) in relation to Lim's time arguments. Anyway! This was definitely an interesting read and also proves horror is superior.