1 Film Culture Crossover Cultural translation and post-Bruce Lee film fight choreography Paul Bowman1 Keywords: Batman Begins, Bruce Lee, Rey Chow, Cultural Translation, Hollywood, Jeff Imada, Dan Inosanto, Jeet Kune Do (JKD), Keysi Fighting Method (KFM), Martial Arts Choreography, Oriental Style, Jane Park, Jacques Rancière. Abstract: This paper reads the emergence of ‘Oriental style’ in Hollywood (Park 2010) as an exemplary case of what Rey Chow calls ‘cultural translation (Chow 1995). The paper explores the intimate yet paradoxical relationship between ‘Oriental’ martial arts and the drive for ‘authenticity’ in both film choreography and martial arts practices; plotting the trajectories of key martial arts crossovers since Bruce Lee. It argues that, post-Bruce Lee, Western film fight choreography first moved into and then moved away from overtly Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong or indeed obviously ‘Oriental style’; a move that many have regarded as a deracination or westernisation of fight choreography. However, a closer look reveals that this apparent deracination is actually the unacknowledged rise of Filipino martial arts within Hollywood. The significance of making this point, and the point of making this kind argument overall boils down to the insight it can give us into how ‘cultures’ and texts are constructed, and also into our own reading practices and the roles they play, sometimes in perpetuating certain problematic ethno-nationalist discourses. Paul Bowman (Cardiff University) is author of Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008), Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies (2007), Culture and the Media (2012, forthcoming) and Beyond Bruce Lee (forthcoming 2013). He is editor of The Rey Chow Reader (2010), Reading Rancière (2011), The Truth of Žižek (2007), Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), issues of Postcolonial Studies (2010), Social Semiotics (2010) and many issues of Parallax. BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk Written for: East Winds: East Asian Cinema and Cultural Crossovers (Coventry University, March 2nd – 4th, 2012) 1 2 Deracinated Ninjas In a chapter entitled ‘An Oriental Past’ in her 2010 book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Park 2010), Jane Park begins from a consideration of a film series in which Asia / the Orient / the East is both everywhere and nowhere. The films in question are Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Park uses the films as clear examples of the extent to which clear borders between East and West are more and more blurred, less and less clear. Asia is everywhere and nowhere in these films in a number of ways. Firstly, of course, they are not Asian films: they are Hollywood films. Yet much of the first half of Batman Begins, in particular, and much of the aesthetic of both is styled oriental – it has an oriental style or sheen – and nowhere more so than in the early sequences in which Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is trained in an isolated mountaintop temple in what Park refers to as ‘ninjitsu’. Park calls it ninjitsu because the masked characters who train Bruce Wayne in martial arts in the temple, and who call themselves ‘the League of Shadows’, are clearly marked as ninjas, are referred to once or twice as ninjas within the film, and wear the traditional/mythological black masks and black costumes, whilst training in swordplay, deception, illusion, distraction, stealth and evasion. So, we might reasonably expect our ninjas to be trained in what is referred to in Western popular culture as ‘ninjitsu’. But who and what and where are these ninjas? The location is not Japan. It is Himalayan/Tibetan. Which seems unusual or incongruous for ninjas. But of course, one might ask: would a ninja headquarters or training school really need to be in Japan in this day and age? And would ninjas need to be Japanese? Surely such an 3 assumption would involve conflating a practice with an ethnicity. And as I want to argue here, such a conflation is precisely the kind of thing that needs to be deliberately avoided in any study of film or culture. Nevertheless, it does not seem unreasonably prejudiced to note that to be ninja as such would seem fundamentally to require being part of a precise historical and social relation; one in which a defeated samurai clan has chosen not to surrender to a victorious samurai clan or to commit suicide but to live on, covertly, secretively, because of the existence of the other samurai clans. And this is as much as to say that one cannot be a ninja as such without being part of feudal Japanese relations; and this would strongly imply being both ethnically Japanese and being located in Japan, and, of course, living in a very precise historical period, in the past. However, if we’re not dealing with this sense of being a ninja, and if we’re just dealing with being an ultra-trained assassin with a black uniform and a predilection for swordplay, then yes, such ‘ninjas’ will be even better stealth assassins if they are not ethnically or linguistically marked, and if they have bases and camps all over the world. But this involves a subtle change in the meaning of the word ‘ninja’, one that has taken place because of what Rey Chow (following Vattimo following Nietzsche) refers to as the weakening of cultural foundations – a weakening of cultural exclusivity, borders and barriers – as a consequence of the intensification and expansion of the complexities and flows of mediated global and transnational popular culture attendant to modernity (Chow 1995: 195) This is why, despite its technically anachronistic character, an understanding of ninjas as globalised and deracinated paid assassins with a penchant for the balletic 4 and the bladed makes perfect sense to us today. Indeed, this is the dominant popular cultural understanding of the ninja. But we should note the Rey Chow type of point, that this is a very weakened, very fluid, deracinated and mobile conception of a ninja (Chow 1995: 195). ‘To be’ a ninja outside of an antagonism structuring feudal Japanese society can nowadays only mean to be a semiotic ninja – a trace, a remainder, a leftover, a mark, a residue, in diaspora. Nevertheless, this remains a semiotics with a currency, a communicability and a transmissibility: an afterlife and an intelligibility (Chow 1995: 199). Of course, the image of the ninja as mobile and globe-trotting is surely the dominant image because it maps fluidly and fluently onto the more than century-old ‘yellow peril’ paradigm (Seshagiri 2006). We should recall that one of the first ‘yellow peril’ fantasy constructions was that of the evil and insidious oriental took the form of the globe-trotting Chinese arch-villain Fu Manchu in the Sax Rohmer short stories and novels, at the dawn of the twentieth century. These were inspired and structured by two diverse sources: on the one hand, Imperial worries about anti-British uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion and, on the other hand, a desire to cash in on the successful format of the Sherlock Holmes novels. What is crucial here is that both Sax Rohmer and subsequent yellow peril fantasists have all recognised or dramatised that what is most perilous about the yellow peril is not when the yellow peril is a huge mass or multitude that is far, far away, over there, in a determinate other place in the East; but rather that the yellow peril is perilous because of its ability to move anonymously, individually, fluidly, fluently, silently, secretly and insidiously across the globe. Fu Manchu’s headquarters were in London’s East End, and he and his 5 henchmen could and would pop up all over the world (or, more specifically, all over the British Empire), at will and unexpectedly.1 In other words, in ‘yellow peril’ semiotics, location is irrelevant. What is not deemed irrelevant in this semiotics though is ethnicity: what subtends and sustains the discourse is a belief in the permanence of a mobile and portable ethnicity which always manifests itself as anti-Western / pro-Eastern nationalist ideology (Seshagiri 2006). Simply being yellow, no matter where and no matter how long you’ve been there, is taken as a sign of a necessary infidelity or non-belonging to the West; and an essential attachment – simply because of skin colour or ethnicity – to another place. Jane Park indicates the tenacity of the hold of this discourse – not just in popular fiction but also in serious public arenas – when she discusses the news media representations of both ethnically Asian criminals and ethnically Asian victims of crime in the US: in the language and representational structure of US news discourse, the ethnically Asian is never simply, wholly or wholesomely American (Park 2010). The hyphen of hyphenated US identity politics reveals itself to be a double-edged sword (Chow 2002). It is with this unclear nexus of ethnicity, alterity, location, place and crossing over that I will be primarily concerned here. This is because in film and in our readings of film there are often conflations and confirmation biases at play which pull our readings in certain directions, often in ways which conform to both a geographical and what Jacques Rancière calls a geometrical structuring of the world, along ethnic and nationalist lines. As Rancière has consistently sought to impress upon us: we fall too easily into a style of thinking in which we assume that social classes and social 6 groups each have their proper place and proper location and proper activities; and, because of this aesthetic distribution of the sensible and this paradigm of viewing and apprehending, this partition of the perceptible, this shared biased commonsense, our own thought processes work like police officers: we assume that we know where and what certain groups, identities and practices are or should be, and we push them back into their perceived proper places – or, when we apprehend them or think about them or represent them or engage with them, we measure the distance between where they seem to be and where we thought and think they should be (Rancière 1999). This is a process that Rey Chow has called ‘coercive mimeticism’ (Chow 2002); coercive mimeticism being a term for any of the many processes through which ethnic, class and gendered identities are assumed, imposed, enforced, insisted upon and adjudicated, in myriad contexts. My argument here will be that looking closely and thinking about the relations between ethnicity and the perhaps surprising topic of martial arts choreography offers important insights into all of this. Choreographing Authenticity In the context of the ninjas of Batman Begins, and of the film’s ‘ninjitsu’, a moment’s digging around or researching – if watching YouTube ‘making of’ clips can be called ‘research’! – reveals that it is actually the case that the choreography we see in the film is derived from a martial art called Keysi Fighting Method (or KFM). This martial art was invented within the last few decades by a street-fighter from Barcelona (called Justo Dieguez Serrano) in conjunction with another from Hull in the north of England (called Andy Norman). These two fighters met on a martial arts circuit made up of a loose network of like-minded martial artists who would travel 7 widely around the world to train with each other at various training camps (not entirely unlike our deracinated ninjas, perhaps). Another of these like-minded fighters was a man – also from Hull – called Buster Reeves: a former sports martial arts star, freestyle sparring champion, world jujitsu champion, and stuntman who, at a certain point in time, exactly when he was a student of Andy Norman in Hull, was lined up to be the stunt body-double for none other than Christian Bale in up-coming film which turned out to be Batman Begins.2 So, the fighting method of the orientalised yet non-Japanese (or non-Japan-located) ‘ninjas’, located in an apparently ancient temple somewhere far, far away, but definitely in the East, in this Hollywood film, turns out to be a very contemporary and avowedly ‘urban’ martial art; one that was invented, formalised and codified – or at least baptised and commodified – by two Europeans, who met on an international training circuit but who insist that KFM ‘comes from the street’, or, at least, is designed for ‘the street’. In any case, KFM became connected with Hollywood thanks to a certain international network of fighters, all of whom were striving for authenticity in their martial arts training. As Andy Norman and others say in interviews about Batman Begins (and elsewhere), KFM strives for authenticity and efficiency; it is not hampered by somebody else’s tradition; it is not, to paraphrase Andy Norman, an ancient residual form of someone else’s truth; it is rather a truth that they themselves worked out in the here and now, through an unending process of thinking, researching, experimentation, testing and verification. Now, to anyone familiar with martial arts rhetoric – that is, with the types of things that martial artists are going to say about their practice – it is very hard not to 8 discern close family resemblances between KFM-style discourse and the rhetoric and discourse of Jeet Kune Do as it came out of the mouth of Bruce Lee in the late 1960s and very early 70s. For Bruce Lee, martial arts practice should not be about respecting tradition and doctrine; it should always be about experimentation and innovation and, as he was wont to say, ‘honestly expressing yourself’. Thus, given the virtually identical style of rhetoric and discourse shared by Bruce Lee’s JKD and today’s KFM, it is clear that KFM is a contemporary manifestation of an impulse that was first defined by Bruce Lee’s inventive, experimental interdisciplinary research programme that he called JKD. Of course, Keysi Fighting Method and Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do (or KFM and JKD) may seem very different in appearance and execution. Where Lee’s JKD would insist on the straight and the direct – the straight right lead or the direct finger jab to the eyes being its exemplary techniques – KFM is more likely to spin and roll into a different position – this is because the ‘pensador’ or ‘thinking-man’ defensive/aggressive stance is what its founders call ‘the nucleus’ of its approach. So Bruce Lee’s JKD and today’s KFM look different but they share the same experimentalist and verificationist ethos. What is more, both were catapulted into the spotlight by a connection with the Hollywood cinematic apparatus. What is (even) more: Both look and seem oriental – the orient is all over them; they are marked Asian – yet neither is properly oriental or simply Asian: KFM appears in the recent Batman films as if it is ninjitsu, but it is not; JKD appeared both in Bruce Lee’s pre-Hollywood supporting role in Longstreet in 1967 and also in his unfinished film Game of Death, as if it were ‘kung fu’, and it was 9 always heavily marked as Asian, as Chinese; but it is not: not really; not simply. Even Bruce Lee himself at times wanted to distance himself from an ethnonationalist interpretation of what he was doing in JKD: In Game of Death Lee chose to wear a bright yellow tracksuit, so that his style could not be semiotically attached to any existing formal style from any culture. And, ultimately, JKD is a Chinese name for an art born in the USA out of Lee’s interdisciplinary explorations in boxing, fencing, grappling, wrestling, and kicking, from a Wing Chun basis – but a basis that became more and more translated and transformed over time, so that only certain axioms of Wing Chun remained (as expressed in sentiments about the centreline and about the immoveable elbow, and so on). So, both JKD and KFM are heavily marked as Oriental; both are semiotically constructed as Oriental; but in the approach of Bruce Lee, to regard JKD simply as Chinese is to conflate Lee’s own ethnicity, on the one hand, and his deracinated interdisciplinary radicalism, on the other; and to do so in such a way as to make the ethnicity trump the activity: in other words, it is to assume that because Lee looked Chinese, therefore what he did was Chinese. This sort of conflation is as legitimate as claiming that because Batman Begins constructs KFM as ninjitsu, therefore KFM is Japanese. In other words, this all points to a problem of culture; one that raises its obscure – or obscured, or black-masked – head, whenever there is a crossover. This is especially visible when the crossover involves or is enabled by cinematic mediation or mediatization. In Authentic Crossing 10 Jane Park argues that in many manifestations of Hollywood’s cinematic imaginary – in its semiotic vernacular – ‘the orient’ stands simultaneously for the ancient past and the technological or technologized future. She argues that in the recent Batman films, East and West are blurred. I want to emphasise the ways that the orient is played and erased here and elsewhere, in order to show the deconstruction of location – and of certain conceptions of ‘culture’ – through the problematization of space and location attendant to international film. The orient is everywhere and nowhere here. It has both crossed over and been crossed out. It has also been underlined. According to the interviews and short films that make up the extras of the DVD release of Batman Begins, Keysi Fighting Method became appropriated by Hollywood and was incorporated into the film largely because of its visual novelty: as one of the interviewees – the fight and stunt coordinator David Forman – puts it: we’d seen kung fu, we’d seen taekwondo, we’d seen jujitsu; but we hadn’t seen this before. So: KFM offered a novel visual spectacle boiling down to a new and flowing style of movement, one that they decided suited the character and personality they were giving to Batman in the film: brutal, animalistic, pugilistic, almost crude in appearance, yet at the same time highly viewable and ultra-slick. According to Andy Norman, the co-founder of KFM, what the filmmakers liked about the look of KFM was that it showed a new way of moving; a way of moving never seen in fight choreography before.3 Because of this, in the wake of Batman Begins, Keysi Fighting Method started to become global. (It is also seen in Mission Impossible 3). This take-off itself is a new 11 version of the same mediatized route that first made all nominally oriental martial arts global: David Carradine and Bruce Lee introduced nominally Chinese martial arts quite decisively to the West; and off the back of this mediation, untold numbers of people all over the world started practicing nominally or actually Chinese, Japanese and Korean arts, first of all, and more and more diverse nationalities of arts subsequently – Brazilian jujitsu and capoeira, in particular. In relation to the exemplary case that is Bruce Lee: it is fair to say that it was only because of his celebrity that Jeet Kune Do became known. Then, as people looked backwards in time, so to speak, ever-desirous to return to the source or the mythic origin of Lee’s art, more and more people discovered Wing Chun. So it was only because of Bruce Lee that the art he studied as a teenager, wing chun, became popular outside of Hong Kong. By the same token, it was only because of Bruce Lee that his teacher, Yip Man, became so well known that he has since been reclaimed and reconstructed as a legendary Chinese patriot within some recent Hong Kong produced films. I talked about this (ultimately doomed) ideological work within Hong Kong film at some length at this very conference here in Coventry last year.4 To put it bluntly: virtually no one would have heard about kung fu were it not for Bruce Lee; no one would be doing Jeet Kune Do; Wing Chun would be insignificant outside (and possibly within) Hong Kong, and Yip Man would be equally unheard of. I say this without any disrespect intended to any of these people or styles. I just want to emphasise the crucial role of the filmic apparatus in producing visibilities, mythologies, beliefs and practices. In fact, there is a sense in which almost every martial art or martial artist today could be said to have a debt to cinema (no matter 12 how unwanted), and could also be said to be mediatized (no matter how antispectacular the martial art is). This is the case even with Bruce Lee’s JKD and with KFM (not to mention MMA and UFC), and even in the face of their shared and avowed commitment to authenticity and reality. For, with both, it is the case that an art that was inspired and guided by the desire for the real and the authentic has been mediatized, and in that mediatization glamorized, and in that glamorization further commodified. So, now, even if you can’t find an actual human instructor in KFM, you can sign up and download the syllabus – white belt, yellow belt, and so on, through to black. And these training videos are themselves pretty slick and groovy textual productions: finely crafted and beautifully edited films which emphasise the different ways to train in order to practice to simulate and emulate and generate authenticity – or the effects and features of authenticity – in training for real and authentic combat. So, pretty soon there should be plenty of virtually-produced KFM certified instructors to set up physically-located schools. In itself, this is no big deal. There have long been correspondence courses. And far be it from me to fetishize the value of the face-to-face co-presence of teacher and student. (Derrida deconstructed this decisively for me decades ago (Derrida 1981).) Rather, the point I would like to make is to caution the conflation of text with geographical location, or geographical location with ethnicity and/or ‘culture’. 13 National Geographethnicity Rey Chow nails one problem of this tendency in her 1993 book, Writing Diaspora (Chow 1993). In this book, Chow points out the ways that, in American universities in particular, the academic world is all too easily divided up geographically. That is to say, academic departments and academic approaches are divided up along nationstate lines, in a way that actually mirrors – and yet obscures – the geopolitical organisation of the world. It mirrors it in that a school or department can be, for example, a school of Chinese studies. In this school or department, there will be experts in so many areas of this geographical entity’s social and cultural landscape: for example, Chinese literature, Chinese language, Chinese history, Chinese philosophy, and so on. In the next building or somewhere across the campus, there will be the Japanese counterpart of this; elsewhere the Russian and Slavic and elsewhere the Indian and so on and so forth – in a way in which the geopolitical identity of nation states is mirrored in the academic division of labour. (There may also be – as there is in my own university, for instance – schools of European Studies. But such schools and departments are less likely to teach European Philosophy than they are to teach the unmodified and putatively universal discipline of capital-p-Philosophy – in other words, the supposedly universal category or version of a subject; a universal or transcendent version of a subject, whose ‘universality’ is of course merely the simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of its Eurocentrism.) The reiteration of geographical or geopolitical (or, in other words: national) boundaries as a way to organise universities, their departments and schools, their 14 disciplinary landscapes, and ultimately therefore the knowledge they produce, has many consequences. For instance, Chow draws attention to the likelihood that translated Chinese texts dealing with, for example, women or the family or the state will all too often be given a modifier in translation, so that, in their English language versions they become, all of a sudden, texts dealing not with ‘woman’ or the family or the state but now with Chinese women, the Chinese family and the Chinese state – and in a precisely diametrically opposite way to the way in which European texts about the same subjects would be translated. Chow proposes that a French language text called, say, la femme, la famille, l’état, would almost certainly be translated as something much closer to woman, the family, the state than French women, the French family and the French state (Chow 1993 :6). Of film itself, Chow says: let’s contrast titles of studies of ‘first-world’ film with titles of studies of non-‘firstworld’ film. While the former typically adopt generic theoretical markers such as ‘the imaginary signifier’, ‘the cinematic apparatus’, ‘feminism’, ‘gender’, ‘desire’, ‘psychoanalysis’, ‘semiotics’, ‘narrative’, ‘discourse’, ‘text’, ‘subjectivity’, and ‘film theory’, the latter usually must identify their topics by the names of ethnic groups or nation-states, such as ‘black cinema’, ‘Latin-American cinema’, ‘Israeli cinema’, ‘Brazilian cinema’, ‘Japanese cinema’, ‘Indian cinema’, ‘Spanish cinema’, ‘Chinese cinema’, ‘Hong Kong cinema’, and so forth. To the same extent, it has been possible for Western film critics to produce studies of films from cultures whose languages they do not know, whereas it is inconceivable for non-Western critics to study the French, German, Italian, and Anglo-American cinemas without knowing their respective languages. (Chow 1995: 27) 15 So, Chow points to the hierarchies of value involved in organising knowledge geographically. The problem is both that this can too easily take place against the backdrop of an assumed universality – capital-p-Philosophy (as universal) versus ‘Eastern Thought’ (as regional), for example – and also that this type of thinking follows an implicit Cold War, orientalist, imperialist or colonialist logic, in which the other culture is there to be known in the form of a data-mine or, ultimately, a target (Chow 2006). Anthropology is a residue of British imperialism, it is often said: the natives are objects and curios, relics from the past, specimens from nature, to be studied by the modern Western investigator. Area Studies, it is also said, is a disciplinary field that is a direct product of the post-Second World War and Cold War US mindset, elaborated in accordance with the injunction to ‘know your enemy’. Such a geographical imaginary – when it organises academic work – is both politically consequential in one way and also depoliticising in another. Edward Said names it ‘orientalism’, of course; and I feel confident that I do not need to give you a lecture on orientalism. But one consequence of the regionalisation of knowledge according to national borders is its essentialism. And essentialism – as much as it can be shown to be politically consequential – is also depoliticizing; in that it works to reinforce the idea that national cultures, with their histories and their languages, organised by borders, are expressions of a cultural essence; with culture regarded as a treasure trove of history to be revered. In this framework, only the past is authentic. The past is superior. The present is corrupt. And specific cultural studies of specific cultures become inclined to evaluate contemporary cultural productions in terms of how well they fare against the values imputed to the past. And this transforms the very 16 definition of, say, literature, or music or art – precluding it from being assessed as a critical or political discourse, and demanding that it be an expression of an authentic culture – an authentic culture that it will inevitably be doomed to fail to live up to, because of the fact that it is contemporary and alive and therefore corrupted by the present complexity of the interconnected, ever-crossing-over world. Regionality But, the retort may come: ok, so maybe we can deconstruct the idea of regional cultures and regional practices and regional texts, like film, because everything is increasingly transnational – for instance, in film financing, film distribution, film production teams, film values, film talent, and so on. But on the other hand, there are obviously regional film industries and histories and institutions and realities. So, how are we to engage with the ongoing reality of this self-evident regionality? If we ignore it on the basis of its complicity with either orientalist or imperialist or otherwise nationalist processes, are we not ignoring a significant political fact about regional film? After all, doesn’t even a cultural theorist like Rey Chow, who prominently problematizes regionalising perspectives, herself write entire books about Chinese film, even as she points to pitfalls and problems of nationalising film studies and essentializing cultures along nationalistic lines and within Eurocentric and colonial conceptual universes? So, if we want to listen to Chow and learn a lesson from Chow, how then do we negotiate the paradox opened by two of her key cautions – first, the caution against falling into the ‘area studies trap’, of nationalising, homogenizing and essentializing culture along national and ethnic lines (Chow 1993; 17 Chow 1998); while, second, treating film as ethnography, as she also proposes (Chow 1995)? Chow herself resolves the paradox of her twin yet apparently contradictory injunctions – on the one hand, do not ethnographize film; but on the other hand, approach film as ethnography – by elaborating what we now too easily call a deconstruction of the notion of both ethnography and – ultimately – of translation, and specifically of what she calls cultural translation. This is not simply a deconstruction because although she certainly deconstructs ethnography and anthropology, she does not really ‘deconstruct’ translation or cultural translation. In actual fact, she turns Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s own deconstructions of translation against them in order to show the limitations of their approach, or rather, the points at which they stop. She does this to show that what she calls the negative impulse – the rigorous but negative critical energy of deconstruction – cannot really engage with the specificity of the film medium itself. And this is the important task, she argues: because this is where the action is. To say that Chow doesn’t deconstruct is not quite right, however. She definitely advocates the need to deconstruct nativism, primitivism, regionalism, ethnonationalism, and so on. She certainly wants to deconstruct the tacit idea that there is an original text, for instance; or, more than that: an original before any particular text; an original that the text is trying to represent, communicate, or indeed ‘translate’. This is why she regularly points to the criticisms levelled against globally successful filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou – in order to show the 18 ways that most of the criticisms made against these directors are based on the idea that their textual productions are unfaithful representations of some true depth and essence of China. Ultimately, she suggests, such criticisms are based on a selfessentializing which follows from a belief that there is an essence or an underlying truth to China that needs to be (yet cannot fully be) translated with accuracy and fidelity into filmic form. But every text is a construct, Chow reminds us: Every text. And this includes the pretext of a nation, such as China. So Chow certainly deconstructs the idea and relation of original to copy, here. But she takes her leave from deconstruction when she notices that the readings of the deconstructionists are so much orientated towards the past (at least the etymological past) and hence towards some sense of the prior and original – even if deconstruction also shows that the original text is a failed or incomplete or unsutured text. The point, for Chow, lies in the orientation towards the past as such. For such an orientation means that, even though the deconstructionists deconstruct the original text, they still believe in it, and look to the past to find it. This is a problem for Chow, for lots of reasons, but mainly because if one orientates one’s reading towards the past then the present is always going to look like an inferior, corrupt and bad copy: a bad translation. So, instead of going down this line, Chow insists, one needs always to remember that even the putative original is always and already an unoriginal construction, a fragment made up of fragments. So, one should orientate one’s reading or valuation of it in terms of its effects on and within the present. In going down this line, Chow foregrounds the work of Walter Benjamin. 19 Cultural Translation The key moment in Chow’s elaboration of a theory of cultural translation comes when she quotes a long passage of Walter Benjamin quoting Rudolph Pannwitz. Pannwitz writes, as Benjamin and Chow both point out: Our translations, even the best ones, proceed into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. (pp. 80-81) [Quoted in Chow 1995: 188-9] I think it may be harder to see or imagine what this might mean in written language or literary culture than it is to see what it might mean in film language and visual culture. Indeed, I think that it is easy to see the ways that not only the supposed ‘best’ but also even the (arguable) ‘worst’ films deftly, happily, joyously and fluidly translate from one film language to another, from one genre to another, from one regional semiotic or technical vernacular to another. In other words, what I am arguing here is that you see this sort of cultural translation all the time, in which an importation (a copy from or of an ‘origin’) intervenes into and modifies a milieu (a 20 ‘destination’, a context, a present). Such interventions or translations or crossovers are inevitably in one sense unfaithful betrayals of a former state, but equally – as Chow concludes – in another sense respectful reiterations and animating breaths of new life, even if that life is a transformation, an afterlife. East Winds So, I am suggesting that a film like Batman Begins is best approached not in terms of a paradigm of simple appropriation but in terms of a thinking of cultural translation. The film is certainly an index of the effects that the translation of oriental style into Hollywood continues to have in film. But if we think of it as an appropriation or an implicitly unjust expropriation of something quintessentially oriental, I think that we are sentencing ourselves to operate according to problematic assumptions about culture as property or underlying essence rather than process or productive event. Of course, features of this process do also indicate the extent to which Western discourses often seek to appropriate and to claim ownership and mastery of practices that might more organically be connected with other cultures. Gary Krug, for instance, has written a fascinating study of the American appropriation of Okinawan karate – a long discursive process, he lays out, which culminates in events like the peculiar case of an America-based martial arts association expressing outrage and refusing to recognize the authority of Okinawan and Japanese martial artists in the same style to award the highest dan-grades without the consent of the US association. In other words, the US-based association bearing the name of a formerly and concurrently Okinawan martial art now regards itself as holding the ultimate 21 authority and being the sole institution with the power to award the grade of tenth dan to anyone. The Okinawan practitioners are regarded by the American association as no longer able to legislate on their own activities (Krug 2001). So crossovers do often entail crossings-out and discursive controversy. There was always controversy at the heart of Bruce Lee’s crossings-over, from Hong Kong to Hollywood and from Wing Chun to Jun Fan to Jeet Kune Do. And, of course, at the pinnacle – the explosion – the crossroads – of Lee’s crossover, he died. In the wake of his untimely demise, Hollywood hungered for more oriental or oriental-esque martial choreography. More importantly, it hungered not just for exotic choreography, but also for more of the Bruce Lee style of authenticity in choreography. The fast, the ferocious, and the beautiful; not the robotic rhythms of kata; but the believable spectacle (the unbelievable-believable). There were always a range of styles of martial choreographies on offer. But one style rose to dominance, trampolining to prominence especially but not solely after the entrance into film of Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon. For, Brandon had studied Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee’s friend and student, Dan Inosanto. Moreover, Brandon studied JKD along with his own friend and contemporary Jeff Imada. And Jeff Imada, who was working in the film industry, helped out prominently with Brandon Lee’s own films and then went on to become the stunt and fight choreographer for a list of Hollywood films that is as long as your arm – so many that I could not list them all here. 22 What this means is that it is possible to trace a strong connection between – and a largely untold story of – Hollywood fight choreography per se (or tout court) and Dan Inosanto’s school of Jeet Kune Do. And one thing that is particularly underacknowledged in this regard is the fact that, whilst Bruce Lee preached interdisciplinarity and innovation in martial arts research, he also always insisted that Dan Inosanto himself should respect and champion the martial arts of his parent culture – the Philippines (a place that Inosanto himself is not actually from). Accordingly, Inosanto has always studied and championed a wide range of martial arts of the Philippines. Now, what is perhaps even less widely acknowledged is the extent to which it is these Filipino arts – specifically Filipino Kali and Eskrima – that we see depicted in film after film after film from Hollywood. A multitude of Hollywood films with the most memorable martial arts choreography have involved Imada in choreographing role. So we might want to rush to a conclusion about the presence of the Filipino arts in Hollywood. But there is more. For what is perhaps most peculiar about many of the films that could be said to be full of Filipino martial arts is the extent to which the choreography within them is represented as if it is non-Eastern, as if it is entirely deracinated, connected with either ‘the US military’, ‘special forces’ or ‘the street’ – specifically, of course, the US street. There is little if any mention or acknowledgement of the Filipino connection – of the fact that these putatively deracinated, universal, logical, rational, Western martial arts – as best seen in The Bourne Identity trilogy, for instance, is not simply universal or US, but rather Filipino. 23 But what about Batman Begins? The founders of KFM are adamant that their art comes ‘from the street’, and that it is ‘for the street’. What they neglect to mention nowadays is that these selfsame founders of KFM, who choreographed Batman Begins, are also – or were formerly – qualified instructors of Dan Inosanto’s school of Jeet Kune Do. This is a branch of JKD which is heavily informed by Filipino Kali. And a quick look at the current appearance of Filipino Kali shows it to be, in many respects, very much like that of KFM. There is a lot that could be said about this. One thing would be the observation that the East Winds that are blowing here are not following the same course between Hong Kong and Hollywood and back again that they once were, in what was once a very visible interaction of regional styles and practices. Now there appears to be some kind of movement between Hollywood and the Philippines, but via two instrumental American-born, American-living, American-working but ethnicallyAsian martial artist choreographers (Dan Inosanto and Jeff Imada). This movement now proceeds according to what we might call a less straightforward, less visible and less regionally-specifiable crossover. Another thing of note is the problematic double-status of the martial arts formerly known as Filipino: on the one hand, they are clearly a dominant force, one that is arguably hegemonic within Hollywood action choreography; but on the other hand, as this ‘ethnicity’ is largely unknown or unrepresented, and because what aficionados might recognize as Filipino is not marked as Filipino and is depicted instead as if it is the height of rational US military or street efficiency, then Filipino martial arts might be regarded as simply the most exploited work force or work horse in town. In either 24 case, whether ‘hegemonization’ or ‘exploitation’, this new formation has clearly involved a crossing out or erasing of an earlier ethnic or cultural identity. But does it matter? Am I an ambassador for Filipino martial arts, wanting to right the wrong of under-acknowledgement, or wanting to right the historical record by publicising the cultural lineage of the martial arts choreography? I am not, and the point of all of this is not just nit-picking or being pedantic for the sake of it or for the sake of raising consciousness or awareness. The point is rather to draw attention to the processuality of culture and to the constitutive character not just of the textual productions – the cultural translations – but also the often unpredictable, often overdetermined nature of the networks that are constructed before, around and in the wake of them. As Fredric Jameson once said of the postmodern condition: in facing it, we must resist the temptation to judge it good or bad; because to judge it is a category mistake: It’s just the way it is. Traditions, networks and relations are constitutively mediated and mediatized. Cultures no longer have self-evident and self-identical layers, depths, surfaces and properties. Instead of properties cultures are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through proper-ties and improper-ties: connections, linkages, articulations and reticulations. As Ernesto Laclau once put it, writing in the context of political theory: [We] gain very little, once identities are conceived as complexly articulated collective wills, by referring to them through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilization. The really important task, is to understand the logics of their 25 constitution and dissolution, as well as the formal determinations of the spaces in which they interrelate. (Laclau in Butler, Laclau et al. 2000: 53) In the face of the globality of the ‘space’ of the cinematic apparatus, Jane Park is absolutely right to focus on the blurring and crossing over of oriental and western styles. The ‘East Winds’ are still blowing strongly, so much so that the ‘East Asian’ of ‘East Asian Cinema’ is no longer in its supposed ‘proper place’ or existing within its supposed ‘proper ties’, but is now at the heart of cultural crossovers of such complexity that region, space, location, ethnicity and identity should now all be approached as cross-cut, cross-hatched, crossed-over, cross-fertilized, crossed out and underlined, in ways that should oblige the study of film culture to blow the cover of any conflation of culture, identity, value or significance with nation, location, language, ethnicity and other essences. References Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, et al. (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London, Verso. Chow, Rey (1993), Writing diaspora : tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Chow, Rey (1995), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York, Columbia University Press. Chow, Rey (1998), Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Chow, Rey (2002), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York, Columbia University Press. Chow, Rey (2006), The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, Durham, Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1981), Dissemination, London, Athlone. Krug, Gary J. (2001). 'At the Feet of the Master: Three Stages in the Appropriation of Okinawan Karate Into Anglo-American Culture', Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies 1(4): 395-410. 26 Park, Jane Chi Hyun (2010), Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Seshagiri, Urmila (2006). 'Modernity’s (Yellow) Perils: Dr Fu-Manchu and English Race Paranoia', Cultural Critique(62 (Winter)). Filmography Batman Begins (2005), Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight (2008), Christopher Nolan. Notes 1 The most recent iteration of the Fu Manchu figure was, of course, the media representation of Osama bin Laden after 9/11: Bin Laden was cast as a Fu Manchu character who seemed to be able to be everywhere and nowhere, apparently at will, and to be able to command hordes of minions and henchmen... 2 Interview with Andy Norman on The Martial Edge website: http://www.martialedge.com/articles/interviewsquestion-and-answers/andy-norman-of-keysi-fighing-method-kfm/ 3 Interview with Andy Norman on The Martial Edge website: http://www.martialedge.com/articles/interviewsquestion-and-answers/andy-norman-of-keysi-fighing-method-kfm/ 4 However, last ear I did ot represe t the resurrectio of Bruce Lee’s pro ies, eto ies, a d displacements – specifically the historical character Yip Man and the fictional character Chen Zhen – as an ideological project that was doomed to failure. At the time I presented it as an interesting filmic attempt to forge a sense of shared recent history between Hong Kong and the mainland.