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"Bliss Cua Lim's extends ideas about the uncanny, the fantastic and the genre we usually call the horror film beyond its usual references to Hollywood and European cinema, which is fully welcome in this new era of global cinema. But it does much more than that. Her consideration of the uncanny and fantastic open up the profoundly untimely nature of fantasy films--and new possibilities for conceiving of the history of cinema."--Tom Gunning, author of "The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity"

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Translating Time

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...........................................................................................iAcknowledgments.................................................................................................iINTRODUCTION Clocks for Seeing Cinema, the Fantastic, and the Critique of Homogeneous Time.....................1CHAPTER 1 Two Modes of Temporal Critique Bergsonism and Postcolonial Thought..................................43CHAPTER 2 The Fantastic as Temporal Translation Aswang and Occult National Times..............................96CHAPTER 3 Spectral Time, Heterogeneous Space The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory............................149CHAPTER 4 The Ghostliness of Genre Global Hollywood Remakes the "Asian Horror Film"...........................190EPILOGUE Writing within Time's Compass From Epistemologies to Ontologies......................................245Notes...........................................................................................................253Bibliography....................................................................................................305Index...........................................................................................................323

Chapter One

The cinema is a legatee of modern homogeneous time. This argument finds its fullest elaboration in the work of Henri Bergson; nevertheless, cinema's entanglement in modern time consciousness is latent in historical accounts of cinema's emergence amid a host of technologies that ushered in profound changes in our apprehension of time and space. The cinema belongs to the shared genealogy of mechanical clock, wireless telegraph, and railroad, that is, to the tendency toward the technical denaturalization, homogenization, and standardization of time.

This chapter is composed of two main sections, the first of which explores the ontological critique of homogeneous time elaborated by Bergson. Beginning with Time and Free Will, written in the years from 1883 to 1887 and published in 1889, Bergson offers a critique of spatialized time contemporaneous with the railroad industry's successful promulgation of standardized public time in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a rationalized temporality that is still part of our global inheritance today. Bergson offers a corrective theory of time, one that disrupts our habit of thinking time in spatial, numerical terms. Bergson's corrective philosophy of time is emphatically visualist, a visualism that can be grasped in two ways: first, as a suspicion of seeing and of optical technologies. Bergson argues that in order to regard time as homogeneous, one must first visualize an empty space in which increments of time can be laid out for measurement. Similarly, Bergson repeatedly equates spectatorship-watching the clock or the moving images of a cinematograph-with our failure to apprehend the heterogeneity of true duration. We misrecognize our own duration as coinciding with the trajectory of the clock hand, or the movement-in-general of the cinematographic apparatus. Yet Bergsonian visualism, I argue in this chapter, also has a second valence, one that holds out the possibility of forging an alternate route through Bergson's suspicion of vision and the cinema.

Drawing on David N. Rodowick's discussion of Deleuze's Cinema books, I suggest that the visual analogues that suffuse Bergson's writing-photograph, cinematograph, spectatorship-should be construed as historical "images of thought." Such figures are not merely conceptual objects of denunciation; rather, visual analogies enable Bergson's temporal critique and ground the modernity of his approach. Deleuze asks a crucial question of Bergson: has the cinema always been with us? Is it, as Bergson maintained in Creative Evolution, a cipher for the age-old flaws of human perception? Or, to ask Deleuze's question in a different way, could Bergson's temporal critique have been possible prior to the advent of the cinema? An alternative path through Bergson begins with a consideration of the cinema's historicity, its own unforeseeable "creative evolution." Bergson's searing treatment of the cinematograph appeared in print in 1907; a hundred years later, we feel the enduring force and relevance of that critique but are well aware that Bergson's cinema-as reducible to the cinematographic apparatus-is no longer our own. Our global cinema-predominantly narrative, industrialized, and media-convergent, a social institution circulating among diverse publics-is not the mechanical novelty Bergson encountered in the medium's earliest years.

The second part of this chapter traces the emergence of modern time consciousness, a reified time that for Karl Mar levels the qualitative heterogeneity of human labor into abstract labor time; homogeneous labor time lies concealed at the heart of the commodity form. Though the concept of progress, according to Reinhart Koselleck, is minted in the eighteenth century, the decisive ascendancy of a world-historical homogeneous time can be traced to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century transformations in the experience of time and space. In the United States, national standard time was operationalized by railway managers in 1883; the following year, the International Meridian Conference inaugurated the worldwide adoption of twenty-four standard time zones calculated from the Greenwich Prime Meridian.

Like Benjamin, Koselleck sees progress as the defining attribute of modern historical consciousness. Both concepts-modern historical time and its central feature, progress-were fired in the furnace of global imperialism from the late fifteenth century onward. In the crucible of empire, the emerging ideology of progress was twinned with its obverse: anachronism. Again and again, colonial expansion and the European encounter with radically heterogeneous worlds were temporalized. Though intractable differences divulged by culture contact always threatened to expose the fiction of a single homogeneous present, such differences were temporally managed by distancing the indigene from the colonizer's present. Koselleck's "contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous," Fabian's "denial of coevalness," and Chakrabarty's "anachronism" are names for allochronic gestures, tactics of temporal distancing that translate heterogeneity into the terms of homogeneous time.

The cinema is implicated in this modern temporal elitism. As filmmaker-theorist Fatimah Tobing Rony demonstrates, early ethnographic cinema is a kind of time machine that transports the primitive to a "faraway present." This chapter closes with a discussion of Rony's experimental video On Cannibalism, a work that dislodges the rhetoric of anachronism by upholding the force of lived experience. Rony's video exposes the ruse of temporal exclusion and brings both the nineteenth-century ethnographic imagination and the contemporary spectator into the ambit of temporal copresence and accountability toward those encountered as savages.

By orchestrating a conversation between two ways of mounting a critique of homogeneous time-Bergson's ontological method and a...