I need to write a research paper. All the details for this assessment can be found in the attached file. Please note that the four peer-reviewed sources must match the sources available in my school's

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtrc21 Transnational Screens

ISSN: 2578-5273 (Print) 2578-5265 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrc21

‘The past is a foreign country ’: exoticism and

nostalgia in contemporary transnational cinema

Daniela Berghahn

To cite this article: Daniela Berghahn (2019) ‘The past is a foreign country ’: exoticism and

nostalgia in contemporary transnational cinema, Transnational Screens, 10:1, 34-52, DOI:

10.1080/25785273.2019.1599581

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1599581

Published online: 25 Apr 2019.Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1132View related articles View Crossmark dataCiting articles: 2 View citing articles ‘The past is a foreign country ’: exoticism and nostalgia in

contemporary transnational cinema

Daniela Berghahn

Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

ABSTRACTGlobal interconnectedness has resulted in cultural homogenisa-

tion and a growing disenchantment with the perceived de ﬁcien- cies of contemporary (Western) culture. This has led, on the one

hand, to an elegiac longing for an idealised past and, on the other, a buoyant interest in cultural di ﬀerence, speci ﬁcally, the exotic. The essay aims to advance scholarly debates on exoticism in

cinema by tracing its close a ﬃnities with nostalgia, attending to the concepts ’shared aesthetic and ideological trajectories. It the- orises and di ﬀerentiates between the ‘imperialist nostalgia ﬁlm’

and the ‘exotic nostalgia ﬁlm’by using Gurinder Chadha ’sViceroy ’s House (2017) and Wong Kar-wai ’sIn the Mood for Love (2000) as

case studies. While the former evokes nostalgia for the British Empire, the latter engenders a universal longing in the spectatorfor a time and place when intensity of feeling was possible. In

a second line of argument, the article develops a model of trans- national reception which explores the hypothesis that nostalgia

and exoticism evoke di ﬀerent aesthetic responses in local and global spectators. While nostalgia is premised on familiarity and the remembrance of shared local traditions, the exotic gaze is that

of an outsider to whom the cultural Other seems enigmatic and alluring.

KEYWORDSExoticism; nostalgia; imperialist nostalgia; transnational reception;Viceroy ’s House ;In the Mood for Love

This article aims to advance scholarly deb ates on the representation of cultural

diﬀerence and, more speci ﬁcally, the exotic in cinema, by bringing exoticism into

dialogue with nostalgia. While nostalg ia in Hollywood cinema and in British and

European heritage cinema has received a signi ﬁcant amount of scholarly attention,

two particular sub-categories which featu re prominently in contemporary transna-

tional cinema, the ‘imperialist nostalgia ’ﬁlm (Rosaldo 1989 ) and, what I shall term

the ‘exotic nostalgia ﬁlm ’, merit closer attention. Both combine an elegiac longing

for an idealised past, constructed ‘as a site of pleasurable contemplation and yearn-

ing ’(Cook 2005 , 4), with the spectacle of alluring alterity. However, as I shall

illustrate, they di ﬀer in terms of their aesthetics and ideological agendas. Both

nostalgia and exoticism stand in an antith etical relationship to modernity and can,

in the broadest terms, be de ﬁned as aesthetic and discursive practices ‘intent on

recovering “elsewhere ” values “lost ”’ (Bongie 1991 ,5)atsigni ﬁcant historical

CONTACT : Daniela Berghahn [email protected] Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 2019, VOL. 10, NO. 1, 34 –52 https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2019.1599581

with major historical turning points. Gurinder Chadha ’sViceroy ’sHouse (2017 )

charts the end of British colonial rule over India in 1947 and Wong Kar-wai ’sIn

the Mood for Love (2000 )re ﬂects the anxieties accompanying the handover of

Hong Kong to China in 1997 via nostalgia for British-ruled Hong Kong in the

1960s.

What distinguishes Chadha ’s imperialist nostalgia ﬁlm and Wong ’sexoticnostalgia

ﬁlm from comparable period dramas such as Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack,

1985 ), M. Butter ﬂy(David Cronenberg, 1993 ), Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992 ),

Victoria & Abdul (Stephen Frears, 2017 ), Queen of the Desert (Werner Herzog,

2015 )andRajrevival ﬁlms of the 1980s like APassagetoIndia (David Lean, 1984 )

and Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983 ), is that they are made by postcolonial

diasporic ﬁlmmakers of Indian/Punjabi and Chin ese/Shanghainese descent rather

than by white Western majority culture ﬁlmmakers. Authorship deserves considera-

tion in this context since it comes with a part icular set of expectations. Postcolonial

diasporic ﬁlmmakers are often seen as ‘native informants ’,whoareexpectedto

provide ‘authentic ’accounts of their culture of origin . They are supposed to articulate

anti-imperialist resistance instead of pandering to the predilections of metropolitan

audiences by appropriating the dominant i mage repertoire and tropes of exotic

alterity. Thanks to their multiple cultural attachments, diasporic ﬁlmmakers are

exceptionally well positioned to act as ‘culture brokers, mediating the global trade

in exotic –culturally “othe red ”– goods ’(Appiah cited in Huggan 2001 , 26) in which

alterity has become a prized commodity. Unless strategically deployed to subvert

dominant codes of representing the cultural Other (cf. Huggan 2001 : 32, 77), self-

exoticisation is commonly regarded with s uspicion because it is imbricated with the

burdensome colonial legacy of exoticism. Yet, as exotic period dramas made by World

Cinema ﬁlmmakers, including Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991 )and The

Road Home (Zhang Yimou, 1999 ), Three Seasons (Tony Bui, 1999 ), Water (Deepa

Mehta, 2005 ), Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007 ) and Before the Rains (Santosh Sivan,

2007 ) show, the collapsed distances of g lobalisation and the transnational ﬂows of

media and people have resulted in a decentring of the exotic, which can no longer be

exclusively understood as the projectio n of exotic fantasies of the other from one

centre,theWest,butwhichemanatesfrommul tiple localities and is multi-directional

in perspective. In contemporary World Cinema, ‘self-exoticisation, in which the

ethnic, the local or the regional exposes themselves under the guise of self-

expression, to the gaze of the benevolent other ’(Elsaesser 2005 , 510) is deployed as

a strategy to garner prestigious awards on the global ﬁlm festival circuit, to engage

transnational audiences and reap commercial rewards.

In this essay, I propose that imp erialist and exotic nostalgia ﬁlms speak di ﬀerently

to local and global audiences. In order to d evelop this hypothesis, I will invoke the

concept of ‘enigmatization ’, which Linda Chiu-han Lai has theorised with speci ﬁc

reference to Hong Kong nostalgia ﬁlms of the 1990s. Hong Kong nostalgia ﬁlms, she

contends, ‘produce messages coded in ways that o nly a local audience can adequately

interpret but that, nevertheless, remain co mprehensible to an international audience

onamoregenerallevel ’(Lai 2001 ,232).Inotherwords,nostalgia ﬁlms grant local

audiences the status of a ‘privileg ed hermeneutic community ’, capable of decoding

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 35 culturally speci ﬁc references by virtue of a ‘shared textual horizon ’and the ‘remem-

brance of a shared popular tradition ’(Lai 2001 : 232, 241). Whereas Lai does not

problematise the concept of ‘local audiences ’, I concur with Appadurai ( 1996 , 48),

who suggests that in a world characterised by accelerated transnational mobility and

de-territorialization, the d istinction between local and g lobal spectators has assumed

‘a slippery, nonlocalized quality ’.I,therefore,conceiveoflocalandglobalspectators

not primarily in geospatial terms, bu tratherintermsofthelocallyspeci ﬁcknowledge

audiences bring to the reception of a particular ﬁlm, regardless of where they actually

live. Whereas Lai suggests that the transnat ional reception of Ho ng Kong nostalgia

ﬁlms results in an interpretative de ﬁcit since global audiences are missing certain

locally speci ﬁc nuances of meaning, I argue that, for global audiences, there remains

a residue of enigma and a sense of mystery, which is an important feature of the ﬁlms ’

exotic allure. In other words, the a ﬀective relationship which local and global specta-

torsdevelopinrelationtoexoticnostalgia ﬁlmsisdi ﬀerent: whereas nostalgia is

community building for local viewers, exoticism relies on and reinforces an outsider

perspective. ‘The exotic gaze ’, Charles Forsdick writes, ‘is a perspective “from the

other side ”, from outside and across geograp hical [or cultural] boundaries ’(Forsdick

2001 , 21). It depends on the maintenance of boundaries, to ensure that cultural

diﬀerence be preserved and perceived. I shall re ﬁne and probe this hypothesis when

considering Viceroy ’sHouse and In the Mood for Love by proposing a model of

transnational reception that examines how ae sthetic strategies, anchored in the cine-

matic text itself, have the capacity to elicit a nostalgic or exotic response in the

spectator.

Correspondences between exoticism and nostalgia

Thereisaclosea ﬃnity between exoticism and nostal gia. Both mobilise distance, be

it spatial or temporal, to enable an imaginat ive investment that replaces historical

accuracy and cultural authenticity with th e construction of a sanitised and embel-

lished past and an idealised alterity. The famous opening lines of L. P. Hartley ’s

novel The Go-Between (1953 ), ‘the past is a foreign country. . .they do things

diﬀerently there ’, encapsulates the chronotopic nature of nostalgia. It is simulta-

neously the longing for a distant place a s well as the longing for a distant time,

typically one ’s childhood or what is perceived to be the golden age in the history of

a nation.

Both the past, described by Salman Rushdie as ‘a country from which we have all

emigrated ’(Rushdie 1992 , 12), and the exotic are premised on the experience of loss

and nostalgic longing. Chris Bongie contends in Exotic Memories that the exotic ceased

to exist at the end of the nineteenth century as the result of cultural convergence and

homogenisation on a global scale and has, henceforth, only continued to exist in

cultural memory. Historically, it is inextricably linked to Romantic voyages of discovery

during which the encounter with radical cultural di ﬀerence in remote corners of the

world prompted a mutual sense of astonishment and wide-eyed wonder (though

historical records, travelogues and novels of adventure are invariably skewed towards

the astonishment experienced by Europeans). ‘The exotic is not [. . .] an inherent quality

to be found “in”certain people, distinctive objects or speci ﬁc places ’(Huggan 2001 , 13).

36 D. BERGHAHN Instead it denotes a particular perception of cultural di ﬀerence that arises from the

encounter with foreign cultures, landscapes, animals, people and their customs that are

either remote or taken out of their original context and ‘absorbed into a home culture,

essentialized, simpli ﬁed and domesticated ’(Forsdick 2003 ,47 –48). Colonial expansion

and subsequent postcolonial migration resulted in persistent contact between di ﬀerent

cultures so that what was once perceived as strange and exotic became familiar. It is

precisely this ‘gradual loss of alternative horizons ’and the deep sense of nostalgia

associated with cultural homogenisation and hybridisation that ‘generates exoticism ’

(Bongie 1991 : 4, 5), de ﬁned as a particular mode of cultural representation and

discursive practice that renders something as exotic. In this sense, exoticism constructs

a desired elsewhere, which is nostalgically imagined as geographically and/or temporally

remote (Bongie 1991 , 7). Ultimately, exoticism –like nostalgia –is ‘a story about loss

(the loss of tradition, the loss of alternatives, the loss of the possibility of an “authentic

experience ”)’(Bongie 1991 , 6). Both discourses seek to salvage something that has

ceased to exist.

Exoticism and nostalgia both spring from the perceived de ﬁciencies of the pre-

sent. Growing cultural interest in the exotic invariably emerges at moments of

cultural crisis, when it serves as a spur ious panacea for a nostalgic longing for

a time and place imagined as better than one ’s own. This holds particularly true for

the nostalgic fascination with so-called ‘primitive ’cultures, imagined as ‘being stuck

in an earlier stage of “culture ”[...] when compared with the West ’(Chow 1995 , 22).

Primitivism, and exoticism more broadly, re ﬂect ‘a sense of exhausted whiteness ’

(Negra 2002 , 62) which projects fantasies of aut henticity, abundance and sensuous

intensity onto Other cultures. A similar sense of disenchantment with the present

underpins nostalgia ’s imaginative investment in the past, which operates through

‘historical inversion: the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past ’

(Bakhtin cited in Hutcheon 2009 , 250). As Linda Hutcheon suggests, the process of

‘nostalgic distancing sanitises as it selec ts, making the past feel complete, stable,

coherent [. . .] in other words, making it so very unlike the present ’(Hutcheon

2009 , 250).

Both nostalgia and exoticism have attracted harsh criticism for fetishizing and

commodifying the past or alterity and for o ﬀering it up to mass-market consumption

on a global scale (cf. Huggan 2001 :28 –33; Spengler 2009 , 2). The visual pleasure

nostalgia and exotic ﬁlms are known to a ﬀord is frequently regarded with suspicion

because it is seen to weaken or fully anaesthetise audiences ’critical capacities, thereby

precluding intellectual interrogation and critical insight. Invoking Fredric Jameson ’s

(1983 )in ﬂuential critique, critics have not tired of reiterating that the nostalgia ﬁlm and

its close relative, the heritage ﬁlm, project visions of the past in which ‘a critical

perspective is displaced by decoration and display, a fascination with surfaces [and]

the past is reproduced as ﬂat, depthless pastiche ’(Higson 2006 , 95). Meanwhile Graham

Huggan takes issue with the ‘the global “spectacularisation ”of cultural di ﬀerence ’, since

it conceals ‘imperial authority through exotic spectacle ’(Huggan 2001 , 15). Far from

celebrating the steadily increasing interest in the postcolonial exotic in contemporary

societies, which bestows cultural prestige and commercial success onto the works of

postcolonial writers, ﬁlmmakers and other artists, he regards it as ‘a pathology of

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 37 cultural representation under late capitalism ’(2001 , 33) that transforms cultural di ﬀer-

ence into commodity fetishism.

As this essay seeks to demonstrate, I do not concur with the pejorative attitude,

prevalent in particular amongst postcol onial scholars, who denounce exoticism

and exotic cinema tout court . By contrast, I argue that exoticism is not necessarily

false or politically incorrect but has a ri ghtful place as an imaginary construction

of the Other, or indeed the Self as Other. Whether it is ideologically retrograde or

not, ultimately depends on the object of ex otic desire. Contemporary transnational

and World Cinema o ﬀersnumerousexamplesofwhereexoticismisharnessedto

new ethico-political agendas that have nothing in common with its tainted colo-

nial legacy (cf. Berghahn 2017 ). I further contend that the visual and sensuous

pleasure which exotic cinema a ﬀords is not inevitably divorced from critical

insight or even an oppositional stance. As Huggan has shown ( 2001 : 33, 77),

exoticist codes of representation can be deployed strategically to uncover and

dislodge long established imperi alist power hierarchies. And ﬁnally, exoticism ’s

visual and sensuous allure e ﬀectively compensates for the hermeneutic de ﬁcit

which arises when World Cinema, which o ﬀers windows onto ‘other ’cultures, is

watched across borders. In this sense, i t is an important aspect of World Cinema ’s

transnational appeal.

Having charted how nostalgia and exoticism intersect and, despite being primarily

interested in the exotic nostalgia ﬁlm, it is nevertheless necessary to introduce its

ideologically more problematic counterpart, the imperialist nostalgia ﬁlm. Bongie ’s

distinction between ‘imperialist exoticism ’, which ‘aﬃrms the hegemony of modern

civilization over less developed [. . .] territories ’and ‘exoticising exoticism ’, which

‘privileges those very territories and their peoples, ﬁguring them as a possible refuge

from an overbearing modernity ’(Bongie 1991 , 17), identi ﬁes them as di ﬀerent mani-

festations of exoticism. But whereas the former serves to assert and legitimise colonial

expansion and imperial power, the latter validates Other cultures by projecting those

utopic and desirable qualities onto them which are perceived to be lacking in Western

societies.

The imperialist nostalgia ﬁlm and Viceroy ’s House

In a much-cited essay, the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo coined the term ‘imperialist

nostalgia ’, to which he alternately refers as an ‘elegiac mode of perception ’,a ‘mood ’and an

‘emotion ’that ‘makes racial domination appear pure and innocent ’(Rosaldo 1989 :107,

108). He proposes that it revolves around a peculiar paradox:

Agents of colonialism [. . .] often display nostalgia for the colonized culture as it was

“traditionally ”(that is, when they ﬁrst encountered it). The peculiarity of their yearning, of

course, is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally

altered or destroyed [. . .] and then regret [. . .] that things have not remained as they were

prior to his or her intervention. [. . .] In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose

of “innocent yearning ”both to capture people ’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity

with often brutal domination. (Rosaldo 1989 , 107-8)

38 D. BERGHAHN Although Rosaldo conceptualises imperialist nostalgia as a longing for the time before

colonial expansion and domination, most critics who have adopted the concept and,

indeed, the ﬁlms cited by Rosaldo himself as examples, namely Out of Africa and British

Raj revival ﬁlms of the 1980s such as Heat and Dust or A Passage to India , actually

exhibit a deep yearning for the days when Britain was the largest empire in history.

Invariably set at a time of imperial decline, this particular type of heritage ﬁlm

simultaneously indulges in a glamorous imperial past and in the exotic allure of

Europe ’s former colonies.

Gurinder Chadha ’sViceroy ’sHouse is part of a new wave of imperialist nostalgia that has

seized British screen culture, examples being the BBC documentary series The Birth of

Empire: The East India Company (BBC 2014) and Indian Summers (Channel 4, 2015 –2016,

set in the Raj ’s summer capital Shimla in 1932) and the period drama Victoria & Abdul

(about Queen Victoria ’sa ﬀectionate friendship with her Indian servant Abdul). In the

streets of London, echoes of Empire reverberate everywhere: The celebrated new Indian

restaurant chain Dishoom recreates the colonial ambience and food of 1930s Bombay cafes,

complete with retro washbasins in the dining area, faded advertisements and sepia photo-

graphs of bygone days. Like The East India Company, a new chain of luxury shops in

London that, seemingly oblivious to its toxic heritage, markets itself as ‘history-infused tea

&co ﬀee sellers ’, Dishoom is Indian-owned. What makes this latest nostalgia for the Raj

diﬀerent from its precursors is that Indians or Britons of Indian descent capitalise on it by

selling ‘acommodi ﬁed dream of the Raj to Britons ’(Je ﬀries 2015 ).

What exactly has sparked this imperial nostalgia boom in Britain now? Not unlike in

the Thatcher era, the heyday of the Raj revival ﬁlms, it has been interpreted as

a response to the gloom of austerity resulting in a weakening of national pride and self-

con ﬁdence. Hence the rallying cry of the Brexiteers ‘Britain will be great again ’– as if

leaving the EU would automatically give Britons the Empire back. In fact, in a recent

YouGov survey forty-four percent of Britons declared that they were proud of the

British Empire, compared with just twenty-one per cent who regretted Britain ’s imper-

ial past (Stone 2016 ). Paul Gilroy o ﬀers a more complex explanation of the imperialist

nostalgia boom. In After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004 ) and, more

recently, in an article in The Guardian entitled ‘The best exotic nostalgia boom: Why

colonial style is back ’(Je ﬀries 2015 ), Gilroy suggests that the British have never properly

confronted and mourned the atrocities of colonial rule and, as a consequence, su ﬀer

from ‘postimperial melancholia ’(Gilroy 2004 , 98). Indebted to the psychoanalysts

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich ’sin ﬂuential study on the West German people ’s

inability to mourn Hitler ’s death ‘and the larger evil of which their love for him had

been part ’(Gilroy 2004 , 107), Gilroy argues that melancholia is a pathological condition

that manifests itself when an individual or a nation wards o ﬀthe process of mourning.

Having failed to work through the loss of Empire and the uncomfortable truths about

Britain ’s colonial history, the British people revisit it obsessively. Whereas postimperial

melancholia is ‘mourning ’s pathological variant ’, imperialist nostalgia is a form of

outright guilt denial that allows Britons to ﬂeetingly restore the lost greatness of the

British Empire and feel proud of their history and national identity (Gilroy cited in

Jeﬀries 2015 ). Despite having been dubbed ‘a British ﬁlm with a Punjabi heart ’(Thorpe

2017 ), Chadha ’sﬁlm is an apt example of the most recent recrudescence of Raj

nostalgia.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 39 Viceroy ’s House charts India ’s transition from being part of the British Empire to

Partition and the founding of the two independent nations, India and Pakistan, in 1947.

In India, the British-Indian co-production was released as Partition: 1947 , but it was

banned in Pakistan as it was felt to misrepresent Jinnah and the national interests of

Pakistan (Bharathi 2017 ). The ﬁlm seeks to tell history from above and below by

adopting the upstairs-downstairs formula of Downton Abbey (ITV 2010 –15) and casting

Hugh Bonneville, the amiable Lord Grantham of this popular heritage television drama

in the role of Lord Mountbatten. The narrative revolves around how Mountbatten, and

his formidable wife Edwina (Gillian Anderson) manage momentous political change on

the Indian subcontinent. The downstairs sub-plot, situated in the servant quarters, tells

the story of star-crossed lovers Jeet (Manish Dayal) and Aalia (Huma Qureshi), whose

love cuts across India ’s religious divide between Hindus and Muslims. Only at the very

end does this historical epic reveal itself to be a postmemory ﬁlm in which the British-

Indian ﬁlmmaker Chadha has a strong personal investment. 1A series of white-on-black

intertitles states: ‘The Partition of India led to the largest mass migration in human

history. 14 million people were displaced. One million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died.

This ﬁlm is dedicated to all those who died and those who survived Partition ’. An old

black-and-white portrait of an Indian woman appears, accompanied by the text:

‘Including this mother who ﬂed Pakistan for India with her children. Her baby daughter

starved to death on the road ’. The camera zooms out of the photo and the mother

becomes part of a family portrait, surrounded by four children. The text reads: ‘After

18 months ’search, she was found by her husband in a refugee camp and the family was

reunited ’. As the portrait dissolves and black-and-white gives way to colour, the

children surrounding their mother are transformed into their signi ﬁcantly older selves,

while the mother is replaced by Gurinder Chadha. The accompanying text reads: ‘Her

granddaughter is the director of this ﬁlm ’.

This revelation enables the ﬁlmmaker of Punjabi descent to assume the stance of shared

victimhood with all the ‘political and psychological bene ﬁts [. . .] the honoured place of

suﬀering ’entails (Gilroy 2004 , 103). The emotional impact of this unexpected disclosure,

underscored by A. R. Rahman ’s stirring sound track, stands in stark contrast to the ﬁlm ’s

opening epigram, ‘History is written by the victors ’.Thedirector ’s personal connection

turns –what looks and feels like a British heritage ﬁlm –into a postmemory ﬁlm that

articulates the trauma of Partition in the attempt to make the nostalgia for the glamour of the

Raj ideologically more palatable. Whilst hist ory is written by the victors, the postmemory of

suﬀering, which is the avowed impetus behind this ﬁlm, is to pay tribute to the victims; but

the victims of what exactly? The violence of Partition or that of the British Empire?

Rather than making the su ﬀering of the victims its main focus, the ﬁlm ’s cinematogra-

phy celebrates the grandeur of the British Empire, captured in numerous aerial and wide-

angle shots of the imposing Viceroy ’s Palace, the British Raj ’s seat of government in Delhi.

Everything is on a grand scale, a reference to the vastness and power of the British Empire.

The pageantry and the ‘mass ornament ’(Kracauer 1995) of hundreds of liveried Indian

sta ﬀ, dressed in pristine white and vibrant red uniforms, and moving in synchrony and

symmetry –at the service of the British Viceroy –aﬀord aesthetic pleasure.

At the same time, the geometry of pattern reduces the people that form them to mere

building blocks, ‘fractions of a ﬁgure ’(Kracauer 1995 , 78), thereby de-individualising

the Indian subjects and intimating the supreme order and control exerted by British

40 D. BERGHAHN colonial rule. This becomes all the more apparent if one compares the symmetry of the

mise-en-scène and the geometrical patterns of lines and circles in which the Indian sta ﬀ

in the palace move and stand with the turmoil of Partition, which puts a sudden end to

the ﬁlm ’s visual splendour. Captured partly in black-and-white footage and partly in

colour, the incessant stream of Indian migrants is depicted as an amorphous mass that

merges with the colour of the sand and the dust of the roads. The marked change in the

ﬁlm ’s colour palette, from the vibrant hues of red and orange and crisp white of the

uniforms and liveries at the Viceroy ’s palace to a monochrome muddy brown,

diminishes the mise-en-scène ’s exotic appeal, given that high colour saturation is one

of the hallmarks of exoticism.

While on a narrative level Viceroy ’s House does not call into question the ethical

imperative of ‘giving a nation back to its people ’(in the words of Mountbatten ’s

daughter), on a visual level it exhibits a nostalgic yearning for the grandeur and control

of the British Empire. It thus reveals the same sense of ambivalence, or even schizo-

phrenia, which Harlan Kennedy described with exquisite sarcasm in relation to the Raj

revival ﬁlms of the 1980s:

While our ears and eyes swoon to the éclat of majestic scenery, lovely costumes, and gosh

all those elephants, our souls are being told to stay behind after class and get a ticking o ﬀ

for treating our colonial subjects so badly. For carving up other nations and leaving them

to put the pieces together. For snobbery, cruelty and oppression. [. . .] There ’s a love-hate

relationship with the Empire in British cinema that ’s totally unresolved. Intellectually, we

agree to eat humble pie about our imperial past. Emotionally, the impact of the India

movies is to make us fall head over heels in love with the dear dead old days, when even

Britain ’s villainies were Big; when even its blunders and failures had tragic status; and

when, if we had nothing else, goddammit, at least we had glamour (Kennedy 1985 , 52).

What distinguishes Chadha ’sﬁlm from the Raj revival ﬁlms of the 1980s, however, is

that it makes the genre ’s irresolvable tension between nostalgia and colonial guilt more

explicit. The director ’s British-Punjabi background, with its ambivalent cultural and

national allegiances, gives her an acute sensibility for the British, Indian and Pakistani

perspectives. Although it was Chadha ’s avowed intention to reach diverse transnational

audiences and to convey a ‘message of reconciliation [that would. . .] speak to

Pakistanis, to Indians, and to the British ’(Viceroy ’s House Press Kit 2017 ), the ﬁlm ’s

critical reception indicates that she could not square this circle. A review in the British

Figure 1. The ‘mass ornament ’of Indian liveried sta ﬀintimates control.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 41 magazine The Economist (2017 ) praises Chadha for ﬁlling ‘a gap in Britain ’s collective

consciousness and cultural memory ’and argues that ‘it will be hard for some to

maintain a sense of nostalgia and triumphalism for Britain ’s empire after watching

Viceroy ’s House ’. Conversely, Fatima Bhutto ( 2017 ), a member of the politically pro-

minent Bhutto family in Pakistan, describes Viceory ’s House as the product ‘of a deeply

colonised imagination [. . .and] a sorry testament to how intensely empire continues to

run in the mind of some today ’. Arguably, these diametrically opposite verdicts result

from the ﬁlm ’s generic hybridity. The juxtaposition of heritage cinema aesthetics and

black-and-white documentary footage of the Partition represents an attempt to temper

the nostalgia for the British Empire with a sense of postcolonial responsibility.

In the Mood for Love –an exotic nostalgia ﬁlm

Unlike Viceroy ’s House , Wong Kar-wai ’sIn the Mood for Love does not engage explicitly

with Hong Kong ’s colonial heritage nor does it articulate an elegiac longing for

a speci ﬁc moment in its past. Instead the ﬁlm exudes a nostalgic mood, a di ﬀuse

sense of loss whose appeal is as universal as it is locally speci ﬁc to Hong Kong. Tony

Rayns describes In the Mood for Love as a ‘requiem for a lost (colonial) time and its

values ’(Rayns 2015 , 43), while Vivian Lee ( 2009 ) sees it as part of the ‘nostalgia fever ’

that seized Hong Kong from the late 1980s throughout the 1990s and that has been

interpreted by Ackbar Abbas ( 1997 ) as a symptom of the handover anxieties that

accompanied Hong Kong ’s return to China in 1997. Although nostalgia is usually

centred on a particular period, Hong Kong ’s nostalgia fever lacked such a clearly

identi ﬁable object of loss and nostalgic desire. If there was ‘a place and time that clearly

stood out ’as a reference point then it was Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, ‘the

glamorous decadence of the ‘Paris of the East ’(Huppatz 2009 , 15), whose fate as

a cosmopolitan capitalist city taken over by China ’s Communist regime in 1949 seemed

to pre ﬁgure Hong Kong ’s future.

The reference to Shanghai is salient for In the Mood for Love in more than one

respect. The narrative is set in the 1960s amongst the Shanghainese diaspora, who live

cheek-by-jowl in multi-occupancy rooming apartments in Hong Kong. This is where

Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Mrs Chan, née Su Lizhen (Maggie

Cheung), meet. When they discover that their respective spouses, who are frequently

taking trips abroad, are having an a ﬀair, they spend more and more time together and

eventually fall in love with each other. Yet determined not to be like their unfaithful

spouses, they ostensibly never consummate their love.

Like the protagonists, Wong migrated with his family from Shanghai to Hong Kong

when he was ﬁve years old. His childhood memories of a communal way of life, where

privacy was scarce and gossip was rife, inform the ﬁlm ’s sense of place and narrative. The

vanishing glamour of a nostalgically remembered Shanghai su ﬀuses the mise-en-scène;

Shanghainese is spoken alongside Cantonese; one of the many songs, ‘Huayang de

Nianhua ’performed by the Shanghainese singer and actress Zhou Xuan in a movie in

1947, is brie ﬂy heard on the radio and, more importantly, lent its title to the Mandarin

release version of In the Mood for Love (Teo 2005 ,10).

The most striking visual reference to Shanghainese culture is the dizzying array of no less

than twenty-two cheongsams which Mrs Chan wears in In the Mood for Love . The dress

42 D. BERGHAHN changes are a marker of temporality, signalling the progression and repetition of time,

speci ﬁcally the time loops that characterise mourning as well as nostalgic recollection. As

Stephen Teo puts it: ‘Maggie Cheung stepping out in high heels and cheongsam, handbag

over an arm, hair perfectly coi ﬀured, is the single most evocative image of nostalgia in the

ﬁlm ’(Teo 2005 , 128). For Wong, the cheongsam is a nostalgia object to which he has

personal attachments. As he stated in interviews, there was no need for him to research

Maggie Cheung ’s dresses, ‘because our mothers dressed like this ’(cited in Teo 2005 ,11).

I would like to propose that Mrs Chan ’s cheongsams, ‘careful replicas of the 1930s Shanghai

style created by a reputed tailor ’(Lee 2009 , 32), simultaneously encapsulate the ﬁlm ’s

nostalgic as well as its exotic appeal, inviting culturally speci ﬁc readings amongst local

and global spectators.

The cheongsam –exotic or culturally hybrid?

Although the cheongsam is widely regarded in the West as a quintessentially Chinese

garment, its evolution since the beginning of the twentieth century suggests that it has

absorbed di ﬀerent cultural in ﬂuences from the East and the West and is thus hybridised.

It was brought to China by the Manchu who imposed it upon the Han people (Clark

2000 , 65). Originally a male garment, it was adopted by urban educated women in the

early Republican period (1911 –1949) as a signi ﬁer of women ’s gender equality. The

cheongsam ’s transformation into the iconic dress of Chinese femininity occurred in

Shanghai in the 1920s and thirties, where it was worn by ‘sing-song girls ’(or prostitutes)

as well as ﬁlm stars, who set fashion trends that were adopted by urban cosmopolitan

women. When it was abolished under Mao Zedong ’s Communist regime in the 1950s,

which regarded it as bourgeois and incompatible with the ideals of communism, it was

preserved as a symbol of Chinese cultural identity in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and

elsewhere overseas. Since many wealthy Shanghainese migrated to British-ruled

Figure 2. Mrs Chan ’s cheongsams encapsulate the nostalgic and exotic appeal of In the Mood for

Love.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 43 Hong Kong, followed by Shanghainese tailors, the cheongsam really came into its own

there and ‘evolved under the in ﬂuence of Western fashion [. . .] and became the everyday

wear of the colony ’s urban woman, who wore a very ﬁtted style accessorised with high-

heeled shoes to create the fashionable image of slimness and height ’(Clark 2000 ,23).

Internationally, the British ﬁlm The World of Suzie Wong (Richard Quine, 1960 ), which is

set in Hong Kong in the milieu of seedy bars and prostitutes, reinforced the connection

between the cheongsam and the sexual allure of the Oriental woman. During the 1950s

and 1960s, the cheongsam had a signi ﬁcant impact on international fashion centres in

Paris, Rome and New York on account of its perceived ‘“exoticism ”and its slim line,

which was then fashionable in Europe ’(Clark 2000 ,27).

The recent fashion revival of the cheongsam during the pre-handover period of

Hong Kong has been attributed to the di ﬀuse nostalgia that anchored itself in the

glamour of 1930s Shanghai and that led, amongst other things, to the establishment of

Shanghai Tang, a luxury emporium that ‘produces Chinese exotica for a global market ’

(Huppatz 2009 , 28). Launched in Hong Kong in 1994, and subsequently in twenty-four

other locations worldwide, Shanghai Tang ’s cheongsam, either ready-to-wear or tailor-

made by the store ’s‘Imperial Tailors ’, is one of its most popular items. Mainland China

eventually re-appropriated the previously outlawed garment and, at the 29 th Olympic

Games in Beijing in 2008, hostesses were wearing uniforms that paid tribute to the

national Chinese dress par excellence.

This brief excursion into the sartorial history of the cheongsam illustrates a number

of salient features of the exotic, outlined in the ﬁrst part of this essay: In a globalised

world, unadulterated cultural di ﬀerence is largely a fantasy and most expressions of

exotica, the cheongsam included, are culturally hybrid. Even so, the cheongsam has

retained its status as the foremost sartorial icon of Chinese femininity, and is actively

promoted as such in the global marketplace. In the process of transnational circulation,

the cheongsam –not unlike the English manor houses of English heritage cinema (cf.

Higson 2010 , 71) –shifts from being an ordinary marker of Chinese cultural identity to

an instantly recognisable signi ﬁer of exotic Chinese femininity.

Exoticism and enigmatization

It is such discrepancies in the interpretation of foreign, or familiar, cultural signi ﬁers

that Lai conceptualises as ‘enigmatization ’(Lai 2001 ), as discussed above. Maggie

Cheung ’s cheongsams function as a key device of ‘enigmatization ’. For local audiences

they evoke, ﬁrst and foremost, nostalgic memories of Hong Kong in the 1950s and

1960s and associations with the impact of Shanghainese fashion and culture during

those decades; for global audiences, by contrast, the cheongsam epitomises the exotic

and erotic allure of the Oriental woman, imagined as enigmatic, seductive, yet

restrained. Its ﬁgure-hugging cut emphasises the delicate feminine contours of

Maggie Cheung while at the same time constricting her movements, forcing her to

keep a perfectly upright posture and to take small, nimble steps. The high Mandarin-

style collar, which conceals her décolletage, adds an air of self-discipline to her attire.

Not unlike the constrictive corset of the Victorian era, which according to costume

historian David Kunzle ‘represents a form of erotic tension and constitutes ipso facto

a demand for erotic release, which may be deliberately controlled, prolonged and

44 D. BERGHAHN postponed ’(Kunzle cited in Bruzzi 1997 , 44), the tight- ﬁtting cheongsams in In the

Mood for Love mobilise a similar tension between sexual desire and its repression.

In fact, the cheongsam is the material embodiment of the ﬁlm ’s romantic plot,

encapsulating the irresolvable con ﬂict between erotic desire and an old-fashioned

moral restraint. Ultimately, the couple ’s unconsummated love speaks to a universal

nostalgia for ‘the past as a time when people believed in love ’(Teo 2005 , 126), a feeling

that has presumably ceased to exist in contemporary society. It is also pivotal to the

narrative of Stanley Kwan ’sRouge (1987 ), another celebrated Hong Kong nostalgia ﬁlm.

The fact that Mrs Chan and Mr Chow ’s love is, ostensibly, never consummated makes it

all the more poignant. The scene showing the couple consummate their passion was

shot but deleted by Wong shortly before the ﬁlm ’s release and is clearly marked as

a narrative elision. A montage of shots showing Mrs Chan running up and down the

stairs leading to hotel room 2046, which Chow Mo-Wan has rented, seemingly to be

able to write undisturbed, but more likely to avoid the neighbour ’s gossip, captures the

moral conundrum accompanying her ﬁrst visit. A cut to Mr Chow shows him inside

room 2046, smoking and waiting for her. When she knocks on the door, the camera

does not follow her inside. Instead a hard cut marks the ellipsis and shows Mrs Chan on

the threshold, already leaving. His remark ‘I didn ’t think you ’d come ’is followed by her

non-sequitur, ‘We won ’t be like them ’, a reference to their spouses ’aﬀair –and perhaps

also an oblique statement that, whatever may have happened between them, will not be

repeated. Only the crimson billowing curtains in the dimly lit hallway and Mrs Chan ’s

bright red coat function as material correlatives of the couple ’s desire, gesturing towards

a possible passionate encounter o ﬀ-screen. The emotional reticence surrounding the

relationship is in large measure attributable to the ﬁlm ’s elliptical editing, which with-

holds narratively signi ﬁcant information and evokes a sense of mystery. Although I am

not suggesting that local viewers are able to resolve the ambiguity surrounding the true

nature of the lovers ’relationship, for global viewers, the enigma is heightened by the

awareness of being cultural outsiders, who can never fully fathom the Other. In this

sense, the ﬁlm ’s many elisions contribute to its exotic allure.

Conversely, the theme of romantic love whose q ualities of renunciation and steadfastness

are linked to the past invites comparisons with similar, old melodrama s, such as David Lean ’s

Brief Encounter (1945 ), Douglas Sirk ’sAll that Heaven Allows (1955 )andFeiMu ’sSpring in

a Small City (1948 ). Meanwhile Wong himself mentioned early Hong Kong melodramas,

featuring the Chinese singer-actress Zhou Xuan such as An All-Consuming Love (Zhaohang

He, 1947 )alongsideHitchcock ’sVertigo (1958 ) as sources of inspiration (Teo 2005 , 118 –19).

These various intertextual references go a long way in explaining the transnational appeal of

In the Mood for Love since they allow for the exotic to be ‘domesticated ’,thatistosay,

translated and integrated into a familiar cont ext, thereby becoming legible. Bill Nichols

describes the process of de- and recontextual ization that underpins exoticism as making

‘the strange familiar [. . .by] recover[ing] di ﬀerence as similarity ’(Nichols 1994 , 18) and

suggeststhatitisoneofthepleasuresWorldCinemaa ﬀords transnational audiences.

According to Nichols, ‘recovering the strange as familiar ’(Nichols 1994 ,18)cantaketwo

forms: either discovering a common humanity that transcends cultural di ﬀerences or recog-

nising aesthetic forms and patterns familiar from European art cinema in World Cinema. In

theMoodforLove is a perfect example, insofar as it deploys the universal theme of love and

renunciation, coupled with the genre conven tions of melodrama, to temper its foreignness

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 45 and allow spectators across di ﬀerent cultural backgrounds to marshal diverse repertoires of

cinematic reference points in the process of cultural translation.

The ﬁlm ’s eclectic musical score, which combines the sad waltz of ‘Yumeji ’s Theme ’by

the Japanese composer Umbeyashi Shigeru with popular Chinese songs by Zhou Xuan and

Latino pop performed in Spanish by Nat King Cole, ful ﬁls a similar function. At the same

time this musical mélange blurs the line between exoticism and nostalgia given that tunes

like ‘Aquellos ojos verdes ’and ‘Te quiero dijiste ’by Nat King Cole were international hits in

the 1960s and therefore likely to evoke nostalgia in spectators all over the world.

Exoticism and the aesthetics of sensuous indulgence

Although a sense of enigma is unquestionably an essential feature of exoticism, it

cannot fully account for exoticism ’s allure. Exotic cinema is inextricably linked to

spectacle. Ever since early cinema ’s travelogues or ‘scenics ’assumed a prominent role

as a purveyor of exotic pleasures, inviting audiences to become armchair travellers who

marvel at the ‘wondrous di ﬀerence ’(Gri ﬃth 2002 ) of far-away lands, strange peoples

and their customs, this particular type of the ‘cinema of attractions ’(Gunning 2011 ) has

become associated with the spectacle of the exotic and the visual pleasure it a ﬀords.

Contemporary exotic cinema continues to prioritise spectacle over narrative absorption,

even if not throughout then at least in key ﬁlmic moments. If then Wong Kar-wai has

been criticised for privileging visual pleasure and for furnishing stylish images that

‘elude narrative justi ﬁcation ’(Bettinson 2015 , 58), then these critics have either failed to

grasp the aesthetic principles of exoticism or have decided to deliberately denounce

them. In other words, ‘moments of pure visual stimulation ’(Gunning 2011 , 75) which

invite the spectator to indulge in the elaborate visual style of In the Mood for Love , have

by some critics been misconstrued as shallow MTV aesthetics, a ‘fashion magazine

sensibility ’(Scott cited in Bettinson 2015 , 59), and as a form of aesthetic self-indulgence

(Thomson cited in Bettinson 2015 , 59). These charges are not dissimilar to those

regularly levelled at the museum aesthetics of heritage cinema, namely, an obsession

with glossy images that invites spectators to become absorbed purely on an aesthetic

level, which allegedly precludes any form of critical engagement.

Chris Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin ’s distinctive cinematography coupled with William

Chang ’s retro production design create a self-consciously aestheticized world in which even

the banal and quotidian reveal their immane nt beauty. The many tableaus in which the

colours of door and window frames echo those of Maggie Cheung ’s cheongsams, lend the

ﬁlm an overtly painterly quality. In addition to nuanced colour palettes, the repetition of

similar geometric patterns in the wallpaper and the fabric of the dress, invite the spectator to

feast their eyes on carefully composed images and symphonies of colour. The insistent use of

frames (reminiscent of Douglas Sirk ’s visual style) and visual obstructions that are unmoti-

vated by a character ’s point-of-view self-consciously emphasise the gesture of display.

Perhaps the most prominent cinematographic device, which invites the spectator to

pause and surrender to the visual splendour of images, is what Vivian Sobchack has

termed ‘the exhibitionism of slow motion ’(Sobchack 2006 , 347). Slow motion defami-

liarizes mundane activities, such as Mrs Chan ’s descent down the narrow winding stairs

to fetch noodles in her pale green and silver thermos at the nearby daibaitong , or Mrs

Chan and Mr Chow ’s walk home along the dimly lit streets of Hong Kong, and

46 D. BERGHAHN trans ﬁgures them into moments of intense aesthetic pleasure. The slow motion, accom-

panied by the sad waltz of Yumeji ’s Theme and Nat King Cole ’s‘Aquellos ojos verdes ’,

lends these sequences a dance-like quality, while the character ’s seemingly weightless,

ﬂoating movements underscore the ephemeral nature of fading memories.

Visual spectacle alone does not adequately account for the exoticism of Wong ’sﬁlm,

which goes far beyond an ‘aesthetic of visual indulgence ’(Lee 2009 , 23), provoking instead

a multisensory response in the spectator. The camera seems to caress the texture of surfaces,

whether it is masonry pock-marked with greenish lichen in Angkor Wat, the crumbling

plaster and peeling posters in the alleyways, the smooth re ﬂection of speckled old mirrors, or

the glistening wet rain on a street lamp and on Chow ’s jet black hair. The close-ups of these

coarse, smooth and wet surfaces emphasise tactile impressions and, as such, would appear to

deftly illustrate what Laura Marks has theorised as ‘haptic visuality ’if it were not for the fact

that Marks asserts that ‘haptic images refuse visual plenitude [and deliberately. . .] counter

viewers ’expectations of [. . .] exotic visual spectacle ’(Marks 2000 ,177).YetMarks ’assertion is

arguably borne out of her programmatic intent to promote an ‘intercultural cinema ’of

a more experimental, ethnographic type that ‘represents sense knowledges not from

a position of wealth but of scarcity ’(Marks 2000 , 239), which she contrasts with more

dominant cinemas, including ‘art-house imports ’that represent ‘sense knowledges [merely]

as commodities ’(Marks 2000 , 239). Wong ’s aesthetics of sensuous indulgence depends

precisely on the combination of visual spectacle and haptic visuality, referring to

a particular type of embodied perception that invokes memories of touch, with other forms

of synaesthesia (the perception of one sensati on by another modality) and intermodality (the

linking of sensations from di ﬀerent domains) in order to reproduce the multi-sensory

pleasure associat ed with exoticism.

‘Sense longing ’, to use Laura Marks ’(2000 , 240) evocative term, denoting the pursuit

of sensory stimulation and indulgence, has always been one of the chief driving forces

behind exotic quests and conquests, be it the importation of spices and stimulants like

Figure 3. Nuanced colour palettes lend the ﬁlm a painterly quality and reveal the beauty of the

ordinary.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 47 coﬀee and cocoa which was part of the colonial enterprise, or the exotic/erotic pleasures

which Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Paul Gaugin, Victor Segalen and countless other

travellers described and depicted when they believed to have found paradise on earth in

Tahiti and other Polynesian islands. The encounter with the exotic Other has tradi-

tionally been imagined as a re-awakening of the senses that have been dulled by the

repetitive humdrum of modernity. Hence, for Segalen, an important commentator on

exoticism, the experience of the exotic Other culminates in an ‘Intensity of Sensation ,

the exaltation of Feeling; and therefore of living ’(Segalen 2002 , 61). In the Mood for

Love speaks to contemporary Western societies ’anhedonia and desire to escape the

perceived blandness of Western culture by inviting spectators to sense ‘how other

people sensuously inhabit their world ’(Marks 2000 , 241).

Paradoxically, however, the quote from the Shanghainese writer Liu Li-Chang, with

which the ﬁlm concludes, appears to contradict the ﬁlm ’s numerous haptically charged

images: ‘He remembers those vanished years as though looking through a dusty

windowpane. The past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he

sees is blurred and indistinct ’. The lines are worth citing here since the inherent

contradiction heightens the sense of enigma while simultaneously identifying In the

Mood for Love as a nostalgic memory ﬁlm that emphatically foregrounds ‘the imperfect

retrieval of memory ’(Rayns 2015 , 81) as one of its key concerns.

Conclusion

As I hope to have demonstrated in the close analysis of the two case studies, imperialist

and exotic nostalgia ﬁlms di ﬀer from each other in terms of their aesthetic and

ideological trajectories. While both types of nostalgia ﬁlm glamourise the past through

sumptuous images and high production values, the wide-angle shots and mass orna-

ment which fetishize imperial power and control in Viceroy ’s House have (except for the

use of vibrant colours) little in common with the spell-binding beauty of images and

aesthetics of sensuous indulgence of In the Mood for Love that engenders a more

universal longing for a time or place where intensity of feeling was possible.

Both case studies complicate my initial hypothesis that imperialist and exotic nostalgia

ﬁlms deploy particular aesthetic strategies that e voke a nostalgic yearning for an idealised past

in local and a desire for an exoticised Other in global spectators. Viceroy ’sHouse is a British

heritage ﬁlm that, arguably, exoticises Britain ’simperialpastmorethanitexoticisesIndia,

thereby calling the distinction between an exotic and a nostalgic spectatorial response into

question. While there is no doubt that the ﬁlm has the capacity to evoke nostalgia in some,

ideologically so predisposed British spectators, it is questionable whether it can elicit a similar

aﬀective resonance on the Indian sub-continent. The Indian ﬁlmreviewsIwasabletoaccess

do not suggest this. IntheMoodforLove is ultimately a sophisticated pastiche of Eastern and

Western in ﬂuences that challenges the notion of a pure, unhybridized local culture and, by

implication, the idea that only a local community of spectators with insider knowledge into

1960s Hong Kong culture can experience nostalgia.

I wish to illustrate this point with a personal anecdote. I remember my own mother

wearing cheongsam-inspired silk dresses in 1960s West Germany. Perhaps, this is not

surprising given the cheongsam ’s well-documented impact on international fashion.

One in particular I have never forgotten. It was a beautifully tailored black silk dress

48 D. BERGHAHN with a large bright turquoise and a pale yellow stylised ﬂower printed diagonally across

from the waist to the hemline. And she wore her dark hair coi ﬀured in a style similar to

that of Maggie Cheung, elegant yet entirely motionless. For me, watching Wong ’sﬁlm

over and over again has been an exotic, but simultaneously also a nostalgic pleasure,

because the ﬁlm ’s costume and production design, alongside Nat King Cole ’s Latino

pop songs, continuously oscillate between the strange and the familiar.

Note

1. According to Marianne Hirsch, who developed the concept in relation the children of

Holocaust survivors, postmemory is ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance

and from history by deep personal connection ’(Hirsch 1997 , 22). Whereas history may

elide or even purposely obliterate memories that cannot be reconciled with o ﬃcial (often

heroic) accounts of the past, the ‘deep personal connection ’that underpins postmemory

accords a rather di ﬀerent meaning and a ﬀective value to events that would otherwise be

forgotten or repressed.

Acknowledgments

I presented an earlier version of this essay, entitled ‘Nostalgia and Exoticism as Tactics of

Audience Engagement in Contemporary World Cinema ’at the NECS Conference in

Amsterdam on 28 June 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential con ﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniela Berghahn is Professor of Film Studies in the Media Arts Department and Associate

Dean for Research at the University of London, Royal Holloway College. She has widely

published on post-war East and West German cinema and on the relationship between ﬁlm,

history and cultural memory. Her extensive work on migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe

has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain. Her

publications include Head-On (BFI, 2015), Far- ﬂung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in

Contemporary European Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2013), European Cinema in Motion: Migrant

and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with C. Sternberg, Palgrave Macmillan,

2010), Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester UP, 2005),

a special issue of New Cinemas (2009) on Turkish German cinema and Unity and Diversity in

the New Europe (Lang 2000). She is currently working on a project that explores exoticism in

contemporary transnational cinemas.

References

Abbas, A. 1997 .Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance . Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Appadurai, A. 1996 .Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 49 Berghahn, D. 2017 .“Encounters with Cultural Di ﬀerence: Cosmopolitanism and Exoticism in

Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra,

2015). ”Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 14: 16 –40.

Bettinson, G. 2015 .The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-Wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of

Disturbance . Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP.

Bharathi, D. 2017 .“Partition: 1947 or Viceroy ’s House Banned in Pakistan: Six Reasons to Know. ”

Ajanta News , August 28. https://ajantanews.com/2017/08/28/partition-1947-or-viceroys-house

-banned-in-pakistan-6-reasons-to-know/

Bhutto, F. 2017 .“Fatima Bhutto on Indian Partition Film Viceroy ’s House :‘I Watched This

Servile Pantomime and Wept. ’”The Guardian , March 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ ﬁlm/

2017/mar/03/fatima-bhutto-viceroys-house-watched-servile-pantomime-and-wept

Bongie, C. 1991 .Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin De Siècle . Stanford: Stanford UP.

Bruzzi, S. 1997 .Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies . London: Routledge.

Chow, R. 1995 .Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese

Cinema . New York: Columbia UP.

Clark, H. 2000 .The Cheongsam . Oxford: Oxford UP.

Cook, P. 2005 .Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema . London: Routledge.

Elsaesser, T. 2005 .European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood . Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP.

Forsdick, C. 2001 .“Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism. ”Paragraph 24

(3): 12 –29. doi: 10.3366/jsp.2001.24.3.12 .

Forsdick, C. 2003 .“Revisiting Exoticism: From Colonialism to Postcolonialism. ”In Francophone

Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction , edited by C. Forsdick and D. Murphy, 46 –55.

London: Arnold.

Gilroy, P. 2004 .After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.

Gri ﬃth, A. 2002 .Wondrous Di ﬀerence: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the- Century Visual

Culture . New York: Columbia UP.

Gunning, T. 2011 .“The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. ”

In Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings , edited by T. Corrigan,

P. White, and M. Mazaj, 69 –76. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.

Hartley, L. P. 1953 .The Go-Between . London: Hamish Hamilton and The Book Society.

Higson, A. 2006 .“Representing the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film. ”

In Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism , edited by L. D. Friedman, 91 –109. 2nd

ed. London: Wall ﬂower Press.

Higson, A. 2010 .Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s .London:I.B.Tauris.

Hirsch, M. 1997 .Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory . Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard UP.

Huggan, G. 2001 .The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins . London and New York: Routledge.

Huppatz, D. J. 2009 .“Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong. ”Design Issues 25 (2): 14 –28. doi: 10.1162/

desi.2009.25.2.14 .

Hutcheon, L. 2009 .“Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern. ”In The History on Film Reader ,

edited by M. Hughes-Warrington, 249 –259. London and New York: Routledge.

Jameson, F. 1983 .“Postmodernism and Consumer Society. ”In Postmodern Culture , edited by

F. Hal, 111 –125. London: Pluto Press.

Jeﬀries, S. 2015 .“The Best Exotic Nostalgia Boom: Why Colonial Style is Back. ”The Guardian ,

March 19. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/19/the-best-exotic-nostalgia-boom

-why-colonial-style-is-back

Kennedy, H. 1985 .“The Brits Have gone Nuts. ”Film Comment 21 (4): 51 –55.

Kracauer, S. 1995 .The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.

Lai, L. C. 2001 .“Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering. ”In At Full

Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World , edited by C. M. Yau, 231 –250. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Lee, V. P. Y. 2009 .Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination . Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan.

50 D. BERGHAHN Marks, L. U. 2000 .The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses .

Durham: Duke UP.

Negra, D. 2002 .“Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and

Television. ”The Velvet Light Trap 50: 62 –76.

Nichols, B. 1994 .“Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and Film Festival

Circuit. ”Film Quarterly 47 (3): 16 –30. doi: 10.2307/1212956 .

Rayns, T. 2015 .In the Mood for Love . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rosaldo, R. 1989 .“Imperialist Nostalgia. ”Representations 26: 107 –122. doi: 10.1525/rep.1989.26.issue-1 .

Rushdie, S. 1992 .Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 –1991 . London: Granta Books.

Segalen, V. 2002 .Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity , Translated and ed. Y. R. Schlick.

Durham: Duke UP.

Sobchack, V. 2006 .“Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow

Motion. ” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded , edited by W. Strauven, 337 –354.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP.

Spengler, C. 2009 .Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolour Aesthetics in Contemporary

American Film . Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Stone, J. 2016 .“British People are Proud of Colonialism and the British Empire Poll Finds. ”The

Independent 19. January: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-people-are-

proud-of-colonialism-and-the-british-empire-poll- ﬁnds-a6821206.html

Teo, S. 2005 .Wong Kar-wai . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Economist (2017 ).“Viceroy ’s House is an Antidote to Colonial Triumphalism. ”March 7.

https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/03/07/viceroys-house-is-an-antidote-to-colonial-

triumphalism

Thorpe, V. 2017 .“British Film with a Punjabi Heart: Director ’s Personal Take on Partition. ”The

Guardian . January. 16.

Viceroy ’s House Press Kit. 2017. Transmission Films, Australia. http://www.transmission ﬁlms.

com.au/ ﬁlms/viceroys-house

Filmography

Birth of Empire: The East India Company . 2014. UK: BBC2.

Bui, T., dir. 1999 .Three Seasons . Vietnam, USA: Giai Phong Film Studio, October Films, Open

City Films.

Chadha, Gurinder, dir. 2017. Viceroy ’s House . UK, India, Sweden: Pathé, Reliance Entertainment,

BBC Films, Ingenious, et. al .

Cronenberg, D., dir. 1993 .M. Butter ﬂy. USA: Ge ﬀen Pictures.

Fei, M., dir. 1948 .Spring in a Small City / Xiao cheng zhi chun . China: Wenhua Film Company.

Frears, S., dir. 2017 .Victoria & Abdul . UK: BBC Films.

Herzog, W., dir. 2015 .Queen of the Desert. USA, Morocco: Benaroya Pictures, H Films, Raslan

Company of America.

Hitchcock, A., dir. 1958 .Vertigo . USA: Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions.

Indian Summers , Season 1 and 2. 2015, 2016 . UK: Channel 4.

Ivory, J., dir. 1983 .Heat and Dust . UK: Merchant and Ivory Productions.

Kwan, S., dir. 1987 .Rouge / Yan zhi kou . Hong Kong: Golden Harvest Company, Golden Way

Films Ltd.

Lean, D., dir. 1945 .Brief Encounter . UK: Cineguild.

Lean, D., dir. 1984 .A Passage to India . UK, USA: Emi Films, Home Box O ﬃce.

Lee, A., dir. 2007 .Lust, Caution / Se ,jie. USA, China, Taiwan: Haishang Films.

Mehta, Deepa., dir. 2005 .Water . Canada, India: Deepa Mehta Films.

Pollack, S., dir. 1985 .Out of Africa . USA: Mirage Enterprises.

Quine, R., dir. 1960 .The World of Suzie Wong . USA: World Enterprises.

Sirk, D., dir. 1955 .All That Heaven Allows . USA: Universal International Pictures.

Sivan, S., dir. 2007 .Before the Rains . USA, India, UK: Merchant Ivory Productions.

TRANSNATIONAL SCREENS 51 Wargnier, R., dir. 1992 .Indochine . France: Paradis Films, La Générale d'Images.

Wong, K-W, dir. 2000 .In the Mood for Love / Faa yeung nin wa . Hong Kong, China: Block 2

Pictures; Jet Tone Production, Paradis Film.

Zhang, Y., dir. 1991 .Raise The Red Lantern / Da hong deng long gao gao gua . China, Hong Kong:

Taiwan: ERA International, China Film Co-Production Corporation, Century

Communications, Salon Films.

Zhang, Y., dir. 1999 .The Road Home / Wo de fu qin mu qin. China: Columbia Pictures Film

Production Asia, Guangxi Film Studio.

Zhaohang, H., dir. 1947 .An All-consuming Love / Chang xiang shi . Hong Kong: Wa Sing Film

Company.

52 D. BERGHAHN