Event

Iggy Cortez

A Yielding Movement into Depth: Nighttime, Remediation, and the Minoritarian Sensorium in Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018)

Through the lens of the nocturnal, this talk situates Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) within aesthetic and technological developments across world cinema as well as contemporary Chinese art cinema. Bi’s film takes place in the mountainous, southwestern province of Guizhou, a region associated with enduring economic underdevelopment, sudden investments in spectacular infrastructure, and its sizable ethnic minority populations (shǎoshù mínzú) – particularly the Miao people, an ethnic group of which Bi is a member. Bifurcated into two, loosely connected parts, the film’s first half is a fragmented neo-noir that suddenly digresses into the film’s spectacular second half - an oneiric excursus at night filmed in an almost hour-long uninterrupted take intended for 3D projection. In a certain reading, the night serves as a metaphorical conceit that links dynamics of technological remediation (digital and drone cinematography, the multiple afterlives of the stereoscopic image) to social and economic transformations. Drawing on Barbara Klinger’s contention that one of 3D cinema’s central concerns is “the relationship between natural space and spectacle,” I interrogate how low-light cinematography, the follow shot’s occlusion of the face, and the phantasmatic presence of the stereoscopic 3D image elaborate a psychogeographic sense of place that prioritizes a critical sensory awareness of our coordinated orientation to and movement within profilmic place. Rather than treat Guizhou and the Miao people as fixed and fully intelligible entities or representations, Long Day’s Journey into Night underscores an approach to ethnic minoritarian identity constituted not only by representational legibility or social construction but also by forms of embodied sensing and attunement. At stake in this discussion is an interrogation of the multisensory modes through which minoritarian exclusion is materialized phenomenologically beyond the visual field, particularly through sensory (dis)orientations to national narratives of progress and timelessness that underpin discourses of late capitalist “modernity.

Iggy Cortez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; the visual and sensory culture of digital media; debates on form and aesthetics across theories of anti-colonialism and race; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment. He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technologically-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).