Arts, Faculty of
Theatre and Film, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Liu, Siwei
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Noir is an elusive discourse, a genre filled with smoking bars, deception, dark alleyways, and disillusioned outlooks of life. So is flânerie, a drifting, aimless mode of being in a fast-changing world. What happens if these two forms converge, when one engages in delayed drifting in a world foreclosed by noir fatalism? Such aesthetic of noir flânerie is the central concern of this thesis. Through close analysis of Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), I argue that noir flânerie functions as a critical strategy of framing ambivalent movement within narratives of disillusionment, creating an alternative time-space that problematizes the mainland socialist teleology. This thesis draws on Linda Chiu-han Lai’s articulation of the flâneur as a critical method for probing the cinematic postsocialist Chinese cities as an embodied cinematic experience of discovery. I further invoke Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the any-space-whatever and David H. Fleming’s any-now(here)-space to complement Lai’s method, in reinforcing the affective potential of the flâneur’s movement in mapping noir fragmentation, which mirrors postsocialist disorientation. Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, this thesis interprets the cinematic Chinese city as an anonymous noir-coded any-space-whatever, embodied through the flâneur’s exploration, which emerges as critical representational strategies in a time of heightened ideological control and accelerated film market development. Besides textual analysis, I also relate to directors’ own account as well as the cultural policies of mainland China and France, to account for the transnational conditions underpinning the films’ circulation. This thesis thus situates itself in the intersection of global noir, mainland postsocialist cinema, and transnational Chinese cinema. Addressing these two films from this intersection is important because they emerge in a new industrial and sociopolitical context of the Chinese mainland. Through the case studies of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this thesis seeks to foreground how postsocialist Chinese cinema, mainland noir, and transnational Chinese cinema intersect as discursive frameworks, with flânerie serving as the mediating strategy through which a mainland Chinese-ness is performed and negotiated both in the domestic market and in festivals abroad.
Noir Flâneur As Method: Mapping Postsocialist Affect In The Wild Goose Lake (2019) And Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) by Siwei Liu B.A., McGill University, 2023 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Cinema and Media Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2025 © Siwei Liu, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Noir Flâneur As Method: Mapping Postsocialist Affect In The Wild Goose Lake (2019) And Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) submitted by Siwei Liu in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Studies) Examining Committee: Dr. William Brown, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, UBC Supervisor Dr. Yang Renren, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Noir is an elusive discourse, a genre filled with smoking bars, deception, dark alleyways, and disillusioned outlooks of life. So is flânerie, a drifting, aimless mode of being in a fast-changing world. What happens if these two forms converge, when one engages in delayed drifting in a world foreclosed by noir fatalism? Such aesthetic of noir flânerie is the central concern of this thesis. Through close analysis of Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), I argue that noir flânerie functions as a critical strategy of framing ambivalent movement within narratives of disillusionment, creating an alternative time-space that problematizes the mainland socialist teleology. This thesis draws on Linda Chiu-han Lai’s articulation of the flâneur as a critical method for probing the cinematic postsocialist Chinese cities as an embodied cinematic experience of discovery. I further invoke Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the any-space-whatever and David H. Fleming’s any-now(here)-space to complement Lai’s method, in reinforcing the affective potential of the flâneur’s movement in mapping noir fragmentation, which mirrors postsocialist disorientation. Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, this thesis interprets the cinematic Chinese city as an anonymous noir-coded any-space-whatever, embodied through the flâneur’s exploration, which emerges as critical representational strategies in a time of heightened ideological control and accelerated film market development. Besides textual analysis, I also relate to directors’ own account as well as the cultural policies of mainland China and France, to account for the transnational conditions underpinning the films’ circulation. This thesis thus situates itself in the intersection of global noir, mainland postsocialist cinema, and transnational Chinese cinema. Addressing these two films from this intersection is important because they emerge in a new industrial and sociopolitical context of iv the Chinese mainland. Through the case studies of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this thesis seeks to foreground how postsocialist Chinese cinema, mainland noir, and transnational Chinese cinema intersect as discursive frameworks, with flânerie serving as the mediating strategy through which a mainland Chinese-ness is performed and negotiated both in the domestic market and in festivals abroad. v Lay Summary This project investigates flânerie in contemporary film noir in The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018). Bringing together the discourse of film noir, flânerie and postsocialist mainland Chinese cinema, it develops the figure of the flâneur not only as a narrative troupe but as a cinematic interpretive method, a spatial and embodied way of seeing, informed by Linda Chiu-han Lai’s use of flâneur as interpreative method and Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the any-space-whatever. The flâneur becomes a mode of perception, narrative, and filmmaking that drifts through postsocialist uncertainty and dislocation. By using flânerie as both method and metaphor, this thesis contributes to the growing field of Chinese film noir studies as well as postsocialist mainland Chinese cinema studies and offers a new way to interpret how these films reflect the affective and spatial tensions of postsocialist life, particularly the disorienting coexistence of commercial pressure and social disillusionment. vi Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished, and independent work of the author, Siwei (Jonathan) Liu. An early draft of Chapter 1 was presented at UBC’s Asian Studies Graduate Student Conference in March 2025. Generative AI ChatGPT was consulted for copyediting purpose only. No generated text was pasted into the thesis and all AI suggestions were carefully reviewed to decide if they should be implemented. All literature review, case analysis and conclusion are individual and original works by the author. All film stills reproduced in this thesis are used under the fair dealing provisions of the Canadian Copyright Act for purposes of scholarly research. vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................ v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 “Filmmaking with Chinese Characteristics”: Noir Flânerie and New Mainland Film Industry Trend ....................................................................................................................... 10 1.2 Detour: the “Transnational” of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night ...................................................................................................................................... 14 1.3 Noir Flânerie in the Chinese Any-now(here)-spaces of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night ...................................................................................................... 24 Chapter 2: The Wild Goose Lake and the cartographic fugitive ............................................. 31 2.1 Diao Yinan’s Industrial Noir and Noir as Disciplinary Pedagogy ................................. 31 2.2 Mapping the Wild Goose Lake: Cartographic Fugitive and Pastiche Construction ....... 40 2.3 Arrival without departure: the Train Station and the Cabin as threshold spaces ............ 51 viii 2.4 Romantic Flânerie: Making Time in the Other Spaces of The Wild Goose Lake ......... 58 2.5 Chapter Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 66 Chapter 3: Long Day's Journey Into Night and the Sleepwalker of Nostalgic any-now(here)-spaces ............................................................................................................................................ 68 3.1 Bi Gan and The Industrial Context of Long Day’s Journey Into Night .......................... 68 3.2 Noir Fatalism: Luo’s Failed Attempts at Self-narrativization in the Present.................. 72 3.3 Mapping Bi Gan’s Kaili and Dangmai: Chinese Any-space-whatever and Reflective Nostalgia ............................................................................................................................... 77 3.4 Deferred Mourning and Imagined Romance: Drift between Memory and Present ........ 83 3.5 The Super Sleepwalker: Reclamation of the Real through Dream ................................. 87 3.6 Chapter Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 98 Chapter 4: Conclusion and Reflection .................................................................................... 102 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 117 ix List of Figures Figure 1.Captain Liu points to the uncartographed Wild Goose Lake area on the official city map. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 00:28:34. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing............................................................................................. 41 Figure 2. Captain Liu shows an unofficial cartography of the Wild Goose Lake. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019. 00:28:59. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ......................................................................................................................... 41 Figure 3. Map of Berlin. M, dir. Fritz Lang, Nero-Film AG, 1931, 00:19:04. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing............................................................................................. 42 Figure 4. The map of Algerian Casbah. Pépé le Moko, dir. Julien Duvivier, Paris Film, 1937, 00:03:17. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ................................................. 43 Figure 5. Liu walks past the real estate advertisement. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:09:20. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. .......... 48 Figure 6. Liu first appears as silhouettes at the station. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 00:03:10. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. .......... 53 Figure 7. Zhou points his gun at the newspaper and starts to hallucinate. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:04:22. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. .......................................................................................................................................... 57 Figure 8. Liu watches the singing head show. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:11:40. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ............................ 62 Figure 9. Zhou and Liu shares cigarettes on the boat. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019,01:15:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ........... 64 x Figure 10. Zhou and Liu watch the "lightshow" of the search team. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:18:01. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. .......................................................................................................................................... 65 Figure 11. Luo Hongwu walks out of Xiaofeng Restaurant. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 00:10:31. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ................................................................................................................................... 85 Figure 12. Luo follows Wan into a tunnel. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 00:19:24. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ........ 86 Figure 13. The boy takes Luo to the prison on a scooter. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 01:23:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. .......................................................................................................................................... 92 Figure 14. Luo and Kaizhen spectate the town from above. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 01:43:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. ................................................................................................................................... 93 xi Acknowledgements To start with, I’d like to express my immense gratitude to the time I spent at the master’s program in cinema studies at the University of British Columbia. The past two years have not been easy, but it was a meaningful, fulfilling and enriching experience to connect with some of the most enlightening minds in this field we call cinema studies, but which far exceed the sole focus of cinema and well into the realm of some of humanity’s most unresolvable inquiries. I’d like to thank my supervisor, Dr. William Brown, who guided me through this rigorous process, bouncing ideas back and forth with me, and pushing me to accomplish the best work of my capacity. Thank you for your patient proofreading and thorough feedback, and for your encouragement for me to explore this thesis in the way I want to. I’d also like to thank my second reader, Dr. Yang Renren. I am grateful to have been able to discuss with you early in this project’s conception at the UBC Asian Department Graduate Student Conference. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Professor Mila Zuo, who has always been a positive and supportive figure during my time at UBC, and Professor Ernest Mathijs as well as Dr. Keren Zaiontz for your inspiring enthusiasm in media culture and pedagogy. I’d also like to thank my peers, especially the Riley Brothers (Will Riley and Liam Riley), Kong Chuiwen, and Donnie Lee. Thank you for engaging in attentive discussion about my thesis and for your support and care. Lastly, I’d like to thank my family: my mom, my dad, my grandma, my grandpa, my grandma’s sister (my auntie), for the many sudden night-time video phone calls asking what I am up to. I’d also like to thank my friends back home in China, whom I occasionally overload with text messages to update about my latest troubles. Finally, I’d like to thank myself, for persisting through all and constantly trying to be better than yesterday. Failure is not scary, but fear is. xii Dedication “It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it” --Raymond Chandler 天生我材必有用，千金散尽还复来。 --李白《将进酒》1 Chapter 1: Introduction “Ever thought of running away?” Liu Aiai asks Zhou Zenong, as the two fugitives from the law circle idly on the banks of the Wild Goose Lake. Having just shared a moment of romantic intimacy on a boat, Zhou stares out into the distance -- and into the car lights streaking through the darkness of the night. He replies: “I’m going nowhere. You’re here to help me get the reward paid to my wife.” Having accidentally killed a police officer in a turf conflict with a rival gang, Zhou’s time is numbered as the police slowly closes in. Convinced the law will catch up in no time, Zhou plans to stage a turn-in with Liu, a streetwalker sent by Zhou’s old connection Huahua, and claim the bounty to send to Zhou’s estranged wife. The mundane yet spectacular image of the police headlights, which supposedly are after the wanted Zhou, becomes a kind of nocturnal lightshow. This glimmer, brief and strange, echoes another light, a firework, at the end of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018). As the camera rotates around the town in Luo Hongwu’s dream, he and Kaizhen sit together in a room that “spins” when a spell is cast. Having returned home to mourn his father’s death, Luo embarks on a journey to investigate the whereabouts of his estranged ex-lover Wan Qiwen in his hometown Kaili. Trying to piece together the past of Wan by visiting different people in Wan’s life, Luo realizes that Wan is not who she claims to be. Traversing between his own memory and his investigation, his reality slowly dissolves into a dream populated by doppelgängers, including his dead childhood friend, his estranged mother, and Wan Qiwen, now with the dream alias of Kaizhen and a different background story. Realizing that he never did find Wan in reality, Luo sobs and kisses Kaizhen, while the room starts to spin like a carousel. The camera detaches, returning quietly, to the sparkler Luo had 2 gifted Kaizhen. It burns yet its spark does not dim. It burns on until the credits roll, perhaps even after it rolls. The two sequences, surreal and fatalistic in their character’s outlook , are taken from two mainland Chinese films, the first, Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019), the second, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. The Wild Goose Lake tells the story of Zhou Zenong, a fugitive gang leader who accidentally kills a police officer and decides to turn himself in so that his estranged wife and child can claim the bounty. Along the way, he meets Liu Aiai, a “female swimming companion”, a euphemism for streetwalker operating in the area, mobilized by the gang to facilitate Zhou’s arrest, aiming to claim the reward themselves. Together, the two flee from both the police and the gang, seeking the perfect moment to orchestrate the arrest, and thus his own demise. Long Day’s Journey into Night, meanwhile, follows a middle-aged Luo Hongwu who goes home following the death of his father, and who, while there, searches for his vanished lover, Wan Qiwen. His search, however, proves fruitless, as instead he ends up wandering into his own dream, where he confronts his traumatic past. The sequence of the fireworks is the last shot of Luo’s dream, where he reunites with the double of Qiwen, Kaizhen, only in the fantastic fabric of dream, where sparkler burns on forever. A.O. Scott, in his review of The Wild Goose Lake, highlights the film’s stylized descent into noir-inflected violence and “chilly, lurid, (and) existentialist attitude”. Meanwhile, Justin Chang points out the dreamlike “unreality” of Long Day’s Journey into Night, noting the film’s focus on the noir hero’s encounter with the “femme fatale” and its noir atmospheres (“Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Both films thus fall under what David Desser terms the “Stranger and Femme Fatale” neo-noir sub-genre (633): with Zhou Zenong as the “stranger” on the run that wanders into the Wild Goose Lake and Liu Aiai as the lethal luring “Femme Fatale” in The Wild Goose Lake; and Luo 3 Hongwu as the estranged homecoming stranger in search of the lethal woman Wan Qiwen in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. While both films are considered as Chinese neo-noir (Chang; Scott), “neo-noir” itself is a contested concept. Mark T. Conrad argues that any film released after the classic noir period can be considered neo-noir, particularly when the director exhibits an awareness of noir conventions. He includes Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Chinatown (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976) as early examples (Conrad, “Introduction” 2). R. Barton Palmer similarly sees neo-noir as emerging in the New Hollywood era, emphasizing genre reflexivity in films like Body Heat (1980) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) (195). However, as James Naremore points out, the timeline of classic noir itself is contested: Paul Schrader’s framing (from The Maltese Falcon [1941] to Touch of Evil [1958]) is often the most widely accepted, though also sometimes contested (35). Writing on noir’s dissemination from Hollywood into world cinema, Desser traces this narrative premise, where “men who wander into situations where they come across a woman to whom they are immediately and fatally attracted”, to the western noir classics Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) (633). In separate interviews, Bi Gan and Diao Yinan have both acknowledged the deliberate use of this particular noir trope: Bi Gan specifically quotes Double Indemnity as the narrative paradigm for his film, where the story of a doomed love affair with Wan echoes the fatal pull of Luo’s nostalgia (Bi, “Shijian yu kongjian”). Diao Yinan, on the other hand, also stages Zhou Zenong’s quest for redemption as inseparable from his entanglement with the femme fatale figure Liu Aiai (Li Li 63). Both films also somewhat exemplify Desser’s “the couple on the run” noir narrative (633),1 1 According to Desser, the cinematic precursor of the “couple on the run” noir stream may be traced to Bonnie and Clyde and even Breathless from the French New wave. See Desser, “Global Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism”. Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry Keith Grant, New York, USA: University of Texas Press, 2012, pp. 628-648. 4 especially The Wild Goose Lake, in which Zhou and Liu become not only entangled for survival but also romantically, fleeing from the gang and the police alike. Meanwhile, Long Day’s Journey Into Night involves Luo and Wan’s planning to run away, even if they do not succeed in doing so. Both stories exude what Paul Schrader situates as the noir sensibility: “a passion for the past and the present, but also a fear of the future”, emphasizing “loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurities” (11) caught in a world that is beyond any one individual’s cognitive capacity. The emergence of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night can thus be explained through Desser’s global noir paradigm, which frames the rise of international noir as part of the dissemination of Hollywood’s influence in global media culture, as well as the advance of mass media communications (632). Similarly, Caleb Kelso-Marsh notes that noir has become a marketing label used to promote East Asian films to Western audiences to provide certain genre predictability and their recognizance in the international film market (45). Aside from this practical consideration, the noir narrative troupes, including the hard-boiled stranger detective, the seductive femme fatale, and the decaying urban cityscape, in their “eastern” noir renditions, signify the new East Asian experience of modernity (Fay and Nieland 2; Kelso-Marsh 47; Teo 144). Therefore, the noir-ness of both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night lies in the conscious use of Western noir paradigms for transnational legibility and to express the local experience of modernity, both issues which I will return to in the chapters that follow. While both directors acknowledge the noir influence upon their work, what emerges in these films is not a simple localization of genre conventions, but a different depiction of a deferred movement altogether. Instead of mobility in the sense of action or chase, both films emphasize on protracted, reflective drift: movements that are less about advancing the plot than about 5 characters lingering, delaying, and reminiscing within space. A fugitive on the run, Zhou, while seeking to avoid being arrested, delays his capture, wandering with Liu through the humid, flickering liminality of the Wild Goose Lake. Luo, meanwhile, drifts between the present and past of Kaili, his investigation taking the form of a journey across real and remembered sites, until he finally dissolves into the film’s famous long take that lasts an hour as he meanders through a reanimated prison deserted a long time ago in his dream. Indeed, both films are deeply entangled with the problem of (im)mobility, a paradoxical mode of movements where one moves but not actively so, movements entangled with loitering, of drifting across fragmented spaces. Both films present excess of time and space (longer takes and deep focus) to unfold, showing momentary detachment from the narrative of a heated chase. The diegetic world unfolds as time passes, warping the characters as well as the audience in an embodied experience. Reading these films as simply Chinese noir export (Chang, “At Cannes”; Scott) risks overlooking how noir sensibility is mapped through these acts of drifting, through a mode of creating bodily relation to the image of an urban landscape that is culturally and affectively specific. I argue the overlap of noir sensibility and this detached mode of movement in The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey into Night constitutes a distinct aesthetics that reflects postsocialist disorientation, disillusionment, and temporal suspension through constructing virtual images of postsocialist Chinese cities. Such movement where one actively moves but never arrives to his destination could be described using the term flânerie, its agent the flâneur.I adopt Linda Chiu-han Lai’s reinterpretation of the flâneur as a critical method to uncover how these films stage flânerie in a noir narrative that embodies the affective mood of living in the postsocialist present, without overt political reference to any real Chinese city. The flâneur, the 6 idle aimless stroller, first explained by Charles Baudelaire as the “passionate spectator” of modern life, embodies a paradoxical position of a detached, intellectual witness of modernity’s contradictions (Baudelaire 5; Frisby 87; Tester 12). The prototypical flâneur observes to understand, and in doing so, displaces himself “away from home and yet feel(s) oneself everywhere at home” (Baudelaire 5). This act of walking-observing, otherwise known as flânerie, constitutes a series of “rational actions” including “investigating, knowing, reflecting and interpreting” that unfold a “poetics of discovery” through the camera’s movement across public space (Lai 216). Lai argues that the ground-level drift in films like Xiaowu (1997) and Suzhou River (2000), where the camera moves alongside its flâneur-characters, immerses the viewer in a fragmented, continuous present that requires their active interpretive participation (219, 225). In Lai’s analysis, many of the films’ protagonists are not actually idle intellectuals making informed observations, but rather what Isabel Carrera Suárez calls counter-flâneurs, whose experience of space is predicated not on vision or intellectual knowledge but on the bodily experience itself. As Suárez argues, the counter-flâneur is a subaltern sensor-body, often gendered, racialized, and economically constrained, a participant navigating spatial violence, visibility, and exclusion (Suárez 854-856, 864). Xiaowu, the unemployed pickpocket from Fengyang in Xiaowu, and Mada, the street-smart delivery driver entangled with Shanghai’s crime underworld in Suzhou River, exemplify this position. Both are marginal social agents whose mobility is tied not to leisurely observation but to survival. The ground-level camera that tracks their pedestrian movement creates a perceptual mode inseparable from their embodied negotiation with the city space and the various encounters in it. Rather than providing an aerial view or panoramic shot to establish spatial control, the films immerse the spectator in fragmented perspectives, where space is disclosed only as it is traversed. This walking becomes, 7 as Lai puts it, a form of discourse-making in generating spatial knowledge: an alternative mapping of urban knowledge that resists the abstract mastery promised by top-down cartographies (206). While Suarez’s counter-flâneur is a strong counterpoint to the Baudelaire’s intellectual flaneur, this thesis still uses flâneur and flânerie to designate the figures and actions they carry out but implicating and acknowledging Suarez’s paradigm. In doing so I hope to conjoin Suarez’s decentered reinterpretation with Baudelaire’s metaphorical use to emphasize both the bodily and mental disorientation of the characters. The significance, or the need to conjoin noir and flâneur in investigating the two films at hand is thus to not only account for how they perform a certain noir-ness in the mainland Chinese context, and how their performance of the deferred flâneur-esque movement contributes to its noir-ness (and vice versa), and how the conjoined theoretical lens of noir flâneur enlightens our understanding of their performance of mainland Chinese cities on the screen. As both manifestations of the crisis of modernity, my bridging between noir and flânerie helps to shed light on the affective state that they seek to represent. Flânerie in the contemporary Chinese context thus becomes not a utopian concept of free mobility, but an embodied way of knowing through the unfolding of cinematic duration and traversing in the space of the postsocialist city, as opposed to Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century flâneur who is navigating urban space with and at ease. Lai links flânerie to Michel de Certeau’s pedestrian speech-act, which sees walking as an enunciative act that creates spatial rhetoric (97), and argues that the characters found in Suzhou River and Xiaowu are walking to enunciate postsocialist alienation (Lai 207). She further aligns this drift with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, depicting the postsocialist Fengyang and Shanghai, respectively the settings for Jia 8 and Lou’s films, as layered, disjunctive, and unstable, and as spaces composed of overlapping historicities (Lai 207). Heterotopia thus becomes an interpretive lens to read Chinese postsocialist cities, foregrounding their spatial and temporal contradictions as sites where unresolved historical trauma and an uncertain future collapse into a present in standstill (210). Within this framework, Lai rethinks the flâneur not only as a narrative figure driven by social alienation, but also as a cinematic mode of representation, where the camera becomes an embodied flâneur, drifting alongside its characters while enabling viewers to encounter the fractured landscapes in an embodied way (211). In light of Lai’s method, both the Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night center on marginal characters who are suspended in movement, figures who drift not toward resolution but entrapped in delay, reminiscence and deferral. Their meandering delays narrative progress and opens a space of encounter with the heterogenic postsocialist landscape. What emerges here is not just a thematic interest in stasis or transience, but a logic of dwelling both in time and space. It is this affective encounter with space through movement, I argue, that constitutes the films’ strategy of embodying the lived psychological experience of postsocialist uncertainty, fragmentation and disillusionment. Such noir-inflected flânerie is not unprecedented. As both a counterpoint and contextual precursor for the noir flânerie found in the Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey into Night, I identify an earlier stream of noir flânerie from the sixth-generation cinema: Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu (1997), Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), and Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003). The “sixth-generation” of Chinese cinema refers to a loosely defined group of directors who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy around the same time in the 1990s. Though not a coherent film movement with a specific thematic concern, their works are often concerned with depicting the 9 transformations brought about by mainland urbanization, with low-budget and on-location shooting style (Zhang 6). These films align noir sensibility as contingent to the mainland Chinese postsocialist condition, embodied through the wandering of marginal social agents: pickpocket, street-smart, conmen, who navigate the fractured social and emotional terrain of the postsocialist city characterized by the unresolved historicity of China’s abrupt transition from socialism to state-controlled capitalism (McGrath 20). In terms of the noir sensibility of this earlier representation of flânerie, Phillippa Lovatt reads Xiaowu and Blind Shaft as marked by docu-realist aesthetics, staging disillusionment with both socialist and capitalist promises (182). Suzhou River, by contrast, mobilizes noir through its Hitchcockian reference, creating a dystopic Shanghai populated by doubles and absences (Silbergeld 15-16; Yeung 189). Often working semi-underground with low budgets and banned from domestic release for their explicit political reference or lack of approval to enter international film festivals, these films are considered to embody the sixth-generation style of social relevancy, where they actively confront urban transformation by documenting it (Braester 22; Nie 380; Zhang 6). The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey into Night, however, emerge under different conditions. While both films retain the motif of the drifter in a gloomy postsocialist landscape, neither expresses overt political overtones: Zhou’s flânerie is framed as a momentary detachment from his fleeing from the police, and the narrative centers on his self-sacrifice to deliver the bounty for his family; Luo’s flânerie is rendered introspective and nostalgic, traversing between a fragmented present in search of a lost past before descending into a dream away from the real. Neither film poses itself as concerned with representing the “real” Chinese postsocialist city: 10 while Long Day’s Journey Into Night is indeed set in Kaili, Guizhou province, a primarily Miao2 ethnic settlement, the film avoids direct ethnographic depiction of any cultural landmarks. On the other hand, The Wild Goose Lake sets itself in a Chinese “Southern city” constructed through a pastiche of different locations within Hunan province, using Wuhan dialect, offering not the image of a real city, but a stylized collage that is the Wild Goose Lake area. Here, cinematic urban spaces function less as an indexical representation of any specific Chinese city and more as a symbolic mise-en-scène constituted by noir iconographic staples like run-down factories, decaying buildings, and dark alleyways. They become not spaces of social investigation but stylized cities of the noir genre. “Filmmaking with Chinese Characteristics”: Noir Flânerie and New Mainland Film Industry Trend Although this aesthetic departure from representing the real to an imagined pastiched reality could be traced to the changing Chinese urban landscape itself, whose postmodern fragmentation seemed to demand stylized representation, I argue this shift from the sixth-generation’s neorealist approach to a stylized noir city could be explained by a broader institutional restructuring of state control over media and cinema, in an attempt to cater to every side’s need. Directors like Lou Ye, Jia Zhangke and Li Yang, were penalized under what was then SARFT, the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television.3 In 2013, SARFT merged with 2 The Miao are a diverse, mountain-dwelling ethnolinguistic group residing primarily in China, and also in Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand. Officially classified under the umbrella term “Miao” in China, the category encompasses four distinct subgroups: the Hmu people of southeast Guizhou, the Qo Xiong people of west Hunan, the A-Hmao people of Yunnan, and the Hmong people of GuiZhou, Sichuan, Guanxi, and Yunnan, whose languages, customs, and histories are mutually divergent. For further detail, see “Miao.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Miao. Accessed 19 Aug. 2025. 3 Lou Ye received a 2-year ban from filmmaking in the mainland while Suzhou River was banned to release in the 11 the General Administration of Press and Publication to become SAPPRFT (the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television), signaling a growing fusion of propaganda and media oversight (Lin 40). By 2018, SAPPRFT was restructured into the NRTA (National Radio and Television Administration) (“Organizational History of Broadcasting and Television Institutions”) under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, with an assigned duty of acting as the formerly dismantled National Film Bureau in film-related regulation and policymaking (“Central Propaganda Department”; Lin 40). As a point of reference, both prior organs SARFT and SAPPRFT were affiliated directly to the State Council of the PRC, while its “publicity” duties were led by the Central Propaganda Department (“Organizational History”; Wang Yong). This Central Propaganda Department takeover signifies an intensification of the Party’s direct management over media’s, including cinema’s, representational function as an ideological tool (Lin 41). Such a move is not surprising given that the CCP’s developmental mandate4 noted the need to further boost the national “soft power”, a term adopted by former president Hu Jingtao to frame China’s need to develop its cultural industry as an essential step in mainland due to its lack of approval from the SARFT to enter overseas film festival. Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu was banned for the same reason. Jia received a 5-year ban from filmmaking in the mainland. Li Yang’s Blind Shaft was shot without going through script censorship and he received a 3-year ban from filmmaking. See Wang Lin 汪琳, “Jia Zhangke: Mingyun benshen nandao shi tian zhuding?” 贾樟柯：命运本身难道是天注定？ [Jia Zhangke: Is Fate Itself Predetermined?], The New York Times Chinese, 30 Oct. 2013; Liu Hui 刘晖, “Li Yang fangtan: dianying de yiyi” 李杨访谈: 电影的意义 [Interview with Li Yang: The Meaning of Film], Jintian wang; and “Lou Ye, bu que qian le” 娄烨，不缺钱了 [Lou Ye No Longer Lacks Money], The Paper, 9 Nov. 2021. 4 The Five-Year Plan is central to China’s national economic planning system. It outlines objectives and directions for national development by coordinating major construction projects, the distribution of productive forces, and key structural ratios within the national economy. With the exception of the post-war recovery period (1949–1952) and the economic readjustment phase (1963–1965), China has issued successive Five-Year Plans beginning in 1953. See more about the history of The Fiver-Year Plan in See “The First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957).” The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China, 28 Oct. 2005, www.gov.cn/test/2005-10/28/content_88648.htm. 12 “the great revival of the Chinese people” (Hu).5 The thirteenth five-year plan, spanning from 2016-2020, called for boosting soft power by “enhancing the influence of Chinese culture”, as well as “the cultivation of competitive cultural enterprises and brands as pillars of the national economy” (“Cultural Development and Reform Plan”). Such ideological tightening also coincides with the need to meet the demand of an expanding film market. The number of screens in China rose from 1,581 in 2002 to 31,627 in 2015, with domestic box office growing from 0.13 billion USD in 2001 to 6.76 billion USD by 2015, and annual feature production increasing from 100 to 686 (Yang 3). To meet the demands of this expanding market, censorship procedures were streamlined to encourage more production. As Diao Jinuo observes, the Chinese Film Industry Promotion Law mandated in 2017, which simplified the production approval process and permitting resubmission after initial rejection, is an attempt by the CCP to transition from a government-led film industry to a “market-led industry under the government’s macro-supervision” (89).6 Meanwhile, to boost Chinese soft power, the Chinese Film Industry Promotion Law promoted transnational and international co-productions, by granting tax incentives, state funding, or even national cinema status depending on individual cases (Diao Jinuo 80). 5 See more history of the PRC’s soft power discourse in Yanling Yang’s “Film Policy, the Chinese Government and Soft Power”. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, vol. 14, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 71–91. https://doi.org/10.1386/ncin.14.1.71_1. 6 However, the leniency of the Chinese Film Promotion Law is only conditional: all public screenings still require final approval; foreign co-productions are restricted to sanctioned modes; and participation in international festivals without approval can lead to severe sanctions, including full production bans. See more in Diao Jinuo’s The Chinese Film Industry: Features and Trends, 2010-2016. 13 Thus, the ideal mainland film of this time carries a dual mandate: to be ideologically aligned with the State, best if exportable as a testament of the national soft power, but also not risk its domestic market-facing potentials. This new “duty-heavy” cinema is encapsulated by Film Industry Aesthetics, a film ontology coined by Peking University Professor Chen Xuguang to call for future Chinese filmmakers towards a more “modernized”, economically sustainable way of filmmaking that cultivates cultural strength (Chen Xuguang 33). This concept emphasizes finding the balance between the “artistic” and the “commercial”, between the auteur and the market, and prioritizes the producer’s role as a mediating force (Chen Xuguang 36). Inheriting the socialist construct of art as an educational tool, this type of film must direct masses to the correct mode of thinking and behaving under socialist value (Chen Xuguang 40). In this sense, Film Industry Aesthetics is less a specific mode of representational aesthetic like neorealism or surrealism, and more a set of general guidelines that echoes the teleological mandate of the PRC’s soft power agenda. Li Li has critiqued “film industry aesthetics” as functioning more as a descriptive framework aligned with the state’s cultural agenda, summarizing policy discourse such as the Film Industry Promotion Law and directives on cultural development. According to Li, the term looks more like a “text-to-text” paraphrasing without any imaginative or critical theoretical position (97). However imaginative or not, Chen Xuguang’s Film Industry Aesthetics nevertheless serves for this thesis as a useful framework that summarizes the new context and characteristics in which Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake were being made: as films which are auteur-driven and market-conscious, but which are subject to the regulatory gaze (ideologically and legally) of the mainland authorities. 14 Detour: the “Transnational” of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night As both films showcase a transnational trajectory in their making and distribution, it is perhaps worth taking a brief detour to invoke the critical discourse on transnational Chinese cinema and transnational noir to illuminate my discussion. Drawing from both discourses, I situate both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night as supported by the transnational festival circuit in circulating mainland stories, which are narratives set within the mainland and shaped by the mainland’s industrial and legal frameworks, including censorship and domestic market expectations mentioned above, even as they circulate through international festival circuits. Meanwhile, the recourse to transnational noir also illuminates the transnational appeal of the noir genre’s adaptability across borders, as a recognizable cinematic grammar responding to the manifestations of global modernity, and in this case, responding to Chinese postsocialist modernity. Transnational Chinese cinema or rather, approaching Chinese cinema from a transnational perspective, was first introduced by Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu in 1997, who in his seminal Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender argues cinema that are usually deemed “Chinese” must be reconsidered “as transnational” in a new framework of cultural exchange, production, and distribution in the new century (3). Lu’s transnational turn in Chinese film studies calls for examination of how the two films concerned in this thesis are made under the new globalizing order of transnational capitalism (“Notes on four major paradigms in Chinese-language film studies” 18). What’s more, he argues the sole consideration of “Chinese cinema” from a single national perspective to be obsolete as it fails to capture the cross-border flow of capital, talent and media in shaping the Chinese filmmaking industry (Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender 3). With his transnational approach, Lu also 15 begs a careful consideration of the specific Chinese-ness that a film performs, emphasizing on the regional cultural differences between the mainland China, the Taiwan straits, Hong Kong (SAR) and the Chinese diaspora (Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender 3). On Lu’s foundation, Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim developed the term “critical transnationalism” to further account for the interplay of regional culture and transnational capitalism in a film’s production and reception. As Higbee and Lim argue, Lu’s transnational turn, though illuminating, still veers the “transnational” towards a celebration of the “supranational flow or transnational exchange of peoples, images and cultures at the expense of specific cultural, historical or ideological context in which these exchanges take place” (Higbee and Lim 12). As Chris Berry further demonstrates, the transnational is not necessarily an equal exchange between corporations within nation-states, but a manifestation of a pre-existing international order where private companies rely on uneven international treaties or state military might to implement new configuration’s division of labor globally (463). In the filmmaking industry, this transnationalization of film thus manifests in how a project might be a co-production between two nationally bounded entities, or an international production where one company employs production and post-production crew from different countries, assigning the division of labor across borders. For Desser, one of the most important elements of neo-noir is its transnational qualities, in its “transnational (mode of) filmmaking, cross-cultural influences, and the idea of global culture” (628). Desser argues that in the 1990s, there is no debate of noir’s existence as a genre because noir has already entered global filmmakers and critics consciousness, through the circulation of classical Hollywood movies and new Hollywood movement (629). Desser identifies in neo-noir like Pulp Fiction (1994) and the Usual Suspects (1995) a “mixing and recycling of new and old 16 and low art and high art” that characterizes the “neo” quality of noir as well as the New Hollywood movement in general (Naremore qtd. in Desser 633). Indeed, as Kelso-marsh notes, Hollywood film noir has circulated in South Korea and Japan post-World War II and shaped their media cultures in hybridized ways (48). Film noir in Asia thus should be understood like its classical Hollywood precursor: that as classical Hollywood Film noir was a transnational result of German émigré directors, American pulp fiction and French poetic realism, Asian noir likewise bears the transnational fusion between classical Hollywood noir and regional cinematic traditions (48). Kelso-marsh attributes the rise of noir in Asian cinema to a common need for a cinematic lexicon to respond to the rise of “common experiences of modernization, urbanization, and globalization” as well as “Americanization” in the Asian contexts (47). James Naremore (77), Andrew Spicer (136) and Edward Dimendberg (18) likewise attributes the depiction of a dystopian urban landscape, the inclusion of the femme fatale, and noir paranoia to the problematics of modernity, which results in fast changing socioeconomic transformation as well as gender role changes and spatial transformation. Writing on Hong Kong noir, Stephen Teo also identifies an intraregional flow between Hollywood noir and Hong Kong jinfei pian (cops and robbers’ films) in John Woo and Johnnie To’s cinema (137). In terms of mainland noir, Stefano Locati argued for a “quasi-noir” Chinese cinematic tradition in the socialist cinema of the 1960s, in fante pian (the anti-spy genre) which uses expressive noir lightings and depicts paranoia (99). However, it is only quasi-noir because these movies often end in an unequivocally morally righteous ending, depicting the socialist good defeating the capitalist evil, due to the films’ propagandist nature (103). Later in the genealogy is the sixth-generation directors, whose noir-tinged works have become the point of discussion for many theorizing on noir from the mainland, especially against the backdrop of rapid socioeconomic transformation after the 17 mainland’s turn to market economy from the socialist system, which Jason McGrath describes as “postsocialist modernity”. McGrath’s “postsocialist modernity” provides an account for how modernization emerges in the mainland after the failed socialist revolutions of the 1960s. The sudden turn to capitalism from socialism resulted, according to McGrath, not only in the rise of consumerism but also in a cultural rupture and ideological disorientation, as the Chinese Communist Party frames the capitalist turn not as defeat but as part of a broader strategy of modernization and ethnic revival (6). Li Zeng has argued that Lu Chuan’s The Missing Gun (2002) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise (1998) exemplify the mainland Chinese localization of noir, in response to the fragmentation and capitalist orientation of postsocialist modernity, while showcasing a degree of postmodern self-awareness of genre mixing (“Hollywood Models and the Production of Film Noir in Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century”). This postmodern pastiche is likewise observed by Harry Kuoshu, who observes the carnivalesque energy in Ning Hao’s noir-comedy Crazy Stones (2006) as a response to the boom of capitalist consumerism and the money fetishism of the mainland (23). Yunda Eddie Feng and Jerome Silbergeld have examined Lou Ye’s Suzhou River vis-à-vis Hitchcock’s disorienting structure and psychoanalytic constructions of doubles in a quickly changing Shanghai (Feng 193; Silbergeld 16). Phillippa Lovatt has positioned Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu and Li Yang’s Blind Shaft in the same realm of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), as docu-fiction noir, which constitutes an “aesthetic of disenchantment” of both socialist and capitalist ideals on both the thematic and visual level (180). But it was not until 2014 that film noir entered mainland audience conscious and the official consciousness, with the massive success of Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice. The then Film Bureau of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television praised Black Coal, Thin Ice’s festival and market success in a 18 special seminar, calling it a “milestone event” in the “many years of Chinese film industry reform” (Yao 40). Other scholars who attended the same seminar also considered the film’s use of noir to be especially enlightening for Chinese filmmakers moving forward, noting that noir seems to be the quintessential genre to both appeal to the market with its inclusion of violence and romantic tension and to explore meaningful moral dilemmas (Yao 41). The general conclusion of this high-profile seminar was that noir seems to be the definitive genre that mainland filmmakers could appropriate and localize to explore mainland transformations, while garnering festival and market appeals. Both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night need to be considered under this transnational lens because they are both officially recognized as Sino-French co-productions, with major investments from mainland entities and minor funding from France’s Center National du Cinéma et de l’image animée ’s Aide aux Cinémas du Monde program (“Aide aux cinémas du monde : résultats des comités de chiffrage--Résultats des commissions”). A deeper dive into the eligibility to receive this funding reveals that the Aide aux Cinémas du Monde is an attempt by the French Cultural Ministry to fashion itself as the leading figure in discovering and supporting auteurs from the so-called “world cinema” (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, “Aide aux cinémas du monde.”). As Chris Berry argues elsewhere, the term “world cinema”, unlike the more politically radical “third cinema”, has come to represent a marketing label used in global film festivals for films from outside of the global north (“What Is Transnational Cinema? Thinking from the Chinese Situation” 112). In the following chapters on the two films respectively, I will consider their specific transnational co-production status in detail. What the two films share is that they seek to be simultaneously market-facing and festival-certified, attempting to ensure both festival prestige and domestic box office profit. Following the 19 transnational approach, both films’ “Chinese-ness” need also be considered. I argue both films are mainland Chinese stories, namely of postsocialist experience, directed by mainland writer-filmmakers, but produced and distributed transnationally in the global art-house festival film circuit: while they circulate domestically as star-filled crime romances (Ge Yiting; Fan and You 47), they are visible transnationally as mainland Chinese noir exports in their Cannes appearance (Scott; Chang). Both films exemplify the contemporary trend of transnational cinema as an alignment between the auteur, the capital which supports it, the mainland Chinese ideological apparatus and market which greenlit its release, and the festival circuit. In other words, both films produce an image of mainland Chinese-ness, encoded through noir genre, that seeks to align with all the above mentioned. If the sixth-generation directors were caught between the increasing demand of the market, the strong ideological regulation from the states, then this newer strand of noir flânerie exemplified by Diao and Bi actively engages to fit every side’s expectation, while preserving their auteurist touch. In this new configuration, both noir genre and flânerie, and in their combined form noir flânerie, become a mode of transnational legibility, bridging state-authorized art cinema and global festival markets, backed by major domestic funding while securing domestic market allure. This attempt to bridge the commercial and the festival shows in their packaging: both featured major stars (Hu Ge and Gwei Lun-mei in The Wild Goose Lake, Tang Wei in Long Day’s Journey Into Night), and both were marketed through recognizable genre appeals (gangster noir in the former, romantic mystery in the latter) (Li Li, “‘Diqiu zuihou de yewan’: Dianying gongye” 46; Shen Yang). Social media campaigns amplified this positioning, with Long Day’s Journey Into Night promoted as a New Year’s Eve “date movie” (Chen Hongyu 66) and The Wild Goose Lake pushed through action-heavy trailers, promoted as 20 a film whose violent spectacles reportedly “attracted Quentin Tarantino in its Cannes screening” (Chang, “At Cannes”). Unlike their sixth-generation precursors, The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night had large budget and strong box office performance (“Diqiu zuihou de yewan Box Office Data”; “Nan fang chezhan de juhui Box Office Data”). Both garnered international festival attention while also released in domestic theatres backed by social media campaigns using livestream platform Douyin (Tiktok’s Chinese version) (Chen Hongyu 66; Shen Yang). In contrast, earlier noir flânerie films were banned domestically for skipping or failing script censorship, even as they garnered international acclaim (Jaffee; Li Yang). They largely circulate online and on DVD, rendering them underground films that relied on overseas distribution rights for income (Nie 381). In terms of fulfilling the duty to enhance the PRC’s soft power, both films continue a tradition of Sino-foreign co-productions, a factor that likely facilitated their festival competitiveness. The Wild Goose Lake was co-produced with Michel Merkt, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night with Charles Gillibert, both famous for their producing credits in European art house cinema.7 It is no news that Chinese cinema partakes in crossborder co-production: Xiaowu was produced with Hong Kong production company Hutong (“Hui zuo shengyi de Jia Zhangke”), and Suzhou River co-produced by Philippe Bober, the founder of Coproduction Office, a Paris-based company known for supporting radical European auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Roy Andersson, and Jessica Hausner (Coproduction Office). The 7 Michel Merkt is a Swiss producer whose producing credits include Elle and Bacurau. He also served on the Caméra d’Or jury at Cannes in 2017 and was named an honorary citizen of Cannes in 2023 for his patronage of numerous films. Charles Gillibert is a French producer, whose production company CG cinema which produced Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, is also known producing Leos Carax’s Annette and Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. Both producers are considered avid supporters of global auteur cinema. See more about Merkt at “Michel Merkt.” Festival de Cannes, www.festival-cannes.com/p/michel-merkt/.; see more about Gillibert at “À propos.” CG Cinéma, www.cgcinema.eu/a-propos. 21 director of Xiaowu, Jia Zhangke, for example, is no stranger to crossborder co-production, as his later works attracted international investment including the Sino-French-Japanese produced Unknown Pleasures (2004) and the Sino-Japanese produced A Touch of Sin (2013). However, neither Unknown Pleasures nor A Touch of Sin were permitted to release in China due to their political undertones, despite critical acclaims in international film festivals (“Hui zuo shengyi de Jia Zhangke”). His later work, the Sino-Japanese-French produced Mountains May Depart (2015), while permitted to release in Chinese mainland, only grossed a total of 32 million RMB in domestically on a 40 million RMB budget, with the overseas distribution sale covering most of the cost (“Hui zuo shengyi de Jia Zhangke”; Shan he gu ren Box Office Data). Similarly, Lou Ye’s Sino-French production Purple Butterfly (2003) grossed an abysmal domestic number of 3 million RMB on a 20 million investment despite being a nominee for the Cannes Palme d’Or, relying heavily on foreign distribution sales to make ends meet (“Lou Ye wenyi wangshi”; “Lou dao”). Though this Sino-foreign co-production is not exclusive to Diao and Bi but also to Lou and Jia from a prior era, it is with Diao and Bi’s films that such co-produced festival-stamped “art house” films managed to garner not only critical high-art recognition but enormous domestic box office revenue. This alignment, however, as Sheldon Lu argues, does not necessarily negate their artistic expression and render the film as simply another instance of a circulating commodified image of mainland China, or as a passive reinforcement of the global transnational film market logic that conceives it (“Notes on four major paradigms in Chinese-language film studies” 19). Chris Berry deepens this claim by considering transnational cinema not as a system that produces a single unified outcome every time it is invoked, but as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari terms “assemblage”, a “contingent ensemble of diverse practices” between technology and 22 politics, which “not only create their own spaces, but also give diverse values to the practices and actors thus connected to each other”(Aihwa Ong, qtd. in Berry 468). Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, Chris Berry argues that the transnational cinema, despite being enabled and working within the global configuration of capitalism (as well as that of cultural capital like film festival exposure and distribution), is in itself “a continuous self-vibrating plateau” that is internally heterogenous and contingent (468). Transnational cinema in its cross-border circulation then, as Berry notes, will inevitably entail different reception, therefore “radically open to connecting with that which is different” (468). With this in mind, after situating The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night within both the mainland socio-political apparatus and the global festival circuit, I turn now to how these films negotiate and perform the image of mainland China at this intersection. Under the new conditions of ideological compliance, international festival circulation, and market appeal, the earlier sixth-generation neorealist approach, which directly confronts urban transformation through a low-budget, documentary style, has largely receded. Instead, The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey into Night see the emergence of stylized noir cities: a pastiche Southern city in the former, and a fictionalized ruined version of Kaili in the latter. These films operate not by referencing the city’s profilmic reality but by crafting an affective noir landscape that vaguely overlap with postsocialist experience, without directly referencing it. These cities can be argued to be formed through Gilles Deleuze’s any-spaces-whatever, and furthermore through David H. Fleming’s any-now(here)-spaces, as I will demonstrate in the chapter to follow. According to Deleuze, the any-space-whatever is a space without clear time-space coordinates, one that cannot be properly situated within any rationally mapped territories but appears as a fragment of itself (Bogue 77; Deleuze 109). In his focus on postwar cinema, 23 certain recurring spaces become evident: urban ruins, fragmented interiors, anonymous buildings, or indifferent zones of passage (Deleuze 120; Rodowick 74). The Wild Goose Lake area and Kaili are not presented as real Chinese cities but rather noir-coded iconographies of “any-Chinese-city-whatever”. What anchors these films is not geographical precision in the real China but an assemblage of recurring signifiers recognizable both from postsocialist landscapes and from noir traditions on a space of disillusionment that points to a Chinese reality that is not locatable in the real. In The Wild Goose Lake, run-down factories, overcrowded residential slums, and half-finished construction sites evoke both the postsocialist urban decay and noir’s fascination with ruins and marginal zones. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the proliferation of anonymous sites like the tunnel, the deserted restaurant, the Tarkovsky-esque flooded room, the ruined cabaret, structures Kaili into a network of unnamed ruins. Though all of these any-spaces-whatever do exist in a narrative of regional dialect (Hubei dialect in The Wild Goose Lake and Guizhou dialect in Long Day’s Journey into Night), therefore granting them some degree of spatial determination, the omission of any ethnographically representative landmark nonetheless renders such cognitive determination always in tension with their vaguely defined Southern Chinese-ness.8 In both films, space is not tied to the specificity of Wuhan or Kaili but recoded as a generic noir landscape that is recognizably mainland Chinese yet fundamentally unlocatable. 8 Notably, Liu Siqi identifies this emerging cinematic trend as the “Chinese Southern New Wave”, featuring films that portray family and social issues set in the subtropical southern China. The films create what IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) describes as a “hypnotic and clammy atmosphere,” drawing on misty weather, mountainous terrain, and the disoriented inner worlds of their characters (International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019 qtd. in Liu 43). Liu names Bi Gan as a key figure for his focus on memory and personal experience. While Diao’s the Wild Goose Lake is not autobiographical, it does also create a misty humid ambiance using incessant rain and sweat. See more in Liu, Siqi. “The South China New Wave: Cinema as Xinxiang (Affective-Ideational Imagery).” Chinese Film in the Twenty-First Century: Movements, Genres, Intermedia, edited by Corey Schultz and Charlotte Mello, Routledge, 2024, pp. 43–58. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003371694-5. 24 Such decentering from the mandarin-dubbed media signifies a creative relocation to the outskirt, the cultural “other” of dominant Chinese cultural production and socio-economic center, a symbolic move to establish an alternative creative discourse (Zhang Bin and Luo Hanxiao 69-70). While evoking a sense of loss and suspension, these spaces, are traversed not by narrative intention but rather through flânerie, whose contingent encounter with the “any-Chinese-city-whatever” constitute not a coherent critique but a series of singular situations in an unrecognizable singular city that could only be taken virtually and symbolically. The postsocialist critique of the sixth-generation thus makes way for a safer noir flânerie, as it predicates its invocation as purely a genre stylization, distancing itself from directly confronting the sociopolitical real, but rather evoking it on an ambivalently symbolic level. Noir Flânerie in the Chinese Any-now(here)-spaces of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night This representational shift from the real Chinese city to the virtual requires a methodological update. If Lai’s flâneur as method foregrounds how cinematic representation of movement could expose the complex political fabric of the postsocialist city, the flânerie in The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey into Night renders the city as a mise-en-scène of postsocialist affect, detaching from explicit historical and political reference. Retaining Lai’s concept of flânerie as an enunciative act and cinematic postsocialist cities as heterotopia, I further draw on Gilles Deleuze’s any-space-whatever and David H. Fleming’s any-now(here)-spaces to account for the affective-spatial qualities specific to The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Deleuze himself relates the emergence of the any-space-whatever to the act of wandering. He writes that any-spaces-whatever have ceased to fulfill their expected roles and now simply exist to be perceived “in a state of strolling, rambling or wandering aimlessly which derived pure 25 optical and sound situation”. (Deleuze qtd. in Rodowick 75) The any-spaces-whatever are spaces where previous identities or functions have collapsed, and where the film world, in this case the hopeless noir city, no longer responds to human intentions or narrative causality (Fleming 525). This is for Deleuze a new “modern voyage” in a “labyrinthine path of loosely connected situations” (76). While the classic Deleuzian any-space-whatever provides a mode of investigation into how both films transform fragmented encounters of spaces of transience into sites of amorphous affects, Fleming’s any-now(here)-spaces situates the same interpretive qualities of the any-space-whatever within the uneven temporalities and spatial logics of the postsocialist Chinese city, perhaps an any-space-whatever with Chinese characteristics. Instead of being born of the European postwar disillusionment, Chinese any-(now)here-spaces are not ruins but rather spaces-in-development, gesturing to what Lin Xiaoping describes as being in the “intense present” of teleological narrative of development and future-making (qtd. in Fleming 529). The any-(now)here-spaces is for Fleming a manifestation of any-space-whatever in modern Chinese context, where the individual experience of time and space becomes less motivated through their actions but through spectating the various “development” that the state has achieved. The “now” and “here” in Fleming’s reorientation of the Deleuzian term is to describe the emergence of homogenous non-places that follows with Chinese development, which share with the traditional any-space-whatever the effect of leaving its spectator in a breakdown of perceptual causality (Fleming 528). These spaces are indeed ruins or demolitions, but contrary to the distraught post-war sites Deleuze writes about, they are sites in service of a better future, thus creating an experience between the past (now ruined) and a vision of the future, a never-ending present (Fleming 530). In this way, the flâneurs in these films do not inscribe onto real urban spaces, but in cinematic constructs that are legibly postsocialist yet 26 detached from their socio-political coordinates. These films do not renounce the postsocialist condition but instead refigure it affectively in the noir-coded city of the Wild Goose Lake and Kaili. Flânerie thus becomes, in Lai’s framing, a kind of spatial act to chart the affective postsocialist space rather than representing the ontological real of Chinese society. Through the films’ noir coding, the postsocialist affect of disillusionment and disorientation then become safely contained in the noir sensibility, becoming the Chinese manifestations of global modernity (Caleb Kelso-Marsh 42; Stephen Teo 139; Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland 68). While Lai frames flânerie as a spatial practice that enunciates and maps affect in the heterotopic fabric of the postsocialist city, the interventions of Deleuze and Fleming allow me to foreground the singularity of spatial encounters that resist simple totalization: Zhou’s walk in the noir city is one for individual survival, not investigative; and Luo’s walk is more suffused with his traumatic obsession with his personal past, not towards the social fabric. In this way, flânerie is not only a traversal or mapping of space but a generative act that transforms space into something affectively and intellectually open. These any-nowhere-spaces invite the viewer’s own drifting gaze, rendering the film itself a vehicle for cinematic flânerie. Moving on from our contextual and methodological framework, we arrive at our close analysis of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, respectively in chapter 2 and chapter 3. Both chapters provide two kinds of analysis drawing on our synthesis between noir negation, postsocialist thematic, and the figure of flânerie: I will firstly map the flâneur narrative of each film. For this I ask: what is the cause of their flânerie? How does this flânerie intersect with the postsocialist fabric of contemporary Chinese society, and how is it encoded through noir fatalism? After this, each chapter then delves into detailed investigation into the sequences that foreground the flânerie in specific any-now(here)-spaces. For The Wild Goose 27 Lake, the noir drift stems from Zhou’s fatalistic recognition of being a desired postsocialist criminal, who internalizes the idea that there is no escape in the context of a heavily surveilled China. This fatalism is not only personal but structurally reinforced: the presentation of police manhunt surveillance procedure as highly efficient does not villainize the law enforcement but rather reinforces its idealized effective image, and Luo’s fatal death reinforces the ideological mandate that no crimes go unpunished.9 His running-not-running around the Wild Goose Lake is thus a kind of intentional delay of his planned demise. Forging a brief intimacy with Liu Aiai, Zhou’s flânerie becomes not only an act of self-redemption to make amends to his family, but also a final emotional lingering before surrendering to his fatal demise. Described as a village-within-the-city area, a spatial mutation in the conceived landscape of Chinese urbanization (Li Peilin 169), the Lake area becomes an alternative space mapped through sites of any-now(here)-spaces. By tracing Zhou and Liu’s movements through the peripheries of the Lake, the film turns transient and transactional spaces into any-spaces-whatever, where narrative urgency gives way to the quiet prolongation of one’s life in the here and now. Their flânerie starts at the train station, where they first meet and cautiously retell the incident from different perspectives to see what steps to take. From there, Zhou retreats into a nameless cabin, an interim threshold that links the prior flashbacks to his actual project of staging a believable turn-in to secure bounty for 9 No essays have been written explicitly about this ideological alignment of mainland crime drama ending. But in recent years, many mainland crime dramas end with a note that all the criminals featured are ultimately trialed, despite not necessarily showing their whereabouts in the diegesis. Notable examples are Caught In Tide (2020), Endless Journey (2021), the Wrath of Silence (2018). It could be inferred from the Chinese Film Promotion Law that this is part of the ideological mandate to depict the “socialist reality” where no crimes go unpunished, to educate the masses. A similar case occurred when Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) was released in China in 2022 via streaming with an altered ending, with the anarchist finale replaced with a text slide stating that the police successfully stopped the plan and sent Tyler (Brad Pitt) to an asylum. See Nectar Gan’s “'Fight Club' Has a New Ending in China.” 28 his wife. Once back outside, the pair traverse the Lake’s environment: they pass a looming development advertisement billboard projecting a modernity absent from the decaying surroundings; they witness a heated factory meeting about relocation, inserted but never resolved; they stumble into a fun fair, where a singing head and mirror maze externalize their psychological fragmentation; and they drift by boat into the misty lake, where intimacy takes place in the dark. This itinerary is less a linear progression than a sequence of contingent encounters, each suspending Zhou’s eventual capture. I argue that these spaces, initially appearing as any-spaces-whatever, detach from narrative progression and instead foreground affective qualities. In their accumulation, they are transformed into any-now(here)-spaces in the fabric of the postsocialist village-within-the-city: fragmented, transitory, transactional sites where time dilates and becomes protracted. For Zhou, these flâneries prolong his life against the fatalistic momentum of noir, putting him in an intense present of the here-and-now, since the present is all he has left. My analysis of Long Day’s Journey Into Night centers on the spatial logic of any-now(here)-spaces across three key sites: Xiaofeng Restaurant, the tunnel, and the dreamscape of a deserted prison reanimated by doppelgängers. Mourning his late father at Xiaofeng Restaurant named after his mother who was gone a long time ago, Luo embarks on a journey into a nostalgic past when he discovers a photo of his long lost lover Wan. The tunnel recalls the moment when Luo and Wan first bonded, a romantic stroll replayed as memory. Arriving at Wan’s last known location, the reanimated prison, Luo falls into a dream environment beginning in a repopulated prison, encountering doppelgangers of his past. For its protagonist Luo Hongwu, the noir tale similarly presents flânerie as a path towards redemption, except not in the real world. Drawing from Yang Yu’s “Projection of Multiple Fantasies: De-subjectivity of Images in 29 Long Day’s Journey into Night”, I understand Luo’s flânerie as an entrapped back and forth within the crystal circuit of the actual (recollection-present) and the virtual (dream) (Yang Yu 66). Luo’s return to his late mother’s restaurant initiates a state of affective paralysis, where both camera and character linger in suspended motion. In the tunnel, where Luo recalls his first meeting with his former lover Wan, the film destabilizes perspective, shifting between subjective memory and externalized re-enactment, rendering recollection spatially fractured and disorienting. Both the restaurant and the tunnel are heterotopic any-now(here)-spaces, where multiple temporalities collide on a singular space that occupies, crystallizing affects rather than progressing action. Finally, in the hour-long one-take dream through a reanimated deserted prison, Luo drifts across a terrain populated by doubles and déjà vus. By invoking Birdman as a comparison, I argue that this astonishing long take showcases a preference for the ontological real where the profilmic time unfolds rather than digital illusion of continuity. Drawing on William Brown’s concept of supercinema, which describes digital cinema’s ability to move through space like a superhuman force (46), I argue that Bi Gan’s “real” long-take represents an alternative mode of cinematic movement that grounds perception in the profilmic journey of Luo. The camera does not pass through walls but detours around them to maintain an embodied traversal. In this way, Bi’s cinema complicates the camera’s posthuman fluidity but stages flânerie as an embodied exploration of the dream world, whose spatial-temporal clarity contrasts the fragmented first half of the film. I argue that this long-take exemplifies flânerie’s ability to reframe the experience of time from being a measurement for movement into a lived presence, constituting Deleuze’s time-image where Luo’s flânerie unfolds as an affective experience rather narrative progression. 30 In constructing his fictional Kaili with a network of popular Chinese songs from the 90s, Bi creates a loose network of signifiers of what Svetlana Boym terms “reflective nostalgia”, where the film does not seek to replicate a utopian vision of the city’s past, but rather one that is self-reflexive of its constructed-ness (Boym 49). This dream space does not resolve but refracts, posting itself as a heterotopia of Luo’s memory and reality to be (re)encountered. Traversing the pure nowhere land of his dream, Luo’s flânerie forms a poetics of discovery through the real and the unreal: in the first half of the film, fragmented recollections blur the boundary between memory and reality; in the second, the hour-long long take grounds perspective in embodied, ground-level drift through the ambivalent encounters with dream doubles. In this floating narrative, the actual can only be grasped through the fabulation of the virtual, by means of dream construction. 31 Chapter 2: The Wild Goose Lake and the cartographic fugitive Diao Yinan’s Industrial Noir and Noir as Disciplinary Pedagogy Diao Yinan, though not a prolific filmmaker, has established himself as a central figure in contemporary Chinese cinema, blending noir narrative with a distinct urban consciousness (Mu 25). With only four directorial credits to his name, his oeuvre reflects a coherent preference for noir. His debut feature, Uniform (2003), focuses on the son of a laid-off factory worker who stumbles upon a police uniform and begins impersonating an officer to gain social leverage. His 2007 Night Train, follows a female prison guard who becomes romantically entangled with a man whose wife she executed. Both circulated primarily in the international festival circuit and were not released in mainland theatres: Uniform won the Dragons and Tigers Award at the 22nd Vancouver International Film Festival (“Chinese film wins Vancouver festival prize”), while Night Train entered the “Un Certain Regard” category of the 60th Cannes International Film Festival (Festival de Cannes, Ye Che). It was not until 2014 that Diao garnered both international and domestic acclaim, with Black Coal, Thin Ice, a film that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, while also domestically grossing 104.3 million RMB on a 15 million budget (Wang Lin; Shu). Often hailed as a precursor to Chinese neo-noir (Wang Lin), Black Coal, Thin Ice follows a disillusioned detective investigating a murder case that destroyed his career and marriage, while becoming involved with a mysterious laundry owner connected to the crime. With the film’s dark atmospheric style, many have considered it as a rare Chinese attempt at neo-noir (Felperin; Wang Lin). To date, Black Coal, Thin Ice is still one of the most profitable Chinese films to have won a major award at an international Film Festival and hailed as a paradigm for bridging art house and commercial filmmaking in mainland Chinese cinema (Shu). 32 The Wild Goose Lake marks a continuation of this art house-commercial hybridity but on a much bigger scale in terms of budget and production. Indeed, the budget of The Wild Goose Lake surged from the 15 million RMB of Black Coal, Thin Ice to a speculated 100 million RMB, while also grossing 203 million at the box office (Ge).10 The Wild Goose Lake has 12 production company credits, as opposed to Black Coal, Thin Ice’s two (Ge). The film was shot over 155 days, at 82 different on-site locations, involving over 370 crew members, 3200 actors (due to use of non-actors for authenticity), “the scale of which exceeded some major Chinese blockbusters”, says producer Shen Yang (Yeguang 00:14:17). Director Diao and star Hu Ge actively promoted the film on Douyin (抖音), TikTok’s Chinese version, which helped facilitate a presale of over 2.5 million tickets (Du). As a Sino-French co-production, backed by Tencent Pictures, Maisong Pictures from the Chinese side, ArteFrance Cinéma, and Memento Films on the French side, the Wild Goose Lake received €150,000 from the French National Centre of Cinema’s Aide aux Cinémas du Monde (ACM), a fund supporting international independent films directed by non-French nationals (Vena). The ACM requires co-production with a French company sharing both 10 The exact budget remains undisclosed. But multiple media surmised that the budget for the Wild Goose Lake was around 100 million RMB. See Ge, Yiting 葛怡婷. “Nanfang chezhan piaofang jin 2 yi, kan duli zhizuo yingpian ruhe maixiang gongyehua” “南方车站”票房近 2 亿，看独立制作影片如何迈向工业化 [The Wild Goose Lake nears 200 million at the box office: how an independent film moves toward industrialization]. Diyi caijing 第一财经 [Yicai Global], 16 Dec. 2019, https://m.yicai.com/news/100436499.html. Accessed 6 Aug. 2025. Web. as well as Xuexi.cn 学习强国. “Hu Ge xin pian ‘Nanfang chezhan de juhui’ piaofang po yi! Ni zhidao zhexie muhoutaimi ma?” 胡歌新片《南方车站的聚会》票房破亿！你知道这些幕后秘密吗？ [Hu Ge’s new film The Wild Goose Lake breaks 100 million at the box office! Do you know these behind-the-scenes secrets?]. Xuexi.cn 学习强国, article.xuexi.cn/articles/index.html?art_id=5676300215146763559&study_style_id=feeds_default&pid=&ptype=-1&share_to=weibo&from=singlemessage&source=share. Accessed 6 Aug. 2025. Web. 33 distribution and screenplay rights, allowing for potential creative input (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, “Aide aux cinémas du monde.”). While Tencent and Maisong are known domestically for their focus on commercial Chinese cinema, including “main melody” films (zhuxuanlü dianying 主旋律电影) that adheres to PRC’s socialist propaganda agendas11, genre films, and children’s animation (Davis), ArteFrance and Memento are committed to global arthouse cinema, in line with ACM’s mission in cultivating French industry through supporting global cinema (Unifrance, “Arte France Cinéma”; “Memento Production”). Swiss producer and Cannes regular Michel Merkt, whose credits include Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) and Kleber Mendoça Filho/Juliano Dornelles’ co-directed Bacurau (2019), also joined the production, reinforcing the film’s position within an international arthouse network (Festival de Cannes, “Michel Merkt”).12 Though not as impressive as Black Coal, Thin Ice in terms of its festival performances, The Wild Goose Lake was still entered to compete in the main category of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival (Festival de Cannes, Nanfang chezhang de juhui). What emerges from Diao’s trajectory, is a conscious collaboration with market force while retaining the film’s festival “art-house” appeal. Indeed, as Diao’s producer Shen Yang 11 “Main Melody” films are a specific genre of Chinese films that cater to the CCP’s mandate to “promote patriotism, socialism and collectivism” and other socialist, sometimes nationalist, values as part of the teleology of Chinese national revival. This descriptive use of “main melody” to refer to Chinese socialist values first appeared in a talk by Head of Chinese National Film Bureau Teng Jinxian in 1987. See Chu, Yiu-Wai. “Introduction: Main(Land) Melody Films and Hong Kong Directors.” Main Melody Films: Hong Kong Directors in Mainland China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2022. 1–28. Print. (Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film). 12 Both Elle and Bacurau garnered critical international festival attention: while Elle competed in the Cannes Official Selection in 2016, Bacurau won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2019. See in: Festival de Cannes, “Bacurau,” Festival de Cannes, https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/bacurau/, and “Elle,” Festival de Cannes, https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/elle/, both accessed 6 August 2025. 34 notes, The Wild Goose Lake was a hybrid product that seeks to cater to both the market and festival, and that the project does not “repel against being a commercial film” (Shen Yang). Diao explains that “as a film made in the industrial way, it is important to make it good, so that more audience can see it” (Shen Yang). This view coincides with the principle of Film Industry Aesthetics which seeks to produce “art-house film” that the general market favors (Chen Xuaguang 33). As a writer-director who has consistently worked on crime dramas, Diao considers “noir” as a genre strategy to negotiate artistic ambition with the investors: “after Night Train and Uniform, I realized that even art-house films will be ‘repackaged’ by capital, making it into a product…after I noticed this, I decided to do it (the “packaging”) myself. I think the sublime could also be vulgar and gaudy” (Diao, “Huosiren de langman”). Diao describes his fascination with crime to be stemming from a fundamental belief that the world is in itself “sinned”, and that it is important to reveal it (“Huosiren de langman”). This seeming pessimism in his view coincides with Schrader’s fatalistic noir sensibility (8), but Diao’s acknowledgment of the responsibility of the artist to reveal the world’s truth the way he sees it situates him closer to Mark T. Conrad’s Nietzschean reading of noir pessimism. For Conrad, the appeal of noir lies not in its nihilism or alienation, but in its confrontation with a post-Nietzschean condition where no universal truth remains, requiring man to create value for himself (“Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir” 19). This “positive pessimism”, the will to make one’s own fate, is embodied in Zhou’s trajectory. As Diao states in an interview, “The only way to overcome death and these confusions is through action... The Wild Goose Lake is a story about a man battling with his own heart, and with death. The protagonist provides an answer within 36 hours: he redeems his perhaps miserable life within time” (Renmin wang Hubei). 35 The film follows Zhou Zenong, a scooter thief gang leader who, during a turf conflict with a rival gang, mistakenly kills a police officer. Wounded in the process, he flees to the Wild Goose Lake area and turns to an old connection, local crime boss Huahua, in hopes of meeting Zhou’s estranged wife, Yang Shujun. Convinced that the law will eventually catch up in 36 hours, Zhou devises a plan for Shujun to turn him in at the train station so that his family can claim the bounty on his head. Unbeknownst to Zhou, however, Huahua has already been working with the rival gang and plots to deliver Zhou to them instead. He enlists Liu Aiai, a “female swimming companion” (streetwalker in reality) forced into the role of Zhou’s contact by Huahua, acting under orders without any real agency or knowledge of Huahua’s broader scheme. The original plan for Shujun to meet Zhou falls through when her brother, Zhou’s right-hand man, is killed in a police raid, leaving her in a mental breakdown. Huahua instructs Liu to take her place to evade police patrol and lead Zhou to a designated room where the turn-in will be staged in nighttime. In deep cover, the two then cautiously walk together in the Wild Goose Lake, through shops, the living quarters, entering a deserted fun fair, going on cruise in the lake and simply wander around, all the while trying to avoid early capture by the police. It is in this shared flânerie of passing time together that they start to develop a bond. Zhou pays Liu with blood-stained money, saying that this would make the turn-in seem more real given Liu's identity as a streetwalker. Yet double-crosser Huahua himself has been double-crossed and murdered by the rival gang, who attempt to seize the bounty for themselves. Barely surviving the ambush and police patrol, Zhou believes Liu is complicit and follows her vengefully. In panic, Liu stumbles upon a meeting of factory owners arguing over who should relocate. Zhou arrives and saves her from being harassed by one of the factory owners. Discovering that she has been forced into being complicit, Zhou forgives her and stays in the restaurant to catch a breath. But the respite is 36 short-lived: as Zhou eats, Liu slips away, and the police close in. Shot as he staggers toward the water, Zhou dies as Liu is recognized as the informant. In the final scene, she is seen to share the reward with Shujun, instead of claiming it herself. Zhou’s recognition of his inevitable demise could be seen as an internalization of postsocialist China’s strong disciplinary response to individuals of exception. As Steven M. Sanders suggests, film noir constructs a world of institutional entrapment and irredeemable guilt, where agency often manifests in the form of surrender (91). Zhou’s trajectory aligns with this fatalism in institutional entrapment by the contemporary Chinese law enforcement: he is not resisting so much as recognizing himself as doomed under Chinese surveillance. Killing a police officer places him beyond the threshold of leniency in a system increasingly governed by China’s maturing mass surveillance project in the 2010s. The tianwang （天网） surveillance system, first piloted in Chengdu in 2005, had by 2012 reached a phase of operational stability, and by 2019 reportedly comprised over 200 million surveillance cameras across the country (Hua; “Zhongguo Tianwang”). This went hand in hand with the establishment of real-name registration policy for mobile phones users launched in 2010, which further tightened control over telecommunications (Chen Shixian and Li Zhen). The year 2012, announced by the radio weather forecast early in The Wild Goose Lake, also positions the film within a significant political conjuncture in contemporary mainland Chinese history. This was the year China saw a new phase of leadership commencing with Xi Jinping’s election as the new president of the People’s Republic of China, and a major anti-corruption operation that had another prominent Party official, former member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Bo Xilai arrested (Xinhua She). Bo had previously served as the Party Secretary of Chongqing from 2007 to 2012, during which he launched the “Chongqing Sweeping Black and Evil campaign” (37 重庆打黑除恶专项行动) in 2009 and 2010, targeting organized gang crime and governmental corruption (Shen Yi). The campaign resulted in 65 death or life sentences, along with over 4800 Arrests and the seizure of over 3.1 billion yuan in assets (“Chongqing dahei chu’e”). While some credited the operation with restoring social stability (Qi), others viewed it as an excuse for Bo to consolidate personal authority for its tightened civilian surveillance and questionable instances of interrogation by torture (Ran Jin and Zhao Lei).13 The Wild Goose Lake’s noir paranoia thus coincides with this context of intensifying surveillance. Zhou is no longer evaluated as a moral subject but as a symbolic threat to public order, one that must be eliminated to preserve systemic coherence for both sides. For the law enforcement distinguishing him would mean justice, and for the gangsters it would garner them the bounty and eliminate a potential informant in Zhou. However, I argue the presentation of surveillance in The Wild Goose Lake is not a resistance on Chinese surveillance practice, but rather enables, not asserts, an affirmative reading of state surveillance, especially through what Aeon J. Skoble refers to as noir’s pedagogical value. Skoble argues that noir’s pessimistic outlook lies in its “amoral” noir characters’ ability to make bad decisions, which leads them to their inevitable doom (42). These flawed “bad” characters therefore do not represent an inversion of the film’s values since these actions usually lead to the “undesired” outcomes, therefore presenting “poor” examples of practical reasoning (44). Though not claiming that all noir 13 In a 2015 speech given at Central Political Committee, President Xi criticized Bo’s Chongqing operation as a vehicle for “self-aggrandizing political ambition”, calling him a “dangerous schemer”（”野心家”，yexinjia）. See in: Xi Jinping 习近平. Zhongyang zhengzhi ju “san yan san shi” zhuanti minzhu shenghuo hui shang de jianghua 中央政治局”三严三实”专题民主生活会上的讲话 [Speech at the Central Political Committee ’s Special Democratic Life Meeting on the “Three Stricts and Three Earnests”]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe 中央文献出版社, 2016. 38 reinforces the dominant institution’s societal control, Skoble believes noir could enable such disciplinary reception. This is the case of Zhou, that as a criminal who committed manslaughter, must at the end answer to the law or be shot down for socialist order to be restored in the diegesis. The film depicts the manhunt in a rational and proficiently neutral stance. On one hand, The Wild Goose Lake presents the manhunt in a similar cross-cutting montage like the one from Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where the film shows both the police and the underground using their different networks in tailing the murderer, Hans Beckett. As Martin Blumenthal-Barby argues, the Berlin police’s surveillance efforts can be characterized as “scientifically oriented”, involving an extended sequence showing the use of personal profile tracking and dactyloscopy cross-referencing, reflecting an emerging “systemic mode of identification and tracking” (71-72). An effective and strong Chinese police surveillance network is similarly constructed in The Wild Goose Lake in a quick montage, transitioning from Liu’s gazes into the news report of Zhou’s incident on the TV in the train station lounge. The news narrates and outlines the police procedure and plans on how to catch Zhou, detailing what has been learned of Zhou’s motive, the surveillance camera footage of Zhou fleeing, and showing that special troops have been deployed to help search the lake area. Not only this, important transportation hubs have also been mandated for heavy check-up, and the montage even includes a crack-down of an underground gambling joint that is non-diegetic in the story, as a collateral result of Zhou’s manhunt. This montage grants the viewer the official account of the investigation, now moving in steady progress. It is worth noting that the broadcasting presents not only the self-contained broadcast footage but also spliced sequences of diegetic events that exceed the purview of a realistic news agency. The broadcast voice continues over images that are not plausibly captured 39 by a camera crew, but instead unfold in a seemingly omniscient, disembodied perspective, one that hovers across urban rooftops in the form of surveillance camera footage, or which intrudes into private domestic spaces, including civilians’ reaction to check-ups and the bounty announcement. This tension between the authoritative news voice and the impossible vantage of its accompanying image already foregrounds the tension between representation and the real. The news, in this case, is not an object within the film but a framing device that absorbs cinematic space into a regime of informational control. The use of TV reportage to anchor the two perspectives render the manhunt in a montage that condenses space-time, progressing it in a highly mechanical and effective fashion. The film’s depiction of police operations as efficient, coordinated, and highly professional, can be read as aligned with the visual and ideological expectations of contemporary Chinese censorship, as opposed to critiquing it. Article 16 of the Chinese Film Promotion Law prohibits films that “disrupt social order,” “undermine social stability,” or “render violence and terror,” including those that depict crime or criminal methods (qtd. in Jinuo Diao 74). The film’s neutral stance toward law enforcement then enables a positive reading of the authority in this framework: it neither romanticizes nor vilifies the system. Zhou never speaks of the police in derogatory terms, but only repeatedly reinforces to himself that “there is nowhere left to run to” (The Wild Goose Lake 01:19:28). In this fatal recognition is a tacit acknowledgement of the law enforcement’s all-seeing power, that their presence is less of a matter of morality but of instrumentality. In intercutting the police operation with Zhou’s story, the film stages the police and Zhou as opposing forces in a societal procedure: the institution versus the rogue individual, where one proceeds mechanically and precisely in its chases, and the other locked in a choreography of survival. 40 Under this light, a film noir about a fugitive on the run must not thus glorify him but instead must grant him a bad ending where he perishes to testify to the effectiveness of law enforcement apparatus. In other words, Zhou’s fatalistic realization is precisely the outcomes desired, if not designed, by the very logic of contemporary mainland Chinese film censorship. He embodies the idealized postsocialist criminal: one who is not opportunistic about escape, but one who has internalized the ideological socialist imperative that no crime goes unpunished. It is in this way that noir narrative constitutes a disciplinary pedagogy for its audience (Skoble 44), aligning with the ideological imperatives of censorship. The noir protagonist, who submits to inevitable destruction, becomes a cinematic figure who coherently fulfills the demands of state-sanctioned narrative closure which renders noir not oppositional, but formally useful to the ideological apparatus for its pedagogical disciplinary value. Mapping the Wild Goose Lake: Cartographic Fugitive and Pastiche Construction When preparing the manhunt on Zhou Zenong, Captain Liu provided the following description of the lake area: CAPTAIN LIU (to his unit). “野鹅塘方圆十几公里， 地图上是没有标注的，就是这片白色地带...应该是最近几年形成的城中村， 有点像一块飞地...野鹅塘湖区的情况是蛮复杂的， 是一个三不管的地带。哪个都想管但是哪个都管不好 那里干什么的都有， 人员结构复杂，鱼龙混杂...” (The Wild Goose Lake ranges around tens of kilometers in radius. The area is not marked on the maps. Should be this blank here (on the official map). It’s probably a village-within-city formed in recent years. The geographies are highly complex, it’s a san-bu-guan region. Everyone wants to regulate it but no one can actually do it. 41 There were all sorts of people there, good or bad…) (The Wild Goose lake 00:28:34; see fig 1 and fig 2) Figure 1.Captain Liu points to the uncartographed Wild Goose Lake area on the official city map. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 00:28:34. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. Figure 2. Captain Liu shows an unofficial cartography of the Wild Goose Lake. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019. 00:28:59. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. 42 Figure 3. Map of Berlin. M, dir. Fritz Lang, Nero-Film AG, 1931, 00:19:04. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. 43 Figure 4. The map of Algerian Casbah. Pépé le Moko, dir. Julien Duvivier, Paris Film, 1937, 00:03:17. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. There are two important things to be noted from Captain Liu’s description: firstly, the Wild Goose Lake is an unmarked space on the official map of the city in the film. Such a space that eluded official cartography is described as a space of sangbuguan (三不管), meaning “lack of regulation from all sides”. Captain Liu referred to this phenomenon as chengzhongcun(城中村), or village-within-the-city, a result of the tension between rapid urban outgrowth and China’s dual land ownership system (Li Peilin 171).14 Since Chinese urbanization is highly regulated and 14 The formation of “villages within cities” (chengzhongcun) stems from deep-rooted institutional differences between urban and rural systems in China. Key factors include: (1) a dual land ownership system in which rural land 44 state-directed, the emergence of the village-within-the-city may be read as a spontaneous dialectical response to the top-down logic of urban planning and spatial control (Li Peilin 171). On one hand, the urban village is a byproduct of massive land reorganization for modernization projects, residues of rural collectivity lodged within the expanding urban grid (Li Peilin 169). Yet on the other hand, they resist full assimilation into the urban order, remaining spaces of hybridity, ambiguity, and non-conformity. They are neither fully urban nor rural, formal nor informal, but something in-between: what might be understood as a kind of urban heterotopia, a contradictory, layered, and liminal space that defies singular definition, but also reflects both the rural and the urban. In this sense, the urban village becomes not just an anomaly in the process of modernization, but a space that reflects the unresolved contradictions of postsocialist spatial transformation. The map on the police briefing confirms this marginal status of the Wild Goose Lake, as it is not a space that was planned but formed over time and could only be approached through the hand drawn map of the police in the local precinct, through their personal knowledge. As noted earlier, the Lake area does not exist in real life and is a pastiche cinematic city that represents a generic Southern Chinese city commanded under Wuhan dialect. The reason to set the story in Wuhan was only because Diao wanted to find a region where a lake plays a remains under collective rural ownership, making it difficult for the state to fully appropriate village residential land during urban expansion; (2) differing governance structures, with villages managed by self-funded village committees (cunweihui) rather than state-funded urban subdistrict offices(jiedaoban); and (3) the persistence of “village registration” (cunji), which grants former villagers economic privileges and collective dividends, often making them prefer their old village status over full urban integration. See Li Peilin, Jubian: Cunluo de Zhongjie — Dushi li de Cunzhuang Yanjiu [Upheaval: The End of Villages — Research on Villages within Cities], Social Sciences Academic Press, 2004. 45 prominent role, and he asks his actors to adapt to the local accents. Diao got the inspiration for the story of Zhou Zenong not based on a Southern story, but rather on a Northerner from the Dongbei (东北) region who committed murder and hid out in the mountains for 3 days before sneaking back home for a final dinner with his family to turn himself in (Yeguang 00:01:00). What’s more, Liu Aiai’s occupation as a streetwalker disguised as a peiyongnü (陪泳女) [female swimming companion] is not a Wuhan phenomenon, but rather one from Guangxi, another southern Province (Li Yan).15 The insistence on keeping the swimming lady as a narrative element is simply because Diao was “impressed” by a photo he accidentally came across of a swimming lady sitting on a boat while writing the script (Li Yan). This reflects Diao’s pastiche approach in which he does not strive to replicate reality but rather as an inventive re-constitution of the affective real. He notes in an interview that he strives for more than a replication of reality. For Diao, “reality today is fragmented and disordered” so he draws from real events, reselecting and reassembling them through subjective imagination to generate new meaning (“Diao Yinan zhuanfang”), thus giving rise to the fictional Wild Goose Lake that stands as a pastiche of a Southern Chinese city that evokes ambivalently the postsocialist Chinese lived reality. Even as the Wild Goose Lake area resists cartographic fixity, the authorities’ deployment of a police map reveals a persistent cartographic impulse, an impulse echoed in two manhunt 15 The term peiyongnü (陪泳女), or “female swimming companion,” is a term for masked illicit sex work in Guangxi province. See in: Zhongguo xinwen wang 中国新闻网. “Nü peiyong: zhen de shi peiyong haishi changji?” 女陪泳：真的是陪泳还是娼妓？[Female swimming companions: Are they really companions or disguised prostitutes?]. Zhongguo xinwen wang 中国新闻网 [China News Service], 15 Oct. 2008, https://www.chinanews.com/shipin/2008-10-15/news5052.html. Accessed 6 Aug. 2025. 46 classics, Fritz Lang’s M and Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), where mastery of space becomes a central concern. Like The Wild Goose Lake, both films promise a totalizing grip on the city (Berlin in M, and the Algiers Casbah in Pepe Le Moko) through official maps in their openings. These cinematic maps represent the state's desire for spatial regulation, presented to the viewer as a top-down, rationalized and totalizing perspective. As Charles O’Brien writes of Pépé le Moko, the cinematic map offers the viewer a position of spatial mastery, projecting a stable distance between the beholder and the spectacle (208). But as Maria Flood writes, such a stable totalizing gaze slowly dissolves as the camera plunges into ground level perspective with its protagonist Pépé to show the winding, labyrinthine Casbah, where the lines of official and empirical knowledge blur (179-180). The Wild Goose Lake echoes this strategy, using Zhou and Liu’s ground-level drift to supplement the abstract top-down vision of official knowledge. Zhou and Liu’s evasive movements remap the lake through embodied flânerie, offering the viewer a spatial knowledge that belongs to cinema rather than to the police. As Lai argues, walking is a kind of “discourse-making” that establishes relations between the individual and the topographical material feature of a place (215). The flânerie thus provides an alternative mapping, a reorganization between the relationship between individual and space. In this case, such reorganization entails destabilizing the abstract 2-dimensional mapping of the Wild Goose Lake area through one’s situated movement, observed through the vantage point of cinema. In this case, the act of flânerie, of aimless wandering, reorganizes spaces into Deleuze’s any-space-whatever, which often manifests as a result of a crisis of the suspended modernity (Deleuze, Cinema 1 120). This perfectly singular space, argues Deleuze, thus gives its instability and spatial indetermination to interpretive possibilities, in this case to the qualitative lived experience of the Wild Goose Lake, which cannot be documented by the 2-dimensional map that renders the 47 area abstract. In this light, The Wild Goose Lake then depicts an alternative imagined space that negates the totalizing and teleological narrative of postsocialist modernity. Liu and Zhou’s ground-level drift in The Wild Goose Lake, their constant movement in and out of shops, streets and living quarters to evade police tailing, becomes what Isabel Carrera Suárez calls counter-flânerie: a form of drift not grounded in deliberate synthesis by optical or intellectual knowledge, but in the bodily negotiation of space that situates them. In this case Zhou and Liu, along their drift, encounter the postsocialist spatial fabric of the Wild Goose Lake village-within-the-city, without fully understanding it. Through their movement as spatial practice, the film thus renders the Lake area as a heterotopia of postsocialist China, constituted through the many any-spaces-whatever, grasped not by official mapping knowledge but through the two’s counter-flânerie. One such any-spaces-whatver is on the street of the lake area, where Zhou and Liu walk past a big development advertisement billboard depicting modern skyscrapers (see Figure 5). After Zhou attends to his wounds upon arriving at the Lake area, he and Liu officially embark on the operation in the morning. The plan is to avoid police patrols during the day and meet Huahua in a designated room in the residential slum by nightfall. For this reason, they travel slowly and cautiously, while also having to pass the time until the meeting. The two move cautiously through the area, one walking ahead while the other follows at a distance, so as not to draw suspicion by being seen together. One such any-space-whatever emerges on the street of the lake area, where Zhou and Liu walk past a big development advertisement billboard depicting modern skyscrapers (see Figure 5). The camera tracks as both walk swiftly beside it. The poster points to a vision of Chinese modernity absent in the material reality of the Wild Goose Lake area. In stark contrast, the actual environment around them is permeated with crowded apartments, garbage-filled alleyways, and an economy tied to prostitution and urban decay: a region of 48 “sanbuguan” (lack of regulation) in captain Liu’s words. Neither stops to look at the poster, but instead they pass quickly. The saturated, modern image of a real estate program contrasts with the humid run-down scenes of the Wild Goose Lake, ironically standing out as a spatial anomaly. The promise of development is a distant vision, absent from the reality of the Wild Goose Lake. The advertisement represents a specter of Chinese modernity’s teleological promise, as its pictorial presence here only signifies its absence. Figure 5. Liu walks past the real estate advertisement. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:09:20. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. Such gestures toward a critique of postsocialist modernity appear only fleetingly and never become central to the narrative, a strategy Diao uses to defocalize the film’s political insinuation. When asked about his world-building, he compares his films to sandboxes, where viewers are invited to explore the details on their own (Diao, “Fuyuan guaidan xianshi” 63). The characters and plot are just one part of this world, he says, like “stems connected to the surrounding soil” (Diao, “Fuyuan guaidan xianshi” 63). This reflects his view of reality as “fundamentally fragmented and loose”, a texture he seeks to capture (Diao, “Fuyuan guaidan 49 xianshi” 63). Another example is Liu’s brief accidental intrusion into a meeting held by factory owners trying to decide who must relocate for undisclosed reasons. Beforehand, she had led Zhou to her boss Huahua’s hideout, unaware of Huahua’s scheme as well as Huahua’s murder by the rival gang leaders after plotting to double-cross Zhou. Zhou, barely made it out alive from the ambush and the police, follows Liu in vengeful suspicion that she was complicit. Seeking refuge, Liu accidentally runs into a factory, where she finds herself the center of attention for interrupting a meeting of local factory owners. Though Liu quickly excuses herself and leaves the frame, the camera lingers on the meeting attentively to show the factory owners arguing who should make the sacrifice to relocate, before slowly panning back on Liu. Completely irrelevant to the manhunt, this argumentation does not fit anywhere in the overall narrative. The camera that refuses to move on speaks to a deeper consciousness to decenter the character in relation to the space they occupy. Instead of having mastery over the space, Liu only passes through and spectates, which destabilizes the totalizing perception granted by the map in the police briefing room. This seemingly irrelevant sequence, like the developmental advertisement, exemplifies Diao’s use of flânerie to construct a narrative of defocalization. While the main narrative concerns the fate of Liu and Zhou, the floating narrative opens potential for encounters that could not be entirely narrativized with cognitive clarity. This process constitutes Lai’s “poetics of discovery” where the narrative becomes “process-oriented” rather than “goal-oriented”, inserting the viewer in the full presence with the contingent happening of an unfamiliar situation where no narrative meaning is pre-given (224). In other words, the viewers discover the factory meeting as Liu discovers it and there isn’t necessarily a causal relationship between the manhunt and this encounter. The experience of the world as he sees it is fragmented, as Diao frames it, and in this 50 case Liu’s contingent meander becomes the spatial practice with which the film opens up room for associative interpretation. This factory meeting might be seen as a subtle reference to China’s industrial restructuring in other instances. The film does not critique it by including it, but rather dilutes its political insinuation through the flâneur, where this meeting is but one of many contingencies Zhou and Liu run into but do not become implicated in. The film, like its viewers, only stumble upon it and does not in itself become opinionated towards this insinuation of China’s industrial restructuring. Framed in a noir-inflected iconography of urban decay and gloomy nighttime, the meeting, with its heated atmosphere is rendered with paranoia and mysteriousness. At the same time, the film never gave more information how what type of industry this meeting involves, and direct reasons for relocation. It was an event already developing as Liu stumbles upon it. We, like her, are never given the full picture, and thus are not granted a vantage point of knowledge to make any informed further judgment regarding its political insinuation. It becomes simply one way of how Diao constructs a sandbox world that feels “realistic” in its cognitive fragmentation and populatedness of various events. As Diao notes, the film’s pastiched depiction of the Chinese South intermittently gestures toward the fragmented condition of postsocialist China, mirroring his belief that “modern life itself has become fragmented” (“Diao Yinan zhuanfang”). The constructed lake area then is fitting to be described as a heterotopia, a self-reflexive interpretive construct that critically mirrors the real world in a performative way in Lai’s mobilization (207). Its trait as an urban village, a developmental anomaly, characterizes it as a phase in modernization that is yet to be overcome. It becomes a space constituted by many any-now(here)-spaces suspended in an unattended neglected present, stretched between its rural past and a vision of a modern future. 51 The industrial restructuring foreshadowed by the factory meeting thus hints on this developmental suspension. Rather as a political critique, such hints could be seen as part of Diao’s world-building strategy, of creating a cinematic world that feels vaguely like Chinese postsocialist reality. Drawing on Deleuze’s and Fleming’s notion of the any-now(here)-space, in the following sections I examine how the film’s disjointed geography stages not just a postsocialist atmosphere but becomes affectively charged through Zhou and Liu’s embodied traversal. I will first focus on the train station where they meet up for the first time and the cabin where Zhou stays to attend to his wounds. These are the spaces before Zhou and Liu embark on their shared flânerie; I will then focus on the beach where their plan is in action, where Liu begins to take the lead in taking Zhou to Huahua’s room. Avoiding police patrol, the two unintentionally walk into the tent of a fun fair and spectate the performance. When night falls, the two circle on the river by boat in romantic intimacies. Returning ashore, the two watch in distance the night-cutting searchlights of the police, before finally deciding to turn him in to Huahua. The pair’s ground-level drift defies the totalizing cartographic gaze of the police and instead produces an alternative mapping: tactile, hesitant, and contingent. Arrival without departure: the Train Station and the Cabin as threshold spaces The Wild Goose Lake kickstarts with a promised titular gathering, get-together, or rendezvous at “A Southern Train Station” (the Chinese title 南方车站的聚会 literally translates to “The Gathering at a Southern Train Station”). The train station in The Wild Goose Lake functions less as a site of transit than as an any-space-whatever of where the past unfolds: it gathers Zhou and Liu’s fragmented recollections into a recap of why they are here and what they must do next, while also foreshadowing their romantic bond. As an affective device, the station signifies departure even as they dwell and remember, and it is from this dwelling that the film 52 departs, through the memories that constitute the film’s first half, the character’s motivations. In this way the station, a space of anonymous transit, becomes the ground for affective dwelling and recollection, which then kickstarts the film’s narrative. Zhou meets Liu for the first time. To the sound of incessant rain and train noises, Zhou first appears as a small figure in a long shot, from behind the pillar. Observing his surrounding in alertness, he moves slowly away as if giving space to Liu, whose silhouette appears before her actual figure: Liu’s silhouette precedes her, projected on her umbrella. The camera stays on her silhouette and pans down as she closes the umbrella and lights a cigarette (see fig 6.). It’s not until the next shot that we finally see a medium shot of Liu, walking towards Zhou to introduce herself. Initially reluctant to engage, Zhou turns away, and the camera follows him as he slowly recedes to darkness, turning away but still leaning on the pillar, separating himself from Liu. Tracking his slow movements, the camera turns back and reframes Zhou behind Liu as she gains his trust, and he starts to tell the story of how he got to this situation. The repositioning and reframing signals a change of Zhou’s trust for Liu, which allows for a creation of a safe space where the flashback takes place. After Zhou tells Liu about his accidental mistake of shooting a policer officer, they move to the train lounge, where the news report of the bounty on Zhou’s head. In the lounge, Liu begins her flashback of how she was forced into being a contact. 53 Figure 6. Liu first appears as silhouette at the station. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 00:03:10. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. It is within this station that we engage not in immediate action, but in both Zhou and Liu’s recollection. Through alternating flashbacks, the film stages for the audience the events leading here: Zhou’s escalating gang rivalry to the accidental killing of a police officer, and Liu’s reluctant conscription as Huahua’s surrogate. These flashback sequences echo and complement one another, reconstructing for both characters, and for the viewer, how each arrived at this desperate situation. This “gathering” also becomes a convergence of timelines, a realignment of fragmented memories across different perspectives, rendering the station not a space of urgent mobility but of introspection. In this sense, the train station becomes a multilayered space, nested with connections to other time-spaces, past betrayals, decisions, gazes, rather than serving as one singular, static site of plot progression. Train stations, like airports and hotels, are spaces of transience and ahistorical, contractually promoting anonymity and passage (Augé 75-77). But Zhou and Liu are not here to pass physically, but to pass time and to get to know each other before proceeding with their plan. Between the flashback sequences, the camera lingers on 54 their slow movements among the pillars of the Southern Train Station. Zhou emerges in and out of the shadows cast across the train platform, circling cautiously around one pillar to avoid being seen by cars that drive past. When he first meets Liu, he steps out from the left, only to circle behind her as she begins to tell her story. Shot mostly in medium close-up, the camera tracks his careful circling in an extended movement, preserving the temporal continuity and framing subtle spatial shifts as he gradually begins to place trust in Liu. The sequence contains little direct dialogue: the spoken exchanges are largely displaced into flashbacks, leaving only essential instructions like names and directions for how to move across the station without detection. Their faces remain restrained, neutral as if suppressing expression so as not to attract suspicion. The minimal speeches are set against the incessant sound of rain and the occasional rumble of passing trains, amplifying the sense of suspended action. In staging its first hour as a two-part sequence of slow, ruminative storytelling between Zhou and Liu, the film then gestures to a defiance to the logic of transience that structures the train station. Even though they are fugitives on the run, they conjure up a flashback that is here to stay. Diao Yinan’s own comments affirm this: “A train station is a place where people part and reunite, a site embedded in our most important memories. The memories of our growing up are inseparable from the station...it feels like a place where people come together and drift apart, a place where stories unfold” (Diao, “Death and Beauty”). This affective framing of the station as both architectural anchor and emotional container underpins Diao’s evocation of departure, both narratively and thematically. Structurally by staging the opening in the train station, the film appropriates its tendency for departure, but not towards action or plot progression, but towards flashbacks, a kind of departing not outbound but inbound. As Liu’s actress Gwei Lun-mei notes, “there is a desire to pull close between the two, even though they hardly know each other” 55 (Yeguang 00:40:33). The delicate movement and Liu’s entrance as a silhouette accentuates the intimate quality of the image, evoking the displaced romantic “rendezvous” suggested in the film’s Chinese title, 南方车站的聚会 (The Gathering at a Train Station in the South). Rather than a festive gathering, this get-together is reframed as a cautious, suspended encounter between two strangers, where intimacy arises from their shared predicament. We later learn that neither is here to take the train but that they rather use the station as a safe location to avoid police surveillance, because “the safest hideout is the most dangerous place” (The Wild Goose Lake 00:31:19). In this sense, they are intentionally defying the conceived transience of the station. This mirrors Zhou’s situation, which he himself repeatedly acknowledges: “there’s nowhere for me to run to” (The Wild Goose Lake 01:19:28). The train station of suspended time and space, with its unnamed, unsituated location in a virtual South, then speaks to his inability to regain his footing in the real world. The secular concept of transience and displacement does not apply anymore, and he has become, together with the incessant rain and the shadows, one that awaits his demise. He can only return to memories and flashbacks, for there is, quite literally, nowhere left for him to go, nor any future he can envision himself inhabiting. The train station, as the site of transience in this sense, becomes an any-now(here)-space where Zhou loiters in passive existence, within the shadows, in carefully measured motion, absorbed into the anonymity of the station, where the continuity of time and space slowly erodes him. In this way, Zhou’s flânerie in the train station spatializes a form of deferred perception, where his fatalism and drift generate a negation of linear temporality, which no longer stands by his side. There is no place for him ever in the future of the conceived space of the Chinese society. Zhou’s slow movement and slow reaction in the train station, a space that promotes progression, then embodies a deferral to move 56 forward and a desire to occupy the transient, to resist the future that does not include him anymore. After the train station meet-up, the two split to prepare for their travel in the lake area. Zhou arrives at a deserted cabin to attend to his wounds. The cabin, similarly, is an any-space-whatever filled with retrospection, a desire to form connection to the past in a space stripped of domesticity and meaning. The origin of the cabin was never explained, but it could be glanced that it was once inhabited, with glass jars, broken telephones, potted plants everywhere, and a bedframe with no mattress on it. Zhou temporarily takes a break and loads his gun for what’s to come. When he sits from fatigue, he points his gun at the wall of posters, and we become subsumed in his mental POV (see figure.7). Waving his gun at the newspapers, we start to hear the sound associated with these specific newspaper reports: among which are bustling traffic and crowds, the stock market, a football match, a possible accident, a pop star, a picture of people laughing, and a jet plane surging into the sky. This montage lingers and solidifies on the jet plane surging, as it turns from black and white into color. 57 Figure 7. Zhou points his gun at the newspaper and starts to hallucinate. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:04:22. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. Wordless but substantial in the soundscape, what this POV toggle of Zhou’s gazes’ reveals is a kind of mental flânerie, while the body is heavily demobilized. Zhou as a fugitive is a social outcast that must engage in self-alienation to survive. Reading this as a sort of reflective moment, even though his goal has always been to give money to his family, the images of family nevertheless never cross his mind. Rather it was the association of a totalizing collage of an eventful vision of life, evoked by the variety of news report here, that evokes, for him, an impeding sense of doom and no return, in contrast to this desperate situation he is caught up in. As a momentary stasis in this narrative of fugitive mobility, this stop on the run represents the paradox of the rational thought of self-sacrifice and the bodily instinct for survival and lays the groundwork for us to understand his somewhat deliberately prolonged flânerie around the lake, as a conflicted struggle between his rational recognition of his inevitable demise, and his 58 instinctual need for survival, which finds its enunciation in his bodies’ walking and dwelling in the lake area. Romantic Flânerie: Making Time in the Other Spaces of The Wild Goose Lake The film’s two-part structure uses the cabin as an intermediate threshold, linking the opening double flashbacks to the chronologically linear drift of the second part. Once Zhou and Liu leave the cabin, the flânerie-proper begins, with Liu leading the way under the pretense of guiding a client. Their route unfolds by travelling in a sequence of distinct spaces in the lake area. It begins on a beach by the lake, where the “female swimming companions” solicit customers, and Liu discreetly picks up a man before abandoning him to deflect suspicion. The two, where Liu leads tacitly walking in the front with Zhou following at a distance, embarks on a synchronous coordinated flânerie, as if double of one another. From there, Liu and Zhou move into the narrow streets of the lakeside settlement, where shops appear sporadically, and roads are shared uneasily by scooters and cars. The wandering carries them into a bizarre rundown fun fair, where they hide from patrolling police who just arrive on site. To further delay their arrival while avoiding capture, they drift onto the lake itself by boat, drifting in the dark water as they begin to develop a romantic bond. Returning ashore, they encounter the sweeping beams of a police searchlight, which streaks across the wilderness like a nocturnal spectacle. At this point, Zhou end the drift and returns to the plan to go to the designated rendezvous point, knowing his capture is inevitable. Instead of an immediate surrender, their walk around the lake region slowly turns into a walk of leisure, through spaces that conventionally promise respite: starting from the beaches, fun fair, boat rides to nighttime spectacle. These sites of leisure become the sites of Zhou and Liu’s careful drift from the police, but also paradoxically cultivate intimacy. These sites paradoxically sustain both alertness and intimacy, shaped by their running-not-running, an 59 urgent type of flânerie. Rather than being psychologically exhausted by these liminal spaces, the two find themselves forging an inexplicable bond in the time they both make from delaying Zhou’s downfall. The beach by the lake is where Liu and Zhou reunite to begin this shared flânerie. The sequence opens with a medium shot of Liu standing alone before the water, her small figure framed against the liminal expanse of sand and sky. The image emphasizes her isolation, suspended between two horizons. Cutting to a side profile, the camera shows Liu’s face neutral and emotionless because her status as a disadvantaged streetwalker leaves her little choice but to stand in as a surrogate for his boss Huahua to lead Zhou his way. When she begins to move, the slowness of her pace conveys an attempt to “act normal” to avoid police suspicion. The film tracks her as she walks across the populated beach, revealing Zhou for the first time as a static figure with his back facing the camera. Two policemen briefly enter, glance at him, and pass on. This wordless choreography unfolds against a soundscape of background crowd noise and water, without dialogue. The communication between Zhou and Liu is staged through movement rather than speech or gaze: the bodily movement becomes a means of conveying meaning. Liu walks past Zhou slowly, brushing by him without acknowledgment, as if initiating contact through the trajectory of her movement. This wordless gesture is immediately mirrored by a local client, who circles Liu before silently soliciting her service. To avoid suspicion, Liu must accompany this random client before ditching him to return to her original route. The parallel between Zhou and the client who seeks sexual transaction underscores how walking functions as a medium of negotiation of survival and desire: in normal circumstances, Liu walks to display her sexual charm, but in this case her tacit visibility is in coordination with Zhou. Zhou and Liu’s exchange 60 is not only wordless but also almost gaze-less; unlike the police, whose look asserts surveillance, or the client, whose look signals sexual demand, their interaction relies on proximity and pacing rather than visual address. There is an overlap between the sexualized attention being put on Liu, and the attention of survival that Zhou places on Liu. The two will become indistinguishable as their bond grows stronger later into this shared journey. By meticulously tracking their movements, the film foregrounds walking-as-communication, investing it with both sexual charge and emotional volatility. The choreography between Liu and Zhou, mirrored by the camera’s lingering gaze, is at once sexually charged and emotionally volatile, paving the affective basis for their shared flânerie and emotional bond around the lake. As the pair shakes Liu’s patron and walks onto the streets from the beach, Liu smiles faintly and mysteriously. This moment marks a shift of Liu’s walking into counter-flânerie. Liu’s walk with Zhou subverts the usual function of streetwalking: instead of soliciting clients under the male gaze or carrying out sex work under Huahua’s control, she is simply walking the street. The flânerie becomes discourse-making, reframing her movement as a form of agency, however limited, that momentarily detaches her from her regular line of work. Here the point is not that she has been liberated but rather that the scheme with Zhou seems to have become a sort of retreat or excitement, a stroll of some sorts, for Liu, where she is not tied to performing her sexual appeals, no longer a capitalist act but a momentary resource to individual freedom. As the heavily armed police forces promptly arrive at the street, the two escape into the nearby tent of a fun fair. In a medium shot, the fabric walls become a background of shadow play: the shadows of the passing patrol stretch across the tent, their silhouettes producing a noir-ish image of light paranoia in broad daylight. Inside, Liu and Zhou keep their distance, navigating the tent cautiously. Their wandering leads to an uncanny spectacle: a woman’s head 61 protruding alone from a vase-like pedestal, seemingly disembodied, who begins to sing Bengawan Solo (see figure 8.). Supposedly a singer of the fun fair who just happen to be resting in her stall when the two walk in, the head sings in a mechanical and emotionless tone. In a reverse shot, Zhou and Liu watch with bewildered expression, wordless, not fully understanding what the show is really about. Bengawan Solo is an Indonesian folk song praising the Bengawan Solo River, popularized in China after World War II (Gao), which imbues the scene with an aura of southern nostalgia to the film’s fictional southern city, and links it to the symbolism of the lake where Zhou will inevitably be shot dead at the end. Thus, a song about the nurturing grace of a mother river symbolizes the Wild Goose Lake’s sheltering of Zhou, and a premonition of his fate of eventually dying the “embrace” of the same lake that had protected him. From the singing head, the couple drifts into the adjoining mirror maze. In shot/reverse-shot, the camera aligns us first with Zhou’s gaze: through the mirrors, Liu appears only once, her figure stable and undoubled, framed in medium shot. When the perspective switches to Liu’s view, however, Zhou appears multiple times, refracted across three different mirrors. Each reflection slightly misaligned, he seems both multiplied and displaced, as if the maze refuses to stabilize his identity. The editing lingers long enough on these alternating shots to draw attention to the disparity: Liu’s singular image versus Zhou’s splintered selves. Inserted in between the couple’s fleeing from police patrol, the sudden encounter with a site of leisurely pleasure speaks to the sentiment of the traditional flâneur who finds himself spectator of the attraction provided by the streets (Tester 7). Emerging as ambivalent narrative figures, the singing head and the mirror gaze could be considered to externalize the couple’s desperate situation and psychological fragmentation: with her hands tied and always ready to perform, the singer is forced to sing when demanded; the maze mirror, fracturing the two into countless reflections, gesture to uncertainty 62 of their scheme’s outcome. The singing head and the mirror maze are not directly related to the chase, but only as symbolism of their fate manifesting in front of the pair. The fun fair’s sudden break-away, detour from the police patrol and its spatial segregation from the outside world transforms it into a space of the here-and-now, an any-space-whatever with symbolic interpretative potentials that is open to be linked to the narrative in different ways. Whatever the characters are thinking eludes us because of their silence. But their shared willingness to meander and dwell in this momentary detour from immediate surrender, to spectate together, showcase a slow development of care for each other, where they become not two fugitives on the run, but two people sharing time together.16 Figure 8. Liu watches the singing head show. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:11:40. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. 16 Notable noir precedents that use fun fairs include The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man, and Strangers on a Train. These noirs typically contrast the supposed joy and spectacle of the fair with psychological unease or violence. In The Wild Goose Lake, however, the fun fair subverts this function: rather than heightening tension, it becomes a space of quiet observation where Zhou and Liu develop an unspoken bond. 63 After their time in the fun fair, the two embark on a boat, supposedly to avoid direct contact with the police patrol on the street. Though not a walk on foot, this trip on water represents a turning point in Zhou and Liu’s relationship, from that of two “business” partners to something of a romantic implication. In the dusk, Liu is seen in a high angle close-up laying comfortably half in the water from the boat, putting one of her arms in the lake, enjoying the water while looking at Zhou with a faint smile. A reverse over-the-shoulder shot of Zhou is given, but he remains silent. This reverse shot frames the two in direct contact, showing no background to identify how far they are away from the shore or where they are. They are in the water, in a space not identifiable. Drifting along til dusk, Liu goes for a swim as Zhou watches. Liu switches into a colored stripped bathing suit and jumps into the water for an enjoyable swim, the vibrancy of which stands in contrast to the dark and dim, liminal space of the boat and the water, a gesture that symbolizes individuality. They then share cigarettes, with Liu uttering the same line as they firstly met at the train station, “brother, can I get a light please?” (哥子，借个火), which has now taken on a completely different undertone: while at the train station she was testing out Zhou’s identity, here she is enjoying momentary freedom on the boat in the lake of nowhere (see figure 9.). 64 Figure 9. Zhou and Liu shares cigarettes on the boat. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019,01:15:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. In the dark, Liu caresses Zhou’s wound, the two engage in sexual intercourse. Zhou then asks Liu to take his money for her “service”, with his blood on it so that it “looks more like a real act” (that it would appear they do not know each other, that he only met Liu because he needed a prostitute). This act of intimacy, unfolding progressively, transforms the barely visible lake into an any-space-whatever. Here, again, dialogue is kept to a minimum and the pair communicate with their action rather than words. The boat is veiled in mist and darkness, lit only by the moonlight. In close-up, their surroundings disappear as they drift in an isolated space at the lake’s center. For Zhou it is the last genuine bond before his demise, built not through words but through shared flânerie; for Liu it is a flicker of free agency away from her pimp boss, where she does not sell affect but follows it. The trip around the Lake has become, to Liu, something of a momentary breakaway from her mundane daily of performing her sexual charm for money. The boat space unfolds the flow of desire and affect where Liu asserts control, not according to who pays, but according to what she desires. The lake, rendered as an any-now(here)-space through 65 the drifting boat, joins the train station and fun fair as spaces of delay to create detours in Zhou’s flânerie to stretch time and prolong his downfall. This boat sequence crystallizes the paradox of their bond: it is at once a fleeting intimacy and a tactical deception, a temporary suspension of their imposed roles in which Liu momentarily exercises agency, yet which is tied to the very network of coercion and betrayal that will ultimately ensure Zhou’s demise. Figure 10. Zhou and Liu watch the "lightshow" of the search team. The Wild Goose Lake, dir. Diao Yinan, Green Ray Films, 2019, 01:18:01. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. This shared flânerie reaches to its climax after they have gone back ashore, the moment discussed in chapter 1. Later the two get back ashore and stumble upon the car lights, supposedly from those of the patrol, breaking through the darkness from the skyline, and quickly fades away. Liu makes a comment on its beauty, and the two stand to spectate the nocturnal light show (see figure 10.). Liu asks if he ever considered running down south. Zhou replies that there is no place to run and that he must do the right thing of leaving the money to his family. In medium shot, both are surrounded by darkness, with only their figure glimmering under the moonlight. In the 66 any-space-whatever of the dark shore, Zhou, now in the heterotopic transient zone of demise, still lingers and experiences any fleeting moments that are potential to momentary sublimation. The construction of the Wild Goose Lake as the any-now(here)-space which is severed and unmapped from the outside world, opens potentiality for the re-cartography of affect through the flânerie of Zhou and Liu, who through walking, detouring in this space of the “here and now”, charts the mysterious ambivalent and delicate morphing of affect, desire and rational fatalism, reflecting and remapping its relationship from the outside world. Chapter Conclusion In this chapter, I have positioned The Wild Goose Lake within the wider tradition of film noir and explored how it creates a stylized noir underworld through localization, through the construction of a Chinese southern village-within-a-city that echoes the fragmented and uncertain textures of postsocialist urbanization. I have argued that Diao, by structuring The Wild Goose Lake as a series of contingent encounters formed through the flânerie of Zhou and Liu, transforms the postsocialist heterotopic space of the Wild Goose Lake into Deleuze’s any-spaces-whatever. Zhou’s walk is not simply a movement through space but also a subversion of it. His flânerie becomes a refusal to be captured by the rational logic of pursuit. While in themselves singular sites where Zhou and Liu encounter narrative contingencies, these any-spaces-whatever, constitute the postsocialist any-now(here)-spaces that embody the social fragmentation in what Lai calls a cinematic “poetics of discovery”, where the viewers and the characters alike navigate a loose network of postsocialist signifiers. I have argued The Wild Goose Lake circumvents direct political critique by adopting a neutral stance on surveillance, portraying it not as oppressive but as an effective apparatus activated in exceptional situations like Zhou’s. In doing so, it channels noir’s pedagogical force 67 in showing the effectiveness of socialist law enforcement. At the same time, the film represents the Wild Goose Lake not as a real space, but as a critically pastiched space of postsocialist phenomena. This heterotopic world, suspended between rural decay and urban surveillance, offers the stage for Zhou and Liu’s flânerie, a ground-level navigation that resists the totalizing cartographic gaze from the dominant social apparatus. In this way, flânerie, in constituting the cinematic journey of discovery, engages the Chinese unconscious by remapping the urban peripheries not as zones of neglect, but as spaces of imaginative, affective possibility such as the bond between Liu and Zhou, almost romantic but ultimately fleeting. The Wild Goose Lake resituates the margins of the city into a cinematic terrain of tension and intimacy, one where desire, memory, and fatality all circulate. And it is precisely in this repurposing of peripheral space, through affect and noir atmosphere, that the film finds its most potent intervention, in the prolongation of life for redemption in a fate sealed by past mistakes and postsocialist teleology. 68 Chapter 3: Long Day's Journey Into Night and the Sleepwalker of Nostalgic any-now(here)-spaces Bi Gan and The Industrial Context of Long Day’s Journey Into Night Bi Gan first attracted critical attention in China and abroad in 2015, when his feature debut, Kaili Blues (路边野餐, 2015), won Best New Director at the 52nd Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, as well as Special Mention for Best First Feature in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section at the 68th Locarno International Film Festival (Yang Xiaoxia 20). All four of his films, which include the short films Tiger (老虎, 2010) and Jingang jing (金刚经, 2012), as well as Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night, are set in or connected to his hometown of Kaili. Bi himself notes the reason for consistently shooting in his hometown is simply due to logistical convenience and geographical familiarity (Xu Yuedong). His films show a consistent thematic exploration of the interplay between dream, reality, and memory, often using character doubles, while displaying a neorealist sensibility, marked by long takes, deep focus, and sustained attention to everyday gestures. On top of this art-house style is the incorporation of his personal poems, especially in Kaili Blues, which appear as intertitles that add a lyrical abstraction to his contemplative images (Xiao and Andrew). As Jiwei Xiao and Dudley Andrew argue, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a spiritual successor to Bi’s debut Kaili Blues, both structurally and thematically: both include a two-part structure consisting of a fragmented reality and a continuous one-take dream sequence as a coda; and both explore the boundaries of reality, dream and memory using cinematic doubles, mixing the real and the unreal (Xiao and Andrew). The key difference is the creative approach and the scale of production, which in Bi’s case might be linked causally the one to the other. The 69 production budget of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, initially estimated by Bi at around 25 million RMB, eventually surged to 50 million, reportedly due to Bi’s lack of experience on managing large-scale industrial filmmaking and the unpredictable weather on set (Fan and You 46). This financial backing stands in stark contrast to Kaili Blues’ 1 million RMB budget, most of which was personal funding from Bi himself (Zhongyuan wang). Marketed as a noir-inflected crime romance, Long Day’s Journey Into Night carried the tagline “the last kiss of the year” (Fan and You 46). The film’s Chinese title also translates to “The Last Night on Earth” (地球最后的夜晚). The film was released in mainland Chinese theatres on December 31st, with a presale box office of 150 million RMB (Fan and You 45). Its release was strategically timed at 21:50 on New Year’s Eve, so that its ending coincided with the first moments of January 1st, structuring its viewing experience as a romantic ritual not to be missed (Chen Hongyu 67; Fan and You 45). After its theatrical debut, the film, though grossing over 250 million on January 1st, faced significant backlash. Many audiences felt misguided by the film’s marketing campaign that presented it as a mainstream romantic noir, while withholding its avant-garde nature (Fan and You 46). As a result, the film’s screening share plummeted from 34% on December 31st to just 7% by January 2nd (Fan and You 46). Domestically nominated in five categories at the Golden Horse Awards, Long Day’s Journey Into Night won Best Sound Effects, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Music (“Jinma jiang di 55 jie ruwu ji dedao mingdan”). Internationally, the film premiered in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, though it did not win any awards (Festival du Cannes, “Diqiu zuihou de yewan”). Despite its mixed reception, the film exemplifies Chen Xuguang’s notion of “film industry aesthetics” in a large-scale, transnationally supported production that attempts to package Chinese auteur cinema as marketable, and using cutting-edge technical practices such as the 3-70 cameraman marathon shooting (37-38). Domestically, the film was backed by a wide network of production companies, including Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, Tencent Pictures, and China Film (Shanghai) Film & Television Culture Investment Management Center, among more than fifteen co-producing entities (Diqiu zuihou de yewan Box Office Data). Like the backers of The Wild Goose Lake, these shareholders are involved in a diverse range of works of different scales and market focus. The French company co-producing Long Day’s Journey Into Night is CG cinema, whose founder Charles Gillibert obtained producing credit (CG Cinema). Gillibert has also served on the jury for the Cinéfondation & Short Films selection at the Cannes Film Festival (Unifrance, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Notable works under CG Cinéma’s banner include Annette by Leos Carax, 24 Frames by Abbas Kiarostami, and L’Avenir by Mia Hansen-Løve (CG Cinema). In Gillibert’s own words, the mission of his company is to bring “auteur cinema back at the center of the industry” and to find the right channel to deliver them to the right audience (CG Cinema). Like The Wild Goose Lake, Long Day’s Journey into Night also gained ACM subsidy at 50,000 euros (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, “Résultats des commissions”). What’s more, the production’s technical sophistication echoes Chen’s call for Chinese filmmakers to use “modernized innovative industrial practices” (38). The significant long take representing Luo’s dream was executed in a complex real-time marathon-style relay involving multiple cameras operators using a mix of handheld cameras, vehicle-mounted rigs, zipline follow-shots, and an aerial drone shot (RED). Though the film indeed faced a backslash for its questionable promotional campaign, which “wrongfully promoted an art-house film as a mainstream romance”, the film still achieved considerable box office returns, and its embrace of short-form social media marketing campaigns was notably recognized to be effective (Fan and You 46). Its promotional strategy, on a technical level, reflects a conscious 71 attempt at repackaging auteur cinema for broader consumption. In this sense, both Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Wild Goose Lake exemplify the new “modern” Chinese “film industry aesthetic”, as festival-oriented and market-aware cinema, characterized by a sophisticated mode of production and a modern marketing campaign (Chen Xuguang 33). It is plausible that Shen Yang, who produced both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, contributed to this orientation. Her producing credits include Kaili Blues, Diao Yinan’s trailblazing Black Coal, Thin Ice, Zhang Ming’s The Pluto Moment (冥王星时刻, 2018), and Zhang Bingjian’s North by Northeast (东北偏北, 2014), all of which have attracted significant international festival attention (Shen Yang). Other than specializing in producing auteur cinema, she is also an active participant in the Chinese festival circuit, having founded several key programs for the Shanghai International Film Festival, including the Asian New Talent Award for emerging directors, project pitching sessions, film forums, and short film competitions (SIFF PROJECT). Commenting on Bi’s Cannes presence and box office result, Shen considered it a success for two reasons: first it was recognized by Cannes, bestowing it with “aesthetic values…because Cannes is one of the top festivals worldwide. We need to trust Cannes’ judgment”. Secondly, Shen says that the film’s presale number of 100 million RMB and 270 million RMB opening box office are “the testament of its market appeal” (Shen Yang). Shen Yang’s utilitarian view of art house cinema is no surprise, given her role as a producer and festival organizer who’s heavily involved in the Chinese festival circuit. Within this framework, Bi Gan’s appropriation of noir in Long Day’s Journey Into Night aligns with industry and festival expectations for works that merge artistic prestige with genre-inflected market viability. Indeed, as Bi himself notes, Long Day’s Journey Into Night started as a “noir” concept. In an interview with Radio France International (RFI), he explains his scriptwriting often starts with 72 genre: “…I usually start with a genre. Like Kaili Blues I started writing as a road movie. And I gradually ‘destroy’ it as I write. The same goes with Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I write and then I ‘destroy’, turning it into a ‘dark fairy tale’(hei se tonghua 黑色童话)” (Bi Gan, “Daoyan Bi Gan tan yingpian”).17 In an interview with Festival de Cannes, Bi elaborates that the film “started out as a film noir, in the style of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity”(“Long Day’s Journey into Night as Seen by Bi Gan”), and he later deconstructed the screenplay, “interchanging parts”, and “moving them from one scene to another” (Bi, “Shijian yu kongjian”). Meanwhile, though widely circulating as a work of noir, Bi does not consider Long Day’s Journey Into Night a film noir: “I think (Long day’s Journey Into Night) is hard to categorize... I do not wish it to be a film that could be defined in normative terms... Its story is quite simple, like a fairy tale for adults. But it is hard to say what genre it is” (Bi, “Shijian yu kongjian”). While Bi does not classify the film strictly as noir, his process indicates that the film’s noir-inflected aesthetics and narrative elements are not accidental but arise from his deliberate engagement with a noir genre framework. Noir Fatalism: Luo’s Failed Attempts at Self-narrativization in the Present “One final thing I have to do... and then I’ll be free of the past.” --John “Scottie” Ferguson, Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 17 “我写剧本通常是先写一个类型化的东西。比如《路边野餐》我就是先写了一个公路式的电影，然后在写作的过程中开始对剧本不断进行破环。这次也一样，然后再破坏掉，把它变成一个”黑色童话”，这可能是一个写作的习惯”(“My screenplay writing begins a specific genre. Kaili Blues started off as a road movie. I consistently ‘destroy’ the structure as I go. Same with Long Day. I turn it into a ‘dark fairy tale’. It’s my habit of writing.”), Bi, Gan 毕赣. “Shijian yu kongjian, jiyi yu yingsu” 时间与空间，记忆与罂粟 [Time and Space, Memory and Opium]. Interview by Muyan. Cinephilia, 5 May 2019, cinephilia.net/70669/. Accessed 27 June 2025. 73 Bi Gan’s turn to noir, even using its basic framework, is thus an important strategy to ensure the film’s legibility in both transnational festival-market circuit and domestic market. But far from being simply a decorative genre layer, the noir narrative of disorientation and disillusionment actually helps to hinge the film’s industrial positioning with its spatial-aesthetic strategies. The story of Luo’s investigation and the wandering it enables, becomes the narrative situation that invites flânerie. We learn gradually that Wan was involved with a local crime boss, Zuo Hongyuan. Bai Mao, whose father was killed by Zuo for his gambling debt, finds the gun that Zuo uses to kill his local opponent. Bai Mao disguises his plan for revenge as blackmail, hiding a gun in a cart of apples to kill Zuo and avenge his father. Bai Mao recruits his best friend Luo to help bring the cart of apples, without telling him what the apples are really for or his intentions. Nonchalantly, Luo forgets to deliver the apple cart for Bai Mao’s meeting with Zuo, resulting in Bai Mao’s death. Later, after Luo’s affair with Wan was exposed, Zuo tightens his control of Wan and tortures Luo to teach a lesson. In desperation, Wan tells Luo she was pregnant but has had an abortion, then persuades him to assassinate Zuo during a movie screening. The result of the assassination was never disclosed in the film, and we learn from Luo’s account that Wan has then mysteriously disappeared while Luo drifted away from Kaili. The investigation is rendered a “long” pursuit in two ways: formally, through Bi Gan’s extensive use of long takes, and narratively, through the constant interweaving of memory and present sequences without clear formal demarcation. In parallel, past and present both advance chronologically yet indistinguishable in their aesthetics and style. The memory thread begins with Luo’s first meeting with Wan and culminates in his attempted assassination of Zuo, while the present follows his search for Wan through those once closely involved with her: a childhood friend now imprisoned, whose name Luo discovers on the back of a photograph hidden in their 74 old rendezvous spot; her ex-husband, a hotel owner who let her stay in exchange for nightly stories, whom she later married under the alias of Chen Huixian; and Bai Mao’s mother, who recounts how Wan manipulated Zuo to kill for her by borrowing a gun from Bai Mao’s father. Each encounter adds fragments that both supplement and destabilize Luo’s understanding of Wan, propelling him toward Dangmai, the cabaret where she is said to work. There, told the cabaret will not open for another three hours, Luo drifts into a nearby cinema to pass the time and falls asleep, transitioning the narrative into the dream sequence. Through his investigation scenes, the memory thread is framed through Luo’s retrospective voiceover, delivered from an indeterminate space and time. His commentary provides an intermittent anchoring, beginning the film with the declaration “This all began with a friend’s death and my fascination with dangerous things (00:06:35),” or clarifying that he and Wan “constantly went to the movies during that time (00:35:07),” as this voiceover is intercut with sequences of their cinema-going. Such interventions mark memory from present and underscore the instability of Luo’s recollection of Wan. In the cinema, as he drifts into sleep while waiting for the cabaret to begin, the film shifts into its celebrated dream sequence, a 62-minute single take representing his descent into a dream scenario, where he travels into a deserted prison and meets doppelgangers of Wan, the deceased Bai Mao and his mother who abandoned him as a kid. To clarify the narrative structure of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I mobilize David Desser’s framework of the “Stranger and Femme Fatale” subcycle of noir in dialogue with Yang Yu’s Deleuzian reading of the film. Within Desser’s category, Wan Qiwen serves as the femme fatale whose allure draws Luo into a chain of fatal situations for her selfish goals, and whose ultimate narrative function is to anchor Luo’s pursuit of a past that he seems to continually misremember. On the other hand, Yang Yu draws on Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image to 75 account for the film’s bifurcated structure, in which the concluding dream sequence refracts rather than mirrors the earlier investigation and memories. Yang argues that the film stages a crystal structure by staging a circuit between the recollection-image (the sudden insertion of memories between investigation in the first part), the dream-image (the one-take dream sequence), and the actual-image (the present investigation in the first part). This, according to Yang, enables a self-referential structure, where the dream sequence becomes the surface where past and present find their reflection, thus constituting a indiscernible “coalescence of (Luo’s) past, present and future in eternal return” (67). Yet because this reflection is never a perfect replica, it enables a constant callback, a mental oscillation between dream, cinematic memory, and cinematic present, that constantly generates new meanings and connections. For example, in the dream, he does not meet Wan, but rather Kaizhen, played by the same actress Tang Wei, who abandons the Guizhou dialect altogether and now speaks in Mandarin, and is overseeing a billiard business; he also stumbles upon a quarrel between a woman and a faceless man. The woman, played by the same actress who earlier played Bai Mao’s mother, now appears as a different person, pleading to be taken far away from her family but is refused by the other man. This incident is thought to refer to Luo’s mother’s actual departure when he was little. The doubling encapsulates the crystal logic of the dream as not a repetition of what happened but a reconstruction altogether, a refraction, where past memory returns not by itself but a new situation to be dealt with in dream, which renders the dream experience not a re-experience of traumatic past, but a trip of possibilities. In this sense, the dream both reprises and transforms the first part’s fragmented interplay of Luo’s past and present, crystallizing into a structure that is itself constantly on the move, where time folds back upon itself, each layer refracted through 76 another, making Luo’s pursuit of Wan Qiwen less a recovery of the past than a continual encounter with memory distortions. Taken together with Desser’s framework, Wan Qiwen as the femme fatale becomes the narrative anchor of this two-way passage. As Yang notes, the anchor of the film’s circulation between memory, present, and dream is not the real Wan herself but Luo’s unreliable reconstruction of her through memory and investigation (66). As the investigation deepens, Luo becomes increasingly unsure of who Wan really is. The investigation begins when Luo finds a photograph of Wan with her friend’s contact information on the back, a photograph in which Wan’s face is blurred out. Luo’s romance with Wan also begins because she supposedly resembles his estranged mother, whose face is never shown in the film. A meeting with Wan's childhood friend revealed that her name is perhaps not Wan, but a woman named Chen Huixian. Later, in a meeting with Wan’s husband whom she married after Luo, Luo learns that they just got a divorce and that she was always infertile, despite having told himself she had an abortion for their child. Yang argues that this contradictory interplay of details is an act of deliberate narrative falsification, blurring the real and the fantasized (70). By the film’s end, he does not find Wan in reality but reunites with Kaizhen, her dream counterpart. Through this two-part narrative, one fragmentary and one hallucinating, Luo traverses between the past, the present and the dream, each reflecting and echoing one another, rendering him a ghost moving aimlessly through this crystal circuit of memory and dream (68). This futile search, coupled with disorientation in his own memory, is, alongside the genre conventions of the Stranger and Femme Fatale, what lends Long Day’s Journey into Night its noir sensibility, through Luo's failed attempt to narrativize reality, of not being able to make peace between past and present, with resolution arriving only in the fabricated realm of dreams. 77 Mapping Bi Gan’s Kaili and Dangmai: Chinese Any-space-whatever and Reflective Nostalgia As I argued in Chapter 1, much like Diao’s fictional Southern City, Bi Gan’s Kaili is also one torn between the real and the fictional. The film was indeed shot in Kaili, and much of the film was set in the deserted Danzhai Mercury Factory area, a huge industrial complex fully equipped with living, commercial (shops and cinema) and institutional quarters (daycare, school, postal office) and even a prison (Xiao Hongshi).18 Abandoned in the 1990s when the mercury supplies became depleted, the architecture was Soviet-influenced, reportedly due to the involvement of Soviet experts in its 1956 design (Xiao Hongshi). The celebrated long take sequence was filmed entirely within this factory, yet, as principal cinematographer Dong Jingsong notes, more than 90 percent of what we see in the film was the hybrid result of production design and on-location architecture (Dong Jingsong). In this way, Bi Gan’s representation of Kaili is not concerned with preserving the profilmic materiality of the real space, but rather a reimagined and reconfigured reality based on a pre-existing real location. As Bi notes himself, he’s trying to capture the 18According to government reports, Guizhou is an underdeveloped region with a lagging economy. Historically, its economy has been dominated by mining and agriculture, while transportation infrastructure has been difficult to develop due to its challenging geography. See Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guowuyuan 中华人民共和国国务院. “Guizhou sheng guihua jianyao” 贵州省规划简要 [Brief plan of Guizhou Province]. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo zhengfu gongbao 中华人民共和国政府公报 [Gazette of the State Council of the PRC], 2012, www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2012/content_2049997.htm. Accessed 13 Aug. 2025. In the 1960s, however, Guizhou became an important strategic site in mainland China’s industrialization program sanxian jianshe 三线建设 [Third Front Construction], aimed at preparing for potential military conflict with Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The program supported and established heavy industries (iron, oil, machinery, railway and etc.) in China’s western inland provinces, including Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou. While later assessments of this project have generally been positive--citing its role in boosting the economy of the Chinese west in the backdrop of the largely eastern-focused Reform and Opening policy--by the mid-1990s, as China’s diplomatic ties with powers such as the United States improved, the declining efficiency of many factories and the difficulty of sustaining production infrastructure led to restructuring, closure of inefficient sites, and staff reductions. Danzhai 丹寨 was among those shut down due to exhausted mining resources and inefficiency. See Marquis, Christopher, and Qiao, Kunyuan. “The Third Front Construction and Private Entrepreneurship.” Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise. Yale University Press, 2022, pp. 176–188. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3006z6k. 78 “shadow” of Kaili, “parts of the city that are long abandoned and neglected”, which form for him the Kaili he remembers rather than the “sleek modern Kaili that people tend to know” (Bi, “In Conversation: Bi Gan with Ethan Spigland”). While these spaces align with the preference for depicting urban decay in Sixth Generation cinema, Bi’s constructed Kaili is stripped of overt political intent. In describing this focus on the neglected ruins of Kaili, he repeatedly used words such as “attractive” and “charming”: “I do think that just like other cities in mainland China, it (Kaili)'s going through transformations... It is something that I find very attractive, very charming, something that I want to be seen by the audience” (Bi, “In Conversation”). Here his interest in ruins is less about formulating a political critique of the postsocialist urban decay, and more about a nostalgia driven by an affective mediation between memory, time and change themselves. Such nostalgia is reflected through naming his characters after Mando/Canto-pop stars, and the film’s music soundtrack, together showing a playful homage to the late 20th-century Hongkong/Taiwan pop stars: Luo Hongwu after a Taiwanese music producer, the villain Zuo Hongyuan after a Hong Kong composer with the same name, Chen Huixian after Cantopop singer Priscilla Chan, and Wan Qiwen after Hong Kong actress Monica Wan. The soundtrack further extends this network, weaving in songs like Tai Chao-mei’s Dark Green Night, Miyuki Nakajima’s Thistle Girl’s Lullaby, and Wu Bai and Karen Mok’s A Reason to Be Strong. These references can be seen as pop culture relics, weaved into the fabric of the story for their affective values rather than as signifiers for their real-life counterparts: for example, Wu Bai’s song plays when Zuo interrogates Luo to signify a sense of defeat because Bi thinks Wu’s voice is “coarse and powerful, like that of the ruins” (Bi, “Shijian yu kongjian”). For Bi Gan’, the music reference becomes part of a nostalgic collage: an audible memory-map that, like the film’s visual ruins, 79 refrains from reconstructing a coherent cultural past, but forms a fragmented network of affective nostalgia, reflective in its pastiched nostalgic Chinese-language music network of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, as Bi notes himself in cryptic fashion: “I am anxious over memory, not over material needs” (Bi Gan, “Zhongguo Dianyingjia Xiehui Shouci”). His fascination with ruins and the act of remembrance itself aligns his consistent representation of Kaili to Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia”. Boym identifies “restorative” and “reflective” as two dominant modes of how cultural production imagines the past (41). While restorative nostalgia emphasizes the reconstruction of an image of the past through reconstructions of monuments and the revival of traditional practices, reflective nostalgia recognizes the impossibility of replicating the past and that the past is also but a constructed myth (49). Reflective nostalgia “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time,” and “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself’” (49). For Boym, “the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but … might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality,” opening “a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development” (50). It then becomes clear why Bi Gan sets Luo’s drift in the neglected, ruined site of the Danzhai Mercury Mine. For, the ruin is the ideal material for reflective nostalgia, the prototypical any-space-whatever in Deleuze’s account. For Deleuze, ruins are sites where their original roles have been halted, and they emerge as spaces emptied of meaning that could only be grappled through aimless wandering by the characters and perceived in “pure optical and sound situations” by the viewers (Deleuze qtd. in Rodowick 75). A similar argument is made by Robert Ginsberg regarding the productive force of ruins. In their material fragmentation, ruins 80 for Ginsberg enable discovery and exploration: “what counts in the ruins is what we find, not what we miss”. In other words, Ginsberg believes ruins motivate exploration in making meaning because “exploration follows no plan, it is a free wandering” (158). In other words, Bi Gan constructs a Kaili of nostalgia that enables flânerie, as a means for the characters to (re)discover their past and present. While one could read the ruined industrial sites as a tacit commentary on China’s industrial restructuring, the story of Luo focuses more on a personal journey to make amends for his own past. This reflection on the problematic of memory itself is delivered in the film when Luo reunites with Bai Mao’s mother, who says that a “mudslide isn’t scary. Being stuck in memory is scary” (01:06:46). Memories in the film also echoes this line, becoming a literal physical blockade, hijacking the present and momentarily plunging Luo into recollections. The memory sequences appear seamlessly within the same visual field as his present reality and later referenced in the dream-images. In this way, memory not only punctuates the present but also generates the dream world, extending the investigation into Luo’s dream where past, present, and fantasy coexist. What Luo does then is to drift and jump from one memory to another. Instead of positioning the industrial ruins as a social problem to be addressed in the story of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he positions the dystopic vision of Kaili as the affective mise-en-scène fitted for a noir iconography, to explore the problematics between memory, the real, and the dream, perhaps probing the problem of existence itself. Flânerie enters this scene as a bodily movement that does not grant immediate answers, but a process of embodied discovery, into any-spaces-whatever, or any-now(here)-spaces in the context of mainland teleology, divorced from their original function and instant narrative-making. 81 But Bi also rejects a completely pessimistic reading of Kaili. When asked where Wan has gone, her ex-husband says she now performs in a bar in a town called “Dangmai (荡麦)”. Luo travels there but falls asleep in a cinema and enters the long dream sequence. Luo does arrive in Dangmai in the diegetic reality of the film, but the film shows no establishing shot of the town. As a result, some critics have conflated Dangmai with the unnamed deserted prison that houses the dream sequence (Bi Gan, “Shijian yu kongjian”; --, “Yi wuxian jiejin xieshi de fangshi”). This conflation renders Bi’s spatial construct more hopeful and reconciliatory. As Bi himself notes, Dangmai is not a real town: in the Miao language, Dangmai means “the place that does not exist”, a place where “different temporalities entangle” (“Zhongguo dianyingjia xiehui shouci”). In the dream, Luo finds the “deserted prison” not deserted at all, but brimming with life where vendors, residents, and doppelgängers from his memory occupy different quarters of the prison, rendering it a fully functioning town. This transformation renders Dangmai a fabular elsewhere, a dream-inflected space accessible only through the threshold of sleep, where the deserted space becomes animated and memory returns as embodied experience. The construction of Dangmai and its Miao significance gestures perhaps to a broader of condition of Chinese ethnic minorities in mainland China, who, though subsumed under the umbrella ethnicity of “the Chinese people”, are often visible through ethnographic tourism that highlights their cultural distinctiveness from the Han majority (Chawla 134; Zhou and Edlheim 260).19 Yet in Bi’s construction, the town is not portrayed as an 19 The Chinese state has often supported the Miao community by including Miao embroidery in its “Intangible Cultural Heritage” for preservation purposes and to boost China’s “soft power”. Similar practices include setting up tourism villages to enhance income for the Miao settlements in Guizhou. But these practices often engage in an internal exoticization of the Miao identity. See Muhammad Iqbal Chawla, “Ethnicity, Diversity, and National Integration of China: A Case Study of Miao Community in China,” Journal of Development and Social Sciences, 82 ethnographic Miaozhai20 (Miao Village) but as a generic county-town of fun fairs and vendors with no clear ethnic demarcations. In refusing to stage ethnicity through the spectacle of settlement, Bi enacts a reflexive strategy: the Miao are not represented as a readily visible object of exotic display but as an implicit signifier in the name of the place Luo visits. This construct of a Miao-Han hybrid settlement that exists outside of real time and space perhaps then gestures towards a vision of mutual existence without internal exoticization, where neither are readily distinguishable from one another. The prison’s magical-realist texture fuses the absence of the real with the vitality of the imagined, as a liminal site where the rules of waking life are suspended and an alternative “magical” one takes place. In this sense, the “non-existent” town becomes an extensively tactile and traversable any-space-whatever, a locus of consolation where memory, dream, and desire intermingle beyond the coordinates of the real. In the sections that follow, I trace this dynamic through a set of key locations. In the first part of the film, the Xiaofeng restaurant sets the embodied flânerie in motion, where Luo, returning to mourn his father, starts his investigation to find Wan. The tunnel sequence extends this drift into a romantic flânerie shared with Wan. In the second part’s dreamscape, I delineate three more flâneries: Luo and Bai Mao’s scooter ride into the deserted prison; Luo’s airborne drift with Kaizhen; and his sorrowful walk after seeing his mother off, culminating in a dream reunion with Kaizhen. These journeys are not isolated, vol. 4, no. 4, Oct.–Dec. 2023, pp. 126–136. P-ISSN: 2709-6254, O-ISSN: 2709-6262. https://doi.org/10.47205/jdss.2023(4-IV)12. 20 See more about this traditional Miao settlement at “Miao Ethnic Village in SW China Preserves Ancient Traditions.” People’s Daily Online, 27 May 2024, https://en.people.cn/n3/2024/0527/c90000-20174482.html. Accessed 10 Sept. 2025. 83 Kaizhen is a double of Wan, just as the mother is doubled by another woman, layering each movement with echoes, displacements, and slippages between the real and the dream. Deferred Mourning and Imagined Romance: Drift between Memory and Present The dislocated, fragmented space of Long Day’s Journey Into Night lends itself to the any-space-whatever: an ambiguous, affectively charged time-space that is not easily locatable. Rather than orienting the viewer, these spaces produce a sense of drift, inviting movement without destination. This spatial configuration, half-remembered, half-invented, structures Luo’s wandering, in the suspended present of trying to process past grief. As Luo recounts the reason why he returns to Kaili, we enter the Xiaofeng restaurant. The scene opens with a broken clock, and a woman walks into frame to take it down and switch it with a picture of Luo’s late father. The camera then moves slowly and horizontally to the left. This kind of slow tracking movement doesn’t just reveal new visual information but modulates how we look. It draws the gaze gradually across space, not in a disjunctive way, but in a drifting manner, gently repositioning our relation to the room and stays on Luo (see Figure 1.). The frame doesn’t really show the restaurant-proper. The shallow focus blurs the periphery, insisting instead on a tight visual intimacy: the picture, the clock, the rusted wall, and Luo’s face. And in doing so, the shot quietly displaces context, it denies the viewer full access to the space’s function as “restaurant,” and instead emphasizes its weight as affective geography. The restaurant edges on being a blurred space where no customers are clearly visible and becomes Deleuze’s any-space-whatever: a suspended place where the coordinates of time and function collapse into perception (Rodowick 75). It contains the photograph of the absent mother and the clock that no longer tells time. The clock that tells no time situates the restaurant out of time, where the measure of regular temporality has lost itself to the affective measure of Luo’s 84 contemplation. In place of a temporal unit is the unfolding tracking shot that becomes the very embodiment of time itself, not measured by the clock but experienced affectively through the scrolling image and rhythm. There emerges, in this example, the spatialization of Luo’s shifting and unstable memory. The restaurant is not a fixed location, but a mutable constellation of feelings and recollections. Space here is fluid, and its becoming into place is dictated not by function, but by Luo’s memory of his mother, the death of his father, and the missing Wan Qiwen. Luo later says he brought Wan here to learn about Zuo, “because when people eat, they can’t lie” (00:18:29), the restaurant becomes a site of involuntary truth, stringing a circuit between the recollection of Wan and the present where Luo mourns his deceased father in the restaurant named after his estranged mother. Perhaps not a restaurant, but an any-restaurant-whatever stripes of spatial and temporal coordinates from the outside world, where the two ends of past and present constantly refer to each other. The camera here also drifts to mirror Luo’s drifting psychology. The camera slowly pans to the left to follow him embarking on the search for Wan, not saying a word about his deceased father. The slow tracking shot sets up the film’s spatiality mapped not by conspiracies or urban codes, but a space constituted as much by external material reality as by interior recollection. If Luo’s tacit stone-faced meander through the space maps the spatial fabric of memory in a time of change, then the drifting camera constructs its own practice of movement, slowly scrolling the screen as if surveilling, lingering on all the details before finally moving on: an embodied cinematic form of nostalgia. We do not get any panoramic shot but only close-ups. This externalizes Luo’s inability to narrativize his present and past, the space he moves through is not so much external terrain as it is the psychogeography of deferred mourning. He is caught in a feedback loop of the past, not simply remembering, but dwelling. 85 Figure 11. Luo Hongwu walks out of Xiaofeng Restaurant. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 00:10:31. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. This temporal and spatial ambiguity crystallizes further in the tunnel, a recuring motif in the film. The tunnel appears twice: first as Luo tails Wan after inviting her to her mother’s restaurant, and second during the dream sequence. Here we will focus on the first example. The tunnel is a sort of passage emphasizing transience, a non-space to be passed and not dwelt upon (77). However, Luo and Wan do the exact opposite. Luo, in his car, drives at pedestrian speed to keep up with Wan, as the two share a walk within the tunnel. In a spinning shot, the camera frames the back of Wan from Luo’s van, moving through a drape of waterfall and finally focuses on the figure of Wan, in red, walking slowly (see Figure 2.). The camera then pans back, following Wan who turns around and walks to confront Luo about his obvious stalking. Here, the camera’s perspective changes seamlessly from Luo’s subjective POV of Wan to a third-person perspective of both Luo and Wan. As Bi himself notes, the tunnel scene represents a narrative point where the subjective and the objective start to become indistinguishable (Yang 70). Even 86 though the camera preserves the duration as much as possible, the questionable POV shift raises doubt regarding the indexicality of the cinematic apparatus, as well as echoing Luo’s prior claim that “cinema is for sure not real. But memories mix truth and lies.” (00:35:34). The falsification of memory is foreshadowed, as the filmic image does not reflect a stable reality but rather destabilizes itself through perceptual ambiguity. Here, the image of recollection does not represent memory, but rather its instability and mutability. Figure 12. Luo follows Wan into a tunnel. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 00:19:24. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. What this reflects is the contradiction between optical truth and absolute truth. In this case, the optical truth is Luo’s memory presented in cinematic image. Here the shift in perspective destabilizes the optical reality of the image, of Luo’s first encounter with Wan, and hints that what we see in the sequence may not be what really happened. This is especially the case after the camera pans and emerges out of waterfall, with water dripping on the lens. Here in Luo’s optical vision, in his recollection-image, we see Wan’s figure only from behind, as Luo recounts the similarity between Wan and his mother. The crucial conflict here is using realist 87 slow cinema aesthetics to represent the short-circuiting of memory and fantasization, to the extent that the memory becomes a result of fantasization, of the process of reminiscence going rogue, rerouted, on a detour, on its own flânerie. The car window which frames Qiwen even when she comes closer to talk to Luo affirms this observation, suggesting that she is always framed within his voiceover, his memory and fantasization. A literal embodiment of his desire and affect. In this sense, the tunnel becomes a symbol for not only a non-place suspended, protracted for the two to meander in romantically, but it also maps a dilated and protracted recollection, a place of “non-memory” perhaps. In this sense, memory time is made excess as a means of preservation in a space of non-time, transforming into a source of affective intimacy. As the passage that links one side to the other through darkness, the inner any-space-whatever of the tunnel becomes the site where the fluid progression of recollection and narrativization is suspended and elongated into a kind of expansive, fallacious ground where recollection and fantasizing takes root in each other. Here the walking in the tunnel mirrors the entrapped flânerie of Luo, who, like the restaurant, cannot remember any spatial details but rather reconstructing constantly his own memories, projecting, creating the any-space-whatever of memory to project his desire and unresolved trauma. There are no spatial details to be mapped but only the nostalgic sensation of romance in the tunnel where all coordinates are lost in the passage of darkness. The camera does not simply record but drifts along from the real to the unreal. The Super Sleepwalker: Reclamation of the Real through Dream As mentioned above, the second half of the film is a one-hour 3-D long take that is supposedly a dream sequence. There is not necessarily a story for this part but a series of encounters. In chronological order, Luo enters his dream to find himself stuck in a cave with a boy with no name, and with whom he plays table tennis in exchange for the direction out. After 88 winning, the boy takes him out of the cave by scooter to a zipline, and gifts Luo the table tennis bat, saying that it has magic that can give its user to power to fly. Learning that the boy does not have a name, Luo decides to name him Bai Mao after his deceased friend. Luo then arrives in the village where he will encounter Kaizhen, Wan’s double, played by the same actress. Instead of having black hair and speaking Kaili dialect like Wan, Kaizhen appears with red hair, speaks Mandarin, and oversees a local arcade. When local hooligans harass her and lock her inside with Luo, barring her from attending a singing competition at the prison center, Luo remembers the magic tennis bat given to him by the child Bai Mao. Using it, he takes Kaizhen on a flying tour, descending into the village square so that she can pursue her dream of “becoming a big star” (01:40:18). The two momentarily part ways, after which Luo encounters a woman, played by the same actress who played Bai Mao’s mother, with a torch who quarrels with another man, demanding to be taken far away. Recognizing this as a spectral refraction of his own mother’s uninformed departure when he was young, Luo points a gun at the man and, with tears in his eyes, asks the woman if she has truly made up her mind. He then forces the man to take her along, before returning to the prison center where he meets Kaizhen again. Rejoining her, the two share a kiss in a magical room that spins upon itself when two lovers cast the right spell. The film concludes with the firework that was only meant to last a minute, now glimmering beyond its duration. Speaking of his insistence on this continuous long take, Bi explains that he wants to present the dream in its lucid state because he conceives of dreams as continuous rather than fragmented, despite their disjointed imagery (Bi, “Koubei liangjihuahua zhihou”). When we recall a dream, he notes, we do not describe it as hundreds of separate fragments but as one coherent experience, an illusion of continuity. His goal was not to capture the “real” in an indexical sense, but to 89 convey the “real” sensation of dream, a world “falsely real” (Bi, “In Conversation: Bi Gan with Ethan Spigland”). The switch from 2D to 3D in this sequence accentuates the otherworldly texture of the dream (Bi, “In Conversation”). This 62-minute sequence was shot in its entirety, not digitally stitched together like a pseudo long take. Bi had rejected such methods earlier in Kaili Blues, insisting the travelling sequences be shot continuously so as to feel more believable, even at the cost of shakiness or blur (Bi, “Yi wuxian jiejin xieshi” 93). Mitchell van Vuren argues that such shifts in film texture enable extradiegetic “travel” by the audience, foregrounding a dialogical relationship between the viewer and the film over an immersive one (96). In other words, it is not only a lucid dream for Luo but also for the audience, except unlike a real dream, both are engaged in a journey of exploration (98). Discussing his long take, Bi distinguishes his method from Birdman (2014), known for its digitally stitched together pseudo-long takes and disguised cuts. Though conscious of constructing his dream sequence as both real and false, he insists on shooting it in its real duration. I argue this dedication to the profilmic event, the journey from the cave, through zipline into Danzhai prison, briefly up on a drone, and then on foot, shape the film’s sense of “travel”. In his book Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, William Brown notes that advances in digital camera movements have facilitated a philosophical shift in how cinema constructs experience, producing Deleuze’s “gaseous perception,” where the camera seems to pass through space effortlessly (46). Such a shift enables a posthuman take on reality, where all spaces form a continuum in the perspective of the digital camera (47). Brown’s theorization of this posthuman turn of the virtual camera is an illuminating counterpoint in thinking about Bi’s physical camera. Though shot digitally, Bi’s dream sequence avoids this virtual approach, grounding and pacing its movement in Luo’s modes of travel, on foot, scooter, zipline, or in the air, each maintaining a 90 contemplative, flâneur-esque pace. The camera, rooted in real action choreography, does not pass through walls but moves around them, detouring when needed to reframe on the characters, leaving the audience waiting until they reappear, often brushing through other parts of the reanimated prison as it finds its way back.21 Such “dead time” of Luo’s flânerie is not omitted but lived, rendering time not as measurement of action but a lucid experience of the dream fabric itself. This constitutes Deleuze’s time-image in which the experience of unbroken time, as “pure sound and optical situations”, has come to subordinate the chain of narrative causality: “…time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time” (Cinema 2 22). In the case of the dream long take, such a time-image is traversed through Luo’s ambivalent flânerie, a kind of action not clearly oriented into a set of movements, but which gives itself up to occasionally being lost in the flow of time. In this way, flânerie paradoxically produces the time-image: while it is constituted by bodily movement, its ambivalence prevents that movement from structuring temporality. Rather, the long take captures Luo’s inability to structure time in his dream while also floating with the dream’s unfolding as an affective experience rather than as narrative progression. Although the dream sequence remains within the human register as driven by memory and desire, it nevertheless produces a flattening between Luo’s subjectivity (as he walks as himself in the space) and his memories (which serve as a foundation of the space he explores). The deserted prison could be seen as an extension of his subjectivity, but also as the part which he himself has not explored before. In this regard we see Deleuze’s crystal architecture in its full indiscernibility between the self (Luo’s memory and present) and the other 21 Up until this thesis’s writing, no source indicates the use of digital special effects beyond standard color grading and the conversion from 2D footage to 3D footage. 91 (the material environment of the prison and its inhabitants), where past, present and dream-images coexist on the same surface. In this way, the long take, though rooted in human choreography, gestures towards the posthuman: not by erasing the human, but by decentering Luo’s subjectivity and situating him within a crystalline space of refracted temporalities and doubles. The dream sequence is constituted by three main flâneries. The first is the ride into the village on the back of a scooter with the unnamed boy, a spectral double of both Luo’s childhood friend and the unborn child he would have had with Wan. The two drift through a road entirely engulfed by darkness before descending via a zipline into the village below (See figure 3.). This ride at night, devoid of landmarks and orientation, evokes the any-space-whatever where the journey from A to B becomes a metaphorical one for the boy and Luo’s bonding. As the boy asks Luo whether he has ever kissed someone and what it feels like, Luo replies from the backseat, “like a dream” (01:23:40). In this uncut tracking exchange, Bi embeds Luo’s romantic displacement and reverie into a moment of innocent inquiry between two figures who derive from the same subject Luo. The boy, at once the echo of a family never formed and a friend lost, voices an affection and desire that was not able fully to manifest. But what they do possess, is the excess of time from the tracking shot of them driving in the darkness, where transience does not produce dead time but time for affective bonding. 92 Figure 13. The boy takes Luo to the prison on a scooter. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 01:23:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. In the second dream flânerie, Luo escorts Kaizhen down to the singing competition taking place in the town center, which Kaizhen considers to be her chance of breakout stardom. Kaizhen, like the boy Bai Mao and the torch-bearing woman, is a spectral construction: an amalgam of displaced traits from Luo’s memory of Wan and his mother. Kaizhen, like Wan, is involved with a local mobster who makes money by loan sharking. But contrary to Wan who cheats on Zuo, Kaizhen is the one being cheated on by the mobster. Resigned to accept this fact, Kaizhen tells Luo she wants to be a singer and experience being on an airplane for the first time in her life. Using the magic tennis table bat gifted by the kid Bai Mao, Luo instead takes Kaizhen to “fly” across the prison, an aerial traversal that mirrors the earlier scooter ride on the land. As the pair lifts off, the camera does not dwell on shots of their intimacy. Instead, it assumes a first-person perspective, drifting slowly over the neon-lit prison in a prolonged panoramic shot, showing the prison in a reanimated liveliness, populated by vendors and the audience of the singing competition (see figure 4.). Here the perspective shift mirrors that from the tunnel, but it 93 differentiates itself in becoming the perspective of not just Luo’s, but of both Luo and Kaizhen’s. As Liu Siqi observes, this dynamic movement imbues the camera with an active, exploratory presence, transforming it from a passive recorder into the character's POV, embodying their affective interconnectedness in this merging of perspectives (50). The cinematic perspective is shared between Luo, Kaizhen, and the viewers in front of the screen. Figure 14. Luo and Kaizhen spectate the town from above. Long Day’s Journey into Night, dir. Bi Gan, Zhejiang Huace Film & TV, 2018. 01:43:33. Reproduced for scholarly analysis under fair dealing. The aerial perspective of the prison in its reanimated form speaks to Luo’s regained control of spatial construction. As Teresa Castro notes, aerial mapping evokes a god’s eye view that condenses spatial heterogeneity into a legible whole (14). It is only in his dream that Luo is able to behold his environment as a whole and share such information in its majesty to the one he cares about. This cartographic gesture differentiates the dream sequence from its past-present counterpart, where the dream, contrary to reality, could be clearly legible in its spatial occupation rather being fragmented: dream for Luo is clearer than reality. Despite its spatial clarity, the 94 prison-town still emerges as an any-space-whatever that exists off the course of Luo’s reality, self-contained, requiring a rite of passage to enter, and imminently reflecting Luo’s past, all of which structures it as a heterotopic any-space-whatever filled with emotional potential every step Luo takes. While the two are airborne, a Dong (侗) folkloric music “Song of the Cicadas” (“蝉之歌”) play in the background (Wu Quan). This version is not the original but a remastered arrangement by composer Lin Qiang, which incorporates electronic elements, infusing the piece with laser-like, science-fictional soundscapes to complement the surreal sense of Luo and Wan’s flight. The Dong people is another ethnic group residing alongside the Miao in Guizhou province, with whom they share autonomous governance of Kaili (Kaili’s administrative status is the “Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture of Guizhou Province”).22As one of the best known songs of the Dong community, “Song of the Cicadas” tells the short-lived romance between two lovers and must be performed collectively with many singing together rather than by a soloist. Its polyphonic form, an imitation of the sound of the cicadas, relies on the interplay between high and low parts (Qin 98). Though not a Dong himself, Bi’s inclusion of the song speaks to a topophilic nostalgia for the mixed ethnic space in which he grew up, instead of a desire to represent the ethnographic distinctiveness of Kaili. As I argued earlier, Bi refrains from direct ethnographic representation of Miao and Dong but stages them as implicit signifiers that 22 See more about this mixed ethnic autonomous prefecture at Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guojia Minzu Shiwu Weiyuanhui 中华人民共和国国家民族事务委员会. “Miao zu 苗族 [Miao Ethnic Group].” Zhongguo shaoshu minzu 中国少数民族 [Chinese Ethnic Minorities], Minzu wenti wuzhong congshu 民族问题五种丛书 [Five Series on Ethnic Issues]. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guojia Minzu Shiwu Weiyuanhui, https://www.neac.gov.cn/seac/ztzl/mz/fzxz.shtml. Accessed 4 September. 2025. 95 reject self-exoticization. In this case, the rearranged, more modern version of “Song of the Cicadas” perhaps gestures to the predicament faced by the ethnic minority in mainland China: that they are often displaced through their ethnic exoticism and must be actively “remastered” to have their culture meaningfully integrated into the dominant Han-centric mainland cultural sphere. Even integrated in the film, “Song of the Cicadas” was not dubbed in Han Chinese, and only plays as an affective background track underneath Luo and Kaizhen’s conversation over how magical the sense of flight is. Interestingly, this airborne oral exchange is rendered through Luo speaking Kaili dialect, Kaizhen speaking Mandarin, and the Dong language in the background. Here the tension between the local (dialect and ethnic language) and the universal (Mandarin) is latent but contained within a romantic exchange that diffuses it. Nevertheless, this use of “Song of the Cicadas” gestures to the problematics of ethnic minority representation in mainland Chinese films: First, much like the naming of Dangmai, Bi avoids deploying ethnic exoticization as a selling point, instead rendering ethnicity as something implicit, almost invisible. Second, however, it is precisely this invisibility, the latent presence of the ethnic minority secondary to the film’s Han characters that raises the broader concern of representation: should the Miao and Dong be articulated as ethnographically distinct subjects, or as assimilated into the cultural normativity of the Han majority? For Bi Gan, he only gestures to this problematic without prescribing a solution, framing his works as rooted in personal nostalgia rather than ethnographic representation (“In Conversation”). Back down in the prison and briefly parted ways with Kaizhen who goes backstage to prepare for her breakout performance, Luo stumbles upon a quarrel between a torch-bearing lady and a faceless man, separated by the prison fence. The lady strikes on the fence in anger and begs the man to honor his promise to take her away from her current husband and son. Though it was 96 not clear what she meant where they planned to go and why the quarrel happens, the fact that the torch-bearing woman is played by the same actress who portrayed Bai Mao’s mother marks her as a spectral condensation of Luo’s own mother, who abandoned him as a child, and of his guilt over Bai Mao’s death. Pointing the gun at the man and forcing him to take the woman along, Luo gives the woman an apple for the road based on his memory of his mother saying that “one would eat even the core of the apple if they were at their saddest” (01:02:40). The woman rejects but gifts him her watch in gratitude. Munching on the same apple and seeing the pair off on the other side of the fence, Luo walks back to the town centre, his eyes filled with tears. Through corridors, stairs, and pathways, the camera tracks from his back with the sound of him munching on apples and his stomping footsteps. The camera occasionally tilts down and reframes on his feet as he descends the stairs. Dark Green Night by Tai Zhaozhen is being performed on stage as he returns to the town centre, asking for Kaizhen’s whereabouts before finding her backstage. Contrary to the walk of discovery when just arriving in town, Luo’s walk here is affectively charged, presented in the entirety of its unfolding. Walking away from the double of his mother, Luo sobs in tears. The walk, presented in continuous long take with panning to reframe, is an embodied walk of sorrow. Through the town centre, where Dark Green Night sings about people finding consolation in their dreams, Luo walks from one affective experience to the other. The walk in the dreamville has thus become a collaborative effort between the viewer and Luo in this meandering through a landscape that he himself doesn’t understand. The viewer becomes a flâneur-investigator, who drifts in the psychological landscape of Luo, manifested in full materiality on the screen, with Luo’s body moving himself. While Yang Yu interprets this sequence through the film’s self-referential structure, reading each encounter as a double corresponding to past trauma or memory (the Bai Mao kid 97 corresponds to Bai Mao’s death, Kaizhen corresponds to Wan who vanished, and the torch-bearing lady corresponds to Luo’s mother’s abandonment) (76), what also stands out is how the dream becomes a site of active participation for both Luo and the audience through this embodied flânerie. Rather than being just a reconstruction of these traumatic pasts, these encounters open up to Luo’s active engagement in the dream, making him a participant who can rewrite the course as opposed to just being spectator of his past life. Within the dream, he intervenes decisively: he names the boy after his late friend Bai Mao, protects Kaizhen from harassment by hooligans and fulfills her dream of experiencing flight for the first time ever, before helping the torch-bearing woman to leave with her new partner. These moments mark a reversal of dream’s supposed passivity: Luo does not passively relive abandonment but alters it, participating in influencing the outcomes of these events. The dreamworld is not a sealed projection of his unresolved past. Rather, it is open not only to discovery but also intervention. If the fragmented past-present sequence reflects an inability to arrive at a narrative, the dreamworld’s encounter then gestures to an attempt at renarrativization. The long take technique used in the dream sequence supports this: uninterrupted and fluid, it offers a continuous unfolding in a narrative of encounter, allowing meaning to emerge as Luo drifts. What emerges is not a passive return of memory in the form of dream, but a cinematic flânerie through a space of possibility, where Luo, half-dreaming and awake, could find consolation in a world that is still becoming. In Deleuze’s account, the dream is not a hidden truth to be deciphered, but a mode of the “virtual”, one figure among many in the flow of images that make up the time-image (56). Dreams are not opposed to reality, but entangled with it in a circuit of becoming, where the virtual and the actual continually reflect and transform one another (Deleuze, 56). Deleuze writes 98 that the dream-image is part of a non-chronological temporality in cinema, where coexistent pasts and potential futures brush against the present (58). In this sense, Bi Gan’s dreamville is not a symbolic dream for psychoanalysis but part of the crystal circuit, in which Luo’s perception and memory are folded into an open, intense present, embodied through an extensive long take. The long take itself becomes the “actual” of the dream-image that, far from being imaginary or unreal, presents an intensified sense of real temporal experience. This dream-image resists finality. It moves without destination, and in doing so affirms the slippage of time, the plasticity of memory, and the blurred boundary between psychic interior and cinematic profilmic exterior. The dreamville is, in Deleuze’s words, like the “‘anomalous’ states of a language system in relation to the current language”, a virtual that resembles the actual but deviates from it (58).23 This deviation in the fabric of dream, becomes Luo’s way out of the noir-ish situation of the real. The walk through the dream, then, is not a descent into symbolism, but a flânerie of not a single disillusioned man, but the collective sum of him, the people he remembers, and the lost space and time he recollects. The dream floats as much as Luo does, as much as time and space do. Chapter Conclusion Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a salient case of the marriage between the industry and auteur experimentation. Through its noir configuration, Long Day’s Journey Into Night encodes Luo’s struggle with remembering in an inescapable sense of fatalism. However, its drifting protagonist gives a different approach to its noir negation. Rather than the straightforward 23 This echoes Michel de Certeau’s notion of the pedestrian act as a speech act within the total language system, the dream here may likewise be conceived as a “dream-act” in its capacity to reconfigure the actual through the virtual. It derives from the actual, diverges into the virtual, and returns to the real as a kind of transformed possibility, forming a continuous circulation between the two states. 99 downfall of a stranger seduced by the femme fatale, Luo’s melancholia is more a result of his own inability to move forward from the constructed vision of his lover, and of his past traumas. The fragmented present-past sequence reflects the inability to live in the present, haunted by a past, reflecting a common postsocialist disorientation. The disorientation presented in the film is rooted less in a concrete social critique on a specific aspect of mainland Chinese life than in Bi’s personal relation to time and change. When asked what problems he has with this “era” (shidai, 时代), Bi responds: “I can neither oppose nor support. It (shidai,or “the era”) exists in my life, and I will be affected by it, but I do not wish to be controlled by it” (“我反对不了，也支持不了，它存在于我的生活里，我也会被它影响，但我不想被它左右”; my trans.) (Bi, “Zhongguo Dianyingjia Xiehui Shouci”). In the same interview, he reflects on how quickly the shidai is changing, noting that many of his friends have been consumed with making a living while he has remained focused on filmmaking. Bi’s position echoes the film’s temporal disorientation, as framed as a matter of Luo’s personal memory and subjective experience. Instead of a vagrant that is displaced due to the pressure of postsocialist transformation, Luo merely drifts out of the inability to reconcile. The mise-en-scène of the urban ruins, while evoking postsocialist social critique, nevertheless becomes affective rather than societal, like any-spaces-whatever that are deprived of functionalities, sites unlike the noir city where danger lurks, but spaces devoid of meaning or any animated-ness. They are the any-spaces-whatever par excellence, only graspable through beholding the characters’ traversal. However, though Bi Gan himself states in multiple interviews that his films are made only in tribute to time and nostalgia, he perhaps unconsciously gestures to the predicament of ethnic minority representation in the Han-centric mainland mediascape. The construction of the non-existent Dangmai and the use of rearranged Dong folk 100 music speaks to the problematic of visibility for the ethnic minority. While Bi reframes from exoticizing them, he also did not make them legible enough to occupy their own time-space within this film but merely gestures towards their existence as spectral and secondary to the story’s Han characters. The two-part segmentation forms a circuit between dream and reality, referencing each other. Through cinematic flânerie that immerses the viewer in Luo’s embodied trip, the audience partakes in the fragmentation of the real and experiences the dream in its full continuity. The film directs us constantly in the flux between the actual and the virtual, constantly gesturing toward our own relationship between the filmic virtual and the phenomenological real. Here, the dreamland is no longer a passive construct, but a becoming-memory, an image that thinks. In staging the many any-spaces-whatever in the dreamland where every encounter is contingent, but nevertheless finds echoes from Luo’s previous experience, Long Day’s Journey Into Night spatializes the struggle of remembering, of the failed attempt at narrativizing one’s past life. In this way, the disillusionment and failure to accomplish any sensible conclusion for the past crystalize in Luo’s flânerie, which in its movements through the nameless dream town maps it not only as a space of misplaced and unrealized desires, but also as a space of possibility, a site of interpretive potential, in Deleuze’s account (120). The immediacy and presentness of the hour-long long take become a perpetual unfolding in the cinematic present, embodying Luo’s entrapment in a perpetual “now” that is here to stay, to be dwelled in, to be meandered through. This is perhaps Bi Gan’s strategy against the pervasion of modernity teleology in real life: while the real postsocialist China is caught in an intense present, a phase suspended in developmental optimism, between disillusioned past and uncertain future, Bi constructs an alternative being-in-the-present in a reverie weaved by nostalgic memory, fantasies and consolation. 101 In this way, flânerie, as an act of forming connections with one’s space, distilling, observing, a critically detached but sensuous movement, becomes how Luo navigates Kaili in Long Day’s’s Journey Into Night. It becomes a cinematic cartography of material reality and affects, not in the sense of charting a fixed map, but in drawing paths through uncertainty, in scripting the flow of perception across an indeterminate space. This links closely to Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s use of the long take and the slow pan, which are not merely stylistic choices but modes of sustaining the integrity of space and time, holding together the visible world and its unseen affective transformations. Here, space is not cut up but lived through, and time is not measured but endured. The image does not command but invites interpretation. The camera does not master the scene but drifts across it, glossing, sliding, meandering, much like the slow flâneur, whose steps are not aimed towards the destination but at the revelation during the trip. There are no destinations here, only a chain of contingencies, faces, doubles, and landscapes that evoke recollection rather than closure. Every step forward is also a step backward into the folds of memory, into the deep side of one’s humanity, into the realm of nostalgia, where dream and past are indistinct, where what we see might already be gone, and what we want might never be what we wanted. This is perhaps Bi Gan’s message for himself as well as the audience, when in Kaili Blues he evokes a line from the Diamond Sutra, which is a text from Buddhist scripture: “The past is unattainable; the present is unattainable; the future is unattainable” (“过去心不可得，现在心不可得，将来心不可得”; my trans.). Should this be read as a consolation of cowardly retreat from political activism in an increasingly surveilled postsocialist China, or a courageous embrace for the futility of human desires for individual transcendence? Or perhaps it is only through realizing that one must let go, that one can finally start to live again. 102 Chapter 4: Conclusion and Reflection This project started with my interest in the narrative breakdown and depiction of aimless wandering in two contemporary Chinese neo-noirs: Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I ask the question: Why would characters drift in a narrative that often promises action, chases, and investigation? How do these aimless wanderings inform our understanding of the story? And how does the camera represent this wandering? To frame such deferred movement in the fatalistic narrative of noir, I use Linda Chiu-han Lai’s reinterpretation of the flâneur as critical method and frame it within the context of Gilles Deleuze’s any-space-whatever. Writing on Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, Lai reworks the idea of the flâneur as a cinematic interpretative method to understand the embodied movement of the camera along with the film’s often mobile and marginalized characters. The flâneur, in its very origins, refers to an idle intellectual who strolls the street to make informed observations of the city (Tester 7). Here Lai recenters it as a figure of mobility, whose walk through the city, when seen and heard through the cinematic apparatus, becomes not just optical but also a corporeal traversal embedded in the constructed spatiality of the city (215). Understanding mainland Chinese postsocialist cities as heterotopias layered with unresolved temporalities and spatial contradictions, Lai argues that cinematic flânerie constitutes a “poetics of discovery,” where viewers are grounded in the encounter of the characters as they drift through the contingencies of urban reality, embodying the fragmented and denarrativized urban experience (224). While Lai’s recentering focuses on the denarrativization of story, I extend her framework by bringing in Isabel Carrera Suárez’s counter-flâneur. Carrera Suárez’s counter-flâneur reframes the flâneur from an idle intellectual observer into a marginal social agent, who has no capacity to make informed observations but whose movements in space show the 103 negotiation between themselves and the spatial logic of the city (856). In short, Lai allows us to approach the flâneur not only as a narrative figure, but also as a metaphor that describes how the film itself moves through space and time. Carrera Suárez provides us with a reconsideration of how the aimless wandering enables marginal social agents to negotiate their relationships to the social space they occupy. Bringing together these past discourses on the flaneur, noir genre and postsociailist Chinese cinema, I coin the term noir flânerie, to describe the distinct narrative situation and mode of representation used in the two films to express postsocialist Chinese disorientation. The deferred fatalistic movements in the two films inevitably restructures temporality, placing their cinematic spatiality and temporality in an ambivalent standstill, each extending the other’s limit, coded by noir fatalism and modernist disorientation. My contribution in this thesis is to extend Linda Chiu-han Lai’s method of cinematic flânerie by bringing in Deleuze’s any-space-whatever and Fleming’s any-now(here)-spaces. While aligning with Lai in viewing the mainland Chinese postsocialist city as a heterotopia marked by unresolved temporalities and spatialities, I invoke Deleuze’s any-space-whatever to illustrate the affective potential of such flânerie in the cinematic postsocialist urban heterotopia. For Deleuze, the any-space-whatever is a crucial step towards a re-formation of time in cinema, where, as mentioned in Chapter 3, the hollowed-out, unsituated “anywhere” status of the space enables a reconsideration of time’s relationship to space and movement where movement replaces numeric metric for measuring time, generating a temporal experience alternative to that of postsocialist modernization teleology. Fleming’s theorization complements Lai’s theorization of the mainland city as heterotopia by extending Deleuze’s framework into a specifically mainland context, where the suspension of temporality in an unlocatable space is not the result of postwar trauma in Deleuze’s original conception of 104 ruins as any-space-whatever, but rather a temporal standstill in the socialist teleology of development and national revival, since these processes seem never-ending (Fleming 533). The cinematic apparatus, while enabling us to walk with the flâneur-character, also allows the space to be beheld as a site of singularities, whose affective qualities need to be attended to individually. By conjoining the term “noir” with “flânerie,” I seek to delineate a cinematic strategy, or perhaps identify a subgenre in postsocialist mainland Chinese cinema, which conveys its affective ambivalence in a genre-coded way. Noir flânerie, in this context, describes a complementary combination of the noir genre and flâneur narratives to encode postsocialist affects of disorientation. Flânerie has always been an act borne of the inability to stay present, to not be content with what already is (Frisby 64; Tester 12); and noir is a genre characterized by disillusionment, fatalism, and hopeless outlooks (Naremore 10; Spicer 4). Noir flânerie thus describes a narrative situation where one moves to escape but is not quite sure how, in a gloomy city of institutional entrapment, that will eventually result in one’s failure. Conjoining the two terms captures this ambivalent narrative suspension: a situation where the plot does progress, but moving forward means accelerated demise, thus one drifts to delay his doom. Viewed in this light, The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night delay the progression of the story, staging dead time that momentarily detaches from the sensory-motor schema, going on tangents and detours, before its characters return to accept the inevitable. Such is the case for Zhou Zenong in The Wild Goose Lake, who is caught lingering between his delayed death and this very life of the present, going in and out of places of the Wild Goose Lake area, stringing together a loose mise-en-scène filled with signifiers of postsocialist contradictions. This contingent flânerie is not only an interpretive method concerned with narrative, but also with cinematic intervention to probe how cinema constitutes the embodied 105 spatial practice within the cinematic world (Lai 216). This is exemplified more significantly in the one-hour long take around dreamville in Long Day’s Journey into Night, where the camera shifts perspective intra-characters and shows the plasticity of fabricated memory and dream, generating a ground-level ambivalently posthuman roaming, blurring the boundary between the boundary of human consciousness and unconsciousness. In Chapter 1, I argued that Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Wild Goose Lake exemplify a conscious combination of the noir genre and cinematic flânerie to represent virtual, pastiched postsocialist Chinese cities, as a strategy to cater to market, festival and ideological demand. In the chapter on The Wild Goose Lake, I investigated how the film constructs and localizes its noir atmosphere by building a Chinese “southern” village-within-a-city that reflects the fragmented textures of postsocialist urbanization, while deliberately distancing itself from representing any real mainland city. By tracing Zhou and Liu’s movements as a form of cinematic flânerie, I argued that the film transforms the heterotopic landscape of the Lake into Deleuze’s any-spaces-whatever: sites of contingency where time, affect, and uncertainty gather. These spaces are not passive backdrops but postsocialist any-now(here)-spaces that embody social fragmentation, offering what Lai calls a cinematic “poetics of discovery,” where viewers and characters alike negotiate meaning. Rather than mounting overt political critique, the film adopts a neutral stance toward surveillance, presenting it as a functional apparatus while simultaneously pastiching urban decay and rural precarity into a stylized noir terrain. In this sense, The Wild Goose Lake does not represent a “real” Chinese city but instead reimagines the peripheries as cinematic terrains of tension and intimacy, where desire, memory, and systematic fatality circulate. Through noir flânerie, the film repurposes marginal space as a site of imaginative, affective possibility, prolonging life and intimacy against the inevitability of 106 postsocialist fate. Similarly, Bi Gan constructs a fictional Kaili in his Long Day’s Journey Into Night as an affective noir mise-en-scène to frame Luo’s fatalistic investigation of his past, shifting between memory and present before dissolving into a dream where he can finally attempt to resolve trauma. While drawing on familiar noir tropes such as “the Stranger and the Femme Fatale”, Bi Gan displaces the genre’s fatalism into Luo’s inability to reconcile with his past and his lost lover. The fragmented narrative structure of the first part, oscillating between past and present, mirrors a postsocialist disorientation, but one interiorized into Luo’s rumination on his past rather than on the present society. Weaving a loose web of nostalgic pop culture references from the 1980s and constructing Kaili from a deserted local mercury mine, Bi stages an affective noir mise-en-scène that enables Luo’s explorative and introspective flânerie. Through the film’s deployment of any-spaces-whatever, including the Xiaofeng restaurant where he mourns his late father, the tunnel where Wan and Luo first meet, and the dreamville where doppelgängers walk, the film transforms derelict postsocialist sites into spaces of memory, affect, and possibility, not to be abandoned but to be revisited. The climactic one-hour long take stages flânerie as a spatio-temporal endurance: a cinematic cartography that drifts across uncertain terrain, sustaining space and time as lived duration, where Luo reconciles with his past, in the comforting fabric of the world that he dreamt up. Here, the camera embodies the flâneur’s movement, to reveal contingencies, doubles, and recollections along the way. The construction of an undisrupted temporality creates a Deleuzian time-image, which renders a reconsideration of how time is experienced lucidly in Luo’s dream, contrary to his fragmented disjointed reality haunted by flashbacks. It is thus the movement of flânerie that gives rise to a reconstruction of time not as a measurement of action because the action itself is ambivalent, but as a space in which affective experience unfolds instead of narrative progression: a sensory-motor schema half 107 broken down, but not fully; a movement-image stretched in the state of becoming time-image. In this sense, Bi stages flânerie as a movement for living in a suspended present, an embrace of memory, reverie, and detour against both postsocialist teleology and the futility of desire. The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night both resort to constructing fictional, pastiche Chinese cities rather than approaching the city in a documentary mode like their sixth-generation counterparts. This distancing from real locations, I argue, may be tied to the changing industrial context of filmmaking in China, where the use of fictionalized cities becomes a strategy to dilute noir’s subversive energy to grant a domestic release to reach more potential audiences. Such proliferation of anonymous Chinese any-space-whatever gestures to the dual dynamic of tightening state ideological control and the homogenization of mainland urban space devoid of defining characteristics. Future research might further investigate this trend in mainland Chinese cinema, not just noirs, where films are set in generalized Southern or Northern cities instead of real Chinese cities, while simultaneously substituting local dialects with standardized Mandarin. This combination of a vaguely locatable city and standardized Mandarin seem to reinforce the any-space-whatever status of mainland city representation, generating perhaps more and more any-Chinese-city-whatever, or any-space-whatever with Chinese characteristics, a homogenization of city imageries, or perhaps the homogenization of Chinese cities themselves. What do we make of films set in fictional Southern cities that are entirely dubbed into standardized Mandarin? Is there self-exoticization within this mainland Chinese South-North divide and their use of different accents? How does the vague situatedness of “South” or “North” shape our spatial perception of China? These questions would require an investigation into the relationship between the circulation of Mandarin in mainland mass media vis-à-vis that of regional dialects, and perhaps also the relationship between the cinematic center 108 of China (Shanghai, Beijing for example) and the lesser represented cinematic peripheries like Kaili in Bi Gan’s cinema, and the fictionalized pastiche city (of Hubei and Guangxi) in Diao’s film. What’s more, both directors’ fascination with the “Chinese South” is another discourse worth probing, especially in the context of the emerging South China New Wave Cinema, first identified at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 (Liu S. 43). This group included Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Kaili Blues, Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent (2016), Gu Xiaogang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2019), and Gao Ming’s Damp Season (2020) (Liu S. 43). What defines the South China New Wave is first and foremost its geographical setting in the South, often marked by ethnographic attention to local landmarks and the use of dialects (Liu S. 44). However, the reason I did not frame The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night within this grouping is that the discourse itself requires further refinement. For example, the so-called “Chinese South” is highly heterogeneous. Bi Gan’s films are all set in Guizhou province; Diao’s The Wild Goose Lake is a pastiche of Hubei and Guangxi; Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent follows the Yangtze River across multiple provinces (Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, and Shanghai); Gao Ming’s Damp Season is set in Shenzhen in Guangdong. All these provinces house very different cultures and regional dialects. Moreover, how do we situate the South China New Wave in relation to earlier “Southern” movements such as the Taiwan and Hong Kong New Waves, exemplified by the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-wai, and Fruit Chan? Their films also display a topophilic fascination with sinophone space Southern to mainland China. In other words, what does the “South” mean in this context? Does it merely designate a geographic preference? If so, is this preference driven by personal nostalgia, or is it an attempt to package the periphery as the exotic? Moreover, is 109 there any aesthetic unity across the films it designates? Is it the subtropical mise-en-scène elements (humidity, heat waves, river/sea-based settlements, incessant rain)? If the South China New Wave is defined by “subtropical mise-en-scène elements,” how might it be placed in dialogue with other cinemas of the global south that likewise stage their stories in humid, ruminative landscapes of rain, sweat, water, and heat? As Liu Siqi has pointed out, the South China New Wave also seems like a discourse more concerned with independent auteur cinema in the mainland than with larger-budgeted works like Diao’s The Wild Goose Lake (43), which raises further need for clarification for this concept. Finally, there should be a reconsideration of film noir discourse in the Chinese context. The concept of Chinese film noir did not enter popular discourse until 2014, when the success of Diao’s Black Coal, Thin Ice popularized noir in both the mainland critical and audience discourse (Harry Kuoshu 15). The commercial and critical success of Black Coal, Thin Ice sparked a scholarly seminar in 2014 hosted by the then-State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the PRC and the China Film Art Research Center, in which the film was noted as proof of the noir genre’s ability to not only attract audience attention but also to embed meaningful social critique. As such, the seminar concluded that noir, once successfully localized in the Chinese context, constitutes a valid and promising creative strategy for filmmakers moving forward (Yao 43). However, the concept “Chinese film noir” (zhongguo heise dianyin 中国黑色电影), is itself a questionable concept and must be further examined in a transnational lens. With Sheldon Lu, Chris Berry, Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim’s transnational methodology in mind, we might reflect on the question of what kind of Chinese-ness is the term “Chinese film noir” designating here. The answer is, and within the scope of the two case films discussed in this thesis, it designates film noirs that were made in adherence to the 110 regulation and ideological bounding of the nation-state of the People’s Republic of China, within which circulates imageries of a PRC in postsocialist transformation. Reflection on this mainland Chinese-ness is important because though it is often agreed that mainland noir did not garner wide-spread attention until Black Coal, Thin Ice, Hong Kong noir has been around for many years already, as Stephen Teo attributes its lineage from Johnnie To of the 2000s, John Woo of the 1990s to Tsui Hark of the 1980s (137). This delineation is important in considering the regional socio-cultural differences that nurse distinct cinematic cultures. Thus emerges a need to, in future research, properly map out a historiography of noir that emerges in postsocialist People’s Republic of China, as a start. This noir historiography may well extend into the Maoist era or even republican period. This has been done partially by Stefano Locati, who argues for a Chinese “quasi-noir” tradition that dates to the socialist 1960s and persisted into the 1980s. Locati identifies that many propagandist fante pian (反特片, the counter-espionage film) of the 1960s made use of common noir lighting and themes of paranoia in staging a good-vanquish-evil narrative to reinforce the legitimacy of the newly established People’s Republic (105). Locati further traces this lineage into the more urban and industrial-themed 508 Mystery Case (508 疑案, 1984) and The Black Cannon Incident (黑炮事件, 1985) and argues these films have showcased a degree of self-reflexivity in their deliberate use of noir techniques and their thematic defiance of socialist realism that precedes them (108). It is because of the urban turn of this early post-socialist “quasi-noir” cinema that Locati believes paves the way for the emergence of the more urban and bleak noirish representation of postsocialist China in the likes of Jia Zhangke’s Xiaowu and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (109), which this essay has attempted to situate using the umbrella category “noir flânerie”. By no means comprehensive, I have attempted to sketch out a brief contour of the postsocialist early 2000s mainland noir and 111 established a lineage to the late 2010s in The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night from the perspective of flâneur narrative, taking into account the changing industrial and sociopolitical context of mainland China. There are of course many films deemed or promoted as “noir” within this gap between Jia Zhangke/Lou Ye and Diao Yinan/Bi Gan that eluded the scope of this thesis, and how they constitute a distinct “mainland noir” historiography needs to be explored in future research. Harry Kuoshu has addressed Ning Hao’s 2006 breakout Guy Ritchie-esque Crazy Stones using both neo-noir and black comedy genre, arguing for a parallel between the film’s carnival energy with the fast development of mainland China (14). Lou Ye has persistently made noir-tinged films such as Mystery (2012), The Shadow Play (2018), and Saturday Fiction (2019). Jia Zhangke, on the other hand, has also used noir aesthetics to map the violence of postsocialist transformation in A Touch of Sin (2013) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Xin Yukun, a director emerging in the 2010s, quickly established himself as a prominent figure in mainland noir with his The Coffin in the Mountain (2014) and his The Wrath of Silence (2017). Cao Baoping’s The Dead End (2015) is a serious-toned drama about a family massacre, while his 2016 film A Cock and a Bull is a pastiche black comedy involving a mysterious murder in the Chinese northwest. The complex landscape of mainland noir, even by simple enumerations here, with their heterogenous qualities in thematic concerns, mode of representation, and their genre mixing, poses a challenge in creating a unanimous definition of “mainland noir”. Writing a “mainland noir” historiography will thus require an effort in trying to account for how these mainland films are noir, to what degree are they “noir”, to what degree are they “mainland”, and what this “mainland noir” historiography may be productive in illuminating discourse on mainland cinema, global noir, and the transnational (Chinese) cinema. Aside from mapping the films, it is also important to trace when exactly the term “film noir” (黑色电影) entered 112 mainland consciousness, in what context it was first translated or coined, and how it was used in mainland academia, news reports or filmmaker’s accounts. Quentin Tarantino’s visit to Beijing Film Academy and the showcase of his Pulp Fiction (1994) in 1995 is an often-cited anecdote that symbolizes film noir’s entry into mainland filmmakers’ and scholars’ consciousness (Yu Sui). However, a more systematic survey of mainland news report and scholarly articles is needed to further pinpoint how and when noir entered mainland consciousness. Furthermore, this trend of proliferating noir-coded mainland crime films may be linked to what Caleb Kelso-Marsh describes as the use of noir as a strategy to rebrand films for international exposure, enhancing their circulation and recognizability. This echoes Bi and Diao’s creative methods, which I have detailed in their respective chapters: both consciously adopt noir tropes as narrative frameworks for their auteurist expressions, intentionally promoting their films as “noir” to enhance their festival prestige and market visibility. Such use of genre aligns with China’s state-led soft power discourse, articulated in the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), which emphasized enhancing cultural influence abroad by circulating meaningful Chinese stories on the global stage (“Cultural Development and Reform Plan”). At the same time, the emphasis that both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night place on their domestic markets shows an increasing awareness among mainland filmmakers of the need to cater to both festival and domestic audiences by circulating a loose network of common postsocialist signifiers in the Chinese any-space-whatever, whose meanings welcome plural interpretations from many. Though not entirely new in constructing this cinematic noir flânerie, with Sixth Generation directors like Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye setting earlier precedents, directors like Diao and Bi have brought this “marriage” of noir and flânerie to notable fruition, achieving both box office success and international festival recognition. In drawing upon how Diao and Bi 113 adopt noir as a genre, what I hopefully have demonstrated is that it may be more productive to consider how filmmakers themselves view noir as a useful framework defined by a set of narrative and visual elements, rather than only asserting that noir is hard to define. Noir in scholarly discussion is indeed, like Naremore asserts, a discourse of “a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies” (11). But this should not be confused with how filmmakers mobilize it, not retrospectively but rather operationally, as both an artistic framework and as a marketable label. Caleb Kelso-Marsh, David Desser, and Stephen Teo, in writing on global and Asian noir, all caution against Western-centric perspectives in noir studies, where emerging crime-related films in East Asia are recognized as “noir” primarily to make them legible to Western audiences and festival circuits (Desser 639; Kelso-Marsh 42; Teo 140). The result is that any Asian noir that does not conform to Western genre expectations risks being deemed a failure. Kelso-Marsh quotes Desser to expose this Eurocentric discourse: “This tension between recognizing a kind of noir in Asia while disavowing any ‘Asian’ particularity in noir--(Akira) Kurosawa makes ‘art’ noir; (Seijun) Suzuki is like Sam Fuller; Wong (Kar-wai)’s films are variations on the French New Wave; (John) Woo derives his structures from Hollywood--is one which denies us the ability to see noir’s reach beyond merely a few isolated examples” (46). Kelso-Marsh then argues that Asian noir itself circulates within an “intra-regional cinematic flow” of genres such as Japanese yakuza and Chinese wuxia, which, alongside Hollywood conventions, shaped many classic Asian noirs (48). Such decentering of Hollywood film noir is illuminating because it reminds us of the importance of excavating local histories and recognizing noir’s adaptability as a transnational form, not just American/Hollywood, but a flexible cinematic language that can be reworked across different social realities. 114 The answer, then, is not that noir has become invalid for evaluating non-Western crime thrillers, but that we must be attentive to how it is applied. Future examinations of Chinese noirs should acknowledge and explore noir as a transnational genre with intra-cultural influences (this includes perhaps a retracing of classical American film noir as well, since it is itself a hybridized cultural phenomenon of French, German and American influences). It is true that when one thinks of noir, one is prone to cite Hollywood classics like The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity as reference points, as is the case for both Diao and Bi. But as scholars, our task is to explore how these films engage in dialogue with cinematic predecessors, local cultural traditions, and regional socio-political contexts. Neither Diao nor Bi replicates precisely the “Stranger and Femme Fatale” formula; instead, they rework noir tropes to tell mainland Chinese stories. Thus, the films’ invocations of noir conventions should be seen as one among many dialogues in play, between filmmakers and markets, censorship, and their own auteurist ambitions. These are not simply mainland China’s entry into Western neo-noir but mainland films that speak simultaneously to Western noir discourses as well to their own cinematic traditions and local socio-historical contexts. In all cases, the stamp “noir” may be no different from the festival stamp that grants these films entry to broader exposures. To invoke the transnational lens again, what we witness in this marriage between mainland investors and the French endorsement in both The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a mutually beneficiary relationship: while the mainland filmmakers seek a platform to accumulate cultural prestige, the international festivals and French cultural ministry seek to reinforce themselves as cultural authorities in dictating what constitutes world auteur cinema essentials. Nevertheless, such mutually complicit relationships, as Chris Berry reminds us, do not necessarily negate the specific message or aesthetics of a given film (465). In fact, it is precisely 115 their heterogeneity, noir flânerie, for example, that becomes the central concern of this thesis so far. The films’ transnational status, the need to travel afar for recognition and to subject themselves to both foreign and domestic gazes, is perhaps an aspect that deserves further attention. The transnational “flânerie” of The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night perhaps reflects and reenacts the historical logic by which international film circuit is organized, around the center of traditional film nations like France and institutions like Cannes, which are rooted in a global order shaped by uneven geopolitical histories (Stringer 35). Future research may relate to conceptualize mainland filmmakers’ relationships with international film festivals, both domestic (Shanghai International Film Festival, Beijing International Film Festival, for example) and foreign, to explore how they navigate the tension to perform an adequate “Chineseness” both at home and overseas. Although my research begins with the figure of the flâneur, film noir, and postsocialist Chinese cinema, what I unconsciously probe is perhaps the cinematic representation of modernity and postmodernity as experiences of lived fragmentations. Indeed, both the flâneur and noir emerged as cultural figures that embody a modernist anxiety towards development. Flânerie, as Lai argues, is a spatial act that seeks to remap the individual in relation to an ungraspable surrounding (205). As Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland note, the international appeal of noir lies in its depiction of modernity’s crisis on a global stage: “of rootless and wandering desire; of chance, accident, and class instability; of local traditions and spaces either imperiled or energized by global flows of culture and capital” (xiii). The Wild Goose Lake and Long Day’s Journey Into Night can be read as parables of how modernity manifests in postsocialist China, cinematic expressions of a spiritual impasse marked by alienation and existential anxiety under mainland Chinese modernity. In this context, flânerie emerges both as a symptom of this crisis, 116 embodying displacement in space and time, and as a critical method, a way of knowing in the midst of modernity. Through the flâneur’s movements and the cinematic forms that stage them, these films render visible urban alienation, perceptual dissonance, and the psychic effects of structural uncertainty. Flânerie becomes the way that both characters and the camera move. Cinema, in this sense, takes on the role of Baudelaire’s modern hero: a vantage point from which to observe the tragedy of a life coded with noir fatalism, rendering its transience sublime (13). Modernity appears as an unending condition we cannot escape from but must learn to navigate. Noir and flânerie together articulate this impasse. Noir treads the precarious line between market and art, voicing a hope for redemption even as its fatalism forecloses it. Flânerie stages the body’s drift in the abyss of the city of darkness. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Cinema and Media Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Brown, William, 1977-
Noir flâneur as method : mapping postsocialist affect in The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Long day’s journey into night (2018)
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