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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 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.