Trespassing world cities (Linda Lai 2005)

Trespassing and a tale of cities: Trespassing world cities is a composite of Lai's tourist video style travelogues. The opening is a low angle shot showing a woman walking, and the camera seems to be in a bag; then it cuts to the tile of New Delhi in 2004, the pan shot of the bridge in New York City in 2001, the tracking shots of Frankfurt city space in 2001, Taipei in 2003, and New Delhi in 2004. The intercuts between tracking shots of these three cities and the following elevators shots of different cities indicate the similarities of these "modern" cities and we (the videomaker and the audiences) cannot easily recognize their differences.

Although ethnographers nowadays acknowledge the constructedness of ethnographic fields, Schneider (2008) argues that fieldwork as a method "still retains its defining position at the center of contemporary social and cultural anthropology" (173), and Clifford (1997) recommends fieldwork should be a multi-site analysis in a globalized world. The "field" in Trespassing is the city space: the floors, elevators, staircase, shores, alleys, and landmarks of different cities. These swinging or static images keep appearing in front of our eyes. The field is clearly-defined--the cityscape, and yet Lai rejects to interpret the meanings of these images in these cities. As Lai writes in Trespassing: "The totality of events in a city forms a thick collage that rejects systematic reading nor individuated signification".

As other works of Lai, with images and written words, Lai self-consciously does not offer audiences a realist and transparent tale of each place--how people live in a certain place at a certain period of time. In Trespassing, we do not see the usual image of an ethnographer describing a place and its people. The video does not allow us to immerse ourselves in the field, pretending the videomaker (and the audiences) can immerse, understand, and interpret other cultures. Rather, we are encouraged to question a walker's power in understanding city life.


A critique of flâneuse in Trespassing:
Obviously, Trespassing depicts the filmmaker walks various cities in the world and encourages audiences to link the video with the practice of female flânerie, a term from the French masculine word flâneur. Baudelaire's flâneur depicts a man who walks the city to experience, observe, understand, and portray city life through both of his participation and detached observation. Therefore, flâneur is both an active participant and critical voyeur to portray and examine city life in sociological, anthropological, literary and historical aspects. However, the concept of flâneur excludes women from the spaces of modernity. As Wolff comments, "The influential writing of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women's experience of modernity. The central figure of the flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male" (1985: abstract). It is because sexual differences were expressed through the segregation of space of public and private, and women were often defined in the private sphere. The experience of walks in the city mainly accounts for the experiences of men. The exceptions are the "non-respectable", the prostitute (D'Souza & McDonough 2006:19).

In Trespassing, Lai further comments that although women nowadays are less bounded by the private spheres than women in the mid-nineteenth century, and they can navigate around the world as what Lai does in the video, street crimes undermine such bourgeois practice. At the end of the video, Lai told us that her beloved student Joey was murdered while taking a brief walk in Moscow in transit for a flight back to Hong Kong. Women walking in the city still face various kinds of danger that flâneur may not experience. In my interview with Lai, Lai openly criticized the male-oriented ethnocentric world view under the concept of flâneur.

Lai: Joey left us. At that time, Hector (Lai's husband) and I had sharing, that in class, we often talked about drifting, and a student drifted in Moscow. Joey intended to have that drifting. If she's still alive, she's studying travel literature in Belgium. Her death affected us a lot.

Kim: Drifting somehow is an activity for men.

Lai: Drifting is dangerous to women. Drifting is a dangerous activity; most critical theories romanticize drifting.

Kim: Critical theories in one sense are gender blinded.

Lai: And these theories always present drifting as productive academically and epistemologically. In fact, drifting is a male-oriented practice.

In summary, as a visual experimentation, Trespassing pushes the boundary of tourist video. Lai as a frequent world cities' traveler brings the audiences the sensuous experiences of the fleeting and ephemeral encounters of city life. At the same time, Lai plays against and makes critiques the "culture" ethnographers inhabit. Culture in any sense is not transparent but interpretative.

References

D'Souza and T. McDonough. 2006. The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris. Manchester & NY: Manchester University Press.

Schneider, A. 2008. Three modes of experimentation with art and ethnography. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14: 171-194.

Wolff, J. 1985. The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of modernity. Theory, Culture & Society 2(3): 37-46.

Non-place. Other space ( Lai 2009)

If I read Non-place. Other space as a visual ethnography, we may need to rethink several things in the making of (visual) ethnography:

1. the "field": ethnography contains fieldwork. The field of this video is two cities, Hong Kong and Macau. The classic ethnographic text may use thick description to describe the field and to let audiences understand and even step in the field through the writing. In the video, we do not see these cities' landmarks (except the high skyscraper shot of Hong Kong). In fact, there are few long shots for audiences to recognize the location. The motif images repeatedly appear in the first part of the video are flowing water, floating chicken corpse, female mannequin with red cheongsam and black lace stockings, two staggering words "no. 10" in Chinese, etc. If the landscape and the objects are the Other Lai represents, these images do not describe what these places really are but "take[s] us into the center of the experiences being described" (Geertz 1973: 18). The sense of instability, the horror, and the suffocation haunter audiences until the last part of the video, with men and women doing (house) work in their "work" place.
2. the "Other": Rather than represent the Other, Lai clearly tells us that representation of the Other is always self representation. Lai self consciously does not position herself as an outsider but she actively invites us, the audiences, to join her journey to explore the cityscapes. One of her poem in Non-place: "The domain of the enigmatic is where I play my daily routine. Here and now fogged by undifferentiated hues. Blow and blow and off I go. Come go with me yes or no? (27 October 2002)".
3. the "story": what means by a story? Non-place provides no mainstream ethnographic situated story (such as how the central character, the Other, lives her life in a particular context). If there is a central character, it is Lai, who selects video shots and words from her visual and written diaries respectively, making sense of and describing her experience of city space (HK & Macau) and other spaces (various art galleries which construct temporary sense of place and community). The story also provides no typical story, without an action-oriented or cause-and-effect plot development and resolution. It also provides audiences no clues how Lai, if she is the protagonist, organizes her life in different spaces and contexts. It is not a realist tale showing audiences a transparent world; the video tells from a feminist standpoint stressing reflexivity and emotion. In Denzin's words, Lai creates her "own situated, inscribed version of the realities" (Denzin 1994: 505).

References

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.
Denzin, N. K. 1994. The art and politics of interpretation. Handbook of qualitative research, edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, 500-515. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

fragments and visual ethnography

As a method, ethnography entails fieldwork, participant observation
author/director's position: detached to build "realist tales" (Van Maanen 1988).

Marcus (1992), however, suggested that "[e]thnography ... provides interpretation and explanation by strategies of contextualizing the problematic phenomena focused upon.... The referent of contextualization for the modernist ethnography ... are fragments that are arranged and ordered textually by the design of the ethnographer.... The whole that is more than the sum of the parts of such ethnographies is always in question, while the parts are systematically related to each other by a revealed logic of connections" (325).

Linda Lai's video work, I told them my camera was on (2005), Excitable speech: all About Cinderella (2006), Trespassing world cities (2006), Non-place ･ Other Spaces (2009), Shanghai saga: other skies, other lands (2009), demonstrate the importance of fragments in representing the world she lives in. These fragments include travelogues, daily interactions with friends, structured and unstructured interviews, written and visual diaries, found footage, critical insights on mainstream media texts, recitation of cultural studies texts, and self reflections. These fragments do not conjure up to a exposition-development-resolution story, nor do they pretend to show audiences the final and definite "truth" of the personal, social, and the material world. Rather than provide a linear, comprehensive, and explanatory account of an event, a person's life, or city life, the fragments under Lai's camera interrupt the "mainstream causal narrative logic" in Lai's words (2005: 1) and acknowledge the constructedness of the "ethnographic field"--the fleeting images, the split screen, and the silence--and "the limits of intelligibility" (Hegde 2009: 292; Butler 2004). As a film historian, cultural studies scholar, an artist, a postmodernist, a university teacher, a traveler, a wife with a Spanish husband, a woman circled with women friends, Lai composites her video fragments from these multiple positions to research and represent the world she lives and studies. Her works create new possibilities of experimentation in visual research and in appropriating others' cultures. That is, Lai's videos do not claim to tell us an objective truth of a specific location; instead, she provides audiences "with some powerful propositional, tacit, intuitive, emotional, historical, poetic, and empathic experience of the Other via the texts" she produces (Lincoln and Denzin 1994: 582).


References
Butler. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Hegde, R.S. 2009. Fragments and interruptions: sensory regimes of violence and the limtis of feminist ethnography. Qualitative inquiry 15 (2): 276-295.
Lai, L. C. 2005. 4748 moons and 13 elliptical years. Artist statement.
Lincoln, Y.S. 1994. The fifth moment. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 575-586. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Marcus, G. E. 1994. What comes (just) after "post"? The case of ethnography. In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Denzin and Lincoln, 563-574. Thousand Oaks: Sage.