The Proximity of Other Skins : Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema

Transnational films that represent intimacy and inequality produce new experiences that result in the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today's global audiences. The Proximity of Other Skins examines transnational films that achieve global prominence in presenting a different cinematic language of love and sex. Author Celine Parreñas Shimizu traverses independent films by Gina Kim and Ramona Diaz to the global cinema of Laurent Cantet, Park Chan-wook and Cannes award-winning director Brilliante Mendoza and their representations of transnational intimacies. In doing so, she addresses unexpected encounters in the global movement of people and goods within their geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. In these celebrated films that move across continents, she finds ways to expand our definition of intimacy, including explicit sex and relations that go beyond sex, enabling us the opportunity to theorize how people now live together in many spheres of contemporary life. Readers can then better understand how intimacy can affirm and express love, but also alienate and oppress, revealing the loneliness, pain, and suffering within transnational, national, and personal relations of power and hierarchy. In studying representations of intimacy, the book calls to expand our vocabulary of moving images and its role in redefining care work and affective relations between people across difference and inequality. The book addresses cinematic intimacies between husbands/wives/lovers, understanding between sex workers and clients, close familiarity between rich and poor, and new affinities between citizen and refugee and laborer and capitalist. "Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the U.S. and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our world views. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don't want to watch and don't want to feel must be born. Film, Sex, Race, Transnationalism, Ethics"-- Provided by publisher Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 1. Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations in Those Long Haired Nights (2017) and Call Her Ganda (2018) 14 2. (Rich) White Women, (Poor) Brown Men, and Sexual Settings: Political and Libidinal Economies in Heading South (2005) and Never Forever (2007) 55 3. The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship: Annihilation and Affliction in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007), Serbis (2007), and Ma’ Rosa (2016) 100 4. Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage: Performing Roles and Breaking Rules between Masters and Servants in The Housemaid (2011) and The Handmaiden (2016) 150 5. The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others: Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2005) and David Byrne’s Here Lies Love (2010–17) 196 6. Epilogue: Memory and Death (2013–Present) 232 References 238 Index 246 Traversing classical Hollywood to the cinema of Park Chan-wook, Gina Kim, and Ramona Diaz, and Cannes award-winning director Brilliante Mendoza, 'The Proximity of Other Skins' looks at transnational films that achieved global prominence by presenting a different cinematic language of love and sex