TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA AND INTERCULTURAL VALUES SHOOTING THE FAMILY Edited by Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS Do contemporary movements of migration and the ever-increasing abundance of audiovisual media correspond to – or even cause – shifts in the definition of both the bourgeois nuclear family and the tribal extended family? In Shooting the Family , twelve authors investigate the transfigured role of the family in a trans- national world in which intercultural values are negotiated through mass media like film and television, as well as through particularistic media like home movies and videos. “Shooting the family” has a double meaning. On the one hand, this book claims that the family is under pressure from the forces of globalization and migration; it is the family that risks being shot to pieces. On the other hand, family matters of all kinds, including family values, are increasingly being constructed and refigured in a mediated form. The audiovisual family has become an im- portant medium for intercultural affairs – this is a family that is being re-established as a place of security and comfort in times of upheaval; it is the family shot by cameras that register and simultaneously create new family values. Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies and Wim Staat is Assistent Professor of Film Stu- dies at the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. A MSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS www.aup.nl SHOOTING THE FAMILY Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat (eds.) SHOOTING THE FAMILY TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA AND INTERCULTURAL VA LUES 9 789053 567500 ISBN 90-5356-750-X Shooting the Family Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 1 Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 2 Shooting the Family Transnational Media and Intercultural Values Edited by Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat Amsterdam University Press Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 3 This publication is made possible by a grant from the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. Front cover illustration: Sitcom, François Ozon © Cinemien, Amsterdam Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer bno, Amsterdam Lay-out: Het Steen Typografie, Maarssen isbn 90 5356 750 x nur 674 © Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam 2005 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 4 Contents Introduction 7 Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat Part 1: The Family and the Media 1. Capturing the Family: Home Video in the Age of Digital Reproduction 25 José van Dijck 2. Migrant Children Mediating Family Relations 41 Sonja de Leeuw 3. The Shooting Family: Gender and Ethnicity in the New Dutch Police Series 57 Joke Hermes and Joost de Bruin Part 2: Private Matters, Public Families 4. Family Portrait: Queering the Nuclear Family in François Ozon’s Sitcom 73 Jaap Kooijman 5. Radicalism Begins at Home: Fundamentalism and the Family in My Son the Fanatic 89 Laura Copier 6. Family Matters in Eat Drink Man Woman: Food Envy, Family Longing, or Intercultural Knowledge through the Senses? 103 Tarja Laine Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 5 Part 3: Translating Family Values 7. Saved by Betrayal? Ang Lee’s Translations of “Chinese” Family Ideology 117 Jeroen de Kloet 8. Eurydice’s Diasporic Voice: Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus and the Family in Poet’s Hell 133 Catherine M. Lord 9. Archiving the (Secret) Family in Egoyan’s Family Viewing 147 Marie-Aude Baronian Part 4: Loving Families 10. Suspending the Body: Biopower and the Contradictions of Family Values 165 Sudeep Dasgupta 11. Unfamiliar Film: Sisters Unsettling Family Habits 181 Wim Staat 12. Micropolitics of the Migrant Family in Accented Cinema: Love and Creativity in Empire 197 Patricia Pisters List of Contributors 213 Index 217 CONTENTS Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 6 Introduction Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat Do contemporary movements of migration and the ever-increasing abundance of audiovisual media correspond to or even cause shifts in the definition of both the bourgeois nuclear family and the tribal extended family? In this book we will investi- gate the transfigured role of the family both as the mediator and as the mediated in a transnational world in which intercultural values are negotiated through mass media like film and television, as well as through particularistic media like home movies and videos. “Shooting the family” has a double meaning. On the one hand, we claim that the family is under pressure and being altered by the forces of global- ization and migration (the family that is “shot to pieces”). On the other hand, fam- ily matters of all kinds, pertaining both to reinforcements and radical reconfigura- tions of traditional family values, are increasingly constructed and refigured in a mediated form: the “reel family” (as in the “visual family shot”) has become an im- portant medium for intercultural affairs. This book originated in the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam. As a group of media scholars with a special interest in intercultural exchanges related to transnational media culture, we discovered that the concept of the family had not been very elaborately analyzed in this respect. Although both the Western nuclear family and the non-Western extended family is under pres- sure (from internal struggles and divorces and from external causes like migra- tion that tear families apart), no extended study has related the concept of the family in an intercultural perspective to media use and media theory. This striking absence in intercultural media theory led to the idea of writing this book. From the beginning, we also had the idea of relating these theoretical notions to certain media practices. We were therefore very happy that the center for mi- gration and image culture, Imagine IC (Imagine Identity and Culture) in Amster- 7 Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 7 dam was immediately interested in collaborating with us on this theme. Imagine IC has programmed a set of screenings, talks, audiovisual assignments, etc., to complement the “Shooting the Family” project. The book and the events present a dialogue between media theory and practice that discusses intercultural values related to family matters. 1 The Family, Interculturality, and the Media In contrast to media studies, in sociology, the family has been studied extensively in relation to interculturality and multiculturalism. For instance, in their book Families in Multicultural Perspectives, Bron Ingoldsby and Suzanna Smith, give an overview of the different ways in which the family can be understood in all its cul- tural diversity. 2 They discuss and compare familial issues like marital structure, kinship rules, family members’ functional roles, parenting and “family life cycles” (from marriage to families with young children and aging families) in all their cul- tural diversities. In this way they demonstrate that although the traditional family of (white) heterosexual parents and their children is often taken as the normative definition of the family, from a multicultural perspective this definition can be ex- tended in many ways as long as it is considered as a group of people that care for each other and provide children a safe place to grow up. Of course, families can be dysfunctional as well, and these unsuccessful families have also been studied ex- tensively from a sociological perspective. 3 In these cases, the family is researched with respect to its function in demographical descriptions of social organiza- tions. When we address the family in this book, we do not so much refer to the exten- sive sociological studies on the family. Our references will be taken from studies in the humanities, especially philosophy and esthetics. Questions of identity, par- ticular esthetic traditions, and ethical concerns will therefore inform our analy- ses. Moreover, all of the chapters in this book analyze particular media texts (fic- tion films, documentaries, television series, and home videos) and look at how in these particular texts the family is (re)presented. The underlying questions are al- ways related to the double meaning of the title of the book: how is the family rede- fined or even undermined by the forces of globalization, migration and intercul- tural encounters, and what is the function of media in this redefinition of the family? 8 PATRICIA PISTERS AND WIM STAAT ————————————————— 1 See www.imagineic.nl. 2 Bron Ingoldsby and Suzanna Smith (eds.), Families in Multicultural Perspective (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995). 3 See, for example, Richard Kagan and Shirley Schlosberg, Families in Perpetual Crisis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 8 In film and television studies, the family has always been discussed in relation to particular genres, especially the filmed melodrama and the televisual soap. Melodramas and soap operas are often compared as “women’s genres” in their emphasis on family relations. In her anthology Home Is Where the Heart Is, Chris- tine Gledhill has collected important studies on the melodramatic field in media studies. 4 The title of Gledhill’s anthology basically refers to the emotional ties and tears (the heart), related to the domain of the home and the family, that are con- noted as feminine. Theoretically, the family in film and television studies has often been related to the Freudian notion of the Oedipal family. 5 Numerous important studies have emphasized the Oedipal plot of all classical films, and as such the psychoanalyti- cal family can be considered as an important paradigm to interpret the world of cinema. Psychoanalysis even featured as a double bill, so to speak, both in the family melodrama of the 1940s and ‘50s, and in the work of film scholars in the late 1970s interested in these films. More specifically, in “Tales of Sound and Fury”, also in Gledhill’s collection, Thomas Elsaesser psychoanalytically case read the esthetics of symbolic excess in the films of Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minelli, but not without acknowledging the irony of jested folk versions of Freudi- an theory appearing in the diegetic world of the very same family melodramas. 6 The study of the cinematic family melodrama has been related to its predeces- sor, the music theatre of the nineteenth-century, particularly to highlight the con- tinuity of popular culture’s interest in the bourgeois nuclear family. In a humani- ties tradition, this connection to the nineteenth-century is particularly relevant, because the bourgeois family is not only represented in popular culture for the first time, it is also theorized for the first time by philosophers who were thinking about the ways in which the nineteenth-century household (oikos) had changed significantly in the modern economy. Modern economies no longer identify the family home as a workplace, and thus the “private” family was born. The gen- INTRODUCTION 9 ————————————————— 4 See, e.g., Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987). And for television: Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Psychoanalysis, Film and Television” (In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled edited by Richard Allen. London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 203-246), and Laura Stempel Mumford, “Feminist Theory and Television Studies” (In The Television Studies Book edited by Christine Geraghthy and David Lusted. London: Arnold Publishers, 1998, pp. 114-130). 5 See, for instance, Raymond Bellour, Philip Rosen, Jean-Louis Baudry, and feminist interpre- tations of this paradigm such as Mulvey, Delauretis, Doane (In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). With the Oedipal family, Freud (and later Lacan) emphasized the initial symbiotic bond between mother and child and the importance of the father in breaking this bond. Although the (male) child first refuses the father (the Oedipus complex), he will eventually identify with the father in order to be able to take his normative place in society as an adult. 6 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury”. In Gledhill. pp. 43-69. Shooting/family 27-01-2005 18:20 Pagina 9 [...]... non-relativistic claim about intercultural values Part 1: The Family and the Media The first part of this book, The Family and the Media, explores the ways in which the family is connected to different types of media representations and media uses In Chapter 1, “Capturing the Family: Home Video in the Age of Digital Production”, José van Dijck provides a historical analysis of the ways in which the family is connected... WIM STAAT Shooting the Family in Four Parts Transnational media determine the first perspective through which this book will address contemporary families It does so by subdividing transnational media into two parts, together harboring the first six chapters of the book In Part 1: The Family and the Media, three chapters will address the media specificity of our understanding of the family In Part 2:... ambiguities in the signification of the “natural” family But before we go into detail on the ambiguities of the family as a resource of intercultural values, let us first consider the changes in the family household From Households to Homelands In the classic genres of the melodrama and soap opera, “home” is a very important concept in relation to the family The homeland is almost never an issue The home... that the work of French filmmaker Ozon is obsessed with literal shootings of the bourgeois family and the staging of alternative family portraits After the death of the hegemonic white bourgeois family, however, there is an afterlife for the family In Sitcom, the father is quite literally killed, but the Spanish maid, her African husband, and the gay son are now, quite literally once more, in the picture... picture They have “queered” the nuclear family by outing the hidden (and forbidden) desires that have always been part of the private and intimate sphere of the family but now are out in the open and have become public The queering of the family demonstrates that the private family has always been a public affair, a façade and a way of presenting oneself to the outside world Moreover, by expressing these... Confucian family ideology: harmony, hierarchy, patriarchy, and piety towards the parents With each film, Lee translates these values differently, thereby betraying the original values and turning them impure With the last film, Hulk, Lee really stirs the concept of the family, of any family, which is an ambiguous experience, a mixture of pleasure and pain However, the question of whether life beyond the family. .. multicultural media setting, both the “home mode” of particular and public media use and the public media themselves are related to transnational imaginations of the family Although these chapters each focus on a very different aspect of contemporary media use, they should be read as a dialogue In Chapter 2, Sonja de Leeuw describes the particular uses of media by children of refugees and migrants in the Netherlands... procedural security of the state In this sense, the intercultural values of migrant families are as particular and contrary to universalist values as natural family values were in the counter-Enlightenment And again, albeit less “natural” and more negotiated by institutions and political contrivances and especially by the images that mediate and present family matters across the borders of the nation-state,... Notably, the bourgeois family presented in Les Terres Froides is not at all the perfect bourgeois family that stands for the French nation-to-be-resisted Family values are established by the beur son and the French father, both coded by an intercultural and interracial dialectic between desire and disgust While in Les Terres Froides the beur son makes visible the intercultural contradictions within the. .. several other contemporary movies but more explicitly than the televisual police series, addresses the changed position of the hegemonic white father figure Laura Copier, on the other hand, claims a more favorable and hopeful position for the father figure (albeit not the white father) in Chapter 5: “Radicalism Begins at Home: Fundamentalism and the Family in My Son the Fanatic” In My Son the Fanatic . 90-5356-750-X Shooting the Family Shooting/ family 27-01 -2005 18:20 Pagina 1 Shooting/ family 27-01 -2005 18:20 Pagina 2 Shooting the Family Transnational Media and Intercultural Values Edited by Patricia Pisters and. between media theory and practice that discusses intercultural values related to family matters. 1 The Family, Interculturality, and the Media In contrast to media studies, in sociology, the family. TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA AND INTERCULTURAL VALUES SHOOTING THE FAMILY Edited by Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS Do contemporary movements of migration and the ever-increasing