THE LOST MEMORY OF THE COLONY
- Postcolonial Melancholia and Subversive Gaze in Third World Cinema
Video Essay / 2022
“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts
- Postcolonial Melancholia and Subversive Gaze in Third World Cinema
Video Essay / 2022
“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts
Melancholia is generally defined as a sentiment of deep sadness or gloom often associated with depression and pessimism. In Freud’s term, melancholia occurs when the subject cannot identify what they have lost in the process of grief. And melancholia is crucial in discussing the affect of colonialism because of the inability to identify the object of loss. The violence that colonialism enforces to individuals has no specific object or aim. However, as Susan Sontag says, it is known that the character difference of Melancholy from regular depression is that this sentiment has charm and passion in it, which often has creative and artistic power. So cinema, could also be one way this melancholia from colonialism could be expressed and transformed. Thus, based on this notion of melancholia and its relation to cinema and colonialism, We could see strong postcolonial melancholia configured in many third world cinema. It is crucial to recognize the postcolonial melancholia in these non Western films because the melancholia is precisely the fuel for it to be expressed through the film, that is an artistic medium. So, let’s take a look at a couple non-western films that illustrate such postcolonial melancholia.
In Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl, a French/Senegalese film, the protagonist Diouana is a young girl from a poor village outside of Dakar, Senegal. She dreams of moving to France to work and living a new cosmopolitan lifestyle. Then she gets hired by a French couple, and her anticipation grows. Yet not long after in France, she starts experiencing harsh treatment from the couple, who forces her to work as a servant. Realizing the disparity between the reality and what she dreamt of, Diouana feels more and more depressed, lonely, and hopeless. Unable to do anything about her situation, she eventually commits suicide. The film is a tragic portrayal of lingering colonialism and racism that haunt an individual, even after when they were able to leave the colonized space. Faced with such violence, Diouana becomes a melancholic figure who cannot identify or retrieve what she has lost. The perpetuated melancholia leads her to cease her own life, which seems like the only active action that she could take to resist the oppression and discrimination she struggled with. The film depicts intense postcolonial melancholia through Diouna and her experience. And based on a real incident, Sembene’s audiovisual utterance of this story is a memorial and cinematic transmutation of Diouana’s death, and further, the grief of colonialism.
On the other hand, in a 60s Korean neorealist film Aimless Bullet, directed by Yoo Hyun-mok, postcolonial melancholia is expressed more multidimensional and layered. Set in the period right after the Korean war, that is an event closely related to the aftermath of Japanese colonialism, the film shows various characters who experience the postcolonial and postwar melancholia in different terms. Chul-ho and Young-ho’s family struggles with poverty, angst, and melancholia that the postcolonial and postwar condition has caused. For Young-ho, after a course of close ones’ death and disappearance, he questions the morality and values of humanity. In desperation, he decides to rob a bank. Chul-ho, who listened to Young-ho’s vent before the robbery, is left with loss of most of his family members as his wife dies in the labor as well. Feeling hopeless, Chul-ho impulsively pulls out both his aching wisdom teeth and directs a taxi to go nowhere as he laments “maybe you’re right, I might be the aimless bullet of the creator” while bleeding and losing consciousness. Chul-ho and Young-ho both are melancholic figures but they manifest it differently. Chul-ho’s is that of Nietzsche’s passive nihilism where one wallows in sadness and depression, while Young-ho’s is active nihilism where one attempts to take an action out of it. Yet both vividly express the death drive and melancholia from the colonialism and war.
These portrayals of postcolonial melancholia in third world cinema holds subversive gaze. It is subversive in a sense that these films focus on and center around the figures who are not white males in the Western world. And unlike mainstream narrative films that depict the heroic journey of a protagonist, these films remember tragic moments and melancholia of an ordinary individuals. Further, the films don’t just show these but twist the story with the act of resistance. Diouana’s suicide, and Young-ho’s bank robbery are both somewhat a resistance and a refusal to be subjected to the postcolonial and colonial reality, while at the same time intensifies the melancholia. And most importantly, I believe the mere fact that these directors and filmmakers made these stories into an artistic form that is a film is in itself a creative and cinematic resistance of the transformative and subversive potential of postcolonial melancholia.