Tem­po­ral Sen­si­bil­i­ties: Queer­ing time­lines and nostalgia

This is the sec­ond of three pieces pub­lished in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Queer East Film Fes­ti­val, whose Emerg­ing Crit­ics project brought togeth­er six writ­ers for a pro­gramme of men­tor­ship through­out the festival.

Yuki Yoshikawa

Dear Pear,

How was your expe­ri­ence at this year’s Queer East Film Fes­ti­val? We ran into each oth­er at a few screen­ings, didn’t we? Even though we were in the same space watch­ing the same films, I’m sure our expe­ri­ences were different.

I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to watch some reper­to­ry Tai­wanese films, rang­ing from the 1980s to the 2000s. Among them, I found the dou­ble bill screen­ing of Jo-Fei Chen’s Where Is My Love? and Inci­den­tal Jour­ney espe­cial­ly beau­ti­ful. I’ve always been drawn to old­er films. There’s some­thing about the slight­ly rough qual­i­ty of the footage, the film’s wear and tear, and the bluish tint that cap­ti­vates me. The occa­sion­al sound of the film’s scratch­es, like some­thing is being set afire, adds a pecu­liar charm to the movie, as if it were a back­ground track. Of course, my fas­ci­na­tion doesn’t just stem from the film being phys­i­cal­ly old. There’s some­thing nos­tal­gic in the streets, land­scapes, the demeanor of a per­son, and the rela­tion­ships between char­ac­ters that are depict­ed in the movie. While watch­ing these films, I asked myself, why do I feel nos­tal­gic for some­thing I’ve nev­er expe­ri­enced? I’ve only been to Tai­wan once, in the late 2010s, as a tourist. It seems like this nos­tal­gic feel­ing that aris­es when watch­ing these films has noth­ing to do with my own per­son­al experiences.

I’m also inter­est­ed in the queer peo­ple from that time. I can’t help but feel a sense of melan­choly. In Where Is My Love?, the film por­trays the roman­tic rela­tion­ship between Ko, the pro­tag­o­nist who resists com­ing out as gay, and his open­ly gay friend, Pierre. In Inci­den­tal Jour­ney, we see two les­bian char­ac­ters: Ching, a woman who trav­els across Tai­wan after break­ing up with her girl­friend, and Hsiang, a lone­ly artist whose past lover mar­ried a man. After run­ning into each oth­er by chance, the two stay at the house of Hsiang’s past lover. Their evolv­ing feel­ings and the grow­ing attrac­tion between them left a strong impres­sion on me. Both these films del­i­cate­ly por­tray the strug­gles and emo­tions of queer peo­ple at the time, through depict­ing expe­ri­ences of com­ing out, heart­break, find­ing a part­ner, and decid­ing where and how to live. I imag­ine these issues must have weighed even more heav­i­ly on them back then than they might do now. It must have been incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to search for a way to live with­out social accep­tance. Watch­ing these films, I feel as though I’ve been touched by the char­ac­ters’ pain and lived expe­ri­ences, which I’m now car­ry­ing with me. It feels like cin­e­ma enables the past and the present to con­nect through time.

Even though the LGBTQIA+ move­ment was gain­ing momen­tum in Tai­wan around the 90s, that still wasn’t an era when queers were social­ly accept­ed. How­ev­er, it’s cer­tain that gay, les­bian, trans­gen­der, and queer peo­ple did exist. Through cin­e­ma, we feel their very exis­tence. It does­n’t mat­ter that the sto­ries depict­ed in these films are fic­tion­al. Some­how, they trans­form into a mem­o­ry that’s not quite my own, but still resur­faces with­in me.

In one scene in Where Is My Love?, a young gay man sits in a dim­ly lit study, del­i­cate­ly hold­ing a cig­a­rette between his fin­gers as he con­cen­trates on his writ­ing under the glow of a banker’s lamp. Anoth­er young man gazes at him wist­ful­ly. The cam­era cap­tures each of them at eye lev­el, align­ing with their per­spec­tives. Their gazes and expres­sions reach us across the screen and through time. Even if this is a fic­tion­al sto­ry or comes from a past that doesn’t belong to me, queer mem­o­ries con­tin­ue to speak to us as nostalgia.

In Inci­den­tal Jour­ney, an artist is cap­ti­vat­ed by a free-spir­it­ed and allur­ing woman stand­ing by the river­side. From a short dis­tance, Hsiang finds her­self sketch­ing the woman. Framed by the still­ness of the moun­tains, we watch the scene from afar, trac­ing the dis­tance between the two. I felt as if this was a land­scape I want­ed to remem­ber. The film is, of course, a fan­ta­sy, and I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly seen this place. But Inci­den­tal Jour­ney paint­ed a qui­et, inner land­scape in me, like a mem­o­ry I car­ry in my mind. Per­haps watch­ing films allows queers, each with their own his­to­ries and expe­ri­ences, to cre­ate such pock­ets of mem­o­ry with­in themselves.

Queer fan­tasies cre­at­ed by film blur the lines between past and present, dis­rupt the flow of time, and mix real­i­ty with fic­tion, ulti­mate­ly con­struct­ing a roman­tic past for queer peo­ple. These films offer us some­thing beyond mere visu­al sto­ries. Through the char­ac­ters’ pain, their joy, and the time they lived through, we can expe­ri­ence an imag­i­nary his­to­ry. This is the pow­er of nos­tal­gia that tran­scends time and space, allow­ing us to reaf­firm our exis­tence as queer individuals.

Pear Nual­lak

Dear Yuki,

I remem­ber when your hands described time on the pub table soon after we met for the first time. You said, ​“Peo­ple think time is like this,” slid­ing your index fin­ger for­ward. By con­sid­er­ing queer time, we under­stand the poten­tial of being tem­po­ral­ly way­ward: time can ​“drag on” because of soci­etal pres­sure to live a straight and nar­row life, so queer­ing time can mean find­ing our own wind­ing path. Or maybe time itself can become drag – mate­r­i­al for desta­bil­is­ing performance. 

His­to­ry became bur­lesque in An Ass-Shaped But­ter­fly. Part of Queer East Expand­ed, this per­for­mance-lec­ture by film schol­ar Misha Zakharov was fol­lowed by a rare screen­ing of Vocal Par­al­lels, direct­ed by Rus­tam Kham­damov. Zakharov, who self-describes as ​“russ­ian-Kore­an” with a low­er­case ​‘r’ with a decolo­nial inten­tion, offered a queer spec­u­la­tive read­ing of Erik Kur­man­galiev, a Kaza­kh tenor who flour­ished in new­ly post-Sovi­et Russia. 

Zakharov’s play­ful inquiry and care­ful research encour­aged my read­ing of Vocal Par­al­lels as a bit­ing satire of the Sovi­et film-con­cert. This art form intro­duced art to the mass­es by com­bin­ing musi­cal and doc­u­men­tary; Vocal Par­al­lels turns it into a sur­re­al cabaret that treats Sovi­et cul­tur­al his­to­ry like a dress-up box. Our host for this film-con­cert is Russ­ian actor Rena­ta Litvi­no­va. With her ultra-femme Sovi­et retro style and barbed quips, Litvi­no­va intro­duces each act and explains the film-concert’s thin plot. ​“One sopra­no hates anoth­er sopra­no […] and the mez­zo sopra­no hates them all,” she says. We fol­low opera divas engaged in rival­ry, includ­ing Erik Kur­man­galiev. Always in full drag, his dark, rich, gen­der-ambigu­ous voice weaves through the film. When he sings ​“Vanya’s Aria” from Glinka’s Ivan Susanin, he’s a ​“female” char­ac­ter in a ​“male” mil­i­tary uni­form play­ing a boy’s role intend­ed for a con­tral­to, the low­est ​“female” voice range that over­laps with a ​“male” tenor. The film treats gen­der like it treats time – playfully.

Because of Vocal Par­al­lels’ sweep­ing his­toric scale and iron­ic tone, we’re kept at a dis­tance. In con­trast, when I went to the UK pre­mière of Chu Ping’s Silent Sparks, I was struck by the close invi­ta­tion to feel time pass along­side the main char­ac­ter, a young gay Tai­wanese gang­ster called Pua. I was curi­ous about this film because I’d been read­ing Jack­ie Wang’s abo­li­tion­ist writ­ing on time and impris­on­ment. The movie begins with Pua being locked into his prison cell. His sched­uled meal­time – what Wang describes as ​“mak­ing time digestible” – is spent silently.

Silent Sparks gen­tly observes how crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion shapes Pua’s dai­ly life. Upon release, Pua resumes work as a casu­al porter and hired thug for his car-and-crime-deal­ing boss, gen­er­al­ly dis­ap­point­ing his long suf­fer­ing moth­er, Ru, a for­tune-teller who insists he eats mee sua (wheat ver­mi­cel­li) for 100 days to change his fate. Pua and Ru live next to the train tracks and can­not afford to sound­proof their home, the com­pen­sa­tion pay­ment for his pre­vi­ous vic­tim adding to their mount­ing bills. I thought of how Wang describes debt as fore­clos­ing peo­ple’s futures, with incar­cer­a­tion as ​“tem­po­ral pun­ish­ment.” The film’s slow pace, along with tun­nelling com­po­si­tions and rhyth­mic lines of city infra­struc­ture, cre­ate the feel­ing of con­fine­ment out­side prison walls.

Pua’s refusal of food out­side prison marks his gen­er­al lack of appetite for life. The only thing Pua desires with sin­gle-mind­ed focus is Mi-Ji, who seem­ing­ly remains cold to Pua despite the pas­sion they once shared in prison. Pua and Mi-Ji are employed by the same crime boss; as their rela­tion­ship rekin­dles, their work becomes more risky. Near the end of the film, when Pua decides to up the stakes in his pur­suit of love, he final­ly eats his moth­er’s mee sua, which failed to change his for­tune but sus­tains him when he makes a life-alter­ing deci­sion in his pur­suit of queer love.

Queer­ness and time cre­ate dif­fer­ent lay­ers and paths in each of these films. Where Vocal Par­al­lels views the breadth of time as a camp spec­ta­cle, Silent Sparks shows how the main char­ac­ter tries to exert his will over time. In the clos­ing scene, we flash back to a moment where Pua seems con­tent with him­self: hitch­ing a ride on a motorised ware­house cart. We’re pulled along with him, jour­ney­ing for­wards and back at the same time. Although Pua is heav­i­ly implied to return where he was at the begin­ning of the film, his ded­i­ca­tion to Mi-Ji refus­es a con­ven­tion­al narrative.

I’ve been think­ing about how queer­ness isn’t always fun or affirm­ing. These films link time with destruc­tion, lin­ger­ing inside the ruins of past cul­tures or indi­vid­ual lives shat­tered by vio­lent sys­tems. After watch­ing them, I feel strength­ened in my resolve that we can’t aban­don our­selves or the peo­ple we love. Queers have always found each oth­er in every timeline.