Representations of suicide in cinema

Here, representations of suicide in fiction film from the United States, Europe, and South East Asia are presented. Films are helpful in addressing discourses on suicide worldwide. Typically, the sufferings of the characters considering suicide or taking their lives occupy a minor part of the plot in scenarios highlighting action, cultural, and social reflection or existential interrogations. In Hollywood dramas, redemption, punishment, lost love, and solitude are major reasons for suicides; often the consequence of genuine injustice. In the European films discussed, suicides on screen often open to comments and reflections on many tragic circumstances explaining the protagonists’ actions. Not recognizing oneself in and by society seems an important reason for suicide. Wanting to understand the motives behind the voluntary death of a peer is recurrent. Much South East Asian cinema reflects the malaise of a society, its interiorized violence, death’ fascination, and the distress of a youth lacking excitement.

Home is where the kitchen is: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018)1

The kitchen has become a prominent trope in East Asian cinema, the narratives of which revolve around the homecoming of female protagonists: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018). In part due to the fact that the films are adaptations of different media – novel and manga, respectively – and in part motivated by their narrative and style – the female protagonist’s loss of voice in Rinco’s Restaurant and the less frequent recourse to the verbal to express taste in these works – the audience is challenged to imagine the taste of, and pleasure in consuming, food, conveyed through only a limited set of sensorial modes. I focus on the transformative aspect of divergent modes of media storytelling in these films and their original source texts, and further argue that the kitchen becomes a ‘choric’ space for female protagonists where the relationship between mother and daughter is reconfigured in order to reinvent themselves.

(Dis)enchanted Taiwanese Cinema, Schizoanalytic Belief and the Actuality of Animism

Taiwanese films abound with religious rites, spirits, specters, ghosts, gods, and other “supernatural” forces. How should we conceive of our involvement in this complex web of dissiminated and animated agencies that populate East-Asian cinema in general, and Taiwanese cinema in particular? Can the essential liminality and heterogeneity of spiritual matters be thought of in terms of active assemblages and transformative becomings? Or, to put it in blunter and somehow naive materialist terms: what does it actually mean to believe in gods, ghosts and spirits? This article aims at outlining a schizoanalytic approach to the complex dynamic of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment at work in Taiwanese cinema. It takes as a starting point the speculative pragmatist question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, situated, situation, that is: how we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of (re)animation of our world(s). This investigation into enchantment and disenchantment in contemporary Taiwanese Cinema articulates around three general lines of thought: 1. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of what it means to believe (in the world); 2. the animist turn in recent post-Deleuzian thought, as put forth in the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Maurizio Lazzarato, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett and many others; 3. a more detailed characterization of the spirits’ virtual presence in terms of metamorphic power, surexistence and propositional efficacy. These three axis ultimately relate to the pragmatist speculative question of how to inhabit and activate a sense of the possible in a given, localized situation – or how do we conceive of our participation to the ever-going process of animation of our world(s).