Film as Ethnography; or, Translation between Cultures in the Postcolonial World

1. Film as Ethnography; or, Translation between Cultures in the Postcolonial World • Group One

2. Film as Ethnography; or, Translation between Cultures in the Postcolonial World • Rey Chow redefines ethnography by explicitly linking ethnography with translation, also points out the superficialness of contemporary Chinese films. Chow discusses the issue of translation by using Benjamin’s theory: “The Task of the Translator”

3. Translation and the problem of Origins

4. Our discussion here can be facilitated by turning to the work of Walter Benjamin, not least because Benjamin himself was writing at the crossroads of culture transformation. Though Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ may seem most immediately relevant to our topic in that deals with the traditional are (which possesses ‘aura’) to mass-produced images such as those of photography and film

5. Aura • Aura implies authenticity, uniqueness (光輪) • Aura comes from unreproducibility • Aura would be destructed through reproduction

6. It is often assumed, writes Benjamin, that the point of translation is to impart information or convey the meaning of the original; this is, however, not so. signified is given priority • Instead what needs to be translated is an ‘intention’ (‘intentio’) in the ‘original’ that Benjamin calls the ‘great longing for linguistics complemenation’

7. As regards the meaning, the language of a translation can-in fact, must-let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own of intentio(Illumintaions 78) to sound like the origin

8. His mystical language notwithstanding, Benjamin is arguing for a materialist though elusive fact about translation-that translation is primarily a process to putting words together. • elusive fact: the original is self-différance • This process demonstrates that the ‘original’, too, is something that has been put together. But this ‘putting together’ is not, as I will go on to argue, simply a deconstructive production of differences.

9. Self-différance • différance=difference+deferral

10. It is also a process of ‘literalness’ that displays the way ‘original’ itself was put together-that is, in its violence. • means word-by-word-ness

11. Before arguing this point, we need to examine closely the way Benjamin discusses the ‘putting together’ this is linguistic translation. What needs to be translated from the original, he writes, is not a kind of truth or meaning but the way in which the ‘original‘ is put together in the basic elements of human language-words.

12. putting together • Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in their smaller details, although they not to be like one another In the same way a translation, instead of resembling if the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language（Illuminations 78）

13. Hence it is words-in their wordness, their literality-rather than sentences, that matter the most in translation. A real translation, Benjamin writes, ‘may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.

14. Arcade • ‘literalness’ is an arcade, a passageway • what is ‘literal’ is what acquires to light in addition to the original that is its content; it is this this light, this transparency, that allows the original/content to be transmitted and translated. • A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully