Reconditioning the fantastic

What is fantastic cinema? Is it a catch-all term for a range of genres or does it refer to something more specific? Much depends, of course, upon whom you ask: in its contemporary colloquial usage, fantastic is an enthusiastic indicator of high quality (a meaning reinforced for viewers of Christopher Eccleston’s tenure in Doctor Who (2005–) when ‘fantastic’ became the Doctor’s signature word). Following the Oxford English Dictionary, fantastic means something extravagantly fanciful, imaginative or remote from reality. That spirit of inclusiveness is at the core of the seminal Cinefantastique, founded by Frederick S. Clarke in 1970. For Clarke, the ‘magazine with a sense of wonder’ was open to reviews and in-depth studies from across the range of horror, fantasy and sf. At the same time that Clarke’s pioneering magazine about fantastic cinema was establishing a following among film fans, Tzvetan Todorov’s study of the literary fantastic, first published in French in 1970, began to take root in academic discourse. Todorov’s central thesis is well known in fantasy scholarship: the fantastic is a specific register of fantasy rather than an adjective referring to fantasy per se. Flanked by the uncanny (natural explanation) and the marvellous (supernatural explanation), the Todorovian fantastic is on display in a text which prompts the reader ‘to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described’ (Todorov 33). Todorov’s work would soon be transposed to film with Mark Nash’s detailed analysis of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (France/Germany 1932) proposing a film genre analogous to Todorov’s literary fantastic: the cinefantastic (see Nash 30).

Despite the influence of Todorov’s fantastic within academic discourse, his work is not without its complications. One of the drawbacks to the Todorovian fantastic and much of the work to expand on it has been the establishment of what Mark Bould has summarised as a canonical sample that is ‘profoundly unrepresentative of fantasy’ (55). Todorov’s survey of the fantastic is narrow– the focus, as Darko Suvin notes, is on ‘possibilities present in French fiction 1650–1950’ (220) with occasional adventures into German (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and English (Henry James) literature but an emphasis that nonetheless remains on European and canonical texts over more populist examples of genre fiction. With that Eurocentric emphasis in mind, Bliss Cua Lim’s Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique is an extremely welcome and exciting addition to studies of the fantastic. Lim expands the scope of enquiry beyond the Anglophone focus of the majority of studies, to take in production contexts as diverse as Filipino and Hong Kong cinema, Asian American video and both Japanese and Korean horror (and their Hollywood remakes). Lim distinguishes her approach from Todorov’s by liberating the fantastic from the restrictions of an implied reader and bringing it into contact with varied and multiple historical audiences. Yet the question that I began with, ‘What is fantastic cinema?’, haunted my reading of Translating Time without being as fully answered as I would have hoped, despite the book’s abundant strengths. There is the occasional need for a return to basics and a more wide-ranging consideration of the implications of the alternative approaches to the fantastic being proposed, which should not dilute the compelling and significant qualities of Lim’s work.

The book’s opening sentence establishes Lim’s central thesis: fantastic cinema encourages us to think differently about time. To think differently about time in the early twenty-first century is, in Lim’s core argument, to think about alternatives to the dominance of the homogeneous time that is an essential feature of global capitalism and was enforced increasingly through the spread of imperialist powers. Lim’s project is thus a postcolonial one and it operates out of two principles – that the persistence of supernaturalism in certain cultures and the existence of societies which experience time in different ways to the standardised units required...