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277 12 Doing Away with Words: Synaesthetic Dislocations in Okinawa and Hong Kong ROSALIND GALT Across his work as a cinematographer, photographer, and director, Christopher Doyle’s images seem to work against claims on materiality. His color-saturated cinematography for directors like Zhang Yimou, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, and Wong Kar-wai is more decorative than realist, and its abstracted style often focuses attention on the composed surface of the screen rather than its profilmic depth.1 Thus Doyle seems at first glance to be oddly matched with a project based on the material significance of cinematic location. Yet, if we examine Doyle’s own background , the question of location takes on what looks like a defining influence. A white Australian, Doyle has worked almost exclusively in Asia, and he commonly goes by the Chinese name “Du Ke-feng.” Self-described as “an Asian with a skin disease,” Doyle’s rewriting of his own ethnic identity suggests that place holds both a mutability and a determining importance in the location of his own practice.2 Indeed, Doyle himself sees place as central to his aesthetics. Discussing his approach to narrative, he says that “why this story happens is because it happens here.”3 Thus Doyle presents something of a conundrum: an image maker who is frequently discussed in terms of his transnational biography but whose work is just as often read as asocial formalism. Moreover, he’s best known as a director of photography—part of a creative team rather than a singular film author. To analyze “Christopher Doyle” as an author figure is to decenter the terms of a film’s own place of origin, opening out different possibilities for designating where it comes from. This relatively unusual situation of attributing a degree of authorial status to a cinematographer adds to the transnational quality of Doyle’s reputation because not only is he an immigrant in Asia but his stardom emerges out of a series of collaborations with Asian directors. In certain industrial, critical, and fan circles, Doyle is famous for his visual style, and this brand is closely linked to the resurgence of East and Southeast Asian art cinemas in the 1980s and 1990s.4 278 | ROSALIND GALT Thus the apparently purely formal account of Doyle (the director of photography with a strong visual signature but no directorial vision) runs in close parallel to his geographically defined histories (Asian New Wave, artist biography). In this chapter, I aim to bring these discourses together, situating Doyle’s aesthetics in terms of their material locations and engagement with geopolitical space. I focus on Doyle’s directorial debut Away with Words (1999), a film that stages these questions of transnational location both narratively and in their formal dialogue with the profilmic. The film is almost entirely set in two locations: Hong Kong and Taketomi Island in Okinawa, Japan. For the most part, Hong Kong constitutes the narrative present, where our directionless protagonist Asano has jumped ship and found himself in a dive bar owned by Kevin, a drunken ex-pat Englishman. Kevin lets Asano stay with him, and joined by Kevin’s Singaporean friend Susie, the two men drift around the city’s gay bars, noodle shops, and garment factories. The narrative is attenuated, and time spent in Hong Kong is heavily overlaid with Asano’s dreamy memories of his childhood in Okinawa. Taketomi is part of the remote Yaeyama Islands in the far south of Okinawa, and these flashback and fantasy sequences focus on the white coral roads, traditional houses, and beaches characteristic of Taketomi. The two locations are clear opposites, with the hyped-up consumerism and seedy glamour of Hong Kong contrasting with the peaceful, premodern landscapes of Taketomi. Hong Kong as world city and filmmaking center is also a highly recognizable location, representationally codified, with each late-night noodle shop or sign-filled street evoking a history of cinematic reference. Taketomi’s beach roads, by contrast, might be anywhere as far as most spectators are concerned. On the very margins of Japan, Taketomi is at once a highly specific location and one that resists the use of conventional national landmarks to identify place. The contrast between these two places grounds the film’s narrative of geopolitical displacement. Hong Kong is a real place to Asano but one in which he is alienated and cannot feel at home. (The same can be said for Kevin and Susie, as all the main characters are immigrants.) Taketomi, meanwhile, is Asano’s home...

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