| dc.description.abstract | In the 2000s, the theme of mourning began to proliferate in the Québécois cinema. The “mourning cinema” (as I term it) often begins with the death of a child or an adolescent, immersing the entire film in a mournful atmosphere. This thesis takes Route 132 (among other mourning films) as the point of departure, to examine the recurrent theme of mourning in the 2000s Québécois cinema. Apart from previous nationalist criticism that perceived tragedy and mourning as the symptom or allegory of national(ist) trauma, this thesis investigates the representation of mourning and its potentiality in the age of globalization.
The first chapter traces the role of mourning throughout the history of Québécois cinema. The representation of mourning in the 2000s films, differing from the previous era, is characterized by two motifs – absurd death and home returning. After observing the mourning films that anchors home returning as the ritual of mourning, methodologically I draw on anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of liminality as the point of departure. Before proceeding to the relationship between man and the land, the second chapter investigates the fleeing from city as the reaction to the absurd death in Route 132. It contours how the exclusive, rationalist oppression of death, absurdity, irrationality, etc. by modernity constitutes the absurd milieu in which the mourner is situated, thus driving him/her out of the city.
The third chapter concentrates on the relations between journey, land and mourning, and analyzes how liminality is cinematographically embodied in move- ment and landscape. Although the journey in the mourning cinema passes through the commonsensical origin of the Québécois nation, the films, contrary to convention, are not indulgent in representing an idyllic pastoral image of the tradition life. On the contrary, they would move incessantly representing the destitute (or even dying) state of land in their representations of these places with cultural significance. They incarnate the immanent liminality en route, whereby the dichotomy between city and countryside, between the present and the past could be transcended. Here, besides the concept of liminality, I also draw on François Jullien’s theory of ressourcer, Daniel Sibony’s distinction between being (être) and having (avoir) to elucidate the relations between land, identity and mourning. If the absurd death shatters what one perceived and believed, then journey and land reconstruct, or even heal, the shattered identity, which is juxtaposed with the collective mourning for the land. As a media, cinema creates a liminal time and space at the interval between reality and fiction where the spectators could practice a collective mourning for the dying patrimonial land. In the age of globalization, the challenge posed by the homogenization of culture is confronted by filmic resourcing, through retrospection and integration.
If the land is the bearer of time and history – especially when the land(scape) in the mourning cinema is often of great cultural and historical significance – then what chapter four examines is the relations between time and mourning. Identity, as Sibony claims, is a state of being instead of having. Yet to pass from the state of having to that of being requires a process of transmission. In this chapter, through analyzing the representation of the time of mourning, I investigate how this transmission takes place. Drawing on Sylviane Agacinski’s passagereté and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of time- space, the thesis argues that the time (of mourning), after being rid of the customary orientation and purpose, becomes a container that contains multiple time-layers. Here mourning is no longer a process of forsaking and forgetting as it is for Sigmund Freud, but rather a continuation of the bond with the deceased, a way to remember. This applies to individual mourning, yet the integration of collective mourning is also made possible through the reiteration of mourning. Finally, Agamben’s notion of “potentiality” is appropriated to interpret the opening, opaque ending in Route 132, whereby mourning remains in the potential, never realized in the Real, and thus remaining always in reintegration and change. | en_US |