Par-Asian technologies: French cinematic, literary, and artistic encounters with east Asia since 1945 (China, Japan)

This dissertation examines the representation of encounters with East Asia in French literature, cinema, and painting since 1945. The term "Parasian" describes the relationships that artists explored between France and Asia, as well as the moments of French self-critique that have been undertaken "par l'Asie," or through Asia. In close readings of films and texts, such as Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras), Un Barbare en Asie (Henri Michaux), and Level 5 (Chris Marker), I analyze how these works deconstruct earlier narratives of China and Japan, and then replace them with accounts that recognize the increased importance of these cultures after World War II. These artists sense, however, that their new types of representations will ultimately end in failure due to the limits of the artistic technologies they use.; For Resnais, Marker, and Michaux, it is only by reconceptualizing the technologies of painting, film, and the printed book will they be better able to represent China and Japan. They not only try to change the way East Asia is understood in France, but to transform the very artistic media they employ in order to arrive at a Par-asian transnational imaginary. I also analyze the rhetoric and discourse by which poets and curators narrativize the blending of European and Asian representational traditions as allegories of larger connections between France and East Asia, as seen in the case of Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese-born painter who made his career in Paris. This kind of discourse reveals a desire for a Par-asian encounter through the medium of painting yet also betrays ambivalence about cultural and artistic miscegenation. In short, images and notions of China and Japan become interfaces that challenge French cultural and artistic competencies, the technologies at their disposal, and claims to understand the East Asian other. I examine French responses to their own history of "Orientalism" in order to understand what the French have at stake, during French decolonization in the second half of the 20th century and, particularly with Olivier Assayas's film Irma Vep, in the face of the importance assumed by East Asia in the 21st.