The Ethics of Narrative in Film: The Great Buddha+and Its Self-Reflexive Devices

Yanqin Tan

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 46卷2期 (2020/09) Pp. 89-113

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.202009_46(2).0005

摘要

This article analyzes the self-reflexive devices in a new Taiwanese film entitled The Great Buddha+ (大佛普拉斯 Dafo pulasi, dir. Huang Hsin-yao, 2017) and elaborates on the ethical implications of them through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy of infinite otherness and Adam Zachary Newton's theory about narrative ethics. Starting with a comparison to Alfred Hitchcock's classical thriller, Rear Window, it examines the three levels of subversion in The Great Buddha+, including a return of scopophilic gaze, a sensibility of documentation and an non-subjugating relations with others, and locates in these subversions a space for self-reflexivity and ethical encounter in a Levinasian sense. Noticing the small but momentous distance between historical persons and fictionalized characters and the difference between lived lives and stories or discourses, The Great Buddha+, this article argues, opens an integrated thriller narrative to encompass a more profound thinking on the ethics of self-other relation. As an attempt to apply ethical criticism to The Great Buddha+, this article explores the ethical experience in films and draws a connection between ethical philosophy and film studies in an East Asian context.

關鍵字

The Great Buddha+ ； self-reflexivity ； ethical philosophy ； narrative ethics ； otherness and alterity

參考文獻

Bordwell, David, “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, Columbia UP, 1986, pp. 17-34.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Random House, 1984.

Buell, Lawrence. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics.” The Turn to Ethics, edited by Garber, Marjorie, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1-14.

Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Afterword: Documentary Filmmaking as Ethical Production of Truth.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 39, no.1, 2013, pp. 203-20.

Comolli, Jean-Luc, and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Baudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University P, 2009, pp. 686-93.