"Bad for the Glass": Representation and Filmic Deconstruction in Chinatown and Chan is Missing

Abstract

It is often maintained that foreign directors who come to America become directors. Examples include the Germans Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder; Hitchcock and John Boorman from England; and even French director Jean Renoir. More recently there have been the emigres from East Europe, notably Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. Part of the reason for this transformation has obviously to do with the pervasiveness of the Hollywood style, which if not strictly an international style has since its classic period remained the most influential cinematic mode. Certainly, the foreign filmmakers who have become American directors were entirely familiar with what they were to be long before they became it. In addition, other foreign directors, notably those associated with the French new wave (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol), have variously achieved artistic autonomy by reacting to the Hollywood style, often by dubious homage of imitation. This is even truer perhaps of the New German Cinema, particularly of the work of Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlondorff. Either one is a Hollywood director, or one isn't.1 Whether such polarization has been a good thing, both for the commercial cinema and for the attempts by criticism to understand it, is another matter. Film, it sometimes seems, either proceeds in blind advocacy of traditional representational (and semiologists would argue repressive) techniques or in an adversary posture toward them. Advocates not only include such mannered and