The creative evolution and crystallisation of the ‘bastard line’: drifting from the Rive Gauche into Suzhou River

Abstract

Deleuze argues that ‘it is never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its essence’; instead, what is tacit at the outset only reveals itself later, after taking a significant ‘detour in its evolution’. This paper argues that Lou Ye's Suzhou River can be understood as the détournement of the ‘bastard line’ of the so-called Sixth Generation's urban realist impulse, and as such materialises a new modality of mainland time-image cinema. By also putting the film into critical relation with Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) via Deleuze, I aim to illustrate how Lou's evental film can be understood as actively modifying our understanding of the cinematic past.