Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema by Markus Nornes
Calligraphy and film, these two seemingly unrelated art forms are poetically united in Markus Nornes’s new book Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema. With solid historical research in traditional East Asian calligraphy and innovative thinking about a variety of films from China, Korea, and Japan, Nornes is breaking new ground by examining the overlooked yet intricate relationship between brushed works and East Asian cinema. Foregrounding the ubiquity and importance of brushed writings in East Asian films, Nornes also challenges the often dogmatic definition of traditional calligraphy through a series of carefully selected examples. Adorned with 139 luxuriously printed color illustrations, Brushed in Light is the beginning of a much-underexplored area of cinema scholarship. While the book may have some limitations as the first monograph to explore calligraphy in relation to film, it is still no doubt an exciting addition to the overall study of East Asian cinema.
Nornes writes knowledgeably but is also passionately poetic. Much of his desire in pursuing the topic of calligraphy stems from his personal interests and his determination to prove that calligraphy not only exists in East Asian films, but also that “the very new art of cinema has democratized and freed the very ancient art of calligraphy” (11). This statement might be a slight exaggeration, but it does highlight the modernist relationship between cinema and brushed works. It is this modernist perspective that drives this book. In the introduction, Nornes also gives a brief examination of the theorization of calligraphy, citing western scholars like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein. Aside from that, Nornes puts much more emphasis on the specificities of East Asian brushed writings and their application to the cinematic. Ending the introduction with a textual analysis of the brushed finishing words—“The End”—in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese films, Nornes gives the audience a taste of the somatic and sensual “force” that is East Asian calligraphy.
The book is intended for an audience with no former training in the history of calligraphy. Chapter 1 briefly traces the origin of Western calligraphy in films before entering into the complex world of East Asian calligraphy. This comparison situates East Asian brushed works in a place much richer than the “beautiful writings” of Western calligraphy; it is a place of “embodiment” (21). Nornes writes: “East Asian calligraphy is a somatic form of art pointing us back to, and facilitating a communion with, the individual human artist, brush in hand, and the moment of inscription” (19). Then the author goes on, detailing strings of calligraphy from China, Japan, and Korea, namely shufa (書法), shodo (書道), and seoye (書藝). While this chapter is in no way a comprehensive historical or aesthetic account of East Asian calligraphy, it does provide solid background information for the following chapters. Nornes also foregrounds the conflict between traditional and cinematic calligraphy, reiterating his belief that calligraphy and film are inseparably bound.
Chapter 2 loosely follows the historical perspective of Chapter 1 with a focus on the development of calligraphy in East Asian films from the silent era until today. Nornes has done elaborate and meticulous field work across East Asian prop shops in the hope of piecing together the story behind the brushed works on screen. The result is a wonderful backstage tour with unseen photographs from various prop shops and studios across East Asia. While this chapter provides a series of fascinating topics from the early Japanese intertitles to calligraphic collages in Chinese films, the structure does feel a little dispersed; however, it ends on a beautifully philosophical note when the author evokes Japanese calligrapher Sisyu and her animated calligraphy, [End Page 64] and enters into the discussion of the life force behind these brushed works.
Chapter 3, titled “Defining Calligraphy”, does exactly that and provides definitions for the complex worlds of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean calligraphy in relation to cinema. Most of this chapter is devoted to the discussion of the “Four Treasures”—ink, brush, paper, and inkstone— and the “Five Styles” of calligraphy along with its cinematic applications and extensions. The “Four Treasures” are tightly linked to the ancient laws of calligraphy, but Nornes examines the four materials anew and finds their cinematic counterparts in films by Byun Young-ju, Jia Zhangke, and Zhang Yimou, among others. He then adds three additional “treasures”— computer, sound, and movement—and Li Xianting’s “Three Irreplaceables”—brush, rhythm, and arrangement—to the definition of cinematic calligraphy (67, 73). Probably the most compelling part of this chapter, its conclusion, is dedicated to the pictographic aspect of the Chinese characters through examples from Red Cliff 2. As opposed to many western scholars who only theorize the appealing, if not exotic, visuals of the Chinese characters, Nornes goes much deeper to combine the semiotics with the pictographic of the brushed words in the film, and the chapter nicely transitions into the emotions and force behind calligraphy.
Chapter 4, titled “Force and Form”, deepens the discussion of the “embodiment” felt in East Asian calligraphy, and more importantly, its manifestation in the cinematic arts. This chapter takes apart the traditional definition of calligraphy in Chapter 3 and pushes this written practice into the realm of modern, if not abstract, arts. This chapter “link[s] the act of writing to the act of viewing” through examples from both traditional (the “crushing” of characters) and the modern perspectives (Xu Bing and Wang Wo) (88). For a Western audience, these examples help elucidate the somatic and temporal experience of viewing calligraphic art. And for East Asian audiences like myself, Nornes’s writing actually encourages us to slow down and look more carefully at something too often neglected. Transitioning from the fine arts to the cinematic arts, Nornes dedicates the second half of this chapter to the brushed works in the mise-en-scene, and how they reflect the specific cinematic culture in Japan, Korea, and China. This is where the limitation of a monograph comes in since many of the concepts explored here could very much use their own chapters. Despite that, Nornes has successfully established the complex and interlocked relationship between cinema and calligraphy.
Chapter 5, being a case study of calligraphy in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, is almost a response to the limitations of Chapter 4. A well-researched and innovative piece combining textual analysis with theories and concepts introduced beforehand, this chapter demonstrates how Nornes’s exciting new research can be applied in cinema studies. On top of theorizing Hou’s use of calligraphy from temporal, spatial, and textual perspectives, Chapter 5 also emphasizes the human body behind brushed works—“that visual trace of a long absent event of the human body in action” (105).
Continuing the discussion of the human presence of calligraphy, Chapter 6 adds a theoretical dimension to the arguments so far and further links the “arts of ink and light” (115). Nornes first examines a multitude of alternative calligraphic practices of signed magazines, props, and even death masks related to cinema. Then he quotes Bazin on the ontology of cinema: “it is no longer as certain as it was that there is no middle stage between presence and absence” (125). Calligraphy— being an art form that preserves the human presence and the event of the brushing through its ink, rhythm, and arrangement—also occupies a middle stage as cinema does. To further this linkage, Nornes evokes Nelson Goodman’s “distinction between autographic and allographic art,” proving that calligraphy and film transform and elevate each other through the creativities of the filmmakers [End Page 65] (131). The possibilities opened up by this chapter in terms of future scholarships on the ontological, material, and definitional aspects of the study of calligraphy in film are numerous.
In the conclusion, Nornes returns to the physicality and sensuality of calligraphy with examples from 13 Assassins and the last writings of Kenji Mizoguchi. It returns the audience to the individual human behind calligraphy. Nornes writes: “When the artist’s body ends its final gesture, what is left is the indexical trace of a past event and existence” (142). There is something about brushed works in East Asian cinema that occupy—using Nornes’s words—an “undecidable place” just like that of cinema (143). What Brushed in Light does is to take the first step of dissecting and understanding this undecidable brushed form and its intricate link to cinema. In many senses, Nornes’s historiography and theorization are just the beginning. [End Page 66]
