Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of In the Heat of the Sun
1994 · Jiang Wen · In the Heat of the Sun on Sightlines
A boy picks a lock. The door gives, and he is inside a stranger's apartment in a Beijing that has been almost emptied of adults. The light coming through is so strong it seems to be leaking into the room. He has no business being there, which is the point. Then there is a photograph of a girl, and he can't stop looking at it.
Hold on to that image of a trespasser standing still in a sunlit room, staring at a picture, because Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun is built out of it. It is the 1970s. The Cultural Revolution has sent the grown-ups of a military compound off to the provinces, and their children have the city to themselves. Ma Xiaojun, called Monkey, is fourteen. He climbs onto rooftops, rides through courtyards with his gang, and falls for an older girl named Mi Lan. A middle-aged man tells us all of this in voiceover. The voice is Jiang Wen's own, and it keeps admitting that it can't be trusted.
That admission is the key to the film, and Deleuze gives us words for why it matters.
Start with what the film appears to be. Deleuze calls the ordinary flashback a recollection-image: a piece of the past with a date on it, an earlier present brought back so that it can explain the present we're in. A grown man remembering his boyhood is the textbook case. The film sets up that promise from the start, with an adult voice, a past in color and a summer that has obviously ended. We settle in to be told what happened.
Then the voice breaks the promise. It stops to say that it has embellished things, or misremembered them, or that a scene we have just watched may never have taken place. The film doesn't stage this as a trick to be cleared up later. The images give way and revise themselves, and we watch memory correcting itself and making things up on screen.
This cuts against one of the oldest agreements in cinema. Characters may lie in words, but what the camera shows is supposed to have happened, at least inside the story. When a film does break that rule, it usually owns up and puts the truth back. In the Heat of the Sun never puts it back. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false, and the finer term is falsifying narration: versions that can't all be true are shown side by side, and none of them gets canceled. For Deleuze this was not a gimmick. Once a film stops being a chain of actions that settle a situation, truth stops being something you find. It becomes something people make, and the act of making it can be shown.
Why look at this film that way? Because of where it stands. In the 1990s Chinese cinema went back to the Cultural Revolution, and its major films, Farewell My Concubine and To Live among them, treated the period as historical trauma. Jiang Wen remembers it as a paradise of endless summer for children nobody was watching. If the film simply said so, it would be a provocation or a piece of sentimentality. By making the memory confess as it goes, it keeps both things in view: a golden boyhood, and the steady suspicion that the gold was put there afterward. The film's real subject is that suspicion.
The gold is literal. Gu Changwei, the cinematographer behind Red Sorghum and Farewell My Concubine, floods the frame with honeyed amber light. He shoots into the sun, lets flare bloom across the lens and pushes the image close to overexposure. Deleuze's term colour-image fits here: a color that soaks up a scene and its feeling until the color is the feeling. Nostalgia is usually a mood laid over a film. Here it's a physical property of the film stock, the way emulsion behaves in hard sunlight. The light shows us the past exactly as a remembering mind would want it.
That is why the voice is so unsettling. The pictures are lush and certain, and the voice keeps doubting them. Deleuze describes a modern cinema in which sound and image come apart and tell different stories, and he calls it audiovisual disjunction. Jiang Wen builds his own version. The voice doesn't contradict the pictures outright. It pulls the ground out from under them. The music adds a second split. The Intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana lifts a boy's crush to the scale of opera, while revolutionary anthems keep the whole thing inside the ideological noise of the period.
Now look again at Monkey himself. He is always on the move, but he rarely does anything that changes anything. He trespasses, he climbs, he looks. Deleuze traces modern cinema back to characters who wander through cities without being able to act on them. He calls the form the voyage or stroll, and he calls the figure at its center the seer, someone who watches and endures more than he acts. In this film the reason is history, spelled out. The adults who make history are somewhere else. The children are left in a half-empty city where events are decided out of their reach, and what they have instead is looking. Breaking into an apartment to stare at a photograph is about as pure a picture of that condition as cinema gives us. Xia Yu was an untrained teenager. He plays Monkey as awkward, ardent and volatile, a body full of energy with nowhere to put it, and he won Best Actor at Venice for it.
The film knows where it comes from. Fellini's Amarcord gave it the knowingly embellished memoir of a boyhood under an oppressive regime. Tarkovsky's Mirror gave it editing that runs on poetic rhyme instead of plot, along with a narrator who corrects his own memory. From Days of Heaven it took Nestor Almendros's magic-hour glow paired with a child's voiceover, and from The 400 Blows a restless camera following a truant through the city, held together by an untested young face. Closer to home, Jiang had starred in Red Sorghum and absorbed its sun-blasted gold as a way of remembering history through the senses, and Gu brought the painterly hand he had used on King of the Children. What Jiang added was the confession. He took the European modernist memory film, put it inside a Chinese history that came with an official script, and turned its doubt into a way of dissenting from that script.
The film counts for even more as a debut. Jiang was China's most famous actor, and he shot enormous amounts of footage, rebuilt a vanished Beijing in detail and wrote the script himself. The result was popular at home and stood apart from both the Fifth and Sixth Generations. It showed that a memory film could admit it was lying and lose none of its power to move us. If anything the admission adds to it.
So watch the light, and then listen for the voice that doubts it. Every time the narrator says it may not have happened, ask what he would lose if he told it straight. The film never answers that for you.
Concepts in play
- falsifying narration — The narrator breaks in to say a scene he has just shown may never have happened, and the film revises or rewinds its own images, leaving versions that can't all be true standing side by side
- the powers of the false — The film breaks cinema's rule that what the camera shows really happened, and it never restores a true version. A boyhood paradise and the suspicion that it was invented stay on screen together
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The frame of a middle-aged man's voiceover about one past summer promises an ordinary flashback to a dated, earlier present, and the narrator's confessions then undermine that promise
- colour-image (affective colour) — Gu Changwei's saturated amber light, backlight, lens flare and near-overexposure make nostalgia a physical property of the image, not a mood laid over it
- audiovisual disjunction — The lush, confident images are repeatedly undercut by a narrating voice that disowns them, and Mascagni's Intermezzo is set against Maoist anthems
- the seer (voyant) — With the adults sent away, Monkey roams rooftops and courtyards, picks locks into strangers' apartments and gazes at Mi Lan's photograph: a watcher in a city where the decisive events happen elsewhere
- voyage / stroll form — The gang's wandering through a half-empty, ungoverned Beijing on bicycles, rooftops and courtyards is restless movement that changes nothing about their situation