巴黎長境頭：侯孝賢與《紅氣球》

Paris Long-Take: Hou Hsiao-hsien and Flight of the Red Balloon

「長鏡頭」作為重要的電影拍攝技法，自二十世紀五○年代以降，其相關論述一直由法國電影學者巴贊的寫實主義美學理論所主導。本文則是企圖以台灣導演侯孝賢以及其2007 年的法語片《紅氣球》，探討如何有可能「解畛域化」當前長鏡頭的既有影像論述。而本文探討《紅氣球》的主要理論概念發想，乃是企圖將過去最常被視為侯孝賢「影像簽名」的「長鏡頭」，以同音異字的方式轉換為「長境頭」，而其中的關鍵，正在將對「（單）鏡頭」的執著關注，移轉到對「情境」的感應變化。此處的「情境」來自法文milieu 的轉譯，原法文的拉丁字根，同時包含「環境」、「介質」與「居間」，而在當代法國哲學家德勒茲與瓜達里的理論鋪陳下，「情境」又可微分為「內在──外在情境」、「間界情境」與「併連情境」，而情境與情境間的轉化即「節奏」，而「界域」正是「情境」與「節奏」的「結域化」過程。對德勒茲與瓜達里而言，所謂的影像或文字創作，即是創造一個新的「感覺團塊」、一個新的「界域集結」。而《紅氣球》中影像的通透浮動，正是巴黎作為一個新的「界域集結」之動態表現。故侯孝賢《紅氣球》與法國導演拉摩利斯1956 年的同名短片《紅氣球》，不僅只是「文本互涉」、「複訪電影」或後設「鏡淵」而已，侯孝賢的《紅氣球》乃是將拉摩利斯的《紅氣球》轉譯為「輕」，轉譯為「摺疊」，轉譯為「材質與形態發生」，讓紅氣球無所不在，給出了巴黎作為一座身體──城市的動態影像，一個「長鏡頭──長境頭──常境頭」的「多褶城市」。

The discourse on the “long take” as an important cinematic technique has long been dominated by the realist aesthetics proposed by the French film critic André Bazin since 1950s. This paper attempts to take Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien and his 2007 French language film, Flight of the Red Balloon, as a point of departure to explore the possibility of deterritorializing the dominant discourse on the long take. In light of the long take as one of the most prominent cinematic signatures of Hou Hsiao-hsien, this paper will start with a conceptual displacement of 鏡, the central character in the Chinese translation of the long take by 境, a homonym to 鏡 in Chinese and the key word in the Chinese translation of the French word milieu, in a wish to shift the obsessive attention on the one single shot to the changing sensation of the milieu. In French, the Latin roots of milieu point to “surroundings,” “medium,” and “middle.” In the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, milieu combines all these three meanings and can be differentiated into interior-exterior milieu, intermediate milieu and annexed milieu. They further conceptualize “rhythm” as the trans-coding from one milieu to another milieu and“territory” as the territorializing process of milieus and rhythms. For Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art is to create a new “bloc of sensation,” a new “territorial assemblage.” What the floating transparency of Flight of the Red Balloon gives is exactly the dynamic expression of Paris as a new “territorial assemblage.” Therefore, the juxtaposition of the French director Albert Lamorisse’s Le Ballon rouge (1956) and Hou’s Flight of the Red Balloon provide not merely cases for the exploration of intertextuality, cinema revisited or mise en abyme, but also the chance to see how the latter trans-codes the former as “lightness,” as “folding,” as “material and morphogenic happening.” This incessant trans-coding makes the red balloon everywhere in Hou’s film and thus gives us a Paris as the dynamic image of a body-city, as a “multi-pli-city” of the “long-take, milieu-take and everyday-take.”