Global Entanglements

The essay begins by focusing on two aesthetic categories, mise-en-scène and mise en abyme, that work in complementary fashion throughout Bong’s work. Mise-en-scène encompasses contradiction, idiosyncratically foregrounding the local while always remaining entangled in transnational relations. Mise en abyme self-reflexively calls attention to the internal logics of the films’ construction, reflecting our immersion in broader systemic relations by offering models for comparison. As such, mise-en-scène and mise en abyme in Bong’s work might be regarded as strategies for articulating in film art what political theorists have described as combined and uneven development. The concept, like Bong’s filmography, is an incitement to think globally about social relations and about the operations of capital in and across broader ecologies.