Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts

Cinema Taiwan

Despite the high profile of contemporary masters such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, there has been little published work devoted to Taiwan cinema. Cinema Taiwan is a vigorous response to this gap, offering an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film that moves beyond nation-state arguments, the auteurist mode, and vestiges of the New Cinema. Rather it seeks to promote an understanding of place, history and media representations as interdependent frames. With contributions from leading scholars from six countries, Cinema Taiwan provides extensive discussion of developments in storytelling, styles and sociopolitical transformation to represent a new maturing of film theory, history and analysis in Taiwan scholarship. The book examines complex problems of popularity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address, as well as new opportunities to forge vibrant film cultures embedded in Taiwanese (identity) politics, gender/ sexuality and community activism. The volume includes a comprehensive filmography, bibliography of essential sources, and a Chinese-language glossary. Insightful and challenging, the essays in this collection focus attention on a globally significant field of cultural production, appealing to readers in the areas of film studies, cultural studies and Chinese culture and society. Darrell William Davis is Senior Lecturer at the School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Ru-shou Robert Chen is Associate Professor at the Department of RadioTelevision, National Chengchi University.

Cinema Taiwan Politics, popularity and state of the arts

Edited by Darrell William Davis and Ru-shou Robert Chen

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Editorial matter and selection, Darrell William Davis and Ru-shou Robert Chen, the contributors for their contributions

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cinema Taiwan: politics, popularity, and state of the arts/edited by Darrell William Davis and Ru-shou Robert Chen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures–Taiwan. I. Davis, Darrell William. PN1993.5.T28C56 2007 791.43095124'9–dc22 2006027020

ISBN 0–203–96439–X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41257–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–41258–7 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96439–X (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41257–5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41257–2 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96439–2 (ebk)

Contents

List of figures

x

List of contributors Preface: Screening contemporary Taiwan cinema

xiii

PING-HUI LIAO

Acknowledgments

xvi

Note on transliteration

xvii

Introduction: Cinema Taiwan, a civilizing mission?

1

DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS

PART I

Politics

15

1

17

The vision of Taiwan New Documentary KUEI-FEN CHIU

2

Haunted realism: postcoloniality and the cinema of Chang Tso-chi

33

CHRIS BERRY

3

The impossible task of Taipei films

51

YOMI BRAESTER

4

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema

60

ROBERT CHI

5

Festivals, criticism and international reputation of Taiwan New Cinema CHIA-CHI WU

75

vi Contents PART II

Popularity

93

6 The unbearable lightness of globalization: on the transnational flight of wuxia film

95

HSIAO-HUNG CHANG

7 “This isn’t real!” Spatialized narration and (in)visible special effects in Double Vision

108

RU-SHOU ROBERT CHEN

8 Morning in the new metropolis: Taipei and the globalization of the city film

116

JAMES TWEEDIE

9 Taiwan (trans)national cinema: the far-flung adventures of a Taiwanese tomboy

131

FRAN MARTIN

10 Trendy in Taiwan: problems of popularity in the island’s cinema

146

DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS

PART III

State of the arts

159

11 King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker

161

PETER RIST

12 “I thought of the times we were in front of the flowers”: analyzing the opening credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn

172

YUNG HAO LIU (TRANSLATED BY MING-YU LEE)

13 “This time he moves!”: the deeper significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good Women

183

JAMES UDDEN

14 The road home: stylistic renovations of Chinese Mandarin classics EMILIE YUEH-YU YEH

203

Contents vii Selected filmography

217

Chinese glossary

220

Selected bibliography

223

Index

229

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16

Voices of Orchid Island: A nuclear waste dump site for Taiwan, courtesy of the director A surrealist scene from Corner’s, courtesty of the director Medium long shot. Ah Wei disappears down the entrance to the passageway, which turns away to the left Medium long shot. Ah Wei appears at the head of the passageway, walking toward the camera. A shoulder appears in the right extreme foreground. The pattern on the shirt makes this recognizable as Ah Jie 180-degree reverse-shot cuts to a position behind Ah Wei as he walks toward Ah Jie, who says, “Wassup? You’re late! They almost got me,” and then is suddenly set upon by the gang, who race in from the left, where the passageway obscures our vision Brief 180-degree reverse-shot as Ah Jie is pushed up against the wall As 2.3, The Best of Times Jump-cut forward to a position in front of Ah Wei (replicating his point of view) as they set upon Ah Jie, shouting, “Kill him.” The gang walks off leaving the stabbed Ah Jie lying on the ground 180-degree reverse-shot to Ah Wei looking on, shocked As 2.6, The Best of Times As 2.7 Very similar to 2.1, but the camera is positioned slightly closer to the entrance to the passageway and further to the left, as Ah Wei runs into the passageway As 2.2, including the appearance of Ah Jie’s shirt in the frame As 2.3, but Ah Wei says, “What’s going on?” As with 2.6, the camera position jumps forward, but it is still behind Ah Wei. Ah Jie says, “I’ve been waiting all along.” As 2.7, including Ah Wei in shock, as Ah Jie says, “Hurry up, or they’ll catch up with us.” Ah Wei responds, “Are you Ah Jie?” 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie, who says, “Who else? Hurry up!” The other gang comes into frame off screen right and attacks Ah Jie As 2.7

21 23 35

35

36 36 37 37 38 38 39 40 40 41 41 42 42 43

Figures ix 2.17 2.18 2.19 5.1 5.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 13.9 13.10 13.11 13.12 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7

180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Wei, who intervenes in the fight. 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie and his attackers as Ah Wei jumps on Ah Jie’s attackers, and drags Ah Jie off. 180-degree reverse-shot to the head of the passageway as Ah Jie and Ah Wei run toward the camera, and past it, pursued by their attackers. Nantes, Festival of Three Continents The Death of the New Cinema, cover Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer (1986) Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision (2002) The Missing The Missing Goodbye Dragon Inn The Missing Meng Kerou (Gui Lunmei) gazes at her classmate Lin Yuezhen (Liang Youmei) in Blue Gate Crossing Lin Yuezhen and Meng Kerou in Blue Gate Crossing Budaixi as folklore … … and as blockbuster movie: Legend of the Sacred Stone Puppet extravaganza from Pili International Multimedia, Taiwan (1999) Gay comedy hit from Three Dots Entertainment (2004) The opening shot of Good Men, Good Women Opening of the second shot of Good Men, Good Women Same shot, now of Liang Ching on bed Same shot, now of her drinking water at the table Same shot, camera drifts away to reveal an old Ozu film on TV Same shot, title up to frame her tearing off and reading a fax End of same shot with Liang Ching in the bathroom Early on in long take in front of mirror Same long take after a very slow pan left and track back Chiaroscuro in What Time is it There? Predominant framing in scene from Woman is the Future of Man An epiphany during a long take from On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Cloud of Romance, 1977 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Spring in a Small Town, 1948 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

43 44 44 81 84 123 125 125 126 126 128 128 134 135 148 148 153 155 184 185 186 186 187 187 188 189 189 195 196 197 209 210 210 211 212 212 212

Contributors

Chris Berry is Professor of Film & Television Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is author of Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004) and co-author (with Mary Farquhar) of Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006). He is also editor of several recent volumes on Chinese cinema and cultural studies. Yomi Braester is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His publications include Witness Against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2003) as well as essays in China Quarterly, Modern China, Screen, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Contemporary China and other venues. He is currently writing a book on Chinese cinema and urban policy. Hsiao-hung Chang is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University. Her books include Postmodern Woman: Power, Desire and Gender Performance (1993), Narcissistic Woman (1995), Gender Crossing: Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism (1995), Queer Desire: Mapping Gender and Sexuality (1996), Sexual Imperialism (1998), Erotic Micropolitics (1999), Queer Family Romance (2000), Absolutely Clothes-Crazy (2001), Encountering a Wolf in the Department Store (2002), Structures of Feeling (2005), and Skin-Deep (2005). Ru-shou Robert Chen is Associate Professor in the Department of RadioTelevision at National Chengchi University. He is author of Cinema Empire (Taipei: Wanxiang,1995) and his translated works include Plays of Shadows: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (2004), Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (2004) and Film Theory: an Introduction (2002). Robert Chi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on Chinese language cinemas, with special emphases on memory, genre, and locality. His writings have appeared in English, Chinese, and Italian.

Contributors xi Kuei-fen Chiu is Professor of Taiwan Literature at Tsing-hua University, Taiwan. She has published articles on Taiwan literature, postcolonial theories in Taiwan, and documentary film studies. She is currently conducting a project on the history of Taiwan fiction. Darrell William Davis is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia). He is the author of Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film (Columbia University Press, 1996), co-author of Taiwan Film Directors, a Treasure Island (Columbia University Press, 2005) and numerous articles in Cinema Journal, Film History, Film Quarterly, positions, PostScript, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and anthologies on Japanese cinema, and Asian popular culture. Ping-hui Liao is Professor of Literary and Critical Studies at National Tsinghua University, Taiwan and author of seven books in Chinese and numerous essays in English. He has recently co-edited with David Der-wei Wang for Columbia University Press Taiwan under Japanese Rule (2006), and with Ackbar Abbas et al. Internationalizing Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2005). Yung-hao Liu is assistant professor at the Department of Radio, Television and Film in Shih Hsin University. He received his PhD in French Literature from Université de Paris III, with a thesis on L’ecriture du Je au cinéma: Pathos et Thanatos dans l’autobiographie filmique(Oct. 2002). His professional fields include theories of cinema and literature (autobiography, auto-portrait, diary), the esthetics of death, experimental cinema, documentary film and Chinese cinema. He is the author of Le cinéma décadré, yann beauvais, Taipei, 1999 (in collaboration with le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Fran Martin is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is author of Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2003), translator of Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (Hawai’i University Press, 2003), co-editor with Chris Berry and Audrey Yue of Mobile Cultures: New Media and Queer Asia (Duke University Press, 2003), and co-editor with Larissa Heinrich of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures (Hawai’i University Press, forthcoming 2006). Her monograph, Backward Glances: Chinese Popular Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary, is forthcoming. Peter Rist is Professor of Film Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. He has edited books on Canadian and South American cinema, and more recently has published articles on silent Japanese and contemporary Chinese films. James Tweedie is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, where he coordinated the Crossing Borders Initiative, an interdisciplinary

xii

Contributors program designed to facilitate the study of globalization in the humanities and social sciences. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, Screen, SubStance, and Twentieth Century Literature, and he is currently completing a comparative study of cinematic new waves from the late 1950s to the 1990s.

James Udden is currently Assistant Professor of film studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He has published on Asian cinema in Asian Cinema, Modern Chinese Language and Literature, Film Appreciation (Taiwan) and Post Script. He is now working on a book manuscript on Hou Hsiao-hsien. Chia-chi Wu received her PhD in Critical Studies, Cinema-TV School at the University of Southern California. She is assistant professor in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University. She has been teaching and writing on contemporary Chinese language films. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is Associate Professor of Cinema-TV at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the author of Song Narration and Chinese-language Cinema (Taipei: Yuan-liou, 2000), co-author of Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (Columbia University Press, 2005) and East Asian Screen Industries (British Film Institute, forthcoming). She also co-edited Chinese-language Cinema: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Hawaii University Press, 2005) and contributed several articles to anthologies on Asian popular cinema and international film musical.

Preface Screening contemporary Taiwan cinema Ping-hui Liao

Inspired though also eclipsed by A City of Sadness and very much working in its shadow, contemporary Taiwan film directors develop their art in response to an array of new challenges. These include increasingly scarce government financial support, rare chances for Golden Lions or Bears to boost international reputations, an aggravating consumerist economy and its impact on the box office, grinding competition from trans-regional cable TV channels and unauthorized internet film downloads, not to mention unprecedented socio-cultural excitements and tensions generated by electoral politics, and, not least, the island state’s irreversible marginalization with the rise of China in the world economy. Mini-Hulks or crouching tigers at the mercy of sidekicks from Hong Kong kung fu movies, and further antagonized by Hollywood, and even Bollywood, Taiwan’s new generation directors have been haunted by the specter of being not quite Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and, certainly, not Ang Lee. Lately Hou himself is said to have been struggling with the burden of the past and over the complex of being no longer “as good”. In an interview with New Left Review, Edward Yang, another luminary in Taiwanese visual culture and an important figure for Fredric Jameson’s postmodern film criticism, was, not surprisingly, nostalgic for the 1970s and 1980s while terribly critical of the present. However, the grim prospects haven’t curbed Taiwan scriptwriters and film directors from producing wonderful pictures, operating on limited budgets. Commercially less successful and certainly with fewer revenues than in the 1990s, contemporary Taiwan cinema continues to be vibrant and able to react in dynamic ways to the uneven processes of localization, globalization, and transregionalization. It reveals a diversity rich in film genres, subject matter, and camera work. According to statistics compiled by the Government Information Office, 2005 saw production of at least 84 films, ranging from drama to documentary to animation and experimental shorts. In 2004, there were similar trends in deploying cinema as site of re-articulation and cultural translation, of redressing post-colonial subjects or responses to Japanese and Korean popular culture. Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang made daunting works like Café Lumiere (2004) and The Wayward Cloud (2005). The latter caused a sensation due to its extended sexually explicit scenes, but it was screened uncut and thereby opened a new page in the performance of sex/gender, in complete freedom of cinematic expression.

xiv Preface But it is in the field of animation and documentaries that contemporary Taiwan cinema reveals its cultural dynamics of communal embrace in terms of psychic structures of identification and social integration, as films that address issues in collective memory and emotional vulnerability in the most vivid manner. Taiwan Aborigine Collective’s mythic legends series, together with a number of heart-felt animations like The Story of Grandpa Elephant Lin Wang (dir. Wang Tong, 2004) and documentaries such as Let It Be (Wu mi le, aka The Last Rice Growers, dir. Yan Lanquan and Zhuang Yizeng, 2005) or Radio Mihu (Buluo zhi yin, dir. Li Zhongwang, 2004), for example, are most impressive works that not only represent life-worlds of the subaltern but also openly challenged the DPP government’s ability to handle farming or the aboriginal population’s livelihood in the face of WTO and global market pressures. In many ways, Zheng Wentang’s film The Passage ( Jing Guo, 2004) may be illuminating in our consideration of the local and trans-regional motifs that inform our current Cinema Taiwan. The film depicts a Japanese young man visiting Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, searching for a masterpiece by the Sung poet and calligrapher Su Dongpo (1036–1101). The artwork in question, Hanshi tie (Poems of the Cold-Food Observance) is a calligraphic piece with poems composed during an annual festival commemorating a patriotic poet in exile. In the eleventh century, Su Dongpo, who suffered banishment from the emperor’s court, composed this melancholy piece, which later became a collectors’ treasure. The masterpiece endured a complex trajectory of drifting and diaspora, as if echoing Su’s eventful career and, even more metonymically, the upheavals of modern China since the mid nineteenth century. It was reportedly owned by a Cantonese scholar, Feng Zhanyun, for a brief period (1862–72), then partially damaged in a fire caused by the 1900 war between Allied Forces and the Qing Rebelling Boxers, handed over for repairs to a group of Japanese craftsmen, retrieved by a famous collector named Kikuchi, who presented it as a gift to foreign minister Wang Shijie in 1949, and eventually returned to the Palace Museum in 1987. Through so extraordinary an itinerary, the piece seems not only to epitomize allegorically the history of the Kuomingtang government in its exile and successive makeovers, but suggests also the dissemination of meanings among Asians from many different communities and temporalities. In the film, the young Japanese attempts to find resonance in the Hanshi tie, which he tells his Taiwanese friends his grandfather spent most of his life mending. With main characters crosscutting paths and helping each other re-discover the relevance of art to life, the film reveals the complex, albeit ambivalent, relationships between Japan and Taiwan. Now, the deployment of a Japanese man who travels to Taipei to heal personal trauma and to create new connectivities on the one hand to his family back home and, on the other, to Sino-Japanese histories is quite common in contemporary Taiwanese film, not to mention advertisements or public images. Hou’s Café Lumiere has been mentioned, and it too traces the winding paths of colonial yearning between young Taiwanese and Japanese subjects. For Taiwan has been indebted to Japan for the latter’s incubatory legacy of colonial modernity in an entangled figure of “intimate enemy”, to borrow the complex term coined by Ashis Nandy. Several late films by

Preface

xv

Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wu Nianzhen, in particular The Puppetmaster and Dou-san: A Borrowed Life, portray in vivid detail the ambivalent nature of Taiwanese postcoloniality. However, in The Passage, it is the sweet, vulnerable qualities in the young Japanese that render him a member of intra-Asian imagined community. Here Chinese print culture and a compassionate understanding of spiritual emptiness among common folks responds to feelings of melancholy and deep loss, connecting those who otherwise would not be friends or comrades. This peculiar structure of feeling in relation to Asian cities and urban postcolonial banality is striking, if we consider the film to be about time passages in which people, artworks, and images move about to re-define their roots and routes. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, a young woman living in the suburbs and working at the Palace Museum in the curatorial division, rushes to catch her bus while having trouble finding a slide for the assignment and struggles to dissuade her mother from selling an old house in which she grew up. Instead of seeing or “re-mapping Taipei” through her eyes, the street traffic and cityscapes, not to mention a distant look at the Museum, are largely framed and captured on a digital video LCD screen. Apparently, processed images and words on the laptop or video equipment give us snapshots in relation to her life in and out of the office. However, she is no cyborg or bobo (bourgeois bohemian), as she desires to visit the Museum’s secret chamber in the hollow of a mountain and to be around a man who loves someone else. When she finds the Japanese in search of the artwork, she persuades her man to help out and to prepare a private art exhibit. In so doing, she discovers meaning in the artworks, and people, rescued and transported from China to Taiwan. A film like The Passage can certainly be interpreted in terms of Fredric Jameson’s allegorical account of postmodern generic cities and third-world national politics, as manifested by his illuminating essay on Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers. But the local as well as trans-regional features that the film reveals will be slighted or at least blurred in that regard. Jameson’s framework also tends to lose sight of the diversity in Cinema Taiwan, as it only highlights films about postmodern cities rather than paying attention to those concerned with Taiwan’s South, the countryside, and tribal communities. To make sense of what constitutes contemporary Taiwan cinema, we need to turn to this most comprehensive and thought-provoking anthology. Contributors to this volume reflect the local and trans-regional characters in keeping with the subjects in question. They offer theoretically sophisticated but politically engaged accounts in relation to a constellation of cinema objects, whether tracing the rapid changes from the New Cinema to more recent variations, which reveal fractured ethnic or communal compositions. They discuss the heterogeneous and syncopated elements in the filmic texts that cross cut each other in a montage of psychosocial impulses. As a result, this remarkable anthology brings us up to date with firsthand observations of Taiwan cinema’s cultural scene and, above all, substantially revises earlier maps as provided by such references as The Oxford History of World Cinema or scholarship currently on offer that focus on prominent filmmakers or mainstream genres. Guided by these experts, I am sure that readers will come to appreciate the complexity and depth of contemporary Taiwan film culture.

Acknowledgments

The editors thank the organizers and participants in two exciting events held in Taiwan: Focus on Taiwan Cinema, National Taiwan University, Taipei, November 2003 and the International Conference on ‘Nation’ and Taiwan Cinema at National Central University, Chung-li, December, 2004. In Chung-li, Lin Wenchi, of National Central University, graciously hosted a contingent of international scholars and provided solid editorial pointers. These events were also attended by directors and we salute all Taiwan filmmakers for their tenacity and good humor at a time of crisis in the industry. We thank Wei-yueh Chen for his contribution to filmography and Chinese glossary. At Routledge, there was enthusiastic support from Stephanie Rogers, who solicited very constructive peer reviews. We thank these anonymous reviewers for their comments, and editorial assistant Helen Baker. Finally, we express gratitude to the contributors of Cinema Taiwan, whose commitment to film studies and Taiwan film culture is evident on every page of this volume.

Note on transliteration

For the most part, we use pinyin for transcriptions of Chinese names and titles, except where other manners of romanization (e. g., Wade-Giles) are used by choice or common convention. We have tried to balance the need for consistency with courtesy for traditional customs in transliterating, given the region’s linguistic variations.

Disclaimer Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Introduction Cinema Taiwan, a civilizing mission? Darrell William Davis

From Wu Feng to Domestic Film Anna The tale of a righteous man, Wu Feng, runs like this: an eighteenth century Han Chinese official, Wu Feng administered the mountainous interior of Taiwan, minding its inhabitants. Generations of Taiwanese schoolchildren learned of him as a model of sacrifice, since he offered his own life in exchange for a group of settlers abducted by aboriginal headhunters. The tribesmen, accustomed to taking Chinese (and later Japanese) heads for ritual uses, were persuaded to stop. Somehow Wu Feng made them promise to give up their savage practices, but he paid the ultimate price.1 This exemplary story was adapted for classroom use, but also for the puppet stage, the opera (gezaixi) and finally, the screen – first by the Japanese (1932), then in 1949 by Wanxiang, a branch of the Shanghai-based Guotai studio. Turmoil on Mt. Ali (Alishan fengyun) directed by martial arts master Zhang Che, was Taiwan’s first Mandarin language feature.2 In 1962, Wu Feng appeared onscreen again in the film directed by Bu Wancang, for Taiwan Studio, a company run by the Kuomintang (Nationalists or KMT), Taiwan’s ruling party from 1949 to 2000. Party officials considered Wu Feng to be a forerunner of their own benevolent presence in Taiwan, to enlighten and redeem a people still too comfortable with Japanese ways.3 The anecdote illustrates the multiple roles and functions served by folk heroes. In succession, Wu Feng appears as colonialist, then in a transitional, commercial role, and finally, as nationalist hero, embodying the Great Chinese war on enemy regimes, from Japanese colonizer to Taiwanese colonized. Wu Feng’s story is multiplied by various media, and between different texts. In theme and variation, Wu Feng presents a model hero doing the right thing. Whether for colonialist, commercial, or nationalist ends, Wu Feng plays his part. Self-sacrifice, integrity, honesty, and peacemaking between rival ethnic groups – these values are equally useful to authorities whether they are teachers, “foreign” colonizers, or Mainland sojourners in “temporary” exile. Japanese colonizers controlled Taiwan, a concession gained from China in 1895, for half a century; when the KMT came in 1945, they began a systematic program of anti-communist sinicization lasting decades. The KMT minority dominated for just as long as the Japanese, and for 40 years it

2

Darrell William Davis

stringently applied martial law, quelling nearly all dissent. Wu Feng’s multiple appearances on Taiwan screens is more than an educational tool, he attests to the uses of cinema as an enduring enlightenment machine: always modern, progressive, the light of civility projected large. While the term “civilizing mission” connotes supercilious aggression and exploitation of native peoples, its connection with cinema is contingent, mediated through entertainment, not just education. In more recent times Taiwan cinema moved beyond its utility as teaching device and fulfilled brighter promises, for artistic and social visions, not just official pedagogy. Taiwan’s cinematic creativity peaked between 1983 and 1993, the age of the Taiwan New Cinema, when commercial prospects were dim, but an opulent film culture somehow flowered in unlikely circumstances. Taiwan’s moribund commercial industry begat Hou Hsiao-hsien; Edward Yang, a US-trained software engineer, returned to Taipei and began filmmaking; late blooming Ang Lee started in dramatic arts in the American Midwest, moved to New York University film school, then struggled in obscurity before becoming the Spielberg of Chinese-language cinema in the 1990s. Where does the winding film trail lead from here? Though pronounced dead by critics in 1990, the New Cinema and its directors continued to flourish on the film festival circuit.4 International festivals are distribution and exhibition networks in their own right; they serve as markets for commercial transactions, and provide venues without which many films would not be seen at all. In Taiwan, there are many new festivals to complement, and compete with the venerable Golden Horse Awards (est 1963); these operate briskly despite the near-total collapse of commercial production.5 For many years now Taiwan-made films have had a negligible presence at the local box office. But festivals of many kinds help maintain some choice for a variety of audiences. Another key shift in cinema’s civilizing mission is intensifying nativist cultural policies under the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), which capitalized on KMT exposure to take executive power in 2000, and again in 2004. Concurrently, with crisis in film production, there arose a variety of public and private initiatives to entice ordinary viewers, especially youth, back to the cinema, urging cinematic expressions of greater accessibility and local focus. These too are civilizing missions in that domestic production (guopian) is promoted as a good object, a reason to go to the cinema. This too has historical resonance, when the KMT supported guopian in the 1960s as a policy of Mandarin language production, which soon overpowered the prolific Taiwanese language film industry. Again, 20 years later the New Cinema was launched by the government studio’s “low capital, high production” policy, designed to attract a new, more educated audience to guopian movies at a time when Hong Kong imports were dominant.6 But the latest round of civilizing mission was pursued by the DPP, the KMT’s implacable antagonist. The short film Guopian Anna, “Domestic Film Alright,” was commissioned by Taiwan’s Government Information Office as a public service announcement in 2004. Screened as a trailer in Taipei cinemas, the short combined antiquarian silent-film style with sophisticated music and digital graphics.7 Its message: come see our new, local movies – different, refreshing, and way better than you

Introduction 3 thought. The 35mm film was made by young, independent filmmaker Wu Misen, featuring the then director of GIO, Lin Jialong, as “Brother Dragon” in a series of romantic pursuits. The object is the silent, listless Anna, a beautiful emblem of Taiwan-made films. The film’s title plays on the name of Domestic Film Anna: a pun on the Hokkien “An-la,” everything all right, no worries. In the film, Brother Dragon is given one hundred ways of courting Anna (read Domestic, locally made film) in which motifs and gags are lifted from In the Mood for Love, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and A City of Sadness, as well as Taiwan pop- music idols. By example and by exhortation, young audiences are urged to seek out, pursue, and energize Domestic Film Anna. To improve local films’ reputation, the short presents a “creative treatment of actuality,” placing local films in the company of international icons in hopes of narrowing the gap between them. John Grierson’s gloss on documentary is useful because it changes focus from pedagogy to persuasion, and even seduction. Guopian Anna seeks to alert and allure younger audiences to the domestic films’ appeal, boosting localism via associated global cachet. The film tries to carve out a space in which guopian may once again entertain Taiwan viewers, plotting a middle course between global milestones and local hits. With no more studio production in Taiwan, with the business of exhibiting popular film ceded to Hollywood movies, Taiwan filmmakers must somehow ply their craft, searching out promising material, funding, and audiences. Guopian Anna tries to wean Taiwan audiences from their dependence on foreign entertainment, just as Wu Feng, in his many guises, redeems a people attached to older, uncivilized ways.

Political commentaries, cinematic accounts Taiwan is a maelstrom of charged political, cultural, and social contestation. Despite an educated, cosmopolitan people, its democratic and demotic practices are strangely hermetic. This is another reason for the heterogeneous, unsettled quality of “Cinema Taiwan.” The island itself has recently attracted insightful political commentary from the left.8 This is a welcome change from the cardboard role it played during the Cold War and after, as “Free China.” No longer is Taiwan just an anti-communist rampart, just as the PRC is no longer unequivocally socialist and progressive. Regionally, Hong Kong is now securely within a national fold instead of the British empire, and Taiwan, once the sole, legitimate representative of China, is a stateless country, like such fraught places as Tibet, Xinjiang, Chechnya, or Palestine. Taiwan must work constantly to free itself from shackling roles imposed by various global forces, some of which were acceptable and even welcomed in the past. Internationally, Taiwan works like a lab experiment in national self-definition. Domestically, though Taiwan politics and media often is a free-for-all, it is still emphatically free. While Taiwan’s ruling party is hardly secure, the vociferousness and venom of its critics testifies to a brutally robust democratic public arena. Given the excruciating farce of the March 2004 presidential election, when the incumbent was charged with faking his own assassination, the status of national

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legitimacy is hard-fought and precarious. For weeks afterward, the KMT blue camp staged huge demonstrations calling the election a tawdry burlesque, as waves of recounts and court cases sought to resolve the crisis. Two years later, President Chen found himself fighting impeachment for corruption in his party and immediate family. In ordinary life, a mood of collective frustration, chagrin, and recalcitrance is palpable – not unique to Taiwan, of course. There is “a measure of disillusionment with the quality of domestic politics,” though this has not yet dampened Taiwanese nationalism, drily notes Wang Chaohua.9 What interests commentators is Taiwan’s shift from authoritarian paternalism to an open society, participatory, contested, and highly fraught. It has mutated from a right-wing autocracy and bitter antagonist of Asian socialism into an island of diversity, democratic, peaceful but still profoundly divided, while remaining a no-less-implacable foe of the PRC. Since the KMT’s toppling in 2000, the Taiwan Strait remains a flashpoint, despite increasing economic investment across the waters. Chen Shui-bian’s embattled administration is so loathed by PRC bosses that there have been historic gestures of détente between the opposition KMT and the CCP on the Mainland.10 Historically, Taiwan people have carried their fate with resilient aplomb, but deep striations and scars mark the society: colonial, military, ethnolinguistic, class, regional, and generational polarization. Little wonder Taiwan’s recent film culture is seen in terms of sadness, invoking Hou’s famous film, and prompting wonder at what a post-sadness era might be.11 Looking out, Taiwan’s geopolitical status is ambiguous, behaving like a well-armed state but unable to be one in the world’s eyes; looking in, often shrill assertions of ethnicity, crass politicization, and uneasy pluralism are heard, given the island’s waning economic prospects and an aging population. In Taiwan we see roiling confluence of political, institutional, and commercial forces, and this disperses creative and critical energies through a mediatized social body. This starkly contrasts with Taiwan’s New Cinema of the 1980s, a movement defining itself in opposition to the authoritarianism of martial law (1947–1987). Taiwan New Cinema was a reaction to state power and concentration of cultural production; this gave the New Cinema immediate political significance, and allowed some latitude from marketplace constraints. Its liberal exception to a staterun didactic cinema earned the movement great international respect.12 As Chiachi Wu says in her essay, Taiwan New Cinema expressed powerful allegorical functions of would-be national legitimacy, playing to a global stage for politically significant cinemas of the world. Now, however, “Cinema Taiwan,” as criticalcreative responses to local film’s dispersion, is disunified, scattered, and without the polarizing power of state repression. Taiwan’s contemporary conflicts and confusions produce, and are manifested by “Cinema Taiwan,” but the films do not allegorize them within a movement the way New Cinema did. Unlike Taiwan cinema, a coherent film culture within a national cinema framework, Cinema Taiwan is heterogeneous. This concept does not assume a norm of narrative feature filmmaking within industrial patterns of commercial production and consumption. Rather, Cinema Taiwan includes alternative

Introduction 5 modes of film form, storytelling, marginal voices, and practices that question cinema’s position as a national culture. It chips away at normative presumptions, fragmenting commonly held assumptions of the movies as primarily national, artistic, or commercial enterprises. Because guopian or Chinese-language movies have been so emasculated in the marketplace, commercial objectives are just as risky and challenging as those from activist filmmakers or the avant-garde. For over a decade Hong Kong and Hollywood blockbusters have ruled Taiwan’s screens, but more recently the colonized have gotten restless. Imaginative financiers, marketing experts, producers, and performers have begun to diverge from narrative styles that have worn thin with the public. Such changes are noted, and mostly applauded by intellectuals, who classify the varieties of local exemption. Sometimes these are repudiations, directly contesting commercial channels and textual address (Blue Gate Crossing; Formula 17); others selectively adapt Hollywood modes of production to local genre conventions (Double Vision); yet another approach rekindles cinematic technique from indigenous qualities unique to Taiwan’s popular traditions (kinetic puppet epic Legend of the Sacred Stone (Sheng shi chuanshuo, Chris Huang, 2000), Splendid Float (Yan guang si she gewutuan, Zero Chou, 2004) a magic realist road movie with Taoist transvestite shamans). Yet another response is a recent cycle of popular, essentially humanist documentaries such as Gift of Life (Shengmin, Wu Yifeng, 2004), commemorating survivors of the great earthquake of 1999, Let It Be (Wu mi le, Yan Lanquan and Zhuang Yizeng, 2005), a portrait of four southern rice farmers, and Viva Tonal – The Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai, Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi, 2003). Another success was Burning Dreams (Gewu zhongguo, Wayne Peng, 2003), about a Taiwanese dance instructor working in Shanghai. All these films crossed over to mainstream awareness and success, sometimes due to public endorsements by popular politicians.13 Because of what twenty-first century Taiwan has become, Cinema Taiwan too is unpredictable, unlikely to resolve into a clearly focused big picture. If Taiwan New Cinema was a reaction to a Cold War propaganda industry, it is hard to now outline something like a constellation, let alone any concerted movement. Like its fractured ethnic and political composition, today’s Cinema Taiwan is at once more market-driven and cosmopolitan, more jagged and factional, with many film cultures jostling in a wide array of representational assertions. This is why Cinema Taiwan is interesting now: all this diversity and disunity, a dramatic, conflicting area full of both tension and creation. If this is a cinema of sadness, it is not one of passive resignation. There are few places in the world so busy pursuing a huge range of exciting cultural activity. Taiwan’s slowing economy does not diminish cultural or political expectations; rather, cultural narratives are enriched by contradictions faced daily by Taiwan people. Shrinking economic fortunes and a contentious, prickly society do not make for happiness, but they also present challenges and opportunities for narrative arts like film, theater, and literature. Performative arts (like scandals and party politics) are the greatest beneficiaries, thanks to an abundance of excitable electronic and print coverage. Politics, accordingly, partakes liberally in outlandish melodrama, sensationalism, and excitement. As a combination of all these, Cinema Taiwan can be

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understood in terms of its pluralism, freely mixing films and video across a spectrum of commercial, experimental, ethnographic, and oppositional impulses. Here there is passionate partisanship, a fiery pluralism far removed from our tepid appeals to tolerance in Western multiculturalism.

Politics, popularity, state of the arts Institutionalization of film studies in Taiwan is evident, bringing a great proliferation of objects, methods, and approaches, with improved access to local and regional texts. There are several reasons for this flowering, including lowered barriers to information and communication technology, aligned with cultural and political factors. Since 2000 there has been an explosion of DVDs, online community activism, and greater acceptance of Taiwan’s vernacular forms. In the past, the existence of Taiwanese language films (taiyu pian) was noted, but not much pursued. Now investigation of these, along with puppet theaters, regional performing arts, records of the Japanese colonial era (in both popular and official forms), Christian missions, heritage preservation, aboriginal programs etc, are encouraged, exhibited, and often funded by government cultural agencies. There is now much fuller recognition and appreciation of artifacts and texts from eras dominated by former taskmasters. These texts are handled using critical tools adapted from abroad. The proliferation of analytical strategies can be seen in the essays to follow. Every Taiwan scholar in this volume has significant experience of the West, with higher degrees from the US or France, while every Western contributor has long experience with Taiwan and its cinema. As elsewhere, film scholarship in Taiwan has cleared pathways to and away from the medium, using movies as platforms to discuss everything from Ah-bian to Zizek.14 Films and film culture are less specific objects or targets of specialized study than pretexts; they provide means to think visually, imaginatively, and laterally. Far from being reduced to mere heuristic, this cinematic imagination opens to wider, cross-media issues, consolidating film scholarship as a postcolonial, post-propaganda civilizing act. Accordingly there are limitations to this volume, since Cinema Taiwan is conflicting, moving beneath and beyond directors, genres, and feature narratives. As a moving target, Cinema Taiwan offers enticements we cannot always follow: key films like Café Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2004), Three Times (Hou, 2005), and sex musical The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005). Other scholars will certainly take on these challenging works. Cinema Taiwan lacks the coherence and national integrity of the earlier New Cinema, because it’s too fragmented and colliding. Cinema Taiwan is interdependent with conflicting notions of nation-statehood, and occasionally, altogether indifferent to nationality. Cinema Taiwan therefore moves away from old models of national identity without resolving into something definably new, still very much in process. Sometimes the relations between film representations and national politics is visible and explicit, as spelled out clearly in Kuei-fen Chiu’s discussion of new documentaries. But at others, the relation is invisible or simply

Introduction 7 not apparent (see Fran Martin and Darrell Davis’ chapters on popular works). In other contexts the framework is popular, but also urban and mediatized, as revealed in the chapters by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie. And, Cinema Taiwan is international, supported by distant lines of finance and critical recognition like Pyramide (France), Pusan Production Plan (S. Korea), and Shochiku (Japan). Taiwan’s leading directors enjoy support from international investors, distributors, and arts boards who see in these talented artists globally compelling “labels,” rather than just commercial film directors. If these New Cinema figures are now canonized, then young filmmakers back in Taiwan have to strike out in other directions. Since the 1980s English-language scholars and critics have been taken with Taiwan films. For Fredric Jameson, the emphasis is on Taipei’s globality in “Remapping Taipei.”15 In its high-rise confinement, urban alienation, casual betrayals, and cruel twists of chance, Jameson despecifies the city’s precise sociopolitical coordinates, which results in a “blurring” of Taipei’s local flavor, as Ping-hui Liao notes in our preface. Seeking account of Taipei itself, as well as Yang’s modernist rendition of it, may be too much, since Jameson is neither geographer nor anthropologist. Nonetheless, Jameson’s (over)emphasis on Yang’s narrative sophistication betrays surprise that such rough materials as Taiwan city-folk yield such modernist and postmodernist form. Of course that’s part of Jameson’s point, that postmodernism is inherent in the third world, just as the third world dwells within (first) world capitals. Overall, the astonishment that Yang, Hou, Tsai and others came out of “nowhere” – because that’s exactly where Taiwan is in the minds of even the most appreciative of Western film critics – discloses a presumption about sources of innovation in the cinema. The charge here is not ethnocentrism so much as exoticism, the explorer’s outlook, where effort and taste is rewarded by an adventurousness that can find new, surplus esthetic value, wherever it surfaces. This broadminded liberalism is behind American doctrines of multiculturalism because it showcases “our” willingness to take “their”’ works seriously, from outside Western canons, coming from “nowhere.” More specifically, the explorer’s mentality is essential for festival programmers who scour the world for new waves and discoveries. But we can champion Taiwan and other geographically marginal filmmakers without awarding extra points or a handicap for remoteness even from Asian centers of production. Recall Jameson trying to locate Yang in relation to some Mainland Chinese directors, now forgotten. This shows him falling back into concentric thinking, pointing out what he takes to be obvious, “that Taipei does not possess the profile or the historical resonance and associations of the great traditional mainland cities, nor is it that all-encompassing closed urban space of a virtual city-state like Hong Kong” (120). That may be, but there is a payoff, Cinema Taiwan, a place that’s nowhere, at least in terms of a regular nation, but still productive, a protean country that only exists onscreen. More positively, Jameson and other Taiwan cinema analysts have kept these filmmakers on the map in retrospectives and college film courses in the West, just when Taiwan directors were having trouble reaching local audiences. Taiwan

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cinema is one of survival, speaking to audiences worldwide, even extending to foreign funds for its filmmakers to keep working.16 They have enjoyed a second life on the festival circuit, in retrospectives, and museums. At home, these filmmakers are recognized; but the audience for their work is not there and if it were up to the local theatrical market they would have already retired to other fields. Today, Hou Hsiao-hsien is a celebrity in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and maybe Paris but his films do not sell, despite strenuous efforts to cast brooding stars and shoot youthoriented stories. This is just one of the many paradoxes of Cinema Taiwan. If it comes out of nowhere – out of martial law, colonial trauma, and perennial marginalization – then maybe the cinema is where Taiwan finds its most apt, eloquent expression. Cinema Taiwan – a place where Taiwan is located by movies, rather than Taiwan(ese) cinema. The volume you hold is a foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film, which brings into focus several developments since the famous milestones of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, et al. This cinema’s artistic reputation remains imposingly high, despite over a decade passing since Hou’s Good Men, Good Women (1995), the final film in his Taiwan trilogy. Starting with this film, the essays in this book take stock since the New Cinema, but they are not limited to the last decade. Certainly, the esthetic quality and historical richness of the New Cinema and subsequent developments qualifies Taiwan film as a civilizing force in world cinema. Like Guopian Anna, these essays try to cross over, spanning the gaps that structure ordinary expectations of local cinema. There are updates, as well as linkages across different worlds: between “old masters” of the New Cinema and young talent with different horizons and ambitions; between fiction features and documentary storytellers; and between innovations of the art cinema and attempts to re-grow a popular audience for entertainment. In this volume, we introduce a number of brand-new texts, topics, and approaches: contemporary hit features little-known outside Taiwan; wakeup calls to jaded urban youth; crossovers from pop literature and music; new formations of gender/sexuality; the impact of nonfiction and autobiography; re-readings of popular classics in light of contemporary cultural practices. All these are civilizing in the sense that they give vent to social pressures, and seek out levers to shift film culture into new expressive registers. Interest keeps rising in the cinema of Taiwan, going beyond auteurist modes (Bordwell, 2005; Yeh and Davis, 2005), vestiges of the New Cinema (Berry and Lu, eds, 2005; M. Berry, 2005), and the nation-state argument (Yip, 2004).17 The authors in Cinema Taiwan consider knotty problems of popularity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address and attempts to forge vibrant film cultures embedded in identity politics, gender/sexuality, and community activism. Ambitious, insightful, and challenging, the essays here will draw your attention to a globally significant field of cultural production. Given the complexities of Taiwan film culture and scholarship, it is probably arbitrary to try to thematize them. Nonetheless, the essays in this book can be seen from at least three angles: the politics of representation; new uses for popular texts;

Introduction 9 and what can be called “state of the arts,” the key esthetic decisions made by filmmakers, as delineated by astute critical analysis. Reversing this formulation (art of the state) may hint at Taiwan life as a narrated show, a shadow play of nation(state)hood tantalizingly flickering across movie, television, and computer screens. Though hard to come to a definitive summary, we could say the narrative flashes captured in Cinema Taiwan work like a microcosm, signposting recent episodes in Taiwan film. In this regard, the collection is an album of exemplary moments, something like the various incarnations of Wu Feng, faithfully performing his civic duties through the years.

Politics of representation Taiwan’s politics of representation are explored in essays by Kuei-fen Chiu, Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, and Robert Chi. Kuei-fen Chiu’s essay critiques the New Cinema, comparing it unfavorably with contemporary activist documentaries that lend images and voices to “the voiceless.” Chiu’s argument directly confronts “performativity” in three films about marginal communities. Taiwan aboriginal tribes dependent on tourism (and therefore on visual inscription), lesbian/gay communities in Taipei, and the historical salvage of a jazz age in Taiwan’s occupation era: all these are voiceless, in the sense of suffering discrimination, or just being taboo, like that of the 228 Incident in the late 1980s, when Hou and his team were preparing the groundbreaking A City of Sadness.18 Berry’s chapter considers the role of the “fantastic” in Chang Tso-chi’s films. Closely analyzing The Best of Times (2002), Berry argues that the fantastic works as a double or stand-in for the socially marginalized and dispossessed. He introduces the idea of “haunted realism” to link the ghost film with postcolonial critique – not only of contemporary Taiwan society, but of realism in particular New Cinema films, and cinematic techniques of realism in general. In “The Impossible Task of Taipei Films,” Yomi Braester discusses cinematic visualization of the city in terms of ongoing projects on the esthetics, and politics of demolition. Using the trope of the crime scene hazard tape, Braester weaves together fiction and non-fiction, Taiwan and Japan, and fantasy–ethnography to yield unexpected insights on Taipei as junction between physical location and urban discourse. Of special interest is what used to be a ubiquitous feature of Taiwan’s cities, the veterans’ villages (juancun), which have in recent years been systematically razed to make way for new, middle-class neighborhoods suitable for shopping and other, more profitable pursuits. Braester brings this ethnographic, activist dimension into dialog with the art cinema, especially the films of Tsai Ming-liang. It is well known that both Taiwan and the PRC were and still are ultra-sensitive about media representations of each other. By approaching Taiwan’s difficult nationhood through its ambiguous representations in Mainland Chinese cinema, Robert Chi finds a counter-colonial regime at work. Chi reworks Lacanian notions of the mirror phase to discover variations on mimicry and dialectical reflections. But “just who is mimicking whom,” and with what sort of historical baggage, is a

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question that takes us into the uncanny, with China coming to mimic the esthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien. This step takes cinema representations well beyond the conventions of Maoist narration, and later Fifth Generation accounts of Taiwan. Like Robert Chi, Chia-chi Wu takes a comparative approach, describing the position of Taiwan New Cinema when launched on the international festival circuit. Wu’s essay is an analytical account of New Cinema’s strategic engagements with Western programming categories, noting the alliances between practices and theory, film styles, and criticism.

Popular texts New approaches to the popular are visible in the essays by Hsiao-hung Chang, Robert Ru-shou Chen, James Tweedie, and Fran Martin. Hsiao-hung Chang subjects Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to a witty interrogation using globalization, stuntwork, and Chinese qing gong (flight power). Given her interest in corporeal and medical diagnosis, she speculates on the skeins of transnationality hiding in wuxia films’ various guises. Ang Lee’s triumph is provocatively positioned as an “outsider” film, upsetting comfortable categories like national and transnational cinema. In this manner Chang contributes a valuable entry in the clinical trials of this seminal film, and in the genre of martial arts. Ru-shou Robert Chen and James Tweedie both write about the Chen Kuo-fu hit from 2002, Double Vision. This surprise box office winner is a stylish fusion of horror, film noir, and specifically Taiwanese themes. Chen points out that this well-crafted and marketed genre film – something unheard of in contemporary Taiwan movies – shows signs of contradiction and ambiguity. He puts the film into an argument about realism and digital imagery, and also gives his essay a surprise ending, a sudden special effect. James Tweedie wants to place Double Vision in a line of city films, comparing it with urban figuration in Taiwan’s art cinema, but also showing the continuities with city films from Europe. Enchantment, disillusionment, nostalgia, and dystopia are all themes in Tweedie’s argument, which draws on theories of art and architecture in making his case. Tweedie also presents valuable material on the evolution of Taipei onscreen, giving special thought to Tsai Ming-liang’s films, with their unique aura of affectionate decay. Fran Martin contributes a perceptive piece on the youth film Blue Gate Crossing (2002), tying its tomboy narrative to contemporary pan-Asian markets. She proposes that Yee Chih-yen’s film marks the moment when lesbian identity politics enters fully into Taiwan’s entertainment culture, accounting for the film’s corporate backing, its textual appeal, and structured ambiguities that offer pleasures to both heterosexual and gay, Taiwan and international audiences. In this way Martin avoids the antinomies of despecification/respecification that many oppositional readings use. Darrell Davis’ essay, “Trendy in Taiwan,” reflects on the question of popularity in contemporary film, and links directly with Martin’s fine discussion of multicoding in recent films like Blue Gate Crossing, but it also brings in intertextual, cross-media factors like the puppet theater, television, and comics.

Introduction 11

State of the arts Finally, state of the art: Taiwan cinema continues its inspiring procession of esthetic fertility. This artistry is finely outlined by Peter Rist, Yung Hao Liu, James Udden, and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. State of the art means more than advanced special effects or elaborate technique; it is the state of criticism, history, and theory too. These four essays are a tour de force of careful detail and synoptic judgment, remarkable in their efforts to pinpoint and analyze various filmmakers’ work. They range from the historical (Rist on King Hu) to a reframing or remedial judgment of King Hu’s most famous film (Liu on Tsai Ming-liang) to a seminal work in the New Cinema (Udden on Hou Hsiao-hsien). Peter Rist offers an engaging reassessment of the work of King Hu, detailing Hu’s essentially theatrical, yet experimental impulse in revitalizing martial arts (wuxia). Rist makes the case that King Hu deserves greater prominence in the film historical canon for his ingenious solutions to technical problems. It’s not often that weighty academic judgments are made in one-word sentences: “Stunning!” Yung Hao Liu moves to “visible signatures,” seeing the hand of director Tsai Ming-liang in his sly subversion of older martial arts traditions in Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). In a highly original approach, Liu employs the French literature on framing and staging to account for Tsai’s intervention in heroic Chinese films of the past. Liu shows how Tsai’s film enacts a criticism, in every sense of the term, as well as homage to King Hu’s classic film. James Udden also encounters directorial signature, seeing a style shift – a sudden change in director Hou’s cinematography in Good Men, Good Women. After careful description, Udden queries the role and significance of stylistic change, arguing that Hou’s radical alteration has implications not only for his own body of work and Taiwan cinema’s reputation (as national cinema), but also for Asian film generally. Emilie Yeh offers a thorough analysis of historical and historiographical issues, bringing to the fore a new paradigm of genre criticism, centering on wenyi (literature-and-art). In a wide-ranging study, she argues for a recasting of generic categories to more accurately capture historical realities of audience experience. It is significant that every essay here is profoundly historical, in line with Taiwan cinema’s traditional sensitivity to vestiges of the past, as well as to the rise and fall of past authority figures. This historical facet lends a happy contingency to whatever orthodoxy currently holds power, whether that is a critical, theoretical, or political regime. In sum, Cinema Taiwan vividly presents Taiwan film’s engagement and struggle with politics, art, culture, and entertainment. The Cinema Taiwan collection resonates beyond Chinese-language film cultures, addressing a wide range of issues on the state of cinema as a form of popular, yet challenging art in the Asia Pacific.

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Notes 1 In fact trickery was involved; Wu Feng let the tribesmen “harvest” a special surrogate, dressed in red, instead of the usual crop of Chinese farmers; the special red man turned out to be master Wu Feng himself, found after his beheading, and this so impressed the natives that they supposedly gave up headhunting forthwith. 2 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 18–19. 3 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 123. 4 Mizou and Liang Xinhua, eds, Death of the New Cinema (Taipei: Tangshan, 1987). See the illustration on p. 84. 5 Some of these new festivals include Taipei International Film festival, Taiwan Biennial Documentary Film Festival, the Feminist Film Festival, Ocean Film Festival, Animation Film Festival, etc. 6 Yeh and Davis, 57–59. 7 I saw Guopian Anna at a multiplex showing mostly foreign films, in late 2004. It was run before a screening of Olivier Assayas’ Clean (2004), starring Maggie Cheung Man-yuk. 8 Perry Anderson, “Stand-Off in Taiwan,” London Review of Books, June 3, 2004; Benedict Anderson, “Western Nationalism, Eastern Nationalism: Is there a Difference that Matters?” New Left Review 9 (May–June 2001): 31–42. See also the roundtable discussion among Chu Tien-hsin, Tang Nuo, Hsia Chu-joe, and Hou Hsiao-hsien; Benedict Anderson, “Tensions in Taiwan,” New Left Review 28 (July–August 2004): 19–42. 9 Wang Chaohua, “A Tale of Two Nationalisms,” New Left Review 32 (March–April 2005): 84. 10 KMT chairman Lien Chan’s visit to the Mainland in April 2005 was unprecedented since the KMT fled China in 1949. He repeated the visit in 2006, with a large delegation of legislators, and received a basket of economic and trade incentives for further integration with the PRC. Lien Chan’s historic audience with Party secretary Hu Jintao is a classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” though that apparent friendship is contingent on local political conditions on both sides, and many politicians and commentators presented his gesture of détente as a betrayal of Taiwan. 11 See Meiling Wu, “Postsadness Taiwan New Cinema,” in Chinese Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 76–95. The “sadness” description was used earlier by Huang Ren in Beiqing Taiyu pian [The sorrow of Taiwanese-language films] (Taipei: Wanxiang, 1994). 12 This scenario needs to be qualified, since Taiwan New Cinema was a movement enabled by Central Motion Picture Corporation, the film studio owned and operated by the KMT, looking to recoup a declining film market. It failed to arrest that decline but it secured instead a small but prestigious global market. The gilded reputation of Taiwan New Cinema, exemplified by Hou, Yang, Tsai et al., was cemented by critics like Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping and Edmond Huang Jianye, who argued strenuously for the movement’s liberationist impulses. Taiwan New Cinema represented a way out from crass commercialism, as well as government propaganda. See Yeh and Davis, 62–65. 13 Former president Lee Teng-hui ensured Viva Tonal’s fortune by repeatedly talking it up in the media and even had a private screening at his residence. President Chen Shuibian went on record to say Gift of Life had made him weep, and urged every Taiwanese to see it. One was Chen rival and mayor of Taipei Ma Ying-jeou who said it made him weep, too. Other documentaries taking the “politician-promotional” path are Stone Dream, to which President Chen was invited and Jump! Boys, attended by Premier Frank Hsieh Chang-ting. See Kuo Li-hsin, “Sentimentalism and De-Politicization: Some Problems of Documentary Culture in Contemporary Taiwan,” Documentary Box 25 (August 2005): 16–23.

Introduction 13 14 Ah-bian is the nick-name of Chen Shui-bian, president of Taiwan since 2000 and former chair of the Democratic Progressive Party. 15 The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 114–157. 16 Hou has been supported by Shochiku; Yang by Pony Canyon (Japan); Tsai by Flach Pyramide (France) and Chen Kuo-fu by Columbia-Asia (Hollywood). The“cinema of survival” idea is from an anonymous referee’s comments on the manuscript. 17 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds, Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2005); June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); for Yeh and Davis, see note 2. 18 228 Incident: in February-March 1947, KMT troops and police attacked the civilian population on a pretext of quelling Communist-inspired revolt, killing thousands across the island and destroying trust in the mainlander administration of Taiwan. Hou’s film is set during this crisis, about an extended Taipei family that experienced the turmoil.

Part I

Politics

1

The vision of Taiwan new documentary1 Kuei-fen Chiu

This chapter discusses an alternative mode of filmmaking in Taiwan that was born about the time Taiwan New Cinema was coming into being: the Taiwan new documentary. There is a close connection between the rise of this new documentary practice and mass movements in the 1980s because both are concerned with “giving a voice to the voiceless.” With this theme underlining contemporary Taiwan documentaries, the filmmakers went a step further to forge rather sophisticated film languages in order to express the problem of giving a voice to the voiceless. Three Taiwan documentaries are chosen for study to illustrate contemporary themes of “giving a voice to the voiceless.” I will discuss the ethnographic documentary Voices of Orchid Island (Lanyu guandian, 1993), the lesbian film Corner’s (Si jiaoluo, 2001), and Viva Tonal – The Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai, 2004), which resurrects historical memories of early modernity in colonial Taiwan. All three are highly acclaimed documentaries in Taiwan. I will discuss how the first two films highlight the notion of “performativity” in addressing issues of the politics of representation and interviews in documentary filmmaking. These two films exemplify Taiwan documentary filmmakers exploiting the reflexive mode to underscore the complexity of giving a voice to the voiceless. I will then analyze how the representational mode of Viva Tonal implies a new historical imaginary that substitutes the notion of cultural flows for the logic of the wounded to redefine the position of Taiwan in transnational circuits.

The Taiwan New Cinema Usually taken to be a landmark year in Taiwan film history, 1982 was the year in which the watershed In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi) was released. Along with The Sandwich Man (an omnibus adaptation of Huang Chunming’s nativist stories, including Son’s Big Doll (Erzi de da wan’ou) by Hou Hsiao-hsien), In Our Time marked the debut of Taiwan New Cinema. These were hailed as a breakthrough in the Taiwan film industry not only because of their stylistic innovations but also because of their attempt to bring on screen “realistic images of contemporary Taiwan.”2 As described by the influential critic Zhan Hongzhi, Taiwan New Cinema revealed the young directors’ struggle for a reconnection with Taiwanese

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society by drawing inspiration from the realist tradition.3 Many features of Taiwan New Cinema are seen to reflect this realist penchant: the use of nonprofessionals instead of established stars, the abandonment of popular martial law-era genres for realistic portrayals of contemporary Taiwanese society, avoidance of melodramatic scenes, and, most of all, the use of dialog in Taiwanese – the language used by the majority of the people but suppressed under the Mandarin-only policy in the postwar period.4 The rise of the New Cinema may therefore be regarded as an attempt by the young generation to render their vision of Taiwan on film. It is noteworthy, however, that Taiwan New Cinema was not “a cinema of or for the masses.”5 Critics charge that New Cinema directors eschewed contemporary controversial social issues; moreover, a large number of films by these directors were bildungsroman stories based on the directors’ or scriptwriters’ childhood memories.6 In the eyes of its harshest critics, New Cinema was the product of Western (read: American) cultural imperialism, for most of the promoters of New Cinema, including film directors and film critics exploiting the media to make New Cinema a spectacular success, drew heavily upon the film language and cultural heritages of Western film tradition in formulating Taiwan New Cinema’s achievements.7 The rise of Taiwan New Cinema was seen to be tied closely to the rise of the bourgeois class in postwar Taiwan which tried to affirm its identity through a (film) language distinguishable from the official (film) language propagated by the state apparatus.8 In this view, the box office failure of New Cinema betrays tellingly the rupture between its directors’ bourgeois esthetic outlook and Taiwanese society in general. To some extent, critics of Taiwan New Cinema are right in pointing out the close connection between Taiwan New Cinema’s rise and the ascending power of a new bourgeois class, although the charge of New Cinema’s complicity with American cultural imperialism requires more careful handling.9There is indeed a fundamental difference between Taiwan New Cinema and xiangtu (nativist) literature of the 1970s to which Taiwan cinema has been regarded as a storied heir. While giving a voice to the voiceless was a top priority in xiangtu writers’ social and cultural vision, it was dropped in Taiwan New Cinema’s “reformation” agenda. To look for the type of film motivated by a kindred social vision that gave the impetus to xiangtu literature, we turn to a “grassroots” form of film production that was set in motion about the time Taiwan New Cinema was emerging: independent documentary film in the early 1980s.

Taiwan documentary and its social vision With the arrest of several distinguished writers, xiangtu literature debates were brought to a sudden, premature halt. But calls for democratization continued, and waves of street demonstrations seemed unstoppable. To counter official TV news reports moderated by the government, demonstrators resorted to on-the-spot documentary filming to produce news reportage from the “people’s” perspective.10 If In Our Time set the tone for Taiwan New Cinema, the stress on eyewitnesses and grassroots vision used by a group of documentary filmmakers calling themselves

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 19 “lüse xiaozu” (the Green Group) initiated new styles that would have a tremendous impact on documentary production in later decades. To boost the credibility of their eyewitness representations, the Green Group took full advantage of the indexical value of documentaries by using unsteady camera movement to underscore the “authenticity” and “reliability” of their filmic representation.11 This led to a strong emphasis on realist, “noninterfering” styles, eschewing the esthetic aspiration that marked Taiwan New Cinema. Playing a crucial role in social movements of all kinds – including the aboriginal movement, the women’s movement, and the workers’ movement that took to the streets – this new type of documentary production often took on the responsibility of giving a voice to the voiceless.12 It was self-consciously and conspicuously grassroots. Like Taiwan New Cinema, Taiwan documentaries of the 1980s can be regarded as a landmark in Taiwan’s film history. But if New Cinema was informed by a bourgeois outlook, the new documentary was marked by its inclination to represent the marginalized and the suppressed. This was probably the first time that subordinated classes gained access to the power of mass media in Taiwan. Documentary filmmaking in Taiwan started as early as 1903 when the Japanese filmed the colony for news reportage. In 1907 a documentary of Taiwan aiming to demonstrate the efficiency and colonial achievements of the Japanese on the island was produced.13 From then on, the documentary continued to be exploited mainly as a genre of propaganda by official authorities until the early 1980s when documentary shooting was turned into a subversive tool by participants in street demonstrations. More than Taiwan New Cinema, people celebrated the documentary as something capable of disrupting the government’s tight media control. Considered this way, it is this new type of documentary filmmaking, rather than Taiwan New Cinema, that shares xiangtu writers’ social vision. As the genre evolved in the post-martial law period (from 1987), giving a voice to the voiceless increasingly became a problem since the notion of the documentary as an objective representation of the world was questioned by new generations of filmmakers. Documentary filmmakers realized that documentaries, just like feature films, involved fiction-making.14 This is not simply because camera shooting, footage screening, and the process of editing inevitably modify and transform the raw material, but also because interviews, a prominent feature of the documentary, are highly performative.15 There is often a tension in well-made documentary films between the filmmaker’s point of view and the interviewees,’ so the subjective dimension of the discourse and methods of the documentary cannot be ignored.16 In spite of the documentary’s problematic claim to giving a voice to the voiceless, documentary filmmakers’ interest in the voice and perspective of the common people did not subside. But the representational style that dominated the 1980s declined. In place of documentaries that stressed exclusively their informational capacity, films characterized by a strong sense of reflexivity began to appear.

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Reflexivity and contemporary Taiwan documentary I have discussed elsewhere how the heightened sensitivity to problematic representational politics in the documentary yielded sophisticated film language in two contemporary works – namely, Voices of Orchid Island (1993) by ethnographerdirector Hu Taili and Corner’s (2001) by lesbian director Zero Chou. 17 I will venture to refine my argument here. In these two acclaimed documentaries, the filmmakers underscore the performativity of the camera to overcome the thorny problem of the camera holder “speaking for” the voiceless filmed subjects. Taking the aborigines on Orchid Island (a small island of the southeastern coast of Taiwan) as its central subject, Voices of Orchid Island is an ethnographic documentary that tackles the issue of encounters between the aborigines and the socially dominant group outside the island and the complications that ensue. The film is celebrated as a milestone in the history of visual ethnography in Taiwan, for if traditionally aborigines are subject to the ethnographic gaze, the film deliberately unsettles the ease with which the ethnographer gazes at, films, and studies aboriginal subjects. Highly conscious of the danger of “speaking for” her aboriginal subjects, Hu deliberately abandons voice-overs and interviews with on-camera experts interpreting the subjects’ lives. The conventional device of talking heads, however, is preserved. If “voice-overs” suggest the authority of the director’s voice, talking heads are often taken to convey the “true” voice of the filmed subject(s). The careful choice of conventional devices reveals the ethnographer-director’s awareness of the pitfalls of “speaking for” the aborigines. 18 However, this does not mean that the director’s voice is absent. The aborigines in front of the camera voice their anger at tourists’ exploiting gaze, but it is the juxtaposition of shots of these interviews with those of tourists’ inept behavior toward the aborigines that brings out the full force of the filmed aboriginal subjects’ protest (Fig. 1.1). Instead of using voice-overs that suggest the unquestionable authority of the voice of the film director, Voices of Orchid Island employs a film language that implies the director’s response to what the filmed subjects say. In some of the most powerful moments in the film, reflexive comments on the inappropriateness of the director’s camera are delivered in a tour de force. For example, the film begins with shots of aboriginal interviewees protesting the gaze of outsiders. Interestingly, just as this message is being delivered to the audience through interviews of several aboriginal subjects, the camera is “roaming” around, capturing at random people and the island landscape. The ease of camera movement is disrupted when an aboriginal child suddenly turns to the camera with a loud protest: “Don’t shoot!” Throughout the film, the camera movement is accompanied by shots that explicitly or implicitly speak against its presence. If the documentary has a history of serving as a tool to bring exotic others under the scrutiny of dominant groups19 and therefore produce a combination of scopophilia (the pleasure in looking) and epistephilia (the pleasure in knowing) for viewers at the expense of subjects,20 Orchid Island asks sharp questions about the production of this viewing pleasure. Thus, outsiders’ exploiting gaze is made an issue from the very beginning of the film. But later in the film, aborigines are shown willingly posing for photographs in

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 21

Figure 1.1 Voices of Orchid Island: a nuclear waste dump site for Taiwan, courtesy of the director

exchange for money. How should we treat this exploitation of to-be-looked-at-ness by the victims themselves, which raises the question of what Rey Chow calls “the Oriental’s Orientalism”?21 The validity of the interviewees’ vigorous protest is here implicitly doubted. The ethnographer-director’s bewilderment at the contradiction between what subjects say and what they do in regard to the issue of to-belooked-at-ness is conveyed through careful editing of the footage, which alerts the audience to the “performative” dimension of documentary interviews.22 With such deft treatment of the politics of interviews, Voices of Orchid Island, true to its title, displays voices in collision. It creates a Bakhtinian space of heteroglossia, where often two or more voices are mixed in a single utterance.23 In the process, the

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ethnographer’s rejection of a monologic production of meaning is fully revealed. The film ultimately is a product of collaboration between the filmmaker and her filmed subjects, who are equals in producing the complex messages of the film. The dialogic relationship between the director’s voice and filmed subjects’ voices certainly points to the full complexity of giving a voice to the voiceless. Orchid Island is thus marked by the position of the director as an outsider to the group whose voice(s) she tries to represent in the film. In contrast, Zero Chou’s Corner’s approaches the issue of giving a voice to the voiceless from the angle of an insider of the subordinated group. Herself a lesbian, Chou faces another set of problems in producing this documentary that presents and comments on gay culture from the perspective of a gay group. While the filmmaker of Voices of Orchid Island confronts dangers of “speaking for” the voiceless, Chou deals with the difficult task of representing gay culture without subjecting her subjects to the peeping Tom pleasure of straight audiences. As in Voices of Orchid Island, the presence of the camera provokes ambiguous implications. The camera is an indispensable tool in bringing out the voice/perspective of the subordinated gay group, but its operation nevertheless involves the danger of complicity with voyeurism that has long oppressed gay people. Chou maneuvers herself out of the dilemma by highlighting the performativity of the filmed subjects. In a rather erotic scene showing two lesbians making love to each other, a woman photographer is also shown to be present at the scene taking pictures of the entangled pair of lovers. The disturbing clicks of the camera shutter and the shots of her taking pictures of the entangled limbs suggest that what we are seeing is deliberately staged. The audience is therefore jolted to a very uncomfortable realization that the filmed subjects may not be victims subjugating themselves to the controlling gaze of the voyeuristic audience but sly actors trying to fool the audience with their dubious performance. The camera does not provide a window in the service of the dominant group; rather, with performativity foregrounded, it works as a critical intervention in producing a counter-vision of this gay group (Fig. 1.2). Sound effects, likewise, are performative rather than just supplementing images. For example, the film begins with a woman’s monolog in French, expressing the pain and loneliness of a lesbian in love. With a monolog delivered in a language that the majority of Taiwanese don’t understand, comes out to the unspeakability of what the voiceless group tries to say comes out. The alienation effect brought by the French language points to the otherness of gay language and culture, and thus denies the audience the possibility of fully mastering what it sees and hears in the film. The strategic use of French creates a sound effect that reinforces the audience’s sense of its own incompetence in fully understanding what is seen on screen. Thus, like the movement of the camera in the film, language is presented as a staged performance rather than a transparent tool of communication. Highlighting performativity through self-conscious film language underscores the two filmmakers’ awareness of giving voice to the voiceless. In Voices of Orchid Island, the danger of “speaking for” the voiceless and that of taking what the other says at face value are laid bare. Corner’s, on the other hand, exploits the performativity of the

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 23

Figure 1.2 A surrealist scene from Corner’s, courtesy of the director

gaze and the voice to invent a filmic space where the voiceless can “account for themselves.” The sophisticated treatment of the politics of representation in these two films shows the extent to which contemporary documentary filmmaking in Taiwan has inherited the legacy of the Green Group in concern for the voice of the people and, at the same time, transcends its realist constraints. As Paula Rabinowitz says, “documentaries construct not only a vision of truth and identity but an appropriate way of seeing that vision.”24 The two films under discussion here clearly illustrate this point.

Viva Tonal and Taiwanese historiography From the ethnographic film Voices of Orchid Island (1983) to the lesbian film Corner’s (2001), contemporary documentaries in Taiwan show an abiding interest in the voiceless, preoccupations that can be traced back to the radical filming practice in the 1980s aimed at overturning “the official story.” Compared to the two films discussed above which rigorously engage the problem of representation, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age seems at first a more conventional documentary. Co-directed by Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi and released in 2004, Viva Tonal traces the introduction of gramophones and the consequent inception of Taiwanese pop songs in the Japanese ruling period. It gives us a glimpse of people’s daily lives in the colonial past under the impact of what could be regarded as the island’s first encounter with a modern culture industry. The film begins with footage from the

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Japanese colonial period, showing fashionable young women and men enjoying themselves outdoors, dancing and yachting. The footage, painting a rosy picture of urban culture in the 1930s, is accompanied by the original soundtrack of the first Taiwanese pop song “The Dance Age” (Columbia Records 1933) produced for commercial purposes: I’m a cultured woman/“Traveling freely about footloose and fancy free/I’m happy to be on my own/I’m not up on the affairs of the world/I only know that in the age of civilization/Social life should be open/Couples together/ Cued in lines/I’m a fool for the foxtrot/Old styles or new styles/I can’t be bothered/I just know that free flowers/Must bear free blossoms/What’s in store for the future/Happily oblivious/No cares nor troubles/The fox-trotting life is for me. (from “The Dance Age”)25 This song is intended to capture the ambience of Taiwan in the 1930s which, as the interviewees recollect, was the age of entertainment. Movies, recording industry, Western-style cafés, and dance halls playing the fox-trot all burgeoned at that time. The pop song heralded a new age of freedom promised by the idea of modernity that was materialized with the introduction of electricity (1905), an island-wide railroad transportation system (1908), the availability of tap water (1908), the establishment of modernized hospital facilities (1915), and the mushrooming of various Western-style entertainment in urban areas. The main interviewees in the documentary include a female singer of Taiwanese pop songs recruited by the former Columbia Records Company in colonial Taiwan, a couple of employees working for the company in the 1930s, a descendent of a high-profile store selling expensive imported commodities at the time, and a classical music composer trained in the Japanese period. In addition to these interviewees whose recollections resurrect what the voice-over describes as “a blank for today’s youth” in Taiwan history, the film highlights three historical figures in the record industry of the 1930s – namely, the pop song singer Chunchun, the lyricist Chen Chunyu, and Shojiro Kashiwano, the chairman of Columbia Records whose enterprise created one of the most remarkable Taiwanese culture industries in the first half of the twentieth century. The main characters of the documentary therefore are people associated with the entertainment section of music production and distribution. They were key players in the shaping of trendy urban culture rather than the oppressed, marginalized groups that engaged filmmakers like Hu and Chou. However, this does not mean that giving voice to the voiceless is not a concern for the directors of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age; it is just that the film plays this theme of the Taiwan documentary in a different way. Here the “voiceless” refers not so much to the voice of oppressed social groups as to suppressed collective memories. According to Dai Bofen and Wei Yinbing, three prominent themes dominate documentary practices in Taiwan: political protest, social movements, and historical preservation.26Films of the first two categories seek to bring out the

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 25 voice of the politically or socially oppressed groups while documentary films of the third kind are concerned with rescuing cultural legacies and historical memories from oblivion. Very often it is the repressed or suppressed histories that define “the voiceless” in documentaries of historical reconstruction. Viva Tonal – The Dance Age belongs to the last category. A quest for forgotten historical memories is set in motion as the voice-over, reiterating the last line of the popular song “The Dance Age,” brings up the following questions in the very beginning of the film: “A resurgent world/Love the ones you choose.” What kind of era would inspire such a song? What made Chen Chunyu write those lyrics? And Deng Yuxian composed it as a foxtrot? The era’s top singer Chunchun What did she feel when she sang the song? What is the role of Shojiro Kashiwano, the chairman of Columbia Records, in the development of Taiwanese popular music? With the aid of Chen, the record connoisseur and collector who mediates not only between the director and the interviewees but also between the present and the past, the directors try to gain access to suppressed historical memories of colonial Taiwan. Abandoning the use of third-person, impersonal voice-over, the directors deliberately employ a first-person voice-over to personify their perspective and thus align themselves with the generations of audience whose knowledge of the Japanese ruling period is extremely limited. In other words, the personal tone of the voice-over identifies the speaker as someone who, like the audience the voice addresses, grew up in a cultural environment with little information about Taiwan’s colonial past. In addition to choosing first-person over the third-person address, it is noteworthy that the voice-over is delivered in Taiwanese rather than Mandarin. Taiwanese, the language spoken by the majority of the people in Taiwan, was suppressed after the island was handed over to the KMT government in the late 1940s. A debate on language issues broke out in the 1970s as indigenous writers tried to resurrect and justify the use of Taiwanese for literary production. But it was not until well into the 1990s that Taiwanese gradually got rid of its stigmatized status. Thus, as with Corner’s, language in Viva Tonal – The Dance Age is presented as highly performative rather than simply a transparent communication tool. The use of Taiwanese in the voice-over implicitly positions the documentary in close association with the “mother tongue movement” kicked off by xiangtu literature in the 1970s. In presenting Taiwanese as the language of the first-person voice-over and in its engagement with collective memories of the colonial past, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age inherits the legacies of xiangtu literature debates, for these two issues were at the heart of the debates.27 But while the film affirms its link with important social and cultural movements of the 1970s, it parts with the tradition of xiangtu movement when it comes to historiographical practice. The directors state clearly in the film synopsis

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that the documentary seeks to transcend the colonizer/colonized opposition in its historical representation of colonial Taiwan. While postcolonial historiographic practice that has dominated Taiwan cultural discourse in the past decade emphasizes the suffering of the colonized Taiwanese people and thus falls prey to what Rey Chow calls “the logic of the wounded,”28 Viva Tonal – The Dance Age shifts away from the suffering of the oppressed to how people lived their fantasies in the cultural ambience of rapid modernization under Japanese rule.29 As remembered by the interviewees, the 1930s were a time of spectacular changes and the golden age for Taiwanese pop songs. Their recollections bear witness to the vigorous transnational flows that involved colonial Taiwan in a vast global network of cultural industries. AChen, the record collector, points out that Western classical music was popular with the urban middle class whereas people in rural areas tended to buy Taiwanese opera or traditional types of music. Classical music composer Guo Zhiyuan likewise tells how he was inspired by German and Russian nationalist schools of classical music and decided to compose his own Taiwanese-flavored classical music. Apparently, a transformation of Taiwanese music was already taking place under the impact of foreign influences. The idea of Taiwan as a venue for transnational cultural flows is underscored as we learn from the interviewees that, with the exception of the singer Chunchun, the key figures who participated in the creation of Taiwanese pop songs in the 1930s all had transnational experiences. Shojiro Kashiwano, the head of Columbia Records in Taiwan, mediated the record industry between Taiwan and Japan. A Japanese himself, Kashiwano was deeply interested in a variety of indigenous Taiwanese music. Chen Chun-yu, the lyricist, was recruited by Kashiwano to produce lyrics exclusively for Columbia Records and worked in a Japanese company in China, where he learned Mandarin Chinese. Deng Yuxian, the composer, went to Japan to learn music composition in his youth. Chunchun, the diva of Taiwanese pop songs, was a singer of traditional Taiwanese opera. With the help of Kashiwano, Chen, and Deng, Chunchun eventually learned to sing Taiwanese pop songs set in tunes for Western styles of dancing. Instead of picturing Taiwan as a victimized colony subjected to the play of foreign powers, the historiographic practice of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age evokes a view of colonial Taiwan as benefiting from transnational circuits of cultural flows. This portrayal of colonial Taiwan eager to seize opportunities brought about by colonial modernity rather than an unhappy victim of foreign pressure may subject the documentary to several charges. For example, doesn’t the documentary’s tilt toward Japanese colonial achievements beg the question of the film’s complicity with Japanese colonialism? Isn’t it rather dubious that the documentary should give such a rosy picture of colonial Taiwan? Besides questions of ideological critique, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age also looks suspiciously conservative in terms of documentary practice. The film adopts a representational mode that appears more informational than polemical. In contrast to the reflexive mode of Voices of Orchid Island and Corner’s, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age seems to avoid questions about the politics of representation and interview. All in all, the film appears to rely naively on the interviewees’ accounts in its reconstruction of the historical past, paying

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 27 little attention to the politics of memories involved in the act of historical recollection.30 To counter these charges, it can be said that the film’s turning away from political events to personal experiences and popular culture signifies a substitution of a bottom-up historiographic orientation for a conventional top-down practice. A subversive emphasis on the historical view from below is thus insinuated in the documentary. As Edward Gunn points out in the short essay accompanying the film’s synopsis, the film is “most passionately about some way to affirm the lived experience of those Taiwanese artists who wrote and sang the advent of a modern lifestyle and drew audiences to the new technologies of phonographs, radio, and films.”31 But it is certainly naive to take all views from below as inherently progressive.32 Aside from the classical music composer Guo Zhiyuan, not much in the documentary suggests that the interviewees practiced anything close to what is defined by Michel de Certeau as “tactic” – clever manipulation by subordinated people of forces alien to them to their own ends.33 True, as Edward Gunn comments in his insightful article “Viva Tonal: The Dance Age for Two Generations,”34 Taiwanese popular songs joined mass circulation serials to forge a local identity. An interviewee in the film also recalls how the lyricist Chen Chunyu worked with key figures in Taiwan new literature movement at that time to promote literature for the masses and how he intended to exploit Taiwanese popular songs to that end. But, the topic is dropped as soon as it is mentioned in the film. The directors apparently are not bent on pursuing this line of inquiry in their documentary. What they do, instead, is to paint a picture of Taiwan in its early modernity when “freedom” rang in the air. Whether in content or in form, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age seems to keep itself aloof from the troubled waters of pointed ideological critique on the one hand and the politics of representation on the other. It is the contention of this chapter, however, that Viva Tonal – The Dance Age makes no less a bold excursion than Voices of Orchid Island and Corner’s in exploiting the role of the documentary as a “discourse of sobriety” for specific social purposes. Bill Nichols defines the documentary as “a discourse of sobriety,” for the documentary “mimics the canons of expository argument, the making of a case, and the call to public rather than private response.”35 The documentary structure is predicated mainly on the establishment of an issue or problem, followed by the examination of and solution to it.36 The documentary as a genre is therefore polemical by nature. It is essentially a discursive formation seeking an emphatic say in the realm of public discourse. Moreover, documentary practice operates upon evidentiary editing of images and sound from the real world to advance its discourse. In Nichols’s words, “[t]he status of documentary film as evidence from the world legitimates its usage as a source of knowledge.”37 Seen in this light, the impression of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age as more informational than polemical is only an illusion. If Voices of Orchid Island and Corner’s stand out because of their virtuosic play of reflexivity, the forte of Viva Tonal lies in its historiographic practice. The film engages critical historiography on several fronts. We have remarked on how the deliberate choice of Taiwanese over Chinese Mandarin as the language of voiceover implies the film’s alliance with movements throughout Taiwan’s history to

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affirm a Taiwan-based identity. This attention to acoustic otherness certainly is not exclusive to filmmakers in Taiwan. At just the time when the suppressed Taiwanese spoken word resurfaced to challenge the hegemony of Mandarin in the 1970s, Cantonese was also deliberately put in play in the kung-fu genre, infusing a local identity into the film products of Hong Kong.38 The intractability of Cantonese to taming by standard Chinese Mandarin, according to Lo Kwai-Cheung, offers “a perfect example of how the use of language constitutes a contested terrain in which a local identity strives to come into being.”39 In choosing to use Taiwanese in its narration, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age stresses its link with the Taiwanese language movement, which is historically inseparable from the Taiwanese identity movement. The awareness of the film’s link with the Taiwanese language movement sheds new light on the film’s relationship to its subject: the rise of Taiwanese pop songs in the 1930s. The rise of Taiwanese popular songs was concomitant with the rise of the Taiwanese language literary movement.40 Though the film focuses its attention on popular entertainment and does not make an issue of the language movement, to resurrect historical memories of this specific era is to salvage memories of the power of the Taiwanese word. In this sense, the film can be taken as a tribute to the history of the continuous struggle of the Taiwanese spoken word for survival. In spite of the fact that the issue of language politics is not explicitly pursued, the significance of the film’s deliberate adoption of Taiwanese should not be overlooked. But the film is most ambitious when it comes to the issue of history writing. With its focus on the implication of the flowering of Taiwanese pop songs in a vast network of transnational flows, Viva Tonal – The Dance Age attempts to substitute an “oceanic cultural imagination” for “the logic of the victim” in portraying Taiwan. In other words, it is the reflection on historiography rather than that on esthetic mode that constitutes the forte of the film. It needs to be registered that the film appears at a time when a new historical imaginary is gaining currency in Taiwan. This new imaginary seeks to reconceptualize Taiwan as a key player in the intersection of cultural flows rather than a passive victim of foreign forces.41 Historically, Taiwan had been a colony subjected to the rules of the Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese before it was taken over by the KMT party and became embroiled in the American bid for world power in the Cold War. Incessant exposures, forced or voluntary, to “foreign” cultures have become an important constituent of Taiwan’s history. How to interpret encounters with others has always been an important theme in Taiwanese historiography. The historical imaginary promoted by dissidents in the 1970s highlighted the status of Taiwan as a victim so as to gather momentum for social change. This historical imaginary became even more widely accepted as the introduction of postcolonialism and Western discourses of identity politics into Taiwan in the late 1980s promoted the spread of “the logic of the wounded.” As argued by Rey Chow, postcolonial discourses of modern Chinese literature often resort to the rhetoric of minority discourse which is basically “the product of damage, of damage more or less systematically inflicted on cultures produced as minorities by the dominant culture.”42 This reliance on the minority figure in discussing Chinese literature can also be found in many other postcolonial national literatures.43 Taiwan

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 29 is no exception. But there is a price to pay for the investment in suffering which characterizes minority discourse: “The ‘minor’ cannot get rid itself of its ‘minority’ status because it is that status that gives it its only legitimacy.”44 Hence, the problem with the status of “minority” is that the status of “social peer” would probably be out of reach of the minority once they are named and recognized as such. To be recognized as a social peer capable of participating “as a peer” rather than “as a wounded party” in transgroup interactions, a new historical imaginary needs to be invented, one that conceptualizes Taiwan as other than a victim suffering from colonial damage. It is my contention that the historiographical orientation of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age should be interpreted in this context of historical revision. Shedding the image of Taiwan as a colonial victim, this film portrays the colony as flourishing on the dynamics of transnational flows. But it is equally important to recognize that the filmic representation of popular entertainment at this time also underscores the birth of a Taiwanese culture out of the intermingling of different cultures. Though drawing heavily upon foreign influences, the Taiwanese pop song as a genre nevertheless maintained its ties with traditional Taiwanese music. Thus, the rise of this specific popular entertainment as portrayed in the film provides an example of the dialectics of roots and routes spelled out by James Clifford in his celebrated book Routes.45 Finally, the film’s portrayal of Shojiro Kashiwano, the Japanese who was in charge of Columbia Record Company in Taiwan and helped set off the trend of Taiwanese pop songs, deserves special attention. There is a long history of negative stereotypical representation of the Japanese in Taiwan’s cultural discourse.46 In cases where the Taiwanese are shown to entertain fond memories of the Japanese rule or its legacies, such a positive view of the Japanese is often balanced by views that present the dark side of Japanese colonization. In Viva Tonal, the conventional “negative” or “balanced” portrayal of the Japanese is curiously missing. Kashiwano, as recollected by his former employees, appears to be a man with vision. He was capable of spotting talent where he found it. It was he who insisted on recruiting Taiwanese singers and lyricists for recordings and thus brought Taiwanese pop songs into being. At the time, transnational record companies in Japan (such as Victor Talking Machine Company and Columbia) produced only Japanese recordings. Kashiwano, who came to live in Taiwan at the age of 14, developed an interest in Taiwanese opera, folk songs, and traditional Taiwanese music, such as Beiguan and Nanguan. It was his ties to the Taiwanese music world that prompted him to insist on using local music talents for recordings and producing popular songs in Taiwanese lyrics. Obviously Kashiwano played a crucial role in making Taiwanese popular songs a trend. It would be naive to take this favorable portrayal of Kashiwano the Japanese as motivated by a quest for “the truth.” I would argue that the significance of this proJapanese gesture in Viva Tonal should be examined in terms of Taiwanese tactics of survival in the interstices of Japanese, Chinese, and US superpowers. Like the Cuna taking advantage of rivalries between European nations to create a space for itself,47 Taiwan has learned to play one superpower off against another. If in the decades after the war the Taiwanese enacted a negation of their association with

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the Japanese culture so as to have their Chinese identity validated, the move to reclaim the island’s Japanese colonial heritages can be an attempt to distinguish the Taiwanese identity from the Chinese identity. It effects a dilution of the Chineseness that many Taiwanese had to affirm in the martial law period. Together with the resurrection of suppressed colonial memories, the recasting of the Japanese figure in a more positive light points tellingly to the film’s active participation in the revision of Taiwanese historiography. With its strong grassroots dimension, the new tradition of documentary filmmaking in Taiwan was indeed born out of mass movements in the 1980s. More significantly, all three of the films discussed here testify to the power of filmmaking as a critical intervention in the ways we see and understand the world. Like Taiwan New Cinema, the Taiwan documentary has opened up an unprecedented space for film production in a new age. But, as noted by Bill Nichols, “documentary filmmaking is a distinct form of cinema, with problems and pleasures of its own,”48 which requires a set of analytical and theoretical tools not identical with those used for fiction features. If Taiwan New Cinema has won itself a place in international film studies, the unlimited scope of what the Taiwan documentary can offer still awaits exploration.

Notes 1 This chapter uses pinyin for transcriptions of Chinese, except for cases where other manners of Romanization are used by choice or convention. I acknowledge the kind research support from National Science Council in Taiwan. 2 June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 56. 3 Zhan Hongzhi, “Guochan dianying de xin qidian” [A new beginning for domestic made films], in Taiwan xin dianying [Taiwan New Cinema], ed. Chiao Hsiung-p’ing (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 85. See also Chiao, “Tai Gang dianying tese” [Features of Taiwan and Hong Kong films], in Taiwan xin dianying [Taiwan New Cinema], ed. Chiao Hsiung-p’ing (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 397. 4 Zhan Hongzhi, “Taiwan xin dianying de lailu yu qulu” [The birth and development of Taiwan New Cinema], in Taiwan xin dianying [Taiwan New Cinema], ed. Chiao Hsiungp’ing (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 25–27. 5 Yip, op. cit., 64. 6 Tony Rayns, “Dashi jingsu de zhongguo tongnian” [Chinese childhood constructed by the Master], in Taiwan xin dianying [Taiwan New Cinema], ed. Chiao Hsiung-p’ing (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 421; Li Tianduo and Chen Peizhi, “1980 niandai Taiwan ‘xin’ dianying de shehuixue tansuo” [A sociological approach to Taiwan New Cinemas in the 1980s], in Dangdai huayu dianying lunshu [On contemporary Chinese films] (Taipei: Shibao, 1996), 56. 7 Liu Xiancheng, “Fangkai lishi shiye: jianshi 1980–1990 niandai pianzhi de Taiwan dianying lunshu” [Opening up the historical vision: On the fixations of discourses on Taiwan New Cinema from the 1980s to the 1990s], in Dangdai huayu dianying lunshu [On contemporary Chinese films] (Taipei: Shibao, 1996), 91–92. 8 Ibid., 92. 9 Xiangtu literature debates in the 1970s were originally activated by critiques of Western cultural imperialism. The rhetoric of the critics of Taiwan New Cinema actually resembles to a very high extent the polemics of pro-xiangtu writers with their strong socialist penchant.

The vision of Taiwan new documentary 31 10 Lee Daw-ming, “Jilupian zai Taiwan” [Documentaries in Taiwan], http:// techart.tnua.edu.tw/~dmlee/article3.html (accessed October 25, 2006). 11 Lee Daw-ming, “Taiwan jilupian de meixue wenti chutan” [On the aesthetics of Taiwan documentaries], in Zhenshi yu zaixian: jilupian meixue guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji [Conference proceedings of “Reality and Representation: International Conference on Documentary Aesthetics”] (Taipei: December 14–15, 2002), 211. 12 Dai Bofen and Wei Yinbing, “Taiwan fanzhuliu yingxiang meiti de lishi guancha” [A historical note on Anti-mainstream media in Taiwan], Film Appreciation Journal 10, no. 3 (1992): 47. 13 Ye Longyan, Rizhi shidai Taiwan dianyingshi [A history of Taiwanese film in the Japanese rule period] (Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998), 71–73; Lee Daw-ming, “Taiwan dianyingshi diyi zhang: 1900–1915” [A history of Taiwan film: Chapter one: 1900–1915], http:// techart.tnua.edu.tw/~dmlee/article6.html (accessed October 25, 2006). 14 T. Minh-ha Trinh, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 97–98; Philip Rosen, “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 74; Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2000), 21; Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage Publication, 1998), 61; John Corner, “Documentary Theory,” in The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 21. 15 T. Minh-ha Trinh, Framer Framed (New York: Routledge, 1992), 145, 194. 16 Corner , op. cit., 11. 17 Kuei-fen Chiu, “Taiwan and Its Spectacular Others: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Two Documentaries by Women Filmmakers from Taiwan,” Asian Cinema 16, no. 1 (2005): 99–104. 18 Jay Ruby, “Speaking for, Speaking about, Speaking with, or Speaking Alongside,” in Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 207. 19 Faye Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect: The Impact of Indigenous Media on Ethnographic Film,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 161–62; Lee Daw-ming, “The Representation of Taiwan Aborigines in Films and on Television in the Past One Hundred Years,” Film Appreciation Journal 12, no. 3 (1994), 59–64. 20 Elizabeth Cowie, “The Spectacle of Actuality,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 43. 21 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 171. 22 Trinh, Framer Framed, 145. 23 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 302. 24 Paula Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso, 1994), 12. 25 I am grateful to the directors of Viva Tonal – The Dance Age, Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi, for sending me the English version of the lyrics and for their permission to reproduce it here. 26 Dai and Wei, op. cit., 47. 27 Xiao Aqin, “Kangri jiti jiyi de minzuhua: Taiwan 1970 niandai de zhanhou shidai yu riju shiqi Taiwan xin wenxue” [The nationalization of anti-Japanese collective memories: Post-war generations in the 1970s and Taiwan New Literature Movement in the Japanese rule period], Taiwanshi yanjiu [Studies in Taiwan history] 9, no. 1 (2002): 209. 28 Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” Boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 6.

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29 It may be interesting to compare this shift toward a more upbeat tone in Viva Tonal with the rejection of the so-called “ethos of sadness” in recent films of Taiwan new cinema directors. See Mei-ling Wu, “Postsadness Taiwan New Cinema: Eat, Drink, Everyman, Everywoman,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 76. 30 Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, “Introduction,” Representations 26 (1989): 2; Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” New Left Review 209 (1995): 5; and Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations 49 (1995): 72–96. 31 Edward Gunn, “Viva-Tonal: The Dance Age for Two Generations” (unpublished article). 32 G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988), 276; and Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 95–96. 33 Michel de Cerdeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xix. 34 Gunn, op. cit.. 35 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4. 36 Ibid., 18. 37 Ibid., ix. 38 Christina Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading,” Cinema Journal 43, no.4 (2004): 25. 39 Lo Kwai-cheung, “Look Who’s Talking: The Politics of Orality in Transitional Hong Kong Mass Culture,” in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey Chow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 182. 40 Xiang Yang, “Minzu xiangxiang yu dazhong luxian de jiaogui: 1930 niandai Taiwan huawen lunzheng yu taiyu wenxue yundong” [Intersection of the national imagination and mass movements: Debates on Taiwanese literary language and the Taiwanese Language Movement in the 1930s], in Taiwan xin wenxue fazhan zhongda shijian lunwen ji [Crucial events in the history of Taiwan new literature] (Tainan: National Museum of Taiwan Literature, 2004), 21–5. 41 Chiu, “Treacherous Translation: Taiwanese Tactics of Intervention in Transnational Cultural Flows,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 31, no.1 (2005): 65. 42 Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 100. 43 Ibid., 101. 44 Ibid., 104. 45 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge UK: Harvard University Press, 1977) 46 Several reasons contribute to this discursive construction of the image of the Japanese. The fact of Taiwan’s being ruled by Japan certainly is an important reason. But SinoJapanese war memories make the issue more complicated in Taiwan. After the KMT government took over Taiwan in 1949, “how ‘Chinese’ could the Taiwanese be after 50 years’ Japanese rule” continued to be a haunting question. To prove their loyal adherence to the Chinese identity, the Taiwanese adopted an anti-Japanese attitude in their cultural practices. See Zhu Xining, “Huigui hechu? Ruhe huigui?” [Where to? And how?] in Xiangtu wenxue lun ji [Debates on xiangtu literature], ed. Yu Tiancong (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1977), 219; Xiao, op. cit., 181–239. 47 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 137–41. 48 Nichols, op. cit., xi.

2

Haunted realism Postcoloniality and the cinema of Chang Tso-chi Chris Berry

Chang Tso-chi’s films seamlessly combine the seemingly incompatible modes of documentary-style realism and fantasy.1 Feii Lu has undertaken a close analysis of Chang’s Darkness and Light (Heian zhi guang, 1999) to demonstrate how its deployment of the shot and reverse-shot structure produces this seamless effect. Drawing on Lu’s essay and Bliss Cua Lim’s writing on “spectral time” in the ghost film, this essay examines the fantastic elements in Chang’s films and in particular The Best of Times (Meili shiguang, 2002) as a powerful means of protesting the normally invisible history of the socially marginalized and dispossessed in Taiwan’s society. Using the idea of “haunted realism” to extend Lim’s insights beyond the ghost film, I further argue that Chang’s innovations demand reconsideration of the famous realism of earlier Taiwan New Cinema films, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s works of the 1980s, and of realism in general. Feii Lu has already drawn attention to and analyzed the hallmark formal features of Chang Tso-chi’s cinema. In Ah Chung (1996), Darkness and Light, and most recently The Best of Times, Chang rigorously pursues a contemporary, nitty-gritty realism, working with nonprofessional actors on stories set amongst the Taiwanese underclass. However, the ends of the films have increasingly departed from conventional realism. The dead possibly come back to life without warning and without apparently causing too much consternation amongst the living. The audacity of these moments is achieved by producing this effect without departing from the strict realist film aesthetics Chang uses throughout his films. Lu has demonstrated how this is achieved in Darkness and Light by embedding these moments within the overall strategic use of the shot– reverse-shot convention in the films, so that the moment when we see the main character’s dead boyfriend and dead father walk in the door is rendered as her point-of-view shot.2 The Best of Times extends this audacious use of realist conventions beyond the shot–reverse-shot structure and produces its own distinctive formal technique. Ah Wei and Ah Jie are cousins and best friends. They get involved with a gang and accidentally kill a member of a rival gang. The other gang hunts them down, first killing Ah Jie. When they chase after Ah Wei, he rounds a corner and finds Ah Jie waiting for him at the spot where he was killed. They run again, and this time they end up at a weir where another friend has previously claimed seeing two men jump

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to their deaths. Sure enough, both are forced to jump off the weir. The film ends showing them swimming and apparently living happily underwater amongst the fishes. It is, of course, possible to understand the scenes Feii Lu analyzes in Darkness and Light as the wish fulfillment or fantasy of the characters whose perspective motivates the shot–reverse-shot structures. But none of the conventional codes to signify fantasy are used in Darkness and Light. For example, there are no close-ups on the face, followed by dissolves. As a result, there is a profound ambivalence here. Furthermore, the final scenes of The Best of Times cannot be explained away quite so simply. Also, there are none of the conventional codes for cinematic fantasy here, and the apparently supernatural is maintained by invoking shot– reverse-shot structures but then going beyond them, making the “it’s just a wish” explanation much less credible. Therefore, the remainder of this essay continues down the other path, by taking the return to life in Chang’s films more literally. It approaches this feature of Chang’s films as a cinematic configuration of time. From this perspective, Chang’s films fit into a larger pattern of Taiwan cinema that disturbs linear time to convey Taiwan’s postcolonial condition. Others have argued for similar disturbances of linear time as configurations that are postcolonial and antirealist as opposed to modern and realist. However, I argue that Chang’s inscription of this disturbance within the codes of realism constitutes a different pattern that combines realism and postcoloniality. Because realism and modernity are closely associated, by combining the realism and antirealism Chang’s style implies that the violent disjunctures of postcoloniality are precisely Taiwan’s modernity. The essay concludes by asking whether looking at Chang’s films in this way enables us to also ask if earlier New Taiwan Cinema’s famous realism might also be reconsidered in this light. First, let us examine how Chang extends the audacious techniques he developed in Darkness and Light. Feii Lu demonstrates how shot and reverse-shot structures are used to render the scenes in which characters appear to come back to life as the subjective gaze of those who miss them. In the absence of techniques like dissolves, this creates an ambivalence about whether we should understand these scenes as fantasy or reality. Chang uses this technique again in The Best of Times in the scenes involving Ah Jie’s death. After Ah Jie has accidentally killed the head of a rival gang, the rival gang comes looking for Ah Jie. They find Ah Wei and him in a short neighborhood passageway, which we have already seen often in the film. Because of what happens next, this otherwise quotidian passageway becomes a symbolically loaded liminal space of transformation. Facing the gang at one end of the passageway, Ah Wei and Ah Jie turn and flee out of the other end. They run through the neighborhood, splitting up and going in separate directions, but planning to meet on the bridge over the weir in the neighborhood. The film follows Ah Wei, who eventually doubles back and returns to the passageway (Figures 2.1–2.9). A brief moment of black follows, before a new scene opens with Ah Wei taking Ah Jie to hospital, where he dies.

Haunted realism 35

Figure 2.1 Medium long shot. Ah Wei disappears down the entrance to the passageway, which turns away to the left.

Figure 2.2 Medium long shot. Ah Wei appears at the head of the passageway, walking toward the camera. A shoulder appears in the right extreme foreground. The pattern on the shirt makes this recognizable as Ah Jie.

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Figure 2.3 180-degree reverse-shot cuts to a position behind Ah Wei as he walks toward Ah Jie, who says, “Wassup? You’re late! They almost got me,” and then is suddenly set upon by the gang, who race in from the left, where the passageway obscures our vision.

Figure 2.4 Brief 180-degree reverse-shot as Ah Jie is pushed up against the wall.

Haunted realism 37

Figure 2.5 As 2.3, The Best of Times

Figure 2.6 Jump-cut forward to a position in front of Ah Wei (replicating his point of view) as they set upon Ah Jie, shouting, “Kill him.” The gang walks off leaving the stabbed Ah Jie lying on the ground.

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Figure 2.7 180-degree reverse-shot to Ah Wei looking on, shocked.

Figure 2.8 As 2.6, The Best of Times

Haunted realism 39

Figure 2.9 As 2.7.

Some time later, Ah Wei happens to see Ah Jie’s killers draw up at the kerbside. Seizing the opportunity, he grabs a brick and hits the gang leader over the head as he gets out of the car. Now the gang chases after Ah Wei as he runs back into the neighborhood. In many ways, this use of the shot and reverse-shot structure is similar to the uses in Darkness and Light, making it possible to read Fig. 2.13 in particular as Ah Wei’s subjective vision. The whole second scene can be understood as Ah Wei’s wish fulfillment, reflecting his guilt over Ah Jie’s death and his wish that he had intervened in the original fight to save Ah Jie. However, it diverges from Darkness and Light in one important way, which ups the ante on the daring disjuncture between fantasy and reality that Chang is pursuing. In Darkness and Light, not only are there no filmic techniques to connote fantasy, but also none of the characters ever question their vision or betray any doubt about what they are seeing. This creates a profound but subtle ambivalence. In the second sequence of The Best of Times, detailed below, Ah Wei reacts in shock to the reappearance of Ah Jie in Figs 2.12 and 2.13, and directly questions Ah Jie in Figure 2.15 about whether he is in fact who he seems to be. Ah Jie affirms his identity and realist codes are maintained. Here then, Chang foregrounds the paradoxical structure without resolving it. Furthermore, The Best of Times goes beyond these shot and reverse-shot techniques in its concluding sequence. Following a chase through and out of the neighborhood, Ah Jie and Ah Wei find themselves at another local spot that has already appeared often in the film – the weir. This is a reverse version of the passageway. Instead of being hemmed in by high walls, they are hemmed in by steep drops into the water. Surrounded by the gang, they turn and leap. The camera goes into slow motion as they arc through the air and freezes, Thelma and Louise-style. The screen goes black for a moment, then we see them struggling underwater. There are more moments of black and more scenes of struggling, which we might at first assume are Ah Wei and Ah Jie’s death throes. But these scenes gradually transform into a

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Figure 2.10 Very similar to 2.1, but the camera is positioned slightly closer to the entrance to the passageway and further to the left, as Ah Wei runs into the passageway.

Figure 2.11 As 2.2, including the appearance of Ah Jie’s shirt in the frame.

Haunted realism 41

Figure 2.12 As 2.3, but Ah Wei says, “What’s going on?”

Figure 2.13 As with 2.6, the camera position jumps forward, but it is still behind Ah Wei. Ah Jie says, “I’ve been waiting all along.”

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Figure 2.14 As 2.7, including Ah Wei in shock, as Ah Jie says, “Hurry up, or they’ll catch up with us.” Ah Wei responds, “Are you Ah Jie?”

Figure 2.15 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie, who says, “Who else? Hurry up!” The other gang comes into frame off screen right and attacks Ah Jie.

Haunted realism 43

Figure 2.16 As 2.7.

Figure 2.17 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Wei, who intervenes in the fight.

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Figure 2.18 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie and his attackers as Ah Wei jumps on Ah Jie’s attackers, and drags Ah Jie off.

Figure 2.19 180-degree reverse-shot to the head of the passageway as Ah Jie and Ah Wei run toward the camera, and past it, pursued by their attackers.

Haunted realism 45 long sequence of the two young men swimming happily with the fish, much like a human version of the fish tank that has so fascinated Ah Wei throughout the film. As we see Ah Jie pull the knife out of his back, Ah Wei’s voiceover says, “My cousin Ah Jie is an idiot for magic tricks. His hands can change anything. He’s not like me. I’m a happy guy. I’m not like other people. I’ve got no worries. However, bad things keep happening.” This sequence is not anchored in subjective perspectives, and with it, the film moves into what might be called magical realism, or a kind of ghostly life after death.3 Mixing genres is not in itself so unusual and cannot account for the shock effect of scenes such as these in Chang’s films where the dead seem to come back to life. But it is unusual to mix genres across the line between realist and fantastic modes. Genre mixing within the realist mode – for example the mixture of the cowboy film and the samurai film in some Kurosawa films – does not seem very incongruous. But when characters seem to come back to life in what has otherwise been a gritty, street level, contemporary realist drama, as is the case in Chang’s films, the effect is surprising. This is because the grounding ontological assumptions of the realist and fantastic modes are incompatible. Realism assumes a secular world, in which reality is equated to material observability. The fantastic is by definition not the observable – whether the result is understood as imaginative or a different order of reality that is invisible to the human eye. To give another example, this is why the mixture of the musical and gritty urban realist mise-en-scene in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole also seems so surprising, although in that case it is more absurdist than shocking. If we take the fantastic elements in Chang’s films literally as a return to life, this invokes the ghost genre. What does it mean to deploy these elements? In the past, ghost and horror films have attracted attention from feminist scholars such as Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, and Rhona Berenstein, and queer scholars such as Harry Benshoff. They have been drawn to the capacity of the fantastic to open the door to the suppressed, repressed, and hidden. Women’s desire is considered threatening to men because it marks the point where those who in patriarchal culture are supposed to be passive objects of male desire become agents. In the same ideological order, the very existence of queer desire is repressed. In these circumstances, the structure of the fantastic both marks this exclusion from the real and the potential breakdown of the barrier between the real and the unreal. 4 More recently, others including Kim Soyoung, Audrey Yue, and John Zou have extended this work. They emphasize the ability of the ghost film to render visible the violent change of the colonial disjuncture. So much of the indigenous is suddenly suppressed, erased, and discarded in the globally uneven flows of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In the ghost film, these elements can be figured as that which returns, or that which lives on amongst us after death, invisible yet effective. Furthermore, in many cultures spirits and ghosts are those who have not left this world because they were badly treated in it and return or stay. As a metaphorical figure of colonial violence, they can express the barely suppressed anger and desire for vengeance characterizing the experience of the colonized.5

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Bliss Cua Lim refers to the blurring of the clear barrier between the pre- and postcolonial moment embodied in the ghostly figure of the living dead as “spectral time.” She marks the ghostly as a temporal figure. It embodies a disruption and indeed a confounding of the order of linear developmental time associated with the modernity forced upon the world by Euro-American (and Japanese) colonialism. For the ghost is not only the past coming back to the present, but the past and the present all at once.6 In this way, Lim’s work echoes work outside film studies that has also used ghostliness to reconsider modern time and its subset, colonial time. Drawing on Benjamin’s insight that modernity is characterized by the shock of the new and a radical disjuncture with the past, Francoise Proust has argued that history appears in modernity as specters that haunt it.7 Benedict Anderson’s The Spectre of Comparisons uses the ghost metaphor to argue that colonial modernity is always haunted by the culture of the colonized.8 There is certainly an appropriate Taiwan cinematic intertext and historical context to support placing Chang Tso-chi’s films in the generic context of the ghost film and the explanatory framework of spectral time. In regard to the cinematic intertext, ghostly and supernatural embodiments of Taiwan’s historical disjunctures can be found in popular films like Double Vision, with its Buddhist cult terrorists in the corporate penthouse suite, and arthouse films like Red Lotus Society, in which the disappointments of modernity are alleviated by the discovery of an ancient martial arts manual that teaches the protagonist how to fly. The focus of Chang’s films is on the lower-class margins of Taiwan society, produced out of its modern transformation since the KMT took over from the Japanese colonizers in the late forties. In The Best of Times, for example, Ah Jie is the son of a KMT soldier who came to the island as a displaced refugee, not as a member of the KMT ruling class. The other young man, Ah Wei, is part of the local Taiwanese underclass. The close relationship between these two disadvantaged sectors of society – ordinary KMT soldiers and the local Taiwanese poor – is literalized by making the two boys part of one large extended family. Furthermore, Ah Wei’s sister Ah Ming is dying of leukemia, a disease often related to the gross pollution that accompanied the economic exploitation of the island and industrialization. If their deaths can be understood as part of the long-term effects of postcolonial violence and social inequality, then their ghostly return represents a kind of spectral righting of those wrongs. However, although Chang’s films can be slotted into the ghost genre and the spectral time concept, the ways in which they do not quite fit are just as interesting as the ways they do. There are at least two issues. First, despite what has just been said about class backgrounds of the protagonists in The Best of Times, colonial history is not necessarily the main ghost that haunts this film or Chang’s others. Second, there is the question of realism, which Lim positions as the opposite of the ghost film and “spectral time.” I will argue that these two issues do not so much challenge Lim’s idea of “spectral time” as extend it, and I am using the term “haunted” to invoke this extended concept.9 To take the first point, although the contemporary troubles of the protagonists in Chang’s films can be traced back to moments of colonial and postcolonial

Haunted realism 47 rupture, the films are firmly set in the present. Despite the deployment of the apparently ghostly and supernatural, the films pointedly do not extend their moments of reincarnation beyond the immediate present that the film is set in. Along with the lack of cinematic clues like dissolves or “ghostly” music, this adds to the surprising or shocking quality of the apparent reincarnations, because nothing about the characters, costumes, or setting is different from what we have seen before. This suggests that the kind of social, cultural, and political disjunctures that can be configured through haunting exceed the events of the postcolonial past. Another example of a film from Taiwan that uses haunted time to this end is Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? where haunted time is configured simultaneously across time zones as well as backward into the cinematic past to convey both globalization and a kind of haunting across cultures.10 Taking stock, we might suggest that at least three deployments of haunted time configure Taiwan’s postcolonial postmodernity in its cinema. First, there are those that rupture the conventional division between the modern and the premodern, such as Red Lotus Society. Second, there’s Tsai Ming-liang’s cutting across time zones to convey the disorienting disjunctures and conjunctures of globalization. And third, there are very local and quotidian invocations of haunted reality in Chang Tso-chi’s cinema, demonstrating how this structure permeates throughout society. Like Chang’s films, Tsai’s films are renowned for constructing a particular kind of realism in all other regards. Indeed, although there are many Taiwan films that invoke the ghost genre to put a focus on the complicated history and politics of the island, Taiwan cinema is mostly renowned for deploying realism to this end rather than the fantastic mode. This challenges us to re-think Lim’s idea of “spectral time” a bit further. Lim maintains the conventional opposition between realism and the ghost genre, aligning realism with modernity, rationality, and the ideology of linear development, and the ghost genre with the premodern, precolonial, irrational, and so forth. But Chang’s films do not use haunted time to represent an archaic or premodern space at all. Rather, the haunting occurs within the realist mode, within a mimetically rendered contemporary world, and within the linear time line otherwise associated with secular modernity. This configuration moves away from the opposition between the premodern and the modern, the precolonial and the postcolonial, and the secular and the ghostly. To understand Chang’s configuration of hauntedness within modernity, we can turn to the idea of multiple and different modernities. Among the main reasons for the advancement of the idea of multiple modernities is the need to register the survival of elements from the past into the present, breaching the modern ideology of an absolute rupture between modernity and premodernity.11 It is the survival and continued operation of these elements that causes modernity to be different in different places, and vice versa. For example, the characters in Chang’s films are involved in a variety of local religious practices. Ah Chung’s mother participates in the rituals of the Bajajiang group. The protagonists in The Best of Times encounter various small shrines and temples in their daily lives, and so on. In Chang’s films, it seems that it is visible religious practice that signifies a

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different and distinctly Taiwanese modernity. This extended and reconfigured spectral time can be called “haunted realism.” I would like to close this short essay by considering the implications of rethinking hauntedness through the lens of multiple modernities, as provoked by scrutiny of Chang’s films. First, if hauntedness and its challenge to the conventional ideology of modernity can occur within realism, what does this suggest about other realist films of the Taiwan New Cinema that do not feature ghosts at all? Can these films be said to be haunted in any way? And what about realism in general? Should the accommodation of hauntedness within realism in Chang’s films be thought of as an exception that proves the general rule about the absolute divide between realist and fantastic modes, or does it challenge the very grounds of that division itself? In regard to the first set of questions, perhaps Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films of the 1980s and his historical trilogy are the most renowned examples of the Taiwan New Cinema and they are often acclaimed for their realism. Indeed, with the exception of the faxed diary in Good Men, Good Women, they remain rigorously within the tenets of realism. Yet, on reflection, I would argue that this realism is also haunted. Lim’s article proves useful again here, because she points out that the two figures that ground the blurring of past and present in haunting are nostalgia and allegory. In reaching out from the present to the past, nostalgia confounds the separation between past and present that distinguishes modernity from all the supposedly backward formations that came before it. In speaking about one thing through another, allegory can also function across the same divide.12 Although allegory is not part of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s realist mode, perhaps it is the very realist recreation of the past in films from A Summer at Grandpa’s to A City of Sadness that provides the foundation for a haunting and nostalgic effect, not within the diegesis of the films, but in the relationship of the films to their audiences in the present day. Furthermore, at the same time as they stay within realist aesthetic codes, all the films allude to and depict events, social tensions, and cultural divisions that the KMT wanted to pretend did not exist during the four decades of martial law. In this way, they too use the past to haunt the present within the codes of realism and modernity, as Chang Tso-chi’s films do. Finally, to turn to the second set of questions, this raises some basic questions about the often-assumed absolute divide between fantasy and realism itself. I have already suggested that the haunting quality of realist films like those by Chang Tsochi and Hou Hsiao-hsien questions the conventional division between the premodern and the fantastic on one side and the modern and the realist on the other. But we can take this thinking one step further. Realism is based on the idea of “representation”: unlike texts in the fantastic mode, there is a declared correspondence between the text and that which it represents. But insofar as there is always a temporal gap between the thing filmed and its appearance in a film, all realist films incorporate the structure of haunting in their effort to reproduce the past in the present. However, the ideology of realism (and modernity) rhetorically proclaims the absence of that gap in the term “representation.” Maybe we have to question the conventional distinction between the fantastic and the realist in terms of the usual split between that which represents reality and that

Haunted realism 49 which is pure imagination, and see that this conventional distinction is produced from within the ideology of realism itself. If we take this position on board and consider the way in which Chang Tso-chi and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films mobilize the haunting potential within realism itself, we can discern a new distinction. This is the distinction between two kinds of realist texts. First, there are those that work to suppress this haunting potential and subscribe to the kind of modernism that proclaims itself the sole and absolute truth of reality. On the other hand, there are realist films which work to make divisions, splits, and multiple truths apparent, not only as a hangover from premodernity, but also as part of modernity itself. In this way, both point to the existence of multiple modernities and the contingency of all modernities.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in Chinese, Pei Kairui (Chris Berry), “Zhumo de Xieshizhuyi: duiyu Zhang Zuoji Dianying de Guancha yu Xieshizhuyi de Sikao,” trans. Wang Junqi, Dianying xinshang [Film Appreciation Journal], no. 120 (2004): 91–95. 2 Feii Lu, “Another Cinema: Darkness and Light,” in Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 137–47. 3 Special thanks to Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh for helping me access the film, making close analysis possible. 4 Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993); Rhona J. Berenstein, Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 5 Chris Berry and Kim Soyoung, “Suri Suri Masuri: The Magic of the Korean Horror Film,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 53–60; Audrey Yue, “Preposterous Hong Kong Horror: Rouge’s (be)hindsight and A (sodomitical) Chinese Ghost Story,” in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (New York: Routledge, 2000), 364–73; John Zou, “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Man,” in Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 39–46. 6 Bliss Cua Lim, “Spectral Times: The Ghost Film as Historical Allegory,” Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique 9, no. 2 (2001): 287–329. 7 Francoise Proust, L’Histoire á Contretemps (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1994). 8 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons (London: Verso, 1998). See also Pheng Cheah, Spectral Modernity: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 9 For further discussion, see chapter 2 of Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, Cinema and Nation: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 10 Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema 27 (2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/tsai_ european_undead.html (accessed October 25, 2006). 11 A number of terms have been put forward to express this idea, including “alternative modernities,” “divergent modernities,” and so forth. However, as Harry Harootunian rightly points out, these terms inappropriately cede primacy to a Euro-American modernity, against which all other forms appear as deviations and afterthoughts of one sort or another. “Multiple modernities” avoids this problem. Harry Harootunian,

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History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163. 12 Although Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are not a good example of allegory, a non-Taiwan example that illustrates this point is Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou’s Yellow Earth, and many of the other “Fifth Generation” films that followed it. The divide between the feudal and the modern is defined as the 1949 revolution within the ideology of the People’s Republic. If these films can be considered to use the pre-1949 era to speak of the post-1949 era and the Cultural Revolution in particular, then they are examples of the use of allegory to haunt the modern with the so-called premodern.

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The impossible task of Taipei films1 Yomi Braester

In the beginning of Sharen jihua/My Whispering Plan (2002, dir. Qu Youning aka Arthur Chu),2 a teenage girl walks out of her house, greets her neighbors who are moving out, and examines the evacuation order pasted on the wall. The entire alley is marked, on both sides, with a yellow hazard tape, reading “Danger, Construction; Please Do Not Approach,” as a sign that the area is going to be demolished. The main storyline proceeds to follow the girl, Jane, and her growing estrangement from her seventh-grade classmate, Sunny. At the same time, the film also tells the story of the disappearance of a Taipei neighborhood, Baozangyan, and records its demolition in real time. As such, My Whispering Plan subscribes to what I have called “the documentary impulse” in urban cinema, that is, the use of film to capture images of fast-changing skylines and vanishing cityscapes. Yet, I will argue that My Whispering Plan also signals the limits of documentation. The record is at best partial, attesting to cinema’s inability to visualize the city’s disappearance. Moreover, the documentary impulse is a cover-up, using demolition scenes to avoid places where the cinema cannot – or is not willing – to go. My Whispering Plan is a prime example of the limits of bearing witness to the changing urban environment. As such, the film may also serve as a metaphor for the impossible task of Taiwanese urban cinema.

Sites of forgetting My Whispering Plan documents one of Taipei’s last remaining slums. The area, Baozangyan (literally “Treasure Hill,” named after the adjacent temple), lies east of Gongguan, overlooking Yung-ho on the other bank of the Xindian River. Like other neighborhoods built on public land, it is populated mostly by veteran soldiers, who came from the Mainland in 1949 and were laid off without any financial support (hence their appellation, juancun, or “veterans’ villages”). The municipal government turned a blind eye to the construction, which was strictly speaking illegal, until the gentrification of the capital became a top priority in the 1990s. On December 4, 2001, the municipal government issued an order to evacuate and demolish the area in preparation for turning it into a park. The first phase of demolition was carried out in April 2004, yet the municipal government declared the remaining residences as protected “historical buildings”3 and halted the project.

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My Whispering Plan functions as a record of Baozangyan. Most of it is shot in Baozangyan’s streets and residences. The hilly layout allows camera views from every possible angle. Handicam is used for tracking shots through the alleys, and locations are chosen to foreground the view of the river and the bridges across it. Toward the film’s ending, Jane’s family moves out of the neighborhood, and the camera captures in real time the massive demolition, dwelling on the faces of residents – played by themselves rather than by actors – whose homes are being torn down. The film also shows the aftermath, as a large swathe of Baozangyan lies wasted, filled with debris. The film spans the entire process of evacuation, from the issuance of the demolition order to the point of carrying it out, and offers a full documentation of the change at Baozangyan. My Whispering Plan does not, however, set out to become a documentary and deviates from true-to-life portrayal. The fictional plot is supported by photogenic but inaccurate images. Jane wanders in the picturesque, hilly alleys demarcated by hazard tape, although only the lower part of Baozangyan was designated for immediate demolition. The destruction seems total, even though the demolition was accompanied by a rethinking of Baozangyan’s future and plans for the preservation and renewal of the remaining part (the renewal project has been spearheaded by National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, with shifting degrees of support by the municipal government). Baozangyan was used as a convenient shooting location, regardless of the dynamics at the specific site. The film touches only fleetingly on the residents’ dissatisfaction and struggle against the municipal authorities, does not dwell on the background that led the inhabitants to take root at Baozangyan, and makes no reference to the efforts to include the existing structures in a renewal project. Baozangyan is not even mentioned by name, except once, when Sunny walks in front of a sign saying, “Creating a new scenery for Baozangyan: Taiwan’s first artistic special zone park.” Most Taipei residents are unfamiliar with Baozangyan, and despite several shots taken from a cab driving through the neighborhood, the film gives no information as to the actual location. These omissions and inaccuracies are insignificant to the plot, and may even place in sharper focus the oppressive force of urban change. Any attempt to read the film as a historical document would, however, be misleading. My Whispering Plan does not subscribe to the hard-hitting social stance of documentary films made on the evacuation and demolition of Taipei’s veterans’ villages, such as Chen Caigen de linjumen/Chen Tsai-gen and his neighbors (1996, dir. Wu Yifeng) and Women jia zai Kangleli/Green Bulldozer (1997, dir. Huang Sunquan). Yet Chu’s film presents a less flattering picture than that promoted by publications of the municipal government. A semiofficial book published in 2001 describes Baozangyan not as a bone of contention but rather as a site of nostalgia and hope: “The community at the illegal construction site of Baozangyan … will hopefully be preserved in the form of a cultural residential park…. No matter how Taipei changes, I wish that it will become a city where we will be able to read [the city’s] history in tidy and seemly spaces.”4 The description comports with the municipality’s vision of Taipei as a lived-in and livable city, evolving and keeping in touch with its past. Yet, the insipid wording

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conceals the author’s evasion of the stakes in the Baozangyan project. The glossy publication focuses on the need to “read history” – that is, to preserve Taipei’s past – in “tidy and seemly spaces,” that is, in sterilized, regulated, and prettified neighborhoods. Insofar as Baozangyan can serve as a site of memory (lieu de mémoire), as Pierre Nora labels those locations that become emblematic of a community’s history,5 it is also embroiled in a battle to implement a selective memory. The site of memory might turn into a site of forgetting. The official discourse sweeps aside questions such as the livelihood of existing communities. The glossy publication mentions the Institute of Building and Planning, but not the fact that the Institute had to intervene forcefully before the municipal government conceded. Students and teachers drew a plan for what they called in English an “artivist village” (gongsheng yizhan, literally “an art village in cohabitation [with the local population]”), a place where the original residents would have the privilege to stay in their homes, while the area would be cleaned up and artists would be given free lodging. “Artivists,” or artist-activists, became an apt addition to the place, which turned into a symbol of resistance to cultureblind planning by the municipal government. The official publication’s grudging acknowledgement of social issues is also evident in the insistence on the term “illegal construction” (weijian). Although legally unprotected, the area is no different from the many other veterans’ villages around Taiwan. The book is careful to include Baozangyan’s story in the chapter “Destruction and Preservation” rather than under the section heading “Veterans’ Villages and State Housing.” My Whispering Plan is clearly aware of the stakes. As a press release states, the film “reflect[s] the emptiness, loneliness, sense of peril and uncertainty that the Taiwanese society is facing.”6 My Whispering Plan takes the middle ground, alluding to unease but leaving the source of tension undefined.

Sanctuary of fallen angels The unease with the changing cityscape and Taipei’s unstable spaces is conveyed mostly through Jane and her troubled relationship with Sunny. The sweet friendship portrayed in the first part of the film slowly turns into possessive jealousy on Jane’s part. As Sunny, a prettier and more sociable girl, develops her friendship with a number of classmates, Jane becomes estranged and irritable. Even though Sunny continues to profess being best friends, Jane’s unrealistic expectations to have Sunny all to herself result in Jane’s violent fantasies. She imagines Sunny being run over by a car and stabbed to death. She records her fantasies in a notebook, manga style, and titles it “Murder Plan” (which is also the film’s Chinese title). The trauma of being evacuated is shifted onto interpersonal relationships and encoded in the manga plot. The plot of the manga is central to understanding the storyline. Jane’s notebook, which causes the final rupture between the two friends, sports on its cover the title of a popular manga series, Tianshi jinliequ/Angel Sanctuary (original Japanese Tenshi Kinryouku). Jane is a fan of the series, as attested also by a poster hanging in her room. Angel Sanctuary focuses on the angel Alexiel, who is punished for rebelling

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against heaven. Her inanimate body is incased in crystal in Heaven, while her soul is made to reincarnate on Earth, each incarnation doomed to a violent death. Alexiel’s present avatar is the boy Mudou Setsuna, who has an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, Mudo Sara. Alexiel’s estranged twin brother, Rosiel, takes revenge by killing Sara. Jane’s fantasies seem to take after the manga plot – first she makes angel costumes for herself and Sunny, casting them as loving sisters in the mold of Setsuna and Sara, and tells Sunny: “I’m your bodyguard.” Yet after Sunny invites another girl to join their costume play, Jane retreats and makes herself up as Rosiel, with the iconic blue arabesque over the left half of her face and shoulder. Rosiel, a beautiful androgynous “inorganic angel,” is portrayed as a tortured soul. The arabesque signs are a symptom of his disintegration into an ugly and vile person. As Rosiel, Jane lets her frustrations and hatred free and wishes for Jane’s death. The final twist takes place when Jane surprisingly commits suicide. Jane continues, in fact, to follow the path set by Angel Sanctuary – Rosiel ends up asking Alexiel to help him end his suffering and facilitate his death. Jane’s fantasies are determined by Angel Sanctuary, and she emplots her nervous breakdown to comport with her manga character. In conflating the manga plot and her life, Jane takes to the extreme the accepted conventions of enacting manga through fan activities such as tongrenzhi (Japanese doujinshi, amateur manga) and cosplay (costume play). Like many other girls of their age who take to manga culture, Jane and Sunny also take part in cosplay – wearing costumes of their favorite manga characters in gatherings of youngsters of similar interests. Jane communicates her feelings toward Sunny through making the matching angel costumes. Her final disappointment with Sunny takes place at a cosplay gathering, after which she returns to her home in Baozangyan and sees a costume-clad apparition that further prods her delusional state of mind. Jane’s hallucinations, seeing Sunny and herself as reincarnations of Alexiel and Rosiel, are both the symptom of her instability and the result of role-playing. The manga provides Jane with a cultural matrix for interpreting her emotions, yet the source of her strained relationship with Sunny harks back to the impending demolition of Baozangyan. Jane’s insecurity is fueled by Sunny’s more confident attitude toward urban space. Sunny is at first unfamiliar with Baozangyan and is easily scared by its dark spaces. She is a passing guest, sleeping over at Jane’s while her home is in turmoil. Sunny’s father is mostly absent and spends his time in the Mainland and the US; the mother cares little about her daughter, who stays with Jane for days. And yet, Sunny has a home to which she can return, as she does at the end. As the film’s ending credits roll, a long take shows Sunny go out onto a veranda. A slow zoom-out reveals the side of an apartment building, with neighbors milling about and performing daily activities. Sunny’s home is far from affluent, and the shot may allude to a community much more loosely connected than that at Baozangyan; yet her abode is at least a standard construction, not impacted by the massive demolition and evacuation. Jane’s jealousy of her friend is also fueled by the poignant discrepancy between their living conditions. The image of Sunny’s apartment building – a frontal shot that places the girl firmly within the architectural context – stands in direct contrast to an earlier

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shot that shows Jane standing at night on the rooftop of her Baozangyan dwelling, overlooking the river. The girl, shot from behind, disconnected from surrounding structures, looks desolately at the lights of cars moving over the elevated freeway. Jane dons her angel outfit, as if trying to fly away from the misery of her home. As I have noted elsewhere, in discussing Lai Shengchuan’s (aka Stan Lai) Feixia Ada/Red Lotus Society (1994), flying over the city may be construed as an escape from the anxiety of urban life and stresses the loneliness and estrangement of the flyer.7 High-rises stand as signs for the yearning to fly over the city. Stan Lai’s film shows the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Building; in My Whispering Plan, the Taipei 101 Building can be discerned in the background, in front of the winged Jane. Jane is an angel without a heaven to which to return and without the haven of a fixed home. She retreats into her cosplay role because Baozangyan provides no sense of security. In mapping Taipei onto manga space, she finds safety in an imaginary angel sanctuary. The connection between Jane’s fantasies and the demolition of her neighborhood is underlined in the film’s last shot. Following the credits comes a surreal image of the now-dead Jane, in angel outfit. She is more content and prettier, and the costume sits better on her; she has at last turned into an angel. By contrast, her old room shows the signs of neglect after the evacuation. The walls are covered with graffiti, similar to the scribblings that Jane and Sunny used for an Ouija board-like game. As a building designated for demolition (or is it that the building too has already passed on?), it bears the marks of ghostly existence. Human death, the disintegration of the community, and the crumbling of urban spaces cannot be separated from one another.

The purloined hazard tape The connection between the two students’ troubled relationship and Baozangyan’s anticipated dismantling is conveyed through an unexpected reference to demolition in the cosplay scene. Jane, distraught and unable to find Sunny, wanders around the cosplay meeting place. As she makes way in the crowd, she walks past a hazard tape extended across the large hall, used as a waist-level separation line. The tape, bearing the words “Danger, Construction; Please Do Not Approach,” is out of place, since no construction is in sight. Yet the appearance of the tape at this point comports with Jane’s state of mind. The bright yellow tape intrudes upon her field of vision as a subliminal yet forceful sign. The same image that appears in the film’s beginning returns to haunt the girl at the moment of separation from her friend. Jane’s insecurity in her relationship with Sunny is compounded by the menace of being uprooted from her home at Baozangyan. The hazard tape appears only in Jane’s peripheral vision. In contrast with her careful attention to the evacuation order, Jane dashes past the tape, which remains most of the time in a blur. Jane acknowledges neither the tape nor the source of her unease. She walks away, returns to Baozangyan, strides intently past the taped alleyway, and finds a place to sit down in a lane in which the yellow tape is unexpectedly absent. It is at this point that she sees for the first time her alter-ego as an

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angel. From this point, reality and violent fantasy blur in Jane’s mind, and the film spins into a vertiginous flurry of alternative visions. With the intrusion of the hazard tape, an indicator not so much of borderlines as of the disappearance of spatial landmarks, Jane’s world falls apart. The mental instability and plot uncertainty signaled by the tape gives way, toward the end of the film, to an undeniable and harsh reality. A long sequence details the tearing down of Baozangyan’s lower level. Buildings collapse as the residents look on, and the camera records their grief-stricken expression. The scene is followed by the last interaction between Jane and Sunny. Jane’s fantasy of murdering Sunny with a pair of scissors leads to the suicide. A shot of Jane’s family sorting through its belongings in the open informs us that Jane takes her life at the same time that the awaited evacuation is in progress. The unsettling effect of demolition is presented through the character of an eccentric squatter, who feels menaced by the heavy machinery. In a telling shot, he is seen scurrying through a narrow alleyway, framed by the yellow hazard tape, as if entrapped. Later, in a sequence following Jane’s self-immolation, he sits on the rubble, the image of consummate dislocation. In committing suicide, Jane has avoided facing these images. The hazard tape, as an ever-present reminder of the coming loss, signals Jane’s willful blindness to the vanishing of familiar spaces. The tape’s message is “purloined” in the sense evoked in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The letter is concealed by being placed in plain view, inside out. With the exception of Jane’s first encounter with the tape, the warning printed on it is lost in a blur of frenzied motion. The hazard tape at the cosplay meeting hall is turned inside out, making the writing even less easily discernible. The ubiquity of the tape contributes, paradoxically, to its invisibility. Demolition leaves few traces behind; Jane stands as an extreme case of the witness who, due to her own demise, cannot testify to the destruction. For demolition to wipe out the collective memory of place, it must be accompanied by erasing the memory of demolition itself. With the utter obliteration of Baozangyan’s lower layer, the hazard tape is removed together with the buildings it demarcated. By inscribing constructions with their impending erasure, the hazard tape can also imprint the import of the disappearing residences. Yet in showing the hazard tape as ultimately unreadable, My Whispering Plan points to the odds stacked against collective memory in the absence of landmarks and communities to carry out the commemoration. Conscious and constant work is needed to ensure that sites of memory do not slip into sites of forgetting. The demolished swathe at Baozangyan is now covered with grass and trees, and the publications of the municipal government contribute to an amnesic version of the place’s history. The activists connected to NTU’s Graduate Institute of Building and Planning initiate events and programs – including film screenings and performance art – to enliven the remaining part of the neighborhood and preserve its collective memory. One student, Guo Boxiu, has made a documentary film to record the old neighborhood and its demolition.

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My Whispering Plan responds in part to the same concerns for leaving a record, yet it also shows the limitations of filmmaking in bearing witness.

The impossible task of Taiwan urban cinema In choosing Baozangyan as the film’s location, and by timing the shooting to coincide with the neighborhood’s demolition, the director Arthur Chu places his work within the context of documenting Taipei’s metamorphosis. Like other filmmakers before him – prominently Wan Ren, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang – Chu deploys Taipei’s cityscape as a mirror of social issues and employs social problems as a metaphor for the changing city. The scene in which Jane’s family takes a photo, as a souvenir of their days at Baozangyan that are drawing to an end, further underlines how the film constitutes an extension of photography and is motivated by the documentary impulse. Yet Chu also shares with his predecessors the challenge of portraying not only the material conditions or even the intangible social context of the city. To fully represent the changing urban environment, a film would have to address what has already disappeared. Tsai Ming-liang, the director who has dealt most extensively with places either no longer in existence or doomed to be torn down, has staked those liminal spaces through spectral references. The father’s apparition in Ni nabian jidian/What Time Is It There (2002) and the ghosts in Busan/Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) join the phantomlike existence of landmarks such as the defunct veterans’ village at the site of the Da-an Forest Park in Aiqing wansui/Vive l’amour (1994) and the overpass over Chung-hsiao East Road in Tianqiao bu jian le/The Skywalk is Gone (2002). Chu’s film follows a similar tactic by portraying Baozangyan as an angels’ sanctuary, a twilight zone that bears, in the film’s last shot, the ghostly traces of an Ouija board. The biggest challenge for My Whispering Plan lies not in documenting the city but rather in denoting its disappearance. Images of demolition are the pornography of urban existence, stark visual images that ignore desires for what cannot be visualized. The cinema is put to the test when required to represent the invisible absence left by material spaces, without recourse to nostalgia and the concomitant fetishizing of landmarks. The city as absence is represented in My Whispering Plan through the hazard tape and the spaces it outlines and demarcates as out of bounds, for the characters and the film camera alike. Throughout the film, the tape delimits the actors’ movement. The stretched pieces of tape do not present a physical obstacle, yet shots such as those of the entrapped homeless person show the characters to be confined by the tape. The close-up on Jane’s face while she scrutinizes the evacuation order behind the tape also emphasizes the tape’s function as a physical and mental barrier. Right after looking at the posted order, Jane stoops down and looks through a gap in the wall into a dark room. Beyond the tape lie spaces that remain mostly unexplored. When Jane and Sunny venture into those rooms, it is for brief and scary moments; only the homeless person feels comfortable in them. The spaces designated for demolition are forbidden, and crossing the yellow line is presented as transgression.

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The camera’s field of vision, too, is blocked by the yellow tape. Jane and Sunny always stand in front of the tape so that it defines the mise-en-scène and confines the depth of field. Many long shots are roughly symmetrical, flanked by the yellow tape that funnels the vision toward the point of interest. Medium shots dwell on the figures while the yellow tape stretches across in the background. The significant details are in the forefront, and objects behind the tape are out of focus. The hazard tape – signaling the demolition process of which it warns – allows and constricts visibility not only to the protagonists but also to the camera. The limits of cinematic vision are also evident in the cosplay meeting, when Jane hastens past the hazard tape, ignoring it and overlooking its strange appearance out of place. The scene is presented in rare point-of-view shots (other POV shots in the film denote Jane’s fantasies). Unlike the frequent over-the-shoulder shots throughout the film, which confirm the characters’ relation to their surroundings, the POV shot at the cosplay comports with Jane’s dislocation. The camera becomes complicit with Jane’s disregard of the hazard tape and suppression of the impending destruction. Even though My Whispering Plan ends up showing stark images of demolition, of poignancy unseen on the Taiwanese screen since Da cuo che/The Wrong Car also known as Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (1983, dir. Yu Kanping), it does so only after establishing that direct representation – filming across the hazard tape – is partial, transgressive, and suspect. The allusion in My Whispering Plan to the obstacles in the way of perceiving and representing urban change provides an occasion to reflect on the tasks of urban Taiwan cinema. Filmmakers must find a balance between depicting specific locations and portraying space as absence. The hazard tape, as a borderline that signals its own erasure, points to the hesitation between the wish to outline Baozangyan’s topography and the need to underline its disappearance. It is emblematic that the tape’s location compromises the realistic record. Many shots, including the one in which Jane examines the evacuation order, give the incorrect impression that Baozangyan’s upper levels were also designated for immediate demolition. The factual inaccuracy is inconsequential, yet the tape’s displacement is symptomatic of the need to find new images of the transforming city. Taipei’s architectural heritage has mostly disappeared, and the old veterans’ villages have been razed almost without exception. In an interview, the director Stan Lai commented that while shooting Red Lotus Society he ran into Tsai Mingliang’s crew filming at Da-an Forest Park.8 There simply aren’t that many locations in Taipei, he explained, and it takes much work to find new angles when using the same spots over and over. Even Baozangyan, a relatively unknown location, has been used in several films, most notably Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Nanguo zaijian, nanguo/Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996). The scarcity of novel images may be an apt metaphor for Taipei’s increasingly uniform skyline, but it presents a major difficulty to filmmakers. The impossible task of Taipei cinema lies in finding a new city for every film, and yet at the same time to allude to the same place and root the images in its specific locations. The anxiety of influence is magnified by the presence of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang, who have already shaped the city in the image of their lenses.

The impossible task of Taipei films

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The next thing in Taipei cinema will appear sooner or later. It remains to be seen if it will only be, like My Whispering Plan, a response to the growing burden of forgetting, or, like Taibei wan jiu zhao wu/Twenty Something Taipei (2002, dir. Dai Liren), a sign of the full disappearance of Taipei’s daily life under the gloss of the city’s gentrification.

Notes 1 I thank the OURs group of urban activists and Arthur Chu for providing me with valuable materials for this paper. 2 Sharen jihua/My Whispering Plan. R.O.C. Taiwan, 2002. Mandarin, 146 minutes. Director: Qu Youning/Arthur Chu. Producers: Huang Liyu/Li-Yu Huang and Huang Wanbo/ Ken Huang. Director of Photography: Zhou Yiwen/Ivan Chou. Sound: Du Duzhi/TuChih Tu. Editor: Chen Xiaoqing/Hsiao-Ching Chen. Distributor: Flash World Entertainment. 3 ROC Team for Urban Reform, “Gongsheng yizhan: Baozangyan lishi juluo shezhi yishucun jihua weituo guihua” [Artivist village: Plan proposal for establishing an artists village at the historical settlement of Baozangyan] (unpublished booklet, May 5, 2003). 4 Xu Yunbin, ed., Zhanqian guhou: Taibei de jueban, fuke yu xinsheng [Gazing forward and looking back: Taipei’s out-of-print, reprints and renewed] (Taipei: Taibei shizhengfu xinwenchu, 2001), 189. 5 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. 6 “Sharen jihua” [My Whispering Plan] (publicity pamphlet, 2002). 7 Yomi Braester, “‘If We Could Remember Everything, We Would Be Able to Fly’: Taipei’s Cinematic Poetics of Demolition,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 29–61. 8 Lai Shengchuan, personal interview, September 2, 1999.

4

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema1 Robert Chi

When we speak of national cinema, we are really speaking of a relation, a series of questions, between nation and cinema. The problematizing of the nation as a modern social form is based on the axiom that the nation is not an a priori or natural category; rather, the nation is a man-made thing and therefore has a history. This in turn leads to two important and interrelated principles. First, the imagination of the Self implies recognition of an Other. This is the Lacanian psychoanalytical adaptation of the Saussurean linguistic principle of the negative differentiation of signs. Second, the modern social form of the nation itself circulates, develops, transforms, and means internationally. Both of these principles are at work in Benedict Anderson’s highly influential definition of nations as imagined communities: the performative imagining of this nation implies the recognition of a Benjaminian homogeneous, empty time-space occupied by other nations as well, and particular nationalisms can arise out of colonial, migrant, and exile cultures. Likewise, the historical foundations of cinema as a cultural artifact lie in the very circulation, promiscuity, and deterritorialization of images. With respect to onscreen conventions, styles, and imagery, the repertoire of what constitutes a particular national cinema may in fact come from other cinemas. In other words a particular national cinema need not be limited to films that are produced within that nation; what is national about cinema and what is cinematic about the nation may have as much to do with how foreign films represent that nation. By extension the same is true when we consider things like contexts of production and distribution, including technological, industrial, legal, and economic conditions. Overall then, as a picture, product, and projection, cinema inflects rather than reflects the national. With respect to Taiwan, this is important for two reasons. First, in a narrower field, the film industry in Taiwan continues to face the challenges of globalization, Hollywood, and transnational Chinese cinemas. Second, in a broader field, the very nationhood of Taiwan overall continues to be a question rather than an answer. The major doubt expressed in that question has to do with the inescapable national Other of Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or Mainland China. The latter consistently and insistently claims Taiwan as a part of its own proper nation and therefore ultimately claims the authority to represent Taiwan. So I propose to examine how films made in China have represented Taiwan. This

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 61 is a problem of representation in the fullest sense, including esthetics, semiotics, and politics.2 Such an examination leads to a better understanding of how a quasinational Other, or a national quasi-Other, can be a site for questioning relations between cinema and nation. This examination is also eccentric and urgent to the very extent that the production of cultural knowledge in and about Taiwan has increasingly shied away from considering Mainland China. There are political, ideological, and pragmatic reasons for this tendency, but regardless of one’s actual political stance with respect to the relation between Taiwan and China, one should not focus exclusively on some more comfortable Other, such as America or Hollywood. Since the political division of Taiwan and Mainland China in 1949, feature fiction films made in those two places have only occasionally depicted contemporary life on the other side. Usually such depictions are indirect and fleeting; very rarely does all or most of the story take place on the other side. There are of course obvious political and institutional conditions that encourage such blind spots. Those conditions include taboos such as those of state and industry policies and those developed and felt personally as disinterest and uncertainty. Those conditions also include positive incentives that point in other directions, such as institutional and personal desires to promote optimistic images of life closer to hand. The results of these incentives are visible in the cinema of the 1960s in the strikingly similar modes of China’s socialist realism and Taiwan’s healthy realism. Finally, of course, those blinding conditions include very practical considerations like the lack of appropriate performers, shooting locations, stories and scripts about the other side, and other kinds of resources. Among the few films made in Mainland China since 1949 that have depicted modern-day Taiwan are Spirit of the Sea (Hai hun, 1957, dir. Xu Tao); Operation Cougar (Meizhou bao xingdong, 1988, dir. Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang); and My Bittersweet Taiwan (Taiwan wangshi, 2003, dir. Zheng Dongtian). Given the troubled political and commercial relations between China and Taiwan, none of these films have been widely seen if at all in Taiwan. Instead, I would like to focus on the peculiar ways in which these three films combine certain political issues and esthetic strategies. This analysis goes beyond a description of “(mis)representations of Taiwan” if or when one of the major goals of such description is identification of ideologically induced errors and the correction of those errors in favor of true or accurate representations. The more interesting question of course is how such “misrepresentations” come about and what they reveal about the past and the present and even what they might suggest about the future in ideology, politics, economics, culture, and most specifically, cinema itself. Spirit of the Sea remakes Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), setting the mutiny onboard a late 1940s warship belonging to the KMT (Kuomintang, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek). The film adds a crucial Hollywood-pastiche sequence involving brawling sailors and bargirls in Taiwan’s southern port city of Kaohsiung, a sequence that takes place in the shadow of the February 28 Incident. Operation Cougar is about a hijacked Taiwanese plane that makes an emergency landing in Mainland China. The incident forces secret antiterrorist cooperation between

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China and Taiwan. Although the action is limited to the plane and its surroundings, there are ample narrative references to unfolding diplomatic events in other places, including Taiwan. Those events are represented through a montage of still images, a strategy that is “cheap” but also quite unusual in Mainland Chinese cinema. Based on a true story, My Bittersweet Taiwan examines the fate of a Taiwanese man who went to the Mainland before 1949 and then remained separated from his family in Taiwan for half a century. The film argues for a humanist understanding of China and Taiwan as part of the same family. At the same time, the film mimics the style of some of the most famous nativist Taiwanese films of the last few decades, especially those of Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is important to note here that the three films in question belong to different historical moments of production as well as to different genres. Spirit of the Sea is a revolutionary historical fiction of the Cold War. Operation Cougar is a political action thriller that appeared during the end of martial law in Taiwan, the opening of civilian travel from Taiwan to China, and the Tiananmen movement in China. My Bittersweet Taiwan is a nostalgic rural melodrama made after the election of Chen Shui-bian to and the retirement of Jiang Zemin from the presidencies on the two sides of the Taiwan Straits. From this perspective, China’s cinematic Taiwan is sequentially the antithesis of revolution, a “wild” political problem that may be solved by both cooperation and force (or better yet, cooperative force), and a lost family member whose kinship is guaranteed through culture, tradition, and blood. This summary of the three films into a narrative of film-political history is based on the notion that films express the historical conditions of their production.

Taiwan in Maoist Chinese cinema Spirit of the Sea opens with the crush of KMT military and civilian personnel attempting to flee Shanghai by ship just before the KMT’s defeat by the Communists in 1949. The KMT warship Gulang is ordered to set sail.3 The last crew member to board is Chen Chunguan, played by Zhao Dan, whose career as a movie star stretched from the leftist cinema of 1930s Shanghai well into the Maoist period after 1949. Troops left on shore open fire on the ship in frustration, and the ship’s officers order the sailors to return fire at their own compatriots. After passing through a fierce storm, the Gulang approaches Taiwan. The US warship guarding the Kaohsiung harbor fails to return the salute that the Gulang offers; instead, the American sailors jeer and throw banana peels. During shore leave, Chunguan meets a Taiwanese waitress, Wen Mengyuan, in the Hollywood Hotel. Mengyuan tells Chunguan that her father, also a sailor, was killed by the KMT while taking part in what she refers to as “the February 28 rebellion.” Later the Chinese sailors and the US sailors fight in the bar, and as a result Mengyuan is fired. The Gulang is ordered to set sail again, and in despair Mengyuan drowns herself in the ocean. The Gulang is ordered back to Shanghai in order to blockade the mouth of the Yangtze River. The Gulang intercepts a shipful of fleeing civilians; the officers lead the plundering and sinking of the civilian ship. The more physically fit civilians are towed in a small boat behind the Gulang, with the intention that they will be forced

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 63 to fight against the Communists. Incensed, Chunguan and several other sailors set the civilians free. The officers punish the youngest and smallest, Little Yu; he later dies. Using the code word “spirit of the sea,” Chunguan leads the sailors in mutiny, and the officers are killed or captured. Enemy ships and planes approach, but after the Gulang signals its new allegiance, it is allowed to pass unharmed. “Spirit of the sea” is an informal name for the horizontally-striped T-shirt that sailors all over the world wear. In the film enlisted men wear it, but officers do not. It therefore symbolizes revolution by the oppressed through a body marked with both class and gender. There are no women sailors, and even if there were it would be hard to imagine them wearing a shirt that visually serves as a second skin that tightly covers and thus reveals muscular, masculine torsos. The title of the film might therefore be rendered into English in the plural in order to emphasize the collectivity of the heroic mutineers: they are the Spirits of the Sea. As Mengyuan tells Chunguan, her father once said that only those with “spirit” (linghun) become sailors. The film reflects this metaphorization through the repeated audiovisual motif of crashing surf and roiling waves. At the same time, the mutineers adopt the phrase “spirit(s) of the sea” as their password. This turns the phrase from a name into a signifier, a sign that points functionally to revolution without having any particular content of its own. The title of the film is thus empty, yet elevated. It serves a triple function as (1) a symbolic name for a material object that in turn symbolizes both the moral and ideological goodness of its wearer and the central conflict of the story understood in Marxist-sociological terms; (2) an allegorical theme about the unfolding of revolutionary Geist; and (3) a pure semiotic sign, a code word. Furthermore, this triple coding of the phrase “spirit of the sea” turns on the particular presence of Taiwan in the film. Mengyuan remarks upon Chunguan’s “spirit of the sea” shirt because her own father used to wear one, too. This mention of her father prompts the revelation that he died during the February 28 Incident. With the accumulation of hints – shirt, naval virtue, Taiwan rebellion – the scene ends with a foreshadowing close-up of Chunguan pensively whispering the phrase “spirit of the sea” to himself. The Taiwan rebellion, in other words, inspires Chunguan not only to engineer the mutiny but also to appropriate the phrase “spirit of the sea” as its password. During the Seventeen Years of the PRC (1949–1966, from Liberation to the Cultural Revolution), only a few Mainland Chinese films openly referred to Sergei Eisenstein. For, as is often noted by supporters and critics alike, Chinese cinema usually favored narrative flow over formal esthetic effects produced through selfconsciously artificial technical means like Soviet montage. In this sense Pudovkin was a more likely inspiration for Chinese filmmakers. Moreover, by the time Mainland China became the PRC and officially welcomed the USSR as its mentor, Eisenstein had long been displaced by Stalinist socialist realism. One film of the Seventeen Years that does clearly refer to Eisenstein is Nie Er (Zheng Junli, 1959), a biopic about the young leftist musician who wrote movie songs in the 1930s, including what would later become the national anthem of the PRC, “The March of the Volunteers.” The climactic psychological montage depicting Nie Er writing

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that song includes a scene of protesters being massacred by KMT troops on a set of stone steps, an image recalling the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. But instead of recreating a single image or sequence, Spirit of the Sea takes Battleship Potemkin as an overall blueprint. This return to the revolutionary filmmaker who most strongly combined theory and practice is an acknowledgment of the convoluted genealogy of Chinese cinema. On the one hand, its immediate inspiration was Soviet cinema. On the other hand it is well known that Eisenstein himself took a great interest in American filmmakers on the cusp of classical Hollywood, most notably D. W. Griffith. And certainly the Shanghai studio-based film industry during its golden age of the 1930s was modeled closely on Hollywood. The strange debt that Spirit of the Sea owes to Hollywood is clearest in the sequence set in Taiwan. The sequence is indeed on a set, and clearly so. The look of the space and architecture, along with details of decoration, anonymous extras on the street, sound, and general hustle and bustle all combine to recreate not so much an urban entertainment district in 1940s Taiwan as a studio back-lot representation of such a district. The set includes various markers of “American decadence” such as neon signs, Coca-Cola logos, and a billboard advertising the musical film The Time, the Place, and the Girl (David Butler, USA 1946). The most glaring marker, however, is the center of the action, the Hollywood Hotel. Besides its large exterior sign, it features an entrance of double-swinging doors (like a Wild West saloon) and bead curtain, hotel-uniformed cigarette boys, simpering waiters, doll-like waitresses, drunken and disheveled American sailors who whistle and paw at the waitresses, both dissolute and righteous Chinese clientele, and convenient guest rooms upstairs. Finally, the highlights of the soundtrack in this sequence include whistles and hoots, random American-English sounding shouts, and a jaded combo of Chinese musicians playing – at the request of the Americans – the Japanese song “China Night.” Dating back to the late 1930s, “China Night” had become very popular in Japanese-occupied territories including Shanghai and Taiwan by 1940 through its association with the movie star and singer Li Xianglan. In particular, the song is featured in the Japanese produced film of the same title, China Night (in Japanese: Shina no yoru, 1940, Toho, dir. Osamu Fushimizu), also released in Chinese as Shanghai Night (Shanghai zhi ye). Li plays a Chinese woman who is saved by a Japanese man in Shanghai, and romance ensues; the film can be thought of as part of the cultural side of Japan’s invasion of China. After the war Li Xianglan was revealed to be Yamaguchi Yoshiko (later also known in English as Shirley Yamaguchi), a Japanese woman born and raised in Manchuria. Since she was technically not Chinese, she escaped persecution as a traitor. Instead she returned safely to Japan, where she continued her acting and singing career for another decade. She continued to be so popular in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia that she appeared in a number of Hong Kong–Japanese co-produced films. From the perspective of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism, however, she was a most unnerving enemy, signifying the betrayal not of national allegiance but of national identity itself. All of this makes the song’s performance in Spirit of the Sea most striking: at this moment, the woman singer sings the opening lines

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 65 in Japanese: “China night, China night/The harbor lights, the purple night/ The sails unfurl, the ship of dreams.” The ship of dreams indeed! In Japanese this last line reads no boru janku no yume no fune, literally “raise the junk’s [sails], the ship of dreams.”4 Here the word janku juts out conspicuously, for it is a word common in English and other European languages, and it is rendered phonetically in Japanese through katakana script. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word ‘junk’ is of Southeast Asian origin and names a kind of sailing vessel. The word was adopted into Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other European colonial languages, after which it eventually became a Japanese word as well. In the Anglophone colonial imaginary, a junk is a particularly Chinese sailing vessel, so much so that it is to this day one of the most internationally recognizable icons of Hong Kong. The third line of the song makes the junk synonymous with the ship of dreams – the latter “ship” (fune) appearing in the Japanese lyrics through kanji or Chinese-style characters. This grammatical and typographical maneuver brings together colonialism; the disjuncture between speech and writing, or better yet between different kinds of speech and different kinds of writing; the worldwide circulation of goods, people, and images; and the historical problematics of representation in all senses. This series continues in Spirit of the Sea since it is American sailors who request or order this Japanese song, thus forcing the Chinese to betray themselves as Japanese colonial subjects. Conversely then it is through the screen of Japan’s then-recent invasion that the Chinese subjects both in the film and watching the film would apprehend the American liberation of Taiwan as a new colonialism. As in the film China Night, that screen is one of familiarity, sexuality, and affect. Moreover, the mise-en-scène here constitutes a classic staging of spectatorship, theatricality, and reflexivity. Thus within just a few moments, the good sailors of the Gulang find themselves awash in national shame and, upon protesting, make the acquaintance of the unexpectedly righteous Mengyuan, whose name tellingly rhymes with meng yuan or “source of dreams.” At the diegetic level the film moves from one waterfront to another, with both the Shanghai Bund and seaside Taiwan being cultural and political contact zones. Shanghai and Taiwan are thus chaotic and decadent, respectively, and they are the two landings of evil between which the Gulang vacillates. Furthermore, it may be said that in all fiction films diegetic settings are simulacra to the extent that they are not depicted but rather constructed through an assemblage of shots from different places. For example, an establishing shot of a building exterior may be followed by an interior shot that was actually taken in a different building. This imaginary space is simulated on the level of the audiovisual text rather than on the level of the profilmic, the way the Taiwanese street is in the film. Indeed, despite the establishing shots of the Shanghai Bund in the beginning of the film, the closer shots on the quay that fill in the action of the opening scene were staged in Qingdao.5 Furthermore, the rest of the Taiwan section of the film, including outdoor shots outside Mengyuan’s house and on a seaside jetty, were no doubt not photographed in Taiwan either. We might therefore say that the film is more “honest” about Taiwan in the sense that by foregrounding the street outside the

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Hollywood Hotel, the film claims for Taiwan the status of nothing more than a fake and “foreign-styled” set. In other words, the Taiwan of Spirit of the Sea is both visually and diegetically present “and” unreal as land or territory. It is suspended between visibility and irrecoverability.

Taiwan in Reform Era Chinese cinema Operation Cougar was made three decades after Spirit of the Sea, but it continues to use Taiwan as image and as sign on the level of the audiovisual text in order to face new conditions of representation – and to produce new possibilities – during the post-Mao era of reforms initiated in 1978. Operation Cougar begins on September 3 of an unspecified year. A private jet carrying Qu Xiaozhen, a business and political leader in Taiwan, is hijacked on its way from Taipei to Seoul by the “Taiwanese Black Asia Special Operations Group.” The hijacker Zheng Xianping directs the plane toward Manila, but because the plane is damaged during the hijacking, the pilot has to land it in China. Zheng demands the release of Liu Tingjun, the group’s leader, from prison in Taiwan. Chinese officials are thus forced to begin communicating secretly but directly with Taiwan officials for the first time in 40 years. Taiwan sends a special team led by Huang Jingru to the landing site in a civilian “Cougar” model helicopter, hence the codename “Operation Cougar.” Huang and the Chinese commander Liang Zhuang determine that the hijackers had used the young woman Ah Li, Liu Tingjun’s lover and a friend of Qu Xiaozhen’s male secretary Zhou, to board the plane before takeoff. The Chinese forces led by Liang Zhuang attempt to sabotage the plane, but they fail, and the Chinese second-in-command is killed. The Chinese forces find that the hijackers have an accomplice in the woods who is in radio contact with Zheng. The Chinese forces use this accomplice to trick Zheng into thinking that the plane has caught fire. (The film declines to explain how hijackers who did not originally plan to land in China happen to have an accomplice on the scene, complete with radio and binoculars. But this hole in the plot may be as much an example of unforeseen infiltration as it is a sign of a weak script.) The hijackers begin to exit the plane, but before snipers on the ground can fire, the accomplice warns Zheng of the trick and the hijackers reboard the plane. The hijackers retaliate by executing a female flight attendant. In the afternoon the Taiwan troops attack but are repulsed. In retaliation the hijackers execute Qu Xiaozhen’s secretary Zhou. Huang Jingru finally agrees to convince Taiwan to release Liu Tingjun to the hijackers. As the sun sets and both sides await the arrival of Liu Tingjun, the hijackers demand another hostage from the ground forces, and Liang Zhuang volunteers to go. That evening Liu Tingjun arrives by helicopter. The hijackers and hostages exit the plane and move toward the helicopter. The ground troops open fire and kill the hijackers; Ah Li, Liang Zhuang, and Liu Tingjun are all killed as well. Huang Jingru leads the remaining forces away at sunrise. The film ends with a nondiegetic pop song about parting at dawn that plays over a montage consisting of the remaining helicopters flying away plus various key

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 67 shots recapitulating the whole story. The final shot of the film displays the following text: “Journalists from around the world have investigated whether or not Beijing and Taipei have once had secret contact and cooperation, but both sides have consistently denied it.” Operation Cougar is an anomaly in the directorial career of Zhang Yimou; many fans, critics, and scholars pay little attention to it. In fact, it was only codirected by Zhang, and it was made by the Xi’an Film Studio as the state-run Chinese film industry was trying to negotiate three contingencies. The first was the relatively new idea of a domestic commercial-entertainment cinema. The second was the internationally successful but domestically unpopular and politically sensitive art films of the Fifth Generation, many of which the Xi’an studio had produced. The third was the impact on the domestic film market of various foreign cinemas – most notably, of course, Hong Kong and Hollywood. The film’s contemporary actionsuspense plot therefore showcases what were then new techniques for staging gunfights, explosions, and blood bursts.6 Therefore, like Spirit of the Sea, Operation Cougar alludes to Hollywood in a cinematically mediated way. Where the earlier film takes from Hollywood a picture of Taiwan under American colonialism, as well as the name of a central setting, the later film makes “America” the surprising and empty code word of its title. For there is no diegetic justification other than the name of a particular model of helicopter for naming the counterterrorism operation “cougar” (Meizhou bao, literally “American panther”). The America in the Chinese title is the continent rather than the country, Meizhou rather than Meiguo. This makes the reference less oriented toward nation-states and more oriented toward the idea of geographic landmass that exceeds national borders. Thus the title reveals territory to be a problematic concept with respect to nationhood and sovereignty. It is a concept that despite culturalist and economic arguments still remains the strategic foundation for China’s goal of unifying Taiwan with the Mainland. Although Operation Cougar is at best an average film, it does exhibit several important features. Most prominent is the narrative-aesthetic technique that emplots the story within a broad international context while focusing the main action in and around the hijacked airplane. That technique pairs a nondiegetic male voiceover with still images of meetings as well as streets scenes in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, New York, and Washington. The technique is used seven times, thus punctuating the audiovisual narrative and repeatedly positioning the story in relation to that broader international context. But the technique is no slapdash affair. Each bit of voiceover develops the international-relations story, and the images are sequenced to reflect this in the manner of a comic strip narrative. Or to be more accurate, since the images are coordinated with that authoritative voiceover, the seven sections in question take the form of a slide lecture. For example, when the voiceover announces that Taiwan agrees to allow a Chinese representative to fly from Hong Kong to Taipei, the sequence builds roughly from a plane to the Presidential Palace in Taipei to various bureaucrats and military men shaking hands and engaging in an office meeting. Likewise, when the voiceover announces that Taiwan is sending a special team in an unmarked

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civilian Cougar helicopter, the sequence cuts to a moving image of that helicopter as it approaches the landing site, thus bringing the narrative back to the immediate context of the hijacking. The result is that the realism of the latter is that of a live television news broadcast. The film transforms such broadcasts into a device of fiction, a site for the production of a reality effect. At the same time, it also transforms them into a mark of genre, to build suspense through audiovisual and narrative cross-cutting. This double appropriation reflects the increasing everydayness of television and other electronic mass media in China in the 1980s. Part of that everydayness consists precisely of the interpenetration of events or phenomena both near and far through the mass media, or the dialectic of the local and the global. More recently, Sixth Generation cinema such that of Jia Zhangke, as well as documentary film and video, have highlighted that mundane saturation on the levels of audiovisual text and even production practices themselves. The technique of using still images in Operation Cougar doubles as a pragmatic solution to the financial, legal, and technical impossibility of shooting those punctuation scenes on location in all those foreign cities. It is this impossibility of exiting the territory of China that the hijacked plane travesties by illegally but undeniably entering that territory. This impossibility applies not only to the movement of people. Here it is also one way to imagine the dilemma of China’s film industry as it attempted to compete with Hollywood and Hong Kong by producing contemporary action-suspense films like this one. For things like genres, narratives, films as products, and capital itself all must traverse national borders in order for such a renewed Chinese cinema to succeed. Besides such conditions of the film industry, Operation Cougar also reflects other international conditions. For example, while the film specifies its starting point as September 3, the year remains unknown. But if we assume it to be approximately the film’s year of production, 1988, then the tale of Taiwanese civilians entering China as armed terrorists appears to be a barely disguised anxiety over the opening of civilian travel from Taiwan to China (by way of third locations such as Hong Kong and Japan) that took place just the previous year. Thus the Taiwan of Operation Cougar is not just a fantasized cooperative partner; it is also the source of pan-Asian terrorism (“Black Asia”). Moreover, the audiovisual texture of the film places Taiwan on par with Hong Kong, South Korea, and the United States. These places in fact represent a wide variety of geopolitical entities: a colony, a nation that may also be considered part of a bigger nation, a superpower, and merely “an indivisible part of” another nation, as China officially describes Taiwan. But by placing them all on the same level of audiovisual and narrative existence, the film implicates them in a community of nationhood. This does not necessarily suggest that cinema is only superficial and can do no more than reduce all these entities to the same level. On the contrary, it shows cinema to be an imaginary space, namely Anderson’s Benjaminian homogeneous, empty time-space that is occupied by other nations as well. The articulation of those entities in terms of a pseudo-cinematic device defamiliarizes them as Others: they become postcards, throwbacks to the more “primitive” medium of still photography, images seen in press reports from far away. Operation Cougar represents a kind of import substitution industrialization,

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 69 with its domesticated special effects: gunfights, explosions, and blood bursts. So it is the conventions of this genre of action-suspense blockbuster, Hollywood-style, that link the realism of the moving and live image (again, guns, explosions, and blood) to this nation of China. And from this follows the emerging-into-view of those “national” Others as Others; they cannot coexist in the same level of audiovisual texture and narrative as the “live” China. That is why in Operation Cougar the villains, as live and living personifications of this underlying problem, are nationless rogues, terrorists from a motley background including Princeton University (Zheng Xianping) and Kaohsiung (Ah Li).

Taiwan in global Chinese cinema The third film in this series of Mainland Chinese cinematic representations of Taiwan is Zheng Dongtian’s My Bittersweet Taiwan. The film’s protagonist Lin Qingwen, also called Ah Wen, is born in Taiwan in 1928. His family has lived in Taiwan since the late eighteenth century, though his paternal grandfather, a doctor of Chinese medicine, still preserves the family’s lore about its old hometown in Henan Province. Ah Wen’s father is a doctor of Western medicine. His Japanese employer refuses to treat a Taiwanese patient addicted to Japanese-imported opium. Having protested against his Japanese employer, Ah Wen’s father is briefly imprisoned and emerges a broken man. He soon dies. Ah Wen repeatedly runs afoul of Matsumura Takeo, the son of a local Japanese official. Throughout the colonial period Ah Wen’s widowed mother is a paragon of strength, virtue, and chastity. After Japan is defeated in the war, she uses a bunch of rice dumplings to “buy” a book from the demoralized and destitute Matsumura, a kindness that he will repay later. Later Ah Wen goes to the Mainland to study at Xiamen University. He stays in Mainland China, unable to return to Taiwan after 1949. In 1983 Matsumura visits the middle-aged Ah Wen, only to learn of the latter’s long separation from his mother. Takeo arranges for mother and son to travel to his home in Japan to meet. After a three-day reunion with his mother and sister, Ah Wen leaves to return to China. As with Operation Cougar, this film too was not shot on location in Taiwan itself. Instead, like America/Hollywood and Taiwan-as-spectral-nation in the first two films, Zheng’s Taiwan is the product of a cinematic pan-Chinese imaginary. However, what this film borrows is not cinematic vocabulary from Hollywood but from Taiwan itself, especially the rural films of Hou Hsiao-hsien. For the film was shot in Fujian Province, in the same area as Hou’s The Puppetmaster (Xi meng rensheng, 1993), and both films employed the same art director. The establishing sequence of landscape views that opens My Bittersweet Taiwan prominently features a long shot of a large gnarled tree, an iconic image from Hou’s early films. Another echo of Hou’s films lies in the protagonist’s name, Lin Qingwen, an anagram of the name of the famous deaf mute photographer in A City of Sadness (1989), Lin Wenqing. Finally, plot devices that appeared in Hou’s earlier films also appear in My Bittersweet Taiwan. These include hand-puppet theater that serves to comment slyly upon Japanese rule; run-ins with local Japanese officials; a grandparent who

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dreams of returning to the family’s ancestral home in Mainland China; and a scene change that cuts quite suddenly to a long funeral procession. This is not to say that My Bittersweet Taiwan is merely a copy or imitation; rather, like the Kaohsiung of Spirit of the Sea, it is a pastiche. Such a pastiche is the creative recombination of existing, recognizable, “unoriginal” elements. From this perspective My Bittersweet Taiwan returns to the visual logic of Spirit of the Sea. Not only is Taiwan inaccessible as a location for filming, in the absence of such firsthand or live film experience what is available is none other than cinematic images. The crucial difference, however, is that those cinematic images are no longer from a third nation; they are the very archetype of that nation’s own “national cinema.” Thus whereas one of Hou’s most memorable early films is the quasi-autobiographical The Time to Live, The Time to Die (1985), this Mainland pastiche turns the story-title of one person’s growing up into the story-title of the whole quasi-nation: from Hou’s Chinese title Tongnian wangshi (literally “past events of childhood”) to Zheng’s Taiwan wangshi (literally “past events of Taiwan”). The Taiwan of this film is thus a two-staged one: pre-1949 and post-1949. Naturally, the latter remains mostly unseen, and this is justified by focusing the narrative on the son who is unable to return there. It is the pre-1949 Taiwan that is literally built out of domesticated images of the Mainland, namely of Fujian. And certainly Hou Hsiao-hsien has had a greater influence than anyone else on what we nowadays imagine pre-1949 Taiwan to have looked like. But the adaptation of Hou’s iconography is not the most important way the film “recovers” Taiwan. Most important is the soundtrack rather than the image track: it is the kind of Chinese that the characters speak. Most of the actors are Fujianese, except – as is usual in cinema – for the stars. And most prominent among the latter are Jiang Wenli as the young mother and Zheng Zhenyao as the aged mother more than 30 years later. Both are distinguished film actresses, and both are heavily associated with the cinematic imagination of Beijing. Jiang Wenli, a graduate of the acting department at the Beijing Film Academy, played a small but symbolically crucial role in Farewell My Concubine (1993, dir. Chen Kaige): the mother of the young Leslie Cheung, who chops off his extra finger and hands him over to the opera troupe. Zheng Zhenyao’s bestknown film is My Memories of Old Beijing (Chengnan jiushi, 1983, dir. Wu Yigong), another China–Taiwan hybrid, but in reverse since it is based on Lin Haiyin’s novel, written and published in Taiwan. Jiang Wenli is originally from Anhui Province and thus could be considered to be from southern China. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese accented Mandarin through which she delivers her lines in My Bittersweet Taiwan remain but a forced affectation. The effect is the reverse of the much criticized smorgasbord of peripheral Mandarin accents in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, dir. Ang Lee): people in the southern orbit of Chinese language, including Taiwan, tended to feel less uncomfortable with that film than people at the symbolic center of China, Beijing. This is because, presumably, what the former heard in the film was close to what they hear in real life rather than to what they expected to hear in a fictional martial arts romance set in premodern Mainland China.

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 71 I draw attention to this aspect of My Bittersweet Taiwan not to question the practical tradition of having even very dialectally marginal characters speak more or less intelligible Mandarin. For here the Mandarin is pointedly and studiously imperfect, and so it is not a continuation of the ideology of post-production dubbing that requires even marginal characters to speak perfect Mandarin. Rather, the marginal (the local, the regional) is reintroduced here through accent, which is perhaps the most volatile, sensuous, “live” (because mostly untranslatable and untranscribable) aspect of any language. Certainly Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, such as A City of Sadness, previously explored the gaps of difference that spoken language opens. It may be argued that the effectiveness of Hou’s explorations depends on a kind of authenticity of landscape, language, plot, and characters. What makes My Bittersweet Taiwan different is that it has recourse only to simulacral images in assembling its vision of a Taiwan that is both intimately close and faraway. Still, both films have a kind of internal consistency, making such “inauthenticity” an inadequate basis for criticism. What is more significant is that that gap of difference lies not between different conceptions of Taiwan but between different conceptions of “national cinema.” On the one hand, there is China’s film production as a unifying practice. On the other hand, there is Taiwan as a quasi-nation, that is, as a site for contestation about the nation itself. But to go one step further, we might still turn this gap or disjuncture around in order to highlight once again the power of the dialogue track to interrupt the smoothly nostalgic image track. It is noteworthy that the value of this interruption also comes from various discourses in society and cinema in China itself from the 1980s to the present. In particular, there has been a general espousal of “humanism” in official literature and art. This emphasis is visible in things such as war films and novels that redefine stereotypes of Japanese and KMT soldiers, figures that were routinely demonized during the Maoist period. My Bittersweet Taiwan very pointedly locates the civilian solution to the family separation in China’s former mortal enemy Japan.7 At the same time, it displaces the Taiwan problem from the image to the soundtrack. In both cases this emphasizes ren, a core concept that covers a semantic range including people, individual, human being, humanity, and so on. This use of the soundtrack is different from that in Spirit of the Sea. In that earlier film, the soundtrack is indeed the site of contestation. But that contestation is articulated as anticolonial nationalistic class struggle. The Japanese song “China Night” propels Chunguan and his comrades to adopt the spoken phrase “spirit of the sea” as their password, a phrase whose meaning comes precisely from being spoken by the right people at the right time and not being written down lest the wrong people read it. In My Bittersweet Taiwan, however, the peculiarly oral dimension of language that is accent becomes an unintentionally productive site of friction that belies different versions of Chinese humanity. This general background of the film as a product of contemporary China is evident in the immediate inspiration for the film. My Bittersweet Taiwan is based on the writings of Zhang Kehui, a Taiwanese man who went to Xiamen to study after the war, was unable to return home, and ended up pursuing a successful military

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and political career in China after 1949. His book One Taiwanese Man’s Feelings for Both Sides contains various short essays as well as a screenplay with the same title as the book.8 Such a basis for the film fulfills two conditions. First, it guarantees a kind of realism; the film is based on a true story. Second, and less obviously, it enables the film to use a trope that is very common in imagining the predicament of Taiwan. That trope is the story-image of Mainland Chinese who went to Taiwan before 1949, could not return, and therefore to this day yearn for their homes and families on the Mainland. Here the film turns that trope around into the storyimage of a Taiwanese man who went to the Mainland before 1949, could not return, and therefore to this day yearns for home and family in Taiwan. Such an appropriation has the benefit of making the film recognizable and easy to follow, both cognitively and emotionally. It also renders it a pastiche. But most importantly it also introduces defamiliarization on the levels of audiovisual text and narrative, resulting in a new perspective on the China–Taiwan hall of mirrors, a new possibility for cinematic representation. This new possibility is based on the deeply rooted anticolonial nationalism of modern China that dates back at least to the Opium Wars. It is the desire to resist directly, and in the name of the nation, perceived foreign threats. One of the more concrete and long-term aims has been the recovery and consolidation of China’s national territory, hence the narration of 1997 as the return of Hong Kong and 1999 as the return of Macau. Although China has not achieved the return of Taiwan, cinema represents a “unification” of politics, economics, culture, collective imagination, and international relations, and it is in the field of cinema that China might first “recover” Taiwan. But under newer historical conditions of the present, China finds itself in the position of quasi-colonizer who nevertheless must take up the tools of Taiwan, that which is both a necessary Other in the logic of nationalism and a historical part of the Self in the logic of the PRC. Rather than recovering Taiwan, China recovers the latter’s cinematic style. Ironically, however, the effect of My Bittersweet Taiwan is not that of colonial mimicry. Taiwan cinema does not become more like that of China; on the contrary, Mainland Chinese cinema becomes more like that of Taiwan. In fact, Mainland Chinese cinema has remained entangled in a colonial logic all along, as it has drawn on sources from Soviet cinema to Hollywood to what in world cinema most typically represents Taiwan nationally, and as it has at different moments appeared to be both colonizer (with respect to Taiwan’s national art cinema) and colonized (with respect to Hollywood). As a colonial logic motivated by anticolonialism, such cinematic representation itself remains “almost the same, but not quite.”9 We therefore call this new historical possibility by the specific name of “counter-colonial mimicry.” After My Bittersweet Taiwan was completed a group of important and influential scholars, critics, and filmmakers gathered in Beijing for a lively symposium on the film. They included the director Xie Fei; Zhang Yiwu, professor of literature at Beijing University; Wang Renyin, editor of the journal Film Art; and the film’s scriptwriter Huang Dan. They commended the film’s freshness with respect to previous Mainland Chinese cinematic representations of Taiwan. Zhang Yiwu

Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 73 describes the film’s historical importance: “Its new content appears in a new context; the Taiwan problem is now no longer the problem of the Communist Party versus the Nationalist Party [KMT], as it was during the Cold War. Now it is where major nations in this new era of globalization lock horns over politics and economics; it involves the US, Japan, and the historical changes of East Asia.”10 This transition from Cold War to globalization in fact has two meanings. First, it is an actual historical development, from one period to another; second, it is also the substitution of a new way of reading the historical past. In either case, in the context of historical change and hermeneutic change, culture has become a site for urgent contestation and negotiation even about “other” things, hence, for example, the emergence of human rights as an equally urgent and common grounds for international debate. Huang Dan sees the film’s political import precisely in terms of ren: “Our policy toward Taiwan is now that we must work for everyday people, for ‘Taiwanese’ as well as Hakka people. Most of them are concentrated in the middle and south of Taiwan. The DPP’s political base and the largest part of Chen Shui-bian’s vote come from here. Only if we work well for them can unification be more than just a slogan. Not only do we want to ‘enter the island’, but we also want to ‘enter [their] hearts’.”11 This situation becomes even more complicated when we consider the whole pan-Chinese area including Hong Kong after its return to China in 1997, not the least because of the unusual circumstance that the former British colony is, generally speaking, more advanced than China in terms of politics, economics, technology, and general standard of living. Thus for China to look into the mirror of Taiwan’s problematic of nation and cinema is also for China to engage in the work of transvaluation of the concept of ren, such as in the foundational Maoist principle of “serving the people,” or wei ren min fu wu. Films like A City of Sadness and My Bittersweet Taiwan convey a sense of Taiwanese history and everyday reality through dissonance, heteroglossia, and contestation on the level of film form. But it is even more important to recognize how My Bittersweet Taiwan unexpectedly demonstrates how those critical concepts cannot exist to challenge the nation without a national Other in the first place. Such an Other must be understood in its own particular configurations of history, language, cinema, and even nationhood itself. What makes this last cinematic Taiwan so bittersweet is that it aspires to be a Chinese version of a Taiwanese film, something that is possible only by first acknowledging difference before (re)establishing a similarity. In other words, Spirit of the Sea, Operation Cougar, and My Bittersweet Taiwan repeatedly show the nation to be a problem of representation that produces particular, peculiar cinematic expressions rather than simply a problem of geopolitics that may be given a fantasy resolution in cinema. This by no means directly impacts the existence or nonexistence of Taiwan as a kind of nation, but at the same time these three films cannot be reduced simply to inaccurate representations or signs of insufficient knowledge. For the cinematic image is a fictive one, and if “national cinema” is a double problematic rather than a unifying solution, then the double problematic of China and Taiwan finds in cinema its own peculiar parallax as well. And if that is the case, finally, then what about Mainland China in Taiwan cinema?

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Notes 1 A longer version of this article appeared in Chinese as Ji Yixin, “Dalu dianying zhong de Taiwan” [Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema], Zhongwai wenxue [Chung-wai literary monthly] 34, no. 11 (April 2006): 11–29. 2 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Representation,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn, eds Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),11–22. 3 Gulang is the name of a small island that is part of the peninsula city of Xiamen in Fujian Province, not far from Taiwan. Besides alluding to the political geography of China and Taiwan, the name of the ship also signifies through the film’s system of images and metaphors having to do with ships, sailors, sounds, and the sea: gu lang can be understood literally as “drum waves.” 4 I thank Huang Shuyan for her patient and timely help with the Japanese lyrics of “China Night.” 5 Bozi, “Youqing de gesheng fei xiang haiyang” [The song of friendship flies out to sea], Shangying huabao [Shanghai film studio pictorial] 1957, no. 5 (December 10, 1957): 18–19. 6 I thank Claire Conceison for relaying this information to me from Yang Fengliang. 7 People from Taiwan and Mainland China could through private arrangement and for the purposes of family reunions meet in third locations such as Hong Kong and Japan as early as 1979. This well preceded the 1987 opening of indirect travel (again, via third locations) from Taiwan to China. 8 Zhang Kehui, Yige Taiwan ren de liang an qing [One Taiwanese man’s feelings for both sides] (Beijing: Taihai chubanshe, 2001). 9 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33. 10 “Taiwan wangshi: xu shuo bai nian beiqing” [My Bittersweet Taiwan: recounting a century of sadness], Dianying yishu [Film art] 294, no. 1 (2004): 28. 11 Ibid., 30.

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Festivals, criticism and the international reputation of Taiwan New Cinema Chia-chi Wu

In 2004, Hou Hsiao-hsien released his first non-Chinese-language film Café Lumiere, a Shochiku Films production in Japanese, with Japanese stars and supposedly, a homage to Ozu Yasujiro on the occasion of the director’s 100th birthday. With this film Hou positioned himself securely within a distinguished pantheon of East Asian international art cinema. Not surprisingly, Café Lumiere received meager box-office returns in Taiwan, but this time it did not count against Hou or the dismal record of domestic productions at home. In 2005, a similar peculiarity: Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud snatched a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival as a French/Taiwan production. Partly because of its sexual explicitness, the film broke Tsai’s own box-office record and counts as an all-too-rare Chinese language hit in Taiwan. It also enjoyed the promotional backing of 20th Century Fox, which took up distribution of the film, mobilizing mainstream theatrical chains and engineering a good deal of media attention to effectively handle its release. On the one hand, Hou Hsiao-hsien makes a Japanese-language film for Shochiku; on the other, Tsai Ming-liang releases a quasi-porn film through 20th Century Fox. What is happening here with Taiwan cinema? To answer this, we must reverse about 20 years to consider how Taiwan cinema in general found its way onto international festival screens and global channels of discourse. Coming out of a notoriously right-wing, anti-Communist society, Taiwan cinema somehow became the darling of festival programs in Europe and AsiaPacific since the 1980s. This happened due to a remarkable confluence of artistic ambition, critical discourse, and a complex configuration of global/ local dynamics. Intentionally or not, Taiwan films and filmmakers took on powerful allegorical functions as cultural expressions of would-be national legitimacy. In their impulse toward national taxonomies and labeling,1 international festivals unwittingly cast Taiwan as an appealing entity, and helped sustain a challenge to the PRC’s claim to exclusive legitimacy. The emplacement, or “national allegorizing”2 of Taiwan cinema at film festivals worldwide served – for awhile – progressive political functions: advancing the “national” status of Taiwan in an international environment where it had hitherto been allowed only “subnational” or “provincial” status.

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Thus Taiwan films’ international triumph set the stage for Hou’s and Tsai’s transnational activities. Yet the “allegorical approach” in understanding Taiwan cinema – that is, a reading that reduces it to its geopolitical realist connotations – is exactly what made it an easy target for domestic attack. Although constituting representations that testify to political and cultural partition and even a defiant national identity, Taiwan cinema often invites domestic accusations against “ambivalent” or “problematic” representations of the nation and history, and against its inaccessibility both in its textuality and distribution. In this essay, I propose the idea of allegorical (mis-)reading, not in the sense that an allegorical reading is inaccurate or erroneous, but to emphasize that Taiwan cinema’s reception is constantly tempered by geopolitics and specific agendas of crosscultural exchange. Taiwan New Cinema presents a case of dialectical tension between transnational and domestic cultural politics, evident in the way the Taiwan cinema of the 1980s and 1990s transformed itself from a local rebellion, to what was called a “newcomer” national cinema, and then to an internationally recognized subcontracted art cinema. Overall, this process exemplifies Taiwan’s engagement with borderless capitalization and a globalized film culture, clearly visible in the production and distribution of Hou’s and Tsai’s projects.

Taiwan New Cinema: a local film movement and its festival connections Taiwan New Cinema arose in 1982 with the film In Our Time, comprising four episodes by four young filmmakers – Jim Tao, Edward Yang, Ke Yizheng, and Zhang Yi. Departing from previous modes of filmmaking preoccupied with generic repetition, escapism, or the “literary tradition” rooted in didacticism and traditional Chinese cultural heritage, In Our Time prefigured a movement devoted to local experiences of growing up, social transformation and history of Taiwan. Filmmakers of the movement include Zhang Yi, Chen Kuo-fu, Chen Kunhou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ke Yizheng, Mark Lee Pingbing (photographer), Liao Qingsong (editor), Jim Tao, Zeng Zhuangxiang, Du Duzhi (sound recording engineer/sound effects director), Wan Ren, Wang Tong, and Edward Yang. Although the movement ran a wide gamut of styles and thematic values, its filmmakers shared a common concern for formal experiment and to fashion a cinemodernism through the influence of Western modernism, to various degrees.3 The historiographical significance of Taiwan New Cinema lies in its dual tendency in inscriptions of the “nation.” On one hand, it attempts to portray the living experiences of the communities that are differentiated by social, historical, cultural/linguistic, and ethnic terms. Hence in a New Cinema work, the nation might be configured as struggle among these communities, the formation of which is a result of Taiwan’s multilayered colonial and postcolonial forces. On the other hand, Taiwan New Cinema represents, with its modern visuality, a coming to terms with the heterogeneity and a re-visioning of the nation that hopefully could resolve historical injustice and accommodate differences.

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Resonating with the nativization movement in the early 1980s, which also sought to forge a new national identity based upon local living experiences, Taiwan New Cinema arose from loosening ideological controls and film censorship imposed by KMT that in turn was obliged to heed the public’s call for democratization. Moreover, Taiwan New Cinema resulted from the state cultural policy made when the domestic industry was soundly trounced by Hong Kong releases and bootleg videos. (In 1983, a new article of film law changed cinema from the category of “entertainment business” to that of “cultural enterprise.”) The initial batch of New Cinema – In Our Time, Growing Up (1983, dir. Hou), The Sandwich Man (1983, dir. Hou, Zeng, and Wan), The Terrorizers (1983, dir. Yang) – was made possible by the “newcomer policy” of the state-owned studio, CMPC (Central Motion Picture Corp.). Yet, instead of completely liberating film from ideology, the newcomer policy turned out to be a push-and-pull dialectic between the newcomers’ struggle for thematic (hence ideological) reorientation and conservative power exercised by the old faction of bureaucrats and critics. Along with the newcomer policy came the expectation that newcomers earn international festival awards. On the officials’ mind at that time was the Asian-Pacific Film Festival (APFF), a festival that had been organized more for diplomatic purposes than professional competition.4 The confrontation between conservative forces and liberal voices inevitably sparked debates in public forums. For the first time in Taiwanese history, the cultural workers opened the hitherto “low-end” cultural product (movies) to serious consideration and minute analysis. Film became a site of political and cultural contestation. The defense of Taiwan New Cinema was aided by a group of cultural workers who not only carried literary influences and Western theories over into Taiwan New Cinema’s textual formation, but also enabled art-world or “high-end” discourses to be applied to film. Here I refer to Zhu Tianwen (writer, screenwriter, cultural critic), Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping (film scholar and critic), Xiao Ye (novelist, writer, producer at CMPC), Zhan Hongzhi (producer, cultural critic), Edmond Wong (Huang Jianye, film critic), Wu Nien-chen (Wu Nianzhen, writer, screenwriter), and Yang Shiqi (journalist).5 More importantly, Taiwan New Cinema marked the first-time domestic film critics, Western-trained and wellversed in international film history, successfully placing Taiwan’s cinema on the map of world cinema by using the very evaluative argot shared by film festival professionals. Particular attention should be directed to Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping’s contribution to Taiwan New Cinema’s international visibility. Chiao received an MA degree in film studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and studied in the doctoral program at UCLA for two years. She established herself as a household name in a major newspaper even before she returned to Taiwan, and her reviews and criticism of world cinema, along with the rise of New Cinema, opened up a new perspective on film interpretation. At home she championed New Cinema by employing methodologies better defined than previous film criticism, and pioneered a professional mode of criticism distinct from story reviews or promotional rhetoric passing for criticism in journalistic discourse.

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She therefore influenced younger generations of spectators and spurred a following of overseas film studies from mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Young students reading her publications learned how to conduct precise discrimination and careful evaluation of films; and it became imaginable to consider “movies” a legitimate object of scholarly pursuit. Whether they went abroad or stayed home, aspiring film critics and scholars felt obliged to import or apply methodologies established in the West. Abroad, Chiao transformed herself into a “cultural informant” who mediated the exchange between Taiwan filmmakers and international film professionals. Sometimes strategically positioning New Cinema in a critical paradigm comparable to that of Ozu Yasujiro (in her defense of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s style) and at other times Italian Neorealism (in her defense of New Cinema’s realist impulses), Chiao successfully staked out a space for Taiwan in world cinema by deploying the concepts of “national cinema,” “new wave,” and “auteurism.”6 With New Cinema, Chiao placed herself among festival professionals, providing introductory materials or production notes to programmers, at times serving as an interpreter (both in cultural and linguistic sense) and programmer. She networked with other international festival professionals, who emerged at this juncture as “Chinese” film specialists and supplied significant analytical accounts of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese cinemas to international spectators. Reviews of New Cinema, along with those of other Chinese language cinemas, now became a specialized activity and acquired more cultural currency. Prominent figures include Tony Rayns, Chris Berry (writing from Australia then and now a prominent Chinese language film scholar), Wimal Dissanayake (Hawai’i International Film Festival), Marco Müller (Italy and Western Europe), Sato Tadao (Fukuoka International Film Festival), Bérénice Reynaud (France and Cal Arts), and Shu Qi (Hong Kong International Film Festival).7 These renowned festival writers became enthusiastic advocates of Chinese language cinemas, serving as festival coordinators, programmers, jurors, or providing English, Italian or other translations of subtitles for prints of Taiwan films meant for international competition and distribution. New Cinema filmmakers themselves had pragmatic economic concerns in joining international circuits. For one thing, cash rewards from a festival prize came with the government’s rewards, offered on the ground that such prizewinning films glorified the nation. Moreover, a festival prize gave the film an inexpensive but momentous promotional push both in the international and domestic markets. Both the rewards and box-office receipts to a degree helped the filmmakers recuperate their production costs and finance their next projects. After Hou Hsiao-hsien’s receipt of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for A City of Sadness in 1989, filmmakers were in a position to raise funds by presale of regional distribution rights to several international financiers. Since the early 1990s, such business practices facilitated the process of Taiwan filmmakers gradually becoming cultural laborers of international art cinema, their works incorporated into the cultural economy of the global art market, eventually causing the almost total detachment of their work from home use.8

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Political-cultural self-definition: postcolonial ambivalence and international film festivals Jameson’s statement on national allegory, though theoretically untenable, may be more nuanced and put to positive political use if taken as a tactic of “misreading.” As mentioned above, when situated within international film festivals, Taiwan New Cinema to a degree defied the “sub-national” status of Taiwan imposed by the PRC. Here Taiwan New Cinema embodies not only a “Third World” national self-definition predicated upon the self-other antinomy that underpins “First World” approaches, but also a political, cultural, and economic self-definition against the PRC and other Chinese communities. Inasmuch as Taiwan remains an “issue” that can be traded off at any time in Sino-American trade and military negotiations, and inasmuch as its attempts to reenter the United Nations or to act as an independent power have been thwarted, presentation of Taiwan cinema as an entity “separate from” and “equal to” that of China at international film festivals assists the assertion of Taiwan’s difference. Such “self-assertion” rendered visible on a global scale was unprecedented in Taiwan’s history of international relations. It should be noted that this is a fitful process though, rife with triumphs, setbacks, and controversies due to troublesome relations with China. Before Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers became world famous, Taiwan had made occasional and sporadic forays into international festivals, but at times were rejected outright when festival organizers buckled to PRC intervention. Sometimes festival organizers would give Taiwan the nod only if the entries accepted a sub-national epithet such as “Chinese Taipei,” “Taiwan, China,” or “Taiwan/China.” Take Berlin Film Festival for example. In 1986, it affixed Hou’s The Time to Live, The Time to Die (1985) to “Taiwan/China” in its “International Forum of Young Cinema” program, which was the first and only Taiwan New Cinema’s entrant at Berlin. It was not until 1990, when Taiwan New Cinema was considered to have ebbed at home, that another Taiwan film, A City of Sadness, was included in “International Forum” at Berlin. Before 1993, Taiwan cinema in general had been granted much less visibility and recognition at Berlin than other European film festivals.9 And Taiwan films could not completely rid themselves of the “Taiwan, China” label until 2005. The scenario is similar in Asia. Hong Kong International Film Festival completely shunned Taiwan films from 1977 to 1986. It was not until 1987, when Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang were building up their international fame, that HKIFF crossed the political barrier to screen Hou’s Dust in the Wind (1986) and Yang’s The Terrorizers (1983). As boasted by HKIFF itself, the 1987 festival staged the first filmic exchange within the Chinese region and between filmmakers across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan filmmakers’ encounter with Chinese directors at international film festivals transgressed the political boundaries that had hitherto been secure. Such encounters signaled the three Chinese communities’ coalescence into the global system of capital and a prelude to formations of trans-Chinese subjectivity emerging in the pan-Chinese co-production in the late 1990s, an issue I address elsewhere.10

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Taiwan New Cinema made significant inroads into what were viewed as “uppermiddle rank” international festivals in Europe and North America, such as the ones in Locarno, Nantes, London, Hawai’i, Vancouver, and Toronto, and Asian American film festivals in the American metropolis, quite often characterized as a “national cinema of excellence” in festival programming.11 In a sense, the success of Taiwan New Cinema was in tune with the economic boom of East Asia in the 1980s, when festivals started to turn to East Asian films as their staple to distinguish their offerings from other festivals. In the late 1980s, a number of festivals showed a strong intention to program as many Taiwan films as they could. In 1988, one year before Hou Hsiao-hsien won the top prize (the Golden Lion Award) at Venice Film Festival in 1989 with A City of Sadness, the Vancouver International Film Festival presented Hou’s special retrospective. As early as 1992, Vancouver staged a complete retrospective of Edward Yang (including his very first film Floating Leaf made in 1981, which had not been seen since its showing on television in Taiwan). In the commentary written by Tony Rayns, Edward Yang is compared to Krzysztof Kieslowski in achieving a “deeply humane kind of filmmaking, but free from ‘humanist’ lies and sentimental evasions.”12 A similar trajectory can be seen in Festival of Three Continents at Nantes, France (Figure 5.1). In 1984 and 1985, Hou had to compete in Nantes in the name of “Taïwan, Chine,” with his The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), respectively. In 1987, Hou was able to enter his Dust in the Wind as a legitimate, independent entry, officially in the name of “Taiwan.” The change of nationality for Hou’s work in Nantes’ program seems to suggest that Hou’s “artistic difference” began to outweigh organizers’ political qualms. And in 1988, Hou was among one of the filmmakers Nantes saluted. In its program, “Taïwan, Hou Hsiao Hsien” was juxtaposed with veteran world class filmmakers like Xie Jin, Im Kwon Taek, King Hu, Imamura Shohei, Oshima Nagisa, Lino Brocka, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembene, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and the new rising Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige. Again, this took place before Hou’s A City of Sadness took its Venice trophy. Because of these triumphs, Taiwan New Cinema and post-New Cinema films became the “representative” of Taiwan, and were single-handedly responsible for the emergence of Taiwan as a “nation” in international film culture. In the discourses produced by the festival programs on Taiwan films, we see how they were tied to identity politics of nationality. Commentators were obliged to explain in detail the tangled historical relations between Taiwan and China. If, for example, we turn to the 1990 program of Rotterdam International Film Festival, we see that “A City of Sadness” alone constitutes a major contents item among those that cover a body of works by a filmmaker or a genre. In a festival catalog that usually spares a tiny space to each synopsis, the item “A City of Sadness” is an essay of four pages explicating the diegesis and its historical backdrop.13 As a new model of “national cinema” – an East-Asian, “Third World” and “Chinese” cinema charged with postcolonial sense and modernist sensibility – the hermeneutic access to Taiwan New Cinema was invested in the framework of a Taiwanese nationality. Another example could be seen at Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois held

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Figure 5.1 Nantes, Festival of Three Continents

in Quebec, Montreal. Its 1991 program published the English translation of Peggy Chiao’s “From Divergent Views of ‘Chinese-ness’ Towards a New Chinese Identity.” Although the title seems to suggest that the identity polemic still operated within the “Chinese paradigm,” in the essay Chiao explicitly articulates a diasporic sensibility and zooms in on the issue of Taiwanese identity: We Chinese lack a “Chinese” political infrastructure and cultural model that we can commonly identify with … The result is a collective vanishing of Chinese people. The films made in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong over the past few years clearly reflect this vanishing. Chinese people’s questioning of, and sadness about, their identity and their situation have become the most popular themes in film. Who is Taiwanese? To pursue this question of a “specific Taiwanese identity,” Chiao then introduces and contextualizes a dozen Taiwan films in the name of New Cinema. 14

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Coordinated by an organization called InterCinéArt, Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois usually opened in Quebec, and then a season of Chinese language films showcased in Quebec would travel to Vancouver, Toronto and a couple of other Canadian cities. The Chinese theme of the festival itself attests to how the diasporic differences of Hong Kong and Taiwan were established and projected onto the geographical imagination of world cinema. As the President of InterCinéArt wrote in his foreword to the catalog of 1992, As the president of InterCinéArt, I want to make use of this space to reiterate our position. InterCinéArt, the organizer of the annual combination of films, exhibitions, happenings, debates on and about China and the Chinese at large, is an apolitical organization because it represents all political instances … This is our destination, multiple ethnicity, contradictory coexistence of both exacerbated and annihilated differences. I believe we have succeeded as “missionaries”: to make known the complexity of the subject “China” from many angles, to have its cinema(s) recognized to such an extent where it can no longer be ghettoized, nor a simple “Third World allegory. 15 Despite or because of its small-scale operation, the festival successfully thematized and exploited the geopolitical partition between varieties of Chinese experience, sociopolitical organization, as well as the PRC’s political sensitivity to Hong Kong and Taiwan. (That year, according to this intro, China’s Film Bureau refused to collaborate with this festival, for reasons unstated.) Interestingly, the introduction’s evocation of postcolonial jargon – “multiple ethnicity,” “differences,” and “complexity of … China” – resonates with the essay written by Chris Berry in the same catalog, “Hybridity and Transnationality: Postcolonial Cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan.”16 Now a predominant figure in the study of Chinese language films, Chris Berry was a diligent contributor and programmer of international film festivals. The film reviews he produced for festival catalogs usually draw heavily upon postcolonial or postmodern concepts. Yet due to the pragmatism of film festival catalogs, his festival writings are often offered as preliminary theoretical warm-ups for his subsequent academic publications. The essay here started by re-situating Hong Kong and Taiwan in the history of global decolonization and postcoloniality encompassing Canada (where the festival was held), Australia (where Berry resided at the time), Hong Kong and Taiwan: “Hong Kong and Taiwan may not seem to have much in common with Canada and Australia...at first sight. However, all four share a postcoloniality coincident with a position on the outer margins of either Chinese or Anglo-Saxon culture.”17 After dwelling briefly on postcolonial terms such as hybridity and cultural liminality and arguing that “almost the whole world is postcolonial today, in the sense of either being colonized, having been a colonizer or having been colonized,” Berry went on to review dozens of films he had seen earlier at the China Times Express Awards held in Taipei a year earlier (1991), to which he had been invited by Peggy Chiao to serve as a juror. In a way, Berry’s own personal mobility – his ubiquity at Chinese-

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related festivals or conferences around the globe – corresponds to his flexible and hybrid professional practice as a Chinese language film expert, commentator/critic, programmer, juror and scholar. As someone who moves comfortably between geographical and professional boundaries, his career itself betokens hybridity and border-crossing, features that equally characterize the objects of his study.18

Globalization of Taiwan cinema and Marxist cultural theories Berry’s essay has at least two important implications for our understanding of contemporary Taiwan cinema in relation to international film festivals. First, written on the competing films at China Times Express Awards but published for the Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois, the essay bears out the filmprofessional-based alliance across national borders in the staging of Taiwan cinema.19 Second, though not written in strict academic terms, the essay points to a juncture where the internationalization of Marxist cultural theory (in the form of the postcolonial) is closely linked to the globalization of Taiwan New Cinema. Connected to global postcolonial identification, Taiwan cinema conjures up a site of projection for cultural critics’ desire to discover a new postcolonial or postmodern geographical imagination. Hence, the international success of Taiwan New Cinema (along with that of Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas) not only embodies a late phase of the globalization of art cinema (a phase when Chinese language cinemas, following Euro-American and Japanese predecessors, were incorporated into the establishment of art cinema), but also underlines the extent to which Marxist cultural theory has been globally and discursively used, in the name of the anticolonial and postcolonial. The domestic intellectual reception of Taiwan New Cinema equally reveals the globalized intellectual exercise of cultural theory. However, Marxist cultural criticism reverberates with very different readings of New Cinema at home from that of Berry or other international intellectuals. Domestic reception of Taiwan New Cinema came in two distinct but overlapping forms, emerging in two eras. The first is encapsulated in the publication of The Death of the New Cinema in 1991 (Figure 5.2), an anthology addressing the “Hou controversy” and written by the so-called “anti-Hou” faction of critics, historians, and scholars. 20 The book is one of a series of publications thematized under the rubric of “war apparatus,” a heading used by the publisher to voice its ideological approach in film criticism. Essays collected in the anthology tend to draw upon Foucault, Benjamin, and Lukács to emphasize the ideological underpinnings of a film narrative. While foregoing any convincing or precise formal analysis of his works, they decry Hou for his “indirect,” “ambiguous” narrative in representing Taiwan’s history.21 One contributor, for example, writes that “instead of subverting ‘official memory’, the cinematic representation of history [in A City of Sadness] froze the already liberated ‘popular memory’ … and went on to transpose history into the nonpolitical aspect of the film narrative” (my translation).22 An English counterpart of such critical texts can be seen in Liao Ping-hui’s essay in the 1993 Public

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Culture, an academic who also contributed to The Death of New Cinema. Evoking concepts such as mimicry and the public sphere in his description of previous Taiwanese anticolonial cultural discourses, Liao contends that Hou’s A City of Sadness is “concerned about the visual effects rather than a historical interpretation.” According to him, the film … allows various forms of interpretation while making no commitment to any one view. At the international festival in Venice, the film was advertised as a political film about the [228] Incident. It was celebrated as a testimony to Taiwan’s gradual development toward democracy, a first step in constructing a narrative of Taiwan’s tyrannical past. Such a strategic decision to gear the film toward the internationalization of civil society and the public sphere helped Ho [sic] win the Venice Festival Award….23 This passage neatly pinpoints an allegorical (mis-)reading of Hou’s film and New Cinema (representing Taiwanese history and nationality) pervading international

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festival discourses. Nevertheless, Liao’s essay and the Death anthology mobilize another mode of allegorical (mis-)reading of Hou or Taiwan New Cinema (as national cinema), which is “already” tempered by an international perspective, with Hou’s international fame looming large in their judgments and their practice of internationalized Marxist/anticolonial cultural politics. According to Liao, Hou’s aesthetic abstraction and formalism signals a complicity with conservative KMT politics and a tendency to “displace” or even “distort” historical reality onto cinematic spectacle.24 If Taiwan New Cinema was posited as a “postcolonial” or “anticolonial” national cinema in the imaginary mapped by international festivals, it is exactly such a configuration that invited the charges at home against it – that it “lacks” radical politics and historical accuracy. Yet in either mode of reading, the allegorical interpretation of Taiwan New Cinema always remains a “misreading.” As mentioned above, allegorical misreading is not necessarily misunderstanding film narratives, but a reading that gets so fixated on the geopolitical realist connotations prompted by international perspectives that it becomes reductive. Despite their polarized views on Taiwan New Cinema, both international festivals and domestic intellectuals insist on the kind of geopolitical realism they perceive as embodied by Taiwan New Cinema, meanwhile “bypassing” two important facts about Taiwan New Cinema: 1

2

Although the thematic focus on history, identity, nativist cultural elements and its ethnographic sensibility make Taiwan New Cinema amenable to allegorical interpretations of Taiwan, New Cinema is indeed a dispersed phenomenon that covers a widely diverse range of textual, thematic, political or apolitical concerns.25 New Cinema never outperformed contemporary domestic commercial releases, Hong Kong or Hollywood productions, thus never constituting a “national cinema” in production quantity or box-office revenues, despite some early works bringing some profits. In a word, New Cinema was too insignificant to help restructure or resuscitate the already collapsing industry.26

It is generally agreed that the new wave receded in the year 1987, when several New Cinema figures stopped making films (temporarily or for good) because of industrial constraints. Most films by New Cinema filmmakers made in 1987 and 1988 failed at the box office, with journalistic reviews increasingly disapproving of their “artistic indulgence.” Though not a true national cinema, the international success of Taiwan New Cinema did make a great impact on Taiwan cinema in the 1990s. The debates about Taiwan New Cinema lasted and culminated with Hou’s receiving the Golden Lion for A City of Sadness at Venice in 1989, followed by the triumph of Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1990) at Tokyo International Film Festival and Nantes. Both films were results of the filmmakers’ initial attempts at international financing and marketing, and the accolade gracing the films affirmed the operation by way of global product differentiation.27 With Godard’s example in mind, marketing managers (especially Zhan Hongzhi) succeeded in marketing Hou

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or Yang through what they called the global channels of “capital recovery” in specialist distribution and exhibition venues.28 Such strategies involve the presale of regional rights to several distribution companies around the globe, more in Europe and Japan but less in the United States or South America. It helped recuperate production fees, generate profits, reach export markets, and hopefully rejuvenate the declining market at home. Since then, domestic production has usually operated in the mode of international/independent filmmaking, sometimes exclusively oriented to international festival competition and art cinema distribution. In the 1990s, Hou and Yang went on garnering awards at high-profile festivals, yet were sustained only by foreign financing and markets. And newcomers such as Tsai Ming-liang, Lin Cheng-sheng, Chen Kuo-fu, and Chang Tso-chi followed a similar path to international fame by picking up major or lesser prizes.29 Yet gradually, Taiwanese viewers were becoming blasé about such international applause, while the domestic film industry was almost completely ruined by Hollywood’s domination and the exodus of the local entertainment industry to China. The survival of Taiwan filmmakers as “subcontractors of international art cinema” and the disappearance of a commercial industry invited the second form of intellectual evaluation of New Cinema, which, as mentioned above, is distinct from the Death of New Cinema criticism but overlapping with it. This mode of critical intervention arrived in the late 1990s and only became better articulated around 2002. It also testifies to the absorption of globalized cultural theory into domestic cultural practice. Death of New Cinema critics in general remained confined to a film’s textual meanings in their effort to critique “auteurs” and to expose the ideological ramifications of Taiwan New Cinema, though incapable of presenting a profound formal analysis of it. Critics of the new generation, however, simply stop at issues regarding narrative hermeneutics, aesthetics, or film form, but seek to contextualize New Cinema in utterly sociological, legislative, and political terms.30In their sociological emphasis, they look more carefully into the passing, rescinding, or changes of government legislation. They highlight policies that directly affect contemporary Taiwan film culture: the subsidy policy stipulated in view of Taiwan New Cinema’s international success in 1989; the implementing of “Incentives for Domestic Films and Professionals’ Participation in International Film Festivals” since 1992, which give prize winners cash rewards, the scale of which would depend on the profile of the festival; and the gradual relaxation of quota imposed on imported/Hollywood films until 2001, when the government voluntarily revoked regulations governing quota and tariff as the price for WTO membership. What is also offered is a microor macroanalysis of industrial practice and malpractice, particularly the exodus of domestic venture companies to Hong Kong and China to capitalize upon the rapidly expanding entertainment industry in China. Based on their study of the political economy of Taiwan cinema, some of them insightfully characterize Taiwanese film culture as a disjointed site under the sway of global capital, as Wei Ti states: Taiwan’s mass media, including cinema, after it was liberated from severe party-state control, did not evolve a democratic and plural production and

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distribution system. Rather, it has been overwhelmingly incorporated into a tide of commercialization and gradually interconnected with the global dynamics of cultural economy. The processes of commercialization and “global interconnection” of cinema are particularly complex.31 Other critics of this faction, however, approach the same issue through a heightened focus on cultural hierarchy and canon formation. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of judgment and “good taste” as a social and political construction,32 they react against the “leaden pretensions” and “myth” of auteur cinema and the international art cinema establishment, seeing New Cinema as a canonic construction by which cultural workers championing it monopolized a critical enterprise.33 The rebellion against cultural elitism sometimes takes the form of antagonism against critics supporting the New Cinema, particularly Peggy Chiao. In their attempt to “de-center” the balance of Taiwan New Cinema discourses around Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, they may even go to the extreme of totally ignoring the textual complexity of Taiwan New Cinema, and making it a scapegoat for the loss of Taiwan cinema’s capacity for “autonomous reproduction, both in terms of critical discourse and commercial revenues” (my translation).34 It is true that New Cinema has constituted a focal point in historical research and academic publications on Taiwan cinema. And it is true New Cinema discourse tends to be homogenized around Hou and Yang. As a cultural and historical phenomenon that brought about a broader reflection of cultural value and taste markers, and substantially reconfigured the historiography and understanding of Taiwan cinema, New Cinema might be perceived as “canonical.” Yet to recognize cultural politics does not mean New Cinema can be dismissed simply as a phenomenon completely fabricated or constructed by an elite group of film critics to gain power in the cultural battle. And to argue that New Cinema has taken on an “institutional” status overestimates the kind of “privileges” available to New Cinema filmmakers and their supporters. One of the eight major markets for Hollywood’s output, Taiwan ironically suffered the dearth of quality film or visual education. New Cinema or cinema in general never achieved a solid pedagogical status. At the time of New Cinema’s emergence, there were only a couple of colleges offering programs in film, television and media culture, and these were confined to preliminary training of production. Since the New Cinema, the number of universities that claim to specialize in film education has increased to merely ten, and the study of cinema, visual or media culture that entails strictly defined theoretical methodologies has been sporadically shuffled under programs of journalism, mass communication, theater, or English-American literature. In Taiwan, there is only one strictly scholarly anthology published exclusively on Hou, but none on Yang or the rest.35 Even with the reign of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000, which systematically instituted the study of Taiwanese literature (“nativist” works and those produced in Japanese colonial years), no momentous decision was made to popularize the study of film or incorporate the New Cinema into official educational curriculum.

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Film professionals’ (both educators and filmmakers) “institutional” linkage is tenuous and tangential. Subsidy policy instituted by the New Cinema’s success in early 1990 long forsook the “cultural mode of production” once exemplified by the New Cinema.36 Cash rewards coming with international trophies, which detractors claim as evidence of New Cinema’s “co-optation,” can hardly cover production and promotional costs. Taiwan filmmakers are still obliged to work on a shoestring budget, which does not come to a fraction of the promotional expenses for a Hollywood A-production, nor even the budget for the “making” of a Hollywood feature. Moreover, in Taiwan’s barren film culture, there is only one professional film journal (that is, not dictated by any of Hollywood majors’ business interest, in which a film scholar/critic is guaranteed freedom of speech). The extent that the New Cinema’s canonical or institutional status amounts to privilege is negligible. To be sure, the New Cinema is a formation over-determined by both domestic and foreign forces, and none of its determinants can be seen in isolation from others. The dilemma of contemporary Taiwan cinema is a disjunctive site in the global nexus of capital and cultural establishment. In world film history, there have been similar cases of configuration interfaced between the national and international forces. And the study of their reception – such as Italian Neorealism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Akira Kurosawa, or Spain’s oppositional cinema – immediately requires unpacking both the global and local political dynamics. Yet the survival of Taiwan cinema in the form of art cinema embodies another phase of internationalization of art cinema, when the European-model art cinema conflated with a national cinema as defined by Crofts has been extended to a nation that is both “Third World” and East Asian.37 Its oppositional textuality may also be mistakenly located in a dubious “Chinese-ness” or “Asian-ness.” Taiwan New Cinema started out as political and cultural rebellion in the domestic context, got re-inscribed as an anticolonial cinema against Japanese, Chinese, or American imperialism on the international stage (but distinct from the category of “Third Cinema”), and ended up transforming itself into a supplier of international art cinema. Taiwan New Cinema’s success at international film festivals signals its participation in global postmodernity, and has had a profound impact on its reception and subsequent generations of filmmaking, distribution, film criticism, and scholarship. The international acclaim enjoyed by New Cinema’s filmmakers inspired followers to achieve a similar mixture of international fame and financial selfsufficiency. A few filmmakers, who had been apprenticed to New Cinema filmmakers in the 1980s, continued to operate in the formalist fold, realist tradition, independent mode of production, and most importantly, the global art-house system of capital recuperation pioneered by Hou and Yang. Some of them turned out to be no less creditable than their predecessors for their ability to redefine Taiwanese (post-)modernity or Taipei urbanity (such as Tsai Mingliang), or to capture a renewed Taiwanese hybridity centering upon disenfranchised communities of youngsters (Chang Tso-chi’s Darkness and Light and The Best of Times). Other works, however, seem at best a bland, even brazen replication of New Cinema’s style and themes. Yet the made-in-Taiwan “artsy films”

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keep being granted international art-house distribution and major or lesser festival prizes.38 Yet the trademark of Taiwan art cinema has been rendered irrelevant to the pressing tasks filmmakers are faced with today. Whether they pay respect to the heritage of the New Cinema, filmmakers are grappling with a wider range of genres (documentary, ghost-horror, teenage romance, animation) and topicalities (queer, children, female, or local subculture) in their attempt to make commercially viable cinema. Recent filmmaking also tends to be more producer-oriented than directorbased, groping for disparate tactics of promotion and distribution that might break Hollywood’s blockade,39 which proves to be insurmountable. At the time of revising this essay (spring 2006), the Majestic and President theaters, Taipei’s major exhibition venues and landmark of “art cinema” are due to close down, which presages further dissipation of alternative spectatorship in Taiwan. Given the lack of normalized, stable and professional business practice, Taiwan simply cannot cultivate “hacks” who learn their craft through run-of-the-mill productions, nor turn out a craft-centered cinema. Even if they score occasional box-office triumphs, recent productions are often, in my own opinion, glaringly flawed or of little aesthetic interest.40 If the antinomy of Hollywood versus national cinema has always been a fallacy (since Hollywood “is” Taiwan’s national cinema in terms of reception), then perhaps any Chinese language cinema shall be perceived as losing out not so much to Hollywood as to diversified forms of pop culture or “frothy” entertainment. With the film market increasingly targeting Taiwan’s youth and the mediascape incessantly fragmented, it is Mandarin pop, East Asian serial dramas, animation/manga/ video games, Internet, and Murakami Haruki that Taiwan films have to compete with.

Notes 1 See Bill Nichols, “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism,” East-West Journal 8, no. 1 (1994): 68. 2 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. 3 See Yeh Yueh-yu, “A National Score: Popular Music and Taiwanese Cinema” (diss., Univerisity of Southern California, 1995), 150–194. 4 For a complete historical contextualization of Taiwan New Cinema, see Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan cinema: Politics, economics, aesthetics, 1949–1994] (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998), 255–296. For English counterparts, see Emilie Yuehyu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 55–73; or Chris Berry and Lu Feii, eds, Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 1–8. 5 For a description of Hsiao Ye’s and Wu Nianzhen’s role in helping the newcomer policy along while tactically smoothing over CMPC’s rigid ideological control, see Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 57–73. 6 For Chiao’s representative publication on Taiwan New Cinema at home, see Taiwan xindianying [Taiwan New Cinema] (Taipei: Shibao, 1988). 7 Tony Rayns’ writings on Chinese language cinemas perhaps have the widest reach around the globe, not to mention his contributions to Sight & Sound. Commentaries penned by Rayns traveled to cities from Rotterdam, London, Gothenburg, Hawai’i,

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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Chia-chi Wu Vancouver, to Hong Kong and Taipei. He worked as a program consultant and English editor of early editions of the HKIFF. Marco Müller is a veteran filmmaker, producer and festival director across Western Europe, such as Locarno, Venice, Pesaro and Rotterdam festivals. Sato Tadao is a veteran director of Fukuoka International Film Festival, a festival with a focus on Asian cinema. Two other critics that also greatly promoted New Cinema’s global visibility are Olivier Assayas, who was then a journalist of Cahiers du Cinéma, and Hasumi Shigehiko, a well-respected Japanese film critic, scholar and president of Tokyo University. For a key source that addresses the gap of reception of Hou Hsiao-hsien between home and the world and Hou’s lack of commitment to popular cinema, see Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 163–85. Whereas most international festivals showed strong enthusiasm for Taiwan and Hong Kong films in the 1980s, Berlin did not pay much attention to them until 1993, when it showcased a large number of films from the three Chinese communities, especially in “International Forum.” That year, Lee Ang’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) as a “Taiwan, China” entrant and Xie Fei’s The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993) shared the Golden Bear Prize. Chia-chi Wu, “Chinese Language Cinemas in Transnational Flux” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2004). Peggy Chiao, interview with Cai Kongyong, Jintian bu dushu [No reading today], Public TV, January 21, 2003. Tony Rayns, “Edward Yang,” Vancouver International Film Festival (Vancouver: Greater Vancouver International Film Society, 1992), 41. It is noteworthy that Tony Rayns dominated the programming of Asian films at Vancouver. Catalogue, 19th International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam, 1990), 36–39. Peggy Chiao, “From Divergent Views of ‘Chinese-ness’ Towards a New Chinese Identity,” catalogue, Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois, 4e édition (Montréal: InterCinéArt, 1991), 40–41. Marie Claire Huot, “President’s Message, A White Lie,” catalogue, Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois, 5e édition (Montréal: InterCinéArt, 1992), 5. Chris Berry, “Hybridity and Transnationality: Postcolonial Cinemas of Hong Kong and Taiwan,” catalogue, Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois, 5e édition (Montréal: InterCinéArt, 1992), 12–18. Ibid., 12. I owe this observation to Darrell William Davis. China Times Express Award was organized by Peggy Chiao, in her effort to institute a professional critics’ award and to contest distributors’ interests that monopolized the Golden Horse Awards. Liang Xinhua and Mizou, eds, Xindianying zhisi [The Death of the New Cinema] (Taipei: Tangshan, 1991). For a summary of the “Death of the New Cinema” controversy, see Lu Feii, Taiwan Dianying, 309–329. English summaries of the controversy can be found in Abe Mark Nornes and Yeh Yueh-yu, “A City of Sadness,” 1994, http:// cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness/table.html (accessed October 25, 2006); and Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 133–35. For essays that illustrate tour de force formal analysis of Hou’s works, see Yeh, “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films”, 163–185; David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 186–237. Wu Qiyan, “Lishi jiyi, dianying yishu yu zhengzhi” [Memory of history, film art, and politics], in Liang Xinhua and Mizou (1991), 231. Liao Ping-hui, “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 294.

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24 For an essay that counters such views and defends City on the very ground of its formal operation by also citing Benjamin, see Yeh Yueh-yu, “Nüren zhende wufa jinru lishi ma?” [Can’t women enter history? Reviewing A City of Sadness”], Dangdai [Contemporary monthly] 101 (September 1994): 64–85. 25 Yeh and Davis bring into focus two New Cinema filmmakers who cannot be easily inscribed as auteurs – Wan Ren and Wang Tong. See Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 74–89. 26 During the New Cinema Era (1982–1987), the number of New Cinema productions was only 58, accounting for less than 14 percent of the total domestic production of those years. See Lu, Taiwan Dianying, 278–79. Also see Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 102. 27 A City of Sadness was financed by a Taiwanese entrepreneur, Qiu Fusheng, with its postproduction done in Japan and score written by a Japanese composer. A Brighter Summer Day was funded by a Japanese corporate (Mico), and entered Tokyo International Film Festival as a US/Japan co-production to avoid China’s intervention. It won the Special Jury Award and the FIPRESCI Award at the 1991 TIFF, and Best Director at the 1991 Nantes. 28 Liao Jingui, “Ta jiu zheyang paiwan le zhebu dianying” [He made the film just like this], Xin xinwen [New news weekly] (September 18, 1989): 74–75. 29 Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive l’Amour (1994), following Hou’s A City of Sadness, scored the Golden Lion Award at Venice in 1994. He went on to win the Silver Bear Award at Berlin with The River (1996) in 1997 and the FIPRESCI award at Cannes in 1998 with The Hole (1998). Chang Tso-chi’s Darkness and Light (1999) was given the Tokyo Grand Prix and the Gold Prize at TIFF in 1999. Lin Cheng-sheng scored a Best Director at the 2001 Berlin FF with Betelnut Beauty (2001). 30 See Wei Ti, “Reassessing the Historical Significance of Taiwanese New Cinema in the Context of Globalization,” 20th Anniversary of Taiwanese New Cinema (Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 2002), 14–20. 31 Wei, “Reassessing,” 16. 32 Pierre Bourdieu, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 33 Zhang Shilun, “Taiwanese New Cinema and the International Film Festival Approach,” in 20th Anniversary of Taiwanese New Cinema (Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 2002), 27. 34 Ibid., 25. 35 Lin Wen-chi, Shen Hsiao-ying, and Li Chenya, eds, Xilian rensheng – Hou Hsiao-hsien dianying yanjiu [Passionate detachment: Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien] (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company, 2000). 36 Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 40–42. 37 Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 14, no. 3 (1993): 49–67. 38 Here I am referring to Xu Xiaoming (Heartbreak Island, 1995), Yee Chih-yen (Lonely Hearts Club, 1995), and Yin Qi (In a Strange City, 1995). In my view, their works represent opportunistic attempts to cash in on the fame of Taiwan art cinema. These filmmakers have all moved toward popular narratives in television or film since mid-1990s. 39 I owe this observation to Lee Chu-chun. 40 In dismissing some films as lesser, I voluntarily risk applying my own esthetic judgment, even though, in film cultural studies, esthetic values are considered as more or less variable and contextual.

Part II

Popularity

6

The unbearable lightness of globalization On the transnational flight of wuxia film Hsiao-hung Chang

After the global popularity of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, transnational Chinese directors have seized the opportunity to make wuxia films by following the same strategy of organizing transnational funding, cast and crew, and distribution networks. Examples include Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Tsui Hark’s Warriors of Heaven and Earth, Seven Swords, and Chen Kaige’s The Promise. In the face of this new global wave of wuxia craze, this chapter takes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a point of departure to explore cultural and political aspects of flight imagination in the current discourse on globalization. The major concern here is not merely to evaluate or criticize this global circulation of film commodity that constantly blurs national boundaries and cultural borders, but to explore how this wuxia craze might ultimately help us to “rewrite” the global as “globall,” a global with an extra “l” endowed with the corporeal imagination of “the balls.” Through a constant play on the English letter “l” both visually and semantically, this paper attempts to map out two major differences: (1) the historical and esthetic difference between the wuxia “flight” and the kung fu “fight” as a mobile displacement of the “l,” and (2) the theoretical and political difference between the “haptic” “qi” space of embodiment and the “optic” cyberspace of disembodiment. All these critical mappings will converge on my central concern on qing gong (ethereal flight) to unleash a radical questioning of the current global wuxia craze by foregrounding the always already “transnationality” of wuxia film in its historical development, stylistic mixing, and cultural reception.1 These historical and cultural explorations of qing gong will finally be taken in this chapter as a line of flight from the current deadlock of global Hollywood versus national cinema to open up a different route of theorizing the dynamics of the corporeal and the political, the transnational and the national. In facing the multiple and ambivalent positioning of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a Taiwanese (American) film, a Hollywood film, a foreign-language film, or a (transnational) Chinese film, two major lines of argument have been developed on the issue of its global popularity. One tends to criticize this wuxia film as a culturally inauthentic product of exotic Orientalism, catering to Western taste. The other emphasizes instead creative spaces of cultural translation and hybridization opened by the film, a space that helps to undo, through its cultural appeal to the imaginary jianghu (the world of outcasts) of ancient China, the impasse of

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nationalist and masculinist conservatism, and to release multiple flows of spectator positioning in cross-cultural reception. However, I move beyond these two dominant interpretations by choosing a different route of approach to the film’s global success: to read the film both literally and figuratively as a site of three interlocking modes of qing gong. The first is the cultural imagination of qi in the wuxia genre, which takes the human body as a force field of cosmology and enables levitation, regardless of the rules of gravity and physical limitation. The second concerns the development of post-cinema digital theories and cyberspace that seeks, through a series of dematerialization, disembodiment, and deterritorialization, the ultimate goal of hypermotility and the absolute dream of dislocating “space” from “locality,” “the virtual” from “the real.” The third comes from contemporary discourses on “disembedding” and “the weightlessness of power” by taking the film as a cultural commodity that can “fly” out of local confinements and restrictions through its global distribution, circulation, and consumption. I will argue that the triple combination of qing gong, namely, the ethereal flight of the wuxia film, the virtual flight of cyberspace, and the global flight of cultural commodity, together creates the film’s global popularity.

Hard and soft, muscle and qi How FAT is Chow Yun-FAT? This light-hearted tease is inspired by the visual representation of Chow Yun-fat’s now middle-aged body on the screen. As the most eye-catching scene of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the ethereal chasing sequence and airborne duel between the martial arts master Li Mubai (Chow Yunfat) and the recalcitrant young woman Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) in the green bamboo has made this erotically charged scene a classic in contemporary wuxia films. However, when we follow the plump body of Chow Yun-fat chasing the slim figure of Zhang Ziyi above the grove and find his body flying with as much agility as Zhang’s without being even slightly bothered by his (over)weight and gravity, we are more than eager to ask: what are the cultural possibilities for us to see and to believe the ethereal flight of Chow Yun-fat? A simple answer can be immediately reached from the technical perspective in the process of the cinematic shooting of qing gong: almost all of the flight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were shot with the help of support wires. In order to make Chow and Zhang fly high in the sky, the flight sequence and aerial duel were shot with the help of wires attached with one end to the cranes to hang their bodies in mid-air and the other to film crew pulling with all their might on the ground. Zhang Ziyi usually needed eight people to pull the wire, whereas Chow Yun-fat needed at least twelve, sometimes over twenty. Judging from its use of wires, the stunningly beautiful spectacle of qing gong in the film is created not from hi-tech special effects, but from intensified human labor. Qing gong is not qing (light) at all; it is so heavy that it needs cranes and twenty people to pull the wires attached to one single actor flying in the air. But we can push the question further beyond technical possibility: what kind of cultural imagination, philosophical and aesthetic tradition could justify this visual obsession with qing

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gong in wuxia films? One can easily observe that in every conceivable cultural tradition, be it western, eastern, present, or past, there are always traces exemplifying human primordial desire for flight; however, there exists a huge difference between the cultural imaginaries cultivated in the West and the East. In the West, the imaginary of flight often relies heavily on auxiliary objects. Whether in terms of science or supernatural Black Magic, the imaginary of flight in the West more often than not requires artifacts for support, such as hot-air balloons, gliders, airplanes, rockets, Icarus’ waxed wings, a witch’s broom, a wizard’s magic stick, Peter Pan’s transparent wings, Superman’s cape, Spiderman’s silken thread, etc. But if we take a quick look at the cultural imaginary of flight in the East, we find that deep in the cultural unconscious there exists an imaginary of flight which values the body’s ability to fly in the air without the aid of any artifact. This kind of imaginary of qing gong flight that may be rejected or deemed totally impossible by Western rationality is strongly related to the theory of qi-body in ancient Chinese thought. For a culturally specific understanding of Chow Yun-fat’s soaring body in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, one needs to explore the concept of the qi-body, one that is omnipresent in Chinese philosophy, aesthetics, and martial arts. The best example could be found in Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, in which two medical body illustrations – the acupuncture man taken from Hua Shou’s Shisijing fa hui (AD 1341) and the muscle man taken from Versalius’s Fabrica (AD 1543) – are perfectly juxtaposed. The comparison and contrast between these two medical illustrations of body highlight the differences between sagginess/firmness, softness/hardness, surface/depth, and downward-sinking/upward-lifting. As Kuriyama persuasively argued, the soft and sagging body of the acupuncture man refers not to any denotation of middle-aged plumpness nor a protruding belly as a lack of exercise, but to the outcome of the circulation and vibration of qi inside out and outside in the body; in contrast, the muscular body perceived in the dominance of Western anatomy exhibits a will to manipulate and control through its body movement as manifestation of autonomous agency. What this muscle-consciousness creates is exactly an isolated and enclosed conception of individual personhood in sharp contrast to the permeability and interconnectivity of the qi-body.2 If we hope to understand further this kind of soft body that Chow represents and its implicit sub-version of the spectacular and muscular male bodies on screen, it is also necessary to pay attention to the different body images “within” the tradition of martial arts film itself. Generally speaking, the martial arts film can be sub-categorized into wuxia films and kung fu films, and the different historical developments and cinematic esthetics of these two categories are keys to our understanding of Chow’s soft qi body in contrast to the muscular but swift and agile kungfu body exemplified from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan. In his book Wuxia gongfu pian, Hong Kong film scholar Ng Ho contrasts wuxia films with kung fu films in a very vivid and succinct way: the most obvious difference lies in the act of f(l)ighting. Whereas wuxia films rely on weaponry such as knives and swords, kung fu films privilege fighting with bare hands and fists (though occasionally it may also use swords and sticks). They are also sharply differentiated in terms of cinematic

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esthetics. Wuxia film allows phantasmagoric actions (such as flying in the sky, descending to the underground, or remotely controlling a sword through qi) and an outlandish presentation of fighting scenes (how to kill a martial arts master in a second), so that it can be quite flamboyant and stylish without being very realistic. Kung fu film focuses on real fighting on the ground (any special effects added would be accused of cheating the audience with fake fighting) and a long, tiresome fighting sequence ensues (it’s never easy to kill your enemy with bare hands), so it requires real fighting instead of faked actions. The difference between the two exemplifies different forms of violence, which also provide different kinds of sensation.3 At this juncture, we may try to theorize the difference between wuxia film and kung fu film by playing further with the two words “fight” and “flight.” The crucial difference between these two words is the (non)presence of the letter “l.” If we perceive the English letter “l” with the aid of the pictographic imagination of Chinese character, then it may stand visually as a vertical leap (whether boosted by trampolines or supported by wires). In this way, the grounded “fighting” of kung fu film is visually, virtually, and vertically transformed into the aerial “flight” of wuxia film. The bodily strength of fighting in kung fu film comes solidly from the ground by taking real actions and body combat as a way of demonstrating excellent martial arts training. At first sight, qing gong in wuxia film seems to be particularly tailored to meet the needs of those actors or actresses who know nothing about the skills of the martial arts; by highlighting their flight in the sky, instead of fighting on the ground, it seems to provide an easy way out. However, the “cultural background” of qing gong is much more complicated than a mere technical strategy to cope with deficiency in performance. Qing gong points to the cultivation of dantian qi (inner force) and its subsequent circulation in the body as the ideal of the Chinese martial arts. While the external physical movements of the martial arts are easy to observe, the internal cultivation of dantian qi and its vibration throughout the body is tangible but invisible. Therefore, in addition to the actor’s facial expressions, actions, and the indirect expression of pushing the enemy away with qi in the process of swordplay or fighting, qing gong flight becomes the most spectacular way for cinema to visualize the invisible qi. As feminist film scholar Linda Williams states in Hard Core,4 if the key to transform the invisible sexual orgasm to visibility in pornography is the “money shot” (the male porno star’s ejaculation outside the vagina for the audience to see), then maybe it is possible for us to make a harmless joke here that the key in wuxia film to transform the invisible qi into visibility is through the shot of qing gong. It is no wonder that qing gong, as the “money shot” of the wuxia film, helps to foreground not only the cultural ideal of the qi-body by transforming the circulation and vibration of invisible qi into visible f(l)ight, but also to build up the major visual attraction in the market consumption of the wuxia genre. Qing gong is a “money shot” that sutures seamlessly high and low, cultural ideal and box office, philosophical thinking and commercial profits.

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“Simularity” between the haptic qi space and the optic cyberspace The first part of this chapter has explored the technical possibility and the cultural imagination for the ethereal flight of qing gong by foregrounding, respectively, its intensive labor and cultural density. But if one knew nothing about the Chinese theory of qi, nor the historical context in which the wuxia and kungfu genres differ from each other, can one still appreciate and be deeply attracted to the brilliant spectacle of qing gong in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? By taking the film’s transcultural and transnational reception into account, “simularity,” a neologism that combines “similarity,” “simulation,” and “simulacrum” (the etymology of these three words in Latin is similis), can be used to theorize a global cultural reception that moves beyond the dichotomy of origin/copy, authenticity/inauthenticity. “Simularity” of qing gong in wuxia film is neither established on a representation of authentic or real “Chineseness” nor simply the outcome of the cultural translation and transformation based on the notion of “hybridity.” The notion of “simularity” will help us move beyond current discussions of the global reception of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, all of which focus chiefly on issues of “cultural discrepancy,” “cultural discount,” and “cultural misreading” or “cultural translation.”5 My emphasis here will be on “transcultural articulation” rather than “cultural (mis)representation/(mis)translation,” an articulation as a constant slippage of similar images, simulations, and simulacra, leading finally to a creative collapse among them. In the past, critics often attributed the transnational popularity of Hong Kong kungfu and action film to the body movement of fighting as a universal language that can be comprehended immediately and circulates well beyond the confines of cultural or national boundaries. However, this line of argument fails to address the global popularity of qing gong, whose defiance of gravity is obviously unreal, if not surreal, and culturally specific. In light of “simularity” as a transcultural articulation, we can read the global popularity of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, besides its superb transnational cooperation, highly impressive cinematic style, and successful Hollywood distribution, as the result of collapsing two different spaces: “haptic qi space” and “cyberspace.” Its success can be explained “not” because it is a film where “Jane Austin meets Wuxia,” a phrase used to promote the film when it was released with a nod to Ang Lee’s film Sense and Sensibility in 1995, but because it is the cinematic site/sight on which “haptic qi space” meets “cyberspace.” The following discussion will take two examples of “cyberspace” – the cyber kungfu film and video games – to demonstrate how the global popularity of these genres pave the way for the transcultural reception of qing gong in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The Matrix stands out as our main example of the cyber kungfu film. The success of The Matrix not only elevates the art of kung fu fighting from its former position of B-movie to a symbol of “chic,” but also introduces Eastern qing gong into the genre of science fiction-action films as a major visual appeal. Ang Lee himself noted that, in a certain sense, the success of The Matrix was a warm-up to his Crouching Tiger,

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Hidden Dragon.6 If audiences can accept Keanu Reeves in black robes levitating in the air or stopping bullets through the use of his mind, then it is also possible for them to appreciate Chow Yun-fat’s floating above the bamboo grove in his white robes. Besides, Yuen Wo-ping, the martial arts supervisor in The Matrix, is also responsible for the choreography of f(l)ighting in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In its public release in the United States, one of the target audiences were fans of The Matrix and those obsessed with the choreography of f(l)ighting by Yuen’s team. In The Matrix, one witnesses the meeting of Eastern kungfu and cinematic special effects, the result of which is a beautiful integration of gravity-defying qing gong with the genre of science fiction. This incorporation of nonrealist qing gong into the act of f(l)ighting in sci-fi therefore paved the way for the reception of the body imaginary of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by opening up the possibility of “simularity” between wuxia films and cyber kungfu films. The second example concerns the global popularity of (Japanese) video games and how the gravity-defying leaps and flights portrayed therein have helped shape the chances of new wuxia films’ global reception. Let’s take a look at the alliance formed between contemporary wuxia films and video games. In the (post)cinema era, the production of a film is necessarily accompanied by multiple connections among novels, DVDs, soundtracks, video games, and other audiovisual commodities for its promotion and marketing. In terms of the relationship between films and video games, the interaction has been close and frequent: films have been adopted from video games and vice versa (Lara Croft, etc.). No wonder the mutual influences between video games and films in terms of image and narrative has become one of the main focuses in contemporary media studies. Moreover, if one narrows the scope of analysis to the specific context of the martial arts film, one can immediately observe that the categories of “video games/fantasy comics” and “sci-fi wuxia” are prominent in the studies of its sub-genres. In fact, many martial arts films were developed from video games or television animation series, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), and Street Fighter (1994), etc. Especially at the end of 1980s and early 1990s, the craze for Ninja Turtles helped spread Asian martial arts in the US and the sales of Nintendo. This craze was further buttressed by the active production of video games/animation/martial arts films in the same period. 7 Therefore, this “simularity” in global cultural reception makes possible the imaginary articulation and slippage between images of “haptic qi space” and “cyberspace.” However, a key difference still exists between these: a difference that can be taken as a starting point for our discussion on the flight imagination of globalization. Here we continue our theoretical transfiguration of the word “flight” in the previous section. If one extra l as a triple v (visual, vertical, and virtual) leap transforms kung fu “fight” to wuxia “flight,” then the wordplay attempted here centers on the “light” in “f-light”: the “light” in the haptic flight as “weightlessness” and the “light” in the optical flight as “illumination.” Starting with the close connection between cyberspace and light as illumination, this link was fully developed in the tradition of Western philosophy and esthetics. Cyberspace created by digital technology is a kind of 3-D space based on the geometry of X, Y, Z axes, which contains within itself implicit Western ideologies, including Cartesian space,

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objective realism, and a linear and monocular perspectivism. Hence, the notion of light as illumination in cyberspace is the manifestation of abstract rationality developed from the “en-light-enment” project, the result of which is the transcendental status of “phallogocularcentrism.” And the overdependence of the cyberspace on optic visuality can be observed in many images of sci-fi movies or video games. Let’s take the f(l)ighting scenes in The Matrix as an example. Though Yuen Wo-ping’s choreography of fighting and aerial combat is marvelous, and the incorporation and transformation of the visual styles of video games such as Street Fighting, Mortal Combat, and Tekken into the film are truly successful, the most visually stunning achievement in this film is not the qing gong of human body but the “bullets-in-flight” created by computer graphics technology. The effect achieved by this computer technique of magnification is not what we see in traditional close-ups or slow motion; on the contrary, this “hyperobject” is created purely from 3-D models and programs of computer graphics. “The bullets-in-flight” is the perfect realization of what Jean Baudrillard terms “the hyper-real,” for the kind of space in which these bullets fly knows no blind spots, hence a perfect example of “obscenity” in virtual reality.8 The digital image of bullets-in-flight generated from 3-D technology leads inevitably to a total disruption of spatial reality and temporal continuity, as greatly cherished by Andre Bazin; this “de-ontologized” flight created out of nothingness is completely subject to digital inspection, control, and alteration. This kind of cyberspace based on “phallogocularcentrism” cannot exempt itself from the critiques of “white mythologies” of the “en-light-enment” project launched by contemporary postcolonial theories: “being white” as both the symbol of “abstract rationality” and as the imperialist mindset which privileges the “white” race. As many theorists of contemporary digital culture have pointed out, video games and sci-fi films developed out of video games exhibit the same desire to occupy and conquer space as travel writing under the influence of Western imperialist ideologies. What’s worse, this imperialist mindset in the world of video games can be further combined with the Cartesian mind/body binarism to generate a disembodied “cerebral self,” a transcendental subject who can extend himself at will in the world of abstract, digital thought. But in addition to the postcolonial critique of cyberspace, this chapter is concerned more about how the differentiation of “light” as illumination in cyberspace and “light” as weightlessness in “haptic qi space” may influence current discourse on global flight. If “light” as illumination in cyberspace enables the separation of body and space, subject and object, and interior and exterior, then “light” (qing in Mandarin) in the haptic qi space, as the gerund and progressive form of qi-ing, is exactly what makes the interconnectivity or permeability between body and space, subject and object, interior and exterior possible. As demonstrated tangibly in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the state of “being light (qing)” is the embodiment of qi as the haptic: only when one completely surrenders one’s muscular control can qi circulate and vibrate inside out and outside in the loosened, soft body, thereby enabling the possibility of qing gong as qi-ing.

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We may now bring the philosophical and political discussion on the difference between cyberspace and haptic qi space back to our analysis of filmic images. Let’s take the bamboo grove scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and that in House of Flying Daggers by Zhang Yimou for examples. Though both of them present a homage paid to the classic bamboo grove scene in King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, we can easily detect the totally different treatment of qing gong flight in these two films. The bamboo grove scene in House of Flying Daggers, which relies heavily on 3-D visual effects, turns the qing gong of human bodies completely into its disembodied, nonhuman counterpart. The flight of smart daggers, daggers that aim at enemies automatically like smart bombs, is the most visually stunning spectacle of the film, which echoes the special effects of bullet-in-flight in The Matrix and water droplets in Hero. The bamboo grove scene in Zhang’s film is the product of a magnification of optic visuality with a strong will to win audiences back to the movie theater by means of brilliant colors and special visual effects on screen. If, as Ackbar Abbas once noted,9 Hong Kong director Tsui Hark made special effects the leading actor in his sci-fi wuxia films by sacrificing the corporeal, then Zhang’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers turn the haptic and ambient space of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon into the cyberspace of special visual effects and sharply contrasted images. Aerial flight in Zhang Yimou’s films is the abstract form of “light” which privileges the hypermobility of the disembodied, cerebral self and the super-visibility of the sovereign I/Eye. The qing gong flight in Ang Lee’s film as an embodied form of qi vibrates and permeates tangibly throughout the film’s costume, set décor, music, architecture, and landscape.

These nations which are not one, this globe which is not one Imagination of flight seems to be ubiquitous in the current discourse of globalization. The old distinction of base- and super-structures has given way to that of the flying “global man” above and the crawling “local man” on the ground, implying the former’s nomadic affluence and the latter’s poverty and confinement. And one of the most important achievements the process of globalization has accomplished is to free “the global man” from the restrictions of location, resulting in the war of independence from the confinements of place.10 Therefore, the practical and metaphorical implications for the global man’s qing gong flight, whether taking an airplane, surfing the net, using web cams, making investments, or transferring capital, all point to a gravity-defying state of weightlessness, totally free from the confinements of body, substance, locality, national boundaries, and cultural borders. And what the qing gong flight of “global commodity” and “the global man” have in common is a transformation of the material form from “use value” to “exchange value” and “symbolic value” through a process of abstraction and disembodiment. After discussing the difference between the cyberspace and the haptic qi space of wuxia film, what theoretical suggestions can we offer to the current discourse of globalization based chiefly on the notion of cyberspace? We can return to our previous elaboration on the word “flight” again by mapping out

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one more transfiguration: the Deleuzian notion of “line of flight” as the becoming process of deterritorialization. Here, the final attempt to theorize qing gong as “line of flight” is to put an extra letter “l” this time right after the word “global.” If adding an extra “l” onto the word “fight” can transform kung fu fight into wuxia flight, then what kind of imaginary can one initiate by adding an extra “l” after the word “global,” especially in “light” of the current “territorialized” discourse of globalization on homogeneity/heterogeneity, globalization/localization? First of all, consider “the ball” in the word “globall.” The plural form of this word, “the balls,” can be taken as a part of male sexual organs, that is, testicles. Unlike the biological penis, which can easily be transcended to “the symbolic phallus,” “the balls” retain a marked sexual difference and are less inclined to be subject to the process of abstraction. The abstract notion of “global” created out of the virtual reality of cyberspace is then immediately endowed with a corporeal connection once we imagine “the balls” in the “globall.” What is even more marvelous is that this “globall” imagination is achieved by the sexed male body serving here as a prototype, subverting the traditional Western deployment of man/woman, mind/body, spirit/substance, culture/nature; after all, no longer do only women have bodies and are bodies. This conception of “the globall,” once endowed with a body, foregrounds the embodied aspect of the qing gong flight in globalization as a co-dependence of the corporeal and the incorporeal, the material and the immaterial, rather than the mere conquering of abstract space to achieve absolute freedom of disembedding. Just like the qing gong flight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which requires intensive use of labor force (qing gong is never “light” nor transcendental), the supposed “lightness” of global commodities is more often than not established on exploitation of the unequal division of international labor force and power relations; what the transcendental status of the global man intends to cover up is exactly the split between the “optimism of software” and “pessimism of hardware.” The extra letter “l” now can be imaginatively visualized as both a vertical “leap” upward “and” a vertical “landing” downward since any qing gong flight will end eventually with a landing, just like any short or long haul air flight. But this “landing” does not necessarily imply “rootedness”; instead, it transforms “roots” into “routes” in its constant exchange between flight and landing, deterritorialization and territorialization, disembodiment and embodiment. The second “line of (qing gong) flight” that we want to develop aims to subvert the rigid demarcation of “global Hollywood” versus “national cinema.” If the word “global” can be transformed into “globall,” then the possibility of opening up another way to the discursive framework lies in the sub-version of the binary opposition of “national versus transnational.” This binary opposition seems to imply that “the transnational” is a way to rid the control of the nation-state, and that is what weakens the power of the nation-state. This conceptualization may further lead to two different conclusions: one is a linear development from “nation-state” to “post-nation-state”; the other is to regard “the nation-state” as the final site of resistance against the invasion of globalization. What this sub-version means is not merely to see “the national” as “crouching” and “hidden” in “the transnational”; the radical implication here is also to see “the national” as always already “the

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transnational.” Here the prefix “trans-” not only refers to the crossing of national boundaries in the process of the production, distribution, and consumption of the film, but also how “nation-state” as an imagined community (imagiNation), as a nation of narration (dissemiNation), as hypheNation, is constantly under a process of construction and deconstruction, territorialization and deterritorialization. 11 We can now return to our case study: the film Crouching Tiger and “the global wuxia craze” it generated. Here the question may start with the “transnationality” of director Ang Lee as a “global man.” To this day, there have been incessant interrogations of Ang Lee’s flowing and multiple identifications by questioning his “actual” national and cultural identity. Is he Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian American, or a Taiwanese mainlander who lives in the US? No wonder when it comes to discussions on “diasporic identification” or “flexible citizenship,” Ang Lee is often cited as a major example.12 And his films, including those produced by Central Motion Picture Corporation such as Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and those produced in Hollywood such as Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), and The Hulk (2003), present a huge range of diversity in terms of film genre, locality, nationality, and culture. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can be regarded as the summit of Lee’s longtime oscillation between independent production and Hollywood production, between art-house film and popular cinema. The questioning of Lee’s (trans)national identification is further extended to the identification of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: is this film a Taiwanese film, a Western film, a foreign-language film, a Hollywood film, or a Chinese film that panders to foreigners? The presumption behind these questionings is a fixed, enclosed, and essentialized conception of identity. If we shift our focus to the notions of “These Nations Which Are Not One” and “This Globe Which Is Not One,” the ambiguity these questions provoke actually opens up the dynamic possibility of transcultural positioning, an always in-between of mobile differentiation.13 Ang Lee, long regarded as a representative of Taiwan’s national glory, is still seen by himself and others as an outsider (“wai ren” in Mandarin) even in the place where he grew up. He soars between Taiwan, America, and China as the second generation of mainlanders in Taiwan, as an alien in the US and as a Taiwanese in Mainland China. Even though he adopts the genre of wuxia, supposedly the most characteristic of Chinese culture, his film Crouching Tiger is doomed to be regarded as a wai pian (foreign film) referring not merely to the status of the foreign, but more to that of the “outsider” film: the “radical” implication of this “outside” comes not from its opposition to an “inside,” but from an “outside” outside the inside/outside dichotomy. Ang Lee as “wai ren” (outsider) and the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as “wai pian” (outsider film) both serve as illustrations of the subversive potential in the notions of “These Nations Which Are Not One” and “This Globe Which Is Not One” in our current theorization of “globall flight.” And the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one of the representatives of global cinema in the twenty-first century inevitably reminds us of the glorious history that the wuxia film, itself representative of twentieth century transnational cinema, has gone through. Crouching

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Tiger, Hidden Dragon adopts a mode of shooting by means of “a new international division of cultural labor force,” which combines the modes developed from the experiences Hollywood and Hong Kong film industry gathered in mainland China during the past ten years. Its team was composed of a Taiwanese director, Hong Kong crew, producers and hundreds of staff from China, and actors/ actresses from Taiwan/Hong Kong/China/Malaysia; the film was shot in locations and settings in China; the soundtrack was recorded in the US. Its global popularity carries the critical momentum to explain not only the following wave of “global wuxia craze” in the twenty-first century but also preceding waves of transnational wuxia in the twentieth century. Instead of being a teleological progression from national to global cinema, it maps out the sub-version of the national “crouching” in the transnational and the transnational “hidden” in the national. In the history of the development of wuxia films, the international market has always played a very important role. Just like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon whose copyright was presold to distributors, in the past many wuxia films have also sold their rights to Southeast Asia to raise the required capital in advance. The international network of distribution of these Mandarin language wuxia films with English subtitles have extended not only between Hong Kong and Taiwan, but also to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. Moreover, wuxia films were already a hybridized genre, including transnational influences from other genres such as Japanese samurai, American westerns, Italian spaghetti westerns, Hollywood musicals, etc. As Meaghan Morris persuasively argues in her studies of Hong Kong cinema, without overlooking the hegemonic role Hollywood films play today, current film studies should be able to dislocate “globalization” from “Hollywood” in certain specific geopolitical areas to allow other sociohistorical contexts of “non-Hollywood global cinema” to appear14. Providing the background for the global hit of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the transnational craze for wuxia film of the last century can thus stand out as exactly what Morris terms the other (nonHollywood) alternative of global cinema. As a transnational wuxia film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon creates an impressive cinematic haptic qi space that can be entered and touched; as a global boxoffice hit, it exemplifies a miracle of cultural commodity with its qing gong flight of transcultural circulation and consumption. Its success points to the triple combination of qing gong in wuxia film, the hypermotility of cyberspace, and the global flight of film commodity into a creative cooperation and co-production. At the same time, its transnational reception itself poses new, challenging questions to the current discourse on globalization and asks for a radically new theorization of body imagination and power deployment. As James Schamus, co-writer and executive producer of Crouching Tiger, once jokingly noted: the shooting of the bamboo grove scene was extremely difficult “with Chow Yuen-fat [Yun-fat] in a harness, hanging by his balls sixty feet up in the sky.”15 After all these historical and theoretical explorations attempted in this chapter, we can now perfectly understand why the lightness of Chow Yun-fat’s “globall” flight, as the representative of the martial arts master or as the global man, is always already labor-intensive and (trans)culturespecific, and why this lightness can never be treated lightly.

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Notes 1 The transliteration of qing gong is used here to highlight theoretically qing as “qi-ing,” as the gerund and the progressive form of “qi.” This transliteration is intended to take qing gong as the incessant, vibrating process of embodying qi in the following reading of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 2 Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 3 Ng Ho, ed., Wuxia gongfu pian [Wuxia kung fu film] (Hong Kong: Sanlian, 2004). 4 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: California University Press, 1989). 5 Some critics foreground the differences of cultural values, esthetic receptions, and social psychology between the East and the West to account for the impossible integration of different receptions and interpretations of the film or to show their deep concern about the dead end that “cultural misreading” may induce. See Ping-hui Liao, “Haiwai hairen lisan shequn de quanqiuhua?” [Diasporic Chinese community in the process of Globalization], Chung-Wei Literary Monthly 32, no. 4 (2003): 17–28; Felicia Chan, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability,” in Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 56–64. Others take this situation more positively by emphasizing the creativity of “cultural translation” and the multiple, flowing spectatorial positions released by it. See Ken-fang Lee, “Far Away, So Close: Cultural Translation in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 281–295; Fran Martin, “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 149–159. 6 Ang Lee also cited Charlie’s Angels as one of the movies that helped promote the global popularity of the art of f(l)ighting. Charlie’s Angels, whose martial arts supervisor is Yuen Wo-ping’s brother Yuen Xiangren, was also a Sony Columbia production. Even though this film does not contain elements of qing gong, it nevertheless pictures an image of tough women warriors, which in turn paves the way for the image of lady-knight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its subsequent feminist reception. For a brilliant discussion on the articulation between the image of the wuxia knight-lady and the image of the “beautiful and yet tough” heroine in contemporary Euro-American feminist popular cultures, see Martin. 7 David Desser, “The Martial Art Film in the 1990s,” in Film Genre 2000: New Critical Essays, ed. Wheeler W. Dixon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 77–109. 8 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on PostModern Culture, eds Hal Foster and Post Townsend (WA: Bay Press, 1983), 126–134. 9 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1997). 10 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Polity, 1998). 11 For a further elaboration of these theoretical notions in the current discourse on transnational Chinese cinema, see Abbas (1997); Chris Berry, “These Nations Which Are Not One: History, Identity and Postcoloniality in Recent Hong Kong and Taiwan Cinema,” SPAN 34–35 (1992–1993): 37–49; Kwai-Cheung Lo, “Transnationalization of the Local in Hong Kong Cinema of the 1990s,” in Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (hereafter TCC), ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 261–276. 12 Wei Ming Dariotis and Eileen Fung, “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee,” in TCC, 187–220; Shu-mei Shi, “Globalization and Minoritization: Ang Lee and the Politics of Flexibility,” New Formations 40 (2000): 87–101.

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13 The notion of “These Nations Which Are Not One” was originally the ingenious title of Chris Berry’s article. It directly echoes French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray’s book This Sex Which Is Not One in which the female imaginary of “two lips” is used as an alternative to the metaphoric identification of male penis with the Phallus. Irigaray’s notion of “two lips” and our theorization of the “two balls” are “neither one nor two,” for both “one” and “two” are established on a fixed and enclosed imaginary of “oneness.” “Two lips” and “two balls” as “metonymic proximity” can thus provide an alternative to the present discourse on nationality, which relies extensively on “metaphoric identification.” 14 Meaghan Morris, “Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 181–199. 15 Stephen Teo, “‘We Kicked Jackie Chan’s Ass!’: An Interview with James Schamus,” Senses of Cinema 13 (2001), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/13/ schamus.html (accessed November 9, 2004)

7

“This isn’t real!” Spatialized narration and (in)visible special effects in “double vision”1 Ru-shou Robert Chen

We live inside an enormous novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.2

In the wake of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Columbia Pictures’ Hong Kong (Asia) subsidiary produced Double Vision at great expense. At US$17 million, this film had the highest production cost of any Taiwanese movie ever made. Its production involved actors and professionals from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US, and Australia. Its total box office sales in Taiwan topped NT$80 million, setting a record for Taiwanese movies since A City of Sadness. Double Vision thus opened up exciting new prospects for the lethargic Taiwan cinema. Double Vision was positioned by the film company as a “serial killing story that takes place in the capital city of Taiwan.” Chen Kuo-fu, the film’s director, production supervisor, and screenwriter, noticed that the Taiwan market had never had any movies with Double Vision’s terrifying theme. On the other hand, horror movies can be considered the international currency of film, and have an avid fan base in every country. Because of this, some critics feel that this film can be seen as Taiwan’s version of Se7en plus The X Files with an additional semireligious ambiance of rebirth and karma. As a result, the movie is as exciting and viewable as any Hollywood product, and has content worthy of discussion. Chen explained quite frankly in an interview, “I wanted to turn it into something that could be exported.”3 The title of the movie and the names of the director and actors are therefore given in English in advertisements and publicity materials, and the trailer is dubbed in English. There is no mention that this is a Taiwanese movie from the beginning to the end. An extensive effort has been made to conceal the fact that Double Vision is a Taiwanese movie. And of course the marketing expenses for this “Hollywood-style Taiwanese movie” were much more generous than for ordinary Taiwanese movies. The general impression was that the production was in line with a Hollywood “A-list” movie budget. The story of Double Vision begins with a stillborn child that possesses two pupils in one eye. Three bizarre murder cases then occur, and the three victims are completely unconnected with each other. The sole link between the three victims is that they all seem to have died from some supernatural causes. The Taiwanese

Spatialized narration and (in)visible special effects 109 police are forced to ask for help from the FBI. The Taiwanese detective Huang Huotu (Tony Leung Ka-fai), troubled by both marriage difficulties and workrelated woes, works with an American FBI detective (David Morse) to help solve the case. After getting some tips from a scholar of religion working at the Academia Sinica, the two detectives gradually come to suspect a secret religious sect, whose members are intent on achieving immortality through committing murder. The mystery deepens when a fourth body is found, and even the resolutely scientific American detective is baffled. Finally, Huang must go to the sect’s secret headquarters, the True Immortal Shrine, to get to the bottom of what has been going on. The production of this film conforms fully to the concept of the “new international division of cultural labor” proposed in Global Hollywood.4 In parallel with the production structure of the movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise as discussed in the book, Hollywood provided the capital for Double Vision and brought together labor from Hong Kong, Australia, and the US, as well as Taiwan. As Hollywood develops this type of “runaway production,” it hopes to maintain its ability to control the movie labor market worldwide and (even more importantly) continue to dominate the global box office. This paper will neither explore this subject any further nor try to investigate the movie’s marketing strategy in Taiwan. Instead, my research focus is on the highconcept5 advertising slogan for the film, “There is only what you believe,” plus the signature graphic, the stillborn child with two pupils in its right eye seen at the start of the film. The juxtaposition of these two elements reveals that the movie is interested in exploring the concept of perception, and questions the dialectical relationship embodied in the Western proverb “Seeing is believing.” The line Huang Huotu shouts at the end of the film after encountering five weird murders is “This isn’t real!” His agony points directly to the film’s key questions: What is real? How are we to know? The dualism of the title “Double Vision” consists of eliminating the boundaries of such dual structures as reality/fiction, science/occult, ideas/content, illusion/ real experience, inner/outer, rationality/belief, the US FBI/Taiwanese police, and so on. The film’s dualism also supplies this chapter’s reading of the film’s two viewpoints, which consist of an account of the relationship among time, space, and cause and effect in the narrative, and an exploration of the meaning of special effects in the movie.

Re-historicization of cinema With regard to the impact of digital special effects and new media on filmmaking, Robert Stam feels that “pre-cinema” and “post-cinema” are becoming increasingly similar.6 People avidly embraced the birth of movies more than a century ago, and today people are excitedly looking forward to the emergence of digital cinema. Movies have gone from soundless to sound and talking, from black-andwhite to color over the course of more than one hundred years And this evolution is seen as the effect of repeated technological revolutions. Today movies have made

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the transformation from analog to digital, and computer technology has entered every nook and cranny of film production. These are truly revolutionary developments. Similarly, the amazement that people felt when they saw Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1895 reappeared when we saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993. Although one can say that movies are changing because of the appearance of new media technology, the issues that preoccupied film theory for a very long time, such as the nature of image, the auteur theory, movie mechanisms, realism, esthetics, and audience reception studies, still await reevaluation. From another angle, Robert Stam’s idea about historical convergence connects the failure of evolutionary development with the sluggish pace of technology. Andre Bazin’s “myth of total cinema” is accordingly being realized only in this new century. From the beginning of cinema until the present, regardless of what equipment was used to produce and project movies, and regardless of what genres of movies were made, all movies needed to confront the dialectical relationship among time, space, and cause and effect. This has particularly been the case for mainstream feature films. Simply put, movies need to duplicate, or simulate, the integrity of the real world, the realness of time and space, and photographic images that reproduce the objects in reality.

The nature of narrative cinema Nevertheless, the evolution of special effects finally gives us an opportunity to see the nature of mainstream feature film. Human activities can always be portrayed in narrative form, and afterward transformed into such different genres as epic, biographical, or horror. These stories often use temporal sequences to establish a unidirectional, linear narrative model. In addition, the story’s lead character takes us from the starting point to the end. He moves forward along a temporal trajectory, and the tests and challenges that he encounters are devices for gradually revealing the preestablished denouement of the story, and are not excursions into the unforeseeable future. (Fairy tales always start with the words “Once upon a time …” which establishes the temporal nature of the story and its conclusion.) If we extend Stam’s notion of pre- and post-cinema, we can see that movies were deeply influenced by the nineteenth century’s mainstream literature – the novel. Like novels, movies focus their attention on the narrative method and arrangement of temporal order. Major breakthroughs occured, however, around the time the computer mouse was first used. For instance, the early Macintosh program Hyper Card transformed data storage from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional structure, and transformed linear sequential structures into random access structures. Mentioning the Hyper Card is not to recount the progress of computer evolution, but rather to pay attention to the spatial aspects of narrative structures. Claude Levi-Strauss regarded myths as three-dimensional structures, and David Harvey suggested in his work on human geography that the photos from a journey can be assembled to create a story, and can also be transformed into markers on a map as geographical information.7 Because of

Spatialized narration and (in)visible special effects 111 their arguments, emphasizing the spatial aspect of narrative structures will change our experience of telling and listening to stories. Double Vision is a story concerning space. Production designer Tim Yip (who won an Academy Award for Crouching Tiger) made the following observations concerning the spatial environment in Taiwan: “The urban planning in Taiwan is extremely chaotic. A lot of things, like roads, have been built without any real thought. After getting this feeling, I quickly projected it into our movie.”8 Yip had to consider the movie’s appeal in international markets, and therefore couldn’t use too much local color for fear that foreign audiences might be distracted from the plot. He accordingly watered down impressions of “Taiwaneseness” in the final version of the movie, so that it “was changed into a background.”9 This kind of thinking meshed with director Chen Kuo-fu’s wish to ensure that Double Vision was not a typical Taiwanese movie. Their rationale extended the aforementioned elimination of dualities: “you are watching a Taiwanese movie/you are not watching a Taiwanese movie” and “this is Taipei/this isn’t Taipei.”

A spatialized narrative In contrast to a typical Hollywood movie, Double Vision has no establishing shot, which usually provides background to the plot, including the story’s place, time, and the character relationships. The first scene starts with a high-angle shot from above of a pregnant woman awaiting Caesarean section, and it ends with a closeup of the stillborn child’s double pupils. The camera enters the double pupils, and the title “Double Vision” then appears on the screen. The beginning of each scene is indicated by the space used to characterize that scene. For instance, the “interrogation room” sign is shown hanging in front of that room before camera moves into the room. In addition, superimposition is often used on the screen to indicate where a space is located. Examples of this include the “Tai Feng Chemical Engineering Group,” “Hsinyi District, Taipei City,” and “Hsin Li Temple, Tamsui.” Each of these locations was the scene of a murder, but each victim’s cause of death was at odds with the spatial environment: for instance, the CEO of the Tai Feng Group drowned and frozen to death in a 17th story office on a hot day; the woman Qiu Miaofang burned to death in a place where there were no signs of fire; and an American priest disemboweled without any signs of struggle. The camera follows the inspection by the coroner and police at each murder scene. Besides letting us gaze on each corpse, the camera also takes in some details of each space, including the CEO’s office and his desk, and the framed photos and dolls in Qiu Miaofang ’s house. Even the colors in each space have symbolic meaning: the black-and-white tone of the executive’s office signify ill-gotten “black/evil” wealth, Qiu Miaofang ’s house looks like a pink model home, and the priest’s bedroom is full of dark red suggesting a weird religious ambiance. The colors lend each of the three murder scenes dual or multiple significances. This effect fits closely with the mutual thinking between director Chen Kuo-fu and production designer Tim Yip, and also portrays the chaos of Taiwan’s urban space.

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Nevertheless, even more importantly, the appearance of each corpse propels the narrative structure forward another step. This is in strong contrast with ordinary Hollywood movies, where the lead character’s activities (such as the daring deeds of a male lead or the progressive discovery of a villain’s hideaway in an action movie) are used to drive the plot. An even more striking difference is the fact that while most Hollywood movies end with the hero’s triumph, in addition to the murdered bodies driving the story line, this film ends with the death of the protagonist Huang Huotu, which is certainly not a happy ending! The chaotic and uncertain spaces in Taiwan underscore how FBI detective Kevin Richter must depend on the troubled Huang Huotu when he arrives in Taiwan to help the Taiwanese police crack the case. Richter does not understand Chinese and his freedom of action is tightly limited. As far as Richter is concerned, murder scenes are among the most familiar places in the strange country in which he must work. For him the streets out in the real city are devoid of all meaning. Richter’s only independent action in the movie comes when he unexpectedly visits a cybercafe – so that he can go online and collect information – and the cybercafe is definitely a place where the real and virtual worlds coexist! The dual or multiple characteristics of space also figures in other scenes. One example of this is when Huang Huotu uses his office as his house (a conflict between public and private domains). Or, in another scene, after the FBI detective lights a cigarette in a school classroom, he says “there’s an exception to everything” while turning off the “no smoking” light (a conflict between laws and their violation). According to the Double Vision Research Handbook, the art design for Huang’s home similarly tries to depict both his tense, crumbling marriage and the complex feelings of the wife (Rene Liu), who still tries to love him. Huang’s dwelling is therefore suffused with warm, dusky lamp light that shows his wife’s love for him is contained here. However, the disorderly furniture arrangement makes the room seem like a maze, perhaps representing Huang’s psychological state.10 The most striking thing about this film is the Taoist temple that was constructed on the top floor of a modern high-rise building, The World Tower. The name of the building specifically disassociates itself with Taipei urban milieu. James Tweedie in this volume describes this building as “the most extreme manifestation of global capitalism – the overnight hi-tech billinonaire – constructs a façade for the most traditional philosophies and superstitions.” It represents not only the conflict between tradition and modernity, but also, for Tweedie, “a spectacle that dazzles because of its incoherent combination of the mythical past and the mythical present.” The structure, images, and various carvings in this temple are said to have authentic materials, and it was built using the blueprint of a traditional wooden temple from over two centuries ago. The temple is nevertheless housed in a modern office tower with reception personnel in its entryway, and entrance to the building is through an automatic door. Tim Yip hopes that the juxtaposition of these contradictory and discordant elements will express the fact that what is apparently a Taoist temple is actually controlled by a modern yet evil power.11

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Visible/invisible special effects The Double Vision Research Handbook aptly uses the heading “Truth that can’t be seen by the naked eye” in its discussion of the use of special effects in the film. This prompts us to look at special effects used in movies. Audiences actually watch two types of images on screen since the emergence of digital technology: one consists of conventional photographs, which capture real objects as images through the physical principles of optics. Photographs of course carry with them the assumption that the objects they represent really exist. The acquired images are both similar to and related to real objects. The second type consists of digital images (what Robert Stam called post-movies and post-photographs) in which the link between image and reality has been eliminated.12 The production of digital images doesn’t need to reproduce materialbased objects. Instead, “pixels” (the smallest units of a digital image) are used to form shapes via points, lines, and three-dimensional structures. Of course this is not to say that digital technology cannot reproduce real objects, just that objects are decomposed into disconnected pixels that the process of digitization and computer programs reproduce as virtual, lifelike images. And because the arrangement of pixels can be manipulated, it is possible to create so-called “unreal” digital images. This is the strength of digital technology; beyond bringing dinosaurs back to life, it can also let dinosaurs virtually appear with real people in the same scene. The difference between traditional and digital images can also be described this way: while movies once considered it their duty to “capture reality,” digital images use special effects to create “reality that never existed.” Digital images therefore wander the frontier between two poles, what we might call “absolute realism” represented by photography and “absolute unreality,” conveyed by pixels. This depends on whether the special effects are intended to be noticed by the audience or not. As far as their production is concerned, digital images can be classified as either visible special effects or invisible special effects. Over 90% of special effects are actually invisible special effects.13 It should be noted that these special effects are generally used to simulate the natural world or real environments that are difficult to create artificially, such as tornadoes and tsunamis. Invisible special effects are also used to depict phenomena that are hard to portray in a controlled manner, such as when a feather slowly drifts out of the sky (in Forrest Gump). These special effects are supposed to go unnoticed by the audience when done successfully. In contrast, visible special effects are used to depict things that cannot possibly exist in the real world, or at least cannot exist in the real world of here and now. Examples include the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the monsters of Harry Potter series. While the audience knows that these things are contrived (or that they are really “not real”), the special effects are the main reason these movies attract so many viewers. When we examine Double Vision from this point of view, we see that the movie is full of spectacular scenes, reflecting its genre as a horror film. Visible special effects play a big role from the stillborn child with double pupils at the beginning of the movie to the slaughter of policemen in the Taoist temple at the end. These special

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effects are intended to satisfy the audience’s curiosity. We get close-up views of three bizarre corpses, a medium shot of a bullet entering a skull in a spray of gore, and a severed tongue. Special effects enable the audience to view the slaughter in the chaotic temple scene: we see swords cut off heads, hands, and feet, and we see half of a broken skull. The movie’s Australian special effects team did a very good job of creating gruesome scenes such as these that both attract and repel. While this film does not employ invisible special effects to simulate natural phenomenon, they are used to depict the illusions seen by officer Huang Huotu. Huang hears his wife scold his daughter in one scene. When Huang pulls his wife’s body around, she has changed into the mysterious Xie Yali. Xie then pulls Huang’s daughter from her bed and prepares to stab her with a knife. Not only is he unable to stop her, Huang also finds his own body moving backward, and the space around him is instantaneously transformed from his bedroom to a corridor at the police station. A gun also appears in his hand. Huang fires the gun, and the bullet hits Xie Yali. His daughter falls down, and the spatial environment transforms again, this time into the Taoist temple. While this is all an illusion, Huang actually fires his gun and actually wounds Xie. This action takes place very quickly (in less than ten seconds), which enables the audience to sense Huang’s trance-like state, and also gives them the sense of being there. The effect is like another layer of cinematic experience. Let us look back again at the birth of cinema. Apart from the documentary film conventions established by the Lumière Brothers, we shouldn’t forget how George Méliès created an unreal style by combining movie technology with magic performances. More than a century ago Méliès had already figured out how to use techniques such as inverted film, multiple exposures, time exposures, splicing, and filming a scene over after turning off the camera (which allowed him to adjust the actors and props while the camera was off) to enhance the vaudeville magic he captured on film. Méliès sometimes made people disappear or made pictures on cards turn into real people, who then walked out of the cards. Méliès also portrayed adventurous journeys to the Moon, the core of the Earth, and the bottom of the sea. He actually used special effects similar to those used in Double Vision, only he had to rely on physical manipulation instead of computer processing. The technology was different, and the effect was also different. It’s ironic that regardless of whether visible or invisible special effects are used, it’s sometimes still very difficult to accurately simulate the extraordinary things of real life. Double Vision contains a very good example of this: fungus was discovered on all of the corpses (this may have been what Xie Yali sprinkled on Huang and caused him to suffer hallucinations). The director wanted something that was “grayish-black in color and able to float in the air, but possessing an intangible quality.” After trying all kinds of possible substances (including real fungus), but failing to achieve the desired effect, the movie personnel finally found that sesame powder worked.14 It seems inconceivable that computerized special effects fail in the very last instance. But if we compare this with a claim made by a special effects specialist who worked for Jurassic Park, we will understand that human intervention is sometimes better

Spatialized narration and (in)visible special effects 115 than any technology. He was quoted as saying (the exact interview data is no longer available) that the hardest special effect to make in the movie was when a glass of water shook and ripples were created resulting from the footsteps of an approaching dinosaur. They solved the problem by having someone tapping the table underneath. Similarly, real sesame powder was used in Double Vision to achieve the effect of verisimilitude. Nothing else, be it visible or invisible special effects, is necessary.

Notes 1 The first draft of this paper was presented at the “Focus on Taiwanese movies: International Seminar on Taiwanese Cinema” (November 28–30, 2003). The author would like to acknowledge feedback and comments from the seminar participants. 2 J. G. Ballard, “Introduction,” in Crash: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2001), 1. 3 Lin Wen and Zeng Baolu, “Taiwan’s Film Director with the Best Head for Marketing: Double Vision Director Chen Kuo-fu Changes from Artist into Marketing Wizard,” in 2003 Cinema Year Book in Republic of China (Taipei: National Film Archive, 2003), 49–52. 4 Toby Miller, et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001). 5 So-called “high concept” means that a concise phrase can be used to sum up a movie and allow the audience to immediately know what it is about and what its selling point is. An example from this chapter is Double Vision = Se7en + The X Files. In recent years Hollywood’s golden rule has been that a successful high concept is the secret to a hot-selling movie. The flip side of this is that if it takes a lot of words to explain a movie clearly, audiences are unlikely to welcome that movie. See Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). 6 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2000), 314–327. 7 Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of the Myth,” in Anthropologie structurale/ Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Broke Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 202–212; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1989). 8 Huang Ting, The Double Vision Research Handbook (Taipei: Kadokawa-Taiwan, 2002), 42. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 60-1. 11 Ibid., 76. 12 Stam, op. cit., 314-327. 13 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Realism in the Photographic and Digital Image (Jurassic Park and The Lost World),” in Studying Contemporary American Film: a Guide to Movie Analysis, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland (London: Arnold, 2002), 210. 14 Huang, op. cit., 108.

8

Morning in the new metropolis Taipei and the globalization of the city film James Tweedie

In the ubiquitous and at times nearly deafening rhetoric of globalization, images and places habitually occupy opposite poles, with “global image flows” the emblematic border-crossing phenomenon, and the neighborhood, the village, and other place-bound communities standing enduringly for the local. Globalization exudes a peculiar “charm” and “charisma,” to use Anna Tsing’s words, and it therefore entices with an allure unmatched since the moment when “modernization” was a galvanizing ambition and a mesmerizing force.1 Cinema has been a crucial element of globalization’s disarming charisma, just as in the moment when modernity spread around the globe, its attractions on view in the films produced in Hollywood, Paris, and Shanghai. In that earlier global rhetoric, the city was a crystallization of a modernity realized in the urban form and placed on display, broadcast outward by modern media technology, especially the cinema. Recent discussions of the “global city” send the rhetoric of globalization crashing headlong into the vestiges of its modern predecessor, two captivating discourses, one burgeoning (aided by the appeal of a resilient cinema, one among many image-based media) the other waning (along with a cinema that joins the long litany of ambitious projects now at their end, most famously history). How do we situate cinema in relation to the “global city” or the “world city,” those oxymoronic phrases whose all-encompassing adjectives appear determined to unsettle and sweep up the city that develops in a particular location with its own history? How do we see the city within the far more spectacular manifestations of a global moment that threatens to overwhelm it? In the past decade the relationship between cinema and the city has been one of the most productive avenues in film studies, and one motivating force behind this project is an uncertainty about the future of a medium described as accurately by the now-familiar language of global flows and the more localized language of neighborhood movie houses and documentary images inextricably tied to the site where they were recorded. The several volumes devoted to the subject of the “cinematic city” demonstrate the possibilities of organizing a research project at the nexus of the modern city and one of its emblematic art forms.2 By creating a dialog between cinema studies and the social sciences at the forefront of the “spatial turn” in critical theory – geography, urban studies, anthropology, and sociology – scholars seek to place images in the social and

Morning in the new metropolis 117 spatial context of their reception and production. Linking cinema and cities allows us to combine one of the areas of film scholarship most amenable to sociological and industrial analysis with one of the most prominent preoccupations of modern and contemporary filmmakers: the historically new spaces and cityscapes of the modern metropolis, the juxtapositions and gatherings of people it makes possible, and the dynamism of the city itself. These recent collections of essays have traced the parallels between the development of cinema and urban experience, most remarkably in the “city film” series adopted, for example, by Roberto Rossellini in post-war Rome or by Walter Ruttmann in his portrait of Berlin. And the recent explosion of work on cinema as “vernacular modernism” explores the intimate connection between cinema and a litany of phenomena emanating from the city. It positions cinema alongside trends in fashion, design, advertising, and architecture; it aligns film with “the promises of mass consumption and the dreams of a mass culture,” as well as the technologies that disseminated those trends, promises, and dreams: photography, radio, and cinema.3 In Miriam Hansen’s foundational essays “vernacular modernism” becomes virtually synonymous with urban experience from the 1920s through the 1950s, and classical Hollywood cinema emerges as “the first global vernacular” circulating from urban center to urban center, creating a network of interlacing modernities.4 Linking and transmitting between Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Shanghai, this new vernacular traces a peculiar map of modernity, prefiguring much of the recent research on the evolving network of world cities, with many of the same nodes prominently represented on modernity’s earliest and latest maps. But each of these new studies of cinema and the city betrays an awareness that the experience of urban life has changed remarkably under the multiple pressures of globalization and with the emergence of the expansive and almost limitless megacities currently under construction throughout Asia. This focus on the city rather than the more familiar category of the nation also reflects the growing importance of cities in a globalizing world, as the disaggregation of the nationstate system leads to innovative forms of governance at more encompassing and narrower levels than the nation, with subnational actors like cities becoming increasingly powerful and autonomous locations of control.5 And most pertinent to film studies itself, this fascination with the cinematic city arises at a moment when the development of vibrant and renowned cultural life (including film festivals) and its display on screen becomes a means of extending a city’s brand recognition and enhancing its stature in the burgeoning competition for prominence in the global economy.6 Alongside these changes in the form and status of the metropolis, revolutions in digital technology and reception environments suggest that even the most basic terms in film studies – cinema and the city – have undergone an epochal transformation and that relationship between film and urban life has entered a new phase. This historically new condition reveals the limitations of an approach that carries forward into the twenty-first century the same conceptual and critical categories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Margaret Morse and others have suggested, the relevant terms may

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not be “cinema and the city”; we may instead be entering an era of cable television and the greater metropolitan area, or digital video and the megacity.7 Less catchy phrases, of course, but they illustrate how even the most basic conceptual categories collapse under the force of successive, wide-ranging transformations. Given these tendencies in the global economy, in recent world cinema, and in film studies, it should not be surprising that the relationship between cinema and the city of Taipei has been the subject of extraordinary interest over the past decade. Wang Wei establishes a stark divide that emerges in the 1990s: if Taiwanese identity was the dominant subject in films from previous eras (from the “healthy realist” classics of Li Xing to the roots-seeking narratives of the early Hou Hsiao-Hsien), a fascination with Taipei characterizes more recent film from Taiwan.8 Earlier representations of Taipei situated the city within a nationalist framework whose center was always located outside the island; others placed the city within an urban–rural dichotomy in which an essentialized Taiwanese identity was inherent in isolated landscapes and in traditional customs on the verge of vanishing. But as Lin Wenchi points out, the New Cinema produces Taiwan’s first films concerned primarily with the promise of the city and the less grandiose reality on the street, its first “city films”; and by the 1990s Taipei itself becomes a vital and imperative presence in Taiwan cinema.9 The study of Taiwan cinema has begun to reflect this urbanization of the films themselves. In 1995 the Golden Horse Film Festival organized a symposium on the representation of Taipei in Taiwan cinema and produced a volume of essays that details the history of films located in that city and anticipates many of the trends that animate contemporary film from Taipei. More recent books like City Zero (Chengshi gui ling) and Movie Theaters in Taipei (Taibei dianying yuan) are devoted either to the screen projection of Taipei, to the city constructed of and by light, as well as glass and concrete, or to the physical environments that nurtured an urban film culture, from the era of movie palaces to the current moment of the multiplex.10 Drawing upon this important research into the New Cinema’s newfound fascination with urban space and experience, this essay will focus on the relationship between cinema and the city of Taipei after the recovery from the Asian economic crisis of the 1990s and during an era of intensified globalization. In a moment when networks of interlinked cities usurp much of the political importance once attributed to nations, the “state of the art” in Taiwan cinema is often concerned with the condition of the city as a form, as a collectivity, and as an environment. As cities become increasingly important “command and control centers” in the global economy, and as the city grows both spatially and in regional and global importance, and as it acquires a newfound cultural capital, it also defers access to the urban experience that once defined the city itself. Under these circumstances, filmmakers like Tsai Ming-liang, Li Kang-sheng, and Chen Kuo-fu have adapted and transformed the “city film” for a new era when the city no longer represents a finite crystallization of modernity, the future realized and glimpsed today, but instead expands and attenuates along the uncertain trajectory of globalization itself. But first, what was the city film? And what is it now? Geoffrey Nowell-Smith outlines a number of defining characteristics of the “city film,” including a

Morning in the new metropolis 119 preference for location rather than studio shooting and the transformation of urban environments from a suitable, stable, readily recognizable backdrop into an object of narrative desire and sustained exploration.11 For Nowell-Smith the crucial and definitive feature of the series is the city’s excessive presence, its “recalcitrance,” “its inability to be subordinated to the demands of narrative.”12 If, as Deleuze suggests, cinema is not merely another medium of representation but also a way of thinking, an adjunct to philosophy, the excessive and seemingly unmotivated presence of the city serves as the site where artists and critics think through cinema and consider the abstract promises, historical forms, and concrete failures of the city. This fascination with the spaces and the possibilities of the city emerges early in the history of cinema, from the moment of the first actualities; and film critics and theorists from the earliest days of the medium have maintained that cinema develops in parallel with the modern city. As Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz argue, “modern culture was ‘cinematic’ before the fact,” and “the culture of modernity rendered inevitable something like cinema, since cinema’s characteristics evolved from the traits that defined modern life in general.” And, they continue, “Modernity cannot be conceived outside the context of the city, which provided an arena for the circulation of bodies and goods, the exchange of glances, and the exercise of consumerism. Modern life seemed urban by definition.”13 But that definition of modernity also contains an important caveat acknowledging the mutability of the city form in history. The twentieth-century vision of the city emerging in tandem with the cinema had undergone crucial changes from the nineteenth century. The city film is not a tale of flâneurs and arcades; it instead bears witness to what Hansen calls “the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, mass annihilation, of rationalization, standardization and media publics.”14 In the work of Ruttmann and Vertov, the city film explores the intimate connections between the space of the city and the logic of large-scale mechanization and Taylorization, with film itself becoming a privileged interface in this assemblage of architecture, bodies, and machines. As James Donald suggests in an essay on Ruttmann and Vertov, “However rationalized and disenchanted modern societies may become, at an experiential level (that is, in the unconscious) the new urban-industrial world has become fully re-enchanted.”15 The return to the city in contemporary film and theory suggests that the city has once again become enchanted territory during our current moment of globalization. The films of Tsai, Lee, and Chen stage a confrontation between the enduring and perpetually renewable appeal of the city in all its glorious abstraction and the intensely fragile environment that comprises the reality of a lived city. Because of Taipei’s decades-long status as a “temporary capital,” and because of Taiwan’s compressed and radical modernization from the 1970s onward, the Taipei city film becomes an extremely sensitive record of that fragility. The New Cinema ushers in a genuinely new era in the representation of Taiwan’s capital, replacing the more circumscribed and patriotic visions of the previous three decades. Li Qingzhi outlines five periods in the history of the city film in Taipei: first, the “reconstruction period” in the 1950s, when films focused on the plight

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of refugees and soldiers transplanted from the Mainland into unfamiliar and often desperate conditions and on the equally unsettled migrants from Taiwan’s rural South; then two periods of relatively unremarkable production in the 1960s and 1970s when obligatory patriotism necessitated a focus on glorious state symbols and upper-class enclaves, and when the White Terror forced filmmakers to turn inward, with relatively innocuous interiors replacing the exteriors now charged with increasing political significance and fraught with danger.16 At the beginning of the New Cinema and with the onset of Taiwan’s “economic miracle” of the late 1970s and 1980s, films of the “breakaway period” document the inescapable problems accompanying rapid urbanization, the attractions of a nostalgic return to an imagined rural past, and the possibility of emigration from Taiwan and flight from the persistent and intractable aftereffects of previously unimaginable prosperity. And, finally, in the fifth period covering the 1990s, Taipei films focus more minutely on the various groups and subcultures present in the city, on a more precise mapping of a subdivided cityscape, on an almost sociological survey just as the city undergoes unprecedented transformations that demolish many of the landmarks from the previous eras of Taipei cinema.17 The buildings and public spaces that once stood for the city are replaced with the multiplexes, malls, and arcades whose surfaces resist localization because of their ubiquity and uniformity.18 Li traces the history of a cinema charged with representing the particularities of a local identity while acknowledging Taipei’s ambiguous and provisional status in the minds of the ruling elite, the eternal allure of the rural, and the successive economic revolutions manifested in the built environment of the city, from days of the economic miracle to the current era of globalization itself. I begin with this divagation on the history of the “city film” and the emergence of the Taipei city film in the 1980s because it illustrates one fundamental problem with recent discussions of globalization, global cities, and cinema. Disenchanted with the modern, we risk succumbing to the many attractions of the global. Too often cultural critics and theorists borrow the rhetoric of unbounded flows devised in the realms of economics and political science, resulting in a discussion limited to the transnational, mobile, border-crossing culture of contemporary world cities. These are, of course, important elements of any discourse on globalization; but as Saskia Sassen suggests, this insistent rhetoric of flows contributes to a “narrative of eviction” and implies that the “type of place represented by major cities may have become obsolete.”19 “How,” she asks, “do we construct a new narrative about economic globalization, one which includes rather than evicts all the spatial, economic, and cultural elements that are part of the global economy as it is constituted in cities?”20 Like Ruttmann’s rendition of Berlin, these cities exist in a temporal, teleological narrative that carries them forward from an insufficiently globalized past to the glorious end state of the global city. What I want to suggest is that we need to supplement this narrative of globalization – so redolent of the earlier tale of modernization, both tales of cities moving forward in time – with a competing narrative of cities in the confines of space. Writing in anticipation

Morning in the new metropolis 121 of conflicts to come and at the cusp of what he called the “epoch of space,” Foucault suggested that “one could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space.”21 The recent films of Tsai, Lee, and Chen all contest this attempt to consider the city of Taipei along a line of historical development from outpost of empire to “temporary capital” to economic center in the regional and global economies. All are concerned instead with “determined inhabitants of space,” with what lingers after history renders its environment obsolete, with the seemingly outmoded but intensely remembered sites of a globalizing Taipei. Each of Tsai’s films constructs an allegory around the dynamics of occupation and eviction, of encampment and displacement in Taipei.22 Vive l’amour (Aiqing wansui, 1994), a film set during the speculative real estate boom of the 1990s, is the most literally concerned with property, as the accidental then repeated encounters of a disgruntled agent, a squatter, and a street peddler transform the commodity of housing into something akin to an intentional community. But his later films return to the dilemmas posed by a city whose physical existence has been produced by and remains under siege from successive modernization campaigns. While Taipei’s monumental architecture features occasionally in his films, a variety of relatively nondescript and interchangeable apartments constitute the dominant spaces in Tsai’s world. And he returns to those environments obsessively, filming them with virtually still cameras in takes whose duration emphasizes both the excessive presence of those environments and their paradoxical vulnerability. Their very ubiquity renders them particularly susceptible to neglect, decay, and destruction, while the stillness and disproportionate attention of the camera renders even the most minor change conspicuous and evocative. As Emilie YuehYu Yeh and Darrell Wm. Davis point out, Tsai’s work contains an often-neglected dimension of camp, an element of coarse humor and extravagant performance intimately connected to entertainment traditions and local character types in Taiwan.23 They also comment on the “eventlessness” and sheer “boredom” of his films.24 It is that second element of excess, that inordinate degree of attention lavished on interiors and evacuated public spaces, zones where nothing happens, that I focus on below. In parallel with the campy appearance of Lee Kang-sheng gallivanting around in his underwear and shaking off an incurable crick in his neck, another form of overkill emerges as a structuring force in Tsai’s films: the overbearing presence of bare walls, inactive construction sites, and other locations devoid of any outward signs of the transformative events that have produced those spaces. The Skywalk Is Gone (Tianqiao bu jian le, 2002) takes place entirely in the aftermath of an unseen event, with the ghostly persistence of architecture the only evidence of a history that always occurs outside the frame. Taken together, Tsai’s films become an ongoing attempt to document both the development of the modern city of Taipei, as reflected on the glass facades of buildings or in illuminated cityscapes at night, and to collect traces left behind by its decay. Deteriorating walls and mounds of rubble mark the fading of the ideals of utopian modernism and anticipate their replacement by what

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Rem Koolhaas calls the “generic city.”25 Tsai’s 1998 film The Hole (Dong), produced as part of a global series of films foreseeing the transition to a new millennium, unfolds within a crumbling, almost completely evacuated apartment complex. The few remaining inhabitants either don surgical masks to stave off disease, succumb to the fever and crawl bug-like through evacuated markets, or produce makeshift, mask-like coverings, momentarily averting the collapse of a building that appears every bit as endangered as its inhabitants. As many critics have remarked, the film eerily foreshadows the SARS crisis, with its omnipresent masks and medico-architectural diagnosis of “sick buildings”; and it portends the abandonment of the potentially dangerous gathering places in urban centers during the height of the emergency. But this allegory of contamination and quarantine also illustrates the waning of a modern conception of the city based on the rationalized construction of a public culture, on the transformative experience of media technology, and on the paradoxical possibility, within these regularized environments, of contingency, chance meetings, haphazard juxtapositions, the unexpected and unregulated. In The Hole those same media technologies disseminate a fear of public spaces, now deemed both dangerous and undesirable. No longer a utopian future glimpsed in the present, the Taipei of Tsai Ming-liang has outlived a modernizing era, and now faces a new wave of expansion, eviction, and demolition. In this film, and in his work more generally, Tsai explores the locations identified by Ren Koolhaas as “Junkspace,” a space left behind after the decline of modernism: “If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe,” Koolhaas writes, “junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.”26 It results, for example, from the reincorporation of the surburbia into the city in the form of massive shopping malls and festival marketplaces, or in any attempt to revive past glory through a process introduced by the prefix “re-”: restore, rearrange, reassemble, etc. In the city facing the aftermath of a modern era, junkspace is both everywhere and utterly unremarkable. “Because it cannot be grasped,” Koolhaas writes, “Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze insures instant amnesia.”27 Yet for Koolhaas, as for Tsai, this junkspace also contains a utopian possibility precisely because of what remains behind as junk. For Koolhaas an emblematic image of the contemporary city consists of empty streets and malls being cleaned out between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m., the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift. Although it situates cinema in a less glamorous and exalted position than Ruttmann or Dziga Vertov, Tsai’s work possesses the benefit of hindsight, with the failed revolutions of modernity already behind him. Tsai’s films instead search through the aftermath of preceding waves of modernization and of cinema, the night shift undoing the damage of the day shift. Although the extraordinarily popular work of Chen Kuo-fu is usually classified apart from the less commercially successful films of Tsai, Chen’s films also concentrate on the transformations of the city of Taipei, focusing on another facet of the same whole. In The Personals (Zhenghun qishi, 1998) the loneliness of the personal ad becomes the conceit for a story that soon gathers a microcosm of the

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Figure 8.1 Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision

city within a small teahouse, a Bakhtinian assembly that recreates the social totality by orchestrating its many voices. In Double Vision (Shuangtong, 2002; Figure 8.1) contemporary Taipei is a site where the most extreme manifestation of global capitalism – the overnight hi-tech billionaire – constructs a façade for the most traditional philosophies and superstitions. The World Tower (Shijie Dalou) that fronts for a Daoist temple becomes the grandest of junkspaces, a spectacle that dazzles because of its incoherent combination of the mythical past and the mythical present, neither imagined as a viable future on a mass scale, neither rooted in a lived history. No longer a glimpse of a utopian future, the city consists of a bizarre combination of shiny new and venerable old fantasies. But the most peculiar and powerful moments in Double Vision occur in the brief interludes where the camera presents a cityscape at some indeterminate hour between day and night. Within the narrative these shots serve a useful function: they are a pausing for breath between periods of intense action, and this last occurs in the morning, just before we discover the death of Richter, the final victim needed for the Daoist spirit to achieve immortality. These are establishing shots in the most general sense: they situate the film in a particular space, a city seen from a distance that provides the panoramic vision of picture postcards but also obscures the spectacular façades and magnificent interiors under construction. A city photographed from its margins, these shots seem to search for a privileged perspective on a place now defined not by its possibilities but by its contradictions, by the tension between the picturesque image of its branded core and the centrifugal forces that send the city scattering outward. Fredric Jameson suggests that in the “world system even the center is marginalized,” and in “Remapping Taipei” he finds its emblematic images in those innumerable shots of people staring out from their apartments, “prosperity and constriction all at once.”28 “What is grand and exhilarating,” Jameson writes, “light itself, the hours of the day, is nonetheless here embedded in the routine of the city and locked into the pores of its stone or smeared on its glass: light also being postmodern, and a mere adjunct to the making of reproducible images.”29 Chen Kuo-fu’s film (financed

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by a major Hollywood studio and fabulously successful in Taiwan, but unable to find widespread theatrical distribution overseas) both embodies and depicts that unsettling collision of center and periphery. In a sense, these images provide the reverse-shot of Edward Yang’s from 15 years earlier (Figures 8.2 and 8.3) While the World Tower represents the allure of the global city seen in all its splendor, these shots seem determined to depict the light over the city and the hours of the day from a distant vantage point, beyond the charismatic force of its façades. Chen’s film pauses for breath by returning to the vision of cranes, high-rises, warehouses, freeways, and sprawl. On the margins of the aspiring global city stands the megacity, not merely a quantitative expansion of the modern metropolis, an increase in population and an incessant outward sprawl, but also a qualitative transformation of urban form and the promise of the city. The megacity looks back at the structures marked as “world” or “global” from their everexpanding verges, a periphery too valuable to abandon entirely but too massive to allow inside. The films of Tsai Ming-liang present the future city from its most intimate recesses, from the vestiges of another era; Chen Kuo-fu examines the ultramodern World Towers that proclaim the inevitable future, the reconstructed temples that recover a mythical past, and then, from a distant perspective, the only location where something like a city remains. The Hole and Goodbye Dragon Inn also provide an occasional respite from the otherwise relentless downpour of rain and concrete. The Hole relaxes into moments of intense nostalgia embodied through a lip-synched impersonation of songstress Grace Chang (Ge Lan), her music monetarily revamping the suddenly neon-lit hallways and lobbies of the bland apartment block. Goodbye Dragon Inn stages an even more elaborate allegory of decay and survival in a Fu Ho Theater faced with imminent closure. While its massive screen memorializes King Hu’s Taiwanese classic, the marginal spaces – the service hallways, restrooms, and broom closets – of the theater become the site of clandestine, subversive, erotic encounters. And in perhaps the most stunning moment of the film, the light from the projector seems to seep through the screen itself, a play of light and shadows cast on the face of the theater’s ticket-taker. Set in a theater rendered obsolete in an age characterized by new media and consumption habits, the film evokes a space at once sick and “haunted” by the relics of a preceding era, haunted above all by a failure to maintain the utopian promise embodied in the cavernous theater built for a past city and its imagined audience of the future. Lee Kang-sheng’s The Missing (Bujian, 2003) unfolds in the characteristic spaces of the new era, with the pervasive blue light of the monitor replacing the alternation of darkness and white light, and with the body of the viewer now flattened onto the plane of the screen, creating a world of total compression and confinement. (Figures 8.4 and 8.5) The image is everything, rendering obsolete the expanded geography of cinema envisioned in Tsai’s film, a zone extending from seats themselves to the area behind the screen, to the projection booth, to the closets and hallways just beyond the penumbra of the image, and finally to the totality of public spaces that develop in the orbit of cinema. Tsai imagines the decaying infrastructure of a cinema that is no longer, its archive of images, enduring repositories of a modern utopian ambition, now

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Figure 8.2 Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer (1986)

Figure 8.3 Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision (2002)

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Figure 8.4 The Missing

Figure 8.5 The Missing

Morning in the new metropolis 127 isolated from the public space that once formed the necessary link between cinema and the city. Koolhaas’s 1995 essay on “The Generic City” concludes with a parable: imagine a film set in an ancient marketplace, he suggests, with buyers, sellers, and their goods passing constantly through the frame, the shots animated by excited gestures, the soundtrack punctuated by shouts. Then switch off the sound and imagine the same scene run backward through the projector: The now mute but still visibly agitated men and women stumble backward; the viewer no longer registers only humans but begins to note spaces between them. The center empties; the last shadows evacuate the rectangle of the picture frame, probably complaining, but fortunately we don’t hear them. Silence is now reinforced by emptiness: the image shows empty stalls, some debris that was trampled underfoot. Relief … it’s over. That is the story of the city. The city is no longer. We can leave the theater now….30 Tsai’s Taipei films are often predicated on the steady demolition and decay of a cinema and a city that are no longer. The movie palace becomes a figure for the urban experience that developed in parallel with the cinema; and obsolete sites like the Fu Ho Theater, relics of another era that have somehow lingered into the present, evoke an entire collective experience of modernity in which cinema served to document and to shape the city itself. In films like The Hole and Goodbye Dragon Inn we see the history of cinema running backward, with theatrical screens inhabited by ghosts of another era in film history. Tsai’s homage to Dragon Inn stages an apparently decisive departure from the crumbling and leaking edifice of the theater; but it also presents this ostensibly exhausted, decades-old location as an atonce-comforting and utterly unfamiliar space, as the home of a specter that inevitably returns in another guise because it “was never alive enough to die, never present enough to become absent.”31 Like the theater in a state of collapse in Tsai’s film, the final image of Lee’s The Missing also envisions a cinema left without walls. The film’s final shot seems to recreate in a construction site in contemporary Taipei the fundamental elements of Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of the most persistent metaphors for cinema, with a captive audience in the theater staring at shadows on the screen, diverting their attention from the “reality” taking place elsewhere, behind them, outside the walls of the cinema. If Goodbye Dragon Inn marks the decline of one notion of modernity that people still insist on inhabiting, The Missing follows the shadows released from the confines of the theater, prancing along outside, constructing a coming culture of images on the streets of a future city (Figures 8.6 and 8.7). Goodbye Dragon Inn mourns the modern city while acknowledging that even nostalgia comes to an end. Bujian is a failed search for what goes missing at the end of the city – its environments of memory and the human relations made possible by those spaces – and for some as yet untheorized combination of new urban spaces, digital media, and the cinema that lingers on long after the end.

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Figure 8.6 Goodbye Dragon Inn

Figure 8.7 The Missing

Morning in the new metropolis 129

Notes 1 Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (August 2000): 328. 2 See, for example, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds, Screening the City (London: Verso, 2003); Linda Krause and Patrice Petro, eds, Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); and David B. Clarke, The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997). 3 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 69. 4 Ibid., 68. 5 See James M. Rosenau, “Governance in a Globalizing World,” in The Gobal Transformations Reader, eds David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 181–190. The debates on the recent decline or persistence or strengthening of the nation-state are endless, but for a summary of those debates see Mauro F. Guillén, “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social Science Literature,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001): 235–260. For a comprehensive account of the weakening of the state, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a recent study of this process in the East Asian context, see Katsuhiro Sasuga, Microregionalism and Governance in East Asia (New York: Routledge, 2004). 6 Julian Stringer, “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy,” in Cinema and the City, 134–144. 7 See Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193–221. 8 Wang Wei, “Taipei in Transformation,” in Xunzhao dianying zhong de taibei [Focus on Taipei through cinema 1950–1990], eds Robert Ru-Shou Chen and Gene-Fon Liao (Taipei: Wanxiang tushu gufen youxian gongsi, 1995), 62. 9 Lin Wenchi, “Taiwan dianying zhong de taibei chengxian” [The emergence of Taipei in Taiwan cinema], in Xunzhao dianying zhong de taibei, 78. 10 See Hong Yueqing, Chengshi guiling: dianying zhong de Taibei chengxian [City zero: The presence of Taipei in cinema] (Taipei: Tianyuan chengshi wenhua shiye youxian gongsi, 2002); and Li Qingzh, ed., Taibei dianyingyuan: chengshi dianying kongjian shendu daoyou [Movie theaters in Taipei: A city tour in films] (Taipei: Meta Media, 1998). 11 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Cities: Real and Imagined,” in Cinema and the City, 104. 12 Ibid., 104. 13 Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, eds. Charney and Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3. 14 Miriam Hansen, “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 363. 15 James Donald, “The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces,” in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 83. 16 Lee Qingzhi, “Xunzhao dianyingzhong de taipei: Guopianzhong dui taibei dushi yixiang de suzao yu zhuanhuan” [In search of Taipei in the films: Domestic movies in forming and transforming Taipei’s urban images], in Taibei dianyingyuan, 41. 17 Ibid., 30-5. 18 Ibid., 30-5. 19 Saskia Sassen, “Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City,” in A Companion to the City, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 168. 20 Ibid., 169. 21 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22.

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22 I-Fen Wu points out that Rebels of the Neon God (1992) is the most precisely located of a Tsai’s films, as it presents a “localist vision” of West End youth culture. See “Flowing Desire, Floating Souls: Modern Cultural Landscape in Tsai Ming-liang’s Taipei Trilogy,” Cineaction 58 (2002): 60. Tsai’s succeeding films construct an increasingly fragmented map of the city, combining readily recognizable locations with spaces so generic that they border on abstraction. 23 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 219. 24 Ibid., 220. 25 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “The Generic City,” in Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 1238. 26 Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. Chuihua Judy Chung and Sze Tsung Leong (Köln: Taschen, 2001), 408. 27 Ibid., 409. 28 Fredric Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 155. 29 Ibid., 155. 30 Koolhaas and Mau, “The Generic City,” 1994. 31 Warren Montag, “Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in Ghostly Demarcations, ed. Mike Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 70.

9

Taiwan (trans)national cinema The far-flung adventures of a Taiwanese tomboy Fran Martin

The question of the national in “Taiwan national cinema” could hardly be more vexed than at present. With the virtual collapse of the island’s film industry over recent years, on the one hand, and increasing pressures toward transnationalization in film production, distribution, and marketing, on the other, the significance of the nation for Taiwan film culture, present and future, seems uniquely difficult to determine. This chapter addresses a phenomenon of the past decade or so that I term “(trans)national Taiwan cinema.” The term refers to an independent but – unlike the “art cinema” of the Taiwan New Wave – relatively populist cinema whose production is transnationalized by its reliance on overseas investment. Further, the orientation of the (trans)national cinema is toward international as much as domestic audiences, yet its degree of internationalization stops short of the almost complete deterritorialization of the new, high-budget, pan-Asian entertainment cinema. Analyzing Yee Chihyen’s 2002 film, Blue Gate Crossing, as a recent instance of (trans)national Taiwan cinema, I explore the film’s “flexible” encoding of two thematics, the national and the sexual, and examine how this flexible media product is interpreted by distinct audience blocs – Taipei-dwelling and queer – who have personal stakes in the representation of these thematics. Through this discussion, the chapter explores the shifting meanings and effects of ideologies of the national, the regional, and the sexual in contemporary Taiwan film culture, highlighting how the new (trans)national Taiwan cinema negotiates between the local and the global, the particular and the general, minority and mainstream audiences, and cultural deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Taiwan cinema’s dark period and the transnational turn Taiwan’s film industry entered a sustained dark period during the 1990s, the culmination of its gradual decline following the “golden era” of commercial production during the 1960s.1 Locally made films lost local audiences as the domestic market fell more than even under the domination of Hollywood imports.2 The decade saw the rise of cable television to the point where Taiwan now boasts the highest penetration rate in Asia.3 Poor critical reviews of local films

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combined with widespread popular discontent with the stylistic inaccessibility and financial failure of the “art cinema” of the Taiwan New Wave, and the perceived disdain for local audiences shown by the overseas festival-focused auteurs. In response to this downward spiral in the fortunes of the national film industry, Taiwanese companies began to direct investments offshore – first to Hong Kong productions and, later in the decade, to Mainland Chinese films, so that runaway capital compounded the effects of the other negative factors.4 In an important recent article, Taiwanese film scholar Ti Wei proposes a provisional three-part typology of responses by Taiwan’s filmmakers to the intensification of Hollywood’s stranglehold over the domestic film market.5 First, Wei observes that the auteurs of the Taiwan New Cinema and its second wave (sometimes called the “Taiwan New New Cinema”) have responded by producing art films oriented primarily toward the international festival circuit. These films – in particular, recent works by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang – also demonstrate a transnational orientation at the level of production, as many of them are financed by overseas production companies (in particular, medium-sized French and Japanese production houses).6 Second, Wei cites Ang Lee as an example of a different response: that of a Taiwanese film professional who has left Taiwan to enter directly into the Hollywood industry, as Lee first did with his direction of Sense and Sensibility for Columbia in 1995.7 Wei also classifies Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) as a film produced through the “export” of Taiwanese filmmaking labor, since the film’s major funding came from Hollywood (Columbia), and aside from the participation of Lee himself and one screenwriter (Cai Guorong), there was scant actual Taiwanese involvement in the film’s production. Wei’s third type of response is typified by Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision (2002), whose production exemplifies the subcontracting model whereby a local filmmaking team is engaged to make a regionally-oriented film for regional audiences, with the whole project financed and managed out of Hollywood.8 A comparable example of a “pan-Asian” popular entertainment film produced on this model is Hong Kong directors’ Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s film Turn Left, Turn Right (2003), which was based on a popular graphic novel by Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao and was set and filmed in Taipei, but was financed from Hollywood (Warner Bros.), Hong Kong, and Singapore.9 In this chapter, I am interested in another response by Taiwan’s film industry to the globalization of film culture and markets, which is slightly yet significantly distinct from the three responses that Wei outlines. This category encompasses films by Taiwan-based filmmakers whose production, like that of the art films, is grounded in Taiwan while drawing on investment by overseas, independent, midsized production companies but which, like the regionally oriented pan-Asian entertainment films, target a broader international and domestic audience beyond hard-core auteurist art-film fans. This category, which I call “(trans)national Taiwan cinema,” includes films like the Taiwan/Hong Kong co-production 20:30:40 (Sylvia Chang, 2004) and the Taiwan/French co-production Betelnut Beauty (Lin Cheng-sheng, 2001). Yee Chih-yen’s Taiwan/French co-production,

Taiwan (trans)national cinema 133 Blue Gate Crossing (2002) – which like Betelnut Beauty forms part of Arc Light’s panChinese “Three Cities” series – is another example. 10 In the light of the depressed state of Taiwan national cinema at the end of the 1990s, some viewers have seized on Blue Gate Crossing and other films like it as a welcome sign that a new kind of Taiwan cinema may be emerging from the ashes of the industry crisis.11 Such viewers approvingly contrast the accessible style, “light” subject matter, and relative financial success of films like Blue Gate with the “elitist” esthetics, heavy social and historical consciousness, and domestic box office failure of films by the new wave and second wave auteurs. Along these lines, two Taiwanese viewers write: Blue Gate Crossing has done pretty well at the domestic box office, and has already broken the 5 million (Taiwan) dollar mark. […] Blue Gate Crossing has managed to shrug off the weighty burden passed down by the Taiwan New Cinema, opening the window on a fresh vista for Taiwan film. 12 The feeling that Yee has achieved is very fresh, very pleasant; he’s shrugged off a great burden. There’s nothing in the film about the question of Taiwanese unification versus independence; nothing about the conflicts between mainlanders and Taiwanese; nothing about corruption in domestic politics; nothing about fin-de-siecle social turmoil. Instead, the film is just about a very simple, romantic memory.13 Arguably, such statements simply restate the familiar and questionable tendency to blame all of the problems of the Taiwan film industry on the Taiwan New Cinema and New New Cinema directors, casting Blue Gate and other films like it as a convenient foil to the despised “art cinema” of the festival-circuit auteurs.14 However, the starting point for this chapter is the conjecture that these commentators may not be entirely wide off the mark in their intuition that films like Blue Gate signal a significant new direction for Taiwan cinema, and one whose broader implications are worth pursuing.

The film Blue Gate Crossing (2002; Figures 9.1 and 9.2) is the second feature film by Yee Chihyen, following Lonely Hearts Club (1995). After earning a Master’s degree in film from UCLA, Yee returned to Taiwan in 1988 where he worked in television drama and advertising before moving on to direct films. Blue Gate Crossing is a coming-of-age/love-triangle narrative that centers on the mutually entangled stories of three high-schoolers, the school hunk and swimming champion Zhang Shihao (Chen Bolin); the beautiful popular girl Lin Yuezhen (Liang Youmei); and Yuezhen’s tomboyish best friend, Meng Kerou (Gui Lunmei), from whose point of view the story is presented.15 Yuezhen has a full-blown schoolgirl crush on Shihao, whom she secretly stalks around the campus and whose personal effects (sports shoes, goggles, ball-point pens, etc.) she steals and obsessively hoards. Kerou, it

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Figure 9.1 Meng Kerou (Gui Lunmei) gazes at her classmate Lin Yuezhen (Liang Youmei) in Blue Gate Crossing

emerges, is secretly in love with her friend Yuezhen, but reluctantly agrees to convey love messages to Shihao on Yuezhen’s behalf. To complete the lovetriangle structure, Shihao now becomes attracted to Kerou. Tensions build as Yuezhen begins to suspect that Kerou is seeing Shihao, whom Kerou has indeed agreed to date in the desperate hope that a kiss from a boy will cure her of her homosexual desire for Yuezhen. Finally, Kerou is driven to confess her love for Yuezhen to Shihao; at first he refuses to believe her, but he seems to grow used to the idea as the film progresses and his relationship with Kerou subtly shifts from a quasi-romantic liaison to a more buddy-like friendship. Kerou dutifully sets Yuezhen up on a date with Shihao; he rejects her, and she bids farewell to her longstanding crush with a ritual incineration of her collection of his pilfered property. Finally Kerou works up the courage to steal a kiss from Yuezhen, who from then on refuses to have anything to do with her. The film ends with Kerou and Shihao reflecting on the future and the passing of the summer. Although her own future is still unclear to her, Kerou has gained a friend in Shihao and has taken the difficult first step of facing up to her same-sex desires; the logic of the coming-of-age narrative tells us that this is the central significance of Kerou’s own “blue gate crossing.” Concurrently with the release of the film in Taiwan, a tie-in book by Yee Chih-yen and Yang Yazhe was published.16 The book tells the story of the film in the form of a lively and engaging popular teen novel, with chapters written alternately from Kerou’s and Shihao’s point of view offering readers additional background details and “inside information” on the emotional experience of the film’s protagonists. As the viewers quoted above gleefully observe, the cinematic style of Blue Gate Crossing could not be further from that of the Taiwan New Cinema and New New

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Figure 9.2 Lin Yuezhen and Meng Kerou in Blue Gate Crossing

Cinema. In place of the rigorous and austere esthetics of Taiwan art cinema, Yee’s film is marked by the “friendly,” up-beat and accessible style of a television teen drama. In contrast to the challenging long takes, implacably static framing, departures from classical narrative form and ruthless hyper-realism of “art” directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang, Yee Chih-yen deploys short takes (the average shot length is 10–15 seconds), a gently mobile camera, very shallow focus, bright color, simple shot composition and an insistent and unapologetically sentimental musical soundtrack, while the narrative conforms to the easy-to-follow structures of the coming-of-age story. Questioned about the film’s style, Yee relates it to his previous work in television commercials – adding the intriguing detail that it was partly his experience working on television spots for McDonald’s that prepared him for entering the world of Taiwanese youth culture in this film.17 And indeed, the overall feel of the film has something of the familiar, undemanding slickness of a television commercial esthetic. What can we make of such a film, which is welcomed by some as indicative of a new form of Taiwan national cinema at the same time as its esthetics borrow

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unabashedly from the promotional image-making style of a multinational fast-food corporation? How does this new (trans)national Taiwan cinema respond, if at all, to the question of the Taiwan local? These are some of the questions to be explored in the pages that follow. But first, I want to address what turns out to be a related question: that of the film’s representation of sexuality.

Taiwanese tomboy narrative meets global coming-out story Within the broader category of the coming-of-age story, Blue Gate Crossing can be approached more specifically as an example of a pervasive modern Chinese narrative: the schoolgirl romance. Tze-lan D. Sang examines the emergence of a distinct modern-vernacular Chinese literary phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s, which she calls the “women’s homoerotic school romance.”18 Through her analysis of works by elite, modernist women writers, Sang traces the historical foundations of an influential modern Chinese literary discourse on homoerotic friendships between young women in modern schools and colleges. The emergence of the schoolgirl romance in literary form in the opening decades of the twentieth century relates to a number of concurrent cultural developments. These include the impact of EuroAmerican first-wave feminism on Chinese intellectuals and reformers, the establishment of women’s schools in China’s cities, the translation of European and Japanese sexology and the consequent invention of the modern Chinese category “female homosexuality” (Nü tongxing ai), and the consolidation of the literary genre of heterosexual romance, from which the early schoolgirl romances drew some of their central narrative and ideological structures.19 The modern Chinese narrative of schoolgirl romance has persisted well beyond the early twentieth-century moment of its initial emergence, and can be traced through contemporary literary, televisual, and filmic works produced between the 1970s and the present in Taiwan (and more recently in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong).20 A significant context for this recent “second wave” of schoolgirl romances is the rise of Taiwan’s lesbian and gay – or tongzhi – movement since the early 1990s, which prompted a wave of lesbian- and gay-themed cultural production across the fields of fiction, film, graphic art, theater, and political and activist cultures. Given this background, Blue Gate can be seen as contributing to a virtual discursive explosion around the figure of the same-sex attracted schoolgirl in millennial Taiwan. Like other examples of contemporary, popular schoolgirl romance – such as Internet fiction and cheap, pop-fiction novels – this film effectively articulates the modern Chinese schoolgirl romance narrative with postmodern Taiwanese lesbian (nü tongzhi) culture – a culture that itself represents a localization of a globally extensive, late-twentieth century lesbian and gay style and politics that initially emerged in Europe and the US. 21 Within the category of schoolgirl romance, Blue Gate can be classified even more precisely as a tomboy narrative. In the regime of secondary gender operative within some of Taiwan’s lesbian subcultures, the tomboy is the erotic counterpart of the feminine po (“woman” or “wife”), in a system comparable with, though not

Taiwan (trans)national cinema 137 identical to, Euro-American cultures of butch/femme. A tomboy narrative, then, is a story told from the point of view of a tomboy protagonist. Leaving aside a sprinkling of low-budget, low-circulation independent lesbian films and videos, Blue Gate is the first more or less mainstream Taiwanese film in which a tomboy protagonist is allowed the possibility of a future.22 Commonly, tomboy characters either die at the end of the story (as in the TTV series The Unfilial Daughter and the PTS telemovie Voice of Waves), or fade from view as the story focuses on their feminine partners (as in the PTS telemovie The Maidens’ Dance). In this context, it is tempting to interpret Blue Gate as a sign that lesbian (nü tongzhi) identity politics have entered fully into Taiwan’s popular entertainment culture. No longer the marginal narrative that it is in other, lower-circulation, essentially subcultural tongzhi texts, the sexual awakening of a sympathetic, nontragic young tomboy seems now to have become fully available as a storyline for both Taiwan (trans)national cinema and popular teen fiction. However, the film’s representation of Kerou’s sexuality is also open to different interpretations. Indeed, Blue Gate is ambiguous enough in this regard that viewers have engaged in lengthy and inconclusive debates over whether or not Kerou remains same-sex attracted at the end of the film, or whether she ultimately falls in love with Shihao.23 Presumably with the aim of maximizing its audience rather than being pigeon-holed as a “minority” (queer) film, Blue Gate is an almost selfconsciously open text in this regard, refusing to foreclose the possibility that the tomboy Kerou has “gotten over,” or will in future “get over” her attraction to girls and get together with Shihao. Interestingly, the novel of Blue Gate, with its inherently smaller market and lower capital investment, is significantly more precise on the question of Kerou’s sexual orientation than the film. To a far greater degree than the film, the novel invites a reading of Kerou’s narrative as a lesbian “coming-out story.” This narrative, a staple of Euro-American gay and lesbian cultures, retrospectively constructs an essential and immanent sexual identity through narrative by linking a series of events in an individual’s life, often dating back to childhood, which, the story proposes, add up to prove gay or lesbian identity.24 Ken Plummer sketches out the key generic elements of the Euro-American coming-out story.25 These include a scanning of the past for clues to the narrator’s essential sexual being; the “sense of an identity […] hidden from the surface awaiting clearer recognition, labeling, categorizing”; and an atmosphere of solitude, secrecy and silence attending the struggle to come to terms with a (homo)sexual identity.26 While some of these elements could be found in the Blue Gate film by viewers inclined to interpret it as a coming-out narrative, all of them are present quite unambiguously in the book. Not only does Kerou describe herself very explicitly as “‘one of those’, a homosexual, a queer, a lesbian, a T (tomboy)” – which she never does in the film – she also uncovers a memory of having been lastingly traumatized in primary school when the teacher forced her to join the “pink kitties” girls’ team instead of the “blue elephants” boys’ team, where she strongly felt that she belonged.27 Unlike the film, the novel buttresses Kerou’s teenage crush on her best friend with a memory of childhood gender rebellion; unlike the film, the novel is clear that at the end of

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the story Kerou loves Shihao as a buddy, not a boyfriend. And with the greater level of detail it offers on Kerou’s emotional experience throughout, the novel is generally far more explicit than the film on the meaning of Kerou’s own “blue gate crossing”: more than simply the general passage from childhood to adulthood, the novel presents Kerou’s teenage crossing as specifically a crossing-over from presexual childhood into lesbian adulthood. Nonetheless, contesting the film’s studied ambiguity on the question of Kerou’s sexual preference at its conclusion, some viewers have countered with active tactics of sexual respecification. For example, one viewer passionately responds to the posts of a group of others who want to insist on the possibility that Kerou has in fact fallen in love with Shihao at the end of the film: [Topic: Of course she didn’t fall in love with the male lead] [Kerou] will always be a lesbian [nü tongzhi]. What she wrote on the wall of the gym [“I am a girl. I like boys”] was just her way of trying to brainwash herself. In reality, a lesbian is always a lesbian. The meaning of “blue gate” is a “gate of the blues.” Once her relationship with the male lead reverts to one of ordinary friendship, she’s able to spend time with him as a friend, but she still has to face her own sexual orientation, and she has to accept that orientation. Actually, for her, the blues have only just begun.28 In the face of the film’s canny despecification of Kerou’s sexual identity, this viewer actively “reterritorializes” the film’s meaning on this point, pinning it down to an unambiguously lesbian significance. This viewer tactic of respecifying that which has been despecified in the film’s attempt to maximize its audience will be interesting to bear in mind as we approach another aspect of the film: its representation of national location.

Blurred locality In line with the general tendency in contemporary Taiwan film production more broadly, Blue Gate is marked throughout the processes of its production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption by transnational linkage and flow. Blue Gate was made as a transnational co-production between Taiwan’s Arc Light Films and the French Pyramide Productions – and it is worth noting here that Peggy Chiao’s Taiwan-based Arc Light company itself is already a translocal venture; in the words of its own publicity, the company aims to “produc[e] high-quality films from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China,” thus “develop[ing] a new direction [for] panAsia Chinese language cinema.”29 Given the lack of a significant local audience for Taiwan film, the film was conceived from the outset as needing to direct itself in large part toward international audiences.30 Aside from doing the rounds of the international festival circuit, the film was marketed heavily in Japan – and interestingly, the film’s domestic promotion also draws heavily on a Japanized esthetic, paradoxically overlaying this Taiwan-produced film’s image with a fashionable

Taiwan (trans)national cinema 139 patina of “Japaneseness” to market it to Taiwanese youth audiences.31 The official Taiwanese website for the film promotes Gui Lunmei and Chen Bolin as “fresh blue idols” (qingxin lanse ouxiang), while the DVD cover describes Chen Bolin as “a new-era popular idol” (xin shidai renqi ouxiang ). Both of these epithets explicitly cite the Japanese “idol” system of high-turnover teen stardom.32 The DVD cover even mimics contemporary Taiwan youth-speak by appropriating the Japanese term for “popular,” ninki (renqi). The film itself is also marked by a heavily Japanized “pan-Asian” cinema esthetic. Its style is strongly reminiscent of Japanese idol dramas (dorama) – one viewer writes that the film seems like “a cross between a Japanese TV drama (riju) and a Taiwan Public Television Service telemovie.”33 In an even more explicit reference, when Yuezhen is rejected by Shihao she simply and efficiently transfers her crush to the Japanese TV teen super-idol Kimura Takuya. The tie-in novel, too, constructs the cultural world of the protagonists as an unmistakably Japanized world of East Asian popular youth culture. For example, Kerou describes how Yuezhen first points out her secret crush, Shihao: Maybe because the slanting rays of the afternoon sun dazzled your eyes, everybody’s silhouette was encircled by a halo of gold. I guess that was why Yuezhen chose this moment – she wanted her protagonist to appear at the most beautiful instant. Only then would his entrance accord with the splendor of her beloved Japanese idol drama style.34 Again, when Kerou is forced to explain to Shihao why they can’t get together, she hilariously reflects: “How I wished I could toss out some lame, Korean dramastyle excuse, like: ‘It’s because we’re half brother and sister, with the same father but different mothers’.”35 The novel also makes intertextual references to the Japanese Ring teen horror films, shojo manga (girls’ manga), and Japanese popular authors Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. Yeh Yueh-yu and Darrell Davis have characterized the appropriation of Japanese pop-culture esthetics in Hong Kong-produced media as a phenomenon they term “Japan Hongscreen.”36 In Blue Gate – as indeed in much Taiwan television drama over recent years – we witness, perhaps, the emergence of a kind of regionally connected, transnational Taiwan screen culture that might be dubbed “Japan Taiscreen.”37 Parallel with the film’s intra-Asian pop-cultural citation runs a certain despecification of the Taiwan local, which, like its canny despecification of Kerou’s sexuality, is explicable as a strategy to maximize the film’s appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Addressing a similar question, Benzi Zhang has written of the increased demand for “self-translatable and self-marketable [cultural] products” in the context of cultural globalization. He discusses the production of various exoticizing images of “Chineseness” in Fifth Generation film and Hong Kong action cinema as instances of such “self-translatable” cultural products in the realm of film.38 As I have been suggesting, Blue Gate, too, could be seen as an example of a transnationally oriented self-translating text; in Zhang’s terms, a “flexible, adaptable, user/reader/audience-friendly cultural product” – but it achieves this

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flexibility not by a reification and exoticization of “Taiwaneseness” for overseas consumption, but rather precisely by the effacement of any strong traces of the local.39 As Blue Gate’s fans enthusiastically note, the film is indeed not “weighed down” by any reference to local Taiwanese history or politics. In contrast with the politically loaded emphasis in the New Wave films of the 1980s on the intricate detail of the Taiwanese local, Blue Gate’s story seems to take place in a generic East Asian city that has been visually constructed for the maximum degree of extralocal translatability. In sharp contrast to the close attention to the material and affective experience of (post)modern Taipei City in the urban films of Edward Yang or Tsai Ming-liang, the use of shallow focus cleanses Blue Gate’s mise-enscene of any identifiable vestiges of the geographic and architectural particularity of Taipei City.40 In place of the unflinching focus on Taipei as post-“economic miracle,” all but post-human metropolis in recent films by Yang, Tsai, and others, Yee’s use of telephoto lenses creates a soothing and generic fantasy cityscape in the more or less international language of modern buildings, traffic, trees, sidewalks, shop-fronts, etc.41 As Yee candidly opines: “Taipei is not the prettiest city to shoot a film. The choice of telephoto lens is really a choice out of necessity only to blur the undesired colors and shapes in the foreground and background.”42 The telephoto lens thus becomes a tool of visual deterritorialization, defocusing the “undesired colors and shapes” of the Taipei local to facilitate the film’s passage overseas. Once again, like queer viewers who actively re-queer the film’s ambiguity on the question of Kerou’s sexuality, Taipei-dwelling viewers similarly attempt to relocalize the film. One such viewer writes: Hearing the characters in the film speaking the language you know so well, and seeing the scenery, which consists of such familiar streetscapes – since the story takes place in Taipei City, not some foreign place – all this creates a feeling of intimacy that makes you feel that the story is very close to your own life.43 A similar tendency is notable in a discussion thread at the film’s unofficial website, in which viewers speculate on what the “big blue gate” of the film’s Chinese title refers to. In an intensely localizing interpretation of the film, one viewer writes: I think that the “big blue gate” must be the big gate of National Taiwan Normal University Affiliated High School on Section 3 of Hsinyi Road. Because students at that school are commonly called “children of the blue sky,” and the school uniform is all in shades of blue, and even their school yearbook is bound in blue tones.44 Struggling determinedly against the film’s intentional blurring of its locational specificity, these viewers “fill in the blanks” to respecify the film’s missing geocultural coordinates. Thus a fantasy cityscape is refocused to appear as the “familiar streetscapes” of Taipei City, including a particular gate of a particular

Taiwan (trans)national cinema 141 high school in Section 3 of Hsinyi Road; a high school with a particular uniform, a particular kind of yearbook, and a particular image in the social imaginary of other Taipei City high school students. Thus, while Blue Gate’s locational despecification matches its sexual despecification, both are contested by local and queer viewers who actively read into the film more satisfying levels of specificity on both points.

Conclusion One interpretation of the way in which Blue Gate Crossing handles thematics of both sexuality and locality – the interpretation I have been suggesting throughout thus far – is through the rubric of despecification. Pushing that argument to its logical conclusion, one might say in the new (trans)national Taiwan cinema I have been describing, “Taiwaneseness” as a distinctive set of geocultural markers effectively becomes a kind of optional extra: opted for by local audiences but not too obtrusive for international ones. According to the same logic of market maximization and smooth transmissibility across differently positioned audiences, one might say that the Taiwanese tomboy emerges into popular entertainment culture at the moment when her distinctively tomboy sex/gender/cultural identity can be subsumed under either a culturally despecified, universalist, indicatively Euro-American construction of lesbian “coming out,” or a sexually despecified, universalist construction of a teenage “coming of age.” An alternative way of framing the phenomena I am discussing is through the rubric of “multicoding,” which I have argued elsewhere applies to the strategy adopted in Ang Lee’s films The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.45 Like Benzi Zhang’s notion of the “self-translatable” cultural product, the concept of multicoding implies that in the era of cultural globalization, films that aim to be accessible and appealing to multiple, distinct audiences may more or less intentionally encode multiple possible interpretations at the moment of production; interpretations that can then be picked up selectively by differently positioned audiences. In that case, one might say that Blue Gate multicodes along at least two axes at once, a geo-cultural axis and a sexual-cultural axis, thus allowing for satisfying interpretations to be made by audiences positioned both within Taiwan and outside it, and both within gay or lesbian subcultures and outside them. 46 Understanding the strategy of the new (trans)national Taiwan cinema as exemplified in Blue Gate Crossing through the rubric of multicoding rather than despecification seems preferable, because it foregrounds the activity of audiences in decoding the filmic signifier at the point of reception. Indeed, in the light of the actual complexity and willfulness of queer and Taipei-dwelling viewer responses to Blue Gate, taking seriously the respecifying activity of viewers seems a far more fruitful approach than simply bemoaning the national/sexual despecification of the filmic text itself. If this instance of (trans)national Taiwan cinema is multicoded for smooth passage across geo-cultural and sexual-subcultural borders in order to maximize its market, then its viewers effectively “value-add” specificity in both respects at the moment of consumption, customizing this flexible product to cater to their local, specific needs and desires. To make this observation is not the same

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as simply celebrating these active audiences with a naïve cultural populism – indeed, it would be difficult to interpret the activity of audiences in differentially decoding films like Blue Gate as “resistant,” given that, as I have argued, such films effectively anticipate audiences’ multiple decoding options in their own selfconsciously polysemic organization. As I have tried to show, Blue Gate’s multicoding strategy simultaneously despecifies the filmic text – as is required by the demands of audience maximization – and offers audiences the option of respecifying that which has been despecified – as is required by the demands of specific, differentially positioned audience blocs. In this regard, the film makes an interestingly complex response to the pressures of media globalization, managing as if by magic to work at once as a queer and a straight, a local and a global, a culturally specific and a culturally generic media product.

Notes 1 Ti Wei, “From Local to Global: A Critique of the Globalization of Taiwan Cinema,” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies [Taiwan shehui yanjiu], no. 56 (December 2004): 65–92. 2 This tendency was exacerbated in the wake of the revocation of all remaining quotas and levies on American film in 2001, as final negotiations were concluded with the US for Taiwan’s long-awaited entry to the World Trade Organization (Ti Wei, “Reassessing New Taiwanese Cinema: From Local to Global,” The 20th Anniversary of Taiwan New Wave Cinema Taiwanese Cinema, 1982–2002 – From New Wave to Independent, Catalogue of the 7th Pusan International Film Festival, 2002. Available online at Asian Film Connections, http://www.asianfilms.org/taiwan/huigu/huigu6.html (accessed September 19, 2004)). 3 Taiwan’s cable television penetration rate was 82.2% in 2001 (Government Information Office, “Mass Media,” Taiwan Yearbook 2003. Available online at http:// www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/5-gp/yearbook/chpt17.htm (accessed September 18, 2004)). 4 Wei, “Reassessing”; Peggy Chiao, “Shijimo de Taiwan dianying” [Taiwan cinema at the end of the century], in Taiwan dianying jiushi xin xin langchao [New new wave of Taiwan cinema in the 1990s], ed. Peggy Chiao (Taipei: Maitian, 2002), xii–xvi, xii. 5 Wei, “Reassessing.” 6 Wei, “Reassessing,” 78–81. On Taiwan New Cinema as transnational culture, see also Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development,” in Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 13–25. 7 Wei, “Reassessing,” 81–83. 8 Wei, “Reassessing,” 84–86. 9 Two other popular entertainment films based on Jimmy Liao’s graphic novels demonstrate a similar degree of transnationalization minus the Hollywood connection: The Floating Landscape (Lian zhi Fengjing, 2003) is a Hong Kong/Japanese/French co-production, filmed in Hong Kong and Mainland China with a mixed Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese cast; Sound of Colours (Dixia Tie/Dei Gwong Tit, 2003) is a co-production between Hong Kong- and Shanghai-based production companies, filmed in Hong Kong and Shanghai with a mixed Hong Kong, Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese cast. 10 The category I am proposing here differs from Hamid Naficy’s influential delineation of the “independent transnational film genre” in several respects. First, these directors are not necessarily themselves “transnationally positioned” (in exilic, diasporic, or expatriate communities outside Taiwan). Second, the films I place in this category are not

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15 16 17 18 19 20

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necessarily most fruitfully approached as auteurist “self-narrativizations”; themes of cultural identity are not always as central to these films as they are to the films Naficy analyzes (Hamid Naficy, “Phobic Spaces and Liminal Places: Independent Transnational Film Genre,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, eds Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 121). Finally, the cultural translations enacted by the (trans)national Taiwan cinema are not necessarily translations between the West and the non-West/“Third World,” as is the case with Naficy’s examples; indeed, these films are just as likely to focus on intra-Asian cultural translations, for example between Taiwan and Japan as in Blue Gate Crossing. Ti Wei observes, local audiences have seized on Ang Lee’s international success and the “near-Hollywood production values” of Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision with similar optimism (Wei, “Reassessing”). Lin Mucai, “Lanse damen – qingse de gaozhong shidai” [Blue Gate Crossing: those bitter high-school days], 2003, http://vm.rdb.nthu.edu.tw/mallok/AvZone/content.asp?post_ serial=3057 (accessed September 15, 2004). He Gu, “Lanse damen: na nian xiatian wo gen chulian yushang” [Blue Gate Crossing: That summer, my first love], 2003, http://thebluegatecrossing.com/gb/index.php?id=114 (accessed August 16, 2004). Lan Zuwei, “The Role of Government in the Development of the Taiwanese New Wave,” The 20th Anniversary of Taiwan New Wave Cinema Taiwanese Cinema, 1982–2002 – From New Wave to Independent, Catalogue of the 7th Pusan Internatinal Film Festival, 2002. Available online at Asian Film Connections, http://www.asianfilms.org/taiwan/ huigu/huigu5.html (accessed September 21, 2004). Appropriately, given her forthright and tomboyish personality, Meng Kerou’s name is a homophone for “ferocity triumphs over gentleness.” Yee Chih-yen and Yang Yazhe, Lanse damen [Blue Gate Crossing] (Taipei: Xinyu, 2002). Mike Walsh, “An Interview with Yee Chih-yen: Directing with an Open Heart,” Metro 135 (Winter 2003). Tze-lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 127–160. Fran Martin, Love and Remembrance: Transnational Chinese Popular Cultures and the Lesbian Imaginary (in-progress book manuscript). Key examples include Chu T‘ien hsin’s short stories “Waves Scour the Sands” and “A Story of Spring Butterflies,” in Backward Glances: Chinese Popular Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary, trans. Fran Martin (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 75–93; Cao Lijuan, “Tongnü zhi wu” [The Maiden’s Dance] (Taipei: Datian, 1991) as well as the Taiwan Public Television Service telemovie adaptation of Cao’s story (2002, dir. Cao Ruiyuan), plus another PTS telemovie, Voice of Waves (2002, dir. Lisa Chen), and TTV’s thirteen-part hit drama series The Unfilial Daughter (2002), based on Du Xiulan’s prize-winning popular novel of the same name Ni nü (Taipei: Huangguan, 2002). In addition, the schoolgirl romance narrative has recently been taken up in a spate of popular and Internet teen fiction – examples include Ranblue’s I Love The Beautiful Basketball Girl (Taipei: Yashutang, 2003), Mayberight’s Only You 1 and 2 [Wo de xinli zhiyou ni, meiyou ta yi he er] (Taipei: Jihe chu ban she, 2002 and 2003) and Cornbug’s My Elder Schoolmate [Xue jie] (Taipei: Hongse xiaoshuo, 2002) as well as in fiction written by actual schoolgirls in Taiwan’s elite girls’ schools, who fictionalize their own same-sex love affairs in stories submitted to school magazines, see Zhang Qiaoting, “Xunfu yu dikang: shiwei xiaoyuan nu jingying lazi de qingyu yayi” [Domestication and resistance: ten elite school girls’ sexual suppression] (Taipei: Tangshan, 2000). Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003). Such independent lesbian films and videos include Li Xiangru’s documentary 2,1 (1999) and Jofei Chen’s Incidental Journey (2001).

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23 See thread on “Did she fall in love with the male lead?” at MallOK Qingnian Chuangyi Gongfang, 2003, vm/rdb/nthu.edu.tw/mallok/AvZone/iwanttalk.asp?post_serial= 3057&printid=1395#2 (accessed September 15, 2004). 24 Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Julia Creet, “Anxieties of Identity: Coming Out and Coming Undone,” in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, eds Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Angus Gordon, “Turning Back: Adolescence, Narrative, and Queer Theory,” GLQ 5.1 (1999): 1–24. 25 Plummer, Telling, 81–96. 26 Plummer, Telling, 33. Versions of this narrative were adapted in a slew of independent American and European films in the mid-to-late 1990s in a kind of teen-movie outgrowth of the New Queer Cinema, so that by now the teenage coming-out story – especially with a lesbian focus – constitutes a recognizable filmic sub-genre. For example, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (Maria Maggenti, USA, 1995), Beautiful Thing (Hattie MacDonald, UK, 1996), All Over Me (Alex Sichel, USA, 1997), Show Me Love (Lukas Moodysson, Sweden, 1998), But I’m A Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, USA, 1999). 27 Yee and Yang, Lanse damen, 124, 91. 28 Randy, “Ta dangran mei aishang nan zhujiao” [She sure won’t fall in love with the male lead], 2003, http://vm/rdb/nthu.edu.tw/mallok/AvZone/iwanttalk.asp?post_serial= 3057&printid=1395#2 (accessed September 15, 2004). 29 Arc Light Films, 2003, http://www.Arc Lightfilms.com.tw/eabout.htm (accessed June 29, 2004). 30 Yee Chih-yen explains: “Since nowadays Taiwan film has to seek finance overseas, one must consider overseas markets at the level of film content, as well. There’s absolutely no question, any longer, of Taiwan cinema confining itself to the domestic market – anyway, for a long time now there has basically “been” no domestic market for Taiwan cinema.” Yee Chih-yen, “Lanse damen suan shi Taiwan dianying ma?” [Is Blue Gate Crossing a Taiwan film?], Posting #1686, http://thebluegatecrossing.com/gb/index.php?page= 20&id=114 (accessed August 16, 2004). 31 See also Davis, this volume. 32 Yeh Yueh-yu and Darrell William Davis, “Japan Hongscreen: Pan-Asian Cinemas and Flexible Accumulation,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 1 (2002): 61– 82, 64. 33 The reference is to the recent PTS schoolgirl romance telemovies, Voice of Waves and Maidens’ Dance; PTS was also involved in Blue Gate’s production. Xiao Hao, “Re: Blue Gate Crossing,” http://www.movie.com.tw/critics/agonymsg.php?agonyre_id=255 (accessed August 16, 2004). 34 Yee and Yang, Lanse damen, 30. 35 Yee and Yang, Lanse damen, 111. 36 Yeh and Davis, “Japan Hongscreen.” 37 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Kenichi Ishii, Herng Su and Satoshi Watanabe, “Japanese and US Programs in Taiwan: New Patterns in Taiwanese Television,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 416–431; Yingjin Zhang, “Cinematic Remapping of Taipei: Cultural Hybridization, Heterotopias, and Postmodernity” (Paper presented at the conference, “Remapping Taiwan: Histories and Cultures in the Context of Globalization,” UCLA, October 12–15, 2000); Kelly Hu, “The Desired Form: Japanese Idol Dramas in Taiwan,” in Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004); Fran Martin, “Trans-Asian Traces: Watching Schoolgirl Romance on Taiwan Television,” forthcoming in TransAsian Screens, 2005. Perhaps tendentiously and certainly wishfully, I would also like to claim

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38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

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the use of the mid-1990s hit single from Melbourne band Frente, “Accidentally Kelly Street” – one of the film’s two theme songs – as an instance of intra-Asian pop-cultural citation. Benzi Zhang, “Culture in Translation: An Inquiry into Global/Local Negotiation,” Studies in the Humanities 27, no. 2 (2000): 122–139, 127. Benzi Zhang, “Culture in Translation,” 127. For detailed discussions of the representation of the “post-modernization” of Taipei City in Taiwanese films of the 1990s, see Lin Wenchi, “Jiushi niandai taiwan dushi dianying zhong de lishi, kongjian yu jia/guo” [History, space, family/country in Taiwan urban cinema of the 1990s], Chung-wai Literary Monthly 27, no. 5 (October 1998): 99–119; Yingjin Zhang , “Cinematic Remapping”; and Lin Wenchi, “The Representation of Taipei in the Taiwanese Films of the Last Three Decades,” http:// www.ncu.edu.tw/~wenchi/article/taipei_english.htm (accessed September 27, 2004). The “Taipei City” thus constructed bears a certain resemblance to the soothingly defocussed view of the city in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman. As well as producing a generic city to facilitate international transmission, the wishful insulation from the sensorially assaultive experience of actually inhabiting Taipei City in these films reflects a distinctively middle-class perspective. Walsh, “An Interview.” “Jimi pai huasheng jiang” [Jimmy’s peanut butter], 2004, Post # 1673, http:// thebluegatecrossing.com/gb/index.php?page=20&id=114 (accessed August 16, 2004). Cotton, 2003, “Lanse damen daodi shi zhi shenme” [What does Blue Gate Crossing mean?], http://vm/rdb/nthu.edu.tw/mallok/AvZone/iwanttalk.asp?post_serial=3057 &printid=1338#1 (accessed September 15, 2004). Martin, Situating Sexualities, 141-61 and “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” in Island On The Edge: Taiwan New Cinema And After, eds. Lu Feii and Chris Berry (Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 149-59. However, of course Lee’s recent, thoroughly transnational method of working in Crouching Tiger is very different from Yee’s method in Blue Gate which, despite its transnationalization at the levels of production and exhibition, remains much more firmly grounded in Taiwan. This might be seen as a kind of massively scaled-down adaptation of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy, with its “something for everyone” logic and its principal objective of smooth translatability across cultural borders. See Steve Erikson, “Interview with Kent Jones,” Senses of Cinema 26, no. 3 (May 2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ 03/26/kent_jones.html; and Stephen Prince, “Introduction: World Filmmaking and the Hollywood Blockbuster,” World Literature Today (October-December 2003): 3-7.

10 Trendy in Taiwan Problems of popularity in the island’s cinema Darrell William Davis

A Taiwanese (puppet) legend There has been a long drought at the box office for locally made films. These have generally avoided popular genres or storytelling, leaving the business of theatrical entertainment to Hollywood and the occasional Hong Kong film. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was a huge exception, though as an international blockbuster it does not quite count as truly Taiwan. As a Taiwan-born filmmaker, Ang Lee’s home-field advantage is not quite the same as a home-made film (guopian, or Chinese-language national picture). Another big success – breaking the $1 million mark – was Legend of the Sacred Stone (Sheng shi chuanshuo, 1999), a furious, flamboyant, costume epic, played to violent perfection by hand puppets.1 This feature, a martial arts fantasy, is a flashy sword and sorcery tale of Jacobean plotting and double crosses. Imagine Thunderbirds on speed (or betelnut) brandishing swords and flying daggers instead of spaceships. Pyrotechnics, formidable monsters, visual trickery and spectacular beheadings dominate the action. Despite their frenetic pace, characters are well defined, with a certain melancholy, and even flashes of black humor. Their exploits draw on pseudo-mythological tales of superstition, betrayal, and bloody revenge. The Pili International Multimedia Co. is the production group behind Legend, with decades of experience adapting traditional puppetry to the demands of popular mass culture. Pili is a family owned business based in a small town in southern Taiwan. It has long mastered the art of captivating children and adults by capitalizing on the esthetic control afforded by hand puppets. Instead of playing up their roots in folk traditions, Pili offers state-of-the-art special effects, kinetic camerawork, a sound designer from Hollywood, popular songwriter Wu Bai, an orchestra from Shanghai, cliffhanger endings and – most important – its own cable channel. Here is the foundation of the film’s success: an entire television channel devoted wholly to Hokkien hand puppets! Within Taiwan there has always been a healthy appetite for the puppets, live and on radio and television, so their crossover to the big cinema screen was not the leap it might first seem. What interests me as an observer of Taiwan’s popular cinema, though, is the successful transition from the rich cultural treasury of hand puppets (budaixi) to the riches of Taiwan’s cinema box office. Somehow this

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televisual – and now cinematic – rendition of budaixi (Figure 10.1) manages to amplify the energy and “fun” of puppetry, without giving up its traditional, local feel. The “traditional” elements of these stories are incidental to their major entertainment value. At least, this is what the filmmakers want their audience to believe. Though many times more cinematic than ordinary action films, or even animation, Legend of the Sacred Stone (Figure 10.2) is still Taiwanese puppetry writ large. An original story composed by Chris Huang (Huang Qianghua) of the Pili troupe, the film employs characters beloved from years of television serials.2 And yet, Legend is also an extension of outdoor puppet plays, a community ritual with regional and linguistic specificity. The various puppet troupes also have a loose connection with folk religion, through funeral rites and religious holidays. Though their sacred functions are reduced on television and cinema, the puppets are still indebted to specific repertoires of Taiwanese opera, folktales, and music. This is important because the Pili artists themselves repeatedly stress their determination to make a hit martial arts movie, and not puppet shows canned for the screen.3 They want to save Taiwan movies, and seem anxious to deny or at least downplay Legend’s wellsprings in folk cultures and techniques, as if this esthetic pedigree might damage the movie’s prospects of going “wide.” The puppets’ grounding in the indigenous folklore of Taiwan may well have been a big part of their appeal at the box office. But this is not something the Pili company wishes to emphasize, preferring to present itself as a professional entertainment enterprise, conversant with the latest technical standards in CGI, digital sound, and production values. But as scholars we must be mindful of older esthetic and cultural debts, ensuring that we account for the puppets’ provenance in folklore, traditional performance, and the rich poetics of puppetry in both Taiwan and China. Fortunately, with Hou Hsiaohsien’s The Puppetmaster (1993), a story based on the life of the master Li Tianlu, we have an outstanding tutorial on the life, art, and politics of Taiwan puppetry. Hou of course was doing something nearly opposite that of the Pili troupe, in spotlighting the artistry of traditional puppetry and indeed, nominating it as a cosmic metaphor for the vicissitudes of Taiwan itself. 4 To repeat, Legend of the Sacred Stone is Taiwanese puppetry writ large. Its basis in folk arts and rituals compels attention. Its folk performance lineage, despite Pili’s apparent disavowals, is a key intertext, a foundation just as important as its cinematic technique and box office success. Accordingly the film Legend of the Sacred Stone may be an exception, and may not reveal very much about popular Taiwan cinema generally because its esthetic roots and materials are culturally specific. This bears comparison with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which for now has also proven itself singular – but for the opposite reason. Ang Lee’s film is a despecification or, at least, a transplanting of its esthetic roots, enabling it to travel far into global reception (see Hsiao-hung Chang’s essay in this volume). Also, like Crouching Tiger, we have yet to see a Legend of the Sacred Stone II, though it has been several years since the film was released. Not to capitalize on a hit within a reasonable time is surely economic folly. It makes no sense for commercial filmmakers not to follow up with another installment, especially since the Pili producers have pledged themselves to revitalizing Taiwan popular martial arts

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Figure 10.1 Budaixi as folklore …

Figure 10.2 … and as blockbuster movie: Legend of the Sacred Stone

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film overall. So the success of Legend of the Sacred Stone may have enriched its makers, and delighted viewers but not held much promise for Taiwan commercial film generally.5 Besides the Pili troupe other companies, like Arc Light and Zoom Hunt, are trying to pursue strategies to attract investors and cultivate local audiences for Taiwan films. These initiatives are cautious, operating on small, carefully planned projects. Script doctoring, talent scouting, marketing gimmicks, and regional alliances have already saturated local production. Zoom Hunt, one of the partners in Ang Lee’s breakthrough, has already turned most of its energies from features to television production on the Mainland. The films of Arc Light represent this new direction but in a different way. Like the Pili puppets, the strategy is framed by and indebted to extra-cinematic modes. If the puppet movie requires an approach answerable to the conventions of puppet theatre (not just film or animation), recent popular Taiwan films also demand similar adjustments. It can be argued that Arc Light is moving beyond its film festival background to make movies aligned with Japanese trendy drama, or dorama. Since local audiences have completely abandoned commercial Taiwan films, contemporary filmmakers must capitalize, where possible, on other, alternative audience formations already in place. I want to propose an analogy between the cultural specificity of Legend and other efforts to make popular films in Taiwan. The analogy is that Legend is ultimately based on extra-cinematic art forms and audiences, and filmmakers since then have also capitalized on extra-cinematic communities that might be courted, and then reconstituted into ticket buying audiences for popular movies.

Arc Light’s strategy Arc Light was formed by Taiwan’s eminent critic/producer Peggy Chiao Hsiungping and director Xu Xiaoming. With financial backing from France and talent scouting in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Mainland, Arc Light aims toward artful films with both popular appeal and international sales potential. Arc Light’s films are especially attractive to certain niche audiences: affluent urban youth, gaylesbian, and film festival followers. To some extent these three groups overlap. And these groups were largely not the audiences who made a hit of Legends of the Sacred Stone (mainly young students and the working class). The goal of tailoring films, the cautious, small-scale effort to court niche markets is pursued by other companies besides Arc Light. These would-be sleepers include gay-themed independent Formula 17 (Three Dots, 2004), trendy romance La Melodie d’Helene (Zoom Hunt, 2004), and Holiday Dreaming (Good Film, 2004). Since Chiao and Arc Light have had major success at festivals, the attempts to court popular audiences are a hand extended from above. This is part of a worldwide trend, post-Crouching Tiger, for sales companies to make foreign films accessible or (to put it another way), for filmmakers to deliver enjoyable, easy-to-digest foreign films. This of course is directly opposite to the dominant international reputation of Taiwan films in the festival market, with difficult, esthetically challenging works by Hou Hsiao-hsien and his kin. In Taiwan, as elsewhere, film

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festival audiences remain somewhat specialized; they tend to be a cinephiliac group with an appetite for the experimental and offbeat. One of Arc Light’s earlier projects was Tsai Ming-liang’s queer musical The Hole (1999), co-produced with the French company Flache Pyramide (Fabienne Vonier and Louis Malle). There was never any expectation The Hole would ever reach a large ticket-buying public. Arc Light then launched its six film ‘Tales of Three Cities’ series with Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (2000), Yee Chih-yen’s Blue Gate Crossing (2002) and Xu Xiaoming’s Love of May (2004).

Three cities This investment and production strategy seeks efficiencies of scale and audience consolidation in the region. As Asian cities are internationalized, they also flex their local distinctiveness. A program of stories with strong regional flavor promotes both international and local recognition. As a series, “Three Cities” appeals to a larger audience footprint, if people realize that the film doesn’t stand alone, but instead belongs to a package. If Taipei viewers enjoy Beijing Bicycle or Blue Gate Crossing, on discovering that the film is part of a thematic series, they might seek out the other installments, if they’ve been properly informed. As a series, the “Three Cities” initiative is also attractive to Euro-American art-house audiences. This is a kind of televisual strategy, pitching not just a single narrative but a multipurpose concept structured thematically. This serial “footprint” notion may be less important than financial economies of production. Planning six (or more) films in a package represents risk management, by arranging finance for a product line, not just a single film that stands or falls alone. Pressure on just one film is reduced if several others are included on the same finance-marketing platform. According to Chiao, “Because we have six products, we can get a cheaper deal for production expenses. This makes it easier to get investment from overseas. If you say you have a package of six movies about the changes in Chinese societies, it’s more appealing to foreign investors.”6 Looking closely at Arc Light’s Blue Gate Crossing (BGC), we have a youth romance cleverly packaged as a Euro-friendly trifle, proving successful in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. Its comely lead, Chen Bolin, broke into the mainstream Hong Kong industry and is about to become a star. BGC is a stylish city film whose themes run directly against those of neorealist or modernist exposes like Bunuel (Los Olvidados, 1950), Lino Brocka (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975), or Hector Babenco (Pixote, 1981). Unlike Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yee’s film celebrates life in the city, instead of subjecting it to critique. In this film, Taipei coyly personifies quirky, idiosyncratic charm. Like Tsai Ming-liang’s treatments of the city, Taipei works as a colorful character but its presence does not dehumanize, it figures as a playful trickster. The Blue Gate Taipei is a seductive mixture of thirdworld street life and contemporary modcons: the buzz of mobile phones and cicadas, immaculate, palm-fringed streets, beach parties, and love triangles. Yee, his production designer, and producers have concocted a vision of Taipei that feels somehow European – an offbeat funkiness combined with a sense of capital city flair,

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yearning, and insouciance. In this respect, the film is simultaneously East Asian and global, a generic urbanity that resonates with the three cities concept, as well as local and international viewers. BGC is not European at all, but a kind of Taiwan trendy drama, a variation on Japanese trendy drama, or dorama. This popular television format has, since the mid-1990s, conquered East Asia. It is available on disc in box sets, now regularly broadcast on cable and network television. Circulation of dorama was originally bootlegged; now they are completely legal, institutionalized. Dorama can be defined as contemporary, romantic, urban fantasies often based on popular manga or serialized fiction by young authors. Ota Toru, the producer of Tokyo Love Story and All Under One Roof sums it up when he says all trendy dramas must have a decisive, wellgroomed heroine; she holds a desirable job in the city (or attends a good school); and is consumed by romance. In short: fashion, setting, and love.7 In Japanese cinema, an early example of the dorama esthetic is Iwai Shunji’s famous Love Letter (1995).8 It was Taiwan that first embraced trendy drama, intensifying the Japanophile discourse called ha-ri, a tribal subculture devoting itself to Japanese popular, rather than traditional culture.9 Ha-ri-zu (Japan-lover tribes) watch for the sheer love of Japanese commodities and open themselves to kawai’i (adorable) products and experiences. These new experiences range from textual, consumer to technological novelties.10 By now, ha-ri is no longer a subculture at all but thoroughly mainstream, and faces keen competition from han-liu, a burgeoning wave of Korean pop-cult. Fans of dorama in Taiwan showed great entrepreneurialism by sharing their obsession, establishing a regional hub and repackaging it for Chinese consumers, from Hong Kong to Singapore, the PRC, and beyond.11 Thanks largely to Taiwan’s supply lines, Japanese films and television made a large impact in Hong Kong around 1997. Among imported films, Japanese movies increased by nearly twofold in number of films released and rose 50 percent at the box office.12 On television, Taiwan and Hong Kong viewers were addicted to the pleasures of Love Generation (1996), Long Vacation (1997), Gift (1997), Shomuni (1998), GTO (“Great Teacher Onizuka,” 1998), Majo no Joken (“Witches Online,” 1999), Naomi (1999), Tabloid (1999), African Nights (1999), Happy Mania (1999), Beautiful Life (2000), and Hero (2001). These television series have well-written scripts, catchy pop music, appealing young stars, and bright, fluid camerawork on attractive locations. They have production values that shamed prime-time television in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Even on pirated VCD, dorama are slick and “classy,” outdoing local programming on every count, in story, theme, cinematography, sound design, narrative structure, acting, and production design. It is this esthetic that Blue Gate Crossing and Arc Light pursues. BGC looks and sounds very much like Japanese trendy drama. It would be convenient to claim that Yee Chih-yen and Peggy Chiao deliberately set out to transpose Japanese dorama to a Chinese location, but the argument here too turns on analogy: the premise, locations, casting of new faces, music, and overall fresh treatment evoke a poignant evocation of youth. BGC is touching

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because its young characters seem almost too innocent, stealing sidelong glances as they peddle their bikes, but they have intimations of adulthood, responsibility, and compromise. The dorama sensibility, carried along by an effective classical score, poignantly combines worldliness and the ephemeral notion of aware, a Japanese esthetic of bittersweetness. This combination of elements matches the appeal of dorama, and reaches out to a substantial audience already in place within Taiwan. Beyond analogy, within the film there is a strong clue to its dorama links. Instead of studying, the pretty lead Lin Yuezhen habitually writes the name of her crush, Zhang Shihao, over and over in her notebook. When Zhang falls for her best friend Meng Kerou, Lin begins to obsessively write another name in the book, Kimura Takuya, Kimura Takuya, Kimura Takuya…. This Kimura (playing a time traveler in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046) is of course dorama’s biggest poster-boy in Japan, representing a level of idolatry that places Lin’s crush in an unattainable sphere, that is, pure fantasy. If Lin’s classmate Zhang Shihao is just a proxy for Kimura Takuya, then this places the sincerity of her affection in doubt. While the kawai’i straight girl Lin Yuezhen toys with fantasies of Kimura Takuya using Zhang Shihao, the kawai’i tomboy Meng Kerou has embarked on a real relationship with Zhang. But this relationship is fraught, blocked by Meng’s own desire for her best friend, for whom Meng reluctantly mediates in the pursuit of Zhang. The substitution of Kimura for Zhang indicates Lin Yuezhen is besotted with an ideal of romantic love with no tolerance for honest, actual friendship. Meng Kerou, on the other hand, acts on her desires, and has her heart broken. The notion of BGC as a variation of trendy drama can be contrasted with another film, 20:30:40, Sylvia Chang’s romantic comedy about women’s love, career, and aging. While BGC was backed by a French concern, Chang’s film had financing from Columbia Pictures-Asia, the company that invested in Crouching Tiger. If BGC tries to be a cinematic form of Taiwan trendy drama, 20:30:40 is true melodrama, one of the core genres of Taiwan film history, with its long tradition of wenyi pictures. Sylvia Chang Ai-jia was one of the stars of Taiwan’s wenyi boom in the 1970s. But, the filiation of Chang and her film with conventional movie melodrama may well be a stumbling block. Like BGC, 20:30:40 attempts to draw a popular audience, but it carries lots of cinematic baggage: genuine movie stars (Lee Sinjie, Rene Liu, Tony Leung Ka-fai), a name director (Sylvia Chang), and a generic affiliation with which audiences in Taiwan no longer have much investment or desire. To the extent the film is seen as a conventional, home-grown Taiwan movie (guopian), it is a liability. If it’s “movies” they want, Taiwan audiences will flock to Hollywood movies. Considering it was a Taiwan film, 20:30:40 did decent business at home, though its budget was many times higher than BGC. The point is that 20:30:40 is a “real,” traditional movie, while BGC appears as something different, at once lighter and more metaphorical. Note Derek Elley’s comment on 20:30:40 in Variety, “Unlike most Taiwanese films, this is closer to the real Taipei, a vigorous, positive city of functioning individuals….” Perhaps, but Taipei film audiences may not “want” to see “the real Taipei,” preferring (like Lin Yuezhen) a proxy, displacement, or surrogate instead. Elley goes on to take a dig at Taiwan’s art cinema reputation: “20:30:40 will come as a pleasant surprise to auds

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who thought Taipei was entirely populated by angst-ridden youths or introverted homosexuals.”13 Yee Chih-yen successfully accomplished the “worlding” of Taipei without falling back into a heavy, third-world auteurism associated with Hou, Yang, and Taiwan New Cinema. At Cannes, director Yee Chih-yen sounded the same note as Elley when taking issue with French journalists’ references to Blue Gate as a “gay” film. “For me, it’s not a film about homosexuality,” Yee said. “It’s rather a film about young people coping with their problems in life.”14 But for Yee to say that BGC is not a gay film is like Pili’s Chris Huang saying Legend of the Sacred Stone isn’t a puppet film. Why take such pains to deny and redefine the films? It’s plain that both filmmakers want to distance their movies from associations that might damage their breakout potential. BGC’s success could be attributed to an extra-cinematic intertext, trendy drama, just as Legend of the Sacred Stone capitalizes on an extra-cinematic intertext, i.e. a fanbase for puppet serials and popular folk arts. The trouble with 20:30:40 is not its structure, writing, or performance (it is a competent, engaging film), but its fatal association with an all-but-discredited business in Taiwan – the commercial movie establishment. If real popularity is to get reacquainted with Taiwan films, they must have local Taiwan characteristics, but also, offer something beyond cinematic features, linking direct to tribes of comics, games, Japanese dorama, and other

Figure 10.3 Puppet extravaganza from Pili International Multimedia, Taiwan (1999)

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intertextual, extra-cinematic forms. They must look and sound like foreign films, but still be Taiwanese. One more intertext to be considered is that of Three Dots’ Formula 17 (2004), the second-highest grossing local film of the year. Here, the connection is not with folk arts, or regional television, but with camp-caricature, a stylized world of gay romantic comedy. Though Formula 17 is an original script, it plays like a cartoon or wacky comic book. Populated entirely by beautiful teenage males, the story twists the conventions of country naïf who learns the ways of big-city life. The style is reminiscent of a Japanese shojo anime (effeminate cartoon), but animated by playful parody. It is completely artificial, dominated by outlandish characters, primary colors and over-the-top, catty dialogue. Action takes place entirely in fashionable bars, nightclubs, and shops devoid of everyday people, especially females. Directed by a woman in her twenties, D. J. Chen, the film was packaged not only to Taipei’s active gay community but sought, and found audiences among urban youth. It’s clear from the casting (television star Tony Yang) that there was a calculated effort to attract young girls and housewives, without diluting the glossy, gay premise. This enabled a crucial crossover, from gay to heterosexual female, in that Formula 17 is breezy and funny enough to be a date movie. It also appeals to young housewives, on a girls’ night out. In fact, the gay-teen presence in Formula 17 is so overt, overwhelming any heterosexual or middle-age reference, that its flouncy inventiveness quickly takes over. The straightforwardness of the protagonist’s quest for true love is the immediate focus of the story, with crackling jokes and pratfalls heading off any questions about gay identity or the lack of women in this milieu. The overall conception of the film is fresh, tapping into contemporary, Taiwanese renderings of camp material like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Sex in the City. This is about as far as it is possible to go from the earnest complexities of Taiwan New Cinema. In other words, the film takes the opposite tack from Blue Gate Crossing, where the “crossing” remains tentative, ambiguous, allowing the filmmaker to object that it is not (just) a lesbian coming-out, but a passage from childhood to adult self-awareness, appealing multiply to distinct audiences, who activate meanings embedded seemingly “just for them” (see Fran Martin’s discussion in this volume). Formula 17 goes in reverse, exaggerating its flamboyant gay-only style and story. And, it is also unlike Legend of the Sacred Stone, which enjoyed a large, preexisting audience ready to follow from television to theatrical box office. Though it is easy to imagine Taiwan’s gay population readily coming out for Formula 17, the company was not taking chances. Three Dots founders had worked for years in film marketing and promotion before starting their own company, and began priming audiences and media outlets months before production even began. This strategy paid off far more than the Three Dots allowed themselves to hope. The company continues its commitment to popular, genre films, releasing horror film Heirloom (2005) and achieving the highest opening box office since Chen Kuo-fu’s horror-thriller Double Vision in 2002 (see Robert Chen’s discussion in this volume). It also completed The Shoe Fairy, which was unveiled at the Pusan Film Festival. And, unlike Pili’s Legends of the Sacred Stone, a sequel, of sorts: Three Dots released its fourth feature, Catch,

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Figure 10.4 Gay comedy hit from Three Dots Entertainment (2004)

another comedy with Tony Yang, directed by D. J. Chen. This film is one of over 30 features released in 2005, whereas there were only 10 in 2003.15 It appears Taiwan popular films are making a modest, but welcome return. Due to Formula 17 and other brave films, Taiwan filmmakers of all kinds are encouraged, but particularly those associated with formerly despised genre films, those in which Three Dots specialize. According to D. J. Chen, Entertainment is seen as a dirty word by many Taiwanese filmmakers. I don’t know why it’s become such a shameful thing, as one of the primary functions of a film is to entertain audiences. Maybe in the past some filmmakers thought ‘entertainment’ was sullied by the aspect of making money, that they can’t get creative satisfaction from entertaining audiences but only from expressing themselves. But I think if you can make a movie that makes people happy, have a good time, or be moved, there’s nothing wrong with that. 16 The perception is growing that popular movies need not be left to Hollywood imports. “We are very happy that Taiwan films can now compete with Hollywood product,” said Three Dots co-founder Michelle Yeh. “It’s a long process towards regaining market share, but we believe that if the current production output continues, Taiwan cinema has hope.”17 Into the new millennium, a fresh but still

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fragile force is trying to re-grow the popular market for Taiwan pictures. First, there must be faith that ticket-buying audiences for local films exist, if they can be reached, or cultivated in sufficient numbers. Some of the films discussed in this essay have demonstrated that this is really possible, if still only on a small scale. To keep this in perspective, recall that in 2004 locally made films took a little more than one percent of the Taiwan box office. Now, it seems that this market must be patiently nurtured from outside traditional film avenues, coaxing audience pockets out from their print, television, and electronic niches. From there, spin, word of mouth, and positive reviews must be generated and shifted onto larger, if not mass media platforms. It has become clear that producers are reaching out to audiences who wish to be entertained by storytellers who dwell among them, not just by blockbusters from afar.

Notes 1 Nelson H. Wu, “Puppet master of martial arts thrills locals,” Variety (January 12, 2004). 2 On the Legend website, fans of the show and the movie argue excitedly over their favorite characters, and true to Taiwan form, propose analogies to national politicians and platforms. 3 “Making-of-Documentary,” Legend of the Sacred Stone, DVD (Deltamac, 2001). 4 See Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Trisecting Taiwan Cinema with Hou Hsiao-hsien” in Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 133–176. 5 At the conference where this argument was first presented, I was told that Pili had decided to relinquish plans for a theatrical sequel, preferring instead to return to television production (International conference on Taiwan cinema, National Chung-chi University, Chung-li, December 3, 2004). 6 Yu Sen-lun, “Passing the Torch of Taiwan film,” Taipei Times 4 (March 4, 2001): 17. 7 Ota Toru, “Producing (Post-) Trendy Japanese TV Dramas,” in Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 78. 8 The following discussion is adapted from Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yeh, “VCD as Programmatic Technology: Japanese Television Drama in Hong Kong,” in Feeling Asian Modernities, 227–247. 9 For two different but equally informative and insightful accounts of the ha-ri-ze see Ming-tsung Lee, “Traveling with Japanese TV Dramas: Cross-cultural Orientation and Flowing Identification of Contemporary Taiwanese Youth,” in Feeling Asian Modernities, 129–154; Lee Tain-dow, “I must be Japanese in My Last Life: Japanese Pop Culture Consumption and Identity Incorporation” (Paper presented (in Chinese) at “The International Conference on Media and Culture Development in Digital Era,” Taipei, March 28–30, 2001). 10 “New” in two of the three senses of novelty specified by Campbell: technical innovation or progress, as well as novel experiences based on the romantic, rebellious, or exotic. Colin Campbell, “Desire for the New: Its Nature and Social Location as Presented in Theories of Fashion and Modern Consumerism,” in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, eds R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (Routledge, 1994), 52–57. 11 In the proliferation of Japanophiles in relation to dorama, the Internet plays a key role. An archive for Japanese dorama is available in “Jdorama” (http://www.jdorama.com), a “websphere” for data collection, learning, and sharing.

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12 Yeh Yueh-yu and Darrell W. Davis, “Japan Hongscreen: Pan-Asian Cinema as Flexible Accumulation,”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–82. 13 Derek Elley, “Blue Gate Crossing,” Berlin Film Festival, Variety (February 16, 2004). 14 Yu Sen-lun, “‘Blue Gate’ Opens at Cannes,” Taipei Times (May 23, 2002). 15 Liz Shackleton, “Heirloom Scares up Strong Opening Weekend,” Screen International (September 19, 2005). 16 Caroline Gluck, “Can Youth Save Taiwan Film?” International Herald Tribune, (November 26, 2004). 17 Liz Shackleton, Screen International.

Part III

State of the arts

11 King Hu Experimental, narrative filmmaker Peter Rist

King Hu Jinquan is arguably the least appreciated “great director” in world film history. He should be better known as the most significant innovator of wuxia pian, especially the cape and sword genre, and was its greatest practitioner.1 Also, he needs to be recognized as one of the most truly original filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside figures such as Miklós Jancsó (Hungary), Glauber Rocha (Brazil), Santiago Alvarez (Cuba), Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), and, even Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland), all of whose artistry has less to do with narrative and more with other aspects of film form or style. Unfortunately, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking has traditionally had few admirers or practitioners in the Chinese-speaking world, and in North America and Europe, King Hu’s esthetic intentions have not been fully understood. The dance and musical-like nature of Hu’s work, which is more painterly and poetic than novelistic or dramatic, is now appreciated intrinsically and for its relevance to Chinese opera, painting, and literature in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, at least, but has not been championed on the world, film-historical stage.2 As an expatriate filmmaker who worked in the commercial film industries of Taiwan and Hong Kong, he remains virtually ignored in Mainland China, but, in Taiwan, where he made, arguably, the best films of his early career, and where he was given the opportunity to make films late in his career, after a major retrospective in 1980, his films were preserved at the Taipei Film Archive and shown periodically enough to ensure his reputation as a film artist.3 King Hu’s first wuxia pian, Come Drink With Me (Da zuixia, 1965–66) not only ushered in the first real wave of Hong Kong action films, but also stands out as the film that completely changed the face of Chinese-language cinema forever more. Of course, the literary genre of wuxia is ancient, and the film genre is almost as old as film itself, in China.4 Many silent martial arts/adventure films were made in Shanghai, but, traditionally, wuxia pian’s history had been hampered by unconvincing action and cinematic rendition, as well as a general critical disdain for popular films. Even the work of the first major star of kung fu, Kwan Tak-hing, who played the character Wong Fei-hung (or Huang Feihong) more than 75 times, pales in comparison with the moves on display in Come Drink With Me. In the first of Kwan’s films, The True Story of Wong Fei Hung, Part 1: Whiplash Snuffs the Candle Flame (1949) one can see the roots of the Hong Kong action film, with acrobatic jumping

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from one level of an interior set to another, with the single protagonist in the center of a circle of adversaries, and with sword, pole, and unarmed combat. But there is little imagination in the filming of these scenes, and Kwan’s moves are unathletic to say the least. Even in 1966, the year of Come Drink With Me’s release, we can find examples of commercially successful Hong Kong wuxia pian, which look terribly dated now. For example, The Jade Bow (directed by Zhang Xinyan and Fu Qi for Great Wall/Sil Metropole) is a highly entertaining and colorful film, with female characters in the principal action roles. It contains some imaginative special effects, but lacks the convincing action, deft editing, and graceful movement of Come Drink With Me. Only moments of under-cranking to create speeded-up action and some supernatural “special effects,” uncharacteristic of Hu’s developed style – e.g. dryice mist piped through costume sleeves as rays of qi (energy) emanating from the palms of human hands – hinder full appreciation today of this landmark film. It features the finest screen performance of Zheng Peipei (or Cheng Pei Pei) in, perhaps, the definitive, prototypical role for warrior women in action. In the film’s first half, she is the central figure in a number of brilliantly choreographed fight scenes, which include long tracking shots, and cutting-on-movement, both of which enhance the film’s dynamism and beauty. The setting of an inn for one of the key sequences, where Golden Swallow (Zheng) catches coins on a hairpin (through the magic of montage), the introduction of a mistaken identity plot device – she is taken to be a man – and the decision to cast the events during the Ming Dynasty, in the fourteenth century, are all trademarks of Hu’s mature work.5 Most remarkably, perhaps, in Come Drink With Me we find a complex rhythm created through changes in the meter of editing, as well as other shifts between stasis and action, including those of character and camera movement. The average shot length (ASL) of the film as a whole is, by my calculation, 5.6 seconds.6 This would appear to be much shorter than the international mean ASL of the period, which was somewhere between 7 and 11 seconds, and Hu’s cutting rate was clearly much faster than that of the other notable contemporary director of wuxia pian at Shaw Bros, Zhang Che, whose One Armed Swordsman had an ASL greater than 6.3 seconds.7 Expectedly, in Come Drink with Me there are big differences in the editing pace between action scenes and scenes which contain a great deal of dialog. For example, within the opening seven minutes of the film, an exterior battle scene, which has an ASL of 4.1 seconds, is immediately followed by an interior scene of torture and plotting with an ASL of 9.8 seconds. More surprisingly, during the second half of the long inn scene which follows, where Golden Swallow demonstrates “his” fighting skills – she is yet to be exposed as a woman – rapidly edited confrontations are interspersed with shots of longer duration, within which, the camera often moves, and suspenseful tension is built up. For example, before her chief adversary in the scene, Smiling Tiger, opens his fan as a signal to his men to rise from their tables, the camera tracks in and left to isolate him in the frame. The shot lasts 11 seconds. The next 7-second shot is composed in a long shot scale. The camera tracks in toward Swallow as the men get up and move to surround her. Then, the next four shots occupy a mere 5 seconds of screen time: Swallow looks toward the right foreground corner of the frame/cut to – Smiling Tiger snapping

King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 163 his fan shut as he faces the left foreground/cut to – one of his men closing a door on the left as the camera tilts down to follow his movement/cut to – a long shot, which reprises the end of the segment’s second shot showing all his men looking up as Swallow looks down in concentration. Then, just as we anticipate confrontation, the action is delayed by two shots (#s 7 & 8) featuring the comic entrance of Drunken Cat (Yue Hua) and another four shots (#s 9–12) to rebuild the drama. These six shots, the first two and the penultimate of which contain camera movement, have a combined ASL of 9 seconds. Remarkably, the next eight shots (#s 13–20) are each only 1.5 seconds long, on average. In # 13, Swallow is seated, center frame, as Tiger’s men circle her clockwise in medium-long shot scale, as the camera tracks right and out, receding from her slightly/cut to – a closer, high-angle shot of the scene as she reaches to the right for her carafe of wine on the table at the moment where no men appear in the frame and lifts the carafe as if she is about to pour herself some wine/cut on this movement to – a flat angle close shot of her, turning to the left as a man slashes his sword down at her, from behind her back; her arm moves fast across the frame to the right, throwing the wine at this man and then in the other direction as the blade of a sword enters the left of the frame, the wine slashing through the frame to the left/cut on the movement of Swallow’s upper body down to the left and the man falling backward on the right to – a detail shot of her legs as she rapidly draws a dagger with her right hand from her stockinged right leg/cut as her dagger is thrust up and out the frame left to – her upper body bent backward to avoid a sword attack from behind. She re-positions herself upright and as she leans toward the left, with both arms outstretched, filling the scope frame, we notice that she also has a dagger in her left arm (at the right frame edge)/cut on movement to – her pointing her right arm to the center background as her left assailant falls backward at the camera with arms outstretched. His body fills the frame as Swallow turns and jumps left, facing right/cut on both these movements to a medium close-up of Swallow, in center frame. Her body faces the camera, while her head and eyes scan right to left/cut on her glance to – a reaction, close shot of two men on the right of frame, staring to the left foreground while another dashes through the frame from left to right, in the background. They turn to face one another, and then turn left again to face the off-screen Swallow, in apparent disbelief. The remainder of the sequence breaks down into a similar pause-explosive action-pause pattern with the next four shots (#s 21–24) having an ASL of 4.25 seconds; the next five shots (#s 25–29), an ASL of 1 second; #s 30–32, ASL 9 seconds; 33–40, ASL 2 seconds; 41– 42, ASL 19 seconds; 43–45, ASL 1.5 seconds; 46–48, ASL 13 seconds. The “pause–thrust–pause” structure seen here is a sophisticated and complex prototype of what David Bordwell discovered as Hong Kong’s model pattern of staging and filming action scenes in his ground-breaking study, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment: Very often the performer’s movements aren’t continuous. First there is a rapid thrust and parry, or a string of blows, or the whirl of a sword or spear. There follows a slight pause, often at the moment a blow is blocked, and the fighters

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It also derives from Chinese Opera, and, in his essay written for the special catalog accompanying the Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective at the 1987 Hong Kong International Film Festival, Sek Kei wrote that “The movements and gestures of the performers are a harmonic fusion of stillness and action.”9 But it is more likely that such rhythmic pulses result from King Hu’s own careful choreography, directing, and editing of the inn scene in conjunction with his “martial arts director,” Han Yingjie who himself had a background in Beijing Opera.10 In any event, the part of the scene described above contains a spectacular, dynamic interplay of multiple actions, wherein Zheng Peipei’s graceful and lightning-fast movements are raised to an almost supernatural level through montage elisions. In a 1997 interview, Zheng discussed the “meticulous” nature of Hu’s directing, showing her “how to act,” teaching her to use her “eyes in fighting scenes,” and telling her to “follow his every move and gesture,” even designing “a pair of twin blades of short length” just for her, because for “a new player” like her “a short sword was easier to handle.”11 King Hu was born in Beijing, on April 29, 1932. Both of his parents were well versed in the arts in general and Chinese painting in particular. He was educated at Huiwen Middle School and the National Arts Academy in Beijing, although he dropped out of the latter. His formal training in the classics and Chinese studies was augmented by informal self-study in painting and literature. He left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1949 where he initially worked in a printing factory. From 1950 to 1954 he worked as a journalist and a tutor and began work in the film industry as a set dresser. He also wrote an un-produced script and became a successful writer of radio scripts. From 1954 to 1958, he rose to prominence as a film actor while working for the United States Information Service as an administrator and producer of plays for Voice of America Radio. In 1958 he signed a contract with Shaw and Sons (later Shaw Brothers) as an actor, with an option to become a writer-director.12 In 1963, two years before making Come Drink With Me, King Hu was credited as “associate director,” on The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai) directed by his friend Li Hanxiang, who became known as the most “classical” of Hong Kong-based directors. Apparently, Hu was responsible for directing the “action” sequences in this film, a musical version of the “Butterfly Lovers” story. In these sequences, the camera panning past foreground trees to follow character movements and the cutting on their exit from the frame (hence fragmenting and dynamizing the space), the stylized use of the widescreen, and the evocative presence of manufactured mist are all elements that stand apart from the rest of the film and prefigure Come Drink With Me and the later films directed by King Hu. Clearly, he possessed a distinctive style even before he became an accredited director.

King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 165 In retrospect, Come Drink With Me, which was both a critical and commercial success in Hong Kong, and Taiwan, for its production company, Shaw Brothers, seems to be Hu’s most conventional film, and the one that most closely converges with Hollywood codes. For a while a “romantic” couple take center stage: Drunken Cat rescues Golden Swallow and they both survive a confrontation with the villains. Surprisingly, given the film’s great success, and the fact that he was still under contract, Hu left Shaw Brothers after an argument with the studio, apparently over money. He took the script for his next film project, initially entitled “Breakthrough” with him to Taiwan in 1966.13 He was hired by Sha Rongfeng, owner of the newly-formed Union Film Company as its production chief, with the responsibilities of purchasing film equipment and training new film workers. He quickly began work on this new project, Dragon Gate Inn (aka Dragon Inn, 1966–68). Perhaps he was already looking for greater freedom away from the commercialism of the Shaws, and it is evident in Dragon Gate Inn that the director was departing from Western narrative conventions. So much information is given at the opening of the film establishing the historical and sociopolitical coordinates that it is almost impossible to digest all of it; many heroic characters die at the end after facing seemingly insurmountable odds; both are situations that were unfamiliar to spectators of Hollywood entertainment. Also, stylistically, Hu elaborates and extends the build-up to confrontations in the inn, and “plays” even more with shot composition and rhythmic editing, especially highlighting the importance of the look. We begin to really feel the intensity of a character’s gaze. Here the female star, Shangguan Lingfeng, gets top billing and, like Zheng Peipei she cross-dresses, posing as Zhu Hui, the “brother” of Zhu Ji (played by Shue Han). Following the aforementioned introduction, Hu provides a stunning 15 minutes of exterior cinematography, where every shot is beautifully staged and composed and where the colorful, historically accurate costumes are set off against a muted, grayish, rocky landscape. Even more striking is the scene where Zhu Hui returns to the inn and fights Mao Zongxian (played by Han Yingjie), the agent of a eunuch (characters who recur often in Hu’s films).14 With arrows flying through the air and acrobatics made even more dynamic and exciting through the full width of the widescreen frame and editing on the pulse, at the instant something or someone touches the frame edge – what David Bordwell terms the “glimpse” – Hu establishes himself as the true “master” of cinematic action.15 In addition, Dragon Gate Inn is the film which most obviously develops the principles and effects derived from Beijing opera, including the use of minimal, percussive, musical instrumentation such as the ban (wooden clapper).16 Further, though King Hu did not have access to the elaborate sets and extensive wardrobes that were available to him in Hong Kong, his move to Taiwan, as Tony Rayns states in an excellent article on Dragon Gate Inn, enabled him much more freedom in choosing natural locations, which “far outclassed the visual limitations of Clearwater Bay,” and where Hu made “full use of the gorges, plains, ravines and mountains of the central Taiwanese interior.” 17 Dragon Gate Inn had a record-breaking run of 105 days in Taipei, topping all Hong Kong and other films at the Taiwan box office, becoming the most successful Chinese-language film till then, on the island; it was also enormously

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successful in South Korea and Southeast Asian territories, and eventually triumphed in 1968 in Hong Kong after Run Run Shaw had deliberately delayed its release to follow Zhang Che’s Come Drink with Me sequel, Golden Swallow.18 Spurred by this success, Hu began work at Union on an epic project, a vast expansion of a classical, short, ghost story by Pu Songling, A Touch of Zen (Xianü, 1969–71). Having now seen at least two different full length (165 and 189 minutes) versions of A Touch of Zen, I can restate what I have told film students on more than one occasion, and that is, if forced to choose just one film, out of the thousands I have seen (a ridiculous proposition, certainly), to represent what I love most about the cinema – a combination of exhilarating, entertaining action and poetic, visual beauty – I would most likely choose this film. For one thing, it contains my favorite action sequence in the history of cinema, where Xu Feng as Miss Yang Huizhen (the xianü, “knight lady” of the film’s Chinese title) and her little band of men fight their first battle in the bamboo forest, halfway through the film. Both David Bordwell and Stephen Teo have argued that Hu’s style derives in part from Japanese action films of the early 1960s, and one can certainly see echoes in this sequence of Akira Kurosawa’s lateral “running trucks” in the forest of his Rashomon (1950).19 But in no other director’s work can we find the exquisite combination of camera movement and action, with actors bouncing through the scope frame on hidden trampolines, providing a sine-wave-like movement – which, I am convinced, equates with the graceful movement of Tai Chi – and where the sound of flapping skirts in the breeze accompanies “glimpse” cutting to allow Xu Feng to fly through the air and dive bomb her opponent. And, who can forget the Chinese operatic, percussive score of bamboo saplings chopped and felled rhythmically to block the warrior opponents’ paths? In her article included in Transcending the Times, “A Pioneer in Film Language: On King Hu’s Style of Film Editing,” Cheuk Pak Tong devotes two pages to “The Battle in the Bamboo Forest: An Analysis of a Classic Scene.”20 She claims that the sequence is “Hu’s most successful experiment” and that it is “made up of 115 shots, and can be divided into three main sections,” the first a 26 shot build-up to the battle, the second, which includes the first phase of the confrontation between the resistance fighters and the enemy soldiers, and the third, climactic episode which is initiated with the cutting of bamboo at the sequence’s 80th shot.21 This narrative segmentation is not the same as the pause-action-pause structure discerned in Come Drink With Me, and which was discussed earlier. But it is interesting that one easily finds arrangements in “threes” in Hu’s work. In fact, my tendency is to divide the sequence into six segments, the first being a “pause” before any action of 16 shots in 94 seconds (ASL of 5.2 seconds) where one in three shots contain camera movement. The first arrow is fired in shot 17 but only one enemy soldier is hit in shot 32, following a barrage of firing, arrows in flight, dodging and running action, where the average shot length is only 1.3 seconds and no fewer than one in every two shots contains camera movement. The next “pause” segment of 24 shots lasts a full 169 seconds (ASL 7 seconds) but the rate of movement remains high, where the two principal protagonists ready for the main

King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 167 encounter. Segment four is a sword fight from shots 57 to 80, which lasts only 63 seconds (ASL of 2.6 seconds), but with camera movement in only 6 of the 24 shots. Shot angles become more extreme, and I would concur with Cheuk that the most intense action begins with the bamboo trunks being cut in shot 81 and Xu Feng eventually taking flight. It is hard to notice all of the cuts – 30 in 40 seconds – as a blistering editing pace matches the extraordinary action. But, the sequence, predictably, does end with a pause: the last four shots taking a leisurely 21 seconds (ASL of 5.25 seconds). Thus, here, I would argue, we find a slight variation in Hu’s action sequence structuring with pause–action–pause escalating action–thrust– pause. The exhilaration of the sequence is enabled in part by the luxurious bamboo forest setting, where the filmmakers could readily shift from the epic scale of extreme-long shot to the intimacy of close-ups while varying the camera angle from flat to high and low in the most intense action segments, and moving the camera on tracks, tripods, and in the operators hands, heightening the viscerality of the piece. Stunning! While making A Touch of Zen, Hu had the opportunity to contribute a 40-minute episode to the three-part (again!) portmanteau film, The Four Moods (Xi nu ai le, 1970). He chose to set his “mood” Anger (Nu) entirely in an inn, and, inspired by the Beijing Opera, Crossroads (Sancha kou), made it unfold as an almost continuous action sequence. In an unpublished essay, “Lying to Tell the Truth: Spatial and Temporal Articulations in King Hu’s Anger,” Scott Preston argues that the film is “primarily an exercise in style.”22 Omitting the very brief prologue and epilogue, he finds that the “film’s timeline can be divided into three distinct ‘acts’ or structural segments,” wherein the first and third parts contain some deliberate false match cuts and indefinite ellipses (in Noel Burch’s terms), and the central part is “built entirely of true continuity cuts,” occurring effectively in “real time.”23 Indeed, in the sense that Anger works as an exploration of the space of an inn through the dynamic action of human figures, it can be understood as the definitive King Hu film. Action certainly isn’t everything in A Touch of Zen, the longest and most complex of Hu’s finished projects. As its English title suggests, it is concerned with spirituality. Richard Combs wrote that the film “spreads itself out in space and time, through three distinct narrative sections, which elaborate the film first in personal, then in political and finally in religious terms, each being shed like a successive layer of skin.”24 The first “section” contains some wonderfully atmospheric scenes set in old, decayed buildings and overgrown gardens, which need to be seen on screen (rather than video) to appreciate their subtleties of decor, light and shadow. It is this section, which is based on the (very) short story “Xianü” (The Magnanimous Girl), and it introduces Xu Feng as the mysterious “girl next door” to the young scholar, played by Shih Chun. Part of the intrigue centers on whether or not she is a ghost, but in the second section she is revealed to be a warrior, indeed, and she leaves her child (conceived during a single, magical night of love) for the scholar to raise, while she fights for their freedom! This incredible turn of events is one of many instances in Hu’s work that mark it as feminist before its time, and his next feature film, The Fate of Lee Khan (Yingchunge zhi fengbo, 1973) starred no fewer than five young women in central action roles.

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Like many creative forces in cinema before him (starting with D W Griffith and Eric von Stroheim in the Hollywood silent era), King Hu had an extremely ambitious film butchered by commercial interests. In trying to maintain the director’s integrity, the Union Film Company released A Touch of Zen in two parts, but the film’s Hong Kong distributors recut it and released it as a single film, to a very small audience. After its box office failure in 1971, Hu signed with Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest company in Hong Kong to make his next two films. Taiwan had given King Hu the opportunity to expand his vision during the time of his greatest financial success, but he needed to return to Hong Kong to resuscitate his career. Even though they were designed to make money, we find the director still experimenting in these films with the setting of the inn – The Fate of Lee Khan – and the choreography of action in both Lee Khan and The Valiant Ones (Zhonglie tu, 1975). I personally prefer the humor and gender balance on display in the former film to the testosterone charge and nationalist theme of the latter, but Stephen Teo makes a very strong case for the greatness of The Valiant Ones partly for its exposition of “valor” and “heroism.”25 Where I differ from other King Hu supporters, is that I feel he continued to experiment with the medium of cinema very successfully during the remainder of his career. I would make exceptions here of the uninspiring comedy made on his return to Taiwan, The Juveniser (Zhongshen dashi, 1981) and Swordsman (Xiaoao jianghu, Hong Kong, 1990) in which hardly any of his work remains. But, The Painted Skin (Huapi zhi yinyang fawang, Hong Kong, 1992) is a vastly underrated, very subtle horror film that brings the “glimpse” principle into the realm of the fantastic. I also admire Hu’s episode in the Taiwanese portmanteau film, The Wheel of Life (Da lunhui, 1983) for its visceral, wide-angle lens treatment of cape and sword play, and though I fail to understand the director’s intentions on All the King’s Men (Tianxia diyi, Taiwan, 1982), for which he was finally able to use Zheng Peipei again as an actress, I find this film to be full of intrigue and to be yet another example of Hu’s desire to experiment (in this case with history and narrative form). But, many do agree on the status of his two films made in Korea (between 1977 and 1979), Raining in the Mountain (Kongshan lingyu) and Legend of the Mountain (Shanzhong chuanqi), which represent collectively, for me, the most beautiful work in his oeuvre. Hu had always struggled to find the perfect locations for his films, and, he clearly had run out of options in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Unfortunately at that time he was unable to return to his homeland and shoot in Mainland China, but found the next best option in the mountains of Korea. I like to think that he had seen Shin Sang-ok’s oneiric masterpiece, The Dream (K K’um, 1967) and had been inspired by it to choose the Buddhist temple setting. In any event these two films demonstrate that Hu was always more interested in Chinese culture and history in general than its martial arts in particular: the care with which he sets his human characters physically and cinematically in the natural landscape and the old rooms, hallways, and courtyards of the temple is truly extraordinary. Moreover, in Legend of the Mountain he manages to fuse the natural with the supernatural, and by casting the young Sylvia Chang as a (possible)

King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 169 ghost he gives us two ethereal beauties in the same film,Xu Feng, of course, being the other. In these films we find King Hu adapting the principles of movement, rhythm, and editing from the action sequence to the film as a whole. Although the story of Raining in the Mountain – searching for a calligraphic treasure – is important, it is the way it is extended and embellished beyond the needs of the narrative, by cutting on movement and glance, by following the characters through hallways and between buildings with a tracking camera, by placing brightly costumed human characters in a majestic natural landscape that distinguishes Hu as a film “director,” and an experimental one at that. Both Raining and Legend were shown in numerous international film festivals, one of which, the 1979 World Film Festival in Montreal, Canada provided me with the first opportunity to see a King Hu film, Raining in the Mountain, an experience that drove my profound interest in the director. In July 1980, at the retrospective of his work in Taipei, King Hu said that he would “stay in Taiwan to develop his career.”26 Although he moved between Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the US over the next four years, he made all three of his next films in Taiwan. He extended his play with the form of the action sequence in Wheel of Life and highlighted mise-en-scene within a widescreen frame, especially costumes and decor, to such an extent in All the King’s Men that the story almost disappears. The time is long overdue for a thorough reevaluation of King Hu’s work as an avant-garde, narrative film director, within which we might discover that Taiwan, as a place that was open to Hu’s experiments, played a major role.

Notes 1 Wu translates into English, variously, as “military,” “valiant,” “fierce,” and “of combat,” while xiá connotes “chivalry.” Thus, wuxiá refers to “a martial world informed by the code of chivalry” (in Ng Ho’s words). Pian means “film.” See Ng Ho, “Jiang Hu Revisited: Towards a Reconstruction of the Martial Arts World,” in A Study of the Hong Kong Swordplay Film (1945–1980), ed. Lau Shing-hon (The 5th Hong Kong International Film Festival, Hong Kong Urban Council, 1981 (revised edn, 1996)), 85. 2 This is, of course, an extremely complex issue. Major retrospectives of Hu’s work were mounted in Taipei in 1980 and 1999, and in Hong Kong in 1979, 1985, and 1998, but it is in Japan that his legacy is, perhaps, best known. After a retrospective in 1988, a number of his films were released on laser disc, and in 1997 the very first complete King Hu monograph was published by Soshi-sha in Tokyo, in the Japanese language: King Hu buyo den’ei sappo: A Touch of King Hu (aka “The Method of King Hu’s Martial Arts Pictures”) written by Yamada Koichi and Udagawa Koyo,and translated into Chinese by Lai Ho and Ma Sung-chi as Hu Jinquan wuxia dianying zuofa (Hong Kong: Zhengwen Press, 1998). 3 In addition to the Taipei retrospectives, a series entitled “Festival of Preservation: A Retrospective of Taiwan Films,” which traveled the world in 1995, included a 35 mm, anamorphic, widescreen print of Hu’s Longmen Kezhan (Dragon Gate Inn, aka Dragon Inn, 1967). Also, the original, two-part, Union Film Company, Taiwan version of Xianü (A Touch of Zen, 1971) was used for the Pioneer, Japanese laserdisc release in 1988. 4 Liu Damu quotes Luo Qing arguing (in 1977) that Shuo jian pian (On the Sword) was the “first wuxia short story, if not the first Chinese short story proper.” This was written during the Warring States Era, 403–221 BC in “From Chivalric Fiction to Martial Arts Film,” Lau Shing-hon, op. cit., 47–62.

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5 For a thorough overview of the “seminal” nature of Come Drink With Me, see Stephen Teo, “Only the Valiant: King Hu and His Cinema Opera,” in Transcending the Times: King Hu and Eileen Chang, ed. Law Kar (The 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival, Provisional Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1998), 19–20. 6 Barry Salt began to incorporate statistical analysis of films as a way to be more objective with his article, “Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Fall 1974), in which he calculated and compared the ASLs of the first third of various films, 14–15. In my own calculations, I always try and measure the ASLs of complete films, as the cutting rate often slows in a film’s mid-section and is often at its fastest in the last third. 7 In his book, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd edn (London: Starword, 1992), 265, 283, Barry Salt argued that the Mean ASL of films, generally declined from approximately 11 seconds to 7 seconds in the years 1958–1975. David Bordwell claims, “In the mid- and late 1960s, several American and British filmmakers were experimenting with faster cutting rates. Many studio-released films of the period contain ASLs between six and eight seconds, and some have significantly shorter averages…,” in “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 17. The figure for Zhang Che is also taken from a Bordwell article, “Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse,” in Law Kar, op. cit., 36. 8 In Planet Hong Kong, Bordwell claims that “pause-burst-pause” is so “deeply characteristic of Hong Kong cinema that we can find it in noncombat scenes as well,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 229. He illustrates the “pattern” (defined in the text of this chapter) with a sequence from Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon (1972), 221. Interestingly, I’ve yet to find a specific reference in the literature on King Hu. 9 In Lo Tak-sing, Senior Manager, “Thoughts on Chinese Opera and the Cantonese Opera Film,” Cantonese Opera Film Retrospective, revised edn (Hong Kong: Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1996 (1st edn, 1987)), 15. I am indebted to the work of one of my students, Stephane Grasso for application of the term “pause-thrust-pause” to Come Drink With Me, and its connection to Beijing Opera. 10 For example, see the interview with King Hu, conducted by Tony Rayns, in “Director: King Hu,” Sight and Sound 45, no. 1 (Winter 1975/1976): 9. Rayns, himself in his “Notes on Four Films” (part of the same article) expresses these changes in rhythm in terms of “subtle inflections in the syntax (a quickening tempo in the editing, a newly lyric tone in the montages, a sudden expansiveness in the pans)…,” 12. See also “King Hu’s Last Interview,” conducted by Hirokazu Yamada and Koyo Udagawa in 1996, where Hu said, “During the making of Come Drink With Me, it was quite difficult for me to handle the action … I have never had any training in the martial arts and I don’t know how to fight, so I called in Han Yingjie, a Beijing Opera actor, to help me out. I studied his martial arts moves and selected the best.” in Law Kar, op. cit., 75. 11 “Remembering King Hu,” Zheng Peipei interview, conducted and compiled by Law Kar, translated by Stephen Teo, in Law Kar, op. cit., 90. 12 For more detailed biographical information, see “King Hu Biographical Notes,” in Law Kar, op. cit., 121–5; Derek Elley, “King Hu,” International Film Guide 1978 (London: Tantivy Press, 1977), 24–30; Stephen Teo, “King Hu,” http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/hu.html (accessed October 25, 2006). 13 King Hu’s Japanese cinematographer, Tadashi Nishimoto (who was given the Chinese name, He Lanshan at Shaw Brothers) claimed that Hu was paid only $2,500HK for directing, much lower than the norm of $10,000HK, plus. In “Remembering King Hu,” 81. Tony Rayns argues that Hu “got away with this because the company had hired him as an actor rather than as a director (he still owed the company two film appearances and had promised to fulfill the contract if they came up with scripts that he approved), but Run Run Shaw never really forgave him for leaving,” in “Laying Foundations: Dragon Gate Inn,” Cinemaya, no. 39–40 (Winter/Spring 1998): 80.

King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 171 14 Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis provide an interesting analysis of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (Taiwan, 2003) as a critique of King Hu’s consistent and insistent demonizing of eunuch characters in his films; in Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 239. See also Yung Hao Lin’s chapter (12) in this volume. 15 David Bordwell writes that “Hu makes his action faster than the eye – and even, it seems, the camera – can follow. Often we are allowed only a trace of the warriors’ amazing feats. We do not see action as much as glimpse it.” In “Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse,” Law Kar, op. cit., 33. 16 I have never witnessed any Chinese opera performances live, and I have never watched any Cantonese or Beijing opera films. My experiences are limited to seeing snatches of Chinese opera as pastiche or parody in Hong Kong entertainment – e.g. Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986), Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Wu Yen (2000) – or under the critical gaze of Mainland Chinese filmmakers – e.g. Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters (1965) and Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1992). Thus, once again I defer to Stephen Teo and his excellent discussion of the relationship between Chinese opera and King Hu’s films, op. cit., 20–21. 17 Rayns (1998), 83. 18 See ibid., 80; “King Hu Biographical Notes,” in Law Kar, op. cit., 122; and Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 141, 302. 19 Bordwell mentions Uchida Tomu’s Musashi Part 4 (1964) as containing a notable example of a “sustained, action-packed tracking shot,” Law Kar, op. cit., 32, while Teo favorably compares Come Drink With Me to contemporaneous “Japanese samurai pictures,” op. cit., 19. 20 Law Kar, op. cit., 60–61. 21 Ibid., 60. 22 This essay was written as a paper for the Concordia University MA in Film Studies program in December 1998, 1. 23 Ibid., 4–5. Preston is using Burch’s scheme elaborated in Theory of Film Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 24 Review, credits and synopsis, in Monthly Film Bulletin 43, no. 509 (June 1976): 131. 25 Teo, op. cit., 23–24. 26 “King Hu Biographical Notes,” in Law Kar, op. cit., 123.

12 “I thought of the times we were in front of the flowers”1 Analyzing the opening credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn Yung Hao Liu (Translated by Ming-yu Lee) Theory and reflection The function of opening titles in films is to serve as the “entrance” to the film. They lead us into the world of the cinematic story. The opening title begins the narration of a film, and once the narration is complete, the closing title “Ends” the film. Hence, the opening and closing titles are like a frame (cadre), which encircles the whole film’s composition as does the front and back cover of a book. Opening and closing titles seem to play a marginal role but the fact is they are quite important. The film scholar Nicole de Mourgues compares the beginning and ending titles of films with two other art forms; painting and theater.2 A painting has a very different approach to framing (cadre). In a painting, the frame encloses the painting, making it inseparable from the painting. The frame and the painting become one unity, but they are functionally independent from each other. The significance of the frame lies in its definition of lines around the painting, marking its range, through which it extends to include a space, a sequence, or an action. In theater, the concept of “frame” is reflected in two ways; one is the installation of the movie house, the other is the reading of the film’s text, an allusion to the first moment the movie projector starts, until the projector’s lamp goes dim and the lights of the movie house are brought up. Between the dimming of the house lights and the bringing up of them, the frame of film text is constructed – a reading process of shadow and light. There have been frequent and detailed discussions about the representation of cinema art itself, the comparison between the frame concept of cinema and the frame composition of painting, with different assumptions made, demonstrations and analyses of esthetics. For example, Jacques Aumont has more than once discussed the concept of movie screen and frame. He says, “We can almost be assured that, if we try to find something around screen, we could find the “frame – object” which is caused by certain things.”3 In his later study, he also notes that “frame is [used to] deliberately show the surroundings of image, and the endlessness of image itself. Frame is the edge of image. In the other, less-obvious level, frame is the sensitive ultimate of the image.”4 Similarly, Noël Burch, in his early

The opening credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn

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silent film study, calls the frame of Méliés’ Optical Theatre “l’apothéose de Méliés.” In his idea, the “cheating” techniques in Optical Theatre show a different concept of frame and titles of image in film.5 If we consider opening and ending titles as a concept of frame, at the symbolic and significant level, we can discuss and analyze this concept. The original source between opening titles and theater art, relatively speaking, allows room for discussion. We can retrace its history very quickly here. In early Western movie houses, the screen was always hidden behind a theater curtain. Early Taiwanese movie houses followed the Western example. Before the movie began, the projectionist, in an extremely theatrical way, pulled the curtain up. This traditional ritual, very interestingly, appears in many movie directors’ works, such as Jean Renoir’s Le Carrosse d’or (The Golden Coach, 1953) and Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1971), Sacha Guitry’s Desiré (1937), Marcel Camé’s Les enfants du paradis (1945), and Jacque Rivette’s La Bande des quatre (1988). In the opening titles of their movies, the narration always begins by pulling up a curtain. The curtain was a part of theatrical representation in theater art, by its opening and closing, it divided acts and changes in the theater’s background, visually amazing the audience with its theatrical movement. The truth is, the curtain in movie houses was an unnecessary decoration with little true function. The opening and closing of the curtain was only to attract the audience’s attention. Therefore, as time passed, curtains in movie houses faded from the scene. From an esthetic perspective, the development of titles in film history was deemed necessary for giving the audience a transition zone; something like a curtain to open the film’s “beginning,” to view the images in the film text. The development of cinematic opening titles, as in the frame of a painting, has its cultural purpose. Besides permitting the audience to view the text step by step, the title also serves as a “passage,” moving the audience from real life into the fictional world of movies.6 Examining titles from that perspective, we find that opening titles are actually very complex, extraordinary, and changeable. In the text, the opening title could have double interpretations; it exists in the context, treated as the film text itself, but above all, it provides important information about the process of movie production. From these bases, we will move forward to the subject of this study – the rich implications in the opening title of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, which are very easy to miss. We use textual analysis to unveil the hidden meaning of the opening title of Goodbye Dragon Inn.

The opening title of cinema as an entrance Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn is an outstanding film. I put the focus on the beginning of Goodbye Dragon Inn (total length 3’33”) in this chapter. The opening title of a film is like an entrance, a front door. It is a transition zone which brings us from the real world into the film text world. The film opening occupies the edge of a film text. Yet, the entrance retains its strategically important narration feature.

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We can look back in cinematic history to see the relationship between opening titles and the “entrance.” “The Entrance” simultaneously provides the entrance to the narration of film text and the fictional world, or diegesis of the film. Hence, visuals like doors and other forms of entrances have become frequently seen images in many films’ openings. For example, in the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987) the opening title, the title of the film, and the names of group members are written on a closed discolored blue door in the first shot; as the opening titles finish, the door opens, through the door, we enter a classroom, into the fictional world of the text. Besides Abbas Kiarostami, in the works of Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Sacha Guitry, and Orson Welles, the opening or the first shots all begin with a door as an entrance into the film plot. Thierry Kuntzel notes that a door has a very clear function of separation. In his essay he points out that the door function has a fade-toblack effect; it has a separation and liaison purpose, and it also connects and divides two spaces.7 It is a cognitive process of natural transition from one place to another, from indoor to outdoor, and vice versa. First, we will analyze in detail the opening of Goodbye Dragon Inn. By looking at the images used and the audio presented in the opening titles, we can examine this remarkable film opening (Table 12.1). By analyzing the above sequence and its organization we can discuss the multiple issues of “opening title – entrance” and the name of the author in Goodbye Dragon Inn. The opening title of cinema is like an “entrance.” The opening of Goodbye Dragon Inn provides multiple entrances, which lead to multiple narrative meanings of film narration. The first title clearly states that this is a Tsai Ming-liang film. It reveals the argument between author and creator. The name of the author comes before the name of the film. In most films, the convention is that the name of the film comes first, then, before entering the plot, the audience sees the name of the director. Yet, in Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn the first image projected on the screen is his name; it is bold and self-assertive. In this sequence, first we read “the name of the author” before “the name of the work.” As Roland Barthes says, “the meaning lies in an order, not in a series.”8 In Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,9 Barthes defines linguistics as such: “The sentence is an order and not a series, cannot be reduced to the sum of the words which compose it and constitutes thereby a specific unit.”10 That is to say, the sum of words is irrelevant to the meaning of a sentence. The meaning of a sentence comes from the comparison between words and their orders in the sentence, not from a series of logical words. In Goodbye Dragon Inn, the name of the author comes before the name of the film. This order reveals that the author takes priority over the film. Also, in the title, the name of the author simultaneously foregrounds his individual style. This leaves the title of the film as only one of the many works by this unique, individual artist. The second title is “HomeGreen Presents.” This is when Tsai starts to quote from King Hu’s Dragon Inn by transposing Dragon’s opening voice-over narration to the opening credit sequence of his current film. This quotation basically follows the

The opening credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn

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Table 12.1

The 1st title The 2nd title

The 3rd title The 4th title The 5th title

The 6th title

The 7th title

The 8th title

Video

Audio

A Tsai Ming-liang Film Home Green Films Presents

Silence Drums, trumpet flourish, Gong (once) (twice). Voiceover: China, Ming Dynasty (with drums, trumpet). VO: The Year is 1457, AD (with music, sound of marching). VO: At that time, the eunuchs had special privileges and power (with music). VO: They had control over two groups.

Producer Liang Hongzhi Executive Producer Tsai Ming-liang Director of Photography Liao Benrong Lighting Li Longyu Sound Effects Du Duzhi Sound Recording Tang Xiangzhu Editor Chen Shengchang Art Director Lu Liqin Makeup Sun Huimei Screenwriter Tsai Ming-liang Assistant Director Wang Mingzong

The 9th title

Li Kang-sheng

The 10th title The 11th title The 12th title The 13th title The 14th title

Chen Shiangqi Mitamura Kiyonobu Miao Tian Shi Jun Yang Kueimei

The 15th title

Chen Zhaorong

The 16th title The 17th title

Li Yizhen Good Bye Dragon Inn

VO: The East Chamber Guards and the Brocade Imperial Guards. These are the fanzi . . .

VO: Fanzi are secret agents.

VO: These fanzi and Brocade Guards are stone-hearted and vicious. If the peasants heard them approaching, they would be frightened to death. VO: This is their second commander, Mao Zongxian. VO: This is their first commander … VO: Pi Shaotang. VO: These men are good fighters … VO: … but perform evil deeds. VO: The head of these men is called Cao Shaoqin. VO: Not only is he in charge, he is also expert with a sword. VO: His fighting ability is extraordinary. VO: The officials are all afraid of Cao Shaoqin Table 2.1 ctd.

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The 1st shot

The 2nd shot

The 3rd shot

The 4th shot

The 5th shot

Audio

Music continues . . . … Dragon Inn. The sedan faces the camera; eunuchs arrive at the place of execution and put down the sedan. Cao gestures to stop. He steps down from the sedan, and goes offscreen, moving left. (Match on action), from Music continues right Cao and his attendants come into the shot. Officials on their knees greet Cao. Cao moves from right to left, to the execution platform. VO: Today he is the prosecutor. Point-of-view shot, through a curtain. Dragon Inn is showing in VO: This is the one being executed. a full house with the same scene as in the 2nd shot. White titles from Dragon Inn. These read: Zhang Jiuyin Title: Shangguan Lingfeng, Shi Jun Music continues … Eye-level shot, the complete screen. Starring Shangguan Lingfeng, Shi Jun, Bai Ying. Co-starring Cao Jian, Li Jie, Gao Ming, Ge Xiaobao, Gao Fei. Xue Han, Miao Tian, Han Yingjie, Liu Chu. Music continues … A longer shot on the screen. Xue Han, Miao Tian, Han Yingjie, Liu Chu. Titles change to: Chang Yunwen, Lu Zhi, Er Niu, Ah Zi, Qi Wei, Yu Jikong Title changes: Special Introductions: Xu Feng, Tian Peng, Wen Tian, Wan Chongshan .

The opening credits of Goodbye Dragon Inn Video The 6th shot

The 7th shot

The 8th shot

Audio

Music continues … Canted shot of movie screen. Director of Photography Hua Huiying Assistant Photographer Zhou Yexing, Qiu Yaohu Assistant Director Tu Zhongxun Music continues … Tsai Ming-liang and Alphonse Youth-Leigh (focus on them; images on the movie screen in background are out of focus). The same screen (closeup) Title changes Mao Wei Makeup Wu Xuqing Martial arts Director Han Yingjie Title changes Jin Kai Grip: Chen Yunwen Gaffer: Zhi Xuefu Grip: Chen Zhengsheng Continuity: Miao Tian Title changes Wang Yuanfu Costume: Li Jiazhi Props: Hong Hualang Stills: Yang Zhaoxiong Scenery: Zhou Zhiliang Title changes Editor: Chen Hongming, Recording: Zhang Hua Title changes Music: Zhou Lanping Title changes Producer: Yang Shiqing Writer & Director: King Hu Raining sound Entrance of Fu He Grand Theater. A man walks into the theater.

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narrative sequence of King Hu’s film, with some changes in order. In other words, from the second title, we hear King Hu’s work inside Tsai’s film. As the two films are overlapping, shown almost simultaneously, questions arise over the source of narrative agency. With the voiceover of the second title, “The year is 1457 AD,” we are put in an asynchronous situation. While quoting from King Hu’s film in the first and the second shot, Tsai, in a radical way, blows up Hu’s scenes on the whole screen, merging his work into that of King Hu. By doing so, Tsai seems to want to mislead the audience into imagining for a moment they are watching Dragon Inn, not Goodbye Dragon Inn. At this juncture, Tsai’s and Hu’s films are converging, colliding, thus producing certain inconsistency and disharmony. The first two shots of Hu’s film are also the opening images used in Tsai’s film. Still, King Hu’s Dragon Inn is historically distant, occupying the entire screen; it is not selected in detail as a page from an album, but presented in full representation. This narrational disjuncture continues to the third shot, when Dragon Inn is seen projected behind the curtain in the theater, apparently from someone’s point of view. Through the swaying curtain we see the audience sitting inside the movie house; what is projected on screen is the opening title of Dragon Inn, “Zhang Jiuyin,” (the Union Film Co. producer) and it is until this image, that the narrative disjuncture of a film within a film is cleared up. The fourth shot, “featuring Shangguan Lingfeng, Shi Jun, and Bai Ying,” the narrational disjuncture emerges again. Yet, this time, the mix is more complicated and polysemous than the first and the second shot, as the audience is aware that they are watching one film projected over another, as a kind of superimposition: the opening title within another opening title. The framing alternates between alignment and separation. Yet, the coincided area of alignment also has a certain distance, reducing the cognitive illusion. In the seventh shot, Alphonse Youth-Leigh (aka Li Youxin)11 and Tsai Mingliang sit side by side watching Dragon Inn. These two Taiwan cinema icons, disheveled and bald, enthusiast and auteur, join together in the auditorium, appreciating the classic, and at the same time, creating one. Tsai is sitting in the house between the screen and his camera, watching King Hu’s film, and at the same time, making his own. He is outside of Hu’s film, but inside of his own film. Between watching a masterpiece, and filming from behind there forms an intriguing dialectic. Interestingly, in this shot, the focus is on Alphonse YouthLeigh and Tsai Ming-liang, not Dragon Inn. That is, the focus is on the author of Goodbye Dragon Inn. And the film projected on the screen, has receded to the background, allowed to go out of focus. The eighth shot is exterior. The Japanese actor Mitamura Kiyonobu arrives at Fu He Grand Theater and rather eccentrically walks into it alone. This is where Hu’s film clearly separates from the diegesis, working more like décor. The first seven shots, from the title “A Tsai Ming-liang Film” to the appearance of Tsai and Alphonse Youth-Leigh sitting together, belong to the opening (dis)orientation. The main story of Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (slender as it is) ought to start from the eighth shot. From the textual analysis above, we have uncovered details that are usually ignored, however, there are many more discoveries that await in opening titles.

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Entrance, arrival and departure of cinema The opening title of cinema is an “entrance,” it helps us to get into the plot. As long as the concept of “entrance” is established, it certainly implies some kind of passage, to connect two places defined by extended space. This space has to agree with the idea of a possibility for opening or commencement. Under this situation and spatial coordinates, the opening most likely would be an entrance for a certain space, an arrival at a premise, a departure, or a beginning of some kind of spectacle or event. In the opening of Goodbye Dragon Inn, the first entrance is the curtain. The curtain leads the audience to the entrance of the cinema and its plot, as Roland Barthes says, “There it shall produce this festival of affection.”12 Interestingly, in the opening of Dragon Inn, the plot confirms our hypothetical assumption; it is an entrance, an arrival, and a departure. The entrance of Dragon Inn starts with the voice of a storyteller, “China, Ming Dynasty. The year is 1457 A.D.” As he finishes “The officials are all afraid of Cao Shaoqin,” the director, King Hu, shows the audience the chief of the East Chamber Guards and the Brocade Imperial Guards – the “vicious Cao Shaoqin.” His two spectacular appearances, right at the moment he arrives at the execution site and after the execution, are the beginning of the story of Dragon Inn, the beginning of a journey of escape, and the performance of chivalry for the sake of righteousness. There is also an entrance in Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, a long entrance to the theater, an entrance to an imaginary festival of affections, an arrival point for the Japanese actor to enter the story, a departure point, the sparks of sexual desire, the progress of its fanning and fulfillment, all this in a very classic structure, but a modern setting.

Signature of author The name of “Tsai Ming-liang” appears three times in the opening title of Goodbye Dragon Inn. The first is “A Tsai Ming-liang Film,” the second is “executive producer Tsai Ming-liang,” and the last is “screen writer Tsai Ming-liang.” However, it seems three times is not enough for Tsai. Before the end of the opening title, the seventh shot, we see Tsai again sitting there with Alphonse Youth-Leigh. That is, the author appears in his own work. The question that begs to be asked is, is this referring to anything? The opening title is usually the place where director signs his name, but how do we deal with signature in cinema? What is its implication in literature and in works of art? We can discuss this in a circuitous way. Movies are very different from paintings, sculptures, and other forms of art in that a movie generally requires a group of people to make it (with the exception of course, of experimental film, films based on diaries, and autobiographical films. The word “film” I refer to here is art film and commercial film which is made according to business production standards). The collectivity of making a movie and movie director worship under auteurism compared to the uncomplicated

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relationship between work and artist can obviously change our attitude when appreciating a film. A spectator, when viewing Vincent Van Gogh’s painting in the Southern French Age or Picasso’s in his Blue Period, or one of Rembrandt or Goya’s paintings, could discuss them in great detail. No matter how the subject changes with different paintings, the relation between artist and his work is relatively simple and direct. When discussing cinema, on the contrary, audiences talk more about the new works of specific directors. The systematic study of career progression and research into the director’s various levels, for example the complete history of Fritz Lang, or the study that focuses only on the works he made during his time in Germany, is more appropriate for discussion of cinema, and, is best done by a professional researcher of cinematic history. Using the methodology of artistic thinking to discuss a film is somehow adventuresome and full of complex variables. Yet, the signature of an author whether in art, sculpture, or film is actually more like the division of different works than an expression of the private or professional life of the artist himself. The declaration of the director’s name in the opening title of a movie can have an unimaginable effect upon moviegoers. It is the moviegoer that makes the name of a movie director an industrial icon. We can look back in art history for the signature concept, where it has a very brief history. The signature phenomenon first appeared in early Italy, spreading eventually to northern Germany until the Renaissance. Artist’s signatures are very commonly seen in the nineteenth century, though some unsigned work still exists. In the twentieth century, signatures became a standard. At the beginning the concept of signatures didn’t appear in cinema. Authors’ names were still absent in the movies of 1912–1913. In early cinematic history, the appearances of names of the director and crew were very modernist and closely linked to the narration and form of cinema. The beginning of opening titles was accompanied with the trend of feature films gradually becoming mainstream. It was during 1912–1913 that people started to make feature films. Before that, there was only one film, La Mort du Duc de Guise, made in 1908, which had rarely seen opening titles.13 However, the logos of the production companies and the names of the distribution and release companies are seen in most films, i.e. the Cock logo of Pathé, and Gaumont with its chrysanthemum-like trademark. The appearance of names of the production, distribution, and releasing companies do not stand for “art,” but a manifestation of iconic copyright.14 Edwin S. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman (1903) is a good example. This film was produced by the Edison Company. The name in the title is Thomas Edison, not Porter. During that time, the signature was that of the producer or production company. Using the production company’s signature provides more commercial, anti-piracy, and exclusive right of production protection than the idea of “artist.” To make the example clearer, in art history, there may have been an unknown dark period for an artist. Through a collector’s hands, this artist’s paintings could pass from generation to generation. But for cinema, which in the beginning was thought of as a temporary art phenomenon, no need was seen for a signature at all. In early times, there was a very small number of films with the author’s name, which was not signed in a declaration way, but in a way of confirming self-reputation. It was

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because of people like Griffith and Chaplin who produced and directed from 1912 to 1913 that the signature started to appear on the screen and the idea of signature began to be accepted by audiences. After Griffith established the Triangle Company in 1915, work released by Griffith bore the name D. W. Griffith and appeared on the screen at least 4–5 times. The appearances of names manifest the concept of copyright more than the concept of artist and author. In modern cinema, Hitchcock is another good example. In Hitchcock’s works, his name frequently and systematically appears in the opening title as “a film by Alfred Hitchcock” and before the title ends “directed by Alfred Hitchcock.” Comparatively, the beginning titles of Chaplin’s work are tedious and wordy. He portions out jobs and titles as “producer,” “screen writer,” “director,” “composer,” and “actor” taking all credits himself. By this long division he confirms relations and arrangements between the work and artist, like a creator of true art works, and between business and the law. The name of Tsai Ming-liang appears three times in the opening title of Goodbye Dragon Inn, contractually dividing it into three different concepts. “A Tsai Ming-liang Film” signifies that he is the author of Goodbye Dragon Inn. One peculiar thing is that there’s no “Director Tsai Ming-liang” only “Assistant Director Wang Mingzong.” It is a very interesting, symptomatic absence. Hence, Tsai’s film implies the concept of director, but provides him a credit with deeper satisfaction. “Executive Producer Tsai Ming-liang,” in traditional film industry division perspective, refers to the administration of film production and the quality guaranteed by an executor. And “Screenwriter Tsai Ming-liang” means that he constructs and designs all plots and images from scratch. Nevertheless, the name of Tsai Ming-liang means more than these imply individually. In the seventh shot, we see Tsai and Alphonse Youth-Leigh sitting together, their backs to the camera, staring at the opening of Dragon Inn. It is a very “Hitchcock-like” signature. We could call it “the signature of their bodies.” Audiences easily recognize Alfred Hitchcock’s signature. He always has a cameo role in his films. Truffaut in his writing, notes that this appearance happened in The Lodger (1927), and became a symbol of Hitchcock’s works.15 Hitchcock sneakily plays nobody in his own films but is actually “affixing his signature, his body, in the body of text.”16 Hitchcock’s signature is more than as a passerby. It is a strong presence, an inexpressible, understandable, and amusing effect for his audiences. However, it is the first time that Tsai presents himself in his film. Unlike Hitchcock’s deliberately looking at the camera, Tsai looks at the screen with his back toward the camera. He gently refuses eye contact with us, the audience. He is subtly suggesting that he wants us to do the same thing as he’s doing, to look at the film. It is not King Hu’s Dragon Inn but Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn that he is looking at. For behind him there’s another camera filming the direction that he looks, causing the audience to follow his gaze into his Goodbye Dragon Inn. This is the end of the opening title. What follows is the first real shot – the beckoning Fu He Grand Theater. The Japanese actor, who is searching for sexual pleasure, walks furtively in, and into Tsai Ming-liang’s film.

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Conclusion This chapter analyses the opening titles of Goodbye Dragon Inn. Tsai Ming-liang combines different kinds of text, deliberately highlighting the uniqueness of his movie, and opens up multiple thinking, sources of text, and entrances. In this three-and-a-half minute opening title, he heterogeneously fuses the already-made classic and the literally in-the-making classic. On the subject of authorial signature Tsai sets up a modern reflection. His signature presents neither the author himself nor the name of the author, but a sign fleeing the opening titles and doing the work of invitation, to an enticing conversation between inscription and the image of the body. We can see then that there’s an enormous gap, and an identity, between the conscious subject (Tsai Ming-liang watching Dragon Inn) and the name “Tsai Ming-liang.” And it is the relation between subject, self, and signature that makes Tsai Ming-liang’s works inimitable.

Notes 1 “I thought of the times we were in front of the flowers” is a line from a Chinese song Liu Lian (reluctant to leave), performed by Yao Li in the 1960s. It is quoted from the closing song of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, in order to frame the “opening – Entrance” issue. 2 Nicole de Mourgues, Le Générique de film (Paris: ed. Meridiens Klincksieck, 1994), 20. 3 Jacques Aumont, L’œil interminable (Paris: ed. Séguier, 1989), 113. 4 Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: ed. Nathan, 1990), 108. 5 Noël Burch’s studies on Méliès’ movies including L’homme-orcheste (1900), Le livre magique (1900), La dislocation mystérieuse (1900), etc. His essay: “Un mode de representation primitif?” Iris: Archives, Document, Fiction, Le cinema avant 1907 2, no. 1 (ed. Analeph, 1984): 113–114. 6 Nicole de Mourgues, Le Générique de film (Paris: ed. Meridiens Klincksieck, 1994), 21. 7 Thierry Kuntzel, “Le travail du film, 2,” in Communication no. 23: Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: ed. Le Seuil, 1975), 138–139. 8 Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” in Poétique du récits (Paris: ed. Le Seuil, 1977), 10. 9 Ibid., 10. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 10 12 Li Youxin is a famous, alternative, and very distinctive film critic and scholar. His personal mark is his tangled hair. He also showed up in another Tsai film What Time Is It There? (2001). His scene is at an art film stall, where movie-goers in Taipei often visit. Roland Barthes, “En sortand du cinéma,” in Communication no. 23: Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris, ed. Le Seuil, 1975). 13 Nicole de Mourgues, Le Générique du film (Paris, ed. Meridiens Klincksieck, 1994), 84. 14 Claude Gandelman and Naomi Greence, “Fétichisme, Signature, Cinéma,” in Hors Cadre no. 8: L’état d’auteur (Paris, ed. PUV, 1990), 149. 15 François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (Paris, ed. Ramsay, 1985), 130. 16 Raymond Bellour, L’analyse du film (Paris, ed. Albators, 1980), 230

13 “This Time He Moves!” The deeper significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good Women James Udden Given the complexity of his films and his situation, there are seemingly endless avenues for inquiry into the significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Yet what seems particularly, if not peculiarly, interesting about Hou is that his style matters in more ways than one might imagine, touching on issues that lie outside the usual provenance of cinematic esthetics. This becomes especially clear when his style changes, and when it does not change “back.” Take, for example, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere (2004), which has been advertised as a homage to Yasujiro Ozu. But what sort of homage? In the later stage of his career, Ozu made entire films where the camera does not move even for the slightest reframing, preferring instead to edit on a 360° system with precise compositions and sometimes graphic matching from shot to shot. For Hou, a stylistic homage to Ozu poses a dilemma. Hou has never edited like Ozu, and in his recent films, he uses a mobile camera in the majority of his shots. Still, this particular film, produced by Shochiku no less, provided a chance for Hou to return to an earlier incarnation of himself: after all, up to 1993, Hou frequently used a mostly static camera in his long takes, the one stylistic trait he did share with the later Ozu. Yet Hou does nothing of the sort in Café Lumiere. More than three-quarters of the shots in this film contain camera movements, and the majority of these go beyond slight reframings.1 Homage or not, this was still a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien, and more importantly, a post-1995 Hou film. Consciously or not, Hou distances himself from both Ozu and an earlier version of himself. This recent example confirms how Hou’s 1995 work, Good Men, Good Women, remains the most radical break of his career. Long the master of the stationary camera up till then, suddenly in this film Hou’s camera seems unable to keep still. Many back then noticed this striking shift in style, but few knew what to make of it. Some simply asked why, but the answers proved to be elusive. Most fascinating, however, is how some were seemingly disturbed by the deeper implications of this change, which has persisted ever since, even in Café Lumiere. Yet why does this striking change in style even matter? It seems odd to suggest that a mobile camera is something more than a mobile camera, that such a formal phenomenon could be portentous and disturbing. In this case, however, this is not merely a pedantic question of form; rather it raises issues that extend beyond esthetic parameters, even touching on questions of national identity. For this

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reason we need to explore the nature of this change in some detail. More importantly, however, we also need to sort out why the now oft-moving camera in Good Men, Good Women is such a significant shift, and why it was not entirely welcomed. As it turns out, this is not simply a departure from a stylistic signature for one of the most original directors in the world today. It is also a departure from a living legacy Hou has inadvertently left for other Asian filmmakers. And while this may have simply been Hou rubbing up against the limits of the medium itself, his own allowance of this radical break should come as no surprise. After all, Hou Hsiao-hsien is a Taiwanese director.

A ringing rupture For those familiar with Hou’s films, the opening shot of Good Men, Good Women must seem like the Hou they have always known. As it turns out, however, this opening is a prolonged mirage. A slow fade in reveals a hazy landscape and an extreme long shot of a group of people singing in the distance (Figure 13.1). This shot lasts a total of 85 seconds, being almost exactly the average shot length of Hou’s previous film, The Puppetmaster (1993). The camera never moves, not even slightly, for the duration of this long take. A careful observer may note slight differences from his past films, such as how one can barely make out the mountains in the background, unlike the breathtaking landscapes of his previous works. One might also note that this scene is rendered in soft black and white which almost resembles a daguerreotype. Still, all of these seem to be minor modulations in the usual Hou game. The shot fades to black as the sound of the singing continues over the film’s title, before

Figure 13.1 The opening shot of Good Men, Good Women.

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gradually fading out as well. A false reassurance washes over from this pre-title sequence handled in a single take: this is the Hou we have come to know. Right at the cut to the second scene, however, a ringing phone chimes in: lacking an extended sound bridge to smooth over this sudden rupture, one is almost jarred into this brave new cinematic world unlike any previously created by Hou. The camera lingers briefly on a white window from a low angle (Figure 13.2), but soon it tilts down and pans left very slowly, revealing the details of an apartment before it frames the prostrate Liang Ching on her bed (Figure 13.3). After focusing on her, the camera becomes motivated by her movements as she languidly wakes up. It reframes her carefully before panning right as she approaches the refrigerator. It then pans left until she seats herself at the table, drinking water from a bottle (Figure 13.4). Soon the camera leaves her there, panning right and tracking in very slowly onto the image of a television screen showing a scene from Ozu’s Late Spring (Figure 13.5). Liang Ching approaches the television set as the camera tilts up to show her tearing off a fax from her fax machine (Figure 13.6). The camera remains still as she reads, while a voice-over recites excerpts from her stolen diary. Once she moves toward the bathroom, the camera follows her in a pan left and holds the view of her moving behind thick, ochre bricks made of semi-opaque glass (Figure 13.7). She sings a mournful ballad to close the scene. This plan sequence is nearly four minutes long, a not surprising figure for Hou Hsiao-hsien. Yet it feels radically different from any previous long take by him. It certainly represents the most elaborate use of camera movements in any Hou shot up to that time, even more so than the numerous movements to be found in his early work, The Boys from Fengkuei (1984). More importantly, this long yet moving take is hardly a one-off device in this film: it instead establishes a major stylistic

Figure 13.2 Opening of the second shot of Good Men, Good Women.

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Figure 13.3 Same shot, now of Liang Ching on bed.

Figure 13.4 Same shot, now of her drinking water at the table.

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Figure 13.5 Same shot, camera drifts away to reveal an old Ozu film on TV.

Figure 13.6 Same shot, title up to frame her tearing off and reading a fax.

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Figure 13.7 End of same shot with Liang Ching in the bathroom.

pattern for the entire work. Even in those moments where the old Hou seems to return, the new Hou still breaks through in subtle ways, almost as if there is an underlying tension between them. For example, during a four minute take of the star-crossed lovers talking in front of the mirror, the actors themselves never move. (Indeed, Jack Kao barely moves his head.) Nevertheless, the camera for long stretches continuously pans left and tracks backward at an excruciatingly slow pace, slowly making him more prominent in the frame as well (Figures 13.8 and 13.9). Even Hou’s nearly static shots now move.

“This Time He Moves!” What is particularly interesting is that Hou’s inner circle not only first called attention to this radical change, they also found it significant, if not troubling. “This Time He Moves!” was originally the title of an article by the film’s scriptwriter, Zhu Tianwen, written upon the release of Good Men, Good Women. For Zhu, the moving camera became the most salient symbol of a new Hou in the making. Indeed, her words then were to prove prophetic: “In the future when people study the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, they will discover that in his creative development The Puppetmaster is a pinnacle, and thereafter there will be complications and twists and turns.”2 She goes on to recount how unsettling the change was for some of those who knew Hou best. For example, after screening Good Men, Good Women, longtime Hou collaborator, Zhan Hongzhi, was stupefied by what he had just seen. As Zhu Tianwen describes it, it was as if Zhan was saying goodbye to an old friend he had once known so well.3 Even Hou himself has more than once expressed his displeasure with this film, often calling it his least favorite. 4

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good Women

Figure 13.8 Early on in long take in front of mirror.

Figure 13.9 Same long take after a very slow pan left and track back.

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Yet while Hou and company are quite aware of the change itself, they are not as clear as to why it occurred. On occasion Hou has claimed that the actress, Annie Shizuko Inoh, posed new challenges since he needed to find ways to express her various states of consciousness. This new requirement, coupled with the need to tie together the various story lines in different time frames, somehow caused Hou to discuss moving the camera even during the scripting stage.5 At other times, however, Hou has expressed the belief that the stationary camera has always been the best way to capture the feeling of the past. He says he first learned this lesson from watching Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor where he felt the moving camera was so much at odds with the historical subject matter. Thus, according to him, since he had lost interest in the past with Good Men, Good Women (at least in part), he had also lost interest in the stationary camera.6 Chen Huaien, the cinematographer for Good Men, Good Women, further complicates the issue. Chen attributes this striking change to the fact that he was no longer operating his own camera. The new camera operator, Han Yunzhong, was unsteady at times, according to him, thus leading to the decision that this unsteadiness would be better exploited than eradicated.7 It is hard to know what to make of all these statements taken together. The evidence from Hou’s own films, for example, does not corroborate this association of the static camera with the historical past. In Good Men, Good Women, a good part of the film does occur in the past, even if it is supposedly a vision of the past from a character in the present. While the camera does move less in these sections compared to the other two narrative strands, the majority of shots still contain ample camera movements. Likewise, Flowers of Shanghai is set entirely in the historical past and yet there is only one shot in the entire film – a brief detail shot of a hairpin on a table – where the camera does not move at all. Furthermore, this would not explain Daughter of the Nile, the 1987 film set entirely in the present. Despite its contemporary subject matter, almost 90 percent of the shots in the film have no camera movement, making it the most static of all of Hou’s films. Such inconsistent explanations imply that the moving camera in Good Men, Good Women was not a fully conscious decision on Hou’s part. By contrast, he seems clearer as to what attracted him to the static camera years earlier.8 Yet both Hou’s discovery of the stationary camera, and his later abandonment of it, are the result of a director who has relied, not on abstract principles, shooting scripts, nor storyboards, but on intuition spurred by the experience of the moment in a particular environment. In other words, the moving camera in this film may have snuck up on him almost unawares, and yet for some reason he felt he had to continue on that path ever since. Yet why should we concern ourselves with a formal detail where a director who usually did not move a film camera, now seems to do so incessantly? The answer is that there is more at stake here than mere formalism. This issue is significant on three levels. First, it touches on Hou’s own personal identity as a filmmaker, and at first glance seems to work against an identity he had long cultivated up to 1993. Second, and more importantly, Hou’s identity as a filmmaker is not strictly his own, but has profound, extra-personal implications. This is most evident in how

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Hou’s signature style has been taken up by several other Asian directors who have followed his cue and have created an Asian brand of cinematic minimalism. Finally, and most significantly, this change serves as a reminder that Hou is a director from Taiwan, and not elsewhere. Far from mitigating his identity as a Taiwanese director, this sudden change by Hou is indicative of how Taiwanese he truly is. In fact, given that he learned and practices his craft in Taiwan, such a sudden change should come as no surprise at all. It is time to deal with each of these issues in more detail.

Partial death of a signature style Knowingly or not, Hou took a tremendous risk when he started moving the camera in Good Men, Good Women. In doing so, he started veering away from one of the two most recognized pillars of his own signature style: the stationary camera. To this day Hou has remained committed to the other pillar, the long take, and presumably will continue to do so for as long as he makes films. Yet simply calling Hou a “master of the long take” does not fully explain how he has stood out on the world stage. After all, he does have some distinguished company in this regards, not just with the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Miklos Jancso and Theo Angelopoulos, but even with other directors in Taiwan such as Edward Yang, Zhang Yi and, more recently, Xu Xiaoming and Tsai Ming-liang. Thus, it is not simply his having long takes, but what Hou does with those long takes that matters the most. I am already treading on familiar territory here since in a previous article I have argued that Hou’s style up to 1993 featured both long takes “and” a predominantly static camera, something which does not mesh with existing definitions of what a Chinese film style should be.9 But I now want to emphasize another point I had suggested there: not only does this tendency not quite fit definitions of a Chinese style, it even does not correspond with the norms of a long-take director found anywhere over the last 80 years. The figures provided in Appendix A demonstrate that as his career progresses, Hou’s takes not only get longer on average, they also become increasingly static – a very odd development indeed. For this reason, Hou has been called not just the master of the long take, he has also been rightly called the “master of the stationary camera.”10 Not that he is completely alone even here: one might recall others such as Chantal Akerman, or even Andy Warhol. But unlike these notable figures, Hou used this rarified esthetic strategy to achieve neither a strong sense of alienation, nor an “esthetic of boredom,” but instead a highly understated, muted form of cinematic lyricism. That this is even possible with both long takes and a static camera is a remarkable accomplishment, and this is where Hou truly stands alone. All this changes starting 1995, as seen in Appendix B. Hou’s continued commitment to the long take suddenly seems to come at the expense of the stationary camera. Unlike the films up to 1993, which stand out like a sore thumb with such a high percentage of static long takes, from 1995 on, the high percentage of shots with a mobile camera blend in well with the figures from other films by Mizoguchi,

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Jancso, and Angelopoulos included in the list, where anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the shots contain at least some camera movement. In other words, by this measure at least, Hou has actually become “less” distinctive, not more so. If one looks more carefully at Hou’s entire oeuvre, however, one begins to realize that both the long take and the stationary and/or mobile camera were not ends in themselves, but means to other esthetic ends much more complex than commonly recognized. Hou Hsiao-hsien, as it turns out, is the master of many things besides the long take and the stationary camera; above all else, Hou is the master of highly elliptical narrative structures conjoined with an audaciously dense mise-en-scene. The former are organized in such an unusual fashion that often significant narrative details are prodigiously delayed in their exposition, or handled in such an indirect fashion that they test viewer comprehensibility. The latter ensures that many of those key narrative details are placed at the very margins of visibility, often lost in a fecund weaving of the quotidian enmeshed in slivers of light and shadow. David Bordwell has noted that the static long take works well with other strategies such as the “postponement of scene-by-scene exposition” and what Peggy Chiao Hsiung-p’ing has called a “recapitulative strategy.”11 Taking this larger view, the static camera alone is not the core of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinematic being. Yet it may well be that Hou faced the limits of the static long take by the time he was making Good Men, Good Women. In this film, Hou pushes variegated lighting schemes, extreme chiaroscuro, and oblique staging strategies even further than he had in his previous two works. Had he persisted with the static long take, he might have eventually accomplished an esthetic of boredom a la Warhol, or the alienation of a Belgian housewife a la Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975). What would have been lost was that patented indirect expression of poetic feeling that has been the hallmark of Hou’s entire career. Thus, Good Men, Good Women is less a radical break than a part of a larger palimpsest where a single item – i.e. the static camera – is erased to make more room for other ongoing esthetic developments. Yet that is precisely where the risk lies. Mise-en-scene in general, and lighting and staging in particular, do not lend themselves to blunt measurements.12 Instead they are subtle, elusive, yet pervasive qualities; to get at them requires painstaking work and case-by-case analyses, which in Hou’s case has only recently been accomplished by David Bordwell in his Figures Traced in Light.13 Being called the “master of the long take” or the “master of the stationary camera” is somehow more graspable and verifiable, even measurable, something the two appendixes attest to. In losing one of these monikers in 1995, Hou unwittingly removed one of the more concrete angles by which the significance of his work could be apprehended. That he has had no major festival awards since The Puppetmaster in 1993 suggests that this change has had more impact than even Hou would probably care to admit.

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Hou’s legacy: pan-East Asian minimalism As it turns out, however, Hou Hsiao-hsien is not an island, but has become the center of a transnational movement that extends well beyond his own work. This can be best described as a pan-East Asian brand of minimalism, evidence of which appears at major films festivals almost every year now, almost to the point of becoming a cliché. Once again, this trend over the last decade is largely defined by a group of films which possess the same traits we find in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work up to 1993: a long-take strategy coupled with a mostly stationary camera. There is no institutional center to this “movement,” no Cahiers du cinema around which young filmmakers and ideas coalesce, no manifestos to live or protest by, no “dogmas” by which to promote an alternative brand of filmmaking. Instead this trend seems to have grown organically, beginning on a small island of dubious geopolitical status. At the forefront of this distinctive brand of Taiwanese filmmaking is Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou forged a distinguishing identity for Taiwanese cinema, not through press conferences or proclamations, but through the films themselves. Moreover, the most salient traits of that identity got him notice among his peers both within Taiwan and without. In other words, a single filmmaker pushed to the limits a most unusual stylistic strategy that did not seem to have any contemporary counterparts in the West. And that is precisely why it has proved to be so attractive to other Asian directors. After Hou’s stunning success with A City of Sadness in 1989, the imitative trend takes off in Taiwan as several directors there all become more Hou-like, including Edward Yang. Yang had long been considered the “Western” or “modernist” wing of the Taiwan New Cinema, the putative inverse of Hou, who was the “Eastern” or “traditional” wing. In the 1990s, however, even Edward Yang becomes more Hou-like. The average shot lengths of Yang’s notable urban trilogy in the 1980s (That Day, On the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985), and The Terriorzers (1986)) never exceeded 15 seconds per shot in any of those films. For Yang’s films in the 1990s, by contrast, his takes are averaging anywhere from just over 25 seconds to just under 50 seconds per shot for his four films from that decade (A Brighter Summer Day (1991), Confucian Confusion (1994), Mahjong (1996), and Yiyi (2000)). But it does not stop with the long take: Yang at times also attempted more challenging methods of arranging his mise-en-scene, something most evident in A Brighter Summer Day. Most interestingly, however, Yang has persisted in the vein of the pre-1995 Hou when it comes to camera movements: his longer takes in the 1990s are still relatively static compared to the norm for a long-take director, evidence that even he could not resist the lure of Hou’s earlier understated style. In A Brighter Summer Day, for example, only 39 percent of the shots contain any camera movements despite an average shot length of around 27 seconds per shot. Yiyi has an even longer ASL of around 30 seconds per shot, and yet only one-third of those have any camera movements whatsoever. Hou’s legacy slowly becomes evident with younger directors in Taiwan as well. Dust of Angels (1991), directed by the newcomer, Xu Xiaoming, and produced by Hou himself, displays such a marked long-take style that many conjectured Hou

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was its behind-the-scenes director as well.14 The ASL in this film is even slightly longer than the figure for A City of Sadness, but this film hardly matches Hou’s masterpiece in terms of narrative and visual complexity. Moreover, the percentage of shots with camera movements in Dust of Angels is nearly 60 percent, almost twice the figure for City. As the decade progresses, however, many of these young directors seem to have an increasing number of “static” long takes. A mild example is Chang Tso-chi, who had worked under Hou in A City of Sadness. In Chang’s Darkness and Light (1999), his takes last nearly 26 seconds on average, but the camera moves in little over 35 percent of these shots. By the mid-1990s, however, there were indications that this was no longer strictly a Hou or a Taiwanese style. Adherents to the static long-take strategy can now be found in Japan, Korea, and most recently, Mainland China. The first clear evidence for this is in 1995 with Maborosi, by the Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda. In this film the average shot lasts 25 seconds, and yet only about six percent of them have any camera movement at all. (Kore-eda paid the price for this, in a sense, since critics in his own country accused him of being too much like Hou.)15 A more extreme example is Lee Kwang-mo’s Springtime in My Hometown (1999) from South Korea. In that film the average shot lasts nearly 50 seconds, yet by my count only two percent of the shots have any camera movement. Now there are even Mainland Chinese examples of this Hou-inspired style, the most notable being Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang, both from 2001. The two most consistent practitioners of this style, however, are the Malaysianborn Tsai Ming-liang in Taiwan, and the Korean director, Hong Sang-soo. Interestingly, the trajectory of Tsai’s career to date is similar to that of Hou’s, since like Hou, the average shot lengths seem to get longer with each passing film: in 1992, his Rebels of the Neon God has a figure of just under 19 seconds per shot, much like Hou’s earliest New Cinema films; by the time he comes out with What Time Is It There? (2001) nearly a decade later, his long takes now average more than a minute each. Most importantly, however, the longer Tsai’s takes are on average as his career progresses, the more static they seem to become. In The River (1997), for example, the average length of a shot is under a minute each, yet there are camera movements in just over 40 percent of the shots (albeit a large number of those are either only momentary camera movements, or only the slightest reframings). By stark contrast, Tsai’s film Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), also has an average shot length of just under a minute per shot (55 seconds), yet less than 11 percent of those shots have any camera movement whatsoever, and once again most of those are only momentary camera movements at best. The most extreme example is What Time Is It There?: in this film the average shot length is now well over a minute, and yet not a single one of those shots move, not even for the slightest reframing!16 Like Edward Yang, Tsai has taken other cues from Hou. Note the extreme (even barely legible) chiaroscuro lighting schemes in the bath house of The River, with only dim spots of lights in hallways and private rooms that barely reveal human outlines and furtive actions. Likewise, in What Time Is It There? carefully sculpted circles of light are often found in the interior scenes, especially a faint glow often directed at a large white fish in a tank (Figure 13.10). This seems to indicate a

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Figure 13.10 Chiaroscuro in What Time is it There?

very conscious adaptation of lighting schemes Hou had been pushing since the beginning of the 1990s. Hong Sang-soo has not been quite as literal in this regards as Tsai Ming-liang, exhibiting instead a more zig-zag appropriation of these same tendencies. Nevertheless, there is also palpable evidence in his films that Hou has been his guiding influence. For example, in The Power of Kangwon Province (1998), the average shot length is well over half a minute per shot, yet not a single one of them moves even in the slightest. A more recent work, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002), averages around a minute per shot, and yet less than a quarter of those have any camera movements. More deceptive is his recent work, Woman is the Future of Man (2004). The numbers alone seem to suggest that Hong has abandoned the static camera much like Hou did in Good Men, Good Women: averaging a whopping 102 seconds per shot, 78 percent of these now have camera movements, a figure that is not surprising for a film with such monstrously long takes. But in almost every case these movements are at best only brief pans and slight reframings that occur only in a fraction of these long takes which otherwise are static. This is most noticeable in the two long takes that occur in the restaurant when Hunjoon and Munho eat and talk after not having seen each other for some time. The first of these long takes is just over six minutes in length, yet nearly five-and-a-half minutes of this shot is done in a completely static framing of the two men eating by the window. The camera pans briefly three times, the last of which reveals an

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Figure 13.11 Predominant framing in scene from Woman is the Future of Man.

unnamed woman who had been in the restaurant, and who is now standing across the street. The second long take parallels the first both in terms of content and style. Being exactly five minutes in length, more than four and a half of those minutes stay put with the exact same framing of the two men eating by the window (Figure 13.11). Once again, a brief pan away and back is used to reveal that the same young woman has reappeared across the street yet again, a sort of ongoing, muted game of hide and seek. While Hong does not usually employ the extreme chiaroscuro lighting of his Taiwanese counterparts, he certainly understands how the long take – especially the static, long take – allows the slightest changes to emerge from a seemingly minimalist image, quietly revealing subtle, yet rich emotional undertows. In Turning Gate, some of the longest static takes occur with Kyungsoo and Sunyoung. When they first meet on the train, for example, the shot begins with a pan right following him as he sits next to her. But for the rest of this nearly four-minute-long take, the camera does not move while his face remains at a more oblique angle and hers is more frontal, allowing her facial expressions to display a complex range of emotions resulting from her conflicted attraction to him. Even more remarkable are the two long takes when they eat together (roughly four minutes and two minutes respectively). Once again, Hong makes her face the main center of attention in both of these long takes. With painstaking deliberation, Sunyoung slowly gets Kyungsoo to remember that in fact they had once met 15 years ago in middle school, and that back then he had already pursued her at her home, much as he has just done this very day. Kyungsoo, in turn, only remembers all this when she moves her hand in a certain way (Figure 13.12), another example of where the smallest detail in this style can possess deep connotations.

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Figure 13.12 An epiphany during a long take from On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate

In short, Hou Hsiao-hsien created a distinctive style that did not send shockwaves throughout Asia, but slow ripples that first hit Japan, then Korea, and now Mainland China. He stands at the center of a quiescent movement that has developed of its own accord, guided most of all by the most striking surface features of Hou’s earlier works: long takes and a static camera. In particular films by Kore-eda, Lee Kwang-mo, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hong Sang-soo, we have not just Hou imitators, but Hou literalists who dot every “i” and cross every “t” to the point where they may not move the camera even a fraction of an inch during an entire film, something Hou never quite does. Only a few begin to touch on the more inimitable aspects of Hou’s style. As Bordwell notes, “Few of these films engage in the intricacies of staging that Hou favored; most rely on simple figure movements and attenuated scenic development.”17 Visually speaking Tsai Ming-liang gets everything down about Hou except for one feature: the density of the mise-enscene. In Tsai’s case, characters are often lost in desolate, seemingly abandoned urban landscapes, especially in the case of The Hole (1998) where normally teeming Taipei has been depleted of humanity due to a strange virus. Likewise, Hong Sangsoo does not come anywhere near the complexity of Hou in terms of mise-en-scene and narrative structure, although he does on occasion make use of some of the more understated aspects of cinematic staging.18 Nevertheless, both Tsai and Hong do show other possibilities of this style, since each has used it to create a body of films that bear their own individual authorial signatures. Yet as we have seen, even before the reverberations of this transnational Asian movement made themselves apparent in film festivals around the world, the center of the resonance was already missing; Hou had already moved beyond his most salient contribution to Asian cinema, no longer abiding by half of his own legacy.

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For this reason it is almost shocking how with Good Men, Good Women, not only does Hou begin to move the camera, he does so with seemingly reckless abandon. If Tsai Ming-liang and Hong Sang-soo are audacious in taking this static long-take style to new statistical extremes, Hou is equally audacious in going in another entirely new direction, one that is less-easily defined, resulting in the “twists, turns, and complications” that Zhu Tianwen describes. But why? Certainly Hou has never considered such widespread imitation a form of flattery, stating that every director should find his or her own style.19 Still, Hou did not abandon this style because of too many imitators (unlike Wong Kar-wai and his own signature style). After all, while shooting Good Men, Good Women, Hou could not have yet known how much Kore-eda was imitating his earlier style in Maborosi, which came out the same year. For this reason, we are forced to look elsewhere for the reason behind this radical break. The answer lies quite close to home.

Hou’s fate as a Taiwanese filmmaker By departing with one of the most salient traits of his rarefied esthetic – namely the static camera – Hou Hsiao-hsien has been toying not only with his own identity as a filmmaker, but also the identity of Taiwanese cinema as a whole, and even that of East Asian cinema, an identity he played no small part in forming. Yet perhaps we should not be surprised by any of this so long as we remember that Hou is a Taiwanese director. Perhaps the sudden shift in 1995 in itself makes Hou the avatar of a specifically Taiwanese identity, and to a lesser extent his identity as an Asian director. After all, is this the first and only time he has changed? A closer inspection of Hou’s career overall reveals that while this may be the most significant change for him, it is neither the first nor the last. The same Hou who in 1984 came out with such films as The Boys from Fengkuei and A Summer at Grandpa’s, came out with bubble gum musical comedies such as Cute Girl and Cheerful Wind just three years before. (Now there’s a radical break!) He began to use a more distanced framing in Boys, and then began to use the static camera in an unorthodox fashion starting with A Summer at Grandpa’s. Working for the first time with Mark Lee Pingbin in The Time to Live, The Time to Die resulted in a significant shift in lighting styles and more experimentation with depth of field. By the time he made Dust in the Wind, Hou Hsiao-hsien was able to combine all of this into a complete package, marking the culmination of all of the changes that occurred during his New Cinema period. But who expected him to shift to the disaffected youth of present day Taipei in Daughter of the Nile? Who expected for him to shift away from stories of people he personally knew to those of a past generation, as he does in A City of Sadness? Who expected the sudden appearance of Li Tianlu nearly 50 minutes into The Puppetmaster? And who ever expected Hou to make a film about a nineteenth century brothel in Shanghai (Flowers of Shanghai), or a film set in Japan (Café Lumiere)? Taking all of this into consideration, the mobile camera in Good Men, Good Women is hardly alone as a marked change in Hou’s career. Instead it shows that change has in fact been the norm for Hou Hsiao-hsien from the beginning.

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More importantly, we should not be surprised by these sudden changes for another reason: change has been the thematic core of Hou’s films. In other words, Hou has given Taiwanese cinema an identity not just through style alone, but by using that style to convey the unique flavor of what is now commonly called “The Taiwanese Experience.” And if anything sums up both the Taiwanese Experience and Hou’s films, it is sudden, unexpected, and often irreversible changes. In the earlier films such changes often involved unexpected personal loss: the sudden death of a father (The Boys from Fengkuei, The Time to Live, The Time to Die), or the sudden loss of an unforgettable love, such as occurs without warning in Dust in the Wind. With the weightier historical trilogy, personal loss becomes a metaphor for abrupt national changes: in A City of Sadness, the Lin family seated at the table in 1945, versus the Lin family in 1949 with its male side depleted by the ravages of outside historical forces; for Li Tianlu in The Puppetmaster, all the lives, the deaths, and the journeys experienced between a time when his Qing-style queue was cut off by the Japanese, to his witnessing of the dismantling of Japanese fighter planes for spare parts at the end of the war; in Good Men, Good Women, those from Taiwan who fought for China were in the end betrayed by the Chinese who later found refuge in Taiwan after the war. The quiescent nature of Hou’s films can often cause one to forget how traumatic the events depicted in them really are. Except that in the case of the Taiwanese, perhaps change is no longer so traumatic: in fact, it may be the Taiwanese are just “used” to it. Consider the suddenness of Taiwan’s economic miracle, the diplomatic shocks of the 1970s, the thoroughgoing democratization which occurred seemingly overnight, the constant vagaries of Taiwan’s troubled relationship with China. This is an ongoing story, and the Taiwanese just seem to respond to change almost with a collective shrug of their shoulders. Thus, if this has been what Hou’s films are about, and if change itself is part and parcel of what it means to Taiwanese, then perhaps what we should ask about Hou’s now mobile camera is not why, but why not? So the deeper significance of a mobile camera is that this does not just concern a director and his unusual aesthetic – this concerns Taiwan, and cuts to the core of what is Taiwan’s place in the world. In the geopolitical sense, Taiwan has not just been pushed to the margins, it has been placed in a NeverNeverland that is a virtual abyss. Benedict Anderson has argued that every nation’s sense of itself – as a nation – is fiction.20 But Taiwan is one of those rare places where the average person is acutely aware of this on a daily basis. Yet remarkably, Taiwan has managed to stake a place in the world despite these impossible odds. Its economic prowess is not seen in numbers alone, but in how it has made itself an integral part of our hi-tech world. 21 Yet culturally speaking, Taiwan can even be seen as a vanguard of sorts, especially for China. Not only does the island “nation” serve as living proof that a Confucian culture can democratize (much to the chagrin of the Chinese Communist Party in China), it serves as a premier example that dynamism and inventiveness are not alien to Asian cultures. And given that it has occurred not just in cinema but elsewhere such as modern dance, as seen in the Cloud Gate Company22, such is not without precedent on this particular island.

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This is where Hou’s true significance lies: many outside of Taiwan have followed his lead, and together have created a distinctive body of films which have become commonplace in film festivals today. The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hong Sang-soo are among the more subtle and sophisticated to be found anywhere at the present time. Moreover, these films are beholden to no tradition except that of their own creation. That a Taiwanese director is the originator of all this says a great deal. Yet that Hou is willing to go beyond this transnational style he helped abet may be his way of saying: “We have done this, but why stop there? What’s next?” With Hou, just as with Taiwan in general, there is so much to be learned than merely a static camera or a label like “MIT” (“Made in Taiwan”). We ought to take both a little more seriously than we do. We should also forgo ready-made conclusions and dig deeper. Perhaps this should be a lesson for all of us. One flaw with the auteur theory is the tendency to look only for consistent themes and stylistic signatures emerging in an industrial morass. Any changes discovered have to fit within a discernible progression or pattern of development. Moreover, in the case of an Asian auteur like Hou there is often the additional baggage of “tradition” thrown into the critical pot. The notion of tradition seems contrary to the notion of change. But tradition is only one part of Asia and Asian cinema; and traditions in Asia have changed many times over even before the encroachment of the West. Such changes have been traumatic at times, violent at others. But what is remarkable about places like Taiwan is that streak of adaptability and flexibility that has served them so well. So long as we take a dynamic, and not a static view of these societies and their cultures, so long as we recognize that change is the norm, not the exception, then certainly we can accept it when a renowned director like Hou Hsiao-hsien suddenly moves. In the end, maybe we need neither praise the change, nor condemn it, nor even explain it. Maybe we just have to accept it, and then wait and see what happens next.

Appendix A Hou Hsiao-hsien's long-take style up to 1993. Title

ASL (secs)

Shots with camera movement (%)

The Sandwich Man (1983) The Boys from Fengkuei (1984) A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) The Time to Live, The Time to Die (1985) Dust in the Wind (1986) Daughter of the Nile (1987) A City of Sadness (1989) The Puppetmaster (1993)

17 19 18 24 35 28 42 83

26 45 32 23 18 11 29 29

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Appendix B Hou’s post-1995 long-take style and that of other notable long-take directors Director

Film Title

Year

ASL (secs)

Shots with camera movement (%)

Mizoguchi Mizoguchi Mizoguchi Jancsó Angelopoulos Jancsó Angelopoulos Angelopoulos Hou Hou Hou Hou Hou

47 Ronin Utamaro and His Five Woman Life of Oharu The Red and the White Traveling Players Hungarian Rhapsody Voyage to Cythera Landscape in the Mist Good Men, Good Women Goodbye, South Goodbye Flowers of Shanghai Millennium Mambo Café Lumiere

1941 1946 1952 1968 1975 1977 1984 1988 1995 1996 1998 2001 2003

89 52 48 54 105 59 67 79 108 105 158 97 66

62 68 60 84 88 63 74 67 72 80 82 82 76

Notes 1 To be fair, only one-fifth of the shots in this film have camera movements that last for more than half of the duration of the shot. Another one-fifth of the shots have only the slightest reframing, while nearly two-fifths have noticeable camera movements, but which occur for less than half of the shots’ duration. So there is some justification for the initial impressions of some that this “seemed” like a more static camera. 2 Zhu Tianwen, Good Men, Good Women [Hao nan hao nü] (Taipei: Maitian, 1995), 8. 3 Ibid., 17–18. 4 Hou Hsiao-hsien, interview by author, Sinomovie Company Office, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20, 2001. 5 Zhu, 14–15. 6 Hou, interview by author, 2001. 7 Chen Huaien, interview by author, Taipei, Taiwan, Chang Tso-chi Film Studio, May 1, 2001. 8 Hou, interview by author, 2001. Hou says that while shooting A Summer at Grandpa’s, he and his crew had a daily noon siesta imposed on them by the real grandfather at the clinic, then over 80 years old, who always required a daily nap right after lunch. According to him, he fell in love with that quiet stillness around the clinic, and he began to use the static camera to try to capture that same feeling thereafter. This does not mean, however, that Hou was fully aware of how far he had gone with this tendency by 1993. He seemed genuinely surprised when he was told that in The Puppetmaster 70 percent of the shots did not move at all. 9 James Udden, “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style,” Asian Cinema 13, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 54–75. 10 Georgia Brown, quoted in Zhu, 14. 11 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 217.

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12 Please keep in mind that both average shot lengths and the percentage of shots with camera movements are in themselves crude measures. They are best taken as starting points and not complete answers in and of themselves. For example, in some cases a long take might have a camera movement which only occurs for a brief part of the entire shot; in other cases the camera movement might be incessant. The percentages I give here do not take these vast differences into account, although elsewhere I have noted that in Hou’s films up to 1993 half of those rare shots that do have camera movements often have barely perceptible camera movements, which means essentially almost no change in framing. In general, however it is difficult to measure the wide variety of possible camera movements in a concrete way, and certainly not statistically: they can only be analyzed and described in a case-by-case fashion, just as I have done for the above scenes from Good Men, Good Women. Still, the fact that such a significantly smaller percentage of Hou’s shots up to 1993 have camera movements compared to other longtake directors does at least indicate that he was pushing the static long take further than most other directors. So in this case, these percentages do tell us something, even if not everything. 13 This book will arguably rank as one of the most ambitious and accomplished in Bordwell’s illustrious career, causing some readers to appreciate qualities of this medium that are often overlooked. However, even Bordwell seems to acknowledge that such esthetic qualities that he describes can be elusive, and thus lost on many viewers, especially those used to the forced attention-grabbing of today’s highly edited films, a global trend he has dubbed “intensified continuity.” One can hope the book will aid many in understanding and appreciating Hou Hsiao-hsien (especially since the cover includes an image from Flowers of Shanghai). But this remains a difficult task. 14 Edmond Wong, “A Youth of a Chaotic Generation, Statues of Dust,” Cinema in the Republic of China Yearbook, 1993 (Zhonghuaminguo dianying nian jian 1993) (Taipei: National Film Archives, 1993), 13. 15 Bordwell, 231. 16 Obviously this figure does not include the four shots used from The 400 Blows, two of which have camera movements. 17 Bordwell, 232. 18 David Bordwell even analyzes the staging of a scene from Hong’s Oh. Soo Yeong! (2002) in the opening chapter of Figures in Light. See Bordwell, 5–7. 19 Hou, interview by author, 2001. 20 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edn (New York: Verso, 1983, 1991). 21 Remember that when the 9/21 earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, many economic pundits worried about a worldwide depression hitting the hi-tech industry, which is evidence enough as to how integral Taiwan has become in the computer chip industry. 22 I am eternally grateful to my fellow Fulbright scholar, Sansan Kwan, who while in Taiwan introduced me to this remarkable company, something I then got to see firsthand while in Taipei. I cannot say anything about modern dance. But I can testify that my experience of seeing this group perform was much like my initial experience with the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien: they were strange, wonderful, different, and somehow not reducible to either “Eastern” or “Western” categories.

14 The road home Stylistic renovations of Chinese Mandarin classics Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh

It is notable that in the recent renaissance of Chinese-language cinema, wenyi and wuxia return together as powerful source materials for filmmakers to venture onto global screens. Examples include In the Mood for Love (2000, wenyi); Hero (2002, wuxia wenyi); Yiyi: A One and a Two (2000, wenyi); House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, both wenyi wuxia).1 Wenyi, “literature and art” or literary art, can be described as Chinese melodrama characterized by interior staging, female pathos, and Confucian ethics, while wuxia, martial chivalry, refers to swordplay films embedded in righteous heroism. Wenyi and wuxia were both staples of the industry from the advent of film production in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Although both disappeared in the Mainland after 1949, they were the backbone of the rationalized, Fordist modes of production in Hong Kong and Taiwan for nearly three decades. Wuxia, often used as a synonym for kung fu, has had unprecedented mainstream exposure in the US and the hype is still on the rise.2 It is safe to attribute this resurgence of wuxia to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD), especially his attempt to return to the “classic” ingredients in forging a film synergy, one that puts wenyi inside wuxia, and wuxia within wenyi, in a way that dialectically energizes both. It was widely reported that the Chinese reception of CTHD was not all positive.3 The film was often criticized for its slow narrative pace and for lacking innovative combat staging. Indeed, CTHD might have appeared too slow, considering the comparison of its 6.3 seconds ASL with that of Swordsman II, which is 3.1 seconds. For Chinese audiences with prior exposure to martial arts, CTHD is an inadequate wuxia picture because it neither attempts to create new action tricks nor surpass the perceived standard of bodily spectacle and special effects. But these very inadequacies turned out to be the cornerstones of the film’s phenomenal success worldwide. Audiences unfamiliar with wuxia were stunned by the presentation of flying figures gliding up and along rooftops, effortlessly treading on high walls as if gravity does not apply to these skilled swordsmen. But in the Chinese speaking community, the film’s accomplishment, to some extent, was interpreted as Lee’s “selling out,” in the sense that he diluted the wuxia style in order to appeal to innocent, inexperienced Westerners.4 The dispute over the identity of CTHD (whether or not it is an authentic wuxia picture) appears to be a question about style (see also Chang’s

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discussion in this volume). We must return to some basic stylistic premises to explain this cross-cultural perception gap. Why must a Western-friendly Chinese film turn the Chinese audience off? Does it mean Chinese people can only enjoy Chinese films and nothing else? How then do we explain Chinese audiences’ century-long embrace of Hollywood pictures? Shouldn’t culture, race, and language disrupt Chinese audiences’ appreciation of Titanic, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter? Might there be something wrong with Jiang Zemin, the former president, when he said everyone in China should go see Titanic? Why is success in the West necessarily a sellout if a Western blockbuster is required viewing for all Chinese? Obviously these questions can be answered in a variety of approaches. But a number of critics and scholars have chosen to deal with them in cultural and political terms, the most noticeable tactic, as well as an easy approach.5 In this chapter, my hypothesis centers on film style, that Ang Lee is not making a straight, predictable martial arts film, or at least not an offshoot of familiar Hong Kong products of the 1990s like the swordsman series (Swordsman I, II, and Asia the Invincible, dir. Tsui Hark). Instead, Lee experiments with the possibility of softening the wuxia formula, by incorporating elements of another Chinese style, the wenyi – the interior, feminine, and the Confucian – and merging those into the masculine and the martial in a new play of Chinese cinematic vernaculars. For Lee the presiding wenyi and wuxia styles have their respective problem areas and design flaws. The melodramatic wenyi tends to fall into a sentimental indulgence when it was thought to lend some civic and political utility in negotiating sociocultural discontent. A typical wenyi narrative structure is organized with lots of coincidences and compressed temporality, features considered excessively economical and implausible, with too many shortcuts. Another problem of wenyi is its escapism, which would push the defeated patriarchy further into a trench. Martial arts master Zhang Che once attacked wenyi for promoting an ultrafeminine fantasy world, symptomatic of a masculine national identity on the rocks. So he set out to remasculinize Chinese cinema in the British colony governed by a relentless capitalist logic. Wuxia, on the other hand, centers on a popular cosmology loosely connected to Taoist beliefs in immortality via enlightenment and strenuous physical training: superior physical skills are on display for performative and pedagogical purposes. This superhuman fantasy was often under scrutiny because it promoted superstition, unbefitting the cinema’s potential role in civic education. For instance, this uncivic, undomesticated wild side of the wuxia style excited legions of Bruce Lee fans who found in him an inspiring ideal of defiance. Like wenyi, narrative cohesiveness and consistency in wuxia are regularly compromised to favor the ecstasies of action-driven spectacle. In CTHD, Lee tries to contain these problems by juxtaposing wenyi and wuxia and creating a tight synergy of these two styles. In order to soften wuxia’s callousness, the slower wenyi expressive style was utilized to rein in the high-speed sword fights; and a tragic wenyi coda was added to remortalize the chivalrous swordsmen as human rather than superhuman characters. Meanwhile, the perceived weakness of wenyi is balanced with an intensified image of the xianü (swordswoman).

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Female characters now are not only concerned with romance and love, but with martial arts achievements and recognition in the jianghu (world of outlaws). Compared to typical wuxia, characterization and cause–effect relations are built up more evenly to guarantee a smoother plot progression. Here, I am not about to evaluate CTHD in regard to Lee’s experiment in synthesis. My question asks, how do contemporary Chinese filmmakers revive old, out-of-date conventions? How do they evoke or mobilize the classical? In addition to cultural and ideological reassessment of classics, do filmmakers have other ways to transform old coin into new currency? In the case of CTHD, what are the patterns that Lee adopts to synthesize two very different narrative styles? Is it really a martial arts film as it is perceived by both Western and Chinese audiences? I hope to use stylistic analysis to unpack some key issues surrounding the diverse reception of the film.

What is wenyi? Wenyi, according to critic and Crouching Tiger’s scriptwriter Cai Guorong, is an abbreviation for literature and art (wenxue yu yishu, thus short for wenyi), rooted in the industry’s practice of sourcing stories from literature. But wenyi was not a new idiom for Chinese film critics. It had been a regular term used by a variety of writers to emphasize the (albeit instrumental) importance of literature and art to society. Perhaps the best-known instance of wenyi is Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (“Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotan hui zhang de jianhua”) in 1942.6 Mao’s defining statement on the future direction of wenyi even influenced many diaspora artists and writers of the following two decades. If Mao promoted wenyi, then his enemy might be expected to vilify it. But interestingly, wenyi did not become a ‘bad word’ for the defeated Nationalist Party, who soon retreated to Taiwan. In Taiwan, the Party promoted a “military wenyi” (junzhong wenyi) to encourage soldiers and officers to engage in patriotic artistic production: writing, directing, and composing. So wenyi continued to thrive in the martial law island of Taiwan, so important in the Cold War balance of power. Later in the 1960s, wenyi transfigured into “healthy realism” and subsequently evolved into the definitive generic term for romantic melodrama when literary adaptations became the norm. In this regard, wenyi is close to what Ben Singer calls a “cluster concept” when he refers to the multifaceted dimensions of melodrama.7 Like Singer, Cai Guorong defines wenyi as a form of expressing emotion and sentiment.8 Wenyi film centers on the depiction of emotion and more important, it takes on a form of “excessive expression” (yongli miaoxie, similar to what Singer calls “overwrought emotion”).9 However, wenyi is not limited to a narrowly defined romantic or sexual emotion but carries a wider range of human feelings like filial piety, parental love, compassion, and mercy.10 In the 1920s, writings on Chinese wenyi were primarily concerned with the embodiment of ethical and artistic integrity within family melodrama. 11 In a similar vein, Hong Kong wenyi director Lee Sun-fung describes wenyi as a cinema of humanity (renxing) rooted in the pathos of tragedy.12 Granted, Lee

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Sun-fung’s description resonates with Mao’s wenyi talk in which Mao redefined humanity in literature and art as an instrument to advance proletarian revolution.13 But Lee slightly revises Mao’s take by seeing humanity, not entirely as a political category, but in emotional terms like compassion and mercy. To Lee, in order to achieve the highest state of humanity, cinema must utilize a style of emotion. This emotional style takes heed of editing, camera work, and composition to maximize the effects of emotional catharsis.14 Note there is a difference between the definitions of Cai and Lee. As a critic with extensive wenyi viewing, Cai’s definition underlines melodramatic excess (“heavy-handed portrayals” or Singer’s “overwrought emotion”) and a sentimentalism to highlight wenyi’s pathology. Lee, speaking from a practitioner’s perspective, advocates a quasiclassicism that balances the means and the end. Symmetry, measurement, and moderation are characteristics in his understanding of wenyi pictures. Cai’s description of wenyi is more macro-scopic, focusing on the cross-fertilization of wenyi as an overlapping style that allows literature and art to cross over between commercial cinema, dime novels, serialized fiction (like martial arts epics), and sentimental romances. Lee’s vision leans toward ‘pure’ literature and art in the fulfillment of elevating popular culture into serious artwork. Here we reach the bifocal dimensionality of wenyi: it is exploitable as either an entertainment commodity or an aspiration to “quality” art cinema. The development of Taiwan cinema in the 1960s and 1970s exemplified these two-pronged, forking configurations of wenyi. Since the early 1960s wenyi relied on two source materials when it was incorporated into the official policy of film production in Taiwan. One of the sources is Italian Neorealism and another is popular fiction; one foreign and classical; another indigenous and vernacular. These two sources were brought to the healthy realist pictures, a style put forward by the party-owned Central Motion Picture Corporation, once the largest studio in Taiwan. Healthy realism is a didactic construction of romantic melodrama and civic virtue, a sort of purified wenyi. It mixes the interior/private mise-en-scene specific to family melodrama with the civil, public space to accommodate government policy, enabling a smooth integration with the state ideological apparatus. Romance novels by the author pen-named Qiong Yao and other woman writers provided vast resources for screen adaptation during the golden age of Taiwan film production. We may safely assume that the literary wenyi feature helped create a distinctive reputation for Taiwan cinema abroad. At the beginning of the 1980s, wenyi ceased to bring high returns to the film establishment and was thus seen as a problem, even a crisis. Qiong Yao films could no longer sustain their popularity, even with new faces and new stories. Eventually vernacular wenyi was replaced by the serious wenyi, the respectable, committed wenxue (literature) of the Taiwan New Cinema. It was not until Ang Lee, a new arrival to the New Cinema and an overseas Chinese director, revisited the classics, did the wenyi style in Taiwan film embark on a new phase.15 Lee is not a naïf when it comes to rediscovery of the old treasures. He is judiciously cautious in reactivating a relation with the classics. But Lee is also a crafty trickster who uses the wenyi style to mediate his improvement of Chinese cinema.16

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The tension between wenyi’s sentimental inclination and its classical equilibrium, once again, helps Lee revive an outmoded style for modern delectation.

Stylistic features of wenyi As the master style of Chinese and Taiwan film, what are the stylistic features of wenyi? Wenyi, as shown above, is a pronged, forking configuration hovering between two sets of choices, between a style of restraint and a style of excess. As a style of restraint, wenyi is predisposed to long takes and long shots in composing a tranquil backdrop. Fluid camera movement is often matched with long takes to create a langorous spatiotemporal continuity capable of playing out rich, often sumptuous staging. Mise-en-scene in the wenyi of restraint requires discreet performances to suppress more assertive expressions of emotions. The wenyi of excess, on the contrary, features brazen modes of expression to bring emotion to light. This type of wenyi exploits optical variations such as zooms and pans, limiting cuts to medium shots/medium close-ups. As David Bordwell suggests, in lieu of establishing shots, such choices facilitate quick and easy transitions without sacrificing spatial orientation. Elsewhere, James Udden also points out that this serves as an economical solution to cost-saving on set construction and film stock.17 Contrary to the low-key acting method in wenyi of restraint, the wenyi of excess demands that actors fully discharge their emotions to deliver an obvious, propulsive narration. In Table 14.1, I illustrate these two distinct styles by contrasting two films – the restrained wenyi Spring in a Small Town (1948, dir. Fei Mu) and the excessive wenyi Cloud of Romance (1977, dir. Chen Honglie). Spring in a Small Town and Cloud of Romance both deal with triangular love relationships and extramarital affairs. Spring in a Small Town is considered the ranking Chinese classic for various reasons; one specific factor has to do with the film’s connection to the restrained wenyi.18 The film features a controlled (contrast between interior and exterior staging), reserved style (minimalism in sound effects and the avoidance of close-ups) to advance inner emotional turbulence. This is believed to be very ‘Chinese’ in the sense that emotion is supposed to be conveyed through understatement and subtle movements, not proclamations. Cinematic devices carry the restrained wenyi, underlined by delicate, horizontal pans and tracking shots. But the film also contains touches of modernist technique. It tries to balance opposing views, between the sickly husband and his young wife. Voiceover narration of the female lead provides an unrestricted narration while lowangle composition emphasizes the eye-line match of the bedridden husband. This, too, is considered a brilliant wenyi treatment, a trope borrowed from Western literature and women’s film classics such as A Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948, dir. Max Ophuls) or Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz).19 Cloud of Romance, on the contrary, uses bombastic zooms, sound effects, and intensified montage to stage a tempestuous relationship. True to the conventions of the excessive wenyi, Cloud favors overstatement over understatement. Decorative lamps, flowers, plants, trees, and windows are placed either in the center or at the peripheries of the frame to garnish the romantic adventures of a

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sentimental couple. David Bordwell calls this a “flashy” style in his recent studies on Hou Hsiao-hsien and Taiwan popular cinema of the 1970s.20 Dialog and songs are keys to plot arrangement; quick zoom-ins and close-ups are frequently used to stage confrontations. Performances are bracketed in shot/ shots to emphasize emotional hyperbole. In the excessive wenyi, directors do not need to rely on sophisticated setups and lengthy rehearsals to bring the story to light but instead follow a set of conventions to coordinate lush melodies of songs, locales, stars, and decorative art.

Table 14.1 Restrained vs. excessive wenyi.

Staging

Restraint

Excess

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Cloud of Romance (1977)

Literary treatment of locales: space as causal agent and fulfils metaphorical function: decrepit genteel mansion mirrored the psychological and emotional state of the characters Plan-séquence

Pragmatic treatment of spatial setups: customary locales with typical, generic functions: woods, beaches and neighborhoods for romantic encounters while living rooms, bedrooms, and coffee shops for argument and negotiations

Cinematography Pans, tilts, tracking shots Deep focus Long and medium shots

Point of view Peripheral decor used to spruce up ‘luxurious’ visual effects

Low angle

Quick zooms Soft focus, rack focus Medium shots, medium close-ups and close-ups Straight level, average height

Editing

ASL: 46 seconds Dissolves Few shot reverse shots

ASL: 10 seconds Cuts, fades and occasional montage Shot reverse shots

Sound Design

Sync sound Voiceover Minimal use of non-diegetic music; diegetic singing of folk songs Lacking sound effects

Dubbing Dialog Non-diegetic pop songs used for narrative transitions and as “dialogue breaks”

Subjective narration complemented with omniscient point of view Occasional unmotivated temporal ellipsis

Objective and linear narration with clear, complete character motivation

Narrative

Thunderous sound effects

Clear indication of time and space; Spatiotemporal continuity primarily carried by dialog

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Crouching Tiger as a contemporary wenyi Now, where does Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stand between these two wenyi styles? With the martial arts serving as the dominant form for the film, can Lee maneuver between these two distinct wenyi devices? Granted, CTHD is not a typical wuxia pian. Unlike the principles of a wuxia picture, which presents its opening fight straight away (in the first five minutes or at the very beginning), CTHD’s first fight was delayed for more than 10 minutes. The first 16 minutes of the film are composed of three sequences of deliberate visits, meetings (about retirement, of all things), arrivals, and more talking and meetings.21 The third sequence particularly features “drawing room conversation,” directing our attention to a typical interior wenyi setup of acquaintances, exchanges, and reunion. In order to match the somber opening Lee delivers a fine coordination of establishing, medium shots, and medium close-ups. The ASL of the opening is 6.4 seconds. Compared to, say, the 3 seconds ASL of the opening of King Hu’s 1967 classic Dragon Inn, the pace for this segment is really slow. And since the progression from master-medium-close-up is so clear, the pace moves like a wenyi more than a wuxia picture with their more percussive, jagged patterns. Furthermore, CTHD is structured with six major and two minor martial arts fights, and an exciting but frivolous chase in the desert. In between these fights and chases, we have many conversations and some love scenes, which are composed in ways similar to the opening sequences, with the love scenes featuring more close-ups, intending a clear emotional expression. For example, in the scene where Jen reunites with Lo, an American (medium) shot showing his entrance to her bedroom is immediately cut to close-ups of the couple embracing each other. This is where Ang Lee clearly adopts compositional devices from the excessive wenyi (Figures 14.1 and 14.2: CTHD vs. Cloud) But in another romantic scene between Li Mubai and Yu Xiulian, another ill-fated couple, Lee switches to the principles of restrained wenyi in order to show suppressed feelings of these two swordsmen (Figures 14.3 and 14.4: CTHD vs.

Figure 14.1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Source: ©2000 United China Vision Incorporated ©2000 UCV, LLC All rights reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Figure 14.2 Cloud of Romance, 1977

Figure 14.3 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Source: ©2000 United China Vision Incorporated ©2000 UCV, LLC All rights reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Figure 14.4 Spring in a Small Town, 1948

Spring). Following established patterns of wenyi, Lee pictures one hot-tempered couple with the excess and another “tame” couple with restraint. In addition to these two contraries, wenyi and wuxia complement each other in key moments of revelation. For instance, there is a moment of action choreography utilizing a tiny teacup during Yu’s second visit to Jen. Yu suspects Jen’s connection with Jade Fox and in order to prove her speculation, Yu performs a trick on Jen. In an elegant drawing room, Yu sits down with Jen and Jen’s mother at a round tea table after having a few polite exchanges. As they all begin to chat, Yu reveals the identity of the man murdered by Jade Fox. Jen’s mother responds with some mindless comment, meanwhile, Yu picks up her teacup, only to drop it surreptitiously. Jen instantly catches it from down under (still in the air), and flips it over back to the table, unnoticed by her mother. This is all done in two seconds and two very quick shots. The tacit martial arts “bickering” between Yu and Jen under the table marks a brilliant, but silent, interlude to an otherwise dull tea break. This spectacular act is not just a trial, but a secret communication. Yu uses physical kung fu to disclose her thoughts to Jen, who in turn, answers it in the same language. Wenyi above and wuxia below prove to accommodate, yet intensify/ synergize the mutual attraction and dependency of these two styles and these two xianü (Figures 14.5–14.7).

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Figure 14.5 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Figure 14.6 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Figure 14.7 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Source: ©2000 United China Vision Incorporated ©2000 UCV, LLC All rights reserved. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Renovating a classic22 Before CTHD, Ang Lee had already undertaken an experiment in revising the wenyi conventions. Eat Drink Man Woman is an example of a quiet exception taken to the wenyi classics. It appropriates a Mandarin classic, Our Sister Hedy (Tao Qin, MP & GI, 1957), from Hong Kong’s colonial treasury, a story about four young women living with their father. Like CTHD, EDMW reworks the classic according to standards of international art cinema. There is a recuperation of wenyi classics beloved by a generation of Chinese viewers, in order to address a world market for foreign language cinema and specifically the burgeoning popularity of Chineselanguage art film. Lee’s EDMW changed four daughters to three and made the father a famous chef. Moreover, what becomes of him, a semi-retired chef and widower? Given the romantic conundrums of his daughters, this is an embarrassment. Parents, let alone a widower, can never discuss romance and sex with their children. For Lee, parental “awkwardness” is the main emotion that binds all his stories of filial relations. The awkwardness is not just interpersonal, but historical. It comes from Chinese films’ long engagement with the problem of filial piety in changing times, and this is a perennial problem in wenyi. Lee sees it as the departure point where he comes to terms with the classic and its twisted presentation of filial relations, the emotional encounter of father and daughters. To Lee, this relationship is potentially romantic, though buried in silence and denial. Lee’s remake therefore brings notable disparities in narrative and style. For instance, in 1957 Hong Kong, father and daughters dwell in the same socioeconomic world, but Taiwan is layered with different, clashing temporalities.23 While Our Sister Hedy’s colonial setting is glamorous, cosmopolitan, Lee uses a sleepy, subdued Taipei as a backdrop for a love story of a father and his three daughters. In Our Sister Hedy, the quarrels of the daughters are primarily with each other, not with the father, while in EDMW, the father is the major problem. Compared to EDMW, Our Sister Hedy’s sibling differentiations are stark, putting up the girls for scrutiny on the same “block.” The sisters’ display betrays a patriarchal, and masculine, ideology; note the reverse-angle close-up of father admiring his daughters. Perhaps Tao’s film should have been called “My Daughter Hedy.” At the outset, the presentation of the sisters seems like a kind of test, like a Biblical parable. The full frontal aspect is striking: four lovely daughters on display. “Four thousand gold,” as the Chinese title says, suggests a beguiling treasury of feminine charm, but also four very willful, fractious, and not entirely dutiful offspring anxious to find individual happiness, not just the family’s. Display and incipient discord, nubility and filial piety, charming daughters and scheming sisters who compete for attention, even stealing boyfriends … such dichotomies are clearly transmitted in this portrait of a modern, urban, and very refined Chinese family. If Hedy qualifies as a female wenyi, Lee’s EDMW could be called a male wenyi because it shifts the emotional burden onto the father. Father takes center stage as the lead, not off stage as a spectator or (as in Hedy), referee. In contrast to Tao Qin’s emphasis on sorority display, it is Chef Zhu who receives a grand,

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theatrical introduction, along with his culinary martial arts. Ang Lee’s introduction of his three sisters is comparatively modest and economical, cross-cutting each daughter in characteristic activity: the eldest, Jialian listening to hymns on a faulty Walkman; Jiaqian in a high-rise office checking spreadsheets; and Jianing working at a branch of Wendy’s, the American hamburger chain.

Conclusion Capitalizing on a classic, Lee reactivates traditions that had been consigned to collectors, catalogs and film courses, delivering a new, improved commodity in accessible terms. What makes EDMW important is its ambition of reworking a model film and a cinematic tradition: the golden age of Mandarin films of the 1950s and 1960s.24 Lee revisits a classic wenyi and recuperates it within a contemporary Taipei setting. He not only adjusts the colonial modernity of Hedy and the ultrafeminine quality of the Cathay/MP & GI line, but goes even further, twisting and even deforming these elements to articulate his father complex. The “breezy” British colonialism is replaced with a cosmopolitan hodgepodge (Wendy’s, Toys R Us, French language labs); modernity turns to neoclassical nostalgia, and Cathay’s urban femininity becomes patriarchal ]emotion governs the physical thrusts and parries of wuxia action. Lee’s evocation of the wenyi traditions from the past, despite never having worked in the Chinese film industry, patently reconnects with an authoritative cinematic treasury. By reviving and renovating an old style for new audiences, Lee is able to talk back to the fathers of Chinese cinema and expose their denials and disguises. By “repatriating” wenyi, Lee also lays claim to a historical and authorial authenticity. Eat Drink Man Woman and his later sensation Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon present Lee as more than a craftsman working in Hollywood, but an auteur affiliating with a classical treasury and a cinematic patrimony.

Acknowledgments Research for this essay was funded by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. An early draft was delivered at “Film Style in Question: an International Symposium in Honor of David Bordwell,” University of Wisconsin – Madison, April 21–23, 2005. I thank Ben Singer, Ben Brewster, and Kelly Conway for their invitation. I also thank Wang Hu, Ng Hei Tung, and Erica Poon for their kind assistance on this project.

Notes 1 We should also note that the Taiwanese-language puppet film Legend of the Sacred Stone (2000, dir. Chris Huang) is a wuxia picture, while romantic Blue Gate Crossing (2001, dir. Yee Chih-yen), an urban melodrama about (homo)sexual initiation belongs to the category of wenyi. See Darrell Davis’ and Fran Martin’s discussion in this volume.

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2 Kill Bill I and II, Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and especially The Art of Action: Martial Arts in Motion Pictures, a documentary film narrated by Samuel Jackson (Columbia TriStar, 2002) all illustrate the martial arts craze in Hollywood. 3 See for instance, critic Nin Yuan’s complaint was entitled “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: an Ornamental Show with No Inner Substance” [Wo hu cang long: nei gong buzu de hua jiazi], Zhonghua wushu yuekan [Chinese martial arts monthly], no. 5 (May 2001): 50– 51. For more critiques on Crouching Tiger, see the following notes. 4 Negative or mixed reviews on the global success of Crouching Tiger can be seen in popular and academic publications across Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Mainland. For an English report on the ambivalence of Chinese critics, see Mark Landler, “‘Crouching Tiger’, Celebrated Everywhere but in China,” The New York Times (February 27, 2001), http:www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/oscars/27ARTS.html (accessed March 6, 2001). To cite a few examples in Chinese: Sam Ho, “Cramped Endeavors of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Wo hu cang long tiao bu chu kuang kuang de xiake xing), Hong Kong Economic Daily, C01 (July 8, 2000); Pang Hong, “Glory and embarrassment of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (Wo hu cong long de rongyao yu ganga), Journal of Hunan Mass Media Vocational Technical College 1, no. 2 (December 2001): 39–42 and Lan Zuwei, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Liberty Times, C30 (July 9, 2005). 5 For instance, see Chia-chi Wu, “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is not a Chinese Film,” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism 22, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 67. See also Ken-fang Lee, “Far Away, So Close: Cultural Translation in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 281–295. 6 Mao Tse-tung, “Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. 3 volumes (Beijing: People’s Press, 1966). 7 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 7. 8 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 45; and Cai Guorong, A Study on Modern Chinese Wenyi Pictures (Jingdai zhongguo wenyi dianying yanjiou) (Taipei: Film Library, 1987), 2. Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) also provides a succinct discussion on excess. 9 Cai, 3. 10 Ibid., 4–7. 11 Yu Dafu’s 1927 article “Film and literature and art” [Dianying yu wenyi], Yinxing [Silver star], no. 13 (1927) and Zheng Zhengqiu, “Problems of Sourcing in Chinese Shadow Play” (Zhougguo yingxi qucai de wenti) both reprinted in Chinese Silent Film (Zhongguo wusheng dianying) (Beijing: China Film Press, 1996), 447–450 and 290–293. 12 See the series of writings by Lee in relation to wenyi pictures such as “Major Issue for 1951: What Constitute [sic] a Good Wenyi Pian?” and “What Makes a Tragedy” and “The Art of Decoupage” in The Cinema of Lee Sun-fung, eds Wong Ain-ling and Sam Ho (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2004), 138–145. 13 Mao, 827. 14 These descriptions are not dissimilar to studies on melodrama in the US. But there is a distinction to be made here between a (Chinese) wenyi expression and a (Western) “melodramatic imagination,” a la Peter Brooks in his The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Western studies on melodrama value historicizing of sexual, class and racial politics, like Christine Gledhill’s edited volume Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987) and Jane Gaines, “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, eds J. Bratton et al. (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 231–245. Chinese writing on wenyi, however, avoids political interpretations. A psychoanalytic-Marxist exercise on Chinese wenyi would be quite unthinkable in Chinese criticism. Rather an incorrigible humanism is more often at work, as in the writing of Lee Sun-fung.

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15 Zhang Jingpei and Ang Lee, My Ten-Year Dream as a Filmmaker (Zhinian Shinian yi jao dianying meng) (Taipei: China Times, 2002), 389–394. 16 See Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Mingliang,” in Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University, 2005), 217–248. 17 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: California University Press, 2005), 194. See also James Udden, “Taiwanese Popular Cinema and the Strange Apprenticeship of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 127–134. 18 The film was not canonized until the early 1980s when the Chinese government began to open its pre-revolutionary cinematic treasure to the world. Hong Kong critics found the film amazing for it embodies a “high” wenyi style rarely seen in most wenyi films made in the 1960s and 1970s. 19 The awareness of a female subjectivity juxtaposed with a recessive masculine position surpassed any leftist blunt treatment of class, national, or gender struggles. This partly explains why it was Spring in a Small Town, not Street Angel, that was chosen for a remake by Tian Zhuangzhuang, the renowned Fifth Generation director. Tian’s remake is called Springtime in a Small Town (2002). 20 Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, 193. 21 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 216. 22 For a detailed analysis on Ang Lee’s remake of Our Sister Hedy, see Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, 201–215. 23 As noted, Jiaqian works for a national airline, while Jialian, the eldest, is a teacher at a top city high school. The youngest daughter, Jianing, works a McJob at Wendy’s, indicating both consumer globalization and international proletarianization of labor. Yet of all the sisters she is the most easygoing, freely taking the initiative in love and sex. 24 In this, Lee mediates between ordinary remakes and true homages like those of Tsai Ming-liang, whose direct references to classic films and performers are the foundation of his own idiosyncratic works.

Selected filmography Selected Chinese-language films Wei-yueh Chester Chen and Ru-shou Robert Chen

20:30:40 (Ershi, sanshi, sishi) (Sylvia Chang, Taiwan/Hong Kong, 2004) Ah Chung (Azhong) (Chang Tso-chi, Taiwan, 1996) All the King’s Men (Tianxia diyi) (King Hu, Taiwan, 1982) Asia the Invincible (Dongfang bu bai) (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong, 1992) Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche) (Wang Xiaoshuai, Taiwan/China, 2000) Best of Times, The (Meili shiguang) (Chang Tso-chi, Taiwan/Japan, 2002) Betelnut Beauty (Aini aiwo) (Lin Cheng-sheng, Taiwan/France, 2001) Blue Gate Crossing (Lanse damen) (Yee Chih-yen, Taiwan/France, 2002) Boys from Fengkuei, The (Fengkuei lai de ren) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1983) Brighter Summer Day, A (Gulingjie shaonian sharen shijian) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1991) Burning Dreams (Gewu zhongguo) (Wayne Peng, Taiwan, 2003) Catch (Guoshi wushuang) (Chen Yingrong, Taiwan, 2005) Cheerful Wind (Fenger ti ta cai) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1981) Chen Tsai-gen and his neighbors (Chen Caigen de linjumen) (Wu Yifeng, Taiwan, 1996) City of Sadness, A (Beiqing chengshi) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1989) Cloud of Romance (Woshi yipian yun) (Chen Honglie, Taiwan, 1977) Come Drink With Me (Da zuixia) (King Hu, Taiwan, 1965) Confucian Confusion (Duli shidai) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1994) Corner’s (Si jiaoluo) (Zero Chou, Taiwan, 2002) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong) (Ang Lee, United States/Taiwan/ China, 2000) Cute Girl (Jiushi liuliu de ta) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1980) Da cuo che also known as Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (1983, dir. Yu Kanping) Darkness and Light (Heian zhi guang) (Chang Tso-chi, Taiwan, 1999) Daughter of the Nile (Niluohe nüer) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1987) (Wu Nianzhen, Taiwan, 1994) Dou-san: A Borrowed Life (Dousang) Double Vision (Shuangtong) (Chen Kuo-fu, Taiwan/Hong Kong, 2002) Dragon Inn also known as Dragon Gate Inn (Longmen kezhan) (King Hu, Taiwan, 1967) Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/United States, 1987) Dust of Angels (Zhiyao weini huoyitian) (Xu Xiaoming, Taiwan, 1991) Eat Drink Man Woman (Yinshi nannü) (Ang Lee, Taiwan, 1994) Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji) (Chen Kaige, China/Hong Kong, 1993) Fate of Lee Khan, The (Yingchunge zhi fengbo) (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1973) Floating Leaf (Fuping) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1981, television drama)

218

Selected filmography

Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/Japan, 1998) Formula 17 (Shiqisui de tiankong) (Chen Yingrong, Taiwan, 2004) Four Moods, The (Xi nu ai le) (Bai Jingrui, King Hu, Li Hanxiang, Li Xing, Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1970) Gift of Life (Shengming) (Wu Yifeng, Taiwan, 2004) Golden Swallow (Jin yanzi) (Zhang Che, Hong Kong, 1968) Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nü) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/Japan, 1995) Goodbye Dragon Inn (Busan) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2003) Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo zaijian, nanguo) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1996) Green Bulldozer (Women jia zai Kangleli) (Huang Sunquan, Taiwan, 1997) Guopian Anna (Guopian Anna) (Wu Misen, Taiwan, 2004) Heirloom (Zhai bian) (Chen Zhengdao, Taiwan, 2005) Hero (Yingxiong) (Zhang Yimou, China, 2002) Hole, The (Dong) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 1998) Holiday Dreaming (Mengyou Xiaweiyi) (Xu Fujun, Taiwan, 2004) House of Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu) (Zhang Yimou, China, 2004) In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi) (Zhang Yi, Ke Yizheng, Tao Dechen, Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1982) In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua) (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 2000) Jade Bow, The (Yunhai yugongyuan) (Zhang Xinyan and Fu Qi, Hong Kong, 1966) Juveniser, The (Zhongshen dashi) (King Hu, Taiwan, 1981) Legend of the Mountain (Shanzhong chuanqi) (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1979) Legend of the Sacred Stone (Sheng shi chuanshuo) (Chris Huang, Taiwan, 2000) Let It Be (Wu mi le) (Yan Lanquan, and Zhuang Yizeng, Taiwan, 2005) Lonely Hearts Club (Jimo fangxin julebu) (Yee Chih-yen, Taiwan, 1995) Love Eterne, The (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai) ( Li Hanxiang, Hong Kong, 1963) Love of May (Wuyue zhi lian) (Xu Xiaoming, Taiwan, 2004) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1996) Mahjong (Majiang) Maiden’s Dance (Tongnü zhi wu) (Cao Ruiyuan, Taiwan, 2004, television drama) Melodie d’Helene, La (Xinlian) (Yin Chi, Taiwan, 2004) Millennium Mambo (Qianxi manbo) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France, 2001) Missing, The (Bujian) (Lee Kang-sheng, Taiwan, 2003) My Bittersweet Taiwan (Taiwan wangshi) (Zheng Dongtian, China, 2003) My Memories of Old Beijing (Chengnan jiushi) (Wu Yigong, China, 1983) My Whispering Plan (Sharen jihua) (Arthur Qu Youning, Taiwan, 2002) Nie Er (Nie Er) (Zheng Junli, China, 1959) One Armed Swordsman (Dubi dao) (Zhang Che, Hong Kong, 1967) Operation Cougar (Meizhou bao xingdong) (Zhang Yimou, Yang Fengliang, China, 1988) Orphan of Anyang, The (Anyang yinger) (Wang Chao, China, 2001) Our Sister Hedy (Si qianjin) (Tao Qin, Hong Kong, 1957) Painted Skin, The (Huapi zhi yinyang fawang) (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1992) The Passage (Jingguo) (Zheng Wentang, Taiwan, 2004) Personals, The (Zhenghun qishi) (Chen Kuo-fu, Taiwan, 1998) Platform (Zhantai) (Jia Zhangke, China, 2001) Promise, The (Wuji) (Chen Kaige, China/Hong Kong/Japan/South Korea, 2005) Puppetmaster, The (Xi meng rensheng) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1993) Pushing Hands (Tuishou) (Ang Lee, Taiwan, 1992) Radio Mihu (Buluo zhi yin) (Li Zhongwang, Taiwan, 2004)

Selected filmography 219 Raining in the Mountain (Kongshan lingyu) (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1979) Rebels of the Neon God (Qingshaonian Nezha) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1992) Red Lotus Society (Feixia Ada) (Stan Lai, Taiwan, 1994) River, The (Heliu) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1997) Sandwich Man, The (Erzi de da wan’ou) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zeng Zhuangxiang, Wan Ren, Taiwan, 1983) Seven Swords (Qi jian) (Tsui Hark, China/Hong Kong/South Korea, 2005) Shoe Fairy, The (Renyu duoduo) (Li Yunchan, Taiwan, 2005) Skywalk Is Gone, The (Tianqiao bu jian le) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2002) Spirit of the Sea (Hai hun) (Xu Tao, China, 1957) Splendid Float (Yan guang si she gewutuan) (Zero Chou, Taiwan, 2004) Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (Fei Mu, China, 1948) Story of Grandpa Elephant Lin Wang, The (Daxiang Lin Wang de gu shi) (Wang Tong, Taiwan, 2004) Summer at Grandpa’s, A (Dongdong de jiaqi) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1984) Swordsman (Xiaoao jianghu) (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong, 1990) Swordsman II (Xiaoao jianghu zhi dongfang bu bai) (Tsui Hark, Hong Kong, 1991) Taipei Story (Qingmei zhuma) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1985) Terrorizers, The (Kongbu fenzi) (Edward Yang, Taiwan, 1987) That Day, on the Beach (Haitan de yitian) (Edward Yang, Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1983) Three Times (Zuihao de shiguang) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/France, 2005) Time to Live, The Time to Die, The (Tongnian wangshi) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1985) Touch of Zen, A (Xianü) (King Hu, Taiwan, 1969) Turmoil on Mt. Ali (Alishan fengyun) (Zhang Che and Zhang Ying, Taiwan, 1949) Turn Left, Turn Right (Xiangzuozou xiangyouzou) (Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai, Hong Kong/Singapore, 2003) (Dai Liren, Taiwan, 2002) Twenty Something Taipei (Taibei wan jiu zhao wu) Valiant Ones, The (Zhonglie tu) (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1975) Viva Tonal—The Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai) (Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi, Taiwan, 2003) Vive l’amour (Aiqing wansui) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 1994) Voice of Waves (Nanian xiatian de langsheng) (Chen Xiuyu, Taiwan, 2002, television drama) Voices of Orchid Island (Lanyu guandian) (Hu Taili, Taiwan, 1993) Warriors of Heaven and Earth (Tiandi yingxiong) (He Ping, China/Hong Kong, 2003) Wayward Cloud, The (Tianbian yi duo yun) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2004) Wedding Banquet, The (Xiyan) (Ang Lee, Taiwan, 1993) What Time Is It There? (Ni nabian jidian) (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2001) Wheel of Life, The (Da lunhui) (King Hu, Li Xing and Bai Jingrui, Taiwan, 1983) Wrong Car, The (Da cuo che) also known as Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (Yu Kanping, Taiwan, 1983) Yiyi: A One and a Two (Yiyi) – – (Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000)

Chinese glossary Wei-yueh Chester Chen and Ru-shou Robert Chen

Selected names Bai Jingrui Bai Ying Bu Wancang Cai Guorong Chan, Jackie Chang Tso-chi Chang, Sylvia Chen Honglie Chen Huaien Chen Kaige Chen Kunhou Chen Kuo-fu Chen Yingrong Chen Zhengdao Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-p’ing Chou, Zero Chow Yun-fat Chow, Raymond Du Duzhi Fei Mu Guo Zhendi Han Yingjie He Ping Hou Hsiao-hsien Xu Xiaoming Hu Jingquan (King Hu) Hu Taili Huang, Chris Huang Jianye Jia Zhangke Jian Weisi

Chinese glossary 221 Ke Yizheng Kwan Tak-hing Lai, Stan Li Pingbing Li Yunchan Lee, Ang Lee, Bruce Lee, Sun-fung Leung, Tony Ka-fai Li Hanxiang Lee Kang-sheng Li Tianlu Li Xing Liao Qingsong Lin Cheng-sheng Liu, Rene Peng, Wayne Qiong Yao Arthur Qu Youning Run Run Shaw Sek Kei Sha Rongfeng Shangguan Lingfeng Shi Jun Tao Dechen Tao Qin To, Johnnie Tsai Ming-liang Tsui Hark Wai Ka-fai Wan Ren Wang Cao Wang Tong Wang Xiaoshuai Wong Kar-wai Wu Feng Wu Misen Wu Nianzhen Wu Yifeng Wu Yigong Xu Feng Xu Tao Yan Lanquan Yang Fengliang Yang Shiqi

222

Chinese glossary

Yang, Edward Yao Li Yee Chih-yen Yip, Tim Yu Kanping Yuen Wo-ping Zeng Zhuangxiang Zhan Hongzhi Zhang Che (Chang Cheh) Zhang Yi Zhang Yimou Zhang Ziyi Zheng Dongtian Zheng Junli Zheng Peipei (Cheng Peipei) Zhu Tianwen Zhuang Yizeng

Selected terms Bajajiang Budaixi Central Motion Picture Corporation Cloud Gate Company Gezaixi Golden Horse Film Festival Healthy realism Jianghu Kung fu Nü tongzhi Military wenyi Taiyu pian Tongzhi Union Film Company Wenyi White Terror Wuxia pian Xiangtu Xianü

Selected bibliography Wei-Yueh Chester Chen, Ru-shou Robert Chen and Darrell William Davis

English language sources Anderson, Benedict. “Tensions in Taiwan.” New Left Review 28 (July–August 2004): 19–42. Anderson, John. Edward Yang. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Anderson, Perry. “Stand-Off in Taiwan.” London Review of Books 26, no. 11 (June 3, 2004): 12–17. Berry, Chris and Feii Lu, eds. Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Berry, Michael. Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Bordwell, David. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. —— Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. —— “Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film.” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 141–162. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Braester, Yomi. “‘If We Could Remember Everything, We Would Be Able to Fly’: Taipei’s Cinematic Poetics of Demolition.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 29–61. Browne, Nick. “The Puppetmaster: The Poetics of Landscape.” Asian Cinema 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 28–38. Chan, Felicia. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability.” In Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry, 56–64. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Chang, Yvonne Sung-sheng. “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development.” In Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu, 13–25. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Chen, Leo Changjen. “The Frustrated Architect.” New Left Review 11 (September–October, 2001): 115–128. Chi, Robert. “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in City of Sadness.” Tamkang Review 29, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 43–84. —— “The New Taiwanese Documentary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 146–196. Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Taiwan and Its Spectacular Others: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Two Documentaries by Women Filmmakers from Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 16, no. 1 (2005): 99–104.

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Dariotis, Wei Ming and Eileen Fung. “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee.” In Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Lu, 187–220. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Davis, Darrell William. “A New Taiwan Person? A Conversation with Wu Nien-chen.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 717–734. —— “Borrowing Postcolonial: Dou-san and the Memory Mine.” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 237–266. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Frodon, Jean-Michel and Olivier Assayas. Hou Hsiao-hsien. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1999. Jameson, Fredric. “Remapping Taipei.” In The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 114–157. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Klein, Christina. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Diasporic Reading.” Cinema Journal 43, no. 4 (2004): 18–42. Kuo, Li-hsin. “Sentimentalism and De-Politicization: Some Problems of Documentary Culture in Contemporary Taiwan.” Documentary Box 25 (August 2005): 16–23. Lee, Ken-fang. “Far Away, So Close: Cultural Translation in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 281–295. Lew, Cynthia. “‘To Love, Honor and Dismay’: Subverting the Feminine in Ang Lee’s Trilogy of Resuscitated Patriarchs.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 1–60. Li, Ya-mei, ed. 20th Anniversary of Taiwan New Cinema (Taiwan xin dianying ershi nian). Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Office, 2002 (Chinese and English edition). Liao, Chaoyang. “Borrowed Modernity: History and the Subject in A Borrowed Life.” Boundary 2 24, no. 3 (1997): 225–245. Liao, Ping-hui. “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle.” Public Culture 5, no. 2 (1993): 281–296. Lu, Feii. “Another Cinema: Darkness and Light.” In Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu, 137–147. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Lu, Sheldon and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds. Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. London: University of Cambridge Press, 2001. Marchetti, Gina. From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989–1997. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Martin, Fran. “The China Simulacrum: Genre, Feminism, and Pan-Chinese Cultural Politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” In Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, eds Chris Berry and Feii Lu, 149–159. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. —— “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria.” Senses of Cinema 27 (2003), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/tsai_european_undead.html (accessed October 25, 2006). —— Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Nornes, Abe Mark and Yueh-yu Yeh. “Narrating National Sadness: Cinematic Mapping and Hypertextual Dispersion.” CinemaSpace, Film Studies Program, University of California, Berkeley (1998), http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness/table.html (accessed October 25, 2006).

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Reynaud, Bérénice. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Rodriguez, Hector. “Questions of Chinese Aesthetics: Film Form and Narrative Space in the Cinema of King Hu.” Cinema Journal 38, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 73–96. Rojas, Carlos. “‘Nezha Was Here’: Structures of Dis/placement in Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 63–89. Schamus, James. “Aesthetic Identities: A Response to Kenneth Chan and Christina Klein.” Cinema Journal 43, no. 4 (2004): 43–52. Shen, Shiao-ying. “Locating Feminine Writing in Taiwan Cinema: A Study of Yang Huishan’s Body and Sylvia Chang’s Siao Yu.” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 267–279. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Shi, Shu-mei. “Globalization and Minoritization: Ang Lee and the Politics of Flexibility.” New Formations 40 (2000): 87–101. Sunshine, Linda, ed. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A Portrait of the Ang Lee Film. New York: New Market Press, 2000. Tay, William. “The Ideology of Initiation in the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” In New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, eds Nick Browne et al., 151–159. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Teo, Stephen. “King Hu.” Senses of Cinema 21 (2002), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/directors/02/hu.html (accessed October 25, 2006). —— “Only the Valiant: King Hu and His Cinema Opera.” In Transcending the Times: King Hu and Eileen Chang, ed. Law Kar, 19–20. Hong Kong: The 22nd Hong Kong International Film Festival, Provisional Urban Council of Hong Kong, 1998. Udden, James. “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style.” Asian Cinema 13, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 54–75. —— “Taiwanese Popular Cinema and the Strange Apprenticeship of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 127–134. Wang, Ban. “Black Holes of Globalization: Critique of the New Millennium in Taiwan Cinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 90–119. Wei, Ti. “Reassessing the Historical Significance of Taiwanese New Cinema in the Context of Globalization.” In 20th Anniversary of Taiwan New Cinema, ed. Li Ya-mei, 14–20. Taipei: Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 2002. Wu, Chia-chi. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is not a Chinese Film.” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism 22, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 67–79. Wu, Mei-ling. “Postsadness Taiwan New Cinema: Eat, Drink, Everyman, Everywoman.” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 76–95. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu. “Elvis, Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: American Music and Neocolonialism in Taiwan Cinema.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–28. —— “Poetics and Politics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films.” In Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 163–185. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu and Darrell William Davis. Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Yip, June. Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Chinese language sources History, Criticism and Studies on Directors Cai, Guorong. A Study on Modern Chinese Wenyi Pictures (Jingdai zhongguo wenyi dianying yanjiou). Taipei: Film Library, 1987. Chen, Feibao. The Art of Taiwan Film Directors (Taiwan dianying daoyan yishu). Taipei: Asia Pacific Press, 2000. Chen, Ru-shou. “A Report on Taiwanese Film Culture in the Nineties” (Jiuling niandai taiwan dianying wenhua shengtai diaocha baogao). Film Appreciation Journal, no. 75 (May– June 1995): 98–112. —— Cinema Empire (Dianying diguo). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1994. —— The Historical-Cultural Experiences of Taiwan New Cinema (Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jing yan). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1993. Chen, Ru-shou and Jing-feng Liao, eds. In Search of Taipei in Cinema (Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taipei). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1995. Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-ping. Auteurs and Genres in the Cinema of Taiwan and Hong Kong (Tai gang dianying zhong de zuozhe yu leixing). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1995. —— Taiwan Cinema of the 1990s: The New New Wave (Taiwan dianying jiushi xin xin langchao). Taipei: Rye Field, 2002. —— Taiwan New Cinema (Taiwan xin dianying). Taipei: China Times Publishing Company, 1988. Du, Yunzhi. A History of Cinema in the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo dianying shi). Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Print Press, 1988. Huang, Edwin Jianye. The Films of Edward Yang (Yang Dechang dianying yanjiu). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1995. Huang, Edwin Jianye et al., eds. Chronicles of Taiwan Cinema, 1898–2000 (Kua shiji taiwan dianying shilu, 1898–2000). Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, 2005. Huang, Ren. A History of Taiwan Film Criticism, Sixty Years (Taiwan yingping liushi nian: Taiwan yingping shihua). Taipei: Asia Pacific Press, 2004. —— Li Xing and His Films, Fifty Years (Xing zhe ying ji: Li Xing dianying wushi nian). Taipei: China Times Publishing Company, 1999. —— The Legend of Xin Qi (Xin Qi de chuan qi). Taipei: Asia Pacific Press, 2005. —— The Sad Story of Taiwanese-Language Films (Bei qing taiyu pian). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1994. Huang, Ren and Wang Wei, eds. A History of Taiwan Cinema, One Hundred Years (Taiwan dianying bainian shihua). Taipei: Chinese Film Critics Society, 2004. Lee, Daw-ming. “A History of Taiwan Film: Chapter One: 1900–1915” (Taiwan dianyingshi diyi zhang: 1900–1915). Film Appreciation Journal, no. 73 (January 1995): 28–44. —— “The Representation of Taiwan Aborigines in Films and Television in the Past One Hundred Years” (Jin yibai nian lai taiwan dianying dianshi meiti dui taiwan yuanzhumin de chengxian). Film Appreciation Journal, no. 3 (May 1994): 59–64. Lee, Tiandow, ed. Discourses of Contemporary Chinese-Language Cinema (Dangdai huayu dianying lunshu). Taipei: China Times Publishing, 1996. —— Taiwan Cinema, Society and History (Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi). Taipei: Yangzhi Press, 1997. Lee, Yungchuan. Taiwanese Cinema: An Illustrated History (Taiwan dianying yue liang). Taipei: Yushanshe Press, 1998.

Selected bibliography

227

Li, Qingzhi, ed. Movie Theatres in Taipei: A City Tour in Films (Taipei dianying yuan: chengshi dianying kongjian shendu daoyou). Taipei: Meta Media, 1998. Li, Youxin, ed. Six Major Directors from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Gantai liu da daoyan). Taipei: Independent News Publications, 1986. Liang, Xinhua and Mi Zou, eds. Death of the New Cinema (Xin dianying zhi si). Taipei: Tangshan Press, 1987. Liao, Jing-feng. Disappearing Images: Cinematic Representation and Cultural Identity of Taiwanese Language Films (Xiao shi de yingxiang: taiyu pian de dianying zaixian yu wenhua rentong). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 2001. Lin, Wenchi. “History, Space, Family/Country in Taiwan Urban Cinema of the 1990s” (Jiushi niandai taiwan dushi dianying zhong de lishi, kongjian yu jia/guo). Chung-wai Literary Monthly 27, no. 5 (October 1998): 99–119. Lin, Wenchi, Shao-yin Shen, and Jerome Chenya Li. Passionate Detachment: The Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Xi lian renshen: Hou Hsiao-hsien dianying yanjiu). Taipei: Rye Field, 2000. Liu, Xiancheng, ed. History, Authors and Cultural Representation in Chinese-Language Films (Huayu dianying de lishi, zuozhe yu wenhua rentong). Taipei: Asia Pacific Press, 2001. Lu, Feii. Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, Aesthetics, 1949–1994 (Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1998. Taiwan Cinema Year Book 1989–2005 (Zhonghua mingguo dianying nian jian). Taipei: Chinese Taipei Film Archive. Tay, William, ed. Cultural Criticism and Chinese-Language Cinema (Wenhua piping yu huayu dianying). Taipei: Rye Field, 1995. Wei, Ti. “From Local to Global: A Critique of the Globalization of Taiwan Cinema” (Cong zaidi zouxiang quanqiu: taiwan dianying quanqiuhua de licheng yu leixing chutan). Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies no. 56 (December 2004): 65–92. Wen, Tianxiang. Tsai Ming-liang and His Films (Tsai Ming-liang de xinling changyu). Taipei: Henxing Press, 2002. Yamada, Koichi and Udagawa Koyo. A Touch of King Hu (Hu Jianquan wuxia dianying zuofa). Chinese trans., Lai Ho and Ma Sung-chi. Hong Kong: Zhengwen Press, 1998. Ye, Longyan. A History of Taiwan Cinema in the Japanese Colonial Era (Rizhi shiqi Taiwan dianying shi). Taipei: Yushanshe Press, 1998. —— Taiwan Cinema of the 1970s (Qishi niandai taiwan dianying shi). Hsin-chu: Hsin-chu Museum of Moving Images, 2002. —— Taiwan Cinema of the 1980s (Bashi niandai Taiwan dianying shi). Hsin-chu: Hsin-chu Museum of Moving Images, 2004. —— The Rise and Fall of Taiwanese-Language Films (Zheng zong taiyu dianying xing shuai). Taipei: Boyang Press, 1999. —— The Story of Ximending (Ximending de gushi). Taipei: Boyang Press, 1999. Yeh, Yueh-yu. “Why Can’t Women Enter History? Reviewing City of Sadness” (Nüren zhende wufa jinru lishi ma?). Contemporary Monthly, no. 101 (September 1994): 64–85. Zhang, Jingpei and Ang Lee. My Ten-Year Dream as a Filmmaker (Shinian yijiao dianying meng). Taipei: Times Culture, 2002.

228

Selected bibliography

Screenplays, with interviews, commentary, production notes Chen, Baoxu. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (Yin shi nan nu). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1994. Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-ping and Tsai Ming-liang. The Hole (Dong). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1998. —— The River (Heliu). Taipei: Crown Press, 1997. Chu, Tianwen, ed. Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu). Taipei: Rye Field, 1992. Chu, Tianwen and Wu Nianzhen. City of Sadness (Bei qing chengshi). Taipei: Sansan Books, 1989. —— Dust in the Wind (Nian nian fengcheng). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1992. Feng, Guangyuan. Pushing Hands (Tui shou). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1993. Hou, Hsiao-hsien and Chu Tianwen. Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua dianying quan jilu). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1998. Hou, Hsiao-hsien, Chu Tianwen, and Wu Nianzhen. The Puppetmaster (Xi meng renshen juben). Taipei: Rye Field, 1993. Tsai, Ming-liang. Rebels of the Neon God (Qing shaonian naza). Taipei: Yuan-liou Publishing Company, 1992. —— What Time Is It There? (Ni na bian ji dian?). Taipei: Aquaris, 2002. Wu, Nianzhen. Dousan (Dousan juben). Taipei: Rye Field, 1994. Yang, Edward. A Confucian Confusion (Duli shidai). Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1994.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations 20:30:40 132, 152, 153 1492: Conquest of Paradise 109 aboriginal movement 19 aborigines 20–2 activists 56 African Nights 151 Aiqing wansui (Vive l’amour) 57, 121 Alishan fengyun (Turmoil on Mt. Ali) 1 allegorical interpretation 84–5 allegory 48, 75–6 All the King’s Men (Tianxia diyi) 168 All Under One Roof 151 Anderson, Benedict 46, 199 Angel Sanctuary (Tianshi jinliequ) 53–4 animation xii APFF (Asian-Pacific Film Festival) 77 Arc Light Films 137, 149–50 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat 110 art cinema 87, 88–9, 131, 132 “artivist villages” 53, 59n3 The Art of Action 215n2 Asia-Pacific Film Festival (APFF) 77 Asia the Invincible 204 Assayas, Olivier 90n7 Aumont, Jacques 172 auteurism 78 awards: see festival prizes Baozangyan 51–3, 58 Barthes, Roland 174 Battleship Potemkin 61, 64 Baudrillard, Jean 101 Bazin, Andre 101, 110 Beautiful Life 151 Beijing Bicycle 150 Benshoff, Harry 45

Berenstein, Rhona 45 Berlin Film Festival 75, 79 Berry, Chris 78, 82–3 The Best of Times (Meili shiguang) 33–49, 88 Betelnut Beauty 132 Blue Gate Crossing 5, 131, 133–42, 150–3, 154, 214n1 body images 97 Bordwell, David 163, 165, 166, 192, 197, 207, 208 The Boys from Fengkuei 80, 185, 198 A Brighter Summer Day 85, 193 budaixi (hand puppets) 146–9 Bujian (The Missing) 124, 126, 127, 128 Buluo zhi yin (Radio Mihu) xii Burch, Noël 172–3 Burning Dreams (Gewu zhongguo) 5 Busan (Goodbye Dragon Inn) 57, 124, 127, 128, 173–82, 194 Bu Wancang 1 cable television 131 Café Lumiere xi, xii, 6, 75, 183 Cai Guorong 205, 206 camera movement 183–97 camp: dimension of 121 camp-caricature 154–5 Cantonese language 28 cash rewards 86, 88 Catch 154–5 Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC) 77, 206 Certeau, Michel de 27 Chang, Sylvia 152, 168–9 Chang Tso-chi 33, 86, 88; see also The Best of Times Chaplin, Charlie 181

230

Index

Charlie’s Angels 106n6 Charney, Leo 119 Cheerful Wind 198 Chen, D. J. 154 Chen Bolin 138, 150 Chen Caigen de linjumen (Chen Tsai-gen and his Neighbors) 52 Chen Chunyu 24, 25, 26, 27 Chengnan jiushi (My Memories of Old Beijing) 70 Cheng Pei Pei 162, 164, 168 Chen Huaien 190 Chen Kaige 95 Chen Kunhou 76 Chen Kuo-fu 76, 86, 108, 111, 118, 119, 122–4, 132 Chen Shui-bian 4, 12n13 Chen Tsai-gen and his Neighbors (Chen Caigen de linjumen) 52 Chia-chi Wu 4 Chiao Hsiung-p’ing, Peggy 77–8, 81, 87, 137, 149, 150, 151, 192 China Night (film) 64 “China Night” (song) 64–5 China Times Express Awards 82, 83 Chou, Zero 20 Chow, Rey 21, 26, 28 Chow, Raymond 168 Chu, Arthur 51, 57; see also My Whispering Plan (Sharen jihua) Chunchun 24, 25, 26 cinema: and the city 116–18, 120–1; as a teaching device 1–2 cities: and cinema 116–18, 120–1 city films 118–19 A City of Sadness 48, 71, 78, 80, 84, 193, 194, 198 City Zero (Chenshi gui ling) 118 Clifford, James 29 Cloud Gate Dance Company 199 Cloud of Romance 207–8, 210 Clover, Carol 45 CMPC (Central Motion Picture Corporation) 77, 206 colonial disjuncture 45–6 colonialism 65 colonization 1–2, 25–6 Columbia Records Company 24 Combs, Richard 167 Come Drink With Me (Da zuixia) 161, 162–4 commercialization 87 computer graphics technology 101 Confucian Confusion 193 Corner’s 20 counter-colonial mimicry 72

Creed, Barbara 45 criticism 77–8, 83–5, 86–7 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 70, 95–105, 132, 141, 146, 147, 203–5, 209–11, 212 cultural elitism 87 cultural movements 25 Cute Girl 198 cyberspace: and haptic qi space 99–102 Da cuo che (The Wrong Car) 58 Dai Bofen 24 dantian qi (inner force) 98, 162 Daoist temple 112, 123 Darkness and Light (Heian zhi guang) 33, 34, 88, 194 Daughter of the Nile 190, 198 The Death of New Cinema 83 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 2 demonstrations 18, 19 Deng Yuxian 26 despecification 140–1 digital images 113 Dissanayake, Wimal 78 distribution networks 95 diversity: of Cinema Taiwan 4–6 documentaries xii, 17, 18–19; see also Corner’s; Viva Tonal – The Dance Age; Voices of Orchid Island domestic production (guopian) 2–3, 5, 152 Dong (The Hole) 45, 122, 124, 127, 150, 197 dorama (Japanese trendy drama) 139, 151 Double Vision Research Handbook 112, 113 Double Vision (Shuangtong) 5, 46, 108–15, 123, 125, 132 Dou-san: A Borrowed Life xiii DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) 2 DPP government: challenges to xii Dragon Gate Inn 165–6, 174, 178 The Dream (K K’um) 168 dualism 109 Du Duzhi 76 Dust in the Wind 79, 80, 198 Dust of Angels 193–4 Eat Drink Man Woman 213–14 economic slowdown 5 Eisenstein, Sergei 63, 64 elections, presidental 3–4 Elley, Derek 152–3 ethereal flight (qing gong) 95–105 ethnographic documentaries 20–2 exploitation 20–1 The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine 97

Index 231 eyewitnesses 18–19 fantastic genre 45, 48–9 Farewell My Concubine 70 The Fate of Lee Khan (Yinchunge zhi fengbo) 167, 168 female homosexuality 136–8 Festival International Du Cinéma Chinois 80–2 Festival of Three Continents, Nantes 80 festival prizes 78, 86 festivals 2, 75, 77, 79–83, 117 festival writers 78 Fifth Generation films 67 fighting 97–8 film culture 4–6 film festival audiences 149–50 film festivals: see festivals films: city 118–19; kung fu 97–8; lesbian 22–3, 136–8; local 2–3, 131–2; martial arts 97–8, 100, 215n2; number of xi; pan-Asian entertainment 132; Taipei 51–9; Taiwanese language 6, 18; wenyi 203, 204–14; wuxia 95–105, 161, 203–4; see also individual titles film studies 87; institutionalization of 6 Flache Pyramid 150 flight: depiction of 96–7; imagination of 102–3 Floating Leaf 80 Flowers of Shanghai 190, 198 folk heroes 1–2 Formula 17 5, 149, 154, 155 Forrest Gump 113 Foucault, Michel 121 The Four Moods (Xi nu ai le) 167 frame: concept of 172–3 freedom of expression xi funding 8, 95, 105 gay culture documentaries 22–3 gay romantic comedy 154–5 gaze 20–1 gender: performance of xi genre mixing 45 ghost genre 45–6 Gift 151 Gift of Life (Shengmin) 5 Global Hollywood 109 globalization 95–6, 102–5, 116 Golden Harvest Company 168 Golden Horse Awards 2 Golden Horse Film Festival 118 Golden Swallow 166

Goodbye Dragon Inn (Busan) 57, 124, 127, 128, 173–82, 194 Goodbye South, Goodbye 58 Good Men, Good Women 8, 48, 183–90, 192, 198 grassroots vision 18–19, 30 Great Teacher Onizuka (GTO) 151 Green Bulldozer (Women jia zai Kangleli) 52 Green Group (lüse xiaozu) 19 Grierson, John 3 Griffith, D. W. 64, 181 Growing Up 77 GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) 151 Guitry, Sacha 174 Gunn, Edward 27 Guo Boxiu 56 Guopian Anna 2–3 guopian (domestic production) 2–3, 5, 152 Guotai Studio 1 Guo Zhendi 23 Guo Zhiyuan 26 hand puppets (budaixi) 146–9 Hansen, Miriam 117, 119 Hanshi tie (Poems of the Cold-Food Festival) xii–xiii Han Yingjie 164 Han Yunzhong 190 Happy Mania 151 haptic qi space: and cyberspace 99–102 Hard Core 98 ha-ri 151 Harry Potter series 113, 204 Harvey, David 110 Hasumi, Shigehiko 90n7 haunted realism 48 haunted time 46–9 Hawks, Howard 174 headhunters 1 “healthy realism” 205, 206 Heirloom 154 Hero 95, 151, 203 heterogeneity: of Cinema Taiwan 4–6 “high concept” 109 historiographic documentaries 23–30 history: of Taiwan cinema 75–6 Hitchcock, Alfred 181 The Hole (Dong) 45, 122, 124, 127, 150, 197 Holiday Dreaming 149 Hollywood: domination by 86, 89, 105, 109, 131; influence of 64, 67 Hong Kong 73 Hong Kong International Film Festival 79 Hong Sang-soo 195–6, 197

232

Index

horror genre 45–6, 108, 168 Hou Hsiao-hsien: changing style 183–4, 190–2, 197–200; criticisms of 83–5; current challenges xi; Festival of Three Continents, Nantes 80; financing 85–6, 132; and My Bittersweet Taiwan 69; realism 48; Taiwanese post-coloniality xii–xiii; Taiwan New Cinema 76; see also Café Lumiere; A City of Sadness; Good Men, Good Women; The Puppetmaster House of Flying Daggers 95, 102, 203, 215n2 Huang, Chris 147 Huang Dan 72, 73 Hu Jintao 12n10 humanism 71 Hu Taili 20 identification issues xii identity 29–30, 80–1 inner force (dantian qi) 98, 162 In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi) 17, 76, 77 institutional status 87–8 In the Mood for Love 203 Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives 174 Iwai Shunji 151 The Jade Bow 162 Jameson, Frederic xiii, 7, 123 Japan: relationship with Taiwan xii–xiii Japanese colonization 29 “Japaneseness” 138–9 Japanese trendy drama (dorama) 139, 151 Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels 192 Jiang Wenli 70 Jiang Zemin 204 Jian Weisi 23 Jia Zhangke 67, 194 Jump! Boys 12n13 junkspace 122, 123 Jurassic Park 110, 114 The Juveniser (Zhongshen dashi) 168 Kashiwano, Shojiro 24, 25, 26, 29 Ke Yizheng 76 Kiarostami, Abbas 174 Kill Bill I and II 215n2 King Hu Jinquan 102, 161, 164–9, 174 K K’um (The Dream) 168 KMT (Kuomintang, Nationalists) 1–2, 4 Koolhaas, Rem 122, 127 Kore-eda, Hirokazu 194, 197, 198 kung fu films 28, 97–8

Kuntzel, Thierry 174 Kuomintang (Nationalists, KMT) 1–2, 4 Kuriyama, Shigehisa 97 Kwan Tak-hing 161 Lai Shengchuan (Stan Lai) 55, 58 La Melodie d’Helene 149 Lang, Fritz 174 The Last Emperor 190 Lee, Ang 2, 99–100, 104, 132, 146, 204–5, 206–7, 213–14 Lee, Mark Pingbin 76, 198 Lee Kang-sheng 118, 124 Lee Kwang-mo 194, 197 Lee Sun-fung 205–6 Lee Teng-hui 12n13, 119 Legend of the Mountain (Shanzhong chuanqi) 168 Legend of the Sacred Stone (Sheng shi chuanshuo) 5, 146, 147–9, 153, 214n1 lesbian films 22–3, 136–8 Let It be (Wu mi le, aka The Last Rice Growers) xii, 5 Letter from an Unknown Woman 207 Levi-Strauss, Claude 110 Liang Shambo yu Zhu Yingtai (The Love Eterne) 164 Liao, Jimmy 132 Liao Ping-hui 83–4 Liao Qinsong 76 Lien Chan 12n10 The Life of an American Fireman 180 light 100–1 Li Hanxiang 164 Lim, Bliss Cua 33, 46, 48 Lin Cheng-sheng 86 Lin Jialong 3 Lin Wenchi 118 Li Qingzhi 119–20 Li Xianglan 64 Li Youxin (Alphonse Youth-Leigh) 178 local films 2–3, 131–2 logos 180 Lo Kwai-Cheung 28 long takes 191–8, 207 Long Vacation 151 Lord of the Rings 204 The Love Eterne (Liang Shambo yu Zhu Yingtai) 164 Love Generation 151 Love Letter 151 Love of May 150 Lu, Feii 33, 34 Lumière Brothers 114

Index 233 Maborosi 194, 198 Mahjong 193 The Maidens’ Dance 137 Mainland China cinema 60–73 Majo no Joken (“Witches on Line”) 151 Mandarin, accented 70–1 manga culture 53–4 Mao Zedung 205 “The March of the Volunteers” 63 marketing 85–6 martial arts films 97–8, 100, 215n2 Marxist cultural theory 83 mass media 86–7 The Matrix 99–100, 101 Ma Ying-jeou 12n13 Méliès, George 114 memory: sites of 53, 56 Mildred Pierce 207 “military wenyi” 205 minimalism: pan-East Asian 193 minority discourse 28–9 The Missing (Bujian) 124, 126, 127, 128 modernity 48–9 “money shot” 98 Morris, Meaghan 105 Morse, Margaret 117 La Mort du Duc de Guise 180 Mourgues, Nicole de 172 Movie Theaters in Taipei (Taibei dianying yuan) 118 Müller, Marco 78 multicoding 141–2 My Bittersweet Taiwan (Taiwan wangshi) 61, 62, 69–73 My Memories of Old Beijing (Chengnan jiushi) 70 mythic legends series xii My Whispering Plan (Sharen jihua) 51–9 Nantes Festival 80–1 Naomi 151 narrative method 110 national cinema 60, 71, 73, 78 national identity 6 Nationalists (Kuomintang) 1–2 nationality 80–1 (trans)national Taiwan cinema 131–42 nation-state 103–4 nativization movement 77 New Cinema 2, 4, 17–18, 48, 119–20, 206 newcomer policy 77 new documentaries 17 New Wave 78, 131, 132 Ng Ho 97

niche audiences 149 Nichols, Bill 27, 30 Nie Er 63–4 Nora, Pierre 53 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 118–19 One Man’s Feelings for Both Sides 72 On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate 195, 196, 197 opening titles: Goodbye Dragon Inn 173–82 Operation Cougar (Meizhou bao xingdong) 61–2, 66–9 Orchid Island see Voices of Orchid Island The Orphan of Anyang 194 Ota Toru 151 Our Sister Hedy 213 Ozu Yasujiro 75, 78, 183 The Painted Skin (Huapi zhi yinyang fawang) 168 pan-Asian entertainment films 132 pan-East Asian minimalism 193 The Passage (Jing Guo) xiv, xv “pause–thrust–pause” structure 163–4 performativity 22–3 The Personals (Zhenghun qishi) 122–3 Pili International Multimedia Company 146–7 Platform 194 Plummer, Ken 137 pluralism: of Cinema Taiwan 5–6 Poems of the Cold-Food Festival (Hanshi tie) xii–xiii political commentaries 3–4 politics: and Cinema Taiwan 6–7 Porter, Edwin S. 180 post-coloniality xiii, 47, 83, 85 postmodernism 7, 47 post-sadness era 4 The Power of Kangwon Province 195 presidential elections: (2004) 3–4 Preston, Scott 167 productions: number of xi The Promise 95 propaganda 19 Proust, Francoise 46 Public Culture 83–4 public service announcement films 2–3 The Puppetmaster (Xi meng rensheng) xiii, 69, 147, 184, 188, 198, 201n8 puppets 146–9 Pyramid Productions 137 qi (energy) 98, 162

234

Index

qing gong (ethereal flight) 95–105 Qiong Yao 206 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 154 Rabinowitz, Paula 23 Radio Mihu (Buluo zhi yin) xii Raining in the Mountain (Kongshan lingyu) 168, 169 random access structures 110 Rayns, Tony 78, 80, 165 realism 33–4, 45, 46–9 Rebels of the Neon God 130n22, 194 Red Lotus Society (Feixia Ada) 46, 47, 55 reflexivity 19–23 ren 71, 73 representational style, in documentaries 19 Reynaud, Bérénice 78 The River 194 Rossellini, Roberto 117 Rotterdam International Film Festival 80 Routes 29 Ruttmann, Walter 117, 119, 122 sadness, ethos of 4, 32n29 The Sandwich Man 17, 77 Sang, Tze-lan D. 135 Sang-soo, Hong 194 Sassen, Saskia 120 Sato Tadao 78 Schamus, James 105 schoolgirl romance narrative 136 Schwartz, Vanessa 119 Sek Kei 164 Sense and Sensibility 132 Seven Swords 95 sex: performance of xi Sex in the City 154 Shanghai Night 64 Shaw Brothers 164, 165 Shin Sang-ok 168 Shizuko Inoh, Annie 190 The Shoe Fairy 154 Shomuni 151 shot–reverse-shot convention 33–4 Shu Qi 78 signature concept 179–81 “simularity”: notion of 99 Singer, Ben 205 sites of memory 53, 56 Sixth Generation cinema 67 The Skywalk is Gone (Tianqiao bu jian le) 57, 121 slum demolition 51–2 social integration xii

social movements 25 social vision 18–19 Son’s Big Doll (Erzi de da wan’ou) 17 soundtracks 71 Soyoung, Kim 45 special effects 109–10, 113–15, 162 “spectral time” 46 The Spectre of Comparisons 46 Spirit of the Sea (Hai hun) 61, 62–6, 70, 71 Splendid Float (Yan guang si she gewutuan) 5 Spring in a Small Town 207, 211 Springtime in my Hometown 194 Stam, Robert 109 static cameras: see camera movement Stone Dream 12n13 The Story of Grandpa Elephant Lin Wang xii Street Fighter 100 sub-national status 79 subsidy policy 86, 88 A Summer at Grandpa’s 48, 80, 198, 201n8 Swordsman (Xiaoao jianghu) 168, 204 Tabloid 151 Taipei 7, 52–3, 58, 118–20, 140, 150–1 Taipei films 51–9 Taipei Story 193 Taiwan: political commentaries 3–4 Taiwan Aborigine Collective: mythic legends series xii Taiwanese language 25, 27–8 Taiwanese language films 6, 18 “Taiwaneseness” 141 Taiwan New Cinema: allegorical interpretation 84–5; and bourgeois class 17–18; and city films 119–20; criticism 83–5, 86–7; domestic reception 83–5; and film festivals 2, 79–83; and Formula 17 154; historiographical significance 76– 7; marketing 85–6; political significance 4; and realism 48; and wenyi 206 Taiwan Studio 1 “Tales of Three Cities” series 150 talking heads 20 “Talks at the Ya’an Forum on Literature and Art” 205 Tao, Jim 76 Taoist temple 112, 123 technological advances 109–10 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 100 television: cable 131 television series 151 temple: in World Tower 112 Teo, Stephen 166, 168 The Terrorizers xiii, 77, 79, 125, 193

Index 235 That Day, On the Beach 193 Three Dots Entertainment154–5 Three Times 6 Tianshi jinliequ (Angel Sanctuary) 53–4 Tianxia diyi (All the King’s Men) 168 The Time to Live, The Time to Die 70, 198 Titanic 204 To, Johnnie 132 Tokyo Love Story 151 tomboy narrative 136–8 A Touch of Zen (Xianü) 102, 166–8 transnational funding 95 transnationality 103–4 (trans)national Taiwan cinema 131–42 The True Story of Wong Fei Hung 161–2 Tsai Ming-liang: city films 118, 119, 121–2, 124, 127; finance 132; in Goodbye Dragon Inn titles 178, 181; influence of Hou Hsiao-hsien 197; international fame 86; locations 57, 58, 121–2, 127; long-take style 194; see also Goodbye Dragon Inn; The Hole; The Wayward Cloud; What Time Is It There? Tsing, Anna 116 Tsui Hark 95, 102 Turmoil on Mt. Ali (Alishan fengyun) 1 Turning Gate 195, 196, 197 Turn Left, Turn Right 132 Tweedie, James 112 Twenty Something Taipei (Taibei wan jiu zhao wu) 58 Udden, James 207 The Unfilial Daughter 137 unification 72 Union Film Company 165, 168 The Valiant Ones (Zhonglie tu) 168 Vancouver International Film Festival 80 Venice Film Festival 78 “vernacular modernism” 117 Vertov, Dziga 119, 122 veterans’ villages 51, 52, 53, 58 video games 100 Viva Tonal – The Dance Age (Tiaowu shidai) 5, 23–30 Vive l’amour (Aiqing wansui) 57, 121 Voice of Waves 137 voice-overs 20, 25 Voices of Orchid Island 20–2 Wai Ka-fai 132 Wang Chao 194 Wang Chaohua 4

Wang Renyin 72 Wang Tong 76 Wang Wei 118 Wang Xiaoshuai 150 Wan Ren 57, 76 Wanxiang 1 Warriors of Heaven and Earth 95 The Wayward Cloud xi, 6, 75 The Wedding Banquet 141 Wei Ti 86–7, 132 Wei Yinbing 24 Welles, Orson 174 wenyi films 203, 204–14 Western film tradition influence 18 What Time Is It There? (Ni nabian jidian) 47, 57, 194, 195 The Wheel of Life (Da Lunhui) 168 Where is the Friend’s Home? 174 Williams, Linda 98 “Witches on Line” (Majo no Joken) 151 Woman is the Future of Man 195 Women jia zai Kangleli (Green Bulldozer) 52 women’s movement 19 Wong, Edmond 77 Wong Kar-wai 198 workers’ movement 19 World Tower 123, 124; temple 112 The Wrong Car (Da cuo che) 58 Wu Feng (folk hero) 1–2 Wu Misen 3 Wu Nianzhen xiii Wu Nianzhen (Wu Nien-chen) 77 wuxia films 95–105, 161, 203–4 Wuxia gongfu pian 97 Xi’an Film Studio 67 xiangtu literature 18, 25 Xiao Ye 77 Xie Fei 72 Xi meng rensheng (The Puppetmaster) xiii, 69, 147, 184, 188, 198, 201n8 Xu Feng 166, 167, 169 Xu Xiaoming 149, 150, 193 Yamaguchi Yoshiko (Shirley Yamaguchi) 64 Yang, Edward: city films 58; criticism from xi; finance 132; financing 85–6; influence of Hou Hsiao-hsien 193; Jameson on 7; Taiwan New Cinema 2, 76; Vancouver retrospective 80 see also A Brighter Summer Day; The Terrorizers Yang, Tony 154 Yang Shiqi 77 Yan guang si she gewutuan (Splendid Float) 5

236

Index

Yee Chih-yen 131, 132, 135, 150, 151, 153 Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu 89n3, 89n4,121,139, 144n32 Yeh, Michelle 155 Yinchunge zhi fengbo (The Fate of Lee Khan) 167, 168 Yip, Tim 111 Yiyi: A One and a Two 193, 203 Youning, Qu 52; see also My Whispering Plan (Sharen jihua) Yue, Audrey 45 Yueh-Yu Yeh, Emilie 121 Yuen Woping 101 Zang Yimou 67 Zeng Zhuangxiang 76

Zhang, Benzi 139, 141 Zhang Che 1, 204 Zhang Kehui 71–2 Zhang Yi 76 Zhang Yimou 95, 102 Zhang Yiwu 72–3 Zhan Hongzhi 17, 77, 188 Zhao Dan 62 Zheng Dongtian 69 Zhenghun qishi (The Personals) 122–3 Zheng Peipei 162, 164, 168 Zheng Wentang xii Zheng Zhenyao 70 Zhu Tianwen 77, 188, 198 Zoom Hunt 149 Zou, John 45