ADOLESCENCE, LOVE & THE MEANING OF LIFE IN EVERYDAY TAIPEI: THE FILMS OF EDWARD YANG DENG Jun A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Letters (Philosophy) Graduate School of Languages and Cultures Nagoya University April 2015 博士学位論文 台北における青春・愛・生命 ―エドワード・ヤン映画研究 名古屋大学大学院国際言語文化研究科 国際多元文化専攻 鄧 軍 平成 27 年 4 月 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One：A Master Barely Known······························ 1 Getting to Know Edward Yang 1 7¼ Films 3 Literature on Edward Yang 11 Analyzing Yang's Film Works 16 Chapter Two：The Body That Hurts································ 19 Adolescent Girls in Yang's Films 19 Hsiao-fen's Troubles 20 Electra's Grievance and Hatred 24 Filles Fatales 28 Chapter Three：Struggling Through the Rites of Passage······ 35 A Circle Linked by Adolescent Boys 35 Night Marching Boy Holding a Torch 37 The Evil of Adolescent Boys 41 A Rite of Passage Without End 45 Chapter Four：The Bittersweet Eros································51 Expectaton or Desire? 51 Unrequited Love 56 Ubiquitous Infidelity 58 Lonely Married Couples 63 Chapter Five：The Weight of Being································· 69 Lights Flickering 69 Fascination with Death 72 Living in Confusion 78 Sisyphean Hero/ine 81 Permanent Detached Onlooker 85 Chapter Six：Lost in Metropolitan Taipei·························· 89 The Problem of Alienation 89 Alienated Labour 93 Paradoxical Rationality 96 Anomic Society 100 Afterword················································ ················104 If Yang were Still Alive 104 They Belong to Yang's Gang 108 Prospect of the Research on Edward Yang 112 Bio-Filmography························································ 117 Bibliography····························································· 121 Acknowlegements············································ ······ ·· ·126 ADOLESCENCE, LOVE & THE MEANING OF LIFE IN EVERYDAY TAIPEI Chapter One A Master Barely Known Accompanying the invention of cinema, our lives come to be more and more luxuriant and colorful. In some sense, thanks to the invention of cinema, the content of our lives as human beings triples. 1 ——Edward Yang (楊德昌) 1. Getting to know Edward Yang In August 2012, the British film magazine Sight＆Sound publicized its latest list of “The Greatest Films of All Time”. This list is based on the magazine’s international poll which asks critics and experts to choose their own top 10 films of all time. This year 856 critics and experts around the world took part in the poll and replied with their top 10 list back to the magazine. It is worthy to note that Sight＆Sound first conducted the poll in 1962 and released its list of “The Greatest Films of All Time” for the first time the same year. Since then, Sight ＆ Sound has updated this list every 10 years and the list of 2012 saw the magazine’s sixth and latest release. In this year’s list, there are only three Chinese language films appearing on this year’s top 100 list— Wong Kar-wai (王家衛)’s In the Mood for Love, Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, and Edward Yang’s Yi Yi.2 Only quite a small amount of Asian films broke into this top 100 list, and there are just four Asian film directors who have more than one film on the top 100 list. They are Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎), Akira Kurosawa (黑澤明), Kenji Mizoguchi (溝口健二), and Edward Yang. 3 For various reasons, it is hard to say that Chinese language films have ever been fully valued by Western audiences and critics. Therefore in 2012, partially due to the “unfair treatment ” towards the Chinese language films in the Sight ＆ Sound poll, the authoritative Chinese movie website cinephilia.net (迷影網), carried out its own poll of “The Greatest Films of All Time” within the Chinese language world. Cinephilia invited 135 film critics, film scholars and filmmakers closely related to the Chinese language film industry to present their own film classics. Those polled came from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas. In Cinephilia’s top 100 list, as predicted, the number of Chinese language films increases to 9 compared with Sight＆Sound’s 3. Surprisingly Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, following Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and 1 楊德昌，“新的書寫方式”，讓-米歇爾·付東《楊德昌的電影世界》，(楊海帝，馮壽農譯)，北京：商務 印書館，2011，第 171 頁。 2 Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love gets 42 votes, ranking 24th, Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, 19 votes, ranking 84th and his Yi Yi , 17 votes, ranking 93rd. 3 Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (《東京物語》)(3rd) and Late Spring (《晚春》) (15th); Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (《七武士》)(17th) and Rashomon (《羅生門》) (26th); Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (《雨月 物語》) (50th) and Sansho Dayu (《山椒大夫》) (59th). 1 ADOLESCENCE, LOVE & THE MEANING OF LIFE IN EVERYDAY TAIPEI Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather, is ranked 3rd in the top 100 list. As with Sight＆Sound’s list, Yang’s other classic Yi Yi also appears in Cinephilia’s top 100, ranking 28th. Therefore in Cinephilia’s poll, once again, Yang is one of the four Asian film directors who have more than one film in the top 100, and the other three directors are Yasujiro Ozu, Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), and Akira Kurosawa. 1 When Edward Yang died of cancer at his residence in California in 2007, in the eyes of world media he was still “a master barely known”. Since his death, the two independent lists of “The Greatest Films of All Time” conducted in 2012, show that Yang’s reputation as a master of film art, has already spread across the world in both the east and the west. Born in Shanghai in 1947, Edward Yang emigrated to Taiwan from mainland China with his family in 1949, following the retreat of the Kuomintang (Nationalist;國民黨) government during the civil war with the Communist (共產黨). Yang’s family was small, consisting of merely five members—his parents, an older brother, a younger sister and Yang himself. The Yangs also have very few relatives on the island. After graduating from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School (臺 北建國中學), Yang enrolled in National Chiao Tung University (NCTU; 國立交通大學) and studied electronic engineering. Four years later, he moved to the United States and took his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida. Since childhood, Yang has cultivated an earnest interest in cartoon and cinema kindled by his brother and father, who were fans of cartoon and cinema respectively, and thus visual arts became a life-long favorite of Yang. After earning his master’s degree, Yang moved to California and enrolled in a film course at the University of Southern California (USC). But it did not last long, as the ideas about film at USC were so different from Yang’s own. Yang dropped out soon after and moved upward to Seattle. From 1974 to 1981 Yang worked at a subsidiary institution of the University of Washington designing computers. By the time he turned thirty, the film dream, which he cherished since childhood but had to put aside to please his parents by choosing to study science, led him back to Taiwan in 1981. “I’m already past thirty. It is time to do something that I’m really interested in.”2 In fact, at that time Yang went back to Taiwan, he was almost thirty-five. Yang went back to Taiwan in 1981, when the island was just starting on its hard-earned journey of democratization, following the aftermath of the Formosa Magazine Incident (美麗島事件)3 of 1979. The political climate changed quietly——in 1986 the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party; 民進黨) was established as the opposition to the ruling Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party), in 1987 the Taiwan Martial Law (臺灣省戒嚴令) was lifted under which the Taiwan people lived 1 Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (《東京物語》)(5th), An Autumn Afternoon (《秋刀魚之味》)(25th) and Late Spring (《晚春》) (44th), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (《悲情城市》)(16th), A Time to Live, A Time to Die (《童 年往事》)(46th) and The Puppetmaster (《戲夢人生》)(55th);Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (《七武士》)(8th) and Rashomon (《羅生門》) (38th). 2 田村志津枝『スクリーンの向こうに見える台湾』東京：田畑書店、1992、p.26。 3 The Formosa Magazine Incident, also known as the Kaohsiung Incident, occurred when Formosa Magazine《( 美 麗島》) and other opposition politicians held a demonstration commemorating Human Rights Day in an effort to promote and demand democracy in Taiwan, on December 10, 1979. The protest led to a series of public trials, and the government of the Republic of China took the protest as an excuse to arrest the main leaders of the political opposition. The incident is the most important incident since February 28 Incident (二二八事件) in Taiwan, and regarded as the turning point of the Taiwan democratization movements. 2 ADOLESCENCE, LOVE & THE MEANING OF LIFE IN EVERYDAY TAIPEI for more than thirty-eight years, and in 1988 the ban on newspapers was also lifted. A progressing democratic society brought more and more freedom for Taiwanese artists to express what they saw and thought. Those ideological and aesthetic regulations imposed on Taiwan cinema before gradually disappeared. The Taiwan film industry encountered a significant chance of transformation and renovation in its history. In Taiwan the film industry was centralized within the hands of the state-owned companies, especially the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC, 中 央 電 影 公 司 ). The fresh air of democratization was brought into Central Motion Picture Corporation as well. The general manager Ming Ji (明 驥 ), through the introduction of his two young and capable assistants Hsiao Yeh (小野) and Wu Nien-jen (吳念真), made a major decision to employ four talented yet inexperienced young directors——Tao Te-chen (陶德晨), Edward Yang, Ko I-chen (柯一正), and Chang Yi (張毅)——to make the omnibus film In Our Time (《光 陰 的 故 事 》 ).