國立臺灣師範大學英語學系
碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University
黑暗之光: 張作驥風格研究
Light in Darkness: Stylistics of Chang Tso-chi
指導教授：吳 佳 琪 博士
Advisor：Dr. Chia-Chi Wu
研究生：謝 雯 伃
Advisee： Wen-yu Hsieh
中 華 民 國 九 十 七 年 七 月
July, 2008
中文摘要
本論文企圖藉由將導演張作驥的電影置於美學、歷史及文化等三脈絡中分
析，從對其創作歷程及作品風格的分析中，探討張作驥如何在台灣新電影的影響
下繼承並發展個人風格。分析重點著重在張作驥的風格及敘事結構的安排，說明
他在台灣當代電影史及整個影史上的定位。第一章對當前台灣電影的處境進行解
釋及評價，同時整理作者論論述的發展歷史，以便在後面的章節進行檢視。第二
章則以綜論和溯史的方式來回顧張作驥的電影背景養成，同時討論新電影運動的
歷史及影響，檢視在新電影及大師侯孝賢的影響力之下，張作驥的風格是如何形
成、發展、以臻成熟。第三章從風格和主題兩方面來探討張作驥明顯的個人印記，
同時與社會文化及歷史經驗相應和。雙結尾的安排與「著魔寫實主義」的安排則
說明了張作驥是如何使用風格技巧來建立關於現代化與後殖民歷史及文化論
述。藉由對張作驥電影風格的分析，架構出的不只是導演本身風格的演進成熟
史，同時窺看電影風格如何與歷史社會做緊密的結合，期望能藉由本文的討論，
架構出張作驥電影風格形成的軌跡，並檢視台灣及世界電影史發展的脈絡。
Abstract
This analysis seeks to analyze the director Chang Tso-chi’s works so as to
discuss how and why Chang represents both a successor and pioneer in contemporary
Taiwan film culture. I examine Chang’s style and narrative structure in order to probe
his significance in contemporary Taiwan, and even in the whole cinematic historical
context. Chapter I gives a thorough evaluation on Taiwan directors and Chang, and
introduces the auteurism’s history in order to review and redefine it. Chapter II
examines Chang Tso-chi’s background and films, and takes note that the influence of
the Taiwan New Cinema movement is great in his films, especially the world-famous
master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s. Chapter III focuses on more detailed analyses of Chang’s thematic and stylistic signatures. Of particular interest is that the specific forking-path structure and the “haunted realism” reflect the modernist and post-colonial point of view by offering criticism in a sympathetic eye. Redefined auteuristic view allows us to analyze Chang’s films within a stylistic as well as historical domain and provides us a better base with which to understand these two concepts. Since the beginning of the TNC movement, the directors of which earned international recognition. Using
Chang as an example, the thesis strives to examine the contemporary trajectory of
Taiwan cinema, which has become a part of the international film industry.
Acknowledgement
I would like to give my sincere gratitude first and foremost to Prof. Chia-chi Wu,
my advisor, for her guidance and encouragement during the past years. Without her
inspiring and consistent instruction, it’s hard for me to accomplish this thesis. I really
appreciate that she spent so much time and energy correcting my logic, grammar, and
interpretation. Her encouragement and suggestion during these years are the greatest
supports for me. I would like to thank for the sophisticated and insightful comments of my committee members, Prof. Hsiu-chuan Lee and Prof. I-Fen Wu as well.
Besides, I am indebted to all the support and concerns of my friends and my
fellow classmates. Were it not for the solace brought by them, I could never hang on
during the struggle with my thesis. Special thanks and love are given to my family
members. They showed great confidence in me and offered unconditional support on the road I’ve taken. Without you all, this thesis will never be brought in the present
form. I owe all of you for the love and understanding. And my gratitude is beyond
words. Amitabha. Table of Contents
Chapter One Introduction………………………………………………...1
Chapetr Two Chang Tso-chi and Taiwan New Cinema………………..19
Chapter Three Salient Features of Chang’s films………………………..53
Chapter Four Conclusion……………………………………………...…91
Works Cited ...………...…………………………………………………………...98
Hsieh1
Chapter 1
Introduction
In this thesis, I will examine the director Chang Tso-chi’s works within specific cinematic, political and cultural frameworks. With thorough discussions on this director and his films, I attempt to determine how and why Chang represents both a successor and pioneer in contemporary Taiwan film culture. I will examine his style and narrative structure, probing their significance in contemporary Taiwan. I will also relate Chang’s films primarily with his predecessors in the Taiwan New Cinema with whom he shares similar stylistics. While studying Chang’s films in a larger cultural framework, I will discuss whether a director can simultaneously interact with film history, film criticism and the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan. Or his or her works should be judged solely aesthetically? Since the beginning of the Taiwan New
Cinema movement, the directors of which earned international recognition, the idea of
“authorship” has sustained. My discussion of Chang and his works can be viewed as a review and redefinition of the concept “auteurism.”
My research will center on two theoretical questions. First, can the terms
“modernist” or “realist” define both Chang Tso-chi and his predecessors in Taiwan
New Cinema, or is another category necessary for the understanding of Chang? And second, if separate categories are required, how and why are they distinct? Further, I would like to study how Chang’s film style can be placed in the lineage of Taiwan
New Cinema. I want to investigate whether Chang can be seen as the successor of Hsieh2
Taiwan New Cinema by surveying the movement from its inception to the present. I will investigate how and why Chang departs from the TNC heritage, and what he has learned in being part of this heritage. By returning to the birth of Taiwan New Cinema,
I will analyze whether the TNC movement is the only influence of Chang’s. Taiwan
New Cinema has been viewed as the product of cine-modernism, but is this term sufficient to describe Chang’s works? In my research I would like to see if Chang’s films can be categorized as a new phase of this cine-modernism. Additionally, do other cinematic aesthetics influence Chang? And finally what other innovations can be seen in Chang’s films? Do these developments reflect Chang’s era? The thesis moves from general stylistic discovery to close-up analyses of the formation of certain techniques or formal elements.
Chang’s style exemplifies the development of post TNC. As a result, studying
Chang’s films is important if we want to have an overview of Taiwan’s film history. In my research, I want to rethink Chang’s film style in the context of Taiwanese film history. I will attempt to explicate how TNC directors influenced him and how he broke with the legacy he inherited. As a study of the development of Chang Tso-chi’s style, my research hopes to refresh discussions and research about Taiwan films. With this research, I hope to draw attention to contemporary Taiwanese film directors who are “the glory of Taiwan” in film art.
Critical Evaluation of Taiwan Directors and Chang Tso-chi
In the early 1980s, in order to resist what was felt to be crass Hollywood and Hsieh3
Hong Kong cinema, the Taiwan New Cinema movement (TNC) emerged, presenting innovative, unconventional films. The movement from 1982 to 1989 attracted attention worldwide, and was considered an aesthetic success. But its alternative themes and challenges to the status quo struggled for a larger market acceptance, and gradually its appeal faded.1 Since then, Taiwan film workers have tried to reclaim this past glory. Therefore the Taiwan film industry after the TNC was ruled by a new generation, which includes such notable directors as Lin Zheng-sheng, Tsai
Ming-liang and Chang Tso-chi, who we can call as the post TNC. There are high expectations for improved box-office performance, which is partially true (Tsai particularly, has found great success worldwide). However, economic and marketing problems still remain in the Taiwan film industry, and these directors are facing great challenges.2
Although TNC tried to attract local attention during its heyday, it mostly failed in this effort, and instead the movement found greater foreign interest. Foreign audiences seem to have appreciated the movement’s vitality and alternative themes more than conservative Taiwan filmgoers. In general, TNC movies were based on realism and
1 I marked Taiwan New Cinema’s beginning time here according to Feii Lu’s Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics. In this book, Lu argues that Taiwan New Cinema began with 1982’s In Our Time. The exact time of its decline was not for sure because since 1985 that Taiwan New Cinema directors took different directions. Lu marks that in 1989, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness, led Taiwan films to reach a new era with the performances of single outstanding directors.
2 Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang’s principal financial support has come from foreign companies, which bodes ill for the overall health of Taiwan filmmaking. Tsai’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone [Heiian chuan] received support from France and Austria. These Taiwan directors must seek financial support from foreign film companies because funding from the Taiwan government and companies is insufficient (as in Lee’s case), or because these sources shy away from controversial topics (as in Tsai’s case). Here I am primarily referring to Tsai Ming-liang. I exclude the world-famous Ang Lee here because he takes the studio production and can also be considered as a Chinese-American film director. Hsieh4 humanitarianism. Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang were at the vanguard of these themes. Numerous studies have shown that their works captured detached modernity
(in Yang’s case) and remote Chineseness (especially in Hou’s case). As TNC began to fade in the 1990s, a new generation of directors emerged. Tsai Ming-liang especially has followed the footsteps of directors like Hou and Yang, with his work initially popular in international film festivals and art house cinema, which in turn led to some blockbuster hits.3 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and William Darrel Davis in their Taiwan Film
Directors have commented on Tsai’s local sensibilities, and written that this director
“occupies or colonizes typically Taiwanese material” and “reconstructs the local in a sophisticated, international art form” (248).4 And not only Tsai, but also other directors in his generation adapted a similar path to gain international claim. Seen in these lights, we can see how a contemporary “age for directors” in Taiwanese cinema reaches back to the roots of TNC for inspiration.
In the preface on the anthology of contemporary Taiwan cinema, Ping-hui Liao
3 Still, Ang Lee is excluded from the discussion here for the reason above. Further, Yeh and Davis point out that Lee may be “Confucianizing” Hollywood, not just as alignment of American genres around family hierarchies, but in the injection of sincerity and diligent craftsmanship. To exemplify their proposition, they analyze Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. First, a consideration on its production background, its embodiment of martial arts, as well as its narrative structure and literary source by Wang Dulu was made. This is an example to show how Lee weighs the alternate attractions of submission and rebellion while coming to terms with his ancestral patrimony.
4 Being a transplant from provincial Malaysia, Tsai has become an intriguing Taiwan auteur. He is deeply embedded in Taiwan’s vernacular culture. Tsai’s distinct authorship could be discussed from the queer affection toward local-working class life. What Tsai presents is called “camp aesthetics.” Camp is rarely used in analyzing Asian film directors, but the two authors find it a powerful strategy to account for many extraordinary things in Tsai’s films. Household utensils, low-brow décor, working-class environments, clothes antiques, and pseudo-political paraphernalia are all parts of the Tsai camp. Besides the campy elements, Yeh and Davis also trace some vernacular histories that continue to haunt Tsai’s creation. Also sultry popular music and cinemas of a bygone era serve as potent sources of arousal for Tsai. In this respect, Tsai also works within the line of a pan-Chinese cultural patrimony.
Hsieh5 notes the dilemmas that the Taiwan film industry currently faces:
Inspired though also eclipsed by A City of Sadness, [1988 by Hou
Hsiao-hsien] 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 chance
for Golden Lions and 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. (XIII)
In spite of these challenges, Liao writes that film production in Taiwan is not confined.
Even working with limited budgets and in difficult situations, contemporary film workers still produce many quality films, many of which focus on localized topics
(though they are often supported with foreign investment). Chang Tso-chi is one of them. Indeed, as Yeh and Davis argue in their introduction, contemporary Taiwanese directors’ attempts are “based on dialogue with earlier founding filmmakers attempting to forge a personal style, attempts that were hampered by the old cinema of authority” (6). In other words, Chang, and his generation of Taiwan directors are very much burdened by history.
The movies indirectly revealed the thoughts of these directors in the 90s, which Hsieh6 we shall examine, including the critical discussion of the symbiotic relationship of the tension between the historical context in the 90s and the directors’ creativity. In a large scale, directors like Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu and Lin Zhen-sheng have established themselves as world known directors. Although certain directors, like Tsai, have been objects of study for a long time, little is known about how Taiwan directors from the 1990s till now have interacted with the tradition and the redlined Taiwan film industry.
There is a tendency for critics to focus on a director’s style after the TNC movement. Directors since the 1990s have tended to reproduce a facile mode of film production by appealing to international festivals and the art houses with highly stylistic films and cinematic language learned from previous generations. So what happened in the aftermath of Taiwan New Cinema, and what the direction of this
“another cinema” claimed in the Taiwan New Cinema Manifesto is, have become a problem. Contemporary Taiwan cinema is treated by critics as a microcosm for contemporary Taiwan culture. In this context, both the international and domestic criticisms are mostly focused on the textual analyses and certain directors’ visual aesthetics only. Only a certain names like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, and sometimes Tsai Ming-liang are the apple of the critic’s eyes. Few studies have tried to investigate how some less-known Taiwan directors within the historical context, or analyze the origin of their stylistic development.
For example, Hou’s works have been closely analyzed and examined. What seems to be lacking, however, is how the post-TNC generation in the 1990s reacts to Hsieh7 the TNC tradition. My thesis is written with the aim to bridge the gap between Hou’s generation (the Taiwan New Cinema directors) and the next one in the 1990s by looking at Chang Tso-chi, who is recognized as the successor of Hou Hsiao-hsien.
The goal of this thesis is to identify the inheritance of the so-called modernist realist tradition beginning with Taiwan New Cinema.
Auteurism Reviewed and Redefined
Evaluation of a director is undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks a critic faces. The beginning of the 1970s saw a number of attempts to validate the director’s importance in film making. Later on, because of the achievement of Taiwan New
Cinema, the study of directors has apparently flourished, beginning from the concentration on individual directors’ thematic and stylistic preferences to an era’s aesthetics on the whole. Historically in Taiwan film history, the TNC movement was the first time the critics concentration moved on stories to distinctive features. This has given us new opportunities and challenges. Examining a director in both historical context and stylistic arena can allow us to understand their films in ways we were incapable of before. Understanding contemporary Taiwan films this way is in a sense simply a more refined and measured interpretation. Such interpretations include those creations elicited by specific imagery, including similes, metaphors and allusions; implications about the delivery of dialogue; and the much deeper implication about how the social context impacts an author’ work. Frequently, these interpretations evolve from searching for the right place for an author in film history or finding a Hsieh8 satisfactory description of why an author develops certain techniques. Getting to know the arguments above helps us better understand films’ different facets.
Some critics, such as André Bazin and Alexendre Astruc, have argued how films reflect a director’s personal vision, and they attribute the development to the influences of directorial practices and film criticism in the 1950s. Robert Stam circumstantially shows that several pioneers preached the attentiveness to the directors’ aesthetic achievement. These include Bazin’s basic deliberation of auteurism arguing that films should mirror the directors’ individual perception, and
Astruc’s “camera pen” (caméra-stylo) which combines the ideas of a director’s filmmaking and a writer’s writing (Stam 83-84).
Bazin and Astruc’s preference of the film directors have rooted the author theory, but it was not until Truffaut’s claim on "la politique des auteurs" in 1966 that auteurism was largely used by the directors and critics of the “nouvelle vague” (the
French New Wave). Truffaut’s surprising hit essay was “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (A Certain Trend in French Cinema), a passionate and critical declaration which suggests that we savor films and attend to the distinctive style or consistent themes of their directors (Truffaut 7-20). Truffaut argues that there are no good or bad movies, only good or bad directors. He proposes that a director’s distinctive style determines one’s entire works and their “audacities are those of men of the cinema and no longer of scenarists, directors and literateurs”5 (17). Yet, not
5 Here Truffaut means that a director does not create convincing mise-en-scène and interpreting the written script only, but has a more important job to make a film with his style. Hsieh9 only the almost appealing and liberal tone that Truffaut takes in declaring the “cinéma de papa” dead and gone, the enthusiastic reactions of the nouvelle vague directors and critics remind us that a new age of film criticism began in the 1960s. Truffaut and his contemporary colleagues at Cahiers du Cinéma employed the “author theory” both in filmmaking and criticism. They were against French cinema after the Second World
War because of its big production and stereotyped theme and style. They admired the
1940s US film noir style, which was brought in France after the ban was lifted after the Nazi occupation. These French directors and critics discovered the vitality and creativity of individual directors in Hollywood productions and found the potentiality of their own films.
The shift from studio production to authorship domination in French filmmaking also marks a change in film criticism in the English language. With the introductory essay of Andrew Sarris, the phrase “auteur theory” was officially shown in film criticism. In his "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," Sarris indicates that a director, in order to be categorized as an “autuer,” must conform to three premises. Primarily,
Sarris points out that “if a director has no technical competence, no elementary flair for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the pantheon of the directors. A great director has to be at least a good director.” What is more, “the second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value.
Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.” And the final one is about “interior Hsieh10 meaning,” which is “the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art.” Sarris defines the
“interior meaning” as something “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material” (Sarris 516). In Sarris’ The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, critics and authors from the 1970s have been inspired to appreciate different distinctive directorial styles.
However, the works of Sarris and other French critics like Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer did arouse criticism right after they declared their position. The “auteur theory” was criticized first due to its only focus on the authorial role of the director. It excludes the collaborative efforts of all other crew members, from the script writer to the cinematographer. According to Stam, “the real scandal of the auteur theory lay not so much in glorifying the directors as the equivalent in prestige to the literary author, but rather in exactly who was granted the prestige” (87). Anyway, film-making is a teamwork process. The “auteur theory” is also criticized by critics in semiotics and structuralism, like Roland Barthes, who focus more on the films’ imagery and other aesthetic elements.6 For semioticians and structuralists, a director’s style and internal intention has little to do with the final visual text. Susan Hayward argues that the tendency of some proponents of auteurism who seizes the concept of structuralism somehow discloses the limitation of autuerism.
For example, to borrow Hayward’s phrase, when the French semiotician Christian
Metz endeavored to “uncover the rules that governed film language and to establish a
6 Barthes’s acclaim: “the author is dead,” could be the best exemplification of structuralists’ reaction toward the auteur theory in film. Hsieh11 framework for a semiotics of the cinema,” he tended to omit the “notion of pleasure and audience reception,” and focused only on “a crushing of the aesthetic experience through the weight of the theoretical framework” (17). Other approaches like psychoanalysis and post-colonialism concentrate more on how the films reflect the protagonists’ mental and political situation. The author-orientated methodology then reflects only part of the meaning of the films. The films are thus viewed in a cultural context, and that implies the “auteur theory” needs modification and reexamination in our times.
“Auteur theory” has been the central topic of contemporary Taiwan cinematic criticism. It has long been the leading principle to examine the TNC directors but it has been as well a misused methodology most misused in the studies of Taiwan cinema. In Taiwan, we share similar perplexity over how to define “autuer theory” itself and its practice by Taiwan critics. Cinema in Japanese colonization and early postwar Taiwan had been the propaganda for government’s use, advocating political authority and preaching loyalty to the country. The government imposed censorship on film productions to make sure the governmental authoritative figures were not violated. In this period of martial law, film critics were limited to discuss more on the morality of the films rather than on their creativity. While it is true that individual directors were discussed, such a focus on morality and political correctness only deflect the critics’ attention away from the films’ aesthetics.
Taiwan New Cinema marked the blooming of a new era of authors. The TNC directors made it a priority to integrate a more natural and direct style into their Hsieh12 contemporary Taiwan cinema. Influenced by the Taiwan nativism, their innovative style recorded both the personal and historical transitions of Taiwan in the 80s.
When the TNC films entered the international film festival arena, they were appreciated for their “primitive” eastern fascination. Moreover, due to the praises and prizes gained at international film festivals and on other occasions, some of the TNC directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, have become internationally recognized names. These auteurs of international cinema and their style take precedence over other issues and become the main concerns of film critics. Some critics discuss the cinematic style of those directors, and some others reaffirm the directors’ “interior meanings.” And recently, as the martial-law ban in Taiwan was lifted, some critics begin to give more attention on how a film interacts with the historical and cultural context. Directors’ creativities and interior meanings are not as important as political context itself anymore. It indicates that Taiwan is now facing the same of dichotomy in film criticism as what western critics do.
Though “auteurism” has flourished in Taiwan film criticism since Hou and Yang gained international acclaim, it trapped subsequent Taiwan directors in the 90s by the lure of success. This outcome seems to have been a dead-end for Taiwan cinema.
Chia-chi Wu points out the problem Taiwan film industry has faced after Taiwan New
Cinema:
[t]he international acclaim enjoyed by New Cinema’s filmmakers inspired
followers to achieve a similar mixture of international fame and financial
self-sufficiency. A few filmmakers, who had been apprenticed to New Hsieh13
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 Ming-liang), 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’ keep being granted international art-house
distribution and major or lesser festival prizes.” (88-89)
What is immediately apparent in this extract is that a number of Taiwan directors adopt “art cinema” themes and styles, specifically preferring those that win international film awards. These directors care little about local market. What is distressing, however, is that many directors who achieved international success in fact gave little back to the local Taiwan industry. This blind reproduction of the successful experiences brought Taiwan film business to its nadir.
However, Reading the exploitation of “author theory” in Taiwan film industry after the blooming of Taiwan New Cinema in the context of the Chia-chi Wu and
Yeh’s observations on an “easy way to success,” I argue that today “auterism” in
Taiwan” is not only a “trap” that allures directors who seek quick success and instant profits, but also a system that establishes the images and aesthetics of Taiwanessness Hsieh14 accepted as a consensus recognized by native and international critics and audience.
In this paper, I want to take Chang Tso-chi, one of the directors of contemporary
Taiwan, as an example to map Taiwan cinema’s current development. I do not choose
Chang for random. Chang represents his generation that gains direct influence from
Taiwan New Cinema and tries very hard to integrate this tradition into his own work.
These directors’ reaction toward the “author models” set before them demonstrates a reconsideration of “auterism”. They are conscious of the importance and advantage in developing their own style and they strive for it. They identify themselves as “artists,” authors of the film. The very purpose to make a film is to create an art piece. In other words, the word “auteurism” should be reassessed in the case of Taiwan directors who started their careers in the 90s, but based their trainings in the mid 80s.
The possible faces of these directors exemplify themselves in how they merge their creativity with the TNC directors’ trapping style. For example, neither the easy adoption of the TNC realistic style nor the exclusively conversion into fantastic and romantic elements can sufficiently explain the distinction of Chang Tso-chi’s films.
The peculiarity of Chang’s films lies in his sustained endeavor to present the local life and history of Taiwan in the late 20th century—the life of the oppressed class, who can not demand for their own rights. My interpretation of Chang Tso-chi’s works seeks to demonstrate that Chang’s gangster bildungsromans may not solely be seen as a cultural form that replicates modes of the Taiwan New Cinema, one which has already obtained international-claimed position.
As mentioned before, in many ways, Taiwan New Cinema and the films in the Hsieh15
90s made by directors such as Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu and Lin Zhen-sheng are delicately woven together in Chang and his films. They offer a framework that “both continues and differentiates itself from the Taiwan New Cinema” (Lu, 2005, 138). In his surprising, brilliant, and compassionate three films, Ah Chung [Azhong], Darkness and Light [Heian zhi guang] and The Best of Times [Meili shiguang], which mark
Chang’s debut as a director, the audience sees not only a deep concern with contemporary Taiwan society but also unique visual features sparkling. In many ways, however, in Chang’s films, some visual motifs may ring a bell of the previous Taiwan
New Cinema.
Chang Tso-chi’s works inevitably invite comparisons with the works of TNC directors, especially Hou. But with close examination, Chang has a very different vision of reality and fiction. The style of Chang’s three films seems simple, yet it
“seamlessly combines the seemingly in compatible modes of documentary-style realism and fantasy” (Chris Berry, 2007, 33). The outcome is the “another cinema”
(Lu, 2005 147) which reveals less interests in “grungy social realism than in psychological realism” (Lu, 2005, 146). As Chang’s films draw to the ending, the audience begins to identify with the protagonists, not because they share the similar living environment but because they are trapped in a similar psychological dilemma.
The true attractive power of Chang’s films, in my point of view, lies in these sympathetic responses—the emotional appeal caused by his distinctive cinematic narrations. Seen in this light, the “realistic element” in Chang’s films noticed by the critics is a mere façade. Under the guidance of his predecessors on the road to be an Hsieh16
“auteur”, Chang Tso-chi has a complex signature that requires rigorous analysis.
Taiwan Films in World Film History
Within the last two decades, TNC and post TNC films have been an auspicious target for both the audience and critics. Their attention was drawn firstly by the
Taiwan New Wave directors in the mid of 1980s. As the reflection and reexamination of the contemporary era, their works were often viewed as a cine-modernism whose style and intention are related to the European film modernism. What they wished to create is “another cinema” which is different from the mainstream melodramas and kung-fu films. The TNC movement opened a space for further development, also created a few film auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. And Tsai
Ming-liang is the most prominent Taiwan auteur winning international prizes and reputation as well after this movement in the case. Thus, my research attempts to give a possible answer to the questions above by exemplifying the director Chang Tso-chi’s films. He is viewed as a direct successor of the TNC movement, and develops the
TNC style to a new extent. Analyzing his film style would help to judge the possibility of “another cinema” after the TNC movement.
In the second chapter I move into the understanding of Chang Tso-chi’s background and films. This section begins with general historical information about
Chang Tso-chi, and then touches upon certain vital transitions of his career. I will examine his apprentice period and documentary film experiences to provide a view of some of the sources of his unique styles. Chang’s directorial preferences should be Hsieh17 seen not only as talent-driven, but as a culmination of his past experiences in film and other media. Also in this chapter I aim to establish a historical framework of Chang’s reactions to his TNC predecessors, whose revolutionary changes in style and theme marked a summit of Taiwan cinema. Beginning with an examination of the specific historical and cultural background of Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, I will explore the aesthetic strategies and thematic paradigm shifts of TNC movement that inspire
Chang’s cinematic innovations. I will provide an overall explanation of how aesthetic strategies and thematic paradigm shifts have operated in the TNC works and examine the methods deployed by Chang, stemming from his experiences working with the
TNC masters, particularly Hou Hsiao-hsien. By emphasizing the crucial correspondences between Hou and Chang, I will present a lineage of modernist realists in Taiwan film history. While tracing how Hou and Chang exemplify realist traditions in Taiwan cinema, I will also examine the differences marking Chang, in order to illuminate his own construction as an auteur.
Subsequent chapter 3 focuses on more detailed analyses of Chang’s signatures, which make him a pioneering director in contemporary Taiwan. In the first part chapter three, I focus on Chang’s distinctive approaches toward film making. Though he has released only four films, Chang has tended to establish signatures. I regard these as not only his inheritance from directors of previous generations but also a result of his own creativity. By exploring the consistent thematic and stylistic constructions in his three films, Ah Chung, Darkness and Light and The Best of Times,
I will highlight perceptible personal styles based on the TNC movement (primarily on Hsieh18 the master Hou Hsiao-hsien), and on the authenticity that emphasizes the distinctive editing, staging and mise-en-scène of Chang. I will discuss Chris Berry’s account of
Chang, which created the term “haunted realism” in relation to Chang’s style and its applicability to life in contemporary Taiwan.7 This stylistic figure, placed in a context of post-colonial, post-modern and post-cold war Taiwan marks Chang’s true difference and significance as a contemporary Taiwanese director.
My purpose throughout is not only to discuss Chang in the narrative of auteurism, which is in any case under reexamination and redefinition under the process, but also to view Chang as one lineament in the contemporary trajectory of Taiwan cinema, which has become a part of the international film industry. The definition and estimation of Taiwanese directors within international film is an ongoing project, and it is hoped that this analysis of Chang Tso-chi and his unique and important contributions, will make a useful contribution.
7 I translated “haunted realism” to Chinese as 「著魔寫實主義」 according to the direct translated version of Chris Berry’s essay in Dianyin-hsienshan. See 「著魔的寫真主義--對於張作驥電影的觀 察與寫實主義的再思考」/ Berry Chris（裴開瑞）著、王君琦譯 / 『電影欣賞』第 120 期 / 2004 / 頁 91-95.
Hsieh19
Chapter 2
Chang Tso-chi and Taiwan New Cinema
The recent reception of director Chang Tso-chi’s Soul of a Demon [Hu die](2008) as a violent gangster film has distracted critics from a more in-depth and revealing investigation of this important contemporary director.8 This response has diverted audiences’ attention from the distinctive features of Chang’s work, and its deeply humanistic qualities. In some cases Chang’s work has been misapprehended as solely art cinema, lacking wider market appeal and more substantive critical attention. But this view is in sum inadequate, and to better understand the important significance of
Chang’s achievements, a more comprehensive and detailed evaluation of his work is needed.
Chang Tso-chi’s Oeuvre
Chang Tso-chi is a key player in contemporary Taiwan cinema. Chang’s work is a combination of 1) themes and techniques inherited from the Taiwan New Cinema movement, 2) the similar stylistic significances Chang shares with his contemporaries, and 3) his own independent examination of arresting alternative themes and new production values.9 Chang’s rural upbringing has given his films a distinctly
8 For example, CMC, Chang’s Hong Kong cooperative company, marketed the film as a “gangster film.” See “The Gangster Film Soul of a Demon: Director Chang Tso-chi Fly with the CMC.” Hitoradio.com. 22, March, 2007.〈http://www.hitoradio.com/news/6_1_1.php?news_id=48063.
9 Two other prominent directors of Chang‘s generation include Lin Cheng-sheng and Chen Kuo-fu. Hsieh20 grassroots and even bucolic flavor, and his narrative strategies have served a simple and romantic function, even when he has portrayed lower class oppression and lack of winning opportunity. His films feature a strategy known as “haunted realism,” which I will explore later in my analysis.
Chang’s career can be divided into three phases-- a learning period, followed by a period in which he developed his unique style, and his mature period. Dividing
Chang’s career into three parts this way will provide a clear framework in which to understand the development of his aesthetics and famed magical realist stylistics.
Born in Jiayi in 1961 to a second-generation family that immigrated from China,
Chang showed little interest in a film career in his youth. His attention was piqued, however during his military service when he attended film classes during his off days.
In an interview with Michael Berry, Chang said, “I was in charge of a theater in the army, and it was very popular….The movies shown were not screened in any systematic way; sometimes reels would even be mixed and matched! Normally we are accustomed to seeing movies in a straightforward, linear fashion, but I realized that you could show ten minutes of one film, then jump to the middle of some other film, then move on to something else. After being exposed to so many movies during that era, I started playing with the idea of pursuing a career in film”(401). This initial experience in editing is surely what inspired of Chang’s later creative, non-linear editing in his work.
After being discharged from the army, Chang entered the Film Department of
Chinese Culture University in Taipei, and began his formal film education. Chang Hsieh21 completed his studies at Chinese Culture University in 1987, and thereafter he worked under several famed directors. Though he got the opportunity to pursue further study abroad, he decided to take Hou Hsiao-hsien’s suggestion that young film directors should develop their style only after serving apprenticeships in the film industry.
Chang began as a director’s assistant for Yu Kanping’s People Between Two Chinas
[Haixialiangan] (1988) and Yim Ho and Tsui Hark’s King of Chess [Qiwang] (1992).
These were followed by a stint as assistant director on Hou Hsiao hsien’s City of
Sadness [Beiqingchengshi] (1989), Yu Kanping’s Two Painters [Liangge youqijiang]
(1990) and Huang Yushan’s Peony Birds [Mudanniao] (1990).
Chang began to immerse himself in the art of other TNC directors (Hsieh 2002,
81) at this period, including Hou Hsiao-hsien. Working with Hou differed from
Chang’s experiences working with others, and at this time he learned how to work with non-professional actors, and began indulged in Hou’s directorial and stylistic preferences, including Hou’s distinctive long takes. In 1989, Chang served as an assistant director on Hou’s The City of Sadness, a family saga which examines the 228 massacre in 1947’s Taiwan. Chang placed himself in Hou’s shoes in order to understand the many challenges directors face (Hsieh 2002, 81), and he said that he was strongly influenced by Hou’s work ethic, and that this experience was a turning point in his career and greatly impacted his later style. To this day, critics say Chang’s work bears strong aesthetic similarities to Hou’s.
At the beginning of his career, some thought that Chang was Hou Hsiao-hsien’s successor as a proponent of realism in film and a spokesman for underprivileged Hsieh22 classes in Taiwan. Without question Chang’s pursuit of a realistic style can be seen as an outcome of his experience working with Hou and other TNC directors, and his career development firmly follows in their footsteps. Chang’s experiences with Hou and other Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers influenced his film techniques and production values, many of his personal thematic concerns, and his empathetic, compassionate portrayals of local poor communities and postindustrial family structure, with their associated criticism of Taiwanese society. Such filial, emotional, penetrating values have proven extremely popular with international audiences.
Chang’s experience working with Tsui Hark was very different from his apprentice experience in Taiwan. This opened Chang’s eyes to the efficiency of Hong
Kong studio production, which had been developed since the late 1960s. Working with Tsui inspired Chang, though we can seldom see Tsui’s influence in the way
Chang synthesizes studio production values into his own innovative, independent productions.10 Nevertheless, working with Tsui also allowed him to receive training from directors outside the TNC group
After his six-year apprenticeship, Chang directed his first TV series in 1991, initiating his independent career. From 1991-1996 Chang directed TV plays and documentaries about the lives of teenagers in Taiwan, including What the Grass Says to the Wind [Fenghancao de duihua] and Teenager? Teenager! [Qingshaonian
10 At the premiere of his most recent film, Soul of a Demon, Chang noted that the three people who influenced him most were Yu Kan-ping, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsui Hark. He said that he learned how to interact with others from Yu, that Hou’s aesthetics influenced him most, and that Tsui’s resourceful Hong Kong studio production had deeply inspired him.
Hsieh23 qingshaonian]. At this time, Chang acquired plenty of documentary techniques that he often employed, and in an interview with Hsieh Ren-chang in 2002, he indicated how this experience influenced his cinematic stylistics:
It is easy for the director to discover the “target” of shooting while making
documentary films. But the difficulty lies in how to capture the picture you
want. Making a documentary film is like conducting a battle. You have to
leave your camera on all the time in order not to miss any important
situation.… I am used to work with non-professional actors due to my
documentary experience (Hsieh 43 [my translation]).11
In this second phase, Chang also began to make his own films. His first effort was 1993’s Gunshots in the Night [Anye qiangsheng]. With this debut feature, Chang declared himself a full-fledged “auteur” controlling the entire filmmaking process.
Interestingly, after Chang finished Gunshot in the Night, he quarreled with the film’s
Hong Kong sponsor and producer Jacob Cheung on the editing of the print, and
Chang demanded that the film be released as he had directed it. In the end, against
Chang’s wishes, a commercial version of the film was released, and Chang refused to be identified as the director of the film (Michael Berry 403-406). We see here an example of the fiercely independent auteur at work, and in this respect Chang has made several important statements about how he asserts auteurist autonomy. Chang believed that “Taiwanese films win international prizes for it takes the
11 The original text in Chinese is: “ 因為拍紀錄片時，會很了解誰是主體，但困難在於能不能讓你 拍到；拍紀錄片可說隨時處於備戰狀態，電源隨時開著，一看到狀況就拍進去。…後來我就起用 非職業演員，這是從紀錄片的經驗衍生的。” Hsieh24 director-oriented pro, yet today’s mainstream in film industry worldwide is the producer-oriented pro. The director-oriented pro can create films irrelevant to the market and the director’s name represents the whole film’s style. This is the origin of
“auterism,” where the audience begins to identify a film with its director’s style (Li
Hsieh and Wu, 2003, 86 [my translation]).12
Chang’s first critically acclaimed film was Ah Chung [Zhongzi] in 1996, which depicts a disfranchised working class teenager who practices the local Ba Jia Jiang folk ritual.13 This film is marked by lower working class sentiments, teenage rebellion, and vulgar language, all shot in a plain documentary style. This film began to draw many critics’ attention to Chang’s fresh film language. Chang’s next film,
Darkness and Light [Heian zhiguang] in 1999, set in the Taiwan port city of Keelung, is more sophisticated, and in this film Chang further developed his grassroots style.
This film won the Gold award in the Tokyo Grand Prix, and the Asian Film award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. It was also a big winner at the 1999’s Golden
Horse Awards in Taiwan, winning Grand Jury, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and the Audience Favorite awards. Though his style was not yet fully developed,
Darkness and Light contained many of the essential magical realistic elements that would mark Chang’s mature style.
12 The text in Chinese is : “台灣電影會得獎, 是因為採取導演制的關係: 現今全世界電影都是製 片人的制度, 可以隨時換導演。導演制可以拍出與市場無關的, 導演的名字就是整個電影, 造就 了作者論。”
13 “Ba Jia Jiang” is a Taiwanese folk ritual for warding off bad luck. It is a practice of praying for a healthy and tranquil life from the divinity. At folk religious gatherings, practitioners first invite the gods to get into their bodies and then launch a parade declaring the gods’ messages. Hsieh25
If the first two phases of Chang’s career germinated his stylistics, the third phase, starting with his 2002 film, The Best of Times [Meili shiguang], demonstrates the full flower of his trademark style and magical realism in the themes like wretched gangsters, unhappy teenagers and irresponsible parents whose lives were eased somewhat by magical realism.14 Commenting on his own magical realism, Chang said that “what the film presents is definitely not reality, but the performance itself is real.” Therefore, “the boundary between surrealism and illusion doesn’t exist” (Li,
Hsieh, and Wu, 2003, 88).15 It is possible that critics in Taiwan have been confused by incongruous or fantastic scenes (such as the appearance of the unicorn in The Best of Times), and Chang’s blurring of the line between reality and dreams. The Best of
Times, with its spontaneous and fluent cinematic style, separates Chang’s work from that of his TNC predecessors. The film was shown at the 59th Cannes International
Film Festival’s Unit International Panorama section. It also won Best Feature Film,
Best Taiwan Film and Best Original Screenplay awards at the 39th Golden Horse
Awards in 2003.
All of Chang’s films can be viewed as types of “bildungsroman,” which are
14 Here I define the often use of Chang’s mixture of reality and fantasy as a kind of magical realism. It is borrowed from the term created by Alejo Carpentier, describing the “practice of Latin American writers who mix everyday realities with imaginative extravaganzas drawn from the rich interplay of European and native culture.” According to The Harper Handbook to Literature, it “recalls the mixture of realistic techniques and surreal images in the work of certain European and American painters of the 1920s and 1930s, who were sometimes called magical realists”. See “Magical Realism,” The Harper Handbook To Literature. 280.
15 The original quote in Chinese is: “看電影是假的，但表演是真的，將超現實與幻覺區分的那條線 是不存在的。”
Hsieh26 about the coming of age of teenage protagonists.16 This genre was popular in Taiwan
New Cinema in the 1980s, though opinions vary on the application of
“bildungsroman” narrative to TNC films. Li Chen-ya says that the most likely explanation of the popularity of this genre in TNC and Chang’s films is “the contradiction between the grand history and petit personal memory” (120), and “the avoidance of historical trauma and the authorities.” He further comments that “the bildungsroman reflects the historical events through the fragments of life” (120-122).
I will discuss Chang’s use of bildungsroman in the next chapter.
Taiwan Film History and the TNC movement
In most analyses of Chang Tso-chi, Taiwan New Cinema and director Hou
Hsiao-hsien are seen as important influences on Chang’s development. Examples include Feii Lu’s “Another Cinema: Darkness and Light” and Chris Berry’s “Haunted
Realism: Postcoloniality and the Cinema of Chang Tso-chi.” These works are useful studies of Chang’s film style, and valuable contributions to Taiwan film studies. I will examine these two analyses in the later parts of this chapter, after examining Chang’s career and the inter-generational relationships between Chang and his predecessors, specifically Chang’s relationship to Hou.
Taiwan New Cinema
16 According The Harper Handbook to Literature, the definition of “bildungsroman” is: “a novel of education from youth to experience” (74). This analysis of a novel’s plot has been applied to film study as well as other narrative genres. Hsieh27
Modern Taiwan film history can be traced back to the Chinese Nationalist Party
(KMT) retreat from China and its relocation to Taiwan in 1949. Taiwan film history could be divided into three eras: the pre-TNC period (1949-1978), the emergence of
Taiwan New Cinema (1978-1982) and the high period of Taiwan New Cinema
(1982-1987).17 After 1987, Taiwan New Cinema officially came to an end.
The arrival of the KMT as an authoritarian government in Taiwan in 1949 inaugurated an era of complete government censorship and control over state and individual film productions. Few Taiwanese films were made during the first years of
KMT control in Taiwan, and most of the films shown during this period were imported from Hong Kong. Original films made in Taiwan were little more than propaganda in support of the new government’s policy.18 The next stage in Taiwanese film lasted for about ten years, from 1950 to 1959. The initial popularity and then the decline of local Taiwanese films (Taiyu pian) were crucial in this period. Most
Taiwanese language films of this period were simply productions of Taiwanese opera stage performances, which were targeted at lower class audiences.
After 1960, the Taiwan film industry grew because of relative political stability and economic growth. In 1963, the KMT controlled Central Motion Picture Company
(CMPC) and began to create films based on what was known as “healthy realism,” a term used by many critics to describe bright aspects of country life under KMT rule.
According to Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s discussion in “The Road Home: Stylistic
17 The following discussion of the periods of Taiwanese film history follows Lu Feii’s analysis.
18 Lu Feii in his Taiwan Film: Politics, Economics and Aesthetics explains this situation in the second chapter: “The era of Reformation.” Hsieh28 renovations of Chinese mandarin classics,” “healthy realism,” which avoids portrayals of darker aspects of society, is a combination of classical Italian Neo-realism and vernacular popular fiction. She argues that “[h]ealthy realism is a didactic construction of romantic melodrama and civic virtue, a sort of purified wenyi. It mixes the interior/private mise-en-scène specific to family melodrama with the civil, public space to accommodate governmental policy, enabling a smooth integration with state ideological apparatus” (206).19 This movement was initiated with director Lee Xing’s
Our Neighbor [Jieto xiangwei] (1963), a film preaching traditional Confucian teachings among its audiences. The film was successful and initiated an era of Taiwan locally-made films.20 The “healthy realism” movement prefigured the core values of later popular Taiwan cinema which avoided harsh realities in Taiwanese society.21
During the next ten years into the 1970s, Taiwan cinema reached the peak of its popularity. Melodramatic love stories and martial art films (wuxia) were the two most
19 Feii Lu argues that Taiwanese “healthy realism” was more closely aligned with Soviet “social realism” than Italian neo-realism after World War II. He compares the differences between these three realisms: “Neo-realism aimed to disclose society’s defects instead of blindly providing optimistic solutions. Socialist Realism, however, sought a bright future for human beings based on the communism and socialism. Healthy Realism portrays how Chinese traditional ethics and good human nature can solve all social problems.” For more details, see Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics, p104, note 149.
20 Films in this category also include The Oyster Girl [Kenu] (1964), and Beautiful Duckling [Yangya renjia] (1965).
21 Major directors of the 1960s and the 1970s such as Li Xing and Bai Jingrui operated within a state-sponsored film style called healthy realism. But their activities during this period are not to be seen as entirely official, just as Taiwan cinema was not all propaganda. A thriving commercial cinema was well established by the late 1950s, with low budget taiyu pain—Taiwanese-language pictures—produced by small companies and directors with various regional backgrounds. The two authors propose the idea of “parallel cinema” to account for the conditions of Taiwan film production in the 1950s and the 1960s. The parallel tracks highlight the authorities’ neocolonial policy toward local Taiwanese culture but, at the same time, leaves a market gap that allows alternatives to flourish. For more information, see Yeh and Davis, “Parallel Cinemas: Postwar History and Major Directors” in Taiwan Film Directors.
Hsieh29 popular genres. The vogue of these two genres can be partly attributed to the fact that the KMT government could easily censor every detail that violated governmental authority, and prohibit films that disclosed any ugly realities in Taiwan. Thus, films with melodramatic and martial art (wuxia) genres were highly accessible to film makers, who could create utopian and escapist films that are unconnected to reality.
These popular genres were made in a dreamy style that emphasized romantic dialog and melodrama, as well as martial arts stunts. They reached a height of popularity, but then reached an aesthetic dead-end, and this golden age began to decline.
The decline of the Taiwan film industry in the late 1970s provides a starting-point for the discussion of the rise of Taiwan New Cinema. Yeh and Davis give a brief account on the background from which Taiwan New Cinema arose:
After enjoying continuous expansion from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s,
Taiwan cinema faced a series of impediments. Taiwan lost its most valuable
overseas Southeast Asian market, following the success of Communist
revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and sanctions were imposed
on Chinese culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. The industry was hit by
another problem in the 1980s: the decline of domestic mandarin-speaking
film audiences, who turned to exciting, tour de force Jackie Chan kung fu
films and excruciating comedies from New Cinema City of Hong Kong.
Furthermore, proliferation of VCRs let audiences stay home or patronize
video parlors for better selection and flexible viewing. Video rental stores
also received licenses from Hong Kong’s two major TV networks—TVB Hsieh30
and ATV—to distribute television dramas, some with better entertainment
quality than local films. (55)
Also relevant is June Yip’s remark:
At the end of the 1970s, the most dangerous threats to the health of the
Taiwanese film industry came from two sources. One serious challenge
came from the rapidly growing availability of imported or smuggled
videotapes of foreign films from America, Japan, and Europe. These pirated
tapes were convenient and inexpensive to rent, extremely current, and,
because many were illegally imported, usually uncensored. The other source
of increased competition was Hong Kong, whose better equipped and
financially flush powerhouse studios were producing thematically more
diverse and stylistically more sophisticated films. (53-54)
These arguments show that the Taiwan film industry was under great pressure during this period because of increased competition from Hong Kong and Hollywood.
Additionally, the Taiwanese viewing public began to tire of sugary melodrama that was common in Taiwanese film by this time. Hence, the Taiwanese golden age of film went into decline. This decline and the pressure exerted by Hong Kong and
Hollywood films inspired the following generation to create films thematically rebellious and aesthetically nouveau.
By the 1980s the Taiwan film industry had reached a definitive stage of innovation, and beginning in 1982, with the ‘New Comer’ policy of the CMPC, a new group of filmmakers emerging to work in the Taiwan New Cinema movement. This Hsieh31 angry generation rose when the decline of Taiwan cinema, the moment that the popularity of Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema was at a zenith. Disgusted with the conservative politics and orthodox, melodramatic themes of Taiwanese films of the
1970s ( a result of KMT manipulation and repression) on the one hand, and the glib, unrealistic martial arts films on the other, this new generation sought a new way to express their pent-up rage, progressive politics and urgent creativity. They used more realist approaches to present their motifs, which centered on nostalgia for the rural past and the corrosive effects of the urbanized present.22 Frequently they worked against the older generation. Aesthetically for the TNC the idea of “art for art’s sake,” rather than simple popular amusement motivated the movement.
The TNC movement began with In Our Times, a film of four episodes made by four different directors: Jim Tao, Edward Yang, Ko Yi-Cheng, and Chang Yi. It is followed by the groundbreaking The Sandwich Man [Erzi de da wan’ou] (1983), adapted from the novel of the same name by nativist novelist Huang Chun-ming. The
Sandwichman is an ideal example of the new TNC style and has become a classic of the movement. The film was an anthology directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Ren and
Zeng Zhuangxiang. The film’s three directors not only subverted traditional cinematic
22 In this respect, thematically and stylistically, the TNC movement was similar to the Taiwanese Nativist Literature movement of the 1970s, which focused on the usage of local languages and local native life. Writers in the nativist group, like Huang Chun-ming, Wang Chen-ho and Chen Ying-chen claimed that literature needed to present a realistic picture of Taiwanese society. Well-known TNC films that echoed the values of the flourishing Nativist movement include A Flower in the Rainy Night, and That Day on The Beach, films that examined the “elements of indigenous Taiwanese life, especially visible in language, literary adaptations, and rural subjects” (Yeh and Davis 56). After the KMT’s arrival in 1949, literature in Taiwan complied with two dominant ideologies—anti-communism and nostalgia—and works describing local country life were neglected. The Literaure Quarterly [Wenxue jikan], established by Wei Tiancong introduced the idea of realism to nativist writers and inspired the nativist movement in the 1970s. For more about the Nativist Debate, see Wei Tian-cong, The Collection of the Debate on the Nativist Literature [Xiangtu Wenxue Taolungji]. Hsieh32 technique, but also brought into play complex historical references, and instilled in the film a keen self-consciousness of Taiwan cinematic history. The Sandwichman remains a powerful, rich classic to this day.
The Sandwichman is suffused with the historical events that colored and shaped
Taiwan society from the 1950s on, and shares many characteristics with Taiwanese
Nativist Literature. The film describes post-war Taiwan’s cultural and political struggles (including references to American economic support for Taiwan), and hopes for a better future. At the same time, the film reinterprets the themes of Healthy
Realism, and one of the defining features of this successful film is its awareness of the cinematic tradition and the legacy of past eras. Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example, in his episode “Son’s Big Doll” in The Sandwichman, portrayed the protagonist’s career as a sandwichman in the 50s.
The “peeling the apple event,” an act of government censorship with The
Sandwichman, illustrates the conflict between the controlling authorities and the young TNC auteurs’ eagerness to freely speak their minds.23 Feii Lu describes how the CMPC responded to an anonymous complaint that The Sandwichman’ depicted an
“un-civilized” culture in Taiwan. Initially, the CMPC edited out some shots in the film when this event was disclosed by the media. However, it aroused so much criticism that the CMPC was forced to release the unedited film (for more detail, see Feii Lu’s
Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, Aesthetics, p. 310).
23 “Peeling the apple” refers to how the government sought to peel away important parts of the film’s episode: “The Taste of the apple.” For a description of the event and its impact, see Chiao, Taiwan Xing dianying [Taiwan New Cinema] (Taipei: Shibao, 1988), 81-124.
Hsieh33
The bravura film style of the TNC directors was based on stylistic reformation, or more generally, a focus on the importance of pure visual aesthetics. These developments not only altered the modes of film production in Taiwan, shifting the focus to the collaboration among independent film producers and directors, but also encouraged young directors to develop their own innovative stylistics, which was later categorized as “auteurism.”
On 6 November 1986, about 50 TNC film workers and Taiwan cultural elites published the “Taiwan New Cinema Manifesto,” with the aim clarifying TNC’s aims and questioning governmental film policy and contemporary film critics in Taiwan.
The Taiwan New Cinema manifesto proclaimed that the movement wished to be nothing less than epoch-making. Governmental support and cultural self-awareness were needed, the manifesto stated, to ensure a bright future for Taiwan cinema. The manifesto showed the belief that “the future of Taiwan cinema has many possibilities,” and that filmmakers were fighting for the existence of the “another cinema” in the film industry (Zhan 117).24 Though the movement itself declined soon after this manifesto, the TNC film makers established a model for later generations with its novelty. As Lu Feii said,
We could say that In Our Time [Guangyin de gushi] both introduced the
auteurs of the Taiwan New Cinema and prefigured the style of Taiwan New
Cinema; Growing Up [Xiaobi de gushi] built the foundation of the TNC;
24 For the whole text of Taiwan Film Manifesto, see Zhan, Hong-zhi,“民國七十六年台灣電影宣言,” 《台灣新電影》, edited by Peggy Jiao. Taipei: 時報, 1988. 111-118.
Hsieh34
The Sandwich Man [Erzi de da wan’ou], however, ensured the existence of
the term “Taiwan New Cinema.” (Lu 1998, 273, my translation)25
Defining Features of the TNC
One reason Taiwan New Cinema remains such an important era in Taiwan film history is because of its groundbreaking transition from governmental domination in the film industry to a period marked by “directorial reign.” Taiwan New Cinema gave life to Taiwanese cinema, which was in decline in the late 1970s. In this context, TNC also forged new directions for later Taiwan directors. As mentioned earlier, TNC directors made no attempt to depict what they felt were superficial commercial elements, and many of their films marked innovation, creativity and radical politics.
Such filmmaking was a revolution in Taiwan, and interpretations of TNC movies necessarily highlighted these new factors and their impact. In the following, I will examine three responses to the TNC films. These aspects include historical consciousness, groundbreaking TNC aesthetics and the TNC’s cultural significance.
Historical Consciousness
The TNC movement implicated the end of the period of repression in filmmaking that had existed during KMT control in Taiwan. Though closely aligned with the CMPC, TNC directors attempted to fight for freedom in producing their films.
25 Note that Lu did acknowledge the role of the government CMPC in the development of the TNC when she wrote that “is because these three films were all produced by the CMPC that we have to admit the influence the CMPC had on the films of this period.” The original text in Chinese is : 可以說, 《光陰的故事》介紹了新電影的作者, 預示了新電影的風貌, 《小畢的故事》打開了新電影起步 的道路, 而 《兒子的大玩偶》則確定了新電影一詞的存在。由於這幾部影片都是由中影所製作 生產的,因此, 我們也不能不承認中影在此一時期對電影生產方向的影響。 Hsieh35
These directors deliberately made “a distinct step away from the pedagogical orientation of healthy realism, the commercialism of studio genres and the eclectic provincialism of taiyu pian [Taiwanese-language film]” (Yeh and Davis 56). Many
TNC films criticized Taiwanese society and examined historical trauma during the authoritarian regime. Additionally, TNC films emphasize movement on local rural life and languages. Yeh and Davis point out that “cultural liberation can be understood as an urge for self-expression from a hitherto silenced group of people” (62), which points toward the grassroots themes of the TNC (which some critics have dismissed as merely rustic or provincial).
Local Taiwan imagery is mostly represented in TNC films on a temporal scale of the 1950s and 1960s, and the spaces it outlines: the rural countryside, peasants and sometimes spectacular yet distant cityscapes. Viewing Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s reveals a “temporal and spatial continuity that helps the teleological construction of the Taiwanese identity”—a theme picked up by TNC directors. The historical and political background portrayed in TNC films, replete with historical, economic and social context, “emphasizes the tragedies of these [Taiwanese] protagonists” (Yeh
1999, 49, [my translation]).26
Aesthetics
26 The original text is “ 但建立身分的過程需要沿著時空的連續性, 朝著某目的定點進行。如此一 來, 身分的構成就具備了起點, 中站, 和目的地。...但是觀眾之所以覺得這些底層人物值得同情的 原因, 是影片同時提供故事發生的歷史/經濟/ 社會脈絡, 來點名小人物的困境。簡言之, 這些人 物的悲劇不在他們的個體性, 而是社會經濟制度條件上。” Hsieh36
The Taiwan New Cinema movement is particularly famous for its stylistic features and also cinematic preferences. Thematically speaking, the TNC films presented compassionate themes and grassroots locales and characters. Many of them portray farmers and working class people, focusing attention on the happiness and sufferings of these lower classes and agricultural groups in Taiwan. Perhaps the best-known example is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Son’s Big Doll,” episode in The
Sandwichman. The economic dilemma of the couple in the film represents the living conditions of many people in rural working classes during the time the film was made.
As in his other TNC films, like A Time to Live, A Time to Die and Boys From
Fengkuei, Hou promotes a compassionate concern for downtrodden people and grassroots themes within his autobiographical depictions. This concentration on working and lower classes was not new in Taiwan film history, however. In the 1960s, the CMPC promoted a series of films endorsing governmental policy in rural villages in Taiwan, employing the “healthy realism” style discussed above.27 A difference with TNC films was that they moved from “healthy realism” and focused on the realists’ attention on realistic conditions, proper, in Taiwanese working classes.28 Yu
Kanping’s Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? [Da cuo che] (1983), for example, based its setting on a veteran community and depicts the issue of the ambiguous moral value
27 Here I refer to a series of films made during the 1960s and 1970s, and to even into the early 1980s under the supervision of CMPC general manager Gong Hong. These films were based on KMT socio-economic policy, which in part focused on the development of Taiwan’s rural countryside. Gong adopted elements of Italian neo-realism but added positive messages that ignored harsh social realities.
28 Thematically, Taiwan New Cinema’s inclination to the Italian Neo-realism is more than the previous generation’s healthy realism.
Hsieh37 influenced by the industrialization from the 70s. Meanwhile, Wang Tong’s A Flower in The Raining Night [Kanhai de rizhi] describes a sex-worker’s life and the generosity of the country people. Concerning on Taiwan’s own history and its people,
TNC films reflect both the historical and personal trauma, as the spokesman for those described in their films.
These themes were given yet more realistic treatment, and subsequently evolved into definitive reflections of Taiwan society in TNC films. To bring the humanistic qualities to life, many TNC films were shot on location and used amateur actors. The development of TNC films in the early 1980s turned from the theatrical mise-en-scène of the previous martial art films and melodramas. From the early 1960s, the production of kung-fu films and wenyi pian in Taiwan relied heavily on theatrical settings creating remote martial worlds or a society of entrepreneurs competing in love and business. The foundation of the studio system in Taiwan supported this.
Studios with ample resources provided space and materials to construct these romantic interior settings and grand exterior milieus. In contrast, TNC films, shot on location most of the times, surprised and challenged audiences visually and thematically. Foremost among these may have been how TNC directors courageously employed amateur actors in their films, which became a standard for them. Although this approach in one sense was in part simply a function of budget considerations, it also demonstrates how the TNC was joined by eager, idealistic young actors, early in their careers, and the use of these original characteristics generated positive feedback among critics and audiences. The puppetmaster Li Tian-lu’s role as a grandfather in Hsieh38 many of Hou’s films is an example. Li’s unaffected, rural style and vivid Taiwanese idioms are representatives of local wisdom and experience, and Li’s work was positively received by audiences and critics. TNC directors often use real people
(amateur actors), capturing their actions and dialogues in unrehearsed situation. This strategy depends not on the stars’ but on the natural conversations and interactions among them, creating the realistic sense. Also, the TNC directors tended to use the long takes and long shots more frequently in order to imitate the real pace of time. As
Yeh and Davis, when analyzing the TNC techniques, say that “(a)ccumulation of concrete detail and meticulous plotting of event, sound, and image promotes the screen experience as a deep respiration or breathing” (Yeh and Davis 101). They have the artistic attempt to reproduce life as it is in the aesthetic framework.
But the scope of TNC films is much broader than previous generations’, going against the illusionary ideologies, aiming to look for the essence of life on the land of
Taiwan. TNC directors are humanistic and historically conscious. Their use of realist stylistics is not just an exercise in style. All of their techniques are capturing; they search for aesthetic frameworks that help record and illustrate their observation to a long-neglected world.
Cultural Significance of TNC
The TNC movement is also distinctive in its cultural significance. It brought in
Taiwan cinema a new vision on themes, directorial consciousness and international claim. First, it was for the first time, Taiwanese artists consciously took an eye on the Hsieh39 local life. This movement has evolved within the political and aesthetic climate of an industrialized Taiwan. Ti Wei says that the TNC movement “was also an innovation because it was the first time that humanistic concerns about local history and society was fully expressed in Taiwanese cinema and attempted to communicate with the local public” (19). June Yip importantly identifies the TNC movement with its specific cultural significance—its roots in the Taiwan Nativist Literature Movement and contemporary postcolonial experience in Taiwan. In Yip’s Envisioning Taiwan:
Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, she starts by questioning what distinguishes TNC films of the 1980s and the Nativist Literature that underpins them. The purpose of her analysis is to “highlight a perceptible shift from conceptions of nation and cultural identity based on unitary coherence and authenticity toward alternative models that emphasize multiplicity and fluidity” (Yip 11).
Viewed from the second perspective, TNC films have raised the cultural status of film workers, especially the position of film directors. The TNC period sees the rising of Taiwan “auteur criticism,” which identifies and examines films by associating them with a director who often uses common themes and stylistic traits. This approach is often connected with heavy use of formal analysis concerned with matters of structure and style in film, and with thematic interpretations of messages about life and society.
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang are the two of the most frequently discussed TNC directors in this new critical wave, and scholars using this approach have examined how the historical and cultural conditions of these two directors’ productions influenced their arrangements of the auteurist unity, and how they established Hsieh40 themselves as auteurs. It has been noted how these two directors tended to organize out of the CMPC studio system, and how they and other TNC auteurs were influenced by the system. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis have examined Taiwan directors, particularly TNC directors, in their Taiwan Film directors: A Treasure
Island. They pinpoint general auteuristic characteristics of several significant TNC directors, including Hou, Yang and Wang Tong.29 They have also pinpointed how
TNC directors anchored and unified audience perception of films, and identified the most distinctive signs of directorial control over their films: editing, storylines, themes and setting. These sophisticated auteur studies are interested in the films only, not in the psychology or private lives of the filmmakers. According to Yeh and Davis,
“Taiwan cinema has become more visible due to the rise of internationally recognized names: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee. These Taiwan directors enjoy substantial attention, not as figures within the accustomed national cinema model but as auteurs of the international cinema, navigating the ceaseless roll of nation versus international, local versus global” (6).
This critical approach, while valuable, focused rather too much on the cinema’s function as cultural and art product, and ignored its entertainment function. TNC films are closer to “author’s cinema” than “spectator’s cinema.”30 As Feii Lu points out,
29 For more discussions on less noticed TNC directors and artists like Wang Tong or Wu Nien-zhen, see Yeh and Davis, “Challenges and Controversies of the Taiwan New Cinema” in Taiwan Film Directors. In order to show that the New Cinema should be seen not only as director-driven, but as a collective endeavor by lesser-known artists, critics, and the public, the two authors include Wu Nianzhen and Xiao Ye in their discussion. Later, they discuss Wang Tong and Wan Ren particularly. These two directors take distinctive approaches to Taiwan nativism, preferring the presentation of historical subjects than the quest for stylistic consistency or innovation.
30 In Huang Lin’s 60 Years of Film Critique in Taiwan, he notes an essay written by the film critic Qi Hsieh41
“TNC directors consciously adopted a detached attitude toward audiences, and thus developed the creative style and the “auteur” consciousness. This was different from the attitude which viewed directors as only one part of film production and
‘influenced the development of film production and cultural art’ in Taiwan” (Lu
Taiwan Cinema 286-287).31 Chang Shih-lun, meanwhile, regarding the logic of how
TNC films transplanted and fit an “art cinema” paradigm into Taiwan society, called this a “Taiwan film phenomenon” in which “the New Cinema directors’ works aggressively targeted the various intermediate-level film festivals and began participating in the outside competition and observation sections of the higher level festivals” (31). We might argue that a vicious circle was taking shape, and Ti Wei says that “major film directors (in Taiwan) continued to ‘keep a distance’ from local markets and audiences both in creation and in marketing. An international film festival approach was adopted by the Taiwan New Cinema School of film workers, and Chang Tso-chi was one of the directors who followed this international film festival path
TNC directors’ sophisticated grasp of past and current circumstances in Taiwan, accessing and highlighting Taiwanese historical experience, and revisiting the reality of daily life for different classes and people in Taiwan; their cultural awareness and
Long-ren on April 25, 1987, “The Inclination of Taiwan Film Criticism.” In Qi’s essay, the circumstances of Taiwan film critics in the late 80s are discussed. Qi argues that because of Taiwan New Cinema, film criticism in Taiwan was separated into two poles: “spectator cinema” criticism and “author cinema” criticism. Film critics should find a balance of their status and approach, for they cannot present all positions of films.
31 The original text of Lu’s argument is: “台灣新電影(對觀眾)採取的是疏離的態度….經由這樣的 經驗，台灣導演培養了所謂電影作者(Autuer)的創作風格與工作態度，與過往導演僅是電影生產 過程一環的工作態度不同，於整個電影美學與文化藝術的發展，有深遠影響。” Hsieh42 flight from government studio production and control toward independent, sometimes revolutionary filmmaking; and their groundbreaking aesthetics that continue to have an important influence on Taiwan cinema—these factors represent the significance of
TNC films, once again underscoring the importance of this era for Taiwanese film.
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chang
Given TNC directors’ historical consciousness, their cinematic signatures, and their cultural significance, it should not surprise us that the relationship between TNC directors and the following generation in Taiwan film has been the subject of academic interest since the decline of TNC. Among TNC directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien is without question viewed as Chang Tso-chi’s mentor. Hou is arguably one of the most appreciated “great directors” in contemporary world film history. He is best known as one of the most significant innovators of the “long take,” especially those in
“empty shots.” Also, Hou is recognized as one of the most truly gifted interpreters of mise en scène, alongside figures such as Louis Feuillade (France 1873-1925), Kenji
Mizuguchi (Japan 1898-1956 ), Ozu Yasujiro32 (Japan 1903-1963), and Theodoros
Angelopoulos (Greece 1935-). For auteurs like these, artistry lies more on their stylistic or formal operation than on the thematic preaching.33
32 Hou is often considered as bearing similar cinematic stylistics with Ozu, even Hou himself said that he had never seen any of Ozu’s film before he has already established his own style. In “Nostalgia at This Present,” Hasumishi Gehiko argues that Ozu’s films are always searching for the lost present while Hou’s films are always searching for the lost past. This point marks the basic difference of these two directors.
33 David Bordwell, in his Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, discusses these four directors’ cinematic staging and mise en scène. These four directors in some way share the same craft tradition, a problem–solving based system, testing a director’s artistic creativity. For a detailed Hsieh43
Hou, as a Director
Hou was born in 194734. He entered the film industry in 1973, first as the apprentice of director Li Hsing. Nurtured at the declining moment of Taiwan cinema,
Hou began to direct his own films in 1980; the first three of them are Cute Girls
[Jiushi liuliu de ta](1980), Cheerful Wind [Fenger tit a cai](1981)and Green, Green
Grass of Home [Zai na he pan qing cao qing](1982). In 1983, he directed one episode in The Sandwichman, which was viewed as the breakthrough film of the Taiwan New
Cinema. Later that same year, he directed The Boys From Fengkuei, which began to reveal his self-awareness and self-assurance as a director. From then till 1987, he directed a series of autobiography films—A Summer at Grandpa’s [Dongdong de jiaqi](1984), A Time to Live, A Time to Die[Tongnian wangshi](1985), and Dust in the
Wind[Lianlian fengchen](1987). His themes, including teenage initiation and love in a rural hometown, and his unique stylistics, have become TNC trademarks, and have had a great impact on Taiwan film. His Daughter of the Nile [Niluohe nuer](1987) presents contemporary urban teenage life. In his masterpiece A City of Sadness (1989), discussion, see David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. However, Bordwell’s emphasis on the history of film forms is sometime criticized and examined. For example, in Ira Bhaskar’s “Historical Poetics,” Narrative, and Interpretation,” she basically examines David Bordwell’s idea on “historical poetics” which focuses on the analysis of the history of form. According to Bhaskar, Bordwell’s objections to interpretation do not function at the level of inadequate or misplaced application of interpretative principles in current criticism.
34 As an immigrant from mainland China, this kind of diaspora experience influenced Hou a lot. In Jean-Michel Frodon’s “Perceiving the Space and Time upon a Mango Tree,” he linked Hou’s personal history with his cinematic techniques. Frodon tries to find consistent elements in all of Hou’s films, saying that Hou chooses to be close to history and politics. Besides, he argues that Hou’s film technique could be called as the “Chinese montage” derived from classical Chinese painting and literature. It mostly originates from Hou’s Chinese background.
Hsieh44
Hou concerned himself with historical issues. His Taiwan trilogies, A City of Sadness
(1989), The Puppetmaster [Xi meng rensheng](1993) and Good Men, Good Women
[Hao nan hao nu](1995)35, deal with Taiwanese history from the Japanese-occupied period, to the white terror36, and into the 1990s and modern Taiwan. A City of Sadness won a Gold Lion Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. This achievement established Hou’s position as an international master. This award-winning event brought a new path for later Taiwan directors—an international film festival award-winning strategy. His 1996 Goodbye South, Goodbye [Nanguo zaijian nanguo](1996), returned to contemporary urban and rural reality. In 1998, he made
Flowers of Shanghai [Haishang hua](1998), an extremely delicate film on purely cinematic mise-en-scène. His later films include Millennium Mambo [Qianxi manbo](2001), Café Lumiere [Kohi Jikou] (2003), The Best of Our Times [Zui hao de shi guang ] (2005), and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007). In all of these films, Hou
35 June Yip’s “Remembering and Forgetting, Part II.: Hou Hsiao-hsien’ Taiwan Trilogy” in Envisioning Taiwan gives a complete research on these films of Hou. This chapter introduces Hou’s three films called Taiwan Trilogy. By the analysis of these cinematic texts, Yip bring the readers to think about the dominant tropes and issues often associated with the discourse of nationhood—the treatment of history, the role of language, the question of modernization, and alternative conceptions of identity. Films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s in this age are significant because they emphasize the fact that historical imagination—the very fact of memory, of actively constructing and creatively retelling the past—can be a critical tool for empowering oneself to deal with the crises of the present moment.
36 The White Terror in Taiwan originated in the 228 event, 1947. During February to May in 1947, a riot happened in Taiwan between local Taiwanese people and the KMT government, also the newly immigrants. The massacre was aroused because of a smuggled-cigarette inspection in Taipei. A man was shot to death during the dispute, thus local Taiwanese people began to react against the KMT government. The government gave the sup the suppression of political dissidents and public discussion of the massacre under the martial law. Then the martial-law enforced period, the White Terror, began, from 1949, ended in 1987. During the White Terror, the Kuomintang (KMT) government led by Chiang Kai-shek imprisoned or executed around 140,000 Taiwanese because of their real or perceived opposition to, according to a recent report by the Executive Yuan of Taiwan. Some prosecuted Taiwanese were defined by the Kuomintang as "bandit spies" (匪諜), spies for Chinese communists, and received serious punishment.
Hsieh45 has developed unique style based on realist intent, including long shots, empty shots and long takes. His use of empty shots is a particularly interesting stylistic development.37 In conventional image-making, characters are located in the center of a shot, and the camera moves or the editing cuts in order to make the audience’ movements can be fully apprehended by the audience all the time. But Hou, in a surprising turn, often sets his camera in a static position and allows his characters to walk into and out of the frame.38 For example, the scene with Shizeko bidding goodbye to Hinome in A City of Sadness, which is set in the hallway of a hospital (the scene is immediately strange, in that there is no clear indication what is the main point or thrust of action is), upsets audience’s expectations by showing a long shot of
Shizeko talking to a nurse, while around them doctors, nurses and patients come and go. The camera remains in an unchanged position at a certain distance. David
Bordwell calls this kind of contrasting mise-en-scène “precision staging” in which the shot is taken by long fixed takes, breaking through the optical constraints of cinematic
37 For “empty shot” and how it dominated Hou’s works, see Nick Browne’s “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster: The Poetics of Landscape.” In this essay, Browne analyzes the structure of Hou’s The Puppetmaster, arguing that the arrangement of inner space and outside space not only serve to imply a political apparatus but a great religious system. This system contains the dialectical relationship between human beings and nature which brought Hou’s work into a philosophical level.
38 This static camera strategy is so noted that when he tries to make his camera dolly with the characters in Good Men, Good Women, the critic James Udden wrote “This Time He Moves: The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women” to exemplify this change. This essay starts from a radical technical innovation in Hou’s Good Men, Good Women. In this film, Hou’s camera seems unable to keep still. This is not merely a question of form, rather it raises issues that extend beyond esthetic parameters, even touching on questions of national identity. Udden points out that 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 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.
Hsieh46 presentations (Bordwell 160).39
In addition to these aesthetic techniques, certain pragmatic concerns had an impact on the TNC. Techniques like these and the picturesque mise-en-scène in Hou’s works (which some analysts say is more poetic and philosophical than dramatic) are now appreciated by audiences worldwide, and have influenced many directors, including those in the new Asian Minimalism,40 the mainland China director Jia
Zhang Ke41 and not least, Chang Tso-chi. I will now examine how Chang has incorporated styles originating in the TNC in his own work.
Chang, as a Successor
Coincidentally, 1987 marks not only the announcement of the “Taiwan Film
39 For further discussion on the “precision staging” of Hou, see Bordwell, David. "Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film." Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2005. 141-162 Also, for a thorough understanding of Hou’s style, see Yeh and Davis, “Trisecting Taiwan Cinema with Hou Hsiao-hsien.” This is a chapter that advances the authorship-historiography framework by using Hou’s works as the example to map Taiwan film culture’s trajectory. Yeh and Davis look at crucial interventions in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most important texts. These texts follow a framework of autobiography. They analyze Hou’s collaborators Zhu Tianwen and Wu Nianzhen as well for they offered their autobiographies to Hou’s Summer at Grandpa’s and Dust in the Wind. They also discuss the eminent Chinese authour Shen Congwen who inspired Hou to make his own autobiographical The Time to Live and the Time to Die. Also by analyzing The Puppetmaster, they conclude that Hou’s finest achievements are a succession of “borrowed” autobiographies, and explore cultural patrimony in Taiwan cinema, via autobiographical acts.
40 According to David Bordwell, Asian Minimalism, which emerged in the 1990s, is a stylistic approach where the director “sets the actors facing the camera or at ninety-degree angles to it, with any background planes perpendicular to the lens axis,” which creates planimetric, almost fashion-shoot imagery. For more discussion, see David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, p. 231-236.
41Jia Zhang-ke (1970-), the “Six Generation” Chinese director, began his film career with 1995’s short film Xiao Shan Going Home[Xiaoshan huijia]. He gained his fame by his later “Hometown Trilogy”: Xiao Wu[Xiaowu](1997), Platform[Zhan Tai](2000), and Unknown Pleasures[Ren Xiao yiao](2001). He deals with alienated teenagers and the impact of globalization in modern China. He has a preference on using long takes, also a cinematic feature in Hou. Jia himself, in an interview, admitted Hou’s influence toward him was great in cinematic aesthetics. See “Conversation with His Idol Hou Hsiao-hsien: Jia Zhang-ke’s Retrospect on His Film Career,” http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/p/2006-12-20/14371378775.html Hsieh47
Manifesto,” but also Chang Tso-chi’s first apprenticeship. It was thus the end of one era, and the beginning of another in which Chang directly succeeds Taiwan New
Cinema auteurs (particularly, as we have seen, Hou Hsiao-hsien). Chang’s experience with TNC artists deeply influenced Chang’s artistic consciousness and his attitude toward the film business. As mentioned earlier, Chang served as the assistant director of Hou’s The City of Sadness, a family saga on the 228 massacre. Chang learned
Hou’s considerable long takes and the value of on location shooting during that period.
He in turn adopted these techniques within his carefully orchestrated style and thematic choices. By comparing some of the salient traits of Hou and Chang’s styles, we will see a profound lineage between them. For example, those familiar with
Chang’s films say that his use of long takes is reminiscent of Hou’s style. Also typical is the use of empty shots in Chang’s work. The technique is seen in Hou’s The City of
Sadness and other works. Chang also adopts long shot and the long take. And the spirit of “precision staging” is also visible in Chang’s works. In the family dinner scene in The Best of Times, we see Wei and Jie walk in and sit down, after which Jie stands and begins to prepare a bowl of food for his father. Although there is no direct focus on either character’s face, the arrangement of this eating scene provides cool-down observation to common life. And thus a realistic sense is constructed.
Like Hou, Chang Tso-chi tends to mix professional actors with non-professional ones. One reason he prefers this is because working with actors with little or no acting experience provides a keen sense of realism, and a certain instinctive “sparkle” in their portrayals. Amateurs have also allowed Chang to train young actors into his own Hsieh48 methods. Amateur actors have become a central cinematic apparatus for Chang, allowing him to blur the boundary between reality and story. In addition to Hou’s influence, Chang’s past experience as a documentary filmmaker makes him good at capturing unrehearsed, unexpected movement and action, enhancing the style that links Chang to his TNC predecessors, and allows him to reach out to the common
Taiwan experience and Taiwan local life.
Thematically, Chang inherits the TNC’s focus on local people, locales and culture. Chang’s three films particularly show the predicaments and difficult positions of underprivileged teenagers. These adolescents are unable to gain “normal” family ties, social mobility, security, and common human needs of love, respect, support, appreciation and inter-communication. Chang’s films portray grown-up traumas that have saddled his teenage protagonists with harsh economic and psychological realities.
In Chang’s films, the main goal of adults is to gain profit, and not to offer help and support to other family members, neighbors, etc. Chang’s marginalized teenage protagonists sharply highlight Taiwan’s metamorphosis into a capitalized and industrialized society.
Like TNC filmmakers, Chang deploys Taiwan’s cityscapes as mirrors of social injustice, and he uses social problems as metaphors of collapsing traditional values.
Chang also shares with his predecessors the challenge of portraying not only the material conditions but even the intangible psychological tension in human relationships. In these respects, Chang was close to TNC themes in what he called the Hsieh49
“element of life.”42 Chang’s grassroots themes center on the depiction of the outcast and disfranchised in Taipei. However, the grassroots themes are not limited to narrowly defined minority stories but carry a wider range of local ingredients, such as multiple dialects, colorful yet sometimes vulgar common sayings, and splendid folk customs. In Ah Chung, we see the protagonist practicing “Ba Jia Jian”. In The Best of times, Ah Jie devotes some of his time to the “Xiao Fa Lo,” which is concerned with the celebration of gods’ appearances. Such nativist themes are sometimes criticized because they promote a less glamorous view of Taipei, unbefitting its status as an international, modern city. Other critics view them as the presentation of Taiwan’s energetic strength.43
Chang’s films can be viewed as careful constructions that blur the line separating fantasy and reality, with fantastic elements within scenes of ordinary life functioning to deconstruct and disrupt conventionalized realist narrative. Elements of daily life pervade Chang’s three movies, but they are always overshadowed by the existence of supernatural or fantastic elements. In Ah Chung, Ah Chung has the special ability to communicate with the gods; Jie in The Best of Times constantly practices magic tricks; the return-from-death endings of Darkness and Light and The Best of Times portray a wish-fulfilling desire and “second chance” in life. By way of these fantastic elements
42 In an interview with Michael Berry, Chang explained his desire to capture the “element of life” from common life experiences. He said that he wanted no acting but the real living situation of his actors. See Berry, Michael. “Chang Tso-chi: Shooting from the margins.” Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
43 For essays criticizing and defending these themes, see Robert Chen, Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jing yan [ The Historical-Cultural Experiences of Taiwan New Cinema]. Taipei: Variety (Wanxiang) Publishing Company, 1993; and Liang Xinhua and Mi Zou, eds. Xin dianyin zhi si [Death of the New Cinema]. Taipei: Tangshan Press, 1987. Hsieh50 within daily environments, we can mark the difference between Chang and the TNC generation. The TNC directors took up the natural use of lighting, color, sound and editing in order enhance the illusionist nature of the reality effect. They reclaim the territory of reality. Chang defines “reality” in another point of view. He once said that
“films are in their essence not real,” and Chang’s arrangement of fantastic elements in realist scenes asserts his radical departure from his predecessors. By way of this
“haunted realism” (as it was named by Chris Berry) and thus Chang creates what Lu
Feii calls “another cinema.”
Probably the biggest challenge for Chang lies not in the thematic heritance and renovation but rather in the stylistics. Chang, learning from TNC’s shooting on location, presented his films as a “cinema of reality” rooted in the pathos and “living environment” of rural life. Chang revised and developed this method by imagining settings, not only as the physical surroundings, but as mirrors of character psychology.
To Chang, in order to achieve the highest state of realism, cinema must admit that it can’t be 100% real. In order to make the emotions and psychology of characters and scenes stand out.
Sharing similar preference to on location shots, Chang has different concerns on the realities he has shown. TNC directors’ mise-en-scène underlines detached emotion and sense of concrete reality. Chang, speaking from a follower’s perspective, advances with a quasi-realism that balances the factual elements and the poetic.
Chang often uses the contrast between light and darkness to create a dreamy atmosphere in his films. That is, TNC directors’ shooting on location is more realist, Hsieh51 focusing on the establishment of epoch-rehabituation that allows its audience to get back time and space (like the 50s atmosphere created in Son’s Big Doll). Chang’s vision, instead, leans toward “psychological” elements presenting the “truth” of life.
Here we reach the “author’s mind” of Chang Tso-chi: it echoes the phrase he says that
“films are unreal but the life experience it presents is true” (Chang).
Conclusion
The TNC directors ambitiously turned Taiwan film industry into a new leaf aesthetically and culturally. Hou Hsiao-hsien, especially, established an auteuristic position in international arena. Following their footsteps, Chang’s films provide an occasion to reflect on the Taiwan’s identity in his own cinematic significance fusing the inheritance he got and his own creativity. Filmmakers seek to find a balance between depicting specific social dilemma and portraying ideal image as the better future. In Chang’s case, different from TNC directors’ focus on the reality, the fantastic elements, as the touchstone that signals Chang’s own innovation, points to the hesitation between the need to be a total realist and the wish to underline a possibility for this dilemma. It is emblematic that Chang adds innovative elements in the TNC or Hou’s realistic style. Hou’s cinematic signature has mostly been extended in Chang’s works. Chang’s addition of the fantastic elements is symptomatic of the need to find new images of the transforming Taiwan society in which the traditional values are dying with the old generation. The confuscious heritage has mostly disappeared in Taiwan, and the old good values have been razed in the industrialized Hsieh52 society. In an interview, Chang commented that while shooting those fantastic scenes he did not express the loss of faith in the real world but the contrary thing. He says that “for the characters, these imaginary worlds represent hope. We always hold to hope for those things we do not have. These hopes become our spiritual sustenance”
(“Shooting from the Margin” 412). The contrast of hope and desperation may be an apt metaphor for Taiwan in the historical context, and it presents a major concern of the director as well.
The historical importance of Chang Tso-chi lies in his lineage with the previous
TNC, especially with Hou, stylistically and thematically. And yet at the same time his films allude to the contemporary Taiwan society and root the images in its specific social and political context. The self-awareness of influence is magnified by the presence of Hou’s themes and stylistics, which have already shaped the Taiwan film history in the image of the beautiful moments. Another new leaf in Taiwan cinema may appear in Chang’s works.
Hsieh53
Chapter 3
Salient Features of Chang’s Films
Taiwan New Cinema masters swept the globe during the 1980s, and the stylistics they employed soon became a cinematic lingua franca. Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward
Yang, particularly, adapted to the new norms that separated them from their previous generation, and inspired a younger generation—including Tsai Ming-liang, Lin
Cheng-sheng, Chen Kuo-fu, Chen Yu-hsun and Chang Tso-chi. Chang’s films show how this generation not only adopted the previous generation’s methods and styles, but also developed distinctive alternatives. And he built perhaps the most subtle and variegated personal style of the post-TNC generation.
I will examine the thematic arrangements and stylistics, particularly narrative structure. The examination of Chang’s preferred mise-en-scène and narrative structure will highlight the relation of his cinematic stylistics to the “director’s intention.
Therefore, I will also consider the “auteur’s intention,” as it is revealed in the aesthetics of Chang’s films.
Themes
When we ponder over “auteur theory,” it comes to mind that the director is identifiably responsible for the film text. But when it comes to a director like Chang, who has only made four feature films in a 20-year career, the recurrence of coherent themes needs more examination. In order to find the identifying mark of the auteur in Hsieh54 a body of works like Chang’s, we need to trace the continuities in his films. Chang adapts recurring themes, which is a distinctive feature of his films. All Chang’s films focus on presenting the realities of life in modern Taiwan. Looking at the world from teenage protagonists’ points of view, Chang captures their angst toward modern society and childhood trauma. These traumatic experiences are presented in the form of violence, reflecting the deformation of modernization in Taiwan.
The Marginalized Teenager
Chang’s films clearly show the predicaments and difficult positions of underprivileged teenagers. They are in difficult positions because they are unable to acquire “normal” family ties, social mobility, security, and the common human needs for love, respect, support, appreciation and communication. Chang demonstrates that an adult society, in which his teenage protagonists try to fit in in order to best respond to the challenges of growing up, withers in the face of harsh economic and psychological realities. Every adult’s main goal is to gain profit, to “get ahead,” and not to offer help and support to others. Thus it is difficult for the teen protagonists to find role models to look up to.
Chang’s focus on teenage protagonists’ struggles has been famously characterized as a kind of “bildungsroman,” the coming-of-age process of teenagers.
In an interview with Xie Ren-chang, Chang said he wanted to “concentrate on presenting teenage life”. After viewing Tsai Ming-liang’s Rebels of the Neon God,
Chang felt that “his understanding of teenagers is totally different from Tsai’s,” and he Hsieh55 also thought that “it is pretty comfortable for those teens to do things that violated the law. Their intention can be further discussed” (Hsieh 44). But, he emphasized, his
“thematic preference was definitely not compensation for his own teenage life” (Hsieh
44).44 Teenagers in Chang’s films become a complex central figure that encounters transformation during the narrative moves on. Yet, generally speaking, the bildungsroman genre relies on identifiable or even standardized plot arrangements, which may include such episodes as misadventure, disillusionment, ordeal and compromise with society.
Some of Chang’s thematic arrangements intends to break the rules of bildungsroman. When we identify generic subjects in Chang’s films, we can see that juvenile delinquency is most dominant. Instead of successfully entering the adult society, as would ordinary bildungsroman characters, Chang’s protagonists fail and collapse while trying to fit into the adult world. We might call this reverse initiation of teens a kind of “counter-bildungsroman.”45 In Chang’s three films that were introduced in chapter 2, certain coming-of age themes are very apparent, but some are overturned. For example, the anger and frustration teenagers often feel towards society are highlighted, and teenagers’ reaction under pressure is viewed as a kind of childish response to social values. Chang’s films subvert the bildungsroman archetypes in which they operate. His protagonists do not learn to become mature at
44 The original Chinese reads, “我還是想專注在青少年這個領域。我看了蔡明亮的青少年哪吒後， 感覺自己對青少年的認知和蔡明亮有些差異，因為那些青少年去殺人放火、偷東西其實是非常 爽，不那麼悶的，所以我想這個領域還是比較有開展性，但並不是什麼彌補心態在作祟。”
45 Here the “counter-bildungsroman” is my own definition of Chang’s thematic preference. Hsieh56 the end of the story—a reversal of typical expectations. This variation on specific generic conventions or formulas helps us understand Chang’s films. The historical and cultural contexts also shape the generic formulas used in his films, illustrating how the intersection of a specific culture and the film’s genre help illuminate his films. In the next section, I will analyze these two contexts.
In Chang’s films, the counter-bildungsroman theme allows us to perceive different values and meanings. These values satirize the hypocrisy of the adult world, and lead Chang’s films to mild social criticism. If we place Ah Chung in an angry-teenager generic tradition, it must be characterized as part of a revisionist tradition. Though possessing a similar structural paradigm, it displaces the values and traditions embodied in the coming-of-age paradigm—for Ah Chung, in the end, compromises with adult society, the Ba-Jia-jian group he joined. Chang’s films in fact ignore generic expectations for he doesn’t provide a solution to teenagers’ problems.
Simply put, Chang invites his audience to question the inevitability of trauma in the coming-of-age, maturing process.
One of the most distinctive features that Chang’s three protagonists share is their uneasiness about encountering adult situations. They are often on the edge of society, and their modes of action evince a kind of instinctive reaction that can be highly self-destructive. Chang loves to involve his protagonists in the gangster culture.
When asked why he has had so much interest in young gangster themes, Chang explains that “gang culture in Taiwan is very complicated, and the gangs today operate like small businesses; they have adapted themselves to commercial culture… Hsieh57
If you go to the central or southern part of Taiwan, you see gangs virtually everywhere” (Michael Berry 414). In Chang’s view, the gangster culture and the temptations it brought are easy outlets for teens to choose when they realize that they can not easily succeed in Taiwan’s materialist, capitalist culture.46 Chang was also impressed by the gangster culture in Taiwan during his documentary filmmaking experience.47 We can see that realism in Chang’s films is both historical and cultural.
The young gangsters’ physical features, dress and language, their psychological and emotional temperaments, their masculine and aggressive reactions—all perfectly capture contemporary Taiwan teen-gang culture. These historical and cultural identifications give the films a sense of reality. Chang effectively and skillfully dramatizes the balancing of the two dimensions of the ordinary and the extraordinary in life situations when it comes to the depiction of real everyday life. As a result of these combinations and reversals, the mental and emotional frustration of Chang’s protagonists comes off as appealing and authentic. I am referring specifically to figures like Ah Chung in Ah Chung, Kang-yi in Darkness and Light and Wei and Jie in The Best of Times. All live in oppressed situations, knowing they cannot win.
Nevertheless, they react with a kind of courage, a kind of acceptance—as if they were going to become better people, with better futures. They never deny the reality of their
46 In Taiwan, the situation is in fact even more complicated. Influenced by traditional Chinese culture, performing well in school and on entrance exams are almost the only achievements teens of school age can look forward to. But this situation is largely limited to middle- or upper-class families that can afford the necessary training for children to succeed academically. Therefore many teens from families that cannot afford this are attracted to the brotherhood-centered gangster culture in Taiwan, in order to find their own measure of security. These are the teens Chang presents in his films.
47 Chang has discussed his experience making a documentary about teenagers addicted to joyriding. He said that it was his first experience working with gangsters, and it inspired him. See Michael Berry, “Shooting From the Margins.” Hsieh58 situations; rather, they intuitively accept them as the fundamental condition of their existence.
Using marginalized teenagers as eyes on the world, Chang constructs, interweaves, and finally destroys four aspects of human relationships—family, the affection of lovers, friends, and relationship with the divine spirit. He shows how each teenager works in vain to create a happy future. In fact, it is the very effort to conserve and support these human relationships that forces teens to give themselves totally to what they believe is worthwhile. But, in all cases, the capitalist adult world destroys whatever gains teenagers hope to obtain in the four aspects of human relationships.
Family ties, which are the foundation of human affection, seem a complicated arena that is constricted yet immense. And complex relationships like those of family or communion with the divine can be evaluated as the epitome of Taiwan’s pantheistic society. Though Chang’s protagonists are independent and sometimes have sophistication that emerges out of their hard-bitten life experiences, they manage to present themselves appealingly as the representatives of underprivileged people in
Taiwan. Dramatically, they are almost wholly confined by their neighborhoods, in dire economic straits, with their family members bearing the brunt of historical and personal trauma. The protagonist in Ah Chung faces emotional embarrassment and family trauma when he sees his mother performing rustic dancing to support her family, and when he mentions his father raping his sister. Kang-yi in Darkness and
Light has to endure the death of her father, a blind massage therapist, and of Ah Wei, her boyfriend, who had become involved with gangsters. Ah Wei and Ah Jie in The Hsieh59
Best of Times lose their lives simply because they want to make a change in their miserable living conditions. Spatially, the only place in which the protagonists can move freely beyond their homes and families is in their neighborhoods. However, this
“outside” is limited and the neighborhood is not that friendly as it first appeared. We can see that, in this space, the protagonists still encounter bullies and violence from the ones they care most. That is to say, the neighborhood is not so much a carefree place as a kind of shelter in which lost teenagers gain the power to recover. How these working-class teenagers’ react toward pressure exemplify the power and strength beneath the surface of industrialized Taiwan. We can adapt Lin Wen-chi’s view on the presentation of urban neighborhoods by Hou Hsiao-hsien and other 1990s Taiwan directors to illustrate the common thematic arrangements of Chang. Lin argues that
“after the ’90s, Taiwan films have begun to describe the contemporary urban space in considerable quantities. Obviously, this urban space was totally different from the one it used to be in the historical context because of extensive development” (102).48 In other words, confining living environments and economic circumstances are the outcomes of capitalist exploitation.49 Teenagers are forced to integrate into this brand new urban space in which they have no previous models to follow. The harsh
48 The original text in Chinese is: “九零年代的台灣電影開始大量正視台灣的都市空間後，發現這 個空間在急速的發展下已經與過去的歷史空間斷然決裂了。” Lin in this essay says that the style and ideology of films experienced a transition during the 1980s and 1990s. The films began to focus on urbanized and capitalized Taiwan, especially Taipei city. Lin points out three directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Ren, and Stan Lai, who are particularly aware of these changes. In his argument, Lin says that history itself cannot connect the past and the present. As well, the urban space is changing from the concrete into the electronic.
49 Lin has applied in his work Jameson’s ideas about postmodern urban space, wherein the “wholeness” of a city is hard to present. The only image the audience can comprehend is a postmodern collage. As a result, the confined environment of the teens in both Hou and Chang;s films represents a confined experience in the postmodern city. Hsieh60 experiences teenagers have in industrialized society reverberate with Chang’s protagonists, forcing them to mature faster.
The teenagers in Chang’s films bear witness to changing urban or industrialized human relationships, and his disfranchised teenaged protagonists serve as metaphors for people and sites in the same predicaments. For example, respectively, his three films document three of Taiwan’s declining slums, located in Guan-du, Keelung, and
Xin-dian. Like other neighborhoods built on the margins of the city, these areas are populated mostly by veteran soldiers who came from mainland China in 1949, and who were then laid off, took up low-paying jobs or became involved in illegal activities, ultimately with little financial support. The spots are definitely out of date and wait for the government to evacuate and reconstruct. Chang tries to capture the life and livelihoods in the communities, but his films do not set out to become documentaries. His concern is more an attempt to reveal the humanity of certain struggling people. For example, the final sequence of The Best of Times suggests a direct humanistic attitude, with symbolism used to enhance the meaning of salvation.
Water, the recurring image around the neighborhood, plays an important role in this salvation. Of this, David Stratton writes that “Water imagery abounds. Min has painted a seascape, and Wei [both in The Best of Times] is fascinated by the tropical fish in a tank in his home (Min’s ex-boyfriend, who helps the boys after the killing, has an identical tank). Water also features in the film’s concluding sequence, which opts for fantasy rather than realism and, to a degree, detracts from the overall impact of the basically tragic story” (35). We see here how Chang tries to provide a sense of Hsieh61 hope in the constrained neighborhood.
In a sense, Chang’s films mourn the death of innocence at the hands of the adult world. That is, the more vigorously teens try to fit into the adult world, the more destructive and desperate they become. This contradiction is most clearly visible in
Chang’s counter-bildungsromans.
Violence and Grassroots Life
While watching Chang’s films, many viewers fixate on the violent acts and grassroots language. The most representative sequence comes in Ah Chung when Ah
Chung angrily smashes the wine bottle against his head, which reminds us of the earlier part in the film, when he had practiced the folk ritual ba-jia-jian and smashed himself with a knife. At that moment, the protagonist’s expositional gesture interweaves with his expressive emotion. These factors, together with the narrative that directs the story into destined revenge sequences, place his films squarely in the cultural and aesthetic tradition of social realism, a category in which harsh reality and struggle create a world molded by interpersonal conflicts, social dissatisfaction and achievement anxieties. According to this position, violence acts out disaffection toward the world, while the helplessness and hatred associated with the disaffection spread through the entire narration.
Many critics have made intelligent connections between the expressive, violent acts and the bereft and hopeless experiences of teenagers coming of age in Chang’s films. Chang’s obsession with violence has dogged the critical response to his films, Hsieh62 so that many reviewers have remained less attuned to the specific historical and social realities dramatized in the films than to the psychological outbursts, dramatized thrills, fantasies and violence. Exploring the social drama of Chang’s films reconnects them more concretely to their original historical context and makes clear that his films are about social and political unrest and outburst, both of which are far more historically tangible than the more-commonly acknowledged vulgarity and violence. In The
Proceedings of Taiwan Imagined and its Reality: an Exploration of Literature, History, and Culture, the contributors have assembled a compendium of arguments on how
Taiwan’s culture has influenced literature, and many of the topics about Taiwanese cultural history in this anthology could act as blueprints for the thematic considerations that permeate Chang’s films (3-8). Three topics stand out as relevant: the traumatic legacy of colonization and associated identity confusion; economic predicaments; and popular folk culture. Each of these topics shows local Taiwanese life and specific social contexts, and also links to the violence in Chang’s films which ultimately combine violent acts and fierce interpersonal relationships.
If violence has always been an ingredient in Chang Tso-chi’s films, the origin of these violent acts is clearly linked to specific times and places in post-war Taiwan and the trauma of colonization. June Yip argues that Taiwanese people have suffered identity crises during the various shifts of political power in the nation. Yip also claims that colonial power (such as the Japanese impact in Taiwan, which deeply influenced generations of Taiwanese), has had great determination in Taiwan Hsieh63
(12-48).50 Seeing Chang in this light, Chang’s use of violent scenes should not be seen as simply psychological dissatisfaction or uncontrolled eruptions. For example, viewing Darkness and Light in an historical context shows the implacable conflict of the local Taiwan gangster group with the newcomer gangsters from the mainland
China, and the ambiguity of identity in a historically-troubled Taiwan. Additionally, relationships between families and businesses refer to a real political and structural crisis in the social arenas of post-World War II Taiwan.
Beside the violent acts, Chang successfully captures the casual quality of the people’s involvement in these scenes, in which we see the vitality of grassroots lives.
At the heart of Chang’s films is a social documentary concentrating on ordinary life.
Working class’ leisure activities such as singing karaoke and drinking by the stands are depicted in Darkness and Light. According to Feii Lu, Chang’s films are “real-life drama” which integrate “reality and drama” (Another Cinema 140). An important point here is the insignificant and sometimes incongruous details portrayed in Chang’s films. Robert Chi explains that a director like Hou Hsiao-hsien, who aims at portraying historicity, bears the idea that “the detail is an event.” He points out that
“what it [A City of Sadness] does not fit is pre-existing, pre-experienced structures of the symbolic, of narrative, of historicity” (70).51 In Chang’s case, however, though
50 In the chapter “Confronting the Other, Defining a Self: Hsiang-t’u Literature and the Emergence of a Taiwanese Nationalism,”Yip examines the specific historical and cultural contexts out of which the hsiang-t’u literature (regionalist or nativist literature) emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s. This was one of the earliest attempts to articulate a distinctly Taiwanese cultural identity. Hwang Chun-ming is the primary focus of the analysis. Hwang’s hsiang-tu stories are notable not only for the richness and complexity of their depictions of contemporary Taiwan life, but also for their inherently cinematic qualities. 51 Robert Chi argues in “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness,” that Hou tends to draw audience attention to traumatic experiences in daily life, which Chi Hsieh64 the focus on the protagonists’ suffering is significant, the importance of his films also lies in their attentiveness to Taiwan local life and tradition. Most obviously, The Best of Times reveals a major dimension of Chang’s work that has seldom been discussed: popular contemporary Taiwanese folk conventions. This quality is especially significant in his Soul of A Demon (2008). Essential to this film is the puppet show, which introduces the audience to this local tradition’s religious perspective.52 This seemingly natural, normal imagery, however, connected the wire-controlled puppets and the destiny-controlled protagonists. Also, it signifies a different and distinctly
Taiwan modernity in visible religious practices (Chris Berry, Haunted Realism 47). If traditions and customs take many forms in different historical context and in different ethnic cultures in Taiwan, in Chang’s representations with grassroots themes, the fusion of different local life styles are documented. Most of the audience is not familiar with the underprivileged world represented by Chang, which is violent and sometimes chaotic. But grassroots culture has in fact spread into every corner of
Taiwan. Chang maintains a sympathetic but detached eye, recording lives that have seldom been the focus of cinematic presentation.
Needless to say, Chang’s preferences for realist and grassroots life came under the influence of TNC directors, who illuminated a realist path for Taiwan directors.
Additionally, his documentary experience has helped him capture everyday life elements in Taiwan. The documentary influences in Chang’s films are undoubtedly defines as a strategy of “melodrama.”
52 Here also seems homage to Chang’s mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, which describes the life of the puppetmaster Li Tian-lu. Hsieh65 meaningful, and show us new ontological claims. Chang prefers to work with non-professional actors, a TNC inheritance, to capture the reality of life. Sometimes,
Chang says, his actors are not even acting—they are simply portraying their own lives.
This style, according to Gavin Rees argues, is a “mixture of very naturalistic acting and a camera that prefers to be distant and unobtrusive” which “creates a strong sense of private lives that have less time on earth than the decaying tenement around them”
(21). This point of view in Chang’s films becomes partially subjective and partially objective, aiming to confront, or offend, our assumptions about the world we think we know. Chang’s films achieve these aims and make their values apparent by depicting unfamiliar locales and vivid (sometimes seen as “exotic”) Taiwanese dialects to audiences. In sum, they depict how Taiwanese working-class people look at the world.
Historically, as well as geographically, the films sink their roots deep into Taiwan folk culture. By rendering the history of Taiwan through imagery culled from tradition, folk culture, and immigrant memory, Chang’s artworks are shaped by post-war social and cultural factors. Fresh thematic choices like these, presented with Chang’s bold skills, are prominent reasons for his popularity to international audiences.
Modern Taiwan Civilization Redefined
As discussed above, Chang’s films are important because they reflect the dilemmas faced by families in modern, industrialized, capitalist Taiwan. His concern is not the industrialization of the city, but the rural reaction to modernization, as was Hsieh66 true for his mentor, Hou.53 On Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lu points out that
“Hou is more concerned with the life experiences of the Taiwanese (bensheng ren), whereas Yang’s works reflect more on those of mainlanders (waisheng ren)” (119).54
The classification of these two categories is not only in races but also in the life style they choose: the former rural and the latter urban. In my observation, however, Chang obtains a more contemporary sense of modern Taiwan than both of these directors by way of his observation on the marginal, or to put it more definitely, the outcasts of the city with their ambiguous existence in modern life.55 That is to say, Chang observes the historical trauma and industrialized uneasiness lies in everyone on this island, a post-colonial phenomenon.
The family in Chang’s films reflects the issue of ethnicity. In such conditions,
53 In “From Historical Remembrance to Spatial Imagination: The Loss of City Images in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,”[從歷史的回憶的空間的想像: 侯孝賢電影中都市影像的失落] Li Zhen-ya points out that in his films, Hou records a special time-and-space experience of the first and the second mainland immigrant generation in Taiwan. What defies Taiwan’s constant urbanization is a rural remembrance. According to Li, Hou presents this loss of innocence by the naming of his films and certain visual aesthetics.
54 We have discussed Hou’s preferred stylistics and themes in the previous chapter. Edward Yang, however, is a master of intricately plotted films, which dazzle the audiences with their juggling of time, space and cognitive games. Yeh and Davis analyze A Brighter Summer Day’s experimental visual strategies, organized under s figure called “tunnel visions.” These strategies, placed in a context of perceptual and phenomenological film theories, have been carried over into works by other Taiwan directors. Yeh and Davis also analyze Yang’s recent comedies, which are comparatively modest, satirical and humanist reflections on cosmopolitan Taipei, a city presented as a motley conglomeration of colliding values. They point out that within highly entertaining packages, Yang explicitly addresses a distorted Confucianism under the trappings of Western-style rationalization. For a thorough analysis of Yang’s style, see Yeh and Davis, “Navigating the House of Yang.”
55 For example, by exploring the changing cultural conflicts between the urban representation and rural nostalgia in “The Country and the City: Modernization and Changing Apprehensions of Space and Time,” Yip highlights a perceptible shift from conceptions of nation and cultural identity based on unitary coherence and authenticity toward alternative models that emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of Taiwan. It is no longer the contrast between the city and the country. It turns out to be the cultural hybridity that results from colonization and a globally mobile population. This hybridity turns the rural past/city present contrast into the undefined present, which is represented by Hou’s Dust in The Wind. The spatio-temporal configurations are parallel to the ambivalent psychology of adolescence.
Hsieh67 ethnicity no longer confines a generation. It provides a new perspective around the issue of national or racial identity where there are no longer “fundamental assumptions supporting that conservative deployment [about national identity] in various ways” (Chris Berry, Race 45). Simply put, his films seem to function as a mirror image of the fragmentation of families and societies in contemporary Taiwan, reflecting their anxiety about identity. Normal families are seldom portrayed in
Chang’s films. In the main, the families in Chang’s films, burdened with disability or with no supportive parental figures, experience lack. Teenage protagonists are in turn sacrificed in these suffering situations.
In Chang’s films, the world exists in single families. Chang’s characters are members of families, rather than members of society, though these families may be discordant, as in Ah Chung, nearing decline, as in Darkness and Light, or a kind of composed family—a substitute or extension of the original family—as in The Best of
Times. Chang himself explains that “the type of family relationship portrayed in the film [The Best of Times] seems quite common. In Taiwan, it is very common to have a family relationship like that” (Michael Berry 407). Here, we see Chang showing concern for the social and psychological problems of contemporary Taiwan society.
Familial affiliation and support suggest traditional domestic values. Yet like Jie’s trauma about his mother’s long absence, each family member seems physically and emotionally deserted by a missing maternal figure. A premeditated awareness on adolescent trauma remains a fundamental element of the peculiar “realism” across
Chang’s films in general. In spite of their predicaments, Chang presents hopeful Hsieh68 possibilities in his films. The teenage protagonists seem to have the power to transform the limited boundaries of their families into vast possibilities in the unattainable realm of fantasy. At the end of Ah Chung, three brothers and sisters, suffering from mental, physical and sexual abuse in their family, sit beside a riverbank and watch the sunset, which implies soothing natural power. Kang-yi in Darkness and
Light dreams of a reunion feast of her family, attended by her dead father and boyfriend.
More than simply an artistic milestone, The Best of Times reflexively looks into capitalistic Taiwan, which is transplanted into the entrepreneurial spirit of gangster culture in the film, the transformation of capitalism of the present age. Indeed, I will argue that the film’s melancholy coming-of-age story is also a meditation on the abnormal situations faced by modern Taiwan people in general, especially the working class. The Best of Times is an attempt to capture the alienation of modernity or capitalism, which brought on unprecedented crises for people in the new millennium.
Meanwhile, The Best of Times was made in 2002, 15 years after martial law was lifted in Taiwan. During this particular historical period after the political ban, some sequences in The Best of Times revealed unspeakble political traumas of Taiwanese people in general. The veteran’s stories told in the film were no longer a taboo. This social context elucidates the film’s treatment of Jie’s father’s grumbling about his experience garrisoning at Gui-shan Island. We see the family composition of multiple ethnicities, communicating with different dialects without difficulty. Language is an Hsieh69 important issue in the formation of a nation, yet Chang treats this issue with humorous irony, implying a cosmopolitan ideal in Taiwan.56 These themes Chang chose seem to fit incongruently into contemporary Taiwan, with this incongruence not only a unique accomplishment of this film, but also an explanation of Chang’s personal concerns about Taiwanese society.
The reasons for Chang’s realist representation of Taiwanese culture include both political awareness and market appeal. TNC directors gave the images of Taiwan an aesthetic reputation. Thus, post-TNC directors quickly understood that their playing field was the international art house. Though sometimes viewed as “maligned for fostering orientalism and demanding exotic novelties to tickle jaded Western palates,” undoubtedly the international art house is the “offshore prosthetic space of opportunity” for this later generation (Chris Berry, The Sacred 200). These directors delved into concrete Taiwan issues, but they kept their films from looking provincial by using the previous generation’s techniques, which were already canonized in the international film industry. Chang’s films, though made in highly industrialized
Taiwan, contain specific cinematic traits that differ from Hollywood films, and his films are thus indeed films that examined themes and motifs often neglected by
Hollywood.
56 June Yip argues in her “Language and Nationhood: Culture as Social Contestation” that language is the very foundation of the building of nations. Whenever there is an asymmetrical arrangement of power—whether along ethnic, class, gender, or territorial lines—language becomes a potent symbol of group identity and can therefore become an even more crucial tool in the struggle for authority. Yip analyzes Hwang’s films and Hou’s films, mostly The City of Sadness, to demonstrate the relationship between language and the rural Taiwanese consciousness.
Hsieh70
Stylistics
Stylistic features of Chang’s films may be understood in terms of at least two conceptions. As the successor to Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chang inherited Hou’s cinematography and other stylistic preferences. In the three films we have been analyzing, Ah Chung, Darkness and Light, and The Best of Times, Chang frequently adopts long takes (shots with relatively long duration), and long shots (with framings filmed at a considerable distance, such that the object or person focused on is recognizable but often defined by the large space and background). These features are thought to be Hou’s or sometimes TNC’s trademarks, and Chang directly inherited these methods. For example, in The Best of Times, few close-ups of the characters are taken. Most scenes are done with medium shots, medium long and long shots. The distance between the subject and the audience creates a sense of objectivity in these scenes.
David Bordwell’s idea about new auteurs’ appearance on the scene is that each generation’s directors have their own stylistic problems to solve. Bordwell says that
“ (i)nevitably, a filmmaker starting out in 1970 confronted problems that directors had not faced fifteen years earlier. He or she came belatedly to the modernist tradition, one that had already acquired a history, a pantheon of masters, a theoretical program, a rhetoric, and a set of institutions” (144). Along the same lines, Hou bequeathed to his followers a historical gift (or burden) that they were required to live up to. Yeh and
Davis argue that “Hou’s long-take aesthetics, characterized by contemplative, distant Hsieh71 photography, temporal ellipsis and loose causality and, additionally, his observing, sympathetic attitude toward life, are frequently explained as manifestations of an
Oriental detachment, and have firmly positioned Hou as a director of the East par excellence” (Yeh 133). Chang can certainly be viewed as belonging to the lineage of oriental/Asian aesthetics Additionally, there are other stylistic features in Chang’s films that are similar to Hou’s, and Chang’s development reveals some aspects of the growth of an “auteur.”
Visual Design: Realistic Atmosphere through Shooting on Location
Chang’s mise-en-scène fits into a realistic tradition. This tradition can be seen in the sets and settings, the fundamental features of mise-en-scène, arranged in his films.
Chang’s mise-en-scène functions not in isolated moments, but in relation to the whole structure of his films. Darkness and Light, like his other films, exemplifies how mise-en-scène can economically advance the narrative and create a pattern of motifs.
David Stratton notes that Chang created a “visually strong” picture in The Best of
Times, “with good use made of the cramped narrow alleyways in the part of the city where the friends live” (35). Chang usually uses real landscapes, as in Darkness and
Light, and by setting Keelung city in the poorest and darkest corner, he exploits the landscapes for sympathetic and compassionate melodramatic effects. The mise-en-scène emphasizes the force of the physical conditions of society and also the inner conflicts of the film’s characters. The setting in his film serves not only instrumental but also metaphorical meanings which “can characterize the kind of Hsieh72 world surrounding the characters and the ability of those characters to interact with that world” (Corrigan 52). For example, when the female protagonist first leads her blind family members through a well-worn underground passage, we wonder how this locale will relate to the other parts of the story. But later, when the blind father and the female protagonist come together to find the love token of the father and his dead wife, we realize that this passage marks an important part of their family history. In ways like this, every setting becomes highly motivated by the structure’s causes and effects, parallels and contrasts, and overall development.
The narrative of Chang’s films depends heavily on interior settings, which establish the protagonists’ intimacy with their family members. Also, in The Best of
Times, from the opening title sequence in which the family is seen busily preparing for the Dragon Boat Festival, Chang positions the viewer in a space that is wholly real: the living environment of a local peasant family. The genius of the film’s beginning is in its presentation of a genuinely real household environment that is randomly arranged and decorated, but in which some order is deeply constructed. Through the subtlety of suggestion, Chang introduces Wei and Jie as the protagonists of the film, with the two playing in the rain after the festival. The first scene is worth noting for its demarcation of the ending, with the illusion of water as well. At the end, Wei and Jie are seen swimming in the midst of a surreal sequence in which they rid themselves of the worries that torment them.57 In Darkness and Light as well, much of the “action”
57 The critic Yo-Hsien Li has argued that the gutter A-chei and A-wei jump into could be juxtaposed with the rain at the Dragon Boat Festival. In his opinion, the rain-gutter-ocean triangle makes clear a process from degradation to salvation for the two leading characters. For detail, see Li Yo-Hsien, Hsieh73 in the film takes place in the living room/dining room of Kang-I’s house, which becomes central during dinner time, with the whole family getting together. Through camerawork, the hidden family history is probed beneath the surface. The interior setting in Darkness and Light, then, exemplifies what we shall find in our study of the international art author: an individual aesthetic element that will almost always have several functions.
Through his realist settings, Chang calls attention to mise-en-scène as a way of mapping different cinematic backgrounds, and also exemplifies his cinematic inheritance. Chang’s first acclaimed film, Ah Chung, exploits several stylistics typical in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films. Chang insists on shooting on location, confining his camera to narrow interiors and providing glimpses of the cityscape. The documentary-like quality, is strengthened by many handheld shots. Camera distance, presence and volume of music or speech, camera movement, shot duration, and type of shot transition are all powerfully at work in Chang’s arrangement. Again we see the close interrelationship of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chang’s work. For example, the setting of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The City of Sadness is post-World War II Chiu-fen, which ironically contrasts the prosperous and vital conditions in the city with the central family’s final misadventure. The Lin family runs a gangster-protector business in
Chiu-fen, a powerful but dangerous business in postwar Taiwan. When business needs to be done, members of the family drink, eat and negotiate with their friends or
“The Story Begins at the Point the Movie Ends.” The Best of Times. Taipei: Filmreader. 2002. 100-107.
Hsieh74 competitors. The drinking clubs and the dining tables of the film appear as appealing, nostalgic stages, evincing a closely observed, but still detached historical atmosphere.
Intellectuals, ruffians and older citizens mill about and chat about the political situation, with hopes that in the future the unfair treatment of Taiwan people will be rectified. In this sequence, the mostly warm lighting conceals the brutal reality of this people’s history and life. Viewed in this perspective, Chang and Hou share a similar approach to the setting.58
Composition
Although Chang Tso-chi’s film style has been coded as a successor of Taiwan
New Cinema, following the norms of realism, and most critics view him as Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s disciple, Chang’s films receives discussion on his own aesthetics, involving issues about contemporary Taiwan cinematic development, current Taiwan political and economical dilemmas. The issues broached in Chang’s films resonate the
“directorial intention” in the “auteur theory” we’ve discussed, indicating that Chang is a recognized post-TNC auteur. The TNC helped bring international attention to
Taiwan directors and films within a global cinema culture. In this part, we will inquiry into Chang’s composition and how he broke with the tradition he inherited.
I will concentrate on the eating scene, or more exactly, the question how Chang’s
58 Likewise, in his reliance on long takes, Chang proved a discerning student. The prolonged shots in Darkness and Light and his later films constitute his efforts to enrich a recognized, indeed canonized tradition. It is, however, with The Best of Times that Chang’s cinematic aesthetics emerge most fully. With The Best of Times Chang confirmed his commitment to the very long take as his primary stylistic vehicle.
Hsieh75 arrangement of this eating scene compared to his mentor, Hou Hsiao-hsien. The eating scenes of these two directors are the key scenes to their films. In part, the eating scenes of both Chang and Hou introduce the main characters to the audience, and reveal the Chinese philosophy lied in the daily dining ritual with its symbolic meaning of reunion. Discussions on different directors’ attempts to develop eating scenes, including the staging, camera angles, and action at the dinner table are not a few.
Thematically, an “eating scene” can encapsulate complicated human relationships into a single scene. This is indeed a common cinematic method for demonstrating emotional conflicts and inner flows.
Technically speaking, an “eating scene,” especially one containing more than one person within the frame, is challenging because the shot can easily fall into either flat or fragmented composition. If a director tends to capture the entire scene in a shot, it may distract audiences from the most important lines and characters. Other times the scene can be dull, or comically lapse into a “Last Supper” effect, as David Bordwell has noted (2005, Figures, 186).59 Additionally, if a director cuts the eating scene into several shots, these separate shots can lose their continuity. Yeh and Davis note that in these scenes, “(s)tyle is almost always purposive. The way in which artworks appear to be made—a provisional definition of style—draws parallels with the work’s thematic narrative or conceptual meanings” (99). For us to better understand Chang
59 Bordwell analyzes Hou’s staging. He argues that in his filmmaking career, Hou has worked hard to maintain a specific staging strategy, adopting techniques such as telephoto and widescreen. Bordwell also points out the Asian Minimalism style popular in the 1990s derives from Hou’s techniques. Though Hou has moved on to newer stylistic experiments, he has established a model for many of the followers, who are attracted by the stylistic simplicity in his previous works.
Hsieh76
Tso-chi’s work as an “auteur,” we can view his eating scenes, which is the most challenging for directors. Composition analysis of these scenes will reveal much about Chang’s directorial preferences. With this in mind, I will compare Chang’s eating scenes with those of Hou Hsaio-hsien.
Influenced by Chinese philosophy, Hou’s films stage a re-consideration, of ordinary Chinese/Taiwanese people’s languages and lives.60 Eating is not only a necessity but also the value of family and community life surrounding them. Of course “eating” is not the same as ceremony, demonstration, exhibition, and so forth, but the eating scenes in Hou’s films form are symbolic. Food preparation and eating in his films often deliver a philosophical message and political sarcasm. As a recognized successor to Hou, Chang envisions his eating scenes in the same way. We may ask then, how do Chang’s eating scenes fit into this traditional understanding of symbolization? With Hou’s mise-en-scène serving as a dominant form of representation, can Chang manipulate his scenes in a different way? We find that, indeed, Chang’s treatment of eating scenes is not traditional, and neither is it totally inherited from Hou Hsiao-hsien. Although it is true that in many respects, the eating scenes in Hou and Chang’s films have a great deal of similarities, unlike Hou’s eating scenes, which place the most important figures in the most significant places (in the
60 In “Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Question of a Chinese Style,” James Udden argues that as a director whose style is often considered broadly “Chinese,” Hou in fact inherits more from Chinese thinking, rather than Chinese artistic stylistics. The Chinese style, according to Lin Niantong, has two principles derived from the traditional Chinese aesthetics: the combined montage within a single shot, and the style “you” (遊). Hou Hsiao-hsien’s works do not completely follow these rules. In Hou’s films, rather than traditional Chinese artistic techniques such as “multiple perspectives,” “elastic framing,” “relative flatness,” and “lack of chiaroscuro,” we see instead a strategy of static shots. Udden points out that we cannot eliminate the elements of physical and technical constraints when we discuss how Chinese directors develop their style. Hsieh77 center of the framing, or in well-lit locations), Chang often concentrates more on framing. In the eating scenes in The Best of Times, for example, several events, sounds and shots stand out as unusual. The first family eating scene is completed in only one take, presented as an ordinary family dinner sequence. Though only a three-minute-long take, this sequence illuminates many details about Wei’s bed-ridden sister, Jie’s retarded brother and drunken father, and a family with no mother. An ordinary family at first glance, this sequence features dinner table conversation, which directs our attention to a typical family chatting, squabbling and interacting. In order to capture the entire atmosphere, Chang delivers a fine utilization of medium long shots. And since the family is so obviously confined within this medium long shot, the framing exists like a theatrical stage more than a cinematic space. Furthermore, this dinner scene is structured with table-centered staging, with a door that enables characters to come in and out from the edge of the frame. First we see Wei come in through the door and find his place to sit. Next Jie gets up from the table to ask his father whether he is going to have dinner or not. Later he comes in, picks up a bowl of food for his father and then goes out again. Chang does not cut in to Jie’s movement
(as he is the only one standing in this composition), but on the whole our attention is directed to every participant through the calm long shot.
In this eating scene, there are many conversations about chores, which occur while the characters are using their chopsticks. Their movements and Jie’s coming in and out compose an effect of flowing of the whole framing. This effect comes off well as we see that Jie only moves on the left side of the frame. This is how Chang Hsieh78 differentiates his compositional devices from those of Hou. Hou is not afraid to break the balance of his framing for his characters are not exactly the center of the frame, but Chang searches for the balance most of the time. The same can be seen in the dining scene of Darkness and Light when Kang-I’s family members are having a meal.
Kang-I is arranged on the right side of the frame and is the only one who stands from time to time to pick up food for her blind family members. This eating scene exemplifies Chang’s preference in framing his characters and the dominant events, forming a steady picture-like visual experience. Again, in the dinner scene in The Best of Times, in the establishing shot we see Wei entering from the door on the left side.
The whole dining room is captured, the wall on the left and the TV on the right. The family dialogue is carried on within this frame, with no special single shots on particular speakers. In this way, the picturesque composition achieves symbolic implication. Exploiting the classical compositional and editing challenge, Chang reconsiders traditions that he has learnt from the previous generation, particularly Hou, delivering an improved point of view on each shot. In sum, what makes Chang
Tso-chi’s eating scenes special is his attempt to reevaluate and re-accommodate a cinematic tradition he had.
Temporal Design: Chang’s Editing Patterns
Chang represents a new step in contemporary Taiwan filmmaking, in part because of his complex spatial and temporal patterns. Focusing on outcast teenagers in Taipei, The Best of Times describes the life of the two main teenage protagonists Hsieh79 and their violent, sometimes absurd struggles in the city. Ah-wei enlists Ah Jie into his gangster life because Jie is in need of job. As their urban adventures continue, they are naively impressed and bewildered by the society. Soon the brightness of their hopes gives way to bloody and dark encounters: Ah Wei’s sick twin sister eventually dies of cancer, and Ah Jie is shot to death at the end.
Let us first look into the sequence when Wei and his sister Ming take a walk along the riverbank. As the action develops, Chang emphasizes the voiceover, and the actors disappear from the horizontal pan. The scene becomes an emblematic painting, with the camera focusing on the empty bridge. Panning through the piebald walls and streets, the neighborhood architecture becomes more than props and settings, as if melting with the characters outside the frame. When the panning shot stops, the whole frame takes shape like a stage. The scene smartly symbolizes the fading life and the hopeful denotation when the central characters walk away silently on the margin of the frame. The sick sister Ming and the young gangster Wei pass through the stage.
They stroll together, a metaphor of the fate of this twin brother and sister. This sequence also pushes the long-take strategy much further, and long shots predominate, so that the composition achieves a picturesque effect.
In Darkness and Light, we see a similar case. The editing of Chang’s film dominates the rhythm, and serves to reflect changing psychological statuses. In
Darkness and Light, a shot of extreme beauty and skill comes in the last seven minutes of the film. The screen is bounded by a window frame and the images in the frame appear like paintings. Looking out the window, Kang-I is attracted to the night Hsieh80 view of the port city. She witnesses a fireworks booming in the sky. It cuts to a shot focusing on the colorful fireworks. Next is a medium close shot of Kang-I from outside the window, with a winning smile, framed in the window. As she watches the fireworks, her brother’s voice is heard off-screen, implying that the oncoming accident might be real, while, at the same time, suggesting a sense of fantasy.
Furthermore, as a summary of the patterns and logic of Chang’s editing, the techniques used in the final sequence of The Best of Times are instructive. At the film’s conclusion, Wei and Jie are traced to the bank of a gutter in their neighborhood.
In the scene immediately preceding the jump, the two teenagers directly encounter the group of gangsters. A couple of dissolves bridge the slow motion of the teens, depicting how Wei and Jie realize they have nowhere to run, and finally decide to jump into the gutter. The two discrete types of scenes are edited together to form the concluding sequences of the film.
Chang Tso-chi’s films do not meet exact realist conventions because they play a game of extending realistic aesthetics to the point of the surprisingly fantastic. This occurs at the endings of his films, suggesting the dead’s return to life. The ambiguity and simultaneous moral intensity of this moment are captured in this last five-minute sequence, which remains one of the most striking examples of Chang’s “haunted realism” (Chris Berry, 2007, 33-50). This haunted realism means the lack of conventional codes for fantasy in these sequences, indicating a seamless effect linking the realistic and the fantastic. The sequence begins with an empty establishing long shot of Wei and Jei’s neighborhood environment, followed by a tracking shot of Wei’s Hsieh81 escape from the gangsters in the narrow alleys. The succinct logic of Chang’s editing is powerfully concluded in the next shot, where Ah Wei appears at the head of the passageway, walking toward the camera. A shoulder appears in the right extreme foreground. Jie is recognized by the pattern of the shirt he wore the day he was stabbed. This shot is identical to one in the last chase sequence, which ended with Jie being stabbed. Because the clothing and other aspects of the settings are unchanged, we are confused about the passage of time. Is this Wei’s wish fulfillment? Or is the previous death scene only a figment of imagination? Yet, through the creative use of an edited space and a series of interactions within that space, Chang depicts more than just a synopsis of the doomed teenagers, but a second chance for them to escape reality into the deep blue ocean in the forking path structure.
But why “haunted realism”? Put simply, because of “the kind of social cultural, and political disjunctures that can be configured through haunting exceed the events of the postcolonial past” (Chris Berry, 2007, 47). As a director who concentrates on contemporary Taiwan, Chang inevitably needs to deal with the colonial history
(comprised of distinctly traumatic events) in Taiwan. As discussed above, Chang’s films stage a critique, or at least an observation of historical influence through his emphasis on Taiwanese folk traditions and violent acts. There is, however, always dissatisfaction among the generation that has been influenced by colonization. Their desire is easily repressed due to their past experiences. Only the fantastic or even ghostly elements can mark the “exclusion from the real and the potential breakdown of the barrier between the real and the unreal” (Chris Berry Haunted Realism 45). Of Hsieh82 course haunted realism is not the same as occult mysteries. Haunted realism in
Chang’s films often come down on the side of reflections on different aspects of modernity, confined in a nostalgic, post-colonial city like Taipei.61
Here, the haunted realism creates a supernatural atmosphere. Chang employs shot and reverse-shot structures to present a magical come-back-to-life association for the audience. Chris Berry defines this as “a cinematic configuration of time” that is “the disjuncture between fantasy and reality” (2007, 34-39) Generally speaking, the use of the shot and reverse-shot is aimed for the subjective gaze. Feii Lu in “Another Cinema:
Darkness and Light” called this “the point of view shot” (140). Lu further argues in this essay that the subjective point of view is not only that of the characters but also that of the audience “when the camera is at zero degrees and front on to the character’s perspective” (141). In other words, in Chang’s endings, this strategy is associated with the compensation or wish fulfillment of the protagonists. The tragic empathy is lessened in this sense. In Darkness and Light, there is a family reunion dinner in which Ah-Wei, Kang-yi’s dead boyfriend, and Kang-yi’s father, who died of cancer, come back to dine with them. The family members chat joyfully, revealing that the two returned from Hawaii. In The Best of Times, Ah-wei experiences the
61 Some critics, however, view Chang’s repetitive use of this strategy as a sign to show that it’s the end of Chang’s creativity. 686, in his “The Darker, the More Beautiful: Examing Chag Tso-chi’s Stylistics from The Best of Times” [越黑暗越美麗: 從美麗時光看張作驥電影的創作方法], argues that the author points out a trap Chang fell into: Chang seems to repeat himself again and again. 686 argues that through these three films, Chang weakens the power of his film language because he overuses his creative innovations. For example, the dream-like ending of The Best of Times tends to repeat the ending of Darkness and Light, but 686 thinks it fails to capture the surprise feeling, and thus the irony between fantasy and reality created in The Best of Times is not as strong as that in Darkness and Light. Whether this argument is correct needs further analysis.
Hsieh83 moment his cousin Ah-Jie suffered beatings by a group of angry gangsters. This seamless editing crosses the boundaries of reality and fantasy, suggesting “haunted realism” as an effective narrative strategy.
Stylistically, “haunted realism” is produced by the extensive use of shot and reverse-shot. Most scenes presented in shot and reverse-shots are used for dialogue when two consecutive shots frame in turns of speakers. They are generally taken from the point of view of the listener, and become, as Feii Lu notes, “the most effective way of encouraging identification with the point-of-view by means of suturing” (Lu,
2005, 142). But this strategy by and large only assimilates itself into the realist tradition, which is also familiar in Chang’s films, but too vague to describe the stylistic of his endings. As mentioned above, the circular ending is hard to tell which event happened in antecedence. The next sequence shows the two boys playing in the water, referring to the fish tank in Wei’s house.
The Best of Times are constructed by the links between the obvious shifts of scenes in reality and fantasy. Basically, the film narrates its story in an episodic way.
The story is thus understated, and indicates “unprecedented shift from the mimetic to the psychological” (Tay 411).62 Like Hou’s autobiographical films, in which he accumulates the “details according to atmosphere affinities and the similarity of various visual impression” (Neri 161), Chang’s films loosely float in a chronological
62 Here I borrow William Tay’s phrase on the style of Chinese modernist novelist Wang Meng. Also influenced by the modernistic ideologies of the West, Wang in his novels developed several techniques correspondent with cinematic modernism’s development. See Tay, William. “Modernism and Socialist Realism: The Case of Wang Meng.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma (WLT) 1991 Summer; 65(3): 411-13.
Hsieh84 order. As a result, the changes of scene deserve more notice. The scene depicting the marginalized teenagers’ last escape begins with an empty shot of a neighborhood alley.
After this, Wei runs from the other side of the alley toward us, and the camera tracks him running between the alleys. The next shot, from another point of view, shows Wei running on the bank he and Jie used to play on. Spatially, this shot constructs the geography of the scene; temporally, it links the action that takes place at this moment with previous scenes. This scene not only creates verisimilitude, but also implies the later impact. But it also has connotations of post-colonial creation of realism and anti-realism, the blurred temporal spectrum in order to achieve what Ping-hui Liao has called the “mixture of identity and post-identity” (Passing and Re-articulation, 113).63
The endings do not follow the typical linear realist timeline. The forking path endings created the sense of haunted realism emerging from an honest realist aesthetic.
At later points in The Best of Times, the logic of editing enhances more psychological or emotional patterns. When Ah Jie is seen again at the spot where Wei witnessed his death, for example, the first image we see of him is a long shot of his figure framed in the narrow alley between two walls; the camera turns back to focus on Wei in another long shot as he tries to figure out whether Jie’s appearance is real or not. This is followed by a cut on action as Jie talks back and swears about Wei’s
63 Ping-hui Liao argues that Hou made City of Sadness a postcolonial mimicry. He offers an idea of “intimate histories,” which is a kind of empathy. According to Liao, Wenqing’s muteness demonstrates contemporary people’s indifferent attitude toward politics. It is a mixture of “identity” and “post-identity.” In similar case, this could be applied to Chang’s films due to Chang’s arrangements often neglected the obvious linear timeline instead of the characters’ subjective understanding on history and time.
Hsieh85 lateness, and then by another cut back to Wei as Jie speaks off screen. With another cut, Jie and Wei are both framed in the walls. Not only are these two central characters’ interaction portrayed by this series of shots and reverse shots, but Wei’s regret and frustration are also built into the editing. Jie’s doubtful existence is always a certain distance away with Wei. Without being in the same shot, Wei seems to witness his lifetime choice again. The establishing shot of this sequence from the point of view of Wei combines with stock framings of Jie takes us right into Wei’s psychologically rendered space. Although here the film seems to follow standard continuity editing devices, the timeline is no longer linear or clear. The pace and décor mimicking the previous part implies the occurrence of the other chance. Next, Wei’s inquiry moves on and, from his point-of-view, spots a group of gangsters hustling toward Jie, just as before. Unlike what he did last time, however, he runs toward them to stop them. The whole sequence is handled in a series of shot/reverse shots, at this very spot with a street lamp on which has been written “Road, light and Truth.” These shots/reverse shots emphasize the ambiguity of what’s going to happen.
Though the ending of the film is a chase scene in which the pursuers and the pursued are supposed to be equal in status, Chang sets up a simple spatial connection between the environment and the protagonists. The editing of their movements is probably one of the most striking features here. As the two protagonists flee from the gangsters in the alley, shots do not alternate between the gangsters and the two.
Instead, they focus only on the movement of the two teens. Without the use of parallel editing to show the gangsters’ parallel progress, the shots jump from one location to Hsieh86 another and enhance the temporal and spatial movement. This organization of the chase helps to demonstrate the filial love between Wei and Jie.
Chang’s editing of the very end of this film creates truly fantastic psychological patterns of time and space. The film’s final shots are presented as a jump cut to a dream world, freezing time by having the two protagonists swimming and playing in the water like fish, almost as if to suggest that only by escaping the real world can they survive. The final scene of the sequence is the film’s most famous and influential.
Accompanied by the sudden silencing of all sound, Wei and Jie’s jump are filmed in slow motion. The first couple of establishing shots in the water are accompanied by blackouts. After the last blackout, they begin to move again within the shining, blue ocean water. In nearly ten cuts in approximately five minutes, the camera focuses on the two victims’ rebirth in the ocean with dissolves connecting each shot. Wei and
Jie’s play in the water is split into seven shots. Their figures on the screen finally swim away, and the film’s final minute is comprised of a single shot on the crystal-blue water, as beautiful as a dream. Like many films with the same motif, The
Best of Times gives its finale slow and romantic pacing. However, with its protagonist-centered medium-paced chase sequences, it arouses the audiences’ sympathy of the two teens.
Chang’s films have one simple focus on these editing skills: Teenagers and their peers idling around cities, looking for the value of their existence. Such a narrative evinces the protagonists’ increasing awareness of the reality of life. Chang’s characters are often simply hanging out, dining and drinking, quarreling and tussling, Hsieh87 observing what they perceive to be great apocalypses in their tiny lives. These themes are closely associated with Hou’s characters. David Bordwell says that “His [Hou’s] modest technique suits an examination of the rhythms of everyday life. Hou has always been interested in how people grow up, break away from family, move to the city, find a job and a mate, get money legally or illegally, and have fun ”(Hou or
Constraint,189). It is those most sensitive characters that “tend to be watchful observers who struggle to understand how distant, sometimes ominous, forces are shaping their lives” (Hou or Constraint, 190). Eventually, using their imagination, they find ways to compromise and survive. Chang has also cultivated a style that pares down narrative movement to a considerable degree, pushing instead toward a more fragmented episodic design. Chang’s films are compiled from episodes depicting ordinary life, repeated daily events and common scenes. In these films, we see characters walking idly around the neighborhood, talking to each other about trivial topics, their families preparing food and dining together. The progression of the storylines lies beneath these daily details: the fights among family members and others, the departure and death of loved ones, and the imagined return of the dead.
This narrative structure gives the illusion of participation, whether for the actors who are involved in their ordinary routines, or for the audience. The perspective reflected in this kind of narrative structure, in other words, is both objective and subjective. The narrative is often propelled by voice-overs of the protagonists, which, combined with the action of the daily chores, presents a common experience wherein the audience can identify with the characters in the film. This approach to narrative structure favors Hsieh88 free association, thus liberating actors.
Chang also develops his films in other ways, using peculiar perspectives. His films concentrate less on what really happened than on how protagonists feel about what happened. For example, The Best of Times begins with the bored and hopeless
Ah-wei providing the voice-over describing his own life and his cousin’s—one just bears it, while the other wants to make changes. In a sense, the plot is linear. At the same time, however, it seems recessive and repetitive, because similar scenes like family get-togethers keep recurring. Aside from the realist elements, Chang’s three films employ circular narrative structure in order to illustrate the anxious and repressed feelings of teenagers. They are not repressed because they overstep the boundaries of family ties, social mobility, security and religious values, but because they want to preserve these values. Chang portrays that the objective of social actors and institutions, including parents or companies in the capitalist world, is to take advantage of teenagers. Through careful juxtaposition, Chang shows how teens strive to create ideal lives. Chang’s preference for this counter-bildungsroman marks him as a speaker for these marginalized people. Feii Lu calls this directorial preference
“another cinema” (137-147).
Conclusion: A Familiar Genre in Alternative Production
Given the vitality of Chang Tso-chi’s films, there has been attention to his significance. Chang’s style is important in multiple aspects. This has become especially clear as his style has developed, and as his work has differentiated itself Hsieh89 from his mentor, Hou. Consciously or not, Chang distances himself from both Hou and a so-called modernist, detached style frequently seen in contemporary Taiwan cinema. This confirms how Chang Tso-chi remains one of the most radical and innovative directors in Taiwan today. In Taiwan, the concept of auteurism in film studies arose with the Taiwan New Cinema. The TNC movement gave birth to internationally recognized names including Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. The
TNC directors rejected old narrative formats, familiar formulae of mass production, and traditional Confucian cultural legacies. When Yeh and Davis argue about Tsai
Ming-liang’s achievement in Taiwan film culture, they say that “if the New Cinema tried to liberate a suppressed linguistic and political minority, Tsai Ming-liang, as post-New Cinema, now resurrects a largely forgotten subculture” (249). Tsai, however, may not be the only person who has been obsessed with forgotten cultures, and the same observation can be made of Chang Tso-chi. To put it another way, what Chang represents is a film traditionlost in his generation.
In Key Concepts in Cinema Studies, Susan Hayward points out that art cinema predominantly refers to a certain kind of technically and thematically experimental
European cinema. It “attempts to address the aesthetics of cinema and cinematic practices and is primarily, but not exclusively, produced outside dominant cinema systems” (8). Robert Phillip Kolker also says in The Altering Eye that an entire film history “could be written about the influences of European styles and their originators on American film, a history that, depending on one’s perspective, would show Hsieh90
Hollywood as either enriching or perceptually homogenizing itself” (5).64 In other words, in international art cinema, something different from the classic Hollywood style is demanded. However, even if the productions look different in theme and style, international art cinema was not purposefully created to counter Hollywood.
International art cinema is often connected with individual directors who innovate with directorial styles in order to mark the differences between their films.
Chang’s effort has been innovative, casting distinctive local material in a sophisticated modernist-realist shape. He has experimented with ambiguous time schemes and techniques canonized since the 1980s. As a direct image of contemporary Taiwan, Chang’s films may not be as despairing as they first seem.
Though the teenage protagonists are trapped, Chang’s films tend to liberate audiences by means of his stylistic and thematic innovations. Like other international auteurs,
Chang attempts to voice his own ideologies. In this sense, his creative schemes may be an indication that he has achieved his aims.
64 This study tries to search for another film tradition other than the American/Hollywood style. It is an attempt, an examination of convention and its response, of cinema used as a probe and the viewer as a co-worker in the field of meaning. It is a study of aesthetic history, with a nod toward economics and an emphasis on influences and changes, on a demand that cinema speak with its voice. Kolker in this book discusses individual figures and their films with movements and ideas, the history of film with works that make history. Kolker begins by studying Italian neo-realism’s development, and then turns to modernism. After realizing that “realism in art can only be achieved through artifice”, the history after neo-realism is the history of change and inheritance, examining how much overt recognition was given by filmmakers, by the films themselves, to the artifice that created the history that made it appear “real” or as a commentary about “reality.”
Hsieh91
Chapter 4
Conclusion
On the Waiting List of the Auteur
In Taiwan film history, the notion of the “auteur,” which usually refers to a director who creates critically-acclaimed films, has become controversial.
Unconventional stylistics in large part define the directors’ identity as an auteur. I have argued that the distinctive signature of Chang Tso-chi may lead the evaluation as both the offspring of Taiwan New Cinema masters, and innovation during his formative years. With his goal of capturing vibrant contemporary elements in a realist/fantastic way, Chang Tso-chi’s efforts mark him as remarkable among his generation in Taiwan.
As I have noted, local-based themes were prominent in the Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, and Chang applied this thematic approach often in his films. The 1990s, however, with their rapid changes in both the cultural and economic fields, has witnessed the alteration of this approach in significant ways, and highlighted new concerns. We have seen, for example, that the income gap in Taiwan has grown dramatically, and beside the glamorous middle-class, which is often depicted in films reflecting modernity, there exists an under-privileged class suffering in silence. In the cultural construction of Taipei city, further, every economic, cultural and political element signifies bourgeois values. As a result, many marginal voices are distorted or silenced. Working within this new environment, Chang has been able to follow the Hsieh92 alternative and ideological leads of the TNC, and also express the compassionate concerns for his own generation. If contemporary Taiwan directors such as Tsai
Ming-liang are interested in the middle-class’s reaction toward modernity, Chang turns his attention in an entirely different direction, one that focuses on the life of those who have been harmed or ignored in the midst of heated modern capitalistic competition. A closer inspection of Chang’s favorite imagery reveals that while his films may be gloomy in tone, they are definitely neither pessimistic nor hopeless.
Chang creates many violent and tragic scenes in his films, but he also comes up with an abundance of poetic imagery symbolizing hope and peace. The juxtaposition of the gutter imagery with the ocean imagery in The Best of Times illustrates this particular point.
Chang’s works express intelligence, creativity and humane compassion, and deserve critical attention. Darkness and Light (1999) and The Best of Times (2002) evince a combination of reality and fantasy that implies a director who is not afraid of appearing bizarre. Those who profess to find them no more than coarse and old-fashioned are perhaps nervously separating themselves from the gritty reality of
Taiwan.
To a large extent, Chang’s creativity is more than an attempt to underscore the problems in Taiwan’s modernization. James Udden writes that “[o]ne flaw with the auteur theory is the tendency to look only for consistent themes and stylistic note emerging in an industrial morass.” It may be limited in scope if we consider that
“[a]ny changes discovered have to fit within a discernible progression or pattern of Hsieh93 development” (2007, 200).65 So this is exactly Chang’s significance: he follows Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s lead, but creates a distinctive body of films with his own signature, and is therefore recognized as the leading transformation of “another cinema,” which the
Taiwan New Cinema wished to create. His works exemplifies how a self-aware auteur may be willing to go beyond his background and be the originator of a new tradition.
That is to say, an “auteur” is willing to change.66 Udden concludes for us in a direct way: “what is remarkable about places like Taiwan,” he writes, “is that streak of adaptability and flexibility that has served them so well.” (2007, 200) As a grassroots director, creativity is the way Chang has created echoes of the Taiwan-ness he has inherited from his predecessors.
A Modernist-Realist
Artistic, thematic and ideological changes, which have been adapted from films made from the TNC, have led to transformations into new introspective perspectives.
On the surface, the cinematic innovations nowadays bear little resemblance to their
65 Scholars like David Bordwell push formal analysis to their utmost. In On the History of Film Style, Bordwell examines the history of how directors strive to improve a previous age’s style. The way the director presents his work is called his “style.” Bordwell tries to determine the continuity and improvement of composition and other techniques in film history. According to him, the history of composition and depth staging (and similar visual elements) intersects with the histories of technology and the history of production practice. In a sense, directors push the film history further with the problem-solving mind.
66 Textual analysis, as a result, serves little other than visual stylistics. Shen Xiao-yin argues that explaining films through a textual analysis consciousness is not enough. She says that while studying films we should be conscious of the interaction between works, audiences and history. Sometimes the author is trying to say something more than that which is presented. Hou’s films, for example, evince more THAN just a certain consciousness but instead try be close to the reality of history. For more information, see “ 本來就該多看兩遍,” Xiao-yin Shen.
Hsieh94 ancestors, although they may be haunted on indistinct levels by what has been called historical heritage. Since cine-modernism largely depends on how it looks at and interprets cultural heritages, post-TNC directors, who have suffered from the decline of the Taiwan local film industry, have embodied different transformations to survive.
The expression “modernism in cinema” includes various versions of historical film classics. These classics, especially those of Italian Neo-realism and the French
New Wave, which were ushered into Taiwan due to the 1970s’s literary modernism, introduced the stylistic conventions to Taiwan film directors. This importation of this
European cinematic modernism inspired the important modernistic movement in
Taiwan, the TNC. TNC’s revolution and reform brought great change to Taiwan cinema, both in themes and stylistics. Though art house cinema and films that aimed to be blockbusters have governed their respective territories, they sometimes share similar signature. Along with unconventional techniques these films have in their separate ways (both in their stylistic trends and their thematic choices) contributed to changing Taiwanese film style considerably.
Although I have bracketed Chang Tso-chi’s films within the lineage of Hou’s influence, I have no intention of situating Chang in the same aesthetic experiences. On the contrary, through close readings of their films, I have tried to show how these two directors, despite their similar techniques such as long takes and empty shots, have developed different stylistics. Chang’s films acquire different meanings partly because of their realist concerns. At the same time, despite the influence of Taiwan New
Cinema, the realist perspectives unique to Chang’s films shape interpretation and Hsieh95 emphasize his character and skills.
Chang’s films bear a significance that stemmed from his experiences working with TNC directors. This significance can be examined as the evolution of the modernist TNC works. While discussing these films, I have analyzed their technical and formal innovations as well as their thematic concerns with dominant social awareness. TNC aesthetics, which are viewed as Chinese and poetic, shaped the creativity of the next generation. This influence may take different forms, like Edward
Yang’s tunnel effect and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s extreme long takes and long shots. The two forms associate the post-TNC directors with a cine-modernist tradition. In this context, the TNC is the source of the universal standards by which later generations of
Taiwanese directors are judged. The “anxiety of being influenced,” noted in chapter 1, represents consciousness among directors in the world, who have begun to question the dominance of prior mentors who may at once positively influence and negatively haunt the work of later directors. Therefore artistic homages appear to be increasingly shifting in the era of individual creativity, since they may become burdens rather than gifts. Partly because of the career path he took, Chang Tso-chi cannot rid himself of historical influence. The second chapter of this thesis characterized his formal and thematic acquisition from the TNC. As the claimed offspring of the TNC movement,
Chang Tso-chi demonstrates in his works respect toward his predecessors, defined as modernist, since the TNC often implies a fundamental emphasis on stylistic innovation.
Furthermore, Chang’s realist concern is a radical attempt at sketching a Hsieh96 modernized Taiwan through the stories of working-class families. This revelation of distortion can be summarized by Feii Lu’s identification of “real-life fantasy”
(Another Cinema 138). The documentary impulse, Chang’s most noted cinematic technique, aggrandizes this idea. Most of the time, Chang initially destroy anything irrelevant to reality in his mise-en-scène. His films consist of the everyday dialogues of non-professional actors in order to build a concrete daily environment. Chang’s idea, however, is not new, since it had been applied to varying degrees by Hou
Hsiao-hsien in his early TNC films.67 Instead of the reason of limited budget, however, Chang’s preference results from his documentary experience, which impels him to concentrate on the representation of the whole rather than a singular plot move.
From technique to theme, Chang craves a disclosure of truth in modern life. This falls within a long realist tradition after World War II, which could be traced back to Italian
Neo-realism.68 As a successor of the TNC as well as a humanitarian, Chang Tso-chi is the child of both a modernist tradition and a realist tradition. Emerging out of this,
Chang constructed a new style that can be called modernist-realist. TNC directors embraced a cine-modernism with ground-breaking stylistic innovations. Chang comes out of this, but at the same time expresses a realist concern for Taiwan local, especially rural life. As a prominent figure immediately following TNC, Chang in his works tries to establish his own signature. In the confined world of Chang’s films, the
67 Here The City of Sadness is a good example, in which Hou’s friends assisted with several characters in the film. Wu Nianzhen, Hou’s collaborative writer, played the news reporter and Jan Hung-tze, a visitor from China.
68 Italian neo-realism (1942-1952) was famous for the working-class centered plots (especially featuring underprivileged children), the use of non-professional actors, and long takes on location, all emphasizing Italy’s bleak situation after World War II. Hsieh97 themes are shown in a modernist way from a realist point of view. Consequently, his films look for places important in the construction of individual identity as points of loss of security and identity for both individuals and communities. In order to illustrate contemporary modernities, Chang has chosen to depict either minority cultures or teenager’s coming-of-age, all the while criticizing the mainstream culture.
Through his aesthetic innovations, he has been able to represent a more “modern” image than many traditional realists.
As Truffaut claims in his ground-breaking work “A Certain Tendency of the
French Cinema,” an auteur defines his or her films as the defense of the director’s aesthetic and ideological postures (7-20). The impact of this declaration remains influential, even in an era when the “author” is supposedly dead. To different degrees, its percussion still determines the self-identity of directors who are consciously and unconsciously reintegrating their stylistics with previous masterpieces. This thesis has intended to point out the “auteur’s consciousness,” which Chang and other Taiwan directors have internalized during their career pursuits. My aim instead is to show how new directors can find their way at the downturn of Taiwan film industry since the 1990s. Only when they are aware of the confinements created by their predecessors’ styles, and in turn try to break out of these confinements, will they create their own styles and become true “auteurs.” And only then will it be possible to do justice to their achievement.
Hsieh98
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