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Taiwan Cine Experience 2009

New Delhi, June 27, 2009
 

Taipei Economic and Cultural Center (TECC) in collaboration with Cine Darbaar hosted “Taiwan Cine Experience 2009” on June 27-28 at the Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi.

“The film festival has been orgainsed to bring forward Taiwan cinema to the Indian audience,” said Wenchyi Ong, representative of TECC. According to Ong, the aim of the festival lies in spreading the aesthetics of Taiwan cinema through films such as Palme d’Or and Cannes nominated movie Three Times, critically acclaimed psychological thriller The Hole, Berlin International Film winner The River, autobiographical film A Borrowed Life.

The film festival was inaugurated by S. M. Khan, Director of Directorate of Film Festival, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Mani Kaul, an esteemed director of Indian film industry and Wenchyi Ong on June 27 evening followed by film screening of Three Times.

Three Times begins in 1966, lushly, with an elegant, awe-inspiring little glide down from a vaporous hanging lamp to a pool table as a group of attractive rural youths clutching cue sticks encircle the lightly rolling colored balls; one after another has his or her turn, while Hou’s camera, as drifting yet concise as ever, moves effortlessly from game table to the distracted glances of the players. Most striking in this crowd is luscious, full-lipped, and impossibly gorgeous Shu Qi, Taiwanese pin-up and central figure in all three of Hou’s tales. It’s Shu Qi’s visage (and how it reacts to differing forms of social and sexual containment) on which Hou will hang all three tales as they unfold back to back.

Yet here in this opener, “A Time for Love,” her glamorous and indifferent introduction is as deceptive as that hazy, Wong Kar-wai-sh gauzy filter that’s laid over every shot. Earnest local boy Chang Chen falls for her before being shipped off for military service; upon his return he finds his beloved no longer an employee of the pool hall he had frequented and in her place another girl of similar age and beauty. In trying to track her down, he dashes from town to town, only to find in each village in which she had been rumored to have taken up work that she is replaced by another pretty young woman. Their eventual reunion and subsequent simple expression of mutual burgeoning love (a lovely hand-hold in the rain before he must be shipped off to the base at 9 a.m.), ends the first “Time” on a reconciliatory note that the following two “Times” will not only circumvent but also conceptually deny. And in retrospect from the political and social tangles of the other stories, the overly aestheticized innocence of “A Time for Love” gives off a whiff of odd conventionality. Permeated by the constant replaying of romantic pop tunes (The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Aphrodite’s Child’s “Rain and Tears”), the languor seems ultimately insufficient in the face of such complex national history.

Shu Qi’s exquisite work in the second chapter, “A Time for Freedom,” lays bare the shortsighted romanticization of what came before it. This masterfully modulated work of art, set in 1911 and told as a silent film, complete with delicately ornate intertitle cards (which at first register as charming gimmickry yet soon become completely conceptually inextricable from the narrative) and a heartbreakingly quiet piano accompaniment, might take its style and setting cues from Flowers of Shanghai, but it has a visual and emotional power all its own. Here, Shu Qi’s courtesan is frequently visited by Chang Chen’s radical newspaper man, a revolutionary who fights for Taiwanese release from imperialist Japanese rule when not in her arms.

As usual, Hou’s camera moves delicately from character to character, from Shu Qi to Chang Chen and back again, picking up on the slightest expression of underlying passion, whether it be politically or romantically anchored. So overwhelmingly quiet and meticulously designed is this scenario, and so unassumingly does its narrative power creep up on you, that Hou’s firm grasp on the blind spots of political engagement might not make itself immediately apparent. Yet Shu Qi’s courtesan remains in her own emotional and social bondage while her seemingly devoted lover speaks of Taiwanese freedom; in the actress’s face we see years of emotional enslavement, compounded by the tragic yet matter-of-factly presented subplot of a 10-year-old girl being primed for the life of a courtesan and possible concubine. Hou’s point, told gently and refracted through the sigh of a love story, that grandiose political gestures often occur at the expense of the individuals still toiling away in their workaday social realities, comes across effortlessly—and puts to shame the finger-wagging grandstanding of the more self-consciously political Manderlay, in which Lars von Trier similarly proposes that international relations cannot be resolved until a country first corrects its own domestic policies. Yet where Trier dredges up the past to angrily, misguidedly accuse the present of lack of foresight, Hou Hsaio-hsien, with a hush, details the ongoing tragic ironies of history (Shu Qi’s gentle uncovering of her lover’s devastating hypocrisies—that he believes in freedom yet ultimately helps pay for a concubine’s enslavement—is heartbreaking), then simply moves forward to the present, with a dramatic cut from the courtesan’s candlelit den to a speeding motorcycle scrambling across a clogged cityscape.

With “A Time for Youth,” Hou simultaneously coalesces and breaks apart the entire endeavor, both bringing the entirety of Three Times into tight focus and revealing the inherent dangers in defining an era solely through the representation of a man and a woman. This third chapter, bathed in dusky evening glow and neon blues and greens, has been most often compared to Hou’s 2001 Millennium Mambo, both favorably and not, yet like “A Time for Freedom,” the 2005-set “Youth” needs to be considered on its own terms, away from Mambo’s more ethereal trappings—for all of its meandering and nightclub posturing, Hou’s closing segment is Three Times’ most concrete and troubling. Finally, the gorgeous images of the sultry Shu Qi and the sexy Chang Chen betray us as viewers; we are persuaded by the two other shorts, and implicitly a century’s worth of iconic male-female coupling, to follow their latest incarnation, this time as a young duo explicitly sexually involved with one another, as the central love story. Yet Hou seems to be begging us to look at this so-called love story with a sidelong glance; as the full consequences of this tale, full of the requisite modern-day spiritual malaise and technological overload, become clear, we realize that indeed there has been a love story here, yet it has emerged from the peripheries, by way of an unexpected third party. And Shu Qi’s (and our) ignorance of it has tragic consequences. A surprise from Hou: the hetero norm, seen in different shades of illumination in 1966 and 1911, has finally been busted wide open. Yet despite this, Shu Qi and Chang Chen ride off together on his motorcycle, ignoring their possible incompatibility in favor of the safety of each other’s grasp, typified by the epileptic Shu Qi character’s clinging to her boyfriend’s body for dear life as they careen down the highway.

Hou’s questioning of the validity of this final couple, caught up in the everyday communication tangle of text messaging and email, and the artistic shortcuts of bar karaoke and computer music-writing programs like GarageBand, throws the entirety of Three Times into dazzling, retrospective illumination: How does the idea of the normatized couple, reflected idealistically only in the 1966 segment, function when so completely wedded to the environmental and political truths of which it is a product? Well, in love, history, and the stranglehold of social codes, there is no one easy answer. In this expansive and personal vision of Taiwan, history isn’t a straight line; rather it’s a constant dialogue, a search for a mutual understanding between both people and eras, from large-scale occupation to individual self-delusion. It all sounds grandiose, yet Hou never makes grander claims than his delicate balancing act can sustain; it’s embedded in the text, in history, and for once, Hou made me not just understand it but feel it.

Taiwanese Cinema: From the Beginning to the New Cinema

Cinema arrived on the island of Taiwan in 1901. For the first 20 years, only the Japanese made documentaries and feature films. In order to keep the colonial structure intact, the Japanese excluded any Taiwanese actors until 1922 in a film called The Eyes of Buddha. The first truly Taiwanese film, meaning local talent and financing, came in 1925 with Whose Fault Is It? Gradually, a vertically integrated industry formed using Taiwanese talent and capital. This was, of course, tightly controlled by the Japanese, and the local films drew on Japanese conventions in the silent era. For example, the benshi, the narrator that sat next to the screen and supplemented the music and images in Japan was adopted and re-termed as benzi by the Taiwanese. They also used another Japanese convention called the rengasi (rensageki in Japanese), which was a curious hybrid of film and theater that used cinema to stage spectacle for the stage. The industry was interrupted in 1937 by the Sino-Japanese War, and virtually nothing was produced until after the Nationalist government took over the island in 1945.With the end of the civil war in 1949, Shanghai filmmakers sympathetic to the Nationalists accompanied Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, and after the economy stabilized, these exiled filmmakers formed the heart of a new film community in Taiwan in the 1950s. Like other industries in the island, the film industry slowly developed in this period with the help of government subsidy. Mandarin and low-budget dialect films constituted the core of the nation's film production. A bilingual film system only lasted for a short period. Dialect film production in Taiwanese soon declined for two reasons: 1) the government attempted to unify the country by declaring Mandarin Chinese the official language of public discourse, and 2) the low-budget fare of dialect films were outclassed by the government-subsidized Mandarin films.

By the 1960s, modernization rapidly expanded in the island. Economic development, civil education, and industrialization were held as the major projects by the government. In 1963, the government's Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC) introduced "Health Realism" melodrama. This genre featured positive attitudes towards traditional moral values that reflected the attempt to reconcile the inherited ambivalence between the socioeconomic restructuring and moral/ethical values in traditional agricultural society. Their most potent competition were period sword films. In addition to these two strains, there were also romantic melodramas, usually based on the stories of woman author named Qong Yao. In the 1970s, health-realism was replaced by Qong Yao's romantic melodrama. The latent anxiety of reconciling modernity and tradition vis a vis rapid socioeconomic change was still present in these films. It was manifested primarily through individual (class, gender) conflict with traditional ethical/moral values in many melodramatic films.In the late 1970s, a sub-genre called "social realism" emerged, featuring sex, violence, and gang subculture. The display and representation of explicit violence, mystified masculinity and misogynous depiction of female sexuality appeared to respond to the long history of the government's repression of sexuality and physicality in cinema through censorship. This low-budget fare soon declined after insatiable repetitions of similar narrative structures and of banal spectacles of sex and violence.

The Emergence of the New Cinema

Beginning in the late 1970s, the local film industry was confronted with a set of challenges. The first was its rejection by moviegoers. Though Taiwanese society had been through tremendous changes in the previous decade, the veteran directors continued to make escapist films. The audience gradually became tired of them and their repetitive clichs. A related challenge to the film industry came from the popularity of home videos. Because the copyright law had only recently gone into effect, inexpensive, bootleg videos were a cheap form of entertainment and a popular domestic leisure activity in the early 1980s. The last kind of challenge came from the well-publicized films from Hong Kong. Cinema from the colony, with its innovations by the New Wave movement and a market economy of production, distribution, and promotion, invaded Taiwan. In the early 1980s, it swiftly replaced local films and became the mainstay of the film market.These financial pressures forced the industry to seek new ways of competing with the Hong Kong films. The first initiatives were taken by CMPC with the support of fresh, young directors. Under the supervision of the CMPC, a portmanteau film called In Our Time, composed of four distinct episodes by four new directors, was produced in 1982. It represented the first break with the old, escapist filmmaking. The film is a review of social change in Taiwan over three decades. Unlike standard Taiwanese fare, this film cast non- or semi-professional actors instead of famous stars and did not follow a traditional narrative structure or fit into any generic category. Because of these innovations, In Our Time is generally accepted as the starting point of the New Cinema Movement.Yet the New Cinema did not materialize until other innovative films appeared and achieved broader recognition. In 1983, Growing Up (directed by Chen Kunhou and produced by Hou, see photograph to the left) and another portmanteau film, The Sandwich Man (directed by three young filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, the director of City of Sadness) attracted a great deal of attention. In particular, The Sandwich Man, composed of three distinct episodes, can be regarded as the hallmark of the movement. The film portrays Taiwan during the cold war period when the country developed its economy with the assistance of aid from the United States.

With a special emphasis on the workers and their misery and their ignorance which resulted from their poverty and deprivation, each episode is different in style. The Sandwich Man was much discussed in the press at the time and was regarded as a significant break with domestic and Hong Kong mainstream cinema. Because of the commercial success and critical acclaim of Growing Up and The Sandwich Man, these new directors were provided with more opportunities to experiment with innovative filmmaking ideas. From this point on, the New Cinema began to develop more fully.

Auteurs

From 1983 through 1989, approximately ten filmmakers participated in this movement, each has respectively developed his (they are exclusively male) own style and has made his own contribution to the New Cinema. For example, Hou Hsiao-hsien's strongly autobiographical films --- The Boys From Fengkuei(1983), A Time to Live and A Time to Die (1985), Son's Big Doll, the first episode in The Sandwich Man (1983), A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), and Dust in the Wind (1986) --- reveal a realism that is startling in its authentic and artistic portrayal of rural life in Taiwan. Because of his unique observational, documentary- like style --- i.e., the use of deep focus and long takes, non-linear narrative, discontinuity editing, and portrayal of the daily lives of the Taiwanese --- Hou Hsiao-hsien has been acclaimed as the most representative auteur of Taiwan's national cinema by local film critics. His personal victories on the international film festival circuit, including his receipt of the Golden Lion at Venice for City of Sadness, have represented a triumph and vindication of the Taiwanese New Cinema.Another leading auteur of the New Cinema is Yang Dechang (Edward Yang).

Regarded as Hou's cinematic equal, Yang is remarkably different from Hou in terms of style and subject matter. Unlike Hou, who always focuses on males, childhood, adolescence, and rural life, Yang is concerned with women, the newly emerging middle class, and urban society. In his three features (That Day, on the Beach, Taipei Story and The Terrorizer), Yang consistently addresses the social and personal problems that confront the urban, intellectual, and cultural elite in the increasingly industrialized, Japan-influenced, and Westernized Taipei.Because of Yang's urban emphasis, the cinematic language he employs is similar to the modernist aesthetic associated with European art cinema. In discussing his work, critics often invoke Antonioni, an observation Yang detests. Detached camera movement, long takes, non- linear narrative, multiple diegeses, location shots, and discontinuity editing, are the hallmarks of Yang's techniques. His skillful utilization of modernist tropes, sharp observations on Taiwan's high-tech, capitalistic, alienated urban life, and retrospective looks at the island's tremendous social changes are also important elements in his films.

Form and Substance

New Cinema directors, all of whom grew up in the post-WWII era during Taiwan's socioeconomic restructuring from an agricultural to an industrialized and capitalist society, examine the various problems that Taiwanese people have to cope with in an increasingly modernized society. In order to create a cinema that entails a more realistic relationship with history and memory, most new films are shot on location. Under a similar notion, minor or non-professional actors are cast to evoke a more "true- to-life" atmosphere.Clearly influenced by Italian neorealism, the new directors are committed to a quasi-documentary style in their filmmaking. They draw deeply on their life experiences to construct their narratives and in their deployment of mise-en-scene. Their narratives often pit the working or peasant classes against a background of deprivation and misery. Almost every new film tries to reconstruct history to some extent. The look at the rural, agricultural past is nostalgic; the attitude toward the urban, industrial present is bitter. As a result, a set of thematic binary pairs can often be found in these films: rural (backward, peaceful) vs. urban (advanced, turbulent); peasant/working class (innocent, benevolent) vs. middle class (sophisticated, manipulative); past (good) vs. present (bad).In addition to these themes, an unprecedented concern with the daily lives of local people has been shown by the new directors, particularly with respect to native cultures and languages. In addition to Mandarin, the official language in Taiwan, other major dialects are included, such as Taiwanese Amoy (the major Jufian dialect spoken in Taiwan) and Hakka.

Because of the power struggle between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists over the four decades since WWII, the Nationalist Party has insisted that the government in Taiwan represents the true China and, therefore, the real Chinese culture. Moreover, when the Nationalist army first came to Taiwan in 1945, a bloody conflict occurred between the Taiwanese and the mainlanders, climaxing with the 2.28 Incident. As a result, the government privileges the so-called "Mid-Land" culture, a culture developed by the Yellow River Valley inhabitants in China since 2000BC, as the single culture that everyone in Taiwan must accept as their own; the native languages (ie. Taiwanese Amoy and Hakka) and cultures were officially suppressed.

The New Cinema directors have responded to a recent increase in the public consciousness of the movement to return to the native and regional cultures. They have used actors who speak Taiwanese Amoy dialect to portray real-life ordinary people. Hou Hsiao-hsien may be the filmmaker who has dealt most carefully with the trilingual phenomenon (Mandarin, Taiwanese Amoy and Hakka) in Taiwan. His Summer at Grandpa's, A Time to Live and A Time to Die, and City of Sadness present multiple dialects to oppose the government's forced mono lingualism.

Another thematic re-orientation by the Taiwan New Cinema is the direct reference to political and social taboos. Behind this phenomenon we may find the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the political, social, and diplomatic reform policies that followed, as well as growing demands for more radical reforms from civilians. Three films made in 1989 --- City of Sadness, Banana Paradise, and Gangs of Three --- touched on political controversies that were considered highly sensitive and forbidden in public discourse before 1987.In addition to the realist approach to subject matter, the New Cinema stands out for an additional reason: the continuing effort to explore the medium's specificity. Rather than conform to the myth that filmmaking should follow generic conventions to fulfill audience expectations, the new directors negotiated commercialism and art. They attempted to make films that sometimes agitated the audience, sometimes forced thoughtful reflection.

Clearly influenced by the Western modernist movement, the narrative structure in these films is more fragmented than linear, the editing is more obtrusive than continuous, and sentimental expression has been suspended to block out emotional identification. Off-screen sound has been used frequently to convey a sense of alienation (especially in the films of Hou and Yang); the frequent use of close-ups is replaced by long takes and long shots that make for a more distanced perspective. This is particularly clear in the manner in which scenes of action are constructed, as we argue in our analysis of the representation of violence.

However, differences exist among individual directors, even though most of them share a common purpose --- exploring the full potential of filmmaking. Wan Ren, for example, despite his quite modernist approach, still emphasizes melodrama in his films. His first work, the episode in The Sandwich Man called The Taste of Apples, successfully conveys the bitter taste of the postcolonial mentality, not because of detached camerawork and fragmented narrative, but because of his use of conventional ways of creating dramatic ironies and comic effects. Another filmmaker, Zhang Yi, concentrates on depicting female psychology in a classical realist tradition. Jade Love is one good example which shows his use of a classical realist narrative to articulate his criticism of feudal patriarchy.

Rejecting the stereotypical concept of filmmaking clearly held by the veteran directors as mere commodity and political propaganda, the New Cinema strives for medium specificity in documenting the social and cultural realities of Taiwan. Yet this bourgeois-humanistic ideology in re-directing the look of Taiwanese cinema does generate debates when a new critical regime came into power with the rise and success of the new films. The critical regime of critics trained in Western academic contexts contested interpretive authority of veteran critics and their institutional territory, the newspaper column. Their attention to and support of the new filmmakers involved less of an ideological struggle (i.e.Westernized aesthetic taste) than a larger question of survival and the power over discourse.

As a result, it is not surprising to see that the attack on the new films came from the veteran critics. Based upon the domestic commercial disasters of the most celebrated filmmakers like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, who were criticized for their idiosyncratic and elitist filmic taste, critics dismissed them as hardly relevant to the majority of working class consumers. Although the veteran critics' remarks can be easily dismissed for being too simplistic and insensitive to artistic expression, it is exactly their take on the distinction between high art and low culture that provoked an interesting reconsideration of the New Cinema. As Taiwan approaches the 21st century, the New Cinema has almost become an obsolete term in discussing film in Taiwan. Given this fact the New Cinema does not renovate the industry nor does it build up a solid reservoir for domestic filmmaking to compete with Hong Kong product. Taiwan's film market continues to be dominated by Hong Kong entertainment films. Many filmmakers who participated in the New Cinema have either ceased making films altogether or have been recruited into television production. Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, on the other hand, have become the most internationally celebrated Taiwanese filmmakers, as evidenced by Hou's coups at Venice for City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster.