2003. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
Initiation: Made for the centenary of Yasujiro Ozu. Project was brought to Hou via his connections with Shochiku studio and this ended up being his fourth film co-produced by that studio. The only condition was that he had to film in Japan. The film ended up subtly entering into dialogue with Ozu's style but also showing the difference between it and Hou's own style.
Thursday 17 December 2015
Millenium Mambo (Film)
2001. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
Transition for Hou to contemporary themes: This film marked a return (after the tentative effort of Daughter of the Nile) for Hou to dealing with modern, urban Taiwan, and came after some failed projects for multi-stranded films (including a project to make films distributed online which the viewer could edit however they choose), one of which involved the magician who ends up in this film. Hou had also experienced for himself the techno scene in Taipei and been impressed by it and its atmosphere and energy. He tries to translate this into the nightclub scenes of this movie.
First film with Shu Qi: Shu Qi previously had only acted in mainstream comedies and sex comedies, but when Hou saw something in her and decided to work with her, she was introduced to a very different kind of cinema. She was made to act in ways that were wholly new to her experience, and in ways that perhaps she had not even previously thought herself capable of. The collaboration would be beneficial for her, as for Hou, and this was the first of their to-date three films together.
The Film:
Narration from 'future': Vicky narrates from 10 years later, as if she is not herself anymore, a different person, standing outside of her own self, of her own body, of her story, narrating her own story as is it were someone else's. (Hence fitting with Hou's detached distanced style).
"Hou and screenwriter Chu T'ien-wen, who has written or co-written thirteen of Hou's films, diffuse whatever dramatic tension might be found in this narrative through their circuitous and elliptical storytelling. Vicky’s voiceover sometimes relays plot information before events are depicted onscreen; in other moments, the voiceover takes the place of dramatization altogether, while individual scenes appear to have no narrative consequence."
Dichotomy between Taipei and Yubari, snowy landscapes of Northern Japan.
Context:
Transition for Hou to contemporary themes: This film marked a return (after the tentative effort of Daughter of the Nile) for Hou to dealing with modern, urban Taiwan, and came after some failed projects for multi-stranded films (including a project to make films distributed online which the viewer could edit however they choose), one of which involved the magician who ends up in this film. Hou had also experienced for himself the techno scene in Taipei and been impressed by it and its atmosphere and energy. He tries to translate this into the nightclub scenes of this movie.
First film with Shu Qi: Shu Qi previously had only acted in mainstream comedies and sex comedies, but when Hou saw something in her and decided to work with her, she was introduced to a very different kind of cinema. She was made to act in ways that were wholly new to her experience, and in ways that perhaps she had not even previously thought herself capable of. The collaboration would be beneficial for her, as for Hou, and this was the first of their to-date three films together.
The Film:
Narration from 'future': Vicky narrates from 10 years later, as if she is not herself anymore, a different person, standing outside of her own self, of her own body, of her story, narrating her own story as is it were someone else's. (Hence fitting with Hou's detached distanced style).
"Hou and screenwriter Chu T'ien-wen, who has written or co-written thirteen of Hou's films, diffuse whatever dramatic tension might be found in this narrative through their circuitous and elliptical storytelling. Vicky’s voiceover sometimes relays plot information before events are depicted onscreen; in other moments, the voiceover takes the place of dramatization altogether, while individual scenes appear to have no narrative consequence."
Dichotomy between Taipei and Yubari, snowy landscapes of Northern Japan.
Daughter of the Nile (Film)
1987. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
First Hou film to take place in Taipei.
"Hou does everything to make the film as far from a disposable, star-geared, impersonal commodity as possible. Employing his trademark long shots and long takes, Hou disinvests the viewer of comfortable, familiar entryways into the emotional and psychological lives of his characters even as he tailors the “teen” movie to his social and cultural concerns."
"the motorcycle ride points to those of Goodbye South Goodbye, while a brutal crime perpetrated in front of a static-camera long take would be expanded upon just a film later in City of Sadness"
"Kasman believes Hou’s shift from male protagonists in films set in the past to female protagonists in those taking place in the present comes from a clear “line of thought”: “the opportunities missed by the socially empowered males in the mid-twentieth century have given way to modern, contemporary opportunities similarly being missed by Taiwan’s women. . . . Hou sees these new women—strong-willed, romantic, partially socially conscious and vaguely looking for something to do with their lives—as the hope for dragging Taiwanese society out of the qualms of the modern life.” That Hou associates women with contemporary urban settings isn’t surprising—he’s commented that he believes that the virile, tough men of his youth have slowly died out, and that attitude is reflected in the decentralizing of Hou’s gangsters to the margins of narrative."
First Hou film to take place in Taipei.
"Hou does everything to make the film as far from a disposable, star-geared, impersonal commodity as possible. Employing his trademark long shots and long takes, Hou disinvests the viewer of comfortable, familiar entryways into the emotional and psychological lives of his characters even as he tailors the “teen” movie to his social and cultural concerns."
"the motorcycle ride points to those of Goodbye South Goodbye, while a brutal crime perpetrated in front of a static-camera long take would be expanded upon just a film later in City of Sadness"
"Kasman believes Hou’s shift from male protagonists in films set in the past to female protagonists in those taking place in the present comes from a clear “line of thought”: “the opportunities missed by the socially empowered males in the mid-twentieth century have given way to modern, contemporary opportunities similarly being missed by Taiwan’s women. . . . Hou sees these new women—strong-willed, romantic, partially socially conscious and vaguely looking for something to do with their lives—as the hope for dragging Taiwanese society out of the qualms of the modern life.” That Hou associates women with contemporary urban settings isn’t surprising—he’s commented that he believes that the virile, tough men of his youth have slowly died out, and that attitude is reflected in the decentralizing of Hou’s gangsters to the margins of narrative."
Wednesday 16 December 2015
Goodbye South, Goodbye (Film)
1996. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
A tale of modern Taiwan: The 'south' of the title refers to Taiwan, defined and labelled as the south in relation to some colonial other, China or Japan, but now independent on its own. Yet the characters of this film still seem somewhat lost, meandering aimlessly. This connects with what Hou has described as Taiwan's struggle to assumes its new status as independent and affluent nation-state. Even though all characters in this film wish to leave Taiwan or think about it at some point, in the end none of them can go ahead with it as they are still too tied to their homeland, stuck there with this impossible desire to leave 'the south'.
Connection to previous Hou films: the film GSG most closely connects back to is The Boys from Fengkuei, in its depiction of the languorous lazy days of a group of petty hoodlums wasting the time away.
Shochiku co-production: for the second time, Hou worked with Japanese producer Shozo Ichiyama, then of Shochiku studio.
"Without affectation, without visible effort, he transforms a staple of pulp fiction—the gangster trying to go straight—into a melancholy meditation on time, place, subjectivity, and Taiwan."
"One of his more languorous movies, Goodbye South, Goodbye is almost too successful in conveying the stagnated, going-nowhere lives of layabouts. Like all Hou movies, Goodbye South, Goodbye is uninflected and detached, demands active engagement, perhaps more so than most of his other films. (It’s probably the most uneventful movie about gangsters ever.) Like all of Hou’s works, it is also rich, lustrous, profound, and affecting."
"There are shots of car rides through crowded city streets, idylls on lush country roads, trains snaking into the mountains. These moments are invariably gorgeous, graceful, swoony—they’re as beautiful as anything Hou has committed to film. The most transfixing is a motorcycle jaunt in the countryside, a lovely, wending tour through rural, overgrown Taiwan."
"Throughout Goodbye South, Goodbye are unexpected cuts to strange angles and puzzling perspectives. In one, there is a close up of snowglobe, with a man’s tattoos in the blurry background beyond it. In another, the camera tracks into a restaurant dining room, except everything is in an orange tint and the soundtrack is silent. Each time, Hou pulls back, revealing that those images were seen through someone’s eyes—in the former, Gao’s girlfriend dawdling in bed, in the latter, Flat Head dishing out orders while wearing orange sunglasses and a walkman."
Context:
A tale of modern Taiwan: The 'south' of the title refers to Taiwan, defined and labelled as the south in relation to some colonial other, China or Japan, but now independent on its own. Yet the characters of this film still seem somewhat lost, meandering aimlessly. This connects with what Hou has described as Taiwan's struggle to assumes its new status as independent and affluent nation-state. Even though all characters in this film wish to leave Taiwan or think about it at some point, in the end none of them can go ahead with it as they are still too tied to their homeland, stuck there with this impossible desire to leave 'the south'.
Connection to previous Hou films: the film GSG most closely connects back to is The Boys from Fengkuei, in its depiction of the languorous lazy days of a group of petty hoodlums wasting the time away.
Shochiku co-production: for the second time, Hou worked with Japanese producer Shozo Ichiyama, then of Shochiku studio.
"Without affectation, without visible effort, he transforms a staple of pulp fiction—the gangster trying to go straight—into a melancholy meditation on time, place, subjectivity, and Taiwan."
"One of his more languorous movies, Goodbye South, Goodbye is almost too successful in conveying the stagnated, going-nowhere lives of layabouts. Like all Hou movies, Goodbye South, Goodbye is uninflected and detached, demands active engagement, perhaps more so than most of his other films. (It’s probably the most uneventful movie about gangsters ever.) Like all of Hou’s works, it is also rich, lustrous, profound, and affecting."
"There are shots of car rides through crowded city streets, idylls on lush country roads, trains snaking into the mountains. These moments are invariably gorgeous, graceful, swoony—they’re as beautiful as anything Hou has committed to film. The most transfixing is a motorcycle jaunt in the countryside, a lovely, wending tour through rural, overgrown Taiwan."
"Throughout Goodbye South, Goodbye are unexpected cuts to strange angles and puzzling perspectives. In one, there is a close up of snowglobe, with a man’s tattoos in the blurry background beyond it. In another, the camera tracks into a restaurant dining room, except everything is in an orange tint and the soundtrack is silent. Each time, Hou pulls back, revealing that those images were seen through someone’s eyes—in the former, Gao’s girlfriend dawdling in bed, in the latter, Flat Head dishing out orders while wearing orange sunglasses and a walkman."
Thursday 15 October 2015
A Summer at Grandpa's (Film)
1984. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Scr: Chu Tien-wen. Cin: Chen Kun-hou.Context:
Biographical element: The film's story is based on a childhood memory of Chu Tien-wen's, which she offered up to Hou as a potential subject for a film after their collaboration on Growing Up. The shoot actually took place in the setting where Chu really lived for a period as a child, for greater authenticity, much like Hou would next film A Time to Live, A Time to Die in his actual childhood home. The exception was Dust in the Wind, which could not be film in Wu Nien-jen's hometown because it had changed too much since his childhood.
The Film:
The continuation of Hou's stylistic evolution: Still under the influence of his TNC cohorts and of new cinematic inspirations, Hou was now asking himself questions about how to make films which he had not previously wondered about. He came up with ingenious and often surprising answers --- for example he has repeatedly claimed Pasolini's Oedipus Rex as providing him the answer for editing a specific scene in this film, the one with children outdoors on trees, over Beethoven music (about 35 mins into the film).
Mode of narrative: We learn about the often serious problems of the adult characters through Hou's style of indirect narration, focalized through Tung-tung's innocent perspective.
Reception:
The film, once again, won the Golden Montgolfiere award at the Nantes 3 Continents festival.
References/Resources:
http://altscreen.com/08/08/2011/tuesday-editors-pick-summer-at-grandpas-1984/
Sunday 27 September 2015
The Boys from Fengkuei (Film)
1983. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Scr: Chu Tien-wen. Cin: Chen Kunhou.Context:
- Place within the TNC: The film is one of the first and most important early films of the New Cinema, coming shortly after the two omnibus films that set it off as a movement. In these early years, there was a sense of collectiveness and camaraderie among the group of filmmakers and screenwriters, who collaborated and influenced each other (e.g. the ideas board at Edward Yang's house which all could write on and take inspiration from). It was at this time that Edward Yang, Chang Yi, Ko I-chen, and the other young filmmakers who, unlike Hou, had been trained abraod in the USA and were more theoretically-minded, opened Hou's cinematic horizons. Together they watched many classic European art films, and Hou could not help be affected by these strange 'new' films he was experiencing for the first time. He has spoken of how they forced him to question his way of filmmaking, which previously had been more instinctive and empirical for him. Boys from Fengkuei is therefore in part a response to the influences and theoretical possibilities Hou observed and absorbed from this sudden widening of his cinematic scope, which he translated into a film that is clearly a new direction for him, but still deeply personal.
- Transition film for Hou: Regarded as the breakthrough film marking Hou's transition from the early commercial musical comedies to a more ambitious and personal cinema, with this stylised social realism.
- Production info: After having worked at CMPC, original breeding ground of the New Cinema, on The Sandwich Man, Hou decided to take the opportunity to work independently. The film was produced by Evergreen Films Ltd (Hou's own? Self-financed? Find out)
- Origin of project: Hou's mind had clearly by now been opened to cinema's potential for highlighting social reality, after his segment on The Sandwich Man, and the issue of internal migration was obviously of relevance during Taiwan's economic boom. The three youths move from Fengkuei in the Penghu islands (aka the Pescadores) to Taiwan's major southern city, Kaohsiung. Hou had visited Fengkuei some time before making the film and was struck by the landscapes and the people, partly inspiring him to make a film about it.
- Autobiographical elements and future connections: The four delinquent youths' idle lifestyle in Fengkuei, passing by the time playing snooker and getting into fights clearly has some resonance with Hou's own teenage years (which he'd later directly turn into a film in A Time to Live, A Time to Die). This film therefore perhaps represents Hou's first meeting with the potential of memory and autobiography to be fruitful sources for cinema/art. The languorous idle way of life the youths enjoy in the first part of the film also slightly prefigures Goodbye South, Goodbye. The pool halls of this lazy coastal town (as does similarly the impending military service conscription) will also serve as a hallmark of a past, perhaps of Hou's youth, in the 1960s, when it reemerges in Dust in the Wind and the 1960s section of Three Times.
The Film:
- .
- Clip from Rocco and his Brothers at cinema: When the boys sneak into a cinema in the hope of seeing something erotic (they're soon disappointed), the film showing is Luchino Visconti's 1960 Rocco and his Brothers. The choice of film is an interesting one, presumably one that was really shown in Taiwanese cinemas, and links Hou's film to Italian Neo-realism, at least in its second wave (1960 being a transitional year for Italian cinema, with Rocco, L'avventura and La dolce vita.) Rocco is a film about internal Italian migration from the south to the north, during the period of rapid economic expansion in post-war Italy, hence clearly having resonance with the primary subject of Boys from Fengkuei. (Other films 'quoted' withing Hou's films: Drunken Master (1978, Yuen Woo-ping) in this one, Beautiful Duckling (1965, Li Hsing) and a King Hu film (Dragon Inn or Touch of Zen?) in Dust in the Wind. Others?)
- The same scene also has an innovative use of a memory-flashback (a rare or unique? example of subjective interiority in Hou's mature oeuvre.), within the shot-countershot structure of Ah-ching watching Rocco on screen, as the guilt of having wanted to see sex in the movie induces within him another kind of guilt, that towards his father. The scene goes from Ah-ching (S) to Rocco (CS) back to Ah-ching (back to S) and then, with the soundtrack of Rocco still audible, into a memory-flashback of Ah-ching's father being hit by the baseball on the head, an accident we know has left him paralysed. All this is done unostentatiously but highlights Hou's relationship to seeing, POV and his own take on S/CS structures. The scene also recalls a scene in the later Dust in the Wind, where Ah-yuan's memory/dream/flashback is triggered by shots of a miner on TV.
- The open-wall in abandoned building scene: After the boys, freshly arrived in Kaohsiung and naive as country hicks, are tricked into paying for and going up to an 11th floor 'screening' where the only 'screen' they find is the open wall of this concrete shell of an unfinished building, which has the dimensions of a widescreen aspect ratio, as one of the boys ironically remarks himself when realising their gullible mistake. It frames the city into a screen, which the boys, having paid, now take the time to watch. On a meta-cinematic level, it opens onto the city and hence the real life, symbolising how Hou's films and the TNC was bringing 'real' Taiwanese life onto the screen. It fits also within Hou's burgeoning aesthetic of 'frames-within-frames', and of showing characters looking. It is also a visual joke, and Jia Zhangke, who was greatly moved when he first watched this film. would pay homage to it in Still Life (2006), as would Wang Xiaoshuai in Beijing Bicycle.
- Pan blending past and present in one take: Scene of Ah-ching's homecoming with a pan that incorporates both the present (his father incapacitated and sitting on his chair) and the memory-past (a family meal before the accident...), a scene sort of like the ending of Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.
- Hou's evolving style: Boys from Fengkuei, even more than the segment he directed in The Sandwich Man, begins to show elements of Hou's trademark style: long takes, long shots (in a BFI Q&A he spoke of wanting to always move the camera further back from the characters, in the Fengkuei scenes, in order to take in more of their environment and hence their relationship to it, within the frame --- a tactic which even his cinematographer Chen Kunhou was dubious about) and compositions with blocking and frames-within-frames (doors, windows, etc). It signals the start of his more 'objective' approach to story-telling, wanting to remain at a distance while still allowing a deep empathy for his characters.
- Use of classical music: For the first time Hou uses Western classical music on the soundtrack (e.g. Vivaldi), as he would use Beethoven in his next film, A Summer at Grandpa's. This came about after a suggestion from Edward Yang, as this period (1983-85) marks perhaps the height of the Taiwan New Cinema as a collective movement with ideas being shared communally. As a soundtrack choice it perhaps helps with Hou's desired objective approach, as the music would feel distanced and not immediately relatable to a Taiwanese audience less used to it.
- Hou's cameo: For the first time Hou gave himself a small acting role, as the mahjong-playing perm-haired boyfriend of the sister, living in Kaohsiung.
Reception:
- Won the Golden Montgolfiere (tied with Tunisian film El-haimoune) at the Nantes 3 Continents Festival.
Resources:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/cteq/boys_from_fengkuei/
The Green Green Grass of Home (Film)
1982. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Cin: Chen Kun-hou.
Context:
It is perhaps important to note that Hou would never again utilize as wide an aspect ratio as he did in his first three films, allowing for the intensity and purity of perception you find in the mature work.
The Film:
"Perhaps the most noteworthy of the three, Green, Green Grass casts Bee and a new ingénue, Jiang Ling (who gets almost no dialogue), as schoolteachers in the countryside. Where the first two films were built on the universal romantic-comedy set-up in which a woman must choose between the cold intelligence of one suitor and the open-hearted spontaneity of another, Green, Green Grass finds Hou loosening up and departing from strict genre templates, rooting his film in the particularities of his setting, and willfully distracting himself with anecdotes from the extended family of his colorful supporting cast. While the female characters are far more marginalized here than they are in Cute Girl or Cheerful Wind, his portrayal of the emotional lives of children—which would become so central in his most autobiographical films—gains a new sophistication. But even in spite of these developments, the film is of a piece with the breezy sentimentality of its predecessors and, like them, ends with a social and moral message: where Cute Girl warns against urban encroachment, and Cheerful Wind encourages patience, charity, and loyalty, Green, Green Grass teaches grade-school lessons of environmental responsibility and conflict resolution."
Reception:
Resources:
http://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/602/cute_girl_cheerful_wind_green_green_grass_home
Context:
It is perhaps important to note that Hou would never again utilize as wide an aspect ratio as he did in his first three films, allowing for the intensity and purity of perception you find in the mature work.
The Film:
"Perhaps the most noteworthy of the three, Green, Green Grass casts Bee and a new ingénue, Jiang Ling (who gets almost no dialogue), as schoolteachers in the countryside. Where the first two films were built on the universal romantic-comedy set-up in which a woman must choose between the cold intelligence of one suitor and the open-hearted spontaneity of another, Green, Green Grass finds Hou loosening up and departing from strict genre templates, rooting his film in the particularities of his setting, and willfully distracting himself with anecdotes from the extended family of his colorful supporting cast. While the female characters are far more marginalized here than they are in Cute Girl or Cheerful Wind, his portrayal of the emotional lives of children—which would become so central in his most autobiographical films—gains a new sophistication. But even in spite of these developments, the film is of a piece with the breezy sentimentality of its predecessors and, like them, ends with a social and moral message: where Cute Girl warns against urban encroachment, and Cheerful Wind encourages patience, charity, and loyalty, Green, Green Grass teaches grade-school lessons of environmental responsibility and conflict resolution."
Reception:
Resources:
http://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entry/602/cute_girl_cheerful_wind_green_green_grass_home
Friday 24 July 2015
Sunday 28 June 2015
Flowers of Shanghai (Film)
1998. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Context:
Hou's career: A shift towards added formalism (choreographed near-constant pans, fades-to-black). For the first time a move to a setting beyond living memory. His third film made in co-production with Shochiki studio, with again Shozo Ichiyama at the helm.
Origins: Based on Han Ziyun (Han Bangqing) novel, written in 1892 and in Wu dialect, and Eileen Chang's 1970s (Mandarin) translation of it (which Hou read). Initially Hou had been planning and researching for a film about Zheng Chenggung, 'Father of Taiwan', who drove away the Dutch in the 17th century, but as part of the research read Flowers of Shanghai. He was so drawn to it that he abandoned the initial project to film this book instead.
Imagined China: The first Hou film fully set in Mainland China (not even any mention of Taiwan) --- although it was all filmed on sets built in Taiwan. Bergala notes that for the first time Hou has to visualise a world from his imagination, closing his eyes to the world in front of him to penetrate a Classical China.
The Film:
Structure: Three strands, each one centered on a different woman. ... an emotional cold war.... four banquet scenes... scenes of meals or pipes being prepared, drinking games, negotiations and particularly conversations, revolving around gossip.
Setting: Set in the English concession of 1890s (Qing dynasty era) Shanghai.... the men are elite affluent Han, the women are trapped as 'high-class prostitutes' within gilded prisons...
The film has exquisite decors, costumes and sets, low-key lighting (oil lanterns, candles etc). Note the one close-up insert shot (very rare for Hou) of the whole film, is to a golden hairpin (?)
Style: Slow fluid arcing camera movements. Little action or drama or conflict, which are mostly elided, and in fact the most dramatic events take place offscreen during narrative ellipses, and are then only made known to the audience by asides in conversation between other characters. The film is far more about atmosphere, of a lazy-rhythmed leisurely world, than plot.
Soundtrack: slow, simple electronic droning, almost ever-present, composed by Yoshimiro Hanno, adds to the lazy, leisurely pace and opiate feel of the rhythm and the pans...
" Because Hou's cinematic syntax is so different from the mainstream (long, slow takes; dearth of close-ups), the range of his style tends to get overlooked, but this is a film that's visually quite distinct from anything else he ever did. Every shot is languorous and opiated, with a drifting camera nodding in and out of consciousness: every single shot begins with a fade in from black and ends with a fade out, even when action between them is continuous, and more than that, the fades to and from black seem to be orchestrated on the set, not in post-production, as the onscreen light sources (candles and lanterns) are the first to appear and last to vanish in the gloom - a beautiful effect derived from Welles. It's also entirely confined to opulent interiors, with characters almost always in medium shot. In the world of this film, the kinetic travelling shots of Goodbye, South, Goodbye (my favourite of Hou's 90s films) are as unthinkable as its extreme long-shots. Of course, these aesthetic choices are absolutely appropriate for a film that's all about social confinement and mannered, moderated intimacy.
Hou's narrative obliqueness is also strongly in evidence, though in a different manner than most of his films. The film is quite talky, and most of the talk is gossip. And that gossip is where the action takes place. In a world in which women are obliged to be preoccupied about their social standing but are largely excluded from social interaction and discourse, gossip is their lifeblood, and reputations and self-respect stand or fall on what their more socially mobile acquaintances (the men) are saying about people the women may never have met. When major plot actions finally do occur on screen in the final act, it's quite shocking, but not really any less shocking than when what we assume to be the film's major plot thread (Master Wang's relationships with Crimson and Jasmin) is wrapped up in an aside between two other characters." - http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=13398&start=225#p507045
Power relationships: Those controlled (the women) try to wrest control through the restrictions of their limitations, behind the scenes, and through influence and circuitous machinations... Gossip, a key currency in this world. Gossip, information, can be power, such that the 'flower girls' can act as power brokers by revealing news etc.
"The “flowers” are doubly bound: first to their madams (or "aunties"), and then to their primary callers, who are expected to support the flowers’ households. Hou then layers on further complexities: women who’ve grown old within the system and see no need to escape it; another who looks for a way to buy her freedom; yet another who lucks into a marriage with a witless young caller and another, more dubious, kind of freedom. All of the women strive toward different lives, different options, but all of these possibilities are thoroughly and oppressively mediated by prevailing historical conditions. For all the men’s obvious economic and physical power over the women, Hou seems generally unconcerned with explicating the male perspective here—in this liminal space the bound women have an odd kind of upper hand. Even the film is divided thusly, with recurring chapters named for each of the main women, yet the movie never feels like a collection of short stories. Hou’s formalism irons their disparate stories into a unified whole."
The brothel as metaphor for Taiwan, its location within the foreign concessions of Shanghai affording it an independent status.
Frustrates promises of exoticised orientalism?
Context:
Hou's career: A shift towards added formalism (choreographed near-constant pans, fades-to-black). For the first time a move to a setting beyond living memory. His third film made in co-production with Shochiki studio, with again Shozo Ichiyama at the helm.
Origins: Based on Han Ziyun (Han Bangqing) novel, written in 1892 and in Wu dialect, and Eileen Chang's 1970s (Mandarin) translation of it (which Hou read). Initially Hou had been planning and researching for a film about Zheng Chenggung, 'Father of Taiwan', who drove away the Dutch in the 17th century, but as part of the research read Flowers of Shanghai. He was so drawn to it that he abandoned the initial project to film this book instead.
Imagined China: The first Hou film fully set in Mainland China (not even any mention of Taiwan) --- although it was all filmed on sets built in Taiwan. Bergala notes that for the first time Hou has to visualise a world from his imagination, closing his eyes to the world in front of him to penetrate a Classical China.
The Film:
Structure: Three strands, each one centered on a different woman. ... an emotional cold war.... four banquet scenes... scenes of meals or pipes being prepared, drinking games, negotiations and particularly conversations, revolving around gossip.
Setting: Set in the English concession of 1890s (Qing dynasty era) Shanghai.... the men are elite affluent Han, the women are trapped as 'high-class prostitutes' within gilded prisons...
The film has exquisite decors, costumes and sets, low-key lighting (oil lanterns, candles etc). Note the one close-up insert shot (very rare for Hou) of the whole film, is to a golden hairpin (?)
Style: Slow fluid arcing camera movements. Little action or drama or conflict, which are mostly elided, and in fact the most dramatic events take place offscreen during narrative ellipses, and are then only made known to the audience by asides in conversation between other characters. The film is far more about atmosphere, of a lazy-rhythmed leisurely world, than plot.
Soundtrack: slow, simple electronic droning, almost ever-present, composed by Yoshimiro Hanno, adds to the lazy, leisurely pace and opiate feel of the rhythm and the pans...
" Because Hou's cinematic syntax is so different from the mainstream (long, slow takes; dearth of close-ups), the range of his style tends to get overlooked, but this is a film that's visually quite distinct from anything else he ever did. Every shot is languorous and opiated, with a drifting camera nodding in and out of consciousness: every single shot begins with a fade in from black and ends with a fade out, even when action between them is continuous, and more than that, the fades to and from black seem to be orchestrated on the set, not in post-production, as the onscreen light sources (candles and lanterns) are the first to appear and last to vanish in the gloom - a beautiful effect derived from Welles. It's also entirely confined to opulent interiors, with characters almost always in medium shot. In the world of this film, the kinetic travelling shots of Goodbye, South, Goodbye (my favourite of Hou's 90s films) are as unthinkable as its extreme long-shots. Of course, these aesthetic choices are absolutely appropriate for a film that's all about social confinement and mannered, moderated intimacy.
Hou's narrative obliqueness is also strongly in evidence, though in a different manner than most of his films. The film is quite talky, and most of the talk is gossip. And that gossip is where the action takes place. In a world in which women are obliged to be preoccupied about their social standing but are largely excluded from social interaction and discourse, gossip is their lifeblood, and reputations and self-respect stand or fall on what their more socially mobile acquaintances (the men) are saying about people the women may never have met. When major plot actions finally do occur on screen in the final act, it's quite shocking, but not really any less shocking than when what we assume to be the film's major plot thread (Master Wang's relationships with Crimson and Jasmin) is wrapped up in an aside between two other characters." - http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=13398&start=225#p507045
Power relationships: Those controlled (the women) try to wrest control through the restrictions of their limitations, behind the scenes, and through influence and circuitous machinations... Gossip, a key currency in this world. Gossip, information, can be power, such that the 'flower girls' can act as power brokers by revealing news etc.
"The “flowers” are doubly bound: first to their madams (or "aunties"), and then to their primary callers, who are expected to support the flowers’ households. Hou then layers on further complexities: women who’ve grown old within the system and see no need to escape it; another who looks for a way to buy her freedom; yet another who lucks into a marriage with a witless young caller and another, more dubious, kind of freedom. All of the women strive toward different lives, different options, but all of these possibilities are thoroughly and oppressively mediated by prevailing historical conditions. For all the men’s obvious economic and physical power over the women, Hou seems generally unconcerned with explicating the male perspective here—in this liminal space the bound women have an odd kind of upper hand. Even the film is divided thusly, with recurring chapters named for each of the main women, yet the movie never feels like a collection of short stories. Hou’s formalism irons their disparate stories into a unified whole."
The brothel as metaphor for Taiwan, its location within the foreign concessions of Shanghai affording it an independent status.
Frustrates promises of exoticised orientalism?
Friday 10 April 2015
Growing Up (Film)
1983. Dir: Chen Kunhou. Scr: Chu Tien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien.
"Zhu Tianwen came into the film industry as a result of publishing a prize-winning piece, “Growing Up” (Xiaobi de gushi, “The story of little Bi,” published in the United Daily News, 1982). Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chen Kunhou were interested in the story of Xiaobi and arranged to meet Zhu in a coffee shop. Thus began a rich creative partnership that continues to this day."
"However, within a sclerotic institution this took a certain amount of guile. To pass the studio’s conservative line of ideology, these assistants would prepare “creative” proposals that disguised the real intent of the films. For instance, Growing Up is about a boy who turns to juvenile delinquency and drives his mother to suicide. He fails to live up to her ambition for him to go to college, and goes to military school instead. Xiao Ye wrote this up as a pitch that promotes the military academy
as a place to straighten out wayward boys..."
"Take Chu Tienwen’s first screenplay, Growing Up, as an example. Zhu’s title of the source, “The Story of Little Bi,” suggests a strong biographical and autobiographical inclination. Here Zhu was interested in documenting the true life of an ordinary boy growing up in a small township with a stepfather old enough to be his grandfather. The boy is sensitive and energetic, but the fact that he was born a bastard and adopted as a stepson of a military man predestines his troubled childhood. As the title indicates, it is a “story,” the fictionalization of an ordinary life that makes it extraordinary. If Zhu were a regular biographer, she might have taken the precaution of observing the codes of biographical writing to keep her story objective, true to the life of her real-life subjects. But in the poetics of auto/biography, the story is written in the first-person point of view of a grown woman remembering her childhood. This textual device repeats itself in the film. On many occasions, the otherwise omniscient narration is accompanied by the voice-over of the neighbor girl, to inform the spectator of her own reflections on the troubled boy next door."
Growing Up, to the surprise of the filmmakers (including the scriptwriter herself), was a commercial success.
"Zhu Tianwen came into the film industry as a result of publishing a prize-winning piece, “Growing Up” (Xiaobi de gushi, “The story of little Bi,” published in the United Daily News, 1982). Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chen Kunhou were interested in the story of Xiaobi and arranged to meet Zhu in a coffee shop. Thus began a rich creative partnership that continues to this day."
"However, within a sclerotic institution this took a certain amount of guile. To pass the studio’s conservative line of ideology, these assistants would prepare “creative” proposals that disguised the real intent of the films. For instance, Growing Up is about a boy who turns to juvenile delinquency and drives his mother to suicide. He fails to live up to her ambition for him to go to college, and goes to military school instead. Xiao Ye wrote this up as a pitch that promotes the military academy
as a place to straighten out wayward boys..."
"Take Chu Tienwen’s first screenplay, Growing Up, as an example. Zhu’s title of the source, “The Story of Little Bi,” suggests a strong biographical and autobiographical inclination. Here Zhu was interested in documenting the true life of an ordinary boy growing up in a small township with a stepfather old enough to be his grandfather. The boy is sensitive and energetic, but the fact that he was born a bastard and adopted as a stepson of a military man predestines his troubled childhood. As the title indicates, it is a “story,” the fictionalization of an ordinary life that makes it extraordinary. If Zhu were a regular biographer, she might have taken the precaution of observing the codes of biographical writing to keep her story objective, true to the life of her real-life subjects. But in the poetics of auto/biography, the story is written in the first-person point of view of a grown woman remembering her childhood. This textual device repeats itself in the film. On many occasions, the otherwise omniscient narration is accompanied by the voice-over of the neighbor girl, to inform the spectator of her own reflections on the troubled boy next door."
Growing Up, to the surprise of the filmmakers (including the scriptwriter herself), was a commercial success.
Tuesday 7 April 2015
A City of Sadness (Film)
1989. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Scr: Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Chu Tianwen, Wu Nianzhen.
Music composed by Naoki Tachikawa, who also composed music for Raise the Red Lantern. (which was also produced by ERA International)
Context:
The first film to make allusion to February 28 Incident (aka 228 or 'ererba') and the massacre of tens of thousands (estimated 18,000 to 28,000 casualties) by the KMT in 1947. Martial law had been lifted in 1987, and historical topics which had been suppressed and taboo to even mention, could now finally be researched and discussed.
First film in Taiwan to be fully recorded with synchronised sound (no post-production dubbing).
Much research was carried out by Hou and his writers, including first-hand testimonies. Part of the film's narrative was based on a piece of reportage by Lan Bozhou, 'The song of the covered wagon', published in 1988 and documenting the lives of the socialist underground during the colonialist period [More info in Island on the Edge, 55-56.]
Billed as 'The saga of a family, the saga of a nation'. (In Taiwan?)
The Film:
'Private history': as opposed to another Big History. History told from below, from perspective of those affected, even indirectly. Use of diary entries and family photographs.
Official vs. Unofficial History
The Lin family as microcosm of the nation.
Family tree:
Initial optimism at rejoining China at the beginning (a new birth, the light after the blackout) later foiled and deflated.
The oldest brother's line about Taiwanese 'mistreated by all, pitied by none'... also the name of the Lins' restaurant Little Shanghai -> ironic as Shanghai gangsters will be responsible for much of their troubles.
Use and meaning of traditional songs in the film (see Chiao essay in Suchenski).
"While listening to Beethoven, Kuanmei explains to Wenqing in writing that the music is based on a legend in which several fishermen, intoxicated by the beautiful voice of a siren, perish in their sinking boat. Like the fishermen in the legend, these intellectuals devote their lives to a beautiful but intangible ideal, which will seductively lead them to destruction"
Reception:
Winner of the 1989 Golden Lion at Venice.
"Later Hou instigated another, even bigger, cultural debate with the first film of his Taiwan trilogy. The criticism of City of Sadness (1989) culminated in the 1991 anthology Death of the New Cinema (Xin dianying zhi si). Contributors from various disciplines and backgrounds were not happy with Hou’s distant photography and obscure storytelling in his depiction of the regime’s brutality toward Taiwanese in the February 28 Incident, a major uprising against the Nationalists’ neocolonial rule. As the most horrific incident in Taiwan’s modern history, the February 28 Incident was then a collective trauma and has become a national scar. People were waiting to see some justice done in the film. But they did not. As a result, Hou was seen as a complacent, conservative artist who had yet to see the political light. The troubled local reception of Hou’s City of Sadness manifests the difficulty of coming to terms with history and historical representation of Taiwan’s scarred past."
Resources:
Berenice Reynaud BFI Classics
Peggy Chiao essay in Suchenski
Music composed by Naoki Tachikawa, who also composed music for Raise the Red Lantern. (which was also produced by ERA International)
Context:
The first film to make allusion to February 28 Incident (aka 228 or 'ererba') and the massacre of tens of thousands (estimated 18,000 to 28,000 casualties) by the KMT in 1947. Martial law had been lifted in 1987, and historical topics which had been suppressed and taboo to even mention, could now finally be researched and discussed.
First film in Taiwan to be fully recorded with synchronised sound (no post-production dubbing).
Much research was carried out by Hou and his writers, including first-hand testimonies. Part of the film's narrative was based on a piece of reportage by Lan Bozhou, 'The song of the covered wagon', published in 1988 and documenting the lives of the socialist underground during the colonialist period [More info in Island on the Edge, 55-56.]
Billed as 'The saga of a family, the saga of a nation'. (In Taiwan?)
The Film:
'Private history': as opposed to another Big History. History told from below, from perspective of those affected, even indirectly. Use of diary entries and family photographs.
Official vs. Unofficial History
The Lin family as microcosm of the nation.
Family tree:
Initial optimism at rejoining China at the beginning (a new birth, the light after the blackout) later foiled and deflated.
The oldest brother's line about Taiwanese 'mistreated by all, pitied by none'... also the name of the Lins' restaurant Little Shanghai -> ironic as Shanghai gangsters will be responsible for much of their troubles.
Use and meaning of traditional songs in the film (see Chiao essay in Suchenski).
"While listening to Beethoven, Kuanmei explains to Wenqing in writing that the music is based on a legend in which several fishermen, intoxicated by the beautiful voice of a siren, perish in their sinking boat. Like the fishermen in the legend, these intellectuals devote their lives to a beautiful but intangible ideal, which will seductively lead them to destruction"
Reception:
Winner of the 1989 Golden Lion at Venice.
"Later Hou instigated another, even bigger, cultural debate with the first film of his Taiwan trilogy. The criticism of City of Sadness (1989) culminated in the 1991 anthology Death of the New Cinema (Xin dianying zhi si). Contributors from various disciplines and backgrounds were not happy with Hou’s distant photography and obscure storytelling in his depiction of the regime’s brutality toward Taiwanese in the February 28 Incident, a major uprising against the Nationalists’ neocolonial rule. As the most horrific incident in Taiwan’s modern history, the February 28 Incident was then a collective trauma and has become a national scar. People were waiting to see some justice done in the film. But they did not. As a result, Hou was seen as a complacent, conservative artist who had yet to see the political light. The troubled local reception of Hou’s City of Sadness manifests the difficulty of coming to terms with history and historical representation of Taiwan’s scarred past."
Resources:
Berenice Reynaud BFI Classics
Peggy Chiao essay in Suchenski
Chu Tien-wen (Industry)
Aka Zhu Tianwen. Born: 1956, Taipei.Best known as a key writer within the Taiwanese New Cinema, and particularly a key collaborator of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's.
"Zhu Tianwen (b. 1956) comes from “the most noted literary family” in Taiwanese literature; her father Zhu Xi’ning (1926–1998), a Christian mainlander, is a celebrated novelist and a cultural officer, and her Hakka mother, Liu Musha, is a respected translator of Japanese fiction. Growing up in a congenial literary circle and raised in Confucianism, Christianity, Chinese and Japanese literature, Zhu Tianwen began to publish in various newspapers’ literary supplements when she was still in high school."
Zhu Tianwen came into the film industry as a result of publishing a prize-winning piece, Growing Up ( published in the United Daily News, 1982). Hou and Chen Kunhou were interested in the story of Xiaobi and arranged to meet Zhu in a coffee shop. Thus began a rich creative partnership that continues to this day. They worked together on the screenplay of Growing Up, which Chen would end up directing. From then on she and Hou would form a close artistic connection and collaboration. It was she who first introduced him to mainland Chinese literature, such as the autobiography of Shen Congwen, that would be so influential for his desire of an 'objective camera' --- leading to long takes and long shots.
That same year Chu wrote the screenplay for Hou's semi-autobiographical The Boys from Fengkuei. She then offered up an incident from her own childhood as the basis for Hou's next film, A Summer at Grandpa's, which she also wrote. She worked on several of his following films.. She also wrote, along with Hou, Edward Yang's 1985 film Taipei Story.. For A City of Sadness, she, Hou and Wu Nianzhen worked together, gathering tremendous amounts of research into the 1945-49 period of Taiwanese history.
She describes her working collaboration with Hou as rooting in words the great quantity of visual ideas Hou threw at her. She also developed and fleshed out his female characters, giving a stronger insight into their internal worlds.
Friday 27 March 2015
Wan Ren (Director)
aka Wan Jen. Born: 1950, Taiwan.
Wan is perhaps the most explicitly political and the least auteurist of the New Cinema directors. Political, because Wan directly exposes social problems and, hence, has constantly run into trouble with censorship. Because Wan’s work crosses a wide range of topics, genres, and styles, he cannot be easily accommodated within the auteur pattern.
He made the 'Taste of Apples' segment of the foundational New Cinema film The Sandwich Man, which had created some controversy. After making the family melodrama Ah Fei (You ma cai zi, 1983), Wan, with his third film Super Citizen (Chaoji shimin, 1985), again faced state censorship. Super Citizen begins with a young man in search of his missing sister in the capital. In his relentless search, the man from the country encounters characters living on the fringes of the city—a con artist, a prostitute, a punk girl, and a lunatic bum. The film thus unfolds a decoupage of poverty, corruption, crime, and disillusionment with modern development and urban prosperity. The brother never finds his sister, but he decides to stay in Taipei in the end. By following his sister’s path, he, too, is engulfed by the metropolis’s black, underground economy. Motifs of “search” and “rescue” remind us of the famous captivity narratives in John Ford’s The Searchers and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and perhaps even Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light.
Like Wang Tong, Wan chose a middle-way approach in making his films palatable to local audiences. Other new directors failed the high expectations of producers and exhibitors in their second or third films. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), Edward Yang’s embarrassing 1984 box office flop Taipei Story, and Zeng Zhuangxiang’s Nature Is Quite Beautiful (Wu li de disheng, 1984) were all major disappointments. In comparison, Wan’s Ah Fei and Super Citizen both achieved modest commercial success. According to Wan, his approach in the New Cinema was different from the main paradigm. Beginning with 'The Taste of Apples', he wanted to make films that were accessible to the audience but at the same time allowed him to make strong social commentary.
Super Citizen was a joint production by Long Shong and New Cinema City’s Taipei office, chaired by none other than John Woo. Woo was not only the film’s executive producer, he also edited the trailer for the film. Certainly this Hong Kong connection meant Wan no longer could stay on the middle ground. He was expected to follow suit behind the Hong Kong New Wave and transform elements of Taiwan New Cinema into more commercial ingredients. Wan Ren was not fully ready for this. Problems arose when Tsui Hark produced his next film, 'The Farewell Coast' (Xibie hai’an, 1987). Wan intended to maintain his critical edge and, as a sequel to Super Citizen, wanted to make another topical film about youth crime. Meanwhile, Tsui wanted to push for a Taiwan version of A Better Tomorrow, an action thriller about the most wanted gunman on the island. Tsui hoped to add more gunfights to sensationalize Wan’s cool depictions of the teenager-cum-fugitive. Wan refused to reshoot and insisted on making the film as a social exposé rather than a pure genre picture.
Wan is perhaps the most explicitly political and the least auteurist of the New Cinema directors. Political, because Wan directly exposes social problems and, hence, has constantly run into trouble with censorship. Because Wan’s work crosses a wide range of topics, genres, and styles, he cannot be easily accommodated within the auteur pattern.
He made the 'Taste of Apples' segment of the foundational New Cinema film The Sandwich Man, which had created some controversy. After making the family melodrama Ah Fei (You ma cai zi, 1983), Wan, with his third film Super Citizen (Chaoji shimin, 1985), again faced state censorship. Super Citizen begins with a young man in search of his missing sister in the capital. In his relentless search, the man from the country encounters characters living on the fringes of the city—a con artist, a prostitute, a punk girl, and a lunatic bum. The film thus unfolds a decoupage of poverty, corruption, crime, and disillusionment with modern development and urban prosperity. The brother never finds his sister, but he decides to stay in Taipei in the end. By following his sister’s path, he, too, is engulfed by the metropolis’s black, underground economy. Motifs of “search” and “rescue” remind us of the famous captivity narratives in John Ford’s The Searchers and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and perhaps even Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light.
Like Wang Tong, Wan chose a middle-way approach in making his films palatable to local audiences. Other new directors failed the high expectations of producers and exhibitors in their second or third films. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), Edward Yang’s embarrassing 1984 box office flop Taipei Story, and Zeng Zhuangxiang’s Nature Is Quite Beautiful (Wu li de disheng, 1984) were all major disappointments. In comparison, Wan’s Ah Fei and Super Citizen both achieved modest commercial success. According to Wan, his approach in the New Cinema was different from the main paradigm. Beginning with 'The Taste of Apples', he wanted to make films that were accessible to the audience but at the same time allowed him to make strong social commentary.
Super Citizen was a joint production by Long Shong and New Cinema City’s Taipei office, chaired by none other than John Woo. Woo was not only the film’s executive producer, he also edited the trailer for the film. Certainly this Hong Kong connection meant Wan no longer could stay on the middle ground. He was expected to follow suit behind the Hong Kong New Wave and transform elements of Taiwan New Cinema into more commercial ingredients. Wan Ren was not fully ready for this. Problems arose when Tsui Hark produced his next film, 'The Farewell Coast' (Xibie hai’an, 1987). Wan intended to maintain his critical edge and, as a sequel to Super Citizen, wanted to make another topical film about youth crime. Meanwhile, Tsui wanted to push for a Taiwan version of A Better Tomorrow, an action thriller about the most wanted gunman on the island. Tsui hoped to add more gunfights to sensationalize Wan’s cool depictions of the teenager-cum-fugitive. Wan refused to reshoot and insisted on making the film as a social exposé rather than a pure genre picture.
Thursday 26 March 2015
Wang Tung (Director)
Born: 1942, China.Director, and initially an art director/set designer.
Upon graduation from the National College of Arts in the mid-1960s, Wang entered CMPC as a set designer, drawing models, props, and costumes. Since then, he has worked with almost every major director, across many different genres and different styles. He was involved in more than one hundred films, including healthy realism, propaganda policy films, war epics, martial arts, kung fu, comedies, and Qiong Yao romantic melodramas. Wang worked with famous directors of the 1960s and 1970s such as King Hu, Li Hanxiang, Li Jia, Bai Jingrui, and Li Xing.
Wang was already a veteran when he joined the New Cinema. Well before Edward Yang, Wan Ren, or other new directors entered the trade, Wang had already established himself as a known director.
Like other New Cinema proponents, he re-invented popular genres by adding a nativist approach to them, starting from his first entry into the New Cinema canon, A Flower in the Rainy Night (which was not however his first film), based on a work by Huang Chunming, and continuing into his so-called 'nativist trilogy'.
A Flower in the Rainy Night was Wang’s entry into the New Cinema, and was shown at the 1983 Chicago International Film Festival where it won an award. It exemplifies Wang as an old school director in a new age, striving to balance the demands of studio affiliation and the emerging social consciousness of nativism. 'A Flower in the Rainy Night' was one of the most desired literary properties by many directors when the novel was first published in 1967, but its subject was considered taboo by the censorship standards of the era. It tells the story of an aging prostitute and her will to begin a new life by becoming a mother. The film outperformed other New Cinema films of the same year, like Growing Up and The Sandwich Man, with a box office record of NT$ 23 million (US$ 600,000) in Taipei alone.[Taiwan Treasure Island, 76] It was however dismissed by critical champions of the New Cinema as 'mediocre'.
Wang already had a liability because of his old school background. In addition, his ethnic and class background may have been another problem. For directors who want to work on nativist themes, their ethnicity and class matters. Born on the mainland, son of a KMT general, Wang had a comfortable, if not privileged, upbringing. This is well represented in Wang’s 1999 autobiographical film, The Red Persimmon (Hong shizi, CMPC). He grew up principally under the influence of his mother, a Chinese ink painter. This specific kind of mainland, Chinese upbringing would cast doubt on Wang Tong’s ability to sympathetically render local experience and expressions, essential to such a film as Flower in the Rainy Night.
His next film, 'Run Away', was a studio-ordered martial arts film, despite the fact he already had plans for a nativist comedy (Strawman which he would make in 1987). Wang thus never managed to fully become an auteur, remaining more of a studio journeyman director who alternated between studio-dictated projects, nativist films and more personal efforts.
'Strawman' would become the first of his 'nativist trilogy'. The story centres on peasants during the final days of World War II. Japanese military officers requisition all their valuables, crops, and animals. People are desperate for food as they watch the birds pick over their fields. Banana Paradise (Xiangjiao tiantang, 1989), and Hill of No Return (Wuyan de shanqiu, 1992) completed Wang Tong’s nativist trilogy. Wang’s preference for comedy may have prevented his trilogy from receiving sufficient critical attention, while it also lacks the formal rigour and invention of Hou and Yang.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s trilogy focuses on extraordinary Taiwanese: artists, gangsters, leftist elites, and writers who were purged by right-wing regimes, both Japanese and KMT. Wang Tong, on the other hand, leans toward hungry farmers, disabled farmwives, foot soldiers, refugees, prostitutes, and deranged Japanese officers. Hou treats the issue of identity as a matter of conscience, of choosing sides; but in the final analysis he acknowledges the norm of Chinese nationality. Wang’s view of identity politics is more pragmatic and contingent; it is no less than a matter of food and lodging. To these wretched people, identity is simply a mechanism for survival.
When Shohei Imamura went to Taiwan to film parts of his wartime prostitute story Zegen (1987),
Wang was there to help as his art director.
Filmography (as director):
- A Flower in the Rainy Night (1983)
- Strawman (1987)
References/Resources:
Sunday 22 March 2015
Xiao Ye (Industry)
Born: 1951.
Writer and key member of the early days of the New Cinema at CMPC studios. His most famous screenplay is that for Edward Yang's The Terrrorisers.
Before joining CMPC, he had established himself as a prominent writer. His work was very popular among college and high school students, and he remained one of the best-selling writers in the mid-1970s. The veteran director of youth stories, Bai Jingrui, took an interest in Xiao Ye’s collection of stories, Birth of a Moth (Yong zhi sheng). In 1977, Xiao Ye adapted his story “The War of the Sexes” (Nanhai yu nühai de zhanzheng) into a script that was produced by Young Sun. Hou Hsiao-hsien served as the assistant director for this film. After graduation, Xiao Ye continued to work on the fringes of the film world by coordinating a column on film criticism for the United Daily News.
After a year’s stint in New York, Xiao Ye returned to Taiwan and entered CMPC as a scriptwriter and production manager in 1982, and immediately set to co-writing a script with another new production assistant, Wu Nianzhen, for an anti-Communist film, 'Portrait of a Fanatic' (Kulian, 1982; dir. Wang Tong).
In 1989, he left CMPC, as did Wu Nianzhen.
Writer and key member of the early days of the New Cinema at CMPC studios. His most famous screenplay is that for Edward Yang's The Terrrorisers.
Before joining CMPC, he had established himself as a prominent writer. His work was very popular among college and high school students, and he remained one of the best-selling writers in the mid-1970s. The veteran director of youth stories, Bai Jingrui, took an interest in Xiao Ye’s collection of stories, Birth of a Moth (Yong zhi sheng). In 1977, Xiao Ye adapted his story “The War of the Sexes” (Nanhai yu nühai de zhanzheng) into a script that was produced by Young Sun. Hou Hsiao-hsien served as the assistant director for this film. After graduation, Xiao Ye continued to work on the fringes of the film world by coordinating a column on film criticism for the United Daily News.
After a year’s stint in New York, Xiao Ye returned to Taiwan and entered CMPC as a scriptwriter and production manager in 1982, and immediately set to co-writing a script with another new production assistant, Wu Nianzhen, for an anti-Communist film, 'Portrait of a Fanatic' (Kulian, 1982; dir. Wang Tong).
In 1989, he left CMPC, as did Wu Nianzhen.
The 'Formosa' Incident (Culture/History)
The KMT’s top-down political and social control finally faced a crisis in 1979 with the famous “Formosa incident” (Meilidao shijian). Formosa (“beautiful island,’’ a name given to Taiwan by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century) was a magazine published by leading political dissidents, most of whom identified themselves as ethnic Taiwanese, not Chinese. Formosa was founded as a direct means to spread oppositional views. The dissidents assembled a rally in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second city, away from the political center of Taipei, to voice their demands for democracy.
The rally ended with a brutal crackdown and the arrest of almost all the elite members of the opposition. Evidence of police brutality was quickly and neatly suppressed. The rally was officially characterized as a “political disturbance and subversion of national security.” Yet the Formosa incident led intellectuals and middle-class cultural elites to reconsider issues of political and cultural legitimacy as represented by the KMT and its ideological foundations.
Anachronistic sinocentrism was under pressure and Taiwan nativism was upheld as a new direction for cultural production in an increasingly modernized, open society. Government’s brutal suppression of oppositional voices galvanized artists and writers to react in their own fields. If political liberation was premature and couldn’t be tolerated by the ruling regime, then perhaps milder reforms could be achieved in less threatening areas such as art, culture, and the cinema. Xiao Ye was in New York City when he discovered the uncensored reports of the Formosa incident. He decided to drop everything and returned home, starting a “revolution” from within. Upon his return, he entered CMPC to “work on the cinema and within the institution that I despised the most.”
[Taiwan, Treasure Island, 64-65]
See aldo Udden p49-50.
The rally ended with a brutal crackdown and the arrest of almost all the elite members of the opposition. Evidence of police brutality was quickly and neatly suppressed. The rally was officially characterized as a “political disturbance and subversion of national security.” Yet the Formosa incident led intellectuals and middle-class cultural elites to reconsider issues of political and cultural legitimacy as represented by the KMT and its ideological foundations.
Anachronistic sinocentrism was under pressure and Taiwan nativism was upheld as a new direction for cultural production in an increasingly modernized, open society. Government’s brutal suppression of oppositional voices galvanized artists and writers to react in their own fields. If political liberation was premature and couldn’t be tolerated by the ruling regime, then perhaps milder reforms could be achieved in less threatening areas such as art, culture, and the cinema. Xiao Ye was in New York City when he discovered the uncensored reports of the Formosa incident. He decided to drop everything and returned home, starting a “revolution” from within. Upon his return, he entered CMPC to “work on the cinema and within the institution that I despised the most.”
[Taiwan, Treasure Island, 64-65]
See aldo Udden p49-50.
Taiwanese New Cinema (Industry, Culture/History)
The New Cinema (xin dianying) is by far the most important development in Taiwan film history. Though it did not transform or rejuvenate the film industry, nor succeed in blocking invasions from Hong Kong or Hollywood, it nevertheless created the most vital cinema in Taiwan history and cultivated some of the finest filmmaking talent at the turn of the twentieth century.
New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s in the face of a commercial industry in crisis, a loosening political climate at the end of the Cold War, and on the eve of Taiwan’s lifting of martial law. Departing from the romantic-themed “healthy-realism” and state-prescribed melodramatic narratives that characterized its predecessors, this new wave of Taiwanese films brought to the screen stories of ordinary people and their experiences amidst Taiwan’s social-economic changes.
The semi-official end of the New Cinema is seen as being in 1987, when they key filmmakers went their own way.
Factors behind the New Cinema:
By the 1970s, Hong Kong had come to dominate the Taiwan market, with imported films and TV, and the domestic market for Mandarin language films was dwindling. CMPC in the early 1980s attempted to rejuvenate the Taiwanese film industry, with a low-risk low-budget 'newcomer policy', giving younger directors a chance with the hope that they could rekindle the interest of local domestic audiences.
Cultural liberalisation was also gradually taking place. In early 1982 the GIO introduced a film law that reclassified cinema as a “cultural enterprise” rather than an “amusement enterprise’’ (comparable to bars, brothels, and dance halls). This change immediately upgraded cinema to a different, higher tier within government administration. Reduction of taxes and tariffs on film, as well as subsidy programs and relaxation of censorship were to be implemented; government was now obliged to assist rather than simply regulate film development. In addition, a two-tier classification system (restricted and general) would be implemented for the first time. This allowed a market differentiation in widening the scope of audience demographics in the hope of increasing film consumption. Second, the drop in pre-production censorship allowed a more efficient management of film production. Films could be made without submitting scripts to authorities.
The rise of a current trying to give a form and voice to a native Taiwanese cultural identiy was influential to the TNW, beginning in the mid-1970s, through the work of nativist literature. This was a re-telling of the historical narrative, a look anew at the history of the island through a completely different and alternative perspective, that of the quotidian, native and ordinary. The TNW would be in some ways the cinematic equivalent. We can think of Hou's films, both his series of personal autobiographical ones, and his 'historical' ones such as A City of Sadness, as re-centring history, form the grand narratives of key figures and events, onto the perspective of ordinary people who lived at that time, felt the consequences of these events, and were 'inconsequential' to it. In Hou's films the major events only happen in the background, get oblique brief mentions at the most, while in the foreground is the lives of ordinary people. It's a move away from a 'sinocentric' history/culture imposed on to the island, both its dislocated emigres and its indigenous and native population, by the KMT.
Taiwan-made films and television programs, though conformist and out-of-date, were guaranteed a large market share and were free from competition from imports. This warm bed for local media personnel became cold and threadbare in the 1980s with deregulation and a more open market. Hong Kong commercial videos carrying television programs with dazzling editing and fast-paced narratives captured the attention of the audience. New Cinema was thus an innovative corporate strategy to deal with this so-called 'crisis'. The New Cinema not only was supposed to win back the audience, it was also expected to raise the overall standards of domestic production. The new directors, like directors in the 1960s, were expected to fulfill the dual objective—the clichéd balance of art and commerce, propaganda and entertainment.
The Beginnings of the New Cinema:
Before the New Cinema, three mainstream filmmakers—Chen Kunhou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Lin Qingjie—had begun incorporating similar “homeland” sensibilities into their genre films. Lin started a new “student genre” (xuesheng dianying) by casting young, unfamiliar faces in a series of films about high school life and romance, for example in 'My Classmates', written by Wu Nianzhen, which won the 1981 Golden Horse award for Best Screenplay. Another refreshing element could be seen in a series of romantic comedies made by Chen and Hou. They began their collaboration in 1978 when they both worked for the independent Young Sun (Yongsheng) production company. Young Sun was a midsized company established by a major distributor, Jiang Risheng, and a veteran director, Lai Chengying, uncle of Chen Kunhou.
"Themes incorporated elements of indigenous Taiwanese life [hence giving a voice to the much-repressed native Taiwanese cultural identity, and/or helping to form it], visible in language, literary adaptations, and rural subjects. Films of the New Cinema were made for a younger, more educated audience, specifically college students and young professionals. But questions remain. Was the New Cinema a movement, like Italian neorealism or the French New Wave? Was it a group style comprised by a number of like-minded directors, writers, and talent? Or, like healthy realism, was it a policy formulated by one or more authorities (e.g., the Central Motion Picture Corporation / CMPC, or the Government Information Office / GIO) charged with updating the film industry? Another possibility is the New Cinema as critical invention: influential critics and journalists who acquired cultural capital by defining characteristics of carefully chosen films and submitting these to scrutiny at international festivals. These various accounts are not mutually exclusive; Taiwan New Cinema in its formative stages was a combination of all these factors." [Page 56 of Taiwan Film Directors...]
"Directors such as Wang Tong (Wong Tung), Chen Kunhou, Wan Ren, Chang Yi; novelists and screenwriters Zhu Tianwen (Chu T’ien-wen), Xiao Ye, and Wu Nianzhen (Wu Nien-chen); editor Liao Qingsong, cinematographer Mark Lee Pingbin, sound designer Du Duzhi: these may not be household names, but they formed the core of this small, genuine homegrown film culture."
Reception and global context:
Taiwanese New Wave films have generally been unpopular at home while celebrated abroad. Some people have, unjustifiably, blamed them for the drop in local production during the 1990s. The shortfall can be explained by other factors: as with Mainland China, Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organisation relaxed import quotas, increasing competition from Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema; consequently, Taiwanese investors preferred to fund Hong Kong films, which were more certain to be regional successes, as well as mainland films targeted at international art-house audiences (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Farewell My Concubine). Lack of support for local film production has led New Taiwanese Cinema directors to seek French and Japanese investment.
"New Taiwanese Gnema is formally very intriguing, and this seems to be behind its enthusiastic international reception. Hou's cinema is characterised by detached cinematography, long takes, elliptical editing, elaborate mises en scene and oblique narration. According to Yeh Yueh-Yu, Hou's films have a certain Orientalist allure to foreign cineastes, offering as they do 'a precious option outside the norms of Western cinema'. I would argue, however, that the pleasures which they offer lie in their innovative interpretation of modernist film aesthetics. Hou, like the Chinese Fifth Generation, ^eals with history through the perspective of the family, yet his use of family saga is non-melodramatic and his emphasis is on quotidian lives that have been brushed by historical events - all with the purpose of contesting the KMT's version of history." [Chaudhuri]
New Taiwanese Cinema emerged in the 1980s in the face of a commercial industry in crisis, a loosening political climate at the end of the Cold War, and on the eve of Taiwan’s lifting of martial law. Departing from the romantic-themed “healthy-realism” and state-prescribed melodramatic narratives that characterized its predecessors, this new wave of Taiwanese films brought to the screen stories of ordinary people and their experiences amidst Taiwan’s social-economic changes.
The semi-official end of the New Cinema is seen as being in 1987, when they key filmmakers went their own way.
Factors behind the New Cinema:
By the 1970s, Hong Kong had come to dominate the Taiwan market, with imported films and TV, and the domestic market for Mandarin language films was dwindling. CMPC in the early 1980s attempted to rejuvenate the Taiwanese film industry, with a low-risk low-budget 'newcomer policy', giving younger directors a chance with the hope that they could rekindle the interest of local domestic audiences.
Cultural liberalisation was also gradually taking place. In early 1982 the GIO introduced a film law that reclassified cinema as a “cultural enterprise” rather than an “amusement enterprise’’ (comparable to bars, brothels, and dance halls). This change immediately upgraded cinema to a different, higher tier within government administration. Reduction of taxes and tariffs on film, as well as subsidy programs and relaxation of censorship were to be implemented; government was now obliged to assist rather than simply regulate film development. In addition, a two-tier classification system (restricted and general) would be implemented for the first time. This allowed a market differentiation in widening the scope of audience demographics in the hope of increasing film consumption. Second, the drop in pre-production censorship allowed a more efficient management of film production. Films could be made without submitting scripts to authorities.
The rise of a current trying to give a form and voice to a native Taiwanese cultural identiy was influential to the TNW, beginning in the mid-1970s, through the work of nativist literature. This was a re-telling of the historical narrative, a look anew at the history of the island through a completely different and alternative perspective, that of the quotidian, native and ordinary. The TNW would be in some ways the cinematic equivalent. We can think of Hou's films, both his series of personal autobiographical ones, and his 'historical' ones such as A City of Sadness, as re-centring history, form the grand narratives of key figures and events, onto the perspective of ordinary people who lived at that time, felt the consequences of these events, and were 'inconsequential' to it. In Hou's films the major events only happen in the background, get oblique brief mentions at the most, while in the foreground is the lives of ordinary people. It's a move away from a 'sinocentric' history/culture imposed on to the island, both its dislocated emigres and its indigenous and native population, by the KMT.
Taiwan-made films and television programs, though conformist and out-of-date, were guaranteed a large market share and were free from competition from imports. This warm bed for local media personnel became cold and threadbare in the 1980s with deregulation and a more open market. Hong Kong commercial videos carrying television programs with dazzling editing and fast-paced narratives captured the attention of the audience. New Cinema was thus an innovative corporate strategy to deal with this so-called 'crisis'. The New Cinema not only was supposed to win back the audience, it was also expected to raise the overall standards of domestic production. The new directors, like directors in the 1960s, were expected to fulfill the dual objective—the clichéd balance of art and commerce, propaganda and entertainment.
The Beginnings of the New Cinema:
Before the New Cinema, three mainstream filmmakers—Chen Kunhou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Lin Qingjie—had begun incorporating similar “homeland” sensibilities into their genre films. Lin started a new “student genre” (xuesheng dianying) by casting young, unfamiliar faces in a series of films about high school life and romance, for example in 'My Classmates', written by Wu Nianzhen, which won the 1981 Golden Horse award for Best Screenplay. Another refreshing element could be seen in a series of romantic comedies made by Chen and Hou. They began their collaboration in 1978 when they both worked for the independent Young Sun (Yongsheng) production company. Young Sun was a midsized company established by a major distributor, Jiang Risheng, and a veteran director, Lai Chengying, uncle of Chen Kunhou.
"Themes incorporated elements of indigenous Taiwanese life [hence giving a voice to the much-repressed native Taiwanese cultural identity, and/or helping to form it], visible in language, literary adaptations, and rural subjects. Films of the New Cinema were made for a younger, more educated audience, specifically college students and young professionals. But questions remain. Was the New Cinema a movement, like Italian neorealism or the French New Wave? Was it a group style comprised by a number of like-minded directors, writers, and talent? Or, like healthy realism, was it a policy formulated by one or more authorities (e.g., the Central Motion Picture Corporation / CMPC, or the Government Information Office / GIO) charged with updating the film industry? Another possibility is the New Cinema as critical invention: influential critics and journalists who acquired cultural capital by defining characteristics of carefully chosen films and submitting these to scrutiny at international festivals. These various accounts are not mutually exclusive; Taiwan New Cinema in its formative stages was a combination of all these factors." [Page 56 of Taiwan Film Directors...]
"Directors such as Wang Tong (Wong Tung), Chen Kunhou, Wan Ren, Chang Yi; novelists and screenwriters Zhu Tianwen (Chu T’ien-wen), Xiao Ye, and Wu Nianzhen (Wu Nien-chen); editor Liao Qingsong, cinematographer Mark Lee Pingbin, sound designer Du Duzhi: these may not be household names, but they formed the core of this small, genuine homegrown film culture."
Reception and global context:
Taiwanese New Wave films have generally been unpopular at home while celebrated abroad. Some people have, unjustifiably, blamed them for the drop in local production during the 1990s. The shortfall can be explained by other factors: as with Mainland China, Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organisation relaxed import quotas, increasing competition from Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema; consequently, Taiwanese investors preferred to fund Hong Kong films, which were more certain to be regional successes, as well as mainland films targeted at international art-house audiences (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Farewell My Concubine). Lack of support for local film production has led New Taiwanese Cinema directors to seek French and Japanese investment.
"New Taiwanese Gnema is formally very intriguing, and this seems to be behind its enthusiastic international reception. Hou's cinema is characterised by detached cinematography, long takes, elliptical editing, elaborate mises en scene and oblique narration. According to Yeh Yueh-Yu, Hou's films have a certain Orientalist allure to foreign cineastes, offering as they do 'a precious option outside the norms of Western cinema'. I would argue, however, that the pleasures which they offer lie in their innovative interpretation of modernist film aesthetics. Hou, like the Chinese Fifth Generation, ^eals with history through the perspective of the family, yet his use of family saga is non-melodramatic and his emphasis is on quotidian lives that have been brushed by historical events - all with the purpose of contesting the KMT's version of history." [Chaudhuri]
The rise of Nativist Literature
A movement which took off in the 1970s, and attempted to give voice to the marginalised people and languages of Taiwan, all those aspects of the island's culture that had been shoved aside by the KMT's sinocentric and anticommunist concerns. Part of a wider nativist (bentu) cultural movement.
Such concerns were deemed rural and unsuitable for representation on a wide public platform. However in the 1970s several writers such as Huang Chunming (Huang Ch’unming), Wang Zhenhe (Wang Chen-ho), Yang Qingchu, and Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) focused precisely on stories of provincial, rural, and “inconsequential” Taiwan people, and the way life had changed in Taiwan over the post-war decades.
An influence on the Taiwanese New Cinema's related concern to be rooted within in the authentic experience of ordinary Taiwanese and to represent a form of Taiwanese cultural identity, which young audiences would never have seen on screen before, can therefore be discerned. One of the founding films of the New Cinema, The Sandwich Man, is a triptych based on short stories by Huang Chunming.
Such concerns were deemed rural and unsuitable for representation on a wide public platform. However in the 1970s several writers such as Huang Chunming (Huang Ch’unming), Wang Zhenhe (Wang Chen-ho), Yang Qingchu, and Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) focused precisely on stories of provincial, rural, and “inconsequential” Taiwan people, and the way life had changed in Taiwan over the post-war decades.
An influence on the Taiwanese New Cinema's related concern to be rooted within in the authentic experience of ordinary Taiwanese and to represent a form of Taiwanese cultural identity, which young audiences would never have seen on screen before, can therefore be discerned. One of the founding films of the New Cinema, The Sandwich Man, is a triptych based on short stories by Huang Chunming.
Saturday 21 March 2015
Healthy Realism genre (Industry)
In the 1960s a new genre of films, aiming to be a national Chinese cinema (Mandarin, anti-Communist, etc) and serving the KMT, influenced superficially by the style of Italian Neorealism but at polar opposite politically,lacking any kind of critical dimension of the society depicted. Local stories would be addressed but with a healthy, uplifting appeal. Introduced by the head of CMPC studios, Gong Hong, as the new direction to pursue. Eventually various different genres would come to be converged into the 'healthy realism' mode, including comedy, women's melodrama, musical films, historical epics. Director Li Xing started out in taiyu pian (a genre of low-budget Taiwanese-language films made quickly and for the native speakers) before making healthy realism films. He made two important early examples of this 'movement'/genre: Oyster Girl (Ke nu, 1964) and Beautiful Duckling (1965). (The latter is briefly shown in an outdoor cinema screening in Hou Hsiao Hsien's semi-autobiographical Dust in the Wind.)
With CMPC’s production full-grown and healthy in the mid-1960s, Mandarin-language film gradually established its “national” trademark by pushing Taiwanese-language film to the margins and encouraging all small independent companies to follow suit. The decade saw a prosperous film industry sustained by directors who made popular genre films, mainly Qiong Yao romantic melodramas, and martial arts, or wuxia. But the major independent contribution to Mandarin film production came in 1963 when Shaw Brothers’ leading director, Li Hanxiang, “defected” to Taiwan from Hong Kong.
Thursday 19 March 2015
Dust in the Wind (Film)
1986. Dir: Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Scr: Wu Nien-jen, Chu Tien-wen.
Context:
The Film:
Clip from Beautiful Duckling: When Wan and Huen return back home, they attend an outdoor cinema screening, the like of which had been referred to in the first part of the film when we saw preparations for one. The film being shown is the 1965 'healthy realist' classic Beautiful Duckling directed by Li Xing. This 'citation' is partly a tribute from Hou (and the writers) to the kind of Taiwanese films that were a staple of his youth, but it also undercuts Li's film, which under the government's dictates shows plentiful harvests and happy farmers, by showing how inadequate its cinematic representation of the same 1960s era was. [In the interview with Burdeau, Hou remarks that he saw and loved this film as a youth. This cinematic 'quote' may be compared with those in The Boys from Fengkuei, while earlier in this film there is a scene shown in the city cinema of a martial arts film (cited in Island on the Edge as being The Ammunition Hunters, 1971) being played.] The scene after Wan has his bike stolen clearly recalls Bicycle Thieves, another reference to Italian neo-realism/post-neorealism to go with the clip of Rocco and His Brothers in Boys From Fengkuei.
Train travelling shots: The POV-train scenes (one at the very start and another one later on) are memorable for many reasons. The train entering a tunnel gives an alternation of light and dark, a visual rhythm of cinema. The scenes also show off the greenery of Taiwan's rural regions. They also form part of the film's overall rhythm, as one of the quieter contemplative moments. They also provide a visual rhyme with later tunnel shots in the mine (the flashback/dream scene) and even perhaps the military base scenes (the tunnel-like enclosure where soldiers receive mail, and seat the shipwrecked family). Aurally, the scene also provides the repetitive rhythm of the train's sound running along the tracks.
Rhythm: Hou in this film displays a heightened interest in rhythm, as formal device and as theme, which he would later develop even more especially in Goodbye South, Goodbye and Millenium Mambo. The opening travelling shot from the train alternating between light and dark (in tunnels), mentioned above, is one of many examples. Journeys back and forth from city to countryside also form another of the film's rhythms. (There are other instances of sudden darkness in the film like the power-cut during the outdoor screening at the village, or the light going out while Wan is writing a letter to his sister.) On a thematic level, rhythm has to do with routine as in the mechanised menial jobs both Wan and Huen are stuck with in Taipei.
Triggered memory/dream-flashback scene: After a series of setbacks, the protagonist has been caught in the rain and receives shelter in a military base. Wan sits with a bowl of noodles, shivering, staring at a black-and-white television screen. There is a news program about mining, and as he focuses on the screen Hou cuts to a close-up of the TV. The flickering image depicts a tracking shot, sliding through the tunnels of the mine and the cramped conditions of the coalface. The forward motion on television suddenly gives way to a reverse tracking shot inside the dark mine. This is a visual rhyme with the many railroad tunnels that connect Wu’s mountain village with the world outside. Apparently, Hou has cut “inside” the TV to the actual scene of the accident. Inside the carriage, injured workers are being pulled back up to the surface. As they reach the top the sky opens up. The sudden flash of light makes them squint. Then a reverse-angle cut to figures, faces, the wife and children anxiously running into the mouth of the shaft to see if father has survived. These are the figures of the mother, Wuan, and his sister from about a decade before. We realize we are inside Wuan’s mind, having flashed back to a memory of his father surviving one of the periodic explosions deep inside the mine. Hou has taken us inside Wu’s memory using the small screen as a transition.
While it clearly recalls the memory-flashback triggered by guilt during a screening of Rocco and his Brothers in Boys From Fengkuei, this scene is different and perhaps unique in Hou's oeuvre, for its fever-dream quality. The images appear in a subjective fast-cut montage of barely perceptible images, including a priest chanting, and the grandfather (Li Tianlu) telling the story of how his grandson was named.
Technical development: Hou and Lee used the Arri III camera for the first tine instead of the Arri II, allowing greater sensitivity to light and ability to focus [Udden 77].
Reception:
Wu Nien-jen's own thoughts/Hou's cinema of 'restraint': In the story of Wu Nien-jen, the writer wanted a more straightforward display of emotions—joy, agony, grief, and anger. This is particularly apposite, at least to Wu, for a life of struggle, the rites of passage balancing exploitative work, illness, military service, and a failed romance— all in the absence of supportive family. This is very dramatic material, and Wu wanted his project realized with strong commercial appeal. The script’s working title was “Romantic city of the wind,” possibly a reference to the windy climate of Jiufen, Wu’s home district. It’s also crucial that Wu’s background is working class, coming from a poverty-stricken miner’s family up in the hills, cut off from bourgeois comforts. But Hou mostly suppresses these privations and emotional discharges because he regarded them as contrived expressions, as excess, not in accordance with the natural path of life, seeing the past as memory-sediments, as flashbacks from a distance.
References/Resources:
http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=13007&p=480767&#p480756
http://www.academia.edu/1595928/_Intimate_Temporalities_Affective_Historiologies_in_Hou_Hsiao-hsien_s_Dust_in_the_Wind._Asian_Cinema._23.1_2012.1_214-25
http://aino.blog.com/2010/02/07/the-introduction-of-taiwan-new-cinema/
Haden Guest -- 'Dust in the Wind and the Rhythms of the TNC' (Island on the Edge)
Context:
- Biographical element: The film is an autobiographical take on the youth of Wu Nien-jen, the co-writer of the film, who also wrote many other scripts for Hou (and for Yang) and would be a director and actor himself.
- Produced under CMPC: It was the last film Hou made under the CMPC studio, and thus marks a transition, which many have observed to be from his 'autobiographical' films to his 'historical' ones.
- During this period Hou's style came under a certain amount of criticism for being ascetic and commercial. He was even referred to by some as 'box office poison'. The debate, focusing on questions of accountability to both public and industry, was so tense that Hou wanted to make Dust in the Wind a commercially viable film. In addition, Chu Tien-wen published the screenplay and shooting script of Dust in the Wind with a string of short essays explaining Hou’s aesthetic choices. Though Chu hoped to mollify anti-Hou critics, her efforts did not pay off because the film itself did not fulfill Hou’s promises. On the contrary, Dust in the Wind augments Hou’s trademark asceticism.
The Film:
Clip from Beautiful Duckling: When Wan and Huen return back home, they attend an outdoor cinema screening, the like of which had been referred to in the first part of the film when we saw preparations for one. The film being shown is the 1965 'healthy realist' classic Beautiful Duckling directed by Li Xing. This 'citation' is partly a tribute from Hou (and the writers) to the kind of Taiwanese films that were a staple of his youth, but it also undercuts Li's film, which under the government's dictates shows plentiful harvests and happy farmers, by showing how inadequate its cinematic representation of the same 1960s era was. [In the interview with Burdeau, Hou remarks that he saw and loved this film as a youth. This cinematic 'quote' may be compared with those in The Boys from Fengkuei, while earlier in this film there is a scene shown in the city cinema of a martial arts film (cited in Island on the Edge as being The Ammunition Hunters, 1971) being played.] The scene after Wan has his bike stolen clearly recalls Bicycle Thieves, another reference to Italian neo-realism/post-neorealism to go with the clip of Rocco and His Brothers in Boys From Fengkuei.Train travelling shots: The POV-train scenes (one at the very start and another one later on) are memorable for many reasons. The train entering a tunnel gives an alternation of light and dark, a visual rhythm of cinema. The scenes also show off the greenery of Taiwan's rural regions. They also form part of the film's overall rhythm, as one of the quieter contemplative moments. They also provide a visual rhyme with later tunnel shots in the mine (the flashback/dream scene) and even perhaps the military base scenes (the tunnel-like enclosure where soldiers receive mail, and seat the shipwrecked family). Aurally, the scene also provides the repetitive rhythm of the train's sound running along the tracks.
Rhythm: Hou in this film displays a heightened interest in rhythm, as formal device and as theme, which he would later develop even more especially in Goodbye South, Goodbye and Millenium Mambo. The opening travelling shot from the train alternating between light and dark (in tunnels), mentioned above, is one of many examples. Journeys back and forth from city to countryside also form another of the film's rhythms. (There are other instances of sudden darkness in the film like the power-cut during the outdoor screening at the village, or the light going out while Wan is writing a letter to his sister.) On a thematic level, rhythm has to do with routine as in the mechanised menial jobs both Wan and Huen are stuck with in Taipei.
Triggered memory/dream-flashback scene: After a series of setbacks, the protagonist has been caught in the rain and receives shelter in a military base. Wan sits with a bowl of noodles, shivering, staring at a black-and-white television screen. There is a news program about mining, and as he focuses on the screen Hou cuts to a close-up of the TV. The flickering image depicts a tracking shot, sliding through the tunnels of the mine and the cramped conditions of the coalface. The forward motion on television suddenly gives way to a reverse tracking shot inside the dark mine. This is a visual rhyme with the many railroad tunnels that connect Wu’s mountain village with the world outside. Apparently, Hou has cut “inside” the TV to the actual scene of the accident. Inside the carriage, injured workers are being pulled back up to the surface. As they reach the top the sky opens up. The sudden flash of light makes them squint. Then a reverse-angle cut to figures, faces, the wife and children anxiously running into the mouth of the shaft to see if father has survived. These are the figures of the mother, Wuan, and his sister from about a decade before. We realize we are inside Wuan’s mind, having flashed back to a memory of his father surviving one of the periodic explosions deep inside the mine. Hou has taken us inside Wu’s memory using the small screen as a transition.
While it clearly recalls the memory-flashback triggered by guilt during a screening of Rocco and his Brothers in Boys From Fengkuei, this scene is different and perhaps unique in Hou's oeuvre, for its fever-dream quality. The images appear in a subjective fast-cut montage of barely perceptible images, including a priest chanting, and the grandfather (Li Tianlu) telling the story of how his grandson was named.
Technical development: Hou and Lee used the Arri III camera for the first tine instead of the Arri II, allowing greater sensitivity to light and ability to focus [Udden 77].
Reception:
Wu Nien-jen's own thoughts/Hou's cinema of 'restraint': In the story of Wu Nien-jen, the writer wanted a more straightforward display of emotions—joy, agony, grief, and anger. This is particularly apposite, at least to Wu, for a life of struggle, the rites of passage balancing exploitative work, illness, military service, and a failed romance— all in the absence of supportive family. This is very dramatic material, and Wu wanted his project realized with strong commercial appeal. The script’s working title was “Romantic city of the wind,” possibly a reference to the windy climate of Jiufen, Wu’s home district. It’s also crucial that Wu’s background is working class, coming from a poverty-stricken miner’s family up in the hills, cut off from bourgeois comforts. But Hou mostly suppresses these privations and emotional discharges because he regarded them as contrived expressions, as excess, not in accordance with the natural path of life, seeing the past as memory-sediments, as flashbacks from a distance.
References/Resources:
http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=13007&p=480767&#p480756
http://www.academia.edu/1595928/_Intimate_Temporalities_Affective_Historiologies_in_Hou_Hsiao-hsien_s_Dust_in_the_Wind._Asian_Cinema._23.1_2012.1_214-25
http://aino.blog.com/2010/02/07/the-introduction-of-taiwan-new-cinema/
Haden Guest -- 'Dust in the Wind and the Rhythms of the TNC' (Island on the Edge)
Tuesday 17 March 2015
Censorship in Taiwan Film Industry (Industry)
Until 1982 all films were vetted by GIO’s film division, and this process had been very strict, similar to the centralised precensorship that still prevails in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). If a script was deemed unsuitable to pass the necessary ideological requirements, it could not be approved for production. However, in 1983 the rules were relaxed, and films could go into production without prior consultation with the government.
Historically, all CMPC’s projects had to be approved by KMT’s “culture work committee” before they could begin production. [Taiwan a Treasure Island, 262] To pass the studio’s conservative line of ideology, these assistants would prepare “creative” proposals that disguised the real intent of the films. For instance, Growing Up is about a boy who turns to juvenile delinquency and drives his mother to suicide. He fails to live up to her ambition for him to go to college, and goes to military school instead. Xiao Ye wrote this up as a pitch that promotes the military academy as a place to straighten out wayward boys. The Sandwich Man was represented to CMPC as a picture celebrating the humanist philosophy of founding father Dr. Sun Yat-sen, from which was derived the basics of KMT nation-building. Each segment in this three-part omnibus supposedly depicted the long-suffering nobility of ordinary citizens of Taiwan. In contrast to their proposals, the two films turned out much differently in the flesh.
The film censorship established in the 1930s by KMT’s wartime cultural commissions was one of extreme propriety and almost fundamentalist proscription. Stipulations were enforced at the scriptwriting stage and included the following: no depictions of Chairman Mao, the PRC flag, or the PRC anthem, even within an anti-Communist story; no more than 30 percent of dialogue could be in dialects or foreign languages; villains could not be killed off before they had a chance to repent; no ear waxing, nose-picking, or other backward behaviors; superstitious practices and the supernatural were to be discouraged; authorities had to be properly depicted, e. g., no policeman’s wife could be licentious, and so on.
The film censorship bureau would like to have sustained its strict pedagogical control of content for as long as possible; yet a civil society in the making and pragmatic considerations of market differentiation led the KMT government to gradually relax film censorship in the early 1980s.
Individual Cases:
The Sandwich Man:
CMPC’s political watchdogs had been alarmed by the strong reaction against 'The Taste of Apples' by conservative journalists. In response, one of the stipulations CMPC required was to insert titles clearly marking the historical period in which the stories take place. Thus the film, in the segment by Hou Hsiao-hsien, opens with the words '1962. Zhuqi'. Zhuqi is a small, south-central town near Mt. Ali (Ali Shan), in a forest reserve developed by the Japanese. These titles mark a diegetic separation of the film from the realities of contemporary Taiwan in the 1980s.
References/Resources:
CMPC (Industry)
Central Motion Pictures Corporation. Major studio in Taiwan. Founded (with government support and financing coming partly from the taxing of imported films) in 1954, with the merger of Agricultural Educational Film Corporation and Taiwan Motion Picture (Lent).
In the early 1980s they proposed a 'newcomer policy', an initiative which allowed younger filmmakers opportunities, and aimed to rejuvenate the Taiwan film industry and win back young domestic audiences. For CMPC this was a low-capital policy which spread risk, and would lay out the platform for the Taiwanese New Cinema.
However they were not the sole entity responsible for the TNW. In 1983 CMPC itself produced only one New Cinema film, The Sandwich Man. The other four made that year — Growing Up, That Day, on the Beach, Kendo Kids (Zhujian shaonian, dir. Zhang Yi), and The boy with a sword (Daijian de xiaohai, dir. Ke Yizheng) — were coproduced with either the independent Evergreen (Wannianqing) or Hong Kong’s New Cinema City.
References/Resources:
http://www.thefilmcatalogue.com/catalog/CompanyDetail.php?id=3383
John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry
In the early 1980s they proposed a 'newcomer policy', an initiative which allowed younger filmmakers opportunities, and aimed to rejuvenate the Taiwan film industry and win back young domestic audiences. For CMPC this was a low-capital policy which spread risk, and would lay out the platform for the Taiwanese New Cinema.
However they were not the sole entity responsible for the TNW. In 1983 CMPC itself produced only one New Cinema film, The Sandwich Man. The other four made that year — Growing Up, That Day, on the Beach, Kendo Kids (Zhujian shaonian, dir. Zhang Yi), and The boy with a sword (Daijian de xiaohai, dir. Ke Yizheng) — were coproduced with either the independent Evergreen (Wannianqing) or Hong Kong’s New Cinema City.
References/Resources:
http://www.thefilmcatalogue.com/catalog/CompanyDetail.php?id=3383
John A. Lent, The Asian Film Industry
The Sandwich Man (Film)
1983. Includes: “Son’s Big Doll” (Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), “Vicki’s Hat” (Dir. Zeng Zhuangxiang), and “The Taste of Apples” Dir. Wan Ren).
Three-part omnibus film, based on Huang Chunming’s stories of Taiwanese provincial life, typical of the Nativist Literature genre.
Context:
Made under CMPC's 'newcomer policy.
Along with In Our Time, another anthology film, it is regarded as one of the foundational films to have kick off the New Taiwanese Cinema.
Came out the same year as The Wheel of Life, also a three-part omnibus film, directed by the three best-known directors of the island: King Hu, Li Hsing and Bai Jingrui, but surprisingly would go on to outperform it.
All films are set in the 1960s, perhaps this was required by the studio to add distance to the satiric and self-critical look at Taiwan of these stories??
The Film:
Issues of masculinity and work roles, and Hou's segment, Son's Big Doll: set in 1962 as an introductory title informs us, and deals with the physical and emotional degradation that often accompany male breadwinning. Hou's hero, introduced to us in his ridiculous and absurd clown get-up doing his ineffective and humiliating job as a walking advertisement, comes home everyday barely acknowledged by his increasingly frustrated wife and a son who recognises him only in costume. At the end, despite an upbeat note for his job, it is clear that something irreversible has taken place in his family life and has created a deep scar.
Issues of neocolonialism and Apples the 3rd segment: “Apples” in particular portrays the dependency of Taiwan on American military and economic aid in the 1960s. Despite, or because of, its black humor, it was seen by conservative critics as a straightforward depiction of Taiwanese backwardness, in relation to both Chinese and American institutions. Americans were closely allied with the KMT throughout the Cold War and were intent on preserving a relationship that sustained U.S. hegemony in the Pacific. As a U.S. embassy junior secretary tells the officer who hit the victim, “Listen. This is an Asian country with which we have the closest cooperation and friendship. So I don’t think there should be any problem. However, the President would be very unhappy if there was any trouble with any of the local people or the government.”
The KMT government looked down on native Taiwanese and systematically deprived them of rights and economic opportunities. Thus when a Taiwanese laborer is accidentally injured in a traffic accident with an American, the man fears the worst. Instead, he is whisked to an immaculate hospital for medical care, solicitation, and due compensation for his entire family, including an offer to send his daughter to the United States for an education. As an extra treat they are offered apples, which at that time were an expensive, imported delicacy.
Linguistic authenticity: Hou's first attempt at faithfully rendering the polyglot nature of Taiwan, and having his characters speak Taiwanese dialect if it's realistic, rather than Mandarin.
Other topical issues inserted: The focus is on those left behind by the economic boom, a neglected and unspoken topic (akin to the way Hou later would bring attention to another previously unspoken trauma, that of the 228 incidence in A City of Sadness.). Son's Big Doll deals with abortion as the father questions their financial ability to raise a second child. In one brief moment the father perhaps even contemplates killing his son because of poverty and hunger. Vicki's Hat deals with the rise of consumer goods, depicted as useless, and the influence of Japan through these.
Meta-dimension to the film and Hou's segment: The title character, in Hou's segment, is literally an advertisement for cinema, much like this film itself was a showcase, even in some way a manifesto, for a new local Taiwanese cinema.
Taste of apples has less darkness than the first two parts, both mood-wise and literally, most of it being set in a hospital with walls glaring in their overexposed whiteness.
Reception:
The film got an advance screening for journalists, and an anonymous letter was sent to CMPC by a local critics’ association to express its displeasure. The letter alerted the censors at CMPC. It even itemized offending sections of the film. The company decided to look closely at the film and hold it to the ideological fire. The company then decided to order a total of eight changes to “Apples,” involving dialogue, tone, behavior, and the outright elimination of certain scenes. CMPC’s act of censorship was dubbed the “apple-peeling incident” by the press. This enraged Wan Ren, Huang Chunming, Xiao Ye, and Wu Nianzhen, who in turn used their connections with a sympathetic press to launch an attack against CMPC. Embarrassed by the coverage in two major newspapers, the company withdrew its orders. Eventually, “Apples’’ was shown whole, thanks to the public intervention of the press, specifically Yang Shiqi, a United Daily News entertainment journalist who championed the New Cinema.
CMPC’s political watchdogs had been alarmed by the strong reaction against 'The Taste of Apples' by conservative journalists. In response, one of the stipulations CMPC required was to insert titles clearly marking the historical period in which the stories take place. Thus the film, in the segment by Hou Hsiao-hsien, opens with the words '1962. Zhuqi'. Zhuqi is a small, south-central town near Mt. Ali (Ali Shan), in a forest reserve developed by the Japanese. These titles mark a diegetic separation of the film from the realities of contemporary Taiwan in the 1980s.
It "was well-received critically and a bigger box-office success than had been anticipated. This led one major newspaper to declare, 'The release of The Sandwich Man heralds the completely new start of the Chinese Cinema in Taiwan!'" [Island on the Edge, 5.]
The film's critical and commercial success (partly certainly for offering a platform for a new kind of content not previously seen in Taiwanese cinema) led to a wave in literary adaptations of Huang and other Nativist Literature texts. (see Lian Xian-hao, 'The Consciousness of Southern Culture' China Tribue, Oct 25 1989, p41.)
Three-part omnibus film, based on Huang Chunming’s stories of Taiwanese provincial life, typical of the Nativist Literature genre.
Context:
Made under CMPC's 'newcomer policy.
Along with In Our Time, another anthology film, it is regarded as one of the foundational films to have kick off the New Taiwanese Cinema.
Came out the same year as The Wheel of Life, also a three-part omnibus film, directed by the three best-known directors of the island: King Hu, Li Hsing and Bai Jingrui, but surprisingly would go on to outperform it.
All films are set in the 1960s, perhaps this was required by the studio to add distance to the satiric and self-critical look at Taiwan of these stories??
The Film:
Issues of masculinity and work roles, and Hou's segment, Son's Big Doll: set in 1962 as an introductory title informs us, and deals with the physical and emotional degradation that often accompany male breadwinning. Hou's hero, introduced to us in his ridiculous and absurd clown get-up doing his ineffective and humiliating job as a walking advertisement, comes home everyday barely acknowledged by his increasingly frustrated wife and a son who recognises him only in costume. At the end, despite an upbeat note for his job, it is clear that something irreversible has taken place in his family life and has created a deep scar.
Issues of neocolonialism and Apples the 3rd segment: “Apples” in particular portrays the dependency of Taiwan on American military and economic aid in the 1960s. Despite, or because of, its black humor, it was seen by conservative critics as a straightforward depiction of Taiwanese backwardness, in relation to both Chinese and American institutions. Americans were closely allied with the KMT throughout the Cold War and were intent on preserving a relationship that sustained U.S. hegemony in the Pacific. As a U.S. embassy junior secretary tells the officer who hit the victim, “Listen. This is an Asian country with which we have the closest cooperation and friendship. So I don’t think there should be any problem. However, the President would be very unhappy if there was any trouble with any of the local people or the government.”
The KMT government looked down on native Taiwanese and systematically deprived them of rights and economic opportunities. Thus when a Taiwanese laborer is accidentally injured in a traffic accident with an American, the man fears the worst. Instead, he is whisked to an immaculate hospital for medical care, solicitation, and due compensation for his entire family, including an offer to send his daughter to the United States for an education. As an extra treat they are offered apples, which at that time were an expensive, imported delicacy.
Linguistic authenticity: Hou's first attempt at faithfully rendering the polyglot nature of Taiwan, and having his characters speak Taiwanese dialect if it's realistic, rather than Mandarin.
Other topical issues inserted: The focus is on those left behind by the economic boom, a neglected and unspoken topic (akin to the way Hou later would bring attention to another previously unspoken trauma, that of the 228 incidence in A City of Sadness.). Son's Big Doll deals with abortion as the father questions their financial ability to raise a second child. In one brief moment the father perhaps even contemplates killing his son because of poverty and hunger. Vicki's Hat deals with the rise of consumer goods, depicted as useless, and the influence of Japan through these.
Meta-dimension to the film and Hou's segment: The title character, in Hou's segment, is literally an advertisement for cinema, much like this film itself was a showcase, even in some way a manifesto, for a new local Taiwanese cinema.
Taste of apples has less darkness than the first two parts, both mood-wise and literally, most of it being set in a hospital with walls glaring in their overexposed whiteness.
Reception:
The film got an advance screening for journalists, and an anonymous letter was sent to CMPC by a local critics’ association to express its displeasure. The letter alerted the censors at CMPC. It even itemized offending sections of the film. The company decided to look closely at the film and hold it to the ideological fire. The company then decided to order a total of eight changes to “Apples,” involving dialogue, tone, behavior, and the outright elimination of certain scenes. CMPC’s act of censorship was dubbed the “apple-peeling incident” by the press. This enraged Wan Ren, Huang Chunming, Xiao Ye, and Wu Nianzhen, who in turn used their connections with a sympathetic press to launch an attack against CMPC. Embarrassed by the coverage in two major newspapers, the company withdrew its orders. Eventually, “Apples’’ was shown whole, thanks to the public intervention of the press, specifically Yang Shiqi, a United Daily News entertainment journalist who championed the New Cinema.
CMPC’s political watchdogs had been alarmed by the strong reaction against 'The Taste of Apples' by conservative journalists. In response, one of the stipulations CMPC required was to insert titles clearly marking the historical period in which the stories take place. Thus the film, in the segment by Hou Hsiao-hsien, opens with the words '1962. Zhuqi'. Zhuqi is a small, south-central town near Mt. Ali (Ali Shan), in a forest reserve developed by the Japanese. These titles mark a diegetic separation of the film from the realities of contemporary Taiwan in the 1980s.
It "was well-received critically and a bigger box-office success than had been anticipated. This led one major newspaper to declare, 'The release of The Sandwich Man heralds the completely new start of the Chinese Cinema in Taiwan!'" [Island on the Edge, 5.]
The film's critical and commercial success (partly certainly for offering a platform for a new kind of content not previously seen in Taiwanese cinema) led to a wave in literary adaptations of Huang and other Nativist Literature texts. (see Lian Xian-hao, 'The Consciousness of Southern Culture' China Tribue, Oct 25 1989, p41.)
Sunday 15 March 2015
Wu Nien-jen (Industry)
Born: 1952, Taipei.Prolific screenwriter, who wrote many of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's films in collaboration with him. He has also had acting roles in major Taiwan New Wave films, such as Taipei Story, A City of Sadness (which he co-wrote) and most notably as the central character of Yi Yi.
A local-born Taiwanese and son of a poor miner from a mining community north of Taipei, Wu
had to struggle harder than the postwar mainlander generation to which most literary, arts, and cultural elites belonged. Wu joined Taiwan’s literary establishment in 1976 by winning awards in major competitions held by the Literary Supplement of United Daily News, a hotbed of literary discovery and talent. In 1978 he started writing scripts and was hired as a production assistant at the CMPC studio in 1981, during the times when the 'newcomer policy' was first implemented to give a chance to younger filmmakers.
Many of Hou’s most famous films, along with those of Edward Yang, Wang Tong, and Ann Hui, were scripted or co-scripted by Wu. He prefers collaborative, improvisational composition, calling himself more of a “facilitator” than a scriptwriter, finding the actual writing stage to be mechanical and anticlimactic. Wu also discovered that directors rarely made good storytellers, especially when sitting in pitch meetings with executives. As a charismatic raconteur, Wu performed as go-between, eliciting story ideas and striking images from young directors, and then enticing CMPC accountants into releasing funds to go into production.
Wu has an affinity with nativism connected to language, ethnicity, style, and gender. As a gifted writer, Wu incorporates Taiwanese dialects and expressions into his compositions. In his stories and scripts, he uses bits of slang and colonial residues (such as Japanese loan-words). Wu’s use of the Taiwanese language relishes its cadences, its salty expressions, its non sequiturs and specificity in a way that normalizes it. In other words, He draws on the example of nativist writers before him in employing Taiwanese as a robust, living language rather than a dialect.
Long after Wu left CMPC, he gained wide acclaim for his television series on Taiwan’s native cultures, Wu Nianzhen’s Taiwan (Taiwan nianzhen qing, 1997–1999; TVBS network). In the mid-1990s Wu directed two films, Dou-san: A Borrowed Life (1994) and Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo, 1996). Both of these films explored aspects of colonial Taiwanese ethnicity.
Tuesday 10 March 2015
A Time to Live, a Time to Die (Film)
1985. Dir: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Scr: Chu Tien-wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien. Cin: Mark Lee Ping-bin.Context:
Autobiography: After having used some of his memories as inspiration in previous films, Hou now directly adapted his childhood as authentically as he could. As he himself narrates at the beginning, this is his story and that of his family --- of the father as he first says in the narration, but the father is absent/aloof, ill and then dead, then it becomes the story of the 3 major women of the family... --- and the film was shot in Hou's actual childhood home in Fengshan, a Japanese style house which at that time belonged to his older brother. Three specific memories are cited by Hou as having stuck with him ever since his childhood and were partly what he wanted to make this film for: 1) the memory of his misbehaving, gambling and running around with his street hoodlum friends while his mother was in the city getting treatment for her cancer, 2) the memory of his older brother telling him off at their mother's funeral, and 3) the memory of his grandmother dying while the children were unable to take any better care of her. The film is extremely honest, holding nothing back even of events that portray young Hou in a none-too-generous light. Clearly this is a profoundly personal film for Hou, and perhaps even an attempt at exorcising or somehow digesting these memories obsessing him, as well as a tribute to his parents and family.
First collaboration with Lee Ping-bin: After having previously worked with Chen Kun-hou for many years, Hou now used for the first Mark Lee Ping-bin as his cinematographer, and he would go on to be hugely important for Hou's work and a world-renowned DoP in his own right.
The Film:
Themes: Growing up, generational gaps and shifts, the social and political transformation of Taiwan from 1950s/60s (eg. through radio broadcasts, history happening in the background where our central protagonist young A-Ha does not fully comprehend it), rural-urban dichotomy, and the homeland/Taiwan dichotomy: especially through the dislocation and confusion of the grandma's character, but in other touches also like the temporary (wicker) furniture bought by the father because he expected this to be merely a temporary stay-over for his family.
Style: Continuing on from last two films while further developing the long-take, long-shot aesthetic, with many still shots and elliptical editing. It creates a mix of detachment and intimacy, since we are witnessing Hou's own story which he narrates over at the beginning and end. The long-shots are still filling the frames full of multiple people co-habiting, creating a sense of community, which is obviously lost in Hou's contemporary-set films. Non-professional actors used once again.
The camera is rarely placed in the room where action takes place, creating frames—walls, doorways, windows, dividers—within the frame.
Structure: three acts, three deaths (father, then mother, finally grandmother). The father's absence is crucial for the rest of A-Ha's adolescence. Each death marked by stains of some sort, the father coughing blood, the mother's tears dropping on a letter, and the grandmother decomposing in the living room.
Historical context in the background: This film and Dust in the Wind, both taking place in the 1960s (and partly in the 1950s for this film --- beginning around 1958, then for the second part around 1965) feature more of Taiwan's historical and political context in the background. But only allusions, such as the tracks of military trucks that drove past in the night, or the flag flying at half-mast.
Since Hou's family had migrated from the mainland in the 1940s, they represent the masses of Chinese families that moved to Taiwan at that time, when Mao was about to make the PRC. Their story is one of dislocation, uprootedness and of a supposedly temporary stayover turning into something longer than they all expected, which is particularly symbolised by the character of the grandmother, but also in the fact that the father only bought cheap furniture and arranged everything so they could easily and promptly move back to the mainland without any ties holding them back in Taiwan. Also KMT propaganda, about 'winning back' the mainland and so on, is heard in radio reports and brought up by the youths. Dust in the Wind would re-explore a similar era and topic, but with the big difference that the family there are native Taiwanese, hence it shows the other side of Taiwan's mainlander-native dichotomy during this period.
Father figures: Like in Boys from Fengkuei, the father is notable in his absence (he only speaks with his son once in the film, though his children find out posthumously that this distance from them was to avoid infecting them with his TB) and vulnerability: he is ill and dies relatively early on in the film. The quest for a father figure can also be read on a national-allegorical level.
A Time to Live and a Time to Die represents a son’s version of his father’s story. Hou chooses cinema as his means of expression, a means considerably different from writing. In this film, various dialects, Hakka, Mandarin, and Taiwanese, coexist not as representatives of isolated cultures but as components of an embryonic shared contemporary Taiwan culture. Instead of speaking from the father’s perspective, the film replaces the father’s voice with the son’s, often portraying the protagonist’s point of view. However, because the story presented by the son in his film is fragmentary, his point of view does not truly restore the fatherly authority; instead, it only emphasizes the absence of a father’s voice in his childhood.
Reception:
References/Resources:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/time_to_live/
http://altscreen.com/05/07/2011/time-to-live-time-to-die-1985-hou-hsiao-hsien/
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