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.
Friday, 27 March 2015
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/
Sunday, 8 March 2015
Chen Kunhou (Director/Industry)
Born: Taiwan, 1939.Director and cinematographer. As a former cinematographer at CMPC, Chen Kunhou is a transitional figure between the old school and initial steps taken in the New Cinema.
In the late 1970s, at Young Sun studios which was co-founded by his uncle, he began collaborating with Hou Hsiao-Hsien. This situation lasted until 1980 when Chen was given his chance to direct. But the collaboration between them remained. Hou would write scripts for Chen to direct and shoot while Chen would serve as Hou’s cinematographer when Hou directed. Chen was cinematographer for all Hou's early films, up to and including The Boys from Fengkuei.
As a director, and with Hou as writer, he had success with romantic comedies such as 'Spring in Autumn' (Tian liang hao ge qiu, 1980), 'I come with the wave' (Wo ta lang erlai, 1980), 'Bouncing sweetheart' (Beng beng yi chuan xin, 1981), 'Six Is Company' (Qia ru caidie fei fei fei, 1982).
Chen’s wide shots of rural landscapes present a shift from the standardized settings of the Qiong Yao melodrama to concrete, refreshing places. His long takes incorporate specific locations into the narrative and, as a result, enrich the visual connotations of an expected romance story.
Resources:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0155292/
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