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:
No comments:
Post a Comment