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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

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/