Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s 9789888208500, 9888208500

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times
2. Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films
3. Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film Home Sweet Home
4. Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother and Taiwan Cinema of the Early 1970s
Conclusion: Transnationalism and the Structure of Feeling of Taiwan Cinema in the Late 1970s
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T R A N S N AT I O N A L R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S

The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s

James Wicks

Transnational Representations

Transnational Representations

The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s

James Wicks

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org

© 2014 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-50-0 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd., Hong Kong, China

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1.

Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times

2.

Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films

23

3.

Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film Home Sweet Home

53

4.

Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother and Taiwan Cinema of the Early 1970s

79

Conclusion: Transnationalism and the Structure of Feeling of Taiwan Cinema in the Late 1970s

1

101

Notes 129 Bibliography 149 Index 161

Acknowledgments

This book combines a love of Taiwan based on my childhood experience of growing up there with a passion for cinema that was solidified with a study of Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) during my master’s program under Jon Lewis at Oregon State University. My advisor at the University of California, San Diego, Yingjin Zhang, encouraged me to channel these background experiences into this project for my dissertation, on which this text is based, and I owe a great debt to him for his encouragement, insight, and support at every stage of this process. At the University of California, San Diego I am also thankful for guidance from Paul Pickowicz, Alain Cohen, Larissa Heinrich, Kuiyi Shen, Winnie Woodhull, Linda Brodkey, Lisa Yoneyama, Wai-lim Yip, Joseph Esherick, Ye Wa, and Sarah Schneewind. In addition, the support, direction, and encouragement of colleagues and friends during my graduate studies in San Diego and research work in Taiwan is impossible to overstate. I would like to extend my gratitude to Wenchi Lin, Ru-shou Robert Chen, Daniel Quirós, Justin Jacobs, Judd Kinzley, David Chang, Jeremy Murray, Jenwa Hsung, Larry Lin, Yin Wang, Alvin Wong, and Angie Chau. This project would not have been possible without the Taiwan R.O.C. Ministry of Education “Talent Cultivation Project of Taiwanese Literature, History and Art in Globalization” grant. To my host-sponsor, Dr. Hsiao-yen Peng at Academia Sinica in Taipei, who supported the project and provided the opportunity to present an in-progress paper at my host institution, Academia Sinica: I am grateful. I am indebted to the assistance and resources made available at Academia Sinica and the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. I will always be grateful for the time and generosity shared by director Li Xing, film writers extraordinaire Huang Ren and Cai Guorong, actors Ke Junxiong, Shi Juan, and Li Xiang in Taiwan. Thank you also to the Taipei Economic

viii Acknowledgments

and Cultural Office in Los Angeles for their support. I appreciate the opportunity to encounter and share with so many great minds along this journey. Considering all of the work, which was a pleasure to watch, read, and research in preparing this manuscript, it is clear that if this text is valuable for readers it is because it stands on the shoulders of giants. Parts of this book have been presented either in full or in part. Thank you to the organizers of these presentations: Sangjoon Lee, Ping-hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang, Hsiao-yen Peng, Wenchi Lin, and Bettina Pedersen, and for the opportunity to teach a Taiwan Films course at the University of California, San Diego. I also thank my colleagues at Point Loma Nazarene University, Carol Blessing, Charlene Pate, Galen Yorba-Gray, Michael Clark, and Stephen Goforth, and my students for their enthusiasm and camaraderie. For their encouragement and support I would like to thank my friends Stella Lin, Agatha Pan, Jimmy Lin and Rora Lee, Ted and Bev Skiles, Brent West, Nick Leggatt, Jouni Hilvo, Bret Barker, Brent Fugimoto, Jason Huang, Shane “Shano” Sjogren, and Melvin Irizarry for his indexing assistance. My deepest thanks go to my parents, Linda-Kay and Frank. I thank editor and rights manager Christy Leung at Hong Kong University Press, editor Sherlon C. Y. Ip, and the three initial reviewers of this book whose critiques improved the final text. I would also like to extend my thanks to Kirk Denton, Guo-Juin Hong, Song Hwee Lim, and the publishers for permission to reprint the following material, and for the anonymous reviewers of these essays for their recommendations that strengthened the arguments: Chapter 2, in part, is a reprint of “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing” as it appears in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 174–212); Chapter 3, in part, is a reprint of “Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: Bai Jingrui’s Jia zai Taibei/ Home Sweet Home” as it appears in Journal of Chinese Cinemas (vol. 14, no. 1 (2010): 15–26); Chapter 4, in part, is a reprint of “Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother and Taiwan Cinema of the early 1970s” as it appears in the Wiley-Blackwell volume A Companion to Chinese Cinema, edited by Yingjin Zhang in 2012 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 118–132). This book is dedicated to my spouse Holly and our children, River, Abbey, and Dylan.

Introduction

There are few more fascinating methods for investigating the ways in which Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) Government defined itself as the representative government of all of China in the 1960s and 1970s than to consider its state-sanctioned film industry.1 The films produced by the state represent ideas of national unity and a glorious “homeland” during decades that witnessed intense transformations in multiple arenas: in film with the rise and eventual decline in popularity of Taiwan cinema in Southeast Asia, in literature with the xiangtu (nativist) literature debates, in the economy with the emergence of factories and small business to replace the island’s agricultural infrastructure, and in politics with the end of the Nationalist government’s international status following the loss of its United Nations seat in 1971. In each of these arenas the state propagated its “free China” ideal on the silver screen—an ideal made all the more complicated by competing regional and cultural influences: the People’s Republic of China to the west, the legacy of Japanese colonialism to the north, concurrent Western military and economic aid from the east, and a vast capitalist market governed by lines drawn during the Cold War to the south. Thus, situating these multiple discourses involves both a historical analysis, bringing the material and historical moments to light, and a cultural analysis, considering the government’s belief that images produced in a pop-medium might bolster the state’s political status as its films competed on the open market. Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s both excavates Taiwan’s socio-historical context and studies the cinematic form of the era employing a transnational, comparative framework.2 The term “transnational representations” refers to the text’s cross-border comparisons such as those between Taiwan films and films produced in Mainland China in the early 1960s, between Taiwan films and concurrent films from

x Introduction

Germany and Senegal that represented the politics of migration, and between Taiwan New Cinema and global new cinema movements. The “state of Taiwan film in the 1960s and 1970s” refers to both the historical-material conditions in Taiwan during these two pivotal decades and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s presentation of itself as the representative government of all of China in terms of: its relationship to the People’s Republic of China (Chapter 2), film form and content (Chapter 3), depictions of gender identity (Chapter 4), and filmic adaptations of nativist literature (Conclusion). Consequently, the text critically challenges academic perspectives within Chinese Studies that present Taiwan’s film history as parallel to rather than intertwined with China, or oversimplify the influence of pre-1980s cinema in Taiwan. Second, this study contributes to the field of film studies by analyzing, in close detail, heretofore under-represented films that demonstrate the influence of transnational flows of culture with filmic images, styles, and influences that traversed national boundaries. Third, the text challenges film history narratives that fail to consider the limitations of the category of “nation” as a dominant paradigm. All the while this study remains focused on the primary motivation for this project: a desire to explore and contribute to the emerging body of scholarship concerning Mandarin films (guoyu pian) produced in Taiwan. In fact, apart from June Yip’s book Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary and Guo-Juin Hong’s recent Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, few monographs have considered in detail the history, aesthetic principles, and framework of pre-1980s film in Taiwan. In the process of elucidating these previously omitted details, this book reveals the oversimplification of summarizing film from the 1960s and 1970s as easily dismissed “propaganda.”3 It also interweaves previous studies of Taiwan cinema with original research into local magazines, newspaper articles, and film studio statistics, and is influenced by the voices of popular contemporary actors such as Ke Junxiong and Li Xiang, film critics Huang Ren and Cai Guorong, and director Li Xing, obtained through onsite interviews in Taiwan.4 These voices are vital to the argument for continuity between Taiwan’s film history and the emergence of Taiwan New Cinema’s notable directors such Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hou Xiaoxian), Edward Yang (Yang Dechang), Ang Lee (Li An), and Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang). Taiwan New Cinema was built on a state industry that was both vivacious and



Introduction xi

multifaceted—and for good reason, was all too ready for the serious makeover that would follow. When the journal Modern Chinese Literature and Culture released the first book-length work in English devoted to Taiwan cinema in the spring of 2003, the articles reflected a common insistence that studies of Taiwan cinema must consider the local, singular, and unique characteristics of the island nation when evaluating its films. In general, they highlighted Taiwan’s distinctive cinematic tradition and cultural productions. However, this groundbreaking volume also left room for future scholars to observe that, at nearly every juncture, Taiwan cinema was also a transnational cinema. For example, at the advent of cinema, Japan occupied Taiwan and managed the production and exhibition of cinema there until 1945. Next, Nationalist films of the 1950s and 1960s, which had inherited an anti-Communist and anti-Japanese tradition from the Mainland, competed with Taiwanese-language films (taiyu pian) in Taiwan’s film market. At the same time, film production on the island was influenced by Hong Kong and Southeast Asia’s commercial system, advance capital, and exhibition market. By the 1970s, adaptations of Qiong Yao novels, Japanese martial arts films, and Hollywood storylines had already made an indelible mark on the narratives of Taiwan’s films. These diverse aspects of Taiwan film history continue to be captured in texts that primarily focus on post-1980 Taiwan film, such as Chris Berry and Feii Lu’s (Lu Feiyi) Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, which lays claim to being “the first English-language anthology on Taiwan New Cinema.” This edited volume introduces its audience to twelve key films released in Taiwan during the last thirty years. Similarly, Tonglin Lu’s Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China, a monograph that traces the two different and unique historical trajectories of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese film, focuses on each society’s recent interaction and confrontation with Western notions of progress as they are reflected on the screen. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis provide a clear schematic of the history of Taiwan film in the first two chapters of Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, then present four essays on Taiwan’s most famous and internationally acclaimed contemporary directors: Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang. In 2007, Ru-Shou Robert Chen and Darrell William Davis edited Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of Arts. While this text is exceptional, the brevity and diversity of the topics addressed in this volume allows leeway for current and future

xii Introduction

scholarship to map out the myriad of discussions into a topography that can be grasped by the amateur and expert alike. Perhaps such projects will follow the direction of auteur analyses such as James Udden’s No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, thematic analyses such as Jean Ma’s account of Hou Hsiao-hsien in Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, or Guo-Juin Hong’s Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, which questions whether the concept of the nation is the best way to frame Taiwan’s film history. Hong considers film in the context of the island’s unique colonial experiences, transferences of power, and today’s multinational corporations in an age of globalization. The above are the primary English-language texts that address Taiwan cinema, along with the historical framework and case studies presented in Yingjin Zhang’s Chinese National Cinema (2004). Exciting recent work has been done on Taiwanese language cinema. Additional key texts that feature chapters on Taiwan cinema include: Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (2005) and Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobshack, and Esther Yau’s New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (1996). Texts written in traditional Chinese that are important to this study include numerous works by Huang Ren, including his text Film and Government Propaganda (1994), and perhaps most importantly, Lu Feiyi’s Taiwan Film: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics 1949–1994 (1998). These works are complemented by film biographies and histories written in Taiwan, such as Cai Guorong’s edited volume National Film in the 1960s: Famous Directors and Notable Selections (1982), Du Yunzhi’s Film History in the Republic of China (1988), Henry Gong’s autobiographical Film Recollections (2005), and histories of the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC, Zhongying) studio. This analysis relies on and is indebted to the scholarship and discussions outlined above, films released during the time period under scrutiny, and sources including magazines, studio publications, and film reviews published in Taiwan during the 1960s and 1970s. While the primary theoretical contribution to Chinese film studies may lie in the presentation of Taiwan film within a transnational context, the film analyses that follow also rely on postcolonial theory in their examination of film form and film sense.



Introduction xiii

Transnational Representations The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also in transformational processes. —Raymond Williams5

In order to capture the various influences which characterize Taiwan film in the 1960s and 1970s I employ an original theory of transnationalism by combining Raymond William’s notion of epochal analysis in his text Marxism and Literature (that society contains its dominant, residual, and emergent modes of culture), in conjunction with Wimal Dissanayake’s discussion in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, which describes how film travels (as image, as commodity, and as cultural product) at the local, national, regional, and global levels. The interstitial spaces between the local, national, regional, and global are also sites of cultural flow, as described by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration. The intent is to shed light on the way Taiwan’s films stage the ideology dominant at various levels of inquiry. This use of transnationalism theory both critiques unequal power relations and takes into account a multi-directional exchange of culture—which I like to think of as “fluid”—between the local, national, regional, and transnational.6 This approach is inspired by, and intends to complement, the use of the term transnational in “contradistinction to ‘global,’ a concept bound up with the philosophical category of totality, and in contrast to ‘international,’ predicated on political systems in a latent relationship of parity, as signaled by the prefix ‘inter.’”7 On the one hand, the transnational method used here reveals the limitations of the term “national cinema.”8 How are we to classify the work of the director Bai Jingrui (1931–1997)? Bai was born in China, influenced by Mainland, Hong Kong, Hollywood, and Japanese film, studied filmmaking in Italy, and then produced films in Taiwan. Thus, when Bai or other directors of the time are classified as representative of a national film tradition in either Taiwan or in Mainland China, national political interests often appear to be determining. Lee Daw-ming states it best when he writes: The history of Taiwan cinema after 1945 was considered by the Nationalist government, and its film historians, to be an extension of, and addition to the history of Chinese cinema (and to the film history of the Republic of China, for that matter) on the Mainland before 1945. Furthermore, in the eyes of the Nationalists, the history of Taiwan cinema certainly has nothing to do with any Mainland China cinema history after 1949 (i.e.,

xiv Introduction

the film history of the People’s Republic of China, which the KMT never even recognized until the late 1990s).9

On the other hand, I follow the lead of Lingzhen Wang in her description of transnational feminism. She writes that the transnational method can be used as a critique of hegemony and hierarchy by “directing our attention to disproportioned movements across borders, and by exposing the underbelly of “the global village”: racism, illegal border crossing, forced economic migration, political exile, and xenophobia.”10 Indeed, transnational transactions are also gendered transactions (see Chapter 4). To summarize Raymond Williams, epochal analyses feature a dominant mode of culture, for example, the feudal system of the European Middle Ages or the bourgeois class of the industrial era. The cultural theorist who studies the cultural dominant should trace the “internal dynamic relations,” or the interrelationship of multiple processes, of this dominant mode as it interacts with other features of culture. One of the features of culture that interacts within the cultural dominant is labeled the residual, which Williams defines as a cultural idea or project that can trace its beginning to a historical moment in the past but remains active within a concurrent dominant cultural system. An example of the residual described by Williams is religion. Religions can function either in conjunction with the dominant mode (maintaining the judicial structure in place) or it can work in disjunction with the dominant mode (by advocating such values as selflessness). According to Williams, another feature of culture that interacts with the dominant mode is termed the emergent, which is not necessarily a “new idea” that materializes in a culture so much as an alternative or oppositional force that challenges the dominant culture in arenas that it “neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize.”11 What is particularly exciting about this dominant, residual, emergent approach is that “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order . . . includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.”12 In other words, there remains hope for the residual or emergent features of culture to change the dominant mode. In addition to this theoretical foundation, Wimal Dissanayake’s categories provide a helpful structure here to take into account cross-border cultural exchange. Dissanayake analyzes film as image, commodity, and cultural product as it travels between the local, the national, the regional, and the transnational. Dissanayake writes in his article “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood” that cultural exchange



Introduction xv

over many levels is not a smooth confluence of diverse forces into an elegant unity, but a “problematic coexistence of different influences with the evolving matrix of cultural modernity and the space of national imaginary”—this is the nature of the local, national, regional, and transnational model.13 By using different observational positions enabled by the translational method, films made in Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s can be seen in new lines of sight.14 At the level of the local, the transmissions, interactions, and appropriations of film culture are never static. Arjun Appadurai describes this well: “locality itself is a historical product and that the histories through which localities emerge are eventually subject to the dynamics of the global.”15 In terms of film exhibition and audience attendance, one finds various interpretations and indigenizations of cinema at the local level that at times the director and production companies do not intend. At the national level, film production is inextricably linked to state policies in a number of ways, including taxation, film rating systems, censorship, and distribution policies. Films produced under state auspices might, among other possibilities, reveal the reality of a particular local situation or condition, perpetuate national origin myths, or use a mode of address that prescribes a “correct” way of seeing and interpreting the images on the screen. In these ways, the complex “intentions” of national cinema are important and worth studying. At the national level the dominant, using Williams’ term, might be assessed by analyzing the qualities of screenplays and films that the state apparatus accepts or rejects. Further examples of the relationship between film and the nation include governmental, administrative, and legal influences on cinema production. Thus, in debates about globalization, it is important to stress the levels of containment which the nation still enforces on cinema production, in contrast to claims of uninhibited cultural flow. In the mid-1990s, Appadurai claimed that modernity at large may mean the end of the nation state.16 But this idea seems less likely today. Chris Berry writes in his article “From National Cinema to Cinema and the National”: “However, if the idea of the territorial nation-state as a transcendent and exclusive ideal form is no longer tenable, that does not mean either that the form of issues of the national disappear.”17 Indeed, a careful consideration of the role of global capitalism and its interrelationship with, rather than its subjugation of, the nation is essential for filmic analysis.18 In Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that to “float ‘above’ petty nationalist concerns” is to ignore the real

xvi Introduction

structure of power that the nation employs as it “facilitates the making and the dissemination” of films.19 This observation is as persuasive for the filmmaker, as Shohat and Stam imply, as it is for the cultural theorist. Overall, the observations on nationalism that Berry and Shohat and Stam address lead to specific questions about the role of the nation in each of the key periods in Taiwan’s modern history: Japanese Colonialism, Nationalist Rule, and the Democratic Era. Within the context of this text’s focus on the influence of the KMT on Taiwan politics during Nationalist Rule, I follow the view that the films the state created and endorsed are presented as a staging, not a reflection, of national policies. The choice of wording between “staging” and “reflection” is selected from Theorising National Cinema. Vitali and Willemen state: .  .  .  films may and may not reflect the ideological trajectory dominant within the nation at any one time, . . . films can be seen not to “reflect,” but to “stage” the historical conditions that constitute “the national” and, in the process, to “mediate” the socio-economic dynamics that shape cinematic production, along with the other production sectors governed by national industrial regulation and legislation. (7)

This characterization of the nation’s involvement in cinema in general is important when considering how the cinematic image is presented in Taiwan’s films of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, taking the case study of Bai Jingrui’s 1970 film Home Sweet Home in Chapter 3, one observes a staging of the “ideal” Taiwan citizen on the big screen, mediated by national and industrial concerns. An excellent model for this type of approach, situated within Taiwan’s national fabric and socio-historical framework, is provided by Fran Martin in her introduction to Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture. Martin writes that culture does not remain constant and unchanged; rather, cultures are transformed and modified as cultural products travel between and across cultural landscapes. Her text provides a case study that illustrates how, using Williams’ terminology, the cultural dominant might be changed and transformed in the contact zone when differing cultures from various localities intersect. In contact zones in which the emergent (whether engendered locally or produced dialectically due to transnational influences) intersects with the dominant, culture fragments, dislocates, and at times radically initiates new formations of identity. For example, Martin describes an archeology of terms that have been used



Introduction xvii

to describe homosexuality in Taiwan such as tongxinglian and tongzhi, terms that lead one to recognize that in an analysis of cultural exchange, local ideas of gender and sexual specificity trump generalizations if the cultural theorist “attends to the historical specificities of local context and is sensitive to the ways in which locality today is always itself marked by translocal interaction.”20 Moreover, the generalizations one encounters when considering polarizing characterizations such as “Chinese vs. Western” do not withstand careful examination when considering specific gender issues in Taiwan.21 Similarly, there is not a universal film language that transcends national borders; rather, the filmic “language” of Taiwan’s state film industry contains distinct national characteristics. At the level of the regional, one must factor in the notion that the very idea of a “region” is also a construction particular to time and place. As with the local and the national, regional affiliations such as the “Pacific Rim” are not created only to name geographical locations, but embody geopolitical agendas.22 Consider the ways Taiwan cinema has been, and continues to be, positioned historically and regionally: during Japanese Colonialism, Taiwan was contained within the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”; in the Nationalist Era, regional demarcations included Taiwan’s position within Cold War boundary lines; and during the Democratic Era today the regional includes the fraught issue of whether or not Taiwan’s political status is that of an independent Asian nation or a province of Mainland China, the People’s Republic of China. The above provides a schematic presentation of Taiwan’s local, national, and regional characteristics following the categories Dissanayake describes in his work. I use another of his categorizations, the transnational, with two qualifications. The transnational is neither postnational nor transhistorical; after all, the intent is not to universalize objects of inquiry. Instead, multiple confluences of culture and power cross national boundaries, and transnational influences constantly change and evolve over time. The transnational category takes into account underlying structures and historical tendencies while recognizing the types of interconnections that shape cinema today, from the transference of voices, images, and text over smart phones and other technologies to the increasing linkages via transportation, consumer culture, and film festivals. Thus, a transnational approach might be broad in theoretical scope since it keeps in mind multiple connections globally, but it focuses on specific objects of inquiry in particular locations when conducting

xviii Introduction

analyses.23 A filmic example of the transnational par excellence would be Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), funded with international capital and strategically employing a pan-Asian cast. The result was a model for the production of a global hit. In the United States, it remains the second highest grossing foreign-language film after The Passion of the Christ (dir. Gibson, 2004). It is no wonder that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continues to serve as an example of the ways cinematic images have become de-territorialized and, within Chinese film studios, how film might convey a pan-Chinese identity.24 In sum, a continual flow links the local, national, regional, and transnational that affects the production of film.25 Thus, placing these two models together at each level—the local, the national, the regional, and the transnational (Dissanayake)—one might also locate the dominant, residual, and emergent (Williams). The advantage of such a conceptual model is that it helps one keep in mind global interconnectivity and cultural flow without losing sight of local, particular conditions within specific film productions and representations.26 Table 1 Transnational Flow and Exchange Local Dominant ↕ Residual ↕ Emergent

↔

National Dominant ↕ Residual ↕ Emergent

↔

Regional Dominant ↕ Residual ↕ Emergent

↔

Transnational Dominant ↕ Residual ↕ Emergent

Consider the following two perspectives. The first is from film director Pratibha Parmar, who states, from the perspective of an Asian lesbian living in England, “I do not speak from a position of marginalization but more crucially from the resistance to that marginalization.”27 Another instance might be the epigraph to the second chapter of Fran Martin’s Situating Sexualities: one Yuan Zenan writes that, “New Park is Taiwan in miniature.”28 This is in reference to the way that Taipei’s New Park, a place for gay males to cruise and make connections, is a microcosm of culture in Taiwan. What is noticeable in these two examples is that the individual, located within a local



Introduction xix

community and part of a vibrant social network of relations, does not see him or herself as “marginal”—but rather as the center. Conceptually, the local spokesperson is a “local” center within a community that contains its own dominant, residual, and emergent on the scale of the local. Seen in a wider perspective, it is possible for a local community to share the same dominant as the national and regional and transnational, but more often there are competing dominants at every level, accepting new influences or offering resistance, appropriating what is valued or excluding that which does not seem acceptable. Rather than use a model which only highlights a center (the hegemonic) to periphery (the marginalized) penetration of culture, in my analysis of films I use transnational theory in order to recognize resistance as cultures interact and intersect at various levels of exchange.29 I recognize that global capitalism does not function uniformly. Still, in my use of the theory of transnationalism, I intend to maintain a conceptualization of transnational capital in total, in a Frederic Jameson-esque sense—when globalization does, in fact, regard the cultural dominants valued by various regional, national, and local cultures solely as hindrances to discard or overturn.30 Otherwise, simply stating euphorically that cultural exchange—in this case the inspiration, production, and distribution of cinema—is a two-way street, offers too much latitude for global capitalism to disguise its dominance and maintain the unequal power relations it has produced. Lastly, it is important to consider transactional exchanges in the interstitial spaces between the local, national, regional, and transnational, an in-between notion that must be credited to Homi Bhabha’s influential consideration of nation and narration. In retrospect, it would seem that at the moment when post-structuralism was in favor and national paradigms were being challenged within cultural studies, the “nation” was retained within film studies as the preferred model to describe film traditions. But this is changing. Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh write in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics: “Ironically, just as film studies is defining its geographic borders and theoretical perimeters, the forces of globalization have forced film scholars to reexamine their assumptions and practices.”31 And Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have written in China on Screen: Cinema and Nation that in the past people may have written about an essential “Chinese culture” but today: “we argue for the abandonment of the national cinemas approach and its replacement with a larger analytic framework of cinema and the national.”32

xx Introduction

The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s An outline of three distinct phases in Taiwan’s history is also necessary to situate the films analyzed in this text. First, the period of Japanese Colonialism affected the island from 1895 to 1945. Cultural historian Ping-hui Liao has divided Japanese colonization in Taiwan into four stages: “Assimilation” (1895–1919), “Integration” (1919–1930), “Incorporation and Coercion” (1930–1937), and “Subjugation” (1937–1945), during the Second Sino-Japanese War.33 The imprint of these colonial phases on Taiwan culture is evident in both conceptual and concrete ways.34 For example, while certain Japanese structures were destroyed by the KMT, such as the Taiwan Jinsha (Shinto Shrine) built in 1901, in order to build the Grand Hotel in 1961 on the same site, other structures were retained by the incoming KMT government in 1945, such as the Office of the Taiwan Government-General, built in 1919.35 In addition, the KMT government allowed Japanese film theaters to stand, theaters where audiences watched newsreels of Japan invading the Mainland only a few years earlier. So while the new government replaced the national language, flags, and also the image of leadership with the omnipresent face of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), the buildings where films were previously shown remained intact. The second phase, Nationalist Rule in Taiwan, can be categorized as lasting from 1945 to 1987. This period included retrocession in 1945 when Taiwan was returned to Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT government after the Second SinoJapanese War, the violent February 28 Incident of 1947 in which 20,00036 people were killed by KMT troops who were establishing their authority and “weeding out communists,” the KMT retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the reception of United States of America military and financial aid from 1951 to 1964, and the eventual decline of Taiwan’s international recognition after losing representation in the United Nations in 1971. Interestingly, the KMT government in many ways functioned in a colonial manner during this phase of history, even as it attempted to differentiate itself from the Japanese colonial regime that preceded it. While the government used cinema in part to appeal to the local populace as members of the Chinese nation, the local populace’s struggle for representation on their own terms remained constant. This is especially important in this study when considering the historical trend of films during the 1970s, films in which patriotic and nationalistic stories represent victory over the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (see Chapter 4 and Conclusion). Fangming



Introduction xxi

Chen, in his article “Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History,” argues that Taiwan society is indeed postcolonial, not postmodern. For example, he writes that in Taiwan, the margins spoke after martial law in 1987 when feminist, queer, and aboriginal voices emerged in order to express recognition, identity, and subjectivity.37 Chen emphasizes: “These groups’ aspirations for liberation did not have to wait until the introduction of postmodern thought into Taiwan; rather, it was precisely the end of martial law that enabled previously suppressed desires to be unbound.”38 So while the theoretical framework for this text considers transnational cultural flow, it also uses postcolonial theory as a complementary lens to understand Taiwan culture in the 1960s and 1970s.39 The third historical phase, the Democratic Era of Taiwan, is delineated by 1987, the year the KMT abolished martial law, and continues to the present. The current time period is characterized in broad terms by globalization alongside a rise in social and political freedoms. Appadurai writes in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization that decolonialization is “a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life.” 40 The dialogue between the local populace and the established KMT regime in the 1960s and 1970s, leading up to today’s more pluralist society in Taiwan, became more vociferous in a persistent effort to achieve political equality and representation. At times this was a dialogue that turned violent, culminating with the Kaohsiung Incident, also known as the Formosa Incident, of 1979. In order to capture this dialogue, this project focuses on the aesthetic and structural analyses of style and content within narrative film representations in addition to the material conditions in which cinema was constructed. In Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution, Chris Berry describes how his work is concerned with examining the interrelationship of the history of the Chinese cinematic image and the history of the Chinese cinema institution as a site of social and cultural formation. He states that the two histories entail a process of renegotiation in which society influences the institution of cinema, and cinema influences society. Cinematic discourse, as it is formed in social and cultural processes, affects society—and this is most evident when the discourse of film “precedes or exceeds” political discourse.41 These “excesses” might be located by noting disjunctions or points of slippage between what is portrayed on the screen and social mandates propagated by the state’s film industry.

xxii Introduction

Accordingly, this text describes how the government in Taiwan intended to use its authority to shape the discourse of film in the 1960s and 1970s. Bruce Cumings, citing Nietzsche, notes that the language we use to describe history is a culmination “molded by a great many distinct regimes.” 42 In order to identify how power shapes discursive practice, Cumings claims that in the process of excavating a historical moment one should archeologically observe the “‘passing events’ in their proper dispersion  .  .  .  that is, a discernible genealogy.”43 As outlined in the chapter summaries below, this text traces the cultural modes of Taiwan’s state film production by providing close readings of representative films from the early 1960s through the late 1970s.

The Structure of This Book Each chapter in this book is meant to stand alone or be read together depending on the reader’s interest. The first chapter, “Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times,” which is intended to be read alongside a screening of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2005 film Three Times, provides an accessible introduction to Taiwan cinema by synthesizing in one location key moments in Taiwan’s film history. While the locus of this chapter is Taiwan’s Mandarin state films, the chapter includes intersections with other national film traditions, recognizing how Mandarin film gradually replaced the vibrant Taiwanese-dialect film (taiyu pian) tradition in the 1970s. In order to do so, it traces the era’s prominent figures, movements, and dates. This includes a summary of Taiwan film in the early 1960s, the influence of Hong Kong film, especially in 1963, with director Li Hanxiang’s The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), a brief account of Taiwan’s so-called “golden age” film in the early 1970s, patriotic war films of the mid-1970s, and adaptations of nativist literature by the state in late 1970s films. Overall, this chapter provides an overview of Taiwan cinema and places in position a scaffolding of historical details and information essential for the analyses presented in the following chapters. The second chapter, “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films,” proposes that the most important link between Mainland Chinese director Xie Jin and Taiwan director Li Xing’s films during the Cold War was the influence of Shanghai’s film tradition of realist aesthetics in the 1930s and 1940s, an aesthetic identifiable less by its accurate replication of reality on the screen than by its fascinating representation of the dominant ideology and distinctive expression of the production



Introduction xxiii

values of the time. This Shanghai tradition was the root of a common cinematic language that flourished on both sides of the Strait after 1949, even though there were unique parameters inherent to each film culture after the Communist victory in the civil war. Despite different political and historical situations, and despite the way these directors are usually framed in the polarizing terms of difference associated with the Cold War, the films of Xie Jin and Li Xing are remarkably similar. In order to make this case, three sets of films are analyzed so that one might recognize narrative similarities, consider the personal experiences which shaped Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s craft, and observe the lineage of realist filmic techniques that link the two filmmakers in interesting ways. This seemingly counterintuitive observation, exemplified by additional surprising connections in the articulation of Shanghai’s filmic modes and devices by Xie Jin and Li Xing in the 1960s, shows that conceptions of film as a universal language, or conversely as the expression of a specific national film tradition, do not entirely account for the similarities of these two Mandarin-language filmmakers. Chapter 3, “Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film Home Sweet Home,” argues that Home Sweet Home’s central concern is the politics, both aesthetic and ideological, of depicting migration within a narrative film. More specifically, this film presents the official state position that the Chinese Nationalist Party held regarding students from Taiwan who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This claim is based on the film’s release by a state studio, CMPC, under state supervision and censorship, in order to further the state’s ideological project through visual media. In order to shed light on the nuances and inflections of Home Sweet Home, and frame it within a wider context, this chapter also discusses two contemporary films that represent migration on the global stage: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de . . ., 1966). Common features in these films include exquisite cinematic imagery juxtaposed with complex protagonists who create a space for individuality and expressions of subjectivity. At the same time, Ali and Black Girl are historical texts that demonstrate the discrepancies between the studio intentions for representing migration, and the actual formal choices that the directors chose to employ. Close readings of these three films help illuminate the ways that Bai Jingrui’s aesthetic choices work both in conjunction and disjunction with the intentions of the Taiwan government in 1970.

xxiv Introduction

The next chapter examines the representation of gender identity and negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother (1972) in order to make two primary observations. First, this early 1970s wenyi, or “literary art,” film released with state approval in Taiwan represents passive males who attempt to earn their right to be worthy patriarchs; women are portrayed as active participants whose actions are acceptable so long as they follow the rule of their fathers. Second, I propose that this model of representing gender changes very little through the middle of the decade, despite numerous social transformations on Taiwan’s political stage. This case is clarified by comparisons with Bai Jingrui’s Goodbye Darling (1970) and Li Xing’s mid-1970s film Land of the Undaunted (1975). Sequence breakdowns of two of the films are presented in order to consider narrative, structural, and aesthetic qualities. Theoretically, the essay re-evaluates Shu-mei Shih’s text Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific, which states that all negotiations in highly volatile situations are always gender negotiations; thus, patriarchal national systems might be undermined by disjunctions and contestations in the cultural and political arenas. Taken as a whole, the work of an important and engaging director, Song Cunshou, emerges as a primary reference point for a study of cinema in a complex, intriguing, transitional period in Taiwan’s history of the silver screen. The story of Taiwan cinema in the early 1960s begins in many ways with Li Xing. The following decade also concludes with Li Xing and his dominant films. The concluding chapter of this book analyzes late 1970s filmmaking, drawing three preliminary observations on the state of Taiwan cinema at the end of the decade. In so doing, the chapter comments on the origins of Taiwan New Cinema by outlining: (1) perhaps surprisingly, the strengths and limitations of Frederic Jameson’s essay “Remapping Taipei,” (2) reflections on the legacy of the Healthy Realist model in Taiwan, and observations on attempts by the state apparatus to depict the local situation in late 1970s cinema, and (3) a brief comparison of the historical situation that saw the birth of Taiwan New Cinema with that of New American Cinema. The purpose of the chapter is to present the antecedents of Taiwan New Cinema, explain the ways in which there is continuity, rather than a total rupture, between Taiwan’s filmic heritage and cinema that emerged in the 1980s, and reveal the reasons why Taiwan cinema was well-positioned for a new generation of directors to take the island’s cinema to new heights.

1 Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s

Perhaps the film that provides the best inroad into both Taiwan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and Taiwan cinema in general, is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2005 film Three Times. The film presents a view of the 1960s by a director who is certainly a product of Taiwan’s Cold War era and one whose current work can be viewed as an aesthetic response to Taiwan’s preceding filmmaking traditions. Consider the image below. Taken at a retrospective exhibition of director Li Xing’s work at the Golden Horse Film Awards in 2008, the picture reveals the notes that Hou Hsiao-hsien wrote while serving as script-supervisor under director Li Xing during the production of Heart with a Million Knots (Xin you qianqian jie) in 1973. Recognized internationally for landmark films in the 1980s and 1990s including A Time To Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985), City of Sadness (Bei qing chengshi, 1989), The Puppetmaster (Xi meng rensheng, 1993), and Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan, hao nü, 1995), today Hou Hsiao-hsien remains at the forefront of Taiwan filmmaking and his theatre “The Spot” in Taipei is a site for the exchange and discussion of new film ideas. In addition, Hou’s importance and influence as a figurehead of Taiwan’s New Cinema movement of the 1980s is recognized in the work of up-andcoming directors such as Tom Shu-yu Lin, director of Winds of September (Jiu jiang feng, 2008) and Starry Starry Night (Xing Kong, 2011). Hou Hsiaohsien’s films link the past to the present, and so it is with Hou Hsiao-hsien that this story of Taiwan cinema begins.1 As the English title suggests (the Chinese title reads: “The Best of Times”), Three Times captures three separate epochs in Taiwan’s history. Each segment in Hou’s film is a stand-alone story, a vignette that reveals a certain mood and atmosphere of the time period represented. In order of depiction in the film, the stories are: “A Time for Love,” set in Kaohsiung in 1966 during

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Figure 1 Li Xing’s script for Heart with a Million Knots, dir. Li Xing, 1973

US military colonialism; “A Time for Freedom,” set in Taipei in 1911 during Japanese colonial occupation; and “A Time for Youth,” set in Taipei in 2005, during which a society experienced the brunt of globalization and the glare of the media spectacle. In each film segment, Taiwan is the setting on a global stage, a contact zone where multiple connectivities between transnational participants create new social spaces and states of mind.2 Each time period represented in the film occurs approximately 16–18 years after a pivotal historical moment in Taiwan history (in order chronologically): the April 17, 1895 signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded Taiwan to Japan; the arrival of the KMT Nationalists in Taiwan in 1949, and the KMT’s abolishment of martial law in 1987. The significance of each 16–18year interval is not explicitly revealed in the film, and without a contextualization of Taiwan’s socio-political history it is difficult to approach the film without appealing to universal sentiments such as loneliness, friendship, and love.3 Certainly, the film generates these emotions, yet the intention of this chapter is to focus on Hou’s perspectives on history, since his filmic strategies



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allow us access points into significant moments in the island’s socio-cultural history and filmmaking traditions. To this end, Hou’s non-linear film is presented here chronologically, using the opportunity afforded in the director’s representations of 1911, 1966, and 2005 to engage in pertinent discussions surrounding issues of colonialism, ethnicity, and gender respectively. Each artistic strategy presented and historical incident depicted in the film can thus be envisioned within a larger and more complex constellation of ideas and background information. If narrative does not exist, but is a construction we use to make sense of reality, then it is particularly fitting to position Taiwan’s key historical moments within a framework created by two of Taiwan’s foremost storytellers: Hou Hsiao-hsien and scriptwriter Chu T’ien-wen.4 Hou’s stream of conscious style allows for spontaneous, unconscious free-associations while it also positions a scaffolding of historical details essential for the analyses presented in the following chapters.5

A Time for Freedom The irony of each translation of the intertitles in Three Times is that they could hardly be more inaccurate, even when interpreted literally. For example, the segment that portrays Taipei life in 1911 is entitled: “A Time for Freedom” (the original text reads literally: “freedom dream” or “dream of freedom”).6 However, this section of the film takes place while Taiwan was under Japanese occupation. The dissimilarity between text and imagery is one of many of the film’s disjunctions. Yet the film is also linked by similarities, constant threads that connect Taiwan’s history. In the film, the most obvious similarity in each section is that they feature the same stars who portray the leading characters, Zhang Zhen as the male lead, and Shu Qi as the female lead. While the time periods in the films change, the star-crossed lovers featured in the foreground remain the same. This similarity accentuates the slippage between fiction and fact, and memory and history, in interesting ways. The segment begins with an eye-level shot taken in middle of a hallway, inside a brothel, facing an open door at dusk. Shoji screens on both sides of the hallway reveal a distinctly Japanese interior design. A lantern hangs in the upper center of the frame. A servant steps onto a stool to light it. As the lantern begins to emit its yellow glow, traditional Chinese script appears on the right side of the screen, reading from right to left: “1911, Dadaocheng.” The

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servant steps to the left side of the frame while the camera remains stationary, allowing the remaining light-gray afternoon daylight to shine through the doorway into the passageway. The servant then picks up the lantern cover, and as he places it on the lantern, traditional Taiwanese music begins to play while the scene fades to black. Next a panning shot, right to left, captures a courtesan, Shu Qi, in her room. Zhang Zhen enters at the right side of the screen. The two lover’s external gestures are subdued, yet they appear internally radiant: subtle smiles change them from reserved statues into elated companions who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Together they comprise the locus of the scene. They speak together on a topic central to Zhang Zhen’s character: the politics of the colonized. Shu Qi asks: “When did you arrive?” The only sound is the non-diegetic track of classical music, and the words are presented as intertitles just as they would during a silent film made at the actual historical moment that the film depicts. Their lips move but their voices have no sound. Zhang Zhen describes how he met one Mr. Liang in Keelung. Shu Qi asks, by way of intertitle: “Do you mean Mr. Liang who fled to Japan after the Reform Movement failed?” Zhang says that Mr. Liang spoke for an hour and wrote four poems and that he “found them deeply moving.” One of the poems reads: “Our homeland is torn asunder. Our brotherly bond is ever tighter.” As this segment’s portrayal of Zhang Zhen and Shu Qi occurs during just one of Taiwan’s many periods of colonization on the island, it is important to consider the significance of the year 1911 within the longue durée of Taiwan’s

Figure 2 Opening scene of segment two in Three Times, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005



Framing Taiwan Cinema

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colonial history. Taiwan’s previous colonial eras were also times when “A Time for Freedom” would seem to be an equally inaccurate description of the times.7 During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when Taiwan was primarily the home of Aboriginals of Austronesian descent, an influx of immigrants from the mainland arrived on this island beyond the periphery of the dynasty’s rule. In the 1540s, Portuguese explorers gave the name “Isla Formosa” to the island, a term which quite appropriately means “Beautiful Island.” It was an appellation that would remain in foreign conceptions of the island up through the twentieth century. European occupation of the island began in 1622 with the arrival of the Dutch, who established Fort Zeelandia in 1624. The Spanish colonized northern Taiwan from 1626 to 1642. In 1662 the Dutch were defeated by Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga, who fled to the island in an effort to regroup and return to the mainland to restore the Ming dynasty after the Manchus (of the Qing dynasty, 1644–1911) overthrew the Ming in 1644. What is remarkable is that history would repeat itself in 1949 when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would attempt the same endeavor—to use Taiwan as a base before reclaiming the mainland—with a similar end result. When Zheng Chenggong’s forces were defeated in 1683 by Chinese admiral Shi Lang, Taiwan became a part of Fujian Province. As Emma Teng persuasively outlines in Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895, the Qing government on the mainland also functioned as a colonizer and colonizing presence over the island. Teng asserts: “With annexation, Taiwan ‘entered the map and records’ not only in symbolic sense but also in a literal sense. Before the Qing conquest of the island, Taiwan was essentially terra incognita to Chinese cartographers.”8 Over the next 200 years Taiwan was but a peripheral hinterland to the governors of Beijing.9 In 1885 Taiwan became a separate province under the Qing rule. Then, after defeat by Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War and the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Taiwan became a colony of Japan in 1895. 1895 is thus a significant year in Taiwan’s political history, yet the date is also significant in terms of film history. 1895 is the year the Lumière brothers first presented their films. Coincidentally it is also the year Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published Studies on Hysteria, introducing their theory of psychoanalysis and initiating a discourse that has inextricably linked cinematic visions and representations of the unconscious mind. The years between 1895 and 1911, the year in which Hou Hsiao-hsien sets his representation of

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Taiwanese people living under Japanese occupation, also marks the beginning of Taiwan film history. Although the date of the first screening of a film in Taiwan is subject to debate, Taiwan cinema emerged within the Japanese colonial system, which imported films from Japan, China, and Hollywood.10 In addition to the filmic image, film exhibition in Taiwan included a benshi who stood in front of the audience next to the screen and both narrated the film and provided a live commentary on the on-screen action. Zhang Zhen and Shu Qi’s conversation in Hou’s film draws attention to the role of literature during a time when “Taiwan ‘natives’ could be only secondclass imperial subjects under Japanese colonial rule.”11 Taiwan’s writers strove for self-representation and, perceiving a connection with the mainland, longed for a return of their homeland to Mainland China. In 1921, the Taiwan Cultural Association was formed in Dadaocheng, the setting of Hou’s scene, in order to represent local concerns and to eventually achieve autonomy. Dadaocheng, a wharf district of Taipei, is located east of today’s Taipei Main Station. The scenes in this segment of the film are exclusively interior shots set in a brothel, and just as in Hou’s film Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua, 1998), material factors necessitated the setting: it would be impossible to film on location considering the current state of hyper-urbanization. But at the same time, the interior shots in the film heighten the stark contrast with present-day perpetual motion and the noise of scooters, buses, and trucks moving through Taipei’s urban center. In this way, the film removes the audience from the present-day moment and brings them deep into the unfamiliar territory and pace of life of Taiwan in the early twentieth century. Yet there is also continuity between that world and the Taiwan of today; what remains constant is the desire for agency and self-representation. The dialogue during this segment demonstrates the complex interrelationship between Taiwan and the mainland. After all, 1911 marks the year in which the Qing dynasty—the first dynasty in the history of China with political rights over Taiwan—was coming to an end. By 1912, the government of the Republic of China, the future government of Taiwan, had been established. The characters portrayed by Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen in Three Times are deeply concerned with the transition that occurred on the mainland. Zhang Zhen states, “Mr. Liang says China will not be ready to help us free ourselves from Japan for another three decades.” The process of “becoming Japanese” was for the Taiwanese a far from welcome, smooth transition.12 During the first seven years of occupation alone, the Japanese killed “some twenty thousand



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‘bandits’” in their efforts to wrest control over the island’s inhabitants.13 Hou notes the turmoil of the time with a strategic intertitle that refers to the beginning of revolt on the mainland: “Three Months Later: The Wuchang Uprising.” The off-screen political events that are referenced in the segment are complemented in the on-screen narrative in the brothel by conflicts of ownership over thee courtesans and the arrival of a new courtesan, only ten years old, whom Shu Qi begins to train. The film represents life under Japanese colonialism in fragments, perhaps the only way we have access to the past, via a subtle use of what Christian Metz has described as the five tracks of cinema: image, noise, writing, music, and dialogue.14 The beauty of Hou’s representations of Taiwan history here is that we encounter complexity without closure. This is what Hou’s film, like all great film, accomplishes: by giving us brief, careful, and rich imagery in focus, both in terms of camera technique and ideological complexity, the tension of all that the period contains but cannot be presented is brought to the surface of our conscious experience. Upon reflection and contextualization it is so full of possibility and meaning that it is difficult to categorize each sensorial response and intellectual concept. At the conclusion of the segment, Zhang Zhen writes a letter to Shu Qi to inform her that he is travelling abroad in Japan and that he has seen “the hall where they signed the treaty handing Taiwan over to Japan.” Historically, the final stage of Japanese rule occurred during the Second Sino-Japanese war during the years 1937 and 1945. When the Nationalists arrived in 1945 to take over the island, they quickly recognized that the local Taiwanese culture had been become in many ways distinctly Japanese. As Andrew D. Morris writes, financially Taiwan was better off due to Japanese economic policies: “in 1939, Taiwan’s per capita value of foreign trade was thirty-nine times that of China”; and in terms of education: “by 1944, 71.31 percent of Taiwan’s school-age population was enrolled in elementary schools learning Japanese ways.”15 Taiwan studies scholar Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang describes the importance of language and literary culture on the island: all Chinese language sections were banned in newspapers and magazines during the Second Sino-Japanese War.16 All of these factors divided artists and writers, and the populace in general, into pro-and anti-colonial camps. While not all residents loathed Japanese governance, the general atmosphere once the Japanese departed was one of elation. This specific moment is not depicted in Three Times, but it is the concluding representation in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s

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1993 film The Puppetmaster. In an iconic image representing the Japanese withdrawal, local residents smash Japanese planes with sledgehammers for scrap metal as the scene slowly fades to black.

A Time for Love In Three Times, the 1960s are portrayed in a segment entitled “A Time for Love.” Between the 1911 and 1966 film segments, a seismic power shift occurred on the island. After Japan surrendered at the end of the Second SinoJapanese War in 1945, the period known as Retrocession began. Retrocession day, October 25, 1945, followed the terms of the Cairo Declaration, which stated that the territories the Japanese had claimed from China would be returned to the Republic of China. According to some accounts, there could hardly be a more startling contrast between the organized, meticulous rulers from Japan and the disorganized arrival of administrators from the mainland, accompanied by their bedraggled troops. What followed was almost immediate unemployment and inflation. The KMT politicos occupied local bureaucratic positions as carpetbaggers confiscated railway equipment and factory infrastructures and machinery.17 Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek had more pressing concerns on the mainland as his Nationalist Government waged war with Mao Zedong and the Communists. Before Chiang and his KMT governors left the mainland in 1949 following their defeat by the Communists in the “War of Liberation,” the “228 Incident” of 1947 took place in Taiwan. This was hardly the precedent to set before he assumed his presidency on the island. The Japanese film centers in Taipei and around the island, including studios and distribution networks, were taken over by the KMT after 1945 when Taiwan was returned to China. The KMT first set up Taiwan Film Studio in Taipei. When it fled to Taiwan in 1949, the government apparatus brought with it China Film Studio and Agricultural Education Film Studio. Yet film was not a number one priority for the ousted regime during this time of recovery. After all, just the pre-production phase of film requires screenwriters, producers, financiers and careful organization and planning.18 Then during production, a cast, photography unit, sound unit, costume makers and designers are all required: a “coordinated effort, involving perhaps hundreds of workers, result[ing] in many thousands of feet of exposed film and recorded sound-on-tape.”19 After the shooting ends comes post-production, which can



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be even more time consuming than production, involving the creation of completed scenes, sound design, and dialogue editing. All this must take place before the final stage in the process, exhibition. In Taiwan, due to high inflation and filmmaking costs, the industry made little progress apart from screening imported films.20 Considering the complexity of producing film on the island, the KMT government funded and imported Mandarin films (guoyu pian) made in Hong Kong while remaining focused on its chief priorities in Taiwan: returning to the mainland while convincing the local populace to “become Chinese.” After the Nationalists’ arrival the island was divided demographically into two main ethnic communities. The first was the benshengren, those from Taiwan who had remained in Taiwan throughout the period of Japanese colonialism. This included the Minnan, Hakka, and Aboriginal groups that comprised a majority of the population. Second was the waishengren, those who came over to Taiwan from the mainland following the KMT’s defeat in the civil war of 1945 to 1949. Nowadays, Taiwan’s twenty-three million residents are generally classified into four distinct ethnic groups. The first group is composed of the mainlanders, who speak Mandarin, the national language imposed by the KMT. They comprise approximately 12 percent of the total population. Second, the Minnan comprise roughly 72 percent of the population. The third group is the Hakka, 14 percent of the population. The fourth group, the aboriginal (yuanzhumin) indigenous peoples, comprising nine tribes, accounts for the remaining 2 percent of the population. Hou focuses on the unique experience of the benshengren in the 1960s during a time of political repression known as the White Terror, when the governing waishengren cracked down on political dissidents and prevented freedom of expression. So again, the intertitle “A Time for Love” seems to be out of place. But the atmosphere that pervades the film’s opening sequence is hardly that of local terror. As the scene begins, light streams through an entranceway into a simple wooden pool hall in a quiet southern Taiwan town. An electric light fixture hangs in the shadows. The ratio of positive to negative space is perfectly balanced here, just as it is in Hou’s opening sequence set in Dadaocheng. Then, initiating one of the most beautiful, ingenious forty minutes in all of cinema history, the pleasant melody of The Platters’ version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” begins. Since modern Taiwan history is so heavily influenced by the US, it is both fitting and symbolic that a western pop song is the soundtrack for the first two shots that last over

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Figure 3 The opening scene of Three Times, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005

four minutes in the sequence. In keeping with mid-1960s global fashion, Shu Qi wears tight aqua-green pants as she stands beside the pool table, and the statuesque Zhang Zhen orbits the table in a plaid button-down shirt, open at the neck to reveal a white undershirt. As they play billiards, red and white pool balls move across a green pool table. The camera pans gently back and forth between the characters and their cues in rhythm with the music and the dynamics of their game. A jump cut divides the scene, yet the lack of tension persists. The lush green tones, the lighting, the wooden walls: everything is simple and yet refined; a certain richness pervades each texture. After “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” concludes, the scene fades again to black. Next, Zhang Zhen, shod in classic black Converse All-Stars, rides his bike alongside a paved country road. The transition from the interior space of the pool hall to the exterior space of the countryside is not explained, but it is apparent that Zhang Zhen’s spirit is light as he glides towards the camera in a tracking shot. This happy-go-lucky scene of riding a bike through rural Taiwan has analogs in the heritage of Taiwan films in the 1960s and 1970s that captured a similar sentiment by way of such cliché shots. Then the film returns to the pool room: an eye-level shot—the same angle as in the Dadaocheng scenes—captures Zhang Zhen entering the hall after getting off his bike. He leaves a letter for the pool hall girl he is fond of. The camera remains stationary as the characters move in and out of the frame. In a later scene, the letter’s contents are revealed. Zhang Zhen reads via voiceover: “I am off to the army. . . . I just wanted to thank you. The days I have



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Figure 4 A comparison of opening sequences with bicycles: Fly Up With Love (Yi ge nügong de gushi) dir. Zhang Shusheng, 1979 (top row) and Three Times, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005 (bottom row)

Figure 5 Zhang Zhen, visible through the window, arrives at the pool hall by bicycle in Three Times, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005.

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spent around here have been the happiest of all.” The militaristic backdrop of the 1960s Cold War era is thus alluded to, but it is not directly interjected into the film. One way to envision the way external predicaments affected the local populace during the 1960s would be to consider how the island has perennially been linked to political affiliations of the region. Lines drawn across the globe during the Cold War linked Taiwan to the United States—director Wu Nianzhen once stated that the psychological colonialism of the United States had more of an impact on the citizens of Taiwan than the material colonialism of Japan.21 Today, Taiwan is considered a part of the Pacific Rim, a delineation that maintains the importance of the United States in the affairs

Figure 6 Map of Taiwan as Japanese colony in 1912



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of East Asia. Then consider Taiwan’s connection to the mainland. If a map were to be drawn in which an imaginary line encircles the island and China to the west, one could envisage that Taiwan is a part of Mainland China. To the north, Taiwan was considered a part of Japan. Maps of Taiwan that were composed during Japanese colonization link Taiwan to its northern neighbor. A fourth encircling line also connects the island of Taiwan to the southern region, linking the Aboriginal peoples to ancestral homelands in the south. While there are additional ways that Taiwan has been united with its neighbors, the result of considering this model, in which Taiwan is “roped” into regional and transnational allegiances to the north, south, east, and west, is that when one perceives all of the layers in total, Taiwan remains at the center of all of these concerns. This is an effective way to think of the island’s identity. So many lines have been drawn around the island for so long—as province, as colony, and as ally in the Cold War—that in the end the social formation is that of an island with very much its own identity, parts of other wholes, and yet definitively a whole unto itself. It is this local identity that Hou’s film revels in. Nostalgia pervades the segment representing 1966, a key year in the period of Taiwan film history known as the “golden age” which lasted from 1964 to 1969.22 After seventeen years of Nationalist governance on the island, the film industry was in the midst of this era of prominence. The first film made by the new regime was actually in production as the Chinese Civil War concluded on the mainland, stranding famous film personalities Zhang Ying and Zhang Che on the island as the doors to the mainland were closed. In 1950 their film was finally released: Wind and Cloud on Ali Mountain (Alishan fengyun, dir. Zhang Ying), the first film “made in Taiwan” following the KMT’s assumption of control of the island after 1949. The narrative structure of Hollywood films, such as Man on a Tightrope (dir. Elia Kazan, 1953) and Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955), was replicated in the local KMT films that would follow, as Huang Ren describes in his article.23 The early films made by the KMT regime on the island were anti-Communist in nature, but as Huang Ren has written as well, anti-Communist films comprise only 30 percent of the total output of films made in Mandarin and produced in Taiwan between 1950 and 1970.24 While early Mandarin films (guoyu pian) propagated political messages, Taiwanese-dialect films (taiyu pian) of the late 1950s and early 1960s were diverse. Note that 1052 Taiwanese-dialect films were made from 1955 to 1969,

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while only 373 Mandarin films were made.25 Taiyu films included hybrids of numerous genres: opera adaptations, action films, martial arts films, musicals, comedies, and romance. Even so, the sensitive KMT government imposed a mandate on both the multi-dimensional taiyu and state guoyu films to avoid Japanese style and dress in their films. By 1966 the taiyu pian was on the decline and its representatives requested preferential treatment from the government that would allow their failing production houses to import the color film stock needed to compete with what was by then an established guoyu industry. By 1967, the taiyu film industry was bankrupt, and by the 1970s, taiyu film companies still in production made the full transition to creating guoyu films. A number of directors, actors, and actresses followed suit, continuing their careers in both guoyu film production and television. This book does not go into great detail in this regard, but the influence of taiyu pian during the late 1950s and early 1960s cannot be underestimated in the history of Taiwan cinema. Taiwan’s state filmmaking apparatus experienced a turning point in 1963. To take a look at that year’s film production and importation for a moment: 70 Mandarin films were produced (including films from Hong Kong) and an impressive 96 Taiwanese films were made on the island; imported films included 9 Japanese films, 63 films from Europe, and a whopping 169 from the United States. The three factors that contributed to the paradigm shift in 1963 include the exhibition of Li Hanxiang’s successful film The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), the emergence of Gong Hong’s managerial prowess at Zhongying Studio (Central Motion Picture Corporation, CMPC), and Li Xing’s film Our Neighbor (Jietou xiangwei).26 These three interlocking factors altered Taiwan’s film landscape and provided the foundation for the Taiwan New Cinema movement that would follow twenty years later. Popular reception of Li Hanxiang’s film The Love Eterne reached mythological proportions in Taiwan that need not be repeated here. Eventually, the director relocated to Taiwan and directed his films in the burgeoning Taiwanese market.27 His 1965 film Hsih-Shih: Beauty of Beauties (Xi Shi), with its massive sets, large scale scenes, and over 12,000 extras,28 out-grossed all Taiwan and Hong Kong film studio productions that year. And his artistic film The Winter (Dong nuan, 1968) is arguably the finest film of the twentyyear period spanning the early 1960s until the Taiwan New Wave of the 1980s.29 In an interview with Director Li Xing in Taipei in 2008, I asked, “What type of transition did you notice between the 1960s and 1970s?”



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Li Xing responded, “In the 1960s the influence of Guolian (Grand Motion Pictures/ Li Hanxiang’s) film studio cannot be underestimated. In 1963 Li Hanxiang’s film The Love Eterne caused a sensation—reporters from Hong Kong stated that Taipei had gone crazy over the actress Lingbo. Then, when director Li Hanxiang came to Taiwan, he started to compete with the Taiwan state films studios and that competition was what propelled the market. This carried Taiwan film through the 1960s and into the 1970s.” Indeed, Hong Kong technicians and personnel arrived in Taiwan alongside director Li Hanxiang. In addition, the major state studios inaugurated their own professional training programs and a star system was set firmly in place. Furthermore, 164 new theatres were built from 1961 to 1965 to satisfy the increasing number of film viewers.30 King Hu, another transplanted “defector” from Hong Kong, renowned for his influential martial arts film Come Drink With Me (Dazui xia, 1966), which he made in Hong Kong, produced landmark Asian films after his arrival in Taiwan, including Dragon Inn (Longmen kezhan, 1967) and Touch of Zen (Xianü, 1970). Due in part to the influence of Li Hanxiang and King Hu, the marketing of recognizable movie stars, and improving production standards, Taiwan’s films were screened in over fifty countries. The creation of Taiwan’s onscreen fictionalized universe and the formation of Taiwan’s “golden age” began in many ways when Gong Hong assumed leadership of CMPC film production in 1963. Gong, a prolific and resourceful manager, produced films for the open domestic market alongside popular films from Hollywood and Hong Kong, while also extending the international market of Taiwan films to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. The films he produced were part of CMPC’s national and transnational film enterprise. Thanks to the growing influence of five key directors, including friend and colleague Li Xing (see Chapter 2 and the Conclusion), Bai Jingrui (see Chapter 3), Song Cunshou (see Chapter 4) as well as Hong Kong transplants Li Hanxiang and King Hu, Taiwan cinema emerged throughout the region.31 After Li Xing’s film Our Neighbor garnered local acclaim, Gong asked Li Xing to make narrative state policy films. Gong’s plan was to make government films in Mandarin that used Italian neorealist techniques. For example, he intended to film on location and depict the economic conditions of the laboring class. But rather than representing the quotidian aspects of their lives, as the Italian neorealists and the Shanghai critical realists ideally intended (thus “exposing the darkness” of society), Gong modified the style so that the characters on

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the big screen find contentment under the auspices of Chiang Kai-shek and his government (see Chapter 2). What followed the year 1963 has become lore in Taiwan film history. Li Xing co-directed the Healthy Realism film Oyster Girl (Ke nü) with Li Jia in 1964. A portrayal of the lives of oyster farmers in a coastal village, it was the first color widescreen film in Taiwan. And in 1965 Li Xing directed a second Healthy Realism film on his own for Zhongying Studio, Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia), depicting duck farmers in Taiwan who benefit from state subsidies and agricultural policies. Together, these films ushered in a new era of popularity (see Chapter 2). The prevalence of Hollywood film during the 1960s was also important. After all, the United States film industry was competing with Taiwan’s films on the open market and the majority of films shown on the island were from the US. The influence of the Hollywood tradition on Taiwan films in the mid1960s can be traced back to the 1950s. Taiwan films of that era were in part

Figure 7 The United Daily (Lianhe bao) newspaper, January 1, 1965 edition, contains a Beautiful Duckling (dir. Li Xing, 1965) advertisement (see right) as well as an image depicting the global threat of communism.



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modeled on Hollywood’s classical narrative form: a recognizable conflict, climax, and resolution. But US influence on Taiwan culture was not only evident in its film aesthetics. The United States Information Agency promoted Hollywood film on the island, and Taiwan’s newspapers of the 1960s made public Taiwan’s alignment with the “free world” during the Cold War. Taiwan was deeply entrenched in an ideological plowed by the United States, the nation whose lead the KMT regime would follow into the twenty-first century in terms of both filmic language and the discourse of international politics. So it is to the twenty-first century that we follow Hou Hsiao-hsien by considering the final segment of his film, Three Times.

A Time for Youth The romantic atmosphere and tone that Hou Hsiao-hsien presents in his depictions of the 1960s—nostalgia for a time when love between young people was possible in the midst of the Cold War, political repression, and conflict between the mainlanders in power and a local populace yet again underrepresented by a new state—disappears in the 2005 section of the film. The third segment’s introductory sequence presents Zhang Zhen intently riding a motorcycle, focused on the road ahead, yet apparently staring at nothing. Shu Qi sits behind him, clutching his waist as tears stream down her face. They head towards the city, the air cold at dawn, Taipei’s sky gray and laden with rain. Under an overpass Zhang Zhen stops the motorcycle and asks if Shu Qi is all right. She seems to calm down momentarily. The title reads: “A Time for Youth.” They continue on. It is the sound of the scene that truly captivates.

Figure 8 The opening scene of segment three in Three Times, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005

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Juxtaposed with the utterly still and quiet representation of 1911, the sound of the motorcycle engine obliterates the silence of the previous era. It is a sound that does not entirely dissipate; the entire third segment contains a dull roar, the whir of mechanical noise, not unlike a David Lynch film. Next, in a hallway shot—always hallway shots in this film, corridors reminiscent of Ozu in terms of the framing—the two lovers enter a modern day Taipei apartment as a blue neon light glows in the hallway. Photographs line the narrow passageway they traverse as Shu Qi checks text messages on her phone. In contrast to previous segments in the film, they do not discuss pressing political concerns. The oppression of the past was a physical, visible depredation. Yet, in the present tense of 2005, postmodern ennui seems to permeate society in a strange, intangible way. Just as Wu Nianzhen stated that the US colonialism of the 1960s was a psychological colonization, in the current order of the twenty-first century a new condition appears to handicap the characters. What is this weight that burdens the characters in “A Time for Youth”? Here their concern is raw nerves. Caught in a love triangle between Zhang Zhen, Shu Qi, and another woman Shu Qi loves, Zhang Zhen and Shu Qi find a temporary respite from the world by making love in the cold apartment. The open expression of their sexuality, not represented in the previous sections of the film, is itself a particular commentary on the past: not because such raw emotion or love triangles such as theirs did not exist before, but due to censorship policies such a presentation was simply not allowed. Still, whatever it is that the two strive for seems to elude them. They search for answers in dark dance halls. They move between signs omnipresent in the city; there is writing on everything. It is a new sensorium that Hou presents in this state where power and language are linked in new ways via image, spectacle, technology, and industry. Hou marks the transformation of society by foregrounding the economic changes that altered the landscape of the island. It is almost an entirely different universe compared to the 1960s when the economy began to be strengthened due to land reforms, foreign investment (including the receipt of millions of dollars in aid from the United States from 1951 to 1964), and profits from exported goods.32 A rise in agricultural productivity was followed by industrial growth in the 1970s. During these decades, Taiwan also experienced a wide range of political and cultural changes. On October 25, 1971, the People’s Republic of China on the mainland was recognized as “the only



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lawful representatives of China” by the United Nations, and the Nationalists were expelled from the position they “unlawfully” occupied, according to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758. Environmental issues plagued the island as factories and small businesses polluted with few legal repercussions. In literary circles, nativist literature debates brought attention to local concerns vis-à-vis “Western domination and exploitation.”33 In film circles, the Healthy Realist films evolved during the mid-to-late 1960s into a mode of wenyi, or “literary art,” films in the 1970s.34 Then, along with the decrease in Taiwan’s international diplomatic prestige as the decade wore on, the wenyi film tradition transitioned to a new era of kangri (resist-Japanese) films that represented regional and global conflicts. Films of this nature, films that show the defeat of foreign threats whenever and however they arose, include: The Everlasting Glory (Yinglie qianqiu, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1974) and Eight Hundred Heroes (Babai zhuangshi, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1976), among others.35 Cinema of the early 1970s demonstrates that a focus on domestic affairs and melodramatic relationships between men and women in contemporary society were an important part of the industry. However, while the wenyi films of the decade shifted from representations of the local to representations of the regional and global, depictions of gender remained in many ways constant (see Chapter 4). Lu Feiyi’s text Taiwan Film: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics 1949–1994 invaluably situates the way the 1970s films transformed with the changing times, and thus helps clarify the types of films available to audiences during that time period.36 By 1975, the number of films submitted for censorship approval was far lower than the highest year of film production in Taiwan, 1968’s figure of 189. This was due to a number of factors, including that in 1970 Mandarin cinema had effectively pushed Taiwanese cinema totally out of the picture. In addition, Taiwan’s film industry, which had experienced a rise during the late 1960s when its films received advance capital from overseas investors in Southeast Asia, was in a downturn. Yet the industry was to recover from this decrease in production and was not to bottom out until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, by the late 1970s Taiwan was to see the production of some of the most successful films in its film history before the industry hit the near-standstill of the 1980s (see Conclusion). The famous Taiwan New Cinema movement from approximately 1982 to 1988 was an aesthetic response to the filmmaking tradition that preceded it, but also a political response to decades of governmental repression.37 When

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the establishment, in the form of CMPC, instituted a “low capital, high production” model in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of its attempt to rejuvenate the Taiwan film industry, Hou Hsiao-hsien and his contemporaries took the opportunity to make award-winning films that integrated new voices into Taiwan’s cinema tradition. Taiwan New Cinema might be characterized as: “a step away from pedagogical orientation of Healthy Realism, the commercialism of studio genres, and the eclectic provincialism of taiyu pian (Taiwanese-language films).”38 Key figures in this movement also included Wu Nianzhen, Edward Yang, Wang Tong, and Wan Ren. While the Taiwan New Cinema movement comprised only 14 percent of the total cinema production from 1982 to 1988, films such as In Our Time (dir. Tao, Yang, Ko, Chang, 1982) and The Sandwich Man (dir. Hou, Wan, Tseng, 1983) left an indelible impact on the film industry in Taiwan that in some ways is felt to this day. In the 1990s, a second wave of directors came onto the scene including Ang Lee, who made Wedding Banquet in 1993, and Tsai Ming-liang, who directed such films as Rebels of a Neon God (Qingshaonian Nezha, 1992) and Vive l’Amour (Aiqing wansui, 1994). The films of this era, including the films of Sylvia Chang, allow one to understand the imagery Hou Hsiao-hsien presents in the final section of his film Three Times. But categorizing this as a “second wave,” just as citing “generations” when considering film on the mainland, is not absolute. For example, Hou Hsiao-hsien made famous films in the 1990s as well, as did the virtuoso Edward Yang, who directed The Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi) in 1986 and Yi Yi in 2000. While films from the Taiwan New Cinema and the Second Wave won film awards abroad, domestic feature production declined and audience interest in domestic productions decreased. For this reason, Taiwan New Cinema has also been blamed for the eventual decline of commercial cinema in Taiwan.39 Additional local factors, including the rise of cable television and unregulated video rental practices, also led to the general demise of film production on the island. By the year 2000, Hollywood controlled over 90 percent of the Taiwan film market. This may be changing, however, if the success of films by women directors like Chen Ying-jung’s Formula 17 (Shiqi sui de tiankong, 2004) and Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies (Ciqing, 2007), Wei Te-sheng’s box office hits Cape No. 7 (Haijiao qihao, 2008) and Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Saideke Balai, 2011), and a current trend of cross-strait co-productions are any indication.



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Returning to Hou’s film, the freedom of expression hard won by political dissidents and Taiwan’s directors of the 1980s appears to be enjoyed today in cosmopolitan Taipei and across the island. And yet residents living in the current pluralistic society, the film indicates, still struggle to express themselves and negotiate their position in the region in an era of globalization. Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen’s attempts to define themselves are constrained by alienating forms of labor that do not allow them to express their full humanity emotionally and intellectually. Robert W. Witkin, in Adorno on Popular Culture, writes regarding the age of late capitalism: The process of production comes to be initiated, ordered and controlled not by the direct producers but by the production system that keeps them employed. Workers become “appendages” to this system, estranged from the product of their labor. They do not choose it, nor does it express their social being. Work is progressively de-skilled and each individual performs routinized, atomized, and meaningless tasks at a pace and under conditions he does not control.40

This summary is an appropriate description of Shu Qi and Zhang Zhen’s condition as they struggle to make sense of their reality within the current landscape of modern Taipei. After all that Taiwan inherited from the twentieth century, is “A Time of Youth” the film’s most ironic intertitle? Or is it perhaps the most optimistic, signaling the opportunity for the young people of Taiwan today to achieve self-definition? Either way, the mediated representation of three separate and important time periods seems to imply that, once seventeen years or so have passed, it is possible to gauge the sentiment of an era. Despite generational changes—hairstyles, writing, music, occupations, lighting, transportation, and modes of expressing affection that change over time—we see life from similar vantage points in each section of Hou’s film, providing a sense of consistency in the narrative. We find concrete differences and similarities—far more than the observations detailed here—as well as the material reasons for social formations and restrictions. Hou’s fictional landscape allows the past to be seen and heard in the present, revealing evidence of the imperceptible, linking what was not visible or sayable in the past to what is visible and sayable today. The slow pacing of the film and its use of long takes coincide with a feeling and atmosphere of waiting. What is next? Three Times is, then, a microcosm of what has occurred throughout Taiwan’s film history. Metaphorically speaking, directors stand in Taiwan’s

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hallways filming their scenes while life changes on the island around them. Interminable conversations link three interconnected narratives: the narrative of each film, the island’s history, and the state’s filmmaking traditions. What remains the same and what changes over time is what the following chapters of this book attempt to reveal in more detail. Just as in Hou’s film, the significant moments are those when emergent, residual, and dominant traditions appear just long enough to be captured momentarily before they transform again. The following essays more closely examine a selection of these moments spanning the years 1960–1980, from which Three Times emerged.

2 Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films

What could be more different than films from Mainland China and from Taiwan during the Cold War, a time when state-controlled media on both sides of the Taiwan Strait reinforced each government’s extreme ideological claims? Consider that in 1956, while China supported the Soviet Union’s decision to crush the Hungarian uprising, Taiwan’s film industry publicly screened films in order to champion the Hungarian rebels. Perhaps it was this gesture that led the People’s Daily (Renmin ribao) to report in 1957 that the film industry in Taiwan was “despicable” since it was organized by bureaucratic officials and “gangsters.”1 Not to be outdone, Taiwan’s Nationalists in “Free China” led by Chiang Kai-shek referred to Mao Zedong and his communist administrators as the “the sons of Satan” in the 1957–1958 edition of the China Yearbook.2 In 1958, when the mainland shelled the Taiwanadministered Jinmen (Quemoy) islands to demonstrate, among other things, that it was not going to be bullied by United States foreign policy, the event was immediately recorded in a documentary film and distributed in Taiwan.3 Later, in 1963, while the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) in Taipei was still recognized by the United Nations as the representative government of China, a joint Taiwan-Japan feature length narrative film on the event was released: Storm over Jinmen Bay (Jinmendao fengyun). And yet the deep fissures that separated the two nations in the early 1960s provide little explanation for the amicable relationship established in the early 1990s between two great film directors: Xie Jin in Mainland China, and his counterpart in Taiwan, Li Xing. How is it that these two directors— the most popular in their respective locales during the mid-1960s, filmmakers who made the most significant state films for regimes that were sworn enemies—find so much in common later in their lives? How are we to understand the 1991 meeting in colonial Hong Kong between Li Xing and Xia Yan,

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one of the most famous leftist filmmakers and playwrights of the 1930s? Although Li Xing and Xia Yan were separated for the majority of their lives by hostile regimes, political affiliations, state film systems, and two generations, it seemed that there was no distance between them when they spoke together in Shanghainese.4 The familiarity Li Xing shared with Xia Yan was also extended to Xie Jin when the two men first met in Hong Kong in 1992. Later in the same year when Xie Jin traveled to Taiwan as the leader of the Chinese delegation attending the Golden Horse Awards, he stayed with Li Xing and his wife. When Xie Jin passed away in October 2008, Li Xing attended his funeral. In 2005, Li Xing had even remarked, “Xie Jin is Li Xing, and Li Xing is Xie Jin.”5 In this chapter, I trace what is perhaps the most important link between the directors’ Cold War–era films: the influence of Shanghai’s realist film tradition of the 1930s and 1940s. The resilient Shanghai realist aesthetic is evident in a diverse cross-section of films including Plunder of Peach and Plum (Taoli jie, dir. Ying Yunwei, 1934), Crossroads (Shizi jietou, dir. Shen Xiling, 1937), and Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun, dir. Fei Mu, 1948). Certainly, the “realist” aesthetic detectable in these influential films is identifiable less by an accurate replication of reality onscreen, than by the distinctive expression of the production values of the time.6 The filmic modes and devices of this Shanghai tradition comprised the root of a common cinematic language that flourished on both sides of the Strait after 1949, despite the unique parameters of their film cultures.7 In drawing attention to their shared realist aesthetic, I challenge the notion that Xie Jin and Li Xing are diametrically opposed filmmakers because of the antithetical ideologies of the regimes under which they made films. At the same time, a national and transnational analysis of these directors and their films affirms how knowledge is often produced within the confines of accepted discourse. Since Xie Jin and Li Xing are usually framed in the polarizing terms of difference associated with the Cold War, the articulation of similarities seems contrary to common sense. Bruce Cumings, citing Nietzsche, notes that the language we use to describe history is a culmination “molded by a great many distinct regimes.”8 In order to identify how power shapes discursive practice, Cumings claims that in the process of excavating a historical moment one should archeologically observe the “‘passing events’ in their proper dispersion . . . that is, a discernible genealogy.”9 Tracing the continuous use of realist filmic techniques after 1949 demonstrates that the



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works of Xie Jin and Li Xing are related in surprising ways. Naturally, there are variations and distinct expressions of this tradition, but a common thread can be discerned that helps one understand the cultural modes of state film production in Taiwan and China during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The realist film tradition of the 1930s and 1940s is reasonably well known,10 but that tradition is not fully understood without taking into account its legacy in Taiwan. In order to trace the nuances and evolution of this tradition, I analyze three pairs of 1960s state sponsored movies directed by Xie Jin and Li Xing in China and Taiwan respectively alongside narratives and images from the classic realist films from Republican-era Shanghai. Rather than an analysis of PRC and ROC film in broad historical terms, this approach allows one to recognize filmic similarities despite different political situations, consider the personal experiences that shaped Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s craft, and observe the lineage of realist filmic techniques that link the two filmmakers in interesting ways.

Act 1: Setting the Stage The 1965 film Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei, dir. Xie Jin) was made in China at a time when a new wind of change was in the air that particularly affected urban intellectuals such as Xie Jin in Shanghai.11 The storm that followed was the Cultural Revolution, which began a year after the film was completed. The climate was already so inhospitable in 1965 that the film would never be formally released. Instead, it was screened to select audiences before being relegated to the shelves during the subsequent chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, and Xie Jin was denounced in front of thousands of people.12 Stage Sisters remains a remarkable historical document to this day because it encapsulates a compelling effort to satisfy the contradictory requirements of state propaganda, classical Hollywood narrative continuity, and Soviet socialist realism. The film depicts the lives of two women who become convinced that the Communist revolution is a just cause. First, the protagonist, Chunhua, escapes certain oppression as a child bride in the rural regions of Shaoxing by joining a traveling opera troupe. There she meets an actress named Yuehong, and together they form an inseparable bond as they perform together on the stage. After Yuehong’s father dies, the dishonest manager of the troupe binds both Chunhua and Yuehong to a three-year contract and takes them to Shanghai

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where they eventually become two of the biggest opera stars in the city. By the time the sisters pay off their debt to their manager and earn their independence, Yuehong is seduced by materialism and petty bourgeois romance, while Chunhua holds to her standards and thus recognizes the moral bankruptcy of Shanghai capitalist society. Eventually, she accepts the value-system of her newfound underground Communist comrades. The climax of the film occurs when, despite their differences, Chunhua defends Yuehong, who has been falsely accused in a corrupt Shanghai court of trying to blind Chunhua. Later, after “Liberation” in 1949, Chunhua and Yuehong join a state drama troupe that tours China to spread the message of communism. The film’s use of setting is similar to pre-1949 Shanghai films: spatial geography becomes a powerful force in the construction of class identity and the division between the rural and the urban takes on moral connotations.13 One might say that in Stage Sisters place makes the people, rather than people making the place. The countryside scenes at the beginning of the film—vast landscapes and mountaintop vistas—establish a pure and rustic location, but that location has been corrupted by Nationalist scoundrels. For example, in one early scene Chunhua is unjustly accused of immorality and then punished by Nationalist policemen by being lashed to a pole in a rural village square. The primary purpose of Chunhua’s painful experience may be to showcase Xie Jin’s skillful presentation of suffering in an aesthetically pleasing way. But in political terms it is meant to demonstrate the evil of the Nationalists, who will go to any length to torment the pure-hearted people of the countryside. At the end of the film, the state drama troupe that Chunhua has joined after liberation revisits the same town, and since the Nationalists are no longer present, their corrupting spell over this pastoral site has disappeared. Chunhua returns to the village square where she had been punished years earlier, thus highlighting the end of the “old society.” Meanwhile, the film presents Shanghai as a site of modernity, but also of decadence. It is inherently depraved, a source of moral darkness and decay. Its only redeeming quality is the underground Communist workers who bring light to the urban citizens. As in the rural-urban border-crossing films of the 1930s, Daybreak (Tianming, dir. Sun Yu, 1933) and Fishermen’s Song (Yuguang qu, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934), Shanghai functions as a character who challenges the protagonist to take political action. In Daybreak, two lovers move from the country to the city in order to find work, but instead find destitution. They learn that the city is a place where seemingly innocuous



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language and behavior are charged with imperialist and capitalist meanings. Once they recognize the significance of linguistic coding, they must choose between supporting the collective voice and joining the masses or conforming to a dehumanizing social system. Thus, Shanghai is the site where at least some characters experience a sort of realization or epiphany. In Stage Sisters, it is in Shanghai that Chunhua realizes there is another way, that one does not have to be “used by the enemy,” to use Xie Jin’s phrasing at the time.14 Ultimately, the setting is as critical to the narrative as the characters’ responses to the choices available to them. Directors of the 1930s so-called leftwing film tradition in Shanghai intended to craft film narratives that “exposed the darkness” of society, including the evils of feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism. These three negative aspects of Nationalist rule are evident in Stage Sisters. Chunhua and Yuehong resist the sexual advances of a landlord and his cronies after they perform in a rural town. They encounter the luxurious consumer products and lifestyle of the city, which temporarily blinds Yuehong to class oppression. Plus, the

Figure 9 Chunhua (Xie Fang) and Yuehong (Cao Yindi) struggle with the temptations of bourgeois luxury as they work together in a Shanghai opera theater.

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malevolent manager of the theater in Shanghai is linked to an international imperialist trade system that sucks dry the financial and moral life of the city. In fact, after the Communists liberate Shanghai, the manager flees to Taiwan. Since he is a character who responds to his situation with an “incorrect” worldview, he is doomed to fail. In contrast, the heroine Chunhua is a victim of adverse circumstances at the beginning of the film, but because of her honesty and resilience succeeds, against the odds, by the end. More interesting, however, is that in pre-1949 settings, characters enter into crucial moments of moral ambiguity, struggle, and tension—for example, Chunhua must negotiate the perils of the bourgeois lifestyle and capitalism, yet after 1949 these conflicts are seemingly resolved. Similarly, films made in Taiwan during the Cold War also depict the era before 1949 as a period in which characters must make every effort to choose wisely in times of uncertainty.

Act 2: Different Backdrop, Same Story Whereas China was striving in the mid-1960s for economic recovery, Taiwan was building on the foundation of its robust agricultural sector and entering a flourishing phase of industrialization.15 Although Taiwan’s populace was generally optimistic about economic developments, the KMT imposed an anti-communist ideological straightjacket on artistic and political expression. Most people in Taiwan had never been to the mainland, and while many of them were apolitical, they resented the Nationalists, especially for the imposition of martial law in 1947.16 In such a milieu, artists could express nothing that directly criticized the government or its ideology of recovering the mainland. It was under these circumstances that Li Xing directed the film Four Loves (Wanjun biaomei; 1965), a romance meant to compete with Hollywood imports.17 Four Loves was the first adaptation of a novel by Qiong Yao, a popular novelist known for her sentimental love stories. Although the film was mostly escapist, it supported the Nationalist authority in surprisingly overt ways. Four Loves, like Stage Sisters, features a female protagonist who searches for a place within a larger group identity. The story is set in the early Republican era on the mainland. The young female protagonist, an orphan, moves in with the family of a wealthy landowner. Nine year-old Wanjun quickly becomes part of her adopted family, whose three sons she refers to as cousins. The family patriarch intends for Wanjun to marry the oldest son



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when she turns eighteen, but that does not stop the younger brothers from vying for Wanjun’s attention. The oldest son is a skinny intellectual who likes poetry and is prone to illness; the second is an athletic and ambitious man with a passionate political adherence to the thought of Sun Yat-sen; and the third is rambunctious and naïve. Wanjun claims to love each brother equally, and thus sets the prolonged sadomasochistic drama in motion by not committing herself to any suitor. The brothers then, each in turn, sadistically berate Wanjun for not choosing her life-long partner from among them. They plead with her, shout at her, and even steal gifts that they had given to her as children. In response, Wanjun weeps, sleeps restlessly, and nearly commits suicide. The viewer’s interest derives from watching each character give and take abuse. Furthering the misery of Wanjun, one by one the brothers leave for Shanghai. The film ends with the arrival of a letter from which Wanjun learns that the three brothers are thriving in Shanghai: the oldest brother has enrolled in a modern university, and the two younger brothers are cadets in a national military academy. As the curtains close, the audience discovers that it is the middle brother who has won Wanjun’s heart.

Figure 10 Wanjun (Tang Baoyun) is informed that her “cousin” has found success in Republican Shanghai.

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Four Loves is mostly set in and around an affluent residence: a living room decorated with elaborate wood carvings, bedrooms with ornamental bed frames, and a courtyard with a landscaped goldfish pond and a white bridge with red handrails. The mise-en-scène presents a glorious excess of consumer goods, such as traditional Chinese silk clothing and a camera that the brothers use to photograph Wanjun. Although there are relatively few exterior shots, the characters within interior spaces often discuss the world around them. For example, the aunt mentions that it is dangerous to be a traveling businessperson in a time of social instability, and the uncle struggles to accept Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary thought. The most memorable shots away from the residence show the middle brother attending an extra-curricular school set on a mountainside that overlooks a river delta and the sea. Instructor Huang, who preaches Sun’s ideology, tells his students that they should be concerned about the future of the nation. Although the film is set in Taiwan, it is clear that by “nation” Instructor Huang means China. As for Shanghai, although it is never directly depicted in the film, it is described positively as the site of bustling commerce and a place where true revolutionaries might taste and touch China’s future. The film looks back and envisions an ideal Shanghai, one that the Nationalists imagined that they had fostered and ruled over.18 Accordingly, each setting (the traditional house, the mountain vista, and the world of Shanghai) is imbued with a positive view of what China once was under the old patriarchal Confucian system and the need to move in the future to a prosperous international market system managed by the Nationalist government. The characters, political agenda, and affect of Four Loves flow seamlessly out of the Republican-era Shanghai film tradition. It is easy to imagine the disapproval this film would have garnered from leftist critics in Shanghai in the 1930s because of its failure to “correctly” criticize feudalism, but one can also imagine its popularity had it been released at that time. Each character conforms to a standard melodramatic type. The characters in Four Loves, as in Stage Sisters, resemble familiar types popular in the films of the 1930s and 1940s: a female protagonist who is a victim of society, a family that struggles to adapt to the changes of modernity, an instructor who teaches correct ideology, and a villainous character—the corrupt jail keeper—who causes the masses to suffer. With these stock characters, combined with the standard juxtaposition of the theme of revolution with “realistic” continuity editing in the style of the classical Hollywood tradition, Four Loves would have been



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intelligible to those on both sides of the strait familiar with the mainstream literary and visual art traditions of the Republican era. Even the conclusion is conventional. The protagonist in Four Loves learns that the Nationalists possess the correct ideology. Those who fail to accept this ideal, like the prison warden who jails Instructor Huang for spreading revolutionary ideas, are doomed to fail just as such characters would have been in Republican-era films. In Four Loves, one finds familiar settings and character types, though they are now positioned in a new Cold War landscape. A key similarity between Xie Jin’s Stage Sisters and Li Xing’s Four Loves is that the narrative thrust of each story is propelled by conflicts involving family members. These family melodramas could function just as effectively with different political backdrops or agendas. For example, if Chunhua in Stage Sisters had joined a Nationalist drama troupe in Shanghai, the plot would still function in terms of Chunhua’s desire to be on good terms with her sister. And had Wanjun’s lovers in Four Loves gone to Shanghai to join the Communist underground, Wanjun would still have suffered emotional torment. The pre-1949 setting in both films is critical to this assessment; it was a time when political choices mattered and the future was unclear, thus offering the promise of a story, of unpredictability. This historical connection to pre-1949 Shanghai in post-1949 Chinese-language films emerges from the constituent parts of the films themselves. The role of the pre-1949 environment in general and the Shanghai setting in particular was essential. In terms of character dilemma, ambiguity, and conversion, neither film would hold together without this setting. To further develop this connection, in the next section I discuss two more films by Li Xing and Xie Jin, taking into account the filmmakers’ intersections with the Shanghai film world.

Act 3: Separated Neighbors In the 1930s and 1940s, Shanghai was a hub of international business divided into three zones: the Chinese Municipality, the International Settlement, and the French Concession. For the city and its nearly three million people, film was a significant social institution. Large crowds attended art deco theatres showing films of heroes surviving natural and national calamities or longsuffering heroines overcoming impossible odds. Studios published their own magazines or yearbooks, and most newspapers had columns devoted to the movies. Shanghai had a vibrant fan culture centered on film stars.19

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It was in this city that Li Xing was born in 1930. A year after his birth, the Japanese bombed Shanghai, and before it could fully recover from this blow the city was attacked again in 1937 and then occupied—first in part, then in entirety—until 1945. Following the end of the war, from 1946 to 1949, China was embroiled in a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. Many filmmakers and actors, who because of the war had been displaced to cities like Chongqing, Kunming, and Hong Kong, returned to Shanghai to make films, resulting in some of the most memorable films of the Republican era. Notable films include Spring River Flows East (Yijiang chunshui xiang dong liu, dir. Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, 1947), Spring in a Small Town, and Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque, dir. Zheng Junli, 1949). Li Xing frequented the cinema during this period and was indelibly influenced by this post-war Shanghai film tradition,20 in particular by Fei Mu.21 He entered university in order to study drama, but did not complete his degree because he fled to Taiwan with his parents and three brothers in 1949.22 There he entered the film industry, directing thirteen Taiwanese-language films before his first production in Mandarin. Cultural production in 1950s Taiwan was dominated by state-promoted “anti-communist” (fangong) propaganda. Taiwan film historian Lu Feiyi asserts that, unlike the work of poets and dramatists, narrative films of the time were romantic, non-confrontational, and in accordance with government policies.23 State-run studios promulgated state policy through didactic films in Mandarin, whereas private studios produced escapist operas or comedies in Taiwanese.24 The Mandarin-language film industry was slow to develop in Taiwan because many Shanghai filmmakers and technicians chose to remain on the mainland. Furthermore, since the Nationalist government intended to return to China soon, it was not particularly interested in developing and investing in new cultural industries. Thus, rather than creating original styles and techniques, both state and private films in Taiwan tended to resonate with the old Shanghai realist tradition: authentic locations and costume details, eye-level camera placements, and the spare use of editing tricks or special effects. The film personnel in Taiwan was in part comprised of the old Shanghai guard as well; for example, the fangong film Opium Poppy (Yingshu hua, 1955) was directed by Yuan Congmei who starred in the Shanghai films Daybreak, Small Toys (Xiao wanyi, dir. Sun Yu, 1933) and Fishermen’s Song. (Interestingly, Opium Poppy also features Li Xing in an acting role.) The local industry did not possess the financial resources, technology, or personnel to



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make sophisticated films; black and white films were the norm because color films were too expensive and difficult to produce. Avant-garde techniques or styles, such as surrealism, improvisation, and unconventional narrative structures were generally absent. And as in China, there was limited use of filters, double-exposure, fish-eye lens, or any radical collision of images. Li Xing is an intriguing figure because he was a member of Taiwan’s “progressive” theater circles before he entered the conservative film industry. Perhaps due to this experience, he hoped that his early films would address relevant social issues. For example, he intended to ease the separation anxiety that many shared after moving from the mainland by making comedies such as Two Lovers (Liangxianghao, 1962), in which miscommunication between characters speaking Mandarin and Taiwanese leads to humorous situations.25 The first film Li Xing both directed and produced in his own studio was Our Neighbor (Jietou xiangwei), released in 1963. This black and white melodrama, set in an inner city slum, is divided into three key segments. The first segment introduces characters who live in make-shift housing units in the back alleys of the city: a drunkard, a shopkeeper, an intellectual, two working men who live together, a mother and her elementary-school daughter Pearl, a grandmother who moved from China with her teenage grandson, and a prostitute and her drug-dealing pimp. They dwell in crowded urban quarters, just like the graduates in Crossroads, who live in alley houses in Shanghai in which simple wood partitions covered in newspaper divided multiple families sharing close living space.26 With the exception of the drug dealer, each character in Our Neighbor possesses redeeming qualities. While the film recounts multiple minor conflicts, which are resolved by the end of the narrative, it focuses on the life of young Pearl after the death of her mother. The second segment of the film depicts a series of dilemmas faced by Fat Uncle Shi, one of the workers in the community, as he raises young Pearl. He struggles to earn enough money to support both himself and his new daughter. He finds himself tempted to earn illicit money by making a delivery for the drug dealer. Uncle Shi initially resists the efforts of the attractive teacher to persuade him to let Pearl go to school instead of working on the street. But by the end of the third and final act, Fat Uncle Shi learns how to balance his many responsibilities, and young Pearl finds contentment both as an adopted daughter and as a student at a state school.

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In many ways, this sugarcoated film does a fine job of telling the story through visual imagery rather than relying on dialogue to convey character emotion. For example, in one scene the drug dealer visits the grandmother’s flat in order to trick her out of the money she has saved for her own funeral. When he enters the grandmother’s room, she is saying her prayers, her Buddhist prayer beads in hand. While the contrast between the dishonest drug dealer and virtuous grandmother is a bit heavy-handed, Li Xing makes excellent use of mise-en-scène, spatial arrangement, and imagery to make his point. Yet, when the film expresses political dogma, it abandons its visual language in favor of directly addressing the audience, essentially commanding it to accept its intended message. For instance, the film begins with the following intertitle while establishing shots that depict urban slums in Taiwan: This story takes place in a corner of the city. The people who live here are without hatred. There is only love. The love between mother and daughter, between compatriots, and of a small, orphaned girl, and the moving fraternal love of the poor masses. Only a society infused with the spirit of love can move forward in the right direction and can hope for a beautiful future.

These words come from an omniscient, third-person perspective that reveals the influence of traditional Confucian values, which can be found throughout Li Xing’s work. It is clear that the narrator is suggesting that if the characters in the film are obedient, forthright, and virtuous, then all of their problems will be resolved satisfactorily. After the first act, the audience learns about the types of problems that the characters face and what they want for their “beautiful future.” At this juncture, the omniscient, third-person perspective is articulated through the grandmother. One evening, when the characters sit together in a circle in the alley to discuss life and family matters, the grandson says: “Grandma, the paper says that tomorrow the first batch of refugees will be coming from Hong Kong to Taiwan.” The grandmother responds that they will go and greet the refugees. The camera then pans right to left to frame the grandmother in the center of the screen. “I hope your father will be there,” she continues, “If he’s not maybe we’ll run into some others who escaped from home. We can ask them about the situation there.” Then she starts crying: “Ah, the poor people of Mainland China are oppressed unbearably these days.” Then the grandson interrupts, “Grandma, they will surely rebel,” and then another



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Figure 11 Grandmother (Cui Xiaoping) offers advice to her neighbors in Li Xing’s Our Neighbor.

neighbor chimes in, “And when that happens, we can all return home.” The grandmother concludes: “Yes, when that happens, we can all return home.” The third key moment when the film addresses the audience directly occurs during another communal gathering in the ghetto. Fat Uncle Shi asks his neighbors whether or not he should perform a one-time drug delivery so that he can earn extra money to help raise young Pearl. Grandmother’s response to Fat Uncle Shi is so politically correct that the skeptical viewer might think she is a government spy sent to the inner city slum to bolster state policy: There is nothing wrong with poverty. Be careful. Petty greed brings lots of trouble on your shoulders. If you’re going to be poor, be poor with integrity. Remember what I say. In Taiwan these days, everyone should be lawful and know their place, only then will we ever be able to return home. If we all engage in slimy activities like [drug dealing], we’re all finished!

The logic of the grandmother’s statement is that if we are virtuous, we will be able to return to China.27 However, the film never explains how Confucian virtue will enable such a return. What is more pertinent to the argument in this essay, however, is that the grandmother’s staging and technique of addressing the audience directly has clear antecedents in the film tradition

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of Shanghai before 1949. The following section analyzes this method, and discusses how Xie Jin employed it as well.

Act 4: Audience Address Xie Jin was born in 1923 in Zhejiang and was in elementary school when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1931. As a child, he attended the cinema regularly with his mother, watching films like Fishermen’s Song, Crossroads, and Street Angel (Malu tianshi, dir. Yuan Muzhi, 1937). In an interview in 1989, Xie Jin stated: “Cai Chusheng, Sun Yu, and Shen Xiling all became my favorite directors.”28 He also watched a lot of Hollywood films. The Republican-era past that Li Xing and Xie Jin grew up in was, however, no time of sweetness and light; between 1931 and the time Xie Jin entered college, China was at war with Japan.29 Thematically, post-1949 socialist films in China differ from those in Taiwan in that they depict the proletariat and the transformation of citizens into revolutionaries.30 Typically, these films represent the lives of archetypal peasants, workers, and soldiers. Xie Jin’s film Woman Basketball Player Number Five (Nülan wuhao) is an exception to this trend. It is useful to compare this work with Li Xing’s Our Neighbor because Xie Jin made his film in a moment of relative intellectual freedom.31 Our Neighbors was not made in a state studio, but in Li’s own studio, and yet its message is complicit with official state ideology. Though produced in a state studio, Women Basketball Player was written and directed at a time when Xie Jin had freedom to express his own ideas, yet it too is in accordance with state policy. My point is that even when these directors were afforded relative autonomy, they used remarkably similar strategies to satisfy the expectations of the state film apparatus. The opening image of Woman Basketball Player is a silhouette of the Shanghai skyline. The contour of the buildings constitutes the foreground; an orange and red sunset blazes along the horizon. This image remains freezeframed while the title and credits roll in bold white characters across the screen. The next shot, the first image of the narrative, is an establishing shot of the Shanghai Bund, brightly lit on a summer morning. It is a new day, and the atmosphere of the shot, however brief, reminds the audience that the sun has set on the dark days before liberation. It is a mood that could not be any more optimistic. The following shots present beautiful and happy members of the women’s basketball team as they laugh and sing together within an



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impressive athletic complex, and coaches who have not seen each other in a long time remark that the other has put on weight since they were last together. Woman Basketball Player contains political messages as explicit as those in Li Xing’s Our Neighbor. Moreover, Xie Jin uses a similar method to convey those messages: the main character learns to welcome the intervention of state policy in private affairs, while a secondary character explains the state policy directly to the audience. As we have seen in Our Neighbor, it is the grandmother, not the main character Pearl, who expresses the perspective of the state. The main character in Woman Basketball Player is Xiaolin, a basketball player on the Shanghai women’s city team. Like Pearl in Our Neighbor, she learns the value of state guidelines for society, but she is not the voice of state policy. That role is given to Coach Tian, played by Liu Qiong, a famous actor during the Japanese occupation. Throughout the narrative, Xiaolin learns that she needs to realize her full potential so that she can bring honor to China in international basketball competitions. In contrast, Coach Tian’s story is more compelling and dynamic. Visually presented in a series of flashbacks, Coach Tian recalls the time when he played as a member of a Chinese team against a US Navy team in Shanghai before 1949. He recollects that at halftime his manager demanded that the Chinese team fix the game so that the manager could make some money, but Tian disregarded the demand and won the game with a last second shot. Afterward, a band of street thugs beat him severely for not losing the game. Taken allegorically, the film suggests that before “liberation” China was capable of standing on its own, but its leaders, who sought personal financial rewards, sold out to foreigners. The function of the flashbacks within the narrative structure is to represent an old, yet familiar, Shanghai setting in which Xie Jin can explore human nature at its worst. Thus, cinematically attentiongrabbing moments of extreme corruption and depravity are depicted at a time when such conditions had allegedly been eradicated by the communist state. So, just as the wealth of Shanghai is presented as an enchanting temptation to Yuehong in Stage Sisters, the most intriguing segments in Woman Basketball Player occur in the “old society,” before the protagonist realizes that Communism solves all problems. Because Coach Tian experienced life in the “old” Shanghai, he possesses a certain authority that he uses at key junctures to persuade other characters.

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When he is introduced to the women’s team early in the film, he is wearing an army shirt from the Southwest Military Region, which confers additional authority. The coach makes his first significant speech in the film after the team loses a game against their local rivals. Xiaolin is singled out in the coach’s diatribe because she was late to the game. Coach Tian says that athletes must always be prepared to strengthen their team, just as soldiers were ready to fight for the Communist cause during the civil war. Then he adds: “Your generation is different because happiness is around you every minute. But some of you do not realize how precious this moment is, and sometimes you do not value what the nation gives to athletes today.” His intention is to startle his young basketball players into action so that they will strive harder in the next game. Coach Tian’s next monologue is directed toward Xiaolin’s boyfriend, Tao Kai. Tao Kai, the film’s representative intellectual, implores Xiaolin to take the university entrance exams instead of playing basketball so that she can serve socialism as an engineer. He says that Xiaolin is wasting her time playing sports. This sends Coach Tian into a rage. He tells the intellectual that if foreigners sneered at the quality of China’s engineers, then Tao Kai would feel

Figure 12 Coach Tian (Liu Qiong) lectures his basketball team in Xie Jin’s Woman Basketball Player Number Five.



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just as humiliated as Coach Tian does when China’s flag is not raised above the podium at a sports competition. Coach Tian says: If we had our flag raised and our anthem played, all of the people from other countries would have to stand up and take their hats off under our flag even if they opposed us. They would have to consider that what is before them is a strong country with a population of 600 million people. Yet some people think that this is meaningless work and has nothing to do with socialism.

The content of the speeches by Coach Tian in Woman Basketball Player and the grandmother in Our Neighbor is of course different. One encourages his team to seize the day, while the other hopes her neighbors will live righteously until they return home. But the method of delivery is the same. The narrative flow of the stories of Xiaolin and young Pearl is entirely interrupted when the grandmother or Coach Tian speaks. This is clearly evident for two reasons. First, the rhetoric of the speeches is incongruent with the topics that the speeches are meant address. When Fat Uncle Shi asks his neighbors for advice about making money on the side, he gets an earful about returning to the mainland. And when Xiaolin is late to a basketball game, she hears about civil war, honor, and political values. Second, when both Coach Tian and the grandmother are framed in close-ups as they give their speeches, they look left and right toward their diegetic audience, and toward the camera and the theater audience. When a character addresses the camera, as Coach Tian and the grandmother do, it breaks the fictional illusion because the audience becomes a part of the reality depicted on screen.32 What is more, while this technique did not originate in Shanghai, it has a particular lineage in the films of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s where it was used to enunciate a certain political effect. Perhaps most pertinent is the last image of the film Small Toys. In this scene, a long-suffering and partially insane village woman named Ye hears fireworks in downtown Shanghai, but she mistakes the sound for the bombs of attacking Japanese forces. At first she screams. Nearby crowds hear her cry and run for shelter. But, after realizing that Ye is wild with passion, the crowds re-emerge from under tables and stairwells to listen to her, moved by her ardent shouts that China must resist imperialism. Ye inspires the crowd, and people from various social classes—from the poor street hawker to the middle class couple to the wealthy party going elites—all start clapping their hands. In the film’s final image, Ye addresses the camera directly and challenges the

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audience to act: “Resist!” Small Toys is not the only film of the era to replicate this strategy in order to express an extra-narrative political ideology. The content and delivery of Coach Tian’s and the grandmother’s messages become even more interesting when one considers that Xie Jin and Li Xing both lived in Shanghai and were intimately familiar with the local film tradition. Both directors convey their personal notions of pre-1949 Shanghai life on the screen, bringing their own memories of old film presentations of the past, whether through flashbacks or stories, into the present moment of their films. Certainly, these cinematic strategies and choices carried significant political connotations. In the following section, I pursue these political connotations by comparing Xie Jin and Li Xing films that bring out the implications of using Shanghai’s critical realist (pipan xianshizhuyi) tradition in service of different state projects in the mid-1960s.

Act 5: Seeing Red The connection between the state and the Shanghai film industry began well before the civil war. As early as 1930, the Nationalist government sought to control cinema in Shanghai, much as it tried to manage many aspects of popular culture, from fortune-tellers on the street to neighborhood gossip in the home.33 One of its steps was to ban martial arts-magic spirit films (wuxia shenguai pian), which had been popular in the 1920s. Government policy held that these types of films, in both form and content, did not serve the interests of citizens in a modernizing state.34 At the same time, the Nationalists approved of films in the realist tradition, especially when they presented patriotic, anti-imperialist stories that served the state’s interests. The state believed that objective depictions of people employed in typical occupations and functioning in everyday social environments had greater cultural value than fantasy or Hollywood genre films. The endorsement of realism is consistent with the nationalist government’s stance in the world of visual arts, in which realist paintings were advocated for the modern project, but unconventional modernist techniques were discouraged.35 Realism is never an “objective” depiction of reality, however, and films in this mode construct realities that could be used to either support or criticize the government. Film censors attempted to curtail the impact of the critical realist films when they “exposed the darkness” of society in projections of class struggle or critiques of culture under the Nationalists. When the Nationalists



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moved to Taiwan, they brought with them their censorship policies and the recollection of their experiences. Du Yunzhi’s history of Taiwan cinema contains an interesting story about a man named Wan Dechuan, a carpenter who worked as a spy for the Nationalists in Shanghai’s film industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Wan was hired by the Lianhua film studio in Shanghai to build film sets, but on the sly he provided the government with an insider’s perspective of the industry. After the civil war, he migrated to Taiwan where he worked for Taiwan Film Studio.36 While efforts such as those by Wan Dechuan were only marginally successful in blocking leftist film production, his story demonstrates another link between the Nationalist film industry in Taiwan and its origins in Shanghai. The extent to which the Nationalists were able to control cinema in the 1930s and 1940s and the degree to which leftist intellectuals influenced the film industry have been debated for some time. In a book published in 2005, historian Li Daoxin largely removes the state initiative from the equation when he argues that it was the leftist intellectuals and directors who recognized that the surfeit of wuxia shenguai pian was inappropriate for the political climate of China in the 1930s. Li includes an extraordinary quotation by Zheng Zhengqiu, one of the most important filmmakers of the early 1930s. In his 1933 article, “How I Came to a New Path,” Zheng declares that “one could look at the problems of the nation as a collapsing wall, or one could make a stand and resist.”37 Zheng then employed the image of two roads: one leading to enlightenment, the other to death. To Zheng, the way to resist was to make political films containing anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and antifeudal themes, instead of escapist films. Regardless, the Nationalists and the leftists both favored the realist mode for film. Many famous directors who worked in the realist mode before 1949 stayed in China to help build the new society, and they were rewarded for their loyalty to the Communist party with public and state positions. Xia Yan, for example, was appointed Vice Minister of Culture (in charge of film) from 1954 to 1965, while directors such as Cai Chusheng continued to contribute to the film industry by writing articles for Film Art (Dianying yishu) magazine. Other Republican-era veterans active in the 1950s film industry included Sun Yu, Situ Huimin, Shen Fu, and Zheng Junli. But in China’s highly politicized culture, the Communist state soon became wary of the pre-1949 critical realist tendency to depict the socially disenfranchised in melodramatic storylines. It is no wonder that Soviet socialist realism

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was imposed on narrative films after 1949, because this film style stresses the triumph of communism. The government was not necessarily concerned about realistic representations “characterized by internal coherence, plausible causality, and psychological plausibility.”38 After all, in the “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao stated: “Marxism-Leninism can include but not replace realism in literary and artistic creation.”39 Now that they were the ruling elite, however, the communists were concerned about the inclination of the critical realist film tradition to critique the dominant culture. For instance, it was acceptable that Big Road (Dalu, dir. Sun Yu, 1934) condemned Japanese aggression by depicting a patriotic road crew attacked by Japanese planes, and it was reasonable that New Woman (Xin nüxing, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934) offered a critique of imperialism by displaying massive navy destroyers in the harbor of Shanghai. But the current regime was not to be the subject of critical representations. It is fitting now to turn to Xie Jin’s 1961 film Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun) because it reveals how the critical realist tradition was interpreted under the auspices of the communist government. The story of Red Detachment takes place in Hainan during the 1930s. The protagonist, Qionghua, is a servant in the household of a ruthless landowner named Nan Batian. Like the flashback sequences in Woman Basketball Player, the depictions of life before liberation in Red Detachment are hellish. Qionghua suffers brutal beatings and is caged in a cell waist-deep in water in the basement of Nan Batian’s extensive estate. Fortunately Changqing, the leader of a woman’s detachment of revolutionary soldiers, rescues Qionghua. In the end, Qionghua joins the detachment and overthrows Nan Batian and his cronies. The script for Red Detachment, written by the August 1 Studio in 1959, was deemed too violent, so it was sent to other studios for production, whereupon it fell into Xie Jin’s hands. Artists and politicos at the time claimed that brutal, violent depictions of revolution on the big screen might dissuade viewers supporting the revolution, but oversimplified representations of revolution were unrealistic and therefore unconvincing. Xie Jin addressed this issue in a People’s Daily article he wrote in 1961, which dealt with how real his realist depictions of revolution could be. He was concerned that audience response is ultimately uncontrollable, regardless of how one chooses to portray violence on screen.40 It is no wonder that Xie Jin was concerned about audience responses to his depictions of suffering, considering that the



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catastrophic Great Leap was coming to a close in 1961. In short, there were plenty of contemporary scars to represent. Xie Jin wanted to show that the suffering in Red Detachment was of the past, not something that the current regime could have inflicted. In 1962, Popular Cinema magazine initiated the reader-voted Hundred Flowers Film Awards. Red Detachment and its depiction of the pre-1949 era won the awards for best picture, best director, best actress, and best supporting actor. In the following year the China Film Archive organized a retrospective of Chinese films of the 1930s, but the moment when films from or about the past could be shown passed quickly. In fact, during the festival of Beijing Opera in the summer of 1964, two films were denounced because they did not sufficiently present revolutionary examples, the same fate that awaited Stage Sisters.41 During this festival, one speaker stated: “Ours is a socialist society and each element of the superstructure must serve the socialist economic base.”42 One way of advancing this project, advocated by “Shanghai propagandists” Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, was to write only about the years after liberation.43 This shift from debates about replicating reality in an authentic way to an advocacy of politics is apparent in the content of Film Art magazine. In 1963, nearly half of the articles were political in nature, while the other half focused on aesthetic matters such as film structure, form, and content. But by early 1966, just before the Cultural Revolution began, most articles on film were related to politics. Thus, attempts at realistic depictions, such as those in Red Detachment of Women, became unacceptable by the time Stage Sisters was released. Stage Sisters failed the political expectations of its era on all counts. In 1964 Xie Jin wrote an article to defend the ways in which Stage Sisters treated the pre-1949 era. He stated: “The film denounces the old society so that audiences can treasure the present moment even more.”44 Still, the film was not released to the public at large for another fifteen years, though it was “screened to select audiences in order to generate criticism.”45 Despite the fact that it had not been publicly released, Stage Sisters was targeted at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Many articles in the People’s Daily condemned the film because of its sympathetic portrayals of the bourgeoisie and its incongruence with Mao’s expectations for art. Specifically, Xie Jin was accused of employing the critical realist tradition of the 1930s rather than using the stateapproved style of “revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.”46

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An illustration of Xie Jin’s outlook toward the state’s involvement in the film industry can be found in Stage Sisters. During the portrayal of life under Nationalist rule, Chunhua becomes a progressive activist working in underground drama troupe, but after liberation she is co-opted into a state drama troupe. In Xie’s depiction, the communist state becomes the inheritor of the leftist realist tradition, but Xie Jin knew the reality was otherwise. In other words, drama and film could no longer remain truly realist under the communist regime. Xie Jin notes in a 2005 interview how bureaucrats muddled his mid-1960s work: “Seen today, the first half of the Red Detachment is still very good, but the second half is not as strong because of the leftist criticisms that led to a lot of cuts and altered the story line.”47 This statement is consistent with his critique of Stage Sisters in 1989: “The second part seems weak to me. I couldn’t finish it the way I would have liked. If I could redo the second part now, it would improve the entire film.”48 By “second half” or “second part,” Xie is referring to the parts of the two films after the protagonists encounter Communist ideals, which of course reflected more directly on the present communist regime. It was clear by the mid-1960s that there was no way Xie Jin could depict communism with the outdated techniques of the 1930s and 1940s.

Act 6: Beautiful Domestication Xie Jin’s stage brother in Taiwan had a different fate. Li Xing’s film Our Neighbor, made in the tradition of Crossroads and other Shanghai films, was extremely successful at the box office. Aesthetically, the style of the film was appealing to both bensheng, the local people of Taiwan, and waisheng audiences who recognized that the film looked like other realist melodramas from Shanghai. Local urban audiences were familiar with this type of film from the mainland because the Japanese government allowed the screening of movies from China until 1937. And the old film reels were re-introduced to Taiwan’s theaters after the Nationalists took over the island in 1945. Politically, Our Neighbor is an ideal state film. Even though it was produced by a private film studio, it depicted reality in a way that was in line with state ideology. The Mainland Chinese characters in Our Neighbor believe that if they live a moral, honest life in Taiwan they will have an opportunity to return to the mainland. It must have been gratifying for government officials



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in Taiwan to see a film that suggested a return to the mainland was still a possibility, though in reality this goal was becoming increasingly improbable. After the film garnered local acclaim, Gong Hong, the newly appointed manager of the state-owned Zhongying Studio (Central Motion Picture Corporation), asked Li Xing to make feature films for him. Gong’s plan was to make government films in Mandarin that used Italian neorealist techniques: filming on location and depicting the economic conditions of the laboring class. But rather than depicting aspects of their everyday lives, as the Italian neorealists and the Shanghai critical realists sought to do (thus “exposing the darkness” of society), Gong modified the style so that the characters find contentment under Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT government. He identified ways in which Li Xing’s techniques could be used for these purposes and was optimistic that he was a good candidate for the project. As with any film project, audience response was considered in advance. Surely Gong recognized that Taiwan audiences would be willing to part with their money to see a “new” variation of an old national film tradition. Gong’s film style was named “Healthy Realism” (jiankang xianshizhuyi), and it could not have emerged at a more fortunate time for Mandarinlanguage film in Taiwan. While Taiwanese-language films comprised 98 of the 120 films produced in 1964 and 114 of 138 films produced in 1965, for a number of reasons they were slowly losing ground to the emergent Mandarin films.49 Hong Kong director Li Hanxiang had established Guolian, a successful studio in Taiwan, and he was producing some of the most popular Mandarin films in Taiwan. With Li Hanxiang came Hong Kong technicians and personnel. In addition, the major state studios had professional training programs and a star system was set firmly in place. Furthermore, 164 new theatres were built from 1961 to 1965 to satisfy the growing number of film viewers.50 Li Xing and Li Jia co-directed the Healthy Realism film Oyster Girl (Ke nü; 1964). A depiction of the lives of oyster farmers in a coastal village in Taiwan, it was the first color widescreen film made on the island. Interestingly, it too, like all the Xie Jin and Li Xing films discussed in this chapter, deals with the adoption of a parentless female protagonist in ways that affirm patriarchal state authority. Also like the Xie Jin and Li Xing films discussed here, Oyster Girl tends to cash in on the titillating appeal of pretty female actresses. The promotional poster for Oyster Girl appeals to the male gaze with its depictions of the heroine and other oyster girls smiling and lounging together in short skirts and shorts. Even more telling is a female mud-wrestling bout at

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the beginning of the film. At first two women fight, but the brawl soon turns into a swirling mass of over twenty women biting, tearing shirts, and soaking each other. Male voyeurism is also prevalent in Women Basketball Player. Xie Jin takes the camera into the bathroom to show the women washing their arms and faces or into the locker room before they change into their uniforms. While there is no nudity, the women are objectified as sexual objects. These representations of gender also have a deep-seated connection to earlier Shanghai film conventions: films like Small Toys contain some incidental scenes that display the female form, such as when Li Lili exercises in front of the camera. In 1965, Li Xing directed a second Healthy Realist film for Zhongying Studio, Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia), this time as sole director. It portrays Taiwanese duck farmers who benefit from state subsidies and agricultural policies. The story of Beautiful Duckling revolves around Xiaoyue, a teenage girl who lives in the countryside with a man, Laolin, who she believes is her father. She loves him dearly and deferentially obeys his every command. Together they live in a traditional peasant home in an idyllic rural setting and raise ducks provided to them through a government program. Their happiness is ruined by Chaofu, a crass, beetle nut–chewing Taiwanese opera performer who occasionally blackmails Laolin. In one scene, Xiaoyue and Laolin participate in an agricultural fair held by the state Farmer’s Association, and there they watch a performance by the mysterious Chaofu and his traveling drama troupe.51 Later, the viewer learns that Chaofu is blackmailing Laolin: Chaofu is in fact Xiaoyue’s brother, and he will tell Xiaoyue that she is adopted unless Laolin pays up. Eventually, Xiaoyue understands that she was adopted by Laolin after her father died in Hainan while serving in the Japanese military, and that Xiaoyue’s mother died before Xiaoyue was old enough to remember her. The neighbor, Laolin, then took her in and raised her as his own. Initially Xioayue is upset, but by the end of the film she resolves to stay with her “father.” In a reading of the film as national allegory, Xiaoyue would stand for the people of Taiwan, and Laolin would stand for the Nationalist Mainlanders who took over Taiwan. The conclusion of the film would then represent the willing and official acceptance of Nationalist rulers by the local Taiwanese, a message that is solidly in accordance with state ideology in the 1960s. That Laolin loves Xiaoyue as if she were his own suggests a beneficent state that takes care of the people. Also, just as the ducks are provided by the state



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in order for Laolin to live a productive and happy life, so too does Laolin provide social and psychological stability for Xiaoyue so that she can live in peace. After Xiaoyue learns the truth, Laolin admits that there is nothing he can do to make her believe that he is her real father. But it is in this instant— the moment he lets her go—that Xiaoyue recognizes Laolin’s genuine concern for her, and she willingly chooses to stay with him. Given the reality of ethnic strife between Mainlanders and local Taiwanese and the resentment of the latter toward the Nationalists, the film’s message was no doubt satisfying to those in power. Beautiful Duckling and Oyster Girl were the two most successful state films of their time. Oyster Girl won best picture at the Asian Film Festival in 1964, and Beautiful Duckling won a number of awards in 1965. In the early 1960s, it was typical for government propaganda films to be screened in Taiwan for one week, but Oyster Girl was released twice and screened for a total of seventy-two days.52 The movies challenged Hong Kong martial arts films at the box office, and they also served to extend the international market for Taiwan films into places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. In return, this marketing strategy brought foreign investment to Taiwan’s film industry, marking the beginning of Taiwan’s “golden age” of cinema in the region. Li Xing’s tendency to look back at China before the Nationalists lost the civil war was most clearly articulated in Our Neighbor. He was able to craft his film by using the old style, and this led the state to recognize him as a capable director who could make good films that advocated state ideology. In Xie Jin’s case, returning to moments before 1949 in his film narratives and employing realist techniques were dangerous political acts that almost cost him his career and his life. Since Xie Jin was a political survivor, he found a way to carry on and flourish even in the latter half of the Cultural Revolution when he made three films. But as the 1960s came to a close, Taiwan’s film industry was emergent, one of the most popular and vibrant cinemas in Asia, whereas film in Mainland China was in decline.

Epilogue One of the most interesting similarities between Li Xing’s and Xie Jin’s films can be seen in their presentation of dramatic, patriotic songs in Beautiful Duckling and Stage Sisters. In Beautiful Duckling, Laolin takes Xiaoyue to visit relatives who are rice farmers. During their visit, it is time for the harvest.

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All of a sudden, the narrative comes to a halt, and the non-diegetic roar of a hundred-member chorus resounds. A panning long shot captures farmers in the rice fields. Then close-ups of cheerful laborers gathering rice fill the screen while a hyperbolic, pastoral-themed song reverberates: Serene is the sky, endless the field The earth teems with golden harvest Fragrant smells arise, agile are the reapers Grain glistens in the sun . . . it is paradise on earth!

The landscape of Taiwan is no longer purgatory for waisheng ren who long to return to their homes on the mainland. If Li Xing had articulated through his characters in Our Neighbor an optimism about returning to the mainland, by 1965 he was happy to support the state’s desire to remain to make Taiwan its home, a home that is a paradise. Xie Jin adopts the same technique of including a non-diegetic chorus in Stage Sisters. After Chunhua wins her court case at the film’s dénouement, the camera begins to roll (rotating around a horizontal axis) and pan (spinning around a vertical axis), while an enthusiastic chorus fills the soundtrack: The people are stirred up . . . the people are in uproar The real villain will not escape Living in the bitter water, in wind and rain I bathe my eyes in the clear water of the spring . . . [The background image fades into a long shot of Shanghai] And the future is as bright as flowered brocade!

This distinctive method of employing patriotic songs is another technique that has its roots in 1930s Shanghai cinema. Most famously, “March of the Volunteers,” the theme song that became the national anthem of the People’s Republic, was written by Nie’er for the film Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernü, dir. Xu Xingzhi, 1935). And Ying Yunwei’s 1934 film Plunder of Peach and Plum (Taoli jie), is bookended by a college student graduation song that features language devoted to the homeland: Listen! The groaning of the masses is everywhere. Behold! Year after year, we witness our land transgressed. . . . Today we transmit the fragrance of peach and plum, Tomorrow we will be the foundation of society!53



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The passionate songs that Li Xing and Xie Jin provocatively introduced into their films constitute one of many key connections they shared with Shanghai film before 1949. They used the setting and memory of old Shanghai in their narratives, their editing and style of character dialogue was inherited from the Shanghai tradition, and they dealt with the political consequences of using such techniques.54 Whether using realist methods or more propagandistic techniques, such as the inclusion of patriotic songs, they consistently referred to the pre-1949 film tradition. These similarities reveal both the national and transnational antecedents of Chinese-Shanghai realist cinema in the 1960s. On the national level, it was no historical accident that the Shanghai critical realist tradition was employed in the 1960s in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic. Instead of developing new film techniques to deliver state propaganda, the state relied on modifications to already-established artistic expressions. The films produced were arguably accessible because they presented familiar settings in recognizable ways. These two directors also enjoyed watching the old Shanghai films in their youth, and this experience left an indelible impression on their filmmaking. When I asked Li Xing about the influence of the Shanghai film tradition on his 1960s films, he responded: “I was 100 percent influenced by Shanghai realism.”55 In addition, it is interesting to consider that the production of Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s films might be said to be similar because both directors were employed by state-supported studios that were in many ways more concerned with national policy than with economic success at the box office. On the transnational level, the film style of Xie Jin and Li Xing was actually a hybrid form comprised of techniques associated with multiple film traditions, not just Shanghai realism. Before 1949, Shanghai cinema was itself influenced by cinematic models from the Soviet Union, including the writings of V. I. Pudovkin on film aesthetics and narrative structure. Another significant influence was the melodramatic style of Hollywood film. Movies from the US offered models to Chinese film directors of narratives with welldefined conflict, climax, and resolution. The classical Hollywood film style is also echoed in the prevalence of medium shots, revealing the body from the waist up, and in the tendency to allot plenty of time to each scene so that it might be thoroughly understood before a new image is introduced. Both Xie Jin and Li Xing use these methods to their full potential. Another influence

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was the Chinese operatic tradition: the actors in Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s films tend to mirror Chinese operatic posing methods and facial expressions. Japanese occupation also influenced the local film industry, as did cultural exchange when directors migrated during the war years between Shanghai and other places such as Hong Kong. In the years following the Second SinoJapanese War, artistic films such as the acclaimed Spring in a Small Town demonstrated that the methods developed in the 1930s achieved a new level of sophistication in the late 1940s. After 1949, PRC and Taiwan filmmaking was influenced by styles that complemented the Shanghai realist mode. Although Italian neorealist films were screened in China in the 1950s,56 the Soviet influence was paramount. Xie Jin stated in an interview: “the strongest influence on the generation of directors that came upon the scene after Liberation was no doubt Soviet cinema. . . . But let’s not forget Italian cinema.”57 Neorealism traveled through various channels to affect the film scene in Taiwan as well. Italian film techniques influenced Gong Hong and directors in Taiwan in the 1960s, including Bai Jingrui, who studied film in Italy. Certainly, there are many differences between Italian neorealism, as expressed in such films as The Bicycle Thief (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948), and Taiwan’s Healthy Realism film Beautiful Duckling. For instance, Healthy Realism films were not as critical of society as Italian neorealism was, and Healthy Realism privileged the values of the state over artistic expression. Still, the two film styles share an intriguing similarity. Gilles Deleuze, in his discussion of Italian neorealism, asserts that even though Italy had been defeated in World War II, it still “had at its disposal a cinematographic institution which had escaped fascism relatively successfully.”58 Communist China and Nationalist Taiwan had fought in a civil war, but kept film institutions relatively intact as well. When it came time to modify existing cinematic techniques, these Chinese-language directors, perhaps like the Italian directors before them, had similar ideas about ways to represent their societies aesthetically, while keeping in mind the limited material resources available to them.59 Artistic choices such as filming on location and using unknown actors were a result of artistic as much as practical considerations. Scholars are tracing exciting new connections between the mainland and Taiwan, including comparisons between Xie Jin and Li Xing.60 Perhaps further studies will analyze the language of film policy documents on both sides of the strait, or observe the methods and intentions of both governments when they screened propaganda films in rural areas in the 1950s. Many questions



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remain unanswered. Were the film communities in Taiwan and China communicating in any way through a liaison in Hong Kong? And should China and Taiwan be discussed, as they are in this study, as having separate national cinemas? Although answers to these questions are still up in the air, some can be found in the cinematic record described in this essay. Xie Jin noted in 2005, “For me, the films I directed before the Cultural Revolution are mostly about the contrast between the old society and the new society. What was the past like?”61 Li Xing’s films in the mid-1960s ask the same question. Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s fictional representations of history provide us with valuable artifacts to consider as the cross-strait drama continues to unfold.

3 Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film

I am a little bird fond of play / who has wandered about in all directions / Now I am very tired / And a tired bird must hurry back to its nest . . . / Taipei! Taipei! —Home Sweet Home’s theme song

The signature state film of Taiwan in 1970 is none other than director Bai Jingrui’s (1931–1997) Home Sweet Home (Jia zai Taibei).1 The film won domestic official approval at the state-endorsed Golden Horse Awards for Best Film, Best Actress and Best Editing. Overseas, the film garnered acclaim at the 16th Asian Film Festival for Best Actress and Best Screenplay.2 And similar to Taiwan’s “Healthy Realist” (jiankang xieshizhuyi) state films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Oyster Girl (Ke nü, dir. Li Xing and Li Jia, 1964) and Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia, dir. Li Xing, 1965), Home Sweet Home represents a fine line that directors at the time managed to toe between propagating state policy and promoting a popular consumer product, not the least because these films were released by the government-owned studio, Central Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongying, CMPC), under state supervision and censorship to further the nation’s ideological project through the visual media. As my analysis will demonstrate, Home Sweet Home is a complex historical document that provides insight into the official position that the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) held regarding Taiwanese students who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This chapter presents a schematic historical contextualization of the film and Bai Jingrui’s biographical background. I then focus on potential discrepancies between the projection of state policy and the formal elements of editing, setting and representations of psychological turmoil among the film’s primary characters.

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In order to reveal the nuances and inflections of Home Sweet Home, and frame it within a wider context, this chapter will also discuss two contemporary films that represent migration on the global stage: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) and Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl (La Noire de . . .). Common features in these films include exquisite cinematic imagery juxtaposed with complex, three-dimensional protagonists who create a space for individuality and expressions of subjectivity. At the same time, Ali and Black Girl are historical texts that demonstrate potential discrepancies between authorial intentions for representing migration and the actual formal choices employed in the films. Thus, close readings of all three films contribute to this inquiry into how the structural components of Bai’s film work in both conjunction and disjunction with the ideology of the Taiwanese state government in 1970. A model for the type of inquiry can be found in an article by Emily Davis entitled “The Intimacies of Globalization: Bodies and Borders On-Screen.” In this essay, Davis analyzes a diverse set of visual filmic narratives in order to explain the relationship between representations of migration, sexual identity, and commodification in narrative film. For example, she asserts that Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears, 2002), Maria Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston, 2004), and the “Badlaa” episode from the X-Files TV show depict how globalization has commodified the body. Davis proves her point by examining the inhumanity of the organ trade in Dirty Pretty Things and the power of xenophobia to propel a narrative of alien infiltration in “Badlaa.” In this study I would like to pinpoint additional scenes in world cinema in which issues of migration intersect with those unstable moments between “exploitation and agency,” exposing the ways people are oftentimes depicted as objects instead of subjects during the migration process.3 Home Sweet Home’s opening sequence introduces the film’s central concern: the politics, both aesthetically and ideologically, of depicting migration within a narrative film. As the film begins, the title, which literally means “home is in Taipei,” stretches across the screen in white Chinese characters against a black background. Next, the cast is introduced to the accompaniment of the film’s theme song, a mixture of late 1960s pop rock and traditional folk song vocals accented by lyrics that announce, “I am a little bird fond of play / who has wandered about in all directions / Now I am very tired / And a tired bird must hurry back to its nest .  .  .” followed by the unmistakable, oft-repeated chorus: “Taipei! Taipei!” With a full screen image of a



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China Airlines passenger plane in mid-flight, Bai initiates the plot by taking the camera within the interior space of the fuselage in order to present the film’s four primary characters. Bai employs a multi-frame matting technique with meticulous pacing and a strategy that is an original contribution to the heritage of CMPC films, so that the audience sees simultaneously both the main characters travelling on the plane towards Taiwan and images of their parties waiting for them in the airport in Taipei. At approximately the two-minute mark, the theme song fades into the dull whir of air conditioning and the muffled engine noise inside the plane. Conversations among the main characters begin. Each conversation at this juncture provides a window into not only the minds of the characters, but also the ideology of the state. One learns that all those on board are graduates who previously studied abroad but are now returning to Taiwan to visit their homeland on a chartered flight. Among them is Dr. Wu (Ke Junxiong), an expert in water conservation. He informs a young woman who studied literature in the United States that he has not been back to Taiwan for ten years. Next, a married couple discusses how it might be awkward for the husband, Zhiyun (Wu Jiaqi), to introduce his American but ethnically Chinese wife, Ruyin (Chen Huimei), to his parents who live on the rural outskirts of Taipei. Then, a playboy named Hefan (Jiang Ming) asks Lengyu (Li Xiang), a wealthy woman who lived with a businessman for three years in the United States, if she plans to return. Lengyu shakes her head. “After all,” she says,

Figure 13 Home Sweet Home’s introduction of key characters

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“the United States is not our home.” The last image depicted within the plane is a close-up of Dr. Wu’s immigration form, on which he scribbles his name in Chinese characters only to replace it with his English name to match his current identity. This first sequence in Home Sweet Home, based on a novel by Meng Yao entitled The Swallow Returns,4 displays the characters’ desires just before they intersect with the island state’s social, cultural, and national pressures and concerns. One important concern that each character must deal with is the social phenomenon and ramifications of “brain drain” in Taiwan during the late 1960s and 1970s. “In the case of Taiwan,” Viem Kwok and Hayne Leland observe, “more than 50,000 college graduates left the country for advanced studies overseas during the period from 1960 to 1979. During this period, only 6,000 of them returned.”5 They cite reasons for many overseas students who do not return to their homeland, such as “lack of employment opportunities for returning graduates, lower salary levels in the indigenous country, and preference of graduates to live abroad.”6 However, Kwok and Leland also agree that these reasons do not neatly apply to the case of Taiwan, because its economic prospects at the time were among the best in Asia. Indeed, Taiwan boasted an impressive agricultural sector, and was entering a new phase in industry.7 Still, students were leaving and not coming back. The Nationalist state decided to tackle this significant social issue on the big screen by way of this fictional narrative. As a matter of fact, the president of CMPC at the time, Gong Hong, classifies Home Sweet Home as a “Studying Abroad Student Problem Film” in his memoirs.8 While narrative film has been used for didactic purposes, its specific articulation in the 1970s was part of the state’s “Cultural Renaissance” movement (Wenhuafuxing yundong) project initiated as a counterbalance to the concurrent “Cultural Revolution” in Mainland China. Chiang Kai-shek himself initiated this movement in November of 1966; the main governmental body running the renaissance was the Ministry of Education, which created the Cultural Bureau with powers of censorship over radio, television and cinema.9 An overarching concern was that traditional Chinese arts, culture, and heritage must not be forgotten in Taiwan while the island’s populace participated in the state-led modernization projects.10 In his study of Taiwan’s “Renaissance,” Warren Tozer concludes that the Cultural Renaissance was “primarily a political rather than an intellectual movement,” and thus the arts in Taiwan “suffer from governmental



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repression.”11 This view is consistent with some film criticisms that also recognize the restrictive authoritarian and patriarchal values permeating the presentations of traditional Chinese culture during the Renaissance. Seen in this context, Home Sweet Home must be understood as a film that intersects a significant social concern, namely migration, with the arts controlled by the state’s didactic project. As a case in point, within the film’s narrative, nearly all of the characters returning to Taiwan conform to national policies by deciding to stay because they are persuaded that the lifestyle, tradition, and values of Chinese culture, rather than the culture of the United States, are the “correct” values. If we consider further the larger context of regional factors in the 1970s, the Nationalist government was exceedingly concerned about its condition on multiple levels, “brain drain” being only one of them. For instance, the Nationalist government had based its identity as “free China” on the fact that it was recognized as such by the international community, a status on the verge of collapse, with the United Nations’ recognition of China in 1971, and US President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. For the audience, the tension between the fictional narrative and the historical context is the glaring disconnect between the nationalist film’s projected social stability and the unpredictable political situation of which the populace was all too aware. While there was room for optimism in Taiwan since the mainland was caught up in its internal turmoil, in broad terms, the conundrum for the state film industry was to use the fictional medium of film to project an image of a nation that did not, and some would say, does not exist. In the imagery of the cinema, Taiwan stands for all of China, and China is “home sweet home.” The creation of a fictionalized Taiwan in CMPC production in general and the formation of that Taiwan in Home Sweet Home in particular, actually began seven years earlier when Gong Hong assumed leadership of CMPC in 1963. Gong [Hong is his given name], a prolific and resourceful manager, produced films for the open domestic market alongside popular films from Hollywood and Hong Kong, while also extending the international market of Taiwanese films to Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.12 Home Sweet Home was part of CMPC’s national and transnational film enterprise. Along with friend and colleague, Li Xing, as well as Hong Kong transplants, Li Hanxiang and King Hu, Bai Jingrui was undoubtedly one of the most important figures who contributed overall to the rise of cinema during Taiwan’s so-called “golden age.”13

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Bai moved to Taiwan in 1949 after the Nationalists lost the Civil War and the mainland to the Communists. He studied art in the university now known as National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. By the late 1950s, after writing film and art criticism columns in newspapers, he was greatly influenced by Italian neorealist cinema and determined that he should go to Italy to study film. From 1961 to 1964 Bai studied painting, cinema and set design as the first exchange student from Taiwan to Italy, undoubtedly enabling a personal insight into the characters he portrays in Home Sweet Home, for he was himself a study abroad student who returned to Taiwan as well. When he returned, among other responsibilities, he served as a committee member and screen editor for CMPC. There he helped introduce the cinematic style known as “Healthy Realism,” modeled to an extent on Italian neorealism. In 1967, Bai directed his first film on his own, Lonely Seventeen (Jimo de shiqisui). Bai intended Lonely Seventeen to critique society in pointed, direct ways, but his original script suffered a massive overhaul by state censors before release.14 After this experience, he turned to safer themes and comedy in his next four films, including Home Sweet Home.15 Bai Jingrui evidently understood foreign film styles outside of Taiwan state policy, and he was all too aware of state censorship. If he was going to make films at home, it was imperative that he deploy his artistic talents in ways that conformed to the approved political expectations of the status quo. Therefore, while there was no need to determine the precise intention of the state regarding “brain drain” in Home Sweet Home, nor to qualitatively measure whether or not the film was successful in terms of persuading its audience to conform to the state’s “Cultural Renaissance” program, it is important to note that Home Sweet Home was produced in order to endorse, rather than refute, state authority. With such historical and biographical contexts of the film industry and the film-maker in mind, how is one to interpret the film itself? Take the opening sequence, for example. The aesthetic choices, such as the split screen montage, are original in the context of Taiwanese film history and hardly conform to the state-sanctioned CMPC tradition of continuityediting, “realist” style, while the ideological choices, displayed by way of the character’s willingness to support pro-KMT policies, are in alignment with the sanctions of the Nationalist government’s agenda. My goal is not to suggest that Bai’s aesthetic originality should be read as a politically progressive move that inherently questions state policy; indeed, emergent artistic trends are often used to embolden dominant culture, to use



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Raymond William’s terminology. Rather, what is fascinating to observe in Bai’s particular case is that his aesthetic choices tend to reveal the tenuous position the state held politically and ideologically, even though his film would seem to be produced solely to bolster the state’s artistic policies and embolden its international political status. For example, just as the first 5 minutes of the film fragment the screen into multiple parts, the film reveals that the state’s supposedly solid and stable position is presented as a disconnected and unmoored creation manipulated by the authorities. Thus, the structural components of the film express and embody the state’s ideological position, generating new meanings as they are repeated throughout the film. This proliferation of ideological function and contradiction is best revealed in the film’s narrative structure. The narrative structure of Home Sweet Home differs from previous state films of the late 1960s, such as Orchids and My Love (Wo nü Ruolan, dir. Li Jia, 1966) and The Road (Lu, dir. Li Xing, 1967). The earlier films typically present their stories in a linear fashion, much like the classical Hollywood mode, and contain a recognizable conflict, climax and resolution. In contrast, Home Sweet Home is divided into three discrete and yet interconnected segments. First, after the primary characters depicted in the plane’s fuselage arrive at the Songshan Airport in Taipei, there is an approximately 30-minute segment depicting the two-month stay of Zhiyun and Ruyin. This couple returns to Taiwan so that Zhiyun can introduce his Chinese-American wife to his family. However, once their conflict in the first narrative is resolved, Table 2 The Three Narratives of Home Sweet Home Home Sweet Home Screen time Character(s) Interior and exterior locations

Narrative 1 30 min. Zhiyun, Ruyin Rural outskirts of Taipei/ Sun Moon Lake

Narrative 2 20 min. Lengyu Hip Downtown Taipei/ Chung Shan Hall

Conflict

Chixia’s marriage

Decision

Stay in Taiwan

Argument with Wangpu Stay in Taiwan

Narrative 3 60 min. Dr. Wu Poor slums of Taipei/ State water conservation project in southern Taiwan Confrontation with Dr. Wu’s father Stay in Taiwan

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the film re-starts, for a second time, at the airport, whereupon the audience observes the two-month stay of the wealthy mistress Lengyu, presented in a screen time around 20 minutes. Finally, the film re-starts at the airport for a third time to kick start Dr. Wu’s first return to Taiwan after ten consecutive years of absence. These three separate segments are bookended by scenes at the airport: in the beginning of the film, the characters arrive there, and in the end, all of the characters congregate there again to either depart or remain in Taiwan as the case may be. The airport serves as a transitory portal; it is Home Sweet Home where people are expected, indeed mandated, to stay. Within this larger structure that organizes the three subplots, each segment of the story contains two pivotal moments in which the characters struggle to define who they are after living overseas. The first moment occurs when the characters are presented intensely contemplating, even meditating, on their present condition in relation to their life-changing experience abroad. The second critical moment is when those characters reach a conclusion about who they are and where they belong. The innermost thoughts are often revealed when the characters discuss their impressions of overseas life with others, or confide in a close friend the ways in which their individuality, character, and personality have been altered by experiencing western culture. A detailed description of this pattern helps us investigate further how this portrayal functions in the film’s narrative structure as a whole.

Narrative 1 In the first narrative, Zhiyun successfully and, indeed, effortlessly introduces Ruyin to her in-laws, who wholeheartedly welcome her into their family after their first dinner together. Significantly, the mother notes that it is fortunate that Ruyin did not acquire any strange habits even though she grew up in the United States. Afterwards, the loving couple takes a walk on a hillside to watch a sublime sunset. While the yellow and pink clouds constructed on a studio set comprise the background, and with the landscape in silhouette, Zhiyun says to his wife, “Before I left here [Taiwan] I didn’t think that Taiwan was special. Now that I’ve returned, I see that we have the same sun here that we had in the United States.” In other words, he realizes that there is no advantage in living overseas, because life is similar no matter where one lives, here or there. Then the couple, still walking together in the midst of nature, discuss



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how hectic it was working for IBM in New York City, and how they rarely had free time to share with each other. Zhiyun intones, “In New York I always felt like I was a machine, but coming back from the U.S., I now feel like a genuine person,” translated in the English subtitles as a “real man.” During this conversation, it becomes apparent that the couple have made their decision to stay in Taiwan almost as soon as their chartered flight touched the ground. The conflict in this story involves Zhiyun’s younger sister, the vivacious and strong-willed Chixia, who becomes engaged to the playboy Hefan. Indeed, the first narrative of the film would contain little conflict without the appearance of this little hellion. Hefan is planning to return to the United States and Chixia wants nothing more than to emigrate. In addition, Hefan is a lewd character who preys on women, and Chixia is always ready to seek out trouble. So when these two become engaged, they provide a perfect example of how not to behave within Taiwanese culture. The entire family overwhelmingly disapproves of Chixia’s decision, and confronts her in her bedroom to talk her out of marrying Hefan.

Figure 14 Chixia’s family screams at her.

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Chixia quickly grows tired of their ranting and raving. While the parents and elder siblings are talking, she puts on a record of western pop music of mostly drums and surfing guitar, and turns the volume way up. Soon, the audience is presented with the just faces of each family member shouting at Chixia, their words drowned out by the music. The camera focuses on each person’s gaping mouth and widened eyes, and this imagery is then spliced and replicated in multiple frames across the screen, so that the full screen is a mixture of endless angry eyes and screaming mouths. This image is disorienting, to say the least, and the way in which it accents the film warrants further examination.16 Film critic Huang Ren identifies the film as “Bai Jingrui’s Healthy Realist masterpiece” for a number of reasons, which include his “mastery of the montage.”17 The highly stylized treatment, especially early in the film, certainly calls attention to the film’s construction. Stylistic craftsmanship is as apparent in this sequence as it is in the introduction. As the first narrative comes to a conclusion, nothing the family can say or do will sway Chixia’s decision, not even the facts that Hefan is a goodfor-nothing, that Chixia is too young, or that she should stay in Taiwan to care for her family. In the end, Chixia decides to leave and the family struggles to accept this decision and its consequences. The inclusion of Chixia’s decision within the narrative is permissible within the framework of this state film because Hefan and Chixia are depicted as rebellious, thoughtless youth. But this is not the fate of Zhiyun and Ruyin. In the last scene of their story, Ruyin approaches Zhiyun in the middle of a field on the farm, where he is holding a lamb. Ruyin says that since his sister Chixia is going to depart, thus leaving her in-laws alone, she has decided to stay in Taiwan. Zhiyun offers, “I have no right to ask you to stay here.” To that Ruyin responds, “But I have the rights to stay with my husband, together. And the farm here needs you very much. Come, let’s go tell your father that we are staying.” Immediately following Ruyin’s passionate declaration of loyalty, the theme song chorus chimes in with the call of “Taipei! Taipei!”

Narrative 2 On that resounding note, the film cuts to the second narrative. This story begins once again at the airport so that the life of Lengyu and Wangpu (Wang Rong), her lover, will now take center stage. In the first segment, the traditional model of the family, care for the elderly and Taiwan’s rustic charm—the very



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ideas endorsed by the state—are cast as more important to the characters than permanent relocation to the United States. In the second narrative, however, a different set of state-endorsed reasons are proposed for two estranged lovers to remain in Taiwan. While the first narrative relies on rural scenery, such as the farmhouse and the famed tourist site of Sun Moon Lake, the second narrative takes the camera into a modern high-rise apartment and on-site footage from Chung Shan Hall in Yangmingshan, built by the Nationalists to memorialize Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s 100th birthday. In the high-rise apartment, Wangpu works in a gaudy art studio, creating paintings obviously influenced by western realistic figure drawings as well as Andy Warhol-style pop art. What remains apparent in the second segment, as it echoes the strategy in the first, is that the foregrounding of attractive scenes, rural or urban, lies at the core of the cinema’s depiction of Taiwan as “home.” The basic plot in this part of the film is as follows. After her arrival, Lengyu joins Wangpu and some old friends at a dinner party in a downtown Taipei restaurant. During conversation over drinks, Lengyu admits that she had a wonderful time overseas, but that she returned to both enjoy the slower pace of life in Taiwan and salvage her relationship with the artist and teacher, Wangpu, whom she had supported financially while abroad. All seems to be going according to Lengyu’s plan until she becomes jealous when Wangpu paints another woman’s portrait, depicting her on the impressive steps of the Chung Shan Hall, a location for government assemblies. After seeing Wangpu’s portrait, Lengyu argues with him, and he in turn packs his belongings and leaves their apartment, leaving her all alone. Lengyu is forced to admit to her friends that she was wrong to let Wangpu leave in the first place—that he is justified in rejecting her—and she decides to return to the United States. At the point of decision-making, the second narrative ends (although she inexplicably decides to stay in the film’s final scenes).

Narrative 3 Representations of subjectivity despite social, cultural, and national pressures and concerns are made visible throughout the film, but perhaps notions of agency are most poignantly presented in the third and final narrative of the film. The focus on the individual search for identity is emphasized in this segment without those glaring stylistic devices discussed earlier. The basic story involves Dr. Wu, a successful water conservancy engineer who returns

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to Taiwan both to attend a conference and to divorce his wife in Taiwan, whom he has not seen for 10 years. The latter proves to be a task that he cannot fulfill due to a wave of social burdens and responsibilities: Dr. Wu’s best friend tries to dissuade him, his brother disapproves of him, his father wants to disown him for being so heartless, and his 10-year-old son becomes estranged to him. Most importantly, the audience learns that his wife Suyuan (played by Gui Yalei, winner of the 1970 Golden Horse Best Actress Award) has, for ten years, taken care of his disadvantaged family, selling vegetables by day and tailoring by night. When Dr. Wu returns, she never requires a thing of him, but only desires his happiness, regardless of the circumstances. Under the emotional pressure that Dr. Wu faces as he negotiates the response from his family and friends in Taiwan, he “doesn’t have a chance” as Emilie Yeh and Darrell Davis declare.18 Indeed, Dr. Wu stays in Taiwan. Dr. Wu’s moment of contemplation and meditation occurs when he visits his colleague’s dam project in the southern part of the island. Dr. Wu recognizes how much his friend wants him to stay, how loyal his wife has been to him despite his infidelity and how much his nation needs his expertise as a water conservationist. In light of all of these pressures, he decides to remain with his family. Just as he is about to give everyone the happy news, Dr. Wu’s father beats him with his walking stick because his father presumes that Dr. Wu’s decision would only prolong the family’s suffering. But all is patched up at the end of the film, when Dr. Wu purchases a new apartment in downtown Taipei and moves in with his family, instead of returning to the United States. As Dr. Wu and his family drive to their new home, the catchy theme song from the introduction concludes the film: “A tired bird must hurry back to its nest . . . / Taipei! Taipei!” Dr. Wu’s journey to Taiwan from the United States could be characterized as a search for personal identity under the pressures of conforming to KMT mandated identity stereotypes. This is the nationalism presented by the state in Taiwan’s arts: not so much a love for the flag and the militaristic defense of its borders, but a simple idea that it is great to be part of the collective project of Chinese culture in “free China,” as opposed to the other China on the mainland. This brings to mind Rey Chow’s argument in her introduction to Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility, that being visible on the big screen does not necessarily translate into empowerment. In the case of Bai’s film, visibility (with inherent value residing in just being visible) does not equal empowerment.



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Characters from all types of settings and class backgrounds are visible on Taiwan’s screen, but as individuals they are organized and presented on the state’s terms, not their own. In the end, Dr. Wu’s unique, individual subjectivity merges into the collectivity of all those who choose to remain at home. He becomes of like mind with those surrounding him: his wife, his father and his colleague who ensures that his company will hire Dr. Wu. The horizons of this conversation surrounding issues of agency and subjectivity are broadened when placed alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl. Ali depicts a migrant worker living in his host country, and Black Girl represents the entire transitional, transnational migratory process from home country to host country. Thus, below I will compare and contrast narratives that depict characters who determine who they are and where they belong after migrating overseas as well as the stylistic techniques each director employs.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a story about a young Moroccan migrant guest worker (Gastarbeiter) named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) who works as a mechanic in Munich, Germany. As the film begins, Ali meets Emmi (Brigitta Mira), a sixty-something German cleaning lady and widow of two decades, at a bar where Ali hangs out after work with his buddies from Morocco and their German girlfriends. Ali is dared to dance with Emmi by his friends, and after one thing leads to another, Ali and Emmi fall in love. The love between Ali and Emmi is depicted as nothing but genuine and sincere, although far from ideal: the two are intensely ostracized by Emmi’s children and co-workers for their relationship. However, after an extended off-screen vacation to rural Germany, Ali and Emmi return to Munich to find that Emmi’s friends and wider social network have accepted their decision. It is after this juncture in the picture that Emmi begins to treat Ali with racist gestures formally directed at both of them, and as a result, Ali becomes frustrated and briefly turns to his former girlfriend, the German bartender Barbara. But in the end, Ali returns to Emmi, recognizing that her love for him is authentic; she in turn apologizes for her actions, and accepts him. The film ends tragically, and a bit mystically, with Ali in a hospital because he suffers from an ulcer that the doctors say he will never recover from; the stress of living overseas will

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hospitalize Ali every six months. Emmi sits next to Ali on his hospital bed as the film comes to a close. Arguably Fassbinder produced Ali in order to provoke his audience into considering a positive view of the guest workers who were “‘encouraged’ to come to West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder-years (the years of the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and 1960s).”19 Fassbinder appears to have had a specific intention: to depict Ali in a sympathetic way in one of the first of just a few films that depicted guest workers in Germany. This specific objective was consistent with the general purpose of New German Cinema directors. Shailja Sharma, in her article “Fassbinder’s Ali and the Politics of Subject-Formation,” writes: “The new German directors went out of their way to subvert the xenophobic and patriarchal traditions of pre-war [German Heimatfilm] cinema.”20 The formal choices that directors such as Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge and others made in Germany during the 1970s undermine both the historic German cinematic form and Hollywood stereotypes so that their audiences might critically assess the content of their films.21 Thus, considering both thematic and theoretical connections, Fassbinder’s Ali is linked with Bai’s Home Sweet Home in interesting ways. Both films address migration as a central theme, and since both were popular upon release, they possessed the potential to produce dialogue in the public sphere. In addition, both films were created with political agendas that are either advanced or hindered by the techniques employed. Fassbinder has been commended for bringing an unvoiced issue to the screen, but the praise is not universal. Susan Patterson concludes in her article that Ali is subjugated at the film’s conclusion because he is confined within Emmi’s space rather than his own; he is never known by his real name, El Hedi ben Salem M’Barek Mohammed Mustafa, and he is not allowed to speak in his own language.22 Moreover, Barbara Mennel writes, in “Masochistic Fantasy and Racialized Fetish in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” that the film is about Ali’s victimization because he is fetishized as a sex object by Emmi’s friends and he is orientalized as the film’s only nude as well as by his music, language, and habits.23 These perspectives might be summarized as follows: Ali is depicted as “noble immigrant.” Even though Ali is reified and co-opted by the forces the film apparently intends to resist, one of Fassbinder’s formal choices seems to redeem Ali’s representation; namely, the framing of the film. Mennel writes: “The social entrapment of Emmi and Ali is mirrored in the film’s structural emphasis



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on the couple’s persistently stark framing,”24 and Patterson also notes the “fragmenting effects of shots through doors, windows, and banisters,” as the characters “are pinned by static camera positioning.”25 Most interesting are two long-take, “still life” shots. In these two breathless moments the camera does not pan or roll, but simply remains on the characters persistently. These still shots effectively grind the narrative continuity to an absolute halt. The result is that the moving figures are captured like photographs—without freezing the frame altogether—in precisely the terms Deleuze uses to describe the “time-image.” The first occurrence of this still-life framing in Ali is absolutely incredible because the narrative is so lively and multifaceted, but the image, in contrast, is as motionless as can possibly be, a complete standstill. The static image is this: Ali and Emmi sit properly, backs straight, alone in a restaurant, staring directly at the camera through a doorway. At this stage in the narrative, Ali and Emmi have been instructed by their landlord that they must marry in order to cohabitate. They proceed to get married at a municipal court and then, by themselves—no one is with them to celebrate—Emmi suggests that they go out to eat at an expensive restaurant that, as Emmi points out, Hitler used to frequent. The only customers in the restaurant, they sit in front of a massive painting. Emmi does not know how to order the unfamiliar and expensive food except with the utmost awkwardness, and Ali is at a loss as well. When they have finally ordered, when the waiter has left the room, the film stops. After all that has transpired: ostracization, marriage, an awkward social setting, the camera stands still as if abandoned, metaphysically fracturing the film’s space-time continuum. While held motionless for only twelve seconds, the film feels like a staged drama in which one imagines that the scene has ended and the curtain will close at any moment. Or it is like the last note in a symphony before the silence. After a while the eye is drawn to peripheral details in the restaurant, such as the yellow painting positioned behind the two characters, while Emmi and Ali stare directly at the camera, at us, the audience. Maybe the audience is one that approves of the marriage that no one else will attend, so in fact Emmi and Ali are not alone; or maybe the audience is one complicit in their ostracism. Or maybe it is, as in Bai’s film, that the fictional construction of the entire piece is revealed, as if the audience is allowed to observe the internal machinery of the production instead of its slick external surface. The film’s structure lends itself to such musings, detached from the narrative

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content, and this pattern is recurrent. The film builds a complex narrative into a crescendo that is followed by static shots such as these. The next occurrence of a stationary image in the film takes place when the relationship between Ali and Emmi is on the rocks. At this juncture Ali turns to the local bartender Barbara for sex, comfort, and food as well, since Emmi won’t make couscous for him. In Barbara’s apartment one evening Ali undresses, his second nude scene in the film, waiting for his lover. He stares at the camera through a hallway, standing in front of a green bedspread in a bedroom framed much like the restaurant scene. Ali’s depiction here is important to the narrative, but it is also important because it problematizes concurrent theories of the male gaze, considering that Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was published a year after the film’s release and that Fassbinder shared an off-screen relationship with Salem. Then Barbara walks out of the bathroom at stage left, turns off the overhead lights and moves (she is also nude) across the room, until the two lie on the bed, holding each other, Ali on top of the supine Barbara. It is at this exact moment that the actors stop moving, effectively ending the extension of their actions into lovemaking. Sharma writes: “when Ali is taken to bed by Barbara, the pleasure of the spectator in this voyeuristic moment is undercut by the obvious framing of the scene by the camera, as well as by the limp, unexcited posture of Ali himself.”26 Then the film stops, a staged moment that stands for 22 seconds. In one instance, Barbara’s hand moves, a momentary break within the caesura. How do these recurrent static images contribute to the depiction of migration and the subject formation of Ali? Just like the characters in Home Sweet Home, Ali too arrives at a moment in which he must decide where he belongs after his transnational journey. His decision is to stay with Emmi in Germany despite all of the trials he endured during the course of their relationship. But this decision is not without ambiguity, for as scholars have argued, it is a choice that places him firmly within a culture that orientalizes (permanently ostracizing) and fetishizes (permanently objectifying) him. So perhaps the least ambiguous aspect of the film’s representation of migration is not found in the narrative events, but in the film’s stylistic devices. When the narrative continuity is ruptured, the result is that one’s mind might wander. At such moments Ali’s predicament, rather than his story presented in a causeand-effect relationship, might become the subject of contemplation.27 Ali’s



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fictional situation brings to mind the actual historical dilemmas involving migration, racism, and economic conditions in Germany. Considering Fassbinder’s film alongside Bai’s is a complex enterprise because the dissimilarities are clearly as great as or greater than the similarities. Still, these observations emerge as key points of comparison: Ali was made within the body of New German Cinema with a certain intention in mind; the formal devices of static framing tend to affirm Ali’s humanity and subjectivity; Ali reaches a moment of extreme psychological tension as a result of his choice to migrate; and in the end he decides where he will call home: he chooses to stay overseas, away from his homeland and family. These four points of reference are also revealed in distinct ways in Black Girl, which will be considered in the following section.

Home Sweet Home opens with the image of a passenger plane traveling towards screen left, while the black and white film Black Girl begins with a huge, white passenger ship moving left to right as it enters a French harbor. In the background, a military ship moors. The protagonist, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), asks as she arrives in France: “Will someone be waiting for me?” There is little suspense initially, for in fact there is someone waiting for her, Monsieur (Robert Fontaine). But the question, in keeping with the use of voice-over in the film in general, allows the audience to listen in on Diouana’s innermost thoughts. Monsieur drives Diouana through the beautiful countryside to an apartment in Antibes that overlooks the French Riviera. Diouana, who migrates to France in order to work as a nanny for Monsieur and Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) just as she had in Senegal, soon learns that she has been brought to work as a common house worker instead. Upon entering the apartment, her first assignment is to clean the bathroom, and specifically the bathtub, at her master’s command. It is this within this walled prison, and specifically in this bathtub, that she takes her life at the film’s dénouement. Of all of the films discussed in this chapter, Diouana’s subjectivity is most clearly evident to the audience due to the access to her thoughts via the voiceover technique. At one point in the film, Diouana states: “Back in Dakar they must be saying: ‘Diouana is happy in France . . . She has a good life.’ For me, France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and my bedroom.” Her

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words make clear that she is by no means content. It is a contrast between what is perceived visually (or in this case, imagined by her family and friends at home) and what she is actually experiencing. Early in the film, when Diouana still has hope for her situation in France, when she still wears fancy clothes and looks forward to experiencing life as a participating citizen in her new environment, she is required by Madame to make “authentic African cuisine” for a dinner party. Part cook and part waitress, though she is neither, she is treated like an object. During the meal an elderly male guest at the dinner party states: “I’ve never kissed a negress,” before placing a kiss on the cheek of the unwilling and disgusted Diouana. After Diouana returns to her solitary seat in the kitchen, she recollects her previous experiences in Senegal. The camera then focuses on a handcrafted mask from Africa, followed by a fade-out and fade-in transition to scenes that depict the events in Senegal that Diouana describes. The mask is significant both in this transition and the film as a whole: Diouana originally gave the mask to Monsieur and Madame when she was first employed by them in Africa. Moreover, as Rachael Langford describes, the mask functions as an object of gift exchange in which both parties were to be treated as members of equal social status.28 Diouana’s voice carries the story as she describes where she sought work in Senegal and how excited she was when she told her friends and family: “I’ve got a job with the white folks.” Her recollections are not overwrought or sensationalized; rather, her tone is smooth, consistent, almost listless. When the flashback concludes, Diouana’s reflections continue to grant the audience privileged access to her thoughts while she completes mundane household tasks. In this way Sembène depicts the entire migratory process, from the job search in Africa to the arrival overseas, to the moment when Diouana must decide if she will stay or if she will return home. Diouana’s commentary exposes the way that the French of the 1960s maintained the colonial idea that Africans possessed a “non-subjectivity or lesser subjectivity” compared with their former European colonizers.29 She also notes the potential for change. Langford argues: “La Noire de  .  .  .  can be seen to confront these issues of identity and subjectivity and to suggest tactics for contesting the reduction of the African to mere identicalness.”30 Due to foreign control over African film production and distribution, the ability to challenge the legacy of colonialism in the filmic medium was long overdue in Senegal. While the first film in sub-Saharan Africa was made in



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1953, a 23-minute short by Mamadou Touré, remarkably, Black Girl was the first feature-length film made by an African director in Africa.31 Sembène, author of six novels and director of two previous shorts at this stage in his career, took the opportunity to challenge racism and oppression in his first feature film. Sheila Petty describes how Sembène’s depictions created optimism among African filmmakers who hoped that cinema would not exist for amusement alone. In 1975, the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI) met in Algiers and wrote the “Algiers Charter of African Film” which “stipulates that African film should be a vehicle for education, information and consciousness-raising, and not strictly a vehicle for entertainment.”32 This historical information reminds one that in Bai, Fassbinder, and Sembène’s depictions, film is similarly not “strictly a vehicle for entertainment,” but arguably “a vehicle for education, information and consciousnessraising” for various political agendas. Again, while there is no need to locate each film’s precise “intention” (as if there were only one), nor to qualitatively measure whether or not these films are successful in terms of persuading their audience to conform to a particular ideological stance, we can observe the stylistic devices used in all three films in their depictions of migration in a comparative framework. For example, Sembène’s use of the voice-over technique grants Diouana a degree of subjectivity that none of Bai’s characters Table 3 Outline of Major Themes Film Depiction of migration Subversion of protagonist’s subjectivity and humanity Formal device Conflict

Home, Sweet Home Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Conform to State Provide positive Policy image of a migrant guest worker Fetishization and Bai’s postmodern orientalization of techniques that Ali, conforming to affirm the film’s stereotype construction is manipulated Non-linear Framing, static narrative shots See Table 2 Ali and German life/ triangular love relationship

Black Girl Challenge colonial stereotypes (Potential) Misinterpretation of suicide

Voice-over Oppression by employers

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possess. Moreover, Diouana’s decision to take her own life rather than remain an object manipulated by others allows her to escape the equation altogether. Unlike any of the other characters discussed here, she becomes subject to no one. Possibly the most significant event that occurs prior to Diouana’s suicide is a conversation she has with Monsieur and Madame regarding a letter they receive from Diouana’s mother. Monsieur reads the letter to Diouana at the dining room table in their apartment, and Madame listens in. The two masters are noticeably excited by this occurrence, as they hope a letter from home will enliven the depressed Diouana. While Monsieur reads, Diouana’s voiceover commentary invalidates her master’s expectations: Diouana’s mother is illiterate, so she could not have written the letter herself; thus, Diouana’s mother’s words were certainly mediated in Senegal even before her employer reads the letter to Diouana in France. Next, when Monsieur finishes the letter and suggests that Diouana respond, he actually begins writing the letter without Diouana’s consent—putting words into Diouana’s mouth. The inscription of Diouana by her employers is offensive.33 And the distance between the master’s skewed perception of reality and the clarity of Diouana’s interpretation of the event is so vast that Diouana excuses herself from the table, refusing to explain the disconnect in their perspectives. In this scene and elsewhere, the film demonstrates that Diouana exercises control over her situation when afforded the opportunity: she walks the streets on her own in Senegal to find employment, she determines to move to France for work on her own accord, and she is in control of her body sexually when she is with her boyfriend before leaving Senegal—frustrating with him when he acts out of line, and conforming to her desires at her own discretion. This character development is crucial for the narrative, for otherwise her suicide might be interpreted as an act of resignation instead of an act of agency and purpose. In the moments when Diouana takes her life she states: “Never again will the mistress scold me . . . ” and “she will never lie to me again.” These statements are both precisely and profoundly the case. Her voice-over and her actions merge into one. Langford claims: “the suicide does not reduce [Diouana] to objecthood, thus constituting a victory for colonial discourse; rather it demonstrates her ultimate agency. . . . In death she becomes fully the unadministrable, uncircumscribable body which has already so aggravated her employers, but at the same time she indelibly embodies her subjectivity.”34 And yet, of course, she has departed. This aspect of the film continues



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to trouble viewers, and perhaps the dissatisfaction Diouana’s death causes viewers cannot be resolved except by considering that the fictional film, if it is intent on instilling hope at all, is motivated by a very real, non-fictional desire to educate its audience. Although from a different time and place, a famous suicide in the history of Chinese cinema sheds light on this issue because it provides a way to understand how Sembène might have intended his audience to interpret the film’s climax with a sentiment other than despair. On March 8, 1935, Shanghai’s famous actress of the silent screen Ruan Lingyu (Lily Yuan) committed suicide. The 24-year-old actress took her life two days before a contentious court case, and years after being under the gaze and scrutiny of a tabloid press that praised the “virtue, innocence, and sincerity of movie actresses in the 1930s” while it demonized other women considered the “femme fatales of the city.”35 Ruan fell into the latter category as she was labeled an “immoral” woman, and by all appearances she simply could not go on living under such pressure. Thus, her suicide has yielded theories of causation that have yet to be entirely resolved. Was it because the press would never allow her to construct her own subject position?36 Or was her death in some way due to the fact that she portrayed intense and tragic on-screen characters who committed suicide? Regardless, all speculation seems to suggest that it was Ruan’s choice to commit suicide. Michael Chang writes: “The fact that Ruan became more human in the eyes of some, but only after taking her own life, was merely another twist of irony. A columnist in Qingqing dianying asked: “If Ruan Lingyu hadn’t committed suicide, would you still express sympathy with her?”37 Ruan’s last decision demonstrated that society could not control every aspect of her being, and metaphorically Ruan Lingyu held up a mirror to those who were profiting by her victimization. It is in such a context of actual, historical agency that Diouana’s action within the fictional narrative might be considered. Similar to Ruan Lingyu, the act Diouana performs in Black Girl is effective in critiquing society because her choice was performed of her own volition. In turn, her choice affects and alters the social relations of all of the participants. But in contrast to Ruan Lingyu, the effect of Diouana’s gesture is important within the film narrative because it is an action that is totally, and unconditionally, absolute. What might be retained from the film is not the idea that suicide is the ideal choice of agency, but that at the core of Diouana’s choice is the notion that action repositions all existing coordinates. In this way, Sembène’s narrative

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and formal devices work in concert to confront racism and the colonial value system. Black Girl manages to avoid the ambiguity found in the narrative and stylistic techniques in Fassbinder’s film, and the disjunction between state purpose and formal devices employed in Bai’s film.

Revisiting The literal translation of the French title of Sembène’s film is: “The Black Girl of . . . ” It is a title that leads to a question important to all of the characters presented in this study: where is home? By returning to the “particular and limited local contexts” of Home Sweet Home after an examination of Ali and Black Girl, it is possible to respond to this question with new perspectives.38 The following table categorizes the three film’s cinematic depictions of migration in order to make two observations and discuss their implications in relation to Bai’s film. First, Home Sweet Home is exclusively set in Taiwan, so we never see the character’s lives overseas. In contrast, both Ali and Diouana are depicted in overseas environments, and even though they become disillusioned when they consider the disparity between what they thought life abroad might be and their actual experience, they still choose to remain abroad. Second, the relationship between the titles of each of the films is significant. In Bai’s film, the title is a location: “home.” But for both Fassbinder and Sembène the title represents the main character presented. Ali is specifically mentioned in Fassbinder’s title, and Diouana is indirectly referred to in Sembène’s title. Moreover, the representations of Ali and Diouana reveal that the migratory process is one that impacts identity formation in powerful ways: they each Table 4 Three Cinematic Depictions of Migration Film Home Sweet Home Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Black Girl

Nation depicted Home Abroad Home/ transition/ abroad

Interior/ Exterior Both Interior/ Exterior Primarily interior Primarily interior

Title descriptions Location: Home Protagonist: Ali Protagonist: (Diouana)

Character decision Return to the homeland Remain overseas Remain overseas/ suicide



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feel a sense of dislocation, an absence of stability, and a persistent notion of incoherence.39 In Diouana’s representation specifically, there is little sense of a unified identity.40 Changes in geographical and social realities appear to cause intellectual and psychological struggles when they try to adapt to new cultural arrangements. Bai depicts his characters, in contrast to Fassbinder and Sembène, with a kind of unified identity incongruent with comparative depictions of migration at the time. Bai’s leading character Dr. Wu, like Mr. Zhiyun and Ms. Ruyin, is represented as an almost entirely centered entity, an “autonomous subject or ego,” that considers his border crossings and psychological transformations with a kind of modernist identity intact.41 And similar to Bai’s other primary characters, Wu finds happy resolutions to his problems, despite the difficulties intrinsic to the migratory experience, once he decides to stay in Taiwan. However, Bai’s characters remain exceedingly complicated entities on one level, considering how they fit within the entire structure of the film—and ultimately not because there is a discrepancy between what these characters believe and what the film intends for its audience to believe, and not because it is difficult to recognize that every character is typecast. After all, each personality is pigeonholed into a state-sanctioned stereotype by the film’s conclusion. Rather, what makes the characters complex is how the film presents them, not according to prevalent models of ideal citizenship, but rather, realistically portraying them as people caught within the predicament of Taiwan’s actual residents. It would seem that Bai’s characters are central to the film. However, since the storylines are quite simplistic, and the key participants are consistently portrayed as complicit with state policies, one might even go so far as to say these men and women are in fact the background of the film. In the foreground are onsite locations showcasing places the government desired to proudly display. All three segments of the film presents at least one such grand location. The settings—Sun Moon Lake (narrative 1), Chung Shan Hall (narrative 2) and the construction site of a dam (narrative 3)—each display the natural beauty of Taiwan or the accomplishments of the Nationalist’s modernization project, while Fassbinder and Sembène chose to focus primarily on interior spaces.42 The incorporation of exterior locations in Bai’s film is consistent with the overall construction of Taiwan in the film as a scenic, powerful, and progressive state. It is the state, not the people, which is paramount.

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Similar to the social condition of the historical time and place, Home Sweet Home contains no rational dialogue, nor does it present the perspective of those students who chose to remain apart from their home and family instead of living under Taiwan’s then-dictatorial regime. We do not see free choices based on reason or individual, subjective interests. The situation that the characters experience in the film is precisely the predicament of the populace in Taiwan in general: how can total freedom be achieved when that existence is managed, controlled, and manipulated by the state? This historical predicament was captured—recorded on celluloid—by motion picture cameras that present us today with a valuable reference point for life in Taiwan under the KMT regime. Thomas Elsaessar, an eminent scholar on Fassbinder’s films, once said that New German Cinema only existed after it was validated overseas, something that never happened to Taiwan film of the 1970s in the west. And, if considering the stereotypes expected of the art house circuit—subterranean characters with fractured psyches, exotic settings, and transfixing narratives—one might infer that Home, Sweet Home was not, and likely will never be, famous in the western art house scene as Fassbinder and Sembène remain today. Bai’s characters, out of historical time and place, in a country soon to lose its international identity, are anachronistically stable and optimistic subjects, instead of volatile and unstable as their material condition would imply. In these and other ways, Bai’s film helps reveal that nationalist rhetoric about what is natural and innate is in fact paradoxical and arbitrary.43 In the first two narratives of Home Sweet Home, Bai provides a key insight to the way his film is pre-arranged, formatted, framed—not necessarily free and natural—through the use of transparent postmodern devices such as the disorienting, fragmented split-screen montage shots and the multi-narrative technique that disrupts a linear presentation of the story. In the third segment, Bai’s choices undermine the film’s intent, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by suggesting why the students who left Taiwan might never return. Taken together, the narrative structure, editing patterns, settings and presentation of characters ensure that Home Sweet Home will remain a captivating object of inquiry for Taiwanese film studies because those structural components shift in meaning depending on one’s vantage point. Certainly, the richness and complexity of Home Sweet Home emerges from its fascinating context, and the ways in which it represents the role of migration in the singular state of Taiwan are clarified when placed within a



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transnational comparative framework. It is a story about four primary characters who decide to live in Taiwan. But it is also a film about an authoritarian regime reinforcing notions of “homeland” at the beginning of a decade which was to witness the most intense of transformations. Since everything that the characters embrace in the film, when they decide to remain in Taiwan, would not exist in the same ways in the following years, perhaps Bai’s film marks one of the last times the KMT government could refer to this homeland as “home, sweet home.”

4 Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s and Taiwan Cinema of the Early 1970s

In 1975 the Taiwan government’s most prestigious film prize, the Golden Horse for best film, was awarded to Director Li Xing for his Land of the Undaunted (Wu tu wu min), a period piece produced in the zhanzheng wenyi jupian (literary art war film) tradition. The film, set in China during the Japanese Occupation period, traces both the life and times of inspirational Headmaster Du (Wang Yin) who will not give in to his Japanese oppressors, and of his students and teachers, who must make their own difficult choices between preserving the dignity of China or giving in to the aggression of those who would destroy it. When imprisoned for his acts of resistance, Headmaster Du informs his Japanese oppressor: “You read our Chinese texts because it is the basis of your culture, your culture is inherited from China. . . . The Chinese are a strong and resilient people who will never surrender!” Certainly, there would be many profitable ways to analyze Land of the Undaunted; however, as the film still below makes clear, a focus on the film’s gender dynamics is particularly rewarding. In the film’s final sequence, the teachers and students struggle to understand the death of their headmaster, who has died while in captivity. The headmaster’s passing erased all hope for the students and instructors he left behind. Yet, in a symbolic act of defiance, an instructor named Mr. Li (Qin Han) reads the headmaster’s final letter to an enthusiastic and moved assembly of students. Since the Japanese military police cannot stand for such behavior, Mr. Li is carted off to prison for political insubordination. But then, in a final act of civil disobedience, the headmaster’s daughter Ms. Du (Lin Fengjiao) picks up the letter and continues reading where Mr. Li had left off. The symbolism is profound on multiple levels. Certainly, the notion that the people of China will never give up despite regional conflict is conveyed

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Figure 15 Ms. Du (Lin Fengjiao) reads Headmaster Du’s (Wang Yin) letter in Li Xing’s Land of the Undaunted.

clearly. Yet, in terms of gender representation, one observes the woman has been figuratively granted authority by her father. Indeed, as the daughter reads her father’s words, the scene captures her presence in the foreground as she reads, while the image of the deceased father looms large behind her. He peers over her shoulders, seeming to approve as his words fall from her lips. In fairness, when asked about this final image, Director Li Xing has stated that this image does not contain any inherent meaning or symbolism.1 But I would beg to differ, because seen in the framework of Taiwan’s film history in the early 1970s, this imagery conforms to a consistent pattern in film: women are represented as adopted into society by way of the approval of strong fathers. These films suggest that to belong to the nation is to have the approval of the patriarchs. My thesis in this chapter is that the finest film of early 1970s Taiwan cinema, Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother (Muqin sanshi sui), seen in comparison and contrast with Bai Jingrui’s interesting Goodbye Darling (Zaijian Alang) from 1970, not only demonstrates the ways in which patriarchal figures confer their approval and authority, but also that the representation of gender in the film sheds light on the larger geopolitical predicament of Taiwan at the time. In order to do so, my analysis of Story of Mother follows the constructive theoretical framework presented in Shu-mei Shih’s Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. My discussion of Story of Mother’s representations of women and female sexuality underscores



Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother 81

Shih’s claim: “there is no identity negotiation that is not at the same time a gendered negotiation. In highly volatile situations, the greatest fears and desires as well as the most fantastic projections of confidence are always articulated in gendered terms.”2 This theorization of gender might inform our understanding of Taiwan’s film representations of the early 1970s. In terms of “identity negotiation,” it is reasonable to conclude that the Chinese Nationalist Party’s censorship apparatus approved of films that presented its distinctive characteristics in an ideal manner.3 Next, an examination of state-approved filmic narratives, themselves structured representations of state-endorsed ideology, reveals that the resolution of conflict entails a “gendered negotiation.” In Story of Mother specifically, the resolution of the film has everything to do with how men and women were expected to behave in Taiwan society. Additionally, Shih’s discussion of “volatile situations” might be evaluated in two ways. First, one could consider that the conflicts within film narratives are presented as “volatile” situations. For example, Story of Mother focuses on an estranged relationship that threatens to divide a family in two. Second, the term “volatile” could apply to Taiwan’s regional and global identity during what could not be a more turbulent decade for a state that based its legitimacy on international recognition.4 The KMT government had based its identity as “free China” on the fact that it was recognized as such by the international community—itself a fictional representation that was altered drastically in 1971 with the United Nations recognition of China. Moreover, Shih describes how a “coherent pan-Chinese” cultural identity might be undermined by “disjunctions and contestations in the cultural and political arenas.”5 While Shih’s statement applies to the historical moment of 1990s Taiwan and Hong Kong, the notion that gender negotiation might destabilize a “coherent pan-Chinese” identity is also relevant to the film Story of Mother, which similarly “thwarts an easy assertion of the emergence of a pan-Chinese culture.”6 The cultural identity that Taiwan propounded in the early 1970s might be termed “pan-Chinese,” to use Shih’s appellation, because the characters on Taiwan’s silver screen, such as those in Land of the Undaunted, were expected to be models of a pan-Chinese identity propagated by the “Cultural Renaissance,” in contrast to the ideas of the “Cultural Revolution” on the mainland (see Chapter 3). Thus, this chapter describes how the depiction of gender in a captivating filmic text, Story of Mother, interconnects with its historical-material context during a time when a series of political setbacks plagued the government.

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Cinematic discourse and images are the product of social and cultural processes, which as Ann Kaplan writes, are by no means gender neutral.7 In turn, the cinematic image affects society—a phenomenon most evident when the discourse of film “precedes or exceeds” political discourse.8 These “excesses” might be located by noting disjunctions or points of slippage between what is portrayed on the screen and social mandates propagated by state film. Darrell William Davis elucidates this idea of excess: Film history is usually practiced using a kind of parallelism, establishing connections between fictional worlds onscreen (texts) and the actual world contained in primary documents from the same period (context). It is deeply satisfying when we “discover” correspondences between film imagery and documented historical fact—when it looks as if film indeed reflects film history. However, this sells film short. Films are themselves primary documents of history, and can reveal things about their time that other historical records might not.9

Accordingly, the depictions of gender and female sexuality in the following analysis might accurately portray gender roles and the social context of Taiwan in the early 1970s. This is to be expected, and it is a fascinating process in and of itself to observe these connections. But what is at times more captivating, as is the case in this chapter, is the way that Story of Mother exposes facets of society that perhaps the KMT government did not intend at the time. Story of Mother is a rich film that demonstrates, as a kind of social gauge, the possibilities available to directors when they took on projects that explore gender relations. In fact, film critic Cai Guorong recommended this film, along with Bai Jingrui’s Goodbye Darling (1970), when I discussed this chapter’s topic with him.10 Both films deal with depictions of gender negotiation and have stood out to scholars of Taiwan cinema and culture. Emilie Yeh and Darrell Davis offer a comprehensive analysis of the film, inspiring further discussion with insights including: “Bai’s Goodbye Darling has a number of moments that would have given Taiwan’s censors plenty of worry.”11 Similarly, Yingjin Zhang states that Story of Mother is “a rare study of female sexuality” in Taiwan.12 At the same time, in many ways these are extremely safe films, films that disclose what the KMT government deemed as acceptable, authorized, and valid representations; certainly, these are images that the state would not release otherwise. Story of Mother demonstrates the types



Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother 83

of gender identity that are acceptable, and which types of gender characteristics cause trouble in Taiwan’s wenyi or “literary art” film tradition.13 Lu Feiyi situates Story of Mother in the broader scope of Taiwan’s film industry, and thus helps clarify the types of films available to audiences during the early to mid-1970s. The number of films submitted for censorship approval from 1970 to 1975 is as follows: 117 (1970), 114 (1971), 81 (1972), 45 (1973), 66 (1974), 49 (1975).14 By 1975 the number of films submitted for censorship approval was far lower than the highest year of film production in Taiwan, 189 in 1968. This is due to a number of factors (see Chapter 1). In 1972 when Song released Story of Mother, 275 films were screened in Taiwan from abroad and another 135 from Hong Kong. In 1972 more films were made in the wenyi tradition than any other film category (27), while comedies came in second that year (20), with martial arts films third (7). During the time period in which Story of Mother was released, the government enforced a quota on the number of films that could be imported to allow the local industry to flourish. This reminds one of the way that national finances were managed in general in Taiwan, film being one aspect of an overall prosperous era of administered economic growth. Song Cunshou made over 25 films in his career, and certainly a standout film from his oeuvre is Story of Mother. As a Taipei film retrospective in 2008 attests, Song is one of the major figures of Taiwan cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.15 He is among the top five directors of this era, along with Li Xing, Bai Jingrui, Li Hanxiang, and Hu Jinquan (King Hu) the latter two known for “defecting” from Hong Kong in order to make films in Taiwan. Song, who originally worked in a printing shop, loved to watch films. After meeting directors Li Hanxiang and King Hu, he started working as a scriptwriter and log keeper for the Shaw Brothers.16 Eventually, he worked his way up the production chain until he was an assistant director; then, with Li Hanxiang’s assistance at Guolian Studios, Song became a director. In his own words, Song went through stages of being “an audience member, a researcher, and then a creator” of films over a ten-year period, a process that enabled him to perfect his craft.17 Song’s first film was a Minnanyu huangmeidiao (popular folk melody in Minnan dialect) film entitled A Perturbed Girl (Tian zhi jiao nü, 1966), which appeared at the height of the subgenre’s popularity. He would follow this film with pictures ranging from martial arts epics such as Iron Petticoat (Tieniangzi, 1969) to contemporary family dramas based on Qiong Yao’s novels such as

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Outside the Window (Chuangwai,1973). Song’s films are distinguished by his careful use of editing, willingness to work across multiple genres, and his placement of characters into situations where a series of allegiances and binary choices test their psychological limits. His work displays a keen knack for employing understatement wisely and an ability to portray subtle character emotion studies. In addition, Song is the type of consummate director who trusts his audience throughout his films. He withholds key names, dates and other relevant details until necessary, keeping the audience guessing and entertained. At the same time he maintains a balance between revealing too much information, like a TV soap opera, and not revealing enough information, like an intellectualized art house picture. These general observations apply to Story of Mother, a film that was critically received but did poorly at the box office. Song stated that film critics might have found the protagonist in Story of Mother to be too young to experience the events that transpire in the narrative, while at the same time it was hard to score a good result at the box office with a film that centers on the life of a middle-aged woman. Instead, Song argues, audiences preferred romances featuring younger actresses wearing beautiful clothes in luxurious settings.18 Regardless, Story of Mother includes such aesthetic virtues as well-paced editing, exquisite use of photographed images—such as those otherwise superficial framed family photographs hung on a domestic wall that in fact provide visual clues foreshadowing future scenes—and a colorful use of thematic images such as the oranges prominent in both present-tense and flashback sequences. Released by privately run Dazhong Studio, founded in 1968, Story of Mother is a melodrama that centers on the psyche of a young college student named Qingmao (Qin Han), who must struggle to accept that his mother (Li Xiang) cheated on his father when Qingmao was a young boy. As such, it is the first film to depict a mother’s affair in the history of Taiwan cinema.19 By the end of the film, Qingmao learns—by way of the advice from the strong female models in his life, namely his girlfriend and his Aunt—that he should take a more tolerant view of his mother’s former infidelity, and forgive her. Then, in an outrageous final scene, the unfortunate Qingmao is barred from reconciling with his mother because she is randomly struck by a taxi at a railroad crossing and dies as Qingmao looks on.20 Song benefited from the full backing of the Dazhong studio owners, including both Li Xing and Bai Jingrui, when he directed the film. Since Li



Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother 85

and Bai were film directors themselves, they understood that Song needed to retain full freedom to manage everything from actors to financial concerns, and that is what they allowed.21 The film did not pose any problems for Dazhong in terms of censorship, even though it might be considered the Lust, Caution (dir. Ang Lee, 2007) of its time due to its representation of sexuality. In the first sequence, and repeated via flashback in sequence 26, the mother expresses pleasure while in the arms of her lover. The shot entails the briefest of glances; however, it does push the envelope at a time when filming pornography would result in the death penalty.22 In any case, from the start the film was made to pass the approval of the censors without causing any problems, and that is indeed what occurred. Li Xing, the producer of the film, stated that he did not want to make films that would be altered later by others.23 In other words, one might say that Dazhong’s films were made to be complicit with state policy. In this way, in terms of what Taiwan and Southeast Asia’s audiences saw, there was not to be a major difference between the films released by the state and those that would be released by local and transnational private studios for the open market.24 In terms of filmic structure, one notes that in comparison with other Taiwan films of the early decade—for example Li Hanxiang’s costume drama The Story of Tin-ying (Tiying, 1970), Li Jia’s comedy The Fake Tycoon (Miao jile, 1971), Li Xing’s Autumn Execution (Qiujue, 1972), and Bai Jingrui’s romantic film Love in a Cabin (Bai wu zhi lian, 1972)—Story of Mother displays a complex narrative strategy. One could even argue that its level of narrative sophistication matches the films of Taiwan New Cinema a decade later. Sequences 7–17 of Story of Mother are comprised of an extended flashback, and moreover, an embedded flashback within the flashback. These flashbacks portray events that occur to Qingmao as a young boy (portrayed by a young Tuo Zonghua, who as an adult starred in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution). A sequence breakdown of the film in table 5, below, enables a more complex understanding of the film’s structure and patterns: As an analysis of the sequence breakdown indicates, this is an intricately constructed film. One of the first important themes to emerge is scopophilia. The idea of looking, seeing, and observing both sexuality and tragedy is projected in the first sequence: the boy follows his mother to her lover’s tryst and sees his mother in ecstasy while in bed with her lover (sequence 1). Later in the film Qingmao stays to watch his father confront his mother even though his father explicitly tells him to leave the room, after which his father dies

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Table 5 Story of Mother Sequence Breakdown

Story of Mother (Song Cunshou, 1972) System 1: Filmic Apparatus and Enunciation System 2: Principle of Spectatorship System 3: Interactants QM = Qingmao (Qin Han); M = his mother (Li Xiang); ML = his mother’s lover; MZ = his girlfriend, Meizhong; BM = his aunt, Bomu; QB = BM’s son, F = his father; BF = BM’s husband, or Bofu; QMB = his younger brother; MH = Mother’s second husband Settings: Primary: Alley (A), University (U), Coffee Shop(s) (CS), Bomu’s home in Taipei (BMH), Mother and Father’s home in Jiayi (MFH), Mother’s House after the Father dies (MH); Qingmao’s dorm room (QMD), Train (T) Secondary: Mother’s lover’s house (LH), Bus Stop (BST), City Walk (CW), Hospital (H), Funeral site (FS), BM’s backyard (BMBY), Meizhong’s dorm room: MZD, Nature Walk (NW), Hotel (H2) * Note: Shading indicates flashback sequences Seq.* 1

Setting A, LH

Interactants QM, M, ML

2

BM, QM, MZ

3

U, QMD, BST CS

4

CW

QM

5

T

QM, M, ML

6

QMD

QM

7a

QM, M, F, ML

7b

MFH, A, LH MFH

8

T, A

BM, QM

9

MFH

QM, F, BM, M

QM, MZ, QB

QM, M

Sequence Details Opening credits, spying sequence: QMB sees M making love Day 1: BM visits QM at the U in order to ask him to reconcile with M QM is emotionally incapable of hanging out with his friends when thinking about his mother QM goes for a walk through the city to clear his mind M meets ML on a train, ML offers M and QM oranges, M accepts, QM does not QM returns to QMD after his walk, he looks at a photograph of his father . . . fade out to another flashback . . .  Sequence 1 is fleshed out with scenes that occur before and immediately following sequence 1 M tries to reconnect with the now distant QM; QM writes a letter to BM BM takes a train to Jiayi, QM meets her at the station and they go home BM encourages F to go to Taipei to seek help for his illness, talks to M

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Table 5 (cont'd) Seq.* 10

Setting H

11

MFH

12 13

H FS

14 15

BMH BMBY

16

MH

17

BMH

18 19

QMD U

20 21

BMH MH

22 23

MH QMD, CS

24

U, NW

25

BMH

26

H2

27

U

28 29

MZD BMBY, BMH

Interactants Sequence Details QM, F, BM, BF F has his illness diagnosed, then returns home with QM on the train QM, F, M, ML ML is at home when F returns, F argues with M and then literally falls deathly ill F F dies in the hospital QM, M, BM, BM takes QM, QM’s two younger siblings stay BF with M QM, BM, QB QM becomes friends with QB QM, QM QM’s younger brother comes to BM for help— his M is not taking good care of him, and in fact, their younger sister dies from neglect QMB The story of QM’s younger siblings is depicted, an embedded flashback QM, BM, BF The story of QM’s younger brother comes to an end QM QM is reflecting (on sequences 7a–17) M, MZ Day 2 of the narrative: M goes to the U to talk to MZ BM, M BM and M discuss QM and MZ’s relationship QMB, MH, M M returns home from visiting BM, she is loyal to MH M, QMB M goes back to Taipei to get in touch with QM MZ, M M and MZ discuss how to get QM back into contact with M QM, MZ QM and MZ have a wonderful time together until MZ mentions M MZ, BM, QM, Day 3: BM and MZ plan to reunite QM with MZ, BF M; over dinner, QM learns that he has been accepted to study in the U.S., BF encourages him to make peace with his M QM, MZ, M QM and MZ visit M, it appears as if M is sleeping around in the hotel, so QM leaves the hotel in anger QM, MZ MZ tells QM to get over himself, especially when he says that he thinks all women are like M MZ, BM BM visits MZ in her dorm room QM, MZ, BM, BM tells QM that the apparent “lover” in M’s BF, QB hotel was just the owner delivering tea

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Table 5 (cont'd) Seq.* 30 31

Setting T MH

Interactants QM, MZ QM, MZ, QB

32

H

M, MH

33

MH, A

M, MH, QB

34

BMH

BF, M

35

TX/ T

QM, M

36

T

QM, M

Sequence Details QM and MZ go to visit M in Jiayi QM and MZ discover their mother is at the hospital M takes good care of MH (unlike how she treated F) M returns home to learn that she missed seeing QM M visits BM, but BF says that QM, MZ, and BM are at the train station M takes a taxi to see QM, meanwhile QM is leaving on a train, M sees QM on the train and runs towards his train, then she is struck by a taxi QM sees his mother lying on the road as his train takes him further away from her

of health complications (sequence 11). Furthermore, the mother is seen from subjective point of view shots as she sleuths around Qingmao’s university campus to see what he looks like after all the years of separation (sequence 19).25 Even the final sequence of the film involves Qingmao witnessing the death of his mother, who is struck by a vehicle at a railroad crossing. Thus, the motif of spying is introduced from the very first sequence of a film that represents multiple dichotomies: pleasure and pain, pre-adolescence naiveté and middle-aged sexuality, and private life and public life. A second significant element of this representation of Taiwan culture in the early 1970s is the way the camera tracks and traces the film’s dominant female characters as they glide effortlessly through settings and between scenes represented in the film. This notion is beautifully revealed in the second sequence of the film, in which Aunt Bomu sets the precedent for how female characters traverse the physical spaces of the film. The second sequence is divided into three scenes: first Aunt Bomu enters the university campus and speaks to Qingmao’s girlfriend Meizhong, then she proceeds to visit Qingmao in his dorm room, then she exits the scene by taking a city bus to head back home. The three scenes in this sequence are linked by her movements and presence, which also foreshadows the way Aunt Bomu will weave in and out of Qingmao’s life later in the film in the flashback sequences; for



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example, when the young Qingmao writes Aunt Bomu a letter regarding his father’s health and his mother’s infidelity (sequence 7b), Aunt Bomu in turn travels by train in order to help the boy. And in the final third of the film, she is a key negotiator between Qingmao and his mother. Certainly, Aunt Bomu and Qingmao’s girlfriend Meizhong, who separately and independently make peace with the mother before Qingmao attempts such a gesture, move back and forth freely between the spaces the mother occupies and those Qingmao inhabits. In this way, the film is progressive for its time; it appears to demonstrate that women’s secondary status was slowly changing. However, two key quotations that at first glance might appear to complement the stature of women in Taiwan society actually function as counterweights to the potential emergence of gender equality.26 The first quotation is by Aunt Bomu. In sequence 9 she tells the mother, as they fix dinner together in the kitchen: “As women we marry and have children, and as such we accept our fate.” Qingmao is seen in this scene spying on his aunt. He overhears the conversation, and recollects it within a flashback sequence, as if he longs for his mother to have accepted the advice of his aunt and “accept her fate” as a woman who must not commit adultery and thus detour from the path designated by the men in her life. The second quotation occurs in sequence 11, when Qingmao’s father confronts the mother about her secret trysts. She passionately explains: “Although I am a mother, I am a woman too!” This would seem to challenge the father and introduce to the discussion the idea that women should be treated as equal subjects rather than objects. However, since this scene is also presented in the film during a flashback sequence, its function in the narrative is to convey a memory that troubles Qingmao. This is the advantage of considering the structure of the narrative in conjunction with the film’s major themes: the mother’s statement is framed by her son’s psyche and recollection, she is part of his imagination and memory, part of his worldview. Thus, her assertion “Although I am a mother, I am a woman too!” on the one hand privileges the mother’s subjectivity. But, on the other hand, its function in the film is to cause anxiety to the protagonist who, in the present tense of the film, reacts with apprehension because such a statement entails equality with his father. These are statements that weigh on Qingmao’s psyche as he negotiates his transition to adulthood. Taken together, these statements suggest that the film does not present a free, uncontrolled, and unmonitored female sexuality as socially acceptable. While the film does push the envelope, and should

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be applauded for raising uncomfortable societal questions such as how one might accept extra-marital affairs, at its most mundane the film maintains the status quo. Intriguingly, Qingmao does not reconcile with his mother for a majority of the film. Early in the narrative, Qingmao safeguards his father’s power by pushing his mother completely out of his life; in this way he blindly holds on to a memory of a perfect father who suffered the ignominy of an unfaithful wife. Throughout this section of the narrative Qingmao’s character is depicted as unbearably ignorant and stubborn (see sequence 27). Again, it would seem that this blind acceptance of the father allows a space for the expression of female subjectivity, since clearly Qingmao holds on to notions of patriarchal authority without logic or reason. But it might also be argued that Qingmao’s father is cuckolded because he is too pathetic to prevent it. Indeed, the father is so frail he suffers a fatal heart attack the moment he attempts to confront his wife about her infidelity. With the father’s death, male authority passes to a son who understands neither his mother nor how to safeguard what is seemingly left of his own authority as a patriarch. The conflict of the film is that Qingmao is immobilized by his immaturity and the fact that his father is a terminally ill invalid and a weak patriarch. So, while women like Aunt Bomu freely maneuver the physical spaces of the film, it is Qingmao’s psychological transformation that enables the narrative to progress through its various stages of conflict, climax, and resolution. The world of the film swings according to the young man’s whims, whether advertently, as when he intentionally rejects his mother’s affection (sequence 7b), or inadvertently, as when he determines to resolve his conflict with his mother (sequence 35). Aunt Bomu and Qingmao’s intelligent girlfriend Meizhong try to influence Qingmao to change his mind; significantly, it is only after learning that his uncle supports the advice provided to him by Meizhong and Aunt Bomu that Qingmao chooses to reestablish a relationship with his mother (sequence 25). So, if the central question of the film, a question introduced in the film’s second sequence, is: should a mother’s infidelity and neglect of her children (sequence 15) be held against her indefinitely? Then the answer is no, for if one understands the mother’s point of view, she deserves compassion. Even her death is cast in a sympathetic light (sequence 36). However, an even more pertinent question remains: who confers this compassion and sympathy? Considering the way gender is presented in the film, it falls to



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the up-and-coming member of the patriarchal system, Qingmao, to earn his rightful role as masculine authority by conferring his approval. Due to the fact that the film never actually presents Qingmao as having reestablished a relationship with his mother, but rather presents only his change of heart, the film could be said to portray a man in the process of attaining his mantle of patriarchal authority, but not entirely achieving it. Qingmao preserves his authority in the film by recognizing that his father was weak and that he himself holds the power to integrate his mother back into his life and society. As for the leading women, they are active in so far as they desire to be with men for their sexual pleasure, (the mother) and in the way they make decisions for themselves (Aunt Bomu and Meizhong). The women are considerate, compassionate, and sensitive. Yet one could say that theirs is a subjectivity that poses no threat as long as there are powerful men in charge. Men in the film must be on their guard: at any moment the mother—who is never named, and thus functions as archetype—might have an affair if her husband is a pushover, weak, and ignorant. Such men as Qingmao’s father will meet the fate they deserve if they are not cautious. In the end, these archetypes: the pathetic father and impetuous mother, pass away. What remains is the enlightened son. Bai Jingrui’s film Goodbye Darling offers a different critique of Taiwan’s male youth. Released by Wansheng Studios two years prior to Story of Mother in 1970, the same year that Bai also directed Home, Sweet Home (see Chapter 3), Goodbye Darling could be deemed a safe film in a number of ways. Unlike the unique editing styles inherent to Home Sweet Home, Goodbye Darling conforms to the continuity editing style in the classical Hollywood mode that was typical of Taiwan film. And while it is a film that does not take extreme risks in terms of political statements, it certainly displays Bai’s willingness, unlike many of his peers, to experiment with camera angles and color lens filters. For example, when the main character, Guizhi (performed by Zhang Meiyao, a former Taiwanese-language film star) puts on her new sunglasses in sequence 4, the subjective point of view shot is tinted red, as if the audience is seeing through her eyes. And, in a brilliant conclusion to the thirteenth sequence, Alang angrily throws his t-shirt at the camera (after pulling the cranes off of a light cord, and then turning the light on, which is amazing considering sequence 8), effectively fading the image to black, creating a natural segue. And Bai’s use of parallel editing is surprising and innovative,

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taking into account that other directors in Taiwan were not attempting such strategies. A sequence breakdown reveals the nuances of a narrative that is a study in contrasts. Old Monkey, a fifty-one-year-old band manager who is continually haggled and easily manipulated by the women in the band, exemplifies the film’s weak male character. Conversely, the strong female characters are typified by the band owner, called Auntie. Her authority carries weight when it comes to any issue that arises in the band dormitory. Emotionally, the band goes as Auntie goes: if she is happy, they follow suit, if she says stop, they stop on a dime, if she is upset, everyone listens. Old Monkey seeks her when he needs advice, and pleads with her to serve as his matchmaker. The main female character, Guizhi, is also a stalwart figure. As a new band member she maintains her optimism, keeps her composure under pressure, and is willing to give a series of second chances to the ill-mannered Alang. She also manipulates Old Monkey into paying her bond to the band, demonstrating clever survival skills and a keen wit. The most important strong-willed character in the film is Alang, but his strength connotes things negative: he is from southern Taiwan, uncontrollable, and violent. The uncouth, hyper-masculine strategies he uses to negotiate gender boundaries are unacceptable. Like the narrative strategies used in Story of Mother, the film presents many scenes that justify the rejection of Alang as a patriarch. In sequence 4 of the film he sadistically forces himself on top of Guizhi in order to rape her, but she effectively bites his mouth to get him off. Alang repeatedly knocks down anything in his way, both physical objects like a table in a night market and a gambling booth in a day market; he even throws Old Monkey down a flight of stairs. He messes around with prostitutes and gets beaten up by the liumang (local thugs) from his neighborhood. He smashes Guizhi square in the face in sequence 17, and in sequence 23 he screams at her: “If you weren’t pregnant, I would kick you to death!” In these ways he is vile through and through. Still, his rough charm appeals to Guizhi. In fact, after he strikes her, she claims that he is not so despicable as to kill her. His attitude appears to change after he finds work as a truck driver in the final half of the film, making him seem more content with both himself and the world around him. It should also be noted that, like Story of Mother, the film might be said to leave a space for the expression of female sexuality. And while it is no more daring than Song’s film, and certainly in line with state censorship

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Table 6 Goodbye Darling Sequence Breakdown

Goodbye Darling (Bai Jingrui, 1970) System 1: Filmic Apparatus and Enunciation System 2: Principle of Spectatorship System 3: Interactants GZ = Guizhi; OM = Old Monkey, band manager; AU = Auntie, band owner; AL = Alang; band members = collective residents of BD Settings Primary: Band Dormitory (BD), Alang’s Room (ALR), AL and GZ’s house in Kaohsiung (AL/GZH), Driving Recklessly on the Road (OTR) Secondary: Street Parade (SP), Guizhi’s Room (GZR), Night Market (NM), Day Market (DM), Auntie’s Room (AUR). (the minor settings of the Kaohsiung segment: the pool hall [PH], truck docks [TD], and train station [TS] occur in one scene) Seq. 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

9

Setting Interactants Sequence Details SP GZ, band Title, and opening voice-over while a band marches members in a small southern Taiwan city; one of the girls is frustrated with GZ’s poor performance BD OM, band Two scuffles: the band members storm the office for members their pay, then two female characters (Au Tao and Fang Mei) tussle over who is Alang’s girl BD OM, GZ OM trains GZ to be the band leader, OM gives her new shoes and sunglasses, making one of the girls jealous GZR GZ, AL GZ and AL meet, he tries to force himself on her, but GZ bites him, the close-up POV shots during this struggle contrast with sequence 13, at the end of the scene Auntie and OM arrive to kick AL out of GZR SP band The band performs along a waterfront members NM OM, GZ, AL OM takes GZ out to eat in the night market, there AL causes a public scene that amuses GZ BD AL, AU Alang goes to the BD in order to ask AU if he can rejoin the band, she consents, then some thugs come to the BD and beat AL up ALR AL, GZ GZ goes to ALs’ flat while he is recovering from his beating and they make love, signified by a close-up of a light bulb BD GZ, OM GZ sneaks back to the BD, but is noticed by OM who inquires after her

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Table 6 (cont'd) Seq. 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

Setting Interactants Sequence Details DM AL, GZ, OM AL, out with GZ, causes a scene during a day market; an opera is being performed in the background, OM spies on the couple ALR AL, GZ, OM After returning to ALR, GZ is frustrated with AL’s behavior and leaves, OM tells AL to stay away from GZ, then AL throws OM down the stairs AUR OM, AU OM asks AU to forbid AL from coming around the BD and to serve as the matchmaker between OM and GZ ALR AL, GZ, AU, AL and GZ make love, AU and OM arrive to take GZ OM back to the BD SP band GZ faints while performing with the band on a blismembers tering hot afternoon in the countryside GZR GZ, OM GZ recovers from heatstroke with OM’s assistance, they agree to marry AUR OM, AU, GZ OM pays AU the money that binds GZ to the band, during the ensuing celebration with the other band members, GZ sneaks off ALR GZ, AL GZ goes to AL’s messy apartment and tells him she is pregnant with his child, but is marrying OM, he is infuriated BD OM OM plays a somber tune on his flute—it has been a month now since GZ left him NM OM OM goes to the night market for dinner, and learns AL has moved to Kaohsiung with a woman (GZ) PH AL, GZ GZ goes to a PH to see AL, he refuses to see her there BD OM OM leaves to find GZ and AL, he falls down the stairs as he leaves DM AL AL is told not to hawk watermelon along a waterfront in Kaohsiung AL/GZH AL, GZ AL demeans GZ in a heated argument by throwing water and insults at her AL/GZH OM, GZ, AL OM comes to get his money from GZ, but upon learning of her pregnancy and poor condition, decides not to ask for it, just then AL walks in the door excited about his new job as a truck driver OTR AL AL drives a truck full of pigs to Taipei, and crashes AL/GZH AL, GZ GZ tells AL he will surely crash again if he keeps up this dangerous occupation



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Table 6 (cont'd) Seq. 27 28 29 30 31

Setting Interactants Sequence Details TG GZ, AL GZ tells AL not to drive or GZ will move to Taipei TS AL, GZ AL asks GZ to stay, but as AL is determined to drive trucks, GZ leaves OTR GZ, AL GZ (on a train) witnesses AL (driving his truck) come to his fiery death in a dramatic train/truck collision SP GZ, OM The band plays on the modern streets of Taipei SP band The cautionary voice-over states: “Goodbye, Alang!” members

restrictions, it manages to represent the pleasure of sex for both women and men in equal measure. Consider the sex scene in sequence 13, which is described elegantly by Yeh and Davis as “simple and exemplary.”27 The scene is silent, without a diegetic or non-diegetic track: first a prone, enraptured Guizhi lies eyes closed in medium shot, facing Alang above her // cut to two paper cranes swinging from a light cord, an orange one on top of a pink one // cut to Alang’s face covered in sweat, eyes closed; then he opens them to look down upon Guizhi // cut again to the cranes, the close-up zoomed in closer than before // cut to Guizhi from Alang’s point of view as she reaches a climax // then a point of view shot from Guizhi looking up at Alang, his eyes open, beaming // cut to another shot of a blissful Guizhi // another shot of Alang beaming // back to Guizhi // cut to the cranes // then a lightly played solo piano soundtrack begins as Alang slowly lies down next to Guizhi, seen from her point of view, he is hot and sweaty in the brightly lit room. As the images move back and forth between the two in this scene, both seem to be enjoying the other and themselves. Moreover, as in Story of Mother, it is Guizhi who initiates their association: she comes alone to his room, in control of her own sexuality and desire. Neither this film nor Story of Mother presents any character that frowns on such behavior. And yet, while Alang and Guizhi might share gender equality in their moment of passion, this is not consistently the case throughout the film. Again, the structure that frames the film undermines such a reading. The film is initiated with a voice of god voice-over, with the moving image of a marching band performing in the background: “Countries are developed rapidly / Above all, Taiwan is outstanding / Many years ago / Three-wheeled carriages were very popular / You could see many low-level buildings too /

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[During that time] There was a girl band at the southern part [sic] . . .” The setting, as the introduction attests, is that of a bygone era, before modernization transformed the island. Thus begins the story of Guizhi, a band member who falls in love with a James Dean-type, Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955) character performed convincingly by Ke Junxiong.28 After Guizhi becomes pregnant, she rejects an opportunity to marry the aged but responsible, albeit weak-willed Old Monkey, and instead moves with Alang to Kaohsiung, where Alang takes a job as a truck driver. Guizhi eventually leaves him; while she is en route to Taipei she sees Alang crash his truck and meet his unlucky end. At the conclusion of the film, as Guizhi performs with a band in Taipei, the same “voice of god” voice-over concludes the film: “Now, three-wheeled carriages exist no longer / And no more low-level buildings / Instead there are paved roads and high sky-scrapers / What about people like Alang? / He is of imprudent and rough character / That won’t suit the present industrial society / So his final conclusion is natural/ Pity can we just say: ‘Goodbye, Darling’!”29 Goodbye Darling, like Story of Mother, was released during the state’s modernization effort, an effort that clearly excludes characters like Alang (see Chapter 3). This “renaissance,” as Jason Kuo persuasively writes in Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan, included the glorification of the nation on all fronts: guoyu (national language), guoyue (national music), guoju (national theatre, Peking Opera), and guohua (national painting).30 This chapter might offer an intervention in the discussion of Taiwan cinema by considering the relationship between gender and this nationalistic state project. Goodbye Darling signals that Alang’s expression of identity will not enable society to advance according to KMT policy. Even though he speaks guoyu, he is not a cultured, modern citizen who would enjoy guoyue, guoju, or guohua. However, while the film cautions men to avoid acting in anti-social ways like Alang, the behavior of the women is not condemned. Goodbye Darling portrays Auntie as a more than capable authority on the local level. The film does not portray any negative occurrences for any of the women of the band who flock after Alang (sequence 7), or fight for his attention (sequence 2). Guizhi is consistently portrayed sympathetically throughout the film. Still, it is the male figure that remains the central figure of the film. Yet he is too assertive, irresponsible, and unmanageable. So it is in alignment with state policy that his death, like Mother’s death in Story of Mother, minimizes any



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threat that his on-screen, non-conformist behavior might hold for society in general. As Shuqin Cui asserts in her text Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema, gender discussions should occur in the context of “self-motivated” movements, rather than within the parameters of a patriarchal nationalism.31 I would argue that such perspectives propounded by Cui are not to be found in the films discussed here. So, rather than a movement from the grassroots, one might conclude that the structure of Story of Mother and the character portrayal of Alang in Goodbye Darling reveals that this presentation of gender behavior was endorsed by the KMT state. And this was a state in a “volatile” situation, to return to Shih’s terminology. The correlation between the political situation in the early 1970s Taiwan film industry and its representation of gender is surprising. While Taiwan’s international prestige decreased as the decade wore on, the state endorsed wenyi film style transitioned to a new era of kangri (resist-Japanese) films that represented the KMT regime as successful in regional and global conflicts. A key moment in this transition occurred in October 1972, when CMPC’s manager Gong Hong, the father of Healthy Realism, left his post and Mei Changling took the helm of the studio. Mei was born in Henan in 1924 and arrived with the KMT in 1949. He had garnered acclaim previously by producing Li Hanxiang’s kangri film Storm over the Yang-zi River (Yangzijiang fengyun, 1969), and more films in this vein were to follow. Throughout the 1970s a patriotic, nationalist film style depicted the defeat of foreign threats whenever and however they arose, including The Everlasting Glory (Yinglie qianqiu, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1974), Eight Hundred Heroes (Babai zhuangshi, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1976), Victory (Meihua, dir. Liu Jiachang, 1976) and A Teacher of Great Soldiers (Huangpu jun hun, dir. Liu Jiachang, 1978).32 It should be noted that Mei also produced films in other genres, including He Never Gives Up (Wangyang zhong de yi tiao chuan, dir. Li Xing, 1978) (see Conclusion). Despite dramatic changes in film style and genre, depictions of gender remained in many ways unchanged. In 1972 Story of Mother features a future patriarch who must forgive the mother’s sins and learn to emulate his uncle, a model of strength in contrast to his own sickly, cuckolded father. In the 1975 film Land of the Undaunted, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, gender equality is not fully realized since a female may only speak under the auspices of the father. So, if one is to look to Story of Mother to locate female characters that exceed their cultural norms, one might find it to a certain extent, but

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not to the degree that women earn rights equal to their male counterparts.33 Moreover, the organization of the film, as the semiotic sequence breakdowns attest, shows that when female subjectivity is expressed, it is encapsulated or carefully framed within the memory of a future patriarch who might approve or disapprove of female expressions of identity. So, to return to Davis’s point established early in the chapter: “[f]ilms are themselves primary documents of history, and can reveal things about their time that other historical records might not,” what does a film that represents gender negotiation in the early 1970s reveal about Taiwan’s precarious political situation? Why, in the ever-transforming political climate, the evertransitioning film market, and the ever-changing styles of the films, does the portrayal of gender remain constant? Why is it that women require the guidance of a firm father in order to function in society? One interpretation might be that fathers, by extension, stand in for the patriarchal KMT authority concurrently in power in Taiwan. If so, a potential reading might be that the consistent representation of the patriarchs throughout the early 1970s correlates with the KMT state’s consistent international policy—despite all challenges to their governance and political standing. Politically, the Nationalist’s constantly propagated their position as the seat of all of China in the early 1970s as both theirs already (since the government was recognized as the Republic of China) and something that must be earned and maintained (after they had lost legal representation in the United Nations). The depiction of Qingmao’s emotional struggles in Story of Mother demonstrates the psychological impasse inherent to this double bind. Qingmao provides a fictional representation of this phenomenon since he is one who is always already the centerpiece of the film—since he is the primary male—and yet at the same time must both earn and maintain this position by forgiving his mother and recognizing the weakness of his father before him. In contrast, Alang fails to earn proper respect as patriarchal figurehead. Perhaps Shih’s statement that “the greatest fears and desires as well as the most fantastic projections of confidence are always articulated in gendered terms” requires qualification. Still, the essence of Shih’s sentiment resonates with Story of Mother when considering the representation of Qingmao as patriarchal authority. After all, so much is at stake in this national allegory: will Qingmao maintain his privileged status, or will he, like his father, be cuckolded as well?



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Story of Mother could not be produced at any other time or place in history. It is a film specific to the ever-transitional local and contingent context of Taiwan in the early 1970s. Still the influence of the global was always part of the equation, as the local and global interwove in a web of power and history. Ella Shohat writes that in the evaluation of transitional situations, the cultural critic should show the “different levels and valences embedded in it.”34 In this discussion, the valences include the cinematic image and a national film institution set within a volatile social context. Despite all of the variables, one might still locate with a degree of clarity a handful of insights embedded in the gender representations in Story of Mother. Naturally, many stones remain unturned, but this case study has attempted to demonstrate that the KMT state propounded a version of gender inequality in early 1970s cinema that perhaps unintentionally encapsulated its geopolitical quandary. As the turbulent 1970s concluded and the transitional 1980s began, new political issues would in turn be captured on celluloid to represent the historical permutations and social instabilities that would follow.35

Conclusion Transnationalism and the Structure of Feeling of Taiwan Cinema in the Late 1970s

The story of Taiwan cinema in the early 1960s begins in many ways with Li Xing, and that of the late 1970s concludes with Li Xing and his dominant films. This chapter again focuses on his films as case studies in order to both re-address the main ideas presented in previous chapters and develop three preliminary observations on the state of Taiwan cinema at the end of the 1970s, a pivotal moment in Taiwan film history. In the first of my observations I juxtapose Frederic Jameson’s perspective of global capital in his essay “Remapping Taipei” with Yvonne Chang’s argument regarding Taiwan’s literary scene in her article “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development” in order to analyze the intersection of the global and the local in Edward Yang’s landmark film. Second, I consider the legacy of the Healthy Realist tradition and classify the variety of films that followed into four categories. Third, I initiate a comparison of new cinema movements by locating similarities and differences between the rise of the auteur director in New American Cinema of the 1970s and Taiwan’s New Cinema movement of the 1980s. It remains a constant that the history of filmmaking in Taiwan during the late 1970s is relatively unexplored, perhaps because the dominant modes of filmmaking during that decade are so straightforward that they do not deserve the close attention that films of the 1980s command. After all, Li Xing and his colleagues were not the masters of mise-en-scène, long takes, narrative, and color that art house aficionados and highbrow academics might prefer to study. But such a dismissal neglects two things: First, the popularity of the old films. Members of the “old guard” still believe—often for good reason—that the pre-1980, “golden-age” of cinema trumps post-1980-era international film awards and representations of characters from the margins of society. To the participants of yesteryear, it is the post-1980 era that is easy to overlook

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because its films have been unpopular in Taiwan. When I asked actress Li Xiang of Story of Mother: “What do you think about Taiwan New Cinema? Many scholars abroad believe that it produced Taiwan’s best cinema.” She responded: “No, that is not the case. When Li Xing was making his films— when I was acting in films—that was when films were on the rise. The films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang in the early 1980s were produced when Taiwan’s films were in decline.” While film personnel of that era, such as Li Xiang cited above, might not have the final word in matters of cultural and historical critique, the popularity of films at various junctures in Taiwan’s history should be taken into account. Taiwan cinema of the 1960s and 1970s produced a foundation, a structure of feeling, that filmmakers respond to in Taiwan even today. Second, as with all cultural artifacts, films of the 1970s are connected to a complex array of historical-material events. As Raymond Williams writes, “The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also in transformational processes.” Certainly, all societies are “complex,” but more importantly, film traditions in Taiwan were forged within specific historical contexts as emergent, residual, and dominant trends coincided with the fluctuations of transnational cultural exchange.1 The transnational method used in this text is most clearly articulated in this text by employing a comparative framework. Chapter 2, “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films,” presents my transnational theoretical model in a comparative mode. Upon examining filmmaking strategies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War, it is apparent that film aesthetics were used in surprisingly similar ways due to a shared residual heritage. In both locations, described as the “nations” of Taiwan and China, the reach of global film traditions is evident in the discussion of Shanghai realism (a residual tradition), Italian neorealism (an emergent tradition), Hollywood filmmaking (dominant in Taiwan) and socialist realism (dominant on the mainland). Yet regional geopolitical differences during the Cold War did not, and at times due to the apparent solidity of language and historical record, often do not allow us to clearly see similarities where in fact they reside. The third chapter, “Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film Home Sweet Home,” compares three films from across the globe. While the dominant, emergent, and residual



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trends in Taiwan in 1970 (dir. Bai Jingrui, Home Sweet Home), in Germany in 1974 (dir. Fassbinder, Ali), and in Africa in 1966 (dir. Sembène, Black Girl), are most definitely singular and particular, the three films are linked by their depictions of migration, a primary concern of transnational critiques. While the possibility of tracing all of the cultural variables in each of the three nations is beyond the scope of the essay, the conclusion of Chapter 3 reveals how comparing films brings into sharper focus the emergent trends in each location.2 There is a sense of hopefulness projected in Sembene’s and Fassbinder’s films for a new future, for the idea that a new dominant, a new definition of “normal,” might emerge. Sembène’s film questions the extent to which racism limits the rights of African workers both at home and abroad, and Fassbinder challenges anti-miscegenation in Germany. However, in the case of Taiwan in 1970, Bai Jingrui’s authorized depiction of migration reveals that Taiwan’s citizens were expected to function as pawns of the state, precisely the identity that the nativist (xiangtu) writers would confront during the decade. Thus, transnational theory, grounded by a focus on historicalmaterial processes, affords the freedom to compare films produced within various film traditions from across the globe without privileging one tradition over another, which might occur in hierarchically configured comparative studies programs which might use a “secondary” text to reveal the nuances of a “primary” text. At the same time, my articulation of transnational theory is also well positioned to take into account the ways in which global forces of capital interact with conditions on the local scale. Within such a framework, a reassessment of “Remapping Taipei” provides a valuable way to understand both Taiwan film in the 1970s and the emergence of Taiwan’s new wave of filmmaking in the 1980s. I argue below that Jameson’s article reveals why it is necessary to consider both the “positioning of the national entity within the new world system of late capitalism”3 and the local interrelationship of literature and film cultures in Taiwan in order to understand the film Jameson critiques, namely The Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi, dir. Edward Yang, 1986). In Jameson’s article, the “world system of late capitalism” is described with specificity while an understanding of Taiwan’s local film and literature cultures is almost entirely, and extremely problematically, omitted. Accordingly, I place Jameson’s observations within a discussion of Taiwan’s literature and film cultures below.

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The Jameson Debate To begin this discussion, definitions and examples of nativism and modernist literature in Taiwan in the 1970s are in order to fill a void absent in Jameson’s familiar article. Taiwan nativist literature initially advocated for the protection of local traditional and agrarian culture in Taiwan as a form of resistance against the assimilation and modernization movements imposed during Japanese occupation.4 The “revival” of the nativist literature movement reflects the transitional period of the 1970s in Taiwan culturally, geographically, and historically. Nativist literature conveyed the experience of local Taiwanese whose perception of history and society differed from that of the Mainlanders who arrived in 1949. The nativist writers expressed feelings from the perspective of the rural and mountainous regions, representing those who had lived on the periphery of urban centers. And they decried the excesses inherent to rapid industrialization and urbanization in the 1970s. Historically, the nativist position was characterized by its opposition to foreign governance, be it Japanese Occupation or KMT forces. Angelina Yee, in her article “Constructing a Native Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the 20th Century,” summarizes the nativist point of view as: a) against Western values such as capitalism, materialism, imperialism, b) against the minority KMT Nationalist government that perpetuated the myth of returning to the mainland, repressed the local populace with violence and imprisonment, and disallowed the formation of new political parties, and c) against the Mainland Chinese government which the nativists characterized as regressive, oppressive, and economically backward.5 Authors of the nativist movement include Wang Tuo, Yang Qingchu, Chen Yingzhen and Wang Zhenhe.6 Hwang Chun-ming, while taken as an advocate for the nativist position by nativist supporters, might fit less precisely in this company of nativist authors since he is quite unconcerned with how he is classified. Still, he has written stories that serve as a wonderful example of literature depicting the countryside from a local Taiwanese perspective. His short story, “The Drowning of an Old Cat,” published in 1974 by Dalin Publishing Company, takes place in a remote town named Clear Spring Village renowned for a pristine natural spring providing fresh water to its community. However, due to modernization projects (sponsored by the KMT, see Chapter 3) and the expansion of the urban into rural spaces, Clear Spring Village is threatened with development by the town leaders of Jiezai, a



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nearby city. When the townspeople of Jiezai arrive in Clear Spring Village to build a swimming pool, four old men try to stop the building project because they want to maintain the rustic charm of their town. This group of elderly patriarchs is led by Ah-sheng who protects the land because, as he states, “I love this piece of land and everything on it.”7 Ah-sheng fails to stop the building of the pool, however, and in an event that is both humorous and tragic, Ah-sheng drowns in the swimming pool in the story’s final scene. In a critique of “Drowning of an Old Cat,” Howard Goldblatt writes: “The land itself stands in the way of progress and must be sacrificed to the god of modernization.”8 The dualisms in Hwang’s story, modernity vs. tradition, and rural vs. urban, are common themes in nativist literature which contrasts with modernist writing in Taiwan. Modernist literature continued to thrive in Taiwan directly after the postwar years, unlike on the mainland. As Michelle Yeh argues, the modern poetry of Taiwan can be distinguished by its language and form. It was written in the vernacular and focused on language exploration and evocative word combinations These features distinguished it from classical poetry, which maintained the conventional meter and rhythm of its 3000-year tradition as a “sister art” to calligraphy and painting.9 Modern poetry during the 1920s and 1930s on the Mainland was inspired by sentiments expressed during the May Fourth Movement—which had also motivated Taiwan’s nativist writers of the 1920s. However, any direct connections to leftwing elements of the May Fourth movement were thwarted after 1945 in Taiwan by the Nationalist’s censorship of texts by writers such as Lu Xun and Lao She. After the KMT government established its leadership in Taipei in 1945, poetry in Taiwan was often characterized by anti-communist, pro-nationalist themes; however, a collection of poets who employed modernist writing techniques, including obscure language and reflections on metaphysical dilemmas, discovered that abstract verse not only allowed them to express their anxiety and frustration, but in addition these sentiments could be published without detection by KMT government censors. The group of writers that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s include Wang Wenxing and Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong). These writers displayed a “double alienation” from the writing tradition on the Mainland and from the physical geography of the Mainland that was their home.10

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An example of modernist poetry includes Shang Qin’s surrealist poem entitled, “Giraffe,” Written in two stanzas, the first consisting of four lines and the second of three lines: After the young prison guard noticed that at the monthly physical check-up all the height increases of the prisoners took place in the neck, he reported to the warden: “Sir, the windows are too high!” But the reply he received was: “No, they look up at Time.” The kindhearted young guard didn’t know what Time looks like, nor its origin and whereabouts, so night after night he patrolled the zoo hesitantly and waited outside the giraffe pen.11

This poem does not follow Hwang Chun-ming’s realistic and humanistic portrayal of Clear Spring Village, or its endearing populace that lives in a close relationship with the landscape. In contrast, Shang Qin’s poem focuses on existential problems and separation anxiety, evoked by such terms as “prisoner” and “freedom,” and feelings of exile particular to modernist poets and writers. The journal Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature, 1960–1973) was founded by Taiwan University students the year after this poem was written. The publication was an important part of the modernist literary movement in Taiwan; it also published translations of Western authors such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Modernist and nativist literature clashed publicly in the 1970s in a dispute which centered around the extent to which the perspectives held by the respective camps accurately represented the experience of living in Taiwan under the KMT. The nativist literature debates demonstrated the divide between nativist writers who claimed that the modernists were not adequately representing the political and social experience of the local benshengren of Taiwan, and the modernists, who argued that the nativist writers were separatists. The debates pitted a local Taiwanese humanist realist tradition against the Mainlanders who displayed aesthetic formalism.12 In 1972, these differences were at the heart of the “New Poetry” debates, in which nativist criticism was directed towards the modernists for not using traditional Chinese techniques or Taiwan’s local dialects in their writings. The debates culminated in 1977–1978, following a government organized conference in 1977 entitled the “Symposium of Literary Workers,” during which attacks on nativist literature took center stage.13 The nativist writers were accused



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of being communists due to their anti-KMT stance, an emotionally charged attack bolstered by concurrent reports of atrocities committed by the communists on the mainland during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the use of the Taiwanese dialect in nativist literature, a language banned in public schools, appeared to be a break with a Chinese nationalism. Nativist writers, such as Chen Yingzhen who defended both his use of language and his allegiance to a Chinese consciousness, denied this accusation.14 The xiangtu literary debates, concerned as they were with the relationship between literary expression and politics, became inextricably linked to film production in the 1970s. This is not to say that prior to the 1970s, film and literary worlds remained apart. Indeed, the fiction of novelist Qiong Yao left an indelible mark on Taiwan filmmaking. Between 1965 and 1970, 22 of her films, including some made by the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, were adapted to the screen.15 Li Xing was the first director to adapt her work when he made Four Loves (see Chapter 2), and Song Cunshou’s film Story of Mother was also a Qiong Yao adaptation (see Chapter 4). Yao’s escapist narratives, including stories set in the early Republican eras that recount love gained and love lost, were a standard genre in their own right in the sentimental and romantic films of the 1960s and 1970s. The film adaptations of Qiong Yao’s work were easily appropriated as part of the “Healthy Realist” tradition and its subsequent modifications. Although they were not to have the same staying power as Qiong Yao’s adaptations, by the late 1970s Taiwan’s film industry embraced a new trend: adapting nativist stories to Taiwan’s screens. Li Xing was at the forefront of this movement. Not surprisingly, his films presented nativist stories with a distinctly state-endorsed point of view. This point of view can be observed in four of Li Xing’s late 1970s and early 1980s films: He Never Gives up (Wangyang zhong de yi tiao chuan, 1978), Good Morning, Taipei (Zao’an Taibei, 1979), The Story of a Small Town (Xiaocheng gushi, 1980), and My Native Land (Yuan xiangren, 1980). Li Xing won the Golden Horse Award for best picture in 1978 with He Never Gives Up, in 1979 with The Story of a Small Town, and in 1980 with Good Morning, Taipei. The Story of a Small Town, classified as xiangtu pian (nativist film), was selected as one of the top three pictures of the year in 1979 by the Chinese Film Critics Association (Zhongguo yingpinren xiehui) of Taiwan. The film begins in a prison woodshop, where a wizened patriarchal figure named Lailao, portrayed by the father in both Beautiful Duckling and in

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the first narrative of Home Sweet Home, invites a younger fellow convict, Chen Wenxiong (Kenny Bee), to work with him on the outside once they have served their sentences. Wenxiong agrees, and after some time they work together in Lailao’s woodworking shop in Sanyi, a small town north of Taichung known throughout the island for its famous woodcarvings. There Wenxiong falls in love with Lailao’s daughter, the deaf Axiu, portrayed by Lin Fengjiao, who won the Golden Horse award for her performance.16 Lailao, Wenxiong, and Axiu’s lives are occasionally disrupted by local ruffians as well as superficial urbanites who seemingly arrive only to disturb the local family’s values of discipline, hard work, and unity. The film concludes with a song that, like the theme song in Home Sweet Home, conveys the message of the film: “Generation after generation/ Features of the small town remain the same.” All the while, panning shots depict a pastoral Sanyi, nestled beside lush mountains and verdant rice fields, while interior shots show a humble dwelling inhabited by kind and trustworthy residents. Li Xing’s film, which avoids the controversial issues often addressed in nativist stories, was among the successful films at the box office before the film production slump of the mid-1980s.17 Once the decline in the local film market was accurately forecast, the KMT government became willing to provide a greater opportunity for more thought-provoking stories and film strategies from its film personnel, including Chen Kunhou, Wang Tong, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and to newcomers such as Edward Yang and Wan Ren. Taiwan New Cinema emerged during this moment of transition.18 In the new climate, screenwriters such as Wu Nianzhen and Chu T’ien-wen advocated for “a return (or ‘regression’) to daily practices of Taiwanese languages and behaviors, things that audiences for taiyu pian had lost, and that had never been seen onscreen by younger people.”19 The example par excellence of this desire is represented in The Sandwich Man (Erzi de da wan’ou, 1983), a tri-part film adapted from three stories by Hwang Chun-ming, and directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zeng Zhuangxiang, and Wan Ren that has been written about extensively.20 Enter Frederick Jameson. His famous essay “Remapping Taipei” focuses on Edward Yang’s 1986 Taiwan New Cinema film The Terrorizers. The film is a multi-narrative work that includes the intersection of three storylines: a photographer who captures Taipei life, a Eurasian woman known as “White Chick” who attempts to swindle money and is involved in multiple relationships (captured by the photographer), and a professional couple—a doctor



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and his wife, a novelist who feels trapped within the closed space of their residence. Taipei, with its geometric cityscape and disco lights within urban clubs, provides the setting. The Terrorizers is unlike the nativist-style film tradition of the stories that comprise The Sandwich Man, or depictions of rural life in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985). However, Terrorizers is classified within the body of Taiwan New Cinema films because it marks an aesthetic break with the previous era’s films and addresses the negative aspects of living in contemporary urban Taiwan society. In general, the extreme characterizations of nativist literature (as traditional and distinctly local) and modernist (as obscure and concerned with aesthetics alone) are blurred and conflated in Yang’s film. However, Jameson’s article reveals that he does not intend to investigate the complexity of the nativist and modernist discussion—or other local cultural factors—as part of his analysis of the film. Thus, he does not fully take into account the cultural, historical, and geographical background of the Taiwan situation. However, Jameson is an expert on the relationship between capital and cultural production, and this is what he focuses on in his essay. On the depiction of Taipei in the 1980s, Jameson writes: Indeed, it does seem to be the case that The Terrorizers (a peculiar and pointed translation of Kongbu Fenzi, 1986) assimilates modernization, and the toll it takes on psychic subjects, more generally to urbanization than to Westernization as such. This lends its “diagnosis” a kind of globality, if not a universality, which is evidently what has made Yang’s critics uncomfortable.

According to Jameson, The Terrorizers depicts the extent to which the global reach of modernization, urbanization, and Westernization has affected Taiwan. Therefore, The Terrorizers fittingly shares many of its characteristics with other “third world films” that similarly use multiple perspectives inherent to a distinctively postmodern approach in their depictions of urban settings and the meaningless routines of its citizens. The characters appear to express feelings of alienation due to their participation in modern modes of labor and production. Jameson asserts: . . . [Taipei] is an example of some generally late capitalist urbanization (which one hesitates, except to make the point, to call postmodern) of a now-classic proliferation of the urban fabric that one finds in the First and Third Worlds everywhere alike.21

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So, how is one to acknowledge the effects of late capitalism in the depiction of life in Taipei, and yet not lose focus on the cultural specificities of the modernist and nativist debates that must be considered in order to analyze the films of Taiwan New Cinema? Yvonne Chang’s essay “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development,” provides an excellent reference point in this discussion. Chang argues that, in contrast to David Harvey’s articulation of the divide between modernity and postmodernity that has been used within Western discourse and universally applied to analyses of East Asia, “it is more justifiable to locate the Great Divide within the historical context of contemporary Taiwan at a point when verifiable cultural reorientations can be discerned.”22 Within the context of this discussion, Chang depicts The Terrorizers as the film that marks a significant divide between two eras. The previous era was a time when serious modernist and nativist art was created, while the latter era is characterized as a time when a new popular art, regulated by market (low-brow, according to Chang) forces, was emerging. I concur with Chang’s argument because, as with Jameson, an economic perspective is essential to understanding the condition of Taiwan filmmaking. Yet not only does Chang recognize the intersection of global capital and Taiwan’s film industry, she also outlines local economic and political factors that influenced the creation of fictional narratives of the era. For example, in terms of the island’s economic situation, Edward Yang’s film was preceded on the island by the commercialization of the media and publishing industries that Yang’s film represents and critiques.23 In addition, I would argue, the film’s position within its historical context has as much if not more to do with the emergence of a postcolonial mentality as it does with the economic system of globalization and postmodern artwork. Fangming Chen writes that the “great divide,” using Chang’s term, in Taiwan was distinctly postcolonial, not postmodern: “aspirations for liberation did not have to wait until the introduction of postmodern thought into Taiwan; rather, it was precisely the end of martial law that enabled previously suppressed desires to be unbound.”24 So the emergence of Taiwan New Cinema, which I see as a combination of both nativism (local stories) and modernist (existential dilemmas) influences— emerged within a new political environment which preceded, and continued after, martial law as Taiwan’s artists seized the opportunity to explore new experiences that could not be represented before.



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This discussion highlights the importance of considering a rubric of postcolonialism to understand Taiwan’s nativist and modernist debates, as well as Taiwan film production in the late 1970s and early 1980s.25 The strict binary division between nativism and modernism in the 1970s at its worst polarizes the conversation in a way that ignores the many factors that nativism and modernism actually share. In terms of literature, it is evident that, on the one hand, modernists and nativists represent alternative methods to express the distinct experience of living in Taiwan. On the other hand, when viewed as responses to the regimentation of the KMT regime it is evident that the opposing factions share the same dilemma: how should one respond to the monolithic colonial regimentation imposed by the KMT? How can one represent the reality of Taiwan’s social conditions through fictional narratives in an age when the dominant restricts free speech and oppositional political views? This was a real and pressing issue during the White Terror: director Bai Ke was accused of being a spy in 1962 and sentenced to death in 1964, and author Chen Yingzhen was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment as late as 1968 for “subversive” activities.26 These are just two instances of widespread political subjugation on the island between the KMT occupation in 1949 and the end of martial law on July 15, 1987. Overall, a “cognitive mapping” of the overarching political situation must be kept in mind; otherwise, the influence of the KMT’s colonial system of governance on both literary traditions might be overlooked. Although the categories I have brought together here—nativism, modernism, and postcolonialism—are admittedly broad, my intention in describing these movements is to provide both a theoretical and historical background to Jameson’s discussion of Taiwan New Cinema. Jameson’s reference points are global. Yet an understanding of nativism and modernism are essential facets of Taiwan’s particular cultural, historical, and geographical experience that deserve close inspection when considering Taiwan’s film scene. For example, Hwang Chun-ming’s work reveals an attachment to Taiwan’s northeastern rural locations, while Shang Qin’s poetry reveals different geographical connectivities—to the mainland, or maybe two geographies at the same time, both Taiwan and China. So, when Yeh and Davis write: “Maybe there are simpler ways to understand and enjoy Yang’s film than the Jamesonian system,” the answer is really yes and no.27 In my estimation, in part, Yeh and Davis are having some fun at Jameson’s expense—Jameson’s essay is indeed nearly impenetrable at multiple

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junctures. Yet, when Yeh and Davis argue that Jameson should understand the local situation more carefully, which Yvonne Chang’s article more clearly conveys, they make a valid point. Jameson’s article nicely outlines the way Yang’s film uses postmodern film techniques, such as depicting a photographer in the manner of Blowup (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), one who takes pictures that in turn question the ontological relationship between image and “reality,” so that overall, Jameson captures the aesthetics of the film, but misses the local context. More specifically, when Jameson entered the scene in Taiwan, what he initially thought to be the result of globalization was actually a complex intersection of the global forces of capital, changing local market conditions, and a particular phase of decolonization. A decolonialist dialogue with a colonial past was not yet possible during the late 1970s, when films like those directed by Li Xing initiated a depiction of the local experience, whetting the audience’s appetite for the “authentic” Taiwan New Cinema films of the 1980s.28 Such an observation is not only available with the advantage of historical hindsight, but also through the lens of a transnational theory which allows one to consider both postmodernity in the age of late capitalism and the local cultural forces that propelled Taiwan’s literary movements and in turn inflected Taiwan filmmaking. Colonial concerns continued to exact a toll—both the residual aspect of Japanese colonialism, and the dominant characteristics of “Nationalist colonialism”—on Taiwan’s state film apparatus. Thus, inquiries into films produced in Taiwan during the 1960s and 1970s necessitate an awareness of both transnational and postcolonial theory.

Reflections on the Legacy of the “Healthy Realist” Model During an opportunity afforded by director Li Xing in Taipei in the fall of 2008, I asked the director to comment on his influence on Taiwan New Cinema. He responded: “In my film Our Neighbors, which started the Healthy Realist tradition, one finds the foundation of Taiwan cinema.”29 Gong Hong, manager of CMPC from 1963 to 1972, concurs in his autobiography that Our Neighbor deeply influenced him while considering the tenets of Healthy Realist filmmaking in Taiwan.30 And Emily Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis accurately observe that the Healthy Realist films “depicted stable, peaceful, and organic Chinese communities in which tensions and conflicts, whether individual, class, or ethnic, are eventually and naturally resolved.”31



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Their description succinctly describes this influential aesthetic approach of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, one that attempted to conjoin filming techniques inherent to Italian neorealism with narratives that suggest that Taiwan’s people thrived under KMT rule. So, the first two phrases in Li Xing’s statement are reasonable: Our Neighbor is a pivotal film in the establishment of Taiwan’s aesthetic approach to film production in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet if Li Xing is correct, and I tend to agree with him, an interesting question arises from his statement taken as a whole: in what ways did Our Neighbor function as a foundation of Taiwan cinema? Furthermore, what was the legacy of the Healthy Realism model if indeed any semblance of it survived the complex decade of change that was the 1970s? It was a decade famously transitional on Taiwan’s political stage both locally and internationally: in 1970 the Diaoyu Tai islands were returned to Japan; in October of 1971 the ROC was no longer represented in the United Nations; in February of 1972 the Shanghai Communiqué was signed, paving the way for diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC; in 1975 Chiang Kai-shek passed away to be succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo; in 1976 Taiwan boycotted the Olympic Games; and in 1979 the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States was terminated. The decade culminated with the Meilidao protests, known as the Kaohsiung Incident, which occurred on Human Rights Day, December 10, 1979, and resulted in the arrest of the “Kaohsiung Eight” and other dissidents rallying for democratic rights. It is common knowledge that the government’s film apparatus did not depict these events directly nor represent their corollary concerns. Thus the films approved by the state could not have been more escapist, despite the government’s nominal strategy to portray the island “realistically.” Yet, from the perspective of KMT ideologues, why should the state allow public screening of films that threatened the status quo? The state had plenty of fires to put out besides the potential conflagration that might result if sociopolitical events were depicted from the perspective of the marginalized within Taiwan’s borders. Moreover, the KMT’s methods were quite successful when viewed from the government’s perspective of marketing the island as a land of prosperity. A 1966 English-language guidebook entitled Free China 1966, published in conjunction with the government in order to promote tourism and trade, states under a section titled “Better Movies for the Chinese People”: Three years ago, the domestic industry was in the doldrums. Pictures were poor. Taiwan made only a few feature-length films. Even the

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documentary film makers were losing money and had to retrench. Then came the turning point. In April, 1963, a Mandarin-dialect picture made in Hongkong [sic], “Love Eterne” broke Taiwan box office records. Its stars became popular idols and its songs were heard everywhere. The moviegoing [sic] public realized Chinese pictures could be outstanding. . . . It seems certain that moviegoing will continue to prosper in Taiwan.32

The introduction of the glossy, oversized text, which states “Free China 1966 is dedicated to the proposition that Taiwan is a laboratory for the continental China of tomorrow,” praises its cinema industry as a source of national pride, with lucrative potential. So it is little wonder that the state continued to ensure that its idealized narrative formula (Healthy Realism) never approximated the conditions of a messy, uncertain reality.33 Instead the KMT state endorsed CMPC film manager Gong’s expansion of Healthy Realism to encompass a “healthy variety of arts” (jiankang zongyi).34 This healthy variety can be classified into the following four genres. The first included nostalgic films. Such films emote a longing of the waishengren (Mainlanders), whether consciously or unconsciously, for their homeland. Films in this vein either take place in Mainland China prior to 1949 but within living memory, or imply the possibility of the concurrent recovery of the mainland by the Nationalist military. These characteristics are present as early as the 1950s in films such as Opium Poppy and in the 1960s with Li Xing’s Our Neighbor. They carry, in part, the lineage of the Shanghai realist mode (see Chapter 2). This filmmaking mode had its literary analogs as well. Taiwanese author Hwang Chun-ming recalls the texts available to

Figure 16 Free China 1966 advertises “Better Movies for the Chinese People.”



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him as a child growing up in Taiwan under the KMT: “either anti-Communist tracts or nostalgic writing by Mainlanders, sentimental yearning for the good old days back in their hometowns.”35 The cultural artifacts of this style seem to harbor at once both the undeniable heartache of the waishengren and the almost palpable absence of the local benshengren (local populace) from the picture. In this way the films are incredibly suspenseful. However, the filmmaking techniques themselves rarely generate intrigue or excitement due to poor production values, low budgets, and mediocre plotlines. While nostalgia was expressed in similar ways throughout the 1970s, new stylistic variations portraying bourgeois families, who at first suffer discord but eventually find harmony, must be appended to this list. Qiong Yao adaptations and films starring the ubiquitous actresses Brigitte Lin and Lin Fengjiao and actors Qin Han and Qin Xianglin might be loosely categorized within this classification. The nostalgic quality retained in such romantic films is a sentiment of longing or homesickness for an “ideal” family that is resolved by the film’s conclusion, however melodramatically. Example films in this vein include Li Xing’s 1971 film Life with Mother (Mu yu nü) which depicts the reconciliation of a mother and daughter after a rocky series of melodramatic events, and Liao Xiangxiong’s 1972 film Love Can Forgive and Forget (Zhenjia qianjin), which features a father figure who welcomes an orphan girl (portrayed by Golden Horse Best Actress Winner Judy Ongg [Weng Qianyu]) in the film’s resolution. The second state-sanctioned film category, itself a re-articulation of the nostalgic mode, included patriotic war films. During the mid-1970s, depictions of KMT military supremacy on the big screen won a number of Golden Horse film awards: Land of the Undaunted (see Chapter 4) in 1975, The Victory (Meihua, dir. Liu Jiachang) in 1976, and Heroes of the Eastern Skies (Jianqiao yinglie chuan, dir. Zhang Cengze) in 1977. So while the Republic of China was suffering political embarrassment at the hands of the Japanese on the global stage, the KMT government in Taiwan was depicting military victories over the Japanese on local screens across the island. The Victory presents local Taiwanese who are loyal to the KMT during the latter stages of Japanese Occupation, while Heroes of the Eastern Skies was endorsed by the Ministry of Education since it portrayed a pro-KMT perspective on fighter pilots in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The third category includes adventure and martial arts films, whether approved for release by the government or produced by CMPC.36 This mode is

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accomplished to near perfection in the films made by Hong Kong “defectors”: Li Hanxiang’s Hsih-Shih: Beauty of Beauties (1965) and King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967)—and falls far short in such CMPC imitations as The Ammunition Hunter (Luo ying xia, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1971), a film replete with poor editing and its insipid representation of something the KMT would never accomplish: liberation of China. The film even ends with a cliché: the hero rides off into the sunset. Throughout the 1970s film directors in Taiwan would continue to strive for but never reach the artistic sensibility of King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (Xia nü, 1970) or the captivating action sequences of Bruce Lee’s kung fu films from Hong Kong. Perhaps the culminating film that best integrates these three film genres of the era is Bai Jingrui’s The Coldest Winter in Peking (Huangtianhoutu, 1981). The story takes place in “the motherland,” embodying patriotism indirectly in its depiction of the Chinese experience of the Cultural Revolution, which bypassed Taiwan. It was escapist entertainment with little bearing on local realities. Based on a true story, The Coldest Winter in Peking depicts the story of Shen Yifu, a man who was sent to a concentration camp in Mainland China during the Cultural Revolution. During the course of the film, the cataclysmic events of the Cultural Revolution lead to the death of Shen’s father; his wife goes insane. The KMT allowed Bai’s depiction of once-banned images of Mao Zedong, Red Guards, and life on the mainland, no doubt in hopes that domestic audiences would find Taiwan’s modernization and lifestyle far superior to life on the mainland, while horrific events that occurred in Taiwan, such as the February 28 Incident or the White Terror, remained absent from the silver screen.37 Such topics would have to wait until martial law was abolished in 1987, and then two more years until Hou Hsiao-hsien’s release of A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) in 1989. CMPC films were at times spectacular and eye-catching. For example, a scene in The Coldest Winter in Peking of sent-down youth (xiaxiang qingnian) dispersing to the countryside contains a longshot that impresses due to the numerous extras employed and the portrayal of a vast landscape. Still, the fact remained that CMPC’s output was rarely equal to or even competitive with the mesmerizing special effects of Hollywood or Hong Kong films that would capture Taiwan’s audiences during the 1980s. In addition, in terms of narrative, the predictable, “healthy” resolution to state-approved narrative conflicts in nostalgic, patriotic, and escapist films rarely created a sensational



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Figure 17 The Coldest Winter in Peking portrays the Cultural Revolution on a grand scale.

viewing experience. Li Xing’s period-piece Autumn Execution (Qiujie, 1972) may be a key exception to this summation of 1970s films. A fourth category of filmmaking emerged that did capture Taiwan’s imagination briefly as the decade came to a close: depictions set in Taiwan that were endorsed by the government apparatus. It was an aesthetic style that, in conjunction with a slight decrease in imported Hong Kong films and a brief window before the rise of video rentals, enabled an increase in film production before the downturn of the 1980s. An average of 53 films were produced from 1974 to 1977. From 1978 to 1981, the average increased to 122; 1982 saw the production of 144 films. Then the decrease set in, with an average of only 68 films made annually from 1983 to 1986.38 It is in this fourth category, representations of Taiwan’s local conditions, that the legacy of Healthy Realism might be most carefully observed. Certainly, depictions of the local setting were not unique in the late 1970s.39 CMPC’s novel images of rural farming conditions in Oyster Girl in 1964 were welcomed upon the film’s initial release, impressing jury members at the regional Asian Film Festival and interesting filmgoers island-wide. At

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the time—fifteen years after the “temporary” retreat from the mainland—it appeared that the government realized that the rural environment within its jurisdiction could be celebrated as a worthy cinematic subject. But the initial sensation caused by ostensible depictions of the local setting on its own terms wore off, and modifications were in order if such portrayals were to remain relevant. So when Li Xing returned to this earlier filmmaking mode—Yingjin Zhang writes, “Li returned to the realist tradition of the ‘native soil’ (xiangtu) that had brought him distinction a decade before”40—he was sure to make some changes. What were these changes in terms of film form and film sense during the 1970s? This question was, in part, the motivation for Chapter 4, “Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother and Taiwan Cinema of the Early 1970s,” as I reflected on Edward Yang’s famous statement that Taiwan New Cinema movement could have emerged ten years earlier if not for government restrictions. A review of early to mid-1970s films demonstrates that certain brilliant directors could have challenged the status quo at quite an early stage in Taiwan’s filmmaking tradition. A poetic filmmaker such as Song Cunshou would have been more than capable of depicting subjects far more taboo than adultery, but he was making films at a time when national concerns forbade controversial topics represented from a local perspective. Still, a study of representations of gender in films released during the decade reveal clues about what was to come. While gender depictions in the mid1970s reveal the ways that patriarchal society in Taiwan was socially constructed, it was not until the second wave of Taiwan filmmakers, including Tsai Ming-liang and Ang Lee, that the particularities of the patriarchal, heteronormative construction of gender would be openly addressed. Li Xing’s films of the late 1970s and early 1980 contrast with Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother. Song’s film suggests that there were cracks in the government’s façade as it attempted to shore up its image on all fronts (local, national, regional, global), while Li Xing’s films presented the fictional construct that the government was as stalwart as ever. It is no wonder that CMPC initially hired Li Xing, a director that Gong Hong once described as conservative embodying the character of a traditional Chinese scholar.41 Li Xing’s perspective on life in Taiwan remained consistent with state policy; throughout his career, he rarely pushed the envelope. Thus even though he was but one participant within a large scale cultural project, Li Xing’s work remains an ideal litmus test to determine what Taiwan’s government deemed



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respectable filmmaking. Consider The Story of a Small Town. As described above, the film ends with a song that conveys the message of the film as a whole: “Generation after generation/ Features of the small town remain the same.” The line “features of the small town remain the same” is particularly revealing. The danger of this empirically untenable notion is perhaps best articulated by Raymond Williams in his theory of structures of feeling. Williams criticizes analyses of culture that reduce social processes to fixed forms, which is precisely what the film displays when it portrays small town life as constant and unchanging.42 Reducing social processes to fixed forms was particularly problematic in Taiwan during the late 1970s because political, economic, and cultural changes were clearly in a perpetual state of flux produced by “particular linkages, particular emphases and suppressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms, particular deep starting-points and conclusions.”43 In the case of The Story of a Small Town, rather than presenting a society in a pivotal state of dominant, emergent, and residual cultural transformation determined to a certain extent by restrictive state policies, the film appeals to Confucian ethics: adhering to the five constant relationships, listening to authoritative instruction, and continually striving for societal betterment.44 In terms of the film’s appeal to such timeless values, one is reminded of the modernist writers’ appeal to timeless values in the 1960s: “Since the focus of the modernist writers was on the private interior world of individual psyches rather than the public external world of social interaction, their works have more frequently been valued for their timeless or universal attributes than for any historically or culturally specific understanding of Taiwan.”45 While Li Xing’s film endorses a generalized view of country life, and modernist writers focused on private interior worlds, they are similar in that editors and censors would consistently approve “appealing to timeless or universal attributes,” rather than the depiction of local, particular conflicts affecting the local Taiwan experience. Li Xing’s leading characters in other films from the late 1970s might also be interpreted as representations of those who persist despite hardship, rather than those who experience specific limitations of state policy. An example would be his adaptation of Zheng Fengxi’s life in He Never Gives Up, which portrays a physically disabled man (played by Chin Han) who successfully enters law school. Other examples of appeals to universal ideals in the

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depiction of lone individuals making their way through life in Taiwan’s rural settings include Li Xing’s My Native Land (Yuan xiangren, 1980) and Chen Yaoqi’s The Pioneers (Yuan, 1980). Moreover, language is a key facet of this equation. Unlike the native experience, including many residents who, like the old-timers in “The Drowning of an Old Cat,” “didn’t understand a word of Mandarin,” the films endorsed by the state in the late 1970s were presented in guoyu. In addition to their use of guoyu, two further similarities in production strategies link these four state film categories—nostalgic, patriotic, adventure and martial arts, and depictions of the local condition. The first is that the films of the 1960s and 1970s, with rare exceptions such as in The Winter by Li Hanxiang, do not contain the caesura, those moments of pause or interruption that allow for audience reflection. Walter Benjamin describes the caesura by reflecting on epic theater in his essay “The Author as Producer”: Epic theater, therefore, does not reproduce situations, rather it discovers them. This discovery is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences. Only interruption does not have here the character of stimulant but of an organizing function. It arrests the action in its course, and thereby compels the listener to adopt an attitude vis-à-vis the process, the actor vis-à-vis his role. . . . What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice.46

Benjamin’s article details how writers might guide their audiences towards a “functional transformation” of society by understanding how the “interruption of sequences” in stage drama allows for audience participation and reflection. The criteria Benjamin presents as essential for the possibility of “reason and practice” in the habitual course of daily life are moments of pause and reconsideration that might be presented in artistic, narrative works. Such a technique became inherent to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film pacing in the 1980s. Films including The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui lai de ren, 1983), A Summer at Grandpas (Dongdong de jiaqi, 1984), and A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985) can be characterized at key junctures as staged interruptions of daily life. This style contrasts with the film sequences of the 1960s and 1970s (see sequence breakdowns of Story of Mother and Goodbye Darling in Chapter 4) that, with the exception of flashbacks, typically proceed methodically from beginning to end.



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This discussion leads one to the second prominent production strategy of films of the 1960s and 1970s in Taiwan, which was generally to tell the story of one protagonist from a certain fictional, yet ostensibly dependable, point of view. Even when parallel narratives are essential to plot, as they are in Land of the Undaunted, they are linked in time and space as part of the same chronology. This Healthy Realist unilinear structure was challenged in The Terrorizers mentioned above, with its multiple stories and intersecting plotlines that seems to suggest the denial of truth, or that the postmodern world is a world without a center.47 With this framework in mind, namely the absence of both the caesura and multiple narratives in Taiwan films of the 1960s and 1970s, one can appreciate that the Taiwan New Cinema was indeed a reexamination of the filmmaking tradition that preceded it. Perhaps, as Yvonne Chang writes: “. . . the real objective of New Cinema promoters . . . was simply to overcome all obstacles standing in the way of the filmmakers producing films, political and commercial alike.”48 As noted in Chapter 1, “Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times,” it is evident that at each stage of the film’s representations, though total constraint was impossible, the dominant political power in Taiwan restricted certain aspects of both residual and emergent culture. Hou’s film begins with a segment depicting Taiwan life in the 1960s, entitled “A Time for Love.” The title seems ironic considering KMT policies and the United States’ military presence during the Cold War, except for the fact that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s nostalgic representation of the 1960s suggests that Taiwan’s youth possessed a psychological resistance that could not be entirely subjugated. This psychological resistance is located in a third space created at the intersection of Taiwan rural life and United States pop culture. The opening track of Three Times, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” sets the mood and emotional platform for the segment, and indeed the entire film. This song also captures the ways in which sentiment emerges from specific Taiwan localities (consider the shots of old highway signs taken throughout the island as Zhang Zhen’s character searches for Shu Qi), yet is conveyed, at least at this particular juncture of the film, via the cultural expressions of a colonizing, foreign influence. Not only do Hou’s filmic representations of the past allow for a reassessment of the historical moment depicted—in this case one locates Hou’s nostalgia for Taiwan in the 1960s rather than nostalgia for Mainland China— but Hou’s film also functions as a commentary on the heritage of Taiwan

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filmmaking. A reevaluation of Taiwan’s filmmaking tradition is most evident in Three Times in the most trying of segments for first-time viewers, due to the intensity of its slow pacing, namely the scenes depicting Japanese Occupation. This segment demonstrates the authoritative reach of the Japanese government into the affairs of even the most private of spaces in local Taiwanese life; namely, that of the brothel. But more importantly, the film presents the caesura. It is as if Hou slows down time itself. The pause, the moments between action that allow the opportunity to reflect on the purpose, rationale, and influence of major events (historical and fictional), is inherent to the structure of Three Times. In contrast, the use of the caesura is a technique largely absent from all of the representative 1960s and 1970s films described in this text: Li Xing’s Oyster Girl, Beautiful Duckling, and Four Loves in Chapter 2 (Xie Jin’s films on the mainland could be included too, for that matter), Home Sweet Home in Chapter 3, Story of Mother and Goodbye Darling in Chapter 4, and The Story of a Small Town in this chapter. These films were inextricably linked to the dominant Hollywood continuity-editing mode. Yet like the still-life shots in Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, described in Chapter 3, which brings the film to nearly a standstill, Hou’s segment depicting Japanese occupation in Three Times allows for viewer contemplation, as inevitably the suture is broken, allowing the mind to consider the image without being chained to the narrative. Consequently, Hou’s techniques might be used to support Bazin’s descriptions of an ideal cinematic realism in which long takes both maintain the dramatic unity of a scene while simultaneously allowing for viewers to contemplate the images on their own terms. In addition to the stylistic technique Hou employs, the narratives in Three Times are also separate from normative portrayals of life under the KMT during Martial Law. By depicting queer identity, the “A Time for Youth” segment of the film presents lifestyle choices and conflicts that were unacceptable in Taiwan according to the status quo of the dominant film apparatus before 1987. Just as he represents sexuality in a straightforward way that would have been censured in the 1960s and 1970s, Hou offers a political point of view that would not have been sanctioned previously: all three segments of Three Times are linked by the idea that the local residents of Taiwan have rarely been able to define their own identity in global politics. Instead, they are spoken for, whether by the Japanese colonial government in 1911, the



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KMT Nationalists in 1966, or by world trade organizations in the age of the “global village” in 2005. Realistic portrayals of political realities during the 1960s and 1970s arguably reach their apotheosis in Wu Nianzhen’s 1996 film Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo). Wu’s film presents the richness and diversity of nativism twenty years after the nativist debates, and the previously and tightly held opposition between modernist and nativist aesthetics breaks down in his work.49 While it may not use a multi-narrative format, it does present a multigenerational perspective in sophisticated ways. In Buddha Bless America, set during US military occupation of rural spaces in Taiwan, the main character Lin-wen encourages his townspeople to welcome US military exercises near their village. He hopes that American doctors will be able to surgically reattach his brother’s fingers, cut off while he worked in a Japanese factory. Wu Nianzhen once stated in an interview: “Even though America has never occupied Taiwan, its influence over the Taiwanese people is far greater [than Japan’s] . . . Its influence extends beyond the cultural and economic to the most important domain of all, politics.”50 At the end of the film, after the American forces depart, Lin-wen must admit that his strategy to help his family failed. He and his fellow local Taiwanese residents then attempt to resume their lives. Buddha Bless America functions as a counterpart to The Coldest Winter in Beijing, the former, as an ideal representative of the lineage of Taiwan New Cinema, depicts the unequal and disturbing state of rural residents of Taiwan, while the latter, as an ideal representative of Healthy Realism’s legacy, depicts a state of affairs that had little bearing on the lives of many people in Taiwan. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was certainly no longer tenable to claim that “the life of small towns is unchanging” as stated in Li Xing’s Story of a Small Town, since political change throughout the island was apparent. The transnational intersections with the local never allowed for indefinite constancy—but as Williams observes, constant flux itself is not absolute; rather, particular articulations occurred at particular points in time. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Wu Nianzhen and others attempted to capture a culture in transition, and it is in this way that “realism” rather than “healthy realism,” if it can ever be entirely captured in a Bazinian sense, is presented by these directors on global screens today. The ornaments of the previous dominant aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s were replaced by an emphasis on ambiguity and/or the focus on particular characters that

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represent specific structures of feeling. So after 1987 it was not only directors looking ahead to new filmic potentialities that led to new explorations in Taiwan cinema history. Perhaps just as important, or perhaps more importantly, key filmic changes during the 1980s and 1990s were due to directors looking back to the foundations of their inherited filmic tradition prior to Healthy Realism, employing techniques previously unexploited or avoided as well as filming in Taiwanese. But a question remains: why did viewers go to the theater in the late 1970s to see escapist portrayals of life in Taiwan, but abandoned the cineplexes when auteurs portrayed the local situation in the 1980s and early 1990s? This question will be addressed in the following segment.

Taiwan Cinema after the 1970s: Auteurs and Blockbusters Taiwan New Cinema certainly shares similarities with several transnational new cinema movements, including the production of a body of films that might be characterized by their challenge to, or absence of, previous aesthetic and studio determinants.51 In the closing analysis that follows, I would like to contribute to comparisons of Taiwan Cinema with China’s so-called fifth-generation cinema and Hong Kong New Wave cinema by using New American Cinema as a primary point of comparison. Similar to the film directors of New American Cinema, the auteurs of Taiwan cinema in the 1980s and 1990s put their distinctive stamps on their films, perhaps most famously Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose long take has influenced film aesthetics throughout Asia. James Udden’s recent book, and his previous article, “This time he moves!”: The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good Women,”52 demonstrates this point clearly. Hou’s films, as well as those by Taiwan film directors Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, continue to receive production capital from international investors. Film investors benefit from such an arrangement, for audiences return to film festivals in Europe and the US and theaters worldwide to see the idiosyncratic film techniques and innovative stories that they have come to expect from each director. Certainly, Hollywood recognizes the advantage of producing films for mass audiences with director’s names emblazoned on film posters and website banners like brand names. Today’s Hollywood auteur films, such as those by Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, also attract return audiences who the anticipate films will be presented in a predictable, identifiable style.



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This marketing tradition stems from the 1970s, when auteur directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman were permitted to make films in their own distinctive styles at a time when Hollywood was ready to transition away from a classical production model that no longer appealed to a broad audience. Between the Paramount Decision of 1948 and the MPAA Voluntary Film Rating System in 1968, Hollywood’s profit margins steadily decreased. A number of factors led to Hollywood’s downturn, including the rise in the popularity of television, a population shift away from the city (with theaters) to suburbs (without theatres), and the restrictions of a production code that prevented competition in X-rated material.53 When audiences returned to theaters in droves, Hollywood executives were delighted. The quintessential Hollywood auteur film The Godfather Part II (1974) displays a number of Coppola’s signature stylistic moves, including the way he builds tension by using set pieces within the mise-en-scène rather than using multiple camera angles or quick-paced editing. For example, when Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) talks to Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) in a prison courtyard in the latter half of the film, the fence is framed so as to bisect the screen, separating Hagan’s head from his body. Then, after the characters move into a new position within the same shot, the fence separates Pentangeli’s head from his body, a move that foreshadows Pentangeli’s eventual death. The artistry of the set piece style is particular to Coppola, one that clearly identifies Coppola as the “author” of the film. The initial enthusiasm for the films, however, was not to last. Financial executives soon realized that they had lost control of the production process when auteurs such as Michael Cimino and Coppola directed highly personal projects that went over-budget and past production deadlines, and failed at the box office. When the blockbuster entered the scene, with films like Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975, the course of Hollywood film history was altered yet again. Today, while blockbusters dominate the film landscape in terms of the box office, there remains a substantial market for Hollywood’s auteur directors. For example, Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012) was marketed as a witty, cool, and explicit film “in keeping with the style and mood of the cult status of Tarantino-written and directed hits.”54 Dana Polan describes how Tarantino’s fans identify with Tarantino films as if they are in on an inside joke.55 They are brought into an unconventional, shockingly violent cinematic experience delivered in a manner singular to the mind of Tarantino. Yet when considering the artistry of a Coppola or

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a Tarantino, the commercial element cannot be ignored—in the Hollywood filmmaking tradition it is all about drawing return customers who are satisfied with their purchase.56 By marketing both the blockbuster and the auteur film, Hollywood has become an even more successful and powerful institution over the last forty years. In Taiwan, the auteur cinema of the 1980s was not followed by a local blockbuster tradition; instead, big budget “whammy” films from the US and Hong Kong filled this gap in the domestic market. Perhaps the paradigm is changing, for a foundation is emerging today for a vibrant market in Taiwan for blockbusters in the vein of Wei Te-sheng alongside auteur films like those by Zero Chou. Together, these directors’ films might provide a return on investment like the films of the 1960s. We can envision such a possibility by noting similarities and differences between the well-known history of filmmaking in Taiwan during the 1980s and New American Cinema, even in brief comparison of these movements such as the one provided here. Especially when it first emerged, the buzz that Taiwan New Cinema created among college students, general audiences, and journalists alike reminds one of the excitement surrounding the “Hollywood Renaissance.” In addition, City of Sadness (dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989) captured critical local acclaim upon release and won the Golden Lion overseas at the Venice Film Festival. Yet after initial waves of success in theaters and in the press, audiences steered away from the remaining Taiwan auteur tradition. However, the decline in film attendance might have been avoided if a new film aesthetic were to emerge, one which deftly combined both a popular appeal to audiences—consider the reception to such films as The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1963) in Taiwan’s rich film history—and an exacting attention to artistic detail, demonstrated in the work of directors such as Edward Yang. Such an approach would engage local audiences just as the KMT once aspired to during the “golden age,” but could focus on the local experience in such a way that audiences would be entertained and moved. This formula has only recently been put into practice, and the exemplary film is none other than 2008’s Cape No. 7 (Haijiao qihao) directed by Wei Te-sheng. In Taiwan’s film history, this film, followed by the success of Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Saideke balai, 2011), might be termed a “blockbuster.”57 How did the film industry fare between the focus decades of this text, the 1960s and 1970s, and Cape No. 7? In brief, two key trends characterize the



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filmmaking institution in Taiwan after the 1970s came to a close. In terms of the industry, Taiwan’s distribution and exhibition channels for films like The Coldest Winter in Peking (dir. Bai Jingrui, 1981) famously collapsed,58 while in terms of the film depictions, nearly all previously taboo subjects (see the previous section) became viable topics.. Today, three trends seem to predominate: the continuation of a residual international art house scene stemming from the Taiwan New Cinema tradition (for example: Goodbye, Dragon Inn, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2003); the impact of multinational co-productions (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, dir. Ang Lee, 2000); and an emergent local revitalization of the film industry (Formula 17, dir. Chen Ying-jung, 2005).59 Cape No. 7 and Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale might be classified as belonging to this third category. If films are popular as a direct result of mirroring the concurrent collective imagination and experiences of society effectively, this would explain the success of Cape No. 7, a film that generated excitement in print, web, and television outlets, and was further advertised by word of mouth.60 Interestingly, the film harkens back to the glory days of 1960s Taiwan cinema by integrating popular songs within the narrative and presenting its narrative in a linear manner similar to the Hollywood commercial style. Cape No. 7 even includes the old concerns of artists in the 1970s nativist literature movement in its storyline. Nostalgia for the Japanese occupation is central to the film’s story, since the main characters, a Taiwanese rock musician and his love interest, a Japanese model, are woven into a secondary plotline situated during in the colonial era. Ping-hui Liao has written that films such as The Puppetmaster (Xi meng rensheng, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993) and Dou-San: A Borrowed Life (Duo sang, dir. Wu Nianzhen, 1994) portray “the ambivalent nature of Taiwanese postcoloniality,” and certainly this statement might be applied to Cape No. 7 as well.61 What links Cape No. 7 with the films Liao describes is a similar representation of local Taiwanese experience; the difference is that Cape No. 7 does so in a way that is entertaining, fast-paced, and endearing. The caesura of the Taiwan New Cinema is jettisoned in favor of techniques directors of the 1960s and 1970s would have considered normative. Cape No. 7, despite its weaknesses—after all, it is a well-received and feel-good film, not a masterpiece—offers the best of both worlds in the history of Taiwan filmmaking; namely, the film represents the lived experience of a local populace, and like the “golden age” of the 1960s, the film was widely popular in Taiwan.

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According to the filmmakers of the late 1960s, however, Cape No. 7 primarily shares one similarity with the past: its success at the box office. Film critic Huang Ren, when asked about his thoughts on Cape No. 7, responded: “No cinema tradition in Taiwan has surpassed the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Cape No. 7 is an entertaining film, but its artistic quality is not equal to Taiwan’s previous films.” How long the current revitalized scene will last is certainly subject to debate. Director Li Xing reminisced: “Cape No. 7 reminds me of the popularity of Li Hanxiang’s The Love Eterne in 1963 because scholars as well as the general populace were interested in the popularity of the film . . . However, Li Hanxiang’s film in 1963 started the rise of Taiwan cinema, but Cape No. 7 is really a question mark.” Indeed, we have yet to see if Cape No. 7 will begin a new golden era, or if the film will be remembered as an isolated incident, albeit a successful one. The era of filmmaking in Taiwan pre-1980 may be known as a “missing period” in western scholarship, but surely it will not remain so for much longer, for the antecedents of Taiwan New Cinema are as nuanced as those of any film tradition at any time. And they continue to shed light on the current moment of filmmaking in Taiwan. This book provides an entrance point into the stories, both fictional and non-fictional, that together comprise the framework for the narrative that followed. It traces a storyline that, like a well-written movie-script, is complete with humble beginnings in the early 1960s, an incredible rise to prominence in East Asian cinema by the end of the decade, a period of decline, and then a brief moment of local popularity in the late 1970s before the final credits  .  .  . of one epoch, followed, and inextricably linked to, the beginning of a new one.

Notes

Introduction 1. This text uses the international standard Hanyu pinyin romanization system, with an exception of well-known political figures such as Chiang Kai-shek, film directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, and locations such as Taipei, romanized in the manner in which they most frequently appear in the Wade-Giles system. 2. See Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China. 3. See Stephen Kramer, “Transcultural Narrations of the Local: Taiwanese Cinema between Utopia and Heterotopia,” 53. 4. I am most grateful to director Li Xing, with whom I had an opportunity to meet in Taipei on three separate occasions, but only one of these occasions was a formal interview. The quotations by Li Xing throughout this book are from that interview. 5. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 113. 6. I use the term “fluid” due to its natural, organic connotations from which I draw inspiration, noting that natural phenomena and human systems are inextricably linked. 7. Nataša Dˇurovicˇová’s “Preface” in Nataša Dˇurovicˇová and Kathleen Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ix. Chris Berry writes, “However, we must recognize that the conceptual distinction between the transnational and the international does not enable a simple sorting out of phenomena into two piles of objects neatly labeled ‘national cinema’ (circulating in an international order) and ‘transnational cinema.’ Rather it constitutes a problematic that animates the analysis of various practices and objects.” See Chris Berry, “Transnational Chinese Cinema Studies,” 12. 8. For further discussion see Yingjin Zhang, “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies.” 9. Lee Daw-ming, “A Brief History of Taiwan Cinema,” 1. 10. Lingzhen Wang, Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts, 18. The use of the term “method” is ascribed to Yiman Wang. 11. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 125. 12. Ibid., 125.

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13. Wimal Dissanayake, “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,” 34. 14. A practical way of thinking these terms through might be to consider a radio station broadcasting in Taitung, a small city in southeast Taiwan. This radio station would be considered “local” in the sense that its frequency and transmission might not reach Hualien, a city approximately two hours north by train on the east coast, or Kaohsiung, the industrial port city over the mountain range two hours to the west, nor the capital of Taipei further north. Is this to say that such a radio station’s concerns would not overlap with the national concerns? Certainly not. When a typhoon approaches, the local station would broadcast information received from the Central Weather Bureau. Similarly, political information and discussions would be a part of this “local” Taitung radio station. In addition, when Japanese, Korean, or Hong Kong television shows and pop music is discussed or presented on the air, the geographical Asian regional is certainly an integral part of this local station’s identity. Finally, global news, events, and gossip become part of the local discussion. Thus, we find in one radio station the intersection of the local, national, regional, and transnational. Each category is inflected by, overlapping with, and shaped by the other, and yet the station remains culturally distinct. Or, to use the analogy of ocean currents and water temperature: the water within any location is a certain temperature, although it is in a continual process of blending, changing, and shifting. Similarly, the “local” is distinct—it has its own temperature—but it changes and shifts according to the rhythms of various movements. 15. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 18. 16. Ibid., 23. 17. Chris Berry, “From National Cinema to Cinema and the National,” 154. 18. Wimal Dissanayake, “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,” 39. 19. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 285. 20. Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, 37. 21. Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities, 42. 22. See Arif Dirlik, What Is in a Rim: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea and Ming-yan Lai, Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestations in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism, 31–37. 23. Discussions of the intersection between the local and global can be found in Chris Berry, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yeh’s edited volume Mobile Cultures; Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited volume Minor Transnationalism; and Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernard’s edited volume Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. 24. See Felicia Chan, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability.”



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25. According to Dissanayake’s terms, the exchange between cultures might include: convolution, transformation, localization, rejection, polysemous and asymmetrical changes, confrontation, commodification, reinvention, and resistance. See Wimal Dissanayake, “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,” 25–29. 26. Transnational theory as applied here might retain its critical edge because it highlights power structures that maintain unequal living conditions and highlights uneven power exchanges when tracing border crossings and cultural flow. In this way, I hope to offer a critique of power relations in keeping with the writings of Judith Butler whose best work serves to “extend the norms of [what it means to be] ‘human’” so that all can be recognized as participants in the public sphere. I remain passionate about this objective, for as Saskia Sassen describes in Cities in a World Economy and Mike Davis reveals in Planet of Slums, hegemonic global commerce and around the clock transnational connectivity creates and then conceals real inequalities. 27. E. Ann Kaplan, Feminism and Film, 377. 28. Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities, 47. 29. See Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim’s article “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” 30. See Frederic Jameson’s discussion of this particular articulation of totality in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 31. Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, 11. 32. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, 3. 33. See Liao Ping-hui and David Der-Wei Wang, Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory. 34. See Darrell W. Davis, “Borrowing Postcolonial: Wu Nianzhen’s Dou-san and the Memory Mine.” 35. Jason C. Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan, 22, 26. 36. Estimates vary. 37. Fangming Chen, “Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History,” 45. 38. Ibid., 45. 39. In the context of the Philippine historical experience, Neferti X. M. Tadiar writes: “The emergent culture of struggle of the colonized would consist of this process of freeing into expressivity the whole range of social life that colonialism impeded, if not obliterated. Culture was this very process of creative restitution and expressive action that Frantz Fanon argued was commensurate with the concrete, practical struggle ‘to bring into existence the history of the nation—the history of decolonization,’” Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization, 4. 40. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 89.

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41. Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution, 21. 42. Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century, 21. 43. Ibid., 22.

1. Framing Taiwan Cinema 1. James Udden writes that Three Times “affirms that Hou still is the master of historical material, yet it also suggests that present-day Taiwan will always elude him,” in No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, 174. Jean Ma claims that Three Times “reworks motifs from the director’s earlier films to produce a sort of capsule history of his career, whose various phases are reprised in the film’s triplicate structure,” Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, 91. 2. The introduction to Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, and Eveline Reisenauer’s text Transnational Migration describes how “the ‘transnational’ has three components”: “transnationalization,” which is the site of transaction/s; “transnational social spaces,” which are transnational spaces created and formed in the contact zone/s of transnational exchange; and “transnationality,” which includes the various forms of connection and “degree of connectivity” between transnational participants. See Transnational Migration, 2. 3. Such an evaluation tends to be the typical response to the film among Western film critics. 4. Christopher Lupke writes: “With the help of Chu T’ien Wen, Hou Hsiao-hsien was able to reconceptualize how he structured film narrative by using perspective as the starting point from which to shape the narrative form,” in “Chu T’ien-wen and the Sotto Voce of Gendered Expression in the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien.” 5. For a comprehensive, accessible history of Taiwan cinema, see Lee Daw-ming’s “A Brief History of Taiwan Cinema.” 6. See director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s description of the title in James Udden, No Man is an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, 174. 7. For following dates and details in this section, see the excellent article: Andrew D. Morris, “Taiwan’s History: An Introduction,” 3–31. 8. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures 1683–1895, 45. 9. Ibid., 85. 10. See Guo-Juin Hong for the first screening of Taiwan films during the colonial era: Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, 16–21. 11. Andrew D. Morris, “Taiwan’s History: An Introduction,” 15. 12. See Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. 13. Andrew D. Morris, “Taiwan’s History: An Introduction,” 14.



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14. For a commentary on the fragments of history and historical representation, see Frederic Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism.” 15. Andrew D. Morris, “Taiwan’s History: An Introduction,” 19–20, 17. 16. See Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan and Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law. 17. Andrew D. Morris, “Taiwan’s History: An Introduction,” 20. 18. For the information in this section, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. 19. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 20. 20. “Xiamen-dialect film first came to Taiwan in 1947.” See Lee Daw-ming, Historical Dictionary of Taiwan Cinema, 354. 21. Wu Nianzhen, “Buddha Bless America, Taiwan, Wu Nien-jen.” 22. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 133–142. 23. Huang Ren, “Wo xie Taiwan dianying lishi de tongku jingyan (shang)” [I discuss the hardships of Taiwan film history (Part 1)]. 24. Ibid. 25. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 125. 26. For a concise history of CMPC, see Lee Daw-ming, Historical Dictionary of Taiwan Cinema. 27. The influence of the popular folk melody films such as The Love Eterne might be clearly seen in Taiwan throughout the 1960s in terms of the Hong Kong-esque interior set designs. 28. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 44. 29. See James Wicks’s ecocinema article “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969).” 30. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 120. 31. See Cai Guorong, Liushi niandai guopian mingdao mingzuoxuan [National film in the 1960s: Famous directors and notable selections]; Chen Feibao, Taiwan dianying daoyan yishu [The art of Taiwan film directors]; Huang Ren, “Bai Jingrui zuopin chuangzuo de xinlu licheng” [The creative process of Bai Jingrui’s films]; and Huang Ren, “Bai Jingrui Luoma kuxue ji” [Bai Jingrui’s laborious studies in Rome]. 32. John Franklin Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, 134. 33. Ming-yan Lai, Nativism and Modernity: Cultural Contestation in China and Taiwan under Global Capitalism, 42. 34. See Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, “The Road Home: Stylistic Renovations of Chinese Mandarin Classics,” 203. 35. These films are known as zhanzheng wenyi jupian (war literary-art films). See Zhongguo Dianying Tushi Bianji Weiyuanhui, Zhongguo dianying tushi 1905– 2005 [Chinese film: An illustrated history 1905–2005].

134

Notes to pp. 19–25

36. See Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan film: Politics, economics, and aesthetics, 1949–1994]. 37. See Yu-shan Huang and Chun-chi Wang, “Post-Taiwan New Cinema Women Directors and Their Films” for an account of “pioneering Taiwanese women directors” and “the birth of women’s cinema during the new cinema era.” 38. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 56. 39. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 240–249 and Chia-chi Wu “Festivals, Criticism and the International Reputation of Taiwan New Cinema.” 40. Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Popular Culture, 3.

2. Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Xie Jin and Li Xing’s Early 1960s Films 1. Anon., “Taiwan dianying xiju gongzuo renyuan zai kunan zhong zhengzha” [Taiwan’s film and theater circles are in a distressing struggle]. 2. Gary D. Rawnsley, Taiwan’s Informal Diplomacy and Propaganda, 34. 3. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 184. 4. Huang Ren, Xingzhe yingji: Li Xing, dianying, wushi nian [The passerby’s trace: Li Xing, cinema, fifty years], 386. 5. In Hou Jun, “Taiwan dianying jiaofu: Li Xing daoyan fangtan lu” [The godfather of Taiwan films: An interview with Li Xing], 14. 6. Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni write: “what the camera registers in fact is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology . . . reproducing things not as they really are but as they appear when refracted through the ideology,” in “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 46. 7. Note that this essay does not focus on the important and popular Taiwaneselanguage cinema in the 1960s. 8. Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century, 21. 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937; and Zhen Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937. 11. Xie Jin, “Wu tai jiemei” [Stage sisters], 44. Following the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, in which some 300,000 people were denounced or imprisoned, the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958–1961 led to the deaths of some 20–30 million people. Diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union ruptured, and then news of border clashes with India splashed across headlines. By the early 1960s, people in China were struggling economically to return to the financial, agricultural, and industrial levels achieved before 1958. In order to maintain the support of the intelligentsia, the government initiated plans to reinstate intellectuals in a united front from 1961 to 1963, but from 1964 to 1965 this window of opportunity was closed. The end of this “cultural thaw” was signaled by many state efforts,



Notes to pp. 25–32

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including the Socialist Education Movement intended to instill class-consciousness in the masses. See Paul Pickowicz, “The Limits of Cultural Thaw: Chinese Cinema in the Early 1960s.” 12. Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, 34. 13. Vivian Shen, The Origins of Left-Wing Cinema in China, 1932–37. 14. Xie Jin, Wo dui daoyan yishu de zhuiqiu [My pursuit in film directing], 56. 15. Due to successful land reforms that ended “feudal” landownership practices, Taiwan’s caloric consumption was second in Asia only to Japan by the 1960s. Taiwan’s population experienced poverty in the 1950s, because the Nationalists had stifled economic growth and removed the infrastructure the Japanese had put in place from 1895 to 1945. But after land reforms and the receipt of millions of dollars in aid from the US from 1951 to 1964, a sense of economic hopefulness permeated society. See John Franklin Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, 134. 16. John Franklin Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, 117. In order to maintain control, the central government massacred dissidents after a riot in 1947, initiated martial law in 1949 (which remained in effect until 1987), and instituted a reign of “white terror.” National Assembly members in Taiwan, including all of the Legislative and Control Yuan, were originally from China. This created friction with the local Taiwanese, who were yet again being controlled by a foreign colonizing government. 17. Hollywood films were concurrently banned in China. 18. The Shanghai setting and information about the Nationalist Party was included in part to avoid government censorship of the film. See Gong Hong, Yingchen huiyilu [Film recollections], 128. I am grateful to one of the MCLC reviewers for this insight, and to both reviewers for their valuable counsel. 19. Michael Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful.” 20. Author interview, Taipei, October 2008. 21. Huang Ren, Xingzhe yingji: Li Xing, dianying, wushi nian, 317. 22. In Taiwan, drama was not offered as a program at any of the universities, so after transferring to National Taiwan Normal University, Li Xing decided to study in the Education Department. Even during this time, he remained passionate about drama, participating in extracurricular drama groups and performances, and he often discussed drama and the arts with his friends. After graduating, Li Xing taught at a school affiliated with National Taiwan Normal University. Later he fulfilled his obligation to serve in the military, and then wrote a column on culture and the arts as a journalist. 23. Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan film: Politics, economics, and aesthetics, 1949–1994], 128–130. 24. One thousand and fifty-two Taiwanese-dialect films were made between 1955 and 1969, while only 373 were made in Mandarin. See Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 125.

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Notes to pp. 33–36

25. His most famous film of the 1950s also fits this criterion. It was a Taiwaneselanguage comedy entitled Brothers Wang and Liu Tour Taiwan (Wang ge Liu ge you Taiwan, 1958), a kind of Laurel and Hardy caricature that could be found in films of the 1930s. The film was produced by Tailian, a local Taiwanese studio that Li Xing made successful almost single handedly. The film portrays the brothers as they discover the scenic sites of Taiwan in a time when travel was difficult and expensive. Building on the success of the initial installment, Li Xing went on to make five sequels. Then, in 1962, Li Xing established his own film studio with financial support from his parents. 26. Li Xing mentioned that this film influenced him in the same interview mentioned in Note 20: Author interview, Taipei, October 2008. 27. Zhang Yingjin asserts: “similar to the humanist tradition of the pre–1950 Mainland cinema, Li’s films concentrate on family values, dramatize separation and suffering, and represent women as the embodiment of both traditional virtues and a modern outlook” in Chinese National Cinema, 135. 28. Da Huo’er, “An Interview with Xie Jin,” 107–109. 29. Xie Jin moved with his family between Hong Kong and Shanghai during the initial stage of those turbulent war years. In 1941, he began his education in drama at the Sichuan Jiang’an National Theater Academy and later he attended the National Nanjing School of Theatre. He studied under famous instructors including Hong Shen and Cao Yu. It is interesting to compare the work of Xie Jin with Li Xing in light of this because both directors used dramatic staging techniques, as if their actors and actresses worked under a proscenium arch rather than within the film frame. In 1948 Xie Jin was invited by Wu Renzhi to make the transition from stage drama to film at the Datong Film Studio in Shanghai. As an assistant director, he learned how to make films in a studio that released an original motion picture every two to three months. See Yun Meng, Zhongguo dianyingjia liezhuan [Biographies of Chinese film personalities], 484. After liberation, Xie Jin stayed in Shanghai. He recollects today: “My teachers all stayed behind to build New China, and I decided not to go abroad,” even though many people had encouraged him to live in Hong Kong. See Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, 26. In 1950, he attended a university in Huabei for eight months to study Marxist philosophy and communist art techniques, although he did not join the communist party. 30. The entire film industry was gradually nationalized in the early 1950s. By the mid1950s, there were no private studios. By contrast, in Taiwan private Taiwanese studios, which released opera and comedy films, competed on the open market with state films and movies from the US and other countries. 31. During the Hundred Flowers movement of early 1957, Mao Zedong asked intellectuals to voice criticism of the present state of affairs in order to shake up the bureaucracy. Xie Jin took the opportunity to write this film about athletes. By this point, Xie Jin already had three years of directing experience under his belt. And he had good reason to believe that his film would be widely successful. The



Notes to pp. 39–42

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future looked bright, and the anxiety inherent in the Taiwan experience was not an issue. Xie Jin has stated in a recent interview: “During the 1950s, we were actually better off than the Nationalist ruled Taiwan—it was only later that things took a turn for the worse.” See Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, 35. Although Woman Basketball Player was altered and Xie Jin’s original intentions were revised, the film still bore the director’s distinctive stamp when it was released after the Anti-Rightist Campaign. 32. This brings to mind discussions of “suture,” the idea that film audiences enjoy the experience of believing that the fantasy on screen is actually occurring in reality. People often take pleasure in misrecognition when they watch a movie. Certainly, the suture is broken when the coach and the grandmother speak. Reality might be said to appear on the screen instead of an elegant diversion. 33. Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937, 92. 34. Film historian Xiao Zhiwei’s 1994 dissertation on film censorship during the Nanjing Decade, which figures centrally in this part of my discussion, describes the Nanjing government’s process as it began to exercise more control of film during the late 1920s. In brief, cinema was self-censored or locally censored until 1927, at which point the Nationalists established the “Film Censorship Regulations.” These regulations were enforced by the National Film Censorship Committee (NFCC), under the Departments of the Interior and Education, until 1934 when the Nationalists reorganized the film censorship body under the Central Film Censorship Committee (CFCC), an arm of the Department of Propaganda. The CFCC, which was dissolved in 1938 during the war with Japan, was centralized by the Nationalist Party in order to more effectively enforce a ban on anti-Japanese representations as well as on foreign films that portrayed China or the Chinese people in demeaning or offensive ways. Studies of censorship demonstrate that during the prewar period from 1927 to 1937, while film was squarely within the commercial and capitalist enterprise, it was also expected to oblige the government by projecting and representing the most moral and uplifting aspects of Chinese culture. 35. Julia Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949– 1979, 1–109. 36. Du Yunzhi, Zhongguo dianying qishi nian [Seventy years of Chinese film], 138–144. 37. Li Daoxin, Zhongguo dianying wenhua shi, 1905–2004 [History of Chinese film culture, 1905–2004], 118. Zheng Zhengqiu’s article “Ruhe zoushang qianjin zhi lu” was originally published in Mingxing Studio’s Monthly (Mingxing yuebao). 38. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 141. 39. Bonnie S. McDougall, Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, 82–83. 40. See Xie Jin “Cong daoyan de ganshou dao guanzhong de ganshou—Hongse niangzi jun daoyan sanji” [A director’s experience and audience experience—random

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Notes to pp. 43–50

notes on Red Detachment of Women] and Robert Chi, “The Red Detachment of Women: Resenting, Regendering, Remembering.” 41. This statement was made by Peng Zhen. The two denounced films were Zaochun eryue (Early spring in February) and Beiguo jiangnan (North and south of the country). 42. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966, 388. 43. Roderick MacFarquhar, writes: “This meant the negation not merely of classical literature, but also of the works of communist and leftist intellectuals written from the 1920s through the 1940s, many of whom were grandees of the current cultural establishment.” The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966, 382. 44. Xie Jin, Wo dui daoyan yishu de zhuiqiu, 56. 45. Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 216. 46. Dong Feng, “‘Sanshi niandai’ dianying de jieshihuanhun—ping yingpian Wutai jiemei” [Revitalizing “1930s” cinema: A critique of Stage Sisters]. 47. Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, 31. 48. Da Huo’er, “An Interview with Xie Jin,” 107–109. 49. Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 129. 50. Ibid., 120. 51. Li Xing’s portrayal of a drama troupe is similar to Stage Sisters in extraordinary ways. One observes in both films the stage set-up during a popular festival, behind the scenes shots of actresses putting on their make-up, and the squabbles between established and up-and-coming performers—details both Xie Jin and Li Xing would have been personally familiar with. 52. Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 135. 53. Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937, 81. This is a modification of Pang’s translation. 54. Specifically, Xie Jin was denounced for his use of Shanghai’s realist tradition, while Li Xing was praised. 55. The same author interview as mentioned in Notes 20 and 26, Taipei, October 2008. 56. Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 201. 57. Da Huo’er, “An Interview with Xie Jin,” 107–109. 58. Gilles Deleuze, “The Origin of the Crisis: Italian Neo-realism and the French New Wave,” 246–247. 59. Ibid., 247. 60. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh traces the recuperation and reactivation of the old wenyi film tradition as it re-emerges in hybrid forms on the contemporary screen. Also, Robert Chi has written an essay that considers how a Mainland Chinese film, Spirit of the Sea (Hai hun, 1957, dir. Xu Tao), depicts a Battleship Potemkintype rebellion occurring on a Nationalist controlled warship. Both articles can be



Notes to pp. 51–58

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found in Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds. Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of Arts. For additional connections between Xie Jin and Li Xing, see Hou Jun, “Taiwan dianying jiaofu: Li Xing daoyan fangtan lu.” 61. Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, 31.

3. Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: The Politics of Migration in Bai Jingrui’s 1970 Film 1. I wish to thank the blind reviewers at Journal of Chinese Cinemas for their valuable counsel. All errors are my own. 2. Huang Ren, Dianying “Alang”—Bai Jingrui [Film “A-lang”—Bai Jingrui], 56. 3. Emily Davis, “The Intimacies of Globalization: Bodies and Borders On-Screen,” 66. 4. The literal translation is “Flying-Swallow-Go-Home,” Fei yan qu lai. 5. Viem Kwok and Hayne Leland, “An Economic Model of the Brain Drain,” 91. 6. Ibid., 91. 7. John Franklin Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, 134. 8. Gong Hong, Yingchen huiyilu [Film recollections], 142. The exact text is “Liuxuesheng wenti dianying: Jia zai Taibei.” 9. Warren Tozer, “Taiwan’s ‘Cultural Renaissance’: A Preliminary View,” 86. 10. See Tun-Jen Cheng and Yun-Han Chu: “the role of state owned enterprises (SOE) shrank relative to the private sector in the 1960s after export-led industrialization (ELI) became the principle development strategy; but SOE’s in the 1960s and 1970s upgraded the industrial base and served as a parking space for the economic bureaucracy and received investment especially during the 1970s for the task of ‘industrial deepening,’” in “State-Business Relationship in Taiwan: A Political Economy Perspective,” 199. 11. Warren Tozer, “Taiwan’s ‘Cultural Renaissance’: A Preliminary View,” 97. 12. Zhang Yingjin, Chinese National Cinema, 133. 13. See Cai Guorong, Liushi niandai guopian mingdao mingzuoxuan [National film in the 1960s: Famous directors and notable selections]; Feibao Chen, Taiwan dianying daoyan yishu [The art of Taiwan film directors]; Huang Ren, “Bai Jingrui zuopin chuangzuo de xinlu licheng” [The creative process of Bai Jingrui’s films]; and Huang Ren, “Bai Jingrui Luoma kuxue ji” [Bai Jingrui’s laborious studies in Rome]. 14. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis write: “Bai intended to criticize the stifling lives of youth in the industrialized towns of Taiwan, but CMPC insisted it be a “socially responsible” film and, hence, the happy ending. Bai had to apply a “romantic” treatment to mask his social critique.” Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 36. 15. Home Sweet Home was part of CMPC’s national and transnational film tradition. It was released in the year that is still notable in Taiwan film history in terms of number of film theaters (826), seats (441,000), and number of time films were

140

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Notes to pp. 62–67

viewed. See Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan film: politics, economics, and aesthetics, 1949–1994]. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 40. Huang Ren, Dianying “Alang”—Bai Jingrui, 69–70. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 41. Susan F. Paterson, “Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the Expropriation of a National Heim,” 47 and Shailja Sharma, “Fassbinder’s Ali and the Politics of Subject-Formation,” 112–113. Shailja Sharma, “Fassbinder’s Ali and the Politics of Subject-Formation,” 107. Alexander Kluge’s brief but entirely fascinating and meditative piece “On Film and the Public Sphere” provides an insight into the intentions of this group of directors. He argues that the possibility for social change is expanded when filmgoers and society in general communicate both their fantasies and intellectual desires within the structure of public dialogue and communal exchange. (See Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” 218.) Kluge’s ideas arrive via Habermas’s text The Public Transformation of the Public Sphere; Habermas argues that a rational public sphere was created during the 18th century, at the beginning of liberal democratism, but mass media and governmental propaganda have since then marginalized and appropriated society’s horizons of perception. This chapter notes a connection between Habermas’s work and (its potential to comment on) modern Chinese culture. Richard Madsen, in his essay “The Public Sphere, Civil Society and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for Contemporary China Studies,” traces Habermas’s ideas in order to locate a sound research strategy for studying society in “post-socialist” China on the mainland. Madsen claims that Habermas’s conception of the public sphere is helpful in structuring a study of Chinese social history, because it allows one to center on “the moral and cultural dimensions” of modernity, while also recognizing, as Habermas observed, the extent to which these “lifeworlds” are “increasingly colonized by ‘systems’ of wealth and power.” (Richard Madsen, “The Public Sphere, Civil Society and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for Contemporary China Studies,” 184.) Madsen concludes that Habermas’s model is helpful when studying China because it allows one to avoid ethnocentric biases when identifying the ways rational public discussion is taking place within historically specific conditions. (Ibid., 187.) Susan Paterson, “Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the Expropriation of a National Heim,” 55. Note a discrepancy here: Barbara is presented in the nude as well. Barbara Mennel, “Masochistic Fantasy and Racialized Fetish in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” 192. Ibid., 193. Susan Paterson, “Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the Expropriation of a National Heim,” 49.



Notes to pp. 68–81

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26. Shailja Sharma, “Fassbinder’s Ali and the Politics of Subject-Formation,” 109. 27. Arguably, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s use of the long-take enables a similar possibility (see Conclusion). 28. Rachael Langford, “Black and White in Black and White: Identity and Cinematography in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de . . . / Black Girl,” 17. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 14. 31. Sheila Petty, “Introduction,” 2. 32. Ibid., 6. 33. Rachael Langford, “Black and White in Black and White: Identity and Cinematography in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de . . . / Black Girl,” 20. 34. Ibid., 19. 35. Michael Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful,” 154. 36. Ibid., 156. 37. Ibid., 157. 38. Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, 30. 39. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 15. 40. Shailja Sharma, “Fassbinder’s Ali and the Politics of Subject-Formation,” 113. 41. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 77. 42. On the one hand, the idealistic presentation of nature and the city in Taiwan may have been placed in the film in order to allure the audience, yet the fact that a majority of students stayed abroad actually reinforces the idea that it was preferable to “feel like a machine” in New York, as the character Zhiyun states, than to enjoy Taiwan’s scenic spots. 43. Saskia Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.”

4. Gender Negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Cinema of the Early 1970s

and Taiwan

1. Author interview, Taipei, October 2008. 2. Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, 87. This assertion is taken from Shih’s chapter entitled “The Geopolitics of Desire,” which describes how gender and nationalism are often presented in a binary structure that subjugates women within patriarchal state systems. In this way, women are the “third term” in struggles between a “geopolitical nation-state” and “unwelcome invaders” (ibid., 88). But Shih notes a distinct contrast between this binary system and the phenomenon of gender articulations in Hong Kong and Taiwan at the end of the 1990s, when there was an effort in Taiwan and Hong Kong to “nationalize or territorialize politics and culture” under the threat of transnational migration; namely the influx of incoming dalumei (“mainland sister”) in Taiwan and the biutse (Cantonese) or biaojie (Mandarin) in Hong Kong (ibid., 96). This entailed an effort of women disembedding patriarchy from the

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Notes to pp. 81–85

nation, so that the nation could be appealed to as an organ unaffiliated from masculinity. Shih writes: “these women deploy their national and transnational allegiances pragmatically and locally to define the meaning of their own politics” (ibid., 116). In this way, the nation is not an oppressor, but strategically appealed to in order to challenge the idea of “transnational Chinese culture” (alternatively, “pan-Chinese culture” or “global Chinese culture”) represented in the mid-1990s media. 3. See Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, and Huang Ren, Dianying yu zhengzhi xuanchuan [Film and government propaganda]. 4. Taiwan’s perennial challenges were three: poverty, authoritarian rule, and the perpetual threat of military action from China. See Liao Kuang-sheng, “Experiences and Major Policies in Taiwan’s Development,” 285. 5. Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, 88. See also Note 2 above. 6. Ibid. 7. See E. Ann Kaplan, Feminism and Film. 8. See Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China. 9. Darrell William Davis, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film, 8. 10. Author interview, July 2008, Taipei. See also Cai Guorong, Liushi niandai guopian mingdao mingzhuoxuan [National film in the 1960s: Famous directors and notable selections]. 11. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 37. 12. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 145. 13. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, “The Road Home: Stylistic Renovations of Chinese Mandarin Classics,” 203. 14. See Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan film: Politics, economics, and aesthetics, 1949–1994]. 15. Song Cunshou Retrospective, Dianying wenwu ji zuopin huiguzhan, Taipei, July 25–30, 2008. 16. Song Cunshou, “Wo de wushi huigu” [My retrospective at fifty years of age], 7. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 8. 19. Mao Qiongying, “Song Cunshou hui gaixianyizhe ma?” [Can Song Cunshou change his course?], 70. 20. Viewers have found the abundance of coincidences in the film difficult to accept, especially the conclusion. See Jin Shihui and Di Zhonghai, “Yunmen Wuji tan Chuangwai yu Muqin sanshisui” [The Cloudgate Dance Troupe discusses Outside the Window and Story of Mother], 20–23. 21. Song Cunshou, “Wo de wushi huigu”, 8.



Notes to pp. 85–98

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22. Zhongguo Dianying Tushi Bianji Weiyuanhui, Zhongguo dianying tushi 1905– 2005 [Chinese film: An illustrated history 1905–2005], 467. 23. Author interview, Taipei, October 2008. 24. See Hector Rodriguez, The Cinema of Taiwan: National Identity and Political Legitimacy, 1995. 25. Depictions of spying might be found in sequences 1, 11, 19, and 23; other important motifs include: the use of flashbacks, representations of death: 12, 16, 30, 35/6; trains: 4, 5, 7b, 8, 10, 15, 26, 35/6; letter writing: 7b, 10, 23; and the soundtrack, which varies between somber and intense, warranting an inquiry in and of itself. 26. Linda Williams considers how women speak to each other within film narratives that privilege patriarchy, and she particularly discusses the way women take up their identities within such systems, be it by resistance or struggling within contradictions. See Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” 413. 27. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 38. 28. This film was mentioned by Ke Junxiong as influential to his acting style in an author interview, Taipei, September 2008. 29. Perhaps this unhappy disclaimer that bookends the film Goodbye Darling, can be situated in the tradition of films like Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955), one of the first youth films in the United States, which included a similar qualification for its viewers—which probably serves to only heighten interest in the films. Yet, voice-overs and introductory text in film were not unique in the history of Taiwan cinema. In fact, the first Healthy Realist film by Li Xing, Our Neighbor (1963) carries a similar voice-over style introduction. Davis and Yeh write, “The feeble attachment of a moral to this story of rich human fallibility is an example of the evolution of healthy realism into something ideologically unruly.” Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 39. 30. See Jason C. Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan. 31. See Shuqin Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. 32. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 143. One should also take note of the fact that after 1977, when Ming Ji was in charge of CMPC, the patriotic film tradition was maintained to an extent, even as the Taiwan New Cinema movement began. 33. When I had an opportunity to ask the actress who plays the role of mother in the film, Li Xiang, if she believed that Story of Mother helped advance women’s rights in Taiwan, keeping in mind that she voices the line: “I am a wife, but I am a woman too!” Li Xiang responded: “No, I do not think that the film had any influence on society. Besides, that was just one line in the film.” Author Interview, November 2008.

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Notes to pp. 99–106

34. Ella Shohat, quoted in Wimal Dissanayake, “Globalization and the Experience of Culture: The Resilience of Nationhood,” 40. 35. See Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas.

Conclusion: Transnationalism and the Structure of Feeling of Taiwan Cinema in the Late 1970s 1. See “Introduction” of this volume regarding the transnational method used here, namely to combine Raymond Williams’ well-known methods of analyzing transformational processes alongside Wimal Dissanayake’s definitions of the local, national, regional, and global. 2. Note that the discussion surrounding authorial intent is fraught with ambiguity and complexity. See Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, Theorising National Cinema. 3. Frederic Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” 142. 4. See Angelina Yee, “Constructing a Native Consciousness: Taiwan Literature in the 20th Century.” 5. Ibid., 101. 6. See June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 28. 7. Hwang Chun-ming, The Taste of Apples, 24. 8. Jeannette L. Faurot, Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, 116. 9. Michelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, 2–3. 10. Wai-lim Yip Lecture, University of California, San Diego, April 2009. 11. Michelle Yeh and N. G. D. Malmqvist, Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, 176. Thanks to Wai-lim Yip for introducing this poem to me and for providing his analysis which influences my interpretation of the poem here. 12. June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 33. 13. I use June Yip’s translation here: Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 40. See also Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan and Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law. Modernist writers were attacked as well. Noting that Yvonne Chang’s representation of literary history in Taiwan demonstrates that modernist literature in Taiwan of the late 1950s and 1960s was not as a-political as it was characterized during the 1970s debates, I would argue that in the historical moment when political topics were taboo, when modernist poetry and fiction in Taiwan tried to address the social situation it was actually a type of intervention using the only method they had available to them—namely, indirect, difficult, experimental language that in the end also pointed to the frustration of living under the KMT regime.



Notes to pp. 107–110

145

14. In retrospect, the 1970s nativist writers were in some ways the inheritors of the sentiments of the 1930s leftwing filmmakers in Shanghai: influenced by the May Fourth era and the New Culture Movement, they denounced both anti-imperialist (vis-à-vis both Japan and the West) and anti-capitalist infiltration. 15. Zhongguo Dianying Tushi Bianji Weiyuanhui, Zhongguo dianying tushi 1905– 2005 [Chinese film: An illustrated history 1905–2005], 427. 16. Thus, the film continues the tradition of depicting a handicapped woman who requires the guidance of a strong, yet loving, father. 17. In 1979, the low-budget Good Morning, Taipei was the eighth highest-grossing Taiwan film screened in Taipei that year. See Zhongguo dianying tushi 1905– 2005, 543. Notably, a patriotic war film (Huang Jun Yun Gui) was the second highest-grossing film that year. Lu Feiyi’s consolidation of film data shows that in 1980 more films were sent to the government for censorship approval (133 films) than in 1970 (117 films), an impressive rebound from the low in 1973 (45 films). Film production numbers would increase until 1982 (144 films). See Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994 [Taiwan film: politics, economics, and aesthetics, 1949–1994], 433. Cultural trends were set in motion that would undermine state-approved film production. Attending the theater to see Taiwan’s films became increasingly less popular due to the rise of TV and the VCR, not to mention Hollywood dominance. Local exhibitors preferred the latter, because they earned a percentage of the profits from imported films. In addition, new forms of leisure entertainment emerged alongside continued economic growth. Interestingly, the rise and fall of Taiwan cinema is in direct inversion to the rise in popularity and number of films produced in Hong Kong and screened in Taiwan. In general, when film production decreased in Hong Kong, film production in Taiwan increased, and when films in Taiwan increased, the films from Hong Kong decreased. 18. The famous films of the Taiwan New Cinema, distributed in the West and the international art house circuit to great acclaim alongside films of Mainland China’s “fifth generation” and following on the heels of the Hong Kong New Wave, comprised only 59 of the 762 films made between 1982 and 1989 and did not revive the Taiwan film market as the government had hoped they would. 19. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 63. 20. In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982) is another early landmark Taiwan New Cinema film, with its second episode, “Zhiwang,” directed by Edward Yang. Note that directors King Hu, Li Xing, and Bai Jingrui directed the portmanteau film The Wheel of Life (Da lunhui) in 1983; interestingly, it features love triangles in three separate time periods which reminds one of Three Times, yet the film overall is not captivating in the same way as the Taiwan New Cinema portmanteau films. 21. Frederic Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” 120. 22. Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development,” 13.

146

Notes to pp. 110–119

23. Ibid. 24. Chen Fangming, “Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History,” 45. 25. See Introduction in this volume regarding the use of postcolonial theory. 26. Although he was released in 1975 due to the “amnesty honoring the death of Chiang Kai-shek.” See Lucien Miller, “Introduction,” 3. 27. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 129. 28. In a description of the relationship between literature and film culture, June Yip writes: “What unites the literature of Hwang Chun-ming and the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and makes their works central to any investigation of Taiwanese nationhood is their common fascination with the socio-historical specificities of the modern Taiwanese experience and their attempts to formulate a sense of Taiwanese cultural identity.” See June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 9. 29. Author interview, Taipei, October 2008. 30. Gong Hong, Yingchen huiyilu [Film recollections], 100. 31. Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 26. 32. Epoch Publicity Agency, Free China 1966, 188–189. 33. Note that no film tradition has of yet represented reality “objectively” or “accurately.” 34. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 143. 35. Hwang Chun-ming, A Taste of Apples, xiv. 36. In the 1950s and 1960s in Taiwan it was impossible to discuss the left-wing sentiments of the May Fourth era, “Hence, the literature taught in Taiwan’s schools was limited primarily to the Confucian classics and traditional Chinese poetry from the dynastic era. Popular literature consisted largely of escapist entertainment—historical romances and swordsmen epic—far removed from the quotidian realities of Taiwan,” June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 23. 37. Note that poor production values persist: in a scene intended to be dramatic, a clumsy second is comically knocked off balance by a swinging door as he storms a private residence. 38. See the film appendix in Lu Feiyi, Taiwan dianying: Zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949–1994. 39. In addition, Chapter 4 suggests that even films set in different settings reveal the local Taiwan experience and condition, albeit indirectly. 40. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 145–146. 41. Gong Hong, Yingchen huiyilu, 139. 42. Raymond Williams also writes: “practical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness”—which one might recognize by locating the difference between dictionaries and actual speech patterns, and clothing



Notes to pp. 119–126

147

advertisements and styles one sees on the street, among other examples. The error of reducing cultural phenomena to fixed forms is one this study has attempted to avoid by presenting the tenets of “Healthy Realism” as a cultural expression at times incongruent with transforming socio-political conditions. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128–131. 43. Ibid., 134. 44. The critique of Confucianism in Tao Yuanming’s poem “Substance, Shadow, and Spirit” comes to mind. 45. June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, 26. 46. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 79. 47. Granted, Home Sweet Home contains multiple narrative programs, but in another sense it has one point of view, namely that of the state. Another interesting case study is the 1969 film Four Moods (Xi nu ai le) directed by Bai Jingrui, King Hu, Li Hanxiang, and Li Xing, yet even in four parts it is far from disorienting. Li Xing perhaps directs his best work in this film; his segment stars Ou Wei. 48. Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang, “The Terrorizer and the Great Divide in Contemporary Taiwan’s Cultural Development,” 21. 49. See the previous section in this chapter. 50. Wu Nianzhen, “Buddha Bless America, Taiwan, Wu Nien-jen.” 51. Note additional connections. Nouvelle Vague in France during the late 1950s and early 1960s was in part a response to the dominance of films from Hollywood by an eclectic, politically charged collection of up-and-coming auteur filmmakers embraced by a film culture ready for films that broke from the previous local filmmaking tradition. The New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is similar to Taiwan New Cinema in that neither movement necessarily contains a single unifying principle that would allow one to classify all films under a single umbrella, and both movements were initiated by cinema industries desperate to locate new strategies to bring audiences back to the theatre due to competition with television and the influx of Hollywood imports. Moreover, both traditions include film directors who were deeply concerned with representing their respective national histories. 52. James Udden, “‘This Time He Moves!’: The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiaohsien’s Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women.” 53. See Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry. 54. Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction, 36; and Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, 145. 55. Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction, 38. 56. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, 156. 57. Thanks to Ru-Shou Robert Chen, I had the opportunity to attend one of the first screenings of this film for journalists in Taipei before it was officially released.

148

Notes to p. 127

58. By 1990, 76 films had been produced; in 1998, only 12; by 2000 Hollywood commanded 93 percent of the market. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, 2004. 59. See Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, East Asian Screen Industries. 60. Brian Hu, “7 Reflections on Cape No. 7.” 61. Ping-hui Liao, “Preface: Screening Contemporary Taiwan Cinema,” xv.

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Index

adventure films, 115, 120 Agricultural Education Film Studio, 8 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974), xxiii, 54, 65–69, 71, 74, 103, 122 Altman, Robert, 125 The Ammunition Hunter (Luo ying xia, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1971), 116 Appadurai, Arjun, xxi, xv Asian Film Festival, 47, 53, 117 auteur, xii, 101, 124–128 Autumn Execution (Qiujue, dir. Li Xing, 1972), 85, 117 Bai Jingrui, xiii, xvi, xxiii, xxiv, 15, 50, 53–77, 80, 82–85, 91, 93, 102–103, 116, 127 Bai Ke, 111 Bazin, André, 122, 123 Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia, dir. Li Xing, 1963), 16, 46–47, 50, 53, 107, 122 Bee, Kenny, 108 Benjamin, Walter, 120 benshengren, 9, 44, 106, 115 Berry, Chris, xi, xv, xvi, xix, xxi Bhabha, Homi, xiii, xix, The Bicycle Thief (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948), 50 Big Road (Dalu, dir. Sun Yu, 1934), 42

Black Girl (La Noire de …, dir. Ousmane Sembène, 1966), xxiii, 54, 65, 69–74, 103 blockbuster, 124–128 Blowup (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), 112 The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui lai de ren, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1983), 120 Browne, Nick, xii Buddha Bless America (Taiping tianguo, dir. Wu Nianzhen, 1996), 123 caesura, 68, 120–122, 127 Cai Chusheng, 26, 32, 36, 41–42 Cai Guorong, vii, x, xii, 82 Cape No. 7 (Haijiao qihao, dir. Wei Te-sheng, 2008), 20, 126–128 censorship, xv, xxiii, 18, 19, 40, 41, 53, 56, 58, 81, 82, 83, 85, 92, 105, 119, 135n18, 137n34, 145n17, 147n53 Central Motion Picture Corporation (Zhongying, CMPC), xii, xxiii, 14–15, 20, 45, 53, 55–58, 97, 112, 114–118 Chang, Sylvia, 20 Chang, Yvonne Sung-sheng, 7, 101, 110–112, 121 Chen Fangming, xx–xxi, 110 Chen, Ru-shou Robert, xi Chen Yaoqi, 120

162 Index

Chen Ying-jung, 20 Chen Yingzhen, 104, 107, 111 Chiang Kai-shek, xx, 5, 8, 16, 23, 45, 56, 113 Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernü, dir. Xu Xingzhi, 1935), 48 China Film Studio, 8 Chinese Film Critics Association (Zhongguo yingpinren xiehui), 107 Chinese Nationalist Party (see Nationalists) Chou, Zero, 20, 126 Chow, Rey, 64 Chu, T’ien-wen, 3, 108 A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989), 116 Cold War, ix, xvii, xxii, xxiii, 1, 12–13, 17, 23, 24, 28, 31, 102, 121 The Coldest Winter in Peking (Huangtianhoutu, dir. Bai Jingrui, 1981), 116–117, 127 colonialism (colonization), ix, xii, xvi, xvii, xx, xxi, 2, 3, 5–7, 9, 12, 18, 23, 70–72, 74, 111–112, 122, 127 Come Drink With Me (Dazui xia, dir. King Hu, 1966), 15 Confucian, 30, 34–35, 119 Coppola, Francis Ford, 125 critical realism (pipan xianshizhuyi), 15, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 49 Crossroads (Shizi jietou, dir. Shen Xiling, 1937), 24, 33, 36, 44 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, dir. Ang Lee, 2000), xviii, 127 Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque, dir. Zheng Junli, 1949), 32 Cui, Shuqin, 97 Cultural Renaissance, 56, 58, 81 Cultural Revolution, 25, 43, 47, 51, 56, 81, 107, 116–117 Cumings, Bruce, 24

Davis, Darrell William, xi, 64, 82, 95, 98, 111–112 Davis, Emily, 54 Davis, Mike, 131n26 Daybreak (Tianming, dir. Sun Yu, 1933), 26, 32 Dazhong Studio, 84 Dean, James, 96 decolonialization, xxi, 112 Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears, 2002), 54 Dissanayake, Wimal, xiv, xvii–xviii, 130n13, 130n18, 131n25, 144n1 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012), 125 dominant, x, xiii–xvi, xviii, xix, xxii, xxiv, 22, 42, 58, 101–103, 111, 112, 119, 121–123, 134n6 Dou-San: A Borrowed Life (Duo sang, dir. Wu Nianzhen, 1994), 127 Dragon Inn (Longmen kezhan, dir. King Hu, 1967), 15, 116 “The Drowning of an Old Cat” by Hwang Chun-ming, 104, 120 Du Yunzhi, xii, 41 Eight Hundred Heroes (Babai zhuangshi, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1976), 19, 97 emergent, xiii, xiv, xvi, xviii, xix, 22, 45, 47, 58, 102, 103, 119, 121, 127, 131n39, 141n43 escapism (escapist films), 28, 32, 41, 107, 113, 116, 124 The Everlasting Glory (Yinglie qianqiu, dir. Ding Shanxi, 1974), 19, 97 The Fake Tycoon (Miao jile, dir. Li Jia, 1971), 85 Farquhar, Mary, xix Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, xxiii, 54, 65, 66, 68–69, 71, 74–76, 103, 122 February 28 (2/28) Incident, xx, 8, 116



Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI), 71 Fishermen’s Song (Yuguang qu, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934), 26, 32, 36 Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998), 6 Fly Up with Love (Yi ge nügong de gushi, dir. Zhang Shusheng, 1979), 11 Formula 17 (Shiqi sui de tiankong, dir. Chen Ying-jung, 2004), 20, 127 Four Loves (Wanjun biaomei, dir. Li Xing, 1965), 28–31, 107, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 5 gender, viii, x, xiv, xvii, xxiv, 3, 19, 46, 79–99, 118 “Giraffe” by Shang Qin, 106 global, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiii, 2, 10, 16, 19, 81, 97, 99, 101–103, 109–111, 118, 122, 123 globalization, xii, xiv, xv, xix, xxi, 2, 21, 54, 110, 112 The Godfather Part II (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), 125 Golden Horse Awards, 1, 24, 53, 64, 79, 107, 108, 115 Gong Hong (Henry Gong), xii, 14, 15, 45, 50, 56, 57, 97, 112, 114, 118 Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan, hao nü, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995), 1, 124 Good Morning, Taipei (Zao’an Taibei, dir. Li Xing, 1979), 107 Goodbye Darling (Zaijian Alang, dir. Bai Jingrui, 1970), xxiv, 80, 82, 91–99 Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Bu san, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 2003), 127 Gui Yalei, 64 Guolian Studios (Grand Motion Pictures), 15, 45, 83 guoyu pian (Mandarin-language film), x, 9, 13–14, 96, 120

Index 163

He Never Gives Up (Wangyang zhong de yi tiao chuan, dir. Li Xing, 1978), 97, 107, 119 Healthy Realism (jiankang xianshizhuyi), 16, 20, 45, 50, 58, 97, 113, 114, 117, 123–124 “healthy variety of arts” (jiankang zongyi), 114 Heart with a Million Knots (Xin you qianqian jie, dir. Li Xing, 1973), 1–2 hegemony, xiii, xiv, xix, 102, 131n26 Heroes of the Eastern Skies (Jianqiao yinglie chuan, dir. Zhang Cengze, 1977), 115 Herzog, Werner, 66 Home Sweet Home (Jia zai Taibei, dir. Bai Jingrui, 1970), xvi, xxiii, 53–65, 71, 74–77, 91, 102–103, 108, 122 Hong, Guo-Juin, x, xii Hong Kong New Wave, 124 Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hou Xiaoxian), xi, xii, xxii, 1–3, 20, 102, 108, 109, 116, 120–121, 123–124, 126, 127 Hsih-Shih: Beauty of Beauties (Xi Shi, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1965), 14, 116 Hu Jinquan (King Hu), 15, 57, 83, 116 Hu, King (see Hu Jinquan) Huang Ren, x, xii, 13, 62, 128 Hwang Chun-ming, 104, 106, 108, 111, 114 In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, dir. Tao, Yang, Ko, Chang, 1982), 20 international, ix, xiii, xviii, xx, 15, 17, 19, 28, 30, 31, 37, 47, 57, 59, 76, 81, 97, 98, 101, 113, 124, 127 Italian neorealism, 15, 45, 50, 58, 102, 113 Jameson, Frederic, xix, xxiv, 101, 103, 104–112 Jaws (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1975), 125

164 Index

Kaohsiung Incident, xxi, 113 Kaplan, Ann, 82 Ke Junxiong, x, 55, 96 Kluge, Alexander, 66, 140n21 KMT (see Nationalists) Kuo, Jason, 96 Kuomintang (see Nationalists) Land of the Undaunted (Wu tu wu min, dir. Li Xing, 1975), xxiv, 79–81, 97, 115, 121 Langford, Rachael, 70, 72 Lao She, 105 Lee, Ang (Li An), x, xi, xviii, 20, 85, 118, 124, 127 Lee, Bruce, 116 Lee Daw-ming, xiii, 132n5 Li Daoxin, 41 Li Hanxiang, xxii, 14–15, 45, 57, 83, 85, 97, 116, 120, 126, 128 Li Jia, 16, 45, 53, 59, 85, Li Xiang, x, 55, 84, 86, 102 Li Xing, x, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 1–2, 14–16, 23–51, 53, 57, 59, 79–80, 83–85, 97, 101, 102, 107–108, 112–120, 122, 123, 128 Lianhua Film Studio, 41 Liao, Ping-hui, xx, 127 Lim, Song Hwee, 144n35 Lin, Brigitte, 115 Lin Fengjiao, 79–80, 108, 115 Lin, Tom Shu-yu, 1 local, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xv–xix, xx–xxi, xxiv, 6–9, 12–13, 17, 19–20, 44, 50, 74, 83, 85, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108–110, 112, 113, 115–124, 126–128 Lonely Seventeen (Jimo de shiqisui, dir. Bai Jingrui, 1967), 58 The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1963), xxii, 14–15, 126, 128

Love in a Cabin (Bai wu zhi lian, dir. Bai Jingrui, 1972), 85 Lu Feiyi (Lu Feii), 19, 32, 83 Lu, Sheldon, xii, xix Lu, Tonglin, xi Lu Xun, 105 Lust, Caution (dir. Ang Lee, 2007), 85 Lynch, David, 18 Ma, Jean, xii Man on a Tightrope (dir. Elia Kazan, 1953), 13 Mao Zedong, 23, 42, 43, 116 Maria Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston, 2004), 54 martial arts film, xi, 47, 93, 115 martial arts-magic spirit films (wuxia shenguai pian), 40 martial law, xxi, 2, 28, 110, 111, 116, 122 Martin, Fran, xvi, xvii May Fourth Movement, 105 Meng Yao, 56 minnanyu huangmeidiao (popular folk melody in Minnan dialect), 83 modernist, 40, 75, 104–106, 109–111, 119, 123 Morris, Andrew D., 7, 132n7 MPAA Voluntary Film Rating System of 1968, 125 Mulvey, Laura, 68 Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of China, 113 My Native Land (Yuan xiangren, dir. Li Xing, 1980) 107, 120 narrative structure, 13, 33, 37, 43, 49, 59, 60, 67, 75, 76, 81, 85, 86, 89, 93, 95, 97, 121, 122, 132n1, 132n4 national, ix, xiii–xix, xxii, 45, 46, 49, 51, 56, 63, 96, 98, 103, 118, Nationalist(s), ix, x, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xx, xxiii, 2, 7–9, 13, 19, 23, 26–28,



30–32, 40, 41, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 56–58, 63, 75, 81, 97, 98, 104, 105, 112, 114, 123 nativist (xiangtu) literature & film, ix, x, xxii, 19, 13, 104–112, 123, 127 neorealism (see Italian neorealism) New American Cinema, 101, 124, 126 New German Cinema, 66, 69, 76 New Woman (Xin nüxing, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934), 42 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi nostalgia, 13, 17, 115, 121, 127 occupation (see also colonialism), xi, 2, 3, 6, 8, 19, 32, 37, 50, 79, 104, 111, 115, 122, 123, 127 Opium Poppy (Yingshu hua, dir. Yuan Congmei, 1955), 32, 114 Orchids and My Love (Wo nü Ruolan, dir. Li Jia, 1966), 59 Our Neighbor (Jietou xiangwei, dir. Li Xing, 1963), 13, 15, 33–37, 39, 44, 47–48, 112, 113, 114 Outside the Window (Chuangwai, dir. Song Cunshou, 1973), 84 Oyster Girl (Ke nü, dir. Li Jia & Li Xing, 1964), 16, 45, 47, 53, 117, 122 Ozu, Yasujiro, 18 Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong), 105 Paramount Decision of 1948, 125 Parmar, Pratibha, xviii The Passion of the Christ (dir. Gibson, 2004), xviii patriotic war films, xxii, 115 Patterson, Susan, 66, 67 People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), 23, 42, 43 A Perturbed Girl (Tian zhi jiao nü, dir. Song Cunshou, 1966) Petty, Sheila, 71 Pickowicz, Paul G., xii The Pioneers (Yuan, dir. Chen Yaoqi, 1980), 120

Index 165

Plunder of Peach and Plum (Taoli jie, dir. Ying Yunwei, 1934), 24, 48 Polan, Dana, 125 postcolonialism, xii, xxi, 110–112, 127 postmodern, xxi, 18, 71, 76, 109, 110, 112, 121 power structures, xiv, xvi, 43, 81, 131n26, 135n15, 140n21, 141n2 propaganda, x, 25, 32, 47, 49, 50 Pudovkin, V. I., 49 The Puppetmaster (Xi meng rensheng, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993), 1, 8, 127 Qin Han, 79, 84, 86, 115 Qin Xianglin, 115 Qiong Yao, xi, 28, 83, 107, 115 Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955), 13 Rebels of a Neon God (Qingshaonian Nezha, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1992), 20 Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzijun, dir. Xie Jin, 1961), 42–44 regional, ix, xii–xix, 13, 19, 57, 79, 81, 97, 102, 117, 118 residual, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 22, 102, 112, 119, 121, 127 retrocession, xx, 8 The Road (Lu, dir. Li Xing, 1967), 59 Ruan Lingyu, 73 The Sandwich Man (Erzi de da wan’ou, dir. Hou, Wan, Tseng, 1983), 20 Scorsese, Martin, 125 Sembéne, Ousmane, 54, 65, 70–74, 75, 76, 103 Shang Qin, 106, 111 Shanghai Communiqué, 113 Shanghai critical realism (see critical realism)

166 Index

Sharma, Shailja, 66, 68 Shaw Brothers, 83, 107 Shen Fu, 41 Shen Xiling, 24, 36 Shih, Shu-mei, 80, 81, 97, 98 Shohat, Ella, xv–xvi, 99 Shu Qi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 17, 18, 21, 121 Situ Huimin, 41 Small Toys (Xiao wanyi, dir. Sun Yu, 1933), 32, 39, 40, 46 Sobshack, Vivian, xii socialist realism, 25, 36, 41, 102 Song Cunshou, xxiv, 15, 79–86, 92, 107, 118 Spider Lilies (Ciqing, dir. Zero Chou, 2007), 20 Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun, dir. Fei Mu, 1948), 24, 32, 50 Spring River Flows East (Yijiang chunshui xiang dong liu, dir. Cai Chusheng & Zheng Junli, 1947), 32 Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei, dir. Xie Jin, 1965), 25–28, 30–31, 37, 43, 44, 47, 48 Stam, Robert, xv, xvi Starry Starry Night (Xing kong, dir. Tom Shu-yu Lin, 2011), 1 Stone, Oliver, 124 Storm over the Yang-zi River (Yangzijiang fengyun, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1969), 97 The Story of a Small Town (Xiaocheng gushi, dir. Li Xing, 1980), 107–108, 119, 122 Story of Mother (Muqin sanshi sui, dir. Song Cunshou, 1973), xxiv, 79–91, 96–99, 102, 107, 118, 120, 122 The Story of Tin-ying (Tiying, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1970), 85 Street Angel (Malu tianshi, dir. Yuan Muzhi, 1937), 36 structure of feeling, 101–102, 119, 124, 146n42

A Summer at Grandpas (Dongdong de jiaqi, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1984), 120 Sun Yu, 26, 32, 36, 41, 42 Taiwan Cultural Association, 6 Taiwan Film Studio, 8, 41 Taiwan New Cinema, x, xi, xxiv, 14, 19–20, 85, 102, 108–112, 118, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128 taiyu pian (Taiwanese-language films), xxii, 13, 14, 20, 108 Tarantino, Quentin, 124–126 A Teacher of Great Soldiers (Huangpu jun hun, dir. Liu Jiachang, 1978) 97 Teng, Emma, 5 The Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi, dir. Edward Yang, 1986), 20, 103, 108–112, 121 Three Times (Zuihao de shiguang, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005), xxii, 1–22, 121–122, 132n1, 145n20 A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985), 1, 109, 120 A Touch of Zen (Xianü, dir. King Hu, 1970), 116 Touré, Mamadou, 70–71 translation, 3, 74, 106, 109 translocal, xvii transnational, ix–xix, xxi, 2, 13, 15, 24, 49, 57, 65, 77, 85, 101–103, 112, 123, 124, 129n7, 129n8, 129n10, 130n14, 130n23, 131n26, 131n29, 132n2, 141n2, 144n1 Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang), x, xi, 20, 118, 124, 127 Tuo Zonghua, 85 Two Lovers (Liangxianghao, dir. Li Xing, 1962), 33 Udden, James, 124, 132n1, 132n6, 147n52



United States Information Agency, 17 Victory (Meihua, dir. Liu Jiachang, 1976), 97 Vitali, Valentina and Paul Willemen, xvi, 144n2 Vive l’Amour (Aiqing wansui, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1994), 20 waishengren, 9, 44, 48, 114, 115 Wan Ren, 20, 108 Wang, Lingzhen, xiv Wang Tong, 20, 108 Wang Tuo, 104 Wang Wenxing, 105 Wang Zhenhe, 104 Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Saideke balai, dir. Wei Te-sheng, 2011), 20, 126, 127 Wedding Banquet (dir. Ang Lee, 1993), 20 Wei Te-sheng, 20, 126 Wenders, Wim, 66 wenyi (literary art), 19, 79, 83, 97, 138n60 White Terror, 9, 111, 116, 135n16 Williams, Raymond, xiv–xvi, xviii, 102, 119, 123, 144n1 Wind and Cloud on Ali Mountain (Alishan fengyun, dir. Zhang Ying & Zhang Che, 1949), 13 Winds of September (Jiu jiang feng, dir. Tom Shu-yu Lin, 2008), 1 The Winter (Dong nuan, dir. Li Hanxiang, 1968), 14, 120, 133n29 Witkin, Robert W., 21, 134n40 Woman Basketball Player Number Five (Nülan wuhao, dir. Xie Jin, 1957), 36–40, 42, 136n31 Wu Nianzhen, 12, 18, 20, 108, 123, 127 X-rated, 125, 147n53 Xia Yan, 23, 24, 41

Index 167

Xiandai wenxue (Modern Literature, 1960–1973), 106 Xiao Zhiwei, 137n34 Xie Jin, xxii–xxiii, 23–51, 102, 122, 134n11, 135n14, 136n28, 136n29, 136n31, 137n40 Yang, Edward, 20, 101–104, 108–111, 118, 123, 126, 145n20 Yang Qingchu, 104 Yau, Esther, xii Yeh, Emilie Yueh-Yu, xi, xix, 64, 82, 95, 111–112 Yeh, Michelle, 105 Ying Yunwei, 24, 48 Yip, June, 144n13, 146n28, 146n36 Zeng Zhuangxiang, 108 Zhang Che, 13 Zhang Shusheng, 11 Zhang Ying, 13 Zhang, Yingjin, xii, 82, 118, 129n2 Zhang Zhen, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, 121 zhanzheng wenyi jupian (literary art war film), 79 Zheng Junli, 32, 41 Zheng Zhengqiu, 41 Zhongying (see Central Motion Picture Corporation)