"'In the Dark Places, Getting Burned': Portrayals of Street Culture in Taiwan Cinema Today"

It is a pleasure to share this recent publication:

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jcfs-2021-0022/html

Abstract

Street culture is represented in two mid-2010 Taiwan films, The Kids 小孩 (Xiaohai, 2015) and Thanatos, Drunk 醉.生夢死 (Zui sheng meng shi 2015), in such stunning and beautiful ways that this essay sets out to etch each of them not only into the annals of Taiwan’s most memorable urban films ever made, but also position them as essential texts within the emergent field of street culture more broadly. Both movies depict physical and ideological boundaries that separate urban spaces from Taiwanese culture at large, and reveal the extent to which their young protagonists are perceived as “abnormal” even as they use street literacy in sophisticated ways to interact with formal actors (such as school teachers and the police) and informal actors (such as hooligans and petty criminals). These two films arguably present the best vantage point to understand the peripheral status of Taiwan’s urban young people who do not conform to hegemonic norms.

Thanatos, Drunk 醉.生夢死 movie poster.

Deng Nan-guang's 8mm Movies (Deng,1935-1941): Mini-Film Review

Deng Nan-guang (1907-1971) was a well-regarded photographer in both pre- and post- colonized Taiwan who shot home movies that offer a candid portrayal of Taiwan life. The silent films recorded in Deng Nan-guang's 鄧南光 8mm Movies 家庭電影 (Deng 鄧南光,1935-1941) show Taiwan under Japanese rule: a leisurely afternoon spent fishing, Tamsui (淡水, Danshui), a school event at a local kindergarten with his son in attendance, a parade, and also scenes along the coast of Japan.

Taiwan's stunning tropical beaches and verdant mountain ranges are renowned. What is remarkable to see here is that all of the island looked like this at one time. Deng's images of Danshui remind me that Taipei once looked like Kenting. What a cool thing it is to see that here. Of course, the material condition and political situation at the time these images were made is powerful as well.

Deng Nan-guang's 8mm Movies x Wami Wang with Improvised Original Music on YouTube

For my complete list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Love in Chilly Spring (Chen, 1979): Mini-Film Review

Love in Chilly Spring 春寒 (Chen 陈俊良, 1979) is pretty hard to watch. Super cheesy, and if you're only reading the subtitles, both unintelligible and laugh out loud funny (see image below). But the star power is evident--the film stars Taiwanese singer Fong Fei-Fei 鳳飛飛 (1953-2012)--and the story itself quite important in Taiwan's history. It takes place in Ilan during the Second Sino-Japanese War when Taiwan was under Japanese colonization, and it portrays a romance between two Taiwanese young people that is thwarted by a Japanese lieutenant. So is it so bad that it's good? For me, not so much.

For my complete list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

The Young Ones (Li, 1973): Mini-Film Review

The Young Ones 彩雲飛 (Li Xing 李行, 1973) is a classic romantic drama from early 1970s Taiwan. Adapted from a novel by Qiong Yao 瓊瑤, and starring Chen Chen 甄珍 and Alan Tang 鄧光榮, the film depicts a young man who loses his love interest to sickness, only to become attracted to a woman identical in appearance later in the film. The "shocking" twists and turns involve a set of twins separated by birth and tragic family histories.

The film is set in the most affluent, cosmopolitan sections of Taipei and briefly Hong Kong. And it features full-length song performances, a kind of MTV-esque quality found in many of the films of the time.

I can't help but think that the influence Li Xing's films had on the modernization of Taipei is underrated. What was once a small percentage of Taipei--as depicted in the film here--is now the norm in terms of communication, transportation, the arts, and global connectivity across all of Taiwan.

For my complete list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Four Moods (Bai, Hu, Li, Li, 1970): Mini-Film Review

Four Moods 《喜怒哀樂》is a portmanteau film, uneven in quality, yet still a must see film for any student or aficionado of Taiwan cinema of the 1960s and 70s because it showcases the four of the five major Taiwan directors (I would include Song Cunshou 宋存壽) of the era.

It is organized into four parts, each one focusing on a particular depiction of emotion taken from folklore: Bai Jingrui's 白景瑞 psychedelic experiment "Joy", King Hu's 胡金銓 tea house drama "Anger", Li Xing's 李行 melancholy representation of loss expressed via flashbacks in "Sadness", and Li Hanxiang's 李翰祥 intersection of the physical and spiritual worlds in "Happiness."

Surprisingly, Li Xing perhaps directs his best cinematic work in this film, a segment staring the absolutely superb Ou Wei 歐威 (pictured below). If you only check out one segment of this film to get an insight into the Taiwan mise-en-scène and aesthetics of the time, Li Xing's section is the one.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Storm Over the Yangtse River (Li Han-Hsiang, 1969): Mini-Film Review

I remember the first time I saw Li Han-Hsiang's 李翰祥 1969 film Storm Over the Yangtse River 《揚子江風雲》--I was in a film viewing room in the Taiwan Film Institute on Qingdao East Road 青島東路 road in Taipei, I was concluding a research trip funded by Taiwan Ministry of Education in 2011 for an article on my favorite Taiwan film of the 1960s and 1970s (Li Hanxiang's The Winter 《冬暖》 (1969),  produced in the same year as Storm Over the Yangtse River), and I had only two hours before I needed to head to the Taoyuan International Airport and head back to the U.S.

It was a film I had to see, in addition to all of Li Hanxiang's major works, in order to discuss his film style and technique. Today, it's great to revisit this classic film--a standout of it's genre in Taiwan film history--restored with clear subtitles, although I do question why these genre film's translate "Japanese" as "Japs."

The film begins with startling black and white film reels of scenic locations in China, such as Beijing's Temple of Heaven, in order to demonstrate the importance of the motherland to Taiwan's film viewers in the late 1960s, and--via a "voice of god" narrator--to remind viewers of the atrocities committed by Japanese military aggression on the mainland during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Storm Over the Yangtse River is perhaps a b-quality melodramatic film about a Chinese spy involved in a complex double-crossing scheme during World War II, but it is "A" quality when it comes to providing a window on pop culture during the Cold War. And true to Li Hanxiang's approach to narrative, it pulls out all the conventional stops of the time: sensuality, torture, action, war, love, patriotism, intrigue, murder, and last-minute rescues.

As the image (below) from the film demonstrates, Li Han-Hsiang was a big-time director who took a "go-big-or-go-home" mentality to his idea of what the silver screen could accomplish. His depictions of war contain numerous extras and his sets are the best of the era.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Love and Duty (Bu Wancang, 1931): Mini-Film Review

As cinema historians and I have described in detail elsewhere, Republic of China (Taiwan, R.O.C.) cinema traces it's pre-1945 heritage to the mainland Chinese film tradition. After all, when the Nationalists fled the mainland in 1949, their number included film directors and personnel who relocated to Taiwan. Director Bu Wancang's 卜萬蒼1931 Shanghai film, Love and Duty 戀愛與義務, produced by Lianhua Film Company, is part of this lineage.

Starring the brilliant Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉 (on whom I've written an encyclopedia entry) and Jin Yan 金焰, the 153 minute silent film portrays a love affair, between a married woman and her childhood sweetheart, and the suffering this relationship ultimately causes.

The portrayal of emotion is over the top, each scene incredibly slow paced. The camera lingers on close-ups of each actor's face until all of the expressions that signify a particular emotion are exhausted, in keeping with late 1920s and early 1930s norms. What is fascinating to observe is the way that this particular style of acting and character portrayal came to be representative of film-making more generally across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong--even today, when the camera stays focused on an individual a little longer than necessary to convey a particular idea, we find the archaeology of these depictions from this earlier time.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

It Takes Two to Tango (Wan Jen, 2013): Mini-Film Review

Wan Jen's 2013 film It Takes Two to Tango 跨海跳探戈 uses humor to illustrate both cultural differences and similarities between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese as it tells the story of a young woman from Taiwan (王心如) who draws ire from her family upon getting engaged to her fiancé from China. One of the standout performances is by the protagonist's father, played by Bor Jeng Chen 陳博正, who had the starring role in Hou Hsaio-Hsien's vignette The Sandwich Man 兒子的大玩偶 in 1983.

It Takes Two to Tango attempts to be a fun movie and has a few gags, and it demonstrates the extent to which free speech is the norm in Taiwan as the film does not hesitate to touch a number of hot-button issues, but over all it is less successful in what it sets out to achieve than the similarly themed The Wonderful Wedding 大囍臨門 (Huang Chao-liang 黃朝亮, 2015), which I would recommend of the two.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Connection by Fate (Wan Jen,1998): Mini-Film Review

Connection by Fate 超級公民 (Wan Jen 萬仁 , 1998), the third film in Taiwan director Wan Jen's “super citizen” trilogy, reminds me of French films of the 1990s in that it--as the director has also concurred--is not driven by a cause-and-effect plot, but rather emotion. In it, a taxi driver named A-te encounters, and discovers a way to assist, the spirit of an indigenous man trapped between the world of the living and the departed in late-1990s Taipei.

Wan Jen's films are somehow perfect despite their imperfections: asynchronous sound, low budget effects, and non-professional acting. In the 1960s and 1970s cinema of Taiwan, poor production values are comical. Here, it is impossible to be distracted because the screenplay is superb. Wan Jen is a transcendent director, a master of depicting memory and a master of seamlessly juxtaposing time periods and locations, most often via the use of a soundscape that is both beautiful and haunting.

Corollary notes: I also found fragments of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière (produced five years later) in Wan Jen's film: shots on the MRT and a scene in a small train station built during the Japanese colonial era come to mind. Additionally, a few rural tracking shots from HHH's Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) overlap with Wan Jen's depictions in Connection by Fate.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Super Citizen Ko (Wan Jen,1995): Mini-Film Review

Super Citizen Ko 超級大國民 (Wan Jen 萬仁 , 1995), which won multiple Golden Horse awards in 1995, is must-see for anyone interested in depictions of political oppression generally, and Taiwan history in the late 20th century specifically. Presented in a series of flashbacks linked by a simple yet moving melancholic score, the film uncovers the life of an aging man who lost nearly everything during Taiwan's White Terror.

Wan Jen's film follows an elderly protagonist named Ko as he recollects being imprisoned for participating in a left-wing reading group during Chiang Kai-Shek's leadership, while in the present it captures Taiwan's mid-1990s, and at times rocky, transformation into a truly democratic state. Along the way the camera does not waiver from depicting Taiwan's most precarious situations both historically and concurrently. It is as sophisticated and complex as any film ever made.

I always wonder, when considering Taiwan's films, the extent to which global audiences might appreciate them because political oppression is experienced and understood universally, while at the same time, Taiwan's situation is singular, considering it's colonial past, the repression of the KMT/GMD/Nationalist government post-1949, and the pluralistic society in Taiwan which has emerged post-1987. Regardless, my hope is that Taiwan films such as this one will enjoy continuous, widespread acclaim.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

The Farewell Coast (Wan Jen, 1987): Mini-Film Review

The Farewell Coast 惜別海岸 (Wan Jen 萬仁, 1987) portrays two young people, a waiter at a restaurant and a prostitute, caught between Taiwan's pre-1987 culture under martial law and the modern pluralistic democracy which is Taiwan today. The first act of the film could appear to be a melodramatic love story in the vein of KMT/GMD/Nationalist government-produced films of the 1960s and 70s, but by the second act Wan Jen's film spirals out of control, in the vein of Bonnie and Clyde, as the director explores ideas previous filmmakers in Taiwan could have only dreamed of representing. Along the way, its characters reflect on what it means to be Taiwanese with only the slightest of connections to the mainland.

For my list of Taiwan Cinema Toolkit film reviews, click this link here.

Film Reviews: Taiwan Cinema Toolkit 臺灣電影工具箱

Created by the Taiwan Ministry of Culture and selected by the Taiwan Film Institute, the Taiwan Cinema Toolkit 臺灣電影工具箱 is a collection of films available for non-profit public screenings. Each film offers a unique insight into Taiwan's rich cinema history.

Links to my reviews of films from two of these collections are below--I'll keep adding films to this page until all of the films are reviewed. -- jw

2016 Taiwan Cinema Toolkit  (32 films)

1. The Farewell Coast 惜別海岸 (Wan Jen 萬仁, 1987)

2. Super Citizen Ko 超級大國民 (Wan Jen 萬仁 , 1995)

3. Connection by Fate 超級公民 (Wan Jen 萬仁 , 1998)
4. It Takes Two to Tango 跨海跳探戈 (Wan Jen 萬仁 , 2013)
5. Love and Duty 戀愛與義務 (Bu Wancang 卜萬蒼, 1931)
6. Storm Over the Yangtse River 揚子江風雲 (Li Han-Hsiang 李翰祥, 1969)
7. Four Moods 喜怒哀樂 (Bai, Hu, Li, Li, 1970)
8. The Young Ones (Li, 1973)
9. Love in Chilly Spring (Chen, 1979)
10. Deng Nan-guang's 8mm Movies (Deng,1935-1941)
11. Civil Disobedience (Chen, 2013)
12. Face to Face (Chung, 2013)
13. Attabu 阿罩霧風雲 (Hsu, 2013)
14. Sock’ n Roll 台灣黑狗兄 (Ho, 2014)
15. Money and Honey 麵包情人 (Lee, 2012)

Showcase, 2016 (22 films)

The Terrorizers (Yang, 1986): Mini-Film Review

Edward Yang's 楊德昌 masterpiece The Terrorizers (1986) 恐怖分子 is one of the few films that I find impossible to praise too highly. I recently re-watched it for the umpteenth time and remain astounded by its opening act which, as a definitive postmodern work, anticipates the multimedia, multi-soundscape, multi-layered editing techniques often attributed to more well-known world cinema films of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as the intro. to Stone's 1991 film JFK--although Yang's technique is methodical and less dramatized, it is more than equal in terms of technique and affect.

Moreover, Yang's narrative style, which interconnects the lives of multiple urban residents of mid-1980s Taipei, perfects this narrative form well before films such as Amores Perros (Iñárritu, 2000), 21 Grams (Iñárritu, 2003), Crash (Haggis, 2004), and Babel (Iñárritu, 2006).

In addition to it's landmark qualities within film history in general, it is equally significant as an unparalleled snapshot of Taiwan in the mid-1980s as the nation transitioned into a new era in terms of its postcolonial condition. I elaborate further on this film, its critical reception, and its representation of this important juncture in Taiwan history in the conclusion of my book on Taiwan film, Transnational Representations (HKUP, 2014).

YouTube Lecture: CSUSB Modern China Lecture Series

My lecture by invitation, “Sympathetic Views of Japan in Café Lumière & Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,” is below. It was delivered on April 20th, 2017 at California State University, San Bernardino.

You can access the conclusion of the paper first by clicking the link here.

Via the YouTube channel: CSUSB Modern China Lecture Series

A couple stills from the lecture:

A Brighter Summer Day (Yang, 1991): Mini-Film Review

Edward Yang's epic work A Brighter Summer Day records more insightfully than any film in its class, a singular moment in Taiwan in the early 1960s. The nearly four hour film, which took three years to make, based on a script with more than 100 characters who deliver their own distinct lines of dialogue, documents a teenage boy's psychological descent in an era of transition generationally, politically, and culturally.

It is without a doubt a masterwork. So when I find myself hesitating to recommend the movie to those who are not familiar with the turmoil in Taiwan during the time period depicted, or reluctant to recommend A Brighter Summer Day because it is primarily dialogue driven, I return to Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016), who describes how films like this are made--namely, perfectly. (See Kiarostami clip, below).

"What I don't like, you don't see in my films."
— Abbas Kiarostami

Happy Birthday Abbas Kiarostami. pic.twitter.com/06ii7aQN5i

— Art Film Art (@ArtFilmCinema) June 21, 2017

SCMS Conference 2017, Wednesday March 22nd

On Wednesday morning I left rainy (warm) San Diego for sunny (cold) Chicago for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2017 conference.

A major takeaway from the "Civics Lesson: Screen Media’s Potential for Empathy, Engagement, and Humanitarianism" presentations is the idea that fan reception is not inherently progressive (leading towards engagement with the Other, inclusive practices, and political transformation). I've thought of this idea in relation to films I've studied from the 1920s and 1930s, so it was fascinating to consider this idea in relation to fan studies today in online and other communities.

Ling Yang's Presentation at SCMS, 2017

The "Chinese Queer Fan Cultures in the Twenty-first Century: Queering Heterosexuality, Geopolitics, and Transcultural Imaginations" panel, with respondent Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, featured work by Ling Yang from Xiamen University from whom I learned about queer fan communities responses to, and re-imaginations of, mainstream works such as the Hetalia manga series. I left before the panel's final presentation in order to attend Brian Bernards' excellent lecture on “Cinematic Soft Power: Memorializing Taiwan’s Colonial History in Umin Boya’s KANO.”

As a visitor here, I can't help but be impressed by this incredible city.

Chicago, 2017

Essay Abstract: Love in the Time of Industrialization

Love in the Time of Industrialization:

Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969)

My essay “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969)” uses the lens of ecocinema (生態論述) in order to examine Li Hanxiang’s (李翰祥) artistic film The Winter 《冬暖》. Li’s engagement with the non-human environment is exceedingly complex and nuanced, revealing a holistic ecological consciousness in his depiction of urban life on the fringes of Taipei’s urban sprawl. The aesthetic moves that Li uses both reveals his experience as a painter and imbues the film with a Buddhist ethos that offers an appealing symbiosis between human interactions and the non-human world--and cinema’s relationship with the world--in late 1960s Taiwan. Indeed, representations of nature provide a seemingly unquestionable source of stability to the film. By situating the film within its historical context, this article demonstrates how broad scale industrial changes in Taiwan would affect the way people interacted with the rapidly changing natural environment and with one another.

〈愛在工業發展的年代：李翰祥的《冬暖》 (1969) 及其自然環境的再現〉運用生態論述的分析技巧探討李翰祥藝術性極高的《冬暖》一片。李翰祥在此片中對於與人類密切相關的生態環境的描寫有著超乎尋常的複雜度與細膩，以一個高度關懷的生態整全觀看待正快速城市化的台北市區外圍的生活。這樣的美學觀其來有自，李翰祥曾經是一個畫家，他的經驗為這部片引入一股特殊的氛圍，直指佛教思想的影響。在六零年代晚期，這部片能着眼於今日眾所關懷的人與自然界互相依存的關係——但也意味着指涉這部片與閲聽者的世界間的關係——實屬不凡。果不其然，李片所述的“自然”無可懷疑地是整部片的敘事安定感的泉源。這篇文章考量歷史的語境，論及台灣因工業化所產生的社會變遷如何廣泛地影響到人與正在轉變中的自然界的關係，以及人與人之間的關係。

Available in: “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969).” Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies 17 (2013): 81-102.

Image from a film review of Li Hanxiang’s The Winter soon after its release in the late 1960s.

Book Chapter/Essay Abstract: Projecting a State that does not Exist

Projecting a State that does not Exist:

Bai Jingrui's Jia zai Taibei / Home Sweet Home

In this essay I argue that Bai Jingrui’s 1970 film 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, many of whom studied abroad and yet did not return. 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. A close reading of the film illuminate the ways that Bai Jingrui’s aesthetic choices work both in conjunction and disjunction with the intentions of the Taiwan government in 1970.

這篇文章談到白景瑞《家在臺北》(1970)中的特有電影美學與意識形態，以及其背後的政治性, 也就是當時的台灣政府怎麼藉由影視審查制度，將當時的敘事電影收編於其思想控管之下。這齣電影從當時代國民黨政府的立場論及六零年代晚期、七零年代早期關於留學生的一些問題：那時代從台灣到外國去讀書的留學生，大部分離開台灣以後就沒有回來。 這個六、七零年代的事實透過中央電影公司的再生產、運用進步的影像技術，意圖呈現一個屬於國民黨認可的意識形態。但仔細的電影閱讀顯現：白景瑞透過其高明的藝術操作，他的電影時而符合、時而竟能脫出台灣1970年代統治者之意識掌控。

Available in: Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s (HKUP, 2014).

Also available in: “Projecting a State That Does Not Exist: Bai Jingrui’s Jia zai Taibei/ Home Sweet Home” In Journal of Chinese Cinemas 4 (2010): 15-26.

Book Chapter/Essay Abstract: Two Stage Brothers

Two Stage Brothers: 

Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing 

This essay 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. 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. This seemingly counterintuitive conclusion 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.

這篇文章主要談到冷戰時期共產黨轄下的中國導演謝晉和避退台灣的國民黨統治下的導演李行，他們彼此之間所慣用的相似電影形式與同樣受到上海現實主義(1930s-1940s)之影響的相關性。我們可以看到，在1949以後的台灣和中國大陸，即使觀念思想上已經逐漸產生差別, 衍生不同的電影文化，上海現實主義仍然是一個共同的根本基礎, 具體賦予這兩位台灣和中國大陸的導演相似的電影語言。這樣的美學性質的探討顯示我們一向認為的電影語言具有世界普同的性質，或者電影語言必然是國家性的這樣的說法,不必然能夠全面說明這兩位中文電影導演相似的電影模式。

Available in: Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and 1970s (HKUP, 2014).

Also available in: “Two Stage Brothers: Tracing a Common Heritage in Early Films by Xie Jin and Li Xing.” In Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21 (2009): 174-212.

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Wei Te-Sheng, 2011): Mini-Film Review

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale 賽德克•巴萊 is a four and a half hour epic account of resistance in Taiwan during an era of Japanese colonization in the 1930s. Directed by Wei Te-Sheng, director of Cape No. 7 (2008), the story follows Mona Rudao as he leads a mission--that he knows will eventually fail--with 300 Seediq aboriginal warriors against Japanese civilians and ultimately the Japanese military who eventually crush the uprising.

 

Mona Rudao is instilled with certainty that he is on the right side of history and that upon his death he will see his ancestors, so the film's most tragic and genuinely heart-breaking depictions are those of women and children on both sides of the multi-faceted conflict who are caught in the crosshairs of colonization. Most of the depictions of the Seediq peoples resonate with authenticity on the screen; however, the small scale depiction (despite some 1500 extras) of the Japanese colonial machinery is not as impressive compared to other historical war films. Over all, a few narrative gaps and a handful melodramatic depictions of nature clearly created via CGI make the film difficult to concentrate on consistently--similar to what happens to viewers who disengage from Zach Snyder films--even though numerous scenes are as memorable, moving, and impressive as any recorded on film today.