what distinguishes TNC films of the 1980s and the Nativist Literature that underpins them. The purpose of her analysis is to “highlight a perceptible shift from conceptions of nation and cultural identity based on unitary coherence and authenticity toward alternative models that emphasize multiplicity and fluidity” (Yip 11).
Viewed from the second perspective, TNC films have raised the cultural status of film workers, especially the position of film directors. The TNC period sees the rising of Taiwan “auteur criticism,” which identifies and examines films by associating them with a director who often uses common themes and stylistic traits. This approach is often connected with heavy use of formal analysis concerned with matters of structure and style in film, and with thematic interpretations of messages about life and society.
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang are the two of the most frequently discussed TNC directors in this new critical wave, and scholars using this approach have examined how the historical and cultural conditions of these two directors’ productions influenced their arrangements of the auteurist unity, and how they established
themselves as auteurs. It has been noted how these two directors tended to organize out of the CMPC studio system, and how they and other TNC auteurs were influenced by the system. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis have examined Taiwan directors, particularly TNC directors, in their Taiwan Film directors: A Treasure
Island. They pinpoint general auteuristic characteristics of several significant TNC
directors, including Hou, Yang and Wang Tong.29 They have also pinpointed how TNC directors anchored and unified audience perception of films, and identified the most distinctive signs of directorial control over their films: editing, storylines, themes and setting. These sophisticated auteur studies are interested in the films only, not in the psychology or private lives of the filmmakers. According to Yeh and Davis,
“Taiwan cinema has become more visible due to the rise of internationally recognized names: Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee. These Taiwan directors enjoy substantial attention, not as figures within the accustomed national cinema model but as auteurs of the international cinema, navigating the ceaseless roll of nation versus international, local versus global” (6).
This critical approach, while valuable, focused rather too much on the cinema’s function as cultural and art product, and ignored its entertainment function. TNC films are closer to “author’s cinema” than “spectator’s cinema.”30 As Feii Lu points out,
29 For more discussions on less noticed TNC directors and artists like Wang Tong or Wu Nien-zhen, see Yeh and Davis, “Challenges and Controversies of the Taiwan New Cinema” in Taiwan Film Directors. In order to show that the New Cinema should be seen not only as director-driven, but as a collective endeavor by lesser-known artists, critics, and the public, the two authors include Wu Nianzhen and Xiao Ye in their discussion. Later, they discuss Wang Tong and Wan Ren particularly.
These two directors take distinctive approaches to Taiwan nativism, preferring the presentation of historical subjects than the quest for stylistic consistency or innovation.
30 In Huang Lin’s 60 Years of Film Critique in Taiwan, he notes an essay written by the film critic Qi
“TNC directors consciously adopted a detached attitude toward audiences, and thus developed the creative style and the “auteur” consciousness. This was different from the attitude which viewed directors as only one part of film production and
‘influenced the development of film production and cultural art’ in Taiwan” (Lu
Taiwan Cinema 286-287).
31 Chang Shih-lun, meanwhile, regarding the logic of how TNC films transplanted and fit an “art cinema” paradigm into Taiwan society, called this a “Taiwan film phenomenon” in which “the New Cinema directors’ works aggressively targeted the various intermediate-level film festivals and beganparticipating in the outside competition and observation sections of the higher level festivals” (31). We might argue that a vicious circle was taking shape, and Ti Wei says that “major film directors (in Taiwan) continued to ‘keep a distance’ from local
markets and audiences both in creation and in marketing. An international film festival approach was adopted by the Taiwan New Cinema School of film workers, and Chang Tso-chi was one of the directors who followed this international film festival path
TNC directors’ sophisticated grasp of past and current circumstances in Taiwan, accessing and highlighting Taiwanese historical experience, and revisiting the reality of daily life for different classes and people in Taiwan; their cultural awareness and
Long-ren on April 25, 1987, “The Inclination of Taiwan Film Criticism.” In Qi’s essay, the
circumstances of Taiwan film critics in the late 80s are discussed. Qi argues that because of Taiwan New Cinema, film criticism in Taiwan was separated into two poles: “spectator cinema” criticism and
“author cinema” criticism. Film critics should find a balance of their status and approach, for they cannot present all positions of films.
31 The original text of Lu’s argument is: “台灣新電影(對觀眾)採取的是疏離的態度….經由這樣的 經驗，台灣導演培養了所謂電影作者(Autuer)的創作風格與工作態度，與過往導演僅是電影生產 過程一環的工作態度不同，於整個電影美學與文化藝術的發展，有深遠影響。”
flight from government studio production and control toward independent, sometimes revolutionary filmmaking; and their groundbreaking aesthetics that continue to have an important influence on Taiwan cinema—these factors represent the significance of TNC films, once again underscoring the importance of this era for Taiwanese film.
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chang
Given TNC directors’ historical consciousness, their cinematic signatures, and their cultural significance, it should not surprise us that the relationship between TNC directors and the following generation in Taiwan film has been the subject of
academic interest since the decline of TNC. Among TNC directors, Hou Hsiao-hsien is without question viewed as Chang Tso-chi’s mentor. Hou is arguably one of the most appreciated “great directors” in contemporary world film history. He is best known as one of the most significant innovators of the “long take,” especially those in
“empty shots.” Also, Hou is recognized as one of the most truly gifted interpreters of mise en scène, alongside figures such as Louis Feuillade (France 1873-1925), Kenji Mizuguchi (Japan 1898-1956 ), Ozu Yasujiro32 (Japan 1903-1963), and Theodoros Angelopoulos (Greece 1935-). For auteurs like these, artistry lies more on their stylistic or formal operation than on the thematic preaching.33
32 Hou is often considered as bearing similar cinematic stylistics with Ozu, even Hou himself said that he had never seen any of Ozu’s film before he has already established his own style. In “Nostalgia at This Present,” Hasumishi Gehiko argues that Ozu’s films are always searching for the lost present while Hou’s films are always searching for the lost past. This point marks the basic difference of these two directors.
33 David Bordwell, in his Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, discusses these four directors’ cinematic staging and mise en scène. These four directors in some way share the same craft tradition, a problem–solving based system, testing a director’s artistic creativity. For a detailed
Hou, as a Director
Hou was born in 194734. He entered the film industry in 1973, first as the
apprentice of director Li Hsing. Nurtured at the declining moment of Taiwan cinema, Hou began to direct his own films in 1980; the first three of them are Cute Girls [Jiushi liuliu de ta](1980), Cheerful Wind [Fenger tit a cai](1981)and Green, Green
Grass of Home [Zai na he pan qing cao qing](1982). In 1983, he directed one episode
in The Sandwichman, which was viewed as the breakthrough film of the Taiwan New Cinema. Later that same year, he directed The Boys From Fengkuei, which began to reveal his self-awareness and self-assurance as a director. From then till 1987, he directed a series of autobiography films—A Summer at Grandpa’s [Dongdong de jiaqi](1984), A Time to Live, A Time to Die[Tongnian wangshi](1985), and Dust in the
Wind[Lianlian fengchen](1987). His themes, including teenage initiation and love in a
rural hometown, and his unique stylistics, have become TNC trademarks, and have had a great impact on Taiwan film. His Daughter of the Nile [Niluohe nuer](1987) presents contemporary urban teenage life. In his masterpiece A City of Sadness (1989),
discussion, see David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging. However, Bordwell’s emphasis on the history of film forms is sometime criticized and examined. For example, in Ira
Bhaskar’s “Historical Poetics,” Narrative, and Interpretation,” she basically examines David Bordwell’s idea on “historical poetics” which focuses on the analysis of the history of form. According to Bhaskar, Bordwell’s objections to interpretation do not function at the level of inadequate or misplaced
application of interpretative principles in current criticism.
34 As an immigrant from mainland China, this kind of diaspora experience influenced Hou a lot. In Jean-Michel Frodon’s “Perceiving the Space and Time upon a Mango Tree,” he linked Hou’s personal history with his cinematic techniques. Frodon tries to find consistent elements in all of Hou’s films, saying that Hou chooses to be close to history and politics. Besides, he argues that Hou’s film technique could be called as the “Chinese montage” derived from classical Chinese painting and literature. It mostly originates from Hou’s Chinese background.
Hou concerned himself with historical issues. His Taiwan trilogies, A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster [Xi meng rensheng](1993) and Good Men, Good Women [Hao nan hao nu](1995)35, deal with Taiwanese history from the Japanese-occupied period, to the white terror36, and into the 1990s and modern Taiwan. A City of Sadness won a Gold Lion Award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. This achievement
established Hou’s position as an international master. This award-winning event brought a new path for later Taiwan directors—an international film festival award-winning strategy. His 1996 Goodbye South, Goodbye [Nanguo zaijian nanguo](1996), returned to contemporary urban and rural reality. In 1998, he made
Flowers of Shanghai [Haishang hua](1998), an extremely delicate film on purely
cinematic mise-en-scène. His later films include Millennium Mambo [Qianxi
manbo](2001), Café Lumiere [Kohi Jikou] (2003), The Best of Our Times [Zui hao de shi guang ] (2005), and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007). In all of these films, Hou
35 June Yip’s “Remembering and Forgetting, Part II.: Hou Hsiao-hsien’ Taiwan Trilogy” in Envisioning Taiwan gives a complete research on these films of Hou. This chapter introduces Hou’s three films called Taiwan Trilogy. By the analysis of these cinematic texts, Yip bring the readers to think about the dominant tropes and issues often associated with the discourse of nationhood—the treatment of history, the role of language, the question of modernization, and alternative conceptions of identity. Films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s in this age are significant because they emphasize the fact that historical
imagination—the very fact of memory, of actively constructing and creatively retelling the past—can be a critical tool for empowering oneself to deal with the crises of the present moment.
36 The White Terror in Taiwan originated in the 228 event, 1947. During February to May in 1947, a riot happened in Taiwan between local Taiwanese people and the KMT government, also the newly immigrants. The massacre was aroused because of a smuggled-cigarette inspection in Taipei. A man was shot to death during the dispute, thus local Taiwanese people began to react against the KMT government. The government gave the sup the suppression of political dissidents and public discussion of the massacre under the martial law. Then the martial-law enforced period, the White Terror, began, from 1949, ended in 1987. During the White Terror, the Kuomintang (KMT) government led by Chiang Kai-shek imprisoned or executed around 140,000 Taiwanese because of their real or perceived
opposition to, according to a recent report by the Executive Yuan of Taiwan. Some prosecuted Taiwanese were defined by the Kuomintang as "bandit spies" (匪諜), spies for Chinese communists, and received serious punishment.
has developed unique style based on realist intent, including long shots, empty shots and long takes. His use of empty shots is a particularly interesting stylistic
development.37 In conventional image-making, characters are located in the center of a shot, and the camera moves or the editing cuts in order to make the audience’
movements can be fully apprehended by the audience all the time. But Hou, in a surprising turn, often sets his camera in a static position and allows his characters to walk into and out of the frame.38 For example, the scene with Shizeko bidding
goodbye to Hinome in A City of Sadness, which is set in the hallway of a hospital (the scene is immediately strange, in that there is no clear indication what is the main point or thrust of action is), upsets audience’s expectations by showing a long shot of
Shizeko talking to a nurse, while around them doctors, nurses and patients come and go. The camera remains in an unchanged position at a certain distance. David
Bordwell calls this kind of contrasting mise-en-scène “precision staging” in which the shot is taken by long fixed takes, breaking through the optical constraints of cinematic
37 For “empty shot” and how it dominated Hou’s works, see Nick Browne’s “Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster: The Poetics of Landscape.” In this essay, Browne analyzes the structure of Hou’s The Puppetmaster, arguing that the arrangement of inner space and outside space not only serve to imply a political apparatus but a great religious system. This system contains the dialectical relationship between human beings and nature which brought Hou’s work into a philosophical level.
38 This static camera strategy is so noted that when he tries to make his camera dolly with the characters in Good Men, Good Women, the critic James Udden wrote “This Time He Moves: The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women” to exemplify this change. This essay starts from a radical technical innovation in Hou’s Good Men, Good Women. In this film, Hou’s camera seems unable to keep still. This is not merely a question of form, rather it raises issues that extend beyond esthetic parameters, even touching on questions of national identity. Udden points out that with one of the most salient traits of his rarefied esthetic—namely the static
camera—Hou Hsiao-hsien has been toying not only with his identity as a filmmaker, but also the identity of Taiwanese cinema as a whole, and even that of East Asian cinema, an identity he played no small part in forming.
presentations (Bordwell 160).39
In addition to these aesthetic techniques, certain pragmatic concerns had an impact on the TNC. Techniques like these and the picturesque mise-en-scène in Hou’s works (which some analysts say is more poetic and philosophical than dramatic) are now appreciated by audiences worldwide, and have influenced many directors, including those in the new Asian Minimalism,40 the mainland China director Jia Zhang Ke41 and not least, Chang Tso-chi. I will now examine how Chang has incorporated styles originating in the TNC in his own work.
Chang, as a Successor
Coincidentally, 1987 marks not only the announcement of the “Taiwan Film
39 For further discussion on the “precision staging” of Hou, see Bordwell, David. "Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film." Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics.
Ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2005. 141-162 Also, for a thorough understanding of Hou’s style, see Yeh and Davis, “Trisecting Taiwan Cinema with Hou Hsiao-hsien.” This is a chapter that advances the authorship-historiography framework by using Hou’s works as the example to map Taiwan film culture’s trajectory. Yeh and Davis look at crucial
interventions in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most important texts. These texts follow a framework of autobiography. They analyze Hou’s collaborators Zhu Tianwen and Wu Nianzhen as well for they offered their autobiographies to Hou’s Summer at Grandpa’s and Dust in the Wind. They also discuss the eminent Chinese authour Shen Congwen who inspired Hou to make his own autobiographical The Time to Live and the Time to Die. Also by analyzing The Puppetmaster, they conclude that Hou’s finest achievements are a succession of “borrowed” autobiographies, and explore cultural patrimony in Taiwan cinema, via autobiographical acts.
40 According to David Bordwell, Asian Minimalism, which emerged in the 1990s, is a stylistic approach where the director “sets the actors facing the camera or at ninety-degree angles to it, with any background planes perpendicular to the lens axis,” which creates planimetric, almost fashion-shoot imagery. For more discussion, see David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light, p. 231-236.
41Jia Zhang-ke (1970-), the “Six Generation” Chinese director, began his film career with 1995’s short film Xiao Shan Going Home[Xiaoshan huijia]. He gained his fame by his later “Hometown Trilogy”:
Xiao Wu[Xiaowu](1997), Platform[Zhan Tai](2000), and Unknown Pleasures[Ren Xiao yiao](2001).
He deals with alienated teenagers and the impact of globalization in modern China. He has a preference on using long takes, also a cinematic feature in Hou. Jia himself, in an interview, admitted Hou’s influence toward him was great in cinematic aesthetics. See “Conversation with His Idol Hou Hsiao-hsien: Jia Zhang-ke’s Retrospect on His Film Career,”
http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/p/2006-12-20/14371378775.html
Manifesto,” but also Chang Tso-chi’s first apprenticeship. It was thus the end of one era, and the beginning of another in which Chang directly succeeds Taiwan New Cinema auteurs (particularly, as we have seen, Hou Hsiao-hsien). Chang’s experience with TNC artists deeply influenced Chang’s artistic consciousness and his attitude toward the film business. As mentioned earlier, Chang served as the assistant director of Hou’s The City of Sadness, a family saga on the 228 massacre. Chang learned Hou’s considerable long takes and the value of on location shooting during that period.
He in turn adopted these techniques within his carefully orchestrated style and thematic choices. By comparing some of the salient traits of Hou and Chang’s styles, we will see a profound lineage between them. For example, those familiar with Chang’s films say that his use of long takes is reminiscent of Hou’s style. Also typical is the use of empty shots in Chang’s work. The technique is seen in Hou’s The City of
Sadness and other works. Chang also adopts long shot and the long take. And the
spirit of “precision staging” is also visible in Chang’s works. In the family dinner scene in The Best of Times, we see Wei and Jie walk in and sit down, after which Jie stands and begins to prepare a bowl of food for his father. Although there is no direct focus on either character’s face, the arrangement of this eating scene provides
cool-down observation to common life. And thus a realistic sense is constructed.
Like Hou, Chang Tso-chi tends to mix professional actors with non-professional ones. One reason he prefers this is because working with actors with little or no acting experience provides a keen sense of realism, and a certain instinctive “sparkle” in their portrayals. Amateurs have also allowed Chang to train young actors into his own
methods. Amateur actors have become a central cinematic apparatus for Chang, allowing him to blur the boundary between reality and story. In addition to Hou’s influence, Chang’s past experience as a documentary filmmaker makes him good at
methods. Amateur actors have become a central cinematic apparatus for Chang, allowing him to blur the boundary between reality and story. In addition to Hou’s influence, Chang’s past experience as a documentary filmmaker makes him good at