and Culture, the contributors have assembled a compendium of arguments on how
Taiwan’s culture has influenced literature, and many of the topics about Taiwanese cultural history in this anthology could act as blueprints for the thematic
considerations that permeate Chang’s films (3-8). Three topics stand out as relevant:
the traumatic legacy of colonization and associated identity confusion; economic predicaments; and popular folk culture. Each of these topics shows local Taiwanese life and specific social contexts, and also links to the violence in Chang’s films which ultimately combine violent acts and fierce interpersonal relationships.
If violence has always been an ingredient in Chang Tso-chi’s films, the origin of these violent acts is clearly linked to specific times and places in post-war Taiwan and the trauma of colonization. June Yip argues that Taiwanese people have suffered identity crises during the various shifts of political power in the nation. Yip also claims that colonial power (such as the Japanese impact in Taiwan, which deeply influenced generations of Taiwanese), has had great determination in Taiwan
(12-48).50 Seeing Chang in this light, Chang’s use of violent scenes should not be seen as simply psychological dissatisfaction or uncontrolled eruptions. For example, viewing Darkness and Light in an historical context shows the implacable conflict of the local Taiwan gangster group with the newcomer gangsters from the mainland China, and the ambiguity of identity in a historically-troubled Taiwan. Additionally, relationships between families and businesses refer to a real political and structural crisis in the social arenas of post-World War II Taiwan.
Beside the violent acts, Chang successfully captures the casual quality of the people’s involvement in these scenes, in which we see the vitality of grassroots lives.
At the heart of Chang’s films is a social documentary concentrating on ordinary life.
Working class’ leisure activities such as singing karaoke and drinking by the stands are depicted in Darkness and Light. According to Feii Lu, Chang’s films are “real-life drama” which integrate “reality and drama” (Another Cinema 140). An important point here is the insignificant and sometimes incongruous details portrayed in Chang’s films. Robert Chi explains that a director like Hou Hsiao-hsien, who aims at
portraying historicity, bears the idea that “the detail is an event.” He points out that
“what it [A City of Sadness] does not fit is pre-existing, pre-experienced structures of the symbolic, of narrative, of historicity” (70).51 In Chang’s case, however, though
50 In the chapter “Confronting the Other, Defining a Self: Hsiang-t’u Literature and the Emergence of a Taiwanese Nationalism,”Yip examines the specific historical and cultural contexts out of which the hsiang-t’u literature (regionalist or nativist literature) emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s. This was one of the earliest attempts to articulate a distinctly Taiwanese cultural identity. Hwang Chun-ming is the primary focus of the analysis. Hwang’s hsiang-tu stories are notable not only for the richness and complexity of their depictions of contemporary Taiwan life, but also for their inherently cinematic qualities.
51 Robert Chi argues in “Getting It on Film: Representing and Understanding History in A City of Sadness,” that Hou tends to draw audience attention to traumatic experiences in daily life, which Chi
the focus on the protagonists’ suffering is significant, the importance of his films also lies in their attentiveness to Taiwan local life and tradition. Most obviously, The Best
of Times reveals a major dimension of Chang’s work that has seldom been discussed:
popular contemporary Taiwanese folk conventions. This quality is especially significant in his Soul of A Demon (2008). Essential to this film is the puppet show, which introduces the audience to this local tradition’s religious perspective.52 This seemingly natural, normal imagery, however, connected the wire-controlled puppets and the destiny-controlled protagonists. Also, it signifies a different and distinctly Taiwan modernity in visible religious practices (Chris Berry, Haunted Realism 47). If traditions and customs take many forms in different historical context and in different ethnic cultures in Taiwan, in Chang’s representations with grassroots themes, the fusion of different local life styles are documented. Most of the audience is not familiar with the underprivileged world represented by Chang, which is violent and sometimes chaotic. But grassroots culture has in fact spread into every corner of Taiwan. Chang maintains a sympathetic but detached eye, recording lives that have seldom been the focus of cinematic presentation.
Needless to say, Chang’s preferences for realist and grassroots life came under the influence of TNC directors, who illuminated a realist path for Taiwan directors.
Additionally, his documentary experience has helped him capture everyday life elements in Taiwan. The documentary influences in Chang’s films are undoubtedly
defines as a strategy of “melodrama.”
52 Here also seems homage to Chang’s mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Puppetmaster, which describes the life of the puppetmaster Li Tian-lu.
meaningful, and show us new ontological claims. Chang prefers to work with non-professional actors, a TNC inheritance, to capture the reality of life. Sometimes, Chang says, his actors are not even acting—they are simply portraying their own lives.
This style, according to Gavin Rees argues, is a “mixture of very naturalistic acting and a camera that prefers to be distant and unobtrusive” which “creates a strong sense of private lives that have less time on earth than the decaying tenement around them”
(21). This point of view in Chang’s films becomes partially subjective and partially objective, aiming to confront, or offend, our assumptions about the world we think we know. Chang’s films achieve these aims and make their values apparent by depicting unfamiliar locales and vivid (sometimes seen as “exotic”) Taiwanese dialects to audiences. In sum, they depict how Taiwanese working-class people look at the world.
Historically, as well as geographically, the films sink their roots deep into Taiwan folk culture. By rendering the history of Taiwan through imagery culled from tradition, folk culture, and immigrant memory, Chang’s artworks are shaped by post-war social and cultural factors. Fresh thematic choices like these, presented with Chang’s bold skills, are prominent reasons for his popularity to international audiences.
Modern Taiwan Civilization Redefined
As discussed above, Chang’s films are important because they reflect the
dilemmas faced by families in modern, industrialized, capitalist Taiwan. His concern is not the industrialization of the city, but the rural reaction to modernization, as was
true for his mentor, Hou.53 On Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lu points out that
“Hou is more concerned with the life experiences of the Taiwanese (bensheng ren), whereas Yang’s works reflect more on those of mainlanders (waisheng ren)” (119).54 The classification of these two categories is not only in races but also in the life style they choose: the former rural and the latter urban. In my observation, however, Chang obtains a more contemporary sense of modern Taiwan than both of these directors by way of his observation on the marginal, or to put it more definitely, the outcasts of the city with their ambiguous existence in modern life.55 That is to say, Chang observes the historical trauma and industrialized uneasiness lies in everyone on this island, a post-colonial phenomenon.
The family in Chang’s films reflects the issue of ethnicity. In such conditions,
53 In “From Historical Remembrance to Spatial Imagination: The Loss of City Images in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films,”[從歷史的回憶的空間的想像: 侯孝賢電影中都市影像的失落] Li Zhen-ya points out that in his films, Hou records a special time-and-space experience of the first and the second mainland immigrant generation in Taiwan. What defies Taiwan’s constant urbanization is a rural remembrance. According to Li, Hou presents this loss of innocence by the naming of his films and certain visual aesthetics.
54 We have discussed Hou’s preferred stylistics and themes in the previous chapter. Edward Yang, however, is a master of intricately plotted films, which dazzle the audiences with their juggling of time, space and cognitive games. Yeh and Davis analyze A Brighter Summer Day’s experimental visual strategies, organized under s figure called “tunnel visions.” These strategies, placed in a context of perceptual and phenomenological film theories, have been carried over into works by other Taiwan directors. Yeh and Davis also analyze Yang’s recent comedies, which are comparatively modest, satirical and humanist reflections on cosmopolitan Taipei, a city presented as a motley conglomeration of colliding values. They point out that within highly entertaining packages, Yang explicitly addresses a distorted Confucianism under the trappings of Western-style rationalization. For a thorough analysis of Yang’s style, see Yeh and Davis, “Navigating the House of Yang.”
55 For example, by exploring the changing cultural conflicts between the urban representation and rural nostalgia in “The Country and the City: Modernization and Changing Apprehensions of Space and Time,” Yip highlights a perceptible shift from conceptions of nation and cultural identity based on unitary coherence and authenticity toward alternative models that emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of Taiwan. It is no longer the contrast between the city and the country. It turns out to be the cultural hybridity that results from colonization and a globally mobile population. This hybridity turns the rural past/city present contrast into the undefined present, which is represented by Hou’s Dust in The Wind. The spatio-temporal configurations are parallel to the ambivalent psychology of
adolescence.
ethnicity no longer confines a generation. It provides a new perspective around the issue of national or racial identity where there are no longer “fundamental
assumptions supporting that conservative deployment [about national identity] in various ways” (Chris Berry, Race 45). Simply put, his films seem to function as a mirror image of the fragmentation of families and societies in contemporary Taiwan, reflecting their anxiety about identity. Normal families are seldom portrayed in Chang’s films. In the main, the families in Chang’s films, burdened with disability or with no supportive parental figures, experience lack. Teenage protagonists are in turn sacrificed in these suffering situations.
In Chang’s films, the world exists in single families. Chang’s characters are members of families, rather than members of society, though these families may be discordant, as in Ah Chung, nearing decline, as in Darkness and Light, or a kind of composed family—a substitute or extension of the original family—as in The Best of
Times. Chang himself explains that “the type of family relationship portrayed in the
film [The Best of Times] seems quite common. In Taiwan, it is very common to have a family relationship like that” (Michael Berry 407). Here, we see Chang showing concern for the social and psychological problems of contemporary Taiwan society.
Familial affiliation and support suggest traditional domestic values. Yet like Jie’s trauma about his mother’s long absence, each family member seems physically and emotionally deserted by a missing maternal figure. A premeditated awareness on adolescent trauma remains a fundamental element of the peculiar “realism” across Chang’s films in general. In spite of their predicaments, Chang presents hopeful
possibilities in his films. The teenage protagonists seem to have the power to transform the limited boundaries of their families into vast possibilities in the unattainable realm of fantasy. At the end of Ah Chung, three brothers and sisters, suffering from mental, physical and sexual abuse in their family, sit beside a riverbank and watch the sunset, which implies soothing natural power. Kang-yi in Darkness and
Light dreams of a reunion feast of her family, attended by her dead father and
boyfriend.
More than simply an artistic milestone, The Best of Times reflexively looks into capitalistic Taiwan, which is transplanted into the entrepreneurial spirit of gangster culture in the film, the transformation of capitalism of the present age. Indeed, I will argue that the film’s melancholy coming-of-age story is also a meditation on the abnormal situations faced by modern Taiwan people in general, especially the working class. The Best of Times is an attempt to capture the alienation of modernity or capitalism, which brought on unprecedented crises for people in the new
millennium.
Meanwhile, The Best of Times was made in 2002, 15 years after martial law was lifted in Taiwan. During this particular historical period after the political ban, some sequences in The Best of Times revealed unspeakble political traumas of Taiwanese people in general. The veteran’s stories told in the film were no longer a taboo. This social context elucidates the film’s treatment of Jie’s father’s grumbling about his experience garrisoning at Gui-shan Island. We see the family composition of multiple ethnicities, communicating with different dialects without difficulty. Language is an
important issue in the formation of a nation, yet Chang treats this issue with humorous irony, implying a cosmopolitan ideal in Taiwan.56 These themes Chang chose seem to fit incongruently into contemporary Taiwan, with this incongruence not only a unique accomplishment of this film, but also an explanation of Chang’s personal concerns about Taiwanese society.
The reasons for Chang’s realist representation of Taiwanese culture include both political awareness and market appeal. TNC directors gave the images of Taiwan an aesthetic reputation. Thus, post-TNC directors quickly understood that their playing field was the international art house. Though sometimes viewed as “maligned for fostering orientalism and demanding exotic novelties to tickle jaded Western palates,”
undoubtedly the international art house is the “offshore prosthetic space of
opportunity” for this later generation (Chris Berry, The Sacred 200). These directors delved into concrete Taiwan issues, but they kept their films from looking provincial by using the previous generation’s techniques, which were already canonized in the international film industry. Chang’s films, though made in highly industrialized Taiwan, contain specific cinematic traits that differ from Hollywood films, and his films are thus indeed films that examined themes and motifs often neglected by Hollywood.
56 June Yip argues in her “Language and Nationhood: Culture as Social Contestation” that language is the very foundation of the building of nations. Whenever there is an asymmetrical arrangement of power—whether along ethnic, class, gender, or territorial lines—language becomes a potent symbol of group identity and can therefore become an even more crucial tool in the struggle for authority. Yip analyzes Hwang’s films and Hou’s films, mostly The City of Sadness, to demonstrate the relationship between language and the rural Taiwanese consciousness.
Stylistics
Stylistic features of Chang’s films may be understood in terms of at least two conceptions. As the successor to Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chang inherited Hou’s
cinematography and other stylistic preferences. In the three films we have been analyzing, Ah Chung, Darkness and Light, and The Best of Times, Chang frequently adopts long takes (shots with relatively long duration), and long shots (with framings filmed at a considerable distance, such that the object or person focused on is
recognizable but often defined by the large space and background). These features are thought to be Hou’s or sometimes TNC’s trademarks, and Chang directly inherited these methods. For example, in The Best of Times, few close-ups of the characters are taken. Most scenes are done with medium shots, medium long and long shots. The distance between the subject and the audience creates a sense of objectivity in these scenes.
David Bordwell’s idea about new auteurs’ appearance on the scene is that each generation’s directors have their own stylistic problems to solve. Bordwell says that
“ (i)nevitably, a filmmaker starting out in 1970 confronted problems that directors had not faced fifteen years earlier. He or she came belatedly to the modernist tradition, one that had already acquired a history, a pantheon of masters, a theoretical program, a rhetoric, and a set of institutions” (144). Along the same lines, Hou bequeathed to his followers a historical gift (or burden) that they were required to live up to. Yeh and Davis argue that “Hou’s long-take aesthetics, characterized by contemplative, distant
photography, temporal ellipsis and loose causality and, additionally, his observing, sympathetic attitude toward life, are frequently explained as manifestations of an Oriental detachment, and have firmly positioned Hou as a director of the East par excellence” (Yeh 133). Chang can certainly be viewed as belonging to the lineage of oriental/Asian aesthetics Additionally, there are other stylistic features in Chang’s films that are similar to Hou’s, and Chang’s development reveals some aspects of the growth of an “auteur.”
Visual Design: Realistic Atmosphere through Shooting on Location
Chang’s mise-en-scène fits into a realistic tradition. This tradition can be seen in the sets and settings, the fundamental features of mise-en-scène, arranged in his films.
Chang’s mise-en-scène functions not in isolated moments, but in relation to the whole structure of his films. Darkness and Light, like his other films, exemplifies how mise-en-scène can economically advance the narrative and create a pattern of motifs.
David Stratton notes that Chang created a “visually strong” picture in The Best of
Times, “with good use made of the cramped narrow alleyways in the part of the city
where the friends live” (35). Chang usually uses real landscapes, as in Darkness and
Light, and by setting Keelung city in the poorest and darkest corner, he exploits the
landscapes for sympathetic and compassionate melodramatic effects. The
mise-en-scène emphasizes the force of the physical conditions of society and also the inner conflicts of the film’s characters. The setting in his film serves not only
instrumental but also metaphorical meanings which “can characterize the kind of
world surrounding the characters and the ability of those characters to interact with that world” (Corrigan 52). For example, when the female protagonist first leads her blind family members through a well-worn underground passage, we wonder how this locale will relate to the other parts of the story. But later, when the blind father and the female protagonist come together to find the love token of the father and his dead wife, we realize that this passage marks an important part of their family history. In ways like this, every setting becomes highly motivated by the structure’s causes and effects, parallels and contrasts, and overall development.
The narrative of Chang’s films depends heavily on interior settings, which establish the protagonists’ intimacy with their family members. Also, in The Best of
Times, from the opening title sequence in which the family is seen busily preparing for
the Dragon Boat Festival, Chang positions the viewer in a space that is wholly real:
the living environment of a local peasant family. The genius of the film’s beginning is in its presentation of a genuinely real household environment that is randomly
arranged and decorated, but in which some order is deeply constructed. Through the subtlety of suggestion, Chang introduces Wei and Jie as the protagonists of the film, with the two playing in the rain after the festival. The first scene is worth noting for its demarcation of the ending, with the illusion of water as well. At the end, Wei and Jie are seen swimming in the midst of a surreal sequence in which they rid themselves of the worries that torment them.57 In Darkness and Light as well, much of the “action”
57 The critic Yo-Hsien Li has argued that the gutter A-chei and A-wei jump into could be juxtaposed with the rain at the Dragon Boat Festival. In his opinion, the rain-gutter-ocean triangle makes clear a process from degradation to salvation for the two leading characters. For detail, see Li Yo-Hsien,
in the film takes place in the living room/dining room of Kang-I’s house, which becomes central during dinner time, with the whole family getting together. Through camerawork, the hidden family history is probed beneath the surface. The interior
in the film takes place in the living room/dining room of Kang-I’s house, which becomes central during dinner time, with the whole family getting together. Through camerawork, the hidden family history is probed beneath the surface. The interior