that of his TNC predecessors. The film was shown at the 59th Cannes International Film Festival’s Unit International Panorama section. It also won Best Feature Film, Best Taiwan Film and Best Original Screenplay awards at the 39th Golden Horse Awards in 2003.
All of Chang’s films can be viewed as types of “bildungsroman,” which are
14 Here I define the often use of Chang’s mixture of reality and fantasy as a kind of magical realism. It is borrowed from the term created by Alejo Carpentier, describing the “practice of Latin American writers who mix everyday realities with imaginative extravaganzas drawn from the rich interplay of European and native culture.” According to The Harper Handbook to Literature, it “recalls the mixture of realistic techniques and surreal images in the work of certain European and American painters of the 1920s and 1930s, who were sometimes called magical realists”. See “Magical Realism,” The Harper Handbook To Literature. 280.
15 The original quote in Chinese is: “看電影是假的，但表演是真的，將超現實與幻覺區分的那條線 是不存在的。”
about the coming of age of teenage protagonists.16 This genre was popular in Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, though opinions vary on the application of
“bildungsroman” narrative to TNC films. Li Chen-ya says that the most likely explanation of the popularity of this genre in TNC and Chang’s films is “the
contradiction between the grand history and petit personal memory” (120), and “the avoidance of historical trauma and the authorities.” He further comments that “the bildungsroman reflects the historical events through the fragments of life” (120-122).
I will discuss Chang’s use of bildungsroman in the next chapter.
Taiwan Film History and the TNC movement
In most analyses of Chang Tso-chi, Taiwan New Cinema and director Hou Hsiao-hsien are seen as important influences on Chang’s development. Examples include Feii Lu’s “Another Cinema: Darkness and Light” and Chris Berry’s “Haunted Realism: Postcoloniality and the Cinema of Chang Tso-chi.” These works are useful studies of Chang’s film style, and valuable contributions to Taiwan film studies. I will examine these two analyses in the later parts of this chapter, after examining Chang’s career and the inter-generational relationships between Chang and his predecessors, specifically Chang’s relationship to Hou.
Taiwan New Cinema
16 According The Harper Handbook to Literature, the definition of “bildungsroman” is: “a novel of education from youth to experience” (74). This analysis of a novel’s plot has been applied to film study as well as other narrative genres.
Modern Taiwan film history can be traced back to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) retreat from China and its relocation to Taiwan in 1949. Taiwan film history could be divided into three eras: the pre-TNC period (1949-1978), the emergence of Taiwan New Cinema (1978-1982) and the high period of Taiwan New Cinema (1982-1987).17 After 1987, Taiwan New Cinema officially came to an end.
The arrival of the KMT as an authoritarian government in Taiwan in 1949 inaugurated an era of complete government censorship and control over state and individual film productions. Few Taiwanese films were made during the first years of KMT control in Taiwan, and most of the films shown during this period were
imported from Hong Kong. Original films made in Taiwan were little more than propaganda in support of the new government’s policy.18 The next stage in Taiwanese film lasted for about ten years, from 1950 to 1959. The initial popularity and then the decline of local Taiwanese films (Taiyu pian) were crucial in this period. Most Taiwanese language films of this period were simply productions of Taiwanese opera stage performances, which were targeted at lower class audiences.
After 1960, the Taiwan film industry grew because of relative political stability and economic growth. In 1963, the KMT controlled Central Motion Picture Company (CMPC) and began to create films based on what was known as “healthy realism,” a term used by many critics to describe bright aspects of country life under KMT rule.
According to Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s discussion in “The Road Home: Stylistic
17 The following discussion of the periods of Taiwanese film history follows Lu Feii’s analysis.
18 Lu Feii in his Taiwan Film: Politics, Economics and Aesthetics explains this situation in the second chapter: “The era of Reformation.”
renovations of Chinese mandarin classics,” “healthy realism,” which avoids portrayals of darker aspects of society, is a combination of classical Italian Neo-realism and vernacular popular fiction. She argues that “[h]ealthy realism is a didactic
construction of romantic melodrama and civic virtue, a sort of purified wenyi. It mixes the interior/private mise-en-scène specific to family melodrama with the civil, public space to accommodate governmental policy, enabling a smooth integration with state ideological apparatus” (206).19 This movement was initiated with director Lee Xing’s
Our Neighbor [Jieto xiangwei] (1963), a film preaching traditional Confucian
teachings among its audiences. The film was successful and initiated an era of Taiwan locally-made films.20 The “healthy realism” movement prefigured the core values of later popular Taiwan cinema which avoided harsh realities in Taiwanese society.21
During the next ten years into the 1970s, Taiwan cinema reached the peak of its popularity. Melodramatic love stories and martial art films (wuxia) were the two most
19 Feii Lu argues that Taiwanese “healthy realism” was more closely aligned with Soviet “social realism” than Italian neo-realism after World War II. He compares the differences between these three realisms: “Neo-realism aimed to disclose society’s defects instead of blindly providing optimistic solutions. Socialist Realism, however, sought a bright future for human beings based on the
communism and socialism. Healthy Realism portrays how Chinese traditional ethics and good human nature can solve all social problems.” For more details, see Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics, p104, note 149.
20 Films in this category also include The Oyster Girl [Kenu] (1964), and Beautiful Duckling [Yangya renjia] (1965).
21 Major directors of the 1960s and the 1970s such as Li Xing and Bai Jingrui operated within a state-sponsored film style called healthy realism. But their activities during this period are not to be seen as entirely official, just as Taiwan cinema was not all propaganda. A thriving commercial cinema was well established by the late 1950s, with low budget taiyu pain—Taiwanese-language
pictures—produced by small companies and directors with various regional backgrounds. The two authors propose the idea of “parallel cinema” to account for the conditions of Taiwan film production in the 1950s and the 1960s. The parallel tracks highlight the authorities’ neocolonial policy toward local Taiwanese culture but, at the same time, leaves a market gap that allows alternatives to flourish.
For more information, see Yeh and Davis, “Parallel Cinemas: Postwar History and Major Directors” in Taiwan Film Directors.
popular genres. The vogue of these two genres can be partly attributed to the fact that the KMT government could easily censor every detail that violated governmental authority, and prohibit films that disclosed any ugly realities in Taiwan. Thus, films with melodramatic and martial art (wuxia) genres were highly accessible to film makers, who could create utopian and escapist films that are unconnected to reality.
These popular genres were made in a dreamy style that emphasized romantic dialog and melodrama, as well as martial arts stunts. They reached a height of popularity, but then reached an aesthetic dead-end, and this golden age began to decline.
The decline of the Taiwan film industry in the late 1970s provides a
starting-point for the discussion of the rise of Taiwan New Cinema. Yeh and Davis give a brief account on the background from which Taiwan New Cinema arose:
After enjoying continuous expansion from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, Taiwan cinema faced a series of impediments. Taiwan lost its most valuable overseas Southeast Asian market, following the success of Communist revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and sanctions were imposed on Chinese culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. The industry was hit by another problem in the 1980s: the decline of domestic mandarin-speaking film audiences, who turned to exciting, tour de force Jackie Chan kung fu films and excruciating comedies from New Cinema City of Hong Kong.
Furthermore, proliferation of VCRs let audiences stay home or patronize video parlors for better selection and flexible viewing. Video rental stores also received licenses from Hong Kong’s two major TV networks—TVB
and ATV—to distribute television dramas, some with better entertainment quality than local films. (55)
Also relevant is June Yip’s remark:
At the end of the 1970s, the most dangerous threats to the health of the Taiwanese film industry came from two sources. One serious challenge came from the rapidly growing availability of imported or smuggled
videotapes of foreign films from America, Japan, and Europe. These pirated tapes were convenient and inexpensive to rent, extremely current, and, because many were illegally imported, usually uncensored. The other source of increased competition was Hong Kong, whose better equipped and
financially flush powerhouse studios were producing thematically more diverse and stylistically more sophisticated films. (53-54)
These arguments show that the Taiwan film industry was under great pressure during this period because of increased competition from Hong Kong and Hollywood.
Additionally, the Taiwanese viewing public began to tire of sugary melodrama that was common in Taiwanese film by this time. Hence, the Taiwanese golden age of film went into decline. This decline and the pressure exerted by Hong Kong and
Hollywood films inspired the following generation to create films thematically rebellious and aesthetically nouveau.
By the 1980s the Taiwan film industry had reached a definitive stage of
innovation, and beginning in 1982, with the ‘New Comer’ policy of the CMPC, a new group of filmmakers emerging to work in the Taiwan New Cinema movement. This
angry generation rose when the decline of Taiwan cinema, the moment that the popularity of Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema was at a zenith. Disgusted with the conservative politics and orthodox, melodramatic themes of Taiwanese films of the 1970s ( a result of KMT manipulation and repression) on the one hand, and the glib, unrealistic martial arts films on the other, this new generation sought a new way to express their pent-up rage, progressive politics and urgent creativity. They used more realist approaches to present their motifs, which centered on nostalgia for the rural past and the corrosive effects of the urbanized present.22 Frequently they worked against the older generation. Aesthetically for the TNC the idea of “art for art’s sake,”
rather than simple popular amusement motivated the movement.
The TNC movement began with In Our Times, a film of four episodes made by four different directors: Jim Tao, Edward Yang, Ko Yi-Cheng, and Chang Yi. It is followed by the groundbreaking The Sandwich Man [Erzi de da wan’ou] (1983), adapted from the novel of the same name by nativist novelist Huang Chun-ming. The
Sandwichman is an ideal example of the new TNC style and has become a classic of
the movement. The film was an anthology directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Ren and Zeng Zhuangxiang. The film’s three directors not only subverted traditional cinematic
22 In this respect, thematically and stylistically, the TNC movement was similar to the Taiwanese Nativist Literature movement of the 1970s, which focused on the usage of local languages and local native life. Writers in the nativist group, like Huang Chun-ming, Wang Chen-ho and Chen Ying-chen claimed that literature needed to present a realistic picture of Taiwanese society. Well-known TNC films that echoed the values of the flourishing Nativist movement include A Flower in the Rainy Night, and That Day on The Beach, films that examined the “elements of indigenous Taiwanese life,
especially visible in language, literary adaptations, and rural subjects” (Yeh and Davis 56). After the KMT’s arrival in 1949, literature in Taiwan complied with two dominant ideologies—anti-communism and nostalgia—and works describing local country life were neglected. The Literaure Quarterly [Wenxue jikan], established by Wei Tiancong introduced the idea of realism to nativist writers and inspired the nativist movement in the 1970s. For more about the Nativist Debate, see Wei Tian-cong, The Collection of the Debate on the Nativist Literature [Xiangtu Wenxue Taolungji].
technique, but also brought into play complex historical references, and instilled in the film a keen self-consciousness of Taiwan cinematic history. The Sandwichman
remains a powerful, rich classic to this day.