國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系 碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master’s Thesis
電影形式與媒介共生：一九八零年代台灣的城市與電影
Medial Dwelling: Urban Materiality and Cinema in 1980s Taiwan
鄧紹宏
Shao-Hung Teng 指導教授：李紀舍 博士 Advisor: Chi-she Li, Ph.D.
中華民國 106 年 6 月
June 2017
Acknowledgements
From beginning to end, Professor Chi-she Li oversaw this project with incredible insight and rigor. I thank him for guiding me through many brainstorming sessions, and for sternly demanding that my thoughts and writings be executed in equal measure, that I manage careful control of my syntactical and structural flows.
Professor Duncan Chesney has generously shared with me his impeccable knowledge of literature, philosophy, and cinema. While some of his attacks on the thesis’s flaws are fatal, what survives, I hope, are the more solidified of the arguments and observations I have been toiling with.
I thank Professor Chun-yen Chen for initiating me into the field of media studies. Our discussions both during and after the defense have helped to plant intellectual seeds I will continue to cultivate in the next stage of my study.
The process of writing this thesis would not have been meaningful had it not been for my family’s unconditional support and tolerance. I thank Yen-fu Lai for sharing with me every bit of pain and joy, in addition to our many disputes and debates, along the way. I can’t thank my parents enough for their encouragement and unfailing trust, and my sister and brother for their humor and salubrious outlook.
Two persons passed away as I struggled to complete the degree: YH, a young talented writer, who sublimated her personal demons into words and images that have become ever inspiring and haunting; my grandfather Yu-wen Teng, who, an NTU graduate himself, envisioned this moment for me more than I ever had. I hope this thesis constitutes a humble memorial to them.
Abstract
Ever since its burgeoning in the early 1980s, Taiwan New Cinema has given rise to a productive scholarship that examines on the one hand social issues New Cinema works help focalize, and on the other the self-conscious constitution of form this cinematic movement potently stages. Yet in the study of urban films, a particular subgenre this cinema brings forth, the question of form is often subsumed under more urgent social critique adopting universal, and increasingly reified, parlance, thereby bypassing the material and reflexive nature of form. In response, this thesis proposes a new look into the formal aspect of these films, trying not only to thicken it with the material conditions experienced in social reality, but to recognize its agency in attuning the diegesis to such a material ambience. I coin the notion of “dwelling cinema” to depict how film form can be deployed as a mediational process, through which urban films of the 1980s learn to adapt to and dwell with the contingency of their material surroundings.
To illustrate the coadaptation of form and its material environment, I identify architectural spaces and the emergent media technologies as two crucial players that help carry out film form’s material-medial vitality. Collectively, architecture and media initiate these films into a formal interplay between transparency and opacity, the twin effects of remediation whose impacts also bear upon the urban space and its living subjects. Chapter Two features transparency as a visual, spatial, and mediational regime, studying how Hou Hsiao-hsien’s and Edward Yang’s early works collaborate with architecture and media technologies to devise a porous dwelling space onscreen. I argue that the effects of transparency conveyed in these films are achieved by involving a multitude of medial objects, whose material underpinnings exposed by the cinematic machine belie an illusion of immediacy underlying the seemingly fluid and interactive ways of dwelling. Chapter Three posits the
underprivileged citizens’ opaque bodies as the focus of interrogation, and studies the interrelations between a New Cinema film, a video artwork, and a street performance.
In these works, the body is cast as a mediatized entity transported from the city’s edge to the center. Tracing its mediated trajectories in and out of architecture, social media, and urban spaces, I argue for a reconsideration of urban space less as represented or blueprinted than as brought together by intermedial nexuses. The body, in a similar vein, invites an imagination of its distributive mediation, which paradoxically consolidates its tenacious opacity that could be deployed for political counteractions.
The conclusion foregrounds the indelible existence of “fissures” in the mediation of architecture, things, and film form. Taking artist Chen Shun-Chu’s installation art as a case in point, this section reconsiders dwelling cinema in light of its irreconciliable form rife with narrative, memorial, and technical dislocations, dislocations that can be further evoked as ethical gestures of dwelling in the age of hypermediation.
Keywords: Taiwan New Cinema, film form, architecture, media technologies, transparency, opacity, urban space
摘要
本論文結合物質及媒介的觀點，重新探究台灣新電影的美學與形式問題。新 電影自一九八零年代初崛起以來，一方面揭露諸多迫切的社會文化議題，促使人 文學界發展在地批判，另方面亦引導電影學者關注音像文本具強烈自主意識的構 成。然而在都會片此一新電影次類型的討論中，形式的討論時常需服膺於文化研 究視野下的社會批判而嫁接上普世的論述語彙，由此忽視了形式內含的物質及反 身性格。相對於此種以文本「反映」外在真實的思維，本論文嘗試從物質環境的 外圍觀點出發，肯認物質在敘事與風格的建構過程中扮演的居中傳介角色。我以
「居住電影」的概念，描繪新電影就地取材的工法如何觸發一系列的傳介過程，
使得電影形式及瞬變的物質環境得以互為接壤、媒合、與共生。
在形式和環境共同適應（coadaptation）的過程中，我聚焦於建築和新興媒 介科技兩者之於敘事傳介及形式轉換的功能；論文並試著在建築與媒介科技重新 媒介電影形式的過程中，開展出「透明」與「不透明」此雙重主體效應與空間佈 署模式。第二章將「透明」視做為一視覺、空間與傳介機制，透視侯孝賢和楊德 昌早期作品如何運用建築形式與媒介科技，形塑出銀幕上通透的居住空間。我主 張藉由玻璃建築與媒介物件生成的透明效果，實則弔詭地揭櫫了電影操作的觀影 機制，並彰顯了媒介科技標舉立即性（immediacy）的表象底下所殘餘的物質基 底。第三章以底層市民的「不透明」身體為考察節點，連結新電影、錄像藝術及 前衛表演藝術於八零年代都市空間的跨媒介實踐。在這些作品中，遭棄斥的身體 藉由媒介科技自城市邊緣返還至中心；我透過追蹤身體在建築與社會媒體之間的 傳介路徑，演示如何將都市空間視做跨媒介運動下的關係鏈結，以超越傳統的空 間再現觀。而身體在此分配式的傳介過程中，亦強化其模糊、不為主流認知吸納 的特性，形成有力的政治抵抗場域。在論文尾聲，我進一步強調「裂隙」在建築、
物質與電影形式媒介過程中的無所不在。本節以藝術家陳順築的攝影裝置為例，
重思居住電影的形式本質如何充斥著敘事、記憶與科技的錯置和斷裂，以此回應 城市居住與媒介使用的倫理問題。
關鍵字：台灣新電影、電影形式、建築、媒介科技、透明、不透明、都市空間
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements i
English Abstract ii
Chinese Abstract iv
One Introduction 1
Two New Cinema’s Transparent Media House 20
Three Transporting the Opaque Body 49
Coda Of Fissures and Stones 78
Works Cited 86
Chinese-Language Films Cited 97
Chapter One Introduction
Cinema and the City: Beyond the Reflectionist Paradigm
A glance at the titles released by Taiwan’s film industry reveals that Taipei, the capital city, has remained a constant thematic concern. During the taiyupian (Taiwanese-dialect film) era, in films such as Taibei fa de zaoche (Early Train from Taipei, 1964) and Kang Ding yuo Taibei (Kang Ding Walks Taipei, 1969), the city figured as a place of opportunities, where characters arrived from the countryside with the hope of overturning their destitute living condition. The city, however, was also a hub of corrupting forces and temptations, sending innocent country lads and lasses down the irreversible path of fate, a predicament Early Train from Taipei’s ending woefully depicted.1 In roughly the same period, when healthy realism (jiankang xieshi zhuyi) came to dictate Mandarin film production by the state-funded Central Motion Pictures Corporation (CMPC), Taipei was purged of all its negative imagings there. In Bai Jingrui’s Jia zai Taibei (Home Sweet Home, 1970), for example, Taipei became a capital city waiting overseas professionals to return, and to construct a promised land that would continue to glorify the traditional values of Chinese culture.2 Beginning at the turn of the 1980s, as the first postwar generation matured, young directors felt the need to reinvent film vocabulary to better approach the
1 For a discussion of taiyupian and Early Train from Taipei, see Chapter Two of Hong Guo-juin’s Taiwan Cinema. Wang Chun-Chi also offers an incisive feminist reading of the film in “A Feminist Reading of Taiwanese-dialect Films before the Mid-1960s.” See also Shen Shiao-Ying’s study of the film in terms of city-country relations and the weakened male protagonist in “Misplaced Taipei Youth:
A Look at Weak Men in Three Taiyu Pian of the 1960s.”
2 See Shiao-Ying Shen’s articles on Bai Jingrui, in which she probes Bai’s aesthetic articulation of the urban and his uneasy relationship with CMPC and healthy realism. Shen, “Stylistic Innovations and the Emergence of the Urban in Taiwan Cinema: A Study of Bai Jingrui’s Early Films” and “A Morning in Taipei: Bai Jingrui’s Frustrated Debut.”
transforming city, which they subjected to the camera’s cold dissection and rigorous means of exposure. This then brought forth the ascent of Taiwan New Cinema, a local film movement that turned into overnight festival darling globally. In both Edward Yang’s Qingmei zhuma (Taipei Story, 1985) and Yu Kan-Ping’s Taibei shenhua (Taipei Legend, 1985), the camera lens focused intently on the conflicts intrinsic to the city, whose irresolvable tensions created a final state of impasse. No longer posited on one side of the city-country binary, nor figuring as abstract cultural and national codes, the city became a subject in and of itself.
This cinematic history of Taipei has been chronicled diligently. In 1995, the Golden Horse Film Festival organized a symposium on the representation of Taipei in Taiwan cinema. The event resulted in a volume of essays detailing the history of
“Taipei films.” Entitled Focus on Taipei through Cinema 1950–1990, this anthology features topics ranging from taiyupian to the then still exhilarating cinema of Tsai Ming-liang. In these articles, scholars developed issues concerning the construction of Taipei’s city image (Lee “Guopian”), its representative strategies in different historical phases (Lin 1995 “Taiwan”), its historical transformation (Wang 1995 “Zouchu”), social and economic structures (Duan ““Yinmu”), and its elusive landscape of desire (Chang and Wang “Taibei”). For the first time in Taiwan film studies, a systematic set of approaches to the city’s screen representation could be detected. Given the fact that most articles in the anthology include the works of Taiwan New Cinema of the 1980s as their analytical focus, one can also observe how the film movement effectively triggered discussions of urban space on the one hand, and initiated the study of Taiwan cinema into the serious setting of academia on the other.3 My thesis looks
3 Besides the 1995 Golden Horse anthology, pioneering scholarly works include The Death of New Cinema: From Saving Everything for Tomorrow to A City of Sadness (Ed. Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua, 1991), which mounted several attacks at the problematic ideologies upheld by the New Cinema directors, and a subsequent anthology in defense of the movement, Passionate Detachment: Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien (Ed. Wenchi Lin, Jerome Li, and Shiao-Ying Shen, 2000). On the critical genealogy
both into a body of work from early-1980s Taiwan to study how these films grapple with an emerging urban environment, and into the critical practices that surround these films.
From a disciplinary point of view, the academic move toward the urban is possible because of the “spatial turn” taking place in the humanities (mainly cultural studies) since the last two decades of the twentieth century. Not only did scholars start to incorporate spatial theories into their analysis of literary and cultural texts, but theorists themselves, not the least of whom include Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Fredric Jameson, drew on film works and mass media to contemplate on the forms of social space. In the case of Taiwan, the address of the spatial is also a phenomenon responsive to the economic structural transformation the island had undergone since the 1970s. What resulted was the large-scale spatial restructuring and redistribution of major cities, causing many urbanites to become estranged from their homeland, some even forced to abandon their own homes. The seismic changes brought forth by modernization, urbanization, and global capitalism in turn led New Cinema filmmakers to turn their camera to the aleatory dwelling environment, often with sharp criticisms tinged with stylistic appeal. Well informed by the emerging spatial theories and by the change of local film culture, scholars soon followed up on these trends to usher in new perspectives that recast film works in a more critical light.4
from The Death of New Cinema to Passionate Detachment, see Shie (14-20). Abé Mark Nornes and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh also collaborated in a series of articles on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness, which they originally circulated through the Internet in 1994. Their pioneer work in the English world has recently been republished in hard copies, see Staging Memories: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (2015).
4 By spatial theories, I chiefly mean those adopted by cultural studies in the 1990s in Taiwan. The formulation of these theories coincides roughly with the 1968 social movement in Paris (such as those of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Guy Debord), and with the emerging sway of late capitalism and globalization of the contemporary age (Frederic Jameson for one). The spatial turn in fact has much broader implications today as the proliferation of digital media begins to transform our perception of both cinema and the city. On this scholarship, see Paul Virilio’s “The Overexposed City”
and Gillian Rose’s “Rethinking the Geographies of Cultural ‘Objects’ through Digital Technologies:
Interface, Network and Friction.” In his article, Virilio famously stated that in the age of cyperspace, which has led to an erosion of the physical, “[t]he screen abruptly became the city square, the
The critical thrust provided by spatial theories was thus conveniently used by film and cultural scholars to address social problems plaguing the modernizing city. In effect, it has helped foreground the issue of minoritization—the subjection of urbanites to a living condition of displacement, deprivation, alienation, and boredom—as the main theme of contemporary city-dwelling. Important notions such as Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” further equipped scholars with a leftist class consciousness, through which they evaluate film works in light of the fact that, while the flow and accumulation of capital has been marked geographically and smoothly navigated by some, others, including the elder mainlanders, the youths, and the outlaws, were left dislodged and disoriented from their own web of social relations.5 In their depiction and criticism of modern city’s dehumanizing tendency, scholars and filmmakers thus gave the thematization of urban minorities an acute humanist hue.
Yet while much of the scholarship on cinema and the city is the fine products of spatial theories and their attendant agenda of social criticism, as these theories were grafted onto the Taiwanese film scene, they have also become increasingly reified.
Following this critical vein, film texts are often read as symptoms and signs, from which larger social afflictions could be diagnosed. In most analyses in Focus on Taipei through Cinema 1950–1990, textual phenomenon could be readily explained via references to the rapid urbanization Taiwan underwent since the 1970s. Through close readings of the films’ narratological patterns and discursive formation, a larger set of truths could be claimed about the reality of an extra-diegetic world.
While these analyses have inspired several important studies that, via intricate readings of form and content, demonstrate astute observations about Taiwan’s urban
crossroads of all mass media” (367). See also Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s chapter on mediated spaces in Remediation: Understanding New Media (168-83).
5 For such an analytical aspect, see, for example, Chen-Ya Li’s “Memories and Imagination: Fading of the City Landscape in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Films” (1998).
condition in historical terms, questions regarding cinema’s own material and technological nature seem to be lost on them. In the hermeneutics of codes and patterns, content and form become meaningful as long as they are justifiable vis-à-vis a larger social reality. In other words, a film work is effective as long as it reflects and deepens our understanding of the external world or the psychological state it represents. This reflectionist perspective gives rise to two interrelated assumptions.
First, it presupposes a stable referentiality between fact and fiction, inside and outside, drawing a neat distinction paralleling the movie screen, which puts one side at the mercy of the other. Second, it loses sight of the rich materiality claimed both by the cinematic technology and by the substances presented on screen, as they are often subjected to metaphorical or symbolic readings that all too quickly neglect the self-referentiality of things themselves. Here Geoffrey Nowell-Smith might help us address the problem, as he states, “[the cities] are there before they signify, and they signify because they are there; they are not there merely in order to be bearers of signification. The fact of being able to work with real materials, which retain their original quality however much they are artistically transformed, is a privilege which filmmakers neglect at their peril” (107).
With cinema’s technicity and the city’s materiality in view, I would like to add another dimension—mediatization—to current discussions of neoliberal urbanism and urban minorities of the 1980s Taiwan cinema. For this era also saw the proliferation of entertainment media and communications technologies at an unprecedented speed and scale. Besides the rise of New Cinema, which introduced the material plenitude of society to the profilmic world, there also emerged the avant-garde theater, street performances, local rock-and-roll music, music videos and the MTV channel, portable Betacams, VHS, not to mention the popularization of cable TVs and telephones.
These media fundamentally change urban lives to such an extent that mediatization
becomes an integral experience of urbanization itself; subsequently, the perception of time and, more important to my thesis, urban space is also being reorganized and rewired. In addition, large-scale mediatization brings in the question of reflexivity for cinema, a medium that gains awareness of its own technological autonomy with the emerging aesthetic codes on the one hand, and reaches out to measure its relative positioning amongst a vibrant media culture on the other. A mediatized view on both cinema and the city can hence retune us to issues of materiality, technology, and film form, which are largely bypassed by the thick description of social malaise and psychic alienation.
Positing minoritization and mediatization as the two dominant forces that characterize urbanization in the 1980s in Taiwan, I then ask in this thesis: how does cinema incorporate these two forces and stage their dynamic interplay? How does Taiwan New Cinema’s formalist—as well as cinema’s own material and technological—consciousness respond to the minoritization of urbanites and the mediatization of urban space? How can we consider minoritization beyond the constraint of humanist critique, and to further attune it to the material and medial environment of the city? Can we develop a type of film knowledge not by projecting outward what is represented onscreen to fit socio-historical realities, but by allowing socio-historical environments and their material constituents into the film? These questions lead me to developing the notion of “dwelling cinema.”
Dwelling in Things: From Heidegger to Latour
In minoritizing the urban subjects, New Cinema often foregrounds the crisis of dwelling that began to loom large as the city experienced its transitional throes at the turn of the 1980s. Situations including the demolition of veteran mainlanders’ villages, migration from country to city, and claustrophobic living in apartment units were
constantly treated in films of this period. Yet beyond mere thematic echoing of the social problem, I am mainly interested in how cinema relates itself to such a dwelling predicament. That is, how does the pressing issue of urban marginalization become mediatized in cinema? How do varying issues of dwelling themselves, or as what Bruno Latour calls “matters of concern” (“Why Has Critique” 231), dwell in cinema?
My evocation of dwelling owes its origins to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In his later work, the philosopher embarked on a series of musings that verged on poetry and mysticism. In the article “Building Dwelling Thinking,”
Heidegger recasts the question of Being by relating it to the mutually constitutive acts of building (bauen in German) and dwelling (buan in Old High German), with dwelling being both the goal and the materializing process of building. For Heidegger, the essence of dwelling lies in the preservation of the fourfold—his mystic invocation of the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals (351).6 The inexplicable origins of the fourfold notwithstanding, Heidegger does make it clear that the fourfold is preserved by the act of gathering, or Versammlung, the word that originally means “thing” in Old German (354-55). It then follows that through the act of gathering, a thing (Heidegger’s prime example being a bridge) does its essential work in carrying out the gist of dwelling—in dwelling, “a thing things,” to borrow the words of Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert (120). Heidegger’s notion of dwelling asks us to reimagine living not as masterful appropriation of surroundings or construction of buildings.
Rather, dwelling relies on the dynamic activities of “things.” Recognizing that things of the world take on real agency, Heidegger construes that in dwelling, subjects do not
6 Unlike most scholarship on Heidegger, which often leaves the fourfold unexplored because of its whimsical tendency, Thomas Rickert insists on the interpretive validity of this concept. See Chapter 7,
“Ambient Dwelling: Heidegger, Latour, and the Fourfold Thing,” of Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric. For conceptual expansion on Heidegger’s dwelling in the field of cultural geography and urban planning, see Paul Harrison, “The Space between Us: Opening Remarks on the Concept of Dwelling” and Colin McFarlance, “The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space.”
so much gather things as they are gathered across them, such as the case where a wide overhanging shingle roof, a fireplace, and a stove gather a way of life in the winter days of the Black Forest.
By “things,” Heidegger usually refers to those endowed with a respectful attribute of nature, art, or craftsmanship, such as a handmade jug, a bridge, or a reclusive house in the Black Forest. But can we continue to speak of “things,” rather than reified “objects” Heidegger so resolutely dismisses out of hand, in contemporary urban setting? And if so, how do they gather in a “dwelling cinema,” a cinema I specifically associate with Taiwan in the 1980s? Here I turn to Bruno Latour’s engagement with and extension of the Heideggerian notion in the new millennium.
Latour approaches “things” from two different but related stances: one concerns social critique’s decaying validity in our age, and the other addresses the possibility of assembling a new type of democracy for post-9/11 political exigency on a global scale.
In a polemical article titled “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2004), Latour sets out to attack the habitual gesture of critique, which, in debunking a given fact as constructed and ideologically conditioned in nature, moves away from really engaging with the conditions enabling such a fact (231). He proposes instead that we devise a “powerful descriptive tool”
that “adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality” (232, emphasis in the original). In Latour’s proposed paradigmatic shift to a realist attitude toward facts, things figure prominently. For him, a thing denotes at once “an object out there” and, more crucial to his descriptive tactic, “an issue very much in there, at any rate, a gathering” (233, emphasis in the original). In Latour’s mind, the critic should be “the one who assembles. . . . [,] the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (246). With the surfacing of an assembly of things, whether human or non-human, matters of fact, in a manner of association and multiplication, should also
register as realistic and ethical consideration of matters of concern.
Later in a chapter titled “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik” (2005), Latour offers a more politically-charged account of “things.” Tracing the word’s etymology in a Heideggerian spirit, Latour reveals that in Nordic and German languages, “Thing” or
“Ding” originally designated an archaic type of assembly, in which congressmen or
“thingmen” gather to discuss political issues (22-23). He then goes on to contemplate the nature of representation, the mechanism employed by political bodies to maintain their democratic order with efficiency. For him, contemporary politics mistakenly pursues a system of representation based on demands of transparency, immediacy, and accuracy. This pursuit, however, only assumes a “representation without any re-presentation” (26, emphasis in the original). In effect, the space of representation and the trajectories it traces are by no means a vacuum; rather, they are teeming with
“opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals” (26), which invite an eloquence that is “much more indirect, distorted, and inconclusive” (30). Such a notion of re-presentation does not so much rely on the efficacies of personal will, reasoning, or unity as function as an assembly of mediators that cohere, collide, and contradict. By alerting our attention to “the masses of intermediaries” necessarily involved in representing anything (29), Latour seeks to shift mere political facts (or pseudo-neutral statements) to complicated entanglements that ultimately register larger matters of concern.
A synthesis of Heidegger’s and Latour’s theoretical insights, dwelling cinema toils with the middle ground of re-presentation, where things and mediators—instead of codes or signs—abound. To further accommodate dwelling as matters of concern, it is also crucial to view the verb “dwell” as always “dwelling in” or “dwelling with,”
intransitive forms that integrate other matters to join the assembly of dwelling on the one hand, and mark a vital layer of mediation in between on the other. To be more
specific, starting in the 1980s in Taiwan, the question of dwelling in things has increasingly become that of dwelling among media, or among medial things. And this is exactly the point that New Cinema helps drive home. By presenting the dwelling predicament faced by its protagonists, New Cinema famously frames them with glass curtain walls, window sills, corridors, isolated apartment spaces, veterans’ village composites, and (dis)connects them with telephone calls, TV screens, novel writing, and rock music. These things populating New Cinema screens are often endowed with a medial character; together they comprise an intermedial terrain that interweaves across each character’s life events, transmits social meanings, and participates in the relay of the diegesis. It is also through these mediating techniques that cinema gains a self-reflexive ground to reflect upon its own dwelling in the city. With the focus laid on these medial things, one can begin to observe that for a film like Edward Yang’s Kongbu fenzi (The Terrorizers, 1986), the fragmented storylines are as much cohered as they are severed and disrupted by random prank calls, one of the protagonists’
convoluted novel plotting, and snippets of photos. Increasingly, the form of a film coincides with its own dwelling among medial things; film form becomes doubled with a medial-mechanical consciousness.
The Reflexive Film Form
Throughout the thesis, the applications of dwelling cinema are threefold. I use dwelling cinema to first describe a group of films which, made in the 1980s, began to turn their viewfinder toward the changing urban environment. In these films, issues such as demolition and evacuation, zoning, and ghettoization are explicitly addressed, with the attendant effects of exploitation, estrangement, violence, and death haunting beyond the narrative register. What binds these works together is the topos contouring the encompassing effect of minoritization, a dwelling crisis afflicting not only
underclass citizens but also well-to-do bourgeois families. Such a thematic concern demands a rigorously realistic approach to the subject matter; young directors in turn came to work with scenes and situations open to external factors rather than in the controlled sets in the studio.7 Subsequently, as cinema migrates into a social ambience, it learns to dwell among a material milieu that blurs the distinction between artifactuality and factuality. And as the material milieu soaks into the diegesis, the latter begins to pulse with forces and agencies anew. This second dimension invites one to consider film texts as lively populated by things and matters prior to its being treated as systems of codes or as discursive sites. On this material end, cinema exceeds the thin and illusionist surface of the silver screen, and gains a thick base upon which it can begin to dwell.
Between the thematic and material dimensions of dwelling, which mark respectively cinema’s self-conception and its storage of raw materials for realizing concepts, I insert a third ground of mediation. This middle ground marks a site where theme and material interface, out of which the question of film form arises. While the term film form can be traced to Sergei Eisenstein’s theoretical writings on dialectical montage,8 it is David Bordwell that revitalized the concept in his neoformalist studies in the 1980s. In devising form as an approach, Bordwell examines closely the intricate technical designs constituting a film work, and regards these designs as where the film’s meanings ultimately lie.9 As his by now canonical study of classical Hollywood cinema suggests, Bordwell tends to locate form in an enclosed narrative
7 For a brief account of the relation between Bazinian realism and Taiwan New Cinema, see Ru-Shou Robert Chen, “Bazin at Work: The Concept of Realism in Chinese-language Films.”
8 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1949/1969).
9 For a classic Bordwellian study of film form, along with lucid methodological illustrations, see Kristin Thompson’s Breaking the Glass Armour: Neoformalist Film Analysis (1988). Bordwell would later engage in the study of East-Asian cinema with his neoformalist method. Besides the important work on Ozu Yasujirō, he dedicates a chapter to the early works of Hou Hsiao-hsien (rarely studied then) in Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005).
system, which speaks directly to the spectators’ hardwired cognitive module, and can be subsequently processed and absorbed into sense perceptions without confusion.10 Although I follow Bordwell’s stern neoformalist approach, taking editing, camera movement, structure, composition, and mise-en-scène as prolific sites where narrative and social meanings are generated, I also go beyond the closed circuit between screen and mind to reserve a certain degree of adaptability—or plasticity—for the discussion of form. As cinema learns to dwell with a sea of changes in its material surroundings, its social adaptation is, I argue, inscribed in its form. I take film form as charged with agency of its own, and in tracing the source of such an agency, the vital force of things comes to the fore. That is, the form becomes plastic and shapeable as it opens toward its material site of embedment, from which things—architecture, media technologies, human bodies—enter to participate in the engineering of form. Simply put, dwelling cinema does not just reflect the change the city undergoes; it undergoes
“filmformic” change along with the city’s transformation. The task for a project on dwelling cinema, therefore, is to depict how film form can be deployed as a mediational process, through which Taiwanese urban films of the 1980s learn to adapt to and to be “structurally coupled” with the contingency of their material surroundings.
To charge the formal aspect of a film work with the force of things is to intervene in the auteurist paradigm dominant in the study of Taiwan New Cinema.
Much of the scholarship on this cinema features directors’ style, a heritage bequeathed from the French Nouvelle Vague, and situates the question of form in the coherent
10 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985); Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells it: Story and Styles in Modern Movies (2006). From a historical and transnational perspective, Miriam Hansen mounted a major attack at Bordwell’s naïve appropriation of cognitive psychology in her “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” For a latest discussion of formalism and its distancing from Bordwell’s textbook pedagogy, see Scott C. Richmond’s “The Persistence of Formalism.”
oeuvre of the idiosyncratic auteur (Lin, Li, and Shen; Yeh and Davis; Udden; Hong).
Indeed, it is certainly not feasible to resist the often insightful discoveries generated by auteurist study, especially when Taiwan cinema of the 1980s is helmed by such towering stylists as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. But with the notion of an adaptable and plastic film form, I also hope to engage the auteur-oriented study of Taiwan New Cinema with two complications. First, the analysis of form in fact affords a broader vision than its usual association with arthouse, auteurist fare. As Chapter Three of this thesis shows, a film deemed as wanting in personal style yet nevertheless gaining tremendous population among audiences can be subject to a detailed analysis of form, one that also acknowledges film form’s effective mediation of its immediate social milieu. Second, while a keen sense of a director’s style holds up a necessary compass for the study of Taiwan New Cinema, it is crucial to note that the auteur is often the one who understands how cinema can powerfully dwell, who yields properly to the shaping forces of things, to allow things to play out on the filmed location. From place-specific architecture to medial objects including TV sets, phones, frames, doors, New Cinema at times makes us feel it is the things that mobilize the auteur.
Echoing Latour’s appeal to engaging directly with the “intermediaries” teeming over a transparent illusion of representation, I identify the force of things mainly with their mediating power. In the chapters, I rely specifically on media technologies and architectural components to expound on this mediating power. My understanding of
“media architectures” here is indebted to literary scholar Kate Marshall’s study of infrastructural architecture represented in twentieth-century American modernist fiction. Resisting traditional readings à la Bachelard, which take literary architecture metaphorically or as reflecting the characters’ psychic state, Marshall portrays architectural objects as first and foremost self-referential and medial. Combining
Luhmannian systems theory and Kittlerian media studies, Marshall contends that architecture, technologies, and communication systems in novels share the materiality and mediality they own in real social space. Once she literalizes communicative process in physical spaces and systems (the primary architectural space for Marshall is corridor) represented in the novel, Marshall can well begin to document how these spaces or systems mediate social relations in the novel and help transmit the novel’s narrative. Media as such become literal things but also more than just things; as a networked system, they turn into a processing machine endowed with social meanings and characters.
Sharing my interest in form, Marshall also points out that a “new formalism,” a renewed interest in “form and its materialities” (21), might arise as one attends “to the processes and structures of mediation” (Levinson qtd. in Marshall 21).11 With their self-referring capacity, medial objects thus not merely double back on themselves;
they also embody the formal processing of the artwork, passing from representational devices to self-reflexive commentary upon the artwork’s transmissive mechanism.
This doubled referentiality in relation both to the thing itself and to the formal aspect of the text constitutes the dominant method I take with media technologies and architectural space discussed throughout the chapters. In their doubly-charged consciousness, medial objects allow cinema to contemplate its dwelling in the city, enabling cinema to carve out a space for its own consciousness to emerge. Film texts in this regard should be viewed as a heterogeneous composite of imbricated spaces, with some absorbed deep into the diegetic register, while others surfacing from that narrative depth to claim a meta-narrative enclave embodying cinema’s own dwelling consciousness.
11 Here Marshall quotes Romantic literary scholar Marjorie Levinson’s article “What is New Formalism?” in PMLA 122.3 (2007): 558-69.
Ultimately, to connect the issue of form, media, and things with Taiwan New Cinema is to complicate the dichotomy between realism and formalism. Throughout the history of film theory, this opposition is entrenched by constant resort to the essential divergence between Bazin and Eisenstein, the long take aesthetics and the montage school, Italian neorealism and cine-modernism. To a certain extent, this binary is also grafted onto Taiwan’s film scene, settled between Hou Hsiao-hsien’s penchant for deep-focus long-take long shot, and Edward Yang’s use of associational editing, respectively.12 Yet as one adopts a view on the open-ended, rather than the representational, nature between text and reality, with a material-packed middle ground that is the form, this binary could be approached in a more dialectical manner.
For realism is never the pale reflection or mimetic portrait of an external social reality;
realism is itself a style whose effects rely on the mediation of things, which forges a cinematic form via the rich expressions of human bodies, material flow, architectural layouts, etc.13 Likewise, while formalist artwork maintains a high degree of autonomy in itself, such an autonomous form of immanence, to follow the teachings of Adorno, cannot but draw its source from reality, thus retaining a connection with the material-historical condition of the society. As some of Edward Yang’s experimental use of telephones and glass panels will demonstrate, in devising a formal, intrinsic law of a film’s own, an artwork also enlists from reality the force of
12 Edward Yang might not be easily identified with the montage school, but one does often resist from associating him with Bazinian realism—for example, in his delineation of Bazin’s legacy inherited by Taiwan New Cinema, Ru-Shou Robert Chen opts to analyze the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang but not Yang. As I also touch upon in Chapter Two, besides the radically fragmented ending of The Terrorizers, Yang’s conceptual use of media technology can somehow be compared to the work of Dziga Vertov and Eisenstein.
13 A cinematic history of realism necessarily harks back to Italian neorealism, amongst which a particular brand of “urban realism” is most related to my inquiry of Taiwan New Cinema. However, I choose to maintain some distance from such a labeling given the term’s contemporary status as a universal (and cosmopolitan) and thus homogenizing parlance. Instead, by realism I tend more towards the recent formulation of “speculative realism,” which aims at prying open the correlation of thinking and being while allocating more attention to a deeper underlying reality buried in the latter.
things to play along.
Transparency and Opacity
With the notion of dwelling cinema, I complicate the relations between the representational screen and the material world external to the screen. I allow things to enter as they are into the representational system, turning mimetic signs into material things gathered and transmitted in a communicative circuit. Furthermore, by retooling things as medial, and as able to relay social meanings on their own, I consider how films are populated by these self-conscious “thinking machines,” how film form is mobilized in collaboration with these medial things.
Against this theoretical backdrop, the main issue I probe in the chapters is the changing nature of urban space in the time of Taiwan’s structural transition, and how these spatial changes bear upon the urbanites’ dwelling body. To this end, one needs to adopt a flexible view on both sides of the body-city relation. As I illustrate, as both urban space and the body have experienced an increased degree of mediation when media technology became more and more popularized in Taiwan, this relation is mainly mobilized by the twin operation of transparency and opacity. In their pioneering study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify immediacy and hypermediacy as the double logic of remediation. As new media engage in the remediation of older media, they often seek to render themselves invisible, producing embodied perceptual effects for the users, while at the same time involving more media to achieve such effects. Along this line, Bolter and Grusin feature transparency and opacity as accompanying the operation of immediacy and hypermediacy, respectively.
Beyond treating transparency and opacity merely as mediating effects, I study them as dispositifs that organize a system of relations to regulate or undermine the
formation of urban spaces and the body. In terms of urban space, a transparent governing logic arrives when the intense urban regeneration resulted in the large-scale application of certain building materials as well as the displacement of others.14 Out of this architectural transition emerges a particular material medium, namely glass, upon which the interior and the exterior both border and collapse, thus calling forth a redefinition of inside and outside, public and private, identity and subjecthood.
Accompanying the rising regime of transparency are the appearances of certain technologies such as the surveillance camera and TV. These technologies help cohere disparate social spaces into representable entities, invoking contemporary urban imagination of spaces as contiguous, homogeneous, and controllable, while at the same time making those unrepresented even more opaque and unfathomable.
On the other hand, the bodies of the urban subjects are rendered transmissible and pervasive as they gain the opportunity to enter the media circuit; there their bodies are made pliable and replicable by varied media forms, such as the screen, sound recordings, and bodily performances. Within a broadcast network opened onto the public, they assume a transparency with which different gazes and visualities can see through, hence putting these bodies under intense social regulation. Yet against transparency as a visual, spatial, and media regime, the recalcitrant bodies of the youths and the marginal also empower themselves with an excessive tendency toward embodiment along the process of mediation. In their strategic use of the body, they often put up another counter-regime of opacity and anonymity, of a “body too much”
that resists the penetration of political-economic forces.
14 This material shift in architecture is especially palpable at the turn of the 1980s, when national and municipal policies were enacted to dismantle veterans’ villages (juancun), the makeshift composites housing the soldiers and their dependents who accompanied the exiled Nationalist regime to Taiwan in the aftermath of the 1949 civil war. While these horizontally crawling structures, deemed
“urban tumors” plaguing the cities’ developing prospect, were cleared up, new sets of high-rise buildings were also put up in a spree, henceforth launching a fresh round of vertical construction of the cityscape. I will discuss this issue in Chapter Three.
The interplay between the body and the mediatized urban environment hence often stages itself along the axes of transparency and opacity. As a dialectical pair, they become the medial dispositifs that organize the main body of my thesis. Although I structure the chapters along the distinction between transparency and opacity, dedicating one chapter to each topos, it is important to note that they are but two sides of the same coin, thus requiring our effort to discern their inherent affinities and tensions.
In Chapter Two, I revisit a few films made in the 1980s by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang to chart the emergence of a dwelling transparency in different urban settings. I first trace the rural youths’ migration to the city in Hou’s Fengguei lai de ren (The Boys from Fengkuei, 1983). Along with the teenage boys, the camera settles into a country-style apartment complex, whose pervious layout allows both humans and machine to maintain an exuberance nurtured by their hometown and to try out their capacity in adapting to the ways of the city. By analyzing the frames, windows, screens, and walls that pervade Yang’s films, I subsequently discuss the emergence of an interior space (most notably the apartment and office buildings) self-reflexively renovated as a film space. This space is a heterogeneous one interconnected by telecommunications and media technologies that both define our conception of modern interiority, and forge a transparency that enables the outside—the more formidable aspect of the city—to infiltrate. I focus on Taipei Story and The Terrorizers to see how Edward Yang, himself regarded by some as an urban architect,15 allows TV screens, telephone lines, tiled walls, and the ubiquitous glass curtain walls to participate in the construction of his gloomy urban stories. As much as his intricate plots that express the existential angst against an estranged urban setting, these medial
15 See Leo Chanjen Chen’s “The Frustrated Architect: The Cinema of Edward Yang.”
objects themselves constitute the form and meaning of Yang’s city films. In the glass city that Yang ingeniously constructs, the indelible materiality revealed in the process of mediation betokens the lurking threats of opacity and obstruction beneath the transparent surface.
Chapter Three considers urban spaces less as represented in a single film movement than as brought together by intermedial nexuses and collaborations. The chapter studies three disparate media works—a video art work, some key scenes from Da cuo che (Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing?, 1983), and a street performance—to expound on their relations. These media works all dramatize the opacity of human bodies, and trace their transport from the city’s edge to the center, making them not only mediated but mediatized along the way. Positing bodies at the intersecting point that channels the convergence of media and urban space, these works urge us to consider the body by other means. On the one hand, via a close reading of the forms of mediation, I discuss the elastic bodies in Papa’s outdoor dancing scenes. These bodies, I argue, are key to bridging the film’s seemingly incongruent and much faulted structures. On the other hand, via video artist Chen Chieh-jen’s video work and art event, I shift to a political mode of interrogation, and consider the social efficacy ventured by Chen once the bodies are equipped with what É douard Glissant called “the right to opacity” (94). I borrow Glissant’s notion to explore the body as a site of resistance, against the oppressive state regime that seeks to pin its subjects down to a criminal identity. The issues of identity, criminality, and opacity, as I show, congeal upon the displaced mainlanders. An intermedial study subsequently demonstrates how this precarious identity is gathered, gains social attention, and becomes a medium that mediates much social affect and unrealizable aspirations.
Chapter Two
New Cinema’s Transparent Media House
Taiwan New Cinema in the hands of the young directors is known for creating memorable dwelling places for its petty yet lively characters. Walking away from the film studios where tireless outputs of wuxia pian (swordplay films), Qiong Yao pian (romance and family melodramas), and junjiao pian (patriotic military education films) that defined 1970s film history had stopped to attract box-office returns, young directors sought to relocate their cinema to the outdoor scenes, where a realistic style can be pursued with sufficient natural lighting, ambient sounds, actual architecture, living people, as well as local histories and stories. The result of this stylistic and thematic awareness is the appearance of a variety of film spaces seldom presented on the silver screen.
For example, in Wan Jen’s Chaoji shimin (Super Citizen, 1985), the protagonist leaves his hometown in the south for Taipei to look for his missing sister. He settles into a shabby veterans’ village (juancun), where he is introduced to his neighbors, whose lives are promptly exposed to him as the walls separating them are thin. He encounters a dysfunctional family of alcoholic husband, snappy wife, and playful children, a lunatic poet, and a small-time hooligan living right next to him. By the end of the film, he decides to not board the train bound for his southern home, and is happily joined by the hooligan friend, with whom he develops a quasi-familial tie.16
16 The illegal juancun has already appeared in “Pingguo de ziwei” (“The Taste of Apples”), a segment Wan Jen directed for the portmanteau film Erzi de dawan’ou (The Sandwich Man, 1983), commonly recognized as one of the works that launched Taiwan New Cinema. In this segment, an American soldier, having wounded (non-fatally) a local in a car accident, walks through the inner bowels of a juancun composite to visit the impoverished family of the injured father. The village’s cramped and untidy layout introduced the local audiences to an aspect of the city little known to them, causing the Information Office to order several cuts to the filmstrips, for fear that the “unhealthy”
In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Lianlian fengchen (Dust in the Wind, 1986), the main plot is set in a coal village in the mountainous region of north-eastern Taiwan. The mountain village nurtures the budding love between teenaged Ah-yuan and Ah-yun, while their families are attuned to a life marked rhythmically by coal mining labors, train rides to and from the city, potato cultivation, and outdoor film viewing. And in Edward Yang’s Haitan de yitian (That Day, on the Beach, 1983) and Hou’s Dongdong de jiachi (A Summer at Grandpa’s, 1984), the characters gather in Japanese-style country houses, each presided over by a stern patriarch specializing in medicine. These imposing houses are constructed in their entirety by quality wood and are meticulously maintained, suggesting also the demand of order and familial norms imposed upon their inhabitants. In all these residences, the characters share life events that appear mutually constitutive. The formation and layout of their dwellings enable a degree of transparency, with which the films can convene disparate yet interconnected plotlines with a holistic material bearing. Breaking free from the artifactual design of the sound stage, Taiwan cinema in the early 1980s begins to migrate into history-specific environs of the local, thereby emitting a new sense of settlement.
Yet while these residences are invariably set at a remove from the city’s everyday bustle, they are not likely immune to capitalist-industrial factors characteristic of the city. This fact is evidenced by the montage sequences of urban crowds and high-rises that bookend Super Citizen, by Ah-yuan’s frustrated pursuit of career in the city and the penetration of rail tracks into the rural village in Dust in the Wind, and by the mother character who receives medical treatment in an urban hospital in A Summer at Grandpa’s. These instances suggest that while cinema has
representation of the ghetto would harm the national image. This famous anecdote is known as the
“apple-peeling incident” (xiao pingguo shijian). For a brief explanation of its history, see Yeh and Davis (62). See also Chen Ping-hao’s analysis of “The Taste of Apples” in his master’s thesis (9-21).
acquired a state of settlement in accord with its material surroundings, the issue of mobility and displacement is also looming large. And while one strand of New Cinema shown above enjoys a reputation for depicting organic social bonds with a humanistic touch, another forceful branch, witnessed mainly in the cinema of Edward Yang, and of Tsai Ming-liang later in the 1990s, probes the increasingly reified social relations against the transforming cityscape with no less precision and rigor.
In this chapter, I study how New Cinema directors employ the notion of dwelling transparency to weld a distinct form for their work. Transparency, as their work shows, is deployed as a double-edged dispositif linking cinematic form with a larger material environment upon which social relations congeal. Transparency facilitated by ready-made architecture affords the self-conscious exercise of camera movement and other cinematic skills. On the one hand, these skills present characters in intimate relation to each other, framing them in a mise-en-scène of unobstructed flow within a sensually porous space. Yet on the other hand, they also demonstrate transparency’s function as a governing technique that hinders characters from real emotional exchange, thus reducing the latter to a state of isolation while making them readily exposable to power manipulation. Both aspects are bolstered by the proliferation of media technologies in the early 1980s, which enhance the possibilities of message transmission, unexpected collision of individuals, identity traceability, and cinema’s own formal experimentation. It is also by frequently enlisting the force of these medial objects that cinema activates an ontological reflection upon its own dwelling in the contemporary age. In what follows, I briefly touch upon Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Fengguei lai de ren (The Boys from Fengkuei, 1983) to illustrate how a transparent mode of human-environment relation manages to sustain itself as the characters migrate from the countryside to the city, mainly by way of the distinct form of an apartment complex deftly appropriated by the camera. I then shift to Edward
Yang’s urban films, in which cinema, doubling the medial-material effect of windows, frames and tiles, carves out a dwelling space to negotiate its terms with the external sides—the city. I chart the emergence of such a “medial space” in cinema’s self-reflexive moments, in which a transparent visual regime could be more dialectically probed as constructed, disjointed, and opaque in nature. Consequently, the issue of transparency calls for a recognition of “mediated immediacy,” a notion that alerts media users (including cinema itself) to the indelible existence of a material infrastructure which the illusion of transparency ultimately refers to.
From Country to City
In the beginning thirty minutes of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei, the four carefree teenagers are seen idling away their time, waiting to be conscripted in their hometown in one of the isles of Penghu, situated off the west coast of Taiwan in the middle of the Taiwan Strait. In their happy-go-lucky meanderings, they are constantly caught in between sets of walls laid out of concrete and the indigenous coral stones (laogu shi).17 These walls prove especially useful as the boys are involved in fights with gangs of an opposite faction, enabling them to act instantly in hiding, fleeing, pursuing, and attacking their rivals. At the same time, the camera also learns to adapt to these walls, using them as material elements to aid its own composition and movement.
For many film scholars, The Boys from Fengkuei marks the turning point in Hou’s career, allowing him to develop a personal style later acclaimed as quintessentially his. It is a time when Hou refrains consciously from classical editing
17 The term laogu 咾咕, or gulao 咕咾 for the elder locals, is in fact a transliteration of “coral” in the Hokkien topolect. These laogu stones originally constituted the coral reefs under the ocean, and were moved ashore to build the locals’ residences for the sake of convenience, as building materials during the time were still insufficient. I will return to the topic of laogu shi again in my conclusion when I discuss artist Chen Shun-Chu’s installation art set in Penghu.
and framing techniques, including continuity editing, shot/reverse shot, and facial close-ups that heighten the characters’ emotions, and opts for a distanced position for objectively observing his filmed subjects. In the Penghu scenes, for example, the use of the long take and the long shot is already remarkable, some employed with the aid of the walls. In one famous fighting scene, the camera simply stays still at a distance, watching the boys carrying on their fight through a vista vision created by walls and objects on both sides.18 Exactly by preventing an omniscient view of the boys, who constantly move in and out of the screen, the walls and the distant camera manage to engage the audience’s attention as to the outcome of the combat. The materiality of the walls thus enables a type of film vocabulary that helps establish a particular mode of address. Such a deliberately distanced tactic, however, is not the whole story. In other times, the camera tracks along the walls, zooming in and out to capture the unfolding schemes and pastimes of the restless boys.
In James Udden’s account, while Hou is later known for the stillness of his camera, a good forty-five percent of the shots in The Boys from Fengkuei contain camera movements (63-64). The camera maintains its agility even after the boys arrive in the crowded Kaohsiung, where their stretching space becomes increasingly constricted. Part of the reason for this camera vitality is that, rather than dwelling in the concrete jungle, the boys settle into an old-styled apartment complex, much like the traditional Chinese quadrangle that maintains a high degree of autonomy in itself.
The complex is furnished with a spacious balcony, see-through windows, open corridor, and a yard in the middle. There the boys are introduced to their neighbors, Ah-ho and his girlfriend Hsiao-hsiang, who live kitty-corner to them. One of the boys, Ah-chin, falls secretly in love with Hsiao-hsiang, and the story ensues between the
18 See Wu Pei-ci’s article (1999), in which she studies this scene in terms of temporality, movement, and the long take.
boisterous ways of the boys on the one hand, and an elusive love triangle that eventually amounts to nothing on the other. At times, it feels that the abode is dwelled as much by the teenagers as by the camera itself, for the house’s contiguous structure provides an ideal ground for the camera to try out its technical capacities. It involves zooming, tilting, craning, and panning—cinematic acts that create spatial continuum to record the characters’ interactions both horizontally and vertically. A number of point-of-view shots are also used, first to reveal the boys’ curious peeking at their female neighbor, and then to mimic Ah-chin’s silent observation of the dying affection between Ah-ho and Hsiao-hsiang. Interestingly, following these POV shots, the film sometimes cuts to Hsiao-hsiang, who unflinchingly returns the gaze, showing her mixed feelings of interest, forlornness, and detachment. Here the apartment’s compound structure enables the exchange of gazes, life events, and emotional undercurrents, offering a space for the characters to reinscribe their mutual bonding beyond mere chance encounters. It further affords a cinematic style that can express formally a distinct mode of dwelling characterized by fluidity, reciprocity, and transparency inside the architecture. Cinema, in this sense, embodies the boys’
city-dwelling with its own representational schemes.
Technically speaking, however, while set in Kaohsiung, this dwelling space is simply not “urban” enough. For some, it bespeaks Hou’s nostalgic sentiment toward the pastoral, and his lack of command in representing the urban and the contemporary.19 Nevertheless, the country-style complex does emit a sense of the contemporary in a brief moment when the soundtrack overrules the visual. Having just moved in, the boys play Luo Dayou’s latest rock-and-roll hit “Lugang Village”
19 Wenchi Lin studies Hou’s tendency to represent the city by way of rural images in his early films in “Xiangcun chengshi” (“City as County,” 2012). For Shiao-Ying Shen, it is not until Nanguo zaijian nanguo (Goodbye South, Goodbye, 1996) that Hou develops a style with which he can confidently approach the contemporary. See Shen, “Nanguo”.
(Lugang xiaozhen) at full volume, using the song’s explicit denial of the neon-lit Taipei as one’s home as the defining theme of their urban story.20 With the song’s deafening sonority, the house is turned into a realm of reverberation in tune with the younger generation’s urban angst. Thus for a moment the half-reclusive house is channeled to the social reality facing the city’s newcomers; the very existence of the radio signals the house’s possible transformation into a medial space, prone to the external stimuli pervading the city. It is with this fleeting reference to media technologies that I turn to Edward Yang’s urban films, in which the emergence of the medial space could be registered with more definitive quality.
The Emergence of a Medial Space
In current studies, a few critics and scholars have noticed, and elaborated to a certain extent, the significance of media that populate Edward Yang’s films. For example, writing on Kongbu fenzi (The Terrorizers, 1986), Edmond Wong (Huang Jianye) points out that the film’s multiple narrative threads are implicitly “enmeshed by medial objects,” leading to “a structure both sober and precise” (140). Wong deems these medial objects as enabling “an introspective meta-perspective,” offering filmmakers a space to reflect on the social aftermaths caused unintentionally by their use of media (140). The reflexivity that Wong touches upon here, however, concerns media users’ humanistic consideration for the well-being of the population on the receiving end of their technology, rather than the ontological meditation on the film medium itself in relation to a larger media environment. Although Wong rightly perceives the connection between media and the film’s structure, he fails to further unpack the relations between “the enmeshment of medial objects” and the film’s
20 I discuss Luo Dayou’s music of the early 1980s in greater detail in Chapter Three.
