Asian Cinema - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2014

This article analyses Yi ye Taibei/Au Revoir Taipei (Chen, 2010). Due to its status as a co-production (with talent drawn from across borders, its various international funding sources and its deliberate appeal to global audiences through the festival circuit), the film is seen to provide a transnational perspective on Taipei. In this the film’s relationship with a film tourism agenda, a branding process pursued by the Taipei authorities, is stressed. Au Revoir Taipei’s consideration of life in Taipei, as a ‘branded city’, is analysed in terms of its three becomings (becoming-Paris, becoming-imperceptible, becoming-dance), in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the time-image (a striking example of which concludes the film) and it’s intertextual referencing of several ‘world’ or ‘art’ cinema classics, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (1964). The film’s transnational view of life in the branded city is thus understood to emerge at the conjunction of global production and distribution realities for film-making, and contemporary work and lifestyle opportunities in Taipei, the convergence of which create a cinematic construction of Taipei city that can be deciphered using Deleuze’s concepts.

Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) depicts a nearly vacant cinema screening King Hu’s martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn (1967) on its last night of business. The film’s composition of the theatre, empty and decaying, marks it as a haunted house, and the few people present as ghosts lingering nostalgically lamenting the theatre’s impending closure. This article, thus, offers a reading of Goodbye, Dragon Inn attending to the intertextual invocation of Dragon Gate Inn as well as the metacinematic focus of the theatre and its operation through the lens of horror film generic conventions. The ghosts populating the theatre present an alternative temporality that values and seeks to preserve the past. Yet the anomie infecting them, characteristically of Tsai’s films, prevents anything more than a temporary nostalgia that cannot adequately establish the past as a viable temporal mode. In the end, the theatre closes and the ghosts disperse.

Many scholars in the fields of cultural studies, film studies, historical studies and gender studies have discussed Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness, as it is one of the most important films in Taiwanese history. It engages with the February 28 Incident, which was buried in Taiwan’s official history for more than 50 years. Hou’s remaking of the historical films acted as a wake-up call not only for the Taiwanese but also for the government to revisit the seminal incident, to think about the present and to reconsider what the best is for the people of Taiwan in the future. This article focuses on the debate about whether women are included in history, through an analysis of A City of Sadness.

As a foundational text in the history of the New Taiwanese Cinema, The Sandwich Man (1983) deserves consideration for the ways in which the inherently contradictory omnibus form is deployed for allegorical and meta-filmic purposes. Besides commenting on changes in contemporary Taiwanese society, this transauthorial feature combining the short films of three directors (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Wan Ren) foregrounds a feature of the multi-director form—seriality—that is likewise persistent within the arenas of production, accumulation, and consumption. The author makes a case for The Sandwich Man’s significance within the context of cultural, social, and political changes occurring in Taiwan, a country where mass-production and artisanal practices have long coexisted both within and beyond the film industry. Furthermore, this and other omnibus films activate a mode of ruptured yet invested spectatorship in which audiences are conditioned to expect certain narrative outcomes due to a serial emplotment of similar themes and repeated events. Thus, ‘serial conditioning’ turns spectators into consumers who, confronted with a limited assortment of stories and characters in the span of a single feature-length omnibus film, are encouraged to engage in a selection process that privileges already-canonized auteurs and therefore has commercial implications even in the context of non-commercial art cinema.

A large number of contemporary Taiwan films deploy, principally, the Taiwanese dialect (Minnan yu or southern Fujianese) in their multilingual presentation of the island. These Taiwanese-speaking films draw consciously and anti-hegemonically from Taiwan’s subculture and folkways in the countryside, distancing themselves from urban, metropolitan conditions. For instance, Wang Yu-Lin’s Seven Days in Heaven (2010) is a black comedy structured on Taoist funeral services, night market bazaars and the mourning of the father. His Flying Dragon, Dancing Phoenix (2012) is Taiwanese go-ah-hi (folk opera) modernized, yet still based on traditional transvestite dramaturgy. Whereas Taiwanese dialect films present the dizzyingly chaotic, syncretic local palimpsest, the circulation into global cinema flattens and simplifies these films into a single rolling line of English subtitle at the bottom of the screen, about to sink into subconsciousness. Such flattening destroys Taiwanese dialect film’s local conditions, in particular multilinguality that constitutes the islander’s very identity, one that switches spontaneously and restlessly among Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hakanese, aboriginal languages, Japanese and English, the latter four often in the form of popular Nipponized-sinologized words and phrases. Taiwan becomes the codeword for switch on account of its colonial legacy and multiracial, entrepreneurial reality. Its magic lies in rhetorical sleight of hand, rhetorical in part because the island is so trapped politically. This article proceeds to analyse code-switching on the soundtrack and the accompanied subtitles in Wang’s films.

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Song Hwee Lim (2014) Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 240 pp., ISBN: 9780824836849, h/bk, US$45