Taiwan Today

Late one afternoon in 1986, a university freshman stepped out of a classroom as if in a trance; he had just seen Taipei Story, a new film by Edward Yang. Two decades later, Lin Jing-jie was busy preparing to release his own movie when he heard about Yang's death. "I still remember that shocking, magical hour, when I felt a wondrous combination of emptiness of mind and fullness of heart," Lin says. That inspirational moment during his student days helped pave the way for Lin's own film career. The Most Distant Course, directed by Lin, won the International Critics' Week Award at the Venice Film Festival in September this year. Shot mostly in eastern Taiwan's Taitung County and financed in part by the Government Information Office's film assistance fund--the balance of funding having been drummed up by the director himself--this film is widely considered a truer indicator of Taiwan's cinematic creativity and potential than Lust, Caution (2007), the latest film from director Ang Lee, which was financed by foreign production companies and shot in Shanghai. Lust, Caution won the higher-profile Golden Lion (best picture) award in Venice.

Although none of Edward Yang's films have won an Academy Award, as Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) did last year, he is the only Taiwanese filmmaker to have won the coveted Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. His last completed film, Yi Yi: A One and a Two, won the award in 2000. For Yang, it added to a handsome collection of prizes garnered at major international film festivals for Yi Yi and his other seven works. After completing this middle-class family saga set in modern-day Taipei, Yang moved on to an animated film project that was left unfinished at his death, of cancer, in June this year.

Like most of his works, Yi Yi presents emotional undercurrents in a seemingly quiet urban landscape. Wu Nien-jen, a novelist and screenwriter, plays a principal part in Yi Yi. Along with film innovators like director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wu and Yang were central figures in the New Wave Cinema movement of the 1980s, a landmark development in Taiwanese film history that continues to inspire filmmakers from later generations, like Lin Jing-jie.

Lin says that Yang and Hou's movies opened his eyes to a sincere, subtle and multilayered way of telling stories set in environments that ordinary Taiwanese people identify with. Indeed, New Wave Cinema was a reaction to increasingly low-quality local productions--farces, crime flicks and martial arts films--that dominated screens around Taiwan at the time.

Industry in Decline

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Taiwan built one of the strongest film industries in Asia with the prolific production of films in the Holo, or Taiwanese, language and later in Mandarin as the government began to see its policy of promoting the national language gain traction. Although the local filmmaking industry had shown energy and creativity, flourishing for well over a decade, it eventually lost touch with audiences, who grew tired of movies that increasingly degenerated into sex and violence.

Film critic Lu Fei-i, who is also a professor at National Chengchi University's Department of Radio and Television, points out that as moviegoers lost interest in Taiwan-made movies in the early 1980s, they began to watch foreign, especially Hong Kong, productions on both big and small screens. Rejection of local films became an indicator of one's good taste.

As the film market collapsed, the government-funded Central Motion Picture Corp. (CMPC) began to fund experimental filmmaking projects by young and relatively inexperienced directors, including Edward Yang. One such project was In Our Time (1982), a film in four segments that spans the early 1960s to the early 1980s and explores personal and social developments. In Our Time was an unexpected box office success and is regarded by many as the film that launched the New Wave genre. Yang directed the second segment, a coming-of-age tale about a middle-class teenage girl living with her mother and sister during the late 1960s. This segment was especially typical of New Wave films' thoughtful, introspective style. Its quiet, slow-paced dramatic development contrasted sharply with the boisterous, melodramatic films that proliferated at the time.

The same year's even more commercially successful film Growing Up, a CMPC-sponsored project based on a novel by Chu Tien-wen, who went on to write screenplays for several New Wave films, cemented the new genre's status in Taiwan's movie scene. The following year saw the release of another two landmark New Wave films: The Sandwich Man, a three-segment production named for the title segment directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Yang's That Day on the Beach. The Sandwich Man was based on novels with rural characters and settings, while Yang's first feature-length film--nearly three hours long--portrayed urban career women struggling to assert their independence amid family, marriage and professional problems. It has been hailed by some feminists as a groundbreaking cinematic manifesto on women's evolving roles in Taiwan, particularly in Taipei's increasingly metropolitan society. All of Yang's urban tales take place in Taipei.

Career Confusion

Yang, who was born in Shanghai in 1947, moved to Taipei in 1949 with his parents. After graduating from National Chiao Tung University, he earned a master's degree in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Florida. He then briefly enrolled at the University of Southern California's film school, but was disappointed to discover the classes focused on the moviemaking business rather than on filmmaking theory. He left California to work in Seattle, designing marine defense information systems at a university research institute. Unable to settle on a career path, Yang applied to and was accepted into the architecture departments at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did not enroll at either. After wavering for years, he decided to devote himself to making films.

In Seattle, Yang was inspired by New German Cinema directors like Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. Through them, Yang saw the possibility of working with limited budgets to make quality movies that display artistic ambition and social concern. In 1981, he wrote the screenplay for and acted in Yu Wei-jheng's The Winter of 1905, a film shot in Japan about the life of a distinguished Chinese Buddhist. Several months later, he directed an episode of a Taiwan Television Enterprise series, Eleven Women, which drew critical acclaim. On the strength of the TV episode, CMPC asked Yang to direct the In Our Time segment.

Lu says that, like the New German Cinema and the earlier French New Wave and Italian Neorealism as well as other cinematic movements--such as those in China, Iran and Vietnam--Taiwan's New Wave Cinema had an indisputable impact on local cinematic culture. "Yang's work marked a clear, sharp departure from the traditional Chinese film model, which evolved from plays that show literary tendencies toward dramatic tension, interpersonal conflicts, elaborately designed dialogues and somewhat exaggerated role-playing," the professor says. "Yang represented a new, confident command of the ways of expression unique to cinema itself, such as arrangement of images in a specific shot and the contrast between light and shadow." Like other New Wave directors, Yang preferred to depict the lives of common people, employing nonprofessional actors for principal roles. The genre, particularly Yang's work, also featured long takes and other unconventional filmmaking techniques.

Sense and Sensibility

In a mid-1990s interview with film critic Edmond Wong, Yang expounded on sense, sensibility and filmmaking. He said sensibility is what one has already felt during a life experience, while with the intervention of sense, one could transcend experience. This, he said, is what filmmaking is about. Yang's portrayal of mostly urban lives in a detached manner clearly distinguishes his work from Hou Hsiao-hsien's warmer, pastoral style. Combined, the two directors' films are like two wings of New Wave Cinema--culminating in 1985 and 1986 with A Time to Live and a Time to Die and Dust in the Wind from Hou and Yang's Taipei Story (in which Hou plays the hero) and Terrorizers. These movies won critical acclaim for Taiwanese cinema at major film festivals around the world.

The two preeminent New Wave directors can be easily distinguished based on their temporal versus spatial proclivities, according to Lu. "Yang's characters move continually from corner to corner of a modern cityscape," he says, "while Hou presents people's stories over a much longer span of time." Hou's A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993) and Good Men, Good Women (1995) comprise a trilogy that spans nearly the entire 20th century. Yang's stark urban tales take place in one room after another and among clusters of concrete apartment and office buildings. While discussing Taipei Story, which tells the tale of the owner of a traditional fabric store in Taipei's older western district and his girlfriend, who leads a bourgeois life in the city's more sophisticated eastern district, Yang said the characters personify the city's older versus newer qualities.

American postmodern theorist Frederic R. Jameson, in a paper titled "Remapping Taipei" published in 1990, elaborated on the "spatiality" or the "insistent relationship [the movie] establishes between the individual space and the city as a whole" in Terrorizers. "Terrorizers is indeed very much a film about urban space in general and offers something like an anthology of enclosed dwellings, whether apartments or individual rooms," Jameson wrote, adding, "Taipei is thus mapped and configured as a superimposed set of boxed dwelling spaces in which the characters are all confined in one way or another." Lu says that at a time when Taiwanese cinema began connecting to the world's film circles, Yang's depiction of a newly industrializing society in a developing Asian country gave Western theorists food for thought, helping to popularize a new area of cultural studies. "In contrast to Hou's works, which present an Eastern, exotic style absent in American and European films," Lu says, "Yang used the cinematic syntax familiar to Western film watchers." He says the family depicted in Yi Yi, a favorite of Western intellectuals like Susan Sontag, is not typically Taiwanese or Chinese, but the kind of family that might live in any city, anywhere in the world.

Shunning Conventions

As they turned away from conventional styles and motifs in their work, New Wave directors were also trying to establish for themselves a more autonomous film production business model. As they sought greater room for creativity and funding, many young directors formed workshops either jointly or on their own. Yang's Taipei Story, for example, was produced by a company established in 1982 by Hou and Chen Kun-hou, the director of Growing Up.

In 1989, Yang established his own workshop, which released A Brighter Summer Day in 1991. Based on the true story of a teenage boy who killed a teenage girl in 1961, the movie transports the audience back to a time of repressed society that Yang felt had molded his generation and Taiwan as a whole. Palpably autobiographical, the story revolves around a high school student from an average mainlander family, much like the director's own. A Brighter Summer Day was a massive undertaking. Beyond its extraordinary length--it was four hours long--the project was also unusual in that it employed numerous young amateur actors. It is widely considered to be one of Yang's most impressive masterpieces.

Lu says that while the New Wave Cinema auteur model established a more independent and creative role for directors--who were often also screenwriters for the films they directed--and had a great influence on Taiwanese cinematic aesthetics and culture, it kept a considerable distance from mainstream commercial film production and marketing channels. New Wave filmmakers rarely sought out local audiences even after gaining international fame. More often than not, New Wave directors had tenuous relationships with local film distributors and movie theater operators. Yang's Taipei Story, for example, was in Taipei movie theaters for less than a week and his Cannes winner Yi Yi has never been commercially released in Taiwan. Lu says Yang was a proud man; he never even considered taking advantage of the government's film assistance fund. He says Yang's non-conformist stance "made it hard for him to establish a place for himself in Taiwan's film business circle."

New Wave Cinema has been cited as a major reason for the withering of Taiwan's film industry, which coincided with New Wave's rise in the 1980s and lingers to the present day. Lu says that this argument is groundless. He points out that from 1982 to 1986 during the peak of the New Wave surge, films by New Wave directors and their followers combined for only 14 percent of the 417 movies produced during that period--and only five of the top 50 films in terms of ticket sales. "New Wave Cinema is hardly to blame, since it never played a leading role in Taiwan's film business environment either in terms of investment, output or market share," Lu says. "It only secured a progressive, fashionable image and a high media profile due to largely favorable opinions from academics and film critics."

Lu concludes that when Taiwanese audiences turned away from overly commercial local films and government-funded propaganda films and began to embrace Hollywood and Hong Kong movies, New Wave directors made a bold attempt to reinvigorate a declining film industry. Although their efforts did not succeed in pulling Taiwanese film out of the doldrums, pioneers like Edward Yang did shed light on a path that younger Taiwanese film adventurers, like Lin Jing-jie, are still following.

1981
The Winter of 1905
(screenwriter and actor; directed by Yu Wei-jheng )

1982
"Expectation" segment of
In Our Time
(director and screenwriter)

1983
That Day on the Beach
(director and co-screenwriter)
Best Photography Award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival
Gold Prize at the Houston Film Festival

1985
Taipei Story
(director and co-screenwriter)
International Critics Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland

1986
Terrorizers
(director and co-screenwriter)
Best Picture at Taiwan's
Golden Horse Awards
Grand Jury Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival
Best Director at the Pesaro International Film Festival, Italy
Best Film at the British Film Institute Awards

1991
A Brighter Summer Day
(director and co-screenwriter)
Best Picture at the Golden Horse Awards
Grand Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival

1994
A Confucian Confusion
(director and screenwriter)
Best Screenplay Award at the Golden Horse Awards

1996
Mahjong
(director and screenwriter)
Special Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival
Best Director at the Three Continents Festival at Nantes, France

2000
Yi Yi: A One and a Two
(director and screenwriter)
Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival
Grand Prix at the Fribourg
International Film Festival, Switzerland

Owned by the Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan's former ruling party, the Central Motion Picture Corp. (CMPC) once played a dominant role in Taiwan's film industry.

In the early 1960s, during the peak of Holo film production by relatively small private companies, the government-affiliated CMPC began to attract experienced technicians and directors from the Holo genre to work on Mandarin movies. For example, CMPC recruited Li Hsing, who had directed a dozen Holo films, including a popular series that began with Ong Ko and Liu Ko Touring Around Taiwan (1959). In Li's Beautiful Duckling (1964), poultry farmers speak only Mandarin in their rural community, not the vernacular Holo that the KMT was trying to suppress. With movies like Beautiful Duckling, CMPC sought to produce "healthy, realistic" movies, which proved to be a successful genre until the late 1970s with Li's He Never Gives Up (1978), the story of a handicapped hero struggling to succeed.

In the 1970s, CMPC also garnered a big market share with patriotic films like The Everlasting Glory (1974), Victory (1975) and 800 Heroes (1976) set during the KMT's war of resistance against the Japanese in late-1930s China. Together with movies on the themes of opposing communism and the founding of the Republic of China in the early 1900s, CMPC's productions appealed to Taiwanese moviegoers during tumultuous times that saw Taiwan's expulsion from the United Nations and its deteriorating diplomatic relationship with the United States as well as the death of Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled Taiwan for nearly three decades. In the early 1980s, however, audiences grew increasingly weary of propaganda films. They were seen as outdated and irrelevant. After all, the movies' stories did not even take place in Taiwan.

At the same time, the once-popular sentimental romance genre, based on the novels of Chiung Yao, also began to subside nearly two decades after the release of films like Four Loves and My Silent Wife, both directed by Li Hsing in 1965. The box-office failure of Last Night's Lamp in 1983 marked the demise of the "three-room" brand of Chiung Yao movies in which heroes and heroines usually shuttle from living rooms to dining rooms and coffee shops in search of love.

With the mainstays of its success failing to connect with audiences, CMPC began allocating funds to the making of New Wave films.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com