• A revised version of this paper is published in Nagib, Lucia and Mello, Cecilia (eds.) Realism and the Audiovisual Media (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp.96-107. 

  Observational Realism in Taiwan New Cinema

Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley 

This paper explores a particular kind of realism in Taiwan New Cinema that is observational, self-reflexive and closely linked to Taiwan’s cultural, social and political context. The case studies chosen for analysis include Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen, 1986), Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer (Kongbu fenzi, 1986/1987) and Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l'amour (Aiqing wansui, 1994).[1]

Cultural and film critics proclaimed the death of Taiwan New Cinema in 1987 (Mizou and Liang, 1991), the same year when martial law was lifted and society began to experience a new wave of cultural liberation and pluralism. However the filmmakers of Taiwan New Cinema, such as Hou and Yang, not only continued to make movies after 1987 but also to exercise profound influence on future filmmakers in Taiwan including award-winning directors such as Tsai.

In this chapter ‘Taiwan New Cinema’ is used in a broader sense to include films made after 1987, that is, post-Taiwan New Cinema, in order to demonstrate the continuing thread of observational realism in these films. Moreover, it is important to situate these films within Taiwan film history in order to fully appreciate the uniqueness of Taiwan New Cinema in terms of its form, rhythm, subjects, and how the element of realism is articulated.

Historical Perspective

The film industry in Taiwan was commercially successful during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. After half a century of Japanese colonialism between 1895 and 1945, the majority of its inhabitants could only speak Taiwanese and a little Japanese when the island was ceded to the Republic of China (ROC) after the World War II. Due to political sensitivity in the post-colonial period,[2] social realism was an approach avoided by local filmmakers who began to make Taiwanese-language films based on traditional folk opera (gezai xi) or modern melodrama to entertain the domestic audience. When they realized that there was a huge appetite for locally produced cinema, an increasing number of Taiwanese-language films were churned out. Over a thousand Taiwanese-language movies were made between 1956-70 (Lee, 1998, p.17). The production time for many of these films was within ten days (Rawnsley, 2008a). As a result their quality was extremely uneven.

When the Kuomintang (KMT, or the Nationalist Party) fled to Taiwan after their defeat by the Communists in 1949, the government strongly promoted Mandarin, ROC’s national language, on Taiwan in order to enhance national unity. Yet Mandarin-language cinema did not take off until the 1960s when a series of historical musical productions broke box office records.[3] As the popularity of Mandarin-language cinema grew, the number of Taiwanese-language films dwindled. There were only ten Taiwanese-language films made in 1970, one of each in 1971–2, and another four in 1980. The last traditional Taiwanese-language film, an adaptation of a folk opera, Chen san wu niang, was made in 1981 (Lee, 1998, pp. 23–24).[4] It is noteworthy that many filmmakers of Taiwan New Cinema returned to the use of Taiwanese-language in their work. However they are very different from the traditional Taiwanese-language cinema of the 1950s in terms of form and narrative strategies. I will explain more about Taiwan New Cinema later in this chapter.

In addition to historical musicals and dramas, the KMT-owned film studio, Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), began championing a new style of films branded ‘healthy realism’ (jiankang xieshi) in the 1960s. Although being named ‘realism’, it is

a didactic construction of romantic melodrama and civic virtue… It mixes the interior/private mise-en-scène specific to family melodrama with the civil, public space to accommodate government policy, enabling a smooth integration with the state ideological apparatus (Yeh, 2007, p. 206).

Hence the products of healthy realism are often seen today as part of KMT propaganda activity. Nevertheless many films of this genre enjoyed both commercial success and critical acclaim in the domestic market at the time. Prominent filmmakers of healthy realism, such as Li Xing and Bai Jing-rui, have influenced many younger generations of filmmakers in Taiwan, including Hou Hsiao-hsien.[5]

While healthy realism gradually faded out, Taiwanese viewers embraced a variety of different genres in the 1970s. For example, traditional martial arts films (wuxia pian), kung-fu movies (gongfu pian) that exploded onto the international consciousness because of Bruce Lee, as well as military drama, political drama, and campus drama that enhanced the KMT-oriented worldview when the ROC lost its seat in the United Nations in 1971 and severed formal diplomatic ties with Japan in 1972 and the United State in 1979. Furthermore, a significant number of contemporary female romance novelists, most notably Qiong Yao, provided rich escapist materials for screen adaptation. This genre is called aiqing wenyi pian (literally ‘romance, literature and art movie’) and was popular not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and many South East Asian countries. As Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (2007, p. 206) has pointed out, ‘the literary wenyi feature helped create a distinctive reputation for Taiwan cinema abroad’.

Although the 1970s were regarded as the golden age of Taiwan film production (Yeh, 2007, p. 206), the challenges from the much more energetic and commercially driven Hong Kong cinema also intensified during the same period. Unfortunately the ROC government made several policies which were damaging to the Taiwan film industry including tax breaks for Hong Kong film companies, and demonstrated its inability to manage bootleg videos. Moreover Taiwanese filmmakers responded to fierce competition by repetitively copying popular formats of Hong Kong cinema with a much smaller production budget in the hope of earning a quick buck. Consequently both the quality and quantity of commercial films produced in Taiwan began to face a serious crisis by the beginning of the 1980s (Lu, 1998, pp. 196–254).

A New Beginning       

It is contentious to try and identify which film launched the movement of Taiwan New Cinema. Perhaps it is fair to say that In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982), a collection of four short films directed by four unknown filmmakers at the time,[6] brought to the public’s attention for the first time ‘realistic images of contemporary Taiwan’ (Yip, 2004, p. 56). The four segments are set between the 1960s and 80s to reflect the process of modernization of the island, and the film was hailed as a breakthrough in Taiwan film history. One year later, Chen Kun-hou directed a feature film in a similar fashion, Growing Up (Xibi de gushi, 1983), scripted by novelist Zhu Tian-wen,[7] which explores contemporary social issues faced by second marriages and marriages between Taiwanese and mainlanders. The box office proved the financial appeal of such ‘new’ cinema by young filmmakers. Later in the same year The Sandwich Man (Erzi de da wan ou), a collection of three short films based on stories by a nativist novelist, Huang Chun-ming, was released. The three segments, set in Taiwan of the early period of industrialization, were directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zeng Zhuang-xiang and Wan Ren.[8]

While The Sandwich Man was in theatres, out was another film consisting of three integrated stories full of familiar film stars in Taiwan, The Wheel of Life (Ta lunhui, 1983), told a reincarnation romance set in ancient China and was directed by three then far more established filmmakers, Li Xing, Bai Jing-rui and King Hu (Hu Jin-chuan). Interestingly while Hou, Zeng and Wan of The Sandwich Man were either born or raised in Taiwan, Li, Bai and Hu of The Wheel of Life all grew up on the mainland. The latter failed both commercially and critically. In contrast, The Sandwich Man did not only become a surprise box-office hit but also attracted serious attention from the media and cultural commentators. The success of The Sandwich Man formally confirmed the arrival of Taiwan New Cinema as a phenomenon (Berry and Lu, 2005, pp. 5–6).

Another fact of The Sandwich Man that is important to the kind of ‘realism’ associated with Taiwan New Cinema is ‘the use of dialogue in Taiwanese – the language used by the majority of the people but suppressed under the Mandarin-only policy in the post-war period’ (Chiu, 2005, p. 18). As previously discussed, Taiwan became the retreat of the ROC government because the KMT lost the civil war to the Communists in China. Taiwan was seen as a temporary base for the eventual recovery of the motherland by many mainland immigrants who were forced to settle in Taiwan for several decades. Local languages and Taiwanese identity were suppressed for the sake of the KMT-interpreted Chinese ideology. The government made a series of policies to prohibit the use of local languages in films (Lu, 1998, pp. 162–6). Yet such suppression became a thorny issue after the process of democratization began on the island in the early 1980s. The Sandwich Man used the Taiwanese dialect in one third of the film which was against the official policy. All the major press in Taiwan were united in supporting the film as it awaited the approval of the Government Information Office (GIO). Cultural and social elites appealed to the government to loosen the ban on local languages in films, and the government obliged. When Hou Hsiao-hsien made Boys from Fenggui (Fenggui lai de ren, 1983-4) with half of the dialogue spoken in Taiwanese, the GIO also approved its release. Martial law was finally lifted in 1987 and there have been no restrictions on the use of local languages in films made in Taiwan since 1989.

I must point out that among the three chosen case studies, Dust in the Wind uses Taiwanese but The Terrorizer and Vive l’amour mainly use Mandarin. The truth is that Taiwan went through a very successful and vigorous Mandarin campaign in the 1970s until this language has become embedded in daily lives of all parts of the society. The population today is generally said to comprise 73 per cent of Taiwanese, 13 per cent of mainlanders, 12 per cent of Hakkas and 1.7 per cent of Aboriginals (Scott and Tiun, 2007, p. 54). However, most Taiwanese people are equally fluent in Mandarin and one local language. Mandarin proficiency is especially widespread among those who received their school education after the late 1960s. For the generations that have been through the Mandarin campaign in the 1970s and for younger speakers, Mandarin has become their daily and most familiar language, even though many of them can also identify another local language as their mother tongue. In other words, Mandarin is widely used across ethnic boundaries in Taiwan today although the standard Mandarin widely spoken in Taiwan is somewhat different from the Mandarin spoken in Mainland China in terms of accents, slangs and terminologies.

Therefore the freedom to use languages realistically in films as spoken by ordinary people in Taiwan, not just the dialects of Taiwanese or Hakka, but also Taiwan’s own version of Mandarin, has been one of the major contributions of Taiwan New Cinema. This is one of the reasons why the rise of Taiwan New Cinema is often seen as closely related to the cultural, social and political democratization of the island and is regarded as ‘an attempt by the young generation to render their vision of Taiwan on film’ (Chiu, 2005, p. 18).

Literary Cinema

Although Taiwan New Cinema was accepted as mainstream because of its early popularity, it is hard to deny its elitist agenda aiming at ‘reforming unsophisticated artistic sensibilities’ (Chang, 2005,  p. 14). Indeed, many filmmakers of Taiwan New Cinema shared a similar sense of cultural elitism and literary wenyi idealism with their predecessors of the 1960s. The major difference is that while the masters of healthy realism looked at Taiwan from a KMT-oriented Chinese perspective, the directors of Taiwan New Cinema strove to reconnect ‘with Taiwanese society by drawing inspiration from the realist tradition’ (Chiu, 2005,  pp. 17–8). Their preference to cast semi- or non-professional actors instead of movie stars is one of the common methods to capture their vision of realistic and contemporary Taiwan.    

The pursuit of observational realism marks the fundamental departure of Taiwan New Cinema from previous cinematic works produced on the island. Firstly, the filmmakers began to avoid theatrical conflicts, meaningful characterization and purposeful dialogue. As Chris Berry and Feii Lu (2005,  p. 6) have observed, Taiwan New Cinema ‘abandoned the simplistic black-and-white storytelling methods of the past in favour of a more subtle and complex mode that was close to real life experience.’ Hence in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind, for example, the audience is not pre-warned of the eventual separation of the two young lovers by any dramatic plot development. There is no conflict or confrontation following the break-up to stimulate the spectators’ emotions or curiosity either.

(a scene from Dust in the Wind)

Dust in the Wind is set in the 1960s between the city of Taipei and a poor mountainous mining village outside Taipei. The protagonists, Wan and Huen,[9] grew up together in the village. Wan gives up his education to work in Taipei in order to help support his family. Huen follows Wan to Taipei a couple of years later when she graduates from the senior high school. Wan and Huen help and care for each other during their stay in Taipei. But when Wan takes up his national military service far away from Taipei, he receives a letter from his younger brother one day saying that Huen is getting married to a postman. When the younger brother’s monotone voiceover tells the episode of the newly-weds’ home visit, the scene cuts from a medium shot of Wan first to a long take of the sky above the village and then to Wan’s family members sitting or standing still in silence on the steps leading to their family home. A cut goes to Huen’s mother, clearly in anger and shame, and Wan’s mother looking sorrowful. Both of them are motionless and quiet. Following Wan’s mother’s gaze, another cut takes us to Huen and her new husband standing outside Huen’s family home. Once again, neither of them says a word or moves much. The next scene cuts to a scenic long shot of the offshore island where Wan takes up his military service. The following cut shows us Wan lying on his bed crying his heart out. But this is the end of the love affair in the movie. What follows is a long take in which the camera pans across trees and sky. As far as the narrative goes, when Wan finally completes his military service and returns to the village, he finds his grandfather out in the field near their home. The only thing the old man talks about is the potatoes he grows and the chit-chat carries on for quite some time. The film ends here without further explaining what happens to Huen, Wan or anybody else.

The natural, realistic and minimum style of performance, weak plots and a slow pace of movement reflecting real life events require ‘an actively engaged audience rather than a passive one’, which is an experience unfamiliar to and hard to be fully appreciated by ‘an audience accustomed to commercial entertainment’ (Berry and Lu, 2005, p. 6). Subsequently, despite of the commercial and critical success at its early stage, the movement has lost the support of the domestic audience since the mid-1980s. As ticket sales diminish, producers and investors also turn their backs. Nevertheless Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers continue to seek opportunities to make low-budget cutting-edge work and many of them have earned international admiration in the art-house and film festival circuits.

The international recognition of Taiwan New Cinema may be due to the second common feature among these filmmakers in terms of how they observe and accentuate reality in their work. Many of these filmmakers are much more interested in cinema as an art form than their predecessors and often pay equally close attention to images, music and languages. Through the experiment of balancing and composing these filmic elements, they have uncovered hidden layers of meanings that are close to ‘real’. As Tsai Ming-liang once said, he rarely uses background music in his films because the natural environment where a person is situated in, as well as one’s internal world, are almost always much more noisy and powerful than any extra music or sound he can add.[10] In Vive l’amour, for example, there is no music and even very little dialogue. In a movie that portrays the loneliness and ‘postmodern alienation’ of urban dwellers (Martin, 2003, p. 175), the silence of the film heightens the noise of their surroundings – car horns, motorbike engines, shrieks of bicycles, etc. – and in turn exposes vividly the emptiness the characters feel inside. Moreover, the characters’ mental state of isolation reflects and is reflected in the images on the screen such as dismal concrete, neon streetscapes, an abandoned park, and so on.

Vive l’amour is set in urban Taipei of a post-economic miracle era. Mei-mei is an estate agent who tries to sell a luxury apartment. A-rong is a stranger she meets on the street and they go back to the empty apartment for a one-night stand. In the meantime there is another man, Xiao-kang, a salesman for funerary niches in a crematorium who steals the key to the apartment at the beginning of the film and secretly lives in the apartment. Neither Mei-mei nor A-rong is aware of Xiao-kang’s presence. The three characters exist in the same confined space separately. Xiao-kang is so depressed that he tries to cut his own wrist until he hears Mei-mei and A-rong enter the apartment and listens in silence to their lovemaking. When Mei-mei leaves the apartment and A-rong is still asleep, Xiao-kang emerges and kisses A-rong’s face. The final act before the film ends is one day after Mei-mei’s second one-night stand with A-rong, she walks through the ugly city. When Mei-mei eventually sits down, we see ‘an extremely long-take close-up of her face. She starts to cry, neither silently and elegantly nor in a distraught and melodramatic manner, but whining and sniffling. She stops, lights a cigarette, and then cries some more’ (Berry, 2005, p. 94). As Berry (2005, p. 91) has pointed out, Tsai intends to make films like real life and so the technique he employs ‘performs realism so rigorously and thoroughly that it teeters back and forth at its limits. Just as drag does not simply negate gender but takes on an ambivalent stance toward it, so Vive l’amour engages in the same realist style that it exposes’.

(a scene from Vive l’amour where Mei-mei can't stop crying)

Another shared attitude among Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers is that many of them prefer to keep the audience at an arm’s length. They try to (re)present an observation or an experience objectively and then leave it to the audience to make their interpretation. For example, there is no real indication of which decade Dust in the Wind is set. But there are some not-so-obvious clues. Firstly, Wan’s father once mentions Wan’s elementary school teacher who had strongly encouraged Wan to take the entrance examination for junior high school. As the system of six-year free and compulsory primary education was extended in 1968 in Taiwan to include three years of junior high school, the audience can figure out roughly when the film is set, but only if it is familiar with Taiwan history. Secondly, movie screens appear three times in the film. The first time is a blank outdoor movie screen set up in Wan and Huen’s village. The second time is in an almost empty cinema in Taipei where Wan and Huen watch an exciting martial arts film together. The third time is back in the village where Director Li Xing’s healthy realism classic, Beautiful Duckling (Yangya renjia, 1964), attracts a large crowd in front of the outdoor movie screen.

Haden Guest (2005, p. 28) interprets the appearance of these movie screens as Dust in the Wind [LN1] casting ‘a retrospective gaze. It looks back at the “new wave”, which was encouraged and sponsored by the CMPC and already drawing to a close by the end of the decade’. This may be true. But more importantly is that the films shown in Dust in the Wind do not only work as an indicator of chronology, but also offer a subtle and interesting contrast to Wan and Huen’s reality. Although Dust in the Wind is a film itself, in comparison with movies of healthy realism or martial arts genre that the Taiwanese audience consumed in a large quantity in the 1960s as Wan and Huen seemingly do in the film, it sends out such a strong sense of realism that it feels real.

(several scenes from The Terrorizer)

Another good example of how filmmakers keep observational distance in order to make their cultural commentary sharp is Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer. Like Vive l’amour, The Terrorizer is set in urban Taipei. While it satirizes middle-brow culture of the 1980s, it is also a chilling tale of art imitating life with disastrous consequences. Yang maintains throughout the film a calculated and precise structural form which prevents the complicated narratives from becoming melodramatic and the audience from sinking into sentimentality.

There are several parallels within the film. First, Yang casts a combination of middle-aged professional actors and young non-professional actors. Several of the professional actors come from the Little Theatre (xiao juchang), an art movement that flourished in the 1980s alongside Taiwan New Cinema. The second parallel lies between two characters: a middle-class wife who dreams of being a famous writer, and a rich boy who wants to be a professional photographer. The middle-class wife who is trapped in a loveless marriage is frustrated because the deadline for a major literary competition is approaching. She confines herself in her room to write a masterpiece, but the writing does not go well. Meanwhile the rich boy who loves photography accidentally comes across a teenage girl nicknamed ‘White Chick’ who is part of a gang. He becomes obsessed with her and leaves his own girlfriend to chase after ‘White Chick’. However ‘White Chick’ steals his cameras while he is asleep.

‘White Chick’ likes to make prank phone calls to amuse herself. One day she rings the novelist and makes the latter suspicious that her husband is having an affair. The misunderstanding prompts the novelist to leave her husband and move in with an old flame who offers her an office job. Moreover, she uses the episode of an anonymous caller in her plot and finally wins the top prize of the competition. In her novel the husband kills his wife and then commits suicide. When the rich boy reads the story in the newspapers, he understands what ‘White Chick’ did. Terrified of what may happen, the boy contacts the husband who then feels he may be able to save his marriage. Unfortunately his wife does not think truth matters and asks for divorce.

The contrast between the two would-be artists is that the rich boy wakes up from his fascination both with ‘White Chick’ and with his artistic pursuit, but the wife’s high-culture aspirations persist. She leaves her husband in pursuit of a literary dream. When she wins the competition, she is also prepared to leave her lover should he dare to limit her ambition. While Yang critiques the wife who values the pseudo-artistic activities more than the two men who love her, one begins to wonder if Yang is also critiquing the literary tendency of the Little Theatre and Taiwan New Cinema, both of which were then accused by many of not caring what the audience wants.

The third parallel is between fiction and nonfiction, dream and reality. The wife’s novels are always autobiographical, but she constantly criticizes her husband for misunderstanding her by being unable to differentiate fiction from nonfiction. The long dream sequence toward the end of the film blurs the boundary between her novel and reality: when the husband realizes that his marriage is over, he steals a gun from his friend who is a policeman. He shoots his boss who overlooks him for a promotion. Afterwards he goes to her flat to kill her lover, and then points the gun at her. When a gun shot is fired, we see the wife is unhurt and the husband leaves the flat. He wanders in the street and meets ‘White Chick’. He takes her to a hotel room while a member of the girl’s gang is waiting to burst into the room to rob him. Policemen arrive nearby at this point and the husband goes into the bathroom and turns on the tap. When the husband’s police friend kicks the door open, the bang coincides with a gun shot. While we see blood on the wall, a cut goes to the police friend who wakes up all of a sudden and another cut shows the wife wakes up from her nightmare at the same time. The police friend walks to his bathroom and discovers that the husband has shot himself. Next we see the wife feel sick and turn her head to vomit. It is hard to tell if she feels sick about her own behaviour towards her husband or if she is finally pregnant.

In the film, one of the literary critics comments on the wife’s award-winning novel as being ‘dramatic yet very close to real life’. This is exactly how The Terrorizer should be described too. As Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang (2005, p. 25) has concluded, ‘The modernistic device of self-reflexivity in The Terrorizer enables the film to maintain a critical distance from the objects it represents’. Edward Yang has demonstrated another dimension of observational realism that gives Taiwan New Cinema further depth.

Conclusion

From the discussion above we can see why Taiwan New Cinema is an important movement. It is not only significant to the development of Taiwan cinema, but also an invaluable contribution to world cinema in terms of techniques, themes and how it articulates realism. While Taiwan New Cinema is part of the cultural forces that pushed forward democratization in Taiwan, the process and the eventual lifting of the martial law in 1987 has enabled filmmakers to use cinema to reflect and rewrite Taiwan history from an individual’s perspective.

Nevertheless, the identity of Taiwan is still contested. Democratization has allowed previously taboo subjects to be discussed openly and freely on the island, but the people on Taiwan have not yet established a consensus about their past or future. In addition to the various cinematic elements analysed above which may explain the decline[LN2]  of New Cinema in Taiwan in terms of its small number of production[11] and commercial non-viability (Berry and Lu, 2005, p.6), perhaps another reason is non-cinematic. There is no doubt that the images, subjects, languages of dialogue and the kind of observational realism in Taiwan New Cinema are all closely intertwined with Taiwan’s cultural, social and political background. Yet until the people on Taiwan have finally come to terms with their local, regional, national and international realities, the representation of individual versions of reality on screen may be always difficult to be embraced by all.