A modernist auteur, Edward Yang: the first decade of his film career (1982-1991)

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Content A MODERNIST AUTEUR, EDWARD YANG: THE FIRST DECADE OF HIS
FILM CAREER (1982-1991)
by
Chu-Chun Lee
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Critical Studies)
May 1995
Copyright 1995 Chu-Chun Lee
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UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA S0OO7
This thesis, written by
Chu-Chun Lee
under the direction o f h ..^T .....T hesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of the
requirements fo r the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
/
Dtan
D ate ^ L , 2, 1:
1995
T H ESIS C O M M IT T E E
Chair'
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Dedication
The author would like to dedicate this thesis to her
parents and husband for their unconditional support and
endless love.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr. David James, Dr. Rick
Jewell, and Dr. Stanley Rosen, for their guidance,
encouragement, and assistance.
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i v
Table of Contents
Dedication ............................................ii
Acknowledgements ..................................... iii
Abstract ..................................................v
Introduction ..........................................1
Chapter
1. Edward Yang and the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement ... 5
2. Expectation ......................................28
3. Definition and Attributes of Modernism ............. 39
4. That Day, on the Beach .......................... 52
5. Taipei Story ...................................... 71
6. Terrorizer 89
7. A Brighter Summer Day..... .........................107
8. Conclusion 126
Afterword 138
Bibliography 141
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V
Abstract
This thesis begins with an introduction of Edward Yang
and his relationship to the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement.
Yang's first thirty-minute film, Expectation (1982),
embodies a general modernist spirit and foreshadows Yang's
more complete development of modernist characteristics in
his four subsequent full-length feature films. By applying
general concepts of modernism as outlined by Malcolm
Bradbury and James McFarlane and theories of modernist film
proposed by Robert Phillip Kolker, William Charles Siska,
and Peter Wollen, along with tenets of semiotics, cultural
studies, structuralism, and authorship, this thesis analyzes
That Day, on the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985),
Terrorizer (1986), and A Brighter Summer Day (1991) through
the analysis of theme, narration, manipulation of images,
sound effects, lighting, and composition. Since these films
illustrate recurrent modernist attributes, this thesis
confirms Yang's position as a modernist auteur in the first
decade of his film career (1982-1991).
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1
Introduction
In 1982, starting with In Our Time, a low-budget
portmanteau film made by the government-owned Central Motion
Picture Corporation and directed by four filmmakers,
including Edward Yang, the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement was
launched and was espoused by many later New Cinema films
sharing the same anti-traditional and artistic nature as In
Our Time (Kuang In Ti Ku Shih). New Cinema films no longer
indulged in political agendas, established genres, star
vehicles or the classic Hollywood style, and instead relied
on modest budgets to experiment with various alternative
approaches to both content and form never seen in Taiwanese
films. In doing so, they inaugurated a new era in Taiwanese
cinema.
Among the New Directors, Yang is distinct. While most
New Directors created a mise-en-scene in a realist style,
employed anti-traditional but still conservative methods of
narration, expressed nostalgia toward the past agricultural
society, criticized the negative effects of urban
modernization, and mainly focused on the lower social class
people struggling for a decent life, Yang transformed his
formal style from an earlier realist approach to a later
more manipulative one. He applied more radical narrative
strategies, fully reorganizing the relationship between time
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2
and space; he paid particular attention to the Taipei
bourgeoisie's alienation and frustration when they were
unable to build healthy relationships, when they failed to
find personal fulfillment, and when they could not adapt to
changing political circumstances. Actually, Yang's repeated
strategies and recurrent themes emphasize his affinity with
modernism, which set him apart from most New Directors.
However, Yang's unique modernist film style, generally
speaking, did not earn local popularity, though it did win
critical success. Most Taiwanese film scholars agree that
Yang has established his reputation in Taiwanese film
history, and some foreign audiences and foreign film critics
have became interested in and familiar with Yang due to his
continuous, extraordinary achievements in international film
festivals in recent years. Unfortunately, in surveying film
books and journals published in both Chinese and English, it
is a shame that most articles about Yang and Yang's films
are limited to general reviews of individual films or
production gossip for film fans. There is no book
specifically targeting Yang's modernist attributes and
providing profound and extensive study of them from an
academic point-of-view. The purpose of this thesis is to
close this gap and to contribute a comprehensive examination
of Yang's films from a modernist perspective.
This thesis begins with an introduction to Yang's
background and the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement. In
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addition, this chapter also contains a brief introduction to
Taiwanese film history before the New Cinema Movement by
presenting a survey of traditional Taiwanese films to
explain the differences between them and the New Cinema.
Most importantly, the chapter surveys the history of the New
Cinema Movement and Yang's relationship to it.
The second chapter is a study of Yang's first thirty-
minute film, Expectation (Chih Wang) , part of In Our Time.
Expectation embodies the anti-traditional spirit of the New
Cinema Movement and experiments with manipulation of images
and sound. Although this anti-traditional spirit and
manipulation are also major features in modernist films,
Yang had not fully developed the detailed modernist
attributes in Expectation, which cannot be seen as a mature
modernist film. However, it foreshadows Yang's modernist
style and themes occurring in his later films.
In order to examine Yang's four subsequent full-length
feature films, the third chapter examines the definition and
attributes of Modernism, referring to Malcolm Bradbury and
James McFarlane's general concepts of Modernism in their
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. and
concluding with theories of modernist film from Robert
Phillip Kolker's The Altering Eye: Contemporary
International Cinema. William Charles Siska's Modernism in
the Narrative Cinema: The Art Film as a Genre, and Peter
Wollen's "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est." This
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4
chapter aims to clarify these concepts of modernist film and
to build a concrete theoretical framework which will be
applied in the examination of Yang's four full-length
feature films.
After establishing the theoretical framework in the
third chapter, this thesis applies modernist theory and
tenets of structuralism, semeiotics, cultural studies, and
authorship to analyze That Day, on the Beach (Hai Tan Ti I
Tien, 1983) , Taipei Story (Ching Mei Chu Ma, 1985) ,
Terrorizer {Rung Pu Fen Tzu, 1986) , and A Brighter Summer
Day (Ku Lin Chieh Chao Nian Sha Jen Shih Chien, 1991) ,
individually in chapters four through seven respectively.
In order to trace Yang's personal signature in his films and
demonstrate that Yang is a modernist auteur, each film will
undergo an in-depth content and formal analysis, including
consideration of theme, narration, manipulation of images,
sound effects, lighting, and composition. By carefully
examining Yang's films, this thesis concludes in chapter
eight, that Yang can be categorized as a modernist auteur in
the first decade (1982-1991) of his film practice.1
x As far as the system of spelling Chinese names or
anything referring to the Chinese language, this thesis
consistently uses the Thomas Wade system of Romanization,
except for some characters' names appearing in films which
are not spelled in the system, but are faithfully copied
from the English subtitles of the films.
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5
Chapter 1
Edward Yang and the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement
1.1 An Introduction to Edward Yang1
Edward Yang (Yang Te-Chang) was born in Shanghai in
1947 with his domicile in Mei County of Guangtung Province;
and two years later left for Taipei, Taiwan, with his
parents, who were government employees of the Kuomintang
Party (the KMT) when the Communist Party occupied China and
Chiang Kaishek led the KMT to retreat to Taiwan. As a
result of this historical background, Yang is part of the
so-called second generation of "the Other Provinces" in
Taiwan.2
When he was a child, Yang often went to the movies with
his father, and was impressed by Hollywood's western films.
As an adolescent, Yang was also interested in drawing comic
2The following introduction of Yang's early film
experience and academic background refers to Cinedossier:
Chinese Films. Number 3: Edward Yang, edited by the Taipei
Golden Horse International Film Festival Executive Committee
and published in Taipei by the China Times Publishing
Company in 1991.
2People of "the Other Provinces" contrast to those who
emigrated from mainland China to Taiwan several generations
or several hundred years earlier. The general
identification of the term, "the Other Provinces," refers to
the people whose ancestral home was in China but sought
refuge from the spread of Communism and emigrated to Taiwan
around 1949.
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books. Yang had mentioned several times in different
interviews that comics have been the most important art
forms influencing his vision of film,3 because drawing
comics is like drawing storyboards. Both are a process of
translating an abstract idea into a visual form. In
addition to comics, during high school, classical music and
architecture were also Yang's favorites. The rhythm and the
structure of classical music inspired Yang's script-writing.
Ieoh-Ming Pei's international fame encouraged Yang's
interest in becoming an architect. However, after failing
the competitive national entrance examination, Yang did not
qualify for a position in the Architecture Department, and
instead, became a student of the Electrical Engineering
Department in the National Chiao Tong University.
While he was at the National Chiao Tong University,
Yang's talent for drawing comics was further encouraged by
his Chinese literature teacher. This teacher inspired his
students by citing Chinese ancestral philosopher Guan's
conception that an extraordinary person creates, but an
ordinary person only holds to existing customs and is
reluctant to accept changes. Following this philosophy,
3The Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival
Executive Committee, Cinedossier: Chinese films Number 3.
Edward Yang (Taipei: The China Times Publishers, 1991)
Chia-In Liu, "My Independence, My Epoch," People May 1994:
98-111.
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7
Yang has never stopped pursuing original ideas and sees
artistic creation as his life-long career.
Yang left Taiwan for the United States after he
graduated from the University. He studied film production
at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of
Southern California after he got a master's degree in
Computer Science in Florida. He did not complete his degree
at U.S.C. because he was not quite satisfied with the
Hollywood model of filmmaking taught there. However, during
his one year at U.S.C., Yang learned how to write a good
script and was inspired by studying many film masters. Yang
especially admired German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, because
Herzog proved that a great film can be initiated by one
person and produced with a limited budget.
Yang had been living in the United States for eleven
years, and had been a computer engineer for several years
before he was asked by his friend, Yu Wei-Yan, to write the
script for The Win ter in 1905 and to act in the film, which
was shooting in Japan. In 1981, the same year of his
involvement in The Winter in 1905, Yang directed Duckweed,
which was included in a Taiwanese television series entitled
Eleven Women's Stories. At the age of thirty-three, Yang's
experiences in script writing, acting, and television
directing laid a solid foundation for him to make his first
film, Expectation, the following year.
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8
Yang's thirty-minute Expectation is one of four
episodes, each by a different director, that comprise the
feature film, In Our Time (1982) , produced by the Central
Motion Picture Corporation. With Expectation, Yang began
his film career and, since In Our Time is considered the
first example of Taiwanese New Cinema, he became one of the
pioneers and one of the most important figures of Taiwan's
New Cinema Movement.
In 1983, Yang made his first full-length feature film,
That Day, on the Beach, in which he used a more experimental
approach. Most methods Yang used in the film had never been
seen in Taiwanese traditional films, so many critics agree
that the film can be seen as one of the most significant
films of that year, and even in Taiwanese film history up to
that point.
In 1985, Yang made his third film, Taipei Story. The
film shares the same theme as That Day, on the Beach--a
careful analysis of the alienation of the middle class in
Taipei. Although Taipei Story is not as experimental as
That Day, on the Beach in terms of narration, it does
portray the Taipei people's struggle between tradition and
the new values resulting from the rapid transformation of an
agricultural into an industrialized society.
Yang established his international reputation after
winning an award in the Lucarno Film Festival for his fourth
film, Terrorizer, in 1986. This film employs strong
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9
modernist techniques and once again represents the
bourgeoisie's frustration and anxiety in Taipei. The
alienation, loneliness, and emptiness of the people in
Taipei are deliberately examined in Terrorizer, as they had
been in Yang's previous films.
After waiting for several years, Yang made his fifth
film, A Brighter Summer Day, in 1991. A Brighter Summer Day
accurately represents the anxious social atmosphere of the
1960's, resulting from both political and economic
instability and foreign imperialist cultural invasion.
While many major New Directors gave up film production to
teach film or changed professions because of a lack of
financial support when the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement
gradually declined after 1986, Yang still continues to make
feature films and is popular in international film
festivals.
1.2 Taiwanese Film History Before the New Cinema Movement
Before addressing the relationship between Yang and the
Taiwanese New Cinema Movement, the seventy-year history of
Taiwanese films before the New Cinema Movement in the 1980's
will be condensed into several pages. This brief
introduction provides the context by which the differences
between traditional Taiwanese cinema and the New Cinema can
be measured.
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1 0
The date of the first film exhibited in Taiwan is
problematic. It once was believed to be 1901,4 until Li
Tao-Ming indicated that 1904-05 may be a more precise date.5
At the very least, the first film in Taiwan must have been
shown during the period of Japanese occupation (1895-1945),
because it is generally agreed that the very first film
exhibition occurred in Paris in 1895. During this fifty-
year period, the Taiwanese film industry was restricted by
Japan's control and had to rely on Japan's equipment and
financial support; having no effective systematic film
organization or professional filmmakers,6 Taiwanese cinema
did not practically develop any further. For its source of
films during that time, the industry mainly counted on
foreign importation.
4Shu-Shang Lu, A History of Cinema and Drama in Taiwan
(Taipei: The Oriental Cultural Service, 1961) There are
also many sources that accept that the first film shown in
Taiwan was in 1901, such as Fei-Pao Chen, ed. A Chronicle of
Taiwanese Cinema (Beijing: Chinese Film Publications, 1988).
sTao-Ming Li, "How Did Films Come to Taiwan?" Film
Appreciation Monthly September-October 1993: 107-21. Tao-
Ming Li and some scholars observe that the Japanese book,
The Creation and Establishment of Asian Pictures, written by
Ichikawa Sai, affirms that 1904-05 is accurate. However,
Taiwanese scholars still cannot find another reliable source
to support or deny its claims.
6Shu-Shang Li, A History of Cinema and Drama in Taiwan
(Taipei: The Oriental Cultural Service, 1961) 6.
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11
In the 50's and the 60's under Chiang Kaishek's regime,
Taiwanese film productions were basically managed by the
government,7 and mainly served as "the strongest political
weapon" of the age.8 In 1963, the Central Motion Picture
Corporation employed a "Healthy-Realistic" principle to
produce films which intentionally presented only the
positive aspects of Taiwanese society, particularly by
glorifying human virtue.9 The films produced under this
principle were effective propaganda that highly praised the
KMT's administrative achievements in Taiwan, and magnified
consciousness of patriotism and encouraged hostility toward
7The three government-owned film production companies
in Taiwan were the Central Motion Picture Corporation
(managed by the KMT, which mainly produced anti-communism
propaganda), The Taiwan Film Company (managed by the
provincial government, which basically made social
educational newsreels), and the China Movie Studio (managed
by the Ministry of National Defense, which primarily
produced ministry educational newsreels).
“During this period, there were some popular Tiyupien
(Taiwanese films spoken in the Fujien dialect). Limited by
meager research sources and its narrow scope, this theses
will not elaborate the importance of Tiyupien.
9Tien-To Li and Pei-Chih Chen, "The Re-exploration of
Taiwanese New Cinema in the 80 's from the Sociological
Aspects," Film Appreciation Monthly July 1990: 71.
According to a veteran film critic, Bang-San Chang, the
"Healthy-Realistic" principle is similar to post-war Italian
neo-realism. The difference between these movements is that
Italian neo-realism examined the negative aspects of Italian
society, while the Healthy-Realistic aesthetic presented
only positive social attributes.
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12
the Communists because of the political struggle between the
KMT and the Chinese Communist Party. In these two decades,
most Taiwanese films served as the KMT's political tools to
highlight the KMT's merits and the Chinese Communist Party's
disgrace.
Replacing the so-called "Healthy-Realistic" model of
the 50's and the 60's, Chiung Yao's romantic melodrama,1 0
martial arts films, and social-realist films were the
mainstream in the 70's.11 The former two escapist genres
whitewashed social problems and satisfied audiences by
offering a fantastic and heroic dreamland. Chiung Yao's
stories are often based on an erotic triangle or an abnormal
10Chiung Yao was one of the most popular writers in the
70's. Her romance novels had been the hottest sources for
melodramatic films in the 70's, and dominated the entire
Taiwanese film market at that time. They almost became a
unique sub-genre, similar to Italian "white telephone
films," and so were named "three rooms" films because their
stories often take place only in living rooms, dinner rooms,
and bedrooms. Although this kind of escapist film lost its
power in the 80's, some of Chiung Yao's novels were still
adapted as soap operas and once again had amazing success on
television at the end of the 80's and the beginning of the
90' s.
“According to Film Year Book. 1979: 7, Chiung Yao's
romance melodramas and Martial arts films numbered more than
seventy percent of the total films produced (292) in 1978 in
Taiwan. This rate of production made Taiwan the third
biggest national film market after India and Japan in that
year. See Tien-To Li, "The Interactive Development of
Taiwanese and Chinese Films in the Changing Political and
Economic Climate," Contemporary April 1991: 25.
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13
love. Her characters must face many challenges before
winning their true loves at the end. Martial arts films,
also escapist, often have a clear-cut line between good and
evil, and emphasize animosity and revenge. Unfortunately,
the unrealistic and over-simplified characteristics of
romance melodramas and martial arts films did not please
audiences in the next decade. This may have been caused by
the quick changes in Taiwanese society, as it entered an era
of industrialization and modernization. Audiences may have
required more stimulating visual and audio effects, and may
have realized that real life is much more complex than the
prevailing representations on the big screen. As a result,
romance melodramas and martial arts films gradually lost the
ticket buyer's attention. Social-realist films emerged at
the end of the 70's, in contrast to the "Healthy-Realist"
films in the previous decade, focusing instead on the
display of violence and sex. The over-riding inclination of
the genre was to emphasize crime and to satisfy the
audiences' desire for a kinesthetic experience. Strongly
restricted by censorship and criticized by most moralistic
viewers, this genre gradually lost its power. These films,
emphasizing escapism, heroism and a gratuitous display of
violence and sex in the 70's, were replaced by the
revolutionary New Cinema in the 80's.
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14
1.3 Edward Yang and the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement
In the 80 's, the Taiwanese film business fell into
decline.12 First, moviegoers were bored by the "three-room"
romance, formulaic martial arts films, and sensual social-
realist films, and finally lost their confidence in local
films completely. The slogan "college students never, ever
see local movies" pervaded college campuses. College
students even believed that it was a disgrace to see local
movies. Another direct cause of the failure of the
Taiwanese film business was the invasion by televisions and
videos.13 The popularity of VCRs, the convenience of the
chains of video rental stores, and the variety of video
tapes primarily coming from Japan and America, kept
audiences at home. In addition, in the beginning of the
80's, Taiwanese audiences were more attracted by Hong Kong
films, which were well-produced for commercial purposes and
were deliberately promoted after the beginning of Hong
Kong's New Wave in 1979.14 In 1981 and 1982, Hong Kong
12 The number of moviegoers was 86,000,000 in 1961. In
1981, the number increased to 250,000,000. In 1982, the
number fell to 190,000,000. See Li "Re-exploration" 76.
13 The rate of television ownership in Taiwan in 1983
was 99%, and the rate of families owning VCRs was 78%,
higher than that in America (64%). See Li "Interactive" 25.
“Beginning in 1979, there were many young filmmakers
making their first films in Hong Kong. Most were of the
first postwar generation and had a strong academic film
background overseas as well as experience in making
television programs. These filmmakers pay more attention to
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15
films were not only celebrated in the Taipei Golden Horse
Film Festival, but also won big success at the box-office in
Taiwan.15 One of the most potent film companies in Hong
Kong, The New Cinema City Film Corporation (Hsin I Cheng) ,
established a branch in Taiwan in 1982.16 All of these
factors enhanced the reputation of Hong Kong films and
strengthened Taiwanese audiences' loyalty to them. From
that moment on, the sluggish Taiwanese movie business
reached its lowest point as Hong Kong films' popularity rose
speedily and made significant inroads into Taiwan's film
market, which was unable to resist Hong Kong's invasion.
The government, especially the Government Information
Office (GIO) directed by Dr. James Song, aggressively
promoted many movements to save the Taiwanese film business
the political (the change due in 1997) , social (the high
rate of crime), and economic (over materialization) problems
in Hong Kong nowadays, and move away from the traditional
methods of filmmaking in terms of both ideology and style.
Because of the commercial orientation of Hong Kong cinema,
most of the new generation filmmakers still make commercial
films. They use big budgets (compared to Taiwan) and big
casts to produce bitter political (social, economic)
allegories made palatable by the sweet coating of comedy.
Taiwanese audiences were stunned by the spectacle and the
hilarious wit of these films. The most important filmmakers
of the Hong Kong New Wave include Tsui Hark, Ann Hui,
Patrick Tan, and Allen Fong.
15Tsui Hark's All the Wrong Clues (Yeh Lai Shang, 1981)
was one of these examples.
16Hong-Yuan Chen, "The Invasion of Hong Kong's Films in
Taiwan," Independent Morning News 26 Dec. 1989.
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16
from this critical crisis. A large number of Taiwanese film
festivals took place in many universities all around Taiwan.
Many conferences hosted by film scholars and critics
discussed films with college students to encourage them to
see local films. The GIO changed the political nature of
the Golden Horse Award by inviting film scholars as judges,
but not the governors, and by encouraging good films, but
not political propaganda. Furthermore, the GIO sponsored
international film festivals in Taipei to animate a variety
of film productions. At the same time, local filmmakers
were encouraged to participate in foreign film festivals to
promote the quality of Taiwanese films. In addition, under
the spirit of the slogan, "professionalization,
aestheticization, and internationalization,"17 the
government revived the Law of Motion Pictures (which
governed production, distribution, and exhibition) and
revealed its determination to support the Taiwanese film
industry to become a truly cultural practice rather than be
reduced simply to a business operation.
In 1982, the government-owned film company, the Central
Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), proceeded with Executive
Manager of Planning Department Hsiao Yeh's plan to give new
directors a chance to rescue the sick film industry. The
CMPC1 s strategy was to operate on a low budget and imitate
17Peggy Chiao, ed., Taiwanese New Cinema (Taipei: China
Times Press, 1988) 23.
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17
the collective model of the Hong Kong New Wave to reduce the
risk of failure at the box-office. Four directors, Tao Te-
Cheng, Edward Yang, Ke I-Cheng, and Chang I, were hired to
make In Our Time (Kuang In Ti Ku Shih), a film comprised of
four short independent episodes about the growing experience
of a child, a teen, a youth and an adult. In Our Time is
generally agreed upon as the first film of the Taiwanese New
Cinema and has become a landmark in Taiwanese film history.
The four directors of In Our Time, with a thirty-
something average age and academic backgrounds in film or
television, distinguish the film from pan-political
propaganda, unrealistic romantic melodrama, traditional
martial arts film, and Hong Kong commercial-oriented cinema.
First, the film did not promote any political issue to serve
the KMT. Second, the story is not based on a fantasy, but
honestly examines life experiences and reflects Taiwanese
social changes. Third, the film was promoted as "the first
'art film1 that has ever been seen over the past twenty
years in Taiwan." This slogan has two meanings. First, the
CMPC intended to use "art film" to win back the audience
attracted to Hong Kong films. Second, the four directors
divorced themselves from traditional genres, star vehicles
and the classic Hollywood style, and instead tried their
best to experiment with forms and content never seen in the
past twenty years.
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18
Learning a lesson from the deliberate promotion of Hong
Kong films, the CMPC decided to use new methods to promote
In Our Time. As In Our Time was promoted as an art film,
the CMPC invited intellectual circles to the premiers and
held several press conferences in order to use the power of
critics and media to lure audiences into seeing In Our Time.
Suddenly, the enthusiasm for discussing In Our Time among
cultural circles and in the mass media manifested a
prosperous atmosphere never before seen in Taiwanese film
criticism. Most critics praised In Our Time as initiating a
new era in Taiwan's film industry. The overwhelming
applause attracted audiences to the theater, making In Our
Time a triumph at the box-office. As a result, other
filmmakers were encouraged to continue making films of the
same nature, and Taiwan's New Cinema Movement began.
Following in the steps of In Our Time, Growing Up
(Hsiao Pi Ti Ku Shih, by Chen Kun-Hou, 1983) and another
portmanteau film, Sandwich Man (Erh Tzu Ti Ta Wan Ou, by Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, Tseng Chuang-Hsiang, and Wan Jen, 1983),
earned both financial and critical success in their
characterizations of life experience and Taiwanese social
and economic changes. Film investors were tempted by the
profits of these films and were no longer hesitant to
support new directors. During 1983 and 1984, the four
directors of In Our Time and the three directors of Sandwich
Man made feature films individually. Some of them even had
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1 9
more than one film project. The important films of the New
Cinema Movement were Edward Yang's That Day, on the Beach,
Ke I-Cheng's I Love Mary (Wo Ai Ma Li), Chang I's Jade Love
(Yu Ching Sao), Tao Te-Cheng's Bicycle and I (Tan Che Yu
Wo), Wan Jen's Rapeseed Girl (Yu Ma Tsai Tzu), Tseng Chuang-
Hsiang's The Woman with Wrath (Sha Fu), and Hou Hsiao-
Hsien's The Boys from Fenggui (Feng Kuei Lai Ti Jen) and A
Summer at Old Grandpa's (Tung Tung Ti Chia Chi). Although
most of these New Cinema films received most critics'
praise, and began to play at various international film
festivals, unfortunately most of them did not get wide
audience support. The bad box-office frightened the film
investors and made them lose their willingness to invest
money in the New Cinema.
In 1985, the number of New Cinema films being produced
dropped significantly. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A Time to Live and
A Time to Die (Tong Nian Wang Shih), Wan Jen's Super Citizen
(Chao Chi Shih Min), and Yang's Taipei Story were three
important New Cinema films of that year. They were not
appreciated by audiences, or by some film critics, who began
to divide in opposite poles. Some of them supported the New
Cinema and respected its artistic and experimental nature,
while others emphasized entertainment and commercial values.
The two conflicting natures of film, as art and as
entertainment, began to be discussed again. Profit losses
seemed to be an inevitable result, because at the beginning
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20
of the Movement, most of the promotion strategies targeted
intellectual audiences rather than the general population.
Although the intellectual circles could influence the
public, their power was still limited. Common moviegoers
seeking entertainment might be curious about the New Cinema
films and went to see them once or twice. When they felt
the New Cinema became too difficult to understand, they did
not return. Without the film investors' financial support,
the New Cinema Movement seemed to be cursed, and almost
died.
In 1986, only Yang's Terrorizer and very few New Cinema
films still attracted mass media and critical attention.
Most intellectual circles and film critics announced that
the New Cinema Movement was finished. At the end of 1986
most pioneers of the New Cinema Movement and intellectuals
signed "The Taiwanese Film Declaration," proclaiming that
they supported the revival of "the other films," which have
a creative ambition, an artistic orientation and a cultural
consciousness.10
Until the so-called Post New Cinema (or the second wave
of the New Cinema begun in the early 90 ’s), few New Cinema
films were produced. Among the New Directors, Yang and Hou
were two of the few still making feature films. Yang's A
10Hsiao Yeh, "The Declaration of Taiwanese Film in
1987," The Story of a White Duck (Taipei: The China Times
Publisher, 1988) 49.
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21
Brighter Summer Day (1991), as well as Hou's films,19 were
not as popular in the local market as they were in various
international film festivals.
The history of the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement was
short (1982-1986) . The crisis of the Taiwanese film
business in the early 80's resulting from the weakness of
the industry itself, the invasion of Hong Kong films, and
the popularity of VCRs, forced the government to promote
several activities to deal with the critical situation, such
as holding local and international film festivals and
enlarging the scale of the Golden Horse Awards. Another of
the most important strategies of the government was to give
new directors a chance. Starting with In Our Time, the New
Directors, including Yang, used anti-traditional formal and
ideological approaches to make New Cinema films more
sophisticated and artistic. Unfortunately, the aesthetic
nature of the New Cinema was not appreciated by most common
moviegoers, although the intellectuals had proudly supported
it. The difficult financial situation choked the New Cinema
Movement. Yang, however, continued to make films and gained
his international reputation.
19After the New Cinema Movement, Hou made Daughter of
the Nile (Ni Lo He Nu Erh, 1987), The City of Sadness(Pei
Ching Cheng Shih, 1989) and The Puppet Master (Hsi Mong Jen
Sheng, 1993).
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22
As noted before, the nature of the New Cinema is to
disrupt tradition and employ alternative aesthetic
techniques. What are the characteristics of Taiwan's New
Cinema? What exactly made common moviegoers turn their
backs?
Almost all of the directors of New Cinema have a strong
academic film background.20 This is very different from the
traditional apprentice system in the conventional Taiwanese
film industry. With strong academic training, the New
Directors used alternative ways to express their ideas, and
explored the various possibilities of filmmaking, instead of
following their predecessors, Pai Ching-Jui, King Hu, and Li
Hsing, who presented their propaganda, martial arts films or
melodramas by applying conventional film languages used in
classical Hollywood films, such as sentimentalism, heroism,
psychological continuity, problem solving, transparent
style, and so on. The New Directors violated the
established film language and managed to develop new forms
(realist and formalist) and new subject matter (rural and
urban).
20Using the eight major New Directors as examples (Chen
Kun-Hou, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, Wan Jen, Edward Yang, Chang I,
Tseng Chuang-Hsiang , Ke I-Cheng, Tao Te-Cheng), there are
six directors who have master's degrees in film from the
U.S., except Chen Kun-Hou, an experienced cinematographer,
and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, who graduated from film school in
Taiwan.
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23
A realist mise-en-scene is very often evident in the
New Cinema. For example, location shooting, non
professional actors, long shots, and deep focus are
characteristic tendencies cf the New Cinema. Location
shooting replaced traditional shooting on a sound stage,
which not only brings a more realistic milieu to the films,
but is also cost-effective for the low-budget New Cinema.
The previous prevalence of sentimentalism and exaggerated
gestures in traditional films disappeared. The New
Directors preferred to use non- or semi-professional actors
rather than established stars in order to achieve an
unexaggerated style of performance. At the same time,
having actors speak in appropriate dialects21 and dub for
themselves made the New Cinema sound more realistic.22 In
addition, the close-up was also replaced by deep focus, long
shots and long takes to give the audience a more objective
21The use of Taiwanese native languages, including the
Fuj ien dialect and Haiku, is another new touch in the New
Cinema. In the early years after the KMT retreated to
Taiwan, in order to implement the official language,
Mandarin, all dialects were prohibited. Mandarin was the
only language used in movies and television. Later, the
prohibition of dialects was gradually loosened, but the
custom of speaking only Mandarin in films still existed
until the New Cinema adopted a variety of dialects.
22In traditional Taiwanese films, actors were usually
dubbed over by professionals in postproduction. This
resulted from the fact that the actors' voices did not sound
professional enough, and that they could not speak adequate
Mandarin, the only language allowed in traditional Taiwanese
films in the early years after the KMT's retreat to Taiwan.
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24
and distanced perspective. Yang's earlier films, like
Expectation and That Day, on the Beach, were influenced by
the realist tendency of the New Cinema Movement, whose mise-
en-scene was based on location shooting, long shots, long
takes, and anti-sentimental performance.
Some formalist styles are also seen in the New Cinema.
The New Directors place emphasis on expressing their
ideologies and subordinating stories to themes. With little
emphasis on story, and preference for discontinuity editing
and non-linear narration, the New Directors break up the
chain of causality and manipulate the continuity of time and
space. Open endings and ellipses stimulate the audience's
imagination and ask them to participate in creating
different solutions to the problems or questions which the
filmmakers raise. Also, in the New Cinema, dialogue is
consciously reduced because themes are conveyed visually by
manipulation of images. Another crucial element in the New
Cinema is that sound must no longer correspond to image, but
can communicate different meanings. Although these elements
are used by many New Directors, Yang apparently has the
greatest affinity for manipulating these formal elements.
Some examples are the "flashback within a flashback" in That
Day, on the Beach, the non-linear narration in Terrorizer,
the open ending of both films, and the manipulation of
images and off-screen sound in Yang's other films.
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2 5
After reviewing the new ways that the New Cinema has
applied film language, it is not surprising why audiences,
who had been accustomed to being fed an easily understood
story, suddenly found the New Cinema almost impossible to
enjoy as a new film form.
The subject matter of the New Cinema no longer
concerned superficial love stories, or a worship of
heroism, but rather the experience of Taiwan's social and
economic changes after WWII. Since the New Directors were
in their thirties, they were the first generation after WWII
to witness Taiwan's changes. They chose their subject
matter from their life experiences, and accurately examined
how the external (social, political, and economic) changes
affected the Taiwanese people's internal values.
First, the New Cinema is nostalgic toward Taiwan's past
agricultural society. The grass-roots lifestyle in the
island's villages and small towns are often portrayed. In
the nostalgic films, the bucolic life and pastoral scenery
are often presented positively as peaceful and frugal. The
virtues that the traditional agricultural society claimed in
order to survive the hard life, such as collaboration and
generosity, are particularly praised. At the same time, the
struggle between the old values embraced by agriculture and
the new values brought by industrialization, such as
speculation and self-profit, are also foregrounded. Some of
the nostalgic films have original scripts, but most are
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26
adapted from literary works which expose the roots of
traditional folklore, deep in the soil of rural Taiwan.
The second category of subject matter examines the
effects of modernization on Taiwan. These kinds of films
are usually set in an urban environment. By means of such
icons as buildings, streets, and billboards, the city is
usually recognized as Taipei, a city of sin, in contrast to
the peaceful countryside in the nostalgic films.
Prostitutes, criminals, and vagrants appear in most of the
urban films. Problems such as prostitution, unemployment,
and single parenthood are reflected in the urban films by
the New Directors without showing violence and sex.2 3
Generally speaking, the New Cinema pays more attention to
the proletariat, and the New Directors have more sympathy
for the lower class people who have been socially ignored
and economically exploited by the bourgeoisie after the
industrialization of Taiwan. This sympathy reveals the
humanist attitude in the New Cinema.
While most New Directors are interested in recalling
the agricultural past and criticizing the negative side of
the modern city, Yang focuses on the empty minds of the
bourgeoisie. Since traditional values were made obsolete by
2 3 In Our Time was made under Hsiao Yeh's "White Duck
Plan" which intended to produce films as clean as a white
duck and fight against the social-realist films of the late
70's depicting only violence and sex. The "clean" tradition
remained in almost every New Cinema production.
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2 7
the termination of the agricultural society, and new values
were just being born, people still lived in a moral vacuum.
Lacking security in their beliefs, their anxiety and
uncertainty pervade the atmosphere. People do not know
where to go or what to do. Yang mirrors the middle class'
psychological problems such as frustration, loneliness, and
alienation resulting from the impossibility of interpersonal
relations in modernized Taipei, which is marked by the
collision of new and old values.
In examining the subject matter of the New Cinema, it
can be concluded that the New Cinema has realistic and
humanistic tendencies; and that the New Directors express
their nostalgia for an agricultural society and examine the
problems that exist in modern cities. Yang's unique
contribution is his portrayal of the bourgeoisie's inner
states in industrialized Taipei.
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2 8
Chapter 2
Expectation
After Yang directed Duckweed in 1981, which was
included in a television series entitled Eleven Women's
Stories, his film career began with Expectation, the second
episode of In Our Time. As indicated in the last chapter,
in 1982, in order to deal with the crisis in the Taiwanese
film industry, the government-owned film company, CMPC,
implemented a budget reduction and imitated the model of
collective production of Hong Kong's New Wave to produce a
portmanteau film, In Our Time, which comprises four
different episodes by four directors, including Yang. The
significance of In Our Time is that it reconstructs film
conventions and embraces a more sophisticated and artistic
approach both in content and form.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine Expectation,
which many Taiwanese critics, such as Edwin Huang, praise as
the best episode of In Our Time.1 How Yang diverges from
traditional film language and experiments with various new
possibilities of filmmaking, such as the manipulation of
narration, image, and sound, will be discussed. Besides the
1Five famous critics' reviews of In Our Time published
in China Times on 29 Aug. 1982 praised Expectation as the
best episode.
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2 9
formal characteristics of Expectation, the content of the
film, along with Yang's motifs of alienation, loss of
direction, and westernization will also be addressed.
Before this analysis, the film's story will be described.
Expectation portrays a teenage girl's experience of
growth. The central character, Hsiao Fen, lives with her
widowed mother and her older sister. In order to earn more
money, her mother rents a spare room to a college boy.
Because she is at the age of puberty, Hsiao Fen is secretly
interested in the college boy. However, she is disappointed
by seeing that her older sister has an affair with him. The
film also describes Hsiao Fen's anxiety about her physical
growth, such as her first menstrual period and her
developing breasts. The friendship between her and her
neighbor, a short boy, who learns to ride a bicycle with
Hsiao Fen and expects to grow up soon to play basketball on
the school team, is also depicted.
Given this description, it is not surprising that
Expectation has no strong storyline. In traditional films a
storyline is usually developed by a chain of cause and
effect, and has a clear beginning and end. Expectation is
composed of the trifles of Hsiao Fen's daily life. Yang
uses fades in and out as the punctuation between scenes.
From one scene to another, there is no spatial or temporal
continuity. For example, in the very beginning of the film,
a scene shows Hsiao Fen and the short boy walking to school
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30
and talking about learning to ride a bicycle. After this
scene fades out, the next one shows Hsiao Fen eating dinner
with her family in the living room and her mother talking
about renting the spare room. There is no temporal and
spatial relation between these scenes, nor is there cause-
and-effect continuity either. For example, the event of
Hsiao Fen's first period has no relationship with Hsiao
Fen's interest in the college boy, and has no relationship
with the event of learning to ride a bicycle with the short
boy. Yang's intention, by means of the trifles of Hsiao
Fen's daily life, is to put these bits together and to
convey the theme of the film, a portrayal of a pubescent
girl's growing experiences, especially her alienation from
other people, her anxiety about her growth, and her
curiosity about boys. In this sense, Expectation's plot is
subservient to its theme, an abstract psychological issue,
and Yang uses a non-linear narrative to express it; in
traditional films, as a counterpoint, the priority of plot
and continuity would not be betrayed.
Yang conveys Hsiao Fen's mind successfully by images,
making Expectation a visually powerful film. This is again
different from traditional films, in which dialogue plays a
crucial role to help explain or develop stories. However,
in Expectation, dialogue is consciously reduced, and Hsiao
Fen's inner state is portrayed by images, not by her
dialogue. Hsiao Fen's interest in the college boy is shown
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3 1
in a sequence of several scenes of the boy's leaving for
school, his paying rent to her mother, and his first visit
to rent the room. Yang also juxtaposes Hsiao Fen's point-
of-view with the slow-motion portrayal of the college boy's
naked chest when he is helping to move bricks, in order to
convey her secret adoration. In addition, Yang's insertion
of shots of uninhabited space strongly conveys Hsiao Fen's
loneliness and helplessness. In the sequence portraying
Hsiao Fen getting her first period, two such shots showing
the entrance of the house and the living room are
immediately juxtaposed after the shot of her yelling for her
Mom. These two shots construct a metaphor expressing that
there is no one to help lonely Hsiao Fen. From these
examples, it is clear that Yang successfully exploits film's
potential as a visual art form.
Another innovation in Yang's Expectation is his
manipulation of sound effects. Sound in traditional
Taiwanese films is mainly used to emphasize verisimilitude,
and is linked directly to and subordinated to the images.
However, in Expectation sound is also designed to convey
Hsiao Fen's mind. One scene shows that Hsiao Fen intends to
approach the college boy by asking for his help with her
homework. The sound accompanying that scene is Hsiao Fen's
thoughts in her mind. She rehearses the conversation and
fantasizes the college boy's kind reaction. Taking
advantage of sound's autonomous properties, Hsiao Fen's
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32
thought is easily understood. This effect leads Yang's
manipulation of sound effects to go beyond the use of sound
effects in traditional films.
Besides Yang's formal and aesthetic experiments with
narration, image and sound, the content of Expectation
completely disposes of the escapism found in traditional
films, for a more sophisticated depiction of alienation,
reflections on westernized socio-historical experiences, and
people's resulting anxiety and loss of direction. Hsiao Fen
is portrayed as a reserved, quiet, introverted girl who is
like any other adolescent, beginning to be conscious of her
physical growth and her curiosity about boys. However, it
seems that no one cares or understands what goes on in Hsiao
Fen's mind. In order to convey Hsiao Fen's loneliness and
isolation, the director not only uses visual elements, but
also avoids developing any relationship between Hsiao Fen
and other characters. The film does not show any deep
relationship between Hsiao Fen and her mother. There is not
one scene showing Hsiao Fen talking to her mother. One
scene shows Hsiao Fen staying in bed, yelling for her
mother's help because of her first period, and immediately
cuts to another scene without showing the development of a
relationship between daughter and mother. Yang provides
some scenes to portray Hsiao Fen's difficulty in building a
relationship with her sister. Hsiao Fen's sister ignores
Hsiao Fen's cramps and shows her impatience by not answering
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33
Hsiao Fen's question, "When did you start liking boys?"
Hsiao Fen's approach does not get any reaction from her
sister.
In addition, Hsiao Fen and her neighbor, a short boy,
are also unable to communicate with each other. When Hsiao
Fen and the boy appear in the same scene, the boy often
delivers a long monologue about his dreams of riding a
bicycle or joining the school basketball team. Hsiao Fen's
reaction to him is cold and indifferent. Hsiao Fen and the
short boy learn to ride a bicycle together, yet once she
learns, she does not care to accompany him any more. The
director's intention is to avoid developing relationships
between Hsiao Fen and other characters which also can be
seen between Hsiao Fen and the college boy. The college
boy's image appears in her mind again and again, including
his first visit and his naked chest. However, Hsiao Fen
does not have any relationship with him at all. Even the
possibility of developing a relationship between them--her
intention of asking him to help with her homework--is
abandoned when she discovers that her sister is having an
affair with him. Yang cuts off potential relationships
between Hsiao Fen and everyone in the film to convey Hsiao
Fen's isolation and alienation from the outside world.
Another major characteristic recurring in Yang's films
is their direct reflection of social and historical
experiences. There are several examples in Expectation. In
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34
a scene showing Hsiao Fen eating dinner with her family, the
international news is broadcast on the television. The
sound of the television here is in the background and does
not relate to the foreground conversation at the dinner
table. However, by means of the news, Yang offers a social
and historical background for the plot, placing the film in
its cultural context. The first news item describes the
Beatles' arrival in Tokyo and indicates that their
popularity reveals the Japanese youth's westernization. The
second news item describes American bombers in Vietnam. By
showing Hsiao Fen's sister, a symbol of Taiwanese youth,
handing a Beaties' album to her friend and listening to a
Beaties' song on the radio, the director provides a
indication that Taiwanese youths are also crazy about the
Beatles, and are also westernized like Japanese youths. The
second news item provides a clue to the historical context
which reveals that the film is set in the 60's during the
Vietnam War. In addition, in order to depict the strong
westernized social phenomenon in Taiwan in the 60's, Hsiao
Fen is shown twice studying in English, once in her yard and
once in her bed. The importance of English becomes a
signifier indicating the strong relationship between Taiwan
and the U.S. Although in Expectation, Yang's interest in
putting his film in a social and historical context is still
hidden in the background and is easily missed, his ability
to reveal social, cultural, and historical experience
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35
becomes a model fully developed and foregrounded in his
later films.
In Expectation, Yang's characters show their loss of
direction and uncertainty about their futures. Living in an
anxious atmosphere and losing values become two major themes
in Yang's films. This inclination may result from Yang's
own experiences while growing up. Yang is of the postwar
generation, characterized by an uncertainty about the future
and a loss of direction in one's life. After WWII, human
beings understood that they could create nuclear weapons
able to destroy humanity itself. The social order in this
time was as chaotic as the political situation. Poverty and
sickness followed the end of the war. Established values
were suddenly questioned. Anxiety pervaded the whole world,
continuing well into the 60's. In America, the decade of
the 60's was also an unstable era. For example, the
assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War challenged the
complacency of post-war prosperity. In Taiwan, after the
KMT retreated from China in 1949 until the 60's, the
Taiwanese had been living in anxiety. Under American
financial support, Taiwan's economy was making progress, and
was in the transitional period from an agricultural economy
to an industrial economy; but generally speaking, most
people still struggled to make a decent life. Politically,
in the 60's the Chinese communists succeeded in developing
nuclear weapons, supported the Vietnam War, and rivaled the
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3 6
U.S. and the Soviet Union for leadership of the world.
Although sheltered by American military protection, the KMT
still was unable to counter-attack the Chinese communists.
The people who had come from China, after many years of
waiting, still could not return, and so lost their sense of
hope about their future and their identity. The native
Taiwanese people lost their identity, too, because they had
been colonized by different types of governments and
cultures. Westernized by foreign influence, the educated
classes' favorite topics in Taiwan in the 60's were
Modernism and Existentialism.
In order to reflect Taiwanese anxiety and uncertainty
at that time, in Expectation, Yang uses Hsiao Fen's
neighbor, the short boy, to depict the anxiety provoked by
loss of direction in the 60's. The boy has the longest
monologue of any character in the film, describing his
expectation of riding a bicycle and growing up soon.
However, after he knows how to ride the bicycle, he tells
Hsiao Fen--"You know, I have wanted to ride a bicycle. I
thought then I could go where I wanted. But now I do not
know where to ride to." This bit of dialogue is an implied
reference to the population's general uncertainty and lack
of direction in westernized Taiwan in the 60's.
In Expectation's form and content, Yang departed from
Taiwanese film traditions, defying conventional linear
narration with its strong storyline, causality, and
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37
continuity, and instead emphasizing conceptual issues or
abstract themes and expressing them with non-linear
narration. By manipulating editing and shots of uninhabited
space, Yang pays more attention to imagery to convey what is
in the characters' minds, and makes Expectation
exceptionally visual. His use of sound also goes beyond the
traditional function of subordinating sound to image,
instead becoming an independent element constructing
important metaphors. As far as the content of the film is
concerned, Yang makes Expectation a locus reflecting
alienation and uncertainty, and positions the film in the
socio-historical context of the 60's. This kind of
penetration of inner states and historical experiences is
completely alien to traditional escapist films.
Although in a generalized sense, this kind of anti-
traditional manner and sophisticated message is a central
spirit and a major feature of modernist film, Yang had not
fully developed detailed modernist attributes in
Expectation, which cannot be seen as a mature modernist
film. Does the anti-traditional manner and the
sophisticated and artistic message revealed in Expectation
portend a pattern in Yang's following films? Do Yang's
following films further develop the characteristics of
Modernism and become modernist films? The relationship
between Yang's following films and Modernism will be
discussed. However, it is necessary to first discuss
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several views of Modernism before examining Yang
subsequent works.
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39
Chapter 3
Definition and Attributes of Modernism
The term "modernism" has been used to suggest the
general temper of the twentieth-century arts, whose
influence spread throughout the world in various fields and
became an international cultural phenomenon. The rise of
the modernist movement has an inseparable relationship with
the development and exploration of new ideas in other
fields. The most important western figures in the early
part of this century include Freud, Marx, Einstein, and
Nietzsche. Freudian psychoanalysis observed the significant
meaning of human subconscious and dream states, thus
bringing people a new concept of human nature. Marxist
theory was a revolutionary analysis of the economic
structure of society and became a powerful opposition to
bourgeois capitalism. Einstein's theory observed a new
relationship between time and space, giving people a new
perspective on the birth of the universe and the relativity
of scientific laws. Nietzsche's philosophy espoused
atheism, leading people to a new understanding of the world
order, which previously was understood to be under God's
governance. These new impacts from different scholars made
people question traditional values, social orders, and
religious beliefs. Although these revolutionary ideas might
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40
not have directly influenced the emergence of modernism, in
such an intellectually stimulating milieu, many artists
explored new ideas, feeling unsatisfied with established
canons of creation and looking for new forms of expression.
At this point, modernism embodied an abrupt break with
tradition, and a guiding revolutionary spirit.
What is the distillation of modernism? To use Bradbury
and McFarlane's words,
In any working definition of [modernism] we shall
have to see in it a quality of abstraction and
highly conscious artifice, taking us behind
familiar reality, breaking away from familiar
functions of language and conventions of form. It
could be said that this is simply its initial
shock, stage one of movement that leads us all
into Modernism.1
This suggestion of "a quality of abstraction and highly
conscious artifice" means that modernism is associated with
a new aesthetic perception of anti-representation and self-
consciousness.2 In this, the anti-representation of
modernism departs from the traditional approaches restricted
by representing the external physical "reality", but uses
metaphors or connotations to convey abstract internal
reality. At the same time, in order to highlight its
conscious artifice, modernism stresses the author's
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, "The Name and
Nature of Modernism," Modernism: A Guide to European
Literature 1890-1930 (London: the Penguin Group, 1991) 24.
2Bradbury and McFarlane 19-56.
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4 1
subjective point-of-view, emphasizing the recognition of
manipulation and the author's self-consciousness. Modernism
came to a more sophisticated, contemplative, stylish,
technical, introverted, manipulative, and deeper penetration
of the meaning of life.
Modernism expanded into many fields of art. In their
rejection of naturalism and realism, modernist novelists
like Joyce produced stream-of-consciousness novels, and
poets like Eliot believed "a poem should not mean but be."
Modernist paintings completely abandoned traditional
representational perspective and developed abstract
movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, and
Surrealism. Modernist dramatists, like Beckett, entirely
violated the conventional, logical norms of traditional
stage plays. In music, the integration of tones and rhythm
in conventional music was replaced by atonal music. By
overviewing these different fields of modernist art, we see
that the essential characteristics of modernism are clearly
concerned with self-conscious anti-representation.
As a cultural phenomenon, modernism also influenced
another art form, cinema. Since the purpose of this thesis
is to identify Yang's modernist manifestations, the
following discussion will emphasize modernism in narrative
cinema, and examine its characteristics. Since the
modernist cinema also broke with tradition, before
discussing its characteristics, it is necessary to introduce
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42
briefly the canon of traditional cinema. The classical
Hollywood film, the most historically influential one, will
be used as an example of the traditional model. Throughout
most of film history, Hollywood cinema had dominated the
world-wide market until it lost its power temporarily as
result of the growth of the postwar modernist European
cinema in the 50's and 60's.
Many film scholars agree that the formal paradigm of
the classical Hollywood film is a style of transparency,
seamlessness, and invisibility. Robert B. Ray indicates
that all formal manipulations are concealed in the classical
Hollywood film to make its style illusionist, and "make the
style's most basic procedure: the systematic subordination
of every cinematic element to the interests of a movie's
narrative."3 As result, the mise-en-scene emphasizes
verisimilitude. For the most part, camera angles remain at
eye-level, lighting is naturalized, subjects are always
center-frame and in the foreground, and set design is
motivated by realism. The editing also logically assures
the continuity of action, dialogue, space and time.
Matching and seamlessness, namely shot-reverse-shot,
connecting glances, and continuing action, become the
prevailing principles of concealment. In short, the aim of
3Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood
Cinema. 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1985) 32.
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4 3
the concealment of formal choices is to make the classic
style transparent and invisible, which Noel Burch has called
"the zero-degree style of filming."4
Since the form of the classical Hollywood film is
subordinate to its narrative, its narration becomes
significant. The norm of the classical Hollywood narration
is basically structured by creating and resolving problems.
David Bordwell indicates that characters have to solve a
clear-cut problem or attain specific goals, and they have to
conflict with others or with external circumstances, and
usually win a victory at the end of the film.5 He also
concludes that the formula of the classical Hollywood
narration has a beginning, middle, and end, and also
proceeds in the order of "Exposition, Conflict,
Complication, Crisis and Denouement."6 In addition, the
classical Hollywood narration is based on the chains of
cause and effect. The events of stories are structured in a
relationship of cause and effect and develop linearly step
by step. In order to create verisimilitude, spatial and
4Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, tr. Helen R. Lane
(New York: Praeger, 1973) 110-13.
5David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Films
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 157.
'David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson,
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985) 17.
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44
temporal continuity coincide with causality, both of which
depend upon the logic and "common sense" of the audiences'
life experiences. Another characteristic of classical
Hollywood narration is the use of an omniscient point of
view to describe the characters' motivations and actions,
which can be seen as inherent of the naturalist and realist
plays or short stories of the nineteenth century.7 It is
not difficult to see that classical Hollywood narration is
structured by "problem and resolution," "cause and effect,"
"continuity of time and space," and "omniscient point of
view."
As William Charles Siska points out in his
dissertation, the rise of modernism occurred near the
beginning of the twentieth century, roughly corresponding to
the birth of the motion picture (1895) . Thus, in the
broadest sense, it can be claimed that all films are
modernistic.8 In a narrow sense, in terms of the most
radically modernist narrative films, they seem to have
boomed about a dozen years after WWII, in the 50's and the
60 's, especially, in Europe.9 The modernist cinema that
7Pam Cook, ed., The Cinema Book (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1985) 212.
sWilliam Charles Siska, Modernism in the Narrative
Cinema: The Art film as a Genre (New York: Arno Press, 1980)
4 .
9Siska 2.
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4 5
will be discussed here is the postwar European cinema of the
60's,10 which won its popularity and brought the movies into
the mainstream of modernism,11 while American Hollywood
films temporarily lost their domination of the world-wide
market after WWII. WWII not only destroyed lives and
property, but also restructured the world order and social
values. After WWII some filmmakers believed that the
classical Hollywood film was too infantile to reflect
increasingly complex social phenomena, and became interested
in the anti-escapist European films which examined the real
material and spiritual problems of the age. On the other
hand, the anti-representational modernist phenomenon may
also have stimulated educated people to challenge
traditional mimetic styles--the invisible formal paradigm
and verisimilitude of the classical Hollywood film. Thus,
the new growth of "the art-house crowd" was quickly
distinguished from the old-fashioned "entertainment-seeking
moviegoers,"12 and gave the "high-art" modernist European
cinema an opportunity to develop diverse possibilities of
10 Although German Expressionist films or French Avant-
Garde in the late 20's and the early 30's or other avant-
garde film movements in various countries are also modernist
practices, only the postwar modernist European films will be
stressed.
21Mast 343.
12Ray 138.
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46
filmmaking betraying the canons established by the classical
Hollywood film.
During the 50's and 60's, in the postwar European film
industry, different from the Hollywood assembly system,
numerous film directors produced films marked by their
individually recurrent themes and personally consistent
styles. Italy's Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Fellini; Spain's
Bunuel, France's Godard, and Sweden's Bergman were pivotal
film auteurs making "personal cinema." These film auteurs
may have produced different subject matter and developed
different personal styles, but they shared the same
principle of breaking with the established traditions of
film and embracing the distillations of modernism, self-
consciousness and anti-representation.
Siska indicates that narrative modernist cinema is
characterized by key concepts of modernist perception
(subjectivity, point-of-view, reflexivity, and open texture)
and their formal derivatives (narrative intransitivity,
estrangement, fragmentation, multiple diegesis, inter-
textuality, and aperture).1 3 In a similar vein, Peter
Wollen's article, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est,"
lists seven modernist strategies that Godard, a radical
modernist filmmaker, uses to counteract the classical
Hollywood film. Wollen indicates that the relationship
“Siska 2.
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4 7
between Godard's modernist strategies and the traditional
Hollywood film is as follows:1 4
First, Godard prefers to break up the continuity of his
plots by inserting intertitles or randomly connecting
unrelated shots or conversations. This strategy betrays the
norms of the classical Hollywood narration following
psychological chains of cause and effect and the continuity
of time and space. Second, Godard is influenced by Bertolt
Brecht, whose Epic theater resists the effects of
identification, the principle of Aristotelian tragedy
exploited in the classical Hollywood film to persuade
audiences to empathize with characters. In order to achieve
an "estrangement" effect, Godard sometimes asks his
characters to address the camera in order to keep a distance
between the characters and the audience. Third, in order to
remind his audiences that the "reality" shown in his films
is chosen by the director's subjective point-of-view,
Godard's films are self-reflexive, foregrounding the camera,
14Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est,"
Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods, vol.2 (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985) 500-09.
Godard
Narrative Intransitivity
Estrangement
Foregrounding
Multiple Diegesis
Aperture
Unpleasure
Reality
Hollywood
Narrative Transitivity
Identification
Transparency
Single Diegesis
Closure
Pleasure
Fiction
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4 8
or other technical apparatuses to shatter the tradition of
transparency which devotes itself to eliding the camera
lens, the spectator's eye, and the film screen as a single
"window on the world," as if the audience is witnessing
"reality."
Fourth, Godard's multiple diegesis allows "an
interlocking and interweaving of a plurality of worlds"15 in
his films which permits multiple stories to occur in one
film; furthermore, these stories may or may not have a
direct or an indirect relationship. On the contrary, the
classical Hollywood film is a "unitary homogeneous world"1 6
obeying a simple linear narration. Fifth, Godard's aperture
style, his open-endedness, employs allusions, quotations and
parody "to provide a kind of 'surplus' of meaning,"17 that
allows more than one interpretation of his films. His style
directly confronts the innocent, harmonious, self-contained
traditional Hollywood film. Sixth, it is not surprising
that Godard's films are not pleasurable in the sense that
conventional films are. Being a radical modernist
filmmaker, Godard requires the spectators to think and
provokes them to participate. His films are contemplative.
This is the reason why modernist art appeals to a small
15Wollen 505.
16Wollen 504.
17Wollen 505.
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4 9
number of sophisticated people, and why modernist films are
considered "high art" and are different from the traditional
commercial-oriented Hollywood film that generates enthusiasm
in spectators and satisfies most viewers by bringing them
pleasure (entertainment). Seventh, for Godard, fiction is
equal to acting, lying, deception, illusion, and
mystification, all bourgeois ideologies which he strongly
resists.18 Therefore, Godard mistrusts dialogue, often
replacing it with improvisation, allowing room for the
performer's self-determination. Wollen's model of Godard's
modernist strategies and Siska's understanding of modernist
perceptions and derivatives indicate the characteristics of
the modernist narrative cinema.
From the introduction of different new philosophies and
breakthroughs in science in the early part of the twentieth
century, modernism emerged as a cultural and international
phenomenon. Postwar modernist European cinema, especially,
embraced the modernist spirit of anti-tradition and
modernist distillations of anti-representation and self-
consciousness. This cinema diverged from the norms
established by the classical Hollywood film, such as
invisible formal style and cause and effect narration, which
18Although Godard considers that film should not
privilege a single class of people, such as the bourgeoisie,
whose values and ideologies are critiqued by works such as
Weekend (1967), ironically his radical modernist films seem
not to be appreciated by common moviegoers, but by
intellectuals, bourgeois for the most part.
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5 0
represented verisimilitude and comforted the audience with
escapist stories idealized in a closed and harmonious
fictional world. The postwar European modernist filmmakers
used a very subjective point-of-view to express abstract
issues, and subordinated plots to themes. Particularly,
bourgeois psychological problems such as anxiety, despair,
alienation, and rootlessness are often portrayed in an urban
milieu often depicted as without values, order, and
direction. Individual examples of this cinema include
Godard's Weekend (1976), Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960),
Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1971), and Antonioni's
L'Bclisse (1962). The modernist narrative film also departs
from the constraints of tradition and engages in the
manipulation of form to foreground filmmaking as a formal
practice. According to Siska and Wollen, the modernist film
is associated with some keys words, including subjectivity,
point-of-view, reflexivity (foregrounding, estrangement,
narrative intransitivity, fragmentation), and open texture
(inter-textuality, allusion, parody, multiple diegesis).
Since the modernist film is an art form predisposed to a
sophisticated and contemplative model, and which seriously
penetrates interior reality, rather than physical reality,
it "addresses thematic issues in dialogue and directing the
viewer's attention to the image"19 in order to require the
19Siska 6.
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5 1
participation of the spectator and challenge the spectator's
intelligence. Resulting from its intellectual nature, the
modernist film became a "high brow" art form; that is, a
bourgeois film which is about the bourgeoisie and is made
for the bourgeoisie.
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52
Chapter 4
That Day, on the Beach
In 1983, Yang made his second film, That Day, on the
Beach, using a more experimental approach. Most film
languages employed in the film had never been seen in
Taiwanese traditional films, so many Taiwanese critics agree
that the film can be honored as one of the most significant
films of that year, and even as a milestone in Taiwanese
film history.1 The purpose of this chapter is to examine
the relationship between That Day, on the Beach and
Expectation, and indicate the modernist attributes in That
Day, on the Beach. Are the manipulations and themes in
Expectation once again evident in That Day, on the Beach?
What is the new experimental approach in That Day, on the
Beach? Did Yang apply more modernist attributes discussed
in the last chapter in That Day, on the Beach, and therefore
make it more modernist?
Most Taiwanese film critics agree that the structure of
That Day, on the Beach, "a flashback within a flashback," is
an experimental approach that had never been seen in
^u-Hsi Liu, and Ting-Fu Huang, "The Top Ten Taiwanese
Films in the 80's," Film Appreciation Monthly Mar. 1990: 62-
75 .
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53
Taiwanese films up to that point.2 To discuss its
narration, two fundamental narrative components, which were
termed by the Russian Formalist school of literary analysis
as the fabula and the syuzhet, will be employed. "Fabula"
is equivalent to "story." According to David Bordwell's
definition, "the fabula embodies the action as a
chronological, cause-and-effeet chain of events occurring
within a given duration and a spatial field."3 "Syuzhet" is
equivalent to "plot," that is the actual arrangement and
presentation of the fabula in the film. The syuzhet is the
"architectonics of the film's presentation of the fabula."4
In order to understand how these two elements work together,
the fabula will be analyzed first.
The fabula of the film describes Jia Li's different
periods of life. About Jia Li's childhood, the fabula
consists of her experiences, including listening to
classical music with her demanding doctor father and
discovering his love affair with his nurse. In Jia Li's
freshman year, she develops a close friendship with Jia
San's girl friend, Ching, when she accompanies Jia Li and
2"The Record of the Voting Meeting of The First Film
Appreciation Award," Film Appreciation Monthly July 1984:
17-24.
3David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) 49.
4Bordwell 50.
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54
Jia San to visit their parents. Ching goes overseas to
study piano after Jia San is forced by his father to marry
another woman. Jia Li refuses to accept her father's
arrangement and marries De Wei, whom she loves. After three
years of married life she discovers that she is unable to
communicate with De Wei anymore because he is always busy
with his business and is having an affair with another woman
to escape the pressure of his business and Jia Li's
insecurity. Jia Li's attempts to save the marriage are in
vain, once she is summoned by the police to a beach where a
bottle of De Wei's medicine has been discovered, and is
informed that De Wei has probably drowned in the sea. On
the beach Jia Li thinks over her doomed marriage and feels
that De Wei, dead or alive, is no longer important to her.
Three years later Jia Li becomes an independent business
woman. Accidentally getting the news of Ching's Taipei
concert from the radio, Jia Li invites Ching to meet her at
a coffee shop. They talk about their past, and at the end
of the film, Jia Li tells Ching that her brother, Jia San,
died from an illness. This is the fabula/story that lies
behind the film's depiction of Jia Li's life experience,
including her childhood, falling in love, married life,
crisis in her marriage, and, finally freedom from her
marriage.
The syuzhet of That Day, on the Beach breaks up the
chronological chain of cause-and-effeet, but arranges the
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5 5
fabula by crosscutting the present and past. Following the
development of the syuzhet, the audience is led backward and
forward between a horizontal temporal line. The film starts
with a shot of fishermen handing a medicine bottle to a
police officer on the beach. Not long into the film,
Ching's three memories--her first meeting with Jia Li,
dancing with Jia San, and visiting with their parents--are
intercut with her present preparations for the concert. The
coffee shop at which Ching and Jia Li meet, becomes a
temporal reference point in the present tense, while their
memories are in the past tense, interwoven together.
Approximately, the first one third of the film follows this
structure, which reveals how Jia San is forced to marry
another woman, how Ching1 s heart is broken, and how Jia Li
meets with De Wei and marries him without her father's
permission.
However, the syuzhet of the remaining two-thirds of the
film has a different temporal reference point. Jia Li tells
Ching that De Wei is thought to have drowned in the sea
three years ago. The arrangement and presentation of the
fabula is to use "that day" (three years ago) on the beach
as a temporal reference point for the rest of the film.
When Jia Li is on the beach, she recalls her condemned
marriage. Her unpleasant memories of married life are
divided into many pieces intercut with the scene showing Jia
Li on the beach. In other words, the remaining two-thirds
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56
of the film is composed of Jia Li's memory of that day on
the beach and the memory's memory (her recalling her doomed
married life). Finally, the plot returns to the coffee shop
from the beach, and before they leave, Jia Li informs Ching
that Jia San is dead; in Ching's point of view, Jia Li
becomes a perfect woman (independent business woman) after
that day on the beach.
Basically, the film is framed by using the "coffee
shop" and "the beach" as two temporal reference points.
However, there are two exceptions. The first exception
appears in the first one third of film, which follows the
structure of composing "present and past." The exception
is the sequence showing Jia Li and Jia San's childhood,
which actually is Jia Li's flashback (her recalling her
freshman vacation at home) within a flashback (at home she
thinks about her childhood). This first exception is a
scaled-down model of the narration of the last two-thirds of
the film.
The second exception is a sequence showing that Jia Li
discovers her father's affair with his nurse when she was a
child. The sequence is edited between Jia Li's conversation
with her mother and her recalling her father's disloyalty to
her mother. The conversation is actually contained within
Jia Li's reminiscence of her day on the beach, when she is
at the coffee shop. So, the second exception actually
expands the narration one more degree by framing "memory and
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57
memory's memory" as a complicated "triple flashback." The
elaborate syuzhet of That day, on the Beach is like the
style of the "Chinese Box," each part (memory) containing--
and, at the same time, being contained--wichin another part
(memory) .
By reviewing the fabula and the syuzhet of the film, it
is clear that Yang once again abandons the traditional or
the classical Hollywood "problem/resolve" style which gives
its characters a concrete, external problem (i.e. rescuing
hostages) to resolve and also breaks up the old-fashioned
chronological causality to tell the story. In That Day, on
the Beach, Jia Li confronts the crisis in her marriage,
which is an abstract problem arising from the relationship
between the couple; she resolves the problem by finding her
own independence. If the audience follows tradition by
viewing the enigma of De Wei1 s death as the "problem" raised
in the film and expecting both a climax and resolution, they
may be disappointed, because Yang does not give any
solution, leaving an open ending to the "problem."5 In
reference to its syuzhet, the multiple, non-linear narration
applied in Expectation is further developed in That Day, on
the Beach. The intermixed "Chinese Box" style, "flashback
within a flashback," was an unprecedented undertaking in
1983, the year the film was made. Obviously, compared with
5Sheng-Chuan Lai, "The Beginning of a New Style of
Drama," China Times 21 Nov. 1983.
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58
Expectation, in terms of the narration, Yang's anti-
traditional technique reveals two ingredients of modernism--
non-linear narration and aperture (open-ending)--and is more
distinct in That Day, on the Beach.
The mise-en-scene of That Day, on the Beach is like
most Taiwanese New Cinema, inclining toward a realist style.
The cinematographic techniques frequently employed in the
film are long takes, long shots, steady camera, eye-level
camera angles, and natural lighting. Instead of using quick
and fragmented editing, long takes make the rhythm of the
film much slower than traditional Taiwanese films and expand
the length of the film to two hours and forty-seven minutes
of running time, breaking the record of Taiwanese
traditional commercial films clocking in at ninety minutes.
The strategy of long shots not only preserves the continuity
of space, but also avoids the over-emphasized sentimentality
evoked by the close ups of details exploited in traditional
films. In the film, the camera is kept steady most of the
time. If it is moved, it is moved slowly and follows the
subject. Extensive pans or tilts are not seen in the film.
The eye-level camera angles in the film avoid the undue
manipulation of images. The lighting generally remains
unobtrusive, but there is one scene revealing Yang's
manipulation of the lighting to explore a more artificial
effect. When Ching dances with Jia San, the lighting
projects a shadow of their dancing on the wall to aesthetize
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5 9
the visual image. Regardless of the instance of formal
manipulation, Yang's cinematography in general remains in a
realist style in That Day, on the Beach, as it does in his
first film, Expectation.
Another element of mise-en-scene, the performance, in
That Day, on the Beach, is unexaggerated and far removed
from the cliches of conventional films. In addition, one of
the big differences between this film and traditional
Taiwanese films is that Yang's actors dub in their own
voices as integral to their performances. Consequently,
different languages--Mandarin, Taiwanese dialect, Japanese,
and German--are spoken by different characters in the film.
They not only break the political myth of "only speaking
Mandarin" in films, but also bring a more realistic
atmosphere to the film. Although all the main characters
are professional and famous performers, including Ai-Jia
Chang (Jia Li), In-Mong Hu (Ching), Ming Tsu (Ha Tsai), Shu-
Wei Mao (De Wei) , Lie Li (Hsin) , and Jun Ian, Feng Mei (Jia
Li's parents), Yang directs them without pushing sentiment.
The exaggerated laughing, crying, or anger always seen in
traditional films is avoided. Happiness, sadness, fighting,
and quarreling are reduced as much as possible.
There are many examples revealing Yang's use of
ellipses to reduce sentimentalism in this film, but the most
obvious one is the sequence showing the conflict between Jia
San and his father. First, the sequence shows that Jia San
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60
speaks to his father peacefully about his real lover, Ching.
Then the shot cuts to a sequence of Jia Li taking a walk
with her mother. When the shot cuts back to Jia San and his
father, Yang uses only a long shot showing a broken glass on
the floor and Jia San kneeling in front of his father. All
the fighting is omitted. This tendency toward conservative
acting is for the purpose of pursuing realism. Belonging to
the generation born after the KMT's retreat to Taiwan, Jia
Li and Ching speak Mandarin. Jia Li's parents of the prior
generation born in the period of Japanese occupation, speak
the Taiwanese dialect mixed with Japanese vocabulary.
Ching's secretary and Jia Li's flower arrangement teacher
speak German and Japanese respectively. It is very clear,
by reducing the actors' exaggerated body language and facial
expression, by omitting passionate sequences, and by having
performers dub for themselves in their appropriate
languages, Yang establishes a realist style of performance.
Although the large established cast is unusual for Taiwanese
New Cinema, which normally mixes professional and non
professional actors, Yang successfully avoids the
performance cliches which professional player may adopt in
traditional films.
By examining these two important elements of mise-en-
scene, cinematography and performance, it can be concluded
that Yang's That Day, on the Beach illustrates a realist and
non-sentimental style. Yang's mise-en-scene is not as
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61
formalist as most European modernist filmmakers' in the
60's. The formalist mise-en-scenes of Fellini, Godard,
Bunuel, or Antonioni namely obtrusive light effects, extreme
camera angles, twisted composition, exaggerated color tone,
and unpredictable performance, are much more radical than
Yang's. Yang's cinematography is basically traditional,
with the exception of his use of long shots and long takes
and his avoiding of shot-reverse-shot editing. Although his
approach to performance in the film is anti-traditional,
Yang does not establish any particular personal performance
style like the European modernist filmmakers mentioned
above.
Another crucial element in Yang's That Day, on the
Beach worth being discussed is that Yang's images carry many
meanings beyond the images themselves. First, like
Expectation, Yang once again uses images to convey Jia
Li's inner mind. He may be influenced by Freudian theory,
which claims that dreams are associated with things that
happen previously in conscious life and can reflect our
response to them. Like European modernist filmmakers who
use dreams to reflect their characters' minds, Yang uses Jia
Li's dream showing De Wei teasing a woman in a telephone
booth to convey her distrust of De Wei. The image of Jia
Li's dream actually echoes the image showing Ah Tsai teasing
a woman in a telephone booth, which is actually what Jia Li
sees before that night. In addition, Yang's images have
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62
another function--condensing stories. Ah Tsai's marriage is
condensed into his wedding photograph. Jia Li's father's
death is also condensed into a shot of a portrait and a
memorial marker of her dead father. Yang also uses images
to replace dialogue. When Jia Li's mother visits Jia Li,
she asks her mother whether she blames her or not because
she marries De Wei without her parents' permission. The
spectators do not hear her mother's answer, but only see
that the image cuts away to the night she leaves home and
shows that her mother actually knows she is leaving, but
pretends not to know and lets her go. It means that her
mother silently agrees to her marriage. One more creative
image in That Day, on the Beach is the Rashomon style of
investigation on the beach. The three fishermen's answers
are individually edited one after another in a montage
structure rarely seen before in Taiwanese films. These
examples of formalist manipulation demonstrate Yang's self-
consciousness as a director. Like most modernist
filmmakers, he directs the viewer's attention to the
metaphors and messages embodied in images more than the
images themselves. This modernist manipulation is very
different from traditional films, whose images shown on the
screen are only a superficial representation or imitation of
events.
Unlike most films of the Taiwanese New Cinema, which
focus on the lower class' struggle and pain caused by
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63
poverty, That Day, on the Beach portrays the rapidly
changing society in Taiwan and Taipei's middle class'
psychological struggle to find their own values. Taiwan had
changed from an agricultural society to an industrial
society within thirty years (from the 50's to the 80's).
According to statistics, in Taiwan, the agricultural
population dropped from 56% in 1953 to 19% in 1983 (the year
of making the film) .6 This statistic explains the
dismantling of the agricultural social structure and the
coming of a new industrial social order. Accompanying these
radical transformations, the established values of
authority, cooperation, and diligence in rural areas were
replaced by betrayal, self-interest, and opportunism in
modern cities. When old values are crushed, and new
positive values are not established, people live in a world
without strong beliefs to support them. As a result,
especially in the cities which were most affected, although
people may have spoken and behaved as those around them did,
in their psyches, they (usually the middle class) began
feeling anxiety, uncertainty, ennui, despair, rootlessness,
loneliness and insecurity. Yang sets That Day, on the Beach
in Taipei, and puts it in the historical context of the
thirty-year period from the 50's through the 80's when
GCheng-Yuan Wu, "Taiwanese Film Culture and Two Film
Concepts," Contemporary Feb. 1987: 97-105.
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64
Taiwan's economy was in a transition period, and portrays
the middle class' helplessness in the changing society.
Through many subtle manipulations, Yang's That Day, on
the Beach depicts the changes between traditional
agricultural society and modern industrial society. Chinese
traditional agricultural society is a patriarchal society,
which emphasizes family ethics and especially respects only
the authority of paternal power. This patriarchal thinking
was strengthened by the Japanese culture, which strictly
obeyed the feudalistic patriarchal system during the fifty-
year occupation. Jia Li's demanding father is an obvious
signifier of traditional patriarchal society. By showing
Jia Li's father's demanding manner contrasted with his
children's and wife's great respect for him, and by showing
his Japanese lifestyle, including his wearing Japanese
pajamas, calling Jia Li and Jia San by Japanese names, and
living in a Japanese-style house, the film depicts the
traditional patriarchal ideology derived from Chinese and
Japanese cultures. When Taiwanese society entered an
industrial era, not only was the traditional authority of
paternal power questioned, but also personal liberty was
emphasized. In the film, the first conflict between old and
new values is the resistance against paternal power, Jia
Li's running away from her father's arrangement of her
marriage. Jia Li's escape partly explains the demise of the
traditional authority of paternal power, and partly
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65
announces the coming of a new era of free love in a new
society. Accordingly, Yang uses the resistance to the
patriarchal system to convey the conversion of society and
its values.
Yang also depicts the opportunism and self-interest of
modernist industrial society in contrast to the indulgence
and cooperation in traditional agricultural society. Hsin,
Ha Tsai, and Hsiao Hui signify the opportunism of the new
industrial society. Hsin is fooling around with different
men in order to take advantage of them. For example, in
order to pass an English examination and go to the U.S. with
her English teacher, Hsin seduces the English teacher. Ha
Tsai is a typical opportunist, marrying a millionaire's
daughter to inherit his father-in-law's business. Hsiao Hui
believes that the world has no true love; therefore, the
relationship between people is based on taking advantage of
each other. With this attitude, she takes advantage of De
Wei to expand her business, but does not love him. This
kind of self-interest is dramatized in the film to
characterize industrial Taipei, where the old values of
earning money with dedication, loyalty, and benevolence are
lost.
In addition to an articulate portrayal of the conflict
between new and old values in the Taiwanese transitional
period, Yang also depicts the middle class' mental and
emotional problems, such as frustration, uncertainty, and
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66
lack of confidence. Yang uses Jia Li and De Wei to express
middle class malaise in the rapidly changing society.
Growing up during the social transition period and living
with the conflict between new and old values, Jia Li and De
Wei are portrayed as middle class people whose problems are
not those of earning a living, but of their inability to
adjust to social change, thus becoming frustrated, uncertain
and insecure. Jia Li's problem concerns her dilemma between
a new or traditional attitude toward marriage. Her leaving
home and marrying De Wei means that she has the advantage of
being a modern woman countering the old patriarchal law.
She wants to have a good marriage to support her confidence
in the new attitude toward marriage. However, she lacks the
skills to deal with modern marriage and does not enjoy
living with De Wei, a husband she chose for herself. The
director uses Jia Li's mother, a traditional Chinese woman,
to contrast Jia Li. Her mother obeys her husband, serves
her husband, forgives his affair, and even sublimates her
devotion to him by considering him a child whom she cares
for. Torn between old and new, on the one hand, Jia Li does
not identify with the traditional concept of marriage like
her mother does, but on the other hand, she does not have
the ability to improve her marriage. Consequently, she
becomes frustrated (quarrels with De Wei), lonely (almost
has an affair with Ping), and insecure (asks her mother if
she blames her for choosing her own husband).
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6 7
De Wei is another representative of the Taipei middle
class unable to cope with the fast changing industrial
society based on opportunism, self-interest, and efficiency.
In contrast to De Wei, Ha Tsai functions as a character
adapting to the industrial society very well. He even warns
De Wei that he will fire him without considering their
friendship, if De Wei fails in business. De Wei is unable
to adjust to the cold industrial society and becomes a
patient of a psychiatrist. The portrayal of people's mental
problems caused by the conflict of new and old values during
the period of social change in Taiwan is important in That
Day, on the Beach.
In addition to the attention given the changes in
society and middle class frustration, That Day, on the Beach
is one of the few Taiwanese films focusing on women as its
subject matter at that time. Although Yang is a New
Director, he does not use a new point of view to portray his
female characters. At the end of the film, Yang chooses
Ching's point of view to depict the director's conclusion of
his film--Jia Li is a perfect woman--because she becomes a
business woman after she is free from her marriage. This
depiction has led the film to be considered as a declaration
in support of modern woman.7 However, this conclusion does
not make the film particularly progressive in this respect.
7Tsu-Shiun Lu, "Motion and Motionless, " China Times 26
Nov. 1983.
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68
Throughout the film, in fact, Yang still uses a very-
traditional way to portray women. Although Jia Li finally
becomes a modern woman at the end, previously throughout she
is portrayed as a traditional woman. She is shown cooking
and washing dishes in her parents' kitchen and her own
kitchen. When men (her brother, her father, and her
husband) are shown working, she is still like a traditional
woman who is supposed to devote herself to doing housework.
Jia Li is shown in a traditional market and a supermarket.
She is shown working only one time, and in that scene, she
is reprimanded by her male boss. Even her hobbies are the
most traditional and stereotypical ones of flower arranging
and shopping. Another main female character in the film is
Ching. Although Ching finally becomes a pianist, she is
portrayed as a traditional woman having no ambitions. She
says that if Jia San does not marry another woman, she will
marry him and will not become a pianist. She only wants to
wait to marry Jia San and be a music teacher. Another
female character, Hsin, finally, actively chooses to leave
her man, but throughout the film she is portrayed as a woman
relying on different men and is abandoned by them again and
again. At the end of the film, Yang gives his female
characters a chance to become independent, but the film does
not emphasize how they become independent. The process of
their changing from traditional thoughts and behavior to
modern ones is not shown. Certainly, this may not be the
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69
main point of the film, but if critics claim this film is
feminist, only quoting the end of the film as evidence would
be a mistake. Although Yang is a New Director interested in
using women as his subject matter, his That Day, on the
Beach maintains a traditional perspective of women. Its
female characters are defined only by the men in their
lives.
Generally, Yang's second film, That Day, on the Beach,
is anti-traditional, sophisticated, and artistic. Like
Expectation, the film breaks with traditional narrative
causality. In That Day, on the Beach Yang goes further and
experimentally arranges time and space to order the
narration with multiple flashbacks in the manner of a
"Chinese Box." The manipulation of time and space is one of
the attributes of modernist films. Although Yang's
cinematography and performance mainly reflect a realist
style which is not like the formalist style in most
modernist films, his manipulation of images is like most
modernist filmmakers' in that shots carry metaphors and lead
the viewer's attention to the meanings inhering in the
images themselves. Yang's images may convey the characters'
psyches and may condense the plot, which are like the
manipulations of Expectation. Moreover, similar to his
first film, Yang once again places his film in a socio-
historical context to depict people's consciousness. In
That Day, on the Beach, Yang places his middle class in a
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70
socioeconomic transition period in Taipei, and explores
their frustration and insecurity brought on by the conflict
of traditional and modernist values. This theme of
bourgeois helplessness amidst an urban milieu and his
interest in featuring women as main characters become
recurring motifs in Yang's later films and makes Yang more
like a modernist filmmaker.
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71
Chapter 5
Taipei Story
Not long after the beginning of the New Cinema
Movement, the audience's curiosity about and participation
in the New Cinema decreased. The box-office failure was
mainly caused by the intellectual nature of the New Cinema
which could not satisfy the traditional Taiwanese audiences
who were used to being entertained by commercial-oriented
films. This situation frightened film investors and made
them unwilling to invest money in the New Cinema. Yang's
Taipei Story was one of the very few New Cinema films in
1985. Like other New Cinema films, Taipei Story was not
appreciated by the local audience. After running only four
days, Taipei Story was removed from theaters because of bad
box-office. This critical situation made some people
consider that Taipei Story predicted the death of the New
Cinema Movement.
The purpose of this chapter is to apply structuralist
paradigms to Yang's third film, Taipei Story, in order to
compare and contrast it with Yang's first two films, and to
discuss its modernist attributes. Does Yang apply formal
paradigms in Taipei Story differently than in his previous
works? Does Taipei Story embody similar thematic concerns
which appear in Yang's earlier films? Do the form and
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72
content developed in Taipei Story qualify it as a modernist
film? These questions will be addressed. However, before
going into a detailed analysis, a synopsis of Taipei Story
is in order.
The Chinese title of the film, Ching Mei Chu Ma, is a
Chinese idiom which generally means a couple's love,
especially originating from their innocent affection when
they were still kids. The two main characters in the film
are Lon and Chin, who have known each other since they were
children, and then become lovers when they grow up. Lon
plays baseball in the national juvenile team and runs a
fabric store at an old street in Taipei. He treasures
justice and loyalty to friends more than he does money.
Chin works for Ms. Mei, a businesswoman, as her personal
secretary with modernist values. Not long after she moves
into a new apartment, she loses her job when the company she
works for is taken over by different investors. Chin hopes
to marry Lon and emigrate to America with him. However, Lon
lends money to Chin's father, who always looks for easy
profits, and ultimately fails in his business. Chin
quarrels with Lon because, without the money, they cannot
emigrate to America. Then, Chin discovers that Lon meets
his ex-wife, so she breaks up with him. One of her sister's
friends is interested in Chin and spends one whole day
waiting for Chin at her door. In order to get rid of her
sister's friend, Chin makes up with Lon and asks him to
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73
accompany her home. That day, as Lon is leaving, Lon is
followed by that man. Lon gets angry by being followed.
Lon fights with him, but is killed.
If Yang's Taipei Story is looked at on the surface of
story, it will appear merely to dramatize a couple's
inability to communicate and their impossible marriage.
However, Yang's Taipei Story is not only a romantic tragedy.
In fact, by means of Lon's and Chin's story, Yang's real
intention is to reveal a strong conflict between new and old
values1 and to reflect people's confusion and pain when they
search for their fulfillment, meanings, and transcendence in
the rapidly changing environment of modernized Taipei.
Using the methods of structuralist inquiry to
investigate the thematic binary pairs in Yang's Taipei Story
is not difficult. Structuralist film critics usually
believe that film directors often consciously or
subconsciously put thematic binary pairs in their works.
Throughout the film, Yang elaborately manipulates his
characters' thoughts and behavior to convey the thematic
binary of new and old values. Lon, Chin's parents, and Mr.
Lai stand for the old values. Chin, Lon's brother-in-law,
and Chin's sister are symbols of new values. These two
^here are many film critics who indicate the conflict
of new and old values in Taipei Story. For example, Tao-
Ming Li, "Let's Discuss Taiwanese Films in the Last Year,"
Film Appreciation Monthly Nov. 1985: 3-4. Sheng-Yu Lai,
"Ching Mei Chu Ma," Film Appreciation Monthly Mar. 1985: 8-
9 .
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74
opposite sets of values will function as a pair conflicting
with each other to structure the motifs of the film.
Lon is portrayed as a person living according to
traditional values. He respects friendship and benevolence,
which are particular concerns in traditional society, but
does not cherish money, which is especially valued in a
modern capitalistic community. He lends his money to Chin's
father and financially supports his taxi-driver friend.
When Chin loses her job, he also asks if she needs his
money, but Chin complains: "we have been together for so
long and you still do not know what I need?"--an indication
of their uncommunicative relationship. Yang also uses some
trifling daily events to show how Lon treasures friendship
very much. Lon records Japanese and American baseball games
for his ex-coach. He goes to visit his ex-wife in Japan
when she is having a hard time after divorcing her Japanese
husband. As Lon is a person with old values, he is
portrayed as a nostalgic man. Lon's nostalgia is shown by
his love of baseball, because Lon is a player on the
national juvenile team; in the film, baseball becomes a
symbol associated with his past. Lon is shown in several
sequences related to baseball. For example, he visits his
ex-coach in a baseball field after he comes back from
America, goes to see a baseball game with his childhood
baseball playmate, and fights in a pub with Chin's friend
who caustically laughs at Lon's baseball history. In
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75
addition, in the sequence before Lon dies next to a broken-
down television set on the road, he fantasizes that he sees
his glorious success in the world baseball championship of
1969 broadcast live on the television. Lon's ex-wife, Gwan,
talks about Lon. Her words literalize Yang's conception of
Lon. Gwan Says:
All you have for others is pity and sympathy. You
are still living in your fairy tale world. Where
people can only be saved if you shed pity on them.
This world is not as simple as when you used to
play baseball. Everything is changed. You are
the only one left.
These are used to depict Yang's intention of characterizing
Lon's reminiscence.
In addition to Lon, Chin's parents are other characters
standing for the older generation with traditional values.
Chin's father still remains unconcerned with quality control
in his business relations, a function of modernized
societies, and inevitably fails. His patriarchal attitudes
are revealed in the sequence when he asks Lon to marry Chin
soon, and to produce heirs carrying his family's name and
continuing the family line. Throughout the film, Chin's
mother is always seen in the kitchen. Several long shots of
Chin's mother show that she is cleaning the floor or doing
other domestic work. Even the only line Chin's mother says
in the film is: "The price of vegetables is up again."
Chin's mother is portrayed as a traditional woman staying at
home. Chin's parents are stereotyped as the older
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76
generation representing the conservative values and sexist
social roles of men and women, patriarchal and subservient
respectively.
Lon's ex-coach, Mr. Lai, also Lon's ex-father-in-law,
is anotuer example of the older generation. He says that
every time his daughter divorces (Gwan divorces Lon, and her
Japanese husband again), he starts wondering whether he
should retire because he finds that it gets harder to
understand what young people are thinking about. Obviously,
Mr. Lai has the traditional concept about marriage that
women should be faithful to only one husband all their
lives. Mr. Lai does not identify with the new values his
daughter embraces.
It is not difficult to find new values to oppose the
old values in Yang's Taipei Story. Chin, a modern
professional woman, is the opposite of her mother and Lon.
First, she resists the authority of paternal power derived
from the traditional agricultural society. According to
Gwan, Chin does not get along well with her father's
mistreatment of her mother because her mother is a
concubine. Her moving out is a strong protest against the
traditional patriarchal value which does not allow an
unmarried woman to move out. Moreover, when the scene shows
that Chin's response to her sister's abortion is not
concerned about her sister's virginity, but is about her
sister's health, Chin's modern, anti-patriarchal stance is
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77
once again stressed. With these examples, it is clear that
Chin is portrayed as a modern woman by showing her
profession and her anti-patriarchal values opposed to her
mother's traditional fatalism and dependency on a
patriarchal system. Besides, Chin is also portrayed as a
modern woman whose self-centered values oppose Lon's values
about friendship. When she realizes that Lon lends money to
her father, she does not care about her father's business
but emphasizes that without that money they cannot emigrate
to America. To conclude, Chin is contrasted with her mother
and Lon in terms of her attitudes toward paternal power and
money.
Lon's brother-in-law in America is another example of a
character who counters old values. Lon intends to invest in
his brother-in-law's business and emigrate to America.
Although Lon believes that his brother-in-law should trust
him because Lon is his family, Lon's brother-in-law does not
compromise and insists on having Lon's money first. Lon's
brother-in-law stands for the new values of industrialized
society which follows a self interested principle.
Moreover, Lon describes that in America his brother-in-law
shoots a black man to death, and in order to escape
punishment, he puts an unlicensed gun in the black man's
hand to pretend that he was defending himself. This is one
more cruel and immoral example in contrast to Lon's
traditional altruism and benevolence. In short, the
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78
thematic binary pairing of Lon and his brother-in-law is old
versus new, friendliness versus cruelty, altruism versus
self-interest, and benevolence versus immorality.
Chin's younger sister and her anarchistic friends
connote new values in the film. Chin's younger sister
rebels against traditional values. For example, she paints
her nails with green polish; she lives with her boyfriend
and aborts their child. Her group of anarchistic friends
also rebel against traditional values, such as authority, by
riding motorcycles at high speed in the restricted area in
front of the presidential office and by gathering in an
empty building which has a sign warning "no entrance." In
addition, Chin's younger sister's aspiration to go to Japan
shows her materialism, another tendency of modern society.2
To sum up, the younger generation's rebelliousness and
tendency toward materialism are used to depict new values in
conflict with traditional values in Yang's Taipei Story.
In Taipei Story, Yang not only shapes his character's
thoughts and behaviors to contrast the thematic binary pair
of new and old, but also uses occupations, locations,
setting, and costumes to concretize this contrast. Yang
highlights Lon's occupation and the location of his store to
stress that Lon is a traditional man. Lon runs an old-
fashioned fabric store in Taipei's western area. The
2Chin's Younger sister says:"Japan is so much fun. All
those nice, pretty things."
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7 9
traditional way of buying fabric to make clothes is
gradually eliminated in the industrialized Taipei where the
textile industry and the business of ready-made clothes
became prosperous after Taiwan's economy boomed. The
western area no longer thrived after the new business area,
the eastern area, flourished. Also, the place Lon usually
goes to kill time in the film is a KARAOKE club named
"Ginza" (a region in Tokyo) , which symbolizes the influence
of Japanese culture and a traditional life-style. The
Taiwanese songs adapted from Japanese melodies sung in the
club especially stress a nostalgia for an older era. Lon is
also shown dining at a traditional eatery beside a road.
However, Lon's costume is not as typical as Chin's and Ms.
Mei's which represent the industrial society. Therefore, it
is clear that Lon's out-of-date business in an out-of-date
area, the KARAOKE club, and the eatery, become eloquent
signifiers of his altitude towards tradition.
On the contrary, Chin is Ms. Mei's personal secretary
dealing with the architecture business and the computer
business, the two most prosperous businesses in Taiwan at
that time. The office building she works in is located in
eastern Taipei, which viewers can identify by the numerous
tall buildings and heavy traffic on the roads. Chin goes to
a pub, a westernized place, with her friends dressed in
suits and ties and makes a joke requiring knowledge of
English. Chin also goes to a disco with her younger sister,
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80
where a popular American song, "Foot Loose", is heard in the
background. Moreover, Chin's new apartment has westernized
furniture, a contemporary interior design, and modern
decorations which differ from her parents' old style house
with dim lighting, a courtyard, and an ancestor's portrait
on the wall. Chin's and Ms. Mei's suits and their
sunglasses are also a contrast to Chin's mother's
traditional Manchus gown.
The binary pairs contrasting traditional with modernist
valves in the film might best be summarized schematically as
follows:
New (Modem, Western) Old (Traditional)
Self-interest Altruism
Cruelty Friendliness
Immorality Benevolence
Rebellion Authority
Anti-patriarchy Patriarchy
Money and Profit Trust and Loyalty
Disco with American Pop Music KARAOKE with Taiwanese Song
Pub with Joke about English A Small Eatery beside Road
Suits, Sunglasses Manchus Gown
Apartment Old Style House
Architecture, Computer Business Fabric Store
Eastern Taipei Western Taipei
Basically, these motifs structuring the bourgeoisie's
difficulty in communicating and pain brought on by a
changing society are common to Expectation, That Day, on the
Beach, and Taipei Story. In Taipei Story, by means of Lon
and Chin's story, Yang constructs a thematic binary pair of
old and new, and reveals their psyches, especially their
frustration, alienation, and uncertainty, caused by their
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81
inability to communicate with each other and their inability
to adjust to the collision of new and old values in the
rapidly changing society. In the film, Chin and Lon's
failure in communicating is shown again and again. In one
scene, Chin comes home late, but Lon does not care about her
reason. Chin even asks Lon twice to ask herself why she is
late, but Lon fails to respond. Another example occurs when
Chin slaps Lon and asks him why he lies to her about meeting
his ex-wife secretly, but Lon does not answer. These
"questions without answers" often appear in Yang's films,
especially in Taipei Story, when Yang depicts the
uncommunicative relationships between men and women. In
addition, Lon and Chin quarrel because of their different
values. For example, Lon's lending money to Chin's father
and visiting his ex-wife are based on his respect for
friendship, which Chin does not value. Therefore, it is not
difficult to understand that Yang again places Taipei Story
in Taiwan's socioeconomic context to reveal the difficulty
of the middle class in communicating and struggling between
modern and traditional values.
Some sub-themes depicted in Taipei Story also can be
seen in Yang's previous films. The influences of Japanese
and American cultures is the first one. The Japanese
language spoken in the film, the KARAOKE club, and the neon
light of the advertisements of Japanese companies like Fu Ji
and Sony, reflect the invasion of Japanese culture. In
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82
terms of American culture, in addition to those examples
discussed before, the intention to emigrate to America is
the most obvious example.
The second sub-theme recurring in Yang's film is
uncertainty about the future and lack of direction. In
Taipei Story, most characters are portrayed as nostalgic and
unenthusiastic about their futures. Lon and Chin plan their
future around their marriage and hopes for emigration to
America. However, Lon takes a pessimistic view of his
future. He says that marriage and emigration are not
panaceas; they are "just a fleeting hope giving people an
illusion that they can start everything again."
The third sub-theme of Taipei Story, also developed in
Expectation and That Day, on the Beach, is Yang's interest
in employing women as subject matter. In Taipei Story, Chin
steps out of the domestic sphere and becomes a financially
independent woman. Compared to Jia Li, in That Day, on the
Beach, who has no financial independence and stays at home,
to a certain degree, Chin is more like a modern woman.
However, Chin still suffers in her relationship with men
(marriage). Chin emotionally relies on Lon. She often asks
for his opinions, protection, and companionship. Like he
does in That Day, on the Beach, in Taipei Story, Yang still
uses a traditional male point-of-view to portray Chin.
These three sub-themes make Taipei Story a film embodying
various aspects of modern Taipei.
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83
In Taipei Story, then, Yang avoids the traditional way
of feeding his audience frequent climaxes by adapting the
modernist attribute of subordinating plot to theme. Like
other modernist films concerned with bourgeois psychological
problems in an urban environment, Taipei Story deeply
penetrates the middle class' spiritual pain in modern
Taipei.
The cinematography in Yang's Taipei Story is also
different from that of first two films. In Taipei Story,
Yang consistently frames his characters in doorways,
windows, and mirrors, and continues employing compositions
to divide his characters in opposite frames in the same
scene to convey their alienated relationship.3 He also uses
the big windows of modern offices to reveal outside
skyscrapers in modern Taipei. This manipulation of
composition becomes a pattern in Taipei Story and in Yang's
later films.
Because there are so many scenes showing the characters
framed in doorways, windows, and mirrors in the film, it is
only necessary to discuss significant examples. For
instance, in the beginning of the film, a shot reveals that
Lon and Chin stand in front of a French window in an empty
apartment where Chin will move in. At the same time, it
seems to be a foreshadowing of Lon's and Chin's inability to
3Edwin Huang, "Edward Yang's Taipei Story," United
Daily News 5 Feb. 1985.
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84
communicate, because they are divided into two frames by the
middle frame of the window and become visually separated in
the same scene. Another clear example of this pattern of
composition in the film is the shot which shows Chin talking
to her architect colleague, Ko, who invites Chin to have a
drink. Implying their impossibility of developing an
affair, the composition of the scene is designed with Chin
on the right side framed by a door, and Ko on the left side
framed by a window. In addition to these two examples, in
Chin's father's old house in western Taipei, in Chin's
modern apartment, and in her modern office, there are
numerous shots designed according to this kind of
composition.
Having his characters stand in front of big windows and
using the window to reveal the Taipei landscape outside is
another of Yang's characteristics in Taipei Story. In fact,
this pattern can also be seen in Yang's That Day, on the
Beach. However, in that film, Yang only once exploits it,
when Ching stands in front of a big window at a hotel,
recalling her past. In Taipei Story, in Chin's office
building, in the tea house where Chin talks with Ms. Mei,
and in Ms. Mei's new empty office building, the windows are
like a backdrop revealing tall modern buildings and many
building projects in progress. Following the characters'
movement in front of the windows, Yang subtly introduces
Taipei's landscapes in the background.
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85
Besides the patterns of composition discussed above,
Yang applies lines to manipulate the visual images. For
example, a scene showing Chin and Ko peeping out at others
from behind Venetian blinds is visually cut apart by the
horizontal lines of the Venetian blinds. Another example is
when Lon and Mr. Lai stand behind a safety net at a baseball
court. The image is covered by diagonal lines from the net.
This sort of manipulation casts some shots of the film with
a formalist style of composition not seen in Yang's first
two films.
Compared with Yang's previous two works, Taipei Story
is more formalist in terms of its thematic structure and its
manipulation of its composition and images. These aim to
foreground the film's aesthetic. Almost all elements of the
film, namely the directing of characters' behavior and
thoughts, choosing of locations and setting, revealing
Taipei's landscapes, and so on, mainly aim to subordinate
theme to form. As the strategy is employed over and over,
it is difficult to miss Yang's intention of making the form
of the structure apparent. Besides, the pattern of
composition and manipulation of images liberate Yang from
the realist style he exhibits in his first films for a more
formalist style which stresses the director's self-conscious
recognition of form. According to Kolker's observation,
"the work of art and how it was perceived became the focus
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86
of attention in modernist works of art."4 Consequently,
Yang does exhibit modernist characteristics in Taipei Story.
Regarding the narration of Taipei Story, it is not like
the complicated structure of That Day, on the Beach, but
primarily follows traditional causality and continuity.5
The only violation of the traditional narration in Taipei
Story is shown in the sequence depicting Chin being told by
her new boss that the company does not need her anymore. In
the sequence, Chin is shown in her new boss' office, and
before their conversation is finished, the scene cuts to
another shot showing Chin standing in front of the office
building, thinking. Then, the shot cuts back to continue
the conversation to indicate Chin's memory of the
conversation. This is the only departure from traditional
narration in Taipei Story.
Again, Yang chooses the same realist approach to
performance in Taipei Story, although the big stars
appearing in That Day, on the Beach are not seen in Taipei
Story, which casts both professional and non-professional
actors. The leading protagonists are singer, Chin Tsai, and
New Cinema director, Hsiao-Hsien Hou.6 Traditional,
4Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary
International Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press,
Inc., 1983) 123.
s Tung Wa, "Phenomenon, Taipei, 1984," Film Appreciation
Monthly May 1985: 4-10.
6 After performing in Taipei Story, Tsai Chin became
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87
exaggerated performances are avoided to prevent undue
sentimentalism. All of the characters are played as lacking
emotion most of the time. Sometimes even the way they speak
is very passionless and in whispered tones, as if they are
speaking to themselves. The violence of two sequences-one
showing that Lon is killed and one showing the fight between
Lon and his friend's gambling wife--is conveyed by distant
long shots, so as not to emphasize it. Yang also mixes
different languages (Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese) to
adhere to the realist style also prevalent in That Day, on
the Beach.
To sum up, in terms of the content of Taipei Story,
like his first two films, Yang places his third film in a
socioeconomic context to depict a modernist subject matter
which examines bourgeois frustration and alienation
resulting from the failure of communication and the struggle
between new and old values in modernized Taipei. At the
same time, the influence of foreign cultures, the
characters' uncertainty about their future, and the
portrayal of women become recurrent topics in Yang's films.
Regarding the form of the film, generally speaking, the
selection of occupation, location, setting, and costume in
Taipei Story is well designed to convey the thematic binary
Yang's wife. In order to reduce film budgets and break the
myths of stardom, the New Directors preferred to use non
professional actors and performed in another each other's
films.
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88
pair of tradition versus modernization. Yang makes these
elements function as signifiers of many different metaphors.
In addition, Yang develops a pattern of composition which is
not seen in his previous works to convey people's isolation
and to reveal Taipei's landscape. As a result, except the
anti-sentimentalist performance style and traditional
narration which appeals to a sense of realism, the form of
Taipei Story is more manipulated and apparent than it is in
Expectation and That Day, on the Beach. Since foregrounding
form is a modernist attribute, Taipei Story is a modernist
film. As it carries the label of "high art," it is not
surprising that the film was not appreciated by large
audiences and stopped running after only four days because
of bad box-office. To borrow from Wollen's article about
Godard's modernist cinema, the word "unpleasure,"7 seems to
be suitable for describing Yang's Taipei Story, as well.
7Peter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est,"
Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods. vol.2 (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985) 506.
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89
Chapter 6
Terrorizer
In 1986, at the end of Taiwan's New Cinema Movement,
only Yang's fourth film, Terrorizer, and very few other New
Cinema films still attracted Taiwanese mass media and
critical attention. Although Yang did not enjoy great
popularity with the local film market, he established his
international reputation after winning the Silver Leopard
Award at Switzerland's Lucarno Film Festival for Terrorizer.
This film is strongly modernist in both form and content.
Through a deliberate manipulation of modernist techniques
emphasizing the form of the work, Terrorizer portrays a
favorite modernist theme--the middle class' problems of
searching for personal transcendence in the dangerous modern
city. The purpose of this chapter is to apply theories of
modernism discussed earlier to articulate the modernist
manifestations in Terrorizer. In addition, as it has been
done in previous chapters, Terrorizer will be compared and
contrasted with Yang's previous works to trace the
development of Yang's personal film style.
Compared with Yang's previous films, unlike the
traditional linear narration of Taipei Story, the narration
of Terrorizer is as complicated as that of That Day, on the
Beach. However, in Terrorizer, Yang does not focus on
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90
manipulating time as he does in That Day, on the Beach, but
pays more attention to structuring the story by intercutting
different lines of action that occur in different places
simultaneously and seem to have a minimal relationship with
each other at the beginning of the film. Following the
development of the plot, the different lines are gradually
woven together and culminate in a tragic ending. This
narration of multiple diegesis in the beginning of Yang's
Terrorizer and the non-linear narration in the rest of the
film are modernist attributes divorced from traditional
linear narration depicting a story by one chain of cause and
effect, and from the priority of traditional narration
following spatial and temporal continuity.1 The following
analysis includes a synopsis of the film and an analysis of
its narration.
In the beginning of the film, there are four main lines
which seem to depict different stories individually.
Line 1:
There is a gunfight one early morning, when the police break
up a gambling party. A young man with a habit of
photography goes to the scene of the crime to take pictures.
According to Fredric Jameson's "Remapping Taipei," he
indicates that Terrorizer embodies modernist attributes.
The narrative of synchronous monadic simultaneity, for
example, is seen by James as "a specifically modernist
phenomenon" in the film. Fredric Jameson, "Remapping
Taipei," New Chinese Cinema, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge: the
Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1994) 119.
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9 1
He takes Bastard's (one of the gamblers) picture when she is
jumping from the second floor to escape from the police.
The young man later quarrels with his girlfriend and moves
out of his girlfriend's place because she is upset that he
sticks Bastard's pictures all over the wall.
Line 2:
Bastard is imprisoned at home by her mother after she is
hospitalized because of the leg injury caused by jumping
from the balcony. At home, she makes numerous prank phone
calls. For example, she pretends that she commits suicide
or reports false fires to the fire brigade.
Line 3:
Chou is a novelist who is tired of the monotonous life with
her husband. Under the pressure of feeling uninspired to
write her new novel, she decides to give up it and start a
new life by working for her ex-lover. Not long afterwards
she has an affair with her ex-lover.
Line 4:
Li, Chou's husband, is a medical lab technician blackmailing
his friend to get a chance at promotion.
These four lines depict four stories intercut together.
In the beginning, they seem to have a minimal relationship
until the plot is further developed and gradually is braided
together. After the quarrel with his girlfriend, the young
man then rents and moves to an apartment where the gambling
joint was, now remodeled after the gunfight. One of the
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92
phone calls made by Bastard is to Li, but is answered by his
wife, Chou. Bastard pretends that she is having an affair
with Li, and wants to talk to Chou in person. On the phone,
Bastard gives Chou an address where the gambling joint
actually was, but is now the young man's darkroom. Chou
goes there and sees the young man. Perhaps realizing that
she has been deceived, she leaves without talking to him.
These three events--the young man renting the apartment,
Bastard calling Chou, and Chou going to the apartment--can
be seen as the first meeting of lines one, two, and three.
Then line two continues with Bastard's escape from home
after she recovers from her injury. After she kills her
patron in a hotel (she earns her life as a prostitute) , she
goes to the apartment (she has the key) and unexpectedly
meets the young man. From their conversation, the young man
learns that Bastard tricked Chou. The encounter of the
young man and Bastard can be seen as the integration of
lines one and two.
Line three follows Chou, who may have been inspired by
Bastard's phone call, and who writes her new novel depicting
an anonymous phone call destroying a marriage and a husband
committing suicide after killing his wife. Her novel gets
first prize and is published in the newspaper with Chou's
photo.
The young man recognizes Chou by seeing her photo in
the newspaper and realizes that Chou's novel may become a
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93
tragedy in real life. At this point, the young man's
recognition of the truth braids lines one, two and three
together. Afraid that Chou's fiction may become tragedy,
the young man informs Chou's husband, Li. At this moment,
line four is added into the "narrative braid" of the film.
From now on, the four different lines join together.
Intercutting with the other lines, line four shows Li
not getting a promotion, although he blackmails his friend.
After he gets the information from the young man, he thinks
that Chou's leaving him is because of the anonymous phone
call that is described in Chou's novel, and he tries to win
her back, but in vain. With the failure of his career and
his marriage, he takes a step toward tragedy. The ending is
ambiguous and will be discussed in detail later.
Terrorizer, is structured by intercutting and weaving four
main story lines together. Applying Wollen and Siska's
theory of modernism, this non-linear narration,
discontinuity, and fragmentation in Terrorizer are modernist
characteristics violating the single linear narration which
obeys a unitary homogeneous continuity in traditional films.
Besides, compared to the traditional film, the discontinuous
and fragmented narration is not easy to follow. This
challenges the spectators' intelligence, because they have
to organize these pieces of the "narrative puzzle" together
by themselves, unlike traditional films which place the
spectators in a passive position and feed them an easily
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94
understood story. The invitation to participate in and to
contemplate the action almost takes away the common
audiences' viewing pleasure.
In addition to the experimental approach of the
narration in Terrorizer, another experimental tactic is
Yang's manipulation of sound. In Yang's first film,
Expectation, Yang deviates from the conventional emphasis on
the coherence of sound and image. Although Yang does not
particularly manipulate sound to the same effect in That
Day, on the Beach and Taipei Story, he pushes the limits of
sound design in Terrorizer.
First, off-screen sound is used in Terrorizer. For
example, the gunfight is not shown on the screen, but only
heard. The images shown, such as a woman washing clothes on
a balcony, and a big gas tank in Taipei's landscape,
substitute for images of the gunfight. The shot-reverse-
shots of characters in conversation are also avoided. When
two characters have a conversation, usually one of them is
off-screen. The one who is not seen is known through the
sound of his/her voice and dialogue. By using off-screen
sound effects, the audiences are invited to imagine the
mi s s ing image s.
Second, the sound of one scene is often continued into
the next scene to convey the simultaneity of disparate
events. For example, the song, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,"
is heard in the scene showing Bastard's mother playing the
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95
album, and is continued as nondiegetic music in the next
scene showing the young man quarreling with his girlfriend.
Another example occurs when Bastard calls her friend who
works in a night club; his suggestion that she hide in his
club is heard on the soundtrack, but the image on the screen
is of the police investigating the landlord in the gambling
joint. Also, when the young man's girlfriend describes
Chou's new novel to him, her narration continues as the
image cuts to the next scene showing Chou meeting Li in a
cafeteria. This effect not only breaks the established rule
strictly requiring the coherence of sound and image to
strengthen verisimilitude, but also is used as a transition
between different lines of narration.
A third experiment using sound effects in Terrorizer
occurs when the young man's girl friend is seen lying in an
ambulance, and at the same time, a voice-over is heard--"I
am so hurt, I don't want to live anymore, really..."--which
seems to be the girl's will. However, the scene is
immediately followed by a scene showing Bastard making a
prank phone call. If the spectators consider the voice-over
to be the girl' s will, they may be misreading the scene.
Although the sound and image seem to cohere in this
sequence, actually Yang manipulates the effect to tell two
events, the girl's suicide and Bastard's game, at the same
time. The sound manipulation in Terrorizer is based on the
incoherence of image and sound, which is anti-traditional
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96
and challenges the transparent classical style. As this
experimental approach to sound effects in Terrorizer clearly
shows Yang's self-conscious manipulation, the film
corresponds to another modernist attribute emphasizing that
the manipulation of the work must be perceived.
As is the manipulation of sound effects in Terrorizer
perceived, so is the manipulation of images. Since Yang's
first film, he has been trying to direct the audience's
attention to the images which replace dialogue to tell a
story. In Terrorizer, Yang uses a series of montage
sequences to tell the story. The quarrel between the young
man and his girlfriend is depicted by editing a series of
short shots. In the sequence, the shot of Bastard's
enlarged picture on the wall indicates that the young man is
interested in her after taking her picture. Following are
some shots showing that his girlfriend destroys Bastard's
pictures, revealing her jealousy. Instead of the
traditional manner of representing a quarrel by physical
fighting and profanity, a series of shots are juxtaposed to
convey the conflict, such as a poster of Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton quarreling in The Taming of the Shrew, a
hand shoving books to the floor, a box of film negative
overturning, and a swinging red bulb. With no dialogue and
no ambient sound, the tension of the quarrel is built up by
the series of images and followed by the climax of the song,
"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," growing more agitated and louder.
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97
In addition, when the young man calls Li and reveals to him
Bastard's game, since the viewers know the story from the
omniscient point-of-view of the narration, in order to avoid
redundancy, Yang does not let the young man tell the story
verbally. The young man's words are transferred and
condensed into some pictures showing the police breaking up
the gambling joint, Bastard's pictures, and the images of
Chou's visiting him and Chou's novel published in the
newspaper. These images explain that the young man knows
the truth and tells everything to Li. Yang also uses images
to describe that Bastard is imprisoned by her mother. A
series of shots of different windows and doors with iron
bars,2 the locks on doors, and even the lock on the
telephone, are employed to connote the imprisonment. This
kind of visual narration may not be strange in other
national cinemas, but it can be seen as an innovation of
film language in Taiwan. As noticed before, this style also
can be seen in Yang's previous films, but is more obvious in
Terrorizer. The anti-traditional and manipulative editing
of a series of shots as a non-verbal means to tell a story
and to convey metaphors shows that Yang avoids the realism
and objectivity of long takes and long shots employed in his
previous films, but rather employs a more subjective way to
direct the viewer's attention to the images in Terrorizer.
2Windows and doors with iron bars are used for the
prevention of burglary in Taiwan, but now become a
connotation of prison in the film.
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98
This style becomes another modernist characteristic in the
film.
In terms of another visual element, lighting effects,
Yang uses low-key lighting to convey the characters'
insecurity, uncertainty, loneliness, and sins. Bastard and
her mother' s home, Li and Chou' s home, the young man' s
darkroom, and the hotel room where Bastard earns her living
as a prostitute, are primarily set with low-key lighting.
For Bastard, her home is her prison and a place where she
becomes a terrorizer to cheat people and to destroy a
marriage by making phone calls. For Bastard's mother, the
home is the place where she nostalgically listens to "Smoke
Gets in Your Eyes" to think of her missing American husband
who abandoned his wife and daughter.3 Accordingly, in order
to convey Bastard's isolation and sins, and her mother's
nostalgia and grudge, their home is set with low-key
lighting.
Li and Chou's home is dark as well. Li and Chou's
uncommunicative relationship is conveyed by the dim bedroom.
Chou's den is a place symbolizing the failure of her career.
She is shown to have no inspiration for writing her new
novel. She destroys her draft papers, picks up the habit of
3Jameson observes that Bastard's American father is a
signifier of U.S. servicemen and of the U.S. empire in
Taiwan, where the Japanese colony and the KMT colony were
located too. See Jameson 136.
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99
smoking again, and cries. The low-key lighting of the den
represents Chou's depression and insecurity.
The young man's dark room is also a place representing
his uncertainty and emptiness. He is the archetype of the
Taiwanese youth in modern society, supported by a rich
family, having no definite plans for the future, and relying
on material and sensual activities, such as an expensive
habit--photography, and love affairs, to fill up his empty
days. He moves to the apartment which he transforms into a
dark room after breaking up with his girlfriend. Later,
when Bastard goes back to the apartment, he has a short
romance with her until she leaves him without saying good
bye and goes off with another man. Consequently, to convey
the young man's suffering from loneliness, uncertainty and
betrayal, the dark room is lit with obscured lighting.
Inside the hotels where Bastard works as a prostitute and
kills her customer is another example of using low-key
lighting to imply sin. The manipulation of lighting effects
used to connote the characters' psyches--especially the low-
key lighting employed to convey frustration, emptiness, and
sin--is a revolutionary approach in Taiwan's New Cinema
Movement, because it goes beyond the traditional use of
light only for illumination. Undoubtedly, Yang's
manipulation of lighting effects raises the use of this
cinematic element from a technical to an aesthetic level.
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100
The ambiguous ending of the film is one more
revolutionary approach violating the clear and singular
conclusion of traditional films. The ending shows that Li
drinks with his police friend and stays at his home that
night. The next morning Li wakes up and looks at himself in
a mirror in the bathroom. The next sequence shows Li's boss
going to work, but is gunned down beside his car (the
murderer is off-screen). Then, the sequence cuts to Li's
police friend waking up and finding that his gun is missing.
The next sequence depicts Li shooting his wife's ex-lover at
his home, pointing the gun at his wife, but finally shooting
a mirror instead. The following sequence depicts Li's
police friend saying that the two victims are all right at
the hospital, and Li bringing Bastard to the hotel. As soon
as the police break the hotel door open, the sound of
shooting is heard and a shot of blood on the wall is seen.
Then the film cuts to a sequence showing that both the
police friend at home and Chou in bed with her ex-lover are
awakened by the sound of gunfire. The police friend finds
that Li has shot himself in the bathroom, and Chou acts as
if she were vomiting. This open ending invites the
spectators to interpret the ending by various readings. Li
may kill his boss, Chou's ex-lover, and Bastard. He may
commit suicide. The whole terrible revenge may be only
Chou's dream. Chou's vomiting may indicate her pregnancy.
This land of ambiguous ending is one of the characteristics
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101
of a modernist style. According to Siska and Wollen's
theory of modernism discussed earlier, modernist films
basically are an art of aperture which "prove a kind of
'surplus' of meaning".4 It is useless to argue which ending
is the correct one, because Terrorizer challenges the
conventions which put the audience in the passive position
of accepting a single resolution offered by directors of
traditional films which employ closure. Terrorizer's ending
is open to different interpretations. Thus, the open ending
is one more modernist trait in Terrorizer.
Reflexivity is another modernist attribute used to
foreground the process of filmmaking to remind viewers that
the film is only a film, and not reality itself, and to
encourage viewers to think and to judge what is seen and
heard by what is not seen and not heard. In Terrorizer,
Yang reveals the process of creating Chou's new novel. Chou
is inspired by an event of daily life, but does not record
reality. The young man's girlfriend says:"novels are
fiction, can't you distinguish the difference between
fiction and reality?" Chou also says, "a novel is a novel;
do not take it too seriously." Although Yang does not
directly foreground the filmmaking process, by means of
showing the process of Chou's creating her novel, Yang
implies that writing is a metaphor for filming, and asks his
4Wollen 505.
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102
spectator to understand that Terrorizer is only a film. Is
the film reality? Modernist filmmakers consider that
reality arises from a process of intellect rather than from
emotional identification. Other of Yang's reflexive
strategies include the shot of huge movie billboards on a
Taipei street populated by movie theaters, and the scene
showing a landlord complaining about someone delivering
fifty lunch-boxes to the apartment for the film crew.5
These elements remind the audience that they are watching a
film and emphasize the existence of the film as a practice.6
As far as the content of Terrorizer is concerned, like
most film titles, which usually point out the theme of the
film, the title of Terrorizer can be seen as the first
indication of its theme. Like most modernists who
illustrate the dark side of modern cities, which are the
root of corruption and sin, through his view finder, Yang
observes that Taipei is also a dangerous city filled with
terrorizers. Although the title indicates a singular
terrorizer, in fact, in the film everyone threatens each
other--all are terrorizers. Li is a terrorizer, because he
5Markus Nornes, "The Terrorizer," Film Quarterly 42.3
(Spring 1989): 45-47.
6Jameson also points out that the theme of Terrorizer is
"the now-archaic modernity"--art versus life, the novel and
reality, mimesis and irony. The correspondence of Chou's
novel to the realities of the real world outside in the film
is read by Jameson as reflexivity, another modernist feature
in the film. See Jameson 123.
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1 0 3
blackmails his friend and kills his boss, Chou's ex-lover.
Bastard is a terrorizer, because her phone call destroys a
marriage, and because she kills people. Chou's ex-lover is
another terrorizer, because he has an affair with a married
woman and causes her marriage to fail. The young man is a
terrorizer, too. His camera is a displaced signifier of a
gun, a fatal weapon, when he uses it to point at a dog, and
when he mentions that his good eye for the camera will also
make him an excellent marksman. Li's boss is a terrorizer.
That he asks Li to take care of the business until the real
director is posted gives Li hope for promotion. However,
the boss does not pick Li as the real director. Li's boss
gives him hope and then turns him down and ruins his life.
This cynical but honest view of modern people and modern
cities is another modernist characteristic betraying the
harmony and ideal Utopias of traditional escapism.
In Terrorizer, Yang also repeats one of the most
significant motifs appearing in his previous films--the
portrayal of Taipei's middle class' in search of personal
fulfillment, meaning, and transcendence. The characters are
unable to deal with their careers and their marriages, which
in Yang's films, are the two crucial providers of meaning
for the Taipei bourgeoisie. Yang's characters in Terrorizer
again suffer mental and emotional frustration, anxiety,
uncertainty, and insecurity--resulting from unsuccessful
careers and uncommunicative marriages. It is rare to see
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1 0 4
passion, energy, hope, confidence or happiness in the film.
Chou and Li are panicked throughout the entire film. Chou
shows her first and only smile in the film when she is
interviewed on television after she receives an award for
her novel. Since Li feels insecure about his promotion, he
blackmails his friend, but still loses the position.
Ironically, the only smile appearing on Li's typically
expressionless face is shown when he lies to his police
friend about the promotion. Accordingly, Yang implies that
to pursue fulfillment through career success has become the
primary goals in the life of Taipei's middle class. If they
are unable to win in the competitive modern city, they are
in a panic.
In addition, the crisis of marriage caused by an
uncommunicative relationship is another aspect of Yang's
portrayal of Taipei's middle class. The alienated
relationship between Li and Chou is suggested by contrasting
Chou searching for new beginnings (getting married,
expecting a baby, writing novels, and leaving Li), and Li's
preferring his monotonous life (staying at the same job and
washing his hands routinely become signifiers of Li's
unchangeable life). The distance between Li and Chou is
also indicated when Li's boss asks him about Chou's new
novel. Li replies:"You got me, I never read [her] novels";
and when Chou says that Li has never asked about her
relationship with her ex-lover, it does not mean that he
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1 0 5
trusts her, but that "he never seems to have cared."
Instead of portraying a hero's adventures as in traditional
films, Yang employs a pessimistic point-of-view to represent
Taipei's middle class' internal conflicts and crushing
defeats when they confront the crises of career and
marriage. Apparently, Terrorizer embodies a modernist theme
examining the bourgeoisie' psychological problems in the
modern era.
By applying theories of modernism to Yang's fourth
film, Terrorizer, it is obvious that it is his most
modernist film up to this point.7 Non-linear narration had
been used in That Day, on the Beach, but in Terrorizer, Yang
7Jameson not only indicates some modernist attributes in
Terrorizer, but also offers another reading of the film from
a post-modernist perspective. For example, he indicates
that Li is a figuration of the "national allegory," whose
failure in his career connotes that Taiwan, a post-Third
World country, can never really join the First World in this
period of late capitalism (Jameson 142) . Besides, Jameson
offers another reading about the ambiguous ending. Jameson
argues that to interpret the meaning of the ending is not
important. In post-modernist films, the subjects are
significantly weakened and the aesthetic of textuality or of
segmentation is more important. Film becomes an
organization of an immense set of variations and
recombinations emphasizing vision, not meaning.
Accordingly, Jameson considers that the ending is post
modernist (Jameson 145). Additionally, Jameson points out
that "modernism is temporal and postmodernism spatial."
From this point-of-view, he indicates that Terrorizer is
like an anthology of enclosed apartments or even individual
rooms, and demonstrates the relationship between the film
and post-modernism (Jameson 147).
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1 0 6
manipulates the narration by intercutting four different
storylines and sophisticatedly braiding them together step
by step until the different lines relate to each other and
complete the film. This fragmentary style of narration
highlights the manipulation of spatial and temporal
continuity. The ambiguous ending violates the traditional
style of closure and encourages the audience's imagination
and participation. The sound effects reject any principle
requiring the coherence of sound and image and instead
experiment with diverse possibilities. Additionally, a
series of shots edited together to be used as visual
narration is another characteristic of the film. Low-key
lighting is employed to signify the dark side of the mind,
such as insecurity and frustration. These anti-traditional
and self-conscious manipulations of form and the revelation
of these manipulations categorize Terrorizer as a modernist
film. In addition, the modernist idea of reflexivity is
suggested by showing the process of creating a novel, an
implied parallel to showing the process of making a film.
Honestly portraying the modern city filled with terrorizers,
and pointing out the middle class' internal conflicts and
crushing defeats resulting from the crises of career and
marriage in the modern era, Yang repeats the recurrent
themes appearing in his previous films and establishes his
modernist film style.
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1 0 7
Chapter 7
A Brighter Summer Day
When the Taiwanese New Cinema Movement declined after
1986, many major New Directors gave up feature filmmaking to
teach film at schools and to make commercials for
television, while some were forced to change professions
because of lack of financial support. Yang, nevertheless,
established his own film studio in 1989, and continues to
make feature films. Having been planned for several years
after Yang's Terrorizer, A Brighter Summer Day was made in
1991. The film, about youth culture in the 60's, was
deliberately promoted by publishing the script and selling
the sound track. At the same time, the Japanese copyright
was sold even before the film was completed, a profitable
situation rarely seen in the Taiwanese film market. This
chapter will analyze many aspects of Yang's fifth film, A
Brighter Summer Day. Yang's recurring themes of human
uncertainty and anxiety, economic and political issues, the
influence of foreign cultures, and the portrayal of women,
will be discussed. In addition, the narration and the
cinematic form of the film will also be examined. Besides
these themes, how the content and the form are related to
Yang's previous films, and how they are associated with
modernism will also be addressed.
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1 0 8
The Chinese title of A Brighter Summer Day is A Youth’s
Murder Incident at Kulin Street, which more directly
indicates the story of the film. Yang is inspired by a real
murder in Kulin Street in Taipei in 1961 when he was at the
same junior high school as the fourteen-year-old youth. A
Brighter Summer Day describes a youth, Ssu, who was born
into a middle class family, but whose parents still worry
about their lives because of the social turmoil in the 60's.
Under the KMT's dictatorship, or "white terror", Ssu's
father is arrested and released. Ssu falls in love with a
girl schoolmate, Ming, whose mother earns her living as a
housekeeper after Ming's father dies. Ssu is jealous and
finally kills Ming, because Ming dates many boys, such as
Ma, one of Ssu's classmates and a commander's son, when
Ming's mother works for Ma's family. The film also
describes the fighting between two youth gangs, the Little
Park and the Two-One-Seven. The leader of the Little Park,
Honey, is Ming's ex-boyfriend, but he leaves her and hides
in southern Taiwan after he kills his rival for Ming, Red
Hair, the leader of the Two-One-Seven. With no leaders, the
two gangs contend for the territory and privilege of holding
a Rock and Roll concert. Honey is murdered by the Two-One
Seven when he comes back for the concert. For revenge, The
Little Park allies with a Taiwanese gang to attack The Two-
One-Seven by surprise on the night of a typhoon.
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1 0 9
However, to read A Brighter Summer Day as a film only
depicting a murder caused by a love entanglement and youth
gangs' fight for leadership is superficial and simplifies
the richness of the film. Yang's point by means of the
murder incident and gang fighting is to advance the theme of
uncertainty and anxiety about the future in 1960's Taiwan.
The theme of the film is revealed in the preamble, which
states
Around 1949, millions of Chinese followed the KMT
to retreat to Taiwan. Most of them only asked for
a steady job, and a stable environment for their
children. However, in the children's experience
of growth, they found that their parents were
living in uncertainty and in anxiety about their
future. Under the anxious circumstances, these
youths usually countered their weakness by forming
gangs.
The plot of the murder incident and gang fighting are
signifiers of the general population's conflicts and defeats
in the anxiety-ridden Taiwanese society resulting from
economic and political instability and from the invasion of
different types of cultures.1 "The uncertainty and anxiety
about the future" and "the anxious circumstances" are key
1Since this theme is very apparent, there are many film
critics depicting the same idea. For example, Yang Chao,
"Are Both Murderer and Victim Innocent?" Cinedossier:
Chinese Films. Number 3: Edward Yang Taipei Golden Horse
International Film Festival Executive Committee, ed.,
(Taipei: China Times Publishing Company, 1991): 40-43. Wei
Chueh, "The Entanglement of A Brighter Summer Day, "
Imaaekeeper Monthly Sep. 1991: 176-78.
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110
words of the preamble, and the themes to which Yang really
turns his attention.
The 60's was a chaotic decade. After WWII, the new
social order and the political situation changed
international relationships. World-wide disorder and
international anxiety continued even until the 60's. In the
U.S., the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and the ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War, challenged
the complacency of post-war prosperity. The popularity of
Rock and Roll is another example of how American youths
expressed their anxiety and their anti-authority sentiments.
In 1968, Britain and France underwent a series of student
movements agitated by disparate ideologies. The Soviet
communists attacked Czechoslovakia to strengthen their world
leadership. The Chinese communists succeeded in developing
nuclear weapons, supported the Vietnam War and launched the
Cultural Revolution in 1966.
This international chaos influenced Taiwan. During
WWII, Taiwan was bombed terribly by the Allied troops in
order to cut off Japan's military supplies. Because long
term Japanese colonization, war, and a power struggle
between political parties destroyed Taiwan, the island was
in ruins and needed to be rebuilt. The greatest flooding
disaster in Taiwan's history occurred in 1959 and was
another reason for the poverty in the 60's. In the face of
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I l l
unbearable poverty, officers' corruption became commonplace.
Politically, the KMT instituted a dictatorship emphasizing
the hostility of the Chinese communists and placed the
country under martial law, therefore covering Taiwan in a
cloud of "white terror" like McCarthyism in America.
Culturally, in the 60's in Taiwan, people lived in fear of
losing their identity and their direction for the future.
After years of waiting, those who came from China still
could not go back, so they lost their identity and their
sense of hope. The native Taiwanese people lost their
identity, too, because they had been governed by different
types of governments and cultures. Since the relationship
between Taiwan and America was strengthening because of
American financial and military support, the overwhelming
Americanization in the 60's strongly influenced Taiwanese
(Chinese) culture. Watching Hollywood films, listening to
Rock and Roll, eating American food, and learning and
speaking English became a mainstay of upper- and middle-
class life. In 1960, Contemporary Literature was published
to introduce modernist literary works. In 1966, the first
radio program especially for Rock and Roll, "The Youth's
Songs", was broadcast.
The purpose of introducing the conditions in Taiwan in
the 60's is to establish a necessary understanding of the
social and historical background for analyzing the economic,
political and cultural issues in Yang's A Brighter Summer
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112
Day and to further explain how these issues affect Yang's
characters.
In A Brighter Summer Day, Yang's characters' anxiety-
first arise from the problems of livelihood. Yang again
chooses a bourgeois family as his subject matter. Ssu was
born into a bourgeois family where the father works for the
government and the mother is a teacher. However, Ssu's
parents still feel insecure about their jobs. The father
has to be "flexible," as his friend calls it, and follow his
colleagues' corruption, or be set up by a political
conspiracy. The mother also depends on a privileged friend
to keep her teaching job. In order to buy glasses for Ssu,
the father has to quit smoking to save money. Ssu and his
elder brother use a closet as their bedroom.
The critical economic situation in the 60's is also
represented by Ming's family. After her soldier father
dies, her sick mother is unable to pay for medicine. The
military dependents' village where Ming and her mother live
is the picture of poverty--narrow spaces, dirty public
facilities, and chickens running everywhere. The frequent
power failures in the film also connote the poverty of the
society at that time. Although Yang does not focus
specifically on how the middle class struggles for a decent
life, by means of job instability, the shortage of money,
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and impoverished surroundings, he does convey their
frustration and insecurity about economic difficulties.
In Taiwan, after the lifting of martial law in 1987,
the political issue which was taboo for every Taiwanese
person, including filmmakers because of censorship, was
enthusiastically examined in many films, including Yang's A
Brighter Summer Day, one of the deepest explorations of the
"white terror" in the 60's. The nervous atmosphere of the
decade is conveyed by scenes showing military jeeps and
tanks driving past the bus which Ssu and his family take,
and a group of soldiers walking through the background of
the poolroom where youth gangsters play snooker. In order
to convey the KMT's obsession with counter-attacking the
communists, the word "revolution" is seen on a wall that Ssu
and Ming jump over to cut class. When Ssu meets another
girl, Tsui, in front of a theater, a song about killing
communists is heard as background music. The only newspaper
in the library is The Central Daily News published by the
KMT (evidence of the KMT's monopolization of mass media);
and singing the national anthem (actually a song honoring
the KMT) before a Rock and Roll concert, become metaphors of
the KMT's dictatorship. That Ssu's father is arrested and
released by The Garrison Command also implies a political
conspiracy.
Another example revealing the political climate is the
ironic portrayal of the harmonious relationship between
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1 1 4
Taiwanese people and people of "the Other Provinces". Ssu's
mother encourages her husband to give up working for the
government and to cooperate with a Taiwanese businessman.
Also, the leader of the Little Park, Honey, from the second
generation of "the Other Provinces," gets along well with
Taiwanese gangsters. Honey even stresses that his Taiwanese
dialect is as good as his Mandarin. This kind of
relationship ironically indicates that "the Other Provinces"
and their next generation gradually accept their historical
fate and identify Taiwan as their home, while the
government, the KMT, still sees Taiwan as its colony--
sacrificing the Taiwanese people's standard of living to
strengthen its political power (or Chiang Kaishek's personal
power) so that it can be reinstated in Mainland China.
Consequently, the KMT's bureaucracy is conveyed by the
bureaucratic attitude of the dean dismissing Ssu from
school, the Commander's wife shouting at police in the
station, and the warden tossing a tape in a garbage can
which he promised Little Elvis (Ssu's classmate) he would
give to imprisoned Ssu. Breaking the political taboo
previously forbidden by the KMT, Yang portrays the anxious
political atmosphere of anti-Communist fervor and "white
terror" and reveals people's resulting uncertainty and
helplessness.
Yang does not forget to point out the diverse
influences on Taiwanese culture. The Japanese songs and
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Japanese houses are evidence of the influence of Japanese
culture. The different accents of dialects and the Peking
opera heard from the radio suggest another culture coming
from Mainland China. Generally speaking, at that time, the
modernization of many countries was equivalent to
westernization, and westernization was almost equivalent to
Americanization. This overpowering American influence is
explicated in A Brighter Summer Day. Little Elvis laughs at
Ssu's sister's Americanization when she takes a shower in
the morning (Taiwanese usually take showers or baths before
going to bed). Ssu's imitation of a cowboy in the Health
Center dramatizes the popularity of the American western.
The American national flags in the cafeteria, the American
chocolate eaten in the theater, and Ssu's sister's going to
church, are also examples. Moreover, the sequence showing a
Chinese teacher criticizing English as inferior to the
Chinese language indicates the conflict between these two
cultures. Little Elvis' idolization of the real Elvis, and
the popularity of the Rock and Roll concert, also exemplify
the admiration of American culture in the 60's. In short,
Taiwan was influenced by different kinds of cultures, and
people succumbed to the influence of foreign culture and
lost their identity.
In this tumultuous environment, people's psyches are
once again portrayed in many ways. Ssu's mother ironically
questions her husband:"Do you really think that our lives
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1 1 6
are steady and secure?" Ssu's sister depends on God to calm
her desperation. Ssu's brother and the young gangsters
escape the sense of emptiness by gambling and fighting.
Like characters in Yang's previous films, Ssu expects a
steady love affair with Ming to alleviate his feelings of
aimlessness, loneliness, and uncertainty. He tells Ming
that he will feel comfortable only if Ming will belong only
to him. Ming and Tsui, another girl, rely on changing
different powerful and rich boyfriends for their sense of
security. Little Elvis' anxiety and other Rock and Roll
fans' desperation and rebelliousness are purged temporarily
by singing Rock and Roll songs with anti-authority words and
by performing exaggerated dances with sexual implications.
Finally, Ssu's murder at the end of the film is an allegory
which not only expresses Ssu's personal anxiety, but can
also be seen as all the characters' and all Taiwanese
people's only way to vent their tension and to protest the
constrictive lifestyle of the 60's.
By analyzing the theme of A Brighter Summer Day, it is
almost impossible to ignore that it again reflects a
recurrent modernist theme. Ming's dialogue emphasizes
several times her belief that the only thing that will
remain the same is the truth that the world must change.
Consequently, the only way for Yang's characters to succeed
is to change themselves and to adapt to the environment.
The film's main points are how the Taipei middle class (the
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1 1 7
youths in the film are the government officers' children)
tries to find a place in an ever-changing, unsteady society,
tries to seek personal fulfillment, meaning, and
transcendence, feels it impossible to build healthy
relationships with others, and suffers from mental problems
when they struggle for transformation and attempt to adapt
to the outside environment. Like most modernist filmmakers,
Yang avoids escapism to reveal complex social phenomenon,
subordinates plot to an abstract theme with a penetrating
psychological issue, sets the film in a modern city of
Taiwan, portrays a bourgeois family's story of the 60's, and
targets the middle class audience who have the same
historical background as the characters in the film.
Although the setting, props, and costumes are
intentionally designed to replicate the environs of the 60's
in Taipei, and the estrangement between the characters and
the audience is reduced by performances more humanized than
in Yang's previous films (more emotional acting and
dialogue, but not exaggerated) , it does not mean that A
Brighter Summer Day is a realistic film. Its
cinematography, lighting effects, and strategies of
reflexivity are consciously designed and are fully
manipulated according to modernist style.
As far as the cinematography is concerned, Yang not
only applies many of his established patterns, but also has
a new approach emphasizing depth of field. As he does in
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1 1 8
Taipei Story, Yang very often frames his characters in
doorways and windows, and composes his shots with geometric
lines in A Brighter Simmer Day. Examples of framing the
characters in doorways and windows appear everywhere in the
film, especially in the scenes set at the Health Center and
in Japanese-style houses. This strategy powerfully conveys
the characters' inability to escape their circumstances,
which is like their being unable to break through the
limitations of the doorways and the window frames. One of
the obvious examples of geometric composition appears in the
diagonal lines of the catwalks in the film studio where Ssu
and Ming watch a period film being made. In the school
corridors and the Japanese-style houses, a row of doors and
windows of classrooms and large numbers of pillars and beams
in the Japanese-style houses form geometric patterns.
Another cinematic pattern used in Yang's previous films
and again employed in A Brighter Summer Day is the use of
off-screen sound which makes the off-screen space as
important as the space shown on screen. For example, when
the conversation between Ssu and Ming at the Health Center
is heard, instead of showing their images, their blurry and
almost unrecognized shadows on a door is shown. In
addition, Yang often begins a scene before the characters
enter the shot and stays with the scene long after the
action ends. Although this style is seen in Yang's earlier
works, it is fully employed and becomes a pattern in A
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1 1 9
Brighter Sumner Day. This kind of "anticipatory set-up" of
having the camera wait for characters symbolizes their
weakness.2 In Yang's A Brighter Sumner Day, the
"anticipatory set-up" not only conveys characters' weakness,
but also reveals the director's conscious manipulation.
Instead of cutting right after the conclusion of the action,
Yang runs the camera a little bit longer after the
characters leave the scene to stress the influence of the
environment, to slow down the rhythm, to convey a feeling of
paralysis, and to give his audiences time for contemplation.
A new approach developed in the film is Yang's
attention to depth of field. Compared with Yang's previous
films, A Brighter Summer Day engages more characters and
their choreography often moves between foreground and
background to make the film more three-dimensional. This is
not seen in Yang's previous films, which utilize a mainly
flat and horizontal style. For example, the sequences set
at the corridors at the school, the poolroom, and the
cafeteria (when Honey talks to Ssu and other gangsters),
show the characters both in the foreground and in the
background. By examining Yang's cinematic style, it is
clear that through the manipulation of the cinematic
elements, Yang completely controls and directs the
audience's views. When the screen is no longer a window,
2Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies. 4th ed. (New
Jersey:Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1987): 68.
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120
and the camera is no longer the audience's eyes, but the
filmmaker's, the presence of the filmmaker and the
manipulation can be perceived, which is an important
modernist attribute.
The lighting effects plays a crucial role in the film.
Like the lighting effects used in Terrorizer, Yang once
again uses low-key lighting to convey people's anxiety and
uncertainty. A pattern of lighting employed in the film is
the effect of visibility and vanishing. The same effect
also can be seen in Yang's previous works like Expectation
(Hsiao Fen's table lamp does not work very well), Taipei
Story (Lon turns off the light when Chin turns it on) , and
Terrorizer (Bastard repeatedly turns the light at the hotel
off and on) , but it is fully exploited in A Brighter Summer
Day and becomes a pattern. First, Ssu's repetitive turning
on and off the lights in the classroom and at home conveys
his anxious psyche. In addition, Ssu's flashlight on the
night of the typhoon, the shimmering candlelight in the
poolroom, the power failure, the neon lights in the
cafeteria, and the flickering light from the movie in the
theater, are used to achieve the effect of visibility and
vanishing and to communicate the anxiety. Also, putting the
source of the light in the background and placing the main
characters in the dark foreground becomes another pattern in
the film. This shadowy effect is a signifier of their
anxious minds and circumstances, and of the ironic title of
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121
the film--A "Brighter" Summer Day.3 This manipulated
lighting contrasts directly to the realistic and unobtrusive
lighting employed in traditional films.
Another modernist manifestation--reflexivity--is
manifest in the film as well. The film begins with Ssu and
Little Elvis hiding in the catwalks in a film studio to peep
at the making of a period film. In this sequence, Yang
shows that the director of the period film argues with his
actress about her make-up and costume. The audience can
also see the filming equipment around the studio. The crew,
such as the make-up artists and the production assistants,
are also seen working on the period film. When Ssu and Ming
cut class, they go to the film studio to kill time and Ming
is asked by the director to audition next time. Later, when
Ssu shows up at the studio by himself to wait for Ma, the
director asks him about Ming. He says: "Where is the girl
who accompanied you that day? She came over for an
audition. She is such a good actress. She can do exactly
what I want--cry, laugh, like real." Ssu replies:"It is not
real. You cannot even tell what is reality and what is not.
What shit you are making." Yang once again uses the
technique of reflexivity to remind his audience that he is
making a film. No matter how realistic the film is, it is
3Wei-Chin Tseng, "Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day:
Anxious Light, Frustrated Characters, Dark Era," Imagekeeper
Monthly Aug. 1991: 68-71.
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122
still a film and not reality. Emphasized by Ssu's words,
the idea of asking the audience to participate in thinking
and in judging what is seen, and heard, and what is not seen
and heard is strongly stressed. This interrogative style is
one of the identifying characteristics of Yang's films, and
also a modernist manifestation.
Where the narration of the film is concerned, Yang does
not do any experimentation with time and space, but mainly
follows the traditional method of narration. However, in
order to deal with the complicated plot and the large number
of characters, he uses a more conservative narration pattern
than in That Day, on the Beach, or Terrorizer. The
narration pattern employed in A Brighter Summer Day is
neither a radically modernist reorganization of time and
space, nor a traditional presentation of continuity. Yang
shows something which is not fully developed in a sequence,
but fills the narrative gap with the characters' lines in
the next scene. For example, Ssu's father visits the dean
of the school and entreats him not to expel Ssu. The scene
concludes by showing Ssu hitting a light bulb with a
baseball bat. Then, through the conversation between Ssu
and his father, the audience is informed in the next scene
that, since Ssu is irritated by the dean's bureaucratic
attitude, Ssu hits him and is expelled. Another example
occurs when some people visit Ssu's father (their
conversation is not heard) ; the viewers do not know what
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1 2 3
happens, until the next scene when Ssu's sister tells Ssu
that the father has been arrested by The Garrison Command.
As noted before, Yang pays a lot of attention to visual
narration and non-verbal communication, so the dialogue is
intentionally sparse in Yang's previous films. In A
Brighter Summer Day, although the images are still the most
important part of the film, along with the more humanized
performances, the dialogue is more natural and plays a role
in developing the plot.
Since Yang's Expectation, women have been significant
in his films. As discussed in previous chapters, Yang
primarily uses a patriarchal point of view to portray women.
Women's portrayals in A Brighter Summer Day still mainly
remain traditional ones. Women cannot escape the
stereotypes of being "mothers" taking care of men, being
dominated by men, being dependent, and being punished if
they challenge the patriarchal system. Ssu's sisters
project the traditional "mother image" by taking care of
their brothers. They translate English songs, lend money,
and suggest that Ssu go to church. Women are also excluded
from men's activities. For example, Ssu's mother is under
her husband's domination and shouted at as a woman who knows
nothing. Tsui is not allowed to be involved in men's
activities such as fighting. Another example is when Ming
is rejected by Little Elvis and another guy when they play a
military game. In the film, women are also portrayed as
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men's possessions. Ming and Tsui are always referred to as
a man's "Miss." Shantung's girlfriend, Hsiao Shen Ching,
has no persona in the film. She is like her man's shadow
following beside him with no importance. Women are also
dependent. The woman who owns the cafeteria is stereotyped
by Yang as a woman intending to kill herself when her man
leaves her. Ming is portrayed as dependent, too. After her
man, Honey, leaves her and hides in southern Taiwan after
killing his rival, Ming dates several men and relies on
whomever can offer her economical and mental support. In
addition, she is also a woman who challenges the patriarchal
system and who is consequently punished by men. In the
film, Ming accidentally fires an unloaded gun at Ssu, and is
immediately slapped by Ma. Ming decides whom she will be
with, so the men fight for her, but cannot control her, and
therefore become victims. Since she challenges the male-
dominated system, she is killed at the end of the film.
After reviewing women's portrayals in A Brighter Sumner Day,
it is clear that, although he is considered a New Director,
Yang does not offer a fresh point-of-view of women, but
rather supports the traditional view that subordinates women
to the patriarchal society.
Yang places A Brighter Sumner Day in its social and
historical context. By using the incident of a youth's
murder and youth gang fights as subject matter, Yang
signifies murder and fighting as people's ways of expressing
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1 2 5
their uncertainty resulting from the critical economic
situation, the threat of the KMT's dictatorship, and
difficulties in identifying with different cultures. In
terms of the cinematography, Yang repeats his established
pattern such as framing characters in doorways and windows,
using geometric compositions and off-screen space to achieve
a modernist style. A new pattern for Yang is to start a
scene before the characters enter the scene and keep running
the camera after the characters leave. This strategy
conveys people's weakness and establishes a feeling of
paralysis. Furthermore, Yang pays more attention to depth
of field to make the film more three-dimensional. The low-
key lighting and the switching between visibility and
disappearing connote people's anxiety. As far as the
narration is concerned, the dialogue plays a crucial role to
fill the gaps in plot not shown on the screen. Yang again
uses a traditional point of view to portray women as
subordinate to the patriarchal society as he does in his
previous films. In addition to reflexivity which brings
interrogations and contemplation, this film's sophisticated
theme reflects abstract inner states rather than represents
superficial physical reality. The manipulation of form
makes it is as important as the "work" itself and makes the
audience perceive the filmmaker's presence. All these
aspects of A Brighter Summer Day qualify it as modernist.
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126
Chapter 8
Conclusion
By observing that Yang's Expectation reveals a general
modernist spirit and applying modernist theories as a
framework to analyze Yang's four feature films, this thesis
concludes that Yang can be considered a modernist auteur
during the first decade of his film career.
First, disposing of the escapism employed in
traditional films to comfort the audience with a harmonious,
fictional universe, modernist filmmakers instead use a more
sophisticated, more contemplative and deeper penetration of
the internal meaning of life and complex social phenomena.
One characteristic of modernist films is to accent
conceptual issues and subordinate plots to themes. One
modernist theme particularly focuses on bourgeois
psychological problems such as anxiety, despair, and
alienation in an urban milieu, which is often depicted as
being without values, order, and direction. This modernist
theme is evident in every one of Yang's films.
Since his first thirty-minute film, Expectation, Yang
has been trying to articulate the theme. Yang subordinates
the story about the trifles of Hsiao Fen's daily life to
reveal a whole portrayal of a pubescent girl1s growing
experiences, especially her alienation from other people,
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1 2 7
her anxiety about her maturation, and her curiosity about
boys. The social and historical experiences are reflected
in the news items about the Beatles and the Vietnam War,
which connote the westernization of Taipei and people's
aimlessness because of the international chaotic situation
in the 60's. In That Day, on the Beach, by composing the
film of Jia Li's memories describing her childhood, her
marriage crisis, and finally her independence, Yang's real
intention is to show the socioeconomic transition period in
Taipei, and to reveal Taipei's middle class' frustration and
insecurity with failed attempts to define their own values
about marriage, relationships and career. Taipei Story
focuses on a middle class couple, Lon and Chin, whose tragic
romance is subservient to the depiction of their painful
inner states and loss of direction, which are highlighted by
their inability to communicate and to adjust to the changing
society marked by the collision of old agricultural and
modern industrial values. Terrorizer dramatizes modernized
Taipei as a corrupt city where everyone terrorizes each
other by blackmailing, cheating, or killing. In the film,
Yang again exemplifies the bourgeoisie's emptiness and
anxiety resulting from a failure to find professional and
personal fulfillment. Setting A Brighter Summer Day in the
60's, Yang features the tumultuous times in Taipei due to
economic, political, and cultural disorder that lead
bourgeois families' children to purge their uncertainty and
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1 2 8
insecurity by gang fighting, murdering, having love affairs,
and singing rebellious Rock and Roll songs. By reviewing
Yang's recurrent theme, it is clear that each of Yang's
films has a different story, but the stories are not
foregrounded and are subordinate to the theme. The
recurrent theme appearing in Yang's films confirms that Yang
consistently places his films in a socio-historical context
and particularly focuses on Taipei's bourgeoisie's
psychological traumas, such as alienation, uncertainty, and
anxiety, when they are unable to build positive
relationships, fail to find personal transcendence and
spiritual fulfillment, and struggle to adapt to the outside
changing society.
Besides the main theme addressed above, two important
sub-themes that cannot be ignored are the influence of
different cultures and the portrayal of women. These two
sub-themes support the main theme and reflect social
phenomena. For historical reasons, Taiwanese culture is
strongly influenced by the Japanese, American, and Chinese
cultures. These different cultures have a powerful impact
on thought and lifestyle. Hsiao Fen studies in English in
Expectation; Jia Li has a demanding father living a Japanese
lifestyle in That Day, on the Beach; Chin drinks at an
Americanized bar while Lon sings at a Japanese style KARAOKE
in Taipei Story; Bastard is a hybrid of American and
Taiwanese in Terrorizer; Ssu lives in Japanese house,
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1 2 9
attends an American Rock and Roll concert, and has parents
and teachers coming from Mainland China in A Brighter Summer
Day. These cultural influences are foregrounded everywhere
in Yang's films to explain how frustrated the characters are
when they do not know with which culture to identify.
Moreover, women play a significant role in Yang's
films. The portrayals of Yang's modernist women in modern
Taipei remain traditional ones. Although Jia Li, Ching, and
Chin are portrayed as modern women, they are emotionally
dependent on men's protection and attention, and are defined
by the men in their lives. Ming dates many boys to find
financial support and emotional security, betrays
patriarchal rules, and is punished by being murdered.
Accordingly, Yang's modern women wear modern masks, since
they still suffer as a result of the constraints of
patriarchal ideology, and this is part of the reason why
they have psychological problems. To sum up, the sub-themes
of being confused by different cultures and women's
dependence also strengthen the main theme that reflects the
complicated cultural situation and people's fragile psyches.
Another manifestation of modernist films is the non
linear narration which betrays the priority of spatial and
temporal continuity and psychological causality in
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1 3 0
traditional films whose "unitary homogeneous world"1 follows
simple linear narration. On the contrary, modernist films
reorganize time and space and allow the interweaving of
plural storylines in one film. Yang's films break up
continuity and chronology and experiment with modernist
methods of narration.
Yang uses fades in and out as punctuation between
scenes in Expectation. There is no temporal and spatial
relation between scenes, nor is there cause and effect
continuity, either. In That Day, on the Beach, Yang
structures the film as a complex "flashback within a
flashback." By using the "coffee shop" and "the beach" as
two temporal reference points, the film arranges the fabula
by cross cutting present and past, and is composed like the
style of the "Chinese Box," each part of Jia Li's memory
containing--and, at the same time, being contained--within
another part of Jia Li's memory. After using conventional
narration in some short passages violating continuity and
causality in Taipei Story, Yang structures Terrorizer by
intercutting different storylines which happen in different
places simultaneously and seem to have no relationship with
each other at the beginning of the film until they are
gradually interwoven step by step. Although the narration
^eter Wollen, "Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est,"
Movies and Methods. ed. Bill Nichols (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985) 504.
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1 3 1
of A Brighter Summer Day is not as radical as that in That
Day, on the Beach or Terrorizer, A Brighter Summer Day is
not traditional either. Yang may not fully develop the plot
in any one sequence, but fills in the narrative gaps with
the dialogue in subsequent scenes. Consequently, Yang's
films indeed more or less embrace modernist narration which
pays less attention to continuity and causality, instead
reordering time and space and emphasizing fragmentation and
multiple-linear narration.
In addition, modernism is also associated with anti-
representation and self-conscious artifice.2 Modernist
films diverge from a restrictive realist style and instead
exploit formalist metaphors or connotations to convey
abstract internal realities, stress the directors'
subjective point-of-view, and emphasize a recognition of
manipulation and the directors' self-consciousness. In
examining Yang's films, it is evident that Yang's
manipulation in his films is always the focus of attention.
Yang's manipulation of images, sound effects, lighting
and composition are foregrounded. His manipulation of
images has been strongly perceived since his earlier films.
As with most modernist filmmakers, Yang's shots carry
messages directing the viewer's attention to the meanings
2Malcolm Bradbury, and James McFarlane, ed., Modernism:
A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (London: The
Penguin Group, 1991) 24.
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1 3 2
behind the images themselves. In Expectation and That Day,
on the Beach, Yang shows Hsiao Fen's memory and Jia Li's
dream by editing shots to reveal the characters' psyches.
In Terrorizer, Yang also edits a series of empty shots of
locks to convey Bastard's imprisonment and edits some
photographs to replace the young photographer's voices or
thoughts. Yang's manipulation of images not only show
abstract inner states visually, but also convey metaphors
and even condense redundant plot elements. This effect
makes Yang's films visually powerful. His manipulation of
sound also goes beyond traditional functions of achieving
verisimilitude by linking images and sound together. Yang's
sound does not always correspond to image, but becomes an
independent element communicating other meanings. In
Terrorizer and A Brighter Summer Day, off-screen sound
expands the audience's imagination to include off-screen
space. The songs, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and "Are You
Lonesome Tonight," express Bastard's mother's nostalgia for
the past with her American husband and the young gangsters'
state of anxiety, respectively. In short, Yang's
manipulation of sound aims to enrich the significance of
what is heard.
Yang does not particularly manipulate cinematic
composition and lighting in his earlier films. Influenced
by the realist cinematic tendency of the New Cinema
Movement, Yang's earlier cinematic style in Expectation and
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1 3 3
That Day, on the Beach is based on a realist approach using
eye-level camera angles, a two-dimensional style,
unobtrusive lighting, long takes, and long shots. However,
beginning with Taipei Story, Yang pays more attention to
cinematic composition. In Taipei Story, characters are
often framed in doorways and windows. Chin and Lon's
impossible communication is also connoted by composing them
in different frames in the same scene. Moreover, Taipei's
modernized landscape is shown from a row of big windows
behind characters, and this strategy of making Taipei's
landscape as a backdrop becomes Yang's cinematic pattern. A
Brighter Summer Day has the same composition pattern that
frames characters in doorways and windows, signifying an
inability to release pressure building in an unstable
environment. At the same time, geometric composition in A
Brighter Summer Day, such as the shots set at Japanese
houses or school corridors, is further evidence of Yang's
manipulation of composition. In addition, the strategy of
running the camera before the action begins and stopping the
camera after the action finishes is another manipulation.
Yang also emphasizes depth of field and transforms his
earlier flat style into a three-dimensional one in A
Brighter Summer Day. One more formal manipulation perceived
is lighting. Since Terrorizer, Yang departs from natural
lighting and applies low-key lighting to convey characters'
anxiety and insecurity. This effect is also utilized in A
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1 3 4
Brighter Summer Day, in which flashlights, candles, and neon
lights are employed to achieve the effect of visibility and
vanishing to communicate people's uncertainty. To sum up,
these manipulations of images, sound effects, composition
and lighting not only raise Yang's films to a higher
aesthetic level, but also stress the modernist quality of
artifice and emphasize the recognition of the presence of
the director.
Another feature which defines Yang's films as modernist
is their open texture, which allows various interpretations
rather than a single conclusion. Although metaphors fill
Yang's other films and invite the spectators to decipher
them, the nature of aperture is especially prevalent in That
Day, on the Beach, and Terrorizer. If spectators follow the
traditional viewing experience by considering the enigma of
De Wei's death as the "problem" raised in the film, and
expecting the climax of resolution, they may be
disappointed, because Yang does not provide any solution to
the "problem." The ambiguous ending of Terrorizer also
confuses the traditional audience, because Yang
intentionally provides many possible conclusions. It is
useless to argue which ending is the correct one, because
Terrorizer challenges the established rule of putting the
audience in a passive position of accepting a definite
resolution. Instead, Yang invites his audiences to
participate in the act of creation.
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1 3 5
Although Yang invites audience participation in
creating his films, he does not require their emotional
involvement. The estrangement effect often seen in
modernist films is influenced by the concept of Epic theater
resisting the effect of identification, the principle of
Aristotelian tragedy, applied in the classical Hollywood
film to persuade audiences to emotionally empathize with
characters. In order to create the feeling of estrangement
between the viewers and his films, Yang refrains from
traditional sentimental performances, and reduces overtly
dramatic sequences. From Expectation to Terrorizer, Yang
directs his actors to portray characters who are emotionless
most of time and who speak in a very passionless way in
whispers. The audience's sentiment is expelled from the
universe of the films and identification is kept at a far
remove from the screen. This paralyzed atmosphere becomes a
trademark of Yang's films, but with A Brighter Summer Day,
the emotionally dead feeling is slightly reduced by
performances humanized somewhat by emotional acting and
dialogue. Yang uses this modernist tragedy of estrangement
to withdraw the audience's emotional identification from the
characters and to encourage the audience's rational
contemplation.
One more modernist manifestation in Yang's films is
reflexivity. Since this strategy aims to remind the viewers
that what they are watching is a film and is a "reality"
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136
that comes from the director's subjective point-of-view, the
filming process is shown to break the myth that films are a
transparent window-on-the-world. In Terrorizer, Yang does
not directly show the process of filmmaking, but compares
the process of writing a novel to the production of film,
neither practice necessarily expressing the truth of
reality. In A Brighter Summer Day, some scenes are set in a
film studio where a period film is being made. Yang even
uses Ssu's line to emphasize that film is not reality
itself. Although Yang's reflexivity is not as apparent as
in Truffaut's Day for Night or Fellini's 8 1/2, which are
films within a film, Yang's reflexive strategies in
Terrorizer and A Brighter Summer Day are not accidental.
In addition to subordinating plot to a recurrent
modernist theme--the Taipei bourgeoisie's psychological
problems--Yang's films also embody non-linear narration,
fragmentation, manipulation of images, sound effects,
composition, and lighting, all of which highlight the
recognition of form. Another modernist attribute in Yang's
films is the open ending inviting various interpretations,
estrangement effects, reduction of audience identification,
and reflexivity breaking the myth of transparency in
traditional films. These modernist attributes, again and
again appearing in Yang's films, not only raise them to a
sophisticated and artistic level, but also challenge
spectators to raise and to answer questions. This
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1 3 7
intellectual quality in some sense is not as pleasurable as
common entertainment films. By consistently applying these
modernist attributes, undoubtedly, Yang is a modernist
auteur in the first decade of his film career (1982-1991).
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1 3 8
Afterword
This thesis argues that Yang consistently applies
modernist features in his films during the first decade of
his film career up to A Brighter Summer Day made in 1991.
However, it does not necessarily mean that Yang will be a
modernist director for the rest of his career, because it is
common for a filmmaker to transform his style from one
period to another. Therefore, it is unwise and dangerous to
label Yang with a certain title to describe the rest of his
career.
A Confucian Confusion, Yang's newest film, made in 1994
and released during the time when this thesis was being
written, was promoted as an "energetic comedy." These two
words articulate Yang's departure from his previous static
and tragic films. In A Confucian Confusion, the theme
portraying the middle class' alienation and pursuit of
personal spiritual fulfillment is replaced by an ironic
representation of the post-modernist Taipei bourgeoisie's
enthusiasm for fame, money, and sexual desire. The plot is
structured by a dynamic interrelationship between the
characters. The French title translated to English is Cross
Chase, which directly indicates the story and the style of
narration in the film. Yang also explores his personal
interpretation of Confucianism and suggests that
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1 3 9
Confucianism over-emphasizes equality, which not only limits
people's ability to think independently, but also forces
people to mask themselves to be the same as others. This
results in people suspecting that others are as hypocritical
as themselves. Yang's questioning of Confucianism is
reflected in the English film title, A Confucian Confusion,
and his expectation of people's finding their lost
independent thinking is reflected in the Chinese film title,
An Independent Epoch, translated literally to English.
From stasis to dynamism, from tragic to comedic, from
representing psychic pain to representing physical behavior
in the pursuit of money, power, and sexual desire, Yang
still keeps addressing philosophical issues and makes the
film sophisticated and contemplative, but his changes are
apparent. In A Confucian Confusion, a writer's
transformation can be seen as Yang's self-reflexive
transformation. This writer composes many novels about the
dark side of society and he believes that his novels reflect
reality, warn mankind, and are superior to hypocritical
cosmetic optimism. However, no one likes his novels. His
wife tells him:
Your books terrify readers with crime and death.
Is this your idea of a cure? If you had found a
cure, you would not be this miserable. You should
be practicing what you preach. Go kill someone
and get killed. Get run over or fatally ill.
Betray a friend, commit suicide, or adultery.
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1 4 0
This statement can be seen as the description of Yang's
previous films which failed at the box-office and were
filled with crime, death, fatal illness, murder, betrayal,
suicide, and adultery. However, at the end of the film, the
writer realizes that everything has different meanings when
people see it from different points-of-view. He points out
that people's potential is denied and bandaged by Confucius'
own teachings, and people would never know that they are the
Great Ones. The writer finds that "fun is everywhere to
suggest new hope for life," and he says: "There is still
time, I must rewrite my books, and now my tragic period has
ended, too." The writer's commitment also can be seen as
Yang's commitment to his transformation from pessimism to
optimism. The writer's intention to rewrite his books
suggests Yang's decision to make films that are different
from his previous ones.
This afterword does not intend to provide an analysis
of A Confucian Confusion, but rather to indicate that the
film is different from Yang's previous works and can be seen
as Yang's turning point toward a different style and
approach. As Yang announced at the premiere party of A
Confucian Confusion in Taipei that his next film may be an
action film, his potential for change is unpredictable and
unlimited.
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1 4 1
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Asset Metadata

Creator Lee, Chu-Chun (author)

Core Title A modernist auteur, Edward Yang: the first decade of his film career (1982-1991)

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Critical Studies

Degree Conferral Date 1995-05

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor James, David (committee chair), Jewell, Richard (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-898

Unique identifier UC11341428

Identifier 1376475.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-898 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1376475

Dmrecord 898

Document Type Thesis

Rights Lee, Chu-Chun

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA