Abstract
In this chapter, I am particularly interested in questioning what might be at stake in a discussion of such dailiness, and the ways in which Hou Hsiao-hsien engages with this his films. I do this not simply as a means of explicating Hou’s own work, but most particularly to extrapolate from Hou’s films a larger, more discursive, understanding of the concept of personal time and the everyday in the philosophy and ethics of film-representation and reception. Carol Greenhouse in her study of the politics of time says: “I view time as being primarily “about” accountability, legitimacy and criteria of social relevance” (82). See in this way, time is not a neutral category, experience, use, or enjoy time. I ask, in particular then, to what extent do films, and especially Hou’s films, picking up on Gillian Beer’s words, engage with the various ways of attending to the ongoing rhythm of dailiness, and further, in what ways do they offer a director like Hou the means to record change in How it feels to be alive (7), at a period when, as I believe it is in the Taiwan of Hou’s films, “the question of living is cracial” (Bell 10). I will ask, if time is primarily “about” accountability, legitimacy and criteria of social relevance, particularly in everyday, then what is a stake in the exploration of temporality.
Going down that street ten thousand times in a lifetime...or perhaps
never at all...
–Daniel Elsenberg, Cooperation of Parts (1990).
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Notes
- 1.
Bergson argues that novelists have a privileged role, because they try to show us the “infinite permeation” (133) that resists the homogenization of duration. Personally, I think that film functions more to resist homogenization of time than does fiction.
- 2.
I use the term “dailiness” in Randall’s sense as a way of opening onto the variety of possible temporalities which emerge in the literature of the early twentieth century, and which are revealed by the structural features as well as the explicit content of the texts addressed. In this regard, there are two important general features relevant to daily time in these texts, firstly, repetition, and secondly, the spatialisation of time (see Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life 20–21). I borrow it in my book, because I think Hou creates the same temporal meaning by the way of film.
- 3.
The theoretical backgrounds of this part of my work reference the following works: Angel Quintana’s A Poetic of Splitting: Memory and Identity in La Prima Angelica (2008); Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1910); Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002); Leo Charney’s Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift (1998); Deleuze’s Cinema2: the Time-Image (1989).
- 4.
See Bakhtin (1981, pp. 84–258); Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’ New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (1992, pp.217–218).
- 5.
This refers to the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from 1937 to 1945. It followed the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.
- 6.
This notion is from literary theorist Michael Bernstein, who asserts that the sideshadow in historical narrative is designed to illuminate other aspects of that history which existed simultaneously as part of the main trajectory of an event, showing the density in the dynamics of that history. Sideshadowing strategies take into account the reality of counter-narratives that exist within historical events and can open such narratives to multiple contingencies that surround an event. It suggests that although things turned out one way, they could also have turned out some other way, expanding the complexity and nuance of events. Corresponding to the sideshadow is the foreshadow and backshadow. Foreshadowing is the built-in evidence of an inevitable conclusion to the story being read. Foreshadowing creates a reading of an event that gives an impression that all events have causal relations to one another by “naturalizing” what is described through the seamless elision of one narrative event into another. Backshadowing takes place when prior knowledge of a situation’s outcome is shared by both the reader or viewer and the author. In this construct, all actions and events move inexorably to a result that is already known. See Bernstein (1994, pp. 3–4; 40–41).
- 7.
See Skoller (2005, p. 86). Where he refers to avant garde filmmakers like Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976 D’Est, 1993), Peter Hutton (The New York Portrait Series, 1978–90, Lodz Symphony 1991–93), James Benning (11 × 14, 1976), and Michael Snow (La Region Centrale, 1971).
- 8.
In order to commemorate the late Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu’s 100th birthday, Japan’s Shochiku Company invited Hou Hsiao-hsien to make this film in 2003. It is Hou’s first foreign film and the first shot in a foreign language. The story is very scattered, about the freelance writer Yoko and used bookstore owner Hajime. They are good friends, who spend a lot of time in a cafe. Yoko’s parents divorced very early, she is brought up by her uncle in Hokkaido countryside, but she has a very good relationship with her father and stepmother. In 2003, Yoko comes back to Japan from Taiwan, and told her parents she was pregnant, the child’s father in Taiwan. Yoko’s parents worry about her future, as an unwed mother. The film does not narrate a causal story full of dramatic tension, even though it contains many dramatic elements and conflicts: the unwed heroine, the feeling between Hajime and Yoko, and Yoko’s family relationships, representing some scattered moments of life, with no beginning and no end in the movie.
- 9.
It is a fishing village located in western Taiwan’s Penghu Islands.
- 10.
Bergson said that is was not by its own efforts that the recollection-image retained the mark of the past, that is, of ‘virtuality” which it represents and embodies, and which distinguishes it from other types of images (see Deuleuze Cinema 2 54). Also Deleuze thinks the recollection-image does not deliver the past to us, but only represents the former present that the past “was”. The recollection-image is an image that is actualized or in process of being made actual, which does not form with the actual, present image a circuit of indiscernibility (ibid 54). In this movie, for the enactment of the past, the director did not use causal flashbacks, but an actual image which belongs to a deeper time-image.
- 11.
The film is about Taiwan puppet master Li Tian-lu’s living in the Japanese colonial period (1909–1945).His own oral narrative occupies one third of the movie. This is an innovation in art: Hou let Li Tian-lu narrate his life by facing the camera, and then let the actors act it all again.
- 12.
Three Times was made in 2005, it features three chronologically separate stories of love between May and Chen, set in 1911, 1966 and 2005, using the same lead actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen. These three stories are A Time for Love, A Time for Freedom and A Time for Youth. The first two stories have a strong sense of nostalgia, the last one focuses on alienation and broken emotions amongst youth in contemporary Taipei. The scene mentioned here is in A Time for Love, where the hero looks for his lover on a small steamer going through the south of Taiwan.
- 13.
Many of Hou’s works borrow a trip/ballad form, i.e. a train journey, steamer, car trip, a journey by motorcycle or on foot: small trains make many round trips between the urban and the rural, differentjourneys occur between the south and Taipei;a grandmother seeks to find a road back to the mainland;a young man’s jaunt...but the object is everyday banality taken as family life in an era of turmoil.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and of the Chronotope in the novel. In The dialogic imagination. Texas: Texas Press.
Bernstein, M. A. (1994). Foregone conclusions: Against apocalyptic history. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Skoller, J. (2005). Shadows, specters, shards: Making history in Avant-Garde film. Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press.
Stam, R., Burgoyne, R., & Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1992). New vocabularies in film semiotics. New York: Routledge.
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Cai, X. (2019). A Poetics of Time: The Representation of Daily Life. In: The Ethics of Witness. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2170-2_2
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