Abstract
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films dispel some of the uncertainties of the present, and establish a sense of continuity with a more localised past. But, given the overwhelming hegemonic realist vision of the country as the “true Taiwan”, it is necessary for him to set the narratives of his films in the past in order to better maintain a sense of continuity or to proclaim a deep sense of national identity. It is not enough simply to represent rural Taiwan, or at least that particular version of rural Taiwan that has taken hold of the real images of the ordinary people and secular world-Taiwan is that remapped and configured in the time of significant transformations in Hou’s films, most especially by his very distinctive, and original, poetics of spatiality and time; a poetics which incorporates individual narratives into a multifaceted, complex reality, which is both heterogeneous and homogeneous, tangible and intagible, private and public.
I draw in black, but I gaze at the blank.
–Pan Tien-shou.
People do not live in places but in the description of places.
–Wallace Stevens.
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Notes
- 1.
Foucault thinks the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle; themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world, where the nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics, an epoch of simultaneity. We are currently in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed (Foucault 1984, 229).
- 2.
Jameson’s dictum that time was the dominant of the modern (or of modernism) and space of the postmodern means something thematic and empirical all at once: what we do, according to the newspapers and the Amazon statistics, and what we call what we are doing. I don’t see how we can avoid identifying an epochal change here, and it affects investments (art galleries, building commissions) as much as the more ethereal things also called values in Critical Inquiry, The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Vol. 29, No.4 (Summer 2003) pp. 695–718.
- 3.
The three vignettes are not arranged chronologically as in 1911, 1966, 2005, the temporality in the film is deliberately rendered in non-linear way so that the film begins in 1966, then moves back in time to 1911, and finally makes a leap to 2005.
- 4.
Cute Girl (1980s); Cheerful Wind (1981); The Green, Green Grass of Home (1982); The Sandwich Man (1983) directed with Wan Jen and Tseng Chuang-Hsiang.
- 5.
The Movement of New Movies in Taiwan, also called “the movement of New Wave films lasted from 1981 to 1990. In 1983, a movie in three parts – Sandwich Man -was made by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Chen Kun-hou and Wang Tong, which led to a dispute about new and old films and the role of censorship. It was ultimately released without cuts and paved the way for many New Wave movies. On January 24, 1987, 50 filmmakers and intellectuals issued the “1987 Taiwan Movie Declaration” which is regarded as the end of the movement of New Wave movies.
- 6.
Doree Massey’s (1999) concept of “power geometries” is useful for thinking about how space, place, production and consumption are connected. Massey proposes that power is exercised through all scales and levels, and that its “geometry” must be understood in relation to how different social groups and individuals are placed in distinct ways in relation to time-space flows and interconnections (Massey 1993). Difference cannot just be conceived in terms of a variance but must also be seen in terms of relational power, with people limiting or enabling the capacity of other groups to participate in consumption on the same terms. People, knowledge and things are situated in relation to flows and interconnections (for example, transportation, financial flows, communications, knowledge and social transactions) (Mansvelt 27). Places are viewed as articulated and hybrid moments in networks of social relations, with “the spatial as a product of power-filled social relations (1999: 41). In Goodbye South, Goodbye, the concept of “power geometries” provides an important reminder that the identity and the land do not exist in a vacuum, but are constituted and transformed through space.
- 7.
The soundtracks in this film almost collect all the selects of Taiwan underground (rock-) music such as Lin Qiang, Summer Lei, Sissey Chao, and LTK Commune. These musics reinforce the movie’s theme of the lost and confusion of rural Taiwan. This opening music is Lin Qiang’s “Self-destruction” – expresses his melancholy and gloomy scream for chaos of the real world and the destruction of the industrial civilization for traditional world, as well as its damage for humanity.
- 8.
Chia-yi County (Chinese: 嘉義縣; pinyin: Jiāyì Xiàn) is a county in southwestern Taiwan surrounding but not including Chiayi City. It is the sixth largest county in Taiwan.
- 9.
(Taiwanese: Lô-chúi-khoe Kong-siā 濁水溪公社) is a well-known Taiwanese “underground” band founded in 1990. Their music has been variously described as having elements of punk, rock, nakasi, Taiwanese folk songs. And the themes of musics are mainly about social chaos, unemployment and survival plight, social movements, life frustration and sexual impulses, etc.
- 10.
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood’s classical film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression. (See, e.g. Biesen (2005), p. 1; Hirsch (2001), p. 9; Lyons (2001), p. 2; Silver and Ward (1992), p. 1; Schatz (1981), p. 112). Hou Hsiao-hsien mentioned in his Master Class, he wanted to make Goodbye South, Goodbye as a noir film, but the actors and conditions could not be achieved (37).
- 11.
Annette Michelson argues that Michael Snow’s Wavelength is a metaphor for consciousness, drawing on ideas from phenomenology in support her thesis. Michelson discusses Wavelength as the film which “reintroduced expectation as the core of film form after Brakhage and Warhol, redefining space as an “essentially a temporal notion”. See Michelson (1987, 173–83). Oringinary Published in Art Forum, June, 1971.
- 12.
Yubari is a middle city in Hokkaido in Japan, which had a prosperous period of coal mining, but also fell into financial difficulties due to the closure of mines. The city started to seek industrial restructuring in the 1990s, so it organized an annual International Film Festival.
- 13.
A Time for Youth (Chinese name is “The Dream of Youth”) is set in 2005 Taipei, which takes the story of Taiwan artist Ouyang Jing as the prototype. Jing is a bisexual who is suffering from heart disease and epilepsy, but she loves life and music. The film represents her emotions and life situation: she has a close girlfriend Micky, but she also falls in love with a man – the photographer Zhen. Hou Hsiao-hsien uses this film to explore the ways that youth challenge the limits of life.
- 14.
Here the national identity means “Taiwan identity”. The history of unification and separation between Taiwan and mainland China is well known: before 1945, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, while mainland China was variously colonized by the Japanese and other foreign powers. After 1949, Taiwan island was controlled by the KMT, while mainland China and Taiwan Island have markedly different histories in the political realm and also in terms of their stages in economic development. Hou’s movies represent identity characters of Taiwan island whichare different from the mainland Chinese. His Taiwan trilogy directly refers to the political and historical traumas of this difference. “Home” or “a sense of belonging” in Hou’s films do not therefore point to “mainland China”, or to any kind of imagined community, CCP, KMT or DDP, but to a very specific Taiwan regional identity.
References
Foucault, M. (1984). Des Espace Autres. Trans. J. Miskowiec. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite.
Michelson, A. (1987). Toward snow. In The Avant-Garde film: A reader of theory and criticism. New York: Anthology Film Archives.
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Cai, X. (2019). Remapping Taiwan: Space as a Time Monument. In: The Ethics of Witness. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2170-2_3
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