Abstract
Chang Tso-chi’s Darkness and Light (1999), The Best of Times (2002), and Soul of a Demon (2007) are characteristic of his peculiar aesthetics of violence, layered poetic imagery, and elegiac filmic style in portraying the coming-of-age stories of young gangsters. This chapter discusses how Chang embeds gang story within plausible accounts of local small town life and volatile teenage passion; how he crisscrosses incompatible modes of documentary-style realism and fantasy sequence to explore the dynamism of lower class multi-ethnic margins and the underworld (jianghu) of Taiwan’s society. Associating Chang’s “haunted realism” with “secular modernity,” it contextualizes his films to investigate how his spectacles of violence visualize the colonial and patriarchal violence that has carved into historical and personal memories as well as individual bodies.
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Notes
- 1.
For Chang Tso-chi’s films and award records, see Appendix G.
- 2.
In an interview, Chang Tso-chi expresses his concern about the disabled people, “As to the retard people, I have been in touch with their groups. They are part of the reality of Taiwan’s society, but they have seldom been covered by mass media. There are quite a few kids like Ah-kee. After filming Ah Chung, I suffered from nerve paralysis in face, and hence someone recommended a blind masseur to me. To my surprise, the blind masseur turned on light for me and even told me that he came late because he went to see a movie. Encountering him inspired me to write the script for Darkness and Light .” See Cheng Ryan Ping-hung , “Walking Out of the Hallway: An Interview with Chang Tso-chi,” 195.
- 3.
Chang Tso-chi expresses his interest in the topics of male bonding and sociality , “I have always been concerned about man’s issues and I like writing about male bonding and sociality . Although Darkness is narrated from Kang-yi’s female perspective , a large part of the original script focuses on her father. However, in the midst of my writing, I thought that Ah-ping played by Wing Fan is more interesting than Kang-yi’s father, so I shifted my focus” (Ryan Ping-hung Cheng 190).
- 4.
Speaking of his filming technique in the sequence of Ah-ping’s death, Chang Tso-chi recalled, “Ah-ping’s death seems very important to me. I used a sequence of shots on his hand, his profiled smiling face, his-point-of-view shot, and finally a full shot on him falling down. My cinematographer could not meet my requirement, so I shot the scene with hand-held camera by myself. I did so to pay tribute to the ending sequence of Léon, where Jean Reno is walking out of the underpass” (Ryan Ping-hung Cheng 193).
- 5.
Chang Tso-chi explains the importance of Kang-yi’s bedroom window and the hallway which serve as the transition from reality to fantasy . He points out, “The hallway is a key scene in Darkness and Light , along which the tracking of camera symbolizes her mood and feeling. Besides, her bedroom window provides a “frame” that contrasts and interfaces the beautiful port with the dark indoor space . Therefore, the camera fades out to a blackout of screen which is quite long in order to portray her psychological transition” (Ryan Ping-hung Cheng 196).
- 6.
Chang Tso-chi , in his survey on locations for filming The Best of Times , discovered the mainland veteran village in Liu-kung-chun , which he calls “The Venice in Taiwan,” for its intricate web-like ditches and cannels and special features of the pillar-supported houses over the water (吊腳樓 Diajiaolou ). Chang stresses, he chooses it as the location for his filming in the hope of preserving the special culture of veteran villages as well as the local flavors of Liu-kung-chun . Given the fact that the veteran village there was already demolished a few years away from the date of the film’s release, Chang’s The Best of Times has recorded the “durée ” of a real space in disappearance witnessed by its inhabitants. See Chang You-chi , “Preserving Diajiaolou in the Hope of Sustaining Cultural Landscape,” United Daily News, 17 August 2011.
- 7.
Berry exemplifies Taiwan’s “secular modernity ” with various kinds of religious practices participated by the characters (especially Ah-jie) in the film. Berry notes, in face with the violent disjuncture arising as a consequence of Western-centered modernity, the ideas of “multiple modernities ” or “secular modernity ” suggest the survival strategies in the third world or postcolonial countries, which register modernity with “the survival of elements from the past into the present, breaching the modern ideology of an absolute rupture between modernity and premodernity” (Chris Berry 2007: 47).
- 8.
The concept of performativity between two deaths seeks recourse to Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan’s theory of “queer acts” between two deaths. The first death is the abjection of the social world which expels those who cannot conform to the Law of the patriarchy and the heterosexuality. Queers who have survived that death can create another life and continually dream of another social space , bringing it into being. The “betweenness” is the space for them to act, to transform and to negotiate between the social and the asocial. See Linda Hart and Peggy Phelan, “Queer Than Thou: Being and Deb Margolin,” 269–82.
- 9.
In an interview, Chang Tso-chi expresses his concern about the prevalent violence in Taiwan . He says, “Originally I hope to use more animations to portray violence, the extreme violence. I have been disturbed by the prevalent violence in Taiwan . Though everybody looks safe, people might be crashed by the trucks; Everyday there are mothers crying. This is Taiwan” (Ya-feng Mon 2010: 89–90).
- 10.
Freud elucidates the complex and subtle relationship between the melancholic subject and his lost object . On the one hand, the object-loss causes the ego-loss, and hence, the ego regresses to the narcissistic phase, in which the ego-libido is in a loop of narcissistic libidinal cathexes back and forth the ego-libido and the object-libido . In the process of regressive narcissistic identification invested with libidinal cathexes, the melancholic subject attempts to attain the lost object by internalizing the attributes of the lost object in a cannibalistic way; on the other hand, the subject’s hatred for the lost object turns into sadism that the subject has to find a substitute for these libidinal cathexes , to keep torturing and punishing the substitute or even to resort to self-destruction. See Sigmund, Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia ,” SE 14, 249–52.
- 11.
Chang speaks of his motivation of filming the patricide sequence, “My original version of the patricide scene is that the father falls down to the son’s gun shot and gets up soon afterwards as if nothing has happened to him; the patricide only exists as a picture in Yi-cheh’s mind. In retrospect, the fact that I eventually cut the part of the father’s survival has to do with my father’s decease. I felt like I have killed my father because I was unable to afford him a good life he deserved” (Ryan Ping-hung Cheng 192).
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Darkness and Light (黑暗之光). Dir. Chang Tso-chi (張作驥). Perf. Lee Kang-yi (李康宜) and Robert Fan (范植偉). Chang Tso Chi Film Studio, 1999. DVD.
The Best of Times (美麗時光). Dir. Chang Tso-chi. Perf. Robert Fan, Kao Meng-chieh (高盟傑), and Tsai Ming-shiou (蔡明修). Chang Tso Chi Film Studio, 2002. DVD.
Soul of a Demon (蝴蝶). Dir. Chang Tso-chi. Perf. Zeng Yi-zhe (曾一哲), Chen Pei-jun (陳佩君), and Cheng Yu-ren (程毓仁). Chang Tso Chi Film Studio, 2007. DVD.
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Chang, I.Ic. (2019). Aesthetics of Violence and Elegy for the Young: Chang Tso-chi’s Gang Trilogy. In: Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3567-9_6
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