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Repressed Memories and the Unhomely in Chung Mong-hong’s Children Trilogy

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Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on Chung Mong-hong’s Doctor (2006), Parking (2008), The Fourth Portrait (2010), and Soul (2013) to investigate how Chung employs aesthetics of unease and everyday banality to explore children’s repressed memories, exposing the “unhomely” state of the drifting children, migrants, and marginalized people. Using Chung’s films to exemplify “the home in the world,” and “the world in the home,” this chapter discusses how global capitalism has caused sociopolitical anomalies and intruded the familial space, individual body, and personal memory, blurring the boundaries between the public and the private and corroding the traditional base of “home” and “nation.” Problematizing the ways of thinking “home” and “nation,” we may re-imagine and re-envision the trans-familial and transnational social sphere.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For Chung’s films and award records, see Appendix H.

  2. 2.

    Invited by the author to give a talk at the NCTU Film Studies Center on the 27 May, 2004, Director Hou Hsiao-hsien mentioned in passing his regard for Chung Mong-hong as a young director with the most potential, in particular praising the composition of Chung’s mise-en-scenes .

  3. 3.

    Chung Mong-hong remarks that the inspiration for Parking came during a visit back from the States, where he found himself blocked for a whole three hours in Wenzhou Street. From this encounter, he penned an award-winning script that spans three national holidays: on Mother’s Day, the Autumn Moon Festival, and National Double Tenth Day, with the segment on Mother’s Day in particular serving as an early prototype for this film’s screenplay (Yi-mei Huang and Wen-chi Lin 119).

  4. 4.

    During an interview, Chung Mong-hong expressed his concerns for Taipei’s middle class, saying that “Chen Mo can be seen as a simple case-in-point of the middle-class undergoing crisis. We see this emergent crisis from two factors: first in how the city of Taipei is being portrayed onscreen. My predecessors like Edward Yang had famously personified Taipei in their films, and so too do all of these new directors try to capture the city on film as well, but what is Taipei truly like? In these films, Taipei is always envisioned as a world enveloped in a shroud of gloom, literally a city of grey. And in light of what has happened in recent years, Taipei today seems only more dismal than ever. Secondly, in what life has become for the inhabitants of Taipei. For the middle class, whose daily routine consists solely of going to work and returning home, with an occasional amusing distraction in between, these people are perhaps the least equipped to handle any hiccups in their predictable lives” (Yi-mei Huang and Wen-chi Lin 120).

  5. 5.

    In an interview, Chung Mong-hong once declared, “I have found that the lives of people in Taiwan , or perhaps that of the entire human race, are in fact no longer limited solely to units of communities, nations, and cities” (Yi-mei Huang and Lin 120).

  6. 6.

    Chong Mong-hong once mentioned that his films were profoundly influenced by film noir : “I really enjoy American classics of the 1940’s and 50’s, particularly of the film noir genre , Billy Wilder, John Houston, and even Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films. I just love the shapes and contour of their work, such as the way they used stark lighting to emphasize humanity’s dark side, which I think is utterly wild. Before I began shooting of this film, I knew that I just had to use the paintings of someone as a centerpiece of the whole film, and that someone is Edward Hopper. He was an American landscape artist who was well-acquainted with many directors, including Billy Wilder. I really enjoy watching movies, and his artwork brought out the loneliness and isolation of many Americans; the visual perspectives he chose were very unique, and were a main source we borrowed from in designing the mis- en-scenes during shooting” (Yi-mei Huang and Lin 119).

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  • Doctor (醫生). Dir. Chung Mong-hong. Cream Film, 2006. DVD.

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  • Mahjong (麻將). Dir. Edward Yang. Perf. Virginie Ledoyen, Ko Yu-luen (柯宇倫), Tang Tsung-sheng (唐從聖), Chang Chen (張震), and Wang Chi-tsan (王啟讚). Atom Films and Theatre, 1996. DVD.

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  • Parking (停車). Dir. Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏). Perf. Chang Chen (張震), Leon Dai (戴立忍), and Jack Kao (高捷). Cream Film, 2008. DVD.

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  • Soul (失魂). Dir. Chung Mong-hong. Perf. Joseph Chang (張孝全) and Wang Yu (王羽). Cream Film, 2013. DVD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Ivy I-chu Chang

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  1. Ivy I-chu Chang
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Chang, I.Ic. (2019). Repressed Memories and the Unhomely in Chung Mong-hong’s Children Trilogy. In: Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3567-9_7

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