Title

Remapping Taipei: globalization and Edward Yang's films

Advisor(s)

Cheung, EMK

Author(s)

Sze, Siu-sin, Jean.; 史筱倩.

Citation

Issued Date

URL

Rights

Sze, S. J. [史筱倩]. (2003). Remapping Taipei : globalization and Edward Yang's films. (Thesis). University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5353/th_b2914471 2003

http://hdl.handle.net/10722/31123

The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works.

Chapter One: Introduction: Mapping Taiwan’s Condition in a Global Era

Chinese cinema has been receiving much attention throughout the last two decades. Numerous books were published in which detailed discussions on the cinema of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were carried out1. In a way, they served as a doorway for people, who are intrigued with the Chinese culture, to enter into and explore the film industry in Greater China. One should however also note that most critics tend to put their focus on films in Mainland China2. This is of course not to say that none of the critics has written on Taiwan cinema. In fact, much focus in the essays on Taiwan cinema is given to the internationally wellknown director Hou Hsiao-hsien (Hou Xiaoxian). Most critics have associated his films with the politics of cultural identity in Taiwan; his films provide a dialogue between the official history of Taiwan and a more personal narrative of histories (e.g. Huang 1990; Jiao 1991; Chen 1993; Yip 1997; T.L. Lu 2002a). Unlike Hou, another Taiwanese director Edward Yang (Yang Dechang), the focus of this proposed dissertation, usually likes to use contemporary Taipei as the main setting for his films. In fact, besides all the different characters, Taipei in his films is always the invisible protagonist. It is through his films that the contemporary life in the city Taipei is told. Although quite a number of critics have analyzed his films in relation 1

For example, Chris Berry’s Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (1985/1991), New Chinese Cinema: Forms, Identities, Politics (1994) edited by Nick Browne et al., At full speed : Hong Kong cinema in a borderless world edited by Esther Yau and Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (1998) edited by Sheldon Lu etc. 2 It is interesting to note that in most books on Chinese cinema (e.g. New Chinese Cinema: Forms, Identities, Politics and Transnational Chinese Cinemas), there is specifically a section dedicated to a feverish discussion on films in Mainland China. Hong Kong cinema and Taiwan cinema, however, are always put in one section alone in which essays on Hong Kong cinema always outnumber those on Taiwan cinema.

-1-

to the notion of modernity (e.g. Huang 1990a; Chen 1993; Jameson 1994; Lin 1995), most of them only discussed this issue with reference to his highly-acclaimed films A Taipei Story (Qingmei zhuma, 1985) and Terrorizers (Kongbu fenzi, 1986). It therefore seems that there has not been a comprehensive study of all of his films. In light of this, this dissertation will thus attempt to generate a discussion on the transformation of a Chinese city in the process of globalization. At the same time, the dissertation will also look at how individuals respond to such transformation. As almost none of the critics, except Jameson, try to analyze Yang’s usage of space and architectures, this dissertation then tries to remap Taipei through various spatial images found in Yang’s eight films in Chapter Two. While the spatial images constitute the outer core or the physical outlook of the city, in Chapter Three, the dissertation will go beyond the existing discussion on Yang’s films by seeing how urban dwellers uses memories, desires and fantasies to respond the labyrinthine city in which different flows interweaving each other at a very fast speed in the era of globalization. By that, the dissertation ends with a conclusion in which a discussion of the relationship between film and public criticism is carried out. As Yang’s films circulate among the international art-house circuits, we can then see an alternative side of cultural globalization. Here, cultural globalization is no longer a question of homogeneity or heterogeneity; it is also about the circulation of ideas across geopolitical boundaries.

-2-

An Overview Yang has once said in an interview that he wanted to use the film A Taipei Story to describe the changes in Taipei and examine how these changes affect urban dwellers (Chen 1993: 110, my translation 3 ). Indeed, this is actually the central theme throughout all of his films. Though Jameson only discusses the film Terrorizers in his famous essay “Remapping Taipei”, one may still draw the conclusion that all of Yang’s films explore the relationship between the individual and the city; they are ultimately films about the urban space (147). For people who are interested in exploring the urban experience in Yang’s films, one should perhaps start with Jameson’s discussion on Terrorizers. In his essay, he rightly points out that Terrorizers is completely different from the other films in the New Taiwan Cinema: it shares “none of the potential sentimentalism of the nativist films” (123). As a critique to modernization, Taipei in this film, as suggested by Jameson, is a city caught between art and life, “the novel and reality, mimesis and irony” (123). At the same time, it is also “a superimposed set of boxed dwelling spaces in which the characters are all in one way or another confined” (147-8). In his discussion, Terrorizers reveals the problems of modernization and the effects it has cast on the psychic life of urban subjects (120). Similar to Jameson’s arguments, in his book The Cultural-Historical Experience in the New Taiwan Cinema (Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jingyan), Robert Chen has made a remarkable statement

3

The original text is: 我的企圖很簡單，就是用一部電影來描述台北，我要探討最近幾年台北 發生的一些變化，以及這些變化對於活在台北市的人們，究竟產生何種衝擊。

-3-

that Yang’s films choose the city as the focal point (100, my translation 4 ). According to Chen, they aim to bring out the problems of urban life and the changes that are brought about by modernization (100, my translation). Issues like alienation, rootlessness and the endless pursuit for a materialistic life are being discussed thoroughly in all of his films (101, my translation). Although Jameson did analyze the characters in the film in great detail, one must not forget that he is seeing the city Taipei from a neo-Marxist point of view. In this case, he has not dealt with the transformation of Chineseness under modernization. In fact, Jameson’s and Chen’s essays, which will be studied in details in Chapter Two, focus largely on the result of modernization rather than the reason behind all the problems of urban life. I am therefore tempted to say that to fully understand the situation in Taipei, we must not leave out the issue of globalization since I think it can give us a more comprehensive understanding of all the problems found in the city Taipei. As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter that there has not been a sufficient study of Yang’s films, there is however one book which focuses entirely on some of his works. In his book Studies of Edward Yang’s Films (Yang dechang dianying yanjiu), Huang Jianye discusses the first six films with different theoretical frameworks. This is the first book that attempts to generate a detailed discussion on Yang’s films, however the essays are not coherent enough in terms of the central argument. Since he adopts different approaches in his analysis, it leaves the

4

The original text is: ﹝楊德昌﹞的電影是以都市為中心，主要在於呈現都市生活的問題，以 及現代化的一些變相，例如人際關係疏離、無根的感覺、以及追求物質享受等，都成為不斷 出現的內容。

-4-

impression that there is no inter-linkage between each of Yang’s films and that his analyses are more like films reviews. Hence, instead of analyzing his films one by one, the dissertation attempts to adopt a thematic approach by using issues on globalization as my main conceptual framework and explore how the process has affected people’s urban experience in the city Taipei through Yang’s films. Currently, there are some works done in relation to the city in Yang’s films (e.g. Chen 1993; Jameson 1994; Lu 2002) though it seems that more works should be done in this field. In her recently published book Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland, Lu Tonglin actually tries to analyze the city in Yang’s A Taipei Story, Terrorizers, and A Confucian Confusion (Duli shidai, 1994). Using Georg Simmel’s theories on money as the central theoretical framework, she analyzes Yang’s films by seeing “how money […] has undermined and disrupted traditional Asian family structure” (119). While her discussion on A Taipei Story is about the relation between tradition and modernity, she tries to see the relation between money and people in Terrorizers. For A Confucian Confusion, she places her emphasis mostly on the relations between technology and life, men and women. Although her essay is quite insightful, she fails to see how individuals respond to the problematic city and to the process of globalization. With this in mind, this dissertation thus attempts to give a detailed reading of the city in relation to the process of globalization in Yang’s films, since in my own view, he is very successful in capturing the problematic sides of urban experience. Yang, as well as the other directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ko I-cheng (Ke Yizheng), Wan Jen (Wan Ren), Tao Te-chen (Tao Dechen), Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang), are

-5-

considered as the leading figures in the New Taiwan Cinema which began in the early 1980s. Similar to the Hong Kong New Wave, the New Taiwan Cinema provides a medium for these directors to articulate new concerns arising from the transformation of Taiwan under the influence of globalization. By placing their focus on the local experience, they address issues on the growing pains of urbanization and industrialization in the contemporary city vividly. Instead of following the Grand Narrative of the Nationalist Party, which emphasizes patriotism or anti-communism, they in fact have constituted Taiwanese’s own small narratives through cinematic language and semantic concerns. By focusing on the critical issues raised by Yang in his films, this dissertation will therefore see how the Chinese in Taiwan construct their own urban experience in the age of globalization.

Taiwan and Globalization In the study of the city Taipei, one should not ignore the issue on globalization. In fact, it seems to me that globalization and modernization go hand in hand; modernization is made possible with the global flows of knowledge, technology and people, globalization in turn is made possible with the process of modernization – they are mutually dependent on each other. I am therefore suggesting that in order for us to understand the city, we must in the first place understand globalization, especially in the case of Taiwan. It is perhaps due to the complexity of the globalization phenomenon that it is difficult for one to give an exact definition of the word. While some critics tend to understand it in terms of the challenge to breakdown of national boundaries (e.g.

-6-

Beck 2000; Lash & Urry 1994; Waters 1995), others may consider globalization as a new mode of modernity (e.g. Giddens 1990; Featherstone 1995). In their edited book Globalization: the Reader, Beynon and Dunkerley have mapped out two different groups of people: one views globalization as something progressive while the other group views it as a disguise for the invasion of Western capitalism and culture (2). In light of the different approaches, in his preface to The Cultures of Globalization, Jameson therefore suggests that the term itself is being described in many diverse directions and yet none of the explanations can aptly answer the phenomenon in a satisfactory way (xi). In an attempt to explore the issue, I will try to look at the phenomenon with reference to cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. In his famous essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, Appadurai points out “[t]he central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization” (5). Earlier critics like Hamelink and Schiller are concerned with the integration of all cultures. They tend to believe that globalization would result in a cultural homogenization. Beck has given a thorough understanding of this term in his book What is Globalization:

Both in the social sciences and among the wider public, a number of writers have adopted what may be called the convergence of global culture thesis. The keyword here has become McDonaldization. According to this view, there is an ever greater uniformity of

-7-

lifestyles, cultural symbols and transnational modes of behaviour. (42, original emphases)

The diminishing of differences, the emphasis on global norms and the influence of multinational corporations are all factors contributing to what Beck calls “a single commodity-world” (43). Critics who hold on to this one-world view of globalization are particularly worried that a homogeneous world would threaten the existence of cultural diversity. They also have the tendency to equate globalization with the invasion of American popular culture. Therefore, Appadurai states in his essay that cultural

homogenization

would

often

lead

to

two

arguments,

namely

Americanization and commoditization (5). Such understanding of globalization is of course based on the assumption that the receiver of different cultures has taken up a passive role and therefore will agree with whatever is transmitted to him/her. In light of this, it is therefore problematic to understand globalization as solely homogenization. Critics like Robertson, Appadurai, Pieterse, Axtmann and Held argue that paradoxically, though globalization aims to create a one-world society, it also opens up a space for the emergence of cultural heterogeneity. As one of the pioneers in the studies of cultural globalization, Robertson has argued that globalization is both “the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole” (8). Critics who share with his view often argue that globalization always involves localization (Beck 45). The term “glocalization” is widely used nowadays which connote the idea that the global is mundanely translated and appropriated into our

-8-

daily life; it refers to the interplay of different cultures and the redefinition of local cultures in the “clash of localities” (Beck 48). Global culture, therefore, is not only a one-dimensional phenomenon, but can be only understood through a dialogic relationship between different cultures. The world that we are living in then is not of a homogenized nature but is filled with what Appadurai calls “disjunctures and differences”. Similarly, Jameson has suggested that one way to understand globalization is to see it as “an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts – mostly nations, but also regions and groups which ... continue to articulate themselves on the model of ‘national identities’” (1998: xii). In other words, the more globalization aims to act as a homogenizing agent, the more differences between different parts of the world would be brought up by the project. To a certain extent, this is perhaps true in some of the Asian cities. Even though Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are in a way very globalized, they still hold on to some of their own unique traditions and in fact have gone through different forms of globalization. In this sense, it is necessary for us to contextualize concepts of globalization in our discussion on its effect on Asian cities. Before I go on to discuss the different phases of globalization in Taiwan, I would like to stress that globalization in Asian cities should not be reduced to the meaning of westernization or even Americanization. If we put it in the Asian context, we would then see globalization in Asia also embodies Taiwanization, Japanization, Hongkong-ization and Koreanization. In light of this, both terms westernization and

-9-

Americanization tend to simplify the whole process of globalization – they therefore can only be considered as a partial globalization. In the case of Taiwan, I would like to suggest that historically there are altogether three different phases of globalization: globalization in relation to colonialism,

globalization

in

relation

to

American

neo-colonialism,

and

globalization after the lifting of Martial Laws in 1987. In view of the situation in Taiwan, globalization acts as an interface for people around the world to interact with each other through the transnational movement of economy, culture, people, technology and information. To borrow Ackbar Abbas’s word, Taiwan can be regarded as “hyphenation” in the age of globalization. While hyphenation connotes a sense of connection between places of different geographical locations, it also refers to “the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism” (Abbas 1997b: 143). Although Taiwan provides a space for people from different countries and of different backgrounds to stay, it inevitably is also a contradictory site. While it tries hard to situate itself in the global arena, Taiwan, being a Chinese society, still has lots of traditional Chinese customs and values which are different from other cultures that “invade” the city as a result of colonialism and globalism; they are incorporated into people’s daily life. In fact, in the dissertation, I am going to show that globalization carries with it a force of deterritorialization. While on the one hand, it brings in different cultures by shattering the existing tradition, on the other hand, the glass skin buildings which are signifiers of globalization also reminds us that globalization can in fact homogenize our urban space by turning the city into a hyperspace, an issue that will be discussed in further details in Chapter Two. When

- 10 -

we discuss globalization nowadays, the term is often refers to the economic side of the city. This dissertation thus tries to deal with the cultural side of globalization. As the city inevitably involves in the process of globalization, cinema, especially those films belong to the art-house circuit then provides a medium for one to look at the issues critically. By analyzing the networks formed by the art-house circuits in Chapter Three and by looking at how films can be treated as a form of public criticism in Chapter Four, the dissertation moves beyond the argument of homogenization and heterogenization. We can actually see that there is indeed a positive side of cultural globalization. In fact, both Held et al and Waters have mentioned that cinema is a source to global culture. The emergence of cinema has “blurred the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures” (Beynon 18). Their focus is of course on the Hollywood market worldwide. We however can also branch out from the argument and appropriate that in the Taiwan context. The film industry in Taiwan is getting more and more international attention these days. Films by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang are often included in international film festivals. In a way, we can say there is a global reception for Taiwan cinema. However, unlike Hong Kong cinema which is closely related to commercialization, Taiwan cinema, especially those films emerged in the early 1980s were not too commercialized. In fact, the directors who belong to New Taiwan Cinema tried to reflect on what Taiwan has been through in all these years, from 1945 to the postmodern era5. They belong to 5

Although Hong Kong New Wave can also be deemed as a movement which began to search for Hong Kong identity and dealt with problems that Hong Kong people faced, it should be noted that they are still very much subjected to the pressure of commercialization (e.g. using stars in their film to boost box office). Films which belong to Taiwan New Cinema, however, tend not to commodify

- 11 -

what I have earlier described as the first wave of New Taiwan Cinema. According to Robert Chen in his book The Cultural-Historical Experience in the New Taiwan Cinema, the New Taiwan Cinema movement is the first time that the cinema in Taiwan consciously constructed a serious cinema culture which at the same time placed a strong emphasis on individual creativity (47, my translation6). The New Taiwan Cinema started off with the film In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982) which was a collaboration of works by different directors. Quoting Edward Yang’s words, Chen explains that this particular film might be “the first film that consciously dealt with the history of Taiwan Cinema, the first film that [Taiwan people] started to ask questions about [themselves], question about [their] history, ancestors, politics, the relation with Mainland China etc.” (47-8, my translation7). While one stream of the movement tends to explore the pace of modernization in Taiwan, another stream led by Hou Hsiao-hsien tends to explore Taiwan identity by retelling their own personal growing experiences. Both tried to resist the Hollywood-style of films by experimenting their own creative ways of telling the stories (Chen 49). To relate this movement to the theories of globalization, it is not hard for us to see that New Taiwan Cinema is in a way trying to indigenize the global cultural form by mediating images and sounds into its own use. To use themselves. They employed amateur actors and actresses and often tend to play with the filming techniques. In fact, they did not attract a large audience when the films were shown (e.g. Edward Yang’s A Taipei Story was forced to suspend only after 4 days of screening, see Huang Jianye Studies of Edward Yang’s Films p. 123-4). Even though the box office is below their expectation, they still try to produce non-commercialize films which aims at giving aesthetic response to the problems found in the city. 6 The original text is: 新電影運動是台灣電影第一次有意識地建立嚴肅的電影文化，而且是具 有高度自覺性的藝術創作，真正產生不少好作品。 7 The original text is: 這部電影或許是台灣電影史上，第一部有意識地去發掘台灣過去的電 影，也就是第一部電影，我們開始問自己一些問題，問有關於我們的歷史，我們的祖先，我 們的政治情況，我們與大陸的關係等問題……

- 12 -

Axtmann’s argument, they “bestow their own meaning upon [the global cultures] and interpret them in line with their own cultures, modifying cultural products in line with personal needs” (Beynon 24). In fact, Yang often plays with the filming techniques. For example, he is keen at using long take in almost of the films. Instead of the Hollywood-style of using shot/reverse shot for conversation, he uses long takes to show a more objective picture of the conversation. Through these shots, “the indifference and the lack of communication between two conversational partners” are shown to the audience (T.L. Lu 137). These are in fact two problems found in the global city. If we look at his films, especially those shot after A Taipei Story, one would often find that he is trying to use his films to spell out the problems of globalization in Taiwan. In light of this, I therefore would like to propose that in his films, he tries to use the medium of globalization (i.e. the cinematic form) to contest the whole process of globalization. Interestingly, we should not forget that Edward Yang himself is a global figure. Having educated in the States for his postgraduate studies, he attained a master degree in computer engineering in the 1970s. After he got his degree, he has taken up a cinema course in UCLA (see his chronologies in Huang’s Studies). In a way, we can say that he himself is already a technologically globalized “local” when he was young. Being recognized as one of the best directors in many global filmic events (e.g. Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival etc.), he is becoming more “marketable” these years, especially in the art-house circuit. We should however note that what he has produced cannot be strictly considered as “local” Taiwanese films. Instead, when we look at the production information of his films, we would

- 13 -

find that he actually got some of the sponsorships from Hong Kong, American or Japanese companies (A One and a Two for example is sponsored by a Japanese Company); he is using global funding to produce something that tastes like the “local” but inevitably with a trace of the “global”. In light of this, we cannot simply put an equation mark between “local” and “authentic”. The “local” here is transformed to a globalized figure. Therefore, we can say that the screening of his films demonstrates a dialectic relation between the “local” and the global; the “local” is globalized but at the same time Yang ironically uses this globalized “local” to combat against the impact of globalization. Cultural globalization, in this case, is no longer a matter of homogenization but something that anticipates differences. This then would lead us to rethink about how cinema, seeing in relation to its form and circulation, can also be deemed as a public sphere in which public opinions are free to be expressed, an issue that I will address later in the conclusion of this dissertation. Taipei in Edward Yang’s films is always portrayed as a global city. Edward Yang seldom uses establishing shot to give the audience a basic view of the city. Instead, one needs to mix and match different shots from different films in order to get a picture of the supposedly global city. Physically, Taipei as shown in his films is a very westernized Asian city which is constantly under construction and destruction. In films like Taipei Story, A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong (Majiang, 1996), we often come across with sights of either a crane or a construction sites. At the same time, the backdrop of such sights will always be the glass-skin buildings. Together with the constant shots of the Western restaurants, we

- 14 -

can definitely agree that Taipei physically can indeed be considered as a global city. Of course, when we talk about globalization, we cannot only rely on the physical image of the city. In lots of his films, we can actually find that the problems of globalization are embedded in his film language, which in turn contribute to the portrayal of the Taipei as a global city. For example, in A Confucian Confusion¸ there is a shot in which the rich female protagonist Molly goes back to her office in early morning after feeling betrayed by people around her. What we see in that particular mise-en-scène is that Molly is leaning against the window while behind her is a rather bleak Taipei skyline with few high-rises like the one that she is working in. As Yang opts to use natural lighting to shoot this shot, the lighting of the office is rather dim. We therefore can only see the silhouette of Molly. What is catching the audience’s attention is not Molly but the city behind her. The whole shot emits a strong sense of melancholy. We can almost feel the loneliness, one of the problems with globalization, of Molly as we are presented with this particular shot. Together with the long take that I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, we can see that Yang also tries to use film language in spelling out the problematic side of the global city Taipei. Even though the city depicted in Edward Yang’s films is very globalized, in terms of the film content, he still places an emphasis on family values and Confucian thoughts, something that he is also trying to be very critical about. By analyzing the global city, we therefore see a constant conflict between the Chinese culture and other cultures that are being assimilated into the society. We should however take note that it is through these differences and contradictions that the

- 15 -

Taiwanese can re-affirm their own Taiwan-Chinese identity. Before I go on with the chapter description, it would perhaps be necessary to outline the historical aspect of globalization in Taiwan.

The Relationship between Globalization and Colonialism In my own view, we cannot talk about globalization in Taiwan without mentioning its history of colonialism since I believe it is the root of the globalization of Taiwan; the exchange between two different cultures has started in the 17th century. As Appadurai has mentioned in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, warfare and religions are “two main forces for sustained cultural interaction” before the last century (1). Indeed, the colonial history of Taiwan started with the war between the Chinese imperial government in the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644) and the Dutch invaders. Formerly known as Ilha Formosa, or “beautiful island”, Taiwan has already existed in the Paleolithic Age 15, 000 years ago (Copper 21). Though evidence has shown that the interaction between the Aborigines and the Chinese can be dated back as early as the Han Dynasty (206B.C. – A.D.222), the island was only formally under the control of the Chinese state since about A.D.1170 (Willis 86). Western vessel has already started to sail through the Taiwan Strait during the Ming Dynasty. It was in 1622 that Dutch forces landed on Peng-hu islands, setting out to harass Portuguese trading vessels (Copper 25). The Chinese official later negotiated with the Dutch representative and it was in 1623 that a treaty was signed between the two countries in which Taiwan was given to the Dutch government in exchange for their withdrawal from Peng-hu

- 16 -

islands (Copper 25). During the 38 years of Dutch colonization, the Dutch people taught the Chinese settlers to use oxen to till the fields which made it possible for them to grow sugarcane and several other cash crops (Copper 25). This development thus “led to an expansion of commerce on the island and trade with merchants in China, Japan and elsewhere in the region” (Copper 25). Besides, Western culture, such as Christianity, was also assimilated into the island (Copper 25). Though the exploitation of the locals for profits by the Dutch was clearly present, Taiwan did experience “significant progress under Dutch rules” (Copper 25). While the Dutch had gained most control of the island in the early 17th century, Spanish forces seized Keelung (Jilong) and expanded “their control to Tamsui (Dan Shui) on the northwestern coast” in 1626 (Copper 25). However, the Spanish only managed to rule parts of the island for 16 years. In 1642, they finally succumbed to Dutch forces which led to an “established nominal jurisdiction” by the Dutch over the entire island (Copper 25). The colonial history of Taiwan was made complicated with the war over Korea between China and Japan in 1894. At the end of the war, China could not help but to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki with the Japanese in 1895 and Taiwan was declared to be part of the Japanese Empire until the end of WWII (Copper 29). During this 50-year reign of the Japanese Government, the culture in Taiwan was very much influenced by the Japanese culture. Some of the Japanese architecture can still be found nowadays in Taipei (e.g. the Presidential Office Building and the Japanese-style houses that are shown in some of Yang’s films like A Confucian Confusion). In an attempt to “establish order and domestic tranquility and to

- 17 -

promote economic development”, the Japanese implemented several policies in order to enhance the power and prestige of Japan (Copper 30). After the governorgeneral, General Kodama Gentaro, assumed his duty in 1898, he soon “restricted the power of the military in Taiwan and in turn, delegated jurisdiction over domestic affairs to his chief of civil administration” (Lamley 209). It was since then that Taiwan started to progress significantly. To enhance a better life for the locals, the Japanese government had made several improvements in terms of the economic infrastructure, public hygiene and the educational system (despite the fact that the locals were forced to learn Japanese as their first language) (Copper 30-1). Hydroelectric generators were also introduced near Taipei, “making Taiwan the first electrified area in Asia outside of Japan” (Copper 30). Though seemingly Taiwan had experienced impressive economic growth, it should be noted that much of the profits served the colonial rulers (Copper 31). Exploitation did occur during these 50 years, but as we can see from Yang’s films, the Taiwan people do not seem to mind living in a Japanese-style house. In fact, they have admiration for the Japanese culture that has now merged with Taiwan’s own culture. We therefore can say that the 50-year of Japanese colonialization in a way has also contributed to the globalization of Taiwan. Seeing in the light of the long colonial history, it is not hard for us to comprehend the relationship between Taiwan and globalization. Leela Gandhi explains that the colonial encounter itself accelerated the contact between previously discrete and autonomous cultures and therefore instead of seeing colonialism as something negative, we can also see it as a “cooperative venture” (124-6).

- 18 -

Colonialism therefore paves way for globalization. Similarly, Anthony King has also mentioned that “colonial cities can be viewed as forerunners of what the contemporary capitalist world city would eventually become” (38). Colonialism in his view is therefore an “expansion of the capitalist word-economy” (38). It is a link between imperialism and globalization. Imperialism thus produces the colonial city but the latter can also be a “prefigure” of the global city (Abbas 1997c: 3). With this in mind, I thus propose to say that the globalization of Taiwan is deeply rooted in the history of colonialism, under the rule of the Dutch, the Spanish and the Japanese government.

Americanization as another Form of Globalization By the end of WWII, The United States of America has become one of the super-power countries in the world. With its strong economy and popular culture from Hollywood, American culture has seeped into every corner in almost every country. As we shall see in Yang’s films, starting from the early 1960s, Taiwan is very much influenced by the American culture. In other words, globalization in Taipei is also related to the process of Americanization. This can be shown with the constant shooting of American restaurants (e.g. T.G.I. Friday’s, Hard Rock Café and McDonald’s) and the influence of American popular culture (e.g. the fascination for Elvis Presley), though the Taiwan people are equally interested in Japanese culture. In fact, Taiwan established close ties with the United States back in the 1950s since it was part of the United States cold war efforts to preserve this valuable ally in Asia. It was “with the help of U.S. economic and military assistance” that the Nationalist

- 19 -

(Kuomingtang) government could implement a series of new policies which “aimed at promoting economic development” (Copper 38). Though Taiwan was forced to leave the international political stage after the Communist government of Mainland China was admitted to the United Nations in 1971, it still has a strong tie with the American government. Up to the present moment, the Taiwanese government still sees the United States as a protector, especially when it comes to their tension with the P.R.C. government. Of course, Americans on the other hand are like the other colonizers who use Taiwan as a place to make profits (e.g. the setting up of various American MNC offices in Taipei and the selling of expensive ammunitions, including F-16 fighter planes, missiles). Hence, we can say that Taiwan in a way is also colonized by the United States, except that the colonization by military force has now taken the form of a kind of cultural and economic neo-colonialism. In this sense, besides the history of colonialism, Americanization in a way also helps to shape the globalization of Taiwan.

Globalization after 1987 The year 1987 has been a critical year in the history of Taiwan. The late President of the Republic of China Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo) announced in that year that the white terror in Taiwan has come to an end by the lifting of Martial Laws. With this new policy, Taiwan has become a more democratic and capitalistic society. Before we discuss the globalization of Taiwan after 1987, I would like to give a brief background of the politics of Taiwan from 1945-1987.

- 20 -

Taiwan was finally handed back by the Japanese to the hands of the Chinese government in 1945, ending the colonial history of the island. However, soon after WWII, the civil war broke out between the Nationalist party and the Communist party. The re-unification with Mainland China did not last long. After the Kuomingtang government was forced to abandon Mainland China in 1949, Taiwan again was separated with the so-called motherland. Peace however was not attainable in Taiwan since there were constant conflicts between the Mainlanders and the Taiwanese, who are regarded by the locals as wai sheng ren and ben sheng ren respectively, ever since 1945. According to Copper, “the ill feelings between the two groups came to a head on February 28, 1947” which was later known as the 228 incident. Under the authoritarian rule of Chen Yi, the conflict was repressed, killing several thousand (there was no official record of the death toll) Taiwanese, including the some of the Taiwanese local political leader (Copper 36). For the next four decades, people in Taiwan were forbidden to talk about the February Incident, for the fear that they might be arrested or executed should they dare to speak up against the government. As I have mentioned earlier on, it is until 1987 that the people of Taiwan are allowed to have the freedom of expression and the freedom of press. Though the economic structure of Taiwan has undergone a significant transformation in the 1970s, it is after 1987 that Taiwan ventures into the field of world economy. Its capital city Taipei is later recognized as a metropolis, which is considered as one of the four little dragons of Asia. From an agricultural-based economy in the 1950s to light manufacturing in the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan’s economy in the 1980s and 1990s is mainly related to the exports of high technology

- 21 -

and chemical products. To use Lyotard’s words, Taiwan now has become “a postindustrial, computerized society” (3-6). With the advancement of technology, especially with the growing dependency on computers, Taiwan’s economy is now largely subjected to the global transformation. We can therefore say that from 1987 onwards, Taiwan has entered into the third phase of globalization. One should however take note that Americanization and Japanization did not phase out after 1987. Instead, they are still present in the Taiwan culture and can be deemed as a form of sustained interaction. In a sense, we can say that the third phase of globalization is a continuation of the previous two phases, except that the city is now facing a much more complex situation: other forms of culture (e.g. Hong Kong culture, Korean culture and even Mainland China culture) also try their way to seep into Taiwan and hence deterritorialize the dominant ideologies found in the city.

By discussing the concept of globalization in the context of Taiwan, I will try to explore the impacts of globalization on a Chinese society in the dissertation. Along with globalization, people’s ways of living has changed tremendously. Some of the ideas found in foreign cultures often challenge what the Chinese have believed for centuries. Yang’s early films thus explicitly show how Taiwan is caught up in transitions from the late 1960s to the early 1980s by discussing the conflicts between the old and the new. The pace of globalization is quickened with the development of technology. In Yang’s films, we can see that technology is one of the factors that facilitate globalization and the process of networking. He however tries to see how individuals understand the city in this network-like society.

- 22 -

As can be seen below, I will not, for most parts of the dissertation, talk about globalization in a celebratory note. Instead, by exploring how the space is imagined and how individuals negotiate with the objective world, I will try to discuss how globalization has created quite a number of negative impacts on human life.

An Outline of the Dissertation Every single film of Yang’s is a Taipei story. People from different countries, different classes and backgrounds gather together in Taipei, searching for a place of their own in this glamorous and yet decadent city. In the dissertation, I will not discuss the films chronologically. Instead I will try to explore issues relating to Yang’s films in two major aspects, namely the urban space and individuals’ understanding of the city. In Chapter Two, I will try to discuss Yang’s portrayal of the city Taipei through several spatial images. By focusing on the streets and buildings in A Brighter Summer Day (Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian, 1991), the glass skin buildings in A Taipei Story and A One and a Two (Yi Yi, 2000) and the mirror space in A Confucian Confusion, we can in fact see that Taipei is city in constant transformation. Spatial images are the important symbols of the city. Based on Lee Chingchih’s “The Construction and Transformation of Taipei’s City Image” and Jameson’s “Remapping Taipei”, I will first see the relationship between cognitive mapping and the cinema. By cognitive mapping, I mean the mental picture that we have about a city. We however have to see it not merely as a rearrangement of the

- 23 -

bits and pieces of the city’s image. Instead, the city is a space that is “lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 39, original emphasis). In other words, the city is best seen in its representations. By seeing how Edward Yang remaps the city through his own spatial representations, we can therefore come to understand how Taipei is deemed as a space that deterritorializes the Chinese tradition and power structure, and how globalization turns the city into a space that is beyond recognition. The chapter will be divided into two sections. For the first section, I will use A Brighter Summer Day, which is set in the 1960s when Taiwan was undergoing a set of transformations, to discuss how the traditional space is being deterritorialized and how the film is in fact about the city Taipei in the 1990s. It should be noted that this murder incident did happen in the 1960s. Instead of following the government’s official record, the film gives an alternative version of the murder case. Made in 1991, the film thus “reorganize[s] the memories and experiences of urban growth in the 60s” (Lee 1995: 29). It is different from those propagandistic films and in fact it has “transcended the ‘government impressions’ of Taipei” (29). By showing the local experience in the 1960s, the film thus has become a challenge to the idea of nation-state and at the same time also helps to articulate the identities of Taiwan-Chinese, which is of course different from Mainland-Chinese, Hongkong-Chinese or Overseas-Chinese. This point will be further elaborated with the analysis of the space and architecture in the film; a city discourse is told not by showing those typical Chinese-style houses but by shooting the scenes in the side street of Taipei. The space in the film has therefore captured the dialectics between the nation-state and the city. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s

- 24 -

idea of deterritorialization, the chapter will try to explore how the idea of family/nation is being deterritorialized by Yang’s construction of the urban space, namely Guling Street, Chungshan Hall and the Japanese residential apartments. It is also interesting to note that this film is entirely different from the other films directed by Yang since this is the only film that is about the history of Taiwan, the dissertation will therefore try to explore the sudden shift from the contemporary moment to a historical time by referring to Dai Jinhua’s “Imagined Nostalgia”. It is my attempt to show that the film is in fact trying to use the images in the 1960s to act as a kind of self defense against the speed of modernization in the contemporary Taipei. In the second section of Chapter Two, I will move from a space of deterritorialized family/nation and power to a postmodern space, which according to Jameson, is totally unmappable (1991a: 44). Baudelaire has once said, “by modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable” (13). This statement has precisely pointed out the speediness of changes. In the city, everything changes quickly. To use Calvino’s words, the city is “an endless, formless ruin” (5) since construction and destruction happens daily; what you see today may already be different from what you saw yesterday. Under those swift transformations, the city has changed beyond our recognition. That is one of reasons that Jameson describes the contemporary city space as a “hyperspace”; it is a space that individuals are unable to “map [their] position in a mappable external world (1991a: 44). In fact, we must take note that hyperspace to Jameson does not only refer to the speed of transformation. It also

- 25 -

refers to the form of architectures found in the city. In the chapter, the glass skin buildings and the mirror image in Yang’s A Taipei Story, A Confucian Confusion and A One and a Two is chosen to discuss this unmappable space. By analyzing the different spatial images in the films, we are then able to understand the unmappable space of the city. In Chapter Three, I will go on with my previous discussion in Chapter Two and try to see how individuals survive the unmappable urban space. Taipei in the mid-90s has already become a metropolis which is an active participant of the process of globalization. The chapter will begin with Appadurai’s famous essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” and discuss how different types of flows, namely the flow of money, people, ideologies, technologies and images, constitute an internally chaotic city. Yang in A Confucian Confusion depict such chaotic nature through the constant shooting of cars fleeting across the road in which the yellow lines in the restricted zone have become an image of webs, wrapping the whole city. In the previous chapter, what I am dealing with is the physical appearance of the city. In Chapter Three, however, I turn my attention from the outer core of the city to its inner core, exploring how individuals could interpret the chaotic urban space. Using Castells’ idea of “networking” in the contemporary era, I go on to explore how Taipei can be deemed as both a systematic network society externally and a chaotic labyrinth internally. In view of this, one might note that conflicts may easily arise between the subjective self and the objective environment as individuals gradually find it hard to decipher the city. To overcome these conflicts, I therefore suggest that the city is best seen from the ground-level.

- 26 -

By outlining the different walkers in the street in That Day on the Beach (Haitan de yitian, 1983), A Taipei Story, Terrorizers, A Confucian Confusion, Mahjong and A One and a Two, I attempt to see that the internally chaotic city can indeed be understood through memories, desires and fantasies. The dissertation will conclude with a discussion on how urban imaginary can also be viewed as a kind of public criticism. Modifying Habermas’ “bourgeois public sphere”, the chapter explores the relationship between cinema and the public sphere. Using Hansen’s and Dissanayake’s essay, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere” and “Cinema and the Public Sphere: The films of Oshima Nagisa.” respectively, I will try to see how Yang’s films can be “a site of interrogatory and oppositional discourse” (Dissanayake 139). Indeed, Yang uses cinema as a channel to voice out his opinion about Taipei. In this capitalistic society, Yang’s Taipei shines with its problems, not with its economy. It is through his films that we see a Taipei that is different from the official image.

Conclusion As can be shown here in the dissertation, Yang’s films do provide us a way to read the city Taipei. In fact, we are like the readers of the city who, according to Roland Barthes, move around the city and “[sample] fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret” – “we are something like that avant-garde reader when we are in the city” (1994: 199). Though we may discover lots of the negative sides of the city when we are exploring it, as Simmel has said, “it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon, but only to understand” (1997: 185).

- 27 -

Chapter Two: (Re)constructing the Spatial Image of Taipei

A city’s spatial images always help to constitute its basic identity. The conventional way to look at the city is to buy a postcard and the most glamorous side of the city is there presented in front of your eyes. Certainly, such kind of tourist gaze is problematic as it tends to undermine some of the political or social issues found in the city, replacing them with its superficial sights. The city then, in Ackbar Abbas’s words, “is seen but not heard” (1997a: 77). In the case of Taipei, one common representation of the city’s image would be a shot from the entrance of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (Zhongzheng jinian tang), depicting the grandiose and dominating nature of the blue-white architecture. In fact, it can be deemed as a reproduction of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Zhongshan Ling) back in Nanjing. Implicitly, it is built to convey a sense of traditional linkage between Mainland China and Taiwan, and to ensure the power of the Chiang’s family. The conflicts between the Mainlanders and Taiwanese locals, the brutality of the Kuomingtang (KMT hereafter) regime during the white terror period and the hidden phallocentric ideology are completely dissolved by the photogenic traditional Chinese architecture and the green space around it. The image of Taipei in this case is a sight to be consumed, rather than a site to be understood. Insofar as the academia is concerned, apart from Lee Ching-chih and Frederic Jameson, few critics have actually tried to look at Taipei’s spatial images, especially those constructed by Edward Yang, from the point of view of cinema. In light of this, I would like to suggest that cinema is one of the best ways to not just see but to also

- 28 -

hear the city. In this chapter, I try to see the relationship between the cinema and the cognitive mapping of landscape. In so doing, I go on to explore how Taipei is portrayed in Edward Yang’s films. Interestingly, we can actually see Taipei in Yang’s representations has transformed from a local suburban space in the early 80s to what Jameson calls, a “hyperspace” (1991a: 44) in the 90s. By analyzing the selected spatial images, I attempt to show how globalization can act as a force that deterritorializes the idea of family/nation. By putting a stroke between family and nation, I attempt to say that in the Chinese concept, family is used to refer to the idea of nation for most of the time. As both concepts are fundamental in Confucianism and KMT’s ruling ideologies, Yang shows in his films that they are the dominant territories which are broken down by the process of globalization. Seeing in light of this, we however must remember that globalization is not an unproblematic process. In fact, by reading Taipei’s spatial images in his films, globalization at the same time is also creating a homeless and alienated space for urban dwellers.

Beyond the physical landscape: a cognitive mapping of Taipei through cinema To understand the idea of cognitive mapping, one has to inevitably look at one of the crucial works by an early urban planner Kevin Lynch. In his book The Image of the City, the term is used to discuss how the city is defined by urban dwellers through districts, paths, edges, nodes, and landmarks. Besides the analysis of the actual environment of some American cities, he also places an emphasis on the relation between the city dwellers and the environment. He argues that our

- 29 -

experience is always related to the surroundings, to “the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experience” (1). The city therefore is “soaked in memories and meanings” of the urban dwellers. To move around in the city, urban dwellers hence rely heavily on a “generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world” which is a “production both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience” (4). In short, every urban dweller has in his or her mind a structure of the city; such kind of internal representation of an environment makes it easier for the urban dwellers to navigate through the city. Although Lynch’s work provides us a basic understanding of cognitive mapping, Abbas has rightly pointed out that the city nowadays is more and more like a spectacle; it becomes too easily to be recognized (2001: 7). What Lynch has not expected is the problem caused by “hyper-legibility and instant recognition” (Abbas 2001: 7). Indeed, cities like Taipei and Hong Kong are now only reduced to a few superficial images (such as the city logos, some well-known architectures). In light of this, it is necessary for us to go beyond Lynch’s arguments. Instead of seeing cognitive mapping as merely a mental reorganization of the city’s images, we can see how the space is “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 39, original emphasis). In Lefebvre’s “representational spaces”8, he argues that those who inhabit the space can “[seek] to change and appropriate” it through the imagination (39). The space in Lefebvre’s sense moves beyond the physical space, “making symbolic use of its objects” (39). In light of Lefebvre’s arguments, I try to say that Edward Yang, as 8

In Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, he suggests that there are altogether three types of spaces. What I have discussed in the dissertation is the representational spaces. The other two types are “spatial practice” and “representations of space”. While the former means how individuals interact with the perceived space, the latter refers to “conceptualized space” (38).

- 30 -

one of the “users” of the space of Taipei, does not merely represent Taipei as it is. As the conventional images of Taipei become too ready to be consumed, Yang therefore has decided to reconstruct a different cityscape of Taipei through other insignificant “non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 39). Taking Kevin Lynch as the starting point, both Lee Ching-chih and Jameson have incorporated the idea of cognitive mapping into their own analysis of the city image. While Lee attempts to understand cognitive mapping as the “individual’s sensual experience and memory of the city” in his essay “The Construction and Transformation of Taipei’s City Image” (27), Jameson sees cognitive mapping as a way to negotiate one’s position in the urban space (Jameson 1992: xiv). In other words, cognitive mapping to Jameson provides a way for individual to “articulate the local and the global” in the postmodern era (Jameson 1992: xiv). As he claims that it is impossible to find one’s coordinate in the postmodern space (1991a: 44), we therefore have to see cognitive mapping as a way to re-present the problematic space. Despite their different backgrounds, Lee and Jameson both use film as a medium to analyze the spatial images of Taipei. Jameson is one of the pioneers to relate spatial images to urbanism in connection with Yang’s films. In his analysis of Terrorizers, he remarkably points out that spatiality is “a unique feature” of this film. It is through spatiality that “the individual space and the city as a whole” can establish a kind of relationship (1994: 147). His analysis of the enclosed spaces, gas tank, and the street from the point of view of the balcony speaks a lot about Taipei. We can therefore say that Terrorizers is indeed seen as “a film about urban space in general” (1994: 147). Jameson’s analysis does in some way enlighten our reading of

- 31 -

Edward Yang’s films, it however should be noted that he is only placing Taipei in the context of Western postmodernity9. As suggested by one of his critics, Jameson fails to relate Taipei in Terrorizers to the social and historical situations of Taiwan in the 1980s. Hence, what he creates in the essay is not a version of “Taiwanese local postmodernism”. Rather, Taipei is “constructed by the illusions and fantasies of the first world and the west” in order to “conceptualize the third world cinema” (Hu). In light of this, I will therefore try to relate Taipei in the films to the local situations as this is key to the question of why Yang wants to present a certain spatial image at a particular time. Unlike Jameson, Lee’s analysis does try to integrate the situation of Taipei with the representation of spatial images in the films. Lee has suggested in his essay that there are altogether five different stages of Taipei’s urban growth which constitute different architectural landmarks. The five stages are the reconstruction period (1950s), the sealing-off period (1960s), the void period (1970s), the breakaway period (1980s) and the puzzle period (1990s). As one of the pioneers in Taiwan who relates cinema and architecture in his critical analysis of Taipei, Lee suggests that a collective cognitive map of the city can be constructed by films of the relative period. In the first period, the cognitive mapping of Taipei resulted in the portrayal of Taipei as a city of “immigrants”, whether from Mainland China or from the southern countryside of Taiwan. Taipei Station and Zhonghua Shopping Mall were two landmarks found in the films of the 1950s. In the second period, the

9

Interestingly, in his article, he often likes to compare Terrorizers with other European cinema and classical American/ European novels. This inevitably adds a tinge of exotic flavor to his analysis. See Hsing-Chi Hu’s review on the book New Chinese Cinema, source available online.

- 32 -

spatial image of Taipei resorted to a kind of governmental propaganda in which Chungshan Hall and other palatial architecture such as Sungshan Airport were always the backdrop of the stories. In the void period, the film market was predominantly filled with endless romantic stories. The city represented was “limited to the school yard, the living rooms and dining rooms in mansions of the rich, or the loving environment of daycare centers” (29). In the forth period (i.e. the breakaway period), filmmakers began to take a more critical stand when mapping out the spatial image of Taipei. The city then is portrayed as a “living nightmare for urban dwellers” (29). Images found include the garbage mountain, “the crowded high-rises and public housing projects” (29). Lastly, Lee points out that the 1990s is a puzzle period in which the new generation of directors tried to depict Taipei in relation to fringe cultures and spaces (30). Overpasses, motels, KTV rooms became the chosen images. In a way, Lee’s categorization does help us to get a clearer picture of the changes in the cognitive mapping of Taipei. We, however, have to also notice that such kind of categorization can easily fall into the trap of stagnation and stereotyping. While some films in that particular period do embody the suggested images, films like A Brighter Summer Day speaks a lot not just of the 1960s situation but also of the late 1980s situation in Taipei. Although Lee concludes that “A Brighter Summer Day [was] made in the 80s to reorganize the memories and experiences of urban growth in the 60s” which can be deemed as a “reaction to the formulaic city image” (29), he fails to explore why Yang wanted to produce a nostalgic film of the 60s in the year 1991. Another critique of his analysis would be his tendency to ignore the possibility of images from different period

- 33 -

overlapping each other. In fact, a lot of images found in the puzzle period have already existed in the films in the breakaway period (e.g. pubs, KTV rooms, and hotels). It therefore points to the impossibility of drawing a clear cut line between each period of time. In my analysis of Yang’s films, I would not adopt Lee’s chronological approach. Instead, I would try to see analytically how images of different period speak to us about the influence of different cultures on local Taiwanese culture. Before we discuss how Taipei is mapped in Yang’s films, it is perhaps necessary to discuss the relationship between cinema and cognitive mapping. In his introduction to the book Focus on Taipei through Cinema 1950-1990¸ Robert Chen rightly points out that “[c]inema is an urban phenomenon” (17). This phrase aptly describes the relationship between cinema and the city. While a lot of films need the city as its basic backdrop, it is therefore not hard for us to comprehend that cinema participates a lot in the construction of the city’s images. On one hand, cinema is a medium for us to realize our mental map of the city; on the other hand, cinema has also taken an active role in helping us to map our city at a cognitive level. It is an archive of “fragmented, broken up experienced memories” and “segments of landmarks and architectural spaces of the city” which are then “recombined to create a (sic.) internally complete spiritual map of the city”(Lee 1995: 27). We must however take note that the cinema does not only describe the city. It also appropriates the space that we lead a mundane life. If it is difficult for one to map his or her space nowadays, I am tempted to borrow Lefebvre’s idea in saying that by mapping the city on the screen, the cinema can henceforth function as a tool that

- 34 -

helps us to re-interpret the place that we dominate. The alternative space, which is opened up by cinema, allows us to be critical of the space we inhabit. The spatial representations of Taipei in Edward Yang’s films are definitely different from those images that we found in traveling guidebooks. In all of his films, we never see a shot of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, or a shot of the Presidential Office Building. All those dominant landscapes found in the postcards are absent and are replaced by insignificant details such as the dirty back alleys, cafés, identical streets and highways. The space of Taipei is not at all glamorous. Instead, it is a space where Taiwanese people carry out their daily activities. Taipei, as it is in the films, is not different from anywhere else in the world. Yang has once explained that he would not represent the urban image of Taipei through a particular architecture for he believes that there is no architecture that can truly be considered the landmark of the city (Lee 1994c: 172-173, my translation10). In light of this, Lee suggests that many directors construct the visual Taipei cityscape by juxtaposing all the spatial fragments (e.g. the shots of the Subway station, Eslite Café and Warner Village Cinemas in A One and a Two) that come to their minds (1995: 27). The city image that we see therefore is the subjective cognitive mapping of the directors. In “Postmodern Urban Landscapes: Mapping Culture and Power”, Sharon Zukin mentions that an urban landscape is always constructed according to the asymmetry of economic and cultural power. In the art-historical context, those with a higher degree of power (e.g. state institutions) can certainly have “the ability to impose a view” (224); the powerful directs the powerless to look at certain things from a 10

The original text is: ［楊德昌］曾經表示，他不會特別去拍那一棟建築，做為代表台北的城 市意象，原因是，台北沒有一棟建築真正夠資格或夠特出成為台北市的地標。

- 35 -

particular desirable point of view. It is therefore a question of perspectives and power. In the visual sense, the landscape of asymmetrical power suggests how the powerful, who are more geographically mobile, try to “draw from a potential repertoire of images, to develop a succession of real and symbolic landscapes that define every historical period” (225). In this case, the images of the landscapes often tend to be something conventional, something that contribute to the tourist gaze of the city. As a director (the powerful in terms of camera movement) and a middleclass man who can travel anywhere at his will, Yang, however, did not try to follow the government’s propagandistic intention. Instead, he tries to reverse such order of power by directing our look to the mundane streets or spaces Taipei, hence constructing his own cognitive map of Taipei. By looking at the list of spatial images found in his films (see Appendix I), we can come to the conclusion that it is precisely through all those images (e.g. various streets, Japanese residential houses, school, overhead bridges and overpasses etc.) that a problematic Taipei is constructed and understood. As lots of critics have already analyzed Taipei as a city of danger11, I will thus focus on the two spaces of which I have mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. It is my hope to see if the analysis of the spatial images can spell out some of the problems that Taiwanese people are facing in the global era.

11

One image that is often discussed in relation to the space of danger would be the giant globe (gas tank) in Terrorizers. It is said in Jameson’s essay that this particular “architecture” signifies Taipei as a space of danger and insecurity; the city is on the verge of explosion with the recurrence of the gas tank. For a detailed analysis, please refer to Jameson’s “Remapping Taipei” (p. 134-135), ChingChih Lee’s Taipei Lost and Found (p. 42-43), Robert Chen’s The Cultural-Historical Experience of New Taiwan Cinema (p. 104) and Tonglin Lu’s “Melodrama of the City” (p. 138).

- 36 -

A Brighter Summer Day: Deterritorialization of Taipei as a space of tradition and power In the Chinese tradition, family is a key notion that indirectly points to the patriarchal ways of thinking in a Chinese society. In fact, this has been one of the key elements in Edward Yang’s films. From his early short film Expectation (Zhiwang, from In Our Time, 1982) to his latest film A One and a Two, family, though not a focal point of the whole plot, still plays a central role in the films. A description of the family structure in every film of Yang’s can be found in the table below:

Films

Family Structure

Expectation

Family without a father figure Jiali’s family: a deteriorating patriarchal

That Day on the Beach

father figure Jiali and her husband’s marriage: divorced Shuzhen’s family: a father without power

A Taipei Story Shuzhen and A Long: separated Li Lizhong (Doctor)’s family: separated Eurasian’s family: father figure absent Terrorizers Photograher’s family: only the maid is present Xiao Si’s family: intact but is anticipating A Brighter Summer Day crisis Molly’s & Akeem’s families are absent A Confucian Confusion Xiao Ming’s family: divorced

- 37 -

Red Fish’s family: half-separated Luen Luen’s family: mother figure absent Mahjong Toothpaste

&

Hong

Kong’s

family:

unmentioned NJ’s family: intact but is on the verge of A One and a Two breaking down

Unlike the Chinese traditional values in which the intactness of a family is always emphasized, we can see from the above descriptions that the families in Yang’s films are always in a crisis situation, either they are broken or are on the verge of breaking down. Rather than affirming the powerful patriarchal center, Yang tries to display a different image of the family, thereby to contest the normative view. One way to see such kind of subversion is to look at how the spatial image of Taipei is portrayed

in

his

films.

Using

Deleuze

and

Guattari’s

ideas

of

deterritorialization/reterritorialization and Foucault’s heterotopia, Chang Hsiaohung and Wang Chih-hung in their essay “Mapping Taipei’s Landscape of Desire: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Family/Park” attempt to explore how the alternative spaces12, such as the parks, pose a threat to the dominant space. Although they did not discuss Yang’s films in their essay, I would like to explore the

cinematic

space

of

Taipei

based

on

their

framework

on

deterritorialization/reterritorialization. By doing so, I would like to see how we can view Taipei as a deterritorialized space of family and power in Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day. Although the focus of my chapter here is on the deterritorialization of 12

By alternative spaces, they mean those spaces other than the normative space, which in this case is the space of the traditional heterosexual family.

- 38 -

the Chinese tradition, the idea of family/nation in particular, one must not see the film as a celebration of a culture that belongs to the Taiwanese people, including those Mainlanders who now have settled in Taiwan. Even though Yang attempts to contest the KMT’s Grand Narrative, the film at the same time carries a sense of melancholy and homelessness. These perhaps are the results of the opening up of a city. The concept of deterritorialization started with Guattari’s earlier works that deal with the idea of antipsychiatry. Guattari differentiates the processes of deterritorialization into relative and absolute deterritorializations. The former “retain the possibility of reterritorialization” while the latter “are marked by the impossibility of being territorialized again” (Günzel). By the word “territory”, we are reminded of the notion of “boundary”. Chang and Wang argue that territory is “a way of structuring the (sic.) space”; ethologically, it “carries emphases on the defense of borderline and highlights the occupational power within the boundaries” (116). In light of this, deterritorialization/ reterritorialization is thus a deconstruction/ reconstruction of the existing borders. While deterritorialization shatters the power structure of the dominant group, reterritorialization regroups the shattered bits and pieces and juxtaposes them together to form yet another dominant group. Together with Guattari, Deleuze has developed the idea further in relation to capitalism. As Chang and Wang have noted in their essay, capitalism is “a process of decoding/ recoding established social codes, a process of deconstructing and reconstructing the structures of domination” (116). In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “[c]apitalism schizophrenizes more and more on the periphery” (232). In their book

- 39 -

Anti-Oedipus, they argue that the Oedipal family structure is among all other institutions which pose different restrictions in capitalist societies. Psychoanalysis thus tends to enforce these restrictions (Bogue 88). Capitalism then is a force of deterritorialization which is a development from “the center to the periphery, the decoding of flows on the periphery develops by means of a ‘disarticulation’ that ensures the ruin of traditional sectors” (Deleuze and Guattari 232). As capitalism seeks to optimize profits, it speeds up “all type of ‘flows’, including the flow of labor power, capital, commodity and communication” (Chang and Wang 116). With all these flows in capitalism, the society is opened up to new opportunities, thereby erasing/deterritorializing the existing borders. Although capitalism threatens all “traditional codes that limit and control social relations and production” (Bogue 88), it at the same time also reterritorializes the deterritorialized within “the state, family, law, commodity logic, banking systems, consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing institutions” (Best and Kellner 89, qtd. in Chang and Wang). To put it in an easier way and for the convenience of the discussion in this chapter, I am more incline to Appadurai’s idea of the erosion of geopolitical boundaries between countries. Deterritorialization to me can be understood as the erosion of various boundaries. As we understood that what Deleuze and Guattari’s work tries to focus is the breaking down and regrouping of desires in the heterosexual family structure by capitalism, I will go beyond their discussion by understanding deterritorialization in a more layman term, which is, the breaking down of the traditional boundaries by economic flows. In Edward Yang’s films, what is being broken down is more than just desires. To further elaborate this point

- 40 -

and to put Deleuze and Guattari’s idea into the context of cultural studies, it might be necessary for us to briefly look at Taiwan history first. Ever since the late 1940s, Taiwan has been under the authoritarian rule of the KMT government. As the number of locally born Taiwanese accounted for over 80% of the total population, the KMT government, in an attempt to exert its power upon the people, have tried to create a “unified” Chinese identity (Wachman 23). It was officially written in the KMT charter that the mission of KMT is to “[complete] the National Revolution, [carry] out the Three Principles of the People13, [recover] the Chinese mainland, [promote] Chinese culture” (qtd. in Wachman 25). To the KMT, Chinese culture is not comprised of different local variants. The Taiwanese local cultures hence found it difficult to survive under the rule of the KMT. Placing the emphasis on Confucian virtues such as living up to one’s words (xinyi) and being loyal and filial to one’s elderly (zhongxiao), the government tried by all means to indoctrinate both the Taiwanese locals and Mainlanders with traditional ideologies14. In fact, in a letter written by Tsiang Yien-si in 1991, it was said that the KMT government “made urgent efforts to promote what is known as the ‘Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement’”(qtd. in Wachman 41). What this movement aimed at was to “affirm and restore those traditional value[s] in the Chinese culture which would help to enrich [people’s] spiritual life in a rapidly developing society that can become also increasingly materialistic” (Tsiang, qtd. in Wachman 41). Through constructing all these Grand Narratives, the KMT hoped they could help to “advance the cause of

13

They are democracy (min zhu), the livelihood (min sheng) and the rights of the people (min quan). In fact, some of the street names of Taiwan were named for such Confucian virtues, such as Shinyi Road (信義路), Ren-ai Road (仁愛路) and Jungshiau Road (忠孝路).

14

- 41 -

reunification” (Wachman 42). Little did the KMT know that its effort to emphasize the one and only one set of Chinese culture would result, ironically, in a proliferation of local Taiwanese culture; the more it emphasizes a single Chinese identity, the more the Taiwanese locals try to “cling to and cultivate their own sense of self” (Wachman 42). According to Yang in an interview conducted by the New Left Review, people like Edward Yang who belong to the second generation of the Mainlanders and grew up in Taiwan during the 60s live a life that is very oppressive under that the “extremely rigid, conservative dictatorship” of the KMT regime (“Edward Yang – Taiwan Stories”). In the same interview, he further said that in his generation, “the typical phenomenon was outward conformity and inner rage”. In light of this, the idea of deterritorializing or the breaking down of the existing boundaries in Edward Yang’s films is not so much about desires, but is about those ideas and Chinese traditions imposed by the KMT government15. Besides the urge to go beyond the official narrative, the shattering of the dominated ideologies is also related to its economic situation. Like Hong Kong, Taiwan is often being described as another “economic miracle” (Rubinstein 3). In his introduction to the book The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present, Rubinstein has briefly sketched the economic development of Taiwan, pointing out the fact that the Americans had helped a lot in Taiwan’s initial economic stage. Although the KMT government always refused to establish a certain kind of connection between Mainland China and Taiwan, it later realized that to develop its economy, “a viable 15

By saying this, I do not mean that all Chinese traditions to Edward Yang are negative in nature. In fact, by precisely constructing a broken-down image of the family structure, Yang is in a way also trying to point out the importance of family especially when the society is more and more caught up in the money economy and facing various urban problems such as alienation.

- 42 -

economic relationship with the PRC” might be possible (Rubinstein 11). Thus, in the 1980s, “Chinese from Taiwan began pouring into the mainland via Hong Kong as tourists and as merchants seeking products for across-the strait trade, and as possible business partners searching for joint enterprises to invest in”(Rubinstein 11). All these happened before the lifting of the martial laws. After Chiang Chingkuo has put an end to the period of white terror in 1987, the Taiwanese people experience a more dynamic change in the socioeconomic aspect. With a more open society, a lot of foreign investments, other than those belong to the Americans and Japanese, have helped to build a Taiwan with a very strong economy. With the circulation of capital and culture, it is not hard for us to see that this has in fact acted as a subversive force that smashes a lot of rigid Chinese traditions. It is precisely the exposure to the different kinds of cultures worldwide that brings about new ideas to the city and henceforth poses a threat to the dominant ideologies set up by the KMT. In Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach, James Lull argued that by “tearing apart [...] cultural structures, relationships, settings and representations”, new cultural territories can be formed (qtd. in Beynon 141). To him, the interaction between different cultures will “influence each other” and therefore “produce new forms” (qtd. in Beynon 142). In an attempt to explain the effect of communications technology on the movement of culture, he writes, People today can re-interpret and use cultural symbolism in new temporal contiguities, greatly expanding the range of personal meanings and social uses. Mixing the traditional with the modern is

- 43 -

fully reasonable and practical in the range of contemporary cultural possibilities. (qtd. in Beynon 142, emphases added) To put Lull’s argument into the context of Edward Yang’s films, we can in fact see that what Yang has done in his films is indeed mixing “the tradition with the modern”. To Yang, Chinese in Taiwan should no longer lock themselves in traditions like Confucianism but should try to re-invent the tradition in order to survive in the city as Yang has shown in A Confucian Confusion. Interestingly, instead of focusing on other elements in the Chinese tradition, Yang has placed the idea of family in a crucial position in his films. This particular choice of his in fact does bring about an issue in the Chinese tradition: the blurring of boundaries between family (jia) and nation (guo). Therefore, by breaking down the family structure, Yang is in a way also challenging the national consciousness constructed by the KMT government. Both nation and family suggest a sense of inclusion and exclusion. In “Crisis and Identity: Representations of Nation and Home in Hong Kong Cultural Imaginary”, Esther Cheung points out that the idea of nation and home is indeed interchangeable (10). In Chinese, “nation” is translated literally as “nation-home” (guojia). Here we can see a subtle relationship between home and nation16. To the Chinese, home is the basis for nation building. When we were still young, we were often taught with a Confucian idea “xiu shen qi jia zhi guo ping tian xia”. This phrase literally means that in order for one to rule the world, one has to first cultivate one’s moral character, then learn to manage a home, so that

16

While “home” in English refers to the private domain of life, “family” is about human relationships. However, it should be noted that these two words in Chinese connotes the same meaning, jia. Therefore, in this dissertation, I see family and home are interchangeable concepts.

- 44 -

one will eventually has the ability to govern a nation. Here we can see that family is being analogized as the miniature of the nation. In fact, for most of the time, the Chinese tends to relate the nation s/he belongs to as his/her “homeland”. Like the idea of “home” which concerns blood-tie relationships, the idea of “nation” is also one of the “spiritual principles binding ethnic Chinese” (Cheung 10). This overlapping idea of family/nation then advances us to understand Yang’s intention to deterritorialize tradition. As I have mentioned earlier on, two focuses of the KMT government regime were “[t]he recovery of China” (fangong dalu) and “the promotion of Chinese culture” (Wachman 25). To the KMT, Taiwan is considered one part of China and that “the notion of one unified China has been deeply embedded in the minds of all Chinese” (Shaw, qtd. in Wachman 35). What the KMT believes is that “China is marked by a single, unbroken line of cultural identity” (Shaw, qtd. in Wachman 35). In the KMT’s view, people living in Taiwan inevitably carry with them the Chinese national identity instead of other “nonlegitimized” cultural identity. By fostering “a particular view of China, history, and culture associated with... the appropriate – Chinese – identity”, the KMT government, thus, has constructed a “Chinese” experience rather than a “Taiwanese” experience (Wachman 41). In view of this, by mapping the image of Taipei in the 1960s in A Brighter Summer Day, Yang is not only deconstructing the family structure and the patriarchal ideologies in the Chinese culture, but is also trying to shatter the idea of one single nation set by the KMT government. By showing a different story of the life of the Taiwanese people, be it the local Taiwanese or the Mainlanders, in the 60s, Yang therefore has reconstructed an

- 45 -

alternative narrative which tries to act against the Grand Narrative that the KMT government has constructed. Set in the late 50s and early 60s, A Brighter Summer Day is a story of the troubled second generation of Mainlanders in Taipei. The whole story takes place in the southwestern part of the city center which includes Guling Street, Nanhai Road and Wanhua Market. From the Wanhua District, where the economic activities in Taipei began, to Chungcheng District, where the political power is situated, we witness a bloody story of the endless struggles between the gangsters from Mainland and those who are bred locally. We also witness a story of Xiao Si, the distraught second generation of the Mainlanders. Yang has indeed constructed a Taipei’s own version of West-Side Story. Unlike Hou Hsiao-hsien who tries to depict a rural image of Taiwan in his historical narratives such as A City of Sadness or A Time to Live and A Time to Die17, Yang still places his emphasis on the city center of Taipei though this is also a story about the life in Taipei back in the 50s and 60s. Interestingly, the images of the city in his films never fall back into the official representation of Taipei. What we see in this film are images of Guling Street, Japanese residential apartments, Chungshan Hall (Zhongshan tang), Little Park ice-cream parlor, the film studio next to the school, Billiard room (or what the Taiwanese used to say the danzi fang), the Army shooting range and the very dominant image of a much power-centered school compound. While the ice-cream parlor used to be a place where boys and girls met and where they were exposed to

17

In both films, the director seldom “brings” the audience to experience the city life of Taipei. Instead, what we are shown are pictures of endless mountains, the little town found in between the hills and the closest image akin to a city is the train station in A Time to Live and a Time to Die.

- 46 -

the western popular culture18, Chungshan Hall and the shooting range once again remind us of the authoritarian power of the KMT government (Lee 1994b: 95). Other image such as the billiard room signifies the Mainlanders living area and the film studio points to the national cinema business in the 1950s. By juxtaposing them together, Yang therefore has recreated the collective experience of the 1950s. By looking at the three spatial images, namely Guling Street, Chungshan Hall and the Japanese residential apartments, I attempt to see (i) how Yang tries to use his cognitive map to subvert the dominant images of Taipei promoted by the government, and (ii) how these images act as a subversive force against the family/nation narrative which the KMT government aimed to promote desperately.

Guling Street If one has ever visited Taipei, perhaps one will find it interesting to discover that the street names of Taipei conjure up to the physical landscape of Mainland China. “City streets in Taiwan were renamed by the KMT for cities, [rivers and mountains] on the mainland” (Wachman 55). In fact, the streets and roads were named according to their locations back in Mainland China. While we have Gueilin Road (Guilin Lu) in the southwestern side of the city, we can find Jilin Road (Jilin Lu) in the northern part of the city center. As both cities are at the similar location back in Mainland China, it is therefore right to say that the city center of Taipei is a remapping of the territory of Mainland China. When the KMT government retreated

18

In the film, the parlor at night is a singing place for Xiao Si’s friend Cat and his elder brother. Though they do not necessarily know what the English lyrics are about, they sing lots of English popular songs that also include those of Elvis Presley.

- 47 -

to Taiwan in the late 1940s, the Mainlanders at first deemed Taiwan as a transitory place. Once they regained China from the communist party, they would return to the mainland which they called home. However, as time went by, it became clear to them that homecoming is forever postponed, the streets in Taipei then became their imagined homeland. In light of this, we can say that Taipei is succumbed by signs that have a strong sense of attachment to the places where most Mainlanders came from; the city is a project of nostalgia for China. The depiction of the sense of longings for their homes and glorious past at China can be seen from films like Lee Hsing’s (Li Xing) Our Neighbor (Jietou xiangwei) or Taiwan modern literature like Pai Hsien-yung’s (Bai Xianyong) famous short story collections Taipei People (Taibei Ren). Yang, however, depicts a Taipei that no longer feeds itself with the propaganda of fighting back to China nor is it a city that indulges itself in a nostalgic feeling towards China. Although the film is set in the 1960s, the city shown in the film does not linger in the past. Instead, the people depicted in the film, including the second generation of the Mainlanders, do not really care about those narratives imposed by the KMT government. In the film, the youngsters do not conform to any school rules. It is true that they are at a rather rebellious age, one should however note that they are definitely not those people who hold on to the Chinese tradition. The construction of such characters indeed speaks a lot about Yang’s intention to go beyond the KMT’s ideologies. In the case of Guling Street, although it is named after the mountain in southern China (Lee, 1994a: 98), it is not a place where people savor the nostalgic past. Guling Street was famous for selling second-hand books in the 50s and 60s.

- 48 -

While people in the past went to Chungching South Road (Chongqing nan Lu) to buy the mainstream and “proper” books, Guling Street was where they should go to if they wanted to buy pornography, non-mainstream publications19 and politically banned books (Lee, 2001: 75). In a period when one was forbidden to get his or her exposure to the outside information, it was a place for those people who were keen about news that were not learnt at home (Lee, 1994b: 95). With all the “non-proper” books sold there, it was a space that deterritorialized the dominant ideologies imposed by the government. We can therefore argue that Guling Street is a symbol of subversive forces. By situating his film in this particular street, Yang has already expressed the subversive nature of his film. Even though the KMT government does not really pay attention to Guling Street, the other space in the film is put into the forefront, bringing the audiences’ attention to the other stories of Taipei. In fact, the killing of the female protagonist did happen back in the 60s, instead of recreating an official narrative of the murder, Yang tries to look deep into the frustrations that the teenagers were facing at that time. To Yang, what is important is not the ideology related to the recovery of China. Instead of filming the general situation of Taiwan in the 1960s, he has highlighted the personal experience. In so doing, he has indeed constructed an alternative discourse that subverts the KMT’s ideologies that I have mentioned earlier on in this chapter. In terms of the style of the film, he has adopted the classic film noir. In fact, he deliberately shoots the street after nightfall in which all sorts of illegal and subversive activities happen on the street. Coupled by the use of low-key lighting, which has created a gloomy atmosphere, the city then is 19

Non-mainstream publications include those outdated magazines imported from the foreign countries. See Lee Ching-chih’s Spatial Signs and Memories, page 95.

- 49 -

portrayed as a site of crime – one common feature of film noir20. Of course, we must also take note that ultimately the film is not a crime story but is about the unpleasant collective growing-up experience of the second generation of the Mainlanders in Taiwan in the 1960s. Interestingly enough, Guling street is not only a place for the teenagers to stroll along, it is also a place where military tanks are shown patrolling the streets. By juxtaposing such images, Yang suggests that even though the government attempts to use military forces to “territorialize” people’s thoughts, Guling Street then is imagined as a site of deterritorialization, a site that combat the government ideologies. Besides the deterritorialization of Taipei as a space of power, the representation of Guling Street also deterritorializes the notion of family/nation that is much emphasized in the Chinese tradition. With the opening up of the city, the streets provide an open space for people to venture into the different parts of the city. It is a space where a certain degree of freedom may be found. In the film, Xiao Si and his friends often loiter around the streets, parks and the parlor in their spare time or when they skip classes. It occurs to the audience that they never want to return home, where they are only confined to their bedroom. In this sense, Guling Street shatters the territory of the family by providing a get-away for the distraught teenagers from the patriarchal power found in the school and in their family. In other words, it is a temporary “home” to this bunch of homeless teenagers. In fact, homelessness in this film also manifests at the nation level. It is precisely the sense 20

According to Dirks, films belong to the film noirs category tend to “show the dark and inhumane side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasize the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic side of human experience”. Also known as black cinema, film noir films can therefore be considered as a response to the life of the city. By choosing this genre to shoot the film, it is not hard for us to understand Yang’s criticism of Taipei in the 1990s.

- 50 -

of insecurity felt at home that they try to search for a better home elsewhere. Guling Street then can serve to be an analogy to the situation of Taiwan. It is always a temporarily unstable station where people come and go. In light of this, we can come to understand why homelessness is one of the themes of this film. Perhaps, when people try to break down the territories drawn by the government, being homeless is the price that they have to pay for.

Chungshan Hall In Yang’s cinematic depiction of Taipei in the 50s, Chungshan Hall is another image that recurs in the film. According to the introduction of Chungshan Hall in the government record, it originally was built to pay tribute to the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Formerly known as Taipei City Hall, the four-story-steelstructure is modeled upon the Spanish mosque architecture which has an area of 113,750 square feet (“Introduction of Chungshan Hall” – Chinese version). This city hall was later renamed as Chungshan Hall (name after the founder of the country) after the KMT government had recovered Taiwan after World War II in 1945. Ever since then, Chungshan Hall has become a place for official gathering. It is the formal reception area for foreign guests and the place where memorial ceremonies are held (“Introduction of Chungshan Hall). While placing its emphasis on the vastness of the hall, the Taiwan government also stresses that the historical value is “embedded within each stone and every brick of Chungshan Hall” (“Introduction of Chungshan Hall”). Looking at the rather complex representations of the building, we can in fact call Chungshan Hall a “zero degree” structure (Barthes 1982: 240). In

- 51 -

his essay “The Eiffel Tower”, Barthes points out that “the Tower is nothing, it achieves a kind of zero degree of the monument” (240). By that, he means that no predetermined meaning is attributed to the Tower. It is an empty sign which “means everything” (Barthes 237, original emphases). Although the name of Chungshan Hall may suggest some Chineseness, the building itself is not a pure Chinese structure. Different appropriations of the spatial image can in fact suggest different ideological positions. In the hands of the Japanese, it is a colonial subject and a demonstration of patriotism. In the hands of the KMT government, it is transformed to a political subject and serves to be a symbol of a patriotic and patriarchal nation. In the hands of Edward Yang, it then becomes a cinematic place that contradicts what KMT has imposed on it. Placing this rather important building in the film, Yang however does not emphasize the vastness and the underlying message – patriotism – that is embedded in the architecture. Rather, the images of Chungshan Hall are a collection of fragmented pictures of the building. Instead of using crane shots where you can first get an overview of the building, Chungshan Hall in the film is only reduced to its front doors, auditorium and backstage. The most interesting thing about this space is that we do not see any formal reception or any government official. Inside the auditorium, we are invited to a little concert where different groups of people are singing the then popular English songs. It is there we hear the song A Brighter Summer Day, originally sung by Elvis Presley. It is also inside the auditorium where we witness the flirtatious look between the teenagers. Outside the hall, local gangsters fight for the power to control. The supposed authoritative power of

- 52 -

Chungshan Hall is taken over by the rather mundane and violent life of the middle and lower class people of Taiwan. Yang uses these minute details to deterritorialize the authoritative power originally embedded in Chungshan Hall. Once again, though the place inevitably carries with a very strong sense of nationalism (e.g. the name of the hall, the functions that used to be held etc.), Yang has challengeed the notion of “nation” that is much emphasized by the KMT. In the film, even though everyone, including the gangsters, seems to be caught in a freeze frame while singing Taiwan’s national anthem, once it is done, life just goes back to where it has always been – fighting between gangster continues, flirting between teenagers continues, singing for the middle and lower class people continues. It seems that the national anthem or the history of the building no longer exerts a kind of power on them or on Chungshan Hall itself. Taipei here is then portrayed as a space with deterritorialized power.

Japanese residential apartment Another dominant image that can be found in Yang’s earlier films is the Japanese style residential apartment. We can in fact find this space in his first short feature Expectation, his first feature film That Day on the Beach, Terrorizers and not to forget A Brighter Summer Day. Built in the period when Japanese colonized Taiwan, this kind of apartment continued to house hundreds and thousands of Taiwanese people, especially the Mainlanders, after the defeat of Japanese army in WWII. In Japan, the patriarchal values are so deep-rooted in people’s minds that females are considered the other of the society up to this century. Therefore,

- 53 -

Japanese residential apartments do not just remind us of the Japanese influence in Taiwan, they also signify the patriarchal power system that is so dominant during the Japanese regime and in Confucianism, a virtue that the KMT used to rule Taiwan. In Yang’s films, however, this kind of patriarchal value found in the Japanese residential apartment is undermined by the failing family structure of the Taiwan society. While the father is absent in Expectation, he is slowly losing his power in That Day on the Beach especially after Jiali, the female protagonist, runs away from it. In A Brighter Summer Day, Xiao Si and his siblings always run away from the house. In fact, we never see the seven of them sitting together under one roof. They are always shown in their own respective rooms. Interestingly, the powerful in the family is not the father especially after he has lost his government job. The mother seems to have more control over it. This already has subverted the patriarchal structure in the family. While the Chinese always stress the importance of an intact family, here in A Brighter Summer Day, the Japanese house is ironically a space that deterritorializes the traditional sexual boundaries found in the family. Another interesting point worth mentioning with regards to the Japanese residential apartments is the material used to build them. According to Lee, most of the architecture was built with rather light wooden materials and paper, it therefore had a very lousy soundproof function (1994b: 96). There is basically no privacy in the Japanese residential apartment; if the family members are quarrelling, neighbors will definitely know what they are arguing about. It is quite ironic to find out that a patriarchal symbol is built upon some really poor construction materials. This piece of fact can indeed be interpreted as the vulnerability of the notion of “family”– the

- 54 -

family is on the verge of disintegration. In the film, when the father beats Xiao Si’s second brother, demanding him to explain why he has stolen the mother’s watch, the camera pans slowly from the inside of the house to the outside of the house. There, we find Xiao Si sitting against the fence of the opposite apartment. He dares not enter the house and is scared by what has happened inside. Family to the teenagers then means nothing but oppression. A lot of the teenagers therefore like to wander the street aimlessly, making friends with the gangsters in order to “release those pressure asserted by the family” (Lee 1994b: 96, my translation21). In this sense, the Japanese residential apartment can be deemed as the starting point that deterritorializes the family structure of the Chinese society. Although it might be too general to equate Chinese tradition to the family values, we can in a sense try to understand family as a metonym for tradition and nation in Yang’s films. Therefore, while Yang uses the Japanese residential apartment to show how vulnerable the notion of “family” might be, we can also see it as Yang’s attempt to point out the unstableness of the idea of “nation”. In this case, he is also trying to combat the KMT’s idea of one unified nation. In light of this, Taipei therefore is being portrayed here as a space of deterritorialized tradition.

21

The original text is: 這種飽受壓力的家庭生活空間，也使得眷村的青少年喜歡離家在外遊 蕩，結黨成羣，並在幫派中找到人際關係的認同與家庭壓力的宣洩所拼湊出來的五十年代。

- 55 -

A nostalgia film or a film about the present? In the New Taiwan Cinema movement, nostalgia 22 is another thematic approach in dealing with the issues found in Taiwan. Interestingly, among the eight films of Yang, seven of which talks about contemporary Taipei. Only A Brighter Summer Day tries to deal with a Taipei back in the 50s and the 60s. The question that immediately rings a bell in one’s mind is then why Yang suddenly wanted to produce a film of the past in 1991. Although Jameson has once criticized nostalgia films as a project of pastiche which approach “the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (1991a: 19), nostalgia films in New Taiwan Cinema in fact do not construct empty history. By turning their perspectives to the history of Taiwan, it is therefore a soul-searching process. Nostalgia then is not an “attempt to appropriate a missing past [into] the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation” (1991a: 19). It is through looking back at the history that the Taiwanese people are able to construct an identity of their own, not an identity constructed by the government ideology. It is also through the returning to the past that they are able to understand the present moment. If we see the past as home, we can therefore understand the surge of nostalgic films as a process of homecoming. As globalization shatters lots of boundaries, including that of the family structure, people do not feel at home anywhere. Therefore they have a stronger sense of homelessness nowadays. Nostalgic film then can serve as a shelter for them. In the case of A Brighter 22

Nostalgia film does not necessarily refer to historical film. In fact, the word nostalgia is understood as “a longing for the past” or “homesickness”. As we see the past more beautiful than the present, we therefore have an urge to return to it, even though we understand that it is impossible for us to do so. We thus “become ‘nostalgic’”. In other words, it involves a sense of lack/ loss. See Rey Chow’s “A Souvenir of Love”, p. 134.

- 56 -

Summer Day, Yang aims not just to constitute an identity of the adolescence, rather, one might argue that the nostalgia film is itself very much an urban film which is also about the problems of living in the city. By drawing my arguments from Dai Jinhua’s essay “Imagined Nostalgia”, I try to show that this is not just a film about the past Taipei but also a film that weaves the situation of the present Taipei. The spatial images presented in this film are also the space of Taipei in the early 90s. While Dai Jinhua focuses mainly on the Mainland Chinese films and cultural phenomena, her arguments about nostalgia as a kind of self-defense can also be applied to the situation of Taipei in Yang’s film. Dai argues that as the economic development of China changed drastically in the 80s and the 90s, cities therefore are subject to modernization and commercialization. However, “in the social realities [...] people discover [...] that the cave that is opened by ‘open sesame’ is not only a Pandora’s box but a labyrinthine palace and a dangerous wilderness constructed out of concrete, stainless steel, and glass enclosures” (208). Nostalgia to the intellectuals, hence, is a “strategic need” which provides “a necessary spiritual space for imagining and for consolation” (209). In this sense, Yang too uses nostalgia strategically in order to understand the “profound anxiety over the aggressively speedy process of modernization” (Dai 219). What we should take into account is that Dai and Yang are actually talking about different historical dimensions. While Dai’s essay talks about the situation in the post-cultural revolution China, Yang’s film is in fact dealing with the post-martial law Taiwan. Both are characterized by one common point: the common folks’ ability to have more freedom in the socioeconomic sense. After the lifting of the martial law in 1987, Taiwanese people

- 57 -

were given the opportunities to have more freedom. People now can have more access to information worldwide and thus the city is caught up in the quick pace of urbanization. It was after 1987 that Taipei joined the other four cities in Asia to become the “four little dragons”. The making of A Brighter Summer Day then provides a space for Yang to combat the forces of “speedy process of modernization”. Guling Street represents the life of the middle to lower class people in Taiwan. By reconstructing the collective memory of Guling Street, Yang then provides us a chance to rethink the contemporary life. In this sense, the past is definitely a source that “provide[s] a rationale for our contemporary struggle and to impart to us some sense of comfort and stability” (Dai 219). Seeing in light of this, we can say that if Taipei back then is portrayed as a space of deterritorialized family structure and power, it then perhaps also points to what has happened in Taipei after 1987 as well. As globalization tends to speed up different flows, which may include the flow of technology, information, finance, ideologies etc., the tradition of Taipei, for example the idea of family and nation, can then be easily deterritorialized. That is why in the film we have the Japanese residential apartment and Guling Street to show how family structure/ patriarchal power are subject to the process of deterritorialization. Interestingly, while capitalism deterritorializes the tradition, Yang attempts to use the nostalgia film to reassert the family values. By bringing the problematic issue to light and being critical about the tradition, Yang has subtly stressed the importance of the family in times of crisis. It is noted that in times of crisis or big changes, Yang is more interested in family issues. A Brighter Summer Day was shot after the lifting of martial law while A One and a Two was shot at the

- 58 -

turn of the century. It is as if to convey the message that it is necessary to cling on some tradition in order to make sense of the present situation. This then incidentally echoes with what Dai Jinhua has said in her article that nostalgia film provides a channel for one to understand our contemporary struggle. In this sense, we can say that Yang also tries to reassert the family values through the depiction of Taipei as a space of deterritorialized tradition in A Brighter Summer Day.

The postmodern Taipei landscape: a hyperspace In the summer of 2000, the mayor of Taipei City, Dr. Ma Ying-jeou expresses the need to build Taipei into a cyber city in the years to come. Instead of “building a city on its physical space”, it is imperative for the government to “accelerate information and communication development” in order to “promote public welfare and enrich the lives of Taipei'’s residents, and to ensure that Taipei develops its full potential as a world-class metropolis” (Ma). In the hope to “better the lives of its residents as well as transform Taipei into one of the most hospitable cities in Asia”, it is therefore important to “build Taipei as a CyberCity based on a vision of cyberspace rather than physical space” (Ma). Taipei then becomes more indecipherable since the city has developed into not just a physically-chaotic city, but a city that exists virtually in the electronic network. This then makes the space of the city all the more problematic. In fact, the word CyberCity in a way does remind us of Jameson’s famous term when he discusses space in postmodern era – the hyperspace.

- 59 -

By analyzing the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, Jameson comes to the conclusion that the mini city with no obvious entry is in fact a postmodern hyperspace which “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (1991a: 44). In other words, the space in the postmodern era is no longer mappable cognitively. Because of the complexity, it henceforth suggests a disjunction “between the body and its built environment” (1991a: 44). It is then a placeless space. Since we only have limited experience, we therefore are not capable of even mapping the urban landscape in the postmodern era. According to Jameson, “the strange new feeling of an absence of inside and outside, the bewilderment and loss of spatial orientation ... the messiness of an environment in which things and people no longer find their ‘place’ – offer useful symptomatic approaches to the nature of postmodern hyperspace” (1991b: 117-118, emphasis added). In the case of Taipei, as globalization becomes an inevitable trend in the economic development, the city becomes more and more towards, what Chu Tienwen (Zhu Tianwen) would call, “a configuration of Milan, Paris, Tokyo and New York” (189). The geopolitical boundaries are now substituted by the flow of money, people and information. Here we can see that the traditional territories are now undermined by globalization. As the flows intercept and go in multiple directions, the space nowadays becomes even more unmappable. In fact, I would like to point out that the hyperspace is in fact the result of such kind of deterritorialization. When the tradition, such as the above-mentioned family/nation, is threatened by the

- 60 -

different flows, people seemingly would have more freedom. However we should also note that in this hyperspace, what we experience is indeed alienation and homelessness. An attachment to any place is made impossible in the hyperspace as we have lost our sense of direction and thus “no longer find [our] ‘place’”. This then leads to the feeling of alienation, which is so pertinent in the daily experience of the city. As the city changes drastically, people living in Taipei easily lose their ways in the city. In Yang’s films, we often see people wandering aimlessly the street. In fact, such sense of alienation and homelessness is very pervasive in almost all of his films. From A Taipei Story to A One and a Two, it seems that the characters are getting more and more alienated from their physical homes. They all long for a certain degree of attachment to a place but home is almost impossible. In the cinematic mapping of the city, Yang seldom starts with an establishing shot of the city. What we see is the juxtaposition of the spatial images of different places. This therefore precisely points to the unmappability of the city and why Yang claims that there is no landmark of Taipei that is worth shooting of. In what follows, I am going to explore how Yang uses glass skin buildings and mirror space to convey the idea that even before Taipei has turned into a CyberCity, it already has become a hyperspace.

Building a hyperspace: glass skin buildings and mirror Even though Taipei can be drawn onto a map, the real space of Taipei in Yang’s films is portrayed as a hyperspace. Jameson once describes that the visual Taipei in Terrorizers is a “cold [...] glassy surface that repels identification” (1994:

- 61 -

123). In fact, this kind of feeling can be found in his earlier film A Taipei Story. Towards the end of the film when Ah Zhen, the female protagonist, stands in the empty office with her former boss, the camera pans to the windowpane and its view as her former boss boasts about the computer industry that she is going to venture into. What we then see is not the usual cityscape but buildings with shimmering glass skin. Later in A One and a Two, such screenshot is also seen when NJ goes to Japan for a business trip. On his way to the hotel, his taxi passes by numerous similar glass skin commercial buildings with their lights on. Both scenes do imply the placelessness of the society in the era of globalization 23 . The glass skin, as argued by Jameson, “achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the [building] from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the [building’s] outer walls you cannot see the [building] itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it” (1991a: 42). Therefore, this has made it difficult for one to recognize the place that he or she is in. Besides this, we can also see glass skin buildings as a metonym of a global city. As we all know that this type of buildings is specially catered for the commercial usage, it hence embodies the flow of capital and of course, the flow of people. Like the idea of a CyberCity, glass skin buildings can also be viewed as the network society, of which I will discuss in greater details in the next chapter. To put the idea simpler, inside the glass skin buildings, lots of invisible exchange activities are happening 23

Other than the glass skin, the cinema complex, Warner Village, in A One and a Two is another example of the hyperspace. Like Bonaventure, it is a mini city of its own. In the film, Yang pans the space from the top to the ground floor, which makes it difficult for one to tell whether he or she is on the street or inside a building. In fact, such Cineplex can be found elsewhere in the world which therefore turns this place into yet another placeless space. In addition to that, the space of the lift, which is quite prominent in Yang’s A Confucian Confusion and A One and a Two, is also a hyperspace.

- 62 -

regardless of time and space. While you may be working in one of the glass skin buildings in Taipei, you are in fact connected to “the network of major metropolitan centers at the national and international levels” (Castells, qtd. in Beynon 73). As the complexity of this network-like space is beyond people’s imagination, the glass skin buildings therefore problematize the mappability of the space. In fact, by shooting such urban images, Yang points out how the national boundaries are easily deterritorialized by such network structure. Another interesting spatial image that occurs in Yang’s films is the constant shooting of the mirror and the space behind it. In a place like Hong Kong and Taipei where we have limited land resources, we often build homes that are less spacious. In this case, mirror is often used to extend the space. Therefore, we can also say that mirror is a metaphor which points to the fact that the space of our cities is all deemed as a confinement. In Yang’s portrayal of the space of Taipei, not only does the mirror enlarge the congested space such as the master bedroom in A One and a Two and the public toilet in A Confucian Confusion, it also functions to bring the audience to enter into the other space of the mirror. What interests me most is that whenever a mirror is present, Yang often tends to shoot the conversation between people through the mirror. In the scene of the public toilet where Qiqi and the stepmother of Xiaoming talks about Qiqi’s career and Xiaoming, the whole conversation is shot indirectly through the mirror. Thus what we see is not the real person standing in front of the mirror but the reflection standing on the side of the mirror. Similarly in the bedroom scene in A One and a Two where NJ and his wife talks about the meaningless life, the conversation is again shot through the reflection

- 63 -

on the glass/mirror. The idea is somewhat similar to Baudrillard’s “hyperreality”. Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern era, the real world is replaced by signs. Hence, “simulations come to constitute reality itself” in the case of hyperreality (Best & Kellner 120). The glass/mirror in Yang’s films then constitute a rather hyperreal world. By bringing the audience into this world, it is therefore easy for us to lose our directions. This, then, has subtly points to the unmappability of the postmodern world. We can in fact also interpret this technique as Yang’s attempt to give a voice to the supposedly voiceless other on the other side of the mirror. This technique does not only speak about the alienation found between people in the city, it also tends to blur the real space with the non-existing virtual space. Hence, it is difficult for the audience to tell which is the real space and which is the virtual space or to locate him or herself within either space. In this sense, Taipei is indeed portrayed as a hyperspace through the spatial image created by the mirror. One should also take note that such kind of representation does in a way echo with what I have discussed in A Brighter Summer Day. By constructing a hyperspace, Yang indeed is also trying to deterritorialize the idea of family/nation. As the world becomes more and more border-less, the territory constructed by family/nation unavoidably is shattered and replaced by the network society. As a matter of fact, Yang’s later films try to go beyond the Grand Narrative of a “Taiwan Miracle”, which is usually publicized by the KMT government. Instead of conforming to the collective ideology, what he is dealing in these films are things that are at a rather personal level. In fact, the hyperspace of the postmodern Taiwan is indeed one of the problems resulting from rapid globalization. It is precisely because of the fact

- 64 -

that Taiwan’s economy grows at an alarming rate, the space becomes more and more indecipherable.

Conclusion: Taipei under construction When Red Fish and his gangs move across the city in the evening in Mahjong, we see images of construction works on the street; when Xiaoming in A Confucian Confusion talks to his boss in the office, we see the cranes outside of the window. These images remind us of the fact that the space of Taipei is under constant construction and destruction. From the Japanese house in his first film Expectation to Dihua Street and the Eastern districts in A Taipei Story, from Guling Street to those placeless glass skin buildings, what Yang has mapped cinematically is a city that is caught between the old and the new, a city that has transformed from a more domestic space to a transnational space. In Remapping Taipei, Jameson notes that just in Terrorizers alone, Taipei is transformed from a traditional kind of space to the national space, the multinational space and the transnational space (148). Indeed, the eight films of Yang also show such kind of transformation. As capitalism proliferates in the city, unavoidably, the city often tends to divide itself into two separate parts. By juxtaposing Dihua Street with the eastern districts together in A Taipei Story, he attempts to show how incongruous Dihua Street is with the rest of the city. Situated in the Western part of the city, Dihua Street, famous for selling textiles and Chinese medicine, is the witness of a prosperous Taipei back in the 50s and the 60s. This was the area where people first stepped on when Taipei was still at its primary stage of economic development. As the

- 65 -

economic center of Taipei slowly moves from the west to the east, Dihua Street therefore becomes part of the history of Taipei. In light of this, while Yang tries to depict the eastern districts with glass skin buildings, he inevitably creates a tension between the old and the new. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps interesting to note that Yang always chooses to shoot real places in his films instead of discursive spaces. Not just do these images of the city bring the audience, especially those who are familiar with Taipei, closer to the understanding of the film, shooting real places also enables us to understand that the “local” and global co-exist at the same time. While we are shown with images of the old dilapidated side of Taipei, we are at the same time also presented with images like MacDonald’s, Thank God It’s Friday Restaurant and Hard Rock Café. By showing the images of incongruous spaces, Edward Yang perhaps is making a claim here that globalization in Taiwan is never a project of homogenization. What he wants to show us is that globalization in Taiwan is to some degree an uneven project which results in an ongoing struggle between the “local” and the global. As Taipei is more and more caught up in the process of globalization, Yang’s spatial images in his later films thus focus more on the multinational and transnational spaces. By mapping the images of Taipei, he is very critical of globalization. Since the city becomes more and more global, people therefore are more and more caught in a sense of alienation, a sense of confinement and a sense of placelessness. These problematic issues are addressed through the spatial images presented in Yang’s films. From a space in A Brighter Summer Day to that in A Confucian Confusion, Taipei is constantly under construction. What then appears as

- 66 -

the landscape in his later films is more likely to be a postmodern hyperspace. As Jameson expresses his concern with the inability to map the landscape in a hyperspace, we therefore need cognitive mapping to understand this placeless space. In fact, in the next chapter, I am going to see how individuals explore the city through memories, desires and fantasies.

- 67 -

Chapter Three: Taipei: A City to be Deciphered

In “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, one of his most important essays, Appadurai sketches out five different global landscapes24 in an attempt to erase the existing geopolitical boundaries between different countries. One critic points out that the new model that is suggested by Appadurai is indeed “collectively and progressively destablizing existing centers of ‘Western’ power and dominance” and that the world is “marked by ‘flows within flows’” (Fore 131). In fact, as Appadurai wrote the famous essay in the late 1980s, he might not have anticipated the fact that in just a decade’s time, the flows of humans, technology, media images, finance information and ideologies have become even more complicated with the introduction of a cyber world. What we find therefore is not only the disjuncture of different flows, but also a chaotic interweaving of the invisible movements. Interestingly, towards the end of his essay, Appadurai suggests to use the “chaos” theory, a mathematical idea, to explain the global cultural processess and the role of different disjunctive flows in such interaction (20). To put the theory in simpler terms, “chaos” theory scientifically refers to the studies of dynamical systems which “[behave] unpredictably and randomly despite their seeming simplicity and that [the] forces involved are supposedly governed by well-understood physical laws” (Britannica Encyclopedia). In other words, this theory poses a threat to the linear worldview that some mathematicians have held

24

They are ethnoscapes (the flow of people), finanscapes (the flow of money), technoscapes (the flow of technology), mediascapes (the flow of media images) and ideoscapes (the flow of different ideologies). For a detailed explanation, please refer to Appadurai’s essay (6-7).

- 68 -

onto for centuries. To understand this concept in the cultural dimension, we may see that globalization is not as simple as it seems to be. It is not only a matter of homogenization or heterogenization but is actually constituted of what Appadurai notes —“complex, overlapping, fractal shapes [of different flows]” (20). He therefore concludes that “it is perhaps important to start asking [the dynamics behind the global system] in a way that relies on images of flow and uncertainty, hence ‘chaos’, rather than on ‘older images of order, stability and systemacity” (20, emphases added). This then perhaps echoes with the last part in my previous chapter; the flow of all the -scapes maybe one of the factors that contributes to a chaotic and unmappable hyperspace in the postmodern era. We may then ask the following questions: How do individuals situate themselves in this seemingly simple and yet chaotic world full of different kinds of flows? When it comes to the understanding of the city that we live in, do individuals see it as completely undecipherable or do they take up different roles in reading the city? While my previous chapter deals with the outer core of the city, this chapter takes the chance to see the inner core of the city. By the outer core of the city, I mean the city that is constructed by visible signs such as buildings and mirrors. As to the inner core of the city, it is in fact a space where human beings try to interact with the network-like city, in which different flows come and go in different directions at a speed that is beyond our imagination. While geographers and urban planners always tend to construct the city through a rational system, this chapter tries to provide an alternative way to see the city. As I am going to show in the following, while the city might appear to be rather rational, it at the same time is in

- 69 -

fact constituted by memories, desires and fantasies. In an attempt to go beyond the existing critiques on Edward Yang’s films, which scarcely touch upon the issue in this chapter, I try to see how individuals negotiate their positions in the network society and how they try to experience this internally labyrinthine city. That is why, in this chapter, I juxtapose Manuel Castells’ idea of “networking” with Elizabeth Wilson’s idea of “the city as a labyrinth”. In fact, Wilson’s arguments can be deemed as a critique to Castells’ emphasis on the economic and rational side of the city. In this context, Castells’ arguments can merely serve as a starting point for us to see how critics try to associate the city with a rather structural image. By discussing Wilson’s ideas, I go on to analyze the different types of walkers in Yang’s films who experience the city through memories, desires and fantasies. It is through the portrayal of different characters in Yang’s films, we can see individuals do have their ways in reading the undecipherable city in the age of globalization.

Globalization and networking Manuel Castells has once said that we are approaching the Information Age or constructing a new social structure of what he called the Network Society (1997: 321). Indeed, with Appadurai’s ideas of flows, we are developing a global economy in which “a network of decision making and information-processing centres” emerge, aiming to “influence consumption patterns, lifestyles, and formal symbolism” (1997: 329). Before we go on to explore how individuals in Yang’s films locate themselves in the labyrinthine city, it is necessary for us to get a basic understanding of the Network Society.

- 70 -

In The Rise of the Network Society, the first volume of his famous Information Age Trilogy, Castells begins with the restructuring of capitalism after the collapse of statism and the Soviet Union in the 1990s. He lists numerous characteristics of the new capitalism, highlighting that it involves “decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms” (2000b: 1). With the reformed capitalism, the world then, in his words, is entering into “an interdependent system working as a unit in real time” (2000b: 2). This has precisely spelt out the situation of the global economy; in order to maximize profits, companies are connected together in the production and after-sales process, regardless of the locations of their headquarters. In order to explain such a situation, Castells uses the word “network” to map out the interdependency of the global economy. By network, we can simply understand it as “a set of interconnected nodes” (Castells, 1999: 6). While power-relation may still exist between nodes, Castells points out that they are necessary for “the circulation of money, information, technology, images, goods, services, or people throughout the network” (1999: 6). Interestingly, this statement inevitably reminds us once again that in this era, the flows inside the network are crucial to the function of the global economy. In fact, the word “flow” connotes the idea of “fluidity” which pinpoints to the slippery side of each movement; since the flow is not fixed to any particular site, it can henceforth easily deterritorialize the existing boundaries. Like flows, networks are not fixed too. They “readapt, form and reform, in an endless variation” (Castells 1999: 7). It is perhaps because of their great flexibility that the networks formed

- 71 -

between the multinational corporations in a way would “transcend national boundaries, identities, and interests” (Castells 2000a: 208). Castells has once mentioned that the interdependency between the different nodes in the networks at the same time has made numerous social changes, such as the attacks on patriarchalism and the rising consciousness of environmental issues. In this case, we can easily see that both networks and flows are highly flexible and in a way bring in new concepts that can free us from tradition. Apart from the flexibility of the networks and their challenges to the existing tradition, another critical feature of the networks is their involvement in decentralization. Castells argues that “multinational enterprises are not only engaged in networking, but are increasingly organized themselves in decentralized networks” (2000a: 208, emphases added). This is not to say that there is definitely not a single center in the network. Castells rightly points out that the network is both “centralized and decentralized” at the same time. It is decentralized because there is not a definite center in the networks, every company involved has a certain degree of autonomy; it stressed the importance of “interactions”, not “instructions” (1999: 6). It is, however, centralized because large corporations merge together, hoping to expand their business areas. In “Information Technology, Globalization and Social Development”, Castells has given a list of the large corporations which merge together and he observes that though they involved in the centralization of power, they are also caught within the networks (6). Interestingly, he points out that we are living in an era where different networks are embedded in another series of networks. In this “networks-within-networks” society, every participant has to

- 72 -

follow the network logic. Those who do not do so will be “wiped out by competition, since they are not equipped to handle the new model of management” (1999: 7). As a matter of fact, when Castells mentions the network society, he always states that the revolution of information technology is “instrumental in allowing the implementation of a fundamental process of restructuring of the capitalist system from the 1980s onwards” (2000b: 13). By comparing to the electricity in the industrial era, he maintains that the information and communication technologies are “a pre-requisite for economic and social development in our world” (1999: 3). In other words, information technology is the basis for the establishment of the informational economy and henceforth, the network society. Ever

since

the

early

1990s,

humans

increasingly

rely

on

the

“telecommunicated networks of computers” which are “at the heart of information systems and communication processes” (Castells 1999: 2). As we are moving towards a knowledge-based economy, information therefore becomes very vital in the development of our society. Nowadays, the competitiveness between companies has increased drastically over the years with the advancement of technologies. As a result, getting the most updated information at a very fast speed means a higher chance to win the other business adversaries. Information technology hence “allows countries to leapfrog stages of economic growth by being able to modernize their production systems and increase their competitiveness faster than the past” (Castells 1999: 3). To become more and more competitive, a lot of multinational corporations use information technology to form a kind of strategic network. Within this network, they share not just costs and resources but most importantly, they share information.

- 73 -

Geopolitical borders no longer limit such kind of cooperation. With the help of information technology, what we then find is “an inter-related [global] system of flexible organizations and information-oriented institutions” (Castells 1999: 4). Although network society is one of the ways to advance our understanding of globalization, we must note that Castells puts his focus more on the economic side of globalization rather than the other aspects. In Taiwan, cultural industry is indeed grounded on a global network. By that, I am referring mainly to the commercialized cultural industry. We can actually see that it is in fact closely connected to the industry in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and the United States. In this cultural network, in order to gain a larger market share, a lot of corporations joined together in disseminating and gathering of information and the latest trends. For example, the Eastern Broadcasting Company (Dong Sen Dian Shi) serves as a news wire for lots of news corporations in Asia. In the case of Edward Yang’s film production, he also participates in such a networkstructure industry even though he is neither an independent filmmaker nor a conventional one. While his films started off with the subsidization from a Taiwan film company, Zhong Yang You Xian Gong Si, both That Day on the Beach and his famous Terrorizers were co-produced with Hong Kong companies. In fact, besides these two films, his latest film A One and a Two got its fund from a Japanese company known as 1+2 Seisaku Linkai. These are his only films that were funded by companies outside of Taiwan. In the case of A One and a Two, such kind of cooperation does not only reflect the Japanese influence in Taiwan, but also presents us with the fact that in the modern film industry, the setting up of a network

- 74 -

between companies is inevitable. What we see in the above information is in fact relating networking to economics factors; the networks formed enable a film to get more financial aids in its production and distribution. To see networking in Taiwan in the cultural dimension, we can try to explore the reception and distribution of films around the world. Apart from the networks in the commercialized cultural industry, we can in fact see that there is also a network between the art house circuits. From Cannes to Berlin, from Hong Kong to Singapore, Taiwanese films by Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien are among the popular choices in various film festivals. In this sense, we can in fact see that culture is a form of what Liao Pinghui argues as “transnational exchange” (1997: 62). As Yang often uses films as a medium for him to express his criticism of the city Taipei, the distribution of his films in Asia and in the western countries do remind us that the circulation of noncommercialized films like Yang’s can also be a form of cultural globalization. In this case, cultural globalization refers not only to homogenization or heterogenization, it also refers to the transnational circulation of public opinion, an idea that will be discussed in greater details in the next chapter. Seeing in light of this, globalization is not only a matter of economic networking, as shown in Castells’ arguments which are confined to multinational companies and information networks. It is also related to the networks formed between cultural institutions. In explaining his ideas, Castells seems to ignore the possibility of internal conflicts in the network society. Unlike Appadurai who mentions the disjunctures and differences between different flows, Castells “neglects [...] the social struggle over networks” (Dijk). Although he does point out that those who are outside the

- 75 -

networks are suffering from poverty and social exclusion, he fails to see that even those who are inside these networks are also “engaged in daily struggles over the construction and use of these networks” (Dijk). What Castells has not mentioned is how individuals interact with the objective environment. In other words, he only presents us with a model of the contemporary society without mentioning how one should experience the city or how the city is understood. If we look at the networks in Edward Yang’s films, what we find are not solely the economic networks but also human networks. In fact, in the following section, I will show that what Yang presents us is a labyrinthine city which should be experienced by the urban dwellers through memory, fantasy and desire. Before we explore that in Yang’s films, we however have to first understand how a city, which is built on networks, can be compared to a labyrinth.

Reading Taipei as a labyrinthine city Although the network society sounds rather structural in nature, we must not forget that it is precisely the disjunctures between the complex flows that make it difficult for one to understand the city, an issue that I will talk about later in this section. If indeed everyone is just a nodal point in the network society, the connection between individuals is made difficult with the increasing numbers of barriers – or what we understand as the disjunctures – amid the flow of culture. At the beginning of the chapter, I mentioned that the city is becoming more and more like a labyrinth. We can in fact see that with the invisible flows of money, ideologies, culture and people, the network society resembles closely to a labyrinth. The idea that the city is like a labyrinth originates from Walter Benjamin’s “A

- 76 -

Berlin Chronicle”. As he guides us through the streets of Berlin via his memories and various persons close to him, he points out that “[t]he city [...] was a maze not only of paths but also of tunnels” (9). Critic like Elizabeth Wilson later goes beyond Benjamin and states that the city as a labyrinth is different from the city as a maze. A maze has a “secret centre” while the labyrinth is “centreless” (Wilson 3). As a complicated network of paths, exploring the labyrinthine city is like having “an endlessly circular journey” and since “the city is in a constant process of change”, our journey thus “becomes dreamlike and magical” but at the same time also “terrifying” (Wilson 3). In other words, a maze is different from a labyrinth as the former has a final exit while it seems that in the latter, we are always returning to where we start off. In this endless journey, the city is like “a magic set of boxes, with, inside each box, a yet smaller and more secret one” (Wilson 3). When we return to where we started off, we may just find that all the old images are replaced by something new and exciting. That is why the city, like a labyrinth, is always hard for the urbanites to locate where exactly they are. It is precisely the swift changes of the city that makes us lose our way out there and thus have to start our journey all over again. Interestingly, if we relate that to Castells’ idea, we may find that he also claims that the network society too may “have a hierarchy, but it has no centre” (1999: 6). If we consider the streets, crossovers and subways of the city are connected like a network, we may then easily see that labyrinth and network society are in fact similar to each other. Both acquire a network-like quality and both are centerless. In this case, as our society involves more and more in networking and

- 77 -

with the endless circulation of flows, the city is then becoming more and more like a labyrinth. One may then question if Taipei, which has participated actively in the process of networking, is a labyrinthine city. The answer may indeed be yes. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that glass skin buildings in Yang’s films are among the sources that turn the city into a hyperspace. In fact, the glass skin buildings in a way also symbolize the form of networking among different companies around the world. From the glass skin buildings in Taipei in A Taipei Story to that in Japan in A One and a Two, they do not just symbolize anonymity and similarity. As they are precisely the products of capitalism, they in fact can be deemed as the implicit symbols for the network society. Beneath their similar glassy surface, what we do not have the chance to witness is the invisible flows of money, information, technology and human beings. Business no longer is a local activity, it may involve other companies in, for example China (as in A Confucian Confusion), the United States (as in A Taipei Story), and not to forget Japan (as in A One and a Two). In light of this, we can thus say that the city’s economy is built upon numerous networks which often crisscross each other. Of course, this does not mean that networking in Taipei is unproblematic. What we see in Yang’s films are mostly characters that are getting lost in this labyrinthine city which is closely related to the other networks around the world, for example, the writer in A Confucian Confusion and the youngsters in Mahjong. We have to understand that the flow of information is not as smooth as it appears to be in Castells’ writings. In fact, as I have mentioned in this chapter for several times already, disjunctures do exist between flows. To

- 78 -

echo with the previous chapter, we can in fact see the breaking down of family/nation boundaries as a result of the disjunctures between mediascapes and ideoscapes. As Taipei opens up itself to the global media, lots of information and ideas from places like America, Japan, Hong Kong and Korea make their ways into the city. Attracted by this import of commodities and spectacles, Taiwanese people are no longer confined to their own culture and tradition only. In this case, tradition is therefore deterritorialized by the mediascapes, resulting in the formation of new ideoscapes. As the flow of the mediated signs and information tends to move faster than the flow of ideologies, the existing ideologies may always find themselves in disjunctures with the incoming new information. In this case, confusion arises with the disjunctures between these two flows; as the urbanites were taught with the traditional values ever since they were young, the influx of vast amounts of brand new information then easily challenges their ways of thinking. The sudden loss of ideology to be relied on is equivalent to a loss of direction, which in fact confuses the urban dwellers. Henceforth, to the urbanites, the city, with all kinds of new information brought about by the process of networking, becomes a labyrinth, waiting for them to explore and to decipher. Apart from this, the fact that every city in the world is becoming more like each other, because of those glass skin buildings, indeed creates a magical and surreal (or to some extent, also uncanny) feeling among the people who are living in it. It is as if the same building that we have seen elsewhere has been displaced to where it is now, thus creating a sense of unfamiliarity. The building therefore looks both familiar and unfamiliar to urban dwellers. This in fact also results in the

- 79 -

inability of the urbanites to identify where they are. Again, this points to the labyrinthine side of the city. What I have written so far is about how we can compare the outer core of the city to a labyrinth. When we turn our attention to the inner core of the city, it is not hard for us to notice that it, too, is like a labyrinth. Interestingly, as I initially tried to map out the human relationships in all of Yang’s films, what I have found is that in Yang’s early three films, the map of human relationships is still easy to be drawn and understood. Starting from Terrorizers, human relationships are becoming more and more complicated and thus difficult to be understood. Everyone in the films is connected to each other one way or another, thereby forming networks of human relationships. In fact, if we look into these networks, while some of them are connected based on friendship and love, there are also people who are connected via the global network system. That is to say, they are connected financially, as in the case of Molly and Akeem in A Confucian Confusion, technologically, as in the case of Li Lizhong’s family and the Eurasian girl in Terrorizers, and informationally, as in the case of the four gangsters in Mahjong. In fact, it is precisely the network which provides the chance for individuals to meet each other. If the Eurasian girl in Terrorizers is not being confined by her mother to her room only, she would not have the time to look up the yellow pages and decide to make a prank call to Li Lizhong. If Molly’s family does not want to earn more money, Molly then would not be forced to accept an arranged marriage with Akeem. In other words, it is chances that link people together. Together with chance, choice is also the factor that affects the human network. If one does not choose to react when there is a

- 80 -

chance, the network might not have been formed. Take Terrorizers as an example again, if Li Lizhong’s wife, Zhou Yufen, refuses to believe in what the Eurasian girl has said over the phone, the network between Li and that girl may not exist. Complicated by the chance encounters, human’s choice and the overlapping human networks, the inner core of the city can also be compared to a labyrinth, which makes it even harder to live in a city. As I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in this labyrinthine city, it is necessary for one to decipher it and to be able to locate him/herself in the city. Other than those bourgeoisies who experience the city merely because they are bored with their life, I have altogether grouped three major sets of people who see the irrational side of the city. It is my intention to show that while the city seems to be structured by rational networks, these people would demonstrate that the city is best experienced through memories, desires and fantasies. Nevertheless, before I go on to sketch out how individuals see the city, I would like to first of all discuss the general traits of the walkers in the city, whose indulgence in and engagement with the city would in fact help us to subjectively understand the place that we live.

Walkers in the city Walter Benjamin was one of the initiators who have developed the idea of the walkers in the city25. In “A Berlin Chronicle”, he merely describes every corner of Berlin. From the park to the cafés, from the underground passes to the streets, 25

While Benjamin and Wilson try to understand the city through memories and desires, there are of course other ways to walk in the city. For example, Michel de Certeau tries to apply semiology to the approach of the city. For details, please refer to his essay “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life.

- 81 -

what we see is in fact his childhood memories of Berlin, introduced by several persons close to him. Written in fragmentary recollections, his writing style in fact reminds us that the city’s experience is indeed made up of fragmented pieces of one’s subjective world. The city therefore should not be viewed as a whole but should be seen through fragmentations. Fascinated by his idea of the flâneur, a wanderer in the street, Elizabeth Wilson also sees that we should not observe the rational side of the city only. In fact, to both of them, a city is lived through different media, such as memories, desires and fantasies, all of which connote the sense of fragmentations in experiencing the city. To become a walker in the city, the foremost quality is that one should at least have the time to stroll the street. In analyzing his idea of the flâneur, Benjamin notes that although s/he may look like any strollers in the street, “behind this indolence there is the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his (sic.) eyes off a miscreant” (1985: 41). He in fact sees the flâneur as an important figure in the city for the flâneur acquires the quality of a detective. Like a detective whose duty is to reassemble the clues and solve the crime story, the flâneur is indeed an artist who “catches things in flight” and paints what s/he sees with the “swift crayon of the graphic artist” (1985: 41). In addition, the flâneur loves the crowd and always intoxicates him/herself with the city’s sight and sound. In fact, s/he often walks with “an inquisitive wonder and an infinite capacity to absorb the activities of the collective” (Jenks 146). In other words, s/he always “abandons himself (sic.) in the crowd” and becomes incognito (1985: 55). It is only then that s/he is able to understand the city and becomes a successful detective. We must, however, note

- 82 -

that although s/he is inside the crowd, s/he often tries to maintain his/her watchfulness by being very critical of the crowd. As suggested by Benjamin, “[t]he deepest fascination of this spectacle lay in the fact that as it intoxicated him (sic.) it did not blind him (sic.) to the horrible social reality” (1985: 59). In this case, s/he is not a wanderer who loiters aimlessly but a careful observer who wants to remain incognito. Another critic Georg Simmel, a well-known sociologist, also develops his own version of the walker in the street. To him, a walker in the street can also be seen as a stranger. Like Benjamin, he sees the stranger as a “potential wanderer” who is “an element of the group” but at the same time s/he is also “outside [the group] and confronting it” (1971: 144). In other words, the stranger is both attached to and detached from the city; s/he is “near and far at the same time” (148, original emphases). Rather than being immersed into the city like the flâneur, they often distance themselves from it and view it at the outskirts. Based on his idea that “repulsion and distance work to create a form of being together” (144), Simmel suggests that “one who is close by is remote, but his (sic.) strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near” (143). What he is suggesting is that the further you are away from the place, the fuller the picture you can get. As a stranger is not fixed to the place where s/he stays, s/he often “confronts all of the [existing ideologies] with a distinctly ‘objective’ attitude” (145). Such attitude does not merely signify “detachment and nonparticipation”, instead, it is “composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement” (145). To Simmel, a stranger is a “character of mobility” who is “in contact with every single element [in the group]

- 83 -

but is not bound up organically” (145, original emphasis). As a middleman within the group, a stranger “brings qualities into [the place] that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it” (143). In Simmel’s words, being a stranger is in fact “a specific form of interaction” (143). There are of course other types of the walkers in the city, but for the purpose of this thesis, I would only focus on these two particular ones since both deal with how the subjective self interacts with the objective world. While Benjamin provides an aesthetic response to the changes in the city because the flâneur is comparable to an artist, Simmel is seeing the city from the sociological point of view. From the above two types of walkers in the street, we can in fact combine them together and conclude that one type of the walkers in the street is people who belong to the leisured class. S/he, who maintains his/her critical ability, is both in and out of the crowd. In Yang’s films, he did in fact portray a few urbanites who try to engage with the city critically. For example, in A Confucian Confusion, the novelist is the most detached person in the film although he is still very much attached to the city. Interestingly, before his marriage to Molly’s sister, he was an active participant in the society who wrote popular romance fictions. It is after his marriage that he slowly realizes that what he wrote was too utopian and that as a novelist, he needs to explore the deeper side of Taipei. Starting from then, he slowly withdraws himself from the city, a place where he grew up and with which he is most familiar. Taipei in his eyes becomes a city that is caught between the tradition (Confucianism) and the urge of being a global city. In the whole film, he is as if a narrator, occasionally making comments on the city and Taipei people who become more and more

- 84 -

hypocritical because of the logic of the money economy. In a scene in which he is hit by a taxi, he argues with the taxi driver about the definition of some Chinese terms, which originally connotes negative meanings. It is in that particular debate that he suddenly realizes that there are indeed no correct answers; everybody should have their own understanding of the terms and whoever borrows the ideas from Confucianism and set them as the truth to all questions should be condemned. The novelist further comments that it is precisely because there are preset “correct answers”, Taiwan is therefore a close society and people in it become slavish and empty inside. People no longer have a clear sense of what truth is – they never question the truthfulness of the truth mediated by the media. People thought they know the truth but in fact they know nothing. All those truths that they thought they know by heart are all imposed by different authorities (government, media etc.). He therefore suggests that instead of following one path only, we should go to other directions in search of our future. This idea is expressed by the mise-en-scène in which an arrow on the road is used to point towards the direction that the novelist goes. By distancing himself from the place that he belongs to, the novelist in the films thus can make sense of the city that he lives in. While the above example on the one hand exemplifies the need for the walkers in the street to be critical of the space that s/he utilizes, on the other hand, it also reminds us that the city is viewed subjectively – others simply might not share the novelist’s idea about the city. We should note that while Simmel has not mentioned the fragmented city experience, both great thinkers seem to ignore that the city is only a subjective selection of place, time, and happenings. As the walker

- 85 -

strolls the street at his/her own ease, s/he in fact is seeing the city from his/her own perspective. Therefore, like an artist, a walker should select what s/he wants to see and thus give a subjective response to the objective world. In what follows, I am going to show how individuals relate themselves to the objective world. In fact, we should note that almost all the characters in Yang’s films belong to the bourgeoisie group of people, who certainly has the leisure time to walk around the city. However, through the analysis, we can see that while some walkers might engage critically with the city, others may simply indulge in the city. It is through their city experiences, constituted by memories, desires and fantasies, which enable us to read the seemingly rational city.

From That Day on the Beach to A Brighter Summer Day: Memoirs of the city Memories are always a good way for one to relate his/her city’s experience. What they constitute is not just our identity but also the identity of the city. Without the past, we are unable to understand the present moment. In the network-like society, everything is transmitted so fast that we sometimes need to hold onto the past in order to respond to the swift changes in the present moment. In Yang’s films, memories are important for it helps one to survive the present. As we can see from the previous chapter, Yang himself is also a walker in the street who relates the city to his memories of Guling Street in the 1960s. The film A Brighter Summer Day in fact points to the possibility of seeing the city in memories. As I have shown in the previous chapter, it is precisely the depiction of the past in A Brighter Summer Day that makes us understand that globalization carries with it a force which

- 86 -

deterritorializes the existing dominant ideologies. In this section, I will choose to analyze A Long in A Taipei Story and Jiali in That Day on the Beach in order to show that one way for urban dwellers to decipher the city is through memory. For most of the cases, people will choose to remember the sweeter past, rather than the bitterness of life. Like A Long in A Taipei Story, he is often indulging himself in his memories of being one of the best baseball players in Taiwan. In the present Taipei, he is being portrayed as an old fashioned guy who works in a clothing shop, an outdated business that no one is interested in. Compared with his girlfriend who is involved in the networks and who works in the Eastern District, we can clearly see that, in contrast, he appears to be the surplus of the society. As a result, he often tends to look back at his past whenever he is unhappy in the present moment. In this case, we can see that memory heals. For him, the modern Taipei is like the metropolis Maurilia in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities which “cannot compensate for a certain lost grace” when compared to the city in the past (30). Even before A Long dies among the trash in the street, he still projects his memory to the broken television. What we see then is a black and white broadcasting of a game in which he has participated as one of the baseball players. In his memory, it is portrayed that they have actually won the regional game and become extremely popular among the Taiwan people. That was the bygone era in which he has once led a glorious life. However, in the present moment of Taipei when people are more concerned with money and efficiency, he is just being deemed as one of the redundant in the society. The city in A Long’s mind is not

- 87 -

what he sees in the present moment but is in fact constituted within his memory of the glorious past. Unlike A Long who selectively chooses to recall the glorious moment of his life, Jiali in That Day on the Beach remembers every detail which includes both happiness and unhappiness of the past. The film in fact starts off with a montage of the present and flashbacks, indicating that this film is actually about the memories of the two young and successful women. This sequence starts with Qingqing, the ex-girlfriend of Jiali’s brother, who is now playing piano and the memory of Jiali is then being triggered off by the music. This shot is immediately followed by Qingqing’s heading for the hotel and we are once again being brought back to the past of Qingqing: Jiali accompanied her to practice her piano and it is followed by the shot in which Qingqing and Jiali’s brother were dancing tango. Yang then cuts back to the present moment and we see that Qingqing is smoking. We are immediately led to her memory in which Jiali’s patriarchal family structure is introduced. The whole montage ends with the present moment when Jiali, who now seems to be very successful in her career, finally meets Qinging. As both of them engage in a conversation, the past of Taiwan is often brought into the forefront. In fact, we can consider the film as a set of flashbacks. It once again reminds us that the city to some of the urban dwellers is all about memory. By analyzing the montage sequence above, we can in fact observe two major characteristics of memory. While montage connotes a sense of fragmentation, what Qingqing remembers is actually the rather trivial and mundane life of the people back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These two ideas are in fact conveyed by

- 88 -

Salmon Rushdie when he writes “Imaginary Homelands”. In his essay, he argues that “[t]he shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities” (12). By referring memory to “remains”, Rushdie in fact points to the fact that memory is the debris of the past. As it is only remains of the past, it therefore can only exist in fragments of trivial things. By piling up the remains, we are then able to understand the city through these “blobs and slabs of the scene” (Rushdie 13). In this film, other than the montage sequence mentioned above, Yang also uses other cinematic techniques to delineate the characteristic of memory. Instead of using shot/reverse shot to show a dialogue between two parties, he has used it to show that memories are in fact very subjective. In the film, there is a scene in which Jiali was looking for Qingqing back in the early 1970s. The same shot is in fact repeated afterwards. However, what is worth mentioning is the change of the perspectives. While in the earlier shot, we are looking at Qingqing’s house from the point of Jiali, the later shot is actually seen from Qingqing’s point of view. Such technique is later used when Jiali leaves her patriarchal home. What we first see is Jiali’s own view of leaving the family, the point of view is then suddenly shifted to Jiali’s mother in which we see a freeze frame of Jiali’s action. This innovation of the shot/reverse shot in fact points to us that memory is very subjective. In this case, we can also say that urban dwellers try subjective ways to understand the city. In fact, if we see the city from Jiali’s perspective, what is presented is a rather patriarchal Taipei. Unlike Benjamin and Simmel who always consider the city walker to be a

- 89 -

male, Yang’s film goes beyond that and tries to see women, too, can be a walker in the street. Placing women as the one of the characters in the film, Yang has shown us how women struggle to attain economic power in the network society. In fact, according to Elizabeth Wilson, male consciousness was still prevalent in the West in the early twentieth century (5). To them, the city is a place where “the forbidden ... becomes possible” (6). Women who strolled the street might be temptresses, prostitutes, fallen women or lesbians (6). The city is actually considered as a masculine space which is “a place of danger for women” (7-8). In light of this, urban planning in the nineteenth century often “exclude[d] women and children” (6). Nevertheless, Wilson rightly spells out the paradoxical nature of the city. While on the one hand, it is a dangerous zone, on the other hand, the city, which is “a place of growing threat and paranoia to men”, “might be a place of liberation for women” since “[t]he city offers women freedom” (7). In the case of Taiwan, as the city is deeply rooted in the traditional idea that a virtuous woman should have the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” (san cong si de)26, women were not encouraged to leave the family and work outside as one of the breadwinners. Bound by these rules and the legalized discrimination, a woman was always deemed as the other in what Annette Lu called “the androcentric society” (291). With the gradual change in the economic structure and with the increasing numbers of interaction with other cultures, “the tradition was facing a severe challenge from rapid social

26

By the “Three Obediences”, it means that a woman should “obey the father before marriage, obey the husband when married, and answer to the son if widowed” (cong fu [fu here connotes the father], cong fu (here fu is referring to the husband], cong zi) (A. Lu 291). As to the “Four Virtues”, they are “morality, skill in handicrafts, appearance, and language for women” (fu de, fu gong, fu rong, fu yan) (A. Lu 291). For more details on the women’s liberation in Taiwan, please refer to Annette Lu’s article.

- 90 -

development” (A. Lu 290). With a better economy, the younger generation, including both men and women, in the 1970s was provided with “a good environment for education and for mobilization” (A. Lu 290). As a result, women began to become more active in the society. With the opening up of the city, more and more women dare to enter the forbidden zone. Therefore, by showing the past of the female city walker, Jiali, in That Day on the Beach, Yang is also sketching the women’s struggling to get out of the confinement imposed by tradition and patriarchalism27. In a way, we can say that Jiali’s wish to break away from her rigid family and to be an independent woman later in the film is her critique to the city back in the early 1970s. In light of this, we can see that the city is in fact closely linked to personal memories. As Taiwan becomes more and more globalized, it is precisely through memories that we can construct a city’s identity amid all the chaotic interweaving of the flows.

A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong: Desires in the city Desires can be found anywhere in the world. In fact, memory, as discussed in the previous section, can be deemed as the desire for one to return to the past which is impossible to be realized. Other than memory, we may also have the desire to earn more money, the desire to get famous, the desire to fantasize something that we cannot get in the reality and the desire to establish an erotic relationship with somebody. In this section, I would focus on the different desires found in the city. 27

While on the one hand, women have more powers in the society nowadays, I am not saying that the female’s experience in the city is positive. As we can see from A Confucian Confusion, we also see female characters like Molly and Qiqi who become more and more manipulative while they get more power in the society.

- 91 -

By analyzing the walkers in A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong, I am going to show how we can see the city as a site of desire. From a male’s point of view, the city is always feminized. When we learnt English in the primary school, we were often told that the pronoun for the city is not “he” but “she”. In fact, the feminization of the city can be best seen in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Placing Venice as the basic point of reference, Marco Polo in Calvino’s book tries to describe to Kublai Khan the cities that he might have visited all along his journey. Grouping different cities together, Calvino comes up with a list of categories, for example, cities and memories, cities and signs and cities and eyes. In this list, he has also included cities and desire. As can be seen in Calvino’s book, all cities are given a female name. From Sophronia, Octavia, Anastasia, Fedora to Isidora, cities are characterized by their feminine qualities. In fact, naming a city after a female name also suggests that the city is very seductive. In recapitulation, Elizabeth Wilson has mentioned in her analysis of the women’s situation in the early twentieth century that women are always recognized as a sexual and dangerous symbol in the city. Indeed, such a view is also expressed by Calvino. Comparing women to the varieties of chalcedony and to the golden pheasant in the city Anastasia (12), he implicitly points out that these three things are temptations that we would find in a city. The city in this case is closely linked to sensual enjoyment. By that, the city is related to the desire to eat, the desire to own luxuries and the desire to be sexually attracted to a woman. In fact, in not just one single passage, he has repeatedly described that women are in fact the point of temptations:

- 92 -

[In the city of Anastasia, I should] tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes – it is said – invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in the water. (12) and [In the city Zobeide, men of different nations] saw [in the same dream] a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her, as they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. (45)

From the above two excerpts, what we see are very explicit erotic descriptions of a woman. Calvino has deliberately described the woman in such a way that she is always naked, waiting for men to chase after her. If we read between the lines, we can then see the city is compared to a naked woman who is seductive to men. While the women described arouse men’s desire, the city in the same way also awakens our desires with all sorts of temptations (12). In this way it is not hard for us to see that the city is always likened to a site of desire. In A Confucian Confusion, we can in fact see that humans are networked erotically. As Molly and Xiaoming, Molly’s best friend’s boyfriend, are suffering from loneliness, they have a one-night stand to overcome the problem of alienation. Other than this erotic experience, we can also see that the other female walker Xiaofeng is also erotically related to three men: Larry, Birdy and Akeem. While

- 93 -

Xiaofeng is the mistress of Larry, she at the same time also tries to seduce Birdy in a hope to get herself the leading role in his new theatrical production. Towards the end of the film, Xiaofeng even develops a semi-erotic relationship with Akeem through a dialogue over the phone. Here, Xiaofeng is like the woman described by Calvino who uses her body to seduce the man. Different from the flâneur and a stranger, Xiaofeng, as a walker in the street, does not engage in a critical relationship with the city. Instead, she turns herself into the intoxicated subject in the city. Making use of the human networks to her own advantage, step by step, she comes close to what she desired. From her erotic engagements with the people around her, we can in fact see that the city here is being portrayed as a site of erotic desire. In fact, in his depiction of the city as desire, Yang tends to shoot the scene in nightfall where desires, something that is forbidden in broad daylight, can have the chance to emerge. Besides seeing the city in relation to the erotic desires, as shown in Calvino’s book, there are also other desires in the city. In fact, we can see that the urbanites at the same time also have the desire to earn more money. However, we have to take note that such desire is always unfulfilled. In Invisible Cities, Calvino describes that it is always difficult to catch the female figures in his book. It seems that they are always pursued by men who subsequently lose the woman after twists and turns (Calvino 45). From this description, we are reminded of Lacan’s idea of desires. In fact, we can see that the desire to earn money is often impossible to be fulfilled in Mahjong. It seems that urban dwellers in the film always hunger for money. They are like gamblers who see Taipei as a city of chance. As a lot of things are not preset,

- 94 -

these gamblers therefore have to grasp every chance quickly. One may note that they do not have any critical relationship to the city even though they enjoy walking down the street. The city to them is not rational either. It is all about money and chance. In the film Mahjong, through the depiction of almost all characters who always rely on chance and their own strategies to earn more money, the city Taipei is in fact being portrayed as the traditional tile game mahjong that is commonly played by the Chinese. Interestingly, while the title of the film is known as Mahjong, the game is completely absent in the entire film. It is only through some filmic elements, similar to those elements in the game, which give us an idea that the city of Taipei is similar to the game of mahjong. For mahjong to be called as a game, its basic requirement is to have four players. To win the game, you need to have money and various strategies, you need to depend on how the other three players play it and of course, you gamble a little bit of your luck. There are different versions of mahjong (Cantonese, Shanghainese and Taiwanese for examples) and each version has its own rules and regulations. In fact, every one of the characters in Mahjong is deemed as the player of the game who never gives up any chances to earn more money. Through them, we see that Taipei in the film is likened to a big mahjong table. Different clusters of players try different means to win money and each cluster takes turn to be the master of the game. When Red Fish, the head of the group, decides to leave the group of the youngsters at the end of the film, Toothpaste, a member of the youngsters, takes his chance to be the master of the group and tries to recruit new members in order to earn more money.

- 95 -

One must not forget that gambling inevitably involves speculation. In order to formulate certain strategies, every one in the film often speculates on how the other players would play the game. In fact, all of them know that speculation is actually a form of chance taking. They fully understand that even though strategies are needed to play the game, speculations help to win the game. Since every character portrayed in the film is very much concerned with money and profit, one often tends to speculate upon things that s/he thinks will have a higher probability of getting profits. In the film, almost every one is in some way speculating on something. In fact, the description of Red Fish’s family as the nouveau riche has already said a lot about the speculative nature of the city. What they desire is to find hot money and become as rich as possible. At the beginning of the film, we are told that Red Fish’s parents speculate on numerous childcare centers for they believe that children are the best source for making profits. As the head of the four youngsters, Red Fish speculates on Marthe, the French girl who comes all the way from Paris to visit her ex-boyfriend Markus, hoping that she will bring money to him by working as an escort in Taiwan. Markus in turn speculates on Alison, a rich Taiwanese girl, in order to extend his business network in Taiwan. It is certain that risk will always be involved whenever one speculates. Though it is possible for one to lose in any speculations and games, I would suggest that risk does not only connote the idea of danger. It is also an embodiment of chance. As suggested by one of the critics Sharon Gee, “mahjong is a complex game, with plenty of strategy and randomness”, this factor of randomness/chance is especially important to the city as it helps to open up different kinds of opportunities

- 96 -

in a city. To these gamblers, when there are opportunities, there is a possibility of earning more money. In the film, everyone seems to be portrayed as a gambler who knows well that with the emergence of the network society, more chances are created by the infusion of the different flows. To him/her, every chance may lead to different endings and every ending may just become another beginning of a chance. In Mahjong, by being the middleman, Red Fish sees Marthe’s arrival in Taipei as a chance for him to negotiate a business deal with Ginger, who has control over the escort service business. However, when Marthe fails to turn out during the meeting, Red Fish subsequently loses in the game. The result, interestingly, gives an opportunity for Luen Luen, the other youngster, to fall in love with the French girl. Here, we can see that both speculations and chance are factors closely related to the desire for more money. From the above discussion of the two films, we can clearly see that these urban dwellers explore the city through all sorts of desires, be it erotic desires or pragmatic ones such as the craving for money.

Terrorizers and A One and a Two: The city of fantasy Similar to memory, fantasy is also a kind of desire which carries a healing effect. To protect ourselves from the cruel reality, we therefore turn to our imagination. Fantasy hence is a form of escapism as well as a form of defense mechanism. We have to take note that fantasy, too, is made up of fragments of life. It is located “between subjective and objective, between an inner world, where satisfaction is obtained through illusion, and an external world, which gradually, through the medium of perception, asserts the supremacy of the reality principle”

- 97 -

(Laplanche and Pontalis 6). In other words, it is “rooted in [the] ‘transactional’ space” (Wright 84). In fact, fantasy “involves the total context and activity in and through which the [desired] object may be attained” (85). Quoting Freud’s observation on his patients who are suffering from hysteria, Wright delineates how fantasy emerges in three phases:

The first phase, sadistic and consciously remembered, expresses hostile rivalry towards a sibling and takes the form: ‘My father is beating the child whom I hate.’ The second phase, masochistic and repressed, is expressed as: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ The final form of the fantasy, again conscious, is ‘A child is being beaten’ (qtd. in Wright 85).

While the subjective self views the whole incident with personal bias in the first phase, s/he becomes the victim in the second phase. In the last phase, which according to Freud is the most “mature” form of the fantasy, the subjective self “constructs a theatre in which [s/he] is the audience” (Wright 85). We can see that fantasy here becomes a setting for desire. In their essay “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality”, Laplanche and Pontalis write,

[i]n fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he (sic.) appears caught up himself (sic.) in the sequence of images. He (sic.) forms no representation of the desired object, but is himself (sic.)

- 98 -

represented as participating in the scene although, in the earliest forms of fantasy, he (sic.) cannot be assigned any fixed place in it (26).

From the above excerpt, we therefore come to understand that fantasy is a staging of unfulfilled desires. Together with Freud’s observation, we can see that fantasy in fact is about role-playing. One can either be an audience or can simply become one of the characters in the fantasy. In Yang’s Terrorizers and A One and a Two, there are urban walkers who try to explore the city through fantasy. In fact, by turning to the channel of imagination, the individual is able to cope with the present moment. It is precisely the problematic present that produces a certain fantasy. In Terrorizers, the female novelist Zhou Yufen is different from the novelist in A Confucian Confusion who has a kind of critical engagement with the city. Zhou on the other hand very much indulges in her own literary world. In fact, we often see her being confined either to her home or later to her office. Bothered by the writer’s block and the communication problem with her husband, Li Lizhong, she then sees the writing of a novel as a perfect site for her to fantasize. In her awardwinning novel, she actually adopts an observer’s point of view (the “mature” form of fantasy, as claimed by Freud) and writes about what happens to a family when the wife receives a call, claiming that her husband has an extra-marital affair. In a way, her novel partly resembles her life in the reality. By channeling her discontents with her marriage into the novel, Zhou is able to make sense of the present moment and thus has the courage to file for a case of divorce with Li Lizhong. In fact, the

- 99 -

ambiguous endings, which will be dealt with in greater details in the next chapter, also remind us that the whole life of Li Lizhong may be fictional and that what has happened in the earlier part of the film is actually Zhou’s own fantasy when she writes the book. In the film, there is particularly one scene which tells us that the cultural industry is closely related to the world of fantasy. When Zhou receives the prize for the best novel of the year, she is invited to be a guest in one of the talk show in the TV station. Her interview is then cut to an interesting scene in which we see the close-up of Zhou in more than nine televisions. In fact, the entire screen is filled with her images. This does not only point out the overwhelming effect and the fascination of the media society. It also implicitly tells us that the media is actually a “fantasy creator”. Zhou in the interview does not appear to be a person who is very much troubled with relationship in real life. Instead, she is being portrayed as a figure of fantasy for the young and aspiring youths who are interested in reading novels. From this example we can clearly see the power of the media in terms of creating fantasy for the audience. As the audience is unlikely to be a famous person in the town, they can then project their fantasy onto Zhou’s images. Other than Zhou Yufen who sees the city in relation to the fantasy, the photographer in the film is also experiencing the city through his fantasy over the Eurasian girl. In Terrorizers, the photographer is exactly like a detective who likes to piece the evidence together in order to save the doctor’s family from breaking up. He is a city walker who always takes his camera and strolls the street. One discrepancy, however, is the fact that he seems to lose the critical distance in seeing the city. He is a person who indulges himself in the pleasure of the city, without

- 100 -

realizing that he is actually at the best position to understand the city. In the film, he becomes obsessive with the image of the Eurasian girl who happens to be in the crime scene when the murder happens at the beginning of the film. He turns the girl into a fantasized object by following her and taking photos of her. He even rent the apartment where the murder took place and pins the enlarged close-up of the Eurasian girl all over the apartment. Interestingly, the photographer here enlarges fragments of the original photo. By putting all the fragments together, the photo hence carries with it an intoxicating effect. This detail at the same time also shows that fragmentation is part of the nature of the fantasy. In fact, Yang in the film deliberately arranges a meeting between the photographer and his fantasized object in the apartment. This meeting however seems like a dream to the photographer. With the apartment covered with black paper and the enlarged photo of the girl, we are like entering the mind of the photographer. What is more interesting is that the girl seems to appear and disappear for no reason at all. Although they have a onenight stand, the whole incident somehow can be interpreted as a fantasy in the photographer’s mind. In addition, when he later jumps on the newspaper and claims that he is the only person who knows the whole truth about the prank call that Zhou Yufen receives, what is doubtful is how come he is so sure that it is the Eurasian girl who dials to Zhou. Earlier in the film, when the girl is locked in the room and making phone calls, we in fact see no traces of the photographer. In this case, it seems to suggest that the Eurasian girl and the prank calls may never exist in reality. They are just a fantasy that the photographer makes up and believes in. By

- 101 -

indulging himself in his role in the fantasy, he then loses his critical ability in seeing the city. Unlike the photographer, Yang Yang in A One and a Two, a seven-year-old boy who is raised in a bourgeois family and who often likes to loiter around, can also maintain a certain critical distance from the city even though he has fantasy over the backs of people’s heads. It is interesting to note that Yang Yang has taken snapshots of the trivial things like the flight of a fly and the backs of different people’s heads. These photos do not just remind us of the fragmentary nature in photo taking, it also points out that one can still be critical when s/he is absorbed by his/her fantasy. By indulging in his seemingly mundane and trivial fantasy, Yang Yang claims that it is precisely because of the fact that no one can ever get a full picture of things, he therefore decides to take picture of the backs of human’s heads. In this sense, people will then have the chance to see what is behind their heads. This is the first essential step to understand that we cannot see things at a superficial level. Although the fantasy seems like a childish act, we cannot help but notice that the whole issue is indeed quite philosophical. What Yang Yang has done is indeed criticize the urban dwellers who are too caught up in the society that demands information and efficiency and therefore seldom have the time to care for the others, let alone the truth of things. In this way, it is my attempt to say that Yang Yang is more critical than the photographer in Terrorizers in their engagements with the city. It is through Yang Yang’s fantasy-cum-critique that we come to see the problems found in the city.

- 102 -

Concluding Remarks With the continuous revolution of information technology and the heavy reliance on it in an era of globalization, it seems that networking is an inevitable trend for individuals to process the most updated information. The flow of information, technology, human resources, money etc. may in fact form the basic structure of the network society and thus can easily decentralize the existing institutional forces. We however have to take note that network society is not as simple as it seems to be. In fact, what is inside is a chaotic interfusion of different flows. At the beginning of this chapter, I have raised questions of how individuals can situate themselves in this world full of different kinds of flows and how they can decipher a seemingly simple but internally chaotic city. By delineating the three types of city walkers, I have attempted to show that Taipei internally is in fact a labyrinthine city. Instead, through the city walkers, we come to see that Taipei exists as a site of memory, a site of desires and a site of fantasy. By exploring the city at a ground-level, the labyrinthine city Taipei, which is participating actively in the process of networking, can indeed be deciphered and understood. Together with the previous chapter, we can in fact see that film can be a form of public criticism, which will be discussed in our next chapter.

- 103 -

Chapter Four: Conclusion: Film and Public Criticism

From the spatial images to the urban walkers who try to make sense of the city, Yang’s films can indeed be seen as a medium that provides reactions to the ideologies imposed by the then KMT government and to the developments of Taipei ever since the 1980s. While Chapter Two attempts to see how globalization can be a force that shatters the dominant ideologies and, at the same time, how it can create an unmappable space of the city, Chapter Three is about the need for urban dwellers to come to understand the outwardly-structured-but-internally-chaotic global city. From this brief summary of the two chapters, we can in fact see that Yang is trying to comment on Taipei’s situation through the depiction of space and characters in his films. In this case, it is possible for us to note that there can be a possible linkage between film and public criticism. As most of Yang’s critics put their focuses on a very detailed analysis of the selected films (e.g. Huang, 1995; Rosenbaum, 1997; T.L. Lu, 2002), few of them have explored the possibility of relating Yang’s films to the notion of “public sphere”. In light of this, I try to discuss in the concluding chapter how his films can actually be seen as a kind of public criticism, be it a criticism of the ruling authority or of the process of globalization. Modifying Habermas’ famous notion of public sphere, it is my attempt to first see the general relationship between cinema and public criticism. By doing so, I try to analyze how Yang’s films can be seen as a form of public criticism in terms of its global circulation and reception. I also attempt to see how contents, images and the cinematic techniques provide a means for public opinion to circulate. In this way,

- 104 -

we can in fact see that films can indeed provide an alternative public sphere to the masses.

Cinema: A New Public Sphere Among all the ideas that emerged in the twentieth century, the idea of “public sphere” is one of the most heated topics that attracts both acclamation and criticism. Written in the early 1960s, Harbermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has generated enormous discussions and insights throughout the century. While some of his arguments are useful to our understanding of the theory of democracy, we have to take note that there are indeed some deficiencies in his theory and that it is necessary for us to appropriate the arguments to our own use when we discuss Taiwan’s situation. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas gives a historical background of the public sphere and its mutations from the eighteenth century to the modern state, “from a space of rational discussion, debate, and consensus to a realm of mass cultural consumption and administration by corporations and dominant elites” (Kellner). Taking the developments of public sphere in Britain, France and Germany as examples, Habermas tries to construct a certain ideal model of the public sphere. To him, the bourgeois space is where the “private people come together as a public” (1989b: 27). Together as a public body, the private bourgeoisie “confer in an unrestricted fashion [...] about matters of general interest” (Habermas 1989a: 136). On the assumption that the society has the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly, a public sphere “mediates

- 105 -

between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion” (Habermas 1989a: 137). In other words, private individuals join together to engage in the debates of various problems, mostly public affairs like political issues, found in the society. They are therefore deemed as the “opponent[s] of public authority”, who try to ascertain the public good (Calhoun 9). It is therefore required of them the ability to be critical of the debating issues. What Habermas has in mind is a “rational-critical discourse on political matters” through which the private individuals make use of their skills of reasoning in voicing out their public opinion (Calhoun 9). Instead of the various literary salons, political clubs, pubs or coffee houses where the public opinion is expressed, Habermas notes that “newspaper and magazines, radio and television are the media of the public sphere” (1989a: 136). In particular, newspapers back then was itself a public and was “effective in the manner of a mediator and intensifier of public discussion” (Habermas 1989a: 140). Considering the rise of capitalism in the late nineteenth century, Habermas uses the word “refeudalization” to describe the transformation of public sphere in the social welfare state. As big corporations and businesses increasingly occupied a more important and powerful position in the public life, “citizens became content to become primarily consumers of goods, services, political administration, and spectacle” (Kellner). In this regard, Habermas observes that the state and society “became interlocked” (Calhoun 21). This is due to the fact that while “the political authorities assume certain functions in the sphere of commodity exchange and social labor [...] social powers now [too] assume political functions” (Habermas 1989b: 141). As a distinction between the public and private realms is necessary for

- 106 -

the function of the public sphere, the situation in this social welfare state then causes the rational-critical debate to “[give] way to the consumption of culture” (Calhoun 21). Public opinion, in this case, is argued to be “administered by political, economic, and media elites which manage public opinion as part of systems management and social control” (Kellner). In other words, public opinion in the contemporary era is actually controlled by those who are in the power, economically and politically. Unlike the bourgeois public sphere which tries to “forge a consensus in regard to general interests”, what is represented in the contemporary era is therefore “managed discussion” which only reflects the private interests of this specific group of people (Kellner). Deeply influenced by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Frankfurt School, Habermas points out that large corporations in fact are manipulating the public sphere by turning the citizens to become “consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation” (Kellner). Habermas then claims that “the public is split apart into minorities of specialists [...] who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical” (1989b: 175). In light of this, “the public sphere has become more an arena for advertising than a setting for rational-critical debate” (Calhoun 26). Media, in this era, then is no longer “facilitating rational discourse and debate” but is involved actively in “shaping, constructing and limiting public discourse to those themes validated and approved by media corporations” (Kellner). Public discourse in this case is reduced to a spectacle and the masses, according to Habermas, just take in blindly and passively whatever is presented to them by the

- 107 -

media. He henceforth sees it as important to revitalize the public sphere by proposing to set “in motion a critical process of public communication through the very organizations that mediatize it” (1989b: 232). He argues that such kind of struggle is in fact a “struggle to make publicity a source of reasoned, progressive consensus formation rather than an occasion for the manipulation of popular opinion” (Calhoun 28). Only then can a democratic society emerge. While Habermas’ idea of the public sphere does help us in a way to rethink the need for a critical public opinion, we however cannot help to realize that Habermas’ model is too idealizing in the age of globalization. It seems impossible to really have a “pure” public sphere in the global era, which is an era of the endless circulation of images, information and money. By saying this, I am not saying that we do not need to construct public spheres in the contemporary age. As globalization itself is not unproblematic, it is indeed necessary for us to have alternative public spheres in which we can have an opposing voice when the state power and the other powerful corporations try ways to shape our society. We, however, have to realize that the public sphere, as suggested by Habermas, needs to be revised before we could actually criticize the society and the process of globalization. What bothers me most in Habermas’ arguments is the repeated emphasis on the passivity of the public masses. To Habermas who is influenced by the thoughts in the Frankfurt School, it is as if the masses are just a group of mindless humans who swallow whatever the large corporations give. Such kind of overgeneralization tends to rule out those non-specialist audiences who belong to the masses but at the

- 108 -

same time who can also remain extremely critical to issues found in the society. When Habermas criticizes consumers’ passivity in reception, he tends to stress the point that the masses are irrational and unreasonable. In Habermas’ view, public criticism has to be rational and has to be explained clearly by different reasons. Both rationality and reasons were two important elements that were being held onto in the Enlightenment project. It seems that Habermas has mistakenly universalized the bourgeois public sphere, without realizing the fact that “[p]olitics throughout the modern era have been subject to the play of interests and power as well as discussion and debate” (Kellner). It therefore remains doubtful if “democratic politics were ever fueled by norms of rationality or public opinion formed by rational debate and consensus” (Kellner). In fact, if we see it in the case of Edward Yang’s films, the circulation and generation of public opinion are not necessarily formed by rational debate and consensus. It is formed by the cinematic images. This issue will be further dealt with in the later part of the chapter. Another critique of Habermas’ public sphere is his tendency to ignore the existence of other public spheres in the society. In fact, when public sphere is about democracy and diversity, Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere is “dominated by white, property-owning males” (Kellner). Here, we can see that he fails to take note of those public spheres formed by the workers or the lower class people, public spheres formed by the opposite sex in the 1960s when they get more political power and also public spheres formed elsewhere other than in those Western countries. In fact, he fails to register that the public sphere actually involves people of different backgrounds who have different experiences of the city (Liao 1993: 286). By setting

- 109 -

up a dichotomy between the public and private, Habermas fails to notice that such dichotomy is in fact assuming that “for any state there must be one public” (Calhoun 37, original emphasis). We therefore have to understand that instead of seeing one liberal-bourgeois public sphere, “it is more productive to theorize a multiplicity of [those sometimes overlapping but also conflicting] public spheres” which “include public spheres of excluded groups, as well as more mainstream configurations” (Kellner). These alternative public spheres can indeed be seen as counter-publics. As suggested by Hjort in her essay “Film as Public Criticism: Dogma 95”, counterpublics are very important since they “function as sites of regroupment and identity construction in the face of demands exerted by an official public sphere” (43). In fact, these counter-publics can be deemed as “arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Nancy Fraser, qtd. in Liao 1993: 285). In light of this, Edward Yang’s films indeed have provided us with several types of public spheres. While they initially are films that attempt to create a bourgeois public sphere, since they are rather popular among the intellectuals than the masses in the society, these films at the same time also create a female’s public sphere, where issues on female’s role in the society are discussed, and more importantly, a trans-Chinese public sphere. By trans-Chinese public sphere, I am referring to the circulation of his films in the Chinese community. This point will be further dealt with in the later part of this chapter. By expanding the numbers of public spheres, we can see that such expansion actually allows us to be involved in a celebration of “diversity, tolerance, debate, and consensus” (Kellner).

- 110 -

Apart from the above two limitations of Habermas’ arguments, we should also take note that media to Habermas is merely a tool for the functioning of the public sphere. In his book, his public sphere is more about the face-to-face communication, he therefore has not discussed the public sphere which is constructed by the media interaction or by “communication mediated by the media and technology” (Kellner). According to Kellner, Habermas “does not envisage how new media and technology could lead to an expansion and revitalization of new and more democratic public sphere”. Media, in Habermas’ conception, only mediates information but does not form another public sphere. In light of this, Kellner uses the Internet as an example to illustrate that it “provide[s] potential for a more informed citizenry and more extensive democratic participation” despite the fact that in the Internet, there is a danger of being misinformed in the process of information circulation. In fact, Edward Yang does see such trend of using the new media to expand the public sphere by setting up his very own animation website “Miluku.com” in which extensive criticisms of the city and Taiwan’s politics can be found. For the purpose of this chapter, I however would not go on and elaborate how new media can be deemed as a new public sphere. Instead, I would like to pay more attention to film and public criticism. In fact, if we see the list of media that was mentioned by Habermas in his book, it did not include film as one of means of transmitting information. Interestingly, at the time that he wrote the book, cinema has already assumed a more dominant position in people’s daily life with the development of technology. It at the same time became more popular among the leisure activities. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

- 111 -

Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin is rather optimistic about new technologies like film and photographs and believes that it is necessary to “turn [these new forces of production] into instruments to democratize and revolutionize society” (Kellner). In comparison, Habermas however seems to be utterly uninterested in it and hence did not see it as a possible means to mediate the public sphere. Drawing my arguments from Miriam Hansen and Wimal Dissanayake, I therefore attempt to see how cinema in fact is closely related to public criticism. In both essays written by Hansen and Dissanayake, they both agree that cinema is indeed “a site of interrogation” (Dissanayake 144). Comparing early cinema (pre-classical cinema) and contemporary cinema (post-classical cinema), Miriam Hansen in her essay “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere” discusses the similarities between them, in particular, their relations with the development of the public sphere (201). Referring to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, she notes that they have moved beyond Habermas’ theory of public sphere by saying that the “social horizon of experience”, which grounded in “ ‘the context of living’ in material, psychic and social re/production”, is another public domain that we should take into consideration whenever public sphere is mentioned. This horizon brings whatever is excluded by the dominant public sphere (i.e. the bourgeois-liberal model) to the forefront (203). Like what I have argued earlier, she too points out that it is impossible, according to Negt and Kluge, “to define and describe ‘publicness’ in the singular, as if it had any homogenous substance”. We should however understand it as “an ‘aggregation’ or mixture of different types of public life” (205). In addition, we too have to know that none of

- 112 -

the public sphere, be it bourgeois, industrial-commercial or proletarian, “can be grasped in purity or isolation from each other” (205). The relations between them are just like self/other – all of them need the other to give definition to themselves. It is only through their “mutual imbrication, specific overlaps, parasitic cohabitations and structural contradictions” that we can come into terms with them (205). With this idea in mind, we can construct a new public sphere. With this theoretical framework in mind, Hansen then explores the relationship between cinema and public sphere. To her, cinema, which “functions both as a public sphere of its own [...] and as part of a larger social horizon”, can challenge “social positions of identity and otherness” and at the same time be “a catalyst for new forms of community and solidarity” (206-208). It is based on this ground that she argued that both early and contemporary cinema “mark a major transition in the development of the public sphere”(201) as the former has “provided the conditions for an alternative public sphere”(208). The latter, transformed from the classical cinema, breaks away from the “classical norm of controlling reception through a strong diegetic effect, ensured by particular textual strategies and a suppression of the exhibition context” (210). Both forms of cinema, according to Hansen, “give the viewer a greater leeway [...] in interacting with the film, a greater awareness of exhibition and cultural intertexts” (210). Similarly, Dissanayake in “Cinema and the Public Sphere: the Films of Oshima Nagisa” states that films, like public sphere, can indeed be viewed as “a realm of our social life” in which different public opinions can be formed (141). It in fact has become increasingly important since it can serve as a site where people

- 113 -

can contest against the dominant ideology. After delineating Habermas’ idea of public sphere, Dissanayake, like Negt and Kluge, criticizes Habermas for ignoring the roles that the marginalized in the society played in public sphere. By using Oshima Nagisa and Hou Hsiao-hsien's films as example, he tries to say that it is indeed possible to find the voice of the subalterns in films. The cinema in this sense is “a production of alterity” (151) – it sometimes does provide us a different perspective in seeing our everyday life. By analyzing Oshima Nagisa’s films, Dissanayake points out that Oshima placed cinema as “a site of interrogatory and oppositional discourse” (139). In almost all of his films, he often challenged the dominant ideology by exploring the life of the marginalized people in the society. In this case, cinema does serve as a force of confrontation. All in all, Dissanayake concludes that cinema is “oppositional and constitutive of the public sphere” (152). After reading both essays, the fact that cinema has an important role in public criticism is self-evident. It can certainly serve as a site of negotiation with the dominant public sphere and hence “reconstruct[s] a horizon of reception [...] in terms of multiple and conflicting identities and constituencies” (Hansen 207-208). Different from newspapers, radio, magazines and some television news programs which may simply present the fact and engage in an interactive debate of public issues, what cinema gets is the delayed response of the public, rather than an immediate debate between private individuals. To see cinema as a public sphere is then to understand the situation that cinema, as a basic source, can generate critical discussions in other media. In this case, cinema joins the other media in expressing the public opinion. We should however also notice that cinema involves fictional

- 114 -

elements, which in turn may affect the critical factor of the public sphere. In addition, whether cinema can remain critical may also be questionable in view of the growing commercialization of the film industry. Although it might not be a good idea to draw a clear-cut line between the types of film, generally we may see that there are two kinds of cinema: the commercial cinema and the cinema belongs to the art-house circuit. Even though a line is drawn between two cinemas, I am still fully aware of those films that blur the classification by crossing the borders (e.g. Wong Kar-wai’s films definitely do not strictly belong to either category). What I am trying to show is that both types of films suffer from the pressure of box office in this era in which profit is the ultimate aim in business. While, generally speaking, the commercial cinema is often deemed as the property of the giant corporations and thus can hardly be critical, the art house cinema is believed to be more critical to the political and cultural situation in the society. Nonetheless, it should be noted that if a film, be it commercial or artistic, is unappealing to the audiences, people can choose not to watch it and nobody would in fact invest in any other films made by the same director whose box office is extremely poor. After all, we are living in a highly capitalized world, and without capital, it is impossible for those filmmakers to make a film that criticizes the situation that we are in. In this sense, it is too generalized when Hansen says that “postmodern media publics draw on the periphery” (210). In order for films to attract more people to participate in the public sphere, we have to come to understand that it is necessary for us to balance the commercial factors and the needs to be critical of the dominant institutions. In fact, Yang is one of the best examples to show that such kind of balancing can be done. Unlike

- 115 -

Oshima who, according to Dissanayake, “fashions a cinema that challenged audiences rather than appealed to them” (144), Yang’s films are both challenging and appealing. Like Wong Kar-wai who belongs neither to the commercial mainstream cinema nor to the art house cinema, Yang’s films remain critical by challenging audiences with things that people usually do not pay attention to in their daily life (e.g. relationship between urban people, trust, loneliness etc.). By bringing the trivial and mundane life to the forefront, the audience often finds it shocking to see how problematic our urban life is and therefore will have the chance to reflect upon his/her own life in the global era. Yang’s films, on the other hand, are also appealing since he often likes to get some of the idols (such as Miao Qianren in Terrorizers, who is a Hong Kong star in the 1980s, Zhang Zhen and Tang Congsheng in Mahjong) to act out the main roles in his films. At the same time, the comical essence in his later films in fact also makes them to be more appealing to the general public. Although they may not attract a lot of local audiences, these factors do help in one way or another. From this example, we can then see it is still possible for cinema to become a public sphere if one is able to balance the commercial factor and one’s intention to be critical.

Edward Yang’s Films: An Engagement with Public Criticism If we look at Taiwan’s situation, the New Taiwan Cinema movement may be deemed as the first step to use films to create a public sphere. As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, a public sphere is the gathering of the private individuals who “join in debate of issues bearing on state authority” and who wish to defend the

- 116 -

freedom of the private realm against “the domination of the state” (Calhoun 7). New Taiwan Cinema movement sets out to “define Taiwanese history and identity and to deal with current social problems previously ignored or suppressed in the national cinema and in Taiwanese culture at large” (Kellner 1998: 42). Kellner in “New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s” rightly points out that this movement is understood as “cultural and political interventions, as probings of Taiwanese society and history, and as self consciously creating a distinctly national cinema” (42). In a way, this movement can indeed be seen as a move to develop “a new, more open and democratic” public sphere for the Taiwan people, which provides a “cultural forum to discuss national problems” as well as those problems generated by globalization (Kellner 1998: 42). Kellner, however, did not notice that the kind of public sphere introduced by the New Taiwan Cinema only worked within the academia and, interestingly, the audience elsewhere. Many critics actually point out that the New Taiwan Cinema only generated public interest in the early 1980s when the local audience was tired of melodrama (Li Tian-duo and Chen Pei-zhi 1996; Li Tian-duo 1997; Lu Fei-I 1998). When In Our Time was first released in 1982, the newly formed bourgeois in fact can identify themselves with the characters in the film, the New Taiwan Cinema therefore has attracted lots of intellectuals’ attention (Li Tian-duo 1997: 196). In 1984, however, the mass audience was getting bored by the revolutionary cinematic technique and the sophisticated message embedded in the films. Films like A Time to Live, a Time to Die and A Taipei Story did not really have a high box office (Li Tian-duo 1997). In fact, according to the table of the yearly best ten box office in

- 117 -

Taiwan from 1982 to 1986, which is included in Li and Chen’s essay, five out of fifty films belong to the movement got their places there. Unsurprisingly, Yang’s famous Terrorizers and later A Brighter Summer Day were not found there (67-68). In fact, as the Taiwan people were more interested in action and comedy, films from Hong Kong were the major market in Taiwan back in the 1980s. In the 1990s, films from Hollywood have taken up a large share of the film market in Taiwan. According to Lu Fei-I’s study on the 1994 film market, he finds that films from the United States accounts for 85% of the local market, which leaves a little room for the survival of Hong Kong and even Taiwan local films (1997: 183). From this figure alone, we can see that the mass audience is moving more towards the commercialized film industry. Yang’s and Hou’s films then only remained to be circulated among the art-house circuit. As I have mentioned earlier in the dissertation, a lot of their films are sometimes only shown during various film festivals. Other than that, few cinemas are willing to buy their films and show them to the audience. If we look at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in the past few years, we can actually see that films by Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang often took an important role in the festival, either as an opening film or as a closing film. Although it might suggest that more and more people are interested in their films, we must not ignore that these films are only popular in the film festivals and art-house circuits. In fact, if we take Yang’s latest film A One and a Two as an example, even though it has entitled him the best director in Cannes Film Festival, the film waits for three years to be released in Taiwan. In fact, it was only shown as a closing film in the Taipei Film Festival 2003. When it was

- 118 -

circulated in Hong Kong few years ago, the film was shown in three cinemas only, among which two of them belong to the art-house circuit and the other one, interestingly, is a commercialized cinema known as AMC, located at Festival Walk. What I have shown in the above paragraph is the general situation of the circulation of New Taiwan Cinema in the trans-Chinese society. In fact, we can see that the art-house and festival circuits provide an alternative route for the circulation of the non-commercialized films. As it is difficult to trace the information about the art-house circuit, in this chapter, I will therefore place my focus on the festival circuits and try to see how they can in fact contribute to a positive side of the globalization. Turan, being one of the senior film critics, points out in his book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made that the cause of festival proliferation is “a symbiotically linked trio of factors” (7). While independent and foreign-language film-makers desire for “appreciative audiences”, some of the audiences at the same time also yearn for “alternatives to the standard Hollywood fare that dominates film screens […] worldwide” (7). The other related factor is that these film festivals are seen as “not-to-be-missed opportunity” for the distributors to “both earn money and promote their goods to the fullest extent” (7). Further to this discussion on the flowering of the film festivals here and there, Turan also enlightens the readers with the view that there are perhaps three types of film festivals, namely festivals with business agenda, festivals with geopolitical agenda and festivals with aesthetic agenda. While in the first section of his book, he sensibly points out how festivals like Sundance and Cannes are linked to publicity

- 119 -

and the marketing of a film28, he mentions in the second section that film festivals such as FESPACO and Sarajevo29, however, might put geographical and political factors as their foremost concern. Other festivals like Pordenone and Lone Pine tend to specifically emphasize the aesthetic part30. Although such categorization might be too rigid and Turan concentrates too much on the Western film festivals, the book gives us a basic view of the film festivals business. Undeniably, some of the festival circuits, such as the famous Cannes film festival held annually, do embody business factors. However, we have to understand that they are still convenient ways for the small film productions to “get their names before a wide public” (Turan 7). If we look at the distribution of Yang’s films in various film festivals, it is not hard for us to note that he is one of the Asian directors who has been a frequent participant in the relatively moneyminded Cannes. Taking his latest film A One and A Two as an example again31, we can see that it has participated in a lot of festivals, for example, Sarajevo Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Valladolid International Film

28

While Sundance Festival is famous for screening independent films, Cannes has become “the world’s largest yearly media event, a round-the-clock cinematic billboard” that has attracted thousands of journalists worldwide (Turan 14). Both events however, especially the former event, have an increa’sing tendency to be festivals related to the mainstream film market. 29 FESPACO is an African Film Festival which aims at promoting film production in Africa. As for the Sarajevo Film Festival, its political stand is so strong that films from Belgrade, the other side of the divided Yugoslavia dominated by the Croatian, seldom get the chance to be screened in the festival. 30 For example, Pordenone Film Festival is related to silent films made earlier this century while Lone Pine Film Festival is the “most focused movie event in the world” which “concentrates exclusively on motion pictures shot in the harsh and craggy landscape of the unique Alabama Hills” (Turan 140). 31 Other than these films, a lot of his previous works have been screened in other festivals. Details on Taipei Story, Terrorizers and A Brighter Summer Day can be found in the website: http://www.asianfilms.org/taiwan. For the film A Confucian Confusion, one can visit the website: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0109685/awards for more information. For Mahjong, information can be found in the website: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0116962/awards. As for the other 2 films, details cannot be found at this stage.

- 120 -

Festival in Spain, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czech Republic, Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland, Hong Kong Film Festival and surely Cannes Film Festival32. If we see from the above list, it is interesting to note that apart from those big events, his film also participated in some interesting film festivals. For example Valladolid International Film Festival showed films that were impossible to be seen elsewhere in Spain back in the 1950s and 1960s when Spain did not have the freedom of expression. Since then, Valladolid has been a place where films, which had been banned, are given the chance to show it in the festival. Different from Cannes, it places its concern for “the art of cinema, for film-making and film-makers rather than the more obvious commercial or glamorous aspects of the industry”.

Another interesting film festival that A One and A Two has

participated in is Fribourg International Film Festival. Held annually in Switzerland, it aims at creating a dialogue between different cultures. In light of this, films shown are limited to those from Asia, Africa and Latin America only. What we can observe is that Yang’s film is appreciated not only in those prestigious film festivals but also in festivals that are not so much into the commercial side of the festival circuits. People who go to such festivals do form a public body of their own. Unlike those distributors who go to Cannes, they are not there to merely consider the commercial value of the film, but to take the chance to reflect upon the city life, which is similar to the city life shown in the film, that they are leading in their own countries. Admittedly, more works should be done in relation to film festivals and public 32

What I have shown here is basically the distribution of Yang’s films in the West. I however do admit that more works could be done regarding the screening of his films in various film festivals in the East, namely Hong Kong Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival and perhaps, Singapore Film Festival. It might be useful to look at the nature of these festivals and see if they have anything in common with those in the West in the future research work.

- 121 -

criticism. I however wish to point out some basic observations. If fact, without the film festival, it is impossible for Yang’s films to get a worldwide attention. His film Terrorizers shocked many people in the 1980s when it was shown in Cannes. That was the time when people started to look at his films and write various critical essays. If we ever type “Edward Yang” or the names of his films in any online search engines, we will find thousands of related entries. Apart from English, a number of entries are even in French, German and Spanish. Among all these entries, some do engage in a critical discussion on his films and the city found in his films (e.g. sensesofcinema.com, online Chicago review etc.). As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, cinema itself can be a source which generate discussions critically in other media, such as newspapers, literary reviews and even the new media. Seeing in light of this, we cam preliminary conclude that while film festivals and art-house circuits are the platforms for Yang’s films to be circulated primarily, Yang’s films in turn are sources for critical discussion in other media. This perhaps tell us a message – film might in some way function as a medium that generates public criticism. Seeing in light of this, the festival circuits, as well as the art-house circuits, constitute an alternative space, if not a counter-space, in which the non-mainstream films can “resist the ongoing globalization of certain mainstream ‘art regards’” (Hjort 38). Given that the commercial circuits usually have a time limit for the screening of each film, it is impossible for them to screen a film like A One and A Two which takes up more than 3 hours to finish the whole film (or the director’s cut of A Brighter Summer Day which lasts for 4 hours). Film festivals then provide the

- 122 -

best place for his films to be shown to the interested public. In fact, I would suggest the reason that his films are so well received elsewhere in the world is related to the fact that what the films have spelt out is not only what has happened in Taiwan, but also tell us a universal symptom that is occurring everywhere in the world. Audiences who go to the various festivals to see his films can in fact identify with the city symptoms, for example the loneliness suffered by the characters, in the films. While his films set out to criticize the contemporary situation in Taiwan, the city found in the films resembles closely to those metropolises like New York, Paris and Frankfurt. In this case, he is not only criticizing Taiwan but also subtly expressing his views on the world’s situation in the global age. The various festivals then serve to be public platforms for him to voice out his criticism through his content, images and the innovative use of cinematic techniques. In other words, he is using a global cultural form (i.e. the cinema) to combat the global (i.e. the various problems with globalization) through a global circuit of film festivals. This then is what I have said earlier in this chapter – the positive side of globalization. While some may argue that we cannot ignore the commercial factors found in big film festivals such as Cannes, I would like to point out that even if the festival itself is “business-minded”, it does not necessarily mean that what has been shown there is not critical. Although more work is needed to be done in order to further explore the relationship between public criticism and film festivals, I am making a preliminary claim here that Yang’s films, with their circulations in the global festival circuits, have in fact created an alternative public sphere where public criticism may be carried out.

- 123 -

According to Liao Ping-hui in “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident as Spectacle”, back in the late 1980s, the KMT government had its control over the media and hence used it to construct an official public sphere. It “directly [held] some 40 percent of the stocks of the three major “official” TV channels” (284). In light of this, we can say that Yang’s films then form an alternative public sphere which is at odds with the dominant “official” public sphere. Since the public sphere is an arena where individuals gather on a voluntary basis, by seeing the critical reception of his films, we can then understand that cinema can indeed form a public sphere. Although Yang’s films are not popular among the masses, they attract lots of intellectuals’ attentions. In fact, his films often generate a lot of debates. While intellectuals like Li Ang, Lai Sheng-chuan and Chang Hsiaohung highly recommends films by Edward Yang, some may simply dislike the way he shoots the films (Li). When A Brighter Summer Day was released in Taiwan, it has become the talk of the town. In fact, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan even has organized a seminar on this particular film in 1991 (L.L. Yang 131). Other than that, in the book Out of the New Cinema (xin dianying zhi wai/hou), there is one particular section devoted to the frivolous discussion on the film. In this book, while Lin Liangpin and Lu Kuang criticize A Brighter Summer Day for being too superficial, others like Lin Zhongping and Li Youxin sees the film as a an important contribution to the Taiwan film industry. There are of course other critiques of this film but I am not going to list them out in the dissertation. What I want to point out is that from this example, we can clearly see that Yang’s film can in fact generate a

- 124 -

public sphere in which individuals gather to debate over certain issues presented in his films. Other than the critical receptions of his films, we can also see the relationship between Yang’s films and public criticism in terms of the circulation of his films in the Chinese society. In fact, the distribution of his films in the other Asian market has helped to create a trans-Chinese public sphere, an idea that I have briefly mentioned earlier in this chapter. As it is difficult to gather information on how his films are received elsewhere in Asia, I am only going to focus on how Hong Kong audience responds to his films. While his films are always among the heated topics in Taiwan, they have also caught the attention of many Hong Kong critics like Yesi and Yeh Yueh-yu. In fact, Li Cheuk-to, the famous film critic in Hong Kong, also thinks very highly of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang (Li). In recent years, even film critics who write for the newspapers’ weekly film reviews turn their attention to Yang’s films. For example, while Yi Yi was released in Hong Kong, a critic for Mingpao Newspaper has criticized the film for the inability to strike a balance between the art film and the commercial film. In view of this, it is not hard for us to notice that Yang’s films only remain to be discussed among the intellectuals in the Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Interestingly enough, the critics of the West seem to have high praise for both Hou and Yang. It surprises one to find out that in fact their films have generated a lot of critiques in the Western academia. In fact, one may say that they are more popular among the westerners than the Chinese. Coupled with its circulation among the Chinese

- 125 -

intellectuals, we can see that there is still a long road for the public sphere opens up by Yang’s films to involve more people of different backgrounds. Even though Yang’s films are not really popular among the masses, he still tries to produce films which aim at providing a sort of public criticism to the Taiwan society. As one of the founders of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, Yang’s films are cultural forums which aim at discussing the problems found in Taipei. For Yang’s film to be a form of public criticism, it is necessary to see how the film content, images and the cinematic techniques help to open up a space for public opinion to circulate. From Expectation to A One and a Two, Yang places his focus mostly on the problems found in the city. A list of issues discussed can be found in the table below:

Film

Expectation

Main issues discussed in relation to the city and to globalization (i)

The lack of communication between people, and

(ii)

A strong notion of loneliness and helplessness is conveyed in the film

(i)

Patriarchalism found in the city, and

(ii)

The struggle of women in the late 1970s and early 1980s

(i)

The conflicts between tradition and modernity

(i)

Alienation caused by both technology and money,

(ii)

The city moving towards a confinement for individuals,

(iii)

The dangerous side of the city, and

That Day on the Beach

A Taipei Story

Terrorizers

- 126 -

A Brighter Summer Day

(iv)

Multiplicity of “truth”

(i)

Loneliness and alienation among teenagers, and

(ii)

The problem of the dominant ideologies and how the film can subvert the discourse of family/nation

A Confucian Confusion

(i)

The need to be independent from Confucianism,

(ii)

Alienation caused by the money economy,

(iii)

The city as confinement,

(iv)

The commodification of emotion for pragmatic reason, and

(v)

The problem of trust between people

(i)

The problem of “intellectuality” caused by the bombardment of information,

Mahjong

A One and a Two

(ii)

The chance found in the city,

(iii)

Commodification of subjectivity, and

(iv)

The city as the global playground for the foreigners

(i)

The unmappability of the space in Taipei,

(ii)

The lack of respect for the intellectual property,

(iii)

The problem of trust between people,

(iv)

Alienation between people because of the fast pace of the city life, and

(v)

The city under surveillance shown by the many shots of the surveillance camera

- 127 -

As can be seen from the issues discussed in Yang’s films, he is indeed very critical of the city that he lives in. Among his films, both A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion are the only two films which attempt to touch on the political arena of Taiwan. As can be read earlier on in Chapter Two, A Brighter Summer Day is a film which aims to contest against the dominant ideology, such as patriarchalism and the idea of family/nation set by the KMT government and the Chinese tradition. In fact, by re-presenting the history of Taipei in the 60s, Yang has constructed a petite narrative which aims to subvert the grand narrative that the KMT government emphasized in the history lesson. As for A Confucian Confusion, while the English title of the film may place its emphasis on the idea of Confuciansim, the Chinese title, Duli Shidai (literally means An Independent Era), however carries with it a strong political connotation. We can in fact interpret it as a call for the political independence of Taiwan, apart from the interpretation that we should move beyond and re-appropriate Confucianism in the new era, as suggested by the neo-Confucianism critic Tu Wei-ming. While these two films create a political public sphere in the cultural aspect, his other films touch on the problems caused by capitalism in the global era. What he has pointed out is that a public sphere may not limit itself to the political aspect of the society. In fact, the contents of his films are one of the important elements that contribute to the public debates of his films. As I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, Yang also tries to establish public opinion through his depiction of the selected images in his films. In a recapitulation of Chapter Two, we can see that Yang has precisely chosen to film

- 128 -

some of the mundane spatial images in order to act as a kind of subversive force against the postcard view of Taipei. Besides those spatial images discussed in details in Chapter Two, Yang also seems to be obsessive of the repeated shots of different American restaurants. These images do not just convey the idea of the domination of American culture. Their very existence in the film also spells out the problem that local culture is erased gradually by the foreign culture and hence it indirectly is criticizing the neo-colonialism of American culture. One image that is worth discussing is Yang’s portrayal of a local pub in which two male characters in A Confucian Confusion share their thoughts about their jobs. At that particular shot, Yang chooses to set the broadcasting of the NBA game as the giant backdrop in this conversation. In this image, the two characters seem to be subsumed by the enormously large close-up of one of the NBA basketball star. Yang deliberately chooses this image to criticize the power of the media over individuals in the global era. In an attempt to open up a public sphere in which people can talk about the critical issues raised in Yang’s films, he also tries to use different cinematic techniques in order to explore the problems found in the city. This is notably seen in his innovation of the ending of Terrorizers. While a film usually has only one ending, he provides three different endings in Terrorizers. While in the first ending, we see the male protagonist Li Lizhong murder his wife, Zhou Yufen, and her boyfriend, in the second ending, we see Li Lizhong commit suicide in his friend’s Japanese-style bathtub. As to the third ending, the camera shows the close-up of Zhou Yufen who seems to have a nightmare and thus wakes up in fright. In this

- 129 -

ending, it seems that the whole story may in fact be Zhou’s nightmare and thus did not really happen in reality. The ambiguous ending is indeed experimental in terms of its cinematic techniques back in the 1980s. Yang here leaves the ending to be open-ended in order to force the audience to rethink it and pick the best ending of their choice. In fact, one way to analyze this technique is to see it as Yang’s critique to the fictional side of the reality. As the society in the global era is increasingly absorbed in images, it then turns into what Jean Baudrillard called a “simulacra”; in the contemporary society, sometimes the image/reflection might resemble very closely to the reality, thus making the image hyperreal. Other than this innovative ending, Yang is especially fond of using low-key lighting to set the basic mood of his films. In fact, in almost all of his films, it seems that he likes to film the city at nighttime. While the government tends to beautify the image of Taipei, Yang’s attempt hence emphasizes the other side of the city (i.e. its dangerous side). Another technique worth mentioning is the technique of cross cutting found in A One and a Two. There is in fact a sequence where the date of NJ and his ex-girlfriend in Japan intersects with the date of NJ’s daughter, Ting-ting, and her boyfriend in Taipei. While NJ and his ex-girlfriend indulge themselves in the memory of their first date back in the 1970s, we see a close resemblance to Ting-ting’s first date here in Taipei. The technique of cross cutting thus does not merely suggest the two events happen at the same time at different place, it also blurs the boundaries between the memory and the reality. Seemingly, Ting-ting’s date is precisely the memory of NJ and his ex-girlfriend. Reality and memory magically merge together to create a sense of surrealism. Yang here has in fact pointed out the surreal quality of the city, a result

- 130 -

that is caused by the speediness of change in the city. Hence, Yang uses this technique to criticize the fast pace of the city caused by its development in relation to globalization. In fact, such techniques also subvert the dominant view that history is a linear production, by pointing out the circular view of history. Together with the critical content and images shown, we can see that Yang’s films can indeed be understood as a cultural forum in which public criticism is carried out.

Concluding Remarks Choosing globalization as my central theme, the dissertation tries to remap Taipei by looking at how Yang’s portrayal of the city through different spatial images in Chapter Two and by analyzing how urban dwellers, as depicted by Yang, can understand the city through memories, desires and fantasies in Chapter Three. By analyzing Yang’s films in these two chapters, we can see that Yang tries to criticize tradition, dominant ideologies as well as rationality in the global era. In light of this, I therefore come to the preliminary conclusion that film can indeed be seen as a form of public criticism. Cinema, in Yang’s case, is a public sphere which according to Kellner is “a site of information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organization”.

- 131 -

Appendix I Film

Spatial images found in the film Suburban residential areas; Japanese style home;

Expectation (1982) grassland That Day on the Beach

Japanese Home; Taipei Train Station; Concert Hall;

(1983)

Beach; Café High-rise commercial buildings; Dihua Street;

A Taipei Story (1985)

Karaoke-cum-restaurant; Eastern District; Empty building Hospital; Gas tank; the deserted apartment & the

Terrorizers (1986)

environment; back alleys; disco; overhead bridge; rooftops; hotel; Japanese suana bathtub Japanese style home; Guling Street and Wanhua Market and Nanhai Road; School Campus; Parlor;

A Brighter Summer Day Billiard place; cinema; Zhongshan Hall; locked tennis (1991) court; Secret Police Office; Church; Little Park; Shooting Studio Friday’s; Lift Lobby and inside the Lifts; Traditionalstyle residential architecture; Pub; TV broadcasting A Confucian Confusion studio; Bird’s Studio; telephone booth; (1994) Chinese/western restaurant; hotel; overhead bridge; hospital; construction sites

Rented house; Hard Rock; Friday’s; Hotel; Luen’s Mahjong (1996)

Home (hostel for the foreign students); Night Market; construction sites; the cityscape of Taipei at night Park/Church; Chinese Restaurant (Yuanshan hotel); Japan suburban/ Tokyo; Glass skin buildings; Da’an District; highways; Subway; School; Balcony; hospital;

A One and a Two (1999)

fast food restaurant like McDonald’s and NY Bagels; Commercial Office; Eslite Café; Night Markets; hotel; lift lobby; Warner Village; pub; space constructed by the surveillance camera; concert hall

(See text on page 35)

Appendix II – Glossary A Brighter Summer Day

牯嶺街少年殺人事件

Chang Hsiao-hung

張小虹

Chen Yi

陳儀

Chiang Ching-kuo

蔣經國

Chu Tien-wen

朱天文

Chungcheng District

中正區

Chungcheng Memorial Hall

中正紀念堂

Chungching South Road

重慶南路

Chungshan Hall

中山堂

A City of Sadness

悲情城市

A Confucian Confusion

獨立時代

Cong Fu (fu here connotes the father)

從父

Cong Fu (fu here connotes the husband)

從夫

Cong Zi

從子

Danzi Fang

彈子房

Dihua Street

迪化街

Dong Sen Dian Shi

東森電視

Edward Yang

楊德昌

Expectations

指望

Fangong Dalu

反攻大陸

Fu De

婦德

Fu Gong

婦功

Fukien

福建

Fu Rong

婦容

Fu Yan

婦言

Gueilin Road

桂林路

Guling Street

牯嶺街

Guo

國

Hou Hsiao-hsien

侯孝賢

In Our Time

光陰的故事

Jia

家

Jilin Road

吉林路

Keelong

雞籠（現稱基隆）

Ko I-cheng

柯一正

Kuomingtang

國民黨

Lai Sheng-chuan

賴聲川

Lee Hsing

李行

Li Ang

李昂

Mahjong

麻將

Mainlander (Wai sheng ren)

外省人

Miao Qianren

繆騫人

Minquan

民權

Minsheng

民生

Minzhu

民主

Nanhai Road

南海路

A One and a Two

一一

Our Neighbor

街頭巷尾

Pai Hsien-yung

白先勇

Peng-hu Islands

澎湖群島

San Cong Si De

三從四德

Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall

中山陵

Taipei People

台北人

A Taipei Story

青梅竹馬

Taiwanese (Ben Sheng ren)

本省人

Tamsui

淡水

Tang Cong-sheng

唐從聖

Tao Te-chen

陶德辰

Terrorizers

恐怖份子

That Day on the Beach

海灘的一天

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

童年往事

Tsai Ming-liang

蔡明亮

Wan Jen

萬仁

Wanhua District

萬華區

Xinyi

信義

Xiu shen qi jia zhi guo ping tian xia

修身齊家治國平天下

Zhang Zhen

張震

Zhongxiao

忠孝

Zhong Yang You Xian Gong Si

中央有限公司