Abstract
In Our Time (1982), a four-part omnibus film featuring four new directors, presents a sort of time travel. The film leaps back in time to the early 1960s before taking the audience forward to the present; segment by segment, it moves through grammar school, middle school, college, and finally to adult life in contemporary Taipei City. Clearly a national allegory, In Our Time traces Taiwan’s development through the 1960s and 1970s, using audio-visual technologies as its distinctive temporal markers. The first episode, “Little Dragonhead” by Tao De-Chen, depicts the transitional period from gramophone and radio to television in a disintegrating neighborhood and situates technology on the borders of class divisions: the haves eventually relocate to the United States and leave their electronic devices, and the have-nots must stay behind, inheriting those appliances secondhand. The second, “Expectations,” Edward Yang’s directorial debut in Taiwan, places television right in the heart of a middle-class household and emphasizes how it serves as a portal for transnational influences, in this case, the Beatles and the Vietnam War, that shape the young’s budding sexuality as well as their worldview. The third, “Jumping Frog” by Ke Yi-Zheng, depicts television as ubiquitous, always broadcasting international sports in a semicommunal rental unit for college students and young professionals, its drama climaxing in an outdoor athletic competition between local and international college students.
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Notes
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1994, p. 779.
See Chiao Hsiung-Ping, ed., Taiwan xindianying (New Taiwan Cinema), Taipei: Shibao, 1990, pp. 15–17. The following attributes of New Cinema are a summary of Chiao’s prologue to this edited volume, a collection of important writings on New Cinema as it unfolded in the 1980s.
June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 53–60.
It is important to note that the number of films produced during this period did not decrease. In fact, feature film production continued to grow, from 95 in 1978 to 144 in 1982. Two specific popular genres of crime thrillers and student films spawned dozens of imitations each year, resulting in a frenzy of low-quality production, which was no competition for Hong Kong and Hollywood films. See Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 241–242. For more detailed description and statistics of film production, see Lu Feii, Taiwan Cinema: Politics, Economy, Aesthetics, 1949–1994, Taipei: Yuanliu, 1998, pp. 255–296 and pp. 433–475.
See various articles in Chiao’s New Taiwan Cinema, and Wu Chi-Yan, Didu kaifa de jiyi (Memories of Underdevelopment), Taipei: Tangshan, 1993.
See John Lent, The Asian Film Industry, London: Christopher Helm, 1990, p. 62.
These dates are quoted from Edmund K. Y. Wong, ed., The Chronicle of Taiwan Cinema 1898–2000, vol. 2, Taipei: The Council for Cultural Affairs, Administrative Yuan, 2005.
This is I. C. Jarvie quoted in Roy Armes’ Third World Film Making and the West, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 159–160.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 272.
Other film critics and scholars have made similar points on the commonalities among New Cinema films. See for example Chiao’s “Introduction,” New Taiwan Cinema, Jen’s “The Past and Future of Taiwanese Cinema,” Wu’s Memories of Underdevelopment, and Robert Ru-Shuo Chen, Taiwan xingdianying de lishi wenhua jingyan (The Historical and Cultural Experience of New Taiwan Cinema), Taipei: Wanxiang, 1993.
Xiao Ye, “Xindianying zhong de Taiwan jingyan” (Taiwanese Experience in the New Cinema), in Yige yundong de kaishi (The Beginning of a Movement), Taipei: Shibao, 1986, pp. 230–233.
Emile Yuen-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis compare Hou and Yang as follows. “Though [Hou and Yang] are the same age (b. 1947), and are both mainland transplants and founders of the New Cinema, their films are radically different, along with their approaches to story structure and the profilmic.” They go on to summarize that “Hou’s approach is more intuitive while Yang is calculating, painstaking, a perfectionist.” See Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 91.
See Chen Feibao, Taiwan dianying daoyan yishu (The Art of Taiwan’s Film Directors), Taipei: The Association of Taiwan Film Directors, 1999, p. 147. It is interesting to note that, when comparing Yang to Italian Neorealists, John Anderson believes Yang’s works to have shown “a far wider field of vision and a more humanistic worldview … than have his Italian predecessors” [my emphasis].
See Anderson, Edward Yang, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005, p. 3.
Godfrey Cheshire, “Time Span: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-Hsien,” Film Comment, vol. 29, no. 6, Nov.–Dec. 1993, pp. 56–63.
Fredric Jameson, “Remapping Taipei,” New Chinese Cinemas, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 122–123.
Similarly, Lu Tonglin summarizes Yang’s thematic concerns regarding the city as “a society cut off from its past but at the same time without a viable future.” I take this to mean that Taipei as a modern city, at least in Yang’s cinema, occupies a temporal vacuum whose history is suspended in the present, spatialized by its architectural as well as cinematic confines. See Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China, New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 119.
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© 2011 Guo-Juin Hong
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Hong, GJ. (2011). A Time to Live, a Time to Die: New Taiwan Cinema and Its Vicissitudes, 1982–1986. In: Taiwan Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118324_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118324_6
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