Hanlin CCA 2010 Taiwan Film Festival Director Info

Taiwan cinema began to take off after the government endorsed and encouraged the local talents to make “healthy realism” films for the public in early 1960s, thus began the golden era of Taiwan cinema movement. The films of this period are mostly influenced by the Italian Neorealism films and the French new wave cinema at the time, such as Visconti’s Roco and His Brothers (1960), De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), Godard’s Breathless (1960), Truffaut’s the 400 Blows (1959), and Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) to name a few. But instead of exploring the dark, criminal, and negative sides of the society like the Italian films, the themes of this period’s Taiwan films emphasized on the positive aspect of social issues, Chinese rituals, and traditional morale and family values. These films sometime have melodrama plots and Hollywood style happy ending which enable audiences to cry a little, laugh a little and go home happy. This film festival selects three milestone classics from this era – Beautiful Duckling, Oyster Girl, both by director Li Xing, and Dragon Inn by King Hu.

In early 1980s, a new wave of film making began to take shape which built on the maturity of the golden age and merged with the flourish Taiwan literary world in the 1970s. At the beginning of this new Taiwan cinema movement, film makers tend to adapt the new western style short stories that are based on the ordinary Taiwanese struggling to cope with poverty, the social and economical changes, and cultural identities. In 1982, four young directors made the film called “In Our Time” which enticed a surprised box office success, and many said it launched the film movement known as New Wave Cinema. This genre of films have the style of slow-pace plot development, long camera shots, framing, and lack of central point of view to give off almost documentary-like story telling, and sometime with narratives by secondary characters. The festival selected thee films by one of the best known director of this period - Hou Hsiao-Hsien: A summer at Grandpa’s, A City of Sadness and Three Times.

By 1990s, the new wave cinema began to taper off as a movement despite many of the films gained international praises and fames, but these artsy films failed to capture the general audience’s interest. With keen competition from the world, such as Hollywood’s big budget films, Hong Kong’s action movies, and increasing high artistic quality of mainland Chinese films. A second new wave of young directors emerged in 2000 to make films that are more appealing to general audience. The most famous Second New Wave director is Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-Liang is another whose films are highly praised internationally, but definitely not easy to watch. Despite their success, Taiwan film industry continue struggle until Cape No. 7 released in 2008 and created a phenomenon at the box office and provided a glimpse of hope to revise the industry. This film festival selected two other box office delights besides Cape No. 7 that are well worth viewing, Island Etude and Orz Boyz from this second new wave period.

For the western audience, director Li Xing may not be a familiar name, because his films were rarely marketed in the West or participated in international film festivals. But for the baby bloomer generation that grew up in Taiwan, Li Xing is famous for his realism family melodramas. In his sixty years of film career, Mr. Li had made significant contribution to the Taiwan film industry. He not only raised the bar of the artistic standards of the Taiwanese films, he also helped nurture many new wave directors and young script writers. The styles of his films are usually simple and direct, no fancy camera movement or cinema technique, but slow-pacing camera shots to let you take in the characters in relationship with their environment. He pays much attention to the details of the production set design to convey the Eastern Cultural compositions and sceneries. According to many of his assistant directors, Mr. Li is a detail-oriented director. He plans all the camera positions and where the actors suppose to be from point A to point B, and there is very little surprise when the camera started rolling. From his vision, he has captured how it was in the 50s and 60s, the Taiwanese culture, the farms and fishing villages, and countryside. Many of his films vividly documented the details of how things were made at the time, such as how a jade artist made a Buda sculpture, how a duckling was hatched, how oyster was raised in the oyster bed. His film also uses many of Taiwanese folk songs as music background to give the film very regional colors.

Two of the Films selected in this festival, Beautiful Duckling and Oyster Girl are directed by Li Xing. In Oyster Girl, Director Li Xing and Li Jia used a fishing village and oyster farming as background to tell an ordinary oyster girl overcome hardship of a dysfunctional family and social criticism to pursue her love and happiness. Again Director Li captured the details of everyday life in the small seaside town. At the time, fishing industry, fish, oyster and shrimp farming and harvesting sea salt were very much alive along with the west coast of the island. The story touched two social issues at the time. One is the bride-price and dowry culture and the other is the social ostracizing unwed mothers. None of these issues are unique to Taiwan; many countries around the world have these social customs. Bride-price (Ping Jin) is the large sum of money the gloom will give to bride’s parents as a gift to compensate losing a daughter and to show his ability to take care of his future wife. The bride’s family usually returns the money as bride’s dowry, but not always. Sometimes bargaining of the bride-price will actually destroy the marriage and a poor man will never be able to save enough money to get marry. Bride-price was being practiced in Taiwan at the time and even now. In this film, the oyster girl’s lover, a poor fisherman, will have to overcome this hurdle, earn enough money to marry her. Unwed mother is absolutely taboo in the East in the old days, even though it is not so much so now. It is a disgrace to the family and social criticism can be severe. When she was pregnant, the oyster girl was forced to leave her own village and live a harsh life somewhere else. Oyster Girl is also a milestone film because it is the first color print developed in Taiwan. Before this film, movie negatives were sent to Japan to develop and make 35 mm prints. Some said Oyster Girl is the first healthy realism film completely made in Taiwan. The film won the best film in Asia film Festival and was very successful in the box office.

Beautiful Duckling is a family drama of a duck farmer who has a lovely adopted daughter, and he was tried to keep the adoption a secret, but was blackmailed by the brother of this daughter. As it was said in the beginning of the film, duck farming is a very big part of Taiwan economy at the time and a famous Taiwanese painter like to use duck as the theme for his watercolors and Mr. Li was very much like to capture the pastoral life of these farmers on camera. The farming industry in Taiwan in the 1960s was very different from the present day. There was no big corporation-run farm; most of the farms were run by individual farmers and their families and harvest depended on labors instead of machine. There are farming associations run by the government to help farmers to improve their production as shown in the film. And most farm families had several generations of parents and children lived together in a big house. These types of social structure began to diminish as Taiwan became more industrialized and young people began to seek work in the city for easy money.

Mr. Li likes to emphasize the importance of family unit in a society in many his films; father figure is the authority and the center of the unit. He does believe in redemption. A valiant often redeemed himself to do good at the end which makes his film somewhat preaching and predictable. Beautiful Duckling is a fine example of the Gold Age films, with healthy realism characteristics. The film was awarded best director, best actor, and best screenplay at the Taiwan Golden Horse Award, and also had won three awards from the Asia film festival in 1965.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is the most famous director of Taiwan New Wave Cinema. Director Hou grew up in Taiwan. His parents moved to Taiwan from mainland since he was a couple of months old. His mother had a tough time adjusting to the lonely life away from her extended family and attempted suicide several times. This background, director Hou said, contributed some of the nostalgic mood in his films. Before he was a director, he had been worked in almost every aspect of film making, include assistant director, screen writer, and producer. He talked about the importance of this period to allow him to accumulate film experiences and achieve his vision maturity. He also emphasizes a director must identify the story of a character in association with his environment and time. This created very personal message in his film. Like the Japanese director Ozu, Hou’s films tends to use slow pace plot development, long shots, and framing the camera at a fix point and let his characters come in and out of the shot. Some of his films are using multiple points of view to tell the story and he likes to use non-professional actors which created documentary-like feel and look to his films. Director Hou stressed the importance of the authenticity of language and dialog in a character. Taiwan writers in the 70s like to use native language in their short stories to improve the authenticity of a character. Hou is very much the same way, insists on the language accuracy that a Taiwanese character must speak Taiwanese, a Shanghainese must speak Shanghainese. In Golden Age films, everyone speaks prefect Mandarin, but beginning in New Wave Cinema, multiple dialect become a trend, even the Hong Kong movies begun to follow. As everything goes global now a day, you find some of the movies has language of multiple countries, or dialog with mix languages in a sentence.

A Summer at Grandpa’s is set in the 60s. Two children were sent to the home of their mother’s parents in the countryside for the summer vacation while their mother is undergo surgery in the city. The boy is about ten or eleven years old, an impressionable age, and the little girl four or five. For the city boy the summer in the countryside is filled excitementsd exploring what the country could offer, swimming in the river, catching the birds, climbing the trees. It is also the time he first noticed the adult world are not always as peachy as he thought. Even though this is an early film by director Hou, his style is already showing. The views of the river and pastoral field along with Smetana’s “my country” as background music, genuinely captured the environment and how it was like growing up in the 60s.

A City of Sadness is director Hou’s most famous movie. The film won the Golden Lion award at the 1989 Venice Film Festival. The film is set in the period around the 228 tragic political incident in 1947. Taiwan was a Japan’s colony for fifty years before it was returned to China after War World II Japanese surrendered. At the beginning of this new era, as stated in the film, the Taiwanese people had great expectation of Kuomingtang’s government to do good. Then the changes were too drastic. Government redistributed of the farm land, demanded people to learn Mandarin, corruptions, and unfair treatments. The Taiwanese has little chance to participate in the political process and felt they had been taken advantage of. The conflict turned violent at Feb twenty-eighth, 1947. Many people died on both sides as result. Government reacted fiercely by imposing marshal law in order to regain control and began to arrest and execute any Taiwanese related to the event which created a period so called “White terror” period. Many people vanished overnight and no one knew what happened to them or executed without trial. Director Hou uses this background to depict the disintegration of an ordinary family being the victims of the event and victims of the people from mainland and Hong Kong. The film was made in the late 80s when Taiwan government beginning to loose up the censorship. Because of this was an untouchable theme, it did not sit well with the government at first. Not until it won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, the film was allowed to show to the public uncensored. The film feels like a Greek tragedy; bad things happened to the family like inevitable fate, not because what they did or did not do. As we watch the youngest brother taking the last family portrait with his camera, he already knew he couldn’t escape the fate that was coming to him, which led us to project tremendous sadness and sympathy to them. And that’s why the film is such a great one.

Three Times or the film’s Chinese title should be translated as “The best of our time”, is director Hou’s more recent film, but it still has the same style and feel of all Hou’s films. Three Times is a trilogy of three unfulfilled love stories in three different time periods - 1966, 1911, and 2005. Again director Hou is examining people and their love in association with different time and places. The first story in 1966 titled “A Time for Love” is a soldier searching for a young woman he met one afternoon playing pool. Growing up in Taiwan, young men like to visit billiard house because there is always a beautiful hostess you can flirt with. The second story “A Time for Freedom”, set in a brothel in 1911 when revolution, fighting for freedom against the Ching dynasty is the upmost important thing for all young men and individual love would have to be sacrificed. The last story, “A Time for Youth”, tells a triangle love story while a singer has an affair with a photographer, her female lover suffers. Hou is marking the progression of time with the way people communicate - the first two stories, letters are the only communication tool, while the third one, it becomes cell-phone calls, text messages, and computer emails. The first two, love was almost unspoken, and in the modern day, sexual intimacy is more free and open. The film was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival.

Director Hou's films have been awarded many awards from prestigious international festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival and the Nantes Three Continents Festival. Six of his films to date have been nominated for the Palme d'Or (best film award) at the Cannes Film Festival. Hou was voted "Director of the Decade" for the 1990s in a poll of American and international critics put together by The Village Voice and Film Comment. Many independent film directors and Roger Ebert praise Hou’s film highly.

(Above article provided by Merle Shao © Copyright material )

In Dragon Inn, director King Hu used the Beijing Opera action movements to choreograph the fighting actions and transcended the wuxia (武俠 ) genre film to a new generation of aesthetic martial arts cinema. Recently, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers and Hero, are all shown traces of Hu’s “Inn films”. Before Hu, fighting actions were mostly one against one. Hu began to choreograph the complex one against many, samurai style fighting and created an innovative rhythm dance.

Wuxia film is unique to Chinese cinema, as Samurai film to Japan, and Western film to American. Traditional wuxia film has cliché melodrama theme and bloody fighting with fist and some of the eighteen different martial art weapons (Michelle Yeoh showed quite a few of them in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). These films are dominated by male characters and have very little artistic merits.

Beginning with Come Drink with Me (Hu’s first wuxia film), Hu’s films use Chinese history or legends as story background, emphasizing the heroic knight fighting for a higher cause. He tends to use medium shots to frame his heroes in fighting actions and follows their operatic-style movements within a small compound of an Inn, along with fast-pace cutting and drumming rhythms, to construct a unique action style. Critics named his style of fighting as the northern style, verse the southern style represented by the films of Chang Che produced under the Hong Kong studio system. Hu’s films express not only the code values of Xia 俠 (knight) as defined in the Chinese history books, but also deliver a hint of Zen/Buddhism philosophy. He is particular intrigued by the myth of female fighter in the Chinese history and legends. The central roles of his films are mostly lady knight-errant; they are cool, capable, unpredictable, often equal or superior to their male counterparts, and ready to die for their causes.

Dragon Inn has put the Taiwan cinema on the world cinema map. It has been selected by the Berlin film festival in 1968 and established King Hu as an icon. The year after, Hu made A Touch of Zen which won him the award in Cannes Film Festival. His original fight sequence in the bamboo forest of this film became an instant classic and inspired many films in the future.

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