Taiwan New Cinema didn't die as much it found new outlets for its creative pulse. The awe-inspiring Cafe Lumiere finds the struggling cinema popping up in Japan, and reaffirms Hou Hsiao-hsien's place at the forefront of world cinema, while Our Time, Our Story: 20 Years' New Taiwan Cinema remembers the glory years.
How does one review a new work by the world's greatest living director? I don't hide my enthusiasm for Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien who, in my estimation, has never made a film short of brilliant. His new feature, Café Lumiere, is surely an exception in his oeuvre in terms of theme and historical significance, but certainly not in terms of emotional truth or shimmering beauty. Watching it with a packed house at the UCLA Film and Television Archive reaffirmed my belief that Hou's films are most luminescent in the company of others, housed in a space of comforting cinephilia. I struggled after the film, as I struggle now, to put words to that sense of visual, sonic, and spiritual illumination Hou imparted to us, which left me doe-eyed in childlike disbelief.
Thus, to explain my thoughts on the film, I think it's necessary to take a detour to another film which played as part of the archive's New Taiwanese Cinema series, a documentary entitled Our Time, Our Story: 20 Years' New Taiwan Cinema.
Our Time, Our Story begins with the arrival of the KMT in Taiwan -- not only the beginning of a new regime, but also of new cinema propagating the heroism of the Kuomintang and the virtues of working hard for the good of the republic. It quickly zips through the “healthy realism” of Lee Hsing and the teen romances of Qiong Yao. Then in a fortunate twist of economic desperation and political relaxation, came the birth of the Taiwan New Cinema movement in the early 1980s, ushering in one of the most fruitful “new waves” in the history of cinema, and paralleling similar developments in mainland China and Hong Kong. 1982 saw the omnibus film In Our Time; in 1983, Growing Up and The Sandwich Man. Taiwanese cinema would never be the same again.
Powerful anecdotes about everyday Taiwanese replaced formulaic melodramas about the dominant class; long takes and long shots replaced Hollywood-style editing. Youthful filmmakers like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Chen Kun-hou, Wu Nien-jen, and Ko Yi-cheng formulated distinctive cinematic strategies to contain new ways of seeing their situation on an island encountering modernity, capitalism, and political transformation. Such cinematic innovation became internationally acclaimed in film festivals like Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, and became the fascination of film scholars and buffs around the world. Unfortunately, their style came under attack within Taiwan as elitist, alienating, and “Westernized,” and soon local audiences began to shudder at the promise of more slice-of-life tales about the everyday Taiwanese, turning instead to films from Hong Kong and Hollywood. As the documentary shows, while the Taiwan New Cinema movement comprised only a small portion of the island's film output, the attention it received in the media turned audiences against Taiwanese cinema as a whole, so that investors started to see all of Taiwanese cinema as a risk they were no longer willing to take.
Our Time, Our Story, then, is structured like a quintessential tragedy. The ascent of the Taiwan New Cinema movement on several levels (aesthetic, political, cultural) resulted inevitably in self-destruction due to its tragic flaw: the style that made it great suffocated the movement as well as the everyday local viewer. It's a terrific and compelling narrative, but the omission of other flaws such as misguided government assistance, Hollywood imperialism, and what seems to be the world's worst distribution system makes the film more an emotional rollercoaster than a well-rounded explanation of the end of new wave.
Perhaps the documentary's most valuable characteristic is its role in attempting to preserve great cultural artifacts and bring past glories (whose themes are still relevant in contemporary Taiwan) back into the public spotlight. In a touching move, the film ends with contemporary footage of the Central Motion Picture Corporation offices in Taipei, now a ghost house, within which canisters of celluloid containing some of Taiwan's most precious treasures sit on dusty shelves while rusting and perhaps deteriorating into extinction. CMPC has released a small handful of these films on poorly transferred DVDs, but that is hardly sufficient, and as the original negatives fade away, so does the chance that such mistakes will be corrected. Perhaps in the future, the only way to see images from films like Kuei-mei: A Woman, The Terrorizers, and A Time to Live and a Time to Die, will be in this documentary.
2003. The Taiwan New Cinema is long over. Many of the directors of the Taiwan New Cinema movement have moved on to shooting commercials, or have looked beyond Taiwan for opportunities to make films. Edward Yang's award winning 2000 film Yi Yi was produced with Japanese money and is yet to be released commercially in Taiwan. Second-wave directors Ang Lee, Sylvia Chang, and Tsai Ming-liang make films with money from Hollywood, Hong Kong, and France respectively. Hou Hsiao-hsien continues to be regarded as among the world's most important filmmakers, churning out masterpiece after masterpiece with funding from Japan and France. In 2003, Taiwanese filmgoers know local films by reputation only; film stars now work in soap operas or in Hong Kong, and a mainstream Taiwanese film industry ceases to exist.
2003 is also the centennial of Yasujiro Ozu's birth. Hou Hsiao-hsien is invited to direct a film as a tribute to Ozu, and with longtime screenwriter Chu Tien-wen, he makes Café Lumiere -- set completely in Japan and shot in Japanese.
It is no coincidence that as funding comes from foreign sources, Taiwanese directors become imminently aware of Taiwan's status in the international financial and cultural arena, and therefore, characters in three recent films -- Yang's Yi Yi, Tsai's What Time is it There?, and Hou's Millennium Mambo -- have moments of transcendence and begin to understand what it means to be Taiwanese while visiting foreign countries. Café Lumiere is this kind of enlightenment to the highest degree, and we get the feeling that while every character in the film is Japanese, the voice is Hou's himself, expressing his gratitude for and fascination with the Japanese culture that has embraced his aesthetic and has helped shape his cinematic eye.
We can thus see Yo Hitoto's and Tadanobu Asano's characters as stand-ins for Hou. They are observers of the world, which one could argue is a profession rare in a society like Taiwan, intent on economic and technological progress. Yo Hitoto's character is a college-aged historian doing research on a pop singer from Taiwan. Tadanobu Asano's character records and archives sounds of trains. Trains and Taiwanese music have long been Hou's fascinations in his previous films, with the famous image of a train emerging from a mountain tunnel in Dust in the Wind and scenes of performed music in A Time to Live…, The Puppetmaster, Good Men Good Women, and Millennium Mambo crucial to the formation of Taiwanese identity.
The two characters enigmatically, persistently, adorably go about their endeavors and the film never comments on their decisions, simply observing their observations, fascinated by their approach to life. This is Hou's most non-narrative film to date, and is thus the most contemplative about the rhythms and colors of everyday life. Shot by Mark Lee Ping-bing, probably the best cinematographer in the world today, the film sparkles with reverence for a world finally tuned to the correct audio and visual frequencies. When Yo Hitoto's pop song appears at the end over tranquil images of train tracks, we're overcome with the sorrowful inevitability that our time spent with the historians of the past and present will soon come to an end.
Café Lumiere will be compared with Ozu's films, especially given the grand Ozu retrospective that recently toured the world, also marking his 100th birthday. But any similarity in camera placement and narrative theme is purely coincidental, as it always is in Hou's films. Café Lumiere is not a film shot in Ozu's style; rather, it is a film shot in reverence to the world of Ozu's cinematic philosophy: a world where children disobey their parents but mutual love keeps the family together, a world that reminds us of the red teapots and electric wires that surround us, a world that changes our lives as we watch and listen to it. If Hou is considered an heir to Ozu, it isn't because he has continued the use of geometrically precise edits of long and medium shots. It's because Hou loves his characters as Ozu did, and he invites us to share his adoration. If that makes the film overly optimistic -- it is by far his sunniest picture -- we're ultimately fine with it because optimism when served right, is far rarer and more valuable than filmed pessimism. The world of Café Lumiere is always daytime, unlike the seemingly terminal nighttime of his last two films, Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo. For Taiwan New Cinema in 2003, the sun rises abroad, absorbing the light it -- for the time being -- cannot find at home.