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338 Exiles in Modernity Films by Edward Yang Taiwan is somehow within the world system as its citizens are in their city boxes: prosperity and constriction all at once; the loss of nature. . . . What is grand and exhilarating, light itself, the hours of the day, is nonetheless here embedded in the routine of the city and locked into the pores of its stone or smeared on its glass: light also being postmodern, and a mere adjunct to the making of reproducible images. —Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Remapping Taipei,’’ in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (∞ΩΩ≤) These people have so much money stuffed up their ass it’s beyond belief! You know, in ten years this place [Taipei] will be the center of the world. The future of Western civilization lies right here. And you know what the odd thing is? We used to study history—the nineteenth century was the glorious age of imperialism, right? Just wait till you see the twenty-first century . . . —English character in Edward Yang’s Mahjong The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away. —Edward Yang During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing—watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life—I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. To imagine such a cinema requires traveling some distance from where we are, spiritually as well as geographically; it means rediscovering versions of the past and future, along with the present, and rediscovering the state of the planet, not in terms of American interests but in terms of others who see both it and us with a kind of clarity we don’t have. For the past decade I’ve been discovering clues about this new kind of cinema in two very different places—in Iran, chiefly through the films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and in Taiwan, through those of Hou Hsiaohsien and Edward Yang: all four filmmakers have been redefining modernity in the world as well as in cinema. With the help of other filmmakers from the same countries (and I’m not counting the Taiwanese and Iranian directors who are interested in making Hollywood movies, the most successful of whom is Ang FILMMAKERS 339 Lee), each pair has been charting a new field of inquiry and exploration between them. It seems an unlikely pair of countries, given how little Iran and Taiwan seem to have in common. But recent art films in both countries have a close relation to Italian neorealism and a relative freedom from the star system. In Iranian cinema, the new field of inquiry is the social impact of cinema itself, how it unites as well as divides people—a social fact that encompasses rich and poor, city and country, sacred and profane. Above all, inquiries are made into social space and physical landscape; sometimes ‘‘the cinema’’ figures only metaphorically or by analogy: it may be what a driver sees through the windshield of his car (as in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry) or what a little girl encounters in the streets of Tehran during a continuous stretch of real time (as in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon). By contrast, the principal discovery being made by Taiwanese directors is their own history—a discovery made possible by the recent loosening of Taiwanese censorship, making the country’s history a permissible subject for the first time. This new field of inquiry—which also involves a remapping of physical space— must negotiate the coexistence of colonizer with colonized; Confucianism with capitalism, democracy, and socialism; China with Japan and America; and personal identity with corporate and national identities. These densely layered ‘‘texts’’ ask to be read and reread. Since 1985, when his A Time to Live and a Time to Die came out, only two of Hou’s seven films have been set squarely and exclusively in the present. On the other hand, only two of Yang’s seven films to date qualify as period pieces: his first and shortest, the half-hour Expectations (1982), and his fifth and longest, A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Yet I’d argue that the two filmmakers are equally preoccupied with history; the sheer presentness of Yang’s contemporary films is every bit as grounded in the twentieth-century history of Taiwan as the...

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