Island on the Edge: Taiwan Cinema and After (review)

A collection of twelve scholarly essays, Island on the Edge: Taiwan Cinema and After discusses the evolution of Taiwan cinema from the early 1980s to the present, focusing on Hou Hsiao Hsien, Tsai Mingliang, Edward Yang, Wang Tung, Chang Tsochi, Wu Nien-jen, and Ang Lee. Priority is appropriately given to the two most representative filmmakers, Hou Hsiao Hsien (four essays) and Ang Lee (two essays). The book covers almost all the themes found in Taiwan films since the New Wave-for example, the disharmonies and confrontations between ethnic groups, between political beliefs, between generations, between genders, and between individuals and society. To provide us with a larger socioeconomic context and explain the book's subject matter, the editors, in their introduction, offer a cursive review of the history of Taiwan and elaborate on the recent situation of Taiwan and its cinema, which are both "on the edge."

Among the twelve essays, I am particularly impressed by Nick Kaldis' "Compulsory Orientalism: Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flowers of Shanghai." With its anti-climactic, anti-heroic style and extremely slow pace, Flowers of Shanghai is difficult to watch and even more difficult to comment on. Kaldis forcefully argues that the pace, locale, costumes, and camera movement are all essential for representing the "excruciatingly redundant lives" of the prostitutes it portrays, and the pronounced lack of action is "intentional because this is definitely not a storyline that hinges on dramatic conflict, progression of narrative events, action of any kind, or plot development." Equally impressive is Rosemary Haddon's "Hou Hsiao Hsien's City of Sadness: History and the Dialogic Female Voice." The voice is that of Hiromi, a daughter-in-law in a family whose saga is set against the background of the 1947 White Terror. In the film, Hiromi never engages herself in any major action, but Haddon's analysis of her role as an observer, from her first arrival as a nurse to the aftermath of the tragedy, convinces us that her narrative voice-over speaks of social consciousness and repudiates the official history. So convincing is Haddon's argument that when she puts Hiromi next to such historical figures as Anne Frank, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Etty Hillesum, we tend to overlook the fact that Hiromi is only an artistic creation.

If City of Sadness is about the history of an island that has inflicted pain on its people, A Brighter Summer Day, based on a true story from the 1960s, is about the individual pain that reflects this history. Liu Yu-hsiu discusses the latter in her essay "A Myth(ology) Mythologizing Its Own Closure: Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day." Her observations about director Yang's "obsessive meticulousness" in constructing a set that authentically recreates a period of thirty years ago is crucial not only for an appreciation of the director s style but also for an understanding of the purpose of the film.

A veteran researcher on Chinese film studies, Chris Berry shows his insight in the very choice of the title of his contribution: "Where Is the Love? Hyperbolic Realism and Indulgence in Vive L'Amour." Indeed, hyperbolic realism and indulgence are quintessential in expressing the "love" or absence of it in Tsai Mingliang's film.

In the Appendix to the book there is a biographical sketch and a filmography for every important director of the last two decades. The filmography is in both English and Chinese—something that is very helpful, since English translations of the scripts of films made in Taiwan and Hong Kong usually leave no trace of information on the Chinese original. For various reasons, in the English-speaking world there have been few books on the cinema of Taiwan, and this volume is thus the first real English textbook suitable for Taiwan film classes for a Western audience.

Nevertheless there is still room for...