Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema: Still Reverberating Around the World

Lee Hsiang-ting　/　photos Flowers of Taipei—Taiwan New Cinema　/　tr. by Phil Newell

September 2015

中文日本語

Some of the most important figures in the New Wave included, from left to right, Wu Nien-jen, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Chen Kuo-fu, and Jan Hung-tze. (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)

Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien was named best director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Seeing Hou on the stage accepting the accolades of the global film elite brought back memories of 30 years ago, when Taiwan’s New Wave cinema movement created a sensation at international film gatherings. Back then, a group of directors began to use film to lay bare the realities of Taiwan’s society. Though firmly rooted in Taiwan, their movies provided tremendous sustenance and inspiration to film connoisseurs and filmmakers around the world, and their influence is still being felt today....

In 1982, four directors—Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Chang Yi, and Tao Te-chen—each directed a segment in a portmanteau film called In Our Time, which is widely considered the pioneering film in Taiwan’s New Wave cinema movement. The style was “natural realism,” combined with literary techniques of expression, which was quite different from the preceding “healthy realism” line of moviemaking and also a major departure from the main formulas that had been successful at the box office for such a long time—romances in the style of Chiung Yao, martial arts movies, and farcical coming-of-age comedies.

They were followed by iconic New Wave directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wan Jen, Chen Kun-hou, and Toon Wang, who made “realist films” that dissected social phenomena in Taiwan. They developed a new aesthetic of long shots, cast unknowns as lead actors, and devoted a lot of effort to putting collective memories on film. In the subject matter of their movies they tried to capture the real lives of ordinary people.

As a result, a division began to emerge between “new cinema” and “old cinema.” The New Wave directors often drew on works of literature, and began, based on the very positive response they were getting, to shoot the more realist themes that audiences were increasingly asking for. Some young literati of the time—such as Wu Nien-jen, Chu Tien-wen, Chu Tien-hsin, Hsiao Yeh, Hsiao Sa, and Liao Hui-ying—threw themselves into scriptwriting. The movie industry was naturally delighted to see this development, while the writers enhanced their name recognition. Thus was launched an innovative period of mutually reinforcing prestige between film and literature.

Taiwan’s New Cinema movement reached its peak in the late 1980s. The directors presented the content of their films in the “auteur” style. They adapted large numbers of scripts from the “Nativist Literature” wave of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and took a somewhat judgmental perspective on the transition that Taiwan society was then experiencing from an agricultural to an industrial society, as well as on various political and economic circumstances. You could say that this was the first time cinema gave voice to “Taiwan consciousness,” which is to say, it was the first time filmmakers put the unromanticized experiences of people living in modern Taiwan at the forefront.

In 1989 Hou Hsiao-hsien made A City of Sadness, a groundbreaking film about a politically highly sensitive subject, that can be seen as the defining movie of that era of Taiwan cinematic history. It won the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival, solidifying the status of “auteur” films in Taiwan. Along with other projects in the New Wave, it pioneered a new worldview of cinematic aesthetics and visual imagery, creating the possibility of modernity in films in Taiwan.

Worldwide influence

Angelika Wang worked as a producer with many of the leading directors of the time, including Huang Chun-ming, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sylvia Chang, Wang Shau-di, and Chen Hwai-en, participating directly in the rise and fall of Taiwan’s New Wave cinema. She says that in 1999 she began to attend many international film festivals, where she found that many people in the industry from all over the world still had strong memories of the New Wave era. She has often wondered how it is that even after 30 years the films of Taiwan from those days continue to have such an impact on these people. In fact, she has learned in conversations with many young directors that Taiwan’s New Wave films have been a major inspiration for their own creative work.

“A few years ago, I met a director from mainland China, still in his 30s, at an international gathering. This was an accomplished director whose work had shown in the CNEX documentary film festival. As we were talking, he reeled off very clear synopses of every single film from Tsai Ming-liang through Hou Hsiao-hsien. It was amazing. I have also been told by many filmmakers from other countries that their films have been deeply influenced by Taiwan cinema.” She says that Taiwan’s New Wave has had a global impact, even though the directors then who made the wave didn’t really have any idea they would produce such reverberations.

“In those days, none of these directors had yet been recognized as geniuses, and for all of them it was hard to raise money to make films. And winning prizes was unimaginable,” says Wang. She recalls the time when they wanted to enter Hou Hsiao-hsien’s movie Dust in the Wind for the Golden Horse Awards. In those days the jury still met at the Government Information Office (GIO) to see the movies, and she remembers that they were frantic to get the film delivered in time. Just before the deadline, the postproduction team, staying up all night, finally completed the editing, and as each reel was brought out by the assistant director someone would rush it off to the developers (this was still pre-digital) and then someone else would bring it to the GIO office, where the jury was waiting to see it. Alas, they didn’t win a single prize at that year’s Golden Horse Awards.

Hand-crafted cinema

Wang talks about the first time Hong Kong director Ann Hui came to Taiwan to watch Hou Hsiao-hsien at work. At the time, Hou was filming A City of Sadness in the mountain town of Jiufen, which was still a bucolic and remote little place, far different from the major tourist attraction that the film made it into. Back then it was not easy to find transport out that way, and Hui had to take a very long bus ride to get there. She found the production team up at high altitude shooting some long panoramic shots, and since they didn’t haven’t any communications devices, people had to literally run up and down the mountain to deliver messages. Even today Hui still says, “It’s incredible that such a brilliant film was shot like that.”

“That was an era in which making a film in Taiwan was a lot like a craft industry—you had to do a lot of things literally by hand. The fact that such incredible creative power could thrive under those conditions really amazes a lot of foreign filmmakers.” Searching back in her memory, Wang comes up with an anecdote about making Dust in the Wind with Hou Hsiao-hsien. The cameras at that time were very noisy contraptions, impinging on the sound recording on the set. Therefore most of the time the actors would go into a recording studio and redo their lines after the film was completed. But the main actor Li Tian-lu was by then very elderly and frail, and it would have been too much to ask him to redo all his lines. So Hou decided that they had to fall back on the sound they could get on the set. Concerned that the cameras would make too much background noise, the crew wrapped them in quilts to shoot the scenes. “It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that such things were common, only 30 years. But as far as contemporary film production goes, that’s unimaginable. Obviously making a good film doesn’t have much relationship to the level of technology involved.”

Ten years after the start of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, Law Wai-ming and Public Television combined to make a documentary entitled Old Cinema Re-visited: Histories of Taiwan Cinema. A decade later, director Hsiao Chu-chen filmed Our Time, Our Story: 20 Years’ New Taiwan Cinema (2002). Today, 30 years after the New Wave cinema movement began, there are still many untold memories as well as feedback from film professionals around the world that have gone unrecorded. This is why Angelika Wang decided to make Flowers of Taipei—Taiwan New Cinema, to record the feelings of these filmmakers from every corner of the globe, tying together the past and the present.

With support from the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs, Wang visited Europe, the US, Japan, Thailand, mainland China, and Hong Kong, interviewing more than 50 important film professionals, critics, and artists, to record the stories of their encounters with Taiwan New Cinema.

Reliving the dynamism of Taiwan New Cinema

Flowers of Taipei was released in early March 2015. It looks back from the perspective of today, 30 years later, on the nourishment, influence, and inspiration that Taiwan New Cinema gave to us. But perhaps even more important than the cinematic revolution that occurred at that time is the sense of self-awareness and self-affirmation felt in Taiwan.

Flowers of Taipei was the one and only entry from Taiwan at the 71st Venice Film Festival. People interviewed for the film included: New Wave icons Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ko I-chen, Toon Wang, and Wu Nien-jen; new-generation Taiwanese directors Wei Te-sheng and Arvin Chen; Japanese critic Tadao Sato, filmmakers Hirokazu Koreeda and Takashi Miike, and actor Tadanobu Asano; well-known French director Olivier Assayas; British critic Tony Rayns; Italian producer Marco Müller; and mainland Chinese directors Jia Zhangke, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Wang Bing, and Yang Chao, as well as artists Liu Xiaodong and Ai Weiwei.

Many of these foreign “film buffs” actually can analyze Taiwan New Cinema at a quite deep level, Wang explains. “A lot of people first got drawn in by the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and this kindled their interest in Taiwan’s political and economic conditions at the time. These films have had a tremendous impact as ‘cultural exports.’” She adds that the New Wave was characterized by works that were low-key and realist, with a softer style of visual imagery. This “frequency” fits in very nicely with the “wavelength” that European audiences operate on.

This applies especially to the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien. His films have an estranged visual aesthetic and understated performances, which fits in well with the pace, mode, and wavelength of European lifestyles. That’s why they especially enjoy Hou’s works. “I once met a French blue-collar worker, a man in his 70s or 80s, not a cultural professional in any way, who talked to me knowledgably about Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, which gives you an idea of how deeply Taiwanese films have percolated into Europe. I also remember that when Flowers of Shanghai came out, there were long lines of people waiting to buy tickets for a theater on the Champs Elysées—it was an extraordinary spectacle. I saw it myself, and wanted to snap a photo so I could give it to Director Hou. [laughs] This was something that simply never happened in Taiwan in those days, with the sole exception of A City of Sadness.”

In fact, even in their heyday New Wave films only accounted for roughly 10% of the motion picture market, and they didn’t perform especially well at the box office. A lot of people in Taiwan didn’t pay the slightest attention to movies by people like Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien until after the press reported that they had won major awards at foreign film festivals.

US president Harry Truman once said that movies have more influence in foreign countries than embassies do. Taiwan’s New Cinema movement has nourished countless film fans and professionals around the world, becoming part of their very being, and is the most outstanding example to date of cultural exports from Taiwan. Through the authoritative analyses recorded in the documentary Flowers of Taipei—Taiwan New Cinema, you can rediscover the power of motion pictures, and if you hope that Taiwan cinema will generate a newer wave that is global in its impact, you can perhaps find some clues in this documentary as to how it was done the first time.

Angelika Wang says that film professionals around the world talk of the works of Taiwan New Cinema as if they were beloved family heirlooms. Many cultural figures and intellectuals say that Taiwan New Cinema has played an important role in the development of their thinking. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)

The late Li Tian-lu (center), a master puppeteer before being cast in movie roles by Hou Hsiao-hsien, played the lead in Hou’s film The Puppetmaster. Hou’s use of long shots and realist techniques revolutionized filmmaking in Taiwan, and The Puppetmaster won the Grand Prix at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Conditions for filmmakers were rudimentary in Taiwan in the 1980s, but that didn’t stop the creative outburst of the New Wave cinema movement, which garnered awards worldwide and whose effects are still being felt today. These photos were taken during the shooting of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile (1987).