Reel Erudition: Film Editor Liao Ching-song

With the coming of spring, students at the Tai­pei National University of the Arts are racing to finish their graduation projects. Liao ­Ching-song arrives each day at the school at 9:30 a.m. and doesn’t go home until after 5 p.m., spending the whole day watching film with students. It is only when he gets home and sits down, numb and exhausted, that he realizes he has talked so much that he has lost his voice.

Reel after reel, Liao gives his all to teach students how to pace, trim, and reassemble movies. The students themselves, having watched the same footage repeatedly for five or six weeks, are so bored they are basically falling asleep. Liao ­Ching-song’s tone as he speaks is authoritative, and he is clearly the master of his realm: “Cut out this part, it’s weak.” “Yes, extend this part a little bit.” Ultimately, when the students watch the post-edited product, their dazed brains get a wake-up shock: “How did it get like this? This can’t be the same film that we got so tired of watching!”

It’s a real mystery, but just by making a few changes here and there, actors’ performances take on new dynamism, and a film is redefined. The line between good and bad, between mush and magic, is paper thin.

For the making of Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) in collaboration with director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Liao acted as both producer and editorial director. (courtesy of Liao Ching-song)

A long and winding road

Technique aside, Liao ­Ching-song wants film editors to “listen to what the movie has to say to you,” and “discover what the film is supposed to look like.” What he does not want them to do is to simply impose their own notion of what it should look like. This requires absolute rationality and 100% sensitivity.

Liao often tells students that an editor can consider him- or herself to be a participant engaging with a film, and get completely absorbed, yet at the same time can completely extract him- or herself. The editor can move freely back and forth between the two extremes of the spectrum of absolute emotion and absolute reason, and choose the most suitable point to come to rest.

So what is it that a film editor does?

Liao himself, who has been called the “midwife of Taiwan New Wave Cinema,” thinks back over his half-century as an editor and takes a rather broad philosophical view of the job. He says his own editorial abilities are “the result of knowledge slowly and painfully accumulated over years of self-cultivation.”

The veteran film critic Justin ­Chang has this to say: “The editor is the thinker and the architect in the editing room. He creates and molds the mood and substance of a film, and can alter the audience’s point of view. He can destroy a movie or make it a success.”

But Liao has never once thought of destroying a movie. “When you are editing you have to take things as they are and face facts, but at the same time you can’t just tamely go along with ‘things as they are.’ So you have to be utterly determined to ‘rescue’ even the worst-shot footage, and get the best you can out of it.”

Liao pulled double duty when working on Wan Jen's Super Citizen Ko (1995), not only editing the film but also helping to write the script. (courtesy of Liao Ching-song)

Liao’s opening credits

If life could be edited, where would we find the first cut of Liao’s editing career?

Perhaps 1973 would be the place to start. Then aged 23, Liao tested into a film editing training course at the Central Motion Picture Corporation. Most of the people who signed up for the exam had graduated from ­theater or film tech departments; he was one of the few who was a blank slate. After completing his training, he started working at the studio as an assistant editor. The editor under whom he was studying didn’t believe in “­theory”; he was all about learning from experience. He took Liao to the set to observe director Ting Shan-hsi filming the war movies Everlasting Glory (1974) and 800 Heroes (1976). Ting, who was in the habit of editing as the filming went along, would from time to time throw out a question to the newcomer Liao, “Tell me, why should it be cut in this particular way?” Not surprisingly Liao was tongue-tied, but then Ting would always explain things and demonstrate to Liao what he meant.

It was not long after entering CMPC that Liao first encountered director Hou Hsiao­-hsien, who was filming a military documentary for the studio. That was the first project on which the two men collaborated. Little did they know what fate had in store for their future. They have worked together from the days when everything was spliced by hand into the digital era, through all the ups and downs of Taiwan cinema, and now they are both considered epoch-changing figures of their respective crafts. Liao edited every one of Hou’s feature films, from 1982’s The Green, Green Grass of Home through 2015’s The Assassin, with the sole exception of 1985’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die. “We matured together, and he has always been a teacher, a friend, and a challenger for me. We have similar temperaments, and when faced with the same problem we often come up with the same answer; sometimes we don’t even have to have a meeting about it.”

Balancing the rational and the emotional, Liao “listens” carefully to films, and edits out a finished product that is “the film as it was meant to be all along.”

Born at the right time

Liao feels that he was “born at the right time,” reaching maturity just when the cutting­-edge young directors of Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema were emerging.

It was 1982, and a new top dog, Ming Ji, had just become head of CMPC. He brought the novelist and screenwriter ­Hsiao Yeh and the director Wu Nien-jen into the company’s planning department, where they were instrumental in launching the New Wave with the production of In Our Time, a collaborative work by four young filmmakers.

Liao edited virtually every one of the films made by the New Wave directors, and spent well over 200 days a year in the editing room. “Eyes glazed, totally silent, hadn’t changed my clothes, a pitiable look on my face… that’s how everybody saw me back then.” Liao thinks back on himself in those days as being like a tree, growing slowly but surely, branch by branch.

So many great directors—Edward Yang, ­Chang Yi, Ko I-chen, Tao Te-chen, Wan Jen, ­Tseng ­Chuang-­hsiang…. So many great films—Growing Up (1983), That Day, on the Beach (1983), The Sandwich Man (1983), The Boys from Feng­kuei (1983), A City of Sadness (1989)…. And each and every director and film posed new challenges, new provocations for Liao, shining a light on areas where he could improve and learn, and even completely overturning his most fundamental narrative logic.

Being able to show an audience, through film, the face of life in Taiwan and the face of emotion, historical viewpoints and value perspectives, and even to strike a blow against “the system” by breaking down taboos—these were themes never touched upon by the so-called “three-room” movies (movies set mainly in “living rooms, cafés and restaurants,” and generally involving middle-class social themes) that Liao had edited previously.

“I have always been the kind of person who wants to cut through confusion and see things with complete clarity. I’ve also been curious about everything, and feel really absorbed whenever it comes to ‘problem-solving.’”

When this nature crossed paths with New Wave directors, it caused Liao’s thirst for knowledge to explode. Every time he had a break from editing he would go into “sponge mode,” reading huge numbers of books on psychology, philosophy, religion, classical Chinese poetry…. He eventually realized that he had given short shrift to computer technology, so he also bought and digested a pile of books on that subject as well (this was back in the era of the DOS operating system).

Balancing the rational and the emotional, Liao “listens” carefully to films, and edits out a finished product that is “the film as it was meant to be all along.”

The turning point

When editing That Day, on the Beach, Liao came to realize what is meant by the idea of “watching unedited film as if it were a living thing,” and he has always had great appreciation for the pacing and rhythm of Edward Yang’s films. But it was A City of Sadness that was the real turning point in Liao’s life as a film editor.

If Hou Hsiao-hsien had not failed to followed the script when making that film, if he hadn’t wanted to depart from telling the story clearly, and if Liao’s editing experience and erudition had not by then reached a sufficient depth, then Liao would never have been able to face the vast amount of unedited film, with no obvious points to make the cuts, without having a nervous breakdown. And as if that were not impressive enough, Liao still had the time and energy to develop the “Liao-style poeticism and emotional logic.”

It was as a result of this experience that Liao realized that films will always put editors to the test, testing not their technique (which has to be a given), but “whether your own self-cultivation and self-training are sufficient” and also “just how thoroughly you can escape from ideology.” These are all things he learned outside the editing room, and he believes that people just entering the field would do well to accumulate an adequate amount of this “erudition of slowness, slowness of erudition” before they ever begin editing.

When A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Liao was of course on hand. Walking on the red carpet, he was not thinking of his personal glory, but rather was hoping that Taiwan could one day produce commercially successful feature films and not just art-house cinema for small audiences. “It’s hard to find a good story for a commercial film. In fact it’s harder to make a good commercial film than a good artistic film.” Liao understands this better than anyone.

In 2006 Liao was named a recipient of the National Award for Arts, and in a biography of Liao that ­Chang Jinn-pei published in 2009, she made the following observation about Hou and Liao: “As they have grown older, Hou Hsiao­-hsien­ has put his life experience into his films, while Liao ­Ching-song has put what he has gained from his reading into his life. Hou started out playful and lighthearted, while Liao has ended up playful and lighthearted.”

It is now 2017, and Liao is still playful and lighthearted. His joyful outlook comes from a kind of “emptiness” that comes from working hard to construct a building and then tearing it down again. Relaxed and at peace, he spends a lot of time mentoring students and working with a new generation of directors. His path of “self-cultivation” has by no means reached an end, and so long as there is some fresh new editing challenge that will enable this “tree” to add a new branch, he will happily jump in with both feet.

An old Chinese saying describes three stages of knowledge: “See mountains, and they are mountains.” (A person takes everything at face value.) “See mountains, and they are not mountains.” (A person realizes that things are not what they seem.) “See mountains, and they are mountains again.” (A person sees reality for what it is and is at peace with that.) We can say that 67-year-old Liao ­Ching-song has reached the pinnacle, and sees farther and more clearly than ever before.

Balancing the rational and the emotional, Liao “listens” carefully to films, and edits out a finished product that is “the film as it was meant to be all along.”

Balancing the rational and the emotional, Liao “listens” carefully to films, and edits out a finished product that is “the film as it was meant to be all along.”

Balancing the rational and the emotional, Liao “listens” carefully to films, and edits out a finished product that is “the film as it was meant to be all along.”

Liao Ching-song is known as the midwife to Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Today he is dedicating himself to guiding a new generation of young directors and film students.