Up-beat?
Given all this, how can "camp" be a useful approach? Here is someone who is characterized most of all by cries of horror at the alienated and lonely situation many modern city-dwellers find themselves in. These authors admit that most comment on these films has focused on this. However, unwilling to let Tsai get away with such a threnody of collapse, such a death-lament for a society buckled in on itself, they struggle instead to offer a dissenting up-beat alternative, however inappropriate it may seem on the surface.
Thus they write of "aestheticizing the local working class," taking an interest in a moment of cross-dressing in Vive l'Amour and the nostalgic performances of Grace Chang numbers from the 1950s and 60s in The Hole.
Hit and miss
This, in other words, is a revisionist view of Tsai, an attempt to challenge the received critical viewpoint. It could be argued that, not liking the equating of homosexuality with the hopelessness of any pursuit of genuine love, these critics instead strive to champion the playful gay element in Tsai's films, trying to see it as celebratory, rather than accepting it as a symptom of malaise -- even though this flies in the face of what Tsai himself says in interviews. (It's unfortunate that this book went to press before the release of The Wayward Cloud).
Tsai's films are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's plays -- slow-moving, relatively plotless, frequently resorting in vaudeville techniques, and appealing to intellectuals rather than the marginal characters they mostly depict. To refer to these films as "camp" on account of their gay elements is as inappropriate as calling Beckett's plays testaments to Catholicism because of references in them to the thieves Christ was crucified with, and other items of Christian iconography. In each case, neither reading could be further from the truth.
Taiwanese New Cinema films have only appealed to local audiences in specific instances. And today, say the authors, distributors are mainly eager for a share of the spoils of Hollywood imports, which since 1997 have claimed 95 percent of the Taiwan box office. But these New Cinema movies have nonetheless strongly attracted foreign critics, and some local ones. This book is a highly intelligent and welcome guide to the movement as a whole, and to some of its major participants.
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