Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) also talks here about his next film, set among the poorest of the poor in Kuala Lumpur and to be entitled Black Eye, after the black eye Malaysia's former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was given by an assailant as he left a courtroom in 1999. “I think good movies, whether they're Eastern or Western, are simply very brave creations,” Tsai remarks. “They're not an effort to cater to the market or to common views or ideas.”
There are interviews, too, with Edward Yang (楊德昌), currently working on a feature-length animation film “aimed ... to compete for the top-level global market.” And indeed the whole thrust of Fountain is up-beat, as well as being intelligent and seemingly aimed at increasing Taiwan's international stature generally. One hopes that there won't be too much emphasis on less probing “lifestyle” topics in future issues. Currently the magazine is twice-yearly, with the possibility of its coming out more frequently later on.
Another cultural periodical relating to Taiwan that has come our way is from Lyons, France. Entitled Transtext(e)s Transcultures (www.transcultures.net), it's unusual in being a trilingual cultural production in French, English and Chinese. It's more academic than Fountain, but arguably equally interesting.
Taiwan is prominently featured in an article on Tsai by the Italian critic Corrado Neri, a frequent visitor to Taipei. The argument is developed from his Italian book on Tsai (Cafoscarina, Venice, 2004) and is in essence that Tsai, most notably in What Time Is It There? (你那邊幾點？), is the Taiwanese equivalent of the French New wave directors of the 1950s, especially Truffaut, in representing a “resistance in the face of the American invasion of the Hollywood movies.” Hollywood was “commercial, mechanical and standardized,” whereas the French (and Taiwanese) New Wave stood for “freedom of expression and creation, fantasy, diversity, research and exploration.” Ang Lee, perhaps, wouldn't entirely agree.
Not all the journal is in all three languages. Sometimes a summary of the main drift of an article is in all three, then the main body of the text is in just one of them. But sometimes entire articles are translated in full. There's even some Greek in an article on the poet Constantin Cavafy — there the main text is in French, with a summary of the argument in English and Chinese.
Even so, the admirable intention of the publication as a whole to present itself in all three languages is maintained. Its general editor is Gregory Lee (whose Chinas Unlimited was reviewed in Taipei Times on June 20, 2004). Lee himself is an Englishman of partially Chinese extraction teaching in France, so the logic of the magazine's linguistic approach may be partially rooted there. More information, anyway, can be accessed on the journal's Web site.
RSS