You’d probably remember him if you saw him at a film festival or a movie theater. He is thin and he always wears a T-shirt and a pair of old plastic-framed glasses. His tiny face is virtually obscured by a long mass of wild gray hair. He’s the type of character you’d probably avoid making eye contact with on the MRT.
But to film workers and enthusiasts, he is an esteemed critic who has been writing about cinema since the 1970s. He is — or used to be — Alphonse Youth Leigh (李幼新).
Leigh introduced local audiences to the Venice and Cannes film festivals in 1980, when “foreign movies” were synonymous with “Hollywood movies.” He is among the first critics to recognize the talent of the Taiwanese new wave directors, and completed a pioneering book on gay cinema in 1993. The writer is also a vegetarian and an animal welfare advocate who likes his pet birds so much that he changed his legal name to Alphonse Perroquet/Parrot Caille/Quail Youth-Leigh (李幼鸚鵡鵪鶉) in 2006.
Photo Courtesy of Pots
Talking to Leigh is both great fun and a challenge. He always focuses on details and particulars, and constantly digresses to the point that he loses himself and eventually has to ask his equally disoriented listener: “Sorry, why am I here?”
Leigh is a true film buff. His eyes light up when talking about his favorite directors and stars like Audrey Hepburn, Alain Resnais and Federico Fellini. He can spend half an hour analyzing a single shot from Resnais’ Providence, or listing each and every movie in which Hepburn speaks French. When the diva passed away in 1993, he made a collage film comparing her movies with her real life.
But Leigh has never been a critic who only chases after the big names. He stresses the importance of recognizing new talent, rather than lavishing praise on the already famous. This is what happened when Leigh wrote two pioneering tomes about Taiwanese new wave cinema in 1986, at a time when the works of Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) were deemed “dull and stuffy” by established directors and film critics.
Photo Courtesy of Pots
“My writing is never the best, but it’s often the first,” Leigh says. “Perhaps this is how I am: I have no talent, but at least I can be a little creative.”
Leigh’s association with director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) dates back to the time before Tsai made it to the silver screen. Leigh met Tsai when he was an aspiring young artist working in small theaters. Leigh saw many of Tsai’s plays, and soon the director asked Leigh to participate in his productions. Despite what Leigh described as a disastrous performance that nearly ruined the work, Tsai insisted that his old-time acquaintance appear in 2001’s What Time Is It Over There? (你那邊幾點) and 2003’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (不散).
People who want to know whether a movie is good or bad are likely to be disappointed by Leigh’s reviews. He does not pass verdict, but explores ideas, builds viewpoints, compares films and conceptualizes them. What is constant in his writing is a concern for minorities and criticism of authority. For example, when the country was under martial law in 1980, he used his book on the Cannes and Venice film festivals as a vehicle to convey a thinly veiled critique of the authoritarian regime under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
“I would write that some foreign critics said such and such things, but actually it was all me,” Leigh says.
Leigh is gay, and often writes about men’s bodies and homoeroticism. He is also a Mainlander (waishengren, 外省人, literally: people from other provinces of China), and he has given much attention to Hoklo-language (commonly known as Taiwanese) cinema.
“I grew up in a juancun (眷村, veterans’ village),” he says. “It was a place isolated from the rest of Taiwanese society. Our image of the Taiwanese was filled with prejudice and ignorance. Taiwanese-language cinema had been silenced by the Chinese Nationalist [KMT] regime for so long. As a Mainlander, I felt I had to be more aware of the oppression and show more respect to those who are different from me.”
Times have changed. Juancun are a relic of the past, and homosexuality is no longer so taboo. For a long while, Leigh wrote intensively about homosexuality and sought homoerotic desire in even the most obscure texts. Consequently, people used to say that through Leigh’s eyes, every movie is a gay movie. In recent years, the critic has moved his focus from gay liberation to issues involving immigrant laborers, Aborigines and animals.
Currently Leigh writes for Pots (破報) and other publications, despite the fact the 60-year-old critic does not use computers and has no telephone. (The only way to reach him is through an old fax machine.)
Anachronisms aside, Leigh is also a man of contradictions. He celebrates homosexuality through writing; he participates in what he calls “nude creations” that involve him or other people employing his nude body for artistic purposes. Yet the devoted cinephile once said he “only sees, never touches.”
Leigh has found comfort and companionship not only in films but among his feathered friends. He often speaks with keen earnestness about his pet birds or swallows that he spots on the streets, so it should come as no surprise that these creatures take up much space in his yet-to-be published book of more than 500,000 words, and in an ongoing video project that he started more than a decade ago.
“The video work is not a documentary … It is more like during wartime, when you plan to flee, you will try to bring all the memories and images you love and cherish and stuff them into one big bag,” Leigh says.
The Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節) handed Leigh the Special Contribution Award this year for his career as a film critic. But with or without the award, he is already a legend in his own right. Forty years after he started out, the critic continues to write and talk about films with a childlike passion.
“Now my fame has far exceeded my learning,” he says. “That is something I need to worry about and stay alert to.”
For those curious about Leigh’s untamed hairstyle, an interview with him by Pots in 2006 attributes it to the writer’s shyness and self-effacement. Apparently, Leigh thinks that the hairdo can distract people from his face, and that since he is too shy to make eye contact with the people he talks to, he needs something distinctive so that others recognize him, rather than the other way around.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby