This may be the first book written in French ever to be reviewed in the Taipei Times, and quite possibly too it will be the last. Nevertheless, the title, Retro Taiwan, was too alluring to miss. Whatever does it mean? Well, your reviewer has gone to some lengths to find out, and so here, with more than a little help from my friends, is what I’ve discovered.
But first a word about the author, Corrado Neri, who appears to be an extraordinary figure by any accounts. An Italian native-speaker, he’s not only fluent in English, but has for some years been lecturing at a university in Lyons, France, in French. In addition, he’s currently a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University of the Arts (NTUA) in Banciao where he lectures in Chinese. Such linguistic super-proficiency can only make a mono-linguist like myself gasp in admiration.
The book is about the obsession over the recent past, notably the 1980s and 1990s, in Taiwanese life generally — in fashion, popular music, restaurants, retrospective exhibitions — but primarily on film. Taiwan produces few historical epics, argues the author, but comes close to being obsessed with making films about the period just before the Internet, the era of CDs, printed books as the only kind of books, and the kind of social relationships that went with these things.
Taiwanese identity
But this period was also that of the advent of Taiwanese democracy, of the transition from martial law to the present multi-party system. That Taiwanese film focuses so closely on this period, and on these developments, stands in huge contrast to China, where the main feature of the era — the Tiananmen Square events — is totally absent from its feature films, and is indeed an unmentionable topic.
Neri divides the Taiwanese films he considers into two broad categories. First there are the now classic works by directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), Edward Yang (楊德昌) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮). These the author sees as “film-festival” films, arthouse movies made with an eye on awards and likely to gain an international audience. Set against these are popular, commercial works less likely to be associated with a particular director, movies such as Jump! Ashin (翻滾吧!阿信, 2011) and Gf/Bf (女朋友, 2012). These latter are characterized by fast editing and sexy actors, but also — as for instance in Night Market Hero (雞排英雄, 2011) — act as cementing feelings of community.
These films set their action in the 1980s and 1990s, but this nostalgia for a relatively recent past doesn’t only characterize Taiwan. It’s an international phenomenon, lingering over events such as the end of the Cold War and the revival of China, and is examined by Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011).
So what lies behind this trend? An anxiety caused by the homogenization of cultures, even within the Chinese-speaking world, the author argues. This often centers on the adoption of US products, and because Taiwan has been open to this influence for longer than China, it means that what is frequently happening is that China is copying Taiwan. Taiwan therefore, for better or worse, has become the market leader. If you say “Godzilla,” people in Taiwan know what you’re talking about, whereas in China they probably don’t.
Other aspects of this situation are that Taiwan is linked to places like Hong Kong and Japan in ways that China isn’t. A film like Machi Action (變身, 2012) is deeply indebted to Japanese anime, for example, while ghost stories and horror stories represent shared aspects of traditional Chinese culture that Taiwan holds in common with Hong Kong.
Does all this mean that Taiwan is obsessed with the recent past because it doesn’t have much faith in the future? Not necessarily, says Neri. It’s true that Taiwan doesn’t produce many sci-fi films (almost always set in the future), but this could be a result of budget constraints, as hi-tech films set in the future tend to be expensive to produce.
Retro Taiwan has a cover image from the film Three Times (最好的時光, 2005) by Hou, that shows actor Chang Chen (張震) playing billiards, with Shu Qi (舒淇) watching. But important though Hou is for Neri, it’s with Tsai that the book concludes (Neri published a book about him in Italian in 2004).
Memories and ghosts
Tsai closes the circle, the author believes. He’s a master of cinema and well-known internationally, but is also obsessed with, for instance, memories and ghosts. These days he tends to produce installations that are both a farewell to cinema and nostalgic for the days when people bought cinema tickets rather than down-loaded most creative products.
What, then, does the future hold for Taiwanese cinema? It’s hard to tell, Neri concludes. But whatever it is, it will be built on the shoulders of the past masters, just as (in the vision of Umberto Eco, among others) the dwarf on the shoulders of the giant can see further than even the giant sees.
This is an important book because it demonstrates how films can simultaneously be coming-of-age movies and evocations of a significant past, often a political past. Gf/Bf, for instance, contains a huge demonstration in what was then called the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Plaza (now Liberty Square).
But Retro Taiwan (with its Proustian subtitle “Time Recalled in Contemporary Chinese-language Cinema”) is much more than that. A total of 98 Chinese-language films are mentioned, and the book as a whole is a superlative guide to whole swathes of its subject-matter. That it should be translated into Chinese as soon as possible goes without saying, and maybe the poly-lingual Neri could even have a major hand in the translation.
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