intimate temporalities

8/13/2019 Intimate Temporalities

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/intimate-temporalities 1/12



Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter 2011

215

fengchen, 1986, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) depicts just such a personal narrative.

As A Time to Live, A Time to Die was based on Hou’s own coming-of-age story,

A Summer at Grandpa’s details screenwriter Chu Tien-wen’s childhood story;

similarly, Dust in the Wind draws from the lm’s screenplay writer Wu Nien-

chen’s own experience. It tells the tale of a young boy (Wan) and his childhood

sweetheart (Huen) who leave the small mining village they grew up in and head

to urban Taipei in search for work to support their families. As his last lm

made under the Koumingtang controlled Central Motion Picture Corporation

(CMPC), Dust in the Wind marks the shift from his earlier autobiographical

“coming-of-age” lms to his later “Taiwan Trilogy” A City of Sadness ( Beiqing

chengshi, 1989, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), The Puppetmaster (Ximeng rensheng,

1993, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), and Good Men, Good Women ( Haonan haonu,

1995, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) which re-narrates pivotal moments in Taiwan’s

history that were long suppressed under Cold War-era Koumingtang rule.

In addition to being a thematic turning point in Hou’s oeuvre, Dust in the

Wind served also as an aesthetic milestone. As critics including James Udden

(2009: 76-82) and Haden Guest (2005) have observed, the lm brought Hou’s

cinematic composition to new depths. In Dust in the Wind , Hou dramatically

expands on aesthetic and narrative strategies honed in his earlier work, making

his shots longer, more distanced, and more static than ever before. The temporal

ellipses seen as early as The Sandwich Man and notable exploitation of off-

screen space in The Boys from Fengkui are pushed to new levels in Dust in the

Wind . Moreover, concerns for rhythm and attention to musical motifs which

characterize many of his later works such as City of Sadness, Millennium

Mamboo (Qianxi manbo, 2001, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien), and Three Times ( Zuihao

de shiguang , 2005, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien) are in Dust in the Wind developed

into both structuring devises and larger thematic concepts (see Guest, 2005).

Thus, while much scholarly attention has been paid to Hou’s “Taiwan

Trilogy” (see, Berry and Farquhar, 2006; Yip, 1997; Reynaud, 2002), here I

place Dust in the Wind center stage. I see the lm as a transitional cornerstone

in Hou’s larger body of work, in which Hou develops a cinematic narration

of history and memory that bridges his earlier emphasis on the personal and

autobiographical, with his later concerns of the national and transnational.

As Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar have argued, Hou’s work indexes not

necessarily a national historiography, per se, but what they explain as a

“historiological mode” of expression. Through such a historiological mode,

they argue that Hou’s lms “[do] not construct the Taiwanese experience as a

monolithic, unied, abstracted, and seemingly objective national history, but as

a multiplicity of distinct experiences, sometimes shared, sometimes separate”

(Berry and Farquhar, 2006: 37). They argue that Hou composes a localized logic

of historical narration that allows for webs of historical narrations, unbound

by any particularly privileged narrative teleology.

In this article, I push this notion of “historiology” further and suggest that




216

what we see in Dust in the Wind , are historiologies that develop specically

along affective terms through overlapping and interpenetrating narratives of

love, loss, longing, worry, and even guilt…etc. In so doing, I aim to complicate

scholarship that has discussed Hou’s work either in particularly cultural

essentialist (be it “Chinese” or “Taiwanese”) terms, or that which places Hou

within larger aesthetic genealogies of cinema, without taking into account

the specic cultural-historical, not to mention largely personal, context from

which his work emerged. Here, I track the more intimate ramications, or what

I call “affective historiologies,” of overlapping cultural historical tensions

which frame and are in turn reected in Hou’s work. I argue that it is precisely

through these affective narratives that Hou, in Dust in the Wind , is able to bring

together the many public and personal marks of Taiwan’s past reected on

individual, familial, national, and even international ties that compose the

complexly intimate story of Taiwan’s own “coming-of-age,” projected on the

screen of the Taiwanese New Wave.

Times/ Ties

The lm opens with the sound of a running train, while the young lov-

ers Wan and Huen stand side by side in the train cart, journeying home from

school. As their bodies sway silently to the rhythms of the train, their intimacy

is portrayed as one that is also steady and ordinary, in harmony with the repeti-

tive sound of the tracks. When the young couple start their walk home from

the train station, the camera is xed and remote, switching from long shots of

the two slowly striding alongside the railroad tracks (Fig. 1, left), and extreme

long shots of the mountains as they slowly climb their way into the village and

arrive home (Fig. 1, right). Static and distanced, the camera leaves space for

the couple to slowly and steadily disappear into the landscape, from daytime

till dawn.

Here, we see an intimate rhythm between both the comfortably silent couple,

and their relationship with the landscape they tread. In sync, their bodies follow

their environment’s contours together. On time, they reach home just before

the last glimmer of light fades into darkness.

Fig. 1. Wan and Huen traveling home from the train station.




217

The young couple’s synchronized temporality between each other and

with the rural environment is sporadically interrupted by the schedule de-

manded of and set by their families. Just as they start entering the village (Fig.

2, left), Huen and Wan are stopped by the grocery store owner who has them

carry home the rice Huen’s mother requested. Upon their arrival at Huen’s

house, they are yet again disrupted as they are scolded for returning later than

usual (Fig. 2, right).

The weight and intervention of Huen’s family expectations on the young couple

are here manifested in temporal terms: through the errand of shouldering the

family’s rice which disrupts and delays their walk, and through the expression

of concern through the mother’s alarm over their tardiness.

These familial interruptions, on the end of Huen’s family, foreshadow

that which Wan’s father soon causes. The father’s injury and the family’s need,

in turn, for Wan to shoulder the burden of the family’s nancial responsibilities

disrupts the pace and trajectory of Wan’s own coming-of -age process. This

can be seen, for instance, in the scene where Wan announces his decision to

quit school. In this scene, we hear the doctor collecting medicine money from

the mother inside the house, as the camera stays with the two generations of

family patriarchs grandfather and father helplessly resting at the doorway.

Shortly after, Wan actively enters into the frame (Fig. 3).

Wan rst returns his father’s watch, which he borrowed to keep time for

a test, and then offers to quit school and head to Taipei to search for work. As

we can garner from clues given in the opening episode where Wan offers to

help Huen with math, and later when the father reminisces over how Wan’s

teacher urged Wan to stay in school because of his talent we know that Wan’s

decision to leave school was one made unexpectedly and out of necessity.

This decision abruptly delays, and ultimately derails, Wan’s future of going

to college. It is a move which, moreover, accelerates his transition from child

to breadwinner. For, like the watch borrowed from his dad to keep time for

schoolwork, Wan’s borrowed time as a schoolboy now needs to be returned to

the family. Here, we witness Wan’s prompted adulthood emerging out of the

ssures of competing and overlapping temporalities to which he is intimately

bound his synchronized relationship with Huen, his personal progression as a

school boy, his obligations clocked through family needs, and his position as

Fig. 2. Family expectations disrupting the couples’ walk back home.




218

young laborer at a time when Taiwan was undergoing accelerated industrializa-

tion and thus required mass amount of labor in its urban centers. That is, we

see Wan’s character growing out of the intersections of personal, interpersonal,

familial, and national times and ties.

Mistimed/ Misplaced

Not long after Wan’s departure, Huen follows suit and journeys to Taipei

also in search of work. However, as soon as Huen arrives at Taipei station,

the couple’s synchronized intimacy, portrayed in the opening scenes, is sub-

stituted by a series of mistimed events and agitations. Following her family’s

instructions, Huen decides to wait for Wan on the platform and not at the rear

station that Wan suggested (Fig. 4, left). Due to Huen’s displacement, Wan is

late in picking her up, leaving Huen vulnerable to the trickery of an old man

who convinces her to leave with him. Wan catches the old man in time and

wrestles back the bag of potatoes, which Wan’s grandfather prepared for him

(Fig. 4, right) while, in the process, dropping and spoiling the lunch he was

supposed to deliver for his boss’s son. Here, family intervention yet again disrupts and delays the young couple,

with Huen’s family’s instructions leading to Wan’s belated pickup, and Wan’s

salvaging of grandpa’s potatoes eventually spoiling Wan’s task and schedule

given by his boss. Such mistiming between the young couple, between them

and their families, and with their work accelerates as the narrative progresses.

Wan struggles to balance his work schedule and his night classes. Huen cries

constantly as she waits for visits from Wan and letters from home, both of

Fig. 3. Wan offering to quit school and nd work as he turns in his report card.




219

which seem to come at too slow a pace. From Huen’s sorrow, we witness

the constant misaligned pace of intimacy, both between Huen and Wan, and

between them and their families.

This widening ssure between the two characters becomes especially

apparent when their plans to visit home together are again and again disrupted

by untimely mishaps at work. Just before one of their visits home, Huen unfor-

tunately burns her wrist with an iron at work and, despite her overwhelming

homesickness, is pressed by Wan to stay in Taipei less the sight of her injury

worry her family. Wan’s agitation over Huen’s carelessness, both in the work-

place and in regards to her family, is coupled by his frustration with Huen for

drinking with his pals over dinner. He yells: “Little girl, what are you doing

drinking with men!” We thus see Huen’s body become the site for contend-

ing temporal narratives. We witness the untimeliness of Huen’s injury at the

workplace derailing her desire to visit family. We also see the disjointed pace

in which Wan and Huen, respectively, perceive Huen’s coming-of-age. Wan

anxiously insists on perceiving Huen as a girl who remains unequipped to take

care of herself and her family. Yet, from Huen’s actions, we see her eager to

transition into, and perform, womanhood.

Just as Wan attempts to discipline her as if a child pressing her to stay

in Taipei, and reprimanding her for drinking with men Huen, responding to

their friend Hen-chun’s taunting dare, takes off her schoolgirl blouse for a

peacock to be painted onto it (Fig. 5). Huen’s schoolgirl outt mirrors her own

body-as-canvas, which she chooses to irreversibly transform from uniformed

schoolgirl to blossoming woman a transformation which, with the image of

a colorful peacock, Huen insists on aunting. As she strips, in (Fig. 5), Huen

claims the center of the frame and takes control over both her body, which

Wan was at that moment trying to discipline, and the male gaze (which is here

triangulated among Wan, Hen-chun, and the unknown man painted on the

bulletin) that Wan was just previously anxiously guarding her from. With the

couple’s exacerbating ssures, we thus witness the misaligned pace between

Wan and Huen’s coming-of-age clocked through their family’s respective

nancial difculties, we perceive the asymmetry between their bodies and the

labors demanded of them at their workplace, and we observe the contention

between their self-development and inter-personal intimacy. That is, we see

Fig. 4. Wan’s belated arrival to Taipei station, which quickly turned violent.




220

Wan and Huen’s intimate relationship, which was originally in-sync, become

increasingly mistimed and disjointed by their own struggles to reclaim control

over their misplaced bodies.

Tempo/ Temporality

The couple’s misalignment is accelerated when the temporal logic of

the nation intervenes, and Wan is suddenly drafted to fulll his military duty,

clocked for two years. Abrupt as this national interruption might seem, de-

velopments and concerns of the national has framed this personal tale from

the very beginning. It was Taiwan’s industrializing development as a nation,

during the 1970s, that conditioned the characters’ migration to Taipei. It was

in response to the cross-strait tension between Taiwan and Mainland China

during the Cold War, that mandatory military service was set up historically

and, within this coming-of-age tale, becomes a narrative turning point. For, if

becoming the family breadwinner heralds Wan’s transition into adulthood in the

context of his family, his fulllment of mandatory military service proclaims

his manhood in terms of the nation.

Although out- of-sync his family’s need for his maturation being before

the nation’s call for his service it is the contestation of these intersecting log-

ics, familial and national, that prompts Wan’s personal growth as a character.

The stories Wan gathers right before his departure situates him within a larger

genealogy of national interruptions and personal, as well as, familial, survival.

As Wan’s employer hands Wan his last paycheck, he shares stories of serving,

and surviving, in the Japanese Imperial Army when Taiwan was still under

Japanese colonial rule. At Wan’s farewell dinner, his father laments over the

Fig. 5. Huen taking off her schoolgirl blouse so to be painted.




221

fate of the family’s men, all deprived of higher education. While Wan’s neces-

sary transition from schoolboy into provider abruptly occurred before he could

nish high school, his draft notice arrived just before he could take the college

entrance exams. Similarly mistimed between national development, family

survival, and personal growth was his father’s possibility of pursuing higher

education, which was foreclosed as soon as the political regime transitioned

from Japanese colonial to Koumingtang rule. For, just when he graduated

from elementary school, “Japanese syllables changed to Chinese, everything

[previous education] went to waste.” These personal narratives tell a national

history in ux from Japanese to Chinese rule which, in turn, inuence the

trajectory of these characters’ and, by extension, their family’s fate, vulnerable

to and thus affected by the nation’s every tremor and turn.

In particular, the nation’s claiming of Wan’s body for military service not

only disrupts Wan’s personal pursuit of education, suspends his connection

with family, but, ultimately, accelerates the detachment of Wan and Huen’s

intimate ties. The pace and permeability of Wan and Huen’s relationship, dur-

ing Wan’s time in military service, is narrated mainly through their exchanged

letters (Fig. 6).Fig. 6. Letters exchanged between Huen and Wan during his military service.

At rst, we see the intensity of Huen’s affection through the number ofletters she sends to Wan. Huen, at the beginning, sends an abundant number

of letters, so much so, that his fellow soldiers tease him: “Your letters take up

all the space on the postal airplane.” In her letters, Huen describes the current

happenings of their friends and family. She details, and even encloses tokens

of, her everyday life (Fig. 6, left). Her longing for Wan’s return, nonetheless,

crops up between the lines. While letters are always already belated responses

from sender to receiver, we sense that this deferred mode of communication, to

Huen, is too slow and unsustainable for the long time they are to be apart. She

bemoans: “387 more days before you’re discharged…387, it takes a long time

even to count.” As she waits and pines for word from Wan, which is always

already delayed, the postman who delivers their letters, however, is always on

time. She notes, “When there’s no letter from you, he tells me probably the

fog keeps the planes from ying.” The postman is always timely in deliver -

ing both physical letters or messages of comfort. Not only is he the punctual




222

bearer of news and affection, he, having once served at the same military unit

as Wan, becomes rst the potential stand-in and then the eventual substitute

of Wan. For, he eventually takes Huen’s hand in marriage. Thus, Wan’s pile

of letters from Huen (Fig. 6, left) is ultimately replaced by a stack of his own

letters (Fig. 6, right) returned from Huen’s old address which, by the time of

the letters’ arrival, had already become passé.

What is highlighted is perhaps the temporal, or ever shifting, nature of

overlapping attachments be it personal, familial, or national ties. The postman’s

timely appearance into Huen’s life, at a pivotal moment when her intimacy

with Wan was persistently delayed and suspended, results in Huen’s shift in

affection. Similar, is Wan’s own substitution of his father, as family provider, in

the face of the father’s untimely injury. The father’s ephemeral position in the

household was, even before his injury, hinted when we learn of his adoption into

the household which, thus, places him only as a temporary “place-holder” of a

patriarch until Wan can legitimately carry down the family name. Comparable

is perhaps the transient nature of Taiwan’s political rule which frames this tale

the shift from Japanese colonial governance to Koumingtang rule and affects

Wan’s family’s growth and trajectory for generations.

Wan’s body bears the overlapping marks of these passing, yet ever so

affecting, ties. This is made apparent, at the end of the lm, when Wan returns

home from the military, wearing the shirt Huen made for him before his depar-

ture (Fig. 7, left). As Wan crouches down his torso embodying the mark of his

ephemeral intimacy with Huen, his body recovering from the sporadic labors

of national as well as familial duties grandpa talks only about his potatoes.

He laments: “Typhoons came early this year, came quite a few times. I doubt

that they[the potatoes] will yield well…bumped into quite a few typhoons…

the potatoes are more difcult to look after than ginseng.” Here, nature itself

is depicted as equally, if not more so, capricious and powerful as human ties.

The camera lingers on the two characters for minutes (Fig. 7, left) before the

sound of the train interrupts their silence from a distance. Following this sonic

interruption, the camera cuts to the lm’s very last scene an extreme long

shot of Taiwan’s northeastern coast on looking on the Pacic (Fig. 7, right).

Fig. 7. Ending scene where Wan and grandpa talk in the open landscape.

While the camera remains still, the traveling sound of the train reminds

us of movements and actions happening, simultaneously, beyond the shot.

Thus, just as Wan and grandpa’s intimate moment is intermittently affected

by sounds of the train from afar, Taiwan’s open landscape is here framed as

equally vulnerable to the tempos of outside forces. As typhoons sporadically

like the transience of political forces, arbitrariness of family duties, and

ephemerality of intimate attachments affect the island so open and susceptible

to the whims of its surroundings; Wan, like grandpa’s potatoes, is inextricably




223

bound to this island and the overlapping ties that mediates, textures, and

binds its historical landscape. Like the potatoes, Wan precariously grows

out of the weight and whims of attachments with which they are intimately

bound the land, the weather, and grandfather’s aging dexterity as a farmer

in the case of the potatoes; personal heartbreak, familial binds, and national

ties in terms of Wan. In other words, Wan’s coming-of-age story itself bears

the public and personal marks of competing narratives that texture Taiwan’s

past. We thus see Hou indexing an intimate tale of “becoming” not contained

by overpowering teleologies of national progression, foreclosed genealogies

of familial longevity, or romanticized developments of young love. For, the

history we see narrated here doesn’t follow the beat of any dominant narrative

trajectory. It emerges out of its ssures. It is thus a historical narration which

ourishes close to the ground, has its roots bound to Taiwan’s soil, and bears

the whims and weight of the heart.

Endnotes

1 For more on the social-historical background of New Taiwanese Cinema’s

rise, see, Zhang, 2004: 240-249; Udden, 2009: 49-85; Chen, 1997.

2 Besides winning awards in Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, The Sandwich

Man won awards at Mannheim International Film Festival, The Boys from

Fenghuei and A Summer at Grandpa’s both won awards at Nantes Film

Festival; A Time to Live, A Time to Die won awards at Rotterdam, Hawai’i,

and Berlin.

3 For overview and discussion of these “cultural essentialist” narratives which

have been employed by various media for very different purposes, see,

Udden, 2009: 1-5.

References

Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar, eds. 2006. “Time and the National: History,

Historiology, Haunting.” In China On Screen: Cinema and Nation. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Bordwell, David. 2005. Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging .

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chen, Ruxiu. 1997. Taiwanese New Cinema’s History, Culture and Experience,




224

2nd ed. Taipei: Wanxing.

Guest, Haden. 2005. “Reections on the Screen: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Dust

in The Wind and the Rhythms of the Taiwan New Cinema.” In Island

on the Edge: Taiwan’s New Cinema and After . Hong Kong: Hong Kong

University Press.

Kellner, Douglas. 1998. “New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s.” Jump Cut: A Review

of Contemporary Media. No. 42(Dec.): 101 -115.

Reynaud, Bérénice. 2002. A City of Sadness. London: British Film Institute

Publications.

Udden, James. 2009. No Man an Island: The Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. London: Eurospan.

Warner, Charles R. 2008. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Optics

of Ephemerality.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 25(1): 1 - 15.

Yip, June. 1997. “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of

Hou Hsiao-hsien.” Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood,

Gender . Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Zhang, Yingjin. 2004. Chinese National Cinema. New York : Routledge.

Filmography

A City of Sadness ( Beiqing chengshi, 1989, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien),

A Summer at Grandpa’s ( Dongdong de jiaqi, 1984, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien),

A Time to Live, A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Dust in the Wind ( Lianlian fengchen, 1986, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Good Men, Good Women ( Haonan haonu, 1995, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982

Millennium Mamboo (Qianxi manbo, 2001, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

The Boys from Fengkui ( Fengkui lai de ren, 1983, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien )

The Puppetmaster (Ximeng rensheng, 1993, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

The Sandwich Man ( Erzi de dawanou, 1983)

Three Times ( Zuihao de shiguang , 2005, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Lily Wong is a Ph.D. candidate of comparative literature at University of

California at Santa Barbara, specializing in Chinese and Sinophone popular

culture, gender and sexuality, and lm and media studies. She has published in

journals, including Pacic Affairs, China Review International , and National

Central University Journal of Humanities. Her research pays close attention to

affective economies, historical writing, and the media formation of transpacic

Sinophone communities.




225

intimate temporalities

Documents