Hong Kong and Taipei in the 1990s: From Wong Kar-Wai’s to Tsai Ming-Liang’s Cinematic Works

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Chungking Mansions is one of the main commercial hubs in Hong Kong for a variety of low-end globalization products. For a long time, Chungking Mansions had a bad reputation as a dodgy place. Still today, some locals avoid stepping inside the building complex.2 Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are connected in a variety of ways. In fact, one of the characters, He Zhiwu, has the same name in both films and shares a number 223 (Cop ID in Chungking Express and prisoner mumber in Fallen Angels). The same actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro, plays both characters. In addition, both films greatly occur in Chungking Mansions.3 Midnight Express is a real, popular food store in Hong Kong.4 The presence of brands such as IBM and McDonald’s is ubiquitous in the film, pointing to the traces of transnational capital all over the textual fabric of Hong Kong.5 Lisiak (Citation2015) identifies four different types of absence within Tsai’s films: absence of movement, absence of speech, absence of home and absence of infrastructure.6 Lim (Citation2013) argues that “silence”—the concomitant foregrounding of silence and the absence of recurrent elements in a film’s soundtrack such as voiceover, music or dialogue—is one of the defining characteristics of Tsai’s works, along with his still compositions.7 The mediating power of the apartment-niche is also the defining aspect of the Taipei Edward Yang portrays in Yi Yi (1999). The city is a space of refracted surfaces that block time after time the spectators’ direct access to the human bodies the city envelopes, preventing us from gaining access to the individuals’ interior condition as articulated through their facial expressions. Privileging sites of encounter placed in the corners of two meeting roads—coffee shops, highway underpasses—Yang often places his camera outside a framing glass that contains his characters’ interactions, punctuating their exchanges with the passing of circulating cars in constant motion through Taipei’s network of freeways. Yang’s cityscape is thus a multi-layered time-space that focuses on the struggles of a particular family to exemplify the troubles of many others since the apartment windows reflect the cars passing by, and, in turn, the in-motion car’s windows reflect the exterior of the buildings they bypass, pointing continuously elsewhere.8 Interestingly, Martin Fran (Citation2003) points out that Vive L’Amour constantly foregrounds emptiness, leaving often characters offscreen and depicting harsh architectural shapes, like building blocks, window frames, doorways or balustrades.9 In “Bringing in the Rain,” Jean-Pierre Rehm invokes Walter Benjamin’s concept of “cinema as a place of narration” to frame Tsai Ming-Liang’s project within the realm of the modern. According to Benjamin, the modern narration requires “a new precision and a new imprecision joined together in a single narrative jargon” (1999, 9), Rehm then, proceeds to locate Tsai’s “modern precision/imprecision dynamic” in his abandonment of the continuity-based, conflict-solving narrative style for the sake of the direct presentation of the opaqueness of the actors’ bodies and psyches; the quasi silent record of their intimate everydayness in the immediacy of a moment stripped off any dramatic surplus. This idea echoes André Bazin’s concept of “pure cinema”—“No more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema” (Bazin Citation1984, 60)—providing a stimulating framework to understand Tsai’s films.10 The Skywalk is Gone is a sequel to What Time Is It There? and a prequel to The Wayward Cloud (2003).Additional informationNotes on contributorsVicente Rodríguez OrtegaVicente Rodríguez Ortega is Tenure-Track Professor at Universidad Carlos III (Madrid), and member of the TECMERIN research group and Instituto Universitario del Cine Español–UC3M. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Cinema & Genre (Manchester University Press) and has written over 20 academic articles and book chapters. He is the founding editor of Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays.