Poetics of Slow Cinema by Emre Çağlayan

Author:Emre Çağlayan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319968728
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.3 Episodes, Structures, Symbols

Despite Tsai’s eventual fall from grace in the eyes of domestic film critics, his minimalist narratives owed some aesthetic influences to local filmmaking conventions. One of the narrational devices that Tsai inherits from Taiwan New Cinema is the use of episodes within the general plot structure. Hou Hsiao-hsien, for example, uses the episodic structure to divide the film into a past and a present, usually resulting in an isolation of historical events and linking their effects to life in contemporary Taiwan. In The Puppetmaster (1993), for example, Hou intercuts the fictional re-creations of the life and struggles of Li Tianlu, a master puppeteer whose work was banned under Japanese colonization, with contemporary interviews with the real Li Tianlu, who reminisces about his past experiences. The overall episodic structure, which is sustained through extreme long takes and static camera positions, enables Hou to meld together historical past and contemporary commentary. Edward Yang, on the other hand, uses episodic structures to disrupt plot progression by deploying flashbacks, which reveal more information and insight about the characters. Yang’s first film That Day, on the Beach (1983), for example, portrays the meeting of two friends who have been apart for years but have decided to see each other to recount old memories. Their conversation develops into a complex series of flashbacks, often verging on flashbacks within flashbacks, which cloud the viewer’s grasp of plot progression. These flashback sequences recur as separate episodes that not only re-enact previous events but function as a means to investigate a Taiwanese cultural past. Such a historical interest in the Taiwanese past is even more explicitly visible in A Brighter Summer Day, which uses a similar structure to chronicle the historical events that a Taiwanese family endures throughout the 1960s.

Tsai, however, uses the episodic narrative structure for different purposes, as in the films there is less of an interest in the history of Taiwan than in the individual solitude of characters. Despite each film containing three or four characters, Tsai rarely shows the characters together on screen at the same time, instead portraying them in their solitude and fulfilling their daily, banal and mundane activities, which are represented through single long takes from fixed camera positions. In other words, the episodes focus on characters in their privacy rather than exploring the ways in which they interrelate with other characters within a social sphere. Such an aesthetic strategy results in “the melding of the public and the private”, in the words of Kent Jones, who writes that Tsai’s “camera seems to gaze at every scene from a distance that is by turns […] discreet, respectful, empathetic and voyeuristic” (2003, 47). There is an aesthetic distance between the spectator and Tsai’s characters that is created by the manner in which the action is portrayed, but there is also a closeness that emerges from the solitary and almost naive ways in which actions unfold within these scenes. Jones suggests that this even applies to Hsiao-kang: despite playing “roughly the

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