Prompt: In thinking about Hou's "Good Men and Good Women" and Yang's "Terrorizers" together, in terms of theme, narrative form, cinematic style, and mode of production and reception, how do you find the films illustrative of the limits and usefulness of the auteur theory discussed in Wu and Needham's articles? Please be specific and focus on one concrete element (e.g. architecture, landscape, ethnicity [e.g. Eurasian girl], language, media, etc. ). Feel free to reference "In Our Time" and other TNC films you have seen.
It was difficult for me to find a specific "thread" of a motif or formal cinematic device that all the directors used in In Our Time other than the portrayal of different time periods of a person's life. But for that precise reason, I think it further supports the "auteur theory" which we talked about in class, and how each director's artistic vision took their share of this larger pie in their own direction while working with similar material about Taiwan during the 80s. Although if we consider that the socio-cultural context of Taiwan formed a majority of the narrative in this film, this argument could be taken in another direction. Especially because the films were just a general attitude or disposition of the 80s, or an ode to that time period of rapid development and change.
For the forum post, I chose to zoom in on the very first vignette, which is the one I found most powerful, so I did a deeper reading of it. The most concrete artistic element I found associated with this segment is perhaps the use of visual symbols - all the mise-en-scene served a coherent purpose in addition to their aesthetic value. But first, I think it's worth talking briefly about the use of music, too.
The first and immediately noticeable feature of the film is its use of non-diegetic music. The timing of when the music comes up usually overlaps with when the main character boy was alone, or using his creative mind - perhaps an indication of his inner passion, desires, and aspirations that are repressed or held back because of the lack of approval from those close to him. The background music gets gradually more and more intense throughout the film until the little girl takes the boy's hands and they go on an evening adventure to recover his dinosaur toy. This is the first time someone fully understands him and is let into his world, and does what he desires, and also "coincidentally" the only instance of lyrical music plays in the background, the peak of narrative tension. Most of the time it seemed almost overwhelming whenever the music would come up, pulling me out of the narrative world immediately, and perhaps that was the point - to create a somber, pensive atmosphere for the viewers to engage with the content presented before them. Usually, they're spaced out well enough for the viewers to immediately reflect on what's happening, and I used this time to come up with a related theory:
This short episode is about societal change, and specifically the drawbacks of Westernization. As a film portraying the attitude of the 80s, perhaps it's commentary was that Westernization was something that everyone desired, but didn't bring society the envisioned changes to the lives of the people.
The first symbol of the West is the radio. It's to show off how desirable or addicting new Western technology can be, yet it didn't bring the family more unity, rather it caused conflict. It also didn't add much to enrich the lives of the characters' families. Listening to soccer commentary made the father more grumpy, and distant from his family. Even touching the radio caused conflict and threatened violence.
The second is perhaps an extended metaphor for the West, and that is the Auntie's family. She wears western clothes and shows off her Western possessions. She tells the kids to draw whatever they desire, rather than giving specific instructions, which is I suppose a very traditional and stereotypical view of what Western education is like and what many parents tried to imitate. What resulted was the little brother's horrendous, black-crayons scribbles which, needless to say, are far from pleasing. Even more obviously, the doll, or a "洋娃娃" in Chinese, directly translates to "foreigner's doll." The girl who plays with the doll doesn't exactly have a likable personality, either.
But even more importantly, the little girl represents a generalization of "Western romance," and how it's impersonal and detached. The entire progression of the story is a traditional hero's journey - a misunderstood underdog who finally finds reason and an accomplice to struggle against authority, recovering his thrown away dinosaur. The setup leads us to believe that as the two families separated at the very end of the film, the girl will hold eye contact until the boy becomes out of sight. The boy looks over his shoulder again and again to find that eye contact, yet the girl stands there stroking her "foreigner's doll," never once looking up, shattering the entire romance plot. This hero's journey never led to any change, and the boy plummets back to his original "stasis." The only reason the girl showed affection in the first place could still be genuine, that's not necessarily excluded immediately. But her primary purpose was to inspire the boy to draw again, so she could take credit for the artwork and receive praise from her mother and her guests. To her, it was merely a "commercial" (!!) exchange of goods between the two, and no feelings were involved.
I think thematically, this first vignette was the most literal with symbolism and metaphors. The role it plays in the larger film is it sets the tone for the three vignettes to come - a story of struggle, not necessarily met with closure, as with many things in real life.
ADDITIONAL COMMENT:
I apologize, I just realized the prompt asks to reference Good Men, Good Women and Terrorizers. I suppose the same argument applies here - the limitations of the "auteur theory" we talked about in class manifests in both of these films in the sense that what is driving the plot and what is the main "spectacle" is the general socio-cultural context. The director can only take this so far, and still adhere to the truth of the disposition of the era.
But at the same time, I don't think it's ignorable that there is so much to capture about the era that Terrorizors portray that the act of doing so itself is already masterful. With Terrorizors specifically, the linearity of the plot plays such a large role in conveying the attitude of the era. Specifically, I refer to the complex plot structure that jumps between the lives of the 7 to 9 main characters, who somehow had their lives associated with each other. I think it's no mistake that the film is difficult to follow along when watching, especially with the lack of establishing shots when transitioning between the different scenes, in fact, quite the contrary. A lot of the time, they were almost matching shots or even a cutaway with a similar spatial and temporal structure, and their lives seem to muddle together. I think this was done for one main reason - the fact that in order to construct a film worthwhile of watching, driven by an interesting narrative painting detailed portraits of its characters, and yet still reveals a greater message about society in large, relies on an important element called "coincidence." This coincidence sends a message that although this seems like an incredibly unlikely series of events that takes place, it did. And because this happened to these random characters, it can happen to anyone in society, thus successfully constructing a microcosm that credibly speaks to society at large.
((I would add in the mix that this was also made possible through Edward Yang's documentary-like perspective with wide shots, almost cinemagraph-like still shots with minimal motion, and the candid "fly on the wall" angles which observe events "objectively." These elements give the film its element of realism and believability because there are so many films that rely on coincidences and they simply do not work. This doesn't seem to fit into my short rant above lol but worth considering still!!))