Ling Zhang

This article examines the cinematic soundscape and audiovisual interplay
in Taiwan New Cinema filmmaker Edward Yang’s historical epic Gǔlǐng jiē
shàonián shārén shìjiàn (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991) to initiate a dialogue with scholarship in radio, sound, music, and media and cultural studies. It investigates how the film reconstructs through sound and ear-witnessing the historical memory of early 1960s Taiwan amid pervasive Cold War paranoia. In doing so, the article emphasizes the re-creation
of a holistic acoustic experience and the effects of sonic mediation and remediation through audiovisual media such as radio and records, situated in the larger context of Cold War geopolitics in East Asia and beyond.

CHINESE FANTEPIAN (COUNTERESPIONAGE OR ANTI-SPY) FILM ON the Trail (Genzong zhuiji, Lu Jue, 1963) opens with a crowd flowing through the border gate from British colonial Hong Kong to Shenzhen, an outpost in southern China, on a foggy morning. The sequence that follows uses these two locations-the old, corrupt colony and the young, independent nation-to contrast capitalism and socialism with evocative audiovisual style. On the British colonial side, the guards appear arrogant, ignoring the people in need, and the atmosphere is chaotic and gloomy. On the Chinese side, the ambiance suddenly becomes vivacious and optimistic: We see a giant board bearing the slogan "Long Live the Great Unity of the People of the World" and a close-up of the national flag, while upbeat extradiegetic music accompanies a disembodied female voice on a loudspeaker that welcomes visitors arriving to celebrate the National Day. A change in musical tone, however, soon implies that a menace lurks underneath this seemingly peaceful fac ßade: Explosives are discovered during a border inspection. Police officers must foil the sabotage plan of secret agents from Hong Kong targeting the power supply of nearby Guangzhou (Canton). This opening sequence poses an urgent question that drives the entire film: How can the saboteurs be stopped? It also dramatizes the regional (Guangzhou and Hong Kong), national (state security), and transnational (Cold War geopolitics) dimensions of Chinese fantepian.

《五朵金花》（王家乙，1959）通常被作为少数民族题材的喜剧与音乐风光电影探讨，本文探究其如何将社会主义背景下的性别解放与民族平等主题编织进公路叙事。将《五朵金花》作为“公路电影”研究不仅可以挑战此类型的西方中心框架，也会赋予影片新的解读视角，如位于电影核心的“社会主义道路”的时间与空间隐喻。在此过程中，民间文化尤其是民歌及当时尚属新奇的彩色摄影呈现的乐观性暗示了其社会主义现实主义风格。除了影片叙事中的旅途及社会主义的象征性“旅途”，《五朵金花》本身跨越多个国家的旅途也使其在“冷战”时期“文化外交”方面扮演了重要角色。于是，社会主义现实主义与公路电影的跨国元素相遇与重叠，创造一种旅行世界的多层次流动。

How has the development of surveillance technology and its normalized intervention into our social structures and daily lives impact our imagination of the future? Does the "total view" of the intense yet impassive gaze of surveillance cameras, combined with the mediated intimacy of social media videos, foreshadow deeper social alienation or the fulfillment of individual desire? In order to address such questions, I take the Chinese artist Xu Bing and his team's film Dragonfly Eyes (Qingting zhi yan, 2017) and its surrounding media culture as a case study to demonstrate how surveillance footage and various modes of cinematic ontology, digital realism, and temporality work in a contemporary socio-political-medial context. Composed by Xu and a group of collaborators, Dragonfly Eyes is the only existing feature-length fiction film constructed completely from surveillance footage. As a highly reflexive film, Dragonfly epitomizes and embodies the precarious potentials of the digital future of capitalism, both invigorating and bleak, expressive and corrupt.

This essay focuses on the stylistic element of “framing” in relation to both interior and exterior urban cinematic space in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story, where the main characters from different class and cultural backgrounds dwell. It explores the interactions between characters and the rapidly changing physical and social environments with which they are associated and situated: the newly emerging urban bourgeois (Ah Zhen and her colleagues) with aloofly refined apartments and dwarfing office buildings, the local taxi driver (Ah Qin) with dilapidated houses and neighborhoods, the small business owner (Ah Long) with the old commercial center Dihua street, and the adolescents with disco nightclubs, deserted buildings, open space, and motorcycles that symbolize mobility, speed and hazard. The ever-changing Taipei in the mid-1980s is a politically significant chronotope of imagining the beyond. Just as Ah Long and the Dihua street are considered outdated by Ah Zhen’s colleagues who frequent the newly developed commercial “East District,” Tokyo is tied to the old colonial past and California to the neocolonial global capitalist future. Linguistic demarcations (Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, and English) of social class and cultural identity connect and traverse these different temporalities and spaces, resembling the glass windows pervasive in Taipei Story. As I will show, the film’s modes of transparency and reflection confuse and obscure distances and boundaries, filling its spaces with anxiety, anger, desolation, violence and illusions that will only ever be illusions.

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本文旨在以台湾导演蔡明亮电影《郊游》( 2013) 为例，探讨当今西方学界关注的“慢电影”与都市“废墟”美学及文化的关联，涉及空间( 如城市、建筑、自然景观等) 、身体与影像的多重交迭，论述“展现”( presentation) 与“再现”( representation) 、有形与无形、可见与不可见、实体的/物质的与精神的或虚拟的、及物与人之间的复杂纠葛、流动与彼此作用。边缘、底层人的处境通常被掩藏和遗忘，各类特权阶层的光鲜生活总被通俗媒体强调、宣传和钦羡。“废墟”空间对都市规划的反抗性，在《郊游》中被刻意强调，然又因人物状态的倦怠而削弱。无论如何，“慢电影”成为保存都市“慢废墟”的重要媒介。