Chen Kuo-fu's Beauty and Sorrow

Director Chen Kuo-fu's third film Peony Pavilion is about to hit Taiwan's cinema screens. It discusses a hot topic:

Perhaps because of a fate laid down in a previous life, schoolgirl Tu Li-li has the same recurring dream: she is in an ancient Chinese garden, where she meets and falls in love with a handsome scholar.

The constant repetition of this dream exhausts Li-li both physically and emotionally. Her mother takes her to a fortune teller, and her classmates introduce prospective boyfriends to her, but they are unable to arrest her gradual withdrawal from reality.

Then one day she sees a huge advertisement hoarding on a bridge. The person in the picture is none other than the scholar in her dream. But before Li-li can meet her dream lover in real life, she accidentally falls from a building and is killed. Her wish is unfulfilled and her regretful soul haunts her bedroom, disturbing the people around her....

The dream scenes in Peony Pavilion are adapted from the Ming dynasty opera The Peony Pavilion. Times ancient and modern, lives past and present, fate, Buddhist ceremony--the film is full of topics which have been talking points in Taiwanese society in the last two years.

More luck than judgement

Compared with those new directors who have overseas degrees in filmmaking or other film-related qualifications, 37-year-old Chen Kuo-fu does not have glittering academic credentials: despite the bookish air imparted by his squarish face and blackrimmed glasses, he never went to university. His career in film has included many ups and downs.

Chen Kuo-fu was first known for his film critiques. But in fact he never planned to make himself a name as a critic. His family ran a shoe shop, and his father's plans for him had been that ideally he should take over the family business, or failing that open a shop of his own.

But the young Chen Kuo-fu would often slip cat of the family home late at night and ride the streets with his friends on motorbikes. Apart from such pastimes, what he liked most was watching films. At Chinese New Year when he was young, after collecting his red envelope of money on New Year's Eve he would be off to the cinema. The lunar new year is a time for family reunions, and very few people go to the movies. But for Chen Kuo-fu, watching films was a way of "enjoying solitude."

Just like the young people in Hou Hsiao-hsien's film The Boys From Feng-Kuei, when Chen was 19 he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. He came from Taichung to Taipei to attend English classes, but his purpose was not to pass the university entrance exams. At a time when Taiwan's export trade was booming, "studying English was simply a way of convincing myself that I was doing something worthwhile," he says.

But to his surprise these six months of intensive courses opened the gates of knowledge to Chen Kuo-fu, and revealed to him that he had a certain linguistic talent. Looking back, he says that studying English was the first vital step on his "road of no return" to cinema.

His motivation to study came from his desire "to know what was written in books about cinema." At that time there were few locally-written or translated works about film, and the only way to glean more information was through materials in foreign languages.

Some time in the early 1980s, he wrote a few unpaid film critiques at a friend's invitation, and thus first acquired his status as a "film critic."

Giving encouragement to film makers

When the New Wave in cinema hit Taiwan early in 1981, students of filmmaking who had come back from studying abroad bringing new ideas with them joined up with the new generation of film lovers who had grown up since the war, to energetically plug their favorite films and artists in newspaper and magazine articles. A cinema culture combining images and the written word helped promote the new film movement.

Working hard with his pen, Chen Kuo-fu was one of the main figures of the time. In his analyses he rarely criticized individual films, but usually discussed some issue raised by a film, often from an ideological starting point. His articles were acknowledged as serious writings which carried much weight. For instance, he would discuss such categorizations as "Chinese cinema," "Taiwanese cinema" and "guopian" (Chinese-language films from Taiwan or Hong Kong), and at a time when Hollywood movies were taking Taiwan's box offices by storm, he reminded film fans not to forget that some films like The Gods Must be Crazy had an element of "colonialist thinking."

His works include an anthology of his own writings on cinema entitled One-Sided Words, a translation of a work on cinema theory, and books on directors Bresson and Hitchcock.

After he became known for his film critiques he was asked to help plan the annual International Film Festivals put on by the Motion Picture Library (now the National Film Archives). After he met Hou Hsiao-hsien, he accompanied Hou to various international film festivals to interpret for him.

Why did the film critic, whose skill lay in using the written word to analyze cinema images, wish to become a director?

Chen says there was no absolute link between his giving up writing critiques and his becoming a director. "Actually I was doing fine writing film critiques, until I discovered that writing them affected my enjoyment of watching films." As a film critic, watching films seemed to have become work, and having to think about the meaning of every new scene that appeared was a real strain!

Farsighted Hou Hsiao-hsien

After he gave up writing film critiques he was at a loose end. A close friend had been contracted to make a program for public television--a 13-part documentary series entitled "Profiles." But he had only filmed 11 episodes when the budget ran out, so he sought out Chen Kuo-fu, with whom he had attended a cameraman's training class at Central Motion Picture Company, and asked him to act as guest director--free of charge--for the last two programs in the series. This was Chen's second crucial step towards creative cinematic work.

He filmed a taxi driver, starting with the program's host Sun Yueh riding in a taxi and chatting with the driver. The driver was facing a little dilemma: a fare had left behind a purse, and he was struggling with his conscience over whether to hand it in as lost property or "confiscate" it himself.

When this close-to-life, realistic documentary was broadcast, Hou Hsiao-hsien happened to watch it. He felt that the TV series had a very "cinematic" feel to it. From the closing titles Hou quietly noted Chen Kuo-fu's name, with the idea of asking him to make a film.

Later, as a planner of the International Film Festival, Chen Kuo-fu took a group of foreign film critics to the set where Hou Hsiao-hsien's A Time to Live and a Time to Die was being filmed, to meet the cast and crew. There Chen first met Hou Hsiao-hsien. When the two had got to know each other better, Hou told Chen that he had once seen him at the Motion Picture Library and had thought of asking him to play a leading role.

Very amused at this idea, Chen Kuo-fu says: "Do you know who the leading lady was going to be? Lin Ching-hsia! At that time Hou Hsiao-hsien thought I was very good looking."

Although Chen did not get to play this leading male role, he and Hou became good friends and long-term collaborators.

Hou Hsiao-hsien is dedicated to bringing on younger talent in the film industry, and has helped finance such films as Edward Yang's Taipei Story. He actively recommended Chen Kuo-fu to film companies, but Chen could never find a suitable screenplay, so his first film was put off again and again.

If I make another film, I'm a dog

Later a story told to him by a junior high school teacher aroused his interest and became the basis of his maiden work, School Girl. The rebellious junior high school student Hsiao Li falls for Hsiao Chiu, a young man without a steady job, and even leaves school for his sake. She hopes to find a life which suits her, but she is tricked into working at a girlie bar. Her best friend Hsiu-hsiu and a bunch of classmates search for her high and low....

In the opinion of Hong Kong film critic Li Zhuo-tao, the way Chen Kuo-fu handles this theme of young people's "confusion and searching" is far better than most "school" films, for it "starts from the viewpoint of the new generation, and shows a startling understanding of and respect for their ideas and feelings. It also conveys an implicit condemnation of the hypocrisy and apathy of the adult world."

School Girl was chosen as one of the best films of 1989 in the China Times Express film awards. But it did not do well at the box office, and Chen himself was not satisfied with his first work either. During filming he felt very isolated, and complains that was not given any say in the choice of cast and crew, nor in how the budget was spent or managed.

"It was really pathetic, probably only the cameraman really backed me up any or understood what l was trying to do!"

"If you have to make that many compromises to make a film, I really don't know what fun there is in directing." After Chen finished filming School Girl, he swore: "I'll never make another film in my life; if I make another, I'm a dog!"

At the time the cameraman told him: "You'll eat those words!"

A Taipei parable

As he was no longer filming, he went to do administrative work, taking on the job of editor-in-chief at the film magazine Imagekeeper. Compared with the complexities of film circles, Chen Kuo-fu, who had never previously worked within an organization, liked this simple environment, and he stayed there until he began shooting his second film.

One day he had been riding his motorcycle when he was caught in a sudden downpour. He hurriedly stopped and ducked under an arcade. Like him, other people also dashed in to take shelter. Bored at waiting for the rain to pass, he began looking at the people around him and the customers in a coffeeshop. This gave him the inspiration for a new work.

Chang Hua-kun, owner of City Films Ltd., presented the plans for Treasure Island for the Government Information Office's subsidy for local film makers, baiting the application with the words "production to be supervised by Hou Hsiao-hsien." He received a grant of NT$4 million, which enabled the shooting of Chen Kuo-fu's second film to go ahead.

The film starts with a heavy rainstorm. Singer Lim Giong plays a KTV errand-boy who takes shelter in a coffee-shop. He unthinkingly picks up a notebook left behind by a customer played by Yip Yukhing, and becomes embroiled in the stormy relationship between a gangland boss and his mistress.

In this film, Chen Kuo-fu tries some bold experiments. The film has complex characters and uses avant-garde visual effects and powerful color contrasts. Before Chen's lens, Taipei appears both familiar and indistinct, full of dark shadows but brimming with vitality.

At the same time as Hou Hsiao-hsien was busy with the last film of his trilogy on Taiwan's tragic past, and that other stalwart of ROC cinema, Edward Yang, was filming A Brighter Summer Day, which looks back at a case of homicide by a young person during the White Terror period, a new generation of directors including Tsai Ming-liang, Hsu Hsiao-ming and Chen Kuo-fu had already "said goodbye to the age of nostalgia and concern for past sufferings."

Their shared characteristic is their "pursuit of a sense of self," and their concern for young people's indecision and indifference.

After Chen Kuo-fu finished shooting Treasure Island, his state of mind was just the opposite of the first time around: he couldn't wait to start making his next film.

Crossing over into production

As well as having things to say, he also wanted to find a way to survive in the film world.

The depressed state of the Taiwan film industry with its small market led Chen to conclude that the only way forward is to shoot low-budget films. Everyone knows that making films is expensive, but how can one save money?

This time, when Chen Kuo-fu worked with Central Motion Picture Company to make Peony Pavilion, they applied the following formula: first the two sides considered the film's scale and degree of risk, and worked out a budget; then Chen Kuo-fu assumed responsibility for delivering the final finished product. In principle, Central Motion Picture Company was not to interfere in how the funds were used or in personnel decisions. In effect Chen Kuo-fu was both director and producer rolled into one.

The traditional model for making a film is that the direction team has to protect the interests of the director and follow the director's orders, while the production team takes its orders from the boss of the film company or from an executive producer delegated by the boss. The result is that one side is constantly making demands for the sake of quality, while the other side, in order to protect the owner's interests, wants to save money wherever it can. Typically both sides spend a lot of time in conflict.

But now with full control Chen could apply his new ideas, and at the same time he knew how much money he could use and what he could achieve with it. He no longer had to spend time on meeting after meeting to get the boss to agree to this or that.

Chen Kuo-fu's decision to go from pure directing into involvement in the production side was mainly because he recognized that Taiwan's film industry is in a very weak condition and is losing skilled professionals. But this gave him a sense of "release"; he would have to do everything himself.

The core team who worked on Peony Pavilion were all friends he "could trust," or who at least, he says, "wouldn't walk out halfway through shooting." He was also able to reduce the number of personnel substantially by abandoning the traditional division of labor into such teams as lighting, camera, gaffers, production and so on; in the past, each of these teams would have a staff of three. After reorganization, just one person was responsible for the odd jobs done by the gaffers.

Many people thought this was unimaginable: who would drive the trucks? What if they needed to set up a raised platform? Quite simple: "Everybody mucked in."

A life in film

Chen Kuo-fu's publicity agent Lin Chih-hsiang has written an account of the shooting of Peony Pavilion, in which he records how with only one day left on the location site, which had been rented from a school, at the end of every shot the director and cameraman would immediately stride quickly over to the next spot to make time, and everyone else would run along behind them, carrying all the gear.

The camera team did not have to worry that they would have to make two trips for their equipment: everybody helped without needing to be asked, "because with even the director and cameraman pitching in to carry things, who would dare to have a hand empty?" says Lin Chih-hsiang.

Peony Pavilion is not only an enjoyable story to watch, it has much to offer photographically and aesthetically too. The camera captures the leading character's struggles with reality; the set recreates the magic of her dream world. Although the two main strands of the story are intertwined, each develops clearly, and the film's suspenseful atmosphere also engrosses the audience from the beginning.

The film was originally invited to take part in the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year, and to coordinate the publicity it was planned for it to start showing in cinemas in February. But it was held up by problems with both post-production work and booking schedules, and the launch finally had to be delayed until school terms start in September.

In recent years films from Taiwan have done quite well at international festivals, and Taiwan's directors have received many invitations to attend. But Chen Kuo-fu does not like film festivals at all.

"I haven't the least interest in film marketing," says Chen Kuo-fu. He insists that the director is a behind-the-scenes technical worker, not someone who should appear in public. But with the current fashion in Taiwan for putting the creative artist in the spotlight, directors can do little but cooperate.

Characterized by friends as a typical Taurus, who only needs to see a patch of grass and a big tree to happily lie down in the shade for a siesta, Chen Kuo-fu describes himself as extremely sensitive and not very used to events attended by large numbers of people, such as film festivals and press conferences. In his view, film festivals are "public relations exercises in which one is constantly interviewed." They have nothing to do with creativity, and going to too many will only make one doubt why one began making films in the first place.

In the shade of a big tree

Although Chen Kuo-fu regards attending film festivals as a torment, he doesn't seem to find creative work the least bit taxing. When he had finished Peony Pavilion and no longer had to go to the set every day, he lived a topsy-turvy life, sleeping in the daytime and getting up in the afternoon to write screenplays until dawn. In this way he completed two screenplays in succession. One of them was adapted from Chen Yu-hui's novel Lonely Hearts Column, which tells the true story of an actress who puts a lonely hearts ad in the paper to find a husband, and meets over twenty men. A film company has already expressed strong interest in this story.

After ten years "in the business," Chen Kuo-fu's film career can be described with the name of a cable TV program: from "Film Chose Me," he now says emphatically: "I have chosen film."

[Picture Caption]

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Cinema reflects human life. Chen Kuo-fu's creative career in cinema is his own experience of life.

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"Once beautiful flowers bloomed here, but now all is dried up and wilted." In a scene from the Ming dynasty opera The Peony Pavilion, the female lead character Du Liniang, who is alarmed that her youth will pass her by, meets a handsome scholar by chance. Under the skillful hands of the art director, a garden and pavilion appear in the studio. (still from Peony Pavilion courtesy of Central Motion Picture Co.)

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Where will a young girl's soul find rest? (still from Peony Pavilion courtesy of Central Motion Picture Co.)

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Troubled by affairs of the heart, the lonely young girl has no stomach for lessons and today has skipped class. (still from Peony Pavilion courtesy of Central Motion Picture Co.)

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Treasure Island has stunning visual imagery and a glittering array of Hong Kong and Taiwan singing stars. (still from Treasure Island courtesy of City Films Ltd.)

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The gorgeous young woman has a fatal attraction which draws the KTV errand boy into her trap. (still from Treasure Island courtesy of City Films Ltd.)

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Chen Kuo-fu has always got around by bicycle. He believes that in urban Taipei, cycling is safer than riding a motorbike.