Passing Through Walls--The Words and Images of Hung Hung

Hung Hung, a poet since junior high who later in life turned to directing films, has found material for his "games" in the language of poetry, novels, and scripts for film and stage.

Passing Through Walls--The Words and Images of Hung Hung

"Rain it's the rain it's the rain / It's the rain that has soaked the wall / And washed away the scribblings of our childhood and the chaos of our adolescence, / Soaked it black, soaked it completely, so you could put your hand into another universe, / Putting it through the wall couldn't be harder than putting on shoes and socks or putting a thread through the eye of a needle.

"Bore into the boat, bore into the night, topple dreams with one kick, / A wall-passer needs no dreams, / He only needs a wall to pass through.

"Pass into the past, pass into the future, pass into your backyard, / Goodbye Cassandra, goodbye Carmen, Kafka caught in the wall goodbye, / Never mind the dirt, who cares if it's into the depths of water or fire / I pass through...."

These are the lyrics to the theme from The Wall-Passer, the forthcoming film written by the multi-talented poet and director Hung Hung (born Yen Hung-ya) that is the follow-up to his The Love of Three Oranges, which won him a Best Director award at the Nantes Film Festival in 1998.

Hung Hung, who always maintains a playful attitude in his work, says that The Wall-Passer is a story about "the fantastic journey of a young man, Tye, as he searches for himself." He believes that every child has had the magical power to cross freely between reality and imagination. As we grow older, we lose that power. Though the power may be gone, we can still fight to pass through the wall and enter that non-existent space to seek it out.

To Hung Hung, poetry, novels, plays, and films are all vehicles that allow him to view things from different points of view. That's why he "plays" in so many different fields.

Games and rules

It's obvious that the fortysomething Hung has not lost his playful instinct--you can see it in his poetry and his films.

"I've never thought of creating as work--it's pleasure," he says. "I also don't think of literature as a calling or some amazing thing because to me, writing, the theater, and film is just fun."

"When I say 'games,' I don't mean hopscotch or something you do on a playground, but rather something like being an architect building a house. If the house fully expresses the concepts you have in mind and all the required functionalities are there, then the process is creating a 'game,'" he says. He believes that all enjoyable games have a special structure. In writing poetry, for example, you determine the rules of the game when you decide on a poetic form. At that instant, an artist becomes a rule maker. During the game, the artist continually adjusts the logical structure and makes sure that form and content match.

Game-playing has always had an important role in literature and the arts. Hung Hung believes that even creating contemplative or painful scenes depends on playing games as you need to find a new and interesting way of expression. Without games, Goethe could not have made Faust--the crystallization of a lifetime of wisdom--so moving.

"The world created by literature is much more fun than the games of real life because the space for the imagination is greater," he says. According to him, this is why film adaptations of great works of literature always disappoint.

Like Kafka depicting torrential rain indoors, using surreal imagery to depict a very real inner feeling is highly interesting. One day a reader will come across the line and feel like things aren't so hopeless after all. The reader passes through space and time to resonate with the author. Hung Hung says, "Though you might be stuck in a trap, your spirit can roam." That is the healing power of literature.

An escape

To Hung Hung, poems are not the words on the surface but secret codes. With age, he's become skilled at manipulating the codes and losing himself in them. "It's a way for me to look at life from another angle, a very subjective interpretation of reality," he says. But he'd rather talk of literature as a kind of escape than of poetry as an influence.

His "escape" is from everyday life, from the crowd, from troubles, to get time to play. "When writing, I can put down a lot of burdens," he says. When heartbroken, for example, he can jot down a poem of just a few lines that captures all the pain he's feeling and let it go.

This is different than just venting in a diary. "It's a way of keeping meaning alive that is respectful to the other person," he says. Taking a memory and expressing it with grace and beauty, infusing it with values and a sense of completeness, it becomes eternal. That is where Hung Hung rises out of the mundane world in search of a space in which to play.

To the ever-optimistic Hung Hung, the most troubling times are when he has too many ideas. "When I have several different stories running through my mind I feel anxious because I don't have the thought power to process new ideas. So in the midst of play, I am actually continually cleaning up, always creating and always throwing away. Then I can start anew," he says.

Lives are filled with milestones, so in 2001 Hung Hung completed work on his play The Human Comedy to encapsulate the experiences of his first 40 years. Also, the film The Wall-Passer, which will be released later this year, is based on his youth.

On the latter, he says: "I use the idea of 'passing through' as a metaphor for the first 20 years because those years are full of wandering, going in circles, and passing through barriers. Like the lyrics say, 'The first 20 years are a long entrance ceremony.' The main character keeps passing through things he thinks are insurmountable and keeping him back." Since Hung Hung has always been contemplative about his life, he is that much clearer about the process.

Multimedia

Theater director. Nantes Film Festival award-winning director. Frequent literary prize winner. Poet. Novelist. China Times Express film reporter. Editor in chief, On Time Poetry magazine. Editor, Performing Arts Review. Golden Horse winner for Best Original Screenplay for Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. Stalker Theatre Group and Happy Sheep Film Studio organizer, scriptwriter, and director. These are all titles that can be conferred on Hung Hung.

Michelle Yeh, a professor of Chinese at the University of California at Davis, once wrote of his work: "Of contemporary Chinese writers, Hung Hung stands out. The areas he dabbles in (poetry, essays, novels, translations, theater and film criticism, and stage and film directing) are many and wide-ranging. That's a rarity not only among contemporary artists but among artists of this century. In diverse fields of arts and letters, he produces one quality work after another."

What enjoyment does Hung Hung derive from working in all these different media?

"Literary genres like poetry, essays, and novels are more from my own imagination, and it's more about pleasing myself than the reader," he says. Now in his forties, Hung Hung says that the poems written in his younger years were about finding the subtle connections between dreams and reality, but now that he's got more life experience, he's been gradually turning toward social and global issues. Poetry is where he can best express his opinions, thoughts, and feelings, and it is the most compact form in which to encapsulate reality. In his 2005 poem Homemade Bomb it is easy to see the traces of the change:

"Kick out the redskins, / Establish America

"Kick out the Jews / Establish Deutschland Uber Alles

"Kick out the Palestinians, / Establish Israel

"Kick out the barbarians, / Establish China

"Kick out the impure-- / Only then can the Master Poem be formed

"Those words that don't fit the rhyme / Those unpoetic words

"Those verbal piles of corpses / Those verbal refugee camps

"Those verbal guerrillas / Those verbal rebel forces

"An orphan smashes a milk bottle / To make a homemade bomb"

A synthesis

To music-lover Hung Hung, rhythm is an essential element of poetry as well. He feels that a poem must find a suitable rhythm to be effective so the stress will be on the right words. Even if a poem has great imagery or structure, it will read like a piece of wood if the rhythm is off.

An emphasis on music also brings Hung Hung's films alive. He is one of a very few Taiwanese directors of his generation who will think about a film's musical elements before filming. Most directors will score the film only after it is shot and edited, but Hung Hung's films are a blend of images and sound from the very beginning.

For example, in The Wall-Passer, the first time the female lead, Nuo-nuo, and the male lead, Tye, go on a date, they run across a dog in an alleyway. Tye ends up frequenting the place. Because the two dated there, Hung Hung thought he should adopt a tempo similar to that in Truffaut's films, so he chose a piano and flute melody. When the couple are having fun in a toy store, he needed music to make a lively atmosphere. Though it is just the two of them in the store, the music comes from a busker outside playing an accordion. It makes the scene seem busy and exciting.

In contrast with the solitary pursuit that is writing, to Hung theater and film are a process of interaction with a group of actors: "When working with actors on a film or with a theater troupe, you never know what the result will be because everyone's interpretation of the script is different. It's like a series of adventures big and small." He says that during filming, the entire structure is in the mind of the director and the others try as hard as they can to fit into his plan. However, during this process in which it seems that the director is the controlling factor, Hung Hung observes the emotions of the actors and crew and continually makes adjustments. This observation is quiet and subtle, but it is what makes a director--and a film--good or bad.

As a writer, Hung Hung is accustomed to keeping his distance even during the messy process of making a film or directing a play.

"To make The Wall-Passer, Hung Hung spent a year and a half getting funding. Like so many Taiwanese filmmakers, he was deep in debt once it was finished. Though conditions were rough, I never once saw him lose his temper. When we hit a problem, he'd always calmly explain the situation to everyone. Facing a debt of NT$7 million with NT$30,000 in interest a month, he still wrote poetry every day, helped organize the Taipei International Poetry Festival, and prepared to go to the Avignon Festival, like the debt wasn't even there," says Chuo Li, the producer of The Wall-Passer. Chuo, usually a fast talker, slows down when discussing the six months he spent working with Hung Hung--Hung Hung's easy-going, poetic nature is infectious.

Shadow of a boy

If after reading about Hung Hung's "playful" attitude toward his work one came away with the impression that he was a romantic literary figure, that would be a mistake. Hung Hung's "simplicity" belies a deeply rational mind.

"Usually before writing a poem or play I will lay out the entire structure in my mind before proceeding," he says. With a special effects budget of NT$20 million for The Wall-Passer and in a situation where just turning on the camera would be like burning money, he planned every shot in detail beforehand. He'd spent a year and a half looking for an investor without luck, so in just 37 working days he completed shooting on what would be a new style of fantasy love story film for Taiwan. He says, "Only when you control the entire process and each step has an important function can a work of art be a success."

As Hung Hung speaks, it is as if behind his thin figure a cinematic scene flickers into being. In the shadow he casts, it is as if we can make out the form of a young boy, a wall-passer.