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On October 8, 1986, the "martial law order" that had hung over Taiwan for 37 years was lifted, and the white flag was cut off. The following year, Chiang Kai-shek passed away, and Taiwan ushered in an important inflection point, as did Taiwanese films.
In 1982, the four-part film "The Story of Time" opened the prelude to Taiwan's "New Film" movement, and by 1987, Taiwan ushered in a new life, but the "New Film" movement had faded, leaving a pile of embers and not seeing Mars.
The Story of Time
In the early days of the lifting of the law, Taiwan's young directors did not seem to be ready for a new era, and the sudden freedom left them helpless. Looking around, it is difficult to find an exit, sinking into the past and difficult to escape, continuing to regurgitate the new film canon, without new ideas.
Taiwan's "New Movie" movement is an epic big five
All this is like the tranquility before the storm, and the whole of Taiwan is quietly waiting for the icebreaker who has drawn a clear line with the predecessors and unveiled the pole. Finally, in 1992, director Tsai Mingming took his "Youth Nezha" and smashed into the dead sea of Taiwanese films, with ripples and ripples, attracting the world's attention, and has been stirring for more than 20 years since then.
Directed by Cai Liangming
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In 1957, Zhou Xuan, the "Singer of Heaven", died, and Cai Mingming was born. In an overseas Chinese community in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, every radio is playing Zhou Xuan's songs, and cai Liang spent his childhood accompanied by the sharp voice day and night.
Cai Mingming is the third eldest of the seven gourd babies in the family, and his parents run a noodle restaurant. Because the children could not be taken care of, Cai Liangming was sent to his grandparents' house at the age of three and lived with them.
Grandpa loves to watch movies, Grandma loves to read novels, grew up in such an artistic atmosphere, Cai Liangming and movies have an indissoluble relationship. In 1960, the Yue opera drama TV series "Chasing Fish" filmed in the mainland can be regarded as Cai Liangliang's enlightenment work, and Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan's performances in the film are still unforgettable.
"'Chasing Fish' is a drama film with a sense of cinema. I remember that there was a scene where Zhang Zhen (Xu Yulan) and the mermaid (Wang Wenjuan) went to see the flower lanterns, and I guessed that the production fee was not high, so it was impossible to find a bunch of flower lanterns on the street. The camera stops inside an alleyway, and the shadow of the lantern walks by, and the shadow overlaps the wall. At that time, I was particularly touched when I watched it, and when I grew up, I felt that this was a drama film with a lot of film ideas. ”
Stills from "Chasing Fish": Xu Yulan (left) and Wang Wenjuan (right)
Frequent school transfers have left Cai Liangliang's childhood shattered. He had few friends, and in the sixth grade of elementary school, Cai Liangming, who was an outside transfer student, was seriously targeted by some classmates who did not like him, resulting in the whole class being reluctant to talk to him. Recalling this incident, Cai Liangming said that I thought it was nothing, it was not a big problem.
The lonely childhood made Cai Liang adapt to loneliness in advance at an age when he should have been happy and carefree, and he was torn apart to grow up quickly. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, Cai Liangming sank his heart in the world of his own and began to pay attention to various details in life, this marginal and helpless mentality directly affected Cai Liangming's later film and television creation.
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In 1977, the 20-year-old Cai Mingming went to Taiwan alone after graduating from high school, first studying for a year in Taiwan Normal University Chinese, and the next year was admitted to the drama department of The Chinese Culture Institute in Taipei (later renamed as the Chinese Culture University) and officially embarked on the road of film.
Stage drama, which is the field where Cai Liangming first set foot. He founded the "Little Dock Theater" with a group of like-minded classmates at school. In 1982, he completed his first stage play "Instant Fried Sauce Noodles" and participated in the performance of the Taiwan Experimental Theater, which was highly appreciated.
Once in the Banqiao Cultural Center, Cai Liangming self-directed the stage play "The Wardrobe in the Room", halfway through the performance, a drunken madman rushed to the stage to scold Cai Liangming, facing the audience of the stage, Cai Liangming did not panic, continued to perform, but accelerated the rhythm, stunned to compress the original plan of 100 minutes of drama to 70 minutes.
"In the process of making films and thinking, I will return to the spatial thinking of stage plays, how to organize plays in space constraints. When I write a screenplay, I often return to the mindset of the stage play era. ”
The enclosed space, the close-up view with the audience, and the on-site strain performance, the valuable experience of the stage drama choreographer during the university period gave Cai Liangming a lot of inspiration. In his future films, he will frequently use large lengthy shots of medium distance to shoot the actions of the characters after being put into the forced place, with the intention of simulating the sense of space between the audience and the actors when watching the stage play.
Stage plays
After graduation, Cai Liangming mainly engaged in script writing, mostly serials and unit plays. It was not easy to kill a bloody road in the Taiwanese screenwriting industry at that time. Wu Nianzhen and Ono two markets, almost all the good scripts are from their hands, and both are the planners and screenwriters of China Film.
In 1984, Cai Liangming's talent was cashed in for the first time. The first film written by him, "The Little Fugitive", was nominated for the best drama film at the 21st Golden Horse Awards, and the actress Yang Huishan won the Golden Horse Film Queen. After this battle, Cai Liangming became one of the first-class screenwriters in Taiwan.
In 1989, Cai Liang first held the guide tube and directed some episodes of the TV series "Happy Car Line" and the TV series "Cape Tianya". Subsequently, Cai Liangming was invited to shoot a TV series about juvenile delinquency, "Children". In the early stage of casting, Cai Liangming wanted to find a person who looked a bit wooden, bad was not on the surface, and even did not know how to blackmail to play the juvenile offender in the play.
As Cai Mingliang walked around the game hall near the Ximending Lion Grove Building, Li Kangsheng was pushed in front of him. Cai Liangming was immediately attracted and finalized him as the male protagonist. After that day, for the next twenty years, the names of the two were no longer separated.
Ximending Lion Forest
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1991 was destined to be a year of extraordinary significance for Cai Mingliang, because he met Li Kangsheng for the filming of "Children", and because the TV series "Li Xiang's Emotional Line" written and directed by him won the Best Director Award at the Taiwan Television Golden Bell Awards that year, which was one of the "Small Citizens' Sky" series of unit dramas curated by Cai Mingliang.
Cai Mingliang (left) & Li Kangsheng (right)
In 1992, Cai Liangming won the Golden Bell Award for Best Director again, this time for another episode of the "Little Citizen's Sky" series of unit dramas, "Give Me a Home". It has set a precedent for the first time in the history of the Golden Bell Awards.
The Golden Bell Award double cannon successfully attracted the attention of Xu Ligong, who was the deputy general manager of China Film Company at the time. Xu Ligong has always cherished his talents as his destiny, and is willing to do his best to support the materials that can be made in his eyes. That is, the year before, when Yang Dechang was filming "The Juvenile Murder Incident on Muling Street", he seriously overspended, filming stagnated, and it was difficult to turn around for a while, fortunately, Xu Ligong sent charcoal in the snow, and only then did he retain this immortal masterpiece in the history of Taiwanese cinema.
In 1992, after supporting Ang Lee to shoot "Push Hand", Xu Ligong also took Cai Liangming under his command. Cai Liangming used Li Kangsheng's experience as an unsampled script for "Teenager Nezha" and turned the story to Ximending that he was familiar with. At that time, Ximending was in the stage of transformation of the old district and the reshaping of the space, and a group of male comrades emerged, and Cai Liangming also implicitly wrote this phenomenon into the script.
Directed by Ang Lee
Producer Lan Dapeng shook his head after reading the script of "Teenager Nezha" submitted by Cai Mingliang, saying, "This can't work, it's too short." The final draft script is also more than 10,000 words, and Lan Dapeng believes that this script cannot support a feature film at all. But Cai Liangming did not change, "If I change the script, I will go on vacation." The producer couldn't help him, waved a big hand, forget it, take it and shoot it.
In the end, the edited "Teenage Nezha" had 106 minutes. Filled into a large section of dialogueless character performances, with long shots of natural time, with postmodern aesthetic characteristics that challenge the audience's inherent viewing experience, Cai Liangming's debut turned out.
Stills from "Teenage Nezha"
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"The films created by Tsai Liangliang, which were once vulgar and gloomy, escape fables about Taipei's urban drifting and family disintegration, have a certain classical cultivation and expose the emotional resonance hidden by the noise and obscurity of contemporary popular culture."
Cai Liangming is known as "the most sincere recorder of contemporary Taiwanese youth culture", and the three boys and a girl in "Youth Nezha" are the ones cai Liangming used to record the urban life of Taiwan's "Beat Generation" in the early 1990s.
No one knows their past, and it doesn't matter about the future, they only focus on the pleasures of the present. If people and people are separated from each other, the sense of alienation runs through the whole film, and no one is fully belonged to, and no one needs to be completely owned. This was a common situation among young people in Taiwan at that time.
Cai Liangming, who grew up away from his parents' life, also went out of his way to deconstruct the meaning of "home" in the movie. The meaning of "home" is subtly and quietly transmuted in "Young Nezha", for the characters in the film, homelessness is better than having a home, because there will be disputes and regrets in a home, and there will be no worries.
Jiao Xiongping pointed out: "Cai Liangliang's spatial consciousness is his declaration of the absurd alienation of interpersonal relations in the twentieth century. Even if a family lives under the same roof, there is a space for each of them, and it is like a strange road on weekdays. Ethics, tradition no longer becomes the psychological anchor of the agrarian society era. When order breaks down, ethics disintegrates. ”
My family did not allow me, so I fled. Fleeing to the city, fleeing to the vast city of Taipei, after the space unfolds, only a moment of trance and stagnation is left, but nothing has changed. The bizarre Taipei is presented in a cold and glamorous posture under cai's bright lens, everyone is an isolated individual, wandering aimlessly, and Taipei is not ready to accept anyone.
Taipei at night
A social environment full of patriarchy and opposite-sex desires was a great obstacle for him, home, school, and company were all places where social control was exercised nakedly, and complete self-control could only be felt in the game hall, as the poster on the wall of James Dean suggested, and unprovoked rebellion was only here.
James Dean poster on the wall of the game hall
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As we all know, Cai Liangming loves to shoot water. Like those great directors, for their own good at shooting things that they love to shoot, it is not happy not to make a trilogy, and Cai Liangming is also. "Teenage Nezha" is the first drop of water, followed by "Long Live Love" and "River", which are Cai Liangliang's first three films, and called the "Water Trilogy", and the Cai style has been laid since then.
Subversion, Yu Shui is no exception. What kind of water does Cai Liangming like to photograph? It is not mountain streams of clear water, nor is it good as water, nor is it the water that moisturizes all things, but stagnant water, stagnant water, sewage, rainwater, and the action of the characters drinking water, as well as tears, to yin to soft, sticky and wet.
These waters are not beautiful, and most of them are hidden in dark corners, and the reason why Cai Liangming is keen on this is because he naturally loves to see dark things, and he also feels that he should let others see, "I believe that a city is like people, and the goodness of a city is determined by its darkest corners."
After the "Water Trilogy", Cai Liangming rode on the road that "people can't understand". "Too slow", "How is it not over", "Talk ah you are", when watching Cai Liangming's movie, many people's inner OS is basically like this.
Cai Liangming himself did not care about this, he had his own ideas and ways to go. "People always tell me, why are your movies so slow? I don't think it's just you who are fast, so why do you have to discuss slow? ”
There is a saying about why Cai Liangliang's film is so slow: because Li Kangsheng made Cai Liangming slow down. I agree. Some things were already doomed in 1991 when Cai Liangming first met Li Kangsheng.
"I met Li Kangsheng, who is very slow, so I started to be slow, sometimes I feel that it is not slow enough, he is slower in reality, and I can't be fast when I am old, slow is beautiful, just like old is also beautiful." 」
When Li Kangsheng auditioned for "Kids" for the first time, Cai Liangming noticed that his movements were slow and clumsy, and Cai Liangming always reminded him: Move faster, faster, let me know that you are still alive, okay? Li Kangsheng, who had been nagging, was a little angry, so he said to Cai Liangming, "I was originally like this." This made Cai Liangming stunned, and he began to rethink what the actor's performance should be like.
"He's so slow, why should I keep telling him to hurry up?" Why can't I wait for him a little slower", this is the answer that Cai Liangming came up with. Slow, as a means, is Cai Mingliang looking for an exit for confusion. This search is more than twenty years.
As everyone knows, after "Teenage Nezha", Li Kangsheng became the eternal protagonist of Cai Mingliang's films. Cai Liangming once said that Li Kangsheng is the "face" of all his works, and without Li Kangsheng, his films cannot be established.
After Li Kangsheng served as the male lead of many films by Cai Liangming, an investor once came to him and asked him: "I can invest in you to make movies, but can your male lead be replaced?" Cai Liangming ruined him: "Let's be friends, don't be work partners." For Cai Mingming, there are three conditions for making a movie, one of which is indispensable: money, freedom, and Li Kangsheng.
"There are only three things in life, Li Kangsheng, the ruins, and the mountains in the backyard, and I live every day in front of these three things." Although Li Kangsheng is a man, I still want to say that he is Cai Liangming's muse.
Just like the section chief pet Zhao Tao, such practices are bound to cause controversy, some people say that Cai Liangming is constantly repeating himself, even the actors used are the same, and the theme, style and form of the film are unchanged.
The French director Jean Renoir said: "A director only makes one film in his lifetime, his other works are only annotations and explanations of this film, and the theme is only an extension and expansion of this film."
Don't you always say that Wong Kar-wai only made the movie "The Legend of Ah Fei". I like to watch Cai Liangming shoot Li Kangsheng, and Li Kangsheng's films for Cai Liangming are always a plus.
And I have always felt that Li Kangsheng is only good in Cai Liang's films, whether Li Kangsheng is on a variety show, a talk show, or an award ceremony, giving people the feeling of being very unspiritual.
Cai Liangming with the movie "A Cloud in the Sky" on the "Kangxi Coming" episode, Xiao S let Li Kangsheng perform a passerby who was waiting for the bus on the spot, Li Kangsheng acted, and Xiao S shook out a pun and a pun: "Really passers-by eh you." ”
Yes, Li Kangsheng, who has a passerby's face, is indeed not outstanding, but in Cai Liang's movie, he is charming.
"Kangxi Lai" episode 5, episode 44
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"I lost sleep last night, a little mixed feelings, this book is like a summary of my creation, can also be regarded as the general arrangement of life, my values, the display of life, life has come here." 」 We will all die, but we want to be useful people so that we don't waste this life. Hopefully, the earth won't be damaged and we'll be back. ”
On July 3, 2014, at the film book launch of "Outing", Cai Liangming came out publicly, which was not a big news in the film and television circle at that time. Of course, people who are idle and have nothing to watch are disappointed, because the object of cheating is not Li Kangsheng.
Cai Mingliang also helped Li Kangsheng clarify on the spot, saying that he was heterosexual and already had a girlfriend. For Cai Mingliang, since he has the courage to say it, he no longer cares what the outside world thinks and thinks.
The film "Outing" is expressed in many forms, such as the movie book
After the public derailment, Cai Liangming asked Li Kangsheng: "Has my sexual orientation caused your troubles?" Li Kangsheng replied to him: "What is your sexual orientation doing to me?" ”
It is enough to have this sentence. Once in the vicissitudes, looking back at "Young Nezha", it is like a love letter between the two people at first sight. What's the matter? There must be a friendship for a lifetime, and there must be no blood relationship.
At the 40th Taiwan Golden Horse Awards in 2003, cai liang's "Not Scattered" was preceded by Li Kangsheng's "Not Seen", both of which were nominated for Best Picture. Although it was ultimately lost to Infernal Affairs, I don't think it could have been more exciting, with two people too familiar to be familiar to compete together, hoping for each other to win the award.
10 years later, at the 50th Golden Horse Awards, Cai Mingming and Li Kangsheng came together again. Living up to expectations, Cai Liangming snatched the best director from Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhangke and Du Qifeng with "Outing", and Li Kangsheng pressed Liang Chaowei and Zhang Liang to win the Golden Horse Film Emperor.
One man and one golden horse, no one returned empty-handed. Than who smiled brighter, clapped their hands and applauded each other, ten years and one round, this time they won. Before Li Kangsheng took the stage to receive the award, Cai Liangming excitedly hugged him and kissed him deeply, beautifully, and achieved a good story.
The 50th Taiwan Golden Horse Awards ceremony
When it comes to the golden partners of the film circle, Cai Mingming and Li Kangsheng are destined to be an inseparable pair, they are too special and too beautiful, they achieve each other and complete each other.
They make each other's lives more complete. They are not lovers, but they have family-like bonds and feelings. The most extreme relationship between men is like this.
(End)