Shiang-chyi Chen

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Excerpt from “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience, and Spectatorship” by Tiago de Luca, originally published in Cinema Journal Vol. 56, No. 1 (Fall, 2016)

A limping woman (Chen Shiang-chyi), with a broom in hand, walks into an empty cinema auditorium framed in a static long shot. She enters the frame from the right, walks up the stairs while slowly sweeping the floor, crosses the upper part of the auditorium, and then climbs down the stairs on the other side and leaves the frame from the left, an action that lasts nearly three minutes. Read More »

After firing a colleague, the head of a PR company begins to question her lifestyle and values.Read More »

When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »

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Chuen-Sheng is a young man fresh out of military service with dreams of making it as a musician. His sister Ah Fen, unhappily married, nurses a secret incestuous passion for him. While Chuen-Sheng steals money from his father and squanders it on roach-infested hotel rooms and cheap hookers, Ah Fen decides she can’t face her life any more and runs away.Read More »

Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It’s dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?Read More »

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Hsiao-Kang, now working as a pornographic actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.Read More »

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When I first came across ‘A Confucian Confusion’, I expected nothing much. I was wrong, very wrong. It turned out to be a great movie. On one of your ‘average’ days, go to a video store, then rent and watch it. I guarantee it will be the best thing on your day. (‘Average’ here means the rest of the days when you don’t win lotto or have a date of your life)

The film looks at a sample of modern Taiwanese life. Edward Yang the director, who won some awards for his later film ‘Mahjong’, focuses at a different part of the taiwanese society. If in ‘Mahjong’ he tells the story through the darker gangsters-like fraction of the population, here he puts a light above a ‘whiter’ group of people, mid to upper class men and women trying to cope with the fast living in the money-driven, ever growing Taipei. And that’s all the film’s about, a window to some Taipei lives in particular and modern taiwan in general. A society as a result, not necessarily an effect, of the very old Confucian philosophy.Read More »