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Abstract
This paper reconsiders the mediation of urban noises and decadent music in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long-overlooked film Daughter of the Nile (1987) under the contexts of noise control and popular entertainment in the late 1980s in Taiwan. It argues that the film embeds distinctive sounds in urban environments to create acousmatic soundscapes that are typically considered ambient noises in mainstream discourse. It further observes that the film provides a critical entry point to the historical debates over the definition and governance of noises at the time, complicating an overdetermined concept throughout the history of sonic perception. Offering a framework to understand the film’s mediation of Taipei’s urban soundscapes, the paper suggests that the film implies an ethic of listening that calls for a more careful attention to the multifarious sounds that reflect the power dynamics between the authority and the residents in the city.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Watch the documentary HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (1997) for Hou’s love of karaoke.
2 Located at the intersection between Roosevelt Road and Heping East Road, Xi Rang was founded by Doze Niu, Jack Kao, Lin Ju, and others, many of whom have been associated with Hou Hsiao-hsien (Jack Kao 高捷 played Xiao-fang in Daughter of the Nile, and Lin Ju 林鉅 was the art designer of the film). The venue also featured performances from rising stars such as Wu Bai and Lim Giong (a future actor and musician for Hou’s films).
3 After recording several Taiwanese songs for films such as Dust of Angels (1992), A Borrowed Life (1994), and his own The Puppetmaster (1993), Hou went on to release an all-Taiwanese album The Sun (1997), realizing his dream of becoming a professional singer.
4 Many of his earlier films feature the struggle of youngsters who were forced to migrate from the countryside to the city, and he also explicitly expresses such sentiment in his song “Drinking to Death in Taipei City” (1997), as he sings, “The night in the city is a song of misery.”
5 Braester (Citation2010) provides a thorough review of what he calls New Taipei Cinema (mostly made in the 1980s and the 1990s) that shared a concern about the impact of urban development (gentrification and demolition), including films such as Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? (1983), The Red Lotus Society (1994), and Green Bulldozer: The Rise of Your New Homeland (1997). While Braester does not include Daughter of the Nile, the film is similarly set in a lower-class makeshift village on Toad Mountain at the periphery of Taipei, a site that also faced the danger of demolition.
6 In the field of Chinese urban film studies, scholars have strived to study the relationships between cinema and the city by focusing on the narrative (Braester and Tweedie, Citation2010), the social network (Braester, Citation2010), and architectural form (Watson, Citation2011). While the focus has been pushed beyond the cinematic texts to the urban contexts, scholars still largely treat visuality as the defining characteristic of both cinema and the city, as if the built space and media environment were experienced only by seeing, but not by listening, touching, or even smelling.
7 The idea that sound is an independent object in a broader media environment is influential for film scholars. Metz and Gurrieri (Citation1980) characterizes cinematic sound as “an autonomous aural object” (24) rather than an adherence to the visual images, a stance he shares with Chion (Citation1994) in his critique of “added value”. This, however, has not stopped scholars from studying film sounds in relation to other senses and media.
8 Heavily influenced by Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of “musique concrète” and Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “media ecology,” Schafer defines and popularizes the terms “sound object” and “soundscape.” With his well-known World Soundscape Project, he distinguished between preindustrial “hi-fi” soundscape and industrial “low-fi” soundscape, clearly establishing a hierarchy.
9 Zhu was turning more towards an urban setting in her novels at the time, including Fin de Siecle Splendor (1990) and Notes of a Desolate Man (1994), and she can be considered as a part of a broader group of urban writers who were active in the 1980s and 1990s, including but not limited to Lin Yao-de, Huang Fan, and Zhang Dachun.
10 The censorship of the film resulted from Hou’s decision to pair an empty shot of Taipei City with a voiceover that narrates “this city will become desolate… become desert, and become wilderness, becoming an unpopulated land without offspring, the mysterious city Babylon,” as well as a scene where the teacher at Xiao-yang’s high school mentions that “it is ‘green’ thought that is trendy now.” It was only after Hou separate the empty shot with the voiceover, which is now layered on a shot of a title card designed in the fashion of the manga Daughter of the Nile, that the Government Information Office approved the film.
11 Even Hou himself regretted his decision to make the film: in an interview, Hou commented, “I shot a bunch of these before, but things are now different from the past; I can’t do it [anymore]. [Daughter] is incongruous with my previous and later films, as if it was a film that I grabbed from a long time ago” (as cited in Berry Citation2014, 151).
12 Hou departed from his usual cooperation with the state-funded Central Pictures Corporation中影 and signed a deal with the commercial film company Xue Fu 學甫 to make Daughter (Su Citation2020, 355) when the New Wave cinema suddenly ran its course. Xue Fu was one of the major commercial studios in Taiwan at the time, and it produced various genre films including Kevin Chu’s military comedy Bighead Brigade (1987), musical Seven Wolves (1989), and Lin Chin-jie’s student films.
13 Immediately after the film’s release, for instance, critics such as Chiao (Citation1987) and Wu (Citation1988) read it as a continuation of Hou’s pessimistic critique of the materialism and consumerism of Taipei as well as a nostalgic lookback at the countryside in his previous films.
14 Neither Yeh and Davis’ Treasure Island (Yeh and Davis Citation2005), Berry and Lu’s Island on the Edge (Berry and Lu Citation2005), nor Hong’s Taiwan Cinema (Hong Citation2011) mention the film, while other monographs on Hou Hsiao-hsien only briefly touch upon it. Udden portrays the film as “a disappointing step back after the consistent quality of [Hou’s] New Cinema works” (2017, 84), particularly because “the staging of the actors and the compositions seem flat after the subtle vibrancy of his New Cinema works” (85). Bordwell sees the film merely as “a virtual textbook on planimetric composition” (2005, 210), which is enabled by the use of the telephoto lens that flattens spaces and squeezes every detail into the frame. Lupke views the film as a transitional piece in Hou’s career and discusses only the narrative structure of the film (Lupke Citation2016, 17). A common blind spot that underlies their analysis is not only their exclusive focus on visuality, but also the emphasis on the domestic space, which is presented in a claustrophobic fashion with the use of telephoto lens. What is lost is an investigation into the broader public spaces and the urban soundscapes in the film, which far exceed the spaces of the private household.
15 Many commentators, including Bordwell (Citation2005), also notes how the shot of the living room often includes a fluorescent fish tank at the edge of the screen, which serves as a metaphor of the confined space of the family. The shot is also often presented in high-contrast lighting, with the interior in dark and the exterior in light, further enhancing the gap between the inside and the outside world.
16 Petty crime was a common theme in Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, including Terrorizers (1986), The Story of a Gangster (1989), Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Dust of Angels (1992), He-Born To Kill (1993), Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Cop Abula (1999)…etc. Several actors who were associated with this genre were intimately tied with Hou, including Jack Kao and Tsai Chen-nan. The theme of free movement within the city was also seen in Terrorizers and Red Lotus Society (1994).
17 Xiao-yang’s family is set on Toad Mountain 蟾蜍山, a real-life veteran village at the south of Taipei. Similar to the cinematic concern over the demolition of these derelict neighborhoods that Braester (Citation2010) mentions in his research, Daughter makes use of the peripheral position of Toad Mountain to address the pitfalls of urbanization. Hou further shot Good Men, Good Women (1995) and Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) at this location. In 2013, a village on the Mountain was planned as an area to be bulldozed, and Hou participated in the protests that demanded preservation of the original site. The village was then designated as a cultural landscape in the next year. The site continues to inspire creative works, serving most recently as the setting for Chang Tso-chi’s Thanatos, Drunk (2016).
18 Traffic noises were one of the biggest concerns in the society, as news reports at the time reveal that the incompletion of the metro system and the lack of noise barrier for the elevated highway allowed traffic noises to permeate the city. In an investigative report (Central Daily Citation1985), it is confirmed that automobiles were one of the biggest sources of urban noise pollution.
19 Such sound can affectively afford either a familial intimacy or urban indifference. For instance, the sound of “It’s time to eat!” that shoots across the domestic space makes the writer Zhang (Citation2018) teary, while Xiao-yang’s grandfather often shares his insights from the outside of the door. However, close to the end of the film, a stiff and formal sound of a news broadcaster on the radio announces the death of an anonymous thief from an off-screen space, an irreverent noise initially neglected by all of the family members until the phone rings to alarm Xiao-yang that it might be her brother.
20 In the short story, Xiao-yang describes the school as “perverted, surrounded by apartments and mansions in all directions, where you can hear [their] performances of TV drama series from every channel in class” (Zhu Citation1989). Interestingly, the students were also a source of noise in the classroom in the film. As a matter of fact, because the students were noisily joking about someone’s farting, the disgruntled teacher, played by Wu Nien-jen, starts to write down the different sounds of farting on the blackboard.
21 One of the most visible victims of urban noises is, perhaps, primary school educators and students, who were portrayed by the media as innocent kids that should be protected from the evils of the city. Many complaints and criticism of urban noises called attention to their negative impact on younger children at school, a space that was imagined as semi-enclosed to the external world, just like domestic household. In a report (China Times Citation1987), a member of the Taipei City Council points out that 95% of primary schools in Taipei were impacted by noise pollution.
22 Before 1983, noise pollution was regulated under the Act of Governing the Punishment of Police Offences, enforced by the Criminal Investigation Unit. This shows that noise was not seen as an environmental issue but rather as an offense to social order by the authoritarian regime. In 1983, the Noise Control Act was passed under the context of environmental right, and the qualification of sounds as noises is now decided collectively by environmental protection agent, noise measurement device, the complainer, and the producer of such sound. However, without enforcement rules that provided the exact definitions of noise, enforcement power for the Environmental Protection Administration, zoning plans that differentiated the noise standards for different parts of the city, the Act was mostly unable to effectively control noises. In 1988, the noise problem was considered so serious that the government initiated a “Soft Whisper Movement” that encouraged citizens to talk with smaller volume.
23 Hosokawa, who theorizes the “Walkman effect,” argues that the Walkman allows the individual listener to be autonomous and mobile regardless of the urban environment, “[decontextualizing] the given coherence of the city-text, and at the same time, [contextualizing] every situation which seemingly does not cohere with it” (Hosokawa Citation1984, 171). Similarly, Bull praises the freedom offered by personal stereos, which “[enable] users to travel through any space accompanied by their own ‘individualized’ sound world” (Bull Citation2000, 3).
24 Xiao-yang already puts on her headphone when her sister attempts to ask her to assist her with her homework in the beginning of the film.
25 Another classic cinematic example of headphone users who are shut in their own world is Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). In the film, the male protagonist is always talking to his AI assistant who speaks to him via headphone. Jonze shoots such scenes in a medium or close-up frontal shot of the protagonist, and the background of the city is mostly blurred to suggest the lack of attention to the surrounding.
26 In 2018, I conducted an unofficial interview with the art designer of Daughter, Lin Ju, also the manager of the real-life bars Xi Rang. In the interview, Lin informed me that the atmospheric color in the coffeehouse (hinted as a “Friday Restaurant,” a nickname for gigolo bars) was a deliberate choice made by Hou, and the crew had to ask a factory to produce neon light for Pink House. For Lin, the warm and intimate design of the coffeehouse was not unrelated to the lively “Tangwai” movement, the activists of which often gathered in similar venues.
27 There are other traces of Japanese pop culture in the film, including the Walkman that Xiao-fang steals, the eponymous and pirated manga that Xiao-yang reads, and the Japanese toy “Little Twin Stars” which their sister steals money from the family to buy. These foreign products are often associated with the act of stealing, hinting at the imitative status of Taiwanese culture at the time.
28 Akina Nakamori, Seiko Matsuda, and Kyoko Koizumi were three of the most successful Japanese female idols during the 1980s. Among them, Nakamori stood out as the most celebrated by fans, particularly because she constantly switched between two contrasting images—an innocent girl and a rebellious girl—in a way that spoke to the rise of female agency during the bubble economy. The song “Desire” that was included in Daughter marked the turn to a rebellious image for Nakamori in the late 1980s. Interestingly, in the short story, Xiao-yang compares herself to another star Matsuda Seiko known for her innocent look, but not Nakamori.
29 Already in Boys from Fengkuei, Hou shows the protagonist selling pirated cassette tape at a pier in Kaohsiung. Meanwhile, in A Brighter Summer Day (1991), Edward Yang also shows a teenager covering the songs of Elvis Presley.
30 Yang Lin has covered songs originally sung by singers such as Mayumi Itsuwa, Miyuki Nakajima, and Akemi Ishii, among others. Other famous artists at the time were also once cover artists, including Julie Sue, Billie Wang, and Tracy Huang, who were performing for American G.I. at military bases. The founder of Zhong Yi, Frankie Kao, was also a disco singer who covered many English and Japanese popular songs.
31 The term decadent music has had a long history in Chinese-speaking communities. Jones (Citation2001) details how in the early 20th Century, the fusion of American jazz and Chinese folk songs led to its condemnation as “yellow” and “decadent” music, mainly by the state and the elites. After coming to Taiwan, the KMT regime was still insistent upon a nationalist song culture, initiating the “Song Purification Movement” to censor whatever popular songs they deemed improper and decadent, including native songs that imitated foreign styles. In contrast, civil campaigns that supported patriotic songs and folk songs, which came with the motto “Sing our own songs!,” were backed by the state. The split between local and foreign songs was so strong that there are two separate terms reserved for the idea of “popular music,” one being “remen 熱門” (exclusively used for foreign pop songs), the other being “liuxing 流行” (exclusively used for local pop songs). When cover artists of remen music crossed over to produce liuxing music, media reacted with great surprises, if not mixed responses.
32 Initially performed only in US military nightclubs in English by local cover artists, disco implies bodily emancipation that was prohibited by the regime, which had instituted a ban on social dance since 1947. Even as late as 1980, Public officials debated over if disco is simply an innocent “sports dance 運動舞蹈” or a lustful “social dance 交際舞蹈” (China Times Citation1980).
33 Other sources also make such connection, such as a publication from a youth guidance center details how lost teenagers loitered at venues like coffeehouse, restaurant, and discotheque (Yee Citation1980), while another magazine focuses on family life criticizes how coffeehouse, dancehall, and bar advocate decadent lifestyle (Ho Citation1978).
34 In an unofficial interview in 2019 with the technician of KISS, who goes by the name Xiao Zhao, he informs me of how the design of KISS was partly modeled after a subwoofer (a double bass speaker). The interior space, in other words, was envisioned as a giant environment for sounds to travel within, enhancing the effects of the music. While for people outside of the space, the sounds may seem like noises, the dancers inside can experience the full effects of the music. Such design is not unlike the logic of Walkman and its headphone, which similarly divide the personal soundscape and the public one.
35 As Schloss and Boyer point out, the freedom and ability to play music out loud in different public spaces via the portable Boombox not only make “sound more visible, definitely more audible, and [draw] attention to the politically charged and contested dimensions that listening often presents” (Schloss and Boyer Citation2014, 400), but it also turn the listeners into performers who address the other listeners in a communicative manner. As a “social machine,” boombox “take control of their immediate environment at any given moment” (407) to transform the original power dynamic.
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Kun Xian Shen
Kun Xian Shen is a PhD student in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on a variety of media practices in various Sinophone communities during the late Cold War. He has translated several academic articles between Chinese and English, which are published in journals such as Renjian, Reflexion, and the edited volume Indigenous Knowledge in Taiwan and Beyond.