CRASSH

The study will focus on two film directors, Jacques Tati of French and Edward Yang of Taiwan, as well as their specific films which depict urban transformations and experiences, and we might classify them separately, according to their geographical and social context, as modern and postmodern styles. Tati’s films, especially for “My Uncle” and “Play Time”, show clear intention in interpreting the transformation of modern cityscape and imposition of modernity on our daily life. His films imply both nostalgic sensation and dialectic criticism. The main role, Mr. Hulot, processes subtle “flaneur” quality portrayed in Walter Benjamin’s essay, thus naturally bringing further discussing on the themes between films, modernity and urbanization. On the other hand, Edward Yang’s film “A One and a Two”, which won Best Director at Cannes Award in 2000, sports a sincere aura and contemplating perception which reflect on contemporary urban landscape of Taipei city, whose multilayer and diversified social network and everyday life symptom a postmodern urban phenomenon. Here we see Henri Lefebvre’s spatial tempo concerning everyday life working on an empirical and psychological way. Furthermore, the study use “postmodern” mainly as a tool to contrast with Tati’s “Play Time” and its sheer modernity image, without intention to frame Mr. Yang’s cinematic achievement. The study looks at cinema as social and spatial practice, the intersection of the axes of historical time and geographical space. In this intertwined contemporary urban space, cinema not only shows event, movement and space, which redefined by Bernard Tschumi, but also our perception for the social network and cultural landscape.