Abstract
In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film Dust in the Wind, the episode of Ah Yuan’s attempt to steal a motorbike obviously refers to the storyline of De Sica’s masterpiece Bicy-cle Thieves. Apart from paying homage to one of the most important directors in film history, this episode also claims its own spiritual predecessor and thematic inheritance: to examine the process in which the individual negotiates with various social forces. In Hou’s film, the individual’s endeavor for negotiation starts with the migration from the country to the city. As the efforts to move up in the class ladder end up in vain, the film gradually reveals that the seemingly binary opposition between the city and the country, between economic opportunity and career stasis, turns out to be an optical illusion. In reality, the city and the country have been subsumed under the same capitalist mode of production that is oppressive and exploitative especially to those from the subaltern class. Secondly, social forces that the individual has to negotiate also include the temporality of modernity that stipulates exactness and regularity. In a labor-intensive industry as the case in Taiwan during the 1970s, the temporality of capitalism appears as a paradoxical synthesis that compromises micro-repetition of unskilled work and macro-development of the economic miracle as a whole. Under such circumstances, the Nature that still coexists with the country comes to be an alternative route through which the individuals can escape from their hardships and frustrations encountered in the city. Compared with the ending of Bicycle Thieves, however, that of Dust in the Wind displaces its social criticism with a metaphysical view of cosmic order that has nothing permanent but capricious changes in life and thereby reduces the social to the natural, implicitly suggesting the impossibility of individuals’ negotiation with social forces. The film’s lyrical mediation and the protagonist’s initiation at the end provide only a symbolic solution to real social contradictions and can be seen as a symptom of the invented Chinese lyrical tradition in Postwar Taiwan.