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Record W242681139

Vive le Cinema: A Reading of What Time Is It There?

2003· article· en· W242681139 on OpenAlex
Ayşegül Koç

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicHong Kong and Taiwan Politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMovie theaterDramaNewspaperArt historyHistoryArtMedia studiesSociologyLiterature
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

As Taiwan makes the headlines these days in local newspapers of Toronto, regarding its ban on visitors from Canada due to the SARS outbreak (1), I have visions of a peculiar Taipei in my mind. In his film The Hole (1998), director Tsai Ming-liang depicts a gloomy, rainy Taipei, specifically the quarters under quarantine because of an unexpected disease got out of control. Using the metaphor of the disease stricken city, Tsai Ming-liang powerfully presents alienated individuals, entrapped in claustrophobic isolation, who struggle to survive on the margins of the society. Tsai Ming-liang moved from his birthplace Malaysia to Taiwan in 1977, to study at The Drama Department of The Chinese Cultural University. It was in Taipei where he started working in theatre and writing screenplays for film and TV. It was also in Taipei, in the Taiwan Film Archives where he was exposed to European cinema, the German Expressionists, the French New Wave and the Italian Neo-realism, which would fascinate him and help form his unique style alongside his movie-going experience with his grandparents back in Malaysia. Even though he says in an interview he is somewhat an outsider to Taipei/Taiwan and his films don't portray cities through their distinctive qualities (2), Taipei is engraved in my imagination through the eyes of Tsai Ming-liang, through his Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L'Amour (1994), The Hole and What Time is it There? (2001). The last of these films will be at the core of this essay, for the sheer pleasure and admiration I felt, watching it three times in a row. What Time is it There? hosts a family of actors Tsai had been working with in many of his previous films. Lee Kang-sheng as Hsiao Kang (his real life nick-name and character name in Rebels of the Neon God, The River (1997) and Vive L'Amour) is a street vendor selling watches. His father is played by Miao Tien and Lu Yi-ching is his mother. Shiang-chyi, the young woman who convinces him to sell her the dual time watch on his wrist, is played by Chen Shiang-chyi. Set simultaneously in Taipei and Paris, the film loosely, unhurriedly ties together the presence of a dead father, the impossibility of sharing the trauma after the death of a loved one between the mother and the son, the overwhelming solitude of a young woman in a city accentuates her foreignness and finding objects of desire on all parties' sides. This modest and enigmatic masterpiece seems to be paced to the speed of Lee Kang-sheng's idiosyncratic gestures and movements. In his notes about the film (a few paragraphs appear as 'special features' in the DVD distributed by Wellspring), Tsai Ming-liang emphasizes this film is Hsiao Kang's (Lee Kang-sheng) film and he himself as a director is merely an observer. In an interview in which he was asked how he and Lee Kang-sheng began collaborating, Tsai Ming-liang recalls how he first saw him standing in front of a video arcade/illegal gambling house, where Lee Kang-sheng was apparently working as a guard watching for the police. It took Lee Kang-sheng a while to answer and accept to play a part in a TV film Tsai offered. On the set Tsai realized his reactions took slightly longer than everybody else's. Laughingly he recounts how he asked him to move a bit faster and how reluctant and stubborn Lee Kang-sheng was. Then Tsai came to realize, in his own words, that there are preconceived ideas about how people normally behave and yet not everybody behaves the same way, and he began to be more accepting towards Lee Kang-sheng's acting, for the fact that's just the way Lee Kang-sheng actually is (3). Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng have become inseparable collaborators from then on. What Time is it There? consists of a hundred and one static shots. On first viewing, intrigued by how perfectly bizarre and touching the film was, the fact all shots were static did not catch my attention. On second viewing I was absorbed in how beautifully each shot was framed, how the elements of composition reflected a minimalist, colorful and poetry-within-ordinary style, reminiscent of a Joan Miro or a Paul Klee painting. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.768
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.310
Teacher spread0.283 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it