Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".