Essay Abstract: Love in the Time of Industrialization

Love in the Time of Industrialization:

Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969)

My essay “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969)” uses the lens of ecocinema (生態論述) in order to examine Li Hanxiang’s (李翰祥) artistic film The Winter 《冬暖》. Li’s engagement with the non-human environment is exceedingly complex and nuanced, revealing a holistic ecological consciousness in his depiction of urban life on the fringes of Taipei’s urban sprawl. The aesthetic moves that Li uses both reveals his experience as a painter and imbues the film with a Buddhist ethos that offers an appealing symbiosis between human interactions and the non-human world--and cinema’s relationship with the world--in late 1960s Taiwan. Indeed, representations of nature provide a seemingly unquestionable source of stability to the film. By situating the film within its historical context, this article demonstrates how broad scale industrial changes in Taiwan would affect the way people interacted with the rapidly changing natural environment and with one another.

〈愛在工業發展的年代：李翰祥的《冬暖》 (1969) 及其自然環境的再現〉運用生態論述的分析技巧探討李翰祥藝術性極高的《冬暖》一片。李翰祥在此片中對於與人類密切相關的生態環境的描寫有著超乎尋常的複雜度與細膩，以一個高度關懷的生態整全觀看待正快速城市化的台北市區外圍的生活。這樣的美學觀其來有自，李翰祥曾經是一個畫家，他的經驗為這部片引入一股特殊的氛圍，直指佛教思想的影響。在六零年代晚期，這部片能着眼於今日眾所關懷的人與自然界互相依存的關係——但也意味着指涉這部片與閲聽者的世界間的關係——實屬不凡。果不其然，李片所述的“自然”無可懷疑地是整部片的敘事安定感的泉源。這篇文章考量歷史的語境，論及台灣因工業化所產生的社會變遷如何廣泛地影響到人與正在轉變中的自然界的關係，以及人與人之間的關係。

Available in: “Love in the Time of Industrialization: Representations of Nature in Li Hanxiang’s The Winter (1969).” Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies 17 (2013): 81-102.

Image from a film review of Li Hanxiang’s The Winter soon after its release in the late 1960s.