Kieran Boland

Ayu Fishing (2019)
Video | Colour | Stereo Sound | 1' 53" | 24 fps

Excerpt from the collaborative film project You say Phonetic, I say Fanatic with Brie TRENERRY (KBT) First shown at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Art (KDMoFA), Taipei October 2019 This excerpt features 林立婷 (Lin), 陳芊曄 (Dora), 林立堯 (Yao) and 林沛瑤 (Patrice) as a Production Assistant. Total Duration 34 minutes

This scene revisits Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1993 film The Puppetmaster in which its protagonist retells a story from his childhood during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. The response to the KdMoFA call-out for actors saw an all female cast replace the all male cast of characters within the original scene.

The project took its inspiration from a Taiwanese friend who insisted she learnt English by watching only three films over and over again. She watched them fanatically to learn the language phonetically. The three films were Fight Club (1999) Trainspotting (1996) and Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Curiously, all films share a reactionary, counter cultural theme—some may even say they represent a decline in western culture. By way of response, we reinterpreted scenes from three Taiwanese films; A Brighter Summer Day (1991) The Puppetmaster (1993) and The Wayward Cloud (2005). The questions that influenced our choice of films were made with an aim to establish a dialogue between Taiwan and Australia. Can we find merit in sharing perceptions and translations of cultural decline framed by cinema? What expectations do we have of our own culture and what shadows do they cast elsewhere? Is the theme of ennui and youthful disenfranchisement, along with a sense that life is elsewhere common across cultures and if so, can we always attribute it to an external cause?

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