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1 Their feature films are: Next of Kin [1984], Family Viewing [1987], Speaking Parts [1989], The Adjuster [1991], Calendar [1993] Exotica [1994] and The Sweet Hereafter [1997] by Egoyan, and Rebel of the Neon God [1992《青少年哪吒》], Vive l'amour [1994《愛情萬歲》], The River [1966《河流》], The Hole [1998《洞》and What Time is it There 《你那邊幾點》2001 ] by Tsai. I am excluding the segment "En passant" in Montreal vu par (1991) and The Sweet Hereafter [1997], because they are not set in Toronto, and En Passant is, literally, not about family. Many critics have pointed out "family" as one of their central themes. See for example the articles on Egoyan by Pevere, Hsiao 1996, and the articles on Tsai by Chang and Wang and by Chang 1998. <back> 2 Rivere, in focusing on Egoyan's use of video images as a substitute for experience, finds this "non-living inscription" repeated "to the point of nausea" (Desbarats 78): "everything is marked by the failure of sexuality, of filial love, of friendship, of the family. All is rendered absurd by sickness, death, violence, . . . " (74-75). <back> 3 The River was most severely criticized by film reviewers, and completely rejected by film distributors; see Tsai's summaries of the criticisms in Tsai Ming-Liang 73; 101. Here I just focus on the criticisms of his pessimism. <back> 4 The exceptions are Kang-Yung Tsai (蔡康永 164), Shung-Ping Jiau (焦雄屏: 1994 156) and Hsiao-Hung Chang and Chih-hung Wang (125). <back> 5 Ivy Chang, for instance, argues that Tsai's characters "evade each other, meet each other by surprise, challenge each other, playing a mysterious puzzle of desire, without producing the answers of 'who I am'" (81).<back> 6 Media technologies, as several critics have analyzed, is one of Egoyan's central concerns. See, for instance, Balley, Shary, Hsiao and the book Atom Egoyan. Tsai, on the other hand, says that for the time being he is not interested in technologies (1998: 114).<back> 7 As Egoyan said, "Something very Canadian about my characters. . . so tentative when it comes to their own personas. . . so self-conscious. . .they don't assert themselves and never quite feel that they have a right to be where they are. . .(Harris 1992:17). This idea of dislocation as being Canadian is also expressed by Rozema.<back> 8 Simply the figures of the two cities' population tell the difference: in an area of 632 sq.km, the number of residents in Metropolitan Toronto is 2.4 million people, while Taipei's 2,640,322 residents have to live in an area which is 2/5 of the size of Toronto.<back> 9 A piece of chilling news for us Taiwanese about Toronto was the murder of one Taiwanese girl and severe wounding of her sister in late July, 2000 by a Canadian in Toronto, Stuart Cameron, who, a carpet cleaner and father of three, was alleged to have attacked or murdered four Asian women.<back> 10 Of course some of their settings are recognizable by long-time residents of the two cities: for instance, the strip bar in Exotica and West Gate Ting and the railroad station in Taipei. Tsai said that in shooting an overpass or the street scenes in Taipei, he makes them both "real" and "abstract" by turning them into a stage with only his actors and actresses but no other passengers (Rehm 92). <back> 11 In Next of Kin and Family there is also a contrast between the WASP and Armenian ethnicity of families, which I will not discuss in this comparison of Egoyan and Tsai. <back>
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