The Sandwich Man: History, episodicity and serial conditioning in a Taiwanese omnibus film

As a foundational text in the history of the New Taiwanese Cinema, The Sandwich Man (1983) deserves consideration for the ways in which the inherently contradictory omnibus form is deployed for allegorical and meta-filmic purposes. Besides commenting on changes in contemporary Taiwanese society, this transauthorial feature combining the short films of three directors (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Wan Ren) foregrounds a feature of the multi-director form—seriality—that is likewise persistent within the arenas of production, accumulation, and consumption. The author makes a case for The Sandwich Man’s significance within the context of cultural, social, and political changes occurring in Taiwan, a country where mass-production and artisanal practices have long coexisted both within and beyond the film industry. Furthermore, this and other omnibus films activate a mode of ruptured yet invested spectatorship in which audiences are conditioned to expect certain narrative outcomes due to a serial emplotment of similar themes and repeated events. Thus, ‘serial conditioning’ turns spectators into consumers who, confronted with a limited assortment of stories and characters in the span of a single feature-length omnibus film, are encouraged to engage in a selection process that privileges already-canonized auteurs and therefore has commercial implications even in the context of non-commercial art cinema.