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This short paper aims to critically analyze a contemporary Taiwanese film, The Fourth Portrait, directed by Meng-Hung Chung, from the perspective of Deleuzian theories. In Deleuze’s two books on cinema, the discussion of images demonstrates the entangled juxtaposition of the three levels: brain-thought, cinema-screen, and world-images that compose the cinematic consciousness. Through the interacted movement-images and time-images, the film unfolds the storyline within the aesthetic pleasure of poetic sentiment that gradually leads the audience to learn that a wandering boy, Hsiao-Hsiang, after the death of his father, has had several adventurous encounters that gradually expose the secrecy of his traumatic family: His birth mother has no decent job and his step-father has killed his own brother. This broken family has been haunted by the shared guilt and the undead memory as Derrida famously claims that hauntology precedes ontology. As the past coexists with the present, Deleuze analyzes the concept of I, with a central fracture in its pure form of the past demonstrating an ontological enigma that remains forever a secret. When the director uses the four portraits to indicate the four important events of this wandering boy, he deliberately leaves empty the fourth portrait, the self-portrait of the boy; it remains as an incomplete piece which symbolizes an enigma of his own life. It shows certain constitutive unnamable forces acting within the boy that seduces him forever to painfully misrecognize himself.

The Empty Face of the Self-portrait: Time, Specter, and Event in The Fourth Portrait by Meng-Hung Chung