The Geographies of the East Asian Cinematography: The Taiwan Convergence

Abstract

When the decline of Taiwan New Cinema (1982-1987) appeared a reality after 1990s, the idea of the national cinema gets strengthened with the globalization of the domestic film market. The brief but intense flowering of Taiwan New Cinema could not be followed by subsequent domestic waves, only to give way its creative momentum to other national cinemas in East Asia. As the nodal point of converging the continental Sinophone cinematic circuit of the Shanghai-Hong Kong axis and the maritime Hollywood-Japan cinematic circuit, however, Taiwan New Cinema combined three strata —postcoloniality, ideological politics, cultural hybridity—of East Asian cinematic infrastructure. Its influence continues in the Fifth and Sixth Generation films in China during the 1990s, fin-de-siècle Hong Kong cinemas, and the South Korean cinema renaissance after the new millennium. My intention is to theoretically frame the geographical mutation of the “East Asian cinematic plane” from the 1930s to the present. Historically, there have been two divergent cinematic axes in modern East Asian cultural geography: the continental curve and the maritime link. The former could roughly be defined by the devotion to the epic, dramatic, and dynamic cinema of spectacle; the latter belongs to relatively static, speculative, and observant aesthetics of realism. After the Cold War and the decline of studio system, the cultural vitality of the East Asian cinema moved to Taiwan and Hong Kong. During the 1980s, Taiwan became the modernist convergence point of two regional axes (“peripheral modernism”) with Hong Kong as its East Asian outpost coping with postmodern cultural capitalism (“hybrid postmodernity”). While Taiwan struggles with the two residual strata of peripheral modernity, that is, postcoloniality and political antagonism, Hong Kong is engaged with the third stratum of hybrid postmodernity by creating a new genre pastiche of East Asian action films, combining wuxia, martial-arts, kung fu, samurai, chandra, ninja, gangster noir, and cop thrillers. In this geographical mutation of East Asian cinematic plane, Taiwan New Wave constitutes the moment of the emergence of postcolonial “minor cinema,” with which East Asian cinema contributes to the making of World Cinema. I would like to adumbrate how the two different cinematic orientations of Hou Hsiao-Hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) helped to promote respectively the East Asian cinematic emergence.