Taiwan Cinema Research Articles

Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjing Zhang (eds) (2020)

Review of: Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjing Zhang (eds) (2020) Amherst: Cambria Press, 328 pp., ISBN 978-1-63857-024-0, p/bk, $49.99

Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching's Hong Kong Stories

This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei's case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema , by Emilie Yueh-yu, Darrell William Davis, and Wenqi Lin

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema , by Emilie Yueh-yu, Darrell William Davis, and Wenqi Lin

“She Deserves It All (?)”: Romance and Tradition in Qiong Yao Films of the 1960s

Abstract Qiong Yao films are known for telling stories of romance. This essay focuses on the female characters in Qiong Yao films produced by the Grand Motion Picture Company (GMP) in the 1960s. Founded by Li Han-xiang in 1963, GMP played a key role in the evolution of Taiwan cinema in general and Qiong Yao films in particular. The 1960s was to Taiwan a time of political and ideological conservatism. Discipline and obedience to authorities were prioritized as an official strategy to celebrate the traditional values and principles of Chinese culture. The Confucian-oriented ideology toward women dominated. The paper proposes that most women portrayed in the Qiong Yao films by GMP remain in the traditional status, emotionally and economically dependent on men. The paper posits that the gender-based/biased authoritarian hierarchy represented in these romantic dramas was closely associated to the patriarchal social structure and the mainstream political ideology. GMP’s 1968 film Love Eternal will be used as a case study to show how “the limits of proprieties” must be followed and what devastating effects were produced in the case when these traditional values were challenged and violated.

From 'New Taiwan Cinema' to 'World Cinema': A Critical Case Study of Edward Yang's Career

From 'New Taiwan Cinema' to 'World Cinema': A Critical Case Study of Edward Yang's Career

Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang

Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang

Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds.), Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds.), Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Rediscovering New Taiwan Cinema in and outside of Greater China: Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 and Chang Tso-chi’s Soul of a Demon

Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 and Chang Tso-chi’s Soul of a Demon are examples of Taiwanese films set in Taiwan during the era of Japanese rule. Since the early 2000s, many of these films have been well received by Taiwanese audiences. Both Cape No. 7 and Soul of a Demon address issues pertaining to Taiwanese identity and history, but how they approach these issues marks a drastic difference. In this paper, I will use Soul of a Demon and Cape No. 7 to illustrate the ongoing development of New Taiwan Cinema and to answer the following questions: How does a younger generation of filmmakers of New Taiwan Cinema endeavor to meet their audiences from different media platforms? How do they engage their audiences in conversations with popular topics when filmmaking today is more diversified in terms of circulation channels, funding resources, and reception?

The left-wing legacy in ’70s Hong Kong television: Chameleon (1978) and Lee Sil-hong’s Rediffusion (RTV) tetralogy

A missing chapter in the history of postwar left-wing Hong Kong cinema involves the channeling of its energies into television in the 1970s. At Rediffusion (RTV), producer Lee Sil-hong – son of director Lee Sun-fung – mobilized veterans from the classical period of the left-wing studios to produce a tetralogy of serialized television dramas that represent the apotheosis of the jiating lunli pian, not only resurrecting the spirit behind such classic Union melodramas as In the Face of Demolition (1953) or their celebrated adaptation of Ba Jin’s “Torrents” trilogy, but doing so with an epic ambition with regard to historical scope and scale that had been inconceivable even in the heyday of left-wing Hong Kong cinema in the 1950s. Providing a panoramic account of twentieth-­century Chinese history, Lee’s tetralogy – Chameleon (1978), Gone with the Wind (1980), Fatherland (1980), and Hong Kong Gentlemen (1981) – predates by at least a decade attempts by China’s Fifth Generation, New Taiwan Cinema, and the Hong Kong New Wave to address such subject matter in comparable fashion through the social epic or family melodrama. Factors that made possible Lee’s achievement include: (i) the central importance of television as a medium for the expression of local cultural identity during the period of Hong Kong’s economic takeoff, (ii) the renewal on television of left-wing filmmaking philosophy and practices inherited from Thirties Shanghai and Fifties Hong Kong, and (iii) the social realist sensibility of the left-wing tradition – along with its strong interest in the transcultural adaptation of foreign literature – that allowed it to frame local experience in terms of the global, benefitting from an awareness of both the 19th-century European novel and the contemporary American television epic. Situating Lee’s tetralogy within the broader historical context of persistent Chinese left-wing efforts across generations to contest politically rival screen practices, this essay analyzes Chameleon for its distinctive worldview and methods characteristic of the jiating lunli pian, while assessing its functional aesthetic as rooted in the literature-inspired realist melodrama with didactic aims – an inherited tradition to which it contributed a magisterial endpoint but beyond which it was unwilling to advance, unlike the groundbreaking modernism of the Hong Kong New Wave’s television work.

“In the Dark Places, Getting Burned”: Portrayals of Street Culture in Taiwan Cinema Today

Abstract Street culture is represented in two mid-2010 Taiwan films, The Kids (Xiaohai, 2015) and Thanatos, Drunk (Zui sheng meng shi 2015), in such stunning and beautiful ways that this essay sets out to etch each of them not only into the annals of Taiwan’s most memorable urban films ever made, but also position them as essential texts within the emergent field of street culture more broadly. Both movies depict physical and ideological boundaries that separate urban spaces from Taiwanese culture at large, and reveal the extent to which their young protagonists are perceived as “abnormal” even as they use street literacy in sophisticated ways to interact with formal actors (such as school teachers and the police) and informal actors (such as hooligans and petty criminals). These two films arguably present the best vantage point to understand the peripheral status of Taiwan’s urban young people who do not conform to hegemonic norms.

(2017) Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change, edited by Kuei-Fen Chiu, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Gary D. Rawnsley

(2017) Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change, edited by Kuei-Fen Chiu, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Gary D. Rawnsley

From visual fantasies to bodily trajectories: The insular epistemology of around-the-island journeys in Taiwan cinema

Abstract Through the lens of the around-the-island journey, this study articulates the geopolitical and sensory turns in contemporary Taiwan, inspecting how the new modality of feelings connotes different political declarations and epistemological paradigms from those in the past. From the Qing Empire, through the Japanese colonial period and to the early martial law period, the island of Taiwan was visually discovered and imagined by exterior political regimes. These foreign travellers’ around-the-island journeys ‘virtualized’ the geographical knowledge through visually syndicating the island and the suzerainties’ political centre into a single entity: either prolonging it as the extended territory of imperial Japan or conflating it with the continent of China. However, the current fetish of around-the-island trips arising in the 2000s represents a tendency of bypassing such visual domination and instead demands a traveller’s poignant bodily engagement and sensory explorations to ‘actualize’ the material knowledge of the island. Through comparing around-the-island movies in the martial and post martial law periods, this study examines how insular epistemology is produced and national identity is generated in sensorium cinema.

Three Times: Chu T'ien-wen on Writing, Screenwriting, and New Taiwan Cinema

The following conversation between Chu T'ien-wen and Michael Berry is distilled from Berry's Chinese book, Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien's Memories of Shadow and Light. Chu's reflections on her early career as a writer and on her involvement in the New Taiwan Cinema movement lead to some surprising and candid revelations. This fascinating discussion is the longest and most in-depth author interview that has ever appeared in the pages of CLT.

The Subtitling of Indigenous Values in the Film Seediq Bale

The movie Seediq Bale, directed by Wei Te-Sheng and produced by John Woo, is a Taiwanese historical drama epic film based on the Wushe Incident in 1930. The story depicts the Wushe Incident, which happened in central Taiwan while it was under Japanese rule. Mona Rudao, a then chief of Seediq indigenous village Mahebu, led warriors against Japanese authorities due to the long-term colonial oppression. In response, the Japanese mounted a relentless counter-attack, killing over three hundred Seediq people. Often compared by the media in Taiwan to the films Braveheart and The Last of the Mohicans, the film, released in 2011, is so far the most expensive production in Taiwan cinema history. Different language registers are present in the movie, including Mandarin, Japanese, and the Seediq language; this can be a great challenge for the translator when translating the subtitles into English. Nonetheless, it is believed that ideologies can be manifested in language use. So, the study attempts to disclose the translatori¦s hidden indigenous ideologies in the English subtitles s/he provided. Moreover, as subtitling translation involves a multiplicity of verbal and non-verbal semiotic modes, those visual and audio elements could also contribute to the final product of subtitle translations. Hence, the study, in addition to the translatori¦s indigenous ideologies and handling of ethnic issues in translation, also looks at how the translator worked with semiotic modes in designing the subtitles for the target context.

Passionately Documenting: Taiwan’s Latest Cinematic Revival

in his opening talk for the 2011 Conference on Literature, Cinema, and Landscape, Taiwanese writer and film critic Lee Yuan (also known as Xiao Ye) remarked on the decentering disposition of Taiwan's latest cinematic revival.1 He notes that these films in similar ways forgo Taiwan's national and metropolitan center, Taipei, in favor of other localities. Lee's observation on decentering also opens up more complex discussions regarding the popular success of recent Taiwanese small-budget blockbusters' combination of feature-film qualities with documentary-style realism. This article offers a case study on recent Taiwanese film productions that not only decenter Taiwanese cinema's internationally renowned image as primarily producing auteur films portraying postcolonial and postmodern ethos, but that also hybridize Taiwan's diasporic Chinese image with Taiwan's local dialect, culture, and landscape. Debuting films featuring passionate road trips around the beautiful island of Taiwan, such as Chen Huai-En's Island Etude (2007) and Fung Kai's Din Tao: Leader of the Parade (2012), stimulated public interest in local Taiwanese landscapes and cultures. Personally inspired memorial stories by young directors, such as Lin Yu-Hsien's Jump Ashin! (2011), also became box office hits. During these past few years, Taiwanese cinema has gradually overcome its late-twentieth-century city of sadness image created by Hou Hsio-Hsian's A City of Sadness (1989), which has greatly influenced Taiwanese cinema's national and international representation.2 This article argues that these new-millennium films reconstruct and activate a sense of Taiwanese nationalism through the fluid intermix of documentary style with entertainment qualities as well as local with global appeal. Their highlighting of passion rather than pathos proposes a new turn and possibility for the revival of Taiwanese cinema and nationalism in the age of transcultural globalization.Different from the canonized Taiwanese films that put Taiwanese cinema on the international map over two decades ago, the new-millennium films discussed in this article approach Taiwanese culture and nationalism by experimenting with possibilities of flexible creativity. In Sentimental Fabulations, Rey Chow raises the importance of cinematic identification by opening with the question Where is the movie about me? (1). Chow's question points to the contemporary Chinese-speaking subject's simultaneous need and desire for individual uniqueness and collective belonging. Her concern also relates to Taiwanese people, who face problems such as recovering from Japanese colonialism, reinterpreting Chineseness through peripheral conditions, reincorporating local cultural diversity, and distinguishing themselves from Western standards. Recent films such as Island Etude, Din Tao, and Jump Ashin! continue to tackle these questions; however, they do so in a more lighthearted and aspiring manner.In a country with a history of negotiating with international and domestic challenges to na- tional identity determinants, the development of Taiwanese cinema reflects continuous efforts at national reconstruction. With the end of Japanese rule in 1945 and the official establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in mainland China in 1949, Taiwanese cinema turned to localism during the 1950s. Having a status different from Hong Kong's as the inheritor of Shanghai's cinema, and hence in the position of having a better-developed film industry environment that represented the legacy of authentic Chinese cinema as opposed to the communist mainland, Taiwan's film productions at the time were mostly localized, low-budget taiyu pian (Taiwanese dialect films) affairs.3 Apart from propaganda films of healthy realism and social realism supported by the KMT nationalist government, melodramas and martial arts films became the ruling genres along with productions of Taiwan xiangtu dianying (native-soil films) during the 1960s and early 1970s. …

Heavy Weather: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tsai Ming-liang, and The Poetics of Environmental Sound

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndy BirtwistleAndy Birtwistle is Principal Lecturer in Film and Video at Canterbury Christ Church University, and is the author of Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video (Manchester University Press, 2010). In addition to his research on film sound, he has published on artists’ film and video, modernism and music, and Taiwan cinema. Andy is also a sound artist and filmmaker whose work has been broadcast and exhibited internationally.

Bentu: Marketplace and sentiments of contemporary Taiwan cinema

Abstract

Taiwan New Cinema: A Movement of Unintended Consequences

Taiwan New Cinema movement that began in the 1980s is arguably one of Taiwan’s greatest cultural breakthroughs; the movement eventually led to numerous awards for Taiwanese filmmakers at the biggest festivals, such as Venice, Berlin and Cannes. This implies that the New Cinema movement was ultimately the result of a carefully orchestrated policy on the part of the Taiwan authority. In truth, however, the New Cinema was more accidental than planned. The initial factors behind the movement were more domestic in orientation than foreign; the movement represented a makeshift attempt to save a domestic film industry that was slowly dying. The multiple awards received by Taiwanese filmmakers were thus unexpected benefits, which the authority and others were slow to recognize. Regardless of its origins, however, the New Cinema’s lasting impact is undeniable. To this day, many of the controversies first raised about the New Cinema remain core issues for Taiwan cinema.

Emerging Appropriate Fuzziness: A Spatiotemporal Observation of Post-Martial Law Taiwan Literature and Cinema

Taiwan’s some four hundred years history, culturally and politically, is inscribed by relationships between rulers and the ruled that shape its social sophistication and gaps between forms of high culture and popular culture. Its built environment, inevitably, echoes this complexity as a representation. Examining Taiwan’s very recent built environment, most critically, this phenomenon is highlighted by the uncertainty that translates Taiwan society’s anxiety about connecting the yet passed authoritarian past and the seemingly democratic present when its post-war Martial Law period was officially terminated in 1987. This paper observes the immediate historicity today in Taiwan that represents this uncertainty, through scrutinising different cultural forms which the built environment has been identically (re)represented. As a central argument, this paper schematises a context which mediates different spatial objects that are derived from different cultural political origins, literature and cinema, where as texts in one context could be relevant, contradictory or even parallel, and suggests a form of appropriate fuzziness. This form, unlike the social conundrum driven by the awkward cultural and political status of Taiwan society, through ways of urbanisation, geo-identification and spatial idealisation, has pinpointed the possibility that directs Taiwan’s spatial evolution on the road ahead.

Defining Taiwanese Identity from the Past and Realities: New Taiwan Cinema, 1982-1996

Defining Taiwanese Identity from the Past and Realities: New Taiwan Cinema, 1982-1996