Cinema Taiwan

Despite the high profile of contemporary masters such as Hou Hsiao-hsien,

Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, there has been little published work
devoted to Taiwan cinema. Cinema Taiwan is a vigorous response to this gap,
offering an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary
Taiwan film that moves beyond nation-state arguments, the auteurist mode, and
vestiges of the New Cinema. Rather it seeks to promote an understanding of place,
history and media representations as interdependent frames.
With contributions from leading scholars from six countries, Cinema Taiwan
provides extensive discussion of developments in storytelling, styles and socio-
political transformation to represent a new maturing of film theory, history and
analysis in Taiwan scholarship. The book examines complex problems of popu-
larity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and
independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address, as well as new opportuni-
ties to forge vibrant film cultures embedded in Taiwanese (identity) politics, gender/
sexuality and community activism. The volume includes a comprehensive filmog-
raphy, bibliography of essential sources, and a Chinese-language glossary.
Insightful and challenging, the essays in this collection focus attention on a glob-
ally significant field of cultural production, appealing to readers in the areas of film
studies, cultural studies and Chinese culture and society.

Darrell William Davis is Senior Lecturer at the School of Media, Film and
Theatre, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Ru-shou Robert Chen is Associate Professor at the Department of Radio-

Television, National Chengchi University.
Cinema Taiwan
Politics, popularity and state of
the arts

Edited by
Darrell William Davis and
Ru-shou Robert Chen
First published 2007
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 2007 Editorial matter and selection, Darrell William Davis and Ru-shou
Robert Chen, the contributors for their contributions

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cinema Taiwan: politics, popularity, and state of the arts/edited by
Darrell William Davis and Ru-shou Robert Chen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Motion pictures–Taiwan. I. Davis, Darrell William.
PN1993.5.T28C56 2007
791.43095124'9–dc22 2006027020

ISBN 0–203–96439–X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–41257–9 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–41258–7 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96439–X (ebk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–41257–5 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–41257–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96439–2 (ebk)
Contents

List of figures x
List of contributors
Preface: Screening contemporary Taiwan cinema xiii
PING-HUI LIAO

Acknowledgments xvi
Note on transliteration xvii

Introduction: Cinema Taiwan, a civilizing mission? 1

DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS

PART I
Politics 15

1 The vision of Taiwan New Documentary 17

KUEI-FEN CHIU

2 Haunted realism: postcoloniality and the cinema of

Chang Tso-chi 33
CHRIS BERRY

3 The impossible task of Taipei films 51

YOMI BRAESTER

4 Taiwan in Mainland Chinese cinema 60

ROBERT CHI

5 Festivals, criticism and international reputation of

Taiwan New Cinema 75
CHIA-CHI WU
vi Contents
PART II
Popularity 93

6 The unbearable lightness of globalization: on the

transnational flight of wuxia film 95
HSIAO-HUNG CHANG

7 “This isn’t real!” Spatialized narration and

(in)visible special effects in Double Vision 108
RU-SHOU ROBERT CHEN

8 Morning in the new metropolis: Taipei and the

globalization of the city film 116
JAMES TWEEDIE

9 Taiwan (trans)national cinema: the far-flung

adventures of a Taiwanese tomboy 131
FRAN MARTIN

10 Trendy in Taiwan: problems of popularity in the

island’s cinema 146
DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS

PART III
State of the arts 159

11 King Hu: experimental, narrative filmmaker 161

PETER RIST

12 “I thought of the times we were in front of the

flowers”: analyzing the opening credits of Goodbye
Dragon Inn 172
YUNG HAO LIU (TRANSLATED BY MING-YU LEE)

13 “This time he moves!”: the deeper significance of

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s radical break in Good Men, Good
Women 183
JAMES UDDEN

14 The road home: stylistic renovations of Chinese

Mandarin classics 203
EMILIE YUEH-YU YEH
 Contents vii
Selected filmography 217
Chinese glossary 220
Selected bibliography 223
Index 229
Figures

1.1 Voices of Orchid Island: A nuclear waste dump site for Taiwan,
courtesy of the director 21
1.2 A surrealist scene from Corner’s, courtesty of the director 23
2.1 Medium long shot. Ah Wei disappears down the entrance to the
passageway, which turns away to the left 35
2.2 Medium long shot. Ah Wei appears at the head of the
passageway, walking toward the camera. A shoulder appears
in the right extreme foreground. The pattern on the shirt
makes this recognizable as Ah Jie 35
2.3 180-degree reverse-shot cuts to a position behind Ah Wei as he
walks toward Ah Jie, who says, “Wassup? You’re late! They
almost got me,” and then is suddenly set upon by the gang, who
race in from the left, where the passageway obscures our vision 36
2.4 Brief 180-degree reverse-shot as Ah Jie is pushed up against the wall 36
2.5 As 2.3, The Best of Times 37
2.6 Jump-cut forward to a position in front of Ah Wei (replicating his
point of view) as they set upon Ah Jie, shouting, “Kill him.” The
gang walks off leaving the stabbed Ah Jie lying on the ground 37
2.7 180-degree reverse-shot to Ah Wei looking on, shocked 38
2.8 As 2.6, The Best of Times 38
2.9 As 2.7 39
2.10 Very similar to 2.1, but the camera is positioned slightly closer to
the entrance to the passageway and further to the left, as Ah Wei
runs into the passageway 40
2.11 As 2.2, including the appearance of Ah Jie’s shirt in the frame 40
2.12 As 2.3, but Ah Wei says, “What’s going on?” 41
2.13 As with 2.6, the camera position jumps forward, but it is still
behind Ah Wei. Ah Jie says, “I’ve been waiting all along.” 41
2.14 As 2.7, including Ah Wei in shock, as Ah Jie says, “Hurry up, or
they’ll catch up with us.” Ah Wei responds, “Are you Ah Jie?” 42
2.15 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie, who says,
“Who else? Hurry up!” The other gang comes into frame off
screen right and attacks Ah Jie 42
2.16 As 2.7 43
 Figures ix
2.17 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Wei, who
intervenes in the fight. 43
2.18 180-degree reverse-shot to a position behind Ah Jie and his
attackers as Ah Wei jumps on Ah Jie’s attackers, and drags Ah Jie
off. 44
2.19 180-degree reverse-shot to the head of the passageway as Ah Jie
and Ah Wei run toward the camera, and past it, pursued by their
attackers. 44
5.1 Nantes, Festival of Three Continents 81
5.2 The Death of the New Cinema, cover 84
8.1 Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision 123
8.2 Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer (1986) 125
8.3 Chen Kuo-fu’s Double Vision (2002) 125
8.4 The Missing 126
8.5 The Missing 126
8.6 Goodbye Dragon Inn 128
8.7 The Missing 128
9.1 Meng Kerou (Gui Lunmei) gazes at her classmate Lin Yuezhen
(Liang Youmei) in Blue Gate Crossing 134
9.2 Lin Yuezhen and Meng Kerou in Blue Gate Crossing 135
10.1 Budaixi as folklore … 148
10.2 … and as blockbuster movie: Legend of the Sacred Stone 148
10.3 Puppet extravaganza from Pili International Multimedia, Taiwan
(1999) 153
10.4 Gay comedy hit from Three Dots Entertainment (2004) 155
13.1 The opening shot of Good Men, Good Women 184
13.2 Opening of the second shot of Good Men, Good Women 185
13.3 Same shot, now of Liang Ching on bed 186
13.4 Same shot, now of her drinking water at the table 186
13.5 Same shot, camera drifts away to reveal an old Ozu film on TV 187
13.6 Same shot, title up to frame her tearing off and reading a fax 187
13.7 End of same shot with Liang Ching in the bathroom 188
13.8 Early on in long take in front of mirror 189
13.9 Same long take after a very slow pan left and track back 189
13.10 Chiaroscuro in What Time is it There? 195
13.11 Predominant framing in scene from Woman is the Future of Man 196
13.12 An epiphany during a long take from On the Occasion of
Remembering the Turning Gate 197
14.1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 209
14.2 Cloud of Romance, 1977 210
14.3 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 210
14.4 Spring in a Small Town, 1948 211
14.5 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 212
14.6 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 212
14.7 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 212
Contributors

Chris Berry is Professor of Film & Television Studies at Goldsmiths College,

University of London. He is author of Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The
Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004) and co-author
(with Mary Farquhar) of Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia
University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006). He is also editor of
several recent volumes on Chinese cinema and cultural studies.
Yomi Braester is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema
Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His publications include
Witness Against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China
(Stanford University Press, 2003) as well as essays in China Quarterly, Modern
China, Screen, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Contemporary China and
other venues. He is currently writing a book on Chinese cinema and urban
policy.
Hsiao-hung Chang is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at National
Taiwan University. Her books include Postmodern Woman: Power, Desire and Gender
Performance (1993), Narcissistic Woman (1995), Gender Crossing: Feminist Literary Theory
and Criticism (1995), Queer Desire: Mapping Gender and Sexuality (1996), Sexual Imperi-
alism (1998), Erotic Micropolitics (1999), Queer Family Romance (2000), Absolutely
Clothes-Crazy (2001), Encountering a Wolf in the Department Store (2002), Structures of
Feeling (2005), and Skin-Deep (2005).
Ru-shou Robert Chen is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-
Television at National Chengchi University. He is author of Cinema Empire
(Taipei: Wanxiang,1995) and his translated works include Plays of Shadows:
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (2004), Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the
Digital Dark Age (2004) and Film Theory: an Introduction (2002).
Robert Chi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and
Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research
focuses on Chinese language cinemas, with special emphases on memory,
genre, and locality. His writings have appeared in English, Chinese, and
Italian.
 Contributors xi
Kuei-fen Chiu is Professor of Taiwan Literature at Tsing-hua University, Taiwan.
She has published articles on Taiwan literature, postcolonial theories in Taiwan,
and documentary film studies. She is currently conducting a project on the
history of Taiwan fiction.
Darrell William Davis is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and
Theatre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia). He is the
author of Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film
(Columbia University Press, 1996), co-author of Taiwan Film Directors, a Treasure
Island (Columbia University Press, 2005) and numerous articles in Cinema
Journal, Film History, Film Quarterly, positions, PostScript, Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television and anthologies on Japanese cinema, and Asian popular
culture.
Ping-hui Liao is Professor of Literary and Critical Studies at National Tsinghua
University, Taiwan and author of seven books in Chinese and numerous essays
in English. He has recently co-edited with David Der-wei Wang for Columbia
University Press Taiwan under Japanese Rule (2006), and with Ackbar Abbas et al.
Internationalizing Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2005).
Yung-hao Liu is assistant professor at the Department of Radio, Television and
Film in Shih Hsin University. He received his PhD in French Literature from
Université de Paris III, with a thesis on L’ecriture du Je au cinéma: Pathos et Thanatos
dans l’autobiographie filmique(Oct. 2002). His professional fields include theories of
cinema and literature (autobiography, auto-portrait, diary), the esthetics of
death, experimental cinema, documentary film and Chinese cinema. He is the
author of Le cinéma décadré, yann beauvais, Taipei, 1999 (in collaboration with le
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).
Fran Martin is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne,
Australia. She is author of Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese
Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2003), translator of
Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (Hawai’i University Press,
2003), co-editor with Chris Berry and Audrey Yue of Mobile Cultures: New Media
and Queer Asia (Duke University Press, 2003), and co-editor with Larissa Hein-
rich of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures (Hawai’i
University Press, forthcoming 2006). Her monograph, Backward Glances:
Chinese Popular Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary, is forthcoming.
Peter Rist is Professor of Film Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
at Concordia University, Montreal. He has edited books on Canadian and
South American cinema, and more recently has published articles on silent
Japanese and contemporary Chinese films.
James Tweedie is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and a member
of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He was previously
a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies,
where he coordinated the Crossing Borders Initiative, an interdisciplinary
xii Contributors
program designed to facilitate the study of globalization in the humanities and
social sciences. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, Screen, SubStance, and
Twentieth Century Literature, and he is currently completing a comparative study of
cinematic new waves from the late 1950s to the 1990s.
James Udden is currently Assistant Professor of film studies at Gettysburg
College in Pennsylvania. He has published on Asian cinema in Asian Cinema,
Modern Chinese Language and Literature, Film Appreciation (Taiwan) and Post Script. He
is now working on a book manuscript on Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Chia-chi Wu received her PhD in Critical Studies, Cinema-TV School at the
University of Southern California. She is assistant professor in the Department of
English at National Taiwan Normal University. She has been teaching and
writing on contemporary Chinese language films.
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is Associate Professor of Cinema-TV at Hong Kong
Baptist University. She is the author of Song Narration and Chinese-language Cinema
(Taipei: Yuan-liou, 2000), co-author of Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
(Columbia University Press, 2005) and East Asian Screen Industries (British Film
Institute, forthcoming). She also co-edited Chinese-language Cinema: Historiog-
raphy, Poetics, Politics (Hawaii University Press, 2005) and contributed several
articles to anthologies on Asian popular cinema and international film musical.
Preface
Screening contemporary Taiwan
cinema
Ping-hui Liao

Inspired though also eclipsed by A City of Sadness and very much working in its
shadow, contemporary Taiwan film directors develop their art in response to an
array of new challenges. These include increasingly scarce government financial
support, rare chances for Golden Lions or Bears to boost international reputations,
an aggravating consumerist economy and its impact on the box office, grinding
competition from trans-regional cable TV channels and unauthorized internet film
downloads, not to mention unprecedented socio-cultural excitements and tensions
generated by electoral politics, and, not least, the island state’s irreversible
marginalization with the rise of China in the world economy. Mini-Hulks or
crouching tigers at the mercy of sidekicks from Hong Kong kung fu movies, and
further antagonized by Hollywood, and even Bollywood, Taiwan’s new generation
directors have been haunted by the specter of being not quite Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai
Ming-liang and, certainly, not Ang Lee. Lately Hou himself is said to have been
struggling with the burden of the past and over the complex of being no longer “as
good”. In an interview with New Left Review, Edward Yang, another luminary in
Taiwanese visual culture and an important figure for Fredric Jameson’s postmodern
film criticism, was, not surprisingly, nostalgic for the 1970s and 1980s while terribly
critical of the present.
However, the grim prospects haven’t curbed Taiwan scriptwriters and film
directors from producing wonderful pictures, operating on limited budgets.
Commercially less successful and certainly with fewer revenues than in the 1990s,
contemporary Taiwan cinema continues to be vibrant and able to react in
dynamic ways to the uneven processes of localization, globalization, and trans-
regionalization. It reveals a diversity rich in film genres, subject matter, and
camera work. According to statistics compiled by the Government Information
Office, 2005 saw production of at least 84 films, ranging from drama to documen-
tary to animation and experimental shorts. In 2004, there were similar trends in
deploying cinema as site of re-articulation and cultural translation, of redressing
post-colonial subjects or responses to Japanese and Korean popular culture. Hou
Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang made daunting works like Café Lumiere (2004) and
The Wayward Cloud (2005). The latter caused a sensation due to its extended sexu-
ally explicit scenes, but it was screened uncut and thereby opened a new page in the
performance of sex/gender, in complete freedom of cinematic expression.
xiv Preface
But it is in the field of animation and documentaries that contemporary Taiwan
cinema reveals its cultural dynamics of communal embrace in terms of psychic
structures of identification and social integration, as films that address issues in
collective memory and emotional vulnerability in the most vivid manner. Taiwan
Aborigine Collective’s mythic legends series, together with a number of heart-felt
animations like The Story of Grandpa Elephant Lin Wang (dir. Wang Tong, 2004) and
documentaries such as Let It Be (Wu mi le, aka The Last Rice Growers, dir. Yan
Lanquan and Zhuang Yizeng, 2005) or Radio Mihu (Buluo zhi yin, dir. Li
Zhongwang, 2004), for example, are most impressive works that not only represent
life-worlds of the subaltern but also openly challenged the DPP government’s
ability to handle farming or the aboriginal population’s livelihood in the face of
WTO and global market pressures.
In many ways, Zheng Wentang’s film The Passage ( Jing Guo, 2004) may be illumi-
nating in our consideration of the local and trans-regional motifs that inform our
current Cinema Taiwan. The film depicts a Japanese young man visiting Taiwan’s
National Palace Museum, searching for a masterpiece by the Sung poet and callig-
rapher Su Dongpo (1036–1101). The artwork in question, Hanshi tie (Poems of the
Cold-Food Observance) is a calligraphic piece with poems composed during an
annual festival commemorating a patriotic poet in exile. In the eleventh century,
Su Dongpo, who suffered banishment from the emperor’s court, composed this
melancholy piece, which later became a collectors’ treasure. The masterpiece
endured a complex trajectory of drifting and diaspora, as if echoing Su’s eventful
career and, even more metonymically, the upheavals of modern China since the
mid nineteenth century. It was reportedly owned by a Cantonese scholar, Feng
Zhanyun, for a brief period (1862–72), then partially damaged in a fire caused by
the 1900 war between Allied Forces and the Qing Rebelling Boxers, handed over
for repairs to a group of Japanese craftsmen, retrieved by a famous collector named
Kikuchi, who presented it as a gift to foreign minister Wang Shijie in 1949, and
eventually returned to the Palace Museum in 1987.
Through so extraordinary an itinerary, the piece seems not only to epitomize
allegorically the history of the Kuomingtang government in its exile and successive
makeovers, but suggests also the dissemination of meanings among Asians from
many different communities and temporalities. In the film, the young Japanese
attempts to find resonance in the Hanshi tie, which he tells his Taiwanese friends his
grandfather spent most of his life mending. With main characters crosscutting
paths and helping each other re-discover the relevance of art to life, the film reveals
the complex, albeit ambivalent, relationships between Japan and Taiwan. Now,
the deployment of a Japanese man who travels to Taipei to heal personal trauma
and to create new connectivities on the one hand to his family back home and, on
the other, to Sino-Japanese histories is quite common in contemporary Taiwanese
film, not to mention advertisements or public images. Hou’s Café Lumiere has been
mentioned, and it too traces the winding paths of colonial yearning between young
Taiwanese and Japanese subjects. For Taiwan has been indebted to Japan for the
latter’s incubatory legacy of colonial modernity in an entangled figure of “intimate
enemy”, to borrow the complex term coined by Ashis Nandy. Several late films by
 Preface xv
Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wu Nianzhen, in particular The Puppetmaster and Dou-san: A
Borrowed Life, portray in vivid detail the ambivalent nature of Taiwanese post-
coloniality. However, in The Passage, it is the sweet, vulnerable qualities in the
young Japanese that render him a member of intra-Asian imagined community.
Here Chinese print culture and a compassionate understanding of spiritual empti-
ness among common folks responds to feelings of melancholy and deep loss,
connecting those who otherwise would not be friends or comrades.
This peculiar structure of feeling in relation to Asian cities and urban postcolonial
banality is striking, if we consider the film to be about time passages in which people,
artworks, and images move about to re-define their roots and routes. At the begin-
ning of the film, the protagonist, a young woman living in the suburbs and working
at the Palace Museum in the curatorial division, rushes to catch her bus while having
trouble finding a slide for the assignment and struggles to dissuade her mother from
selling an old house in which she grew up. Instead of seeing or “re-mapping Taipei”
through her eyes, the street traffic and cityscapes, not to mention a distant look at the
Museum, are largely framed and captured on a digital video LCD screen. Appar-
ently, processed images and words on the laptop or video equipment give us snap-
shots in relation to her life in and out of the office. However, she is no cyborg or bobo
(bourgeois bohemian), as she desires to visit the Museum’s secret chamber in the
hollow of a mountain and to be around a man who loves someone else. When she
finds the Japanese in search of the artwork, she persuades her man to help out and to
prepare a private art exhibit. In so doing, she discovers meaning in the artworks, and
people, rescued and transported from China to Taiwan.
A film like The Passage can certainly be interpreted in terms of Fredric Jameson’s
allegorical account of postmodern generic cities and third-world national politics,
as manifested by his illuminating essay on Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers. But the
local as well as trans-regional features that the film reveals will be slighted or at least
blurred in that regard. Jameson’s framework also tends to lose sight of the diversity
in Cinema Taiwan, as it only highlights films about postmodern cities rather than
paying attention to those concerned with Taiwan’s South, the countryside, and
tribal communities.
To make sense of what constitutes contemporary Taiwan cinema, we need to
turn to this most comprehensive and thought-provoking anthology. Contributors
to this volume reflect the local and trans-regional characters in keeping with the
subjects in question. They offer theoretically sophisticated but politically engaged
accounts in relation to a constellation of cinema objects, whether tracing the rapid
changes from the New Cinema to more recent variations, which reveal fractured
ethnic or communal compositions. They discuss the heterogeneous and synco-
pated elements in the filmic texts that cross cut each other in a montage of psycho-
social impulses. As a result, this remarkable anthology brings us up to date with
firsthand observations of Taiwan cinema’s cultural scene and, above all, substan-
tially revises earlier maps as provided by such references as The Oxford History of
World Cinema or scholarship currently on offer that focus on prominent filmmakers
or mainstream genres. Guided by these experts, I am sure that readers will come to
appreciate the complexity and depth of contemporary Taiwan film culture.
Acknowledgments

The editors thank the organizers and participants in two exciting events held in
Taiwan: Focus on Taiwan Cinema, National Taiwan University, Taipei, November
2003 and the International Conference on ‘Nation’ and Taiwan Cinema at National
Central University, Chung-li, December, 2004. In Chung-li, Lin Wenchi, of
National Central University, graciously hosted a contingent of international scholars
and provided solid editorial pointers. These events were also attended by directors
and we salute all Taiwan filmmakers for their tenacity and good humor at a time of
crisis in the industry. We thank Wei-yueh Chen for his contribution to filmography
and Chinese glossary. At Routledge, there was enthusiastic support from Stephanie
Rogers, who solicited very constructive peer reviews. We thank these anonymous
reviewers for their comments, and editorial assistant Helen Baker. Finally, we
express gratitude to the contributors of Cinema Taiwan, whose commitment to film
studies and Taiwan film culture is evident on every page of this volume.
Note on transliteration

For the most part, we use pinyin for transcriptions of Chinese names and titles,
except where other manners of romanization (e. g., Wade-Giles) are used by choice
or common convention. We have tried to balance the need for consistency with
courtesy for traditional customs in transliterating, given the region’s linguistic
variations.

Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to
reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any
copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify
any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
Introduction
Cinema Taiwan, a civilizing mission?
Darrell William Davis

From Wu Feng to Domestic Film Anna

The tale of a righteous man, Wu Feng, runs like this: an eighteenth century Han
Chinese official, Wu Feng administered the mountainous interior of Taiwan,
minding its inhabitants. Generations of Taiwanese schoolchildren learned of
him as a model of sacrifice, since he offered his own life in exchange for a group of
settlers abducted by aboriginal headhunters. The tribesmen, accustomed to
taking Chinese (and later Japanese) heads for ritual uses, were persuaded to stop.
Somehow Wu Feng made them promise to give up their savage practices, but he
paid the ultimate price.1
This exemplary story was adapted for classroom use, but also for the puppet
stage, the opera (gezaixi) and finally, the screen – first by the Japanese (1932), then
in 1949 by Wanxiang, a branch of the Shanghai-based Guotai studio. Turmoil on
Mt. Ali (Alishan fengyun) directed by martial arts master Zhang Che, was Taiwan’s
first Mandarin language feature.2 In 1962, Wu Feng appeared onscreen again in
the film directed by Bu Wancang, for Taiwan Studio, a company run by the
Kuomintang (Nationalists or KMT), Taiwan’s ruling party from 1949 to 2000.
Party officials considered Wu Feng to be a forerunner of their own benevolent
presence in Taiwan, to enlighten and redeem a people still too comfortable with
Japanese ways.3
The anecdote illustrates the multiple roles and functions served by folk heroes.
In succession, Wu Feng appears as colonialist, then in a transitional, commercial
role, and finally, as nationalist hero, embodying the Great Chinese war on enemy
regimes, from Japanese colonizer to Taiwanese colonized. Wu Feng’s story is
multiplied by various media, and between different texts. In theme and variation,
Wu Feng presents a model hero doing the right thing. Whether for colonialist,
commercial, or nationalist ends, Wu Feng plays his part. Self-sacrifice, integrity,
honesty, and peacemaking between rival ethnic groups – these values are equally
useful to authorities whether they are teachers, “foreign” colonizers, or Mainland
sojourners in “temporary” exile. Japanese colonizers controlled Taiwan, a conces-
sion gained from China in 1895, for half a century; when the KMT came in 1945,
they began a systematic program of anti-communist sinicization lasting decades.
The KMT minority dominated for just as long as the Japanese, and for 40 years it
2 Darrell William Davis
stringently applied martial law, quelling nearly all dissent. Wu Feng’s multiple
appearances on Taiwan screens is more than an educational tool, he attests to the
uses of cinema as an enduring enlightenment machine: always modern, progres-
sive, the light of civility projected large. While the term “civilizing mission”
connotes supercilious aggression and exploitation of native peoples, its connection
with cinema is contingent, mediated through entertainment, not just education.
In more recent times Taiwan cinema moved beyond its utility as teaching
device and fulfilled brighter promises, for artistic and social visions, not just
official pedagogy. Taiwan’s cinematic creativity peaked between 1983 and
1993, the age of the Taiwan New Cinema, when commercial prospects were
dim, but an opulent film culture somehow flowered in unlikely circumstances.
Taiwan’s moribund commercial industry begat Hou Hsiao-hsien; Edward Yang,
a US-trained software engineer, returned to Taipei and began filmmaking; late
blooming Ang Lee started in dramatic arts in the American Midwest, moved to
New York University film school, then struggled in obscurity before becoming
the Spielberg of Chinese-language cinema in the 1990s. Where does the winding
film trail lead from here?
Though pronounced dead by critics in 1990, the New Cinema and its directors
continued to flourish on the film festival circuit.4 International festivals are distri-
bution and exhibition networks in their own right; they serve as markets for
commercial transactions, and provide venues without which many films would not
be seen at all. In Taiwan, there are many new festivals to complement, and
compete with the venerable Golden Horse Awards (est 1963); these operate briskly
despite the near-total collapse of commercial production.5 For many years now
Taiwan-made films have had a negligible presence at the local box office. But festi-
vals of many kinds help maintain some choice for a variety of audiences.
Another key shift in cinema’s civilizing mission is intensifying nativist cultural
policies under the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), which capitalized on
KMT exposure to take executive power in 2000, and again in 2004. Concurrently,
with crisis in film production, there arose a variety of public and private initiatives
to entice ordinary viewers, especially youth, back to the cinema, urging cinematic
expressions of greater accessibility and local focus. These too are civilizing missions
in that domestic production (guopian) is promoted as a good object, a reason to go to
the cinema. This too has historical resonance, when the KMT supported guopian in
the 1960s as a policy of Mandarin language production, which soon overpowered
the prolific Taiwanese language film industry. Again, 20 years later the New
Cinema was launched by the government studio’s “low capital, high production”
policy, designed to attract a new, more educated audience to guopian movies at a
time when Hong Kong imports were dominant.6 But the latest round of civilizing
mission was pursued by the DPP, the KMT’s implacable antagonist.
The short film Guopian Anna, “Domestic Film Alright,” was commissioned by
Taiwan’s Government Information Office as a public service announcement in
2004. Screened as a trailer in Taipei cinemas, the short combined antiquarian
silent-film style with sophisticated music and digital graphics.7 Its message:
come see our new, local movies – different, refreshing, and way better than you
 Introduction 3
thought. The 35mm film was made by young, independent filmmaker Wu
Misen, featuring the then director of GIO, Lin Jialong, as “Brother Dragon” in
a series of romantic pursuits. The object is the silent, listless Anna, a beautiful
emblem of Taiwan-made films. The film’s title plays on the name of Domestic
Film Anna: a pun on the Hokkien “An-la,” everything all right, no worries. In
the film, Brother Dragon is given one hundred ways of courting Anna (read
Domestic, locally made film) in which motifs and gags are lifted from In the Mood
for Love, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and A City of Sadness, as well as Taiwan
pop- music idols. By example and by exhortation, young audiences are urged to
seek out, pursue, and energize Domestic Film Anna.
To improve local films’ reputation, the short presents a “creative treatment of
actuality,” placing local films in the company of international icons in hopes of
narrowing the gap between them. John Grierson’s gloss on documentary is useful
because it changes focus from pedagogy to persuasion, and even seduction. Guopian
Anna seeks to alert and allure younger audiences to the domestic films’ appeal,
boosting localism via associated global cachet. The film tries to carve out a space in
which guopian may once again entertain Taiwan viewers, plotting a middle course
between global milestones and local hits. With no more studio production in
Taiwan, with the business of exhibiting popular film ceded to Hollywood movies,
Taiwan filmmakers must somehow ply their craft, searching out promising mate-
rial, funding, and audiences. Guopian Anna tries to wean Taiwan audiences from
their dependence on foreign entertainment, just as Wu Feng, in his many guises,
redeems a people attached to older, uncivilized ways.

Political commentaries, cinematic accounts

Taiwan is a maelstrom of charged political, cultural, and social contestation.
Despite an educated, cosmopolitan people, its democratic and demotic practices
are strangely hermetic. This is another reason for the heterogeneous, unsettled
quality of “Cinema Taiwan.” The island itself has recently attracted insightful
political commentary from the left.8 This is a welcome change from the cardboard
role it played during the Cold War and after, as “Free China.” No longer is Taiwan
just an anti-communist rampart, just as the PRC is no longer unequivocally
socialist and progressive. Regionally, Hong Kong is now securely within a national
fold instead of the British empire, and Taiwan, once the sole, legitimate represen-
tative of China, is a stateless country, like such fraught places as Tibet, Xinjiang,
Chechnya, or Palestine. Taiwan must work constantly to free itself from shackling
roles imposed by various global forces, some of which were acceptable and even
welcomed in the past. Internationally, Taiwan works like a lab experiment in
national self-definition. Domestically, though Taiwan politics and media often is a
free-for-all, it is still emphatically free. While Taiwan’s ruling party is hardly
secure, the vociferousness and venom of its critics testifies to a brutally robust
democratic public arena.
Given the excruciating farce of the March 2004 presidential election, when the
incumbent was charged with faking his own assassination, the status of national
4 Darrell William Davis
legitimacy is hard-fought and precarious. For weeks afterward, the KMT blue
camp staged huge demonstrations calling the election a tawdry burlesque, as waves
of recounts and court cases sought to resolve the crisis. Two years later, President
Chen found himself fighting impeachment for corruption in his party and imme-
diate family. In ordinary life, a mood of collective frustration, chagrin, and recalci-
trance is palpable – not unique to Taiwan, of course. There is “a measure of
disillusionment with the quality of domestic politics,” though this has not yet
dampened Taiwanese nationalism, drily notes Wang Chaohua.9
What interests commentators is Taiwan’s shift from authoritarian paternalism
to an open society, participatory, contested, and highly fraught. It has mutated
from a right-wing autocracy and bitter antagonist of Asian socialism into an island
of diversity, democratic, peaceful but still profoundly divided, while remaining a
no-less-implacable foe of the PRC. Since the KMT’s toppling in 2000, the Taiwan
Strait remains a flashpoint, despite increasing economic investment across the
waters. Chen Shui-bian’s embattled administration is so loathed by PRC bosses
that there have been historic gestures of détente between the opposition KMT and
the CCP on the Mainland.10
Historically, Taiwan people have carried their fate with resilient aplomb, but
deep striations and scars mark the society: colonial, military, ethnolinguistic, class,
regional, and generational polarization. Little wonder Taiwan’s recent film culture
is seen in terms of sadness, invoking Hou’s famous film, and prompting wonder at
what a post-sadness era might be.11 Looking out, Taiwan’s geopolitical status is
ambiguous, behaving like a well-armed state but unable to be one in the world’s
eyes; looking in, often shrill assertions of ethnicity, crass politicization, and uneasy
pluralism are heard, given the island’s waning economic prospects and an aging
population.
In Taiwan we see roiling confluence of political, institutional, and commercial
forces, and this disperses creative and critical energies through a mediatized social
body. This starkly contrasts with Taiwan’s New Cinema of the 1980s, a movement
defining itself in opposition to the authoritarianism of martial law (1947–1987).
Taiwan New Cinema was a reaction to state power and concentration of cultural
production; this gave the New Cinema immediate political significance, and
allowed some latitude from marketplace constraints. Its liberal exception to a state-
run didactic cinema earned the movement great international respect.12 As Chia-
chi Wu says in her essay, Taiwan New Cinema expressed powerful allegorical
functions of would-be national legitimacy, playing to a global stage for politically
significant cinemas of the world. Now, however, “Cinema Taiwan,” as critical-
creative responses to local film’s dispersion, is disunified, scattered, and without the
polarizing power of state repression. Taiwan’s contemporary conflicts and confu-
sions produce, and are manifested by “Cinema Taiwan,” but the films do not
allegorize them within a movement the way New Cinema did.
Unlike Taiwan cinema, a coherent film culture within a national cinema
framework, Cinema Taiwan is heterogeneous. This concept does not assume a
norm of narrative feature filmmaking within industrial patterns of commercial
production and consumption. Rather, Cinema Taiwan includes alternative
 Introduction 5
modes of film form, storytelling, marginal voices, and practices that question
cinema’s position as a national culture. It chips away at normative presumptions,
fragmenting commonly held assumptions of the movies as primarily national,
artistic, or commercial enterprises. Because guopian or Chinese-language movies
have been so emasculated in the marketplace, commercial objectives are just as
risky and challenging as those from activist filmmakers or the avant-garde.
For over a decade Hong Kong and Hollywood blockbusters have ruled
Taiwan’s screens, but more recently the colonized have gotten restless. Imagina-
tive financiers, marketing experts, producers, and performers have begun to
diverge from narrative styles that have worn thin with the public. Such changes
are noted, and mostly applauded by intellectuals, who classify the varieties of
local exemption. Sometimes these are repudiations, directly contesting commer-
cial channels and textual address (Blue Gate Crossing; Formula 17); others selectively
adapt Hollywood modes of production to local genre conventions (Double Vision);
yet another approach rekindles cinematic technique from indigenous qualities
unique to Taiwan’s popular traditions (kinetic puppet epic Legend of the Sacred Stone
(Sheng shi chuanshuo, Chris Huang, 2000), Splendid Float (Yan guang si she gewutuan,
Zero Chou, 2004) a magic realist road movie with Taoist transvestite shamans).
Yet another response is a recent cycle of popular, essentially humanist documen-
taries such as Gift of Life (Shengmin, Wu Yifeng, 2004), commemorating survivors
of the great earthquake of 1999, Let It Be (Wu mi le, Yan Lanquan and Zhuang
Yizeng, 2005), a portrait of four southern rice farmers, and Viva Tonal – The Dance
Age (Tiaowu shidai, Jian Weisi and Guo Zhendi, 2003). Another success was
Burning Dreams (Gewu zhongguo, Wayne Peng, 2003), about a Taiwanese dance
instructor working in Shanghai. All these films crossed over to mainstream
awareness and success, sometimes due to public endorsements by popular politi-
cians.13 Because of what twenty-first century Taiwan has become, Cinema
Taiwan too is unpredictable, unlikely to resolve into a clearly focused big picture.
If Taiwan New Cinema was a reaction to a Cold War propaganda industry, it is
hard to now outline something like a constellation, let alone any concerted move-
ment. Like its fractured ethnic and political composition, today’s Cinema Taiwan
is at once more market-driven and cosmopolitan, more jagged and factional, with
many film cultures jostling in a wide array of representational assertions.
This is why Cinema Taiwan is interesting now: all this diversity and disunity,
a dramatic, conflicting area full of both tension and creation. If this is a cinema
of sadness, it is not one of passive resignation. There are few places in the world
so busy pursuing a huge range of exciting cultural activity. Taiwan’s slowing
economy does not diminish cultural or political expectations; rather, cultural
narratives are enriched by contradictions faced daily by Taiwan people. Shrinking
economic fortunes and a contentious, prickly society do not make for happiness,
but they also present challenges and opportunities for narrative arts like film,
theater, and literature. Performative arts (like scandals and party politics) are the
greatest beneficiaries, thanks to an abundance of excitable electronic and print
coverage. Politics, accordingly, partakes liberally in outlandish melodrama, sensa-
tionalism, and excitement. As a combination of all these, Cinema Taiwan can be
6 Darrell William Davis
understood in terms of its pluralism, freely mixing films and video across a spec-
trum of commercial, experimental, ethnographic, and oppositional impulses. Here
there is passionate partisanship, a fiery pluralism far removed from our tepid
appeals to tolerance in Western multiculturalism.

Politics, popularity, state of the arts

Institutionalization of film studies in Taiwan is evident, bringing a great prolifer-
ation of objects, methods, and approaches, with improved access to local and
regional texts. There are several reasons for this flowering, including lowered
barriers to information and communication technology, aligned with cultural
and political factors. Since 2000 there has been an explosion of DVDs, online
community activism, and greater acceptance of Taiwan’s vernacular forms. In
the past, the existence of Taiwanese language films (taiyu pian) was noted, but not
much pursued. Now investigation of these, along with puppet theaters, regional
performing arts, records of the Japanese colonial era (in both popular and official
forms), Christian missions, heritage preservation, aboriginal programs etc, are
encouraged, exhibited, and often funded by government cultural agencies. There
is now much fuller recognition and appreciation of artifacts and texts from eras
dominated by former taskmasters.
These texts are handled using critical tools adapted from abroad. The prolifera-
tion of analytical strategies can be seen in the essays to follow. Every Taiwan
scholar in this volume has significant experience of the West, with higher degrees
from the US or France, while every Western contributor has long experience with
Taiwan and its cinema. As elsewhere, film scholarship in Taiwan has cleared path-
ways to and away from the medium, using movies as platforms to discuss every-
thing from Ah-bian to Zizek.14 Films and film culture are less specific objects or
targets of specialized study than pretexts; they provide means to think visually,
imaginatively, and laterally. Far from being reduced to mere heuristic, this cine-
matic imagination opens to wider, cross-media issues, consolidating film scholar-
ship as a postcolonial, post-propaganda civilizing act. Accordingly there are
limitations to this volume, since Cinema Taiwan is conflicting, moving beneath
and beyond directors, genres, and feature narratives. As a moving target, Cinema
Taiwan offers enticements we cannot always follow: key films like Café Lumiere (Hou
Hsiao-hsien, 2004), Three Times (Hou, 2005), and sex musical The Wayward Cloud
(Tsai Ming-liang, 2005). Other scholars will certainly take on these challenging
works.
Cinema Taiwan lacks the coherence and national integrity of the earlier New
Cinema, because it’s too fragmented and colliding. Cinema Taiwan is interde-
pendent with conflicting notions of nation-statehood, and occasionally, alto-
gether indifferent to nationality. Cinema Taiwan therefore moves away from old
models of national identity without resolving into something definably new, still
very much in process. Sometimes the relations between film representations and
national politics is visible and explicit, as spelled out clearly in Kuei-fen Chiu’s
discussion of new documentaries. But at others, the relation is invisible or simply
 Introduction 7
not apparent (see Fran Martin and Darrell Davis’ chapters on popular works). In
other contexts the framework is popular, but also urban and mediatized, as
revealed in the chapters by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie. And, Cinema
Taiwan is international, supported by distant lines of finance and critical recog-
nition like Pyramide (France), Pusan Production Plan (S. Korea), and Shochiku
(Japan). Taiwan’s leading directors enjoy support from international investors,
distributors, and arts boards who see in these talented artists globally compelling
“labels,” rather than just commercial film directors. If these New Cinema figures
are now canonized, then young filmmakers back in Taiwan have to strike out in
other directions.
Since the 1980s English-language scholars and critics have been taken with
Taiwan films. For Fredric Jameson, the emphasis is on Taipei’s globality in
“Remapping Taipei.”15 In its high-rise confinement, urban alienation, casual
betrayals, and cruel twists of chance, Jameson despecifies the city’s precise
sociopolitical coordinates, which results in a “blurring” of Taipei’s local flavor, as
Ping-hui Liao notes in our preface. Seeking account of Taipei itself, as well as
Yang’s modernist rendition of it, may be too much, since Jameson is neither
geographer nor anthropologist. Nonetheless, Jameson’s (over)emphasis on Yang’s
narrative sophistication betrays surprise that such rough materials as Taiwan
city-folk yield such modernist and postmodernist form. Of course that’s part of
Jameson’s point, that postmodernism is inherent in the third world, just as the
third world dwells within (first) world capitals. Overall, the astonishment that
Yang, Hou, Tsai and others came out of “nowhere” – because that’s exactly
where Taiwan is in the minds of even the most appreciative of Western film
critics – discloses a presumption about sources of innovation in the cinema. The
charge here is not ethnocentrism so much as exoticism, the explorer’s outlook,
where effort and taste is rewarded by an adventurousness that can find new,
surplus esthetic value, wherever it surfaces. This broadminded liberalism is
behind American doctrines of multiculturalism because it showcases “our” will-
ingness to take “their”’ works seriously, from outside Western canons, coming
from “nowhere.” More specifically, the explorer’s mentality is essential for
festival programmers who scour the world for new waves and discoveries. But we
can champion Taiwan and other geographically marginal filmmakers without
awarding extra points or a handicap for remoteness even from Asian centers of
production. Recall Jameson trying to locate Yang in relation to some Mainland
Chinese directors, now forgotten. This shows him falling back into concentric
thinking, pointing out what he takes to be obvious, “that Taipei does not possess
the profile or the historical resonance and associations of the great traditional
mainland cities, nor is it that all-encompassing closed urban space of a virtual
city-state like Hong Kong” (120). That may be, but there is a payoff, Cinema
Taiwan, a place that’s nowhere, at least in terms of a regular nation, but still
productive, a protean country that only exists onscreen.
More positively, Jameson and other Taiwan cinema analysts have kept these
filmmakers on the map in retrospectives and college film courses in the West, just
when Taiwan directors were having trouble reaching local audiences. Taiwan
8 Darrell William Davis
cinema is one of survival, speaking to audiences worldwide, even extending to
foreign funds for its filmmakers to keep working.16 They have enjoyed a second life
on the festival circuit, in retrospectives, and museums. At home, these filmmakers
are recognized; but the audience for their work is not there and if it were up to the
local theatrical market they would have already retired to other fields. Today, Hou
Hsiao-hsien is a celebrity in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and maybe Paris but his
films do not sell, despite strenuous efforts to cast brooding stars and shoot youth-
oriented stories. This is just one of the many paradoxes of Cinema Taiwan. If it
comes out of nowhere – out of martial law, colonial trauma, and perennial
marginalization – then maybe the cinema is where Taiwan finds its most apt,
eloquent expression. Cinema Taiwan – a place where Taiwan is located by
movies, rather than Taiwan(ese) cinema.
The volume you hold is a foray into the cultural politics of contemporary
Taiwan film, which brings into focus several developments since the famous
milestones of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, et al.
This cinema’s artistic reputation remains imposingly high, despite over a decade
passing since Hou’s Good Men, Good Women (1995), the final film in his Taiwan
trilogy. Starting with this film, the essays in this book take stock since the New
Cinema, but they are not limited to the last decade. Certainly, the esthetic quality
and historical richness of the New Cinema and subsequent developments quali-
fies Taiwan film as a civilizing force in world cinema.
Like Guopian Anna, these essays try to cross over, spanning the gaps that structure
ordinary expectations of local cinema. There are updates, as well as linkages across
different worlds: between “old masters” of the New Cinema and young talent with
different horizons and ambitions; between fiction features and documentary story-
tellers; and between innovations of the art cinema and attempts to re-grow a
popular audience for entertainment. In this volume, we introduce a number of
brand-new texts, topics, and approaches: contemporary hit features little-known
outside Taiwan; wakeup calls to jaded urban youth; crossovers from pop literature
and music; new formations of gender/sexuality; the impact of nonfiction and auto-
biography; re-readings of popular classics in light of contemporary cultural prac-
tices. All these are civilizing in the sense that they give vent to social pressures, and
seek out levers to shift film culture into new expressive registers.
Interest keeps rising in the cinema of Taiwan, going beyond auteurist modes
(Bordwell, 2005; Yeh and Davis, 2005), vestiges of the New Cinema (Berry and Lu,
eds, 2005; M. Berry, 2005), and the nation-state argument (Yip, 2004).17 The
authors in Cinema Taiwan consider knotty problems of popularity, conflicts between
transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking
as emerging modes of address and attempts to forge vibrant film cultures em-
bedded in identity politics, gender/sexuality, and community activism. Ambitious,
insightful, and challenging, the essays here will draw your attention to a globally
significant field of cultural production.
Given the complexities of Taiwan film culture and scholarship, it is probably
arbitrary to try to thematize them. Nonetheless, the essays in this book can be seen
from at least three angles: the politics of representation; new uses for popular texts;
 Introduction 9
and what can be called “state of the arts,” the key esthetic decisions made by film-
makers, as delineated by astute critical analysis. Reversing this formulation (art of
the state) may hint at Taiwan life as a narrated show, a shadow play of nation-
(state)hood tantalizingly flickering across movie, television, and computer screens.
Though hard to come to a definitive summary, we could say the narrative flashes
captured in Cinema Taiwan work like a microcosm, signposting recent episodes in
Taiwan film. In this regard, the collection is an album of exemplary moments,
something like the various incarnations of Wu Feng, faithfully performing his civic
duties through the years.

Politics of representation
Taiwan’s politics of representation are explored in essays by Kuei-fen Chiu,
Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, and Robert Chi. Kuei-fen Chiu’s essay critiques
the New Cinema, comparing it unfavorably with contemporary activist docu-
mentaries that lend images and voices to “the voiceless.” Chiu’s argument
directly confronts “performativity” in three films about marginal communities.
Taiwan aboriginal tribes dependent on tourism (and therefore on visual inscrip-
tion), lesbian/gay communities in Taipei, and the historical salvage of a jazz age
in Taiwan’s occupation era: all these are voiceless, in the sense of suffering
discrimination, or just being taboo, like that of the 228 Incident in the late 1980s,
when Hou and his team were preparing the groundbreaking A City of Sadness.18
Berry’s chapter considers the role of the “fantastic” in Chang Tso-chi’s films.
Closely analyzing The Best of Times (2002), Berry argues that the fantastic works
as a double or stand-in for the socially marginalized and dispossessed. He intro-
duces the idea of “haunted realism” to link the ghost film with postcolonial
critique – not only of contemporary Taiwan society, but of realism in particular
New Cinema films, and cinematic techniques of realism in general.
In “The Impossible Task of Taipei Films,” Yomi Braester discusses cinematic
visualization of the city in terms of ongoing projects on the esthetics, and politics of
demolition. Using the trope of the crime scene hazard tape, Braester weaves
together fiction and non-fiction, Taiwan and Japan, and fantasy–ethnography to
yield unexpected insights on Taipei as junction between physical location and
urban discourse. Of special interest is what used to be a ubiquitous feature of
Taiwan’s cities, the veterans’ villages (juancun), which have in recent years been
systematically razed to make way for new, middle-class neighborhoods suitable for
shopping and other, more profitable pursuits. Braester brings this ethnographic,
activist dimension into dialog with the art cinema, especially the films of Tsai
Ming-liang.
It is well known that both Taiwan and the PRC were and still are ultra-sensitive
about media representations of each other. By approaching Taiwan’s difficult
nationhood through its ambiguous representations in Mainland Chinese cinema,
Robert Chi finds a counter-colonial regime at work. Chi reworks Lacanian notions
of the mirror phase to discover variations on mimicry and dialectical reflections.
But “just who is mimicking whom,” and with what sort of historical baggage, is a
10 Darrell William Davis
question that takes us into the uncanny, with China coming to mimic the esthetics
of Hou Hsiao-hsien. This step takes cinema representations well beyond the
conventions of Maoist narration, and later Fifth Generation accounts of Taiwan.
Like Robert Chi, Chia-chi Wu takes a comparative approach, describing the posi-
tion of Taiwan New Cinema when launched on the international festival circuit.
Wu’s essay is an analytical account of New Cinema’s strategic engagements with
Western programming categories, noting the alliances between practices and
theory, film styles, and criticism.

Popular texts
New approaches to the popular are visible in the essays by Hsiao-hung Chang,
Robert Ru-shou Chen, James Tweedie, and Fran Martin. Hsiao-hung Chang
subjects Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to a witty interrogation using globalization,
stuntwork, and Chinese qing gong (flight power). Given her interest in corporeal
and medical diagnosis, she speculates on the skeins of transnationality hiding in
wuxia films’ various guises. Ang Lee’s triumph is provocatively positioned as an
“outsider” film, upsetting comfortable categories like national and transnational
cinema. In this manner Chang contributes a valuable entry in the clinical trials of
this seminal film, and in the genre of martial arts.
Ru-shou Robert Chen and James Tweedie both write about the Chen Kuo-fu
hit from 2002, Double Vision. This surprise box office winner is a stylish fusion of
horror, film noir, and specifically Taiwanese themes. Chen points out that this
well-crafted and marketed genre film – something unheard of in contemporary
Taiwan movies – shows signs of contradiction and ambiguity. He puts the film into
an argument about realism and digital imagery, and also gives his essay a surprise
ending, a sudden special effect. James Tweedie wants to place Double Vision in a line
of city films, comparing it with urban figuration in Taiwan’s art cinema, but also
showing the continuities with city films from Europe. Enchantment, disillusion-
ment, nostalgia, and dystopia are all themes in Tweedie’s argument, which draws
on theories of art and architecture in making his case. Tweedie also presents valu-
able material on the evolution of Taipei onscreen, giving special thought to Tsai
Ming-liang’s films, with their unique aura of affectionate decay.
Fran Martin contributes a perceptive piece on the youth film Blue Gate Crossing
(2002), tying its tomboy narrative to contemporary pan-Asian markets. She
proposes that Yee Chih-yen’s film marks the moment when lesbian identity poli-
tics enters fully into Taiwan’s entertainment culture, accounting for the film’s
corporate backing, its textual appeal, and structured ambiguities that offer plea-
sures to both heterosexual and gay, Taiwan and international audiences. In this
way Martin avoids the antinomies of despecification/respecification that many
oppositional readings use. Darrell Davis’ essay, “Trendy in Taiwan,” reflects on
the question of popularity in contemporary film, and links directly with Martin’s
fine discussion of multicoding in recent films like Blue Gate Crossing, but it also
brings in intertextual, cross-media factors like the puppet theater, television, and
comics.
 Introduction 11
State of the arts
Finally, state of the art: Taiwan cinema continues its inspiring procession of
esthetic fertility. This artistry is finely outlined by Peter Rist, Yung Hao Liu, James
Udden, and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. State of the art means more than advanced
special effects or elaborate technique; it is the state of criticism, history, and theory
too. These four essays are a tour de force of careful detail and synoptic judgment,
remarkable in their efforts to pinpoint and analyze various filmmakers’ work. They
range from the historical (Rist on King Hu) to a reframing or remedial judgment of
King Hu’s most famous film (Liu on Tsai Ming-liang) to a seminal work in the New
Cinema (Udden on Hou Hsiao-hsien). Peter Rist offers an engaging reassessment
of the work of King Hu, detailing Hu’s essentially theatrical, yet experimental
impulse in revitalizing martial arts (wuxia). Rist makes the case that King Hu
deserves greater prominence in the film historical canon for his ingenious solutions
to technical problems. It’s not often that weighty academic judgments are made in
one-word sentences: “Stunning!”
Yung Hao Liu moves to “visible signatures,” seeing the hand of director Tsai
Ming-liang in his sly subversion of older martial arts traditions in Goodbye Dragon Inn
(2003). In a highly original approach, Liu employs the French literature on
framing and staging to account for Tsai’s intervention in heroic Chinese films of
the past. Liu shows how Tsai’s film enacts a criticism, in every sense of the term, as
well as homage to King Hu’s classic film. James Udden also encounters directorial
signature, seeing a style shift – a sudden change in director Hou’s cinematography
in Good Men, Good Women. After careful description, Udden queries the role and
significance of stylistic change, arguing that Hou’s radical alteration has implica-
tions not only for his own body of work and Taiwan cinema’s reputation (as
national cinema), but also for Asian film generally. Emilie Yeh offers a thorough
analysis of historical and historiographical issues, bringing to the fore a new para-
digm of genre criticism, centering on wenyi (literature-and-art). In a wide-ranging
study, she argues for a recasting of generic categories to more accurately capture
historical realities of audience experience.
It is significant that every essay here is profoundly historical, in line with Taiwan
cinema’s traditional sensitivity to vestiges of the past, as well as to the rise and fall of
past authority figures. This historical facet lends a happy contingency to whatever
orthodoxy currently holds power, whether that is a critical, theoretical, or political
regime. In sum, Cinema Taiwan vividly presents Taiwan film’s engagement and
struggle with politics, art, culture, and entertainment. The Cinema Taiwan collec-
tion resonates beyond Chinese-language film cultures, addressing a wide range of
issues on the state of cinema as a form of popular, yet challenging art in the Asia
Pacific.
12 Darrell William Davis
Notes
1 In fact trickery was involved; Wu Feng let the tribesmen “harvest” a special surrogate,
dressed in red, instead of the usual crop of Chinese farmers; the special red man turned
out to be master Wu Feng himself, found after his beheading, and this so impressed the
natives that they supposedly gave up headhunting forthwith.
2 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 18–19.
3 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 123.
4 Mizou and Liang Xinhua, eds, Death of the New Cinema (Taipei: Tangshan, 1987). See the
illustration on p. 84.
5 Some of these new festivals include Taipei International Film festival, Taiwan Biennial
Documentary Film Festival, the Feminist Film Festival, Ocean Film Festival, Animation
Film Festival, etc.
6 Yeh and Davis, 57–59.
7 I saw Guopian Anna at a multiplex showing mostly foreign films, in late 2004. It was run
before a screening of Olivier Assayas’ Clean (2004), starring Maggie Cheung Man-yuk.
8 Perry Anderson, “Stand-Off in Taiwan,” London Review of Books, June 3, 2004; Benedict
Anderson, “Western Nationalism, Eastern Nationalism: Is there a Difference that
Matters?” New Left Review 9 (May–June 2001): 31–42. See also the roundtable discussion
among Chu Tien-hsin, Tang Nuo, Hsia Chu-joe, and Hou Hsiao-hsien; Benedict
Anderson, “Tensions in Taiwan,” New Left Review 28 (July–August 2004): 19–42.
9 Wang Chaohua, “A Tale of Two Nationalisms,” New Left Review 32 (March–April 2005):
84.
10 KMT chairman Lien Chan’s visit to the Mainland in April 2005 was unprecedented since
the KMT fled China in 1949. He repeated the visit in 2006, with a large delegation of
legislators, and received a basket of economic and trade incentives for further integration
with the PRC. Lien Chan’s historic audience with Party secretary Hu Jintao is a classic
case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” though that apparent friendship is contin-
gent on local political conditions on both sides, and many politicians and commentators
presented his gesture of détente as a betrayal of Taiwan.
11 See Meiling Wu, “Postsadness Taiwan New Cinema,” in Chinese Language Film: Historiog-
raphy, Poetics, Politics, eds Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 2005), 76–95. The “sadness” description was used earlier by Huang
Ren in Beiqing Taiyu pian [The sorrow of Taiwanese-language films] (Taipei: Wanxiang,
1994).
12 This scenario needs to be qualified, since Taiwan New Cinema was a movement
enabled by Central Motion Picture Corporation, the film studio owned and operated by
the KMT, looking to recoup a declining film market. It failed to arrest that decline but it
secured instead a small but prestigious global market. The gilded reputation of Taiwan
New Cinema, exemplified by Hou, Yang, Tsai et al., was cemented by critics like Peggy
Chiao Hsiung-ping and Edmond Huang Jianye, who argued strenuously for the move-
ment’s liberationist impulses. Taiwan New Cinema represented a way out from crass
commercialism, as well as government propaganda. See Yeh and Davis, 62–65.
13 Former president Lee Teng-hui ensured Viva Tonal’s fortune by repeatedly talking it up
in the media and even had a private screening at his residence. President Chen Shui-
bian went on record to say Gift of Life had made him weep, and urged every Taiwanese to
see it. One was Chen rival and mayor of Taipei Ma Ying-jeou who said it made him
weep, too. Other documentaries taking the “politician-promotional” path are Stone
Dream, to which President Chen was invited and Jump! Boys, attended by Premier Frank
Hsieh Chang-ting. See Kuo Li-hsin, “Sentimentalism and De-Politicization: Some
Problems of Documentary Culture in Contemporary Taiwan,” Documentary Box 25
(August 2005): 16–23.
 Introduction 13
14 Ah-bian is the nick-name of Chen Shui-bian, president of Taiwan since 2000 and
former chair of the Democratic Progressive Party.
15 The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 114–157.
16 Hou has been supported by Shochiku; Yang by Pony Canyon (Japan); Tsai by Flach
Pyramide (France) and Chen Kuo-fu by Columbia-Asia (Hollywood). The“cinema of
survival” idea is from an anonymous referee’s comments on the manuscript.
17 David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2005); Chris Berry and Feii Lu, eds, Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and
After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005); Michael Berry, Speaking in Images:
Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2005); June
Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004); for Yeh and Davis, see note 2.
18 228 Incident: in February-March 1947, KMT troops and police attacked the civilian
population on a pretext of quelling Communist-inspired revolt, killing thousands across
the island and destroying trust in the mainlander administration of Taiwan. Hou’s film
is set during this crisis, about an extended Taipei family that experienced the turmoil.