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The first chapter of this book, “Framing Taiwan Cinema: Perspectives on History in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times”, which is intended to be read alongside a screening of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2005 film Three Times, provides an accessible introduction to Taiwan cinema by synthesizing in one location key moments in Taiwan’s film history. While the locus of this chapter is Taiwan’s Mandarin state films, the chapter includes intersections with other national film traditions and describes how Mandarin film gradually replaced the vibrant Taiwanese-dialect film (taiyu pian) tradition in the 1970s. In order to do so, it traces the era’s prominent figures, movements, and dates. This includes a summary of Taiwan film in the early 1960s, the influence of Hong Kong film, especially in 1963, with director Li Hanxiang’s The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), a brief account of Taiwan’s so-called “golden age” film in the early 1970s, patriotic war films of the mid-1970s, and adaptations of nativist literature by the state in late 1970s films. Overall, this chapter provides an overview of Taiwan cinema and places in position a scaffolding of historical details and information essential for the analyses presented in the following chapters.

The chapter analyzes the sense of “Japanese” in the film Café Lumière, in other words, the fact that many of the Japanese audience felt that it was a “Japanese film.” The “Japaneseness” of course did not simply occur at the site of reception but was also embedded as a strategic commodity, produced by multiple Japanese companies: Shôchiku, Asahi Newspaper, Sumitomo Corp., Satellite Theater, and IMAGICA. Hou states in an interview, “The theme of the film had already been decided from the beginning, and I was requested to make a Japanese film.” The chapter views the film as a success in creating a “common sense [kyôtsû-kankaku],” and its oxymoronic aspect—a Taiwan filmmaker’s Japanese film—is one of the film’s attractions. By adapting philosopher Ôhashi Ryôsuke’s concept of “systemic sense,” originated from Aristotle’s “common sense,” the chapter analyzes how the filmmaker made the oxymoron possible.

This chapter introduces the key historical, industrial, and aesthetic dimensions of the Taiwanese new wave. It emphasizes the relationship between this cinematic movement and Taiwan’s economic and spatial transformation in the period leading up to the new cinema. “Healthy realist” films of the 1960s address the circumstances of Taiwanese modernization before retreating into an idyllic countryside, but landmark omnibus films of the early 1980s (In Our Time and The Sandwich Man) confront this modern reality more directly. The chapter concludes with an extended treatment of the “master shot” aesthetic and the urban milieu visible in the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien. While he initially deployed long takes in nostalgic narratives and trained them on the vanishing spaces of rural Taiwan, Hou’s characters and his work as a whole eventually migrate to the city. Usually associated with roots-seeking narratives or historical epics, Hou’s films are equally significant as documents of Taiwanese urbanization.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's renowned trilogy of films on modern Taiwanese history—A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, and Good Men, Good Women—all travel back in time through the subjective portals of dream and reverie, fantasy, story worlds, memory, and intoxication. The first film of this trilogy derives its formal logic from the uneven temporality of memory; the second, whose Chinese title translates literally as “drama, dream, life”, is described by the director as “dream-like, like a wonderland”; and the third has been aptly characterized by one critic as a thoroughly “nocturnal” film, with its main character passing constantly through states of sleep and awakening, daydreaming, and inebriation. The close analysis here begins from the premise that these works offer important insights on the conjunction of memory, media, violence, and nationhood in contemporary discussions of the posthistoire.

Insufficient Taiwanese funding accounts in part for directors such as Tsai’s and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s French connections. Having set a precedent for working outside of the Sinophone world with Café Lumiere, shot and set in Japan with Japanese dialogue, pillar of Taiwanese cinema Hou went “further West” when he accepted an invitation from the Musée d’Orsay to make a film with at least one scene in the museum and starring French icon Juliette Binoche. Hou connected with France through Albert Lamorisse’s 1950s near-silent short, The Red Balloon (1956), which inspired Hou’s Sino-French feature, Flight of the Red Balloon (2007). Too loosely related to the original to be called a remake, Flight qualifies as a “makeover,” to invoke Andrew Horton’s term. Intertextual references to other art forms, such as painting (Félix Vallotton’s The Ball, 1888) and music (Camille Dalmais’ remake of Tsai Chin’s “Chin Chin”), contribute to Flight’s Sino-Frenchness.

The expansiveness of Wong Kar-wai's approach to intertextuality, citation, and borrowing, along with the dense cross-cultural, cross-medial matrix in which his films are situated suggest another angle on the director's position within the tradition of art cinema. Likewise, the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang also illustrates the reverberations of postmodernism in the arena of art cinema, a development that complicates the view of these directors as realists based on their reliance upon the long take. The idea of a cinema of time finds a further resonance in contemporary Chinese cinema beyond the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai. One notable figure who engages a similar problematic of temporal form and historicity is Jia Zhangke, one of the leading directors of the PRC's Sixth Generation. Jia's films assume a critical view of the official discourse of progress and market reform shaping China's new era.

This book focuses on the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wong Kar-wai, directors who have not only propelled Chinese cinema into the international spotlight in recent years, but also crafted a distinctive idiom, a cinema of time, across the realms of national and transnational film culture. The following chapters show the significance of this cinema of time as a response to the historical ruptures and political upheavals of modern Chinese history; a representational politics implicating questions of historiography, national identity, gender, and sexuality; and an active engagement with and reinvention of the modernist legacy of art cinema in response to globalization and shifting conceptions of narrativity in a post-classical film culture.

This chapter explores the interaction between phone and graphe. The first part reflects on the frequent silencing of the Chinese language in Western theory by isolating script from its real linguistic complexity. An analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien's film City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) shows how the figure of muteness can serve to contest such a bias by staging a complex, nonconventional interaction between different Sinophones, the Chinese script, and the medium of film. The second part provides a critique of the media politics in recent theory that equate the sonic with resistance and marginality. It looks at texts—such as Chinese glossolalic poetry and Han Shaogong's novel A Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao cidian)—that avail themselves of the complex, flexible, and multifaceted interaction between script and sound in Chinese.

Considering Ozu Yasujiro in Asia involves asking the role of discursive definitions of “Ozu” in the establishment of a transnational Ozu. This will be done with regard to Hasumi Shigehiko, whose Director Ozu Yasujiro (1983) is arguably the most influential book on Ozu in Japan. The chapter considers how Hasumi has helped create a transnational “Ozu” within Japan, in part by promoting another director, Hou Hsiao-hsien. The chapter sketches a triangulation in which a Taiwanese director becomes prominent in Japan via a critic looking at him through Ozu. It then explores Hasumi’s potential objections to this project. Not only has he disagreed with terming Hou “Ozuesque,” but his Ozu book begins with an argument against the very concept of “Ozuesque.” The relationships between Ozu and Hou that Hasumi enables are ultimately shaped by the theoretical and discursive context of imagining a border-crossing Ozu in 1980s and 1990s Japan.

This article traces some ways in which contemporary filmmakers have borrowed from and referred to the work of Ozu Yasujiro. In particular, the works of Wayne Wang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Suo Masayuki, and Abbas Kiarostami are discussed as adopting stylistic or thematic materials from Ozu’s films. Far from simply copying Ozu’s work, these filmmakers have freely transformed his techniques for their own specific ends. The chapter briefly describes the cultivation of the “Ozu brand” by the Schochiku studio. It also situates Ozu’s development as a director in the context of the influence of Hollywood on Japanese cinema, explaining how Ozu responded to American movie techniques in cultivating his own filmic style.

This chapter examines the symbolic logic of official nationalism and its metaphoric use of infrastructural development. It considers the tropes of migration and transportation in Taiwanese New Cinema and the early work of Hou Hsiao-Hsien. While poetry was the most relevant medium for reinscriptions of nationalism in Singapore, the early films of Hou, the major figure of the Taiwanese New Cinema movement, have provocatively recast elements of Kuomintang (KMT)-led development and modernity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the KMT’s emphasis on developing light industry, mechanizing agriculture, and improving transport and infrastructure during the 1960s and 1970s, which intensified in proportion to the weakening of Taiwan’s political standing.

This chapter looks at museums in the “ecomuseum” mode that serve to forge a “sense of place” for local communities. The Lanyang Museum (蘭陽博物館‎), opened in 2010, is a natural history museum focused on the “mountains, plains, and ocean” of Yilan county where it is located. The linchpin in a network of museums in the county, it both offers Yilan people cultural outlets and forms of cultural identification and stimulates tourism and economic development. Gold Museum Park (黃金博物園區‎), or Gold Ecological Park, struggled initially to live up to the ecomuseum ideal, but it eventually developed a close working relationship with the local community of Jinguashi, where it is located. The idea of the ecomuseum goes well beyond matters of local identity; it also sits well with a particular image of Taiwan and Taiwan national identity. With community-oriented ecomuseums dotting the national map, Taiwan becomes a nation of identifiable communities that are simultaneously unique and part of a diverse whole.