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Examining Hou Xiaoxian's Dust in the Wind (1986) and City of Sadness (1989) as case studies, this chapter tells the story of how Jiufen, a once sleeping mining community in Northeastern Taiwan, transformed into Taiwan's first site of historical origins almost entirely re-imagined by the Taiwan New Cinema, making it a truly postmodern nativist landmark. This chapter demonstrates how Dust’s rural representations not only stem from the filmmakers' practices of location shooting as cultural remembrance, but also provide spectators with a visual framework for recollecting their own memories. Jiufen is imaged as a paradigmatic Taiwanese hometown, a space in which one has learned to accept one’s unfulfilled aspirations. City re-shapes this image of Jiufen into a metonym for the entire nation, a home where all – regardless of identity – must remember and accept personal loss as part of their collective history. Through City, Jiufen materializes into a paradigmatic site of Taiwan’s coming of age, a heterotopic microcosm of the nascent Taiwanese imagined community. Thrown into the national spotlight by the Taiwan New Cinema, Jiufen transforms off-screen into a socially contested space, attracting the diverse and competing attentions of local and international tourists, preservationists, advertisers, filmmakers, historians, developers, and politicians.

This chapter explores how Hou Xiaoxian and Jia Zhangke have responded critically and reflexively to the commoditization and neoliberal redevelopment of place by challenging their own notions of authenticity and realism in two iconic shooting locations: Jiufen and Chongqing. By the production of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Jiufen has transformed into what Urry calls a “tourist place,” a nostalgia themed space where film-induced tourism has all but overwhelmed the historical aura so cherished by Hou. I argue that the film’s disruptions of Hou’s realist style are reflexive responses to his own sense of complicity in transforming Jiufen into a tourist place. Operating like an alienation effect, moments of spectacular excess expose how the spectator’s perception of Jiufen is far from natural, but mediated through images popularized by Hou’s own films. Whereas Hou seems unable to experience Jiufen outside the dichotomy of authenticity and inauthenticity, Jia makes meaningful sense of his hometown's neoliberal redevelopment through a critical lens shaped, surprisingly, by none other than Hou's cinema. It is with this translocal, cinephilic, and reflexive framework of place making that Jia Zhangke re-imagines the decimated landscapes of Chongqing in Still Life (2006). Rather than simply lament the disappearance of authenticity, the film carefully observes the place making practices of China's "floating population," who must depend on their resourcefulness to navigate a geography of ecological ruin. Importantly, these unexpected modes of agency show Jia's departure from the authoritative, detached, and privileged modes of place making institutionalized by Fifth Generation auteurs.