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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.

This chapter considers Taiwanese-born Hollywood director Ang Lee's position in Asian and world cinema. It first examines the characteristics of Lee's cinema, from globalization and cultural identity to homosexuality, patriarchy, feminism, and family. It then reviews the history of transnational Chinese cinema and Taiwan cinema, along with the characteristics of Taiwan New Cinema. It also evaluates Lee's position in Taiwan New Cinema; the historical context of his Academy Awards for Best Director that he won for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi; his influences as a director; his collaboration with American independent film producer James Schamus; and his miscellaneous projects. The chapter concludes by discussing Lee's place in the deepening relationship between American and Asian cinema.

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.

The redefinition of “Hong Kong” occasioned by the Handover coincided with the re-imagination of the city in other ways as well. Produced within this charged political context, Stanley Kwan's Hold You Tight mediates various local and global currents in queer cinema within Hong Kong screenscapes. Kwan redraws the line, yet again, between popular schlock and New Wave aesthetic experimentation. The film's New Wave auteur credentials are certainly hard to challenge. Hold You Tight won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival as well as the Teddy award for best gay/lesbian film at the festival. Set in Hong Kong and Taipei, Kwan solidifies an important regional link between Taiwan New Cinema and Hong Kong's “Second” Wave. The film offers the distinct vision of a cinematic auteur in addition to the common aesthetic and discursive currency needed to function in the international art film circuit as well as the regional market for Chinese-language cinema.

The second chapter proposes that the most important link between Mainland Chinese director Xie Jin and Taiwan director Li Xing’s films during the Cold War was the influence of Shanghai’s film tradition of realist aesthetics in the 1930s and 1940s, an aesthetic identifiable less by its accurate replication of reality on the screen than by its fascinating representation of the dominant ideology and distinctive expression of the production values of the time. This Shanghai tradition was the root of a common cinematic language that flourished on both sides of the Strait after 1949, even though there were unique parameters inherent to each film culture after the Communist victory in the civil war. Despite different political and historical situations, and despite the way these directors are usually framed in the polarizing terms of difference associated with the Cold War, the films of Xie Jin and Li Xing are remarkably similar. In order to make this case, three sets of films are analyzed so that one might recognize narrative similarities, consider the personal experiences which shaped Xie Jin’s and Li Xing’s craft, and observe the lineage of realist filmic techniques that link the two filmmakers in interesting ways.

This chapter examines the representation of gender identity and negotiation in Song Cunshou’s Story of Mother (1972) in order to make two primary observations. First, this early 1970s wenyi, or “literary art,” film released with state approval in Taiwan represents passive males who attempt to earn their right to be worthy patriarchs; women are portrayed as active participants whose actions are acceptable so long as they follow the rule of their fathers. Second, I propose that this model of representing gender changes very little through the middle of the decade, despite numerous social transformations on Taiwan’s political stage. This case is clarified by comparisons with Bai Jingrui’s Goodbye Darling (1970) and Li Xing’s mid-1970s film Land of the Undaunted (1975). Sequence breakdowns of two of the films are presented in order to consider narrative, structural, and aesthetic qualities. Theoretically, the essay re-evaluates Shu-mei Shih’s text Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific, which states that all negotiations in highly volatile situations are always gender negotiations; thus, patriarchal national systems might be undermined by disjunctions and contestations in the cultural and political arenas. Taken as a whole, the work of an important and engaging director, Song Cunshou, emerges as a primary reference point for a study of cinema in a complex, intriguing, transitional period in Taiwan’s history of the silver screen.

This chapter begins with a comprehensive introduction to the history of Anti-Japanese cinema in Taiwan from the 1949 retrocession until the 1960s. Because of Taiwan and Japan’s shared Cold War political interests and the fact that all three major film studios in Taiwan at the time were state-sponsored, there was a lack of films willing to address the complex role Taiwan played during the Pacific War. Lin excavates some of the overlooked cinematic examples of Taiwanese war films, from early documentary films to a now-lost 1957 film about the Musha Incident. Lin shows that the way the Second Sino-Japanese War eventually snuck its way back into mainstream films came somewhat surreptitiously via the genre of popular 007-style spy thrillers. In the 1970s shifts in Taiwan’s political status led to a more robust attempt to commemorate the war through a series of big-budget films centering on famous battles and illustrious generals.

This chapter argues that Home Sweet Home’s central concern is the politics, both aesthetic and ideological, of depicting migration within a narrative film. More specifically, this film presents the official state position that the Chinese Nationalist Party held regarding students from Taiwan who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This claim is based on the film’s release by a state studio, CMPC, under state supervision and censorship, in order to further the state’s ideological project through visual media. In order to shed light on the nuances and inflections of Home Sweet Home, and frame it within a wider context, this chapter also discusses two contemporary films that represent migration on the global stage: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf, 1974) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (La Noire de …, 1966). Common features in these films include exquisite cinematic imagery juxtaposed with complex protagonists who create a space for individuality and expressions of subjectivity. Close readings of these three films help illuminate the ways that Bai Jingrui’s aesthetic choices work both in conjunction and disjunction with the intentions of the Taiwan government in 1970.

Mukokuseki (literally, “nation-less”), is the practice of crossing, hybridization, and co-production. This chapter focuses on the concept of mukokuseki in the spatial imagination of Japanese gangster films or the yakuza genre, with a focus on the representation of Taipei. It consists of three parts: mukokuseki as a mode of production and urban representation; Taipei as an ambivalent site for mukokuseki ventures; and finally, Taiwan New Cinema scenes as desirable locations/edges for the stylistic reorientation of contemporary Japanese cinema.

This epilogue advances the thesis laid out in the main body of the book by demonstrating how a nation’s soft power in the form of cinema can attract aliens to adopt practices and to develop projects—whether within or without the said nation’s territory—that might, in turn, reinvigorate, rejuvenate, and resurrect that nation’s cinema, becoming, as it were, the latter’s afterlives. It contends that, nearly four decades after its inception, Taiwan New Cinema continues to exert its influence across the world, with evidence ranging from open acknowledgment of affinity and specific filmmaking practices (such as homage and remakes) to other routes and detours (e.g., migration). By focusing on how Taiwan cinema attracts aliens to the island, this Epilogue also turns the outward-bound notion of soft power on its head not so much to discount its impact abroad but rather, precisely, to account for the harvesting of its effects as they travel back home like a boomerang. It maps out the implications of this alien resurrection for our understanding of Taiwan cinema and its afterlives vis-à‎-vis the three keywords of the book’s subtitle (namely, authorship, transnationality, and historiography) and the overarching framework of soft power (here emphasizing the role played by Taiwanese institutions).