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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.

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.

The “city film” has been a prominent genre in recent world cinema. This chapter examines that series as a global phenomenon and views Taiwan’s city films within both an international and a domestic context. It begins by asking what the city film was in the first half of the twentieth century and how the pressures of globalization have transformed both urban space and its representation in cinema. It then considers the specific circumstances of Taiwan’s new wave, with particular emphasis on films located in Taipei. The chapter concludes with the work of Edward Yang, especially Taipei Story, a film that features scenes of interior design and meditations on modern urban architecture. Yang’s films accentuate acts of design, and they suggest that many of the traits habitually associated with cinema, especially its artificiality and staginess, its constant destruction and reinvention of reality, are also the defining qualities of the global megacity.

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.

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.

Ghosts and spirits are conspicuous presences in city films from Taiwan, and this chapter posits the cinematic spectre and the act of haunting as a response to the destruction that accompanies the development of the global city. It suggests that the “low,” often trashy genre of the ghost film is particularly attuned to what Rem Koolhaas calls the “junkspace” left over when one model of urban life has been rendered obsolete by another. The chapter considers both the immensely popular work of Chen Kuo-fu, especially Double Vision, and the slower-paced, more experimental films of Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng. Tsai’s films return repeatedly to vanishing and crumbling spaces and to ghostly figures that transgress the boundaries between inside and outside, foreign and domestic, past and present.