Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction
- 1 Charting the Course: Defining the Taiwanese Cinematic ‘Tradition’
- 2 Taiwanese–Italian Conjugations: The Fractured Storytelling of Edward Yang's The Terrorizers and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up
- 3 Mapping Hou Hsiao-hsien's Visuality: Setting, Silence and the Incongruence of Translation in Flight of the Red Balloon
- 4 Tsai Ming-liang's Disjointed Connectivity and Lonely Intertextuality
- 5 The Chinese/Hollywood Aesthetic of Ang Lee: ‘Westernized’, Capitalist … and Box Office Gold
- 6 Filming Disappearance or Renewal? The Ever-Changing Representations of Taipei in Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
1 - Charting the Course: Defining the Taiwanese Cinematic ‘Tradition’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction
- 1 Charting the Course: Defining the Taiwanese Cinematic ‘Tradition’
- 2 Taiwanese–Italian Conjugations: The Fractured Storytelling of Edward Yang's The Terrorizers and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up
- 3 Mapping Hou Hsiao-hsien's Visuality: Setting, Silence and the Incongruence of Translation in Flight of the Red Balloon
- 4 Tsai Ming-liang's Disjointed Connectivity and Lonely Intertextuality
- 5 The Chinese/Hollywood Aesthetic of Ang Lee: ‘Westernized’, Capitalist … and Box Office Gold
- 6 Filming Disappearance or Renewal? The Ever-Changing Representations of Taipei in Contemporary Taiwanese Cinema
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
What if we stopped asking whether cinema can be some sort of magic door opening onto absolute time, and instead asked about cinema's role in the construction of different temporalities in different societies, politics, cultures, classes and so forth. (Berry, in Khoo and Metzger, 113)
Historical Context, Cultural Background
Contemporary Taiwanese cinema (from the 1980s to the present) must be understood in relation to, and in reaction against, earlier forms of film-making on the island. Though I do not consider the large body of films that were produced between 1895 and the early 1980s to comprise the New Taiwanese cinematic ‘tradition’, one cannot understand the context out of which this tradition arose without looking back into history. One must look beyond the frame, so to speak, to see within it.
The earliest films which were produced on the island of Taiwan were Japanese products, examples of ‘imperial Japanese film culture’ (Gaskett 3). Japan controlled the majority of media content in the earlier half of the century, a control that was tied directly to a rapid succession of Japanese military victories. This control extended in both ways: not only did Japanese filmmakers ‘set up shop’ in their extended empire, but non-Japanese filmmakers from within that empire were drawn away from their own countries and into Japan.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Taiwanese Cinema in FocusMoving Within and Beyond the Frame, pp. 14 - 46Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014