ABSTRACT

The book examines recent developments in Taiwan cinema, with particular focus on a leading contemporary Taiwan filmmaker, Wei Te-sheng, who is responsible for such Asian blockbusters as Cape No.7, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and Kano. The book discusses key issues, including: why (until about 2008) Taiwan cinema underwent a decline, and how cinema is portraying current social changes in Taiwan, including changing youth culture and how it represents indigenous people in the historical narrative of Taiwan. The book also explores the reasons why current Taiwan cinema is receiving a much less enthusiastic response globally compared to its reception in previous decades. 

part I|84 pages

International reception and Taiwan cinema

chapter 2|16 pages

Taiwan cinema across the globe

A Brazilian perspective

chapter 3|14 pages

Variables of transnational authorship

Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wei Te-sheng

chapter 4|14 pages

Taiwan cinema at the Venice Film Festival

From cultural discovery to cultural diplomacy

chapter 5|16 pages

Contesting the national, labelling the renaissance

Exhibiting Taiwan cinema at film festivals in Japan since the 1980s 1

chapter 6|11 pages

Programming Taiwan cinema

A view from the international film festival circuit

chapter 7|12 pages

Interventions on cultural margins

The case of the Chinese Film Forum UK and the presence of Taiwan cinema in the UK

part II|98 pages

Taiwan cinema and social change

chapter 8|18 pages

Becoming a nation

The shaping of Taiwan’s native consciousness in Wei Te-sheng’s post-millennium films

chapter 9|11 pages

Imagine there’s no China

Wei Te-sheng and Taiwan’s ‘Japan complex’

chapter 10|12 pages

Kano and Taiwanese baseball

Playing with transregionality and postcoloniality

chapter 11|12 pages

Seediq Bale as history

chapter 12|13 pages

Violence and indigenous visual history

Interventional historiography in Seediq Bale and Wushe, Chuanzhong Island

chapter 13|14 pages

Archiving a historical incident

The making of Seediq Bale as a socio-political event

chapter 14|17 pages

Mona Rudo’s scar

Two kinds of epic identity in Seediq Bale

part III|18 pages

Interview and supplement

chapter |2 pages

Appendix I

A short biography of Wei Te-sheng 1

chapter |3 pages

Appendix II

Synopses of Cape No.7, Seediq Bale and Kano