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Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film

Taiwanese-Language CinemaRediscovered and Reconsidered

Edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri and Ming-yeh Rawnsley

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About this book

Rethinks Taiwan’s film history with new insights into its vibrant local-language popular cinema

  • First English-language book on Taiwanese-Language Cinema
  • Diverse approaches and fresh angles on Taiwanese-Language Cinema
  • Combines original essays with translations of key essays by Taiwanese scholars

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered presents diverse approaches to the vibrant commercial film industry known as Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian). After a long period of neglect, films are being restored and made available with subtitles. Taiwanese-language cinema was a cycle of over 1,000 dramatic feature films produced between the mid-50s and early 70s in the local Minnanhua Chinese language most commonly spoken on the island, also known as "Taiwanese" (taiyu).

The rediscovery of Taiwanese-language cinema is stimulating new scholarship, both in Chinese in Taiwan and in other languages, which challenges our conventional understandings of Taiwanese film history and opens up new approaches to the films themselves.

This volume includes a mix of new English-language scholarship material with key essays by Taiwanese scholars newly translated from Chinese for the volume.

Reviews

Here Taiwanese-language cinema finally receives the sustained scholarly attention it deserves, with leading global scholars offering insightful readings of both acknowledged classics and relatively forgotten films placed in the broader context of Taiwan’s film industry, culture and society. An essential volume for those interested in Taiwan and Asian popular cinema.
A tour-de-force transnational endeavour with original research by scholars from Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and Europe, Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered offers illuminating analyses on taiyu pian, Taiwan’s native cinema that flourished during the 1950s and 1960s. A definitive work on the new history of the lost and found film treasures from Taiwan.
Provides a lively, wide-ranging and critically persuasive account of an under-researched period in Taiwan’s film history and will surely help refocus critical attention on the island’s rich history of popular entertainment cinema.
Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered—the first collection of its kind in English—offers a nuanced exploration of taiyupian’s complexity and diversity, covering topics such as historical revisits, genres, directors, studios, and music compositions.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Editorial Note on Languages

Introduction - Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley

Part I: Critical Intervention

Chapter 1. Don’t Call Me ‘Taiyupian’: Reflections on the Taiwanese Hokkien Cinema Era and Its Myths - Chih-heng Su (Translated by Francesca Jordan)

Part II: Social Transformation

Chapter 2. Representations of Blindness in Taiyupian - Ta-wei Chi

Chapter 3. From Stage to Screen: The Emergence of Taiwanese Opera Films in Social History - Ju-fang Shih (Translated by Jonathan Henshaw)

Chapter 4. Taiyupian as Vernacular Modernism: Material Culture, Home Spaces and Taiwan as a Home - Adina Zemanek

Part III: Industry and Aesthetics

Chapter 5. The Spirit of Yufeng: Lin Tuan-qiu’s Film Career and the Hushan Film Studio - Wan-shun Shih (Translated by Martin Ward)

Chapter 6. The Relationship between Actors and Industry in 1960s Taiwanese-Language Cinema - Hsin-chi Chen (Translated by Stefan Harvey)

Chapter 7. Re-examining Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters and Martial Arts Films: Genre Hybridity, Translocality and Cross-nationality - Ru-shou Robert Chen

Chapter 8. Taiyupian’s Musical Soundscapes: Listening in on Composer Tseng Chung-ying and His Context - Nancy Guy

Chapter 9. Sound Legacies: Post-synchronised Sound and Echoes of the Taiyupian in Pre-Dolby Taiwan Cinema - Evelyn Shih

Part IV: Transnational Dimensions

Chapter 10. Translation and Transformation: From Gothic Romance to Family Complex of Taiyupian - Fang-mei Lin

Chapter 11. Film Circulation and Mutual Influences between Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Cold War - Jessica Siu-yin Yeung

Contributors

About the contributors

Chris Berry

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. His curating work includes the 2011 Cultural Revolution in Cinema season in Vienna (with Katja Wiederspahn) and the Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema: Recovered and Restored project (with the co-editors of this book). Film Festival jury service has included Hawai’i, Pusan, Singapore, and the Golden Horse (Taipei). He has authored and edited many books, most recently Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities (2020).

Wafa Ghermani

Wafa Ghermani holds a PhD from the Université Paris 3 – La Sorbonne Nouvelle in film studies. Her PhD focused on Taiwan cinema and National Identity from the Japanese colonial period to the present. She is currently assistant professor at Taiwan Central University. She previously worked at the Cinémathèque française and is a curator for many festivals and Taiwan film-related events.

Corrado Neri

Corrado Neri is an associate professor at the Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3. He has conducted extensive research on Chinese cinema in Beijing and Taipei and published many chapters in books and articles in journals. He is the author and co-editor of several books, including Tsai Ming-liang (2004), Ages Inquiets. Cinémas chinois: une representation de la jeunesse (2009) and Retro Taiwan: Le temps retrouvé dans le cinéma sinophone contemporain (2016).

Ming-yeh Rawnsley

Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Associate, Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London and also at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Taiwan Studies and has published widely in both English and Chinese on Chinese-language cinema and media and democratisation in Taiwan. Her more recent publications include Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (edited with Kuei-fen Chiu and Gary Rawnsley, 2017).

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