AUTHORS: Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis With the untimely passing earlier this year of famed Taiwanese film director Edward Yang, there’s never been a better moment to look back at the sweep of recent cinematic history emanating from this little island, which has done much more for world film than its tiny circumference might suggest. The book focuses on “New Taiwan” cinema, a moment which spanned the ‘80s and ‘90s, and uses the four big guns as praxis: Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and Ang Lee. Yeh and Davis’s book received accolades from the academic community, yet manages to keep things simple enough so that people who think Laura Mulvey is the name of a homeware collection will still find it compelling. After all, Taiwan is a part of China, and Chinese cinema is the collection of metatags to the world we see wake up to everyday. The Taiwanese re-script of Chinese identity politics, however, is a post-colonial construct with a very different set of trajectories and influences and occupies a very different echelon within the global imaginary. This book, at once accessible yet challenging, makes an excellent companion to a month’s worth of at-home DVD viewing and will give one a renewed appreciation for the little island that could.
384 pages