INTRODUCTION Press To this day, Taiwan remains a post-colonial region with an identity crisis. Like Hong Kong, Taiwan was a formally colonised region (an island nation) that is now independent. But, unlike Hong Kong which was a colony of the British – a distant nation – Taiwan was a colony of neighbouring Japan. The Chinese Civil War, a fight between loyalists to the Republic of China (the Kuomintang or KMT) and the Communist Party of China (the CPC), began in 1927 and did not end fully until 1950. At the conclusionUniversity of the war, China divided into the Republic of China (the ROC) in Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (the PRC) on the mainland. When the KMT Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai- shek, were ultimately defeated, Chiang and his army retreated to Taiwan. As a result, and especially since the end of World War II and the Chinese Civil War, Taiwan is engaged in a continual struggle to define itself in relation to both the Chinese Mainland and to Japan. In reaction, scholars and observers have com- mented that Taiwan remains torn between China, the so-called ‘motherland’, and CopyrightJapan, the so-called ‘fatherland’. In some respects, this metaphor is apt: like other regions that have gone through the decolonisation process, Taiwan struggles fullyEdinburgh to reconcile its independent status. Darrel William Davis expands on the notion of Taiwan as an identity- seeking nation in the introduction to his and Robert Chen’s edited volume Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and the State of the Arts: ‘Internationally, Taiwan works like a lab experiment in national self-definition. Domestically, though Taiwan politics and media often is [sic] a free-for-all, it is still emphati- cally free’ (2007, 3). Davis continues by describing the island of Taiwan as 1 NEW TAIWANESE CINEMA IN FOCUS an ambiguous geopolitical state, a foe to the PRC that nevertheless remains divided between the old-world, right-wing autocrats of Asian socialism and the new, diversely democratic population. Most importantly, Davis’s point is that, despite Taiwan’s struggle to define itself politically on the international stage, Taiwan’s media remain ‘free’. Unlike on the mainland, government owner- ship of media assets has been disbursed in Taiwan. The relative freedom of the media in Taiwan is the result of the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) sustained pressure on the opposition party (the Kuomintang).1 Despite the freedoms that film-makers in Taiwan enjoy, the financial sol- vency of the film industry itself remains in a constant state of precariousness. Further compounding the problem, many of the most successful Taiwanese film-makers have found more success abroad than at home. Internationally, Taiwanese cinema is associated with an ‘art-house’ aesthetic. Domestically, industry insiders bemoan that reputation. Art-house cinema can be thought- provoking but slow moving, depressing even, and it can reek of the intellectual elite. Partly as a result of Taiwan’s ambivalent political landscape and partly as a result of the art house genre more generally, Taiwanese cinemaPress is plagued with a ‘feel-bad’ reputation. The cinema of Taiwan, Darrell William Davis observes, contains overwhelming amounts of sadness (Davis 4). But, he is quick to add, sadness does not equal ‘passive resignation’ (5) within Taiwanese cinema. On the contrary, what he calls Taiwan’s ‘cultural narratives’ have only become more interesting as a result of the divisiveness and tension within modern-day Taiwanese society (Davis, 5). James Tweedie, in his essay: ‘Morning in the New Metropolis: Taipei and the Globalization of the City Film’ (2007), comments similarly to Davis, noting that sadness, as it relates to TaiwaneseUniversity film, is not necessarily equivalent to passivity. Nostalgia for the past, in other words, is not incompatible with the need to move forward. One of the film-makers for whom nostalgia is not necessarily expressed as ‘passive’, is Taiwanese Second Wave (1990s to early 2000s) film-maker Tsai Ming-liang. Tweedie describes Tsai’s aesthetic project as an active need to collect bits of the past before it has disappeared; to capture the cycle of development and destruction in Taipei and to ‘collect traces left behind by its decay’ (121). The act of collecting traces on film can be a nega- tive,Copyright neutral, or positive activity, depending on the context. In Tsai’s 2001 film What Time is it There?/Ni nabian jidian (2001), for example, protagonists Shiang-chyiEdinburgh and Hsiao-kang meet on the Taipei Skywalk which was then torn down in 2002. Tsai’s camera documents the destruction of the building though the skywalk itself is not essential to the plot. Though the film is shot in both Taipei and Paris, the lack of establishing and exterior shots suggests a certain arbitrary aspect of the setting. Because What Time is predominantly ‘a film about film’ (Bloom 2005, 20), its geographical settings, Taipei and Paris, are significant but not essential to the plot. 2 INTRODUCTION Though the film would not necessarily need to have been filmed in Paris, the fact that Tsai was invited to film in Paris is significant. For the past fifteen years or so, there has been a considerable increase in cross-cultural currents moving between French and contemporary Taiwanese cinema. Tsai, in par- ticular, is intrigued by Paris and, more specifically, Paris of the 1950s and ’60s, when the French New Wave movement was in its initial stages. In her article ‘The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria’ (2003), Fran Martin argues that, despite Tsai’s intertextual citation of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows throughout What Time?, the director is not simply lamenting a bygone time era. Not only does Tsai cite European film-makers; he also cites popular Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema. This self-reflexivity, or ‘double citation’ as Martin calls it, leads me to describe Tsai’s films as local yet univer- sal Taiwanese cinema. The terms ‘universal’ and ‘to local tastes’ are obviously complex and, in many ways, subjective. In the context of this book, however, the term ‘univer- sal’ simply means something that carries currency or meaning for an interna- tional array of viewers. It would be safe to say that a well-known film,Press such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Wo hu cang long (2000), contains ‘universal’ appeal in the sense that the film grossed $213.5 million worldwide when it was released in 2000. On the other hand, it might make sense to say that a film such as Edward Yang’s Terrorizers has ‘universal’ appeal in the sense that fans of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni would appreci- ate Yang’s slow-moving camera and objective distance from his characters. ‘Universal’, in other words, can be defined and measured in terms of money or in terms of the apparent ‘sophistication’ of the film text itself. The films which are discussed in this volume are ‘universal’University according to the latter definition. Clearly, the ability of the industry to sustain itself precedes all other concerns. The ‘local/universal’ dichotomy, observed within the ‘text’ of the film itself, rests on a more abstract plane altogether. Nevertheless, this book is propelled by textual readings of this more abstract dichotomy within Taiwanese cinema. Though New Taiwan cinema functions as a special case study in intertextual, national yet transnational cinema, the idea of an intertextually rich, ‘hybrid’ film is not exclusive to Taiwanese cinema. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (vol. 1, 2003),Copyright for example, functions as an elegant example of intertextual, hybrid film-making. Kill Bill – an American film that consciously integrates Japanese visual languageEdinburgh into its plot – is emblematic of the sort of East–West hybrid- ity that I discuss throughout this volume in the context of Taiwanese cinema. Tarantino’s film moves effortlessly between genres such that the viewer must pay attention in order to follow its narrative leaps. In an interview about his film, Tarantino states that, if one were to attempt to find Kill Bill in a video store, it would be labelled as part of the ‘revenge’ genre.2 Yet, even within the revenge genre, Kill Bill contains countless layers of subgenres: the kung fu 3 NEW TAIWANESE CINEMA IN FOCUS movie, the Japanese samurai movie, the spaghetti western, manga, anime, and the Italian giallo, to name a few. In the film, Lucy Liu (a Chinese-American actress) plays O-Ren Ishii, the Chinese-Japanese-American leader of the Tokyo yakuza gang. In one particularly noteworthy scene, one of the gang members ridicules her mixed-race heritage and she quickly decapitates him as a warning to the others. She speaks both Japanese and English – she uses Japanese when she is being polite and when she is on the verge of death and English when she is warning her fellow Japanese gang members never to speak negatively of her heritage. Thus, in this sense, the viewer must actively engage in Tarantino’s use of intertext – the cinephiles in the audience will probably notice it more – and, furthermore, the viewer must be aware of the linguistic and cultural exchanges as they play out within the film. Similarly, this volume is devoted to Taiwanese films that play with and prob- lematise this East/West dichotomy; films such as Kill Bill, which do not fall into predefined categories or genres, but rather contain elements that help to form and inspire the creation of new genres. All the films that are highlighted in this volume exhibit ‘hybridity’3 and, in some cases, ‘adaptation’.Press The word ‘adaptation’, however, is not meant to imply regression or repetition in any way. The definition of ‘adaptation’, in the context of this volume, rests on the notion of intertextuality, citation, and translation rather than on homage or pure nostalgia.