Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008–20: Environments, Poetics, Practice

Author: Christopher Brown

Publication date: 2024

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Total page numbers: 218

Price: £85

ISBN: 9781474478274 (hardback), 9781474478304 (Ebook – ePub), 9781474478298 (Ebook – PDF)

In this monograph, I seek to account for the unique characteristics of Taiwan’s cinema from 2008 until 2020, by investigating how filmmakers have imagined the island’s diverse environments. Drawing on cartographic approaches to film research, I analyse the appearance of onscreen maps, but fundamentally my intention is to argue for the varied ways in which filmmaking can itself be understood as a form of mapping. Arguing for the limitations of existing approaches to recent Taiwanese cinema – notably the scholarly focus on auteur directors and arthouse work – I aim for a broader survey that refocuses attention on the making of films. This explains my decision to approach screen mapping and environments from the critical standpoint of film poetics, a mode of enquiry that probes the ways in which a film is shaped by a process of construction.

Chapter 1 is an introduction that sketches out the critical, cultural and methodological contexts that inform the book’s central arguments. I begin by discussing the importance of the year 2008 to accounts of Taiwanese cinema, which prompts some reflections on the adequacy of existing critical frameworks and periodisation. I then examine the significance of cartography to Taiwanese history and identity, summarising the typical ways in which onscreen maps were depicted, and often suppressed, in twentieth-century films made in Taiwan. Noting that the early twenty-first century witnessed a surge of interest in mapping the island, my attention shifts to academic perspectives on film cartography, and how these might inform an appraisal of recent Taiwanese cinema.

In Chapter 2, I discuss films in which onscreen cartography recurs and is indicative of the filmmakers’ broader interest in affectively and thematically mapping Taiwan, analysing three case studies: Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (Fu Tien-Yu, 2009), Godspeed (Chung Mong-Hong, 2016) and Aground (Hsin Chien-Tsung, 2017). Contemplating questions around queer mapping and orientation, affective itineraries, cinematic salvage and mapped representations of historical experience, I investigate how cinematic cartography is used to chart the island and its place in the world.

Chapter 3 examines the reappearance of forests in films such as Starry Starry Night (Lin Shu-Yu, 2011), Soul (Chung Mong-Hong, 2013), The Tag-Along (Cheng Wei-Hao, 2015) and Forêt Debussy (Kuo Cheng-Chui, 2016). Forests have not featured significantly in Taiwanese cinema since the 1970s, so why did they recently return to cinematic prominence? We might account for this recent arboreal trend with reference to national identity, eco-cinematic agendas, developments in digital technology, the rise of genre cinema, and transnational business strategies. More compellingly, perhaps, these films can be understood as traumatic narratives in which the forest is mapped as something authentic that has paradoxically grown out of artifice.

Chapter 4 addresses questions of mapping in the fiction films that have emerged over the past decade about Taiwan’s original inhabitants, the island’s indigenous tribes. These include Wawa No Cidal (Cheng Yu-Chieh and Lekal Sumi, 2015), Lokah Laqi (Laha Mebow, 2016), Pakeriran (Lekal Sumi, 2017) and Long Time No Sea (Tsui Yung-Hui, 2018). Thematically, questions of land ownership and appropriation lie at the heart of these narratives, and I argue that visually, the trope of surveying – as a precursor to territorial acquisition – can be understood in relation to cartographic forms such as the aerial view. Thematically and formally, these films challenge abstract notions of space, while at the level of practice, the use of non-professional actors requires us to consider the relationship between performance and environment.

Chapter 5 examines the relationship between mapping and design in recent depictions of Taipei. Design 7 Love (Chen Hung-I, 2014) experiments self-reflexively with what it means to design, while other films including Love (Niu Cheng-Tse, 2012), The Mad King of Taipei (Yeh Tien-Lun, 2017), 52Hz I Love You (Wei Te-Sheng, 2017) and The Story of the Stone (Starr Wu, 2018) share with Chen’s film an impulse to construct Taipei as a designer city. This is undertaken by the creative decoration of the city’s environments using multicoloured palettes, while the narrative recurrence of boutique stores points to dynamics of city-fashioning. More fundamentally, I argue that design is about the plotting of the future, with both narrative and design shown to be motivated by desire; love provokes the spatial and affective movement of ensemble casts along intersecting, mapped routes.

Chapter 6 investigates the mapping of interior space in a range of films that situate significant portions of their dramas in relatively confined living quarters: flats, apartments and houses. At stake in films such as Exit (Chienn Hsiang, 2014), Sen Sen (Bon An, 2018), More Than Blue (Lin Hsiao-Chien, 2018) and Dear Ex (Hsu Yu-Ting & Hsu Chih-Yen, 2018) are commonly accepted notions of what the domestic and the familial entail. These films are preoccupied with the home as an unhealthy, ailing space, and rework a Taiwanese tradition of recuperative family melodrama, with theatrical performance an important theme and mode. I examine tensions between the materiality of the home and psychological journeys, discussing how the filmmakers construct domestic atmosphere and conceive cleaning in relation to narrative progress.

Chapter 7 examines how sound is used to dramatise the process of masculine change in ‘quiet places’ – the tranquil, sleepy settings common to otherwise diverse films including A Time in Quchi (Chang Tso-Chi, 2013), The Great Buddha + (Huang Hsin-Yao, 2017) and Secrets in the Hot Spring (Lin Kuan-Hui, 2018). While these films are ostensibly constructed in terms of urban centres versus rural peripheries, character psychology is ultimately a more critical concern, as the filmmakers ask why it is that their protagonists feel peripheral. I examine how affective and gendered journeys are articulated through the film soundtracks.

The book draws on several original interviews with contemporary filmmakers, and is intentionally broad in coverage, appraising case studies including works of popular entertainment, genre cinema such as comedies and horror, films about indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ cinema and arthouse work. By asking what it means to map an environment onscreen, I hope to offer new insights into a critically neglected, yet creatively dynamic, period in Taiwan’s film history.