Is There a Chinese New Wave in Animation?

Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (9/30/2023)
Is There a Chinese New Wave in Animation? An Examination of Student Animation in China
By Jingyi Zhang

Figure 1. The exaggerated proportion of figures in Fish in the Bus.

The beginning of the millennium was important for Chinese animation. It not only began the rejuvenation of the Chinese animation industry, which embodied “the promise of the modernization of Chinese visual culture,”[i] but also saw the creation of a surprising range of works that can be categorized as independent animation. Additionally, it was a significant period for Chinese animation education. In January 2000, the Beijing Film Academy separated the animation major from the Art School, forming an independent Department of Animation. This change signals the rise of professional animation education in China in the 21st century. Since then, animation departments and institutions have gradually been founded in many universities and provinces, including the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the Communication University of China (CUC). That department in particular has trained and inspired many young animators who contribute to the commercial and independent films in Chinese animation industry. Scholars have conducted many studies in Chinese animation, yet they rarely consider the important field of student films.

In this paper, I investigate student animation created after 2000 in China, focusing on those works directed by the students who graduated from CUC. I argue that student animation reflects the ongoing changes within Chinese animation, changes that will alter the industry, and make important breaks from the characteristics of the 20th century. The student films exhibit a variety of narrative, visual styles, and techniques. They not only are influenced by the development of digital technology and global animation and cinematic culture but also indicate the trend of reviving traditional visual styles and telling indigenous narratives. Moreover, the young generation of filmmakers have gone on to enter the industry, often while keeping their personal, auteur styles. With the new talents, new technology, new producers and a new reputation on the world stage, I keep wondering whether we are witnessing a new wave set off by the young animators in Chinese animation history. Continue reading

Evans Chan retrospective

An Evans Chan online retrospective will present seven films by this New York-based maverick filmmaker from Hong Kong:

https://venue.cityline.com/utsvInternet/internet/eventDetail?lang=en&event=38799

They include To_Liv(e) (1991), Crossings (1994), Journey to Beijing (1998), The Map of Sex and Love (2001), Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), Datong: The Great Society (2011), and Chinatopia (2011). Unique stories about history, culture, as well as artistic and political figures in Hong Kong and the global Chinese diaspora will be revealed in these creative, emotional, and rarely seen documentaries and fiction films.

To Liv(e) evokes the angst and eros in post-Tiananmen Hong Kong of 1989, whereas Crossings unveils the streak of anti-Asian violence in America through the exploration of a real life interracial murder in the New York subway in the 1990’s.

Anthony Wong Yiu-ming in To Liv(e)

Anita Yuen Wing-yee in Crossings.

Continue reading

Nikah review

Source: The China Project (9/7/23)
‘Nikah’: An astonishing portrait of Uyghur life on the edge of erasure
‘Nikah’ allows viewers to understand the stakes of a culture’s shattering. It also shows us the extreme beauty of Uyghur communal life.
By Darren Byler

A still from Nikah, a fictional film by Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan, showing Dilber and Rena preparing for Rena’s wedding.

Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan’s Nikah is extraordinary. It is a quiet film, a portrait of a young Uyghur woman and her family living in a Uyghur world in the late 2010s. It is astonishing in its restraint, in the way it remains true to a ground-level view of what it looked and felt like to be on the verge of internment. Nikah is a portrait of the impossible becoming reality.

The story on the surface is a simple one. Two daughters in their 20s, Dilber and Rena, are caught between their own ambitions — careers, travel, love — and community pressures to follow gendered norms dictating what young women should do, who they should get married to, and the life path of a wife and mother. After the younger sister Rena is married to a young man in the community, the pressure builds on the older sister Dilber to marry as well — or be lost to old age or, more ominously, as whispers imply, be married off to a Han man.

In 2017, the Chinese state criminalized much of what is portrayed in the film as signs of religious extremism. Drawing on one of the world’s broadest counter-terrorism laws and a mandate from Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, police and civil servants began to use face-recognition video surveillance, informants, and torture to “round up those that needed to be rounded up.” Dilber and Rena — plus other characters portrayed in the film — are exactly who that mandate was for. As viewers, we are placed on the precipice of the largest mass internment of a religious minority since World War II. Continue reading

Love Is a Gun review

Source: The China Project (9/8/23)
‘Love is a Gun’: A spellbinding vision of yearning for freedom
Taiwanese actor Lee Hong-Chi pulls off a remarkable artistic feat in his directorial debut, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
By Amarsanaa Battulga

Lulu, in a scene from Love is a Gun

The past comes flooding into the present in Lee Hong-Chi’s (李鸿其 Lǐ Hóngqí) visually arresting mood piece Love Is a Gun.

The Hong Kong-Taiwan co-production premiered earlier this week at Venice Critics’ Week, an independent parallel section of the prestigious Venice Film Festival, running until September 9. It shares titles with a 1994 cryptic erotic thriller starring Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts as a troubled crime-scene photographer, but there the similarity ends.

The characters in Lee’s story, co-written by himself, has some parallels with two other recent Chinese-language films, namely Gaey Wa’r (2021) and Absence (2023), which premiered at Cannes and Berlinale, respectively. Played by Lee himself, Sweet Potato has recently finished a prison stretch for shooting someone while working for a “Big Boss” that he’s never met or talked to. Now making meager earnings by renting umbrellas at the beach, he attempts to break free from the vicious cycle of his past criminal life, only to discover that it isn’t so simple.

Continue reading

Games and Gaming in Chinese and Sinophone Cinema–cfp

Dear colleagues,

We have extended the essay proposal deadline for the special issue “Games and Gaming in Chinese and Sinophone Cinema” to October 1, 2023, to accommodate more submissions to this special issue for Journal of Chinese Film Studies. More essay proposals are warmly welcomed! Please see below for the CFP with updated timeline. Please share the CFP with interested colleagues and scholars who work on related subjects. Thank you!

CFP: Games, Gaming, and Interactive Aesthetics in Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Cinema
A special issue of Journal of Chinese Film Studies (JCFS)
Guest editors: Li Guo, Hongmei Sun, Douglas Eyman

[Link to full CFP]

This special issue invites submissions of research essays on games, gaming, and interactive aesthetics in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone cinema and media. From Hong Kong’s first videogame adaptation in Future Cops(1993) to the recent film based on the mobile game Onmyoji The Yinyang Master (2021), from the videogame-adapted animation Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn (2014) to director Cheng Er’s gamified narration in Hidden Blade (2023), contemporary Chinese and Sinophone cinematic productions provide diversified and remarkable works that call for an in-depth exploration of the subject of games and gameplay in film. Engaging Chinese and Sinophone film studies in dialogue with scholarships in game studies and media theory, this special issue inspects how games and gaming can transform or even reshape cinema through new experiences of interactive aesthetics through AI-generated algorithms, multiverse narratives, psychological mazes, game montages, and gamified gazes and points of view. Building on existent scholarship on game culture, media theory, and interactive cinema, we seek essays that examine the mutual adaptations of games and cinematic productions. Drawing from Lev Manovich’s media theory, we consider the effect of computerized gaming and computer-assisted gaming on traditional filmmaking, filmmakers’ diversified approaches to the introduction of computerized gaming to cinematic production, and the impact of new media and its own conventions on film industry and the process of filmmaking. As Manovich observes, it is difficult to “draw a strict line between interactive movies and many other games that may not use traditional film sequences yet follow many other conventions of film language in their structure” (Manovich 2002, 288). By exploring interactive movies and games structured around film-like sequences and simulating real-person interactions, we ask how cinematic apparatus contributes to the players’ experiences and is reconfigured through interactive video game play. Continue reading

Taiwan animation

Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (9/1/23)
Taiwan Animation: From Subcontractor to Creator
By Qiu Liwei; translated by Yixing Li

This essay reviews the evolution of Taiwan animation, from the golden age of overseas subcontracting in the 1980s, to the creation of original content in the early 21st century, and the market orientation in the current age. The focus of this discussion is the interdependence and balance between two perspectives: the contractor-oriented, skill-intensive production perspective and the audience-oriented, creative perspective.

At a glance, Taiwan animation can be described as the exploration of originality and shaping of a unique style based on experience acquired from subcontracting for overseas production.

Before we expound on the production and the creation respectively, we should briefly discuss the general characteristics of the industry. We observe that the Taiwan animation industry is “labour-intensive,” with a demand for long production hours and ample manpower; it is “skill-intensive,” as specialized skills are required by various stages and styles, such as traditional hand-drawn animation, computer animation and stop-motion animation; it is “knowledge-intensive,” as knowledge is needed in planning, directing, marketing and producing; it is “fund-intensive” as the above-described processes require considerable manpower, software, and hardware. Continue reading

New article on Pema Tseden’s Jinpa

Dear MCLC members,

My new Open Access article, Boxed within the Frame: Tibetan masculinities in transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa, has recently been published in the New Cinemas journal. I think anyone with an interest in Tibetan and Chinese (and indeed world) cinema was shocked and saddened to learn of Pema Tseden’s untimely passing in May of this year. He was a pioneer in so many ways and his death is a great loss to us all. The article looks at Jinpa (2018), which I think is one of his best and often overlooked works.

Abstract: The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature  (2018) marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of , he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.

All the best,

Zoran Lee Pecic (zoran.l.pecic@ntnu.no)

‘Talks Overnight’

Source: The China Project (9/1/23)
Talks Overnight’ probes intellectuals’ anxiety in COVID-era China
Writer-director Su Qiqi describes her deeply personal, black-and-white debut as a “faux-fiction” film.
By Amarsanaa Battulga

Still from ‘Talks Overnight.’

Talks Overnight, a low-budget slice-of-life Hong Kong production, recently had its international premiere as part of the Mulan International Film Festival in Toronto. The fourth edition of the not-for-profit volunteer-run festival, which aims at “facilitating appreciation of Chinese cinema,” ran between August 11 and 20.

Largely doing away with a plot, the film pieces together a middle-aged couple’s several conversations, hence the title. Its form reminds one of Liú Jiāyīn’s 刘伽茵 award-winning Oxhide (2005) in that Sū Qīqī 苏七七, who previously co-produced the arthouse hit A New Old Play, casts herself, her husband Mǎ Yuèbō 马越波, and their friends in scripted versions of themselves.

Continue reading

Heaven Official’s Blessing

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “Navigating Transmedia Storytelling and Franchising in Chinese BL: Heaven Official’s Blessing,” by Linshan Jiang. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/linshan-jiang/. My thanks to Linshan Jiang for sharing her work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Navigating Transmedia Storytelling and Franchising in
Chinese BL: Heaven Official’s Blessing

By Linshan Jiang


MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2023)


Promotional poster for the first season of Heaven Official’s Blessing.

Danmei (耽美), or BL (Boy’s Love), refers to male-male romance. Although it originates from Japanese popular culture, it is now also immensely popular in China. In the Chinese market, successful and profitable cultural productions are referred to as IPs (intellectual properties), a concept aligned with Henry Jenkins’ notions of “transmedia story” and “transmedia franchise” (Jenkins 2006: 95, 96). These transmedia stories unfold “across multiple media platforms,” with each contributing uniquely to the overall narrative (Jenkins 2006: 95–96). At the same time, IP or “transmedia franchise” cater to market demands, and the latter can “[pitch] the content somewhat differently in the different media” (Jenkins 2006: 96). Notable IPs such as Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖师), or the TV adaptations The Untamed (陈情令) and Guardian (镇魂) have garnered widespread attention in both popular media and scholarly discussions (Baecker/Hao 2021: 18; Wong 2020: 503).

What is special about the BL industry in China, as discussed in previous BL scholarship, is the double influence of censorship (both state and self-imposed) and market profitability (Hao 2023: 66; Hu/Wang 2021: 672; Wang 2019: 47; Xu/Yang 2013: 30). Due to its homosexual content, the BL genre faces continuous censorship from the National Radio and Television Administration. However, despite the strict censorship, the BL industry remains lucrative, leading to the continual emergence of adaptations of BL novels and other cultural productions. Producers and creators of BL transmedia franchises navigate the complexities of censorship while capitalizing on market opportunities. Continue reading

21st Century Cinema of the Sinosphere–cfp

Call for Papers: 21st Century Cinema of the Sinosphere
Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2024 panel organized by Wesley Jacks and Yongli Li

We invite submissions of paper proposals exploring the impact of Chinese globalization as manifested in contemporary transnational cinemas to be held at the SCMS 2024 Annual Conference in Boston.

This panel builds from the term “cinemas of the Sinosphere,” put forward by Chris Berry in 2021 for its dual abilities to cover transnational Chinese cinema “in all its forms” and to link Chinese cinemas to ongoing and competing processes of globalization. For this panel, we welcome proposals that extend, challenge, and respond to Berry’s notion of “cinemas of the Sinosphere” through case studies attuned to specific films and film industries. Of particular interest to the co-organizers are questions of “address” which interrogate how/where/when audiences outside the political boundaries of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are catered to/ignored.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

  • The evolving impact of the Chinese film market on specific global cinema industries
  • The success/failure/irrelevance of co-productions and co-production agreements between China and partner nations
  • Sinitic language cinemas outside Chinese film industries
  • Digital platforms in/surrounding China
  • Depictions of “foreign” territories and/or border crossing in films produced by PRC companies
  • The push for a transnationally “successful” Chinese blockbuster
  • Encounters between neoliberal and big state models in Hong Kong cinema and/or HK-PRC co-productions.

Please submit your proposal (around 250 words) and a brief bio (100 words) as one PDF file no later than August 18th to the panel co-organizers, Wesley Jacks (wesleyjacks@ln.edu.hk) and Yongli Li (yonglili@holycross.edu). Meanwhile, please feel free to email us if you have any questions.

Made in Censorship review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeremy Brown’s review of Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film, by Thomas Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jeremy-brown/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen
Movement in Chinese Literature and Film

By Thomas Chen


Reviewed by Jeremy Brown

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)


Thomas Chen, Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, xii + 248 pp. ISBN: 9780231204019 (Paperback). ISBN: 9780231204002 (Hardcover).

Censorship and restricted research access can spark creativity and open up new paths, as Thomas Chen’s Made in Censorship shows. I first experienced this myself during the 2000s, when I went to the flea market in search of documents after archive staff denied me access to what I wanted to read. That denial of access shaped my project in fruitful and beneficial ways. And when I encountered state-enforced amnesia about June Fourth, I was so bothered by the lies and erasures that I chose to write a book about the topic. So did Thomas Chen. Like so many other artistic and scholarly projects related to China, our works were sparked by censorship and, as Chen argues, made in censorship.

Chinese censorship literally shaped Made in Censorship. Chen received Chinese government funding that contributed to the publication of his thought-provoking book. Think about that.  The Chinese party-state funded a project that resulted in a book with the words “Tiananmen Movement” in the title, although Chen wisely framed his project in safe and innocuous terms while researching in China. Chen also participated in what he calls a “collaborative” and “collegial” (133) process of censoring a Chinese translation of one of his articles, a revised version of which appears in this book, revealing what censors excised. These backstories, which Chen recounts with thoughtful reflexivity, enliven and enrich the book. They support Chen’s point that cinematic, literary, and scholarly output about June Fourth is not only possible, but has been occurring continuously in China since 1989. Continue reading

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Victor Fan’s review of Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age, by Jason McGrath. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/victor-fan/. Given the obvious conflict of interest, I filled in for Jason McGrath, who would normally oversee publication of our media studies reviews. Enjoy.

Best,

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention
from the Silent Era to the Digital Age

By Jason McGrath


Reviewed by Victor Fan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2023)


Jason McGrath, Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022, 404 pages. ISBN 978-1-5179-1403-5 (paper); ISBN 978-1-5179-1402-8 (cloth).

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age is one of the most ambitious, thought-provoking, and groundbreaking works on the subject to date. Besides being an inspiring piece of research, the book also provides a solid method of critical analysis that is highly accessible to university students of all levels, without compromising the complexity and nuances of its discussion.

Although titled Chinese Film, the book addresses an intersection between three concerns that go beyond the study of Chinese cinema: (1) What is realism and how is it related to the question of cinematographic reality? (2) Can we rehistoricize Chinese cinema based on how the cinematic works of each historical period negotiate their specific sociopolitical conditions and aesthetic values through modes of realism? (3) With our current knowledge of Chinese film theory and criticism, how do we fully incorporate them into the larger discourses of film studies in order to develop a method of analysis that can address Chinese cinema’s cultural and sociopolitical specificities and its situatedness in global cinemas?

McGrath explicitly addresses the first two concerns. The third concern, however, may not be entirely visible to most readers but is in fact McGrath’s effort to address the current debate on Asia as method: how one relates bodies of knowledge generated in Asia to Euro-American knowledge under the pressures of colonialism and imperialism, and how one uses such knowledge not as a universalizing theory, but as a method that can address the intricate relationship between the universal and the particular.[1] In my opinion, this is the most trailblazing contribution of this book, and I daresay that the method McGrath proposes is the method employed in the book itself. Continue reading

New Sinophone Documentaries–cfp

Call for Papers
New Sinophone Documentaries: Trajectories and Intertwinements

This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas proposes to examine the pasts and presents of new documentary movements in the Sinophone sphere. Roughly three decades ago, new documentary movements surfaced in multiple sites across the Sinophone world. In Taiwan, independent documentary filmmaking arose in the context of political opposition and social movements in the 1980s. Since then, diverse new documentaries have flourished alongside the rapid development of Taiwan’s democracy. In mainland China, independent documentaries first emerged as underground films around 1990. As works proliferated and won attention from domestic and international film critics, the Chinese independent documentary movement has been recognized as forming an unofficial archive of China’s social, economic, cultural, and other changes. In Hong Kong, independent documentaries since the 1990s have provided a marginalized but important alternative to commercial narrative cinema and other entertainment media. They have served, moreover, as vital witnesses to Hong Kong’s evolving sociopolitical conditions since the former British colony became a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China in 1997.

Given these distinct yet sometimes intersecting histories, this special issue invites essays that examine the legacies and/or current states of independent documentary filmmaking in the Sinophone sphere. The primary focus will be on productions from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China but considerations extending beyond these regions are welcome. Topics include but are not limited to: Continue reading

Chinese Animation: Multiplicties in Motion

Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion: A Book Publication Workshop in Honor of Professor Yingjin Zhang (1957-2022), June 29-30, 2023, HKUST, Hong Kong
Time:
June 29-30 (Thursday & Friday, Hong Kong time), 2023
Location: IAS 5007, Lee Shau Kee Campus, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Zoom: ID: 986 4286 2563; Password: ACASSHSS

Organizers:

Daisy Yan Du, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
John Crespi, Colgate University, USA
Yiman Wang, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

Sponsors:

Global China Center, School of Humanities and Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

No solicitation of the papers below, because their authors have made the commitment for the edited volume Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (under review by a major university press in the US.)

June 29 (Thursday)

Panel 1, Introduction, chaired by Daisy Yan Du: 9:00-10:00am

Kellee Tsai, Dean of School of Humanities and Social Science (HKUST), “Welcome Speech”
David Wang, “Modern Chinese Literature, Film, and Animation”
John Crespi, “Chinese Animation: A Statement of the Field”
Yiman Wang (on behalf of Yingjin Zhang), “Playful Dispositif and Remediation: Chinese Animation from the Perspective of Film History as Media Archaeology”

Coffee/Tea Break: 10:00-10:20am Continue reading

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley’s review of 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema, edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rawnsley/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis for overseeing publication of the review.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema

Edited by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin


Reviewed by Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley 

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2023)


Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis, and Wenchi Lin, eds. 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022, xii + 563 pp. + 40 illus. ISBN: 978-0-472-07546-1 (cloth) / ISBN: 978-0-472-05546-3 (paper) / ISBN: 978-0-472-22039-7 (e-book)

It has always been a rewarding experience to read works by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis. In their Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (2007), Yeh and Davis took an auteur approach and provided readers with a careful study of several Taiwan-based filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang. That volume explored Taiwan film directors’ particular styles of image composition and editing patterns, as well as how, from a larger perspective, their artistic trajectories and career developments were related to Taiwan’s social, political, and cultural history. One year later in East Asian Screen Industries (2008), Davis and Yeh adopted an industry-focused approach and articulated new benchmarks set by Japanese, South Korean, and the three Chinese-language cinemas—Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. Their examination of structural features and strategies employed by these five film industries between the 1990s and the 2000s illuminated an emerging trend of “increasing decentralisation, deregulation and regional cooperation” (p. 3). This framework has contributed enormously to our understanding of East Asian screen cultures and talents within the global flow of communications.[1]

In their new volume, 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema, published in December 2022, Yeh and Davis team up with co-editor Wenchi Lin and take a conventional approach from the discipline of film studies—that is, a meticulous examination of individual films. As the editors state, their aim is to reveal a wide spectrum of Taiwanese cinematic output in addition to updating the existing literature. Their stated criteria of selection include (1) films that represent different historical settings, genres, auteurs, and formats in the post-war era; (2) films that are less studied in the English language literature; (3) prioritizing films produced in the twenty-first century; (4) films that are readily available for viewing with bilingual subtitles and suitable audio-visual quality; and (5) films that the contributors themselves prefer (p. 2). Based on the above considerations, Yeh, Davis, and Lin offer readers thirty-two original interpretations of films released between 1963 and 2017, arranged chronologically, which together demonstrate a fresh and expansive perspective on Taiwan cinema. Continue reading