Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island

Film and Culture Series

by Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis

Focusing on the work of four contemporary filmmakers—Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang—the authors explore how these filmmakers broke from tradition, creating a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history. Featuring stills, anecdotes, and close readings of films, the authors consider the influence of Hong Kong and martial arts films, directors' experiments with autobiography, the shifting fortunes of the Taiwanese film industry, and Taiwan cinema in the context of international cinema's aesthetics and business practices.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2005

About the author

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is Lam Wong Yiu Wah Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is the author of East Asian Screen Industries (BFI, with Darrell Davis), Taiwan Film Directors (Columbia University Press, with Darrell Davis) and editor of Chinese-language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (University of Hawai’i Press, with Sheldon Lu).

Reviews

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (2005) by Emile Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis is a good overview of the Taiwanese New Wave film movement. The authors acknowledge in the introduction that it is not an exhaustive study but a collection of essays that illuminates the main players in the movement. It reads mostly like a book for general readers, although, it sometimes veers into the theoretical when discussing Frederick Jameson's essay on Taiwanese cinema or when discussing "camp" in the films of Tsai Ming-liang. There is an Introduction six chapters and and a Postscript. The six chapters are: 1. Parallel Cinemas: Postwar I History and Major Directors, 2. Challenges and Controversies of the Taiwan New Cinema, 3. navigating the House of Yang, 4. Trisecting Taiwan Cinema with Hou Hsieo-hsien, 5. Confucianizing Hollywood: Films of Ang Lee, and 6. Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang. All in all, and interesting and enlightening look at Taiwanese New Wave-I suppose an updated volume that tracks what these directors have done to date would be nice to see in the future, but somehow I suspect that time has passed for such a project.

[Pedro Xaime]

Chapter 4: Navigating the House of Yang

[a]

solo quería leer el capítulo sobre Yang y terminé leyendo más.

[Sylvain · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good tackling of the three best Taiwanese film directors (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang) and Ang Lee. That the chapter on Lee is by far the weakest clearly speaks more about his overrated status as a filmmaker than it does about the authors' skills.