(eds Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri & Ming-yeh Rawnsley, EUP, 2024)
Special Introduction From Dr. Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley
Research Associate, SOAS University of London, UK
Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered is the first anthology in English about a long-neglected but now rediscovered cinema phenomenon.
In 2017, Chris Berry and I applied for a grant to bring nine newly restored Taiwanese-language films—commonly known in Mandarin as taiyupian or in Taiwanese as Tâi-gí phìnn—to several British and European universities for a screening tour. The tour had a low-key start but created a snowballing effect. We not only extended the tour to mid-2019, but also coedited a special issue on ‘Taiwanese-language films’ for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2020 to showcase the most recent scholarship on the topic in English. By that time, the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) restored seven more taiyupian directed by two auteur filmmakers—Xin Qi and Lin Tuanqiu. Hence, we invited Wafa Ghermani and Corrado Neri to be co-applicants for another screening tour in 2020 with a more ambitious scope, by covering more countries and cities, and reaching venues outside university campuses, including several arthouse cinemas and film festivals in the UK and Europe.
Nevertheless, Covid-19 pushed us to readjust our delivery, with many of our events forced online or into a hybrid format. The timeframe of the project was also postponed from the end of 2020 to early 2022. These involuntary changes brought three unexpected advantages: (1) because of online arrangements, we were able to share the selected taiyupian with a global audience, moving beyond the UK and Europe; (2) as the timeline of the project lengthened, new research on taiyupian was generated; and (3) we were allowed by the funding body to transfer the usage of the budget saved from touring to publishing. Therefore, I am both grateful and privileged to be able to work with many outstanding scholars to present this new volume that aims to mark a watershed moment in scholarship on Taiwanese-language cinema.
Taiyupian was a substantial commercial film industry that produced at least 1,291 films between the mid-1950s and 1970s. Once the taiyupian industry declined in the 1970s, they were quickly forgotten because the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist government favored Mandarin as a national language. Meanwhile, in the era of art cinema, low budget commercial films like taiyupian also attracted little critical attention as most of the scholarly interest in the Taiwanese film industry focused on Taiwan New Cinema.
Yet those attitudes no longer prevail, and by the 2010s, a new interest emerged both in and outside Taiwan despite the difficulty of accessing old taiyupian. The TFAI’s restoration and release of surviving Taiwanese-language films on DVD has reversed the negligence of this industry and rewritten the history of Taiwanese cinema over the last couple of decades. This is part of a larger shift at the TFAI to broaden its remit to include a more inclusive and diverse catalogue of films by adding popular, escapist, and mass market films that had previously been discarded as of no cultural value. This trend was in line with global tendencies. Now that some of these restored versions of taiyupian also have English subtitles, this lively and diverse cinema is beginning to get international recognition as a significant part of world cinema history and to provoke critical and scholarly debates. This new anthology attempts to do justice to the complexity and diversity of taiyupian with chapters that examine a variety of issues, periods, genres, directors, and studios. We hope that it will deepen our knowledge and understanding of taiyupian and encourage scholars and students to reconsider what we thought we already knew about this cinema.