Taiwan is best known among film aficionados for the New Wave Cinema, or Taiwan New Cinema, movement of the 1980s—a tide of socially conscious movies characterized by their slow pace, frequent use of distant camera positions, and realistic depictions of contemporary life. Several of the films produced during this innovative period in domestic moviemaking captured the attention of international film scholars and influenced budding art-house directors around the world. Earlier this year, a new documentary examining this movement was released in Taiwan. Through interviews with foreign critics and filmmakers, Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema explores the emergence of New Wave movies and how they shaped foreign perspectives on Taiwan’s national cinema. “I’d often wondered why these films had such a big impact overseas,” explained Wang Ken-yu (王耿瑜), the movie’s producer, in an interview with the Taipei Film Commission. “I wanted to discover how foreigners perceived these works.”
The idea of developing a new documentary about this period in Taiwan’s cinematic history was proposed in 2012 during a forum held at the Taipei Film Festival to mark the 30th anniversary of the New Wave movement. Work on the project, which was funded by Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, began not long afterward. The result, Flowers of Taipei, was released in March along with three digitally restored movies from the period—The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985), Dust in the Wind (1986) and The Terrorizers (1986). The former two films, which address themes such as dislocation and the changing nature of rural life in Taiwan, were directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), while the latter, a bleak depiction of urban existence, was directed by Edward Yang (楊德昌, 1947–2007). Hou and Yang are widely regarded as the most influential filmmakers to emerge from the movement.
The Mandarin title of Flowers of Taipei is identical to that of In Our Time, a 1982 release considered by many to be the initiator of New Wave Cinema. An anthology film, In Our Time consists of four short stories, one of which was directed by Yang, about the rapid development of Taiwanese society. Featuring sparse narration and numerous long shots, the movie differed both aesthetically and thematically from mainstream Taiwanese productions of the period, which were typically martial arts epics or sentimental romance films.
Local moviegoers found the naturalistic depictions of ordinary life in New Wave works to be a refreshing change of pace, says Chen Ru-shou (陳儒修), a professor of cinema and cultural studies at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei. “At a time when Taiwan was changing rapidly from an agricultural to an industrialized society, these filmmakers offered an unflinching look at the loss and pain brought about by this transformation.”
A scene from Hou’s 1986 film Dust in the Wind (Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company)
A number of the filmmakers who emerged during the New Wave period would go on to garner global recognition. Hou won the Golden Lion prize for best picture at the Venice International Film Festival in 1989 for A City of Sadness, a family drama about the 228 Incident—the February 28, 1947 anti-government uprising that was violently suppressed. Yang received the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2000 for his last completed film, Yi Yi: A One and a Two, which tells the story of a middle-class family in Taipei. Meanwhile, Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮), a Malaysia-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker who is a leading figure in the post-New Wave generation of directors that emerged in the 1990s, won the Golden Lion in 1994 for his movie Vive L’Amour.
Hou and Tsai are the only two locally based interviewees in Flowers of Taipei with the exception of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), who opens the documentary with a monologue contextualizing the Taiwan New Cinema movement. Although more than 50 actors, critics and filmmakers were interviewed for the project, only around half of them appear in the movie.
Wang noted in her interview with the Taipei Film Commission that a 2002 documentary Our Time, Our Story: 20 Years’ New Taiwan Cinema had already adequately covered local perspectives on the movement. “Our Time, Our Story presents interviews with many people in Taiwan’s film industry, leaving few new domestic viewpoints to explore,” she explained. “However, in recent years I’ve met quite a few painters, musicians and writers in Beijing who are deeply passionate about our New Wave films.”
After deciding to focus on overseas perspectives, Wang recruited French cinematographer Olivier Marceny and director Hsieh Chin-lin (謝慶鈴), a native of Taiwan living in France. Like Wang, Hsieh had worked on New Wave films in the 1980s, including some of Hou’s movies. For around 18 months, the team went to nations including Argentina, France, Italy, Japan and Thailand to conduct interviews. In comparison to Our Time, Our Story and another earlier documentary on New Wave films released in 1998 called The Taiwan New Cinema, the result “casts a broader look at the movement and focuses on its influence and status in global film history,” says film critic Ryan Cheng (鄭秉泓). “This new documentary’s romantic, exotic touch forms a pleasant complement to the previous two movies on the subject.”
Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda notes in Flowers of Taipei that New Wave works inspired him to pursue a career in film. (Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company)
Flowers of Taipei regularly features two filmmakers on screen together discussing New Wave’s impact. For Cheng, two conversations stand out in the documentary—the debate between French director Olivier Assayas and his compatriot, film critic Jean-Michel Frodon, and the conversation between two mainland Chinese filmmakers, Wang Bing (王兵) and Yang Chao (楊超). The French duo discusses how New Wave films disclosed the emergence of a distinct cultural identity in Taiwan to international audiences. Meanwhile, the latter pair draws attention to the individualism displayed by the characters in Hou’s films, which contrasted sharply with the collectivism commonly featured in mainland Chinese works.
Cheng also highlights the comments of Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, whose father was born and grew up in the Kaohsiung area in southern Taiwan during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). In the documentary, Koreeda notes that The Time to Live and the Time to Die, which is based on Hou’s childhood and adolescent years in today’s Fengshan District of Kaohsiung City, called to mind his father’s tales about life in Taiwan and inspired him to pursue a career in film.
While Flowers of Taipei has been criticized in some quarters for having too few Taiwanese interviewees and for focusing too much on Hou and Yang, Cheng believes these criticisms are unfair. “I don’t think Hsieh set out to make a factual record. Rather, she’s divided the documentary into small segments, each of which resembles a three to five-minute modern art piece and contributes to building a global perspective on Taiwanese movies,” he says. “Such a decentralized examination [of New Wave films] deserves praise and prevents the documentary from ending up as a cheap piece of self-important, sentimental reverie.”
NCCU professor Chen points out that in the broader international context, Taiwan New Cinema was a fresh continuation, following those in France, Germany and the United States, of the Italian neorealist movement of the 1940s, which was characterized by movies set among the working class and shot on location using amateur actors. “During the 120 years or so of film history, most nations have had their own movement in which a group of emerging directors presented their views on social issues such as the effects of modernization,” he says. Chen notes that in Taiwan’s case, New Wave—which according to strict definitions lasted from 1982 to 1986—was largely about the nation’s rapid economic development and the resulting social upheaval.
French director Olivier Assayas, left, and critic Jean-Michel Frodon note in the documentary that the New Wave movement helped shape foreign perspectives on Taiwan’s national cinema. (Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Company)
Although they earned considerable praise from local and international critics, the works that came out of the Taiwan New Cinema movement were ultimately unsuccessful in boosting the commercial fortunes of the domestic filmmaking industry. However, the innovation and vitality they brought to Taiwan’s cinematic landscape influenced and inspired a generation of young directors such as Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), who worked on a few of Yang’s movies and later directed Cape No. 7 (2008), a film about the formation of a rock band that became the second-highest grossing movie in the nation’s history when it was released.
According to Chen, directors such as Wei are carrying on the cultural exploration of the Taiwan New Cinema movement, while adopting filmmaking techniques that appeal to wider audiences. “Locally produced films are now striking an effective balance between artistic and commercial considerations,” the professor says. Given the movement’s strong influence on modern Taiwanese productions, he believes that regular re-examinations of the Taiwan New Cinema tradition such as Flowers of Taipei are of great value, particularly as they help introduce internationally celebrated domestic movies to younger audiences. “The high quality of New Wave works often astounds my students,” Chen says.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw