THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Taiwanese cinema produced, in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most formally rigorous bodies of film work in cinema history - the Taiwanese New Wave, built around three major figures who are each doing something formally distinct while sharing a historical and cultural context that gives the tradition its specific weight.
That context: Taiwan is an island whose complicated relationship to mainland China, whose history of Japanese colonial occupation, and whose specific formation as a destination for the mainlander community displaced by the Communist victory in 1949 produced a society carrying multiple layers of historical unresolved business simultaneously. The Taiwanese New Wave is, in significant part, a cinema about what it means to live in a place whose historical identity is still being contested - formally, politically, personally.
THE ESSENTIAL FILMS
Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000): Three hours. A Taipei family across one year. A father reconsidering his life, a teenage daughter, a young son who photographs the backs of people's heads because, as he tells his grandmother, we can only see what's in front of us. Yang's final film and the most complete formal statement of the Taiwanese New Wave's central concerns: the cost of modernity, the gap between intention and arrival, the specific texture of a city in the process of becoming something its inhabitants didn't choose. The most formally precise film in the tradition. Possibly the best film made in the twenty-first century.
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991): Four hours. Taiwan in the 1960s. The displaced mainlander community, military compounds, teenage gangs, a murder based on a true case Yang's own family was adjacent to. The most structurally ambitious film in the catalogue - it moves across dozens of characters across four hours and builds toward a single moment with the patience of a novelist rather than a genre filmmaker. The specific weight of a community living in a country that wasn't the country they were supposed to be living in - the mainland as the future that never arrived - saturates every scene.
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989): The first film to address the February 28 Incident - the massacre of Taiwanese civilians by the Nationalist government in 1947, which had been politically unspeakable for forty years. A family across the period of Japanese withdrawal and Nationalist takeover, told with Hou's characteristic long-take patience. The film that opened the historical silence about what happened in Taiwan after 1945.
The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993): A biography of Li Tien-lu, the Taiwanese puppet master, told across the Japanese occupation period. Part documentary, part fiction, formally unlike anything in the surrounding cinema. The sequence structure is episodic in the way oral history is episodic - not narratively linear, but accumulative.
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001): A street vendor selling watches in Taipei whose father has just died, becoming obsessed with resetting all his clocks to Paris time. His mother, in grief, trying to communicate with the dead. A Taiwanese woman in Paris. Tsai's formal signature - long static takes, minimal dialogue, bodies moving through urban space - at its most precise. The film that most clearly demonstrates what the third major Taiwanese filmmaker is doing, which is distinct from both Yang and Hou.
Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994): Three strangers in an empty Taipei apartment. No explanation for how they come to share the space. Minimal dialogue. Long takes of bodies in rooms. A formal argument about urban loneliness that doesn't explain its own premise and is more effective for not explaining it. The final scene - a woman crying in an empty park for several unbroken minutes - is one of the great formal choices in 1990s cinema.
THE CONTEMPORARY TRADITION
The Taiwanese New Wave produced no direct successors in the way the French New Wave produced successors - the formal demands of Hou and Yang were too specific and too rigorous for easy continuation. The contemporary Taiwanese cinema thread runs through Midi Z (Thanatos, Drunk), Zero Chou, and the diaspora filmmakers working between Taiwan and international production contexts. Less formally unified than the New Wave, more formally diverse as a result.
The Required Watching Guide to Taiwanese New Wave Cinema is the full sequenced curriculum - the films in viewing order with the historical context for each.
The Taiwanese New Wave is, in significant part, a cinema about what it means to live in a place whose historical identity is still being contested - formally, politically, personally.