Subject Librarian
Lucinda M. Hall
Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
Internet resource(s)
- Independent Documentary Filmmakers from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan web archive
Chinese independent documentary filmmakers from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been crucial to bring attention to social and political developments. Their projects are important primary source material for the study of contemporary China, and support institutions’ programs on contemporary China studies. Because of the sensitive nature of their work, their web presences are at risk to disappear at any time. ... - Taipei Film FestivalTaipei Film Festival supports the creation of Taiwanese films, promotes international film exchange, expands viewership, and deepens film education.
- Taiwanese American Film Festival (TAFF)The festival will serve as the nation’s premiere showcase for film and media by Taiwanese American and Taiwanese creatives. They are the go-to platform for highlighting unique voices at the intersection of Taiwan and the U.S. and to equip emerging filmmakers for their next project, no matter what size. ...
- Taiwan Film Festival of BostonTaiwan Film Festival of Boston (TFFB) is a non-profit organization striving to bring Taiwanese stories and films to the United States and the world. Tthrough compelling stories of growth, identity, discovery, and adventure, these films transcend and illuminate culture.
- Vancouver Taiwanese Film FestivalVancouver Taiwanese Film Festival (TWFF) is a non-profit, culture and arts event, presenting high-quality Taiwanese films. It is also the first large non-profit event in Canada focused on promoting Taiwanese films.
Keeping up with the journal literature
Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for a national or regional cinema? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's you can download and read the articles you want.
You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.
Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's now available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.
Introduction to Taiwanese cinema
In the first half of the 20th century, as a colony of Japan, most of the films screened in Taiwan’s cinemas were imported (see Japan, film in). Japanese filmmaker Tanaka King directed the earliest feature film The Eyes of Buddha in 1922, with the first film by a Taiwanese director, Liu Xiyang’s Whose Fault Is It?, appearing three years later. As in Japan, cinemas used a benshi, or live narrator, to explain the action on screen. In 1949, the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) relocated to Taiwan, embarking on a process of Zhōngguóhuà, or sinicization, with the insistence that Mandarin be used in all film production (see China, film in). From 1953, the KMT established the Hong Kong/Kowloon Film and Drama Free Association, demanding concessions from Hong Kong filmmakers who wished to screen their films in Taiwan’s cinemas, and thus fostering interdependence between the film industries of the two countries that continues to the present day (see Hong Kong, film in). Commercial film production was a feature of the economically prosperous 1960s, with martial arts films and romances popular; and in 1963, the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC) instigated a cycle of moral instructional ‘Health Realism’ melodramas. ...
Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Taiwan, film in. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 3 Jun. 2021
In the Library's collections
This page focuses on motion pictures made in Taiwan or by Taiwanese directors and producers. You can use the links below to begin your search.
- motion pictures taiwanCall number range scattered between PN 1993.5 .T28 or .C5.
- motion pictures chinaCall number range PN 1993.5 .C5 on Baker Level 4.
Introductory reading(s)
Chinese-language film: historiography, poetics, politics by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 C463 2005ISBN: 9780824828134This volume, the most comprehensive work to date on Chinese film, explores the manifold dimensions of the subject and highlights areas overlooked in previous studies. Leading scholars take up issues and topics covering the entire range of Chinese cinema. Their cross-cultural engagements with individual films, accomplished with an acute sense of chronology and history, tackle questions of issues related to historiography, poetics, aesthetics, genres, and directorial styles; at the same time, they address the economics of film production and consumption as well as the cultural politics of globalization, identity, subjectivity, nationality, citizenship, and gender formation as embodied in filmic texts.
The Chinese cinema book by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 C4422 2020ISBN: 9781911239529Publication Date: 2nd ed.This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. ...
Chinese national cinema by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780415172905This introduction to Chinese national cinema covers three 'Chinas': mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Historical and comparative perspectives bring out the parallel developments in these three Chinas, while critical analysis explores thematic and stylistic changes over time. As well as exploring artistic achievements and ideological debates, Yingjin Zhang examines how - despite the pressures placed on the industry from state control and rigid censorship - Chinese national cinema remains incapable of projecting a single unified picture, but rather portrays many different Chinas.
Early film culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780472901029This volume features new work on cinema in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China. Looking beyond relatively well-studied cities like Shanghai, these essays foreground cinema's relationship with imperialism and colonialism and emphasize the rapid development of cinema as a sociocultural institution. These essays examine where films were screened; how cinema-going as a social activity adapted from and integrated with existing social norms and practices; the extent to which Cantonese opera and other regional performance traditions were models for the development of cinematic conventions; the role foreign films played in the development of cinema as an industry in the Republican era; and much more.
The Oxford handbook of Chinese cinemas by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780199765607What does it mean for a cinematic work to be "Chinese"? Does it refer specifically to a work's subject, or does it also reflect considerations of language, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, or political orientation? Such questions make any single approach to a vast field like "Chinese cinema" difficult at best. Accordingly, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas situates the term more broadly among various different phases, genres, and distinct national configurations, while taking care to address the consequences of grouping together so many disparate histories under a single banner. ...
Speaking in images: interviews with contemporary Chinese filmmakers by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 B49 2005ISBN: 9780231133302Speaking in Images offers an engaging and rare collection of interviews with the directors who have changed the face of Chinese and international cinema. Michael Berry's discussions with such directors as Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Stanley Kwan, Tsai Ming-Liang, Edward Yang, and Hou Hsiao-hsien offer an eclectic and comprehensive portrait of contemporary Chinese cinema. ...
Thirty-Two new takes on Taiwan cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .T28 A15 2022ISBN: 9780472055463Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging "New and Post-New Cinema," or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan's moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. ...
Transnational Chinese cinemas: identity, nationhood, gender by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 T65 1997ISBN: 9780824818456Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demonstrates that gender identity has been central to its formation. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality have been an integral part of the filmic discourses of modernity, nationhood, and history. ...
Selected book title(s)
Cinema Taiwan: politics, popularity and state of the arts by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .T28 C56 2007ISBN: 9780415412582Following the recent success of Taiwanese film directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese film is raising its profile in contemporary cinema. This collection presents an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film that goes beyond the auterist mode, the nation-state argument and vestiges of the New Cinema. ...
Film production and consumption in contemporary Taiwan: cinema as a sensory circuit by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .T28 M66 2016ISBN: 9789089648884This book uses the potent case study of contemporary Taiwanese queer romance films to address the question of how capitalism in Taiwan has privileged the film industry at the expense of the audience's freedom to choose and respond to culture on its own terms. Interweaving in-depth interviews with filmmakers, producers, marketers, and spectators, Ya-Fong Mon takes a biopolitical approach to the question, showing how the industry uses investments in techno-science, ancillary marketing, and media convergence to seduce and control the sensory experience of the audience--yet that control only extends so far: volatility remains a key component of the film-going experience.
Island on the edge: Taiwan new cinema and after by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .T28 I85 2005ISBN: 9789622097155This is the first English-language anthology on the Taiwan New Cinema and its legacy. It is an exciting collection which covers all the major filmmakers from Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang to Ang Lee and more. Gathering a range of essays that analyze individual films produced since the advent of the Taiwan New Cinema in the early 1980s, it aims to complement Feii Lu's History of Taiwanese Cinema, translated by Chris Berry. Taiwan and its internationally renowned cinema are "on the edge" in more ways than one. ...
New Chinese cinemas: forms, identities, politics by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 N49 1994ISBN: 9780521444095New Chinese Cinemas analyses the changing forms and significance of film-making in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong since the end of the Cultural Revolution, with a particular emphasis on how film comments on the profound social changes that have occurred in East Asia over the past two decades. ...
Worldly desires: cosmopolitanism and cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .H6 H79 2018ISBN: 9781474428453How does cinema imagine our place in the world? Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan looks at the studios, films and policies that charted the transnational vision of Hong Kong and Taiwan, two places with an uneasy relationship to the idea of nationhood. ...
Other library resource(s)
Asian film online: volumes 1 & 2 by Call Number: Electronic resourceAsian Film Online offers a view of Asian culture as seen through the lens of the independent Asian filmmaker. Through a selection of over 1,000 narrative feature films, documentaries and shorts curated by film scholars and critics, the collection offers highly relevant perspectives and insights onto themes relevant across Asia, including modernity, globalization, female agency, social and political unrest, and cultural and sexual identity. ...
Chinese language film from Oxford Bibliographies Online - Chinese Studies by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199920082International interest in Chinese cinema in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is often traced back to the showing of Chen Kaige’s 'Yellow Earth' at the Hong Kong Film Festival in 1985. Since then the number of publications from academics and film critics has grown steadily, and the teaching of Chinese cinema has spread through universities and, to a lesser extent, schools across the world.- Film in Taiwan from Oxford Bibliographies Online - Chinese Studies by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199920082Taiwan cinema in this bibliography covers two periods in the history of Taiwan cinema: some during Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) and mostly after the end of World War II (1945–present). Although film arrived in Taiwan more than a century ago, relatively few books and essays, in any language, have explored Taiwan cinema during the Japanese colonial period. In the past quarter of a century, most film studies on Taiwan cinema in the West discuss only films and their makers after 1950, especially those after the emergence of Taiwan New Cinema. Despite the fact that Taiwan cinema has been known globally since the late 1980s, and masters like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang are household names among international art film enthusiasts, academic interest in studying Taiwan cinema is relatively low in comparison to interest about China and Hong Kong cinemas. ...
Hou Hsiao-Hsien from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Hou Hsiao-hsien is the most important and influential Taiwanese filmmaker, and his sensuous, richly nuanced work is at the heart of everything that is vigorous and genuine in contemporary film culture. An heir to the great modernist legacy—with its use of elegantly staged long takes, the performance of many non-actors, and a radically, even vertiginously, elliptical mode of storytelling—Hou’s work does place unusual demands on the viewer, but its sophistication is understated and its formal innovations are irreducibly bound up with the sympathetic observation of everyday experience. ...- Taiwanese cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Like the island itself, the cinema of Taiwan has always been in a perpetual state of liminality. Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty years (1895–1945) and during that time no cinema that could be labeled as distinctively “Taiwanese” emerged. After World War II, Taiwanese cinema was still caught between a political rock and an economic hard place. Despite allowing some low-budget films to be made in the Taiwanese dialect, the Kuomintang (KMT, aka “Nationalist”) government made sure its cinema did not violate its core ideological tenets of a “Greater China.” This came largely at the expense of anything specifically “Taiwanese,” something the KMT saw as a threat to the legitimacy of its one-party rule over the island. Even when a commercial industry did slowly emerge in Taiwan in the 1960s, it still operated under the twin shadows of the government’s strict policies and the exporting prowess of Hong Kong, which dominated Taiwan’s Mandarin-language market.
- Transnational and diasporic cinema from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Although from the earliest years film production, marketing, and reception involved extensive national border crossing, the rubric “transnational cinema” has emerged only comparatively recently. Taken up from other disciplines such as anthropology and migration and postcolonial studies, the concept of “transnational” in this still-emerging area of cinema studies remains highly varied, pointing to sometimes contested working definitions and analytic approaches.
Finding scholarly journal articles & titles for Taiwanese cinema
Articles and other writings about Chinese language films can be found in many publications. Our collection includes 2 journals which look exclusively at Chinese language cinema. You can use Film & Television Literature Index to find articles or use the search box at the top of the page.
Journal of Chinese cinemas by Call Number: Electronic journalJournal of Chinese Cinemas is a major refereed academic publication devoted to the study of film and media as practiced in Chinese-speaking communities. They consider submissions on any aspect of production, distribution, and reception. They especially welcome essays based on original archival research and/or exploring cross-cultural manifestations of mediation. Objects of study include, but are not limited to, commercial releases, independent films, videos, video art, animation, new media, exhibition conditions, and texts and debates. ...- Da zhong dian yingCall Number: Journal
Film & television literature indexCall Number: Electronic resourceThis index covers over 300 journal and magazine titles for film and television reviews, scholarly and critical analysis of cinema and television, and articles of popular interest about film and television. About half the journals and magazines are film periodicals and the other half cover film and television with some regularity. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.
Screen studies collection by Call Number: Electronic resourceA comprehensive survey of current publications related to film scholarship alongside detailed filmographies. This collection includes the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database and the detailed and complementary filmographies created by the American Film Institute (AFI) and the British Film Institute.
The web of science citation databases by Call Number: Electronic resourceThe online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.
Selected movie titles
Find more Taiwanese films in the library's online catalog.
234 shuo ai ni = Another woman by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #An aspiring actor takes on a case that requires her to assume a false identity. In hopes of preparing for the lead role in a play, she agrees to trick a man into taking her as his mistress, but things escalate far more than she had originally planned.
Jie wu kuang chao = Hip-hop storm by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #18238A documentary about a group of hip-hop dancers in Taiwan.
Lian lian feng chen = Dust in the wind by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #17600A love story about a young couple from a village in the northern-east part of Taiwan. The boy, Ah-yuan goes to Taipei to work after graduating from junior high school so he can earn money to send home. The girl, Ah-yun, follows him the next year and they work hard to earn enough money to marry. Then Ah-yuan must spend three years in the military and the girl marries someone else. Although Ah-yuan regrets what happened he does not blame Ah-yun.
Warriors of the rainbow: Seediq Bale, part 1 & part 2 by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #14798After Japan invades Taiwan in 1930, the native Seediq people are in danger of losing their culture and way of life. The men are taken from their traditional lives as hunters and forced to perform hard labor at low wages. The women are taken away to be household workers for the Japanese. The Seediq are also forbidden to tattoo their faces, which many believe is necessary to cross the 'Rainbow Bridge' after death. The Seediq men plan to go to war against the Japanese to fight for their freedom.
Wo de shao nu shi dai = Our times by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #19451 (Region 6)The movie takes us on a 20 year journey through through the life of the main character, Truly Lin. Seen mostly as a flashback to how her life wound up where it is, we follow Truly back to her senior high school year and watch as she teams up with TaiYu to break apart growing love between rivals Ouyang and Minmin. Through the course of the next year we watch all 4 teens mature, and in the end, nothing is as originally desired even though Truly and Taiyu wind up with whom they initially wanted.
Zhuan shan = 1 mile aboveCall Number: Jones Media DVD #A young Taiwanese man decides to bicycle to the highest point in Tibet to fulfill his brother's final wish. Fortunately, he meets an experienced rider half-way through the journey.
