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.

This 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 and 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...

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.