{"title":"The Affective Turn","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.5040/9781350030275.article-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350030275.article-001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter aims to recast the historiography of post–World War II Taiwan cinema in affective terms and, in so doing, sets the stage for examining Taiwan filmmaking in the twenty-first century as a form of regional soft power anchored in a specific cultural imaginary known as little freshness. It argues that the imaginary of little freshness embodies an affective trait shared across the Taiwan Strait by youths whose engagement with a market of miniaturization as cultural producers and consumers is inflected by a sense of generational injustice in the face of neoliberal capitalism. This affective turn can be captured by the phenomenal box-office success of Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 in 2008, which kick-started a rescaling of the market size and reorientation of audience from the global to the domestic in contemporary Taiwan cinema. By examining the popularity of Taiwan’s little freshness cultural imaginary in China and Hong Kong, this chapter reworks the notion of soft power into a form of citizen-to-citizen connectivity that is largely free from the intervention of the state and its agents whilst rescaling the operation of soft power from an international to a regional one. It concludes that the social, cultural, and political ramifications of the generational revolt by a sizable demographic of youths, and of the citizen-to-citizen soft power evinced by this affective cinema, may well be long-term and wide-ranging for us all.","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117063374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Medial Turn","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the flow of soft-power resources across different artistic realms through Tsai Ming-liang’s intermedial practices in order to reflect upon the state and status of the cinematic image in the post-medial era. Tsai’s declared retirement, in 2013, from feature-length filmmaking frees him to develop other modes of artistic practice—what this chapter calls a medial turn, signaled by a move away from the movie theater and into art galleries and museums—that demands an expanded definition of cinema. This chapter argues that Tsai’s drift from the black box to the white cube reformulates the affective relationship between cinema and its audience. It will examine how Tsai, via a carnivalesque staging of his cinematic and intermedial work in his first solo exhibition held in Taipei in 2014, raises questions about the contemporary status of the museum as a cultural institution and a mass medium as public space. As Tsai’s medial turn coincides with his adoption of digital technology in filmmaking, this chapter also explores the ways in which Tsai’s digital turn affords an extension of temporal duration and slowness in a series of short films whose medial attention on the World Wide Web challenges the ethics of spectatorship. This chapter concludes that Tsai’s medial-cum-digital turn shows us that the power that cinema (conventional or expanded) has to move us, whether in the movie theater or in the museum, remains with images that slow us down and that demonstrates to us the softness and tactility of the human body.","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127270975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Aural Turn","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter focuses on two non-Chinese-language films, Café Lumière and Flight of the Red Balloon, made by Hou Hsiao-hsien in the twenty-first century. Both commissioned by foreign institutions, the two films demonstrate the soft power of Hou’s authorship, highlight the transnational dimension of filmmaking, and upend lingua-centric models of film historiography. More importantly, this chapter argues that these films signal Hou’s aural turn, registered as much by the use of non-Sinophone languages as by a privileging of aural over visual elements, which are inextricably bound to gendered voices in the films. Both films remind us that it might be the materiality of sounds rather than images that resonates in and with us, and that ultimately moves us in our film-watching—and film-listening—experience. In fact, soft power can operate through broadcasting gendered and material voices as something to be sensed rather than to make sense of. This chapter argues that Hou’s aural turn has given voice (in both literal and metaphorical senses) to languages (including the languages of music and puppetry) whose materiality has been at odds with the ideologies of different ruling regimes over Taiwan’s long twentieth century. Divorced from language and meaning, the materiality of gendered voices in Hou’s cinema has projected a soft power so loud it makes us turn our heads to listen more closely to aurality.","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114438460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Industrial Turn","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter aims to illustrate the soft-power appeal of Ang Lee’s cinema by tracing the industrial turns his career has taken at various stages. It will focus on Life of Pi because it is not merely a trans-Pacific co-production but a simultaneous turn toward Taiwan. The production of Life of Pi provides a case study of soft power efforts by Taiwanese local governments (in this case, Taichung) to promote their cities as filming locations in the hope of generating tourism. Bringing Lee’s career full circle to its originating point of Taiwan, Life of Pi demonstrates how Lee has transformed himself into a cultural broker between Hollywood and Taiwan as well as how cinema collaborates with other industries (in this case, city branding and location tourism) to spread Taiwan’s soft power domestically and globally. Moreover, the industrial turn occasioned by the making of Life of Pi was also a technological turn for Ang Lee as it was the first time he had engaged with 3D technology. While no Taiwanese landscape makes any appearance in the film, Life of Pi is testament to the ability of cinema and technology to create a make-believe world that eschews restrictive conceptions of authorship and (national) historiography whilst demonstrating the soft power of transnational storytelling—both Life of Pi’s and Lee’s life story—that can only be described as dream-like and utopian.","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123486849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Historiographical Turn","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides a historiographical account of the Taiwan New Cinema movement by constructing a story about Taiwan cinema’s reception in foreign lands through the notion of soft power. It asks the following questions: What makes Taiwan cinema attractive to foreigners, and what makes such receptive reception possible? It examines the various agents, institutions, and mechanisms that have facilitated this cross-cultural cinephilia as well as the actual objects (directors and films), processes (including cultural translation), and discourses involved. This historiography is not meant to be a comprehensive or chronological account of a nation’s cinema but is rather a transnational lens cast upon that cinema’s most significant new wave movement as deemed by alien agents. This chapter seeks to illustrate the ways in which and the extent to which a documentary, Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema (2014), proffers a historiographical account of Taiwan cinema as a form of soft power that travels transnationally through the notion of authorship. It proposes a historiographical turn for Taiwan New Cinema so that it is no longer conceived as part of a national cinema or a constituent of transnational Chinese cinemas but singularly as a form of transnational cinema. As a documentation of this cinematic legacy, Flowers of Taipei is a historiography of presence that lives in the minds and bodies of viewers whose cross-cultural cinephilia has expanded into a deep respect for an island-state whose lack of hard power continues to be compensated by the global reach of its cinema as soft power.","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116037028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epilogue","authors":"Song Hwee Lim","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197503379.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This epilogue advances the thesis laid out in the main body of the book by demonstrating how a nation’s soft power in the form of cinema can attract aliens to adopt practices and to develop projects—whether within or without the said nation’s territory—that might, in turn, reinvigorate, rejuvenate, and resurrect that nation’s cinema, becoming, as it were, the latter’s afterlives. It contends that, nearly four decades after its inception, Taiwan New Cinema continues to exert its influence across the world, with evidence ranging from open acknowledgment of affinity and specific filmmaking practices (such as homage and remakes) to other routes and detours (e.g., migration). By focusing on how Taiwan cinema attracts aliens to the island, this Epilogue also turns the outward-bound notion of soft power on its head not so much to discount its impact abroad but rather, precisely, to account for the harvesting of its effects as they travel back home like a boomerang. It maps out the implications of this alien resurrection for our understanding of Taiwan cinema and its afterlives vis-à-vis the three keywords of the book’s subtitle (namely, authorship, transnationality, and historiography) and the overarching framework of soft power (here emphasizing the role played by Taiwanese institutions).","PeriodicalId":358384,"journal":{"name":"Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power","volume":"48 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132678627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：