The Historiographical Turn

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.