Christopher Brown’s Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008–20: Environments, Poetics, Practice focuses on the concept and practice of mapping to investigate a substantial number of Taiwanese cinematic products. Post-2008 Taiwanese cinema has often been examined and studied with its commercial orientation and genre diversification in mind, in witness to the proliferation of film productions featuring a myriad of themes, styles, and narratives. In this book, Brown looks deeper into a broad range of filmmaking practices, employing mapping as his approach and trying to identify the aesthetic results of these oft-cited commercial successes. Diverging from the already fruitful and extensive studies on the Taiwan New Wave of the 1980s and 1990s, with their primary attention to authorship and resulting sense of continuity, the approach Brown adopts does not concentrate on any single director nor center on the influence of authorship on the broader market and mediascape. Instead, he sets out to analyze “films of a wide range of directors for their contribution to more general aesthetic trends” to “see the reiterative effect of certain themes and forms being repeated over time” (18).

The book opens with an examination of existing scholarship on the practice of mapping in relation to colonialism and imperialism, stressing its subjective intentions, such as expansion in the political and economic spheres. It further traces the evolution and implications of cartography in Taiwanese cinema and the broader social context, highlighting the fact that mapping often functions as an instrument of power. In the Taiwanese context, the strict control over the practice of mapping under the autocratic rule of the Kuomintang and the portrayal of what constitutes state territory highlights the controversy and complicity involved in presenting and publicizing geographical facts, which tend to be disguised as objective and scientific. While this control has been greatly reduced since authoritarianism ended in 1987, it remains an essential part of Taiwan’s modern history, with impacts continuing to linger and matter. Brown lays the foundation for further examination by pointing out how the Kuomintang asserted strict control over cartography, in a manner not unrelated to propaganda and indoctrination aimed at strengthening its regime, and certainly affecting onscreen cartography. Taiwan’s political evolution to a democratic society opened doors to diverse mapping practices, which continue to dynamically reflect “how filmmakers negotiate the industrial and geopolitical realities” (8). What is of significance here is the variety of filmmaking practices. In the book, Brown groups Taiwanese films made from 2008 to 2020 based on thematic, stylistic, or narrative similarities, avoiding the limitations of labeling or attempting to argue for a coherent, unified national cinema. The study also highlights how these films rely on or depict Taiwan as a distinct geographical environment, embedded in world politics, examining how screen mapping has been part and parcel of the “ongoing process of making and becoming” (190).

Drawing on a wide range of films made in Taiwan since 2008 as case studies, Brown selects and analyzes key features, themes, and developments that are particularly critical and organizes the book around six discrete yet interconnected aspects and their relationships with mapping, along the line of thought of films as constructed artifacts. Chapter 1, the introductory chapter, lays the foundation for analyzing and understanding Taiwanese films as a form of mapping, informed by the tradition of film poetics. Chapter 2 focuses on the mapping impulse of filmmakers and the meanings and implications of their attempts to chart the island of Taiwan and to situate it, both as a geographical space and a political entity, on the world map. Chapter 3 investigates the trending reappearance of forests, which often foregrounds a sense of authenticity (albeit one constructed through artifice), alongside the aesthetic value of forests within the broader discourse of cinematic cartography. Chapter 4 looks at films about and/or by Taiwan’s original inhabitants, which stand out based on an affective relationship with the natural environment, particularly with locales such as the land and the sea, not only as elements of mapping but also expressions of lived experience. Chapter 5 focuses on the idea and practice of Taipei as a designer city and explores the role design plays in contributing a vibrant, fashion-driven sensibility to cinematic decoration and onscreen cartography. Chapter 6 shifts its focus to interior décor, domestic spaces, and familial dynamics, delving into the interplay between individual psychological journeys and the evolving need to reconfigure traditional, often patrilineal, conceptions of home in favor of more modern, diverse, and multilayered recuperations of belonging within the home or a home-like atmosphere. Chapter 7 examines the significance of sound and soundtrack, specifically focusing on male characters who experience a sense of peripheral existence in urban settings, and highlighting the role of listening as a crucial act in mapping—both physically and psychologically.

Mapping is more naturally understood in the chapter focusing on the “far from pristine” forest as a place where “the truth lies” with “the prospect of coming to terms with repressed and painful events” (60) and in the chapter on the filmmaking by and about indigenous communities emphasizing “the profound and affective, though diminishing, connection of tribes to their ancestral territory” (86). There are also chapters that consider more urban-oriented mapping, such as the one discussing the centrality of Taipei as a design(er) city and another exploring how remapping interior geographies helps “legitimize alternative understandings of domesticity, to accommodate people whose experience does not match idealized conceptions of family life” (141). Brown concludes the book with a poetically sensed sentence, making a brief intervention into Chen Hung-I and Wei Ying-Chuan’s 2021 film As We Like It (揭大歡喜), writing that an old paper map helps the character to find his way, as “an artifact of the past, hidden in a vision of the future” (192). The sheer quantity of film productions from 2008 onwards results in frustrations or even a sense of futility in attempting to argue for a “national style,” instead revealing the importance of the framework of mapping in thinking about how multiple tropes (thematic, formal, or stylistic) come together in the Taiwanese context. Such a framework proves meaningful when probing any cinematic novelty while connecting the past, present, and future in the context of Taiwan.

Brown acknowledges in the book that the divergent background contexts and production/exhibition conditions of cinematic output, such as authorship, budget, marketing, and target audience, pose a non-ignorable risk in the categorization and examination. Therefore, it is more effective to see this book as an in-depth and structured scrutiny covering a wide range of filmmaking practices emerging in Taiwan after 2008, where domestic production and consumption gradually recovered, while also showcasing a clear ambition for engaging with the international community, either through festival circuits or streaming platforms. Given the ever-shifting global economy and regional political uncertainty, the notion of mapping and the impulse to map creatively (visually and auditorily), whether politically motivated or not, continues to resonate in the Taiwanese context, including in cinematic expression, not as in Taiwan’s authoritarian past to assert control and attempt to naturalize and legitimize the regime from top to bottom but more as a means to explore identity, individuality, and community in relation to the concepts of environment (natural or built), atmosphere, home/family, and nation/state.