Book Review: Berry, Chris, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri, and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, editors. Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

This anthology can be seen as a continuation (or an expansion) of the 2020 special issue on Taiwanese-language cinema published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, edited by two of the editors of this collection, Chris Berry and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley. It primarily extends earlier initiatives from the same collaborators, beginning with the 2017 screening tour and symposium titled “Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema: Rediscovered and Restored.” Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered—the first collection of its kind in English—offers a nuanced exploration of taiyupian’s complexity and diversity, covering topics such as historical revisits, genres, directors, studios, and music compositions.

Each chapter offers more than just historical insight and economic and industry analysis of this “forgotten” time. It challenges the long-standing bias against taiyupian films of the 1950s and 1960s—in fact these films should be more accurately seen as “Hollywood Taiwan,” as the editors put it. No longer can it be said that this is one of the largest film industries you’ve never heard of in the history of Taiwan cinema. Every chapter successfully refutes the long-standing misconception that these films were of poor quality or lacked adequate marketing and circulation. Low-budget films do not necessarily mean low production standards; rather, these essays highlight that under-resourced companies often produce a kind of “cinema of poverty”—a stylistic term used not derogatorily but to underscore their transnational, translocal, multilingual, and genre-hybrid creative qualities.

The book is organized into four parts, starting with a radical chapter of “Critical Intervention,” and moving on to three main areas of overview: “Social Transformation,” “Industry and Aesthetics,” and “Transnational Dimensions.” Su Chih-heng opens the anthology with his trailblazing chapter “Don’t Call Me ‘Taiyupian’: Reflections on the Taiwanese Hokkien Cinema Era and Its Myths,” and he starts by suggesting a correction in naming. While skeptical of non-Taiwan-based, Anglophone studies on Taiwanese-language cinema, Su nonetheless raises critical questions for us to consider. What is in a name? Juliet may argue in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that a name is merely a label, a convention, and doesn’t define the essence of a person or a thing, but in Taiwanese cinema, naming is political. Su reminds us that political consciousness is always present in Taiwanese Hokkien cinema (a term he advocates as a replacement) and can’t be fully understood from a depoliticized view. Using the term taiyupian then, which follows the Mandarin pronunciation instead of the Taiwanese Hokkien pronunciation, continues to perpetuate a Mandarin-centric perspective. Although his tone is confrontational—he himself describes it as such—his candor reflects shared frustrations with Taiwan’s current political climate.

Indeed, the editors of the anthology feel compelled to clarify their own position :

We see the logic of his argument, and therefore we have not used taiyupian in this introduction. But it is also true that at this moment, many readers in English might be confused by the term ‘Taiwanese Hokkien cinema’ , and it remains to be seen if this term will catch on. In recognition that even the naming of the phenomenon under consideration remains highly contested and dynamic, we have not imposed any particular term on the authors included in this collection and allowed them to use whatever terms they prefer … In our case, the preferred term is ‘Taiwanese-language cinema’. (9–10).

The political dimension of language is central to why this part of the national film history has been overlooked, why the films have been downplayed, and why the recent resurgence of interest is so significant. Part of the neglect towards the Taiwanese-language film industry has to do with the Chiang Kai-shek regime’s suppression of local culture and language and its broader ambition to re-Sinicize Taiwan’s identity as (mainland) Chinese. This context helps explain why Taiwanese-language cinema has long been framed as melodramatic and is also seen through the lens of “suffering” as a structure of feeling—a product of “repressed public memory” (Zhang 2013, 3)—or associated with the culturally resonant term beiqing (sadness), famously invoked in the film title A City of Sadness (1989). Revisiting this framework, Ta-wei Chi brings disability studies to his analysis, examining how blindness is visually represented in Taiwanese-language films. Also engaging with the period’s political landscape, Su argues that KMT policies actively encouraged Hong Kong filmmakers to shoot in Taiwan, turning the island into a site of ideological contest during the Cold War. These cultural and economic forces, shaped in no small part by language policy, obstructed the Taiwanese-language industry’s transition to color film, leading to its steep decline.

Scholars in this collection accentuate the cultural and historical heritage of Taiwanese-language films by emphasizing the vibrant, grassroots, yet ephemeral emergence of many private film production companies, which during their peak contributed to a wealth of productions. As Adina Zemanek observes, taiyupian reflects a form of vernacular modernism that emphasizes both “global connectedness and the agency of local societies in selectively reacting to global forces” (81). This is vividly expressed in the films’ visual portrayals of urban life and their mirroring of contemporary social changes, such as the appearance of pharmaceutical companies as markers of modernity. Yet, as the chapter by Hsin-chi Chen reveals, attempts to model the Taiwanese film industry after Hollywood were ultimately unsuccessful. Without binding contracts, actors moved freely between studios (a freedom driven in part by financial instability), but this also meant a lack of job security and no stable star system. Production cycles were often short, and many films became one-off successes, with studios unable to sustain themselves in the long run.

And because Taiwanese Hokkien, as a variant of Minnanhua, allows for circulation and consumption alongside other Sinophone film industries—particularly Amoy, Cantonese, and Mandarin—it forms a “porous network” (Yeung, 247). Wang Chun-chi, both a prolific scholar on this subject and one of the key figures behind Taiwanese-language film preservation and restoration projects (she was the former director of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute), rejects the idea that Taiwanese-language films were merely low-budget imitations of other genre films from neighboring countries. She has previously argued that their creative achievement lies in their ability to adopt a “cannibalistic” counter-strategy—to “devour everything local, national, colonial and global in order to achieve an impure, but distinctive, form of expression” (Wang 2012, 76), a framework that Ru-shou Robert Chen continues to explore in his analysis of the understudied martial arts subgenre within Taiwanese-language cinema, reiterating the theme of the films’ “cosmopolitan and hybrid cultural appropriations” (Berry and Rawnsley 2020, 73).

Most anthologies of this sort often lend themselves to casual browsing—a chapter here and there. But this particular collection deserves a straight-through read. Its structure is deliberate, its momentum cumulative; to read it out of sequence is to miss the quiet architecture of the editors’ design. Of the three general topics surveyed, the area of “Industry and Aesthetics” emerges as the most compelling, a fact reflected in the generous space it occupies within the volume.

Aside from the previously mentioned textual analysis of the martial arts genre, other scholars venture into a range of other genres, including Fang-mei Lin’s study of the limits of Gothic romance’s translatability in “family complex” films, Jessica Siu-yin Yeung’s survey of women spy films, and Evelyn Shih’s examination of Hong Kong’s reflexive cinema, which cleverly repurposes the dubbing traditions of taiyupian.

Additionally, the analysis of music and soundscapes threads throughout the volume, interweaving with other themes and accentuating Taiwanese-language cinema’s transnational appeal. Ju-fang Shih reminds us that taiyupian traces its roots back to the traditions of early Taiwanese opera. Wan-shun Shih’s chapter offers a rich, detailed account of filmmaker Lin Tuan-qiu and the rise and decline of private film studios during the Taiwanese-language film era, a chapter that resonates powerfully alongside Nancy Guy’s exploration of soundscapes and the work of composer Tseng Chung-ying—a pairing that brings a fresh perspective to Anglophone scholarship.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the anthology itself embraces linguistic and cultural specificity by featuring several translated chapters, allowing authors to write in their native languages rather than conforming to English as the default. Taiwan occupies a paradoxical position: both significant and peripheral in global terms. Previous scholarship on Taiwanese-language cinema was largely localized and contained, especially in the absence of infrastructure for film preservation. While this may reflect a justified skepticism toward Anglophone interventions, this inward turn can sometimes run counter to the inherently transnational nature of the cinematic subjects under study. In this context, the study of Taiwanese cinema is the study of Taiwan. Perhaps we no longer need to constantly justify ourselves to outsiders, fearing we’re unseen, when, in fact, we are already being seen.

Works Cited

Berry, Chris, and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley. “Introduction to a special issue on Taiwanese-language films (taiyupian).” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, no. 2 (2020): 72–75.

Wang, Chun-chi. “Affinity and Difference between Japanese Cinema and Taiyu Pian through a Comparative Study of Japanese and Taiyu pian Melodramas.” Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 6, no. 1 (2012): 71–102.

Zhang, Yingjin. “Articulating Sadness, Gendering Space: The Politics and Poetics of Taiyu Films from 1960s Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (2013): 1–46.