Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island

This well-illustrated, in-depth study of the most celebrated directors and films from Taiwan and the development of Taiwanese film focuses on the extraordinarily rich 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 to create a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history.Following the relaxation of government control of the film industry in the 1980s, Taiwan's directors sprung from relative obscurity to international acclaim. Yeh and Davis trace this development, analyzing Taiwanese film from the end of World War II to the present. Featuring stills, anecdotes, and close readings of films, the authors consider the influence of Hong Kong and martial arts films, and Taiwan cinema in the contexts of international cinema's aesthetics and business practices.

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is associate professor of cinema studies in the Department of Cinema-Television and associate director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the author of Phantom of the Music: Song and Narration in Chinese-language Cinema and the coeditor of Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics.Darrell William Davis is senior lecturer at the School of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is the author of Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film.