Title: Before the Wave: Art Film Culture in Cold War Taiwan
Speaker: Dr. I-Lin Liu (Chiu Research Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Oregon State University)
Time: November 20 (Thursday), 2:00 – 3:30 PM PST
Zoom Information: https://ucsb.
This presentation examines the reception of art cinema discourses and films in Cold War–era Taiwan—a postcolonial developing nation-state that both benefited from and was constrained by the postwar order of Pax Americana. Drawing on transnational and nontheatrical film and media studies approaches, it challenges the conventional historical narrative centered on the 1982 emergence of Taiwan New Cinema (TNC). Prevailing periodizations often dismiss pre-TNC Taiwanese film culture as a cultural wasteland dominated by propaganda, shallow writing, and middlebrow commercialism.
By tracing how Taiwanese critics, filmmakers, and bureaucrats engaged with international art cinema discourses, this research reveals that art cinema provided a vital framework for negotiating Taiwan’s postwar political and economic transformations. It highlights how an East Asian authoritarian state not only observed but also actively participated in the development of world cinema. At the same time, it explores how cineastes invoked the idea of art cinema as both aesthetic ideal and political instrument, deploying it to articulate modernity and critique authoritarian governance.
For more information, please see: https://taiwancenter.
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