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Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-20
Environments, Poetics, Practice
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Book Presentation:
Investigates how geographical environments are mapped in Taiwanese cinema
• Offers a wide-ranging account of an under-researched period in Taiwanese film history, the years 2008 to 2020
• Foregrounds the importance of mapping in recent Taiwanese cinema, bringing together perspectives from cartography, film poetics, cultural history, design, gender and queer studies, East Asian studies, and production studies
• Analyses thematic, aesthetic, and historical trends, and films of diverse genres and styles, in contrast to the more typical focus on auteur directors and art cinema
• Draws on existing and original interviews with filmmakers, providing first-hand perspectives on the topics discussed
What is the relationship between filmmaking and mapping?
Accounting for the unique characteristics of Taiwan’s cinema from 2008 to 2020, this book examines how filmmakers have depicted and imagined the island’s diverse environments.
Drawing on cinema, cartography, and cultural studies, Christopher Brown argues that by refocusing attention on how films are shaped through a process of construction, the tradition of film poetics enables us to think about Taiwanese cinema differently: as a form of mapping. Wide-ranging in scope and drawing on original interviews with contemporary filmmakers, the analysis appraises case studies including works of popular entertainment, genre cinema such as comedies and horror, films about indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ cinema, and arthouse work. By asking what it means to map an environment onscreen, the book offers new insights into a critically neglected, yet creatively dynamic, period in Taiwan’s film history.
About the Author:
Christopher Brown is Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Sussex. A practitioner as well as a researcher, Chris has published work on contemporary Taiwanese film, practice-as-research, and American cinema.
Press Reviews:
Mapping Taiwanese Cinema is an exciting breakthrough – the first book on Taiwanese cinema since 2008, with an original approach to cinema as not just including maps but itself a mapping technology, and combining analysis of poetics with the practices of filmmaking. A must-read.
– Chris Berry, King’s College London
Christopher Brown analyzes Taiwanese cinema, 2008-2020, by way of well-curated mise en scène, soundtrack, and cartographic imaginary. Maps are defined as "instruments of power" and are meticulously traced through multiple scenes like Wordsworthian "spots of time," or Brown’s spots in space.
– Sheng-mei Ma, Michigan State University
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power (2022)
Authorship, Transnationality, Historiography
Taiwan Cinema (2019)
International Reception and Social Change
Dir. Kuei-fen Chiu, Ming-yeh Rawnsley and Gary Rawnsley
Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan (2016)
Cinema as a Sensory Circuit
by Ya-Feng Mon
Translingual Narration (2015)
Colonial and Postcolonial Taiwanese Fiction and Film
New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus (2014)
Moving Within and Beyond the Frame
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