dc.description.abstract | Film director Wan Jen is the ignored by studies on Taiwan New Cinema, which mainly focus either on Hou Hsiao-hsien or on Edward Yang. In fact, Wan Jen’s unique position in Taiwan New Cinema could shed light on, further complicate, enrich and refine our understanding of the most important movement of Taiwan Cinema. In this thesis, I would like to investigate and interpret Wan Jen’s oeuvre in chronological order, in order to see what Wan Jen shares with New Cinema directors and how he differs from his contemporaries.
The thesis begins with a Preface, which introduces the context of Taiwan New Cinema in general and Wan Jen’s relation to it. Wan Jen’s debut film The Taste of Apple (1983) demonstrates many of Wan Jen’s later concerns and styles are taking shape. Thus, Chapter One maps out the three issues, class, gender, and history in Wan Jen’s films. The topics include city-country conflict, gender and urbanization, and historically inscribed city, with which the following three chapters would take turns to deal. Chapter Two investigates the “city-country conflict” in Super Citizen (1985) and Farewell to the Channel (1987). With the two films, Wan Jen sets city and country in dialectic encounter, breaking up with the fixed discourse of “city versus country” common in Taiwan New Cinema. Chapter Three probes Wan Jen’s Ah-Fei (1984) and The Story of Taipei Women (1991), shows how Wan Jen adopts family melodrama to portray women’s responses to urbanization and modernization. By focusing on mother-daughter negotiations, Wan Jen goes beyond the anxiety about the rupture of patriarchal lineage in Taiwan New Cinema. At last, Chapter Four reviews Super Citizen Ko (1994) and Connection by Fate (1998). The two films turn urban space into a heterotopia, in which encounter with the (historical and political) Other makes for possible alternatives to present impasse concerning Taiwan’s future.
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