Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Through the Nexus of Bodies and Things: Introduction
- 2 Mediated Knowledge: Methodology
- 3 Bodily Fantasy: Embodied Spectatorship and Object Intervention
- 4 Sensory Linkage: The Politics of Genre Film Making
- 5 Intimacy: Internet Marketing as Collaborative Productio
- 6 Indeterminacy: Control and the (Un)productive Body
- 7 Mediation and Connections in a Precarious Age: Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Sensory Linkage: The Politics of Genre Film Making
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Through the Nexus of Bodies and Things: Introduction
- 2 Mediated Knowledge: Methodology
- 3 Bodily Fantasy: Embodied Spectatorship and Object Intervention
- 4 Sensory Linkage: The Politics of Genre Film Making
- 5 Intimacy: Internet Marketing as Collaborative Productio
- 6 Indeterminacy: Control and the (Un)productive Body
- 7 Mediation and Connections in a Precarious Age: Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Years after the release of Blue Gate Crossing in 2002, Fran Martin compared the film with Taiwan New Wave Cinema in an analysis of that which she terms ‘(trans)national Taiwan cinema’. She concludes that Blue Gate Crossing has successfully detached itself from the New Wave Cinema's ‘rigorous and austere esthetics’, which are characterised by ‘the challenging long takes, implacably static framing, departures from classical narrative form, and ruthless hyper-realism’. By comparison, Blue Gate Crossing is said to be marked by an ‘up-beat and accessible style’.
The accessible style can be problematic if interrogated with respect to national identity. To elaborate her point, Martin writes:
In contrast with the politically loaded emphasis in the New Wave films of the 1980s on the intricate detail of the Taiwanese local, [Blue Gate Crossing’s] story seems to take place in a generic East Asian city […] In sharp contrast to the close attention to the material and affective experience of (post)modern Taipei City in the urban films of Edward Yang or Tsai Ming-liang, the use of shallow focus cleanses [Blue Gate Crossing’s] mise-en-scene of any identifiable vestiges of the geographic and architectural particularity of Taipei City. In place of the unflinching focus on Taipei as post-‘economic miracle’, all but post-human metropolis in recent films by Yang, Tsai, and others, [Yee Chih-yen’s] use of telephoto lenses creates a soothing and generic fantasy cityscape in the more or less international language of modern buildings, traffic, trees, sidewalks, shop-fronts, etc.
Undefined, the adjective ‘generic’ appears twice in the quoted passage and has been used by Martin in two senses. On the one hand, it indicates qualities that are generally shared rather than specific, as in ‘a generic East Asian city’. On the other, it refers to cinematographic expressions that conform to conventional formulae, as in ‘a soothing and generic fantasy cityscape in the more or less international language’. In either case, Martin suggests that genericity has bred a compromised depiction of the local reality, within which lies the key to Taiwan specificity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary TaiwanCinema as a Sensory Circuit, pp. 97 - 130Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016