Multiple voices
The invention of cinema coincided roughly with the cession of Taiwan to Japan, which imported not only its films, but also the tradition of the benshi. In the era of silent cinema, the benshi was responsible for telling the story to the audience, clarifying its meaning and giving voice to the various characters. The benzi (Taiwanese version), although not involved in the films, were the first stars of cinema in Taiwan. They are sometimes credited with playing a subversive role in relation to Japanese colonial power, and with being able to decide the genre of a film according to their comments. March of Happiness (Lin Cheng-sheng, 1999) revives one of them in a secondary role, the famous Zhan Tian-ma, founder of the Tianma Tea House. The practice continued long after the arrival of talkies in a country where foreign imports dominated for a long time, and where part of the population remained largely illiterate. Whether a conscious or unconscious legacy, the mix of interviews and fiction in The Puppet Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993), which traces half a century of Japanese occupation through the story of a famous puppeteer, or more recently The Great Buddha (Hsin-yao Huang, 2017), in which the director frequently comments on the action, seem to echo this particularity. The Man Who Has A Camera (Naou Liu, 1933), one of the earliest surviving Taiwanese films, highlights another: a travel diary through four East Asian cities - Canton, Shenyang, Tokyo and Tainan in Taiwan - it embodies the island's transnational character, its aspect as a melting pot that resists the assimilationist attempts of Japan and then the post-war nationalist government. This did not prevent a local dialect cinema from flourishing in the 1960s, alongside an official, doctrinaire cinema subsidized by the State. This doctrine is known as "Healthy Realism", which simultaneously extols Confucian values, the progress of modernization under a paternal government and a bucolic setting inspired by Chinese painting. The two most famous examples are Lee Hsing's Oyster Girl (1964), featuring coastal landscapes, and Beautiful Duckling (1965), a melodrama of filiation set on a duck farm. As for cinema in the local dialect, which is often poor and homemade, badly combed and much freer, a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, "Le cinéma de (mauvais) genre taïwanais", exhumed a few of its jewels. Shortly afterwards, two of the greatest classics of wu xia pian, the Chinese saber film, were shot in Taiwan by King Hu, the grand master of the genre: Dragon Inn (1967), to which Tsai Ming-Liang paid an austere tribute in Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), evoking the closure of a decrepit cinema, followed by the stunningly beautiful A Touch of Zen (1971), whose aerial battles take place in the midst of birch and bamboo forests, pierced by brilliant rays of light.
New kitchen
Competition from booming Hong Kong cinema at the turn of the 1980s prompted the government, through the Central Motion Picture Corporation, to support young auteurs. This became known as the New Taiwanese Cinema. Among them was Edward Yang, whose work is essentially set in a Taipei undergoing accelerated modernization. His first film, Ce jour-là sur la plage (1983), already showed a predilection for river films and, incidentally, featured Christopher Doyle behind the camera, who had to apply for special permission and went on to become Wong Kar-wai's regular cinematographer. Taipei Story (1985) is a melancholy portrait of a city and its moods. Hou Hsiao-hsien, who plays the lead role in the film, also embarked on a career that would earn him the veneration of his peers and critics alike, first with a semi-autobiographical trilogy evoking childhood(Un été chez grand-père, 1984; Un temps pour vivre, un temps pour mourir, 1985), then the arrival in the capital(Poussières dans le vent, 1986). Long sequence shots, a hollow evocation of the country's intimate history, which he continues with a new trilogy that broadens the perspective even further: La Cité des douleurs (1989) revisits the difficult relations between post-war Chinese immigrants and the pre-existing population. The same theme, but in a different era, is explored by Edward Yang in A Brighter Summer Day (1990), a nearly four-hour fresco on rivalries between teenage gangs that establishes him as one of the masters of contemporary cinema. The secret and fascinating work of Huang Ming-chuan, who claims to belong to no particular school, has not enjoyed such critical support: The Man from Island West evokes - a rarity - the island's aboriginal roots, Bodo the island's authoritarian past through an allegorical blend of violence and surrealism. A similar disarray characterizes the filmmakers of the Taiwanese second wave who appeared in their wake. Ang Lee, the most prominent member, offers a light-hearted version in his "Daddy's Right" trilogy, which culminates in Salty, Sweet (1994 ). Generational conflict and the tug-of-war between traditional and modern values are the sinews of a latent war, while Lee displays an American tropism that he will put into practice as he pursues a successful career in Hollywood. Tsai Ming-Liang's more hermetic, more chic (?) cinema has critics and festivals in a swoon, with his successive Les Rebelles du Dieu Néon (1992) and Vive L'Amour (1994), in which a disoriented, idle youth - Ming-Liang only arrived in Taiwan from Malaysia at the age of twenty - and an underworld Taipei play the leading roles.
The neon demon
The film industry, plagued by piracy and foreign competition, is in deep crisis, but this doesn't stop directors from surfacing, such as Kuo-Fu Chen, author of Partagerait bonheur... (1998), which follows a successful young woman, except in love, in her quest for a husband via classified ads, or Lin Cheng-sheng, who is a good student, but a little diligent, with a film like Betelnut Beauty (2001), yet another portrait of a melancholy, nocturnal Taipei. Before his untimely death, Edward Yang ushered in the new century with what is unanimously considered his masterpiece, Yi Yi (2000), a virtuoso intergenerational portrait of the life of a middle-class Taipei family. In the same year, Ang Lee directed Crouching Tiger, bringing wu xia pian back into fashion. Hou Hsiaohsien's films tend more and more towards pure aestheticism with Millenium Mambo (2001), which is especially noteworthy for its spellbinding portrayal of Taipei and its neon lights. The trend is reversed with Cape No. 7 (Wei Te-Sheng, 2008), which remains the most successful Taiwanese film to date, mixing Mandarin, Japanese and Min dialect to do justice to the island's cultural diversity, while at the same time stirring up controversy about the place given to - idealized - Japanese influence. Seediq Bale (2011), an epic fresco by the same director that recounts the rebellion of an indigenous minority against the Japanese, darkens the picture. Pinoy Sunday (Wi Ding Ho, 2010) tackles a relatively new theme, that of immigration, in this case Filipino, and the difficulties they face, treated in a comedic tone, which Midi Z also does. At a time when Hong Kong production has suffered a dramatic drop in quality, Taiwan represents a kind of oasis. Mainstream films that demonstrate a craftsmanship one would almost hesitate to describe as American are produced without brilliance, but with punctuality, such as the romantic comedy You Are the Apple of My Eye (Giddens Ko, 2011), the gangster film Monga (Doze Niu, 2010), set in the 1980s during the final hours of the dictatorship, or Kano (Chi Hsiang Ma, 2014), a baseball film that follows a mediocre baseball team, but one that is bound to excel, stand alongside a well-established tradition of auteur films with a polished - sometimes overdone - look. Zero Chou is just one example: Fleurs à la dérive (2008) delicately interweaves three lesbian tales.Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang, the tutelary figures of contemporary Taiwanese cinema, continue to work more or less sparingly. The latter hasn't made a feature film since Stray Dogs in 2013, in which we find his predilection for end-of-the-world and diluvian atmospheres, at the heart of which he places a father and two children left as if stranded by the world. Wawa No Cidal (Yu-Chieh Cheng and Lekal Sumi, 2015) tells the story of an overworked journalist's return to the land, and features the classic confrontation between the traditional world of yesteryear - that of the Friends of Hualien in particular, another of the island's aboriginal peoples - and devastating modernity. Rice paddies and coastal landscapes come together in enchanting visions, while Face à la nuit (Wi-ding Ho, 2019), an inevitably melancholy whodunit, returns to the neon-filled nocturnal atmospheres made famous by Christopher Doyle with Wong Kar-wai, and which Asian cinema is particularly fond of. Documentary films are also doing well, with Small Talk (Hui-Chen Huang, 2016) and The Shepherds (Elvis Lu, 2018), for example, exploring the links between religions - Buddhism in one case, Christianity in the other - and LGBT struggles, an increasingly frequent and accepted subject, as shown in Dear Ex (Mag Hsu & Hsu Chih-yen, 2018), in which a father chooses to leave his inheritance to his lover rather than to his wife and son. The conflicts this creates are, of course, resolved by cinema. In recent years, a number of Taiwanese films have appeared on platforms such as Netflix. The falls (2022), Grand Prix du Jury at the Taipei International Film Festival 2023; The Silent Forest (2022); Gatao: The Last Stray (2019), Best Action Film at the Hong Kong Film Festival 2020; or Days of the Future Past (2021), Audience Award at the Taiwan International Film Festival 2022.
