taiwanese new cinema

Taiwan's own film studio, the state-run Central Motion Picture Corporation, was losing money on formula pictures by 1980, and in 1982 it gave its budget to a cohort of first-time directors for a low-budget anthology instead of another genre picture. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang and Wan Jen took long takes and non-professional actors into a country the old cinema had never filmed straight. Censors tried to cut The Sandwich Man's depiction of poverty before its 1983 release and lost, in public, a fight the old guard never forgave; Edward Yang delivered the movement's own epitaph in a November 1986 speech, published two months later as the Taiwan Film Manifesto. The films outlasted the argument. A City of Sadness sits with one family through the White Terror, the repression the Kuomintang ran on Taiwan from 1947 to 1987. Dust in the Wind sends A-yuan and A-yun from a mining town to Taipei for work and lets the years catch up with them anyway. Vive L'Amour has three lonely Taipei residents sharing one apartment, none of them aware the other two exist. In Yi Yi, Edward Yang's last film, NJ's brother owes him money, his mother-in-law lies in a coma, and his wife decides her life has gone empty. The same patient attention, now turned on a whole family instead of two people falling for each other.

Distinguish from Hong Kong New Wave emerged from a similar Chinese-language cinema context but pursued genre energy and commercial reinvention where Taiwan favored realism and contemplation. Slow Cinema overlaps significantly — Tsai Ming-liang is central to both — but Taiwanese New Cinema is historically and geographically specific, while slow cinema is an international tendency.