Contenu du sommaire : Taiwanese Cinephilia

This essay argues that the evolution of the Golden Horse Awards cannot be understood through institutional history alone but must be viewed through its ongoing negotiation with cinephile culture, particularly through the affect of “madness.” While the awards began as a tool for anti-communist state propaganda, audience reception repeatedly transformed its cultural meaning, creating new forms of film appreciation specific to the postwar Taiwanese political and social context. This study thus contributes to our understanding of how film institutions and audience communities mutually construct cultural meaning, even under authoritarian conditions.

The article examines Taiwan's pioneering Women Make Waves International Film Festival as a site for documenting an alternative feminist history and its broader struggles for gender equality in cinema. Through thematic programming, the festival tackles issues such as gender representation and identity while experimenting with different delivery styles. The article also raises critical questions about the challenges of preserving the labour and collective experiences of such events, underscoring the importance of archiving “absence.” By situating the festival within global feminist networks, the article highlights its lasting impact on reshaping narratives and transnational solidarity in cinema.

Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang's late museum-commissioned and “post-retirement” film and digital video works mark an important shift in the auteur's approach to moving images. Tsai's recent works have moved away from scripted narrative and more toward film and digital images as images in his reflections on time, space, and memory. I connect Tsai's experiments with the ontology of the image and the role of the face in cinema – specifically the ageing face of his “male muse” Lee Kang-sheng – to the early Screen Tests of Andy Warhol and ageing star Norma Desmond's famous line from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) about the fate of silent cinema: “We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.” I examine how a devoted cinephile culture in Taiwan has allowed Tsai to collaboratively curate retrospective events such as Tsai Ming-liang's Days at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education even as he has been remarkably productive beyond “retirement” with new commissioned works such as Xining Public Housing. Tsai thus revisits early filming locations, recalls and restages his career, and reflects on the ageing faces of his nonprofessional actors and the face of the city of Taipei itself. I advance a series of propositions about cinephilia – as nostalgic, intercultural, reparative, and pedagogical – that are both general and tied directly to Tsai's focus on faces and time in his late and post-retirement body of work.

How is cinephilia articulated onscreen, in fiction films, in twenty-first century Taiwanese cinema? In answering this question, I argue that pastiche has become dominant in the island's recent popular cinema, notably in genre films and in romantic dramas that engage in nostalgic depictions of the past. The article commences with an analysis of film posters that appear onscreen, prompting a discussion of intertextuality, the ways in which contemporary filmmakers engage with traditions of commercial cinema. Tracing the development of onscreen cinephilia in the 2010s, I then contend the importance of pastiche as a defining feature of many recent genre films that are intended to be understood and appreciated as imitations. Finally, I turn to the recent trend of nostalgic youth romances, focusing on the ways in which they pastiche the past – specifically, historical film-viewing experiences – as well as the cross-cultural, cross-media genre of the dorama.

With a focus on Wave Makers (Netflix, 2023), this study explores how a political series moves from fictional immersion to fan re-creations and into civic engagement. Using mixed methods, including content analysis and digital ethnography, the research examines the interplay between the series' narrative structure and fan-driven mobilisation. The findings reveal that Wave Makers transforms fictional representations of political aides and campaign ethics into catalysts for online debate, fostering creative reinterpretations and mobilising political action. This study contributes to an understanding of how digital media shape contemporary fan culture and bridge the gap between entertainment and civic participation in Taiwan.

This article examines guopian-related discourses on film-focused PTT forums through a netnographic lens, situating these discourses within the term's geopolitical contingencies, conceptual ambiguities, and the entanglements of the Cold War and its aftermath. Founded in 1995, PTT is Taiwan's largest terminal-based bulletin board system (BBS). By the early 2000s, forums such as Ourmovies (Guopian ban 國片板) had become vital sites of cinematic exchange, as Taiwan cinema confronted intensified competition from unrestricted Hollywood imports while renegotiating its relations with Hong Kong and PRC cinemas amid shifting cross-Strait geopolitics. A netnographic discourse analysis elucidates how guopian has been debated, revisited, and reconfigured within these forums, which have functioned as affective publics sustained through diverse modes of cinephilic articulations and exchanges. Shaped by the platform's sociotechnical infrastructure and ethos of sharing, film-focused PTT forums epitomise a locally specific cinephile culture in transition.

Amid economic crises and the collapse of land-based fiscal revenue, China's county governments face severe fiscal insolvency. The emergence of the “operational-first finance” approach comprises informal coping strategies developed by financially distressed county governments to circumvent the constraints of formal institutions. Some of these strategies have evolved into adaptive informal institutions. To open this black box, our in-depth investigation identifies three principal approaches. First, vertical bargaining – manifested in the manipulation of transfer payments, project packaging, and debt transfers – leverages shared interests and has become the dominant strategy for fiscal survival. Second, market profiteering – reflected in the promotion of new land-based fiscal revenue mechanisms and the sale of public resources – operates in quasi-legal grey zones but proves insufficient to remedy funding shortfalls. Third, societal extraction – implemented through heightened taxes and non-tax revenues and often perceived as “civilian plundering” – involves practices characterised by overt illegality or excessive social costs that prevent them from becoming widespread, given considerations of organisational and individual rationality.