ABSTRACT
The question of the national in “Taiwan national cinema” could hardly be more vexed than at present. With the virtual collapse of the island’s film industry over recent years, on the one hand, and increasing pressures toward transnationalization in film production, distribution, and marketing, on the other, the significance of the nation for Taiwan film culture, present and future, seems uniquely difficult to determine. This chapter addresses a phenomenon of the past decade or so that I term “(trans)national Taiwan cinema.” The term refers to an independent but – unlike the “art cinema” of the Taiwan New Wave – relatively populist cinema whose production is transnationalized by its reliance on overseas investment. Further, the orientation of the (trans)national cinema is toward international as much as domestic audiences, yet its degree of internationalization stops short of the almost complete deterritorialization of the new, high-budget, pan-Asian entertainment cinema. Analyzing Yee Chihyen’s 2002 film, Blue Gate Crossing, as a recent instance of (trans)national Taiwan cinema, I explore the film’s “flexible” encoding of two thematics, the national and the sexual, and examine how this flexible media product is interpreted by distinct audience blocs – Taipei-dwelling and queer – who have personal stakes in the representation of these thematics. Through this discussion, the chapter explores the shifting meanings and effects of ideologies of the national, the regional, and the sexual in contemporary Taiwan film culture, highlighting how the new (trans)national Taiwan cinema negotiates between the local and the global, the particular and the general, minority and mainstream audiences, and cultural deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
