Please join us for a film screening with:
Chun-chi Wang 王君琦, director
Taiwan Film Institute
Moderated by:
Ying Qian, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures,
Columbia University
Taiwan cinema has been mostly known by its New Wave in the 1980s and its New Wave auteurs Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang, and others. Recently the art films of Tsai Ming-liang has also attracted a lot of scholarly attention. But Taiwan cinema of the 1950s and 1960s have been overlooked. This is actually similar to Chinese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, or Korean cinema of that period. In East Asia, except for Japan, all other countries’ cinema cultures seem to only become internationally visible from the 1980s or 1990s.
Even within Chinese cinema studies, Taiwan’s dialect cinema has often been regarded as trashy, conservative, traditional and equated with opera films. Dangerous Youth and a large number of Taiwan dialect films restored by the Taiwan Film Institute, subvert all the stereotypes.
Made in 1969, Dangerous Youth is a youth film with resonance to the larger 1960s youth culture in the world, and proceeds the youth films by the Taiwan new wave, such as those by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang.
Featuring a love triangle between a prostitute, a pimp, and a procuress, Dangerous Youth is perhaps the most confrontational and yet stylistic of all Taiwanese-dialect films in its depiction of a morally corrupt capitalist society. In the film, one’s own body can be easily sold in exchange for money, while pleasure is bought and replaced at a fast pace. Save for the much harried and harassed female protagonist, each character is driven by his or her own impulses and implicated in a larger web of machination one way or another. Using a speeding motorbike as the central metaphor for a youth in distress, the film’s unflinching look at carnal desire and its new wave aesthetic establishes it as a pioneer of Taiwan’s youth films.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Chang received her doctorate degree in Cinema-Television Critical Studies from the University of Southern California. She taught at the Department of English at National Dong Hwa University in Hualien County shortly after returning to Taiwan, with an academic history mainly focused on the portrayal of gender and sexuality as well as the cultural history of films.
In recent years, she had expanded her research areas to include Taiwanese-language cinema and filmmaking as a social practice while pushing forward film education and offering cultural materials in remote areas of Taiwan by holding film festivals and related activities.
This is a Weatherhead East Asian Institute Arts and Culture event.
No registration required
