13 - More than Blue and Man in Love: Transnational Korean-Taiwanese Film Remakes as a Facilitator for Taiwan Cinema

Summary

Taiwan cinema, which remains widely acclaimed for its new wave (that is, the Taiwan New Cinema of the 1980s and the 1990s), has experienced a transition from arthouse sensibilities to popular tastes over the last two decades. Taiwan New Cinema – in particular, the work of internationally recognised auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang – has achieved tremendous success in global film festival circuits, though the milestones of that movement were not always welcomed by local audiences and failed to make a strong domestic box-office showing, a factor that partially explains the industrial downturn of the 1990s and the early 2000s. In contrast to that critically lauded yet financially underperforming output of previous generations, the most recent trend in Taiwan cinema – sparked by the commercial success of the locally produced crowd-pleaser Cape No. 7 (Hái-kak chhit-ho, 2008) and sometimes referred to as the Post-New Wave – represents an industrial revival and a renewed interest in domestic productions among local moviegoers. The filmmakers associated with this Post-New Wave have also embarked on a potentially profitable journey of genre film production, offering spectators a steady line-up of several different types of narrativebased entertainment, including comedies, historical epics, romance and teenromance films, horror films, thrillers and crime dramas (or triad films).

Despite the fact that this genre-focused trend marks the recent rise of Taiwan popular cinema, locally produced films have faced competition from other countries’ imports, including Japanese anime and South Korean blockbusters, which have attracted local audiences. South Korean films in particular have demonstrated a capacity for broad appeal in various Asian countries and regions, as part of the Korean Wave or Hallyu phenomenon of the past two decades (Khoo 2021, 41). In fact, Korean popular culture was first introduced to Taiwan in a significantly large way beginning in the late 1990s, and it reached its peak in popularity around the time of the 2003 historical television drama Jewel in the Palace (Dae Jang Geum)'s airing in 2005 (Sung 2010; Huang 2018). In the years that followed, Korean popular culture has continued to exert trend-setting influence through the transnational dissemination of television dramas, pop music, idols, stars, fashions and consumer goods in Taiwan, and this phenomenon helps to shed light on the uneven, asymmetrical power relations of intra-Asian cultural flows (Iwabuchi 2008, 159–60).