Cinematic Remapping of the Taiwanese Sense of Self: On the Transitions in Treatments of History and Memory from "The Taiwanese Experience" to "The Taipei Experience"

This thesis, with the particular focus on Taiwanese films set in Taipei, investigates how the Taiwanese cinema, through its diverse treatments of history and memory, enacts its role as a cinematic interpretation of the envisioning of Taiwanese national identity within the transnational context.

The first chapter centers on the Taiwanese New Cinema’s portrayal of “The Taiwanese Experience,” which refigures Taipei as a site of cultural hybridization, and further contends against the Kuomintang’s configuration of Taipei as a site coherent to the nationalist One-Chinese narrative. The second chapter examines the instability of recollection, and the artificial and invented quality of history and historiography through the emerging Post Taiwan New Cinema’s utilization of collage of fragmentary shots that shuttle between Taiwan’s past and present. The third chapter explores the Post Taiwan New Cinema’s depiction of “The Taipei Experience,” which transfigures Taipei as a postcolonial city of layers of historical inscriptions, and therefore suggests an alternative route to locate Taiwan and the Taiwanese identity within the transnational context.

With the concentration on the context of postcolonialism and the awareness of what Taiwan is and has been, this thesis discovers that the cinematic layerings of different phases of Taiwan’s past and present can illustrate the emergence of “The Taipei Experience” through the erasure of “The Taiwanese Experience.” This thesis therefore reevaluates “The Taipei Experience” as an alternative embodiment of “The Taiwanese Experience,” which in consequence paves a way for an innovative perspective to (re)imagine and (re)negotiate the Taiwanese sense of self.