2020 CTS Film Week: Taiwan Retro Cinema: Nostalgia, Memory and Consumption

Dr Corrado Neri (Université Jean Moulin)

Abstract

Many recent successful – in terms of selling, but also in terms of diffusion and international visibility – works of Taiwanese popular culture dwell in a problematic form of nostalgia. Films like Paradise in Service 軍中樂園 Junzhong leyuan (Doze Niu鈕承澤, 2014), Monga艋舺 Mengjia (Doze Niu, 2010) or You are the Apple of My Eye那些年，我們一起追的女孩Nanian, women yiqi zhui de nühai (Giddens Ko九把刀, 2011), Our Times/Wo de shaonü shidai我的少女時代 (Chen Yushan陳玉珊, 2015), TV series like The Way We Were/Shiliu ge xiatian十六個夏天 (2014), and documentaries The Moment/Nashi cike那時此刻 (Yang Lizhou楊力州, 2016)  expose different, but yet somehow similar, longing for an (imagined?) past. Reading Douwe Draaisma, Harmut Rosa and Simon Reynolds (among others) I’ll try to locate and decipher the role of this phenomenon both in the context of Asian Studies as in relation to the European sinology, tying to situate the reason for the local success and the relevance of these oeuvre in the transnational flux of communication.

Speaker Biography

Corrado Neri is associate professor at the Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, currently (2016-2017) visiting professor at National Taiwan University of the Art, Taipei. He has conducted extensive research on Chinese cinema in Beijing and Taipei and published many articles on books and magazine (in English, French and Italian). His book Tsai Ming-liang on the Taiwanese film director appeared in 2004 (Venezia, Cafoscarina). Ages Inquiets. Cinémas chinois: une representation de la jeunesse, was printed in 2009 (Lyon, Tigre de Papier). His third book, Retro Taiwan, has recently been published for l’Asiathèque (Paris, 2016). He co-edited (with Kirstie Gormley ) a bilingual (french/english) book on Taiwan cinema (Taiwan cinema/Le Cinéma taiwanais, Asiexpo, 2009); Global Fences (with Florent Villard, IETT, 2011); Reinventing Mao: Maoisms and National Cinemas/La Réinvention de Mao. Maoïsmes et Cinémas Nationaux (Special issue of Cinéma & Cie International Film Studies Journal (with Marco Dalla Gassa, Federico Zecca) and Politics and Representation in Sinophone Cinema after the 1980s/Politique et Représentation dans le Cinéma Sinophone après 1980 (Special #55 de Monde Chinois Nouvelle Asie, with Jean-Yves Heurtebise).

* All SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies are free and open to all to attend. We suggest you arrive a few minutes early at the venue to secure your seat.

Organiser: SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: ml156@soas.ac.uk