Double Vision:
Taiwan's New Cinema, Here and There

A conference at

Yale University
Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street
New Haven, Connecticut

Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, 2003

Free and open to the public

schedule / directions / films / bios

Over the past 20 years, Taiwanese cinema has been among the most innovative and celebrated in the world, with its films and artists inundated by international awards and accolades. This fall Yale will host a month-long celebration and exploration of Taiwanese film, beginning with a visit by acclaimed director Tsai Ming-liang in early October. From October 30 to November 2, the Film Studies Program, the Council on East Asian Studies, and the Whitney Humanities Center will host a conference and film festival devoted to recent cinema from Taiwan. "Double Vision: Taiwan's New Cinema, Here and There" will explore the local cultures and histories recorded in the images of the "New Cinema," and it will consider Taiwanese film's rapid emergence onto an international stage and its relationship to the social and cultural transformations that accompany the process of globalization. We will search through the local and trans-national contexts that produced this remarkable moment in Taiwanese culture. And we will ask what comes after the "New Cinema"?

Over the course of the weekend the conference will feature a keynote address by Fredric Jameson, several 35mm prints of crucial films from Taiwan, and four panels with distinguished scholars, critics, film executives, and directors. Notable guests will include the directors Ang Lee and Chen Kuo-fu, Fredric Jameson of Duke University, Peggy Chiao of Arclight Films and the Taiwan Film Center, the screenwriter and producer James Schamus, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, and many important scholars of Chinese cinema.

The conference begins with Thursday screenings of two Hou Hsiao-hsien masterpieces, A Time to Live and a Time to Die and City of Sadness, both in rare 35mm prints. Friday's events include a keynote address by Fredric Jameson, a discussion with Chen Kuo-fu, and screenings of Chen's most recent work. And on the evening of Saturday, November 1, Academy Award winning director Ang Lee will take the stage at the Whitney Humanities Center to provide his insights into the recent history of Taiwanese cinema and to trace his personal itinerary as a filmmaker. Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum will moderate this discussion, which will be preceded by a screening of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and followed by From the Highway by Zhang Zengze, a film that Lee chose because it helped spark an interest in cinema during his childhood in Taiwan.

This conference and film festival marks the continuation of an annual tradition in the Film Studies Program. In recent years our film conferences at the Whitney Humanities Center have looked at the cinemas of Ireland, Japan, and the Balkans. And each event has combined a series of 35mm screenings with extended discussions involving film and literary scholars, cultural historians, and important figures from each region's film industry. Next spring, the Program will host a major international conference devoted to pioneering French film critics André Bazin and Serge Daney, and, together with the Council on East Asian Studies, a conference on the cinema, literature, and visual culture of Hong Kong. "Double Vision" provides an important opportunity to reconsider the remarkable body of films produced in Taiwan over the past 20 years. And, as it continues the ongoing collaboration between the Yale Film Studies Program and the Whitney Humanities Center, the conference also represents a promise of more to come.

Sponsored by the Yale University Film Studies Program, the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, the Taiwan Council for Cultural Affairs, and the Taiwan Film Center.