Emre Çağlayan - Poetics of Slow Cinema_ Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom-Springer International Publishing_Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

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(2004, 133), resembled Soviet socialist realism in terms of its mode of
production, which was state-controlled, and representational strategies,
which comprised a tailored idealism (see also Horng 2010). Despite the
similarities with Italian Neorealism in its use of on-location cinematography
and non-professional acting, its didactic idealism in narrative focus
and lack of ability in probing social questions largely contradicted its realistic
project. Guo-Juin Hong, for example, argues that the rigid styles and
conventions of Healthy Realism in pre-1980 Taiwan cinema paradoxically
disassociate themselves from the social realities of Taiwan, hence
leaving a gap in audience engagement as well as a creative and aesthetic
opportunity for Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers to emerge and reconnect
with certain national and cultural realities. Hong writes: “New
Taiwan Cinema since the early 1980s re-politicizes realist aesthetics by a
progressive reinvention of film aesthetics inherited from Healthy Realism”
and as such these filmmakers were largely “concerned with cinematic
time and space related to nation and modernity” (2011, 86). In this
respect, connecting with the roots of Taiwanese culture through a realistic
portrayal of its spatial and temporal structures was the first and foremost
objective of Taiwan New Cinema.
The Taiwan New Cinema movement officially began with consecutive
releases of two omnibus films by the CMPC: In Our Time (1982) and
Sandwich Man (1983), both of which contained films directed by a
younger generation of filmmakers, including the now well-known Edward
Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Both films were critically and financially successful,
as their narrative focus shifted from heroic, overly melodramatic
tales to pensive, naturalistic portrayals of village and city life. Zhang writes
that while the rural lifestyle was depicted as an innocent site where “indigenous
cultural practices are increasingly threatened by modernization and
urbanization”, urban centres were “depicted as an alienating place where
individuals have gradually drifted away from their childhood dreams and
are now desperately searching for their lost identity and a meaning to their
life” (2004, 244). Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early films, for example, examined
the ways in which modernity as a discourse permeated the rural landscape
and altered centuries of cultural traditions (see Lu 2002, 95–115; Tay
1994). In this respect, Taiwan New Cinema was a collective attempt at
exploring Taiwanese history, culture and identity by way of examining
contemporary social problems in a manner that was not possible in earlier
cinematic traditions. But in terms of aesthetics, Taiwan New Cinema manifested
a combination of social realist and modernist tendencies (see