100 Books Like Cinema Taiwan

I have always enjoyed reading works by Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis as I find their perspectives on the subject I love–Taiwan cinema–refreshing and intelligent.

In their new volume, Yeh and Davis team up with co-editor Wenchi Lin and provide a meticulous examination of 32 individual Taiwanese films between 1963 and 2017. I like the fact that this book offers a wide spectrum of Taiwanese cinematic output in addition to updating the existing literature.

I am particularly inspired by a question that runs through the entire volume: What does national cinema mean to Taiwan at different times under different social, political, and cultural contexts?  

This is one of the first English books I read about Taiwan New Cinema (TNC), arguably the most significant film movement in Taiwan to date.

When the TNC occurred in the 1980s, I was a student and Taiwan was going through the early stage of regime transition and democratization. It was an exciting but also uncertain time. I found films of TNC compelling but often opaque in meaning.

Reading this book in the early 21st century suddenly unlocked a lot of mysteries about the TNC as a film movement and the brilliance of these works for me. It motivated me to start researching Taiwan cinema as a subject more seriously.       

I recommend this book because it is one of the few single-authored monographs in English that covers Taiwan cinema exclusively and comprehensively.

The study of Taiwan cinema has proliferated and diversified a great deal in recent years. However, when Hong’s Taiwan Cinema was published in 2011, most books on this subject were edited volumes and tended to have a narrower focus at the time. I like the fact that the author has offered many first-hand research materials.

I learned not only about the history of Taiwan cinema from pre-1945 to the new millennium but also why and how Taiwan cinema has shown the island as a contested nation on screen throughout the many decades. 

I think the author is very clever by bringing in the trendy concept of soft power and thus opening a new window for our understanding of Taiwan cinema.

I found the book not the easiest to read if you are not particularly familiar with the language of cultural studies or with specific films and filmmakers in Taiwan. However, the author has presented a convincing and valuable argument by linking a cinematic output to the entire system, which enables the production, circulation, and distribution of this output.

In other words, Taiwan cinema is a result, but the system that enriches creativity is where Taiwan’s values and soft power lie.  

This lavishly illustrated large-format volume takes the reader from George Lucas’s childhood and early youth to his years at film school and his subsequent Hollywood career as a director, writer, and producer, with a particular emphasis on the production histories of his key films.

With unprecedented access to countless interviewees and archival materials, Hearn brings George Lucas and the making of his films to life.

Apart from telling compelling stories, he also reproduces a wide range of documents for the reader’s perusal so that the book may serve as an archive in its own right (and I have certainly used it precisely in this way in my own research).

This short but very informative and stimulating book in the BFI Film Classics series was first published in 2009, with a new edition coming out in 2020.

Brilliantly illustrated with screenshots from Star Wars and some of the films George Lucas’s most famous production was influenced by, Will Brooker combines a meticulous analysis of the style, story, and themes of Star Wars with important details about the film’s production history and illuminating references to Lucas’s previous films and to the Star Wars saga as a whole.

I’ll admit that I picked up Tessa Bailey’s books strictly because of the reader raves all over TikTok. I read her It Happened One Summer first, and then immediately put Hook, Line, and Sinker on my wish list and I have to say, I loved the second book even more than the first, and that was a high bar to beat.

A riches-to-rags story about two sisters forced to move from their luxurious lives in LA to a much more sparce existence in a small fishing village populated with sexy crab fishermen, it’s part Schitt’s Creek and part Deadliest Catch—a testament to the fact this toe-tingling romance was conceived and written during the pandemic when the author was admittedly binging both shows on TV.

John Cassavetes is a kind of saint in the world of independent films. With his spouse, Gena Rowlands, he made films—A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—that launched a revolution in American filmmaking.

This collection of Cassavetes’ writings and conversations opened my understanding of art and life at the deepest level. This is the quote that I’ve kept with me always: “[When you compromise your vision, you create] a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts… These innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don’t have anything else.” 

This is a book for animation aficionados who really want to think about the nuts and bolts of animation. As someone with a tendency to revel in the world building of the finished product of animation, be it a Miyazaki movie or a Disney film, this book re-orients me to the materiality of the medium itself. And yes, traditional animation is a material medium! Frank looked at thousands of animation cells, literally frame by frame, and in her book provides us with a glimpse of the enormous labor, expertise, and occasional mistakes that go into creating even a seven-minute short subject. She brings back from the past the many women who were the inkers and in-betweeners in American animation studios and makes us realize the enormous effort (and tedium) that went into producing the fluid and flexible cartoons that Hollywood is known for.

Along the way, Frank touches on the… show more.

Yes, of course, just about everyone has heard of Roger Ebert (d. 2013), the great film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host, with Gene Siskel of the PBS program Sneak Previews. But have you ever read any of his reviews? They’re delightful–smart, funny, touching, and thoroughly readable.

Ebert must have seen every film ever made (his reviews are arranged in these collections alphabetically by film title). In each short review he offered, not just his opinion of the film in question, but striking insights into the film’s themes, meanings, symbols, and underlying philosophy.

Any film lover should immediately obtain all four collections.