Imaging Communities: Location Shooting as Place-making in Contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese Cinemas

Imaging Communities critically examines the cultural politics of location shooting practices and their resulting cultural representations in Chinese and Taiwanese art cinemas since the late 1970s. It focuses on fiction films shot on-location in rural and developing communities by nine contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese film auteurs, including Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, and Hou Xiaoxian. Existing research demonstrate that Chinese and Taiwanese filmic representations reflect contemporary social changes in the region. However, little is known about how the social effects of these changes in the production environments affect the ways films are made, much less the social impact of filmmaking on the communities in which they were shot. To amend these theoretical oversights, this work draws from industrial authorship studies, production culture studies, post-structural cultural geography, and environmental psychology to engage in discourse and formal analysis of production narratives and filmic representations of place – settings experienced by filmmakers and spectators as sites of symbolic, affective, and emotional meanings. These examinations show how filmic place-making, or experiential processes of emplacement and cognitive practices of imaging that shape shooting locations into places, both impact and are informed by the institutional politics, social contestations, and cultural performances occurring within Chinese and Taiwanese production environments.More specifically, this dissertation argues that Chinese location shooting developed from an institutionalized mode of collective ethnography aligned with Maoist notions of socialist labor into an auteurist practice of nation-building more inclusive of Chinese “others,” including migrant laborers and the rural poor. In contrast, Taiwanese filmmakers grew conscious of location shooting as a historiographical and place-making practice belatedly when indigenization and community consciousness movements burgeoned in the mid-1980s. A case study of productions in Jiufen further demonstrates how Taiwanese filmmakers revised their location shooting practices to contest controversial practices of branding and consuming place as a commodity, thus engaging in production as a form of environmental activism. The final chapter explores the geopolitical ambiguities of cross-strait filmmaking, the practice of shooting on-location in both the P.R.C. and Taiwan. Acting as cultural ambassadors, Chinese and Taiwanese filmmakers perform cultural identities that aspired towards the emergence of a pan-Chinese imagined community, yet were confronted by continued allegiances to disparate nationalities. Neither “major” nor “minor,” the resulting representations of place in cross-strait films constitute ambivalent cultural performances that neither fully comply with nor oppose national ideologies, thus complicating claims that globalization has led to the irrelevance of nation-states