In Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1970s, a commercial film industry existed that produced over a thousand films made in the language colloquially known as Taiyu (Taiwanese), a variant of Minnanhua (Southern Min), that was commonly spoken on the island at this time. Less than a fifth of this cinematic output has survived. In the 1990s, research on these Taiyu films began to appear within Taiwan, but they were overlooked by English-language scholars of Taiwanese cinema, the majority of whom focused on the auteur-driven films of the 1980s New Cinema and its 1990s iteration, as well as earlier Mandarin-language films. This has begun to change over the last decade, with more research on Taiyu films appearing in English-language journals and edited collections, facilitated by the efforts of the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute in restoring and subtitling the films, and making them digitally available.

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered, edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, is the first anthology in English on the topic. Partly, the book strives to make this “lost” cinema and the research it has attracted accessible to English-speaking readers; three of the chapters are translations of work previously published in a 2017 Chinese-language collection edited by Wang Chun-chi. The editors do not themselves contribute chapters but instead provide a useful introduction that discusses the history of the industry that produced Taiyu films, as well as trends in existing scholarship, before advocating for a deeper analytical engagement that the contributors then proceed to undertake.

Showcasing an impressive diversity of methodological approaches, the anthology is divided into four sections. The first is comprised entirely of a chapter by Su Chih-heng, labelled a “critical intervention” – a bold choice as a starter, considering that Su argues against the term Taiyupian or “Taiwanese-language cinema,” which the editors have chosen as their book title, favouring “Taiwanese Hokkien cinema” instead (responding to his arguments, the editors do not impose any particular term on their contributors). The rest of Su’s chapter aims at correcting what he views as myths about Taiyupian that have resulted in skewed critical analysis. It’s a provocative, occasionally polemical piece that is often compelling, such as when Su critiques the dominant narrative that the industry went into decline due to shoddy production values and insufficient audience demand. Other arguments are less secure. Su’s warning against relying on the surviving films to infer the general tone of Taiwanese Hokkien cinema seems questionable given, for example, the range of approaches available to researchers of silent films, about 75 per cent of which are lost. The best contributions in this anthology, indeed, demonstrate that with a carefully considered methodology and an appraisal of cultural context, convincing conclusions can be reached that take account of gaps in the historical record.

The second section of the book examines the relationship between Taiyupian and social transformation, analysing screen representations of disability and disadvantaged bodies, opera films, and connections between Taiyu films, Western modernity and vernacular modernism. Shih Ju-fang’s excellent chapter explores the genre of Taiwanese opera film, and its hybrid conditions of production and reception. She argues that theatre performers used their artistry, stage technology and imagination to experiment with chain dramas (plays in which film sequences were interspersed), thereby laying the groundwork for set visualization in Taiyupian. Her emphasis on hybridity is nicely complemented by Adina Zemanek’s chapter investigating how Taiyu films depict the experience of modernity as grounded in everyday material culture, with the filmic design of urban dwellings conceived as a cultural bricolage that reflects Taiwan’s connections with regional and global powers.

The book’s third section focuses on industry practices and their impact on aesthetics. The chapters here discuss the career of director-producer Lin Tuan-qiu, the relationship between actors and the industry, innovations in the wuxia (martial arts) genre, musical scoring practices, and the endurance of Taiyupian sound design practices. A standout chapter is Ru-shou Robert Chen’s discussion of aesthetics and generic hybridity in Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters (1968). Paying close attention to the interplay between Taiyupian and Mandarin-language films, as well as US and Japanese influences, he argues that director Chen Hong-min’s eclectic, cross-national experience enabled him to innovate his own stylistic approach in the wuxia genre. Evelyn Shih’s analysis of the afterlife of Taiyupian is perhaps the finest chapter in the anthology. Taking the Hong Kong comedy Upstairs and Downstairs (1979) as a case study, Shih notes that even as the Dolby noise-reduction system was gradually adopted, post-synchronization sound continued to flourish in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She traces the film’s comedic sonic devices back to Taiyupian practices, arguing for their lasting popularity, while contending that the parody of post-synchronization sound implies both audience familiarity, and a growing acknowledgment of the broader shift towards sonic naturalism.

The fourth section of the collection considers transnational dimensions and comprises two chapters, about the function of melodrama in the adaptation of Gothic romance, and structural similarities in the production conditions of Taiyupian and Hong Kong Cantonese films. Focusing on the female spy film genre, Jessica Siu-yin Yeung meticulously analyses how regional film circulation operated in relation to Cold War geopolitics, explaining how Taiyupian and films from Hong Kong made in other languages (Amoy, Cantonese, Mandarin) should be seen as a porous network. This reflects ongoing debates, also discussed by the editors in their introduction, around how Taiyu films can be understood in relation to a range of transnational comparative frameworks.

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered will be of interest to academic researchers and postgraduate students working in film, media and cultural studies relating to Taiwan, China and East Asia; it is also accessibly written, making it very suitable for use in teaching on undergraduate courses. The book provides a lively, wide-ranging and critically persuasive account of an under-researched period in Taiwan’s film history and will surely help refocus critical attention on the island’s rich history of popular entertainment cinema.