于昌民 Chang-Min Yu

Digitality, Film Phenomenology,
and Sinophone Film Historiographies

My research focuses on three separate but at times interconnected sub-fields in film and media studies. First, I work on how digital infrastructure transforms the aesthetics of contemporary film, both Hollywood blockbusters and art cinema. In particular, I am interested in how cinema reinvents its own ontology in the cultural market of media competition. Second, I am invested in what we call film phenomenology—the ways in which the audience's embodied perception is mobilized by onscreen corporeal figures. Finally, my recent work aims to rewrite Taiwanese film history by interrogating the monumental status of the Taiwanese New Cinema to see the film movement's continuity with previous decades, especially the 1960s. This was the era in which Taiwan's“Chinese cinema”was debated and transformed into Taiwanese cinema. In my forthcoming book, Modernism Disclaimed: The Film Culture of Becoming Taiwanese, 1960-1989, I argue that we need to deconstruct modernist film historiographies, which are ways of writing film history by resorting to an abstract formulation of modernity or modernization. By returning to mainlander elites' engagement with all things modern in their intermedial artworks, the book analyzes avant-garde shorts produced by the writers at Theatre Quarterly, Mou Tun-fei’s early works, Chen Yao-chi's graduate films, television documentaries, and the Taiwanese New Cinema's discursive construction.