Taiwanese Cinema After 1945
Taiwanese cinema grew again after 1949, when the end of the Chinese civil war brought many filmmakers sympathetic to the Nationalists to Taiwan. Even then, the majority of films were still made in Taiwanese and this continued for many years. For example, in 1962, out of a total of 120 films produced, only seven were made in Mandarin; the rest were made in Taiwanese. However, the production of films in Taiwanese began to decline, due to a variety of reasons, ranging from limited scope and waning interest for such films, to the Nationalist government's promotion of Mandarin in mass media and its deeming of Taiwanese dialect as too "coarse". The last movie filmed entirely in Taiwanese was made in 1981.
The 1960s marked the beginning of Taiwan's rapid modernization. The government focused strongly on the economy, industrial development, and education, and in 1963 the Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC) introduced the "Health Realism" melodrama. This film genre was proposed to help build traditional moral values, which were deemed important during the rapid transformation of the nation's socioeconomic structure. During this time, traditional kung-fu films as well as romantic melodramas were also quite popular. The author Qiong Yao is especially famous for the movies made in this time period which were based on her widely-read romantic novels.
Taiwanese cinema of this period is related to censorship in the Republic of China and Propaganda in the Republic of China.
Read more about this topic: Cinema Of Taiwan
Famous quotes containing the word cinema:
“Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)