Thus, Taiwan New Cinema masters are sometimes seen by Brazilian audiences as inheritors of a certain Asian cinema aesthetic and prestige previously located and recognised in Japanese masters Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, both objects of numerous studies and retrospectives in the country, and largely admired by the public. Interestingly, this follows in a long tradition of consistent distribution, reception and critical appreciation of Japanese films in the city of São Paulo, which has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and thus a special relationship with the country and the culture. Today, these three directors can be considered to be quite well-known in the country especially amongst students, cinephiles and academics.
Moreover, there have been retrospectives of Hou, Yang and Tsai’s work in the main cities in Brasil in the past decade, and Tsai Ming-liang has visited the country at least twice. The São Paulo International Film Festival, Brazil’s largest and most prestigious annual film event, has been showcasing Hou, Yang and Tsai’s films for years, closely following their notoriety in European Film Festivals and helping to establish them as synonymous with Taiwan cinema. On one hand, from the 1980s onwards Brazilian audiences have been able to see major works by Taiwan New Cinema masters Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang both commercially and in film festivals, and from the 1990s onwards it embraced the work of art-house director Tsai Ming-liang. This reflection departs from two objective observations concerning the reception of Taiwanese cinema in Brazil. This will allow for a broader reflection on the process of distribution and exhibition of Taiwanese films abroad, and for an interrogation into the commercial, political and artistic forces which inevitably affect the international reception of a national cinema. The aim of this chapter is to offer an in-depth examination of the reception of Taiwanese films in Brazil in the past three decades. Therefore, we argue that these seemingly powerful female images in BCB are all represented as stigmatic which attempts to equalize female power to negativity thereby essentially disavowing feminism. We categorise the three leading female characters into significations of “dominant feminism”, “passive feminism”, and “recessive feminism”, and show how their power is exercised through scheming, seduc- tion and detainment, respectively. By revealing the problematization of representations of the seemingly powerful female characters in BCB produced by male filmmakers, we unveil the hidden contradiction of feminism and anti-feminism in order to gain a profound understanding of women’s power relations and the socio-cultural perception of them in the Taiwanese context. Through a postfeminist reading, this study attempts to challenge the dichotomy of Asian versus Western values in order to engage Taiwanese films into the global debate of feminism.
This paper aims to add to the underrepresented scholarship on feminist critique in Taiwanese cinema by investigating the ways in which female power has been represented in the female-centred Taiwanese film, The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful (BCB).
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