Cold War Romance: Film and Cultural Politics Across the Taiwan Strait, 1950s-1970s

FAIN: FT-54696-06

Zhen Zhang
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

By taking a comparative look at the cinemas on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, one of the frontiers of the Cold War, I hope to shed new light on the relationship between politics and culture in these Chinese settings particularly and in that period generally. Instead of finding cinematic illustrations of the clichéd ideological divisions, my primary interests lie in aspects of popular culture and the work of fantasy that countered or "worked through" the Cold War syndrome in complex ways. The project will thus focus on the parallels and sometimes intersecting trajectories or imaginaries of modernity on the two sides of the Strait.