Chang-Min Yu (Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2024-25)
“Modernism Disclaimed: Taiwan Film Historiography Before and Beneath the New Cinema”
What got you interested in your research topic?
I was an English literature major and saw Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) in a class. That moved me to write my first ever long review of a film that I later know is exhaustively researched. It was a good attempt. That’s why I was a cinephile before I was a scholar. Those few early years in college and graduate school were just me consuming all the canonical films and “One Thousand Films You Have to See Before You Die.” Typically two per day, so that gave me a good basis in thinking about what it means to teach and analyze famous films from, for example, the French New Wave and the lesser-known traditions. And of course the follow-up question about how to size up the cinema of Taiwan against all these other more well-known films from the Western canon.
My current book manuscript, Modernism Disclaimed: Taiwanese Film Historiography Before City of Sadness originated from my long-standing concern about how to work with what I was taught—cinematic modernism as an unsurpassable milestone—and other, unwritten film histories from and of Taiwan. My argument is that we should think with Taiwanese intellectuals, who have been wrestling with the same problems at least since the early 1960s and how they helped to shape the emergence of Taiwanese consciousness.
Outside of work, where can we find you?
I’ve been in love with the Somerville Community Path and Fresh Pond. It is just wonderful to jog on the path and around the pond in autumn: perfect weather and beautiful colors along the way. And because I don’t have a car here, I would usually do two laps around the lake and head to Trader Joe’s and take the red line home. By the way, the Apple Cinema in the same strip mall does $6 Tuesdays! I’ve seen Alien: Romulus and Joker: Folie à Deux there already! (P. S. Don’t believe the reviews. I think the Joker sequel is pretty good, almost like a film from Tsai Ming-liang.)
What would you want to do most as a career if you were not in academia?
I probably will choose any profession that would make more money: lawyering or coding. It is not like that I need more money (but also, who doesn’t?). It is simply that, once you are in academia, you feel acutely that peers around you are on different career paths and at different paces. In contrast, any career advancement for an academic usually moves at a glacial speed, a bit like good research, though I am very happy that I get to bide my time doing what I like and thinking about film aesthetics. Or, maybe I would become a cat gentleman. We have three fur-babies: Michi, Ollie, and Tofu. They are the best.
Read Prof. Yu’s bio on our website!