Branded city living: Taipei becoming-Paris in Yi ye Taibei/Au Revoir Taipei (2010)

This article analyses Yi ye Taibei/Au Revoir Taipei (Chen, 2010). Due to its status as a co-production (with talent drawn from across borders, its various international funding sources and its deliberate appeal to global audiences through the festival circuit), the film is seen to provide a transnational perspective on Taipei. In this the film’s relationship with a film tourism agenda, a branding process pursued by the Taipei authorities, is stressed. Au Revoir Taipei’s consideration of life in Taipei, as a ‘branded city’, is analysed in terms of its three becomings (becoming-Paris, becoming-imperceptible, becoming-dance), in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the time-image (a striking example of which concludes the film) and it’s intertextual referencing of several ‘world’ or ‘art’ cinema classics, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (1964). The film’s transnational view of life in the branded city is thus understood to emerge at the conjunction of global production and distribution realities for film-making, and contemporary work and lifestyle opportunities in Taipei, the convergence of which create a cinematic construction of Taipei city that can be deciphered using Deleuze’s concepts.