When in Rome: Pai Ching-jui at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia

Pai Ching-jui was famously the first Chinese-speaking graduate at the Italian state film academy in Rome, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Csc), in 1963. Nonetheless, histories of Taiwanese cinema have yet to establish the impact of Pai’s studies in Italy on his career, nor have they taken into account that Pai arrived in Italy almost a decade after Italian neorealist cinema first took Taiwan by storm, to a dramatically transformed cinematic context. Using Pai’s Italy correspondent editorials, his Csc graduation short, ‘Un Amore’, and the interviews he gave and editorials he wrote about Italy upon returning to Taiwan, this article traces how Pai developed his notion of contemporary European cinema and how he planned to bring his discoveries back home to revolutionize Chinese-language cinema. In particular, it will uncover how Pai believed contemporary cinema was repudiating the ideal of verisimilitude and instead making cinema’s mechanisms more evident to spectators. Pai believed this conceptual shift in film storytelling was transforming the spectatorial experience and making cinema more integral to contemporary life.