Edinburgh Napier University

  This article takes perhaps the most successful film- maker of Chinese origin, Ang Lee, out of his Taiwanese context of discussion and investigates the ways that his transnational/global filmmaking intersects with Chinese cultural identities and influences. This further problematizes the concept of national cinema and notions of “the national” as being defined within the boundaries of a nation-state. In the era of globalization, the fixed notions of national are problematic in thinking through cross-cultural communication (which is not unidirectional if it is to be successful). Ang Lee’s films take place in cross-cultural, transnational settings and deal with the themes of Chinese/Taiwanese diaspora, homosexuality, and cultural identity. The analysis of “Chineseness” in Ang Lee’s trans- national/Hollywood cinema help us interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational.