Ting-Huei Chao

Teenager’s Film, Summer Times, Cultural Representation

The teenager’s film Summer Times illustrates an eternal love between a young lady from Taiwan and a young boy at Kinmen in summer vocation. On the one hand, it completely puts the characters on the students of senior high school. On the other hand, this film tries to avert the traces and memories of Kinmen as a battle-field, and transforms it to be a beautiful and romantic love-field through visual-audio aesthetics and narrative form. This article reads and interprets it through citing theoretical perspectives of film studies and adopting the method of textual analysis. It discusses with three dimensions including the writing of travelling guide and the use of visual-audio aesthetics, the construction of narrative form and the representation of gender image, and the struggling and negotiation of cultural field. This article argues how Summer Times represents specific cultural meanings through film language.