在「新電影」中初試啼聲的《兒子的大玩偶》（1983），影片的最後一個停格鏡頭意義非凡，它可謂是預先勾勒出一種由「新電影」至1987年隨〈台灣電影宣言〉後出現的「新台灣電影」揉捻寫實與現代性、本土與後設性美學力量之間隔性影像形態。侯孝賢與楊德昌1980年代的作品，從《風櫃來的人》（1983）、《戀戀風塵》（1986）、《恐怖份子》（1986）、《尼羅河女兒》（1987）到《悲情城市》（1989），不僅由於提煉了「健康寫實主義」至「鄉土文學」的所述題旨及內在精神而複雜地辯證了國家電影的殊異性，更以不著痕跡卻融會再現與呈現、構成與自然，及現象與想像之間的「後設窗框」，差異化在地與國際甚至東西方電影寫實主義的既有表現特質。「新電影」這一種反身性呈現型的影像美學景觀，爾後非但被蔡明亮的《不散》（2003）加以承襲，更轉置出一種造形展示的音像範式，進一步展現出一種疊置於現象與（非）敘事、呈現與展示，及窗框與銀幕間的當代台灣電影思想形體。

The final freeze shot of The Sandwich Man (1983), the film that heralds the “Taiwan New Cinema,” is extraordinarily significant, for it registers an aesthetic type of in-betweenness incorporating realism with modernism, nativism with meta-quality. This aesthetic type dates back to the “Taiwan New Cinema” and culminates in the “New Taiwan Cinema,” which emerges after the ‘Taiwan Cinema Manifesto' in 1987. Several films of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang in the 1980s, such as All the Youthful Days (1983), Dust In the Wind (1986), The Terrorizers (1986), Daughter of the Nile (1987) and A City of Sadness (1989), deepen the peculiarity of national cinema by refining “healthy realism” and “nativist literature.” They also differ from the cinematic realism, categorized by local/cosmopolitan and east/west, by adopting the “meta-window-frame,” which subtly integrates representation/presentation, construction/nature as well as phenomenon/imagination. Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) inherits this aesthetic landscape of reflexivity-presentation in “Taiwan New Cinema” and further transfigures it into an audiovisual paradigm capable of plasticity-monstration. Tsai's film is a new figure of contemporary Taiwan cinema which unfolds itself within the overlap between phenomenon and (non)narrative, presentation and monstration, as well as window-frame and screen.