Taiwan Today

A new study sifts through the cultural legacies of Taiwan as seen by its filmmakers.

Film is the ideal cultural ambassador. At relatively low cost, compared with such alternatives as live entertainment and museum exhibitions, film can transport a nation's way of life to the farthest reaches of the globe. In a non-threatening manner, film can convey not only culture, but the country's hopes and aspirations and its national essence.

This leads to the questions of just what is the national essence, and how did it evolve. In Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis envision Taiwan as a floating treasury claimed, at one time or another, by the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. In the authors' view, today's standoff between the Taiwanese and the Chinese governments is seen as, fundamentally, an ongoing struggle over patrimony. This has been not only political, but cultural, linguistic and ethnic, and has provided the nation's cinema, according to the authors, with a common theme.

Filmmaking in Taiwan began during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), and early films represented the ideal that the Japanese empire held for its subjects. The Bell of Sayon , for example, was designed to show Japan's enlightened colonial rule, in this case as it modernized and nationalized a primitive aboriginal tribe. Produced in 1943 and based, probably somewhat loosely, on a real incident, the film portrays Sayon helping with a ceremony to celebrate the induction of village youth into the Japanese military. Ignoring torrential rain at the end of the rites, she insists on seeing off the young men, falls into a river and disappears. Her life is emblematic of the sacrifices and loyalty the empire expected of its subjects.

The Kuomintang (KMT) government, which assumed the administration of Taiwan after Japan relinquished control at the end of World War II, viewed cinema in an equally didactic fashion. Determined to erase all possible vestiges of Japanese influence, the KMT attempted to use film to make Taiwan's peoples into model Chinese. For most Taiwanese, the so-called national lan guage, guoyu, or Mandarin, was actually a foreign tongue. Although films were routinely made in the Holo spoken by most Taiwanese, Mandarin-language films were sponsored by the KMT government as it tightened its grip on the island and gradually eclipsed them.

Yeh and Davis see the existence of parallel cinema endeavors in this early post-Japanese period, characterized by differences in language (Mandarin versus Holo), in the type of films made (a state-sponsored cinema of nation-building and propaganda that contrasted with the highly commercial vernacular entertainment genre) and in the scale of production. Large, well-funded Man darin studios were juxtaposed with the small and medium-sized enterprises that turned out Holo films. The authors note that these same three points of divergence--language, mode of address and production scale--correspond to some of the deepest cultural differences and antagonisms that characterize society in Taiwan today.

A development in the 1960s within state-sponsored film, known as healthy realism, provided a lighter alternative to the blatant propaganda of earlier offerings. Its heroes were ordinary people--farmers, fisher folk and garbage collectors. The films are humanistic and environmentally aware. Nature plays a nurturing role--sheltering communities in which individual, class and ethnic tensions are resolved. Government propaganda is presented in a more subtle fashion in these films. Kind government officials, for example, are seen helping peasants solve their problems. In contrast to the Manichean dramas of the Japanese and early KMT eras, villainy, corruption and violent conflict are seldom present.

For the most part, directors knew how far they could stray from the government's preferred scenarios. On the rare occasions when healthy realism strayed into unhealthy realism, pressures could be brought to bear. A classic example involves Bai Jingrui, whose 1967 film Lonely Seventeen intended to reveal the stifling lives of young people in Taiwan's industrial enclaves. Its central figure becomes schizophrenic after the death of a cousin she had sexually desired. The KMT-run Central Motion Picture Corp. (CMPC) informed Bai that the communists might use the film message to discredit the Republic of China and urged him to understand his responsibility to society. Bai reworked the ending, and the sanitized version depicts the girl's parents admitting that they had failed to educate her properly. The daughter then goes off to join a skiing excursion organized by the KMT Youth Corps (where presumably she will receive the proper moral guidance). Although Lonely Seventeen placed fifth in the country's top 10 list for 1967, Bai was not happy with it, complaining that anyone could see this was not a romantic film, but a depiction of teens under such stress from parents and the school system that they began to exhibit weird behavior and twisted psychology.

Its didactic nature notwithstanding, the national cinema expanded continuously up through the late 1970s. Thereafter, it encountered a series of impediments. In Southeast Asia, which had been Taiwanese cinema's most lucrative market, communist revolutions succeeded in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The anticommunist message of Taiwanese productions was no longer welcome there. Although Indonesia and Malaysia remained steadfastly anticommunist, resentment of the success of indigenous Chinese minorities led both countries to impose restrictions on Chinese-language films. In Taiwan, audiences turned to livelier imports from Hong Kong, including Jackie Chan kung fu flicks and light comedies. The advent of VCRs abetted this, particularly after video rental shops received licenses from Hong Kong's two major television networks to distribute their products, some of which provided better entertainment quality than local films.

In response, the New Cinema movement arose in Taiwan. Although it did not succeed in curbing the popularity of Holly wood and Hong Kong productions, the movement was by far the most important development in Taiwan's film industry and cultivated some of the finest filmmaking talent in the world at the close of the 20th century. It constituted a major shift from a cinema defined mostly by commercial terms to a purely auteur-driven cinema. For these directors, their art trumped box-office sales.

New Cinema themes incorporated elements of indigenous Taiwanese life, often in ways that meant directors had to resort to guile to get their proposals past CMPC scrutiny. Proposals to the censors disguised the real intent of these films. A film about a boy who turns to juvenile delinquency and drives his mother to suicide, for example, was presented to the CMPC as promoting military academies and their ability to straighten out young troublemakers.

At the heart of the cleverly satirical The Taste of Apples is a critique of Taiwan's neocolonial dependence on American military and economic aid in the 1960s. When an ordinary Taiwanese laborer is injured in a traffic accident with an American military officer, the man fears the worst. Instead, after a US embassy official informs the military officer that "the president would be very unhappy if there were any trouble with any of the local people or the government," the injured man is sent to an almost unimaginably modern hospital where he is treated with great solicitude. His family is paid compensation, and his daughter is offered an opportunity to study in the United States. They are even offered apples, which were an expensive imported delicacy at that time. But the recipients do not find the apples very tasty. A nearly indescribable mixture of fear, bewilderment and displeasure, the film hints at Taiwanese reactions to the US presence.

The Taste of Apples was sensitive not only because of what it said about the KMT's relations with Washington but also because it touched on relations between the Mandarin-speaking "mainlanders" and the Holo-speaking locals. For example, the Mandarin -speaking policeman who escorts an American to the laborer's neighborhood has difficulty communicating in Holo, while an American nurse at the hospital speaks it well. When the CMPC ordered eight changes to the film, the local press objected strongly to what became known as "apple peeling" and won--the film was screened unaltered. This public stand against censorship bolstered the development of the New Cinema movement.

Building on the work of nativist authors, screenwriters and filmmakers began to incorporate elements of Taiwanese daily life and local dialects (primarily Holo, but also Hakka). Particularly after the government's forcible suppression of a pro-democracy rally in 1979, later known as the Kaohsiung Incident, the sinocentrism of the KMT came under attack. External developments reinforced domestic pressures on the KMT government, as the People's Republic of China began to undermine the international position of the Republic of China (Taiwan). If Taiwan were no longer recognized as China, then how could Chinese culture retain its hegemonic position there? Although the government remained unwilling to tolerate political dissent, perhaps milder reforms could be achieved in less threatening areas like art and literature. Thus the New Cinema movement was born.

Yeh and Davis focus their analysis on four major figures: Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang. Although the works of these auteurs are only rarely explicitly political, they still confront a cultural patrimony, a highly politicized subject in Taiwan. Legacies like Confucianism are examined and contested. Yang's acclaimed A Confucian Confusion, for example, poses the dilemma well--the cultivation of Confucian virtues, such as conformity, discipline, obedience and diligence, simultaneously stifles imagination, creativity and critical thinking. Characters ask themselves and each other how a good person should be defined, and how they should live. How is it that, in late 20th century Taiwan, people should feel themselves bound by the ethics of a mainland philosopher from the second century B.C.?

Though the authors do not make this point, Hou Hsiao-hsien is less clearly concerned with Confucianism. The concerns of Hou's Taiwan trilogy--City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women--are more focused on the interplay of nativism and colonialism, and the experiences of those who have migrated from rural areas to the city. While an air of pathos hangs over all three, clever flashes of humor alleviate the gloom. In City of Sadness, for example, residents of a small mining town in 1945 are in a quandary about how to hang the new flags of the ROC they have been ordered to display. They believe that they will be shot or jailed if they get it wrong, and spend the entire day arguing about whether the sun (the KMT party emblem, located in the upper left corner of the national flag) should be on the top or the bottom. The question of what to do with the old Japanese flags is more easily solved--the women make them into pants. The narrator comments, "All the kids playing outside had red asses. Like mon keys." The widely acclaimed Hou counts both the winning of the Grand Jury prize at the Cannes film festival and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival among his numerous triumphs.

In Ang Lee's equally famous trilogy, Pushing Hands , The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, Yeh and Davis's contention on the recurrent theme of the contestation of Confucianism in Taiwan cinema is more noticeable. The father in Wedding Banquet comes to accept an interracial homosexual liaison; in Eat Drink Man Woman, he abdicates his role as patriarch. But this reviewer found the authors' use of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as an example of Lee's "Confucianization of Holly wood" to be a bit far-fetched. One can find a rejection of Confucianism in Jen's leap from a cliff, which allowed her to avoid marrying someone she did not desire, and also a metaphor for Taiwan's independence--Jen would rather die than succumb to a union that is abhorrent to her. But this may be over-interpretation. Rather than Confucianizing Hollywood, Crouching Tiger may have only delivered a serving of Chinese kitsch--a high-tech adaptation of the cookie-cutter plots that amassed a fortune for the Shaw brothers and a variation of the egocentric action films of Jackie Chan. Screenwriter James Schamus's comment on the success of the film, "We kicked Jackie Chan's ass," cited by Yeh and Davis, reinforces the view that crass commercialism rather than Confucianism guided the film's production. And Lee achieved his greatest successes not in Taiwan but in Hollywood. As the authors point out, there is some doubt that Lee should even be considered a Taiwanese director.

Tsai Ming-liang's films share some common ground with Ang Lee's, in that an aging, repressed father is a frequent central figure of their films. But Lee's protagonists are normally heterosexual, while Tsai's tend to be homosexual. Tsai's The River combines a uniquely Taiwanese working-class campiness, with an anti-Oedipal message--the son desires the father. When the son has sex, anonymously, with his father, he is cured of a mysterious illness, and the family is temporarily reunited. In these and other films, Tsai rewrites the typical Confucian ethical drama.

Ironically, just at the time Hou Hsiao-hsien was achieving his greatest successes, Taiwanese cinema audiences began showing a preference for Hollywood films. At one point Tsai Ming-liang resorted to visiting box offices to encourage people to see Taiwanese films.

Although Hollywood has become the de facto national cinema of Taiwan, the authors conclude on a message of hope. New directors are emerging, and they are motivated by a desire to revive the industry by tracing other sides of Taiwan's cultural heritage --the aboriginal peoples and the history of the various foreign occupations of Treasure Island. The potential for niche marketing to global audiences exists--online and through animation, documentaries, digital cinema and hitherto marginal forms of filmmaking. Having produced this fine first chapter on Taiwan's film industry, it is to be hoped that Yeh and Davis will undertake a study of the new cinematic era they predict.

Copyright (c) 2005 by June Teufel Dreyer.