Taiwan Today

In the early days of Taiwan’s film history, Taiwanese people played only a minor role. The earliest movie theaters catered exclusively to the Japanese who occupied the island from 1895 to 1945, and the films they screened were produced mainly in Japan. When traveling film troupes won permission from the Japanese colonial government to screen movies outside of major cities, they too screened the easily obtained Japanese films, as well as imports from Hollywood and Shanghai and the occasional foreign agricultural or nature documentary. When Taiwanese participated in these early days of Taiwan’s cinema, they did so almost exclusively as the audience. They would not, however, remain voiceless for long.

Even under the watchful eye of the Japanese, Taiwanese benzi, or film narrators, learned to poke fun at the Japanese through their running commentary during the screening of silent pictures and their clever translations of later foreign-language talkies from Japan and other countries. The benzi became both cinematic dragoman, interpreting a foreign world on screen for a local audience, as well as a source of pride in shaping Taiwan’s film experience on its own terms. In Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen, Hong Guo-juin (洪國鈞) writes “These moments of linguistic play were subtle forms of subversion, undermining the authorship [author’s emphasis] of the films, and, by extension, the authoritarian hold the colonial regime had on the meaning of film texts.”

Recapturing History

Hong, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina, describes a benzi as a “cultural translator and a national warrior in one,” and in his implicitly political film history, he functions as a benzi in his own right, attempting to recapture Taiwan’s film history both from fragmented historical treatments as well as foreign scholars who have controlled the narrative. If Hong’s tone at times sounds prickly, the reasons are understandable. He quotes, for example, the dismissive description of Taiwanese cinema that he encountered in a textbook when he first began film studies in the United States. “In 1982, Taiwan was an unlikely source of innovative filmmaking,” wrote Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell in their Film History: An Introduction. They go on to describe their amazement that by 1986 Taiwan was being celebrated as one “of the most exciting areas of international film culture.”

Hong takes issue with the idea that this innovative period of Taiwanese cinema was a happy accident—one with no antecedents, no history. He sets out to retrace the history that led up to this much-praised period. Hong is equally unwilling to view Taiwan’s film history as peripheral to the developments of Japan, mainland China or Hollywood. He saves a particular peevishness for another scholar who places Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), a much celebrated Taiwanese director, in the context of mainland China’s “fifth-generation” directors. “What is doubtlessly startling is that Taiwan should deserve mentioning not because of some filmmakers’ own contribution to world cinema but, rather, it is validated by its connection to the cinema of the Mainland,” Hong writes.

Hong describes these examples of the historical treatment of Taiwanese film as a “historiography of absence,” and he sets out to fill in some blank spaces. For Hong, the act of telling history is itself a form of recapturing the narrative and restoring Taiwan’s ownership of its own history. Yet his book is more ambitious still. Through his reconstruction of the historical record, Hong attempts to show how national identity was shaped and reshaped through the various phases of Taiwan’s cinematic history.

In that early phase of the benzi, Hong points out the irony of this approach by describing this phase as “cinema before nation.” The development of a national film perspective was by necessity expressed through the subtleties of resistance under Japanese occupation. It is in the postwar years that Hong is able to excavate a cohesive national narrative, as the Nationalist government attempted to rid Taiwan of Japanese influence and create political and social unity through a shared sense of Chinese identity on screen.

Postwar films such as Descendents of the Yellow Emperor (1956) attempted to reattach Taiwan’s historical narrative to the history of China after a 50 year interlude of Japanese rule. While the residents of Taiwan were happy to be free of Japanese occupation, however, they soon found themselves chafing at governance by fellow Chinese as well. In part this was a result of the differences in attitudes shaped by the varying experiences of the two groups. The wave of Chinese that arrived with the Nationalists after 1945 had entirely different historical narratives from the Chinese who had immigrated to Taiwan in the previous centuries. The Nationalist government employed film to help paper over these differences and to construct a common identity that included both groups.

Fortunately for the lighthearted, not all the fare was as didactic as Descendents of the Yellow Emperor. Comedies such as Brother Wang and Brother Liu Tour Taiwan (1958) approached the subject with levity and slapstick humor. Hong points out that one of the interesting roles of these popular comedies was to function as a travelogue. By watching the comic duo cause mayhem and merriment throughout different parts of Taiwan, audiences were able to gather a mental impression of their shared territory in a gently humorous atmosphere.

In the postwar years, humor was one of the few officially permitted vehicles used to address communal differences, since the Nationalist government kept a tight lid on subjects that could undermine social stability. When relations were depicted between families who arrived with the Nationalists and those who had been in Taiwan for generations, they were presented as farces and romantic melodramas that drew laughs from the misunderstandings caused by the different Chinese dialects spoken by the two groups. It will not be surprising that films of this period, with such titles as Both Sides Are Happy (1962), barely scratched the surface of the repressed hostility resulting from the privileging of one group’s historical narrative over the other’s. A cinematic exploration of such painful subjects would not arrive until the end of martial law, when a reassessment of national identity became a rich source of material for Taiwanese cinema.

By the late 1980s, Taiwan, having grown prosperous, began to liberalize its political system. The Kuomintang (KMT) fostered a loyal opposition to give voice to those with different views. Political opposition outside the party (dangwai), however, soon became a truly independent voice of opposition to the KMT and its grip on the cultural policies of Taiwan. The end of four decades of martial law in 1987 unleashed those pent-up historical grievances on the screen in a way that had never been seen before in Taiwan.

In A City of Sadness (1989), Hou Hsiao-hsien sets out to reclaim the entire postwar narrative by exploring the earliest and most tragic days of conflict between the arrival of the Nationalists and the earlier residents of Taiwan. The film explores the 228 Incident in 1947, during which communal violence broke out between the two groups and instigated an island-wide crackdown during which many were killed. The film follows the Lin family as it suffers under a period known subsequently as the “white terror.” In a representation of the decades of silence endured by the Taiwanese, Hou’s protagonist is a deaf-mute who struggles to find an identity of his own without the aid of speech.

Hou’s film sets out to rewrite Taiwan’s history from 1945. It begins in a Taiwan newly liberated from the Japanese and tells a story entirely at odds with the official postwar narrative. “By bringing to light both Taiwan’s darkened history as deeply implicated in its colonial legacies, and by giving voices to the heretofore voiceless so as to compete against the authoritarian official speech with increasingly emphatic vernacular contrapuntal sounds,” Hong writes, “A City of Sadness illustrates the cinematic imagining and representation of Taiwan’s history.”

The outpouring of the bottled-up frustrations of the earlier residents of Taiwan forced a complete reassessment of identity on the island. Political changes led to the peaceful adoption of a multiparty democratic system, and culture was reassessed from myriad standpoints. When Hong refers to “a contested nation on screen,” he is referring in part to these competing histories told by different communities in Taiwan.

Hou occupies a special place in Hong’s study of Taiwan’s film history. Hong uses him as a narrative hinge between the end of the martial law period and the burst of cinematic creativity of the 1980s. In some respects this is because Hou represents not just something new politically, but also a new phase in the development of film aesthetics. Hou’s visual creations make full use of the possibilities of cinema. His stories are told with sound and silence, space and time. He is constructing, in other words, a uniquely creative work of art from the most basic building blocks of film.

While films like A City of Sadness gave voice to the silent history of a part of Taiwan’s population, Taiwan’s directors in the 1980s also began to confront a new set of perils shared by all the people of Taiwan. These too were problems of identity, but they were problems resulting from industrialization and urbanization—the breakdown of traditional social bonds, bewilderment in an urban landscape and the depersonalization of society.

International Influence

In his search for the roots of Taiwan’s film history, Hong notes the fact that from the outset Taiwan was influenced by international trends. At times, these trends threatened to overwhelm the domestic film industry, but in the 1980s Taiwan became a much-celebrated part of the global cinema community and an influence in its own right on foreign directors. While Hong convincingly reconstructs a historical narrative leading up to this point, the reasons for the enormous critical success of Taiwanese filmmaking of this period are curiously contradictory.

While directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien helped establish the singular creative vision of the director, known as auteur cinema, directors like Edward Yang (楊德昌) combined this new artistry with themes that had a universal appeal. This “new wave” of Taiwanese cinema, in other words, was both vibrantly unique in its storytelling and curiously global in subject matter. Taiwan, it would seem, had found its own cinematic voice, and it was a voice that the international film community could easily understand.

Hong is particularly strong when it comes to analyzing the films of this period, and it is a pleasure to rethink these films in light of his sensitive and intelligent insights. When discussing Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers (1986), for example, Hong focuses on how the cityscape imprisons the characters of the film. “Terrorizers looks unflinchingly at the spatial disconnect and isolation beneath the glitter of the urban splendor,” he writes. The city ultimately enervates and terrorizes its inhabitants in Yang’s vision. Just as in the films of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007), Yang’s characters lead lives of quiet desperation, unable to find meaningful human connections.

While a city is more commonly viewed as a symbol of modernization and prosperity, for these artists it is often treated as a place of terrifying isolation. This is captured in the film Vive L’Amour (1994) by Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮). In the film, the dislocation of the city is exemplified by an empty apartment and the loveless lives of a female real estate agent and two men who have both stolen a key to the vacant dwelling. “It is a space,” Hong writes, “over which neither of the two men has a legitimate claim, a space that both can occupy, temporarily at best, as their borrowed home.” Here then are the insecurity and sterility of modern urban life, severed from family and community.

The film ends with a comically tortured sex scene in which one man hides under the bed while the realtor and the other man return for meaningless sex. The camera then pans across a bleak and empty cityscape and fixes on the woman crying in a park, crying for six or so interminable minutes. This prompted one critic to ask “Where is the love?” But then again that is just the point. This type of honest, intellectual examination of modern society is challenging, both in the disjointed art-house manner of presentation and also in the non-Hollywood treatment of these very real issues of contemporary life.

It is easy to see why this highly thought-provoking and ingeniously filmed period of local cinema made Taiwan the darling of the highbrow film world. Yet the very same reasons for the critical success of these films made box-office sales challenging. Like a hothouse flower, these films withered in the harsh environment of commercial demands. While some viewers wanted to be challenged intellectually and explore the aesthetic and narrative possibilities of film, the majority still went to the movies to be entertained. And Hong’s study of Taiwanese cinema ends with the tension between art and commerce that troubles directors everywhere—the question of how to both entertain and create films of artistic and intellectual merit.

If Hong’s project aims to place Taiwan at the center of its own cinematic history, he succeeds through the very act of reconstructing past events from his perspective as a native son who privileges Taiwan in its own historical narrative. Yet, there is something ultimately utopian about his ambition. His study ends with praise for the vision presented by the film Island Etude (2006), which follows another deaf-mute character, this time on a bike trip around Taiwan, bypassing Taipei and historical sites. “It is a journey,” Hong writes, “in which one is compelled to immerse oneself—at least for the duration of the film, with its diegetic fantasy and extradiegetic desire—in a totality of a Taiwan that is finally, if only temporarily and cinematically, free of contention.”

This nostalgia for an imagined Taiwan free from a contested identity and existing only in pastoral simplicity is understandable, and yet it hardly represents Taiwan. Would Taiwan be Taiwan without the debate over national identity? Would Taiwan be so dynamic and intellectually rich if it did not engage in those debates over modernity and how its cities shape local culture? Indeed, the argument over Taiwan’s national identity and its representation on screen no longer relies on deaf-mutes and suppressed historical narratives. It flourishes from the tension between competing voices and different histories openly debated. It is made richer by scholars like Hong, who passionately argue and reargue the nature of a national identity. His book adds one more narrative to a debate that derives its richness from its diverse perspectives and its never-ending reinterpretation of identity in a restless and dynamic society.
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Robert Green is a contributing writer based in New York as well as a contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2011 by Robert Green