Taiwan Film Directors

A Treasure Island

Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Darrell William Davis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231502993
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Focusing on the work of four contemporary filmmakers—Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang—the authors explore how these filmmakers broke from tradition, creating a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history. Featuring stills, anecdotes, and close readings of films, the authors consider the influence of Hong Kong and martial arts films, directors' experiments with autobiography, the shifting fortunes of the Taiwanese film industry, and Taiwan cinema in the context of international cinema's aesthetics and business practices.

Parallel Cinemas

ONE

POSTWAR HISTORY AND MAJOR DIRECTORS

Taiwanese must dress, eat, and live as Japanese do, speak the Japanese tongue as their own and guard our national spirit in the same way as do Japanese born in Japan.

–GOVERNOR KAWAMURA TAKEJI, 1929¹

In its present form the KMT Government more closely resembles an Occupational Government than a Government of the people.

–LT. COMMANDER MAX BERMAN, R.N.V.R. FEBRUARY 5, 1946²

Background

As a colony of Japan, Taiwan was in a state of confusion at the end of World War II. People’s loyalties, their language, their very thoughts were up for radical revision. Industry, institutions, and social organization had to be rebuilt. Taiwanese people looked forward to rejoining the Chinese mainland. There were high expectations among the island’s elite for self-determination, but these were soon dashed. Taiwan’s rule was handed over to the victorious Nationalist party (Kuomintang, or KMT), though for several chaotic months after the surrender it was the Japanese who continued to maintain order.³

Under colonial rule, film production in Taiwan was controlled by the Japanese, either through contracts with local filmmakers or by simply using Taiwan as a colorful location, with Taiwanese aborigines as extras. With the exception of three films that were solely produced by the Taiwanese, most of the features shot in Taiwan between 1921 and 1943 were produced by Japanese studios, like Nikkatsu, Toho, and Shochiku.⁴ The 1943 film Bell of Sayon (Shayuan zhi zhong / Sayon no kane) represents the colonial interest of filmmaking in Taiwan. This film was one of the “national policy” films (kokusaku-eiga or guoce dianying in Chinese) administered by the Japanese government.⁵ Made for the Japanese audience at home, Bell of Sayon restages a real-life event about a young aboriginal, Sayon, who died for a patriotic cause. The film opens with a long documentary-like sequence introducing aboriginal life in Taiwan. Highlights include Japan’s “enlightened” colonial governance that helps modernize and nationalize a primitive, aboriginal tribe. Sayon hence enters the diegetic story as a happy girl on a pig farm. Despite being an aborigine, Sayon is modern, diligent, and patriotic to the Japanese empire. Young men in Sayon’s village are called to serve on the front. She helps with the ceremony to celebrate the conscription of the village youth. At the end of the ceremony, a rainstorm strikes the village, but Sayon insists on seeing off her friends. On the way she falls down into a roaring river and disappears. Her accidental death works as an emblem of colonial sacrifice and loyalty to encourage all Japanese subjects.

Shot on locations in Taiwan with the help of hundreds of aborigine extras, Bell of Sayon is a 100 percent Japanese film. It was produced by Shochiku, directed by Shimizu Hiroshi, featuring Japan’s Manchurian star Li Xianglan, also known as Ri Koran or Yamaguchi Yoshiko.⁶ Taiwan and its people were there to provide testimony to Japan’s benevolent rule in Southeast Asia and around the empire.⁷ Although the film was made on Taiwan, it was not conceived for the island’s audiences. Instead, like every other resource Japan took from Taiwan, it was intended for the edifying entertainment of Japanese at home.

It is clear that cinema in Taiwan was treated by the Japanese as a typical captive market, one-sided, force-fed, and exploitative. Few, if any, opportunities existed for indigenous production on a commercial basis. The exhibition market bears this out, being dominated by imports controlled by colonial interests. Parallel to the lack of production, film exhibition relied on imports from all over the world, particularly Japan and Hollywood. Shanghai-produced Mandarin films were allowed before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Between 1941 and 1945, under strict wartime censorship, film exhibition was limited to those from Japan, Germany, and Italy. In 1945, film imports from the former colonizer stopped, and a vacuum developed on Taiwan’s cinema screens.⁸ Given the urgent needs of postwar reorganization, there were pressing tasks for the incoming KMT to complete, and film or cultural policy was not its immediate concern. Securing order and legitimacy was its top priority, and the party set about this with grim military efficiency. Ignoring the welcoming gestures of the Taiwanese, the incoming administration expropriated Japanese assets and seized the colonial reins. Within a few years, the party declared martial law, which amounted to dictatorship of the KMT for four decades.⁹ The KMT’s initial lack of interest in production, its neglect of film policy, and the corresponding importance of revolutionizing public consciousness all contrast markedly with the early Communist regimes in both the Soviet Union and China. Not until the 1960s do we see a full-fledged effort to establish a national cinema with pedagogical functions.

Parallel Cinemas

The gradual establishment of postcolonial Taiwan cinema can be viewed as a series of three parallels. “Parallel cinemas” offers a framework that captures the simultaneous linguistic, ideological, and commercial fractures in the 1950s and ’60s.¹⁰ The first is linguistic. The KMT was coming into an island society that had become acculturated, if not assimilated, to Japanese social organization. For local audiences, spoken Mandarin Chinese was a foreign language. In film production, pictures had to be made for distinct audiences in two different languages: in Mandarin or the “national language” (guoyu) for the post-1945 mainland transplants, then turning into a flood of refugees in 1949 with the Nationalist defeat. Pictures were also routinely made in the Taiwanese language for audiences who spoke southern Fujian dialect (minnan yu or Hokkien), a derivative of Fukkienese. As the KMT tightened its grip on Taiwan, Mandarin-language films were assiduously cultivated, and Taiwanese-language films were gradually eclipsed. The linguistic parallels of film production were not merely a segregation but also a form of intensifying opposition. It was not that Taiwanese-language films competed for the same audience as the Mandarin pictures. They were distributed and shown on different circuits. But because the ruling party came from the mainland and spoke the official “national language,” its paternalistic objectives eventually took priority.

Another parallel can be seen in the type of films made: a highly commercial system of entertainment largely transplanted from Hong Kong, as opposed to a state-sponsored cinema of nation-building and propaganda. A further parallel is that of scale: between the major large studios and/or production companies—Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC, Zhongyang dianying gongsi), Grand Pictures (Guolian dianying), Union Pictures (Lianbang yingye), and First Film Enterprise (Diyi yingye), all making Mandarin feature films. In contrast to the large Mandarin studios, there were the small to mid-sized studios and production companies—Huaxing, Yufeng, Tailian, Jixing, and others—which turned out Taiwanese pictures on a smaller scale. Taken together these three parallels—linguistic, mode of address, and production scale—correspond to some of the deepest cultural differences and antagonisms which persist in Taiwan society to this day.

To describe the formation of Taiwan’s major official studios, we must consider the filmmaking activities of the KMT while it was still based in China. The Central Film Studio (Zhongyang dianying zhipianchang, short for Zhongzhi), founded in 1934, was the KMT’s earliest production house and consisted of propaganda and military film units.¹¹ When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, a film unit under the party’s military commission was turned into the “China Film Studio” (Zhongdian, short for Zhongguo dianying zhipianchang). It made newsreels, documentaries, and anti-Japanese propaganda features during the eight-year war against Japan.¹² When the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, China Film Studio also moved and came under ownership of the Ministry of Defense.¹³

Eventually, the KMT would make films through CMPC to promote its vision of a healthy Chinese-Taiwan polity. In addition to China Film Studio, KMT consolidated two official Japanese film units into “Taiwan Provincial Film Studio” in 1945, called simply Taiwan Film Company (Taiying, short for Taiwan dianying gongsi).¹⁴ Meanwhile, the party also took over an affiliation of distributors and theater chains that showed films during the Japanese period. Finally, another production unit was the Agriculture and Education Motion Picture Studio (Nongjiao, short for Nongye jiaoyu dianying gongsi), which made features up until the formation of CMPC in 1954.¹⁵ These three—China, Taiwan, and the Agriculture studios—made a handful of films in the early years of Taiwan’s postwar transition, but at this time there was a lack of facilities, film stock, and other resources.

In 1950 the Agriculture and China Film studio launched an official feature production in postcolonial Taiwan. Awakening (Emeng chuxing, dir. Zong You), an anti-Communist espionage story, was the first locally made Mandarin-language feature, and the inaugural film officially backed by the party in Taiwan. However, it was not the first feature produced in postwar Taiwan. Turmoil on Mt. Ali (Alishan fengyun) is the picture, a singing melodrama among the aborigines of the interior, marking Taiwan’s initial entry into film production.¹⁶ This 1949 commercial picture was directed by Zhang Che (Chang Cheh) for Wanxiang, a branch of a Shanghai / Hong Kong–based company called Guotai (not the same as the famous Hong Kong major Cathay). Turmoil was Zhang Che’s first film. Thus, at nearly the same moment, two features were made and released in Taiwan: a nationalist piece of political indoctrination and a singing love story about an exotic, romantic indigenous tribe. Two parallel impulses, one political, the other commercial, complemented and often contested each other even within Mandarin-language production. These impulses—both transplanted from the mainland—dominated Mandarin production until the 1980s. Zhang’s Turmoil on Mt. Ali is also an echo of the old Japanese appropriation of native tribal communities on behalf of colonial modernization, as in the kokusaku national policy film Bell of Sayon. The appropriation this time around, unlike the Japanese, was for entirely commercial ends.

It took some time for film output to steady and produce regular yields. At this stage it was the Agriculture studio that produced the most features, a total of nine films between 1950 and 1953.¹⁷ On its initial formation through a merger of the Agriculture studio and the distribution / theater chains left behind by the Japanese, CMPC contributed just one feature, Spring returns to Meigang (Meigang chunhui, 1954; dir. Zong You).¹⁸ Despite its quick start, CMPC was not to make films on a mass scale. Between 1954 and 1959, it made only thirteen fiction features, indicating the relative unimportance of film production for the KMT.¹⁹ It was not until the mid-1960s, at a time of greater stability, that CMPC began a policy of explicit nation-building through film production. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s screens were served by imports from Hong Kong, which produced films for the all-important Taiwan market in both Mandarin and minnan languages.²⁰ In addition, since there was so little domestic production, the KMT allowed imports from Hollywood, Europe, and even Japan, in spite of an initial ban on Japanese features.²¹

Taiyu pian

Before Mandarin-language production found its feet, a lively and productive Taiwanese-language film industry—taiyu pian—was established. Taiyu pian served the millions of minnan-speaking viewers, which made up a numerical, if not political, majority. Production of these films was robust enough to justify application of the term “Golden Age of Taiwanese film,” or to be more precise, two distinct Golden Ages.²² In the first, from 1956 to 1959, 176 Taiwanese films were made. The second Golden Age saw the production of at least 800 titles from 1962 to 1969. In 1962 alone, 120 films were released, while only seven Mandarin-language films were made.²³ It is noteworthy that long before Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a taiyu martial arts picture, Tiger Lo and Dragon Jen, was directed by Liang Zhefu in 1959. Liang adapted his film from the same source as Lee.²⁴

The large numbers alone might indicate something of the type of pictures taiyu pian were: Taiwanese opera, folklore, comedies, and popular serials based on well-known community events were turned out very quickly and cheaply. One of several factors in the success of taiyu pian was the unexpected popularity of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan, an opera film made in 1956. Directed by He Jiming in collaboration with a big opera company, Gongyueshe, this film uncannily recaps the importance of opera in early Chinese film history. Initial attempts to film opera by mainland Chinese filmmakers in the teens were echoed in Taiwan four decades later. As a colonial filmmaker, He Jiming was trained in Japan and became an educational documentarist during the occupation period. Occasionally, He was a rensageki (linked drama) director, helping local opera troupes build up business by inserting segments of moving images between live acts.²⁵ After the war, he continued to work in the official sector. With the success of Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan, He established his own film studio, Huaxing, in central Taiwan.

However, He was not the first to adapt Taiwanese opera to film. In fact, before Xue Pinggui a local opera troupe called Duma had already made a 16mm feature shot in 1955, Six scholars in the romance of the west chamber (Liu caizi xixiangji). It was a commercial flop but, parallel to Mandarin production, it reveals the nascent Taiwanese production in the postcolonial period, branded and constrained by martial law. The prints have been lost but, according to secondary recollections, the film was not as polished as Xue Pinggui and suffered from many technical flaws.²⁶ This failed attempt indicates a cinema sought after by indigenous theatrical organizations to gain a foothold for traditional folk arts, similar to the Japanese rensageki of the silent era.²⁷ One year later, in 1956, Gongyueshe decided to film one of its popular shows. Unlike Duma, the company took no chances and asked an experienced rensageki director to get involved. Even though it is based on a popular opera, Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan was an experiment in incorporating cinematic elements into a traditional theatrical presentation in order to rejuvenate it. Tracking shots, irises, symbolic inserts, close-ups, and rack focus were used to give the familiar repertoire a new look.²⁸ Its huge popularity took the company by surprise, but it lost no time making other films in this vein. This opera film marks the beginning of the first Golden Age of Taiwanese production.

Some examples include opera films like Pang Gu opens the sky (Pang Gu kaitian, 1962; dir. Hong Xinde) and Grandma Yang sheds her cocoon (Yangling popo tuoke ji, 1962; dir. Li Quanxi). The former has a p...