Colonial Archives, Postcolonial Archeology
Guo-Juin Hong
Workshop on the Decolonial Humanities
February 22 2008, Duke University
Atomic bombs fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 8 and 9, 1945. A week
later, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s acceptance of the terms set by the Ally in the
Potsdam Declaration on August 15. Four and a half decades later, the Emperor’s radio
address opened the famed Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness (悲情城
市). Monotonous and impassionate, Emperor Hirohito’s voice is opaque, as much as the
screen is dark. When a character finally manages to bring light on by fidgeting with the
bulb, the flash of light is a sudden and profound reminder of Taiwan’s history in
cinematic representation. Between light and darkness there seems to be the most fitting
adobe where the history of Taiwan resides. However, the moment of sudden illumination
in City’s opening moment brings to light, as if only by way of an off-and-on switch,
Taiwan’s darkened history deeply implicated with its colonial legacy as well as the
cinematic means of imagining and representing that history. For a colony to come to light
in and of itself, the empire must have fallen. Or has it?
Fifty years of Japanese colonization in Taiwan see generations of people having
to live between two nations, between Japan and China. But, what of Taiwan itself? This
question is increasingly pertinent because the history of Taiwan has been in such a
transition state for more than four hundred years and, even as of today, the multiply
colonized island still lacks a history to call its own. If 1945 was indeed a time of
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transition, one has to ask from where to what. That is, can we assume that the return to
China is a return home, Taiwan’s supposed, and I must also add, contested, national
origin? The question can be posed as a problem of sovereignty. If Taiwan has been
passed through the hands of the Spanish, to the Dutch, China’s Ming Dynasty loyalists,
and then to the Qing Dynasty government, what would make this particular transition
from the Japanese to the Chinese Nationalists, who would lose its governance of the
Mainland to the Communists just a few years later, a definitive one? The road home for
Taiwan keeps extending towards the horizon while no single act of looking back can tell
where it all came from.
It is possible, however, to imagine an origin in the future, a national history
without nation. When the character in A City of Sadness manages to bring light back on
with the Japenese Emperor’s announcement of unconditional surrender canvassing the
entire sonic background, it is a moment when history comes to a stand still, a rupture in
time in order for history to find its place, both forward and backward where it must, after
the pause, begin again in time. A moment, in light of the theme of this workshop, when
the decolonial takes place—different from the colonial it seeks to eradicate, more
insistent than the colonial that refuses to relinquish its grips, and tentative in its opening
up of a gap without filling it, the horror of colonization and the easy fix by exiting from it
that never works. A trick, no doubt, and a solution, at least for now: we seem to find
comfort and feel uneasy at the same time, in the so-called postcolonial field of the
Humanities, manifested in the spheres of politics, culture, and, of course, in the very
production of knowledge in the academy.
2
My interests have been in film, the aesthetics, theory, and historiography of film.
My current research has taken me deep into the colonial archives of Taiwan cinema, with
much obstacle and obscurity, with much hearsay and not much extant materials. What I
also encounter, again with great difficulty and great intrigue, is how the knowledge of
colonial Taiwan is produced, and how that production changes over time. Therefore, even
though my project is devoted to post-1945 Taiwan cinema, it must begin with the film
history of pre-1945 Taiwan. Because any history of film cannot be understood outside the
very place it is produced and exhibited, and because film, as a technology at once cultural
and industrial, represents, or even precipitates, how the modern is implicated in the EastWest dichotomy in the colonial/postcolonial drama of nation-building, it is a start to ask
this: When was film first introduced in Taiwan? That question must be followed by a
doubt, indeed a deep suspicion, on how the question has been answered. If the
Humanities have been the way—even the science, the method, the way—that allows for,
or impels us to accept, an understanding of history as knowledge and historical narratives
as imperatives, the prison house of imperialist epistemology will have to crumple at the
site of the archives, a postcolonial dig that may—or may not—share some energy with
the decolonial to which this workshop is committed.
If the colonial conditions entail a loss, or at least a suppression and denial, of the
history of the colonized, revitalizing the research and the writing of colonial history must
be an important part of the project of the decolonial Humanities. Based on this working
premise, I will put forth two seemingly unrelated accounts. First, I present a case study of
Taiwan’s colonial film history and how the change in the study of that history shows, at
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least in the context of Taiwan, and by extension, East Asia, the Humanities hard at work
to decolonize history from its colonial past, and how it is deeply entrenched in that very
history it seeks to exorcise, that which still haunts. Second, I look at film exhibition
practices in colonial Taiwan. The role that film exhibitors plays presents a possibility to
see the decolonial forces as always already in tension with the colonial and to suggest a
historiography that sheds light on a “national cinema without nation.”
Race for the “National Origin”
When did Taiwan’s film history begin? The history of how that seemingly
straightforward question has been answered shows much intrigue in the multiple and still
changing answers. For over three decades after Lu Su-Shang published The History of
Taiwan’s Film and Drama in 1960, the book considered for a long time as the first
Taiwan cinema history ever written, the beginning of Taiwan’s film history was recorded
as November 1901, five years later than China and Japan.i Many publications after Lu
simply copied that date without questioning it. An important example is Du Yun-Zhi.
First published in 1972 and the winner of the grand prize of the Chiang Kai-Shek Literary
Award later in 1975, Du’s The Film History of China was reprinted in 1988 under the
auspice of the Council for Cultural Affairs, a government agency under the
Administrative Yuan of the Nationalist government in Taiwan. Interestingly, this later
edition claimed to have been expanded its coverage to 1983 as well as revised based on
new archival materials. Even the title was changed to The Film History of the Republic of
China, clearly a move to be distinguished the Republic on Taiwan from the communist
People’s Republic on the Mainland. The portions on Taiwan’s colonial period were
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different in tone, even though the historical data remained the same. The earlier version
emphasizes that Taiwan is part of China and Japanese rulers’ use of film merely a tool for
“enslavement” (奴化) and that domestic production at the time was an “insult to Chinese
people” because Taiwanese were uniformly depicted as submissive and willing subjects
of the Japanese regime.ii However, the later revision softens its rhetoric about Japan’s
rule, while giving emphasis to Shanghai film imports as the key influence on the
commencement and subsequent development of Taiwan’s film industry. iii
Doubtlessly, as an historian officially sanctioned by the Nationalist government,
Du Yun-Zhi stands for an ideological slant that treats Taiwan during Japanese occupation
as inferior, even insignificant. However, the subtle change in tone between the two
editions reveals a larger shift in film historiography: Taiwan is now seen as an entity with
its own history. An even clearer manifestation of this shift can be seen in a new wave of
research done by historians in the early 1990s, less than a decade after Du’s second
edition. Those historians attempted to retrace Taiwan’s film history and endow it with
significance in its own right by way of reentering the colonial archives. In so doing, the
more recent film research attempts to write a history of Taiwan that is, on the one hand,
not subordinate to China’s film history and, on the other, closely imbricated with the
history of Japan’s colonization. Colonial history is Taiwan history.iv
“November 1901” as the beginning of Taiwan cinema based on Lu Su-Shang’s
account was not challenged even as late as 1992, five years after the Martial Law was
lifted and a burgeoning Taiwanese consciousness on the rise. Taiwan’s history was now
to be treated as its own. In this context, film historian Lee Daw-Ming visited the National
Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Arts in Tokyo, Japan, and there he
5
chanced upon a 1941 publication by Ichikawa Sai (市川彩), entitled The Creation and
Development of the Motion Pictures in Asia (《亞細亞映畫之創造及建設》). It so
turned out that Lu’s earlier account was based on a chapter from this monograph and,
after Lee’s further research, was proven erroneous.v Lee’s own research was able to date
the first film screening back one year to June 1900, when Oshima Inoshi (大島豬市) and
his projectionist Matuura Shozo (松浦章三) exhibited in Taipei and other cities the
Lumiere Brothers’ cinematophraphes, significantly in this version, only three and four
years after they arrived in Japan and China respectively.vi If the colony was deemed
lagging behind, this new find closed the time gap successfully by one year.
From a pro-Nationalist perspective, Li Tian-Duo bemoans the “lateness” of film’s
introduction to Taiwan via Japan and not the “consanguine” (血緣相依) China as the
direct result of “the order of colonial dependency in the world system.”vii However, as
further research continued to unearthed facts, mostly newspaper advertisements and some
fragmented reports, more and more documents surfaced to suggest that film exhibitions
in Taiwan have taken place even earlier. In August and September of 1899, an unnamed
businessperson brought an Edison projection system from the US and showed a
documentary short on the Spanish-American War.viii Encouraged by these new historical
findings, film historian Ye Long-Yan dug deeper into the colonial archives and was
greeted by an even greater surprise. In August 1896, less than a year after the “invention”
of cinema, a time coinciding with Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan, a Japanese merchant
brought with him to Taipei some ten Edison short films. That was the very first exhibition
of Kinetoscope in Asia, three months before the same technology arrived in Kobe, Japan.
6
The colony has all of a sudden leapt ahead of its colonizer in time, film-time and
technology-time.
Ye’s delight in Taiwan’s earlier introduction of cinema before Japan is apparent,
while his disappointment that the more advanced film technology, specifically Lumiere’s
cinematographes considered closer to the cinema proper, did not arrive sooner than it did
in Shanghai, is barely concealed.ix In the field of historical research, the search for the
origin of Taiwan cinema has become a retrospective race again time, one that tried to
reset the clock of film history against the received colonial timeline. The former colonial
subject’s quest into the archives is, finally, a postcolonial archeology that seeks to race
ahead of its colonizer in time, modern-time and nation-time.
This is of course but one account of a formerly colonized region’s way of dealing
with its colonial history. By winning the race for the origin, so it seems, the colony could
finally succeed in ridding all of its colonial history, legitimated by historical research,
moving from lagging behind to being ahead of time. This is particularly crucial in the
East Asia context wherein the prominence of the leading role of historical progress and
civilization is still a highly contested position, especially between the historical
contention between China and Japan. It may then be important to posit the significance of
the history of film in East Asia by zooming out to the context and, finally, admit the place
of the West in the larger picture, a move, I suspect, to be a not particularly popular one.
Film History without Production, National Cinema without Nation
It remains open whether the founding moment of Taiwan’s film history may be
revised again. What is certain, however, is that film activities in Taiwan after the
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technology was introduced were a mixture of Japanese colonial government propaganda,
Japanese, Taiwanese, and later Mainland Chinese entrepreneurs’ commercial exhibitions
and infrequent filmmaking, and numerous imports from Japan, Hollywood, Europe and
China. The first key figure is Takamatsu Toyojiro (高松豐次郎), who arrived in 1903
and frequently brought various newsreels and shorts from Japan and Europe to Taiwan.
Following great successes in the touring exhibition business, Takamatsu went on to build
a total of eight theaters in different cities. He even established an acting school in 1909
and began inviting film celebrities from Japan to appear on stage in 1910. According to
Ye Long-Yan, Takamatsu’s commercial achievement in the film business had largely to
do with his personal relationship with a high-ranking official in the colonial government.x
The colonial regime supported and influenced the kinds of films exhibited because they
were believed to help educate the Taiwanese to become better colonial subjects.xi The
political utility of film was, in short, the backbone of Takamatsu’s financial gains.
Takamatsu’s savvy maneuvering between colonial politics and film as a
commercial enterprise also marked the first film production in Taiwan. Commissioned by
the colonial government, Takamatsu began shooting the first documentary to be produced
in Taiwan in February 1907. Two months of shooting brought the crew to more than one
hundred towns and cities all over the island and the production was closely followed and
reported by a leading newspaper, Taiwan Nichinichi Shimpo (台灣日日新報). Premiered
in Taipei on May 8th and later screened in Osaka, Tokyo and other major cities in Japan,
this documentary, entitled Introducing Taiwan Today (台灣實況の紹介), served two
purposes at once; it was the colonial regime’s concerted effort to showcase modernizing
progress made in the colony both to the colonized and to people in the mother country, a
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dual effort to legitimate its rule to the former as well as to garner further support from the
homeland for its colonial enterprise.xii
While newsreels and documentary remained a central part of early cinema in
Taiwan and exhibition of foreign imports continued to flourish, domestically made
narrative film did not begin until 1922 with the production of The Eyes of the Buddha (大
佛的瞳孔) by Japanese Tanaka King (田中欽). Significantly, this production of the first
feature-length film involved several Taiwanese locals, particularly Liu Xi-Yang (劉喜陽)
who later co-founded the Taiwan Cinema Research Association (臺灣映畫研究會) in
1925. Even though the Association was short-lived, it did inspire the first all-Taiwanese
produced film, Whose Fault Is This? (誰之過？), written, directed and starred by Liu
himself.xiii Between 1922 and 1943, a total of sixteen feature-length films were produced
between 1922 and 1943. xiv Taiwan-Japan co-production continued to be the norm with
only two other exceptions. First, a Taiwanese businessman, Zhang Hanshu (張漢樹),
founded a film company with a branch office in Shanghai. The company produced Love
Waves (情潮) in 1926 but was disbanded after the film’s failure at the box office. The
other case was Blood Stains (血痕), shot in 1929 and released in the following year.
Produced entirely by a Taiwanese crew, this film was lauded as the first domestic
blockbuster.
The mode of co-production was inevitable, in fact, largely due to crippling
financial and technological deficiencies as well as strict censorship imposed by the
colonial government. Tight censorship, furthermore, dictated that domestic production
comply with Japanese policy and propagate colonial indoctrination. As in other colonial
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contexts, the colonizers and the colonizeds were granted selective and regulated access to
available resources, entertainment included. Taiwanese were denied admittance to
theaters for Japanese only, high prices in first-run theaters precluded a large portion of
the local population, and the language barrier continued to be an obstacle. One account
summarizes the conditions of Taiwan cinema well.
The late 1920s context, in both film exhibition and production, was
twofold in character: the Japanese had permanent movie theaters and a
strong film industry at home to back up their film production in Taiwan,
while Taiwanese film exhibition was still mainly itinerant, with the
exception of one permanent movie theater in Taipei, [and] the film
production industry was still dependent on Japan’s specialized skills.
During Japanese rule, Taiwan never managed to set up an independent
film industry.xv
In short, similar to other colonies, Taiwan could hardly qualify to claim any indigenous
film production. A pressing two-fold question is then how to write the colonial period
into Taiwan’s film history when confronted by, on the one hand, a film history without
film production, and, on the other, a national cinema without nation.
Under such circumstances, three important aspects of Taiwan’s cinema warrant
specific attention: the role of the benzi (辯士, commentators of silent films, an equivalent
of Japanese cinema’s benshi), traveling exhibitions, and imported films from China,
especially Shanghai. Together they weave the fabric of colonial Taiwan cinema that long
drapes over postcolonial Taiwan’s film development after the island’s return to the
“motherland,” a questionable and complicated notion of “China” since 1945.
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The Benzi, Cultural Translator and Warrior in one
Film historians have long attributed great significance to Japan’s benshi in their
functions as exhibitors, translators, and even creative interpreters.xvi Mediating between
foreign imports and local audiences, the benshi functioned as a kind of protector of
culture by both narrating the story and mimicking the voices of the characters.xvii When
the benshi practices were adopted and re-termed the benzi (bianshi, 辯士) in Taiwan,
they performed the additional task of explaining the plot for the audience. The role of the
benzi provides an occasion to see the role of this everyday practice of the colonized
subjects played in the complex cultural and political life during the occupation period. xviii
The benshi from Japan were first introduced in one of the earliest permanent
movie houses in Taipei, Fang Nai Ting Theater (芳乃亭), established in 1911 and
catering to Japanese audiences only. In the beginning, untrained theater employees were
asked to comment on the films and, as a result, the quality of those ad hoc commentators
was nowhere near the well-trained and highly regarded benshi masters professing in
Japan. The Taiwanese benzi are often lauded by historians as being potentially subversive
by negotiating between the well-established tradition of the Japanese benshi and the
ruling colonial regime’s tight censorship. But how so? Existing accounts are scant and
vague at best. For example, the only concrete evidence several historians cite is the use of
words like “dogs,” a common way for the Taiwanese to implicitly refer to the Japanese.
As daring as that sort of act of defiance might have been because a Japanese policeman
and a fire marshal were routinely present at screenings for local audiences, it seems
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farfetched to call its performers “the pioneer of [Taiwan’s] nationalist movement” solely
based on that practice.xix
While citing similar incidents when the colonizers were ridiculed by way of
linguistic play, Ye Long-Yan, for one, believes that the subversive power lies deeper and
elsewhere, namely in the manipulation, even recreation of film text itself by exhibition
practices in Taiwan’s colonial context. The most noted was the Mei-Tai Troupe (美臺團,
which literally means Beautiful Taiwan). Ye distinguishes the cultural benzi from the
political benzi. The cultural benzi were a select group of intellectuals, well trained in
speech and rhetoric and thus able to utilize their knowledge of language and culture to
connect the film texts with current affairs. Those skills ensured their popular status as
entertainment celebrities who were beloved by the audiences but feared and closely
watched by the colonial authorities. However, some of the benzi ventured further to
politicize the authorship of film texts when film commentaries were scripted word by
word by the colonial regime. They carved out a space, if only by a moment of mutual
acknowledgement with the audience that allowed a Taiwanese consciousness to
emerge.xx Whenever the word “dog” was uttered became a poignant moment rich with
mutual recognition of the colonial structure shared by the benzi and their audiences.
Those linguistic plays were potential forms of subaltern subversion, undermining the
“authorship” of the films and, by extension, the authoritarian status of the colonial regime
to regulate the meaning of those films.
The benzi continued to exert considerable influence after the coming of sound in
cinema. There are several reasons, the first of which is still language. Japan’s colonial
government did not enforce an all-out Japanese language policy until the Sino-Japan war
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broke out on the Mainland in 1937. Even with the coming of sound, few Taiwanese
audiences could understand Japanese, not to mention European or Hollywood imports,
especially in the rural areas with high illiteracy rate; even films from China in mandarin
required oral commentary.xxi Second, the benzi’s role in film exhibition, as I suggested
earlier, went far beyond mere translation or interpretation. Their individual styles and,
often, the nativist slant they demonstrated in moments of vernacular linguistic plays, were
so integrated into the viewing experience for the local audiences that their presence
remained strongly in demand. Finally, as there were only very few permanent film
theaters on the island and only in major cities, the presence of the benzi was imperative
for touring exhibitions.
The Hybrid Text of Colonial Taiwan Cinema
Touring exhibitions started out as a necessity. By the late 1910s and early 1920s,
there were less than a handful of permanent movie theaters in Taipei, one in Tainan and
another in Kaohsiung (the two major cities in southern Taiwan). In other words, a quarter
century after cinema was first introduced in Taiwan, it remained a modern technology
and an entertainment apparatus not easily accessible to people outside of a few urban
centers. Even though films were brought to the rural areas by touring exhibition
merchants from as early as 1904, what was shown was a variety of texts from divergent
contexts whose heterogeneity defined the colonial condition of Taiwan cinema during
Japanese occupation.
It is important to note that, although access to films was regulated by the colonial
government and limited by affordability, audiences in Taiwan were by no means an
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isolated populace that lacked exposure to world cinema, be it from Europe, Hollywood,
Japan or China. Transnational from the beginning, Taiwan did not have a history of its
own film production; its cinema was forged on a unique foundation, messy and unstable,
that chracterizes the complex relationship between nation and cinema in a colonial
context. A hybrid mixture of film texts with every provenance but its own traveled the
island in the first half century of world film history. That film history was nonetheless
made Taiwan’s own. I will now focus on one touring practice because I believe it best
represents a nascent national movement that, despite its lack of fanfare (e.g. compared to
its counterpart in colonial Korea), encourages an understanding of nationalism under
colonialism as an on-going contentious operation.
Vernacularizing the Others, Internalizing the Self
It would be bestowing too much credit on or imputing too much responsibility to
single out one group to explain the budding national consciousness in pre-1945 colonial
Taiwan. It is possible, however, to gain valuable insight by tracing a brief history of the
Taiwan Cultural Association (臺灣文化協會) and its touring film exhibition sector, the
Mei-Tai Troupe mentioned earlier. The Association was founded by prominent
Taiwanese intellectuals, such as Chiang Wei-Shui (蔣謂水), Lin Hsien-Tang (林獻堂),
Tsai Pei-Huo (蔡培火) and Yang Zhao-Jia (楊肇嘉), all of whom were and would
continue to be influential political figures during the occupation period and beyond.xxii
The Association’s first meeting was held on October 17, 1921, at an all-girls high school
located in a Taiwanese populated section of Taipei City. With nurturing the development
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of Taiwan culture as its core mission,xxiii the Association offered public lecture tours,
organized summer schools, and staged theatre performances of spoken dramas.
Some historians consider the Association’s theatrical performances
groundbreaking by bringing the Colonial Taiwan in sync not only with the specific
medium but also with the larger world picture within which arts, entertainment and
representation were embedded. In other words, to “develop Taiwanese culture” would
necessarily mean to rupture the colonial bind, if only temporarily, to bring the world to it
or to meet the world head on.
Colonial Taiwan was, as we have seen, never in an iron house, isolated
completely from the outside world. As Japan’s model colony, Taiwan had long been the
testing ground for the construction of a modern “nation,” one that was a loyal subject to
the Japanese empire’s modernizing project. In the realm of the cinema, on the other hand,
we have seen that, despite the impossibility of having its own film production under the
colonial regime, Taiwan had long been exposed to major films produced in Europe,
Hollywood, Japan and China, from newsreels to all genres of popular films. Finally, we
have seen that, given the previous two conditions, Taiwan’s experiences with modernity
as well as cinema have not only been regulated and framed by the colonial regime and its
changing imperatives throughout the occupation period, but they have also been mediated
by a great variety of cultural agents until 1937 when the war in China halted most, if not
all, non-sanctioned activities. The Taiwan Cultural Association provides an extraordinary
case study.
While the Association was extremely successful during its short-lived active years
with a reported number of attendees to the touring lectures and other activities exceeding
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110,000, the leading members of the Association were dissatisfied because of the
inability to reach out to the largely illiterate Taiwanese populace outside urban areas. In
the 1924 annual meeting, a consensus was reached to establish a film exhibition sector in
order to further the pedagogical agenda of the Association. As the association planned the
organization of its own film sector, an occasion in 1925 made it all possible. On Tsai PeiHuo’s mother’s seventy-first birthday, a large sum of gift money was collected. Tsai used
a very small portion of the money to buy some token gifts for his mother and then used
the rest to go to Tokyo and purchase a projector and several educational films. Thus
began the Mei-Tai Troupe. The first screening did not begin, however, until April 1926
when the films Tsai had brought back from Japan were approved by the colonial
government for showing.xxiv The Mei-Tai Troupe enjoyed an extraordinary success in
Taipei, Tainan and other parts of Taiwan, and its popularity was, according to a
newspaper at the time, attributed to three major factors: 1) affordable admission fees, 2)
local audiences’ emotional affinity to the Troupe, and 3) Taiwanese locals’ strong “desire
for knowledge” (求知慾). The Troupe was so successful that a second and then a third
unit were organized soon afterwards, bringing more films to more people in more areas
of Taiwan.xxv
If we pause for a moment and examine more closely what these three reasons of
success suggest, they provide more help in explaining the struggling nascent national
consciousness in colonial Taiwan. “Affordable admission fees” seem straightforward
enough in that high-priced movie theaters in big cities were largely inaccessible for most
locals because, pure and simple, they could not afford such luxury. When the Mei-Tai
Troupe toured the second-tier cities, even rural areas, charging only a small fraction of
16
the fees in Taipei, those screenings were in popular demand. In addition, the culturalcum-political benzi, particularly those affiliated with the Mei-Tai Troupe, were keen on
bringing social and political reality into their interpretive performances of film texts.
Whatever subjects were narrated and explained, they satisfied the audiences’ need for
entertainment, on the one hand, and knowledge of the world, on the other, and “emotional
affinity” easily prevailed.
What was, I want to ask further, the appeal of affordable film exhibitions with
interpretations of the film texts aligned with social and political reality? What was,
exactly, this “desire to know?” To know what? Having immersed in secondary materials
about this period without direct access to the history in question, a difficulty experienced
just like those historians before me, here I come to agree with their attempt at speculative
interpretations. Following Ye Long-Yan, Zhang Yingjin suggests that an emerging sense
of a “Taiwanese identity” best explains the popularity of the Association’s film
activities.xxvi It may be feasible to venture yet another interpretation by considering the
films exhibited by the Mei-Tai Troupe.
When Tsai made purchases in Tokyo, educational films topped his choice.
Among the first films the Mei-Tai Troupe introduced to the Taiwanese audiences were
documentaries about agricultural advancement and farming co-ops in Denmark, as well
as animal life in Antarctica.xxvii The selection of films revealed some underlying aspects
of the tasks of “cultural development” advocated by the Association. Instead of
documentaries made by and/or for the Japanese colonial regime, which would certainly
gain them permission more easily to screen, the distant and outlandish locations of those
films provided both a distancing from the immediate political context and an annexing of
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Taiwan to the larger world—beyond Japan and China. Furthermore, the emphasis on
science and technology suggests a significant link between modernization and the forging
of national identity, the duo of colonial desire par excellence.
In the form of a non-conclusion, in my somewhat tedious recount of the race for
the national origin, I have left assumed, at least assumed accepted, that the origin of the
cinema is decidedly not East Asian, not China, not Taiwan and not Japan. It was a race to
search for the moment where film, that “Western” technology, arrived first. A touch of
irony, perhaps; the race for a national origin of film history turns out to be a race to return
to the point when another empire arrived, this time the technological onslaught of the
cinematic apparatus still enveloping us today. By focusing on the exhibition practices and
their function both as a pedagogical tool to counter colonial brainwashing and as an
interpretive operation of vernacularizing a great diversity of cultural texts from other
cultural contexts: in other words, to crave out a space for Taiwan’s very own film culture.
It may be possible then to imagine the decolonial project has long begun in the throe of
the colonial.
I am fully aware that I have been privileging the “decolonial” side of the
problematic over the questions of “the Humanities” so far. But I want to say, if seemingly
unconvincing right now, that this is precisely where the questions of the Humanities in
Taiwan, and perhaps East Asia, too, will begin to figure slightly more clearly. What I
wish to open up is this: If the Humanities as conceived in the loosely understood Western
context as an intervention of what constitutes a person in the broader institutionalized and
institutionalizing study of “man,” the epistemological project in East Asia will have to
18
differ and it shifts the focus to the very act of producing knowledge by acknowledging
the continuing tension with competing histories as well as contending historiographies.
Lu Su-Shang, The History of Taiwan’s Film and Drama (Taiwan dianying xiju shi)
《臺灣電影戲劇史》, Taipei: Yin-Hua Publishing, 1960.
ii
The rhetoric of the “slave” (nuli, 奴隸) as an antithesis to “national people” (guomin, 國
民) occupies a significant part of Chinese nationalist thinking since as early as the late
Qing dynasty. Rebecca Karl demonstrates convincingly in her study that the dichotomy
between the “slave” as passive and goumin, the true national subject, as active, works, at
least in the nationalist discourse, to situate China’s struggle within the larger global
context and serve to link up China’s struggle against imperialist invasion with other
regions of the world through a common state of “statelessness.” See Karl, Staging the
World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002, P. 54 and P. 79.
iii
Du, Yun-Zhi, The Film History of China (Zhongguo dianying shi) 《中國電影史》,
Vol. 3, Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1972, pp. 1-3; and, Du, The Film History of
the Republic of China, (Zhonghua minguo dianying shi) 《中華民國電影史》, Taipei:
The Council for Cultural Affairs, Administrative Yuan, 1988, pp. 439-440. Another
noteworthy change is that in the original the author’s preface (mostly personal
reminiscences) and abstract (brief explanation of periodization emphasizing its focus
after 1949 on “free China” only, that is, Taiwan and Hong Kong) are replaced by a
preface written by the Council’s director at the time of the publication. The tone of the
latter is subdued at best, lauding film as a significant art and its importance as historical
document.
iv
Another manifestation of this significant shift in film historiography can be found in
critical works done on New Taiwan Cinema in the 80s and early 90s, an analysis of
which will be provided in Chapter Five.
v
Lee, “The First Chapter of Taiwan’s Film History: 1900-1915” in Film Appreciation,
No. 73, p. 28 and “How Did Film Arrive in Taiwan?” in Film Appreciation, No. 65, p.
107.
vi
Lee, “The Relationship between Film and Politics during the Japanese Colonization,”
History Monthly, Nov. 1995, P. 123.
vii
See Li, Taiwanese Cinema, Society and History 《台灣電影、社會與歷史》, Taipei:
The Society for Chinese Cinema Studies, 1997, pp. 36-37.
viii
See Huang, Ren, and Wang Wei, eds., One Hundred Years of Taiwan Cinema, Taipei:
Chinese Film Critic Association, 2004, pp. 11-13; and, Huang, Jian-Ye, ed. The
Chronicle of Taiwan Cinema 1898-2000, Taipei: The Council for Cultural Affairs,
Administrative Yuan, 2005, p. 107.
ix
Ye, Long-Yan, The History of Taiwanese Movies During the Japanese Colonization
《日治時期台灣電影史》, Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998, pp. 51-53. Chapter Two will have
occasions to analyze in greater detail Ye’s impressive oeuvres of Taiwan’s film history,
particularly those on Taiwanese-dialect films.
i
19
x
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies during the Japanese Colonization, pp. 64-71.
In One Hundred Years of Taiwan Cinema, the authors single out the 1906 exhibition of
newsreels on the Russo-Japan war and claim that, by showing the courage and patriotism
of the Japanese soldiers, those films “changed the impression Taiwanese had had of
Japan and they began to worship Japanese Emperor, to worship Japanese soldiers.”
Though such a watershed transformation of attitude towards Japan was unlikely, it is
clear that cinema as propaganda was a top priority for the colonial government. See
Huang, pp. 16-17.
xii
Both Lee Daw-Ming and Ye Long-Yan provide detailed, even identical, accounts of
this documentary, stressing its importance of the wish of Japanese colonizers to introduce
Taiwan to Japan, a desire to cast this island as a fast-modernizing, model colony. See
Lee, “The Relationship between Cinema and Politics During Japanese Occupation,”
History, Nov. 1995, pp. 123-125, and Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, pp. 71-78.
xiii
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, pp. 164-165. See also Zhang, Yingjin, National
Chinese Cinemas, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, p. 116.
xiv
See Huang, pp. 18-33.
xv
Deslandes, Jeanne, “Dancing Shadows of Film Exhibition: Taiwan and the Japanese
Influence,” Screening the Past, November 2000. This journal is published on line by La
Trobe University, Australia. See http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/
xvi
For example, see Donald Ritchie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema: A Concise
History, Tokyo, New York and London: Kodansha International, 2001, pp. 18-22; and
Isolde Standish, “Mediators of Modernity: ‘Photo-interpreters’ in Japanese Silent
Cinema,” Oral Tradition, Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 93-110.
xvii
Nornes, Abe Mark, “For an Abusive Subtitling,” in The Translation Studies Reader,
ed. by Lawrence Venuti, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 451.
xviii
Ye, pp. 184-194 and pp. 326-330. Besides Ye’s book, other major historical works on
Taiwan cinema also include specific sections on the benzi. See for example Huang Ren, A
Hundred Years of Taiwanese Cinema, pp. 38-40; and Chen Feibao, A History of Taiwan
Cinema (Taiwan dianying shihua) 《臺灣電影史話》, Beijing: Zhongguo dianying
chubanshe, 1988, pp. 4-8.
xix
Huang, A Hundred Years, p. 39.
xx
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, pp. 190-191. According to his account, some
benzi from the Mei-Tai Troupe would even make sensational speeches after the
screening, barely tolerated by the colonial government.
xxi
Chen, A History of Taiwan Cinema, pp. 5-6.
xxii
For detailed history of this organization see Lin Bo-Wei, The History of Taiwan
Cultural Association 《台灣文化協會滄桑》, Taichung, Taiwan: Tai-Yuan, 1993;
Zhang Xian-Yan, “The Establishment and Disbandment of the Taiwan Cultural
Association” 〈台灣文化協會的成立與分裂〉in Selected Essays on Taiwan History
《台灣史論文精選》, Taipei: Yushangshe, 1996, pp. 131-159; and, most importantly,
Tsai Pei-Huo et al. History of Taiwan’s National Movement 《臺灣民族運動史》,
Taipei: Zili wanbaoshe wen hua chubanbu, 1971, particularly Chapter Six, “The Taiwan
Cultural Association” 〈臺灣文化協會〉, pp. 281-354.
xxiii
In his Chinese National Cinema, Zhang Yingjin quotes from Chen Feibao’s A History
of Taiwan Cinema, stating that the Association’s clear intentions were to “elevate Taiwan
xi
20
culture, awaken the Han national consciousness and resist national oppression by the
Japanese” (Chen P. 8 and Zhang p. 115), which is in turn quoted from History of
Taiwan’s National Movement co-authored by Tsai Pei-Huo.
xxiv
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, pp. 135-137.
xxv
Taiwan Peoples’ Daily 《臺灣民報》, April 25, 1926, quoted in Ye Long-Yan, The
Film History of Xinzhu City 《新竹市電影史》, Xinzhu, Taiwan: Xinzhu Municipal
Cultural Center, 1996, pp. 64-65.
xxvi
Zhang, p. 116 and Ye, pp. 136-138.
xxvii
Huang, One Hundred Years of Taiwan Cinema, p. 41. Later on imports from China
and even Chaplin’s films were also included.
21