Abstract
Atomic bombs fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 8 and 9, 1945. A week later, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender. After fifty years under Japanese colonization, Taiwan was soon to be returned to China. More than four decades later, in 1989, the emperor’s radio address provided the opening for famed Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A City of Sadness. Monotonous and impassionate, the emperor’s voice is as opaque as the screen is dark. When a candle is finally lit at a family shrine, the flash of light is a profound reminder of Taiwan’s history in cinematic representation. Diegetically, the scene takes place during a power outage; the Japanese emperor’s radio address must then be issued from elsewhere and made to coexist with the unknowing subjects on screen.
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Notes
Lu Su-Shang, Taiwan dianying xiju shi (The History of Taiwan’s Film and Drama), Taipei: Yin-Hua Publishing, 1961.
The figure of the “slave” (nuli) as antithetical to “national people” (guomin) had occupied a significant part of Chinese nationalist thinking since as early as the late Qing dynasty. Rebecca Karl demonstrates convincingly that the binary between the “slave” as passive and guomin, the “true” national subject, as active, is particularly effective in the nationalist discourse to situate China’s struggle within the larger global context. That dichotomy serves to link up China’s struggle against imperialist invasion with other regions of the world through a shared condition 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.
Du Yun-Zhi, Zhongguo dianying shi (The Film History of China), vol. 3, Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1972, pp. 1–3; and, Du, Zhonghua minguo dianying shi (The Film History of the Republic of China), 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, i.e. Taiwan and Hong Kong) are replaced by a preface written by the Council’s director at the time of the publication. The new preface takes care to avoid political partisanship by lauding film as art and its importance as historical document.
See Li Tian-Duo, Taiwanese Cinema, Society, and History, Taipei: The Society for Chinese Cinema Studies, 1997, pp. 36–37.
See Huang Ren and Wang Wei, eds., One Hundred Years of Taiwan Cinema, Taipei: Chinese Film Critic Association, 2004, pp. 11–13;
and Edmund K. Y. Wong, ed., The Chronicle of Taiwan Cinema 1898–2000, Taipei: The Council for Cultural Affairs, Administrative Yuan, 2005, p. 107.
Ye Long-Yan, The History of Taiwanese Movies during the Japanese Colonization, Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998, pp. 51–53. Chapter 2 will analyze in greater detail Ye’s impressive oeuvre of Taiwan’s film history, particularly those on Taiwanese-dialect cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, pp. 164–165. See also Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, New York and London: Routledge, 2004, p. 116.
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.
Abe Mark Nornes, “For an Abusive Subtitling,” in The Translation Studies Reader, Lawrence Venuti, ed., New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 451.
Ye, The History of Taiwanese Movies, particularly 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, Taiwan dianying shihua (A History of Taiwan Cinema), Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1988, pp. 4–8.
Misawa Mamie, Silver Screen in the Colony: Research on Taiwan Governor Office’s Film Policies, 1895–1942, Taipei: Avanguard, 2002, pp. 56–66.
For detailed history of this organization, see Lin Bo-Wei, Taiwan wehua xiehui cangsang (The History of Taiwan Cultural Association), Taichung, Taiwan: Taiyuan, 1993;
Zhang Xian-Yan, “Taiwan wenhua xiehui de chengli yu fenlie” (The Establishment and Disbandment of the Taiwan Cultural Association) in Taiwanshi lunwen xunji (Selected Essays on Taiwan History), Taipei: Yushangshe, 1996, pp. 131–159;
and, most importantly, Tsai Pei-Huo et al., Taiwan mingzu yundongshi (History of Taiwan’s National Movement), Taipei: Zili wanbaoshe, 1971, particularly chapter 6 on the Taiwan Cultural Association, pp. 281–354.
Harry J. Lamley, “Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945: The Vicissitudes of Colonialism,” in Taiwan: A New History, Murray A. Rubinstein, ed., Armonk, New York, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999, p. 232.
Taiwan People’s Daily, April 25, 1926, quoted in Ye Long-Yan, Hsinchushi dianyingshi (The Film History of Hsinchu City), Hsinchu, Taiwan: Hsinchu Municipal Cultural Center, 1996, pp. 64–65.
Leo T. S. Ching provides the definitive study to date on the questions of national identity in colonial Taiwan. See Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. See especially chapter 3, “Between Assimilation and Imperialization: From Colonial Projects to Imperial Subjects,” pp. 89–132.
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© 2011 Guo-Juin Hong
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Hong, GJ. (2011). Colonial Archives, Postcolonial Archaeology: Pre-1945 Taiwan and the Hybrid Texts of Cinema before Nation. In: Taiwan Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118324_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118324_2
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