Almost Propaganda But Not Quite: Identity, Modernity and the Construction of ‘The Native’ in Gift of Life and Viva Tonal

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, there has been a peculiar boom of documentary films (what I call the ‘New Documentary Movement’) in Taiwan, amidst the general decline of feature film production.¹ The boom carries such momentum that, in order to take advantage of it, a biennial international festival of documentary films was created in 1998, complete with various prizes. The cause of this boom is a subject still waiting to be thoroughly explored, though given that the New Documentary Movement, which began in 1988,² closely followed the unfolding of the Nativization Movement (bentuhua yundong) in Taiwan in the mid-1980s — a movement that sought to distinguish Taiwanese culture from the mainland Chinese — a facile explanation would be to ascribe this odd phenomenon to the rise of the so-called ‘native consciousness’ during this period, an explanation this chapter seeks to unpack. A comparison with Taiwan’s New Cinema Movement, which began in 1982 with The Story of Time (Jiao 1990: 21), would reveal a picture more complex than such simple interpretations allow.