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Taiwan Black Movies was nominated for Best Documentary at this year's Golden Horse Film Awards. While it's no surprise that the feel-good documentary Jump! Boys took the prize, it was a pretty close competition in my mind (yes, this is despite the fact that only two documentaries were in the running...).
What follows is my attempt at yet another rough translation from the China Times supplement that was handed out at the festival site. The introduction was cropped, but what remains is a pretty straightforward translation of Chen Jun-rong's original reporting. It's also my attempt to circulate some English-language information about some pretty rare films, hopefully to be commercially re-released sometime in the near future.
[...]
A current student at National Chengchi University's Department of Radio and Television, Hou Chi-ran has had much to brag about this year. First was his so-called "Taike1 Motorcycle Diaries", a short film entitled My 747, which was invited to participate in the Pusan Film Festival. With Taiwan Black Movies immediately following, it was as if a double happiness descended upon his home2. Not only did Taiwan Black Movies become the first documentary ever to be invited to participate in the Tokyo Film Festival, it also had the honor of receiving a nomination from the Golden Horse Committee. This budding young director is starting to get recognized in the film world, as well as earning the nickname "Junior Director Hou"3 amongst his friends.
[...]
Q: Where did you get the idea for filming Taiwan Black Movies?
A: When I was working as a Research Assistant at the Database of Taiwan Cinema, I was helping to reorganize their timeline of Taiwanese movie history. I discovered that amongst filmographies from various time periods, the majority wouldn't even mention the "Social Realist movies" (社會寫實片) produced in the early 1980's. If they were mentioned at all, they were usually hastily written off as "criminal, violent, gangster-ridden black movies", or characterized as a blight besmirching the history of Taiwanese cinema's past 20 years. Aesthetically, they were labeled as the darkest days before the dawning of the New Taiwan Cinema era. These kinds of materials drew my curiosity towards these films and an era that had been so sedulously, purposefully forgotten.
Q: What particular qualities of Social Realist movies do you feel are worthy of further investigation?
A: First of all, aesthetically speaking, these films were flooded with a great amount of crime, violence, nudity, and other such elements. Not only did they bring an unprecedented amount of thrill and excitement to their audiences, these elements are rare in the entire history of Taiwanese cinema.
Furthermore, what is the social significance that drove these films -- from 1979's Never Too Late to Repent (錯誤的第一步) to 1981's Shanghai Society Documents (上海社會檔案) -- to take crime and female vengeance as their main themes? Why were they so quickly [and commercially] successful amongst audiences, becoming the mainstream film models of the first 2 or 3 years in the early 1980's? Certainly it is connected to the political turbulence and social reforms that were occuring at the time. The Kaohsiung Incident (美麗島事件), the Jiang T'sui District Murder (江子翠命案), the Lin Family Murders (林宅血案) -- in the late 1970's, the news was filled with violent images and stories that were no worse than what was projected onto the silver screen.
In the 1960's, Western film studies were moving towards a genre-oriented mode of analysis, investigating mass-produced films as a window into popular, social psychology. I was curious to find out if Social Realist films were merely giving vent to primal, carnal desires, or if they were serving as a substitute for social anxieties. Were [actresses like] Yang Hui-shang (楊惠姍), Lu Xiao-fen (陸小芬), Lu Yi-tan (陸一嬋) merely lusting for crazy revenge against beastly men? A sexist society? Or were they perhaps railing against dozens of years of political censorship under the repressive regime of the KuoMinTang?
Q: When you first started filming this documentary, what was your plan?
A: At the time I was collecting these materials for inclusion in the Database of Taiwan Cinema, I deeply experienced the same kind of thrill that the first audiences of Social Realist films must have felt. Like in Shanghai Society Documents, the blade that slashed across Lu Xiao-fen's breasts shocked all of Taiwan, or in Never Too Late to Repent, the signature image of leading male actor Masha (馬沙)'s shackled feet as they emerge from the depths of the prison and advance towards the audience, to the famous "honeybee stinger" across Lu Yi-tan's breast in Queen Bee, Yang Hui-shang, Lu Yi-feng (陸儀鳳), and so forth -- each of them had important segments within Social Realist movies. In those conservative times under the martial law era, those shocking scenes that moved the hearts and souls of Taiwanese audience members now not only left an impression on many a fifth grade students' memory4, but they are long-forgotten classic scenes of Taiwanese cinema.
When I first started filming this documentary, not only was I motivated by the desire to collect these precious old films, but I also wanted to attempt to present a freshly annotated viewpoint. Within my film, Social Realist films and Taiwanese political society in the late 1970's mutually illuminate each other, excavating the dark mood of the times, hidden within these film cels.
Q: What kind of reactions have you gotten from your audiences?
A: After seeing all this "newly unearthed" footage, many of my younger friends have said to me in surprise, they never knew that before they were born, Taiwanese movies contained so many fierce images and thoughts. Some foreigners have also raised suspicions that 瘋狂女煞星 (1981) was actually the original Kill Bill. Strangest yet is when a friend told me that the scene in which Lu Xiao-fen is chased to a dark, abandoned warehouse by five rapists is the same scene that had caused her repeated nightmares as a child. She'd always thought that the evil, hideous faces in her dreams were just a product of her own imagination, but it wasn't until she saw Taiwan Black Movies that she had the sudden realization that she'd probably seen that movie when she was too young to separate onscreen fiction from reality. Early in her childhood, she must have received a shocking education in a movie theater.
Q: You've wrestled with these black movies now for a year and seven months. Now that you've finished the task, what kind of personal harvests have you reaped?
A: These kinds of audience responses have probably been the most meaningful part about making Taiwan Black Movies. To recover this part of Taiwan film history, long submerged in the audience's memories, while simultaneously attempting to link these films with the social environment of the time has allowed the backstage action and the hypnotized audience in front of the screen to find each other.
This search has also opened up previously-unexplored directions for Taiwanese film studies, stitching up a patch that was previously ignored. On the trivial side, you can say that it has liberated one woman from the recurrent nightmares of her youth. From an irreputable start to a future full of anticipation, these are all truly the results of this documentary.
In the past, I've heard it said that each film product will develop its own life, will grow into whatever it wants itself to become. It was only after Taiwan Black Movies that I personally understood this point. I was summoned by these black movies, and through me, they have found the vector they wanted, the voice they needed to say what it was they had really wanted to say -- no more, no less, and with utter accuracy. It is especially this last part that makes me feel like the year and seven months were really worthwhile. For Taiwan black movies to have selected me from millions of people, it truly was an honor.
1 台客, popular slang for "Taiwanese cool"
2 雙喜臨門, basically, very auspicious events for Hou Chi-ran
3 After Hou Hsiao-hsien, still currently Taiwan's more successful director.
4 Translator's glitch here... I'm not sure if he's referring to himself, having seen these movies when he was in the fifth grade, or if I totally misread the sentence.
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