FMS Colloquium Lecture Series: Chang-Min Yu "Mountain (1966), Liu-Pi-Cha (1967) and Documentary Modernism in Taiwan"

Chen Yao-chi’s documentaries, Mountain (1966) and Liu Pi-Chia (1967), point to a post-colonial condition in Taiwanese cinema. What if, for the artist himself, there was no appropriate tradition to inherit and reinvent in formulating new sentiments and experiences? How could he borrow, deconstruct, and reimagine the history of American and European cinema for the sake of Formosa? This talk will examine how Chen put forth a kind of documentary modernism in the articulation of a Taiwanese verité and revamping the Flahertian formula. In Mountain, the everyday coexistence of Chinese and Taiwanese people on the island is under scrutiny by the interrogation of the camera. Whereas in Liu Pi-Chia, one witnesses, through the labor of infrastructure, the naturalization of a mainlander in the postwar temporality of a deracinated past and a Sisyphean future. These two films arguably mark the mythological beginning of the Taiwanese New Cinema, fifteen years avant la lettre.