Taiwan Black Movies Part 3

 

Taiwan Black Movies (2005)

Director: Hou Chi-jan

Since I have quoted this documentary throughout these reviews about Taiwan genre movies, I should cover this even though, as previously mentioned, its structure for myself makes it difficult to critique. As it is a talking head production with clips of films, I find that it is hard to scrutanise a production where all the content is less in in-depth subtext but the information being carried forwards.

It is nonetheless a document of great interest, one I wished had been longer as it tackles its subject where, after Never Too Late to Repent (1979) became a success, suddenly there were so many films made in its wake that, as one editor explains, he could be working on fourteen films at the same time. Or that real world gangsters wished to work on these films, starring as extras and even bending producers' arms for money to film in downtown Taiwan. A lot of the film is about the distributors continually dodging the censors, including a montage of censored scenes, an issue that eventually lead to government intervention which stopped this movement.

This is sad. Alongside those I have seen, there are films shown in the documentary which shown various tangents in these genres films which entice - Queen Bee (1981) a martial arts film where the female lead has bees tattooed to her collar bone and chest; Girl with a Gun (1983), where the documentary has a gruesome but compelling sequence from the film where the female lead is cutting up and disposing of a body, which cuts to reverse negative in the midst of for haunting effect; the evocatively titled Gunshot at 6 o'Clock in the Morning (1979); and Girls' Concentration Camp (1983), which in the trailer shown looks the most lurid, as a Taiwanese women in prison film with all the clichés, but as a film from that country is immediately interesting to see for any cultural differences.

On the other hand, this censorship is talked of, alongside these genre films already burning out by 1981, having led to the New Taiwan Cinema of 1982 onwards existing. So this means, whilst we lost this original movement, we got instead the likes of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, so one would not want to change time and lose films like A Brighter Summer's Day (1991). In hindsight, the only thing I would wish to have been different if that this original movement of genre films had gotten recognition much quicker, so many survived in better quality than what we got. None so more than the last film cover...

*****

On the Society File of Shanghai (1981)

Director: Chu-Chin Wang

Screenplay: Yung-Hsiang Chang and Ching Wang

Cast: Hsiao-Fen Lu, Shou-Ping Tsui, Fu-Mei Chang, Chi-Chun Chen, Yung-Hsiang Chin, Ji-Chi Chou, Chieh Huang                          

 

Contextually based on "scar literature", anti-Maoist literature which came in the late seventies soon after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, the first scenes of Society File is of men trying to flee mainland China only to be captured by the leaders and called unpatriotic, emphasising this point. This follows a trend of these films avoiding their Taiwanese culture, here setting itself in China where the main narrative follows the story of Li Li-Fang (Hsiao-Fen Lu), a female suspect in a stabbing of a military chief's son, a figure with a scar on her forehead, and scars on her chest and lower belly which alongside her demeanour leaves the investigating detective Mr. Shung and his younger male assistant curious to how she ended up this way. Against the will of their seniors who just want to throw the book at her, they wish to work backwards and learn why this young woman is even in this scenario.

Set in 1960, cutting to the summer of 1969 too, the film builds a narrative from flashbacks about Li-Fang's downfall, trying to learn why a woman who was a nurse suddenly contributed to the son of a major figure being stabbed by multiple men on her prompt, especially a person by the name of Wang she was close to. This films exists in how Taiwan, with its uneasy relationship with China over the years, wished to view its communist neighbours and their ideology next to their capitalist culture, though the result has much more nuisance than this even if by accident. It has absurdities, the female teacher of Li's old school, Principal Wong, is forced to wear a dunce's cap and work by young Maoists in blue uniform, broad caricature between them, whilst however contrasting this with a more profound image, of an old senile man at said abandoned school changing "Long live Chairman Mao" in his chair outside. Or Mr. Shung existentially wondering how the ideals he exited with has lost its way among broken windows and abandoned old buildings where he tells his assistant these concerns.

It is definitely a drama as much as a genre film, as alongside Li-Wang and the man she had stabbed Wang being half siblings to different mothers, the Principal his own dismissed and divorced as a bad element by his military father, there is the more sombre plot of how Li-Fang went as a nurse in 1969 to tend old figures of power in a building of rest, retired suddenly and is shown to be in a less emotionally healthy state moving back into her father's workplace. Gender politics plays into the narrative too, with her being told to marry a doctor twice her age on her father's encouragement. Her new husband is shown as being spineless and her father becoming paranoid and abusive when it is realised she is not a virgin before her wedding day. The plot reveal is not that difficult to realise - [Major Spoiler Warning] that she was raped by one of the old military members whilst caring for him as a nurse [Spoilers End] - but the build to the truth does take this seriously in between its pieces of genre storytelling, such as how most of the scars (including one she inflicts on herself) are in scenes of pure shock value. It is a compelling melodramatic film because it does take its subject seriously.

It's use of a very well worn archetype, an older and wider detective, helps immensely as a plot point as Mr. Shung becomes the compelling and sympathetic lynchpin alongside Li-Fang, always carrying a pipe with him, and showing both the wariness of his work but the skill he has acquired over the years, such as an unprofessional but blunt way to deal with a prisoner feigning madness by opening a window encouraging him to jump. Li-Fang herself, a figure as much of others' recollection as seen, is just as distinct, on one hand powerful but the other broken, actress Hsiao-Fen Lu committing to the performance. When the film does finally answer the question it has built up to, why she has ended up arrested and on trial for murder, it is a tragedy. Returning to its source, it does come off as an anti-communist China film, arguably propagandist, but more meaningful than this to a much symbolic idea of how power in general corrupts.

Also in a less then stellar print in the version I saw, looking like a VHS scan with burnt on English subtitles, On the Society File of Shanghai nonetheless closed the book on a fascinating festival of films on the right note, with the fact that that they were from a movement I had never heard of having a richer profoundness. All of them were rewarding, all sadly difficult to access and, with their restorers having to use what survives, cursed to their disadvantage in a world of smoothing over the past, a hurdle in the way of their greater access as these films, for the open minded to their scars, all have something interesting to see both as genre films and in what they were tapping into culturally as Taiwan Black Cinema chronicles. As time capsules, before the New Taiwanese Cinema came in 1982, they are enlightening.