The Paths of Imagining the Avant-garde: On Taiwan Film Experiments in the 1960s

The Taiwan Spectrum section, a part of Taiwan International Documentary Festival since 2014, aims to review and explore Taiwanese documentaries from new perspectives, supplement what these films may lack, formulate new historical perspectives, and engage in discourse with the fiction film-centred narratives of Taiwanese film history. Examples include the 2014 theme of ‘When Camera Comes in Between’, which centred on the relationship of those in front of and behind the camera, and in which five Taiwanese documentaries were selected for further discussion; and the 2016 retrospective ‘What’s the Colour for Documentary? – The 30th Anniversary of Green Team’, in which documentaries by Green Team (active 1986-1990) were subtitled in Chinese and English, and re-released and contrasted with CTS news reels.

Although the Green Team films have long been recognised for their significance, their works have never been widely disseminated after the group disbanded. During the planning stages of the 2016 TIDF, we came to the striking realisation that even with the exemplary status that Green Team enjoys, the discourse that their works seek to engage in has never gone through serious development simply because nobody could view them. Such is the disappointment that results from these works remaining unseen!

In other words: in the 2016 TIDF, we attempted to make ‘unseen’ works seen by improving their visibility and readability, and to enable these works to become known by an audience who brought with them the discourse of a new generation. This was an unforgettably wonderful experience, letting classic works cross into a new era to see the light of day again, and it was this experience that informed and encouraged us in curating this year’s Taiwan Spectrum.

‘Unseen’ films

How can unseen films be discoursed with? This was our main concern during planning. Before we settled on the direction for this year’s Taiwan Spectrum (this was roughly mid-2016), Richard Yao-chi CHEN told us that his student works while studying film at UCLA are all still extant, and he had begun organising and restoring them for a potential complete screening during the festival. These works include The Archer (1963), Through the Years (1964), The Mountain (1966) and Liu Pi-chia (1967).

The Archer is a five-minute-long hand-drawn animation based on the ancient Chinese legend of Houyi shooting down nine suns but leaving the tenth in the sky. The film features the roughly four-year-old children of American friends recounting the story after hearing CHEN tell it once; CHEN recorded their childlike retelling and used it as the narration for his animation. What made the film more entertaining were the differences between their retelling and the traditional legend, such as the legendary ‘king’ becoming the ‘president’. Through the Years combined real-life documentation with fictional depictions: part of the film was shot in a well-lit movie studio, while other portions are incidental video recordings of the Grand Canyon, joining together in a contrast of metaphors, a place once abuzz with life, now deserted and dead. Both of these works employ an innovative style of narration.

The Mountain was filmed during spare time when CHEN was filming Liu Pi-chia. CHEN joined HUANG Yong-song, MOU Tun-fei and HUANG Giu-rong — all students at the Taiwan Art College — on an excursion in the mountains in Hsinchu. The three interviewees talk about their artistic ideals and dreams, how only KMT party members could receive scholarships, and their views on the Vietnam War; the song ‘California Dreamin’’ plays throughout, highlighting the dejection in the zeitgeist. Not long after graduation, MOU, who said that he would ‘rather die than not become a director’, completed I Didn’t Dare to Tell You in 1969 and The End of the Track in 1970; both of these feature-length dramas had children as main characters and showcased real-life concerns, becoming part of Taiwan’s first batch of independent films. Yet because of their relatively non-commercial nature, these two works were neglected, censured and censored back then, with I Didn’t Dare to Tell You even inexplicably having positive and optimistic secondary school scenes cut into its ending, an obvious intrusion of government propaganda incoherent with the rest of the film. A search revealed that the only existing 35mm copy of both these films are now in the archives of the Taiwan Film Institute.

In addition, CHEN was a pioneer in introducing the theory of cinéma vérité in the magazine Theatre Quarterly (note 1) and served as theatrical director for HUANG Hua-cheng’s play The Prophet. Thus Theatre Quarterly, despite its short run from 1965 to 1968, served as a main lead in revisiting these works: the magazine held performances of Waiting for Godot and The Prophet, and a total of 11 films were screened in its two film exhibitions. By now, the Taiwan Spectrum section was focused on the 1960s and sought to explore the reality behind these avant-garde films.

However, in previous academic and critical literature on the Theatre Quarterly film exhibitions, descriptions of the films themselves were all rewrites based on programme notes or other articles, a hint that the primary sources of these works (all physical film reels) had long been lost. The volumes of relevant discourse also frequently mention how Theatre Quarterly served as a pioneer in a ‘modern / avant-garde / experimental’ trinity. It seems inevitable that existentialism, modernism and Westernisation — all concepts brought in from the West — would bear influence on thought, but another question piqued our interest: where did this ‘wave of films’ come from?

In his commentary ‘The Two Years of Theatre Quarterly’ (note 2), LIU Da-zen writes, ‘The initial strategy of Theatre Quarterly was to use more than 90 percent of its pages to translate and introduce modern, Western theatre and film. CHIU Kang-chien even argued that such a lopsided approach should be sustained for at least a decade or two! The reason was plain and simple: we were too far behind.’

In a void resulting from the political climate, although a handful of Western art films did trickle in (such as Italian neorealism and French nouvelle vague films, and works by Federico FELLINI and Ingmar BERGMAN, whose 1960 film The Virgin Spring was introduced with a pornographic title), in the face of the worldwide wave of films, Taiwanese audiences could only sample a select few. In some ways, it was far more common for people to read translated scripts and reviews, and imagine how these art films looked like. It was under these circumstances that the young artistic talents of Theatre Quarterly began filming their own works.

However, more than half a century later in 2018, with most of these works have long been lost, we can also only imagine what these lost films looked like by piecing together scraps of information or combining descriptions from multiple sources. Somewhat paradoxically, the common threads linking these two periods — and the path we took for our project — are ‘being unseen’ and ‘imagination’!

Finding the past through ‘dual imagination’

Starting from this ‘dual imagination’, we began to follow multiple sources of historical information in search of the ‘alternative films’ that briefly flickered onto the scene decades ago. Contemporaneous with these films in the 1960s were the mainstream fiction films, largely centred on Taiwanese-language commercial productions, adaptations of Chiung Yao’s romance novels, Huangmei opera films, and ‘Healthy Realism’ features. But did anyone make any individual or independent non-commercial productions in their time off?

In our angst about curation we began to fantasise: Was it possible for experimental films to exist in the context of Taiwanese-language cinema? Back then, the directors Edward YANG and HOU Hsiao-hsien would have been high school students or university freshmen; could they have been at the Theatre Quarterly film exhibitions, and did they try their hand at 8mm film? Did the artists of the renowned Fifth Moon Painting Society and Eastern Painting Society create motion picture works? The magazine Designer, which lasted for a total of nine issues from 1967 to 1968, constantly called in its pages for films to be featured in a future film exhibition, but no news of such exhibition ever came even in its final issue…

These pipe-dream speculations and fantasies ended with some research. One researcher quipped to us, ‘Have you ever seen how miserable life is for people who are serious about making Taiwanese-language films?’ This was enough to make us realise that experimental films in this context were an unaffordable luxury. After reaching out to HOU Hsiao-hsien, he told us that he didn’t try shooting on 8mm film, but we heard that when the late Edward YANG wanted to switch his subject of study to film in the US, he did make a piece on 8mm film for his application, but that piece has long been lost. As for artists, it would have been impossible to ask every one of them owing to the sheer number. Finally, we even dived deep into the archives of the Kuangchi Program Service and individually checked hundreds of reels of acidic-smelling film, but came up with nothing.

As we went down one dead end after another, our originally messy strands of clues were gradually pruned and refined. After going through the interpersonal relationship networks of those in the arts and humanities back then, we focused our efforts on certain artists, the Theatre Quarterly magazine, film students who were then studying abroad, and Hong Kong or Western professionals who were known to have contacts in Taiwan.

Fortunately for us, the photographer CHANG Chao-tang joined us in searching for lost films. In addition to bringing from his home 8mm reels shot more than 50 years ago, he also enlisted the help of artist and designer LIANG Hsiao-liang in finding several reels of 8mm film from the personal effects of the late artist LONG Sih-liang. The artist HAN Hsiang-ning also gave us 8mm reels that he shot in 1965.

After going through digital conversion and restoration, we realised that CHANG’s film reels contained footage of the Modern Poetry Exhibition in 1966. This footage, now screened for the first time in 52 years under the title Modern Poetry Exhibition 1966, features shots of the young HUANG Yong-song, MOU Tun-fei and HUANG Giu-rong. Among LONG’s film reels we found many family recordings, as well as Getting Ready for the Festival, which was selected for the second film exhibition organised by Theatre Quarterly in 1967; this film utilised many close-up shots to depict festival celebration by the common people. The film Run was shot by HAN Hsiang-ning in 1966, in which he asked the artist XI De-jin to run around the empty Ren’ai Road roundabout in Taipei; in contrast, HAN’s 1965 film Today has never been publicly screened before, and features a headless human-like figure that is beached and beaten by the waves, rolling along the beach in constantly shifting poses.

In addition to these rediscoveries, we also had a selection of known documentary films, such as PAI Ching-jui’s A Morning in Taipei (1964), and CHUANG Ling’s Life Continued (1966) and My New Born Baby (1967). Extending our connections further, we have Routine (1969) by LAW Kar, a Hong Kong film critic who once served as editor for Theatre Quarterly; The Milky Way (1968), by the writer Xi Xi; and T’ai Chi Ch’uan (1969), a recording of the philosopher NAN Huai-chin practicing tai-chi at Taiwan’s northeastern coast made by Tom DAVENPORT, an American director commissioned by National Geographic to film in Taiwan. The basis of this year’s Taiwan Spectrum had now taken shape.

What’s more, we also included two recent works by the artist SU Yu-hsien. In 2016 SU did a remake of the 1965 play The Prophet written by HUANG Hua-cheng, in which the actors CHUANG Ling and LIU Yin-shang were invited back to the original site to recreate the play, at the time a pioneering effort in breaking through the confines of conventional theatre. Plaster Gong (2017) is a behind-the-scenes look, in which the performers at the time talk about the views and perspectives of the Theatre Quarterly crew in relation to modernism.

Unfortunately, the at-the-time astounding works of HUANG Hua-cheng, one of Theatre Quarterly’s principal figures, have now been lost: rumours have it that these works were later moved to a printing shop which then went bankrupt, and the owner of the shop disappeared without a trace. We also discovered that in 1994, the Chinese Taipei Film Archive (now the Taiwan Film Institute) held a seminar titled ‘Theatre Quarterly and Me’, in which HUANG Hua-cheng brought his 8mm film reel of Experiment 002 to recreate the original screening in 1967: the film was projected onto six screens, with the projector placed on a wobbling helmet, and breathing sounds were added on site. From the VHS recording of the entire seminar, we have selected the portion featuring the screening of Experiment 002, which may well be the only existing video documentation of the film.

Imagined avant-garde, avant-garde imagination

The aforementioned film works defy individual labels, traversing genres such as animation, docudrama, documentary, fiction film, video art and experimental film. From an abstract perspective, however, they are a sudden surge in creative energy and, like other movements in film across the world, bear a high degree of originality and pioneering spirit. In conversing with their time period, these non-conforming and daring works can be seen as a sort of reflection of the unique zeitgeist of the 1960s.

Besides the 19 screened works, we also list information pertaining to 15 other lost films. Although unseen, these lost works nevertheless form a part of our entire collection of 34 films, no matter how briefly they may have existed in this world, with the entire collection brought under the title ‘Imagining the Avant-garde: Film Experiments of the 1960s’.

This collective presentation signifies that there was indeed a trend in filmmaking — both a trend in film involving young people, and a trend in experimentation that took the form of film. The diversity of these works challenges the definition of film, and also sketches out the rough edges of Taiwan’s own sense of modern film. As these works are now rediscovered, they will converse with and supplement what we know as the modernist / avant-garde / experimental trends of 1960s art and fill in a gap in film history.

Interestingly, if we follow this context and the experimental spirit these films embody, we will realise that the avant-garde nature of these films stems from a certain type of imagination, and this imagination itself might also be an avant-garde one. From a curator’s perspective, this 1960s movement in film experiments can be said to possess an ‘imagined avant-garde’; perhaps by naïvely recreating it through an exhibition, we are also children of our own one-sided ‘avant-garde imagination’!

(tr. by Kevin WANG)

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Note 1: ‘Documentation methods and their realism’, Theatre Quarterly 3 (August 1965), p. 189-196.

Note 2: China Times arts supplement, 29 August 2013.

Note 3: The Modern Poetry Exhibition was organised by four magazines, Youth Literary, Modern Literature, Li Poetry and Theatre Quarterly. Artists HUANG Yong-song, HUANG Hua-cheng, CHANG Chao-tang, LONG Sih-liang and others were invited to each present a visual depiction of one of their most favorite modern poems. Taipei’s Ximending area was originally the chosen venue, but police intervention caused the exhibition to be moved to the Fu Bell on the National Taiwan University campus, where the campus police then caused the exhibition to be relocated to outside the NTU Student Activity Center; the exhibition lasted only one afternoon.