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Taiwan - By Dan Bloom on Thursday, December 22, 2011 0:08 - 0 Comments - Post a Comment - Report Abuse
Taiwanese Cinema Huang Retrospective

Who is Huang Mingchuan? Outside of Taiwan, film director HMC (黃明川) is not well-known, and even inside Taiwan, he has been relegated to the sidelines of the commercial film industry. Even worse, the national news media outlets — magazines and newspapers — have mostly ignored him over the years, and most young people today have no idea who or what he is, do not recognize his face and admit that they do not know his name. “Huang Mingchuan who?” they often say.

Of course, the younger generations of Taiwanese youth today know the names and faces and films of Ang Lee, Hou Shiao Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and others — Ju Ba Dao of “You are the Apple of my eye” fame and Mr Wei of ”Seediq” Bale fame — but they know very little about the three films of HMC’s stellar, lunatic, independent, made-on-a-shoestring-budget trilogy. I call it “The Taiwan Gone Mad Trilogy”.

So, sad but true, ask almost any college student today in Taiwan about Huang Mingchuan’s powerful films about Taiwanese society in the 1990s and their faces go blank. HMC who?
Taiwan has passed HMC by. And this is a shame, and a shame on Taiwan’s cultural industry of cinema, literature, newspaper reporting and academic research. For ten years in the late 1980s and all the way through the 1990s, HMC — madman, moon-gazing lunatic, a man with his head in the clouds, an underground rebel of Rabelasian proportions, and a former professional photographer with a Manhattan studio in the 1980s (not to mention a voracious reader) — from 1989 to 1999 poured his heart out (and his inquisitive, probing mind) in three powerful films that can deserve to be archived at film museums worldwide.

This man (and his films) should not be forgotten. Such a fate is not becoming a native talent like this. By ignoring him, and consigning his films to the dustbin of history and cutting room floor of Taiwan’s evolving cinema, Taiwan is the loser. And Taiwan, great country that it is, should know better than to ignore one of its own geniuses.
To become a more just society, to search for its own roots as anation, Taiwan needs to stand again for HMC. National treasures like this do not come by that often in the firmament that is modern life.

In a recent interview with Ho Yi of the Taipei Times, HMC, now 56, said: “Around the time when Taiwan’s martial law was lifted, the country was driven by a strong desire to open up to the world and become a more just society. To many, it was also a time to search for one’s roots.”
Back in 1999, the art critic and poet Chang Te-cheng put it this way wrote a well-received article about Huang’s three feature films — Flat Tyre, The Man from Island West, calling them his “myth trilogy” — Aboriginal myth, military myth and political-religious myth, concluding that HMC’s trilogy reflected his attempt to come to terms with a society and culture in transition.

So how did HMC slip so quietly into Taiwan’s cultural atmosphere and leave a trail of three culture-shifting films that carry echoes of Wim Wenders of Germany, Jean-Luc Godard of France and Pier Paolo Pasolini of Italy, as well as Mitsuo Yanagimachi of Japan and Sajiyat Ray of India? This question be addressed,

Born and raised and educated in a desperate Taiwan under an ”Alice in Wonderland” dictatorship at the end of the ”White Terror” martial law days (1949 – 1988), HMC spent seven important years in New York City running a photography studio in mid-town Manhattan and absorbing — deeply, intimately, intellectually — the various Western symphonies based on ideas of women’s liberation, the search for ethnic and spiritual identity, the rewriting of American Indian history, the artist’s need for rebellion, social justice and other kinds of free-thinking visions, both artistic and emotional.

These themes animate HMC as a man, as a human being, as a Taiwanese. And as the film-maker that he is!

He is the Walt Whitman of Taiwan, it’s Jack Kerouac, it’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

For a man who grew up in a small town in southern Taiwan, surrounded by rice paddies and pineapple fields, baked in summer sun and blasted by winter winds coming down from Siberia, HMC went out to “see the world” and reported back in a unique, cinematic style on what he saw, what he heard, what he dreamed.

Revisit the HMC Trilogy film by film — there are English subtitles now — and see for yourself what a lone independent film director has achieved.

Such genius only come around once in a generation. Who will be the next HMC in Taiwan’s evolving cinema-scape? Time will tell.

[NOTE: A DVD box set of the HMC trilogy is now available with an accompanying book in Mandarin (and one essay in English) and with the addition of his 1999 short film ''The Wind Within.'' All the films have English subtitles. To information, e-mail hmc_films@yahoo.com]

The three films discussed above are:

”The Man from Island West” (西部來的人, 1989) tells the story of a member of the Atayal Aboriginal tribe returning to his village after years of living in Han-Chinese society in Taipei.

”Bodo” (寶島大夢, 1993) looks at the absurdity of Taiwan’s authoritarian past through the eyes of a low-ranking soldier.
”Flat Tyre” (破輪胎, 1998), ,looks at the use of political and religious iconography in Taiwan.

This post was submitted by Dan Bloom.

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