Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang (University of California, Berkeley)
Yao-chi Chen’s documentary Liu Pi-chia (1967) has long been hailed as the first cinéma vérité, or truthful cinema, in the Taiwanese film history. Some have even gone so far to call it the very first “modernist documentary” in the Chinese-speaking world for its non-propagandist rendering of a Nationalist veteran in a settlement village designated for farmers and dam builders. The existential truth of the exiled state, as captured by the film’s nihilist overtone, is believed to challenge the aesthetics of “Healthy Realism” upheld by the Nationalists. The divide between the modernist “truth” and the propagated “reality” was further fortified after the film was banned. As for Chen himself, after being charged for joining a leftwing reading group, he opted for a career in narrative films and was considered “silenced” ever since. In this essay, I seek to revise this putative primal scene of the documentary avant-garde in Taiwan within a broader media ecology during the 1960s and 70s, a period when the Cold War geopolitics, agricultural science, and propaganda mechanism converged to redefine the visual rhetoric of “the real” across different mediums and genres. I will comparatively read Liu Pi-chia with a series of pedagogical documentary films on rice farming of “free China”— directed by Chen but funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States. I suggest that Chen, whose pursuit of social critique through documentary was considered dead in the early 1970s, still managed to invent a hybrid audio-visual rhetoric by grafting the imperative of scientific/ethnographic “truth” onto the sort of emotive gestures and critical thrust in his earlier work Liu Pi-chia. I further situate his singular aesthetics of exactitude within the matrix of postwar journalism, photography, and the changing geopolitical mapping of “China” as an ambivalent cultural-ecological zone during the Cold War era.
Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang is a PhD candidate in Chinese cinema, literature, and print culture at University of California Berkeley. His research interests cover visual and literary culture of late imperial and Republican China, cinema and media from Cold War Taiwan and Hong Kong, theories of materialism, and the intersecting industrial-technological histories of cinema, architecture, and urban infrastructure. His research has been sponsored by The Fulbright Program, Mellon Foundation, and the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. He has served as the editor of Room One Thousand, an interdisciplinary architectural journal of UC Berkeley, and the director of North American Taiwan Studies Association. He has published on Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship, among other journals. He is currently a doctoral fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, where he is completing a dissertation titled “Speculative Statecraft: Logistical Media and the Culture of Chinese Cold War, 1940s-1970s.” In this dissertation, he deals with propaganda cinema, media, and literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong in relation to the design and discourse of military logistics in the context of Cold War.