大稻埕

The film Twa-Tiu-Tiann is Yeh Tian-Lun’s second film after Night Market Hero in 2012, which is a continuation of his locality route, with Taiwanese as the main language and a lot of local elements. It was released during the Chinese New Year in 2014 and was positioned as a family-friendly New Year’s Eve film, generating NT$200 million at the box office (Tsuyoshi Nojima, translated by Chang Ya-Ting, 2015, p.311). Twa-Tiu-Tiann tells the story of Chen Yu-His, a college student, and Chu Chueng-Te, a history professor, who travel through time and space to Dadaocheng, Taiwan’s most prosperous first downtown area during the Japanese rule in the 1920s. Two historical events, the Japanese Crown Prince’s visit to Taiwan and Chiang Wei-Shui’s Petition Campaign for the Installation of Taiwan’s Parliament are involved. Although the film sets to travel to 1920s, there are only two Japanese who appear, Goto Shinpei, the 4th Governor of Taiwan and Kurosaki, a police officer.

Police officer Kurosaki suddenly barges into Nan Chun tailor shop, shouting in a Kansai accent that no trouble was allowed, and beats Ah Chun with a baton, then went out with the words “You Taiwanese are so disorderly”. Subsequently, he entered the theater where the Taiwanese play was being staged, saying, “Go home immediately, the show is over. The Crown Prince will be visiting Taiwan soon. From now on, all non-Japanese performances are completely banned”. But the people in the theater were not willing to obey his orders, chanting a Taiwanese song together, and Professor Chu even threw a basin of water on his head. Finally, he had no choice but to leave in disgrace. From one perspective, the image of Japanese in Twa-Tiu-Tiann is stereotypical, similar to the image of violent and bad Japanese who despises and bullies the Taiwanese in films from 1950s to 1970s. However, what differs it from the films of that period is that Japanese also become the object of ridicule by the Taiwanese.

In fact, although the film is meant to be a return to history, it makes a lot of historical mistakes, such as the 1930s paintings and songs appearing in the 1920s, and referring to the Taisho era of Japan as the Showa era (Akamatsu Miwako, Translated by Chen Yun-Yuan, 2017, p.212). Filled with various “pastiche” plots and hilarious performances, the film is a mix of comedy and farce, while history seems insignificant, just like what Jameson (1991) describes as the features of postmodernist culture, “a new depthlessness”, “a consequent weakening of historicity” and “a whole new type of emotional ground tone”. By presenting historical architecture and folklore activities, and with the help of art and styling, Twa-Tiu-Tiann recreates the social landscape of colonial Taiwan. Whereas “nostalgia” is not a “representation” of historical content, but merely consumption of history, catering to the tastes of the masses in today’s commodity society (Zhao, 2010).

Although Japanese Kurosaki is portrayed as a stereotypical colonizer and Chen Yu-His also witnessed his atrocities, Chen himself did not suffer direct discrimination and harm, nor did he ever come into direct conflict with the colonizers, so he was always an outsider of the social reality of colonization in the film from the beginning to the end. This is the same as the current situation of most Taiwanese. Even though they know that colonization has brought humiliation and pain to Taiwan, since they do not have direct experience of colonization and do benefit from the modernity brought by colonization, they are less willing to dwell on the real face of history than to use the colonial past as a kind of nostalgic consumption.

Nostalgia occurs when people are dissatisfied with reality and want to find solace from the past. In the film, Chen experienced the double damage of losing his mother and his love in modern Taiwan, but he fell in love with Ah Rui in colonial Taiwan. Although Ah Rui eventually returned to the 1920s, he ended up meeting a girl who looked like Rui in modern Taiwan. After this time travel, his wounds were healed. For the audience, the healing effect is the same. The colonial oppression is resolved by the entertaining treatment of the Japanese police being mocked, Professor Chu used a modern catwalk show to help Ah Chun expand her business, and Ah Chun, who was shot, also escaped to modern Taiwan…By giving the audience a happy ending, the film creates beautiful imagery of colonial memory (Huang, 2011).

Therefore, Japanese complex in Twa-Tiu-Tiann is influenced by postmodernist culture. The film uses Dadaocheng in the Japanese period as a nostalgic space, “approaches the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation”, and “conveys ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image” (Jameson, 1991). Japanese exist as part of nostalgic consumption, for whom Taiwanese to find solace. Moreover, it should be pointed out that this kind of nostalgic narrative is an entertaining, consumerist reconstruction of history, making history “itself” out of reach.

References

Akamatsu Miwako, Translated by Chen Yun-Yuan. (2017). Narratives of the “Japanese Era” in Modern Taiwanese Cinema: Centered on Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, Twa-Tiu-Tiann, and KANO [現代台灣電影中「日本時代」的敘述——以《賽德克·巴萊》、《大稻埕》及《KANO》为中心]. In Shozawa Jun & Lin Chu-Mei (Ed.). Japanese Memory in Post-War Taiwan : Returning to the Post-War Time and Space [戰後台灣的日本記憶——重返再現戰後的時空]. Taipei, TP: Asian Culture Publishing Co., Ltd.

Huang S. (2019). Taipei Memory in Taiwanese New Year Films: Case Studies of Báng-kah and Twa-Tiu-Tiann [台湾贺岁怀旧电影建构之台北“记忆之场”——以《艋舺》《大稻埕》为例]. Contemporary Cinema. 2019(09), 89-93.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. North Carolina, NC: Duke University Press.

Tsuyushi Nojima, translated by Chang Ya-Ting. (2015). Finding New Taiwan Through Movies in 2007-2014 [銀幕上的新台灣：新世紀台灣電影中的台灣新形象]. Taipei, TP: Linking Publishing, Ltd.

Zhao, C. (2010). The Japanese Complex in Taiwanese Cinema [台湾电影中的日本情结]. Qilu Realm of Arts. 2010 (04), 56-61.