The Development of “Indigenous People Documentaries” in Early Twenty-first Century Taiwan, and the Concern with “Tradition”

When I began filming 16mm documentaries on Taiwanese indigenous people in the 1980s, I once consulted a colleague in the field of television documentaries about network support. He told me that “works concerning indigenous peoples evoke the degenerate and grim aspects of Taiwanese society. They would not sell.” Indeed, from the period of the Japanese occupation to that of the Nationalist governance, documentaries in Taiwan had long been beholden to the state. To gain legitimacy, the films had either to pay lip service to the government, which was desperate to domesticate and educate the people (Lee), or serve as international propaganda, projecting the positive image of Taiwan to the world. This was true not just in network television. Even Central Pictures Corporation, whose main output consisted of narrative films as well as documentaries, had been dubious about the indigenous themes. To a great extent, the development of documentary films in Taiwan well exemplifies Faye D. Ginsburg’s statement concerning “the deliberate erasure of indigenous ethnographic subjects as actual or potential participants in their own screen representations in the past century” (Ginsburg 40).