Before Seediq Bale: Representation of Taiwanese Aborigine’s Documentary Films (1984-2010)

The emergence of documentary making in Taiwan allowed filmmakers and culture researchers the opportunity to tell stories and raise awareness of various issues of importance to them. Recently, aboriginal film-directors have also begun to express and record stories of their own tribes via the work of the documentarian. Recording and mediating on their own culture confers upon these artists a responsibility to transmit and explain their tribal stories and history to outsiders. We could then argue that these aboriginal directors play an essential role of shuffling between the boundaries of screening-in and screening-out, presentation and representation, furthermore, trying to balance their multiple roles as truth recorders and story tellers. They broadcast their identity as indigenous people in Taiwan for, as with many minority ethnicities they face a perception of themselves as “the others”, having at best a marginality of existence in this island. The theory of ethnography by Clifford (1986) will be presented ere to clarify the difference between writing and recording. Additionally, this paper will also discuss the narration of these Taiwanese aborigines’ documentary films since narrators represent different concepts of culture interpretation and self-identity. Furthermore, this paper will use Mignolo’s (1998) division of the metaphor of ethnography into three positions: frontier, border and anthropologador. We will apply this division to these narrators in Taiwanese aborigines’ documentary films.Not only that, the idea of local culture in globalization from Featherstone’s (1995) point of view will be further interpreted here to analyze how these documentaries could form strategies with which local people could resist globalization.