ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
While Taiwan spent four decades under martial law, cinema, in the island's Hokkien language, was a rare outlet for creative expression. Now archivists are rushing to preserve what remains of this crucial piece of Taiwan's history. Ashish Valentine reports from Taipei.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE BEST SECRET AGENT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, non-English language spoken).
ASHISH VALENTINE, BYLINE: Taiwanese Hokkien, or Taiyu, was the mother tongue of most people here before Mandarin Chinese became dominant. It's not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Films in Hokkien, called Taiyupian (ph), were made in all kinds of genres from "Best Secret Agent (ph)," a spy thriller about a woman torn between her heart and her duty...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE BEST SECRET AGENT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, through interpreter) I hate you. You've been playing me for a fool.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character, through interpreter) I'm telling you, you'll understand me one day.
VALENTINE: ...To "Dragon Superman," a crime fighting vigilante.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "DRAGON SUPERMAN")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character, through interpreter) How long before we land?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character, through interpreter) Ten minutes before you land in hell.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
VALENTINE: But of the more than 1,000 Taiyupian that were made, fewer than 200 survive. Many were simply thrown away after they played in theaters. Today, researchers are scouring the island to dig up these old reels before they decay beyond repair. When they find one, they send it to a workshop run by the Taiwan Film and Audio Visual Institute in an industrial neighborhood of New Taipei City. There, the first person to handle it is technician Wu Long-Hao.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLASTIC CRINKLING)
VALENTINE: He carefully unravels an old reel, treating it with a Q-tip and scalpel. Many of the frames are brittle and covered in dark spots. It's painstaking work. A single film can take weeks to restore, he says.
WU LONG-HAO: (Through interpreter) Taiwan's climate is naturally hot and humid. Kept in these conditions, chemicals in the film broke down in a process called vinegar syndrome.
VALENTINE: These rapidly vanishing films are some of the few records of what Taiwan actually looked and sounded like during martial law, a period of otherwise intense censorship that ended in 1987. Ming-Yeh Rawnsley at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says that makes them meaningful to younger Taiwanese today growing up in a democratic society.
MING-YEH RAWNSLEY: When you actually start to see these rediscovered films, then you start to connect with the past.
VALENTINE: To really understand the value of Taiyupian, she explains, we have to understand how languages in Taiwan changed as colonial powers came and went.
RAWNSLEY: Taiwan was a Japanese colony until 1945. After Taiwan went to a nationalist government under the Republic of China, Mandarin became the national language.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
VALENTINE: The nationalist government churned out countless propaganda films in Mandarin, struggling for influence against their communist rivals who had taken control of mainland China, like "All Roads Lead To Freedom," which profiled defectors from communist China. But despite the new emphasis on Mandarin, most people still spoke Hokkien. So local filmmakers produced movies in their mother tongue, using melodrama to dodge censorship. Director of the Taiwan Film Institute Arthur Chu says, these films gave Hokkien speakers a much-needed emotional release.
ARTHUR CHU: (Through interpreter) When they experienced hardship in life, they would see sad movies and cry along with the characters in the films. And if they were unhappy, they could watch comedies, laughing until they forgot all their sorrows.
VALENTINE: These films are now some of the best records we have of what Taiwanese Hokkien sounded like. And they also preserved the island's landscapes before decades of intense development.
CHU: (Through interpreter) When we think about what a film leaves behind, I don't think we're just restoring a film. It's the soul of that era.
VALENTINE: For NPR News, I'm Ashish Valentine in Taipei.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
