Taiwan Black Movies
Director: Ho Chi-jan
Year: 2015
Rating: 7.0
Country: Taiwan
This is a one hour documentary that explores a very small and unknown slice
of Taiwanese cinema that only lasted for a few years from the late 1970s
to the early 80s. The Anthology Film Archives of NYC (where we at Subway
Cinema began our festivals!) did a virtual fest of a few of these films last
year along with a few interviews. They were downloadable so I was able to
do so and am finally getting around to some of them. They are disreputable
films - ignored in writings on Taiwanese cinema and with nearly all the prints
having been destroyed. Of the 117 films that the documentarians think were
made that fall into this category they could only locate about ten of them
- all in bad condition. A tragedy for film watchers.
They call them Black Movies because most critics put the flowering or dawn
of Taiwanese Cinema at the beginning of 80's with what has been called New
Taiwanese Cinema when young directors like Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien
began making films that portrayed a more realistic, sophisticated and sympathetic
view of the country. But before the dawn, as the documentarians say, is the
night or black. I believe that this term was constructed by them. Most of
the people interviewed call them social realism films. They were wedged between
New Taiwanese Cinema and what had dominated the film industry though the
1970s - kung fu and romantic aka Weepie films. By the end of the decade the
Weepie films had run out of tears and Hong Kong films were beginning to take
over with much higher production standards than what Taiwan could do.
So taking their cue from both Hong Kong and American exploitation films they
began producing genre films that were action, gangster and female revenge
films. They may be social but how realistic they are is debatable. At the
time Taiwan was still under Martial Law and strict censorship. But they danced
around the censorship by putting back the censored parts of the film which
included a bit of nudity but a lot of violence. What was strictly off limits
was politics unless it was critical of Communist China. The director of this
documentary, Hou Chi-jan, in an interview along with the fest says trying
to put this together was extremely difficult - many of the people involved
with the films had no desire to talk about them - a blemish - and again they
could find very few of them to show clips of. But of course these are exactly
the sort of films many of us love. So, yes a tragedy.
Some of the titles shown were Never Too Late to Repent, On the Society File
of Shanghai, The Challenge of the Lady Ninja, The Lady Avenger and The Woman
Revenger. They are not mentioned but I wonder if those trashy Brigitte Lin
films such as Golden Queen Commandos (1982), Pink Force Commandos (1982)
and Seven Foxes (1985) would be considered Black Movies. Perhaps too late
in the cycle.
