Small-gauge Films in 1930s Taiwan

Moderator: SU Ui-tiok
Speaker: LEE Daw-ming (Film Scholar)

Commercial films and propaganda-oriented newsreels have been the focus of discussions on cinema in Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895-1945). An important dynamic documentation has been ignored: small-gauge films and cameras introduced from Japan provided Japanese and Taiwanese people in Taiwan with a simple means of recording local living, events, and scenery. Decades later, these unpolished images became an archive for imaging and analysing the Japanese colonial rule. In comparison with official documentary footage, they conceal pervasive representations of ‘colonial modernisation’. Additional traces of amateur filmmaking and related communities are found in propaganda materials, newspapers, and magazines from those years. Through a screening of footage from those early years and sharing by an invited scholar, the present seminar offers another approach to film history.

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