ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a general argument about the contribution of history film and includes reflections on how this could be applied to Taiwanese filmmaker Wei Te-sheng's Seediq Bale. The earliest of the new technologies, film, is now more than a century old, yet the issues it poses for historical telling may be taken as a kind of test case for these new media for rendering history. History as drama is shot through with fiction and invention from the smallest details to the largest events. Take something simple, such as the structure and its furnishings in which a historical personage such as Mona Rudo or other tribal members or the Japanese colonisers live and work. Or some process, such as the wild boar hunt at the start of Seediq Bale, or the reconstruction of various battles between the indigenous groups or against the Japanese.
