ABSTRACT
Taiwan’s documentary filmmakers have been actively participating in the revisionist narration of history since the lifting of martial law. A key area of representation and reinterpretation has been the Japanese colonial period. In this chapter, I argue that Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (Viva Tonal: Tiaowu shidai), a 2003 documentary that had relatively high box-office receipts and generated considerable controversy because of its relatively positive portrayal of the colonial era, oscillates between two different interpretations of colonial modernity, one stressing the colonial government’s generative role, the other highlighting the interdependence and mutual influence between center and periphery, the colonial elite and the colonized. Ultimately, however, this documentary by women directors Chien Wei-ssu (Jian Weisi) and Kuo Chen-ti (Guo Zhendi) refuses to settle on a simplistic narrative of dominance and resistance, choosing instead to present colonial modernity as constituted through circuitous and multidirectional cultural traffic rather than simply emanating from the imperialist metropole. In other words, underneath the film’s veneer of postcolonial nostalgia is a strong desire on the filmmakers’ part to discover a legacy of Taiwanese cultural ingenuity and agency. Moreover, through an examination of women’s performing roles in 1930s urban consumer culture, the film retrieves, intentionally or unintentionally, an image of the Taiwanese modern girl that is quite distinct from the highly educated elite modern woman, a figure that was previously made visible to some extent through memoirs of and documentaries about upper-class Taiwanese professional women. The film reveals the non-elite’s participation in modern cultural formations and contributes to our understanding of the class formations and class mobility in colonial modernity. However, the film’s success is also its liability: the recuperation of the lower-middle-class modern girl is unfortunately accomplished at the risk of glorifying the commodification of the female body and eclipsing other possibilities for modern womanhood.
