ABSTRACT
In homes and culture centers throughout Taiwan as well as metro stations in Taipei, the douli bamboo hat and the water buffalo serve as metonyms for rural Taiwan and, by extension, an imagined authenticity. Millions of Taiwanese, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of whom have never been on a farm, continue identifying nostalgically or romantically with the douli-wearing farmers, not unlike idealistic American longings stirred by the windmills of the high plains that at one time represented countless family farms. Family farms and agrarian Taiwan with them were brought sharply into focus by the 2004 documentary film Let It Be (Wu mi le). The film is an acute study of rural Taiwan that also reveals a far less idyllic pastoral than many might otherwise imagine. Directed by Yen Lan-chuan (Yan Lanquan) and Juang Yi-tseng (Zhuang Yizeng), the film brought rural Taiwan to urban cinema with a catalog of sounds and images representing a timeless, folkloric Taiwan. But their chronicle of quotidian farm life also unveiled a world of agricultural chemicals and invasive species, Daoism and Buddhism, and both domestic policy and global politics; in short, it depicted a complex world, both exploited and vanishing. However, the traditional rice farmers in southern Taiwan, the social actors represented in Yen and Juang’s documentary film, are not the only subject at hand in Let It Be. Equally important is the Taiwanese viewing subject, as well as the community for which their film was produced and which their film produces. In other words, the Taiwanese cultivated by Let It Be deserve as much scrutiny as the cultivating Taiwanese projected onto the screen.
