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From taiwaninsight.org - April 13, 12:02 AM

Written by I-Lin Liu. This article provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-nominated short documentary Island in Between, asking who the film is for and what lies beyond the representations.

 

Like many cinephiles in Taiwan, I was surprised to learn that the 96th Academy Awards nominated not one but two documentary shorts—Island in Between and Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, directed by filmmakers of Taiwanese descent. Like many of my Taiwanese cinephile friends, I was slightly underwhelmed after watching S. Leo Chiang’s beautifully crafted Island in Between. Part of the reason was perhaps I was too familiar with most, if not all, the intricacies regarding Taiwanese identity and Kinmen island’s Cold War past that Chiang is unpacking with the utmost care in his film. Acknowledging that one should not criticise a movie for what it is not, I started pondering the possibility that this film might not be for me. 

Then, whom is this documentary for? In an interview, the director, Chiang, addresses this question head-on. Talking with a Taiwanese film critic for Initum Media, Chiang rejects the criticism that his film comes from a “United States perspective.” What Chiang wants to accomplish in Island in Between is to explain the unique histories and lived experiences of Kinmen (and Taiwan) to people who might not be familiar with the region and its complicated histories and politics. With his experiences living and working in the US for decades, Chiang thinks that compared to other Taiwanese filmmakers, he can be the perfect intermediary between the ones who know and the novices waiting to be initiated. (And, of course, how the intermediary mediates or filters information will shape how narratives are constructed and what knowledge is transmitted. More on that later.) 

Speaking from his heart in that interview, Chiang also taps into a long liberal tradition of documentary. The desire and belief that films, especially nonfiction films, can become a medium for intercultural communication can be traced to the 1930s when different nations attempted to foster an international platform for nonfiction films that could serve educational purposes (see ​​Zoë Druick’s “The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, reactionary modernism, and the formation of film studies” and “Reaching the Multimillions”: Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film”. This is indeed a noble dream. What other medium can reach an audience of “multimillions” in a short period? And wouldn’t it be great if we could exchange truths about cultures and peoples with one another? Wouldn’t more true information be the antidote to racism, colonialism, and all forms of injustice? Ideology cannot work without a firm infrastructure. And the infrastructure for this version of liberal documentary ideology is indeed unstable. The main initiator of this movement was the International Educational Cinematograph, an international organisation set in Rome with deep involvement of officials from Mussolini’s fascist regime. When cultural elites across the globe were dreaming the dream of using documentary films to facilitate cross-cultural communication, the world was also gradually engulfed in the flame ignited by racism, imperialism, and colonialism. 

Nonfiction films are not only good for intercultural communication but also useful for interest groups to do their political and economic bidding. Nation-states and corporations use documentary and newsreel techniques to disseminate messages that are beneficial for them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, propaganda films were a staple of the early years of the Oscars’ Best Documentary Short Film category, created in 1941, when the United States declared war against the Japanese Empire. In the first decade of the category, most, if not all, awarded films were propaganda films about the ongoing war and its aftermath. For instance, Churchill’s Island, a film about Britain’s defence against Nazi Germany’s air raids, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, won the first Academy Award for documentary shorts. During the heyday of the Cold War, the United States’s overseas propaganda arm—the United States Information Agency (USIA)— had commissioned many talented filmmakers to produce films for them. Many of these films entered and won the Best Documentary Short Film Oscars (see notes), even though USIA films were not allowed to be distributed domestically for their political nature. 

Government-sponsored or produced films dwindled from the Best Documentary Short Film category decades after its establishment. In the 21st century, films depicting stories about social justice movements, films portraying underprivileged people in a humanist light, and films that express humanist values have become the norm. Island in Between, a film that attempts to “share insights in this volatile geopolitical situation through a very human perspective,” fits well in this new tradition. 

Indeed, Island in Between consciously distances itself from the forms of government-produced propaganda and newsreels, the kind of filmmaking that employs an omniscient voice-over or narration that directs viewers’ attention. The film features sequences from newsreel footage and propaganda films from Taiwan and the United States. (I cannot locate films and newsreels from Taiwan that the director used, but the film from the US might be The Army in Taiwan, produced by the Army Pictorial Center. The film was part of The Big Picture (1951-1971) TV series produced by the United States Army. The information can be found in Jeffrey Crean’s work. According to the Army Pictorial Center catalog, The Army in Taiwan might have aired in the US in 1966).  

However, they are used as a foil against which the director Chiang launches his humanist intervention. Chiang pushes back against propaganda footage by deploying individual and personal voices, especially his own. Before the propaganda film sequences, we see the director filming his parents in front of the Beishan Broadcasting Station (we hear his mother say, “videotaping is much more interesting!”)—the once wartime construction now becomes a background in a home movie. During the newsreel sequence produced by the KMT state, we hear the director musing about how he used to sing a patriotic anti-communist song, which accompanies the newsreel images of soldiers performing goose steps and other more quotidian images of Taiwan during the martial law period. Pseudo-objective newsreel images now become an illustration of childhood memories.  

The film is interested in situations that cannot be easily confined to any given categories— whether it is political ideologies or national identities. The juxtaposition of a portrait of Mao and a photograph featuring President Tsai on the wall of a knife shop is one thing that comes to mind. The film is populated with people who are not “native” Kimanese and people who have multiple identities. We hear Taiwanese conscripts reflecting upon their military careers when stationed in Kinmen, Chinese spouses worrying about the COVID lockdown in China, tourists visiting the frontline island, and director Chiang thinking out loud with his three passports. These vignettes add a humane dimension that is missing in the bellicose propaganda sequence we see earlier in the film. But curiously, besides a paraphrase by the director, we don’t hear what Kinmen people think or feel about the war, national identity, or their lives on the island. Crucial voices are missing if the film intends to be a bridge between cultures. 

When writing about the observational documentary, a mode of filmmaking that emphasises recording what’s in front of the camera with minimal intrusion on the part of the filmmakers, the eminent film scholar Bill Nichols notes that observational films show their audiences “the actual texture of history in the making,” through the rough quality of sound ad image. It is precisely because of “muddy sound, blurred or racked focus, the grainy, poorly lit figures of social actors” that an observational film signals to its audiences that what they are witnessing is the recent past or even an ongoing reality. Island in Between and its well-crafted image and sound are not operating in this observational mode. This is not to say that Island in Between is false or that only films with low-quality look and feel are about reality. But this is to highlight one limitation of Chiang’s strategy. When turning profilmic landscapes into beautiful images, Island in Between also elides the history and politics that shaped or created that landscape. The case in point is the Beishan Broadcasting Station that bookends the film. At the end of the film, Chiang shows us again the massive wall consisting of 48 sets of speakers, and the director takes a picture of his mother and father at the beginning of the film. The difference is that now it is nighttime, and lights with changing colours emanate from the structure. Accompanied by Brahms’s waltz, the psychological warfare structure now becomes an installation of strange beauty. Through this image, the film thus captures the contradiction of the beauty and horror of Kinmen Island.  

But this stunning image also overlooks the simple fact that this light show accompanied the Broadcasting Station, is another artwork, The Shape of the Wind Sound Wall, by artists—Hu Chin-Hsiang and Tsai Bing-Hua. The Shape of the Wind Sound Wall attempts to remediate Kinmen’s wartime experience and its natural landscape. This work was part of the 2021 Golden Gate Ocean Art Season-Golden Ningjing, curated by the artist Yu-Chuan Tseng. The Ocean Art Season was Kinmen’s government’s project to promote local tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic. Mentioning all this is not to say Chiang must reveal this background, but to point out that many particular voices and specific contradictions on the ground are pasted over by centering his voice and his memory. Instead of looking at things from a bird’s-eye view, Chiang and other like-minded filmmakers might build a more inclusive bridge by immersing themselves in the contradictions of local everyday life. 

 

Author’s notes: 
*I would like to thank Wu Chee-Hann for giving me the opportunity to write about this film, Wang Shih-An and Fan Ssu-Chieh for their impressions of the film, Hsieh I-Yi for sharing essays, and Chen Ping-Hao for engaging in discussions on the subject. Naturally, any mistakes in this essay are solely my responsibility. 

*Best Documentary Short Oscars winners produced or distributed by USIA include Nine from Little Rock (1964) and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (1969). Other nominated USIA films include Cowboys (1966) and An Impression of John Steinbeck: Writer (1969). For the list of awarded and nominated films for the category, see here. For a thorough discussion of USIA and basic information about these films, see Nicholas John Cull’s The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. 

*There are already many great documentaries about Kinmen. For those who are interested in this topic, films by Dong Zheng-liang (董振良), Hung Chun-hsiu (洪淳修), and Huang Ting-fu (黃庭輔) are a good start. I want to thank film critic Chen Ping-hao for pointing out these filmmakers to me.​ 

 

I-Lin Liu is a PhD Candidate at the Media School, Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on the reception and repurposing of art cinema discourses and films in postwar Taiwan. Related to this project, he has written about USIA and its curation of experimental films. The essay can be found in The  Journal of e-Media Studies. 

 

This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Kinmen-An Island in Between‘.

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