Research film project – Goodbye Taipei, Goodbye

London, April 2024. A cold spring evening. I was drinking a pint of ale at the Britannia Public House at 94 Ironmonger Row while trying to make my way through a copy of the almost-unreadable book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan (1704). After a while I decided to switch to the much-more readable Wikipedia page about its author, George Psalmanazar. And I discovered that he was a good friend of Samuel Johnson and, to my disbelief, that he lived right here on Ironmonger Row, not far from the pub where I was by then finishing my second pint of ale. I later walked up and down the street thinking of this absurd Frenchman who claimed to be the first native of Formosa to visit Europe, and who wrote a book purported to be a faithful description of Formosan culture and which was in fact a total invention. Psalmanazar combined accounts of the Aztec and Inca civilisations with descriptions of Japan, added a pinch of Thomas More’s Utopia, and claimed that the capital of Formosa was called Xternetsa, a place where men walked naked and rode camels, ate snakes and unfaithful wives, sacrificed the hearts of thousands of young boys to the gods while their priests ate the bodies. Today, anyone can ‘walk’ the streets of Taipei or Tainan on Google Maps or fly there in 14 hours; only 300 hundred years ago one could make these preposterous claims and get away with it. Well, almost get away with it, some sceptics did challenge his account.

Fast forward one and a half centuries. It is the heyday of the empire and the British public was regularly exposed to images of Formosa on the pages of The Graphic and The Illustrated London News. In preparation for my research trip to Taiwan, I have explored the digital archives of these magazines at the British Library and found dozens of illustrations made by travelling artists and, after the turn of the twentieth century, photographs of Taiwan, or Formosa, as they called it until the 1960s. Portraits, landscapes, rituals, costumes, military training and earthquakes (see, for example, figs. 1 and 2).

A world apart from the preposterous descriptions made by Psalmanazar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. I was fascinated by these images and considered how to fashion them in the film I was planning to make. I thought I could juxtapose these drawings and photographs to my own footage of Formosa, another British gaze on the contested island. I thus decided to apply for a grant which I was eventually awarded by Sciences Humaines & Sociales; this gave me the opportunity to be hosted by CEFC Taipei (Centre Etudes France Chine) in June 2024, a month I spent in Taipei and other locations in the north of Taiwan, travelling with my camera and filming a variety of places which captured my interest.

Another image caught my interest during a previous visit to Taipei. The Horrifying Inspection woodcut was made by printmaker Huang Rong-can in the aftermath of the 228 Incident. This image haunted me, and I struggled to link it to the other images of Taiwan I collected from the archives. On one side, I had images evoking the warmth of the ancestral. On the other, a small and painful Guernica. My filming itinerary changed on account of The Horrifying Inspection. I visited a cemetery in Taipei’s Liuzhangli district but failed to identify Huang Rong-can’s grave. I was more successful visiting the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park, the Ankang Guesthouse, the National 228 Memorial Museum and the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park. I went to the place where it all started and visited the locations of the 22 February 1947 events in Dihua Street, Nanjing W Road and Yanping N Road. I went to Jiufen and looked for the locations of the White Terror film A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989). I realised I could no longer make a film about Taiwan without engaging with the painful history of the White Terror. Taipei is saturated with reminders of the events, and often in a paradoxical manner. When I left the National 228 Memorial Museum, I made my way to the metro station named after the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, a national monument named after the man responsible for that horrifying inspection. Overwhelming.

Goodbye Taipei, goodbye. I am in London now, at the Britannia Public House at 94 Ironmonger Row once again. I am looking at the material I filmed in Taiwan, over four hours of footage including locations related to the White Terror and a variety of other places. I am also looking at the archival material I collected at the British Library and the photographs of Taiwan in the early years of the twentieth century, which I bought in a small shop near the Dalongdong Baoan Temple. I have been thinking long and hard about how to turn this material into a film. I considered the option of essayistic filmmaking, something I did with my previous film. Aran Diary (2023), which was screened at the Taipei University of the Arts in June during my visit, uses a fictional narrative to reflect upon my own experience of the Aran Islands, being inspired by essay films like Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). But this interplay between fiction and documentary does not feel right for my new film. I thought of a travelogue, but I do not think that would do justice to the exceptional archival images I have found. The main challenge is to link the idea of a British gaze over Taiwan in history and in my practice while including a reflection on the sites of the White Terror. I want to let the images do the talking and I am aiming at a film of place, time and memory, of sounds and of no words. Editing, my favourite part of the process, starts now.