Ironic Indigenous Primitivism

Finding Sayun (不一樣的月光), by Atyal Director Laha Mebow (陳潔瑤), 2011

Laha Mebow

Laha Mebow was born in 1975 in Nan-ao, Taiwan. She was raised in Taichung by her father who was a police officer and her mother who was a teacher. She trained at Shih Hsin University along with other leading indigenous filmmakers like Umin Boya and Mayaw Biho.

只要我長大 (2016)

In addition to these fiction films, she also made a couple of documentaries:

Ça Fait Si Longtemps (2017)

And 32 Km - 60 Years 32公里～六十年 (2018)

哈勇家 GAGA (2022)

Neorealism 意大利新現實主義

• Finding Sayun follows many of the conventions of neorealism, a genre of film that was invented in Italy after the end of World War II, and famously captured the spirit of documentary film in fiction by using nonprofessional actors, focusing on ordinary life themes, and story lines that often deviate from the traditional three act structure.

• 單車竊賊 Bicycle Thieves (1948)

  Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio De Sica | 1948

• Darryl helpfully lays out the structure of this film for us:

  • Each act serves a function:
    • (1) To raise awareness about the production of indigenous images in colonial or commercial films, especially images of ‘primitive romance’;
    • (2) To document the everyday worlds and the ongoing lives of three different generations in a contemporary indigenous village;
    • (3) To beguile potential visitors with a compelling quest for roots and a blissful image of traditional life.

The story of Sayon

莎韻之鐘 Sayon's Bell サヨンの鐘

• Darryl traces the history of this film across the Japanese, KMT and post-martial law eras
  • The story in the Japanese Period
    • Sayun speaks unaccented Japanese but wears colourful aboriginal attire. Most importantly, she represents a civilizing influence on the men in the community. Two young men come into conflict in what seems to be a nascent love triangle, or a love quadrangle, as Sayun may have a crush on the Japanese teacher.5 But everyone’s romantic yearnings are sublimated into service: one young man is called to fight, and Sayun assures the other that his time will soon come. After her martyrdom, Sayun’s devotion to the teacher is generalized into devotion to the emperor. The melody of ‘The Bell of Sayon’ is played at Sayun’s funeral, before Sayun rises from the dead and leads a rousing chorus calling Taiwan’s volunteer soldiers to arms: Taiwan Jun!
  • KMT era
    • The Kuomintang had no use for Sayun. For a while after the war, ordinary Taiwanese people remembered ‘The Bell of Sayon’ and Sayon’s Bell. In 1958, Sayun’s story was adapted into a Taiwanese language film, which is no longer extant. Not freighted with a civilizing or imperial mission, the film played up Sayun’s tale as romantic martyrdom: she died for love. (Judging from the poster, the Japanese teacher had turned into a Kuomintang officer, so perhaps there was a political subtext.) In 1959, a Taiwanese language popular song about Sayun was released, only to be banned simply because it was about the colonial era.
  • The story in the 90s
    • Presumably, one busload of tourists an hour would be good for the local economy, although the tour bus operators are not indigenous-owned, nor is the ... the Hot Pepper Cultural Center rest stop next door. Newspaper reports encouraged ! local people to make the trip to see Sayun, eat a jalapeno and enjoy everything else Wuta Village and Nan-ao Township had to offer!
    • (But opposition as well … ) Now that Chiang is mayor of Nan-ao, there is no longer a picture of Sayun in the township office. In 2008, Chiang opened a museum of Atayal culture that puts Sayun’s story into historical context. Sayun should be nothing more than a short footnote in Nan-ao’s history. Part of the meaning of Sayun’s story for local people is the fact that most Atayal soldiers who volunteered to fight for the Emperor did not return…

Primitivism

Finally, both the paper and the film deal with one of the central themes of this course: primitivism. This is the idea that Indigenous people are only indigenous to the extent that they preserve some kind of primordial culture, or that Indigenous people represent some kind of orientalist antidote to modern society. Indigenous people constantly have to fight to preserve their culture while also having their own modernity (and the necessity of cultural change) respected and legitimated. This is a struggle that takes place both within and without Indigenous societies, but it is made more difficult by the expectations and fantasies of non-Indigenous peoples. Often the only way Indigenous people can respond is through humor or irony.