Colonial Reminiscence, Japanophilia Trend, and Taiwanese Grassroots Imagination in Cape No. 7

Abstract

In just two months after its debut in theaters on August 23, 2008, Cape No. 7 ((sic)) generated a whopping 450 million NTD in box office sales, pulling the Taiwanese cinema market out of the slump it had been stuck in for so long. This film brought adolescents which had nearly abandoned the Taiwanese cinema scene flocking back to the theaters. From August to October, viewing Cape No. 7 became a national pastime for web citizens. This paper will investigate the film and its social and cultural phenomena from three directions: First, the cultural transference between Taiwan's Colonial Reminiscence and the Japanophilia Trend in the wake of glocalization. If we said that Cape's cultural phenomena and trend are due to the interactive course and a cultural imagination stirred up by complementary works in and out of the movie, rousing the furthest depths of the Taiwanese unconscious, we should try to enlarge the scope of space-time and investigate the following under a globalization frame: how does director Wei De-Sheng utilize cinematic symbols to link together the Taiwanese older generation's nostalgia, the younger generation's fetishes, and Japanophilia? How do we illustrate the complex cultural ambivalence present between Taiwan and ex-colonizing nation Japan through film symbols and camerawork that belong in a post-modem time-space compressed environment? Second, post-modem simulacrum and the cultural phenomena of Cape No. 7. From the viewpoint of cultural production in the wake of glocalization, we can see from the marketing strategies or the social and cultural effects Cape evoked after its release that there is a separate meta-narrative out of the film, and we can discuss: (1) how do the director and his production crew manipulate historical memories, local grassroots force, and story-telling skills through simulacrum logic to create a historical and anthropological space, turning "history" into a nostalgic object and cultural fetish? (2) How can the fictional movie plot be interwoven with the non-fictional local people and events, combining movie sets and actual scenery to encourage Hengchun's local cultural imagination, reinventing Hengchun's local particularities and symbolic meaning? Third, an open, tolerant, multi-dimensional grassroots imagination as an emancipatory power in a place-based transnational social sphere. If we view "re-discovering" Hengchun trend ignited by the intertextuality between the film and its context as a quest for "Taiwanesenes," we might find that there is no such thing as a "genuine" Taiwaneseness, because Taiwaneseness has already been mixed with American, Japanese, Chinese, and several other aborigine tribal genes. The quest for "Taiwaneseness" cannot be separated from Europe-American modernity and capitalism-centered globalization. Is it possible to propose a new way of imagining modem nation as the more complex transnational landscape and to move the monolithic narrative from the nationalist boundary to the "place-based transnational spheres" of social life? Looking at the film and its context from a viewpoint of Taiwaneseness in the wake of glocalization, the time-space scope of Taiwanese grassroots imagination can also be expanded. In the glocalization process, the mixed cultural genes of each different stage of modernization in Taiwan can be thought over and new groupings of ethnic groups and cultural inheritance can be reconsidered, so that we can overcome the binary divisions of Japanese love/hate, unification/independence, and north/south. As the political ideology confronts and turns to stink into social life, the collective grassroots imagination works its way from the bottom-up and remodels a community that "accepts others and appreciates diversity" In the place-based transnational social sphere where we encounter the colonial reminiscence and the emergent ethnicities, myriad stories can be told through the memories, narrations, and desire in the course of individual, and the marginalized people can be included in the collective grassroots imagination in designing diverse modes of identification and living.