.1970's National Identity In The Taiwan Film Studies

With more than one hundred years'development, the Taiwan film, as a kind of artistic form and mass media of communication, has played its influential role in Taiwan's culture system. In addition, those Taiwan films also directly or indirectly reflect various aspects of the description on national identity between the official and the folk. During Kuomingtang Martial Law era, the official appealed nationalism in a top-down way. At the Post Martial Law era, directors and screenwriters started to describe the localized nationalism from the folk view. Taiwan films had become a carrier and a part of the main ideological form of the whole society in that the works of both those two eras all kept pace with the times.This essay focuses on "expression form" in order to emphasize the difference of national identity in films with the changes of the context. Chapter one is discussing three expression forms in Taiwan films from the 1970s to the Post Martial Law. At that time, the mainstream ideology of Taiwan society had not given up its position to the whole country. The fancy of Taiwan films aimed at building a legal country which can represent both Taiwan and the mainland. This fancy can be summarized as those three expression forms of national identity:the nationalism,the contradiction expression of nationalism and escapism. Chapter Two mainly discusses the dispute of "unity or independent" in Taiwan society in Post Martial Law era; and the expression of traditional Chinese nationalism was surrounded by queries and deconstruction. So those Taiwan films began to probe into national identity of Taiwanese based on local history and space. And the expression forms of national identity correspondently focus on critical recreation of local history and pluralistic reconstructing in transnational capitalism times. On the base of previous two chapters, Chapter Three explores the discourse space of the Chinese identity in Taiwan films. Combined with image and text, this chapter analyses national identity of contemporary Taiwan films from nation, people and culture; Figures out the original problems; and finally looks forward to the future of its development.