Precocious modernism: Mou Tun-Fei’s I Didn’t Dare to Tell You (1969) and The End of the Track (1970)
Journal
Journal of Chinese Cinemas
Pages
1-21
Date Issued
2022-01-01
Author(s)
Abstract
In cataloguing donated films previously not on the record, the Taiwan Film Institute found Mou Tun-Fei’s two films, I Didn’t Dare to Tell You (1969) and The End of the Track (1970). Aesthetically daring, topically sensitive, and culturally unprecedented, these works feature children and adolescents as their protagonists, detailing the Taiwanese experiences and changing landscapes at the time from their precocious perspectives. It is not an overstatement to see these two films as signaling a kind of cinematic modernism. Here, I propose the term precocious modernism as a framework to extrapolate the significance of these two films. The descriptor precocious is meant to capture Mou’s aesthetic ambition in portraying such stories as well as these films’ standing in the historical context of Sinophone cinema and more generally art and literature circles in Taiwan. The word modernism signals how the films are stylistically connected to the global neorealism and European cinematic modernism and how their distinct vision anticipates in some way the New Cinema a decade later. Through this lens, I aim to deconstruct the linear discourses of cinematic modernism in order to partially reformulate Taiwanese film history in a multilinear manner.
Subjects
Cinematic modernism | film historiography | Mou Tun-Fei | realism | Taiwanese film history
Type
journal article