The Division of Chinese and the Centre for Chinese Language & Culture, NTU, cordially welcome you to the following seminar, to be conducted in Mandarin. Registration is not required and admission is free.
Seminar of NTU's Division of Chinese and Centre for Chinese Language & Culture
Topic: Traversing the Space of Entertainment and Political Propaganda– A Preliminary Study of the History of Taiwan Movie in the Colonial Period
Speaker: Associate Prof. Misawa Mamie (Nihon University)
Visiting scholar, the School of Humanities of Social Sciences, NTU
Date and Time: 16 June 2009 (Tuesday) 2:00 – 3:30pm
Venue: CCLC Conference Room
Seminar Abstract
It is generally believed that the history of Taiwan movie began in 1895, the same year when Taiwan was seized by Japan. Movies also became popular in Taiwan in the colonial period. There were, however, actually not many movies produced in Taiwan in this period. Therefore, it may not be sufficient to understand the Taiwan movies in this period only by using the method of textual analysis, which is the mainstream in the field of movie study. Nevertheless, there is much more in movie study than textual analysis. In this presentation, by understanding movie as a medium constructed in a social context, I will try to examine the consumer space of the movies in Taiwan in 1920s -1930s. It is expected that this would demonstrate a possibility of doing research on movie in a period in which few films were made. To put it concrete, I will try to clarify the "divided routs" of the spread of movies which were peculiar to the colonial Taiwan, and analyze the phenomenon of "hybridized nativization" in the consumption of movies in Taiwan. Finally, the subtle relationship between the consumer, entertainment, and propaganda in the social context of Taiwan will be discussed.
About the Speaker
Prof. Mamie Misawa is currently associate professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Culture at Nihon University, Japan. She obtained her master degree of philosophy at the department of history at Taiwan National University with the dissertation “The screen under the Colonial Rule: The film policy in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial period (1895－1942),” which was published in Taiwan in 2002. Her second book, “Between Motherland and Imperial country: On the trajectory of the Taiwanese filmmaker during the Japanese colonial period,” will soon be published by one of the most renowned publishers in Japan, the Iwanami publisher. This book is an expansion of her Ph.D dissertation with which she earned her doctorate at the University of Tokyo in 2006. Prof. Misawa had already been an active film critic even before she went to Taiwan to study. Her research interests include the history of modern Taiwan, and the history of Chinese films.