Wushe Incident Film Analysis

The uprising on which the film is based, Wushe Incident, has generated tremendous impacts on both Japanese and Taiwanese society since 1930, not only because of its brutal bloodshed in resistance and crackdown , but also for its anachronism and dislocation. At that time, the wave of military resistance against Japanese had ebbed for many years in Taiwan, and Wushe was seen as a model of colonized and “civilized” settlement by colonial government. Leo Ching has compared two discourses on the causality of this incident, which are from a report by Japanese colonial authority and another unofficial one by Japanese leftist intellectuals Kawano Mitsu and Kawakami Jotaro. Although the two reports emphasized almost contradicting views, Ching finds

Furthermore, Mona’s accusation on the latter “civil” facet of colonization, offers us a way to understand the formation of the colonized subject. First of all, just as we discussed above, two seemingly opposite strategies, violence and civilization, are in fact mutually complementary and supportive in the colonial machine. The machine first violently uproots the aborigine from its life, language, and culture, and then turns them into exploited object in the disguise of civilization. Then, if in the violent conflict the aboriginal people can still sustain their subjectivity on the clear distinction between self and enemy, the latter phase of civilization bring them an inevitable dislocation and disrupture of self-identification. From all the civil institutions (clinic, store, and so on), erstwhile hunter and warrior Mona Rudao beholds the alienated image of his Seediq people: coolie and servant. To invoke the analysis of David Eng on the (failing) formation of male subject of Japanese boy in the American internment camp during the Second Would War, in this mirroring process, Mona’s “bodily ego” as a hunter and warrior, cannot unite with the beheld “visual imago”, which presents Seediq people as coolie and servant. Focusing on how hegemonic white cultural norm circumscribes the Japanese boy’s self-identification of masculinity, Eng argues that classical Lacanian explanation of subject formation neglects certain concern about social factor that will create fragmented identification for minor group but a “self-willed identification”. In Seediq Bale, the intrusion of colonial social order has created the alienated recognition of self-image, resulting in the displaced and disrupted subjectivity of Seediq people. To trace its origin, it is the military defeat of Seediq people before that