Originally published in Taipei Documentary Filmmakers’ Union Newsletters (紀工報), Issue 56 (2022.05.19)
BY Mr. GeckoBiHu
(This English version of the article you're now reading is translated by myself, on July 13, 2025)
The Islands: Secretly A Comedy
Following The Right Thing (2010) (廣場), which documented the Wild Strawberry Movement (野草莓運動), and The Edge of Night (2018) (街頭), a close-up on key members of the Sunflower Movement (太陽花學運), Chiang Wei-Hua’s new documentary The Islands (2022) (島．國) accompanies young political activist Chen Ting-Hao, one of the Sunflower Student Movement’s core members, as he begins his post-movement political work in the Matsu Islands, probing deeper and more directly toward the core of the imagined community that is Taiwan/Republic of China, while also indirectly observing the pondering ripple effect (or the lack there of) of the movement.
Having served his conscription military service in Matsu Islands, Chen decided to see “conducting political work on the Islands” as the imaginary goal of his social practice. And so the “Taiwan as an independent country” identified Chen and the Matsu Islands’ symbolically charged landscape full of “Republic of China-identified symbolism” forms an exquisite chemical reaction, as everywhere we go, we see all sorts of materialisation of the Symbolic Order “flaking off” from the edge of it. This is why filming Chen doing even the most whatever mundane task is not the least bit boring, because no matter it’s just him picking up trash on Matsu’s beachfront, finding cellphone single (which constantly switches between Taiwanese and Chinese companies due to the proximity of geography), sawing the tip of the R.O.C flagpole, introducing abandoned bunkers to tourists, knocking down layers of thick paint off defunct military buildings or chatting with local children, the threefold boundaries of Symbolic Order lying on top of each other (the boundaries of R.O.C./ Chen’s “Republic of Taiwan,” Matsu as a dominantly “blue-leaning over green” island (pro-KMT over DPP), and the islands as literal border against People’s Republic of China across the strait) continuously “flake off” from the symbolic “country/nation” into the material world — like the flaking off paint.
This is also why The Islands is, at heart, a low-key comedy. Watching the obedient Chen Ting-Hao solemnly deliver an R.O.C. flag to Shengli (Victory) Fort, first requiring his companion to break the flagpole in half with his feet (so it fits in the trunk) then raising the flag, only to take it down again after some locals points out “an error in the Symbolic Order,” requiring the snipping off of the gold orb on the tip of the flagpole using a bolt cutter (after sewing failed to work), demanding him to drive to a workshop to fetch the tool, only to discover that under the orb there’s yet a small portion of wooden rod that also needs to be cut, so that the flag can finally be raised to the top of the pole, preventing it from releasing any incorrect messages (the misalignment between the Symbolic Order and the material world is finally aligned), is just like watching how Buster Keaton being at the front of the locomotive laying down huge wooden railroad ties while the train is driving forward, finishing the railroad track itself as it goes, or watching how Jacques Tati finding his way toward the elevator while lost in the Paris glass skyscraper maze. Everyday at the Shengli (Victory) Fort, is a day of making sure that the material world is still aligned with the Symbolic Order.
It is precisely because Matsu’s cultural landscape remains frozen in the fervor of the Chinese Civil War, its casually discharged saturated symbols acquire a renewed tension through Chen (Chen constantly explained and “interpreted” his own actions and its meaning to the camera), coincidentally providing a grammar that is simultaneously unhurried yet tension-filled, even more precise and with archaeological depth, to Chiang who was accustomed to filming urgent clashes scenes of protest on the streets. It henceforth forms a duet: While Chen performs mundane chores, Chiang “picks up” those “flaking off” Symbolic “crumbles” by his camera.
So rather than likening Chen to a splash of color in an oil painting surrounded by contrasting colors, he’s more like a bottle cap stuck on the canvas with dried-up paint, pretending to be part of the painting. As a matter of fact, “flagpoles” themselves are Symbolic Order’s “declaration of ownership” over the material world, they’re the howl in the wind. Chen’s “roleplaying” becomes its fascinating counterpart. “Roleplaying” here is a diagetic event, and the core of political work is grafting yourself into the Symbolic Order through “roleplaying”, and to then change reality, because Symbolic Order “is reality.” Chen is fully aware of this logic from the beginning, henceforth continuously “reporting his own actions” to the camera, like an actor confirming his relative position on stage.
The paradox is that even if you’re aware of the playful distance between oneself and the Symbolic Order, you are still dominated by it, because the Symbolic Order is the structure of everyday living itself. This is why when Chen’s discussing his lawsuit due to the March 18th Movement (Sunflower Movement), he stated that there’s a “ghost.” That “ghost” is the Symbolic Order, it dictates Chen and the co-defendants cannot simply state their actions for what they are in court, they must say they were merely “passing by,” and so on.
The culmination of this poetic distance appears at the film’s end: Chen attempts to report an invading action of a Chinese dredging ship to the R.O.C. coast guard but in vain (as the ship is 6.6 km away), yet ironically learning that China (the PRC) also has a public notice considering these dredgers as illegal. Chen henceforth tries to “report” the infraction as a “citizen”, to “the authority,” only to be declared as “untruthful” when asked for his ID number. The Real is not truthful, for the real is not reality, it lies outside the boundaries of reality. And here through Chen, we see the embodiment of “the trench of the Real,” a trench that is located outside the boundaries of realities of the R.O.C., of the PRC and of the country that is Taiwan in this scene. This is why the Chinese maritime personnel’s final response is to repeat the phrase “we must verify,” for reality has reached its end.
However, the “trench” is not the same as an underground order. The rehearsal before the trial in court, the confessional monologues of political judgement toward the camera, the dredging ships, the existence (and non-existence) of the Republic of China, all belong to an underground order. The unspoken underground order is actually a constitutive part of the Symbolic Order. It underlies the surface Order. “The trench” is the futility of attempting to close the gaps in the Symbolic Order. Just as we only become aware of the Symbolic Order at its limits (only on the island does one become aware of the nation), it is in silence of denial and failure that we discover the subject. Here, Chiang cuts together a sequence of derelict coastal bunkers and shots of the ocean taken within the bunkers henceforth framing it by the bunkers themselves. No matter how mighty the Symbolic Order is, how many fortifications in the material world it established, it can not capture the real subject. The subject is an unidentifiable lament, a backlit raft adrift in the sea like a stain in the image.
The Making of Crime Scenes: Also a Horror Film
In The Islands, “Symbolic Order as reality” remains the plot within the film, however in Hsu Che-Yu’s short The Making of Crime Scenes (事件現場製造), “Symbolic Order as reality” is directly enacted by the film itself. And while The Islands is secretly a comedy, The Making of Crime Scenes, except for its appearance as a documentary, an experimental film, and a (meta) martial arts (Wuxia) film, is also a horror film. Through a relentless “parrying” of reality, the film induces an ontological vertigo, until nausea. On the surface, it concerns KMT’s 1984 political assassination of the Taiwanese writer and journalist Henry Liu (Chiang Nan) in California (江南案), however it’s also about how Taiwanese martial arts films serve as unconscious “relics” of modern Taiwanese political history, as well as about the ontology of cinema, and about ontology itself.
When the film opens, we see a combination of digital simulation and actors’ reenactments, forming an reenacted scene of Liu’s assassination, and hear the voice-over of one of the real assassins, Wu Tun, who shot and killed Liu himself, narrating the situation back then. Then shot of trees, dust falling from a trembling rooftop, the sound of swordplay, until a wire-suspended wuxia costumed swordsman floats down, we were transported to the now-abandoned Taiwan Film Culture Co. film studio sets, where Wu once thrived as a producer, and later after his release out of prison, rose to become a major figure in the industry. What follows is the film’s most delicate shot: Liu’s body from the reenactment now lies on a pile of dead leaves in the abandoned studio ruins. The camera crane pulls back to reveal two men in Taiwanese gangster attire with one of which holding a revolver in the scene, holding up fallen bicycles and then ride toward the studio’s retro period-style street, while the lens keeps craning up until through the tree leaves, we see two white-robed wuxia swordsman duel on the streets’ nearby rooftop, with a still standoff, then exchanging blows, switching offense/defense, before both leaping from the eaves.
Firstly, this long take superimposes three strata of killing: Wu’s political assassination of Liu under the order of the KMT, gang turf wars over money making actors in the old Taiwanese film industry, and the wuxia wandering swordsman’s duel. Secondly, it ignites a fascinating chemical reaction with Wu’s voice-over: he is describing how he used to storm gangs with a samurai sword to retrieve actors who had been abducted by rival gangs, basically gangs killing each other racing to abduct actors. We henceforth tend to interpret the existence of the two actors in gangster attire as reenacting the gang wars, which actually does not make sense since they appear to be reenacting the killing of Liu. However, not only is the set not California, the Taiwanese period-style streets may not even be a realistic depiction of the era of the gang wars that took place. Even as a set, the actors’ movements also in the end look more like they’re “riding into a film.” Even farther a match is the era of the period-style streets and the swordsmen. But rather than reenacting a shooting of a wuxia film, the shot of the duel is shot in such camera movement as if the film itself is actually a wuxia film. Thus, the shot does not “represent” any scene, it in itself is a scene, a scene of the Symbolic Order, within which including the underground Order, trying to manifest itself materially.
Martial arts films often tell the story of how the lone heroes infiltrate enemy camps to assassinate tyrants or generals who invade their homeland. Here, such a motif literally materialized into “martial arts films as films for the executioners,” with Wu himself explicitly confirming this: not only does Wu never for a second regard the killing of Liu for the country as a big deal from beginning to end (this is also basically the case of the higher up generals sending out the execution order), he even directly identified himself as a loyal and filial moral wuxia swordsman.
“Killing Liu was never a big deal. But how to stage the scene to that effect, that’s drama.” When Wu utters this near the film’s end (probably the closest a Taiwanese film has got to The Act of Killing), we see a parallel shot: from the eaves of Taiwan Film Culture Co. film studio descending to a gang figure pulling a bike into the building, then to the swordsman suspended midair beside a tree. However this time he is only passively being hung, dangling from a crane, drained of all theatricality, because the “back stage” has now been materialized.
“Who knew the FBI was that powerful, and so we were defeated.” This line embodied the film’s central question: if a crime is not identified as such, the crime does not exist. And The Making of Crime Scenes very cleverly, in the middle of the film, while Wu was describing a KTV gang war, put in a section within which a handheld 3D scanner operator explaining to the camera in an interview style, how the technology was sought out by the police to reconstruct crime scenes. The digital technology itself is not the point here, rather it is the fact that ontologically, as a thing that points out realities, it makes “reality is formed by the act of identification” observable. And it, this thing, just so happens to be in the shape of a gun, and also literally a camera.
The film thus subtly asks more than two layers of questions (from the opposite direction) : not just how Wu, but up to collective crimes, might be identified, but “how ‘Liu himself’s crime’ was identified to a point of him ‘deserve to be a target of killing.’” The title “The Making of Crime Scenes” does not just refer to the film’s attempt to reconstruct a crime scene, but also pointing to how the murderer, the murdering collective and an ideology can “identify a target that deserved to be killed,” while also referring to how drama, films can be the relic of crimes. It is in this sense that all wuxia (martial arts) films can be potentially seen as latent horror films.
Wu says they “lost” because he was “identified by the Symbolic Order”, thus made part of reality, and transitional justice should have revealed how the other fifty thousand Wu Tuns created their crime scenes (yet it has not, and perhaps never will). These corpses and perpetrators float between our screens and within edits, as symbolic debts. The Scanned images henceforth metaphorically embodying this ontology status: digitally reconstructed motorcycles, beer bottles, up to Wu’s own half torso, all rendered as fragmentary, drifting in a black void. Their meaning is not that “this is an incomplete, fragmented re-creations of reality,” but that “this form of being broken in the void is precisely the true shape of reality itself.” Reality has boundaries. It continuously identifies its boundaries, and continuously (and simultaneously) creates the realm of itself and the void.
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