A Film About 40 Years of Taiwanese Folk Music Opened Just as Bob Dylan Won the Nobel. What Does It Say?

Forty years ago, Hou Chi-jan had just been born, and Taiwan's folk-song movement was beginning to stir. Forty years later, he was asked whether he could direct a documentary about those forty years of folk music.

Jonathan Lee and Tao Xiaoqing heard that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the same moment.

On October 13, the two of them were sitting with ten other people, Yang Xian among them, at the premiere of a documentary called Forty Years (《四十年》). "There are only four words for how I feel: I am beside myself," Jonathan Lee said.

Dylan's prize meant a great deal to this group. In 1970s Taiwan they had started a folk-song movement. Unlike the traditional "folk songs" of mainland China, their movement was closer to Western folk — the singer-songwriter kind. In it, young singers including Jonathan Lee hoped to do what the Beatles and Bob Dylan had done: put "something worth pondering" into their songs and "set off a slow but powerful revolution in thought." Tao Xiaoqing was a radio host at the time, and she helped push the movement along.

Ma Shifang, Tao Xiaoqing's son and a well-known music critic, argues that it was this movement that gave song lyrics a "literary quality," setting the newborn local folk song entirely apart from the loud, flag-waving "songs of praise" of 1970s Taiwan. Sodagreen's music can be traced back to the folk songs too, Ma Shifang said on a music program on television.

So it is easy to see why they were so moved when they read the words of Dylan's Nobel citation: "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

They had also just walked out of a movie theater. In that 120-minute documentary, Forty Years, director Hou Chi-jan filmed these musicians, now in their fifties and sixties, onstage and backstage at the 2015 concert at Taipei Arena marking forty years of folk songs.

But when the white-haired folk singers picked up their guitars in front of the camera and began to sing, the critic Ma Shifang said, it was as if he had dropped straight into another time and place.

People tend to think of that as the golden age of Taiwanese music, "a simple, lovely time" — and some have been saying so for forty years. Back then music seemed strong enough to hide the Blue-Green political split and the question of identity from view.

For most young people, though, these stories now have almost nothing to do with their lives. It was a long time ago. They may have heard only a few of the songs that came out of that moment — The Olive Tree, Grandma's Penghu Bay, Orchid Grass (《兰花草》) — or they may know only Jonathan Lee, still working today, and Hu Defu, still hammering the piano at music festivals.

But just as a young person can still be moved by Bob Dylan fifty years on, a netizen born in the 1990s who goes by TheoAlle wrote on a well-known Taiwanese forum that he had just seen Forty Years, which opened on October 14, and found it quite moving — even though "apart from Jonathan Lee and Tao Xiaoqing, the mother of folk songs, I couldn't really recognize anyone in it."

Documentaries do reasonably well in Taiwan, and the film was meant for a theatrical release from the start.

Hou Chi-jan took the job in 2014.

An organization called the Chinese Musicians Exchange Association, which had put on many events tied to the folk-song movement, went to the film distributor Qianhouzi Integrated Marketing with the idea of a documentary marking forty years of folk songs. Wang Shi, who runs Qianhouzi, brought in the producer Li Yaohua, and Li Yaohua recommended Hou Chi-jan to direct.

Over the past thirteen years this mid-career Taiwanese director has made feature films, documentaries, commercials and music videos. Before Forty Years he also worked on another influential documentary, Listening to the Era Sing (《听时代在唱歌》), in which veteran musicians told the history of Taiwanese music in their own words.

For that film Hou Chi-jan spent several years interviewing folk singers, going "from a fan to someone who understood the industry better."

This half-insider hesitated before taking the subject up again. He certainly does not accept the phrase "age of innocence." Very possibly it was an illusion produced by information that did not travel — the young musicians strumming guitars or listening to records simply did not know what was happening on the other side of Taiwanese society. All they knew, roughly, was that in 1970s Taiwan, still under martial law, the government kept urging people to sing songs of praise for the state, so that when the Beatles and Bob Dylan arrived, young people threw themselves in without looking back.

Soon some of them began to say: we should sing our own songs.

A few were more radical. Li Shuangze, for one, drew a line from "foreign songs" to "Coca-Cola," and it is said that he smashed a Coke bottle onstage on purpose. Others sounded more measured, like Tao Xiaoqing, then working in radio. She questioned the cultural conservatism around her and argued that "until we are able to write our own songs, we should keep singing the songs of those who came before us, until the day we can write our own."

"What I wanted in this film was for them — the folk singers — to come back to a very real version of themselves, with no symbols hung on them," Hou Chi-jan said in an interview with QDaily this September.

So he decided to film the singers' lives now. He went to their homes and their workplaces, traveled with them, and went to the folk concert that is held once every ten years. Shooting took less than a year.

On June 5, 2015, a concert called "Folk Songs Turn 40 — Sing a Verse of Remembrance Again" was held at Taipei Arena, bringing together 68 Taiwanese folk singers. Hou Chi-jan filmed them getting ready for it and coming off it. In the film you often see the same nice device: whenever a singer is about to step onstage, the camera turns away and cuts to that person's ordinary life.

Hu Defu eating with his family, or walking alone down a street, remembering the indigenous-rights movements he threw himself into. Tai Zhaomei, who has been ill for years, going in for a routine hospital check. Yang Xian walking into an instrument shop to try out a guitar. Jonathan Lee getting back together with the members of the Wooden Guitar Chorus.

Tao Xiaoqing's living room — the same one for decades, and known as the "folk-song restaurant" — turns up again and again. The raw young singers of that time always came here to pour out their troubles after a breakup, or to show up with a poor report card and ask her about their future.

Hou Chi-jan is good with historical material; Listening to the Era Sing, which also recorded the folk years, shows that. But the private stories in Forty Years sit more like side branches off the folk-song movement, and he gave up the grand narrative entirely. That makes the film more lyrical and easier to be moved by — and it also makes it quite likely that people will walk out still in the dark about this history.

One reason is the material: almost nothing from the folk years survives in good condition. The other is the film language Hou Chi-jan has picked up over the past few years of shooting.

"In my earlier work, I never went out to other people," he says. By his own account his early films rarely put "people" at the center of the story — Stardust 15749001 (《星尘 15749001》), My 747 (《我的七四七》), Taiwan Black Movies.

In that early work his method was usually to rebuild an object, or the look of an era, out of documents. The clearest case is his first documentary, Taiwan Black Movies (2005), about the pile of gritty crime pictures Taiwan turned out between 1979 and 1985 — films the histories of Taiwanese cinema barely mention. By collecting the paper trail of the period, he put that forgotten history back on the screen.

Then, on a documentary job about local community development, Spotlighting Taiwan (《点台湾》), he began to notice "people" as an element, and he carried the approach over into The Poetry of Bookstores (《书店的影像诗》). "The title says bookstore, but it's really shooting the bookstore's owner — what is this person like. While I'm shooting I go after some details of their life, or of their work: how they pray, how they eat. Those are what I care about most, because I slowly came to know that this is the kind of thing film suits best."

That way of looking at things plainly shows up in Forty Years as well.

The June 2015 "Folk Songs Turn 40 — Sing a Verse of Remembrance Again" concert at Taipei Arena ended up taking in more than NT$60 million at the box office.

What Forty Years will take in is hard to guess. Just as hard to guess is how old its audience will be.

Asked about it, Hou Chi-jan said he now expects people between 35 and 45 to be the most likely to feel it. "They have the memory but never really lived through it. They have the interest — maybe they like this kind of art-house film, or they like Taiwanese history — and the interest makes them want to understand the thing."

But on a television interview program, Hou Chi-jan said he is a little nervous about how these most sympathetic viewers will react. They may well decide the folk years were not the way he recorded them. Or their favorite folk song may not have made the film.

Hou Chi-jan told us more about making documentaries.

Q: QDaily; A: Hou Chi-jan

Q: You had to film the history of folk songs one more time. What did you want to shoot first?

A: On this subject of forty years of folk songs, the first thing that jumped into my head was what these people look like now. I pictured an ordinary midday, say: Tao Xiaoqing cooking at home; or she is at home, or on a bus, or by chance in a café or a convenience store or someone else's house, and she hears one of the songs from back then. She hears that song, and for a moment time and place come apart, and afterwards she goes on doing what she does now.

That is what I love most about film — it keeps one time and place whole, and every so often a flash of light inside it breaks the boundary of ordinary life, lets your thoughts drift off, and then you come back to the everyday.

Q: But you seem to have made a lot of documentaries connected to history.

A: I have always been a nostalgic person. From childhood, the songs I listened to were the ones that had already been popular; newly popular songs are harder for me to feel. All the songs I like need time added to them, and I think it is that thickness of time that pulls me in. So basically I have this leaning, this leaning toward looking back.

In college I worked on the Taiwan Cinema Database and Taiwan Television Database projects. What I did was go to the film archive and work with box-office figures and report sheets. Back then a huge box-office sheet came out every day, listing exactly which films were playing at which theaters and how many tickets each sold, and even recording the weather. Every day the distributors' guild put out a Taipei box-office report, going back to 1977.

After I finished my military service I did not know what job to do, so my teacher had me digitize these box-office sheets — type them in. Every day I was typing numbers and film titles. Extremely boring and also extremely fun, because you knew what film played where on any given day and how many tickets it sold.

That is how Taiwan Black Movies came about. The other thing I did was go to the National Central Library and work through the old newspapers' entertainment pages day by day, writing down every headline to do with film. So it was old newspapers all day, then back to the research room to type. I was a human digitizer.

Q: Recording history or recording people — which are you better at?

A: I do love reading history, but I think history should be background. It should be the important background for building a character, and that is homework the maker has to do himself. It does not have to sit in the main position; it is more like a supporting part. It is there so that when you go in to shoot, you understand this person's life, and while you are shooting you have more to draw on when you judge and decide what to film — so that when the moment shows up, you can tell that it matters.

Q: With Forty Years, was finding historical material harder than finding people?

A: Hard, really hard. First, none of it is good quality; second, there isn't enough of it. These old materials about folk songs cannot yet add up to a complete aesthetic or a complete argument. I have always thought there are many ways to make a documentary, but people's idea of a documentary has become very traditional. They don't imagine using old footage to tell a new story, but that is a documentary too — you shoot nothing new at all, you go to the archive, find this material and string it together to make a new argument, or remake and turn it into something else. I think there are all kinds of ways to make a documentary; originally I had thought about building something out of old archival footage.

Q: You say the audience's idea of a documentary is very traditional. Traditional how, exactly?

A: The idea that there have to be people, and the people have to be interviewed, or that you talk something through and then cut in archival footage. There is a grammar people expect, something like a news feature.

Q: When you have this much material, how do you decide what to put in a limited running time?

A: You need a point of view. Taiwan Black Movies had one: why does everyone who tells the history of Taiwanese film skip this stretch? Why is that? What I did amounted to dragging a history people did not want to face back out into the open.

There is a theory of genre film which says every genre film is absolutely bound to the society of its time, and the most commercially successful films are the ones that best reflect the society of that moment. So I set these films against the society of the time, and that is the point of view of Taiwan Black Movies.

That is to say: why did these strange films exist at all? Because at that time the state of mind in Taiwan, taken as a whole, was extremely unsettled, dark and uncertain, so you wanted to see exciting things on the screen, to let out the things you could not say in real life.

Q: Every film is born out of a context. When you were making Taiwan Black Movies, the Taiwanese film scene looked bleak — and yet Taiwan had quite a few documentaries?

A: It wasn't bleak at the beginning, actually. I think Taiwanese documentary, from the 1990s on, was a hundred flowers blooming, and full of energy.

Q: What kind of conditions produced that?

A: Because narrative film had collapsed — there was no commercial market. I remember 2003 was the very bottom: Taiwanese films' share of the market was 0.3 percent, which means narrative film was finished. So why did documentary rise? Because people still needed to see their own stories. I think people on every piece of land need to see their own stories. They had the need, but narrative film had collapsed.

Something else happened as well: the technology changed. From the late 1990s, Sony invented DV. DV came on the market and the cameras shrank from big bodies to small ones, and they were far cheaper than the old ENG cameras.

Back in 1993 and 1994, the ENG cameras the schools used were the same ENG cameras the television stations used. Each one cost over a million NT dollars, and they were heavy, bulky and expensive; editing was a headache too, because it wasn't digital editing, it was analog.

Once DV existed, some people came out: Yang Lizhou among the early ones, the group at the documentary film institute in Tainan, Wu Yifeng and others. I think they were able to make more and more work, and to get better and better at catching people's real lives, precisely because DV had arrived — you could create at a much lower cost.

Q: Besides DV bringing budgets down, was there any other reason?

A: Lower budgets also let creativity speak freely, because the more money there is, the more hemmed in creativity can be. The poorer you are, the fewer people you answer to, and the more beautiful creativity can get.

A film that had to air on television followed a fixed format, but once it became a very private piece of work, I think the freedom got much greater. That is when you got things like Swimming on the Highway (《在高速公路上游泳》), or Yang Lizhou's earlier I Love 080 (《我爱 080》) — that tug of war between the person recording and the person recorded. Making documentaries that way opened up much more of Taiwan's imagination about what a documentary could be.

When I was making Taiwan Black Movies in 2004, Lin Yuxian was shooting Jump! Boys at the same time, and that film was a great success too. That was a period when narrative film was already dead, down to its last breath, but people still wanted to see Taiwan's own stories, so young people used cheap equipment to shoot stories about Taiwan that moved everyone — because society still wanted to see stories like that.

Cover image: courtesy of the Chinese Musicians Exchange Association, poster for the "Sing a Verse of Remembrance Again" concert (cropped)