By Denise Shapiro
Taiwanese cinema went through a transformative period during the Cold War, but that remains an overlooked part of Sinophone cinema history, a UC Santa Barbara audience heard last week.
I-In Chiang, a film historian at Tamkang University in Taipei, spoke via Zoom about Li Han-hsiang, the founder of Grand Motion Pictures (GMP), the first privately-owned film studio in Taiwan, in a talk presented by UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies.
“There are secrets lying behind the Grand Motion Pictures,” Chiang said. “It is often mentioned with only a few lines. We may know how it begins, but we never know how it ended.”
Chiang’s expertise in Chinese language cinema, women and gender studies, and Sinophone studies all figure into in her ongoing research. In her Ph.D research in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, she focused on the political turmoil the region went through in the 1950s and 60s and how the GMP was influenced by this.
All film studios in East Asia were government-owned in the 1950s, so the GMP broke norms when it became the first private-run studio in Taiwan. Its founder Li Han-hsiang was one of the most famous directors in Taiwan during the 1960s and so the studio garnered immediate success.
Chiang aims to uncover the untold history and persistent mysteries behind the studio, like the circumstances under which it was founded and why it shut down only seven years later. In her talk, Chiang said that Li started the studio to create a film industry in Taiwan that could compete with Hong Kong’s highly successful industry.
Li started his directing career working for the Shaw Brothers, an illustrious Hong Kong-based studio known for its “sentimental melodramas,” Chiang said. But she cited Li saying that he left that studio in 1966 to start his own for “the cultural pride of being Chinese.” His new studio, the Grand Motion Pictures, would stand up and take full responsibility for the nation’s problems.
This more critical type of cinema required the knowledge of “background information that was known by most diaspora Chinese audiences,” Chiang said, “and watching these stories on the screen created a sense of collective identity.” Despite Li’s noble intentions, he left with a lot of the Shaw Brothers’ clientele, so the two parties had a lot of bad blood.
A battle ensued between the two studios, which fought over who could make more popular Chinese language films. If one studio heard what the other was developing, it would drop whatever project it was working on and start making the same film in the hope of releasing it before the other studio. Whichever studio finished first was the winner, since audiences would not want to see the same film in the same language made by a different studio.
The GMP was on the rise, but circumstances changed when Li Han-hsiang had to secretly leave Taiwan in 1970 due to the complicated “relationship triangle between Taiwan, Hong Kong and China,” that affected Chinese film markets and political ties during the Cold War.
So only seven years after its creation, the GMP folded due to a multitude of political and financial reasons, despite its popularity and promising future which quickly took a nosedive. Li went back to Hong Kong and rejoined the Shaw Brothers in 1972, which put an end to the competition between the GMP and the Shaw Brothers and the company never recovered. Li rebranded his film style as he paved a new path with erotic moon films. He successfully made films for the rest of his career and eventually moved back to China to work closer to home. The prolific film director and studio founder died of a heart attack in Beijing in 1996 at age 70.
“Due to Li Han-hsiang’s failure and also due to political reasons, the GMP is rarely mentioned in Taiwan’s film history,” said Chiang. But, the studio was a trailblazer and actually contributed a lot to Taiwan’s film industry. It improved the quality of films made in Taiwan, allowing them to receive a higher status within Asia and creating a more recognizable national cinema for Taiwan. Also, the GMP expanded film markets when its Chinese diasporic films were popular in Taiwan and other national markets, proving that a privately-owned studio system could work. Lastly, the GMP elevated Taiwan’s film industry status to a level where Taiwanese filmmakers did not have to move to Hong Kong and could work in their native country.
All in all, the studio’s rich history is often ignored and forgotten, Chaing said, and she intends to continue her research into the impact it has made on Taiwanese culture and its film industry.
Denise Shapiro is a Film and Media Studies and Communication student who is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.