The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute on Thursday released what it says is the earliest documentary filmed in Taiwan, offering a glimpse of the landscape and society from as early as the 1920s during Japanese colonial rule.
The seven-minute silent short, Formosa (福爾摩沙), captures scenes of labor in colonial-era Taiwan — including people picking tea leaves on mountainside plantations and hauling bamboo on rail carts.
Japanese authorities are shown inspecting the work.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute
Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945 after the Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
Prior to that, the Netherlands occupied the southern part of Taiwan from 1624 to 1662, while the Spanish held territory in the north for a shorter period at about the same time.
The film also documents the transformation of society and the landscape, featuring indigenous people in traditional attire traversing rugged mountain paths, along with tile-roofed stone houses and temples with flying eaves built by Chinese immigrants.
The film — which is on the institute’s YouTube channel — is believed to have been shot in the 1920s, research commissioned by the institute showed.
While the film appears to have been made for educational purposes and is attributed to the “Hollandsche Film Universiteit,” evidence suggests the footage might have been shot by American photographer Herford T. Cowling during his time in Taiwan as part of a broader Asian tour, the institute said in a statement yesterday.
A copy was gifted to the institute by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in 1991, it said.
However, details about the film’s origin remained largely unknown until research shed some light on the matter, it said.
Institute executive director Du Li-chin (杜麗琴) said that the release of the film, along with the research, is part of a broader effort to “decolonize the visuals” of Taiwan’s colonial past and to restore Taiwanese society’s agency in shaping its own narrative.
The research was featured in the latest issue of the institute’s Film Appreciation Journal released on Friday last week.
The institute, which is responsible for preserving the nation’s audiovisual archives, seeks the “return” of early images and footage related to Taiwan’s indigenous people from global archive institutions, Du said.
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