"Super Citizen Ko" Film Screening and Online Talk on Politics during 1950s

11:00-13:00

"Super Citizen Ko" Film Screening

Venue: Room BGLT in SOAS University

Synopsis

1994∣120min∣Color∣Fiction∣Mandarin, Taiwanese

The film narrates the political history of Taiwan over a period of 50 years, following the imposition of martial law in 1947 and ‘The White Terror.’ Suspected of being a leftist, KO spent around 30 years in prison and institutions, always obsessively worrying about the fate of his best friend CHEN executed in the 1950s. Their friendship and CHEN's fate is chronicled in flashback. Soon after his release, KO goes in search of the truth and a part of himself. Only when he learns the truth is he able to pay his respects.

Director

WAN Jen

One of the most influential directors in Taiwan’s New Wave Cinema of the 1980s, he made his debut, The Taste of Apple, in the landmark work The Sandwich Man (1983) with HOU Hsiao-hsien and ZENG Chuang-hsiang. WAN has consistently explored Taiwan’s social problems and political issues. His work has always been politically sensitive and critical of the impacts of industrialization and political corruption, and has been powerful in challenging how the past is presented and whose story is told.

13:30-15:00

Online Talk on People Unwanted by the Nation: The Politics of Mourning in Super Citizen Ko

Speaker: Lin Shu-Chun

Venue: Microsoft Teams

Abstract

The works of film director Wan Jen, including The Taste of Apples (1983), Ah Fei (1984), Super Citizen Ko (1994), Connection by Fate (1998), and It Takes Two to Tango (2013), examine the political condition of Taiwan using political metaphors. This talk focuses on Super Citizen Ko, which explores the unmournable political suffering and the completion of its mourning. After the Kuomingtang retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Taiwan became trapped in the frame of the conflict between the “communists” and the “liberal democrats” in the Chinese Civil War, and the “patriots” were differentiated from suspected “communist spies.” The unmournable nature of political suffering and the search for mourning are discussed in two parts, namely “Unmournable Scene” and “Two Graves in the Heart: Grave-Seeking, Mourning, and Atonement.” First, the death and wounds of the people unwanted by the nation became unmournable. Second, the monologues, madness, and withering of political victims, along with their evasion of subjects and the erasure of the places of their memories by the nation, has further increased the difficulty of mourning. Third, the value of mourning lies in understanding the connection and interdependence between oneself and others. Super Citizen Ko grants meanings to mourning through the worshipping of the unmarked graves in Liuzhangli, the ashes of the victims’ families, and wounds of the second generation, stressing the inevitability of mourning in the process of relieving sadness. Political victims who have lost their lives can be remembered only if they are the subjects of mourning.