They may already have their own pro-fessions, but since learning how to use the camera, they have made documentary film making a part of their lives. They tell stories through film, and behind each film is commitment. Yang Ming-hui and Lin Chin-lien are striving to track down and record elements of traditional culture that are fast disappearing.

Perhaps because he has the ability to grasp the language of the camera, or perhaps because of his concern for his community, in less than two years since learning how to operate a camera, Yang Ming-hui has shot six documentary films, and has won several prizes for his work.

Yang, 31, is a teacher at the Chungte Primary School in Hsiulin Rural Township in Hualien County. Dark and well-built, on the surface he is not that different from other Atayal young people. But his refined powers of observation set him apart.

The living are more important

The Chungte Plain where Yang lives was the site of research by Japanese scholars from an early date. There they discovered the 3000-year-old remains of a neolithic culture. During science class, Yang often takes his students out into the field to search for stone implements.

Today, the local-culture education center at the school is jam-packed with stone implements, pottery, and pieces of iron. For his research, Yang went to the household registry office and photocopied the cadastral map, on which he clearly marked the location where each artifact was found. After he got cable TV at home, his favorite shows became the archaeology programs on the Discovery channel. When he saw an advertisement seeking students for a class (sponsored by the Council of Cultural Affairs) to train documentary film makers who would record local culture, he thought that if he only knew how to use a camera, he could make a visual record of the cultural artifacts.

But after he finished the class he had a change of heart. "I figured that I should be more concerned with the living, not the dead," he explains. Archaeology is certainly not the most pressing concern of the indigenous peoples.

Speaking for the weak

His first work, "Song of the Wanderer," tells the story of three mentally-ill members of his tribe. They grew up together as close friends. But, after marital failures and difficulties in life led to the loss of emotional control, they left their village. Yang's work was a runner-up at the 1996 Taipei Film Festival.

The motivation behind recording their story was that "I wanted to say something on their behalf." He has an even deeper aspiration: He wants to use the focus on problems in his immediate environment to get people in the society-at-large more involved. Aboriginal people have long lived on the margins of society, neither understood nor accepted. Even more tragically, while indigenous people as a whole have been neglected, they extend the same attitude of neglect to the weakest in their own communities.

"A Record of Knife-Making Among the Taroko Tribe of Hualien" shows the process of knife-making among elderly tribesmen who have been forging knives for over half a century. The film depicts them as they hammer away and temper the steel next to a blazing fire, sweat pouring off them like rain. "Fading Hunting Dance" shows an old grandmother in the tribe teaching young schoolchildren the steps and music to the traditional hunting dance.

Whether it be knife-making, dance, music, cloth-making, rattan-weaving, or some other traditional skill, Yang notes that the transmission of tribal culture is under serious threat. Young people are no longer willing to learn these crafts, and these skills can't be relied on to make a living. Yang is frustrated that every child knows how to dance like pop singer Chang Hui-mei, but he recognizes that "the issue is not whether traditional culture is 'good' or 'bad,' but that it is inevitably disappearing as the result of changing times." All he can do now is to meticulously record how traditional crafts are done, in hopes that, if anyone wants to learn them in the future, they can find their spirit from the films.

Full-time jobs, not one-off festivals

In his documentaries about knife-making and the hunting dance, Yang let the camera silently observe and record. By contrast, in "Please Give Us a Job," which won special mention at the Golden Harvest Awards, there is a clear and direct socio-political message.

He begins with the point that most aboriginal people make their living with physical labor, like carrying bricks, constructing formwork for concrete, or building roads. But the government has allowed more than 300,000 foreign laborers into Taiwan, seriously affecting the livelihoods of indigenous people.

In the film, one aboriginal concrete pourer working in a tunnel expresses mixed emotions as he works alongside foreign laborers. The boss wants him to teach the foreign laborers how to do masonry. But he worries that after they learn this skill, the company will lay him off.

The film ends with an emotional appeal from an indigenous person: "Is it possible that we aboriginal people are valued even less than foreign workers? Why are we so mistreated by society?"

The interviewee at the end of the film speaks until he begins crying. This documentary generated a lot of discussion among the Golden Harvest judges. Some thought the material was presented too directly. Others felt that, when most television programs on the aboriginal people are so poorly made, why shouldn't they themselves express their feelings "with strength"?

Yang's view is that the main cause of the alcoholism and misuse of mountain resources in indigenous tribes is the lack of employment. Even more seriously, many indigenous people are poorly educated and don't understand the law. This has led to cases of people working for as long as a year and a half without getting any wages whatsoever.

He even thought about suggesting to the government that they subsidize a group of attorneys for aboriginal people to help the latter reclaim back wages. Or perhaps the government could open a technical school, so people could learn skills like hair styling, plumbing, electrical wiring, or cooking. That would be more practical than sponsoring once-a-year ceremonial activities.

Yang has so much he wants to say. He has turned one room of the house where he lives into a workshop, using the NT$50,000 and NT$100,000 prizes he has won to install an editing machine, projector, and other equipment. Currently he is working on two projects, one about the many aborigines who marry at a very young age, and another about a tribal shaman.

He has received a lot of positive feedback from the outside world, but faces a big problem: His colleagues at the school think he spends too much time making films and lecturing, and they are not pleased. "Success has become an obstacle," he laments.

Still, he says, "it's really enjoyable making films, and I wouldn't be able to stop." He wants to keep filming until "I have said all that I want to say." If he still has time, he wants to show the fruits of his labors to aboriginal communities all over the island and come face to face with his own people.

Horrifying!

Are you afraid of coffin-makers? When Lin Chin-lien first chose the subject of "Li Jung-lin the Coffin-Maker," the reaction of some of the students in his class was "That's horrid!" or "Who would watch a film like that?"

It's obvious that the judges who voted Lin's work "outstanding" at this year's Council of Cultural Affairs ROC Documentary Awards did not find anything terrifying about the subject matter. One of the judges, Wang Tung, said that what he saw in the film was "respect for professionalism, respect for life."

Nevertheless, anyone who would choose such a subject must be rather unusual!

Lin Chin-lien, 43, is the principal of the Liming Nursery School in Taichung. In preparation for taking over his father's kindergarten business, in college he studied pre-school education. He especially enjoys taking the children on field trips. But he doesn't like taking them to amusement parks, feeling that modern man-made facilities are no match for nature and tradition.

Sometimes he takes the children to see things like how to make a fire with charcoal, or how to make tofu or soy sauce. A decade or so ago he thought that it would be even better to videotape the proceedings. That was when he first bought the necessary video equipment. He asked friends who knew how to work the stuff to handle the technical side, while he served as "host" of the program. Standing before the lens, he introduced traditional crafts like glass-blowing, making the lion's head for the traditional lion dance, coopering, and rice-wine brewing. He made his film into an educational videotape and showed it to his kids.

He wanted to give the kids a look at traditional agriculture, so they could understand how the fields were cultivated in the past. But, unexpectedly, he couldn't find an ox anywhere around! He ended up spending NT$45,000 of his own money to buy a water buffalo. It was only when he got the beast into the paddy that he discovered it couldn't plow a field, and that he had been cheated by the animal dealer. He had to sell it at half the original price to a breeding farm.

Sometimes Lin does field research. He once edited a history covering the 280-year past of his hometown, Hsinchuangtzu. He also worked on a survey of the (now assimilated) Pingpu aboriginal people in central Taiwan, discovering stone coffin burial sites at Shihtunkeng near Puli.

Being in constant contact with local culture, he realized that he would have far greater opportunities and wouldn't have to rely on friends for help if he could handle the technical side of filming himself. That is when he decided to join the FS Film/Video Studio class in central Taiwan.

Nothing supernatural

"The Coffin Maker" was his final project for the FS Studio class. He met the subject of the piece, Li Jung-lin, nine years previously when Li handled the funeral of his mother. But it was only two years ago, when Lin's mother's grave was robbed, and Li, wearing a gas mask, personally went into the grave to repair the damage to the coffin, that Lin really came to understand this man. He discovered that Li has quite remarkable views on death, human dignity, and on the poor self-regulation of the funeral industry.

The documentary takes the audience to a 1000-square-meter factory in Tali Rural Township in Taichung. The structure of the combined residence/factory is about the same as that of a typical lumber plant. The sounds the audience hears are those of machinery cutting large pieces of fresh wood. The sights they see show the process of cutting, carving, and polishing coffins.

Li has been in the funeral industry for decades, and he has stuck with his profession despite the fact that outsiders think of it as a taboo industry, and "keep a respectful distance." He is very dogged in the face of such fears, though he can't help but sigh: "People offer their respects at altars and temple doors we make, but they are put off by a coffin made from the same wood." He argues that there is nothing to fear. "It's all in their heads."

Li speaks easily into the camera, shattering one ghostly popular myth after another. For example, popular legend has it that the wood in coffin shops emits sounds, which are the souls of the deceased coming to choose their own coffins. Lin explains, with scientific basis, that the sound comes from the wood drying and splitting under the northeast seasonal winds, and is completely unrelated to spirits.

"When I was first looking for a subject," says Lin Chin-lien, "I just thought that everybody was doing pretty much the same stuff, and that it would be meaningless to also do that. At least no one had ever done a film on the subject of coffins."

Successor to the local Taoist master

Lin certainly is interested in unusual subject matter. When a temple dedicated to the Earth God was moved from its original spot near a ring road, Lin asked local elders how they planned to celebrate the completion of the move. Some said that when they were small and the temple was first built, a drama troupe was invited to perform the dance of Zhong Kui (a benevolent deity who protects people from evil), and that they would like to see that again. In the end, not only were the wishes of the seniors gratified, but Lin's lens captured this rare traditional performance.

Lin's understanding of local customs has caused an 85-year-old geomancer and Taoist ritualist, whom the local people call the "Puli Spiritualist," to see Lin as his successor. He insists on teaching all the skills and practices of geomancy and the Taoist arts to Lin.

Though Lin has little interest in becoming the local "spiritualist," he is glad to take this opportunity to indulge his addiction to film making. So after work he races off to Puli, with the only thing on his mind being making a video record of the Taoist practices of the old geomancer. His attitude is, "if something exists, then it should be faithfully recorded." He reserves comment on whether there is anything behind geomancy, exorcisms, and the like.

Having spent so much time filming, Lin has accumulated a large stock of materials. But he doesn't have any particular message or "consciousness" to communicate in his work, and hundreds of rolls of raw footage remain piled up in the workshop above his office. "I film as much as I can," he says. It's just that he hasn't gotten around to putting the task of editing the film on his schedule.

p.48

During the Japanese occupation era, the Atayal people clashed with the Japanese in the Wushe Incident. This is one subject that interests Chongte Primary School teacher Yang Ming-hui. Through field research, he met the Bunun aborigine Kao Cheng-tsung, who has collected a great deal of historical materials. He was going to interview elderly indigenous people who knew about the incident.

p.51

Nursery school director Lin Chin-lien (left) selected the unusual subject of "The Coffin Maker" for a video. The main subject, Li Jung-lin (right), is sticking to his profession despite the fact that many people think it a "taboo" industry.