Econometrics-in-Nature and the Measures of Cinema in Cold War Taiwan

Shaoling Ma

Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies,

Cornell University

Abstract

My talk traces the Cold War construction of Taiwan as a computational environment from two distinct archives between the 1960s and 1970s: the use of computational tools in economic analysis and rural development, and documentary cinema. In order to show how the KMT government was effectively using U.S. aid, Taiwanese and American technocrats and econometricians working with the Council for International Economic Cooperation and Development (CIECD) performed dynamic inter-industry relational analysis that was contingent upon existing computational hardware and thus state- and private technological resources. The Joint Council on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) applied systems design and software applications to compile farm data and develop regional agronomics models. In the same period, documentary cinema neither lagged behind nor merely supplemented such new ways of ordering the relations between the people, the economy and the natural environment. The second part of my discussion turns to Richard Yao-Chi Chen 陈耀圻—Liu Pi-chia (1967, 27mins), the director’s thesis film and Taiwan’s pioneering cinéma verité, and his later work, A Chinese Farm Wife (1974, 17 min), produced for the American Universities Field Staff as an ethnographic survey of developing nations. In variously employing the camera zoom, informational subtitles, and shifting temporal frames, the two documentaries unfold the dynamic relations between traditional, collectivized farm-work, female reproductive labor, and surplus military labor set against the horizon of the island’s burgeoning industrialization. Computational modeling, in short, helped enrich the culture of data that analog cinema was both adapting and challenging. Both media techniques defined each other, that is, they formed recursive, feedback loops between representation and modeling, hitherto distinguished as contested properties of non-digital and digital media, respectively. In arguing for their convergence, I hope to show that the camera simulates the economy and its social relations, and in so doing, resembles the computer in its command of objects; and correspondingly, that computer-aided agronomics becomes a visual tool in representing Taiwanese economy.