Colour glass ceiling: The life and death of Taiwanese-language cinema

Abstract Why are there less than ten colour films out of 1,200 Taiwanese-language films (taiyupian)? In the late 1950s, the market for Taiwanese-language cinema was much larger than the market for Mandarin-language cinema. So, why did Taiwanese-language cinema not break into colour? How did Mandarin-language colour feature films suddenly become the mainstream of film production after 1967? With archival research and interviews, this essay argues that the émigré KMT Nationalist regime systematically promoted the production of Mandarin-language colour films and suppressed the Taiwanese-language cinema. This produced a ‘colour glass ceiling’ – a seemingly invisible barrier hindering the advancement to colour film – for Taiwanese-language cinema. Consequently, Taiwanese-language cinema suddenly died out in the 1970s due to the lack of black-and-white film stock. The essay argues that this knowledge of the unfair power imbalance between Taiwanese-language and Mandarin-language cinema changes our understanding of Taiwan film history, by highlighting not only the political economy of the technical transition to colour but also the importance of raw film stock in explaining the vicissitudes of Taiwanese-language cinema.