James Wicks

Projecting a state that does not exist: Bai Jingrui's Jia zai Taibei/Home Sweet Home

ABSTRACT The opening sequence of Bai Jingruis Jia zai Taiei/Home Sweet Home (1970) introduces the films central concern: the politics, both aesthetically and ideologically, of depicting migration within a narrative film. More specifically, Home Sweet Home provides an insight into the official position that the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) held with regard to Taiwanese students who studied abroad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article presents a schematic historical contextualization of the film and Bai Jingruis biographical background. I then focus on potential discrepancies between the projection of state policy and the formal elements of editing, setting and representations of psychological turmoil among the films primary characters. My goal is to offer a preliminary inquiry into how the structural components of the film work in both conjunction and disjunction with the ideology of the Taiwanese state government in 1970.