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Signs of Silence and Resistance in Strawman

Abstract Taiwanese director Wang Tong’s film Strawman (1987) aims at comparing the maimed national identity and sense of helplessness of colonized Taiwanese people to the situation of a “strawman” in the late period of the Pacific War. I explore the relationship between the filmic representation of trivial events involving Taiwanese farmers and the irrepressible power of life and humanity that emerges despite Japanese empirical exploitation and domination. The events become a series of detours of sign processes that represent not just the tangos of life and death but also the tangles of the colonizer and the colonized in the real world, while the film’s Kristevean ideologemes operating through sign functions correlate the cinematographic world and the possible contextualized real world