VERDICT: Hsu Che-yu’s examination of a political assassination combines digital and physical reconstruction techniques to understand the life of a mobster, assassin, and film producer.
In 1984, Taiwanese American writer Henry Liu was gunned down in his home in the United States by an assassin named Wu Dun. It transpired that the hit was arranged by the Taiwanese government via the United Bamboo Gang, Taiwan’s largest mafia organisation. Despite being convicted of his crime Wu Dun was given amnesty after six years and subsequently used his connections to found a film studio. Hsu Che-yu’s excellent new film The Making of Crime Scenes explores the strange confluence of the production of “wuxia” films, gangsterism, and patriotic political assassination through two contrasting forms of reconstruction.
The first is digital, and perhaps the more striking and shocking. Using technology employed by crime scene scanners, Hsu recreates the assassination. The film begins with a computer-generated man (based on a stand-in) lying on the ground with a bullet wound in his forehead. Slowly, the details of the prone figure are filled in before the setting is illustrated around him while we hear Wu Dun’s account of the killing – he was a ‘crack shot.’ Later we are informed that the technique being used is designed for crime scenes, and thus produces a lasting impression of this otherwise unseen and potentially forgotten moment.
Conversely, Wu Dun went on to become a producer of wuxia films, lavish period productions that echoed the swordplay that Taiwan’s gangs still engaged in at the time. Hsu gains access to Wu Dun’s old production studio and within its delipidated buildings reconstitutes both the epic action of the films that were produced there, and the surreptitious criminality of the man who oversaw them. As the camera pans from a young Wu Dun furtively sneaking through a backstreet to a rooftop swordfight, Hsu draws a troubling line between the collective memory of patriotic gangsterism during Taiwan’s period of Martial Law and the ornate tales of ancient heroism on screen.
Director, editing: Hsu Che-yu
Screenplay: Chen Wan-yin
Cast: Wu Dun, Kuo Po-yo, Lai Tung-che
Producers: François Bonenfant, Chen Yung-Shuang
Cinematography: Chen Kuan-yu
Music: Wang Wen Qing
Production companies: Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains (France)
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (Ammodo Tiger Shorts Competition)
In Mandarin
22 minutes
