Re-Examining Extreme Violence: Historical Reconstruction and Ethnic Consciousness in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale

Abstract

This article hinges on the ideological divide of extreme violence represented in Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale with an aim to explore the cultural and political dimensions of the Wushe Incident. The first part of the article accounts for the historical setting of the film and the trope of beheading in the traditional Seediq culture. The second part discusses how Wei Te-sheng’s film sheds a new light on localized spectacles of decapitation and further tackles varied forms of violence caused by inner and outer conflicts within the Seediq tribes in face of Aboriginal traditions and colonial hegemony. The final section brings into focus the issue of how the extremism of the film engages the global flows of violence in cinema and facilitates Aboriginal glory and consciousness in defiance of the continued symbolic oppression in twenty-first-century Taiwan.