Some have called him madman, lunatic, visionary.

So who is Huang Mingchuan? Outside of Taiwan, film director HMC (黃明川) is
not well-known, and even inside Taiwan, he has been relegated to the
sidelines
of the commercial film industry. Even worse, the national news media
outlets -- magazines and newspapers -- have mostly ignored him
over the years, and most young people today have no idea who or what
he is, do not recognize his face and admit that they do not
know his name. "Huang Mingchuan who?" they often say.

Of course, the younger generations of Taiwanese youth today know the
names and faces and films of Ang Lee, Hou Shiao Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang
and others -- Ju Ba Dao of "You are the Apple of my eye" fame and Mr
Wei of ''Seediq'' Bale fame -- but they know very little about
the three films of HMC's stellar, lunatic, independent,
made-on-a-shoestring-budget trilogy. I call it "The Taiwan Gone Mad
Trilogy".

So, sad but true, ask almost any college
student today in Taiwan about Huang Mingchuan's powerful films about
Taiwanese society in the 1990s and their faces go blank. HMC who?

Taiwan has passed HMC by. And this is a shame, and a shame on Taiwan's
cultural industry of cinema, literature, newspaper reporting and
academic research. For ten years in the late 1980s and all the way
through the 1990s, HMC -- madman, moon-gazing lunatic, a man with his
head in the clouds, an underground rebel of Rabelasian proportions,
and a former professional photographer with a Manhattan studio in the
1980s (not to mention a voracious reader) -- from 1989 to 1999 poured
his heart out (and his inquisitive, probing mind) in three powerful
films that can deserve to be
archived at film museums worldwide.

This man (and his films) should not be forgotten. Such a fate is not
becoming a native talent like this. By ignoring him, and consigning
his films
to the dustbin of history and cutting room floor of Taiwan's evolving
cinema, Taiwan is the loser. And Taiwan, great country that it is,
should know better than to ignore one of its own geniuses.

To become a more just society, to search for its own roots as a
nation, Taiwan needs to stand again for HMC. National treasures like
this
do not come by that often in the firmament that is modern life.

In a recent interview with Ho Yi of the Taipei Times, HMC, now 56,
said: "Around the time when Taiwan's martial law was lifted, the
country was driven by a strong desire to open up to the world and
become a more just society. To many, it was also a time to search for
one's roots."

Back in 1999, the art critic and poet Chang Te-cheng put it this way
wrote a well-received article about Huang's three feature films --
Flat Tyre, The Man from Island West, calling them his "myth trilogy" --
Aboriginal myth, military myth and political-religious myth,
concluding that HMC's trilogy refleced his attempt to come to terms
with a society and culture in transition.

So how did HMC slip so quietly  into Taiwan's cultural atmosphere and
leave a trail of three culture-shifting films that carry echoes of
Wim Wenders of Germany, Jean-Luc Godard of France and Pier Paolo
Pasolini of Italy, as well as Mitsuo Yanagimachi of Japan and Sajiyat
Ray of India? This question be addressed,

Born and raised and educated in a desperate Taiwan under an ''Alice in
Wonderland'' dictatorship at the end of the ''White Terror'' martial
law days (1949 - 1988), HMC spent seven important years in New York
City running a photography studio in mid-town Manhattan and absorbing
-- deeply, intimately, intellectually -- the various Western
symphonies based on ideas of women's liberation, the search for ethnic
and spiritual identity,
the rewriting of American Indian history, the artist's need for
rebellion, social justice and other kinds of free-thinking visions,
both artistic and emotional.

These themes animate HMC as a man, as a human being, as a Taiwanese.
And as the film-maker that he is!

He is the Walt Whitman of Taiwan, it's Jack Kerouac, it's Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

For a man who grew up in a small town in southern Taiwan, surrounded
by rice paddies and pineapple fields, baked in summer
sun and blasted by winter winds coming down from Siberia, HMC went out
to "see the world" and reported back in a unique, cinematic
style on what he saw, what he heard, what he dreamed.

Revisit the HMC Trilogy film by film -- there are English subtitles
now -- and see for yourself what a lone independent film director
has achieved.

Such genius only come around once in a generation. Who will be the
next HMC in Taiwan's evolving cinemascape? Time will tell.

-------------------------------

[NOTE: A DVD box set of the HMC trilogy is now available with an
accompanying book in Mandarin (and one essay in English) and with the
addition of his 1999 short film ''The Wind Within.'' All the films
have English subtitles. To information, e-mail hmc_films@yahoo.com]

Films discussed above are:

The Man from Island West (西部來的人, 1989) tells the story of a member of
the Atayal Aboriginal tribe returning to his village after years of
living in Han-Chinese society in Taipei.

Bodo (寶島大夢, 1993) looks at the absurdity of Taiwan's authoritarian
past through the eyes of a low-ranking soldier.

Flat Tyre (破輪胎, 1998), , looks at the use of political and religious
iconography in Taiwan. Also called Flat Tire,