Healthy Realism genre (Industry)

In the 1960s a new genre of films, aiming to be a national Chinese cinema (Mandarin, anti-Communist, etc) and serving the KMT, influenced superficially by the style of Italian Neorealism but at polar opposite politically,lacking any kind of critical dimension of the society depicted. Local stories would be addressed but with a healthy, uplifting appeal. Introduced by the head of CMPC studios, Gong Hong, as the new direction to pursue. Eventually various different genres would come to be converged into the 'healthy realism' mode, including comedy, women's melodrama, musical films, historical epics. Director Li Xing started out in taiyu pian (a genre of low-budget Taiwanese-language films made quickly and for the native speakers) before making healthy realism films. He made two important early examples of this 'movement'/genre: Oyster Girl (Ke nu, 1964) and Beautiful Duckling (1965). (The latter is briefly shown in an outdoor cinema screening in Hou Hsiao Hsien's semi-autobiographical Dust in the Wind.)

With CMPC’s production full-grown and healthy in the mid-1960s, Mandarin-language film gradually established its “national” trademark by pushing Taiwanese-language film to the margins and encouraging all small independent companies to follow suit. The decade saw a prosperous film industry sustained by directors who made popular genre films, mainly Qiong Yao romantic melodramas, and martial arts, or wuxia. But the major independent contribution to Mandarin film production came in 1963 when Shaw Brothers’ leading director, Li Hanxiang, “defected” to Taiwan from Hong Kong.