I never considered myself a movie-watcher. The flashing lights, the freezing-cold temperatures of the theater, the exaggeratedly immersive soundscapes of a Dolbyfied world, and the chomping sounds that accompany the demise of popcorn all tend to be a bit much for me. Thus, I am as surprised as anyone that, since overhauling my dissertation, I keep returning to movies, both as part of my research, and as part of my daily life here in Taiwan.
And yet, here I am, returning once again to the topic of documentaries. This time, I’m going to try and bring together my experiences watching Yeh Shih-Tao: A Taiwan Man 台灣男子葉石濤 and some of the documentaries at the 2022 Sinophone Musics Film Festival 華語音樂影像誌聯展 (my attendance at the latter sadly truncated by a cold that continues niggle, despite my prodigious water-and-tea-drinking efforts).
Specifically, in the case of both Yeh Shih-Tao and several of the documentaries at the Sinophone Musics Film Festival, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend post-screening discussions with directors. These events gave me the opportunity to think further not just on what these films are trying to do as films—that is, what the directors are trying to achieve, what stories are being told, what technical considerations come into play from my perspective as a viewer—but also on audience members’ reactions to these films.
Most interesting to me was the fact that, at every post-screening Q&A session, a surprisingly high proportion of those who piped up did so not to ask questions, but to share the way in which these documentaries connected or resonated with their own lives. By sharing these details, these sessions provided valuable insight into some of the ways that audiences make meaning from documentary films, and also into documentaries’ ability to make truth claims.
So today I’m going to talk about just a couple of these discussions. I hope to needle a little bit further at the feedback loops that form between music as an aesthetic object of performance, music as a subject of films and documentaries, and audiences’ re-narrativization of musical materials and figures mediated by the truth-claims of documentaries. A meta-discussion about discussions that arise from films that discuss and show people discussing the arts, if you will.
“Director, Many Thanks”
The first of the Q&A sessions that I attended followed the screening of White and Black 空白祭, a documentary that is (nominally) about composer Wang Lisan 汪立三, and the ways in which politics allegedly foreshortened his promising career.
As might be expected, much of the conversation revolved around technical and narrative considerations of the film: how did you choose this subject? (A: the pianist approached me.) Why did you follow this pianist so closely? (A: he seemed like an interesting guy.) What are your thoughts on the 20-year historical period that this film jumps over? (Tldr: well, that’s an interesting and complicated question that is definitely complicated to answer despite how interesting it is and could be interesting for a documentary if it weren’t so complicated.)
Interesting though this discussion was, the exchange that struck me most was, in the grand tradition of academic conferences, “more of a comment than a question.” This comment was offered up by the self-identified Director of Programming at National Education Radio of Taiwan 國立教育廣播電臺. Speaking clearly and forcefully, she opened with the statement, “Director, many thanks for bringing us such an in-depth documentary; many, many thanks.”1 She then went on to recount her first encounter with Zhang Yiming 张奕明, the pianist who is as much a subject of the documentary as is the composer around whose music much of the documentary revolves.
Eventually, the speaker’s comment came around to the fact that she and Zhang Yiming have been in touch for several years, owing in part to the speaker’s publications on a different Chinese composer of the generation before Wang Lisan. She also noted that, when Zhang Yiming released the collected piano works of Wang Lisan on Naxos, she took the opportunity to broadcast the recording on National Education Radio, making her “perhaps the first person to introduce on air the piano pieces that [Zhang Yiming] had researched.”2
There are a few things that I find interesting in this statement. First, in a response with which I can sympathize, it seems that the speaker found the film to be as much about Zhang Yiming as Wang Lisan.
Second, unlike in the average fictional film, it seems that this statement reflects an impulse for the speaker to insert herself personally into the narrative. Sure, if I’m watching La-La Land I might use my experiences driving in LA to critique the film (e.g., “If anyone ever got out of their car in the middle of a traffic jam on the 405 to start dancing between lanes, there would be hell to pay”), or if I’m watching Derry Girls I might draw connections with my own educational history, (e.g., “Sister Michael gives me flashbacks to some of my more terrifying elementary school teachers”). But these are ways of explaining why certain elements of a film or TV show resonate with me. I don’t think of them as the metaphorical wardrobe through which I might pass en route to finding the Irish sitcom equivalent of Mr. Tumnus. In contrast, this speaker’s comment struck me very much as an effort to situate herself in the context of the film, not in a self-aggrandizing way, but in a way that clarified how the film’s narrative was filtered through her own personal experiences.
The crux of the speaker’s comment, however, was her closing statement, when she stated that she hoped Zhang Yiming’s as-yet-unwritten biography of Wang Lisan would serve as a launching-point for a continued conversation between pianist and director. The reason this would be a fruitful revisit, according to the speaker, is that the director’s use of paintings and other artistic elements reveals a school of humanistic thought that is very different to that which is found in Taiwan in the past few decades.
Nowhere in the documentary is there a direct gesture made to the divergent cultural histories of Taiwan and Mainland China over the past 70+ years. And yet, through the filter of her own personal experiences, the speaker was able to find resonances far beyond the narrow scope of the film’s subject. In other words, the ability to see herself in the documentary allowed her to move beyond understanding the film as a narrowly focused documentary about a pianist’s crusade to bring attention to an under-recognized composer. Instead, the film became a vehicle for drawing broad conclusions—or at least finding self-confirmation—about the different historical trajectories of Taiwan and the Mainland over the last several decades.
“I Really Admire This Film”
In my first venture back into the real world after more than a week of feeling self-pityingly phlegmy, I had the great fortune to be able to revisit the first documentary that I saw in Taiwan, Yeh Shih-Tao: A Taiwan Man 台灣男子葉石濤, directed by Hsu Hui-Lin 許卉林. For this second viewing of the documentary, I traveled to Tainan for a screening at the South Taiwan Film Festival 南方影展—where just a few days ago the film was awarded the festival’s Human Rights Award—in order to attend a post-screening discussion with the director.
(For those of you who have recently joined my blog, Yeh Shih-Tao: A Taiwan Man is a documentary film about one of the most important figures in 20th-century Taiwanese literature, the eponymous Yeh Shih-Tao. Yeh was highly prolific, both as a writer of short fiction and theoretical essays. Among his most lasting contributions, explored at length in Hsu Hui-Lin’s documentary, is Yeh’s A History of Taiwan Literature 台灣文學史綱, the first systematic attempt to define Taiwanese literature as an independent tradition, rather than a minor sub-genre of Chinese literature. If you want to read more, you can check out the original post.)
Like the discussion after White and Black, this discussion also revealed rich details about the making of the movie. Of particular interest to me was the director’s extended and generous exposition on exactly why she incorporated different artforms into the documentary, from modern dance and animation to stage plays and rakugo 落語. (Apropos of nothing, I am crushed to miss an upcoming performance by the two rakugo artists featured in the movie.)
But also like the post-screening discussion of White and Black, the talk-back session for Yeh Shih-Tao was a platform for audience members to share their own personal experiences, their own connections with the subject matter of the film, and the personal meanings they crafted from the film’s narratives.
In this instance, an audience member shared that she started visiting Yeh Shih-Tao when she was still a student. Although not a literary scholar, she was simply a fan of Yeh Shih-Tao’s writing, and through him she met many of the figures of contemporary Taiwan literature who were featured in the documentary. She brought along three books that Yeh Shih-Tao had personally signed for her, and passed them around so that other audience members might see the author’s signature up close and on paper. Speaking emotionally in a trembling voice that frequently sounded close to tears, she spoke of Yeh Shih-Tao as an erudite literatus who was familiar even with the works of Soviet authors, but who in his later years was unable to rid himself of the shadow of his experiences as a political prisoner during the White Terror.
What ultimately emerged from the speaker’s extended monologue was a fear that young people today “don’t read books, don’t read many novels.”3 For this reason, the speaker opened with the statement, “I really admire this film,” and went on to explain that, in her view, literature has only a small chance of attaining relevance in the lives of “young people” 年輕人 (that nebulous demographic that seems always to hover between bogeyman and aspiration). She feared that many of the principles that Yeh Shih-Tao and his followers stood for—the formation of a native Taiwanese literary canon, democratization, political reform—have today become little more than catchwords. And even as she lamented that it had taken this long for someone to tell the story of these authors and their importance for both Taiwanese literature and democracy, she stated, “When I was growing up, more people read novels. I think nowadays [people would rather just] watch movies. So I admire you, Director Hsu. You have to work hard to continue creating!”4
What I’m most struck by in this rather impassioned delivery, which went on for almost seven minutes, are some of the assumptions undergirding the speaker’s comments. First, the idea that young people no longer read is a well-worn trope, but one that is not entirely borne out in my experiences both studying and teaching at schools ranging from Scripps to Stanford, and NYU to the School for the Art Institute of Chicago. Young people certainly read differently than previous generations, and this may mean that certain writers, characters, and novels no longer speak to young readers as they used to (Holden Caulfield, anyone?) But it’s important to distinguish differences in reading habits from the death of reading as a practice.
Another revealing viewpoint is the speaker’s perception that the links between literature, Taiwanese identity, and democracy remain unexplored. If we were talking about academic circles, this would be a hard position to defend—scholars in all fields love to feel important, and linking our work to big issues like democracy, human rights, and (self-plug!) nationalism are ways of upping the stakes as we rationalize our reasons for pursuing our arcane interests. Taiwanese literary history is no exception, and these links have been explored by many scholars, starting with none other than Yeh Shih-Tao himself in his A History of Taiwan Literature.
But this speaker, who is clearly highly engaged in literature and passionate about Taiwan’s literary community, also made reference several times to the fact that she is not a scholar. Thus, she is not approaching this question from the viewpoint of an academic, but rather from the point of a view of a (highly engaged, knowledgeable) general readership. If this kind of reader feels that the links between Taiwanese politics and literature are underexplored, it should spur those of us in the scholarly world to continue seeking ways to address not just each other, but also broader readerships who believe in the importance of our research, but who currently have no means of accessing it.
Documentary as Mirror
Throughout my engagement with documentary films in Taiwan, I have had the privilege of sitting in on many richly researched, eye-opening conversations and presentations. In particular, the 2022 Sinophone Musics Film Festival showed the broad array of possibilities for these kinds of discussions, from the deeply erudite lecture on the history of music documentary films by Professor Xiao Mei 萧梅 of the Shanghai Conservatory, to the lively panel discussion between faculty in Shanghai and Taipei about the role of documentary film in ethnomusicology. Presentations ranged from personal reflections, like Ma Chi Hang’s discussion of his process in Ballad on the Shore, to more educationally oriented discussions, like Professor Tsai Tsung-De’s 蔡宗德 discussion of the pedagogical outcomes of his (almost accidental!) documentary filmmaking pursuits. And they included meta-level musings on the very nature of the documentary genre, as when White and Black director Zhou Hongbo explained that he thought that one of the important functions of documentaries is to give future generations an opportunity to come into contact with information, people, and cultural artifacts that might otherwise be lost.
But to me, the most valuable part of the post-screening Q&A sessions at both the 2022 Sinophone Musics Film Festival and at the South Taiwan Film Festival was the chance to see how audiences fuse narrative content and personal history to make meaning from documentary films. In short, documentaries in these festivals not only provided a neatly packaged, slickly filmed historical narrative, they also provided a mirror in which audience members could see themselves.
Key to this self-recognition is the fact that many of the audience members who asked questions and made comments seemed to place a great amount of stock in the truth-claims put forward by these films. That is to say, most of the audience members who chimed in seemed to buy whatever the film directors were selling. Whether this precedes the tendency to see oneself reflected in a documentary film, or whether seeing oneself reflected in a documentary film inclines one to sympathize more readily with the message of a film, involves more chickens and eggs than I have the time or resources to get into here.
Regardless of which comes first, perception of truth or self-recognition, the directors of many of these films are masters of combining the spoken word, images, and music to create immersive, multimedia works that appeal not only on the level of intellectual curiosity, but also on an emotional level. Meanwhile, scholars today are under ever greater pressure to produce “socially relevant work,” and to perform “public ethno/musicology.” In the face of these pressures, regardless of how one feels about documentary film as an academic medium, these films have much to teach us. Most importantly, they underscore that, in getting our messages out to the world, it’s never about information alone. Rather, these films remind us of the need to make people care about that information.
“導演,非常感謝你帶給我們這麽一部有厚度的紀錄片,非常非常的感謝”。
“我可能是臺灣第一個在廣播節目介紹【張奕明】研究的鋼琴作曲”。
“大家都不看書了,也不會太多看太多的小説”。
Between the speaker’s rapid delivery, heavy accent, inconsistent amplification, and emotion, sections of her comments were indistinct. Square brackets indicate where I have approximated/paraphrased. “以前長大的時候比較多可以看小説嘛,我覺得現在 [人都只好] 看電影,所以佩服導演,而且一定需要努力繼續創作”。