This week’s post is a bit fuzzy on the details, mainly because the film I’m discussing is not commercially available. As a result, I’m operating from memory here.
That said, I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy of the film so that I can talk about it in my dissertation. So stay tuned—in just a couple of years, you lucky readers *might* be able to read even more about Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man!
In my head, the voice of David Attenborough is inextricably linked with the documentary genre. Tbh, in my heart of hearts, he sort of is the documentary genre. His soothing voice makes sense of the animal kingdom, translating it into a neat, clean narrative for me, the completely uninformed viewer. In short, he makes me feel like I know something—a precursor perhaps to the era when “research” came to be synonymous with “Googling.”
For anyone hoping for clean Attenboroughian narratives today, you have my condolences. In fact, the Attenborough style is sort of the antithesis the 2022 documentary Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man 台灣男子葉石濤, directed by Hsu Hui-lin 許卉林. Like many of the films I watched during the Taipei Film Festival, I saw this documentary at the independent theater The Spot Huashan 光點華山. I found it to be a chaotically beautiful pastiche of interviews and multimedia performances, which combine to form an unabashedly un-objective portrait of one of the giants of modern Taiwanese literature—and what it means to be Taiwanese today.
Documentaries and Their Discontents
In reality, the Attenborough model has fallen into a bit of disrepute. Whether we think of Ulrike Koch’s The Saltmen of Tibet, the beautifully contemplative The Birth of Sake, the blockbuster Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the romp through Chinese-American cuisine and identity offered up by The Search for General Tso, or even Qiu Jiongjiong’s Madame 姑奶奶 (which I discussed a few weeks ago), the omniscient narrator is largely a relic of the past. Instead, documentary filmmakers increasingly leave documentary subjects to tell their own story.
In a lot of ways, this mirrors transitions in ethnographic research. Gone are the days when omniscient academics like Claude Lévi-Strauss would hold forth from atop the ivory tower to reveal the immutable truths of an entire culture.1 Instead, ethnographies have moved towards highly contextualized accounts of the author’s interviews and interactions with interlocutors, acknowledging that any given viewpoint is both personal and biased, but also that this micro-level information-gathering can offer perspectives on lived experience that more “objective,” macroscopic accounts often gloss over.2
Now, I’m hardly a documentary buff. I don’t keep up with new documentaries, I don’t go to documentary film festivals, I don’t go out of my way to watch every documentary that crosses my path (a source of unending disappointment to Netflix’s very dogged suggestions algorithm.) But it seems to me that Yeh Shih-tao leans gleefully into the impossibility of omniscience, bringing together multimedia resources not so much to answer the question, “Who was Yeh Shih-tao,” but rather to show us how cultural histories can generate discourse, and the ways that we produce collective significance from these discourses.
Documenting Taiwan
Yeh Shih-tao 葉石濤 (1925-2008) was a key player in a nativist Taiwanese literary movement that sought to distinguish itself from its Chinese counterpart. Importantly, Yeh didn’t just rely on historical data, although his seminal literary history of Taiwan was the first of its kind. No, as an author-scholar, he married theory and practice, putting forth critical views about what it means for literature to be “Taiwanese.” These achievements were in spite of significant financial troubles throughout his life and a lengthy period of imprisonment and “reeducation” during Taiwan’s martial law period. In creating a documentary about Yeh Shih-tao—and in titling it A Taiwan Man—this documentary inserts itself squarely into the debates about what it means to be Taiwanese today.
In some ways, Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man fits neatly into the genre of documentary film as I understand it from a layperson’s perspective. His son takes us to the family home. Former colleagues recount stories of how they personally benefited from his guidance. And academics weigh in with analyses of his life and work, adding the weight of scholarly authority to the film’s many anecdotes.
But this film is also draws unabashedly on the fictional, the subjective, and the interpretive. It announces this fictionalizing tendency from the very outset, opening with scenes from a performance of a stage play based on one of Yeh’s short stories. And this is not an isolated event—the entire film intersperses its more “factual” material with animated sequences, readings of Yeh’s fictional works, contemporary dance, even a Taiwanese rakugo performance.3 Many of these works do not try to get at the intellectual substance of Yeh’s thought. Rather, as you can see in the video clip below, they take his life and work as inspiration, a point of emotional departure for the art of a new generation.
Where do these diverse, unexpected, and unabashedly “unfactual” sources lead us? Most obviously, they promote the idea of a distinctly Taiwanese culture—not Chinese, not Han, not even Sinophone, but a multiethnic Taiwanese culture that emerges from the confluence of colonization, imperial domination, and military dictatorship. But beyond the film’s rather unvarnished political inclinations, all of this begs the question: what is a documentary? Is contemporary dance about a literary figure who passed away almost 15 years ago documentary? Is traditional storytelling? Is animation?
The Fiction of Documentary Film
In 1973, Clifford Geertz’s “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” was detonated in the midst of the ethnographic social sciences.4 Far from arguing that fields like anthropology should be searching for immutable, universal truths, Geertz argued that every act of writing is fictionalizing.5 This is not to say that there is no basis in truth to what the ethnographer writes. Rather, it acknowledges that ethnographic writing is its own creative act that will inevitably change the lived experience it seeks to describe.
With characteristic Teutonic precision, erstwhile doyen of West German musicology Carl Dahlhaus makes a similar point. Dahlhaus argues that research will always uncover a mountain of facts, and that it’s up to the individual researcher to decide which of these facts become data. In other words, the researcher must narrativize (or, in Geertz’s terms, fictionalize) their findings, bringing sense to an otherwise incoherent mountain of facts.6
Geertz’s work has subsequently been strongly critiqued—how much fiction is too much fiction?—but his main point stands, namely, that the decisions we make about what to write and what to skip fundamentally shape the narratives we create.
The same applies to documentary. Would Jiro be the same dreamer of sushi if we interviewed only his dissatisfied customers, or would he be a sushi autocrat? Would General Tso and his chicken tell the same celebratory tale of Chinese-American perseverance if they spoke from the perspective of their Taiwanese progenitor? Would Bilan de Linphel inhabit the same demimonde of cabarets and cruising sites if Madame had included interviews of her university professor colleagues?
The Impossibility of Documentary Film
I assume that most documentaries aspire, on some level or another, to “document” their subject matter. And yet, like ethnography, like history, documentaries face an impossible task. Indeed, if a dusty, overlong academic tome is unable to turn all the available facts into data, what chance does a mere 90-minute or two-hour film have?
It seems to me that Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man fundamentally understands both the limitations of the documentary genre and its fictionalizing potential. On the one hand, it leverages the memories of friends, academic analysis, and the written record left by Yeh himself to create a defensible (albeit partial) account of history. On the other hand, by presenting a multimedia pastiche of contemporary creative arts, the documentary’s narrative also embraces film’s emotional potential.
The film’s multimedia strategy seems like a tacit confession that all documentaries take part in fiction. But it is also a reminder that documentary film is not an ethically neutral genre: from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1936) and the smash Netflix docuseries Cheer and Tiger King, to public broadcasting classics by the likes of Ken Burns or David Attenborough, and from Radiolab podcast series like “Mixtape” to the multimillion-dollar true crime podcasting industry, documentaries stake out positions, make claims, and try to win over audiences.
Documentary filmmakers make their claims in part by presenting the facts. But a well crafted documentary also makes recourse to the kinds of emotional appeal that can evade logical interrogation, and to which multimedia is uniquely suited. In short, a good documentary—like good journalism, scholarship, or any other form of storytelling—makes us want to believe.
In the case of Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man, this emotional appeal has a certain emancipatory potential, creating yet another data point arguing for a Taiwan that historically and culturally distinct from Mainland China. But the goals of documentary are not always so wholesome—Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Triumph des Willens used much the same techniques to support a paranoid, authoritarian, genocidal regime.
Today, a would-be media magnate can mount an insurrection at the US Capitol in order to retain power, largely by pulling the levers of social and traditional media to evoke the same kind of emotional response that documentaries from Olympia to Yeh Shih-tao, A Taiwan Man try to elicit. In this kind of media landscape, it bears thinking not only about what documentaries say, but also how they say it.
Lévi-Strauss was one of the seminal anthropologists of his generation. Though wrote many influential works, much of his output is seen today as essentializing and fundamentally reinforcing a worldview that places Western thought at the top of an intellectual pyramid. This tendency to essentialize can be seen even in some of his lockjaw-inducing titles, such as The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
For example, in Nadia Chana’s 2019 dissertation, an entire chapter is devoted to transcribing an interview with one of her interlocutors, without any commentary or editorializing on the part of the author.
Rakugo is a Japanese storytelling genre in which a seated speaker uses multiple voices and physical postures to act out a comedic dialogue, often to the accompaniment of an instrument like the shamisen.
I realize that ethnography and documentary film are two distinct phenomena. That said, I’m going to push the documentary-ethnography comparison a little further. This is partly because of certain superficial similarities between ethnography and documentary film, and partly because I’m not going to do a bunch of reading on documentary film theory before writing this post.
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973): 3-30.
Carl Dahlhaus, “What Is a Fact of Music History?” in The Foundations of Music History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 33-43.