Reinventing personal documentaries

The 2000s witnessed a shift in Taiwan’s documentary scene from public engagement to personal exploration. Emerging filmmakers embraced poetic, performative, and self-reflexive approaches, further blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. The mid-2010s saw the continuous evolutions in this trend of personal documentaries. This paper explores these ongoing transformations through the creative use of sound and music in Huang Pang-chuan’s documentaries, Return (2017) and Last Year When the Train Passed by (2018). Composed by Lim Giong, known for his collaboration with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke’s films, these documentaries challenge the cinematic conventions of using and thinking about sound and music. Analyzing their unique audiovisual approach, the paper investigates how the combination of ambient sound and music creates sonic narratives and soundscape compositions that serve both poetic and political purposes. Furthermore, by examining their collaborative work, the paper contributes to existing scholarship on Taiwanese documentaries, highlighting how creative use of sound and music contributes to reinventing a nonfictional aesthetic of personal documentaries that reflects the historical context of its formation. Finally, this paper considers that Lim Giong’s influence on a new generation of filmmakers further attention, particularly regarding his impact on the evolving aesthetics of Taiwanese documentary sound

Acoustics · Art · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Physics · Sociology · Soundscape · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

• The many ways of speaking as ‘I’

  Tze-Lan Sang, Tze-lan Deborah Sang•Studies in Documentary Film•2020

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• Conventions of Sound in Documentary

  Jeffrey Ruoff•Cinema Journal•1993

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