Course Description

In recent years, documentaries have become an increasingly important medium by which people come to know the world. Where mainstream documentaries were once the provenance of organizations like the BBC Natural History Unit, or PBS’s Nova and Cosmos, documentaries such as Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) now contend for blockbuster status. Meanwhile, legacy media organizations like the New York Times now produce documentaries, such as the Oscar-nominated piece about Taiwan, Island in Between (2024), and media monolith Netflix now regularly produces documentary series, such as the popular production Street Food: Asia (2019). What is more, contemporary definitions of documentary film are increasingly capacious, prompting documentary film scholar Bill Nichols to provoke, “What if documentaries aren’t simply informational, but rhetorical? What if they aren’t only rhetorical but also poetic and story driven?” (2015, x).

In the multimedia-saturated information environment of the 21^st century, in which speech and image occupy increasingly dominant roles in the promulgation of information, the advantages of documentary film are clear. Unlike text-based media, documentaries offer multisensory portrayals of their subjects, combining image, text, and music to provide audiences with a sense of their subject matter. The advantages of this medium are even clearer in discussions of music and the performing arts, a fact that reached mainstream awareness with the breakout success of Wim Wender’s 1999 documentary about the Cuban music ensemble, the Buena Vista Social Club. Despite the many strengths of documentary film, however, many scholars remain cautious of documentary film, skeptical of documentary’s potential for totalizing narratives and tendency to privilege emotional oomph over historical nuance.

In this course, we will embrace documentary film as a means to approach a topic that has, until recent years, occupied an ambiguous position in academic literature: Taiwan. To focus this exploration, we will focus on the way that documentary filmmakers use the performing arts as both subject and resource to shape narratives of Taiwan. In turn, we will use our focus on Taiwanese documentary film to expand our understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of documentary film in the 21^st century.

Special Course Features

NB. In future iterations of this course, we hope to organize a study trip to Taiwan over the winter break, where we will have the opportunity for student groups to present their work to one another in person. For the initial course offering in Fall 2025, however, there is no travel.

This course will be taught in tandem with a corresponding course at National Taiwan University (NTU). While this will have little impact on the daily running of the course, it does determine the structure of our primary course activities and assignments:

1. Regular film screenings: Over the course of the semester, we will hold six film screenings outside of class hours. These are the keystone texts we will explore in class and, as such, attendance at screenings is required.
   
2. Lucid board and online engagement: One of the benefits of running this class alongside a sister course at National Taiwan University is the opportunity for students to exchange viewpoints on Taiwanese history, culture, and music, as well as on documentary films more generally, with students occupying very different subject positions. Put differently, what strikes you in each of these films as interesting, confusing, striking, or banal will almost certainly be informed by your experience of and background with Taiwanese culture. In exchanging thoughts, opinions, and experiences with students at Taiwan’s top-ranked research university, you have the opportunity not only to learn from your Taiwanese colleagues, but also to contribute the perspective on Taiwan that you gain as an outsider, and to give your Taiwanese colleagues an opportunity to consider perspectives that they often take for granted.
   
   With this in mind, our primary course activity will be regular engagement with our online Lucid board. All students will be expected to interact with their colleagues multiple times per week on our Lucid board. Students are required not only to post their own thoughts, but also to respond regularly to their colleagues in Taiwan. Several times over the course of the semester, more formal written exchanges between HMC and NTU students will be expected.
   
3. Periodic online class sessions: We will hold three online class sessions with our classmates in Taiwan over the course of the semester. During these sessions, we will focus on small-group breakout sessions, offering opportunities for interaction, exchanges of ideas and perspectives, and getting to know one another.

3. Discord server: Students will be expected to interact periodically with their counterparts on NTU’s campus through a standing platform like Discord.

4. Final projects: Each student will join a multinational team to produce a final project on a related topic of your choice. Over the course of the semester, you will develop your topic in a series of steps, culminating in a media-rich final project to upload online to a public blog site. These projects will serve as a cross-institutional archive of the work and learning that we achieve in this course. (For examples of similar HMC final projects, see the Ethnomusicology @ HMC blog). Each team will also be responsible for a video presentation on their topic. These will be uploaded to a gallery, and your colleagues will comment and offer feedback on each team’s work prior to submission of final drafts.