ABSTRACT
Documentaries addressing environmental concerns began to appear in Taiwan in the mid-1980s. Since then, Taiwanese documentary makers have addressed a wide range of environmental issues and intervened actively in environmental debates. This chapter discusses five documentaries to show how Taiwanese documentary makers and critics engage critical issues of ecocinema and contribute to ecocinema studies in general. If ecodocumentary making and studies are driven by the impulse of “world-making,” trying to herald a new world in which environmental ethics is a paramount concern, then how an ecodocumentary maker constructs an ethical environmental discourse in a proper aesthetic form in the pursuit of that goal is a pivotal issue in ecocinema studies. This chapter analyses an activist documentary of environmental justice, an indigenous documentary highlighting the dilemma of “endangered humans vs. endangered nature,” an eco-cosmopolitan documentary that shows the dynamism between the global and the local in its vision of animal liberation, a highly stylized documentary that exposes the complicated interplay between documentary aesthetics and environmental ethics, and a popular ecodocumentary that exploits the power of affect to create a sense of ecosublime in its shaping of the cinematic experience. Our discussion of these five Taiwanese documentaries illustrates how ethics and aesthetics are intertwined in the realm of ecocinema. It also calls for what David Ingram calls “a pluralistic eco-aesthetic” for the study of ecocinema.
