The many ways of speaking as ‘I’: Wuna Wu’s first-person documentaries from Taiwan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Touted as a representative of the ‘Me’ generation of documentary makers in twenty-first-century Taiwan, Wuna Wu has appeared as both filmmaker and social actor in her documentaries. Even when the ostensible subject matter of the film is not Wu, she has often inserted herself into the story and the frame. This raises questions of why she elects to be visible to the documentary viewer, what her visibility and performativity in front of the camera allows her to achieve, and what she gains by using a first-person voiceover narration. This essay examines Wu’s first-person positioning in three prize-winning documentaries: Happy or Not (2002), Farewell 1999 (2003) and Let’s Fall in Love (2008) and argues that she has experimented with a wide variety of first-person positionings, ranging from that which renders her vulnerable to that which self-empowers. Her diverse first-person approaches underscore the question of documentary ethics, the importance of mediation for self-identity, and the opportunities for building sociality and community through documentary. Her first-person films bring out the interconnectedness between self and other, providing a window on the residual effects, in modern Taiwan, of the Confucian concept of the self as relationally defined.