[ Khun-giân ] ：
The Third Voice

The first node on the sound path of “[ Khun-giân ]” was filmed in 2015: the “Dutch Cave”(蕃字洞) on the island of She-liao in Keelung is the first place where the Spanish language appears in Taiwan. The first record of Dutch inscriptions in the stone caves of She-liao Island is in the book “Ile Formosa” by French M. C. Imbault-Huart (published in 1898, p.195). The scene index starts from the sound path of “Travels in the Colony” by Haruo Sato, seeking the literary inscription. Visiting from the island of Shel-iao in Keelung to the Anping port in Tainan (the ” The Lessons-for-women Fan ” and the Tainan air raid incidents), to the Gluban tribe of Kawanakajima in Wushe, Nantou, and to the Haruo Sato Memorial Museum in Shingu, Japan. These paths parallel the places where Yong-he Yu came to Taiwan, forming a triple space-time (1697-1920-2021) documentary image. Although Haruo Sato’s route to Taiwan concentrates on the ‘left-side of the island’ (Tu-Niu Boundary, ‘土牛界線,’ the boundary of the West Plains Indigenous and the East Alpine Indigenous, later known as the defense lines of frontier guards, ‘隘勇線’), which is similar with the route taken by Yong-he Yu to collect sulfur in Taiwan, the former cuts through the middle and eastern parts of Taiwan as far as Nenggao Cross-ridge (能高越嶺), while the latter does not cross to the east and travels more dispersedly and widely than the former. Even though there is a chronological gap between the depiction of the indigenous Wushe people of Taiwan in Haruo Sato’s work and the depiction of the Plains Indigenous people in Yong-he Yu’s “Barbarian Zhuzhi-ci ” (〈土番竹枝詞〉) in “Travel Via a Small Sea (Sulfur Mining Diary), ” they both show the judgment of hetero-ethnicity and a ” non-coeval time-lag/parallax” about the foreign language and the local sound and music. It is because the filming path is overlapping with literary texts (or historical events) that the experience of filming and interviewing for “[ Khun-giân ]” constantly questions where the “third voice” is heard. “[ Khun-giân ]” does not seek to represent historical scenes, or to call upon the body of the event as a “third subject” in the oral voices of those who experienced it, or to provide historical narration. In fact, the “third voice” does not exist in a specific, single body/subject; instead, it is always beyond the scene, the documentary image, and the screen, waiting to be triggered and presented through hearing.

In the abandoned house in Thut-thau Port, Tainan, the only foreign language that appears in the text, “Quanzhou dialect”, triggers Haruo Sato to trace the “sound of the deceased spirit “: “Why …… why don’t you come earlier?” (ann4 t͡suã554….. ann4 t͡suã554 bo5 gak7 za3 lai5 ?) In the XI Taiwanese Zhuzhi-ci (竹枝詞) by Yong-he Yu, there is also a description of the traditional opera in Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The word “Chu-li” (侏離), which originally meant the strange and incomprehensible voices of minorities or foreigners and barbarians from the West, is used in the Zhuzhi-ci (竹枝詞) to describe the Hokkien tone of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou area sung by the local actors. In ” The Lessons-for-women Fan, ” in addition to the “sound of the deceased spirit/ Quanzhou dialect, ” there is also a Taiwanese voice at the end of the text, “lí lâi-ah, tshiánn-tsē” (“Here you are, please take a seat.”), spoken by a white parrot kept by the grain merchant, Huang. The appearance of this personified voice is not merely a scene description, but one of the punchlines in the text. In ” Travels in the Colony, ” besides the characters’ “dialogue,” special descriptions of voices include the Chinese dialect of the Xiamen area in “Journey to the Sun Moon Lake,” a description of the tone of a wooden pestle striking a stone “as clear as a metal tone,” a popular song started from the Japanese 50 syllabaryいろはin the Taisho period (presumably the “Iroha Song”) [Note 4], a pilgrim’s hymn, the bird chirps of La Li Lu Le Lo in “The Locust’s Great Journey,” the Ma Ha Fu Ne verbalize nouns in “The Devilbird,” or the music of bowed-stringed instrument in ” The Lessons-for-women Fan, ” and the chanting of the Ryukyu shamisen in “The Travel to She-liao Island.” It is these “words and voices” that create the colonial auditory space in Sato’s ears, while Yong-he Yu’s Taiwan is filled with sensory or visual descriptions of the ecological and living features of the indigenous daily objects, of plants (banana, plumeria, betel nut, thorny bamboo, fan-suainn (番檨, mango), xiao-lang(蕭朗), Mesua ferrea, etc., see volume I), and of animals (giant snakes, stags, Malayan sun bear, wild swine, etc., see the “Supplement to the barbarous land,”“番境補遺”). The body movement during filming interlaced with the two different sensory writings. “[ Khun-giân ]” begins to focus not on the oral presentation of the characters in the front, but on the entangled sound and physical scene beyond the events and the characters.

“[ Khun-giân]” turns the “narrative sound” in the literary scenes to “tones,” “words,” or “short sentences.” The narrative intention behind the text and the photographer is unreadable; however, a new “third voice” is gradually formed as the voice and the scene are inter-dismantled and inter-diluted. When these “tones,” “words” or short sentences” are neither in the narrator’s body nor in the filmmaker’s edition of the scene, but through a group of “entangled sound objects,” connection between scenes, and “transitive verbs” that are triggered by the physical impedance of different environments and subjects. Perhaps, the sound path of “[ Khun-giân]” begins to emerge as its own “sound site.” The French acoustic theorist Michel Chion refers to an interview in which John Cage repeats “I don’t need a voice to speak to me.” This statement implies that we cannot really “hear,” but rather align “narrative” and “narrator” in voice, hearing a Voice within the Sounds, and projecting words, clarity and intention onto the “speaker” and the “authority of speech.” This mode of perception allows the sense of hearing to be dependent on, and glued to, the visual image; however, for Chion, we should “only need the voice to speak to us,” without the narrative and spatial positioning induced by the “speaker.” In Chion’s 1994 book on film sound, “Audio-vision: Sound on Screen,” he states that “‘the POA (point of audition)’ should be understood as a space or area’ (Chion 1994: 90). The “point of subjective audition” refers, on one hand, to the situation in which the audience shares in the subjective auditory experience of the character in order to enter the character’s inner world; on the other, in a spatial sense, as the spatial location in which the audience “hears” the visual narrative presented in the image, which gradually constitutes a displacement of the viewer’s subjective perspective on the content of the image. The sound logic of “[ Khun-giân]” attempts to constitute the auditory space of the scene from the entangled sound objects off-screen and the “subjective hearing-points” of the viewer, diluting the auditory adhesion to the possible narrative of the images with the projected documentary video clips, and allowing only the sound to speak for itself and the viewer’s own subjective hearing-points to return to their own space through sound. And we can then find the third voice in this sound path.