Quiet Places

This chapter examines how sound is used to dramatise the process of masculine change in ‘quiet places’ – the tranquil, sleepy settings common to otherwise diverse films including A Time in Quchi (Chang Tso-Chi, 2013), The Great Buddha + (Huang Hsin-Yao, 2017), and Secrets in the Hot Spring (Lin Kuan-Hui, 2018). From the characters’ perspectives, these are backwaters in which they involuntarily languish, but while these films are ostensibly constructed in terms of urban centres versus rural peripheries, they are ultimately about character psychology; the filmmakers ask why it is that their male protagonists feel peripheral. I examine how the characters’ affective journeys are articulated through soundtrack components including ambient sound, music, voiceover, and sound effects, looking at connections between depictions of environments, and masculinity that is in the process of undergoing change. These films all require that the viewer must not merely hear, but listen to, the soundtracks, and a final consideration of Father to Son (Hsiao Ya-Chuan, 2018) prompts an exploration of the connections between listening, mapping, and narrative patterning.