Beyond Beauty is a Taiwanese documentary produced by renowned director Hou Hsiao-Hsien and directed by aerial photographer Chi Po-lin. It consists entirely of aerial shots of Taiwan from the vantage point of a helicopter. We’ve wanted to see it ever since we watched the trailer showing off the crystal clear images of the best scenery that the island has to offer. Given how small and how heavily industrialized the island is, the variety and grandeur of the natural landscape can’t help but surprise and impress.

The opening scenes sweep through this wealth of natural scenery with no context and barely any narration. There are rugged, forest-covered mountains, blue seas sparkling in the sun, rivers curled in all manner of curious shapes and much more than I am able to name. A bit later the camera moves on to human inhabited rural areas: fishermen and fish farms, herds of livestock, farmers working their fields. The incredible clarity of these images makes them every bit as mesmerizing as the earlier shots. Still, without so much as text identifying where these places are, even the most spectacular of vistas starts to get boring. Then the narrator starts talking in earnest and gets so annoying that you wish he’d just shut up.

It is neither surprising nor deplorable that a project of this nature should push a environmentalist agenda. I am very far from being an environmentalist myself but I think that I am fair enough to at least admire a well reasoned argument for the cause. So my problem with the narration in Taiwan From Above isn’t that it’s pro-environment, it’s that it amounts to nothing more than vacuous pontification. And pontification it is because everything is said in the most accusatory and most paternalistic of holier-than-thou tones. This means it’s basically preaching to the choir because it certainly doesn’t try to make any reasonable arguments.

I’m not going to make this post too long by going through the position taken by this documentary in detail so I’ll just mention a few examples. One of these is how the narrator berates among many other things Taipei’s excellent metro system because it consumes so much electricity, ignoring the fact that trains are by far the most environmentally friendly of transport systems. Perhaps the dumbest statement is when he approvingly quotes an organic farmer who uses no pesticides, saying that “Whatever is left after the insects have eaten their fill belongs to us.” Not only does this demonstrate how pests can very well destroy the entirety of a crop, leaving absolutely nothing left, it also ignores how the inefficiency of small-scale organic farming would necessitate farming on a much larger area to support the same level of population.

The narrator does acknowledge the contradiction between wanting development and preserving the environment. But the incoherence of his arguments and the impractical nature of his only suggestion of an alternative makes this little more than empty hand-wringing. What I find especially contemptible is the implication that all development is inherently harmful, as if Taiwan could even exist as a nation without the strong economy that development has brought about. It is especially revealing when he bemoans a time when everyone’s houses had a river running in front of it and a mountain behind it. Yes, that was also the time when probably everyone were uneducated subsistence farmers and the average life expectancy was in the 50s.

One could just try to ignore the narration and focus on the amazing images and marvel at the technical competence involved in capturing them. I have no doubt that this project will be of inestimable value to Taiwan, decades or even hundreds of years from now, historians will be eager to pore over these high resolution images to see what the country was like. But it gets incredibly annoying when the images also show what a spectacular sight a modern city can be yet the narration continually denigrates everything that is man-made. It’s like the narrator is showing us all those millions of Taiwanese going to work, exercising in the park, packed in religious festivals and saying, “Fuck you all for ruining Taiwan!” If the makers of this documentary thinks the island is overpopulated, they should at least have the intellectual courage to openly make this case.

As it stands, while the aerial photography is everything I could have hoped for, the writing of the narration is so dumb and the overall tone is so antithetical to my own beliefs that I find it impossible to recommend it. As my wife commented, even the closing shot of a group of young climbers proudly displaying the Taiwanese flag smacks of hypocrisy. After all, they are tourists, which the documentary has sneered at, they must have used modern transportation to get there, which the documentary despises and they are proud of a nation whose entire existence and strength comes from industrial development. Those young Taiwanese may well be proud of their country but from what we hear here the makers of this documentary are ashamed of it.