A heartfelt ethnography of remembering, Hong Kong-based filmmaker Ma Chi-hang’s reflexive documentary Ballad on the Shore (2017) exemplifies what Benjamin J. Harbert calls “ciné-ethnomusicology”: film work that inflects ethnomusicology by “relating music to cinematic experiences” in an epistemological circuit of documentation and film exhibition (Harbert Reference Harbert2018:245). The film rediscovers Hong Kong’s forgotten past as a fishing village by listening critically to the disappearing sounds of the Tanka boat-dwellers, a discriminated ethnic minority group living on boats in south China long before the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony in 1842. Quintessentially an expression of local culture, these sounds have become foreign and, worse, forgotten even to the younger generation within the indigenous community. The film’s title is telling: as the fishermen’s ballads become disconnected from their original marine environment, like fish out of water, they end up languishing on the shore and facing extinction. The shore is figured not as a landing site, let alone the point of departure for a journey, but rather as the last station of a dying tradition. Lai Lin-sau, a senior villager on the island of Tap Mun (Grass Island), is one of the few Tanka people who can still sing the Tanka songs. The shot before the title appears shows him not only singing but also forgetting the lyrics due to old age. Forgetfulness is included precisely to fight against forgetting.

The film poses questions about the preservation and revival of disappearing music as mediated by visual ethnography. The orally transmitted Tanka ballads are endangered because the Tanka language, or the fishermen’s dialect, is itself an endangered language in Cantonese- and English-dominant Hong Kong (it was listed in the domain of oral traditions and expressions in the first Intangible Cultural Heritage inventory of Hong Kong in 2014). Moreover, the very seafaring life that has been shaping the lyrics for generations has radically changed. Chan Wai-yee, after conversion to Christianity, has set the lament songs of the boat people to the words of Bible. She is a good improviser who appears to be infusing new life into the old genre. Can one say that the Tanka songs are still a living tradition even though they are no longer sung in traditional contexts?

As a foil to this, the film draws our attention to the value but also limitations of the work of ethnomusicologist Kenneth Chee-kwong Yip (see Yip Reference Yip1989), who is especially concerned with the correctness of each song’s text. We follow his footsteps in the Tai O fishing village soliciting songs from senior informants of his acquaintance. He double-checks with them to fix his transcription of the lyrics. The illiterate informants demonstrate specialist nautical knowledge circulated through the lyrics and point out where it’s been misheard and mistranscribed. For example, opium is referred to as “foreign tobacco” in a ballad and the ethnomusicologist does not understand its Tanka pronunciation. As the scholar documents all the Tanka songs with his camera, and the film goes on documenting Yip’s documentation, the director muses in voiceover that for all his efforts Yip cannot preserve the boat people’s disappearing marine life, which is key to understanding the meaning of the ballads.

To counter the impossibility of preservation and highlight a shared female experience of suffering, the interview with Chan Wai-yee from Grass Island is brought to life through cinematic reenactment. The account of her fear of/escape from arranged marriage and her dear mother’s devotion to her welfare segues into a wedding lament sung by Ho Sai-mui from the Hong Kong district of Aberdeen. This is played against Michael Rogge’s well-known historical documentary footage of Hong Kong and followed by the director’s personal reflections. Creative aims rather than clarity drive the editing choices, making viewers unsure of whether they are seeing the interviewee or the songstress. The director fleshes out Tanka ballads as a living archive of the boat people’s affective history and everyday life.

This documentary’s most unique contribution to ciné-ethnomusicology lies in the episodes that shed light on the bond between musical revival and human connection. In one of these, as Ho Sai-mui and her husband perform at a local primary school, the camera pans across the faces of young listeners. One boy blocks his ears refusing to listen while some girls sing along. This “lecture-recital” moderated by none other than the director shows that exhibition and performance are as important as documentation to create new audiences, albeit inattentive or even resistant ones, to music repertoires on the verge of disappearance. Cinematic experiences comfort and console the elderly informants, too. After Lai Lin-sau’s wife passes away about two-thirds into the film, the director shows him the footage of their conjugal bliss accompanied by a song sung by him. As the footage cuts to his wife’s close-up, Lai chokes in silence and then sings along with himself on the screen-within-the-screen. Lai passes away at a nursing home afterwards. Senior women from his family improvise funeral laments for him, attesting to the livingness of the disappearing music. The film ends in a reflexive yet hopeful vein as the footage played to Lai earlier is exhibited at a community screening in Aberdeen. The loop between documentation and film exhibition keeps endangered music alive and connects people from different places and stations in life.