MCLC: quarter century of independent docs

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin B Lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: quarter century of independent docs
***********************************************************

Source: Moving Image Source (5/14/13):
http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/extending-the-paintbrush-20130514

Extending the Paintbrush: A Quarter-Century of Chinese Independent
Documentaries
by Aaron Cutler

“Documentary should not be simply about film or art—it should have a
direct relationship with the reality that we live in every day, a
direct relationship with social work. From this it follows that one
person making a documentary film is not important; what is important
is many people working together for its sake.”

This is the Chinese independent documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, in
his essay “DV: Individual Filmmaking,” explaining how he understands
his practice. The epiphany came while Wu, a former high school teacher
and television news station employee-turned-documentary filmmaker, was
studying with the older Japanese documentary filmmaker Shinsuke Ogawa
in 1991. The previous year Wu had finished Bumming in Beijing: The
Last Dreamers (1990), the film that would come to be widely known as
China’s first independent documentary. It is also one of the starting
points of “Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions” (“CR/DV”), the
Museum of Modern Art’s sweeping, 28-film survey of the past
quarter-century of Chinese documentary film (co-curated by MoMA
Department of Film Assistant Curator Sally Berger and Kevin B. Lee,
independent curator and Vice President, Programming and Education for
dGenerate Films, an American distribution company for Chinese cinema),
which began last week and will continue until June 1.

In Bumming in Beijing, Wu interviews five young fellow freelance
artists who have chosen to abandon their government-assigned life
paths to pursue their crafts in the nation’s artistic capital. A
theater director speaks for the group when he says that pursuing what
he enjoys was the only realistic alternative to killing himself or
living like an aimless conformist. They do this despite knowing that a
strict government can upend their homes and lives at any time. The
military massacre of civilians due to student protests at Tiananmen
Square occurred on June 4, 1989, nearly halfway through Wu’s shoot;
though none of the people in the film refer to Tiananmen by name, it’s
clear that the incident helps contribute to their increasing loss of
hope in the possibility of making a living as artists in China,
leading to four of the five of them leaving the country by film’s end.

At the time of Bumming in Beijing’s completion, the Chinese
documentary tradition essentially consisted of state-sponsored
propaganda films, the most notable subset of which were called zhuanti
pian, or “special topics” films. In these programs (typically
conceived for television), a narrator recited a scripted commentary
that extolled a particular aspect of Chinese society, with stock
images illustrating his points. Bumming in Beijing’s filmmaking, whose
style came to be known as jishi zhuyi (“on-the-spot realism”) opposed
this approach. The film’s rough, handheld images and direct,
unfiltered sounds lacked voiceover as well as musical accompaniment.
Instead, they allowed for the rare occasion in Chinese media of people
sharing themselves honestly with the camera, which included sharing
their doubts and concerns about the country’s future.

The approach taken by Wu (who was present at several events during
“CR/DV”’s first days) reflected greater social change in a country
opening itself to a free market economy and greater acknowledgment of
foreign voices. 1988’s River Elegy, a six-part series aired on Central
Chinese Television (CCTV), had initially assumed the appearance of a
“special topics” film encouraging Chinese citizens to embrace foreign
trade before criticizing modern China as a decaying culture burdened
by the weight of tradition. (The series was censored after the
Tiananmen Square Massacre, and its director, Xia Jun, was fired.) In
the late 1980s foreign documentary crews came to shoot in China,
exposing young national filmmakers to other approaches that went even
further beyond towing the party lines.

“As China transitioned to a free-market economy, documentary film
became a means to capture how ordinary people lived and responded to
their new realities,” says “CR/DV” curator Sally Berger. This can be
seen in a film like Jiang Yue’s sweeping The Other Bank (1994), which
begins with documenting the rehearsal and performance process of a
Beijing production of a play directed by Mou Sen, one ofBumming in
Beijing’s leads. (Wu Wenguang appears as a supportive audience
member.) After the play’s run ends, the film’s focus shifts to
interviewing its discarded actors, who have come from rural areas
throughout China for this work and who must now each decide whether to
try to survive in the metropolis or return home. Like Bumming in
Beijing, the film focuses on young people at a crossroads, and the
play’s central image—a distant place that one must strive to
reach—comes to take on a different meaning for each of them as they
define their own paths.

Berger continues that, “Real people in real situations not only found
voices in non-fiction films, but also became part of the fabric of
fiction films.” The young filmmaker Zhang Yuan, who graduated as a
member of the Sixth Generation of students to attend the Beijing Film
Academy, showed how fiction films could utilize documentary with what
is now often considered China’s first independent feature,Mama (1990).
The story of a young single mother struggling to raise her mentally
challenged son, shot in Zhang’s apartment, mixed fictional
elements—including a clear, forward-moving narrative and repeated
emotive close-ups of the actress Qing Yan—with color footage of real
developmentally challenged children as well as interviews with their
mothers, who discuss the need for the government to grant their
families easy access to schools as well as full legal rights and
protection. The effect of this combination is to expose the viewer to
an ongoing social problem while giving him or her a character with
whom to identify; the same holds true for the older filmmaker Zhang
Yimou’s subsequent, much larger-budget fiction film The Story of Qiu
Ju (1992), in which the star Gong Li appears as a peasant woman within
real poor Beijing neighborhoods.

Qiu Ju was released the same year that a small group of about a dozen
people met informally in Zhang Yuan’s home to discuss the emergence of
what would be called the New Documentary Movement. No manifesto was
written, and no principles were laid out save that the filmmakers
would support each other in their opposition to official media
channels. The NDM’s early filmmakers understood the system that they
were opposing because many of them worked for it—in fact, their
television station jobs allowed them to easily borrow cameras and
other filmmaking equipment with which to make their independent films.

They came to see two foreign documentary filmmakers in particular as
important models for their work. The Japanese filmmaker Shinsuke Ogawa
(the subject of an upcoming New York retrospective at Anthology Film
Archives) helped create the Yamagata International Documentary Film
Festival, where many independent Chinese documentarians received key
foreign exposure. His dedication to chronicling the struggles of
peasants oppressed by the Japanese government helped inspire Chinese
films like Li Hong’s Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997), for which the
director spent two years filming migrant women looking for work in
Beijing. (The film in fact won Yamagata’s Shinsuke Ogawa Award, given
to emerging Asian filmmakers, a few years after Wu Wenguang had won
the prize for his film My Time with the Red Guards [1993, not included
in “CR/DV”].)

The other influential foreign artist was the American documentarian
Frederick Wiseman, whose films study the mechanics of institutions
ranging from military complexes to mental institutions to high schools
and avoid voiceover, soundtracks, and on-camera interviews in favor of
observing authority figures as they make fools of themselves in
action. Wiseman was such an important influence that Wu Wenguang (who
had since made a sequel to Bumming in Beijing, consisting of new
encounters with its leads, called At Home in the World [1995]) brought
him to China, where he organized a screening series and met NDM
filmmakers. It’s easy to see Wiseman’s influence in a film like Duan
Jinchuan’s No. 16 Barkhor South Street (1996), a TV-sponsored record
of a national ceremony celebrating the anniversary of China’s 1951
declaration of sovereignty over the current “autonomous entity” of
Tibet, or what has often been called Tibet’s liberation. As the film
proceeds, Chinese officials order Tibetan civilians to wear clothes
identifying themselves, and tell them that they will not be able to go
to the bathroom during this event that they have been required to
attend. The film’s careful observation, made by a Chinese filmmaker
who had lived in Tibet for eight years prior to filming, makes clear
the problems inherent in calling Tibet liberated without delivering an
explicit message about them. “It proved a valuable approach to a
situation where so little could be said publicly,” says Robert
Barnett, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia
University. “Duan made a commitment to really look at what he could
actually see in Tibet, rather than fulfill peoples’ desires for what
they want to see there.”

Though “CR/DV,” as well as this article’s historical summary, has
omitted many key films and filmmakers from the NDM, the narrative of
Chinese independent documentary can still be summarized as that of a
small, little-known group of collaborators based in Beijing. But soon,
as series co-curator Kevin B. Lee says, “The technology proliferated
beyond the professionals.” In 1997 the small, light mini DV (digital
video) camera debuted in China, leading to what the great documentary
and fiction filmmaker Jia Zhangke (represented in “CR/DV” with his
hybrid film 24 City [2008]) has since called “the age of the amateur.”
Shooting on mini DV proved significantly cheaper, faster, and simpler
than working with celluloid cameras had been and as a result, many
more people were able to make films with much greater facility than
had previously been the case. In a 2002 questionnaire, the filmmaker
Ning Ying wrote simply, “dv allows for more freedom.”

The new technology left greater room for documentary artists to be
able to make films outside Beijing. The monumental Tie Xi Qu: West of
the Tracks (2003) is one such example of a film whose creation was
facilitated by mini DV’s advent. The film's television-trained
director, Wang Bing (whose marvelous recent film Three Sisters is
currently playing in a weeklong theatrical run at Anthology Film
Archives), and his sound engineer Lin Xudong spent two years filming
in the Tie Xi factory district. Wang was thus able to record many of
the metallurgical and smelting factories, originally built by Japanese
imperialists in the 1930s, as they fell into disrepair, abandoned by
bankrupt owners. He was also able to record their workers being
discarded. The finished film consists of three parts, shot roughly
simultaneously, that focus on the remaining active factory
environments, which are male-dominated (most of the female workers
have been fired), the district neighborhoods whose residents are being
forced out of their homes, and the railway system running throughout
the area. Though the people onscreen rarely acknowledge Wang, his
proximity to them is always felt. A recurring type of shot throughout
the film positions the camera at the front of a train, looking forward
through the snowy tracks, as though eager to capture the district
while it still exists.

West of the Tracks subtly indicates how the switch from film to mini
DV cameras created not just a technical shift but an existential one.
The filmmaker could no longer behave like an observer, as the amount
of time and equipment involved in working with celluloid could allow
him, but would now have to explicitly be a part of the action. The
degree of active participation in the action could vary—in Railroad of
Hope (2002), the filmmaker Ning Ying’s voice is heard onboard a train
as she talks with migrant workers seeking employment—but the choice to
actively participate could not.

In Wu Wenguang’s 2001 essay “DV: Individual Filmmaking” (published in
an English-language translation by Cathryn Clayton in 2006), Wu wrote
about the changes that he felt himself undergoing while recording a
traveling performance troupe with a mini DV camera for his film Jiang
Hu: Life on the Road (1999). “With this project,” he wrote, “I just
carried the DV camera with me like a pen and hung out with the members
of the troupe.” He would turn the camera on and off as he chose to,
taking it with him into people’s homes and even using it while
cooking. Up to then, making documentaries had not been “such a casual,
individual thing”; now the separations between filmmaker and subject,
and between life and art, only existed to the extents to which he
wished to impose them. As a result, he claimed, he became more
connected to and invested in his subjects than he had ever been
before. Rather than being a filmmaker, “I have become an individual
with a DV camera…it was DV that saved me, that allowed me to maintain
a kind of personal relationship to documentary filmmaking, and made it
far more than just an identity.”

The extent of Wu’s presence in the celluloid works he had made up to
that point had varied. In Bumming in Beijing, his voice can be heard
offscreen as he addresses his fellow freelance artists; at other times
he can be seen in front of the camera. At all times he was included as
a character within the action. Yet with video he would not just
include himself within the story, but criticize his place in it. A
young man from a rural part of the Eastern Chinese province of
Shangdong with the stage name Wang Zhutian brought Wu an
autobiographical script for a fiction film that he wanted the director
to shoot; Wu demurred, and instead filmed the young man as he took the
script to a Chinese mainstream film production executive, who told him
that it would need to be less personal and include more sex.

Resulting scenes show members of the film industry (including Mama
director Zhang Yuan) speaking condescendingly to the young man and to
other people from poor, rural backgrounds who are trying to break into
the industry while happily greeting the cameraman Wu as one of them;
these scenes also show Wu letting the imbalance stand for the sake of
his own movie. Wu stays silent in response both to colleagues cajoling
him and to Wang begging him for help, and in both cases his silence is
damning. Wu struggled to find a title for his film until attending the
Tokyo International Film Festival. After hearing filmmakers who had
been snubbed for prizes complain—“Fuck the jury,” “Fuck the
festival”—he chose to title it Fuck Cinema (2005).

At one point in the film, a man laughs at Wu’s camera and says, “I see
you came armed”; in another moment, Wang says that he feels as though
Wu’s camera is being pointed at him like a gun. Fuck Cinema suggests
that a great imbalance of power exists between the person filming and
the people being filmed. The parties have to actively work together if
they wish to hold equal control over what is being depicted.
Independent filmmaker Jian Yi felt the same way. In 2004 Jian was
working as a public communications expert for a European Commission
initiative called the EU-China Training Programme on Village
Governance. Part of his work consisted of training residents of small
villages throughout China how to conduct an election. But he felt
compromised in his efforts to communicate with civilians directly; as
Jian writes by e-mail, “I found myself talking with villagers while
ten escorts from various levels of the local government surrounded
me.”

For the sake of getting alternative perspectives on village life, he
soon afterwards invited Wu Wenguang to judge a national photo contest
on village governance. The two men received a set of submissions shot
almost entirely by professional photographers, to which Wu responded
by suggesting that they engage villagers in telling their own stories.

A nationwide application process resulted in the selection of 10
villagers from different parts of China, each of whom made a short
documentary about his or her hometown’s electoral processes that were
eventually combined into the omnibus film China Villagers Documentary
Project (2005). Each segment begins with a brief introduction to the
filmmaker, who can belong to either gender and many different age
groups. (The youngest filmmakers are in their early twenties, the
oldest in their late fifties.) This introduction is followed by a
brief chronicle of fellow villagers arguing over how to run elections
best. Like in comic novels, the stated end goal is rarely reached. The
things that consistently come to matter in the short films are not who
wins the elections, but other aspects of self-governance, such as the
pleasure of voting for the first time. Some segments diverge from
voting preparations altogether for more pressing business, such as
debates over how large to build a village’s lake.

In the film’s second segment, a group of children point at the camera
and shout, “Monster! This is a monster from another world!”, a comic
reflection on Wu’s problems with his own filmmaking. Since then, Wu
has shepherded amateur filmmakers through training at his Caochangdi
Workstation in Beijing and through programs such as his Folk Memory
Documentary Project, in which people record their villages’ histories,
sometimes for more than one film. Zou Xueping’s The Starving Village
(2010) captured the recollections from members of her village of The
Great Famine (1958-1961), a period during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in
which anywhere between 15 million and 45 million people starved to
death. In Zou’s follow-up film, The Satiated Village (2011), the
filmmaker returns to show The Starving Village to the film’s subjects
and record their reactions to it, including their concerns over
whether showing the film abroad would do harm to China.

Wu’s brand of participatory documentary is one particular strand of
observational films unfolding in recent Chinese independent
documentaries. Others are overtly political in observing people and
places that might never be registered on film otherwise. American
filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki, present at "Chinese
Realities/Documentary Visions" with his experimental portrait of an
oil-rich site-turned-ghost town, Yumen (co-directed with Chinese
filmmakers Huang Xiang and Xu Ruotao), writes by e-mail that "one of
the stark differences between the creative communities I've been
involved with in the United States and in China, of course, is the
political climate, and how government pressure and repression work to
shape and, contrary to the government's intention, even fuel the
production of the independent documentaries in China today.”

An example of a political film demonstrating compassion towards others
is Zhao Liang’s Petition (2009), filmed over 12 years as people from
throughout China camp out near Beijing petition offices to demand that
the government address their grievances. A viewer senses that the
filmmaker cannot help but become emotionally invested in his subjects
as he films them. Other films, such as Tape(2010), are more directly
pointed towards self-observation from the outset, as the performance
artist Li Ning (who has previously collaborated with Wu Wenguang)
assembles disorderly fragments from throughout his professional and
personal life in order to comment on his struggles to survive as an
artist. Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (2007) suggests how both a filmmaker
and his or her subject always hold responsibility to each other. The
black-and-white film consists mainly of an interview with Wang
Qingyao, an 85 year-old former teacher whose wife was a high school
vice principal beaten to death by her students during the Cultural
Revolution. Wang photographed her corpse and now presents the images
to Hu because, he says, “If I do not tell the true story, I would be
ashamed of not doing my duty.” He is also speaking for the filmmaker.

These films’ humanist approaches are just a few examples of the kind
of work that’s being done, as are more formally experimental
documentaries like the structural work Oxhide II (2009) and the found
footage film Disorder (2009). Karin Chien, President/Founder of
dGenerate Films, says that for her the filmmaking in contemporary
Chinese independent documentaries—whether the films are being made for
personal, political, or aesthetic reasons—is “basically an extension
of the pen or the paintbrush.” She sees the films as tending “to draw
towards things that are not covered in the mainstream media,
specifically because they are not being covered there. While in the
United States documentaries often exist to give another side of an
issue that’s being discussed, in China there is often simply no
discussion.”

One can see this emphasis on acknowledging hidden subjects—in a
country wherefilm festivals live at risk of government closure, and
where outright criticism of the one-party system can still land an
artist in prison—continuing not just through pure documentaries, but
also through fiction films with documentary elements. Pema Tseden’s
Old Dog (2011), which will receive a weeklong run during “CR/DV” with
the filmmaker in person, tells the story of a Tibetan family arguing
over whether to sell its prized mastiff to Chinese buyers before the
animal can be stolen. The state-sponsored Old Dog functions like early
independent Chinese fiction films did by recording actors in the
interest of revealing a setting. This time, the setting is Tibet under
Chinese rule, as shown by the first director in China to film in the
Tibetan language with an all-Tibetan crew. “This film is trying to
find a language that gives us the comforts of fictional storytelling
while encouraging us to search for other levels of meaning,” says
Robert Barnett, in reference to the way the film allegorizes
contemporary challenges facing Tibetan culture.

Yet even despite all these different trends and examples, it’s still
hard to generalize about what’s happening in Chinese independent
documentary film today. This is not just because there’s so much
product—in feature-length films as well as the many videos uploaded
onto the Chinese YouTube, tudou.com—but also because so little of it
is being seen in China or in the States. The bulk of these films never
achieve theatrical distribution in either country, instead reaching
audiences through DVDs and online links. What is clear is that a
widening number of approaches are available to independent Chinese
filmmakers, many of whom are making deeply personal work in dialogue
with each other’s.

Ying Liang’s When Night Falls (2012) is a fiction film based on a true
story, and even largely inspired by two previous documentaries—One
Recluse (2010), an investigation into the case of a young man, Yang
Jia, executed in 2008 for murdering four policemen after he had beaten
and his claims of police abuse ignored, and Wang Jinmei (2010), a
filmed interview with the young man’s mother. Both of these
documentaries were directed by the visual artist and political
activist Ai Weiwei, who has made a practice of posting his films
online despite the Chinese government’s efforts to either firewall
them or take them down altogether. (Ai’s record of his own extreme
struggles with Chinese police, Disturbing the Peace[2010], is featured
in the “CR/DV” lineup.)

Ying’s film uses a professional actress (Nai An) to imagine how Wang
Jinmei might have behaved on the day that her son was executed (an
event that she did not learn about until after it happened), while
bookending its reimagining with photographs and tweets that the real
woman had posted online. Ying has told me that in real life the case’s
proceedings were closed to the public, and that information about Wang
Jinmei had been difficult to find. He told this story as a way of
helping people identify with someone that he considers to be an
ordinary woman in extreme circumstances. Ying writes by e-mail that
“Life is wider than cinema is for me.”

Many of the films discussed in this article can be found and viewed
online. More information about recent Chinese independent documentary
can be read in the bookThe New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For
the Public Record (2010), edited by Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa
Rofel. The book includes a reprint of Wu Wenguang’s essay “DV:
Individual Filmmaking.”

Thanks for additional research help to Robert Barnett, Sally Berger,
Chris Berry, La Frances Hui, Jian Yi, Kevin B. Lee, J.P. Sniadecki,
Wai Ho, Zhu Rikun, and Karin Chien and dGenerate Films.

Aaron Cutler lives with the artist Mariana Shellard, works as a
programming aide for the São Paulo International Film Festival, and
keeps a film criticism site, The Moviegoer.