MCLC: Wu Wenguang's Memory Project

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 20 10:27:40 EST 2011


MCLC LIST
From: kevin lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Wu Wenguang's Memory Project
***********************************************************

Source: dGenerate Films:
http://dgeneratefilms.com/academia/getting-the-past-out-loud-wu-wenguangs-m
emory-project-and-a-new-voices-for-documentary-film-at-nyu/

³Getting the Past Out Loud²: Wu Wenguang¹s Memory Project and New
Voices In Documentary Film at NYU
By Maya E. Rudolph

³Independent film has gone from underground to come above ground.² Wu
Wenguang¹s most recent project in mentorship and documentary
filmmaking, which made its US premiere at NYU under the title Getting
The Past Out Loud: Memory Projects with Wu Wengugang, is an
exploration of individual and collective memory, of personal
storytelling, and of the evolving talents of China¹s newest generation
of filmmakers. The event was organized by Professors Angela Zito and
Zhang Zhen at the Center for Religion and Media Studies at NYU, which
Zito co-directs and was co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema
Studies, where Zhang is Associate Professor. The event was also made
possible thanks to generous support from China House.

Wu, often extolled to as the godfather of the New Documentary Movement
in Chinese independent cinema, presented two of his own projects at
the weekend screening series, but emphasized the significant work of
those young people involved in the Memory Project.  ³My generation of
filmmakers often started out working within the state system, but we
were dissatisfied and bored,² Wu expressed in conversation with
Professors Zhang, Zito and Cinema Studies Professor Dan Streible.
³Filmmaking twenty years ago was about throwing tantrums. The new
generation is more introspective, they don¹t need to throw tantrums.
They¹ve adapted a more authentic independent posture.²

The Memory Project, launched in 2010, was designed with as much
credence to oral history and family succession as to extending
documentary practices to the boundaries of Chinese village life. The
aim of the Memory Project is to dispatch young filmmakers‹mostly
recent college graduates‹away from urban landscapes and Wu¹s
Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing to their hometowns, the villages of
their predecessors. Here, armed with digital cameras and a posture
that is as earnest and curious as it is ³independent,² these
filmmakers being to unravel stories of village histories and politics,
stories of their families and themselves. Five films, including Wu
Wenguang¹s most recent film Treatment and Memory Project participant
Zou Xueping¹s Satiated Village, screened at NYU. I was fortunate to
see three screenings: Wu Wenguang¹s 2005 Fuck Cinema and two
selections from the Memory Project, Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi by
Luo Bing and Zhang Menqi¹s Self-Portrait With Three Women.

Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi is a film by Luo Bing, a Beijing-based
artist who returned to his ancestral village in Hunan Province to
interview his grandparents¹ generation about the darkest, most brutal
years of the Cultural Revolution. While Luo¹s exploration of the
so-called ³famine years,² the period of widespread starvation from
1958 to ¹61 that accompanied Mao¹s ³Great Leap Forward², is often
wrenchingly sad, his camera does not neglect the humor and irony of
village life. The community in Luo Village is presented as one largely
without bitterness, where a certain acknowledgement of their shared,
albeit harrowing past allows the village elders to connect with
one-another, and also with the young man holding the camera.
Throughout his process, Luo searches for an elusive memoir written by
his neighbor, Ren Dinqi, which is rumored to spare no detail in
spelling out the days of Grandpa Ren¹s life from unbearable suffering
to redemption.

Luo¹s pursuit of the memoir takes him away from the paths and
courtyards of Luo Village and into quiet rooms laden with
detritus‹abandoned farm equipment, old tools, the remnants of a
not-quite-forgotten time‹where he questions what it means to remember,
to record memory. ³Did he write the memoir here?² Luo voice-overs, his
camera probing the dusty surfaces of a dark room, ³Did he write it
because he suffered too much?² The forward motion of Luo¹s camera is
steady: opening doors, walking down paths. While the question of
Grandpa Ren¹s memoir carries a poignant narrative through-line, it is
Luo¹s encounters with neighbors such as Yu Maoli, that are most
heart-stopping. A man clearly nearing the end of a terribly difficult
life, Yu Maoli speaks with Luo Bing until his daughter, her voice
needling from off screen, shrilly forbids her father from discussing
the shadows of the past. Luo tries to reason with the daughter, asking
what harm an interview can do in this day and age, while the camera
remains on Yu Maoli. His lips move, silent and desperate-seeming, but
no words come out‹ some memories are perhaps simply inexpressible.

Zhang Mengqi is a filmmaker and dancer whose film Self-Portrait With
Three Women represents a wholehearted attempt to reconcile personal
history, from the corporeal to the abstract. With regard to her mother
and maternal grandmother as both generational and emotional
touchpoints, Zhang constructs a intimate narrative that blends the
boundaries of physical spaces‹bodies and dwelling places‹with the
intangible sense of memory, of passed time. Zhang¹s approach to her
indisciplinary autobiography is remarkably frank, incorporating
voice-over biographical details and archival photographs and letters
to set the record spinning into motion.

It is when Zhang delves into an exploration of blood-lines, sometimes
literally interpreted through discussion of menstrual patterns and
other moments of female adolescence, that she breaks with narrative
convention and constructs a more experimental work of art fusing
memory, speech, and body. After recording her mother¹s discussion of
various moments of both shame and triumph in Zhang¹s upbringing, Zhang
projects a close-up image of her mother telling these stories on her
body. Here, her mother¹s face illuminates and and colors Zhang¹s
contorted form like a stain. A vocabulary for modern dance is probably
useful in describing these scenes, but the essence of Zhang¹s
performance‹that which is written on the body, that which is shaped by
gender and loss and family to form and deform the self‹is undeniable.
While a few moments of pleading self-discovery betray Zhang¹s youth as
a filmmaker and a woman, this Self-Portrait is unashamed, wholly
concerned what it means to both embrace and even revile the conditions
of the body, the limitations of legacy, the infinity of
self-reflection.

While Zhang¹s exploration is entirely her own, it¹s difficult not to
draw parallels between Self-Portrait and the project of another
frequent Wu Wenguang collaborator and student: Li NingŒs 2010
documentary Tape. Tape, a sprawling, inventive, and absorbing movement
of brutal self-examination, follows Li Ning¹s life as a father,
husband, dancer, and teacher through years of Li¹s most experimental
and elemental moments.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the screening of Zou Xueping¹s
Satiated Village, Zou¹s second film in a series that portrays life and
history in the filmmaker¹s hometown. Zou¹s earlier film in this
series, completed in 2010, is entitled Starving Village.

The screening of Wu Wengguang¹s 2005 documentary Fuck Cinema was
highlighted by his discussion of the work as an unexpectedly personal
effort that brought Wu and his legendary role in the Chinese
independent filmmaking community into an unprecedented and relatively
uncomfortable spotlight. Fuck Cinema tells the story of Wang, a
migrant huckster so dead-set on seeing his autobiographical screenplay
produced, he lives and breathes cinematic ambition, sacrificing every
comfort and sleeping on the roof of a dormitory to see his dream
realized. For all of Wang¹s earnest perseverance and goofy naiveté,
the revelation of Fuck Cinema unfolds an uneasy reality. Wang¹s
struggle is tripwired by arrogant directors, dismissive producers, and
an industry that appears impenetrable and self-important, ugly even.

After appealing repeatedly and unsuccessfully to Wu for financial and
structural support, Wang expresses his deep disappointment with world
of cinema as it exists both inside and out of Wu¹s camera. Wang now
exists only as a subject of Wu¹s dispassionate gaze; he¹s a just a
character in the lens of a celebrated filmmaker. What is this
industry, this artistry in which Wu is so deeply engaged? What does it
mean to shape someone else¹s story? Wu¹s physical absence from the
frame and his passivity as a documenter speaks volumes, ultimately
blurring the line between subject and object in an incomprehensible
slew of cinema, story, industry, responsibility.

Intercut into Wang¹s story are a series of audition tapes, pretty
young actresses asked to speak their opinion about prostitutes.
Without context, without direction, the women stumble through
answers‹what¹s there to say? Wordlessness, a gesture towards the
unutterable is the stagnant current of Fuck Cinema.  ³Cinema is a
complex idea,² Wu announced after the screening, ³You say Œfuck it¹
when you don¹t know what else to say. When the feeling overwhelms
you.²

What has been accomplished by Wu Wenguang and the Memory Project seems
broader than just a new approach to documentary storytelling, but
suggests an important step in the evolution of Chinese cinema‹cinema
as self, cinema as history, even cinema as an overwhelming force.  In
my experience, the 80-hou (born after 1980) generation is sometimes
maligned as an indifferent collection of privileged and arrogant
youths, ³little emperors² with their focus always forward,
self-absorbed without being self-aware. To the contrary, Luo Bing and
Zhang Mengqi¹s films are some of the strongest evidence I¹ve ever seen
to suggest the talent, mindfulness, and gratitude of the 80-hou
generation. Certainly, these works lack the rageful zeal of this
documentary legacy¹s self-described tantrum-throwing days and films
like Wu¹s Bumming in Beijing (1990), but inspire a sense of uncommon
introspection and acute understanding of narrative exchange, that a
story can be a conversation. These film notably also show the 80-hou
generation in a markedly different light than films like  Jian YiŒs
sometimes absurdist, reality-TV-centered documentary Super, Girls!
(Jian Yi, one of the first filmmakers to focus on the 80-hou
generation, also boasts a significant history of shared projects and
creative exchange with Wu Wengguang.). Framing is impossible to
ignore‹Wu makes this much clear in Fuck Cinema‹and the eye that
focuses the camera can never be relegated to that of a mere spectator.

Whether addressing the political scars of the faint past or assembling
facets of personal history, each filmmaker is completely present in
their questions and answers, their consideration of a shared past and
individual future. Wu Wenguang¹s magnanimous efforts as a mentor and a
supporter of young artists are giving rise to a generation of films
not easily ignored. Sure, this is where the personal and political
meet, but also where community and independence intersect to show how
cinema can, and does, look.

=================================================

http://dgeneratefilms.com/chinese-cinema-events/a-conversation-with-wu-weng
uang/

CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Filmmaker Wu Wenguang on the Memory Project
By Maya E. Rudolph

After his screening series premiering many works from the Getting the
Past Out Loud: Memory Projects at New York University, I spoke with
filmmaker and Memory Projects organizer Wu Wenguang about the project,
a new generation of filmmakers, and his view on screening works in the
US. The event was held at the NYU Center for Religion and Media and
co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema Studies, with generous
support from China House.

Special thanks to NYU Professors Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen for
curating the program and arranging this interview with Wu Wenguang.


dGF: When and how did the Memory Project begin?

Wu Wenguang: The project started last year. It was last summer that we
had the opportunity to start this. It was during this time we first
started going to villages to conduct interviews. It had to be summer,
this was the ideal season for heading off to these villages. So,
everyone headed off to their own villages, their hometowns, for these
interviews. When they got back, everyone started to edit, give advice,
collaborate. This is how we got started.

dGF: The majority of the people participating in this project as
filmmakers are pretty young, born in the 80s or 90s. You¹ve said that
your generation¹s view of cinema differs greatly from that of these
young people. What do you feel you have to teach one another‹what kind
of exchange do you have?

WWG: These kids have a lot of confidence, real self-starters. I don¹t
know if I really can teach them much. We can simply work together.
Sometimes, the people in these villages think I¹ve taught them how to
shoot and what to shoot. This isn¹t the case; they¹ve chosen how and
what to shoot by themselves. What I have to teach them isn¹t
important. What is important is their own work and how they choose to
conduct it.


dGF: In some of the films, the subjects express hesitation about
having the films shown abroad. They¹re worried that foreigners will
develop a negative view of China or Chinese village life. As someone
who works hard to have these films screened abroad, how do you
reconcile this contradiction?

WWG: Yes, this appears especially in Zou Xueping¹s film Satiated
Village. The villagers expressed these kinds of misgivings. They are
worried. They think foreigners won¹t understand, will laugh at them.
When you saw this film, did you want to laugh at them?

dGF: Definitely not. History is complicated.

WWG: It¹s not even about history. It¹s about human understanding.
Would you look at this work and this, ³You are so stupid?²

dGF: Of course not.

WWG: Right. But they are afraid, they even assume that you will look
at them and say ³You are so stupid.² But you won¹t. They need to be
told now that you would not say this, that you won¹t laugh at them.

dGF: Jian Yi¹s IFChina Original Studio has closed recently. What do
you think about this? Does it create any concern for or have any
effect on your Caochangdi Workstation?

WWG: I believe they are relocating to new location. I¹m not totally
clear on the events surrounding this. Why did they have to close? I
think, overall, no one can really make them close their doors. There
is no such thing as closing off this kind of organization now‹we have
email, we have internet. Nobody can stop you. Just one
person‹yourself‹can stop you. No one else can force you to do
anything. Even if they [IFChina] no longer have the cooperation of the
University and they get kicked out, they can find some other place to
operate. They¹ll find a new place and continue to work.

dFG: I agree. So, this is the last time most of these works have
screened in the US. How did you feel about the audience reaction?

WWG: This was about what I expected. The audience was great and
received all the pieces really well. The best audience is one that
really gets the work, will engage with the filmmakers and material.
The best audience is one that really expresses interest in the work.
They can come from any background and just come to watch, start
thinking after watching. That¹s the goal.





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