MCLC: extreme documentary

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin B Lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: extreme documentary
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Source: dGenerate: 
http://dgeneratefilms.com/china-today/extreme-documentary-ai-weiwei-li-ning
-and-voyurism-in-chinese-cinema/

Extreme Documentary: Ai Weiwei, Li Ning, and Voyeurism in Chinese Cinema
By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph

A long time practitioner and advocate of self-documentation, Ai Weiwei
made online waves last week when he installed a set of
³self-surveillance² cameras to document his life and work via a live
feed. Buttressing the demands for ³transparency and openness² that
characterize so much of Ai¹s work, this project launched a
tongue-in-cheek reaction to the government surveillance cameras that
surround Ai¹s home and workshop. Only days after mounting his latest
³installation,² though, Ai was ordered to remove the cameras and the
internet feed ceased to live.

In the aftermath of its short existence, the so-called ³Weiwei Cam²
has been discussed as everything from an exercise in artistic
narcissism to a wry subversion of the Chinese government¹s Big
Brother-ing. It seems undeniable that at its crux, the camera project,
launched to commemorate Ai¹s eighty-one day detention last year,
served as a kind of self-aware self-policing. After all, what harm
could befall a man with the world¹s eyes on him?

With the Weiwei cam censored last week, Ai tweeted, ³The cameras have
been shut down. Bye-bye to all the voyeurs,² sparking another school
of thought on his act of radical transparency. A documentary filmmaker
whose work often chronicles his own movements and artistic and
activist efforts, Ai is no stranger to inviting public eyes to his
personal dealings. For a figure such as Ai Weiwei for whom
documentation is both a voluntary and involuntary way of life, much
can be gleaned from this most recent experiment, which reflects a
larger tendency of self-examination and voyeuriusm in Chinese
documentary film. In effect, Ai Weiwei¹s most recent project seems to
fit into the greater scheme of self-documentation in Chinese cinema
and a trend of what might be called extreme documentary.

In Li Ning¹s hefty and often brutally personal documentary Tape, there
is little of Li¹s life left to viewer¹s imagination. With his camera
rolling, Li argues with his wife, laments his financial ruin, engages
in all manner of literal and figurative contemplation of his lower
anatomy, strips himself bare and endures the waters of
experimentation, physical anguish, and creative guilt. With
unflinching intimacy and a running time upwards of three hours, Tape
should be a struggle, or at least a challenge to watch, but the viewer
is more often than not transfixed by the profound and immediate access
to Li Ning¹s innermost life. This is, in Lacanian or Mullveyan terms,
pure cinema, for Li Ning entices a rare and complete voyeurism. Li is
no doubt both puppet and puppet-master, the cinematographer and editor
of his own life; the choreographer and the dance itself. He is, like
Ai Weiwei, a performer whose personal exposure before the audience is
more than simply a negotiation or a collapse of the subject-object
paradigm, it¹s a kind of conversion.

The notion of extreme transparency is not limited to Li Ning¹s raw
self-exposure or Ai Weiwei¹s exhibition of personal politics through
daily activity, but seems to extend to a good deal of contemporary
Chinese documentary. Perhaps some of this self-reflection is wrapped
up in the concept of jiancha, a term used during the Cultural
Revolution to mean self-criticism, but which suggests a renewed
approach to examining the individual within the turbulent confines of
Chinese society. Broadcasting oneself to invite indiscriminate
voyeurism, despite the edge of narcissism and scopophelia suggested
inherently, is a radical act in a society where the individual remains
so conceptually and practically marginalized. Young Chinese
documentary filmmakers, from Wu Haohao to those involved in Wu
Wenguang¹s memory project, are increasingly turning cameras on
themselves, their own memories and bodies.

The audience¹s intimacy with the subject/object likewise might
suggest, in some cases, a directness and purity of narrative. It
seems, though, that in these filmmaker¹s efforts there is a kind of
suspension of control that disables complete narrative authority. In
Li Ning¹s film especially, it¹s apparent that the control the
filmmaker possesses over the film is no different than the control the
individual possesses over himself. But it¹s the margins of this
control, the unpredictable and highly vulnerable tenor of this willed
presentation, that makes Tape, the Weiwei Cam, and many more such
documentary events so electric­so extreme.

Ai Weiwei may have said goodbye to his internet voyeurs for now, but
in the greater realm of Chinese documentary, there¹s plenty more to
see.