Alison Klayman (alisonklayman.com)

Alison Klayman is a journalist who, while living in China from 2006-2010, produced radio and television for news sources such as  NPR’s “All Things Considered,” AP Television, Voice of America, Current TV, and CBC. She is the director of the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. I spoke with Alison at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah about the film’s trajectory, the role of social media in making bringing this story to life, and her working relationship with China’s most notorious artist and filmmaker. Thanks to Alison and her team for their cooperation.

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dGenerate Films: Can you talk a little about the origins of your working relationship with Ai Weiwei and how the project got started?

Alison Klayman: I had been living in Beijing for about two years when my roommate, Stephanie Tung, who was working at Three Shadows [Photography Center, a gallery and cultural center in Caochangdi, Beijing] got me involved in an exhibition they were doing of Ai Weiwei’s photos from New York. The photos are kind of a“greatest hits” series of contemporary cultural figures in China and provided an interesting window into this cross-cultural understanding of New York that I was really drawn to. I was kind of underemployed at the time and Stephanie suggested I make a video to accompany the exhibition. Rong Rong [photographer and Three Shadows director] gave me the okay and I went from Three Shadows to Weiwei’s house with the camera already rolling. It was really natural and organic. I didn’t just show up at Weiwei’s door and say “I’m fascinated by you, I want to film you.” We finished the video and Weiwei liked. I think it showed who he really is—very charismatic and engaging, fun-loving, doesn’t take himself too seriously. And then projects just kept coming up, so I feel compelled to keep filming. That’s kind of the beauty of Beijing—it’s very open and you can easily fall into these kinds of projects unexpectedly.

dGF: The film opens with a very loaded quote about Ai Weiwei’s cats and the fact that, if one of his many cats hadn’t learned to open the front door, no one would know that cats were capable of opening doors. This opening seems to speak both to Ai’s status as a maverick and also brings to mind Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration that “it makes no difference if a cat is black or white so long as it can catch mice.” Can you discuss this opening?

AK: We tried out a million different openings. I was really uncertain how I wanted to open the film—we even had a different beginning at the screening at Art Basel. I wanted to audience to meet Weiwei first as an artist, one on one. Ultimately, I felt this opening gave the film somewhere to go and gave momentum to many of the storylines, especially the projects related to the Sichuan earthquake. It’s also telling because Weiwei’s house is just filled with cats—animals everywhere.

On the level of allegory, I think this represents the idea that Weiwei is part of a generation of like-minded people, but he’s still a unique case. It’s this fact that makes the film engaging, the fact that he’s completely unique and kind of one-in-a-generation.

dGF: How did you conceive of your audience as you were editing, in terms of their knowledge of China and of Ai Weiwei?

AK: I did post in New York with an editor who had no background in China and no Mandarin language skills, so this gave me perspective on what people know and don’t know about China. I really had no idea beforehand. I designed the film to add value for those who are familiar with Weiwei and get to know him in a new way, but I made the overall assumption that people didn’t really know anything about him.

Now, after his detention, I have to question what people really do know. Sure, people are more aware of Ai Weiwei, but I think this creates more of an appetite for information than a preconception. After the detention, I contemplated changing the film to open with this story-line, but I now see the film as a chronicle of everything leading up to the detention. We had no need to reverse engineer the film.

dGF: In the film, [Chinese art scholar and curator] Karen Smith says of Ai Weiwei’s art “because it’s Chinese, it becomes political.” This seems like a telling description of how even without a topic as politically divisive as Ai Weiwei, any story about China can be politically charged these days. How did this idea inform your storytelling or approach to the film’s inherent politics?

AK: This was an entry point to a lot of aspects of the film. I’ve seen Ai Weiwei interact with a lot of journalists and react to people’s expectations. I think these expectations are what Karen is alluding to. I think people applied the term “dissident” to describe him far before it was applicable. On a certain level, it has to do with anticipating expectations—of existing on a public stage—even though he’s on a public stage all of the time with twitter and press coverage.

Also, there’s an emphasis on what is real vs. fake in Weiwei’s art, so I was curious to know to what degree his politics are genuine. I wanted to know if his political convictions are genuine or more strategic. I’m convinced now that he’s genuine. He puts forth a set of values rather than a plan for political reform and it’s these values that make him a popular figure.

from "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

dGF: Social media has played a huge role in the film’s existence, from Ai Weiwei’s use of twitter to the kickstarter campaign to help finance the documentary. How do you hope social media will be used in the distribution and future of the film?

AK: Social media has been crucial so far. [Twitter founder] Jack Dorsey is a supporter of Ai Weiwei and we’ve had messages from twitter employees saying that Weiwei is an inspiration for what they do. We’ve had meetings in New York and San Francisco, but it’s all still really new, so it’s hard to say how we’ll work to promote the message. It’s a message that’s about much more than just promoting a film. In some ways, the film is a contribution to the history of social media. There aren’t a lot of historical twitter films—this may be the first. I think it’s a challenge for filmmakers regarding how to go forward with telling social media stories and giving a physical presence to these platforms that aren’t physical.

It’s also worth mentioning that I was really struck when I asked Weiwei what, to him, was a watershed moment in his life and he said “the internet.” At first I though, of course, the internet was a big deal for everyone, but this was a truly profound development for him. It wasn’t just a sidenote.

dGF: Can you talk about your experience with Ai Weiwei’s detention? How did this impact you personally and how did it impact the film?

AK: I actually found out through social media, maybe an hour or so after he disappeared, but before his studio was raided. I was in New York and stayed up until maybe 5am, skyping with studio assistants. They were tweeting from his account, acknowledging that it wasn’t him writing the tweets. It was really an all-sides attack on twitter, so I stayed up following [the assistants’] good flow of information.

By Monday morning, it was a big story and I had emerged as a go-to person who was an expert on Ai Weiwei, was in New York, and had strong personal feelings about what was happening. I think I probably had two years worth of media training in a few weeks.  As far as the film is concerned, I took a week long-break from the footage after he was detained. When I came back to editing, I felt a sense of obligation to just finish telling the story. It was tough—a lot of the footage from happy times felt really sad. For a while, it wasn’t looking good. We feared he was going to come up against Subervsion charges, but I really couldn’t stop working. I just wanted to get the film out into the open, to create awareness, so we were just rushing forwards. The day he was released was really the best day ever. It was just so great. The things that’s funny is that, after everything, Weiwei still had the same cell phone number. There was a tweet about a text message he had sent from that number. I later heard from [UCCA director, featured in the film] Phil Tinari and he said he’d just given Weiwei a call and he answered. So I did the same.

dGF: Speaking generally, how do you—as an American—conceive of yourself as the person telling this story? Additionally, you interview a group of people—both expats and Chinese—who occupy a fairly specific echelon of Chinese artistic culture. How does this influence the way the story is told?

AK: First of all, I never saw this movie about someone who doesn’t have a voice. It’s not a story that hasn’t been told and I never set out to speak for someone else. I wanted to present a good, honest, behind-the-scenes portrait of someone who belongs to the world. I spoke with some of Weiwei’s friends who thought he was an American citizen, but in fact, he’s let his green card lapse. As far as the community represented is concerned, I really just want to feature good storytellers telling a good story. I wanted to stick to people with real cred, who know Weiwei, who are close to the world he lives in. In any case, it’s clear that Ai Weiwei is really a global figure.

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. 

Wu Wenguang at NYU

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. You’ve said that your generation’s 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 don’t know if I really can teach them much. We can simply work together. Sometimes, the people in these villages think I’ve taught them how to shoot and what to shoot. This isn’t the case; they’ve chosen how and what to shoot by themselves. What I have to teach them isn’t 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. They’re 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 Xueping’s film Satiated Village. The villagers expressed these kinds of misgivings. They are worried. They think foreigners won’t understand, will laugh at them. When you saw this film, did you want to laugh at them?

dGF: Definitely not. History is complicated.

WWG: It’s not even about history. It’s about human understanding. Would you look at this work and this, “You are so stupid?”

dGF: Of course not.

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

dGF: Jian Yi’s 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. I’m 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. They’ll 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. That’s the goal.

Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward are editors of the recently published The Chinese Cinema Book (BFI and Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Song Hwee Lim

Song Hwee Lim is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), co-editor of Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (Wallflower Press, 2006), and founding editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. His next monograph, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, will appear in 2013.

Julian Ward

Julian Ward is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies attached to the Asian Studies department of the University of Edinburgh. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and has written articles on the representation in film in different eras of Communist China of the Sino-Japanese War. He is the author of Xu Xiake (1587–1641): The Art of Travel Writing (2000), a study of China’s foremost travel writer of the imperial period.

The Chinese Cinema Book, published earlier this year, provides a crucial and  comprehensive guide to Chinese cinema history, contemporary scholarship, and a range of discussions of Chinese cinema in both national and trans-national contexts. Incorporating contributions from many leading scholars in the field of Chinese cinema studies, as well as writings from editors Lim and Ward, the book is divided into five thematic sections: Territories, Trajectories, Historiographies; Early Cinema to 1949; The Forgotten Period: 1949–80; The New Waves; and Stars, Auteurs and Genres.

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dGF: In the prologue to “The Chinese Cinema Book,” you state that, despite its rather authoritative title, “this book does not pretend to offer a comprehensive coverage of Chinese cinema throughout its long and complicated history and multifarious manifestations,” but rather aims to provide “an overview of the ‘state of the field’.” In selecting works to represent the “state of the field” and assembling this most recent collection of scholarship, what was your approach to comprehensively taking the temperature of today’s climate for Chinese cinema studies? 

SL and JW:  First of all, we’re fully aware that this is an English-language publication designed to be a useful resource for academics and students, and that it should also appeal to a general readership. This means covering fairly familiar territories while introducing some new areas, and bearing in mind the availability of film materials on DVDs with English subtitles. In our other role as editors of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, we are keenly attuned to the state of the field in terms of established and emerging scholarship, and we therefore attempt to reflect that in this book as well. Overall, we are pleased with the coverage of the book in terms of the range of topics and scholars.

dGF:  In editing the book, did you discover any particular areas of focus or recent trends that unexpectedly begged attention? 

SL and JW: Following initial discussions with the publishers in September 2008, we were aware that, given the available space, it was impossible to do full justice to a variety of diverse topics, including the Cultural Revolution and documentaries produced in the People’s Republic of China since the 1990s. Having commissioned authors to write on specific topics, we were delightfully surprised by the focus that some authors had chosen within the remit of their chapters. For example, the exploration of previously neglected areas such as Cantonese cinema of the 1950s and less famous martial arts stars, as well as of recent phenomenon such as transmedia celebrity have opened up the scope of the book in rather unexpected but interesting ways.

dGF:  As you write, the field of Chinese Cinema Studies is rapidly expanding and can no longer fit its entire scholarship population working outside of Chinese societies comfortably “in the average living room.” With this influx of scholars, what new ideas and approaches to material have you observed coming into play? 

SL and JW:  This is an exciting time to be working in the field of Chinese Cinema Studies. The first ten to fifteen years since 1991 (taking Chris Berry’s edited book, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, as the marker) can be described as a phase of emergence and consolidation during which important work was done on key issues, periods, genres, and directors. Since the new millennium, I believe we are witnessing a pluralization of the field both in terms of topics covered (for example, gender and sexuality, time and space,  ecocriticism) and background of scholars (film studies, art history, and media and communications in addition to the more conventional area studies, comparative literature, and history). More importantly, with transnational cinemas becoming a more common phenomenon in film production, Chinese Cinema Studies is increasingly breaking away from a national cinema model and staging dialogue with world cinema cultures, whether in its consideration of films, directors, stars or genres.

dGF: The first essay in the book is Chris Berry’s “Transnational Chinese Cinema Studies.” The discussion of “transnational” and “translocal” has long been the locus of much discourse in Chinese Cinema studies. In beginning the collection with Berry’s essay, a rather frank appraisal of “transnational” and how the term may be most effectively used, did you hope to offer a point of clarification, preserve this buzzword, or simply offer Berry’s view as a jumping-off point? 

SL and JW: As Chris Berry argues in his piece and elsewhere, the 1997 book edited by Sheldon Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas, has now come to name the field that we study. By foregrounding the “transnational” our book rightly acknowledges this state of the field. More importantly, Chinese cinemas, for a variety of reasons, are particularly productive for interrogating the concept of “transnational cinema”, which in itself is gaining foothold in the discipline of film studies. Given the still pervasive Anglo- and Euro-centrism within film studies in western academia, Chinese Cinema Studies has a lot more to offer to the discipline beyond a national cinema model through which westerners can understand “the region”. Rather, it has potential in taking centre stage in the rethinking of certain conceptual models in film studies, the “transnational” being a prime example.

dGF: In terms of contemporary mainland film, the articles in the book tend to reflect a tendency towards more “mainstream” or strictly “independent” filmmaking in China. Yet, as filmmakers like Jia Zhangke have drifted away from the margins of filmmaking and into international limelight, how do you see this gap being bridged in Chinese cinema? What is the current you see forming, if any, in terms of a “median” film culture between extreme mainstream and extreme underground? 

SL and JW: Over the past few years, it has become increasingly apparent, as the templates of historical rural allegories for the Fifth Generation and edgy urban dramas for the Sixth Generation played themselves out, that the old categorisations of Chinese film are no longer sustainable. Feng Xiaogang, who rose to fame as the master of the New Year comedy, has made big budget epics about the Chinese Civil War and the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, while Huang Jianxin, one of the most interesting and subversive of the Fifth Generation directors, now makes state approved ‘Main Melody’ productions, such as Beginning of the Great Revival, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Jia Zhangke, on the other hand, can now be seen as an international auteur whose “national label”—whether in terms of sixth- or seventh-generation (a label many filmmakers categorized as such actually reject), or mainstream or independent—has become less relevant.

dGF: What impact do you hope this book will have on the Chinese cinema studies community? There is a fair amount of cross-reference between scholars evident here, so I was wondering if you could comment on that.  

SL and JW: The Chinese cinema studies community is a very visible presence, not just in print but also at international academic conferences. Cross-referencing between authors, while incidental in this book, is a healthy sign of a substantial body of work having been established in the field and receiving recognition from peer scholars working within it. Of course it remains important for the field to continue to discover new areas of research interests and to push theoretical frameworks, but it is heartening to witness a palpable sense of confidence in the quality of scholarship in the field within the chapters of the book.

Professor Eugene Wang

Eugene Yuejin Wang is Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. We recently spoke with Professor Wang about his interests in Chinese art and Chinese film, the areas of intersection between these two fields, and his interest in painter Liu Xiaodong, who is the subject of Jia Zhangke’s documentary Dong. Dong will screen Monday 9/26 as the opening film of the 11-film series on Chinese independent film at Doc Films in Chicago. In this conversation Professor Wang reflects at length on the way Liu and other artists work in relation to the idea of nationhood, especially in regards to national disasters such as the 2008 Beichuan earthquake in Sichuan. Wang pays particular attention to Liu’s 2010 work “Getting Out of Beichuan,” which Wang considers “marks a new stage and possibly a new turning point in the contemporary Chinese art scene.”

A native of Jiangsu, China, Wang studied at Fudan University in Shanghai (B.A. 1983; M.A. 1986), and subsequently at Harvard University (A.M. 1990; Ph.D. 1997). He was the Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995-96) before joining the art history faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. His teaching appointment at Harvard University began in 1997, and he became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.

He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and postdoctoral and research grants from the Getty Foundation.

His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) has received the Academic Achievement Award in memory of the late Professor Nichijin Sakamoto, Rissho University, Japan. He is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004).

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dGF:  I understand that a lot of your past research focused on Medieval Buddhist art and visual culture.  Recently you have been researching Chinese film.  Where did these interests arise?  In addition, is there any synergy between inquiries into Buddhist art and Chinese film?

Eugene Wang: Before I started researching medieval art, I was deeply engaged in Chinese film.  I actually wrote a script and published a few essays.  Film has always been one of my side interests.  I’m always intrigued by how people screen disparate images together.  You have a set of images.  They may or may not have a relationship with one another.  Somehow you string them together and you have an image flow.  In cinematic terms it would be called montage.  If these images are on a wall, such as in Buddhist caves and wall paintings, then you have an iconographic program.  There is something very interesting about the visual logic underlying this flow of images.

On top of that, film scholars love to talk about how the entire film medium can be traced back to the primal scene, Plato’s cave.  In medieval China, there was this proverbial Shadow Cave, which showed images on the dim back wall of the cave.  You enter and can’t see anything then all of a sudden the scenes reveal themselves.  What that exemplifies is a pre- cinema cinema.  There is a sense of images emerging out of the wall.

I was interested in film more as a structure of images.  Modern technology has made that easier for streaming of images to be presented to an audience.  Prior to that, there was always an impulse to make some kind of an image flow.  More specifically in the Buddhist culture, there is a tendency to make that flow more of an internal set of entopic images so it is more like interior theatre that captures certain types of mental processes.  What is shown is not what is normally seen around you, it something internal, mental.  In the case of Buddhist art, these processes are presented on a cave wall.

dGF:  How did your interests evolve from, initially, Chinese film into Buddhist art?

EW: In hindsight one could find all different ways of justifying that transition.  Though for me, there is a deeper interest of exploring the visual narrative, in the sense of how images are connected by logic that is not just illustration of certain textual narratives.  I have a problem with the common way people understand visual narrative.  Often, it is understood to be an illustration of certain texts.  The texts will tell you one story and then you illustrate that with a set of images.  We all know that the monster that comes out of this type of visual illustration is different from the textual narrative in the sense that it has its own interest, it has its own flow, and often it will elaborate on things that the textual narrative does not seem to be interested in.

This is one of these issues I point out in my book Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visuality in Medieval China, which is a study on how visual narrative works in tenuous relationship to a Buddhist sutra.  What I found was quite interesting.  Often in the reading of the sutra, you would have certain details that were very insignificant.  Somehow the painter elaborately paints these details.  Likewise, there are other details you would think are so graphic and so evocative, but the painter was completely uninterested in them.  These facts take you by surprise.

In addition, with textual narrative you can say, “today I’m speaking here.”  You can then switch your imaginary locales, and say “I’m now in New York as opposed to yesterday when I was in Boston.”  In the first few sentences, you discuss your experiences in New York, then the next few sentences you talk about Washington D.C.  Then you somehow recall your experiences in Boston.  With textual narrative you have the convenience of not locking into these places in a very fixed topographic relationship.  In your mind, these cities are free-floating abstract entities.  With the visual narrative, once you put Boston on the map, it’s fixed.  You cannot alter the order. This fixed relationship does not exist in the textual narrative.  You can imagine once they illustrate different places mentioned in the text, and start to come up with a larger picture, they have to work out a good topography so this larger picture can make sense.

In addition, Buddhist texts have different chapters.  You can read from chapter 1 to chapter 24 but in Buddhist art they would have scenes from all of these chapters dispersed in all different places.  If you trace these scenes superficially, they are completely scrambled.  If you study them carefully, it is not in total disarray.  There is in fact logic or method to this seeming madness.  That logic is visual and special.  With that logic in place you begin to have all different types of implications as to why various scenes are placed next to one another.

dGF: In April, you presented at the “Just Images” symposium.  Your topic was “Documentary Apathy and Sympathy: Liu Xiadong between Canvas and Camera.”  Please tell us about your presentation.

Liu Xiaodong paints "Getting Out of Beichuan" (photo: Supernice.eu)

EG:  In 2010 Liu Xiadong went to Sichuan to paint an earthquake scene.  He set up this huge canvas and began to paint.  Actually, he wasn’t painting the earthquake scene per-se.  He invited a group of young woman from other towns to pose as models in front of this earthquake-caused pile of rubble.  The sheer set up is mind-boggling.  When this work was first shown, I was completely blown away by it.  It is a huge canvas.  The exhibition did a good job using multi-media to present it.  You also have the photograph of him working with the models.  You also have a video of him working and directing the models.  This case intrigued me because I’m always interested in inter-media.  How painting and photography interact with each other.

The case with Liu Xiaodong made it particularly interesting because he spearheaded the new generation of painters that came of ages in the 1990’s.  The way they make their impact and distinctions is through not buying into national narratives, choosing to stay on the margins and exploring the marginality.  They seem to be interested in the mood and gestures that are normally outside the larger narratives.  There are certain received ways of characterizing how within the narrative characters work.  Liu Xiaodong is, however, concerned about what is going on outside of the framework.  He focuses on the migrants, the outcasts, people who don’t belong anywhere.  He portrays these characters with nonchalance and indifference.

This apathy inadvertently carries an implicit critique of past generations of artists who he and his contemporaries believe are too driven by larger passions.  What sets the ‘90’s generation apart from the ‘80’s is that the ‘90’s generation no longer feel bound to a larger national narrative.  Liu Xiaodong’s Sichuan painting fascinates me because it marks a new stage and possibly a new turning point in the contemporary Chinese art scene.  In other words, it marks both the culmination of the ‘90’s generation in terms of their distinct style and sensibility and challenge for them as well.  These artists are facing this earthquake aftermath and the situation is potentially stirring and disturbing.  Under these circumstances, it is very hard to remain emotionally unattached.  How can Liu Xiadong and his contemporaries keep their distance from a national narrative but also remain engaged in a meaningful way.

dGF:    Liu Xiadong went to Sichuan to paint in the aftermath of the Earthquake, but was his painting actually about the disaster?

Liu Xiaodong's finished painting "Getting Out of Beichuan" (photo: Supernice.eu)

EW: Technically, it seems to be about the earthquake, but this is really hard to assess what it is really about.  Ultimately, the painting is about how human beings deal with the plight and challenge of surviving disasters.  What he is trying to do is bring the painting to a level that it transcends the immediacy of this particular earthquake and get to another level.  In a way, this is a departure from his earlier practice, which is why this painting fascinates me.  His earlier practice carries a notable stance of refusal of any metaphysical overtones in his painting.  The emphasis is always on the immediacy of the experience. When he paints laborers he makes sure not to fall into the 1980’s allegorical way of making a pictorial scene.  He makes sure to let the viewer share in his interest of the texture of the real life with its brutalities, horrors, miseries, joy.

The subjects of this painting, the young women, were hired from Chongqing.  They had nothing at all to do with the earthquake.  The conceptual design behind this was Liu Xiadong came up with a philosophy or some sort of conviction.  In the face of massive disasters, a typical Chinese response is that there should be some type of regeneration.  In other words, the conviction rests on the hope of the young to reproduce.

In Taihu, he did a companion piece to the Sichuan painting.  He invited a group of young men to model.  These two pieces were put on exhibition next to each other, representing the Yin and Yang.  With these forces you could symbolically orchestrate a scenario of regeneration.  He seems to be saying that is a way to respond to disasters.  Yet, what I find to be most interesting is that we actually don’t know if he was setting this up to be some kind of statement, i.e., to say that nothing else actually works and this is the only way out. In a way, it is undermining all these other solutions; or you could, if you want to press hard on this, derive some kind of inferences from this in thinking that it could be some kind of implicit critique of this kind of response to disasters.

dGF:  Is this the first time he touches upon a national narrative?

EW: I don’t know if he is intentionally doing that, but it certainly carries some ramifications of that.  He is a very smart artist.  He came up with this solution and, of course, just left it unsaid.  I don’t think there is a deliberate program of posing any implicit critique of national narratives but as an artistic strategy, it is very effective.  It makes you think about what it is doing.

It raises the question you start to suspect: are we left to understand that he thinks all the ways of the government’s handling of the earthquake aftermath are ineffectual?  I’m not saying he is implying that, but it certainly would elicit that type of response.  Or, he could be saying he is just thinking that in fact the best therapeutic way of coping with this is to face the enormity of the disaster with courage.  We may take comfort that eventually people are going to reproduce and the new lives are going to outlast the disaster.

Or, he may just use this way to simply justify his special skills in figure painting. Liu Xiaodong has a way of painting a landscape that he kind of distrusts.  He believes that to paint landscape, it’s better to paint in the figural spirit.  Try to paint the landscape in figures with a figural mood and so forth.  It just may well be since he is good in painting portraits, this is just a way of rationalizing his artistic strategy.

All of these possibilities are there.  This is why this work is so fascinating to me.  It is very conceptual.  Coming from Liu Xiadong, this is particularly fascinating because he and his generation are known for keeping out all this external verbiage and just deliver to you to this real authentic unmediated texture.

dGF: How does this generation of artists engage with the communities they are embedded in?  As you mentioned previously, Liu Xiaodong goes to Sichuan and in the aftermath of the earthquake is painting among great ruin.  What about the people around him?  What is his relationship with these communities?

EW:  The rapport is there.  Liu Xiadong himself grew up as a street kid.  He never assumes any elitist detachment from the common people.  He could easily relate to them.  On the other hand, he also kept a diary.  From the diary we know in fact there are ugly things going on around him, as the painting production was dragging on.  There was heavy drinking and bloodshed between his crew and another newly-arrived documentary film crew when he was in Sichuan.  From the diary you could tell he was not making a fuss about this or romanticizing anything.  In this sense, there is a detached observation of things around him.

Consequently, you could feel that he is trying to internalize this scene to the extent that what he sees outwardly is the staging of his own mental theatre.  He never said anything about how he should respond to the conflicts going on around him.  You almost get a sense he was becoming too philosophical about it.  Yet, he doesn’t make his art in a philosophical gesture.  He still clings to a deadpan observational mode.

Here and there, he would include little details that are often very suggestive and sometimes even private.  For instance, he would paint a little horse in the background.  The reason why this was the background was at the time, Liu Xiadong was observing horses mating.  He found that very powerful.  Nevertheless, the horse appears in the painting as a still life.  Again, we see him including the motif of reproduction as a way of overcoming disasters.  The most interesting thing about this is he includes this motif very cryptically.  Unless you have already read his diaries about the painting, you wouldn’t really know that the horse is significant.

dGF:  Liu Xiadong’s paintings are similar to those of his colleagues in the 1990’s generation of artists.  What were the roots of this artistic movement?  In Jia Zhangke’s documentary about Liu Xiaodong Dong, Liu Xiadong claims to be influenced by ancient Chinese art such as the Northern Wei periods.  Are those really the antecedents for this generation of artists?

EW: In the scene where he mentions being influenced by ancient Chinese art he talks about his own art and says “meiyou yisi,” nothing is really interesting.  Even concerning his own art, he starts to feel that it comes from a European oil painting tradition.  In the end, he believes that he is still doing what other people have done before.  You can start to sense his frustration with the reliance on the received visual means and formula.  That is why I think Liu Xiaodong always continues his oil painting but, at the same time, is always casting doubt on his own work.

Subsequently, he is always deploying photography and video work as a means of internalizing the cinematic ways of looking at a scene.  If you look at his Sichuan works, there are certain perspectives to internalize the camera eye and to see how the optical lens projects on the screen.

As for the Northern Wei thing, if he truly believes what he says, then he would have given up this hyper-realistic mode and do more schematic ways of creating figures.  In the Northern Wei style, the figures would be geometrical and slimmer. He didn’t do that.  This can only then lead you to believe that he is using the Northern Wei as a counterpoint—an abstract antithesis, not actual formal model—to undermine his reliance on European oil painting.

Unfortunately, he is trapped. Once you believe what you do is Western in essence, you try to do something to undermine this style.  I guess it is his rhetorical way of dealing with his own frustration.  It doesn’t hold.

dGF: Does the fact that he mentions the Northern Dynasties indicate that he is trying to break out and expand his style?  Is he searching for a new inspiration?

EW: This is a dilemma not only for Liu Xiaodong but for all cutting edge artists.  There has been this myth bandied around that any art medium has a development, and as an artist you are the one who is supposed to take it to the next level.  Unfortunately, there is this sense that each artistic medium has come to an end.  Everything that should be done has been done, and there is nothing left to be done in painting, if we follow the evolutionary premise.  If you believe that, you can see that eventually there is nothing for artists to push the envelope with. This narrative has an impact on Liu Xiaodong.

Nevertheless, he is smart enough to realize that he should not buy into this narrative.  If you want to be a successful artist, you need to drop that narrative because that narrative in itself is dead.  If you drop that narrative, you find that there is actually a lot left to be done in painting.

Liu Xiadong is actually in a conflicted situation.  One the one hand, he somewhat inadvertently still believes that narrative, which would lead him to question the purpose of his work.  The fact that he still does what he does with some conviction shows that he also doesn’t care; he just does what he does.

There is of course, a certain limit to what he does.  With photography available, there are questions as to why he is still spending days doing these portraits. Yet, we all know there is so much the painting can capture that photography cannot.  On the other hand, he often works with photographers and filmmakers to document the artistic process.  He is at a juncture where he realizes that painting as a medium has run into a wall, so he is thinking and asking the question, what’s next?  What is a good painter supposed to do in this day and age with technology?  That is not an easy question to answer.  That moment of frustration is just his way of grappling with that difficult question.

There is already an implicit solution to this dilemma.  Somehow, he still makes the art of painting matter by erecting this large canvas in front of the aftermath of the earthquake and painting these models as if a camera were set up.  A camera was actually set up to document the process. There was a resulting rivalry between the camera crews and Liu Xiaodong.  I actually did a comparison between what was recorded in the documentary film versus his painting.  In the documentary film, you can see a meditative stance.  There was one very powerful sequence in which the camera work seizes upon significant details of things in the ruins. You would have, for instance, some bricks and some shattered windows and then, all of a sudden, a clock.  That sequence ends with a little cat peeping in the ruins.  It’s almost like a surreal meditation on time, materiality, and survival.

You also see the filmmaker parading the female models at the foot of a gigantic dilapidated building.  He makes this sharp contrast between the magnitude of the ruin and these tiny figures winding their way to Liu Xiadong’s painting spot.  The filmmaker was trying to play this dramatic contrast between this magnitude of the natural disaster and the insignificant human figures.  That visual rhetoric comes across very easily.  In contrast, it’s interesting that Liu Xiaodong should set up his canvas away from the ruin sight, enlarge the human figures, and put the ruins in the distance, doing the opposite of the filmmaker.  There is clearly not only a difference in the mediun, but also different approaches to visualizing the scene.

You can see in the film there is still some unarticulated monologue, which is a philosophical meditation on destruction, time, and life.  In contrast, it makes Liu Xiaodong’s work all the more restrained in its refusal of any meditative stance.  Obviously, the scene struck him as powerful, but he doesn’t have any pretension for philosophical meditation.  In light of this film, you also sense that a lot is lost in the medium of oil painting.  It is tantamount to saying that there is only so much you can do on the canvas.  The canvas is also, in fact, as much about replicating and reconstituting things as it is a failure to capture things at the same time.

You can see that what Liu Xiaodong does with the canvas becomes a very powerful way of acknowledging the limitations of what the canvas can do.  Yet, he sticks to it.  By sticking to it, he lets us feel the a tacit refusal of any overt philosophical meditation.  You are left with a very poignant feeling that a lot is lost in the picture, but that feeling is retained.  That feeling is very powerful.  It’s ironic that you have a canvas that purports to capture a slice of experience.  It ends up being a very monumental reminder of how much is lost.  To the extent that the canvas delivers that heavy feeling, it succeeds monumentally on the ruins of failure.

Relevant Classroom Use

Mr. Zhao’s evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates offers a window into hard choices that face directors as they try to carve out space for self-expression in China’s authoritarian system. Like Mr. Zhao, many seek to balance their independent visions with their desires to live securely and win recognition.

Listen to a podcast interview with Wong from the Sinica podcast on Popup Chinese.

We interviewed Wong about his experience reporting this story and its broader relevance on art and culture in contemporary China.

dGF: What attracted you to report on this story?

Edward Wong: While living in Beijing, I had watched and greatly admired two of Zhao Liang’s films, “Crime and Punishment” and “Petition.” In November 2010, I met him at a dinner in the 798 arts district with Karin Chien, the founder of dGenerate Films. At that time, he was working on “Together,” a documentary that the Health Ministry had commissioned as a public service announcement about people with HIV/AIDS. For the film, he had just recorded a song by Peng Liyuan, the celebrity wife of Xi Jinping, the man who is expected to become the next leader of China. Zhao also told me about how he had used social networking websites to track down interview subjects with HIV/AIDS. This new project sounded interesting. We talked a lot too about the making of “Crime and Punishment,” and about how he had lied to police officers to get access to their station house in northeast China.

I found Zhao to be an engaging person, and I thought that he might make an interesting profile. As I spent time with him, I found he had a lot of interesting things to say not only about making films, but also about the role of artists and intellectuals in China.

dGF: Given that this story is part of a series on Culture and Control in China, do you see the issues and challenges that Zhao Liang faced common to other cultural sectors or artists in China?

Wong: Yes, the challenges that Zhao Liang confronts every time he makes a film are familiar to artists across China. The question I keep hearing from artists here, especially those who work in a mass medium like film, is: How do you maintain your artistic integrity and get your work seen without bowing too much to government restrictions? In the American system, it’s often market forces, represented most powerfully by studio executives, that hold sway over filmmakers. Here, the government can have great influence over a film if the filmmaker wants wide distribution for it. Filmmakers who want their films seen in theaters both engage in self-censorship and negotiate with censors over scripts and rough cuts.

Even though Zhao went through that process on “Together,” the documentary still turned out to be a socially committed film, and Zhao doesn’t seem to have bought into the system – he told me his next film will be made in an independent manner, outside the censorship process and with foreign financing. But if he does go the independent route, which is a familiar one for him, he’ll have to live with the fact that the film almost certainly will not be seen by many Chinese. During our interviews, he told me repeatedly that he makes films for a Chinese audience.

Gu Changwei, a supervising director on “Together” and a much more prominent filmmaker than Zhao, has chosen to make movies within the system. On every production, he has to negotiate with representatives of the state. He told me the film bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or Sarft, are “the most conservative – there’s no way to be more cautious than they are.” This is what many artists working in different media across China face: negotiating their work and their relations with conservative censors and officials, many of whom come from an older generation.

dGF: What were the most significant ways that working on this article changed or enhanced your understanding of independent films and filmmakers in China?

Wong: The most interesting aspect of researching this article was seeing the dialogue between filmmakers with an independent spirit and the state. During the reporting process, I learned in detail from Zhao Liang, Gu Changwei and others about the negotiations that take place between filmmakers and representatives of the government, particularly with censors from the film bureau. I felt privileged to get a glimpse into the way the system works. Zhao described for me some of the discussions he had with censors and officials over content in “Together.” It was interesting for me to hear what roles various government bodies played – the Health Ministry, the Central Propaganda Department and the film bureau of Sarft.

Gu had an interesting story about navigating the system in order to get approval from the film bureau for “Love for Life,” the narrative fiction film that was a companion piece to “Together.” Once Gu had the idea for the film, he had to first get support from the Health Ministry before film officials would approve the project, since it was on a topic (HIV/AIDS) that some officials still consider sensitive, and it was based on a banned book. Once health officials had agreed to back the project, the film officials knew they could shift the blame to the health officials if anything went wrong, so they granted approval. This process of constant negotiation was fascinating to me.

As for as filmmakers working outside the system, I found in my reporting that independent directors and producers are dedicated to their visions of society and work together in a community to realize those visions even when there is little financial backing and no official support. Despite the constant attempts by the state to control the industry, that fierce spirit makes me optimistic about Chinese film.

dGF: How would you characterize the response to your article, especially in comparison between Chinese and non-Chinese readers?

Wong: The response has been consistently positive. Many Western readers told me they find Zhao Liang compelling and thought the narrative revealed to them the intricacies of artistic creation and political dialogue in China. My Chinese friends who have read the article in English said it accurately shows the nuances in making choices that relate to the state.

If you’re an intellectual in China, these are choices and decisions you grapple with all the time, in ways big and small, and I think many intellectuals in China get frustrated with how Westerners often frame those choices: as a duality between being a complete rebel or being a sellout. For many foreigners, Ai Weiwei, for better or for worse, has come to represent the ideal of an artist in China. Zhao Liang and many Chinese intellectuals do not follow Ai Weiwei’s lead. They take a more pragmatic path. Certainly they create art or start public conversations that make many officials uncomfortable, but they sometimes acquiesce to demands by officials too. And the government and the Communist Party are not monolithic. There are officials who quietly support even some of the more controversial work by these artists. There’s a fluidity in China, and people move in both directions. One Chinese friend wrote this to me in an email: “The piece did a good job showing the readers the dilemma artists like Zhao are facing in China today, and that agreeing to work within the system can have many subtle implications and is not as black-and-white as ‘going over to the dark side.’” Last time I checked, there wasn’t much response from readers on Zhao Liang’s microblog, but one person commented that the story was the most complete one he or she had read on Zhao, and that Zhao was “niubi” which is Chinese slang for ultra-cool.

dGF: Reading about Zhao Liang being caught between two worlds (the independent network and the state apparatus), I couldn’t help wondering if it was analogous to your own position as a reporter working in China for a U.S. newspaper. What sort of challenges do you experience in your role as a foreign reporter? Does working for a major publication like the NY Times bring any kind of stigma (positive or otherwise) to your interactions in China?

Wong: Working for a Western news media organization in China draws a wide range of reactions from ordinary Chinese. It really can vary, so I don’t want to generalize. From my experience with the central government and with local authorities, Chinese officials are at best ambivalent and at worst downright hostile to foreign journalists. That reaction can change from region to region, or as broader political trends in China shift.

I wouldn’t say my situation is analogous at all to that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. The fact that I have foreign citizenship makes a big difference in my relationship with the Chinese state, obviously. I don’t feel the pressures from the state as keenly. Also, I work in the American mass media system, which has much wider latitude for freedom of expression than mass media in China.

That said, I do think that whenever you work in an institution, you become bound by the limits of that institution, and that’s where I would say my experience might have some overlap with that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. As is obvious to anyone who reads it, The New York Times has strict formats in which news is presented and rules that govern how reporters write their stories. It can be something as simple as choice of words, for example, or it can have more to do with judging what crosses the line between so-called objective reporting and opinion. These are things that all reporters at The New York Times and in other news media organizations negotiate everyday. I have great respect for The New York Times and its role in public discourse in the United States, but there are boundaries that reporters are always trying to navigate and limits that they are testing. I believe this situation helps me empathize with Chinese artists and intellectuals, though the world in which they operate is a much tougher one, and they are much braver souls than me.

Relevant Classroom Use

Chris Berry

Chris Berry is Professor of film and television studies at Goldsmiths University of London, and co-editor of the recent volume The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Most recently he co-curated a special film series “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire: The Cultural Revolution in the Cinema” with Katja Wiederspahn for the Film Archiv Austria, with the cooperation with the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnological Museum and the Film Archive Austria)in its special exhibition “The Culture of the Cultural Revolution.” We caught up with Professor Berry to learn more about the films and his experience in curating the series.

dGF: Has this exhibition changed your understanding of the Cultural Revolution and film? What were the major obstacles you faced in curating the exhibition at *Film Archiv Austria*?

Chris Berry: I guess my thinking about the Cultural Revolution was already changing along with a lot of other peoples’, and the process of putting together the series became part of that. I was very struck when I read the Tsinghua University professor and leading mainland public intellectual Professor Wang Hui’s comments in “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” where he argued that the legitimacy of the entire contemporary Chinese political, social and cultural formation is built on the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution. Along with everyone else, I had taken that repudiation for granted for a long time and not gone much further. If today’s combination of neo-liberal economics and authoritarian politics needs a stereotype of the Cultural Revolution as a disastrous combination of the opposite — a command economy and anarchic politics — maybe that’s too simple. It’s not that I want to embrace the Cultural Revolution! But I think it made me realize that we need to decouple the Cultural Revolution from legitimization of the present to get a more complex understanding of it.

In the area of culture specifically, Paul Clark’s book, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, has helped to explode all kinds of myths about the Cultural Revolution. Those include the idea that there were only 8 Model Works (yangbanxi) — there were more. And the idea that the films of those 8 Model Works were only movies that the 800 million Chinese had access to was wrong, too. There were older films that continued to circulate, numerous documentaries, new feature films after 1972, and a range of foreign films from countries like Romania, Albania, and North Korea. So, I already wanted to take another look by the time the idea for the series came up.

The “Cinema of the Cultural Revolution” series at the Austrian Film Archive (Film Archiv Austria) was initiated by Katja Wiederspahn, and I curated it together with her. Katja is an old friend of mine. She works as an independent curator and also for the Viennale, Vienna’s international film festival. We had previously cooperated on a special focus on the 1930s actress Ruan Lingyu for the Viennale. That was a lot of fun, so I wanted to work with her again!

The event itself took place in June of this year, but Katja first spoke to me about the possibility of working together on the series early in the autumn of 2010. She had heard that I would be spending 4 months in Vienna as a Senior Fellow at the IFK — the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, or Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften — in early 2011. By coincidence, Helmut Opletal’s great exhibition, “The Culture of the Cultural Revolution” was due to open more or less when I arrived at the beginning of March, and so the idea was for the Ethnological Museum and the Film Archive Austria to co-sponsor the film series. I’ve written about the exhibition on a post to the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture list, but here I will just say it is also an effort to return to the Cultural Revolution and develop a more complex understanding without in any way losing sight of the terror that was very powerful feature of the Cultural Revolution.

By another coincidence, Opletal’s exhibition opened in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. So, as we went round it, both Katja and I were thinking about the visceral thrill of political action, including violence, and how powerfully exciting this can be for young people, at the same time as it can make them vulnerable to being used and making mistakes. That’s why we chose Mao’s saying “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” for the film series. We felt it captured the sense of excitement and danger perfectly. Now that we’re doing this interview in the wake of the riots in England, I’m all too well aware again of how youthful excitement can translate into anger, violence, and destruction!

You ask what obstacles we faced while working with the “Film Archiv Austria.” Well, of course, working with them was anything but an obstacle! In fact, without their resources and support, the whole thing would have been impossible from the process of sourcing the films all the way through to projection. I’m really grateful to everyone there for all their help, and it was a huge delight to present the programme in the old Metro Kino movie theatre in central Vienna. However, the consideration that this was a public event for a general audience rather than an audience of China specialists certainly did shape the process of selection. We could not assume that people had seen any of the major films from or about the Cultural Revolution or knew much about it, and we could not make this event about discovering completely unknown works or anything like that.

"The East is Red" (1965, dir. Wang Hui)

However, one of the great pleasures of starting from a kind of tabula rasa position was the ability to see films like The East is Red, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and the revolutionary ballet version of The Red Detachment of Women again on 35 mm prints. We also showed Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Blue Kite, which is one of the most moving of the films made since the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, and a number of contemporary documentaries, including Hu Jie’s devastating Though I Am Gone, which has been released in a German version now, and is one of dGenerate’s films. Other documentaries included Carma Hinton’s classic investigation of the Cultural Revolution generation, Morning Sun, and the Dutch Chinese filmmaker Yan Ting Yuen’s Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works, which not only interviews the stars of the film versions of the model works but also covers contemporary performances and revivals. One of my favorites was Zhang Bingjian’s Readymade, which looks at Mao impersonators, including a woman who was first alerted to the fact that she resembled the Great Helmsman by her own mother. We also wanted to include at least one of the huge cycle of 80-100 films made in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution that took part in the repudiation of it. I’m very pleased that we were able to get hold of Yang Yanjin’s Troubled Laughter, which is a rare Chinese satire, and both funny and moving.

"Troubled Laughter" (1979, Deng Yimin and Yang Yanjin)

The real and shocking obstacle in all this was the difficulty of finding prints. You might expect it to be hard to find prints of the Cultural Revolution era films. But actually, a lot of those have made their way into archives around Europe, because they were made relatively freely available at the time. However, by the time they got to the archives, the prints were often already deteriorating by going pink, and that is a real problem. I expected that. But I did not expect to find that so many Chinese films from the 1980s and 1990s that were released in Europe and elsewhere are simply not around anymore, or are in shocking condition. In the case of Troubled Laughter, we were very lucky to get help from Marie-Claire Quiquemelle in France. Otherwise, we couldn’t have shown anything from the late 70s and early 80s at all.

Our other real obstacle was trying to build bridges to an audience that knows little about the era. Although European leftists of the 1960s were often inspired by the Cultural Revolution, that was a long time ago now! So, we also wanted to bring the whole series to life by bringing over Shanghai’s famous “Red Collector”, Mr. Liu Debao. Mr. Liu has over 3,600 film prints in his private collection, which emphasizes the Cultural Revolution. I first met Mr. Liu in Shanghai a year or more ago. He’s a very expansive character — so generous and enthusiastic. But he’s also a true believer in Mao’s China. He was a Red Guard and went up to Beijing twice to see Chairman Mao, and today he has a huge patriotic pride about China’s determination back then to go down its own independent path rather than submit to the West or the Soviet Union.

Mr. Liu brought an 8.75mm projector with him and a mix of 8.75mm and 16mm documentaries and newsreels. One of the newsreels was about the 8.75 format. It was a bit like super-8, but had a larger image. The point was for China to have its own unique format, not only to enable films to reach the countryside with mobile projection teams but also to reduce dependency on imports. Another newsreel was about the launch of China’s first satellite — a success which the film attributed to the power of Mao Zedong Thought! And there were documentaries about the building of the Red Flag Canal, a triumph of labor mobilization to enable irrigation of dry areas, and about Mao meeting the Red Guards in Beijing. (This is another moment to thank the Metro Kino projectionists! Imagine trying to show these films in a regular movie theatre!) Mr. Liu clearly loves all this material, and his presence and presentation really made everyone feel the enthusiasm of the Cultural Revolution and how full of energy and sincerity many of the young participants were. If we were impressed by him, he was very impressed by the Film Archiv Austria’s cinema technology collection as well as by their commitment to looking after their prints, and so he decided to donate his 8.75 mm projector to the archive!

dGF: One of the major criticisms of Cultural Revolution cultural production is the political nature of the works. It is often seen by western audiences as a very monolithic movement. What are the unique aesthetics of Cultural Revolution film and art in general? How influential was the socialist realism movement, in the USSR, on Chinese artists during this period? What other forces shaped such artistic production?

Berry: Yes, the style of the model works, including the style of the films made out of them, is very overwhelming. But it is also very distinctive. For people outside China at the time, the films and posters were the first contact they had with the Cultural Revolution, and they seem to have left an indelible image of China in the rest of the world, as well as a very powerful image of the Cultural Revolution itself in China. But at the same time we must acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution style has to be seen as part of a long history of efforts to invent a specifically Chinese modern style since the May Fourth Movement early in the twentieth century, if not earlier. What made the Cultural Revolution style different was how successful it was and how powerfully it took hold. Even if people got bored with the limited range of works available or their politics, the style continues to get people’s attention!

"The Red Detachment of Women" (1971, dir. Jie Fu)

You can get some sense of its power when you watch something like the ballet version of The Red Detachment of Women. Forget delicate swans fluttering tragically to the floor. This is girls with guns and grenades, but still en pointe. The militant requirements of the revolutionary aesthetic led to a complete reworking of traditional ballet. The romantic couple is irrelevant and the pas de deux more or less disappears. In its place comes a range of breathtaking leaps and aggressive thrusts, all coordinated by the corps de ballet. Seeing the main character poised above the cowering landlord, her bayonet held over him, is such a contrast to anything you’ll find in traditional ballet! It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up — for all kinds of reasons. And the whole work is amazingly kinetic and energetic.

As well as ballet, the people who designed and developed the model works also borrowed Western symphonic music, and mixed it with elements of Chinese opera music. Adding Chinese instruments and other elements “sinicized” symphonic music, but it also enabled an integration of the individual works, so that they were no longer as fragmented and episodic as traditional operas. And, as with the ballets, the contents changed, too: the old scholars and generals and fair maidens were replaced with worker, peasant, soldier heroes and class struggle themes.

As regards the links with Russia, of course ballet came from there. It might seem very strange to people in the West that China took ballet, because we think of it as a court art, and very much the opposite of revolutionary art. But the Russians hung on to it as a national form, I believe. And for China in the 1950s, it was OK because it came from the Soviet Union. I think it spoke to the desire to be modern, as was also the case with symphonic music. This is something else we forget about the Cultural Revolution. The drive for rapid material change, scientific modernity, and so forth that we see in China today is in fact a continuity from both before and during the Cultural Revolution. That has been a consistent, indeed desperate, goal from the 1920s on, and it has been associated with Europe and North America throughout. Just how to get there has changed!

But although these art forms were taken in via the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet split had well and truly taken hold well before the Cultural Revolution. China stayed loyal to Stalin’s memory despite Khrushchev’s criticisms of him. So, they had adopted socialist realism in the 1950s, but after the split and the need to develop their own path in everything, the Chinese communist line on the arts was “a combination of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism”. Of course, it’s precisely that idea of romanticism that licensed the highly unrealist style of the Cultural Revolution model works.

dGF: Power is often a motif pervasive throughout the films of the Cultural Revolution. How is power and lack thereof imagined and visualized in the portrayal of class struggle, social strife, representations of the CCP, and
Mao Zedong?

"Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works" (2005, dir.Yang Ting Yuen)

Berry: For me, something that gave me a jolt when watching the model works again was the strong and positive emphasis on class hatred. All that energy was very exciting, but I was brought up short every time the films hammered home the need to mobilize class hatred. I couldn’t help wondering about what it was like to be on the receiving end of that hatred. I wonder whether anyone had similar worries at the time, or is my thinking that way more the result of all the post-Cultural Revolution films that present it from the perspective of the victims of class struggle? I had an interesting conversation with Professor Suzanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik of the University of Vienna about this. She helped with Helmut Opletal’s exhibition, and also helped us to bring Mr. Liu over from Shanghai, so I am especially grateful. She was also in China during the early 1970s as a student, and her take on it was that by then everyone was nervous. The targets of struggle had shifted so often and yesterday’s accusers had become today’s accused so many times that everyone knew it could be them next.

As you might expect with a movement that placed such emphasis on identifying and eliminating the enemy as a way of unifying “the masses” with their leaders, the Cultural Revolution is very starkly polarized. Characters are either good or bad. The aesthetic theory of the “Three Prominences” (san tuchu) articulated this: among the characters, the positives ones should be prominent; among the positive ones, the heroes; and among the heroes, the main hero should be most prominent. Bad guys were lit poorly, decentered in the frame, skulking, and looked down on, whereas heroes were bright, shining, in the centre, and shot from below, often gazing into the middle distance. In the documentaries from the time, Chairman Mao gets the close-ups!

However, one thing that has to be said about that is I don’t think it always worked. In theory, the most positive character is supposed to be the most interesting, but I don’t think that someone who is so uniformly knowledgeable and good draws our attention. In The Red Detachment of Women, for example, it’s the male detachment leader who is the main hero. But I can’t even remember his name right now. The one who everyone loves is Qionghua, the former slave girl who has to learn to submit to revolutionary discipline rather than pursue personal revenge. I’m sure if you asked most people who the main character was, they’d say her.

dGF: In present day China, both censored film and art are often disseminated through the conduit of social media and the Internet, but what about censored output during the Cultural Revolution? I understand films that were sanctioned by the CCP were shown in cities at theaters and in the countryside by teams of roving projectionists. In a sense, this was a very egalitarian medium for communication. Nevertheless, did an audience and an apparatus for distribution of illicit material exist during the Cultural Revolution?

Berry: No. Or at least I have never heard of anything like that. Film was easy to control, compared say with poetry or even art. We know that people wrote underground novels and poems, copied them, and circulated them by hand. We know that some artists made watercolors on thin tissue paper, rolled them up, and hid them in a secret compartment of furniture. We even know that the Party had trouble establishing standardized and unchanging versions of the model works, and that was one of the reasons they wanted to film them — once their were filmed and the authorized version was clear to everyone, local troupes couldn’t make local changes! But there was no video, and not even any home movie cameras in China then, let alone the internet.

For Madame Mao's eyes only.

I suppose the closest thing to what you’re asking about was so called “internal” (neibu) screenings of banned works and foreign works that were not released to the general public. In theory, these were to inform trusted central figures of what to be on guard against. But tickets to internal screenings were highly sought after, and not always for those reasons! I believe that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) was a huge fan of The Sound of Music. I’ve always found Julie Andrews a bit scary.

dGF: Recent films such as Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and The East Wind State Farm look back at the Cultural Revolution through a present-day lens. Acknowledging the genre-based thematic and aesthetic differences, comparing Hu Jie’s and other contemporary documentaries about the Cultural Revolution with film produced during the “Scar Literature” era, how do these films incorporate themes of memory/remembering as well as re-creating history through art?

Berry: Both sets of film are all about remembering the Cultural Revolution and, in some cases, other difficult parts of the Mao era. But there are some important differences between them, of course. The recent films are independent documentaries, whereas the films from the post-Cultural Revolution era were melodramas, for the most part, and made within the sate-owned studio system of the time. The contemporary films are oral histories that are often a last chance for older people to give their testimonies. The government’s line is that the Cultural Revolution has been declared a mistake and dealt with, so there’s no need to make any more films about it. So, I don’t suppose these current documentaries are very welcome, to put it mildly. In fact, I think they are incendiary and I’m not surprised that many of the filmmakers are keeping relatively quiet about them.

"Though I Am Gone" (2007, dir. Hu Jie)

On the other hand, I think that most of the post-Cultural Revolution melodramas were part of a process of trying to rebuild trust between the government and the people on the grounds of a shared suffering — Deng Xiaoping suffered during the Cultural Revolution, just as so many ordinary Chinese did. It’s always struck me how the Chinese government and people were ready to go back and make films and write novels about the Cultural Revolution so quickly after it was over. It took the Soviets decades to begin to go into the Stalin era, and the Germans were not really ready to start confronting the legacy of fascism so quickly, either. But that’s where Wang Hui’s point comes in. Repudiating the Cultural Revolution and constructing a very straightforward image of the Cultural Revolution re-legitimized the Party.

Having said all that, I think that the best of the films from that cycle from the late 70s are not so simple. For example, Troubled Laughter shares a self-reflexive quality with Though I Am Gone. In Hu Jie’s film, it’s very striking that the old widower took a camera with him to take pictures of his wife dying in the ER at the hospital after her students had beaten her. It opens a second dimension to the film, so that it becomes a meditation on the need to document and to bear witness as well as a documentary about a specific topic. In the case of Troubled Laughter, the film is all about a journalist who is caught between his desire to tell the truth and all kinds of social and political pressures, including from his own family members, to submit and tell the “truth” that the Cultural Revolution leaders in his town want him to tell. So that film also opens up a lot of questions about what truth is, what the duty and role of an artist or a journalist or a filmmaker is, and so on. In fact, I think it’s weathered the years extremely well, and I hope that people will start to rediscover some of these “forgotten films” soon.

Relevant Classroom Use

Ying Qian

Ying Qian is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Qian’s area of focus involves examining the evolving documentary visions in 20^th century China. She is interested in the social processes and “film thinking” that have enabled and shaped the making of documentary images, and the ways in which these images have provided framings, interventions and agencies to historical change.

Recently, Qian co-organized a conference titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary” at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. We spoke with Qian about the highlights of the conference as well as her ongoing research in Chinese documentary.

dGF: Could you give a brief overview of your research? What are your specific interests within the field of documentary film study?

Ying Qian: I’m writing a dissertation on the history of Chinese documentary since the Mao era. I also write about documentary practices in the Republican period in my introduction chapter.  My interest in documentary cinema was initiated by encounters with contemporary independent documentary, and I used to make my own documentary films as well.

In my dissertation, I try to move the timeline further back. When talking about contemporary documentary, critics would point out that these films are very different from the official practices and especially from the documentary practices of an earlier era.  New documentaries do not usually have a “Voice-of-God” commentary; they also have different approaches to conceptualize reality and deal with contingency in filmmaking. These observations are clearly true; though I think the division between the past and the present is not so binary.  When one examines the documentary productions in the Mao-era seriously, one finds some important continuities despite many ruptures.  I see documentary of the present as multiple responses to the end of the Mao-era.

dGF: Did your interest evolve from a dearth in research in Mao era documentary film?

Mao Zedong

YQ:  Yes. So far, Mao-era documentary films are almost entirely overlooked by both English-language and Chinese-language scholarship, so certainly I would like to fill this gap.  After all, documentary cinema was an integral part of people’s everyday experience during the Mao-era, and the total length of documentary produced during the period doubled that of fiction films.

But my interest in the Mao-era also comes from a personal interest in understanding my own love of cinema. The Mao era had infused in the population a love of cinema at a quite different register than that in the U.S.  When I grew up in China’s 1980s, cinema wasn’t really seen as entertainment.  Instead it was seen as a serious venue of artistic expression, and a way to think through large social problems.  It was as if suddenly the country emerged from the Mao-era traumatized and speechless, and had to resort to images to process half-thoughts and complex experiences. I am interested in understanding this particular type of cinephilia.

In recent years, the film industry in China has become more and more entertainment-oriented, but independent documentary continues the legacy of social cinema, staying connected to the society through a closer bond with historical reality.  At the moment, independent documentary in China has lots of energy, and filmmakers are courageous to try many topics, doing things trial and error.  However, theoretical and critical interventions are far from adequate.  My project hopes to offer such an intervention.

dGF:  Would you characterize your research a fusion between literary and historical criticism?

YQ:   Yes, it’s both a cultural history and a film studies dissertation.  History is a big part of the dissertation, and I use more theoretical writing by Chinese filmmakers and critics than critical theory from elsewhere.  I want to understand the intellectual and artistic resources available to filmmakers in particular historical moments, and these are very contextual.

dGF:  In April you organized a symposium titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary.”  How was the conference conceived?

YQ:  The original idea came from our curatorial work.  Since 2009, I have been curating with two other colleagues– Jie Li and J.P. Sniadecki—a Chinese independent documentary film series entitled “Emergent Visions” at the Fairbank Center at Harvard.  During the Q&A sessions after screenings, the idea of ethics would often arise.  For example, we screened Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest.  This is a film about prostitution in China.  The discussion after the screening centered on the fact that the filmmaker didn’t obtain proper consent from the sex workers he had filmed.  Since sex work is illegal in China, the film might have brought risk of arrest and prosecution to the subjects in the film.

Disturbing the Peace (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2009)

Recently, we screened Ai Weiwei’s film Disturbing the Peace. Ai Weiwei’s filmmaking was irreverent and aggressive, especially when dealing with the police.  The question of “respect” came up during the discussion after the screening.  Some audience asked whether he was disrespectful to the police and forcing the camera into people’s faces; others commented on the various ways the film camera might have intervened into the interactions captured on the screen, whether filmmaking spurred violence and confrontation at times, while repressing them at other times.

The ethical practices of documentary filmmaking directly influence the kinds of films made, and the types of cinematic experience the audience is engaged in. The symposium aimed to discuss these issues.  In China, most independent documentary filmmakers are serious about their craft and purpose.  They believe in film as openers of public space of discourse, capable of negotiating interpersonal relationships in new, innovative ways.  They are using their cinema to examine the society and foster social transformations.  Because of their serious intent, we hope that bringing ethics into documentary discourse would also be important input to engage the filmmakers.

dGF: Who were the colleagues you organized this with?

YQ: I organized this with Jie Li and Professor Eugene Wang.  Jie Li is a college fellow at Harvard teaching East Asian cinema. Professor Eugene Wang works on both contemporary and traditional Chinese art.

dGF:  Who else participated?

YQ:  The community of scholars who work on Chinese documentaries is quite small.  We sent out invitations to the senior faculty first.  In the second round we invited more junior scholars. We also invited scholars who work on documentary photography, as it shares similar ethical issues with documentary cinema. Among our panelists are Professors Yingjin Zhang (UC San Diego), Carlos Rojas (Duke), Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Duke), Claire Roberts (Australian National University), Qi Wang (Georgia Tech), Luke Robinson (Nottingham, UK), William Schaefer (U. Rochester) and others from Harvard (Winnie Wong, Eugene Wang, Jie Li and myself).

dGF:  There were three panels.  What interesting issues surfaced from the discussions on these panels?

YQ: We realized that ethics is a diffuse concept and there are many kinds of ethics to think about.  There is an ethics of filmmaking, how we attend to relations between the filmmakers and the subjects and the power dynamics between them.  There is also an ethics of representation, which registers symbolic violence imposed on the subjects. There is also an ethics of watching: how should we watch and discuss these films as audience?

Realizing the ethical questions involved in production and finding ways to solve these problems could help the filmmaker to innovate on film styles and forms. In exhibitions of documentary cinema in China, one still sees many purely observational films that seem to take camera as a transparent medium of representation.   I think the reason behind this (at times banal) style is the fact that ethical questions are not thought through.  Filmmakers are not allowing their films to register these ethical dilemmas of cinematic representation, even though actually allowing that would open up stylistic and formal innovation.

We also talked about issues of documentary film distribution.  Ethical issues are very contextual.  How you ethically represent an issue, social event, or a group of people sometimes is only apparent to an insider.  Only an insider can see the power dynamics between the subjects and the filmmakers.  When such a film travels to other parts of the world, where such power dynamics are not so easily detected by overseas audiences, the ethical question become more complicated.  We need to think about these cross-cultural exhibition issues.

dGF:  This is also related to the methods of documentary exhibition, especially in China.  These films are not getting commercial distribution.  They are being screened in museums and cinema clubs.

Ai Xiaoming

YQ: Yes. This is very problematic.  When documentary films are being showed in galleries that are only accessible by car, in a suburb of Beijing, it raises questions about the audience.  At the same time, now there are a lot of films that are distributed on line.  Some of the political documentaries made by Ai Xiaoming or Ai Weiwei are distributed online.  This is a more wide-reaching and democratic method of distribution.  We can see there is also an ethics of distribution and accessibility.

dGF:  How do those films evade the government censors?

YQ:  They don’t.  There is a continuing process of uploading and then deleting films.

dGF: Is there a sense, from filmmakers, of anticipation how a film will be perceived by audiences in China versus western audiences?  Is there a difference in topics or portrayal of subjects based on whether a film will receive international distribution?

YQ:  Most documentary filmmakers grew up in China.  They go overseas for film festivals, but it’s not very clear to me that they would be so culturally fluent as to correctly anticipate what a foreign audience would be interested in.  However, I do believe they are deeply influenced by film festivals.  Filmmakers who want to get into film festivals will find films are selected by film festivals as exemplary works.

Bumming in Beijing (dir. Wu Wenguang)

When independent Chinese documentary cinema developed in the early ‘90’s, there wasn’t a recognizable standard for what was considered a “good” documentary.  Film festivals became a crucial standard-setter.  The Hong Kong film festival screened Wu Wenguang’s first film Bumming in Beijing, and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival in Japan bestowed awards upon it.  This gave lots of impetus to documentary making in the 1990s.  Suddenly this genre was considered equally promising as feature films, which were also getting prizes in international film festivals at the time.  Wu Wengguang also brought back from Yamagata works by Ogawa Shinsuke and Frederic Wiseman.  They subsequently became prototypes for documentary film in China.

dGF: There seems to be the idea that independent documentary in China is very counter-hegemonic.  While this may be true, to an extent, it roots are in the mainstream media in China, namely CCTV.

YQ:  I think that new documentary did start within the system in the 1980’s.  The models at that time, in the 1980’s, came from a number of sources.  A lot of them were from outside of China.  In 1980, there was collaboration between Japanese television crews and Chinese television crews.  They went on to make landscape documentaries about the Silk Road, the Yangtze River, and the Yellow River.  Through these collaborations, Chinese documentary TV producers were able to see how the Japanese producers worked.  Development of documentary film also grew from re-watching past films.  For example, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo was made in 1972, and was banned and criticized.  There was a mass campaign against this film in China.  Nevertheless, re-watching this film provided a lot of inspiration for documentary filmmakers in the 1980’s.

dGF:  Do you feel that Jia Zhangke has become that prototype for new narrative and documentary filmmakers?  It seems as if his influence is inescapable on the newer generations of documentary filmmakers and independent-narrative filmmakers.  We can almost see a formation of the Jia Zhangke category of film.

YQ:  That’s very interesting.  I would also say it’s a prototype for independent fiction cinema.  You see a lot of new filmmakers making fiction in a very similar way to Jia Zhangke.  But you know Jia Zhangke’s recent documentaries, for example I Wish I Knew and 24 City, are mostly interview-based, but we don’t see a rush to imitate that in the documentary community.

The Square (dir. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan)

In fact, I would say Jia Zhangke in his early years learned a lot from documentary filmmakers.  In Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu / Pickpocket, TV crews from the county’s television station were shown to make interviews with people on the streets. A similar setup was in a documentary film entitled The Square, made in 1993 by Zhang Yuan and Duan Jingchuan.  In The Square, the documentary lens showed a television crew from the CCTV orchestrating interviews at the Tian’anmen Square. The documentary camera of Zhang and Duan was filming the “documentary camera” of the CCTV, exposing the apparatus of official media in a comic way.  Jia Zhangke most likely had seen this film as the film community in the 1990s was quite tightly knit, and Zhang Yuan is a fellow Sixth Generationer.   In that case, Jia Zhangke was actually influenced by early to mid 1990’s documentary.

dGF:  Chinese filmmakers are usually quite deeply embedded in the communities they are documenting.  Do you think there are any ethical implications that arise from this relationship in terms of how subjects are portrayed and images are presented?

YQ: Embedment in a community and friendship with one’s film subjects are obviously very good things for documentary filmmaking.  The filmmaker Feng Yan, for example, has filmed a peasant woman from the Three Gorges region for many years, and from her film Bing’ai one can find, in the film frame, this deep inter-personal relationship. In the end, documentary film doesn’t document some pure reality; it documents how realities are understood and manifest in an inter-subjective space created by the filmmaker and the subjects.  Being embedded in the community in most cases allows a higher level of inter-subjectivity in the works.

However, it doesn’t mean that filmmakers would not abuse trusting subjects.  Subjects might be too embarrassed to say no to a friend’s camera in circumstances when they actually don’t like to be filmed.  Filmmakers might know the subjects so well that they can “stage” emotional scenes for them.  One of the papers presented by Qi Wang, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, concerns films where visible violence erupts in the frame.  In some films, the filmmaker artificially creates an environment where people will get upset and violence will break out.

dGF: What types of influence does the unique Chinese political and social environment have on the development of these films?

YQ:  Documentary cameras are deeply attracted to change.  In an environment that changes so swiftly and in such a massive scale daily, filmmakers are constantly stimulated to observe, grasp, and film.   Rapid social transformation explains the vitality of documentary cinema in the past two decades.  In terms of policing and censorship, it’s not easy to know to what extent the state has hindered filmmakers’ work.  Some filmmakers who made very controversial films are allowed to continue working, which means there is some room in the society for independent expression.  This room, of course, didn’t come as a gift from the state.  It has come through continuous efforts by filmmakers to push the boundaries.

Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul (dir. Hu Jie)

It’s very easy in China to turn conservative and say that films about certain subjects simply could not be made because they could potentially be banned. Self-censorship is the easier way, yet these filmmakers have been consistently choosing the hard way.  They really helped to push the envelope.  For example, Hu Jie made Searching for Lin Zhao’s  Soul in 2004.  It was about a political prisoner who was executed in 1968. At the time when Hu Jie made it, everyone was surprised that a film like this could be made.  Hu Jie had to leave his job while making it, because of the political sensitivity of the topic.  Yet in the end, it turned out ok.  The film was shown on some university campuses; it couldn’t be distributed in China but was downloadable online for a long time.  Lin Zhao became a household name after the film went viral online.  Filmmakers like Hu Jie are passionate about their subjects.  They take the risk to push the envelope just because they have to tell the story.  They then created room that later generations of filmmakers now enjoy.

The biggest hurdle, I think, is funding.  Many of these filmmakers are badly funded.  Some have to leave official jobs when their subjects become more politically sensitive, or when filming takes too much of their time. Wider distribution of Chinese documentary is necessary for the continued growth of the independent documentary film industry.  But wider distribution domestically is not yet possible due to the political circumstances.

Relevant Classroom Use

Guo-Juin Hong is Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at Duke University. Hong has published articles on such topics as early Shanghai cinema, new Taiwan cinema, documentary film, and queer visual culture. His essay on colonial modernity in 1930s Shanghai was the winner of the 2009 Katherine Kovacs Essay Award, Honorable Mention, and his dissertation received the 2005 Dissertation of the Year Award, Honorable Mention, both by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Hong teaches courses on film theory and historiography, Chinese-language cinemas, melodrama, documentary, and visual culture.

Earlier this year Guo published Taiwan Cinema: A Contested Nation on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan). The book is described as “A groundbreaking study of Taiwan cinema, this is the first English language book that covers its entire history. Hong revises how Taiwan cinema is taught and studied by taking into account not only the auteurs of New Taiwan Cinema, but also the history of popular genre films before the 1980s. This work will be essential reading for students and scholars of Taiwan and Chinese-language cinemas and of great value to those interested in the larger context of East Asian cultural history as well as film and visual studies in general.”

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dGF: Could you tell me a little about your present interests in Chinese language cinema.  What are you concentrating on right now, and what do you have planned for the future?

GJH:  My book came out in February of this year and it is the first and only full-length book in English language on Taiwan cinema that covers its entire history.  In that book, I looked at the question of national cinema as the core problematic because of the unique status of Taiwan. After 400 years of colonial history, Taiwan seemed to straddle between the status of nation and non-nation.  Questions of national cinema seem outdated because of all the discussion of the transnational and the global.  However, I find that to be over-simplistic.  Even though national cinema is a very problematic category, it is still deployed at all times for other minor cinemas in relation to Hollywood. I go through the history of Taiwan cinema and I locate different critical historical moments to test the questions of nation in cinema which is think is still a very productive historio-graphical exercise.

Now that it is done, I hope that it has opened up doors for people to continue paying attention to not only Chinese language cinemas in general, but also Taiwan cinema specifically because especially in English language study, Taiwan cinema before 1982 has always been neglected.  It was a situation that didn’t get at least partially corrected until a year ago when I guest edited a special issue for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, focusing on what we call the “missing years” between 1960 and 1980.  Those years were obviously important to the history of Taiwan cinema but also I think it is an important part of the larger cultural history of East Asia.  This is the work I have been concentrating on the last few years.

dGF:  What about your newest projects?

GJH: Now that the book is out and completed, I actually have several projects going on.  My newest project centers around the year 1949, the year at the end of the civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists.  The result of the defeat of the war was, of course, the Nationalist government with Chiang Kai Shek fled—or temporarily relocated, as they called it—to Taiwan bringing with him some two million soldiers and civilians.  That was also a really pivotal year for Mainland China as well.  The Communist party took over and began to liberate and revolutionize China and really continued in certain kinds of massive historical transformations that of course, we can say started in 1911, when Dr. Sun Yat Sen overthrew the dynasty and established the republic.

But in focusing on 1949, this project does not aim to do any kind of revisionist historical research.  Basically, I’m not really interested in doing work about the historical facts about that year about the massive migration and massive reshuffling of China, Taiwan, and broadly speaking, East Asia as well.  But, I want to look at different kinds of cultural representations in more recent years looking back at 1949.  People who are more familiar with that history would know that starting in the late 1980s, when Taiwan actually lifted the martial law, the cross-strait relationship began undergoing tremendous changes.  On both sides, people have begun to really look at the year 1949 and try to imagine or re-imagine possible future cross-strait relationships.

For example, very significantly, over the last two years, several very important writers in Taiwan published either a biography of a father who migrated to Taiwan or an autobiography about their own experience of crossing the straits.  There are lots of narrative films and lots of documentary films.  This project for me is particularly exciting and momentous because my father also came to Taiwan from China in 1949.  I have been really collecting lots of materials and historical items such as biographies and autobiographies.  I’m hoping in the next two years to finish this book project.

dGF:  Is this looking at the year 1949 from a solely Taiwanese perspective?

The Founding of the Republic (2009, dir. Han Sanping)

GJH:  No.  It would also entail looking at how people in China look at the period.  So many Chinese are interested in Taiwan now and I actually think it’s a much more substantive interest.   There is now the craze for Mainlanders to come to Taiwan.  You can also begin to see in China, last year China had their biggest production ever, The Founding of the Republic.  It began in a very official kind of way to revisit that period.  In some sense, I think a more complex and nuanced understanding of that particular year can be understood in a more comparative way.

dGF:  What was the inspiration for this project?

GJH: I think it grew out of the idea of “crossing,” both thematically and cinematically.  If you look at some of the older films, the event of crossing the strait from China to Taiwan is obviously very significant.  We can sort of see, to use a French theorist term, almost a traumatic image.  This type of representation is a recurring trope.  In the part I have begun working on, I look at some of those films and see how they cinematically represent that particular cultural memory.

dGF:  In addition to the idea of “crossing,” is the concept of home, the longing for one’s ancestral homeland going to be explored?  This is often a common theme explored in Chinese literary productions.

GJH:  Yes.  What I was going to say before was that in addition to crossing is the idea of return.  Even before return there is the question of roots and up-rooted-ness.  The idea of being forced into this kind of massive migration to a strange exotic tropical island with the hope of returning, but that would not be possible for some forty years.  This was a kind of massive, shall we say long-term transition from a certain kind of rooted-ness to a certain kind of up-rooted-ness and then when does the question of return become possible?  How will these previous forty years be resolved?

So definitely the several themes, I guess if we use some temporal spatial terms, will be the idea of crossing most immediately related to that particular historical moment, but also because of the cultural representations, how do we keep returning to that moment of crossing brings other issues: transition, rooted-ness, and up-rooted-ness, especially the questions of home, the lost home and the reestablishing of the home.  Of course now, for the last two decades, it’s possible to return.  Especially if you look at those autobiographies that I mentioned, whenever they talk about how they made it to Taiwan, it’s absolutely spectacular.  But then once they are in Taiwan, things become very murky.  So in some ways, literally speaking, these forms of biography and autobiography are also performing certain kinds of repetition of that particular remembering of the traumatic moment.

Of course, if we look at it comparatively from how cultural representation in China may engage with the act of crossing, we bring in a couple of different kinds of dynamics.  It’s actually the betrayal or departing of a little brother or family.  It becomes the theme of returning to the motherland.  That type of analysis will bring forth very different kinds of dynamics.  I think it’s very productive and useful to think about the present and the future by looking really closely and carefully at the past and how that past can be understood, reinvented, and revised.  That’s why I find this project to be very exciting.

dGF: Are you currently working on anything in the realm of Chinese language documentary film?

GJH: I’m definitely interested in that.  Like I said, this is the beginning of a new project and I’m slightly more familiar in texts from Taiwan.  Hopefully when I’m on sabbatical next year I’ll be able to branch out and look more closely at documentary in Mainland China.

dGF:  In terms of documentary in Taiwan, what have you seen as the most reoccurring and dominant themes?

GJH:  I think documentary in Taiwan, as we know it, pretty much started in the 1980’s, in really close connection to the processes of democratization and the democratic movement.  So it started very much activist, either political or social.  It was always about justice, democracy, modernization, and rights.  It started before the martial law was lifted.  It had that really strong root, broadly speaking, in activism, and so it’s very counter-hegemony.

It has also evolved into something very different from mainland documentary.  Because it is concerned about rights of minorities and about freedom, a lot of the great Taiwan documentaries often take a very much personal or individual perspective.  In a very general way, compared with a lot of the work we see coming out of Taiwan, Chinese documentary is still concerned with the masses and the collective.  What we see in Taiwan, for example, there are some incredibly powerful and beautiful personal documentaries.  On the other hand, because of that tendency of being more in tune with the individual psychology of desire, we see in other documentaries for example about indigenous people, even about the anti-nuclear movement, they will have a very strong emphasis on the people, not necessarily as a group per-se but also a very strong sense of the individual.

Also, because documentary in Taiwan is mainly supported by the public television stations, it provides filmmakers with the ability to have their documentaries made and also have a venue to show it.  A lot of documentary filmmakers are engaged with this system.  Something I’m really looking forward to finding out more when I go back to Taiwan next year is how the privatization of public television in Taiwan will influence documentary filmmaking.  I have also been working on another book project, another comparative project on the new documentary movement both in Taiwan and Mainland China since the 1980’s.  So, documentary is one of my ongoing interests and I’m going to keep working on it.

dGF: Now in terms of documentary film in Taiwan, compared to the Mainland, what level, if any level of censorship exists?  Is there a similar underground independent cinema culture in Taiwan as there is in China?

GJH: In Taiwan, because it grew out of political activism the idea of censorship, especially nowadays, is almost unthinkable.  That doesn’t mean that you can basically do anything.  Like I said, the mechanism or the institution of the public television stations does not, of course, have explicit guidelines of censorship.

Nevertheless, it, shall we say, informs the kind of work that would come out.  For example, if you’re doing indigenous issues, disaster, and humanitarian work, then you are more likely to be funded.  You can say that there is not that sort of black and white political censorship, but in the case of Taiwan, documentary straddles the gap between political sensitivity and the market.

The very idea of the situation in China, an underground culture, really does not exist in Taiwan, but in Taiwan in order to have your documentary made you need to apply and apply yourself to a different kind of mechanism.  Thus, I don’t think that censorship would be the right word to describe the constraints.  Though, it’s also not market because we all know that documentary doesn’t really have the same kind of commercial market like narrative films.

dGF: In terms of documentary films in Mainland China, there is almost an imbrication of documentary style and narrative film.  We see films like Before the Flood and we see them directly influence and even serve as the inspiration for work by Jia Zhangke like Still Life and even Dong.  There is almost a fusion of documentary-narrative style.  Have you witnessed that evolution in Taiwanese cinema?

GJH: To begin, we can see that as a mode of representation, documentary emphasizes reality.  So, its relationship to realism is inevitable.  One can argue that Jia Zhangke’s films borrow from documentary or certain kinds of neo-realist aesthetics.  How do we separate that?  I do see your point in that the idea of the visual and aural apparatus and its engagement with “reality” vis-a vis “fiction” is a murky distinction.  That’s why I think it’s very important to think about documentary only as a mode of representation, not as a certain kind of fact or statement.  To see the stylistic influence on each other, between narrative and documentary film, is a very insightful way to engage.

More specifically about the development of documentary film styles, I actually think that because especially nowadays it’s so easy, not necessarily to see every film made in China, but it’s at least very much more available to see and get exposed to various types of documentary styles.  We can now see many different types of hybrid genres in not only commercial cinema but also documentary.  For example, there is a very popular documentary in Taiwan released in 2006 called Jump Boy.  It was extremely popular and well received.  I believe the director himself said that he made the documentary because his real interest was to make narrative film.  He wanted to gain some attention so that he could make a narrative film.  I believe his first narrative film just came out.  That actually explains quite well why his film actually looks like a narrative film.  In some sense, he was showcasing that he could use a documentary mode as the subject but to tell as story as if it were a narrative film.  We see that in other cases as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, can we say the films of Jia Zhangke are really so undecidedly fiction or documentary or is it aesthetically both?  I think the question really is because of the availability of technology and all sorts of exposures and accesses we need to pay a lot more attention to the individual filmmakers’ intentions, especially in terms of documentary because it does allow a little bit more individual freedom.

dGF:  I wanted to explore your familiarity with queer Chinese cinema, in particular the films of Cui Zi’en like Enter the Clowns and Queer China, Comrade China.  Have you done any research on any of these films?

GJH: No, not in terms of Mainland China.  I did work on some part of the queer movement in relationship to documentary in Taiwan.  In Taiwan, documentary was so intimately related to the political movement about rights and freedom.  Queer documentary started in the 1990’s.   The queer movement in Taiwan’s biggest enemy was not the government but rather it was the media.  There were issues with privacy.  In the 1990s, there were some famous cases in Taiwan where TV news would sneak into gay bars and then aired unauthorized footage effectively outing people.  There was a period where documentary and gay activists had a very tense relationship with media.  It takes a lot of courage and different kinds of courage to be so publicly out in Taiwan.  In the 1990’s, that was very much the case.

The question that is the core of any kind of queer movement is about visibility.  In Taiwan, it was very interesting, in some works, to see the negotiation between visibility and invisibility.  This informed a lot of interesting work that I looked at in an article that will hopefully soon be published.

Relevant Classroom Use

Li Ning, director of Tape

Tape, a highly experimental documentary by performance artist, dancer and filmmaker Li Ning, made its European premiere last January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Since then it has screened at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight and won the Silver Award at the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Exhibitions, aka YunFest. The film makes its West Coast premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this Thursday April 7 as part of the series “Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries.”

The dGenerate catalog describes Tape as follows:

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI.

dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee interviewed Li Ning at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The following is a transcript of the interview. Translation by Amy Yiran Xu and Isabella Tianzi Cai.

dGF: You were originally a dancer, sculptor and performance artist for many years. How did you begin to make videos? Tape was originally a dance performance piece. At what time did you decide to make Tape as a video?

Li Ning: It began in 2000. I owned a DV camera then. I used it to document my performances, with my troupe, and also our training. It started simple, and I didn’t expect myself to make a documentary. Kevin knows this, I feel strongly about Jinan. I have been seeing certain scenery and objects there for over 30 years. They have left a mark in my heart and in my head. I used this crappy camera and made my first film. It was an amateurish film, which was completed 10 years ago and lasted a little over 40 minutes. In my opinion, it was closely related to Tape. And at a deeper level it shares the same things with those in Tape, such as our human condition, our changing cityscape, the choices that each human being faces.

dGF: This concept of “tape,” how did you come up with the idea of it?

Li Ning: It started in 2002. One day while I was taking a nap, I spotted a spider climbing down my window panel. I hallucinated. I thought I saw it extruding tape, which was actually its silk, from its body. The tape looked sticky, thin, and shiny. And I wondered, what if one day we could witness interpersonal relationship as it manifested itself in the form of tape, instead of something invisible? What if some day if we can actually see someone chasing another person, sabotaging another person, or loving another person? Instead of apprehending such things through imagination? That was my idea then. In 2005, I formally started the project.

dGF: And at what point did you decide that you needed to film your family?

Li Ning: In 2005, my wife was pregnant. I wanted to make some home video about it then, and it was not intended for the actually film. At the time, I filmed everything around me without any intents or purposes. It was totally random. Well, some were in fact documents of my dance troupe since some footage showed the troupe members training and their gradual changes over time. Some were of my mother, who was getting old. I only wanted to document her so that I would not regret not doing it in the future. My intentions were simplistic. I find that once I intend what I film to be a documentary, it immediately gets pretentious and practical, though still enjoyable as a film. Put it another way, such kind of art becomes rootless; it loses its roots while still showing off its fruits.

dGF: At what point did this become a difficulty? At what point did it become a problem between your mother, your wife, and yourself? In the film, sometimes they object being filmed. How did you maintain your shooting even though they were not comfortable?

Li Ning: Yesterday someone asked me something similar; it was about whether I was being harmful to my family. Fiction film directors do not have this problem because they are free to avoid it. Documentary directors cannot. I think of documentary filmmakers as people who put themselves on an altar as if they are to be sacrificed. And when they sacrifice themselves, they also sacrifice those around them like their family and friends. I think that if documentary filmmakers aren’t able to make the sacrifice, then they can’t make documentaries, unless they feel comfortable filming someone drowning while standing offshore with their cameras.

If, however, they want to film something in which they are involved, then they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves. I don’t see this psychological determination as a moral dilemma because otherwise this kind of documentary can’t be made. If someone has a video camera in hand, then it’s obligatory for him or her to show the truth – this is how I see it.

I have had many internal conflicts with myself. It is cruel for me to decide to exhibit my personal experience in public, especially my bleeding experience. However, I have been filming myself for years. I think I have been rendered numb by the constant exposure. For example, initially I could not lay my eyes on the footage of me being beaten up, but the more I watched it, the more I wanted to laugh at myself. I even thought amusingly that those thugs could hit me harder.

When I look what I film, I forget that I am still part of my family. I feel that my existence is that of a video camera. Of course, I am still a human being with rich human emotions. I love my child and I love my mother very much. I had conflicts with my wife, but we were not foes. In Tape, I inserted footage of us strolling in a park. I showed it to her. It was to restore the previous damage done to her image. And it also made me feel easier.

dGF: I want to talk about some of the projects that are in the film. There is one scene where you take off all his clothes and starts climbing a construction site, and another scene where you also take off all his clothes and dives into an icy river, and all the other activities involving your troupe performing on highways, public sidewalks and demolition sites. How did you get the idea of doing these crazy projects?

Li Ning: To me, these projects are not crazy; they are ordinary. On the contrary, seeing people carrying their briefcases and following whatever they are told to do by the state is crazy. They have lost themselves. This is why sometimes I expose my body or do things that will prove my existence; these endeavors have a calming effect on me.

During the execution of these projects, the results were often quite unpredictable no matter how planned each step along the way was. And interestingly, the more uncustomary the planned course of action was, the more likely we were to feel our existence during the process.

I never want to harm anyone by doing whatever it is. That is why lots of details need to be taken care of. For example, we did not want to jeopardize drivers when we threw fake money on the road. We specifically avoided money that looked like real Chinese banknotes and used US dollars and spirit money instead. Accidents might occur if drivers got distracted by what we were doing. I value life a lot.

I like doing bizarre things, but my bottom line is that I will never harm others’ lives. I may harm myself though.

dGF: This movie takes a very difficult and challenging exploration of your relationships with people because there were a lot of secrets and private things involved, not just about your life but also about others, such as sexual relationships, family arguments, incidents which might embarrass most people. How do you make the decision to keep those things in the video, especially when it may involve the intimate details of others?

Li Ning: I don’t think that I have exposed too much about sex. I deliberately left space for audience to imagine things. Performances involving me being naked all took place in public space. I don’t think that I used naked bodies as a way to depict sex in Tape. In Tape, I made love with my comforter, not with a female body, not with my wife, not with any real person. I wanted to protect real people, and I wanted to give viewers space for imagination. Most people do not have a problem imagining sex when they are not showed it explicitly.

As for my relationship with my family, I have given the answer in my reply to the previous question. I try to be honest in depicting my relationship with them. I try not to contemplate whether I have indeed harmed them in the end. It is not the same as avoidance because my child will see this film when he grows up, and my wife will see it too. People who have seen this film told me that I had courage, but I know that I was just being bullheaded. I think that real courage will be shown when I answer to my child and my family members about the film many years from now.

dGF: How many in the movie have actually watched the final movie?

Li Ning: My family has watched bits and pieces. Other characters in the film have not seen it. Members of my dance troupe have all seen it.

dGF: So in some ways, your dance group is closer to you than your family.

Li Ning: Yes, I agree. This is the case for these years. I feel closer to them these years.

dGF: Can you say how your family and your dance group reacted when they saw the movie?

Li Ning: My mother called me one day and asked me to go over to her place – we lived in separated homes then. She told me that she watched some discs that I left in a drawer at her place. She asked me what I was doing with them because they were about our private life, some of which involved tense moments between her and me. I placated her by telling her that film was not intended to taken seriously as reality.

Before I came here, my wife and I were in some bad terms again. I was in a bad mood when I left. When I was in Beijing, just moments before I was about to board the plane, my mother called. She said she was afraid to call me. The cellphone she had was the one I used in Tape. The cellphone had always been left on, but it was off that day and she turned it on. She saw the greeting message on it, which was my will. She was scared by it and thought that I wasn’t coming back. I felt terribly sorry for my mother then. She is in her golden years yet she has to constantly worry about her adult son because he makes troubles all the time.

I joked about the will and told her that the phone was a piece of prop for my film and the message was part of a screenplay, I only left it on my phone because I was afraid that I might forget it. After she heard me saying so, she dropped her worries, asked me to be careful and not to think too much. She told me if I could, try not to get a divorce because a broken family would not be good for my child. I lied. I consoled her and told her not to worry.

As for the members of my dance troupe, they felt old when they were watching the film. They are still young, but it has been four or five years for them by now. They felt they had changed so much during this time. Some actually told me that they felt stupid about what they had done with me for the past four to five years. They realized that it was more important to go with the flow rather than try to change he status quo. But I consider myself going with the flow.

Wu Wenguang commented that my art was like an insurrection by the corporeal against the machine. I thought otherwise. I think I want to express struggle, which is instinctual, and it is different from rebel, which requires the faculty of reasoning.

dGF: Since you were talking about you mother, and you mention you lied to her, there is this issue of fiction and performance. Even though this film is documentary and trying to explore the honesty and truth of his life, there are still performances and you said some scenes are staged. How can you resolve the relationship between trying to achieve truth for your but also lying to his family and friends using fictional explanations?

Li Ning: I think I have given some answers in the previous questions. I consider myself a sacrifice, so I am psychologically prepared and anxiety-free. I want to continue doing what I have done, but I also apologize to people. Once I have set my mind to making this film, I can only keep doing it, and nothing could stop me.

There is a scene where I dived into an frozen river in Tape. All I wanted to achieve in that scene was to capture a human face beneath the ice of a frozen river. I needed to have this image for my film, and I did it without thinking about the consequences. If I had not had this image, I would not have been able to sleep, so it was better for me just to get it done. I had thought about this image for over a month before I finally filmed it. This is probably considered irresponsible and crazy. But like a poet, when he or she creates poetry, or art, he or she is prepared to sacrifice him or herself.

Even if you are not prepared to sacrifice yourself, someone else will. And when you do, you do not regret. I think I have found my place at Rotterdam. Few people have actually come to see my film, and it is not a big hit, but I know I’m presenting something truthful to the world. My point is that what’s real and true isn’t always recognized and accepted by most people, but it is beautiful. Maybe it is like soap bubbles and breaks easily, but for me, fleeting beauty is worth pursuing.

Relevant Classroom Use

In a previous post, Isabella Tianzi Cai wrote:

Together is a behind-the-scenes documentary of Chinse director Gu Changwei’s upcoming feature film Life is a Miracle (2011), which exposes the discrimination faced by HIV/AIDS patients in China. Zhao documented the interactions of the cast and crew as they came face-to-face with the disease during the production. Initially, many only showed fear because of their ignorance of the disease. Their attitude slowly started to change as they learned the science behind it… Together suggests something quite different from Zhao’s previous work style. As a matter of fact, it is not an independent production but a not-for-profit film. Zhao expressed his commitment to making it despite its source of funding because he believed in its educational value and society-changing power. As Edwards quotes him saying, “if the film has social value then it’s worth making.”

Click here to read Dan Edwards’ review of the film, and read his interview with Zhao Liang.

Relevant Classroom Use