"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" (dir. Alison Klayman)

The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which was directed by Alison Klayman and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a story about an artist and filmmaker, about a tug-of-war between an activist and his government, and a portrait of modern China—but it’s also a story about cats. In the film’s opening sequence, Ai, whose propensity to speak in metaphor is evident throughout the film, discusses the many cats he keeps milling around his home and studio. “One cat out of forty has learned to open the door,” he reports, remarking that if that one cat hadn’t succeeded in opening the door, no one would even know that cats were even capable of opening doors. A charming moment later we see this apparently exceptional cat leap up, open the studio door, and free himself. Welcome to the world of Ai Weiwei.

A portrait of any artist—even one as dynamic and controversial as Ai – is no simple profile to capture, but Klayman’s obvious closeness to her subject and the impressive roster of experts she’s brought on board present a thorough, well-structured chronicle of the artist’s life and times. For Ai, it’s clear from the first frames that every day exists on a public stage: in the international media, on the government surveillance cameras surrounding his home and studios in Beijing, and, most significantly, online. While Never Sorry is an account of how one poet’s son became an international figure for artistic mega-projects and political subversion, it is also a story that explores and champions social media in a way rarely seen on film. From his daily Twitter activity to the “Cao ni ma, zuguo” (Fuck you, motherland) internet meme that launched a thousand gasps, the internet has played—and continues to play—a crucial role in Ai’s international reach as an artist and the practitioner of a broad political message.

The film presents a linear account of Ai’s life, from his family’s years being “re-educated” in Western China to his early artistic career in the New York in the 1980s, the emergence of the Beijing underground art scene from a collective post-Tiananmen depression, and the myriad projects that have ensued over the past few decades. Offering a contemporary narrative touchpoint is Ai’s endeavor to collect the names of all the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. The collection of names, while affecting as a eulogy for an unspeakable tragedy, seems to drive at the crux of Ai’s message. This project, like so many of his artistic crusades, is about calling for government transparency, examining what is real vs. what is fake, about making bold statements and damning the consequences—no matter how personally damaging they might be.

Clashes between Ai and the Chengdu police offer some  of the film’s most compelling footage, providing behind-the-scenes access to the making of Ai Weiwei’s Sichuan-based documentaries Hua Lian Ba Er (Dirty Faces) and Lao Ma Ti Hua (Disturbing the Peace). The altercations suffered during the Sichuan project come to a visual, if not physical climax, with the documentation of a kind of digital camera shoot-off between Klayman and Ai’s assistants and the Chengdu police during a heated confrontation. Ultimately, it’s the momentum of the Sichuan project and ensuing violent entanglements with the Chengdu police that leads the story to the moment Ai is now best known for: his eighty-one day disappearance and detention at the hands of Chinese authorities in 2011.

Birds in flight: flipping in solidarity at the Sundance Awards cenemony

While weaving together the various threads that compose Ai’s story, Klayman employs no singular narrator, but relies on the expertise of a community of artists and scholars who are intimately acquainted with Weiwei and his world, such as Chinese art experts Karen Smith and Philip Tinari, New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos, director Gu Changwei, artist Chen Danqing, and Ai Weiwei’s mother and his wife, the artist Lu Qing. This assembly of de facto narrators may not represent a broad range of Chinese or even expat attitudes but speak to a specific intellectual culture of galleries and museums, the spaces that house, but do not necessarily typify, the tangible pieces of Ai’s message.

There’s no denying that Ai Weiwei is a film constructed for non-Chinese audiences whose potentially cursory acquaintance with Ai’s story will be well-served by Klayman’s clear, if occasionally somewhat didactic style of reporting. There may remain, however, a few gaps in the audience’s understanding after the credits roll. The final credits sequence is accompanied by a video of Ai singing along to the Cao Ni Ma song. This Chinese internet sensation that plays on the characters Cao Ni Ma (meaning, ostensibly, “Grass Mud Horse”) being phonetically identical to the characters for “Fuck Your Mother” has come to represent the internet’s usefulness to in expressing superficially-apolitical sentiments below government radar.

The meaning of this epilogue was lost on numerous members of the Sundance audience, baffled that such a trenchant piece of reporting—while certainly light-hearted at moments—would end on such a silly-seeming note. Indeed, Ai’s opening story about his cats is broadly allegorical, but bears even more significant weight when one considers Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration that “it makes no difference if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” So much of Ai Weiwei’s work and life is devoted to wading through the black and white of ethical and political behavior, not to mention tangling with the often indiscriminate “mouse-catching” of the Chinese government, to present the quote without this deeper context seems somehow to weaken it.

Overall, the Spirit of Defiance award seems highly appropriate for this film that promotes in its subject an undeniable spirit of rebellion. In Ai Weiwei’s world, there’s the rebellion of creation in a country fixed in an endless cycle of destruction and development, the rebellion of using social media to subvert the restraints of local geography, and the thrilling rebellion of an outstretched middle finger—a gesture of solidarity adopted by the Sundance awards ceremony audience—to show the world just what he’s made of.

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph

At the Slamdance Film Festival, where Pema Tseden’s elegiac 2010 feature Old Dog made its US premiere last week, filmmakers are asked to share their “war stories”—the trials and tribulations of producing Slamdance’s class of often low-budget, off-the-grid films. While battling budget woes and zany locations mishaps is common among Slamdance filmmakers, Old Dog arrived in Park City with a self-evident “war story,” a sense of the political and poetic enmeshed in each highly emblematic frame of this story of an aging Tibetan herder and his eponymous mastiff.

Though Tibetan director Tseden was educated at Beijing Film Academy and cooperates with SARFT, Old Dog (the “uncensored” director’s cut screened at Slamdance) is a textually and contextually uncompromising film, laying bare a family’s struggle for integrity and tradition in a Tibetan mountain village. Tseden’s filmmaking—calm, measured, unafraid of long takes and wide, vacant shots—is certainly resonant with that of his Chinese contemporaries working in the independent sphere; identifiable as part of an aesthetic movement devoted to digital photography, stolid pacing, and a belief in the revelation of truth through minutiae. Indeed, as with many Chinese independent filmmakers of the past few decades, the juxtaposition of urban and rural, the geography of “development,” is crucial within Tseden’s lens both as a visual and social device.

Old Dog opens with Gonpo putting slowly into town on a scooter, dressed in customary Tibetan herder’s clothes with his raggedy mastiff trotting alongside the bike. The surrounding mountains are tremendous, almost disappearing into the sky. In contrast, the town is a pipsqueak. With its nondescript building flats and muddy roads, the town appears as a cracked root brought to life only by a few tiny details: pool players outside a small shop, kids (human) and kids (goats) playing together, goats watching a kind of urban tumbleweed (a plastic bottle container) blowin’ down Main Street. Gonpo has come to town to deliver yak butter to friends and family, including his police officer cousin, but he ends up in negotiations with Lao Wang, a Chinese trader who offers to buy the mastiff for a handsome sum. From the initial sale of the dog, the story stretches out with the efforts of Gonpo’s father, Akhu, to reclaim and protect the scruffy pup from further acquisition by traders or thieves looking to make a bundle selling the dog to wealthy mainlanders who keep Tibetan mastiffs as pets, as status symbols. It is Akhu’s struggle, both moral and physical, to keep the dog safe that drives the plot to an unexpected crescendo of violence and desperation, but Old Dog is remarkable for the textures that fill up the story and its seemingly empty spaces.

From the opening sequence of Gonpos’ sojourn into town, we encounter an aggressive, busy soundscape. The clink and roar of construction; the shrill call of pop music blaring from stores; the hum of a scooter’s motor; the bleating of goats; wind and insects; even the screechy blather of a Mandarin-language TV station in the family’s otherwise tranquil mountain home. Tseden is frugal with the movement of his camera and subjects and tends to hold a shot long after the frame is vacated by humans and animals, but the cacophony of sounds often overwhelms an abandoned landscape. In the film’s climactic moment, a prolonged event of mercy and brutality, the audience can look away if they choose, but the choked noises of this violent act are impossible to ignore.

Though the allegorical hand governing Old Dog can be heavy at times, even the most loaded metaphor is artfully incorporated into the style and narrative. Gonpo and his wife Rikso’s inability to bear children may suggest an heirless future for Tibetan traditions on a broad scale, but there’s no denying the uniquely human pain in Rikso’s face as she looks out on a courtyard of children playing. In a characteristically composed shot, Rikso and Gonpo stand symmetrically on either side of a school gates; her gaze is on the children, his out towards the distant mountains. The symbolic heart of the film may be the dog and a nomadic legacy being eradicated and somehow appropriated by the mainland, but what reverberates is this family’s desire for freedom. The few POV shots afforded the characters are almost all directed upwards, at the mountains or even the flimsy-looking police station that occupies the second floor of shoddy downtown building. This landscape, after all, is one of ups and downs, the topography that separates town and country and draws the fault lines between these two worlds.

In the end, Pema Tseden has crafted a roughly graceful film that exposes a world not often seen and, in a wash of flatly silvery light and pained expressions, leaves behind a sense of powerlessness before both the grandly natural and also that which is manipulated by man.  The film’s final moments are wide, sweeping shots of Akhu moving steadily through an incredible mountain terrain and disappearing over a hill; the sound of his breathing steady, heightened, and then fading.

"Fujian Blue" (dir. Weng Shuoming)

dGenerate Films is pleased to announce that Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue will be available to rent for all Comacast Cable on-demand subscribers during the month of January.

Fujian Blue is a thrilling narrative portrayal of reckless youth, corruption, and heartache in of southern China’s most telling social environments.

A full review by Mike Fu can be found here:

“Subtropical reveries of money, sex, and power dominate the golden triangle of southern China in this gritty neorealist drama from Robin Weng (Weng Shouming).  Featuring idyllic natural landscapes side by side with Fujian province’s urban sprawl, Weng’s narrative follows a group of young hoodlums circulating carefree in a vapid nightlife of karaoke bars and dance halls.  By day, they pursue a more malicious endeavor to extort money from local housewives, whose husbands have made their fortunes abroad and left them floundering at home.  The film opens contrasting rows of decrepit houses with breathtaking mansions, reminiscent of a southern Californian suburb, glistening beneath the sun.  Already the dichotomy of contemporary Chinese society becomes apparent: the rift between haves and have-nots threatens to grow ever wider, and the stakes only become higher for a younger generation willing to risk everything.”

From L to R: Dan Streible, Angela Zito, Wu Wenguang, Zhang Zhen

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

Wu, often extolled to as the godfather of the New Documentary Movement in Chinese independent cinema, presented two of his own projects at the weekend screening series, but emphasized the significant work of those young people involved in the Memory Project.  “My generation of filmmakers often started out working within the state system, but we were dissatisfied and bored,” Wu expressed in conversation with Professors Zhang, Zito and Cinema Studies Professor Dan Streible. “Filmmaking twenty years ago was about throwing tantrums. The new generation is more introspective, they don’t need to throw tantrums. They’ve adapted a more authentic independent posture.”

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

"Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi" (dir. Luo Bing)

Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi is a film by Luo Bing, a Beijing-based artist who returned to his ancestral village in Hunan Province to interview his grandparents’ generation about the darkest, most brutal years of the Cultural Revolution. While Luo’s exploration of the so-called “famine years,” the period of widespread starvation from 1958 to ’61 that accompanied Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, is often wrenchingly sad, his camera does not neglect the humor and irony of village life. The community in Luo Village is presented as one largely without bitterness, where a certain acknowledgement of their shared, albeit harrowing past allows the village elders to connect with one-another, and also with the young man holding the camera. Throughout his process, Luo searches for an elusive memoir written by his neighbor, Ren Dinqi, which is rumored to spare no detail in spelling out the days of Grandpa Ren’s life from unbearable suffering to redemption.

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

"Self-Portrait With Three Women" (dir. Zhang Mengqi)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intercut into Wang’s story are a series of audition tapes, pretty young actresses asked to speak their opinion about prostitutes. Without context, without direction, the women stumble through answers—what’s there to say? Wordlessness, a gesture towards the unutterable is the stagnant current of Fuck Cinema.  “Cinema is a complex idea,” Wu announced after the screening, “You say ‘fuck it’ when you don’t know what else to say. When the feeling overwhelms you.”

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

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

CIFF Official Logo

Reporting for the Electric Sheep blog, John Berra delivers a comprehensive account of the sights and sounds of the 8th annual China Independent Film Festival. Commenting on festival highlights, Berra offers an opinion on Shu Haolun‘s No. 89 Shimin Road, a staple of the current festival circuit throughout Asia.

The turbulent political landscape of the late 1980s is filtered through a nostalgic lens in Shu Haolun’s No. 89 Shimen Road (2010), although reference to Tiananmen ensures that this engaging drama will not receive a mainland release. High school student Xiaoli lives with his strict but understanding grandfather in Shanghai following his mother’s relocation to the United States, and becomes romantically involved with two girls who represent opposing social ideologies; next-door neighbour Lanmi becomes an escort for easy money while classmate Lili is more politically motivated. Shu resorts to some coming-of-age clichés, but this is still an evocative snapshot of youthful uncertainty at a time of social instability.

The documentary program, which included Xu Tong (director of Fortune Teller)’s Shattered, “also offered a range of approaches to independent filmmaking, from studies of creative culture to self-portraits and undercover reports.”

Xu Tong’s Shattered (2011) follows Tang Caifeng, a woman with a chequered past (involvement in illegal mining and prostitution) who returns to her north-east home town to reunite with her father, a retired engineer who was educated under Japanese rule; Old Man Tang has kept many artefacts of the occupation, but his ‘living history’ is of greater value than the portraits of Lenin and Mao Zedong that clutter the home.

Reporting in a year that saw both significant struggles and triumphs for Chinese independent film and festivals in particular, Berra’s analysis of Chinese independent film in 2012 and beyond is well worth considering:

Due to the political implications of making films outside the system in China, not to mention the problem of securing exhibition and distribution for productions that lack the ‘dragon seal’ from SARFT, it is still appropriate to group such efforts under the ‘independent’ banner. Yet it should be noted that some films in this year’s CIFF line-up, such as No. 89 Shimen Road and [Jin Rui's] The Cockfighters, find Chinese independent cinema moving towards an American independent model by locating their social concerns within recognisable commercial genres, not to mention boasting production values that contrast with the ‘hand-made’ qualities of [Song Chuan's] Huan Huan or [Zhang Ciyu's] Pear.

On the basis of this year’s CIFF selection, the Chinese independent sector appears to have achieved a balance between artistic exploration and commercial aspirations; these potentially conflicting versions of ‘independent production’ are able to comfortably co-exist, mutually supporting one another due to the difficult circumstances under which both are brought to fruition by their directors. CIFF has also encountered difficulties in terms of accommodating the growing interests of directors and viewers within a limited space and schedule, but like the filmmakers that it supports, the festival has managed to find a measure of freedom within a world of restriction.

"No. 89 Shimin Road" (Dir. Shu Haolun)

By Maya E. Rudolph

No. 89 Shimen Road will screen tonight in Chicago at 7pm as part of the Doc Films Monday Series: A Selection of Chinese Independent Cinema

Shu Haolun’s 2010 coming-of-age film No. 89 Shimen Road presents an archetypical study of longings and movements, rhapsodizing the personal and political as a long form narrative reminiscence. The story unfolds in 1989 Shanghai, from the shutter of Xiaoli, a high school student and self-proclaimed aspiring Henri Cartier-Bresson. Xiaoli largely ignores the revisionist propaganda he’s fed at school, preferring to document his world—elderly “uncles” chewing over the nightmares of the recent past, daily life in the longtang where he lives with his grandfather, and his friend Lanmi, an alluring neighbor who becomes the very embodiment of his teenage lust—in black and white stills that he sends to his mother in America.

In the legacy of Shanghai filmmakers from Shen Xiling to Lou Ye, Shu exploits the longtang’s community architecture to naturally coerce characters towards intimacy. The shared circulation of noises, daily rhythms of teeth brushing and laundry drying create the landscape of Xiaoli’s growing affection for Lanmi, a desire that is both comfortably steeped in the film’s titular home address and edged with adolescent thrill. So intertwined are their lives that Lanmi’s transformation from a modest beauty to a confident vamp learning the dangerous power of her own prettiness occurs tangibly under Xiaoli’s nose, in his own bedroom mirror.

As a counter to the sensual giddiness of Lanmi’s long hair and sweet expression, Shu introduces Xiaoli’s new classmate, Lili—a headstrong Beijinger whose utilitarian schoolgirl bob and androgynous clothes belie her progressive pep and advances towards Xiaoli. Lili’s aggressive insistence that Xiaoli check out her own photographic efforts proves neither strictly self-aggrandizing nor romantic in nature: she has clandestine photos of recent student protests sent by a cousin in Beijing. Lili, an obvious child of privilege with the irrepressible ardor of a true modern girl, allows neither Xiaoli’s initial reluctance nor the encroaching danger of authority censure to slacken her radicalization, inviting Xiaoli to run away to Beijing with her and become part of the action in Tiananmen Square.

Lili and Xiaoli at "No. 89 Shimen Road"

Xiaoli, unapologetic in his reluctance to leave China and join his mother in America, remains generally inert amid the whirl of feminine exuberance and a political reality gradually growing both clearer and closer. Like his grandfather who patiently awaits government reparations for paintings seized during the Cultural Revolution, knowing they are unlikely to materialize, Xiaoli largely holds back from decisive action. He uses his camera to follow Lanmi and Lili into strange new territories, to contemplate new images and sensations.

It is only in retrospective narration from a 2008 vantage point, waxing nostalgic about the home he once knew, that Xiaoli truly seems to act. In the grander structure of his narration of No. 89 Shimen Road, his camera has become more than a tool for passive documentation. Here, he retroactively reveals the truth of a moment in time. This too is Shu Haolun’s prerogative, conceiving No. 89 Shimen Road as a follow up to his 2006 documentary Nostalgia, a poetic essay on bygone days in the fast-vanishing Shanghai neighborhoods of his childhood. What remains for Shu, and for Xiaoli, among the emotional ruins, is a conviction that the loss of this erstwhile spirit in politics and in the home is a spoil of a “war…[that] no one knows when it began, nor when it will end.”

In examining this “war” of time, of social bodies, of political suppression, the question of movement is writ large. Both the literal movement of Shu’s camera and indication of the social movement unfolding within TV frames, snatches of pirated radio broadcasts, and within the borders of Xiaoli’s lens are almost theoretical, occurring in unanticipated, truncated bursts. What recur are images of laundry drying, a leaking faucet: that which is familiar but imperfect. Montages of Xiaoli’s black and white stills of Shanghai street life, which provide the film’s most poignant, consciously Cartier-Bressonian images, punctuate the narrative periodically, as though to reiterate the difficult nostalgia of the story. Everything—the feelings of youthful longing, the fervor of students charging China’s campuses with reformist resolve, the preciousness of Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” replayed on cassette, the old house on Shimin Road—is gilded memory now.

Xu Xin’s 2005 documentary Fangshan Church, an unassuming account of a Christian congregation in a somber agricultural village in northern Jiangsu Province, examines not the face of God, but those of devout followers. Xu’s unobtrusive portrait of Fangshan Church and its pious “disciples” opens with a series of plainly framed black and white close ups: elderly congregants facing a pulpit, eyes peering forward from seemingly unaffected, prodigiously wrinkled faces. This opening montage of faces committed in prayer is imbued with a certain reverence, a sense of the sacred articulated also in the hymns and hushed prayers delivering a devotional murmur to an otherwise stark and quiet landscape.

Fangshan Church, the narrative informs through limited title cards and scant talking-head interviews, was built thanks to the generosity of the community family members living in relative religious and economic deliverance in Taiwan. The church structure, a narrow building equipped with a modest cross that stands out amid the rough-hewn terrain of Fangshan village, caters to a Sunday congregation of nearly 900 people. Both the church and its congregants exist humbly, resolutely within Xu’s objective lens, offering a portrait of Christian dogma without evangelical fervor, daily life without much earthly expectation. A Sunday sermon catering to a packed house is exhibited with a casual tracking shot up the aisle, then follows a prophetic-seeming exodus of people and bicycles from the church up a narrow path back towards their homes. Finally, casting his camera upon the emptied church, Xu tilts the camera slowly upwards—what’s up there besides a vaulted ceiling?

The discussion of the church’s somewhat tenuous relationship with the Communist Party is mentioned only briefly, despite the local government’s past attempts to close the church. “We’re not an anti-government organization,” one congregant insists, while another adds that their interest is not in proselytizing, but “singing and dancing.” Indeed, singing is a constant presence in the church and community at large, seemingly the congregants’ preferred mode of communication between themselves and to God, and a departure from lives in a dusty town that appears dense with hardships. Yet for all of Xu’s straightforward portraiture and attention to the subtle joys and habits of these followers—a seeming attempt to personify such abstractions as faith and Godly grace—the narrative ultimately divulges the squabbles, the doubt, and the profane discussions of money, contradicting ideologies, and clerical power that plague every religious community.

Though Xu follows few of the congregants outside of their worship in the church and the occasional home prayer meeting, among the more closely watched congregants are Hu Shengqiang and his wife. Steadfast church members who eat, work, and cohabitate in tranquil simplicity, the man and wife pass time reading aloud to one another from the book of Genesis, stories of Eden. In the film’s final moments, it becomes clear that Shengqiang has passed away and his wife, grieved to hysterical tears, sings a song at his graveside. This song is no hymn in the traditional sense and there is no mention made of God or the Church in these late moments, just an overwhelming sense of devotion.

Relevant Classroom Use

Winter Vacation (dir. Li Hongqi)

Li Hongqi’s award-winning black comedy Winter Vacation is labeled “Crucial Viewing” by the Chicago Cine-file blog.   Winter Vacation screens Monday at University of Chicago’s Doc Films at 7pm. Screening details here.

Patrick Friel writes in Cine-file:

Set in a small industrial town and primarily concerned with a group of disaffected teen boys and their families, WINTER VACATION draws inevitable comparisons to the work of Jia Zhang-ke (PLATFORM, THE WORLD, STILL LIFE, 24 CITY) in its insistent and idiosyncratic look at modern China. But Jia’s films are downright baroque compared to the minimalist style of Li. The film is slow and features little action—more often than not the characters are sitting quite still or standing stationary—and Li’s compositions and long shots favor empty space and the generic, sterile surroundings (both inside and out), but once one is used to the pacing and visual bareness, one begins to see a rich vein of emotion laying just below the surface of the characters’ lives. Li’s formal elements provide considerable insight into the desperation and stasis they feel (and are actually quite stunning). While his film is part of a larger wave of recent Chinese cinema that is offering a serious critique of contemporary society there, it is also doing so through a delightfully acerbic use of humor. It is a dryly-comic film; the humor creeps up unexpectedly, maintaining a disciplined restraint to match the minimalism of every other aspect of the film. But, a few times, it bursts forth and bites you in the ass, providing (for me at least) several uncontrollable genuine belly laughs. Who says severe minimalism can’t be fun?

"Ghost Town" (dir. Zhao Dayong)

Zhao Dayong’s epic documentary Ghost Town is labeled “Crucial Viewing” by the Chicago Cine-file blog.   Ghost Town screens tonight at University of Chicago’s Doc Films at 7pm. Screening details here.

Patrick Friel writes in Cine-file:

GHOST TOWN is a cinema of accretion: details build up, people’s lives pull into focus, the arc of a place is allowed to emerge. What would have been picturesque at 70 minutes begins to verge on profound at 170 minutes. Zhao’s film is observational in mode, like Frederick Wiseman’s work. But Wiseman gains depth through the actions of the people who inhabit and interact with the social structures and institutions he focuses on. Zhao’s subject is also a “structure”—the small village of Zhiziluo in the Southeastern part of China, near Tibet and Burma. Zhao focuses on the breakdown of this place, formerly a county seat and now all-but abandoned by the Communist government. Only the locals remain, struggling with their day-to-day existence and dealing with poverty, divorce, alcoholism, lack of work, marriages of convenience. This abandonment also allows a degree of freedom for the Christian members of the community who faced severe repression and imprisonment in decades past. As subject matter, all this is nothing spectacular or surprising—documentaries on the poor and disenfranchised abound. It is Zhao’s exceptional use of digital video and natural light and his eye for small moments and details that transform GHOST TOWN from sociological documentation into Cinema. Zhao gets a range of looks from his DV format—dark, chiaroscuro-laden interiors like those in Pedro Costa’s COLOSSAL YOUTH; hazy, muted exteriors that could be Hong Sang-soo; eye popping swaths of color that would be at home in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film; verité rigor and dreamlike softness. But it is the many small moments and little details that add an incredible richness to the film. A cat lazing by a fire. A chicken walking past the camera, filling the frame. Sparks flaring up during a ghost ceremony. The blue hat of an elderly woman singing. Young boys rough-housing. Dogs sniffing each other. Zhao lets things unfold in their own way and lets our eye wander with his own. It is when he moves beyond the specifics of hardship to the specifics of place that the film shines. (2008, 170 min, video)

"Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse?"

Covering the Vancouver International Film Festival for Variety, Robert Koehler has been filing rave reviews of some new Chinese independent documentaries he’s seen at the festival’s Dragons and Tigers lineup. We are excited to see his praise for Bachelor Mountain, the new film by Yu Guangyi (whose Timber Gang is distributed by dGenerate) and Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse, the latest by Li Hongqi (whose Winter Vacation is available through dGF).

Coincidentally, the same three documentaries are also reviewed enthusiastically by Kathie Smith, who covered VIFF for the website Twitch.

Click through to read excerpts from Koehler’s and Smith’s reviews – click on their names to access the full text of Koehler’s reviews on Variety (registration required) and Smith’s on Twitch. Also read the program notes on all Chinese language films at VIFF by programmer Shelly Kraicer.

Bachelor Mountain

Koehler: “Reinforcing his position as one of the world’s superior nonfiction filmmakers, Yu Guangyi completes a landmark docu trilogy with the exquisitely observed and touching “Bachelor Mountain.” Rounding out what came before with the rough-and-ready “Timber Gang” and the intense character study “Survival Song,” Yu’s look at the life and impossible love of a hardscrabble logger/laborer is his most emotionally felt work and, if fests are paying attention, should get Yu some worldwide love.”

Smith: Yu Guangyi’s Bachelor Mountain peels one more layer back from the façade built around the international notion of modern China. With a sharp eye for the punishing and perfunctory realities of life in the Changbai Mountins, Yu reveals humanity without exploitation or device. Men are beasts of burden up for hire, and the climate measures up to an unspoken endurance test of keeping warm–neither of these are opinions, but frank facts of the blunt images far from the financial centers of China’s economic dragon.

Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse?

Koehler: The epic road trip of gifted Chinese post-punk band P.K. 14 is given radical cinematic treatment in “Are We Really So Far From the Madhouse?” One of China’s most inventive rising filmmakers, Li Hongqi (“Winter Vacation”), flexes his filmmaking muscles by rethinking the music doc from the ground up. Li’s typically deadpan wit comes across here in unexpected ways, which will strike chords with progressive and music-specialty fests worldwide.

Smith: Mainland Chinese music isn’t all erhus and Teresa Teng. Likewise, Mainland film isn’t all Zhang Yimou and quasi-political dramas. Like a match made in post-rock experimental film heaven, Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse? is a collaboration between Li Hongqi (who sent me swooning last year at VIFF withWinter Vacation) and underground rock darlings P.K. 14. Pushing the boundaries of a documentary, Madhouse might as well be considered a sound and image collage within a very loose context. Li hangs out with P.K. 14 on tour in China, films them on stage, in the van and in hotels, and sets a dozen of these sequences to their songs and bizarre ambient sound. If that sounds like a glossed up tour video, think again. Li is a director who relishes mundane and monotony to the point of beautiful abstraction.

Apuda

Koehler: A devoted son’s virtually single-minded care for his slowly dying father is given similarly disciplined focus in He Yuan’s gorgeous “Apuda.” Much like Harvard-based filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Elisa Barbash, who combine a highly sophisticated approach to filmmaking with scientific analysis, He is an ethnographic researcher at the Yunnan Academy of Sciences who also happens to be a documaker of considerable artistry. Pic’s length and extreme slowness will make it a more exotic item for art-centric and docu fests, but this gem shouldn’t be overlooked.

Smith: It is hard not to think of Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films, especially In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, while silently occupying the dark, oppressive space that of Apuda calls home. He Yuan’s portraiture through the camera lens is equally as haunting and uncompromising as Costa’s. Apuda is a tough film, but not for the sake of being tough. The contrast between the living conditions depicted in the film and anyone watching the film anywhere is huge. Life, especially in the West, has been homogenized by progress and sterilized by convenience to the point that the images of a simple man with little means are shocking. He Yuan’s explicit ethnographic study has far more grand sociological implications through film and its unlimited global reach. Apuda is an astonishing documentary with micro specificity but macro scope.

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