Thomas Mao (dir. Zhu Wen)

By Shelly Kraicer

During a recent interview with an independent Chinese journalist, I was somewhat taken aback, but also quite amused by her rather pointed question to me: “In an online discussion of an article you wrote recently, some [anonymous] commenter was skeptical that Westerners could be so interested in debating Chinese movies and ideology, when in fact it has nothing to do with them. What do you think?”

What could I think? I remember reading the original comment the journalist was referring to, and noting at the time that the implied (and oft-heard) background to this attitude was something along the lines of “outsiders [like you] are fundamentally unequipped to comment on (write about / research about / review) our Chinese films (painting / dramas / novels), so just what do you think you are doing, anyway?

At the risk of answering one cultural judgment with another, I find this display of an aggressively protective attitude to Chinese culture to be distinctly Beijing-ese. Hong Kong, Taipei and Shanghai tend to be much more relaxed about foreigners in their midst, given their cosmopolitan histories. Their urban intellectual cultures more readily admit “other” voices — foreign voices, alternative points of view — with fewer hangups than Beijing’s thriving and otherwise open intellectual culture. Beijing has long been the capital of mainland Chinese independent film and avant-garde culture. No less than half of the dGenerate Films catalog are by Beijing-based filmmakers: Jia Zhangke, Liu Jiayin, and Cui Zi’en, to name a few. And yet, despite its openness to progressive artisitic activity, Beijing has an intensely policed view of the cultural “other” and the potential role of these “others” in its cultural discourse.

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There may be several reasons for this dichotomy. Beijing has been a more homogeneous Chinese city until quite recently (dating to probably the early part of this century, with the internationalization of Beijing’s urban surface, at least, in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics). And Beijing remains (in a certain, conflicted, post-Cultural Revolution way), the incubator, curator, and protector of a certain idea of Chinese culture. This protective attitude leads Beijing’s cultural workers to patrol (though, again, for completely understandable reasons having to do with resistance to various colonialisms and post-colonial hegemonisms) the boundaries of “us” (Chinese) and “them” (foreigners). This attitude often strives to keep “our” (i.e. Chinese-made) cultural works in a safe zone, circumscribed and patrolled by rather regressive definitions of “the Other”. I’m generalizing, obviously, but I hope not uselessly.

There are clear exceptions: many Chinese intellectuals I know joyfully and productively bring Western cultural theoretical concepts into their work, and play, creatively, in the spaces between Western post-theories and the various streams of Chinese historical cultural heritages. Western voices themselves, though, talking about Chinese art and artists, are entertained somewhat problematically. People in Beijing are often curious about what I’m working on (film research, for example), and are curious to hear my opinions, though they often far too quickly take these as somehow representative of a particular template of what “a Westerner thinks about our Chinese movies” (which is rather often far from the case, especially with my willfully idiosyncratic readings of what I’m watching here). But there comes a point in most conversations I have with Chinese colleagues where things sadly grind to a halt, to a refrain something like “there are just certain things you won’t be able to understand, since you’re not Chinese”. You can almost hear the intended effect: the portcullis clangs down, the drawbridge ratchets up, and the castle is secure with you safely outside. What can a “non-Chinese person” say to that? Any attempt to argue the point circles back to demonstrate that you just “can’t know”. It’s a completely self-sealing argument.

Now, this objection is also true, to a point. I’m still learning Chinese, and it’s getting better, but still not good enough. I’m learning more Chinese history, but there is an awful lot I still have to learn. I’ve been living here for seven years trying to immerse myself in various contemporary cultural scenes, but there’s a lot I’m still missing. Beijing is just so huge, and its culture workers are in the midst of an explosion of creativity in so many fields. Yet, these limitations don’t guarantee that one is at some basic level sealed out of the heart of things. Foreigners like me who are in a certain sense committed to learning about China can constantly approach, asymptotically, if you will, an insider’s point of view. We won’t get there (the asymptotic line never actually reaches the axis it’s creeping towards), but we can get closer and closer. And certainly close enough to say interesting things about the art we’re seeing, and the artists we’re meeting.

I hope I’m far from functioning as one of those old-fashioned restrictive “portals” that Western “China hands” used to assume the role of. Those arbiters of what examples of essential “Chineseness” can pass through their filtering critical gaze to be consumed by the outside, non-Chinese world. That period of the “mysterious Orient” is fortunately long gone, although its traces are stubbornly hard to eradicate, both in the West (just look at the kinds of Chinese films that are still attracting distributors’ hard cash in North America and Europe) and in China itself, where distrust of the limits of “China experts” is something I bump into all the time. So much so that I quickly cringe when someone calls me a “Chinese expert” here, given all the baggage, described above, that necessarily comes with that label.

Two films I’ve seen happen to reflect in interesting ways on the issues behind this othering of Outsiders. I hope to be able to discuss them here in more detail later, but for now, I’d at least like to point towards them in this context:

Zhu Wen’s delightfully paradoxical Thomas Mao (Xiao dongxi) is a fictional tale about a Chinese farmer and a German artist; then it flips to a semi-documentary about a Chinese painter and a European curator. Zhu stages various confrontations between the Foreigner and the Chinese in a series of modes (comedy, science fiction, wuxia, documentary) and flips the stakes again and again, until the outside/inside distinction starts to blur and melt away. Also in semi-experimental mode, Yang Rui’s mysteriously beautiful abstract-fictional-poetic-essay Crossing the Mountain (Fan shan) aims its substantial visual gifts and structural puzzles directly at cultural boundaries: the mysterious bombs spiking the plot threaten to blow up the borders that delineate the film’s characters, and a hazy erotic languor somehow insinuates connections that go through or around the violence and horror marking out Difference.

I’d be fortunate indeed if I could cultivate that sort of languor, eroticized or not. But I’m happy to root out paradoxes, and confront limits wherever I can find them. I’ll certainly keep trying to butt my head up against the Difference Police, both here and at home, and demonstrate that the most interesting boundaries are the ones one can work to sneak around, undermine, or blow up.

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Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema

I was able to attend two events last month that showcased the strength, diversity, and vitality of new independent documentaries from China. The first, at BAFICI, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, was a section on recent Chinese independent docs that I curated for the festival. Intended as an abbreviated look back at the past 2 years or so of Chinese indies, I selected eight films (but could easily have chosen twenty) that represented different directions in what I called “radical” documentary filmmaking (using “radical” as broadly defined, in form or in content) in China today:

Ximaojia Universe, d. Mao Chenyu, 2009

Disorder, d. Huang Weikai, 2009

Ghost Town, d. Zhao Dayong, 2008

Survival Song, d Yu Guangyi, 2008

Wheat Harvest, 2008, d. Xu Tong

Disturbing the Peace, d. Ai Weiwei, 2009

Using, d. Zhou Hao, 2008

Bing Ai, d. Feng Yan, 2007

The Argentinian press and BAFICI audences keyed onto the more political aspects of the films: an exemplary piece is by the Argentine super-critic Quintin in Perfil magazine here in Spanish. I tried at the same time to highlight innovations in form and style as well as an incipient trend away from the political and towards the personal. See below for a few new signs of this quick flourishing (at China-speed, where things happen in an unimaginably compressed timeframe) of a contemporary Chinese cinema of the personal.

From Buenos Aires to Songzhuang village, just outside of Beijing

Poster for China Independent Documentary Film Festival

Songzhuang’s latest film festival, the 2010 edition of their annual Chinese Independent Documentary Film Festival, made my BAFICI film list look like old, stale news. Officially called, in English, the 7th Documentary Film Festival China (or Diqi jie Zhongguo jilupian jiaoliuzhou), Songzhuang this year presented a selection of completely new documentaries, mostly premieres, filmed in many cases by first-time directors whose work I was encountering for the first time. Programmers Zhu Rikun, Wang Hongwei, and Ying Liang put together a consistently interesting selection: ten feature-length documentaries in competition, plus another ten out of competition. Additional sidebars focussed on Wu Wenguang’s recent work, on Swiss documentaries, on a retrospective of Korean director Kim Dong-won, and on a selection of independent Singapore documentaries.

Every year the Songzhuang indie film scene shows encouraging signs of incremental progress, as an institution and as a community. This year there were exciting infrastructure developments: a second meeting room, a lushly appointed cafe and meeting place (spartan in its previous incarnation) with a useful variety of drinks (most essential for pre- and post-film discussions and gatherings, where filmmakers, curators, journalists, and audiences could spend hours talking over the films we’ve just seen); and a range of DVDs of indie Chinese docs for sale. On the festival side, projection quality in Fanhall Films‘ well-appointed basement theatre continued to be exemplary; though Songzhuang town’s municipal Art Centre’s projection facilities continue to be sub-par. It’s encouraging to hear, though, that Zhu Rikun’s Fanhall Films complex will be expanding even further, and that a second film theatre is in the works. They also plan to build, as part of the complex, a hotel for guests and for students and teachers of the school for young filmmakers that Fanhall has established over the past year. That should be the subject of another posting.

Every year at Songzhuang, the international contingent of visitors increases in size and significance. In addition to the above-mentioned sidebars, each of which had several overseas guests, there were, by my count, an unprecedented three representatives from international distribution companies at the Songzhuang screenings this year. Rather amazing, thought it shows something about the “buzz” that Chinese independent films seem to acquired outside of the country.

The Village Elementary (dir. Huang Mei)

Speaking of the films themselves, amidst a generally high level of accomplishment across the board for these young directors’ first or second films, a number stood out for me, all, it turns out, by woman directors. The eventual first prize winner, The Spiral Staircase of Harbin (Haerbin xuanzhuan louti), is by veteran director Ji Dan. She uses interviews to paint an intense, soul-bearing investigation of two friends from her youth, one poor and ill, the other middle class but stressed, set against Harbin’s symbol-laden cityscape. New director Huang Mei has shot a deceptively simple film about rural education and poverty called The Village Elementary (Changchuan cun xiao). Her honesty, her respect for her subjects, including a charismatically intellectual, politically aware, but sadly frustrated Sichuanese elementary teacher, gives the film a dirt-poor lyricism that tightly binds the minute details of individual lives to larger issues of political powerlessness and economic dependence. Liu Heng’s Back to Daxian (Huidao Daxian) is also set in a school in Sichuan. This rambunctious, rough-hewn but sometimes shockingly vivid glimpse of urbanized seventh graders battling with their teachers, parents, and each other is compulsively watchable. Most ambitious, and most strange in its epic scope and eerie tone, is Yang Yishu’s second film On The Road (Lushang).  She planned to shoot a road documentary, riding with a couple of truckers through southern China, when what turned out to be China’s worst winter storm in a century struck, transforming their road-bound world into a nightmare of snow, ice, and immobility.

If there had been an audience award, it would surely have gone to A Song of Love, Maybe (Lianqu) by the (male) director Zhang Zanbo. Snazzy and snappy, surprisingly slick, like reality TV with Chinese indie characteristics, Zhang shot the ultra-personal moments of a young KTV hostess and her louse of a boyfriend, whose soap-operatic duplicity is apparent to everyone but her. Emotional breakdowns, shocking revelations, captured by Zhang’s high-def fly-on-the-wall camera.

A couple of issues cropped up again and again during our (now beer- and wine-enabled) post film sessions, one technical, the other ethical. Many of the documentaries this time ran three hours or longer. Wang Bing has a lot to answer for. There are of course subjects that demand amplitude and epic treatment, but it seems not unlikely that a significant number of the over-extended films now being produced would benefit from some rigorous, third-party editing. Freedom can mean freedom from intrusive editing ; independence can mean independent from the filtering, controlling hand of a director; the imperative to catalogue and preserve a fast-disappearing reality can mean that one’s all footage has archival significance: but not necessarily, and not all the time.

I’ll just leave a marker here for the other hotly debated issue, to be discussed another time. How much explicit consent should an independent documentary filmmaker give her or his subject before, during, and after the filming? How much power can the subjects of the film claim? What are the implications of an unbalanced relationship of power between a camera-wielding filmmaker, and the subjects captured and exposed by that camera? How implicated is the audience in a kind of exploitation, an active consensual voyeurism, when films with vague or aggressive concepts of these boundaries are projected? Some of the more intimately personal films at Songzhuang raised these questions, and they need urgently to be debated and re-argued.

Tape (dir. Li Ning)

I have to mention two of the weirdest films at Songzhuang this year, both approaching something like experimental / fictional / performance / documentaries, both by male directors, each of which left me alternately stupefied and somehow curious for yet more. Dancer Li Ning’s Tape (Jiaodai), an epic three hour film on himself, his performance art, and his doomed troupe of guerilla urban dancers, was wildly disorganized but intermittently compelling. And new director Xue Jianqiang’s bravura night poem Martian Syndrome (Huoxing yao zonghezheng) is as hallucinatory in its image aesthetic as it is infuriating in its documentary ethics.

All of which confirms that the future of Chinese indie documentaries still looks bright, diverse, healthily contested, and always full of surprises.

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Condolences (dir. Ying Liang)

I’ve always enjoyed attending the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which perks up a dark and sleety Dutch mid-winter with what is quite possibly the world’s most creatively curated large-scale festival of art and experimental cinema. IFFR has always strongly supported Chinese language independent films. And films in Chinese usually do quite well there, having won the top prize, the Tiger Award, quite often in past few years (Flower in the Pocket, Malaysia, 2008; Love Conquers All, Malaysia, 2007; Walking on the Wild Side, 2006, China; The Missing, Taiwan, 2004; Suzhou River, China, 2000).

Even if this year’s lineup of new Chinese films might have been a bit less scintillating than usual (though standouts included Yang Heng’s Sun Spots in competition, Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II, Lou Ye’s Spring Fever, and Xu Tong’s documentary Wheat Harvest), one short stood out: Ying Liang’s Condolences (Weiwen). And the IFFR jury recognized this: Condolences won one of three Tiger Awards for Short Film. It’s a particularly well-deserved prize, in my opinion: this 20 minute fiction short of Ying Liang’s is this gifted young Chinese director’s best work so far.

It’s not hard to describe the materials with which Condolences is constructed. The film opens with a short introduction showing still pictures and a voice over news report of an actual fatal bus accident in Zigong (Ying’s hometown) on March 31, 2004. Then we see a quick shot, under the title, of a broken ceiling. After which the film’s core, a long take begins. For 19 minutes, up to and including the closing credits we watch one shot. The camera looks along an interior hallway or long covered courtyard, slightly off centre, to a brighter courtyard space far off at the end where funeral preparations are underway. In the middle foreground, an old woman sits alone on a stool, almost in silhouette. Various people bustle around: a TV crew and some assistants preparing the funeral. Later on, a delegation of visiting local officials arrives, inspecting it while greeting the old woman. We can also spy a Buddhist monk in orange vestments who arrives late, and an aggrieved older resident. We learn that the old woman, Grandma Chen, has lost her husband and son in the bus accident, and the funeral is for them.

The entire complex action of the film takes place in this one shot, in the manner of pre-classical cinema. Ying’s camera captures this long space, and his mise-en-scene arranges the action in at least five separate planes: the foreground space, where people pass through; Grandma Chen on her stool a bit further back; the middle ground of the receding hallway; the background room where the funeral transpires; and finally the back wall decorated with a large hanging cloth and portraits of the deceased.  This pictorial structure is uncannily like a Velazquez, with its layering, multiple points of focus, and narrative-in-depth, constructs an active, engaged viewer in much the same manner as the Spanish master’s great paintings.

Most of the movement is provided by the TV crew, a director, cameraman, and reporter (the latter played by Ying Liang’s producer and co-designer Peng Shan) who move back and forth through the space capturing an official report for local (state-owned) TV. The other agent of movement is the Zigong city mayor’s delegation, who wind through the space three times, like a snake, formally greeting Grandma Chen, offering her some “gifts” (a comforter, some bags of groceries), conveying to her official condolences, and inspecting the shabby and rubble-filled space.

One hilarious bit of business has the TV reporter shooing the monk, resplendent in yellow, away when he comes to inspect her interviewing the mayor; later, as he bangs his prayer drum, she tells him to shut up while she records an introduction. From the beginning, we hear sounds of drilling and hammering, and later can infer that the old neighbourhood is being torn down.There seem to be only two holdouts in this old residence: Grandma Chen and the older male resident, who interrupts the mayor’s visit to complain about being forced to move without compensation and is summarily hustled out of mayoral and camera range.

The politics of forced, under-compensated relocation and property development are one element lying under the film’s surface. Another, more fundamental, is a satire on the construction, mediatization, and presentation of official versions of “reality” (i.e. lies) in Chinese media and governance. The official bustle around the human centre of attention, Grandma Chen, mostly ignores her. The TV crew are busy filming a propaganda-news version of the funeral and visit (we overhear a comment implying that they have in fact paid for the funeral service to provide a backdrop for the report). The official visit itself is a perfectly distilled miniature version of Chinese official government speech and action: the mayor goes through his motions for the camera, using Grandma Chen essentially as a prop. Finally, everyone except Grandma Chen clears out, and she approaches the altar at the back, and, continuing to face away from us, burns funeral money and attend to her private grief.

Condolences highlights Ying Liang’s gifts as a filmmaker. He’s at his best, I think, when he’s designing conceptually. His use of cinema structure to lay out, articulate, and work through partly abstract, political, conceptual problems is best shown, up to now, in his brilliant feature The Other Half (2007), where a sequential interview form probes deeply into gendered domestic relations and environmental crises. Taking Father Home (2005), firmly grounded in plot, is to me less successful in this regard, since it is heavily weighted towards pure narrative. On the other hand, Good Cats (2008) bravely tries, experimentally, to synthesize political/symbolic conceptualization with a through-composed story. Its strengths derive from the tension within the film between symbolic language and narrative realism: it’s a tension that the film never quite works out, but it’s one that one could call productively provocative.  Condolences is tight: pure, complex, rich, and precisely designed: structure and content are tightly integrated. And the film sparkles: it brings a sharp, brilliant, humane illumination to cold Rotterdam winter days.

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1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

Part One: Toronto International Film Festival (September 10-19, 2009)

One looks to comprehensive film festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), for an overview of contemporary cinema that offers both breadth and depth. TIFF’s expansiveness, for example, allows one to make some judgments about the relative place of particular kinds of film in the world right now. I would like to try something of the sort with Mainland Chinese cinema in the context of TIFF, in particular how several new films might be situated in the world-cinematic scene.

Although Jia Zhangke seems in the process of retooling his cinema to head in new directions (though his public reaction, uncomfortably aligned with the Chinese government’s, to the Melbourne Film Festival Affair gives one pause), Jia-ist cinema, through its profound effect on most younger independent Chinese directors, seems lately more restrictive than liberating in its influence. Film language in “mainstream” indie Chinese films (both docs and features) seems to have temporarily congealed into something like formulaic liturgies: fetishization of the long take, the distant camera, the objective tone, the unedited minutiae of daily life.

At the same time, commercial Chinese film has adopted its own pathologies, giving us a series of big budget bloated historical epics cautiously tucked away, far from the sensitivities of the Film Bureau, into genres that are safely protected from any possible overt contemporary relevance. Several of these latter works found their way into TIFF, which has frequently, in the past ten years, extended a generous welcome to foreign fare that might attract the attentions of North American distribution. Since sword-wielding costumed Chinese actors sold in the past (thanks, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and your progeny), they have gained a marketable sheen that TIFF is one of the key agents in promoting.

He Ping’s Wheat (Maitian) stars actress/model Fan Bingbing as the wife of a lord of a small city in Zhao during the Warring States period. The men are off fighting the state of Qin, so the women are left behind, in charge. Two Qin refugees arrive: the comic actors Huang Jue and Du Jiayi, who while hiding their enemy identities, forge ambivalent relationships with the Zhao women. At first, the comic antics of Huang and Du seemed unbearable (light non-stop popular comedy banter, though it does work for a Chinese audience); but after a while their ritualized, dance-like movements and the film’s odd reveling in its own tonal heterogeneity infiltrate its ostentatiously pumped up visual scheme and make it oddly fascinating.

Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Warrior and the Wolf (Lang zai ji) is another plainly commercial venture that looks like yet one more attempt to cash in on the already-curdled wuxia swordplay fantasy trend. Based on a Japanese novella, the film’s story, set in a vaguely ancient imaginary Chinese past, involves a Chinese soldier (Japanese star Joe Odagiri, doing his best) sent to a frontier post who becomes sexually involved with a woman from a taboo minority tribe (Hong Kong model Maggie Q, woefully miscast). There are old-fashioned sex scenes, animated wolf spirits. And there are battles, filmed in an undistinguished shake-and-swish blur, vast panoramas of black, silver, and blue, whose stolidly sculpted heaviness (the whole things seems molded from lead) is surprising from a cinematographer as talented as Wang Yu. A colleague more generous to the film than I detected some signs of Tian Zhuangzhuang in this mess (an interest in ethnic minorities, a tale of the dilemma of the loner), but I couldn’t get past the muddy narrative, momentumless weight, and unconvincing performances.

City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan)

The third “big movie” that TIFF selected from China poses an entirely different sort of problem: Lu Chuan’s controversial City of Life and Death (Nanjing Nanjing). There has been considerable confusion about the film, a Spielbergian epic that attempts to depict the historical horror of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. Chinese viewers (and reviewers) have reacted, violently at times, against the film’s most distinctive gesture: making a Japanese soldier the main character, with whom the audience is induced to identify, and through whose eyes most of the action takes place. This certainly distinguishes the film from the run-of-the-mill Chinese propaganda films who use black/white moral schemas to portray Japanese invaders as monstrous enemies and Chinese resistance as thoroughly noble. Nevertheless, City of Life and Death remains fundamentally aligned with CCP propaganda, though it dresses its message in modern, up-to-date cinematic skin and liberal-humanist clothes. While stripping away the most old-fashioned elements of the so-called “main melody” (zhuxuanlu) war film, Lu Chuan implicitly preserves the core: individuals are exalted as Martyrs to the Nation; State power is justified by its defense of the historically vulnerable Nation; hence State power is necessary to continue to defend the Nation. This is, like its model Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, a “Never Again” movie, in which a quasi-masochistic spectacularization of great suffering is mobilized in the service of state ideology. What distinguishes City of Life and Death is that Lu Chuan has the originality and cleverness to forge a liberal/humanist version of this kind of Chinese historical mythification. It’s a Wen Jiabao-ist film (Wen Jiabao, the current Prime Minister of the PRC, is the leader currently, and successfully, presented to China’s citizens as the human, compassionate face of the Party’s rule) perfectly in tune with the gentler, more rational, modern, liberalizing factions in the CCP of today.

On the indie side, TIFF found room for three Chinese features and a documentary. Guo Xiaolu is represented by her second feature She, A Chinese (Zhongguo guniang) and her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian(Cengjingde wuchanzhe). Both films exhibit an undeniable fluency: Guo as a screenwriter hits all the right indie notes in her tale of a Chinese woman from the sticks who eventually ends up free and in possession of her own identity, leaving a trail of men (a rapist, a gangster, an English school teacher, a shopkeeper) in her wake. It’s all too rare to see a woman director’s take on this kind of story, and Guo puts a nice satirical, ironic spin on material which, in others hands, already feels stale. But it’s difficult not to see a certain expediency in this kind of filmmaking: it “works” quite well for foreign film audiences, who see something a little exotic, but not too much: the material simultaneously flatters and tweaks a foreign audience’s set of expectations. Guo’s documentary has similar strengths and weaknesses, though it has a fun and interesting structural conceit: each of its stories of contemporary proletarian struggle is preceded by a chorus of children reading exemplary tales from a school book.

Lou Ye’s Spring Fever (Chunfeng chenzuide yewan) seems to me a felicitous re-writing of his 2006 feature Summer Palace. If Lou’s dominant subject is freedom, and his material is sexual life, then his films can be read as having a common project: working through the conditions of freedom in an erotically charged realm. But there are always shields, obstacles, cloaking the main action, that complicate or block the work Lou’s cinema is striving to achieve. In Summer Palace, the obstacle was the Political. Erotics was taken to be subordinate to politics. Or, perhaps, vice versa — in fact each alternately substitutes for the other in this re-created world of post-adolescent fervor. For Spring Fever, the obstacles are cleared, political baggage is pushed aside, and erotic life is tackled head-on. Freedom is achieved, at first, through a series of struggles juxtaposing homo- and hetero-sexual couplings (I wouldn’t call this a “gay” film as much as a “polysexual” film). Then, the film reaches its emotional climax with a simplified, freely constituted threesome (two men and a woman) who manage to establish, for a shimmering few moments, an distant island of pure erotic liberty. It doesn’t last, but like the flowers that blossom briefly throughout the film, beauty is achievable, at least in motion.

The Search (dir. Pema Tseden)

One Chinese independent film at TIFF (which we also showed at the Vancouver International Film Festival) is a marvel. The Search (Xunzhao Zhimei Gengdeng), by the Tibetan director Pema Tseden (aka Wanma Caidan), is a road film, a love story, a Tibetan opera, and a film about filmmaking, all in one.. This is only the second feature film shot in Tibetan in China by a Tibetan cast and crew (it’s largely filmed in Tibetan minority areas of Gansu and Qinghai provinces): the first was the same director’s The Silent Holy Stones (Jingjing de manishi, 2005). Both managed to pass censorship: just imagine the difficulties.

A movie director is looking for actors to cast in his film of classic Tibetan opera Drime Kunden. Accompanied by a producer, a cameraman, and a driver, he drives through one spectacular mountainscape after another, interviewing and auditioning locals. When he finds the perfect actress to play the female lead, she insists that she will only participate if they take to find her former boyfriend, now a teacher in a provincial town. They agree. As they drive, the producer reveals that he was a former monk, with a love story to share of his own. The film’s all non-professional cast give performances of vivid authenticity. Pema Tseden’s classically still camera captures, through the characters’ deadpan line readings, an intense, hinted at, vividly felt reality behind their stories.

Politics are kept completely off screen, but the political is an absent presence that is still palpable. By my count, there is but one word of Mandarin in the film (appropriately, it’s “dianying” or cinema). Some critics I’ve talked to in Toronto and Vancouver talk about The Search’s debt to Kiarostami’s car-based conversation films: the image of a tiny car trundling slowly, in the distance, up a mountain road undoubtedly recalls Kiarostami. But in this highly charged context, such images acquires entirely new meanings. It’s a sense of incongruity: the vast scale of the dry steppes set against the human scale, crammed in tight, of five people in a car. Or a lonely figure or two, or a cluster of houses clinging to the side of a dusty road. People and places don’t quite fit, in the world of The Search. The film is, among other things, a search for a place where one can fit, a search for markers of human scale within a vast land. Or, inversely, a search for the presence of the vastness of a land and its grounded culture in the placeless new urban spaces that seem to be closed off from any kind of outside (the dance studio the director and his party visits, or the tinsel-tacky booze soaked bar, for example).

The Search is suffused with yearning: for lost loves, recalled paradises, for a traditional culture near the vanishing point. And for the possibility, which just might be real, of capturing on film an evanescent spiritual beauty, almost beyond reach.

Part Two: Vancouver International Film Festival (September 30-October  15, 2009)

Queer China, 'Comrade' China (dir. Cui Zi'en)

Our focus at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is squarely on East Asian independent films: following my colleague Tony Rayns’ footsteps, from whom I inherited half of the “Dragons and Tigers” section of VIFF in 2007, I am pleased to be afforded lots of space to feature new directors’ works, works that experiment with film language, and works that represent underrepresented voices in cinema.

Cui Zi’en has been a frequent visitor to VIFF, and we screened his informative, groundbreaking documentary Queer China, “Comrade” China (Zhi tongzhi) along with the young director Fan Popo’s sly and frequently hilarious short New Beijing New Marriage (Xin Tianmen Dajie), which gathers bystanders’ amused (and sometimes not so amused) reactions to a couple of same-sex couples taking formal wedding shots in front of Beijing’s Qianmen Gate.

On the radical end of the spectrum, VIFF screened young provocateur Wu Haohao’s documentary/essay Kun 1: Action (Kun 1 xingdong) in the Dragons and Tigers Competition. It’s a very Godardian meditation on cinema, youth, sex (rather explicit: the director leaves little of his anatomy to the audience’s imagination), political activism (flavoured post-Mao anarchistic), and the daring application of spray paint to public monuments. It’s fun, provocative, young, and unrestrained: one of already five documentaries, all in different genres, from 23-year old Wu, which together offer a filter-free look at the obsessions and energies of the coming generation of filmmakers.

We showed two other important Chinese documentaries at this year’s VIFF. Du Haibin’s Venice prize-winner 1428 takes as its subject the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake of 2008 (the film’s title refers to the precise moment the quake first struck: May 12 2008 at 14:28 local time). Du’s two visits to the devastated town of Beichuan, one 10 days after the quake, the other 200 days later were provoked, initially, by a compulsion to volunteer in the rescue, and, then, after witnessing the false official Chinese TV version of the recovery, to construct a truthful version of the survivors’ indomitable commitment to go on living. Subtle, scrupulously non-dogmatic, compassionate, and critical, Du’s film is a rich, open text: it grants the audience full autonomy to judge for themselves.

Petition (Shangfang), by Zhao Liang, is a stunning, epic work of political filmmaking. A holdover from pre-Maoist China, individual petitioners still come to Beijing to formally seek redress from the central government for injustices meted out by local officials. Met with contempt and sometimes violence by the Petition Office (photographed, surreptitiously by Zhao at some risk), they settled in a “Petitioners’ Village” (now demolished) to which Zhao, over the course of twelve years, repeatedly returned to catalogue their lives and miseries. Linking the intimacies of shattered lives with the most radical political analysis, Petition is epic in scope and profound in its implications, as its critique expands to challenge the foundations of China’s current political system.

Sun Spots (dir. Yang Heng)

Two of the Chinese independent fiction features at VIFF provoked strong reactions. Yang Heng’s Sun Spots (Guangban) invited repeated screenings, for its stunning images and rigorous style. This film gets close to the epitome of the “long take Asian art film”. But in Yang’s hands, each shot justifies its own length, captured in precise detail and breathtakingly sharp deep focus with masterfully exploited digital photography. Though the main characters are often so far away that their facial expressions are more implied than shown, the backgrounds are alive and fairly vibrate with energy, so integrated are they in the energy of each shot.

Oxhide II (Niupi II) is Liu Jiayin’s follow-up to her multi-award winning Oxhide (Niupi, 2005), and it’s even better. This masterpiece of ultra super low budget stucturalist/narrative cinema is also, delightfully, quite a crowd-pleaser. Around the activity of Liu and her parents preparing and eating dumplings together (that’s the plot), Oxhide II emanates a rich field of associations: the survival of humane, artisanal economy in a ruthless finance/investment-dominated world being one. What Liu honours thematically is precisely what she enacts in her practice. Her father’s struggling handmade leather goods practice, the subject of a lot of conversation in both Oxhides, is evoked by her own hand-made filmmaking methods (cast and crew are Liu and her mother and father). David Bordwell’s analysis is acute and compactly comprehensive, worth reading in full here , but I’ll quote the punch line: “… every festival that’s serious about the art of cinema should pledge to show Oxhide II.”

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Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

Perhaps I’ve been spending just a bit too much time watching movies in China? I have this recurring daydream, most often when I’m watching a new Chinese film that some enterprising young director has sent me. I always watch every independent film that I receive. You never know what gems might appear unsolicited in the mail. And, even if the film isn’t so terrific, it will still be a useful index of all sorts of interesting trends: it might reveal what young filmmakers in China are filming, how they are looking at the world around them, or, at least, what they think people like me want to see.

The daydream, or perhaps it’s a fantasy, is this. There exists, down some dusty grey hutong alleyway of Beijing, a Chinese Indie Director’s Discount Emporium. You want to make a film? Step right in and assemble your movie at bargain prices. The shelving on the left is stocked with cast members: long-haired village boys, out of school, drifting aimlessly. At the back is a set of grainy, dusty, brown-grey village-scapes, ready to be populated by said drifters. To the right, useful equipment. Some tripods, but with a restriction: they must be set up at least 50 metres from the subjects being filmed. Right beside is a very long long shelf, holding 3 minute, 10 minute, even 20 minute-long takes, offered for a steal at family-sized package prices. Alternatively, you could go for deep discount on little DV cams, with the proviso that, held close to the subjects, they be shaken as vigorously as possible. The dialogue shelves in the centre are threadbare: screenplays for rent are all dialogue-light. And, off in a corner, is a shelf labelled “Prostitutes”. It’s over-loaded, with a three-for-the-price-of-one sale.

This may seem a bit mean. But the people I’m making fun of here, in fact, are international film programmers like me (I select Chinese language films for the Vancouver International Film Festival), not the filmmakers themselves. It seems that many of us (my colleagues from other film festivals, and wouldn’t exclude myself) sometimes seem to select films armed with a checklist of “East Asian art film attributes”, the things that populate the shelves of our hutong indie shop. Who can blame a young director from China, who, with little or no chance of gaining any return on his or her investment within his own country, tries to design a film to suit those foreigners who pay the bills, fund post production, and just might offer an overseas distribution deal?

It’s too easy to choose more of what you already know, and it’s too easy to train audiences (I should say, to educate audiences) to expect a certain kind of film experience from a certain brand of national cinema. It’s something that I and my colleagues need constantly to be on guard against. After all, the joy, and if I may say so, the social value of the work I do come from constantly expanding, not restricting, the range of cinema that audiences can see. We should be in the business of opening wider the gates, or even blasting the gates apart altogether. Not honing and strengthening them to exquisite perfection.

Little Moth (dir. Peng Tao)

Fortunately, the Chinese indie brand is still going quite strong. In fact, each of the items in my indie shop has current exponents who give them fresh power and exciting possibilities.

Peng Tao uses that browny-grey palette to devastatingly expressive effect in Little Moth (Xue chan, 2007). His tightly framed hand-held camera rattles along behind the film’s desperately poor characters, pinning them against the rough, impoverished, desaturated urban environments where they are trapped. The colourless futures we see are all that they can imagine for themselves.

As for that distant tripod, I can think of no better exponent than Yang Heng with his debut Betelnut (Binglang, 2006) and this year’s Sun Spots (Guang ban, 2009). The tension he exposes between solitary youths and the wide spaces of their rural environments comes from classical symmetries, balances Yang designs in his distantly framed images. He shows how expressive and powerful a camera set far back from the action can be.

Oxhide (dir. Liu Jiayin)

If you want to see long takes that sing, Liu Jiayin’s brilliant series Oxhide I and Oxhide II (Niupi I and Niupi II) are state of the art examples. She knows how to make time itself the subject, and the director, of each shot: she stretches and repurposes cinema in ways no one else yet has imagined.

The girlfriends-turned-prostitutes by the long-haired drifters trope? Well, perhaps that one is due for a little rest.

What’s really eye-opening, finally, is when I see films that push these conventions into new territory: Wanma Caidan’s The Search, which screened at both the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals, uses a long shots to heartbreaking effect. Even more exciting are films that forego the conventions completely. To take one example, the very young director Wu Haohao has already made a series of documentaries (Kun 1 Action!, Criticizing China, Forbid Silence, all from 2008) that tear up every convention possible, harnessing the boldness and audacity of youth to make movies say new things in wild new ways.

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San Yuan Li (dir. Ou Ning, 2003)

What is a Chinese film?  Ever since I’ve started living and working in Beijing over six years ago, most serious discussions about Chinese cinema ultimately come down to this elemental question, either in its descriptive mode (what defines a Chinese film?) or in its more urgently prescriptive version (what should a Chinese film be?).  Often, it’s filmmakers themselves who seem most anxious about the issue.  Behind it lie several subsidiary anxieties: “What do Westerners want from Chinese films?”, “What’s my role in Chinese society?”, “Are films art, or commerce, or politics?”

In English, we don’t distinguish between zhongguo dianying (movies made in China) and huayu pian (Chinese language films).  Chinese film in the first instance can simply mean the national cinema of China, from its early years in Beijing and Shanghai to the present day, both within and outside the state run system of production, distribution, and exhibition.  A broader geographical definition adds to this films from “greater China”, encompassing Taiwan and Hong Kong.  A still broader meaning includes any films in the various Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, etc.).  A still wider circle would embrace filmmakers of Chinese ethnicity like Ang Lee and John Woo, whose work can be in English or in Chinese.

So much for the first term in “Chinese film.”  The second word, “film”, is equally ambiguous.  Look at any catalogue of the state-run Shanghai International Film Festival, and you’ll find the official narrow interpretation of Chinese film, encompassing state-owned film studios’ mainstream propaganda films (zhuxuanlu pian) and independently financed commercial movies authorized by the Film Bureau, both on film and DV.  Small-scale independent “image exhibitions” in China (see my previous article for an overview) will show films made outside of the system, these days almost exclusively on digital video.

With foreign film festivals, the picture becomes even more complex.  There are still international film festivals that largely follow the creaky old Shanghai IFF model, filtering out non-sanctioned cinema (several of the old-style “Category A” film festivals fit this bill).  On the other hand, there are festivals such as Rotterdam’s International Film Festival that exist to “discover” (for western viewers), support (though financing and programming) and promote independent, alternative, non-commercial cinema.  Most festivals lie somewhere in between.

Foreign festivals of either bent attempt to satisfy certain ideas about what constitutes “China” and what constitutes “film.”  No choices are completely objective, and none escape the confines of pre-existing notions of cultural and national difference.  Even the most independent, enterprising festivals can have a stake in constructing a vision of a product, the “independent Chinese cinema” brand.  This is a brand that can satisfy certain prejudices and requirements of an alternative art film distribution network.  We have to change the question, then.  Instead of asking “what is a Chinese film?”, let’s ask instead “what kind of cultural work can Chinese cinema do?”

Foreign film festivals, especially, play critical and controversial roles in presenting, labeling, constraining, defining, and shaping foreign cultural production for domestic (i.e. Western) consumption.  Since the era of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, “Chinese film” has often meant something gently or violently exotic: old models of Orientalism carried over quite easily into our so-called “postmodern”, “post-colonial era.”  Sex and violence, preferably vibrantly coloured and richly costumed, sell, because they offer western viewers a comfortingly familiar vision of a China that they think they already know.  It’s hard to account for films like Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia, 2006) any other way.

For many in the West, China is currently being re-defined as an increasingly powerful and ominous nation.  This fear of a new economic and cultural adversary colours how Western media outlets choose to depict China.  Films that in some way underline social problems, films that are bleakly depressing, films that adopt some sort of adversarial stance in relation to power, all constitute an approved set of images which flow towards Western audiences.  Examples abound.  To pick three, almost at random: Zhang Lu’s Grain in Ear (Mang zhong, 2005), Han Jie’s Walking On The Wild Side (Lai xiaozi, 2006), Li Yang’s Blind Mountain (Mang shan, 2007).  Again, the point for festivals and distributors is to supply audiences with comforting images of what they think they already understand: China as a place essentially different from their own home.  China is a place whose internal problems and contradictions need to be exposed, defined, and consumed.  This essentially is just a way of confirming one’s own “normality” in the face of a menacing “other.”  The role of critical, independent Chinese directors in making these films is therefore sometimes all too painfully ambivalent.

Enter the Clowns (dir. Cui Zi'en, 2001)

Within the Chinese filmmaking community, there are other fault lines.  Particularly visible is an implied polemic between film art and film politics.  For many independent filmmakers enmeshed in China’s particular political situation, film offers an imperative duty of opposing power.  Facing a Party whose old style hegemonic control of political discourse is no longer matched by its control over China’s social and economic space, cinematic discourse has an unavoidable responsibility to engage.  Alternatively, the Party’s now only sporadic surveillance of visual culture provides filmmakers with a new freedom to explore questions of form, to create or challenge film aesthetics.  Exemplary figures  include young filmmakers like Liu Jiayin (Oxhide [Niu pi, 2005]), queer experimentalist Cui Zi’en (Enter the Clowns [Chou jue deng chang, 2001]) and avant garde artists Ou Ning (San Yuan Li [2003] and Meishi Street [Meishi jie, 2006]) and Yang Fudong (An Estranged Paradise [Mosheng tiantang, 2002] and Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest [Zhu lin qi xian, 2003]).

Another tendency newly visible in mainland Chinese independent cinema is the urge to record and catalogue.  This is the work that these new Chinese films do.  There has been a virtual explosion, mainly on the documentary side, but also in new narrative fiction, to use cinema as a kind of archive, capturing communities and disappearing or threatened ways of life.  This movement, if it’s not premature to call it that, results in long (sometimes very long) films that function as exhaustive catalogues of data, seemingly assembled more than structured, presenting in some sense a “complete” view of a certain slice of Chinese reality, presented raw and un-altered, for a viewer to digest and analyze on his or her own.  I’m thinking of recent films like Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town (Feicheng, 2008), Cong Feng’s Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic (Ma Daifu de zhensuo, 2008), and Lin Xin’s Classmates (Tongxue, 2009).  Derived from the ethnographic documentary tradition, but injected into mainstream independent film discourse (if that term makes any sense), these catalogue films respond to what can be seen as a political imperative to show the truth: real, unmanipulated reality, untainted by the ideological manipulations of previous Chinese cinema.  Watching this movement is fascinating: the resulting works can be exhilarating, or pretty mind-numbing, or a provocative mixture of the two.

So what can be done to avoid the traps of cramming “Chinese cinema” into restrictive definitions?  What should Chinese film be and do?  It’s not easy: people largely see what they want to see.  Mass media is about giving comfort, reinforcing patterns of thought, policing the boundaries of what we call knowledge.  If I had to give the Chinese filmmakers an answer, I’d say: Make and exhibit films that show audiences what they don’t already know.  Find images that are fresh, provocative, that destabilize the complex of pre-established, pre-thought concepts that a film audience totes like baggage.  Don’t show what’s already been seen; don’t depict what’s already been imagined.  Unsettle, surprise and disturb, and you’ve started to point in the right direction.

This article, revised in June 2009, is based on a shorter article that originally appeared in the Festival Daily, published by the Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007.

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The Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Home of the Chinese Independent Film Archive (Photo courtesy of Iberia Center of Contemporary Art)

By Shelly Kraicer

Whenever I am interviewed about Chinese independent cinema, the question that comes up more often than anything else is “Can these kind of films be shown in China?”

The situation is changing, rapidly, and in substantial ways. The answer used to be “Yes, sort of”.  Now, it’s “Yes, most definitely”.

Independent films, i.e. films made outside the government censorship system, can’t be shown in regular commercial movie theatres.  When I arrived in Beijing back in 2003, one had to do a bit of investigative work to find screenings; at art galleries, a few bars and cafes, and occasionally on university campuses: all low- to zero-profile events.  Now, though, there is, if not exactly a profusion, then something like a blossoming of screening opportunities for “unauthorized” Chinese indie films.

One such event, which I attended in early April, provides a handy opportunity to sketch out a provisional, though hopefully not too superficial overview of the Chinese independent film scene.

The Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA) organized their first annual film festival from 29 March to 19 April this year.  Called “What Has Been Happening Here”, the festival took place in the CIFA’s headquarters at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, in Beijing’s 798 Art District.

The comprehensive exhibition was well organized and impressively curated.  There were several sections: one featured screenings of new Chinese independent DV films; one provided a smartly chosen and extremely useful overview of the history of Chinese DV films from its origins in the 1990s to now; one provided a retrospective of films made by Jia Zhangke’s company XStream Films, and the directors associated with it (Jia himself, his regular d.p. Yu Lik-wai, Emily Tang, and Han Jie); and a final section offered selections from the last ten years of experimental/avant garde DV work.  Accompanying these screenings, which ran morning to evenings daily for 21 days, was an exhibit in the Iberia Center capacious gallery space that surveyed the indie film scene in China today.  It highlighted the six key organizations involved in producing, distributing, and exhibiting the films, with supporting documentation, videos, artifacts, and a rich selection of materials.  The institutions featured were:

• Chinese Independent Film Festival (CIFF)
• Fanhall Films
• Li Xianting’s Film Fund
• Beijing Indie Workshop
• Caochangdi Workstation
• Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest)

First, a word about CIFA itself.  It is a non-profit academic institution, founded in 2008, devoted to “sorting, collecting, and promoting” contemporary Chinese independent films.  The CIFA underlines that it is a non-governmental film archive, in implicit distinction to the PRC’s China Film Archive, the very official, bureaucratic national institution devoted to safeguarding official, approved Chinese cinema.  The CIFA’s director, Zhang Yaxuan, is an expert on Chinese independent documentaries and a film maker and producer herself.  The facilities of CIFA within the Iberia Art Centre at 798 include a spanking new screening room of 79 comfortable seats.  The excellent projection and sound equipment — the finest yet that I’ve encountered in a Chinese non-commercial venue — suggests that the CIFA is well enough funded not to skimp on necessities.  The screenings themselves were well-run (though there was occasional trouble getting the projection ratios right, necessitating your correspondent dashing to the projection booth to discuss the accuracy of the watermelon-shaped heads on screen).

The Chinese Independent Film Festival was founded in 2003.  It is located in elegantly livable, gracious Nanjing, one of China’s most important intellectual centres, and features an annual festival of all genres of Chinese independent cinema (features, documentaries, shorts).  CIFF has since 2007 instituted a juried competition section.  Run in conjunction with the Nanjing RCM Art Museum, the CIFF uses a variety of venues around Nanjing to show an excellent selection of what their programmers (including Zhang Xianmin and Cao Kai) consider to be the year’s best Chinese indie films, based on their mission to support “independent spirit, openness, inventive in form, forward thinking” cinema.  I’ve attended the 2007 edition, which offered a relatively low-key but well-attended series of concurrent screenings over about a week (in 2008 the festival took place in late September).  The discussions after the films, and among the filmmakers, though, were anything but low key: the festival cultivates a real sense of intellectual energy and ferment.

Fanhall Films, run by Zhu Rikun, is a multi-faceted indie film support organization based in Songzhuang Arts District, a distant eastern suburb of Beijing.  Fanhall started as a website and online discussion forum and has broadened into film production and distribution.  They have produced a series of indie films, released (authorized) DVDs in China of unauthorized films (a neat trick, and a good subject for a later post), and sponsor the China Documentary Film Festival and the Beijing Independent Film Festival (each annually, in Songzhuang).  They also constructed, last year, a comfortable medium-sized screening room, above which is a spacious cafe and small exhibition space.  The trip out to Songzhuang is long (a grueling 2 hours plus by bus from the centre of Beijing), but Zhu Rikun and his staff take advantage of the community feel provided by the artists village at Songzhuang, and invite directors to spend the week during their festivals.  Community-building is a vital part of their agenda.  For more detail on the 2008 version, see my first blog entry.

Also based at Songzhuang, and closely supporting Fanhall’s film exhibition events, is the Li Xianting Film Fund.  The fund was started in 2006 by the famous art critic Li Xianting, who raises funds from artists, now outrageously prosperous in the international art market, whom he supported in the 1980s and 90s.  The fund is building an archive of independent films to support the work of researchers and filmmakers, publishes a journal, and provides grants for the development, production, and post-production of new film projects.  It also co-presents the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the China Documentary Film Festival with Fanhall Films.

Beijing Indie Workshop was founded by Beijing Film Academy professor Zhang Xianmin in 2005.  A non-profit organization supporting indie filmmakers, Indie Workshop provides equipment and post-production facilities for impecunious filmmakers, produces films, and organizes a continuing series of informal screenings and rigorous discussions of recent works (I’ve been fortunate to attend a few, which combine an intellectual salon flavour with organized film appreciation — participants are encouraged to fill out scorecards and give ratings for each film screened).  It also works to connect new filmmakers and films with foreign festivals, curators, and researchers.

Caochangdi Workstation was founded in 2005 by documentary filmmaker and theoretician Wu Wenguang.  It is made up of his Documentary Studio, the Living Dance Studio, and the Beijing Storm Company.  It provides a space for video and performance art, supports the work of filmmakers, and hosts a series of film, video, and performance exhibitions and festivals at its space in Caochangdi, a suburb of Beijing close to the 798 Arts District.  This year, CCD are hosting a May Festival of performance (works from their 2009 Young Choreographers’ Project) and film (a Documentary Forum).  CCD’s workshops include support for an ongoing series of films called the Villager Documentary Project (documentaries made by people living in Chinese villages, provided with technical and organizational support by CCD Workstation).

The Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival was launched in 2003, and is bi-annual.  It’s a documentary film festival based in Kunming, Yunnan, featuring screenings of Chinese and foreign documentaries, a documentary competition, and seminars bringing together Chinese and foreign documentary filmmakers.  Yunfest was founded with a strong anthropological-documentary film bent, and still has a section devoted to these films.

I’m tempted to try to compare the programming philosophies of the various festivals, but hesitate to generalize without enough data.  So I only offer this as a very tentative, provisional sketch, and really invite comment or correction (see the comment link below).  BIFF/CDFF tend, I’d say, to emphasize the political role of cinema, film as social critique and as agent for social/political change.  They are willing to push the edge, sometimes quite a bit, on political content, though are savvy about keeping a low enough profile to get away with some programming risks.  CIFF in Nanjing, while supporting these films too, seems to put equal or greater emphasis on film as art, and championing films that are formally innovative and  aesthetically risky.  CIFA, at least in its first incarnation, builds a historical context, and has an interest in defining something like a canon of Chinese independent cinema.  But I’m really reluctant to over-generalize, and genuinely welcome suggestions on how to clarify the above suggestions.

Chinese film events are obsessively self-documenting: there’s always at least one person from the organization filming everything that goes on.  So that’s good news if you are doing research in the field; there should be resources available if you want to follow Q&As, panel discussions, and directors’ comments from any of the events.  It’s not quite like being there, though.  One does have to attend these festivals to really get a sense of the ferment, energy, seriousness (lots of seriousness) and dedication that the small communities of Chinese filmmakers and their supporters bring to their activities.  Which, in this time of slumps (both economic and creative, cinematically speaking), is a terrifically encouraging thing.

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Photo courtesy of TreeHugger.com

It’s always an interesting time to be in China, a place seemingly without uninteresting times.  To be here now, though, lets you see a singular moment in society floating, unpinned, somewhere in between two bankrupt ruling ideologies.  The collapse of official Communism/Maoism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics, as the ruling thinking evolved from pre-Liberation through the Cultural Revolution to post-Mao Dengism, is the keynote for lots of standard accounts of China today.

Traditional Chinese culture was, for a time, obliterated by various more or less radical and institutional versions of leftist ideology.  These slowly disappeared in fact, though the rote sloganeering formulas persist, especially around the “liang hui” or annual meeting of the Chinese government’s legislative bodies, that took place in the spring.  Following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the unbridled embrace of wealth-concentration and manifest corruption in the Jiang Zemin era, the new god became capitalism, in its rawest, unregulated forms.  Free market ideology imported from its Western exponents has washed over China, pushing some groups and regions ahead, leaving millions in the interior and the countryside, behind.  Now that financial market capitalism is having its own profound existential crisis in the West, does China have to think about tossing out its brand new ruling ideology, right on top of the refuse of the old one?  It’s enough to cause a case of ideological whiplash.

What happens when an unstable society starts to face the possibility that its hot new set of ideological nostrums might be just as insubstantial as those it has just recently thrown over?  It must be a dizzying sort of disorientation for those Chinese who have invested their new identities in the new ways of thinking.

Post-Jiang Zemin China has spawned a brittle, tacky, sometimes grotesque superstructure aping ostentatious luxury.  Beijing has thrown up gold, silver, and blue buildings that flaunt Greek, Roman, steel-and-glass, and faux-Qing-bangled facades.  Today, more often then not, these monster buildings lurk under stilled, looming construction cranes hiding vast, endless ranks of empty offices in a post-Olympics slump that wasn’t the endless boom people were expecting.  Small encampments of workers, who look like migrant labourers now without work, have just cropped up on the streets around my home.

What does this crisis look like in today’s Chinese films?  At the top end of the commercial spectrum is Feng Xiaogang, whose Chinese New Year blockbusters have always both directed and crystallized the public mood.  You Are The One, released at the end of 2008 is a magical, tragedy-tinted romance among the newly rich.  But it registers a profound disquiet with the limits of financial success.  Through the film’s obligatory New Year uplift ending, with stock prices magically soaring back to the stratospheres of pre-2009 financial heaven, Feng signals the missing, impossible happy ending required by both the genre and the money-as-happiness mindset China has embraced.

Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin)

At the other end of the spectrum are many recent independent films about going nowhere in China’s rural inland backwaters — it’s a veritable Chinese indie genre.  Take Yang Jin’s accomplished Er Dong (2008), which tells a story about a young man who drifts out of school and into minor, then really serious trouble.  He can’t get any traction in a series of small towns far from the economic action, the kind of places where having nothing means you’re going nowhere, forever.  All that’s missing is that other standard ingredient from Chinese indie so-called miserablism circa 2009: the girlfriend turned prostitute by her rapacious exploiter of a boyfriend.  See, for example, Wang Yiren’s Tatoo (2009) and Peng Tao’s Floating in Memory (2009)

The rise and fall of the hit TV show Super Girl Singing Contest (China’s answer to American Idol, now called Happy Girls) provides a fascinating model, lightly abstracted, for just what the post-communist fantasy of super-capitalism looks like here.  Jian Yi’s documentary Super, Girls! (2007), an account of some contestants attending regional auditions in 2006 for the show’s second year makes this all engagingly clear.  The film follows a number of hopeful young female contestants, all wanting to become overnight amateur singing superstars.  They are inspired by the sensational success of the 2005 edition of the show that transfixed the country and made new superstars out of winners, like the slightly androgynous Li Yuchun.  The show’s ruling ethos, that absolutely anyone can become a superstar, is taken painfully literally by the documentary’s engaging subjects, who have the desire but (for the most part) lack the talent and marketable star-potential to succeed on the show’s terms.

Super, Girls! (dir. Jian Yi)

That is what’s simultaneously fascinating and sad about the film: we see these young women yearning media-based “superstardom”, a dream manufactured and perpetuated by Chinese media and commercial interests who are obviously looking for exploitable talent.  But the young women have so completely bought into the show’s ideology (if one can call it that) that they are totally self-deluding, and inevitably shocked, bewildered, and crushed when they don’t pass the auditions.

It’s hard for me not to think of this model as a perfect analogue for mythical free-market capitalism and its delusional seductions, which pretends that anyone, regardless of environment, birth or advantages, can become a millionaire, a winner in financial capital’s prosperity sweepstakes.  What this model masks, both in its Chinese capitalist version, and its Super Girls entertainment guise, is the seductive delusions implicit in its appeal.  In a corrupt environment like China’s where closeness to power and pre-existing advantages (often tied together) determine one’s success, unregulated capitalism is a field where pre-determined winners amass more wealth and power, leaving the rest behind.  Super, Girls! shows how dreams of ordinary people, consigned to being left behind by the system, are nurtured to support a system built to exploit and abandon them.

The film also reveals, in some cases, these young women’s resilience and determination to exploit whatever opportunities they can squeeze out from between the cracks.  As the consensual fantasy girding the now vanishing world financial system also cracks apart, I have little doubt that Chinese dreamers and makers — released yet again into an ideology-free zone that’s both terrifyingly unmoored and saturated with limitless possibility — will find their own spaces to wriggle through and thrive in.

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The persistence of the past, and the present’s attempts to colonize it, tame it, and re-engineer it, is a remarkable phenomenon of recent Chinese culture, including Chinese cinema. There is no other place I’m familiar with where the past is so constantly present.

Shanghai Film Studio, pre-demolition (photo by gumbase)

Fundamentally, the past here in China is both utterly disposable and simultaneously completely re-creatable. This was brought vividly to mind while I read about the recent demolition of the Shanghai Film Studio (SFS). Located in the Xujiahui neighbourhood of downtown Shanghai, the Shanghai Film Studio’s land is apparently far too valuable to continue to house the sprawling and outdated facilities of this fabled centre of Chinese mainstream film production. I was lucky enough to visit twice. The second was an official working visit, when the very helpful staff assisted me in finding prints for the retrospective on the Fourth Generation of Chinese Filmmakers that I presented at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2008. My first visit, though, was somewhat surreptitious. After visiting the neighbouring St. Ignatius Cathedral, I wandered around the Xujiahui neighbourhood just southwest of central Shanghai, a vast area that formerly contained the grounds of the the substantial Jesuit mission to China (the wonderfully restored library, the late 19th century Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei remains, along with part of the former Jesuit school). Just across the street was an ancient-looking stone barn-like structure enmeshed in a wall. The wall was decorated with a flamboyantly kitschy 70s style gate. The gate turned out to be the entrance to the Shanghai Film Studio. The guards seemed too bored to bother to stop me, so I wandered in and strolled around the grounds, where I found some sound stages, a fleet of 1940s style cars marshaled for some period film, perhaps, and a general air of somnolence.

It was thrilling, though, to think of the Shanghai Film Studio’s illustrious past, the amazing movies that were created on this spot, in these buildings. Founded in 1949, the SFS absorbed workers from Shanghai’s golden age of movies (which was led by Lianhua Film Studio and Mingxing Film Studio’s 1930s productions of modernist melodramas and comedies, featuring great directors like Sun Yu and Yuan Muzhi, and sublime film stars like Ruan Lingyu and Zhao Dan). The SFS was responsible for its own post-golden age of great movies, including Xie Jin’s series of classic films (Women Basketball Player No. 5, The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, Hibiscus Town) and many of the foundational works of the Fourth Generation (Evening Rain, My Memories of Old Beijing).

But that’s merely history, and the buildings were looking shabby in 2006. Today, the SFS is just rubble. Presumably to be replaced by something of real, contemporary value: another shiny glass shopping mall or luxury condo complex reflecting Shanghai’s imagination of what its future should look like. What particularly caught my attention in the account I read of the demolition was the fate of that old building I noticed in the corner of the wall. It was one of Shanghai’s oldest structures, a Carmelite convent, St. Joseph’s Convent of Carmel, constructed in 1874. It is also now rubble. But not gone forever, or so the guardians of China’s physical history would have it. As the invaluable blog Shanghai Scrap describes it, a city bureaucrat explained that “they are knocking it down and rebuilding it on the old foundation. It will be a new version of the old convent. It’s much cheaper this way. Restoring it would take too much time and money.” Instant history! It will be a brand new-old, an “improved” copy of the original, but presumably much less shabby and much more appealing.

That’s the key: it is fake, re-constituted “history”, built right on top of the smashed rubble of the actual past. In China, this is quite common, and from a Chinese perspective, one might ask why Westerners like me fetishize actual relics of the past, with their supposed aura of authenticity. We worship this authenticity, and insist that it gives some kind of mystical, direct, non-mediated access to what we think of as a real, objective past. But is it not also a complicated proposition, that needs critiquing and unpacking too?

The key popular mainstream films of this holiday season are about trundling out, as mass entertainment, official versions of history. Both Chen Kaige’s Forever Enthralled and Wilson Yip’s Ip Man devolve into Party-approved accounts of patriotic resistance against Japanese invaders (coincidentally, one of the key historic pillars of the Party’s own legitimacy). John Woo’s Red Cliff epic plays it a bit safe: its history is set far back in the Three Kingdoms era (220-280 CE). But it still updates, with state of the art cinema technology, a foundational myth about heroism, Chinese unity, and legitimacy that, on the surface at least, nicely harmonizes with the Party’s current view of things.

Outside of the zone of official discourse, there are independent artists and filmmakers whose works are obsessed with documenting this disappearing past before it succumbs completely to State-defined ideological re-construction. Jia Zhangke’s recent 24 City digs deeply into a moment of transition: the obliteration of a socialist-era factory in Chengdu. Jia insists on animating, through documentation and reconstruction, the lives and social history that are about to be obliterated. Hu Jie’s controversial series of documentaries, offering radical historical re-investigations of the most controversial episodes of China’s post-1949 history, are one filmmaker’s act of resistance against faked, ideologically massaged history.

Qianmen during renovation, April 2008 (photo courtesy china.org.cn)

On a grassroots level, Ou Ning’s documentary Meishi Street addresses the human cost of Beijing city government’s policy of near-total obliteration of its traditional residential quarters. The inhabitants of Meishi Street have a special burden to bear. They are in the way of a “re-creation” of the Qianmen district just south of Tiananmen Square. This vast urban demolition project is the Carmel convent story writ super-large. Beijing has prepared a modern copy of an imaginary late Qing dynasty commercial district , this time ready for visitors to Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Games (I wrote a bit about my visit there in my last blog entry). This for the sake of a master plan that sanitizes the city’s real history — this area was a vibrant commercial district of Qing dynasty Beijing, where Manchu courtiers and Chinese subjects could mingle and enjoy the city’s famous brothels, among other things. Today’s Qianmen is a purified zone, a 3-D diorama that tourists can safely consume..Some of the people who actually lived on Meishi Street, as the film shows, were creative enough to mount a form of resistance, but were ultimately powerless against the collusion of government regulation, police power, and property developers’ interests.

Here, in the People’s Republic of China, history still actively determines contemporaneity. In a place with China’s still heavily contested history, political power’s ultimate responsibility, to safeguard and bolster its own legitimacy, is deeply rooted in its control of that past, or, to be more specific, in its control over the discourse surrounding the past. As long as power can control that discourse, in its essentials, it maintains a lock on what it perceives to be the historical foundations of the legitimacy of its own rule. Copies are more “real”, in an ideological sense, than the “real thing”, or at least more stable, more reliable. Shanghai will have its new-old Carmelite Convent, as part of a newly projected Shanghai Film Centre. And what version of the history of Chinese cinema will that film centre offer? I’m pretty confident that it will be as problem-free, as purged of messy thought-provoking details, as reassuringly consumable as Qianmen today.

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BIFF’s home at Songzhuang is quite distinctive: a rather distant suburb within the Beijing city administration, Songzhuang has been home to visual artists for several years now. Land there is still cheap, so internationally renowned, affluent Chinese artists have built villa- or courtyard-style houses. Younger artists who have yet to establish themselves or who work on the margins of the commercial art scene can afford to rent cheap studio and living space out here too. This culturally fertile space, connected to Beijing yet remote enough to be protected by a sense of distance, has managed to balance risk-taking with discretion, and is just the right sort of space to support independent film exhibition now.

Supported by renowned art critic Li Xianting’s Film Fund and by the locally owned Songzhuang Art Center, BIFF this year put together a challenging, provocative, and impressive program of features, documentaries, experimental shorts, and short student works. Under Li Xianting’s artistic direction, BIFF’s main programmer, Zhu Rikun worked with a programming team to produce one of the most consistently interesting lineups of Chinese independent films I’ve yet seen at an event like this in China (there are others, two of the most prominent are Nanjing’s China Independent Film Festival, now in its fifth year, and Yunfest, in Kunming, Yunnan, which specializes in documentaries).

There were several standouts among ten recent features films screened at BIFF. Ying Liang’s new film Good Cats (Hao mao) continues the path he set with his Taking Father Home (Bei yazi de nanhai, 2005) and The Other Half (Ling yi ban, 2007), both dGenerate titles. Ying along with his producer/co-screenwriter Peng Shan have a consistent vision of China in post-industrialized urban crisis. Cities amount to moral disaster zones, made up of fragmented social networks pulverized by extreme, uncontrolled commercialization and exploitation and a nexus of Party and business interests whose hegemony seems irresistible. Taking Father Home’s irrevocably shattered family shows one kind of victimization, in which a tragic quest is played out against a brilliantly decomposed urban landscape; The Other Half’s witty survey of business and social networks (a lawyer’s eye view of society in the process of dissolution) is equally anchored in a vision of infrastructural disaster. Good Cats sharpens and focuses the satirical vein in Ying and Peng’s work: it’s a dark, funny, withering dissection of the new ruling class.

Two other standouts, both of which demonstrate that visual beauty and social critique are not mutually exclusive, are the second features of two young directors with great futures: Yang Jin’s Er Dong and Zhao Ye’s Jalainur. Er Dong, a narrative tale of a young man with delinquent (or just lazy?) tendencies who makes all the wrong decisions. Although the film looks like simple narrative cinema (it’s virtually all story without being strongly marked by visible stylistic gestures), Yang’s brilliantly cinematic framing and mise en scene push the film beyond unadorned plainness. Jalainur, Zhao Ye’s virtually plotless mood piece, is a visual poem about a retired train engineer and his relentlessly loyal protégé in China’s frigid, post-industrial Northeast. This powerful work creates unforgettably dream-like images of steam, smoke and snow, a lament to the oblivion that China’s past is consigned to irrevocable, unmanaged change.

Many of the documentaries screened at BIFF had an urgency and political force impossible to ignore. The opening film, Pan Jianlin’s provocative Who Killed Our Children (Haizi haizi) challenges the official version of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake with first person testimonies that are devastating in their directness. Documentary historian Hu Jie continues his project to expose China’s undocumented recent past with National East Wind Farm (Guoying dongfang nongchang), a searing account of the fates of so-called “rightists” sent to a labor camp in Yunnan in the late 1950s. Radical director and film and queer theorist Cui Zi’en premiered his newest work, the feature documentary Queer China (Zhi tongzhi), a comprehensive, intellectually provocative survey of the history and present condition of gays and lesbians in China.

Contemporary artist and filmmaker Ou Ning’s Meishi Street (Meishi jie, 2006), another dGenerate title, takes on planned urban destruction: the Beijing government’s controversial project to destroy the historic neighbourhood of hutongs around Qianmen (south of Tiananmen Square) in the name of urban renewal. Ou’s masterstroke here is to give a camera to Zhang Jinli, one of the stalwarts who resists this poorly compensated forced displacement. Filmmaking agency is thus granted to the documentary subject, and Zhang’s involvement in chronicling his (very colourful) resistance to power infuses the film’s form with added meaning.

I happened to visit the “new Qianmen” neighbourhood shortly after I saw Meishi Street. It’s an appallingly Disney-fied, commodified simulacrum: a pastiche of faux-post-Qing Dynasty facades veiling an unfinished shopping strip, the Great Mall of Qianmen. The buildings are there, but still empty of the luxury and souvenir stores that will soon lure tourists herded through its fake streets. The overall effect is of a sterile, ghostly wasteland evoking an idealized past masking a consumerist present. These newly erected monuments to crass commerce acknowledge, in their own perverse way, the irretrievable social and cultural losses that the brave films at BIFF seek to document.

Shelly Kraicer is a Beijing-based writer, critic, and film curator. Born in Toronto, Canada, and educated at Yale University, he has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, the Village Voice, and Screen International. Since 2007, he has been a programmer of East Asian films for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has consulted for the Venice, Udine, Dubai, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.