Today’s film:

Some Actions which Haven’t Been Defined Yet in the Revolution (dir. Sun Xun)

2011. China. Directed by Sun Xun.

MoMA program description:

This complex, beautifully rendered woodprint animation—made using a method that was popular in the decades following the 1949 formation of the Peoples Republic of China—presents a dark portrait of the contemporary world.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

For Mainland Chinese viewers who are new to Sun Xun’s work, Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet In The Revolution offers an unforgettable experience, akin to a waking dream. Coursing through the film’s narrative is the logic of dreams, its landscape a torrent of ineffable, dark emotions. The soundtrack—created by Jin Shan—only amplifies these feelings. Like fallen fragments, the film’s visual elements come directly from life, as everyday images and organisms. Yet under Sun’s cool and fractional treatment, these quotidian abstractions—detached from the circumstances under which they arise—become symbols that are eerie and parched of emotion.
- Liu Xi (translated by JiaJing Liu), LEAP

Now while the film only went for 13 minutes, it was animated entirely with woodcuts of which thousands were used! It takes me like a day at best to do one… and that’s not even with a lot of detail, I was stunned when I put into context even what a team of folks carving blocks would need to do to complete this project. As you can see by the stills I’ve found on the internet, the level of detail is not to shabby either. Just to clarify, the animated film was made up of the blocks, not animated prints on paper. So the grain of the wood and the negative space was brilliantly used as well to create some of the lines and effects.

- Alex Gillies, Against the Grain

Today’s film:

Though I Am Gone (dir. Hu Jie)

Wo sui si qu (Though I Am Gone)

2007. China. Directed by Hu Jie.

MoMA program description:

The documentaries of Hu Jie, China’s most fearless historical filmmaker, probe lost stories of the nation’s revolutionary past. His profile of 85-year-old Wang Qingyao reveals how Wang extemporaneously performed the role of documentarian when his wife, the school teacher Bian Zhongyun, was beaten to death by her students as an accused reactionary during the Cultural Revolution. Wang’s photos of the incident emerge as a historical precursor to the contemporary documentary movement in its efforts to record social injustices and marginalized figures.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

“Because the Chinese official authority does not want us to remember the history, we non-official people should remember on our own.”

- Hu Jie, quoted in Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Alternative Archive.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

In terms of documentary types, Hu’s Though I Am Gone can be said to deploy a range of strategies that go well beyond those associated with an expository mode. As a result of the film-maker’s use of different types of materials and a variety of audiovisual methods, Though I Am Gone becomes a formally and aesthetically compelling collage consisting of facts, memories and associations.

- Cheung Tit Leung, Directory of World Cinema

The “star” of Hu Jie’s film is Bian Zhongyun’s husband, Wang Jingyao. Now over 80, the elderly man speaks about his wife’s death with frankness and emotion. For more than 40 years, Wang has carefully kept Bian’s blood-stained clothes, her watch that stopped at the exact moment of the beating, and photos taken right before her cremation revealing her bruised body. This is the first time, through Hu’s camera, Wang is able to show Bian’s story, including her brutal death, to the world.  The effect is powerful, if only for demonstrating the care he has taken of these items under extremely difficult circumstances.  Wang Jingyao has done a great service to the memory of those who died during the Cultural Revolution, and deserves the deep respect of all those who do not want to forget the Cultural Revolution, but instead want to learn from it.

- Weili Ye, Asian Educational Media Service

He kept the photographs for four decades, waiting all the while to transfer them into the Cultural Revolution Museum, if such a museum is ever to be built.

- Jie Li, Public Culture

Then there are such as the photo Wang took of the view from their apartment window of the open space where — in the days before the onset of the Cultural Revolution – he would wait to meet her when she returned from work, and the revelation that he secretly set up a memorial for his late wife inside a bookcase in their home — things that have more to do with his love for her than his determination to see that justice will eventually be served.   Consequently, even while Though I Am Gone is undoubtedly filled with much sorrow, this thoroughly admirable effort also does leave its viewers with a sense that (some) humanity, love and bravery can and has managed to prevail even in incredibly trying times and circumstances.

- Webs of Significance

In addition to recording Wang, Hu’s film also foregrounds the very idea of archiving and testimony. Even before the title of the film appears, the first shot is a close-up of Wang Jingyao’s Seagull-brand camera, which we later find out he used to take photographs of his wife’s body the day after she died. The year of the film’s production, 2006, is the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution and of his wife’s death. Wang says he has been carrying a cross since then and that he feels it is his responsibility to reveal what happened. The film draws attention to the connect between the archiving of all documents from photographs to bloodstained clothes and the convincing revelation of truth… Hu’s editing of the film and his dual focus on Wang Jingyao’s documentation process almost as much as what he has documented suggest a strong sense of affinity with Wang.

- Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Alternative Archive.”  In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

- Links to online resources about Ban Zhongyun’s death on Wellesley College website

It took a year of negotiations and a viewing of the Lin Zhaofilm to persuade Bian’s aging husband to tell his story and show his photographs for the first time. These images, and Hu’s film that has taken them to a wider audience, is testimony not only to the brutality of the Maoist era, but also the importance of documenting history – especially in an environment in which the past is constantly erased and rewritten to suit the political needs of the present.

- Dan Edwards, “Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement,” Senses of Cinema

Just before the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival, the Organising Committee suddenly issued a notice on 26 March saying the film festival was ordered to suspend and the committee was still communicating with the relevant departments. Sources say the suspension is the result of the nomination of documentary “Though I am Gone.”

- Sophia Cao, China Digital Times

The mainland-based Douban website touts itself as a movie database but a search for Hu Jie’s 2007 documentary Though I Am Gone – about the brutal killing of a school principal during the Cultural Revolution – proves fruitless. The mainland may have sanctioned other films which broach the so-called ’10 years of catastrophe’ but Hu’s film is still banned because of its subject.

- Clarence Tsui, South China Morning Post

One of the reasons the Communist Party reacted with such sensitivity to his most recent work is that many of the former members of the Red Guard who attended Bian’s middle school were members of the families of high-ranking officials who are still revered today. “Some were daughters, nieces or granddaughters of members of the Politburo,” says Wang, the widower featured in the film. “It was essentially a royal school.” Yaowu, for example, was the daughter of a senior Communist Party official. The students also included Deng Rong, daughter of the later Communist Party patriarch and economic reformer Deng Xiaoping, as well as Liu Tingting, a daughter of former President Liu Shaoqi.

- Andreas Lorenz, Spiegel

I think from a foreigner’s point of view, it would be very sad if you made a film that could not be seen by your audience. But for me it’s normal, because after all they don’t allow you to make these films. The public media never makes or broadcasts these kinds of films. That is the reality I face. So the most important thing for me is to make the film, and to make a good film. Then the word will spread. This is the standard I set for myself. I don’t have a way to distribute the films, so the only channel I have is to make a really good film. If it’s good enough, the word will spread. If the film does not find an audience I do not complain that it is banned – I criticise myself for not doing a good enough job.

- Hu Jie, interviewed by Dan Edwards, Art Space China, August 1 2012

Today’s film:

The Questioning (dir. Zhu Rikun)

Cha fang (The Questioning)

2013. China. Directed by Zhu Rikun.

MoMA program description:

As a producer, festival programmer, and distributor, Zhu Rikun has long served as a bastion of China’s independent documentary movement. On July 25, 2012, he visited three human rights workers in Jiangxi province and was questioned by local police. Zhu turns their encounter into a real-time demonstration of civil disobedience, deconstructing the logic of interrogation.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

In this cramped space-time, the obviously biased police control turns into a scene from the theatre of the absurd around a misunderstanding about Zhu Rikun’s nationality.

When a police officer, with the his passport in hand, insistently demands him to give spoken confirmation of his nationality, bureaucratic pavolvism is driven to the brink of slapstick, especially as the ultra-smart team of sleuths, unaware they are being filmed, switch on their own camera… Decapitating some of them, the framing reflects – albeit involuntarily – the robot-like, servile attitude of these headless chickens, the strong arms of power that even forget the meaning of the question they are asking. The effect of this minimal dispositif would be outright comic if it did not reveal, in twenty minutes of real-time footage, the violence of the State’s oppression.

- Charlotte Garson, Cinema du Reel

At present, the best that artists can do is to persist as far as they can within the limitations of the system, but the results often lack creativity. Optimism would be misplaced. I still doubt whether there is a way out when there is clearly a lack of ideas or skills and when there is such a restrictive environment. Things will change if genuinely independent film-makers leave this circle and take responsibility themselves. Only then will there be a glimmer of hope.

- Zhu Rikun, The New Statesman, October 2012

Today’s film:

Lao ma ti hua (Disturbing the Peace)

Disturbing the Peace (dir. Ai Weiwei)

2010. China. Directed by Ai Weiwei.

Artist and social activist Ai Weiwei has made several documentaries about his activities, but nowhere is he as prominent as in this chronicle of his troubles with local authorities during a trip to Chengdu in 2009. Traveling to support a detained civil rights advocate investigating corruption related to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Ai is assaulted in his hotel room and arrested by police. His subsequent investigation is both an unprecedented object lesson in civil rights self-defense and something akin to performance art, as he confronts the justice system to a breathtaking degree.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

In the fall of 2009, Chinese movie theatres débuted “The Founding of a Republic,” a big-budget political extravaganza to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution. Around the same time, in no theatres anywhere, Ai Weiwei put out his own film entitled “Disturbing the Peace,” a no-budget documentary shot with a handheld camera, which documented a bizarre day in Chengdu, in which Ai, the lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, and others try to find out what happened to one of the artist’s assistants, after she disappeared into police custody following a raid on her hotel room. (In Chinese, the film is known as “Laoma Tihua.”) It is less a film than a visual record of a Sisyphean trip through the justice system.

- Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, April 4, 2011

Watching that movie, I’m pretty sure my jaw was open the entire time.

After they beat him they sent him back to Beijing, but they kept one of his assistants, a woman. So he flies back the next day with lawyers and confronts them about letting her go, and he’s filming the whole time, and the way he talks to the cops. The fact that it was all filmed, and that you’re sitting watching it, it was just unbelievable. You can’t not be a fan after watching that, especially for a young Chinese citizen, watching that and thinking “Somebody can do that? Somebody DID that?” It’s really mind-blowing.

- Alison Klayman, director of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, interviewed in Vice

Not surprisingly, Alison Klayman’s forthcoming documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry draws heavily on Ai’s Sichuan films. However, if you have only seen the excerpts, you haven’t seen the half of it. Disturbing the Peace is particularly staggering, as Ai “talks truth to power” in a way officialdom is most definitely not accustomed to. Especially telling is the way he needles them with the Party’s own rhetoric. It is also chilling to witness, knowing how dearly he will pay for his boldness.

- Joe Bendel

It is clear that Ai’s outspoken internet postings and his activism contributed to his detention, but another related cause that has been less explored in overseas discussions is his role as a documentary filmmaker. Working with a production team organized through his Beijing studio—his residence and his main headquarters located in the northwest corner of the capital—Ai has released eight guerilla-style documentaries and many short online videos that, in their rough style and critical approach, seek to initiate a space of open inquiry and free speech around social issues in China. These goals may appear similar to those pursued by Chinese independent filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Zhao Liang, and Zhao Dayong, but Ai’s work is far more confrontational, far more directly political in function, and absolutely devoid of concern for both cinema aesthetics and the status of the artist. His are hard-hitting activist films that are shot in-situ, edited together swiftly, and then immediately posted online to contribute to his larger project of unmasking abuses of power and egregious cover-ups.

- J.P. Sniadecki, “Documentary Is Just One of My Tools: The Digital Activism of Ai Weiwei,” Cinema Scope

: I take a tough stance, and we film with insistence and force. That kind of style no one has ever done before in China, because China is different than Michael Moore’s USA, where there is rule of law and effective lawyers. There are lots of problems when we film with force: we can be beaten to the point of suffering a brain hemorrhage, you know? Even before filming it was already like this, for this society is rather brutal and without rules. So, I am not producing films just to produce film, but rather to bring these stories and injustices into the wider sphere so that others can know. Many people think that I make films for the films themselves, and this is totally laughable. We do so many things here, not just films. I am an artist or maybe better to say a participant in society. Documentary is just one of my tools.

- Ai Weiwei, interviewed by J.P. Sniadecki, Cinema Scope

Further reading: an interview on Ai Weiwei’s filmmaking with Zhu Rikun, curator of the Ai Weiwei film series at Jacob Burns Film Center, 2012

Longing for the Rain (dir. Yang Lina)

Making documentaries since 1996, director Yang Lina was first recognized for her intimate record of a group of retired seniors in a Beijing residential community in Old Men (1999), with which she swept almost every top award in documentary film festivals all over the world. Later on, she continued to amaze  audiences and professionals with other documentaries like The Love Story of Lao An (2008). Earlier, she also appeared in Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000) as an actress.

Longing for the Rain marks Yang Lina’s progression from documentary to feature filmmaking. In IFFR 2013, some adored this film as a daunting portrayal of a well-off desperate housewife hungry for unattainable sex and the explicit sexual scenes in her wild dreams were just unprecedented in Chinese cinema – this film showed the sexual audacity and awkwardness of the rising new rich, the emptiness of a fidgeting soul and the impossibility of self-help at a certain period of one’s life, by a female director, from China – it was a breath of fresh air. Some disliked it because the series of repeated wet dreams just seemed endless and there were better ways to solve a woman’s pent-up sexual desire, other than turning to various superstitious resolutions, also, the representation of the husband looked too impotent, at some point even ridiculous – it was suspected to draw a derogatory picture of the Chinese people, only to cater for western imagination, like what a number of previous award-winning films had done.

To quote one of the programmers in IFFR that this film is a total new voice, unheard in previous male-dominant Chinese cinema; that it depicts the conflicts between capitalism and communism, between the urban and the rural; that it explores the contemporary female lives and their desires. Yang said she had around $320,000 (2 million RMB) at her disposal and was grateful to have top professionals in her crew.

Whether you like this film or not, it will be written into Chinese film history as it is the first film ever that presents woman’s sexual desire so bluntly, by a mainland filmmaker.

- Xu Jia

Yang Lina (photo: The Hollywood Reporter)

An interview with Yang Lina by Kevin B. Lee and Xu Jia

We have read so much about you and your various works, but how would you describe yourself as a filmmaker?

I was a dancer by training and then did theater for ten years. But in my film, like Old Men and the followings ones, you can tell that I like story-telling. The concept of a feature film has been with me for long, but I was yet to grasp the techniques to present a feature at the time. After years of making documentaries, the chance to make a feature film came and I started to write down the story. However, documentary is like a shadow and it is unlikely to separate it from my feature filmmaking. In this film, I tried to combine elements of both documentary and feature together in my film, but it was not easy. I am a fan of Dogma 95, but it is difficult to achieve that.

Who did you make this film for?

Independent films like this one is impossible to screen in mainstream cinemas back in China as it is not able to pass the censorship, so it can only be seen in film festivals like Rotterdam and watched by a small crowd. It is a film from my heart and there is a slight chance that it could reach a big audience. I dedicate this film to life itself. Thanks to my previous documentary filmmaking, I was so touched by my subjects that I felt like nobody: I knew little about life and it was their wisdom and knowledge that taught me the meaning of life. In our education system, nobody tells you how to tell right from wrong. We grow up on our own. In school, nobody would tell you that you are a woman and how important woman is, nor did our moms tell us. It was life that taught us that in a woman’s life, one can be independent and make her own choices. The world is not just controlled by men.

The sexual themes are very exclusive even in Chinese independent films, especially female sexuality, so that is also a very original aspect of the film. Why did you decide to make it that explicit with the sex toys, masturbation and nudity? It’s obvious that you don’t have to do that, unless you really want to.

In real life, women’s desire has always been there, but I don’t understand why it should become a taboo in film. There are many outlets for people’s lust and sexual passion. To a certain degree, I’d say China has already become one of the most open countries that people have a rather high level of sexual liberation. One night stands are not unusual while female’s sexual desire was rarely present in Chinese cinema, especially in female director’s works. I think we are all direct people then why not act directly? China is now a kingdom of sex, a kingdom of liberation. No matter with money or through marriage, you can get sex. Sex is not a problem and I feel even in the United States, people are not so open to sex. There is no need for me to conceal it.

To make a woman’s film is what I want to do because I’d find it unreasonable for myself to make yet another movie about men in a patriarchal society. For me, personally, in real life I have a relatively good life and most of the time I feel I have freedom, but is such freedom suitable for me? For some people, sex is a matter of random choice, but for others, it is not. What I want is to express women’s contradictory emotions and depressed sexuality. It is not like once the society becomes open in terms of sex, everybody enjoys sex without concerns accordingly. Such freedom is a delusion. A rather ungrounded freedom. For example, it seems now in China people can talk about homosexuality, unlike what was in the old days. It has become a trendy topic but in terms of legalizing equal marriage, people are no longer that enthusiastic or allowed to argue.

The spiritual aspect of this film is very interesting. To me, it feels very conflicted, ambivalent about religion. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your religious background. What approach you want to take to explore this dimension?

Many generations of my family were Buddhists. I myself used to be one of them. I am not sure whether I will be a Buddhist again, but for now, at least I don’t worship Buddha and I am not a vegetarian. I think it is a self-destructive process, a damaging force. I am sympathetic with critical films with clergymen and nuns in Western movies, for example Mother Joan of the Angels by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. The conflict probably originates from my unresolvable inner conflict. Except for my two main actresses, everybody acts himself or herself, including the Taoist priest and the large monk. In 2008 and 2009, I shot a documentary in a temple and become familiar with the monks. As for the Taoist priest, you could see my own attitude towards religion and feel a certain degree of absurdity.

How did you come up with the idea of the ghost?

Ghost is one of the cultural elements in our Eastern philosophy. It is a huge pity that my maternal grandmother passed away really early and I didn’t have a camera then and thus not able to have a conversation with her any more. The more I grow up, the more I want to go back to my past. It is only through the ghost can I express my protagonist’s desire. I feel it is the most suitable vehicle to depict her sexual anxiety.

Your previous works like Lao An, even though it’s hand-held, it is very steady and soothing, but this film looks disruptive and even turbulent. Could you talk about the different feelings these film evoke?

I think it might be feature film’s glamour. Also, regarding the visuals, this time, it is a different cinematographer; in my documentary, it was only my own breathing, but in a feature, each brings his or her own breathing, including actors. I found the leading actress through audition and the supporting actress has been a close friend of mine for thirty years. I did not have a script. The two-page synopsis was actually required by the cinematographer and my producer who insisted it was a must to carry our work on. I had the actors on set and told them about the basis idea of each scene and they gradually got used to this way of working despite some initial challenges for the professional actors as they were used to be told what to say and how to move. It was the amateur actor, my supporting actress, who was most adaptable: The funniest scene is the one in the car where they are talking about the dildo. It was all improvisation and only a few words of instruction were given. The supporting actress did a very good job but I wanted a second take. She paused her acting and said well, let us proceed as I am done with this scene. Basically I only made one take or two because I wanted to ensure the actors feel at ease, not bored. I’d prefer a subtle performance than a sensational one. Occasionally when the actors were not in their best condition I would give them a day off. The next day, they’d be much more actively creative. I finished shooting this film in twenty days, but the post-production took me two years.

What is your opinion about films like The Piano Teacher? And who are your favorite film directors?

I have watched that film, but I think my story is quite different. Recently I am watching Bergman, whose films feature mothers, daughters and their relationship. I like these films, but I find it impossible to borrow anything to my film, maybe for my next film, but not for Longing for the Rain. Maybe aesthetically applicable, but in emotional aspects, it is not possible. Our world is too different from theirs, so my limitation is that I can only make a film of my own style. I am now in awe of Bergman. In my thirties, I was easily hypnotized by his works, but now I am just fascinated by his late films. Also, this year, I systematically watched every film by Werner Herzog.

This interview was originally published on Xu Jia’s website.

Today’s film:

Longing for the Rain (dir. Yang Lina)

Chunmeng (Longing for the Rain)

2013. China. Directed by Yang Lina. With Siyuan Zhao, Jia Fu, Pong paz roj Dej.

MoMA program description:

Over the last 15 years, Yang Lina made her name as one of China’s most notable women documentarians. Her first narrative feature, in which a Beijing housewife is seduced by a mysterious phantom lover who threatens to destroy her comfortable middle-class life, is a daring hybrid of genres, mixing an erotic ghost story with a deeply personal religious quest. Yang’s surreal depiction of female sexuality is made even stranger by moments of social documentary, yielding a highly original vision of subjective desires commingling with China’s contemporary reality.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

The film reveals an urban middle-class malaise which is rarely touched upon in Chinese cinema, be it mainstream or independent: the former mostly subject female characters as either lovelorn figures in romantic dramas or comedies, while the latter usually situate women as individuals caught in the maelstrom of social changes sweeping across a country rushing towards its embrace of a market economy. Female physical desire has largely been marginalized, Yang said.

- Clarence Tsui, The Hollywood Reporter

The first real discovery of the festival. A film about a chinese upperclass woman who has vivid and plaesureful sex-dreams about a ghost. A somewhat trashy premise… And the great thing is, the film isn’t afraid of the lure of trashiness. On the contrary, it gives in, like its protagonist, to pleasure. Yang Tian-yi and her cameraman obviously had a lot of fun shooting the stylized sex scenes (every single one plays out in a decidedly different way, but all are in sharp contrast to the much rougher looking non-sex scenes), even a joint shower with the grandmother can turn into some kind of erotic play, other sequences are set to high-flying classical music. But pleasure is never constant, always fleeting. The images – never in danger of crystallizing into static beauty – move along in frantic pace, a busy film in a busy world, but not in a Soderberghian-trancelike-everything’s-connected-and-look-how-beautiful-digital-cinema-can-be-when-you’re-only-interested-in-surfaces-way. The world of the film is fleeting, but not ever-fleeting, but instead made up of a series of discrete shocks. Desire doesn’t get lost along the way, but it changes shapes and objects, like when the protagonist and her female frien visit different priests of different religions, maybe to get rid of the ghost, maybe to come closer to him. They just don’t know beforehand.

- Lukas Foerster, reporting from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, for Dirty Laundry

‘China is in a transitional period, but women’s economic liberation isn’t bringing independent lives,’ Yang says. ‘Traditional values have stuck as women become more passive in a social environment eroded by commercial values. Some young women now take a house and a car as a basic requirement before marriage, using money to weigh a relationship that follows in the historical concubine tradition.’

- Yang Lina, interviewed by Nicola Davison for Time Out Shanghai

“I am a documentary maker, but I noticed that I increasingly wanted to add fiction elements to my projects. So, mainly because this film’s theme is hard to capture in a documentary, I decided to experiment with fiction. It proved to be the most suitable form for what I had to say. Naturally, this created new problems. I am, for instance, accustomed to walking into an existing setting and recording the events that take place there. Now I had to construct everything and give my actors directions. Incidentally, I didn’t work with a script, but gave the actors specific orders per scene.’

- Yang Lina, interviewed by Maricke Nieuwdorp at the 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam

Full length interview with Yang Lina with Xu Jia and Kevin B. Lee, at the 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam

Today’s film:

Tape (dir. Li Ning)

Jiao dai (Tape)

2010. China. Directed by Li Ning.

MoMA program description:

Avant-garde dancer Li Ning documents five years of his struggle to balance his career as a choreographer with a dance troupe of committed college students, and his responsibilities as a son, husband, and father. The artist’s life becomes intertwined with the film and with his own obsessions. Tape utilizes a variety of approaches, including first-person documentary, guerilla street video, and even homemade CGI, to produce an uncanny portrait of a private life enacted in public.

TAPE (Dir. Li Ning) trailer from The dGenerate Films Collection on Vimeo.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

We can perhaps say that, though the word is derogatory in meaning, “absurdity” is indicative of China’s final arrival at the dawn of post-modernity. Perhaps no film exemplified this theme more comprehensively than Tape, contemporary avant-garde dancer Li Ning’s five year chronicle of his personal life, alternating between his struggles with two types of “family”: his oft-neglected wife, son and mother; and his enthusiastic but unstable dance troupe comprised of college students. Made amidst a massive urban renovation project performed on his hometown of Jinan, the film is a postmodernist collage of cinéma vérité-style filming of Li’s interactions with his family, direct cinema-style filming of civic incidents, such as three men holding down a woman as her store is shut down, self-reflexive confessions, scripted voice-over narration, computerized special effects, experimental mise-en-scene, dream sequences, dialectical editing, and so on. The film plays like a fever dream of the artist’s life that gradually descends into nightmare.

- Isabella Tianzi Cai, dGenerate Films

Using an often hilarious and always baffling combination of dance, digital video, and computer animation, Li and his troupe enact quasi-Situationist and surely illegal interventions, often in drag or completely naked, in public spaces, in the middle of busy intersections, or amid wreckage and busted concrete. With the persistent use of the texture and sound of tape in all its forms, it’s hard not to think of Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape, but Li’s cracked self-portrait also weaves in fly-on-the-wall documentation of everyday life, burlesques of Chinese bureaucracy, and personal disclosure in its exploration of the body as a site of unconquerable self-possession.

- Cullen Gallagher, Leo Goldsmith, and Rachael Rakes, The Brooklyn Rail

The film invades privacy to the point of being provocative, as if it has given up censoring all the footage caught on the camcorder. Tape is not only a continued personal record of Li Ning; it also contains several incidents that were national issues in China. Li Ning documents the extremely important and violent conflict between the individual and the nation and also transforms them into material for performances. Li Ning took up the camera to observe the birth of a family, but as time passes and the pile of tapes grows, he must confront the numerous standards that try to confine him. This is an edgy documentary that shows both the significance and despair of an artist who is fighting against social suppression and prejudice.

- Minyoung Kang, Cinefantasm

In a wonderful paradox, Li Ning has made a film that is truthful to humanity and the human experience, yet his obsession and his focus on his work has made him inept in his human relationships. This is one of the rare films that has touched me in a truly personal way, it has inspired me to just go all out with my own work. If you believe in something strong enough, truly invest yourself in the work. Which is ironic given that the film ends with the ultimate price Li Ning had to pay for his artistry.

- Carlo Labrador-Panalangan, dGenerate Films

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

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

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

- Li Ning, interviewed by Kevin B. Lee for dGenerate Films

Today’s film:

When Night Falls (dir. Ying Liang)

Wo hai you hua yao shuo (When Night Falls)

2012. China. Directed by Ying Liang.

MoMA program description:

Through his four narrative features and numerous shorts, Ying Liang utilizes low-budget digital video and observational documentary techniques to produce withering portraits of ordinary Chinese caught in webs of injustice. Inspired by the 2008 case of a young man’s murder of six Shanghai police officers, Ying’s newest feature focuses on the killer’s mother, whose own life is thrown into disarray by both the brutality of the criminal justice system and the netizens who oppose it. Uncommonly attentive to its mostly mute heroine, the film is a quiet plea for humanism amid forces that breed its opposite.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

The facts of the case are well known; it’s no spoiler to say that, despite Wang’s efforts, her son was executed, and the scene in which Wang learns this is a quiet masterpiece of imagination. Her gestures—drinking from a teapot, tearing leaves from a calendar—have both a spontaneous nobility and a futile comedy that are as grand and as poignant as a scene from Griffith. “When Night Falls” is a work of memory, reconstruction, and empathy that blends a coolly analytical style with a fierce yet quiet passion. Its precise and intimate scope, its canny sense of refracted representations, turns its lightly idealized modernism into a powerful version of political documentary. No wonder the Chinese government is unhappy with it.

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Part of what makes When Night Falls excel as a work of cinema, as well as a political intervention, comes from Ying’s harnessing of isolation and pathos for the express purpose of displaying, through spatial articulation and physical bombardment, what it feels like when the entire apparatus of the Chinese government bears down on a lone individual. A great deal of this results from Nai’s performance as Wang, whose slow, hunched movements through Ying’s deep, recessed compositions return a specific social valence to Antonioni/Tsai architectural imprisonment. One particularly fine shot finds Wang walking alone through a street towards the camera as an unseen loudspeaker trumpets the “splendid” Olympic Games. A woman bikes past her quizzically. The scene would be Kafkaesque except there is no paranoia, only bone-aching sorrow.

- Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope

Shot in long, static takes and constricting compositions — which partake of documentary-style realism while reinforcing the suffocating atmosphere of rank injustice, sorrow and paranoia — When Night Falls is a work of profound and vital humanism. Bravely and eloquently giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced — the film’s original Chinese title can be translated as “I Still Have Something To Say” — Ying Liang has made an impassioned rallying cry for transparency and fairness in a state’s relations to its citizens.

- Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

Filmed in long static shots, When Night Falls is the most discreet and elliptical kind of political statement. Indeed, the reaction of the Chinese authorities to Ying’s film has been more dramatic than anything he shows on screen. Effectively exiled to Hong Kong, the director has now been warned he faces arrest if he returns to the mainland. His wife and parents have been harassed by the Shanghai police, while shadowy figures even offered to buy the film’s copyright in order to prevent its Jeonju premiere in April. The screening went ahead anyway. Beijing’s clumsy attempts at censoring a low-key indie feature have only boosted its global profile and political impact enormously.

- Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter

The emotional process of making the film was difficult. I struggled between the real Wang Jinmei and how Wang Jinmei was portrayed in this film, and between how real events had happened and how this film was depicting them. I had to—similarly to how a documentary filmmaker would—respect the truth of what happened and respect Wang Jinmei as a person. I felt that this was a moral duty. And yet what I also had to do, as most fiction filmmakers would, was to use images and sounds to help people relate to how Wang Jinmei felt. My cinematographer, Ryuji Otsuka, is a Japanese man who has lived in China for a long time and directed a number of documentary films there. He was constantly helping me find an emotional relationship between the camera and the character through color and lighting choices that could reflect Wang Jinmei’s situation. A fiction film can create its own expressionistic value. He, Nai An, and I found this value by putting together the images we had in our hearts of a mother.

- Ying Liang, interviewed by Aaron Cutler, Fandor Keyframe

For a filmmaker, the fact that the film has become a topic as such can’t be more embarrassing and unfortunate. What I have experienced and what I envision will happen in the future have made me to accept such a fact: “JUST CINEMA”, which indicates on the one hand that the power of cinema shouldn’t be over-evaluated, and on the other hand, cinema could achieve everything. I cannot totally agree with the latter opinion about the importance of cinema—- at least I don’t “simply”, “solely” or “absolutely” believe in such a statement. But there are people who insist that films could be so important that they would do everything to prove and guard this claim via public power and public instrument, which corners me, a negligible filmmaker, to a political or politicized predicament.

- Ying Liang, “Nothing About Cinema, Everything About Freedom.” 

View a timeline of Ying Liang’s troubles following the production and release of When Night Falls.

Today’s film:

Petition (dir. Zhao Liang)

Shang fang (Petition)

2009. China. Directed by Zhao Liang.

MoMA program description:

Filmed over the course of 12 years, Zhao Liang’s landmark documentary explores the world of petitioners who travel to Beijing to seek justice back in their hometowns. Zhao uses secret cameras to capture a bureaucracy that leaves people waiting for years for their cases to be heard. The film takes a startling self-reflexive turn when Zhao becomes entangled in a heartbreaking tragedy that unfolds between a petitioner and her daughter. This is a stirring achievement in both journalistic dedication and documentary ethics. The 5-hour long version of Petition captures in greater detail and complexity the stories of the many petitioners who seek justice. The two-hour version of Petition, edited for international festivals and television, offers a dramatically condensed version of Zhao’s five-hour investigation, revealing how the observational aesthetic is reconfigured for general audiences.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

“They are the dregs of society. Scorned and maligned, they live a dangerous existence in crude shantytowns as they pursue their quixotic quest.

They seek redress from the Chinese government and for filmmaker Zhao Liang, these ‘petitioners’ are his country’s greatest heroes. The product of over ten years spent with these marginalized justice seekers, Zhao’s Petition stands as arguably the most damning documentary record of contemporary China to reach American theaters since the initial rise of the Digital Generation of independent filmmakers.

- Joe Bendel

Mr. Zhao’s camera is a stubborn, patient witness to some shocking scenes of bullying and intimidation, and he also offers a sympathetic ear to the ordinary people whose government hardly seems to care. “Petition” is an anthology of Kafkaesque anecdotes, most of them fragmentary, but what gives it shape and almost unbearable dramatic weight are the handful of stories the director pursues in detail. The most sustained of these — the stuff of a tragic novel — involves a woman named Qi, who has come from the countryside after her husband’s death. She is joined by their daughter, Xiaojuan, and it is only late in the film, after they have been separated and reunited, that you realize how long their ordeal has lasted, and how terrible it has been.

- A.O. Scott, The New York Times, Jan 13 2011

Zhao films the protest marches and raids by thugs hired to break petitioners, part of a routine that never changes for a veteran like Qi, discovered a decade on in seeking redress for her husband’s hastily covered-up death during a workplace medical checkup, but only succeeding in losing her daughter as well by ignoring the girl’s schooling and upbringing for an irreconcilable mission that verges on psychosis. (Zhao challenges his viewers throughout to discriminate between injustice and clinical paranoia, while observing the mutually reinforcing relationship of both.)

- Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice

Zhao excels at both drawing out these people’s war stories—accumulating piles of meaningless “re-registration” slips from official paper pushers, being shuttled in and out of detention centers, or in the case of Qi and others, into psychiatric hospitals under dubious diagnoses and drug regimens—and grabbing often surreptitious glimpses of a one-party state’s swift subjugation of the disorderly.

- Bill Weber, Slant Magazine

In 1996, Mr. Zhao began taking his camera to a shantytown in Beijing called the Petitioners’ Village, where people with grievances from all over the country camp out while trying to plead their case at the central petition office. It was a Sisyphean mission, and a dangerous one: the system encourages security officers to abduct and punish the petitioners. Mr. Zhao shot 500 hours of footage, sometimes using hidden cameras inside the petition office. In the middle of the shooting, Mr. Zhao came to believe security agents were stalking him. The film was finished, and made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, but was immediately banned in China. Officers asked about Mr. Zhao in his hometown. He turned off his cellphone and fled to Tibet for three weeks.

-  Edward Wong, New York Times, August 13, 2011

Filming China’s Dark Side from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Journalist: In the short version, many dramatic elements about Fan Xiaojuan and her mother is gone, even some essential content.

Zhao: But a film has limited capacity. The general mood of the short one is tough and brave, so I tried to avoid tears during the editing. For example, I would avoid scenes that might sadden the audiences and trigger tears. I tried to make my work more masculine. But in the longer version, I highlighted the mother-daughter story. If the audiences feel like to cry, let them cry freely.

In the longer version, the mother-daughter story is told in flashback, across-edited with the ongoing reality. Their ten-year life experience is reflected in the long process of looking for the mother. In the two-hour version, the structure is readjusted to help the audience understand the film. Too complicated plot may cause many misunderstandings, such as confusions in the chronological order. The relationship between different characters is quite complicated.

- Zhao Liang, interviewed in Liang You magazine, translated by Yuqian Yan for dGenerate Films

Ethical questions regarding the relationship between a documentary maker and his subjects came to a head in Petition, particularly in the scene where Juan gives you a letter to pass on to her mother to say that she’s leaving Beijing. Can you talk about how you felt about that situation at the time?

I agreed with Juan’s decision to leave. There was no need for her to waste her youth in a place like Beijing South Railway Station. On and off I was hinting to Qi that Juan might leave some day, but she refused to believe it because she was afraid of being separated from her daughter. If Juan had given the letter to her mother she would have stopped her leaving. So Juan gave the letter to me to pass on. I knew it would be ugly. Before I had an OK relationship with the mother, but when I gave her the letter, her reaction was as I predicted. She wouldn’t listen to any explanation and wasn’t willing to think about it from any other perspective.

At that time the struggle I had was whether to shoot or not. As a professional documentary maker I knew this would be important, so I had to shoot it. When I edited the film I saw that because I was so focused on talking to the mother, her head was cut off in the picture – including later when she ran off and I was chasing her. All the footage is of the ground or my feet. So I didn’t use all the footage, but I really regret that now. The footage of me chasing her is so cruel for the audience to watch, but if I could have included the scenes of me speaking to her it would have helped the audience understand better and I would have been less criticised.

- Zhao Liang, interviewed by Dan Edwards, Senses of Cinema, July 2012

Zhao Liang’s patience must be the same as the patience of the litigants of Petition, as seen in his labourious, morose working method, but his objective is the opposite. You can’t challenge reality (because you risk ending up like the community of litigants), so you have to sing it. To the point of looking for beauty in what is unjust? Yes, even to that point. Reality—in other words, power—can easily assimilate its own critique, but not its hymn, which will always be the property of the poet. With any other topic he could have been involuntarily serving the propaganda of what he’s criticizing, but the issue of the absence of justice turns our hearts with so much power that this is impossible. It’s an issue that can’t be read in two ways because the facts that Zhao Liang describe are flagrantly indisputable (and therefore, impossible to manipulate, even though contemporary pessimism, since the birth of the audiovisual, tell us that everything is). In spite of this—and much to his regret, I imagine—because of his formal strength, his inspiration, Zhao Liang has become not the poet of justice, but the poet of injustice (he doesn’t criticize, he sings)…affirming the superiority of art and the artist over the rest of the mortals.

- Albert Serra, Cinema Scope

Additional resources on Zhao Liang and his films can be found at Facts and Details.

Today’s film:

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

Niu pi er (Oxhide II)

2009. China. Directed by Liu Jiayin.

MoMA program description:

In 2005, a 25-year-old Beijing film student issued her startling debut film, Oxhide, a stylized feature film starring her parents as themselves, shot entirely in their tiny apartment. Her self-sufficient follow-up,Oxhide II, takes her highly formalized approach to everyday life even further, depicting her family’s preparation of a dumpling dinner in real time, set across nine distinctly positioned shots around a multi-purpose table. A work of great precision and intimacy, Liu’s film probes deep into deceptively banal surfaces to reveal the sublime mysteries of a Chinese family.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

I had to think, almost with pity, of all those US indie filmmakers who believe they have to cultivate CGI and slacker acting, to seduce investors and strain for outrageous sex and edgy violence. Liu made this no-budget, low-key masterpiece over years in a single room, and with her parents. That’s a new definition of cool.

- David Bordwell

Video Essay on Oxhide II, dir. Liu Jiayin (script by David Bordwell) from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo.

I continue to subtract.
You can put a lot into a film and think you still have a film.
But what you have is no longer a film.
I want to wring the sponge dry.
Jogging is jogging, not track and field.
A film is a film, not acrobatics.
I am focused on what a film can do without; that is want to get rid of.
I don’t want to add; I want to subtract.
I want to get back to basics and build my clumsy movie with my clumsy
hands.

- Liu Jiayin, director statement

Pushing the shared formal preoccupations of the minimalist-realist mode in contemporary film practice as far as any works of the last ten years, Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (Niu Pi, 2005) and Oxhide II (Niu Pi Er, 2009) occupy an unassailable position on the leading edge of latter-day international art cinema. As incarnations of no-budget, independent DV filmmaking, they establish both aesthetic and logistical strategies for the production of an artistically laudable self-made cinema. That is, Liu has made a set of films that engage deeply with the cinematic art of her precise historical moment, while also offering a template for the creation of comparably viable work under the most profound of restrictions.

- Michael J. Anderson, Tativille

Using video and long lenses, the material subject of Oxhide II is less emphasized than the flat gestalt of the experience of cooking with Liu’s family, as indeed it is her mother, father, and the filmmaker herself who star as the dumpling makers and eaters.  The overall effect of the ingredients, their mixing, and the dinner table talk (which is more instructive than conversational) express character not through plot or dramatic dialog—the dramatic undercurrent of the video is maintained by rare dolops of discussion about the family’s failing business—but through the sum total of gestures over time.  We get acquainted with the barely dramatized family almost entirely through watching how each family member cooks (or in Liu’s inexperienced case, tries to).  Faces are rare in the film, and so we take what we can get, which is a surprising amount, from the simple actions of kneading the dough, the filling of dumplings.

- Daniel Kasman, Mubi Notebook

These are the details of life that I think are interesting but that are often overlooked, especially within films, so I make a special effort to film them. Usually in films, if people are cooking or eating dinner, it’s never to show that people cook or eat dinner. It’s only ever used as a backdrop in which to show or say something else. So for example during dinner two people have a fight; or somebody announces they’re pregnant; or somebody announces they’re having an affair. And cooking scenes are often used to express that a couple are happy together; or to say something about a family; or the relationship between two people. These scenes are hardly ever about the cooking or eating.

I think these daily routines are interesting in themselves. I don’t have to add anything else to these moments in order to make them interesting to me. I don’t think you need somebody to catch fire, or for somebody to die, to make them worthy of observing.

- Liu Jiayin, interviewed by Christen Cornell, Artspace China

Who was this filmmaker who so maturely delineated the space of her imagination, carving a humanist monument from next to nothing? Even without the surprise factor that helped make Oxhide a festival cause célèbre, the more technically accomplishedOxhide II proves that Liu’s arte povera aesthetic is capable of a seemingly infinite number of variations. Featuring the same ensemble of characters in the same cramped apartment, now dealing with the stresses and encroachment of the Beijing Olympics and the imminent demise of their shop, Oxhide II ascribes to a conceptual pattern based on space rather than time.

- Andrea Picard, Cinema Scope

While Bumming in Beijing is doubtful as to whether a female vagabond can be successful, it seems to be accepted fact inOxhide II that she cannot: the domestic has become the setting for art. The family table becomes the platform for the coming together of differing people through creative labour. As the single focus of the latter film’s nine shots, it is the only space in which the family members stop arguing with each other and instead communally make bags, dumplings and ultimately the film itself. The table, with its weathered and scratched surface, is where the identity of the makers has always become plastic, even when the world outside seeks only to limit them. The inspiring portrayal of art in both films suggests it has the potential to turn the maker into a gender-neutral figure who is open to different identities, whether sexual, racial or class-based.

- M. Lý-Eliot, The f-word, October 16 2012

I had thought that the fundamental element that would allow me to continue the Oxhide series was my parents’ old apartment, but I don’t think that way anymore. The soul of Oxhide is a family, a father, a mother and a daughter, and the relationship among them. As long as my family is around, Oxhide will continue. It might be in the apartment, but we might go outside. We might go to a park. As long as we are there, no matter where we are, it’s all Oxhide. Oxhide is not my only subject, but it is a subject that will go on because life will go on.

- Liu Jiayin, director statement