The Olympic Stadium in Beijing, designed by Ai Weiwei in the city he now calls "a nightmare"

In his essay posted on The Daily Beast on August 28, 2010, artist Ai Weiwei rants about Beijing being a nightmarish city for anyone to live in. He says that the rapid economic progress of China has ironically made its capital unrecognizable and its people identity-less, and the country’s political rigidity has only worsened these problems.

In a depressing overview of the people living in Beijing, Ai sorts them into one of the two categories. One, he says, are the money-grabbers and power-worshippers who are distressingly predictable. “You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind.” Frustrated, he goes on. “No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.” The other category, which refers to the mass middle to low wage earners in the city, sounds just as pitiful. “I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope,” Ai observes.
The hopelessness that Ai tries to describe has a particular dimension. Working like dogs and making little money certainly could deject people, but the essay makes a turn as Ai brings up the issue of trust between the Chinese people and the Chinese government, which is known to be one of the biggest culprit behind China’s low Gross National Happiness index. In his own words, “[the] worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system.” This sense of mistrust chisels away people’s happiness whenever they find a need for justice. And that happens almost everyday in Beijing, as some films in our catalog can attest to.

Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, for example, zooms in on a common Beijinger’s struggle with the government about the demolition of his house for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Cui Zi’en’s We Are the . . . of Communism, documents the capricious providence of education for migrant workers’ children in Beijing. What these two examples share in common is that the basic needs and rights of the common people in Beijing cannot be met, and the mechanism to obtain justice is often unavailable.

And yet, Ai’s portrayal of Beijing as a land of total darkness does not paint a complete picture of the complexity of life in this city of  nearly 25 million people. Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II are examples of Beijing residents’ preservation of their cultural identity. Although the city of Beijing changes its face almost every day to the point of defiling its rich heritage, inside people’s homes time-honored traditions like dumpling-making continue, testifying to the resilience of their culture. Watching Liu’s intimate, heartfelt family dinner with her parents makes us temporarily forget the unpleasant world outside their home. Moreover, as Liu’s father says in the documentary, each person makes his own dumplings, just as each person has a distinct character. Ai may still believe and argue that the people of Beijing are uniform and predictable, but in the less conspicuous corners of Beijing we see how individual identities as well as non-mainstream group identities secretly flourish. We can count on the dedicated efforts of independent Chinese filmmakers to reveal those worlds to us.

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Zhao Liang confronted by Ai Weiwei on camera

In his blog on the New Yorker website, critic Richard Brody responds to last weeks’ New York Times cover feature on Zhao Liang, director of Crime and Punishment (distributed by dGenerate) and Petition (which Brody deems “the fiercest and most confrontational film regarding the Chinese government’s suppression of dissent that I’ve seen”). Brody summarizes the article’s charting of the tensions that arose between Zhao Liang and activist/artist Ai Weiwei following Zhao’s following Jia Zhangke’s lead to withdraw their films from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival in light of political tensions between the festival and Chinese authorities.

Brody focuses on a video of Ai’s on-camera challenge to Zhao for giving in to the government’s demands. Ai also insinuates that Jia withdrew from the festival so as to ensure good standing with the Chinese government in order to produce a government-approved film made for the Shanghai Expo, I Wish I Knew. Brody counters criticism that the film is a feature length promotional video for Shanghai compromised by the constraints of government approval:

If so, the government didn’t get its money’s worth: the film (which I reviewed when it was shown here earlier this year) is an audacious recuperation of ways of life and thought from pre-Communist China, an embrace of Taiwan and Hong Kong, a poignant lament for victims of the Cultural Revolution, and a depiction of the Expo as an alienating, inhuman monstrosity. (He did something similar when making his first officially approved film, “The World,” at Beijing’s World Park.) Jia’s symbolic art, like that of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch under the Hays Code, is ingeniously conceived to say exactly what’s on his mind regardless of external constraints.

He also tries to broker a conciliatory stance between Ai’s righteous indignation and Zhao’s pragmatic compromise:

Ai’s fury is entirely justified—he has endured, and continues to endure, horrific ordeals in order to live freely under a tyrannical regime, and he is entitled to view those who make common cause with it, of any sort, as being on the wrong side of morality. But only he and others who have endured similar persecution are entitled to say so. Heroism can’t be undertaken prescriptively, and those of us who write and make art without fear of arrest should pause before accusing Zhao of collaboration or cowardice.

Read Brody’s full article.

Jia Zhangke’s Dong and Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment are available on Amazon

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

Accompanying the article are two videos: one in which Zhao shares his thoughts on filmmaking in China, and another in which Ai Weiwei confronts Zhao on camera over the withdrawal of his film Petition from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival in order to avoid political controversy.

dGenerate Films is the distributor of Zhao’s film Crime and Punishment. It can be purchased through dGenerate or Amazon, or viewed online at Amazon or Fandor.

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Ying Qian

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mao Zedong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disturbing the Peace (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2009)

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

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

dGF: Who were the colleagues you organized this with?

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

dGF:  Who else participated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ai Xiaoming

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

dGF:  How do those films evade the government censors?

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

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

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

Bumming in Beijing (dir. Wu Wenguang)

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

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

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

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

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

The Square (dir. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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World-renowned artist Ai Weiwei is responsible for bold, iconic works such as the Beijing Olympic Stadium, but he has proven to be just as daring as a political activist. Ai has leveraged his celebrity status to speak openly about human rights abuses in China as few public figures have dared. As Evan Osnos writes in a 2010 profile on Ai in The New Yorker, “His cultural and political footprint is unique in a country where people generally face a choice between thriving within the confines of the system or shouting from the shadows outside it. For the moment, he is attempting to do both, and nobody is at all sure where that leads.” His efforts have not gone unpunished; earlier this month, his million-dollar studio in Shanghai was demolished by the government, who deemed the building illegal (this despite that the government had approved the building in 2008).

As part of his activism, Ai has become a prolific filmmaker documenting ugly cases of human rights violations in China. Below are 19 videos produced by Ai Weiwei Studio that have been posted to YouTube, many of which, as well as others, can be found on Ai Weiwei’s YouTube Channel. The shortest is four-and-a-half-minute long; the longest lasts three hours and 40 minutes. At the moment, most of them are without English subtitles. As YouTube is blocked in China, these videos can be accessed in China through the links listed on this site.

Hua Hao Yue Yuan [Blissful Harmony]
August 2010

This 11-part video tells the stories of LIU Dejun and LIU Shasha, who were victims of unresolved police brutality.

San Hua [Three Flowers]
June 2010

In this 8-part video, a group of women took it upon themselves to crack down illegal cat trade. It also reveals the current situation between people and animals in China.

*This video contains disturbing visual content. Please watch it at your own discretion.

Nian [Miss]

This sound work is contributed by thousands of volunteers who read out names of those killed in the Sichuan Earthquake.

Yi Ge Gu Pi De Ren [A Lonely Man]
April 2010

This video took Ai Weiwei Studio two years to complete. It is about the court case of YANG Jia, who committed violent crimes to right the wrong that had been done to him.

Mei Hao Sheng Huo [A Beautiful Life]
March 2010

This 6-part video investigates the curious case of Chinese citizen FENG Zhenghu, who was denied entry to China eight times and was stranded in the Tokyo Narita International Airport for over 100 days.

4851
September 2009

In this video, the names of 4851 people who have perished in the Sichuan Earthquake are presented as the running credits of a film.

Hua Lian Ba Er [Dirty Faces]
November 2009

This video documents the investigation of hundreds of unsafe school buildings, which caused the deaths of numerous students in the deadly Sichuan Earthquake. AI Weiwei and his team’s activities in Sichuan was frequently interrupted and harassed by the state policy.

Lao Ma Ti Hua [Stewed Pork]
October 2009

This 8-part video documents the court case of Chinese lawyer TAN Zuoren. Tan’s fight for justice for students killed by unsafe school buildings in the Sichuan Earthquake made him a threat to state stability.

Tong Hua [Fairy Tale]
July 2009

Ai Weiwei transported 1001 Chinese people to a small town in Germany called Kassel for his art exhibition. This documentary is a window to the people’s lived experience during the entire process.

Feng Zheng Hu Hui Jia [FENG Zhenghu Returns Home]
December 2009

After having been stranded in the Tokyo Narita International Airport for over 100 days because China refused to let him pass the customs eight times, Chinese citizen FENG Zhenghu finally returned home.

Wei Hai Guo Jia An Quan [A Threat to Homeland Security]
December 2010

On Dec. 2, 2010, AI Weiwei was denied his right to leave China for unclear reasons.

Sun Ya [SUN Ya]
December 2010

Sun Ya’s 6-year-old daughter was infected with AIDS during a hospital visit in 2002. He tried to sue the hospital but lost the case. This video features an interview with Sun.

Liu Nian Bu Li [Unlucky in Liu’s Year]
November 2010

With his air-ticket in hand, Chinese lawyer LIU Xiaoyuan was denied his right to fly to Japan for an academic conference.

Xi Mei [Ximei]
November 2010

This video features an interview with Ximei, who got infected with AIDS during a hospital visit but could not get justice for herself.

Shang Mian Da Le Zhao Hu [Heeded by Those from Above]
October 2010

In this video, AI Weiwei interviews ZHAO Liang, who pulled his film from the Melbourne International Film Festival because he was coerced by the Chinese government.

Jing Cha Da Ren Le [The Police Hit People]
October 2010

In this video, journalist YIN Yusheng is interviewed. YIN was stalked by the police and brutally beaten by them because he was deemed an advocate for democracy.

Shi Shi Jiu Shi Zhe Yang [This is What Happened]
October 2010

In October 2010, the tragic “My Father is LI Gang” Incident (NYT) left a grief-stricken family. This video features interviews with the father and the brother of the college girl who was killed in this car accident by the son of a prominent government official LI Gang.

Hua Er Wei Shen Me Zhe Yang Hong [Why Are the Flowers So Red]
March 2010

Shot and edited by AI Xiaoming, this 8-part documentary investigates Chinese lawyer TAN Zuoren’s court case. TAN was sentenced to five years in prison because he sued the state for constructing unsafe school buildings, which killed numerous students during the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.

Lastly, here is a video produced by Alison Klayman for The New Yorker in 2010, chronicling Ai Weiwei’s activism and filmmaking. Klayman is currently working on a documentary about Ai Weiwei. Titled ‘Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,’ the film is scheduled for release in fall 2011.

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Artist Ai Weiwei (source: Archinect)

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Chinese architect and artist Ai Weiwei, designer of the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium in Beijing, and whose current “Sunflower Seeds” exhibition is receiving critical acclaim in the Tate Modern Gallery in London, now faces the demolition of his Shanghai art studio demolished later this month. According to the Chinese government, Ai’s studio was erected illegally and had to be removed by law. But according to the artist, the building project was initiated by a high government official who came to him in 2008, soliciting his help in developing a new cultural district in Shanghai. The current accusation against Ai states that he does not have the proper paperwork for the building project, but two years ago before the project started, Ai was told that the paper works were all in place. The contradiction in the government’s statements arouses Ai’s suspicion that the demolition is a retaliatory act against his political activism in China’s human rights movement, which remains a hot-button issue with the Chinese government.

Before the Flood (Dirs. Yu Yan, Li Yifan)

While Ai’s celebrity status as a globally recognized artist makes his eviction particularly newsworthy, it’s certainly not unique. In the past decade, millions of Chinese were uprooted to make way for the Three Gorges Dam project (as depicted in Yu Yan and Li Yifan’s Before the Flood and Yu’s Before the Flood II) and many thousand Beijing residents who were forced to relocate for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (as depicted in Ou Ning’s Meishi Street). These are but two instances of a nationwide phenomenon of residents having their property taken or destroyed by force. But there’s one distinction to make with Ai Weiwei’s situation. In the case of the uprooted residents, people’s personal rights were made subservient to more prestigious projects that were supposed to benefit the nation at large. Ai’s case is a more conspicuous situation of harassment by the government. As Ai continued to gain fame and support both internationally and domestically, his political affiliations and beliefs have been increasingly monitored and moderated by the state, lest it pose a threat to the state’s control over public security and national stability.

Meishi Street (dir. Ou Ning)

For the time being, no one in China – not even those like Ai whose international stature would seem to glorify their country – has the power to fight against the state. However, the upside of the current situation is that it is easier to report their predicaments to a worldwide audience, through video, internet sites and social networks.  Chinese nationals are increasingly getting behind the camera and acquiring proactive roles in using other means of media exposure. Ai Weiwei is almost without peer in this regard, as reported earlier this year in a feature by the New Yorker. Still, Ai is by no means the first to tap into newly accessible media to document his hardships with authorities.  In Ou Ning’s Meishi Street is the subject of the documentary, Zhang Jinli, uses the video camera himself to film the demolition of his neighborhood as it was happening around him. By acquiring the means to tell their own stories, people like Zhang are no longer completely disadvantaged but are empowered to take some action on their own behalf, if only to make others aware of their plight. Although Zhang did not receive justice in the end as he would like to have, his case exists for others to learn from and take action in the future.  Following this spirit of preserving the facts, the film’s unobtrusive reportage editing approach shows the director’s intention to keep everything as factual as possible, with no deliberate narration or any other kind of interference. Meishi Street stands as both a valuable historical archive as well as a statement of concern for the disempowered, made with the hope that its existence may inspire actions on behalf of social justice.

Isabella Tianzi Cai is a regular contributor to the dGenerate blog. She is a graduate student in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

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[Ai's] cultural and political footprint is unique in a country where people generally face a choice between thriving within the confines of the system or shouting from the shadows outside it. For the moment, he is attempting to do both, and nobody is at all sure where that leads.

Osnos goes on to introduce a video clip related to his article, which is viewable below.

Alison Klayman, a Beijing-based filmmaker, has been following Ai for months, both at Ai’s studio in Beijing and on his constant travels. (Her documentary about Ai’s life and work is scheduled for release next year.) As depicted in this video, and explored in the magazine, Ai visited a police station in April in order to file an official complaint about being beaten by local police last year. The police officers he encounters become the unwitting participants in a work of art that is Ai’s life itself.

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National East Wind Farm, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Two themes are central to the fifteen documentaries: forgotten or suppressed history and marginal, dispossessed social groups. In the first category, Hu Jie is a pioneering documentarian, who in recent years has engaged in making video works about the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), two forbidden topics in modern Chinese history. His National East Wind Farm (Guo ying dong feng nong chang, 2008) examines the experience of hundreds of “Rightists”–former teachers, cadres, university students, and military officials who were persecuted for answering the Party’s call to voice their criticisms—incarcerated on a “thought reform through labor” farm in Mile County, Yunnan Province of southwest China. The neutral term “national farm” is official history’s euphemism for gulag. Based on interviews with former inmates and staffs of the farm, the film re-examines the absurd history from the Great Leap Forward period through the Cultural Revolution, as well as the sufferings of the bodies and souls subjugated to “remolding.”

Hu’s other work In Search for the Soul of Lin Zhao (Xun zhao Lin Zhao de ling hun, 2005) investigates an unresolved and suppressed case in modern Chinese history of thought. Lin Zhao, a student of Beijing University unique in her keen observation of social problems and courageous expression of her opinion, was persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Movement and executed in 1968. Treating her as a pioneer pursuer of civil rights and freedom of expression, the “Director’s Statement” calls for a re-examination of her legacy against the contemporary need to improve democracy and reassert human rights.

Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu, 2006, Hu Jie), tries to reexamine the Cultural Revolution from the sufferings of Ms. Bian Zhongyun, an ordinary high school deputy principal in Beijing who was beaten to death by her students. The film investigates into the fact that educators were the first and most heavily persecuted group during the period, but their sufferings were largely ignored by official media. Hu reveals the reason of this negligence in the “Director’s Statement”: “The huge amount of casualties among ordinary citizens would change the overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, together with the analysis of the movement’s nature, therefore leading to a deepened research on the responsibility of the Cultural Revolution.” The film is a challenge to the thin line in law and media concerning historical accounts.

Looking for the Lost Veterans of 1979 (Xun zhao 79 yue zhan xiao shi de lao bing, 2008, Zhang Dali) focuses on another ignored social group from a forgotten historical event—the veterans from the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. As the war became out of context, the veterans found themselves deserted by the economical reform and social reconstruction in the past thirty years. From the veterans’ recounts about the glory and brutality of war and their changed experience thereafter, the film asks the question about the affect of war and social changes on common soldiers and citizens.

Many documentaries about more recent history focus on a unique phenomenon among contemporary China’s rapid and sometimes aimless changes—demolition. Artists of Yuan Ming Yuan (Yuan ming yuan de yi shu jia men, 1995, Hu Jie) and Farewell, Yuan Ming Yuan (Gao bie yuan ming yuan, 2006, Zhao Liang) are two direct records of the same event: the forced demolition of the avant-garde artist community around Yuan Ming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) in western suburb of Beijing, and the “last spring” of the artists.

Before The Flood, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Before the Flood (Yan mo, 2005, Li Yifan and Yan Yu), winner of the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, can be seen as a documentary version of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. For almost the whole year of 2002, the two filmmakers recorded how the two thousand-year-old town of Fengjie was devastated, its residents displaced, to prepare for its eventual flooding for the Three Gorges hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River. The film combines panoramic overviews and detailed observation of individual sufferings and endurance. The “Director’s Statement” calls it an allegorical work: “It focuses on individuals and objects under specific circumstances, and, through their changes and struggles, tries to open a window about this age.”

Two films focus on the 5.12 Earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, and investigate into, from different perspectives, the hidden or unseen reality behind the catastrophe. Who Killed Our Children (Hai zi hai zi, 2008, Pan Jianlin) investigates the death of hundreds of students at Muyu Village Middle School in Qingchuan county, and from this small angle examines the most shocking and heartbreaking fact about the earthquake: the high casualties of students due to the shoddy constructions of elementary, secondary, and nursery schools. As the responsibility concerning the students’ death and the accurate statistics of the causality has become a major source of unresolved conflict between the government and victims’ parents, Pan’s film is a case study of this conflict as well as a response to the problem’s call for independent report.

Red White (Zhong sheng, 2009, Chen Xinzhong), was named after a heavily devastated county, and presents local people’s material and emotional response to the catastrophe through the many mundane details of everyday life: food and shelter, conversations and quarrels, new year celebration, funerals, and religious ceremonies. At the center of the film is the activity of a Taoist master, who serves as fortuneteller, feng shui master, and source of help for many other material and emotional problems. From this unique angle, the film humanizes the survivors and ponders on human need for faith and divinity after trauma. In a review of the 2009 Beijing International Film Festival, Ying Liang, another director from Sichuan, highly praises the film for its withdrawal of moral judgment and its vivid capture of the uncanniness surrounding the landscape.

The relationship between the individual and the state machine is the explicit theme of many films about contemporary issues. Old Mom’s Pork Feet Stew (Lao ma ti hua, 2009) by controversial artist Ai Weiwei is the most recent work in the list and the filmmaker’s direct tribute to the 60^th anniversary celebration. This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other human rights activists of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) and their later frustrating struggle with the authorities.

Petition, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Petition (Shang fang, 2009, Zhao Liang) presents a broader and “stranger than fiction” view of ordinary citizens’ struggle for judicial justice. Its protagonists—the people appealing to the high authorities in Beijing for their wrongs unresolved through local channels—are victims of and fighters against the defects of China’s legal and governmental system (according to the sociologist Yu Jianrong). Zhao’s film followed and recorded the struggles and sufferings of the “petitioners” on the margin of Beijing for an amazing 12 years, from 1996 to 2008. Divided into three chapters—”Petition Village”, “Mother and Daughter”, “Beijing Southern Railway Station”—the film combines group portraits and individual depictions. In an interview, Zhao Liang describes his working attitude as “gracious presentation.” The graciousness is especially represented in his attention to and compassion for individual lives and sufferings.

Hu Jie’s Rural Mountain (Yuan shan, 1995) is another compassionate and dignifying portrait of the dispossessed. It records the work and life of one of the most exploded group in contemporary China: the coal miners in some private and often illegal mines on the high plateau of the underdeveloped Qinghai Province. More than a protest against grave social problems—the primitive and dangerous working condition, the merciless mine owners and irresponsible local government, and the appalling poverty behind the workers’ choice, the film is an honest document about labor and life. The “Director’s Statement” expressly stated the film’s aspiration in locating the characters in human history: “[The hard labor] reflects the perseverance and dignity of the working class, and forms a segment of the history toward human civilization that we should never forget.”

Rural Mountain, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Other films present overviews of the sixty years. 60 (2009, Zhang Ming) is part of the oral history project “They Say,” a compilation of interviews with ordinary citizens about their experience in historical and political turmoil in some forgotten historical periods. The protagonist, Wang Kang, is a contemporary to the P.R.C. His sixty years of life witnesses the growth of the republic, the various political movements, and the endless darkness and poverty. The series explores the questions about our responsibility to the often bitter, absurd, and already forgotten past, and the functions of film in the reservation and reconstruction of memory.

Ms. Hong (Hong jie, 2009, Zhang Gong) portrays the experience of the Red Guards generation. Ms. Hong was the filmmaker’s neighbor, whose turbulent life is common to ordinary citizens in a stormy society. Notably, the film is an animation. As one of the three animation shorts, together with Mist (Mi wu, Zhang Xiaotao) and Idol (Ou xiang, Chen Xuegang), to open the 2009 Beijing Independent Film Festival, it indicates a new direction for Chinese independent films.

West of the Tracks, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

The last film on the list, West of the Tracks (Tie xi qu, 2003, Wang Bing), is a climactic work of Chinese independent documentary filmmaking, and a master combination of panoramic view and closely-observed details. The nine-hour film is a comprehensive record of the heavy industry district in northeast China through the difficult years brought by the huge and cruel transformation of the nation from a planned to market economy. Its three chapters—”Rust”, “Remnants”, and “Rails”—focus on industrial work, youth and family life, and individual emotions respectively, and also respectively treat the social problems of bankruptcy and unemployment, demolition of old neighborhoods, and the lives on the margins of the city and of modern industry. Just like Before the Flood and Red White, the daily details recorded in the film also shockingly reveal piles of ruins. In “West of the Tracks and the New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China,” Lu Xinyu uses the image of ruins as an allegory for the loss of utopia among the huge historical and social changes in today’s China. The new documentary movement, for her, arises from and responds to the ruins. She claims, “The destiny of ‘art’ in contemporary China is to reestablish the connection between art and the people that humbly but stubbornly live on the land, to search for justification for the existence and emotion of these people.”  West of the Tracks is an artist’s response to this destiny, which is also the destiny of the more and more records of unsanctioned memories.

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This so-called “leitmotif commercial blockbuster” breaks the pattern of regular political films with its star-studded cast, featuring nearly 200 of China’s well-beloved film professionals, including action heroes Jackie Chan and Jet Li, international star Zhang Ziyi, comedy king Stephen Chow, and even directors Chen Kaige, Jiang Wen, and Feng Xiaogang. In an interview with South Capital Entertainment Weekly, director Han Sanping proudly calls this film an “ingenious cooperation of politics and commerce.” A report on Chinafilm.com reads “The elder generation watches history; the younger generation counts stars.”

In an illuminating report in The Independent, Cliff Coonan defines the film as both an “A-list extravaganza” and a “stirring propaganda epic,” and gives a good reading of the “moments of subtlety and what appear to be hidden political messages” in the plot. Contextualizing the film in global cinematic propaganda, including Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1905), Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), and, most disturbingly, Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1934), Coonan notes, “By peppering the picture with stars, its producers hopes to update the patriotic cinema for a new generation.”

In an interview with AFP, Luisa Prudentino, an expert on Chinese cinema, also predicts that the “Jianguo Daye” formula will be the model for future propaganda films. “This allows the authorities to counter Hollywood’s growing influence here by making blockbuster films that make money while also getting their message across to the masses in a more glamorous way,” she said.

On the other end of the spectrum, almost simultaneous to the opening of The Founding of a Republic, controversial artist Ai Weiwei uploaded onto the internet his own “celebration gift film,” Lao Ma Ti Hua (named after a famous Sichuan saying roughly meaning “old mom’s pork feet stew”). This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other witnesses for the human rights activist Tan Zuoren of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) at the eve of the court meeting.

The political message is overt. Tan was persecuted for his investigation into the shoddy constructions of the collapsed school buildings at the 5.12 earthquake last year, but here the splendid marble-clad building of the Chengdu municipal police bureau draws sharp contrast with the so-called “tofu crumble” projects at the background. The main part of the documentary records the frustrating and unresolved negotiation of Ai’s group with different parties of the Chengdu police about the release of their detained partner and about a proper explanation of their sufferings–just as Qiu Ju did in the Zhang Yimou film. A police officer managed to say nothing remotely meaningful in hours, often not even complete sentences.

The film ends with a sequence of shaky images when the police forced Ai to surrender his  camera in front of the Chengdu Police Station. It’s true to the mode of guerilla filmmaking: the civilian’s desire to record finally triumphs over the authorities’ suppression of the moving image.

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