Lan (dir. Jiang Wenli)

The ScreenOut Film Exhibition, hosted by Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily, is China’s first (and so far only) campaign to introduce art films into commercial-run cinemas. It has presented a number of indie films by many acclaimed Chinese directors, such as Jia Zhangke, Gu Changwei, Lv Le, Wang Quanan, and Wang Xiaoshui. This year, a special retrospective programme at UCCA will screen selected films from past years and a special screen of this year’s new film Lan (dir. Jiang Wenli) and Judge (dir. Liu Jie).

DATES
April 11, 2010 – April 28, 2010

15rmb for adults (with exhibition admission)
10rmb for students with valid student ID

ADDRESS
798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, P.O. Box 8503, Chaoyang District, Beijing, P.R.China, 100015

Tel: +86 (0) 10 8459 9269/8459 9387
Fax: +86 (0) 10 8459 9717

TRANSPORTATION
- By Car: From Sanyuan Bridge or Siyuan Bridge enter the Airport Expressway, then leave the Airport Expressway at the entrance to Jiuxianqiao Rd.
- By Bus: Take Bus 401, 402, 405, 445, 909, 955, 973, 988, 991 to Dashanzi or Wangyefen Stop.

Full screening schedule and film descriptions after the break.

SCREENING SCHEDULE

Sunday, Apr. 11
13:00
Old Fish
101 mins, Chinese and English subtitles, Q&A with director Gao Qunshu

Wednesday, Apr. 14
19:00
Jalainur
92 mins, Chinese and English subtitles, Q&A with film director Zhao Ye

Saturday, Apr. 17
13:30
Railroad of Hope
56 mins, In Chinese with English subtitle, Q&A with director Ning Ying

19:00
Knitting
98 mins, Chinese and English subtitles, Q&A with director Yin Lichuan

Sunday, Apr. 18
16:00
Judge
98 mins, In Mandarin with English subtitle, Q&A with director Liu Jie

19:00
Lala’s Gun
99 mins, Chinese and English subtitles, Q&A with director Ning Jingwu

Sunday, Apr. 25
19:00
Lan
85 mins, Chinese and English subtitles

Tuesday, Apr. 27
19:00
The Story of Ermei
115 mins, Chinese and English subtitles

Wednesday, Apr. 28
19:00
The Search
122 mins, In Tibetan with Chinese subtitle, Q&A with director Pema Tseden

FILM DESCRIPTIONS

Old Fish
Drama, China, Gao Qunshu, 2007, 101 mins, In Mandarin with English & Chinese Subtitles
13:00, Sunday, Apr. 11

Awards:

• Best Actor and Jury Grand Prix in Shanghai Film Festival (2008)

Lao Yu, an old cop in Harbin, knows a thing or two about explosives. He’s also about to retire and has a routine for family, work and leisure. When criminals start planting bombs in the city, he volunteers to defuse them, out of an old-school sense of duty and a deep-seated sense of boredom. One after another he defuses the bombs (and barks at his young colleague),until number 11,a big one…played by real Harbin cops in their snow-bound city, Old Fish is at once a solid action thrilled and a subtle elegy to the sorrows of the “accidental heroes” that are becoming extinct in contemporary China.

About the director:
One of the most popular TV directors in China, Gao Qunshu has turned to filmmaking in recent years. Gao had made two smaller films, first Tokyo Trial in 2006 and then Old Fish in 2008. Based on an actual serial-bomb extortion case in Qiqihar in Northeast China, the latter film harks back to Gao’s roots in crime dramas, and is highly lauded for his documentary-like treatment using lots of long shots and a cast filled with amateur actors. The film was awarded Jury Grand Prix and Best Actor (for Ma Guowei, who is a cop in real life) at the 11th Shanghai International Film Festival.

Jalainur
Drama, China, Zhao Ye, 2008, 92 mins, English & Chinese Subtitles
19:00, Wednesday, Apr. 14

Awards:

• Shanghai International Film Festival Asian New Talent Award for Best Director Award (2009)

Jalainur (a Mongolian word meaning “ocean-like lake”) is a coal mine in the Manzhouli City of Inner Mongolia. Old Zhu, a steam-train driver, and his apprentice Li Zhizhong, a train signalman, are inseparable. Old Zhu, who has worked at the colliery for thirty years, will soon retire, leaving Zhizhong lost and confused. The latter decides to follow Master Zhu after work one day, much to Zhu’s quiet dismay. Impending obsolescence shadows the future of these men, although Zhihong, riding the trains like a romantic horseman and waving his signal flag, remains dedicated to both his job and Zhu. Director Zhao Ye’s cinematic vision monumentalises the smoke, steam and grit that form the existential texture of lives in the colliery, celebrating as well as mourning the passing of time and the fragility of friendship. A plate of steamed buns glows like a celebration of resilience in the middle of a barren landscape interrupted by the figures of tired men and gasps of smoke from the long throats of locomotives; in another scene, Old Zhu and Zhizhong awkwardly sing a duet in the street that captures exactly the sense of loss that both of them must eventually learn to live with.

About the Director:
Jalainur is Zhao Ye’s second feature film, and it received the FIPRESCI prize in Pusan in 2008. Barely thirty years of age, he has already directed Ma Wu Jia in 2007, which won the Best Picture Award at the China Independent Film Festival, and a short animation film, Cai Wei, in 2004.

Railroad of Hope
Documentary, China, Ning Ying, 2001, 56 mins, Chinese with English subtitle
13:30, Saturday, Apr. 17

Awards:

• Forum at Berlin International Film Festival (2002)
• Cinéma du Réel Award at French Real Film Festival (2002)
• Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival

Every year during August and September, several thousand agricultural workers travel more than 1800 miles across China, from Szechwan to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. There, endless cotton fields await the harvest. For many, it is the first time away from the home village, and the first time on a train. In fascinating detail and nuance, Railroad of Hope casts a light on the relatively new phenomenon of internal migrations across China, featuring the scores of workers traveling by rail. During the journey, the camera crew wanders the train, filming passengers as they eat or sleep, and asking them such questions as “Is this your first trip?” “What are your ideals?” “What is important to you in your life?” The result is a rare and wonderful presentation of the thoughts, hopes, and dreams of ordinary Chinese.

About the director
Ning Ying was born in Beijing. She first directed a film in 1990, yet recently was the subject of a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive. At the international level, her best known films include: For Fun, On the Beat and I Love Beijing which are also known as the BEIJING TRILOGY. These films show the profound changes experienced by ordinary Chinese people during the post-Mao reforms.

Lala’s Gun
Drama, China, Ning Jingwu, 2008, 99 mins, English and Chinese subtitles
19:00, Sunday, Apr. 18

Awards:

• Generation 14plus program at Berlin International Film Festival (2009)

Lala’s Gun tells the story of a young boy of the Miao ethnic minority in China. As dictated by tradition, every Miao boy upon reaching the age of fifteen is to receive a gunfrom his father as a symbol of reaching manhood. Lala, however, has been raised by his grandmother, his mother having died and his father having abandoned the family years earlier. Though promised a gun from the local gunsmith, Lala sets off to other villages in search of a father he never knew.

About the director:
In 1996, Ning Jingwu graduated with a master degree in directing from Beijing Film Academy and has been working on film industry as director, writer and producer. He used to be a poet before he entered filmmaking. Ning’s films show his compassionate concerns for minority groups and people from lower class, including kids, the disabled, labors and aboriginal tribes. He depicts the banal everyday life of these minority groups in a style characterized by a sense of poetry and simplicity.

Judge
Drama, China, Liu Jie, 2009, 98 mins, Mandarin with English subtitle
16:00, Sunday, Apr. 18

Awards:

• Horizons at Venice Film Festival (2009)
• FIPRESCI Prize at Miami Film Festival (2010)

This story happened in 1997 in a small city in northern China. A criminal named Qiuwu was sentenced to death for stealing two cars. The lead judge on this case, Judge Tian, had just lost his daughter in a tragic traffic accident – she was killed by a stolen car. A change in the law creates an opportunity for Qiuwu to avoid execution… At the same time, Qiuwu tries to lighten his sentence by offering to donate one of his kidneys – creating a chance for a rich businessman named Lee to survive a terminal illness. Lee sets to work paying Qiuwu’s family and greasing the wheels of the system so he can secure the kidney… Lee discovers that the only way to secure the kidney is after Qiuwu’s execution – an execution that is now being questioned based on the new changes in the law… On the execution ground, a hard decision awaits Judge Tian.

Director’s Note:
January 1, 2007, the Supreme Court took back the review right of death penalty. That news reminded me about a true story, in which a young guy was sentenced to death for merely stealing two cars a decade ago. Are we going to be surprised from the loose death penalty standard when we look back 10 years from now? Through my film, I hope people can start thinking more about life and death and the philosophy behind them.

About the Director:
In 1987 Liu Jie entered the Beijing Film Academy and studied photography for 4 years. From 1992 to 2003, as director of photography or producer, he made a number of acclaimed independent films, none of which, however, met the general public in Chinese mainland. Courthouse On The Horseback – Liu’s first work as director-Official Awards-Premier Horizon at 63rd International Venice Film Festival.

Knitting
Drama, China, Yin Lichuan, 2008, 98 mins, English & Chinese Subtitles
19:00, Saturday, Apr. 17

Awards:

• Directors’ Fortnight 2009 Cannes Film Festival
• Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture and Best New Performer at Golden Phoenix Award (2009)

Daping hates Haili. Haili strode out of nowhere into her apartment, her life, and her promising relationship with Chen Jin. Though Daping tries to be a kind and honest person, Haili bullies her mercilessly. Then one day, Chen Jin disappears, leaving Daping pregnant again and not knowing how to survive. Haili has also experienced many hardships and difficulties in her life, and might be just the person to help Daping in troubled times. Although her mocking attitude doesn’t change, there’s still a chance for a bond to form between these two women’s hearts.

Director’s Note:
This is a moving film full of humanism. Created in the style of traditional realism, the film focuses on social reality. But society is only the background for a vivid depiction of people and their stories.

The film unfolds from a female perspective and deals with female themes. Yet it expands from these themes to demonstrate humanism and express my understanding of life compassion and forgiveness, as well as pay tribute to the protagonists’ tenacity.

About the Director:
As an important member of the poetry society “Xiabanshen (Lower Half of the Body),” she is praised as the leading female writer of the generation of “post-1970s” and “the cool generation.” In 2006, she wrote and directed her first film The Park, which is rapidly making her “one of the ten most eye-catching young directors in the new Chinese film power” (Variety).

Lan
Drama, China, Jiang Wenli, 2009, 89 mins, Mandarin with English subtitles
19:00, Sunday, Apr. 25

Awards:

• South Korea’s 14th Pusan International Film Festival audiences Choice Awards (2009)

Lan, the debut by acclaimed Chinese actress Jiang Wenli (Lost Indulgence, And the Spring Comes), is a recollection of growing up under her grandfather’s fold during the Cultural Revolution. This Cultural Revolution-set tale of a young girl, whose dream of becoming a champion gymnast is scuppered by the realities of everyday life and family background, is handled with grace and feeling, and is notably light on the political cliches besetting stories of the era.

About the director:
Jiang Wenli, born 1969 in Bengbu, Anhui, is a famous Chinese actress. She graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1992. She won the Best Actress award at Rome Film Festival for her performance in And the Spring Comes which was directed by her husband Gu Changwei.

The Story of Ermei
Drama, China, Wang Quanan, 2004, 115 mins, English and Chinese subtitle
19:00, Tuesday, Apr. 27

Awards:

• Panorama at Berlin International Film Festival (2004)
• Best Female Actor at Golden Phoenix Award (2004)
• Paris International Film Festival Best Actress (2004)

Jingzhe tells the story of Ermei (played by Yu Nan), a young villager in rural China. When Ermei’s family falls on hard financial times, she is forced to marry off to an alcoholic villager so her family can collect the dowry. Unhappy in her married life, Ermei runs away to the city where she finds a work at a restaurant. She has an affair with a man named Qiao but soon returns to her drunkard husband, where an emergency forces her to take initiative in her relationship.

About the director:
Born in Yanan in Shaanxi province in 1965, he attended film school in Beijing. After graduating in 1991, he began working for Xi’an Film Studios and also wrote screenplays in his spare time. His feature film debut, Yue Shi (Lunar Eclipse), which also starred Yu Nan in the leading role, was shown in the International Forum section of the Berlinale in 2002. Jingzhe is his second film as a director.

The Search
Drama, China, Pema Tseden, 2008, 112 mins, Tibetan with Chinese subtitle
19:00, Wednesday, Apr. 28

Awards:

• 12th Shanghai International Film Festival Jury Prize Award (2009)

A film director is accompanied by his friend and a business owner, who serves as a guide, to find an actor and actress to play the roles of Prince Drimé Kunden and Princess Mande Zangmo. In a village known for its Tibetan opera performance, the director finds a girl, an ideal candidate for the role of princess. Her melodious voice touches everyone. However, she decides to take the role only on the condition that the director and his friend find her ex-boyfriend, who previously acted as the prince along with her. The director consents to her wish. On the way to find her ex-boyfriend, the business owner narrates his touching love story as a young man. Throughout their search, the story gradually draws in both the director and the girl with the covered face. The initial simple search for an acting cast eventually becomes a complex inner and outer search for existential and spiritual meaning. Finally, although they find the girl’s ex-boyfriend, her face is still not revealed. The life and the search for Drimé Kunden both continue.

About the director:
Pema Tseden is the son of Tibetan nomads, the only one of three siblings to have finished his schooling. He is also the first director in China ever to film movies entirely in the Tibetan language. The Search, Pema Tseden’s latest film, won the Grand Jury Prize at Shanghai’s recent International Film Festival and is slated to be shown at the upcoming Locarno film festival in Switzerland.

Relevant Classroom Use

dGenerate Films is pleased to introduce CinemaTalk, an ongoing series of conversations with esteemed scholars of Chinese cinema studies.  These conversations will be presented on this site in audio podcast and/or text format.  They are intended to help the Chinese cinema studies community keep abreast of the latest work being done in the field, as well as to learn what recent Chinese films are catching the attention of others.  This series reflects our mission to bring valuable resources and foster community around the field of Chinese film studies.

For our first CinemaTalk, we spoke with Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London.  Some of Chris’ work includes:

• Author, Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006) with Mary Farquhar
• Author, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004)
• Editor (with Ying Zhu), TV China (Indiana University Press, 2008)
• Editor, Chinese Films in Focus II (British Film Institute, 2008)
• Editor (with Feii Lu), Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005)
• Editor (with Fran Martin and Audrey Yue), Mobile Cultures:  New Media and Queer Asia (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2003)
• Translator and Editor, Ni Zhen’s Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy:  The Origins of China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers (Duke University Press, 2002)
• Author, “Imaging the Globalized City: Rem Koolhaas, U-thèque, and the Pearl River Delta,” in Cinema at the City’s Edge, edited by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming), part of a series TransAsia: Screen Cultures, co-edited by Chris Berry and Koichi Iwabuchi

Kevin Lee, dGenerate’s VP of Programming of Education, spoke with Chris about various topics from his current work and areas of focus, to comparisons between contemporary Chinese cinema and the Fifth Generation filmmakers whom he helped to champion in the 1980s and 1990s, to which recent Chinese films that have excited him the most.  

Play the Podcast

Download audio file (dGenerate_Chris_Berry.mp3)

Download it here (right-click to download). (File size: 28.7MB)

Full transcript follows after the break.

dGF: With what sort of activities are you presently involved in terms of your work with Chinese film?

CB: There are two or three projects, one of which is finishing an anthology on independent documentary in China, which I’m co-editing with Lu Xinyu (Fudan University) and Lisa Rofel (UC Santa Cruz). And that’s been in gestation for a long time.  I think that it reflects the fact that for me independent documentary has been the most powerful force in Chinese film for quite a long time now, not only in the documentaries themselves but also in their impact on the style of most interesting fiction feature films.  So when you think about someone like Jia Zhangke, who in fact crosses both documentary making and fiction filmmaking, he would be exemplary of what I’m talking about.

And then together with Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University), we’ve been co-editing a series of books with Hong Kong University Press that tries to emphasize the idea of trans-Asian screen cultures.  I think that’s because we’ve been interested to notice how first of all cultures these days often cut across particular media, but they also cut across borders.  So there are many Asian regional phenomena that are probably not very well known outside Asia, but form a kind of Asian metropolitan popular cultural circuit that needs more analysis.  To be honest we haven’t been doing enough of that, but we’ve been eager to try to create a space with this series for younger scholars to publish.  We just have a couple of books out there; there are more on the way.  We’ve got a manuscript at the moment on Korean masculinity and how images of Korean masculinity have not only been shaped by the consumption of Korean masculinity outside Korea.  So people like Bae Yong Joon and pop star Rain, who are big in the Asian region, and whose images are formed by that kind of regional consumption, as well as Korean local consumption.

dGF: These strike me as two contrasting areas of study, because Chinese documentaries to me are very specifically focused on local phenomena within China.  Of course you can infer these global trans-developments or thematic significances from them, but they are still very locally-based.  Whereas this other project you are involved in is acknowledging how the Asian identity is this confluence of different regional influences.  You had me thinking of transnational film productions like Chen Kaige’s The Promise.

CB: Right.  There’s another manuscript on that actually, which is under consideration at the moment.  And then there’s another one on the Pusan International Film Festival and its regional focus on Asia.  Yes, you are right in a way, but I would say that although these Chinese documentaries seem to be very local, the culture around them is much more international than it might first appear.

The films themselves, and also their subject matter, are in many ways quite local, but I would say that the aesthetics that have become dominant in these films grow out of Chinese directors in the 1990s coming into contact with both American so-called “direct cinema”, which is sort of a fly-on-the-wall observational mode without any voiceover, without any music, and also French cinéma vérité-style documentary, which again is also observational but where the filmmakers themselves are much more part of what’s going on, maybe on screen, maybe talking directly to people and so on.  And these two styles, along with the Japanese director Ogawa Shinsuke, who pursues similar kinds of things but very much focused on social issues and social concerns, and he’s the person behind the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, which is huge in Asia.  These three international forces shaped this Chinese documentary culture.

Furthermore, given the situation within China, where it’s quite difficult for these films to be screened, the films very often find an informal audience inside China.  But they also circulate quite strongly internationally, and often are made with international documentary film festivals in mind because of the awareness that is one of the main sort of sites that they are going to be shown in.  So even though the topics may be very local, the culture itself is quite transnational, I think.

dGF: It seems that there’s more audience definitely abroad, and within China, it’s a very specific, and some would say narrow, audience of enthusiasts of Chinese documentary and any sort of social documentation of what’s going on in China, so you have these clusters of film festivals here and there.

CB: And you’ve got to remember that within China, these films do not go through the censorship process, and therefore cannot be shown on television, and cannot be screened commercially.  So what you say there about the audience is correct, but there are some structuring factors that also help to determine narrow availability to audiences.

dGF: It raises the question that has lingered throughout Chinese cinema since the Fifth Generation: who are these movies being made for?  There has been skepticism about these films being pitched towards an audience that is inherently looking for critical content about China.  Do you see that as a continuation in some thematic ways between what happened in the Fifth Generation and what’s going on today?

CB: Well, I do see there is a continuation in a certain sense.  I don’t accept the argument that these films are made for foreigners or people who want to knock China or all the other kinds of things that get trotted out against them of that nature.  I do accept the argument that this is part of the process of moving away from a mass audience towards a more diversified set of audiences and a more diversified set of productions.  Different people are interested in different things.  I think the same kinds of people in China like these films as those overseas.  Whether we are talking about Fifth Generation films or whether we talking about independent Chinese documentaries, they are not going to be on in your multiplex, and they are not going to be screening on Time-Warner TV in America.  I just think that there is room for a variety of different audiences, and I do think that it is good to have cinematic forms that encourage critical thinking.  By critical, I don’t necessarily mean negative, I just mean analytical thought.

dGF: You really were one of the key figures in bringing the Fifth Generation and Sixth Generation to attention.  Contextualizing your work within this new generation of filmmaking, when did it really become apparent to you that there is some really significant work being done with independent documentaries?

CB: Well pretty soon after they began in the early 1990s, actually.  I think for me, Wu Wenguang’s films were the first ones that really started to come to light outside China.  I do remember watching Bumming in Beijing back in the early 1990s at the Hawaii Film Festival.  But I also remember seeing Duan Jinchuan’s Tibet Trilogy, and that was the moment when I thought that there’s obviously more going on, not just one person.  No. 16 Barkhor South Street was just a remarkably accomplished film, and very very polished as well.  So that was the point where it became more exciting.  You saw on film a China that you had not seen on film before.  And this is quite immediately striking.

There were similar things in some of the feature films coming out the same time, like Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards. And then of course Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan cooperated to make The Square, which I think was in 1994.  You saw the situation where the Sixth Generation feature film makers and these documentary film makers often overlapped, and moved back and forth between feature films and documentary.  And it became very clear quite quickly that a sort of on-the-spot documentary aesthetic was driving both sets of films.  That’s what I meant about the idea that in my opinion this aesthetic has been the most interesting thing that’s been going on for the last 15 years.

dGF: Has it seemed pretty consistent to you over the last 15 years or are you seeing there are mutations?

CB: There are lots of changes and the main thing is diversification.  Before 1997 when the DV camera arrived in China, as it did in the rest of the world, most of the people involved in making these films had backgrounds in television or in filmmaking.  It would be hard to have access to the equipment without that background and it would be hard to use it without that training.  Once the home DV camera arrived, everything changed because it became a lot easier to use, became much affordable to a larger spectrum of people, and you started to see all kinds of people getting involved in documentary.  As a result, the strict observational direct cinema aesthetic that was dominant in the early years began to disappear, so that you would see more variety of forms.  You would see in some cases a return to more television documentary aesthetics.  In other cases you might see more personal or biographical filmmaking.  And there was certainly a shift around the end of the decade from looking at social issues towards what in China people talk about as personal filmmaking.  But personal doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical.  It meant more filmmaking about individual people; whereas that individual person might also embody a social issue, but they might also be much more focused on them as individuals.  This has been observed in particular by a scholar who is now in Nottingham University in England, called Luke Robinson, who did his PhD on that particular shift.

Now having said all that, what’s going on right now?  I still see a lot of observational filmmaking, but I also I suppose I see also more of an interest again in the kind of ethnographic filmmaking that we maybe not have seen so much of up until recently with people moving off to China’s margins, if you like, and working on various kinds of, not only ethnic minorities, but also unusual cultural phenomena.

dGF: I’ve seen several documentaries about drug addicts, AIDS victims, and homeless migrants.

CB: Right, exactly.  Right through from the end of the last decade, there has been a big focus on social margins, and also now more and more focus on subculture around that.  The other big change, the other big thing that has been happening in the last 2 or 3 years in documentary, has been oral history, with some people like Hu Jie.

dGF: You’re referring to a film like Though I Am Gone.

CB: Yes.  And also someone like Wang Bing’s He Fengming. I think those films are very interesting to me because they are very touchy and they are very sensitive issues.  I think the authorities have been quite willing to accept almost any kind of socially marginal group appearing in the film, or social problem or social issues.  But Communist Party history somehow has been off-limits, and still probably is in many ways, I think.

dGF: One of dGenerate Films’ titles, San Yuan Li by Ou Ning and Cao Fei, is the subject of an upcoming essay of yours to be published.  Can you talk briefly about the essay and your interest in the film San Yuan Li?

CB: San Yuan Li, as well as Ou Ning’s Meishi Street [another dGenerate title], are really interesting examples of the kind of diversification I was just talking about.  I wrote about the first film in a book called At the City’s Edge, edited by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, coming out soon from Hong Kong University Press.  Both films are in that on-the-spot documentary mode, but with a difference.  That’s probably because of Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s art background.

The first film is very much a montage piece about an area of Guangzhou called Sanyuanli.  It’s full of historical significance, because according to legend (or maybe even history!) it was the village that resisted the British during the Opium Wars.  Now it’s a “village in the city” in Guangzhou, near the railway station, and a real rabbit warren.  In China, it’s notorious for crime, and at first Ou and Cao approach it from a distance.  But by the end of the film, scenes with people posing for the camera suggest that they have made some contact with the locals after all!  The film is an explicit homage to Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a City, and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.  So, the film seems to suggest that Chinese cities are going through another period of tumultuous change and remapping, a bit like German and Russian cities in the early twentieth century.

Meishi Street is about local inhabitants resisting the redevelopment of a neighborhood in Beijing.  If San Yuan Li was distanced, it goes in the opposite direction, because they get one of the local inhabitants to help them document what’s going on.  It’s very emotional!

dGF: In the last two or three years, what are some films you’ve seen that have excited you the most, or that you are most fascinated by?

CB: Though I Am Gone I think is an incredibly powerful film, and probably to me is Hu Jie’s best film yet.  And I think it’s remarkable not only because of what it documents, but also because of the way in which the subject himself went out.  I mean how many people who have been phoned and told, ”Your wife’s dying in a hospital,” would go and pick up the camera on the way to the hospital?  Especially at a time and place when buying and owning a camera was quite a difficult thing.  Obviously, he had this urge to document, and so the film becomes a kind of meta-commentary on itself, on the importance of documentation in terms of featuring the issue of justice and all of that.  I find that very powerful because it has become not just about a particular case but about the importance of documentary in general.

I think the same of He Fengming, and I like that film again because of the way in which Wang Bing’s decision to just set the camera up and let her talk speaks to the importance of witnessing with old people.  And you think of how most oral history films will somehow feel the urge of adding archival footage to go to the place the person is talking about, on the assumption that just sitting there and listening to somebody is not enough, that people can find it boring.  I think He Fengming somehow insists that you witness, you bear witness.

Then, I think the other thing that I find exciting is Jia Zhangke’s films and the way in which Jia Zhangke is responding to the need to, on the one hand maintain his aesthetics, and on the other hand do new things.  And I’ve been interested in some of his films like Useless, the way in which some things are clearly staged.  And then when you look at 24 City, you’ve got this involvement of these stars who perform like the regular workers who have been interviewed.  Some people found seeing Joan Chen doing her “Joan Chen” thing, as a supposed worker from Shanghai, irritating.  They thought that it trivializes the interviews with the real workers.  I thought it works to make us conscious of how the truth is something that is also performed and narrated, a told story.

dGF: One question I have for you when you raise that criticism of Joan Chen is, were those Chinese viewers or non-Chinese viewers who made that point? Because the film raises this issue of multiple spectators, and the very different responses and the knowledge they bring to watch the film, because a lot of people outside of China don’t even recognize any of these actors except for Joan Chen.

CB: That’s right.  There’s something very ironic and weird about it because out of the four actors, Joan Chen is the only one who is able to perform her role with the appropriate accent.  Lu Liping for example, does her role in standard Beijing Chinese.  She’s a very good actress.  I think she performs the role very well in many ways, but a number of Chinese people have said to me, that they thought that was odd.  She was a little bit vocally too good.  And Zhao Tao, somehow a lot of people didn’t feel she was quite believable or something.  Whether that was just because they were just too conscious of recognizing her, I don’t know.

So the person who complained to me about the idea that they didn’t like it because they thought it implicitly trivialized the “real people” in the film (Joan Chen is a real person too!), that person was actually somebody who is a westerner but knows quite a lot about Chinese film.  But I agree with you.  But on the other hand, the Chinese people I spoke to who didn’t like it – some like it and some don’t – they mostly seem to be concerned about the accent.  This is interesting because it echoes some of the criticisms that were made for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where it was about the poor Mandarin of some of these actors.

I agree with you that for many international viewers, they, probably apart from Joan Chen, they probably won’t necessarily recognize the other actors.  They may just believe that they are totally real people.  I think I’m fine with all of these except for Joan Chen, and that is just because I think she is too iconic or something.  So it is a mistake to think that she can disappear into the part.

dGF: But is it even Jia Zhangke’s intention to make her disappear?

CB: Good question.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.

dGF: And the fact that it is Joan Chen, it harkens back to the more conventional forms of the Communist-era film that will glorify the anonymous labor force by casting them as someone like Joan Chen.

CB: Well, she only did a couple of those.  She would like me to emphasize that she is not that old!  She did one or two roles in the late ’70s when she first started, but then she went to the States.  She was very young when she first began.  She did this role where she played a deaf telegraph operator, a deaf girl who really wants to learn how to become a telegraph operator in order to overcome her disability, in order to serve the nation, serve the party and so on.  But really that was the only role I think she played that was like that.

Of the four actors, she is the one who is a real star, in the sense that she carries the star persona into her films.  Whereas Zhao Tao and Lu Liping and Chen Jianbin, they don’t have a sense of persona necessarily that they carry in their films.  But she does.

dGF: I think the film in that way is actively asking the question of that mode of cinema, that more conventional mainstream, what role or place it has in this more supposedly more authentic direct cinema mode.  It’s a very stimulating clash of the two different modes of filmmaking.

CB: I think he’s been doing this for a long time.  I mean if you go back to something like Platform, it not an accident; it’s about a bunch of performers.  So this idea of the reality and performance.

dGF: And even Xiao Wu I find fascinating.  It’s about someone who’s continuously trying to redefine their role, a social role they perform.  The film changes from one genre to another as well.

Since we are talking about narrative films, 24 City, you can say, is a half-narrative film, but are there other narrative films in the last two or three years that have excited you?  Because that was really where the action was for many years in Chinese cinema.

CB: Yeah, not so much recently.  I mean I’m interested intellectually in the fact that Chinese fiction filmmaking is in a state of revival.  In 2002, whenever it was that China entered the WTO, there was a kind of panic, and the sense that the Chinese film industry was doomed.  But in fact after the really terrible decade of 1990s, when I believe 70 percent of Chinese movie theaters closed, there’s now an active program of building new cinemas, renovating cinemas, and the number of Chinese films and the percentage of the box office taken by the domestic productions, is going steadily up.  So we have a very interesting situation where Chinese cinema is responding to this challenge, if you will, no doubt aided in some ways by government policy.  It is in a state of revival.

Now, having said that, a lot of the films that I’m seeing do not excite me.  A lot of them seem to me like low budget versions of Hollywood films set in China.  There’s clearly a strategy on the part of Chinese filmmakers, where a certain contingent of Chinese filmmakers are saying “What’s the point of getting international awards if there is no longer a market for art-house films in the west, or anywhere in the world?  Because as we know, art-house screens are disappearing in the world.  We cannot sustain that.  We have to take seriously our local market.  We have to get back in touch with the audiences.  And we have to make commercial cinema that they will enjoy.”

So I think that’s what is going on behind the production of films like The Matrimony, this pseudo-horror film that was quite successful a couple of years ago, and so on.  Companies like Hua Yi Brothers and other big private companies, which now really do dominate the market and have taken over completely from the state studios, are pursuing this kind of filmmaking.  Personally, I don’t find the films terribly exciting.  But that doesn’t mean to say I don’t understand why they are doing it, and I also agree with the importance of having a significant local commercial industry.  Otherwise you end up with the situation like Taiwan, where it’s very difficult to keep everything going because basically they don’t have a production base any more.  I think that’s a very interesting phenomenon, I just don’t particularly like the films.

On the other hand, in the independent cinema, I suppose I got very tired in the last few years that everything seems to be a Jia Zhangke wanna-be film.  This is a very cruel way of putting it.  Many of the films are quite good in many ways.  But it’s like they are all sub-Jia Zhangke.  Now I suppose someone like Ying Liang has come along.  There are also various films that are coming more out of the fine art world, and more sort of avant-garde experimental in style.  I haven’t been blown away by any of these films yet, personally.  But I think it’s good that it’s happening, and I think it’s good to see that kind of diversification.  Hopefully that will open up in new directions.  Those films are very often completely not influenced by this on-the-spot documentary style.  And Ying Liang, I don’t know what you say his mode is.  Folk opera-amateur mode?  I don’t know.

dGF: That’s an interesting way putting it.

CB: But nonetheless I appreciate the fact that it is something different.

dGF: There is no shortage of these films coming out so one is due to change the landscape.  It’s interesting that you said Jia Zhangke has such an influence, which I think is true.  But it’s a matter of time before that becomes a convention that a new generation of directors will be working actively against.

CB: Yeah.  I think it has reached that point.  That’s necessary at this point.  Having said that, when I was in Beijing last summer I saw a film set in the Northeast, which was very much in this kind of Jia Zhangke mode.  I thought everything about it was good except for that.  I remember just feeling like the film was not going to get the attention that it deserves because people would just label it in that way.  So it’s a very difficult challenge, I think, for filmmakers to figure out how to do something that they feel is authentic to them, and at the same time it’s not just falling into that mode.

Relevant Classroom Use