Cao Fei (photo credit: The New York Times)

By Ariella Tai

Internationally renowned visual artist Cao Fei has recently put on a new show entitled “Play Time,” pieces of which are currently on view at the Lombard-Freid Projects in Chelsea, New York City.  The show takes inspiration from children’s television shows like “Thomas and Friends,” “Teletubbies” and the BBC program “The Night Garden,” as well as other forms of youth entertainment, like puppets and miniature skateboards.  The New York Times profile observes, “The show seems to be a transitional one for Ms. Cao, who plans to shut down “RMB City” [her acclaimed online interactive environment] this summer.  But it has her trademark sensibility: pop and playful on the surface, complex social portrait underneath.”  Her reconstruction of Thomas the Tank Engine travels around Beijing as it picks up construction debris and transports it to a large dump near the Summer Palace, while her skate park for tiny skateboards exhibits architecture reflecting the highly developed landscapes of contemporary Chinese cities.

More after the break.

Cao Fei has become known for her explorations of youth subcultures in China, ranging from videos on the lives of Cosplayers to the creation of “RMB City.”  In “RMB City,” her avatar “China Tracy” engaged in performances, created videos and games and, in the avatar’s second incarnation, was manipulated by users into various activities within the virtual environment.  Her work within this popular online game highlighted her ability to communicate with “a shockingly young audience,” tapping not only into complex underground cultures but also into the fantasy worlds of several of her subjects.  Her 2007 video, “Whose Utopia” observes several factory workers in Guangdong acting out their innermost desires to dance ballet, breakdance or play rock musicians within the confines of their factory workplace.

Her 2003 experimental video San Yuan Li, co-directed with artist Ou Ning, reflects her inclinations and talents in their earlier forms.  Edited from footage taken by a dozen young artists, this highly stylized, and energetically rhythmic film explores the case of a village that has been physically hemmed in on all sides by the towering skyscrapers of Guangzhou during the city’s rapid modernization.  The villagers develop ingenuous ways to make their living and maintain their way of life.  This piece, like her later works, takes on the task of “documenting society,” and the ways in which Chinese are affected by the shifting economic and social milieus.  She tells the New York Times: “All my experience did not come from art school… It’s from growing up in the early 1990s in the south of China.” Continually interested in collaboration and interaction with her audiences, she is strongly connected to the context of her experiences and art.

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Meishi Street (dir. Ou Ning)

By Sara Beretta

Everyone, in a sense, is an artist, in that we all strive to better express ourselves. As bricoleurs, we all do our best to depict our thought, wishes and fears, making use of the media we were given (voice, gestures and action, broadly speaking) and employing techno media, in the big and blurry cloud of creativity, communication and experimentation. People mix sounds, images and what else occurs in order to be better heard and understood or, on the contrary, to conceive meanings in different and alternative, sometimes obscure and imaginative, ways.

It’s not that surprising, then, that boundaries are blurring in art, as more creatives are exploring liminal areas and practices to narrate themselves and the world they live in. This is true for contemporary Chinese artists and filmmakers, mixing practices and channels to convey their ideas. Renowned examples include artist Ai Weiwei’s work in documentaries, Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s projects in video art and films (including dGenerate’s titles Meishi Street and San Yuan Li, as well as the productions Renminbi City and Vitamin Creative Space), multimedia works by Yang Fudong, and Song Tao’s Birds Heads. In a recent article in Red Box Review, curator Samantha Culp expresses her wishes for the outcome of this mixing, specifically in how it might help sustain China’s independent film scene:

Hopefully China’s independent filmmakers can appropriate some strategies from their art-world counterparts about creating a sustainable practice through commerce, and artists can start playing with the intriguing funding, distribution and presentation possibilities opened up by crowd-sourced fundraising, quasi-curatorial festival programming, and online dissemination of works.

All of this is presented to describe a sort of ethnographic turn happening in Chinese art, especially in video and visual production, which these days often mixes up fiction and documentary practice, as if we had to transcend into the imaginary to narrate the real, to understand and deepen it. These artists occupy a unique realm that occasionally intersects with the commercial success of mainstream Chinese cinema and globally acclaimed contemporary art. Independent filmmakers may show their films in the art world, while works of artists are screened in film festivals and. We can even see a dancer documenting himself in a long experimental work (Li Ning’s Tape), rising debates and discussions after screening. In this new panorama, there are a few developing points to look at, and that my own research is focusing on. Just to mention a few: artists’ creative engagement in telling life and, maybe even more significantly, audience’s response to new art forms and showcases, actively participating different selling and distribution channels, hybridized contexts, including the web and social networks, that give chance to non-specialist to get in, appreciate and discuss. In China there’s a growing public sphere of art, that’s opening to (self)representations.

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The latest issue of Hong Kong-based Open Magazine features three articles on citizens’ documentary in Chinese civil rights movements. One of them, written by Teng Biao, who is a human rights lawyer in Beijing, has been translated and published at Interlocals.net. See original.

In the article, Teng gives a comprehensive overview of the civic documentary movement in China for the past few decades. While the facts are impressive in both volume and numbers, the ideas aren’t all new to us. He writes,

Information monopoly is designed to benefit those in power, while Citizens Documentary can eliminate the cover-ups in certain extent. Only a few documentaries can already make the dictatorship pay a huge price. One can imagine that with the expansion of the Civic Documentary campaign, covering up truth will be a futile and obsolete attempt. Till then, there should be a significant change in the mode of power operation. (Interlocals)

Such a reversal of these power dynamics can be seen in Ou Ning’s and Cao Fei’s collaborative film, San Yuan Li. Ou and Cao led a group of twelve amateur videographers to videotape their enigmatic little village of the same name, embedded in the outskirts of the megalopolis of Guangzhou. In the past decade, because of the state’s plan to modernize the region and the ever expansion of the city, everything old about the village has been either rapidly changing or rapidly disappearing. In order to save the village’s transitory appearances, the filmmakers enlisted ordinary villagers to document the losses. Politically speaking, this form of resistance is subtle, but it is kindled with a spirit of free discourse, both journalistic and democratic in nature.

Another point of relevance in Teng’s propositions lies beyond the implicit political significance of cultural or historical preservation using film; when certain documentaries are produced for investigative purposes, the stakes can be even higher. In Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, we experience a zero-distance encounter with a group of Beijingers facing demolition of their homes. These people open themselves up in front of the camera and for the camera, venting grievances that they couldn’t elsewhere. One man decries the state media for exactly the same reason that Teng mentions: “covering up truth will be a futile and obsolete attempt.”

In the face of China’s unassailable march towards modernity, nobody is an isolated victim. The questions and debates on which aspects of Chinese culture are worth preserving and which information needs to go out in the light will mount with increasing urgency. Already manifested in Xie Wenjun’s documentary, Disappearing Guangzhou, cultural preservation and human rights movements can be intricately linked. See Arthur Waldron’s comments on Xie’s film:

The narration makes the point that the post-80 generation involved in documenting cultural loss in Guangzhou is focused on cultural preservation, but for the residents of the endangered neighborhoods, it is the even more serious matter of the defense of rights. (Waldron)

Note that the people in Guangzhou feel threatened today not just because some have been forced to relocate for the upcoming 2010 Asian Games but also because there was a proposal in the local government to replace Cantonese with Mandarin in some television broadcasting. Protests abounded after the news leaked, despite the fact that it had all just been a proposal. To read more about China’s language policy, see Waldron’s blog.

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Since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, China has undergone a series of profound, ever-accelerating transformations spurred by experiments with a market economy and a more open approach to foreign investment and external cultures. In the last decade the consequences of these changes have dramatically impacted China and its place in the world. Concurrent with the Portland Art Museum’s CHINA DESIGN NOW exhibition, the Northwest Film Center continues to explore the perspectives of Chinese and western filmmakers whose works reflect on the broad currents of contemporary change in Chinese society. As China’s past and future collide, the works by these media artists provide unique insight into the social and aesthetic confusions, obstacles, and opportunities being navigated in the interstices between history, daily reality, and the future’s promises.

Other films screening as part of this series include Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, Ning Ying’s I Love Beijing and Perpetual Motion, and Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes.

More details can be found at the NW Film Center site.

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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.

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The idea for the company was inspired by one of our films, San Yuan Li, by Ou Ning and Cao Fei.  By a chance encounter, I indirectly helped Andrew Gluckman, now a good friend, book a screening of San Yuan Li at New York University in December 2007.  At the time, I had no inkling of what was to happen.  Nor did I know anything about the film.  But when I saw San Yuan Li, I was blown away by the artistry and production methodology of the film.  After the screening, Ou Ning told me many films in China were being made underground, meaning without censorship and without any chance at domestic distribution.

I knew there was an audience here for these films – given the immense interest in China, and a general lack of access to media made from within China, it seemed like an obvious one-two connection.  Problem was, I was and still am an independent film producer, a consuming profession.  I self-distributed films I produced, but the thought of tunneling a new route to bring underground Chinese films to the U.S. was daunting.

So I mulled over the idea, and a month later, it came out in an idle chat between myself and Brian Newman, Tribeca Film Institute’s Executive Director, as we were riding the free Sundance Film Festival shuttle bus.  Brian said he was developing a new platform called Reframe designed specifically to distribute independent films to the academic market.  He promised to accept all the films I brought back China.  Reframe would take care of the physical manufacturing and order fulfillment. Brian’s offer suddenly made the idea much less daunting.  I got back on the phone with Ou Ning, who immediately sent me forty films to watch.

The content was there, the distribution network was coming, all that was needed now was the missing link between the two.

More information on San Yuan Li can be found here.

Come back soon for Part 2 of “The Birth of dGenerate Films” by dGenerate President Karin Chien…

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