"Red Collector" Liu Debao in his studio filled with vintage Mao memorabilia (photo: Shanghai Journal)

On his blog Shanghai Journal, Andrew Field reports on his encounter with Liu Debao, a Shanghai artist who has collected over 3,600 film reels from the Mao era. Field first heard about Liu from an interview with cinema scholar Chris Berry posted on our site. He visited Liu in his studio along with Ying Qian of Harvard, who is currently researching Mao era Chinese cinema. A full report of their visit can be found on Field’s blog.

Two films that are probably not in Liu’s collection, but are essential records of Mao era China, are Though I Am Gone and Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, both directed by Hu Jie. Learn more about them in dGenerate’s catalog.

Relevant Classroom Use

Chris Berry

Chris Berry is Professor of film and television studies at Goldsmiths University of London, and co-editor of the recent volume The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Most recently he co-curated a special film series “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire: The Cultural Revolution in the Cinema” with Katja Wiederspahn for the Film Archiv Austria, with the cooperation with the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnological Museum and the Film Archive Austria)in its special exhibition “The Culture of the Cultural Revolution.” We caught up with Professor Berry to learn more about the films and his experience in curating the series.

dGF: Has this exhibition changed your understanding of the Cultural Revolution and film? What were the major obstacles you faced in curating the exhibition at *Film Archiv Austria*?

Chris Berry: I guess my thinking about the Cultural Revolution was already changing along with a lot of other peoples’, and the process of putting together the series became part of that. I was very struck when I read the Tsinghua University professor and leading mainland public intellectual Professor Wang Hui’s comments in “Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity,” where he argued that the legitimacy of the entire contemporary Chinese political, social and cultural formation is built on the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution. Along with everyone else, I had taken that repudiation for granted for a long time and not gone much further. If today’s combination of neo-liberal economics and authoritarian politics needs a stereotype of the Cultural Revolution as a disastrous combination of the opposite — a command economy and anarchic politics — maybe that’s too simple. It’s not that I want to embrace the Cultural Revolution! But I think it made me realize that we need to decouple the Cultural Revolution from legitimization of the present to get a more complex understanding of it.

In the area of culture specifically, Paul Clark’s book, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, has helped to explode all kinds of myths about the Cultural Revolution. Those include the idea that there were only 8 Model Works (yangbanxi) — there were more. And the idea that the films of those 8 Model Works were only movies that the 800 million Chinese had access to was wrong, too. There were older films that continued to circulate, numerous documentaries, new feature films after 1972, and a range of foreign films from countries like Romania, Albania, and North Korea. So, I already wanted to take another look by the time the idea for the series came up.

The “Cinema of the Cultural Revolution” series at the Austrian Film Archive (Film Archiv Austria) was initiated by Katja Wiederspahn, and I curated it together with her. Katja is an old friend of mine. She works as an independent curator and also for the Viennale, Vienna’s international film festival. We had previously cooperated on a special focus on the 1930s actress Ruan Lingyu for the Viennale. That was a lot of fun, so I wanted to work with her again!

The event itself took place in June of this year, but Katja first spoke to me about the possibility of working together on the series early in the autumn of 2010. She had heard that I would be spending 4 months in Vienna as a Senior Fellow at the IFK — the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, or Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften — in early 2011. By coincidence, Helmut Opletal’s great exhibition, “The Culture of the Cultural Revolution” was due to open more or less when I arrived at the beginning of March, and so the idea was for the Ethnological Museum and the Film Archive Austria to co-sponsor the film series. I’ve written about the exhibition on a post to the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture list, but here I will just say it is also an effort to return to the Cultural Revolution and develop a more complex understanding without in any way losing sight of the terror that was very powerful feature of the Cultural Revolution.

By another coincidence, Opletal’s exhibition opened in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. So, as we went round it, both Katja and I were thinking about the visceral thrill of political action, including violence, and how powerfully exciting this can be for young people, at the same time as it can make them vulnerable to being used and making mistakes. That’s why we chose Mao’s saying “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire” for the film series. We felt it captured the sense of excitement and danger perfectly. Now that we’re doing this interview in the wake of the riots in England, I’m all too well aware again of how youthful excitement can translate into anger, violence, and destruction!

You ask what obstacles we faced while working with the “Film Archiv Austria.” Well, of course, working with them was anything but an obstacle! In fact, without their resources and support, the whole thing would have been impossible from the process of sourcing the films all the way through to projection. I’m really grateful to everyone there for all their help, and it was a huge delight to present the programme in the old Metro Kino movie theatre in central Vienna. However, the consideration that this was a public event for a general audience rather than an audience of China specialists certainly did shape the process of selection. We could not assume that people had seen any of the major films from or about the Cultural Revolution or knew much about it, and we could not make this event about discovering completely unknown works or anything like that.

"The East is Red" (1965, dir. Wang Hui)

However, one of the great pleasures of starting from a kind of tabula rasa position was the ability to see films like The East is Red, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and the revolutionary ballet version of The Red Detachment of Women again on 35 mm prints. We also showed Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Blue Kite, which is one of the most moving of the films made since the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, and a number of contemporary documentaries, including Hu Jie’s devastating Though I Am Gone, which has been released in a German version now, and is one of dGenerate’s films. Other documentaries included Carma Hinton’s classic investigation of the Cultural Revolution generation, Morning Sun, and the Dutch Chinese filmmaker Yan Ting Yuen’s Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works, which not only interviews the stars of the film versions of the model works but also covers contemporary performances and revivals. One of my favorites was Zhang Bingjian’s Readymade, which looks at Mao impersonators, including a woman who was first alerted to the fact that she resembled the Great Helmsman by her own mother. We also wanted to include at least one of the huge cycle of 80-100 films made in the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution that took part in the repudiation of it. I’m very pleased that we were able to get hold of Yang Yanjin’s Troubled Laughter, which is a rare Chinese satire, and both funny and moving.

"Troubled Laughter" (1979, Deng Yimin and Yang Yanjin)

The real and shocking obstacle in all this was the difficulty of finding prints. You might expect it to be hard to find prints of the Cultural Revolution era films. But actually, a lot of those have made their way into archives around Europe, because they were made relatively freely available at the time. However, by the time they got to the archives, the prints were often already deteriorating by going pink, and that is a real problem. I expected that. But I did not expect to find that so many Chinese films from the 1980s and 1990s that were released in Europe and elsewhere are simply not around anymore, or are in shocking condition. In the case of Troubled Laughter, we were very lucky to get help from Marie-Claire Quiquemelle in France. Otherwise, we couldn’t have shown anything from the late 70s and early 80s at all.

Our other real obstacle was trying to build bridges to an audience that knows little about the era. Although European leftists of the 1960s were often inspired by the Cultural Revolution, that was a long time ago now! So, we also wanted to bring the whole series to life by bringing over Shanghai’s famous “Red Collector”, Mr. Liu Debao. Mr. Liu has over 3,600 film prints in his private collection, which emphasizes the Cultural Revolution. I first met Mr. Liu in Shanghai a year or more ago. He’s a very expansive character — so generous and enthusiastic. But he’s also a true believer in Mao’s China. He was a Red Guard and went up to Beijing twice to see Chairman Mao, and today he has a huge patriotic pride about China’s determination back then to go down its own independent path rather than submit to the West or the Soviet Union.

Mr. Liu brought an 8.75mm projector with him and a mix of 8.75mm and 16mm documentaries and newsreels. One of the newsreels was about the 8.75 format. It was a bit like super-8, but had a larger image. The point was for China to have its own unique format, not only to enable films to reach the countryside with mobile projection teams but also to reduce dependency on imports. Another newsreel was about the launch of China’s first satellite — a success which the film attributed to the power of Mao Zedong Thought! And there were documentaries about the building of the Red Flag Canal, a triumph of labor mobilization to enable irrigation of dry areas, and about Mao meeting the Red Guards in Beijing. (This is another moment to thank the Metro Kino projectionists! Imagine trying to show these films in a regular movie theatre!) Mr. Liu clearly loves all this material, and his presence and presentation really made everyone feel the enthusiasm of the Cultural Revolution and how full of energy and sincerity many of the young participants were. If we were impressed by him, he was very impressed by the Film Archiv Austria’s cinema technology collection as well as by their commitment to looking after their prints, and so he decided to donate his 8.75 mm projector to the archive!

dGF: One of the major criticisms of Cultural Revolution cultural production is the political nature of the works. It is often seen by western audiences as a very monolithic movement. What are the unique aesthetics of Cultural Revolution film and art in general? How influential was the socialist realism movement, in the USSR, on Chinese artists during this period? What other forces shaped such artistic production?

Berry: Yes, the style of the model works, including the style of the films made out of them, is very overwhelming. But it is also very distinctive. For people outside China at the time, the films and posters were the first contact they had with the Cultural Revolution, and they seem to have left an indelible image of China in the rest of the world, as well as a very powerful image of the Cultural Revolution itself in China. But at the same time we must acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution style has to be seen as part of a long history of efforts to invent a specifically Chinese modern style since the May Fourth Movement early in the twentieth century, if not earlier. What made the Cultural Revolution style different was how successful it was and how powerfully it took hold. Even if people got bored with the limited range of works available or their politics, the style continues to get people’s attention!

"The Red Detachment of Women" (1971, dir. Jie Fu)

You can get some sense of its power when you watch something like the ballet version of The Red Detachment of Women. Forget delicate swans fluttering tragically to the floor. This is girls with guns and grenades, but still en pointe. The militant requirements of the revolutionary aesthetic led to a complete reworking of traditional ballet. The romantic couple is irrelevant and the pas de deux more or less disappears. In its place comes a range of breathtaking leaps and aggressive thrusts, all coordinated by the corps de ballet. Seeing the main character poised above the cowering landlord, her bayonet held over him, is such a contrast to anything you’ll find in traditional ballet! It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up — for all kinds of reasons. And the whole work is amazingly kinetic and energetic.

As well as ballet, the people who designed and developed the model works also borrowed Western symphonic music, and mixed it with elements of Chinese opera music. Adding Chinese instruments and other elements “sinicized” symphonic music, but it also enabled an integration of the individual works, so that they were no longer as fragmented and episodic as traditional operas. And, as with the ballets, the contents changed, too: the old scholars and generals and fair maidens were replaced with worker, peasant, soldier heroes and class struggle themes.

As regards the links with Russia, of course ballet came from there. It might seem very strange to people in the West that China took ballet, because we think of it as a court art, and very much the opposite of revolutionary art. But the Russians hung on to it as a national form, I believe. And for China in the 1950s, it was OK because it came from the Soviet Union. I think it spoke to the desire to be modern, as was also the case with symphonic music. This is something else we forget about the Cultural Revolution. The drive for rapid material change, scientific modernity, and so forth that we see in China today is in fact a continuity from both before and during the Cultural Revolution. That has been a consistent, indeed desperate, goal from the 1920s on, and it has been associated with Europe and North America throughout. Just how to get there has changed!

But although these art forms were taken in via the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet split had well and truly taken hold well before the Cultural Revolution. China stayed loyal to Stalin’s memory despite Khrushchev’s criticisms of him. So, they had adopted socialist realism in the 1950s, but after the split and the need to develop their own path in everything, the Chinese communist line on the arts was “a combination of socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism”. Of course, it’s precisely that idea of romanticism that licensed the highly unrealist style of the Cultural Revolution model works.

dGF: Power is often a motif pervasive throughout the films of the Cultural Revolution. How is power and lack thereof imagined and visualized in the portrayal of class struggle, social strife, representations of the CCP, and
Mao Zedong?

"Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Model Works" (2005, dir.Yang Ting Yuen)

Berry: For me, something that gave me a jolt when watching the model works again was the strong and positive emphasis on class hatred. All that energy was very exciting, but I was brought up short every time the films hammered home the need to mobilize class hatred. I couldn’t help wondering about what it was like to be on the receiving end of that hatred. I wonder whether anyone had similar worries at the time, or is my thinking that way more the result of all the post-Cultural Revolution films that present it from the perspective of the victims of class struggle? I had an interesting conversation with Professor Suzanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik of the University of Vienna about this. She helped with Helmut Opletal’s exhibition, and also helped us to bring Mr. Liu over from Shanghai, so I am especially grateful. She was also in China during the early 1970s as a student, and her take on it was that by then everyone was nervous. The targets of struggle had shifted so often and yesterday’s accusers had become today’s accused so many times that everyone knew it could be them next.

As you might expect with a movement that placed such emphasis on identifying and eliminating the enemy as a way of unifying “the masses” with their leaders, the Cultural Revolution is very starkly polarized. Characters are either good or bad. The aesthetic theory of the “Three Prominences” (san tuchu) articulated this: among the characters, the positives ones should be prominent; among the positive ones, the heroes; and among the heroes, the main hero should be most prominent. Bad guys were lit poorly, decentered in the frame, skulking, and looked down on, whereas heroes were bright, shining, in the centre, and shot from below, often gazing into the middle distance. In the documentaries from the time, Chairman Mao gets the close-ups!

However, one thing that has to be said about that is I don’t think it always worked. In theory, the most positive character is supposed to be the most interesting, but I don’t think that someone who is so uniformly knowledgeable and good draws our attention. In The Red Detachment of Women, for example, it’s the male detachment leader who is the main hero. But I can’t even remember his name right now. The one who everyone loves is Qionghua, the former slave girl who has to learn to submit to revolutionary discipline rather than pursue personal revenge. I’m sure if you asked most people who the main character was, they’d say her.

dGF: In present day China, both censored film and art are often disseminated through the conduit of social media and the Internet, but what about censored output during the Cultural Revolution? I understand films that were sanctioned by the CCP were shown in cities at theaters and in the countryside by teams of roving projectionists. In a sense, this was a very egalitarian medium for communication. Nevertheless, did an audience and an apparatus for distribution of illicit material exist during the Cultural Revolution?

Berry: No. Or at least I have never heard of anything like that. Film was easy to control, compared say with poetry or even art. We know that people wrote underground novels and poems, copied them, and circulated them by hand. We know that some artists made watercolors on thin tissue paper, rolled them up, and hid them in a secret compartment of furniture. We even know that the Party had trouble establishing standardized and unchanging versions of the model works, and that was one of the reasons they wanted to film them — once their were filmed and the authorized version was clear to everyone, local troupes couldn’t make local changes! But there was no video, and not even any home movie cameras in China then, let alone the internet.

For Madame Mao's eyes only.

I suppose the closest thing to what you’re asking about was so called “internal” (neibu) screenings of banned works and foreign works that were not released to the general public. In theory, these were to inform trusted central figures of what to be on guard against. But tickets to internal screenings were highly sought after, and not always for those reasons! I believe that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) was a huge fan of The Sound of Music. I’ve always found Julie Andrews a bit scary.

dGF: Recent films such as Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and The East Wind State Farm look back at the Cultural Revolution through a present-day lens. Acknowledging the genre-based thematic and aesthetic differences, comparing Hu Jie’s and other contemporary documentaries about the Cultural Revolution with film produced during the “Scar Literature” era, how do these films incorporate themes of memory/remembering as well as re-creating history through art?

Berry: Both sets of film are all about remembering the Cultural Revolution and, in some cases, other difficult parts of the Mao era. But there are some important differences between them, of course. The recent films are independent documentaries, whereas the films from the post-Cultural Revolution era were melodramas, for the most part, and made within the sate-owned studio system of the time. The contemporary films are oral histories that are often a last chance for older people to give their testimonies. The government’s line is that the Cultural Revolution has been declared a mistake and dealt with, so there’s no need to make any more films about it. So, I don’t suppose these current documentaries are very welcome, to put it mildly. In fact, I think they are incendiary and I’m not surprised that many of the filmmakers are keeping relatively quiet about them.

"Though I Am Gone" (2007, dir. Hu Jie)

On the other hand, I think that most of the post-Cultural Revolution melodramas were part of a process of trying to rebuild trust between the government and the people on the grounds of a shared suffering — Deng Xiaoping suffered during the Cultural Revolution, just as so many ordinary Chinese did. It’s always struck me how the Chinese government and people were ready to go back and make films and write novels about the Cultural Revolution so quickly after it was over. It took the Soviets decades to begin to go into the Stalin era, and the Germans were not really ready to start confronting the legacy of fascism so quickly, either. But that’s where Wang Hui’s point comes in. Repudiating the Cultural Revolution and constructing a very straightforward image of the Cultural Revolution re-legitimized the Party.

Having said all that, I think that the best of the films from that cycle from the late 70s are not so simple. For example, Troubled Laughter shares a self-reflexive quality with Though I Am Gone. In Hu Jie’s film, it’s very striking that the old widower took a camera with him to take pictures of his wife dying in the ER at the hospital after her students had beaten her. It opens a second dimension to the film, so that it becomes a meditation on the need to document and to bear witness as well as a documentary about a specific topic. In the case of Troubled Laughter, the film is all about a journalist who is caught between his desire to tell the truth and all kinds of social and political pressures, including from his own family members, to submit and tell the “truth” that the Cultural Revolution leaders in his town want him to tell. So that film also opens up a lot of questions about what truth is, what the duty and role of an artist or a journalist or a filmmaker is, and so on. In fact, I think it’s weathered the years extremely well, and I hope that people will start to rediscover some of these “forgotten films” soon.

Relevant Classroom Use

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (authors Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, Lisa Rofel)

A new book by three eminent China scholars is out – The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record edited by Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel. Peter Monaghan has a full report for Moving Image Archive News.

Relevant Classroom Use

Spring Fever (dir. Lou Ye)

In the new issue of Senses of Cinema, Chris Berry offers a review of the 6th China Independent Film Festival, held this past October in Nanjing. An excerpt:

By international standards CIFF is a relatively small and under-resourced event. Screenings are scattered across a range of minor colleges, art galleries and museums in Nanjing, a former capital up the Yangtze from Shanghai. This year, approximately 70 experimental films, documentaries and dramatic features, almost all of them low-budget Chinese films, were included. Lou Ye’s Chunfeng Chenzui de Yewan (Spring Fever) won the Best Film award, and Ying Liang’s Hao Mao (Good Cats) and Zhang Jianchi’s Bai Qingting (Take Me to Vietnam) shared the Jury Prize. Anywhere else in the world, such an event would be a minor festival attracting little if any international coverage. But the very particular circumstances of China mean that CIFF can claim to be the most important film festival in the country.

Berry goes on to explain the significance of the festival’s programming, describes the collegiate atmosphere of the community forged by the festival, and identifies trends in Chinese independent filmmaking as reflected in the festival lineup. As a fellow attendee of the festival, I can attest to the festival’s extraordinary atmosphere and a special sense of camaraderie cultivated among its participating artists.

The rest of Berry’s report can be found at Senses of Cinema.

Relevant Classroom Use

Students worldwide are welcome to the program, administered through the University of Washington. Twelve quarter credits are transferable to other institutions. The program is especially well suited for upper-level undergraduates who intend to continue their studies in Chinese cinema, and for graduate students and professors who plan to teach courses involving Chinese films. No knowledge of Chinese is required.

The courses will be taught by professors from outside Asia (including Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, and James Tweedie) and a variety of faculty from the Beijing Film Academy. The program also includes meetings with filmmakers. The program cost (including tuition and lodging) is $3,300 + registration fee. Rolling admission will start on January 1, 2010.

Further details on curriculum and application procedures can be found on the program’s website. Questions should be addressed to the program director, Professor Yomi Braester: yomi @ uw.edu.

Relevant Classroom Use

Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town is about alienation and distance, about aimless wanderers and broken hearts, yet it is shot with the tenderness of a root-seeking journey. In this three-hour documentary, the meditative rhythm parallels the pace of life depicted. The scale of screen time embodies the scale of lost history the film tries to capture through extraordinary visual sensitivity.

Life in Zhiziluo Village lingers between an irretrievably lost past and an unfulfilled promise of a future. In Part One, “Voices,” local Christian pastors, a father and a son, preach the doctrines learned from American missionaries back in the pre-revolutionary age, and parse the Old Testament for laws to follow in daily life. Their devotion and calmness, however, can hardly conceal the father’s traumatic memory of twenty years of prison for faith and the growing estrangement between the two generations.

In Part Two, “Recollections,” various people are forced to leave their homeland for unknown destinations: young men look for jobs in the city; young women are swindled or sold into marriages in afar provinces; a middle-aged divorcee faces the perspective of losing his homestead due to the government’s development plan. For them, life in the village will soon become mere recollections.

Part Three, “Innocence” portrays the seemingly carefree life of a 12-year old boy, abandoned by his family and catching wild birds for food. When he and other local youngsters perform a Lisu fire exorcism near the end of the film, we return to the age-old ghost worship mentioned by the elder pastor at the beginning. Life forms a circle. Progress and future, as embodied by the huge statue of Mao overlooking the town from a deserted former county hall, seem to have forsaken the land.

What distinguishes the film from other contemporary Chinese films about abandonment and oblivion is its scrupulous attention to details and the meaning and dignity it endows these details. In nightmarish case studies like Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2002) or apocalyptic fables like Ying Liang’s The Other Half (2006), homeland becomes wasteland. The characters, through their daily frustration and doomed attempts at escape or change, manifest the barren urban landscapes. Ghost Town, on the other hand, regularly punctuates the portraits of anguish and anger with calmly observed and compassionately recorded daily routine and toil. Through Zhao’s humanistic, observational camera, cooking, lighting the fire, feeding chicken, hard travels along the winding mountain roads, even animal slaughter on the streets, all acquire the same ritualistic sanctity as the Christian sermons and the Christmas banquet that are at the center of the village’s spiritual life, and the source of its hope.

Rituals and customs of remote, minority regions have long been a fascination of Chinese Han artists. Feature films like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s On the Hunting Ground (1985), set in Mongolia, and Horse Thief (1986), set in Tibet, and documentaries like Duan Jinchuan’s Tibet trilogy, all feature rituals as a basic form of existence for the local people. Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain (1990) also uses the protagonist’s trip along the border of Sichuan and Tibet and among minorities such as Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples to embody “one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom” (Mabel Lee, in her introduction to the English translation of the novel). In his essay “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Post-socialism,” Chris Berry analyzes the paradoxical status of these regions and peoples as some kind of “others” within China, which enables the filmmakers to “express the sense of alienation and distance from their own culture felt by many educated Chinese amid the disillusionment of the post-Mao era.”

In a later essay “2005: The Power and Pain of the New Documentary Movement,” Lu Xinyu decodes the revived allegorical meaning of rural and minority regions in the digital-generation documentaries. In her example of Sun Yueling’s The Book of Winds (Feng Jing), the filmmaker follows a Tibetan Buddhist lama and his two students on a pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kawakarpo, and treats their simple joy and devotion as a counterpoint to life in globalized civilization. Lu notes:

As the city and modernization no longer nourishes utopia, but only symbolizes its disillusionment, nostalgia (for the rural roots—as the Chinese term implies inherently) becomes a refusal of, and reflection on, modernization. The result is not only a continuation of the exploration in the 1980s, but also a homage to the dignity and value of the people living and suffering in today’s countryside.

Ghost Town is a highly aestheticized exploration of this tradition. Zhiziluo Village is also a special witness of the gravity of China’s urbanization and modernization. As Mr. Zhao mentioned in the Q&A after the NYFF screening, the village, originally occupied by the Lisu and Nu minorities, is an abandoned county seat from the Mao era. Now only the local peasants were left behind on the urbanized wasteland. The film contrasts the effortless beauty of the rural landscape with the dilapidated three-storied buildings and the desolate streets. Often kept at a distance, nature not only serves as a backdrop to human suffering and dignity at the foreground, but locates the people on the land.

Against this backdrop, the meticulously recorded religious and folk ceremonies and the daily rituals become substitutes for the lost roots and severed links to the soil, tradition and ancestry that would endow life with meaning. One of the most memorable rituals in the film is a rustic, religious funeral on top of the mountain. Starting with a striking image of a young man carrying a wooden cross climbing the mountain, the funeral merges a gospel chorus with the local tradition of chanting lamentation. When the ritual ends with a body buried and a new tomb sealed, the question about root and meaning is directed to us, the living.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (2009, dir. Liu Jiayin)

Held on June 13-21, 2009, the 12th Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) was, to quote Chris Berry, “bigger than ever.” In his review of the festival on Senses of Cinema, Berry analyzed the continued growth and unusual challenges confronting this “large and ambitious A-list festival.”  The subtle and ambiguous status of Chinese independent cinema is of particular concern.

For this relative newcomer to the international festival circuit, the greatest challenge is to attract strong entries for its main competition. Berry notes that the unavoidable self-awareness of “both political sensitivities and the expectations of the public and the authorities” makes the selection of foreign films “idiosyncratic, to say the least.” In the domestic sector, the official-sponsored status of the festival prevents it showing Chinese independent films—films that have not been through the government censorship system, although the various sidebar events managed to “provide spaces where independents can appear and participate.” Berry especially noted the presence of Liu Jiayin and praised highly her new work Oxhide II, inevitably absent in the festival:

Like the original Oxhide (2005), Oxhide II is a no-budget minimalist miracle. Filmed in long-take mode in her family’s tiny Beijing flat, it stars Liu and her parents, following them through the conversation that occurs during the New Year custom of rolling, boiling and eating dumplings. Just as Christmas lunch might tell you a lot about the many Western cultures, we get an insight not only into Liu’s family dynamics but also surviving the pressures of ordinary city life and the new market economy in China today. In the inevitable absence of the film, Liu herself appeared at a female filmmakers’ roundtable. It was sponsored by a women’s lifestyle website, and featured a bevy of glamorous and dolled up women filmmakers. Amongst them, Liu stood out almost as much as the moderator, the famous male filmmaker and former independent, Jia Zhangke. Her no make-up image and no-frills ethos of filmmaking struck a refreshing note and sent a strong message to the many ordinary young women in the audience.

For Berry, the most exciting and unexpected discovery of the festival also proved the dilemma concerning independent cinema. This was The Search (Xun Zhao Zhi Mei Geng Deng), the long awaited second film from Tibetan director Pema Tseden (a.k.a. Wanma Caidan), which won the Jury Grand Prix. Although his “sensitive” status as an ethnically Tibetan director in the People’s Republic makes it impossible for Pema Tseden to avoid going through the official censorship process, his film is, Berry noted, “exactly the kind of uncommercial and low budget film that would normally be made as an independent film in China.”

Relevant Classroom Use

I finished watching Ghost Town last night. It’s a very fine film indeed. One of the reviews mentioned Jia Zhangke. But I immediately thought of Wang Bing. The three-part structure, the epic historical theme with larger social implications, the patient observational filmmaking, the people speaking to camera but the filmmaker’s own absence, all these things made me think of Wang Bing. And like his films, it has a strong sense of historical consciousness, an eye for unique material, and a real sympathy for the people in the film and their tough lives. It’s a testament to the continuing strength of the Chinese documentary movement.

The craft, the skill, is partly in the filming but also very much in the editing, and that’s how the filmmaker draws us through the work. The ending, which takes us back to the opening section with its emphasis on Christianity, but then focuses on the Mao statue that has been lurking there in the background throughout (again due to thoughtful choices in the editing) is very powerful, opening all kinds of questions about the impact of different ideologies from outside the town at different times (and of course the impact of other things — like alcohol), and how the villagers are desperate for effective help, but that the things they turn to do not always turn out to be so useful. Watching a film like this, I am reminded again of how important editing is, and what a pity it is not widely recognized as a separate skill in China.

There have been a few independent documentaries and feature films that have dealt with Christianity in China recently. As an atheist, I must admit that I usually find anything that reminds me of how prevalent Christianity is again in China and the inroads it is making very disturbing. I know the situation in China is complicated by the collapse of old socialist values, and a very real experience of abandonment by the state on the part of poor people. As we see in the first part of Ghost Town, the church not only gives them a set of values, but it also supports them materially and socially. Indeed, I assume that part of what that edit at the end of the film is doing is drawing our attention to how Mao took the place occupied by the church before the revolution and now the church is fill the gap occupied by the collapse of Maoism. The films that bother me the most are the ones that seem to proselytizing. For example, I was quite disturbed by Gan Xiao’er’s Raised from Dust, which is also in your catalogue and seemed to me to see suffering as ennobling. Of course, that leads many of its supporters to compare it to Bresson. That’s intended as a great compliment. However, I must admit I have the same problem with Bresson, so maybe it’s just me! With Ghost Town, however, the film seems to be simply observing that, and so although I find the facts worrying, I’m not so bothered about the film.

One of the most notable things is that after all the talk about how Chinese documentary film has become “individualized” or “personal” (gerenhua) over the last ten years, with a retreat from observational towards personal filmmaking, this film does not fit that pattern at all. It’s classic observational filmmaking, with no voiceover and just a few titles to orient the viewer. So, maybe it makes us think more about what “individualized” or “personal” filmmaking in China means. I’ve been working with Lisa Rofel and Lu Xinyu to finish an anthology on China’s New Documentary Movement for the Hong Kong University Press this summer (we hope it will be out next year) and we’ve been having a lot of conversations about this. For some filmmakers, it may be about putting themselves in the film or focusing on their personal lives. But for others, it’s about the way in which the arrival of DV technology has enabled them to make films by themselves, without a crew. That’s what Wu Wenguang talked about in his essay on “Individual Filmmaking” (originally published as “Yige Ren de Yingxiang” in Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang (Shanghai: Shanghai Yishu Chubanshe, 2001) 257-263, and translated for Cinema Journal 46, no.1 (2006): 136-140 by Cathryn Clayton.) That essay is all about how the DV liberates him as an individual filmmaker. In that sense, I guess this is an individual film, because it seems to have been made by Zhao Dayong alone, and so are Wang Bing’s films.

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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.  

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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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