Xu Xin’s 2005 documentary Fangshan Church, an unassuming account of a Christian congregation in a somber agricultural village in northern Jiangsu Province, examines not the face of God, but those of devout followers. Xu’s unobtrusive portrait of Fangshan Church and its pious “disciples” opens with a series of plainly framed black and white close ups: elderly congregants facing a pulpit, eyes peering forward from seemingly unaffected, prodigiously wrinkled faces. This opening montage of faces committed in prayer is imbued with a certain reverence, a sense of the sacred articulated also in the hymns and hushed prayers delivering a devotional murmur to an otherwise stark and quiet landscape.

Fangshan Church, the narrative informs through limited title cards and scant talking-head interviews, was built thanks to the generosity of the community family members living in relative religious and economic deliverance in Taiwan. The church structure, a narrow building equipped with a modest cross that stands out amid the rough-hewn terrain of Fangshan village, caters to a Sunday congregation of nearly 900 people. Both the church and its congregants exist humbly, resolutely within Xu’s objective lens, offering a portrait of Christian dogma without evangelical fervor, daily life without much earthly expectation. A Sunday sermon catering to a packed house is exhibited with a casual tracking shot up the aisle, then follows a prophetic-seeming exodus of people and bicycles from the church up a narrow path back towards their homes. Finally, casting his camera upon the emptied church, Xu tilts the camera slowly upwards—what’s up there besides a vaulted ceiling?

The discussion of the church’s somewhat tenuous relationship with the Communist Party is mentioned only briefly, despite the local government’s past attempts to close the church. “We’re not an anti-government organization,” one congregant insists, while another adds that their interest is not in proselytizing, but “singing and dancing.” Indeed, singing is a constant presence in the church and community at large, seemingly the congregants’ preferred mode of communication between themselves and to God, and a departure from lives in a dusty town that appears dense with hardships. Yet for all of Xu’s straightforward portraiture and attention to the subtle joys and habits of these followers—a seeming attempt to personify such abstractions as faith and Godly grace—the narrative ultimately divulges the squabbles, the doubt, and the profane discussions of money, contradicting ideologies, and clerical power that plague every religious community.

Though Xu follows few of the congregants outside of their worship in the church and the occasional home prayer meeting, among the more closely watched congregants are Hu Shengqiang and his wife. Steadfast church members who eat, work, and cohabitate in tranquil simplicity, the man and wife pass time reading aloud to one another from the book of Genesis, stories of Eden. In the film’s final moments, it becomes clear that Shengqiang has passed away and his wife, grieved to hysterical tears, sings a song at his graveside. This song is no hymn in the traditional sense and there is no mention made of God or the Church in these late moments, just an overwhelming sense of devotion.

Relevant Classroom Use

It’s interesting to compare this take on overseas Chinese migration with a recent article in the New York Times about how tens of thousands of Chinese migrants have transformed the Italian city of Prato into a low-end textile and garment hub of Europe, with mixed-to-negative reactions by the Italian locals.

But for all the talk of how the impact of Chinese foreign commerce and migrant labor is being felt around the world,  there is much-needed activity happening in the opposite direction, as China serves as a destination for both commercial and cultural exchange. We’ve reported earlier about the interesting “Raiding Africa” project funded by the Rotterdam Film Festival and spearheaded by Gertjan Zuilhof.  He’s submitted several updates on the project during its summer run: entries five and six are particularly interesting in describing how visiting African filmmakers are encountering China, interacting with local Chinese and filming their experiences.

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