Michael Berry is Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is the author of the BFI Film Classics monograph Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy, which offers extended analysis of the films Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures; A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, which explores literary and cinematic representations of atrocity in twentieth century China; and Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, a collection of dialogues with contemporary Chinese filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhang Yimou, Stanley Kwan, and Jia Zhangke.  Also an active literary translator, Berry has translated several important contemporary Chinese novels by Yu Hua, Ye Zhaoyan, Chang Ta-chun, and Wang Anyi.  Current literary translation projects include the modern martial arts novel The Last Swallow of Autumn (Xia Yin) and Wu He’s (Dancing Crane) award-winning novel Remains of Life (Yu Sheng), a fascinating literary exploration of the 1930 Musha Incident, which was honored with a 2008 NEA Translation Grant.

In this conversation with dGenerate’s Kevin Lee, Michael shares his insights on Jia Zhangke, specifically his career development since the “Hometown Trilogy” and his recent controversy at the Melbourne International Film Festival.   Be sure to read Jia’s statement of withdrawal from the Melbourne Film Festival as a point of reference.

Play the Podcast (Time: 17:39)

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Get a list of Michael’s publications and a timecoded index of topics covered in the interview after the jump.

Interview Topic Index

0:00-0:51 – Introduction
0:51-4:00 – Jia Zhangke’s career development
4:00-7:45 – Jia’s recent controversy at Melbourne
7:46-11:45 – Jia as a political filmmaker
11:45-15:20 – Moving beyond the mavericks
15:20-17:30 – Distributing the digital revolution

Selected Publications by Michael Berry

• Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy (British Film Institute & Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2009)
• A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2008)
• Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2005; Traditional Chinese edition, Rye Field, 2007; Simplified Chinese Edition, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008)

Book Length Translations by Michael Berry

• The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, by Wang Anyi.  Translation by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan, with an Afterword by Michael Berry (Columbia University Press, 2008).
• To Live by Yu Hua.  Translation and Afterword by Michael Berry (Anchor
  Books, 2003).
• Nanjing 1937: A Love Story by Ye Zhaoyan.  Translation and introduction by Michael Berry (Columbia University Press, 2002, Faber & Faber, 2003, Anchor Books, 2004).
• Wild Kids: Two Novels about Growing Up by Chang Ta-chun.  Translation and introduction by Michael Berry (Columbia University Press, 2000).

Relevant Classroom Use

Lu Xinyu (photo courtesy of UCLA International Institute)

Lu Xinyu is Professor and Director of the Radio and TV Department, School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.  Professor Lu is widely regarded as the leading scholar on independent Chinese documentaries.  Her influential book Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (Beijing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003) was the first book to systematically theorize the New Documentary Movement in China from the beginning of 1990s.  She spent the past academic year as a visiting scholar in the department of cinema studies at New York University.

Selected Publications by Lu Xinyu:

Books:

• Writing and What It Obscures (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008)
• Documenting China: The Contemporary Documentary Movement in China (SDX Joint Publishing Company, Beijing, 2003)
• Mythology. Tragedy. Aristotle’s Art of Poetry: New Concept to Ancient Greek’s Poetics Tradition (Fudan University Press, Shanghai, 1995)

Papers and Articles:

• “The Power and Pain of Chinese New Documentary Movement”, Dushu No. 5, 2006.
• “Ruins of the Future Class and History in Wang Bing’s Tiexi District”, New Left Review, 31 Jan/Fab 2005. London.
• “Tiexi District: History and Class Consciousness”, Dushu No. 1, 2004.
• “The History of Documentary and the Document of the History”, Journalism Quarterly, Winter, 2003.
• “A Memorandum about Contemporary Chinese Documentary Development”, South China Television Journal No. 6, 2002 and No. 1, 2003.
• “Began from the Other Side: New Documentary Movement in China”, Frontiers No. 3, 2002.

In this interview conducted by dGenerate’s Yuqian Yan, Lu Xinyu told us about her current work during her visit in New York and how she was attracted to independent Chinese documentary from an aesthetic and humanist background.  Starting from Aristotle’s poetic concept of “tragedy”, she led us to understand the New Documentary Movement as a unique art form that depicts the tragic life of ordinary people in the rapidly changing Chinese society.  The interview was conducted in Chinese.  Full English transcript after the break.

Play the Podcast (in Mandarin Chinese) (Time: 16:43)

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dGF:  What projects are you currently working on?

LX:  My current research project still focuses on the New Chinese Documentary Movement.  I hope to contextualize this movement in the development of Chinese cinema, as well as world cinema today in order to better understand and reflect on the unique contribution of Chinese documentary.  I think it is important to examine why Chinese documentary has become a movement and its significance to world cinema in general.  This is why I have been attracted to this subject.  My experience in New York this year as a visiting scholar enables me to approach this issue from a broader perspective.  Both Chinese social development and the trajectory of Chinese cinema are interconnected with the process of globalization.  All of these aspects should be discussed in relation to each other.

dGF:  We know that your PhD degree was in aesthetics.  What led you to study independent Chinese film and documentary?

LX:  My PhD dissertation was about dramatic theory.  I was concerned about the reason for the decline of the modern Chinese drama.  In order to understand this, I turned to classical Western dramas and poetics tradition.  I felt that using the Western concept of “comedy” and “tragedy” to analyze and categorize Chinese theater was very problematic.  During my study of Aristotle’s Art of Poetry and its relation to ancient Greek drama, I found a vital change in the concept of “tragedy”.  In ancient times, tragedy, according to Aristotle, was closely linked to the hero and his eminent family.  Heroes were all from royal or noble families.  Why? The explanation given by Aristotle was “happen to.”  But my research found out that heroes became heroes because they were responsible to the whole city-state and society.  But in modern individualistic society, ordinary people become the ones who bear the weight of society.  People from the lowest social class are most likely to be the victims of social transformation.  Therefore the meaning of tragedy has fundamentally changed from the dramatic action of the noble family to the depiction of the tragic life and psychological world of ordinary people.  In this sense, it is the life of ordinary people that embodies the meaning of social tragedy.

I started to teach at Fudan University after my graduation in 1993.  I had some communication with TV stations for my Special Feature Documentary class.  At that time there was a heated discussion about the definition of documentary.  1993 was the year when New Documentary Movement started to be legitimized and accepted within the system.  From then on, I found that TV documentary rather than literature was paying attention to ordinary people.  Literature, on the contrary, entered a self-reclusive, narcissistic stage.  It was documentary that facilitated the dialogue between art and society.  That was very appealing to me since documentary functioned as a continuation of my interest in the transformation of tragedy.  I started to use aesthetic theories to understand Chinese documentary.

dGF:  When you say TV documentary, do you mean “special feature documentary?” (zhuan ti ji lu pian)

LX:  In fact, the TV documentary at that time was a rebellion against special feature documentary.  When we came to the “TV time,” we abandoned the word “documentary” because it belonged to the “Film time”, and conveyed a sense of propaganda.  People who worked for TV stations replaced “documentary” with “special features” (zhuan ti pian).  Therefore at the end of 1980s, when we started to turn against the fake, grandiose and empty formula of the special feature, we redefined and rediscovered the concept of documentary.

Why TV stations?  TV workers were very sensitive to social changes.  The New Documentary Movement started from television because, compared to the film system, these people had closer contact with society and more opportunities to use film equipment.  Accessibility to equipment is also an important reason.  Many first generation independent filmmakers built up their relationship with TV stations through a variety of ways, either private or public.  That was the only way for them to get a hold of equipment.  The 1990s were also the time for the reformation of Chinese television system, which created a flexible space for independent filmmakers.  Many filmmakers took advantage of that space to work on their own projects, including some of the most famous directors like Wu Wenguang.

dGF:  If you look back at that time, how does it compare with the documentary scene in China today?

LX:  The first generation independent Chinese documentary makers had very strong political intention.  They held a clear attitude to criticize and rebel against the mainstream coercive ideology.  Political intention and social responsibility were prominent features among the first generation.  These directors preferred to understand society through observation, to approach Chinese society from the bottom up.  Therefore they were more willing to use the observational mode of direct cinema, combining Frederick Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke.

Wiseman’s observation was objective and dispassionate.  He maintained certain distance from his subjects; his observation was cold in some sense.  Ogawa used observational mode in a more interventional way.  He treated his subjects as his own self.  The first generation borrowed from both Wiseman and Ogawa to depict Chinese underclass as an objective “other.”  But this “other” was positioned equally to the directors themselves.  This is the major difference from the second generation who emerged at the end of 1990s.  With the emergence of digital video, filmmakers are no longer dependent on TV stations.  Many young directors use the camera to express themselves.

The new generation emphasizes individualism and self-expression, while the previous generation focused on realism.  The first generation placed emphasis on the “other”; and the second generation expresses the existence of the self.  In a broader sense, it is the existence of both “other” and “self” that constitute Chinese society today.  So there’s some interesting dynamic between the two generations.  The first generation directors claimed that “We are not artists. We are just artisans.”  This claim emphasizes the position of the director in relation to reality.  They do not want to impose their subjectivity on reality, but to allow the conflicts of reality to be revealed from the text without authorial manipulation.  The second generation directors see themselves as artists.  So their aesthetic style incorporates more performativity and self-reflexivity.  Interestingly, they may have never heard about these theories, but they instinctively created these styles to break the boundary between what’s in front of the camera and what’s behind it, and the boundary between subjectivity and the other.  They boldly show themselves in the film, therefore the boundaries between the director and film subjects, public and private disappear as well.  In this sense, they are very avant-garde.  They break established rules and create new aesthetic styles.

This is the current situation of independent Chinese film and documentary.  Meanwhile, those documentaries of social concerns still exist in an influential and powerful way.  So independent Chinese documentary or independent Chinese cinema today is very diversified.

dGF:  You’ve already mentioned many, but I still want to ask what are the major issues that you are most interested in, or you think are important to us as independent cinema lovers.

LX:  I’m most interested in how Independent Chinese cinema and New Documentary Movement build up their connection with society.  How do they redefine the concept of documentary and art?  What is art?  We used to imagine art as a self-contained pure aesthetic form.  This concept was quite influential after 1980s.  But now we are facing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society, both temporally and spatially.  Everyone’s life is inevitably involved in and affected by this process.  How should art react to these changes?  As a film director who bears this social pressure, how to express and represent his understanding of this society, his expectations for the society and for life itself?  All of these construct a new artistic platform for us to understand Chinese society today.

If we only learn Chinese from economic and social perspectives, we’ll never understand the psychological changes Chinese people are going through during this transformation.  By watching independent documentaries, we not only experienced the psychological world of the directors, but also got to experience the existence of people at different social levels through the lens of camera, especially the existence of the underclass and how they struggled through these changes, their pains and their needs.  This is extremely important to me.

dGF:  What would you say have been the most impressive or most significant works of Chinese documentary in the last few years?

LX:  There are a lot.  I’ve written extensively in my essays.  For example, West of the Tracks.  It focuses on how the traditional mainstream community becomes a marginalized group in Chinese society.  Working class used to be the dominant class in China, but they become marginalized under today’s market economy and social transformation.  How does the changing life of this huge group of people affect Chinese society and the industrialization process of the world?  What is its significance to globalization?  West of the Tracks pushes us to think about these questions.  The director has a very interesting view of art.  He says, “If you think my film is about laid-off workers, it means you haven’t fully understood my film.  My real focus is on human life.”  As long as it concerns human life, it has something to do with art.  Art is always about human life.  Politics and economics are the power that is behind human life.  We see the complexity of power relationship through the fate of individual and therefore to reflect on the problems we come across.

Another example would be Before the Flood, which is about the Three Gorges Project.  It is a powerful combination of broad social background and individual lives, a vivid depiction at both macro and micro level.  Bing Ai also takes Three Gorges Project as its subject matter, but explores it from a feminist perspective.  Woman’s affinity for land, for river makes the film extremely powerful and penetrating.  It allows us to experience the development of Chinese society and the tragedy of Chinese people from within.

Relevant Classroom Use

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

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

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

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

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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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