Yang Jin's Er Dong, featured in both QCC and ISSAS programs

By Ariella Tai

Earlier this year, two new screening groups devoted to independent Chinese cinema were introduced into the Chinese film scene.  The Qifang Cinephile Collective (QCC) and Indie Screening Alliance of Art Spaces (ISSAS) are both organized as traveling networks of screenings.  The QCC holds several screenings each month in cafes, bars and libraries located in 11 different cities.  Among the most recent round of screenings, themed “Youth”, was Yang Jin’s Er Dong, available in the dGenerate catalog.  The ISSAS, initiated by curators Zhang Xiamin and Zuo Ging, will offer a 15-film program in the spring and fall.  ISSAS’ April 2010 launch featured six Chinese independent films made within the past two years.

Both the QCC and the ISSAS seek to create new distribution channels within China, so that films providing vital perspectives in contemporary Chinese society and produced through independent means can be circulated within their country of origin.  ISSAS, in particular, was specifically organized to redress these films’ lack of availability to the public and to “…promote the distribution of independent films, integrate current resources and effectively organize film events to further showcase the value of these works.  [They] also hope to undertake some international film exchange events to change the current monologue of film culture in China.”

ISSAS’ first season included 25 films, called “To Live in China,” and programs were broken up into different stages of life, including childhood, elementary school, junior highschool, university, youth, middle-age and elderly.  In his introduction to the program, Zhang Xiamin writes:

Curator Zhang Xiamin

“In my narration, therefore, I must include the description about the nation, the political sovereign entity and personal life. All are stretched like a long roll and everyone is like a chapter in a story. Personal history is history, contemporary history is also history. It can be called local anthropology. I try to divide human history into several ordinary phases. I’ll organize film screenings based on the theme of each era, in an attempt to reflect the social structure, personal experience, public discourse of such era through these works.”

Last season’s screenings took place with across five art spaces: Times Museum, Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art, OCT Contemporary Art Centre, Contemporary Art Research Centre of Southwest Jiaotong University and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu).

Stay tuned for information on this fall’s upcoming lineup!

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Yang Jin, director of The Black and White Milk Cow and Er Dong

In this interview originally published on Sina.com, director Yang Jin talks about the making of The Black and White Milk Cow (available through the dGenerate catalog). Yang discusses how he found his actors and how he worked with them. He also mentions his filming experiences, which include what he did to transition from one scene to the next, how he worked around his tight budget, as well as his experience with working with a script. He says that in Er Dong, he used a different approach, which was that he didn’t follow the script very strictly but filmed extra footage that could be used in the editing afterwards.

Translated by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Q: May I ask what made you want to make The Black and White Milk Cow?

Yang: When I was still in school, my class did an exercise on making tragic stories. The requirement of the exercise was such as we needed to throw all tragic elements at one single character. I had read Chinese writer Wang Xin’s novella “The Black and White Milk Cow” at that point, and I considered the main character in Wang’s story extraordinarily tragic.

Q: So can we say that this film is a tragedy?

Yang: Yes.

Q: When did you shoot it?
Yang: I started it in the summer of 2004 and completed it at the end of that year.

Q: Were you still in school?
Yang: That’s right.

Q: Where did you shoot it?
Yang: I shot it in my hometown Caochuan county, which is in Pinglu, Shanxi. A few scenes were shot in the urban area of Pinglu, outside Caochuan.

Q: Why did you choose this place?
Yang: I had a small budget. Being able to shoot in my hometown saved me a lot of money. I didn’t need to pay my crew, neither for lodging. I am very familiar with the place. It is where my grandmother grew up. I have been there as a child. And I remember that there was a school in the village. Unfortunately when I started shooting the film, the school was gone. A family lived on the compound then. And we filmed there.

Question: Did the place look the same as it did when you were a kid? Were there big changes that you could tell?
Yang: I think the impression one has of a place is determined by its sceneries and its people. To me the place looked roughly the same except some mud houses were replaced by brick houses. As for people, most young men left for cities to find jobs. Those who stayed behind were old people and women. In general, I felt that there weren’t that many changes.

Question: Who were your production team consisted of?
Yang: I had three crew members. Originally there were four. Besides my girlfriend and I, I had my senior Wu Gang, who studied cinematography at Beijing Film Academy and whom I hired as my cameraman, and I had a friend of mine from high school, who studied history in Shanxi Normal University and whom I hired as my sound crew. Because the actor I had for the film quit his role after a few days of shooting, I had to ask my high school friend to act, and Wu Gang had to help with the sound. Just to add to that, my uncle was our driver.

Q: Can you say more about your cast?
Yang: The leading role was played by someone from Shanxi Agricultural University originally, but because he quit, I used the friend from Shanxi Normal University. The rest of the cast were all my relatives. For instances, my aunt was in it, and my aunt’s father played the village chief, and he had been a village chief before.

Q: So except for your friend, everyone else was from the village?
Yang: Almost, except for another girl who played Xu Fei in the film. She was from my mother’s workplace. I asked my mother to find me the pretties girl for me from her workplace, and that was how she found the girl. The girl was a fresh college graduate and was new in my mother’s workplace.

Q: How long did it take to shoot the film?
Yang: A total of eighteen days, with one to two days off in between. It was pretty fast.

Q: Do you think it was a smooth shoot?
Yang: Very much so.

Q: Were there problems with the actors in general?
Yang: Not really. All my cast arrived on site early for each day’s shooting, especially the kids. They would bring their lunch with them to the shooting site so that they did not need to go home for lunch. We prepared a lot of food for them, but they did not want to eat it. They were enthusiastic.

Q: Did you pay them?
Yang: No.

Q: During the shooting, what were the most interesting things that happened? Did everything go as planned?
Yang: Majority of the time things went as they were planned, so it was quite fast. The hardest part of the shooting was the cow. Nobody in the village actually drank milk, so there were no cows to be found. There was an ox farm nearby, but they raised meat cattle only. We went to town to look for a cow. We chose one with the most patterns on its body. After the shooting when we were shipping it back to town, the cow stumbled and fell on the truck. This got us really worried because the cow was pregnant with a cub. After we arrived our destination, we bought some preventive medicine for it so that it wouldn’t suffer from a miscarriage. It cost 10,000 yuan in total to shoot this film, and the money we spent on the cow was well over 2,000 yuan.

Q: Did you buy the cow?
Yang: No way. It would cost us 20 to 30 thousand yuan. We could only afford to rent the cow.

Q: And it was from the town?
Yang: Right. We sent it back after we were done with shooting.

Q: When exactly did you complete the film?
Yang: In January, 2005.

Q: And it was submitted to the school as your term project?
Yang: Right.

Q: How did they comment on your film?
Yang: They all agreed that it was too long because the assignment required us to make shorts, to tell concise stories, to avoid unnecessarily long plots. Despite those, my teacher Cui was being very encouraging. Cui believed that students should be allowed to shoot what they wanted as long as they were serious about what they wanted to do. He wanted variety, and the length of the film should not matter all that much.

Q: Had you made a short before?
Yang: I have. Many were for my classes. However, what differed my work from most of my classmates’ work was that I only shot what interested me. One thing that I would never do is to leave my camera on at a corner and let it roll for half an hour, an hour, and submit whatever that has been captured as the assignment.

Q: What lasting influences do you think A Black and White Milk Cow have on you and your future works?
Yang: I think I have accumulated some valuable experiences by making this film. The most important thing that I learned was how to handle interpersonal relationships during shooting. Because we did not have a producer, we had to take on the job of a producer ourselves, and that seemed to add a big workload to our shoulders. To be honest, there wasn’t much directing needed for the shooting of this film. Once I showed my actors and actresses the script, they all knew how to act. I gave very few instructions in terms of acting. Instead I was telling everyone when and where to meet, how to work with a specific person, and things such as these.

Q: And I suppose it was the same with your crew?
Yang: So far, all the crew members for my films, as well as the crew members for films that I have participated in producing, were consisted of my own relatives and friends. There have never been any problems with these people. On the other hand, working with the actors and actresses always required more work.

Q: What did you do to make good relationships with your actors and actresses?
Yang: To make friends with them, and to relate to them, I consider these to be the most important things.

Q: Were there actors or actresses who quit their jobs in the middle of the film?
Yang: Yes. In A Black and White Milk Cow, the person who agreed to act in the film only did so for two to three days and withdrew afterwards because he needed to go back to school to take a graduate school entrance examination. We let him go. In my second film Er Dong, the actor we found was somewhat obstreperous. We had to talk to him every now and then so that he could continue working with us. It happened almost every other two or three days. These small talks often took longer than actual directive instructions about acting.

Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin)

Q: Had everything been written out in detail in the script before you started shooting? Or were you changing the script as you were shooting?
Yang: In A Black and White Milk Cow, everything was laid out in detail. All I needed to do was to follow the script. I did not shoot anything extra. Technically speaking, extra footage is always helpful and needed. Because I did not do that, I used almost everything I captured on film. For example, for the transition from summer to fall, I didn’t have any footage that I could use to fill in the gap. As a result of that, I had to use title cards, to make the film look like the main character’s diary. In my second film Er Dong, I made sure that I shot a lot more interview footage than first time because I knew I would be able to use them in the editing later. Some of the interviews were about the character’s dreams. If there is a gap in the flow of the images during the editing, I would cut out something appropriate to the story and then use it to fill in the gap. All in all, Er Dong was done in a flexible way whereas A Black and White Milk Cow was done more rigidly.

Q: What do you think about the actors and actresses in A Black and White Milk Cow? Were they playing other people or were they playing themselves?
Yang: They were acting themselves. For examples, the village chief, the children’s parents. I asked them to talk about their lives and their concerns, such as what they thought about constructing a new school building in the village. They said that they did not have the money for a new building, but they were happy to contribute by working physically in the building process. I think they were being true to their circumstances, and they were telling their true thoughts.

Q: Who do you think is the most truthful character in A Black and White Milk Cow?
Yang: I would say the village chief. There are always a lot of things that the village chief needs to take care of, in the school, in the village. For example, when my father was working in a town, he encountered a lot of village chiefs who needed to come to town to look for help with fixing roads, electricity, fresh water supply. In order to do so, they often needed to go to people with money, ask for donation from them, or make connections with higher-level government officials, and ask them to send some subsidies. The village chief in the film had actually experienced all of these before he was asked to act in the film, so he needed least acting, and he was the most truthful.

Q: Has anyone from the village seen the film after it’s made?
Yang: Everyone from the village has. I made a few DVD copies of the film and brought them back to the village. At that time, there were no DVD players in the village. Some people brought the DVD’s to a company for holding marriage ceremonies to have them transferred to VCD’s. And they watched the film together afterwards. When they watched the film, I wasn’t around. When I went back to visit, they told me that the film was interesting to watch. They did not pay much attention to the plot, but were more interested in seeing who appeared in front of the camera. For them, it was fun to see people they knew in the film.

Q: Did any of them act again in Er Dong?
Yang: Yes, my aunt. In A Black and White Milk Cow, she acted as the mother of an anonymous child. In Er Dong, she acted as Er Dong’s mother.

Relevant Classroom Use

Poster for Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin)

Early this month, Beijing-based journalist Lance Crayon was interviewed about Yang Jin’s second feature and dGenerate release Er Dong.  Listen to the discussion on the China Radio International website, to hear his enthusiastic assessment of the film as a “low budget epic” that uses non-actors and a sparse soundtrack to create a fascinating portrait of contemporary rural China.

Crayon says, “Watching this film was a lesson on what life is like in rural China. As a Westerner I have no idea what China is like outside of big cities…its quite educational.”  He also touches on Yang Jin’s talent and ingenuity, at one point tentatively calling him “a Chinese Robert Bresson”.

Er Dong is available in dGenerate’s catalog, alongside Yang Jin’s first feature film, Black and White Milk Cow.

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Director Liu Jiayin answering questions at Get It Louder (photo: Get It Louder)

Get It Louder (Da Sheng Zhan), one of China’s hottest showcases for emerging creative talent, followed its first session in Beijing with a run in Shanghai. The film program was particularly intense, featuring 26 movies (9 documentaries and 17 narrative) by both Chinese and non-Chinese filmmakers. The screenings included dGenerate titles Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin), Oxhide I & II (dir. Liu Jiayin) and Street Life (dir. Zhao Dayong).

Get It Louder’s stated theme of “Sharism,” emphasizing a spirit of collaboration and exchange among audiences and artists, was especially pertinent to the independent films on display, which otherwise are largely inaccessible to audiences in China.  Director Q&A sessions were characterized not only by technical and artistic topics, but often went in depth over the the directors’ intentions. The concept of “Sharism” was demonstrated in the exchanges between viewers and directors, enriching the cinematic experience. One’s individual experiences of the film is not cancelled but amplified in exchanging perceptions with others.

The artistry and complexity of the works shone through in the screenings. The hard life of homeless migrant workers is realistically and poetically told by Zhao Dayong in Street Life. The fiction work by Yang Jin is deeply rooted in his own experience growing up in rural Shanxi province. Liu Jiayin’s exploration of time and space creatively transforms gestures and rituals we all pass through daily. Once again, art and life are not that far from each other, and sharing the experience of feeling and commenting on them is enriching and worthy. Hope there will be more and more events and occasions – in China and elsewhere – to have a look at ourselves through the eyes (and lens) of independent directors.

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Film Director Yang Jin

dGenerate Films and the Apple Store in Beijing continue their ongoing series showcasing China’s newest filmmakers powered by digital technology. Next Tuesday, November 2, acclaimed digital filmmaker Yang Jin will show clips from his films and discuss his creative process.

Yang Jin’s talk is part of the series “Meet the Filmmakers,” a collaboration between the Apple Store in Beijing and dGenerate Films. Digital tools, from digital video cameras to editing software, have placed filmmaking in the hands of the people. This series introduces award-winning directors discuss with the general public how they use digital technology to create their latest movies, attracting worldwide attention and acclaim.

Read news coverage of the inaugural “Meet the Filmmakers” events, and watch video from previous Apple Store talks with filmmakers Cui Zi’en, Jian Yi and Peng Tao.

Corrected: This event will be held at the Apple Store in Xidan Joy City (NOT Sanlitun), Beijing, starting at 7pm.

Address: North Street, Xicheng District, Beijing Xidan Joy City. Phone:  131(8610) 6649-1400

Yang Jin was born in 1982 in Shanxi. In 2000, he enrolled in the Shanxi Film School’s photography program. In 2003, he enrolled in the College of Art And Communication at Beijing Normal University, where he majored in directing. He made a few of documentaries and some short feature films during his time there. Yang’s first film The Black and White Milk Cow (2004) won the Ecumenical Jury Award and FICC Jury/Don Quijote Prize of the International Federation of Film Societies at the 19th Fribourg International Film Festival. His second feature Er Dong screened at the Pusan, Rotterdam and Hong Kong Film Festivals.

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Photo courtesy of TreeHugger.com

It’s always an interesting time to be in China, a place seemingly without uninteresting times.  To be here now, though, lets you see a singular moment in society floating, unpinned, somewhere in between two bankrupt ruling ideologies.  The collapse of official Communism/Maoism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics, as the ruling thinking evolved from pre-Liberation through the Cultural Revolution to post-Mao Dengism, is the keynote for lots of standard accounts of China today.

Traditional Chinese culture was, for a time, obliterated by various more or less radical and institutional versions of leftist ideology.  These slowly disappeared in fact, though the rote sloganeering formulas persist, especially around the “liang hui” or annual meeting of the Chinese government’s legislative bodies, that took place in the spring.  Following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the unbridled embrace of wealth-concentration and manifest corruption in the Jiang Zemin era, the new god became capitalism, in its rawest, unregulated forms.  Free market ideology imported from its Western exponents has washed over China, pushing some groups and regions ahead, leaving millions in the interior and the countryside, behind.  Now that financial market capitalism is having its own profound existential crisis in the West, does China have to think about tossing out its brand new ruling ideology, right on top of the refuse of the old one?  It’s enough to cause a case of ideological whiplash.

What happens when an unstable society starts to face the possibility that its hot new set of ideological nostrums might be just as insubstantial as those it has just recently thrown over?  It must be a dizzying sort of disorientation for those Chinese who have invested their new identities in the new ways of thinking.

Post-Jiang Zemin China has spawned a brittle, tacky, sometimes grotesque superstructure aping ostentatious luxury.  Beijing has thrown up gold, silver, and blue buildings that flaunt Greek, Roman, steel-and-glass, and faux-Qing-bangled facades.  Today, more often then not, these monster buildings lurk under stilled, looming construction cranes hiding vast, endless ranks of empty offices in a post-Olympics slump that wasn’t the endless boom people were expecting.  Small encampments of workers, who look like migrant labourers now without work, have just cropped up on the streets around my home.

What does this crisis look like in today’s Chinese films?  At the top end of the commercial spectrum is Feng Xiaogang, whose Chinese New Year blockbusters have always both directed and crystallized the public mood.  You Are The One, released at the end of 2008 is a magical, tragedy-tinted romance among the newly rich.  But it registers a profound disquiet with the limits of financial success.  Through the film’s obligatory New Year uplift ending, with stock prices magically soaring back to the stratospheres of pre-2009 financial heaven, Feng signals the missing, impossible happy ending required by both the genre and the money-as-happiness mindset China has embraced.

Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin)

At the other end of the spectrum are many recent independent films about going nowhere in China’s rural inland backwaters — it’s a veritable Chinese indie genre.  Take Yang Jin’s accomplished Er Dong (2008), which tells a story about a young man who drifts out of school and into minor, then really serious trouble.  He can’t get any traction in a series of small towns far from the economic action, the kind of places where having nothing means you’re going nowhere, forever.  All that’s missing is that other standard ingredient from Chinese indie so-called miserablism circa 2009: the girlfriend turned prostitute by her rapacious exploiter of a boyfriend.  See, for example, Wang Yiren’s Tatoo (2009) and Peng Tao’s Floating in Memory (2009)

The rise and fall of the hit TV show Super Girl Singing Contest (China’s answer to American Idol, now called Happy Girls) provides a fascinating model, lightly abstracted, for just what the post-communist fantasy of super-capitalism looks like here.  Jian Yi’s documentary Super, Girls! (2007), an account of some contestants attending regional auditions in 2006 for the show’s second year makes this all engagingly clear.  The film follows a number of hopeful young female contestants, all wanting to become overnight amateur singing superstars.  They are inspired by the sensational success of the 2005 edition of the show that transfixed the country and made new superstars out of winners, like the slightly androgynous Li Yuchun.  The show’s ruling ethos, that absolutely anyone can become a superstar, is taken painfully literally by the documentary’s engaging subjects, who have the desire but (for the most part) lack the talent and marketable star-potential to succeed on the show’s terms.

Super, Girls! (dir. Jian Yi)

That is what’s simultaneously fascinating and sad about the film: we see these young women yearning media-based “superstardom”, a dream manufactured and perpetuated by Chinese media and commercial interests who are obviously looking for exploitable talent.  But the young women have so completely bought into the show’s ideology (if one can call it that) that they are totally self-deluding, and inevitably shocked, bewildered, and crushed when they don’t pass the auditions.

It’s hard for me not to think of this model as a perfect analogue for mythical free-market capitalism and its delusional seductions, which pretends that anyone, regardless of environment, birth or advantages, can become a millionaire, a winner in financial capital’s prosperity sweepstakes.  What this model masks, both in its Chinese capitalist version, and its Super Girls entertainment guise, is the seductive delusions implicit in its appeal.  In a corrupt environment like China’s where closeness to power and pre-existing advantages (often tied together) determine one’s success, unregulated capitalism is a field where pre-determined winners amass more wealth and power, leaving the rest behind.  Super, Girls! shows how dreams of ordinary people, consigned to being left behind by the system, are nurtured to support a system built to exploit and abandon them.

The film also reveals, in some cases, these young women’s resilience and determination to exploit whatever opportunities they can squeeze out from between the cracks.  As the consensual fantasy girding the now vanishing world financial system also cracks apart, I have little doubt that Chinese dreamers and makers — released yet again into an ideology-free zone that’s both terrifyingly unmoored and saturated with limitless possibility — will find their own spaces to wriggle through and thrive in.

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