"The Transition Period" shows the inner workings of local politics in China

U.S. ambassador to China Gary Locke’s recent arrival in Beijing generated intense discussions among Chinese nationals about how Chinese civil servants compare unfavorably to their American counterparts. As reported in a September 20th article in The Wall Street Journal’s blog “China Real Time Report,” the central government and its affiliated media bodies such as the Guangming Daily and the Xinhua News Agency tried to cast aspersions over the political motives behind the U.S. government’s choice of a Chinese-American ambassador. But Chinese online netizens focused on something entirely different. After seeing photos of Locke buying his own coffee and carrying his own bags, and learning that he flew coach to China, Chinese web commentators assailed their civil servants for squandering taxpayers’ money on ridiculously extravagant meals, cars, and the like, and for shirking physical work and other chores that they consider to be below their dignity.

Zhou Hao’s 2011 documentary The Transition Period, which will be playing next Monday in Chicago’s Doc Films series on Chinese independent cinema, looks at the working life of one typical Chinese civil servant by the name of Guo Yongchang before his transfer to a new post within the Chinese government. Shot over the last three months of Guo working as the party secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of Gushi County in Xinyang Municipality of Henan Province, this documentary presents different facets of Guo’s work as a medium- to low-level Chinese civil servant in a leading position. This article aims at laying out some groundwork in China’s political system and its political environment for first-time viewers of the documentary, as sometimes the stories in the documentary are more complicated than their presentations. (Spoilers may follow.)

Gushi County has a population of about 1.6 million and a total of 32 towns. Like every other county in China, it is governed by both its county government and county party committee, with the latter having more power over the former. You may read the translation of a popular online joke below to learn about the different roles and levels of clout of five main constituents of the Chinese government:

An eighth-grader asks her mother about the Chinese government, “What does the government do?”

“The government is like me, your mom,” she replies. “I cook for you, wash your clothes, and make your bed. I do all the hard work in this house.”

“What does the party committee do?”

“Well, the party committee is like your father,” Mom replies. “He makes all the important decisions and orders me around to carry them out.”

“What does the People’s Congress do?” the girl continues.

“The People’s Congress is like your grandpa,” Mom replies. “He strolls around with his bird cage every morning but never does anything.”

“What does the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference do?”

“Well, the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference is like your grandma,” Mom replies. “She complains about everything, but she has no power to change anything.”

The girl asks her last question. “Then what does the commission of discipline inspection do?”

“The commission of discipline inspection is like you,” Mom replies. “You are sheltered, clothed, and fed by all of us, but all you do is check on us.”

For Guo Yongchang, since he is the party secretary of Gushi County, he has more power than Gushi County’s County Chief Fang Bo, who belongs to the county government. This explains why at the beginning of the documentary, many people, including businessmen and petitioners, are seen to go directly to Guo’s office to elicit information, seek advice, and beg for help. At one point in the documentary, Guo likens the role of a party secretary to that of a godfather. The analogy is not a stretch in reality.

A number of instances in the documentary support this analogy. For example, Guo half-suggested half-instructed a two-man envoy about their construction project that instead of building a 26-story building, they should make it 33-story to get his approval. For another, he visited the Bureau of Letters and Calls of Gushi County and approved visitors’ requests without consulting the proper procedures used by the bureau.

In fact, the latter incident echoes Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao’s generous donation of 10,000 yuan to a two-year-old boy suffering from leukemia. Premier Wen was said to have met the body’s poverty-stricken parents at Tianjin Train Station during an inspection trip to Tianjin in September 2009. Although both Guo and Premier Wen have helped the victims in these cases, such single acts of heroism will not bring structural changes to China’s political system.

"The Transition Period"

This is why Guo lives in contradictory terms with himself. In one of his reflective moments, he said that he supported a new policy by the standing committee of both the municipal and the provincial party committees in China, which was to handpick party officials with law degrees to join their league. He believed this to be a positive change because China should follow the rule of law, rather than the rule of people.

However, his words do not often match his actions. The biggest breach to his own words are probably the dinner parties and drinking parties that he has frequently attended. At one of the meetings, he urged the civil servants in Gushi County to help cut government spending by drinking less. According to the government report, Gushi County’s income amounted to 280 million yuan in 2008, but its spending surpassed 12 billion yuan in the same year. Yet, these reminders about frugality were never taken seriously, even by himself. Every time he was at a party, we see him emptying glasses after glasses and cups after cups of alcohol.

But as Zhou points out at the beginning of the documentary, Chinese civil servants have two major responsibilities, one being that of attracting investors. To do so, they often need to drink excessively at meals as drinking is an integral part of socialization, and deals are broached and sealed in drinking parties.

This convention inevitably applies to Guo. He confessed in a farewell party with the People’s Congress of Gushi County that he had big ambitions for Gushi when he was appointed its party secretary. He chose to socialize with businesspeople because he wanted to convince them to invest in Gushi.

In the same confession statement that Guo made in front of the retired officials, he said in tears that the work that he had done for Guishi had never been for his own career advancement. In fact, it all harmed his career. What he meant was that the central government would likely consider him a corrupt official who spent much without making a profit because Gushi’s spending far exceeded its income. However, the businesspeople he had entertained at various meals and parties thought differently. They considered Guo the best government official to work with and Gushi the best place to invest. Why? It is probably because Guo showered them with many forms of government concessions and subsidies.

Sadly, Guo’s understanding of government concessions and subsidies is rather limited. He told a story twice in the documentary to illustrate the relationship between government and businesses. The story goes that in 1958, heavy deforestation in Huzu Town of Gushi County caused a local reservoir to slowly dry out, and subsequently it stopped migrating egrets from coming. However, in the 1990s, after trees were planted back, the birds also came back. In Guo’s negotiations with businessmen, he usually offered money-related incentives as a welcome sign, be it a waiver on electricity or a generous monetary gift. If this is not an overstatement, then he seems to have naively treated trees as a metaphor for money in his story.

Yet money cannot buy everything. Local governments are supposed to bring systematic improvements to their districts, counties, etc. Human capital and infrastructure are only two examples of the areas that local governments can help improve.

Director Zhou Hao

Guo planned to leave his office before the Chinese New Year in 2009. News of his transfer naturally caused unease in the county government as well as in the municipal and provincial party committee because new officials needed to be appointed. Who would get appointed in what positions was always a potential source of resentment in the Chinese government and it could obstruct work within the government.

This can be reflected in a complaint made by Guo’s secretary. She mentioned that a civil servant working at the grassroots level did not want to be transferred to the committee of people’s political consultative conference because he would have no future there. Instead, he expressed wishes to work in the general office of the party committee or in the local labor bureau, which has become the ministry of human resource and social security today.

A complication is also involved in such transfers. Guo spoke jokingly about a personal encounter. He said that one time when he was in Beijing, a high-ranking government official met him and some others for dinner. After the meal, he saw him packing up all the food and riding off with his bicycle with many bags. Compared to the official, a county-level party secretary or a county chief lived much better materially.

It is certainly not true that all high-ranking officials are as thrifty as the one in Guo’s story. But most Chinese will agree that Chinese civil servants are not as egalitarian as Gary Locke. As some of you have probably read the following quote by Mencius: “One either does mental work or manual work. The one who does mental work rules, and the one who does manual work is being ruled.” The idea that a civil servant must not labor physically like a physical worker is deeply entrenched in the Chinese mentality. This explains why in the documentary, when the buses and cars that some officials rode got stuck in the New Year snow, they only helped with clearing the icy road begrudgingly, if they did so at all. They returned to their comfortable seats soon after making some gestures of help. County Chief Fang, who later becomes Party Secretary, even exclaims, “This is hard work!”

For the construction workers who blocked the government building of Gushi County to protest not getting paid for their hard work, they certainly have an indisputable screen image of “being ruled.” Outside the government building, they openly argue with Guo about their delayed payment. But once inside the government building, and their number reduced from a big group to a small clique of five representatives, they appear tamed, docile, and very quiet. Party Secretary Fang lambasts them for blocking the gates and obstructing government work, and he threatens them with tougher measures if they refuse to cooperate. The representatives leave with promises from Fang, though Fang seems more motivated to save his job than to help them with their problems.

For those who are curious about Guo Yongchang and want to find out more about his life, his Baidu entry states that he works at the bureau of letters and serves as an inspector now. However, he himself has been inspected by the State Bureau of Letters and Calls and the Ministry of Inspection under the State Council for corruption, and he was found to have received bribes of 740,000 yuan and an additional 10,000 USD. This may puzzle those who’ve seen the film, because in one secretly filmed scene he actually orders someone to return the money that had been sent to him as a bribe. Perhaps he returned some bribes and kept others; how he decided which to accept is left undisclosed. The reality is always more complicated than it seems.

Relevant Classroom Use

Participating filmmakers at the 2nd Annual Beijing New Youth Film Festival (photo: Genevieve Carmel)

The 2^nd annual Beijing New Youth Film Festival was held from September 9-18. Organized by the Trainspotting Culture Salon, this young festival makes space for new directors to showcase their work, connect with more experienced filmmakers, and receive feedback from peers and critics. Screenings and discussions were held at CNEX, Trainspotting, and the Wenjin International Art Center at Tsinghua University. The jury included a diverse team of authors, creators, and art critics, in addition to Fifth Generation filmmaker Lv Yue, who was the director of photography for works including Zhang Yimou’s To Live and Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock.

The festival was divided into three program sections: An invitational section featuring new work by distinguished directors, a competition section for new directors, and an Austrian section, programmed by the Austro Sino Arts Program. The opening and closing films of the festival were Pema Tseden’s Old Dog and Zhao Liang’s Together, respectively.

This year’s New Youth Image Award was given to the early Li Xianting Film School graduate Zheng Kuo for his second documentary The Cold Winter, which follows the 2009 artist demonstrations against the demolition of art districts surrounding Beijing’s 798 art zone. The New Youth Image Award was also bestowed on painter-turned-filmmaker Tao Huaqiao for his partly dramatized documentary Luohan, about gang culture in his Jiangxi Province hometown. The animated film Piercing Me by Liu Jian and the documentary Mirror of Emptiness by Ma Li received Distinguished Technical Awards. Mirror of Emptiness, about a Buddhist monastery on the Tibetan Plateau, also won the Special Jury Award. Finally, Deng Bochao’s documentary Under the Split Light, about the disappearance and preservation of Hakka cultural traditions on Hainan Island, received the Humanitarian Award.

The following is a full list of films screened at the festival:

Annual Invitational Section

OLD DOG (2011), Pema Tseden

GAS (2010), Lin Xin

5+5 (2011), Xu Xing and Andrea Cavazzuti

SHATTERED (2011), Xu Tong

POETRY AND DISEASE (2010), Geng Jun

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS(2011), Ji Dan

A MONK’S TEMPLE (2010), Shen Shaomin

LAST CHESTNUTS(2010), Zhao Ye

MY MOTHER’S RHAPSODY  (2011), Qiu Jiongjiong

TOGETHER (2010), Zhao Liang

New Youth Competition Section

OLD DONKEY (2010), Li Ruijun

LUOHAN (2009), Tao Huaqiao

CHINESE CLOSET (2010), Fan Popo

THE COLD WINTER (2011), Zheng Kuo

UNDER THE SPLIT LIGHT (2010), Deng Bocha

APUDA (2010), He Yuan

EIGHT-INGREDIENT PORRIDGE (2010), Li Dong

THE DAYS (2010), Wei Xiaobo

MIRROR OF EMPTINESS (2010), Ma Li

LOST WALL (2010), Pan Zhiqi

MANGO (2011), Xu Zhipeng

STARVING VILLAGE (2011), Zou Xueping

SATIATED VILLAGE (2011), Zou Xueping

STRAY HOME (2011), Bai Zhiqiang

PIERCING ME (2009), Liu Jian

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH THREE WOMEN (2010), Zhang Mengqi

WANG LIANG’S IDEAL (2010), Gao Xiongjie

Austrian Section

INSIDE AMERICA (2010), Barbara Eder

OCEANUL MARE (2009), Katharina Copony

KAFKANISTAN (2007), Lukas Birk

FOLLOW ME (2010), Johannes Hammel

SOCIALISM FAILED, CAPITALISM IS BANKRUPT. WHAT COMES NEXT? (2010), Oliver Ressle

A DAY IN THE FACTORY (2010), Nico Mesterharm

EVERY SEVENTH PERSON (2006), Ina Ivanceau and Elke Groen

OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), Nikolaus Geyrhalter

CORE OF FLOCK (2009), Barbara Husa

ABENDLAND (2011), Nikolaus Geyrhalter

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.

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Karin Chien

Let me start by making a provocative statement – in my three years of distributing and working with Chinese independent filmmakers, I’ve experienced greater creative freedom than in ten years of producing independent film in the US.

For most of us, Chinese independent cinema is an unknown. A film like Zhang Yimou’s Hero, financed with Chinese state backing, about Chinese empire, and made by a party-line director, is sold here as arthouse fare, distributed byMiramax. Subtitles are enough to qualify a film as “independent cinema” in America.

So let’s begin with a redefinition. The films I work with are made outside the state studio system and without official government authorization. These are films that do not submit scripts or finished products to censorship committees. These are also films that cannot obtain official distribution or official funding in China. These films are often referred to in the West as unauthorized, underground filmmaking. The Chinese filmmakers call it independent cinema.

So how do you make films outside the system in China? You fly under the radar or work on the margins. Films are made on microbudgets, with cast and crews consisting of friends and family, shot with digital cameras, edited on laptops, and fueled by passion and a singular vision. In their domestic market, most of these films will only be shown at independent film festivals, where filmmakers sometimes hawk DVDs after screenings. Some filmmakers experiment with uploading films onto YouTube, some count on European sales to recoup their budgets, some rely on grants to finance their next films, and some even find angel investors. A tiny percentage will pierce the mainstream consciousness, but all of them will strive to make another film.

Sound familiar?

But here’s where American and Chinese micro-budget cinema diverge. Because we still believe in a one-in-a-Blair-Witch chance, most American indie films willingly play the Hollywood system. The carrot of theatrical distribution and financing motivates even micro-budget films to favor rising stars when casting, adjust scripts for wider audience appeal/product placement/cameos, or tell stories in genres that American and international audiences watch in droves. (As a producer, I’m fully guilty.) In short, commercial considerations influence nearly every aspect of American independent filmmaking, even at the $25,000 budget level. There are those who escape these burdens and make uncompromising films, but they are the exceptions.

In Chinese independent cinema, our exception becomes their rule. When you take the domestic marketplace out of the equation, what becomes the impetus for filmmaking? Not only trained filmmakers but poets, painters, and journalists are turning to digital video as an aesthetic, social, political, or personal tool. Painters like Xu Xin (Karamay) and Hu Jie (Though I Am Gone) wield video cameras like a well-honed brush: within the digital image, they are preserving and observing China’s recent history, showing us events that cannot be taught in schools or spoken about on the news. Artists like Huang Weikai (Disorder) and Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town) are making groundbreaking films that rewrite the rules of cinema because they weren’t taught those rules in the first place.

By choosing to work outside the system, Chinese independent filmmakers are shut out of monetized domestic distribution. No theatrical, no TV broadcast, no home video (pirated anyways), no Internet VOD. Here’s a thought: if there was absolutely no chance your film would receive commercial distribution in the US, would you still make your film? What would it look like, and would you cast/write/shoot/edit differently? And if that freed you to take creative risks, would that be irresponsible filmmaking or would it be truly free filmmaking?

I don’t mean to dismiss the very real and very diffuse oppression that Chinese independent filmmakers can face. The temptations of wider audience, greater financing and theatrical distribution are as strong in China as anywhere – they have lured many a filmmaker away from independent filmmaking and into the state studio system. Those who choose to create independent cinema in China are operating on the margins of a large state apparatus, without guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of movement, or freedom of production. Yet they have generated a space that allows for maximum creative freedom. Somehow, in the midst of all this repressive state authority, independent filmmakers are producing the only free media in China. It’s a startling realization.

Given the production parallels to our own micro-budget filmmaking, it’s hard not to extrapolate the comparison. In the US, where capitalism long ago co-opted the language of independent film (see Warner Independent Pictures), it’s a small miracle that any film is made outside the Hollywood system. Anyone who’s ever tried to cast a film with professional actors can attest to this. Perhaps in China, because the machinery is so clearly labeled “State,” it’s a more visible force. Here, the multi-national corporate apparatus is omnipresent.

For the last three years, my dGenerate Films partners and I have been distributing Chinese independent cinema around the world, mainly in the US. We send revenue to independent filmmakers in China every fiscal quarter, and that feels good.

But our revenue is small compared to what filmmakers receive from European distributors. The greater international film community has set up shop in Beijing so they can catch these films first. American industry and audiences would do well to pay as much attention. We will not only learn something about China, but perhaps also about creative freedom in independent filmmaking.

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Six Essential Films from the Digital Generation of Chinese Independent Cinema

Unknown Pleasures (2002, dir. Jia Zhangke)
Jia Zhangke’s last film made independently outside the state system was also his first film shot on digital video, and remains a milestone in validating the DV aesthetic for international art cinema. Available on Netflix

Meishi Street (2006, dir. Ou Ning)
A landmark in activist filmmaking in China, Meishi Street shows ordinary citizens taking a stand against the planned destruction of their homes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The subjects were even given cameras to film their first-hand confrontations with the authorities.

WATCH MEISHI STREET ON FANDOR:

Disorder (2009, dir. Huang Weikai)
Huang Weikai’s one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China’s major cities today. Made from over 1000 hours of amateur footage, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society.
Available on institutional DVD from Amazon and dGenerate Films

Ghost Town (2009, dir. Zhao Dayong)
A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past while its residents piece together their existence. The first Chinese independent documentary to screen at the New York Film Festival, Ghost Town elevated the Chinese digital documentary movement to new levels of poetry.
Available on DVD from dGenerate Films, coming soon to Fandor

Oxhide 2 (2009, dir. Liu  Jiayin)
Breaking new ground in cinematic art, Liu Jiayin’s follow-up to her masterful debut Oxhide turns a simple dinner into a profoundly intimate study of family relationships.
Available on DVD from dGenerate Films

Petition (2009. dir. Zhao Liang)
Shot over twelve grueling years, this heartbreaking study of petitioners spending their lives waiting for justice to be served is a monumental testament to the tremendous dedication and creative resourcefulness found among the Chinese independents.  Avaialble on institutional DVD from Cinema Guild

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“A riveting portrait of an artist’s attempts at expression and conflicts with societal norms.” – Museum of Modern Art Performance artist Li Ning turns his life into art in this epic work of experimental documentary. For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Li’s chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. Tape captures a decade’s worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China. “Li succeeds in revealing his own soul” (Rotterdam International Film Festival). Director’s Bio: LI Ning is an avant-garde dancer and performance artist, who made his film debut with the documentary Tape. Reviews The Brooklyn Rail MoMA Documentary Fortnight International Film Festival Rotterdam Select Film Festivals: WINNER, Silver Digital Award, YunFest Documentary Festival OFFICIAL SELECTION, MoMA Documentary Fortnight OFFICIAL SELECTION, International Film Festival Rotterdam OFFICIAL SELECTION, Jeonju International Film Festival OFFICIAL SELECTION, Beijing Independent Documentary Film Festival Film Clip:

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Photo courtesy World Socialist Website

dGenerate films is proud to welcome director Ying Liang to the New York City and SF Bay Area at the end of April and beginning of May.  Ying will attend screenings of his most recent two features, The Other Half and Good Cats.

Ying is one of a select few Chinese filmmakers screening their works in the program “On the Edge: New Independent Cinema from China 2009″ at the Film Society at Lincoln Center.  The Other Half screens on Friday April 24th at 9pm and Good Cats screens Sunday April 26 at 6pm. 

The Other Half will also have a special screening at the China Institute on April 25th at 5pm.  The April 25th screening will feature Ying Liang in a Q&A session following the film.

Ying Liang will then head across the country for two events in the Bay Area.  The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley will have Ying on hand for a screening and discussion of The Other Half  on April 28th at 4pm.  Ying will also attend the West Coast premiere of Good Cats as part of the New Directors showcase at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 26, 28, 29 and May 1.

If you’re interested in attending any of these showings please visit the corresponding website and get your tickets early. 

The Other Half

The Other Half is a harrowing political critique of China that explores the social and environmental problems facing the country, mostly through the monologues of women seeking counsel in a law office. Variety critic Ronnie Scheib said of this movie:

By having “real-life” women tell their problems directly to the camera, behind which sits a “fictional” femme with problems of her own, Ying and g.f./producer/co-writer Peng Shan have forged a dynamic dual perspective on China’s female population.

Endlessly haunting, the complex interplays between the individual and the collective, sound and image, foreground and background, all infuse Ying’s films with serene, even joyous consciousness that is the opposite of despair.

The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody adds: 

With a blend of documentary and fiction, Ying roots the action firmly in a depressing cultural context: the ubiquitous official loudspeakers blaring police announcements and the television droning patriotic propaganda belie the economic and moral corruption that pervades the system and infects private life. Filming with a puckishly bland interview-style fixed camera and sarcastic cityscapes, Ying convincingly depicts a state of repressed volatility which, when it blows, does so with a far-reaching, vitriolic, righteous audacity that has few parallels in the modern cinema. 

Good Cats

Writing for the San Francisco International Film Festival, Roger Garcia describes Ying’s newest feature Good Cats:

Luo Liang, a young man trying to meet the expectations of family and work, has come to town looking for something better but is unsure of his lot in life. His snobbish wife nags him to get a proper job and learn some skills. He responds by romancing a prostitute. His role as a driver for ruthless property developer Boss Peng soon is ratcheted up to enforcer, as Peng’s ambitions expand. His former mentor, meanwhile, sees his fortunes sink and heads for a tragic end. Following Taking Father Home (SKYY Prize, SFIFF 2006), and The Other Half (SFIFF 2008), Ying Liang continues to document the effects of fraud, greed and corruption—capitalism —in his home town of Zigong, charting how economic changes have altered the lives of many Chinese today. Ying’s invocation of the three destinies of modern Chinese man—as wanderer, corrupt boss or tragic loser—is enriched through sly wit, excellent work with nonprofessional actors and his insertion of Chinese rock group Lamb’s Funeral into scenes where the band functions as a kind of Greek chorus to the proceedings. As a putative master of the bleak comedy, Ying finds irony in Deng Xiaoping’s ends-justify-means dictum that a cat’s color is irrelevant: It’s good as long as it catches the rat. But just look how the cats unleashed by Deng have turned out.

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