Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai) tied for most mentions in PBS' poll of essential documentaries about China

Last month the acclaimed documentary Last Train Home, about migrant laborers in China, made its US television premiere as part of the POV series on PBS. As part of the film’s online promotional efforts, POV polled several filmmakers and experts in Chinese cinema to recommend top documentaries and features about China. We were pleased to see that Disorder tied for most mentions among all films, including a recommendation by Last Train Home director Fan Lixin. Fan writes of Disorder: “A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!”

Other documentaries receiving multiple recommendations: Petition by Zhao Liang, whose Crime and Punishment is distributed by dGenerate, and Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang (who also took part in the poll). Strangely, Blind Shaft also tied for most mentions in this “documentary” poll, even though it is a narrative feature.

Not surprisingly, Jia Zhangke was the most recommended filmmaker, with six mentions spread across five titles. His documentary Dong is distributed by dGenerate.

All the recommendations can be found at the POV website on PBS.

Relevant Classroom Use

Ou Ning (director of Meishi Street and San Yuan Li):

9/11 Berenice Reynaud curated the Thematic Retrospective – Digital Shadows: Last Generation Chinese Film for San Sebastian International Film Festival. It will screen 20 films, including Meishi Street. (9/18-9/19, two screenings).

9/11 The press conference for 2011 Chengdu Biennial will be held tomorrow. I’m speechless after I got this notice, “According to the official requirement of the government press conference, please wear light-color, short-sleeve shirt with a tie.” There’s still enough time to buy a light-color, short-sleeve shirt, but no one has ever taught me how to wear a tie …

Zhao Liang (director of Crime and Punishment):

9/13 F***, Money can do everything! (commenting on “the Most Beautiful Moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival)

Cui Zi’en (director of Enter the Clowns, Queer China ‘Comrade China‘, We Are the… of Communism)

Professors should put all their effort into teaching and their life condition should be similar to mine – a small apartment, no car, low class. Those who also work for the government or make a fortune through academics are excluded. (Responding to “The possession of an ordinary Chinese family.”)

9/3 September 1^st is the first day of school. 6,000 children from the immigrant worker’s family are out of school. I cried for a whole day and turned off my cell phone. Desperate. Woke up in the middle of the cool night, I don’t know if I should be angry or ashamed for living in this time-space.

Jia Zhangke (director of Dong)

9/8 Chinese cinema is facing too many taboos. One is the long-term film censorship, the other one I think that can not be ignored comes from the conservatism of Chinese audience. I once said, we are always discussing the issue of sex or violence, but it is always the case that the first one to write a letter of complaint is ordinary audience, even earlier than the government. ( Original article “Jia Zhangke talking about Chinese Cinema: Too Many Taboos.”)

Xu Tong (director of Fortune Teller)

9/3 Taiwanese scholar Guo Lixin visits Li Xianting at Songzhuang. Mr. Guo pays close attention to Mainland Chinese independent documentary. In 2009, he wrote the article “Right of Prostitutes, Sexual Morality and Self Rightness: Further Discussion on Moral Controversy of Wheat Harvest.” I leant a lot from it.

Li Ning (director of Tape)

9?9 We are now at our final stage of rehearsal and preparation! I ’m getting more and more excited! I’ve never expected that yesterday’s crazy experiment could be turned into a formal play… I told my surprised young guerrillas, “I’m always against art, against performance. What I want is presentation and discovery. You think it’s just a pretentious speech?! It’s what we are doing now!”

Relevant Classroom Use

Professor Eugene Wang

Eugene Yuejin Wang is Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. We recently spoke with Professor Wang about his interests in Chinese art and Chinese film, the areas of intersection between these two fields, and his interest in painter Liu Xiaodong, who is the subject of Jia Zhangke’s documentary Dong. Dong will screen Monday 9/26 as the opening film of the 11-film series on Chinese independent film at Doc Films in Chicago. In this conversation Professor Wang reflects at length on the way Liu and other artists work in relation to the idea of nationhood, especially in regards to national disasters such as the 2008 Beichuan earthquake in Sichuan. Wang pays particular attention to Liu’s 2010 work “Getting Out of Beichuan,” which Wang considers “marks a new stage and possibly a new turning point in the contemporary Chinese art scene.”

A native of Jiangsu, China, Wang studied at Fudan University in Shanghai (B.A. 1983; M.A. 1986), and subsequently at Harvard University (A.M. 1990; Ph.D. 1997). He was the Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995-96) before joining the art history faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. His teaching appointment at Harvard University began in 1997, and he became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art in 2005.

He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and postdoctoral and research grants from the Getty Foundation.

His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005) has received the Academic Achievement Award in memory of the late Professor Nichijin Sakamoto, Rissho University, Japan. He is the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (New York, 2004).

——

dGF:  I understand that a lot of your past research focused on Medieval Buddhist art and visual culture.  Recently you have been researching Chinese film.  Where did these interests arise?  In addition, is there any synergy between inquiries into Buddhist art and Chinese film?

Eugene Wang: Before I started researching medieval art, I was deeply engaged in Chinese film.  I actually wrote a script and published a few essays.  Film has always been one of my side interests.  I’m always intrigued by how people screen disparate images together.  You have a set of images.  They may or may not have a relationship with one another.  Somehow you string them together and you have an image flow.  In cinematic terms it would be called montage.  If these images are on a wall, such as in Buddhist caves and wall paintings, then you have an iconographic program.  There is something very interesting about the visual logic underlying this flow of images.

On top of that, film scholars love to talk about how the entire film medium can be traced back to the primal scene, Plato’s cave.  In medieval China, there was this proverbial Shadow Cave, which showed images on the dim back wall of the cave.  You enter and can’t see anything then all of a sudden the scenes reveal themselves.  What that exemplifies is a pre- cinema cinema.  There is a sense of images emerging out of the wall.

I was interested in film more as a structure of images.  Modern technology has made that easier for streaming of images to be presented to an audience.  Prior to that, there was always an impulse to make some kind of an image flow.  More specifically in the Buddhist culture, there is a tendency to make that flow more of an internal set of entopic images so it is more like interior theatre that captures certain types of mental processes.  What is shown is not what is normally seen around you, it something internal, mental.  In the case of Buddhist art, these processes are presented on a cave wall.

dGF:  How did your interests evolve from, initially, Chinese film into Buddhist art?

EW: In hindsight one could find all different ways of justifying that transition.  Though for me, there is a deeper interest of exploring the visual narrative, in the sense of how images are connected by logic that is not just illustration of certain textual narratives.  I have a problem with the common way people understand visual narrative.  Often, it is understood to be an illustration of certain texts.  The texts will tell you one story and then you illustrate that with a set of images.  We all know that the monster that comes out of this type of visual illustration is different from the textual narrative in the sense that it has its own interest, it has its own flow, and often it will elaborate on things that the textual narrative does not seem to be interested in.

This is one of these issues I point out in my book Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visuality in Medieval China, which is a study on how visual narrative works in tenuous relationship to a Buddhist sutra.  What I found was quite interesting.  Often in the reading of the sutra, you would have certain details that were very insignificant.  Somehow the painter elaborately paints these details.  Likewise, there are other details you would think are so graphic and so evocative, but the painter was completely uninterested in them.  These facts take you by surprise.

In addition, with textual narrative you can say, “today I’m speaking here.”  You can then switch your imaginary locales, and say “I’m now in New York as opposed to yesterday when I was in Boston.”  In the first few sentences, you discuss your experiences in New York, then the next few sentences you talk about Washington D.C.  Then you somehow recall your experiences in Boston.  With textual narrative you have the convenience of not locking into these places in a very fixed topographic relationship.  In your mind, these cities are free-floating abstract entities.  With the visual narrative, once you put Boston on the map, it’s fixed.  You cannot alter the order. This fixed relationship does not exist in the textual narrative.  You can imagine once they illustrate different places mentioned in the text, and start to come up with a larger picture, they have to work out a good topography so this larger picture can make sense.

In addition, Buddhist texts have different chapters.  You can read from chapter 1 to chapter 24 but in Buddhist art they would have scenes from all of these chapters dispersed in all different places.  If you trace these scenes superficially, they are completely scrambled.  If you study them carefully, it is not in total disarray.  There is in fact logic or method to this seeming madness.  That logic is visual and special.  With that logic in place you begin to have all different types of implications as to why various scenes are placed next to one another.

dGF: In April, you presented at the “Just Images” symposium.  Your topic was “Documentary Apathy and Sympathy: Liu Xiadong between Canvas and Camera.”  Please tell us about your presentation.

Liu Xiaodong paints "Getting Out of Beichuan" (photo: Supernice.eu)

EG:  In 2010 Liu Xiadong went to Sichuan to paint an earthquake scene.  He set up this huge canvas and began to paint.  Actually, he wasn’t painting the earthquake scene per-se.  He invited a group of young woman from other towns to pose as models in front of this earthquake-caused pile of rubble.  The sheer set up is mind-boggling.  When this work was first shown, I was completely blown away by it.  It is a huge canvas.  The exhibition did a good job using multi-media to present it.  You also have the photograph of him working with the models.  You also have a video of him working and directing the models.  This case intrigued me because I’m always interested in inter-media.  How painting and photography interact with each other.

The case with Liu Xiaodong made it particularly interesting because he spearheaded the new generation of painters that came of ages in the 1990’s.  The way they make their impact and distinctions is through not buying into national narratives, choosing to stay on the margins and exploring the marginality.  They seem to be interested in the mood and gestures that are normally outside the larger narratives.  There are certain received ways of characterizing how within the narrative characters work.  Liu Xiaodong is, however, concerned about what is going on outside of the framework.  He focuses on the migrants, the outcasts, people who don’t belong anywhere.  He portrays these characters with nonchalance and indifference.

This apathy inadvertently carries an implicit critique of past generations of artists who he and his contemporaries believe are too driven by larger passions.  What sets the ‘90’s generation apart from the ‘80’s is that the ‘90’s generation no longer feel bound to a larger national narrative.  Liu Xiaodong’s Sichuan painting fascinates me because it marks a new stage and possibly a new turning point in the contemporary Chinese art scene.  In other words, it marks both the culmination of the ‘90’s generation in terms of their distinct style and sensibility and challenge for them as well.  These artists are facing this earthquake aftermath and the situation is potentially stirring and disturbing.  Under these circumstances, it is very hard to remain emotionally unattached.  How can Liu Xiadong and his contemporaries keep their distance from a national narrative but also remain engaged in a meaningful way.

dGF:    Liu Xiadong went to Sichuan to paint in the aftermath of the Earthquake, but was his painting actually about the disaster?

Liu Xiaodong's finished painting "Getting Out of Beichuan" (photo: Supernice.eu)

EW: Technically, it seems to be about the earthquake, but this is really hard to assess what it is really about.  Ultimately, the painting is about how human beings deal with the plight and challenge of surviving disasters.  What he is trying to do is bring the painting to a level that it transcends the immediacy of this particular earthquake and get to another level.  In a way, this is a departure from his earlier practice, which is why this painting fascinates me.  His earlier practice carries a notable stance of refusal of any metaphysical overtones in his painting.  The emphasis is always on the immediacy of the experience. When he paints laborers he makes sure not to fall into the 1980’s allegorical way of making a pictorial scene.  He makes sure to let the viewer share in his interest of the texture of the real life with its brutalities, horrors, miseries, joy.

The subjects of this painting, the young women, were hired from Chongqing.  They had nothing at all to do with the earthquake.  The conceptual design behind this was Liu Xiadong came up with a philosophy or some sort of conviction.  In the face of massive disasters, a typical Chinese response is that there should be some type of regeneration.  In other words, the conviction rests on the hope of the young to reproduce.

In Taihu, he did a companion piece to the Sichuan painting.  He invited a group of young men to model.  These two pieces were put on exhibition next to each other, representing the Yin and Yang.  With these forces you could symbolically orchestrate a scenario of regeneration.  He seems to be saying that is a way to respond to disasters.  Yet, what I find to be most interesting is that we actually don’t know if he was setting this up to be some kind of statement, i.e., to say that nothing else actually works and this is the only way out. In a way, it is undermining all these other solutions; or you could, if you want to press hard on this, derive some kind of inferences from this in thinking that it could be some kind of implicit critique of this kind of response to disasters.

dGF:  Is this the first time he touches upon a national narrative?

EW: I don’t know if he is intentionally doing that, but it certainly carries some ramifications of that.  He is a very smart artist.  He came up with this solution and, of course, just left it unsaid.  I don’t think there is a deliberate program of posing any implicit critique of national narratives but as an artistic strategy, it is very effective.  It makes you think about what it is doing.

It raises the question you start to suspect: are we left to understand that he thinks all the ways of the government’s handling of the earthquake aftermath are ineffectual?  I’m not saying he is implying that, but it certainly would elicit that type of response.  Or, he could be saying he is just thinking that in fact the best therapeutic way of coping with this is to face the enormity of the disaster with courage.  We may take comfort that eventually people are going to reproduce and the new lives are going to outlast the disaster.

Or, he may just use this way to simply justify his special skills in figure painting. Liu Xiaodong has a way of painting a landscape that he kind of distrusts.  He believes that to paint landscape, it’s better to paint in the figural spirit.  Try to paint the landscape in figures with a figural mood and so forth.  It just may well be since he is good in painting portraits, this is just a way of rationalizing his artistic strategy.

All of these possibilities are there.  This is why this work is so fascinating to me.  It is very conceptual.  Coming from Liu Xiadong, this is particularly fascinating because he and his generation are known for keeping out all this external verbiage and just deliver to you to this real authentic unmediated texture.

dGF: How does this generation of artists engage with the communities they are embedded in?  As you mentioned previously, Liu Xiaodong goes to Sichuan and in the aftermath of the earthquake is painting among great ruin.  What about the people around him?  What is his relationship with these communities?

EW:  The rapport is there.  Liu Xiadong himself grew up as a street kid.  He never assumes any elitist detachment from the common people.  He could easily relate to them.  On the other hand, he also kept a diary.  From the diary we know in fact there are ugly things going on around him, as the painting production was dragging on.  There was heavy drinking and bloodshed between his crew and another newly-arrived documentary film crew when he was in Sichuan.  From the diary you could tell he was not making a fuss about this or romanticizing anything.  In this sense, there is a detached observation of things around him.

Consequently, you could feel that he is trying to internalize this scene to the extent that what he sees outwardly is the staging of his own mental theatre.  He never said anything about how he should respond to the conflicts going on around him.  You almost get a sense he was becoming too philosophical about it.  Yet, he doesn’t make his art in a philosophical gesture.  He still clings to a deadpan observational mode.

Here and there, he would include little details that are often very suggestive and sometimes even private.  For instance, he would paint a little horse in the background.  The reason why this was the background was at the time, Liu Xiadong was observing horses mating.  He found that very powerful.  Nevertheless, the horse appears in the painting as a still life.  Again, we see him including the motif of reproduction as a way of overcoming disasters.  The most interesting thing about this is he includes this motif very cryptically.  Unless you have already read his diaries about the painting, you wouldn’t really know that the horse is significant.

dGF:  Liu Xiadong’s paintings are similar to those of his colleagues in the 1990’s generation of artists.  What were the roots of this artistic movement?  In Jia Zhangke’s documentary about Liu Xiaodong Dong, Liu Xiadong claims to be influenced by ancient Chinese art such as the Northern Wei periods.  Are those really the antecedents for this generation of artists?

EW: In the scene where he mentions being influenced by ancient Chinese art he talks about his own art and says “meiyou yisi,” nothing is really interesting.  Even concerning his own art, he starts to feel that it comes from a European oil painting tradition.  In the end, he believes that he is still doing what other people have done before.  You can start to sense his frustration with the reliance on the received visual means and formula.  That is why I think Liu Xiaodong always continues his oil painting but, at the same time, is always casting doubt on his own work.

Subsequently, he is always deploying photography and video work as a means of internalizing the cinematic ways of looking at a scene.  If you look at his Sichuan works, there are certain perspectives to internalize the camera eye and to see how the optical lens projects on the screen.

As for the Northern Wei thing, if he truly believes what he says, then he would have given up this hyper-realistic mode and do more schematic ways of creating figures.  In the Northern Wei style, the figures would be geometrical and slimmer. He didn’t do that.  This can only then lead you to believe that he is using the Northern Wei as a counterpoint—an abstract antithesis, not actual formal model—to undermine his reliance on European oil painting.

Unfortunately, he is trapped. Once you believe what you do is Western in essence, you try to do something to undermine this style.  I guess it is his rhetorical way of dealing with his own frustration.  It doesn’t hold.

dGF: Does the fact that he mentions the Northern Dynasties indicate that he is trying to break out and expand his style?  Is he searching for a new inspiration?

EW: This is a dilemma not only for Liu Xiaodong but for all cutting edge artists.  There has been this myth bandied around that any art medium has a development, and as an artist you are the one who is supposed to take it to the next level.  Unfortunately, there is this sense that each artistic medium has come to an end.  Everything that should be done has been done, and there is nothing left to be done in painting, if we follow the evolutionary premise.  If you believe that, you can see that eventually there is nothing for artists to push the envelope with. This narrative has an impact on Liu Xiaodong.

Nevertheless, he is smart enough to realize that he should not buy into this narrative.  If you want to be a successful artist, you need to drop that narrative because that narrative in itself is dead.  If you drop that narrative, you find that there is actually a lot left to be done in painting.

Liu Xiadong is actually in a conflicted situation.  One the one hand, he somewhat inadvertently still believes that narrative, which would lead him to question the purpose of his work.  The fact that he still does what he does with some conviction shows that he also doesn’t care; he just does what he does.

There is of course, a certain limit to what he does.  With photography available, there are questions as to why he is still spending days doing these portraits. Yet, we all know there is so much the painting can capture that photography cannot.  On the other hand, he often works with photographers and filmmakers to document the artistic process.  He is at a juncture where he realizes that painting as a medium has run into a wall, so he is thinking and asking the question, what’s next?  What is a good painter supposed to do in this day and age with technology?  That is not an easy question to answer.  That moment of frustration is just his way of grappling with that difficult question.

There is already an implicit solution to this dilemma.  Somehow, he still makes the art of painting matter by erecting this large canvas in front of the aftermath of the earthquake and painting these models as if a camera were set up.  A camera was actually set up to document the process. There was a resulting rivalry between the camera crews and Liu Xiaodong.  I actually did a comparison between what was recorded in the documentary film versus his painting.  In the documentary film, you can see a meditative stance.  There was one very powerful sequence in which the camera work seizes upon significant details of things in the ruins. You would have, for instance, some bricks and some shattered windows and then, all of a sudden, a clock.  That sequence ends with a little cat peeping in the ruins.  It’s almost like a surreal meditation on time, materiality, and survival.

You also see the filmmaker parading the female models at the foot of a gigantic dilapidated building.  He makes this sharp contrast between the magnitude of the ruin and these tiny figures winding their way to Liu Xiadong’s painting spot.  The filmmaker was trying to play this dramatic contrast between this magnitude of the natural disaster and the insignificant human figures.  That visual rhetoric comes across very easily.  In contrast, it’s interesting that Liu Xiaodong should set up his canvas away from the ruin sight, enlarge the human figures, and put the ruins in the distance, doing the opposite of the filmmaker.  There is clearly not only a difference in the mediun, but also different approaches to visualizing the scene.

You can see in the film there is still some unarticulated monologue, which is a philosophical meditation on destruction, time, and life.  In contrast, it makes Liu Xiaodong’s work all the more restrained in its refusal of any meditative stance.  Obviously, the scene struck him as powerful, but he doesn’t have any pretension for philosophical meditation.  In light of this film, you also sense that a lot is lost in the medium of oil painting.  It is tantamount to saying that there is only so much you can do on the canvas.  The canvas is also, in fact, as much about replicating and reconstituting things as it is a failure to capture things at the same time.

You can see that what Liu Xiaodong does with the canvas becomes a very powerful way of acknowledging the limitations of what the canvas can do.  Yet, he sticks to it.  By sticking to it, he lets us feel the a tacit refusal of any overt philosophical meditation.  You are left with a very poignant feeling that a lot is lost in the picture, but that feeling is retained.  That feeling is very powerful.  It’s ironic that you have a canvas that purports to capture a slice of experience.  It ends up being a very monumental reminder of how much is lost.  To the extent that the canvas delivers that heavy feeling, it succeeds monumentally on the ruins of failure.

Relevant Classroom Use

Relevant Classroom Use

Yang Weidong interviews a subject for his documentary project "Signal" (Photo: Yang Weidong)

A work in progress by Beijing artist Yang Weidong was recently shown in Hong Kong. Named “Xu Yao” or “Need” in Chinese and “Signal” in English, the documentary comprises of roughly 20 minutes of edited video interviews that Yang conducted with 237 notable Chinese subjects over the past three years. Yang asked each person the same question: “What do Chinese people need most today?” Among the interviewees were director Jia Zhangke and contemporary oil painter Liu Xiaodong, who appears as himself in Jia’s documentary Dong.

The premiere of Yang’s unfinished film project coincided with the publication of the first book in a series, also by him, named Li Ci Cun Zhao: 500 Wei Zhong Guo Ren De Xin Ling Ji Lu (Di Yi Juan) [For the Record: 500 Chinese People’s Inner Thoughts (Volume I)]. On July 22, 2011, he was invited to hold a press release for the book at the Hong Kong Book Fair, which was also the venue for the first public screening of “Need.” This event has been recorded in full by the Social Record Association (aka SocREC) of Hong Kong.

The concept for Yang’s project can be traced in the Chinese documentary tradition. Back in 2000, independent filmmaker Ju Anqi made There’s a Strong Wind in Beijing, in which he and his crew famously confronted people in both public and private space in Beijing with the same question of whether they thought that the wind in Beijing was strong. Though absurd, this question sometimes opened up the conversations, tricking people to divulge what was really on their mind. Compared to Ju’s film, which is certainly more spontaneous and experimental in nature, Yang’s “Need” is more serious and urgent in tone, and the reason must be traced to Yang’s initial motivation for the project.

As stated in the preface of his book, Yang began the project two years after the death of his father. He sought justice with the Chinese authorities about the matter, but soon experienced an existential crisis. As their prolonged communications showed, the values held by those in power could hardly align with his own, and vice versa. To get the real meanings of the universal values that have kept coming up in their conversations, he decided to consult contemporary Chinese elites for an answer. The people that he has approached so far include university professors, independent scholars, retired party members and authority figures, writers, artists, industrialists, and so on and so forth.

In his attempt to interview these subjects, rejections have been common, especially among those who are still working in the system under the auspices of the Chinese government. However, contacting elites who worked outside the system alone was not a solution, either. Yang made contact with a number of politically sensitive men whom had been marked by the state and consequently he became listed as one of them. He has been closely watched by the Chinese state police ever since. In a press release, he mentioned an incident in which nine Chinese security officers came to his residence one night and questioned him until dawn. Fortunately, as far as it appears to be right now, he is not in any grave danger at the moment. He said admittedly that he would always try to negotiate with the authority figures when they came to stop him. By conceding to some of their requests, he would at least manage to complete his project.

The existing short shows only a glimpse of the project, as different answers to the same question come on screen in flashes, and explanations to the answers are left out entirely, it is meant to be seen a collage of every one’s thought about the same matter. And it goes without saying, viewing the documentary is best complemented by reading the book, which has the best thirty interviews on paper. For a sneak preview of the interviews as well as a general sense of people’s answers, John Garnaut’s article on The Sunday Morning Herald is a good guide. As he succinctly puts it, this is a film about “China’s thirst for freedom.”

Yang looks forward to finishing his project. Lining up for his new round of interviews are Chinese elites living overseas and even top political leaders including the Chinese president. As both an artist and a Chinese national, he refers to his actions as an instance of performance art, injected with sincere and legitimate social concerns and responsibilities of a true member of a civil society.

Relevant Classroom Use

Zhao Liang confronted by Ai Weiwei on camera

In his blog on the New Yorker website, critic Richard Brody responds to last weeks’ New York Times cover feature on Zhao Liang, director of Crime and Punishment (distributed by dGenerate) and Petition (which Brody deems “the fiercest and most confrontational film regarding the Chinese government’s suppression of dissent that I’ve seen”). Brody summarizes the article’s charting of the tensions that arose between Zhao Liang and activist/artist Ai Weiwei following Zhao’s following Jia Zhangke’s lead to withdraw their films from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival in light of political tensions between the festival and Chinese authorities.

Brody focuses on a video of Ai’s on-camera challenge to Zhao for giving in to the government’s demands. Ai also insinuates that Jia withdrew from the festival so as to ensure good standing with the Chinese government in order to produce a government-approved film made for the Shanghai Expo, I Wish I Knew. Brody counters criticism that the film is a feature length promotional video for Shanghai compromised by the constraints of government approval:

If so, the government didn’t get its money’s worth: the film (which I reviewed when it was shown here earlier this year) is an audacious recuperation of ways of life and thought from pre-Communist China, an embrace of Taiwan and Hong Kong, a poignant lament for victims of the Cultural Revolution, and a depiction of the Expo as an alienating, inhuman monstrosity. (He did something similar when making his first officially approved film, “The World,” at Beijing’s World Park.) Jia’s symbolic art, like that of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch under the Hays Code, is ingeniously conceived to say exactly what’s on his mind regardless of external constraints.

He also tries to broker a conciliatory stance between Ai’s righteous indignation and Zhao’s pragmatic compromise:

Ai’s fury is entirely justified—he has endured, and continues to endure, horrific ordeals in order to live freely under a tyrannical regime, and he is entitled to view those who make common cause with it, of any sort, as being on the wrong side of morality. But only he and others who have endured similar persecution are entitled to say so. Heroism can’t be undertaken prescriptively, and those of us who write and make art without fear of arrest should pause before accusing Zhao of collaboration or cowardice.

Read Brody’s full article.

Jia Zhangke’s Dong and Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment are available on Amazon

Relevant Classroom Use

Ying Qian

Ying Qian is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Qian’s area of focus involves examining the evolving documentary visions in 20^th century China. She is interested in the social processes and “film thinking” that have enabled and shaped the making of documentary images, and the ways in which these images have provided framings, interventions and agencies to historical change.

Recently, Qian co-organized a conference titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary” at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. We spoke with Qian about the highlights of the conference as well as her ongoing research in Chinese documentary.

dGF: Could you give a brief overview of your research? What are your specific interests within the field of documentary film study?

Ying Qian: I’m writing a dissertation on the history of Chinese documentary since the Mao era. I also write about documentary practices in the Republican period in my introduction chapter.  My interest in documentary cinema was initiated by encounters with contemporary independent documentary, and I used to make my own documentary films as well.

In my dissertation, I try to move the timeline further back. When talking about contemporary documentary, critics would point out that these films are very different from the official practices and especially from the documentary practices of an earlier era.  New documentaries do not usually have a “Voice-of-God” commentary; they also have different approaches to conceptualize reality and deal with contingency in filmmaking. These observations are clearly true; though I think the division between the past and the present is not so binary.  When one examines the documentary productions in the Mao-era seriously, one finds some important continuities despite many ruptures.  I see documentary of the present as multiple responses to the end of the Mao-era.

dGF: Did your interest evolve from a dearth in research in Mao era documentary film?

Mao Zedong

YQ:  Yes. So far, Mao-era documentary films are almost entirely overlooked by both English-language and Chinese-language scholarship, so certainly I would like to fill this gap.  After all, documentary cinema was an integral part of people’s everyday experience during the Mao-era, and the total length of documentary produced during the period doubled that of fiction films.

But my interest in the Mao-era also comes from a personal interest in understanding my own love of cinema. The Mao era had infused in the population a love of cinema at a quite different register than that in the U.S.  When I grew up in China’s 1980s, cinema wasn’t really seen as entertainment.  Instead it was seen as a serious venue of artistic expression, and a way to think through large social problems.  It was as if suddenly the country emerged from the Mao-era traumatized and speechless, and had to resort to images to process half-thoughts and complex experiences. I am interested in understanding this particular type of cinephilia.

In recent years, the film industry in China has become more and more entertainment-oriented, but independent documentary continues the legacy of social cinema, staying connected to the society through a closer bond with historical reality.  At the moment, independent documentary in China has lots of energy, and filmmakers are courageous to try many topics, doing things trial and error.  However, theoretical and critical interventions are far from adequate.  My project hopes to offer such an intervention.

dGF:  Would you characterize your research a fusion between literary and historical criticism?

YQ:   Yes, it’s both a cultural history and a film studies dissertation.  History is a big part of the dissertation, and I use more theoretical writing by Chinese filmmakers and critics than critical theory from elsewhere.  I want to understand the intellectual and artistic resources available to filmmakers in particular historical moments, and these are very contextual.

dGF:  In April you organized a symposium titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary.”  How was the conference conceived?

YQ:  The original idea came from our curatorial work.  Since 2009, I have been curating with two other colleagues– Jie Li and J.P. Sniadecki—a Chinese independent documentary film series entitled “Emergent Visions” at the Fairbank Center at Harvard.  During the Q&A sessions after screenings, the idea of ethics would often arise.  For example, we screened Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest.  This is a film about prostitution in China.  The discussion after the screening centered on the fact that the filmmaker didn’t obtain proper consent from the sex workers he had filmed.  Since sex work is illegal in China, the film might have brought risk of arrest and prosecution to the subjects in the film.

Disturbing the Peace (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2009)

Recently, we screened Ai Weiwei’s film Disturbing the Peace. Ai Weiwei’s filmmaking was irreverent and aggressive, especially when dealing with the police.  The question of “respect” came up during the discussion after the screening.  Some audience asked whether he was disrespectful to the police and forcing the camera into people’s faces; others commented on the various ways the film camera might have intervened into the interactions captured on the screen, whether filmmaking spurred violence and confrontation at times, while repressing them at other times.

The ethical practices of documentary filmmaking directly influence the kinds of films made, and the types of cinematic experience the audience is engaged in. The symposium aimed to discuss these issues.  In China, most independent documentary filmmakers are serious about their craft and purpose.  They believe in film as openers of public space of discourse, capable of negotiating interpersonal relationships in new, innovative ways.  They are using their cinema to examine the society and foster social transformations.  Because of their serious intent, we hope that bringing ethics into documentary discourse would also be important input to engage the filmmakers.

dGF: Who were the colleagues you organized this with?

YQ: I organized this with Jie Li and Professor Eugene Wang.  Jie Li is a college fellow at Harvard teaching East Asian cinema. Professor Eugene Wang works on both contemporary and traditional Chinese art.

dGF:  Who else participated?

YQ:  The community of scholars who work on Chinese documentaries is quite small.  We sent out invitations to the senior faculty first.  In the second round we invited more junior scholars. We also invited scholars who work on documentary photography, as it shares similar ethical issues with documentary cinema. Among our panelists are Professors Yingjin Zhang (UC San Diego), Carlos Rojas (Duke), Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Duke), Claire Roberts (Australian National University), Qi Wang (Georgia Tech), Luke Robinson (Nottingham, UK), William Schaefer (U. Rochester) and others from Harvard (Winnie Wong, Eugene Wang, Jie Li and myself).

dGF:  There were three panels.  What interesting issues surfaced from the discussions on these panels?

YQ: We realized that ethics is a diffuse concept and there are many kinds of ethics to think about.  There is an ethics of filmmaking, how we attend to relations between the filmmakers and the subjects and the power dynamics between them.  There is also an ethics of representation, which registers symbolic violence imposed on the subjects. There is also an ethics of watching: how should we watch and discuss these films as audience?

Realizing the ethical questions involved in production and finding ways to solve these problems could help the filmmaker to innovate on film styles and forms. In exhibitions of documentary cinema in China, one still sees many purely observational films that seem to take camera as a transparent medium of representation.   I think the reason behind this (at times banal) style is the fact that ethical questions are not thought through.  Filmmakers are not allowing their films to register these ethical dilemmas of cinematic representation, even though actually allowing that would open up stylistic and formal innovation.

We also talked about issues of documentary film distribution.  Ethical issues are very contextual.  How you ethically represent an issue, social event, or a group of people sometimes is only apparent to an insider.  Only an insider can see the power dynamics between the subjects and the filmmakers.  When such a film travels to other parts of the world, where such power dynamics are not so easily detected by overseas audiences, the ethical question become more complicated.  We need to think about these cross-cultural exhibition issues.

dGF:  This is also related to the methods of documentary exhibition, especially in China.  These films are not getting commercial distribution.  They are being screened in museums and cinema clubs.

Ai Xiaoming

YQ: Yes. This is very problematic.  When documentary films are being showed in galleries that are only accessible by car, in a suburb of Beijing, it raises questions about the audience.  At the same time, now there are a lot of films that are distributed on line.  Some of the political documentaries made by Ai Xiaoming or Ai Weiwei are distributed online.  This is a more wide-reaching and democratic method of distribution.  We can see there is also an ethics of distribution and accessibility.

dGF:  How do those films evade the government censors?

YQ:  They don’t.  There is a continuing process of uploading and then deleting films.

dGF: Is there a sense, from filmmakers, of anticipation how a film will be perceived by audiences in China versus western audiences?  Is there a difference in topics or portrayal of subjects based on whether a film will receive international distribution?

YQ:  Most documentary filmmakers grew up in China.  They go overseas for film festivals, but it’s not very clear to me that they would be so culturally fluent as to correctly anticipate what a foreign audience would be interested in.  However, I do believe they are deeply influenced by film festivals.  Filmmakers who want to get into film festivals will find films are selected by film festivals as exemplary works.

Bumming in Beijing (dir. Wu Wenguang)

When independent Chinese documentary cinema developed in the early ‘90’s, there wasn’t a recognizable standard for what was considered a “good” documentary.  Film festivals became a crucial standard-setter.  The Hong Kong film festival screened Wu Wenguang’s first film Bumming in Beijing, and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival in Japan bestowed awards upon it.  This gave lots of impetus to documentary making in the 1990s.  Suddenly this genre was considered equally promising as feature films, which were also getting prizes in international film festivals at the time.  Wu Wengguang also brought back from Yamagata works by Ogawa Shinsuke and Frederic Wiseman.  They subsequently became prototypes for documentary film in China.

dGF: There seems to be the idea that independent documentary in China is very counter-hegemonic.  While this may be true, to an extent, it roots are in the mainstream media in China, namely CCTV.

YQ:  I think that new documentary did start within the system in the 1980’s.  The models at that time, in the 1980’s, came from a number of sources.  A lot of them were from outside of China.  In 1980, there was collaboration between Japanese television crews and Chinese television crews.  They went on to make landscape documentaries about the Silk Road, the Yangtze River, and the Yellow River.  Through these collaborations, Chinese documentary TV producers were able to see how the Japanese producers worked.  Development of documentary film also grew from re-watching past films.  For example, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo was made in 1972, and was banned and criticized.  There was a mass campaign against this film in China.  Nevertheless, re-watching this film provided a lot of inspiration for documentary filmmakers in the 1980’s.

dGF:  Do you feel that Jia Zhangke has become that prototype for new narrative and documentary filmmakers?  It seems as if his influence is inescapable on the newer generations of documentary filmmakers and independent-narrative filmmakers.  We can almost see a formation of the Jia Zhangke category of film.

YQ:  That’s very interesting.  I would also say it’s a prototype for independent fiction cinema.  You see a lot of new filmmakers making fiction in a very similar way to Jia Zhangke.  But you know Jia Zhangke’s recent documentaries, for example I Wish I Knew and 24 City, are mostly interview-based, but we don’t see a rush to imitate that in the documentary community.

The Square (dir. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan)

In fact, I would say Jia Zhangke in his early years learned a lot from documentary filmmakers.  In Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu / Pickpocket, TV crews from the county’s television station were shown to make interviews with people on the streets. A similar setup was in a documentary film entitled The Square, made in 1993 by Zhang Yuan and Duan Jingchuan.  In The Square, the documentary lens showed a television crew from the CCTV orchestrating interviews at the Tian’anmen Square. The documentary camera of Zhang and Duan was filming the “documentary camera” of the CCTV, exposing the apparatus of official media in a comic way.  Jia Zhangke most likely had seen this film as the film community in the 1990s was quite tightly knit, and Zhang Yuan is a fellow Sixth Generationer.   In that case, Jia Zhangke was actually influenced by early to mid 1990’s documentary.

dGF:  Chinese filmmakers are usually quite deeply embedded in the communities they are documenting.  Do you think there are any ethical implications that arise from this relationship in terms of how subjects are portrayed and images are presented?

YQ: Embedment in a community and friendship with one’s film subjects are obviously very good things for documentary filmmaking.  The filmmaker Feng Yan, for example, has filmed a peasant woman from the Three Gorges region for many years, and from her film Bing’ai one can find, in the film frame, this deep inter-personal relationship. In the end, documentary film doesn’t document some pure reality; it documents how realities are understood and manifest in an inter-subjective space created by the filmmaker and the subjects.  Being embedded in the community in most cases allows a higher level of inter-subjectivity in the works.

However, it doesn’t mean that filmmakers would not abuse trusting subjects.  Subjects might be too embarrassed to say no to a friend’s camera in circumstances when they actually don’t like to be filmed.  Filmmakers might know the subjects so well that they can “stage” emotional scenes for them.  One of the papers presented by Qi Wang, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, concerns films where visible violence erupts in the frame.  In some films, the filmmaker artificially creates an environment where people will get upset and violence will break out.

dGF: What types of influence does the unique Chinese political and social environment have on the development of these films?

YQ:  Documentary cameras are deeply attracted to change.  In an environment that changes so swiftly and in such a massive scale daily, filmmakers are constantly stimulated to observe, grasp, and film.   Rapid social transformation explains the vitality of documentary cinema in the past two decades.  In terms of policing and censorship, it’s not easy to know to what extent the state has hindered filmmakers’ work.  Some filmmakers who made very controversial films are allowed to continue working, which means there is some room in the society for independent expression.  This room, of course, didn’t come as a gift from the state.  It has come through continuous efforts by filmmakers to push the boundaries.

Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul (dir. Hu Jie)

It’s very easy in China to turn conservative and say that films about certain subjects simply could not be made because they could potentially be banned. Self-censorship is the easier way, yet these filmmakers have been consistently choosing the hard way.  They really helped to push the envelope.  For example, Hu Jie made Searching for Lin Zhao’s  Soul in 2004.  It was about a political prisoner who was executed in 1968. At the time when Hu Jie made it, everyone was surprised that a film like this could be made.  Hu Jie had to leave his job while making it, because of the political sensitivity of the topic.  Yet in the end, it turned out ok.  The film was shown on some university campuses; it couldn’t be distributed in China but was downloadable online for a long time.  Lin Zhao became a household name after the film went viral online.  Filmmakers like Hu Jie are passionate about their subjects.  They take the risk to push the envelope just because they have to tell the story.  They then created room that later generations of filmmakers now enjoy.

The biggest hurdle, I think, is funding.  Many of these filmmakers are badly funded.  Some have to leave official jobs when their subjects become more politically sensitive, or when filming takes too much of their time. Wider distribution of Chinese documentary is necessary for the continued growth of the independent documentary film industry.  But wider distribution domestically is not yet possible due to the political circumstances.

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Wang Xiaoshuai (middle) and Liu Xiaodong (right) share their views on youth, art and homecoming at an open dialogue at Minsheng Museum of Art in Shanghai. [Photo: China Daily

When Wang Xiaoshuai realized he could never paint as finely as his high school pal Liu Xiaodong, he gave up painting and turned to filmmaking.

Liu was one of the few students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts to have a solo exhibition right after graduation. Wang, however, went through some years in low tide working in Fujian Film Studio in the early 1990s.

Since then, Wang has won many international awards for his movie productions, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2001. His latest project, Chongqing Blues, competed for the Golden Palm at last year’s Cannes International Film Festival.

Liu himself is no stranger to film, having worked as an artistic collaborator with independent Sixth Generation filmmakers in the 90s, and later serving as the subject of Jia Zhangke’s documentary Dong. Recently, he is the subject of another documentary, this time by Hou Hsiao-hsien, that follows Liu as he returns to his hometown in northeast China.

At the talk Liu addressed criticism that his work takes advantage of his subjects, making millions of dollars from painting portraits of the poor and exploited. ”This is hardly avoidable as we live in a commercial age,” Liu said. “Society commercializes a person incredibly quickly. As an artist, I have to be alert about being commercialized too.”

Dong is available as part of the dGenerate catalog.

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Jia Zhangke speaks out at a forum held at the 2011 Shanghai International Film Festival (photo: china.org.cn)

Originally published in The Guardian, June 16 2011

He had to abandon one film lest it broke anti-pornography laws. Then he ditched a spy movie rather than fill it with Communist party “superheroes”.

The frustration of making films in a country with “cultural over-cleanliness” has led an internationally acclaimed Chinese director to lash out at its censors, a state news site has reported.

Jia Zhangke won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 2006 – apparently earning the approval of China’s leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping, who is expected to become president next year.

But he began his career as an “underground” film-maker – directing movies that were praised abroad but never saw official release in China– and he complained of ongoing battles with censors as he addressed a cultural forum in Shanghai. Unusually, his remarks were reported by an official news site, china.org.cn.

“The only reason that we cannot make genre movies is the barrier that censorship sets,” Jia said.

He said he scrapped a film about a man’s sex life after an official decided it might break anti-pornography laws. He also abandoned a spy film about the Communist party and Kuomintang due to controls.

“If I want to make the movie here, I have to portray all the communists as superheroes,” Jia said.

“This would betray my original idea and make it difficult to develop the story.”

He added: “This kind of cultural over-cleanliness that bans the erotic, violent and terrifying is cultural naivety.”

China has a vast censorship apparatus, but films and television programmes are particularly tightly controlled. One film director told the Guardian that censors demanded 400 changes before they would pass his movie.

Hong Kong director and producer Manfred Wong told the Shanghai forum that in crime movies made on the mainland all police officers must be portrayed as good guys, while romantic movies cannot show affairs or cohabitation before marriage.

He argued that mainland film-makers need a ratings system. Some believe the government might relax constraints if age restrictions were introduced.

But Li Hongyu, who writes about film for Southern Weekly newspaper, said it was simplistic to suggest a ratings system would result in less censorship.

While western ratings systems focus on issues such as violence and pornography, China has much wider concerns about the content of films, he said.

“China’s control over movies is more detailed. China has a movie censoring committee composed of approximately 30 or so staff whose backgrounds are very diverse, spanning from movie professionals, the Women’s Federation, the [Communist] Youth League, teachers, and a religious committee to various governmental administration departments,” Li added.

“The debate about introducing a ratings system has been going on for many years. But it is hard to implement, since if the system is used, it will not be easy to cover the government’s other considerations. What if it is concerned about political views?”

Official requirements, which concern the moral as well as political qualities of content, can be baffling to outsiders: the head of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television recently denounced TV time travel dramas for their “frivolous” approach to history.

Jia Zhangke’s film Dong is available through the dGenerate catalog.

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Dong (dir. Jia Zhangke)

By Ariella Tai

As part of a larger feature on the films of director Jia Zhangke at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Leo Goldsmith focuses on “Jia’s first documentary proper;” Dong- available for purchase or rental through the dGenerate catalog.  Goldsmith discusses the ways in which this multilayered documentary meditates on the shifting landscapes of China, both literal and economic, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the artist in these times. Goldsmith observes that Dong is,

…partly about the effect the [Three Gorges Dam Project] has had on the people of the region. … Fengjie, home to the Qutang Gorge, is captured by Jia’s films as it vanishes: landscapes seem to dematerialize in the distant fog while, in the foreground, buildings are ripped apart by the hands of dozens of shirtless laborers.

The film is also, in large part, about artist Liu Xiaodong as he paints the day laborers in Fenjie and eventually travels to Thailand to complete portraits of young sex workers in Bangkok.  The role that he occupies as an artist in contemporary China is as important to the film as the physical sites he visits:

Like Useless, Dong forms part of a series of non-fiction films on the work of artists in contemporary China, and as in the other film, Jia seems to use these works to meditate on his own role as a creator. In Liu, Jia finds a particularly significant subject: as a student at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, Liu starred as the lead in Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days and served as art director for Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, both made in 1993 and two of the early masterpieces of “Sixth Generation” cinema in China…Liu’s alignment with neo-realist, post-socialist Chinese cinema in some way complements his work as a painter, which is largely made up of portaits composed in a rough, but naturalistic style, vaguely reminiscent of Lucian Freud.

Goldsmith also astutely points out Jia’s exploration of Liu’s work as an act of reflection on his own artistic practice.  He notes that although Jia turns a critical lens towards some of Liu’s “forced interactions with locals” and potential “elitist distance,” he shares a similar background with the painter. “Liu, like Jia, comes from a Northern industrial town and had to migrate to Beijing to make a life as an artist, an experience that parallels that of many migrant workers simply struggling to find a foothold in China’s burgeoning quasi-capitalist restructuring.”

Such moments emphasize Jia’s ambivalence about his own work as well as Liu’s, an acceptance or even deliberate attempt to problematize the artist’s role in the face of pressing social issues… it’s clear that Liu means to document, in some sense, the alienation of the working class from their labor, and as he reports at the end of the film, his intention is to use their bodies both to express something of himself and to give back to the subject something like dignity. And while Liu’s disquisitions on the difficulty and serious labor involved in being an artist seem a little dubious in light of the labor of his subjects, he is nonetheless realistic, even cynical, about the possibility of effecting real “change through art.”

To read the entire review, visit Not Coming to a Theater Near You here.

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