Chinese directors Zhu Wen (L) and Liu Jiayin (R) pose during a photocall at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Picture: AFP

The nine-day San Sebastian [Film F]estival… features 18 films made by Chinese directors over the past decade with the digital cameras, which make it cheaper to shoot and easier to skirt government censorship.

Chinese filmmakers are using digital cameras to explore new, more daring forms of storytelling and are covering marginalized characters and themes that were previously ignored.

“There really are many people who are filming in this format, which is the independent cinema in China,” said Chinese filmmaker Liu Jiayin, whose movie “Oxhide II” is in the film festival.

The movie features her mother and father as actors and the action takes place entirely inside their dark, dreary and modest home where the couple and their daughter discuss the state of the family’s failing business.

Like most Chinese movies made using the digital technology, the director also wrote the script.

“With this format I can do everything. Five or ten years ago if I wanted to shoot a film, I couldn’t have done it. Now I can,” said 30-year-old Liu, who invested all her savings to buy the camera she used to make the film.

- From The New Age.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide (dir. Liu Jiayin)

On the Cine-File website, a comprehensive and highly selective guide to movie screenings in the Chicagoland area, critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Ebert Presents at the Movies, Mubi.com and Chicago Reader) singles out Oxhide as “Crucial Viewing” for this week. Liu Jiayin’s masterpiece screens Monday at Doc Films at the University of Chicago as part of its 11-film series of Chinese Independent cinema, co-programmed with dGenerate.

CRUCIAL VIEWING

Liu Jiayin’s OXHIDE I (Contemporary Chinese)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
Liu Jiayin made a name for herself on the festival circuit with this no-budget chamber piece; Monday’s Doc Films screening marks its long-overdue first appearance in Chicago. Despite OXHIDE’s popularity with a certain theoretical-formalist crowd, it’s one of the few films from the last decade to feel like the work of an outsider; Liu’s use of the ‘scope frame, for example, is a genuinely original: instead of using the wider aspect ratio to expand the horizontal, she cuts off the vertical, reducing the actions of a Beijing family (played by Liu and her parents) to hands, torsos, and the movement of objects across a table. There’s only one location, the camera is always static, the lighting is non-existent, and there are only 23 shots in the whole thing—but instead of being some dry postgraduate exercise, OXHIDE is nervy and sometimes surprisingly energetic, thanks in part to Liu’s sophisticated sound design; few recent films have been able to do so much with so little. (2005, 110 min, Video Projection) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

This will be the largest series of Chinese cinema in Chicago this year. The series is listed online at: http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/dev/calendar/2011/fall/monday.shtml (note that the opening night screening is not listed).

A Selection of Chinese Independent Cinema

Mondays, September 26 – November 28, 2011
Doc Films, University of Chicago
Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall
The University of Chicago
1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL

Tickets $5, free with DocFilms season pass ($30)

Few national cinemas are as vibrant as that of contemporary China. Similarly, there are few places in the world today where art and media practice share such an important role in addressing national memory and societal issues. For these and other reasons, some of the most important work being made in China today is made by independent artists, with techniques that challenge the conventions and boundaries of both documentary and fiction film.

dGenerate Films (http://dgeneratefilms.com) stands as an important cultural pipeline, distributing independent cinema from mainland China within North America and Europe. This program intends to offer a sampling of the dGenerate catalogue, which contains many of the most important films produced in China within the last decade. These films reflect Chinese independent cinema in its broad diversity, social urgency, and creative innovation.

Full schedule after the break.

September 26 • 7:00 • 58m & 70m
Disorder & Dong
Huang Weikai & Jia Zhangke, 2008 & 2009 • Huang Weikai’s gritty digital city symphony of Guanzhou has aptly been described as “Vertov on acid”. Drawing on hours of footage from a network of amateur videographers, Huang summons a critique of whitewashed contemporary media and all-pervasive voyeurism. Dong, a documentary by China’s greatest living filmmaker, depicts the painter Liu Xiaodong.

October 3 • 7:00 • 110m
Oxhide I
Liu Jiayin, 2005 • One of the most important Chinese films in the past decade and a monument of world cinema, Oxhide is a brilliant paean to the powers of formalism. Liu Jiayin cast her parents and herself as fictionalized versions of themselves. Through the thousand daily travails of city life, a genuine and deeply moving picture of Chinese familial solidarity emerges from the screen. DVD

October 10 • 7:00 • 113m
Transition Period
Zhou Hau, 2009 • If you think Chicago politics smells of cronyism, wait till you see its Chinese counterpart, vividly captured by journalist-turned-filmmaker Zhou Hao. A prizewinner at this year’s Hong Kong Documentary Festival, The Transition Period is a startlingly candid portrait of Guo Yongchang, a Chinese Communist Party county secretary who eventually was convicted on corruption charges. We see Guo discuss how to split tax revenue with lower-level officials, smear cake on the face of an American businessman seeking favors, and threaten local workers protesting over unpaid wages. DVD

October 17 • 7:00 • 115m
Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul
Hu Jie, 2004 • Lin Zhao was a young woman who attended Peking University in the 1950s. Of all the students at the university, she was the only one who refused to write a political confession during Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, and as a result was sentenced to prison. Lin composed endless articles and poems from her cell. Forbidden to use pens, she wrote with a hairpin dipped in her own blood. Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman’s legacy of courage and conviction.DVD

October 24 • 7:00 • 132m
Oxhide II (director Liu Jiayin)
Liu Jiayin, 2009 • 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. Building on the stunning vision of Oxhide, writer-director Liu Jiayin once again casts herself and her parents in scripted versions of their life in a tiny Beijing apartment. At the same time, “Liu’s shots are carefully, rigorously, exquisitely composed” (Berenice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema), showcasing one of the most gifted visual artists working in China today. DVD

October 31 • 7:00 • 90m
Timber Gang
Yu Guangyi, 2006 • Yu’s documentary confronts the viewer with a China not-yet eclipsed by massive development, depicting the grueling, Herzogian conditions of rural subsistence labor. Lumberjacks in a mountainous area of China use a method that has not changed for centuries. The men stay in humble cabins, where they eat, drink wine and sleep together. This is the last year for the lumberjacks. In the spring they will start looking for other work in the city. DVD

November 7 • 7:00 • 169m
Ghost Town
Zhao Dayong, 2009 • A remote village in southwest China is haunted by traces of its cultural past; Zhiziluo is a town barely clinging to life. Divided into three parts, this documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people left behind by China’s new economy. A father-son duo of elderly preachers argue over the future of their village church. A twelve year-old boy scavenges the hillside to feed himself. Zhao’s novelistic yet urgent film attests to the filmmaker’s deep commitment to his subjects as well as the painful lives of those forgotten by the onslaught of development. DVD

November 14 • 7:00 • 91m
Winter Vacation
Li Hongqi, 2010 • Winter Vacation is a film of quiet anger. Throughout its still mastershots, a many peopled cast passes in and out of this wintery town within Inner Mongolia. Terse and deadpan, Winter Vacation evinces a style recalling such filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch, Tsai Ming-Liang and Corneliu Porumboiu. DVD

November 21 • 7:00 • 85m
No. 89 Shimen Road
Shu Haolun, 2010 • A poignant reflection of memory in the years leading up to Tianemen Square, No. 89 Shimen Road tells the story of one boy’s coming of age and the community that supported him on one street in Shanghai. Creating an eerie relay of stand-ins for the coming tensions within China throughout the 1980s the film finds urgency and a personal voice within the register of nostalgia. Conceived of as a richly textured fictional account of the time, the film weaves many elaborate devices including still photography and controlled film footage meant to evoke a document of the time, an elaborately recreated milieu. DVD

November 28 • 7:00 • 168m
Tape
Li Ning, 2010 • Shooting for five years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist despite 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. One of the finest portraits of an artist in recent memory, Li’s film makes a case for the inseparability of the personal and political and an edifying testament to the struggle to create. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI. DVD

Relevant Classroom Use

The Olympic Stadium in Beijing, designed by Ai Weiwei in the city he now calls "a nightmare"

In his essay posted on The Daily Beast on August 28, 2010, artist Ai Weiwei rants about Beijing being a nightmarish city for anyone to live in. He says that the rapid economic progress of China has ironically made its capital unrecognizable and its people identity-less, and the country’s political rigidity has only worsened these problems.

In a depressing overview of the people living in Beijing, Ai sorts them into one of the two categories. One, he says, are the money-grabbers and power-worshippers who are distressingly predictable. “You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind.” Frustrated, he goes on. “No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.” The other category, which refers to the mass middle to low wage earners in the city, sounds just as pitiful. “I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope,” Ai observes.
The hopelessness that Ai tries to describe has a particular dimension. Working like dogs and making little money certainly could deject people, but the essay makes a turn as Ai brings up the issue of trust between the Chinese people and the Chinese government, which is known to be one of the biggest culprit behind China’s low Gross National Happiness index. In his own words, “[the] worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system.” This sense of mistrust chisels away people’s happiness whenever they find a need for justice. And that happens almost everyday in Beijing, as some films in our catalog can attest to.

Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, for example, zooms in on a common Beijinger’s struggle with the government about the demolition of his house for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Cui Zi’en’s We Are the . . . of Communism, documents the capricious providence of education for migrant workers’ children in Beijing. What these two examples share in common is that the basic needs and rights of the common people in Beijing cannot be met, and the mechanism to obtain justice is often unavailable.

And yet, Ai’s portrayal of Beijing as a land of total darkness does not paint a complete picture of the complexity of life in this city of  nearly 25 million people. Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II are examples of Beijing residents’ preservation of their cultural identity. Although the city of Beijing changes its face almost every day to the point of defiling its rich heritage, inside people’s homes time-honored traditions like dumpling-making continue, testifying to the resilience of their culture. Watching Liu’s intimate, heartfelt family dinner with her parents makes us temporarily forget the unpleasant world outside their home. Moreover, as Liu’s father says in the documentary, each person makes his own dumplings, just as each person has a distinct character. Ai may still believe and argue that the people of Beijing are uniform and predictable, but in the less conspicuous corners of Beijing we see how individual identities as well as non-mainstream group identities secretly flourish. We can count on the dedicated efforts of independent Chinese filmmakers to reveal those worlds to us.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

By Ariella Tai

On the University of Sydney’s blog Artspace, Christen Cornell interviews Liu Jiayin on her acclaimed films Oxhide and Oxhide II (both available in the dGenerate catalog).   Despite being one of the youngest artists of the current generation of independent Chinese filmmakers, she is credited with being one of the most innovative.  In this interview, she discusses her aesthetic choices, as well as her reasons for using daily household routines as the focus of her films. She gives an especially provoking response when asked what she wants the viewer to draw from her extended observations of daily household tasks, quipping that “Maybe it’s just how to make a bag, or make dumplings.”

CC: But we’re shown the years of repetition in this family’s daily tasks, we’re shown their skills, and how each member of the family has their own way of doing things. There’s a feeling of respect in the film.

LJY: True. These are the details of life that I think are interesting but that are often overlooked, especially within films, so I make a special effort to film them. Usually in films, if people are cooking or eating dinner, it’s never to show that people cook or eat dinner. It’s only ever used as a backdrop in which to show or say something else. So for example during dinner two people have a fight; or somebody announces they’re pregnant; or somebody announces they’re having an affair. And cooking scenes are often used to express that a couple are happy together; or to say something about a family; or the relationship between two people. These scenes are hardly ever about the cooking or eating.

I think these daily routines are interesting in themselves. I don’t have to add anything else to these moments in order to make them interesting to me. I don’t think you need somebody to catch fire, or for somebody to die, to make them worthy of observing.

So daily routines aren’t backdrops in my films – they’re the subject, and that’s very important. Nothing is simply a backdrop, just like in life. I can’t just say ‘today wasn’t really that interesting so I’ll cut that out’, that this day wasn’t really part of my life, or it was simply part of the backdrop of something else that was more real.

Liu also meditates on how her films reflect on modern Chinese society, and her role as an artist in shaping (or not shaping) impressions of contemporary China.

CC: I wonder if this approach is a response to the pace of change and forgetting in China today. Your films are slow and observational, careful to include every moment, whereas modern China seems to be all about speed and forgetting.

LJY: Perhaps, but I don’t want to be too self-conscious about that. I’m sure my values can be seen in my films, but I don’t want to make any great statements about society. I don’t want to try to represent anyone or pose any arguments about how society should be. My life is just my life; my films are just my films. I don’t think I have to ‘say’ anything in order to make powerful cinema.

In China today, most filmmakers seem to think they need to represent somebody in order to give their films weight. A film has to represent a certain class or profession. I think if I can manage to represent myself then I’m already doing quite well! [laughs]

And anyway, who’s to say that I would be able to represent anyone else? Let’s say I set out, do my research, and make a film about China’s rural migrants who move to the city to find work. I might think their perspective is very important but how do I know I am able to express it? How do I know my opinions are the same as theirs? Where does someone get that kind of confidence?

All these films about China that we’re watching right now – I think they could have a very short life span. They might be relevant for about ten years, and then we might look back and find that the films that look at daily life might better represent the times.

CC: Still though, I think your films do say a lot about society, about contemporary China. Perhaps it’s just that they do so by describing your point of view so specifically.

LJY: I’m sure the audience can see my opinions in the content, but I’m still more concerned with approach. My filmmaking experience has always been about how to make a film. This has always been my interest, more than what I might say while I’m doing so. In these last few years my real interest has been with time in the filmmaking process, and that’s where I’ve put most of my thought.
While making Oxhide II what I considered most was this question of time. How to use ‘real time’? Should I use it? If I am going to use real time, then why? And how am I going to film real time in relation to space?

So I thought about that a lot and then chose my method. This is what I spent most of my time thinking about, not whether or not I should express Chinese tradition or anything like that. That’s not my purpose. My purpose is to develop a filmmaking style that expresses the way that I experience life.

To read the full text of the interview, visit Artspace.

Relevant Classroom Use

In conjunction with the screening series New Tales of Chinese Cinema screening this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image, here are two video essays exploring films from the series, both published at Moving Image Source. The series includes Disorder by Huang Weikai and Oxhide II by Liu Jiayin, both distributed by dGenerate. Oxhide II screens Saturday, April 30 at 2pm. Disorder screens Saturday, April 30 at 5pm

Descriptions of each video can be found at the Moving Image Source, and after the break.

New Beginnings: Opening moments from contemporary Chinese cinema

Slow Food: David Bordwell on Oxhide II

Notes on New Beginnings: Opening moments from contemporary Chinese cinema:

For decades, Chinese cinema was understood in generational blocks, each with its own defining characteristics: the Fifth Generation rejected socialist realist propaganda in favor of lushly filmed, socially critical allegories; the Sixth Generation rebuffed the Fifth by embracing gritty urbanism. We may now be at a point where Chinese cinema is too diverse to define. The etymology of the generational concept—used to characterize waves of Beijing Film Academy graduates, who for years were China’s only trained filmmakers—is now obsolete in an age where digital filmmaking equipment is widely accessible. The independent scene is as prolific as ever, producing hundreds of features a year outside of state supervision, particularly in the documentary realm.

The explosive activity generated by this new technology is overturning other truisms and assumptions of Chinese cinema. The state-sponsored system was long an object of ridicule, as its lackluster product was routinely trounced by Hollywood imports, whether in Chinese theaters or the pirate DVD market. But signs of creativity and innovation are sprouting, enabled to some extent by the state film industry’s redoubled efforts to compete in the world market, whether by upgrading its CGI prowess or encouraging fresh approaches to storytelling.

Some of the most vivid examples of this diversification are on display in “Tales From the New Chinese Cinema,” a series curated by Cheng-Sim Lim and Bérénice Reynaud, that recently screened in in Los Angeles and will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image from April 29 to May 1. This video essay looks at the six films in the program, demonstrating their collective range of stylistic approaches and thematic interests by focusing solely on their opening moments. Even within these minute samplings, there’s a wealth of detail to be discovered, both cinematic and cultural. In many cases the film’s special cinematic qualities are informed by specific cultural subtexts, which this video attempts to uncover. Of course, there’s much more to be said about these films than what their opening moments can contain: for example, read Reynaud’s extensive commentary on several of these films, published in Senses of Cinema. We’ve only scratched the surface of these and many other works from today’s Chinese cinema.

———-

Notes on Slow Food: Oxhide II and the art of dumpling making

“Every festival that’s serious about the art of cinema should pledge to show Oxhide II.” That’s what David Bordwell had to say about the second feature by Chinese independent filmmaker Liu Jiayin. A follow-up to her debut family saga Oxhide, this homemade epic (shot in makeshift Cinemascope by masking the top and bottom sections of Liu’s camera lens with tape) consists of nine shots and a cast of three people (Liu and her parents), a thoroughly utilized table, and over 100 dumplings whose construction and consumption are meticulously documented. While Oxhide II enjoyed exposure at Cannes and Rotterdam, no major American fests heeded Bordwell’s call; it was the Wisconsin Film Fest (in Bordwell’s hometown of Madison) that held its U.S. premiere last April.

Oxhide II is enjoying a resurgence this spring, with one-off showings in Oregon, Los Angeles, and at the Museum of the Moving Image, thanks to the curatorial efforts of Shelly Kraicer, Cheng-Sim Lim, and Bérénice Reynaud. This video essay uses Bordwell’s notes on Oxhide II, originally published on his blog Observations on Film Art, as a script to examine the film in depth. Additionally, we’ve translated Bordwell’s analysis into Chinese to produce a bilingual commentary that alternates between spoken Mandarin with English text and spoken English with simplified Chinese text. We hope these efforts might make Bordwell’s insights more accessible to the film’s native language audience—and perhaps induce a much-needed Chinese language edition of Bordwell’s invaluable study Planet Hong Kong.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

In the lead-up to the ten-film, five-venue series “Between Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: New Chinese Cinema,” Reed Johnson in The Los Angeles Times gives a lengthy feature exploring the series and interviewing its co-curators, Cheng-Sim Lim and Berenice Reynaud.

The article introduces the series in the context of Chinese cinema history, following the Fifth and Sixth Generations of Chinese filmmakers. In contrast, the current wave of largely digital filmmaking is more numerous in quantity and diverse in approach:

“I call it this sort of flowering of many voices,” says Cheng-Sim Lim, a film scholar who co-curated “Between Disorder.” “You have this breaking up of this very unitary view of Chinese film.”

Reynaud offers additional context in the way of how these films are seen in China:  ”You have film clubs, cafes, you have also a number of websites where you can download independent video for free, [and] you have a lot of little film societies.”

The article touches on nearly every film in the series, but gives special attention to Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II:

Among the most startlingly original movies is “Oxhide II,” a sequel by the young female director Liu Jiayin to her stunning, self-financed “Oxhide I” (2004), which she shot in Cinemascope in her parents’ 50-square-meter apartment/kitchen/workshop in southern Beijing, where the family scratches out a living by making purses. Casting her real-life parents as themselves and deploying a single, stationary camera, the writer-director combines carefully choreographed body movements and seemingly incidental but actually scripted dialogue in tightly framed shots, producing a claustrophobic and harrowing, yet disarmingly humorous narrative of a family’s inner tensions.

The banal rituals of daily life take on surprising significance as Liu reveals her skill as a miniaturist master and her deep empathy toward characters struggling to break free of physical and social confines. Reynaud compares the way the “Oxhide” films unfold to the method of spreading out and reading a classical Chinese scroll painting. “What they borrow from the scroll is the absence of a vanishing point, the absence of a master gaze and, very importantly, the use of negative space,” she says.

The series begins Wednesday, April 6. More information here.

Relevant Classroom Use