The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (authors Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, Lisa Rofel)

A new book by three eminent China scholars is out – The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record edited by Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel. Peter Monaghan has a full report for Moving Image Archive News.

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Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town is about alienation and distance, about aimless wanderers and broken hearts, yet it is shot with the tenderness of a root-seeking journey. In this three-hour documentary, the meditative rhythm parallels the pace of life depicted. The scale of screen time embodies the scale of lost history the film tries to capture through extraordinary visual sensitivity.

Life in Zhiziluo Village lingers between an irretrievably lost past and an unfulfilled promise of a future. In Part One, “Voices,” local Christian pastors, a father and a son, preach the doctrines learned from American missionaries back in the pre-revolutionary age, and parse the Old Testament for laws to follow in daily life. Their devotion and calmness, however, can hardly conceal the father’s traumatic memory of twenty years of prison for faith and the growing estrangement between the two generations.

In Part Two, “Recollections,” various people are forced to leave their homeland for unknown destinations: young men look for jobs in the city; young women are swindled or sold into marriages in afar provinces; a middle-aged divorcee faces the perspective of losing his homestead due to the government’s development plan. For them, life in the village will soon become mere recollections.

Part Three, “Innocence” portrays the seemingly carefree life of a 12-year old boy, abandoned by his family and catching wild birds for food. When he and other local youngsters perform a Lisu fire exorcism near the end of the film, we return to the age-old ghost worship mentioned by the elder pastor at the beginning. Life forms a circle. Progress and future, as embodied by the huge statue of Mao overlooking the town from a deserted former county hall, seem to have forsaken the land.

What distinguishes the film from other contemporary Chinese films about abandonment and oblivion is its scrupulous attention to details and the meaning and dignity it endows these details. In nightmarish case studies like Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2002) or apocalyptic fables like Ying Liang’s The Other Half (2006), homeland becomes wasteland. The characters, through their daily frustration and doomed attempts at escape or change, manifest the barren urban landscapes. Ghost Town, on the other hand, regularly punctuates the portraits of anguish and anger with calmly observed and compassionately recorded daily routine and toil. Through Zhao’s humanistic, observational camera, cooking, lighting the fire, feeding chicken, hard travels along the winding mountain roads, even animal slaughter on the streets, all acquire the same ritualistic sanctity as the Christian sermons and the Christmas banquet that are at the center of the village’s spiritual life, and the source of its hope.

Rituals and customs of remote, minority regions have long been a fascination of Chinese Han artists. Feature films like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s On the Hunting Ground (1985), set in Mongolia, and Horse Thief (1986), set in Tibet, and documentaries like Duan Jinchuan’s Tibet trilogy, all feature rituals as a basic form of existence for the local people. Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain (1990) also uses the protagonist’s trip along the border of Sichuan and Tibet and among minorities such as Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples to embody “one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom” (Mabel Lee, in her introduction to the English translation of the novel). In his essay “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Post-socialism,” Chris Berry analyzes the paradoxical status of these regions and peoples as some kind of “others” within China, which enables the filmmakers to “express the sense of alienation and distance from their own culture felt by many educated Chinese amid the disillusionment of the post-Mao era.”

In a later essay “2005: The Power and Pain of the New Documentary Movement,” Lu Xinyu decodes the revived allegorical meaning of rural and minority regions in the digital-generation documentaries. In her example of Sun Yueling’s The Book of Winds (Feng Jing), the filmmaker follows a Tibetan Buddhist lama and his two students on a pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kawakarpo, and treats their simple joy and devotion as a counterpoint to life in globalized civilization. Lu notes:

As the city and modernization no longer nourishes utopia, but only symbolizes its disillusionment, nostalgia (for the rural roots—as the Chinese term implies inherently) becomes a refusal of, and reflection on, modernization. The result is not only a continuation of the exploration in the 1980s, but also a homage to the dignity and value of the people living and suffering in today’s countryside.

Ghost Town is a highly aestheticized exploration of this tradition. Zhiziluo Village is also a special witness of the gravity of China’s urbanization and modernization. As Mr. Zhao mentioned in the Q&A after the NYFF screening, the village, originally occupied by the Lisu and Nu minorities, is an abandoned county seat from the Mao era. Now only the local peasants were left behind on the urbanized wasteland. The film contrasts the effortless beauty of the rural landscape with the dilapidated three-storied buildings and the desolate streets. Often kept at a distance, nature not only serves as a backdrop to human suffering and dignity at the foreground, but locates the people on the land.

Against this backdrop, the meticulously recorded religious and folk ceremonies and the daily rituals become substitutes for the lost roots and severed links to the soil, tradition and ancestry that would endow life with meaning. One of the most memorable rituals in the film is a rustic, religious funeral on top of the mountain. Starting with a striking image of a young man carrying a wooden cross climbing the mountain, the funeral merges a gospel chorus with the local tradition of chanting lamentation. When the ritual ends with a body buried and a new tomb sealed, the question about root and meaning is directed to us, the living.

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National East Wind Farm, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Two themes are central to the fifteen documentaries: forgotten or suppressed history and marginal, dispossessed social groups. In the first category, Hu Jie is a pioneering documentarian, who in recent years has engaged in making video works about the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), two forbidden topics in modern Chinese history. His National East Wind Farm (Guo ying dong feng nong chang, 2008) examines the experience of hundreds of “Rightists”–former teachers, cadres, university students, and military officials who were persecuted for answering the Party’s call to voice their criticisms—incarcerated on a “thought reform through labor” farm in Mile County, Yunnan Province of southwest China. The neutral term “national farm” is official history’s euphemism for gulag. Based on interviews with former inmates and staffs of the farm, the film re-examines the absurd history from the Great Leap Forward period through the Cultural Revolution, as well as the sufferings of the bodies and souls subjugated to “remolding.”

Hu’s other work In Search for the Soul of Lin Zhao (Xun zhao Lin Zhao de ling hun, 2005) investigates an unresolved and suppressed case in modern Chinese history of thought. Lin Zhao, a student of Beijing University unique in her keen observation of social problems and courageous expression of her opinion, was persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Movement and executed in 1968. Treating her as a pioneer pursuer of civil rights and freedom of expression, the “Director’s Statement” calls for a re-examination of her legacy against the contemporary need to improve democracy and reassert human rights.

Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu, 2006, Hu Jie), tries to reexamine the Cultural Revolution from the sufferings of Ms. Bian Zhongyun, an ordinary high school deputy principal in Beijing who was beaten to death by her students. The film investigates into the fact that educators were the first and most heavily persecuted group during the period, but their sufferings were largely ignored by official media. Hu reveals the reason of this negligence in the “Director’s Statement”: “The huge amount of casualties among ordinary citizens would change the overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, together with the analysis of the movement’s nature, therefore leading to a deepened research on the responsibility of the Cultural Revolution.” The film is a challenge to the thin line in law and media concerning historical accounts.

Looking for the Lost Veterans of 1979 (Xun zhao 79 yue zhan xiao shi de lao bing, 2008, Zhang Dali) focuses on another ignored social group from a forgotten historical event—the veterans from the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. As the war became out of context, the veterans found themselves deserted by the economical reform and social reconstruction in the past thirty years. From the veterans’ recounts about the glory and brutality of war and their changed experience thereafter, the film asks the question about the affect of war and social changes on common soldiers and citizens.

Many documentaries about more recent history focus on a unique phenomenon among contemporary China’s rapid and sometimes aimless changes—demolition. Artists of Yuan Ming Yuan (Yuan ming yuan de yi shu jia men, 1995, Hu Jie) and Farewell, Yuan Ming Yuan (Gao bie yuan ming yuan, 2006, Zhao Liang) are two direct records of the same event: the forced demolition of the avant-garde artist community around Yuan Ming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) in western suburb of Beijing, and the “last spring” of the artists.

Before The Flood, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Before the Flood (Yan mo, 2005, Li Yifan and Yan Yu), winner of the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, can be seen as a documentary version of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. For almost the whole year of 2002, the two filmmakers recorded how the two thousand-year-old town of Fengjie was devastated, its residents displaced, to prepare for its eventual flooding for the Three Gorges hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River. The film combines panoramic overviews and detailed observation of individual sufferings and endurance. The “Director’s Statement” calls it an allegorical work: “It focuses on individuals and objects under specific circumstances, and, through their changes and struggles, tries to open a window about this age.”

Two films focus on the 5.12 Earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, and investigate into, from different perspectives, the hidden or unseen reality behind the catastrophe. Who Killed Our Children (Hai zi hai zi, 2008, Pan Jianlin) investigates the death of hundreds of students at Muyu Village Middle School in Qingchuan county, and from this small angle examines the most shocking and heartbreaking fact about the earthquake: the high casualties of students due to the shoddy constructions of elementary, secondary, and nursery schools. As the responsibility concerning the students’ death and the accurate statistics of the causality has become a major source of unresolved conflict between the government and victims’ parents, Pan’s film is a case study of this conflict as well as a response to the problem’s call for independent report.

Red White (Zhong sheng, 2009, Chen Xinzhong), was named after a heavily devastated county, and presents local people’s material and emotional response to the catastrophe through the many mundane details of everyday life: food and shelter, conversations and quarrels, new year celebration, funerals, and religious ceremonies. At the center of the film is the activity of a Taoist master, who serves as fortuneteller, feng shui master, and source of help for many other material and emotional problems. From this unique angle, the film humanizes the survivors and ponders on human need for faith and divinity after trauma. In a review of the 2009 Beijing International Film Festival, Ying Liang, another director from Sichuan, highly praises the film for its withdrawal of moral judgment and its vivid capture of the uncanniness surrounding the landscape.

The relationship between the individual and the state machine is the explicit theme of many films about contemporary issues. Old Mom’s Pork Feet Stew (Lao ma ti hua, 2009) by controversial artist Ai Weiwei is the most recent work in the list and the filmmaker’s direct tribute to the 60^th anniversary celebration. This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other human rights activists of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) and their later frustrating struggle with the authorities.

Petition, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Petition (Shang fang, 2009, Zhao Liang) presents a broader and “stranger than fiction” view of ordinary citizens’ struggle for judicial justice. Its protagonists—the people appealing to the high authorities in Beijing for their wrongs unresolved through local channels—are victims of and fighters against the defects of China’s legal and governmental system (according to the sociologist Yu Jianrong). Zhao’s film followed and recorded the struggles and sufferings of the “petitioners” on the margin of Beijing for an amazing 12 years, from 1996 to 2008. Divided into three chapters—”Petition Village”, “Mother and Daughter”, “Beijing Southern Railway Station”—the film combines group portraits and individual depictions. In an interview, Zhao Liang describes his working attitude as “gracious presentation.” The graciousness is especially represented in his attention to and compassion for individual lives and sufferings.

Hu Jie’s Rural Mountain (Yuan shan, 1995) is another compassionate and dignifying portrait of the dispossessed. It records the work and life of one of the most exploded group in contemporary China: the coal miners in some private and often illegal mines on the high plateau of the underdeveloped Qinghai Province. More than a protest against grave social problems—the primitive and dangerous working condition, the merciless mine owners and irresponsible local government, and the appalling poverty behind the workers’ choice, the film is an honest document about labor and life. The “Director’s Statement” expressly stated the film’s aspiration in locating the characters in human history: “[The hard labor] reflects the perseverance and dignity of the working class, and forms a segment of the history toward human civilization that we should never forget.”

Rural Mountain, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Other films present overviews of the sixty years. 60 (2009, Zhang Ming) is part of the oral history project “They Say,” a compilation of interviews with ordinary citizens about their experience in historical and political turmoil in some forgotten historical periods. The protagonist, Wang Kang, is a contemporary to the P.R.C. His sixty years of life witnesses the growth of the republic, the various political movements, and the endless darkness and poverty. The series explores the questions about our responsibility to the often bitter, absurd, and already forgotten past, and the functions of film in the reservation and reconstruction of memory.

Ms. Hong (Hong jie, 2009, Zhang Gong) portrays the experience of the Red Guards generation. Ms. Hong was the filmmaker’s neighbor, whose turbulent life is common to ordinary citizens in a stormy society. Notably, the film is an animation. As one of the three animation shorts, together with Mist (Mi wu, Zhang Xiaotao) and Idol (Ou xiang, Chen Xuegang), to open the 2009 Beijing Independent Film Festival, it indicates a new direction for Chinese independent films.

West of the Tracks, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

The last film on the list, West of the Tracks (Tie xi qu, 2003, Wang Bing), is a climactic work of Chinese independent documentary filmmaking, and a master combination of panoramic view and closely-observed details. The nine-hour film is a comprehensive record of the heavy industry district in northeast China through the difficult years brought by the huge and cruel transformation of the nation from a planned to market economy. Its three chapters—”Rust”, “Remnants”, and “Rails”—focus on industrial work, youth and family life, and individual emotions respectively, and also respectively treat the social problems of bankruptcy and unemployment, demolition of old neighborhoods, and the lives on the margins of the city and of modern industry. Just like Before the Flood and Red White, the daily details recorded in the film also shockingly reveal piles of ruins. In “West of the Tracks and the New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China,” Lu Xinyu uses the image of ruins as an allegory for the loss of utopia among the huge historical and social changes in today’s China. The new documentary movement, for her, arises from and responds to the ruins. She claims, “The destiny of ‘art’ in contemporary China is to reestablish the connection between art and the people that humbly but stubbornly live on the land, to search for justification for the existence and emotion of these people.”  West of the Tracks is an artist’s response to this destiny, which is also the destiny of the more and more records of unsanctioned memories.

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Lu Xinyu (photo courtesy of UCLA International Institute)

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

Selected Publications by Lu Xinyu:

Books:

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

Papers and Articles:

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

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

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

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dGF:  What projects are you currently working on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Harvard screenings were anchored by a panel session, chaired by Harvard professor Eileen Chow, that offered three distinct takes on the burgeoning indie documentary scene in China.  Lu Xinyu of Fudan University examined what she dubs the “First Generation” of Chinese documentarians, describing their chief characteristics and principles:  an emphasis on social observation executed via direct cinema practices, and a rejection of the mainstream practice of idealization in representation.  Lu noted an emerging “Second Generation” of documentarians whose works reflect an increasingly subjective and self-reflexive approach.

Zhu Rikun offered his own historical account of the explosive production of Chinese docs over this decade, commenting specifically on how affluent members of Beijing’s art scene (such as Li Xianting, who funds both festivals programmed by Zhu) became invested in supporting documentaries. Zhu observed that Beijing artists and art patrons were concerned that an increasingly commercialized contemporary art scene was growing disconnected from China’s reality. They felt the need to bolster the connection between art and society, and found documentary as their ideal medium for this endeavor. Zhu also remarked on how the availability of digital video and editing equipment accelerated the documentary movement at every step, from production to distribution; and how the internet helped organize of a critically engaged audience across the country, giving rise to an independent film festival circuit that has become increasingly visible and vital over a remarkably short period.

Markus Nornes, professor of Asian Film and Video at Michigan and currently visiting scholar at Harvard, offered a provocative presentation titled “Demolition, Christianity, and the Slaughter of Animals Great and Small.” The title reflected his paper’s overall concern with thematic and formalistic conventions emerging among Chinese documentaries. At the same time Nornes acknowledged the vitality of the documentary circuit, specifically in venues like YunFest where local film projects and exhibitions have engaged their communities, reflecting the potential of these festivals to reflect the heterogeneity of China’s culture.  His talk concluded with concerns over the future of the independent spirit of Chinese documentary filmmaking as the genre matures under the auspices of industrialization and professionalism.

As for the films in the program, the ones I managed to catch were uniformly outstanding, and having three of the directors present greatly enhanced the experience.  Xu Xin‘s two films reflect a fascination with cultural practices in danger of extinction, whose practictioners are seemingly out of step with their times and surroundings.  Torch Troupes follows a traditional Sichuan opera singer as his troupe struggles to get by, while Fangshan Church depicts a Jiangsu congregation of mostly elderly Christians. Wang Wo’s experimental documentaries Outside and Noise take the direct cinema approach to the realm of avant gardism, immersing the viewer in a non-narrative, highly sensory experience of urban China in its visual and aural splendor.  Zhao Xun‘s Two Seasons, which recently premiered at YunFest, was a true crowd-pleaser, depicting the rigid, at times absurdly comic social dynamics that govern a middle school in Hubei.

The series also included Feng Yan‘s Bing Ai (sort of a feminist version of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life), Zhao Liang‘s Crime and Punishment, a remarkable documentary on police interrogation tactics, and Zhao Dayong‘s Ghost Town, a devastating three-part chronicle of an existence in utter poverty in a remote southwestern mountain town.

Kudos to J.P. Sniadecki, Ying Qian and Jie Li at Harvard for assembling an impressive program.

Emergent Visions: Independent Documentaries from China was co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard East Asia Society, the department of Visual and Entertainment Studies, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts.

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