Mouthpiece (dir. Guo Xizhi)

This week we are spotlighting the Reel China Documentary Biennial, which held its Fifth edition last October with a showcase of nine recent documentaries produced by independent filmmakers in China. To commemorate the event, we are posting a handful of reports by attendees of the festival.

By Christopher Campbell

Guo Xizhi’s Mouthpiece is part of the recent “vérité” tradition in Chinese documentary that continues to be partly inspired by the work of American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, known for his faux-objective “fly-on-the-wall” approach to his subject matter. However, the film’s major departure from the conventions of that detached, voyeuristic style with its seemingly invisible camera –and this appears to be true for many other observational documentaries in China right now – is in the way it includes so much acknowledgement of the camera and cameraman, breaking the “fourth wall” of what would otherwise be a strictly empirical perspective.

This actually benefits Mouthpiece thematically with regards to the documentary’s presentation of the confused and complicated concepts of the media. Constantly Guo’s camera is mistaken for or presumed to be part of or representing the news crew(s) he is documenting (they appear to employ the same kind of small DV cameras presumably used by Guo). But perhaps this is not so strange? What, after all, separates the artist’s lens from that of the television journalist’s? Very little, aesthetically. Yet, for a medium and movement that extends from and is able to work outside of the state-run propaganda machine, and which therefore tends to be thought of as a greater outlet for the independent voice, the documentary comes across as the true mouthpiece of the title.

The film lays witness primarily to the workings of the Shenzhen TV news program “First Spot,” inside and out. Guo turns his camera on the makers of the local media, showing us production meetings and fairly candid views of the long and short processes of putting together the show, but it also follows journalists on location for a peek at how they gather the stories that will later be reported on. This second aspect provides the more interesting parts of Mouthpiece, because it opens up a layered visual discourse pertaining to the question of what exactly is being documented. Is the film about the newsmakers or the news itself? Is it about how they distort the news or is it self-reflexively about how documentary can reveal such distortions while concurrently itself being potentially distorting, or at least limiting?

The duality of Guo’s lens as both window to the actions (some of which appear highly unethical) of the “First Spot” crews and window to that which these journalists are covering is quite thought provoking.  The slum dwellers and arrested teens and shop owners are foremost directly communicating to the journalists, yet they are also simultaneously being captured by the documentary.  How they will be represented to an audience, and to what audience they will be represented, is clearly different with each of the two (types of) camera lenses and ultimate (edited) visual media products. There is an intriguing amount of blurring of medium going on, though at the same time there are constant reminders of the separation of news and documentary. Civilians and police are regularly asking Guo if he is a member of the press, while employees of the “First Look” team also occasionally ask the same, only jokingly.

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

1428, Du Haibin’s primarily observational film of the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, has similar moments involving queries from onscreen subjects. One woman asks the filmmaker if he is shooting for the media or for himself. He answers that it’s the latter, but of course whether intended or not it has ended up being for international viewing (the film has played many of the world’s prominent film festivals, including Venice, where it won a major prize). The concept of personal purpose, though, is likely different to the general Chinese civilian than it is to the global audience. That woman in 1428 may never have the opportunity to see the film, or any other documentary of the sort, and so for her there are only those two distinctions. Here, on the other hand, we think of shooting for “ourselves” as being exclusively connected to home movies, which tend not to be edited into something for public show. Still, as an artist, Du is indeed shooting for himself, in that he is at the time shooting material for an expected expression, from his own perspective, of that which he and his camera have witnessed.

Another woman approaches Du’s camera assuming it and him to be “the media.” She is not corrected or at least she ignores any clarification of intent and proceeds to use the opportunity to complain about the government’s handling of its relief effort and her own personal experience with the unsatisfactory issuing of electric blankets, cooking utensils and other needed goods. For her the film becomes a mouthpiece for her criticisms, yet ironically her vocal protests might likely have been excluded in a news media report. While she thinks she is talking to the media, she perhaps is better represented by in fact unknowingly talking to the greater witness of the (festival-going) world. Then again, for much of that audience, 1428 may function more as a kind of from-a-distance disaster tourism with its consistently matter-of-fact view of the tragedy and its victims (the audience at the Reel China screening of the film, it is worth noting, seemed more emotionally responsive to the suffering of animals depicted on screen).

It is interesting that domestic forms of disaster tourism are portrayed in 1428 near the end of the film, when Du returns to the region for follow-up observance and documents the people hawking photos and other items related to the earthquake (much like what went on, and continues, in NYC after 9/11). The film does have additional purpose for international viewers, though, in that it displays angles on the tragedy that the Chinese government and media have limited in their exported acknowledgment and coverage. In this address 1428 is akin to Mouthpiece in the way it extends from what is officially recognized and communicated domestically.

Even in its apparently exhaustive documentation of the earthquake aftermath, however, there is, as is also the case with Mouthpiece, a sense we are witnessing only a peripheral and general address of subjects, situations and issues. 1428 includes the basics of post-disaster occurrences for an encapsulating yet altogether briefly concentrated and chaptered look the homelessness, physical and spiritual loss, media attention and exploitations experienced in the province at the times of filming. And 1428 is neatly formulated and tied together with recurring motifs (the constantly present tramp, or “idiot,” being the most notable) for a dramatic and poetic package that has been produced by and from one specific artistic vantage point.

At nearly two-thirds the running time of Mouthpiece, Du’s 1428 is comparatively concise, edited for greater consumption, cinematically. The three hours allotted to Mouthpiece do not really give it any more of a comprehensive truthfulness, partly because the subjects documented are still very episodic. We are taken from story to story in much the same way the news would guide us through reports on them. More time is spent on this or that story, though presumably each might in fact be focused more fully – albeit differently – on “First Spot” than in the film, but it ultimately comes off as a chronologically strung-together collection of sequences, an experiential film that likely could have just kept on going, along with the continued life and operations it observes. Maybe Mouthpiece ends when it does because it has gone through and represented the gist of all Shenzhen’s important ongoing issues? And maybe the film’s length, along with its year-later follow-up, means to remind us that neither a city’s problems nor the media’s coverage of these problems (and the problems with that coverage) ever cease? One of the main distinctions between documentary and news coverage, which is remembered thanks to Mouthpiece, is the fact that at some point the documentary does need to end.

Relevant Classroom Use

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)

This week we are spotlighting the Reel China Documentary Biennial, which held its Fifth edition last October with a showcase of nine recent documentaries produced by independent filmmakers in China. To commemorate the event, we are posting a handful of reports by attendees of the festival.

By Mirela David

Three documentaries made an impression on me at the 5^th Reel China Documentary Biennial: Du Haibin’s 1428, Ji Dan’s Spiral Staircase of Harbin and Huang Weikai’s Disorder. I will compare the three movies, taking into consideration the following aspects: how they approach everyday life, public/private spheres, reality, censorship, themes and genre.

Du Haibin’s 1428 explores the quotidian hardships of the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake: from living in ruins, trying to cook with meager means, and waiting in line to get food from the government, to discussions dealing with compensation and living in temporary housing. Ji Dan’s Spiral Staircase of Harbin examines the inner struggles of two families, surrounding their children and their personal dramas. Scenes of everyday life abound in this documentary too: house chores, cooking, eating, going to the marketplace, bargaining, worrying over money. Huang Weikai’s Disorder, on the other hand, is not  so much concerned with elements of everyday life as he is with unexpected, out of ordinary events that can take place, such as the malfunctioning of a hydrant that inundates an intersection, or  the various naked people on a bridge interrupting traffic.

The way these authors explore their found events can also be analyzed by considering the relationship between public and private spheres. Du Haibin explores public destruction in the first part of his documentary, and moves deeper into private family stories,  dramas and emotions in the latter part. Ji Dan exclusively focuses on the inner life of her characters and confines the documentary to the privacy of their home or work, with one notable exception when accompanying a woman on her way to see her husband in jail. In stark contrast to both, there’s Huang Weikai’s hallucinatory capturing of what can go terribly wrong in the public sphere.

When trying to assess how these various directors approach reality, it is imperative to reflect on technical aspects such as the camera, DV technology, censorship, and the presence or absence of a narrator.  Even though there is a pretense in documentaries to present reality, especially in such documentaries where the absence of a narrator makes it more convincing to believe one can render something more objectively, this is a mere illusion. The issue of representation is forever daunting. All directors make conscious editing choices of what to include and what to cut, and through that process they can ably modify the message of the documentary.

The Spiral Staircase of Harbin (dir. Ji Dan)

The position of the cameraman and the absence of the interviewers are particularly fascinating. In 1428 there is one instance where a person addresses the cameraman, and he answers back. Otherwise there is no contact with the cameraman. However, in Spiral Staircase of Harbin documentary you get the feeling the characters are constantly talking in a confessional mode to the camera, which has total access to their private life. In Disorder the camera is close to where the action is, where the most shocking things occur. This is enabled by the emergence of the new DV technology, which makes it accessible for any ordinary person to record on-the-spot videos. This explains the violence and the out of ordinary stories presented in this movie. The director’s craft then consists of editing the stories, as well as in his choice of depicting the story in black and white images.

Even though the various palettes of colors prompted him to opt for black/white images, they create a sense of bleakness, which make the stories even more striking. In representing reality, it appears that for Huang Weikai visual images are much more striking than words. Watching Disorder you are constantly bombarded with shocking visually suggestive images. By contrast 1428 consists of both visually shocking and interesting spontaneous dialogues and confessions. Music is also salient in 1428, and even though it was custom made I recognized the musical accompaniment of a Romanian pop song that was paradoxically in vogue in Europe and has even been taken up by Rihanna in the US. Even though most songs were meant to express feelings, the chaotic message of this song (at least the Romanian version) goes well with the mayhem in Sichuan and its circulation underscores the global circulation of music.  Similarly, dialogue and confession seem to be the most germane elements in Ji Dan’s movie.

Related to the issue of representing reality is censorship, and whether what is presented on the screen is the director’s choice, or has gone through the censor’s bureau and has been screened or “harmonized” so as not to disturb certain political sensibilities. Disorder, with the shockingly violent images of policemen dragging women and beating people on the street, would certainly be problematic; therefore I find it quite bold to make such a movie. It’s likely that 1428, would not pass censorship.. There are a couple of scenes in 1428 where the people who appear in the documentary are trying to decipher just how much they should engage in political criticism on camera, as well as detect whether this is a state documentary, in which case they can try to demand help.

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

The absence of a narrator or an omnipresent voice gives more credence to the apparent reality. The construction of the narrative is intriguing and parallels can be established between all three movies, in the choices the directors make to intertwine more stories. Ji Dan only has two stories, while the other two directors work with more stories that they interweave. Du Haibin has probably the most sophisticated technique of narrative. 1428 employs the figure of a man in rags, apparently a madman, who appears at several key moments, including at the beginning and the end of the documentary. The madman functions as a linkage between the various stories, somewhat like a narrative motif. Even though he isn’t introduced from the beginning, he will become part of a particular story told by his father. Striking is his father’s assessment that his son’s life before the earthquake was even worse than the temporary housing where they now live.

Huang Weikai also achieves a state of disarray in Disorder, as the English title of his movie suggests, by the disruptive  manner in which he arranges the hallucinating and incredible video imagines he has at his disposal. While Du Haibin shot 175 hours of footage, which he then cut, Huang had at his disposal almost 1000 hours. Both manage to capture the state of absurdity that natural or manmade disasters can create. It’s worth noting that pigs function as symbols in both Huang’s and Du’s documentaries to express this state of mayhem, whether running around to elude being sent to death or running into traffic. The idea that things aren’t going as they should be and that one has lost control over one’s life is investigated on a more psychologically charged level by Ji Dan.

What brings Ji Dan’s and Du Haibin’s documentaries closer is the prominence they assign to feeling. Du describes the process of editing 1428 as first organizing his own feelings while wanting to capture the feelings of the survivors at the same time. Ji’s Spiral Staircase of Harbin also examines the inner feelings of the teenage daughter, of the frustrated mother, as well of the disgruntled father and tired wife. Du Haibin focuses on mourning while Ji Dan focuses on melancholia. If we think of Freud’s comparison of mourning with melancholia and their shared symptoms these documentaries seem even more similar. While mourning refers to loss of loved ones as in Haibin’s movie, the object of melancholia is mostly located in the unconsciousness, since it is not clear. One could guess that the impossibility of communication could be the cause of depression for the young girl in Ji Dan’s movie, while the problems of having a husband in jail and a daughter refusing to go to college would explain the mother’s frustrated state; similar problems with a teenager out of control plague the father of another family, who also has to face a terminal illness. However, it is all left undetermined: an impossibility of communication encumbers the mothers of both families, the first one unable to speak with her daughter, the second with her husband.

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

One of the most exciting parts of these documentaries has to do with their informal engagement with the politics of ordinary people. Most often than not, the effect is comical, although some people’s political comments are staggering. In 1428 some of the people demand that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao should come and speak to the earthquake victims. The scene when an official stops over an impromptu pot in the middle of the street is quite humorous, when a man skillfully thanks the government for the help he received.  Many of the people are grumbling and questioning some of the relief efforts: thus the Moshi village priority project enrages some peasants, who protest they can’t even get a loan to build a house. Their understanding of politics is quite sophisticated, particularly with one woman who complains vehemently while at the same time making it clear she’s not arguing against the government. Sometimes they even discuss conspiracies, disputing whether the government knew about the earthquake and didn’t announce it. The answer that comes from one of the people is quite amusing: they would have saved the officials. Overall the comments are quite surprising and in line with the lively political debates you can find in any park in Chinese cities. Politics are discussed in Spiral Staircase of Harbin too, at the mother’s workplace, when her coworkers are complaining that 2008 was China’s biggest shame, since the government was not able to take measures to prevent the stock market crisis. The most comical political comments come from the father, who, while watching the Olympics, argues that China is becoming a world power. Furthermore, he adds that “Mao didn’t take on the world, but that’s what’s happening here” for an even more humorous effect.

Faith, like politics, is also explored in subversive ways. The woman’s ritual of lighting a circle of candles in the middle of the street in Spiral Staircase of Harbin is quite striking. She prays for everything from her husband in jail to her daughter passing the exam.  Meanwhile, the father’s thoughts of turning to Christianity point to a crisis in faith. The same crisis is explored by 1428, in the dialogues of the peasants who try to make sense of the tragedy. One peasant exclaims that “Buddha cannot even save himself let alone us from the disaster”. Other people mourn the loss of people as well as the destruction of Daoist and Buddhist temples.

All in all, there are palpable similarities between the three movies, in terms of genre, narrative (the lack of a single narrator; intertwined stories), their focus on sentiment and pain and a pervading chaos, as well as the often comical way people engage informally with politics, and a particular approach to issues of faith.

Mirela David is a Ph.D candidate  at NYU in Modern Chinese History with a minor in Modern Japanese History. She spent two years in China studying at Fudan University and has completed Master Programs at Bucharest University and Tubingen University in Germany in Sinology.

Relevant Classroom Use

The Bimo Records (dir. Yang Rui)

Event Date and Time:

December 17, 2010
1:30pm – 7:30pm

Location:

Department of Cinema Studies, Michelson Theater
721 Broadway, Room 648
New York, NY 10003

On the Edge of Documentary in China: The Films of Yang Rui

1:30pm – 3:00pm
Bimo Records Bimoji (2006, 91 min, English subtitles)
In the Daliang Mountains of Sichuan live the tribal Yi people. Their priests, or bimo, communicate with the spirit world on behalf of the community. Yang follows the lives of three bimo: The Spell Casting Bimo, from a clan famous for their curses and whose black magic is now forbidden by the government; The Soul Calling Bimo who cures the sick and calls to souls for help and good fortune; and thirdly, The Village Cadre Bimo, empowered by the government with religious and political status as a cadre.
Winner, Best Documentary Award in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Student Film Festival (2008), nominated for Basil Wright Film Prize in Britain Royal Anthropology Film Festival (2007), shown at Locarno, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2006)

3:00pm – 3:30pm Break

3:30pm – 5:15pm
Crossing the Mountain Fanshan (2009, 98 min, English subtitles)
Violence lurks in the forest – headhunters, bombs, riflemen — but so do games, puzzles, dances and love. “Crossing the Mountain” emerges in fragments whose young protagonists live with the ghosts of past wars. Yang spent much time over a three-year period with the Wa people on the Chinese border with Burma, collecting their stories to produce this highly unusual, experimental ethnographically inspired fiction, producing a mysterious film, full of beautiful landscapes, dreamlike silent connections, and eerily gorgeous light. Documentary, story, mythmaking and ethnography, the film is as tough in its anti-exoticizing savvy as it is captivating in its embrace of an intangible spirituality.
Shown at Hong Kong Film Festival (2009); The 40th Berlinale (2010); Vancouver International Film Festival (2010)

5:30pm – 6:30pm Q&A with the Filmmaker, Yang Rui

6:30pm – 7:30pm Reception

About the Director Yang Rui

Yang Rui was born in 1975 in Liaoning Province in northeastern China and graduated from the Journalism Department of Liaoning University in 1995. She then became a documentary director in Liaoning TV and CCTV. Yang graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 2005 with a BFA while working as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s assistant director for the productions Delamu and Go Master. She lives in Beijing.

Presented by The Department of Cinema Studies and The Center for Religion and Media

Sponsored by The Center for Media, Culture and History, China House, NYU, & with the support of the Asian Cultural Council, and the NYU Humanities Initiative

This event is free and open to the public

Relevant Classroom Use

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

This week we are spotlighting the Reel China Documentary Biennial, which held its Fifth edition last October with a showcase of nine recent documentaries produced by independent filmmakers in China. To commemorate the event, we are posting a handful of reports by attendees of the festival. Be sure to read the first report previously published, “Absurdity, Art and Life on Tape” by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Accessing the Everyday

By Carol Wang

How does one access the everyday? NYU’s Reel China Documentary Biennial offered an opportunity to consider this question through a selection of contemporary documentaries from independent Chinese filmmakers. The festival began with Du Haibin’s 1428, which documents the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in a cinéma-vérité style. Du, initially arriving on the scene in Beichuan ten days after the quake, captures the images and narratives of a region reduced to rubble. A woman talks about her lost children while doing laundry, a family searches through an empty but intact dormitory for a missing son, and men duck under a crane to grab steel rods from a building site. A young unkempt man, wearing just an ill-fitting winter army coat, ambles across the frame and gazes intently into the camera with a vacant look. There is a considerable amount of news footage available from the days and weeks immediately following the earthquake; much of it is urgent, fast-paced, and sensationalistic. 1428 offers something more understated: a slower tempo, a measure of patience which seems to demonstrate the filmmaker’s concern for his subjects. Despite the abnormalities that define the lives of these individuals, there is very little drama. Real time, when transposed onto the screen, sometimes appears excruciatingly slow.

Du returns six months later to continue filming. It’s winter now, but many are still living in makeshift tent shelters, and continue to rely on government handouts to meet their daily needs. Some, though, have attempted to make their own living—the butcher trucks slabs of meat to the lot where government distributions take place, and teenagers are hawking DVDs and photos of the Beichuan disaster zone to tourists. Du plays an unexpected role here: In response to a question from a tourist, “Is the DVD okay?,” the vendor responds, “Of course, this is the Disaster Zone. If it’s no good, you can bring it back. Look, the media is documenting this” [paraphrased]—and the vendor gestures at Du’s camera, the implication being that the camera is somehow representative of officialdom. Viewers are also implicated, because we too are watching a DVD about the disaster zone.

We see the changing of seasons, and the film’s chronicling of the passage of time is steady. The message seems to be: life goes on. A father holds his toddler daughter with one hand and a twisted steel rod with the other. Du unexpectedly shows no funerals, but a wedding. The bride and groom, seen in the back of a car, arrive at their house and attempt to enter the bridal chamber. But the door is locked, and the groom, holding the bride, attempts awkwardly to kick the door in. In another scene, farmers try to herd uncooperative pigs onto a blue truck, but are only partially successful. Du seems to be depicting the quotidian in their lives as a way of reaffirming their humanity. The tragedy is not obvious—even the rubble, which signifies ruin but can also signal remaking, is commonplace in China. Is there a difference between earthquake rubble and construction rubble, unplanned destruction and planned destruction?  Throughout 1428, the absurd, the tragic, and the mundane are represented in equal measure. Is this what constitutes the everyday?

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)

Huang Weikai offers a very different take on daily life in Disorder, a collage of disjointed, jarring snapshots that emphasize the absurdity that is characteristic of urban China today. By compiling footage from ordinary individuals who just happened to have a camera in the right place, at the right time, Huang has captured in filmic form the pathos of China’s rapid modernization. One of the opening scenes is that of an accident: a man lies prone on the ground in front of a car, and several individuals are bent over him. They are not concerned about his health, however, having already deduced that he is not hurt but playing it up to get compensation from the driver. Without explanation or voiceovers, the film cuts from one story to another and back—police conduct a raid that yields bear claws and anteaters, a family on a walk comes across an abandoned child, a man perched on a bridge demands to speak to a specific policeman about his grievance, and an archeological site is turned overnight into a private construction zone. Here, too, there are pigs running amok. They are on a highway, and in a later shot, live pigs are scampering around dead ones killed in an accident—unseen by the camera, but visible through the aftermath.

The individuals depicted here are emotional; they are furious, confused, bemused, and irritated. But as viewers, we don’t necessarily share their emotional response to the situation. We don’t even seem to share a response with other viewers. During the screening, there seemed to be a lack of consensus on how to interpret the scenes—very few garnered uniform responses from the audience, with some sitting silently as others laughed. The instability of what can be considered normal affects what we can be amused at, and what we must take seriously. The film refuses to translate China for its audiences, and this refusal can also be seen in the title(s). The film’s English title, Disorder, compels us to view the images through a certain lens, as if Huang’s point was to convey the disorderliness and incomprehensibility of these street scenes. Yet, if one considers his original Chinese title, Xianshi Shi Guoqu De Weilai (“now is future of the past”), this is not evident. Rather, what is conveyed is a sense of temporality and orderliness that is not apparent in the film. The past comes before the present, which comes before the future.

Despite this, however, Huang forgoes any attention to the continuous passage of time in the film, perhaps because there is no overarching narrative. All the footage is offered as representations of the immediate present, and even when the camera returns to a story after visiting others, it is as if no time has passed at all. The pigs are still on the highway, the man is still standing on the bridge’s handrails, and the baby continues to lie among the weeds. And since continuous time illustrates or is a marker of normalcy, the lack here contributes to the sense of the abnormal, the ridiculous, and the extraordinary. In very different ways, both 1428 and Disorder counter the prevailing narratives of modernization in China. An argument can be made that the documentary impulse in China is driven by a desire for truth and to show what the censored newscasts cannot. Du’s method is to let his subjects speak, and he dares us to listen, for as long as it takes them to tell their stories. Huang’s challenge to the viewer is of a very different order: he confronts our desire for coherence and linearity, and challenges us to redefine the normal and the everyday.

The absence of a narrative arc, and the fact that Huang did not film the footage himself, communicates a lack of investment in any of the individuals depicted. Disorder cannot demonstrate concern, as 1428 does, by hearing out laments, accusations, or stories of lost loved ones, because Huang was not present at the moment of filming.  By entering the creative process at a later stage, Huang cannot help but depict the individuals as mere symbols or representations of urbanization, rather than as people. If the impulse for consuming Chinese documentary is to learn something—to acquire information, or to better understand some previously under-explicated aspect of Chinese life, one walks away from Disorder not having learned much of anything. Instead, what Huang imparts to his audience is a mood, a feeling, and something atmospheric, which reveals much more about China than a tidy narrative ever could.

Carol Wang is a graduate student in anthropology at The New School for Social Research.

Relevant Classroom Use

Tape (dir. Li Ning)

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Published as part of Dong Week at dGenerate Films, a series of articles on Jia Zhangke and the art world in China.

Absurdity loomed large at the Reel China Documentary Biennial this year, held at New York University from October 15-17. The two film directors on hand, Huang Weikai and Du Haibin, repeatedly used “absurd” to describe the message that they wanted their films to convey. In Huang’s Disorder and Du’s 1428, this sense of absurdity is manifested acutely in their apocalyptic visions of urban Guangzhou and rural Sichuan province, respectively. It is as if in exchange for economic acceleration, China has traded its citizens’ sanity. No one can deny that in China progress is real, but it is also mindless. To quote Jean Baudrillard in his book The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, progress “picks up speed precisely in proportion to its increasing indifference to its original aims.” We can perhaps say that, though the word is derogatory in meaning, “absurdity” is indicative of China’s final arrival at the dawn of post-modernity. Perhaps no film exemplified this theme more comprehensively than Tape, contemporary avant-garde dancer Li Ning’s five year chronicle of his personal life, alternating between his struggles with two types of “family”: his oft-neglected wife, son and mother; and his enthusiastic but unstable dance troupe comprised of college students. Made amidst a massive urban renovation project performed on his hometown of Jinan, the film is a postmodernist collage of cinéma vérité-style filming of Li’s interactions with his family, direct cinema-style filming of civic incidents, such as three men holding down a woman as her store is shut down, self-reflexive confessions, scripted voice-over narration, computerized special effects, experimental mise-en-scène, dream sequences, dialectical editing, and so on. The film plays like a fever dream of the artist’s life that gradually descends into nightmare. Li’s wife and mother regularly berate him over his artistic indulgences and lack of income. By his own choice, he lets the camera infiltrate his private life with increasing invasiveness. One particularly distubring shot finds him masturbating in bed next to his sleeping son. The film as a whole plays like a chronicle of creative energy misspent, producing futile rage and self-pity. Initially the exuberant leader of his troupe, Li becomes increasingly nostalgic of the past. Past images of his naked body exercising in a playground bleed into a present image of the playground left empty.

Li Ning

Tape advances along a rough chronology. One of the very first scenes shows the swollen belly of Li’s pregnant wife’s. As the film goes on, the baby is born, and slowly grows from a toddler to a young boy. However, the film does not follow chronology strictly. Certain scenes are referred back to at different points in the film or recycled, at times puncturing the moods of neighboring sequences. For example, there is a close-up shot of Li’s face, painted like a woman, that surfaces a few times in the film. The exact purpose of this shot is open for interpretation. Another example is a shot of a dirigible floating in the sky. Though it could be that there had been several unrelated spottings of the dirigible, the shots all look the same. More likely than not, it is a symbol that Li embeds in the film for some yet-to-be defined purpose. If Tape has a climax, it would be during a performance that Li performs in a hotel lobby that in interrupted when someone films Li’s performance without his permission. Wearing a futuristic and rather kitschy silver costume, Li comes to blows with the man, despite being outnumbered, and leaves with his head bleeding. The entire act and its aftermath is captured on camera by Li’s assistant, who doesn’t waver, even when he becomes the target of attack. There are humiliating close-ups of a beaten up and dejected Li, which are left uncut. His voice-over censures himself for setting his self-expectations high but falling short of them whenever important moments arise. It’s a complex, compelling sequence that certainly taps into audience’s sympathies, but complicates them with its overt acts of self-representation. But this may not even be the lowest point in Li’s documented life: that honor may be reserved for when he stands in line anonymously with hundreds of other job applicants waiting to be interviewed. It is not hard to see that after five years of documenting his life and his art, the camera and Li grow into one organic whole. With Tape, Li can be said to be in a league of artists whose lives embody their aesthetics, and vice versa. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her self-portraits are an example. Kahlo painted her reality with an unflinching eye. She claimed that she was the only subject that she knew best to be put on canvas by herself. Therefore, she painted her marriage, her miscarriage, and her numerous operations. The same is true of Li. With utmost sincerity and honesty, Li peels his life inside and out. Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “A man is not other than a series of undertakings.” We sense Li’s existential crises in the film, but they in turn are transformed by the making of the film into a work of living art.

Li Ning performing dance (photo: Aurillac International Street Theatre Festival)

Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (1990) putatively started the Chinese documentary movement. Since then, Chinese filmmakers made documentaries about ordinary people, including Jiang Yue’s The Other Bank (1994), which follows stage director Mou Sen and Mou’s students for years after their successful play of the same name. One thing that Bumming in Beijng, The Other Bank, and Tape have in common, besides the fact that they are all independent productions, is the portrayal of the fate of artists at the center of their stories. Wu used artists because he was close to a group of artist friends. Inspired by the Japanese television program Where is My Home?, Wu experimented with this new documenting strategy, which avoided stylistic conventions and rationalist construction. Like Wu, Jiang also did not use pre-scripted voice-over narration in The Other Bank. These techniques – interviews, direct cinema, participatory research –  can be schematized and taught to other documentary filmmakers. In other words, films like Bumming in Beijing and The Other Bank can be reproduced endlessly. Tape, on the other hand, is a masterpiece because it is not reproducible at the same level as Wu’s or Jiang’s films. The personal price that one needs to pay to make an imitation of Tape is exorbitant, because it involves a near-total commitment on the part of the artist for spanning years, smashing boundaries of intimacy and decorum. The Chinese independent documentary tradition informs us of a lineage that goes back to 1980s state-produced documentaries. The very first independent documentaries were made mainly to supplement or to subvert the state rhetoric and mainstream representation of what was going on in Chinese society. The realism in these earlier works, like Luke Robinson argues in his essay “From Public to Private,” was that of social realism (as opposed to the propaganda of socialist realism). However, as Robinson argues, in their embrace of contingency or the unexpected, Chinese documentary filmmakers are slowly breaking away from social realism and shifting to personal realism. In other words, subjective and personalized documentaries are gradually supplanting “objective” documentaries. One may argue that this shift is hardly surprising because it is a byproduct of China’s progress. One thing that happens as a modernized society enters a postmodern phase is the individual’s re-questioning of his or her personal sacrifices made for the nation to make that progress. The impulse to think for oneself inevitably surfaces. As a result, personal films that foreground self-expression become popular. Instead of hearing the nation’s calling, people want to hear their own calling. For Tape, Li divulges what he knows about himself. He organizes the materials just like the way that he would organize his memories. And by organizing his memories, he can make sense of his life and his existence: he can re-examine his dreams and beliefs; he can re-experience past joy, solidarity with past friends, even pain and humiliation; he can even omit any part of his memory without any of us knowing a thing about it. Only he will know. For Tape, I think most people will admire Li for his veracity.  It is true that some of the things that Li generously presents are so personal that they are impenetrable or appalling. But what is not in doubt is the abundance with which Tape offers its uniquely aesthetic experience.

Isabella Tianzi Cai is a regular contributor to the dGenerate blog. She is a graduate student in Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

Relevant Classroom Use

Du Haibin speaks at the YMCA Chinatown in San Francisco, event co-sponsored by the S.F. Asia Society

The two-week tour of Du Haibin and 1428 across the U.S. has finally concluded. We were able to collect a few photos along the way.  We extend our deepest gratitude to all of the venues and sponsors that played host to Du Haibin and his award-winning film. Special thanks to New York University and Reel China for sponsoring Du Haibin’s first-ever visit to the U.S., which made all of his screenings and appearances possible.

Visit our events page for information on upcoming screenings.

dGenerate is already making arrangements for Chinese screenings and director appearances for the winter and spring. If you are interested in organizing an event, please contact us.

More photos from the tour after the break.

NYU Reel China discussion panel: (l. to r.) Zhu Rikun of Fanhall Films, NYU Professor of Cinema Studies and Reel China curator Zhen Zhang, NYU Professor of Cinema Studies Dan Streible, Du Haibin and Reel China translator Cindy Chen

Du Haibin speaks with Mike Fu of Columbia University's Weatherhead Institute at a screening of 1428 held at the Maysles Institute.

UC Santa Barbara Professor Michael Berry talks with Du Haibin at UCSB screening of 1428.

dGenerate Films' Kevin Lee lectures on Chinese independent films prior to a screening of 1428 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Relevant Classroom Use

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)

The Reel China @NYU Documentary Film Festival presents a sampling of the most outstanding contemporary independent documentaries produced in China. Participating filmmakers range from more experienced professional documentarians to young novices. As their disparate visions extend and overlap, we witness the persistent presence of independent cameras that, amidst the disorienting transformation in China, assures the discovery and documentation of fragments of contemporary reality that are becoming history at breakneck speed.

In addition to screenings of the best new independent documentaries from China, directors Du Haibin (1428) and Huang Weikai (Disorder) will be on hand for discussions following their screenings. 1428 and Disorder are both distributed by dGenerate Films.

5th Reel China@NYU is curated by Zhang Zhen (NYU), Angela Zito (NYU),
with Zhu Rikun (Li Xianting Film Fund) and Zhang Pingjie (REC Foundation)

Presented by the Center for Religion and Media and The Department of Cinema Studies

Sponsored by the Center for Media, Culture and History and China House, NYU.
Support for this event was received from the Asian Cultural Council.

A full list of screenings and events after the break.

***
All screenings and discussions take place in the Cinema Studies Department, Tisch School of the Arts, Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th floor
Free and open to the public

Friday, Oct. 15, 2 pm
1428 (2008, 117 min)
Directed by Du Haibin

The Great Sichuan Earthquake rocked China on May 12, 2008 at 14:28 in the
afternoon, leaving more than 69,000 people dead and 15 million displaced. Ten days later, celebrated filmmaker Du Haibin arrived in Beichuan, the hardest-hit town, and began filming this remarkable documentary, capturing the stunned reactions of the villagers, the horrific damage to homes and livelihoods, and the torments that official media coverage overlooked.

Q&A with the director after the film

Friday, Oct. 15, 7 pm
A Love Song, Maybe (2010, 114 min)
Directed by Zhang Zanbo

A waitress becomes involved in a relationship with a customer who comes to her for pleasure and escape. Their relationship, however, is plagued from the very beginning by lies, desire, impetuosity, confusion and pain. Shot among friends, the film creates an atmosphere of intimacy that alternates every day domestic life with the intensely emotional world of karaoke.

Saturday Oct. 16, 9:30 am
Fortune Teller (2010, 180 min)
Directed by Xu Tong

Li Baicheng makes a living by telling the fortunes of prostitutes and others in the demimonde of salons and massage parlors. In his forties, he met Pearl Shi, a woman cruelly mistreated at home because of her disability. He decided to leave their hometown, taking her with him to the countryside of northern China. But now a bitterly cold winter combines with a campaign against prostitution to send the couple back to their hometown. Spring is coming; they take to the road once more and travel to a fair where they wait for their luck to turn. A fascinating look at how people still find meaning in old traditions of divination in their fast-paced urban lives.

Saturday Oct. 16, 2 pm
Spiral Staircases of Harbin (2008, 109 min)
Directed by Ji Dan

On a hill in Harbin, in China’s Heilongjiang Province — the director’s hometown — a girl neglects her exam preparation in favor of drawing pictures. Her mother wants her to study. Below, a couple is unable to talk with their son who is always playing with his friends. The emotional lives of these powerless parents play out against the atmosphere of an unforgiving modern urban society.

Saturday Oct. 16, 3:50 pm
Disorder (2009, 58 min)
Directed by Huang Weikai

The faster Chinese urbanization advances, the stranger peoples’ behaviors and moral standards become. Disorder combines more than twenty street scenes into a collage, revealing absurd facets of Guangzhou’s urban life, giving us an experimental film about the city, in the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Camera.

5:00 pm Panel discussion with directors, curators and scholars

Saturday Oct. 16, 7:30 pm
Lao Ma Moved (2009, 163 min)
Directed by Zha Xiaoyuan

Rug-weaver Lao Ma and his family live in a remote village at Haiyuan County, Xi Haigu District, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Rug weaving is a profession closely tied to traditional craft, but economic difficulties ensue as weavers’ families wrestle with marriage, childbirth, water shortages that ruin farming, and the hard fact of needing to travel away for work. The film reflects the poor living conditions of the Hui Muslim peasants in this mountain area.

Sunday Oct. 17, 10 am
Wind, Flowers, Snow, Moon (2008, 100 min)
Directed by Yang Jianjun

In a small village in the northwest of Sichuan province, Mr. Yang, a ninety year-old grandfather, is the ninth-generation successor in a family of fengshuiexperts. They preside over funerals for the village. The documentary focuses on intimacy with life-and-death and the tragedy of how “the young perish, while the old linger”. Sons and daughters wrangle over funeral expenses; an affectionate couple dies, one after another. Yang’s family celebrates the birth of his great-grandchildren while simultaneously burying a son who has died of cancer.

Sunday Oct. 17, 1 pm
Mouthpiece (2009, 197 min)
Directed by Guo Xizhi

This unusual film takes us into the everyday life of a media organization in the southern city of Shenzhen. It unfolds in two parallel spaces: the Shenzhen TV news program “First Spot” and the city itself. At the TV station we see work routines of meetings, article writing, worry over viewing rates and market share, even lunch time napping. Out in the city, “the mouthpiece” news organ crews walk the energetic streets, recording people delivering their misfortunes to the camera while houses of immigrants are destroyed with thundering explosions.

Sunday Oct. 17, 6 pm
Tape (2010, 175 min)
Directed by Li Ning

Director Li Ning writes: “After many years, my research into the use of tape reached a point of obsession and madness. It was the focus of my entire life at home and on stage. It preoccupied my thoughts and my work. In China, a land of magical illusions, what I am doing is destined to become ridiculous and absurd. Through encounters with major events in many countries and my own extreme behavior in and out of performance installations, I have finally married reality and surreal art into a seamless realm. But in the end, I have become just another photo pasted on an employment form, forced to function in society as part of the machine.” This ongoing work appears in its latest cut in Reel China, part of a nascent experimental trend in independent documentary in China.

Event staff support: Jeff Richardson, Ann Neumann
Thanks to: Barbara Abrash, Richard Allen, Faye Ginsburg, and Antonia Lant

Relevant Classroom Use

Petition (dir. Zhao Liang)

In the recent Top Ten Chinese Films of the 2000s poll, one of the top-ranked documentaries was Zhao Liang’s Petition: The Court of the Complainants. A pretty impressive showing, given that the film was just released last year and has been seen by relatively few people, even in Chinese cinema circles. Tonight folks in Minneapolis will have a chance to see what some are calling the most exciting Chinese documentary since West of the Tracks.

Zhao Liang will be visiting the Walker Art Center this weekend to present his films Petition and Crime and Punishment. Then he will visit the East Cost to present his work at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, the Harvard Film Archive, the China Institute in New York, and the Center of Religion and Media at New York University.

Information on his films and a full schedule of his programs after the break.

“Zhao Liang has endurance, an endurance that he shares with many of those who appear in his documentary films. The individual stories of the underprivileged are what interest him, and he makes this a starting point for his exploration of the general constitution of Chinese society. Zhao captures those sides of life that are ignored by official politics and, in so doing, acts as a chronicler of everyday life. Futility, running idle, stubbornness, and stamina are motifs shared by all of his films, while the dramatic consequences of the rapid economic and structural transformation in China constitute the continuous backdrop to his work.” (Quoted from the catalogue of the 2008 Berlin Biennial)

Crime and Punishment (dir. Zhao Liang)

Crime and Punishment

Shot near the director’s hometown at China’s border to North Korea, Crime and Punishment follows a few young officers at the local police station as they carry out their law enforcement duties and features cases too insignificant and absurd to be reported in the media: A mentally ill man calls them for a “corpse” he has found in his bed which turns out to be a pile of blankets. An apparently mute robbery suspect would not provide them with the needed confession. The long and penetrating shots of the director gradually uncover the real human stories and key themes from a China that is both regimented and rapacious. This witty picture, whose comedy often has a chilly edge, provides us with an insight into how the social structure is influenced by the omnipresence of police. The film was the winner of the Best Director Award at the 10th One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and the top prize at the Festival of Three Continents, 2007. In Mandarin with English subtitles, 122 minutes.

Saturday, January 30, 7:30 pm – Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Wednesday, February 3, 7:00 pm – Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

Friday, February 5, 8:00 pm – The China Institute, New York City

Petition: the Court of Complainants

Since 1996, Zhao has filmed the “petitioners” who come to Beijing from all over China to file complaints about abuses and injustices committed by the authorities. He follows the sagas of peasants thrown off their land, workers from liquidated factories, and homeowners who have seen their dwellings demolished but received no compensation. Often living in makeshift shelters around the southern railway station, the complainants wait months or even years for justice and face brutal intimidation. Filmed up to the start of the 2008 Olympic Games, Petition arrestingly illustrates the contradictions of a country experiencing powerful economic expansion. Premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. 2009, in Mandarin with English subtitles, video, 120 minutes.

Friday, January 29, 7:00 pm – Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Monday, February 1, 7:00 pm – Harvard Film Archive

Saturday, February 6, 1:00pm – The Center for Religion & Media, New York University

Relevant Classroom Use