Li Ning, director of Tape

Tape, a highly experimental documentary by performance artist, dancer and filmmaker Li Ning, made its European premiere last January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Since then it has screened at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight and won the Silver Award at the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Exhibitions, aka YunFest. The film makes its West Coast premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this Thursday April 7 as part of the series “Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries.”

The dGenerate catalog describes Tape as follows:

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI.

dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee interviewed Li Ning at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The following is a transcript of the interview. Translation by Amy Yiran Xu and Isabella Tianzi Cai.

dGF: You were originally a dancer, sculptor and performance artist for many years. How did you begin to make videos? Tape was originally a dance performance piece. At what time did you decide to make Tape as a video?

Li Ning: It began in 2000. I owned a DV camera then. I used it to document my performances, with my troupe, and also our training. It started simple, and I didn’t expect myself to make a documentary. Kevin knows this, I feel strongly about Jinan. I have been seeing certain scenery and objects there for over 30 years. They have left a mark in my heart and in my head. I used this crappy camera and made my first film. It was an amateurish film, which was completed 10 years ago and lasted a little over 40 minutes. In my opinion, it was closely related to Tape. And at a deeper level it shares the same things with those in Tape, such as our human condition, our changing cityscape, the choices that each human being faces.

dGF: This concept of “tape,” how did you come up with the idea of it?

Li Ning: It started in 2002. One day while I was taking a nap, I spotted a spider climbing down my window panel. I hallucinated. I thought I saw it extruding tape, which was actually its silk, from its body. The tape looked sticky, thin, and shiny. And I wondered, what if one day we could witness interpersonal relationship as it manifested itself in the form of tape, instead of something invisible? What if some day if we can actually see someone chasing another person, sabotaging another person, or loving another person? Instead of apprehending such things through imagination? That was my idea then. In 2005, I formally started the project.

dGF: And at what point did you decide that you needed to film your family?

Li Ning: In 2005, my wife was pregnant. I wanted to make some home video about it then, and it was not intended for the actually film. At the time, I filmed everything around me without any intents or purposes. It was totally random. Well, some were in fact documents of my dance troupe since some footage showed the troupe members training and their gradual changes over time. Some were of my mother, who was getting old. I only wanted to document her so that I would not regret not doing it in the future. My intentions were simplistic. I find that once I intend what I film to be a documentary, it immediately gets pretentious and practical, though still enjoyable as a film. Put it another way, such kind of art becomes rootless; it loses its roots while still showing off its fruits.

dGF: At what point did this become a difficulty? At what point did it become a problem between your mother, your wife, and yourself? In the film, sometimes they object being filmed. How did you maintain your shooting even though they were not comfortable?

Li Ning: Yesterday someone asked me something similar; it was about whether I was being harmful to my family. Fiction film directors do not have this problem because they are free to avoid it. Documentary directors cannot. I think of documentary filmmakers as people who put themselves on an altar as if they are to be sacrificed. And when they sacrifice themselves, they also sacrifice those around them like their family and friends. I think that if documentary filmmakers aren’t able to make the sacrifice, then they can’t make documentaries, unless they feel comfortable filming someone drowning while standing offshore with their cameras.

If, however, they want to film something in which they are involved, then they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves. I don’t see this psychological determination as a moral dilemma because otherwise this kind of documentary can’t be made. If someone has a video camera in hand, then it’s obligatory for him or her to show the truth – this is how I see it.

I have had many internal conflicts with myself. It is cruel for me to decide to exhibit my personal experience in public, especially my bleeding experience. However, I have been filming myself for years. I think I have been rendered numb by the constant exposure. For example, initially I could not lay my eyes on the footage of me being beaten up, but the more I watched it, the more I wanted to laugh at myself. I even thought amusingly that those thugs could hit me harder.

When I look what I film, I forget that I am still part of my family. I feel that my existence is that of a video camera. Of course, I am still a human being with rich human emotions. I love my child and I love my mother very much. I had conflicts with my wife, but we were not foes. In Tape, I inserted footage of us strolling in a park. I showed it to her. It was to restore the previous damage done to her image. And it also made me feel easier.

dGF: I want to talk about some of the projects that are in the film. There is one scene where you take off all his clothes and starts climbing a construction site, and another scene where you also take off all his clothes and dives into an icy river, and all the other activities involving your troupe performing on highways, public sidewalks and demolition sites. How did you get the idea of doing these crazy projects?

Li Ning: To me, these projects are not crazy; they are ordinary. On the contrary, seeing people carrying their briefcases and following whatever they are told to do by the state is crazy. They have lost themselves. This is why sometimes I expose my body or do things that will prove my existence; these endeavors have a calming effect on me.

During the execution of these projects, the results were often quite unpredictable no matter how planned each step along the way was. And interestingly, the more uncustomary the planned course of action was, the more likely we were to feel our existence during the process.

I never want to harm anyone by doing whatever it is. That is why lots of details need to be taken care of. For example, we did not want to jeopardize drivers when we threw fake money on the road. We specifically avoided money that looked like real Chinese banknotes and used US dollars and spirit money instead. Accidents might occur if drivers got distracted by what we were doing. I value life a lot.

I like doing bizarre things, but my bottom line is that I will never harm others’ lives. I may harm myself though.

dGF: This movie takes a very difficult and challenging exploration of your relationships with people because there were a lot of secrets and private things involved, not just about your life but also about others, such as sexual relationships, family arguments, incidents which might embarrass most people. How do you make the decision to keep those things in the video, especially when it may involve the intimate details of others?

Li Ning: I don’t think that I have exposed too much about sex. I deliberately left space for audience to imagine things. Performances involving me being naked all took place in public space. I don’t think that I used naked bodies as a way to depict sex in Tape. In Tape, I made love with my comforter, not with a female body, not with my wife, not with any real person. I wanted to protect real people, and I wanted to give viewers space for imagination. Most people do not have a problem imagining sex when they are not showed it explicitly.

As for my relationship with my family, I have given the answer in my reply to the previous question. I try to be honest in depicting my relationship with them. I try not to contemplate whether I have indeed harmed them in the end. It is not the same as avoidance because my child will see this film when he grows up, and my wife will see it too. People who have seen this film told me that I had courage, but I know that I was just being bullheaded. I think that real courage will be shown when I answer to my child and my family members about the film many years from now.

dGF: How many in the movie have actually watched the final movie?

Li Ning: My family has watched bits and pieces. Other characters in the film have not seen it. Members of my dance troupe have all seen it.

dGF: So in some ways, your dance group is closer to you than your family.

Li Ning: Yes, I agree. This is the case for these years. I feel closer to them these years.

dGF: Can you say how your family and your dance group reacted when they saw the movie?

Li Ning: My mother called me one day and asked me to go over to her place – we lived in separated homes then. She told me that she watched some discs that I left in a drawer at her place. She asked me what I was doing with them because they were about our private life, some of which involved tense moments between her and me. I placated her by telling her that film was not intended to taken seriously as reality.

Before I came here, my wife and I were in some bad terms again. I was in a bad mood when I left. When I was in Beijing, just moments before I was about to board the plane, my mother called. She said she was afraid to call me. The cellphone she had was the one I used in Tape. The cellphone had always been left on, but it was off that day and she turned it on. She saw the greeting message on it, which was my will. She was scared by it and thought that I wasn’t coming back. I felt terribly sorry for my mother then. She is in her golden years yet she has to constantly worry about her adult son because he makes troubles all the time.

I joked about the will and told her that the phone was a piece of prop for my film and the message was part of a screenplay, I only left it on my phone because I was afraid that I might forget it. After she heard me saying so, she dropped her worries, asked me to be careful and not to think too much. She told me if I could, try not to get a divorce because a broken family would not be good for my child. I lied. I consoled her and told her not to worry.

As for the members of my dance troupe, they felt old when they were watching the film. They are still young, but it has been four or five years for them by now. They felt they had changed so much during this time. Some actually told me that they felt stupid about what they had done with me for the past four to five years. They realized that it was more important to go with the flow rather than try to change he status quo. But I consider myself going with the flow.

Wu Wenguang commented that my art was like an insurrection by the corporeal against the machine. I thought otherwise. I think I want to express struggle, which is instinctual, and it is different from rebel, which requires the faculty of reasoning.

dGF: Since you were talking about you mother, and you mention you lied to her, there is this issue of fiction and performance. Even though this film is documentary and trying to explore the honesty and truth of his life, there are still performances and you said some scenes are staged. How can you resolve the relationship between trying to achieve truth for your but also lying to his family and friends using fictional explanations?

Li Ning: I think I have given some answers in the previous questions. I consider myself a sacrifice, so I am psychologically prepared and anxiety-free. I want to continue doing what I have done, but I also apologize to people. Once I have set my mind to making this film, I can only keep doing it, and nothing could stop me.

There is a scene where I dived into an frozen river in Tape. All I wanted to achieve in that scene was to capture a human face beneath the ice of a frozen river. I needed to have this image for my film, and I did it without thinking about the consequences. If I had not had this image, I would not have been able to sleep, so it was better for me just to get it done. I had thought about this image for over a month before I finally filmed it. This is probably considered irresponsible and crazy. But like a poet, when he or she creates poetry, or art, he or she is prepared to sacrifice him or herself.

Even if you are not prepared to sacrifice yourself, someone else will. And when you do, you do not regret. I think I have found my place at Rotterdam. Few people have actually come to see my film, and it is not a big hit, but I know I’m presenting something truthful to the world. My point is that what’s real and true isn’t always recognized and accepted by most people, but it is beautiful. Maybe it is like soap bubbles and breaks easily, but for me, fleeting beauty is worth pursuing.

Relevant Classroom Use

Xu Tong, Shelly Kraicer and Tang Xiaoyan at screening of Fortune Teller at Rotterdam (photo courtesy of Xu Tong)

This year’s Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR) offered a slice of the best of Chinese indie, experimental, and near-indie cinema. Provocative films as usual, and some very special guests; more on that in a moment. Notable 2010 features like Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation (Hanjia), Zhao Dayong’s The High Life (Xunhuan zuole), and Li Ruijun’s Old Donkey (Lao Lütou) were accompanied by one premiere: Black Blood (Hei xue), by Zhang Miaoyan, a brooding blood-transfusion AIDs drama whose gloomy predictability was vitiated by its strikingly monumentalist-minimalist photography. The Piano in a Factory (Gangde qin) married the quirky independent sensibility of director Zhang Meng with a modulated, elegiac tone that was mild enough for the China Film Bureau to condone. Li Ning brought his challenging hybrid performance piece/doc Tape (Jiaodai) to Europe.

Five stunning short films in IFFR’s Spectrum Shorts section suggest that the centre of creativity of China’s independent filmmakers may be shifting from fiction though documentary to experimental shorts seen in gallery settings as often as film festivals: Gu Tao’s avant garde elegy for the Wenchuan earthquake On the Way to the Sea (Qu dahaide lushang); Central Academy of Fine Arts graduate Tan Tan’s movingly abstract Positive (Yangxing); Zhou Xiaohu’s inspired clay animation Forgotten Column (Yiwang zhu); photographer Hai Bo’s beautifully concentrated examination of rural space Tai Ping Chuan; and the inkbrush drawing-based cosmology of animator Sun Xun’s Beyond-ism (Zhuyi zhiwai).

Tang Xiaoyan answers questions at screening of Fortune Teller at Rotterdam Film Festival (photo: Xu Tong)

For me, though, one event stood out. For the screenings of his documentary Fortune Teller (Suan ming), director Xu Tong brought a special guest from a small Hebei town east of Beijing to Rotterdam: one of the characters from the film, Ms Tang Xiaoyan. Xu’s film focuses on a Hebei fortune teller named Li Baicheng, his mentally and physically handicapped wife Pearl, his brother, who’s also in the business, and Li’s clientele, most of whom are sex workers from the neighbourhood. Tang is one of those workers.

Li himself is a sparkling-eyed gnome of a man, who walks around on crutches and practices his craft with both conviction and “tricks” as he calls them. He provides a service local people need, a mixture of consolation, life advice, superstition, name-changing therapy, and entertaining prediction. Reality and simulation form a comfortable mix. Much in the same way, indeed, that the sex workers of the village offer their clients a mix of reality and simulation, to service equally real needs.

One of Xu’s points is that both occupations, on the margins of Chinese society today, are equally persecuted by arbitrary government/police crackdowns. Tang Xiaoyan is Li’s most memorable client. She runs a small business — brothel would suggest something much larger than the reality — that employs three young women. We see her physically chasing off (with a big stick) a drunken and disorderly client/ex-lover; lamenting her tough past and brutal initiation into the business; and aspiring to change her luck by seeking a new name from fortune teller Li. She’s a kind of a natural verité movie star, with fearlessness and openness that positions her as a heroic counterpart to Li’s charismatic and compassionate trickster.

In Rotterdam, audiences were delighted to meet Tang Xiaoyan in person. She radiated a kind of confident glamour, with diamond sparkle nose stud and earrings not at all out of place in the Euro-arty-chic ambience of the Festival. I hosted the post-screening Q & A and asked her how she felt about being in Xu’s film. She replied that she hoped people would fight for their happiness as she had, that struggling through whatever difficulties life threw at you was essential. Her toughness had a bit of mystery around it: an intertitle in Fortune Teller announces that, after Tang’s arrest for prostitution, she spent 14 days in jail and then disappeared. And we don’t see her for the rest of the film. Well, she certainly hasn’t disappeared from Xu Tong’s camera eye: the best news they gave us was that his next film, Shattered, will take up her story and introduce us to her father, Old Tang himself, who has seen more of Chinese history than we can imagine. The film is set to premiere at next month’s Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Relevant Classroom Use

Fortune Teller (dir. Xu Tong)

This year’s 40th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival has a particularly strong showing of Chinese films. Though none are competing for the prestigious Tiger award, there are plenty in the Bright Future section of emerging filmmakers, as well as a couple of programs specifically about China. But we are especially pleased to announced that two titles we distribute in North America will make their European premiere at Rotterdam. dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee will be attending the festival; if you happen to be there and would like to meet Kevin or attend a screening, he can be reached at kevin *at* dgeneratefilms *dot* com.

Our films are:

Fortune Teller, dir. Xu Tong

Li Baicheng is a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and marginalized figures whose jobs, like his, are commonplace but technically illegal in China. He practices his ancient craft in a village near Beijing while taking care of his deaf and dumb wife Pearl, whom he had rescued from her family’s mistreatment. Winter brings a police crackdown on both fortune tellers and prostitutes, forcing Li and Pearl into temporary exile in his hometown, where he revisits old family demons. His humble story is told with chapter headings similar to Qing Dynasty popular fiction, as the film draws narrative complexity from China’s everyday life.

Cinerama 7 Tue 01 Feb 10:30
Cinerama 5 Fri 04 Feb 12:45

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Tape, dir. Li Ning

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe.  Li’s chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI.  Much like Jia Zhangke’s Platform, Tape captures a decade’s worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.

LV 6 Wed 02 Feb 12:00 tickets
LV 3 Fri 04 Feb 16:00

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In addition. Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town, Street Life) will screen his new documentary My Father’s House, as part of the Festival’s special Raiding Africa program. Inspired by the growing influence of China in some African countries, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) asks seven filmmakers from South Africa, Cameroon, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Angola to make films in China. The African directors’ films will premiere, along with a contextual film program, during the Rotterdam’s 40th edition.

We hope to have more coverage of the festival in the days to come…

Relevant Classroom Use

Artist Li Ning performing "Tape"

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), one of the leading venues for global cutting-edge cinema, announced its Bright Future program of debut and second feature films by fresh filmmaking talent from around the world. Five Chinese titles are included in the lineup, including two represented by dGenerate Films: Fortune Teller by Xu Tong and Tape by Li Ning. dGenerate Films is the North American distributor of Fortune Teller and the international sales agent for Tape.

The IFFR runs from January 26-February 6, 2010 in Rotterdam. Both directors Xu Tong and Li Ning will be present at the festival. Screening dates and details will be announced later.

The full Competition lineup for the prestigious Tiger Award will be announced over the coming days. We expect more exciting titles from China to be announced, possibly featuring names familiar to the dGenerate catalog. Stay tuned.

Relevant Classroom Use

It’s interesting to compare this take on overseas Chinese migration with a recent article in the New York Times about how tens of thousands of Chinese migrants have transformed the Italian city of Prato into a low-end textile and garment hub of Europe, with mixed-to-negative reactions by the Italian locals.

But for all the talk of how the impact of Chinese foreign commerce and migrant labor is being felt around the world,  there is much-needed activity happening in the opposite direction, as China serves as a destination for both commercial and cultural exchange. We’ve reported earlier about the interesting “Raiding Africa” project funded by the Rotterdam Film Festival and spearheaded by Gertjan Zuilhof.  He’s submitted several updates on the project during its summer run: entries five and six are particularly interesting in describing how visiting African filmmakers are encountering China, interacting with local Chinese and filming their experiences.

Relevant Classroom Use

Li Xianting Film School's Ying Liang (left) and Zhu Rikun (right) with owner and daughter of their favorite restaurant in Songzhuang (photo by Gertjan Zuilhof)

Last month we reported that the International Film Festival Rotterdam launched “Raiding Africa,” an exciting program commissioning several African filmmakers to make new films in China. The IFFR enlisted the Li Xianting Film School to help initiate the African directors into the Chinese independent film scene. Located in Songzhuang on the outskirts of Beijing, Li Xianting Film School is the first film school for independent filmmakers in China,.

IFFR’s Gertjan Zuilhof, the organizer of the program, is providing ongoing updates on the project at his IFFR blog. His latest entry introduces the Li Xianting Film School, where important figures like Zhu Rikun and Ying Liang (whose films dGenerate distributes) are fostering the independent film movement in China through their screenings, events and educational programs.

We’ve visited Songzhuang on multiple occasions, and we’ve always meant to profile the Li Xianting Film School in depth (the closest we’ve come is Shelly Kraicer’s indispensible guide to the Chinese indie film scene). So it’s great that Zuilhof is bringing exposure to the Film School through both the Raiding Africa program and his blog. And it’s amusing to read Zuilhof’s observations on Songzhuang, a former farming town that has become a haven for Beijing artists, and has traded its acres of fields for newly-built galleries. Zuilhof quips: ”They make modern art museums here like they are pizza huts.”

Relevant Classroom Use

Portrait of Mozambique President Armando Guebuza in a Chinese restaurant (Photo: Ella Raidel, IFF Rotterdam)

The International Film Festival Rotterdam has announced an exciting new project where several African directors will make films in China.  We find this a brilliant initiative to bridge two parts of the world that are developing complex new social and economic ties. Additionally, it’s wonderful that IFFR enlisted the Li Xianting Film School in Beijing, the first film school for independent filmmakers in China, to help initiate the African directors into the Chinese independent film scene.  Among its faculty, the Li Xianting Film School features at least a couple of dGenerate directors such as Ying Liang and Yang Jin. This promises to be a wonderful opportunity of artistic and cross-cultural exchange.

The project has already kicked off with a blog by Rotterdam Festival programmer Gertjan Zuilhof, which will follow the project through its many stages. We’ll be keeping tabs on it to see how the participants are progressing.

The full press release from IFFR follows:

Inspired by the growing influence of China in some African countries, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) asks seven filmmakers from South Africa, Cameroon, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Angola to make films in China. The African directors’ films will premiere, along with a contextual film program, during the Rotterdam’s 40th edition. The program, titled ‘Raiding Africa’, includes a film workshop produced by the IFFR in collaboration with the Li Xianting Film School in Beijing and supported by Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund.

More after the break.

In 2009 the IFFR undertook an extensive research trip to countries in Eastern and Central Africa. The result was the IFFR 2010 ‘Forget Africa’ program consisting of the African films found during the research and of thirteen commissioned films by international filmmakers presenting their first view on Africa. The IFFR did meet many young and talented directors who had learnt film making in small initiatives or collectives. The reasons that they haven’t been picked up internationally were various, but most of them practical; no subtitling, no funding, no international network. The films the IFFR showed from these young filmmakers are now being picked up internationally.

The ‘Raiding Africa’ program aims to stimulate the exchange of cultures, to support the careers of the African directors included in last year’s ‘Forget Africa’, to create a situation in which the Africans are informed about Asian independent low budget filmmaking and to allow them to work internationally. The filmmakers taking part are:

-       Omelga Mthiyane, South-Africa (Thank You Mama)
-       Emile-Aime Chah Yibain ‘Ancestor’, Cameroon (The Way to the Cross)
-       Ssenkaaba Samson ‘Xenson’, Uganda (Creation Lab)
-       Caroline Kamya, Uganda
-       Yves Montand Niyongabo, Rwanda (Maibobo)
-       Amour Sauveur, Congo-Brazzaville (Coupable)
-       Henrique Narciso ‘Dito’, Angola (A guerra do Ku-Duro)

For ‘Raiding Africa’, the IFFR and Li Xianting Film School in Beijing organize a film workshop this summer in Beijing. During the workshop the seven young African filmmakers are teamed up with experienced Asian Chinese-speaking filmmakers. The mentors taking part are Chinese filmmakers Ying Liang (Taking Father Home) and Sheng Zhimin (Night of an Era), Beijing Film Academy teacher Zhang Xianmin, Tiger Award winning Thai filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong (Mundane History), Singaporean filmmaker Sherman Ong (Flooding in the Time of Drought) and China-based Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek (RU There).

Rotterdam programmer Gertjan Zuilhof, who curated ‘Forget Africa’ and is now working on ‘Raiding Africa’ together with assistant-programmer Inge de Leeuw states: “One of the big issues of our time is the domination of the Chinese in some African countries and their absence in daily life. So the idea is to ask African filmmakers to make a movie in China and to get to know more about the people that live behind gates in their continent. This new project turns ‘Forget Africa’ around and gives the filmmakers involved the chance to take a close look at the Chinese as well as to get experience in international low budget digital filmmaking.” The upcoming months, Zuilhof will file regular updates on ‘Raiding Africa’ on his blog on the IFFR website.

Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund is contributing financially to ‘Raiding Africa’. The project fits its current focus on African cinema. Given the limited possibilities for professional film training in many African countries, the Fund regards ‘Raiding Africa’ as a valuable opportunity and experience for this group of talented young African filmmakers.

‘Raiding Africa’ is developed and produced by the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Partner China:
Li Xianting Film School, Beijing

Supported by :
Hubert Bals Fund, Netherlands
Göteborg Film Fund, Norway
Festival Cinema Africano, Asia e America Latina, Italy
Durban International Film Festival, South Africa

Relevant Classroom Use

Condolences (dir. Ying Liang)

I’ve always enjoyed attending the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which perks up a dark and sleety Dutch mid-winter with what is quite possibly the world’s most creatively curated large-scale festival of art and experimental cinema. IFFR has always strongly supported Chinese language independent films. And films in Chinese usually do quite well there, having won the top prize, the Tiger Award, quite often in past few years (Flower in the Pocket, Malaysia, 2008; Love Conquers All, Malaysia, 2007; Walking on the Wild Side, 2006, China; The Missing, Taiwan, 2004; Suzhou River, China, 2000).

Even if this year’s lineup of new Chinese films might have been a bit less scintillating than usual (though standouts included Yang Heng’s Sun Spots in competition, Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II, Lou Ye’s Spring Fever, and Xu Tong’s documentary Wheat Harvest), one short stood out: Ying Liang’s Condolences (Weiwen). And the IFFR jury recognized this: Condolences won one of three Tiger Awards for Short Film. It’s a particularly well-deserved prize, in my opinion: this 20 minute fiction short of Ying Liang’s is this gifted young Chinese director’s best work so far.

It’s not hard to describe the materials with which Condolences is constructed. The film opens with a short introduction showing still pictures and a voice over news report of an actual fatal bus accident in Zigong (Ying’s hometown) on March 31, 2004. Then we see a quick shot, under the title, of a broken ceiling. After which the film’s core, a long take begins. For 19 minutes, up to and including the closing credits we watch one shot. The camera looks along an interior hallway or long covered courtyard, slightly off centre, to a brighter courtyard space far off at the end where funeral preparations are underway. In the middle foreground, an old woman sits alone on a stool, almost in silhouette. Various people bustle around: a TV crew and some assistants preparing the funeral. Later on, a delegation of visiting local officials arrives, inspecting it while greeting the old woman. We can also spy a Buddhist monk in orange vestments who arrives late, and an aggrieved older resident. We learn that the old woman, Grandma Chen, has lost her husband and son in the bus accident, and the funeral is for them.

The entire complex action of the film takes place in this one shot, in the manner of pre-classical cinema. Ying’s camera captures this long space, and his mise-en-scene arranges the action in at least five separate planes: the foreground space, where people pass through; Grandma Chen on her stool a bit further back; the middle ground of the receding hallway; the background room where the funeral transpires; and finally the back wall decorated with a large hanging cloth and portraits of the deceased.  This pictorial structure is uncannily like a Velazquez, with its layering, multiple points of focus, and narrative-in-depth, constructs an active, engaged viewer in much the same manner as the Spanish master’s great paintings.

Most of the movement is provided by the TV crew, a director, cameraman, and reporter (the latter played by Ying Liang’s producer and co-designer Peng Shan) who move back and forth through the space capturing an official report for local (state-owned) TV. The other agent of movement is the Zigong city mayor’s delegation, who wind through the space three times, like a snake, formally greeting Grandma Chen, offering her some “gifts” (a comforter, some bags of groceries), conveying to her official condolences, and inspecting the shabby and rubble-filled space.

One hilarious bit of business has the TV reporter shooing the monk, resplendent in yellow, away when he comes to inspect her interviewing the mayor; later, as he bangs his prayer drum, she tells him to shut up while she records an introduction. From the beginning, we hear sounds of drilling and hammering, and later can infer that the old neighbourhood is being torn down.There seem to be only two holdouts in this old residence: Grandma Chen and the older male resident, who interrupts the mayor’s visit to complain about being forced to move without compensation and is summarily hustled out of mayoral and camera range.

The politics of forced, under-compensated relocation and property development are one element lying under the film’s surface. Another, more fundamental, is a satire on the construction, mediatization, and presentation of official versions of “reality” (i.e. lies) in Chinese media and governance. The official bustle around the human centre of attention, Grandma Chen, mostly ignores her. The TV crew are busy filming a propaganda-news version of the funeral and visit (we overhear a comment implying that they have in fact paid for the funeral service to provide a backdrop for the report). The official visit itself is a perfectly distilled miniature version of Chinese official government speech and action: the mayor goes through his motions for the camera, using Grandma Chen essentially as a prop. Finally, everyone except Grandma Chen clears out, and she approaches the altar at the back, and, continuing to face away from us, burns funeral money and attend to her private grief.

Condolences highlights Ying Liang’s gifts as a filmmaker. He’s at his best, I think, when he’s designing conceptually. His use of cinema structure to lay out, articulate, and work through partly abstract, political, conceptual problems is best shown, up to now, in his brilliant feature The Other Half (2007), where a sequential interview form probes deeply into gendered domestic relations and environmental crises. Taking Father Home (2005), firmly grounded in plot, is to me less successful in this regard, since it is heavily weighted towards pure narrative. On the other hand, Good Cats (2008) bravely tries, experimentally, to synthesize political/symbolic conceptualization with a through-composed story. Its strengths derive from the tension within the film between symbolic language and narrative realism: it’s a tension that the film never quite works out, but it’s one that one could call productively provocative.  Condolences is tight: pure, complex, rich, and precisely designed: structure and content are tightly integrated. And the film sparkles: it brings a sharp, brilliant, humane illumination to cold Rotterdam winter days.

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide II (dir. Liu Jiayin)

The International Film Festival Rotterdam concluded this past weekend; this year’s edition was of special interest to us, what with eighteen films by Chinese directors or with a Chinese theme.  Two indie films in particular drew critical attention, much of which is summarized below.

Oxhide II by Liu Jiayin, already touted by the likes of David Bordwell, received praise from Rotterdam critics across the board. James Mansfield, writing in the film site Little White Lies, hails it as a “real discovery:”

The simple set up – nine stationary long takes around a table, moving 45 degrees clockwise between each scene to complete a circle come film’s end – is transformed into a humorous, quietly virtuosic family drama. Jiayin Liu’s second feature is set up as a quasi-documentary, with the filmmaker and her parents playing themselves (though working from a script) as they cook a meal in real time, talking about food, the family business, and life…  ‘Oxhide II’ magically transforms the simplest of objects into a majestic stage, so that the everyday act of cookery is all that’s required to yield a grand narrative.

Gabe Klinger, writing in the French film site Independencia, also expressed astonishment over a film he describes as “simply made and may be simply described but is anything but simple.”

The film has a grand total of nine shots, each one emphasizing a different angle, but always in the general direction of the table (sometimes directly above or below it). The three characters step out of the frame every once in a while and come back with new ingredients, tools or arguments, and eventually the dumplings are boiled and promptly consumed. That’s all there is to it. And yet, it manages to be a profound reflection on family and the art of passing down knowledge.

In The Auteurs Notebook, Daniel Kasman calls it “a direct, honest, miniature epic:”

Discovering the simplicity and factuality of Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide II was palatably exciting, even if the film’s form and subject—the real time creation, cooking, and eating of 73 dumplings—sounds fit for pure formal exactitude.  But Oxhide II rides high on process, on the pleasure one takes in seeing things assembled, made, slowly come to together; parts fitted, vague shapes formed, function revealed.

Kasman is more equivocal about another Chinese indie, Yang Heng’s Sun Spots, which, like Oxhide II, is the director’s sophomore feature. He writes:

I assume the genre of feckless, barely employed, malaise-ing youth such as those featured in Heng Yang’s second feature Sun Spots are a convention well past its expiration date, and perhaps relevancy.  Yet few films so precisely and deliberately, almost stubbornly and most certainly stunningly frame their youthful clichés in as stoic and minimal a grandeur as Yang’s epic digital theater… Yet with such a look, the film seems to have little to say; Sun Spots’ youths are mopey and detached from the landscapes that imposingly pin them physically to the ground in front of us, but we get little sense of, say, the society of the kids, as Hou develops in the petty downtime of Goodbye South, Goodbye, or the local and historical context of Jia’s superficially similarly pictorial Still Life.

Shekhar Deshpande, writing in Dear Cinema, expresses more enthusiasm:

The film is a visual beauty to behold… Gung Ban [Sun Spots] relishes its frame with lights that are enchanting. There are scenes with something between a silvery daylight and a moody twilight fills the frame, without its golden tones. There are objects in the foreground of the characters, bear bottles, bags, etc. add to the surreal quality of the beautiful image.

Interviews with Liu Jiayin and Yang Heng can be found on Offscreen and the Rotterdam Film Festival site, respectively.

Relevant Classroom Use

During the IFFR 2010 Awards Ceremony for Short Films on Monday, February 1, 2010 in festival location Rotterdamse Schouwburg, the award-winning short films of the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam were announced. The three Tiger Awards for Short Film were granted to Wei Wen (Condolences) by Ying Liang (China), Atlantiques by Mati Diop (France/Senegal) and Wednesday Morning Two A.M. by Lewis Klahr (USA).

The film was even cited by film critic Neil Young in his top ten list for the 2000s in the Best Chinese Films of the 2000s Poll conducted by dGenerate.

The jury had this to say of Ying Liang’s new short in their award citation:

Wei Wen (Condolences) by Ying Liang (China)
“A fixed camera position, reminiscent of the early days of cinematography, gives the viewer the opportunity of objectively gazing into a theatre which develops around a grandmother who lost two of her relatives in a traffic accident. Her personal tragedy is turned into a precisely choreographed analysis of a social structure in which all participants are out for their own benefit. Only after the circus is over does our heroin move into the spotlight.”

To raise the profile of short films as a highly influential form of art but also as the realm in which cinema has been both democratized and popularized by the online and digital developments, the International Film Festival Rotterdam founded its Competition for Short Films in 2005. In this year’s edition, thirty-one films of up to sixty minutes in length were presented to the international jury consisting of Jeremy Rigsby (programmer of Media City Festival in Windsor, Canada), Shai Heredia (director of Filter India Festival, Mumbai, India) and Albert Wulffers (filmmaker, writer, visual artist and teacher, The Netherlands).

Relevant Classroom Use