Director Ying Liang

Director Ying Liang was interviewed at the Apple Store Sanlitun Beijing, as part of the “Meet the Filmmakers” series, co-presented by the Apple Store in Beijing and dGenerate Films, an ongoing series to showcase China’s newest filmmakers powered by digital technology.

Ying Liang graduated from the Department of Directing at the Chongqing Film Academy and Beijing Normal University. He directed his first feature film,Taking Father Home (2005), which won awards at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2006, Ying made The Other Half (2006), which is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film also won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival.

The video of Ying’s interview is in three parts, with an English transcript following each video. Video of Part One is below. Click through to view both videos and the full transcript. Interview conducted by Gigi Zhang. Videography by Michael Cheng. English transcription and subtitles by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Note: English subtitles for each video can be accessed by clicking on the CC button in the pop-up menu on the bottom right corner of the player. The subtitles can be repositioned anywhere on the screen by clicking on them (if they are not displaying properly, click them to adjust).

PART ONE:

Gigi: Thanks to everyone for coming and being interested in independent Chinese cinema. Many of you may not know Director Ying Liang that well, so why don’t we start by having him introduce himself? Could you talk about yourself a little bit? And also the shorts as well as longer films that you have made? What are their similarities?

YL: Thanks Gigi for introducing me, and addressing me as a director and a filmmaker, and associating me with the underground film production world. But honestly, I am not any of those. I am just some guy who likes this medium. I like using a DV camera to film things. What you see on the screen is a short by me. I am not very satisfied with this short. I made it last year or the year before last. It is roughly 14-minute long. I have done features before. Actually I’m working on one right now. Most of my shorts, a total of 14 of them, are shot in Zigong, Sichuan. This one is different from most of my other films. It has a more concrete narrative structure, and very linear in that sense. To most people it may also seem a little artsy. So far I have only been a one-man team for all my films. I spent my own savings of 30,000 yuan on my first feature. And I have not spent any more than this amount. I really don’t consider myself a film director. Being called one in this luxurious space makes me feel that I don’t deserve it, and I am a little reluctant to be called so. I know how embarrassing it must feel for Gigi to introduce me. But please proceed with the questions.

Gigi: We should not judge a director by the budget or the length of his or her work. You are being modest. So far you have made 13 shorts and three features. Do you think the shorts that you have made land you on your features in some way? What is the relationship between these two forms? Do you have any advice or suggestions for the film students sitting in the audience?

YL: My shorts are not much different from the shorts made by many other students in film schools. Back in school, I have been taught that shorts are a good exercise before making features in terms of production, producing, as well as screenwriting. In retrospect, I did see one other benefit of making shorts, that is, I could mature during the making of them. I am not satisfied with this particular film because it is not extraordinary in any way. Despite a slightly larger budget and a tighter narrative, it is still an average student short or medium-length film, depending on how you define a short. Right now, I am more interested in making shorter shorts, but with more room for creativity. I think this kind of short is more challenging to the mind, and at the same time, it is also most appropriate to this art form. Most of the time, it’s not easy to tell if a short is a narrative film, a documentary, or an experimental film. Shorts are a unique form; they foreground time. I have some friends who make shorts. I often share my thoughts with them and also with my students at Songzhuang. They tell me interesting little things in life that they have neglected in the past. And I tell them that all these can be good materials for shorts. As for my features, I go about shooting them less effortlessly. The experiences that I have gained by making shorts are certainly helpful, especially in terms of working around a tight budget.

Gigi: You mentioned that you only spent 30,000 yuan for your first feature. Did you shoot it on DV cam?

YL: Yes. Before 2008, I used MiniDV. After 2008, I used HDV. I don’t think that my techniques have improved much whereas the technology has certainly kept developing. I think I am lazy. I don’t always know how good I want my films to look because to me, that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the freedom enjoyed by the artist, which includes the freedom from state production codes, the freedom from economic concerns, and the freedom for artistic creativity. I like being able to use this medium to tell interesting snippets of life in creative ways. I want to keep my relationship with filmmaking pure. The filmmaking process is not yet industrialized for me; my production team has been small, so has my budget.

Gigi: You mentioned that your filmmaking process is not yet industrialized. But I wish to ask you more about the funding of your films. I know that in the past you have secured some funding through overseas organizations. Was that helpful? Do you know if other independent filmmakers have also been funded as such?

YL: This is the most industrialized space that my film has ever been screened. For me, getting funding from overseas organizations was purely by chance, and it was atypical. At the time, I just finished my first film. I didn’t think about distributing it. I looked for some film festivals online, and I sent off my film to them. Surprisingly, it received some awards, including cash awards. I didn’t expect to have these cash awards at all. However, they did help me get started on my next film projects or related works, such as writing a screenplay, preparing for shooting, etc. I kept working, and more cash awards came by that way. I also applied for funding. But my relationship with overseas organizations hasn’t been very good. One reason is that I don’t like being restricted in any way, certainly not in my filmmaking process, and also not in my life. Money always gets offered with conditions attached. It is the same with an investor as with a cultural institution. These conditions could restrict me. They could make me feel not being true to my own calling. Every person knows to be grateful. Making a film is hard work. After you complete a film, if you show it to others and get approved by them, you feel proud of your work. However, when you are offered money for the work you have done, you are naturally inclined to feel grateful towards the offer. That could somehow shape your future film projects in unforeseeable ways, which could be restricting. For example, it could affect your attitude towards filmmaking, your choice of subjects, etc. I often tell myself not to be affected by such funding. I want to continue being myself. The relationship between me and some overseas organizations is mostly just collaborative. If they ask too much of me and make me feel too restricted, I tend to give up the funding or the project. But I should mention that the reason that I am here today. dGenerate Films Inc. is a New York-based nontheatrical distributor of independent Chinese films. My films have been distributed by them to North American colleges mostly. They helped me make my work known overseas. I have to thank them here today.

PART TWO:

Gigi: You said that you had a collaborative relationship with overseas organization, but I take it to mean that it was also a business relationship in which both sides have invested interests. For people who just arrived, this is director Ying Liang. He studied film production at Beijing Normal University and later also studied directing at Chongqing University. He is currently an independent filmmaker. I learned that when you were at Beijing Normal University, you were classmates with Ning Hao, who now makes short and medium-length films. In terms of filmmaking practices, what do you see as the differences between him and you as well as the similarities?

YL: Starting from 1993 or 1994, the filmmaking program was put in place as part of an adult education program. However, our educational policies changed, so this program no longer exists. Peng Tao, who directed Little Moth, Han Jie, Yang Jin were all from there. Sadly this program is no longer there. This is a comprehensive program. From observing life, to writing screenplays, to producing films, to auditioning actors and actresses, to editing, everything was taught to us. You can say that each of learned how to complete a film by himself, or with the help of a very small team. In this sense, I don’t see much difference between us. The difference is rather at a more personal level. For examples, our interests are different, and our conceptions of film too. Every filmmaker or artist is an individual entity. His or her preferred way of working is analogous to a college graduate’s choice of employment.

Gigi: You are one of the organizers of Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival. You made a statement there that went like: “The future of Chinese narrative films, unlike that of Chinese documentaries, isn’t bright; they will be very limited.” Could you explain what you meant by that? Why did you express two different views on our narrative films and our documentaries?

YL: I referred to independent narrative films because these films don’t often pass muster with the censors. Officials from China’s Film Bureau like to say – although I have not heard it myself, but I read it in writing – that young and independent filmmakers who make personalized and subjective films do not have a future. I used to think that this was only true in China. However, this March when I was in Kuala Lumpur, I heard something similar from the chief officer of the Malaysian Film Bureau. Malaysia also has a group of independent filmmakers, who are very similar to mainland Chinese independent filmmakers. They were told by the officer too that if they kept making personalized films there would be no future for them. I should note that the future in my speech and the future in those people’s speeches are different. I was being frank. I think if anyone wants to be an independent filmmaker, he or she needs to be prepared to sacrifice a lot first. Some people asked me before how I was able to keep at my job as an independent filmmaker, what difficulties I had had, etc. Usually I told them that I did not have any difficulties. I made my choices, and I should be responsible for all the consequences of my choice. Since this is the case, there is really no complaint to be made, and perseverance is unknown to me. If I felt that I had to persevere instead of just being an independent filmmaker, I would no longer enjoy being one. I think if a person does not enjoy what he or she is doing, he or she might as well give it up. Instead of making independent films, why not play computer games on Mac Books or surf the Internet? For me, I find the Apple interface too difficult to navigate and their desktop icons too small to notice, and I do not always remember the shortcut keys, so I give up Apple. Making independent films and using an Apple computer are similar in nature. It depends on your interest. To those who don’t enjoy it, I would suggest not take it too seriously. Do something you enjoy then.

Gigi: Are you an Apple user?

YL: I am sorry I am not. I do not get much funding. Compared to PC, it is very high-end. Like I said earlier, having my film screened here was certainly very high-end for me.

Gigi: We have been here talking for a while. Shall we change gears and have you introduce your film on the screen?

YL: Sure. It has been playing for a while.

Gigi: Which film is this?

YL: The Other Half. It was shot in 2006. Its story is related to women’s rights movement. It is a narrative film. I edited it using Adobe Premiere 6.5.

Gigi: You have just watched excerpts from director Ying Liang’s The Other Half. This film won four international awards, right?

YL: Not important.

Gigi: Including the Woosuk Award at Jeonju International Film Festival in Korea.

PART THREE:

Man: The number of people who are interested in seeing Chinese independent films is increasing. Although many of these films have won awards at international film festivals, they are not available to majority of the population in China. We often have to search for these films on Taobao.com. I want to know what you think about this phenomenon. And my second question is whether you wish to make commercial films in the future?

YL: Personally I am quite satisfied with everything. I know many filmmakers as well as artists from other fields want to reach a wider audience, but I am not that way. It is not extremely important to me whether people see my work or not, and I do not think my films are that important anyway. You probably have noticed that my films are closely tied to the social milieu of our time. They are mostly based on my personal experiences and observations. And they do not amount to anything larger. If I am interested in larger topics and themes, such as Chinese youth culture or gay culture, like Professor Cui Zi’en, I will do something different. What I film is mostly based on my personal choices. I think our visual media have very limited influences on people, and you can almost argue that it has no influence at all. Ideally speaking, our visual media, people in general, and society at large are three distinct entities, and they should be that way. This is just my personal opinion. As to where to see these films, in China the opportunities are truly limited. Film festivals are one of the venues, but there aren’t so many. You can buy from the Internet, but you need to do extensive search before finding what you want.  BT downloading is another way, and I am not against such illegal channels. I am content with the fact that people who want to see it can see it. I do not care that much about my films or how to distribute them. If I do, then I will start making commercial films and aim for the market, with schemes about how to do so. But that really isn’t what I like. I like this personal relationship with film. If this friendship is contaminated by personal interests, I will no longer like it as much, and I may do something else altogether. Everything I do now has something to do with visual media. As Gigi mentioned, I helped organize a film festival, and I taught a filmmaking class at Songzhuang. But all these things are done out of pure interests, without the concern of making money. All the profits that I have made happened by chance. I like it this way. Either I do voluntary work for others, or I do it for myself. That is also why I dissuaded my students from becoming independent filmmakers because they will faced many difficulties, many demands, and many misunderstandings.

Gigi: You mentioned that your films were marketed in North America. When you were shooting them, did you want to cater to their taste specifically?

YL: This is something that I resist a lot. North America is only one part of the map because there are film festivals all over the world. I mentioned North America because this event was organized by a New York-based distributor. I was invited here to screen my film and talk about it. What you brought up is something I resist a lot. I like to think the relationship between me and various foundations as ordinary friendship. I want to maintain it that way. Think about a film critic and a filmmaker. They have to maintain certain distance.

Relevant Classroom Use

Ying Liang

dGenerate Films and the Apple Store in Beijing continue their ongoing series showcasing China’s newest filmmakers powered by digital technology. This Thursday, April 21, acclaimed digital filmmaker Ying Liang will show clips from his films and discuss his creative process.

Ying Liang’s talk is part of the series “Meet the Filmmakers,” a collaboration between the Apple Store in Beijing and dGenerate Films. Digital tools, from digital video cameras to editing software, have placed filmmaking in the hands of the people. This series introduces award-winning directors discuss with the general public how they use digital technology to create their latest movies, attracting worldwide attention and acclaim.

Read news coverage of the inaugural “Meet the Filmmakers” events, and watch video from a previous Apple Store talk with filmmaker and activist Cui Zi’en.

All events will be held at the Apple Store in Sanlitun, Beijing, starting at 7pm.

Ying Liang graduated from the Department of Directing at the Chongqing Film Academy and Beijing Normal University. He directed his first feature film, Taking Father Home (2005), which won awards at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2006, Ying made The Other Half (2006), which is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film also won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival. Ying Liang’s latest film Good Cats (2008) premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Relevant Classroom Use

More details can be found on the film here.

Friday, January 29 2010 ~ 6:00–8:00 PM
$5 member / $10 non-member

This film series is made possible through the generosity of the public and private grantors, and the support of the general public. Free popcorn and refreshments will be served and an open discussion will follow the screening. Seating is LIMITED. Reservations are on a first-come, first-served basis. To purchase tickets, please visit the China Institute website. For further information, please contact sinomatheque@chinainstitute.org, or call 212-744-8181 x137.

Location Details:

China Institute
125 65th Street
New York NY 10065

Relevant Classroom Use

dGenerate Films is pleased to introduce CinemaTalk, an ongoing series of conversations with esteemed scholars of Chinese cinema studies.  These conversations will be presented on this site in audio podcast and/or text format.  They are intended to help the Chinese cinema studies community keep abreast of the latest work being done in the field, as well as to learn what recent Chinese films are catching the attention of others.  This series reflects our mission to bring valuable resources and foster community around the field of Chinese film studies.

For our first CinemaTalk, we spoke with Chris Berry, Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London.  Some of Chris’ work includes:

• Author, Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006) with Mary Farquhar
• Author, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004)
• Editor (with Ying Zhu), TV China (Indiana University Press, 2008)
• Editor, Chinese Films in Focus II (British Film Institute, 2008)
• Editor (with Feii Lu), Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005)
• Editor (with Fran Martin and Audrey Yue), Mobile Cultures:  New Media and Queer Asia (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2003)
• Translator and Editor, Ni Zhen’s Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy:  The Origins of China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers (Duke University Press, 2002)
• Author, “Imaging the Globalized City: Rem Koolhaas, U-thèque, and the Pearl River Delta,” in Cinema at the City’s Edge, edited by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming), part of a series TransAsia: Screen Cultures, co-edited by Chris Berry and Koichi Iwabuchi

Kevin Lee, dGenerate’s VP of Programming of Education, spoke with Chris about various topics from his current work and areas of focus, to comparisons between contemporary Chinese cinema and the Fifth Generation filmmakers whom he helped to champion in the 1980s and 1990s, to which recent Chinese films that have excited him the most.  

Play the Podcast

Download audio file (dGenerate_Chris_Berry.mp3)

Download it here (right-click to download). (File size: 28.7MB)

Full transcript follows after the break.

dGF: With what sort of activities are you presently involved in terms of your work with Chinese film?

CB: There are two or three projects, one of which is finishing an anthology on independent documentary in China, which I’m co-editing with Lu Xinyu (Fudan University) and Lisa Rofel (UC Santa Cruz). And that’s been in gestation for a long time.  I think that it reflects the fact that for me independent documentary has been the most powerful force in Chinese film for quite a long time now, not only in the documentaries themselves but also in their impact on the style of most interesting fiction feature films.  So when you think about someone like Jia Zhangke, who in fact crosses both documentary making and fiction filmmaking, he would be exemplary of what I’m talking about.

And then together with Koichi Iwabuchi (Waseda University), we’ve been co-editing a series of books with Hong Kong University Press that tries to emphasize the idea of trans-Asian screen cultures.  I think that’s because we’ve been interested to notice how first of all cultures these days often cut across particular media, but they also cut across borders.  So there are many Asian regional phenomena that are probably not very well known outside Asia, but form a kind of Asian metropolitan popular cultural circuit that needs more analysis.  To be honest we haven’t been doing enough of that, but we’ve been eager to try to create a space with this series for younger scholars to publish.  We just have a couple of books out there; there are more on the way.  We’ve got a manuscript at the moment on Korean masculinity and how images of Korean masculinity have not only been shaped by the consumption of Korean masculinity outside Korea.  So people like Bae Yong Joon and pop star Rain, who are big in the Asian region, and whose images are formed by that kind of regional consumption, as well as Korean local consumption.

dGF: These strike me as two contrasting areas of study, because Chinese documentaries to me are very specifically focused on local phenomena within China.  Of course you can infer these global trans-developments or thematic significances from them, but they are still very locally-based.  Whereas this other project you are involved in is acknowledging how the Asian identity is this confluence of different regional influences.  You had me thinking of transnational film productions like Chen Kaige’s The Promise.

CB: Right.  There’s another manuscript on that actually, which is under consideration at the moment.  And then there’s another one on the Pusan International Film Festival and its regional focus on Asia.  Yes, you are right in a way, but I would say that although these Chinese documentaries seem to be very local, the culture around them is much more international than it might first appear.

The films themselves, and also their subject matter, are in many ways quite local, but I would say that the aesthetics that have become dominant in these films grow out of Chinese directors in the 1990s coming into contact with both American so-called “direct cinema”, which is sort of a fly-on-the-wall observational mode without any voiceover, without any music, and also French cinéma vérité-style documentary, which again is also observational but where the filmmakers themselves are much more part of what’s going on, maybe on screen, maybe talking directly to people and so on.  And these two styles, along with the Japanese director Ogawa Shinsuke, who pursues similar kinds of things but very much focused on social issues and social concerns, and he’s the person behind the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival, which is huge in Asia.  These three international forces shaped this Chinese documentary culture.

Furthermore, given the situation within China, where it’s quite difficult for these films to be screened, the films very often find an informal audience inside China.  But they also circulate quite strongly internationally, and often are made with international documentary film festivals in mind because of the awareness that is one of the main sort of sites that they are going to be shown in.  So even though the topics may be very local, the culture itself is quite transnational, I think.

dGF: It seems that there’s more audience definitely abroad, and within China, it’s a very specific, and some would say narrow, audience of enthusiasts of Chinese documentary and any sort of social documentation of what’s going on in China, so you have these clusters of film festivals here and there.

CB: And you’ve got to remember that within China, these films do not go through the censorship process, and therefore cannot be shown on television, and cannot be screened commercially.  So what you say there about the audience is correct, but there are some structuring factors that also help to determine narrow availability to audiences.

dGF: It raises the question that has lingered throughout Chinese cinema since the Fifth Generation: who are these movies being made for?  There has been skepticism about these films being pitched towards an audience that is inherently looking for critical content about China.  Do you see that as a continuation in some thematic ways between what happened in the Fifth Generation and what’s going on today?

CB: Well, I do see there is a continuation in a certain sense.  I don’t accept the argument that these films are made for foreigners or people who want to knock China or all the other kinds of things that get trotted out against them of that nature.  I do accept the argument that this is part of the process of moving away from a mass audience towards a more diversified set of audiences and a more diversified set of productions.  Different people are interested in different things.  I think the same kinds of people in China like these films as those overseas.  Whether we are talking about Fifth Generation films or whether we talking about independent Chinese documentaries, they are not going to be on in your multiplex, and they are not going to be screening on Time-Warner TV in America.  I just think that there is room for a variety of different audiences, and I do think that it is good to have cinematic forms that encourage critical thinking.  By critical, I don’t necessarily mean negative, I just mean analytical thought.

dGF: You really were one of the key figures in bringing the Fifth Generation and Sixth Generation to attention.  Contextualizing your work within this new generation of filmmaking, when did it really become apparent to you that there is some really significant work being done with independent documentaries?

CB: Well pretty soon after they began in the early 1990s, actually.  I think for me, Wu Wenguang’s films were the first ones that really started to come to light outside China.  I do remember watching Bumming in Beijing back in the early 1990s at the Hawaii Film Festival.  But I also remember seeing Duan Jinchuan’s Tibet Trilogy, and that was the moment when I thought that there’s obviously more going on, not just one person.  No. 16 Barkhor South Street was just a remarkably accomplished film, and very very polished as well.  So that was the point where it became more exciting.  You saw on film a China that you had not seen on film before.  And this is quite immediately striking.

There were similar things in some of the feature films coming out the same time, like Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards. And then of course Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan cooperated to make The Square, which I think was in 1994.  You saw the situation where the Sixth Generation feature film makers and these documentary film makers often overlapped, and moved back and forth between feature films and documentary.  And it became very clear quite quickly that a sort of on-the-spot documentary aesthetic was driving both sets of films.  That’s what I meant about the idea that in my opinion this aesthetic has been the most interesting thing that’s been going on for the last 15 years.

dGF: Has it seemed pretty consistent to you over the last 15 years or are you seeing there are mutations?

CB: There are lots of changes and the main thing is diversification.  Before 1997 when the DV camera arrived in China, as it did in the rest of the world, most of the people involved in making these films had backgrounds in television or in filmmaking.  It would be hard to have access to the equipment without that background and it would be hard to use it without that training.  Once the home DV camera arrived, everything changed because it became a lot easier to use, became much affordable to a larger spectrum of people, and you started to see all kinds of people getting involved in documentary.  As a result, the strict observational direct cinema aesthetic that was dominant in the early years began to disappear, so that you would see more variety of forms.  You would see in some cases a return to more television documentary aesthetics.  In other cases you might see more personal or biographical filmmaking.  And there was certainly a shift around the end of the decade from looking at social issues towards what in China people talk about as personal filmmaking.  But personal doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical.  It meant more filmmaking about individual people; whereas that individual person might also embody a social issue, but they might also be much more focused on them as individuals.  This has been observed in particular by a scholar who is now in Nottingham University in England, called Luke Robinson, who did his PhD on that particular shift.

Now having said all that, what’s going on right now?  I still see a lot of observational filmmaking, but I also I suppose I see also more of an interest again in the kind of ethnographic filmmaking that we maybe not have seen so much of up until recently with people moving off to China’s margins, if you like, and working on various kinds of, not only ethnic minorities, but also unusual cultural phenomena.

dGF: I’ve seen several documentaries about drug addicts, AIDS victims, and homeless migrants.

CB: Right, exactly.  Right through from the end of the last decade, there has been a big focus on social margins, and also now more and more focus on subculture around that.  The other big change, the other big thing that has been happening in the last 2 or 3 years in documentary, has been oral history, with some people like Hu Jie.

dGF: You’re referring to a film like Though I Am Gone.

CB: Yes.  And also someone like Wang Bing’s He Fengming. I think those films are very interesting to me because they are very touchy and they are very sensitive issues.  I think the authorities have been quite willing to accept almost any kind of socially marginal group appearing in the film, or social problem or social issues.  But Communist Party history somehow has been off-limits, and still probably is in many ways, I think.

dGF: One of dGenerate Films’ titles, San Yuan Li by Ou Ning and Cao Fei, is the subject of an upcoming essay of yours to be published.  Can you talk briefly about the essay and your interest in the film San Yuan Li?

CB: San Yuan Li, as well as Ou Ning’s Meishi Street [another dGenerate title], are really interesting examples of the kind of diversification I was just talking about.  I wrote about the first film in a book called At the City’s Edge, edited by Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, coming out soon from Hong Kong University Press.  Both films are in that on-the-spot documentary mode, but with a difference.  That’s probably because of Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s art background.

The first film is very much a montage piece about an area of Guangzhou called Sanyuanli.  It’s full of historical significance, because according to legend (or maybe even history!) it was the village that resisted the British during the Opium Wars.  Now it’s a “village in the city” in Guangzhou, near the railway station, and a real rabbit warren.  In China, it’s notorious for crime, and at first Ou and Cao approach it from a distance.  But by the end of the film, scenes with people posing for the camera suggest that they have made some contact with the locals after all!  The film is an explicit homage to Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a City, and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.  So, the film seems to suggest that Chinese cities are going through another period of tumultuous change and remapping, a bit like German and Russian cities in the early twentieth century.

Meishi Street is about local inhabitants resisting the redevelopment of a neighborhood in Beijing.  If San Yuan Li was distanced, it goes in the opposite direction, because they get one of the local inhabitants to help them document what’s going on.  It’s very emotional!

dGF: In the last two or three years, what are some films you’ve seen that have excited you the most, or that you are most fascinated by?

CB: Though I Am Gone I think is an incredibly powerful film, and probably to me is Hu Jie’s best film yet.  And I think it’s remarkable not only because of what it documents, but also because of the way in which the subject himself went out.  I mean how many people who have been phoned and told, ”Your wife’s dying in a hospital,” would go and pick up the camera on the way to the hospital?  Especially at a time and place when buying and owning a camera was quite a difficult thing.  Obviously, he had this urge to document, and so the film becomes a kind of meta-commentary on itself, on the importance of documentation in terms of featuring the issue of justice and all of that.  I find that very powerful because it has become not just about a particular case but about the importance of documentary in general.

I think the same of He Fengming, and I like that film again because of the way in which Wang Bing’s decision to just set the camera up and let her talk speaks to the importance of witnessing with old people.  And you think of how most oral history films will somehow feel the urge of adding archival footage to go to the place the person is talking about, on the assumption that just sitting there and listening to somebody is not enough, that people can find it boring.  I think He Fengming somehow insists that you witness, you bear witness.

Then, I think the other thing that I find exciting is Jia Zhangke’s films and the way in which Jia Zhangke is responding to the need to, on the one hand maintain his aesthetics, and on the other hand do new things.  And I’ve been interested in some of his films like Useless, the way in which some things are clearly staged.  And then when you look at 24 City, you’ve got this involvement of these stars who perform like the regular workers who have been interviewed.  Some people found seeing Joan Chen doing her “Joan Chen” thing, as a supposed worker from Shanghai, irritating.  They thought that it trivializes the interviews with the real workers.  I thought it works to make us conscious of how the truth is something that is also performed and narrated, a told story.

dGF: One question I have for you when you raise that criticism of Joan Chen is, were those Chinese viewers or non-Chinese viewers who made that point? Because the film raises this issue of multiple spectators, and the very different responses and the knowledge they bring to watch the film, because a lot of people outside of China don’t even recognize any of these actors except for Joan Chen.

CB: That’s right.  There’s something very ironic and weird about it because out of the four actors, Joan Chen is the only one who is able to perform her role with the appropriate accent.  Lu Liping for example, does her role in standard Beijing Chinese.  She’s a very good actress.  I think she performs the role very well in many ways, but a number of Chinese people have said to me, that they thought that was odd.  She was a little bit vocally too good.  And Zhao Tao, somehow a lot of people didn’t feel she was quite believable or something.  Whether that was just because they were just too conscious of recognizing her, I don’t know.

So the person who complained to me about the idea that they didn’t like it because they thought it implicitly trivialized the “real people” in the film (Joan Chen is a real person too!), that person was actually somebody who is a westerner but knows quite a lot about Chinese film.  But I agree with you.  But on the other hand, the Chinese people I spoke to who didn’t like it – some like it and some don’t – they mostly seem to be concerned about the accent.  This is interesting because it echoes some of the criticisms that were made for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where it was about the poor Mandarin of some of these actors.

I agree with you that for many international viewers, they, probably apart from Joan Chen, they probably won’t necessarily recognize the other actors.  They may just believe that they are totally real people.  I think I’m fine with all of these except for Joan Chen, and that is just because I think she is too iconic or something.  So it is a mistake to think that she can disappear into the part.

dGF: But is it even Jia Zhangke’s intention to make her disappear?

CB: Good question.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.

dGF: And the fact that it is Joan Chen, it harkens back to the more conventional forms of the Communist-era film that will glorify the anonymous labor force by casting them as someone like Joan Chen.

CB: Well, she only did a couple of those.  She would like me to emphasize that she is not that old!  She did one or two roles in the late ’70s when she first started, but then she went to the States.  She was very young when she first began.  She did this role where she played a deaf telegraph operator, a deaf girl who really wants to learn how to become a telegraph operator in order to overcome her disability, in order to serve the nation, serve the party and so on.  But really that was the only role I think she played that was like that.

Of the four actors, she is the one who is a real star, in the sense that she carries the star persona into her films.  Whereas Zhao Tao and Lu Liping and Chen Jianbin, they don’t have a sense of persona necessarily that they carry in their films.  But she does.

dGF: I think the film in that way is actively asking the question of that mode of cinema, that more conventional mainstream, what role or place it has in this more supposedly more authentic direct cinema mode.  It’s a very stimulating clash of the two different modes of filmmaking.

CB: I think he’s been doing this for a long time.  I mean if you go back to something like Platform, it not an accident; it’s about a bunch of performers.  So this idea of the reality and performance.

dGF: And even Xiao Wu I find fascinating.  It’s about someone who’s continuously trying to redefine their role, a social role they perform.  The film changes from one genre to another as well.

Since we are talking about narrative films, 24 City, you can say, is a half-narrative film, but are there other narrative films in the last two or three years that have excited you?  Because that was really where the action was for many years in Chinese cinema.

CB: Yeah, not so much recently.  I mean I’m interested intellectually in the fact that Chinese fiction filmmaking is in a state of revival.  In 2002, whenever it was that China entered the WTO, there was a kind of panic, and the sense that the Chinese film industry was doomed.  But in fact after the really terrible decade of 1990s, when I believe 70 percent of Chinese movie theaters closed, there’s now an active program of building new cinemas, renovating cinemas, and the number of Chinese films and the percentage of the box office taken by the domestic productions, is going steadily up.  So we have a very interesting situation where Chinese cinema is responding to this challenge, if you will, no doubt aided in some ways by government policy.  It is in a state of revival.

Now, having said that, a lot of the films that I’m seeing do not excite me.  A lot of them seem to me like low budget versions of Hollywood films set in China.  There’s clearly a strategy on the part of Chinese filmmakers, where a certain contingent of Chinese filmmakers are saying “What’s the point of getting international awards if there is no longer a market for art-house films in the west, or anywhere in the world?  Because as we know, art-house screens are disappearing in the world.  We cannot sustain that.  We have to take seriously our local market.  We have to get back in touch with the audiences.  And we have to make commercial cinema that they will enjoy.”

So I think that’s what is going on behind the production of films like The Matrimony, this pseudo-horror film that was quite successful a couple of years ago, and so on.  Companies like Hua Yi Brothers and other big private companies, which now really do dominate the market and have taken over completely from the state studios, are pursuing this kind of filmmaking.  Personally, I don’t find the films terribly exciting.  But that doesn’t mean to say I don’t understand why they are doing it, and I also agree with the importance of having a significant local commercial industry.  Otherwise you end up with the situation like Taiwan, where it’s very difficult to keep everything going because basically they don’t have a production base any more.  I think that’s a very interesting phenomenon, I just don’t particularly like the films.

On the other hand, in the independent cinema, I suppose I got very tired in the last few years that everything seems to be a Jia Zhangke wanna-be film.  This is a very cruel way of putting it.  Many of the films are quite good in many ways.  But it’s like they are all sub-Jia Zhangke.  Now I suppose someone like Ying Liang has come along.  There are also various films that are coming more out of the fine art world, and more sort of avant-garde experimental in style.  I haven’t been blown away by any of these films yet, personally.  But I think it’s good that it’s happening, and I think it’s good to see that kind of diversification.  Hopefully that will open up in new directions.  Those films are very often completely not influenced by this on-the-spot documentary style.  And Ying Liang, I don’t know what you say his mode is.  Folk opera-amateur mode?  I don’t know.

dGF: That’s an interesting way putting it.

CB: But nonetheless I appreciate the fact that it is something different.

dGF: There is no shortage of these films coming out so one is due to change the landscape.  It’s interesting that you said Jia Zhangke has such an influence, which I think is true.  But it’s a matter of time before that becomes a convention that a new generation of directors will be working actively against.

CB: Yeah.  I think it has reached that point.  That’s necessary at this point.  Having said that, when I was in Beijing last summer I saw a film set in the Northeast, which was very much in this kind of Jia Zhangke mode.  I thought everything about it was good except for that.  I remember just feeling like the film was not going to get the attention that it deserves because people would just label it in that way.  So it’s a very difficult challenge, I think, for filmmakers to figure out how to do something that they feel is authentic to them, and at the same time it’s not just falling into that mode.

Relevant Classroom Use

SFGate Homepage featuring Ying Liang

What a nice surprise to see our very own Ying Liang, director of Taking Father Home and The Other Half, peering at us from the homepage of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s website.  And what an even nicer surprise to read the great article by Jeff Yang (formerly of A Magazine fame) tying dGenerate Films, and the films and filmmakers we represent, into the digital media revolution enabling independent voices from historically media-oppressed nations to be heard.

Yang and (we) agree we’ve come a long way from the government censorship of Tiananmen Square media coverage to today’s digitally-driven, people-powered media movement occurring in countries like China and Iran thanks to new technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and digital video.  Give it a read here.

For more details on Taking Father Home and The Other Half, visit our Catalog.

Relevant Classroom Use