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

This reminds me of some other recent reports about China’s burgeoning alternative music scene. An article in Telegraph, entitled “Western Companies Use Rock Music to Tap into China’s Youth Market,” cites “China’s Creative Voice,” a report by the London and Hong Kong-based brand consultancy Hunt Haggarty, noting that a unique Chinese voice in popular culture is “the voice of an only child who grew up free from the hangovers of China’s Cultural Revolution; a young person who perhaps finds greater solidarity with his friends than family and whose rising self-confidence, tinged with a new cultural nationalism, is mirrored by that of the nation as a whole.”

Another article in The New York Times earlier this year, entitled “Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made in China,” offers a more detailed report on China’s underground hip-hop scene. It notices that although avoided by broadcast media as subversive, hip-hop groups like Yin Ts’ang (or Yin Cang, “hidden”) and Yin Tsar (or Yin Sanr, “the three shadows”) and nightclubs are growing rapidly in cities across the country, while thousand of raps and music videos by Chinese M.C.’s are spreading over the Internet. Taking the freedom offered by this new form of expression, some Chinese rappers “address what they see as the country’s most glaring injustices.” For Wang Li, a 24-year-old who became interested in hip-hop upon hearing Public Enemy in the mid-‘90s, rapping “helps him deal with bitterness that comes with realizing he is one of the millions left out of China’s economic boom.”

Many Chinese independent filmmakers, too, belong to the post-Cultural Revolution generation and share similar bitterness and confusion. In the series at Walker Art Center, Ying Liang’s new film Good Cats (Hao Mao, 2008) is a unique articulation of these sentiments inspired by the alternative music movement. Featuring the music and performance of the punk-rock band Lamb’s Funeral, the film challenges the dominant neo-neorealist mode in most Chinese indies to adapt a style similar to Japanese cult film Expressionism. (The ugly, dilapidated suburban landscape, the absurdity taken too seriously by people, and the ennui and aimless anger of the young generation quite remind me of Crazy Thunder Road (Kuruizaki sanda rodo, dir. Sogo Ishii), a 1980 cult hit featuring a Tokyo biker gang and garage punk band, although Good Cats is much bleaker and more socially-conscious.) The most striking sequence in Ying’s film comes when the scene shifts from the protagonist’s own shabby neighborhood to black-and-white documentary footage of the demolition of the city. A song accompanies the sudden transition:

Is human degenerating,
Or is the world too lonely?
In a city like this,
I find no emancipation.

This is a cry for freedom shared by both Chinese underground musicians and independent filmmakers.

Relevant Classroom Use

The fourten films span from the leftist classical, made at the eve of the Communist victory, Crows and Sparrows (1949) to such “model plays” produced during the Cultural Revolution as Red Detachments of Women (1961, modern ballet version 1970) and Red Lantern (1970), from the “historical and cultural reflection” of the fifth generation like One and Eight (1983) and Yellow Earth (1984) to independent products of the sixth and the digital generations, such as Beijing Bastards (1993), Platform (2000), and Good Cats (2009, by dGenerate director Ying Liang, area premiere). As a whole, the series charts the unprecedented propulsive energies at work through years of radical transformation and looks to the future of a country still in flux—one responding both to its past and its relatively new prominence in the larger world.

The series is copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Consortium for the Study of the Asias at the University of Minnesota, and organized by Sheryl Mousley, Walker film curator, and Jason McGrath, associate professor of modern Chinese literature and film.

Dates: November 4 – 23, 2009
Locations: Walker Art Center Cinema (on 35mm film) and Bell Museum Auditorium, U of Minnesota (on video).

All films are in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.

Schedule:

Wednesday, November 4
New Year’s Sacrifice (dir. Sang Hu, 100 min, 1956)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Friday, November 6
Crows and Sparrows (dir. Zheng Junli, 113 min, 1949)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 7
Little Red Flowers (dir. Zhang Yuan, 91 min, 2006)
7:30 pm, Walker Art Center
Additional showing on Wednesday, November 11 at 10:00 am.

Sunday, November 8
Red Detachment of Women (dir. Pan Wenzhan, et al., 120 min, 1970)
3:00 p.m. Walker Art Center

Monday, November 9
Red Detachment of Women (dir. Xie Jin, 92 min, 1961)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Wednesday, November 11
Red Lantern (dir. Cheng Yin,112 min,1970)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Friday, November 13
Yellow Earth (dir. Chen Kaige, 89 min, 1984)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 14
Platform (dir. Jia Zhangke, 154 min, 2000)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Monday, November 16
One and Eight (dir. Zhang Junzhao, 90 min,1983)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Wednesday, November 18
Ermo (dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 98 min, 1994)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

Thursday, November 19
Beijing Bastards (dir. Zhang Yuan, 95 min, 1993)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Saturday, November 21
Good Cats (dir. Ying Liang, 103 min, 2009) and Cry Me A River (dir. Jia Zhang-ke, 19 min, 2009)
7:30 p.m., Walker Art Center

Monday, November 23
Pirated Copy (dir. He Jianjun, 90 min, 2004)
6:00 p.m., Bell Auditorium

For more information, please visit the program website.

Relevant Classroom Use