Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai) tied for most mentions in PBS' poll of essential documentaries about China

Last month the acclaimed documentary Last Train Home, about migrant laborers in China, made its US television premiere as part of the POV series on PBS. As part of the film’s online promotional efforts, POV polled several filmmakers and experts in Chinese cinema to recommend top documentaries and features about China. We were pleased to see that Disorder tied for most mentions among all films, including a recommendation by Last Train Home director Fan Lixin. Fan writes of Disorder: “A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!”

Other documentaries receiving multiple recommendations: Petition by Zhao Liang, whose Crime and Punishment is distributed by dGenerate, and Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang (who also took part in the poll). Strangely, Blind Shaft also tied for most mentions in this “documentary” poll, even though it is a narrative feature.

Not surprisingly, Jia Zhangke was the most recommended filmmaker, with six mentions spread across five titles. His documentary Dong is distributed by dGenerate.

All the recommendations can be found at the POV website on PBS.

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Ou Ning (director of Meishi Street and San Yuan Li):

9/11 Berenice Reynaud curated the Thematic Retrospective – Digital Shadows: Last Generation Chinese Film for San Sebastian International Film Festival. It will screen 20 films, including Meishi Street. (9/18-9/19, two screenings).

9/11 The press conference for 2011 Chengdu Biennial will be held tomorrow. I’m speechless after I got this notice, “According to the official requirement of the government press conference, please wear light-color, short-sleeve shirt with a tie.” There’s still enough time to buy a light-color, short-sleeve shirt, but no one has ever taught me how to wear a tie …

Zhao Liang (director of Crime and Punishment):

9/13 F***, Money can do everything! (commenting on “the Most Beautiful Moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival)

Cui Zi’en (director of Enter the Clowns, Queer China ‘Comrade China‘, We Are the… of Communism)

Professors should put all their effort into teaching and their life condition should be similar to mine – a small apartment, no car, low class. Those who also work for the government or make a fortune through academics are excluded. (Responding to “The possession of an ordinary Chinese family.”)

9/3 September 1^st is the first day of school. 6,000 children from the immigrant worker’s family are out of school. I cried for a whole day and turned off my cell phone. Desperate. Woke up in the middle of the cool night, I don’t know if I should be angry or ashamed for living in this time-space.

Jia Zhangke (director of Dong)

9/8 Chinese cinema is facing too many taboos. One is the long-term film censorship, the other one I think that can not be ignored comes from the conservatism of Chinese audience. I once said, we are always discussing the issue of sex or violence, but it is always the case that the first one to write a letter of complaint is ordinary audience, even earlier than the government. ( Original article “Jia Zhangke talking about Chinese Cinema: Too Many Taboos.”)

Xu Tong (director of Fortune Teller)

9/3 Taiwanese scholar Guo Lixin visits Li Xianting at Songzhuang. Mr. Guo pays close attention to Mainland Chinese independent documentary. In 2009, he wrote the article “Right of Prostitutes, Sexual Morality and Self Rightness: Further Discussion on Moral Controversy of Wheat Harvest.” I leant a lot from it.

Li Ning (director of Tape)

9?9 We are now at our final stage of rehearsal and preparation! I ’m getting more and more excited! I’ve never expected that yesterday’s crazy experiment could be turned into a formal play… I told my surprised young guerrillas, “I’m always against art, against performance. What I want is presentation and discovery. You think it’s just a pretentious speech?! It’s what we are doing now!”

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Mr. Zhao’s evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates offers a window into hard choices that face directors as they try to carve out space for self-expression in China’s authoritarian system. Like Mr. Zhao, many seek to balance their independent visions with their desires to live securely and win recognition.

Listen to a podcast interview with Wong from the Sinica podcast on Popup Chinese.

We interviewed Wong about his experience reporting this story and its broader relevance on art and culture in contemporary China.

dGF: What attracted you to report on this story?

Edward Wong: While living in Beijing, I had watched and greatly admired two of Zhao Liang’s films, “Crime and Punishment” and “Petition.” In November 2010, I met him at a dinner in the 798 arts district with Karin Chien, the founder of dGenerate Films. At that time, he was working on “Together,” a documentary that the Health Ministry had commissioned as a public service announcement about people with HIV/AIDS. For the film, he had just recorded a song by Peng Liyuan, the celebrity wife of Xi Jinping, the man who is expected to become the next leader of China. Zhao also told me about how he had used social networking websites to track down interview subjects with HIV/AIDS. This new project sounded interesting. We talked a lot too about the making of “Crime and Punishment,” and about how he had lied to police officers to get access to their station house in northeast China.

I found Zhao to be an engaging person, and I thought that he might make an interesting profile. As I spent time with him, I found he had a lot of interesting things to say not only about making films, but also about the role of artists and intellectuals in China.

dGF: Given that this story is part of a series on Culture and Control in China, do you see the issues and challenges that Zhao Liang faced common to other cultural sectors or artists in China?

Wong: Yes, the challenges that Zhao Liang confronts every time he makes a film are familiar to artists across China. The question I keep hearing from artists here, especially those who work in a mass medium like film, is: How do you maintain your artistic integrity and get your work seen without bowing too much to government restrictions? In the American system, it’s often market forces, represented most powerfully by studio executives, that hold sway over filmmakers. Here, the government can have great influence over a film if the filmmaker wants wide distribution for it. Filmmakers who want their films seen in theaters both engage in self-censorship and negotiate with censors over scripts and rough cuts.

Even though Zhao went through that process on “Together,” the documentary still turned out to be a socially committed film, and Zhao doesn’t seem to have bought into the system – he told me his next film will be made in an independent manner, outside the censorship process and with foreign financing. But if he does go the independent route, which is a familiar one for him, he’ll have to live with the fact that the film almost certainly will not be seen by many Chinese. During our interviews, he told me repeatedly that he makes films for a Chinese audience.

Gu Changwei, a supervising director on “Together” and a much more prominent filmmaker than Zhao, has chosen to make movies within the system. On every production, he has to negotiate with representatives of the state. He told me the film bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or Sarft, are “the most conservative – there’s no way to be more cautious than they are.” This is what many artists working in different media across China face: negotiating their work and their relations with conservative censors and officials, many of whom come from an older generation.

dGF: What were the most significant ways that working on this article changed or enhanced your understanding of independent films and filmmakers in China?

Wong: The most interesting aspect of researching this article was seeing the dialogue between filmmakers with an independent spirit and the state. During the reporting process, I learned in detail from Zhao Liang, Gu Changwei and others about the negotiations that take place between filmmakers and representatives of the government, particularly with censors from the film bureau. I felt privileged to get a glimpse into the way the system works. Zhao described for me some of the discussions he had with censors and officials over content in “Together.” It was interesting for me to hear what roles various government bodies played – the Health Ministry, the Central Propaganda Department and the film bureau of Sarft.

Gu had an interesting story about navigating the system in order to get approval from the film bureau for “Love for Life,” the narrative fiction film that was a companion piece to “Together.” Once Gu had the idea for the film, he had to first get support from the Health Ministry before film officials would approve the project, since it was on a topic (HIV/AIDS) that some officials still consider sensitive, and it was based on a banned book. Once health officials had agreed to back the project, the film officials knew they could shift the blame to the health officials if anything went wrong, so they granted approval. This process of constant negotiation was fascinating to me.

As for as filmmakers working outside the system, I found in my reporting that independent directors and producers are dedicated to their visions of society and work together in a community to realize those visions even when there is little financial backing and no official support. Despite the constant attempts by the state to control the industry, that fierce spirit makes me optimistic about Chinese film.

dGF: How would you characterize the response to your article, especially in comparison between Chinese and non-Chinese readers?

Wong: The response has been consistently positive. Many Western readers told me they find Zhao Liang compelling and thought the narrative revealed to them the intricacies of artistic creation and political dialogue in China. My Chinese friends who have read the article in English said it accurately shows the nuances in making choices that relate to the state.

If you’re an intellectual in China, these are choices and decisions you grapple with all the time, in ways big and small, and I think many intellectuals in China get frustrated with how Westerners often frame those choices: as a duality between being a complete rebel or being a sellout. For many foreigners, Ai Weiwei, for better or for worse, has come to represent the ideal of an artist in China. Zhao Liang and many Chinese intellectuals do not follow Ai Weiwei’s lead. They take a more pragmatic path. Certainly they create art or start public conversations that make many officials uncomfortable, but they sometimes acquiesce to demands by officials too. And the government and the Communist Party are not monolithic. There are officials who quietly support even some of the more controversial work by these artists. There’s a fluidity in China, and people move in both directions. One Chinese friend wrote this to me in an email: “The piece did a good job showing the readers the dilemma artists like Zhao are facing in China today, and that agreeing to work within the system can have many subtle implications and is not as black-and-white as ‘going over to the dark side.’” Last time I checked, there wasn’t much response from readers on Zhao Liang’s microblog, but one person commented that the story was the most complete one he or she had read on Zhao, and that Zhao was “niubi” which is Chinese slang for ultra-cool.

dGF: Reading about Zhao Liang being caught between two worlds (the independent network and the state apparatus), I couldn’t help wondering if it was analogous to your own position as a reporter working in China for a U.S. newspaper. What sort of challenges do you experience in your role as a foreign reporter? Does working for a major publication like the NY Times bring any kind of stigma (positive or otherwise) to your interactions in China?

Wong: Working for a Western news media organization in China draws a wide range of reactions from ordinary Chinese. It really can vary, so I don’t want to generalize. From my experience with the central government and with local authorities, Chinese officials are at best ambivalent and at worst downright hostile to foreign journalists. That reaction can change from region to region, or as broader political trends in China shift.

I wouldn’t say my situation is analogous at all to that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. The fact that I have foreign citizenship makes a big difference in my relationship with the Chinese state, obviously. I don’t feel the pressures from the state as keenly. Also, I work in the American mass media system, which has much wider latitude for freedom of expression than mass media in China.

That said, I do think that whenever you work in an institution, you become bound by the limits of that institution, and that’s where I would say my experience might have some overlap with that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. As is obvious to anyone who reads it, The New York Times has strict formats in which news is presented and rules that govern how reporters write their stories. It can be something as simple as choice of words, for example, or it can have more to do with judging what crosses the line between so-called objective reporting and opinion. These are things that all reporters at The New York Times and in other news media organizations negotiate everyday. I have great respect for The New York Times and its role in public discourse in the United States, but there are boundaries that reporters are always trying to navigate and limits that they are testing. I believe this situation helps me empathize with Chinese artists and intellectuals, though the world in which they operate is a much tougher one, and they are much braver souls than me.

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Zhao Liang confronted by Ai Weiwei on camera

In his blog on the New Yorker website, critic Richard Brody responds to last weeks’ New York Times cover feature on Zhao Liang, director of Crime and Punishment (distributed by dGenerate) and Petition (which Brody deems “the fiercest and most confrontational film regarding the Chinese government’s suppression of dissent that I’ve seen”). Brody summarizes the article’s charting of the tensions that arose between Zhao Liang and activist/artist Ai Weiwei following Zhao’s following Jia Zhangke’s lead to withdraw their films from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival in light of political tensions between the festival and Chinese authorities.

Brody focuses on a video of Ai’s on-camera challenge to Zhao for giving in to the government’s demands. Ai also insinuates that Jia withdrew from the festival so as to ensure good standing with the Chinese government in order to produce a government-approved film made for the Shanghai Expo, I Wish I Knew. Brody counters criticism that the film is a feature length promotional video for Shanghai compromised by the constraints of government approval:

If so, the government didn’t get its money’s worth: the film (which I reviewed when it was shown here earlier this year) is an audacious recuperation of ways of life and thought from pre-Communist China, an embrace of Taiwan and Hong Kong, a poignant lament for victims of the Cultural Revolution, and a depiction of the Expo as an alienating, inhuman monstrosity. (He did something similar when making his first officially approved film, “The World,” at Beijing’s World Park.) Jia’s symbolic art, like that of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch under the Hays Code, is ingeniously conceived to say exactly what’s on his mind regardless of external constraints.

He also tries to broker a conciliatory stance between Ai’s righteous indignation and Zhao’s pragmatic compromise:

Ai’s fury is entirely justified—he has endured, and continues to endure, horrific ordeals in order to live freely under a tyrannical regime, and he is entitled to view those who make common cause with it, of any sort, as being on the wrong side of morality. But only he and others who have endured similar persecution are entitled to say so. Heroism can’t be undertaken prescriptively, and those of us who write and make art without fear of arrest should pause before accusing Zhao of collaboration or cowardice.

Read Brody’s full article.

Jia Zhangke’s Dong and Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment are available on Amazon

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Originally published on Fandor, where Crime and Punishment is available on streaming video.

Zhao Liang has distinguished himself as one of the fiercest of the Chinese documentarians who’ve emerged in the past ten years. His 2007 debut Crime and Punishment offers a dose of Zhao’s filmmaking at full force. At first glance, the film, which closely follows the lives of Chinese military police monitoring a North Korean border town, might bring to mind American reality shows like Cops and its ersatz offspring. But its sensibility couldn’t be more different. Zhao’s film emphasizes punishment more than crime: his cops, remarkable for their lack of media savvy, repeatedly beat subjects in front of his cameras. Unlike American reality TV, these incidents aren’t served to the viewer as exploitation passing as entertainment, but something more ethically committed and unnerving.

Zhao captures every detail of the agonizing proceedings, staying with some of his subjects for hours, even days of grueling interrogation. He includes telling moments most directors would leave on the cutting room floor, such as one man’s tortured efforts to remain in a squatting position while handcuffed. The film’s most memorable scenes are its outbursts of police brutality, yet it also gets a potent impact from a drunken discussion about life in the police force between two disillusioned young cops.

Crime and Punishment exposes a whole host of ills in Chinese society: petty bureaucracy, mistreatment of the mentally ill and physically handicapped, rampant alcoholism. A deaf-mute man is beaten and suspected of being a pickpocket because the police can’t communicate with him. Old Wang, a scrap metal salesman, gets arrested for not having the right permit and then isn’t allowed to leave because his son insults the cops on the phone.

No thinking spectator would take Crime and Punishment for a defense of the  police force. However, it’s notable that the cops ultimately come off as more pathetic than menacing. None of the men whom they arrest wind up in jail. This is due in part to the cops’ repeated failure to extract confessions through use of violence in lieu of hard evidence. Once freed, Old Wang goes right back to selling scrap metal, a victory of sorts for him. When they get introspective, the police don’t pat each other on the back, but engage in booze-soaked self-pity.

Zhao doesn’t present any solutions to the social problems Crime and Punishment depicts; in fact, his vision would go on to get substantially bleaker in Petition, a documentary depiction of bureaucratic hell that reaches epic Dickensian dimensions. His most recent film Together is just as socially committed, advocating the rights of HIV patients in China, but in a key sense it marks a departure for Zhao’s filmmaking. While Crime and Punishment and Petition were made without the approval of the Chinese government,Together was produced by China’s Ministry of Health with the intention of informing Chinese people about HIV. Despite the compromises inherent in the project and some aesthetic missteps (like a sappy montage about an HIV-positive boy), it shows that his interest in China’s outcasts remains alive. However, to see Zhao at his most intrepid and uncompromising, one must turn to Crime and Punishment.

Steve Erickson is a freelance critic who lives in New York. He writes for Gay City News, The Nashville Scene, the Tribeca Film Festival’s website, ArtForum, Film Comment and other publications.

WATCH CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:

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Zhao Liang

Zhao Liang graduated from China’s Central Academy of Drama in 1985. He supported himself as a photographer while working on his early documentaries. His first feature documentary Crime and Punishment won the Best Documentary award at the Festival des Trois Continents. Zhao’s 2009 documentary Petition: The Court of the Complainants premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His 2011 film Together is about discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS in China and was commissioned by the Ministry of Health.

FILMOGRAPHY

2011 Together

2009 Petition

2007 Crime and Punishment

2006 Farewell Yuanmingyuan

2005 Return to the Border

2004 City Scene

2001 Paper Airplane

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Mr. Zhao’s evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates offers a window into hard choices that face directors as they try to carve out space for self-expression in China’s authoritarian system. Like Mr. Zhao, many seek to balance their independent visions with their desires to live securely and win recognition.

Accompanying the article are two videos: one in which Zhao shares his thoughts on filmmaking in China, and another in which Ai Weiwei confronts Zhao on camera over the withdrawal of his film Petition from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival in order to avoid political controversy.

dGenerate Films is the distributor of Zhao’s film Crime and Punishment. It can be purchased through dGenerate or Amazon, or viewed online at Amazon or Fandor.

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Directors Zhao Liang and Fan Lixin in Zhao Liang's Beijing studio (photo: Grace Wang)

Unlike some of the higher profile documentarians in North America and Europe, the majority of documentary filmmakers in China are working alone or with a skeleton crew, without shooting permissions, and often little to no funding.

Wang asks, if these documentary filmmakers are really faced with countless adversities, what drives them to continue to churn out so many great works?

In her conversation with Zhao Liang, the director of Petition (2009) and Crime and Punishment (2007), Zhao revealed that he spent 12 years filming Petition. Once he started, he felt that he could not stop. His conscience and sense of responsibility reached such a high level that he could do nothing but become fully committed to his task.

How can these documentary filmmakers keep going? For Wang the answer seems to be for them to succeed both artistically and commercially. In order to succeed both ways, she thinks that one or all of the following are needed:

Better-produced films, continued artistic innovation, attention to details, and much, much needed marketing to get people in front of screens.

Besides these areas for improvement, Wang includes another view uttered by Wang Shiqing, the cinematographer of the award-winning Up the Yangtze (2007): “Film is a group art. You can’t make a good film alone.”  The proverbial one-man crew is perhaps still the most common approach adopted by contemporary Chinese documentary filmmakers In fact, many dGenerate directors, including Zhao Liang, Zhao Dayong and Xu Tong have made superb films that received international acclaim using this method.

Fan Lixin holds pirated copies of his film "Last Train Home" (photo: Grace Wang)

In terms of domestic film distribution, Wang says that today, Chinese independent documentaries most often travel by word of mouth. People’s blogs serve as one of the most important platforms for news of new documentaries to reach out. To illustrate the actual distribution mechanism, Wang interviewed Fan Lixin, director of the acclaimed Last Train Home, who was buying pirated DVDs of his own film in China. Fan confessed that he was happy to see those DVDs despite the fact that he was helping illegal DVD-makers make money because it was better that the film was being watched than not so at all.

Regardless of how films circulate in China and ways to improve the current situation, especially with the state censorship board, Wang perceives “open collaboration” between and among Chinese documentary filmmakers, “international producers, good editors” and those with “artistic visions” to be the key in taking Chinese documentary cinema to a new level. The goal, as she firmly believes, is to create a bridge that allows the world to come and see the real China, one that no one can afford not to look at any more.

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Together (dir. Zhao Liang)

Chinese Radio International broadcast a segment profiling Zhao Liang’s new documentary Together. The film will screen at the 35th Hong Kong International Film Festival. You can listen to the program here.

Together is a behind-the-scenes documentary of Chinese director Gu Changwei’s upcoming feature film A Tale of Magic (formerly known as Life is a Miracle), which alludes to the discrimination faced by HIV/AIDS patients in China.  Zhao documented the interactions of the cast and crew as they came face-to-face with the disease during the production.

Film critic and blogger Dan Edwards discusses the film in the radio program:

“When you talk about HIV in China, it’s very easy to remain at an abstract level and not relate to what this means for individual people on a daily level… but hearing some of these stories about the gross discrimination and isolation that a lot of HIV sufferers face in China would have been quite a revelation.”

Edwards has written extensively and interviewed Zhao about the film. You can read more from him on his blog Screening China.

Watch Zhao Liang answer questions at the international premiere of Together at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Zhao Liang’s acclaimed feature Crime and Punishment is available in the dGenerate catalog.

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Shattered (dir. Xu Tong)

The 35th Hong Kong International Film Festival begins March 20th and runs to April 5th. We’re pleased to see that several films from directors who have films in the dGenerate catalog will be presenting new works, including some world premieres like Yu Guangyi’s Bachelor Mountain and Xu Tong’s Shattered. More information on these films, and a list of other Chinese films screening at HKIFF, after the break.

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