New Chinese-Language Documentaries

Ethics, Subject and Place

Kuei-fen Chiu, Yingjin Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415722063
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317936947
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Documentary filmmaking is one of the most vibrant areas of media activity in the Chinese world, with many independent filmmakers producing documentaries that deal with a range of sensitive socio-political problems, bringing to their work a strongly ethical approach. This book identifies notable similarities and crucial differences between new Chinese-language documentaries in mainland China and Taiwan. It outlines how documentary filmmaking has developed, contrasts independent documentaries with dominant official state productions, considers how independent documentary filmmakers go about their work, including the work of exhibiting their films and connecting with audiences, and discusses the content of their documentaries, showing how the filmmakers portray a wide range of subject matter regarding places and people, and how they deal with particular issues including the underprivileged, migrants and women in an ethical way. Throughout the book demonstrates how successful Chinese-language independent documentary filmmaking is, with many appearances at international film festivals and a growing number of award-winning titles.

1 Introduction New Chinese-language documentaries

DOI: 10.4324/9781315858517-1

Setting the parameters

Against the background of a veritable recent boom of documentary filmmaking and documentary studies around the world, ¹ independent documentaries from mainland China have attracted international media attention and scholarly investment in the past decade (Pickowicz and Zhang 2006: 23–108; Y. Chu 2007; C. Berry et al. 2010; Y. Zhang 2010b: 133–41; Robinson 2013; Johnson et al. 2014). ² Mainland Chinese filmmakers’ courageous confrontation with sensitive sociopolitical matters, their signature claims to truth and reality, and their frequent appearances at international film festivals—not to mention a growing number of award-winning titles to their credits—have compelled critics and scholars to reexamine a wide range of issues regarding documentary studies in general. ³ As an entry point into this fast-growing field, our book takes ethics as one central issue in current Chinese documentary studies, and it proposes to do so by bringing place and migration into our enquiry, along with other important categories such as subject, gender, and power. Given our emphasis on these key concepts related to documentary studies, we believe that any serious consideration of Chinese-language documentaries is incomplete without engaging new Taiwan documentary, a vibrant force that has produced a sustained social impact and has cultivated a sophisticated film language since the 1980s. From the outset, therefore, we seek to set the parameters of our investigation right.

By choosing the term “Chinese-language,” ⁴ we want to keep a distance from the territorial definition of “the Sinophone” proffered in Shu-mei Shih’s recent writings (2007, 2011, 2012), which essentially insist on excluding mainland Chinese cultural productions except for those vaguely placed on the margins of “China” or “Chineseness.” Without reiterating major arguments vis-à-vis Shih’s definition and her subsequent revision (S. Lu 2008; Y. Zhang 2009; Dirlik 2013), we believe that it is more productive than a simple gesture of denial or outrage to redirect critical attention to Chinese-language cultural productions from both mainland China and other Chinese-speaking societies. Our immediate aims are twofold: on the one hand to preserve the counter-hegemonic, decentering force of the Sinophone by approaching visual productions inside—as well as on the margins of—mainland China as being equally disruptive and subversive as (if not more so than) their counterparts in other parts of the world, and on the other to bring into focus the intriguing, yet much under-appreciated, growth and transformation of documentary filmmaking in Taiwan. ⁵ In Taiwan, as in mainland China, independent documentaries started outside the political mainstream in the 1980s and have since continued to intervene in the heart of “an ever-shifting geometry of power and signification” (Massey 1994: 3) and have proven to be a resilient force operating in the cracks and fissures opened up by the uneven developments of the nation-state (socialist or capitalist) and globalization. The “new” that precedes “Chinese-language” in our title thus distinguishes our objects of analysis from the dominant state productions of documentary—and oftentimes propagandist—images as official memory (as explained in Chapters 2 and 3) and highlights the independent spirit shared by new filmmakers in mainland China, Taiwan, and elsewhere, in both fictional and documentary modes (Cheung 2007, 2010).

Engaging the keywords

A cluster of keywords are used to structure our investigation in this book. This section enumerates a few pairs of them and anticipates theoretical issues to be addressed in our discussion of specific documentary works in the subsequent chapters. These pairs include “history and politics,” “theory and ethics,” “subject and gender,” “place and migration” as well as “exhibition and circulation.”

History and politics

“History” refers to both the history of documentary films and the sociopolitical history that documentary filmmaking tries to intervene, revisit, and reshape by means of its own—albeit inevitably changing—aesthetics and politics. When independent documentaries emerged in mainland China and Taiwan in the 1980s, they claimed to produce new representations of truth and reality by tactically adopting the perspectives from below—that is, from the voiceless, the powerless, the marginalized, and the underprivileged. In Lu Xinyu’s view, if the first stage of independent documentary in mainland China displayed an overriding interest in social issues, the second stage is no longer exclusively characterized by social concerns but is practiced oftentimes with an eye to express the filmmaker’s individuality. ⁶ While many works continue the tradition of interpreting a changing China from the bottom up, some filmmakers in the second stage “brought an experimental avant-garde spirit and exploration of film language into the production of documentary,” and such self-reflexive and performative explorations “created a new era dominated by personal images” (X. Lu 2010: 34–5). Admittedly, as we caution the reader in Chapter 5, it is debatable whether “dominated” is an overstatement and whether a similar expression such as “from public to private” (Robinson 2010) is accurate for the so-called second stage starting in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, critics generally agree that significant changes in the recent development of mainland Chinese documentary films include “diversification of styles, de-politicization of narration, restoration of a plebeian (pingmin) attitude, individualization (gerenhua) of perspectives, establishment of an international outlook, and attention to the ontology of documentary” (Y. Zhang 2010b: 140). ⁷

With the significant exception of the establishment of an international outlook, we find a similar trajectory in the development of new Taiwan documentary. The momentum to “give voice to the voiceless” precipitated the birth of new Taiwan documentary in the 1980s (see Chapter 3), and social documentaries dominated the scene as non-professional documentarians aligned themselves with street demonstrators. Although the practice of documentary filmmaking to “explode”—rather than merely “explore”—reality with a new vision has continued, personal documentaries and experimental films began to emerge around the turn of the twenty-first century and have increasingly attracted international recognition (see Chapter 10).

In spite of these notable similarities, crucial differences exist between new Chinese-language documentaries in mainland China and Taiwan. If the observational position is identified as a characteristic of new Chinese documentary, the participatory mode of engagement tends to prevail in new Taiwan documentary, particularly in its early phase of development. The emphasis on the filmmaker’s own perspective in Taiwan also stands in contrast to the apparent lack of the commitment to anchoring precise meanings in much of new Chinese documentary. Whereas mainland Chinese filmmakers have by and large rejected the label of “underground” and have intended their works to serve as the “alternative archive” (C. Berry and Rofel 2010a) in modern Chinese history, Taiwan’s early documentarians typically defined their works as oppositional and sought to engage in a direct social intervention in public debates. The different functions and goals of documentary filmmaking—from opposition, resistance, subversion to individualization, de-politicization, and aestheticization—point to different kinds of politics involved in the recent documentary history and reflect different sociopolitical contexts that have given rise to new documentary filmmaking in mainland China and Taiwan. Furthermore, the geopolitical differences have resulted in a sharp contrast between the virtual invisibility of Taiwan vis-à-vis the high profile of mainland China in the international film circles, and we shall probe into these differences and possible underlying factors in Chapters 7, 10, and 11.

Theory and ethics

Bill Nichols (1991: 76) defines the difference between fiction and documentary as one between erotics and ethics: “Instead of the fictional space of narrative and questions of style, we confront the axiographic space of documentary and questions of ethics” (Nichols 1991: 77). For Nichols (2010: 48), ethical issues are central to documentary filmmaking because documentaries are representations of the historical world and cannot eschew the question of their effect on the real world and the lives of those filmed. Other scholars likewise regard ethics as essential to documentary, because “filmmakers identified themselves as creative artists for whom ethical behavior is at the core of their projects” and for whom there is no escaping from confronting three conflicting sets of responsibilities—those to “their subjects, their viewers, and their own artistic vision and production exigencies” (Aufderheide et al. 2009: 1). Moreover, ethics is significant to documentary because filmmakers usually take up the position of “storytellers who tell important truths in a world where the truths they want to tell are often ignored or hidden” (Aufderheide et al. 2009: 20). This is why, following Emanuel Levinas, Michael Renov (2004: 159–60) defines documentary filmmaking as an ethical encounter with the other—an encounter that prioritizes the questions of justice, responsibility, and being-for-the-other. Similarly, Garnet Butchart (2006: 430) asserts that ethics in documentary filmmaking is always connected with truth: “ethics is a matter of deciding for or against what is not known or cannot as yet be recognized from the point of view of currently available knowledge systems (moral, religious, ideological, etc.). It is with this conception of truth that ethics is properly concerned.” As Butchart sees it, documentary filmmaking honors the ethics of truth at the moment when the visual mode of its address is brought to visibility.

More questions may arise in documentary’s critical engagement with the notions of truth. What is truth? How is truth produced? In whose interest? And for what purpose? At the same time, documentary practice is expected to honor the ethical principles of “do no harm” and “protect the vulnerable.” The attention to the ethical dimension of documentary filmmaking helps distinguish it as a mode of cinematic representation with indexical links to the historical world. In this sense, documentary is driven more by the Levinasian ethics concerned with the need of the other than a mere quest for the ontological question of being. That is to say, documentary filmmaking is conceived as a response to the demands of the other, in which response/responsibility is, in Levinas’ words, “not just other-regarding behavior, but is a being-for-the-other” (Perpich 2008: 120). The crucial question is no longer the relationship of the ego with itself, or the creativity of the self; rather, it is the ethical relationship with the other—the responsibility/response-ability to the other (Perpich 2008: 87)—that forms the backbone of documentary filmmaking. This move beyond ontological questions turns documentary filmmaking into an ethical event. To quote Levinas (1998: xii) again: “It is this shattering of indifference—even if indifference is statistically dominant—this possibility of one-for-the-other, that constitutes the ethical event.” Although documentary filmmaking can be and has been practiced as creative art, it always involves commitments and responsibility and is inevitably implicated and complicated by ethics in variant forms.

Ethical issues have informed much of our investigation in this book, and the pressing question for many documentaries under discussion concerns not simply “what constitutes the truth?” but also “what constitutes the ethical production of truth?” The attention to the production of documentary thus brings us from the ethical responsibility for the other to the ethics of self that is deeply involved in the documentary encounter. For Wu Wenguang as for Hsiao Mei-ling (Xiao Meiling) and Si-Manirei (Zhang Shulan), the self is inevitably implicated in renegotiating the boundary between self and other when a documentarian cares for and reaches out to the other, especially the subaltern other (e.g., migrants, women, and the underprivileged in general), and such renegotiation constitutes a different production of truth and reality—the kind of truth and reality that may turn out to be as unexpected as it is unsettling (see Chapters 5 and 6). After all, as John Ellis (2012: 98) rightly observes: “Documentaries take us out of the lives we know and offer us other ways of living, sometimes strange, sometimes unwelcome, but always enlightening. They take us to places and situations that can enrage us or make us feel profoundly uncomfortable.”

Subject and gender

Documentary filmmaking traditionally is a male-dominated field of practice worldwide, and this remains true to new Chinese documentary with a few notable exceptions. ⁸ By contrast, a prominent feature of new Taiwan documentary is the large proportion of active women directors in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: new Chinese-language documentaries
• PART I History and politics
• 2 The history of documentary filmmaking in mainland China
• 3 The vision and voice of new Taiwan documentary
• PART II Theory and ethics
• 4 Independent documentary and social theories of space and locality
• 5 Subject to movement: Wu Wenguang and the ethics of self
• PART III Subject and gender
• 6 New subjectivities in women’s documentary films
• 7 The other as interlocutor: “voices of the people” in Taiwan’s documentaries
• PART IV Place and migration
• 8 Empowering place: Jia Zhangke’s post-nostalgic assemblage of Shanghai
• 9 Migration documentaries and the vision of cosmopolitanism
• PART V Exhibition and circulation
• 10 Taiwan documentary in the international arena
• 11 The circulation of mainland Chinese independent documentary
• Glossary
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index