Independent Chinese Documentary

From the Studio to the Street

L. Robinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230298293
• eBook ISBN: 9781137271228
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The rise of independent documentary film production is the most radical development in the contemporary Chinese mediascape. This book is a sustained examination of Chinese independent documentary in relation to one of its central principles: xianchang, or being 'on the scene'.

1

Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary

The rise of a movement

One day towards the end of 1991, the film director Zhang Yuan hosted a meeting at his house in Xidan, Beijing. Those present came from a variety of professional backgrounds – some had trained as artists, others as filmmakers, yet others in television – but most had recent experience in the state media conglomerate, CCTV. The aim of the gathering was simple: to discuss the concept and implications of independent film production (W. Cui, 2003, p. 84). Although the group dispersed without issuing a formal manifesto, and with an apparent agreement to preserve only the loosest of affiliations (X. Lü, 2003a, p. 13), the documentary director Li Xiaoshan, who was present, recollects that two conditions were agreed upon as fundamental to the maintenance of its autonomy. The first was operational independence, incorporating issues of self-sufficiency in production and financing; the second was duli sixiang, or ‘independence of thought’, primarily signifying autonomy from state-approved ideology (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 204). Aside from Zhang, participants included a number of individuals – Jiang Yue, Duan Jinchuan, Wu Wenguang – who would gradually emerge as the driving force behind independent documentary in China, as well as others, such as Wen Pulin and Shi Jian, who would make a name for themselves in other fields. Several of these figures went on to take part in an academic symposium on documentary organized by Shi Jian at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute some weeks later (Y. Zhang, 2010, p. 121). There, in a closed session, various films were screened to heated debate, including Bumming in Beijing and Tiananmen [Tiananmen] (1991), a series shot for television by Shi Jian, Chen Jue and other members of the Structure Wave Youth Cinema Experimental Group (SWYC) (X. Lin, 2005; W. Wu, 2002, p. 132). Early the following year, the Hong Kong International Film Festival scheduled Tiananmen. Although it was taken off the programme after pressure was applied from Beijing (Barmé, 1993, p. 282), in the accompanying publicity materials the SWYC referred to the film as a ‘new documentary’. Lin Xudong (2005) has suggested that this was possibly the first time the concept had formally appeared in print.¹

Despite the appellation ‘New Documentary Movement’ (xin jilu yundong), popularized by Lü Xinyu’s book of the same name, it is debatable whether these interconnected events represented the genesis of an organized artistic faction. First, as Zhang Yingjin (2010, p. 120) has pointed out, despite these directors’ common interests, their lack of systematic coordination in particular was not characteristic of a sustained artistic movement. It is for this reason that I have opted instead to use the term ‘independent Chinese documentary’ to describe works classified under this rubric (even though this phrase is problematic in other ways, as I will touch on later). Second, these activities arguably represented less a point of origin than the clearest manifestation of forces already in motion. All the works screened at the Broadcasting Institute seminar had roots in the state television system stretching back prior to 1991. In 1988, in preparation for the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the PRC’s foundation, CCTV commissioned a series of documentary productions to be broadcast to a foreign audience (W. Cui, 2003, p. 85). One of these, produced by the Bureau of Society and Education, was Tiananmen. Another, produced by the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, was The Chinese [Zhongguoren] (1988), several episodes of which were written and directed by Wu Wenguang (X. Lin, 2005). However, following the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the implication of the CCTV-commissioned series River Elegy [Heshang] (1988) in the democracy movement, the state media conglomerate underwent intensive restructuring. In consequence, programmes considered sensitive or inappropriate were shelved, Tiananmen and The Chinese among them. Although Shi Jian and his colleagues continued to work on the former until its completion in May 1991, CCTV refused it broadcast time, banned the series domestically and denied it official international distribution (Voci, 2004, p. 80). Wu Wenguang, in contrast, adopted a slightly different approach. Taking some of the material he had shot for The Chinese, and some he had shot on the side while working on the programme, he borrowed equipment from friends and colleagues and continued to film his subjects after the summer of 1989 (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 65). Early in 1990, while in his hometown of Kunming, Yunnan Province, he used further personal connections to access an editing suite, refashioning his material over three days and nights of continual work (F. Fang, 2003, p. 378). The result was the first edit of Bumming in Beijing. Rather than attempting to distribute the film through official channels, Wu Wenguang handed out copies in private to friends and fellow media professionals, creating a considerable stir (p. 348). Thus was ‘independent’ documentary, in the sense of documentary produced and circulated outside the state media system, born.

It is perhaps for these reasons that Bumming in Beijing has been treated both as instigator of and prototype for independent Chinese documentary.² Even if one rejects the concept of a ‘movement’, other films produced around this period shared distinct characteristics with Wu’s work, simultaneously aligning them as a group while distinguishing them from traditional Chinese documentaries. The directors mostly came from the world of television, as opposed to the film studio system and associated training institutions that raised the Fifth and Sixth Generations of feature film directors. Like Wu Wenguang, however, they eschewed working directly within the state system, preferring to produce their documentaries outside it wherever possible (Berry, 2007, p. 118). Their subject matter was distinct and innovative: rather than concentrate on the major events or great historical figures of traditional documentary, they chose instead to turn their cameras on the everyday lives of those around them (F. Fang, 2003, p. 348). Initially, this meant their direct contemporaries: the educated artistic elite of Bumming in Beijing, for example. Yet even this focus was pioneering, for never before had such ‘marginal’ people been made the major characters of a documentary (X. Lü, 2003a, p. 5).³ Finally, they all displayed aspects of the cinematographic style that Ernest Larsen had commented upon in New York. The established Chinese documentary format of the post-1949 era was an extreme version of the Griersonian expository mode, an illustrated lecture dominated by lyrical script, ‘voice of god’ narration and re-enactment or staging. This formula served as the paradigm for all mainstream Chinese documentary prior to 1989, including the zhuantipian, or ‘special topic film’, a televisual innovation of the 1980s of which River Elegy was an example (Berry, 2007, p. 117; Y. Chu, 2007, pp. 29–30). In contrast, the new documentaries adopted a rather different approach. While retaining elements of the zhuantipian – for example, the formally arranged talking heads utilized by Wu in Bumming in Beijing and 1966: My Time in the Red Guards [1966: Wo de hongweibing shidai] (1993), his second documentary – they also began to develop an aesthetic characterized by handheld camerawork, technical lapses, and the use of distinct new cinematographic techniques, notably long takes, synchronous sound and tracking shots (Berry, 2007, p. 122; X. Lü, 2003a, p. 5). It was this style that drew consistent overseas comparison with cinéma vérité.⁴ Christened jishizhuyi (‘reportage realism’ or ‘documentary realism’) by its practitioners, documentaries utilizing it were termed jilupian.

Despite the (somewhat shocked) familiarity with which foreign critics greeted these films, several of the directors have argued that the new documentaries emerged in a cultural vacuum. This position is exemplified by Wu Wenguang’s oft-quoted comment that, when he shot Bumming in Beijing, he had no concept of what a documentary was (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 6). In part, such claims reflect the tightly controlled post-Tiananmen environment into which these films surfaced. They are also perhaps indicative of the traumatizing nature of those events, and the immediate need to process them. Even if one does not wish to interpret Bumming in Beijing quite as literally as Larsen, the ‘crucial structuring absence’ (Berry, 2007, p. 118) of 4 June is still apparent in the earliest documentaries. This is perhaps most obvious in Wang Guangli, Shi Jian and the SWYC’s I Graduated! [Wo biye le!] (1992), which was shot primarily on the Beijing University campus, and features interviews with students from across Beijing’s many educational institutions, all of whom were involved in, or connected to, the demonstrations of 1989. However, this sense of broader cultural isolation also speaks to the particular development of documentary in China. Historically, local exposure to a variety of documentary modes following the 1949 revolution was uneven. The 1950s were comparatively open, and saw visits from directors outside the communist bloc: Chris Marker shot the footage for Sunday in Peking [Dimanche à Pekin] (1956) on a two-week trip to China in 1955 (Lupton, 2005, p. 50), while Jean Painlevé toured Shanghai in 1957 (Johnson, 2011, p. 43). However, this situation was reversed for much of the 1960s. In 1971 and 1972, respectively, Joris Ivens and Michelangelo Antonioni became the first significant western documentary makers invited to shoot in the PRC since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, but neither of their projects – Antonioni’s Chung Kuo [Cina] (1972) and Ivens’ How Yukong Moved the Mountains [Comment Yukong deplaça les montagnes] (1976) – was an unqualified success.⁵In consequence, CCTV coproductions in the 1980s with Japanese crews from the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) and Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), as well as the UK’s Antelope Productions, provided the first sustained contact that many Chinese media professionals had had with foreign documentary makers.⁶ Lü Xinyu (2003a, p. 14) has thus suggested that the very early stages of the ‘movement’ emerged less as a consequence of ongoing theorization than through gradual, practical attempts to lay the foundations of a new form of documentary realism.

These conditions, however, changed rapidly over the course of the early 1990s, as invitations were extended to these directors to show their works abroad. In 1991, Bumming in Beijing premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and from there was picked up by festivals around the world (F. Fang, 2003, p. 379). That year alone, the documentary was screened in Berlin, Fukuoka, Hawaii, London, Vancouver, Montreal and Yamagata. More significantly, however, in 1993 the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival showcased six Chinese documentaries, including work by Wu, the SWYC, Duan Jinchuan and Wen Pulin, and Jiang Yue (X. Lin, 2005). At Yamagata that year, the filmmakers were exposed to a wide range of documentary styles and techniques, two of which were to have a lasting influence. The first was that of Ogawa Shinsuke, the Japanese documentary maker and founder of the festival, whose entire oeuvre was shown in a commemorative retrospective. The second was that of the American documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, whose films Model (1980) and Zoo (1993) were screened at the festival in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Ogawa’s work is characterized by an explicit social and political commitment. He lived and worked alongside his subjects, rather than coming to them as an ‘objective’ outsider, and his most famous series of films concerns the resistance of local farming communities to the appropriation of land for the construction of Tokyo’s Narita airport (Berry, 2007, pp. 129–30). Wiseman, in contrast, is most noted for his studies of American institutions and their day-to-day operations, shot in the strictly observational style of 1960s American direct cinema. Lü Xinyu (2006, p. 15) has suggested that these two styles were particularly influential because, together, they demonstrated how the filmmakers could achieve a bottom-up analysis of Chinese society. Certainly, exposure to these techniques caused the directors to comprehensively reassess the nature and significance of documentary production.

The consequence of this reassessment was the refinement of independent documentary’s emergent film practice into one that bore the distinct imprint of both Wiseman and Ogawa. Increasingly, directors sought to eradicate any traces of the zhuantipian that had survived in their films in favour of the very strict prescriptions of direct cinema: exclusive use of natural sound; no interviews; and the minimization, at least in the films of Duan Jinchuan and Jiang Yue, of the filmmaker’s presence on camera wherever possible.⁷ In addition, they began to switch their focus from friends and colleagues – urban, educated, middle class – to the quotidian experience of ordinary people lower down the social scale, and the operation of Chinese state institutions on the ground (Berry, 2007, pp. 120–1). From this transformation emerged films such as Out of Phoenixbridge [Huidao Fenghuangqiao] (1997), in which director Li Hong lived with her subjects for a period during shooting, not unlike Ogawa; Jiang Yue’s A River Stilled [Bei jingzhi de he] (1999), on the relationship between two labourers working on the Three Gorges dam project; and Duan Jinchuan’s No. 16 Barkhor South Street [Bakuo Nanjie shiliu hao] (1997), a classic piece of direct cinema that focuses on the operations of a juweihui, or ‘residents’ committee’, in Lhasa, Tibet.

These films form the apogee of what Lü Xinyu (2006, p. 14) has termed the first phase of the ‘New Documentary Movement’, which she suggests lasted from independent documentary’s emergence at the end of the 1980s to the middle of the 1990s. Politically and socially engaged, they are sometimes described as films on ‘public’ (gonggong) topics.⁸Such topics concern questions of ‘state’ (guojia) and ‘nation’ (minzu): historical issues, for example, or the day-to-day operation of the Chinese state apparatus, as exemplified by the army, the police force, railway stations and coal mines (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 7). Hence, while these films are often about public spaces, they also concentrate on incidents or institutions that require face-to-face contact between ‘real people’ and state representatives at the most local of levels. It is precisely through such interaction, in particular the organization of daily life by officialdom, that Duan Jinchuan has argued that the ideological work of the Chinese government system as a whole is thrown into sharp relief (W. Wang, 2000, p. 133). This focus on the social and political forms of everyday existence partly accounts for the designation of these films as public.

The earliest manifestations of independent Chinese documentary are thus usually seen as an attempt to break with accepted values, conventions and modes of production in Chinese documentary filmmaking. Stylistically, the directors endeavoured to emancipate themselves from traditional methods of achieving documentary signification. In terms of subject matter, they sought out new, even sensitive material, and strove to address it from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, rather than that of the government. Finally, they aimed for self-sufficiency in production, turning their backs on CCTV and the official broadcast media. While not a direct challenge to the power of the state, these films did constitute an implicit criticism of older forms of documentary and the vested interests that generated them. And yet, just at the point when a coherent independent documentary style might be said to have emerged, critics have located new and equally radical shifts in representational form. These changes have been described as, and ascribed to, the ‘diversification’ or ‘pluralization’ (duoyuanhua) of independent documentary practice from the late 1990s onwards.

The diversification of independent Chinese documentary

Both critics and directors seem broadly to agree that independent documentary in the PRC underwent a transformation from around 1997. Cui Weiping (2003, p. 89) has argued that, while this year was the high point of what Lü would term the first phase of the ‘movement’, it was also a turning point in its evolution; Lin Xudong (2005) has suggested that a new breed of filmmaker and documentary started to emerge from around 1997; while individual filmmakers, most obviously Wu Wenguang (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 75), have also pinpointed this period as one in which their own documentary film practice changed dramatically. Moreover, there is also broad agreement as to how these changes manifested. Two significant factors are usually invoked. First, younger filmmakers began to move beyond the strictly observational approach adopted by filmmakers such as Duan Jinchuan. They demonstrated a willingness to experiment stylistically, transgressing the conventions established by their predecessors. Extradiegetic music and variations on the voiceover were employed; live and period film footage intercut; the re-enactment revived. Such experimentation reaches its zenith in contemporary works such as Huang Weikai’s Disorder [Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai] (2009) or Li Ning’s Tape [Jiaodai] (2009), which are as concerned with pushing the formal limits of documentary as they are with questions of content. Thus we see the emergence of documentaries that, with reference to the famous modes outlined by Bill Nichols (1991, pp. 32–75; 2010, pp. 142–71), are as ‘performative’ and ‘reflexive’ as they are ‘observational’.

The second significant factor is the diversification of subject matter. The focus on social institutions and minorities does not disappear; indeed, since the early 2000s a new strain of socially committed film has surfaced that is much more explicitly political than that of the 1990s. This is exemplified by the activist documentaries of Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming.⁹ However, such films have been complemented by a slew on topics that depart from the public subjects of the early documentaries. These new works analyse individual, often autobiographical, experiences, sometimes even events that, from another perspective, might be considered public. They scrutinize the familial – ethnographies of marriage and of family dynamics are pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary
• 2. Metaphor and Event
• 3. Time, Space and Movement
• 4. Ethics, the Body and Digital Video
• 5. Sound and Voice
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary of Key and Recurring Chinese Terms
• Bibliography
• Films and Television Programmes Referenced
• Index