Screening China

Drunken White Men, Kindhearted Whores and Bestial Japanese: Zhang Yimou’s ‘The Flowers of War’

2012-02-05T18:54:00.000-08:00

Christian Bale and Ni Ni in Zhang Yimou's latest heavy-handed effort, The Flowers of War.

Were Zhang Yimou and the folks at SARFT really surprised when Zhang’s nationalistic, overly sentimental and cliché ridden latest film failed to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film last month? Admittedly the Academy Awards are no stranger to clichés or melodramatic content, but given The Flowers of War was up against A Separation by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi – by all accounts a beautifully understated drama – Zhang’s film was always facing an uphill battle. The Flowers of War is so heavy handed, and in parts frankly laughable, that I don't think it's at all surprising that it failed to even make the Oscars shortlist.

I was dubious from the moment I heard Zhang was working on a film about the Nanjing Massacre. There’s no doubt the seizure of China’s wartime capital in 1937 by the invading Japanese army, and subsequent systematic rape of the female population and execution of hundreds of thousands of residents, was one of the great war crimes of history. Unfortunately, however, this horrific incident is constantly harped upon by Chinese Communist Party propagandists to reinforce the notion that China needs a strong authoritarian leadership to resist foreign aggression. It’s also a handy device for directing attention from China’s home-grown atrocities. Given Zhang Yimou’s record of recent films that less-than-subtly affirm a worldview strictly in line with that of the Chinese Communist Party – from the necessity of authoritarian leadership to hold China together (Hero) to the tough-but-caring image of provincial party cadres (Not One Less) – I wasn’t confident Zhang was going to say anything new or challenging about the massacre. What I did expect was hordes of marauding Japanese beasts, heroic Chinese soldiers and endless suffering by defenceless Chinese civilians. I wasn’t disappointed.

The film opens with a group of school students – convent girls no less – running through the fog-shrouded ruins of Nanjing as the Japanese roll into the city. Their retreat into their convent is covered by a particularly manly squad of Chinese soldiers who manage to wipe out the entire unit of Japanese troops on the girls’ trail. The Chinese soldiers are paragons of fighting resistance to the end, and they are all eventually killed except for their officer, Major Li. He goes on to single handedly eliminate a second Japanese unit who turn up at the convent the next day to rape the girls, dying grandly in slow motion as he simultaneously pulls out the pins on a dozen or so grenades, thereby eliminating the last of the Japanese who have evaded his unerringly accurate bullets. With Chinese super-soldiers like these we’re left wondering how the Japanese were able to seize Nanjing in the first place.

Meanwhile a mortician in the form of Christian Bale arrives at the convent to prepare the local dead priest for burial. Bale spends the first half of the film enacting the stereotype of the stupid, drunken, lascivious white man in China. Until, of course, the brutality of the Japanese inspires a spiritual road to Damascus and he starts concocting plans to save the innocent schoolgirls. Oh, and in the meantime a group of gorgeously exotic prostitutes turn up seeking shelter, providing a sexy love interest in the form of Yu Mo (played by newcomer Ni Ni), the archetypal whore with a heart of gold.

Are you retching yet?

Predictably, the Japanese, almost to a man, are shrieking rampaging animals, with the exception of one laughably “cultured” officer who turns up at the convent and rather bizarrely sings a folk song about being homesick.

When the Japanese demand the presence of the school girls at a “party” to celebrate the city’s capture, we come to the crux of the film’s drama – which unfortunately isn’t very dramatic at all. With an almost equal number of convent girls and women of the night on the convent premises, it isn’t hard to guess the plan Bale and the prostitutes come up with to spare the pure young sisters from the lustful clutches of the Japanese. Yet the deception takes a painful 40 minutes or so to play out, with lashings of hand-wringing sentimentality and tears along the way, as well as a quick sex scene and some glimpses of female nudity to keep male viewers interested. It all ends very heroically with swelling choirs on the soundtrack to alert you to the spiritual grandeur of the sacrifice involved. Subtle this film is not.

Yu Mo (Ni Ni) and her band of kindhearted prostitutes in The Flowers of War.

U.S. audiences seem to concur with my dim view of Flowers, with Reuters describing its opening weekend in the States as a “belly flop.” The film reportedly took “an anaemic US $48,558”, which must be a big disappointment for its makers, considering it cost close to US $100 million to produce. Having said that, the film was the highest grossing domestic title in China last year, so it’s unlikely to lose money in the long run.

Commentator Lu Yiyi wrote a post for The Wall Street Journal last week accusing U.S. reviewers of anti-China bias and double standards in their accusations of the film’s demonisation and stereotyping of the Japanese. While she has a point about double standards – plenty of Hollywood films demonise non-Americans, and many of them have been applauded by U.S. critics – but her argument glosses over the fact that it’s not just the Japanese that are two-dimensional caricatures in The Flowers of War. There isn’t a single rounded character in the entire film.

As noted, Bale is the embodiment of the Chinese stereotype of the parasitic useless white foreigner in China (until he undergoes and very predictable change of heart), while the women in the film fall into two strict categories. The convent girls are the embodiment of Chinese female purity and innocence, while the prostitutes are exotic Madam Butterflies crossed with Suzie Wong, harbouring with hearts of pure gold. And yes, the Japanese are all marauding rapists, except the officer who sings folksongs.

Lu angrily defends Chinese directors’ right to portray Japanese soldiers as monsters, given their atrocious actions during the war. Setting aside the domestic political reasons the CCP encourages such portrayals, it’s a misnomer to claim that portrayals that acknowledge brutality preclude rounded characters or psychological insights. Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), while a flawed film in many ways, springs to mind as a work that manages to explore the thinking of Japanese troops, and how their thinking led them to behave the way they did, without ever shying away from their savage brutality. It’s an example of the kind of reflective filmmaking that is completely lacking in China’s official Party-controlled industry. Similarly, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) looks at the emotional complexities of wartime loyalties and unflinchingly portrays Chinese collaboration with the Japanese army, while also clearly conveying the savagery of the occupation.

It’s also extremely disingenuous of Lu Yiyi to claim in her WSJ post that Flowers had nothing to do with the Chinese state because the money came from a Chinese bank. Apart from the fact that all Chinese banks are state owned, Lu must be aware that any official production in China – especially one of the size and scope of The Flowers of War – goes through a very rigorous censorship process which severely limits what filmmakers can and can’t say. The state has a huge influence over the content of any official production, irrespective of where the financing comes from.

Zhang Yimou spoke recently of a paucity of decent scripts in China’s official sector, and while he didn’t allude to the reasons, directors like Jia Zhangke and Stanley Kwan have been more forthcoming. Jia was quoted as saying in Shanghai last year, “The only reason that we cannot make genre movies is the barrier that censorship sets…This kind of cultural over-cleanliness that bans the erotic, violent and terrifying is cultural naivety.” As reported here at Screening China, Stanley Kwan stated at a post-screening Q&A in Beijing in late 2010, “Now many Hong Kong directors come to the mainland. But they have to deal with a long list of banned topics – no scary films, no erotic films, no gay films. They just have to make the best of what’s left.” Even China's most commercially successful filmmaker of contemporary times, Feng Xiaogang, when asked if he was a master filmmaker at the time of Aftershock's release in 2010, replied sadly, “This is not an era that can produce masters. Because we face too many danger points. You can’t get too close to these danger points."

It’s no coincidence that the CCP condones so many films about the Nanjing Massacre and the Japanese War while banning so many other topics, including any depiction of the CCP’s own atrocities. The CCP covets greater cultural influence globally, but their main priority is ensuring that Chinese cultural products reinforce the Party’s worldview for domestic audiences. Chinese studio films these days may wrap their messages up in packages resembling a Hollywood product, but that doesn’t make them any less ideological. The not-so-subtle message at the heart of Flowers of War, and countless other TV series and movies made in China, is that if you have to hate someone, hate the Japanese, and be grateful contemporary China has a strong military dictatorship – sorry “People’s Government” – to keep the motherland safe from the outside world. This is why the CCP hated Lust, Caution so much – any drama that acknowledges shades of grey in its account of the war or the Japanese is considered heresy.

So why do commentators like Lu Yiyi spend their time jumping up and down about supposed anti-Chinese bias in foreign film reviewing, instead of looking at what China's filmmakers are saying about the situation in the Chinese industry? Lu could a lot more to improve China's hand in the cultural stakes by speaking out against the censorship that has hamstrung the Chinese film industry for more than half a century. As the well-known Chinese film critic Raymond Zhou wrote late last year in China Daily – a publication that is hardly a bastion of anti-CCP commentary: "We have a censorship system so inane and so completely out of touch with reality that it is a miracle any good work survives."

In any case, it's really sad to see a filmmaker of Zhang Yimou’s former stature making such vacuous and predictable fare at the service of the country’s authoritarian masters. Zhang’s films of the 1980s and 90s were so original and cinematically imaginative it’s hard to believe it’s the same director who churns out titles like Hero, Curse of the Golden Flower and Flowers of War.

There’s a message here kids – sell your soul and your work begins to ring hollow.

Newsbites: China Fails to Make the Oscars, Asian Film Award Nominees, and Mainland 2011 Box Office Results

2012-01-24T17:20:00.000-08:00

Wei Te-sheng's Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale made the short-list of Oscar nominees, but failed to gain a final nomination.

It’s been a disappointing result for China in the Oscar sweepstakes this week, with no Chinese titles making the nominee list for best foreign film. The complete list of nominations was announced on Tuesday (24 January). The mainland’s hopes were pinned on Zhang Yimou’s new epic about the Nanjing massacre, The Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale. As reported in the last Newsbites post, the film was the highest grossing domestic title in China last year, but it failed to even make the short list of Oscar nominees.

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, directed by rising star of the Taiwan industry Wei Te-sheng, made the shortlist but failed to gain a final nomination. You can see the complete list of Oscar nominees here.

Asian Film Award Nominations
China has done better in the nominations for the Asian Film Awards, presented annually by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society. Nominations were announced earlier this months and Greater China featured strongly. Tsui Hark’s 3D martial arts film Flying Swords of Dragon Gate picked up seven nominations, while The Flowers of War and Warriors of the Rainbow each picked up six nominations. All three films have been nominated in the Best Film category.

The Taiwan-produced You Are the Apple of My Eye, mentioned in my last Newsbites post as the surprise 2011 box office hit in Hong Kong, also picked up two nominations: Michelle Chen is in the running for best actress and Ko Chen-tung for best newcomer. You can see a complete list of the Asian Film Nominations here. The award winners will be announced on 19 March.

2011 Box Office
China Media Monitor Intelligence has been tabulating Chinese box office figures this month, which unsurprisingly show strong growth. According to CMM-I China’s total box office for 2011 was RMB 13.115 billion (around US$2.079 billion), an increase of just under 29 per cent on 2010’s figure. China’s film market is now the world’s third largest in terms of box office, behind the U.S. and Japan.

Takings for domestic titles still lag behind imports, however, despite the protectionist and censorial restrictions mainland China places on foreign films. The top three earners in China for 2011 were all U.S. blockbusters: Transformer 3 (RMB 1.09 billion/US$ 172 million); Kung Fu Panda 2 (RMB 600 million/US$ 95.1 million); and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (RMB 460m/US$ 72.9 million).

The top domestic films lagged way behind the highest grossing U.S. titles, with The Flowers of War pulling in RMB 467 million (US$ 74 million), and the Communist Party’s ode to itself, The Founding of a Party aka Beginning of the Great Revival making RMB 423 million/US$67 million. It should be noted, however, that there were widespread reports of box office figures for Founding of a Party being artificially inflated through various scams.

Christian's prayers were answered, with Flowers of War coming in as China's top-earning domestic titles of 2011.

You can see the full figures for the highest grossing foreign films here and highest grossing domestic titles here. CMM-I has also tabulated the highest earning regions in China in terms of box office here.

New Doco on Ai Weiwei
Artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei has been in the news a lot this past year, and now filmmaker Alison Klayman has unveiled a documentary about the man entitled Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. According to The Wall Street Journal the film debuted last Sunday (22 January) at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. The L.A. Times carried a long report about the screening here.

Youku-Fox Deal to Stream Movies Online
Finally, The Guardian carried an interesting piece this week about a deal between the popular Chinese video-hosting site Youku and 20th Century Fox, to stream 250 films online through a pay-per-view platform. The deal is set to bypass China’s filmic censorship regime, which only applies to cinema releases and films broadcast on television, as well as protectionist measures which limit foreign imports to 20 titles a year. As we noted in a post earlier this month, Tudou cut a deal with Sam Voutas to release Red Light Revolution online earlier this month, similarly by-passing the censorship apparatus. Red Light’s producer Melanie Ansley is quoted in the Guardian piece:

“I think the internet offers a place for stuff that takes a little more risk. Some of the comments from viewers of our film say ‘how did this get past the censors? I can’t believe that I’m watching this, that this is up on Tudou’. I don’t know what the tipping point is, but thinking practically there will be a day when [the government] will move in. But when that day is none of us know.”

Releasing a small independent title like Red Light Revolution online is one thing, but it will be interesting to see how the authorities react to the Youku deal with Fox. It will also be interesting to see whether Chinese viewers will be prepared to pay for online content when piracy is so rife, and DVDs can be procured anyway for less than RMB 10 (less than US$ 1.50) each.

Flashback – Zhang Yuan’s "Crazy English"

2012-01-16T03:28:00.000-08:00

Li Yang, China's most infamous English teacher, works the crowd in Zhang Yuan's 1999 documentary Crazy English.

Flashback posts look back over older titles in Chinese cinema.

Like an airforce plane coming in on a bombing run, the scream of jets builds over the opening credits until Li Yang explodes onto screen. “Crazy English! Crazy Life! Crazy Work! Crazy study! Be crazy every minute! Everywhere! I love this crazy game!”

Welcome to the crazy world of Li Yang, China’s most famous English teacher, captured at the early peak of his fame in Zhang Yuan’s 1999 documentary Crazy English (Fengkuang yingyu).

Like many directors of the so-called “sixth generation,” Zhang’s work has moved between factual and dramatic filmmaking, especially in the first decade of his career. In 1994 he made the famed documentary The Square with Duan Jinchuan, while his early features Beijing Bastards (1993) and Mama (1994) blended drama and documentary in ways that have since been taken up and explored further by Jia Zhangke.

Zhang’s filmmaking since the 1990s has unfortunately taken a more conventional dramatic path, and Crazy English was his last documentary to date. It was also the first of Zhang’s films passed for release in mainland China, smoothing the way for the director’s acceptance into the mainstream film industry. Zhang was apparently required to make cuts to get the film passed, although I don’t know what the nature of the changes were. Never having seen the film before, I was delighted to stumble upon Crazy English recently on Youku (the Chinese equivalent of Youtube).

Watching Crazy English 13 years after its release is fascinating on a number of levels. First, there’s the thrill of watching documentary images from the recent past and comparing the sights and sounds of the 1990s with today’s China. In any other nation 13 years would be merely a blip, but given China’s rate of change it’s like an eon. The most obvious visual difference for me was people’s standard of dress. The crowds in Zhang’s film look noticeably shabbier than the average city dweller of contemporary times. English is also spoken a good deal more now in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai – a shift Li Yang may well claim to have played a part in.

For all the surface changes, many things in China of course remain the same, and perhaps one of the most surprising continuities is the enduring nature of the Crazy English phenomenon. I say surprising because “Crazy English” teaching seems so transparently gimmicky and Li himself seems like such a frankly dubious character.

So who is Li Yang? If you believe his own publicity, he was once a shy, mediocre student struggling with English and every other academic subject. Then he started shouting English words out loud and his world was transformed. Eventually he started taking his “teaching” methods on the road, addressing vast rallies of thousands with a mixture of nationalistic and ultra-capitalistic rhetoric stirred with healthy doses of racism. Between his pronouncements he has the crowds yell inane English phrases like, “I like it!”, “He is a bad man!” and “Never let your country down!” at the top of their voices. This, apparently, helps them learn English. Since the late 1990s, Crazy English has snowballed into a multi-million dollar nationwide mini-industry, complete with books, tapes, magazines and constant touring by Li.

PLA troops partaking in a Crazy English rally atop the Great Wall in Zhang Yuan's Crazy English.

Zhang Yuan was remarkably prescient in capturing the Crazy English phenomenon as its first wave of popularity was breaking across China at the end of the 1990s. The first 40 minutes of the film comprises clips from Crazy English rallies, often held in famous locations like the Forbidden City, atop the Great Wall, and the hall of Qinghua University (Qinghua is akin to Oxford or Cambridge in terms of reputation in China).

Li is the classic motivational speaker, playing with his audience’s insecurities and prejudices to cut them down, and then build them up again by generating mass euphoria. He makes fun of the way Japanese people sound when they speak English, and tells the crowd they can learn English better than any foreigner could ever learn Chinese. As is so often the case in China, when Li talks about “foreigners” and “the West,” he really means the United States, and the English he teaches has a distinctly American twang. Other nations, or other forms of English, barely register in the nationalist worldview.

Li even employs an elderly American fall guy at many rallies, on hand to speak a few Chinese phrases in an excruciatingly bad accent so that everyone can have a good laugh at the laowai. Meanwhile, I’m sure the laowai was laughing all the way to the bank.

Li encourages his listeners to learn English so they can attain riches, status and power – rhetoric that chimes nicely with the contemporary pro-market ideology of China’s ruling party. Li was even hired by the authorities to help teach Beijingers English in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Zhang intercuts footage from Li’s rallies with media interviews in which Li constantly repeats the same pat clichés, quoting the “Intel CEO” (apparently Intel equals big U.S. company, which equals money, power and world domination) and name-checking other “crazy” people like Nelson Mandela. I wonder what the former ANC leader would make of Li’s blatant racism?

The most fascinating moment in Crazy English comes around half way through the film, when a journalist from the U.S. magazine Time interviews Li. The journalist chats in fluent Mandarin – luckily there are no students on hand to witness that – while Li mostly speaks English. It’s the first time we hear Li converse in English – as opposed to yelling simplistic phrases – and it becomes clear that his English is, to put it bluntly, not that great. He makes numerous mistakes, telling the journalist he is “a crazy people” who teaches Chinese people “proudness.”

Don’t get me wrong – Li’s English is a million times better than my Mandarin and I’m the last person to criticise anyone’s ability to speak a second language. Hats off to anyone who can even make themselves understood in a language other than their mother tongue. Li, however, holds himself up as a fluent English speaker and repeatedly claims he was earning RMB 3-4,000 an hour (!) acting as a translator for foreign companies in Guangzhou before he launched his Crazy English concern. I’m not sure what that equated to in 1999, but in today’s money that’s between AU$460-615 an hour, or US$470-630. Even today that would be an incredibly high hourly rate – in the China of the 1990s it would have been an astronomical sum. Given his performance in the Time interview, I find it very hard to believe any foreign executive was handing out that kind of cash for Li’s translations.

Another day, another rally in Zhang Yuan's Crazy English.

Zhang Yuan’s film essentially shows that many Chinese people – like many people the world over – will pay almost any amount of money to be told what they want to hear. Li’s spiel perfectly captures the strange mix of inferiority and superiority, disparagement and envy, with which many Chinese people regard the outside world. He tells young Chinese people they can not only be like Americans – they can be better, richer and more powerful than people in the U.S. Even better, they can squash Japan while they do it.

The chanting in unison and endless yelling appears to create a powerful sense of euphoria and confidence for many at the Crazy English rallies, uncomfortably evoking scenes engendered by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, or even Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Chinese commentators have often made similar observations. According to The New Yorker, maverick Chinese novelist Wang Shuo once wrote of Li Yang,

“I have seen this kind of agitation. It’s a kind of old witchcraft: Summon a big crowd of people, get them excited with words, and create a sense of power strong enough to topple mountains and overturn the seas… I believe that Li Yang loves the country. But act this way and your patriotism, I fear, will become the same shit as racism.”

In addition to the dubious psychology of Li’s approach, one wonders how useful totally disconnected phrases such as “I like it” and “You are a bad man” prove to be when rally attendees are confronted with English speakers in real life – assuming participants retain anything from their time in Li’s presence.

Li Yang was reportedly critical of Zhang’s film after its release, dismissing it with typically clichéd nationalist logic. “The movie was stupid,” Li was quoted as saying by the online publication China.org. “It was not a real documentary because its intention was to please a Western audience.”

Still, Li is right to the extent that Zhang’s film is not without its faults. The documentary is superficial in that it makes no attempt to probe its key subject, instead focusing entirely on Li’s public persona. Most of the film is taken up with clips from rallies, which quickly become very repetitive. The only quieter moments we glimpse are the media interviews and some scenes of Li lecturing his company staff. We see no interludes of Li socializing, no private moments, and no interactions with the documentary crew in which Li expresses his feelings or views.

On the other hand, delving into Li’s private life may have revealed an even more unsavoury character. In September last year Li’s American wife publicly accused her husband of beating her up – in the presence of their three daughters no less. A week later Li admitted to inflicting domestic violence on his spouse. His public apology was tempered by a statement to China Daily on September 13, “I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it’s not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders.” The couple have since filed for divorce.

Perhaps Li should be grateful that Zhang’s film didn’t dig deeper.

Zhang Yuan’s Crazy English, complete with English subtitles, can be viewed on Youku here.

You can read more about Li Yang and his Crazy English in this New Yorker profile from 2008.

Frontline Policing in Guangzhou – Zhou Hao’s "Cop Shop" and "Cop Shop II"

2012-01-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

Police on duty at Guangzhou Railway Station in early 2012. Image eChinacities.

Zhou Hao is one of the most prolific of China’s current crop of documentarians, having churned out six films since his debut Houjie Township in 2003. Among his recent works are Cop Shop (Chai guan, 2009) and Cop Shop II (Chai guan II, 2011), two documentaries about the daily operations of the police station at Guangzhou Railway Station, one of the busiest public transport hubs in China. Unlike Using (reviewed here), Zhou’s truth-bending 2008 film about his relationship with a Guangzhou junkie, the Cop Shop films take a straight-forward observational approach.

Speaking personally, four years living in China didn’t leave me with a particularly positive view of the local boys in blue. At best I found the cops overly bureaucratic and generally unhelpful. At worst they were outright rude. The experiences of local friends showed that when it came to abuses of power by people with links to the ruling party – including violent assaults – the cops simply turn a blind eye.

It was with some surprise, then, that I found myself sympathising with the officers in Zhou Hao’s films. The first Cop Shop plays out mainly around the front desk of the police station, where a constant stream of characters from the square outside come in looking for food, shelter, advice, train tickets and money. It’s a grim snapshot of the desperation that China’s economic boom has generated alongside pockets of wealth. The police spend most of their time deflecting those looking for help, directing many to a nearby “social aid centre.” Judging by the reluctance of many to visit the centre, conditions there appear bleak.

Cop Shop II sees Zhou return to the same police station around a year later, in the lead up to Chinese New Year in 2011. As hundreds of thousands of migrants pass through the railway station returning to their hometowns, the police are often expected to work 24 hours at a time. Unsurprisingly a group of officers grumbles to Zhou’s camera at one point about the ineptitude of those allocating shifts.

Without explicitly making the point, the Cop Shop films present a pretty damning view of the vagaries of China’s bureaucratic administration, which impacts negatively upon both the police and the swirling masses outside. In one scene, for example, a recently released prisoner on his way home comes into the station and explains he can’t check into a hotel for the night because ex-prisoners aren’t provided with the documentation that regulations require hotels to sight before admitting guests. All the police can suggest is that the man sleeps on the square outside until his train arrives in the morning. Meanwhile, the police themselves are expected to work excruciatingly long hours and deal with the fallout of a social system over which they have little control.

Cop Shop II is the more interesting of the two films, in that it provides a more varied and nuanced view of the micro-society in and around the police station. In the period before Chinese New Year, the police are told to prioritise keeping the square outside the railway station clear to facilitate the flow of thousands of passengers. As a result, the officers spend a great deal of time detaining illegal pedlars selling everything from folding stools to pancakes. Meanwhile, a man caught systematically conning travellers out of their hard-earned cash is simply given a talking to and allowed to go free.

The situation is representative of much that is wrong with law enforcement in China, where petty rules and regulations targeting the poor are often enforced, while actual crimes and abuses frequently go unchecked. And every time the police release a street pedlar after a day’s detention, he or she immediately returns to the square and begins selling his or her wares. Economic necessity outweighs any deterrent the police can offer.

One of the most fascinating sequences in Cop Shop II involves a conversation between Zhou and an elderly man arrested for selling stools and water. “Without reservation I hate Deng Xiaoping,” the man says quietly to Zhou’s camera, before launching into a scathing critique of contemporary China’s economic system. “All this was caused by Deng Xiaoping. In Mao’s era workers basically didn’t have to pay for housing or education… Factories took care of your medical bills. Kids went to university for free,” the man says. “I can say in this period of Deng Xiaoping, people’s state of mind, [their] helping spirit, has regressed to that of primitive society, or even worse.”

His viewpoint belies official media claims that all Chinese have unambiguously embraced economic reform and the current path of development. While I encountered few people in China willing to endorse Mao’s era in quite the positive terms used by the man in Zhou’s film, the gist of his comments reflect sentiments I have often heard expressed. In short, unfettered capitalism, in an environment completely dominated by government business monopolies and a weak rule of law, has turned Chinese people against one another and reduced daily life for many to the level of an animalistic struggle for survival. With no effective systems or institutions in place to deal with these issues, the police of the Cop Shop films spend their days fobbing off an endless parade of the distressed and disenfranchised.

The officers deal with all this with a surprising degree of patience and humour, although I couldn’t help wondering if they were on their best behaviour for Zhou’s camera. As mentioned, patience and humour were attributes sorely lacking during my limited interactions with the police in Beijing.

While Zhou could be criticised for not probing police culture and actions a little more deeply, it’s unlikely he would have been permitted to stick around the police station if he had started asking uncomfortable questions or recording questionable acts. Nevertheless, the Cop Shop films, especially Cop Shop II, are an engrossing look at the myriad pressures and problems faced by uniformed officers in China, as they deal with the front line victims of what has become a cut-throat, highly stratified society.

Putting China’s Sexual Sea Change on Screen – Interview with Sam Voutas

2012-01-11T15:18:00.000-08:00

Sam Voutas (right) directing Red Light Revolution. Images courtesy Sam Voutas.

Last November I reviewed Sam Voutas’ Red Light Revolution, China’s first “sex shop comedy.” Shortly after I interviewed Sam for Australia’s Metro magazine and learnt that 2012 is shaping up to be a good year for the Australian writer-director-actor. Red Light is set for theatrical runs in the UK and Canada this month, and a UK DVD release in mid-February. Meanwhile, in China Toudou – the local equivalent of Youtube – is giving the film an “online release” today coincide with Chinese New Year. You can view the film – unfortunately without English subtitles – here.

On the eve of Red Light Revolution’s online release in China, and theatrical runs in Canada and the UK, I’ve selected a few choice quotes from my interview with Sam for Screening China. My full interview will be available in the February issue of Metro.

How did an Australian film director come to be living and working in Beijing?
I’ve been residing in Beijing for over six years now, but the first time I came was when my folks brought me on holiday when I was two years old. At that time there very few foreigners in China, so I remember very clearly those feelings of being the “other”, of walking around and people staring because you look different. My mum is from Melbourne but she was in the public service, working in the embassies, so around 1986 we moved to China and lived here until 1989. I came back around 2005.

Were you working in the Chinese film industry before making Red Light Revolution?
Yes, the film that really started getting things going for me here was City of Life and Death [a.k.a. Nanjing! Nanjing!] directed by Lu Chuan. I auditioned for that movie in mid-2007 and got a role, although in the end I think maybe four-fifths of what I shot was not in the movie [laughs]. Since then I’ve been working on a lot of independent Chinese films, and also TV. Often I’ll be working as an actor, but at the same time I’ll also take on cameraman jobs, or editing. I think in the independent film world, if you only wear one hat, you’re going to be waiting for the phone to ring.

Sam directs Zhao Jun (left), Vivid Wang (second from left) and Candy the blow-up doll in Red Light Revolution.

Where did the idea for Red Light Revolution come from?
I thought it was a very surprising change in China – the emergence of these sex shops. About 1992 I went to one of the first in Wangfujing [a prominent shopping strip near Tiananmen Square]. At that time it was very different – like a pharmacy. People were wearing lab coats. You don’t see those anymore! I considered making Red Light Revolution a documentary, but then thought, “Hold on, as a fiction piece there might be a lot more to run with.”

One of the things I loved about the film was the way it captures Beijing hua – the local dialect Beijingers speak on the street. Did you write the dialogue yourself, or did you have some help in getting that authentic Beijing flavour?
I wrote all the dialogue myself in English and then we translated it. Even though I speak Chinese, I think to be able to write a script that colloquial would have been impossible for me. So I wrote it in English and then had it translated into Chinese. Then I had that version re-translated to give it more of a Beijing flavour. So the jokes are actually the same – or similar – in English and Chinese, but it was mainly just sitting down with the translator and saying, “This is the phrase that we’ve got in English. Is there a similar phrase that has that same flavour in Beijing hua?

Given that non-approved films can’t be shown in Chinese cinemas, how have you been screening Red Light in China?
We’ve been taking it on tour. So next week we’re going to Shanghai, and then Kunming, Chengdu – showing it in small venues, but trying to pack them out, using internet word-of-mouth. So far the word-of-mouth on sites like Douban [a Chinese site similar to Facebook] has been overwhelmingly positive.

What kind of venues do you use?
We’ll do things like Yugong Yishan [a mid-sized rock venue] in Beijing. Some of them are not traditional theatres, but they can still fit 200 people. But we’ll also do things in a small café where we can only fit 50.

But one of the interesting things that’s happening in China is that there are about 20 million people who go to the cinema, and there are 450 million people who are watching media content on the internet. That makes it a very exciting time for independent filmmakers. For Chinese New Year, Tudou is going to do an online release of Red Light Revolution. They’ve purchased the online rights and they’re giving it a platform that’s going to bring it to many more people than we’d get with a cinema release.

Is that a pay-per-view model?
No, the Tudou deal will be free. Tudou is going to be promoting it and putting links on their front page. It will be accessible to anyone on the internet in mainland China.

So the rules pertaining to cinema releases don’t extend to online releases?
Not yet! So this is kind of an interesting window [laughs]. I don’t know how long that is going to last, but it creates an interesting opportunity for us. We’re also having a theatrical release in Canada and the U.K. in January, around those same dates. And it’ll be hitting DVD in the U.K. by Valentine’s Day in February. So we’re trying to go as “day-and-date” as possible around the world.

Red Light Revolution will be released in cinemas on January 13 in Toronto, January 23 in London, and January 27 in Vancouver.

Mainland Cinema Ticket Prices to be Capped?

2012-01-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

The futuristic surrounds of Beijing's BC MOMA cinema.

Anyone who lives in mainland China will be familiar with the high cost of cinema tickets, which are particularly expensive relative to wages. Ticket prices of RMB 60-80 (that’s US$9.50-12.70, or AU$9.20-12.30) are not uncommon in Beijing. Given that the average wage is a fraction of what people earn in the West, that makes for an expensive night out. There may be some relief in sight for Chinese film fans, with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) announcing plans to cap ticket prices, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Tong Gang, head of SARFT’s Film Bureau was reported as saying on Monday that “SARFT will issue a recommended pricing guideline for cinemas in 2012, set a maximum price and urge cinemas to increase half-price ticket deals.”

High prices haven’t held back the crowds in China’s major cities. According to The Guardian, China “now boasts the third-largest annual box office returns in the world.” 2011 saw Chinese cinemas pull in around RMB 12 billion (close to US$ 2 billion).

In terms of China’s overall population, however, access to cinemas is quite restricted. According to the LA Times last year, the country currently has around 6,200 screens, compared to North America’s 40,000 servicing a population about one-quarter of the size of China’s. These figures reflect the huge disparities in China between major cities and the rest of the country, and the vast disparities of wealth across Chinese society. While there's a lot of people packing out cinemas in China, there are much larger numbers who simply can't afford a ticket.

Newsbites: Flowers of War Rakes in the Cash, Content Restrictions Tighten & Ai Weiwei Speaks

2012-01-09T17:21:00.000-08:00

Happy new year! Too many end-of-the-year deadlines and too many festivities mean Screening China has been very quiet of late. So let’s kick off 2012 with a look at the China film news.

The big event of recent weeks has been the unveiling of Zhang Yimou’s latest epic, The Flowers of War. With a budget reportedly between US$90-100 million, Zhang's film is the most expensive ever made in China. Flowers hit Chinese screens on December 16 and stars Christian Bale as a priest sheltering in a church with a group of Chinese women during the Japanese seizure of Nanjing in 1937. Predictably, the film has been criticised for its heavy nationalistic tone. It’s perhaps a measure of Bale’s naivety that when he was asked about the film’s nationalism at the premiere in Beijing, he claimed, “I hadn’t ever considered that question.” He also rather laughably claimed he thought Zhang Yimou wouldn’t have wished for the film to be taken that way either.

Christian Bale stalks through the ruins of Nanjing in Zhang Yimou's new epic The Flowers of War.

Flowers has done well at the box office, with The Wall Street Journal noting after its opening: “The Flowers of War (金陵十三钗) scored big with moviegoers on its opening weekend in China, pulling in 152.1 million yuan (US$24 million).” On January 4, Hollywood Reporter stated the film had grossed US$83 million in its first 17 days of release, making it the top-grossing Chinese film of 2011, and the third highest grossing Chinese film of all time.

Those figures put it well ahead of China’s first 3D martial arts flick, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, which opened in China on the same weekend. Directed by Hong Kong action legend Tsui Hark, Flying Swords stars stalwart Jet Li and the wonderfully versatile Zhou Xun. The film is a sequel to New Dragon Gate Inn, which Tsui wrote and produced back in 1992. Hollywood Reporter was disappointed with the film, but conceded, “Made as pure mass entertainment with an A-list cast for the China market, Tsui’s target audience won’t feel short-changed.”

Zhou Xun in Tsui Hark's Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.

Still on the subject of box office, the surprise end-of-year hit in Hong Kong was a small film from Taiwan called You Are the Apple of My Eye. According to Hollywood Reporter the high school comedy set in the 1990s pulled in HK$61.29 between its mid-October release and the end of 2011, placing it second only to Transformers: Dark of the Moon in Hong Kong’s annual box office roll-call. Even more surprisingly, the film is a directorial debut for Taiwan author Giddens Ko. The film also did well in Taiwan and Singapore. I’ve previously written about the Taiwanese film revival here and here, so it’s heartening to see the island’s small industry continue to power along.

Teenage love is a poke in the head - a loving moment from Giddens Ko's surprise hit You Are the Apple of My Eye.

Back on the mainland, Christian Bale wasn’t only making headlines with his box office performance in December. While he was in China for the premiere of Flowers of War, the actor attempted to visit blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who is under house arrest in a village called Dongshigu in eastern Shandong. As many journalists and activists have attested, Dongshigu is surrounded by a small army of hired thugs who have successfully isolated Chen from the outside world. You can read a recent account of a journey to the village by acclaimed Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun here. Bale, like many others, found himself roughed up when he approached the village and was unable to see Chen. According to Reuters, when Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin was asked if China had been embarrassed by Bale’s actions, he replied, “If anyone should be embarrassed it’s the relevant actor, not the Chinese side.” Way to go Beijing – still winning hearts and minds after all these years.

The tightening up of governmental control over screen content over the past year continues, with The Washington Times reporting last month:

“China is proposing to ban movie content that it says disturbs social stability and promotes religious fanaticism, the latest attempt by the authoritarian government to tighten control over what people see. According to a draft law posted on the Cabinet’s website on Thursday, films must not harm national honour and interest, incite ethnic hatred, spread ‘evil cults’ or superstition, or propagate obscenity, gambling, drug abuse, violence or terror. A total of 13 types of content are banned in the draft law, but no terms or phrases were defined.”

After a tough year in 2011, the culture war in China shows no signs of abating, with Bloomberg reporting President Hu Jintao’s comments in the magazine Qiushi, published on January 1: “International forces are trying to Westernize and divide us by using ideology and culture. We need to realize this and be alert to this danger.” Which is CCP-speak for, “We’re concerned about the amount of non-vetted information people are accessing, and we intend to do something about it.”

As has been widely reported, control of online content, particularly microblogs like Weibo, has been tightened, and “excessive entertainment” has been restricted on television. Incidentally, state media reported the campaign against excessive TV entertainment had been successful early this month, with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television declaring, "Satellite channels should design programs with innovative content, promoting traditional virtues and socialist core values in their new entertainment programs." All those CCP cadres who have made millions unleashing state-controlled capitalism on their people must be sniggering up their sleeves about that one.

While we’re on the topic of socialist culture, The Wall Street Journal reported that China was planning to launch the world’s first 3D TV channel on January 1, although it seems only a test channel in Shenzhen is currently broadcasting. According to WSJ, the 3D channel will have 4.5 hours of new content each day, and content will include “cartoons, sports programming, films on special topics, variety shows and programming from major events such as the London Olympics and China’s annual Spring Festival gala.” The Spring Festival gala in 3D? Oh man… it’s painful enough in two dimensions.

Moving on to China’s unofficial film realm, J.P. Sniadecki recently managed to get around the ban on Chinese artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei talking to media and conduct an interview for Canadian journal Cinema Scope. Sniadecki’s interview is distinguished by the fact that it focuses on Ai’s documentaries, which have largely been ignored – or at least overshadowed by his visual art – in the West. Sniadecki provides a good overview of Ai’s filmmaking career, and provides a fascinating chat with the great man himself. This choice quote sums up Ai’s attitude and why I love independent Chinese documentaries:

“It is primarily a matter of freedom of speech: it is just that simple. No matter how wrong or mistaken my point of view may be, I still want to have the right to speak, the right to be heard. In this society, if this right has no way of being guaranteed, then there is no point in speaking about democracy, freedom, and human rights. Humans have being discussing these questions for hundreds of years, and there is no need to discuss them again, they are universal truths. But how did they become politically sensitive questions here? Isn’t it comical? It’s like air and water, the most fundamental building blocks of life—if they are made scarce, how would we survive?”

On a happier note, the great mainland director Jia Zhangke and his muse Zhao Tao held a formal wedding banquet on January 7 in Jia’s hometown Fenyang, Shanxi province, which was the setting for Jia’s early features. As noted here at Screening China last October, the long-term couple tied the knot at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. You can see more pictures from the Fenyang banquet here.

Jia Zhangke and long-term collaborator Zhao Tao celebrate their wedding in Fenyang on January 7.

Last but not least, casting an eye over China’s border readers were no doubt distressed to learn of the death of one of the world’s great dictators, champion golfer and well-known cinephile, the Dear leader himself Kim Jong-il on December 17 (although his death wasn’t announced until December 19). Kim had long played a central role in North Korea’s film industry, and during my trip to the DPRK last August I picked up an English-language edition of his book On the Art of Cinema. As well as being a great conversation piece, I can safely say it’s one of the most boring books on film ever written. Unfortunately it had nothing about kidnapping directors from overseas to bolster your film industry - one of Kim's great innovative moves as overseer of the DPRK film world. Fear not, however, Kim’s fat little son is ready to step into the big shoes left by his dad – this documentary just churned out by the amazingly efficient North Korean state media shows what an all-round achiever Kim Jong-un really is. The images are also very funny – although they probably seem less so to the people he rules. It remains to be seen what the death of the Dear Leader means for the DPRK film industry.

Quick Link: Producer David Bandurski on China’s “Third Affliction”

2011-11-17T16:01:00.001-08:00

Producer and media researcher David Bandurski.

David Bandurksi, the American Hong Kong-based producer of Chinese director Zhao Dayong, recently penned an opinion piece in the New York Times on what he calls China’s “third affliction” – the nation’s negative image in the world. The piece doesn’t contain anything revelatory for those familiar with contemporary China’s cultural and political landscape, but it’s a neat encapsulation of the schizophrenic nature of China’s cultural sector, split as it is between closely controlled, anodyne state-sanctioned product, and a vibrant unofficial sector which is at best ignored by the state, and at worst actively suppressed.

In my last Newsbites post I wrote about the sixth plenary session of the 17th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party that took place in October, focusing on “cultural reforms.” Bandurski writes of this meeting:

“The message behind the turgid ideological phrasings and the rodomontade about how the party was leading ‘the great reawakening of the Chinese people’ was that China’s leaders would encourage culture so long as it served their narrow political ends. The Decision states emphatically that China’s rank-and-file ‘cultural workers’ must uphold the party’s ‘main theme’ and ‘keep to the correct orientation’ in cultural creation.”

Which is Party-speak for ‘do what we want or look out.’ Meanwhile, as Bandurksi notes, a filmmaker like Zhao Dayong can pack out the Lincoln Center in New York with the premier of his documentary Ghost Town, while having to live with the “bittersweet recognition that this moment would never have been possible in Zhao’s own China.”

Bandurski also notes that:

“No sooner had the curtain closed on the C.C.P. meeting in Beijing than media outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan reported with unmistakable schadenfreude that an Oct. 17 showing at Lincoln Center of the 2009 Chinese propaganda epic The Founding of a Republic had drawn not a single filmgoer.”

I’m a bit stunned that Founding of a Republic didn’t manage to attract a single viewer (where were the Chinese consular staff??), but there you go. As I wrote in an article for The Diplomat last year, Founding of a Republic is a fascinating piece of CCP revisionism, that sees the party depicting itself as a unifying, pro-capitalist force from the earliest days of the People’s Republic – a pretty stunning rewriting of history given the history of China under Mao.

Bandurski’s comments come at the end of a particularly tough year for Chinese filmmakers working outside the state-sanctioned production and distribution system. As was widely reported, Ai Weiwei disappeared for several months earlier this year after being arrested at Beijing airport, and has now been slapped with a massive tax bill. Ai Xiaoming suffered all kinds of harassment from local authorities in Guangzhou in the first half of the year, and security personnel intervened outside her apartment to stop me interviewing her in March. Beijing’s Queer Film Festival and Tongzhou Documentary Festival were both forced to officially cancel (though some unpublicized screenings were reportedly held). And now, with the year drawing to a close, filmmaker Jian Yi has been forced to close his IFChina Studio at Jinggangshan University.

In short, while China’s leaders wax bureaucratic about the nation’s glorious culture, they are busy doing everything in their power to suppress the creative energy of their people. Let’s hope things ease up in 2012 – so far the signs aren’t looking good.

As well as producing Zhao Dayong’s films such Ghost Town and The High Life, David Bandurski is a researcher for the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. You can read more of his commentary on Chinese media and politics here.

Where Can Chinese Indies Be Purchased or Viewed Online?

2011-11-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

The DVD cover for Zhao Dayong's The High Life, now available through Lantern Films.

Readers of Screening China often write to me and ask where they can obtain copies of the independent Chinese films I write about. Unfortunately it's not easy to get many of the titles, but some are now available on DVD for online purchase, or are available for viewing online, so I thought I'd do a post with a couple of tips on where these sites can be found. Please note I have no affiliations with any of the companies or websites listed and take no responsibility for their products or services. All the sites I've listed provide copies of films with English subtitles.

I've written about the U.S. distributor dGenerate Films a few times - you can read my interview with the company's Kevin Lee here. dGenerate specialise in providing independent Chinese content to educational institutions and the like, but a number of their titles are now available for private online rental. I've written about many of the films in their ever-expanding catalogue, which you can check out here.

Another place where you can watch numerous Chinese documentaries online for free is the China Independent Documentary Film Archive. Most of the titles on the site are lesser known works by lesser known directors, but there are a couple of key titles by Wu Wenguang, widely regarded as the first independent documentary maker in China. Among other Wu titles, the film that kicked off the whole independent doco movement in 1990, Bumming in Beijing, is available to watch, as is Wu's extraordinary auto-critique of China's documentary world, Fuck Cinema (2005). Hu Xinyu's The Man, which I wrote about here, is also available to view. Although the site is free, users are required to register before viewing the films.

Recently I was happy to see that Chinese director Zhao Dayong and his producer David Bandurski have released consumer DVDs of all Zhao’s titles, available for online purchase from their Lantern Films website. Regular readers of Screening China will know I’m a big fan of Zhao Dayong’s work - you can read a series of short interviews I did with the director here.

As well as the acclaimed documentary Ghost Town (which I wrote about for RealTime), last year Zhao directed his first drama, The High Life, which I reviewed here. Both Ghost Town and The High Life are now available from the Lantern Films site, as well as Zhao’s excellent earlier documentary Street Life, about the homeless community around Shanghai’s famous Nanjing Lu shopping strip. The DVDs are very reasonably priced between US$20-12, and it appears they will ship to any country. It would be great to see more independent filmmakers in China making their work available in this way.

Finally, France's Institut national de l'audiovisuel (or National Audiovisual Institute, aka INA) has released an excellent boxed set of Zhao Liang's work with English and French subtitles. The package includes Zhao's three key documentaries, Petition, Crime and Punishment, and Paper Airplane, as well as a selection of his short video works. The package costs 30 euros and INA will ship to any country, although their online shop is unfortunately only in French. So either find a French-speaking friend, or else do what I did and order using Google Translate. You can order the Zhao Liang boxed set here.

If readers have any other tips please feel free to post them as comments.

Flashback: Air Rifles and Male Ennui - Hu Xinyu's "The Man"

2011-11-08T17:43:00.000-08:00

In the course of researching my thesis and book on China’s independent documentary movement I’ve been watching a lot of older Chinese films. I’ve decided to blog about some of them in a series of “Flashback” posts.

First up is the domestic drama of Hu Xinyu’s documentary The Man (Nanrenmen) from 2003.

A typically lackadaisical moment from Hu Xinyu's ode to male ennui, The Man (2003).

Air Rifles and Male Ennui - Hu Xinyu's "The Man"

No matter what culture you’re in, placing members of the same sex together in close quarters for prolonged periods is always a bad idea. Yet it’s the painful dynamics of watching a trio of bored, unfulfilled men cooped up in a tiny apartment in a provincial Chinese city that makes Hu Xinyu’s film The Man such a hypnotically discomforting experience – like a slow-motion train wreck played out over two hours.

The film’s locker-room tone is set early, when we see three men snoozing on a large mattress on the floor. Or maybe it’s three single mattresses pushed together – the bed is such a mess it’s hard to tell. They sleepily shoot the breeze, bemoaning the lack of available sex, until the middle one playfully grabs the crotches of the other two.

From the trio’s aimless conversations we gather the groper, Su, is recently laid-off art teacher, currently staying at the filmmaker’s apartment. The third man is Shi Lin, a local friend who spends a lot of time hanging around the director’s flat. The director Hu Xinyu is also a teacher, but one who habours aspirations to be a filmmaker. He channels these aspirations into recording the aimless lives around him. Interspersed with scenes of the three talking – mainly about women – we see Shi Lin shooting sparrows with an air rifle, while by night the trio indiscriminately consume arthouse films and porn DVDs.

The Man is lifted out of the purely observational realm by Hu Xinyu’s self conscious deployment of dramatic devices. Unusually for a Chinese documentary, there is some incidental music, while half way through the film a shot of Su and Shin Lin wielding the air rifle suddenly dissolves into an action sequence complete with animation. It’s as if Hu can no longer stand the drabness of their lives and needs to liven up their existence, even if it’s only on screen. The excitement quickly fades, however, as we fall back into the plodding rhythms of the men’s daily lives.

The three constantly discuss the movie they’re in, and resentment towards the director from the other two occasionally boils to the surface. At one point Shi Lin complains of Hu’s arrogance, pointing out that while he and Su are struggling to get by, Hu only has to call relatives in the U.S. to get thousands of dollars to help fund his filmmaking activities. Late in the film a frustrated Su pushes the director’s camera aside and demands they both go to a brothel “for release”.

For all its domestic focus, The Man is not without social import. Apart from its rather dark portrait of male subjectivity – especially when left without meaningful activity – the film is a bleak comment on the life options open to ordinary people in second-tier Chinese cities. Admittedly this is hardly an original topic, but it’s rare to see lives on screen that are so utterly banal. Hu Xinyu’s token efforts to liven up the film with dramatic devices, as well as the epic tragedy of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America that we see throughout the film on the apartment’s television, only reinforce what a hopeless task it is generating dramatic meaning in such a featureless environment. As Su comments at one point, “With no financial foundation and power, you can’t do anything.” The emptiness of it all is summed up by the final shot of a mouse, twitching away its last moments of life after being shot by Shi Lin’s air rifle.

Hu Xinyu’s snapshot of grey lives in a featureless city probably appeared more original in 2003 than it does in 2011, as a seemingly endless stream of independent Chinese features have taken up similar themes in the past decade. Yet The Man’s reflexivity and the sheer pointlessness of the subject’s lives makes for strangely engrossing viewing – even if you’re left squirming in your seat for much of the film.

Hu Xinyu’s The Man is available to view online at the China Independent Documentary Archive: www.cidfa.com/modules/watch.php?vid=41
Users need to register with the site before watching.

So Long IFChina Original Studio

2011-11-06T17:26:00.000-08:00

Jian Yi talks to a student volunteer at IFChina Original Studio in March this year.

In my “Newsbites” post of October 29, I noted that IFChina Original Studio, an initiative of Chinese filmmaker Jian Yi and his wife Eva, had been told it had to leave Jinggangshan University. Last Saturday (November 5) Jian Yi issued an official statement confirming the studio’s closure.

IFChina was established by Jian Yi and Eva in 2009 on the grounds of Jinggangshan University in the small provincial city of Ji’an in Jiangxi Province, southeast China. Seeking to reconnect with the reality outside China’s booming major centres, Jian Yi gave up a comfortable academic position in Beijing to return to his hometown of Ji’an with his wife Eva and set up the studio, through which they organised theatre classes, video workshops and photography programs, all based on an oral history foundation. As I detailed in my RealTime article on the studio in July, the area around Ji’an was home to China’s communist forces for several years in the early 1930s, before they were forced to abandon the area and embark on their “long march” to northwest China. So the area is rich in a grass-roots history of life under early forms of Chinese communism that has barely been recorded.

In mid-October, after 29 months of operation, Jian Yi was suddenly informed that IFChina needed to leave Jinggangshan University and cease to exist. He is unable to publicly talk about the reasons at this point. Let’s just say it’s been an eventful year internationally, and consequently a very difficult year for China’s creative community. You can read about some of the troubles others have experienced here and here.

I visited IFChina in March this year and witnessed first hand the positive impact the studio’s activities were having on the local community, especially the dedicated band of young students volunteers working with Jian Yi and Eva. It’s difficult for people outside China to comprehend just how culturally barren China’s second and third-tier cities can be, so the presence of something like IFChina in a place like Ji’an was truly special.

Jian Yi and Eva are currently assessing their options regarding the future. Jian Yi ended in his statement on the weekend with a summation of the philosophy that makes him and his wife such special people:

“We want to work on culture because we believe that it can generate positive energy among all of us in the society so eventually the negative energy will no longer consume us and, with the positive energy and courage thus gained, a better future will be possible.”

Screening China wishes Jian Yi and Eva the best of luck and every success in their future endeavours.

Beijing Hua and Blow-up Sex Dolls: Sam Voutas’ "Red Light Revolution"

2011-11-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

Shunzi (Zhao Jun) and Lili (Vivid Wang) in Sam Voutas' "sex shop comedy" shot entirely in Beijing, Red Light Revolution.

“Sex. Shagging. Making love. Whatever you want to call it, everyone does it. But no-one does it more than us Chinese…”

So begins Sam Voutas’ Red Light Revolution (Hong deng meng), billed as China’s first “sex shop comedy.” I was at The Beijinger when Sam’s film started doing the rounds in Beijing, and I have to admit I was initially a little dubious about the film. A Chinese sex comedy written and directed by a laowai? What were the chances of it being any good? Shortly before I left Beijing earlier this year I got to meet Sam – a fellow Australian – and he gave me a copy, which I perused once I was back in Melbourne. And I must concede, whatever the chances against it, Sam has produced a film that’s not only very funny, but also manages to really capture the flavour of life in China’s capital.

Zhao Jun plays the hapless cabbie Shunzi, who in one nightmare day loses his job after a fight with his boss, and his wife after she runs off with a foppish thespian. Reduced to living with his parents in their cramped courtyard home, a chance meeting with an old school friend leads to him teaming up with Lili (played by the gorgeous Vivid Wang) and opening one of the sex shops that these days can be found on almost every street in Beijing.

The film’s rapid-fire style is established in the opening scenes, when Shunzi calls his wife to say he’s been fired. Cut to Shunzi’s television going out the window.
“You’re a lousy cab driver!” she yells after it, as the crestfallen Shunzi arrives to find his shattered set on the pavement.
“Lousy? I know this town like the back of my hand!” Shunzi fires back.
“Good! Then you’ll know where to go to beg!” screams his wife.
Shunzi races upstairs to find his place already taken by a young actor. “I’ve played the emperor Puyi,” the young man declares. “More like his eunuch,” Shunzi replies disparagingly.

It’s in scenes like this that Red Light Revolution oozes with the bawdy humour and colourful turns of phrase that pepper Beijing hua (Beijing dialect), topped off with the rolling “rrrrs” that make the city’s lingo so distinctive. From Shunzi’s aging parents to a wizened neighbourhood patrolman, the film affectionately portrays a range of Beijing archetypes without ever feeling hackneyed or clichéd. The script’s local flavour is all the more remarkable given it was written by an Australian.

Sam also manages to include many amusing details of Beijing life, such as Shunzi’s attempts to navigate China’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and get a permit for his shop. After numerous calls we see his sidekick Lili filling out a form to apply for a form to get the permit. Which would be funny if it wasn’t so spot on!

Shunzi (Zhao Jun) introduced to sex shop merchandise by an old school friend (Jiang Xiduo).

From the shots of ginormous flyovers to dusty grey hutong, Red Light Revolution captures the sites and sense of Beijing so evocatively it left me feeling quite homesick for the place. The soundtrack also comprises a series of catchy tunes by a range of Beijing bands. If I had any criticism, it would be that the story does flag a little in the final 20 minutes. But with a total running time of just 90 minutes, Red Light Revolution never outstays its welcome.

The film has played at numerous festivals in the U.S., and in September this year it screened at the Singapore International Film Festival. Alas, Australian festivals have proved resistant and as far as I know the film has yet to screen in Voutas’ home country. Which is surprising given the amount of interest there is in China in Australia, and Sam’s Australian connection. I’ll be interviewing the director next week for Metro magazine, so I’ll post some choice quotes from our chat here at Screening China. In the meantime, if you want a chuckle and a dose of authentic Beijing street life, ditch the overblown historical epics and sanitized dramas of the Chinese studios, and check out Red Light Revolution.

Newsbites: Jackie Chan's 100th Film, China's Big Presence at Venice, and the CCP's Renewed Interest in Culture

2011-10-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Spacey checks out Gong Beibi in his first Chinese feature, Inseparable, unveiled this month at Busan.

I’m conscious Screening China has been quiet for the past month, as I’ve been tied up with my thesis and a few other things such as the recent World Cinema Now conference at Melbourne’s Monash University, where I gave a paper on Chinese documentaries. I’ve also been busy catching up on a whole lot of older Chinese film titles which I’ll blog about in the coming weeks. But first a news round up of what’s been happening in Chinese film over the past month. You may also notice the blog has a new look, which is hopefully more reader-friendly.

The Big End of Town: Spacey in China, New Zhang Yimou, and 100 Flicks for Jackie

The Wall Street Journal reported that Kevin Spacey’s “first Chinese film” premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in early October. Inseparable is described as a “dark comedy” set in Guangzhou. Directed by the Taiwan-born Dayyan Eng, the film also stars Daniel Wu, who has appeared in Hong Kong flicks like One Nite In Mongkok and mainland movies like The Banquet and The Founding of a Party. The plot of Inseparable sounds a little bizarre. Wu plays a local man down on his luck, while Spacey is his American neighbor who decides to save him. According to the WSJ they are “soon donning handmade superhero outfits and fighting injustices around Guangzhou.”

dGenerate Films have a complete list of the 22 Chinese films that played at Busan this year. For anyone confused, the Busan International Film Festival used to be the Pusan International Film Festival, Asia's biggest film festival.

Jackie Chan, Hong Kong’s all round action hero and latter day apologist for dictatorship, has released his 100th film. Entitled 1911 it focuses on the revolution that swept away the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China, the last vestige of which still exists on the island of Taiwan. The film also stars mainland China’s Li Bingbing, and Joan Chen makes an appearance as the infamous Empress Dowager. The Wall Street Journal did a short interview with Chan about the film here. For anyone down in Melbourne, a subtitled print of the film is currently playing at the Russell Street Greater Union cinemas.

"Don't worry Jackie, anyone would look battered after making 100 movies." Li Bingbing comforts Jackie Chan in 1911.

The trailer for Zhang Yimou’s new epic about the Nanjing Massacre, The Flowers of War, has been released and can be viewed here. It’s another China meets Hollywood production, with Christian Bale in the leading role. It’s been released in the U.S. in mid-December – let’s hope the actual film is less clichéd than the trailer. Given Zhang Yimou’s output over the past decade I’m not holding my breath.

China’s Venice Bonanza

Films from the Asia region did well at the Venice Film Festival (31 Aug- 10 Sep) this year, taking out three top prizes. Two of these went to Chinese titles. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Silver Lion for direction went to Cai Shangjun’s People Mountain People Sea (a literal rendering of a Chinese expression meaning a really crowded place). I don’t know much about Cai, other than the fact he directed a feature in 2007 called The Red Awn and wrote the script for Zhang Yang’s well-known 1999 feature Shower. I’m keen to see People Mountain People Sea, which according to the WSJ is “based on a true story about a man searching for his brother’s killer.”

Legendary Hong Kong New Wave director Ann Hui also had a new film at Venice called A Simple Life, which earned Deanie Ip the festival’s Best Actress Award. Hong Kong mega-star Andy Lau appears as the male lead alongside Ip.

Another Hong Kong legend, John Woo, was on hand at Venice to promote a new Taiwanese epic that he produced, entitled Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, directed by Wei Te-sheng. Wei previously directed Cape No. 7, which gave the Taiwanese industry a huge push a couple of years ago by becoming the island’s second biggest box office earner in history (beaten only by Titanic). For earlier posts on Taiwan’s film revival see here and here.

Last but certainly not least on the Venice roll call, Jia Zhangke was present to serve as the jury president of the festival’s Orizzonti section. Jia also took the opportunity to announce that he had married long-term collaborator Zhao Tao. Congratulations to the happy couple! Zhao Tao appeared in the Italian film Io sono Li at the festival – her first role in a film not directed by Jia Zhangke.

Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao announced their marriage while at the Venice Film Festival last month.

The CCP’s Revived “Interest” in Culture

Less joyous is the news that China’s beloved leaders had a get-together in Beijing this month focusing on culture. Specifically, it was the sixth plenary session of the 17th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

The is worrying because apart from the obvious fact that a focus on culture for the CCP invariable means exerting a greater degree of control, attacks on culture have often presaged broader political campaigns in the history of the People’s Republic. The first move in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example, was a condemnation of the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office by Shanghai critic Yao Wenyuan. Yao went on to become a member of the notorious “Gang of Four” in the following years, until his arrest with the rest of the so-called “Gang” after Mao’s death in late 1976. Given that the last year in China has been extremely tough in terms of censorship, arrests and harassment of anyone seen not to be toeing the line, the latest developments in the cultural sphere are worrying.

Russell Leigh Moses speculated in the Wall Street Journal about what the latest “cultural reforms” signify:

“One aim is that many officials want to put the Party back front and center in the lives of people – be that through revolutionary nostalgia or providing cultural guidance… Some officials write and act as if a lot more guidance from the top is needed, and that cultural direction supplied by the Party will address moral shortcomings in society… There was [also] another agenda being pushed at the plenum: combatting the deepening influence of social media.”

Sure enough, last Wednesday (October 26) The Guardian reported that CCP had issued an official communiqué in which it “vowed to intensify controls on social media and instant messaging tools.”

Control over television content has also tightened, with both The Wall Street Journal and Guardian reporting this week that “entertainment” programs are to be restricted in primetime. According to The Guardian, “Provincial channels will be allowed to show no more than two entertainment shows in the ‘golden time’ between 7.30pm and 10pm.” The WSJ claimed the dreaded State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) also issued a statement this week which amusingly expressing a desire to limit “excessive entertainment” and “low taste.” SARFT already pulled the plug on the very popular Super Girl – a local version of American Idol – last month.

What all this means for the Chinese film industry remains to be seen – not to mention the unofficial independent sector. Apparently IFChina Original Studio, which I wrote about here, has just been told they need to leave Jinggangshan University. On the other hand, the Beijing Independent Film Festival was able to proceed this year, despite some intense pressure from police. Trainspotting cafe in Beijing was also able to host the Beijing New Youth Film Festival from September 9-18.

David Bandurski over at China Media Project has provided a partial translation of the People’s Daily editorial that followed the Central Committee plenum on culture, which is a classic piece of CCP babble. Check it out here.

Zhao Liang Now “Celebrated” by the Chinese Government Claims New York Times

2011-09-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

Zhao Liang (second from right) and Gu Changwei (far right) at a press conference about Zhao's documentary Together in Beijing earlier this year. The others pictured appear in the documentary.

Chinese documentarian Zhao Liang has been in the U.S. news recently with a somewhat critical profile of the director in the New York Times entitled, “Chinese Director’s Path From Rebel to Insider.” The long article by Edward Wong details Zhao’s supposed “evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates.” Zhao’s new “insider” status is said to be the result of his last documentary, Together, which was backed by China’s Ministry of Health and approved for release in Chinese cinemas.

I’m not sure why the NYT published a profile focusing on this issue now. Together was completed last year and screened in Chinese cinemas around nine months ago. You can read my article on the film for the January 2011 edition of the The Beijinger here. The director also answered a couple of questions about the film via email last December. Zhao is one of the most talented of China’s contemporary filmmakers, so it’s great to see him receiving such prominent recognition in the U.S. press. I felt, however, that Wong’s profile was somewhat unfair and inaccurate on a number of counts.

First there is the issue of Zhao's relationship with the Chinese state. One small-scale documentary for the health ministry that screened in a handful of mainland cinemas hardly makes Zhao the “insider” that the article claims. When I spoke to Zhao about the film during its cinema run in Beijing, he explained that it came about because Chinese director Gu Changwei was making a dramatic feature about the AIDS virus (Love for Life aka Life is a Miracle) and he invited Zhao to shoot a “making of” documentary to accompany his film. Zhao took the opportunity to find out more about the disease and the discrimination endured by AIDS sufferers by contacting victims online, a process detailed in the documentary. According to Zhao, “Before the shoot I had no knowledge at all of HIV – I gradually learned through preparing and shooting the film.” I can well believe Zhao’s claim, given the general level of ignorance regarding AIDS in China.

Although working within the system of course brought restrictions, Zhao’s comment was, “If the film has social value then it's worth making.” In contrast, Wong’s article implies that Zhao’s primary motivation was to make a film that would be “widely seen in China.” If that was really Zhao’s aim it's debatable whether he succeeded. I’m not sure about other cities, but in Beijing Together screened at one cinema (BC MOMA), and the two sessions I attended were not exactly packed.

Wong’s article also does little to combat the perception outside China that the Chinese state is a monolithic entity that moves in a unified fashion along a single path. Wong writes, for example, “The story [of Gu’s feature] was from a banned book by Yan Lianke. Yet, the Health Ministry had agreed to support the movie.” As Wong presumably knows, the Health Ministry is not the Propaganda Department or the Public Security Bureau, and the average health ministry official probably couldn’t care less whether a book is banned. Given the byzantine workings of the Chinese bureaucracy, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Ministry of Health wasn’t even aware of the ban. The Chinese state is a vast network of competing bureaucratic structures and “bans” imposed by one department are not necessarily respected by another.

Finally, the article seems to assume that filmmakers are either “inside” or “outside” the system, whereas in reality many filmmakers move between the official and unofficial realms. When I spoke to Zhao he seemed to regard Together as a one-off opportunity that came along unexpectedly and he made the most of it. That did not mean he had fundamentally changed his outlook on filmmaking or his plans to continue making work outside the censorship apparatus. Even Wong’s article acknowledges Zhao’s next documentary will be a “return to his old way of filmmaking.”

Admittedly, Wong’s article does become more nuanced as it progresses, and he acknowledges that Chinese filmmakers face an extremely difficult choice. They can either make films outside the censorship regime that very few mainlanders get to see, or else they achieve wider distribution and tailor their work to the authorities’ demands and expectations. Overall, however, I think he leaves readers with the impression that Zhao Liang has sold out his principles in exchange for acclaim and recognition.

Interestingly, the dGenerate film site ran an interview with Wong last week, in which the reporter commented, “I think many intellectuals in China get frustrated with how Westerners often frame those choices [open to filmmakers]: as a duality between being a complete rebel or being a sellout.” He seemed to feel his article had helped combat this black and white view.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody seemed to have similar misgivings as I did about Wong’s profile. In Brody’s column the day after Wong’s profile appeared in the NYT he stopped short of directly criticizing the piece, and acknowledged that some figures within China – notably Ai Weiwei – have been quite critical of Zhao Liang’s choices. He adds, however, that “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.”

Zhao’s future work, I suppose, will be the ultimate measure of what impact his flirtation with the official production realm has had on his filmmaking.

Vacant Human Shells – Li Hongqi's “Winter Vacation”

2011-08-18T01:53:00.000-07:00

"I want to be an orphan" – the amusing child character from Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation.

Chinese cinema is no stranger to deadpan urban dramas, but few have matched the ultra-minimalism of Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation (Han jia, 2010), which I caught recently at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Set in yet another bleak northern town, Li's players depict the repetitive motions of their senseless lives as if all emotion has been sucked out of them, leaving them as vacant human shells without apparent motivation for any of their actions.

Despite the drama's barren atmosphere, Li's flattened approach makes for some surprisingly amusing moments, particularly in the interactions between an old man and his small grandson – the only figure in the film who expresses any desire to escape the life-sucking vacuum of the featureless town. At one point a young friend asks the little boy what he wants to be when he grows up. “An orphan,” he replies without hesitation.

The bleak surrounds of Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation.

I haven't seen Li's earlier features – So Much Rice (Hao duo da mi, 2005) and Routine Holiday (Huangjin zhou, 2008) – but I gather they evoke a similarly straight-faced absurdism and humour. I did catch his documentary Are We Really So Far From the Madhouse? (Women li fengren yuan jiujing you duo yuan?) at the Hong Kong Film Festival this year, and found it excruciating. I was attracted to the film by its focus on Beijing band PK14, who I saw play a couple of times when I was living in China's capital. While the film mostly comprises images of the band on the road, all the synch sound is replaced by a cacophony of animal noises. As friend of mine commented, it's like a conceptual art work with a bad concept.

Winter Vacation is certainly a superior film, but it still felt like a work straining for an artistic significance it never quite attains. Li certainly captures the chronic crisis of meaning in modern China, which has seen many withdraw into a state of total apathy. He also pointedly evokes the empty cliches that stand in for real political and civic life in China. When one kid in the film announces his decision to leave school, a friend asks him what he'll do. “Strive for socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he amusingly replies.

Although Li informs his drama with a wry humour that sets him apart from many of his contemporaries, he's hardly the first to depict the emptiness of life in third-tier Chinese cities, and everything in Winter Vacation felt a tad obvious. Zhang Meng's Piano in a Factory – also at the Melbourne festival this year – plays out in a similar setting, and in many ways is a more conventional film. But Zhang at least attempts to push the miserabilist urban genre by asking “Where do we go from here?” In contrast, Li depicts a familiar conundrum with a droll humour, but otherwise adds little to what we've already seen in countless other titles.

The Canadian online film journal Cinema Scope has a long interview with director Li Hongqi here.

New Dreams in a Old Landscape – Zhang Meng's "The Piano in a Factory"

2011-08-15T01:39:00.000-07:00

Wang Qianyuan (left) as Chen, the laid-off factory worker and musician, and Qin Hailu as his girlfriend in Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory.

Like so many recent Chinese dramas, Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin, 2010) is set in China's drab northeast, where the old socialist heavy industries have been shut down and the inhabitants left unemployed. Unlike many recent Chinese features, the story forsakes a miserabilist realist aesthetic for a refreshing lightness of touch and surrealistic visual edge.

Chen (played by Wang Qianyuan in his first leading role) is a former steel worker and member of his factory's band. Although steel production has ceased, he continues to play with his fellow musicians at local weddings and funerals, and occasional street performances. We're introduced to the band as they rehearse in a scrubby field beneath two massive smokestacks – the first of a string of startling images that juxtapose the locals' creative endeavours with the bleakness of their surrounds.

Musical talent runs in Chen's family, and he dreams of buying his young daughter a piano, partly to encourage her musical aspirations, and partly to stop her running off with her mother when Chen's looming divorce is finalised. Unable to scrape together the cash to purchase such an expensive instrument, Chen eventually decides to gather his former comrades and resurrect their factory to create a piano from the detritus of the town's former industry. In the ruins of their workshop Chen and his friends fire up their furnaces and attempt to forge a new dream.

It all sounds horribly cheesy, and I have to admit I put off seeing The Piano in a Factory at the Hong Kong Film Festival earlier this year in lieu of what looked like more challenging fare. But when I finally caught Zhang's film at the Melbourne Film Festival a fortnight ago I was pleasantly surprised. Zhang keeps sentimentality at bay by grounding his drama in the grim realities of post-industrial life in China's northeast on the one hand, and playfully literalising his protagonist's creative visions of a more vibrant, colourful world on the other.

At one point, for example, Chen and his cohorts, after drinking heavily, attempt to steal a piano from a local school. When they are caught mid-act the instrument is left stranded in the snow-bound school yard. While the others flee, Chen is framed lovingly caressing the keyboard as snow falls around him – a beautiful image of an artist in a cold climate that hovers between dream and reality. In another more amusing sequence, Chen's girlfriend leads a troop of celebratory flamenco dancers when the factory piano is finally finished. There is no firm line between the real and imagined in these scenes, fulfilling the surrealistic maxim of bringing the unconsciousness into everyday life.

Portrait of the artist in a cold climate – Chen caresses a stolen piano in the snow in Zhang Meng's The Piano in a Factory.

Another moment of creative whimsy in The Piano in a Factory.

As the former way of life for these socialist subjects is literally dismantled around them, Zhang attempts to envision a new way of being that avoids sinking into the morass of complete disillusionment, or embracing the cut-throat ethical vacuum of the new capitalism. The unsympathetic portrayal of Chen's former wife – who has left him for a man grown rich selling fake medicines – illustrates Zhang's disdain for China's contemporary thirst for material gain at any cost. Equally, clinging to the past appears futile, as the townsfolk's desultory efforts to preserve the totems of their former socialist existence imply. One of the local old timers, inspired by Chen's piano making efforts, leads a protest to try and halt the demolition of the factory's emblematic smokestacks, under which generations of workers have laboured. But no-one in authority in China is about to listen to a bunch of former workers about what they want for their city, and towards the end of the film the smokestacks come crashing down.

Chen, although a flawed character, represents the hope of a new way of being in the world, one that forsakes the grand national visions of the socialist era for an investment in small-scale, individualised dreams of creative fulfillment. It's an idealised notion to be sure, but Chen's quest to find personal meaning in the creativity we bring to our daily lives is one that I found quietly inspiring. After all, it's not only in China that many have lost faith in the collectivised dream of eternal progress and ever-increasing material enrichment. Zhang's evocation of way of life that doesn't rely on perpetual gain, nor seek solace in the comforting straightjacket of ideology or religion, is apposite well beyond China's borders.

A Searing Portrait of a Haunted Childhood – Chung Mong-hong's "The Fourth Portrait"

2011-08-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Melbourne International Film Festival drew to a close on Sunday (7 August). Unfortunately the program was pretty light on films from China this year – perhaps a lingering affect of the festival's tiff with the Chinese government back in 2009 over the documentary 10 Conditions of Love. There were a handful of mainland titles screened, however, which I'll be reviewing in the next couple of posts. First up though is Chung Mong-hong's The Fourth Portrait (2010) from Taiwan.

A Searing Portrait of a Haunted Childhood – Chung Mong-hong's The Fourth Portrait

Bi Xiaohai as Xiang in Chung Mong-hong's wonderful second feature The Fourth Portrait.

Chung Mong-hong's extraordinary second feature The Fourth Portrait (Di si zhang hua) offers a Taiwanese tale from the wrong side of the island, eschewing the concrete jungle of Taipei for the verdant vegetation of the island's poorer rural areas. The film's heavily saturated colour palette only adds to its dream-like tropical ambience – but it's a dream in which nightmares constantly lurk at the edge of frame.

Director Chung Mong-hong made his debut with Parking back in 2008 – which I wrote about here – a solid if overly sentimental commercial feature that delved into the darker, after-hours side of life in Taipei. The Fourth Portrait similarly deals with the memories and experiences lying beneath the visible flow of daily life, but it's an altogether more complex and evocative work than Parking.

The film opens with Xiang, a taciturn 10 year-old boy, being left alone by his father's sudden death. After he is caught stealing lunches at school, a gruff cleaner realises Xiang has no family at home, and through his intervention the boy is reunited with his long absent mother, now living in a rural area with a baby and her brooding new husband. As Xiang hesitantly enters into a new life with his surrogate family, he begins to dream about his older brother, who vanished in mysterious circumstances several years earlier. Disturbed by these nightly visions of his sibling's wondering soul, Xiang begins to suspect his stepfather knows more about his brother's disappearance than he is letting on.

Xiang with the gruff school cleaner in The Fourth Portrait.

At one level Chung's film is a beautifully understated study of the powerlessness of childhood, strongly reminiscent of François Truffaut's classic debut The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959). Like Jean-Pierre Léaud's character in Truffaut's film, Xiang is a boy who has experienced too much too young, and who understands far more about the world than the adults around him realise. He moves through his surrounds as an observer rather than a protagonist, trying to make sense of adult senselessness, and sketching his encounters in a series of portraits illustrating his gallows humour and growing sophistication. In another nod to Truffaut, when Xiang reaches his fourth portrait, Chung's film ends in a startling moment of reflexiveness that turns the boys gaze back upon the viewer – and upon Xiang himself.

The Fourth Portrait can be also read as a allegory for Taiwan's troubled place in the world. Xiang's missing brother is the most literal of the film's apparitions, but Taiwan here is an island haunted by many spectres, from the traumatic wartime memories of the school cleaner, to Xiang's mother's painful past on the mainland. Like Xiang, Taiwan has lost its patriarch and entered an era of relative freedom, yet as a political and cultural entity it remains unsure of itself and where its future lies. Xiang finds an uneasy shelter in his mother's new home – just as Taiwan has tried to ensure its economic survival by cosying up to Beijing – but his bullying step-father, nursing his own dark secrets and murderous temper, is hardly a role model for the boy. If there is hope, it lies with the younger generation, expressed in Xiang's final moment of clear sighted, unflinching self-examination.

The allegorical resonances of The Fourth Portrait never feel forced, and the spare script and restrained performances prevent the story ever slipping into sentimentality or melodrama. Bi Xiaohai is wonderful as the introverted Xiang, achieving a fine balance between expression and introversion. Leon Dai plays Xiang's stepfather with a contained menace (Dai also had a role in Parking), and Hao Lei is excellent as Xiang's mother, carrying her own scars from her life on mainland China. Best known for her lead role in Lou Ye's Summer Palace in 2006, Hao's performance in The Fourth Portrait earned her Taiwan's 2010 Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Leon Dai (left) as Xiang's stepfather, and Hao Lei as his mother in The Fourth Portrait.

The Fourth Portrait bodes well for Chung Mong-hong's career as a budding talent of Taiwan's contemporary film revival. If Parking proved he could produce thoughtful commercial product, The Fourth Portrait reveals his potential to evolve into a truly great director. While the film's pace and domestic drama is reminiscent of the classics of Taiwan's new wave, and the Truffaut influence is clear, The Fourth Portrait is an original, quietly searing picture of childhood, whose atmosphere lingers long after Xiang's probing eyes have burnt up the final frames of the film.

Newsbites: Founding of a Party Scams its way at the Box Office, Film Festivals in Beijing & Shanghai, and Stanley Kwan Returns

2011-08-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

We're just in it for the suits – Wang Xinjun and Andy Lau in Founding of a Party, the Chinese Communist Party's latest love letter to itself.

It's been a while since the last Newsbites post, so here's a new roundup of China film news from around the web.

The biggest recent film news on the mainland has been the release on 15 June of Founding of a Party, the Communist Party's latest love letter to itself. This one marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the CCP. Like 2009's Founding of a Republic, the new film is an all-star affair starring, among others, Andy Lau, Chow Yun-fat, Fan Bingbing and Zhou Xun. Shanghaiist has thoughtfully provided a complete who's who of the film's star studded cast.

As noted in an earlier post, the lovely Tang Wei was to play Mao's girlfriend, but was pulled form the film at the insistence of Mao's family, who deemed the actress too racy to be bedding the Great Helmsman. Given Mao's rep for bedding vast numbers of young beauties, I would have though Wang would have been right up his alley.

Me? Racy? Tang Wei as Mao's girlfriend, a part eventually cut from Founding of a Party.

As is usual practice for Party pics, a raft of Hollywood blockbusters were held up to ensure a clear playing field in China's cinemas, and a week after the film's release the state news agency Xinhua breathlessly reported:

“Nearly 3 million Chinese paid to watch The Founding of a Party... in the first five days of screening, the film's releaser said Wednesday. The film, which is expected to set a new box office record in China, reaped more than 105 million yuan (16.15 million U.S. dollars) as of Sunday, five days after it was officially released.... Ticket sales of the film accounted for more than 57 percent of the country's current box office.”

The film's “releaser”?? Xinhua really needs to crackdown on its English polishers.

Reviews for the film even within China's media were lukewarm, and according to The Wall Street Journal, a month after its release, Founding of the Party had made around 348.45 million yuan ($54 million), a long way short of Avatar's record of $73.2 million during its first two weeks of release in China, and total Chinese gross of gross total of $204 million.

The Wall Street Journal also notes allegations that the film's box office was inflated by state-owned companies taking their employees to cinemas en masse. I know from my own time in Chinese state media that this is standard practice when the authorities need to bolster numbers for any cultural event. More amusing were claims that the Jinyi International Cinemas chain based in Guangzhou was found to be selling Founding of the Party tickets to every customer, and then simply changing titles by hand when viewers actually wanted to see other films. Coincidentally, “Jinyi was one of two chains in Guangzhou responsible for the province’s leading national ticket sales in the first few days of the movie’s release.” Shanghaiist also reported on the doctored tickets.

Ah you gotta love the CCP – has there ever been a political organisation that spends so much money and time reassuring itself of its own greatness and popularity? If this blog post is to be believed, genuine ticket sales in some theatres were dismal indeed.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to see Founding of a Party yet, but it's relative lack of success in China is interesting, given that Founding of a Republic appeared to be a genuine hit with many mainland audiences back in 09. My guess is that while Founding of Republic appealed to a sense of unity and nationalism in China, people these days are far less tolerant of overt propaganda in praise of the CCP. Or maybe it's just a terrible film.

While the party has been busy making love to itself, at the other end of the spectrum China's unofficial film sector continues to suffer harassment from the authorities, with Beijing's Queer Film Festival recently forced to follow the lead of Tongzhou's Documentary Film Festival and publicly cancel, while secretly going ahead with unpublicised screenings. The Shangahiist reports:

“Organisers decided to host the festival at the Dongjen Book Club, located in the capital's Xicheng District but determined they would not officially announce the venue until the last minute to lower the risk of a premature shutdown... Three days before the start of the festival, however, on June 12, district police as well as officers from the Bureau of Industry and Trade, as well as the Culture Bureau, showed up at the book club, and demanded to meet with the organisers. At the meeting, the police informed organisers that the festival was 'illegal' and had to be cancelled. The book club was also threatened with 'harsh consequences' if it decided to go ahead with the hosting of the festival.”

The report notes that organisers went ahead with a series of screenings for invited audience members at various secret venues around Beijing, while publicly stating the festival had been canceled. Shanghaiist claims around 500 people attended these screenings over five days. Last month dGenerate Films ran an interview with the festival's executive director, Yang Yang.

The current tense environment in China isn't stopping some from speaking out, as Jia Zhangke proved recently when he railed against censorship in China during a public appearance at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Unusually, his comments were reported on the Chinese state media site China.org. Jia was quoted as saying, “The only reason that we cannot make genre movies is the barrier that censorship sets.” Apart from Jia's statements the Shanghai festival seems to have been the usual glitzy, anodyne affair.

Meanwhile it seems Beijing is determined to outdo its southern rival in terms of pomp and ceremony, if Shelley Kraicer's account of the capital's recent inaugural film festival is anything to do by. Well, when I say inaugural festival, the capital has of course been playing host to various festivals for years – they're just not festivals recognised by the authorities. I'm sure the forced cancellation of both the Documentary Film Festival and Queer Film Festival had nothing to do with the authorities wanting to hog the limelight for their own awesome spectacular. Shelley Kraicer reports on the dGenerate site in suitably sardonic style:

“This large-scale PR project (for that’s what it is, fundamentally: a state power-driven PR demonstration on a giant scale) necessitates large, splashy, visible, easily media-tized events, with both domestic and international impact. So, actual film screenings, the core of a film festival’s mission, were relegated in the BJIFF to a sort of barely publicized sideshow (during the festival it was impossible to find English-language information on the film schedule, and Chinese language info was incomplete and only available piecemeal online). Decorative festival side bars included an under-populated 'film market' and 'project market', and various hard- or impossible-to-get-into directors’ talks and festival seminars.”

According to this CCTV report, the festival program featured such cutting-edge titles as the year-old Hollywood blockbusters Black Swan and The Social Network – both of which have, of course, been widely available on pirate DVD in China since they hit U.S. screens in 2010. No wonder the festival organisers didn't want to publicise the schedule.

In more serious news, the Wenzhou high speed train crash on 23 July caused an outpouring of grief and anger in China as authorities quickly moved to try and gloss over the incident and silence families of the dead. Asian Fanatics claimed last week that Chinese film stars Tang Wei and Ge You had their Weibo accounts terminated after they posted critical comments about the crash (Weibo is China's version of Twitter. Twitter itself is blocked on mainland China). Ge was quoted “So many people have died, but there was no apology.” The content of Tang Wei's comments was not reported.

Down in Hong Kong, Hollywood Reporter says famed local director Stanley Kwan is currently in pre-production on an adaption of Han Han's novel To the End of Love. Han Han is one of China's most popular novelists and bloggers, especially among China's youth. According to HR the film is a “love story, where river creatures grow to gigantic proportions due to pollution.” Kwan is quoted as saying the tale is “a reflection on the current situation in China.” Apparently the script is currently with the Chinese censors. The article also notes Kwan has a backup project if To the End of Love proves too problematic, based on an essay by Han Han entitled I’m Doing Fine in Hong Kong, Thank You. That film would be shot entirely in Special Administrative Region.

Stanley Kwan on stage with a local journalist at Beijing's BC MOMA cinema in December 2010. Kwan was in Beijing for a special screening of his 1992 classic Centre Stage. Photo Dan Edwards.

Finally, The Wall Street Journal reported back in June that attempts to turn Bruce Lee's former Hong Kong abode into a museum dedicated to the star have come to naught, after negotiations between the proprty's current owner and the Hong Kong governemnt broke down after the owner reportedly made "unreasonable demands, such as wanting to set up his own offices in the museum." Determined fans can still access the site, however, as Lee's home is apparently "currently used as an hourly love motel."

The man himself in that famous yellow jump suit.

You Can’t Build on an Emptiness – IFChina Original Studio

2011-07-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I was privileged to spend a few days staying with filmmaker Jian Yi in Ji'an, Jiangxi Province, at his IFChina Original Studio. The studio is an exciting initiative recently launched by Jian Yi and his wife Eva. The following is an article I wrote for RealTime magazine in Australia about IFChina's work.

Originally published in RealTime arts magazine.

You Can’t Build on an Emptiness – IFChina Original Studio

IFChina Original Studio founder and filmmaker Jian Yi, outside the studio on the campus of Jinggangshan University. Photo: Dan Edwards

Ji’an doesn’t look like the most auspicious place for a groundbreaking experiment in China’s budding civil society. The town doesn’t appear in any English language guidebooks, the local station platform is just a low-slung slab of concrete and, in early spring when I visited, a bone chilling mist hung over the town. Yet this minor Chinese city is home to IFChina original studio, a bold attempt to generate community participation in the arts and oral history in the heart of one of China’s poorest regions.

Hidden Stories
“We wanted to start with oral history because this place is so special – the Chinese revolution under Mao Zedong started here,” explains Jian Yi, a gently spoken local filmmaker whose credits include the documentary Super, Girls (2007). Jian Yi founded IFChina Original Studio with his wife Eva in 2009 on the campus of Jinggangshan University. Their activities include theatre classes, video workshops and photography programs, all built on an oral history foundation.

In a nation where history is always highly contested and politicised terrain, IFChina’s attempts to record personalised stories from China’s recent past and incorporate these into theatre and film projects is not only brave – it’s virtually unprecedented. “We are really doing groundbreaking work,” Jian Yi acknowledges. “We are facing an audience with zero literacy about documentaries and narrative films...many people who come to our screenings say, ‘That was the first documentary I ever saw’.”

Despite being a minor city, Ji’an provides fertile ground for a documentary maker looking to generate community interest in oral history. The remnants of the Chinese Communist Party fled to this area after thousands of members were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Shanghai in 1927, an incident that led to a fundamental shift in the previously urban-based party. As Mao Zedong rose to the fore with his vision of an agrarian-based revolution, the Communists regrouped and declared a Chinese Soviet Republic just south of Ji’an, a region they controlled until 1934, when encirclement forced them to embark on their “long march” to northwest China.

Since founding IFChina Original Studio, Jian Yi has been working with locals – mostly students from Jinggangshan University – to capture this history before it vanishes with only official accounts remaining that leave much unsaid. He cites a story from a 97-year-old local as an example of the tales they have uncovered: “This guy told a story of how his sister tried to get back the body of her husband, one of two men ‘wrongly executed’ by a faction of the Communists.” The murdered pair were local bandit leaders that Mao had persuaded to join his cause, but who were then killed in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. “The story was so human – you know, when we talk about Jinggangshan we think about this huge revolutionary era that’s so heroic. But this one little human story can reveal a side to the era that has been previously buried under slogans and a ‘grand’ historical narrative.”

IFChina Original Studio also works with locals to record more contemporary explorations of China’s rapidly shifting social reality. The 10,000 Village Writing Project will see students from rural areas at Jinggangshan University trained in recording oral history. “We’ll ask them first to write about their own family,” says Jian Yi. “We already have some young people writing about their experiences with the One Child policy. Most of the young female students from rural areas have younger brothers, so all of them have experience of the punishments of the policy. Then they will expand to their extended family, and the village as one community.”

One of their primary goals is to create a series of handbooks that will facilitate the creation of similar projects around the country, as well as hopefully leading Ji’an locals into more sophisticated forms of expression like documentary films. Jian Yi sees this nurturing of local culture as vital to China’s future, as the nation stands at a crossroads between its poverty stricken past and a materially wealthy but potentially culturally impoverished future under a system rife with restrictions.

“I’m convinced culture is a basic need,” Jian Yi asserts. “People are still trying to survive, but I don’t think we can survive as a proper society without culture. Many people around me are very cynical, while many people who do think independently tend to be very critical. I think it’s a step forward from not thinking at all, but then they don’t have the kind of positive energy which a society needs to cultivate and build something. I don’t think you can build something on negative energy, I don’t think you can build something on an emptiness.”

Participants at IFChina Studio attend a briefing prior to commencing an oral history project on one of Ji'an's Maoist-era power stations, which is due to be soon demolished. The man holding the chalk over the blackboard is the son of a former power station worker who grew up in the residential community once attached to the station. Photo: Dan Edwards

Reconnecting
It was his desire to build and cultivate a positive ethos in one of China’s more disadvantaged regions that led Jian Yi to give up a comfortable academic position in Beijing and return to his hometown to establish IFChina Original Studio.

“I lived in Beijing for more than a decade – going to school, teaching and working,” Jian Yi recalls. “Being in Beijing you really begin to have illusions about the country and you begin to misjudge many things. When I came back [to Ji’an] every year to visit relatives, I felt like I was in a different world. So that was the first objective – to get reconnected to social realities. The second objective was to do something similar to what Wu Wenguang and I did with the Villagers’ Documentary Project.”

The Villagers’ Documentary Project was an earlier attempt to forge a creative space for China’s rural classes, who despite comprising the majority of the country’s population, rarely have the chance to represent their own lives in any medium, let alone a relatively expensive one like video. Jian Yi was able to garner funding from an EU project on village governance in 2005 and worked with well-known Chinese documentary maker Wu Wenguang (whose credits include China’s first independently produced documentary Bumming in Beijing back in 1990) to train farmers in documentary making. Jian Yi says his work on the Villagers’ Documentary Project gave him the experience and confidence he needed to strike out and establish IFChina Original Studio a few years later.

International exchange
In addition to fostering localised forms of creative expression, an important part of the studio’s vision is giving Ji’an locals exposure to visiting foreign residents and interns. These programs, in turn, provide visitors with a chance to experience China away from the booming urban centres like Beijing and Shanghai. “I think it would be very exciting for people to come here to do their work, because it’s a totally different environment to Beijing,” enthuses Jian Yi.

IFChina’s internship program provides young people with interests ranging from arts management to filmmaking an opportunity to spend anything from one month to a year working at the studio. Similarly, the residency program provides a chance for scholars, artists and filmmakers with an interest in participatory cultural work to spend one to two months living on campus at Jinggangshan University, working with IFChina.

As well as accommodation, the studio provides volunteer translators who will help residents visit the region’s more remote revolutionary sites, including some historic villages. “You know, the social realities are there – Mao Zedong started from the villages here, and today China’s rural areas are still where China’s future has to come from,” comments Jian Yi.

Although IFChina Original Studio is clearly underpinned by an ambitious vision, Jian Yi sums up their work in quite modest terms: “We try to do very little things in a little community.” Yet as an earlier generation of Chinese in the same area demonstrated 80 years ago, little things with deep roots can one day change a nation.

 Arts workers and scholars interested in internships or residencies at the studio should contact Jian Yi via the IFChina website at: www.ifchinastudio.org

Xu Tong's Relentless Gaze – Shattered

2011-07-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

This is the last of my posts reviewing Chinese work from this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival - apologies that it has taken so long to get all of these up online.

Old Tang and his daughter Tang Caifeng, in Xu Tong's latest documentary Shattered.

Independent Chinese documentaries are not known for their easy, upbeat tone, and few present a more confronting vision of China's lower depths than director Xu Tong. Last October I wrote about his Fortune Teller, a grueling look at the life of a crippled itinerant fortune teller and his deaf, mute, mentally impaired wife as they wandered around China's north. Among that film's cast of characters was a tough brothel owner named Tang Caifeng, who disappeared at the end of the film following her arrest during a crackdown on the sex trade. Fortune Teller's sequel, Shattered, which premiered at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival, catches up with Tang Caifeng a year later, as she returns to her father's home in China's far northeast.

Like Fortune Teller, Shattered pulls no punches in portraying the social atomisation of Chinese society under the stratifying forces of a rabid state-run capitalism. The new film casts contemporary society against a historical backdrop through a series of interviews with Caifeng's 80 year-old father, a retired railway worker who speaks candidly about the socialist era and the changes in China since Mao's death.

Old Tang's house is like a museum, with portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, Mao and Lin Biao adorning the walls. Despite renouncing his Communist Party membership in 1958, Tang's memories offer a strong riposte to the official version of China's history now peddled by the party, which claims the entire country rejoiced at the introduction of market reforms in the late 1970s and has joyfully advanced into an ever-more prosperous future ever since. Old Tang recalls that the dissolving of the communes under Deng Xiaoping brought intense anxiety to the countryside as peasants wondered how they would survive individually. He also says that the day Hua Guofeng – Mao's successor and the man who brought the Cultural Revolution to an end by arresting the “Gang of Four” – came to power was the day the nation “returned to the era of old China... 50 years of planting the roots of socialism were ripped out overnight.”

Old Tang's memories are contrasted with the dog-eat-dog contemporary world inhabited by his daughter Caifeng. In one telling sequence her father jokingly announces Caifeng has been made captain of an imaginary train, which immediately prompt his daughter to ask for a bribe for a sleeper berth. When Old Tang “dismisses her from office,” she exclaims, “What's wrong with me?” with mock indignation. “I'm following the spirit of our Communist Party!”

Out in the real world Caifeng meets “Brother Wu,” and is deeply impressed by his ownership of an illegal coal mine raking in RMB 2-3,000 a day (many rural workers in China earn no more than a few thousand RMB a year). Illegal mining is endemic in China and thousands of miners die every year in shafts lacking even rudimentary safety precautions. None of this seems to bother Caifeng, who becomes an enthusiastic investor in Wu's venture until intertitles tell us the mine is discovered and closed by police. Caifeng rounds up a group of thugs and has the man who reported the illegal operation beaten until he is permanently disabled. “He deserved to be dead,” she comments to Xu Tong.

Meanwhile back at home Old Tang's family is mired in dysfunction. All his sons are trapped in unhappy marriages, and over a tense new year's dinner the family goes into meltdown. “He regards himself like Mao Zedong,” one of the sons later says of his father. “He's so arrogant.” We never get a firm sense of what lies behind these familial tensions, however, and it remains unclear if the sons' resentments are really inspired by Old Tang's behaviour or are imply a generalised expression of rage at their impoverished living conditions.

Much else remains hazy in Xu's film, not least the filmmaker's position in relation to the confronting scenes he captures. There is the question, for example, of how he responds to Caifeng's brutality. While Xu can't be held responsible for the violence Caifeng arranges to have perpetrated on others, the filmmaker appears to have a quite close relationship with the woman and her family. Did he really sit back and do nothing when she arranged to have a man beaten half to death? Did he really say nothing when she proudly recounted this incident to camera? If his response was as blank as his film implies, doesn't that make Xu complicit in her actions? Especially since he is rendering Caifeng's personality and actions as a spectacle by filming them for his documentary.

Linked to this ethical ambiguity is Xu's framing of peasant life. Like the endless scenes of the fortune teller's mentally impaired wife vomiting and dribbling over herself in his last film, I really couldn't see the point of scenes like Caifeng's de-waxing of her father's ears, in which we see her happily scooping out huge chunks of embedded wax with a little metal spoon. Similarly, a prolonged family argument about Old Tang's masturbating and a scene in which a pig is slaughtered seemed calculated to shock more than anything else. Xu must be aware how these scenes will look to his audience – who like him are mainly urban, educated and relatively well off compared to the people on screen. By constantly homing in on aspects of rural life that he knows will likely make this audience squirm, I feel like Xu is – perhaps unconsciously – pandering to the disparaging view of rural life commonly held by Chinese urbanites.

Old Tang and Tang Caifeng in Xu Tong's Shattered.

I'm not suggesting Xu should “pretty up” his portraits to match an urban sensibility – I just think there is a difference between engaging with your subject's situation and way of life, and blankly dwelling on those aspects you know will cast them in a poor light in the eyes of many of your viewers. I always end up feeling uncomfortable with Xu's films because I feel like he looks at his subjects with the detached ethnographic gaze of an educated, middle class urbanite fascinated with the “primitive” life of China's poor – a perspective that can't help but end up being condescending towards his subjects.

UCCA in Beijing’s 798 art zone hosted a season of Xu Tong’s work last month, and you can read a more sympathetic account of the filmmaker's approach to documentary in an article Time Out Beijing ran to coincide with the screenings.

Jia Zhangke's Yulu – Striding confidently forward, but into what?

2011-07-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

Folk singer Zhou Yunpeng, one of the personalities profiled in the Jia Zhangke-produced documentary Yulu.

As I sat watching the world premiere of Yulu – produced and partly directed by Jia Zhangke – at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival, I kept thinking of a conversation I'd had in Beijing a few weeks earlier. During a rather heated post-lunch discussion about China's politics and film industry, a friend who is a scriptwriter for Chinese television declared that local filmmakers face two choices: they can remain “independent” and financially insecure or they can do the Communist Party's bidding and enjoy a comfortable future. He didn't believe there was any middle ground.

To back up his claim he wheeled out the example of Jia Zhangke, a formerly great filmmaker whose work, he said, has been blunted and tamed since he began submitting his features for approval by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television in 2004 (SARFT's approval is essential for official release in mainland China).

I have often heard this charge leveled at Jia by people in Beijing's creative and intellectual community, and previously I had always thought it unfair. Yes, his films have changed since his brilliant early productions like Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform (2000), but for my money his recent Still Life (2006) and I Wish I Knew (2010 – also screened at this year’s HIFF) have been every bit as challenging as his first features. Unfortunately the experience of watching Yulu made me reconsider my view.

It's perhaps unfair to describe Yulu as a “Jia Zhangke film,” since it actually comprises a dozen short documentaries by seven different directors profiling “up-and-coming figures who the younger generation can easily identify with,” to quote the Hong Kong Film Festival program. Jia produced the project and directs the opening and closing segments – both of which exemplify the film’s problems.

Yulu opens with Jia’s portrait of Cao Fei, an entrepreneur who has created a groceries shopping website. We hear about Cao's initial failure to generate interest in his site, which folded in early 2010, and his determination to succeed now that he has decided to try again. None of which, frankly, is very interesting. Cao seems like a nice enough guy, but we don't spend long enough with him to gain anything but a very superficial impression, and Jia's portrait is shot through with such a grating “up and at em” tone that it feels more like a motivational video than a serious documentary.

The superficiality of Jia's opening continues throughout Yulu, as the film relentlessly plows through a dozen short documentaries in 90 minutes. Some segments are saved by much more intriguing subjects, such as Wei Tie's affecting sketch of Zhao Zhong, founder of the Green Camel Bell NGO in China's northwestern province of Gansu. Zhao explains how he started his environmental work after the life-changing experience of falling into an ice crevice in Tibet, where he was trapped for 33 hours. He also reveals the dangers of working in China's severely under-resourced and inexperienced NGO sector through the story of a young volunteer who drowned in the Yellow River in 2008.

Other engaging episodes included Tan Chui Mui's portrait of investigative journalist Wang Keqin, and Chen Tao’s profiles of the blind folk singer Zhou Yunpeng and the AIDS charity worker Zhang Ying. But most of the documentaries suffer from the same lack of depth that plagues Jia’s opening contribution.

It is in Yulu's final episode, however, that the film's irritating “can do” tone becomes something more disturbing. Directed by Jia Zhangke, the segment focuses on Pan Shiyi, founder and current chairman of SOHO China. Anyone who has lived in Beijing will be familiar with SOHO, a development company that has famously constructed a series of vast residential-commercial complexes around the capital. One of their most recent creations sits on the site of the original Sanlitun bar street in the middle of Beijing's embassy district, once a rather notorious strips of dive drinking establishments.

The SOHO complexes represent the more stylish end of a massive redevelopment program that has rapidly ‘modernised’ the face of the China's major cities over the past two decades. Unfortunately for many long-term inner-city residents, modernisation has involved casting hundreds of thousands out of their homes, often with little or no compensation, so that old apartment blocks can be cleared to make way for shiny new skyscrapers. Meanwhile developers and government officials – who are often one and the same – have reaped untold wealth.

Admittedly, SOHO’s complexes have largely been built on former industrial sites rather than residential areas, but like all such developments they have involved the commercialisation of land supposedly held by ‘the people’ under the socialist system, with the proceeds pocketed by officials. As this sympathetic Forbes profile from last year notes, figures like Pan Shiyi and his wife – SOHO CEO Zhang Xin – are widely despised because of the assumption that amassing wealth through property development in China is impossible without involvement in high level corruption. I don't know enough about SOHO to say for certain if this is true, but all my experiences in China indicate that developing prime Beijing real estate on the scale that Pan and Zhang have done would be impossible without some serious kickbacks and buddying-up to corrupt officials. In any case, SOHO's glossy but often poorly planned developments personify much that is wrong with China's model of urban development. Given Jia Zhangke's previous concern with the disenfranchised and the alienating effects of China's incredibly rapid plunge into rapid capitalism, his uncritical celebration of a figure who has amassed immense wealth through this process is somewhat puzzling.

Even more bizarrely, Jia claimed at the post-screening Q&A in Hong Kong that the main theme running through Yulu was the huge rift between rich and poor in China today. I'm not sure how he thought the film expressed this, given one of his own segments extolled a figure of extreme wealth. To me Yulu felt like a singularly undiscerning celebration of “high achieving” figures that showed little concern for what it is some of these people are achieving, and the means by which they are achieving it. Shortly after Jia spoke, an audience member pointedly asked if the Yulu's upbeat tone and theme of striding confidently forward were inspired by the walking figure of the Johnnie Walker logo – as viewers are reminded throughout, the liquor firm was the film’s principal sponsor.

Which brings me back to my friend's assertion that Chinese filmmakers face the stark choice of dwelling in financially impoverished isolation, or getting with the government program. These days that program is a mix of authoritarian politics and state-controlled capitalism that primarily benefits a very small elite – the essence of what academic Chris Berry calls China's “state-corporate hegemonic culture.” As with all forms of capitalism, the myth propping up this culture is that it gives anyone the chance to make their fortune. In China, this is even less true than the West, since the state holds all the trump cards, including the main industries, the media, and the courts. I once thought my friend's judgment regarding the position of filmmakers in this societal matrix too black and white. But when Jia Zhangke begins making films in which the very theme embodies his sponsor's logo, while celebrating property developers in one of the world's most brutally corrupt real estate markets, I have to wonder if my friend is so far off the mark.

The directors of Yulu are: Jia Zhangke, Wei Tie, Chen Tao, Song Fang, Chen Ziheng, Wang Zizhao, Tan Chui Mui.

Jia Zhangke at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival.

For those in Beijing, BC MOMA will be screening of Yulu this Sunday, July 24 at 8pm. 
The following Saturday (July 30) at 4pm the same venue will be screening Zhao Liang's Together, which I wrote about here.
Both films will screen with English subtitles.

Ai Weiwei Released on Bail

2011-06-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei out on bail - seen here at the door of his home in Beijing last night. Image David Gray/Reuters via The Guardian.

Good news today, with media outlets reporting Chinese artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei was finally released last night on bail. The Wall Street Journal has posted a short video of Ai's arrival at his home in northeast Beijing. Although Ai looked tired and appears to have lost a lot of weight, he basically appeared to be in good health. He reportedly said he was unable to offer any comment to the media other than expressing happiness at being back home.

As I wrote about here Ai Weiwei disappeared on April 3 after being detained at Beijing Capital Airport while attempting to board a flight for Hong Kong. Apart from a few minutes with his wife Lu Qing on May 15, Ai had not been heard of since his arrest until last night. It's still unclear if he has been formally charged, although the Guardian reported: “Beijing police said they had released the 54-year-old 'because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes.'”

Chinese state news agency Xinhua added in a release late last night that Ai has also been released because of a “chronic disease he suffers from” – presumably a reference to his diabetes. They also reported a police claim that “Ai has repeatedly said he is willing to pay the taxes he evaded.” Rather laughably, the Chinese authorities have maintained Ai's detention has nothing to do with his activism and is all about “economic crimes.”

Ai Weiwei is China's best known contemporary artist and has also produced a range of documentaries related to China's activist community.

It will be interesting to watch what happens next. Presumably Ai Weiwei promised to change his outspoken ways in exchange for his release, but I can't see him remaining quiet for long. Yet re-arresting him will not exactly be great PR for China's rulers. Ai has also stated many times he does not wish to leave China permanently and live overseas.

Stay tuned.

A Blank Slate for Our Own Thoughts and Prejudices – Wang Bing's Man With No Name

2011-06-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

The man with no name in his subterranean dwelling, a scene from Wang Bing's eponymous documentary.

Wang Bing's new documentary Man With No Name is an intriguing companion piece to his recent debut drama The Ditch, so it's fitting that the two films screened alongside each other at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival. Both works depict the lives of marginalised men living in the ruggedly parched landscape of China's northwest, but where The Ditch dramatises events from sixty years ago, Man With No Name is an observational documentary set in the present.

The film's style harks back to the early days of China's independent documentary movement, when directors like Duan Jinchuan, inspired by the “Direct Cinema” of Frederick Wiseman, pursued a purely observational approach that eschewed voice-overs, music and obvious directorial intervention.

While an observational aesthetic remains central in most Chinese documentaries, these days most filmmakers adopt a more mixed – and I think more honest – style that often includes interviews and interactions with their subjects. In this instance, however, Wang Bing has completely masked his own presence, as his camera silently follows the nameless man of the title across a year living in the desert-like yellow earth of China's northern interior. I say “in” because the man quite literally lives in a cave dug into the soil, where he appears to lead a completely pre-modern existence, employing only basic tools and cooking rudimentary meals over an open fire. Without the man's plastic containers and the brief glimpses we catch of passing cars and the odd passer-by there would be little to indicate that the setting is present-day China.

Our first glimpse of the man sees him emerging from a hole in the ground, clad in rags. We follow him through a series of seemingly random activities that include rummaging around in other caves, collecting manure off village roads, and spreading soil on the ground near his home. Gradually it becomes apparent that he is cultivating a small plot outside his cave, and as the weather warms up a crop sprouts. In the final scene we see him once again collecting manure in the brown autumn landscape, continuing his cycle of primitive subsistence farming. The handful of other people we see enter the frame appear oblivious to his presence. The nameless man lives by himself and talks to no-one. In fact he remains silent for the entire film, never acknowledging Wang's camera or the director's presence.

Wang Bing's Man With No Name.

The man's lifestyle is certainly startling – it's hard to believe that anyone could be leading such an insular, pre-technological life in a nation undergoing such a headlong rush into the future. Watching Man With No Name in the high-rise concrete jungle of downtown Kowloon only added to the film's surreal edge. Whether the man's ascetic existence is to be pitied as a life of unimaginable poverty, or a riposte to modernity's unsustainable materialistic ways, is left to the eye of the beholder. In fact, Wang's refusal to take up any position in relation to his subject was, for me, the film's biggest weakness. Apart my discomfort with the basic conceit of “pretending the camera isn't there,” purely observational documentary often brings to mind a comment Godard made about US director Richard Leacock back in 1963: “Leacock is busily hunting down truth without ever asking himself... what truth he is after.”

Put another way, Direct Cinema's pure attention to surface detail often ends up being, well, rather superficial. Who is the man with no name? Ultimately, the camera tells us very little and renders him as an object, one more piece of debris in the little cave that he lives in. He has no history, no subjectivity, no voice of his own. Yet he must presumably be capable of some level of communication for Wang to have persuaded him to appear in the film.

Questions left hanging can provoke a thoughtful engagement with the images and story on screen, but when the viewer doesn't get past the question of who we are looking at, the uncertainty becomes frustrating rather than productive. For me the film would have been much more interesting if we could have heard how the man got there, his thoughts about his situation, how he regarded the surrounding villagers, and what his attitude was to Wang's camera.

It's instructive to compare Wang's film to Zhao Liang's Crime and Punishment, which also takes a observational approach, but shows the police subjects and their suspects in a range of situations that allow them to stand as complex individuals, with equally complex relations to the institutional framework within which they work. Zhao makes a point without being didactic, and still leaves a broad interpretative space for the viewer to occupy. In contrast, Man With No Name leaves us with little more than a rather prosaic look into an unknown man's daily routines. Beyond a sense of amazement (wow, someone is still living like this) and intrigue (who is this guy?), the film is so wide open to interpretation it becomes almost meaningless. Perhaps this is Wang's point. It's easy to read the man as a victim, for example, but since we learn nothing about how he came to live this way, such a reading says more about the viewer's attitude to modern life than the man himself. That still leaves Wang's human subject as little more than a blank object, however, onto which we project our own thoughts and prejudices.

Corrosive Obsession – Yu Guangyi's Bachelor Mountain

2011-06-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

San Liangzi in Yu Guangyi's quietly moving documentary Bachelor Mountain, screened at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Yu Guangyi's documentary Bachelor Mountain – caught at this year's Hong Kong Film Festival – beautifully captures the space where individual temperament and social circumstances intercept, forging a documentary that is both subtle in its social critique and moving in its portrayal of unrequited love.

Bachelor Mountain opens with a shot that's become standard in Chinese independent cinema – the isolated individual dwarfed by harsh surrounds. We see a man knee deep in snow, wrestling with a timber log. Inter-titles introduce San Liangzi, a 46-year-old laid-off worker. We move to a group of women eating on the mountainside in the open air, their breath steamy in the icy surrounds. Centuries of logging have left the slopes largely bereft of timber, and recent environmental regulations have delivered the final blow to the local timber industry, leaving most of the local men without regular work. The women cheerfully explain that most of their number have left to seek better lives in the cities. “We'd all leave if we could,” one of them states frankly.

San Liangzi is one of those left behind with no money, no job and no wife. We follow his morning routine in his dark, dirty abode, where the only heating is an open fire. He hikes across his village to help out with chores at the home of Wang Weizi, a feisty 29-year-old woman who has converted part of her parents' courtyard home into a small inn. San has nursed a crush on Wang for a decade, although the studied casualness with which she regards his presence suggests he hasn't gotten far in his advances.

Initially San comes across as a gentle, if slightly simple giant, but as the film progresses it becomes apparent that his reticence and bulky frame hide a deeply sensitive nature. “I haven't been with a woman for ten years,” he tells the director matter-of-factly. Yet even if Wang Weizi turns him down in the end, he claims he won't regret the decade he's spent chasing her. In an age that puts so much store in economic relations, San's dedication is endearing, and even admirable in its selflessness – although we're left wondering what being “turned down” would mean for him, since Wang appears to have no romantic interest in him at all after a decade of pursuit.

By her own admission, Wang is focused entirely on her business. “It's an aftereffect of being poor,” she explains to her parents. “You think too much about money.” We can hardly fault her for wanting to improve her situation. Accepted into a special sports school at age sixteen, she had to forgo the opportunity because of her parent's inability to pay the fees. And although the town appears to attract a steady stream of tourists in summer – perhaps drawn by the mountainous surrounds – it's clear the area is a backwater, left high and dry by the economic tide that has forcefully swept China's major cities into the 21st century.

There's also the small matter of Wang's sexual orientation. Her utter disinterest not only in San, but in men in general, implies San may be barking up the wrong tree, and at an awkward New Year dinner one of his friends comes out and says what we've begun to suspect. “You're never going to change her,” he tells San gently. “Because she likes women, not men.” San simply mumbles that they don't know her like he does and changes the subject. By this stage of the film, however, San's endearing devotion is starting to look increasingly like a willful, self-defeating blindness.

When tourist season arrives, he quietly tramps over to Wang’s inn every night after working all day on a construction site. As urban tour groups indulge in hedonistic rituals of dancing and drinking around him, San wordlessly labours into the night, completely without recompense, ignored by both Wang and the partying throng. The scene graphically illustrates China's urban-rural divide, but San's willingness to be exploited is more disturbing than the obvious social gap between him and the tourists.

Although San's passivity is frustrating, it comes as a shock when we follow him home one night and finally find his bitterness laid bare. Stumbling down darkened village lanes in the driving rain he rages to himself, taut with impotent rage, cursing Wang Weizi' name and her imperviousness. Is he drunk? Or has he simply gone mad with longing and loneliness? Eventually he reaches home and collapses into an exhausted sleep.

A final inter-title tells us that when Yu Guangyi returned to the town a year later, Wang's business was booming and San's love remained unchanged. He was still working at the inn every night.

San Liangzi's humble home in Yu Guangyi's Bachelor Mountain.

Yu’s film is resolutely non-judgmental in its treatment of his subjects, from San's obsession to Wang Weizi's cool indifference. Her relationship with San is clearly exploitative, but Wang could never be described as devious, or even manipulative, since she gives San no reason to think she has any romantic attachment to him and makes it clear she doesn't want to pay him for the work he does at the inn. Her economic situation is only mildly better than his, and she is at least making an effort to improve her life, which San seems unwilling or unable to do.

Yet we are left to ponder the social and economic conditions that foster such a mercenary approach to life and relations, as well as the personal distortions engendered by circumstances that have left the mountain stripped of vegetation, the community devoid of young women, and men like San stranded with virtually no hope of a steady income or family life in their hometowns. Is it this situation that has produced San's corrosive obsession? Or is it borne of an innate foible in this personality?

Bachelor Mountain achieves a rare and subtle balance between the social and the personal, probing the cost of China's city-centric mode of development through the psychology of a kind, but deeply flawed individual caught up in a world he seems singularly ill-equipped to deal with. Given San's almost saint-like selflessness, his inability to forge a life or find a partner is a sad indictment of the materialist times that we live in.

Hong Kong From the Bottom of a Glass – Freddie Wong's The Drunkard

2011-05-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

Freddie Wong's debut The Drunkard, seen at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival.

The image of the dissolute artist pursuing a bohemian lifestyle and resisting the allure of the market may not have much credence in today's rampantly commercialised culture. But if the novel The Drunkard is anything to go by, the tension between art and commerce was very real for Shanghai-born novelist Liu Yichang. His autobiographical stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of a writer living in the squalor of early 60s Hong Kong, balancing serious literary ambitions with the need to write pulp fiction and soft porn to earn a living. For not the first time a local director has produced a screen adaptation of Liu's book, which appeared at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival.

The new film shares the title of the novel and is directed by critic-turned-director Freddie Wong. It was the Wong Kai-wai-esque publicity image above that initially caught my eye in the Hong Kong festival program – and then made me think twice about seeing the film when I realised 2046 was based on the same source material. That film's prequel, In the Mood for Love, was also based on a Liu Yichang piece, the short story Intersection.

Fortunately Freddie Wong's film turned out to be anything but a Wong Kar-wai remake, although it's instructive to compare it to 2046 to illuminate what's different in his approach. I haven't read The Drunkard – as far as I can tell it's never been translated into English – but Freddie Wong appears to remain much more faithful to the novel than Wong Kar-wai. The latter essentially created an idealised version of the story's protagonist, borrowed the book's narrative core, and mixed it with a bevy of other sources to produce a movie that continues Wong Kar-wai's long term thematic interest in the nature of memory, longing and loss.

Freddie Wong's film actually contains what I presume is a subtle dig at Wong Kar-wai, when the writer-protagonist Mr Lau has a dream that his autobiographical novel will one day be adapted for the screen – twice. The first time the director will not pay him a cent. When the second director pays him it will be the first time he has ever received a penny from the Hong Kong film industry for his work.

As this wry wink at contemporary audiences implies, Freddie Wong's take on 1960s Hong Kong, and the artist's position in the colony's brazenly materialistic culture, is much less romaticised than Wong Kar-wai's rose-tinted vision. The central character is also nothing like Tony Leung's debonair, devil-may-care playboy luxuriating in an air of perpetual melancholy. The Drunkard's Mr Lau, played by Taiwanese actor John Chang of Brighter Summer Day fame, is a tortured soul on the wrong side of middle age, wrestling with poverty, traumatic memories of wartime Shanghai, and an alcoholism that threatens to destroy him.

Tony Leung in 2046 – dissolute but debonair.

John Chang in The Drunkard – just dissolute.

A steady parade of women drift in and out of Lau's life, but unlike the titillating sex scenes and soft-focus melodrama of the writer's romantic liaisons in 2046, the relationships of The Drunkard are marked by Lau's awareness that his precarious financial situation and alcoholism make him poison for the women in his life. One of the film's most heartbreaking sequences sees him abandon his lonely landlord, in the knowledge he will never be able to satisfy her quiet longing for companionship and love. Lau salves his own need for physical comfort by paying for sex in the seedy bars he frequents, his disgust with the sex industry matched only by his self-loathing for his inability to resist it.

In short, The Drunkard is an altogether grittier portrait of early 1960s Hong Kong than anything Wong Kar-wai has offered, because each director has quite different concerns. Wong Kar-wai's Hong Kong is the dream-like city of his childhood memories, a half-imagined scene always hovering on the edge of reality. Freddie Wong's world is much more grounded in the material deprivations of the era, and the cut-throat culture it produced. More specifically, The Drunkard asks what the role of an artist is in a society where the money is the only value and instant gratification is the only pursuit.

For all its contemporary surface sophistication, the culture of Hong Kong and the position of the city's artists has perhaps not fundamentally changed. As Freddie Wong noted in a recent interview, “Even though the movie is set in the 60s, after 50 years, most of the characters and situations in the novel still resonate. Hong Kong is still very commercial; people want to make money... After 50 years, the situation hasn't changed.” Beyond China's borders, the commodification of culture is no less extreme, making the question of what we truly value – and how me measure that value – more pertinent than ever.

The Horror of History – Wang Bing's The Ditch

2011-05-24T01:43:00.000-07:00

Prisoners in Wang Bing's The Ditch.

Bedraggled men sit in a seemingly empty desert landscape, the bareness of their surrounds strangely beautiful on screen. We see the group from a distance, as if the desert itself is a brooding presence observing these puny beings on its surface. The men are allocated numbers and descend into caves dug into the desert floor, where earthen “beds” carved out of the wall await them. Welcome to the world of Wang Bing's The Ditch, surely one of the most stark depictions of the deprivations of the Maoist era ever committed to celluloid.

Many Chinese features since the 1980s have touched on the suffering inflicted by Mao's endless mass political campaigns, but few have been so brutally raw in their depiction of the era's cruelties. The Ditch plays out on the edge of the Gobi desert in China's northwestern province of Gansu, where thousands were exiled after taking up Mao's invitation to speak out about societal problems during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. The wave of criticism spooked the regime – or perhaps as some claim the entire setup was designed to lure out dissenters. In any case, the Anti-Rightist Campaign followed hot on the heels of the Hundred Flowers movement and saw many of those who had spoken out imprisoned or otherwise persecuted. As some of the characters in The Ditch recall, many suffered for 'crimes' such as pointing out incidents of corruption or suggesting the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” should be widened to become a “Dictatorship of the People.”

A desperate prisoner scrounges for sustenance in Wang Bing's The Ditch.

After their arrival in the desert, the prisoners of the The Ditch are forced to endure pointless labour, digging an endless trench and 'cultivating' the arid soil of their surrounds. Carts do the rounds every morning collecting the night's corpses as old men literally drop dead from overexertion. Some of those left living receive letters from home informing them that their wives have divorced them in order to escape association with “bad” political elements.

After a time all work ceases as Mao's botched “Great Leap Forward” sees famine sweep across the country and the camp's meagre food supply dwindles to almost nothing. Men are reduced the level of animals, eating plants they know will poison them, or in some cases gnawing on the corpses of fellow inmates.

The most heartbreaking sequence sees the dull monotony of starvation disturbed by the arrival of an inmate's wife, who has travelled for days to bring her husband supplies. But by the time she arrives her husband has already expired. A fellow prisoner is reluctant to reveal the location of the body because, he tells fellow prisoners, he knows the remains have already been cannibalized. Meanwhile the camp administrator berates the distraught wife for wanting to see her “reactionary” husband. “You should move on,” he tells her brusquely.

These scenes are all the more disturbing for the veracity claimed by director Wang Bing. “Everything in the film really happened at the camp,” Wang was quoted as saying following the film's debut at the Venice Film Festival last year. “Nothing has been made up or added.” The story is based on the director's interviews with elderly survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui labour camps, as well as the novel Goodbye, Jiabiangou by Yang Xianhui.

Given The Ditch's realist tone, it's not surprising Wang Bing has emerged from China's independent documentary sector. His first film in 2003 was the epic nine-hour epic West of the Tracks, which traced the closure and decay of one of the China's mammoth socialist industrial complexes in far northeast. The Ditch is Wang's first dramatic feature, and reveals the director to be an artful stylist, framing his bleak tale in long shots in which the men are only vaguely differentiated from each other as the indignities of prison camp life take their toll and their individuality is dissolved by hardship and hunger. They are dwarfed and ironically imprisoned by their stunning, wide open desert surrounds, adrift in a world utterly divorced from the urban environments they have come from. The camera shadows them moving through the treeless environment in tracking shots evoking the ghostly presence of the dead littering the landscape. Every frame of this movie feels haunted – by hunger, death, and the knowledge that the Chinese authorities have attempted to erase this history from the nation's consciousness.

Eventually the handful of survivors of this nightmare are released by the Bureau for Re-education to make way for a new batch of prisoners. The camp director asks one inmate to stay on, offering him privileges in return for help dealing with influx of new men. “You'll be better off than those released,” the director tells him. “After the famine, they'll still be Rightists.” The comment hangs like a portent of the Cultural Revolution that was to engulf China a few years later, subjecting “Rightists” to a new bout of murderous persecution at the hands of Mao's Red Guards.

Like other recent films dealing with the Maoist era, such as Hu Jie's In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul and Though I Am Gone, it seems unlikely authorities will tolerate screenings of The Ditch on the Chinese mainland, even at 'unofficial' festivals and events. I was fortunate to see the film at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival, the one place in China where such controversial works can be openly screened. Meanwhile, back on the mainland cinemas are gearing up to unleash the Communist Party's latest love letter to itself, the sequel to 2009's Founding of a Republic, imaginatively entitled Founding of the Party. But until films like the The Ditch and Lin Zhao can openly screen in their country of origin, the ghosts that play at the edges of these tales will continue to haunt the nation's consciousness – and no amount of historical revisionism will dispel them.

Newsbites: Lu Qing Sees Ai Weiwei, Documentary Festival Cancelled & No Tang Wei for Mao

2011-05-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

Ai Weiwei missing poster. Photo: stunned

This relocation business takes a lot of time! But I'm pleased to report I'm now reasonably settled in Melbourne and getting stuck in to my doctorate on China's independent documentary movement. Which means I can finally get back to some blogging. I'll shortly start rolling out some reviews of what I saw at the Hong Kong Film Festival back in March, but first a quick news update.

As noted in my last two posts, on Sunday, April 3 China's best known contemporary artist Ai Weiwei was taken from Beijing airport as he attempted to board a flight for Hong Kong. After nearly six weeks during which nothing was heard from the prominent artist, designer and filmmaker, his wife Lu Qing told international media outlets on Monday, May 16 that she had been allowed to see Ai Weiwei for around 20 minutes on May 15. The Guardian reported that Lu found Ai in “good physical health but mentally conflicted and tense.” That must have come as a relief, following unconfirmed reports in late April that Ai had been tortured while in custody.

Although it's good to hear Ai Weiwei appears to be physically ok, it is still not clear where or why the he is being held – or when he might be released.

The general mood of tension in China shows no signs of abating, as I wrote about here for RealTime magazine earlier this month. The situation has continued to deteriorate even since that article was written. In April I blogged about my experiences trying to interview the filmmaker and academic Ai Xiaoming in Guangzhou in March. On May 13 China Human Rights Defenders reported that she continues to suffer harassment, including having the lock of her front door filled with glue and being bombarded with “silent phone calls, believed to be automated, that have disrupted her phone service.”

In more bad news for China's film community, on April 18 organisers announced the cancellation of the 8th Documentary Film Festival China, an event staged annually since 2004 in the far flung Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. The festival is one of a handful of regular events in China showcasing films made outside the country's state-controlled approval system. The 2011 edition had been planned for the first week of May. Critic and programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival, Shelly Kraicer, reported on the dGenerate website on May 12 that, “Several levels of government, represented at a surprisingly high level, made it clear... that this was not the right time for an independent organization to screen Chinese films that the state has not authorized.” Kraicer also claimed that foreign visitors who had journeyed to Tongzhou were followed by plain-clothed police.

Meanwhile in the “official” industry actress Tang Wei may have been spared a cringe-inducing experience by the intervention of Mao Zedong's grandson Mao Xinyu. After falling from grace with mainland authorities for daring to act in a film that dramatised Chinese history in an interesting fashion (Ang Lee's Lust, Caution), the talented actress was apparently set to be “rehabilitated” by playing the Great Helmsman's early girlfriend Tao Yi in the hotly anticipated follow up to the thrilling Founding of a Republic, imaginatively entitled Founding of the Party. According to the Shanghaiist, however, Tang Wei was pulled from the production because, “The late Chairman's family did not want the controversy that surrounds Tang Wei to cast a bad light on the family name.”

The gorgeous Tang Wei and the back of Tony Leung's head in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution.

Right... your ancestor kills millions of his own countrymen – including many of his own comrades up to and including China's President – and you're worried an association with Tang Wei will cast the family in a bad light? Personally I think they did Tang Wei a favour.

Further afield, at Cannes this week Fox International announced the “creation of the annual Fox Chinese Film Development Award, which is accompanied by a first-look deal with the studio and a cash grant of HK$100,000,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The article says, “Submissions are open to any Chinese-language project, or a project with the potential to be adapted into a Chinese-language film.” The call for entries is apparently open until October 30.

Speaking of Hollywood crashing the China party (no pun intended), the LA Times reported last week that Christopher Dodd, the new Chief Executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, will be visiting the Shanghai International Film Festival in June, “in an effort to build relations with film officials there.” Apparently Dodd has made “opening doors with China” a top priority, no doubt with the aim of encouraging Chinese compliance with last year's WTO ruling that the country has “violated international trade rules by restricting imports of foreign movies and other media." So far Chinese authorities appear to have made no moves to address the ruling, and they seems unlikely to do so their current state of cultural paranoia. Besides, with Founding of the Party due for release later this year, they have no need to import vacuous blockbusters.

Here's some good news about one of the few genuinely great commercial mainland features of recent times – Hollywood Reporter says Jiang Wen’s wonderful Let the Bullets Fly, which I wrote about here has been sold to Japan, Australia and the UK. Which means I may get to finally see it with subtitles and glean all those plot points I missed when I saw it in Beijing.

Poster for Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly.

Finally, in my last post I mentioned the “controversy” some Western newspaper columnists have tried to whip up over the censoring of Bob Dylan's performance last month in Beijing. On May 13 the man himself fired off a rare riposte to his critics via his website, claiming “If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.” You can read his full post here.

News Bites: No Word From Ai Weiwei, Hong Kong Festival Awards, & 3D Porn

2011-04-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has not been heard from since he was arrested in Beijing on Sunday, April 3. Image the Guardian

Last week I posted about the arrest of China's most prominent contemporary artist (and documentary filmmaker) Ai Weiwei. There has been no word of Ai's current whereabouts since then, and yesterday afternoon the Guardian reported that Ai's driver Zhang Jingsong and his accountant Ms Hu are also now missing. Ai Weiwei's friend Wen Tao has not been heard from since he was arrested the same day as the artist.

Many individuals and governments around the world have voiced their concerns about Ai Weiwei's detention. On April 8 a letter protesting Ai's arrest was published in the Guardian, signed by a range of Chinese and China-related creative figures, including documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming and the UK Chinese film expert Professor Chris Berry.

You can read a more detailed article I wrote for New Matilda on the current wave of repression and the impact it is having on China's creative community here. An even grimmer assessment of the situation can be found in the China Human Rights Defenders website here.

On a less depressing note, the Hong Kong International Film Festival drew to a close last Tuesday (April 5). I spent a couple of days at the festival in late March and managed to catch around a dozen films, including a lot of new Chinese titles.

Standouts for me included Wang Bing's astounding The Ditch and Freddie Wong's The Drunkard, both of which I'll write about in separate posts.

On the whole though the Chinese titles this year were disappointing compared to last year's strong showing. Li Hongqi's documentary Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse?, about Beijing band PK14, was a grating piece of misjudged experimentation, while Felix Chong's Hong Kong triad flick Once a Gangster was one of the silliest films I've seen in a long time.

Most disappointing of all was the Jia Zhangke-produced Yulu, a documentary comprising a dozen or so short films by seven different directors profiling “successful” people in contemporary China. Two of the segments were directed by Jia himself, and I'm sorry to say they were among the weakest. The film made me rethink the increasing criticism I've heard leveled at Jia Zhangke in recent years in China, which I'd previously largely written off as sour grapes on the part of other filmmakers. More on that in a future post.

The weaker Chinese lineup at Hong Kong this year was reflected in the festival's awards, which in contrast to 2010 featured only one Chinese title: Old Dog, by Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tsenden, which won the Golden Digital Award. Unfortunately I didn't see Tsenden's film, but I enjoyed his earlier film The Search, which I saw last year in Beijing.

No prizes went to Chinese documentaries this year, although Yu Guangyi's Bachelor Mountain, Xu Tong's Shattered and Cheung King-wai's One Nation, Two Cities were all nominated for the Humanitarian Award for Documentaries. Of these Bachelor Mountain was the strongest, but none came close to the power of last year's winner, Petition. I'll write about Bachelor Mountain and Shattered in future posts. In the the meantime here's the complete list of Hong Kong Film Festival winners from the Hong Kong International Film Festival website.

List of Hong Kong International Film Festival Award Winners

Asian Digital Competition
Golden Digital Award: Old Dog
Silver Digital Award: Eternity
Special Mention: The Sun Beaten Path

Humanitarian Awards for Documentaries
Best Documentary Award: Peace
Outstanding Documentary Award: Pink Saris

Short Film Competition
Grand Prize: Pigs
Jury Prize: Little Children, Big Words
Special Mention: Nowhere Elsewhere
Special Mention: I was a Child of Holocaust Survivor

FIPRESCI Prize
FIPRESCI Prize: Bleak Night
Special Mention: Good Morning to the World

SIGNIS Award
SIGNIS Award: Winter’s Bone
Special Mention: The Human Resources Manager

In other China film news, the Hollywood Reporter noted recently that the People's Republic is still dragging its feet responding to the World Trade Organization ruling in December 2009 that Beijing's restrictions on film imports violate WTO regulations.

The article says: “Two weeks have passed since China promised to tell the World Trade Organization what it’s doing about allowing an agreed upon rise in foreign participation in the distribution of movies at its booming box office and all that’s come out of Beijing is a plea for patience and a complaint about the world trade body.”

The China delegation apparently asked other WTO members “to understand the difficulty and complicated situation China is facing during the process of implementation."

The difficulties and complications no doubt relate to reconciling the desire of the Communist Party to control what Chinese people see while still complying with WTO regulations. It's a real dilemma for China's leaders, who love all the riches a market economic brings (particularly for them and their families), but hate the way it undermines their control of information.

While we're on the subject of commercial film industries, the Hollywood Reporter also revealed a few days ago that The Warring States, yet another dull historical epic from China's studios, is set to be released in the US and Canada on April 22. According to HR, “The film stars Honglei Sun and Francis Ng as Sun Bin and Pang Juan, two students of military strategy who fought for supremacy during China’s Warring States Period, which lasted from 475 to 221 B.C.” Sounds riveting.

More interestingly, the latest offering from the Hong Kong industry is being billed as “the world's first 3D porn film.” The wonderfully titled Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is breathlessly described by the Guardian as “a movie so salacious that Chinese audiences are reportedly flocking from the mainland to more permissive Hong Kong for the chance to see an uncut version.”

Directed by Christopher Sun , the film is apparently “based on the classic Chinese erotic text, The Carnal Prayer Mat, and follows a young man as he befriends a duke and enters a world of royal orgies and other sexual peccadilloes.”

A steamy moment from the world's first 3D porn flick, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy. Just don a spare of coloured specs to get the full effect.

Longer term watchers of Hong Kong movies will remember an earlier version of the tale, also entitled Sex and Zen, released back in 1991 during the industry's heyday, when soft-core “Category III” romps like Erotic Chinese Ghost Story were common fare. Incidentally Erotic Chinese Ghost Story starred Amy Yip, who also appeared in the original Sex and Zen.

The Guardian says producer Stephen Shiu told Hong Kong media that the 3D Sex and Zen would “leave audiences feeling like they are sitting right there at the edge of the bed.”

Oh well, it beats another four hour movie about feudal generals. Sex and Zen is set to open on Hong Kong screens on April 14.

Finally, it's not really film related, but aging rocker Bob Dylan played mainland China for the first time last week, packing them into Beijing's Workers' Gymnasium (just down the road from my recently vacated Beijing apartment) on April 6. I'm sorry I left Beijing a few weeks too early to see the show.

Visiting foreign performers in China are required to submit set lists and lyrics to the authorities before they are issued permits to play, and according to Charles Shaar Murray in a rather simplistic and stupid article in the Guardian, Dylan was specifically barred from playing Blowin' in the Wind and Desolation Row (the final track from his classic 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited).

Dylan plays China and makes New York Times columnist indignant for failing to inspire a revolution.

Dylan has copped a lot of flak from certain quarters for submitting to these rules - including an amusingly hysterical piece from Maureen Dowd in the New York Times - but one of my favourite China commentators James Fallows fired off a riposte on Sunday defending the singer. Interestingly Fallows claims that Dylan did in fact play Desolation Row in Shanghai following the Beijing gig.

Read for yourself and decide – I'm just sorry I missed the show.

Ai Weiwei Detained: “They can’t take different viewpoints”

2011-04-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

Chinese artist, writer and documentary filmmaker Ai Weiwei - detained in Beijing on Sunday while trying to leave for Hong Kong.

It's been a long time since I've posted as I've been in the midst of a move from China back to my home in Australia. Before the big move I spent several weeks traveling around China, including meetings with several filmmakers and a stop at the Hong Kong Film Festival. More on all that in coming posts. Right now here's some news that can't wait.

On Sunday, April 3 prominent artist, filmmaker and outspoken critic of the Chinese government Ai Weiwei “was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong” reports the Washington Post. “Police later raided his studio” according to the same report. It seems eight of Ai's assistants and his wife Lu Qing were detained after the studio raid.

Two days on Ai has still not been heard from. Several foreign governments have called for his release according to the UK Guardian this morning. It's not clear if any of his assistants are still being held. Nothing has been posted on Ai Weiwei's Twitter account since Sunday.

You can view a PBS News Hour clip about the arrest here.

Giving the finger to Tiananmen - Ai Weiwei's Study in Perspective (1995).

Ai Weiwei's detention comes amidst the worst crackdown on activists, writers, lawyers and artists in China for years. Reports regarding the exact number detained in recent months vary, but the China Human Rights Defenders site claims, “The Chinese government has criminally detained a total of 26 individuals, disappeared more than 30, and put more than 200 under soft detention since mid-February after anonymous calls for 'Jasmine Revolution' protests first appeared online.”

The same article features a map - seen below - detailing the names and locations of those in detention. I have also personally heard of one more individual in detention in Yunnan who does not appear to be the CHRD list. Click on the map below to see a larger version.

Last week the Chinese-born Australian writer and blogger Yang Hengjun was arbitrarily detained for several days in Guangzhou, as was widely reported in the Australian press.

Pressure has also increased on those who have not been detained, as I experienced on my recent travels around China. On March 18 I visited Sun Yat-sen University (Zhongshan Daxue) in Guangzhou to interview documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. After meeting Ai on campus, she led me and my translator back to her apartment, but we were intercepted by a plain-clothed security man outside her complex. He was quickly joined by two other men and one woman. They demanded to know the identity of me and my translator, and what we were planning to do in Ai's home.

After a short discussion Ai persuaded them to let me and my translator leave in exchange for her accompanying the plain-clothed personnel to the campus security office (Baowei Chu). My translator and I were followed by other plain-clothed men back to the subway. Over the next hour we managed to shake them in a rather ridiculous game of hide and seek on the underground. At no point did any of the men and one woman involved in the incident identify themselves or offer any form of identification.

Ai Xiaoming later contacted me in Hong Kong via email and stated she suspected her phone was tapped and her email account had been hacked. Our experience shows her apartment is under surveillance, although she claims she was unaware of this until the incident on March 18. Another foreign academic I met in Hong Kong confirmed that she has previously been able to visit Ai's apartment unimpeded.

In Hong Kong another Chinese filmmaker who I'll refrain from naming told us that while he was away from his studio on the mainland, security personnel had visited and informed an assistant that any foreign visitors must henceforth be cleared a month in advance with the local security office. No foreigners are permitted to visit the studio without prior permission.

Clearly the Chinese authorities have been deeply spooked by what has been happening in North Africa and the Middle East, despite the fact that calls for “Jasmine Revolution”-style protests on the mainland have attracted little direct support, as I reported for New Matilda back in February.

These latest developments are deeply concerning and carry serious implications for the country's independent film sector, which for two decades has largely been tolerated, even as “official” TV and cinema content continues to be heavily censored.

Fingers crossed Ai Weiwei and the many others in detention are released soon. If you're unfamiliar with Ai's work and activities, check out this detailed interview that appeared in the March issue of Time Out Hong Kong. In the article Ai pertinently asks:

"How can a government after 60 years in control be unable to take even a small slight? They can’t take opinions. They can’t take different viewpoints. They are going further and further in the opposite direction of democracy.”

The events of recent weeks have only confirmed Ai Weiwei's bleak assessment of China's rulers.

The Camera is a Weapon: Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Ou Ning

2011-03-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

Artist, curator, writer and documentary filmmaker Ou Ning.

In addition to being an artist, curator, writer, and director of the Shao Foundation, China's cultural renaissance man Ou Ning is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. After making the experimental San Yuan Li 2003 with Cao Fei and other members of the U-theque collective in Guangzhou, Ou Ning relocated to China's capital, where he made Meishi St (2006) about the demolition of one of Beijing's oldest areas in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics. Both films are now part of the dGenerate Films catalogue.

In March 2010 I interviewed Ou Ning in Beijing about his filmmaking career for an article I was writing on China's independent documentary sector for RealTime arts magazine in Australia. Only a few select quotes appeared in that piece, but the complete interview contains a wealth of fascinating material not only on Ou's background, but also the rise of China's “digital” documentary generation. Late week dgenerate published the entire interview – you can read the full text below or click here to see it on the dgenerate site complete with clips from Ou Ning's films.

Thanks to Ou Ning for his time and for speaking so openly about some controversial matters. The interview was conducted mostly in English.

Dan Edwards: I believe you started your career as an editor and graphic designer. Can you tell me how you first became involved in filmmaking?
Ou Ning: In 1999 I was commissioned by Emei film studio to design a film magazine. When I got the magazine's content I was very disappointed, as it was all just about movie stars and commercial movies. I advised the publishers to change the magazine, and along with Wu Wenguang I got them some content about independent films. The publishers were very happy and commissioned me as the editor.

At that time there were no real film critics in China. With the magazine we organised screenings in a group that became U-theque. I knew the Hong Kong film director and critic Shu Kei. He had distributed a lot of art films in Hong Kong, and through him I was able to get the license to distribute a lot of films in China. The screenings we organised were very successful and U-theque grew very big.

In 2003 there was the “Zone of Urgency” at the Venice Biennale. The curator Hou Hanru wanted to discuss social problems in Asian cities, and he was particularly interested in “alternative spaces” in Asia. U-theque was a good example of an “alternative space” – a space that is freer than official institutions like museums. U-theque used to use a lot of ordinary spaces for screenings like bars and cafes. So they commissioned U-theque to make San Yuan Li.

Did the U-theque screenings take place in Guangzhou?
Actually U-theque began in Shenzhen. We had so many people we also moved to Guangzhou as well. We had a total of 800 members in both cities.

Is U-theque still active?
No. In 2003 an important historical event happened. After we made San Yuan Li, Nanfang Dushi Bao [Southern Metropolis Daily, a mainland newspaper famous for its investigative reporting] sponsored our retrospective of Jia Zhangke films in 2004. Then the death of the student Sun Zhigang was reported by the Southern Metropolis Daily [Sun was beaten to death while being arbitrarily detained by police in Guangzhou].

So the after that the Guangdong Government really hated the paper. They also hated the film, San Yuan Li. Actually they never saw the film, but San Yuan Li [an area in Guangzhou] had a reputation as one of the worst areas for drug abuse in China. They were afraid our film would publicise that.

Fifteen police broke into my office studio and took all my documents and DVDs. They were trying to prove U-theque was an illegal organisation – and that the Southern Metropolis Daily had supported an illegal organisation. They also wanted to take my computer but I insisted they could not take it.

Then they banned U-theque as an illegal organisation.

How did you come across the subject matter for your next film Meishi Street, and how did you first meet the main character, Zhang Jinli?
They really liked San Yuan Li in Europe. Both Le Monde and Le Figaro reported on it at the Venice Biennale.

In 2005, Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation supported Shrinking Cities, a project looking at shrinking cities like Liverpool and Detroit. This drew my attention to the organisation, and they commissioned me to make a project about Beijing. But I quickly found Beijing was very different to Guangzhou.

Initially I wanted to make a film like San Yuan Li – ie not a traditional documentary film. In San Yuan Li there is no story, it's just like a montage. I wanted to do one about Dashilan [an area in Beijing just south of Tiananmen Square]. All the footage in San Yuan Li was sped up, but in the new film about Beijing I wanted the whole thing very slow. So I shot a lot of footage in Dashilan. I went there for four days every week and interviewed a lot of people, shot every hutong – totally there are more than 100 hutongs in Dashilan, and I shot almost every one. So I had more than 200 hours of footage, shot over one year.

I met Zhang Jinli [the central character in Meishi St] one morning in 2005 – it was summer, very early morning. I got up about 6am and was shooting on Meishi Street. An old person came to me because he saw me with a camera and thought I was a journalist. He came to tell me, “Today something will happen at 179 Meishi Street” – the address of Zhang Jinli's restaurant. As a documentary filmmaker, every day I was looking for a story. He told me something would happen at 9am, so I organised all my team and we went there.

At 9am Zhang Jinli hung his banners for the first time outside his restaurant and handed out flyers. When he saw me with my camera he got so excited – he thought, “Oh good, a journalist has come!”

I talked with him – that was the first time I met him. After that every time I went to Dashilan I would talk with him, and I found he was a really interesting man – a very smart guy. So I had a new idea. I decided to give a camera to him, teach him how to use it and ask him to document his protest and his daily life.

Zhang Jinli's character is very good – he's very interesting and humorous. Because he was trying to protect his property I realised this was a very urgent story. So I wanted to make a film about his story first, and after that I would continue with my other project. So that's how Meishi Street came about.

How long after you met Zhang Jinli did you decide to give him a camera and ask him to document his own story?
After I met him, it was one month later I gave the camera to him.

Was he keen, or did you have to persuade him?
Actually he is very open to new things. When I told him, “I am going to give the camera to you,” he was very happy. The first day he just took the camera and shot some of his friends in the park.

That scene is in the film...
Yeah, that's right. He felt very excited – the most exciting thing for him was one time he hung the banners on the roof of his house. The police came to take down the banners. When he put the camera on the police, the police were very afraid of the camera. That made Zhang Jinli realise that actually the camera is a weapon for him. Then he was more motivated to shoot more footage.

A resident of Dashilan discusses the area's demolition in Ou Ning's Meishi Street.

I noticed in a lot of the footage in the film, Zhang is filming the police, but the police have cameras too.
Yeah, it's very interesting. You can say that digital technology has had a great impact on Chinese political society. You can see at the end of the film during the demolition process, there are so many cameras on the scene. That means that there are some cameras from the police station, some from our team, some from NGO organisations. The digital technology has brought some opportunity to the people to document history by themselves. This is a great change in China. Before that, history only had one version, by the Chinese Communist Party, but now with digital technology history has different versions. History has a Zhang Jinli version, a Security Bureau version... there's a lot of different versions, not just one version. That is a great progress in the political situation in China.

In terms of the final film, how much time did you actually spend on the street shooting Zhang's story, and how much of the film did Zhang Jinli shoot himself? Did he shoot most of the footage that we see in the film?
Two-thirds is Zhang's, one-third our team. In total he provided me with about 70 hours of footage. The last scene of the demolition is mainly by us, because Zhang is in the action, on screen.

And was Zhang involved in putting the film together during the editing process?
No, he just provided footage. That is why the film is directed by myself. Actually at that time Zhang Jinli didn't have the opportunity to tell a story. The original idea was to give a camera to him and teach him to edit. That would be a more complete idea – just like Wu Wenguang did with his village project. He gave a camera to villagers and taught them to edit.

But Zhang Jinli, after this, bought a camera himself, opened a blog and he's become very interested in digital technology and using all the different kinds of media to document his daily life. He is still in the process of trying to get his compensation. He now lives in his sister's house. Before the Olympics the district government said they'd give him a house close to where he used to live as compensation, but after the Olympics when he went back to talk to them they ignored him.

So it sounds like it was quite an empowering experience for him, in terms of telling his own story and producing his own media?
Yeah, he is so smart. Every two or three days, or at least once a week, we would meet and he would provide his new footage. After one month I found he was not only shooting but also speaking – narrating. Like a journalist. So in Meishi Street we can see him becoming educated as a citizen journalist. We can see him acting just like a journalist, interviewing people.

Did you ever go back to your original project about Beijing?
After Meishi Street, I had so many new projects so I haven't had time to do it.

That footage would already be very valuable – big parts of that area have been destroyed and rebuilt in the past few years.
Yeah, after Meishi Street was rebuilt in 2007 I often went back there to get new footage. So my footage covers the whole process of change in that area – it's totally different now. I really want to finish this project, but I don't know how to find the time...

Demolition around Dashilan in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics. This is one of the oldest areas of Beijing, lying just south of Tiananmen Square.

Both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street are very collaborative projects, with multiple people contributing to the filmmaking process. Do you feel this an important aspect of your approach to filmmaking?
Yes. This is a new way of making films – you know most of the Chinese documentary filmmakers often work individually, in one-man teams. But because when I started making films I was running the U-theque organisation I developed a co-operative idea from that orgnisation. For each project we had a list of four or five people who were in charge of the camera. So we shot a lot of footage, and then every week we would have a meeting to discuss what to do next. From Monday to Friday we would be shooting in the city. Then Saturday or Sunday we would sit down, have a meeting to preview and discuss all the footage, then decide how to shoot the following week. So we had so many meetings when making the film.

Was this for both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street?
Yes, both.

Are other people from U-theque still involved in filmmaking?
Of course! There's quite a lot. Huang Weikai [Disorder, 2009, also in the dGenerate catalogue] participated in both San Yuan Li and Meishi Street. He was my main cameraman. So far he has made three documentaries by himself. Also Fu Xinhua, another member of U-theque, has made two more films about urban villages in Guangzhou.

In earlier periods of the People’s Republic, filmmakers only came through the film schools and other specific training institutions, so groups like U-theque and the idea of people training themselves is a big change.
Yeah, there are two things that made this change. First was pirate DVDs. People educated themselves. They didn't need to go to Beijing Film Academy – they saw a lot of films through pirate DVDs, which gave a very rich film history. When they had seen this history they wanted to make things themselves, and they found there were very cheap cameras that had come out. I mean everyone can buy a camera and start filmmaking. We can also say pirate DVDs are part of digital technology. This technology has had a great impact on filmmaking in China.

When did that change start to happen here?
I think it was in the 1990s people started seeing DVDs. It was after that – after the turn of the millennium – they started making films. I wrote an article about this for a Belgian art festival – how DVDs and digital cameras changed filmmaking in China and the whole political situation.

Many of China's independent documentary filmmakers seem to come from fine arts backgrounds. I'm thinking about people like yourself and Cao Fei, Ai Weiwei and Zhang Dali. Others like Zhao Dayong and Hu Jie started as painters before moving into filmmaking. Why do you think so many visual artists in China are attracted to documentary filmmaking?
I think today you must know that documentary is the most powerful medium to show your concept of Chinese society. For example Ai Xiaoming was the first intellectual to use documentary film to talk about very sensitive events in China. She made a film about Sun Zhigang, the young man killed by the Guangzhou police. She also made a film about an AIDS village in Henan. Documentary film is the powerful medium for people to get involved in politics. Ai Xiaoming was the first one to do that, and then Ai Weiwei has also done that.

I think today's contemporary art is very commercial in a very commercial system. Some artists have changed to making documentaries because they are concerned about Chinese society and Chinese reality. It's a more direct way to express themselves, because a lot of artists care about society and they have found contemporary art has lost its critical power.

Ai Weiwei discovered this. He has produced four documentaries, and then he mails the DVDs to a lot of different people for free. Anyone can send their address to him and he'll mail it to them. He has distributed more than 15,000 copies of his films this way.

Earlier you talked about the problems U-theque had, and how much the authorities didn't like San Yuan Li. Have you ever suffered any other interference from the authorities in your filmmaking activities? Did you have any problems when you were shooting Meishi Street for example?
When I was shooting San Yuan Li the government didn't know – I just had to deal with the people in the village. So there was no trouble in making the film. And in Beijing, because Dashilan – where Meishi Street is – is a tourist area, there were so many tourists every day with cameras the street office and local government could not recognise who was a tourist and who was a documentary filmmaker, so there was no problem [laughs].

Do independent documentary filmmakers in China generally regard themselves as a community, or do they tend to work in isolation? Do you have much communication with other filmmakers?
Yeah. There is a community in China. At the very beginning it was maybe a filmmakers community, but now because Ai Weiwei and Ai Xiaoming use documentary films to get involved in citizen's political movements, some activists have joined in. The Chinese activists also gather on Twitter. They have a big community, because Ai Weiwei is like a leader – a godfather. When he makes a documentary film, he sends a DVD to everyone and it becomes very well known in the activist scene. So the community is getting wider and bigger – it's gone beyond the filmmakers. Chinese activists discuss politics on Twitter every day – and discuss everything that happens in China.

Are you currently working any other film projects?
[Sighs] Even though I work as a curator and the director of the Shao Foundation, the thing I most like to do is to be an artist – a creator. I really want to go back and make a film. When you work as a curator you have to handle a lot of administration. I hate that! [laughs]

I made a film about Guangzhou, and one about Beijing, so I'd like to make a film about Shanghai. There's a worker community in Shanghai built in the 1950s, also located in the center of the city. A lot of migrants have now moved in – it's the same kind of community as Dashilan and San Yuan Li. I planned to do this project after the Beijing project – I planned it in 2006, but I haven't had time to do it [laughs].

Zhao Liang's "Together" Featured on China Radio International

2011-02-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I noted Zhao Liang's documentary on HIV in China, Together, screened recently at the Berlin International Film Festival. I'm pleased to say that as a result the film is getting some coverage here in China. On Wednesday China Radio International interviewed me about the film for a brief segment which also includes an interview with Zhao himself.

You can listen the radio segment here, although unfortunately the audio files used by CRI only seem to work on PCs. If any Mac users are interested and really can't access a PC, please leave a comment and I'll email you a Mac-friendly file.

You can read my article on Together from the Beijinger magazine here.

Who's Using Who? Zhou Hao's Hall of Mirrors

2011-02-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of 2010 I was able to catch two documentaries by Guangzhou-based filmmaker Zhou Hao at Beijing's Ullen's Center for Contemporary Art. Both Using and The Transition period were fascinating peeks into rarely seen sections of Chinese society. dgenerate Films distribute Using in the US, and they recently published an essay by me on Zhou's work. You can read the complete text below or go to the dgenerate site to see the article with video excerpts from Using.

Who's Using Who? Zhou Hao's Hall of Mirrors

Ah Jun (left) and Ah Long in Zhou Hao's Using.

Southern Metropolis Daily has a proud reputation as one of the very few newspapers in mainland China with real teeth, so it's perhaps not surprising the paper's ranks have also produced such sharp-eyed documentarian as Zhou Hao. Zhou's stories focus on minor, charismatic players in contemporary Chinese society, honing in on small stories to make broader points about various social milieux, from the world of heroin addition in Using (2008) to small town politics in The Transition Period (2009). More intriguingly, Zhou's films also highlight the uncertain, often fraught relationship between documentary makers and their subjects.

Using

Using opens among a group of emaciated junkies living under a highway overpass, a concrete island home in a sea of traffic. The casual presence of death is immediately apparent as we see Ah Long, a man in his 30s, chatting on the phone with a family member of an ailing addict. “He won't last long,” Ah Long states bluntly. “I'm saying you should come to see him... You can come and have a last look...”

Drug addiction is not an issue that gets much coverage in the Chinese media, and it's hard to know how widespread the problem is in China. Using delves into this murky world in the southern city of Guangzhou, tracing the friendship between Zhou Hao and a heroin addict named Ah Long over the course of several years.

After the opening sequence, we follow Ah Long and others back to a derelict structure beside a railway track. The uneasy, distrustful camaraderie among the drug users is immediately familiar to anyone who has encountered heroin addicts in reality, or seen their zoned out expressions on screen before. In fact, one of the striking aspects of Using is the way it shows heroin to be a cultural leveler, creating subcultures of users who always tell the same lies to themselves and those around them, to feed a habit they know will destroy them. The language of addiction, it seems, is the same in any culture.

In this sense, Using adds little to previous films about the culture surrounding heroin, apart from revealing its existence in present-day China. The film's emotional nexus, however, lies elsewhere, in the knotty relationship between filmmaker Zhou Hao on the one hand, and Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun on the other. The on-again off-again nature of their “friendship” is established straight after the film's introductory sequence, when inter-titles tell us police cleared out the derelict building shortly after Zhou Hao filmed there. Ah Long disappears for six months and Zhou Hao gives up hope of ever seeing him again – until Ah Long calls out of the blue and they are reunited over a meal.

It's a pattern repeated throughout the film, as Ah Long disappears time and again only to call Zhou Hao a few months later and tell the director he is “his one true friend” – before asking for money. After one prolonged disappearance the director finds Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun living in a room shared with a puppy. Ah Jun asks the filmmaker for RMB 500, and he grudgingly hands over 200, saying firmly “This is all I have.” The couple laugh, as Ah Long comments, “I told her you'd only have 200 yuan... I said there's no way you would bring 500 yuan here.”

It's clear the filmmaker is being played for cash, but Zhou Hao is no fool – and neither is Ah Long. At one point Ah accuses the director of feeding his habit so that Zhou can coolly observe the results through his lens. But just as Zhou is repeatedly drawn back into Ah Long's orbit by his fascination with the junky's world, Ah Long clearly enjoys the attention and validity the camera lends his otherwise rather squalid existence. As this web of interdependence grows increasingly tangled, it becomes less and less clear who is “using” who.

Towards the end of the film Ah Long's girlfriend, Ah Jun, tells the filmmaker that many of the most dramatic scenes we've witnessed – including Ah Long coughing up blood after he's supposedly swallowed razor blades – were simply staged to extract money. “You never thought his acting was just a little too good?” she asks pointedly. And it's true – Ah Long is quite a performer. And like all actors he seeks out an audience, just as director Zhou Hao wants to be on hand to capture his best moments.

It's this blurring of truth and lies, calculated drama and a very real addiction, that makes Using such an emotionally discomforting experience. Like the filmmaker, we want to switch off but we just can't look away.

Inevitably Ah Long's addiction leads him to a grim dead end, and takes him places Zhou Hao's camera can't follow. After narrating the final stages of the addict's downward spiral, Zhou Hao leaves us with a final flashback that perfectly captures the uncertain boundaries that have framed his friendship with Ah Long throughout the film. As the addict edges along a dangerously high wall beside a railway track, he looks down at Zhou filming from the safety of ground level. “I could jump down,” he says jokingly. “You'd get your perfect shot.”

With a final wave, Ah Long climbs down onto a side road and leaves Zhou Hao filming from the far side of the wall. As he disappears into the distance we're left to ponder – have we been observers of his fate, or accomplices to his decline?

The Transition Period

A quite different, though also quietly reflexive film, The Transition Period follows a county-level party secretary during his last months in office. From the opening scenes we get a sense of the way personal relations stand in for institutional procedures and structures in China, as the party secretary personally meets with peasants whose homes have been forcibly demolished, dolling out ad hoc compensation in response to their complaints. Later we see local business luminaries visiting the secretary’s office and coyly ask for favours while inviting him to dinner.

The secretary's domain is in Henan, a land-locked province in central China where the economy lags far behind the coastal regions. Although the area has a county chief, as at all levels of government in China, it’s the party secretary who holds real power.

As well as the cronyism that infects China's corridors of power, The Transition Period lays bare the repressive dynamics of the nation's top-down power structures, as the central character informs a meeting of township-level party secretaries that if anything “happens” on their patch, they will take the blame.

It's this vague yet pervasive emphasis on “stability,” combined with a weak system of law, that leads to some of the worst abuses by authorities in China. Low-level cadres tend to follow a deeply-instilled instinct to suppress any sign of social disturbance, lest it reflect badly on their superiors and undermine their own career prospects. The lack of legal means by which citizens can resolve conflicts means ordinary people and the authorities are in a constant dance of negotiation, appeasement and repression, that puts as much strain on cadres as it does ordinary citizens.

One protracted sequence illustrates how these dynamics play out on the ground, as the party secretary's car is surrounded by an angry mob of builders who have not been paid by a private contractor working on a government job. Despite the crowd's fury, the secretary skillfully defuses the situation by agreeing to see a small delegation of workers at the local government office.

The representatives are brought to a meeting room where they are greatly outnumbered by officials and silenced by the intimidation of their surrounds. The secretary berates them for causing a disturbance and promises severe repercussions if they instigate another protest. At the same time he promises to obtain their wages, which he does later in the film by threatening the contractor.

Although the episode reveals the unrelenting pressure placed on officials by China's haphazard system of administration, it also underscores why China’s political system is so resistant to reform. Any meaningful strengthening of institutional procedures would require a separation of powers, threatening the very basis of the immense arbitrary power wielded by local cadres.

In a disturbing indication of the extent to which this power is taken for granted, the party secretary quite deliberately flaunts his influence and privileges for Zhou's camera. We see him planning his own succession in cahoots with other officials, openly making a mockery of Beijing's talk of “intra-Party democracy.” Only when the discussion moves on to the exchange of large sums of money does he casually ask Zhou to turn off his camera.

Although such scenes indicate serious corruption is rampant, other abuses of power seen in the film are simply puerile. Like most officials in China, a considerable slice of the party secretary's working life seemingly comprises publicly-funded banquets fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. On one occasion he celebrates the birthday of a local Western businessman by becoming utterly inebriated and happily smearing the businessman's face, as well as his own, with cake.

Another stiff meeting with a visiting Taiwanese business delegation is followed by an inevitable drinking session, in which one of the Taiwanese drunkenly slurs down the camera, “Business and government want the same thing. First: POWER! Second: MONEY! They sound almost the same in Chinese – the two are indivisible!” The speech neatly sums up the twin drivers of China's particularly avaricious system of state-controlled capitalism.

Complicity with the Camera

The most disquieting aspect of Zhou's cinema is not so much what he shows us – though this is often disturbing enough – but his subject's willingness to act as they do for his camera. Far from being a fly-on-the-wall observer, Zhou deploys his lens as a kind of proxy audience, encouraging his subjects to play heightened versions of themselves for the screen. The characteristics his subjects chose to reveal speak reams about the particular social worlds they inhabit, from the petty abuses of power infusing the political realm of The Transition Period, to the insecurities and escapist desires underlying addiction in Using.

Even as the camera's gaze lays bear the contours of these characters' worlds, it calls into question our own complicity as consumers of their on-screen behavior. For all their willingness to perform for the camera, these are not actors – they are real people, whose actions have real consequences for the world around them. We may find their actions amusing, titillating or even abhorrent, but their eagerness to act as they do never lets us forget that we tolerate a world that makes these scenes possible.

News Bites: Chinese Films in Europe & Speculation on the Loosening of Foreign Film Imports

2011-02-21T06:35:00.000-08:00

Screening China's regular wrap up of Chinese film related news from around the web.

As noted in my last post, Zhao Liang’s latest documentary Together was programmed for the Berlin International Film Festival this year. According to a report in Chinese newspaper Global Times on Friday, February 18, the film won “a rapturous reception” at the festival, and “moved many in the audience to tears.”

Behind the scenes, the Hollywood Reporter noted from Berlin that Well Go USA has “picked up the North American rights to Jackie Chan's latest film, the historical epic 1911.”

The report claims the company is planning to simultaneously release Chan’s film – his 100th movie – in China and the US. Apparently, “1911 tells of the founding of the Republic of China when nationalist forces led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing Dynasty.”

Jackie Chan, set to celebrate his 100th movie by making another nationalistic historical epic.

Great, another nationalistic historical epic. I can’t wait.

Chan co-directed the film with Zhang Li – I’m not sure if this is the same Zhang Li who was the cinematographer on John Woo’s Red Cliff films.

Hollywood Reporter also noted Wong Kai-wai was in the German capital, hawking his yet-to-be completed biopic of Ip Man, the martial arts legend who taught Bruce Lee his moves. This is a tad strange, since the film Ip Man did exactly the same thing in 2008.

Wong Kar-wai's film is entitled Grandmasters, and stars Wong regular Tony Leung, as well as Zhang Ziyi (working with Wong a second time after her leading role in 2046) and Chang Chen.

The glamorous Zhang Ziyi in Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (2004).

While we’re on the subject of European film festivals, dgenerate Films carried a report last week from the recent Rotterdam Film Festival (which ran January 26-Feburary 6) by critic and curator Shelley Kraicer. Several Chinese works screened at the festival, including Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation, Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, Li Ruijun’s Old Donkey, Zhang Meng’s The Piano in a Factory, Li Ning’s Tape, and Zhang Miaoyan’s Black Blood (which premiered at the festival).

Shelley described Black Blood as “a brooding blood-transfusion AIDs drama whose gloomy predictability was vitiated by its strikingly monumentalist-minimalist photography.” I’m curious to see it, if only to find out what monumentalist-minimalist photography looks like.

Also at Rotterdam was Xu Tong’s documentary Fortune Teller. Xu was on hand along with one of the subjects of his film, sex worker Tang Xiaoyan. According to Shelley, Xu Tong’s yet-to-be-seen new film Shattered “will take up her story and introduce us to her father, Old Tang.” Shattered will reportedly premiere at next month’s Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Xu Tong, Shelley Kraicer and Tang Xiao Yang at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Image by Xu Tong from www.dgeneratefilms.com

Incidentally, the program for the Hong Kong festival will be announced this Thursday, February 24 and tickets will go on sale on Saturday, February 26. Keep an eye on their site for details.

Back in mainland China, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported last week that “a female official with China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television [SARFT] faces prosecution for allegedly taking bribes worth 40,000 yuan (6,068 U.S. dollars).” The report states “Yang allegedly favored two TV stations in issuing permits for TV programs to be viewed online in 2007.”

SARFT is the body charged with regulating China’s film, television and radio industries, a duty which includes ensuring no “inappropriate” content is broadcast or released on the nation’s cinema screens.

SARFT was also in the news last week for issuing a circular instructing film and TV producers to cut down on smoking scenes in local dramas. If only they could similarly influence smoking in reality.

State-owned newspaper China Daily speculated last week that the number of foreign films allowed to be released in Chinese cinemas may rise from the 20 titles currently permitted, in response to the World Trade Organization ruling last year that China’s restrictions on audio-visual imports violated WTO regulations.

The article was purely speculative however, and Beijing based IP lawyer Stan Abrams, writing on his blog China Hearsay, expressed doubt about the report. He writes:

“As I’ve written about several times before, the WTO case said that China must open up A/V imports and distribution to foreign enterprises as it promised in the WTO Accession Protocol over a decade ago. That’s it. Nothing about censorship, nothing about quotas.”

The Shanghaiist argued that the rash of foreign releases in the first months of this year indicates that the quota may be lifted, or else there will be a drought of foreign movies later in the year.

A more likely explanation, however, is that the authorities are deliberately burning through a series of Hollywood blockbuster titles in order to make way later in the year for Founding of the Party, another love letter from the Communist Party to itself in the vein of 2009’s Founding of a Republic. It’s standard practice for screens to be cleared of serious competition when these state-backed blockbusters are released.

The new epic from China’s state-owned studios is being made commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in the middle of this year.

News Bites: Changes Afoot for Screening China & Zhao Liang's Together Selected for Berlin

2011-02-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

Xin nian kuai le – or happy new year! Just got back from a week in China's far west visiting my wife's hometown for the festival of fireworks, food and crappy television galas that is Chunjie, or Chinese New Year. And with the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit some changes are afoot for Screening China.

First up is the news that I'll be relocating from my current home of Beijing to the clearer skies of Melbourne, Australia in late March, where I'll be taking up a doctorate at Monash University. The good news is I'll be researching in the area of Chinese film and working towards a planned book. I'll also be regularly in and out of China over the next couple of years visiting family and friends, and carrying out further research for the project.

Screening China will definitely still be going – in fact I'm hoping to be able to post more often in 20111. Rather than focusing exclusively on the longer form essays and reviews I've been featuring throughout 2010, readers can expect more short posts collating the latest Chinese film news from around the web. That doesn't mean the longer posts will stop – they'll just be interspersed with more bite-sized news bites.

In that vein I noticed today that Zhao Liang's new documentary Together – which I wrote about here – has been selected for this year's Berlin International Film Festival. The film is screening several times between February 14-19. Readers who happen to be in Germany for the festival can see the times here.

As far as I know Together is the first of Zhao's films to be selected for Berlin, which is ironic given that it's far from his strongest film. Nevertheless it's great exposure for one of China's most important contemporary documentary makers.

The only other mainland movies screening at Berlin this year are Zhang Yimou's Under the Hawthorn Tree and Chen Kaige's Sacrifice – rather uninspired and conservative choices from two directors well past their prime. Hong Kong's Dante Lam also has a film in the program called The Stool Pigeon.

For Beijing-based readers, Zhao Liang will be appearing this Saturday (February 12) for a Q&A after a 5pm screening of Together at Beijing's BC MOMA cinema. The film will screen with English subtitles. Director Gu Changwei will also be on hand, as Together is partly a “making of” documentary about Gu's up-coming feature Life is a Miracle.

In other festival news, the full program of this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival will be announced on February 24, and tickets will go on sale on February 26. The festival runs from March 20 to April 5. Keep an eye on the festival site for further details.

Let the Bullets Fly Takes China’s Domestic Box Office Crown

2011-01-26T05:23:00.000-08:00

The dirty three: Ge You, Chow Yun-Fat and Jiang Wen star in Jiang's new "Eastern Western" Let the Bullets Fly.

A quick news bite and reason to celebrate – Jiang Wen’s visually stunning Leone-influenced “Eastern Western” Let the Bullets Fly recently became China’s biggest domestically-produced box office hit according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The report states: “On Sunday, Jan. 16, Bullets had sold tickets worth 641,740,000 yuan (US$ 97,428,990) Beijing-based EntGroup said, citing data it collects from theaters with computerized ticketing systems – a pool made up of about 97% of China's roughly 2,000 theaters.”

Jiang has a string of acclaimed directorial credits under his belt, including Devils on the Doorstep (2000) and his 1994 masterpiece In the Heat of the Sun. In the West he's probably better known for his acting roles, which include the male lead opposite a young Gong Li in Zhang Yimou's debut Red Sorghum (1987), and the ex-convict lead in Xie Fei's remarkable portrait of Beijing street life, Black Snow (1990).

Let the Bullets Fly sees Jiang well and truly in form, playing the central role as well as directing. It’s great to see such an original and visually inventive film knocking previous record holders Aftershock and Founding of a Republic off the top box office perch. It’s also been interesting to observe just how little attention this film has received in the Chinese state media compared to the wall-to-wall coverage afforded the aforementioned party-backed blockbusters.

While Founding was open CCP propaganda, and Aftershock neatly expurgated any aspects of the Tangshan earthquake disaster that might cast the party in a negative light, Bullets culminates in a none-too-subtle uprising against a decadent and corrupt town leadership dominated by a godfather-like crime boss – hardly a comforting message for a government riven with graft and corruption.

It’s also notable that the version of Bullets showing in China has not been subtitled in English – unlike Aftershock and Founding of a Republic. Unfortunately, that makes the film’s rapid-fire dialogue impossible to follow for a bad Chinese speaker like myself, but that didn’t stop me reveling in the sheer visual exuberance of it all when I caught the film in a Beijing theatre earlier this week. Playing beside Jiang in the quick-shooting shades-wearing outlaw lead role are Chow Yun-Fat as the local crime boss and Ge You as Jiang's somewhat reluctant partner.

Effortless cool - Jiang Wen in Let the Bullets Fly.

Bullets isn’t quite on par with In the Heat of the Sun, but it’s far and away the most entertaining and inventive mainland commercial movie I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t wait to see a subtitled version so I can get all the plot nuances!

Despite its popularity, Bullets may not hold China’s top domestic box office spot for long. Part of the reason for China's box office record being constantly broken in recent years is an ongoing massive expansion in the country’s cinema sector. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “China's box office rose 64% in 2010 to hit US $1.47 billion and a surge in wealth and theater building has made the territory the biggest outside the U.S. for four Hollywood blockbusters in the last 14 months.”

Another self congratulatory state-backed blockbuster entitled Founding of the Party is in the works, so the powers-that-be will no doubt be working to hard to ensure it takes to crown with the usual tactics – a release in a peak holiday season and the removal of all competition from the nation’s screens.

Markets economies are great when you control all the markets.

Gun play - a tense moment in Let the Bullets Fly.

2010: Chinese Cinema in Review

2011-01-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

Documentary maker Ai Xiaoming filming in the studio of painter Yan Zhengxue in Beijing, September 2008. Image Dan Edwards.

While 2010 is rapidly receding into the past, earlier this week dGenerate Films paused for a moment to look back over the past year with a compilation of comments and “best of” lists from a range of filmmakers, critics and academics. Although I was on holiday in Australia when they were compiling contributions, I managed to knock together a quick entry comprising titles, moments and events that sprung to mind when I thought about the past twelve months. It's been a busy year!

Other contributors include the dGenerate team, academic Michael Berry, Beijing-based festival programmer Shelley Kraicer, and filmmakers Xu Tong, Hu Jie and Huang Weikai. My effort is reproduced below – you can click here for the complete entry on the dGenerate Films site.

2010 Year in Review
2010 left a stream of images seared on my mind, from the bloodied body parts of a petitioner mowed down by a train in Zhao Liang’s Petition, to the melancholic countenance of the poetry writing cop in Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, to the parade of aging Shanghai faces in Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew. Some of these images entertained. Many horrified. But whatever their nature, they all served to expand our understanding of that thrilling, maddening and sometimes frightening space that is contemporary China.

Zhao Dayong's The High Life.

For me the aforementioned titles represented the year’s viewing highlights. But as any student of Chinese cinema knows, the real struggle for local filmmakers since the late 1970s has not been so much getting films made as getting work screened. Despite the ongoing inanities of China’s censorship regime, 2010 was a relatively good year for Beijing in terms of the visibility of more challenging filmic content.

After opening in late 2009, Beijing’s Broadway Cinematheque MOMA kicked off 2010 with a comprehensive retrospective of Third Generation director Xie Jin, and maintained a strong program all year. Despite grappling with the same restrictions faced by every “official” cinema in China, it’s a testament to the work of programmer Wu Jing that BC MOMA has consistently pulled large crowds to an eclectic roster that has included everything from rarely seen classics like Xie Fei’s Black Snow, to unsettling contemporary works like Liu Jie’s Judge and Yang Rui's experimental feature Crossing the Mountain.

The futuristic surrounds of BC MOMA, Beijing's one and only arthouse cinema.

2010 was also the year that saw the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), in Beijing’s 798 art zone, establish itself as a serious screening venue, hosting controversial works like Zhao Hou’s Using, Xu Tong’s Fortune Teller and Zhao Dayong’s The High Life. Put simply, UCCA made works available to local audiences that are very difficult to access elsewhere in Beijing – and often pulled near capacity crowds in the process.

Personally, though, the real highlights of 2010 for me came in a series of face-to-face interviews I was able to conduct with some of the Chinese directors I admire most.

Early in the year I was able to chat with Nanjing filmmaker Hu Jie (In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul, Though I Am Gone) by phone – only to have our call interrupted by police monitoring his line. Mid-year I was privileged to spend an afternoon observing Hu Jie’s friend, the activist academic and documentary maker Ai Xiaoming, as she interviewed painter Yan Zhengxue about the three years he had recently spent in jail as a result of his advocacy work with local farmers.

The year ended with an extended interview with Zhao Liang in his studio on the outskirts of the capital, reflecting on his 10 years of innovative documentary making amongst some of China’s most marginalised groups.

The quiet determination of these men and women to tell their stories, despite severely restricted domestic screening opportunities, constant hassles and occasional personal dangers, left a profound impression. For me, their films do what cinema does best – open our eyes to new worlds that would otherwise remain invisible. More importantly, these directors are key players in the ongoing struggle to make China a more open, reflexive and creative place, working for little to no personal gain and frequently enduring restrictions on their own lives to make the films they believe in. Veteran Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan summed up the attitude of much of China’s filmmaking community before a full house at BC MOMA in December: “I don’t know when we will see change, but our voice cannot be beaten.”

Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan spoke out against the restrictions on Chinese filmmaking when he appeared at Beijing's BC MOMA cinema in December 2010. Image Dan Edwards.

Fear, Loathing and HIV: Zhao Liang's Together

2011-01-19T06:53:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good Christmas break. I'm back in Beijing after a glorious couple of weeks back home in Australia. It was a warm 28 degrees when I left Sydney (that's Celsius for US readers - or 82 degrees Fahrenheit) and -11 when I touched down in Beijing (12 degrees Fahrenheit). All the more reason to stay inside watching films I suppose!

Towards the end of last year I published a short email exchange I had with documentary maker Zhao Liang about his new film Together. That exchange was background for an article I was writing for the January issue of the The Beijinger magazine, which came out while I was away. Readers in Beijing can pick up a copy from many cafes, galleries and bookshops around town – for everyone else I've reproduced the article below.

I was also pleased to hear Zhao's earlier films Crime and Punishment (reviewed here) and Petition (reviewed here) are currently enjoying a short season at New York's Anthology Film Archives. These are two of the most powerful documentaries to come out of China in recent years, so it's great to see them getting greater exposure in the US. You can read coverage of the rave reviews the films have received in the New York press on the dGenerate Films website.

Read on for my article on Zhao's latest work, Together.

Fear, Loathing and HIV: Zhao Liang's Together

He Zetao (left), the HIV+ child in Zhao Liang' new documentary Together.

“The most important thing is that this film gives hope to other people,” says Zhao Liang of his new documentary Together – but it's a hope balanced by the unflinching critical eye for which Zhao is famous. The end credits, for example, tell us there are an estimated 740,000 HIV sufferers in China. Of these, around 400,000 are possibly unaware of their condition.

It's this vast vacuum of public knowledge that Zhao, one of China's leading contemporary documentary filmmakers, is looking to fill with Together. And it's not just the audience he wants to inform. “Before the shoot I had no knowledge at all of HIV,” Zhao admits. “I gradually learned through preparing and shooting the film.”

Together was conceived by veteran director Gu Changwei (And the Spring Comes, Peacock) as a companion piece to his new feature Life is a Miracle, described by Zhao as “A film about the nature of people in the face of disaster.” The characters in Gu's drama suffer from a strange disease referred to only as “the fever,” an appropriate metaphor for a condition that for many in China remains shrouded in mystery.

Several HIV+ volunteers worked with Gu on his shoot, including a young child called Hu Zetao, who plays one of the film's central characters. Zhao Liang's documentary captures the shifting relationships between the HIV+ volunteers and the rest of the cast and crew, which includes stars like Zhang Ziyi.

Initially ignorance among the crew is high – when informed that the lighting stand-in has the virus, one extra is so terrified that he cannot even bear to look at him. “Actually Chinese people are a very tolerant,” Zhao comments. “But discrimination exists because people lack knowledge and mainstream media stigmatizes the disease.”

If Together illustrates Zhao's point by showing us the prejudices HIV carriers suffer, his documentary also highlights the positive effects of education. Through a series of information sessions in which the cast and crew talk with medical experts about their concerns, and the sense of community fostered by the pressures of film production, close bonds gradually develop between the HIV+ volunteers and the others on set. When the lighting stand-in is forced to leave the shoot due to his deteriorating condition, his tearful farewell makes clear he is no longer a faceless “HIV carrier,” but a friend whose emotional and physical pain the crew share.

The broader social context of HIV is also traced in Together, as Zhao Liang delves into online chat rooms set up by HIV sufferers. Zhao's conversations play out as text scrolling across the screen in real time, as if we are sitting with the filmmaker in front of his computer. This stripped back approach makes the pain woven into the simple lines on screen all the more heartbreaking.

Although these scenes make clear the fear and discrimination endured by HIV+ people, the very act of reaching out to them and putting their stories on screen is small step towards lifting the veil of ignorance around the disease. The fact that Together is showing in local cinemas is also a step in the right direction, since this is the first of Zhao's films to have an official release in mainland China.

Zhao's last documentary, Petition, was a shocking portrait of the life of petitioners living on the outskirts of China's capital. The film, which debuted at Cannes in 2009 and earned Zhao the Humanitarian Award for Documentaries at the 2010 Hong Kong International Film Festival, has rarely been seen on China's mainland.

When asked if working within the system on Together necessitated any changes in his approach, Zhao replies cautiously, “This film was really different to my old films. Because this was a not-for-profit movie, I needed consider a lot of social factors. But to me, if the film has social value then it's worth making.”

If that makes Together sound like a dry public education advertisement, fear not. Although there are moments when Zhao's gritty style clashes with the more mainstream-friendly touches, Together offers a thoughtful, highly emotional look into one of China's most pressing social concerns. By bringing us face to face with HIV sufferers, Zhao makes it clear that the virus is not just the concern of a marginalized subculture – it's a disease that effects every one of us.

Zhao Liang's Together is screening at Beijing's BC MOMA cinema throughout January. Gu Changwei's Life is a Miracle is scheduled for release in March-April.

This article originally apepeared in The Beijinger magazine, January 2011, page 50.

"Documentary is My Lifelong Career” – an interview with Zhang Tianhui

2010-12-29T00:16:00.000-08:00

This will be my last post for a couple of weeks as I'm off to Australia for a well-earned break. There are some changes afoot for 2011 which I'm hoping will give me more time to devote to Screening China. Until then – happy holidays!

But before I go...

Back in October I was lucky enough to catch a pair of documentaries by Zhang Tianhui at the Get It Louder Festival in Beijing. Both 7th Medical Ward and Farewell, Beijing (poster above) revealed Zhang's talent for sympathetically sketching his subjects while gently revealing their all-to-human failings. You can read my reviews of the films here.

After the screenings in Beijing, Zhang headed south to film the Asian Games in Guangzhou, so I was unable to interview him in person. He kindly took the time, however, to answer a few questions about his filmmaking via email – a translation of our interaction is below.

Two of Zhang's answers stood out for me. The first was his citing of Federico Fellini, Emir Nemanja Kusturica and Hou Hsiao-Hsien as key directorial influences. I was surprised he chose three directors so closely identified with dramatic feature films, while naming only two specific documentaries he felt had had an impact on his own work.

On reflection, however, his choice of Fellini and Kusturica makes sense – both filmmakers produced their best-known work in societies undergoing profound social and economic transformations (post-war Italy and 1990s Serbia respectively), and each displayed a keen awareness of the surreal, absurdist air this lent their surrounds. The China of today is undergoing a similarly disorientating societal experience.

As for Hou Hsiao-Hsien, almost every Chinese director I have spoken too has named him as an central influence. It would be worthwhile sitting down one day and penning a serious consideration of the impact Hou's work has had on mainland Chinese cinema over the past twenty years.

The second point I thought noteworthy in Zhang's responses was his distaste for what he regards as the “impetuousness” of some contemporary Chinese documentary makers, and his emphasis on taking the time to understand his subjects before he begins to shoot what he thinks is important.

Particularly in Farewell, Beijing, Zhang deftly evokes a broader social and historical context for his character's story, allowing the man's personality to take centre stage while generating a fruitful dialogue between the conditions of contemporary China and some wildly differing understandings of the country's recent past. The film is a testament to Zhang's methodical, considered approach.

Thanks to Wang Yi for her help with translating the email interview with Zhang.

Have you made any other films apart from 7th Medical Ward and Farewell, Beijing?
I have made two short dramas, the 16mm Youth on the Roof (屋顶少年) and an dramatic adaptation of the documentary Farewell, Beijing called Xie Jingsheng (谢京生).

What first attracted you to documentaries?
People often say a movie can't be completed by one person, but under some circumstances documentary movies can be done by a single person. Before I wasn't in a position to make feature films, but I could shoot documentaries to express myself. I did everything on these two documentaries [7th Medical Ward and Farewell, Beijing] – shooting, sound recording, editing and the poster design. Everything except the translations [for subtitling].

So you generally work alone?
Before I worked alone, but from my next documentary I will set up a small group to work together.

How did you come across the stories of 7th Medical Ward and Farewell, Beijing?
7th Medical Ward came from a report in the Xiamen Evening News called “7th District Ward” (七区病房). Farewell, Beijing came from a Ji Heiming's photography collection Vanished Youth [an approximate translation of 走过青春 – literally Walked Past Youth] and Sun Chunlong's reportage Sent Down Beijing Youth Who Stayed Yan'an (留守延安的北京知青).

[NB: “Sent down youth” were young urbanites sent by Mao to live in the countryside and “learn from the peasants” from the late 1960s to the mid-70s. The practice stopped with Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976].

One aspect of your films which I really like is your ability to sympathetically engage with your characters and allow their personalities to shine, while still alluding to bigger social issues. How conscious are you when making films about balancing individual stories with the bigger picture?
I have a hobby, which is to stand to the side quietly observing other people. Then I think about things related to this person. My way of shooting has been influenced by this habit – go to a place, learn the truth of peoples' everyday lives, stand to the side quietly observing, and record what I'm interested in. So I don't need to design or arrange anything – their stories naturally reflect broader social phenomena.

Have you been influenced by other filmmakers or artists?
The novelist Wang Xiaobo, and the filmmakers Federico Fellini, Emir Nemanja Kusturica and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Also the documentaries Kindergarten (幼兒園) by Zhang Yiqing and Houjie Township (厚街) by Zhou Hao.

Digital technologies have had a huge impact on the way documentaries are made in China in the past decade. Do you personally feel digital technology has effected the way you make films?
In the past it was very difficult to shoot films or documentaries. Now everyone can be a director just by picking up a DV camera and shooting. Ten years ago I was painting film posters at the entrance of Xiamen Malong Cinema. Then I would go out on my old bike to put the posters up everywhere. I thought, “If I could find a better job I wouldn't have to do this anymore.” Ten years later people are sitting in cinemas watching my films. If we didn't have digital technology, and still had to use film to record images, I think this would have been mission impossible.

Do you see yourself as part of a wider movement or community of documentary filmmakers?
Of course. Drama cannot compete with documentary because of documentary's authenticity and social value. If I have the chance I will shoot more dramas, but documentary is my lifelong career.

What, if anything, differentiates China's current generation of documentary filmmakers from earlier generations?
I don't know what you mean by earlier generations, but I have never felt an obvious generation gap with the documentary makers I have come into contact with. Every era has it's own characteristics. People in different age brackets focus on different things – to have a hundred flowers bloom is quite normal.

If there is a difference, I think current documentary makers are more impetuous and inclined to follow trends. Documentary film festivals are partly responsible for this. At the end of 2009 teacher Zhu Rikun [founder of Fanhall Films] said in Nanjing, “Festivals are the scourge of directors.” I really agree with that.

What are your future plans? Are you currently working on any projects?
I am planning to write a drama script, and then I will go to Guizhou to research, investigate and shoot some material. This is a habit I formed while shooting documentaries – if there is not enough research, investigation and material you can't come up with a good script.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Ruan Lingyu & Stanley Kwan at Beijing's BC MOMA

2010-12-16T07:35:00.000-08:00


Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage (1992).

Last week Beijing's sole art house cinema, BC MOMA, hosted a ten day retrospective focussing on China's legendary silent screen actress Ruan Lingyu. On Sunday (December 12) the season drew to a close with a grand finale featuring a live musical accompaniment to Ruan's most famous role as a doomed Shanghai prostitute in The Goddess (1934), followed by Stanley Kwan's 1992 Ruan Lingyu biopic Centre Stage, starring Maggie Cheung. Kwan was on hand to introduce the film and offer some stirring words about the need for greater freedom in China's contemporary film industry.

Although little known in the outside world, Ruan Lingyu remains a national icon in China 75 years after her suicide at age 24. She begun acting in the 1920s at the tender age of 16, but it wasn't until the turn of the 1930s that her career took off as she starred in a string of hits such as A Spray of Plum Blossoms (1931), Love and Duty (1931) and Little Toys (1933). Her work culminated with her role as the nameless prostitute in The Goddess (1934) and her portrait of a writer and single mother suffering under the weight of traditional morality and tabloid gossip in New Woman (1934). The latter's unflattering portrait of Shanghai's tabloid press did not endear Ruan to local journalists, who relentlessly pried into her tumultuous personal life and eventually drove the young woman to take her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills on March 8, 1935.

Only six of Ruan's films survive in their entirety, all of which were screened in the BC MOMA season. The final night kicked off with a brief speech from the beautiful Wu Jing, BC MOMA's programmer, introducing The Goddess and local electronic duo Iloop, on hand to provide the live soundtrack.

BC MOMA programmer Wu Jing introducing electronic duo Iloop at the final night of the Ruan Lingyu retrospective last Sunday (Decemeber 12). All images from the screening Dan Edwards.

Wu Jing and Iloop.

I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of electronic soundtracks for silent films – it always seems a rather clunky way of making old films “relevant” to modern audiences. Great cinema needs no apology and can always stand on it's own terms – it doesn't need to be “updated.” Having said that, Iloop didn't do a bad job of providing a musical backing, and while I didn't think they really added anything to the film, they certainly didn't detract from the experience.

Iloop preparing to do their stuff just before the screening.

The Goddess itself was fantastic. I had seen the film once before on DVD and loved it, so it was great seeing Ruan Lingyu's gorgeously expressive performance blown up to full size on the silver screen. The grim tale of an impoverished young woman selling herself nightly on the streets of Shanghai is striking for its forthrightness and modern style, just as Ruan's nuanced performance is remarkable for its emotive power and realism. Having seen her earlier work Love and Obligation (1931) at the retrospective opening, it was amazing to see how rapidly her acting talent matured in just a few short years – and all the more tragic that her life was cut short so soon after making The Goddess.

It's also sad to reflect on the way China's vibrant cinema of the 1930s and 40s was interrupted by the Communist victory in the Civil War and the subsequent imposition of “socialist realism” on the arts. The filmic arts on the mainland are still struggling to recover today, as Stanley Kwan's comments after The Goddess indicated.

Introducing his Ruan biopic Centre Stage, Kwan recalled his controversial casting of Maggie Cheung in the lead role back in the early 90s. At that point Cheung was regarded as little more than a pretty wallflower within the Hong Kong industry, but her portrayal of Ruan in Centre Stage earned her the Best Actress Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1992 and marked the beginning of her transformation into a serious actress.

Stanley Kwan (left) is introduced by BC MOMA programmer Wu Jing (right) before the screening of Kwan's Centre Stage on Sunday, December 12. Between Kwan and Wu is a local journalist who interviewed Kwan.

Kwan also remembered that despite the film's success at Berlin, Hong Kong audiences were far from impressed by Centre Stage when it debuted at a Jackie Chan Foundation charity event. According to Kwan, the screening was punctuated by the sound of folding seats as more than half the audience walked out of the 1,000-plus seat cinema before the film's end.

Following this poor reception, the local distributor cut 20 minutes from the film, and didn't even bother preserving the negative of Kwan's original cut. Such were the halcyon days of the early 90s in the Hong Kong film industry.

Kwan's cut of Centre Stage was only rescued form the dustin of history by the Sydney Film Festival, who happened to keep the full-length print that had been sent to them back in the early 90s. A fresh neg was struck from this print when the film was released on DVD a few years ago, and Kwan's version resurfaced after two decades.

Watching Centre Stage today, it's easy to see why mainstream Hong Kong audiences were taken aback when the film was unveiled in 92. Kwan takes a Brechtian approach to portraying Ruan's life, enacting key episodes from the last few years of her life in a series of dramatic vignettes framed by discussions between Kwan and his cast about the actress' life, as well as interviews with elderly survivors of the 1930s Shanghai film industry.

The self-conscious illusionism of the drama does nothing to lessen the film's emotional impact however. Although simplistic interpretations of Brecht's approach stress the creation of an emotional distance between the audience and the drama they're watching, Brecht himself never disavowed an emotional engagement with drama – rather he sought to combine emotion with a critical, reflective attitude in the audience, anchored in an awareness that drama is a representation of reality, rather the illusion of reality. It's a difficult approach to pull of successfully, but when it works it can lead to works of immense emotional and intellectual power.

Centre Stage evokes the tantilising paradox at the heart of our fascination with tragic figures like Ruan Lingyu, as their animated likenesses etched into celluloid bring them back to life, even as the images remind us of the ever-growing temporal distance between the present and the moments recorded on screen. Watching The Goddess, Ruan seems so real, so beautiful, and so alive – but the emotive power of her image only makes the poignancy of her real life death all the more acute.

Part of the melancholy pervading Centre Stage comes from the sense that we can never really know the real Ruan Lingyu, or what really went on between her and her friends, lovers and colleagues all those years ago. All we have are uncertain memories, decaying buildings and degraded movies. The dream-like Shanghai Kwan creates in the film makes it feel like we are looking back into Ruan's life through a window heavily frosted by the passage of time. All we can see are glimpses and hints of a bigger story that has largely slipped from our grasp.

Stanley Kwan and interpreter Wang Yi at the Q&A before the screening of Centre Stage.

Although many reacted badly when Centre Stage was unveiled in Hong Kong two decades ago, the film's innovative approach recalls the invigorating vein of bold experimentation that ran through the heart of Hong Kong's commercial film industry during its heyday of the 1980s and early 90s. As Kwan commented before the screening, this was a golden era because of it's sheer stylistic and topical diversity. “Now many Hong Kong directors come to the mainland,” he reflected ruefully. “But they have to deal with a long list of banned topics – no scary films, no erotic films, no gay films. They just have to make the best of what's left.”

After a pause Kwan added, “I don't know when we will see the change, but our voice cannot be beaten,” provoking a rousing round of applause from the audience.

Stanley Kwan taking questions from the audience at the Q&A before Centre Stage.