11/18/2011
Dan and I met while she was visiting Boston. She said Chang Loong passed away last year at the age of 25. I felt I just lost a friend.
11/20/2011
After talking to a few friends, I was able to put the day to a weekend in July, 2010. I start to feel terrible about it.
11/21/2011
Shi Zhuo told me it was probably July 10, 2010.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Deborah Kerr
I love men, sometimes more than I love my own kind. I love how they focus on what they do. Once they figure out what they want, they don't play sitting on the fence. I especially love how they chase after women, once they know whom. In my opinion, women like to play games, but only because they get to determine the rules and when to bend them. I myself have no doubt been in that position.
I invented rules, then I kept pushing the envelope too, as if it must be a fun thing to do. I enjoyed the unpredictability of outcomes yet my control over them. I created a uniquely themed ride, I took a man with me, and we enjoyed ourselves like there were no tomorrow. I am able to say that there have been great memories. However, the past is now behind a stained glass, like in a Wong Kar-wai film.
I invented rules, then I kept pushing the envelope too, as if it must be a fun thing to do. I enjoyed the unpredictability of outcomes yet my control over them. I created a uniquely themed ride, I took a man with me, and we enjoyed ourselves like there were no tomorrow. I am able to say that there have been great memories. However, the past is now behind a stained glass, like in a Wong Kar-wai film.
He remembers those vanished years. As though looking throusth a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. - In the Mood for Love (2000)Some words I read before certainly did not register on my mind as they do now. I wish there is a way for me to conclude my story up till this point. But as I always warn Mike, your past will catch up with you.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Paul Virilio
I am constantly in and out of reality these days. I slip out from a conversation easily, and I often stop in the middle of what I am supposed to do. Where does my mind go? The past, maybe. But it feels more like a fantastic present that I have invented for myself - it just feels like I am back in the past.
Recently I read a short screenplay I wrote about four years ago. I named it "1216" mainly because that was the day I thought I met Solly, a guy I used to like. Well, I made a mistake. I met him on December 18, 2005, not the 16th, and that was also the date I started a blog at Xanga.com. A lot happened there.
I remember in college, I read a short story in Professor Anderson's American Short Fiction class; in it, the author writes that people forget years and remember moments. This is certainly true for me.
Yes, I believe there are "emotionally charged" words. My heart stirs too when I see them.
Recently I read a short screenplay I wrote about four years ago. I named it "1216" mainly because that was the day I thought I met Solly, a guy I used to like. Well, I made a mistake. I met him on December 18, 2005, not the 16th, and that was also the date I started a blog at Xanga.com. A lot happened there.
I remember in college, I read a short story in Professor Anderson's American Short Fiction class; in it, the author writes that people forget years and remember moments. This is certainly true for me.
This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while the snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying "snow," my lips move so that they kiss the air. (Ann Beattie "Snow")When I am confused, I like to open my right palm and read it religiously. The lines dance stories for me. I enjoy spending hours deciphering them. Yet today I seem to have come to an inconclusive conclusion again.
Yes, I believe there are "emotionally charged" words. My heart stirs too when I see them.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Cui Yongyuan
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.3105.001 Ethical Direction: Chinese Independent Documentary
Prof. Zhang Zhen and Prof. Angela Zito
December 18, 2010
Amateur Video in High-Profile Socially Engaged Projects:
The Chinese Village Documentary Project in Focus
Last year, I wrote a research paper on Through Navajo Eyes, which is a series of seven films made by seven Navajo film students under the supervision of Sol Worth, a communications professor and John Adair, an anthropologist in 1966. Worth and Adair selected seven Navajo film students and taught them how to use the film camera. The goal of their project was to find out if there was any connection between film language and language. I studied the films by the Navajo students in detail and also read about their culture and language. To my disappointment, the project did not yield any groundbreaking results, and the findings were to a large extent inconclusive. As I pondered over the significance of the films and their inclusion on the National Film Registry, I suddenly recalled and was deeply struck by an incident that Worth and Adair described in the earlier phase of the project. According to them, they sought the approval of a prominent medicine man, Sam Yazzie, in the Pine Springs Navajo community before they started soliciting people to be in the project. Sam, after listening carefully to the academics explain what the project was about, asked them three questions. First, he asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” To this, the two professors answered no confidently. Sam then asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any good?” The professors answered no again but with some hesitance. Finally, Sam asked, “Then why make movies?” To this, they fell silent. The awkward situation made them shoot some awkward replies, which they could not recall in detail afterwards.[1] In their co-authored book about the project many years later, it is said that at the time Sam did not own any sheep at all. His three questions were mean to be metaphorical. “Then why make movies?” I ask too. I make it the guiding question of my paper on the China Village Documentary Project.
The China Village Self-Governance Documentary Project (from here on the Village Documentary Project or VDP) is a project initiated as part of the EU-China Training Program on Village Self-Governance by veteran Chinese documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang and his assistant Jian Yi. It started in September 2005, but the project lived on till today. In 2005, announcements about the project were made on the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend as well as on the web. Any Chinese rural resident could apply, but only ten would be selected as finalists in the video category plus a hundred in the photography category. This paper looks specifically at the video category of the project. As promised by the project organizers, the ten finalists would get free transportation to and from Beijing, free food and lodging during their stay in Beijing, each person a digital video (DV) camera, a tripod, ten blank video tapes, free lessons on operating the DV camera and making documentaries, and last but not least, free access to editing facilities.[2] Except for the actually shooting, all other activities were conducted on site of Caocangdi Workstation, which is a non-profit art center for performance art, documentary film and video, and video art, founded by Wu and his wife choreographer Wen Hui in April 2005. The workstation is located in the Caochangdi Art District, which is a newly constructed art district outside the more famous 798 Art Zone in Beijing. The workstation shares close proximity with other art and cultural centers in the district such as award-winning independent filmmaker Zhao Liang’s Three Shadows Photography Art Center and the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA); together they form the front line of China’s contemporary art scene. Designed by renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei and generously supported by diverse international institutions and programs, such as the Asian Cultural Council from the United States and the Zürich International Theater Festival from Switzerland, the workstation is solidly world class. According to their founders, the workstation serves the public totally free-of-charge. Anyone can use its space and its facilities for study and information exchange. Additionally, it houses its own archive, which is professionally maintained to last into the future.[3] All these features of Caochangdi Workstation are new and exciting in China’s art world. However, more likely than not, they are vaguely grasped, if at all, by the villagers involved in the project. This is a point that I will come back to in a later section of my paper.
As it turns out, the Village Documentary Project has a fairly decent website where much related information about it can be found. Besides the introductions to the ten rural filmmakers and their works, the villagers’ reflections on the project, Wu’s own journal entries, and Wu’s correspondences with the villagers are open for anyone to read. While these may cater to an academic audience who are interested in doing research about the project besides those who already harbor an intense interest because of the fact that they were participants in the project, the news digest, media report, awards and comments may cater more to the general public because they are not as voluminous and formidable. In fact, except for the crude layout of the website (anyone with the most basic-level training in HTML can use preset templates to make these webpages), I would consider the publicity of the project well executed, and the excellent content shall add merit to the project as a whole. Not surprisingly, one of Wu’s journal entries reveals his intention to keep everything well-documented. On November 6, 2005, he wrote, “I would probably stay in each filmmaker’s place for roughly three days (including travel time). I will see what technical help they need for shooting, whether there is any problem with their topics, and I will also document them during shooting and in their everyday life. I plan to use both video- and audio-recording. These materials may be used for a book publication in the future.”[4] As we can see, Wu is very passionate about the project, and he has a special use for his collections too. I think that if not for this passion, Wu would have treated his work as mundane chores (i.e. making frequent cross-country trips and completing tasks), and he would have let much potentially important information slip past him as unremarkable white noise.
This is why I think Wu’s passion needs some address. His filmmaking career has certainly added an indispensable and fascinating dimension to the project, and it is essential to look at it closely. Thanks to many of Lü Xinyu’s publications on Wu and others, whom she thinks are pioneers to China’s independent production scene in the early 1990s, Wu is now known in the west as the most important founding member or sometimes the father of China’s New Documentary Cinema or the New Documentary Movement, which was putatively launched by his first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990). In 1990, Wu was working in a production team of the Special Topic Program of China Central Television. He quit this job and became an independent filmmaker not long after. Like others who also abandoned their jobs at the state television station, Wu was unhappy with the mainstream documentary practices. He rejected the patronizing form of state documentaries as well as their pretentious rhetoric in favor of a down-to-earth and cinéma vérité approach whose goal was to represent unadulterated and unaltered reality, especially the everyday life as lived and experienced by ordinary Chinese people.[5] This line of thought had guided him in his career up until 1996. From 1996 to 1998, he did not make any documentaries because he became jaded with the life and job of following people around with a huge video camera. From 2000 on, he transitioned to a new approach to documentary, which is best described as a free form of documentary filmmaking. As he has confessed, he no longer worked with preset topics in mind but shot footage whenever he felt like to. To him, video documenting was becoming like writing diary. He only edited the footage into a documentary when he found the inspiration to do it. Out of this new approach he made Dance with Farm Workers (2001), Search for Hamlet (2002), You are Called an Outsider (2003), as well as Fuck Cinema (2005). While these documentaries were unique in their own ways, Wu stated that he was getting increasingly bothered by the fact that they all dealt with people on the low rungs of society. He felt skeptical of, bored with, and rejected the documentation of others’ miseries. Here is an excerpt from his reflection:
One day, I saw an article on the Internet, “Flying like a Migrating Bird, but All in Vain.” It is said that in regard to the people who are living low lives, “although you document them, you do not help them.” I was hurt by this remark. I dare not say if my documentaries documented anything, or if they revealed anything, or if they represented anyone. I was ashamed to say so . . . Somehow by making a documentary of a miserable person, you become a successful artist, and you get a free air-ticket to go to a film festival. On this end, you are rhapsodizing about your film in front of an admiring audience. Yet on the other end, your subjects are carrying on their miserable lives with little or no change. In the beginning you probably do not feel bothered, but after a while, you will have questions about it.[6]
Although in my opinion it is not imperative for all documentary filmmakers to help their filmed subjects because that should be someone else’s responsibility, I could sympathize with Wu, especially because it is not his dream to lead a rich and comfortable bourgeois life – he was an “educated youth” who volunteered to work in Yunnan from 1974 to 1978 – in which case he would have less difficulty distancing himself from his subjects. I think his new realization about the documentary form and its function lends itself to his pursuit of yet another way of making documentaries and making use of them, which resonates with Sam Yazzie’s concern. Tracing Wu’s filmmaking career, I think it is becoming obvious why we can say that he has found his place in the Village Documentary Project.
I would like to add some words here about Wu’s assistant Jian Yi, who is another key figure in the project; their partnership was also crucial for the project. Jian was probably more famous for his fiction film Bamboo Shots (2007), which received the Bronze Zenith Award at the 31st Montreal Film Festival and documentary Super, Girls! (2007), which tells the story about a group of ordinary city girls entering the Super Girl Singing Contest, a popular television show in China terminated in 2007, before he and his wife Eva Song formally launched the IFCHINA Original Art Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University in Ji’an, Jiangxi in June 2009. Jian studied in both China and the United States. One of his master’s degrees is in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame.[7] Jian is fluent in English, meaning that he is a great facilitator when it comes to researching and applying for funds and grants. For instance, IFCHINA was partially funded by the Dutch fund Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. Having spent a year in the U.S., Jian was also exposed to various American cultural organizations and was aware of different kinds of international supportive programs that Wu was not firsthand. Jian often spoke fondly about Appalshop – a 41-year-old documentary film studio founded by Bill Richardson, which he came into contact in Whitesburg, Kentucky.[8] Appalshop was Jian’s great inspiration for ARTiSIMPLE Studio, which he founded in 2005, the same year that the Village Documentary Project was launched, as a center for collaborative community and citizen projects. Appalshop also inspired Jian’s subsequent organization, IFCHINA, the first-of-its-kind non-profit art and cultural organization that documents the stories of a city and memories of its communities, families, and individuals. On the newly launched website of IFCHINA, its mission is stated in clear terms, including “raise[ing] civic awareness” and fostering “a stronger sense of shared human values.” Among many great things that the organization does is the teaching of video-making to ordinary citizens. And like the archive of Caochangdi Workstation, IFCHINA is planning to establish its own museum, called the Museum of Memories, to house all the artworks produced.[9] All these dreams and ambitions of Jian show great consistency in terms of ideology with his collaboration with Wu, the fact of which should strike us as the immergence of a new turn among Chinese independent filmmakers in the China’s independent documentary world.
Before I make any attempt to theorize the new turn and discuss whether it is legitimate to label the project as such, I would like to analyze the project in terms of its life history from the villagers’ point of view first. As we know, the villagers have been credited for their directorial responsibilities for the documentaries produced. Since that is the case, they shall be treated seriously and respectfully for that role. As I have mentioned earlier, some of the villagers’ journal entries are available online. These documents actually assemble into a comprehensive production log, which covers a wide range of production-related issues such as inclement weather, equipment failure, and permissions for shooting. However, I argue that the most fascinating and fundamental aspect of the villagers’ writing is their self-awareness, and sometimes more accurately their self-reflexivity, which forms the basis for all actions taken. I will highlight certain observations, emotions, and ideas as noted down by the villagers.
First of all, almost all of the villager filmmakers expressed disbelief about the project in the beginning. Jian Yi’s hour-long documentary on the project, Seen and Heard (2006), features different villagers talking about their encounters with and initial reactions towards the terms of the project. Supplementary to the visual evidence in Jian’s film, the villagers’ written records give additional textual testimony. In his piece titled “Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True,” the oldest villager among the group, Nong Ke, from Guangxi Province, reproduces the dialogue that he had with his family right after he learned of his acceptance into the project. Nong’s son wanted to knock some sense into his old man by referencing the numerous advertising hoaxes that happened in China every day. More worried than concerned, his wife also tried hard to give him some reality checks by shooting rhetorical questions at him. She disparaged his calling of the project as something serious by comparing it to raising livestock (reminiscent of Sam’s metaphorical question); she half-mockingly discouraged him from participating in it by saying that he was too old and had no proper education anyway. Being put on the spot, Nong reacted much more strongly than in private. He refused to bend and said that Southern Weekly could not trick people like him. He promised his wife that he would raise more pigs to make up for the money if he were tricked. Despite the determination to embark on the journey to Beijing, which was to be his virgin voyage, and his public declaration to pay due cost if the plan went awry, Nong confessed that he did still feel uncertain and had sleepless nights.[10] For a farmer like him, we shall understand that the stakes behind the simple act of participating were extremely high because an entire year’s savings on raising livestock and selling farm produce could be wasted on pursuing like-natured quixotic dreams. In this sense, Nong as well as the other less privileged villagers are noteworthy for their courage, albeit quite foolhardy to their friends and family. The journey was to be taken alone; it became the ultimate test to see if an ordinary villager with little education could live larger than his or her life.
The villagers’ train rides to Beijing were all safe and smooth. But once they arrived, their experiences were filled with constant shocks. In fact, I argue that they were having a heightened sense of the self, which had probably been left dormant in most of their lives. Jia Zhitan, from Hunan Province, has a descriptive writing style. His journal entries from November 1st to 4th, 2005 give us a good idea of the portion of the project that took place in Caochangdi Workshop Art Center in Beijing. Interestingly, he was taken aback by Ai Weiwei’s architectural design of the center at first. “The brown-colored iron gates were shut tight. There was not even a sign next to the gate. The only thing lacking in the design were perhaps barbed wires. Dog barking welcomed us in. It was getting dark, but I could not see a single light in the quiet space,” he writes. “Is this place a detention center?” Jia’s first impression for Wu was a negative one too because Wu looked like a shady contractor with his unkempt beard. Jia’s suspicions only subsided the next day after the first meeting with the event organizers, some of whom were foreigners, passing out the cameras and tapes as promised.[11] Upon receiving his lot, Nong did a simple calculation. He writes, “I learned from the check that this tiny gadget, no bigger than my palm, cost more than the price of seven pigs. My God! Seven pigs! I would have to labor for a year for that amount of money, not counting 4,000 jin (or 2,000 kilograms) of corn and 1,000 jin (or 500 kilograms) of concentrated fodder in addition to it.”[12] For Nong and Jia at least, the short stay in Beijing gave them many “first” experiences such as first time seeing foreigners and people of an ethnic minority in person and first time touching high-tech camcorders. These experiences allowed them to see themselves in relation to the outside world, and that was where their surprises came from. Additionally, because the villagers were also making practice films and were forced to shoot each other and later looked at the tapes, they saw how they looked, talked, and moved in film and must be aware of how they compared to others.
The shooting process was challenging to the villager filmmakers, each in its own way. Like the project organizers, we tend to assume that the villagers would have easier access to their fellow villagers and the daily happenings in their respective villages. However, that was not always the case, and the ease with which we assume them to have with finding the subjects of their documentaries was not always true. As we will see, some of them had to make effort in networking and interact beyond their everyday social circles. As indicated in Shao Yuzhen’s diary, making a documentary about self-governance in her village in the outskirt of Beijing was not an easy task because she needed to sell her ripe Bok Choy, which was still in the field and needed transportation to go to the city, she needed to get rid of all the sweet potatoes still at home, and she also needed to hand-pick the cotton in her cotton field. Busy running multiple tasks at once, she was frustrated with herself because she always made silly mistakes such as forgetting to charge the battery of her camcorder or remembering to charge it but failing to connect the battery to the power chord securely and thus missing the shooting of certain events. At night, she worried about how to speak to the local party secretary about her documentary in order to get the necessary permission and support, and how to approach the village committee so that they would start the meetings on land contracts as soon as possible, especially within the required production period of her documentary. In the end, we know that her request was ignored or effectively turned down, and she resolved to filming random people and things. However, the process of her negotiating with those with title and power was necessarily valuable. In her dairy, she also mentioned her daughter, who played with her camcorder, and she noticed that her daughter could use it much better than she could. She exclaimed that she was getting old, but she was determined to get the documentary done at all costs because otherwise she would never be someone.[13]
Similar to Shao, Zhou Cengjia also went through quite some wanderings before he finally found a subject. At first, he went to talk to his village accountant about filming the reconstruction of the new power grid in his village. However, he was told that he would need to wait for them to get permission from higher up authorities before he was allowed to film. “What servility!” he cries out in his diary. “Even the village cadres cannot understand the significance of this project. How sad this is!” Since he could not find support in his own village, Zhou made contacts outside it. He called his former classmate who became the head of a neighboring village. Luckily his independent-minded former classmate was willing to participate. Zhou was a diligent filmmaker. Although he had to spend time on managing his shop, he had many ideas about his documentary and filmed many things happening around him other than his former classmate. During the month that he was working on the shooting, it rained frequently, so he complained about the bad weather several times. External restraints aside, he blamed himself for not knowing how to use the computer and send emails over the Internet too.[14] Though difficult, the shooting process became a self-discovery process and a self-improvement process for Zhou. The basic skills that he would learn by trying to get the documentary done are beneficial to him in the long run.
For the younger villagers amongst them like Wang Wei from Shandong Province and Yi Chujian from Zhejiang Province, it was comparatively easier to handle the camerawork and find subjects. As we can see from Jian’s Seen and Heard, Wang has an outgoing and congenial personality. His reflection on the project shows something quite different from the older generation. He describes his inner thoughts and emotions in much greater detail than the aforementioned villagers. While on the bus going back home, he pondered over the concept of villager self-governance. He thought that the current state of villager self-governance was underdeveloped, and he questioned whose responsibility it would be to realize villager self-governance. He set his topic to be the dispute over land contracting within his village. By going around interviewing people and making the documentary, he realized that he was getting unbelievably more worried than his fellow villagers about the situation. Although he sympathized with the village cadres that the fellow villagers had little education and thus low suzhi or civility, which was a factor to be considered when carrying out large-scale land reforms, he sympathized with a few villagers who were living under over the extreme poverty. “Has societal development ever benefited them? Did they get their share in the country’s economic takeoff?” he asks. “How many times can they eat meat in a year? How many times can they make dumplings? When was the last time that they bought new clothes? Was it a dozen years ago? Or did it never happen?”[15] He condemned the indifferent look cast upon them by his village especially because some of the people in the village were living a life many times better-off, yet those people were unwilling to let go and kept delaying letting go of the land that they occupied despite the fact that every villager should have a share of the land by law.
The final versions of the villagers’ documentaries last between ten to fifteen minutes. As the credits show, not every documentary was edited by the villagers themselves. Obviously there are practical limitations involved in teaching every one of them film editing, such as their varying learning abilities and possible time constraints and time conflicts with their personal lives. Looking at the edited films, however, we can see that it was not the project organizers’ attention to eliminate all technical errors of the shot footage. Instead, some errors were deliberately included, and the ten edited documentaries exhibit a variety of existing well-known documentary practices. In a way, the villagers’ works have undergone a facelift to gain legitimacy to enter relevant international film festivals. In Zhou Cengjia’s film about his ex-classmate, Village Head Wu Aiguo, the final two shots were an obvious technical mistake. A wide angle shot of Wu Aiguo walking into the distance is followed by a telescope shot of Wu Aiguo, just as his body is beginning to decrease in size. Zhou probably wanted to show his subject leaving; however, the message was wrongly constructed and delivered because in order to show someone leaving it is necessary to avoid zooming in and out and starting a new frame. One of the Navajo film students, Mike Anderson, made a practice film about the growth of a piñon pine. As an amateur, Mike made a similar mistake. Because “all the trees both small and large were shot as close-ups filling the full frame,” Mike “failed to communicate the process of growth which can be shown when something small becomes big.”[16] This is probably a trivial point, but the inclusion of this mistake seems deliberate because Zhou’s film was not edited by him but Li Haihan, whom I presume to be a professional editor. Amateur mistakes aside, if we looking the ten films together, we shall notice that they roughly cover all the established documentary forms. There are occasional talking-head interviews (with Wu Aiguo, for example), direct cinema observations (children leaving school), cinéma vérité-style participatory shooting (stopping a couple in a bad quarrel), cinéma vérité-style provocative questioning (asking people why they did not vote in their village elections), journalistic narration (introductory remarks about different locations), and interestingly too, an autobiographical impulse (filming one’s own actions), which may categorize better with amateur video aesthetics. Overall, they form a palette of documentary visuals, making the end omnibus or anthology film a strong candidate to be selected and shown alongside professional productions in the festival circuit.
I understand that Wu and others can get guilty by endlessly making documentaries about miserable people, and I agree that people too can get bored with watching this kind of films, which tell stories of victimhood. However, I would like to stress that in the case of China, where human rights issues are far from being resolved at the present, such documentaries still play an important role. The expansion of China’s middle class is true to a certain extent, but given the scale of its population and the fact that majority of the population is still rural, meaning that various kinds of social welfare are not sweeping in practice, we ought to bear with the number of films about underprivileged people. Therefore, the case for documentaries to be an empowering medium shall be accepted to last for a relatively longer period of time in China. This view is echoed in Chinese human rights activist and lawyer Teng Biao’s writing:
Village officials sold village land without disclosing records and accounting details, resulting in vigorous campaign among the villagers. With the help from the lawyers, journalists, and scholars, villages go against and denounce the officials. In 2005, the Taishi incident in Panyu, Guangdong, became one of the famous cases of the Chinese Civil Rights Movement. Ai Xiaoming’s documentary, "Taishi" recorded the event. Lawyers were beaten, villagers were arrested, and the whole village was enveloped in an atmosphere of terror. The last scene of the documentary showed filmmaker being beaten in containment by a group of unidentified gangs. In horror, with her car door broken, she called for help. The producer then added the following subtitle: "During the shooting process, I found that many agencies have video cameras, I think the villagers should have a video camera of their own.”[17]
In reality, the ten villagers chosen for this project may inadequately represent all rural Chinese. They may be considered to evade even harsher realities experienced by certain groups among them. The fact that this project is a collaborative project between Chinese independent documentary filmmakers and the European Union gives an extremely strong backbone to the villager filmmakers selected. The continuing exposure of the project on newspapers also to a great extend ensured its transparency. These factors add on to the potency of the use of documentary as a political tool.
Jia Zhitan is one of the villagers who continued to make documentaries after the 2005 phase of the project was over. His later experiences with making documentaries provide some solid responses to Sam’s question of why make movies. First, Jia started and is now the director of “a committee of an orange growers’ cooperative, which enjoys great popularity among some 200,000 local growers.” The fame that he has gained from the high-profile transparent Village Documentary Project allows him to have great trust from those who know about it. 200,000 is not a small number; he probably cannot remember everyone’s name in the cooperative, but he represents them and fights for them with his camera. Second, in 2008, Jia made a documentary about “outraged villagers petitioned against a coal mine for discharging high levels of pollutants into drinking water sources and its owner’s misuse of the environmental protection subsidy of nearly 2 million yuan ($294,000).” “He sent the 20-minute video to the State Council in October 2008 and Premier Wen Jiabao was quick to respond for resolving the issue.” Third, he continues to explore the use of documentary and uses his spare time to record local history, which will soon die with the people who bear witness of it. For example, he interviewed a widow whose husband committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. That man was purged because he had previously been given a scholarship by Kuomintang to study. Jia sobbed behind the camera as he listened to the widow talk because when he was a child, his life was saved by the man. Jia carries his video camera around and films people and things when he feels compelled to. Sometimes he winds up in a fight and is threatened to have his camcorder destroyed. He often responds in those situations that there is nothing wrong to record reality. As his fame grows, more and more powerless people come to him and plead his help. However, he is not able to help everyone. Li Shibing, 72, sought Jia’s help with getting the compensation of his land after being relocated. Jia turned him down because he was under great pressure at the time. Three weeks later after Li spoke with Jia, Li committed suicide.[18]
What the above incident tells us is perhaps the insufficiency of cameras or similar projects that aim to teach people how to amplify their stories and make themselves seen and heard. Indeed, from 2005 on, probably inspired by the Village Documentary Project, a group of projects that share similar organization structures have sprung up in China. Just this year, the Environment & Human Short Documentary Project was conducted as part of a green project called “Qing Guo Qing Cheng Huan Jing Xin Guan Cha [Green Country Green City Environmental and Spiritual Observation],” which was organized by the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology (SEE) Foundation, Beijing Indie Workshop (founded in 2005 by Zhang Xianmin), and the Tencent Company for Public Welfare. College students from over 200 institutions were encouraged to participate in this project by submitting documentary proposals that explore contemporary environmental problems and construct innovative solutions. Of the proposals, 20 were selected as finalists. These students were given free training in video filmmaking as well as a small fund to complete their documentaries. The winners were shown at the Ullens Centers for Contemporary Art (UCCA) on November 9th, 2010 in Beijing. Some of the films produced are already available online at sina.com, which is one of the largest and most popular Chinese websites. Another example is Jian Yi’s IFCHINA Original Art Studio’s Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University. As is mentioned earlier on in the paper, IFCHINA uses the same model to teach ordinary Chinese how to use the video camera and tell their own stories. All of their works will be housed in the Memories of Museum (currently under construction) and will be free for public viewing. It is not hard to see that the three examples all put little emphasis on copyright issues and on commercial distribution. Despite making 20,000 yuan for airing their documentaries on TV twice, all the villagers involved in the Village Documentary Project expressed little interest in having their films official distributed. Wu mentioned that he also did not want to complicate the project and similar projects in the future by bringing in commercial partners. This differentiates the amateur videos by the villagers and perhaps other kinds of amateur videos, especially in the last century in the United States, as the argument made by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible goes, “the utopian and independent impulses of amateurism have been complicated by professional, commercial and official interests from the beginning.”[19] The significance of this cluster of Chinese projects, I argue therefore, points to something quite original compared to the more well-known route to fame in the Chinese independent cinema world.
Since the early 1990s, the way to have a serious career in documentary filmmaking for Chinese independent filmmakers has been to start making an award-winning documentary film in the international film festival circuit. After getting some awards, these independent filmmakers can then be more credited to secure funding for their next productions through official channels. Very often the funding comes from abroad, through film festivals, independent donors, international television stations, and grants from established cultural institutions. For examples, the Motion Pictures Association (MPA) Asian Pacific Screen Academy Film (ASPA) Fund is automatically open for application to ASPA Award winners, the Asian Film Fund by the Pusan International Film Festival has a special grant for documentaries, and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema offers NETPAC cash awards at 28 film festivals in 21 countries. If international support is unfortunately out of reach, Chinese independent documentary filmmakers have the option of applying for a limited amount of financial support by their local, regional, and in some cases national television stations. Investments, however, are rare because venture capital companies are more likely to fund fiction films, which have better profit returns. Going back to the Village Documentary Project, it is a pioneer in establishing a new mode of production and distribution. It awakens Chinese filmmakers that they need not limit themselves to making art alone, they need not be solidary fighters for whatever cause, their contacts in society are wide-ranged, so they can collaborate with different institutions for different purposes, and finally, they are capable of turning their subjects into filmmakers.
In October 2010, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation art was opened in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. Ai was commissioned by Tate for this exhibition. He hired almost the entire town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province from 2008 on to make life-size porcelain sunflower seeds. 150 tons of fake sunflower seeds were made in the end and shipped aboard. Ai paid all his workers using the money that he received from Tate. It was said that the town was on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved by Ai. If such is the case, what parallels can we draw between Ai , Wu, and Jian? Obvious, all three are Chinese; they have all been recognized for their art and/or films internationally; interestingly, all three also started engaging ordinary Chinese in their art or their work directly. I thought in the beginning that the engagement they were able to offer were insignificant because Ai’s workers were doing menial jobs and Wu told his film students to use their cameras to observe people and things and not to make probing documentaries like China Central Television’s program “Jiao Dian Fang Tan [Topics in Focus].” I thought the observational method that Wu preferred prevented the villagers from making use of their intelligence and thus reduced them to like-natured factory workers, who were just passively carrying out orders and operating a sophisticated machine. Additionally, I also paralleled the amateur videos by the villagers as just another kind of products carrying the “Made in China” label because they looked low-quality. However, my own views changed. I found out that the villagers became self-conscious during the project. Although they were asked to record reality and never required to rigorously examine or organize it, they have learned many valuable things, about themselves, about others, about what they could do for their villages once they had a camera. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The camcorders were permanently given to the ten villagers. Some have continued to work with Wu and make documentaries and other not. I think that the important thing is not whether they become documentary filmmakers because the impact of the project is and should be beyond the ten of them. Society at large actually benefits from the Village Documentary Project and other similar projects, especially when they receive wide and transparent press coverage, because ideas will beget ideas. These projects are inspiring to in many good ways. Last but not least, the successes that these projects achieve will contribute to the building of a transnational infrastructure for new modes of production and distribution. In a rapidly modernizing nation still struggling to make everything work nicely together, I see these infrastructure-builders epoch-making.
[1] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 32.
[2] China Independent Documentary Film Archive, “China Villagers Documentary Project,” CIDAF News & Events, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.cidfa.com/modules/project.php?pid=4.
[3] “Caochangdi Workstation Art Center,” Caochangdi Workstation Intro, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/english/about_us.htm.
[4] Wu Wenguang, “Cun Min Ying Xiang Ji Hua Gong Zuo Shou Ji [Village Documentary Project Diary],” Caochangdi Workstation, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectworknote.html.
[5] Matthew David Johnson, “’A Scene beyond Our Line of Sight’: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, ed. Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 51-6.
[6] Wan Jing, “Jiu Shuo Lao Wu Qu Zhao Mei Nü Wan Le [Let’s Just Say Old Wu Left here Looking for Pretty Girls],” Southern Weekly, Oct. 31, 2007,
http://www.infzm.com/content/6826.
[7] “Jian Yi: Documentary Filmmaker and Photographer,” The New School India China Institute, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.newschool.edu/ici/subpage.aspx?id=23832.
[8] Jian Yi, “Message from the Co-founders,” IFCHINA Original Art Studio Participatory Documentary Center Annual Newsletter 2009 (English), Jan. 22, 2010, 2.
[9] “Who Are We?” IFCHINA Original Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.ifchinastudio.org/.
[10] Nong Ke, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen [Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True],” Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings],
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[11] Jia Zhitan, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Oct 31 - Nov. 4, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[12] Nong, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen.”
[13] Shao Yuzhen, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 5 to 13, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[14] Zhou Cengjia, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 22, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[15] Wang Wei, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 7, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[16] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 96.
[17] Teng Biao, “China: The Use of Citizens Documentary in Chinese Civil Rights Movements,” translated by florence, Interlocals, Aug. 19, 2010,
http://interlocals.net/?q=node/361.
[18] Li Xiaoshu, “Farmer’s Harvest of Reality,” Global Times: Discover China, Discover the World, June 9, 2010,
http://special.globaltimes.cn/2010-06/540395.html.
[19] Melinda Stone and Dan Streible, “Introduction: Small Gauge and Amateur Film,” Film History 15, no. 2 (2003): 123.
H72.3105.001 Ethical Direction: Chinese Independent Documentary
Prof. Zhang Zhen and Prof. Angela Zito
December 18, 2010
Amateur Video in High-Profile Socially Engaged Projects:
The Chinese Village Documentary Project in Focus
Last year, I wrote a research paper on Through Navajo Eyes, which is a series of seven films made by seven Navajo film students under the supervision of Sol Worth, a communications professor and John Adair, an anthropologist in 1966. Worth and Adair selected seven Navajo film students and taught them how to use the film camera. The goal of their project was to find out if there was any connection between film language and language. I studied the films by the Navajo students in detail and also read about their culture and language. To my disappointment, the project did not yield any groundbreaking results, and the findings were to a large extent inconclusive. As I pondered over the significance of the films and their inclusion on the National Film Registry, I suddenly recalled and was deeply struck by an incident that Worth and Adair described in the earlier phase of the project. According to them, they sought the approval of a prominent medicine man, Sam Yazzie, in the Pine Springs Navajo community before they started soliciting people to be in the project. Sam, after listening carefully to the academics explain what the project was about, asked them three questions. First, he asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any harm?” To this, the two professors answered no confidently. Sam then asked, “Will making movies do the sheep any good?” The professors answered no again but with some hesitance. Finally, Sam asked, “Then why make movies?” To this, they fell silent. The awkward situation made them shoot some awkward replies, which they could not recall in detail afterwards.[1] In their co-authored book about the project many years later, it is said that at the time Sam did not own any sheep at all. His three questions were mean to be metaphorical. “Then why make movies?” I ask too. I make it the guiding question of my paper on the China Village Documentary Project.
The China Village Self-Governance Documentary Project (from here on the Village Documentary Project or VDP) is a project initiated as part of the EU-China Training Program on Village Self-Governance by veteran Chinese documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang and his assistant Jian Yi. It started in September 2005, but the project lived on till today. In 2005, announcements about the project were made on the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend as well as on the web. Any Chinese rural resident could apply, but only ten would be selected as finalists in the video category plus a hundred in the photography category. This paper looks specifically at the video category of the project. As promised by the project organizers, the ten finalists would get free transportation to and from Beijing, free food and lodging during their stay in Beijing, each person a digital video (DV) camera, a tripod, ten blank video tapes, free lessons on operating the DV camera and making documentaries, and last but not least, free access to editing facilities.[2] Except for the actually shooting, all other activities were conducted on site of Caocangdi Workstation, which is a non-profit art center for performance art, documentary film and video, and video art, founded by Wu and his wife choreographer Wen Hui in April 2005. The workstation is located in the Caochangdi Art District, which is a newly constructed art district outside the more famous 798 Art Zone in Beijing. The workstation shares close proximity with other art and cultural centers in the district such as award-winning independent filmmaker Zhao Liang’s Three Shadows Photography Art Center and the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA); together they form the front line of China’s contemporary art scene. Designed by renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei and generously supported by diverse international institutions and programs, such as the Asian Cultural Council from the United States and the Zürich International Theater Festival from Switzerland, the workstation is solidly world class. According to their founders, the workstation serves the public totally free-of-charge. Anyone can use its space and its facilities for study and information exchange. Additionally, it houses its own archive, which is professionally maintained to last into the future.[3] All these features of Caochangdi Workstation are new and exciting in China’s art world. However, more likely than not, they are vaguely grasped, if at all, by the villagers involved in the project. This is a point that I will come back to in a later section of my paper.
As it turns out, the Village Documentary Project has a fairly decent website where much related information about it can be found. Besides the introductions to the ten rural filmmakers and their works, the villagers’ reflections on the project, Wu’s own journal entries, and Wu’s correspondences with the villagers are open for anyone to read. While these may cater to an academic audience who are interested in doing research about the project besides those who already harbor an intense interest because of the fact that they were participants in the project, the news digest, media report, awards and comments may cater more to the general public because they are not as voluminous and formidable. In fact, except for the crude layout of the website (anyone with the most basic-level training in HTML can use preset templates to make these webpages), I would consider the publicity of the project well executed, and the excellent content shall add merit to the project as a whole. Not surprisingly, one of Wu’s journal entries reveals his intention to keep everything well-documented. On November 6, 2005, he wrote, “I would probably stay in each filmmaker’s place for roughly three days (including travel time). I will see what technical help they need for shooting, whether there is any problem with their topics, and I will also document them during shooting and in their everyday life. I plan to use both video- and audio-recording. These materials may be used for a book publication in the future.”[4] As we can see, Wu is very passionate about the project, and he has a special use for his collections too. I think that if not for this passion, Wu would have treated his work as mundane chores (i.e. making frequent cross-country trips and completing tasks), and he would have let much potentially important information slip past him as unremarkable white noise.
This is why I think Wu’s passion needs some address. His filmmaking career has certainly added an indispensable and fascinating dimension to the project, and it is essential to look at it closely. Thanks to many of Lü Xinyu’s publications on Wu and others, whom she thinks are pioneers to China’s independent production scene in the early 1990s, Wu is now known in the west as the most important founding member or sometimes the father of China’s New Documentary Cinema or the New Documentary Movement, which was putatively launched by his first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990). In 1990, Wu was working in a production team of the Special Topic Program of China Central Television. He quit this job and became an independent filmmaker not long after. Like others who also abandoned their jobs at the state television station, Wu was unhappy with the mainstream documentary practices. He rejected the patronizing form of state documentaries as well as their pretentious rhetoric in favor of a down-to-earth and cinéma vérité approach whose goal was to represent unadulterated and unaltered reality, especially the everyday life as lived and experienced by ordinary Chinese people.[5] This line of thought had guided him in his career up until 1996. From 1996 to 1998, he did not make any documentaries because he became jaded with the life and job of following people around with a huge video camera. From 2000 on, he transitioned to a new approach to documentary, which is best described as a free form of documentary filmmaking. As he has confessed, he no longer worked with preset topics in mind but shot footage whenever he felt like to. To him, video documenting was becoming like writing diary. He only edited the footage into a documentary when he found the inspiration to do it. Out of this new approach he made Dance with Farm Workers (2001), Search for Hamlet (2002), You are Called an Outsider (2003), as well as Fuck Cinema (2005). While these documentaries were unique in their own ways, Wu stated that he was getting increasingly bothered by the fact that they all dealt with people on the low rungs of society. He felt skeptical of, bored with, and rejected the documentation of others’ miseries. Here is an excerpt from his reflection:
One day, I saw an article on the Internet, “Flying like a Migrating Bird, but All in Vain.” It is said that in regard to the people who are living low lives, “although you document them, you do not help them.” I was hurt by this remark. I dare not say if my documentaries documented anything, or if they revealed anything, or if they represented anyone. I was ashamed to say so . . . Somehow by making a documentary of a miserable person, you become a successful artist, and you get a free air-ticket to go to a film festival. On this end, you are rhapsodizing about your film in front of an admiring audience. Yet on the other end, your subjects are carrying on their miserable lives with little or no change. In the beginning you probably do not feel bothered, but after a while, you will have questions about it.[6]
Although in my opinion it is not imperative for all documentary filmmakers to help their filmed subjects because that should be someone else’s responsibility, I could sympathize with Wu, especially because it is not his dream to lead a rich and comfortable bourgeois life – he was an “educated youth” who volunteered to work in Yunnan from 1974 to 1978 – in which case he would have less difficulty distancing himself from his subjects. I think his new realization about the documentary form and its function lends itself to his pursuit of yet another way of making documentaries and making use of them, which resonates with Sam Yazzie’s concern. Tracing Wu’s filmmaking career, I think it is becoming obvious why we can say that he has found his place in the Village Documentary Project.
I would like to add some words here about Wu’s assistant Jian Yi, who is another key figure in the project; their partnership was also crucial for the project. Jian was probably more famous for his fiction film Bamboo Shots (2007), which received the Bronze Zenith Award at the 31st Montreal Film Festival and documentary Super, Girls! (2007), which tells the story about a group of ordinary city girls entering the Super Girl Singing Contest, a popular television show in China terminated in 2007, before he and his wife Eva Song formally launched the IFCHINA Original Art Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University in Ji’an, Jiangxi in June 2009. Jian studied in both China and the United States. One of his master’s degrees is in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame.[7] Jian is fluent in English, meaning that he is a great facilitator when it comes to researching and applying for funds and grants. For instance, IFCHINA was partially funded by the Dutch fund Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. Having spent a year in the U.S., Jian was also exposed to various American cultural organizations and was aware of different kinds of international supportive programs that Wu was not firsthand. Jian often spoke fondly about Appalshop – a 41-year-old documentary film studio founded by Bill Richardson, which he came into contact in Whitesburg, Kentucky.[8] Appalshop was Jian’s great inspiration for ARTiSIMPLE Studio, which he founded in 2005, the same year that the Village Documentary Project was launched, as a center for collaborative community and citizen projects. Appalshop also inspired Jian’s subsequent organization, IFCHINA, the first-of-its-kind non-profit art and cultural organization that documents the stories of a city and memories of its communities, families, and individuals. On the newly launched website of IFCHINA, its mission is stated in clear terms, including “raise[ing] civic awareness” and fostering “a stronger sense of shared human values.” Among many great things that the organization does is the teaching of video-making to ordinary citizens. And like the archive of Caochangdi Workstation, IFCHINA is planning to establish its own museum, called the Museum of Memories, to house all the artworks produced.[9] All these dreams and ambitions of Jian show great consistency in terms of ideology with his collaboration with Wu, the fact of which should strike us as the immergence of a new turn among Chinese independent filmmakers in the China’s independent documentary world.
Before I make any attempt to theorize the new turn and discuss whether it is legitimate to label the project as such, I would like to analyze the project in terms of its life history from the villagers’ point of view first. As we know, the villagers have been credited for their directorial responsibilities for the documentaries produced. Since that is the case, they shall be treated seriously and respectfully for that role. As I have mentioned earlier, some of the villagers’ journal entries are available online. These documents actually assemble into a comprehensive production log, which covers a wide range of production-related issues such as inclement weather, equipment failure, and permissions for shooting. However, I argue that the most fascinating and fundamental aspect of the villagers’ writing is their self-awareness, and sometimes more accurately their self-reflexivity, which forms the basis for all actions taken. I will highlight certain observations, emotions, and ideas as noted down by the villagers.
First of all, almost all of the villager filmmakers expressed disbelief about the project in the beginning. Jian Yi’s hour-long documentary on the project, Seen and Heard (2006), features different villagers talking about their encounters with and initial reactions towards the terms of the project. Supplementary to the visual evidence in Jian’s film, the villagers’ written records give additional textual testimony. In his piece titled “Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True,” the oldest villager among the group, Nong Ke, from Guangxi Province, reproduces the dialogue that he had with his family right after he learned of his acceptance into the project. Nong’s son wanted to knock some sense into his old man by referencing the numerous advertising hoaxes that happened in China every day. More worried than concerned, his wife also tried hard to give him some reality checks by shooting rhetorical questions at him. She disparaged his calling of the project as something serious by comparing it to raising livestock (reminiscent of Sam’s metaphorical question); she half-mockingly discouraged him from participating in it by saying that he was too old and had no proper education anyway. Being put on the spot, Nong reacted much more strongly than in private. He refused to bend and said that Southern Weekly could not trick people like him. He promised his wife that he would raise more pigs to make up for the money if he were tricked. Despite the determination to embark on the journey to Beijing, which was to be his virgin voyage, and his public declaration to pay due cost if the plan went awry, Nong confessed that he did still feel uncertain and had sleepless nights.[10] For a farmer like him, we shall understand that the stakes behind the simple act of participating were extremely high because an entire year’s savings on raising livestock and selling farm produce could be wasted on pursuing like-natured quixotic dreams. In this sense, Nong as well as the other less privileged villagers are noteworthy for their courage, albeit quite foolhardy to their friends and family. The journey was to be taken alone; it became the ultimate test to see if an ordinary villager with little education could live larger than his or her life.
The villagers’ train rides to Beijing were all safe and smooth. But once they arrived, their experiences were filled with constant shocks. In fact, I argue that they were having a heightened sense of the self, which had probably been left dormant in most of their lives. Jia Zhitan, from Hunan Province, has a descriptive writing style. His journal entries from November 1st to 4th, 2005 give us a good idea of the portion of the project that took place in Caochangdi Workshop Art Center in Beijing. Interestingly, he was taken aback by Ai Weiwei’s architectural design of the center at first. “The brown-colored iron gates were shut tight. There was not even a sign next to the gate. The only thing lacking in the design were perhaps barbed wires. Dog barking welcomed us in. It was getting dark, but I could not see a single light in the quiet space,” he writes. “Is this place a detention center?” Jia’s first impression for Wu was a negative one too because Wu looked like a shady contractor with his unkempt beard. Jia’s suspicions only subsided the next day after the first meeting with the event organizers, some of whom were foreigners, passing out the cameras and tapes as promised.[11] Upon receiving his lot, Nong did a simple calculation. He writes, “I learned from the check that this tiny gadget, no bigger than my palm, cost more than the price of seven pigs. My God! Seven pigs! I would have to labor for a year for that amount of money, not counting 4,000 jin (or 2,000 kilograms) of corn and 1,000 jin (or 500 kilograms) of concentrated fodder in addition to it.”[12] For Nong and Jia at least, the short stay in Beijing gave them many “first” experiences such as first time seeing foreigners and people of an ethnic minority in person and first time touching high-tech camcorders. These experiences allowed them to see themselves in relation to the outside world, and that was where their surprises came from. Additionally, because the villagers were also making practice films and were forced to shoot each other and later looked at the tapes, they saw how they looked, talked, and moved in film and must be aware of how they compared to others.
The shooting process was challenging to the villager filmmakers, each in its own way. Like the project organizers, we tend to assume that the villagers would have easier access to their fellow villagers and the daily happenings in their respective villages. However, that was not always the case, and the ease with which we assume them to have with finding the subjects of their documentaries was not always true. As we will see, some of them had to make effort in networking and interact beyond their everyday social circles. As indicated in Shao Yuzhen’s diary, making a documentary about self-governance in her village in the outskirt of Beijing was not an easy task because she needed to sell her ripe Bok Choy, which was still in the field and needed transportation to go to the city, she needed to get rid of all the sweet potatoes still at home, and she also needed to hand-pick the cotton in her cotton field. Busy running multiple tasks at once, she was frustrated with herself because she always made silly mistakes such as forgetting to charge the battery of her camcorder or remembering to charge it but failing to connect the battery to the power chord securely and thus missing the shooting of certain events. At night, she worried about how to speak to the local party secretary about her documentary in order to get the necessary permission and support, and how to approach the village committee so that they would start the meetings on land contracts as soon as possible, especially within the required production period of her documentary. In the end, we know that her request was ignored or effectively turned down, and she resolved to filming random people and things. However, the process of her negotiating with those with title and power was necessarily valuable. In her dairy, she also mentioned her daughter, who played with her camcorder, and she noticed that her daughter could use it much better than she could. She exclaimed that she was getting old, but she was determined to get the documentary done at all costs because otherwise she would never be someone.[13]
Similar to Shao, Zhou Cengjia also went through quite some wanderings before he finally found a subject. At first, he went to talk to his village accountant about filming the reconstruction of the new power grid in his village. However, he was told that he would need to wait for them to get permission from higher up authorities before he was allowed to film. “What servility!” he cries out in his diary. “Even the village cadres cannot understand the significance of this project. How sad this is!” Since he could not find support in his own village, Zhou made contacts outside it. He called his former classmate who became the head of a neighboring village. Luckily his independent-minded former classmate was willing to participate. Zhou was a diligent filmmaker. Although he had to spend time on managing his shop, he had many ideas about his documentary and filmed many things happening around him other than his former classmate. During the month that he was working on the shooting, it rained frequently, so he complained about the bad weather several times. External restraints aside, he blamed himself for not knowing how to use the computer and send emails over the Internet too.[14] Though difficult, the shooting process became a self-discovery process and a self-improvement process for Zhou. The basic skills that he would learn by trying to get the documentary done are beneficial to him in the long run.
For the younger villagers amongst them like Wang Wei from Shandong Province and Yi Chujian from Zhejiang Province, it was comparatively easier to handle the camerawork and find subjects. As we can see from Jian’s Seen and Heard, Wang has an outgoing and congenial personality. His reflection on the project shows something quite different from the older generation. He describes his inner thoughts and emotions in much greater detail than the aforementioned villagers. While on the bus going back home, he pondered over the concept of villager self-governance. He thought that the current state of villager self-governance was underdeveloped, and he questioned whose responsibility it would be to realize villager self-governance. He set his topic to be the dispute over land contracting within his village. By going around interviewing people and making the documentary, he realized that he was getting unbelievably more worried than his fellow villagers about the situation. Although he sympathized with the village cadres that the fellow villagers had little education and thus low suzhi or civility, which was a factor to be considered when carrying out large-scale land reforms, he sympathized with a few villagers who were living under over the extreme poverty. “Has societal development ever benefited them? Did they get their share in the country’s economic takeoff?” he asks. “How many times can they eat meat in a year? How many times can they make dumplings? When was the last time that they bought new clothes? Was it a dozen years ago? Or did it never happen?”[15] He condemned the indifferent look cast upon them by his village especially because some of the people in the village were living a life many times better-off, yet those people were unwilling to let go and kept delaying letting go of the land that they occupied despite the fact that every villager should have a share of the land by law.
The final versions of the villagers’ documentaries last between ten to fifteen minutes. As the credits show, not every documentary was edited by the villagers themselves. Obviously there are practical limitations involved in teaching every one of them film editing, such as their varying learning abilities and possible time constraints and time conflicts with their personal lives. Looking at the edited films, however, we can see that it was not the project organizers’ attention to eliminate all technical errors of the shot footage. Instead, some errors were deliberately included, and the ten edited documentaries exhibit a variety of existing well-known documentary practices. In a way, the villagers’ works have undergone a facelift to gain legitimacy to enter relevant international film festivals. In Zhou Cengjia’s film about his ex-classmate, Village Head Wu Aiguo, the final two shots were an obvious technical mistake. A wide angle shot of Wu Aiguo walking into the distance is followed by a telescope shot of Wu Aiguo, just as his body is beginning to decrease in size. Zhou probably wanted to show his subject leaving; however, the message was wrongly constructed and delivered because in order to show someone leaving it is necessary to avoid zooming in and out and starting a new frame. One of the Navajo film students, Mike Anderson, made a practice film about the growth of a piñon pine. As an amateur, Mike made a similar mistake. Because “all the trees both small and large were shot as close-ups filling the full frame,” Mike “failed to communicate the process of growth which can be shown when something small becomes big.”[16] This is probably a trivial point, but the inclusion of this mistake seems deliberate because Zhou’s film was not edited by him but Li Haihan, whom I presume to be a professional editor. Amateur mistakes aside, if we looking the ten films together, we shall notice that they roughly cover all the established documentary forms. There are occasional talking-head interviews (with Wu Aiguo, for example), direct cinema observations (children leaving school), cinéma vérité-style participatory shooting (stopping a couple in a bad quarrel), cinéma vérité-style provocative questioning (asking people why they did not vote in their village elections), journalistic narration (introductory remarks about different locations), and interestingly too, an autobiographical impulse (filming one’s own actions), which may categorize better with amateur video aesthetics. Overall, they form a palette of documentary visuals, making the end omnibus or anthology film a strong candidate to be selected and shown alongside professional productions in the festival circuit.
I understand that Wu and others can get guilty by endlessly making documentaries about miserable people, and I agree that people too can get bored with watching this kind of films, which tell stories of victimhood. However, I would like to stress that in the case of China, where human rights issues are far from being resolved at the present, such documentaries still play an important role. The expansion of China’s middle class is true to a certain extent, but given the scale of its population and the fact that majority of the population is still rural, meaning that various kinds of social welfare are not sweeping in practice, we ought to bear with the number of films about underprivileged people. Therefore, the case for documentaries to be an empowering medium shall be accepted to last for a relatively longer period of time in China. This view is echoed in Chinese human rights activist and lawyer Teng Biao’s writing:
Village officials sold village land without disclosing records and accounting details, resulting in vigorous campaign among the villagers. With the help from the lawyers, journalists, and scholars, villages go against and denounce the officials. In 2005, the Taishi incident in Panyu, Guangdong, became one of the famous cases of the Chinese Civil Rights Movement. Ai Xiaoming’s documentary, "Taishi" recorded the event. Lawyers were beaten, villagers were arrested, and the whole village was enveloped in an atmosphere of terror. The last scene of the documentary showed filmmaker being beaten in containment by a group of unidentified gangs. In horror, with her car door broken, she called for help. The producer then added the following subtitle: "During the shooting process, I found that many agencies have video cameras, I think the villagers should have a video camera of their own.”[17]
In reality, the ten villagers chosen for this project may inadequately represent all rural Chinese. They may be considered to evade even harsher realities experienced by certain groups among them. The fact that this project is a collaborative project between Chinese independent documentary filmmakers and the European Union gives an extremely strong backbone to the villager filmmakers selected. The continuing exposure of the project on newspapers also to a great extend ensured its transparency. These factors add on to the potency of the use of documentary as a political tool.
Jia Zhitan is one of the villagers who continued to make documentaries after the 2005 phase of the project was over. His later experiences with making documentaries provide some solid responses to Sam’s question of why make movies. First, Jia started and is now the director of “a committee of an orange growers’ cooperative, which enjoys great popularity among some 200,000 local growers.” The fame that he has gained from the high-profile transparent Village Documentary Project allows him to have great trust from those who know about it. 200,000 is not a small number; he probably cannot remember everyone’s name in the cooperative, but he represents them and fights for them with his camera. Second, in 2008, Jia made a documentary about “outraged villagers petitioned against a coal mine for discharging high levels of pollutants into drinking water sources and its owner’s misuse of the environmental protection subsidy of nearly 2 million yuan ($294,000).” “He sent the 20-minute video to the State Council in October 2008 and Premier Wen Jiabao was quick to respond for resolving the issue.” Third, he continues to explore the use of documentary and uses his spare time to record local history, which will soon die with the people who bear witness of it. For example, he interviewed a widow whose husband committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. That man was purged because he had previously been given a scholarship by Kuomintang to study. Jia sobbed behind the camera as he listened to the widow talk because when he was a child, his life was saved by the man. Jia carries his video camera around and films people and things when he feels compelled to. Sometimes he winds up in a fight and is threatened to have his camcorder destroyed. He often responds in those situations that there is nothing wrong to record reality. As his fame grows, more and more powerless people come to him and plead his help. However, he is not able to help everyone. Li Shibing, 72, sought Jia’s help with getting the compensation of his land after being relocated. Jia turned him down because he was under great pressure at the time. Three weeks later after Li spoke with Jia, Li committed suicide.[18]
What the above incident tells us is perhaps the insufficiency of cameras or similar projects that aim to teach people how to amplify their stories and make themselves seen and heard. Indeed, from 2005 on, probably inspired by the Village Documentary Project, a group of projects that share similar organization structures have sprung up in China. Just this year, the Environment & Human Short Documentary Project was conducted as part of a green project called “Qing Guo Qing Cheng Huan Jing Xin Guan Cha [Green Country Green City Environmental and Spiritual Observation],” which was organized by the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology (SEE) Foundation, Beijing Indie Workshop (founded in 2005 by Zhang Xianmin), and the Tencent Company for Public Welfare. College students from over 200 institutions were encouraged to participate in this project by submitting documentary proposals that explore contemporary environmental problems and construct innovative solutions. Of the proposals, 20 were selected as finalists. These students were given free training in video filmmaking as well as a small fund to complete their documentaries. The winners were shown at the Ullens Centers for Contemporary Art (UCCA) on November 9th, 2010 in Beijing. Some of the films produced are already available online at sina.com, which is one of the largest and most popular Chinese websites. Another example is Jian Yi’s IFCHINA Original Art Studio’s Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University. As is mentioned earlier on in the paper, IFCHINA uses the same model to teach ordinary Chinese how to use the video camera and tell their own stories. All of their works will be housed in the Memories of Museum (currently under construction) and will be free for public viewing. It is not hard to see that the three examples all put little emphasis on copyright issues and on commercial distribution. Despite making 20,000 yuan for airing their documentaries on TV twice, all the villagers involved in the Village Documentary Project expressed little interest in having their films official distributed. Wu mentioned that he also did not want to complicate the project and similar projects in the future by bringing in commercial partners. This differentiates the amateur videos by the villagers and perhaps other kinds of amateur videos, especially in the last century in the United States, as the argument made by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible goes, “the utopian and independent impulses of amateurism have been complicated by professional, commercial and official interests from the beginning.”[19] The significance of this cluster of Chinese projects, I argue therefore, points to something quite original compared to the more well-known route to fame in the Chinese independent cinema world.
Since the early 1990s, the way to have a serious career in documentary filmmaking for Chinese independent filmmakers has been to start making an award-winning documentary film in the international film festival circuit. After getting some awards, these independent filmmakers can then be more credited to secure funding for their next productions through official channels. Very often the funding comes from abroad, through film festivals, independent donors, international television stations, and grants from established cultural institutions. For examples, the Motion Pictures Association (MPA) Asian Pacific Screen Academy Film (ASPA) Fund is automatically open for application to ASPA Award winners, the Asian Film Fund by the Pusan International Film Festival has a special grant for documentaries, and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema offers NETPAC cash awards at 28 film festivals in 21 countries. If international support is unfortunately out of reach, Chinese independent documentary filmmakers have the option of applying for a limited amount of financial support by their local, regional, and in some cases national television stations. Investments, however, are rare because venture capital companies are more likely to fund fiction films, which have better profit returns. Going back to the Village Documentary Project, it is a pioneer in establishing a new mode of production and distribution. It awakens Chinese filmmakers that they need not limit themselves to making art alone, they need not be solidary fighters for whatever cause, their contacts in society are wide-ranged, so they can collaborate with different institutions for different purposes, and finally, they are capable of turning their subjects into filmmakers.
In October 2010, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds installation art was opened in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. Ai was commissioned by Tate for this exhibition. He hired almost the entire town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province from 2008 on to make life-size porcelain sunflower seeds. 150 tons of fake sunflower seeds were made in the end and shipped aboard. Ai paid all his workers using the money that he received from Tate. It was said that the town was on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved by Ai. If such is the case, what parallels can we draw between Ai , Wu, and Jian? Obvious, all three are Chinese; they have all been recognized for their art and/or films internationally; interestingly, all three also started engaging ordinary Chinese in their art or their work directly. I thought in the beginning that the engagement they were able to offer were insignificant because Ai’s workers were doing menial jobs and Wu told his film students to use their cameras to observe people and things and not to make probing documentaries like China Central Television’s program “Jiao Dian Fang Tan [Topics in Focus].” I thought the observational method that Wu preferred prevented the villagers from making use of their intelligence and thus reduced them to like-natured factory workers, who were just passively carrying out orders and operating a sophisticated machine. Additionally, I also paralleled the amateur videos by the villagers as just another kind of products carrying the “Made in China” label because they looked low-quality. However, my own views changed. I found out that the villagers became self-conscious during the project. Although they were asked to record reality and never required to rigorously examine or organize it, they have learned many valuable things, about themselves, about others, about what they could do for their villages once they had a camera. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” The camcorders were permanently given to the ten villagers. Some have continued to work with Wu and make documentaries and other not. I think that the important thing is not whether they become documentary filmmakers because the impact of the project is and should be beyond the ten of them. Society at large actually benefits from the Village Documentary Project and other similar projects, especially when they receive wide and transparent press coverage, because ideas will beget ideas. These projects are inspiring to in many good ways. Last but not least, the successes that these projects achieve will contribute to the building of a transnational infrastructure for new modes of production and distribution. In a rapidly modernizing nation still struggling to make everything work nicely together, I see these infrastructure-builders epoch-making.
[1] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 32.
[2] China Independent Documentary Film Archive, “China Villagers Documentary Project,” CIDAF News & Events, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.cidfa.com/modules/project.php?pid=4.
[3] “Caochangdi Workstation Art Center,” Caochangdi Workstation Intro, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/english/about_us.htm.
[4] Wu Wenguang, “Cun Min Ying Xiang Ji Hua Gong Zuo Shou Ji [Village Documentary Project Diary],” Caochangdi Workstation, Nov. 22, 2010,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectworknote.html.
[5] Matthew David Johnson, “’A Scene beyond Our Line of Sight’: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China, ed. Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 51-6.
[6] Wan Jing, “Jiu Shuo Lao Wu Qu Zhao Mei Nü Wan Le [Let’s Just Say Old Wu Left here Looking for Pretty Girls],” Southern Weekly, Oct. 31, 2007,
http://www.infzm.com/content/6826.
[7] “Jian Yi: Documentary Filmmaker and Photographer,” The New School India China Institute, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.newschool.edu/ici/subpage.aspx?id=23832.
[8] Jian Yi, “Message from the Co-founders,” IFCHINA Original Art Studio Participatory Documentary Center Annual Newsletter 2009 (English), Jan. 22, 2010, 2.
[9] “Who Are We?” IFCHINA Original Studio and Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University, Dec. 9, 2010,
http://www.ifchinastudio.org/.
[10] Nong Ke, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen [Thank Southern Weekly for Making My Dream Come True],” Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings],
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[11] Jia Zhitan, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Oct 31 - Nov. 4, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[12] Nong, “Gan Xie Nan Fang Zhou Mo Rang Wo Meng Xiang Cheng Zhen.”
[13] Shao Yuzhen, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 5 to 13, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[14] Zhou Cengjia, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 22, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[15] Wang Wei, Diary, Cun Min Zuo Zhe Shou Ji [The Villagers’ Writings], Nov. 6 to 7, 2005,
http://www.ccdworkstation.com/videosvillageprojectrnote.html.
[16] Worth and Adair, Through Navajo Eyes, 96.
[17] Teng Biao, “China: The Use of Citizens Documentary in Chinese Civil Rights Movements,” translated by florence, Interlocals, Aug. 19, 2010,
http://interlocals.net/?q=node/361.
[18] Li Xiaoshu, “Farmer’s Harvest of Reality,” Global Times: Discover China, Discover the World, June 9, 2010,
http://special.globaltimes.cn/2010-06/540395.html.
[19] Melinda Stone and Dan Streible, “Introduction: Small Gauge and Amateur Film,” Film History 15, no. 2 (2003): 123.
Han Sanping
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
December 18, 2010
High-Grossing Chinese and Korean Blockbusters and Their Role in the “Renaissance of National Cinema”
Blockbusters mobilize expansive social resources, assemble a great variety of talents, attract a wide range of audience, and make enormous profit returns. They cultivate a movie-going culture, help industrialize and streamline a country’s film industry, and put national cinema on a par with the best of Hollywood. This paper uses specific examples to discuss and compare how Chinese and Korean blockbusters help build their respective film industry, and the subsequent contributions that they make to their respective national cinema.
In my best judgment, the Chinese film industry has many things to learn from the South Korean film industry. During the course of this semester, the films that we have watched and discussed and the texts that we have studied give many pointers as to how to understand the renaissance of Korean national cinema. While the renaissance of Korean cinema is a good term to describe the rise of Korean cinema, I would like to pick this idea of renaissance apart because like the more popular notion, “hallyu” (sometimes “hallyuwood”), it indicates something temporary, and like a wave, it will soon fade away. Yes, all cultural phenomena have life cycles; they are all subject to “death.” However, isn’t it too early to issue the death certificate to Korean cinema? Can’t we think of it as still being in the process of making? I believe that much work still remains to be done to have Korean cinema realize its full potential, and for that to happen, the Korean cinema must not dwell on its past achievements. As for Chinese cinema, the same humility applies. Chinese films must understand that at the present, they are just beginning to make a splash. Major hits exist, but the overall quality is low. Although the numbers associated with its rate of growth are staggering, the industry is at large immature. At the managerial level, different authorial voices representing different authorial forces are still vigorously competing against each other. With no prior experiences, China’s first film industry legislation has yet been set in place to help sort out various kinds of legal matters. On top of these, the industry also perches precariously on China’s economy, whose future as we know has generated widely contrasting views. It shocked the world that China overtook Japan as the second largest economy in the world in the second quarter of 2010 in August 2010. Predictions also say that at the current rate, its economy will overtake the U.S. in the year 2035. But in reality this is just press. China’s problems far outnumber its achievements. There are so many potential pitfalls that the vista ahead really looks no more promising than a huge landmine.
The South Korean film industry is ahead of the Chinese film industry by at least ten years. This is also roughly I think how much South Korea’s economy is ahead of China’s economy structurally. Ten years may seem short, but (increasingly) they can be a long time in creating a big gap in the development of a film industry. As we know, new technologies replace old ones rapidly nowadays; the media and cultural landscape is also constantly being reshaped. In the last century, after the end of the Korean War (1950-3), South Korea’s film industry underwent a boom. The late 1950s and 1960s are widely known to be the Golden Age of Korean cinema, boasting many well-made domestic films. For China, this period was also a productive time. Movie-going was part of the popular culture, and a steady supply of films were made for the general public who could watch them at extremely low prices. However, while the Korean film industry continued to mature under the pressure of a series of nationwide democratic movements, China’s film culture was completely halted in 1966 because of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which no films were made. Although the industry was resuscitated after the political tumult, from the end of the 1970s to roughly the mid-1990s, it was doing notoriously badly in terms of box office. The lackluster performance was due to the industry’s haphazard transition from being centrally planned to being market-driven. The transition was partial and passive in practice because resistance to the reform was strong at every level. For one thing, the film culture was still largely conservative. It was structured on the Soviet-style command economy from the early 1950s. Everything from production quotas, to film licensing, to film distribution, and to film exhibition went according to the central government’s directives, giving no heed to the market. Neither Hollywood nor Western European imports were allowed into the country. The China Film Corporation (CFC) also adopted the so-called flat-rate film purchasing system whereby it contracted a studio’s entire production output regardless of quality. While it benefited the Fifth-Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who thrived in this space without having to face the consumers, the number of tickets sold kept dropping from 1980 to 1985, and the industry lost more and more money each year. Finally in 1986, studios were allowed to have a share in the box office revenue generated. It was this direct interest in the market along with various distributors’ and exhibitors’ growing autonomy from the CFC’s monopoly that finally enabled a new round of reforms in the industry, including horizontal integration with other businesses and the downsizing of the various overemployed distributors.[1]
In 1985, South Korea made an important trade agreement with the United States to drop its screen quota for domestic films from the previous number of one third of a year in 1976 to 146 days or 2/5 of a year. This resulted in an influx of Hollywood films in the domestic market, which was later thought to be the key external factor that helped spur the Korean film industry to make high-quality films. Internally, the financial support from well-endowed conglomerates or chaebol like Samsung and Hyundai enabled secure funding for big-budgeted films. In many cases, the corporates’ ways of conducting businesses helped streamline the industry. For instances, market research suddenly became an integral part of the pre-production process, and test screenings were added before the actual premieres. Overall, the industrialization of the film industry allowed it to establish a greater industrial chain, mobilize greater social resources, and in turn generate greater profits. Marriage Story (1992) was one of the first films produced in this manner; its success was later modeled and improved upon by other productions. It is thought that before the 1997 financial crisis hit the Asian market and resulting in the withdrawal of chaebol, the Korean film industry had actually already had a more-than-basic business infrastructure in place, which would account for the subsequent successes of a steady stream of commercial films since the 1999 hit Shiri (1999). On the Chinese side, China approved the importation of ten international blockbusters annually as late as 1994. Over the next fifteen years, the number slowly climbed to twenty. In 1995, just a year after the relaxation of importation policy, foreign films generated 70-80 percent of the total box office. As a counter measure to encourage domestic film production by generating profit for investment, the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television allowed Chinese studios to distribute imports on CFC’s approval list in 1996; the condition given was that one quality domestic film must be made in exchange for one imported film.[2] These measures and others slowly recovered the movie-going culture in China. As the statistics show, China’s box office revenue increased from $219.6 million in 2004 to $909 million in 2009, which equaled to an average 30% increase per year. In 2010, the revenue is expected to exceed $1.4 billion, keeping up with the previous growth rate. As for the number of films made domestically, it increased from 145 in 1995 to 456 in 2009. This number is expected to exceed 500 in 2010. By the end of 2009, the total number of multiplexes was 1670 and the total number of screens 4723, 626 of which were new screens added in 2008.[3] And the daily growth rate for the number of screens is currently at 3.3.[4] Major South Korean exhibitor Lotte Cinema is set to launch its first theatre this month. It also plans to open ten more sites in China in 2011, adding 70 more screens in 2011 and another 52 in 2012.[5] Reading these numbers I can feel blood pounding in my ear. On the one hand, they harbinger a great march forward. On the other, the rocketing numbers make me uneasy. I wish I could find out exactly how much revenue share Chinese domestic films have made in all the yearly totals from 1994 on so that I can then compare their growth. Unfortunately the statistics on the Chinese film industry are hard to come by even through the official Chinese websites.[6]
The growth of the Korean film industry is told in many different ways; one may perhaps attempt to tell it as a series of successful films that overtake Hollywood films in attracting the domestic audience. Shiri (1999), JSA (2000), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003), Taegukgi (2004), The King and the Clown (2005), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), The Host (2006), Scandal Makers (2008), The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008), Haeundae (2009) are all such examples. From the list, it is not too hard to see that their themes and undertones have shifted from more solemn topics involving sensitive political history to relatively lighter-hearted topics that deal with imaginary disasters or fantasy history. I think that the same trend applies to Chinese blockbusters, which are starting to lighten up their stories. Feng Xiaogang’s If You Are the One (2008) is a comedy; it is the third highest grossing domestic film. Feng’s latest big hit Aftershock (2010), which topped the chart, is a tragic drama dealing with the aftermath the 1978 Tangshan Earthquake. Up till this point, Feng has been making comedies only. For the purpose of this paper, my focus is set on another Chinese blockbuster The Founding of a Republic (2009). In my opinion, this film roughly sets the life clock of the Chinese film industry to Korean’s JSA (2000) a decade earlier. Both films have created box office miracles but are not the first ones to do so in their respective countries. I think that it will be interesting to compare how they tell extremely well-known histories to their respective national audiences in ways that are new and engaging. Can their successes be copied? If so, what lessons can we glean from them so as to serve the ever present need of constructing national cinema?
The Founding of a Republic (2009) was made for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the First Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). It covers the Chinese history from the end of World War II to 1949, known as the Chinese civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Party of Communists (CPC). The film does not focus on the battles. Instead, it focuses on the important historical figures during this history, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling, Soong Ching-ling, etc. However, it is not a drama about only a few of them either. The history is told through all of them without dramatizing any one of them. As is unbelievable as it sounds, 170 Chinese movie and television stars played in this film. Many of them appear on screen for just over a few seconds for very small roles. Jackie Chan plays a journalist for example, Zhang Ziyi is one of the women’s representatives who are taking a photograph with Mao, and Tony Leung Ka Fai shows up briefly as a photograph intruder. It is said that many of the stars came to act in the film without demanding any pay. In fact, if everyone did, the budget would have gone way beyond 37 million yuan ($5.56 million). I shall note here too that the film had a comparatively much shorter production period than most Hollywood films. It was made in roughly ten months, one third of the time of an average Hollywood film. In the beginning, the production team only assembled the core group of actors and actresses. The extreme successful marketing team, which advertised for this film while it was still in the production stage, did a great job of attracting star attention. New players joined the group as the production was taking place, and the team grew bigger and bigger as time went by in the snowball effect. Though new hiring was not included in the original budget, since many of them volunteered, the film was able to get completed within its budget. Some have attributed the snowball effect to the personal clout of one of the directors of this film, Han Sanping, who is also the chairman of the China Film Group Corporation (another name for the CFC), which as is mentioned earlier, is a very powerful national institution. This view may be a little skewed because patriotic sentiments are quite enough for a Chinese actor or actress to raise him or herself to this kind of occasion (sadly things may change in the future). Although on the one hand, no consumer will want to pay to watch a leitmotif film about China’s national history, on the other, the deep seated humiliation that Chinese bear of their modern history not counting the most recent two decades is not easily suppressible, especially if it has been aroused in the right manners.
In his essay “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” Frances Gateward comments on the relationship between cinema and national history. He writes that “cinema has become central to the national historical memory, providing younger generations engaging and readily available mimetic experiences of the monumental traumas of which they have no firsthand recollection.”[7] The marketing team of the film knew very well that they were going to face an audience that was young, most of whom would be in their 20s and 30s. As the subsequent market survey results show, 51.81% of the sample audience who watched this film was between 20 to 29 years old, roughly 20% was from each of the 30- to 39-year-old group and the 40-and-above group, and the rest came from people below 20.[8] How to make the 20-year-olds understand how the CPC gained its legitimacy as the leading party of China and why the KMT failed in this cause? Indeed, how did the KMT fail? I will discuss one scene in the film. I argue that this scene helps neutralize Chiang’s character, contrary to the more popular but negative imagination of Chiang for majority of people in mainland China. Together with the rest of film, Chiang’s mistakes and his resultant defeat are cleverly contextualized. The message is such that history can be cruel sometimes; bad political decisions can and will result in disastrous outcomes.
This scene happens in the quiet open space of a park. It says “Nanjing” on screen. Chiang and his son first appear in an extreme long shot, walking and talking. The color scheme is toned down, showing the wet rain-washed cement floor in black and grey and the distant foliage in dark shades of green. Chiang is dressed in a black changshan (a traditional Chinese long shirt for men) while his son Ching-guo in a grey Zhongshan suit (also known as Mao suit in the west). A flight of pigeons wipe the screen every now and then as they fly across the foreground to the background and back again. Chiang tells his son in a solemn voice that he flew back from Manchuria because of him. Madame Chiang was leaving for the U.S. to ask for help (effectively money help). At this crucial point, the KMT could not afford any tumult. A heavy tap of his walking stick on the ground followed by a sudden close-up of him accentuates this message, which is targeted at Ching-guo. Ching-guo responds by saying that the entire economy of China would collapse if the corrupted Kong family was not punished. “I absolutely understand,” Chiang lets out a deep sigh. “The corruption of the KMT is in the bones.” He continues to exhort his son that although punishing the corrupted is important, the timing and the degree are crucial too. A shot-reverse-shot shows Ching-guo in a grimace. The shot returns to Chiang as he utters, “It’s tough. You lose the party if you proceed. You lose the country if you don’t.” The disagreement between them is subtly conveyed through another medium shot of Ching-guo. Although he tells his father that both the country and the party are at the brink of disaster, his father cuts him short. Chiang gives a one-sided exhortation-cum-lecture on the most crucial things at hand. He walks up the stairs, exits the frame, leaving Ching-guo in an ethical suspension. A slightly tilted high-angle camera shot on Ching-guo suggests his inferior position in this matter. Even though he is eager to help, the corruption of the KMT, as Chiang says, has become incorrigible. By contrasting the will to correct evil and the evil itself, the point on the corruption of the KMT is very well delivered. Moreover, it is extremely easy to relate to for contemporary Chinese audiences because ironically, the CPC has also become a corrupt party after it gained power (despite its constant crackdowns on corruption). In as short as 2 minutes and 8 seconds (the entire length of this scene), we see that as a leader, Chiang has his priorities – he needs to call the U.S. for help and he needs to save the South (the North is taken by Mao). However, Chiang is bound hand and foot. His armies are tired; his people are suffering; his leadership is in a peril.
In JSA (2000), as we have seen, the North Korean soldiers are humanized. They are shown to be just as curious, funny, warm-hearted, and yet powerless as the South Korean soldiers. Even though these approachable images of them as created by the film go against the prevalent demonized images in popular media, they are easy for South Korean audience to accept through dramatization. After all, North Koreans and South Koreans are related both jus sanguinis and jus soli. The foregrounding of their male bond, fraternal love, and mutual devotion sweeps aside the political disparities between the two sovereignties. Tragedy only ensues when the political disparities erupts from below again. I read somewhere that Director Park Chan-Wook once said that he was a devout reader of Sophocles. Antigone, written by Sophocles in 442 BC, is exactly a tragedy brought about by the conflict between one’s devotion for one’s family and one’s devotion for one’s city. In theorizing tragedy, Hegel has deemed Antigone the best Greek tragedy ever written because it shows the underlying rubric of the tragic form – the conflict of two equally good causes. Interestingly, Park’s film Old Boy (2003) also resonates with another Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus the King, written in 429 BC. (The voluntary blinding of his eyes by Oedipus and the voluntary cutting of his tongue by Oh Dae-su powerfully pass on a cluster of metaphorical messages. For example, in order to gain true insights and peace of mind, corporeal faculties like vision and speech may not be the relevant any more. Oedipus the King was deemed by Aristotle as the best Greek tragedy in his book Poetics. As for Sophocles, his playwright career is developed highly systematically. He constantly seeks improvement using theory.) By absorbing the vitality of Greek literature and mixing it in his Korean movies, Park is “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
In the case of The Founding of a Republic, literature and other established cinematic methods are borrowed but new grounds are broken too. If The Founding of a Republic had tried to humanize Chiang as well as the others instead of historicizing them, it would have ended up a historical drama. I think that China’s founding history is perhaps too heavy and expansive to allow for simple dramatization, which could easily trivialize or travesty history. Maybe I feel this way because I was not raised in a democracy and therefore resist trying to understand history from more personalized points of views, or through heroism, friendship, etc. I respect literature with all my heart; however, I like to see cinema being challenged to explore its capacity too. As we know, personalized accounts of history are copious in cinema. In China, dramas about Mao and on Chiang are everywhere. The Found of a Republic does something quite different from those dramas because Mao is not the protagonist and certainly not the entire story. This is not to say that the film does not humanize the characters. Rarely can one imagine Mao Zedong happily getting drunk or Zhou Enlai losing his temper. These unconventional snippets of their lives aim to shorten the distance between the national leaders and the general public. However, that said, I can see that these character subplots are never developed fully, meaning that The Founding of a Republic is still firmly about the history and not about the people. The film does not judge individuals based on who they are. Nothing is personal. For example, when David Kung, the General Manager of the Yangtze Company and also Ching-kuo’s cousin, defiantly refuses to sell his hoarded supplies in his godown, he says that he is a businessman and this is how to do business. In fact, conflicts abound in this film, but time and again, every bad guy is contextualized, historicized.
Other noteworthy sequences in The Founding of a Republic include the round table discussion about the design of China’s national flag and the voting on China’s national anthem. These symbolic objects are highly emotionally charged for Chinese nationals. How the design and the song are determined behind the scene has never been depicted in cinema until in this film. During the voting, a delegate, who is played by a very famous Chinese actor and comedian, Feng Gong, keeps raising his hand to speak but keeps missing the opportunity as others speak first. Finally he speaks after the camera falls on him the twelfth time, but he says coyly that everything has been said already. This kind of humor downplays the individual. We laugh at him because we understand that he is just as eager as everyone else except not as lucky to be the first one to speak. By laughing at his final and only remark, we acknowledge that the agreement has been reached; our laughter is our way of participation and our way of support. In fact, humor is a great way of reaching out to the audience. In JSA, there are many memorable scenes where we laugh at the characters too. For example, while every other guard is standing like a column in the demilitarized zone, Sergeant Lee and Jeong Woo-Jin spit on each other across the border, violently suppressing their own laughter. In a way, if the audience laughs too, they are guided into being subversive and into disrespecting the border.
Thanks to the aggressive marketing by the Marketing Company of the CFC, the box office success of The Founding of a Republic was a miracle. An interview with the manager of the company, Jiang Fude, reveals many exciting new methods that they have adopted to promote this film. It used to be that marketing was never taken seriously for domestic films; the marketing branch of the CFC was set up as late as 2007. At first, they tried to market it as a holiday film for the 60th anniversary of China. However, as more and more stars joined the production, they quickly changed gear and started marketing it as a commercial film instead. Also, they did not make use of the commercial space on the state television China Central Television (CCTV) but made use of available platforms and created new channels for film advertising. For example, 4,000 sales agencies of Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd were mobilized to promote the trailer; yet, Tsinghua had never had any trade relation with the movie industry. The company’s strategic maneuvers greatly reduced the total marketing cost, which was budgeted at 10 million yuan ($1.5 million); the total revenue generated in the marketing sector tripled the cost. Many new chains were added on to the company’s existing operational chains, creating an expansive network of support.[9]
The Founding of a Republic made 420 million yuan ($63 million), ten times of its total budget. It is ranked as the second highest grossing domestic film made in China’s film history. This year, Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, which made 647.75 million yuan ($97 million), trumped it. Aftershock was co-produced by Huayi Brothers Co. – a private company unlike the state-run CFC – and IMAX. It will be interesting to see how Huayi and the CFC compete to have a share in the Chinese market in the future. As is evident in the recent five years, Chinese domestic films are climbing up the box office revenue chart one after another. With the success of each one of them, the industry slowly matures too. I think this is probably what has already happened in South Korea a decade earlier. As for national identity in national cinema, I think The Founding of a Republic is a rare achievement because it strikes a balance between individuals and history. It is entertaining but it is not entertainment. The film actually requires one to pay close attention to grasp the history. Watching this film feels like walking into a huge historical museum; you can feel its solemnity and a certain kind of openness. In our last class, Professor Jung-Bong Choi suggested that culture had shifted from following politics to following economics in the last five decades. Maybe Korean cinema has completed this transition while Chinese cinema is still in it. On another note, if the CFC integrates well with the market but at the same time remains a state enterprise and pits itself against the more commercialized Huayi, will the Chinese film industry be divided? If that happens, maybe the CFC will continue to promote national cinema by making quality pictures with non-escapist content, while Huayi will join the league with CJ Entertainment, making whatever to sell?
[1] Ying Zhu and Seio Nakajima, “The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry,” in Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, edited by Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010): 23-8.
[2] Ibid., 28-33.
[3] Ding Wenlei, “Building China’s Hollywood,” Beijing Review, Feb. 18, 2010,
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/business/txt/2010-02/11/content_246761.htm.
[4] Cheng Qi, “China’s Box Office is Expecting to Exceed 10 Billion Yuan in 2010,” China Economy, Nov. 18, 2010,
http://www.ce.cn/culture/whcyk/gundong/201011/18/t20101118_21979862.shtml.
[5] “CineAsia to Honor Lotte Cinema in December,” Yahoo! Movie News & Gossip, Nov. 14, 2010,
http://fe.movies.fy6.b.yahoo.com/news/usmovies.thehollywoodreporter.com/cineasia-honor-lotte-cinemas-december.
[6] Here are some combined results of the ten highest grossing Chinese films from my own research: 1) Aftershock (2010) yielded 647.75 million yuan ($97 million); 2) The Founding of a Republic (2009) yielded 420 million yuan ($63 million); 3) If You Are the One (2008) yielded 325 million yuan ($48.8 million); 4) Red Cliff I (2008) yielded 321 million yuan ($48.2 million); 5) Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) yielded 295.5 million yuan ($44.4 million); 6) Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) yielded 293 million yuan ($44 million); 7) Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) yielded 291 million yuan ($43.7 million); 8) A Simple Noodle Story (2009) yielded 261 million yuan ($39.2 million); 9) Red Cliff II (2009) yielded 260 million yuan ($39 million); 10) Hero (2002) yielded 250 million yuan ($37.6 million). Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) is currently playing in theaters, so its box office revenue is still growing.
[7] Frances Gateward, “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007): 194.
[8] China Film Art Research Center and China Film Archive, The Document of The Founding of a Republic (Beijing: China Film Press, 2010), 547.
[9] Ibid., 439-51.
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
December 18, 2010
High-Grossing Chinese and Korean Blockbusters and Their Role in the “Renaissance of National Cinema”
Blockbusters mobilize expansive social resources, assemble a great variety of talents, attract a wide range of audience, and make enormous profit returns. They cultivate a movie-going culture, help industrialize and streamline a country’s film industry, and put national cinema on a par with the best of Hollywood. This paper uses specific examples to discuss and compare how Chinese and Korean blockbusters help build their respective film industry, and the subsequent contributions that they make to their respective national cinema.
In my best judgment, the Chinese film industry has many things to learn from the South Korean film industry. During the course of this semester, the films that we have watched and discussed and the texts that we have studied give many pointers as to how to understand the renaissance of Korean national cinema. While the renaissance of Korean cinema is a good term to describe the rise of Korean cinema, I would like to pick this idea of renaissance apart because like the more popular notion, “hallyu” (sometimes “hallyuwood”), it indicates something temporary, and like a wave, it will soon fade away. Yes, all cultural phenomena have life cycles; they are all subject to “death.” However, isn’t it too early to issue the death certificate to Korean cinema? Can’t we think of it as still being in the process of making? I believe that much work still remains to be done to have Korean cinema realize its full potential, and for that to happen, the Korean cinema must not dwell on its past achievements. As for Chinese cinema, the same humility applies. Chinese films must understand that at the present, they are just beginning to make a splash. Major hits exist, but the overall quality is low. Although the numbers associated with its rate of growth are staggering, the industry is at large immature. At the managerial level, different authorial voices representing different authorial forces are still vigorously competing against each other. With no prior experiences, China’s first film industry legislation has yet been set in place to help sort out various kinds of legal matters. On top of these, the industry also perches precariously on China’s economy, whose future as we know has generated widely contrasting views. It shocked the world that China overtook Japan as the second largest economy in the world in the second quarter of 2010 in August 2010. Predictions also say that at the current rate, its economy will overtake the U.S. in the year 2035. But in reality this is just press. China’s problems far outnumber its achievements. There are so many potential pitfalls that the vista ahead really looks no more promising than a huge landmine.
The South Korean film industry is ahead of the Chinese film industry by at least ten years. This is also roughly I think how much South Korea’s economy is ahead of China’s economy structurally. Ten years may seem short, but (increasingly) they can be a long time in creating a big gap in the development of a film industry. As we know, new technologies replace old ones rapidly nowadays; the media and cultural landscape is also constantly being reshaped. In the last century, after the end of the Korean War (1950-3), South Korea’s film industry underwent a boom. The late 1950s and 1960s are widely known to be the Golden Age of Korean cinema, boasting many well-made domestic films. For China, this period was also a productive time. Movie-going was part of the popular culture, and a steady supply of films were made for the general public who could watch them at extremely low prices. However, while the Korean film industry continued to mature under the pressure of a series of nationwide democratic movements, China’s film culture was completely halted in 1966 because of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which no films were made. Although the industry was resuscitated after the political tumult, from the end of the 1970s to roughly the mid-1990s, it was doing notoriously badly in terms of box office. The lackluster performance was due to the industry’s haphazard transition from being centrally planned to being market-driven. The transition was partial and passive in practice because resistance to the reform was strong at every level. For one thing, the film culture was still largely conservative. It was structured on the Soviet-style command economy from the early 1950s. Everything from production quotas, to film licensing, to film distribution, and to film exhibition went according to the central government’s directives, giving no heed to the market. Neither Hollywood nor Western European imports were allowed into the country. The China Film Corporation (CFC) also adopted the so-called flat-rate film purchasing system whereby it contracted a studio’s entire production output regardless of quality. While it benefited the Fifth-Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who thrived in this space without having to face the consumers, the number of tickets sold kept dropping from 1980 to 1985, and the industry lost more and more money each year. Finally in 1986, studios were allowed to have a share in the box office revenue generated. It was this direct interest in the market along with various distributors’ and exhibitors’ growing autonomy from the CFC’s monopoly that finally enabled a new round of reforms in the industry, including horizontal integration with other businesses and the downsizing of the various overemployed distributors.[1]
In 1985, South Korea made an important trade agreement with the United States to drop its screen quota for domestic films from the previous number of one third of a year in 1976 to 146 days or 2/5 of a year. This resulted in an influx of Hollywood films in the domestic market, which was later thought to be the key external factor that helped spur the Korean film industry to make high-quality films. Internally, the financial support from well-endowed conglomerates or chaebol like Samsung and Hyundai enabled secure funding for big-budgeted films. In many cases, the corporates’ ways of conducting businesses helped streamline the industry. For instances, market research suddenly became an integral part of the pre-production process, and test screenings were added before the actual premieres. Overall, the industrialization of the film industry allowed it to establish a greater industrial chain, mobilize greater social resources, and in turn generate greater profits. Marriage Story (1992) was one of the first films produced in this manner; its success was later modeled and improved upon by other productions. It is thought that before the 1997 financial crisis hit the Asian market and resulting in the withdrawal of chaebol, the Korean film industry had actually already had a more-than-basic business infrastructure in place, which would account for the subsequent successes of a steady stream of commercial films since the 1999 hit Shiri (1999). On the Chinese side, China approved the importation of ten international blockbusters annually as late as 1994. Over the next fifteen years, the number slowly climbed to twenty. In 1995, just a year after the relaxation of importation policy, foreign films generated 70-80 percent of the total box office. As a counter measure to encourage domestic film production by generating profit for investment, the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television allowed Chinese studios to distribute imports on CFC’s approval list in 1996; the condition given was that one quality domestic film must be made in exchange for one imported film.[2] These measures and others slowly recovered the movie-going culture in China. As the statistics show, China’s box office revenue increased from $219.6 million in 2004 to $909 million in 2009, which equaled to an average 30% increase per year. In 2010, the revenue is expected to exceed $1.4 billion, keeping up with the previous growth rate. As for the number of films made domestically, it increased from 145 in 1995 to 456 in 2009. This number is expected to exceed 500 in 2010. By the end of 2009, the total number of multiplexes was 1670 and the total number of screens 4723, 626 of which were new screens added in 2008.[3] And the daily growth rate for the number of screens is currently at 3.3.[4] Major South Korean exhibitor Lotte Cinema is set to launch its first theatre this month. It also plans to open ten more sites in China in 2011, adding 70 more screens in 2011 and another 52 in 2012.[5] Reading these numbers I can feel blood pounding in my ear. On the one hand, they harbinger a great march forward. On the other, the rocketing numbers make me uneasy. I wish I could find out exactly how much revenue share Chinese domestic films have made in all the yearly totals from 1994 on so that I can then compare their growth. Unfortunately the statistics on the Chinese film industry are hard to come by even through the official Chinese websites.[6]
The growth of the Korean film industry is told in many different ways; one may perhaps attempt to tell it as a series of successful films that overtake Hollywood films in attracting the domestic audience. Shiri (1999), JSA (2000), Friend (2001), Silmido (2003), Taegukgi (2004), The King and the Clown (2005), Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), The Host (2006), Scandal Makers (2008), The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008), Haeundae (2009) are all such examples. From the list, it is not too hard to see that their themes and undertones have shifted from more solemn topics involving sensitive political history to relatively lighter-hearted topics that deal with imaginary disasters or fantasy history. I think that the same trend applies to Chinese blockbusters, which are starting to lighten up their stories. Feng Xiaogang’s If You Are the One (2008) is a comedy; it is the third highest grossing domestic film. Feng’s latest big hit Aftershock (2010), which topped the chart, is a tragic drama dealing with the aftermath the 1978 Tangshan Earthquake. Up till this point, Feng has been making comedies only. For the purpose of this paper, my focus is set on another Chinese blockbuster The Founding of a Republic (2009). In my opinion, this film roughly sets the life clock of the Chinese film industry to Korean’s JSA (2000) a decade earlier. Both films have created box office miracles but are not the first ones to do so in their respective countries. I think that it will be interesting to compare how they tell extremely well-known histories to their respective national audiences in ways that are new and engaging. Can their successes be copied? If so, what lessons can we glean from them so as to serve the ever present need of constructing national cinema?
The Founding of a Republic (2009) was made for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the First Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). It covers the Chinese history from the end of World War II to 1949, known as the Chinese civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Party of Communists (CPC). The film does not focus on the battles. Instead, it focuses on the important historical figures during this history, like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling, Soong Ching-ling, etc. However, it is not a drama about only a few of them either. The history is told through all of them without dramatizing any one of them. As is unbelievable as it sounds, 170 Chinese movie and television stars played in this film. Many of them appear on screen for just over a few seconds for very small roles. Jackie Chan plays a journalist for example, Zhang Ziyi is one of the women’s representatives who are taking a photograph with Mao, and Tony Leung Ka Fai shows up briefly as a photograph intruder. It is said that many of the stars came to act in the film without demanding any pay. In fact, if everyone did, the budget would have gone way beyond 37 million yuan ($5.56 million). I shall note here too that the film had a comparatively much shorter production period than most Hollywood films. It was made in roughly ten months, one third of the time of an average Hollywood film. In the beginning, the production team only assembled the core group of actors and actresses. The extreme successful marketing team, which advertised for this film while it was still in the production stage, did a great job of attracting star attention. New players joined the group as the production was taking place, and the team grew bigger and bigger as time went by in the snowball effect. Though new hiring was not included in the original budget, since many of them volunteered, the film was able to get completed within its budget. Some have attributed the snowball effect to the personal clout of one of the directors of this film, Han Sanping, who is also the chairman of the China Film Group Corporation (another name for the CFC), which as is mentioned earlier, is a very powerful national institution. This view may be a little skewed because patriotic sentiments are quite enough for a Chinese actor or actress to raise him or herself to this kind of occasion (sadly things may change in the future). Although on the one hand, no consumer will want to pay to watch a leitmotif film about China’s national history, on the other, the deep seated humiliation that Chinese bear of their modern history not counting the most recent two decades is not easily suppressible, especially if it has been aroused in the right manners.
In his essay “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” Frances Gateward comments on the relationship between cinema and national history. He writes that “cinema has become central to the national historical memory, providing younger generations engaging and readily available mimetic experiences of the monumental traumas of which they have no firsthand recollection.”[7] The marketing team of the film knew very well that they were going to face an audience that was young, most of whom would be in their 20s and 30s. As the subsequent market survey results show, 51.81% of the sample audience who watched this film was between 20 to 29 years old, roughly 20% was from each of the 30- to 39-year-old group and the 40-and-above group, and the rest came from people below 20.[8] How to make the 20-year-olds understand how the CPC gained its legitimacy as the leading party of China and why the KMT failed in this cause? Indeed, how did the KMT fail? I will discuss one scene in the film. I argue that this scene helps neutralize Chiang’s character, contrary to the more popular but negative imagination of Chiang for majority of people in mainland China. Together with the rest of film, Chiang’s mistakes and his resultant defeat are cleverly contextualized. The message is such that history can be cruel sometimes; bad political decisions can and will result in disastrous outcomes.
This scene happens in the quiet open space of a park. It says “Nanjing” on screen. Chiang and his son first appear in an extreme long shot, walking and talking. The color scheme is toned down, showing the wet rain-washed cement floor in black and grey and the distant foliage in dark shades of green. Chiang is dressed in a black changshan (a traditional Chinese long shirt for men) while his son Ching-guo in a grey Zhongshan suit (also known as Mao suit in the west). A flight of pigeons wipe the screen every now and then as they fly across the foreground to the background and back again. Chiang tells his son in a solemn voice that he flew back from Manchuria because of him. Madame Chiang was leaving for the U.S. to ask for help (effectively money help). At this crucial point, the KMT could not afford any tumult. A heavy tap of his walking stick on the ground followed by a sudden close-up of him accentuates this message, which is targeted at Ching-guo. Ching-guo responds by saying that the entire economy of China would collapse if the corrupted Kong family was not punished. “I absolutely understand,” Chiang lets out a deep sigh. “The corruption of the KMT is in the bones.” He continues to exhort his son that although punishing the corrupted is important, the timing and the degree are crucial too. A shot-reverse-shot shows Ching-guo in a grimace. The shot returns to Chiang as he utters, “It’s tough. You lose the party if you proceed. You lose the country if you don’t.” The disagreement between them is subtly conveyed through another medium shot of Ching-guo. Although he tells his father that both the country and the party are at the brink of disaster, his father cuts him short. Chiang gives a one-sided exhortation-cum-lecture on the most crucial things at hand. He walks up the stairs, exits the frame, leaving Ching-guo in an ethical suspension. A slightly tilted high-angle camera shot on Ching-guo suggests his inferior position in this matter. Even though he is eager to help, the corruption of the KMT, as Chiang says, has become incorrigible. By contrasting the will to correct evil and the evil itself, the point on the corruption of the KMT is very well delivered. Moreover, it is extremely easy to relate to for contemporary Chinese audiences because ironically, the CPC has also become a corrupt party after it gained power (despite its constant crackdowns on corruption). In as short as 2 minutes and 8 seconds (the entire length of this scene), we see that as a leader, Chiang has his priorities – he needs to call the U.S. for help and he needs to save the South (the North is taken by Mao). However, Chiang is bound hand and foot. His armies are tired; his people are suffering; his leadership is in a peril.
In JSA (2000), as we have seen, the North Korean soldiers are humanized. They are shown to be just as curious, funny, warm-hearted, and yet powerless as the South Korean soldiers. Even though these approachable images of them as created by the film go against the prevalent demonized images in popular media, they are easy for South Korean audience to accept through dramatization. After all, North Koreans and South Koreans are related both jus sanguinis and jus soli. The foregrounding of their male bond, fraternal love, and mutual devotion sweeps aside the political disparities between the two sovereignties. Tragedy only ensues when the political disparities erupts from below again. I read somewhere that Director Park Chan-Wook once said that he was a devout reader of Sophocles. Antigone, written by Sophocles in 442 BC, is exactly a tragedy brought about by the conflict between one’s devotion for one’s family and one’s devotion for one’s city. In theorizing tragedy, Hegel has deemed Antigone the best Greek tragedy ever written because it shows the underlying rubric of the tragic form – the conflict of two equally good causes. Interestingly, Park’s film Old Boy (2003) also resonates with another Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus the King, written in 429 BC. (The voluntary blinding of his eyes by Oedipus and the voluntary cutting of his tongue by Oh Dae-su powerfully pass on a cluster of metaphorical messages. For example, in order to gain true insights and peace of mind, corporeal faculties like vision and speech may not be the relevant any more. Oedipus the King was deemed by Aristotle as the best Greek tragedy in his book Poetics. As for Sophocles, his playwright career is developed highly systematically. He constantly seeks improvement using theory.) By absorbing the vitality of Greek literature and mixing it in his Korean movies, Park is “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
In the case of The Founding of a Republic, literature and other established cinematic methods are borrowed but new grounds are broken too. If The Founding of a Republic had tried to humanize Chiang as well as the others instead of historicizing them, it would have ended up a historical drama. I think that China’s founding history is perhaps too heavy and expansive to allow for simple dramatization, which could easily trivialize or travesty history. Maybe I feel this way because I was not raised in a democracy and therefore resist trying to understand history from more personalized points of views, or through heroism, friendship, etc. I respect literature with all my heart; however, I like to see cinema being challenged to explore its capacity too. As we know, personalized accounts of history are copious in cinema. In China, dramas about Mao and on Chiang are everywhere. The Found of a Republic does something quite different from those dramas because Mao is not the protagonist and certainly not the entire story. This is not to say that the film does not humanize the characters. Rarely can one imagine Mao Zedong happily getting drunk or Zhou Enlai losing his temper. These unconventional snippets of their lives aim to shorten the distance between the national leaders and the general public. However, that said, I can see that these character subplots are never developed fully, meaning that The Founding of a Republic is still firmly about the history and not about the people. The film does not judge individuals based on who they are. Nothing is personal. For example, when David Kung, the General Manager of the Yangtze Company and also Ching-kuo’s cousin, defiantly refuses to sell his hoarded supplies in his godown, he says that he is a businessman and this is how to do business. In fact, conflicts abound in this film, but time and again, every bad guy is contextualized, historicized.
Other noteworthy sequences in The Founding of a Republic include the round table discussion about the design of China’s national flag and the voting on China’s national anthem. These symbolic objects are highly emotionally charged for Chinese nationals. How the design and the song are determined behind the scene has never been depicted in cinema until in this film. During the voting, a delegate, who is played by a very famous Chinese actor and comedian, Feng Gong, keeps raising his hand to speak but keeps missing the opportunity as others speak first. Finally he speaks after the camera falls on him the twelfth time, but he says coyly that everything has been said already. This kind of humor downplays the individual. We laugh at him because we understand that he is just as eager as everyone else except not as lucky to be the first one to speak. By laughing at his final and only remark, we acknowledge that the agreement has been reached; our laughter is our way of participation and our way of support. In fact, humor is a great way of reaching out to the audience. In JSA, there are many memorable scenes where we laugh at the characters too. For example, while every other guard is standing like a column in the demilitarized zone, Sergeant Lee and Jeong Woo-Jin spit on each other across the border, violently suppressing their own laughter. In a way, if the audience laughs too, they are guided into being subversive and into disrespecting the border.
Thanks to the aggressive marketing by the Marketing Company of the CFC, the box office success of The Founding of a Republic was a miracle. An interview with the manager of the company, Jiang Fude, reveals many exciting new methods that they have adopted to promote this film. It used to be that marketing was never taken seriously for domestic films; the marketing branch of the CFC was set up as late as 2007. At first, they tried to market it as a holiday film for the 60th anniversary of China. However, as more and more stars joined the production, they quickly changed gear and started marketing it as a commercial film instead. Also, they did not make use of the commercial space on the state television China Central Television (CCTV) but made use of available platforms and created new channels for film advertising. For example, 4,000 sales agencies of Tsinghua Tongfang Co. Ltd were mobilized to promote the trailer; yet, Tsinghua had never had any trade relation with the movie industry. The company’s strategic maneuvers greatly reduced the total marketing cost, which was budgeted at 10 million yuan ($1.5 million); the total revenue generated in the marketing sector tripled the cost. Many new chains were added on to the company’s existing operational chains, creating an expansive network of support.[9]
The Founding of a Republic made 420 million yuan ($63 million), ten times of its total budget. It is ranked as the second highest grossing domestic film made in China’s film history. This year, Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, which made 647.75 million yuan ($97 million), trumped it. Aftershock was co-produced by Huayi Brothers Co. – a private company unlike the state-run CFC – and IMAX. It will be interesting to see how Huayi and the CFC compete to have a share in the Chinese market in the future. As is evident in the recent five years, Chinese domestic films are climbing up the box office revenue chart one after another. With the success of each one of them, the industry slowly matures too. I think this is probably what has already happened in South Korea a decade earlier. As for national identity in national cinema, I think The Founding of a Republic is a rare achievement because it strikes a balance between individuals and history. It is entertaining but it is not entertainment. The film actually requires one to pay close attention to grasp the history. Watching this film feels like walking into a huge historical museum; you can feel its solemnity and a certain kind of openness. In our last class, Professor Jung-Bong Choi suggested that culture had shifted from following politics to following economics in the last five decades. Maybe Korean cinema has completed this transition while Chinese cinema is still in it. On another note, if the CFC integrates well with the market but at the same time remains a state enterprise and pits itself against the more commercialized Huayi, will the Chinese film industry be divided? If that happens, maybe the CFC will continue to promote national cinema by making quality pictures with non-escapist content, while Huayi will join the league with CJ Entertainment, making whatever to sell?
[1] Ying Zhu and Seio Nakajima, “The Evolution of Chinese Film as an Industry,” in Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, edited by Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010): 23-8.
[2] Ibid., 28-33.
[3] Ding Wenlei, “Building China’s Hollywood,” Beijing Review, Feb. 18, 2010,
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/business/txt/2010-02/11/content_246761.htm.
[4] Cheng Qi, “China’s Box Office is Expecting to Exceed 10 Billion Yuan in 2010,” China Economy, Nov. 18, 2010,
http://www.ce.cn/culture/whcyk/gundong/201011/18/t20101118_21979862.shtml.
[5] “CineAsia to Honor Lotte Cinema in December,” Yahoo! Movie News & Gossip, Nov. 14, 2010,
http://fe.movies.fy6.b.yahoo.com/news/usmovies.thehollywoodreporter.com/cineasia-honor-lotte-cinemas-december.
[6] Here are some combined results of the ten highest grossing Chinese films from my own research: 1) Aftershock (2010) yielded 647.75 million yuan ($97 million); 2) The Founding of a Republic (2009) yielded 420 million yuan ($63 million); 3) If You Are the One (2008) yielded 325 million yuan ($48.8 million); 4) Red Cliff I (2008) yielded 321 million yuan ($48.2 million); 5) Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) yielded 295.5 million yuan ($44.4 million); 6) Bodyguards and Assassins (2009) yielded 293 million yuan ($44 million); 7) Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) yielded 291 million yuan ($43.7 million); 8) A Simple Noodle Story (2009) yielded 261 million yuan ($39.2 million); 9) Red Cliff II (2009) yielded 260 million yuan ($39 million); 10) Hero (2002) yielded 250 million yuan ($37.6 million). Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010) is currently playing in theaters, so its box office revenue is still growing.
[7] Frances Gateward, “Waiting to Exhale: The Colonial Experience and the Trouble with My Own Breathing,” in Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema, edited by Frances Gateward (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007): 194.
[8] China Film Art Research Center and China Film Archive, The Document of The Founding of a Republic (Beijing: China Film Press, 2010), 547.
[9] Ibid., 439-51.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Zhang Jingyin
For some reason this site no longer allows me to color my texts. I still want very much to write my posts in a tripartite fashion, but I can't do it any more.
Mike had me made an announcement on Facebook that he would terminate his Facebook account. I didn't like it because I didn't like the inconsistency in his words and actions. Not long ago he cared a lot about accepting a friend request on Facebook and pestered me about my delay in helping him with it. Now, he told me his executive decision to have it closed. He said he was afraid of identity theft. Why now? Why not earlier?
We had our fourth class on New Chinese Documentary in Angela's house. I think we had a good discussion, and I know I spoke up a lot more times than any of my classmates. I was the presenter.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
Week 7 (10/21/2010): Korean Blockbuster
A paradox has been twirling in my head since yesterday’s class on Korean blockbuster. Obviously not all American films have a market in South Korea because of the fact that they are culturally specific. The screen quota that South Korea eventually lifted in 2006 would be redundant even if it were kept in place. There is no doubt that Hollywood films target at the largest number of audience possible by churning out de-contextualized narratives that offend as few as they can. But American films do not equate Hollywood films. Left unrestricted by the quota, they may still not guarantee a good return unless it is arguable that South Koreans have a penchant for American films for some other reasons.
Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000) are both considered the mainstay of the first phase of Korean blockbuster, which exploits nationalistic sentiment above all. Both films tell stories of a divided Korea and hearken back to the Korean War. They set box-office records along with unprecedented popularity for two consecutive years respectively. For a few years after them, big-budgeted films using the same themes continued to reap box-office receipts in Korea. For examples, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005). The war fever only seems to have subsided as the second wave of Korean blockbuster caught on. With more developed technology, experienced management, mature venture capital, as well as an admired ambition to take on an even greater regional market, the second phase of Korean blockbuster is rid of cultural and political odor to resemble Hollywood even more.
In Sung Kyung Kim’s paper “’Renaissance of Korean National Cinema’ as a Terrain of Negotiation and Contention between the Global and the Local: Analyzing Two Korean Blockbusters, Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000),” Sung systematically explores the success of the two films according to the economic and industrial background at the time of their releases, audience’s expectations, and the mass-appeal characteristics of the films. While his methodology can be repeatedly applied to analyze all successful large-scale movies made in and for the domestic market, his findings are historically specific to South Korea. The 1997 financial crisis, which Sung suggests has made Korean nationalistic sentiment reach a new height, also affected countries and regions like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Though the film industries in these different places were not developed uniformly, anti-Hollywood campaigns did not sweep these other places and nationalistic sentiments were also kept at bay. Sung enumerates relevant government policies that helped vitalize Korean cinema, for examples, the Film Promotion Fund, the Cultural Promotion Fund, and tax incentives for private investors. However, the key factor that set off the ‘renaissance’ is arguably not monetary. The freedom to touch tabooed subjects in unconventional ways is the blessing of the Korean New Wave directors. This freedom was not just felt and enjoyed by Korean artists. Korean people in general felt the need to stop ostracizing their Northern neighbors. According an archived article by the Federation of American Scientists, “[i]n a public opinion survey conducted on the February 25 inauguration day, an overwhelming majority of 93.8 percent supported the Government's North Korea policies. Even in a survey done after the North Korean submarine incursion in June, 62.4 percent of the people supported the Sunshine Policy.”[1] Sung makes a point that “it is important to avoid dogmatic and suppressive nationalistic ideas and attitudes, and to dehumanize and demonize minority groups within the nation” (Sung 10). This may just be an accurate appraisal of South Koreans’ mentality in 1999 if the survey is correct and credible.
In “’Military Enlightenment’ for the Masses: Genre and Cultural Intermixing in South Korea’s Golden Age War Films,” David Scott Diffrient offers his view on 1960s Korean auteur Lee Manhee’s films about the Korean War. He gives extensive textual analysis of two of Lee’s films, The Men of YMS 504 (1963) and The Marines who Never Returned (1963), in order to prove that they give a fair cinematic representation of the war. One interesting observation that he makes is a similar question asked in both films. In The Marines who Never Returned, the question is “Why should I die?” In The Men of YMS 504, the question is “Why did my father die?” Apparently both questions are self-reflexive, but Diffrient posits that they exhibit characters’ consciousness that “personal survival could take precedence over heroism and national or political agendas” (Diffrient 45). This is a perfect example whereby the meaning of a text is created by the reader, the idea of which Roland Barthes argues in his famous essay “The Death of the Author.” Lee’s films were officially labeled as “military enlightenment” and “anti-Communist” by censors who worked for the Park Junghee regime because they read the films totally differently from Diffrient. These politically charged questions obviously did not manifest themselves as being politically subversive in their minds. More likely than not, they regarded these questions as rhetorical questions that were meant to elicit voluntary anti-Communist thoughts and sentiments. Under the Cold War atmosphere, majority of South Koreans must have complied with that line of thinking.
Kim Kyunghyun takes a similar approach as Sung in explaining the success of Shiri and JSA, but what is unique about his analysis, other than socio-economic reasons that he lies out, is the psychoanalytic component. These psychoanalytic arguments are very sophisticated at places, but they are worth reexamination. At the most superficial level, and to put it very bluntly, both Shiri and JSA ostracize females. In Shiri, Lee Myunghyun the female sniper is gunned down by her lover despite the fact that her military excellence surpasses that of many men. In JSA, Major Sophie Jean desperately tries to probe but at last remains at the peripheral of the male universe despite her excellent investigation skills. Kim associates the superior-yet-inferior status of these two female protagonists with the myth in psychoanalysis that film is a medium born of male fantasy. To digress here a little, most American screenwriting classes teach students that for narratives to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they have to be charged with actions, without which stories only move forward sluggishly. If we grant pro-action as having more resonance with the male rather than the female gender, then Lee Myunghyun and Major Sophie Jean will ultimately embody the male fantasy of female failure when women try to emulate men physically and rationally. Kim takes a step further. He writes,
The Korean War and the postwar authoritarianism had unleashed political terror that eventually led to the characterization of trauma through male masochism . . . genre films vied for remasculinization, transposing its historical pains and gentrifying it into pleasurable elements of gender relations ready for commercial consumption. (Kim 274)
The necessary assumption of Kim’s arguments is that Korean males are largely, if not solely, responsible for the vicissitudes of Korean people in the twentieth century. Despaired Korean males, who have indeed also suffered a great deal as soldiers and militants, find solace when they can finally confer the commonly agreed and admired male characteristics – such as the power to fight and the power to probe – to women. Through fantasies of “male masochism,” which I take to mean the loss of their lover or friends in Shiri and JSA respectively, “male subjectivities are born” (Kim 275). These subjectivities must be self-reflexive because they reveal the contradictions in males themselves. They are made aware of their own failures by the very male values that they uphold. After all, “male masochism” produces pleasures perhaps just like female masochism. Using psychoanalysis as the lens to read Shiri and JSA, Kim certainly enriches the textual analysis. Whether to agree with him is however another matter.
[1] Federation of American Scientists, “The Government of People’s Sunshine Policy toward North Korea and Plans for Implementation,” 1999 South Korea Special Weapons Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Missile Proliferation News, April 12, 1999. http://www.fas.org/news/skorea/1999/990412-sunshine.htm (accessed October 22, 2010).
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