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 31^st 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 1^st to 4^th, 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 9^th, 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.

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[1] Sol Worth and John Adair, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, 2^nd 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.