Article about China's new documentary

Dancing with Myself,Drifting with My Camera:The Emotional Vagabondsof China's New Documentary

by Bérénice Reynaud

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/chinas_new_documentary.html

The voices of silence I saw my first Chinese documentary, Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing – The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing – Zuihou De Mengxiangzhe, 1990), at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1991. A young man was taking a hand-held video camera though the streets, back alleys and run-down apartments of Beijing, probing into the daily lives of marginalised artists. Part Jeanne Dielman (for its long takes, mundane actions and empty domestic spaces), part awkward cinéma vérité-cum-talking heads, with a touch of interventionism à la Marcel Ophuls (as Wu sometimes appears in the image and can be heard conversing or arguing with his subjects), Bumming in Beijing, unfolding over 150 minutes, offered access to a China never seen before, and was a genuine breakthrough in formal terms. I have recounted elsewhere, in a text recently quoted in Senses of Cinema, the exhilaration I experienced at discovering this first documentary (1). I was particularly fascinated by the moments in which apparently “nothing happened” and nothing was said. As I was analysing it at the time as a throwback to the tropes of Chinese classical painting (in which “the void” plays an essential part) (2), I was happily challenged by Ernest Larsen's sensitive description of the piece: Wu is not afraid to show us “nothing” – someone cleaning a flat, for example, or making a painting... It is tempting to see this figure of style as distinctively “Chinese” – but the temptation is worth resisting. Furthermore, Wu's long takes and emphasis on duration serve as a kind of counterpoint to the suddenness with which Tiananmen was crushed... The prolonged moments of near silence in Bumming in Beijing produce the aesthetic effect of outlasting the remembered roar of government tanks (3). On the other hand, at crucial moments, Wu adopts a performative mode that goes beyond the tropes of traditional vérité and brings forward his body and his voice, as if to fill the void. Yet, unlike Marcel Ophuls, who inserts his disruptive questions and confrontational humour to track down his interviewee's lies and omissions, Wu stages himself within the picture he (re)creates. The void that structures Bumming in Beijing sends the viewer back to the few months between spring and autumn of 1989 during which no image was taken and death was taking its toll. It is a void that threatened to engulf him as well as his subjects, so the relationship he establishes with them, far from being confrontational, is of shared sympathy. Of the five people whose lives he observes – a female writer (Zhang Ci), a male (Zhang Dali) and a female (Zhang Xia Ping) painter, a photographer (Gao Bo) and an experimental theatre director (Mou Sen) – two define themselves as “vagabonds” (mangliu) (4) either emotionally (Zhang Xia Ping, who later has a nervous breakdown in front of the camera) or professionally (Gao Bo, who equates it to the state of being a freelance photographer (5)). Like them, Wu is an independent artist, unattached to any “work unit”, and working underground – a fate shared by a number of filmmakers of the “Sixth Generation” after 1990 (6).

Graduation, Blog, Popcorn, Mountain and Documentary

A good Friday night should starts with waiting for your buddies to come at the crossroad and sees the sunset of Spring night on this metropolitian city. The last brush of sunlight casts its shade on the face of the St. John's statue and the night falls before you notice it. The switching point of day and night has this transforming quality, which bringing a sense of silent film: we know silent film is never silent, with live-music and subtitle and passion; the moment just after sunset contains the remaining vibration of the endless movement of the day, but also a sense of silence and underground turbulence of the night. Stood there as I did, I enjoyed the 10 minutes of being alone in crowd, saw dogs fighting, babies crying, cars passing and I stood there as a rock in a stream. The talk of the everning was about Blog, the debate about it and what we get from it. Liu introduced couple of bloggers she viewed all the time and also some meaningless but hot debate among writers and literature critices nowedays. And then Hao told some unpleasant experience about his job search in Beida and Tsinghua and his final decision to go back Beida and Teach. I am happy it worked out eventually and hope he will have a good head start there. His graduation seems to be a sure thing on the table, but mine is so vague now. I know I should have nothing to complaint about, but the uncertainty about my future makes me really uncomfortable. But at least I learn one thing from our discussion that I should not hope to find my ideal job in one shot and maybe I should start with whatever I get and keep on searching. Liu wishes to launch her new career as documentary film/TV maker after graduation and she is learning by doing now. She helps some groups to make documentaries and learn all aspects of that business. And then we have a debate about talent. She believed only the talented person can make the big hit, with superb sensitivity to bring the dramatic event in ordinary life in to big screen. The creativity underlying the choice of topic is almost everything that counts. I'd rather believe it is the critical thinking, the philosophical reflection about human being, and artistic presentation which make great documentaries. Like the recent hit, the Darwin's Nightmare. Everyone knows the military conflict in Congo and people suffer from the civil war. However it was the director's observation of the link between globalization, the underlying western involvement, the unequal distribution of wealth, which contributes to the unique perspective of the film. To be creative is easy, but it is difficult to make a life by being creative always. So my suggestion to Liu is to be a producer rather than a director or screenwritter. :) After the long dinner, we walk about 50 blocks to see the Brokeback Mountain. We passed by a small popcorn shop on Broadway after we walked by the only off-Broadway theater on Broadway. The shop produces iteself and it originally from the small town of Popcorn in Indiana. The popcorn is very sweet but tasty, like the early spring night we enjoyed. At a moment or two, we talked about what our definition of "happy life" is. Hao said he want to have family and becomes a famous professor after 20 years of hard working. Liu makes jokes about his definition of Kant-like fame and her definition is to have some great ideas and makes several good documentary. She believes it is the creativity which makes her life happier. I don't know how to response to the question. My answer is something in between. I am stilling looking for what I am becoming, at my old age, it sounds like nonsence but it is not. People like Ennis and Jake are lucky, even though they suffer from not able to live their ideal lives, but at least they realize earlier who they are and what they want. They have no doubt about their sexual identity and their source of happiness is simple: to go to a remote place like the B-mountain and be themselves. In real life, every few of us has a place to retreat. Go figure youself, that is our fate. Plan to see a documentary film talk by Wu Wenguan at NYU next Friday. As the leading figure of the so called New Documentary Movement in China, he attractes both eyeballs and money from big sponsors like EU. The project called Village Video Project and try to capture the changing scence in Chinese rural areas from villager's own perspective. However, I feel a little bit cliche about the idea; eventually it is him to decide to whom the DV camera is given, and what to show in the western median and what not to show. The voice of people is collected by him and disseminated by him, and at the end of the day it is his art work not theirs.

lost and found

I forgot my memory stick in computer lab and suddendly I realized I have no backup of it. The idea terried me and I faced the danger of lost of my dissertation analysis. I run back to library and the nice guy sat in front of the computer said he did find it and returned it to front desk. Here again my dearest friend, my hours of working in the boring lab!!! I am in physically weak condition today. My talk with International Office makes me sick and no other good news come in. I am disappointed about myself, my work and my inercia to move on. In fact I worked out too much of my poor body this week and it complains a lot. My back hurts and I decided not to go my squash class tonight.

杜甫 夢李白之一

死別已吞聲， 生別常惻惻。 江南瘴癘地， 逐客無消息。 故人入我夢， 明我長相憶； 君今在羅網， 何以有羽翼？ 恐非平生魂， 路遠不可測。 魂來楓林青， 魂返關塞黑； 落月滿屋梁， 猶疑照顏色。 水深波浪闊， 無使蛟龍得。

孟郊 遊子吟

慈母手中線， 遊子身上衣； 臨行密密縫， 意恐遲遲歸。 誰言寸草心， 報得三春輝？

李頎 聽董大彈胡笳聲兼寄語弄房給事

蔡女昔造胡笳聲， 一彈一十有八拍。 胡人落淚沾邊草， 漢使斷腸對歸客。 古戍蒼蒼烽火寒， 大荒沈沈飛雪白。 先拂聲絃後角羽， 四郊秋葉驚摵摵。 董夫子，通神明， 深山竊聽來妖精。 言遲更速皆應手， 將往復旋如有情。 空山百鳥散還合， 萬里浮雲陰且晴。 嘶酸雛雁失群夜， 斷絕胡兒戀母聲。 川為靜其波， 鳥亦罷其鳴； 烏孫部落家鄉遠， 邏娑沙塵哀怨生。 幽音變調忽飄灑， 長風吹林雨墮瓦； 迸泉颯颯飛木末， 野鹿呦呦走堂下。 長安城連東掖垣， 鳳凰池對青瑣門， 高才脫略名與利， 日夕望君抱琴至。

Identity

I started to read Kundera's Identity last night after a long conversation with Mao. Mao mentioned one of her students at NYU suddenly lost her mental control and became unconcisous since the past Sunday. I met that girl once at Mao's new year party. She was graduated from Nankai University and married her foreign lanugage instructor and moved to U.S. in 1999. She is of my age and just started her doctoral study last Fall. She is kind of easy-going and happy nature girl and her happiness is contangious. We went along pretty well and had a lot of fun that night. Mao said her husband flew from Virginia when she was already hospitalized. She can not even recoginze him. No reason was released about her sudden madiness. Mao and I feel sorry for her, but we don't know what we can do at this stage. It is a very difficult situation. She is American and has her family, and her husband doesn't want other people to get into their privacy. If she will continuous be insane, I don't know what will happen to her,without her extended family around her. That was the story I was told before I began to read Identity, another story about lovers who lost their identity even with the closest ones. Lovers suddently forget about each other. In the begining of the book, Chanty had this dream in which her ex husband and his new wife appeared, as well as lots of other people who had not got involved in her life for a long time. She concluded that the dream was to de-value her present life by boosting her past, and she refused to take it because she liked her present way of living and her lover Jean-Mac. I stopped there and went to sleep. Then I had this weird dream myself, about my mid school classmates, especially this girl called Cheng Wen. I was not particular kin on her even in school days, but in my dream she got married and had kids. We talked and then she had to leave for home. I am very tired after that dream. What does it mean? Today is International Women's Day and I have to reflect who I am and what I am becoming. In the dream, I seemed to lost my identity and became nothing more than a joke to my friends who had "real-life". Is it true? Do families, kids, husbands, homes prove your success? Do I need all these to make my life "full of meaning"? I doubt. But the tougher question is "what is it then?" Kundera let his heorin to make jokes about the married men, and called them "daddized". So if I am not going to mommized myself, what shall I be? I always complain that I don't have a life here as doctoral student, but will I have a life later as a faculty or researcher or anything? I need to define myself through my work, my relationship, my family and my beliefs. But now, many of them are hanging in the air. So who am I? A caterpillar? But a caterpillar of what? Maybe it is the morning Yoga class which makes me too critical about myself. The truth is I am in the middle of the river, between puberty and adulthood, between student and profession, between China and America. My life so far is about cross the lines, but where is my boundary?

My brother

Here is my brother.

coincidence

Recently, I find the movie star Liu Ye looks very similar as my brother in his early 20s. Before that, I always think my bro has some remote African heritage which makes him appears differently.

Blog of mind

Blog is the thing you can fall in love with. By chance, I find blog of my college friend and her crowd in Beijing. They are typical white-cellar high-maintance girls in BJ and they live the kind of live which I could have live. I read their writings, there seems to be much desire and temptation which I can not possibly afford.

Some of them are very articulated and their writings have this quality to commuicate with the least possible touch of their real emotion. They live the metropolitian lives, but constantly feel like outsiders or observers. What is real in the floating world of theirs? What do they count on in the mid of lonelyness?

They live a parellal lives as professionals here. They consume same drinks, food and especially entertainments. They watch Desperate Housewives, Six Feet Under, and the BIG H-movies, and they have the luxury to travel to the most remote areas in China with modern transportation modes. They fight back and forth between Beijing and Hong Kong, and they consume at the most popular clubs and KTVs in town. After a while, the eye-catching characters of these descriptions faded and you face a group of naked souls without home. One of them left Beijing for Hong Kong and she commented, Beijing contains too much desires which she can not afford. Desire for too much of everything. Is it true?

People use blog to map their minds. So you see everything in blogs. It seems many of the bloggers I read started to write from late last year. Maybe I should read more of them to understand the regular people of my age in BJ.