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Chinese Digital Cinema - Lensing Life
By Ben Cho
(August 2008)
With Beijing aggressively "reduxing" its cityscape and culture for the impending Olympics, it seems like as good a time as ever to drop by and check the vigorously beating pulse of the nation's digital cinema movement and what Chinese independent filmmakers are doing to communicate the rapid, radical and often-surreal mutations to the "reality" of Chinese life.
Take one look at a Beijing tourist map and you'll notice the six square "rings" which surround the inner city's big drawcards: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the 798 art-gallery district, the Summer Palace, the clubs of Dongcheng District. Beyond the sixth ring, however, lies a small village, Songzhuang, home of numerous farms, factories and deserted wastelands.
It takes about seventy minutes from Tiananmen to reach Songzhuang, and, on this particular occasion, I was indebted to a friend who accompanied me to navigate the complex chain of public buses and trains needed to arrive there (in Beijing's gridlock, a taxi is simply not an option for those concerned about time and money). There's virtually no signage in English and it's refreshing to see a street that hasn't been stained with a McDonald's, KFC or Pizza Hut (like so many things in China, this may have changed the instant I left...).
What drew me to Songzhuang first and foremost was the chance to visit the area where two of China's most important film festivals are housed, the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the China Documentary Film Festival. One of the key figures behind these festivals (and many of the films screened there) is Zhu Rikun. Zhu's grand vision for Songzhuang is to convert it into a one-stop shop for China's indie filmmakers to complete post-production and unveil works at the district's film festivals.
We drive around the area and visit the Songzhuang Art Center, one of the main screening venues, and then onto Zhu's home, which is being renovated to accommodate visiting artists and filmmakers and, eventually, post-facilities. His company, Fanhall Films, takes this vision one step further as a production and distribution home for the waves of digital filmmakers eager to get their vision beyond China and onto the international film landscape.
Conversation naturally turns to the recent run of digital cinema making serious inroads abroad and the filmmakers who are leading the charge: Wang Bing, Ying Liang, Yu Guangyi, Cui Zi'en, Zhang Yuedong, Peng Tao, Yang Heng, Wang Wo and many, many others. Some of their films are slowly finding their way onto DVD, but most have been restricted to screenings at festivals like Vancouver, Rotterdam, Hong Kong and Pusan. After a few hours in Songzhuang discussing filmmaking, festivals and the area's future prospects, I make the trek back to my hotel in the heart of Beijing and get on the email about writing a few notes on the filmmakers, to keep a careful eye on in the future.
Good Cats, Mid-Afternoon Barks and a Little Moth
Now, it would be wrong to suggest that many of the filmmakers mentioned here form some new "Generation" the way Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and others formed the backbone of the "Fifth Generation" or Wang Xiaoshuai, Jia Zhang-ke and Zhang Yuan constitute the so-called "Sixth Generation." But there's no denying a swarm of new directors (some very young and others middle-aged) are making serious waves on the international film scene, utilizing digital technology in narrative and documentary filmmaking modes to check the pulse of up-to-the-moment China.
A lot of distinguished work is being done in both Shanghai and Beijing examining life in those cities, but the last twelve months or so have yielded a number of brilliant works by filmmakers whose geographical attentions lie elsewhere. For Sinophile cinephiles eager to investigate the full spread of China's landscapes, there's been some outstanding work depicting the grungy streets of Zigong (Ying Liang's The Other Half) all the way to Guangxi's tropics (Zhao Ye's Ma Wu Jia), the gritty coastal areas of Fujian (Weng Shou-ming's Fujian Blue) back to the humid sidewalks of Hunan (Yang Heng's Betelnut).
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At the forefront of China's DV-renaissance is Ying Liang, a Shanghai-born filmmaker currently based in Sichuan province (which was recently rocked by devastating earthquakes). All of Ying's immensely-moving feature films - Taking Father Home, The Other Half and Good Cats - are set in Sichuan province, and all feature a similar aesthetic approach with their sharply-composed and coolly distanced imagery. While each may center on a rather tragic figure struggling to make sense of Sichuan's social climate, there are plenty of droll delights sprinkled throughout the films and keen socio-political insights about life in small-city China.
Ying has been working away with his producer/partner Peng Shan in Sichuan, very much removed from the filmmaking communities in Shanghai and Beijing, but there have been many difficulties faced by the duo in making cinema on the sorts of budgets usually allocated for the hair-dressing department alone of American studio pictures. They are, by and far, some of the most exciting voices to emerge from China's independent film scene of late. Ying happens to be one of the most tenacious and strong-willed, too, and his latest film, Good Cats, is another mini-masterpiece of small-town thuggery, sexual frustration and Chinese death metal in Sichuan province. Festival screenings beckon...
Peng Tao's Little Moth tackles the problem of child exploitation in the provinces, and it's bound to bring a tear to the eye of even the most hardened cinephile. A docudrama of quietly devastating power, the little moth of the title is a young, disabled orphan sold to a poor couple who exploit her disability to help their begging racket. Territorial squabbles between rival beggars gives our protagonist a chance of escape, but the prison goes well beyond the grip of her surrogate parents; it's a society high on greed, indifference and exhaust fumes. Meanwhile, a group of teenage boys spend their days dodging the sweltering sun of Hunan in Yang Heng's Betelnut. Unlike Peng's handheld camerawork, Yang's visual approach is to capture the boys in long-shots and long-takes, and the resulting effect gives the audience a fairly accurate sense of the pace and rhythm of daily life in Hunan. Like their small-town teen counterparts in the western world, the boys kill time by fighting and hanging out in Internet cafes, karaoke bars and on the riverbanks. There's next to no narrative drive fuelling Yang's film, but to look for character arcs, plot turning points and the like is to miss the point; Yang's debut is much closer in spirit to the experimental work he did as a short filmmaker than, say, the dramatic urgency of Little Moth.
Zhang Yuedong starred in Li Hongqi's wonderfully offbeat comedy So Much Rice, and perhaps Li's idiosyncratic approach to tackling the mysteries of urban living rubbed off on the young director. His very distinct debut feature, Mid-Afternoon Barks (image at top of page), draws on Ionesco far more than Peng's gritty social-realism. Divided into three parts, the film accumulates meaning from its series of strange encounters and discussions all the way to the final moments that render prior events a new level of significance. An innovative sound design (thanks in part to Zhang Yang, frequent collaborator of Jia Zhang-ke) is matched by an audaciously conceived set of images, all of which direct themselves to the closing scene of light poles sprouting up across a village. The brilliance at the core of Zhang's film is to conceptualise the problems of rural China in an offbeat cinematic language that gets to the heart of the issues in its own weirdly wonderful way. My only hope is that some brave distributor takes a chance on the film and brings it out on DVD.
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Jia Zhang-ke and 24 City
Jia Zhang-ke is perhaps the most prominent Chinese independent director who has taken up digital filmmaking to consistently magnificent results. His earlier features, the acclaimed Xiao Wu and Platform, were shot on 16mm and 35mm respectively, but Jia turned to digital filmmaking for 2002's Unknown Pleasures, and since then he has continued to go digital for The World, Dong, Still Life, Useless and 24 City.
Regardless of format, what has remained constant throughout Jia's feature-films has been his intense focus on effects of the rapid shifts in the socio-economic climate for those at the lower rungs of China's social-ladder. From the pickpocket, Xiao Wu, of his feature-debut to the dancing brigade of Platform, and the drifting travelers in search of loved ones in Still Life to the retired workers and ambitious capitalists of 24 City, nearly all of Jia's protagonists are very much victims of a China scarred and continually thrashed by momentous social change.
Last year, Jia released the short film Our Ten Years, commissioned by a Chinese newspaper, which thematically continued this focus in the most simple of terms: a train passes through the seasons and the decades, and two women experience the changes from the Cultural Revolution to the current YouTubed world. But the digital format has worked marvellously for Jia's productions of late, and there seems to be an exact sync of form and content given Jia's continuing interests in the bleeding of "fiction" into "reality" (and vice versa). Working with cinematographer (and sometimes director) Yu Lik-wai, Jia nails down with an extraordinary precision the haunting beauty of his environments in both his documentaries (Dong and Useless) and narrative features (The World, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life). The graceful and contemplative cinematography shared between both fictional and documentary forms has ultimately reached a point where his fiction-features are deeply etched with a mesmerising realism and his documentaries contain a layer of enigmatic artificiality to them that feeds back into the overall thematic pursuit of what's really "real" in current China.
This conceptual blend ultimately leads us to Jia's latest feature, 24 City, which screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year - a terrific fusion of documentary and fiction that is by far his most fascinating experiment yet. Setting his film in a factory-district formerly famous for producing armaments, Jia goes about interviewing retired workers and the area's new inhabitants about their past, the present and the uncertain future. Well-known Chinese actresses such as Joan Chen, Zhao Tao (Jia's regular muse) and Lu Liping "star," but they're slyly inserted as talking heads amongst actual interview subjects. The peppering of familiar actresses amongst real-life subjects is, in some ways, the sort of cheeky surrealism that found its way into Still Life when a rocket launched off into outer-space or a UFO flashed through the skies. There's another subtle effect in having Joan Chen and Lu Liping's star personas levelled as normal Chengdu dwellers. The film explores the way in which China's shifting historical periods have momentarily benefited some only to significantly downgrade them later, and the appearance of these actresses democratised amidst ordinary faces contributes to an overall tension running through the film. As critic Robert Koehler once stated about the China of Jia's The World, instability is the "only constant in this ever-emerging thing called ‘China.'" Jia announced that 24 City was his gift to China for the Olympics, and it's a valuable, cautionary offering for the scores of uber-rich currently sitting at the top of the social hierarchy, not to mention the Communist government trying to control the growing unrest and unbalanced economy.
Han Jie and Diao Yinan: The Jia Zhang-ke Connections
Han Jie has worked as Jia Zhang-ke's assistant director on a number of Jia's productions, but he only recently directed his debut feature, Walking on the Wildside, a rollicking road-movie about three wayward teens in Shanxi who go on the run after brutally bashing a fellow school student. The influence of Jia's style of cinema understandably hangs off Wildside, but there's a sufficient formal flair to it all and Han elicits potent performances across the board from his non-professional cast. Diao Yinan starred in Yu Lik-wai's All Tomrrow's Parties and he's written a number of feature scripts (he was one of the many writers on Shower), but I think he's well on his way to becoming a top-notch director. Jia and Yu Lik-wai served as "artistic advisors" on Diao's debut feature, Uniform, a terrific social-realist drama focusing on a young guy in Xi'an who takes a cop's uniform and gets up to all kinds of mischief with the new authoritarian attire.
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Screened in last year's Director's Fortnight at Cannes, Diao's sophomore feature, Night Train, is in some ways a "thriller," but Diao's spot-on sense for lacing the story with jet-black humor, not to mention his ability to invest in his characters a real sense of humanity and vulnerability, gives it an intense and moody atmosphere all its own. The film's elegant visual style (courtesy of Dong Jinsong) is on direct display from the stark, haunting opening, but the splendid imagery isn't just meant to please the eye - in the tradition of the great European auteurs, Diao's strictly controlled framing conveys much about his characters and their depressingly bleak environment in a way that only the best cinematic imagery can. Again a police uniform is prominently placed on the film's protagonist, but this time we're in the company of a female, Wu Hongyan, a thirty-something bailiff in charge of female prisoners awaiting execution in a grim industrial province of Shaanxi. When she's not on the job, Wu travels to matchmaking dances in search of companionship and, maybe, love, completely absent from the grim realities of her job. When she encounters Li Jun, a smelting plant laborer, her job and her love life will cross paths with extraordinary results... Essential viewing.
Reality Bites Hard
On the documentary side of cinema, Wang Bing is surely one of the world's most important filmmakers, not to mention an icon for independent docu-makers in China. His 2002 epic nine-hour look at the industrial wastelands of Northeastern China, West of the Tracks, earned Wang worldwide acclaim although the film has yet to be released on DVD in the U.S. or U.K. (a French DVD without English subtitles is still bumping around online marketplaces).
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2007's He Fengming screened at the Cannes Film Festival that year and was relatively short in comparison. Chinese history is once again at the heart of He Fengming, a three-hour interview with an elderly ex-journalist who suffered incredible emotional and physical pain throughout the Cultural Revolution. Wang's camera remains firmly fixed on the titular subject as she details at length her tragic romances, her exiled life in the labor camps and her resolute attitude to survival it all. No documentary in 2007 quite matched the raw emotional power of He Fengming, and no other documentary even came close to doing it with the most simple of formal methods.
Wang also had the short film Brutality Factory screened as part of the State of the World omnibus at Cannes that year and it was a similarly hard-hitting piece of history (this time produced as fiction) about the Cultural Revolution-era torturing of political dissidents. Wang's fourteen hour installation piece, Crude Oil, premiered at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival, an eco-horror-documentary of sorts which outlines the full operational process of producing the precious black liquid. If you can endure this titanic production, set in China's vast western deserts, you'll probably never look at a gas-pump the same way again.
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Yu Guangyi's debut documentary, Timber Gang (aka The Last Lumberjacks), qualifies as one of Chinese cinema's most exciting first features, an eye-popping journey into the wild regions of Northeast China that gives the docu-adventurism of Werner Herzog a serious run for his money. Armed with a digital camera and his survival gear, Yu joined a group of lumberjacks as they set off on the most hazardous and climatically-punishing of treks to fell trees and ease them down the snowy hills. Perhaps the only thing to top the remarkable content within the film is the fact that Yu had no formal training going into the production, just a firm commitment to record the lives of these men and their disappearing way of life anyway he could given the inhospitable circumstances. His next documentary feature, Survival Song, should be unveiled soon at the forthcoming China Documentary Film Festival and Seoul CinDi Festival. (Update: Yu's film would end up taking top honors at the Seoul CinDi Festival.)
Still on documentaries but moving back toward Beijing and Shanghai, Wang Wo may have made a feature in 2004, Ma Tou Street, but it's his recent experimental documentary work, Noise and Outside, that has garnered attention from Chinese film critics. Both films present a vision of city life stripped raw, with an emphasis on the clutter, the chaos and quotidian routines of those lining the crowded footpaths and gutters. (Fanhall and Hong Kong indie distributor Ying E Chi recently released Outside on DVD with English and French subtitles.)
The wretched hardships of street life also appear in Zhao Dayong's compelling Shanghai-set documentary, Living on Nanjing Road, which explores a group of poor migrants' daily grind as they go about collecting garbage, stealing and begging. There's no real narrative arc to the proceedings; instead, the bulk of the running time is taken up with a mosaic of quotidian details of each individual under the spotlight. Like any film featuring a network of characters confined to a restricted area, sometimes their lives collide head-on, but more often the episodes lead to dead-ends, pretty much mirroring the realities of the men's ambitions and schemes.
Although its no-budget roots are immediately apparent, Liu Gaoming's intriguing documentary Pai Gu focuses on the human dimension behind one of the global film industry's most pressing concerns: piracy. Everyone knows China is flooded with bootlegged DVDs, but perhaps what's less well known is that many of the titles aren't just the standard Hollywood blockbusters or Chinese box-office hits, they're European art films - the sort of stuff relatively accessible in the west but virtually impossible to find legitimately in China. Pai Gu is an enterprising bootlegger from the countryside looking for love and, like most of his generation, eager to make as much money as possible, selling DVDs from a "shop" the size of most people's kitchens. His shelves are stocked with DVDs that range from Tsai Ming-liang to Bergman, and there's a picture of Volker Schlondorff on his wall as a mark of respect to the German director for speaking out in favor of movie piracy. It's clear there is plenty of scope for debate on movie piracy beyond the chest-thumping rhetoric of the MPAA, but Liu's interest in Pai Gu's day-to-day drudgery and his search for love makes clear that the men on the street corner aren't exactly living like kings off the likes of Disney, Paramount and Universal.
Unknown Pleasures?
Writing on the current American "independent cinema" in Sight and Sound, Mike Atkinson noted, "We haven't yet seen much evidence of the egalitarian film-making world that the inexpensiveness of digital video was supposed to provide." Digital video has delivered a vastly different result in China, however, and the kind of world Atkinson envisaged is rapidly becoming a reality. The low-cost cinema of Ying Liang, Wang Bing, Yang Heng, Peng Tao and many others has consistently produced miraculous results equal to the higher indie budgets of, say, Jia Zhang-ke or Diao Yinan, and, although the lion's share of contemporary Chinese cinema finding its way into U.S. movie theatres is the kind of bloated epic on which Zhang Yimou has become frighteningly fixated, the festival circuit is buzzing with activity from China's digital mavericks (I'm gearing up for the Vancouver International Film Festival whose healthy Chinese line-up includes 24 City, Good Cats, Survival Song, Emily Tang's Perfect Life, Wang Wo's Up and Down and many others).
DVD and online broadcast has yet to provide an ideal platform for viewing a great deal of digital Chinese cinema, but there are encouraging signs to suggest that more and more of these films will find a home outside festival screens. Strolling through one DVD store in Beijing, I found copies of Still Life stocked with 300: if you want cine-egalitarianism in action, I can't think of a better example than Jia's soulful masterpiece jostling for space with an overblown chunk of Hollywood cotton-candy. For a filmmaker committed to charting the ongoing shifts in Chinese society, it was an image straight out of a Jia Zhang-ke film. -MPM
The author's deepest thanks to Chow Keung, Zhu Rikun, Wang Hongwei and Ying Liang.
Author Ben Cho is film programmer for the Brisbane International Film Festival.
Photos courtesy of the Vancouver Film Festival. Top: Mid-Afternoon Barks.
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