Chapter 4 Personal Documentary - WordPress.comChina: Bumming in Beijing: ˜e Last Dreamers (1990).6 Several months after Wu started ˜lming Bumming in Beijing, Shi Jian (b. 1963),

Chapter 4Personal Documentary

Personal DocumentaryFrom 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late seventies docu-mentary lmmaking in the Peoplersquos Republic of China was mostly under absolute state control in the service of socialist ideology as the countryrsquos social life during this period was largely equalised with state-led political life1 During the Cultural Revolution the ideological demands made on artistic and media productions became so strict that all publicly exhibited documentaries needed to pass the direct censorship of state leaders For example in depicting a state ocial the camera was only allowed to move toward and not away from him A dolly-out or zoom-out shot in such a scenario would be considered a wicked attack on the leader implying his distance and isolation from the people2 Photographic evidence of this kind of documentary alignment of state ideology and the publicrsquos reception can be located in the published album of Li Zhensheng a journalist who took and secretly preserved photographs of the Cultural Revolution3 Two of these were taken during the screening of a newsreel documentary framing an avid audience diagonally in a medium shot who are applauding in response to the screened image a waving Chairman Mao accompanied by his political coterie including the then Defence Minister Lin Biao According to the caption this screening took place on 13 September 1966 in Harbin the capital of Heilongjiang Province e audience was made up of students obviously Red Guards and they shouted lsquoLong Live Chairman Maorsquo each time Maorsquos image appeared on the screen4 Exemplied by the direct connection between Maorsquos waving hand onscreen and the avid faces and applauding hands of the students looking up at the screen Lirsquos photographic memory eectively summarises the relationship between ocial documentary and its audience in Cultural Revolution China e ideological hailing and interpellation that Western lm theory of the cinematic apparatus sets to expose is hardly disguised here After the end of the Cultural Revolution and particularly in the eighties Chinese documentary lmmaking while mainly practiced within the ocial production framework of state-owned television networks began to experiment with an apparently more liberal perspective and more humanistic approach to representing the past Conceived in a spirit of cultural and historical reec-tion that grew out of a desire to understand the recent trauma of the Cultural

Memory Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema - Chaparralindd 124 28082014 124811

httpswwwcambridgeorgcoreproductFABEBEDC581D1032895750AB12023091Core terms of use available at httpswwwcambridgeorgcoreterms Downloaded from httpswwwcambridgeorgcore University of Bristol Library on 06 Jun 2017 at 165029 subject to the Cambridge

Personal Documentary 125

Revolution and which resulted in the freshly resumed contact with international and particularly Western culture ndash classic as well as contemporary ndash these new documentaries of the eighties named zhuanti pian (special-topic lm) often deal with the topic of history Examples are TV documentary series on the history of the Communist Red Armyrsquos Long March the fty-year history of the Peoplersquos Republic of China histories of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and biographies of Mao Zedong and other major founding gures of the Peoplersquos Republic of China Commonly equipped with a pre-written script that needed to be approved before lming actually started these documentaries tend to adopt the form of a carefully illustrated moving image lecture an impersonal voice-over delivered in standard Mandarin informs and persuades accompanied by music and images that are carefully composed lmed and edited eir perspective while less imposing in ideological terms still issues from a position of singular superiority and authority to which the audience is subjected If some of the more liberal-minded special-topic documentaries such as Yangtze River (Huashuo changjiang 1983) and River Elegy (He shang 1988) signicantly challenge previously ideological one-mindedness with frameworks of thinking alternatively informed by Western civilisation and general Chinese history their manner of presentation is nevertheless univocal and didactic As a matter of fact although popularly accepted and technically perfected as a mainstream practice this humanistic intellectual approach to documentary and history continues to be debated For example in an attempt to salvage quickly disappearing cultural sites and search for indigenous seeds of capitalism since 2006 the CCTV has broadcast a number of serial documentaries on Chinese history including Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan) e City of Huizhou (Huizhou) Early Merchants from Anhui (Huishang) and Early Merchants from Shanxi (Jinshang) Apart from featuring the staple characteristics of the eightiesrsquo special-topic documentaries such as a scripted voice-over and an omniscient camera vision these so-called lsquohumanistic documentariesrsquo (renwen jilupian) enjoy the added production value brought about by computer-generated image (CGI) technology which re-imagines and re-images the historical past as an ossied scene to be nostalgically missed Concerned about their implied simplistic logic of a linear historical causality critics such as Cheng Kai question this particular lsquohumanismrsquo on its representation of a visually appealing past seeing in it a questionable tendency to mystify the past and encase it as a lsquosafe existencersquo for convenient and poorly reected consumption by the public5

It is in the context of and in stark contrast to such didactic practices that new and independent documentaries emerged and from the very beginning moved in an unprecedented direction As early as May 1988 Wu Wenguang (b 1956) a former schoolteacher who temporarily worked for television turned a borrowed video camera onto his freelance artist friends in Beijing Like his lmed subjects the lmmaker himself was far away from home (Kunming Yunnan Province) belonged to no lsquowork unitrsquo had little money and survived in temporary living spaces provided by friends or in cheaply rented homes At that moment Wu was unaware that he was making the rst independent documentary in contemporary



126 Memory Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

China Bumming in Beijing e Last Dreamers (1990)6 Several months after Wu started lming Bumming in Beijing Shi Jian (b 1963) a director of CCTVrsquos Special Topic Department began the shooting of Tiananmen an eight-part documentary about Beijing with private funding7 Envisioned as an experiment to go against the ocially ordained special-topic documentaries Tiananmen ended up not being broadcast on television because of the documentaryrsquos ideologically neutral lsquogrey tonersquo in depicting life in the capital8 It adopted a bottom-up perspective on reality and history through interviews or rst-person accounts of ordinary people synchronised sound recording lowered camera angles mobile long takes and various other strategies9

e coincidence of these two attempts at a dierent presentation of Chinese reality coming respectively from outside and inside the ocial system (consid-ering Shi Jianrsquos state-related employment status) and joined by other like-minded gures forms the backbone of Lu Xinyursquos seminal writing on the rise and signicance of what she calls the lsquoNew Documentary Movementrsquo10 Apart from the desire of these early experimenters ndash who also belong to the Forsaken Generation ndash to record and present alternative Chinese realities quick develop-ments in and expanded access to digital technology since the mid-nineties (particularly in the form of camcorders and video-editing software) absolutely pushed the new documentaries to grow into todayrsquos admirable dimensions and particularly in the direction of what I call lsquopersonal documentaryrsquo in the following discussion From the topics and subjects chosen for documentation to the actual technical and aesthetic decisions implemented in representation new and especially independent documentaries have been travelling on an unprec-edented path aiming less to lsquopersuade and promotersquo given or authoritative views than to lsquorecord reveal preserve analyze interrogate [and] expressrsquo specically motivated visions on reality11

In his overview of Chinese documentary lmmaking critic Lin Xudong praises the independent practicersquos abandonment of scripted narration and its opting for ambient sound and a mobile camera seeing in the latter the emergence of a much more lsquoconcrete confrontational open and individualisticrsquo reality12 e resulting epistemological space oered to the audience rather than being a closed and ideologically charged sphere allowing little room for participation in the production of knowledge is lsquomore liberatedrsquo because the documentaryrsquos lsquostructural epicenterrsquo has lsquomoved away from oscreen narration and toward the events actually taking place onscreenrsquo13 With the help of digital technologies the lmmakerrsquos camera becomes more mobile as it can readily follow a lmed subject into his living space and invite him to talk straight to the camera in his immediate lived milieu complete with its live ambient sound An unprec-edented sense of depth mass and volume of the physical world is thus brought forth into visibility and audibility Lin Xudongrsquos observation aptly highlights the independent practicersquos rerouting of the epistemological mission of documentary into a more open direc-tion where underrepresented aspects of Chinese life can enter the publicrsquos view e dierence and novelty of alternative aspects of reality are indeed no small




achievement of the independent lmmakers However this epistemological pursuit does not stop at the level of documenting what is thematically dierent from ocial practices More impressively and particularly by way of the lsquopersonal documentaryrsquo this pursuit also embodies a project of seeking self-knowledge ndash a journey that not only reveals the subjects and subject matters as the content and target of documentary lmmaking but also bares the traces of the complexly meaningful encounters between lmmaker camera and reality More than just an aesthetic novelty of a few lmmakers with particular artistic temperaments this persistent (although initially neglected) search for a reexive embodied and hybrid mode of documentary enacts a critical attitude toward the inevitable process of encoding and transformation when reality enters representation and becomes a historical document14 Its major practitioners ndash many happening to be members of the Forsaken Generation ndash are able to translate their historical vision about the socialist past into a concerned conscious and critical interven-tion in the documentation and interpretation of the present (as self-conscious historical records) so that the kind of historical misinformation and manipu-lation they experienced could be lessened or avoided In this regard although scholars introduce necessary nuances in our understanding of the independent status of these new documentaries the impact of their individual-based critical visions in representing the Chinese experience ndash past as well as present ndash cannot be overemphasised15 In a discussion of the connection between documentary and modern historiography Philip Rosen distinguishes what is at work when a pre-lmic piece of actuality enters a lmic shot and becomes part of a docu-mentary For Rosen rather than annulling the truth-value of the pre-lmic real it would be more productive to redirect critical attention away from the mere lsquocontentrsquo of a nished documentary to the actual lsquoprocessrsquo of lmmaking thus recognising the contexts in which our tendency for narrativisation takes place16 Mapped onto our current discussion the most important value of personal docu-mentary lies precisely in its active exercise of critical thinking in regard to the transformation of reality into history by way of the presence of the lmmaker and his camera

Chinese Veriteacute and Duan Jinchuanrsquos Invisible GazeFrom the very beginning the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) played a crucial role in connecting the new Chinese documentarians with their international predecessors and colleagues and particularly in intro-ducing them to the observational practice of Frederick Wiseman and the social documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke In 1993 the works of seven lmmakers were shown at the festival among which Wu Wenguangrsquos 1966 My Time in the Red Guards (1993) a memoir of collective yet personal experiences of the Cultural Revolution as Red Guards won the rst Ogawa Shinsuke Prize inaugurated in 1993 to honour start-up Asian documentary lmmakers17 at same year YIDFF also awarded Frederick Wiseman the Mayorrsquos Prize for his lm Zoo (1993) and organised a retrospective of eleven documentaries by Ogawa Productions to




commemorate Ogawarsquos death in 1992 Following their initial exposure to these inuences the Chinese documentarians were introduced to the rich language of documentary illustrated by works from all over the world the most directly inuential style among which proves to be that of non-interference from Wisemanrsquos direct cinema18 Duan Jinchuan who would later become arguably the most important practitioner of direct cinema in this group acknowledges that his e Square (Guangchang co-dir Zhang Yuan 1994) was directly informed by Wisemanrsquos Central Park (1989)19 In the context of a China that had just emerged from the shocking painful and hushed experience of a student-led democratic movement and its crackdown by force in 1989 direct cinema with its alleged absence of subjective opinion might indeed be the best way to depict the struc-ture of the unbalanced power relationship existing between the government and its citizens without attracting unwanted attention to (and censorship of) the person of the lmmaker As Chinese documentarians were also trying to reject the voice-of-God presentation in ocial documentaries it is hardly surprising that they found direct cinema to be such an attractive and eective approach with which to dissect and analyse the highly politicised and symbolic spaces in postsocialist China Exemplar Chinese veriteacute documentaries over the years include Du Haibinrsquos Along the Railway (Tielu yanxian 2000) Duan Jinchuanrsquos e Square (co-dir Zhang Yuan) South Bakhor St 16 (Ba kuo nan jie shiliu hao 1995) e Secret of My Success (Linqi da shetou 2002) and e Storm (Baofeng zhouyu co-dir Jiang Yue 2005) Jia Zhangkersquos In Public (Gonggong changsuo 2001) Kang Jianningrsquos Yin Yang (Yin Yang 1997) Li Yifan and Yan Yursquos Before the Flood (Yanmo 2003) Zhang Yuanrsquos Crazy English (Fengkuang yingyu 2000) Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghongrsquos Houjie Township (Houjie 2003) and Senior Year (Gaosan 2005) Zhu Chuanmingrsquos Extras (Qunzhong yanyuan 2002) and so on After seeing Wisemanrsquos Central Park (1989) Duan felt that he too could use a lsquosandian jiegoursquo (dispersed focus structure) ndash or what Bill Nichols identies as an overall mosaic structure in Wiseman ndash in which there are no lsquoconcrete characters individual destinies or heightened conictsrsquo20 Apparently exemplifying direct cinemarsquos famous attitude of the lmmaker being a y on the wall (while leaving strong impressions of lsquotactlessrsquo voyeurism on closer inspection) Wisemanrsquos methodology of non-interference appears reasonably attractive and eective for Duan who was searching for the symbolic meaning of a chosen subject in the Chinese context21 is search for truth underneath surface phenomenon is particularly obvious in e Square and South Bakhor St 16 Both documenta-ries feature a symbolically resounding space ndash one being Tiananmen Square in Beijing the other being a residence community committee oce in Lhasa Tibet ndash whose daily workings point to the hidden mechanisms of Chinese political life Containing no central protagonist or storyline e Square simply records the passers-by on Tiananmen Square and their various activities there Old people young people families peasants soldiers and foreigners take pictures y kites engage in pickpocketing do sightseeing or simply pass by Asked if the people lmed in e Square were aware of the presence of the camera and of the fact that they were being lmed Duan replies lsquoEverybody is doing a show and they do it




most naturally and unconsciously until this accumulates to a certain point they themselves will be shocked to see their own performancersquo22

As arguably the most signicant lieu de meacutemoire (site of memory) in China Tiananmen Square is laden with ritual political and historical signications that transform into an unnamable yet palpable ambience23 is historically charged and temporally overowing space imbricates the human gures that appear in it Whether the latter are aware of it or not once they appear on the square they occupy a position not only in space but also in time ndash a sensitive and symbolic position that has the potential to connect them to what has happened here before and what might come after In this sense under the observational gaze of the camera ndash non-interfering perhaps but acutely attentive ndash Tiananmen Square shapes forth as a symbolic stage that because of the content and intent bestowed by centuries of historical time restructures the gures whether national leaders Red Guards tourists or passers-by of today into potential subjects in history Whether the latter are conscious or not of that almost preor-dained relationship with history their presence already acquires the quality of a performance because the square has long been a stage on which the national history of China unfolds With Maorsquos portrait looking down at the square and symbolically the whole country this grand stage is still open and the show is still on Similarly although on a much smaller scale South Bakhor St 16 is the oce of a residence community committee (jumin weiyuanhui) that is located near the centre of Lhasa Tibet A residence community committee is the most basic unit of the Chinese government administration and where the most direct and inti-mate contact between the government and its citizens takes place rough the defamiliarising exemplication of two representative public spaces ndash lsquoone open the other closedrsquo to use his own words ndash Duan manages to highlight the subtle exercises of power in the most symbolic and mundane spaces in China With full acknowledgement of the eective analysis that Duan achieves in visualising the hidden structure of powerrsquos spatial expression we also need to be aware of criticsrsquo sustained challenge of the misleading assumption that non-interfering observation and the avoidance of a deliberately arranged narrative allow direct cinema a greater degree of objectivity and therefore truth Bill Nichols notes direct cinemarsquos employment of the standard tropes of subjective editing that are more obviously associated with ction lms and discerns in the midst of its apparent objectivity the implication of lsquoa social subjectivity dissociated from any single individuated characterrsquo24 In the case of Wisemanrsquos documentaries Barry Keith Grant highlights the presence of subjectivity in Wisemanrsquos approach evidenced by an analysis of Titicut Follies (dir Frederick Wiseman 1967) a documentary about a state institution for the criminally insane in Massachusetts25 With all the apparent openness of identication that characterises the particular structure of the point of view in Wisemanrsquos lm the combination of lsquodetached observation and expressive manipulation (through mise-en-scegravene and montage)rsquo actually results in lsquowhat Jean Rouch has called ldquoethnographic cinema in the rst personrdquorsquo26

Despite the applicability of the Wisemanian veriteacute in Duanrsquos postsocialist




China Duanrsquos acceptance of Wiseman seems insuciently informed In an illuminating analysis of the two-tier structure characterising Wisemanrsquos works Bill Nichols points out their cyclically poetic (and may I add musical) general organisation that relies on repetitions and variations In contrast on the local level of individual sequences that form facets of the overall mosaic structure these minor units follow rather conventional (though only partially executed) narrative codes of construction by way of manipulating spatial and temporal continuity27 e epistemological consequence of such a double (and self-contra-dicting) structure as Nichols cautions us is a way of seeing that is active (with full acknowledgement) yet also retroactive lsquoPolitically Wisemanrsquos choice of an ldquoensemble of social relationsrdquo is extremely narrow and fails to examine the larger ensemble circumscribing the boundary between institutions and the public or the characteristics of class struggle found at that boundary itselfrsquo28

Duanrsquos invocation of direct cinema and Wisemanrsquos techniques is a necessary and eective strategy for capturing and distilling structural factors in the social space of postsocialist China His choice of a disembodied perspective manages to present spaces that are undeniably more open to interpretation than was the case in previous ocial documentaries However such a deliberate erasure of personal involvement and more problematically its presentation of an alterna-tive account to a pre-set (ocial) target tends to close the discursive space just opened when it is applied to personal history In other words when applied to the representation of discursive spaces such as history memory and ethnography that are more closely reliant on human agency and interaction documentary lmmaking places a rigorous demand on the lmmaker for reexivity Curiously while Duan emphasises the oering of an open space (made possible by a lsquodispersed focusrsquo strategy with the absence of a central story) he mentions in an interview his deep fascination with theatre and especially the Aristotelian unities (of time place and action) and expresses his interest in a self-contained complete structure29 His desire for lsquotheatricalityrsquo in documentary following the Aristotelian unities might be understood as the pursuit of a structural theatri-cality such as whether the motivation for each turn and conict makes sense and whether it is a correct or proper arrangement of the relationship between people and events is proper arrangement depends on the lmmakerrsquos understanding and judgment of the contingencies of the situation so as to be able to capture the totality of a given event30 In other words and perhaps not surprisingly Duanrsquos direct cinema of non-involvement while having no plot does seem to contain a narrative motivated by a desire for counter-authoritative accounts of history is is what makes his non-interfering observational practice interesting and valuable at rst (in the early context of initial rebellions against ocial narra-tive) but when continued later in documentaries such as e Storm causes one to want to rethink the implications of direct cinema for Chinese documentary e Storm is a re-investigation of the Land Reform (tudi gaige) that the CCP started in 1946 (and carried through 1953) as a strategy to mobilise peasants in joining and supporting the CCP in the Civil War (1946ndash9) against the ruling Nationalists In the form of a grassroots oral history this documentary presents




peasants in a village in northeast China where the Land Reform was rst put forward for experimentation All the featured peasants were either actual partici-pants in or close-range witnesses to the movement of over ve decades before e peasants speak from memory giving accounts of manipulation injustice and cruelty that exude a quiet disturbing poignancy e directors frame the documentary as a counter-narrative in contrast to two ocial representations of the history of Land Reform One is the 1961 feature lm directed by Xie Tieli that bears the same title Duan and co-director Jiang deconstruct that ocial narrative by presenting actual gures that either were among or personally knew those who served as prototypes for the original novel from which the 1961 lm was adapted31 e other implied target in the documentary is the construc-tion of a local museum which was being built at precisely the same time as the documentary was being lmed e Storm qualies as a non-physical alternative archive of history that contrasts with the local museum the latter continuing to immortalise the incomplete ocial accounts of history while exploiting the past through lsquored tourismrsquo a goal desired by the local authorities Duan and Jiangrsquos interrogation does not simply target the version of national history authored by the CCP To set o the personal testimonies of the peasants they juxtapose archival footage of propaganda from both the Communists and Nationalists32 Ironically each side fervently voices its concern for the interests of the Chinese people e peasantsrsquo personal testimonies frequently jar with those grandiose ocial accounts of the experience and instead speak of the actual daily violence of the mass movement in the late 1940s More interest-ingly while these personal testimonies seem to work in sync in oering an alternative version of the past at times they are also in conict with each other resulting in a polyphonic eect For example among the featured peasants and previous Land Reform ocials a Grandma Ding gives an account of her experi-ence being a witness to the cruelties and injustice in the highly contested process of reform implementation Only later on do we learn from another fellow villager that Grandma Ding herself an active member of the local reform team had actu-ally incriminated and beaten others hard during lsquoworkrsquo is subtle moment of contradiction opens up the text of the current grassroots oral history to incre-dulity and suspicion a rewarding wake-up call that reminds us of the necessarily selective process of recollection33

e Storm is certainly invaluable in uncovering previously unknown details of a highly distorted past As in most of Duan Jinchuanrsquos works the presence of the lmmaker is hidden behind the camera in e Storm e personal testimonies we hear are from the lmed subjects alone each interviewee faces the camera alone and recounts his or her experience ere is neither onscreen communica-tion between interviewees nor dialogue between the interviewees and the lm-makers If in e Square and South Bakhor St 16 the represented space ndash physical political and historical ndash is still open and multivalent the narrative in e Storm seems to become more categorically summarised In other words the docu-mentary provides dierent accounts of the past but does not necessarily oer a truly alternative frame of thinking about history and its representation e




testimonies in e Storm despite the little frisson of suspicion over Grandma Dingrsquos account remain disappointingly consistent in debunking the lies and partial representations in ocial media Instead of exploring more fully the current equivocation that hangs around the lsquotruthrsquo of Grandma Dingrsquos testimony (and by extension that of all the other testimonies) the documentary uncovers vivid grassroots memories of the past and then stops at that level of thematic alterity letting go of an opportunity to more substantially benet from the testimonial cacophony and perhaps from there attempt a more thorough inves-tigation of the nature of history memory and narrativisation on a structural rather than just thematic level As possible precedents of e Storm in the history of documentary Errol Morrisrsquo e in Blue Line (1988) and Claude Lanzmannrsquos Shoah (1985) are two classics that also rely on testimonies in their search for the truth lying beneath respec-tively the shooting of a police ocer and the Holocaust In a trenchant analysis of the clashing of voices and memories in postmodern documentaries such as these two masterpieces exemplify Linda Williams argues that the practicersquos greatest epistemological value lies precisely in its bypassing the traditional goal of looking for a single truth and demonstrating instead a deep interest in the constructions of truth to show that all lsquotruthsrsquo are lsquopartial and contingentrsquo34 Qualied as a mode of historical inquiry postmodern documentaries throw light on the processes through which history lsquobecame as it isrsquo because of their emphasis on lsquothe ideolo-gies and consciousnessesrsquo behind the lsquocompeting truthsrsquo35 History in this case is no longer assumed to be available as some essentially graspable truth and as the object of a condent and penetrating subjectivity equipped with objective methodologies and scientic technologies Rather it displays as many facets as there are faces voices individual experiences and personal memories that provide the testimonies and impressions e latter forms what Williams calls lsquoa horizon of relative and contingent truthsrsquo from which the spectator is invited or challenged to consider everything altogether for an approximation of the past36

Compared to e in Blue Line and Shoah e Storm successfully testies against a given version of the past but fails to pursue the complications revealed in the testimonials It is a documentary still steeped in the mindset of modern historiography in which according to Philip Rosen lsquothe pertinence of documents is intricated a priori with the ex post facto signicance of the historical sequencersquo the latter as a result of the unication and sequentiation of multiple (and poten-tially conicting) temporal sequences37 e Storm chooses and structures the elements ndash testimonies of villagers who recall a past in the present ndash in accordance with a present desire to provide an account dierent from and counter to what has been represented in ocial history Alternative accounts are gathered to play against past lies but then stop there e complications of history and historical representation come alive at the level of counter-authority but are not explored in rigorous questioning of the possible partiality and fabrications of these current alternative accounts e urgency of that conundrum ndash that independent Chinese documentaries seem prone to slip back into a paradigm they rose up against in the rst place ndash seems to be what drives the critic Lu Xinyu to question




the basic issues of documentary lmmaking lsquoWhy did we start Who are We How do we narrate And whyrsquo38 Yingjin Zhang also points out three problems in independent Chinese documentary lmmaking from the 1990s erasing oneself blind belief in objectivity and exploitation of the lmed subjects39 Excessive dependence on or trust in the cinematic apparatus and technology coupled with insucient reection on the erasure of the signature of the lmmaker has left much to be desired in some independent documentaries For example Houjie Township (Houjie dir Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghong 2003) is an accomplished piece capturing the lives and spaces of migrant workers in Guangdong whose mundane complaints and pleasures oer an incisive reection of globalisation at home However this great example of Chinese veriteacute demonstrates awkward if not disrespectful reticence regarding the lmed subjects when the latter are emotionally invested and caught in vulnerable moments in their lives in front of the camera40

To counter these problems in independent Chinese documentary I argue that apart from the Chinese veriteacute practice that Lin Xudong has summarised and championed there is actually a line of documentaries that does not hesitate to show the lmmakerrsquos involvement in the documenting process e baring of the lmmakerrsquos position sometimes in the form of the camera movement sometimes in the more obvious presence of the lmmakerrsquos body or voice bespeaks a signicantly dierent tendency that oers inspiring answers to some of the problems already encountered by independent documentary Although Lin Xudong oers a valuable paradigm for the understanding of the new docu-mentaries their signicance cannot be fully appreciated without considering the specic role of the lmmaker in the documentary text It is for that purpose that I propose we turn our attention to lsquopersonal documentaryrsquo ndash a practice that highlights the presence of creative subjectivity and which has actually been in existence since the very beginning of the production of the new documentaries in the early 1990s Filmmakers of these personal documentaries who are Duan and Zhoursquos fellow members of the Forsaken Generation have created lmic texts that both reect on history and reality and explicate the relationship between the human agent and the historical or lmic space Going beyond illuminating aspects of history and reality that are not found in ocial representations these more personally involved practices explore the process of knowledge production through which memory and reality pass through the camera to become historical representations in the form of documentary

Personal Documentary[Documentary] is rst and foremost a discovery of the self41

ndash Wu Wenguang

I hope that by having you watch [West of the Tracks] you can discover shared emotions Meaning that I myself am lming them this time but while showing the truth of their lives I am also showing my own feelings I was following




their lives but at the same time I am layered within the lm So the people who view the lm are trying their hardest to feel their lives as they watch and are also seeing me there or perhaps that triggers them to think of something else I feel like that connects with an emotional exchange between myself and the viewers42

ndash Wang Bing

e denition and theorisation of personal documentary is still under construc-tion On the one hand the term seems chimeric enough to include documen-tary subgenres as diverse as diary lm home movie essay lm the lsquoIrsquo lm self-documentary autobiographical video personal cinema and sometimes postmodern documentary and domestic ethnographic lm All of these display a common interest in the intimately experiential and subjective dimensions of human existence43 On the other hand as a point of convergence this commit-ment to the lived experience and subjectivity does not plant pickets around a clearly demarcated and nervously guarded territory Rather this theoretical core seems more suggestive than denitive cultivating a special kinship with open-minded and open-ended notions such as border-crossing exibility hybridity instability mobility plurality and porousness Michael Renov approaches the personal in documentary through a comparison with an equally volatile concept in literature the essay In his summary of previous thinking on this literary form the essay is identied as a site where

descriptive and reexive modalities are coupled [] the representation of the historical real is consciously ltered through the ux of subjectivity [ and] a self is produced through a plurality of voices marked fundamentally by a sense of indeterminacy [or] epistemological uncertainty44

rough its proximity to the subjectivity of the essayist the essayistic is already in the sense of Montaignersquos lsquobook of the self rsquo autobiographical and personal In lm and video the essayistic converges with the personal in that its lsquolocat-able itineraryrsquo is often related to the unique specicity of a persistent personal voice vision or style Such an insistence on connecting to the historical world by way of subjectivity seems to be what drives Renov to assign to the essayistic the signicance of being a lsquoldquonewrdquo or historicizing autobiography in lm and videorsquo45 In the history of non-ction lm and video some of the most prominent works in the essayistic and personal mode include Diaries Notes and Sketches (dir Jonas Mekas 1969) Of Great Events and Ordinary People (dir Raul Ruiz 1979) Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (dir Hara Kazuo 1974) Sans Soleil (dir Chris Marker 1982) Naked Spaces Living Is Round (dir Trinh T Minh-ha 1985) and Shermanrsquos March (dir Ross McElwee 1986)46

As Renov notes the rise of autobiographical documentary lmmaking in the West needs to be understood in the context of the post-1960s cultural climate As that era was characterised by the displacement of the politics of social move-ments (for instance anti-war civil rights the student movement) with the




politics of identity lsquo[the] ldquopost-veriteacuterdquo documentary practice from 1970 to 1995rsquo denitely reected a greater interest in the issue of subjectivity47 In the case of contemporary independent Chinese documentary personal documentary as a distinct mode of practice develops in the general context of a postsocialist desire to review and revise ocial history However in signicant contrast with the veriteacute practice that has gained currency in China personal documentary not only aims at presenting a dierent interpretation of the past or an alternative aspect of the present but also exercises critical thinking on representation itself Highlighting the very process of making a documentary and baring the formal factors of moving image representation personal documentary emphasises its specic contingencies on the complex network of information and intention reminding us of the epistemological and ethical consequences that documentary as a mode of representation specically launched from the present has on how the past might be remembered and how the future might be envisioned As is evident from our discussion of the ocial and mainstream humanistic documentaries what needs to be excavated and cultivated are not only previously underrepresented aspects of Chinese life but also ndash indeed more crucially ndash a new relationship to history and representation in which the lmmakers as well as the audience are able to participate in the knowledge production and historical representation as conscious historical subjects e personal is political as well as historical Ross McElwee ndash one of the most prominent and engaging practi-tioners of personal documentary ndash puts it in simple candid terms

I think the most political thing I can do anyway is to try to render peoplersquos lives including my own in some sort of context that makes other people interested empathetic questioning or even antipathetic to what theyrsquore seeing ndash but that somehow engages them to look at life as itrsquos really lived and react to it48

Rather than being taken as a xed focal enclosure the self-inscription of the lmmaker as Renov illumines often contains a gaze directed outward to other people and to the wider social historical and cultural context is outward gaze helps to construct lsquohistorical selves that are nonetheless sites of instability rather than coherence [and the] construction of subjectivity [becomes] a site of instability ndash ux drift perpetual revisionrsquo49

at instability nds a quite concrete personication in the gure of Wu Wenguang the lmmaker and artist who made Bumming in Beijing ndash the rst independent Chinese documentary While perhaps in apparent contradic-tion with his early deep respect for Wisemanrsquos observational practice (which evidences the complex process of Chinese documentaryrsquos development more than it discredits direct cinemarsquos contribution to it) Wu has evolved to defend and embody a strong individual or personal stance (geren lichang) and has become one of the most prominent proponents as well as innovators of hybrid documentaries that blend performance documentation and the self-reexive involvement of the lmmaker50 I have discussed this in detail elsewhere51 ere




have been well-considered concerns about the danger of lsquoover-emphasisrsquo on the personal stance because critics fear it might reduce the social impact of inde-pendent documentaries if they solely focus on the self to the exclusion of eorts to connect to any other issue52 Such concerns are understandable in the context of some of Wu Wenguangrsquos early provocative statements that his documentaries are simply his individual attempts to understand issues of personal interest and that he has no desire or intention to speak for others However Wursquos impressive oeuvres over the years unfailingly combine the personal and the social aspects of documentary and performance thus accentuating rather than dismissing the need to elaborate on the theoretical social and historical impact of the personal documentary53

In the following I will delineate the formal characteristics of the personal documentary in the hope of laying out a framework by which to understand its construction of a particularly embodied relationship between subjectivity space and time is informed construction and conscious exploration when envisioned in historiographical terms qualies as a highly reexive mode of documenting reality and participating in its transformation into visible evidence of history First a personal documentary tends to index the physical presence of the lm-maker by making it visible or audible Less physical strategies of evidencing the presence of the lmmakerrsquos creative subjectivity include deliberate camera angles and frame compositions (thus indicating the specic point of view of a shot) expressionist cinematography that adds a personal touch to the documentary footage taken from the phenomenal world and an idiosyncratic montage editing that highlights the expressionist intention or intellectual activity of the lmmaker Second due to its specically positioned and necessarily limited perspective a personal documentary demonstrates a deep interest in the lsquomeeting encounter [and] dialoguersquo ndash terms that Renov nds appositional in ethical philosophy and documentary ndash between the camera and the phenomenal world54 When trans-lated into the structure of a narrative this thematic interest tends to take the form of a journey an itinerary or a trajectory and emphasises the process of lm-making as the constant shaping forth of a relationship between the embodied subjectivity of the lmmaker and the lmed subject (or subject matter) ird as a result of the above commitments to the physically-based specicity of the lmmakerrsquos subjectivity and the concretisation of his relationship with the phenomenal world in the act of an encounter or through the scenario of a journey a personal documentary tends to highlight the contingency of the current epis-temological project in the present moment in which the lmmakerrsquos embodied subjectivity is placed By spatialising and embodying the lsquonowrsquo as the lsquoherersquo where the self stands starts o and returns to and where diverse temporalities such as personal memory traces of the past and the current moments of lmmaking converge a personal documentary demonstrates an awareness of the presence of the past in the present us this practice evidences a sensitive understanding of the phenomenal world as also a historical world where past and present subjectivity and phenomenon self and other are not mutually exclusive and self-complete but rather have a profoundly involved relationship with each other As




a result its narrative structure eschews the usual chronological order marking a journey and acquires a textuality thickened by the convergence overlaying and sometimes clashing of multiple temporalities represented by multiple person-alities discrete experiences and diverse memories Although being a journey of a documentary a personal documentary values non-linearity complexity density and even messiness all pointing to the coming together of discrete aspects of exist-ence and experience Such an ethically-charged interest in the contact zones ndash sites where relationships take place ndash tends to be manifest in all aspects of the cinematic form such as combining ction and non-ction in the narrative introducing performance in representing reality and mobilising unconventional framing and editing strategies to evoke a juxtaposition of dierent spaces or temporalities Subjectivity ndash mostly that of the lmmaker as a historical inquirer ndash serves to provide a concrete footing to this cinematic journey in time and space Documentary scholars have noted the shared impressionability of both the lmmaker as an embodied subjectivity and the phenomenal world as lsquothe multi-layered and heterogeneous environmentrsquo55 Whereas Michael Renov calls attention to a sort of lsquocrucible eectrsquo in which reality is subjected to the heat and pressure of the lmmakerrsquos creative subjectivity Yiman Wang inspired by Jia Zhangke and Walter Benjamin observes the laudable willingness of the Chinese documentarian to be lsquosearedrsquo (zhuoshao) by the immediate context of the actual material ambience56 e subjectivity of the human agent (mostly the lmmaker but also applicable to lmed subjects who actively present their stances and situations and form an inter-subjective relationship with the lmmaker) the spatiality of the current situation in which the cinematic epistemological project takes place and the temporality of a richly layered present moment these point as a dynamic whole to the personal documentary as being more than merely a novel reexive cinematic style It embodies an ethically consequential vision that historical representation through non-ction moving image or otherwise need always be aware of and call attention to its own specic situatedness and dynamic connection with other nodal points of experience and knowledge thus to avoid blindly subsuming the innite entirety of human experience (including history) under an isolated interpretation e value of the personal documentary is found in its highlighting of docu-mentary lmmaking not as a nished product of objective knowledge but as a lived result of a dynamic epistemological journey in which the subject of this journey ndash the lmmaker ndash and the phenomenal world (including the lmed subjects in it) leave marks on each other Rather than penetrating into a target eld extracting useful information and then leaving it as a clean and triumphant beneciary who gets what he has set out to look for the lmmaker either physically or symbolically and quite likely both emerges out of the process of lmmaking changed and imprinted by what has been a dynamic negotiation with the site Neither the lmmaker nor the eld stays the same as before the arrival of the camera e eld as an epistemological object characterised by alterity or otherness renders this encounter an ever-renewing process and thus makes demands on the documentarianrsquos active attention In response the lmmaker




needs to exercise a high level of awareness of his own position ndash physical as well as symbolic ndash in order to give an evolving order or structure to the unknown envi-rons and carve out an epistemological itinerary in its midst57 e actual shape of this cinematic itinerary is one ndash doubtless a highly suggestive one ndash among many possible forms that the relationship between lmmaker and eld can potentially take at implied (and informed) uncertainty is of a narrative and historical nature It invokes the necessary and humbling relativity of our knowledge about the past others and even oneself as complexly contingent entities Rather than being a closed and self-complete lsquoobjectiversquo agent of knowledge the lmmaker as an embodied subjectivity acquires a spatial dimension as does the eld Instead of being solid and opaque this intentional and creative subjectivity is porous penetrable and spacious ready to be marked by the experiential encounters and epistemological journeys What Renov privileges in the essay lm as a double gaze that is directed both outward at the world and inward at oneself becomes an exchange of information and material in embodied experiential and inter-subjective terms58 While the lmmaker gains a little more knowledge about the phenomenal world he also benets from a self-vision in the course of his encounter because the mutual conguration existent between subject and eld reveals his position to be lsquowithin a matrix irreducibly material and of neces-sity historicalrsquo59

Chinese documentary lmmakers seem to be increasingly aware of the urgent need to lsquorestore the authorrsquo or lmmaker (huanyuan zuozhe) to his proper position Guo Xizhi for example advocates a way out of the conventional self-eacing and unifying narratives of history60 Huang Wenhai the director of Dream Walking (Mengyou 2006) ndash an idiosyncratic and controversial documentary about artists that won the Grand Prize at the Cineacutema du reacuteel an international documentary lm festival in France ndash identies his goal in lmmaking as striving at a lsquopsychological realismrsquo (xinli xianshi zhuyi) with a distinct personal touch61 From the very beginning of its development in the early nineties till the present independent Chinese documentary has demonstrated a consistent interest in experimenting with the inscription of the self as a specically historically situ-ated subject Examples of this include practically the whole repertoire of Wu Wenguang such as Bumming in Beijing (1990) Life on the Road (Jianghu 1999) Dance with Farm Workers (He mingong yiqi tiaowu 2001) Fuck Cinema (Cao tama de dianying 2005) I Graduated (Wo biye le dir Wang Guangli 1992) More an One Is Unhappy (Bu kuaile de buzhi yige dir Wang Fen 2000) Nightingale Not the Only Voice (Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou dir Tang Danhong 2000) Home Video (Jiating luxiang dir Yang Tianyi 2001) West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu dir Wang Bing 2003) Jade Green Station (Bise chezhan dir Yu Jian 2003) Losing (Shisan dir Zuo Yixiao 2004) Mao Chenyursquos Soul Mountain (Ling Shan 2003) and Between Life and Death (Xi Mao Jia Wu Chang jiashen yinyang jie 2004) Crow in Winter (Hanya dir Zhang Dali 2004) Tape (Jiaodai dir Li Ning 2009) Martial Syndrome (Huoxing zonghezheng dir Xue Jianqiang 2010) and so on62 Furthermore as we shall see in Chapter 5 Chinese women and queer lmmakers bring more experimental dimensions to personal documentary evidencing a




tendency that echoes Renovrsquos analysis of the rise of autobiographical lm and video in the US as a result of awakened identity politics In the rest of this chapter I will discuss two personal documentaries with landmark status that evoke the place of history in the current time through the presence of the lmmakerrsquos embodied subjectivity ese are Wang Guanglirsquos I Graduated and Wang Bingrsquos West of the Tracks Both lmmakers insert a personal performance of their own in the midst of apparently observational documenta-tion e lmmaker rather than being a y on the wall becomes a participating gure not so much in the actual life of the lmed subjects as on a contextual level where the current journey of lmmaking unfolds Both directors although largely keeping their image outside the cinematic frame enact encounters with sites replete with historical resonances I Graduated visits universities in Beijing that are seeing o their last batch of students who have participated in the democratic movement in 1989 West of the Tracks features state factories that were once the proud backbone of socialist industry and are now being closed and sold to give way to new economic reform plans In the midst of such sites of memory the lmmakers apply their felt presence as attentive and caring subjec-tivities and engage in epistemological encounters with the phenomenal world making palpable and raising awareness about the process through which the past is gured in the present and the present transforms into history

I Graduated Subject-ing the Past to the PresentOn 5 July 1992 Wang Guangli (b 1966) a rst-time lmmaker who had quit his job at the China Youth University for Political Sciences two years earlier went to Peking University with a video camera in hand Over the following six days he (sometimes with another cinematographer) lmed students graduating from this famous academy and a few other universities in Beijing making what would later be known as I Graduated an important lm that helped announce the unmistakable advent of independent documentary in China Wangrsquos thematic focus on graduates who were bidding adieu to college life in a 1992 Beijing is a signicant choice As is clear from the seven lengthy interviews featured in the documentary the lmed subjects had entered college in 1988 at the latest meaning that they were born toward the end of the sixties belong to the Forsaken Generation (as does the lmmaker himself) and had experienced or participated in the historic student-led democratic movement in the spring of 1989 Prompted by the current occasion of concluding an important stage in life the graduates speak on camera about their feelings toward contemporary circumstances displaying a general sense of frustration confusion repressed anger and poignancy Whether reminiscing on the death of a friend in 1989 and enunciating a controlled indictment of state violence or complaining of disguised persecution and expressing a complicated sarcasm toward the future the interviewees bring about a collective portrait of the graduates as representa-tives of a generation caught in a historical cleft that is obscure yet impactful e emotive tones expressed by these voices and gures include bitterness sadness




contemplativeness hesitancy nonchalance anger irony and even pretension and hopefulness all of which bespeak a desire to understand the recent historic events of 1989 and make sense of their reverberating relevance Although no comforting or assuring conclusion seems possible these enunciations and gures give shape to a precious archive of a group of particularly situated individuals who wonder aloud about their relation to Chinese history and reality All the interviewees are placed in spaces immediate to their college life that is currently ending Inside their dorm rooms or outside at a campus corner the seven graduates are captured in ordinary poses under natural lighting forming a sharp contrast with the careful frontal and articially lit presentation applied to the testimonials in Duan Jinchuanrsquos e Storm ey sit low on the oor lounge about on the bottom part of a bunker bed or speak to an oscreen interlocutor (that is the director) on the side Although during the interviews Wang Guangli makes his presence audible only a couple of times his intimately positional framings of the lmed subjects testify to a close rapport between them and him characterising the interviews not as one-sided presentations but as communicational sharing More signicant evidence of I Graduated as a personal documentary can be found in the opening ending and non-interview sections of the lm because these parts by way of a highly subjective camera and a deliberate performance on the part of the lmmaker prove that this documentary does more than record the memoirs of several post-1989 graduates Instead not only does the lmmaker identify himself as a generational cohort sharing the intervieweesrsquo experiences and feelings (Wang was born in 1966 and had participated in the movement in 1989) the documentary by way of an intricate trajectory across the personal collective testimonial and performative dimensions of memory also transforms the visits of a few college campuses in one summer into a symbolic journey in memoriam of a recent history that cannot yet be remembered in public in China In this transformation of the moving image representation into a historical intervention ndash particularly one that contests ocially imposed amnesia ndash what plays a central role is the presence of a particular historical subjectivity that is formed as a result of the interchanges between the lmmaker and subjects and between the camera and the space e felt presence and highlighted performance of the director is crucial in evoking a repressed past and preserving its memory To indicate the specic independent and personal origin of this mnemonic investigation in the guise of an amateur graduation lm I Graduated presents the arrival of the lmmaker (and the camera) on the documentary eld by way of an extremely limited and embodied entry his handheld camera passes through the backdoor of a noisy restaurant and then a sordid alley before arriving on the proper campus of Peking University (Figure 41) Immediately indicative of the critically alternative status of the independent documentary this extraor-dinary unocial entry was necessitated by the political circumstances ough silenced the memory of 1989 was still fresh As the national university known for its leading role in student-led movements in modern China in 1919 as well as 1989 Peking University was (and still is) a highly sensitive zone subject to strict




surveillance including careful identity checks at its gates Wangrsquos unauthorised camera would have been denied entry which is why he chose to enter the campus surreptitiously via an adjacent small restaurant As evidenced in the documen-tary at one point his lming was indeed discovered stopped and investigated by the universityrsquos public security ocers

Figure 41 I Graduated (dir Wang Guangli 1992) An unocial entry onto the documentary scene

Beyond the interviews the documentary contains a number of wandering observations following the students in their packing and preparing to leave college If such observational sequences tend to remind one of Wisemanian direct cinema there are a few highly stylised sequences that suggest otherwise For example I Graduated employs two curiously subjective musically enforced and emotionally charged travelling sequences at the beginning and end as struc-tural brackets At the beginning three haunting travelling shots set the subtle elegiac tone of the documentary e camera looks at an empty sports eld from behind a metal netting divider It oats past dormitory buildings with gaping windows in front of which bicycles stand in disorder as if they had been aban-doned long before e camera then passes a construction site guarded by a wall of corrugated boards As indicated by the signs on the boards a new overpass is being built here an urban planning project proudly undertaken by the municipal government as lsquoanother climax of socialist labor contestrsquo In stylistic discordance




with this ocial note of pride and progress are the yellowish colour lter and the over-exposure eect to which these three shots are subjected e over-exposure eect works to the eect that the darker lines of the netting divider or the window frames have a skeletal scaolding look while lighter-coloured surfaces such as the walls and the sky tend to be whited out Such deliberate visual eects communicate a highly subjective approach to the lmed space as a sort of emotional wasteland where the past ndash indicated by the empty windows and lsquoabandonedrsquo bikes ndash is being replaced by new urban constructions e featuring of two dividing structures guarding the university and the city (construction) respectively also communicates an uneasy sense of separation between the two spaces e college graduates are leaving the university that as a site of memory registers their youthful dreams as well as frustrations ey will soon have to adapt themselves to the city and its like where economic progress and material demands unfold and in which previous ideals are suppressed Accentuating this early expressionist treatment of the lmed space in I Graduated is a poem spoken and sung by a male voice that sounds uniquely dispirited melancholic yet still desiring e poem is authored and performed by Huang Jingang an important sound artist who also worked on I Love XXX Meng Jinghuirsquos 1994 experimental play discussed in Chapter 2 of this book Accompanied by a solo guitar the monologue performance seems to be an elegy for lost friends and an adieu to lost (or possibly betrayed) love ndash two themes that nd obvious resonances in 1989 if we understand the signicance of that historic moment not only in terms of national politics but also in terms of its impact on private relations and personal psyches such as the friendships and romances of its young actors e latter personal angle is exactly how director Lou Ye chooses to approach the subtle yet resounding after-eect of 1989 in his banned feature Summer Palace63 lsquoGo go in just one day all of you will be gone and disappear what you want forgotten and what I want remembered all are relinquished So long so long my darling rsquo Accompanied by these lines the documented space that is already heavily stylised appears even more like a psychological landscape than a real one Although at this early point it is unclear what the lsquoIrsquo and lsquoyoursquo in the poem refer to the rest of the documentary interweaves interviews and the lmmakerrsquos wanderings on campuses gradually revealing that these pronouns refer to the shared status of the lmmaker the interviewees and the Forsaken Generation (exemplied by the lmmaker and the graduates) as a distinct group of subjects who try to gure out their status in contemporary Chinese history I Graduated concludes with the graduates seeing each other o at the railway station with tears hugs and kisses followed by a lengthy travelling shot that features a similar monologue presentation of the poem e camera oats on the Changrsquoan Avenue (the Eternal Peace Avenue) the famous eastndashwest main street running across Tiananmen Square and in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace Framed in a mobile central perspective the shot takes the viewer into the space of a nighttime Beijing drifting for about three-and-a-half minutes before slowing down to a stop and freezing upon an obscure crowd that is crossing the street in the half dark (Figures 42 and 43) Alongside Huang Jingangrsquos




Figure 42 I Graduated An elegiac ending

Figure 43 I Graduated An elegiac ending ndash closing image of the documentary




musical monologue on the soundtrack this sequence turns out to be a deliberate performance on the part of the director himself In my interview with Wang Guangli he revealed that this ending was the result of a careful coordination of time space and his own embodied enactment e itinerary along which the camera travels ndash the current long take showing the last part of it ndash covers in turn Wukesong Gongzhufen Military Museum Xidan Xinhua Gate and Tiananmen Square actually repeating the itinerary by which state army trucks travelled in the early morning of 4 June 1989 on their way to enforce the armed clearing of the protesters on the square64 To accomplish this take Wang and his cameraman got into a taxi at around three in the morning which was approximately the same time the infamous historic incident began Wang mentioned that at the time of lming in the small hours of the morning from the moving taxi the wind was blowing so hard that he had to hold the legs of his cameraman as a human stabiliser so that the lming could be executed more steadily He also confessed that as they drove along the deserted streets at night whose memory and meaning are too full tears started streaming down his cheeks e musical poem of Huang Jingang provides a vocal expression of the memory-charged and history-replete emotional overow that Wang feels in his ritualistic performance through the embodied camera Accompanying this take on the soundtrack Huangrsquos melancholic monologue gathers emotional momentum and reveals dimensions of experience that go beyond the personal into the generational and historical realm

Irsquom sad at how casually I have lost my virginityNowadays I have no words or tearsI have no home to go only to make much ado about nothingNowadays I am a lawless and jobless loafer In those days the organization accused me of my stammering unsteady

standIn those days I shared life with my brothersOften thinking of collective suicideIn those days I was criticized harshly but girl you remained silentOh in those days my brothers and sisters were pure and clean So many people have left only Irsquom not scared of stayingSo many people have died only Irsquom brave enough to live onIrsquoll live a hard life Irsquoll often think of a big riverI will miss you all destined to write and sing songs for you Nobody will know me any more once we say goodbyeSo long so long my darlingSo long so long my darling

Loss of innocence betrayal of love the evocation of co-generational lsquobrothers and sistersrsquo the idea of collective suicide the sadness at inevitable forgetting and unfullled longing ndash all these connotations of the poem remind us of similar themes present in the creative works by other members of the Forsaken




Generation (see Chapter 1) Two haunting cases of the kind of lsquocollective suicidersquo can be found in the lm Summer Palace in which Yu Hong and her best friend Li Ti two ctional counterparts of the post-1989 graduates in Wangrsquos documen-tary both try to take their own lives As a component of what Michael Berry sees as lsquoself-destructive cycles of repetitionrsquo present in the life of Yu Hong the lmrsquos principal protagonist Li Tirsquos suicide in the light of the lsquocollective suicidersquo that Huang Jingang and Wang Guangli contemplate in I Graduated might be interpreted as a repetition of Yu Hongrsquos earlier abortive attempt and in its sad accomplishment succeeds as a form of lsquoclaiming a form of belated victimhoodrsquo65

At this point it is clear that the lsquoIrsquo in the title of Wangrsquos documentary and in the early part of Huangrsquos musical poem refers to the collective persona of not only the graduates featured in the lm but also the Forsaken Generation to which all of them including the lmmaker and the musician belong Structured around the pronouns lsquoIrsquo and lsquoyoursquo the untitled poem gives voice to a subjectivity that is transferable between the addresser and the addressee(s) and between the individual artist and a specically placed collective persona Compounding this vocal performance is the directorrsquos own embodied cinematography whose exis-tential root in real historical time elevates the trajectory of the camera beyond pure aesthetics and into the realm of historical memory It becomes practically a ritualistic moving image dance in memoriam of a repressed past e implications of this calculated cinematic performance are reinforced toward the end when the mournful verse of Huang becomes gradually replaced by noises the grainy indistinctness of which sounds disturbingly suggestive With this the long take also slows down on the dark night street e camera encounters a somewhat disorderly group of people who are running across the street in slow motion e strange noise becomes increasingly louder as the camera moves closer to the scurrying crowd before freezing on the scene (Figure 43) us the documentary ends with a haunting evocation of what happened on the early morning of 4 June 1989 when students had to run for their lives away from the armed violence of the state e stylised visual contrast between the nighttime darkness and the white or lightly coloured clothing of the crowd (plus a few street lights in the distance) in this nal scene echoes the expressionist treatment already obvious at the beginning of the documentary Doubtless caring little about direct cinemarsquos rule of objectivity here the director creatively manipulates the documentary material taken from the phenomenal world to serve his expressive goal As Wang Guangli reveals in reality the crowd crossing the street is a group of high school students who were on their way to see the daily national ag-raising ceremony e suggestive noise that replaces Huangrsquos vocal performance is actually that of a strong wind blowing on the microphone at the time of lming66 rough slow motion editing and volume adjustment Wang Guangli is able to transfer the documentary image and sound to an allegorical order Blurring the boundary between ction and non-ction without completely replacing the latter with the former (because the suggestive somberness of the nal image makes one wonder about its status and meaning rather than condently mistake it for a piece of




lsquofactualrsquo data) Wang eectively conjures up a eeting yet crucial imaging of what cannot yet see approved representation in China Despite the many observational shots in I Graduated that capture various scenes of the graduates preparing to leave college the presence of the lmmaker and his camera in this documentary is primarily of a subjective and performative nature As a result the selected phenomenal eld is ltered through an epis-temological investigation driven by an attentive consciousness Apart from the stylised opening and ending scenes the director inserts yet another subjective presence in the act of an intentional performance As the graduates are seen leaving the campuses the director indicated by a mobile handheld camera walks into an emptied dormitory building where students have nished moving out Up the stairs through a dark corridor and into dorm rooms from which all student belongings have been removed the camera wanders around quietly in this newly abandoned space It reveals and dwells on various traces of the freshly ended lived time such as grati-covered walls and skeletal bunker beds that are stripped bare bidding adieu to a collective past by way of a personal performed ritual Together with the performances in the opening and ending scenes of the docu-mentary the self-inscription of the lmmaker proves crucial to the memorialisa-tion of loss67 It is through the presence of the subjectively mobilised camera of the lmmaker that the lived time of real history whether the studentsrsquo former lives or 4 June 1989 is made present again to our consciousness While it is impossible to re-present the past particularly a past such as 1989 that has been ocially forced into invisibility the lmmakerrsquos contemplative revisit after all has happened and passed serves as a visible and sensible reminder of the current documentary space as one that is charged with lived time and historical memory In discussing Mekasrsquo Lost Lost Lost Michael Renov evokes Jacques Derridarsquos discussion of the Nietzschean signature and notes lsquothe recurrence of the invested iconographic gure in Lost Lost Lost can be said to speak the artistrsquos subjec-tivity even as it reproduces the concreteness of historical detailrsquo68 Comparably through a signature performance of the lmmakerrsquos return to a site of loss and memory the epistemological trajectory of I Graduated not only transforms into a thought-provokingly blurred borderline between past and present but also conrms the lmmakerrsquos subjectivity as a primary shaping force behind this personally meaningful and historically resounding inquiry

West of the Tracks Subject-ing the Present to History69

Lasting over nine hours West of the Tracks as the rst documentary by the painter-turned-lmmaker Wang Bing is a phenomenal cinematic epic about Tie Xi Qu (meaning lsquothe district west of the railway tracksrsquo) a former socialist industrial compound located in Shenyang Liaoning Province Consisting of three parts lsquoRustrsquo lsquoRemnantsrsquo and lsquoRailsrsquo the documentary is structured around three spaces essential to the life of the workers and their families the factories the residences and the railway system that connects




the various facilities inside the compound Space as both a fact of life and an aesthetic concept provides the structuring principle with which the massive documentary footage is selected and organised is is especially obvious in the rst section lsquoRustrsquo which lasts for four hours and presents the closing of three factories within the compound one after another In each of the factories three exemplar spaces are presented also one after another the work place the resting room and the bathhouse As is obvious from their distinct functions these three spaces impose on the lives of the workers an impersonal industrial schedule For years and indeed generations every day after leaving home the workers work in the work place rest and eat in the resting room and take showers in the bathhouse after a dayrsquos work and before going home e impersonal nature of such an existence ndash which itself is a historical phenomenon as the documentary gradually reveals that all this apparently timeless regularity is actually ending ndash is visually reinforced by the many long shots that frame the workers as tiny gures moving on the gigantic metallic structures within the diminishing vastness of the factory space Although the second part of the documentary lsquoRemnantsrsquo features the residential area it focuses more on the children of the worker fami-lies e factory space and the residential space are kept separate and we do not see how the workers come to work or leave to go home In lsquoRustrsquo they are always already inside the factory doing one of the three regular activities mentioned above or walking along a corridor on their way to one of the three specied locales ey talk to each other but this verbal aspect remains insignicant and does not form a narrative core for the documentary e spatiality of the factory represents a particular kind of existential economy that regulates individual life with the impersonal rhythm of industrial culture and socialist modernism70

e apparent cyclical sameness of this socialist industrial time is not here to last As the factories close one after another the familiar spaces become aban-doned and their previous temporal meanings are rendered irrelevant Crucial to bringing out the historicity ndash the lsquoonce there and now no morersquo sense of existence ndash implied in the gradual abandonment of the state factories in Tie Xi Qu is the embodied presence of the conscious subjectivity of the lmmaker Wang Bing makes this apparent from the very beginning of the documentary Following a static panorama shot of the industrial compound Tie Xi Qu the documentary starts its journey with ve consecutive shots indicating the camerarsquos gradual entry into the district Lasting altogether for about ve-and-a-half minutes these opening shots have the same eye-level central perspective ndash a stylistic feature also characterising the rest of the lsquoRustrsquo section ndash and reveal the phenomenal eld of the compound in a solemnly balanced composition With such lsquoa ritual entry into historyrsquo we are led into a ghost town of disappearing socialist-planned economy (Figure 44)71

As the camera obviously placed in the front of the train moves forward lsquoonrsquo the extending railway track the encounter between the camera and the eld is poetically accentuated by the snowakes that visibly rush toward and rest on the camera lens forming a perfect instance of what Michael Chanan calls lsquothe element of visual noisersquo72 According to Chanan lsquothe incursion of noise




and accident provides evidence that the image is taken from the space of lived experiencersquo73 Whereas the camera the lmmaker and the spectator are currently combined in a singular subjectivity represented by the central perspective of these opening shots the uncontrollable accidental presence of the snowakes with their natural physicality emphatically visible on the camera lens blurs our vision and thickens what is normally presented as a transparent penetration into the phenomenal world In turn the specic position of the camera is empha-sised it is in front of a train xed at eye level and in the process of visiting the industrial compound on a snowy day ndash all of which contribute to a certain mood characterising the resulting representation

Figure 44 West of the Tracks (dir Wang Bing 2003) A lsquoritual entryrsquo into the historical space of Tie Xi Qu

Further raising our consciousness of the current moving image act of entering an unknown eld is the quietness and slowness characterising these opening shots With only the indistinct noises of the train engine and the swishing snow on the soundtrack the extraordinary simplicity in the shot composition ndash namely the repeated use of the central perspective ndash pushes the spectator to browse the other parts of the screen such as the two sides of the railway that extends centrally in front of the camera Revealed are huge factory buildings steel frames and bridges testifying to a glorious past that now appears curiously deserted in the midst of the contrasting quietness as neither machines nor humans sound




active e train is moving slowly In contrast to the train in Lumiegravere Brothersrsquo LrsquoArriveacutee drsquoun train agrave la Ciotat (1896) that symbolises the steamy prosperity of an earlier modern era or the train at the beginning of Berlin A City Symphony (dir Walter Ruttmann 1927) that expresses the speedy condence and eagerness of modern urban life the train in West of the Tracks is slow Its stops and destination are not clear as the factories gradually close and there are no more major manu-facturing goals to be fullled Comparable to the human train in Jia Zhangkersquos Platform that progresses awkwardly to a symbolic destination no longer relevant or reliable the train in Wang Bingrsquos alternative epic about the ending of a classic socialist industry runs slowly in loops symbolising the weakening pulse of not only a dysfunctional economical prospect but also an outdated way of life As the eminent humanist geographer Yi-fu Tuan puts it lsquothe intention to go to a place creates historical timersquo because the place has become a goal situated in the future74 e sense of historicity in West of the Tracks is inseparable from the presence of the lmmaker faced with the space of Tie Xi Qu as a site of memory Like I Graduated West of the Tracks does not feature Wang Bingrsquos physicality in a directly visible manner within the cinematic frame Rather the presence of his attentive subjectivity is evident in the embodied central position of the camera from which the current epistemological inquiry and historical contemplation emits

Figure 45 West of the Tracks Following the workers in their space [i]




Figure 46 West of the Tracks Following the workers in their space [ii]

For example there are an impressive number of mobile shots in which Wang Bing follows a certain worker from one place to another in the factories such as when the worker goes to work or to the bathhouse (Figures 45 and 46) e composition of these shots similar to the ve tracking shots at the beginning of the documentary is largely central and symmetrical e worker moves ahead of the camera in a long narrow corridor walled in on both sides by dilapidated windows and doors ere is no other gure in view From shot to shot the calculated simi-larity and simplicity in framing calls attention to the mobility of the camera and the presence of the lmmaker who is following the worker e meaning of such a persistent lsquotrackingrsquo down of the workers is made obvious when at later points after the factories are closed down one after another the lmmaker comes back alone walking down the corridors and aisles with no worker gure in view Since the workers are the representative human occupants of the socialist industrial space their removal gives visibility to the changes taking place in the factories To emphasise this meaningful contrast the director performs a ritualistic revisit to a site pregnant with lived time similar to what Wang Guangli does in I Graduated His presence fully palpable as we can hear the directorrsquos heavy breathing and footsteps Wang Bingrsquos camera moves around in the narrow corridors where workers walked on a daily basis It enters what used to be a resting room inspects the abandoned lockers where belongings have been removed looks closely at a worker ID that is left behind exits and goes down a staircase turns into another




corridor and peeks in at the bathhouse Everywhere the camera turns the factory space looks completely deserted Obviously the lmmaker is the only human presence to witness the disappearance not only of the human gures but also of a particular historical time that their way of life embodies Although presenting Tie Xi Qursquos historic transformation in largely chrono-logical order the documentary contains a curious single instance of reversed temporality When the camera enters the bathhouse which is also empty the bathing pool looks still lled with water the shot dissolves into one that has exactly the same composition and available lighting yet reveals two male bathers e latter shot is obviously one taken from an earlier moment when the factory was still operating is single ashback belongs to the lmmaker as a witness of historical change All is not forgotten because of his critical presence and epistemological attentiveness Compounded by such an awareness-raising subjective camera and editing is the orderly and repetitive structure characterising the lsquoRustrsquo section e many mundane details of the workersrsquo lives in the factory such as the many rounds of work dining and bathhouse scenes are selected and organised to familiarise the spectator with the typical regularity of such an existence Here Vivian Sobchack sounds appositional in her discussion of the lsquohome moviersquo ndash aptly called lm-souvenir in French ndash when she speaks about lsquothe piecemeal specicity of the objective fragments of the lm-souvenir [that is] set against our subjective activity of attempting to constitute the whole ensemble of evoked experiences as a coherencersquo75 According to Sobchack lsquothe impossibility of realizing this objective (to rejoin and re-member the real ldquoelsewhererdquo and in other times) leads to an ldquoempty sympathyrdquo ndash what we call ldquonostalgiardquo ndash in relation to the screen imagersquo76 By repeating a familiar detail and emphasising its change with a subtle variation on the sameness of the image ndash for instance the same composition and lighting eects of the bathhouse shots analysed above ndash Wang Bing is able to evoke a profound sympathy for the emptying of the past that is taking place in Tie Xi Qu During such performative revisits to the scenes marked by disappearance the lmmaker through his presence observes the industrial place gradually changing back into natural space again and also participates in the transforma-tion of this selected phenomenal eld into represented history To quote Yi-fu Tuanrsquos inspiring observations on the experiential and subjective relationship between humans and landscape

the human being by his mere presence imposes a schema on space He marks [the] presence [of this schema] on those ritual occasions that lift life above the ordinary and so force him to an awareness of lifersquos values including those manifest in space77

In West of the Tracks the director equipped with a movie camera and the episte-mological intention of a historical nature imposes a specic temporal schema on the space of Tie Xi Qu that aims at both the presence of the past in the now and the inevitable transience of the present in becoming past




is particular schema is reected in the cinematic itinerary by which the director covers and organises the space of Tie Xi Qu in the documentary Avoiding fancy idiosyncratic editing strategies in the construction of a subjective and positional sense of cinematic time (with the only exception of the ashback mentioned above) Wang Bing chooses to as Franccedilois Beacutegaudeau observes lsquoguard [the repeated] opening and closing of doors that a professional montage would have quickly dismissedrsquo78 is assures the existence of the space of Tie Xi Qu lsquoby way of a trajectory winding through itrsquo for the industrial compound is lsquothe sum-up of the subjective itinerariesrsquo that this trajectory covers79 e pres-ence of the conscious subjectivity of the director who travels around in Tie Xi Qu and uses a movie camera to capture his encounter with this suggestive space gives the landscape the shape of a subjectively-ltered cartography ndash one lled with emotions and epistemological intentions ndash and thus enables the current moving image representation of the industrial compound to enter the order of history and memory e many doors that Wang Bing along with the workers has opened passed and closed will nally be removed and Tie Xi Qu will turn into something else but their historical existence ndash the once-there-like-that-ness ndash is preserved in the documentary A similar scene is featured in Before the Flood (Yanmo dir Li Yifan and Yan Yu 2003) a documentary about spatial transformation in Fengjie a town in Sichuan Province that borders on the impactful ree Gorges Dam project and has to be abandoned and relocated Also in Spring in Wushan (Wushan zhi chun 2003) a personal documentary by the director Zhang Ming (b 1961) who made his reputation earlier with Rainclouds over Wushan (Wushan yunyu 1996) unhooked doors are seen piled up and opened to demolition debris As a native of Wushan another town going through the same fate of state-ordered relocation as Fengjie Zhang Ming visits an intriguing site of memory in his hometown accompanied by his old friend Mr Qi Standing on a characterless at ground covered with debris and decorated by several detached doors Mr Qi constructs a mental map of the placersquos past in front of the camera

Here was the cinema here was the square now we are standing at the cinemarsquos entrance Itrsquos incredible to think in this palm-size place so many people have lived here so many things have happened here now to think of all that standing on these ruins itrsquos really incredible

e sharp contrast between this detail-lled mental map of the placersquos past and the visual blankness of the site powerfully evokes the shape of change and disap-pearance which becomes palpable precisely due to the presence of conscious subjectivities here enacted through both Mr Qirsquos remembrance and Zhangrsquos lmmaking It is no accident that West of the Tracks especially the section lsquoRustrsquo chooses to combine an embodied camera with a repeated use of central perspective compo-sition (Figures 47 and 48) Applied to the long shots that present the monu-mental vastness of the factory space a central perspective is able to visualise the




Figure 47 West of the Tracks Central perspectives [i]

Figure 48 West of the Tracks Central perspectives [ii]




apparent inniteness of the receding space of the phenomenal world in this case evoking a poetic sense of the classic socialist industryrsquos lack of a clear prospect or promising future Avoiding montage editing and combined with an embodied camera the central perspective composition makes explicit the situatedness of the representation anchoring it to a specic position ndash that of the lmmaker as a conscious and intentional subjectivity ndash from where the current epistemo-logical inspection and contemplation issues Under the gaze of this specically positioned subject the phenomenal world of Tie Xi Qu is visualised in front of the camera as a site where history and memory compound and where present and past conate all these forming a particular emotional landscape of the place Steve Nealersquos observation on the relationship between the staging of spectacle and the gaze resonates here

[Spectacle] addresses the imbrication of looking and the visible not [as in documentary] as the prior condition to the construction of a form of knowledge about a particular subject or issue but rather as that which hovers constantly across the gap between the eye and the object presented to it in the process of the scopic drive80

Here the lmmakerrsquos subjectivity becomes lsquothe lter through which the real enters discourse as well as a kind of experiential compass guiding the work toward its goal as embodied knowledgersquo81 Each of his own gazes and steps is his navigator on this self-erasing map of postsocialist China In that sense the signicance of Wang Bingrsquos documentary lies in its exemplication of a gurative mode of presenting an alternative historical account as well as an alternative historiography Instead of producing simply another dierent account Wang Bing inscribes his personal vision to create a contestation by implication Both Wang Guangli and Wang Bing help revive memories of a past not simply through providing newly discovered alternative accounts of events More importantly they change the frame of looking by way of enabling and visualising the presence of their specic historical subjectivity eir embodied personal vision not only demonstrates their dierence but also exemplies a powerful way of contesting ocial historiography




Revolution and which resulted in the freshly resumed contact with international and particularly Western culture ndash classic as well as contemporary ndash these new documentaries of the eighties named zhuanti pian (special-topic lm) often deal with the topic of history Examples are TV documentary series on the history of the Communist Red Armyrsquos Long March the fty-year history of the Peoplersquos Republic of China histories of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and biographies of Mao Zedong and other major founding gures of the Peoplersquos Republic of China Commonly equipped with a pre-written script that needed to be approved before lming actually started these documentaries tend to adopt the form of a carefully illustrated moving image lecture an impersonal voice-over delivered in standard Mandarin informs and persuades accompanied by music and images that are carefully composed lmed and edited eir perspective while less imposing in ideological terms still issues from a position of singular superiority and authority to which the audience is subjected If some of the more liberal-minded special-topic documentaries such as Yangtze River (Huashuo changjiang 1983) and River Elegy (He shang 1988) signicantly challenge previously ideological one-mindedness with frameworks of thinking alternatively informed by Western civilisation and general Chinese history their manner of presentation is nevertheless univocal and didactic As a matter of fact although popularly accepted and technically perfected as a mainstream practice this humanistic intellectual approach to documentary and history continues to be debated For example in an attempt to salvage quickly disappearing cultural sites and search for indigenous seeds of capitalism since 2006 the CCTV has broadcast a number of serial documentaries on Chinese history including Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan) e City of Huizhou (Huizhou) Early Merchants from Anhui (Huishang) and Early Merchants from Shanxi (Jinshang) Apart from featuring the staple characteristics of the eightiesrsquo special-topic documentaries such as a scripted voice-over and an omniscient camera vision these so-called lsquohumanistic documentariesrsquo (renwen jilupian) enjoy the added production value brought about by computer-generated image (CGI) technology which re-imagines and re-images the historical past as an ossied scene to be nostalgically missed Concerned about their implied simplistic logic of a linear historical causality critics such as Cheng Kai question this particular lsquohumanismrsquo on its representation of a visually appealing past seeing in it a questionable tendency to mystify the past and encase it as a lsquosafe existencersquo for convenient and poorly reected consumption by the public5

It is in the context of and in stark contrast to such didactic practices that new and independent documentaries emerged and from the very beginning moved in an unprecedented direction As early as May 1988 Wu Wenguang (b 1956) a former schoolteacher who temporarily worked for television turned a borrowed video camera onto his freelance artist friends in Beijing Like his lmed subjects the lmmaker himself was far away from home (Kunming Yunnan Province) belonged to no lsquowork unitrsquo had little money and survived in temporary living spaces provided by friends or in cheaply rented homes At that moment Wu was unaware that he was making the rst independent documentary in contemporary











































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing



























































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing





















































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing
















































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing












































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing






































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing

































































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing




























































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing























































































































ndash Wu Wenguang






ndash Wang Bing





















































































































ndash Wang Bing























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Documents

Chapter 4 Personal Documentary - WordPress.comChina: Bumming in Beijing: ˜e Last Dreamers (1990).6 Several months after Wu started ˜lming Bumming in Beijing, Shi Jian (b. 1963),